Gaudete et exsultate: Catholics Online

Christians too can be caught up in networks of verbal violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in Catholic media, limits can be overstepped, defamation and slander can become commonplace, and all ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned. The result is a dangerous dichotomy, since things can be said there that would be unacceptable in public discourse, and people look to compensate for their own discontent by lashing out at others. It is striking that at times, in claiming to uphold the other commandments, they completely ignore the eighth, which forbids bearing false witness or lying, and ruthlessly vilify others. Here we see how the unguarded tongue, set on fire by hell, sets all things ablaze (cf. Jas 3:6). (115)

I quote that section of James often enough with penitents; the tongue is a small organ but it gets us in all kinds of big trouble.

I first came online back in 1993 when I was a senior in college. Before long I discovered the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and its Catholic channels, as well as a Catholic listserv for which I promptly signed up. I was very innocent in those days, having been a Catholic for only about a year and with most of my knowledge of the Church having come from books, and I wasn't sure what to make of what I found, which was a lot of arguing and fighting. That's not to say that I didn't jump in myself when I knew that I was right about something ... because I had looked it up, thank you very much. I still have some of that attitude in me and it continues to get me in trouble. (More on that in the planned final post on Gaudete et exsultate, tentatively titled 'examination of conscience.')

The Divine Mission of Brother Wicked Treasurer

Yesterday Pope Francis spoke to priests, religious, seminarians, and permanent deacons in the cathedral in Bologna. He took a couple of spontaneous questions. Here's part of one his answers to a religious who asked about, among other things, the 'psychology of survival' that the Holy Father has mentioned before. Here's part of the Pope's reply:

Laudato Si': An Admonition to the Online

Furthermore, when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise. (47)

Cardinal Burke on Sinful Habits

I've been reading this book of retreat conferences for priests by Cardinal Burke. In one of the conferences on the sacrament of Reconciliation, the Cardinal speaks about certain special situations. The first is vocational discernment and the second is scruples. Here's the third:

"The third situation is that of the person enchained by a sinful habit. In this case the temptation is not the sin in itself, but the first and more fundamental temptation, the temptation to discouragement. Whereas as good pastors of souls we try to help the penitent to discover the roots of this habit and to heal them, we must first of all help him to not fall into discouragement. Once the penitent becomes discouraged, as Satan well knows, he will remain paralyzed and will no longer succeed in carrying on with his battle against sin. Acts of trust in Divine Providence, the intercession of Our Lady, Refugium Peccatorum [refuge of sinners], and recourse to patron saints are all every effective tools against discouragement." (p. 75)

This resonates with my own experience as a sinner and a confessor. If we are afflicted with sinful habit X, often 'stop doing X' is not the best strategy for our spiritual effort. Often it's better to look at the rest of our life apart from X, in order to (1) avoid the occasions of X, and (2) to find the function of X in our life so as to be able to heal the problem at the root.

As the Cardinal points out, the greatest temptation is the discouragement that makes us despair of ever healing our sinful habit. We give up whatever means are given to us to avoid the occasions of sin, we stop trying to let and abandon ourselves to God's Providence and the prayers of Our Lady and our saintly patrons. This is the danger that is usually much more grave than the acts of the sinful habit itself.

Aggiornamento

From the Philokalia:

The fathers ... kept the commandments; their successors wrote them down; but we have placed their books on the shelves.

Overheard on retreat:

In the old days, when a friar arrived at a friary for the first time, the first thing he asked was, 'where's the chapel?' Then it was, 'where's the refectory?' Now it's, 'what's the password for the wifi?

Correction

Once in a while in my wish to live a spiritual life I have wandered into a dead end or a blind alley. Usually it involves the wrong use of religion. I seek to do something appealingly religious while not paying attention what grace may be really inviting me to do or look at, which may be something less appealing on the surface, that is, to the flesh.

These moments have been very helpful and instructive for me, for they both warn me about my capacity to use religion poorly and leave me better able to discern. In this sense they are missteps that become gifts of grace, for through them God helps me grow in awareness and in the ability to see better what I am supposed to attend to.

