Franciscan Spirituality

Every once in a while I get an email forwarded to me about a friend of a friend who says he wants to be a friar. Usually these don't go anywhere.

The once I received yesterday seemed a little more promising than usual. In the forwarded email the man said he had a "burning desire" for the Franciscan life. To say something like that reveals some intuition of the Franciscan vocation. As St. Bonaventure says in the prologue to the Itinerarium:

Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi

"Indeed there is no other way but through the burning love of the Crucified." In this simple statement we hear two of the central themes of Franciscan spirituality. First, it always has a focus on the affective; it lodges in our heart, our love, our feelings. Second, these are devoted to Christ crucified, the perfect intersection of love and suffering that is the Cross.

All (Franciscan) Saints

Yes, we Franciscans even have our own feast of all saints, a time to remember and celebrate the little Franciscan cohort of the church at rest in heaven.

It's been almost 800 years since Francis received his first companions, which Francis described in his Testament as the time "when the Lord gave me brothers."

Since then God only knows how many friars and sisters and seculars have lived their lives through the inspiration of Francis and Clare. Surely many of them are among the saints with God. Today we celebrate them, and look forward to sharing in their joy, rest, and destiny.

Turkey

The Holy Father's visit to Turkey this week is truly a big deal. Cardinal Sean has a prayer posted for him and his trip.

Feelings

Feelings are a funny thing in the spiritual life. On the one hand you have to pay close attention to them: the little angers and annoyances that arise in our heart remind us of our unreasonable expectations of the world and other people. Our little attractions to others remind us of our vocation to communion with one another, and ultimately, to God. When we're sad for no reason, it can teach us that our home is not here, but in heaven. When we're happy for no reason, it can be a foretaste of our eternal joy and beatitude with God.

On the other hand, sometimes proper ascesis and right effort is to ignore and disregard our feelings. On Sunday I was preaching, and I felt terrible. I was tired, and kept thinking that I was going either too fast or too slow. I didn't feel connected to the assembly, and found my text stale and repetitive. But my pastor said it was the best he had heard from me thus far.

I guess knowing when to listen to our feelings and when to ignore them is a work of discernment.

Christ the King

Well, we've reached the last week of the year of grace 2006, and here's my homily for this weekend. (P.s. I made this homily before I was aware of the recent difficulties in Tonga. So let's remember to pray for their intentions and their peace.)

A few years ago I took a political science course, and in the class I met a guy from the island of Tonga. Now maybe you’ve never heard of Tonga – I know I hadn’t. Tonga is a little island in the south Pacific, and our political science teacher, interested as he was in different systems of government, was very interested in meeting someone from Tonga. You see, Tonga is one of the last places in the world with a real monarchy. They have a real king who actually rules the country.

Now this is pretty foreign to our experience. We’re not used to being ruled by royalty. For us, we are familiar with more modern forms of earthly government: presidents and prime ministers, parliaments and congresses. For us, kings are a thing of the past.

Does this make it hard for us to get into this feast of Christ the King? I don’t think so. Fact is, the kingship of Jesus Christ and the nature of his kingdom are so different from any earthly idea of power and government that perhaps we who don’t have any experience of earthly kings will understand today’s feast more easily.

Think about it. Take a look at Christ the King there on the Cross. What kind of power is that? Instead of earthly power he is nailed to the Cross and can’t even move his hands and feet. Instead of royal robes he is naked and shamed. For a crown he has only the crown of thorns made by his torturers.

What kind of king is this? Pontius Pilate was pretty curious about it. Seeing the beaten and bound Jesus before him, he wondered what kind of king he could possibly be dealing with. And so Jesus described his kingship to Pilate:

For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.

The kingdom of Christ is about truth, not earthly power. Reigning from the throne of his Cross, Jesus Christ reveals the truth. And the truth is that real power in this world is humility and the giving of oneself for others. It’s not about having it your way, and not the power to influence and control anybody. Real power is humility and the willingness to give of oneself for others. And this is the kind of king we are dealing with in Jesus Christ.

Reigning from the throne of the Cross, Christ the King reveals to us the truth about our world. The true story of the world is not in the halls of power or in the overwhelming suffering of war. It’s not even in the world’s false hope for an earthly peace which is only about everyone being able to pursue their own desires without interference. The real history of the world is not found in the careers of presidents and prime ministers.

