The Way of the Disciple by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 156

The essential thing is not to look away from Jesus, because, as long as he is there at the center of our souls we can be sure that we shall not greatly go astray from his way. (96)

The small size of this book is a cloak for its immense spiritual weight—it is a challenging book to read its call is to the "boldest and most adventuresome of undertakings."1 Erasmo looks at five stages of discipleship through the lens of familiar gospel stories:

  1. The free, spontaneous, and mysterious call of Jesus (Mark 3:14-15)
  2. The learning of trust through the experience of fear (the storm on the lake)
  3. Baring to Jesus our needs and sufferings (the healing of Bartimaeus)
  4. The reciprocation of God's love by accepting his forgiveness (the washing of Jesus' feet by Mary)
  5. Becoming evangelists to share the good news (the Samaritan woman at the well)

He also ends with a beautiful reflection on Mary as the model of the Christian disciple, which is nicely paired with Mary's Voice in the Gospel According to John. He explains how the Christian vocation in a nutshell is to become another Mary: "Because a Christian disciple is above all a Christ-bearer, there exists a deep and indispensable relationship between Jesus' disciples and the Mother of Emmanuel" (129).

Finally, I am most struck by this call to purity of heart for understanding Scripture:

The monk who wants to attain knowledge of the Scriptures should not waste his efforts on the books of the commentators, but should rather direct all the activity of his spirit and all the attention of his heart to the purification of the vices of the flesh. Once these have been driven out, and the veils of the passions have been lifted, the eyes of the heart will naturally contemplate the mysteries of the Scriptures. For the grace of the Holy Spirit has not taught these mysteries for them to remain unknown and dark; rather, they became such through our own fault, when we allow the veil of sin to darken the eyes of our heart. Once these have been restored to their natural health, the simple reading of Sacred Scripture amply suffices all by itself for the contemplation of true knowledge.
–Cassian, Institutes, 5, 34

Preface

  • "Those who contemplate the Gospel text with the eyes of a faithful lover can, with patience, begin to discover the whole in the fragment, the full Mystery of Christ hidden in each and every scene." (11)
  • "If we have ears attuned to his voice and hearts willing to learn what his Heart has to teach, in every line of the Gospel we will hear Christ calling us to enter into his intimacy and destiny as disciples." (12)

Becoming Wet Clay in His Hands

  • Peter—in Lk-05 ("Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.") and Jn-06 ("Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life")—shows us the apparently opposite impulses that define discipleship: consciousness of one's utter unworthiness and simultaneously one's desperate need to abide in God (15)
  • "The passion for simply abiding in the company of Jesus , the need continually to be with him in every sense of that verb, is at the very heart of discipleship" (16)
  • A prerequisite for becoming a disciple is the willingness to abandon the old and a desire to be created again (16-17)
  • "What we seek with all our soul is the possibility of opening ourselves up in prayer to God's transforming action...the life of contemplation is the boldest and most adventuresome of undertakings." (18)
  • Ps-68: "God's holiness simultaneously shatters arrogance and makes the just rejoice...Our business as Christians is to work tirelessly at becoming destitute and needy orphans and widows who rely only on the mercy, goodness, and power of God." (21)
  • "What do we prefer, our own self-acquired wealth or the beautiful poverty of Christ." (22)
  • "Christian life is at bottom about being continually rejuvenated and re-creted by the power of the Spirit" (23)
  • "We must pray with Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Lord, send my roots rain' (from 'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'), pray to become like wax before the advancing fire of his holiness, wax that is only too glad to be changed by heat into a new and more useful shape, glad even perhaps to be consumed as it feeds the beauty of a burning, light-giving flame." (25)
  • "Tears are the humble, created water of my heart that corresponds to the powerful uncreated water of the Spirit's life in me. Tears are perhaps the most rejuvenating and re-creating water of all, the evidence that I have allowed grace to melt the ice at the center of my being." (26)
  • "The way of the disciple is necessarily a way of discipline, because discipleship is the living school in which we learn how to be like Christ by intimate association with him." (27)
  • "Mature Christian freedom is my total availability and obedience to the will of the all-wise God." (29)
  • "Pondering God's Word is the concrete manner in which the soul becomes more and more malleable to the stress of God's hands." (32-33)
  • Simone Weil: "The most precious goods must not be searched for; they must be waited for." (33-34)

The Invitation: "Come to Me"

  • Discipleship is the intimate following of Jesus (35)

The monk who wants to attain knowledge of the Scriptures should not waste his efforts on the books of the commentators, but should rather direct all the activity of his spirit and all the attention of his heart to the purification of the vices of the flesh. Once these have been driven out, and the veils of the passions have been lifted, the eyes of the heart will naturally contemplate the mysteries of the Scriptures. For the grace of the Holy Spirit has not taught these mysteries for them to remain unknown and dark; rather, they became such through our own fault, when we allow the veil of sin to darken the eyes of our heart. Once these have been restored to their natural health, the simple reading of Sacred Scripture amply suffices all by itself for the contemplation of true knowledge.
–Cassian, Institutes, 5, 34

