One of the standard activities of a visit to our place in Yonkers is a trip to the friars' cemetery to remember and pray for our dead.
This is the section where the friars have been buried since I joined the Capuchins. When I was a postulant we were on the back row. A few others who have died since then are buried elsewhere.
I prayed a special gratitude for those friars who had been ministers of the mercy of God for me in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. That is to say, my confessors.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
And let perpetual light shine upon them.
Among many noteworthy happenings back when I was parochial vicar in Yonkers, one day in 2008 an Italian friar showed up and announced that he was the archbishop emeritus of Izmir (i.e. Smyrna) and that he was making a pilgrimage to one of the earthly assignments of our own Venerable Solanus Casey. (Original post here.) Among other things he related that he was working on the cause for canonization of his parents, Sergio Bernardini and Domenica née Bedonni. Read about them here.
Well today at lunch I found myself sitting next to the same Archbishop Giuseppe. I reminded him that we had met once before and I asked how his parents were moving along. He was happy to say that they were now venerable, another step toward blessed and perhaps saint.
Archbishop Giuseppe is not the only priest I have ever met who was trying to canonize his parents. There's also Fr. Raffaele of the Carmelites, whose parents Ulisse and Lelia are Servants of God. You can read about them in Italian here.
You can find Fr. Raffaele giving daily inspiration on Twitter
10 novembre (martedì) Lc 17,7-10
Non ci crediamo giusti perché facciamo ciò che dobbiamo fare, almeno lo facessimo con amore...
or in the back corner of Santa Maria della Vittoria (which is also Cardinal O'Malley's Roman church) saying his rosary and receiving local penitents like me.
You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48)
"What, then, is the perfection the Lord asks of us? Does it mean that all of our intentions become utterly pure and that we should become totally free of temptation? No. We are to be perfect in our turning to God, in our reliance on his mercy."
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)
On my way home from an appointment this morning I stopped by the Lateran Basilica to visit the Italian-English-Irish confessor, a gentle old friar. (How many penitents does he get who confess in Irish?) I really appreciated the penance he gave me:
"Pray the Veni Creator Spiritus for yourself, five Hail Marys for the people of the parish, and few more for the person you hurt."
I've taken to going to the Lateran basilica for confession. They're OFMs there and sometimes it's just easier to confess to a Franciscan in case I want to refer to our Rule or the Testament of St. Francis. Besides, Francis recommends that we confess to "priests of our religion." (Earlier Rule, XX:1) So here's a paraphrase of what a priest of our religion said to me last night:
In a certain sense it's a good thing for you to have an experience of sin, of being a sinner. There is so much suffering that comes to you as a priest in the sacrament of Reconciliation, and you must receive it with all gentleness and mercy, knowing yourself as a brother sinner who prays to God and celebrates his mercy together and in communion with his brother and sister sinners. Our Pope Francis has emphasized our role as confessors in this sacrament of mercy. You must know the suffering of sin, the frustration, the difficulty, the feeling of being trapped in precisely what you don't want to be and what you know is less than the person God creates. From this comes real compassion, the suffering-with that moves beyond superficial sorts of kindness.
On the other hand, this is not enough. As a priest you have an even greater responsibility to overcome sin, to be about all the means available to you to allow the Holy Spirit to defeat sin within you. Only with this will you be able to communicate real hope to those who come to you for confession; you must believe in the possibility of liberation from sin with a belief that comes from your own experience. You must know at least something of the rest and peace that comes from this freedom from sin--which is freedom for God--if you want your promise of its possibility to be genuine and confident.
So repent and be converted for God's sake, but also for the sake of your brother and sister sinners.
Yesterday I finally got to confession. It had been too long. In fact, it had been since the day of my pilgrimage to the bleak Via Ostiense 131/L. I just didn't know whom to ask. It's so much easier to walk up to a confessional box. When you have to pick someone, knock on his door, and ask him if he has a moment to hear your confession, that's something different. But I had been praying that the Holy Spirit let me know to whom I should try to go, and, perhaps spurred on by the beginning of the second stage of Advent yesterday, I finally managed it.
