acta capituli generalis diffinitorum ordinis praedicatorum fr. carolo a ...

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‘is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience is so hideous
a paradox... Are there different species of time in the same world, “good times” and enveloping
folds of inhuman time in which men fall into the slow hands of living damnation?’
I would guess most people, in the midst of war – in bloody clashes between Muslim and
Christian in Nigeria and Indonesia, in ethnic cleansing and famine in Sudan, amid chaos
in Iraq – most people experience something like ‘different species of time’: life still goes
on. But there are not, in fact, two species of time. It is the same world. I remember reading,
years ago, the words of Albert Camus to the French Dominicans after World War II.
They made sense to me then and seem terribly apt today: ‘There is in this world beauty
and there are the humiliated. We must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful, neither to
the one nor to the other.’ We must strive, hard as it is, to live in this powerless tension.
John Baptist Metz, in a beautiful little book on poverty, describes powerlessness as the
language of solidarity. It is the way we say Yes to the poor, but we have also to say No to
the temptation to recapture power through word, sacrament, money, or position. He
writes, ‘Satan wants us strong. Power he understands. It is powerlessness he fears.’
There is this precise difference between power and powerlessness that distinguishes the
disciples of a rabbi from the disciples of Jesus. The rabbi sat in the synagogue, disciples
came to him, took notes and sought to repeat everything the rabbi taught. Jesus was different.
He did not sit in a synagogue but took to the roads; disciples did not come to him,
he sought them out; and his disciples were not asked to repeat what he said but to do what
he did. The rabbis gave their disciples notebooks; Jesus gives his disciples a basin and a
towel – and a command: ‘If I, your master and lord, have washed your feet, you ought to
wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example. Do as I have done to you’ (Jn
13.14-15).
This washing of the feet by the one who is both lord of the feast and servant is, as Herbert
McCabe has written ‘a symbol of a new kind of relationship amongst men and women, a
relationship neither of dominance nor subservience but of equality in love, a relationship
in which we are equal in love to each other… This new kind of relationship finds echo in
the Gospel of Luke, where those ready and waiting for the return of the master find, to
their surprise, that ‘he himself will seat them, put on an apron, and serve them as they sit
and eat!’ (Lk 12.37).
There is a story told by a young mother which captures for me the essence of this powerless
ministry. She had a handicapped son and confessed to having been over-protective of
him. One day, she let him go to the store by himself. When he was late returning, his
mother grew concerned and went out on the street to wait for him. Finally she saw him
limping up the street. She rushed toward him and said, ‘Where have you been?’ He replied,
‘I was coming home and I met Carol. She dropped her doll and it broke.’ And the
mother blurted out, ‘And you had to stop and help her pick it up!’ ‘No, mother,’ he said,
‘I had to stop and help her cry.’
Confronted by others’ pain and suffering, we often do not have the right words. We do
not know the right thing to do. We have no tools to repair damage, we are not technicians
who can put things right. But we can always speak out of what we do not have: we can
speak to the powerless out of our own powerlessness. If we do not waver from our emptiness,
then we can always help people cry. Like the sinful woman we can always wash