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  • "The whole labor of the interpretation of Scripture is intimately related to the ascetical life, to the effort to overcome the blindness that sin inflicts upon our soul." (36)
  • His translation of Mk-03: "Jesus went up into the hills and called to him those whom he desired; and they came to him. And he created twelve, in order that they might be with him and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons." This contains the five elements of discipleship (36):
    1. Our solitude with Jesus
    2. His freedom in choosing and calling
    3. Our response to the call
    4. The Shared life of companionship with Jesus and the other disciples
    5. The mission to teach and heal
  • "The Disciple will spend the greater part of his time and effort, not 'doing God's work', but simply in yielding to the work God wants him to do. No one can be a disciple without first being a contemplative." (36-37)
  • "The written Word, even when profoundly meditated upon, can at best bring us to the threshold of the living person of Jesus. Nothing can substitute for this personal encounter." (39)
  • "In Scripture, what we could call the 'good news of damnation' is always the necessary prelude to the good news of salvation." (40, cf. T. S. Eliot)
  • Guerric of Igny: "If in the depths of your soul you were to keep a quiet silence, the all-powerful Word would flow from the Father's throne secretly into you. Happy then is the person who has so flex the world's tumult, who has so withdrawn into the solitude and secrecy of interior peace, that he can hear not only the Voice of the Word, but the Word himself: not John but Jesus." (43-44, Sermons, 4, 2)
  • "We who are merely human are usually too full of our own ideas, projects, desires, anxieties, and prejudices to be free enough to receive anything." (45)
  • "In the same way that the eternal Son never desires ever to be anything but Son, so, too, his disciple never desires to be anything except, more and more, a disciple." (45)
  • "Christian life means to continue always being created by God. No one can be a Christian without learning how to become totally dependent on God as Father, in union with Jesus as our brother and Mary as our mother." (46)
  • "Adulthood, instead of freeing us, has often turned us into slaves—perhaps respectable, outwardly successful, highly educated—but nonetheless slaves." (48)
  • "'Rest for our souls' is intended by Jesus to be a real and genuine state of life, the natural condition in which a child of God habitually exists...This rest is not laziness or a restoration of energy in order to get back to serious work: it is an end in itself." (49, cf. Is-66)
  • "As creatures we are always going to be serving some 'master' or other" (50)
    • "The crucial question is: Whom or what will we serve?" (52)
  • "Christ provides the foundation for the only authentic humanism worthy of the name...monastic life should represent in the CHurch the very form of Christian humanism." (54)

Following the Homeless One

The storm on the lake in Mt-08

  • "Our praying and doing should be ordered to a continual act of self-sacrifice in union with Jesus' redemptive death." (58)
  • "We must strive for the day when we can truly say that the love of God and the desire to do his holy will are our deepest motivation. As Christians, we may not love even our own family more than God and his unfathomable will, and at times very painful sacrifices are required of us if we are to live this truth." (65)
  • Jesus exposes his friends to mortal fear to teach them what is essential (66)
  • Jesus sleeping through a storm is an image of what our trust in God should look like (66)
  • "If we admit Christ into the boat of our life for him to sail with us, even the most tormented moments at the surface of the emotions can coexist with a deep calm, the deep sleep of a will that rests, like Jesus, in the bosom of the eternal Father...We cannot surrender our souls as hostages to the whims of this world's waves." (67)

Once the disciples have run out of every possible personal resource of strength and understanding, once moral fear has washed their eyes clean, then and only then does the Lord work the marvel: by a mere word, he calms the winds and the sea. In a real sense, Jesus can do this in my life only when I allow him and beg him to, only when I run to him with untiring pleas and thus show him that I no longer trust in myself, only when I stop playing sorcerer's apprentice over the cauldron of my life and become silent, expectant disciple. I have to allow him to be the Lord of the tormented sea of my soul, the Lord of the waves of my passions- Lord of both my greed and my sadness (for sadness can be a vice), Lord of both my anger and my eroticism, my envy, my pride, my drive to accomplish and shine and be admired. (69)

Leaping Bartimaeus

Bartimaeus in Mk-10

  • Unlike Bateimaeus, "We may not be blind in our body, but we are surely blind in our soul." (73)
  • We need to say with him, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Mk-10)
  • Six moments in the encounter between Jesus and Barimaeus:
    1. The blind man is alone and sunken in misery: we need to acknowledge our own brokenness
    2. He was not looking just for human comfort but for the Kingdom of God.
      • "We have to recognize ourselves as truly needy in order then to expose ourselves to God's transforming action in Jesus and dare to persist against whatever obstacles arise." (77)
      • "God is faithful, and in the end he always comes to those who await him with such longing." (77)
    3. Bartimaeus shouts out with boldness: "Christians must implore our Father with all the boldness and daring of the child who knows that nothing can be denied us by the God who loves us and who is the Lord of heaven and earth...Jesus is always listening and he never fails to respond." (78)
    4. He wastes no times but throws off his mantle and springs to Jesus: we come to Jesus as we are because we know that God loves us—the "me" he created—not our illusions about ourselves (80)
    5. He limits his request to the essential thing he needs: he has come to restore the whole of our humanity to what God had made it in the beginning.
    6. Bartimaeus receives his sigh, and the first thing he gazes upon is the beauty of Jesus.
  • "We will be too weak and scattered to pray as we ought if we habitually scatter our spiritual energy in other directions." (84)