Christ the King reveals to us from the Cross that the true kings and queens of this world are those who quietly struggle to love each other, to bear with each other’s burdens, to give of themselves without counting the cost or expecting anything in return. The true story of this world is the story of those who in so many small and forgotten ways, give of themselves for each other, give of themselves for the life of another. And this is the Kingdom of God. It’s the real history of the world, and you won’t see it on CNN.

Jesus explains to Pontius Pilate that his kingdom “does not belong to this world.” The kingdom of Jesus Christ is not of this world, but it is in this world. And the kingdom of Christ is in the world because of you and me. In the book of Revelation we hear today how Jesus Christ

has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.

It is us who are made into the kingdom of God in this world.

We are fortunate here at this parish in so many ways, not the least of which is that we baptize our children here in the midst of the Sunday assembly. In this we have the tremendous privilege of witnessing the very thing we proclaim today in the book of Revelation. In the baptisms we celebrate we see with our own eyes how Jesus Christ makes “us into a kingdom and priests for his God and Father.”

In baptism we witness the royal anointing with oil we have all received. Just as David was anointed by the prophet Samuel to be the greatest of the kings of Israel, and just as Jesus was anointed on his feet by Mary in preparation for his enthronement and glorification on the Cross, we too are anointed in our baptism to share in the kingship of Christ.

You and me, we are the anointed royalty of the kingdom of God. As baptized Christians we are the kings of the world. But our royalty doesn’t get us anything as this world counts power and value. Our royalty is the kingship of Christ the King who rules from the Cross, naked, unable to move, and crowned with thorns.

Our kingdom is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of those who try to follow and imitate Christ by giving of themselves for each other, who offer their efforts and love and lives for the life of the other, indeed for the very life of the world.

Franciscan Blogroll

For those who read German, go ahead and check out Pax et Bonum.

Vinculi

Anyone who reads my posts once in a while knows that Wikipedia is one my favorite sites. Not only do I love the knowledge it provides, but the very idea of the project appeals to me too. Of course it's a project that's going on in many different languages. The other day I noticed that a "Vicipaedia" is being built up in Latin! You can check out the homepage here, and here's their page on Benedict XVI. And while you're at it, why not check out the news at Nuntii Latini.

Too much fun it all is.

Presentation

Today is the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, recalling her dedication in the Temple by her parents, Ss. Anne and Joachim.

It's a curious feast day in that it has its origins in extra-canonical scripture, namely the Protoevangelion of James. I couldn't think of any other feast day like that; can anybody else?

In a way it reminds me of the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, with its origin in the second book of Maccabees. Because Catholic Christians accept the Old Testament of the Septuagint, while Protestants and Jews do not, this feast doesn't appear in the current version of the Jewish Scriptures. So, oddly enough, this Jewish feast appears in the Christian, but not the Jewish Scriptures. To make matters even more strange, Hanukkah also appears in the Gospel of John at verse 10:22.

And All his Empty Promises

KJN had a great post yesterday about her decision to start wearing a chapel veil. Apparently she has done so in the past, but was shamed out of it by some helpful and progressive souls.

For me it's not about whether or not a woman ought to wear a chapel veil. Nobody wears such thing where I serve. Not even the religious sisters I know and work with wear veils!

For me the story spoke to how we use our labels and factions in the catholic church to tear each other down. When we see someone praying in a certain way we put a label on him or her. And we have a host of labels: liberal, conservative, progressive, neo-con, restorationist, radical, traditionalist. And by these labels we are tricked into ignoring the simple fact that the person we are labeling is praying at all and struggling to express some devotion to God.

What would I say in my heart if I saw a woman wearing a chapel veil? Would I think, "Oh my, this one is a traditionalist!" or, "Well, here's someone who has internalized the patriarchal culture of oppressing women!"

Or perhaps would I see someone who was trying, in her own way, to express her reverence and devotion for our Lord? Even if it isn't what I would do, do I take up the challenge of seeing the grace of God in her devotion, or do I dismiss her with a label?

The devil uses these handy labels to help us to dismiss each other, so that we might not see the grace of God, especially if it's a grace that we don't understand or wouldn't want for ourselves.

Just for the record, people make fun of me for wearing a zucchetto.

