Moments of Grace

Update to this old post below. As part of my World Day of Prayer for Vocations homily this weekend, I used the story of the kid in the library. Just for fun, I looked him up to see if I could find out what he is up to thirty years later. I found his LinkedIn page. He's an employment counselor. How fitting!

Old post:

The other day there was a program on TV about St. Maria Goretti. At one point it showed a picture of the priest who gave Maria her first Holy Communion. He looked like a regular, unremarkable priest. I was thinking about him a little. In all of the joys and struggles of his life, whatever they were, in all of the highs and lows of his vocation, that particular moment, when he ministered first Holy Communion to Maria Goretti, was probably one of the most important moments of his life. What I mean is that it was so from God's perspective, from the point of view of the larger economies of grace.

I think that we're often unaware of the way God wishes to make instruments of us in particular moments with one another. God knows that it works better this way, without the interior tangles of pious self-awareness. In the economies by which God pours out his own sanctity in the world, we never know how God is making use of us.

Here's an example from my own life. When I was a senior in college I was considering religious life. There was another kid among the philosophy majors who had been a seminarian. I didn't really know him. One night we ran into each other in the library. He asked me if it was true, that I was thinking of entering religious life. I said that it was. "Good luck with your vocation," he said.

For him it was surely an offhand comment, but for me it made a big difference. Your vocation. It made the whole business real. I had been considering religious life, for sure, but as my idea. The idea of being a Franciscan friar attracted me, and so I was thinking of trying it out. I remember standing there after the guy walked away, jarred by the idea of having a vocation, a call from God. He had named something for me with a clarity that I hadn't known. God used him to accomplish an important grace for me at that moment, probably without his having any idea.

This is why it's good to pray that God guide our speech and interaction with others, and that we work whatever spiritual practices we need to stay open and attentive when we are with one another. Nevertheless, we may not be aware of the graces God works through us, and mercifully so. God keeps us ignorant of these movements a lot of the time, saving us not only from temptations to vanity but also keeping us from messing up the plainness of grace with the clumsiness of self-conscious piety. So we may get to heaven and find out that the most graced moments of our lives were things we hadn't even thought about. In fact, we may as well presume that this will be the case; it will help us to be humble on this pilgrimage and keep us from taking what we know of ourselves as graced before God, which is very little, too seriously.

Rome, The Deposit Of Faith

I've started on a version of this post several times, but for some reason it never comes out right and either abandon it before posting or delete it soon after. I'm not sure why.

There's a joke that gets made in Rome, that Rome is the 'deposit of faith.' That is to say that one arrives in Rome with faith, or at least because of the faith, but that living and working in Rome causes one to lose the faith. Thus, when one leaves Rome, the faith is left behind, 'deposited' there.

Vocation and Pathology

From time to time I'll see something ranting against celibacy, saying that it's a pathological choice or at least can't be healthy, etc. It seems to me that these usually fall into the kind of black and white thinking that doesn't take seriously the work of grace.

Sure, some people take up the celibacy of religious life or the priesthood for imperfect reasons, and even from pathology. And, of course, some celibacies end in disaster and suffering not only for the would-be celibate, but also for others, as we know all too well in our time. In religious life one has the joy of seeing old celibates for whom the charism has worked as advertised, having broken them open to a chaste and non-exclusive love for the world which reflects the love of God in its own particular way. But one also gets to see the celibacies that have gone wrong, leaving celibates dried up in an affective dead-end.

One can say the same things, mutatis mutandis, of marriage, or of any vocation we enter into with every good intention, but as the wheat and weeds of our blessed and broken selves.

The danger is to think that reasons and motivations are all good or all bad. We are mysterious messes, made of the goodness in whose image we are created together with the festering and rotten injuries left by the effects of sin. Can God call us to the vocation he gives us for our salvation--and for our chance to participate in his salvation of the world--as this total person? In other words, can God call us to our vocation with both our good reasons and bad for our attraction to the choice, with both our sanctity and our pathology at work? Yes. It's called redemption.