Reflecting on a conversation with a confessor the other day, it became clear to me that my 'observance' of the Lent of Benediction was one of these moments. This is not to say that the blessing of God through the intercession of St. Francis isn't upon the friars who observe this 'Lent' according to the Rule we have promised, but that in my case, at this moment, what I imagined to be an inspiration to observe this 'Lent' was really a way to avoid paying attention to what grace is really inviting me to at this particular moment in my story.

The journey on which being a disciple of the Lord sets us is not always so easy and nor is it even pleasant insofar as we have not been delivered from our addiction to comfort and easy consolations. It is all too easy--and indeed the world invites us to this constantly--to self-medicate rather than seek the true health that is our salvation. And religion can be one of these false medications as much as any other created thing that the flesh can learn how to use wrongly.

And so I gratefully let go and try to begin again to be attentive to what grace invites.

Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 45)

Devout and Depressed

A quote from St. Francis de Sales for his feast day today:

Be sure, my daughter, that if you seek to lead a devout life, you must not merely forsake sin; but you must further cleanse your heart from all affections pertaining to sin; for, to say nothing of the danger of a relapse, these wretched affections will perpetually enfeeble your mind, and clog it, so that you will be unable to be diligent, ready and frequent in good works, wherein nevertheless lies the very essence of all true devotion. Souls which, in spite of having forsaken sin, yet retain such likings and longings, remind us of those persons who, without being actually ill, are pale and sickly, languid in all they do, eating without appetite, sleeping without refreshment, laughing without mirth, dragging themselves about rather than walking briskly. (Introduction to the Devout Life)

Fleshly Religion vs. Christianity

There is an idea of religion that is preached by the flesh, and it says--among other things--that religion is a sort of binary project, a choice between being a saint or a sinner. 'Saint' in this case means somebody 'holy'--given an idea of holiness as something that is accomplished or possessed, a sort of spiritual capital analogous to social, cultural, or political capital. Being a 'sinner' in this scheme is then the opposite: being impure, dirty, unacceptable, without value.

The God of this fleshly religion is at best a sort of cosmic landlord, a deity that allows us to live in the fleshly security and comfort of something like a 'state of grace,' so long as we pay the dues of our successful efforts to be 'holy.' Those who succeed in this holiness may approach their god with the rotten satisfaction of being his favorites, the children he likes best, knowing that they are better than the lazy, unholy remainder of humanity whom they imagine their god despising as much as they do.

Christianity liberates us from the tyrannical binary of this fleshly religion, revealing that holiness isn't like that at all. For the choice given to the Christian isn't whether to be a 'saint' (that is, according to some pre-conceived idea of sanctity we have woven out of our vanities) or a 'sinner,' but a choice that clusters around what sort of sinner we want to be. We have all sinned, and we continue to be sinners. Our choice is whether to be the sort of sinner for whom the misery and suffering of sin hardens the heart and spirit, or the sort of person for whom the experience of sin becomes a path to humility and gentleness.

We live in a world broken by sin, a world scarred by all of us who have taken the easy path of allowing suffering and violence to reproduce in ourselves, responding to hurt with more hurt. And this continues to happen because this broken world is inhabited by all of us broken-hearted people, folks whose ability to make good choices has been injured by the legacy of brutality to which we are heirs.

But the good news is that Jesus Christ, in his Passion and Resurrection, has taken all of the misery and suffering that we insist on for ourselves, all that we are at worst, disregarding, torturing, and killing each other, and has given nothing back but blessing and new life. In this Mystery he has blazed a new path for the humanity he borrowed from us through the consent of our Blessed Mother. This is the path of letting our broken hearts break open instead of closed, of allowing our experience of ourselves as broken and sinners to teach us the humility and gentleness of the Kingdom of God rather than the bitterness and disregard of the world and its culture of death.

Justified Ramble

In the summer of 2002 I emerged from the former Capuchin novitiate in Mt. Calvary, Wisconsin and moved to Boston to become a student at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology. (How passing are the things of this world!) In various senses I was at an impressionable moment, and this turned out to be a good thing because my ideas of the Catholic faith at the time were somewhat random, spotty, and unbalanced, the result of some years spent in solitary reflection, undisciplined reading, and uneven use of pastoral care and spiritual direction. I was very much ready for the good teachers that I had at Weston.

