Gaudete et exsultate: Community

I took some time to read Gaudete et exsultate. Anything I would say about it generally has already been posted here and there, so there's no need for me to repeat it. I do have some personal reflections to share, however, on this exhortation to holiness. This is the first.

In salvation history, the Lord saved one people. We are never completely ourselves unless we belong to a people. That is why no one is saved alone, as an isolated individual. Rather, God draws us to himself, taking into account the complex fabric of interpersonal relationships present in a human community. God wanted to enter into the life and history of a people. (6)

In religious life it's a commonplace to say that the reasons you entered are not the same reasons you have stayed. In the same way, what you anticipated as being the greatest challenges don't turn out to be the things you struggle with the most. Conversely, what seemed like an easy thing when you first professed can become a great struggle. I am sure that those who are married or in any other sort of particular vocation have analogous experiences.

When I made my religious profession, I had not thought much about the line, Therefore, I entrust myself with all my heart to this brotherhood. As time has gone on, however, I realize that this is one of the most challenging aspects of the whole business.

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:

Bring Me The Breviary

Over the last couple weeks a visiting friar has displaced me from my regular place in choir. Not a big deal, though I don't like my little choir-cubby ruffled.

One friar noticed my suffering and said,

'Well, brother, there are many displaced persons in Rome.'

Franciscan Identity Crisis Ramble

I've been thinking about trying to write this post for a long time.

There's a lot of begging in Rome. There are scammers too, but with the scams that I usually get, I guess because I look like a good 'ugly American' mark, I've grown wise and I turn the tables and frustrate the person and try to playfully shame him."What would your mama say? Going around tricking foreigners!"

But it's the begging that troubles me more.

Feast of St. Francis Post

Today is the feast of St. Francis. As the Roman-Seraphic Liturgy of the Hours puts it, 'St. Francis of Assisi, Deacon, Founder of the Three Orders.' So happy feast day to all the friars of the First Order, all the nuns of the Second Order, and to all the brothers and sisters of the Third Order, Secular and Regular.

Last night we had the Transitus--the prayer service that commemorates Francis's passing from this life on the evening of October 3, 1226. It was simple by the standard of what I'm used to with the friars in the States, but still beautiful. Our Father Guardian gave an encouraging homily, beginning from the Testament of Siena. It's a short enough text to post in its entirety:

Write that I bless all my brothers, those who are in religion and those who will be until the end of the world. Since because of the weakness and pain of illness I cannot speak to them, I reveal my will for my brothers in these three statements, namely: that as a sign and remembrance of my blessing and my testament, they love one another, that they love and observe our holy Lady Poverty, and that they always be faithful and subject to the prelates and all clerics of holy Mother Church.

So today I'm just praying for willingness and faithfulness regarding these three admonitions of our Seraphic Father.

I pray to love the brothers God has given me in my vocation to be a Franciscan friar, to always speak and act toward them with charity. To love my brother whether I find him helpful or not, whether I agree with him or not, whether I am edified by his visible behavior or if I endure the temptation of the flesh to consider him a bad religious or priest.  And in the same way I pray that God and my brothers would look past all the ways I give scandal and bad example by my laxity and disregard for what I have promised to them.

I pray for the grace to always nourish my love for my spouse Lady Poverty, and that the Lord would show me how to love her more completely in the circumstances in which I find myself by holy obedience. I pray to be able to notice, take, and thank God for the opportunities I am given to share in the suffering of his poor, as I pray to know and take the opportunities to make myself subject to them for his sake and for the sake of his Kingdom.

I pray that I might love the Church as the mother who has received me into her care, offering me a chance to be free of the misery that this world insists on for itself with its errors and selfishness. May I love her and surrender to her embrace always and in all things, even when she seems confusing or even unholy in some ways, because Christ himself loved her and gave himself up to make her holy. (Ephesians 5:24-25)

Amen.

Laudato Si': My Ranty Examination of Conscience

Here is the part of Laudato si' which has hit me the hardest:

This [lack of "awareness of problems which especially affect the excluded"] is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. (49)

Is this me? Is this us as religious? Is my 'holy poverty' as a religious such that it shields me from contact with the poor? Do I 'live and reason'--and pray--from a 'comfortable position' and live 'a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world's population'?

