Familiarity breeds contempt, according to the old saying. Outside that, familiarity breeds something worse—complacency. Part of my own personal theory as to why Christianity has suffered a reversal of fortunes in the 20th and 21st centuries is because one of the central cores of the faith—the Scriptures—has become old hat. The commands to love your neighbor as yourself and to pluck out your own eye if it causes you to sin with the declarations that prostitutes and tax collectors (the lowest of the low for Jews of the 1st century) were entering the Kingdom of God before the Pharisees were bundles of lit dynamite when Christ uttered them; they were landmines when they were recorded by the evangelists and repeated to the early Christians in the catacombs; and they were sharpened pikes to the Christians who heard and read them after Constantine and Theodosius. Today, two thousand years later, they have become as familiar as and as boring as a sunrise. A few words into the readings and our minds usually switch to autopilot after we recognize which verbal pattern is being repeated to us. It’s all very bloodless and respectable.
And the familiarity has spread beyond the message to the Messenger, a logical result when the Word is the Message. G.K. Chesterton famously (and accurately) described orthodoxy as a boulder balanced on its tip; if pushed too much in any direction, the whole thing was bound to collapse. The same thing has happened to Christ. The proclamation of being the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God have swallowed up entirely His being the Lion of Judah; the Prince of Peace Who came not to bring peace but the sword. It is telling that we are more familiar with iconography of Christ carrying a lamb on His shoulders than we are of Him with a sword issuing from His mouth. And in an age awash in moral therapeutic deism, it was predictable that the over saturation of Christ as Good Shepherd—gentle, peaceful—would devolve into saccharine depictions of “Jesus is my homie.”
This is why only fragments of Scripture that still have some power to jostle us out of that autopilot setting are the ones that do not click with our modern sensibilities and perceptions. The whipping of the money changers, the command to treat your brother like a tax collector if he refuses to stop sinning, the statement that anyone who loves his family more than Christ will not enter the Kingdom still shock us to some extent because they do not square with the “Jesus is my homie” paradigm. It seems too harsh, angry and unloving for God to do.
When an imbalance occurs, a counter action that can restore that lost balance is necessary. Gabriel Possenti is one of the necessary counterbalances.
Most of the usual circle of saints with which we are inundated today follow a usual pattern of sanctity, part of which is the eschewing of violence. Many saints are remembered precisely because they renounced their former lives of brutality; St. Ignatius de Loyola, St. Christopher, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Martin of Tours are four prominent examples. They fit with our modern conceptions of what following God entails. St. Gabriel breaks this mold. According to the story:
After freeing a young woman from would-be rapists, St. Gabriel Possenti confronted the onrushing brigands waving revolvers. At that moment, Possenti fired at a lizard that happened to be running across the road and dispatched it with one shot. Thus having demonstrated his excellent handgun marksmanship, he was able to take command of the situation and ran the now-frightened brigands out of town.
In that one action, St. Gabriel shatters multiple, modern understandings of Christianity that, actually, have nothing to do with Christianity. A saint is not supposed to show anger; St. Gabriel reminds us of what Thomas Aquinas taught six hundred years previous—that anger towards the right things is holy and the lack of anger against the right things is the real sin. The modern saint is supposed to be weak (termed “meek”) forsaking all physical means of righting wrongs; St. Gabriel dispatches it as he did the lizard. The saint is supposed to be an over saturation of St. Francis, loving all creatures to the point where they will do what he asks of them, as the mosquitoes did for St. Rose of Lima and the rats did for St. Martin de Porres; St. Gabriel demonstrates that there is an hierarchy to love, as there is an hierarchy to everything. But the greatest fantasy that the young saint killed as surely as if he had put a bullet through it is the idea that the saint is an unearthly, almost elven creature.
I will admit that I went through a period where I didn’t care to read about the saints, especially the children saints. St. Dominic, St. Tarsus, St. Gemma Galgani never seemed to be people that (to use the dish ragged excuse) “I could relate to.” They had been too perfect, too holy, too stained glass even when alive. I liked having an extra blanket on my bed in wintertide and here was St. Dominic willingly going without any so as to offer his sufferings to God. The very thought of conflict of any kind put me in a panic and here was St. Tarsus being martyred for the Eucharist. There was too wide a gap between where I was and where they had been at even younger ages than myself. Of course, being able to “relate” to a person is the poorest measurement we can use between ourselves and others because it asks the wrong question. The issue isn’t whether we can relate to someone but whether we should imitate someone. That question never even rises because when we make the issue whether we can relate or not, we are focusing all the attention on ourselves and not on the other person.
However…
It is also true that people are more willing to imitate and less likely to pervert the question when the person asked to be imitated is a flesh and blood human being and not a stained glass window. This isn’t to argue that St. Dominic et al were stained glass windows but that they have been presented as such by various writers over the time because it is easier. St. Gabriel doesn’t allow this to happen with his life because his life was never one that could be described as being “perfect” in terms of sanctity. He loved to dance and party and gamble and play music and he loved the girls; at one time, being engaged to two different ones at the same time with the knowledge of the other. Not a particularly sinful man but what we would call a frivolous one. And the best part is that he did not completely change when he dedicated his life to Christ and became a Passionist. To be sure, he did change; gone was the frivolous lifestyle centered solely on the world but remaining was the masculine energy, the drive to act, to take a risk that had been expressed in dance, cards and wooing before. Just as the medieval code of chivalry had channeled manhood to the protection of the weak and defenseless for the greater glory of God, St. Gabriel’s nature was molded into that of a 19th century knight, complete with weapons and damsels in distress. It was Aquinas’ adage—grace perfects nature—played out on the world’s stage.
And in that, one of the frames that encompasses many of the lies surrounding Christianity today is broken. The idea that a saint must be a non-threatening, never angered figure who perpetually speaks of the modern idea of “peace” (everyone being nice to each other) has led to the emasculation of Christianity. The old poems describing Christ not as prince or king but warrior have been forgotten; the old, martial hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” and “O God of Earth and Altar,” have been quietly tucked in the dust bin; and even some of the incidents in the Bible are skipped over (when was the last time we read or heard about Samson killing a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone or Judas Maccabeus slaughtering the Hellenistic armies?) This is one reason why more women than men proclaim themselves Christian; Pew Research, in years past, found that Christian congregations around the globe are more women dominated—53% to 46%–while in the US, the split is 61% woman, 39% man. If being a Christian means not just giving up what we want (a demand it makes on all its adherents) but eradicating the drives that nature has implanted in us—for men, the drive for strength, to protect, to act, to risk—and not simply allow grace to sharpen them, it’s understandable why so many men have decided it’s not for them. Christianity has not been tried and found lacking; it has been tried and found not strenuous enough.
It’s into this paradigm that St. Gabriel barges in, guns blazing, reminding us of the necessity and the holiness of masculinity that recognizes when quiet words and prayers are not enough when the dragons are about to devour maidens and he had the imagination enough to both recognize the dragons and that dragons require a knight with drawn sword as their answer. If St. Paul was correct when he described us as the Body of Christ, each with our own part to play, St. Gabriel knew that on occasion, he must be the fist and that a hand incapable of becoming a fist is flawed.