Greccio at 800

(This is a reflection I prepared for our quarterly magazine, The Capuchin Journey)

One of St. Francis of Assisi’s early biographers, Brother Thomas of Celano, relates how St. Francis, three years before his passing from this life, planned and celebrated Christmas in the little hill town of Greccio, located about halfway between Rome and Assisi. Three years before his death would make that the Christmas of 1223, of which we mark and celebrate the eighth centenary this year.

St. Francis enlisted the help of local friend, a certain nobleman named John, to help gather everything that was necessary for his idea of putting together a living nativity scene. St. Francis exclaimed,

“I wish to enact the memory of the babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see as much as possible with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he rested on hay.” (1)

This desire, to know and to feel the love and suffering of Jesus, to follow in his footprint, was Francis’s particular devotion to Christ and his vocation in him. This desire was most perfectly realized in Francis’s experience of the stigmata, which, as St. Bonaventure writes, transformed the lover, Francis, into the image of the Beloved, Christ. (2)

When that Christmas Eve arrived, everything was prepared according to St. Francis’s expressed wish. The ox and the ass were led to the spot, the local faithful approached with lamps and torches for light, and the holy Mass of the vigil of Christmas was celebrated over a manger filled with hay. St. Francis himself sang the gospel of that holy night, and preached with remarkable devotion and sweetness on the King born poor, the ‘babe of Bethlehem’ whom Francis loved and desired with all his heart. It is said that contact with the hay from the manger subsequently restored many animals to good health, and even some people as well.

A curious and yet beautiful vision came to pass during the celebration. One of those present and at prayer, perhaps John of Greccio himself, (3) the friend who had helped St. Francis prepare for that night, saw a baby, apparently lifeless in the manger. St. Francis approached the vision, touched the baby, and awakened him from a deep sleep. St. Bonaventure writes that St. Francis even picked up the baby to embrace him. (4)

The early Franciscan writers note that this vision of St. Francis awakening the child suited the Christmas moment because of Francis’s mission to awaken the presence of Christ in the hearts of many, to stir up in their souls the love of God and devotion to the newborn Christ of Bethlehem. This invitation remains for us today—an invitation, as we approach Christmas ourselves and the eighth centenary of the celebration at Greccio—to allow the example and devotion of Francis of Assisi to stir up to new life the presence of Christ in our hearts.

As we set up our own nativity scenes in our homes, or as we pray before them in our churches, let us ask the Holy Spirit for some small share of St. Francis’s own desire to see with his own bodily eyes the hiddenness and poverty of the Lord born in Bethlehem, and even the ‘discomfort of his infant needs’, born away from home and in a place where there was no room for him or his parents at the inn. And may we also find the answer to this prayer in a renewed vision of the suffering Christ in the poor of our neighborhoods and our country as well as in the fear and terror of those in places, much in our thoughts these days, that are suffering the horror of war.

We need not fear our hearts breaking as we contemplate these sufferings of Christ in the peoples of this world, for if we allow our hearts to break open, we also have hope, and indeed a saving hope. For open hearts are ready to receive the Holy Spirit. And just as at Christmas the Holy Spirit conceives the Word of God as the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, anointing him as Lord and Savior of the world, so the same Spirit, in the same way, can conceive the presence of God in us, making of us Christians, anointed members of Christ after Christ’s own Heart, awakening in us the presence of Jesus.

Opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit in this way as we approach another Christmas, we can let the Spirit make of our own hearts a living nativity scene, a little ‘Greccio’. And if we fear that our hearts might not be fit for God because they can sometimes harbor darkness or even be a little cold at times, let us rejoice, for the good news of Bethlehem is that it is precisely in such places that God wills—indeed desires—to born among us. In this awareness of the littleness and the poverty of our inner self, where Christ wishes to be born and abide—in order to make us a dwelling place for God in the Spirit (Ephesians 2:22)—we can marvel with St. Francis at the humility and poverty of the God who empties himself into the poverty of our little hearts, so that by his poverty, you might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9) in blessing and grace.

Then, having celebrated Christmas within, having prepared a little ‘Greccio’ in our hearts where God hides and makes himself little in order to glorify our littleness and poverty from the inside, let us let that love of God out, into the outside, where the ‘infant needs’ of Christ are heard in the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. In this way, the Love of God, made incarnate for us at Christmas, may continue to take flesh in the gentleness and charity we reflect out toward a suffering world.