When it works, when someone succeeds in surrendering to this work of salvation, it's a truly blessed and amazing thing. Pathologies are flipped, turned inside-out--pick your metaphor--by the opportunities for grace and growth that the vocation brings and become gifts given for the encouragement of others and their salvation. Just because it sometimes doesn't work when we don't succeed in surrendering to grace, just because sometimes pathology swallows up what would have been sanctity and uses it for its own rotten and meaningless ends, that doesn't make it the fault of the vocation.

Look To God, Do Not Be Afraid

One of the curious things about living in a friary while still trying to learn the local language is that you don't really get to know the other brothers. Unless you somehow know of them on paper or by office or reputation, the language barrier prevents or at least renders difficult some of the ordinary mechanisms of acquaintance.

It's not a bad thing, but just is. It is, however, an interesting thing. My not knowing what I might have known by now about some of the brothers around me reminds me of the irreducible mystery that other people always are, and leaves me more attentive and grateful for what I do perceive.

For example, one of the friars I live with is an Indonesian, about the same age as me in religion. His project in life right now seems to be the study of Arabic. Beyond that, I hardly know a thing about him, apart from the diligence, kindness, and devotion I observe.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that he seems to have always the same song in his head, as evidenced by the hum that can be heard from time to time in the hallway or while we are doing the dishes after meals. It is the lovely, almost haunting In the Lord I'll be ever Thankful from Taizé:



It touches my heart in a way; very early in my Christian journey I had the song on a Taizé tape to which I listened often. As I start to think of my twentieth anniversary of baptism coming up next month and all the twists and turns, amazing graces and blind alleys, the few graces to which I have surrendered and the many sins by which I have clung to my misery, I'm grateful for such an apparently little thing that arrives to remind me of the unity of the economies of grace and the gentle persistence of the love of God.

io ti assolvo

Even in this age of smartphones and tablets, I still carry a little old-school notebook with me. In it are the most random of all notes: scribbles from meetings with formation, spiritual, and academic directors, rhetorical notes-to-self, directions to places, digests of bus schedules particular to the certain times of day when I would habitually need them. One of the best recent additions I have made is the absolution formula in Italian.

I don't know why, but it's happened several times that someone here has just come up to me and asked to confess. Maybe it's what they do in Italy. Maybe it's because they can see that I'm a foreigner, probably don't speak the language very well, and will therefore have to be quick about it. Maybe it's what the Holy Spirit arranges for my encouragement and for whatever graces he wills for these seemingly random penitents.

As this happens, it forces a duty on me. I myself have to start going to confession in Italian. It's not because I have to; here in Rome as it was in Assisi it's easy enough to find an English-confessing priest at one of the basilicas. But I realize that if I'm going to hear confessions in Italian I have to go to confession in Italian. I need to know the critical vocabulary of the encounter; the way the words work and flow according to the customs and scripts of that very particular moment, the terms and syntax that are recognized in the naming of grace.

It's like when we were in the novitiate in Honduras and were challenged to share vocation stories with the novices; the most critical term was inquietud; it was a way of talking about a motivating restlessness in the heart. I never would have happened on the word myself, but in that setting it was an indispensable term for speaking of an experience of God.

So, one of the current projects is to prepare for my first confession in Italian.

Charity and Obedience

Back before I concluded from Universae Ecclesiae that I shouldn't mix and match OF and EF in praying the Divine Office (see my pre-UE dubium on the question here), I would often pray the little hours from the Roman Breviary rather than from the Liturgy of the Hours. In doing so, for large parts of the year I would find myself praying through Romans 13:8 as the capitulum for Sext:

Nemini quidquam debeatis, nisi ut invicem diligatis: qui enim diligit proximum, legem implevit.

"Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law." (RSV)


The passage has been coming to mind for me during my examinations of conscience for confession. More and more I find it hard to examine myself on obedience and charity as if they were separate things; some kind of new, converging understanding is starting to come into focus for me. I am not quite sure how to articulate it yet, but I'm confident that it's some kind of grace that God wills to give me.

