The annual rhythm of the Christmas celebrations often runs the risk of making this time pass as a routine, to the point of deferring the dimension of mystery or even cancelling it. In order not to give in to this temptation and in order to savor Christmas better, I thought it opportune to share with everyone my present reflection on the meaning of Christmas as a gift to the Poor, the nodal point of the Christology of the Human Word in the Cusmanian perspective.
To begin with, it is important to underline that Cusmano, in his numerous letters, deploys an absolute Christocentrism, which places God at the center as the very reason for life. God being the whole of life, any claim to a life without Him can only be self-destructive for the human being. Cusmano wrote in this regard, in a letter: “My God, You are everything for me. I want nothing, but You alone and to possess You alone I renounce everything, I give to You my soul, my body, my powers and my senses. I desire You in every moment of my life and in order to possess You for just one moment I am happy to lose everything”[1].
This primacy of God in Cusmano has as its foundation the mystery of the Incarnation, that is, Falzone explains, the understanding of Christ as the Word of God “who becomes incarnate, suffers and dies for sinners, but who remains with us in the sacrament of the Eucharist and makes himself present in a very special way in the ‘sacrament’ of the poor”[2]. Behold the mystery that constitutes the pivot of both the theological and spiritual thought of Cusmano and of his charitable activity. However, to designate this mystery, Cusmano uses the formula “Human Word” instead of the classic expression “Incarnate Word”. In fact, according to him, “Jesus Christ is the Human Word […]. He took on a body and a soul like we have, and thus became man without leaving God. He, being God consubstantial with the Father, lowered Himself to our misery and made it His own; and making it His own, He took upon Himself all the pains that were due to us, and suffered everything for us, in order to relieve us of the least suffering and enrich us with all the treasures of His grace”[3].
What then can be the theological significance of this formula “Human Word” with which Cusmano designates the mystery of the Incarnation? I would like to recall that the term “Incarnatio” was used by St. Ignatius of Antioch and developed by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in their respective reflections on the key passage in the Prologue of Saint John: “And the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14). In one of his Catechesis, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI points out that the word “flesh” in this text indicates, in its Jewish meaning, “man in his entirety, the whole man, but precisely under the aspect of his transience and temporality, of his poverty and contingency”[4]. This leads us to affirm that Saint John wished to indicate that the salvation offered by God in this mystery concerns the concrete and total human being, both in his joys and in his miseries. This initiative of God had only one purpose: the divine sonship of man. Benedict XVI himself explains: “God took on the human condition in order to heal it of all that separates it from Him, to allow us to call Him, in His Only Begotten Son, by the name of ‘Abba, Father,’ and to be truly children of God. Saint Irenaeus affirms: ‘This is why the Word became man, and the Son of God, the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God’”[5]. It follows that the Word became flesh, gratuitously and according to a logic of surplus, taking on the temporal and contingent condition of man, with the sole purpose of saving human nature by reconciling it with God.
A double movement is outlined in this process. First of all, in the downward perspective, there is the movement of God towards man, which is followed, in the upward perspective, by the movement of man towards God. It is at the end of this double movement of lowering and elevation that the human being is saved in the measure in which, by assuming humanity, the Word divinizes it, thus enabling it to the filial relationship and communion with God.
Cusmano certainly has in mind this doctrine of the Incarnate Word and does not seem to ignore the Christological and Trinitarian controversy of the past. However, he remains a child of his time and lives in a century, the nineteenth, whose piety and devotion are marked by a pronounced Christocentrism and oriented towards the Incarnation as a work of God’s gratuitous love that places man before the need for a response of the same nature, that is, making love with love. This is why Cusmano deploys his thought in the wake of Saint Vincent de Paul who, as Falzone points out, paraphrasing Mezzadri, “had centered his Christocentric spirituality with adherence to Christ the Incarnate Word, in the interior experience and practice of life, in relation to his neighbor, to the poor above all who represent him”[6].
This environment provides Cusmano with the basis for his contemplation of the mystery of the Word. In the formula “Human Word”, he connects in a symbiosis the eternal Johannine Logos (Jn 1:1-3) and the Christ of kenosis (Phil 2:6-11), that is, the Jesus who remains united to the Father in the Prologue and the Crucified of the Pauline Hymn where the Savior takes the condition of a slave. Moreover, the recourse to this formula allows Cusmano to recover the profile of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah and the figure of Jesus as the Servant who remained faithful to his Father even unto death for the salvation of the human being. Cusmano makes this thought explicit by saying that, in kenosis, the Word, “consubstantial with the Father, lowers himself to our misery” and gives us “this spectacle of love, humbling himself to our lowliness”; He, the eternal Word, descends and lowers “his infinitely rich nature” to unite it to our “infinitely poor” nature” [7].
In the ascending movement, the pro-existential purpose of kenosis is confirmed, because the Word humanized Himself in order to “relieve us of every slightest suffering and enrich us with the treasures of His grace”[8]. The humanization of the Word, therefore, is followed by the divinization of man, and this man is the poor man whom the humanized Word raises from the garbage and the weak man whom he raises from the dust “to make them sit with the noble and give them a throne of glory” (1Sam 2:8). In this regard, Cusmano emphasizes that Christ “came down from the heights of heaven to the miserable condition of man, he took upon his shoulders the miseries of all, he made his own the sufferings and the feathers of all […] to open up to poor sinners the path of forgiveness and the joy of Paradise”[9]. It thus becomes evident that, in the perspective of Cusmano, the humanization of the Word has the Poor as its terminus ad quem. The initiative starts from God who descends into man in his integrity, under the aspect of his transience, his poverty or contingency, in order to elevate him to Him. In this way, every self-referential drift of the human being to raise himself alone to God is thwarted; it is the Word who humanizes himself first and the divinization of man follows.