Sometimes I'm afraid I have to say yes. And if I have to say yes, my Franciscan vocation, as I am living it now, has become meaningless.

It's not supposed to be that way. A few quotes from our Capuchin Constitutions:

Poverty, chosen in order to follow Christ, makes us sharers in his filial relation towards the Father and in his state as brother and servant in the midst of people, and leads us to solidarity with the littlest of this world. (61,2) 

Those friars are to be praised who in particular situations, living with the poor and sharing in their conditions and aspirations, encourage them in social and cultural progress and in the hope of eternal goods. (63,2) 

Called the gospel path of poverty, let us accustom ourselves to suffering privations after the example of Christ and the memory of St. Francis, who wanted thus to be poor and to entrust himself, having abandoned all things and free from bonds of the heart, to the Father who cares for us. (77,1) 

And let us not be numbered among those false poor, who love to be poor on the condition that they lack nothing. (77,2)

Do I put myself in a place where I share the aspirations of the poor? Do I have to suffer any privations for the love of Christ and his poor? Do I love to be poor in such a way as to lack nothing? Laudato si' has brought me the torment of these questions. But I have to trust it as a good, a graced torment.

The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:53) I pray that line every evening in Our Lady's Magnificat. And I worry that I am the rich, not the hungry. And if so, how do I dare to hope for any grace from God?

In one of the presentations this past week at the New Provincials' Workshop, one of our General Councilors spoke on the embourgeoisement of religious obedience. I will agree to do this or that, I will take up this or that life, so long as it serves my goals of self-realization, of amassing my own moral capital within the organization, etc.

Has religious life as I have found it served to help me to become one of God's poor or has it served my embourgeoisement? I worry that the answer may be the latter.

So what do I do? I pray. I pray you Lord, for the courage to go where my consecration leads me. I pray for the grace of giving you permission to do what you have to do to make me the poor man I have professed to be before you, the Church, and the world. 

Laudato Si': Holy Poverty

I was fortunate today to have cleared my desk of work by noon, so as to start to read Laudato si' as it was published. I read it quickly and will have to go back and read it again. It's quite a marvelous document. I thought of making a post of my favorite quotes, but now I realize it will take more post than one.

Right at the beginning is the beautiful and clear intuition of St. Francis that is the root of Franciscan sine proprio and holy poverty:

The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. (11) 

 That is Franciscanism. It is the admission that nothing, not a thing or a place or a person or even your own self belongs to you alone. It is a confession that you yourself are not god, are not the center of the universe, and that other persons and things have ends and purposes and joys that are apart from your use or enjoyment of them.

In human relationships, this holy poverty is called chastity. Pope Francis is helping us to see that we need to find together a new chastity toward our sister mother earth.

Ash Wednesday Confession

After Morning Prayer, Office of Readings, Mass, and hanging up some laundry on the roof to dry, I make it to the office and add an #ashtag column to my Tweetdeck, just for the day, so I can pray for everyone who uses it and share in the hope and promise of Ash Wednesday.

And as I start to see the faces with their ashes, it makes me think of the cross that Deacon Ron traced on my own forehead on the day of my baptism, and how necrotic I have let it become, Lord.

How little have I reached up to Heaven, entrusting myself to the prayers, protection, and example of Our Lady and the saints, knowing and taking courage from my membership in a sacred communion that overcomes the limits of time and space.

How little have I taken and still less have I sought the opportunities to be your own compassion to those who suffer because of my sins and the sins of the world, knowing that in charity and forgetfulness of self lies the freedom from the tyranny of this self that doesn't realize he was drowned in the Jordan.

How much of what I have called discipleship or a spiritual life has really been the work of a fleshly religion, an effort to make myself just and acceptable before God, as if our Father in Heaven were an earthly parent who love was conditional, as if I had not been baptized into your sacred humanity, Lord Jesus, a humanity with which the Father is "well pleased," (Mark 1:11), as if your Passion, death, and Resurrection had not delivered us from such a religion, from self-justification by works of the law, from wearing our human righteousness like a badge that marks as just and saved.

How little have I truly turned my life over to you Lord, preferring instead of rotten luxury of my own will. As long as my poverty is mine, I have not become poor, I have not followed in your footprint.