Perhaps it has something to do with my new ministry as guardian, as a 'grace of office.' I'll pray for that.

Actual Graces

An important truth of the spiritual life which is vital to remember but easy to miss:

When we become aware of needing some particular grace, such as God's help in the struggle with some temptation, or with overcoming some sin, or in obtaining some virtue, this awareness itself is the grace of God at work.

It's easy to get the idea that the pursuit of holiness works like this: we examine ourselves, find ourselves deficient and miserable, decide that we need certain graces to become more holy and less unhappy, and then go to God in prayer to ask for what we have figured out we need.

When things get really bad on this impoverished idea of religion, God can get to be imaged as kind of ultimate spiritual clerk. Prayer is like going to the DMV. You know just what you need, and you hope your request and materials are in order to have it fulfilled. Of course it's even worse than that, because often you walk away from the DMV having succeeded in taking care of your business. If you treat God this way, he will allow you to continue to fail at happiness and fall prey to sin, because you have not understood the most basic of graces God wants to share.

When the desire for grace and God's help arise in the heart, perhaps suggesting that we pray, this already is the grace of God at work. Of course God wants to give us all the graces we need to overcome our sins and to obtain the virtues that will make us happy ourselves and beneficial to each other, but most of all God wants to freely consent to our created condition as persons made from and imagined in the creativity of his own overflowing, trinitarian love.

The thought that I need a certain grace is not my spiritual self-diagnosis, but God's invitation to consent to my dependence on him.

Chrism Mass

I attended the Chrism Mass yesterday, and I was very happy that I did. In my three Holy Weeks as a parish priest in the archdiocese of New York I was only able to go once; in the other years I had to stay home to do afternoon wake services for folks sneaking in their funerals before the paschal triduum.

For me the Chrism Mass is one of those moments, especially now that I'm a priest, when I find myself lifted out of the details and dramas of daily life and into the larger picture of God's action and our vocation within it. I mean this both in the sense of the vocation of the universal and local Church within all of revelation and salvation history, but also in my individual story of vocation and salvation.

Praying within such a large assembly of priests (follow the link to to see how impressive the clergy turnout was) I was just struck by where I find myself in this life.

Who was I twenty years ago? A college student, a kid who thought himself clever and bright but without much motivation to make anything of it, a child of privilege in some senses, but ungrateful, an adolescent who related to others and to the world mostly as a source of bemusement or entertainment, self-centered in subtle but defining ways, not religious but not atheist or agnostic either, instead just someone whose frame of mind towards self, others, and the world did not admit of any way in which such ultimate questions could be personally interesting. And I wasn't special in any of this. There were tons of us, and we spent our days drinking and indulging our self-congratulating brightness through our conversations and our music, making amusement out of everything.

Fast forward twenty years and I find myself a religious priest, concelebrating the Chrism Mass with the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. Why me? Why should I have the gift of this mercy, rather than any of other wandering souls with whom I grew up or went to college, of which not an insignificant number are already dead? I don't know. It's just mercy. When you first start off in a religious or priestly vocation, you think it's some kind of special privilege. You never admit this, of course, sometimes not even to yourself, but the idea is in there, lurking among many of the thoughts of the old Adam. But after a while you realize that such ideas are flimsy nonsense and that your vocation is just God expressing his merciful salvation in your particular case.

During the Canon, I prayed for my first priests. At the memento for the living, I remembered Fr. Larry, who dealt with me in the time of my first inquiries and again as a neophyte, always with more carefulness and pastoral sense than I ever knew about at the time. At the memento for the dead, I prayed for Fr. Leo, who was pastor of the parish where I was initiated. On August 30, 1992 he gave me my first Holy Communion. He also heard my first confession on the following Saturday, and many more thereafter until I graduated from college and ran off in foolhardy zeal to my first entrance into religious life.