_____

1. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. Vol. I: The Saint. Eds. Regis J. Armstrong, O.F.M. Cap., J. A. Wayne Hellman, O.F.M. Conv., and William J. Short, O.F.M. (New York: New City Press, 1999), 255. (Hereafter FA:ED.)

2. FA:ED, vol. II: The Founder, 710

3. FA:ED, vol. I: The Saint, 256, footnote c.

4. FA:ED, vol. II: The Founder, 610.

The Way of the Cross

A cross is first of all an intersection. The Cross of Jesus Christ reveals several: the intersection of deity and humanity, of heaven and earth, and of love and suffering. When love and suffering are joined, they become a sacrifice, a ‘sacer-facere’, a making of something holy. Discernment is the discovery, each day, of what will be the sacrifice I make of my own life, how I will follow in the Lord’s footsteps in suffering love. “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)

In loving prayer and attentive discernment we discover the particular, individual ‘way of the Cross’ to which God invites us. This ‘way’ comes to be revealed not only in the ‘big picture’ of our ‘vocation’ but also in the activities, relationships, and struggles of daily life, which, in the light of the Cross, take shape as opportunities for charity and holiness. Let us seek this ‘narrow gate’ (Matthew 7:13) of our salvation. In the words of St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan Doctor of the Church, “There is no way except through the most burning love of the Crucified.” (The Soul’s Journey into God, prologue)

(reflection for Good Friday prepared for our vocation department's social media)

Resting Like A Bundle of Myrrh

Back on the feast of All Franciscan Saints, long-time internet friend and sometime fellow American in Rome Fr. Daren J. Zehnle tweeted this lovely image of some of said saints from St. Francis of Assisi church in Teutopolis, Illinois:

(It looks like a nice parish by the way. See their website here.)

That's St. Bonaventure, of course, to Our Lady's left. You can tell because of his red cardinal's hat, which he has rightly doffed in such heavenly company and deposited on his little cloud. So right away I wanted to know what his book says. You couldn't quite make it out in the photo, though you can tell that it says something. So I asked Fr. Daren to find out, and now he has come back with a closer photo, in which you can see that it says crucifixus.

Now I was intrigued. Certainly St. Bonaventure speaks often enough of the crucified, but usually--at least in my memory--in a declined form. I couldn't remember any instance of it in the nominative, as in the book in the picture.

But sure enough a little searching surfaced what must be the page of the book Bonaventure is holding open. It's from chapter nine of the Major Legend of St. Francis, on Francis's "ardor of charity and desire for martyrdom."

Christus Iesus crucifixus intra suae mentis ubera ut myrrhae fasciculus iugiter morabatur in quem optabat per excessivi amoris incendium totaliter transformari.

"Jesus Christ crucified always rested like a bundle of myrrh in the bosom of [St. Francis's] soul, into Whom he longed to be totally transformed through an enkindling of ecstatic love."

(FA:ED II: 597, cf. Song of Songs 1:13)

Feast of St. Bonaventure

By gift or blessed coincidence, my turn to preside at the community Mass fell on today, the feast of our Seraphic Doctor St. Bonaventure.

I had some time to spend with him, so I returned to some texts and thought about what I might give for a homily. In the end I landed on Bonaventure's account of St. Francis descending the mountain after the experience of the stigmata:

After true love for Christ transformed the lover into his image, when the forty days were over that he spent in solitude as he had desired, and the feast of St. Michael the Archangel had also arrived, the angelic man Francis came down from the mountain, bearing with him the likeness of the crucified, depicted not on tablets of stone or on panels of wood carved by hand, but engraved on parts of his flesh by the finger of the living God. (Major Legend XIII:5)

Jacob's Ladder

And Jacob dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. (Genesis 28:12-13b)

And Jesus said to Nathanael, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man." (John 1:50-51)

Jesus, as the Son of man, reveals himself as Jacob's ladder. It is the humanity of Christ that is the ladder, that which joins heaven to earth.

Christian life and spirituality is a finding of ourselves, day by day, in that sacred humanity of Christ, so that we may also say of our own humanity, with Jacob, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it." (Genesis 28:16) It is a discovery of who we truly were all along, a humanity made sharer in the infinite love and creativity of God by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christ is the way and the door. Christ is the ladder and the vehicle. (St. Bonaventure)

Salty Ramble

Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matthew 5:13)

Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain. 

He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas. 

Inside I was seething. I thought I'd gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn't the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain-raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies, and friends, not Southern Comfort. I needed a spiritual guide. (Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like To Go To War)

Fishy Ramble

Today it was my turn to be principal celebrant at Mass. I've come to hold such days precious in my current circumstances. When I was in the parish I would preside at Mass once a day at least; here, in a community of many priests without an external ministry, my turn only comes around once or twice a month. I treasure it even more when it falls on a Sunday. After all, Sunday is, as the Office of Readings reminds us today in the passage from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, "the first and greatest festival...the foundation and the kernel of the whole liturgical year."

On a Sunday, of course I also get to preach. (I tend to give a homily here only on days when the brethren have a right to one, namely on Sundays, other solemnities, and feasts. I sense that the brethren appreciate this discretion.) The gospel for today is Matthew 4:12-23, Jesus' move from Nazareth to Capernaum and the call of Peter and Andrew, James and John. Because of the limits of my Italian, I have to preach very simply, though I did play a little bit on 'fishers,' pescatori, and 'fished,' pescati. Pity I didn't think to mix peccatori and peccati, 'sinners' and 'sins,' into my Italian word salad.

I think the forced simplicity is a good thing spiritually; it makes me pay attention to what is essential, to what is the simple good news of the Scripture and how it can be communicated simply. But this also leaves my own personal reflection free of any demand that it be pointed toward the pastoral or even the communicable.

"I will make you fishers of men," says Jesus to Peter and Andrew. I think about myself in that context, as someone fished out of the world by the apostolic preaching, that is, by the New Testament and Sacred Tradition. Ever since I was little I've had a mysterious attraction to Jesus Christ and him crucified, and for this I stand in grateful awe before God in my prayer because I firmly believe what our Seraphic Doctor St. Bonaventure teaches us, that there is no way except through the burning love of the crucified. But at the time of my exterior conversion, it was the apostolic preaching that hooked me. I read the New Testament and decided that I wanted to be a Christian. I studied, thought--and finally prayed--to know which sort of Christian I ought to become. I finally decided that it had to be one of the apostolic Churches, which for me at the time meant Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Considering myself a Westerner, "rehearsed in the rigors of Western thought" as we used to think of ourselves back in college (in our vainglory) I decided to become a Roman Catholic.

And what of me, as one thus fished? What happens to a fish when it comes to be fished? It struggles, it flops around in the hopes of returning to the sea, it dies, and is turned into food.

When you convert, at first it seems like a smooth and glorious thing to be thus fished, to be "saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called 'the world'" (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation) But soon you struggle because the worldliness and the lies within begin to have trouble breathing. So in their panic they make us flop about, here falling into doubt, there slipping into sin. But eventually they die, buried in baptism, and you find yourself free to be turned into food, into nourishment for your sister and brother sinners. In this regard I think of an ordination homily I once heard from Seán O'Malley. The Cardinal remarked that each day, when a priest consecrates the offered bread saying, for this is my body, which will be given up for you, he is also talking about himself, his own body, his own life, united to the sacrifice of Christ, handed over to be broken in the nourishment of the People of God and the world.

Struggle, death, nourishment for others. So our being fished offers us a description of stages of the spiritual life, not unlike many others. Purgative, illuminative, unitive. Selfishness to self-oblation. Death to life. When I was younger I used to read about such plans and stages of the spiritual life with great delight, and the more steps the better. I would imagine myself reaching the highest stages of prayer and contemplation, of sanctity and self-abnegation before too long, without a lot of effort, and along a bright and consoling path. But years later I realize that spiritual things are not conformed to the time we measure in the passing days and years. It is not a neat progression from one stage to another, such that the flesh might feel a sense of advancement through some set of grades or ranks. The truth is that I am always flailing around as the selfishness and attachment in me panics and suffocates, hoping to catch, just one more time, a couple nasty breaths of the dirty air of sin. I am always entering the peace that comes with the death of this person I thought was me but is unknown to the Creator. I am always discovering the delight that the very brokenness that results from this process leaves me broken open for others, for nourishing my fellow sufferers.

Ramble On My Slow Posting

This blog has really slowed down. Some of it I attribute to my use of Twitter, which, as I have shown, is eminently suited to Franciscan preaching. Not that most of what I do on Twitter is preaching, but the tweets I might consider preaching always end up as the ones that get the most retweets and favorites. But some of the slowing of the blog has also certainly come from changes in my life.

I started blogging during the Easter season of 2006, just when I was edging toward a series of intense transitions: from a temporarily professed religious to a perpetually professed one, from a layman to a cleric, from a friar in formation to one in his first assignment, and finally from a deacon to a priest. 

Shiny Muddy Puddle

In the dark chapel the brother sacristan begins to light the altar candles. From my place in choir towards the back of the chapel I see the smooth metal of the monstrance--in which we will soon adore the Blessed Sacrament--begin to glow in reflection.

Somewhere in the back of my mind St. Bonaventure reminds me that the power of these things--the light, the brother, the monstrance--to reproduce themselves as objects of reflection in my mind is the footprint from their origin, their faint imitation of the Word in which they are created, the Word who proceeds from the Unbegotten Source as perfect Image and Refulgence.

I take a moment to just appreciate the light; its dignity as the first of us creatures, the first of us to receive the original gaze of divine blessing, 'it was good.'

Seeing again the beautiful glow of the monstrance, I start to think that maybe it's good that we have shiny stuff in the practice of faith, for this too is our vocation, to become shiny, to become those from whom the light of God's overflowing love reflects to the people and situations around us.

Another teacher arrives from the back of my mind, certainly one my first teachers of the Franciscan tradition though I've forgotten which. I remember how he told us about a moment when he looked down and saw his reflection in a muddy puddle. He decided that the muddy puddle was his image for Franciscan spirituality. Even though the puddle was muddy, when the light was right he could see his reflection just fine.

And so that's our confession. The Light is right. The Light is right for the love of God to shine through us to the world, even though we aren't quite shiny, even in the poverty before God of being, at times, as shallow and dirty as a muddy puddle.

Most Burning Love

I organized my whole afternoon yesterday so I would be able to watch the Holy Father's Mass with the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. I'm glad I did; there was much of interest to notice. The homily was especially striking. After the Mass I went to chapel for Vespers. During the meditation period, part of the homily kept coming back to me:

"When we journey without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we confess a Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord: we are worldly, we are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord." (Zenit)

Lost, Unworthy, Burning, and Sent

I was thinking about the calls of Isaiah and Peter as we have them in the readings for Mass today.

It's funny; we tend to think of heaven as pleasant, or at least comforting--at funerals we are consoled by our hope that the faithful departed are now on their final journey to heaven and we take courage for our own lives in looking forward to heaven ourselves--but the prophet Isaiah, faced with the heavenly court, is afraid. Finding himself in that blessed firmament, the first thing created after the light, Isaiah can only say, "Woe is me! For I am lost." (Isaiah 6:5a, RSV)

All Saints Ramble

Everywhere I've been to Sunday Mass in Italy, both inside and outside of religious houses (with the exception of Santa Susanna in Rome, where you can go if you just want to sing out of Gather Comprehensive and have that slightly-to-the-liberal-side-of-center standard American sort of worship-experience), they seem to use this little Sunday bulletin/worship aid published by San Paolo and called La Domenica. It's actually pretty good. It has the readings and proper prayers of the day, as well as the Gloria and Creed printed in it. There's a little reflection on the front and a formula for the Universal Prayer inside. I usually expect such things to be not very good, but these aren't bad.

Today, however, on this solemnity of All Saints, I was a little disappointed. The reflection was too much history and not enough eschatology. And on the front are the patron saints of Europe: Benedict, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein. Now I have nothing against these saints in their service as patrons of Europe (although, as I expressed in this post, I have worry that Italian devotion to St. Benedict risks giving new birth to the excesses of Joachim of Fiore); indeed patron saints of Europe must be very busy in this tempo di crisi, as the phrase goes here in Italy. Personally, I've been praying to St. Benedict recently. My first priest, the good Fr. Larry at Connecticut College, has always maintained that I am supposed to be a Benedictine rather than a Franciscan. I have always dismissed this, but lately I've started to wonder. Maybe it's just the temptation of living near Norcia. And of course I'm more or less in love with Edith Stein; probably the best homily I've given in Italian was just a quote from her Kreuzeswissenschaft for the feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis. When I think about her description of her famous conversion-prayer moment in Frankfurt, it touches my own experience so strongly. It's funny; for my mothers and fathers in religious life the iconic moment in this mold seems to be Merton on the corner of 4th and Walnut; for me it's a struggle between feeling like Edith Stein in Frankfurt or like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

But to get back to the patrons of Europe, all those saints have their proper days in the calendar; they don't need to be on the cover of the bulletin today. To me the feast of All Saints is about them, for sure, but also for all the saints who are unknown, who will never be canonized for the veneration and encouragement of the Church Militant. Indeed, we go through the cycles of the liturgical year celebrating the feast of this or that saint, we can read the Martyrology each day and meet even more. But to believe in the salvation we have in Christ, it seems to me, is to confess that all of these are but a small fraction of the members of the Church Triumphant. And because we who are still on the journey of this life hope to join the saints one day, but because few of us will ever be canonized, today is the day we look forward to as our own future feast day. Indeed, that is our hope as we pray through this day; that one day we will find ourselves on the other side of the praise and veneration that goes up from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant on All Saints Day.

As St. Bernard reminds us in the Office of Readings today, this is, in fact, the function of All Saints Day. Not that the saints should gain anything from our venerating them, but that our recollection of their destiny should kindle in us the desire to share it.

resurgamus cum Christo, quaeramus quae sursum sunt, quae sursum sapiamus

says St. Bernard, riffing on the great Pauline Easter slogan, 'seek the things that are above,' sursum sunt quaerite. (Colossians 3:1)

"Let us rise again with Christ, may we seek the things that are above, may we taste what is above."

That's the spiritual life; seeking after a taste once tasted. Yearning for a God once glimpsed, but who seems to recede from our understanding and who seems to resist our comprehension. And indeed, it is supposed to be this way, because God refuses to be reduced to a 'thing' that can be possessed, that can be had like any other created good, much less any other consumer commodity. And this is why prayer is the first and best school of evangelical poverty, because what we seek can't be possessed in any way that our created bodies and minds can understand, and because as we settle into the 'uninteresting wilderness' of prayer, we find that our very desire for what we have tasted is itself the bread for our journey. It is the desire that turns out to be rest, and this is the way in which our prayer takes shape, as we journey to the Father, as the mirror image of the self-emptying God, of the immolated Christ.

non enim dispositus est aliquo modo ad contemplationes divinas, quae ad mentales ducunt excessus, nisi cum Daniele sit vir desideriorum.

"One is not ready in any way for the divine contemplations, which lead to interior ecstasy, unless he be like Daniel a man of desires." (St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, prologue, 3)

On Fanta and Modernism

I wouldn't presume to say that I have much in common with our holy father the Pope, Benedict XVI gloriously reigning. Nevertheless, we are both Catholic priests, foreigners living here in Italy, fans of St. Bonaventure, and native speakers of Germanic languages. And as I begin to live here in Italy, I am noticing ways in which I have come to understand Benedict a little better.

First, Fanta. There was some amusement when it was reported some years back in the secular press that Benedict likes Fanta. Fine. It is a little funny to imagine the dignified old professor-pope enjoying a sweet, bright orange soda. But here's the thing, at least for you Americans: here in Italy it's quite a different substance, this Fanta, and much superior to what we have at home. So I get it. Yum.

Second, the so-called 'Benedictine Altar Arrangement.' To some, the Pope's apparent preference for six candles and a crucifix arranged on the altar itself is a welcome symbol of his 'hermeneutic of continuity.' To others, it is further sign that Benedict is a crypto-traddy making every effort to roll back the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council. Living here in Italy, as the Pope has for many years, has helped me to better understand his preference. You see, there seems to be a very common style for arranging altars here, and it goes like this: you take all the candles, whether these be one, two, or even four (that's the most I've seen, and at the lower basilica of St. Francis no less) and put them all the way on one side of the altar. On the other side, you put a flower or plant or even a whole floral arrangement.

In this practice I perceive the drive towards modernist unbalance that smolders away in the Churches, and the rotten and relativist fruit of which we all know so well. So as I see more and more of these unbalanced altars, I understand more and more why a thoughtful priest like Benedict XVI might want to restore some classical proportion to the setting of the Sacrifice.