And yet you, Lord, have continued to hold me in your mercy, have continued to invite me to the salvation you are always working for me. Grant me the willingness to turn myself over to you, to find myself only in your love and your will. Grant me the surrender to sink into the grace of my baptism.

Fr. Cantalamessa on Zacchaeus, Francis, and God's Love

The other day, November 1 to be exact, was the feast of Blessed Raniero of Borgo Sansepolcro, one of those poor souls who has his proper feast day on the same day as the Solemnity of All Saints. It's kind of like having your birthday on Christmas, I suppose. He also has one of the zaniest vocation stories you'll ever hear.

In celebration of his Name Day, our own confrere Raniero Cantalamessa, Preacher to the Papal Household, presided at Mass today and preached for us.

Theses on Prayer from Mary Magdalene

More and more over the years, I turn to Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Lord as both a means to understand prayer and a model for praying. I've written the same stuff before, but instead of linking some old post I thought to make a new one in the 'theses' style.

Theses on Prayer from Mary Magdalene (John 20: 11-18)

• Getting up early helps
• Stay still, stay where you are inside. Don't get up and do something else either physically or interiorly at the first thought of doing so, even when others have run away.
• Even when all you have inside seems like emptiness, look into it.
• Whatever question or concern or hurt happens to be on your heart, address it simply to whatever presence seems to be there, whether you recognize the presence or not, whether it seems like anything or not.
• Know that when you recognize the presence of God, this is how we, in our limited perception, experience God recognizing and calling to us. So like many aspects of prayer--and indeed, prayer itself--things feel like our action and our perception when in fact they are the action of the Holy Spirit praying within us. This is a sort of optical illusion of the interior vision that happens because of our being limited to time and space.
• Accept without discouragement that the experience of God in prayer feels fleeting. It feels this way because God is not a 'thing' that can be possessed like our other created experiences and still less like a physical, temporal good. In this sense prayer is the first and primary school of evangelical poverty, because the object of our desire cannot be grasped and possessed. Prayer trains us in letting go, because we have no choice with God but to let go.
• Further, even if it seems as if God flees from us in prayer, he is not fleeing in order to be rid of us, but as a way of drawing us, seducing us even, deeper into the mystery, that we may begin again with an even more profound gaze into the empty tomb.
• The fruit of prayer is witness to and announcement of the Resurrection, that the world may know that the new creation has begun to arrive.

I Came To Do Good, And I've Done Pretty Well

Sometimes I get into some anguish over this life that I have chosen, this vocation. Has it made me a more charitable person, someone more open to the love of God and more free to love his neighbor, or only more selfish and self-involved? Does it give glory to God? Is it really a sign of his coming Kingdom? Twice I have chosen to seek entrance into one of the mainstream branches of the Franciscan Order instead of some newer, reformed group. Was that the best thing? The best thing for me? What God willed for me? Has this life brought me closer to Jesus? (This last one was the solitary criterion of discernment for my spiritual director at the time of my entering the Capuchins.)

Then there are my relationships to the brothers themselves, to the Order, to the Franciscan movement, etc. Are these not ambivalent in many ways? Isn't it true that I have never really felt comfortable or at home in religious life as I have found it? If I examine my conscience on what I have vowed, that 'with all my heart I give myself to this Brotherhood,' am I not overwhelmed by what is found to be lacking?

When I heard the gospel at Mass today, however, it occurred to me that maybe all of this might not be such a bad thing.

Pilgrimage to St. Benedict Joseph Labre

Guessing that it was probably the last day of Christmas quiet here in the Curia, I decided that yesterday was the right moment for a little pilgrimage I had been hoping to make.

I first happened upon a devotion to St. Benedict Joseph Labre in the days after my departure from the novitiate of the OFM. I had entered their formation program right after college. It was a very rich of time, full of formative experiences, things learned, and friendships made for which I have become increasingly grateful over the years. In the end, though, it didn't work out. I found myself marking my third anniversary of baptism already a novice religious; I had a lot of zeal, but not a lot of roots. I was also very innocent in a lot of ways; most of my expectations of religious life had been formed from reading the lives of the saints and from the movies. Having found something different and not a few things that were hard for me to understand or interpret, life got confusing. On the advice of my directors, I left half-way through the novitiate, on Christmas morning.

