Gratitude for a love I do not understand

  -4-

The heading of this section touches on an aspect of faith that my culture has stubbed out almost completely. I am not sure whether Father C himself wrote these section headings, or if it was a helpful editor. In any case, the words are alien to the world around me:

_{“Perfection does not consist in understanding God’s designs but in submitting to them.” (Page 8)}

Part of the inefficient faith that has been adopted and expressed in America is due to the loss of this particular truss in the foundation of our spiritual life. While we have been warned again and again to avoid our own understanding as a supreme guide to a walk with God – “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding,” for example, from Proverbs 3:5 – (and, “There is a way that seems good to man that leads to death,” from Proverbs 14 and again in 16) the honest Westerner will recognize that obedience on this point will place him precisely and untenably against the current.

It goes without saying that the worldly think like this. Sadly, there is not a Christian alive who is not substantially, if not completely, influenced by the singular importance of “my own understanding.”

That is to say, I will believe of God only what I understand of God. I will believe of the faith only what I understand of the faith. Worse still, I will obey only orders that I completely understand.

We would be appalled if one of our own took up a defenseless position, such as building an ark, healing the sick, tending to a leper colony or choosing death over a simple verbal denial of Christ. We would warn such a person that they had not thought it through.

Some acts of charity are indefensible. When Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, volunteered to be starved to death at Auschwitz in July 1941, in place of a man he hardly knew, we could say this selfless act made no sense. The man he saved that day could have been killed in the death camp the next day, or later the same day. The man he saved may have been a cheat, or a thief, or could become one later. All Kolbe knew was that the man had called out in horror that he would never see his wife and children again. Kolbe asked to take the man’s place. The prison guard agreed, and Kolbe was starved for 14 days, caring for the other men with him who were condemned in this way, and eventually given a lethal injection in August.

Every day since then, until his own death 53 years later, Francizek Gajownicek was thankful to Kolbe (now St. Maximilian since 1994) for “the gift of life.” In 1994, at the St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church of Houston, Gajownicek told his translator Chaplain Thaddeus Horbowy that “so long as he ... has breath in his lungs, he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe.” Gajownicek died on March 13, 1995, a gentle old soul that had been touched by Christ-like love against the ugly backdrop of unutterable cruelty.

Here are some comments from the man senselessly saved: “I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

“I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

“For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.”

Faith, hope and love sometimes lead us to do things beyond our own understanding, much less the understanding of on-lookers. Believing only what we understand will stop us cold. My culture replaces faith, hope and love with discussion and adequate debate. Our communities of faith do this as well, sometimes.

I wish to take a page from Francizek’s book, and spend my life in gratitude for a love I have yet to understand. To do this I have to turn my back on my culture and the poor quality of faith that it has nurtured. To face Christ one must countenance none else; nothing other.