Each time the parable of the Good Samaritan rolls around in the lectionary, as it does today in the Sunday cycle, I think of one of those teachers, the professor I had for Moral Theology 101. One of his things, which he returned to a couple of times during the semester, was that the tradition had always seen the Good Samaritan as more of a Christological allegory than a moral example, and perhaps we would do well to preach it that way. I took the advice and have always done so, more or less, up to and including today. Trying to give homilies with my little bit of Italian, I have stuck close to some of my familiar approaches, at least so far.

Nevertheless, though I had my little homily prepared in this way a week ahead of time, my personal reflections went in a different direction. As I practiced the gospel before Mass, the reflexive motive in 10:29 just stayed with me; in Italian, volendo giustificarsi, 'he wished to justify himself.'

This scholar of the law had one of the great privileges of all of human history, to have the Lord himself say to him, 'You have answered correctly.' And yet, in that little shift into the self in his final question, he made a spiritual wrong turn. Everything he had said before that turned him outwards, loving God with all his heart, being, strength, and mind, and his neighbor as himself. But wishing to justify himself, it got turned around, twisted back, and he became the homo incurvatus, the human being bent over into himself.

It's tempting to take the easy way out of this ever-present danger of religion and say 'God is other people,' forgetting the simultaneous truth of 'God is other, people,' as teaches the oft-repeated anecdote about Avery Dulles, may he rest in peace. The transcendence of God pushes us inside, to the mind, the soul, the spiritual parts of our created being that resemble most the being of God. In this sense a spiritual life can't be lived without some reflection on one's own self, examination of conscience, discernments and resolutions aimed, on the one hand, at living better the obligations of the state of life to which we are called, and on the other, staying out of sin, especially mortal sin. But this sometimes slips from its rightful context of the love of God such that our religion turns into a sort of lease between ourselves and the Landlord, who is happy to let us live comfortably (and in bad cases, in presumption) in a 'state of grace' as long as we pay the rent of our good behavior. Our 'spirituality,' which is supposed to inspire us to abandon and lose ourselves in God and his designs, goes into a sort of reverse, becoming a project of managing the interior safety and security of ourselves as pious persons. As if our salvation were something God offered with indifference, a 'take it or leave it,'  instead of something he wills for us, and is just dying--literally--to give us!

Also in the spiritual order people sometimes try to trade freedom for security, but these securities turn out to be illusory and ordered to misery. And the last miserable result is a soul ready for and resigned to hell because it's easier than surrender.

The cure, as Jesus points out to the scholar and to any of us who have fallen into similar distortions at one time or another, is mercy. To become the merciful neighbor by allowing our hearts to break open at the sight of our suffering sister or brother, and to accept the freedom to let their suffering intrude upon our time and resources. This is the path to the re-forming of ourselves in God as persons salvaged and saved, re-ordered according to God's vision for the blessedness of creation, as St. Francis himself discovered:

The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin to do penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter was changed into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I lingered a little and left the world. (St. Francis, Testament, 1-3)

Pope Francis's Exorcism

I saw what has been called the Holy Father's exorcism on Sunday and didn't take much note of it at the time, though inquiring minds would like to know what was in that folder. Since then, though, it's been coming back to mind. Maybe it's the strange progression of the story in the Italian media, though I have to admit that the grammar of Italian public discourse is somewhat opaque to me even at baseline.

Was it an exorcism? Spokescleric Fr. Lombardi says no. Apparently some experienced exorcists who watched said it certainly was. Another I heard speaking in private said no. In any case, as far as I'm concerned, it's none of my business. If the Holy Father knew by some means, natural or supernatural, that an exorcism was indicated and he did it, well, good for him.

What I do feel like saying, however--and this goes for both the more religious and less religious sorts of people--is that often when we get to talking about such things we don't take seriously enough that the devil is happy for us to do so, so long as our discussion, whether it be fearful or dismissive, bemused or pious, can be made to serve his purposes. The devil is happy to have us discuss things like demons, possession, exorcism, etc., so long as such conversations serve to make us dismiss religion or spiritual danger on the one hand, or to focus less on the love of God and the victory of Christ on the other. In other words, if the result of such talk is that we end up more dismissive of God and true religion on the one hand or more afraid and timid on the other, the devil wins.