The End of the World

Here's my homily for this weekend:

My grandmother lived down the road from here in Gloucester, Massachusetts. When she was getting on in years she would speak very matter-of-factly about her coming departure from this world. She would say things like,

“I’ll never need to buy any more socks; I have all the socks I’ll ever need.” Or one day when we were at “Stah Mahket” she said,

“I’m so old; I don’t even buy green bananas anymore!”

Such plain talk about death and dying can seem shocking to us who live in a culture that is so bent on denying death. Medicines and consumer products promise to make us look and feel younger. Even the normal signs of aging and growing up, like my ever-disappearing hair, are supposed to be a cause for shame, and a cause to give somebody our money for a remedy.

But thanks be to our Lord Jesus Christ, our death is not something to look upon as an evil to be feared or as a misfortune to be denied. Our death is the moment when all of the love we have given and received for the Lord’s sake, all of the goodness we have struggled to do, and all of the grace we have rejoiced in are summed up all at once. As we leave this world, all of the love, grace, and goodness of our lives are sealed into history and become permanent and indestructible in the Lord. And we ought to rejoice in such a thing as a graced destiny that is given to us by God.

And as each of us has an end that we can look forward to, so does the world as a whole. Every year at this time the Scriptures we proclaim at Mass lead us to reflect on this final destiny of creation. Today we begin the last two weeks of the year of grace 2006, and at the end of the liturgical year we are always invited to reflect on the end of the world.

Now there are a ton of people out there who would like to help you to reflect on the end of the world, from the protestant evangelical authors of the popular Left Behind series, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to knock on your door. Trouble is, when folks reflect upon and look forward to the end of the world, they tend to create it in their own image. Mostly when I listen to them, I don’t hear about the glory of our Lord, but about eternal rewards and vindication for the speakers themselves and the punishment and misfortune of those they don’t approve of.

And when you hear preachers talking about rewards for themselves and punishments for everybody else, rather than preaching the glory of God, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit.

But what are we catholic Christians to say about the end of the world? Well, if we stick close to the Word of God as we hear it here in the assembled community of faith, we can’t go wrong.

Already in the book of the prophet Daniel, six or seven generations before the birth of our Lord, we hear about the Resurrection. The prophet describes the rising of the dead as the great sign of the end of the world.

And this Resurrection has already begun! The Resurrection of Christ, the great mystery of our faith, is the end of the world breaking into human history. We look forward not to a Resurrection that is just about us as individuals, but about us as the Body of Christ, as those who have become the members of the Lord through our Baptism! This is why St. Paul can call Jesus the “first fruits from the dead.”

By our baptism and our reception of the Body and Blood of the Lord in Holy Communion, we share in the very Resurrection of Christ. The Body of Christ that we receive is the Body of Christ that we are, and it is the same body that was Risen from the tomb on the third day.

This is how we may take the gospel we proclaim today from St. Mark’s apocalypse:

And then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.

Now this isn’t like with superman: “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane.” No. In fact, the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, you will remember, has the Risen Lord himself asking the disciples, “men of Galilee, why are you standing looking into the sky?”

No, seeing the Son of Man coming in the clouds, the Lord Jesus Christ who is the meaning and purpose of time and history, it isn’t about looking up into the sky or looking forward to future events in a merely human history. It’s about right now, and about what we are doing right now.

The Son of Man who is the judge of the world comes to us in the Scriptures we hear and in the sacrament we receive. The Body of Christ we receive here at Mass is the Body of Christ eternally raised from the dead, it is the Resurrection itself that we consume and take into our own lowly bodies!

This Resurrection is the end of the world in the sense of being the purpose, or goal of the world. In the Eucharist God gives us this Resurrection in the Body of his only-begotten Son. In our communion we are brought into the goal or purpose of all creation. We ourselves are fashioned and made into the end of the world.

And let’s take some comfort and encouragement from all this! The day-to-day struggles and the pains and inevitable decay we suffer in this life are not the whole story. We know that there is a deeper meaning, a deeper purpose to human life and the world. We know that all of the anxieties and pains we suffer for the sake of each other, all of the love we struggle to give to and accept from one another, all of this is summed up in the life and ministry, the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus.

And by his own Resurrection from the dead, Jesus will bring all of our love and pain and meaning along with him into the Risen life with God that is the real goal, purpose, and end of the world.

So let us praise the Lord and receive Communion in faith and gratitude, for by our Communion with him we will be caught up into the Resurrection and have our little lives hidden away in God for all eternity.

