I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Having spent the last week with Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, I’m now ready to give some preliminary impressions: preliminary because I’ve not read the whole thing, or even a tenth of it. But I spent an hour with it on Monday evening, and half-an-hour each morning since, and I think I’ve got the flavor of it.

Bottom line: I love it. It’s a keeper.

To recap, I got this book after praying for help from God to jumpstart in me a deep love of scripture. I want that precisely because the scriptures are a chief way God chose to use to make himself known to us. They are, in a sense, incarnational; and as St. Jerome said, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Conversely, to know Christ one must know the scriptures, and to love Christ one must love the scriptures.

And Erasmo clearly loves the scriptures. It’s clear in every line. He has read them, tasting the words, chewing on the meaning, and coming to know the Lord he loves through them, and he has made his meditations available to us.

The book begins with a lengthy introduction (around fifty pages) entitled, “A Cordial Reading of God’s Word,” which gives Erasmo’s approach to the project. These fifty pages (or, at least, the thirty or so that I’ve studied) might be worth the price of the book all by themselves. Here’s a sample:

The principal care of one who would make his house within Christ’s Word must be to allow the sacred text all its importance, all its resonance, all its radiance and centrality. He will ceaselessly allow it to occupy the central “block” of both his page and his loving attention, as in those manuscript commentaries on The Book in the Middle Ages—of Jewish, Christian, or Moslem origin—which display a minimal portion of the inspired text within a solid square in the middle of the page and whose thick margins, on four sides, became more and more crowded with the glosses of scribes who prayed, studied, memorized, and recopied—in a word, celebrated—the text inexhaustibly.

Not only is the Word of Scripture central to the study of Christ, it is to be central to our lives. The page with the Word at its center and glosses around the outside is to be the model for my life: my life is to be a gloss on the Scripture.

Every page is like this: every page has some fact, some link, some relation, some metaphor, rooted in the Word, rooted in the Faith, rooted in the Liturgy, that opens my eyes and begins to lift me up to heaven. I could multiply examples endlessly, but if I gave as many as I’d like then I’d certainly be hearing from the the Copyright Cops. But here’s one more example, in paraphrase.

At one point, while talking about the importance of the Greek text, Erasmo notes that the word St. Paul uses in Letter to the Ephesians for the “offering” of the temple sacrifices is the same word Matthew uses when people “bring” the sick and lame to Jesus to be healed. The sacrificial victim must be spotless, without flaw; and when folks bring their loved ones and “offer” them to Christ, he heals them, makes them clean and spotless, so that he can in turn offer them to God. And this adds a crucial element to the scene:

The situation in Matthew is then enhanced from a merely thaumaturgic one (even if this is establishing Christ’s crucial identity as Messiah) to a cultic, mystagogical, and even eucharistic one.

Jesus is not just a magician, not just a wonder-worker: in healing those brought to him, he is foreshadowing what he came to Earth to do for all of us on the cross.

In addition to reading and studying the opening essay, I’ve been spending some time each morning with the actual scripture of Matthew and Erasmo’s meditations on it. I’ve gotten partway through verse 19 of Chapter 1, which is slow going consider that the first 16 or 17 verses are all begats. (There are important lessons in the begats!) And my experience with these shorter meditations is similar to my experience with the opening essay: on every page there’s a connection I had not made, an image that will stick with me and enrich all future readings. I hope to have more to say about some of them in coming days and weeks.

In the meantime…if anything I’ve said appeals to you, go ahead and get a copy. I think you’ll find it to be worthwhile.

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Erasmo’s view of scripture is deeply incarnational. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God; and the purpose of scripture is too bring us face to face with Him. Though the Bible, God’s word written, is not in itself divine, still:

The written word of the evangelist: Is it not an incarnation of the spirit of his spoken word, breathed from his mouth of flesh on the roads of Palestine?