In his counsel, the priest invited me to live these days of immediate preparation for Christmas con cuore stupito. It probably just stuck in my mind because it sounds funny to the ear of an English-speaker. 'With an amazed heart' or 'with an astonished heart,' I guess you could say. 'With a stupefied heart' doesn't really do it, but it's not an entirely useless thought; perhaps it captures something of being overwhelmed by contemplation of the mysteries at hand.
In one of the little synchronicities of grace, later on I happened to pray Night Prayer in Italian. (As I have mentioned, I don't really prefer it.) When I came to the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Italian, there was the substantive of the same word:
O santa Madre del Redentore, porta dei cieli, stella del mare, soccorri il tuo popolo che sta cadendo, che anela a risorgere. Tu che accogliendo quell'Ave di Gabriele, nello stupore di tutto il creato, hai generato il tuo Genitore, vergine prima e dopo il parto, pietà di noi peccatori.
That's the Latin natura mirante that translates in our American-English breviary as 'to the wonderment of nature' if I remember rightly.
A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.
But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas is also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is. The creation, and we ourselves as created beings in it, as full of wonder and beauty as it all is even just on its own terms, finds in the newborn Jesus its true destiny, that we and all created being exists precisely so that God might be with us, incarnate among us. And our prayer is to sit in wonder, con cuore stupito, at the astonishing realization that we exist so that the overflowing Love we call the Blessed Trinity may love all the more by drawing us into the dynamic relations that are Himself. This is why it is the Holy Spirit--the Love the proceeds from the Father and the Son--who conceives Jesus Christ, that in the humanity of Christ we might be invited, drawn, and folded into the eternal, blessed and infinitely happy generation of the Beloved by the Lover.
Last week was the week of road trips. Last weekend I was in Manchester and Camp Fatima, New Hampshire. It was Beacon, New York for Tuesday and Wednesday and then New Haven and Yonkers for Friday and Saturday.
In the course of my travels I stopped by a religious house that I had been told still had a functioning priest confessional. Houses of religious priests used to have these in former times, a semi-secret entrance where a priest could go and summon another priest to hear his confession. I guess that most of these no longer exist or function; what used to be the priests' confessional in my last assignment is now the parish food pantry.
Enter by a unmarked side door which you will find open, I was told, and there you will see, in addition to inner doors to the house proper, another door, which to a trained eye--such as that of a priest--will be recognizable as a confessional. Go in and press the button there to ring the bell, and a priest will come to hear your confession.
I admit that I was somewhat doubtful about all this. It all seemed to belong to another time. Nevertheless I went and found everything just as it had been described to me. I found the outer door unlocked. Once inside, I recognized the confessional right away. I rang the bell and knelt down in the dark.
A couple of minutes went by. But just when I was ready to get up and leave with my doubts confirmed, I heard footsteps. Then the light came on the other side of the screen. Then came the big surprise: the voice of a young woman:
"Are you a priest here for confession?"
"Yes," I said sheepishly, too thrown off to think of anything more clever. She was just a bit of a surprise.
"O.k., I'll see if I can find someone," she offered back and left.
A couple of minutes later a priest came and heard my confession.
Of course I have spoken with many young women in the confessional, but up until the other day it had been as the confessor, not as the penitent.
"As spiritual as we might become, we are still also animals. And the animal man has needs--food, water, shelter, and rest for sure--but also things like beauty, play, pleasure, friendship. Of course these needs have to be attended to within the limits of divine law, reason, and our state in life if we want to be happy. But they must be attended to nonetheless; sometimes subtle temptations can get us to ignore them. We do so at our peril. If we don't feed the animal, soon we will find that the animal feeds on us."
Today I did myself a favor and went to one of the days of recollection for priests offered here in Boston.
The first part was a holy hour. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed and we prayed Midday Prayer together. Then there was a little conference given by one of the priests. Before Benediction at the end, there was an opportunity for confession. Confessors arranged themselves in the various corners of the church and sanctuary. I went to confession myself, but when I got back to my pew I had trouble settling down to quiet prayer. I tried the rosary, but that didn't work either. Maybe it was too warm, or maybe I was socially anxious about the rest of the day.
Not being able to pray, I just sat and watched the priests go to confession. There was reflective music playing, so there was no danger of hearing anything. I just watched. It turned out to be a beautiful and encouraging reflection.
One priest approaches the other. They greet each other like any pair of colleagues, an exchange that might occur in any setting. But then it changes. The penitent sits, and both heads are lowered as a confession is spoken softly.
This hunkering down, it displays an entrance into sacred time, a departure from the customs and boundaries of the world. The words that are spoken in confession and the conversation that follows are at the deepest level of secret. How much of the spiritual life depends on a certain sublime secrecy! The utter Simplicity of God meeting the solitude of the singular creation of an individual human soul!
I watched, over and over, the intimate secret of grace defeat the isolating secrecy of sin.
Then, from this conversation of two Christian souls, something new emerges. One raises a hand over the other. For a moment they have ceased to be peers. One is in authority and judgment over the other. But just as this gesture terminates in the sign of the cross made over the penitent, so this judgment terminates in the self-sacrificing, incarnate Word, a God who wills to let go of everything it ought to mean to be divine--in our human imagination--in order to free us from our chosen misery. So what we call a judgment in this context is not a judgment to which the sinner is subjected, but a proclamation of the Risen Christ, who Himself is the judgment against sin and the tangle of passions and frustrations Christian tradition calls 'the world.'
Then, absolution proclaimed and received, the sacred time closes up again. The two men shake hands as a sign of their reentry into the ordinary time and space of the day.
'So you find yourself in the position of someone who is partly spiritual mature, but not fully. And both can be used to your advantage.
'You are fortunate in that you have the spiritual maturity to recognize that your trials and challenges are a gift from God, and you trust Him enough to know--at least in your head--that they are for your own good and serve His purposes for you in your vocation. On the other hand, you recognize that you are not yet fully mature because you do not always receive and use well the difficulties and sufferings presented by your trials, and sometimes these become occasions of distraction and sin in your failure to accept them. So, let your recognition of your spiritual maturity give you the strength of gratefulness to God, and your recognition of your weakness give you the security of humility and dependence on Him.'
Remember that we can sometimes get to the point where we are so accustomed to conversation with God that we can forget what an awesome thing it is. When we remember, in praying the Divine Office for example, that this is a many-layered conversation, that it is our calling out to God but also God's speaking to us, and ultimately the prayer of the Son of God united to our humanity and our human speech praying to the Father in the Holy Spirit, this awareness can help us to stand in awe at the very fact of the prayer God has worked within us, and no distraction can stand up to that.
Being a priest shifts one's relationship to the sacraments in ways that go way beyond simply coming into a new role or function in the sacramental encounter. (Some of those who talk about priests as "presiders" at Mass wish to flatten this sacramental reality by making the priesthood into a mere function or the priest into a facilitator.) Even though these graces have come to be revealed to me in mysterious and sometimes unexpected ways, I have found them to be consistently encouraging and confirming of my vocation.
One of the most practical set of shifts comes in confession. I have found that trying to be a thoughtful and thorough penitent is the best way to try to become a thoughtful and attentive confessor. Being a confessor, in turn, has helped me to become a better penitent.
I was thinking about this yesterday after I received a simple but challenging penance. The priest gave me a decade of the rosary. There's nothing unusual about that. But then he said that I should reflect on which of the mysteries of the rosary suited my spiritual condition, or which one best spoke to the graces I was seeking. I was then to offer that particular decade of the rosary as my penance.