In my opinion, we would do well to take Fr. Merrin's advice and be wary of demonic tactics that could be at work even in our conversations about such things:

"He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us."

But we should also remember that the devil knows well our tendency to collect shiny things even when their edges cut us, and always tries to make us think that his primary efforts are the sorts of sensational things that make for tabloid sales and  'viral' videos. The comment of Jeffrey Burton Russell comes to mind:

"The Devil no doubt has some interest in cultural despair, Satan chic, and demonic rock groups, but he must be much more enthusiastic about nuclear armament, gulags, and exploitive imperialism . . ."

(Mephistopheles, 257, quoted from Arthur Lyons, Satan Wants You: The Cult of Devil Worship in America)

Rosary Ramble

It's almost twenty-two years since I first tried to pray the rosary. Since then I've had a lot of them; some break, some get given away, others go missing. Still others that seem extra special for some reason or other get hidden away before they break. I tend to identify them with where they came from, who gave them to me, or who blessed them.

Soupy Spiritual Danger Ramble

Yesterday I went out for my walk. As I usually do when I have some, I offered treats to the feral cats that hang around outside the kitchen. The folks who work in the kitchen seem to feed them, more or less, leaving them this or that: chicken scraps, rabbit heads, old gnocchi. Perhaps they do it out of kindness or perhaps because cats hanging around the kitchen are better than rats. All the usuals were there yesterday--the big, grizzled, black and white tom I've come to call 'Big Meanie,' the one-eyed calico, the tabby that's funny-looking in some way I can't articulate. They seemed hungrier than usual. Then I realized; they must suffer somewhat on fast and abstinence days when there's not much to be cooked in the kitchen.

Having now lived through two fast and abstinence days here in Italy, I can now share with confidence what one eats on them. For the main meal in the middle of the day, you get a bowl of vegetable soup. That's it. For supper, there's spaghetti (with just a little oil and garlic) and scrambled eggs.

I share this partly because of certain recent disappointments I've had with the press. How can you interview someone about having an intimate Holy Thursday lunch with the Pope and not ask him what he got to eat? And if you did ask, how can you leave it out of the article? There's a little Manichean in all of us, friends, of whom we need to beware. The heresy can be subtle and is very seductive. Just watch Star Wars.

Part of our Holy Thursday lunch here was a lentil and potato mush that was pretty good. Or at least I thought so. As I often share with the brethren when we eat lentils, I once made lentil soup for a girl and after she ate it she brought up the idea of marriage. To be fair, she had consumed two glasses of wine and I think she was lonely, but still. After trying to tell this story one of the friars said, very seriously,

"That's not true love."

He's right, of course. But how much easier it is to live in a world of conditional and transactional love, of doing to others as they do unto me, of helping out those who have been helpful to me, of doing good in the hopes that it will dispose others to help me in the future. And how much easier it is to live in such an imagination before God, as if God were the landlord who lets us live a 'state of grace' as long as we pay the rent of our good behavior, instead of surrendering to the God who makes himself our servant and saves us precisely as the unworthy sinners we are, such that we might become liberated servants of one another.

Overheard: St. Francis Is Not A Mushroom

From an edifying friar:

"I turned to study the Church fathers because, when I was a young friar, St. Francis started to give me indigestion. Not St. Francis himself, but the way they used him. Without an idea of the tradition of religious life they would justify any crazy thing they wanted to do with, 'St. Francis says this...' or 'St. Francis says we have to...' as if St. Francis was born like a mushroom."

Apparently, to be born like a mushroom is a French saying that suggests someone or something born ex nihilo, without provenance or parentage.

Amen.

A Little On My New Disposition

I have arrived in Rome and will be staying in a small friary for a spell. Tomorrow I am to become a student at the "Torre di Babele," which seems like a very inauspicious name for a language school. They have placed me in the 'level 3' class. Depending on whom you ask, there are either seven or eleven levels. Such mysteries, the suggestion of secret levels, and name of the place make me wary of masonic influence. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will soon provide me with a worthy confessor willing to discuss such things.