It was a strange time, difficult and confusing.  But it also got to be a very blessed time, a moment when I began to learn for myself--somewhat ironically--what Franciscan poverty really meant for me. I had to seek in prayer what I was supposed to do, not in some abstract sense of 'what should I do with my life', but in the immediate and concrete sense of what I was supposed to do the very next day.

At some point in this moment of my journey I discovered Benedict Joseph Labre. I don't remember if I read somewhere that he was the patron saint of people dismissed from religious life or if I decided it myself. If he's not, he should be. Having decided that he wanted to become a Trappist, he applied to La Trappe and was rejected. After that he tried to be a Carthusian, but was sent home after a few months. After that he was admitted to another monastery of Trappists, but that didn't work out either. In each of these cases, one immediately suspects something that what we would call mental illness or at least instability. What he had taken to be a vocation to religious life not having materialized, Benedict Joseph became a kind of homeless pilgrim, a 'fool for Christ', visiting and praying at the shrines of Europe. He died during Holy Week of 1783, at the age of 35, on a street in the neighborhood of S. Maria ai Monti in Rome, where he attended Mass each morning.

What I hadn't known before moving here to Rome is that Benedict Joseph Labre is also buried in that same church; the people of the area already thought him a saint at his death. When I realized this, I knew I had to make a pilgrimage.

Hic Jacet Corpus S. B. J. Labre

If you know Rome at all, S. Maria ai Monti is close to the Cavour stop on Metro B, so it's also not far from the Colosseum. St. Benedict Joseph's altar is the first one to the left of the sanctuary.

After praying for everyone I could think of, I spent some time just sitting by Benedict Joseph's altar. I got to thinking about how many times, on the way back and forth to Italian school, I had rode by on the subway not so far from there, totally unaware of my passing the remains of this saint given to me as an important devotion in my own story. I thought that perhaps he had been praying for me all that time. Some of those summer days weren't so easy, in fact, especially during the second half of August as Rome went dead and the heat seemed like it would never end, and there I was, still living the grind of language school. Probably Benedict Joseph Labre is praying for everyone who passes by on Metro B, especially those in any kind of struggle.

One time I went to confession and the priest recommended to me as a penance to pray for everybody who was praying for me. A lot of people pray for priests and religious, he said, and it was a good thing to remember and remain grateful for their charity. I think there's a lot of courage in that, to remember that we are being prayed for not only in ways that we are aware of, but also by people and in in ways that are hidden from our awareness. Indeed, in the largest sense, this is one of the great encouragements of being a Catholic. When we say that we are members of the 'Catholic' Church, we don't mean this primarily as a historical or geographical category, but as an acclamation of a communion that embraces at once the Church on earth, the Church in heaven, and the Church in purgatory. To pray in Christ is to embrace the catholicity of this communion, to confess and take courage that the Church in Heaven is praying with us and for us.

St. Benedict Joseph Labre, pray for us.

All Saints Ramble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Vocation: An Examination of Conscience

Today in the gospel we have the wonderful scene of Mrs. Zebedee trying to intrigue with Jesus for her sons to have the top spots in the Kingdom. (Matthew 20:17-28) Jesus responds by explaining that it doesn't work like that in his Kingdom; it won't be like it is among the gentiles where one lords it over another. Instead, to be close to Jesus, to sit by his side, will mean drinking the chalice of Christ's passion and suffering. The one who wants to be great must be the servant, and the one who wants to be first will be the slave.

This is the sort of teaching that put the hook in me for Christianity when I first sat down and read the New Testament. Here was the answer to the never-ending violence of this world, to the disregard for human life and the natural world, to the structures of privilege that gave so many material advantages to some and so few to others. The answer was a sort of inverted revolution accomplished by Christ crucified, a revolution that provides human nature with an escape from the violence of power and the tyranny of the self, a path from the death of sin to the life of Resurrection.

The Franciscan expression of Christianity grabbed me similarly. Here was what becoming the servant and slave looked like in practical terms. Francis had renounced his status and refused to have money. He had insisted on 'most high poverty.' For a kid who knew of no durable and complete way to understand the world and what it meant that he was in it, and who wondered why he should have the safety and leisure, the fun and play of being in college while other kids the same age were dying or suffering terrible traumas inside and out in Iraq, it was a powerful message.

Twenty years later, I have to ask myself how it's going. Have I drunk the chalice of Jesus Christ? Have I become servant and slave of all? Has my life as a friar made me a follower of most high poverty? I'm not sure. In some ways the religious life that I have found is more bourgeois in its orientation and presumptions than anything I knew beforehand. I live in a nice house. I can go out to eat if I want to. I have a smartphone. I can have nice beer. I have a reliable internet connection and pretty good health coverage.

For the three years I was a parish priest, I even had a good job. Having earned my credentials at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology, I learned the trade, and found myself suited to it by both natural talent and supernatural gifts. I had my own office. Sometimes I felt like a functionary in a sacramental bureaucracy, especially when I found myself--as I often did--presiding at funerals, weddings, and baptisms of folks with little or no interest in the faith. But even at those moments I was usually able to rise to the occasion and preach even harder and better, giving reverence to the intense privilege of the opportunity for evangelization.

But I didn't get into this thing to have a career, to be a 'professional minister,' or even to be a respectable member of society. Were the apostles 'professional ministers'? Does anyone ask for the CVs of the martyrs? Have I drunk the chalice of Jesus Christ? Have I become a follower of most high poverty?

But here a critical and difficult question emerges: As a finally professed religious, is my obedience my poverty? Is my renunciation of my own will, the 'money bag of my own opinions' as St. Bonaventure put it, my highest poverty and my renunciation of the world? For example, if my superior tells me to take a nice vacation because he thinks I need it, or tells me to go buy new shoes because the ones I have are ratty and unpresentable, is letting go of my own will and ideas about these things my drinking of the chalice of Jesus' passion and death, even though the world is full of poor people and poor children who will never enjoy a nice vacation or have a new pair of shoes?

Christmas, Atheism, and Power

Reflecting on Christmas, and especially our Holy Father's Christmas homily in which St. Francis plays such a part, I've been thinking about contemporary disbelief in God and how maybe it relates to our wrong ideas of power.

Perhaps part of what makes it so hard for folks to believe in God--and even for us religious folks, sometimes, to act as if he exists--is that we are confused about power. God is the Almighty; he is the infinite creative power that made the heavens and the earth and sustains all things in being. And yet, when the Almighty God is revealed to us, what do we get? First, a baby born not only in an obscure place but away from home, to plain parents, and into an ethnic group that was--at least at that time--historically important by no accepted standard. Second, a tortured and convicted criminal being executed on the cross. Christ crucified could not even move his hands and feet, much less control anything or make anybody do anything. And yet these are the privileged revelations of the all-powerful, Almighty God.

Perhaps when we talk about power we are too often talking about what is really the abuse of power, the leverage or ability to manipulate and coerce, to make others conform to our will, to co-opt others into the disorders of our hearts and the futility of our sins.

In Jesus Christ the highest power is revealed as self-emptying humility. If we were to come to really understand and practice our own wills to power in this way, maybe it would be easier to believe in God. Indeed, perhaps God would become as self-evident as he necessarily must be.

Not that it's easy. To embrace the true power revealed in humility is hard on the flesh, which has lusted for the violent domination of others ever since Cain killed his own brother. The crown of thorns cuts and digs when we put it on. But is the crown of the true royalty of this world, of those who bear the real power that is the only source of peace.

Poverty and Priesthood

Maybe this isn't a big thing, but maybe it is. Maybe it's a little edge of a big thing. Not sure yet. I'll keep praying.

Three things which seem to me to be given:

1. My sense of what it means to be Franciscan (and to be a Franciscan is my first desire as a Christian) centers around something Francis called 'most high poverty.' The Franciscan charism is not first of all about serving the poor, helping the poor, or advocating for the poor, but about becoming poor oneself. It is not just about adopting a lifestyle of material poverty or an interior disposition of spiritual poverty, but an evangelical synthesis of both. It does not demand living among and working with other poor people in an absolute way, but such has something of a normative force ever since Francis found that it was among the lepers that the bitterness of this world could be changed into 'sweetness of soul and body.' I too want this sweetness which Francis famously tasted, and I believe that the shortest route to it is to find my poverty with other poor people.

