|
Back to Table of Contents
Marmion's message: Stay focused on the living Christ
by Father Xavier Nacke, OSB
 This past fall, Conception Abbey hosted a colloquium on Blessed Columba Marmion, the
Irish Benedictine abbot and spiritual director. The question pondered at the colloquium
(and subsequently asked by the editors of Tower Topics): What is the significance
of Blessed Columba Marmion for the Church today?
To my way of thinking that significance is well pointed to in something I read on a
holy card distributed on Mission Sunday in October. Beneath a picture of Pope Benedict
XVI is this quote: “This path, upon which my venerated predecessors went forward,
I too intend to follow, concerned solely with proclaiming to the world the living
presence of Christ.”
This icon of Blessed Marmion hangs at Marmion Abbey in Auror, Ill.
In a nutshell, Blessed Columba’s significance for us today lies in his
emphasis on Christ as the center of the spiritual life! On the cultural landscape of
our times is a real search for religious experience – what we sometimes hear as
“meaningful experience.” This has spawned all kinds of attempts to fill
this hunger. They are attempts which look to the past, look to other traditions,
Christian and non-Christian, for ways and means. However, in Catholic spirituality
there runs a rich and moderately wide stream of tradition to meet this need. This
stream is basically unified. That is, there are certain constants in it. For example,
the Sacramental life of the Church, the Sacred Scriptures, the place of contemplation
in the life of prayer, the supremacy of charity among the virtues and the foundational
importance of faith and humility – these are represented in all the varieties of
expression in Catholic spirituality. But the emphases are different. Carmelite
spirituality, for example, will put a different emphasis or tenor on contemplation and
action than, say, the Franciscan or Benedictine.
The search for “meaningful” religious experience in our lives can cause
people to look outside of the stream. With good will, and without realizing it, they
look for experiences as substitutes for faith. But faith is the one thing that the
whole stream of Catholic spirituality is meant both to nourish and to live out of.
Against this background comes the spirituality of Blessed Columba Marmion. Dom
Columba was an Irishman born at the middle of the 19th Century. He began as a diocesan
priest and ended up as a Benedictine abbot in Belgium. He was much in demand as a
retreat master and spiritual director especially for priests and religious. He died in
1923 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II Sept. 3, 2000.
Blessed Columba Marmion, an Irish Benedictine monk who died in 1923,
has been a master of the spiritual life to a generation of Catholics, especially
priests and religious.
Marmion’s significance for us today lies in clearly focusing Catholic
spirituality at the center of the stream of tradition – the living Christ! The
beatification booklet used at St. Peter’s in Rome put it this way:
For a whole generation of Catholics (but more particularly of priests, monks and
nuns), Dom Columba Marmion has been a master of spiritual life. He drew Catholics back
to biblical sources (mainly St. Paul’s) and liturgical sources of their faith, he
made them become aware with realism of their life as sons and daughters of God,
animated by the Spirit, humble and simple in their appeal for mercy and the
Father’s love. This vision came together with a high sense of the participation
in Christ’s Body in the Eucharist and with a strong Marian devotion, asking
Jesus’ Mother to form Christ inside those who appeal to her.
Dominican Father Aidan Nichols put it this way:
[The book,] Christ the Life of the Soul is undoubtedly the fundamental text for
Marmion’s thought. It is unapologetically God-centered. Only God, author of our
salvation, can make known to us what he desires of us if we are to attain to him.
Tragically, people fritter away energy through misconceptions of holiness, or by losing
themselves in minutiae of religious observance, when what is needed is the fullest
possible synthetic view, the amplest panorama, of the divine plan. Such is the
fruitfulness of the divine thought that it can fail to mature only through our fault
– not by virtue of any insufficiency of its own. That metaphor of fruitfulness,
with its resonance of the richness of God’s self-offer, recurs time and again in
Marmion, a presage of its role in an equally Trinitarian Catholic thinker later in the
century, Hans Urs von Balthasar. (Aidan Nichols, O.P.)
What has been going on in the Church in the last 100 years did not happen from
scratch! People like Blessed Columba were instrumental in renewing Catholic life in the
sources of our faith and spirituality – “the living presence of Christ!”
We welcome your comments:
communications@conception.edu
www.conceptionabbey.org
Back to Table of Contents
|