Elizabeth of Hungary

Today is also the feast of St. Elizabeth, patroness of the Secular Franciscan Order. Chiara has a couple of great posts on her, so check them out here.

Names

I was reading a book yesterday about Bible translations. It was discussing the question of using the name of the local deity in the local language to translate "God."

The idea made me uncomfortable, I must admit. Not that I know anything about this stuff, to be sure. So take what I say with a grain of salt, at least.

Nevertheless, "God" is not an utterance that is somebody's name. It is a clumsy placeholder of a term with it's referent in a transcendent Reality that is quite beyond our naming. This goes for the abstract nouns Elohim or Theos or for Biblical titles of God like Adonai or Kyrios.

God does reveal a name to Moses, YHWH, but it's cryptic and hardly a name in any sense that relates to our experience. Jesus reveals God as Father, which isn't a name but a suggestion of a particular kind of relationship.

Thus it seems to me that translating the complex utterance "God" with a proper name doesn't make much sense, religiously or theologically.

End

Since this weekend in the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time already, and we are coming to the end of the liturgical year, I'm sitting here this morning trying to write a homily on the end of the world. For whatever reason, it seems to be a difficult birth so far.

The trick is to hold the two senses of "end" together at the same time. The end of the world is both the terminal point of history and temporal progression, but is also the goal of human life and history.

The same is true of our personal end in death. It is the terminal point of what we have come to think of as ourselves, our life in time and in this world. But our death is also the goal to which we look forward, in which all of our love and goodness and effort for each other's sakes and for the sake of the Lord are summed up and made unrevisable and indestructible.

After all, as Francis approached the end of his life at the ripe old age of 44 or 45, he invited in the presence of "sister death."

Adam

The question came up: did Adam pray? If so, what was his prayer life like?

Of course Adam had it all: a peaceful life and original innocence. So what could he possibly pray for?

How we answer this question may reveal our own idea of prayer. If we see prayer as basically remedial, as something we have to do because of our wretched condition and constant need to ask for the "graces we need," well then we might say that Adam hardly needed to pray.

On the other hand, if we see prayer as the grateful response of creature blessing its Creator, then Adam would have had just as much reason to pray as the rest of us who happen to live with the effects of original sin.

History, Eschatology, and Mission

I have been having such fun this morning writing this piece of homework that I thought I would post it:

One aspect of our reading that has caught my “ecclesial imagination’ with regard to missionary activity” has been the interaction of missionary dynamics with different theologies of history. The God of Israel and Christianity is a God who is revealed in the violent processes of history (e.g. Ex 15:3, 12) and who creates a place to dwell among a people on earth. (Ex 15:17) The same God is revealed in the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. (Jn 1:14) This same Jesus, resurrected from the dead as the Risen Lord is God as the end of history. (Rev 22:13) He is the end of history both in the sense of purpose and terminal point.

As we have moved through the course these past weeks, I have been attentive to the ways in which conceptions or theologies of history interact with the theology of mission.

The powerful interaction between theologies of history and Christian mission begins in the New Testament itself, both in the sense of the practice of the primitive church and New Testament theological reflection. Here we can see the beginnings of how eschatology can set the tone for mission. And in this sense it seems to make quite a difference if one’s eschatology is of the futuristic or realized type.

Paul, though he seems to soften his apocalyptic expectation over the course of his career, seems generally confident in the immanent, historical return of Christ and the end of the age. (e.g. 1 Thess 5:2) This lack of remaining time no doubt inspired some of Paul’s incredible missionary zeal as a founder of churches, and his concern that the churches be found behaving decently and at peace at the Lord’s coming. (e.g., 1 Cor 1:10)

Perhaps most interestingly, in the letter to the Romans Paul’s eschatology and sense of history necessitate his contribution to the great missionary revolution of the New Testament: the mission to the gentiles. In the middle of the letter to the Romans, Paul presents a theological reflection that is a theology of history and mission at the same time. In the seemingly strange historical plan of God, the conversion of the nations will be required to convert unbelieving Israel. (Rom 11:13) The unbelieving “trespass” of the Israel of history (11:11) is the condition for the mission to the nations. (11:12) In fact, the gentile mission must come to some completion in history before the Israel of history can be saved, (11:25) but saved it will be. (11:26) Once the “full number” (11:25) of the gentiles are “grafted” (11:17) into Israel, the Jews will also be saved. (11:26)

Thus human effort in history at preaching the Gospel and converting all the nations to Christ will be required if God is not to be a liar in his covenant promises to Israel.

