Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter, April 30, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Speak to us of reading
During the night the angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and led out the Apostles, and said, “Go and take your place in the temple, and tell the people everything about this life.”
After Pope Francis died both supporters and detractors came out of the woodwork. His funeral brought together the USA and Ukraine, Trump and Zelensky, faces inches apart, alone outside in the sun sitting in two Vatican chairs, leaning in. Afterward, both of them talked of peace.
In an essay published online by “The Imaginative Conservative,” Professor David Deavel calls himself a “second kind of friend” to Pope Francis, referring to C. S. Lewis’ idea about those of us who read the same books but see the world very differently:
The Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not be your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong things out of every one.
Something I repeatedly loved about Pope Francis’ words was their liminality. It all depends … wait and see … who am I to judge? He refused, perhaps like any good Jesuit, to be pinned down on one side or another of anything theological or sociological or even political (although he made his aversion to deportation clear even in February with VP Vance, depriving these men, women and children of their inherent dignity).
Dr. Deavel (University of St. Thomas, Houston) turned our attention to what he calls “perhaps Francis’s best document of his pontificate. Short, sweet, and full of good lines quoted and written,” written in July 2024 and published in February 2025, this “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” breathes life into not only the art of reading but also the joy of seeking what God provides for us all, what Francis calls “the path to personal maturity.”
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.
“Tranquil” reading demands “personal engagement, personal rewriting, enlarging through imagination, in short creating a whole world by bringing into play our skills, memory, dreams and personal history, with all its drama and symbolism.”
For Francis the world’s diverse richness of persons demonstrates God’s love for us, and we discover this diversity quickly through literature. “Contact with different styles will always allow us to explore more deeply the polyphony of divine revelation without impoverishing it or reducing it to our own needs or ways of thinking.” This was as true in the 4th century (Basil of Caesarea’s “Discourse to the Young”) as it is today.” Jorge Luis Borges called this simply “listening to another person’s voice.”
The pope speaks of how important this is from his own experience: “We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us!” Without it, how can we avoid what T. S. Eliot called our “widespread emotional incapacity,” depressing our ability to be “profoundly moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings?” Comparing the East (Japan) with the West, Francis recalled saying, “I think the West lacks a bit of poetry … all our words bear traces of an intrinsic longing for God.”
Everyone who does wicked things hates the light, but whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
Jesuit Pope Francis refers to St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, his understanding of desolation and consolation, and to reading as an act of discernment in which “a person is challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct, rediscovering ways of relating to reality that are more welcoming, not merely strategic and aimed purely at results. We aim to experience the infinite grandeur of being, returning to us a sense of perspective, leisure and freedom.”
Glimpsing this grand infinity is meant for each of us finite folks, and it changes us from the inside out. “By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understanding others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgment of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition. Judgment is certainly needed, but we must never forget its limited scope. Judgment must never issue in a death sentence, eliminating persons or suppressing our humanity for the sake of a soulless absolutizing of the law.
“The wisdom born of literature instills in the reader greater perspective, a sense of limits, the ability to value experience over cognitive and critical thinking, and to embrace a poverty that brings extraordinary riches. By acknowledging the futility and perhaps even the impossibility of reducing the mystery of the world and humanity to a dualistic polarity of true vs false or right vs wrong, the reader accepts the responsibility of passing judgment, not as a means of domination, but rather as an impetus towards greater listening.”
Francis recognizes the way we tend to “imprison the freedom of the Word” rather than experiencing “a great spiritual openness to hearing the Voice that speaks through many voices, the mysterious and indissoluble sacramental union between the divine Word and our human words.”
In one of his last letters, this pope who chose the name of Francis opens a window for us to “a ministry that becomes a service born of listening and compassion, a charism that becomes responsibility, and a vision of the true and the good that discloses itself as beauty.” Thank you, papa.
So it is written, so let it be done.
I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise shall ever be in my mouth. The Lord hears the cry of the poor. Glorify the Lord with me, let us together extol his name!
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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