A Dominican perspective

Below is the Christmas letter Father Chysostom McVey, OP, Promoter General of the Dominican Family and Assistant to the Master General of the Order for the Apostolic Life, sent this year.  It seems worth sharing.

Dear Family and Friends,           January 2006

It has, I know, been quite a year for just about everybody: natural disasters (the earthquake toll in Pakistan alone is now 83,000, with survivors facing a cruel winter in the mountains, making the elderly and infants especially vulnerable) and man-made ones with tens of thousands of victims of an ideology, or racial and religious hatred, and random violence. ‘Where there are victims,’ as the Jesuit, Jon Sobrino, reminded a group of us Dominicans in El Salvador in December, ‘there are also victimizers.’ Several times during Advent, verses from Isaiah’s vision (Is 11.1-11) of a ‘peaceable kingdom’ reappear, with wolf and lamb living together, lions eating grass, being led by a child; babies crawl among poisonous snakes and a little child puts its hand in the hole of a vipers’ nest and remains unharmed. While there are animals and children in Isaiah’s vision, there is no mention of ‘man.’ Perhaps the peaceable kingdom is only possible if we become like children. They belong there; we older ‘victimizers’ do not. Where does responsibility lie? And what are we becoming? What is becoming of our world – hardly a ‘peaceable kingdom?’

Someone, in a recent article said he did not want u-topia, ‘no place,’ but eu-topia, ‘another place and a good place.’ I thought that particularly apt. Not utopia, ‘no place,’ which is nowhere, and can never be, but eutopia, ‘a good place,’ which can and must be everywhere. This is the kind of ‘good place’ Christians long for and work for: ‘What we hope for is what he promised: a new heaven and a new earth, where justice is at home’ (2 Pt 3.13). Along with Emily Dickenson’s poem about hope being ‘the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all,’ I discovered a new favorite from Thérèse of Lisieux, who said, ‘My personal folly is hoping.’ So is mine.

In Madrid last year, I picked up a book of Goya’a etchings. He was old and deaf in 1824 and he portrayed himself as an old man with long white hair and beard, stooped, and walking with two canes, yet above the drawing he had written, Aun aprendo, ‘I am still learning.’ It is above my desk now as I write. I think I identify with Goya because I am getting close to his age – and I am still learning – even from eight- and ten-year-old great nieces, who told me, ‘It’s better to be a girl because girls can do anything!’ I thought of sending that message to the gang on the other side of the Tiber but my hoping is not yet that outrageous.

My hoping has been strengthened this past year. By brothers and sisters who minister in Albania to a people still bruised from years of Communism; by brothers, sisters and laity in Vietnam who labor creatively under severe restrictions – and where one old Dominican told me, ‘Thank God for the Communists because they have kept us poor and faithful.’ Outside Saigon, the Order has several hospices for AIDS victims. We visited one for young men, ten in all, dying from AIDS related diseases. We prayed, sang, and then the doctor – who had earlier told me, ‘We die easily in Vietnam’ – asked them to share their hopes. They had not, most of them, lived a ‘good’ life, and one of them hoped ‘to live a little longer, to serve, to be able to say I’m sorry.’ As you can imagine, this year tears have lubricated my hoping. Somehow this seems the only proper response (although I am working on outrage too). I pray this year will bring us all closer to that ‘eutopia’ promised us and for which, deep down, we all yearn.

Chrys McVey (Tom)