Thank you, Lord, for the mercy of this vocation. I don't know why you have given it to me and not someone else, and I only pray to always rely only on You alone in my desire for faithfulness.

Confession Video

Everyone is posting this video, and I couldn't resist it either. I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with it, but it certainly captures something real in the experience of the grace of the sacrament.

For me, it's the finger in the holy water that strikes the deepest. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but to me it spoke to that moment when I realized that the still-festering injuries of original sin remaining in me can infect even what seems to be otherwise devout behavior. For me, that's the experience that began to teach me the nature of real compunction, and helped me at least begin to taste the surrender of repentance.

Plus, I also realize that the confessional in the video reminds me a little of the one in which I made my first confession, only a week and two hours after I was baptized. I was exceedingly nervous and ashamed for having made such a mess of my grand experiment in such a short time. The old priest was so kind. That moment has been an enduring image of God for me over the years.

From My Confessor

Short and sweet today:

"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."

Mustard and Grace

As I start to think about moving, one of the things that happens is that I run into things long packed away, like journals of notes to myself. As I rearranged some things in my foot locker this morning, I turned to random page in one volume and found this amusing and biting little reflection:


March 10 [2005]

Spring break. At the soup kitchen this morning. Hot dog and chili day. Everyone was getting mad because:

1. They only got one hot dog
2. There was no mustard

Guests were mad, staff were annoyed with the guests, etc., etc. A mess of a day.

Reflection: Am I not exactly the same way with grace?

My Grace is Sufficient

Preaching on St. Joseph, Bernardine of Siena comes to us in the Office of Readings today:

There is a general rule concerning all special graces granted to any human being. Whenever the divine favor chooses someone to receive a special grace, or to accept a lofty vocation, God adorns the person chosen with all the gifts of the Spirit (omnia charismata donat) needed to fulfill the task at hand.

This is a beautiful and important teaching. Hearing something like it when I was in an early spiritual impasse helped me to shift my understanding and keep going. The teaching implies that the spiritual life is not about effort, but consent. We don't have to reach up and squeeze grace out of some stingy deity. All the graces we need are there; it is only our inability to let go and accept them that holds us back from sanctity.

I often mention this teaching to the couples I am preparing for marriage. They have been given each other as a special and unrepeatable vocation in the world. Unfortunately, it is a vocation without a high success rate. They need to believe that all the graces they need to succeed are there for them, if they only stay close to the God who delights to join them as one.

The Lord Gave Me Brothers

It's one of the most quoted lines of St. Francis; it ends up in intercessory prayers and on holy cards for professions of vows. Francis's insight that his brothers were a gift from the Lord is an attitude Franciscans hold dear, and it informs our theological idea of who we are as an Order and a movement.

Sometimes I make fun of how we use the phrase; in the Testament of Francis it is only a dependent clause:

Et postquam Dominus dedit mihi de fratribus, nemo ostendebat mihi, quid deberem facere, sed ipse Altissimus revelavit mihi, quod deberem vivere secundum formam sancti Evangelii.

"And after the Lord gave me some brothers, nobody showed me [NB, not 'us'] what I had to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I [note: not 'we'] had to live according to the form of the holy Gospel." (Testament, 14)


For Francis, the primary kindness of God was the revelation of his vocation to live "according to the pattern" of the holy Gospel, a gift that came attendant on the gift of brothers. To live the gospel according to the Franciscan idiom requires a consciousness of sisters and brothers given to one as a gift.

It's something of which I am increasingly aware the further I get from the program of initial formation. All along the way, brothers have been given to me in various roles to help me along: friends on the natural level, companions on the 'inner way,' confessors, and wise elders who can straighten out my thinking. Even brothers who are enemies are a gift in the sense that they provide an opportunity to carry out Jesus' teachings on charity and a chance to refuse to participate in the cultures of gossip and detraction which can so poison a religious community.