The Necessary Wastefulness of Love

The washing of Jesus' feet by Mary in Lk-07

  • Theme of Luke's Gospel: the joy and thanksgiving that well up in our hearts at discovering the mercy of God (85)
  • "The way toward the contemplation of God's beauty begins with the recognition of one's own deformity and ugliness." (85-86)
  • "Deep and overwhelming love is beyond words and beyond reason." The Pharisee's words separate him, while the woman's silent love embodies Ps-46: "Be still and know that I am God" (91)
  • Mary converts the fruit of her sin into an act of love and praise. "This tainted fruit is the only thing she has to offer; but the fire of her love transforms the ugliness of sin into the beauty of adoration." (92)
    • "This woman has found the secret of how to convert the coal of sin into the diamond of love, by the sheer pressure of her desire and the heart of her devotion." (94)
  • "Actions are more eloquent than words because they give proof of truth in the soul." (95)
  • "When love is based on gratitude at knowing oneself love and forgiven, the soul will never be at a loss as to how to express such love, especially through a habitual silence that just wants to admire and adore. The essential thing is not to look away from Jesus, because, as long as he is there at the center of our souls we can be sure that we shall not greatly go astray from his way." (96)

The Abandoned Pitcher

The woman at the well in John 4:1-42

  • This episode offers a synthesis of the stages of discipleship (99)
    1. The free, spontaneous, and mysterious call of Jesus
    2. The learning of trust through the experience of fear
    3. Baring to Jesus our needs and sufferings
    4. The reciprocation of God's love by accepting his forgiveness
    5. Becoming evangelists to share the good new
  • Jesus asks for a drink of water: "This action of making himself needy out of love may well be the greatest and most astounding work of his omnipotence." (105)
  • "The only thing love wants is to be loved in return." (106)
  • "The first thing that the divine light does in us, before communicating to us its own life, is to expose our sins." (109-110)
  • The woman and Samaria together represent "the general human slide toward idolatry, self-indulgence, and the abandonment of God's Law." (110)
  • The woman had six "husbands", but Jesus is the seventh man in her life: "Seven is the number of perfection, the number signaling the end of the search, the fulfillment of all desire, the arrival home." (111)

Between the Ascension and Pentecost

from Lk-24

  • No one can be a disciple in isolation (117)
  • In the Ascension, it is as if Christ is saying "I leave for heaven so that your own hands may not become my hands, your deeds my deeds, your heart my heart." (122)
  • "Jesus disappears as a single individual in order to fill the whole world with his presence." (122-123)
  • "The connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and his first coming to Mary at the Annunciation is the key to the Gospel of Luke." (124)

The Disciple Contemplates the Mother

  • "Because a Christian disciple is above all a Christ-bearer, there exists a deep and indispensable relationship between Jesus' disciples and the Mother of Emmanuel." (129)
    • The Christian vocation in a nutshell is to become another Mary (131)
  • "We love Jesus for the sake of the Father, and we love Mary for the sake of Jesus and the Father." (132)
  • "It is impossible to find Jesus in isolation from the two essential communities to which he belongs by his nature as incarnate Word. In his divinity we cannot embrace him apart from the community of the Holy Trinity; and in his humanity we cannot approach him apart from the family through which he enters our race and shares our human condition to the full." (132)
  • "The worship of Jesus is inseparable from deep reverence for the Mother by whose obedient faith he has come into the world." (133)
  • "His father gave him the will to die for us, but Mary gave him the body and the blood to perfect and consummate the sacrifice. Mary alone gave Jesus the blood with which to drown man's sin!" (133-134)
  • The two fundamental paradoxes (mysteries) of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ, two natures in one Divine Person; the Blessed Trinity, three Persons yet one God. (139)
  • "What indeed is the life of prayer, if not the practical form of our own redemption as a result of our participating in Christ's saving work?" (145)
  • "We are to do what we see Jesus himself doing: working, suffering, praying, interceding, dying, and rising for the life of the world." (146)

Topic: Spiritual Classics

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Bibliography

file:(~The Way of the Disciple)

New Words

  • troparion: a short hymn of one stanza in Byzantine music and in the religious music of Eastern Orthodox Christianity (90, Wikipedia)
  • kenosis: the "self-emptying" of Jesus (133")

Created: 2023-07-09-Sun
Updated: 2024-05-08-Wed

  1. "What we seek with all our soul is the possibility of opening ourselves up in prayer to God's transforming action...the life of contemplation is the boldest and most adventuresome of undertakings." (18) ↩