In this way, two important aspects of the contemplation of Christmas or the mystery of the Human Word are deduced: the full assumption of the sufferings of humanity and the precedence of example over proclamation. In the first aspect, the Human Word shows compassion and emotion before the moral and material misery of humanity and offers himself as a model of solicitude, tenderness and charity. The humanization of the Word then becomes a process of gift or charity without limit that every Christian, particularly those called to serve the Poor, must infinitely imitate. It is thus that at Christmas we are called to first welcome the gift that we are and then give ourselves to others.
In the second aspect, we have a methodological option that consists, as Civiletto explains, in “combining proclamation and service together” because, in Jesus, these two terms “are indissolubly united,” even though Jesus himself “premised ‘practice on theory’”[10]. Cusmano cites various New Testament episodes in support of this methodological option of the Human Word. This is the case, first of all, of the Last Judgment (Mt 25:31-46), which is based on Works of Mercy and not on “empty theories, separated from practice” because He, the Human Word, “Eternal Wisdom of the Father, wanted to unite, indeed to premise practice to theory, ‘coepit facere et docere’”[11]. This is also the case with the Multiplication of the loaves (Lk 9:11-17), where “Jesus broke the bread to feed the crowds, and entrusted to the Apostles the mission of helping and serving them: Vos facite illos discumbere, vos date illis manducare”[12]. This is the case, finally, of the Disciples of Emmaus (Lk 24:18-35), who had recognized Jesus, not at the explanation of the Scriptures, but at the breaking of the bread.
In short, Jesus began by doing and continued by proclaiming. Inspired by this method, according to the teaching of Cusmano, “if we want to make Jesus known, we must begin, not by teaching, but by doing. It is not enough for souls to listen”[13]. Behold, this is the true meaning of Christmas as a gift to the Poor; this is also the novum of the Morsel of the Poor, which is founded on the mystery of the Human Word and which should be raising, not only at Christmas, but every time and everywhere as a social paradigm against the globalization of indifference.
In the final analysis, to affirm that the Morsel of the Poor is founded on the mystery of the Human Word is equivalent to founding it on the Christology of gift. The humanization of the Word is a guarantee to us as Poor, to whom the Lord assures: “Fear not, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the Kingdom” (Lk 12:32). It is therefore the newness of this surprising and excessive gratuitousness of the Work accomplished by God in the Human Word that Cusmano intends to highlight and that should serve as our guide during this Christmas season. In the offering of a morsel, it is always a question of the charity of Jesus Christ, which is manifested in the total gift he made of himself in favor of all men and women, and in particular of the Poor. It is therefore obvious that, like the doctor of the law in the episode of the Good Samaritan, he says to you and to me: “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37), this Christmas.
Best wishes, for a Merry Christmas to all. Viva Jesus!
Fr. Romain Ntumba Tshimbawu S.d.P.
[1] G. Ajello (ed.), Lettere del Servo di Dio P. Giacomo Cusmano, Fondatore del Boccone del Povero, I/1: (1864-1884), Boccone del Povero, Palermo 1952, 145.
[2] M. T. Falzone, Storia e Spiritualità cusmaniana, II: La Vita Nuova, Centro Studi e Animazione Cusmaniana, Palermo 2003, 107.
[3] G. Ajello (ed.), Lettere del Servo di Dio P. Giacomo Cusmano, Fondatore del Boccone del Povero, II: (Alla sorella Suor Vincenzina, 1881-1888), Boccone del Povero, Palermo 1952, II, 13-14.
[4] Benedetto XVI, «“Si è fatto uomo”. Udienza Generale (9 gennaio 2013)», inhttp://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/it/audiences/2013/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20130109.html.
[5] Ivi.
[6] M. T. Falzone, Storia e Spiritualità cusmaniana, II, 112.
[7] Ivi,113.
[8] G. Ajello (ed.), Lettere del Servo di Dio…, II, 14.
[9] P. Fazio (ed.), Lettere del Servo di Dio P. Giacomo Cusmano, Fondatore del Boccone del Povero, Nuova Raccolta, I vol., Boccone del Povero, Palermo 1970-1972, 13.
[10] G. Civiletto, «Le radici cristologiche della teologia del povero in Cusmano», in C. Bianco (ed.), Il povero, ottavo sacramento? L’epistolario di Giacomo Cusmano tra morale, spiritualità e pastorale, Dehoniane, Bologna 2014, 146.
[11] P. Fazio (ed.), Lettere del Servo di Dio…, II, 23.
[12] F.P. Filippello, Le mie Testimonianze al Tribunale della Chiesa. Notizie sulla vita e le virtù del P. Giacomo Cusmano e Documenti su la Storia del “Boccone del Povero”, Vol. II/2, Boccone del Povero, Palermo 1924-1936, II/2, 296.
[13] Ivi.