This personal experience reminds me of two spiritual attitudes I must foster in myself. First, I must have the courage to go to the brothers who are given to me. When a suggestion in prayer tells me to call this brother, or that I should talk something over with another whose wisdom I trust, these are probably the promptings of the Holy Spirit working through the fraternity. To become willing to go to others for help when the Spirit suggests it is the greatest school of humility. (Note that this is also one of the reasons why we must be living lives of daily prayer.)

Second, I must note that God is probably using me in the same way. In the mysterious economies of grace, perhaps I am the brother that somebody else needs at some time in his vocation. Many times this will be hidden from me; the Spirit does this in order to shield us from the self-consciousness and vainglory that would get in the way. Therefore, I must be attentive and present to the brothers, because I never know what the Holy Spirit is doing through me, often in spite of me, and whether I know it or not.

From My Confessor

Qui bene distinguit, bene docet:

As sinners we should keep in mind that our root problem is not that we are people who commit this or that sin, but that we are squanderers of grace. Sin, after all, considered as evil, is the privation of the good or virtue that ought to be there instead. That is why there is nothing delightful or even interesting about sin; when there seems to be it is because we have been deluded or tricked by worldly distraction, concupiscence, or the devil.

We believe in a just God, a God who is Justice, and one of the primary expression of God's justice in our lives is to supply with us with all of the particular grace we might require to live the life to which we have been called with freedom and joy. My yoke is easy, and my burden light. So if we sin, it is because we have missed out on the grace that is offered to live the opposite virtue or to do the opposite work.

This is why vigilance and attention are so critical, to leave our minds and senses free enough to notice and take advantage of the graces that come to us in the course of our days.

Penance: the old 10, 10, and 10.

Dust. Wind. Dude.

The other day I was sitting in church at the end of the day, when the afternoon sun comes in low through the windows on the St. Joseph side. One of the windows in front of me as open, and the sunlight was beaming through. In the sunbeam I could see particles of dust hanging in the air or moving about. This sight fascinated me when I was little, and I still enjoy it.

As I continued to consider the illuminated dust, I noticed how strong a metaphor it is for ourselves. We are hardly anything, unnecessary and entirely contingent. That we are anything worth noticing--indeed anything of beauty--it is only because at certain moments we catch the Light and become illuminated by Grace. We would be dirt on the floor, except that the quickening heat of the Light bears us up so that we might float on the currents of the Spirit, Who blows where He wills. To have this habitually is what holiness means.

'Dust to dust,' as someone will pray of us one day as our bodies are committed to the earth, but in this time in between, we have a glimpse of the world to come as particles of dust made beautiful, shiny, buoyant, and warm in the Light.

Two Years of Priesthood: Stats

I know this is silly and a little irreverent, but I thought it would be interesting. After two years in the priesthood, here are my stats:

Baptisms: 42

Confirmations: 1

Marriages witnessed: 19

Priests on whom I have laid hands at their ordination: 3

Committals: 54


Δ for the Church Militant under my watch (baptisms less committals): -12 :(

Grace and gratitude: overwhelming and endless, respectively.

Worthiness: Less each day.

Catholic Quick Start Guide

It's no secret that the average Catholic does not practice the faith. For whatever reason, at this point in history there are huge numbers of Catholics who fall into the category of 'baptized but un-catechized.' After each moment of sacramental initiation, whether it be Baptism, Holy Communion, or Confirmation, many are lost to the praying assembly.

Occasionally it happens, though, that someone who has not practiced or considered the faith since their first Holy Communion or Confirmation is led back by circumstances or just ordinary grace. They range from the cautious but curious to the overwhelming zealous and energetic. Whatever their condition, they need a plan. So, having given this 'how get going again in the faith' advice several times in confession or in the parlor, I thought I would post it.

(N.B. This plan is for Catholics who have previously begun their sacramental initation as infants or children, and are coming back to the faith. The situation of catechumens--those who are adult candidates for Baptism--and baptized Christians of other Churches and ecclesial communities is a different case.)