The guardian of the friary is an Indonesian friar of Dutch ethnicity and seems very kind. Arriving in my room I found that he had left me a note of welcome in English. I just have to share a little of it:

During the summer the following time-table applies:
6:15 Morning prayer-time for prayer (Matins, Meditation, Private Mass)
7:30 Eucharistic concelebration in the choir of the Capuchin Sisters
8.00 Breakfast
12.45 Lunch
19.30 Vespers
19.45 Dinner
22.00 Silence and happy dreams

"Happy dreams." As Holden Caulfield would say, that knocks me out.

Also, I shall have to use the "time for prayer" in the morning for meditation, since I wouldn't pray a private Mass when I had the opportunity to pray with the sisters, and I can't say Matins because my set of 1962 Roman-Seraphic breviaries was one of the hard sacrifices I made when I was packing up for my move to Italy.

Baker on Ochino

As I've mentioned a couple of times, one of my delights these days has been finally getting around to reading Dom Augustine Baker. Most recently, I was amused and surprised to find in his Sancta Sophia a take on early Capuchin history. Baker adduces our own Bernard Ochino as a negative example in his discussion of the necessity of prayer in the ministry of being a religious superior. Ochino, of course, is famous for apostatizing to Calvinism during his term as vicar general of the nascent Capuchin reform. After wandering through various Protestantisms and pastorates and starting a family that would eventually die of a plague in Poland, Ochino himself died in obscurity somewhere in Moravia.

"A fearful example of the mischief following the neglect of internal prayer in a superior, we find in Bernardine Ochinus, a superior in a most strict order, who was a famous zealous preacher, and, as might be judged by outward appearance, of more than ordinary sanctity; yet withal, to comply with those outward employments, a great neglecter of internal conventual recollections. And when he was sometimes charitably admonished of such his tepidity, his ordinary answer was: Do you not know that he who is always in a good action is always in prayer? Which saying of his had been true, if such good actions had been performed in virtue of prayer, and by grace obtained thereby, for then they had been virtually prayers; whereas actions, though in themselves never so good, if they want that purity of intention which is only to be had by pure prayer, are in God's esteem of little or no value,--the principal motives of them being no other than such as corrupt nature is likely to suggest. Ochinus, therefore, continuing in the same neglect, was by one of his brethren prophetically warned that he must expect some terrible issue thereof, in these words: Cave ne te ordo evomat, that is, Take heed that our order be not hereafter constrained to vomit thee out of it. The which unhappily fell out; for notwithstanding all his other specious qualities and endowments, he, first forsaking God, was afterwards forsaken by Him, and became a wretched Antitrinitarian apostate. And it is very probable that the greatest part of the apostates of these times (such I mean as have formerly lived in religious orders) do owe their apostasy and perdition to no other cause so much as to such neglect and apostasy first from prayer; the which holy exercise if they had continued, they would never have been weary of their habit first and afterward of their faith."

As an old Jesuit retreat master once said to us, "I used to tell myself that my life was prayer. And it might have been true, had I been praying." As the oft-repeated and variously attributed saying goes, when a priest or religious gets himself into trouble, the first question you ask is, "When did you stop praying your breviary?"

Thinking Inside The Box

To have an integrity as a religious person, one must be engaged in a continual struggle against the tendency of religion to domesticate God. Part of giving oneself to a life in community is the willingness to take up the sacrifice and difficulty of doing this not just against the background of one's own distraction and sin, but the cocktail of the collective distraction and sin of a group of Christians.

As if that weren't enough metaphors for one day, in reflecting on this I've been playing with another one: the box.

Religion is like a box into which we are supposed to put ourselves. It is a set of boundaries and definitions, practices and behaviors revealed by the Holy Spirit and built up by sacred tradition. Placing ourselves in this box helps us to hold on to the salvation we have received by providing practices that keep us mindful of the economies of grace around us and of the ways God wills us to be useful for the salvation of others. The boundaries and limits of the box help us to avoid the errors and confusions that lead us back to our former way of life, that we may be daily delivered from the misery of the vain way of life bequeathed to us by the legacy of brutality that is original sin, the vana conversatione a patribus tradita. (1 Peter 1:18. I love that phrase; it's one my favorite Easter slogans.)

