Learning to Love in the Great Crowd that Can’t be Numbered

Back in 1927 Dorothy Day, a passionate social activist who was beginning to awaken spiritually, attended a Catholic Mass.

Noting the presence of every strata of society gathered for worship in the same place, Day was especially impressed “by the egalitarian and inclusive way people gathered for the liturgy,” writes Bishop Robert Barron.

What impressed Day, Barron notes, was that the Mass was one place where the usual social distinctions that separate much of society were blurred: “rich and poor, educated and ignorant, members of establishment families and immigrants all came together in the same place for the same purpose.”

The Mass is, Barron says, a “countercultural sign to an antagonistic social ontology” even today.

Mass, at least in my community, is a gathering of farm hands and farm owners, English speakers and Spanish speakers, native born Americans and immigrants. In the months before the last election you could see bumper stickers from both political parties on cars in the church parking lot.

We weren’t coming together to fight or show each other up. Our common purpose was and is the same one that has gathered Christians in every century: we come to listen to the Scriptures, God’s Word, and to receive Christ in the Eucharist, praying for grace to live according to what we have heard and received. Frequent presence at Mass allows us, when we open our eyes, to see ourselves in a more accurate light than we do in places that segregate us by income, interests or political views.

“Thank God, thank God that I am like other men,” Thomas Merton declared in 1958 after his revelatory experience on the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville.

The worldly wise convert turned Trappist monk had been a contemplative in Kentucky’s Gethsemanai Abbey for 17 years at the time of this experience. Merton was merely visiting the shopping district on business when, momentarily, the connection between all people was revealed to him. “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers:

And if only everybody could realize this! But there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Merton’s experience was grounded in a distinctive of the Christian faith: “I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are.”

While I haven’t experienced connection on the level of Merton, I feel the longing for it more and more as I hear so many people commenting that they just can’t respect anyone who views the world differently than they do. Church is one place that challenges this common attitude, though even in church we sometimes succumb to it.

Outside of church there are very few opportunities to truly interact with people whose social class, language or race is different from our own. And there are so many opportunities to tune into views we already have, giving our social media friends a “like” when they trash the same groups of people that we also despise. It is so very easy to slip into the proud attitude condemned by Christ: “I thank God that I am not like other men.” Pride is indeed the deadliest sin.

On the other hand I do hear others saying they are tired of this oppositional culture and are hungering for ways back to humility and civility. Bishop Barron may be on to something his chapter on the Mass in the rich little book An Introduction to Prayer, when he reminds us that in the book of Revelation, we find all around God’s throne “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and nations.”

The Olympics is a bit like that, but it’s a competition. The Mass, on the other hand, is a precursor of what is to come: it is a communion.

Reading the Revelation passage in the light of Dorothy Day’s insight, it occurred to me how important specific numbers usually are in the Scriptures. We see the twelve tribes of Israel, for instance, and come to better understand why Christ, when choosing disciples, selected twelve of them. The number 40 quickly reminds us of the Flood, Israel’s wilderness wandering and Christ’s fast in the desert. Likewise we remember that seven signifies perfection and three indicates the symmetry of completion.

I’m not a biblical scholar, but it seems reasonable to suggest that if the Bible is so keen on communicating truth through numbers, when the text points out something that can not be counted, we might want to take a second look.

When God called Abraham (Genesis 15:5), he asked him to consider the incomprehensible number of stars glittering in the night sky and the grains of sand on the seashore as well. This, God said, would be the number of people who would be blessed through his faithfulness. The symmetry is complete at the end of time as we know it, when John’s vision in Revelation describes a great crowd which “no one could count.” Though it’s possible to reject the invitation, the God whose very Being is Love invites everyone to his table. Mass, Barron says, is a glimpse of this future reality. It’s is a very freeing experience in times like ours.

We do not have the ability to achieve it completely in this broken world, but we can keep on seeking the kingdom of God “within” us.

In his sermon Contracted Views in Religion, (which Ken Meyers quotes on a recent recording of the Mars Hill Audio Journal) St. John Henry Newman exhorts his listeners in words that ring true in this moment as they did in his:

As we cannot help hearing what goes on in the world, let us guard, on hearing it, against all intemperate, uncharitable feelings towards those who differ from us, or oppose us. Let us pray for our enemies; let us try to make out men to be as good as they can fairly and safely be considered; let us rejoice at any symptoms of repentance, or any marks of good principle in those who are on the side of error. Let us be forgiving.”

Of course we still distinguish right from wrong, helpful politics from hurtful policies, justice from injustice. But with hearts cleansed and humbled in communion, perhaps we can also listen more deeply and offer correction, when necessary, more respectfully as we ask for eyes to see the reality of our common humanity.

We don’t even know the number of hairs on our own head, but Christ assures us that the Father does. So the hairs on every head in the uncounted crowd at the heavenly feast must indeed be astronomical. Perhaps that vision can help us give those around us a little more grace and understanding.

Please share Sparrowfare and subscribe here to stay in touch!

You might also enjoy No Man Is an Island: One of Many Reasons I Still Show up at Church and Whoever You Are and However You Voted, You Are (Still) My Neighbor.

“Dr. John F. Crosby explores key personalist insights found in the thinking of John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini” on a recent Friday Feature of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, which you can hear for free as long as the post is up by downloading the Mars Hill Audio Journal App. The 2016 lecture, “Fundamental Ideas of Personalism: John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini” is provided to Mars Hill courtesy of The Hildebrand Project.

David Brooks’ NY Times opinion piece Personalism: the Philosophy We Need is an inspiring introduction to what personalism could offer us in the isolation and division in today’s culture.

Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash