Amoris laetitia: The Cultural Challenges

Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and to make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others. Indeed, in many countries where the number of marriages is decreasing, more and more people are choosing to live alone or simply to spend time together without cohabiting. We can also point to a praiseworthy concern for justice; but if misunderstood, this can turn citizens into clients interested solely in the provision of services. (33)

Freedom is highly valued in our world; freedom of choice, self-determination, etc. This is a good thing in itself. But the Holy Father points out rightly that if freedom is not accompanied by "noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates." If in my 'freedom' to do what I want with myself I do what makes me miserable and makes those around me suffer, I am not free. I am a slave to sin. If I am 'free' in such a way as to compromise or ruin the gifts I have been given for my own flourishing and the good of others, what good is such 'freedom'?

As Pope St. John Paul II famously put it, "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."

Christian Freedom

Our freedom in Christ is worth our attention from time to time, both because of the errors of the flesh and the world, and because it is the means by which we fulfill the commandment to love our neighbor. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Walking

I've always been a walker. Wherever I live I always fall into set paths: Prospect St. to Ogden St. to Edgehill Rd. in New Haven. The main road through Connecticut College down to the lonely back of Cummings Arts Center and back over South Lot to the far road. Down the River Corrib path to Galway Cathedral and back home on Newcastle. Up Waterman to Thayer and down to Wickenden, where all the coolest spots in Providence could be found. Up the white trail to the 'stop sign' blazed red trail at Sleeping Giant. Down Fulton St. to Euclid Ave. on the edge of Queens. Up Mass Ave. past Porter Square past John the Evangelist to that funny pedestrian path right by the Greek pizzeria that leads all the way to Alewife station, and then back on the T. The big loop of Morsemere down to the Roberts Ave. in Yonkers, a stop at Christ the King, and back home on North Broadway.

Somehow my walking provides for me an intersection of freedom, contemplation, and solitude. At least that's what one of my best spiritual directors once suggested.

I bring this all up because it has become for me an example of how God redeems our personalities and natural peculiarities for His own purposes. Here in the parish ministry, my walking has done a lot for me. I almost never drive anywhere if it's not too far to walk, given the time I have. One result of this is that I not only run into parishioners, but I get to know the sort of folks who hang out in the streets. It makes me feel more connected to the people, gives me opportunities to ask about their concerns, and gives that much more specificity to my prayer for the intentions of the people of the parish.

This is the sort of plain reflection that gives me a little bit more confidence and clarity in my own vocation as a friar and a priest. I can see God making use of me in my own particularity. It's easy to see the Holy Spirit making use of one's talents and strengths, but when He is discerned to be making a redemptive use even of one's eccentricities or random habits, it reveals the depths of the gentle salvation of God.

From My Confessor

Some strong words today on prayer and renunciation:

When in the Our Father we pray, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, we must take the words on earth as first of all applying to ourselves. Even on the natural level we have enough incentive to reject our own will in favor of God's will--for we have spent enough time carrying our own selves as a burden to know that our own will is neither trustworthy nor directed to genuine joy, freedom, and perfection.

This is why it is critical for us to take advantage of as many of the small opportunities to renounce our own will in the course of a day. Not that these miserable little penances really matter--and we shouldn't dwell on them as it is too much an occasion of vainglory--but they are what can train our spoiled minds and intentionality. They are the little acts that tone our spirit for the greater renunciations, the ones that really matter.

Penance: the old 3, 3, and 3.

Onward to Death

Last night I was scanning some old pictures that I found in my room. It's really something to look at yourself in the past and wonder about that person. You recognize yourself, and know that it's you, but the person in the picture is also mysterious and opaque, somebody else in a different place with thoughts and dreams that might have become quite foreign over the intervening years.