Things turn around all too easily, however. Religion becomes not the box into which we put ourselves for our safety and in order to remain attentive to God, but the box into which we put God in order to domesticate him and protect ourselves from him. We can  use religion to make God into a safe and intelligible commodity, perhaps a nice resource that we as religious people are privileged to possess and even share with others (aren't we nice!) or a bean-counting judge who is happy with us and unhappy with everyone else. Or perhaps he is unhappy with us too! That's something one notices a lot as a confessor; how easily an idea of God is instrumentalized by human self-hate. Or we think that because we are religious people, we know exactly what God wants and what is expected of us. Perhaps this makes us into Pharisees, but sometimes it also makes us domesticate God by making him the nice and 'pastoral' mascot of our relativism, protecting ourselves from the discomfort and political incorrectness of ever having to say that anybody else is wrong or that their behavior is unacceptable.

The world and the flesh, in their infantile arrogance, want a God who can be safely stored and who will not challenge their rule over our lives. Of course the world and the flesh are wily; they will help us to think that we are being 'stretched' and 'challenged' even when we are growing ever more safe and comfortable with ourselves and the 'God' we have put in a pretty box.

Let us put ourselves in the box instead, the box of true religion that is God's means of freeing us for the salvation of our brothers and sisters.

Dom Augustine Baker on Religious Life

A long time ago I had a certain realization in prayer that has haunted me ever since. I realized, on the one hand, that God have me a religious vocation because this was his best chance of saving my life, making me a saint, and making some use of my gifts for the good of the world. In that, then, I have the confidence that this vocation is ordered to my happiness and sanctity. On the other hand--and this is the scary part--I realized that if I were to become worse rather than better by my religious life, I would end up in a worse condition than I ever could have deteriorated into while living in the world.

I was thinking about this old reflection as I came across this stark description of the same in Dom Augustine Baker:

"In the same sense, and with the same conditions, we are to understand the nine privileges that St. Bernard affirms are to be found in a religious state. For surely it was far from his meaning to apply said privileges to any but industrious souls, whose principal care is to purify themselves interiorly, and not at all to tepid persons that neglect to correspond to their profession. For who but the industrious and vigilant: 1. do live more purely than men do in the world; 2. or fall more seldom; 3. or rise more speedily; 4. or walk more warily; 5. or rest more securely; 6. or are visited by God more frequently; 7. or die more confidently; 8. or pass their purgatory more speedily; 9. or are rewarded in heaven more abundantly?

"On the contrary, it is justly to be feared, yea, to certain it is, that habitually tepid and negligent souls in religion are in a far worse state, more immortified, more cold in devotion, more estranged from God every day than others, considering that, in the midst of the greatest advantages and helps to fervour and purity, they will continue in their negligence; and therefore they must expect, for their obstinate ingratitude and for their offending against so great light, that they shall be more severely punished by Almighty God than others the like that live in the world." (Sancta Sophia, I, 3, III, 5)

Heal me, Lord, of my negligence and tepidity, and make me industrious and vigilant!

The Salvific Un/Willingness

Mainstream religious life, at least in my cultural context, faces some large and fundamental challenges. Hardly anybody would disagree with that. What we disagree on is how to go forward. Some think we need to retrieve what has been lost and restore what once was. Others see our trouble as having failed to complete or commit to the process of renewal and updating called for by Vatican II. Sometimes I think I have an opinion on this, and sometimes I don't. More and more I feel like most of what I hear in this debate has hardened into unwisdom.

But here's one thing of which I am increasingly convinced: A religious must be maximally willing to lose his life for Jesus Christ through the charism of which the Holy Spirit has made him a steward. At the same time, however, a religious must be maximally unwilling to lose his soul to the state of religious life as a human institution.

The most dangerous temptations religious face both individually and corporately seek to invert this stance, to help us find ways to protect our lives from the invitation of the charism while simultaneously tricking us into losing our souls and salvation to the institution.