2. My sense of myself as a priest is that I am a steward of the sacred mysteries of our faith. This means for me that when these mysteries and the liturgy that celebrates them happen to be in my custody, I do whatever I can to see that they are celebrated as the Church asks and expects. This leads me into traits that are seen as 'conservative' and even 'traditionalist.'

3. Pastors of parishes that serve poorer areas and poor folks tend to be on the more 'liberal' and 'progressive' side, and this tends to include their approach to the sacraments and the liturgy.


In this current little funny moment of my life, expecting to take on a totally new assignment in Rome in the spring, I have been asked to seek part-time, temporary work in the meantime as something good to do and for the support of the brothers. Since the priesthood is my only real professional competence or credential, I have been seeking priestly work from local pastors.

But here's the thing. Because of the (2) and (3) above, I am more comfortable seeking such work in parishes that are not in the poorest places, and so my examinations of conscience are sometimes asking me if I am failing in (1). In other words, my conscience is asking me whether my faithfulness to my priesthood is coming into a tension with my faithfulness to my Franciscanism. Maybe it's a creative tension. Maybe it's an invitation to a new sort of synthesis or sense of my vocation. Maybe God is telling me to let of something, or grab onto something else. We'll see. I'm at a liminal moment in my vocation after all, and God is all about liminal moments.

And maybe it's no big deal, but maybe this is pointing to something the Holy Spirit is asking me to adjust inside about how I desire Christianity in my particular state of life as a friar-priest. It's a ragged reflection, both inside and in this post, but it's the edge where my heart and conscience and prayer are right now.

Against Personal Holiness

Each year on this feast of the North American Martyrs I read in the Office of Readings the selection from the diaries of St. Jean de Brébeuf and I'm cut to the heart as I hear him express his desire for the martyrdom and horrible sufferings he certainly received.

Still bumbling along, now in the twentieth year of my baptism, how far I am from that! On a good day I can thank Jesus Christ for having found me worthy of the little sufferings of my easy life, but that's on a good day. A lot of the time I still resist, and am still the miserable plaything of the world, the flesh, and devil. Still seeking comfort rather than the Cross, status and esteem rather than the poverty of being nobody for this world, security and a cool dry place to take my walks and sit and read instead of the anxiety of the poor and the dependence on God that only comes from interior poverty.

But what to do with this experience is perhaps the real spiritual question. To be disappointed about it, to let myself feel let down by the fact that I find myself not yet a saint, is also from the flesh. It leads to subtle resentments against God for not fulfilling the vainglorious desires that go all the way back to my first fervor, my love for the idea of being holy, to breathe a purer and more rarefied atmosphere than the rest of humanity mired in its confusion and sin. There is anger in the half-conscious thought that surely I would be a saint by now, surely I would be able to look at myself and see an excellent soul rather than a miserable sinner.

Against such disappointment and resentment, the better response is humility. To forget about my stupid self altogether and its selfish longing to look on itself as holy--this is the path to real sanctity. When I am no longer concerned with myself, it is then that there will no longer be any hooks for the temptations of the world, the flesh, and devil and still less room for the tedious distractions and dramas by which we conspire to hobble each other in the mission to which we are called.

This is why I'm sometimes troubled by talk of 'personal holiness' as a work of the spiritual life. It's all to easy to start to imagine holiness as some sort of commodity or credential that we are supposed to obtain, purchasing bits of it with what effort we can afford. Of course this is an easy way to imagine things, even unconsciously, in a commercial world.

But the way to become holy is not to desire holiness but to desire God. Since God has been our desire all along, it's not even really about doing something at all but about letting go of the distractions that keep us from being who we are in the first place.

Holy Poverty Against Pious Prosperity

I love how today's gospel of the huge catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11) cuts through the very unfranciscan doctrine of the 'prosperity gospel.'

Peter, James, and John had caught nothing all night, but at Jesus' command the nets are lowered once again. The huge catch that follows is astonishing to all. Trusting in the Lord's command leads to a turnaround for Peter's business. At that moment he is a flourishing success of a fisherman. So far so good for the prosperity gospel. Following the Lord leads to material success.

But what happens next shakes up the materialistic doctrine. Peter and his co-workers don't even enjoy their new success, because their response is to leave it all behind to follow Jesus. They see through the blessings to the Blessed One. Now Peter will be a fisher of human beings, the material success of the moment being realized as a mere sign of the evangelical victory that is his real destiny.