The Gift Is Not Like The Trespass

As I was praying the Office of Readings this morning, it struck me how lovely it is to get to pray a Te Deum every day during this Easter Octave. The Easter Octave is like a week of Sundays; on each day there is a Te Deum in the Liturgy of the Hours and a Gloria in the Mass. Then another thought came to me: the six 'extra' singings of the Te Deum and Gloria on the Monday through Saturday of the Easter Octave recover the ones omitted on the six Sundays between Ash Wednesday and Easter. I'm also pretty confident that there are enough alleluias in the antiphons, hymns, and dismissals of the Easter Octave to make up for the alleluias omitted during Lent.

But Easter isn't just the Octave; it is a whole season of fifty days that is, as Athanasius put it, one great Sunday. At the end of it, I'm sure that we will have sung more alleluias than if the whole of the paschal cycle of Lent, Triduum, and Easter had just been thirteen more weeks of Ordinary Time. We end up with more than we gave up.

The Easter alleluia of the Church is superabundant; it goes far beyond the alleluia-silence of Lent. This reminds us that the death and Resurrection of Christ is not just a restorative remedy for the fallen creation. As one of my teachers used to put it, "the Incarnation is not plan B." The paschal mystery not only renders the sin of Adam 'completely destroyed' as the new English Exsultet sings it, but opens up to us and for us the infinite mystery of creativity and delight that we call the Blessed Trinity. The humanity of Christ, passing through all of the misery and alienation that we have insisted upon for ourselves with our sins, becomes the ladder and door by which we are invited to step into the divine life. We have only to allow our humanity to buried with his in baptism, that we might rise with our own humanity newly configured to his divinity.

The creation happens through the only-begotten Word precisely so that this Word might be incarnate in it, that the eternal and infinite dynamic of Love that we call the Father and the Son might share itself with even more superabundance.

Buried and raised with the new Adam, we find ourselves in an even more happy condition than the first Adam enjoyed in the original blessing. Even more than being restored to the happiness of unfallen creatureliness, we are drawn into the very life of God.

Humble and Precious and Chaste

Yesterday I put on Twitter the old gag about the recipe for holy water: take regular water. Boil the hell out of it. It got retweeted a bunch of times, and immediately I felt bad because I don't know if this is an old joke in the public domain or if it belongs to someone. So if it does, I apologize.

Nevertheless, I like the joke for the theology embedded in it. It's not that something has to added to the water to make it holy; the holiness is already there (apparently) but for the hell that needs to be boiled out.

Sanctity is not something new to be found, but a deeper identity to be uncovered as distractions, sins, and false selves are cleared away. Holiness is the real identity of the creature; we have just forgotten about and become distracted from who we really are.

This is why the old advice we've been fed for so long, 'be yourself,' is so right, but at the same time often unhelpful. Of course we should be our real selves, the flourishing and happy saints free for compassion and care that God has created us to be. But this isn't something you can just do.

When I try to just 'be myself' I usually end up reinforcing a false self and any number of vain self-attributions that I have wrapped like dirty bandages around the festering injury that is the lingering effect of original sin. Being myself ends up being a very hard and ongoing work that requires letting go of all kinds of stuff that I thought was me, of struggling to be free of the tyranny of the self, of abandoning what I thought was me in favor of the creature I am in the mind of God.

This is why we're like the recipe for holy water. We are already saints, but for surrendering to having the hell burned out of us by the burning love of the Crucified, apart from which there is no way.

Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem crucifixi.

Per Ardentissimum Amorem Crucifixi

I'm always fascinated by the way words and phrases swirl about and reiterate and recombine not only in the mind but also in community. One brother articulates something, and the words or phrase can enter the general discourse of the community. Sometimes this can be constructive, giving the group a common critical vocabulary. Other times it can be destructive, as when we reduce each other to labels and explanations.

Anyway, that's not my point today. I was just thinking about how, according to this sort of phenomenon, a title from a few posts ago perhaps came to me from a song without my being aware of it. The song is "The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane" by Jeffrey Lewis:

The seventh rule (I hope you understand)
Is not to look to deep into your soul
Or you might find a hideous, hopeless hole
Of hatred, hunger, infinite, idiot
Mindless, meaningless, nothingness, nothingness,
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness
And that's what I did

And every aspect of life that I selected
Was instantly and brutally dissected
I saw the horrible emptiness within
The reasons behind everything
And it was at that moment that I went insane.

That's the trouble with the ersatz spiritual experiences one might have through drugs, or with the endless journey of personal archaeology to which we are invited by the therapeutic culture: You arrive at the searing experience of your interior poverty, but with no good news on the other side.

