August 8, 2021 (Feast of St. Dominic)

by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.

Didn’t you think there was light at the end of the Covid tunnel? But Delta Plus makes one wonder. Sadder yet, the darkness is our own doing. … What if everyone had gotten vaccinated? What if we hadn’t politicized the mask that protects?

That sadness does not cloud the joy of our patronal feast, the Solemnity of St. Dominic. His contagious joy invites yours; he you call to be heralds of Good News by sharing faith and joy! … Dominic’s times weren’t easy nor safe. They had plagues and wars, they experienced poverty and famine, they saw the fall of Constantinople and Jerusalem.

Dominic witnessed; no, he didn’t participate in an inquisition and a crusade that made southern France a 20-year battlefield of blood. Pope Innocent III called for a crusade after his Papal Legate was murdered. It unleashed a violent religious fervor fueled by the avarice of the French nobles for wealth and land to combat the Albigensian heresy. The adage still holds true: follow the money especially when you are looking at wars of religion.

The Albigensians saw themselves as warriors in an eternal war between matter and spirit. They were dualists with two gods, the good God of the New Testament, and the evil creator god of the Old Testament, whose name was Satan. They called themselves Good Christians but rejected Christianity at its core. The denied the incarnation, the reality of the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension because God could have no connection with matter. Meat, marriage, and procreation were all evil. They could not accept a God who is in love with wounded material creation, who redeems it by taking it to himself and lifting it to divine life.

Humanity is constantly tempted by dualistic thinking that divides people into good versus evil. We hear it still in the ideological language that utterly demonizes the other.

Dominic chose a different battleground and crusade: winning human hearts and engaging thinking minds. He used words, not weapons. He used words, “to preach, with a mission from the Church according to the way of the apostles, in humility, not in authority.” “His was a ministry ‘of gentleness’, ‘preaching, imploring and weeping.’” Vicarie. P. 147 & 148

From his youth Dominic listening to the voice of the Gospels. Studying scripture was his passion! They were the core of his prayer. When famine arose in Spain, the young Dominic sold all that he had, even his copy of the Gospels, saying, “I will not study on dead skins while living skins are dying of hunger.”

One who knew him well wrote: “he had a special prayer which he often made to God, that God would grant him true charity which would be effective in caring for and winning the salvation of men; he thought he would only really be a member of Christ’s Body when he could spend himself utterly with all his strength in the winning of souls, ...”

Dominic simply loved people. Jordan of Saxony who knew him well, wrote: Everybody was enfolded in the wide embrace of his charity, and since he loved everyone, everyone loved him. He made it his own business to rejoice with those who were rejoicing, and to weep with those who wept. He was full of affection. … Isn’t that how we should be?

When we love someone, our imagination enshrines their image, their voice, their qualities, their way of acting in our hearts. I invite to an imaginative praying of the scriptures, sacraments, and service. Envision Jesus and the Jesus way that you may live it. Faith is more than “believing”; it is trust him and his way. Do what he did and feel how he felt!

Sadly, in a time of incivility and ideology, we are tempted by anger and coercion. If we view ourselves as victims, we easily give ourselves over to the temptation to dehumanize and demonize the other.

The medieval dictum is God moves us not by coercion but by attraction. It should be no surprise that Dominican law was not imposed under the pain of sin. That was not a novelty, but an expression of a deeper strand of Christian thought. In the 2nd century, the Letter to Barnabas, reads: “The new law of Christ is ‘without the yoke of necessity.’” (Barnabas 2:6) Irenaeus echoed it: “Christ gives us counsel; as is proper for God, he speaks without constraining us” (Expideixis 55). Paul too wrote:  “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). Love takes us further than law commands into the land of becoming a gift of self.

The tradition that St. Dominic lived emphasized a different set of values than America’s assertive, acquisitive Christianity. The Dominican scholar, Fr. Simon Tugwell, named it, “humility, the kind of trust in God that frees one from crippling anxiety, a spirit of not judging others, the refusal to measure oneself, and, above all, the spiritual discernment to be able to identify at any given moment what the situation actually calls for.” (The Way of the Preacher, p. 8) Let me read that again: “humility [is] the kind of trust in God that frees one from crippling anxiety, a spirit of not judging others, the refusal to measure oneself, and, above all, the spiritual discernment to be able to identify at any given moment what the situation actually calls for.”

Dominic’s way of seeing was the Gospel and the love that God lavishes on us. Freed from self, Dominic was in love. So passionate was his love that he wanted to lift every man and women into the heart of God. Dominic was called the joyful friar; he was in love. Love delights! Fall in love!