It got me thinking about death, and what it means spiritually. This life culminates in our death, so to think of ourselves in process is always to think about where it will all end up. Every moment that comes and goes presents us with a choice of what sort of person we are going to be. Each day our lives become that much less subject to revision. Finally, at the moment of our death, for better or for worse, we have decided who we are going to be in the world and all we were to God, ourselves, and each other goes into the immutability of eternity. The prayer at the beginning of the wake service puts this together so well for me: "We believe that all the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel in death." Not only are they not unraveled, but they are made permanently durable in the eternity of God.

Each day we decide what kind of death will crown our lives.

Here's your humble blogger, just over half of my life ago:

Press Four

I love to find spiritual advice in unlikely places. One of my favorites is my voicemail menu. Each time I call the enthusiastic voice invites me to press four to "change my personal options." Of course this a faulty description. Within the voicemail I can adjust things for which there is an option, but I can't change the options.

Nevertheless, each time I check my voicemail I'm reminded that the gift of the spiritual life is to be able to do just that: to change one's personal options. Just because we can exercise choice in how we fulfill our particular seflishness and our patterns of venial (God forbid, mortal) sins doesn't make us free persons. Nobody who is truly free chooses what makes him miserable.

The spiritual life invites us to do more than exercise the options we have settled for with ourselves. We are invited to accept new options, to "change our personal options." This reminds me of one of my all time favorite quotes: "God did not invite the Children of Israel to leave the slavery of Egypt: He commanded them to do so." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 110)

Ransomed from Futility

I've always loved the part of the first letter of Peter that comes around in the lectionary today:

Realize that you were ransomed from your futile conduct, handed on by your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious Blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished Lamb.

We all suffer with "futile conduct," whether we call it sin, maladaptive behavior, addiction, or what have you. It's all the misguided stuff we keep doing (insanely) because we believe (wrongly--and against repeated evidence!) that it will bring us happiness or peace.

Our spiritual task is to realize, to make real in our own daily lives, our deliverance from such things through the power of Christ's Passion and Resurrection.

Freedom

Today I am off to the church where I am to make my final vows tomorrow morning.

At school they tried to teach us a lot about freedom. They told us that our real freedom did not consist of our ability to revise our lives over and over, but in the freedom to dispose of ourselves definitively in and for God.

In fact, our possibilities for revising our life decrease with every moment and every year until finally, one day, we reach our death. When that day comes we have no more choices and we have to say, with our friend Pontius Pilate, like it or not, "what I have written, I have written" and what I have done, I have done.

So if my real freedom consists not in the illusion of having as many options as I can have for as long as possible, but in my liberty to dispose of myself once and for all for God and for the Body of Christ which is the Church of God, well that's what I'll try to do tomorrow.

Pray for me, my friends.

Limit Cases

I enjoy the character of the jailer from today's first reading. To me he illustrates two opposing limits of human freedom.

When he realizes that Paul and Silas have been freed from their chains, he decides that it is his duty to fall on his sword and kill himself. This is one way of looking at ourselves and the world; we can see ourselves in all of our failure to live up to the expectations of ourselves and others. We can see how we have failed in the very things we were meant to have done. We can dwell on how much we have not been the people we are meant to be. We may not take this attitude to logical conclusion of suicide, but we will commit many little acts of suicide, self-hate, and self-sabotage.

This is one limit of human freedom. On the other hand, when the jailer realizes that Paul and Silas haven't gone anywhere he asks, "What must I do to be saved?" This act of vulnerability, of admitting that he lacks something, leads him to baptism. This is the other limit of human freedom.

He goes from preparing to commit suicide to having a baptismal party with his whole household in one paragraph. Quite a turnaround!

We can look at our failure to be perfect, even our failure to be good or what we are meant to be, in two ways. We can hate ourselves because we're imperfect. In the end this kind of self-hate is a form of inverted pride; it assumes that we are supposed to be a genius or a saint.

On the other hand, we can look at our imperfection and accept our vulnerability and humiliation. And when we do this we can enter a school of prayer, and come to the right dependence of a creature on God.

So there are the choices for the broken and imperfect creature. Hate yourself because of it and tend toward suicide, or learn vulnerability and humility from it and tend toward God.