And this is why Erasmo bases his commentary on the original Greek text of Matthew’s gospel. Nothing about the Incarnation of Christ is an accident: not the time, not the place, and not the people. If we accept God’s omnipotence, then we have to say that the Gospel was ultimately recorded in Koine Greek because that’s the way the Lord wanted it. It’s worth looking at it that way, to see what we might see. (And then, Erasmo quotes a Hassidic proverb: “To read the Scriptures in translation is like kissing your wife through a handkerchief.”) Not, I hasten to add, that you need to know Greek to read this book, which is fortunate because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read it.

Erasmo begins his commentary with the title of the work, “good tidings according to Matthew”. And here again we see the Incarnation at work. Christ is God Incarnate, the fullest Revelation of God to His people. To know the Father, we must know the Son. And the principle way we know the Son is through his witnesses, and especially through the four evangelists.

We might put it like this: Christ, God Incarnate, is the embodied revelation of God, and the content of that revelation. The Church—the Apostles and their heirs, the multitude of saints, and all the rest of us—as the Mystical Body of Christ is also in a way the embodied revelation of God, and specifically the means of transmitting that revelation. The Church says that general revelation ended with the Apostles, and this is certainly true, but in another sense revelation is continually on-going as we encounter Christ in the scriptures and pass Him along to others. The content of revelation is unchanged and unchanging, but Christ will continually reveal it to each of us, if only we let Him. Erasmo says,

We come to see who God is and experience the depth of his love only by being taken up into the faith of the saints (in this case, St. Matthew), those who proclaim to us by the witness of their life and words the reality of the God who inhabits them.

When God descends to earth and enters human history, He doesn’t do so by halves.

I have a dirty little secret.

I don’t really like reading the Bible all that much. I mean, I’ve read it; all of the New Testament and much of the Old, much of it multiple times. I look at a passage of the New Testament and it tends to go in one eye and out the—well, you know what I mean. And this is not a Good Thing, especially for a Lay Dominican, given that Study is one of the four pillars of Dominican life.

Mind you, I studied obsessively during my first few years as a Catholic revert. The Faith was my current interest, and I burrowed into it with vigor. But interests wax and wane, and other things have my attention at the moment.

Which is why God made promises. I vowed to love my wife when I married her, in preparation for those times when loving unselfishly is difficult. And as a Dominican I promised to continue to study the Word, in preparation for those times when other things look shinier, and when I’m tired in the morning and just don’t want to do it. And during Lent I came face to face with the fact that this is one of those times, and that I need to get moving.

At times like these, prayer is indicated: the kind of prayer where you say, “Lord, I don’t want to read your word, but I want to want to read your word. Please help!” And I’d been praying this kind of prayer during Holy Week.

So on Holy Saturday I was at Barnes & Noble with Jane, and saw a book: Volume III of Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, published by Ignatius Press. I noticed it because it had the usual Ignatius spine, and because it was HUGE, 870 pages, dwarfing all of the books around out. So I pulled it out and took a look. It was subtitled, “Meditations on the Gospel according to St. Matthew”. Not the whole gospel, mind you; chapters 19 to 25 only. Turns out he covers chapters 1 to 11 in the first volume (746 pages), and chapter 12 to 18 in the second volume (800 pages), and he still has three chapters left to go; I’m expecting that the fourth volume, if he manages to publish it, will be 1200 pages at least.

I nearly recoiled in horror, but instead I took a closer look.

It’s a verse by verse commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, beginning from the Greek text. It is intended to be a cordial reading of the Gospel, a reading from the heart. It is intended to be read in the context of the Church and its teachings. It is intended to be part of an encounter with the Living God through His Word written.

Did I mention that Matthew was St. Dominic’s favorite gospel? He carried it with him everywhere.

Interesting, I thought. If only I had the time to plow through something so big. And I walked away.

I think I got about eight feet away before I turned around and went back. When you ask God for something, it’s unwise to walk away from the answer.

Naturally, B&N only had the third volume. So I ordered a copy of the first volume (from Amazon, on my cell phone; sorry, B&N!), and it arrived today. I spent an hour during my daughter’s dance class reading the (first part of) the introduction. And I’m more convinced than ever that my running across it on Saturday was an answer to prayer.