Two truths of the Christian life come to mind. First, we must always remember that the Christian life is not an opportunity to get something, but a challenge to give even our own selves away. Second, the material blessings of this life are not to be enjoyed for their own sake, but as signs and means for the working of the salvation God desires for people.

Moving

It was one year ago today that I moved back here to Boston. There have been many graces, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been a challenging adjustment. Being a full-time doctoral student is a very different life than the parish priesthood.

Today, a year later, I find myself moving again, if only to a new room in the house. It's an effect of being named guardian of the fraternity; I get a new and improved room.

Sometimes in religious life it seems like as soon as you get adjusted to your circumstances, things change and you have to start over again. It's easy to fall into the attitude of always waiting for things to 'calm down' or 'get back to normal' so you can live a peaceful religious life. At this point I'm starting to realize that it is the adjusting, the demand to let go occasioned by change, that is the life itself. As the friar who preached the other day at the Mass of religious profession for our novices said in his homily, our vows are only a means to embracing the fullness of a life of letting go in gospel poverty.

It's so easy to say that we'll get to something once we get settled or 'things get back to normal.' That's when I'll get my prayer life back together, or reconcile with someone who has something against me, repent of some pet sin, go on a diet, etc. All of that is an excuse to live in the unreality of an imaginary future. In the spiritual life there is only now. This isn't just some cheap spiritual saying, but derives from the eternity of God himself, for Whom there is no before or after, but only Now.

Praying For The Protesting Ordinanda

(Please note: This post is not about women's ordination per se, and nor do I wish to host a discussion of it.)

Finding myself free of any obligation for Sunday Mass today, I decided to celebrate the appearance of Universae Ecclesiae by going to the EF Mass at the cathedral. Unfortunately, I wasn't there in time to assist from choir or sing in the schola, so I went to church as a morally absent priest. Oh well; if only such a thing were one of my more serious sins.

On the way into the cathedral on a Sunday, one usually encounters the sexual abuse protesters. I always try to greet them warmly. Today was different. Outside the cathedral this morning there was something else: a women's ordination protest. Smiling young men were passing out literature. I politely declined to take it. In the middle of the protest was an older woman displaying a large sign that read, "Will You Pray For My Vocation?" She made my nun-dar tingle, I have to say, but I didn't look close enough to see if she had the 'pin.'

Stopping by the Blessed Sacrament chapel to make my preparation for Mass, I started to think about the woman's request. Should I pray for her vocation, as she asked? If one accepts what the Church teaches, it can be said with confidence that this woman does not have a vocation to be a priest. So if I were to pray for her vocation, I thought, I would be praying for something quite apart from the intention she seemed to be asking, or imagined she was asking.

But then I thought, isn't that the nature of all real prayer? In our distraction, false loves, and inordinate attachments, many times we don't have a clear picture of the graces we really need. What graces we pray for and what graces God delights to give us can be different things, though we can be sure we aren't too far off the mark if we strive to place our thoughts and imagination in clear, apostolic teaching.

This is why real prayer always has the nature of surrender. It is the opening of the intention and affection to a Love and a Will that we can know, but which we cannot comprehend. To sit or kneel down to pray is to find the willingness to take a step on a path that is trusted, but unknown. And often God only shows us the very next step we are to take. Believe me, this is a manifestation of his Mercy.

This is why prayer is a school of humility and an expression of evangelical poverty. Prayer is the perfect victory of our humanity displayed by Jesus himself, undoing the disobedience of our first parents in the garden: not my will, but yours be done.

To ask someone else to pray for us is an even deeper surrender, an even greater degree of humility. In the intimacy of our own prayer, we can always shy away. We want to avoid the interior vertigo of letting go of ourselves and our own will, and because we don't trust in God, we can avoid prayer. Even worse, we can twist our pieties into a defense from God. In all of this, we have control. But if we ask someone else to pray for us, we have lost control. The grace God means for us is sought, whether it is the grace we think we wanted or even if we are trying to sneak away from God altogether in some way or other.

So, having been led into this reflection, I decided to respond positively to the woman's request, and pray for her vocation. That she didn't, perhaps, know what she was asking, and now receives my little intercession perhaps against her aims doesn't matter. All prayer is like that anyway, to one degree or another.