Personal Cosmic Monuments
Recently, we celebrated the feast of St Scholastica, the brother of the godfather of Western Monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia.
The readings for the mass of that day stayed in my mind for a number of reasons. The first was that it was on a day when a huge rainstorm hit town, and I was only able to arrive at Mass because of the break in the rain, only for the heavens to open and once again bucket down the moment mass began. Those familiar with the biography of St Scholastica may remember one occasion when, having prayed to God to make his brother Benedict stay at her place for the saintly version of afternoon tea a little while longer, a heavy downpour came to block Benedict’s egress.
The second reason was that the first reading, taken from the beginning of the book of Genesis (1:1-19), dealt precisely with the making of the heavens, and the positioning of the waters over and under the vault. While at one level, the readings were apt in light of that day’s weather conditions, I also listened to that reading with new ears. What drew my attention was not so much the making of the heavens, seas, sun, moon and stars, but the fact that after each of these have been made in their turn, God affirmed them, made evident by the almost liturgical refrain “and God saw that it was good”. Creation was not just a mere product of a command, but also were geological, astronomical and nautical signs of divine love.
The third reason came at the reading of Mark’s Gospel (6:53-56), when Jesus was presented with masses of sick for healing. At first glance, it would be hard to imagine a connection between the first reading and the Gospel, apart from the correlation between the first creation and the healing that brings about a second creation. However, the pairing of these readings came after an intuition I put into writing for Church Life Journal a couple of years back about the anime series 86:Eighty Six. Having done some research and writing on that, I was now able to see the continuation between the readings.
The upshot was that the cosmos and the persons being healed were not two categorically distinct and unrelated objects of attention. Rather, as I argued in that CLJ article, there was a continuum in which the former was a channel of divine love towards the latter, making the cosmos a monument to human persons and reminders of God’s love for them. Both episodes are part of that single movement in which the God who created the heavens and called them good, stooped down to impart that love to humanity, so that humanity can conversely look up at those heavens and asks, as Psalm 8 puts it, “What is man that you care for him?”.
It also puts into sharper relief Romano Guardini’s observation in The Living God:
…there is a seeing mind behind everything that happens and that I am the object of its seeing. It means that provision is being made of what is good for me. It means that there are eyes in the world that see everything, from which nothing is hidden that may injure or benefit me. It means that not a hair of my head shall fall without being noticed and assessed with regard to my welfare and salvation. It means that there is a significance in everything that happens in the world, and there is a heart, a concern, and a power stronger than all the powers of the world, which is able to fulfill the purpose of its care for man (26).