A more realized eschatology leads to a theology of mission with less urgency. The book of Revelation suggests that the final judgment has already come to pass: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (18:2) In this kind of theological imagination, history has, in a sense, already come to an end, and there is not much left to do but to wait in “patient endurance” (2:2) for the great apocalyptic mess to pass over.

This distinction between the theologies of mission produced by different kinds of historical sense and eschatology can be seen in modern Christian groups with strong apocalyptic expectation. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, look forward to the coming of a renewed and perfected world in a very concrete way. Since this perfected kingdom will only be enjoyed by those who confess religion properly, it is the good will of the Witness to make an effort at helping others to share in it. This imagination of the immanent end of history as we know it can account, at least in part, for the tremendous missionary zeal of the Witnesses.

On the other hand, a fringe group like the Branch Davidians, who came to public consciousness in 1993, believed that they had already received their eschatological prophet in the person of their leader. For them the time of mission was over; they had only to wait for the completion of the final apocalyptic battle.

But what of us who have a Christianity that is more towards the mainstream? What is our theology of history or sense of eschatology? There is a general vertigo and malaise around these issues for us late- or postmodern people. As the old saying goes, attributed to various French philosophers, ‘God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel very well myself.’

Our world is no longer pervaded by a general sense of its theological finality. The horrors of the twentieth century have broken down our confidence in the evolutionary and progress based models that were supposed to replace a superstitious eschatology. The strongly acclaimed “end” of Marxism has even broken the hopes of purely material and secular eschatologies.

Catholic Christians seem to favor a theological approach of “both/and.” Thus we try to affirm an eschatology that is both futuristic and realized at the same time. The kingdom of God that is the finality of history has already been realized in the Incarnation, Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom, and especially in the mysterious connection of his historical human life and the transcendent event of his Resurrection. On the other hand, human history is still “on the way” to somewhere; The Risen Christ has not yet come to “full stature” (Eph 4:13) and world is still groaning for its full redemption. (Rom 8:21-22)

We must be sure that this “both/and” approach is an invitation to live in a creative tension rather than a way to absolve ourselves from having to make any theological claim at all. Living in such a tense, two-fold theology of history will lead us to a double sense of mission.

First, our realized eschatology, our belief that history has reached its completion in the Resurrection, will lead us to proclaim to the world the great joy that “fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (Rev 18:2) This will be a mission of preaching and proclamation, of bring the world the good news that it has been freed from its “bondage to decay” and may begin to enjoy “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21)

Second, our belief in a “not yet,” in a futuristic eschatology, will lead us to a mission of service. This vision of history as not yet complete will call us to serve the world as healers and prophets. This is the missionary mandate to heal the sick and preach the coming kingdom, (Lk 9:1-3) to denounce injustice, and to “bind up the brokenhearted.” (Is 61:1)

Liturgy Lite

One of my teachers told a story about a Mass he went to. The presiding priest introduced the Penitential Rite by inviting the assembly to call to mind their "failures and shortcomings."

At the end of the Mass our teacher went to the priest and told him:

"Paul tells us that we are to boast of our failures and shortcomings, that the power of Christ may shine through us. I came here today for forgiveness of sins."

Coffee

You just never know where Wisdom is going to show up.

This morning, as I'm sitting here reading C.K. Barrett's commentary on the Gospel of John, I look up and see this quote on my Starbuck's coffee cup:

Life is a school for angels. Love is the Teacher, so do your homework without fear. Death is merely graduation.

Isn't that great? Now we know that we aren't going to become angels; but we do aspire to the life of the angels in the sense that we hope to share with them the life of heaven.

The first letter of John teaches us that God is love. If we are very bold, we may even turn it around to say that Love is God! And we believe that love is our Teacher because Love Itself became one of us in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth.

So let's love, do our homework, and have our coffee without fear, and look forward to our graduation.

Thanks Starbuck's!

Religion

I don't have to preach liturgically this weekend, but I was thinking about the Gospel nonetheless.

Last Sunday we heard the great double commandment: We are to love God with all we are, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But what will this look like in our spiritual practice? This Sunday we are given a positive and negative example.