Pray

Attend Sunday Mass as devoutly as you can. Get yourself a Sunday Missal or Daily Roman Missal to help you prepare ahead of time as well as become more familiar with the Mass in general. A good hand missal will also have a lot of other good resources for your prayerful exploration.

Develop a practice of going to confession to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Once every couple of months, with extra effort for Advent and Lent is a good minimum schedule for a devout soul. If you don't have anything to say, either you have a bad memory or your sin is that you aren't reflecting on your life. If you are struggling with serious and habitual sins, go more often.

Pray each day. It doesn't matter how, though a mixture of formal prayers and simple quiet before the Lord is good. Find the time of day when you can pray with the least distraction. For many people this is the peace of the early morning before things get crazy. For others it's the evening after the day has been dealt with. For some with a bi-phasic workday (like a parish priest) the afternoon might be the best time for prayer. Try different forms and practices of prayer and follow what catches your heart. If you don't have a rosary, get one. If you have one on your car mirror, take it down and pray it instead.


Join

If you are not an active member of your parish, become one. In most cases you are a parishioner of the parish territory in which you live, which is usually the closest Catholic church. However, you can also make yourself a parishioner of a parish somewhere else simply by registering there. Go where you feel your soul will be fed. Support your parish with your prayer, your good example, and a weekly financial contribution.


Learn

If you don't have your own copy of the Sacred Scriptures, get one. The standard American English Bible for Catholics is called the New American Bible.

Empower yourself by learning the faith and the teachings of the Church. Pick up a catechism. For those in the States, the Catholic Catechism for Adults by our bishops is very good, and is usually in stock in regular bookstores. If you want to go first class, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a great reference, and is available everywhere. When one person (even a priest!) says that the Church teaches this or that, and someone else says the teaching is something else, you don't have to wonder. Learn it yourself.

Visit a Catholic bookstore when you can, and browse the spiritual books. If something grabs your attention, pick it up.


Discern and adjust your life

Through prayer and learning you will soon notice ways in which you need to bring your life more in line with Catholic teaching.

If you have not completed your sacramental initiation, begin this process right away. In many cases this means that Confirmation is still lacking. Most parishes will have a program for this, or can direct you to one.

If you are struggling with serious, habitual sin, find a confessor whom you feel takes you seriously and can offer practical advice. Do a little detective work on yourself. Ask what this sin does for you. When does it happen? What are the occasions of the sin? What is the opposite virtue and what are the practical means of acquiring it?

There are many lifestyle and marriage situations which may need adjustment. Some marriages outside the Church are easily regularized according to Catholic practice, while others may be more complicated. Talk to a priest whom you trust, and then pray to the Holy Spirit to show you opportunities to speak and pray with your spouse about it. The same goes for those who are not married, but may be simulating marriage through cohabitation. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you notice opportunities to open the subject of the Church's expectations of the two of you.


Above all

Take it easy! The plan for this life is to walk with the Lord, so there's no need to run. This is a work of grace; it's not your own. Your job is not to push, but to consent. Attend to the graces at hand, stay grateful, and take it one day at a time.

Telling the Conversion Story

As an adult convert, the telling of the conversion story becomes a regular part of religious practice. You are called upon to tell your story to brothers and sisters who also marvel at God's grace, but also to people who are just curious. You also have an awareness of the conversion story as an internal narrative that forms a kind of self-apology in the consciousness of yourself as a praying person.

Since the day of my Baptism almost seventeen years ago, I have told my "conversion story" more times than I know, both to myself and to others. What is fascinating to me is how the story has changed.

My sense of my conversion story has changed in two basic ways: it's starting point has been steadily retreating to an earlier point in my earthly life, and the agency of the story has been shifting away from me and onto God.

When someone asked me to tell my story around the time of my Baptism, I started the story a couple of years before, when I became interested in this or that, concerned about what it meant to be a human being in this or that way, how I picked up the gospel of St. Matthew on a hot summer night and read the Sermon on the Mount, and how my inability to know any criteria by which I might "choose" a church was my first school of the surrender of prayer.