I liked the idea, so now I will probably use it myself. Not that you can give every penitent a whole decade of the rosary, but some would really appreciate it. That's another of the funny things about imposing penances; sometimes people think that the "size" of the penance corresponds to the gravity of the confession. Therefore, when I say that the biggest penance I ever received was to 'say fifteen Our Fathers and then go home and say Evening Prayer with great devotion' those to whom I tell this story presume that my confession must have been pretty serious. But this is not always the case. I think that the most objectively grave confession I ever made got me a single Hail Mary.
For me, the amount of penance I give to a penitent depends on what I can guess about his or her spiritual condition. Sometimes I give the most religious people the smallest penances as an opportunity to combat spiritual pride or Pelagianism. Sometimes I give the least devout a larger penance so as to get them to sit still for a moment and perhaps listen to the Holy Spirit. I often ask penitents not just to say prayers, but to offer them for someone. Many times I ask them to pray for the victims of the sort of sin they have confessed, particularly in the cases of sins that are wrongly viewed by the world as victimless. In this, though, one has to be careful. For example, someone who confesses to having procured or performed an abortion may not be emotionally ready to pray for the dead child, particularly if the penitent is the mother. In other cases such an invitation may be exactly what the penitent needs to release emotion and hurt and begin to repair the relationship with the deceased. So you have to be careful. But as every penitent knows, the inspired confessor who gives us just the right penance is a great spiritual gift, so I pray for the graces I need to be that guy when I can.
A word from my confessor: "The life of a religious or a priest is only possible as a life of prayer. What does it mean to live a life of prayer? It means to abide in a constant, habitual awareness of God. Therefore it is also a habitual awareness of grace, the grace which is our strength in trial and temptation."
His words reminded me of one of the most challenging questions we friars are asked when we present ourselves for perpetual profession of vows:
Do you wish to serve the Lord and to love, adore, and pray to Him with a pure heart and a pure mind and to be a man of prayer or, better yet, to be made, like Saint Francis, a prayer?
It's startling to imagine that if we still imagine ourselves as people who pray, as if prayer was an activity beside other activities of daily life, we have not yet fully surrendered to the mystery and gift of our baptism. To be caught up completely in the Spirit, drawn up into the overflowing Love and creative Delight of the Blessed Trinity, this is where prayer is going; it is to become ourselves, in Christ, a prayer. "I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me." (Galatians 2:20)
And yet, it's also a dangerous idea; it can be pretended to far too early. Once when I was on retreat I met an old priest. I was talking to him about prayer. He said, "When I was young, I used to say that my work was my prayer. And it might have been, had I been praying."
A new town means testing out new confessors. I think it hit a home run on the first try:
Two things, Brother.
First, remember that our angers, frustrations, and distractions--and therefrom, our sins--derive from our consent to and coupling with our erroneous and distorted views and interpretations of ourselves, other people, and the world. Therefore we must always be praying for the grace to see things as they really are, as they are in God's sight, rather than as they might appear to be.
Second, remember that a sturdy sense of humor is invaluable in religious life.
Indeed, many times the second counsel fulfills the first. And pray for me, too.
"Avail yourself of the grace of God as you strive for a higher degree of Christian perfection."
What else is there to say? It's the simplest thing, but it can be very difficult. Grace is there for us; the sense that grace has to be squeezed out of a stingy God is an optical illusion of the spirit, deriving from the confusion and distraction of our minds. Grace is there for the taking, or better, is there trying to make a home in us in God's passion to relieve us of the burden of our misery, our self-absorption, and the dullness and frustration of our sins.
It is God's delight to replace the boredom and sadness of sin with a flourishing and creative holiness; all we have to do is consent and surrender. This is the whole of the spiritual life; simple, and yet a long and treacherous journey.
It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings from one of my teachers: "Grace is free, but it's not cheap."