Religion can go either way for us. It can teach and enrich us toward openness and love and make us better people. It can make us more gentle, or it can make us more hurtful. It can serve our health or it can make us sick. The same is true of other basic vectors of human life: sexuality, family, food, etc.

The scribes in the Gospel use their religion as a way to indulge themselves: their pride, their vanity, their security. As the old saying goes, "power is the lust of the clergy." Their religion is not about loving God and neighbor, but about loving their own self-satisfaction.

The poor widow, on the other hand, gives to the Temple out of her poverty. And that's the trick to real spiritual practice. We must give not out of our riches but out of our poverty, not out of our power but out of our humility.

We must not, like the scribes in the Gospel, indulge ourselves in the (erroneous) idea that we are something great. We must not even please ourselves with what one friar called "delusions of adequacy."

Hardly anyone of us is a living saint. Nor are we spectacular sinners. Both our goodness and our sinfulness are unremarkable for the most part. To be humble is to accept the truth, to realize that we are "poor in spirit."

Now with this knowledge we can do one of two things. We can panic and try to fool the world into thinking we are something special, or a genius, or a saint, or whatever. And religion can be a big help in this project, as it was with the scribes! Eventually we can even fool ourselves.

Or we can accept our poverty and our insignificance. And when we find this kind of genuine humility, we can offer the little good we do have to the world. And to offer the world something truly humble is to offer it something fresh and about which it knows little these days. In this way we can imitate the widow whom Jesus praises today.

Wrong

Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk to clear my head of a paper I was trying to write. On the way back I went by two police officers who were attending to street repairs around the corner from our house. As I passed them I said hi. One of them looked at me and said, "You don't look right walking around here." I smiled, but I was speechless at the comment.

I hardly think about it, but it's true. I live in the wrong neighborhood. By the world's standards, I don't belong here. And I'm proud of it. Proud of it in the Lord, of course.

It reminded me of a band I used to listen to back in college, Nomeansno. Their best album, "Wrong," contained a poster or something that said, "Be Strong. Be Wrong." I hung it in my dorm room, and I think it might still be pasted to the inside of the lid of my footlocker.

Sometimes that's just the attitude that the disciple of the Lord needs. To have the strength and courage to think and do the wrong thing in the eyes of the selfish and glittering ideologies of this world.

Open

Today is the first day since Columbus Day that I have nothing on my calendar. No lectures to attend, no appointments with friars, teachers, doctors, or for car maintenance. No prayer to lead and no dinner to prepare for the brothers.

Not that it's a day off. There's plenty to do and lots of things to file away and deal with here on my desk. Not to speak of the paper I need to get going on this morning or the laundry I desperately need to get done today. But I have the time to myself, and I can put on some college radio and enjoy the peace of the house and do what I need to do.

One time I was working with another friar and when we got the project together I said, "O.k., good, that's all set." The brother remarked that it was my favorite feeling to look at something - a term paper, a clean room, a pot of beans, my own soul, whatever - and see it squared away and "all set."

I guess that's why I like a day like today.

Idolatry

I spent all of yesterday morning pushing myself through the ponderous, 140 page penultimate chapter of David Bosch's Transforming Mission. The book claims to be an attempt to use Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of paradigm shift to understand the history of Christian mission. I don't know if he really accomplishes this in particular, but it's a great book with a lot to think about. By the way, reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions made a big difference for me back when I was 19, but maybe that's for another day.

Bosch has a great statement toward the end of the book: he says our problem is that we're all Romantics and Pelagians at heart, and they amount to the same thing. I thought it was a brilliant thought and I was reflecting on it all day.

We're Romantics because rather than worship God, we would rather adore our cherished images of ourselves and the great things we imagine we will accomplish. When we desire prayer or "spirituality," sometimes what we really want is to admire our own imagined holiness.

We're Pelagians because all of these great plans for holiness and transformation of the world and inauguration of the Kingdom of God, we imagine as efforts or projects that are our own. And we want to own them as if they were worldly works.

These amount to the same thing because they are both ordered to the same goal: worship of ourselves.

Reflecting on this reminded me of the beginning of Hilaire Belloc's Pelagian Drinking Song:

Pelagius lived at Kardonoel
and taught a doctrine there
How, whether you went to heaven or hell
It was your own affair
It had nothing to do with the church, my boy,
But was your own affair.