It is a difficult and, at times, harrowing discernment to follow this stance in the small moments of daily life as well as the larger contours of one's vocation. But it is the burning love of the Crucified within, and it is salvation.

New Translation: Temptations to Idolatry

The Christmas season having ended, we find ourselves again in the tempus per annum, unfortunately Englished as 'Ordinary Time.' My first--and very influential--liturgy teacher used to refer to the typical day of low solemnity as the 'rainy Tuesday in Ordinary Time.' And so here it is. As the first day with the new translation when one is free to offer 'any Mass' as the Ordo puts it, a 'feria of the iv class' in an older dispensation, I decided to pray one of the new Mass forumularies for the dead this morning, offering the Mass for the the recently deceased father of one of the friars. Requiescat in pace.

After Mass I was thinking about how the prayers seemed like an improvement, and how they were more supplicative and contained less presumption about the deceased having already arrived at the beatific vision. But you know what? When I went back and looked at the old prayers, they weren't much different. I thought I would be writing a post about how the new prayers better recognized continued purification after death and the need to pray for the dead on their continued journey to the fullness of salvation. I was going to sing the praises of the new translation, saying that it would help restore a pastoral consciousness of the Last Things. As it turned out, there wasn't much in the old prayers to accuse them of failing in these things.

So I guess one has to say that the widespread error of presumption with regard to the state of the departed after bodily death is not the fault of the liturgy, or at least of the liturgy as the Church presents it (How the liturgy is celebrated, mis-celebrated, and abused is another matter.) Conversely, then, one has to say that the new translation won't auto-magically fix the problem. Thus we arrive, by extension, at a general principle: the new English translation of the Roman Missal will not magically solve all the pastoral and theological problems with which the Church is afflicted.

The new Missal isn't a savior. We have one of those already.

Gossip, Detraction, etc.

One of my disappointments with religious life as I have found it is that in some ways we seem to have abandoned the classic concerns of the spirituality of our state. Not that I think old-fashioned ideas about spirituality are good just because they are old, but sometimes I feel that common life is very much in need of listening to our spiritual fathers and mothers from the past.

One area where I think this is especially true is in the use of speech. Writing from the tradition of religious life is full of admonitions, warnings, and invitations to ascetical practice (we would say 'spiritual practice') in the use of speech. The dangers of gossip, detraction, and idle chatter have long been recognized. And yet, in the course of my own training and formation in religious life, I have never heard anyone recommend examination of conscience on these sorts of things, nor indeed much concern for their harmfulness at all.

I was thinking about this and confessing to God my own sins in this area as I said my prayers this morning. In the Office of Readings today, St. Columban reveals that he knew well these temptations and dangers: "Men like nothing better than discussing and minding the business of others, passing superfluous comments at random and criticizing people behind their backs."

It's a very destructive business, and not only rampant but more or less uncriticized in religious life as I have experienced it. Here's a real-life example: Apparently two brothers had a tense and unsuccessful conversation. This conversation was reported to me several times by various other brothers. In each case, the details, setting, and motivations presented were different in such ways as to present one of the brothers at fault and the other innocent. In one telling one of them was totally open and good, and the other dismissive and cruel. In another the analysis was reversed. What really happened? I don't know. But what I do know is that in the reporting of the incident it got to be about blaming rather than anything spiritually useful. The devil is quite happy to make use of our idea of right and wrong, so long as it convinces us that what is wrong with our communities is someone else's fault.

Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 115-116)

Beyond all of the well-known negative effects of gossip, detraction, and calumny, the ultimate spiritual problem is that we become to one another not the persons created by God, but the narratives that are told about us. We begin to treat each other according to this constructed identity, because it's easier than getting to know each other in all of our complexity. At worst, we can begin to act ourselves either in conformity or reaction to this false and shallow caricature of our true self. If we do this long enough, we can even forget who we really are. Because this false self is also unknown to God, we will also always feel like there is something fundamentally amiss with our prayer life, but not be able to name it.

Let us rather accept the admonition of our holy father Francis: "Blessed is that religious who takes no pleasure and joy except in the most holy words and deeds of the Lord and with these leads people to the love of God in joy and gladness." (Admonition XX)