"When you're in love with someone, you look forward to opportunities to give a gift or do something extra for that person. Birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions provide moments for people to express their love in a special or extraordinary way. In our relationship with God, these special occasions are called temptations."
"Nobody likes to be confronted about the injustice and meanness with which we treat each other, but we must not lash out or react ungratefully when it happens. Truth is, many times we don't know how we come off, how we are perceived. Most of the time we don't know that we are dismissing, disrespecting, and bullying each other. So when we are confronted on these things we must respond with gratitude instead of allowing the old Adam to react with anger. If we have treated this one brother poorly, we will keep doing the same thing to others. We must be grateful to the one let us know by confronting us on our behavior, and thank God for his courage."
It's my eighteenth Lent eve. I love this day, full of hopes and promise for new beginnings and a fresh start of things. I think it's a common feeling, and why Ash Wednesday is so popular.
Once in a while I get in an argument with someone about the holy days of obligation. 'They are a burden to people,' goes the usual argument, and should either all be moved to Sunday or have their obligation removed. It's too much to expect people to assist at Mass on weekdays when they have to work and do a hundred other things. My refutation of this line of argument is always the same: 'It doesn't seem to be a problem for people on Ash Wednesday.'
On the contrary; everyone goes to church on Ash Wednesday; only Christmas (among white people) and maybe Passion Sunday (among Latinos) can rival it for attendance. It's easy to get down on the people for this; as a priest it's easy to indulge disdain against the people's mania to 'get their ashes' and wonder why there couldn't be even half as much devout desire to 'get their Sunday obligation fulfilled,' 'get their sacramental absolution,' 'get their marriage regularized.' or 'get their deceased relatives a proper burial.'
But maybe that's just it: Ash Wednesday is the great 'feast day' of the not-good-enough Catholic, and the time for me to admit that I'm not only one of them but maybe the worst of all.
Perhaps everyone goes to church on Ash Wednesday not for any shallow reason--the theory of the 'A&P Catholics' comes to mind here; ashes and palms--they come when they get something--but because of some of the deepest reasons of all. We preach and teach all the time about the new life we have in Christ, about our liberation from death and sin, and our identity as an eschatological people with one foot in the New Jerusalem, the marriage of heaven and earth. (Well, at least I preach these things.) But does this doctrine really match our ordinary experience of ourselves as would-be Christians? If we are honest, isn't our ordinary experience of ourselves as Christians closer to Ash Wednesday than Easter Sunday?
Though forgiven and cleansed from guilt, doesn't the wound left in us by original sin still fester? Are we not still tricked by concupiscence and still struggling with the hooks and footholds that the world, the flesh, and the devil find in our own disordered attachments and distorted thinking?
I was baptized on a Saturday afternoon. A week and an hour later I was in the confessional on the other side of the same church, my resolutions and new life in Christ already in shambles. "Thank God for the grace of having made a good confession, tell Jesus that you love him and want to serve him faithfully from now on, say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and now make a good Act of Contrition..." I remember what the priest said in my first confession because I wrote it down. I keep it in order to remember that I haven't made a lot of progress since then.
We who are baptized but have yet to make a solid beginning of the Christian life, we'll be in church tomorrow.
We religious whose lives of spiritual torpor and material luxury make a mockery of God and give scandal to the world, we'll be there too.
We priests who don't say our prayers, but instead give room to our laziness and abuse the people of God by indulging our arrogance and immature need to control, we'll be saying Mass for you.
See you then, brothers and sisters. It's our feast day.
"You are little hard on yourself. Just think about it."
Sometimes it's the simplest messages, as well as the ones that descend to the natural level, that are the hardest to hear.
Since 'grace builds on nature,' we should remember that nobody likes to sit a long time on a hard seat. Firm perhaps, but not hard. So if our nature is too hard, maybe grace won't want to sit there either.
How's that for opening up a can of mixed metaphors?