This post is long enough; I’ll have to say more about the book in the coming days. (If I don’t, nag me!)

Recently I was reading Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer, and—

OK. Half of you are saying, “Who’s Georgette Heyer?” and the other half are saying, “Hey, you’re male.” Time for a recap.

Georgette Heyer was an author—or, so I gather, the author—of regency romances in the middle of the 20th century. Regency romances are romance novels set in Regency England, in the time after George III went made but before his death. I do not usually read romance novels, but there’s something about Heyer, as authors as diverse as Lois McMaster Bujold and Julie Davis have noted. She’s funny, she has great characters, she writes well; and when you’re in the mood for something light and frothy, they are great fun. I suspect that she is more akin to P.G. Wodehouse (though less farcical) than to the average romance novelist. And it would be hard to overstate her influence. Some years back there was a flood of novels intended as sequels or companions to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with the noted exception of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the ones I glanced at all seemed to owe as much or more to Heyer as they did to Austen. She created her own fictional world, every bit as carefully constructed as a good science fiction or fantasy milieu, and millions have accepted it as the Real Thing. (Give her a try. Try Frederika. Or possibly Talisman Ring. Or maybe The Grand Sophy. I’ll wait.)

So anyway, I was reading Cotillion, in which a thirty-something man of property is travelling from London to the country to make an offer of marriage to a long-time acquaintance. He is not in love with her, or with anyone, but he’s the heir and it has been successfully impressed upon him that he must marry. He well likes his long-time friend, and so off he goes. On the way, he encounters a young woman of good family, great spirit, equal beauty, and little experience who is running away from home because her grandfather, the patriarch, won’t let her marry the man she wants to marry, because she is too young. What’s a gentleman to do? She has a grand strategy, but he can see it won’t answer. He can’t take her back to her family, because she won’t tell him who they are. He can’t leave her on her own; there are unscrupulous people about, don’t you know. Got to take her with him. And from there, of course, the tangles increase.

Now, here’s what led me to reflection. All of his acquaintance are wondering what has happened to him. They hear about the girl, and they all begin to jump to conclusions. Long, drawn out, extremely logical, plausible, believable conclusions, all of which happen to be quite wrong; and they go wrong for two reasons: first, they don’t have all of the information; and some of the information they do have they disbelieve. But as I say, their conclusions are, given the information they have and choose to believe, completely logical.

It occurred to me that we are in much the same position relative to God. It is possible (see Thomas Aquinas) to deduce the existence of God from first principles; and given that He exists, there are certain things that can proven about Him: that He is omnipotent and omniscient, for example. But is less obvious is that these statements are essentially negative. God is infinite, you see, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense of being unbounded. We can put no bounds on His knowledge or His power. That doesn’t mean that we truly understand what it means to be omnipotent; we don’t. It is simply not conceivable to us.

And yet, on a daily basis we try to make sense of God, and thus to put bounds on Him. And perhaps we even reason logically, and come to valid conclusions, based on what we know for sure. But the one thing we can know for certain sure is that God eludes our intellectual grasp. This why Pope Benedict in his writings frequently refers to God as the “Wholly Other”.

And yet, all is not lost. We are doomed to intellectual failure, but we are not doomed altogether.

We cannot grasp God, not intellectually, and certainly not by reasoning from first principles. But He knows this, and He doesn’t leave us orphaned. Instead, He has revealed Himself to us, first through His history with the Israelites, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. He’s in fact told us quite a lot about Himself, and all we really need. It’s partial information, but it’s enough.

Of course, we still go astray intellectually, just as the various on-lookers in Cotillion do. But the confusion does not go on forever. In time the gentleman comes home, and the on-lookers are able to find out from him what’s really been going on. And so we can go to God; and so in time He’ll bring us to live with Him, we are allowed to hope, and we will see Him clearly, and all our questions will be answered.