Plug

Check out Michael Hallman, a seminarian whose posts display a rigorous thoughtfulness.

Penance

In the Franciscan sense, penance is the grace of effort we receive from the Lord to turn ourselves to God and away from our selfishness and self-involvement. This is how Francis described his own conversion at the beginning of his Testament, and how he described the life of penance in his Letters to the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, or his Letters to All the Faithful, depending on the edition you have.

One of the funny things about penance is that the penance we are given is not usually the penance we imagined ourselves doing. What we are given to do in order to turn ourselves to God and away from ourselves turns out to be something we don't really want.

This is because the penance we picture ourselves doing when we imagine ourselves as fine disciples of the Lord often turns out to be just one more form of selfishness, and in the more dangerous form of spiritual pride. Penance is hardly penance if it feeds our sense of self-satisfaction and makes the flesh feel like it's accomplishing something spiritual.

The devil is perfectly happy to have us do great things for the Lord, provided we can be made to do them in order to feed our own pride and lusts for recognition and approval. But because we are serving ourselves and not the glory of God, we will be constant grouches for lack of receiving the miserable rewards we seek. Our discipleship we will be opaque, and even little children will be able to tell that we are fakers.

Fall

Last night the network went down in the friary where I live. So this morning I walked over to our other house to read my email and blog a bit.

On the way I was thinking about how this is really my favorite time of year. Perhaps it just suits my temperament. It's as if after the loud and manic mood of summer the earth cools off, takes a deep breath, lets go of some of her brightness and settles down for a quieter reflection.

It's just seems easier this time of year to relax the heart and think straight.

Hands

One aspect of being ordained deacon last month is that I have become an ordinary Eucharistic minister. This doesn't make much difference, except that, for the first time ever, I have been a regular minister of the host.

As a minister of the host, one sees a lot of outstretched hands. Since most people receive the host in their left hand, I notice a lot of wedding bands. And I reflect on how all of the holiness and pain and sacrifices of those marriages are taken up into the love and sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist.

I also notice hands that have worked hard, hands that look tired, and the occasional mangled hand or missing finger. So many individual stories of effort and hope, pain and misfortune that are offered in the great sacrifice and thanksgiving of the Eucharist.

All of these, by Baptism and Eucharist, are aspects of the humanity of Christ. And by the Incarnation, the humanity of Christ is our door into the perfect peace, joy, and communality of the life of the blessed Trinity.

All Souls Day

Last Sunday after the early Mass I was sitting having coffee with some of the brothers, and they were teasing one another. The one was telling the other that he was earning more and more time in purgatory for his teasing.

As if purgatory is a bad thing! In fact, it is a teaching about the outrageous kindness and mercy of God. Even if we haven't finished - or hardly begun - getting ourselves ready for the full vision of God upon our earthly death, God has provided this manner, this time, this place - who knows what it is really - to complete our purification.

Sometimes I hear people say that this world is a test, and they're right in a way. But it's not like a final exam or a drug test. Yes, we have a choice whether to accept or reject the revelation of God the Father in Jesus Christ. But God is so good that the odds are stacked way in our favor. Even if we don't finish the "test" in this life, God has provided a way for us to be further purified after our death.

To wake up one day in purgatory is a great joy! Because there is only one exit from purgatory: the presence of God.

God wants nothing more than to save the world from it's insistence on its own misery, and bring us into the perfect peace and joy that is God himself. In fact, God is literally just dying to save us.

All Saints Day

Today is one of my favorite feast days. It's sort of a populist celebration in that we venerate today not just the publicly canonized saints, but all of the holy people who lived and died in obscurity. We'll never know who they are, but today we celebrate their eternal enjoyment of the presence of God.

It's also a day about hope, a hope that began in one family and has snowballed throughout history to include all the nations and peoples of the world. God promised Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, that they would have a child and that their descendants would be a great nation. Remember that Paul says that this birth from a barren couple was the beginning of the Resurrection!

This promise has grown and grown through the ages until it reaches its final fulfillment in the picture of heaven from today's first reading, in which thousands upon thousands from every nation and people sing the praises of God in the great flowing sea of joy and praise that is heaven.

Not only do we celebrate all the saints today, but we celebrate a destiny, our destiny and that of the whole creation.