Letters from Bishop Bartosic

On today’s feast one year ago, Pope Francis queried the crowd gathered for the Angelus in the Piazza San Pietro: ...am I aware of the immense gift I carry within me through Baptism? Do I acknowledge, in my life, the light of the presence of God, who sees me as his beloved son, his beloved daughter?

It’s an important question. Baptism puts us into relationship with God and with each other. Meet your brother Tomás Diaz: he is a Texan, a theologian and an educator. In an article in The Lamp, Diaz introduces himself as born with a genetic disorder that has wasted his voluntary muscles. Weakness defines my life, he writes, going on to make the extraordinary declaration, and that’s not a bad thing.

Diaz describes a last-minute decision to live on campus during his freshman year in college. His frightened parents moved in with him, showering and dressing him, until a friend stepped in and his parents stepped out to watch from afar. As my disability entered into the lives of others, he writes, those lives were given the opportunity to change, to transform. The parent knows this intimately – children are born and they must (sometimes against all odds) become strong. The very weakness of these little growing persons makes the parents’ strength. The children, and their littleness, give birth to the parent’s greatness. I became such a little thing, a kind of midwife of the strength in my teachers and friends.

Dependence bringing to birth the strength of those around us: Diaz could be talking about Baptism. Christening makes us dependent upon Christ. In Baptism, what is ours becomes his, what is his becomes ours, up to and including his dependency. Chief among the things we know about Jesus, thanks to the Gospel, is his awareness of dependence upon the Father: Son is both who he is called to be and what he is called to do. We are truly Christ-ed, to the degree that he not only permits us to call his Father, our own; in fact, he teaches us to do this.

So, a Christian cannot understand herself without reference to Christ. Nor can she understand herself without reference to her neighbor, those others who belong to Christ: those who, through him, with him, and in him, have also become sons or daughters of the Father and therefore, her brothers and sisters. Each one with his or her weakness, but:

Of course, the “he” written above refers to the Christ: but we know the Messiah is depending on the members of his body to carry his work forward.