But as time went on, the starting point of the story retreated into the past. After a couple of years I realized the importance of choices and influences that came upon me several years before. My discovery of punk rock and hardcore rock and roll, for instance, was helping me to make the "critical turn," to know that the values and given wisdom about the world were not always the best or what the heart really wanted. An interest in mathematics combined with the awakening of reading Plato for the first time had both helped me to understand what it is meant by a spiritual reality.

Even later I began to remember certain experiences of the Infinite Mystery that I had when I was real little. Returning to such experiences from time to time in prayer, I have begun to see how God was drawing me into the grace of prayer--unaware as I was--even from early childhood. This helped me to understand certain spotty attractions to Christ crucified and to the life of faith that I also experienced as a kid.

All this is to say that it has been an amazing experience to see my conversion story unfold backwards. When I was baptized I thought that this was a process I had begun a year or two before, but now I can see it as something that was going on as far back as I can remember.

All of this makes for the second shift in my consciousness of my conversion story, which is the question of the main character. When I was baptized, I admit that it was mostly me. I had decided to do this bold thing because of what I had to come to believe and to desire. More and more I know that this is a story about God and not about me; about how God--in his tremendous mercy--has given me the opportunity to be relieved of the tyranny of my life being about me. In other words, it's not my conversion story anymore. It's a story about grace in which I play a supporting role, and not even very well. But that doesn't matter, honestly. God is so good, who cares about me?

Hermitage Notes: The Arboreal Observance

It's a beautiful Spring morning. Four young Franciscan friars offer Mass together with quiet devotion, two of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and two of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Amen. Thank you, Holy Spirit.

After Mass I take a walk in the woods, up to a little clearing where someone has placed a statue of Francis. The woods, it really does it for me. Peaceful and secure. Quiet and yet full of the little noises of insistent life.

The trees are my spiritual directors. Reaching up to the sky they fulfill the joyful Easter slogan, sursum sunt quaerite, "Seek the things that are above." Without torturous self-reflection they take the grace of God poured out in sunlight and rain and transform it into their own flourishing. Could it be so simple with us? Yes!

Coincidence or Providence?

I think that a lot of people on the spiritual journey have had an experience that can be interpreted as either coincidence or Providence. We meet a spiritual mother or father who has the exact wisdom we need at a certain time. We come across the precise spiritual book that helps us forward. A homily seems to speak to our precise spiritual concern. A holy card in our pew or on the floor in church seems like it was just for us.

Are experiences like this coincidences, or little acts of Divine Providence arranged by the Holy Spirit for our benefit? People ask me that sort of question all the time. To be honest, I don't think how we interpret them matters so much. What matters is that prayer has freed us just a little from distraction and misery and made us sensitive to the superabundant goodness of God that is always around us. Little sparks or seeds of God's love are all around us all the time; most of them we miss because of our distraction, much of which is necessary in order to fulfill the work and acts of love we are called to each day.

Here's my favorite example from my own life: For whatever reason I have always had a certain attraction to and spiritual affinity for the mystery of the Lord's Transfiguration. It has always fascinated me as a sort of Resurrection appearance that precedes the Passion, given to a select, inner circle of the disciples. Praying the mystery, I'm led into its mystical, precious, and glorious light, what you would call in Latin, praeclarus.

If I had to pick a day for receiving my religious vocation, it would be the feast of the Transfiguration in 1993. Not that there was anything grand about it, but I remember praying that day--in a chapel dedicated to the Transfiguration--and finding the grace to consent in a concrete way to my desire and interest in pursuing a vocation to religious life.

So it was a delight and a wonder for me to one day calculate that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, on which the Lord's Transfiguration has been proclaimed for as long as anyone can remember.

Is this a coincidence or an act of Providence and destiny? To me the question doesn't really matter. Everything that exists is a sort of co-incidence of the love of God and the creation that overflows out of that love. Prayer is the discipline that allows the Spirit to train us to see ourselves and the world as this perfect and mystical "coincidence."