The spiritual life, that is, a life lived in and according to the invitations of the Holy Spirit, reveals the saving discovering that our horrible interior poverty is not a cause for insanity or even sadness, but something to be embraced because it is exactly where God wills and delights to meet us in the burning love of Christ crucified.

The self-emptying of God who is Jesus Christ is the healing of our horrible emptiness within, the poverty of God in Christ condemned and crucified is the redemption of the poverty of our hearts.

Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi.

"There is no way but through the burning love of the Crucified." (St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium, prologue)

On Stardom and Mirrors

Many times in preaching the Epiphany, I have taken as my angle the imitation of the magi. We too, ought to be wise, and true wisdom means seeking Wisdom herself made flesh in Jesus Christ. As the magi followed the star, so too we can realize that the natural world, properly interpreted, leads us to the Word through whom it is created. As St. Bonaventure writes in his famous treatise, The Journey of the Soul into God, we are to see the whole created universe as a scala ad ascendendum in Deum, a ladder or stairway by which we can ascend to the contemplation of God. (I:2)

Maybe I notice this every year and forget, or maybe I never caught it before, but it's interesting that Leo the Great, in the Office of Readings today, recommends for our imitation not the magi but the star. "The obedience of the star calls us to imitate its humble service: to be servants, as best we can, of the grace that invites all men to find Christ."

The love of God that shines upon us in Christ doesn't will to terminate in us. Holiness isn't something to be sought and possessed personally like another consumer commodity. On the contrary, we strive to surrender to the sanctity God wills to shine upon us not only so that we ourselves might become shiny, brilliant, and happy, but so that God might find in us a sort of mirror to reflect his love to others.

Our being is meant to be just that, a sort of mirror. When we strive to let go of the dust of our distractions and to let God heal us from the filth of our sins, we are allowing the mirror to become clean and clear once again. The cleaner our mirror, the more fully and purely we can reflect the Light God shines on us to the relationships and situations around us.

Thus, our spiritual life is about letting God make us into stars by which others might find a way to the Light.

Bonaventure's Examination of Conscience

The other day I was reflecting on St. Bonaventure's instructions for novices and the model for confession he provides in them. These are the things on which the conscience should be examined and confession made:

• Offenses against the Rule, especially as regards obedience, poverty, and chastity
• Negligence or irreverence in the Liturgy of the Hours
• Ingratitude for all God's spiritual and temporal gifts and blessings
• Inadequate love of God and neighbor
• Wasting of time, idleness, and listening to and engaging in empty, useless, harmful, and laugh-provoking talk
• Failure to vigorously resist improper, harmful, and peevish thoughts
• Over-eager eating and drinking
• Procrastination regarding the carrying out of good resolutions God has inspired
• Rash judgment of others
• Futile rejoicing and sorrowing
• Lack of sorrow for sins

Via et Vehiculum

Sketchy van is the way and the door. Sketchy van is the ladder and the vehicle. (Cf. Itinerarium 7:1)

Devotion to the Saints

Each year on the feast of St. John Vianney I think of the permanent deacon who instructed me as a catechumen and then baptized me nineteen years ago this month.

The deacon thought of himself a simple man, and had found in John Vianney another cleric who had persevered through difficulty in his theological studies. Over the years I've realized that this was an important thing for me to see; it was my first real-life experience of personal devotion of a saint.

There are all sorts of devotions to saints, all of them blessed.

Sometimes we find in a saint or spiritual writer a resonance with our own experience of Christianity; we see some similarity in the graces and struggles and find someone in whom we can see ourselves. For me I think of Augustine, Benedict Joseph Labré, Thomas Merton, and Edith Stein.

Sometimes the saint seems to have something that we desire, or who seems like an intercessor consonant with what we seek. For me I think of Joseph, Monica, Thomas, and Bonaventure.

Sometimes a devotion arises from something like a combination of these two sorts of dynamics; the life and holiness of the saint not only speaks to something in our own experience, but of taking it to a depth or a place that we still want to go. For me I think of Francis.

Sometimes we can become devoted to a saint because his or her doctrine helps us understand the operation of grace in our own prayer and desire for Christianity. For me I think of Cassian and John of the Cross.

I suppose there are many more ways that we come to receive the gift of devotion to different saints. In all of it we give thanks to Christ, because it is his death and resurrection that has established us in a communion that transcends time and death.