"Trust in the Lord
with All Thine Heart"

In Haiti it was common for a national holiday to be proclaimed on some great occasion and on all principal feast days. I could not believe my eyes at my first Corpus Christi day, for I saw things that I had previously known only through paintings of the medieval world: the arrases hanging on the city walls and buildings, the stations built in people's houses where the Lord would be received in hospitality, and, of course, the Lord Himself processing through the entire city (carried off by a priest bearing a large monstrance) with little girls strewing flower petals before his path.

Royal marriages still have this quality. At the recent wedding of the present Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, heirs to the British throne, a national holiday was decreed. The world stopped.

The whole world is summoned this day before a king. And ultimate judgments are indeed executed: the cities of offenders are burned recalling Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as Jesus' prophecies concerning Capernaum and Bethsaida, for having offended the King of the Universe. And individuals are permanently cast out from the king's presence and executed.

The scene is compelling and compels us to ask, what then is the perfect state of Christian life? In the Western Church this subject became something of a science and is still being debated. During the Middle Ages, the verdict was nearly universal. The perfect state of Christian life was virginity lived in the context of religious poverty and obedience. Today, the verdict is marriage, which is the proto-Church (in Eden), called the "domestic Church" in the Roman Catechism.

But this is the outward manifestation. The deeper question is, what is the acceptable state of the heart? Surely it is not enough simply to refrain from sex or to live in poverty. One can do this in a mean-spirited way. But what does a perfect heart look like?

The Scriptures repeatedly set out pictures of perfect life with God. Its theme is always the same: complete and willing dependence upon Him. Our God is Providence supplying our every need. The Lord Jesus has taught us not to be anxious:

Nonetheless, we must not fall into the trap of believing that the Life of Chester A. Reilly, drinking beer in a hammock, is a perfection of Christian life. For the Lord Jesus also taught that we must struggle:

The inverted mirror-image of this, of course, are those who rely wholly on themselves — the comfortable and self-sufficient who cherish the thought that they will build better and larger barns to store all they have hoarded. Over such a man, Jesus teaches, an angel will indeed be given charge:

Before I resigned my former life to commit myself entirely to the Apostolate in Haiti, I lived, not in two worlds (for God is no respecter of persons), but among the comfortable and the afflicted who gathered before the King's Table. I continued teaching theology at a Roman Catholic college and serving a parish along the Maine "Gold Coast," and I spent weeks or months in Haiti where starvation, disease, and death are commonplace. In one world, I commonly saw obesity from gluttony and in the other children who were given a grain of salt each night to allay the ache of their empty, distended stomachs. The humanitarian doctor Paul Farmer said, "If I could have the money Americans spend grooming their dogs, I could solve every health problem in Haiti" (Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains).

Particularly striking were the people I saw in both countries gathering around "the One Table" of the Roman Catholic Church. In the States, I had slowly become numbed to the irreverence and indifference of church-goers shuffling down a communion line without due preparation, receiving in the hand, and then joking with friends on the way back to the pew. I even witnessed two older men nearly coming to blows because one had taken the others aisle seat. After Mass, I commonly saw people leaning on the Tabernacle outside the sanctuary making smalltalk or telling off-color jokes. Their attire, we might say their "wedding garments," ranged from sweat suits to tee-shirts with indecent slogans to short shorts with revealing tank tops. It was not unusual to see people leaving before the blessing and then jockeying to get out of the parking lot first.

In Haiti, the poorest of the poor would come to Church scrubbed as clean as clean can be and beautifully attired. Their shoes were shined. Their ties were nearly tied. Each girls hair was meticulously adorned. However tattered their clothes might be during the week, each Haitian found one suit of clothes to present before the King.

But it was the atmosphere around communion that touched me most deeply. A reverent silence filled the place becoming more concentrated as we approached the Canon of the Mass, when all fell to their knees on the hard ground. Finally, when the priest presented the consecrated Host to the people — the Lord Jesus becomes really and actually present — tears streamed down many faces, yes, even grown men, whispering prayers of adoration under their breath.

I had never seen such love of God expressed so sincerely in all my life. It would not be hard for me, you see, to resign from the college, parish, and hospital where I served. I would cast my lot with these people no matter what might lie ahead. For I knew myself to be amongst God's acceptable hearts.

Have you ever been in love? Have you ever come to a place where you would burn down your whole world in order to be near your beloved? This is the point to which Elisha came as he approached his vocation under Elijah. He told the older man, "But first I must kiss my father and mother, and then I will follow you." And Elijah rejoined, "Go back again, for what I have done to you?!" (1 Kings 19:19-20). Chastened, Elisha burns down his whole world. He breaks up his plow, his only means of vocation, and burns it, roasting his twenty-four plow oxen, providing a general feast for all the people.

Jesus said to the young ruler, "Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, .... and come, follow Me (Mt 19:21)," Who is God. And this Elisha did. He no longer was able to depend upon himself. He could no longer be self-reliant, for he had given everything, offered in love to God. "If you want to be perfect ...." (Mt 9:21), Jesus told the young ruler. Complete dependence upon Providence — this is perfection.

A parishioner many years ago looked back on his life and told me that in the end trusting God was really all that mattered. He related how he had taken his family on a vacation to the seashore. One of his little daughters had brought a friend. He took the two girls into the surf but soon they got caught up in a powerful riptide. He found himself overwhelmed keeping his head above water while holding these two little girls. He saw that they certainly would all drown. So he released his own daughter who was an able swimmer holding on to the friend who was not. As he remained struggling with the scared little girl in his arms, he watched the current carry his own little girl out to sea.

"I had told her many times how to handle a riptide," he said. "Just go with it until you are able to swim parallel to the beach." But all those years later, the powerful emotions of the time still made tears stand in his eyes.

He said, "Father, I knew God held me in His hand. I could feel it. He wanted me to trust Him. And when I let go of my daughter, I felt myself to be part of something bigger than myself."

Finally, he was able to struggle toward the beach, and he saved that little girl. His wife had already run for help knocking on doors to use a phone. And before too many hours passed, they received word that their daughter was safe on a beach in the next town north along the coast.

Perhaps you know this place of letting go and letting God, even releasing the thing that you most loved and for whom you would die. But he could not die, for he held a little life in his hands, someone else's daughter. For that brilliantly clear moment, he was part of something bigger, for his love was upon someone else, not of his choosing, but of God's choosing.

We know the opposite state of mind. It is self-importance often expressed in terms of our rights and prerogatives. God does not decide, but we do. Did you know that the United States is the only country specifically conceived and founded on a legal foundation of individual rights? As late twentieth-century philosophy was preoccupied with social constructivism, so eighteenth-century philosophy was preoccupied with individual rights. The Founding Fathers of the United States read John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Charles Montequieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Our nation and culture was formed in this philosophy. And this preoccupation with individual rights continues to predominate trained like a vine upon the trellis of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

It cannot be surprising, then, that the U.S. leads the world in Covid-19 infections. The cause is obvious. It is the insistence on individual rights and a depraved indifference to the common good. Have you not heard the cry? "But what about our liberties?!"

Let me take this one step further: the one who does not love the other, but who insists on self-love, placing his family before God as Elisha wished to do, who will not release his own daughter into the riptide .... well, this man's heart is not right .... not in God's eyes, anyway.

Needless to say, all people who live in chastity and poverty are not virtuous, but they have taken an intentional step. For the place where we become completely dependent upon God is the heart's true home, where it becomes tender and sincere.

The opposite, of course, is a heart having a callous over it. And perhaps in this we solve the riddle of the man who did not trouble himself to find a wedding garment for the king's feast. He did not scrub himself cleaner than clean. He did not strive to present himself as acceptable. A certain indifference characterized the state of his calloused heart. And he is cast out from the King's presence, which is the outer darkness, the fate of all self-important and selfish men — a whole world which chronically insists on its own rights and prerogatives.

What a world? Could you spend eternity in a wilderness of such people? Do we not all depend on the unselfish heart? Are we not all uplifted to hear of nobility in the human spirit? And is the heart not moved just to be near to a pure and chaste and true love of God? If the answer is, "Yes," then we begin to take steps toward an acceptable state of heart, for this is the state of our God's heart, too.