The Easter Itinerancy

(An old post updated)

Every year on this holy night I reflect on the grace of itinerancy that the Holy Spirit has given me; only twice in my whole baptism have I been in the same place for the Easter Vigil for more than two years in a row. When I think about all the places I've been for the Vigil, it puts me in awe of God and in a state of gratitude for my journey.

Here's my Easter Vigil history:

• 2026: Sacred Heart, Yonkers, NY (concelebrant)
• 2025: Sacred Heart, Yonkers, NY (celebrant)
• 2024: Sacred Heart, Yonkers, NY (concelebrant; first time in charge of RCIA)
• 2023: Annunciation, Crestwood, Yonkers, NY (concelebrant)
• 2022: Our Lady of Sorrows, White Plains, NY
• 2021: Our Lady of Sorrows, White Plains, NY
  
  
• 2020: (COVID-19 pandemic, prayed what is provided in the Liturgy of the Hours for qui sollemni Vigilæ paschali non interfuerunt)
• 2019: Basilica of St. Teresa of Ávila, Rome
• 2018: Basilica of St. Camillo de Lellis, Rome
• 2017: Basilica of St. Camillo de Lellis, Rome (in the 25th year of my baptism)
• 2016: Capuchin General Curia, Rome (concelebrant)
  
  
  

Layers and Locations

I had an amazing transition-time dream last night. Like a lot of my dreams it took the form of an adventure. There were curious but telling locations: a dark intersection at night, a celebratory event with friars, a hospital that turned out to be dedicated to St. Francis, Newhallville (a neighborhood near where I grew up), and the home of a high school classmate. Between these there were various means of transportation: walking with the GPS on my phone malfunctioning and a ride each in a soccer-mom van and a dumb waiter. Some of the friars were in the dream, as well as other people I haven't seen or thought about in ages.

In one part of the dream I was cooking. It was like one of the afternoons when it's my turn to prepare the friars' supper. The funny part was that people kept bringing me new ingredients. Since the new items I kept receiving were of very high quality, and also to be polite, I had to keep revising the meal in order to include them in the dish. It got to be very challenging. Isn't that a rich image of the spiritual life? God gives us increasingly rare and beautiful graces, and we are left with the challenge of integrating these into the whole of our journey with all of its weeds and wheat, thereby forever arriving at a new grasp of ourselves and who we are before and in God.

The dream reminded me of some truths about people and places in the journey. Because of God's eternity, and because our spiritual lives are nothing but our participation in the mystery of God, our spirituality is somehow simultaneous over the whole of life. When we enter into a new relationship, for example, we bring into it everyone else to whom we have related. This is why we are all such blessed messes of true love and destructive pathology in all of our relationships. Salvation is the process by which each relationship becomes ever more chaste and charitable, with new ones starting at a better baseline. Places exert a similar influence; the places we have been have formed us, and we bring them into the new places we settle. I guess that's why religious life-options like the monastic vow of stability or the mendicant life of itinerancy are so spiritually potent.

In my prayer today I'm just thanking God for everyone and each place I take with me into this new life.

Motor Memory

In advance of my anticipated big move to Italy, I  have made a transitional move to our friary of post-novitiate formation. I lived here myself, of course, when I was in temporary vows and studying for ordination. That was six years and four moves ago. Our home is not here, but in heaven.

The room I have been given is on the same corridor as the room I had when I last lived here. Even after a couple of weeks, when I come out of the stairwell I still find my feet and eyes pointing me to my old room. I have to catch myself. Through all of the places I've lived, through all of the joys and sufferings of the past six years, hidden away in the memory of my eyes and feet was the orientation to my old room. It was there all along. I never noticed that this bodily memory was there, and why would I have?

Perhaps there's a lesson and encouragement about prayer in this. Maybe prayer is less an activity, and still less something I decide to do or not--let us put to death our inner semipelagian!--but just a consent and a surrender to an orientation that heart and mind have had all along. Underneath all of the undulation of devotion and dissipation, in the soil beneath the weeds and wheat of my meager acts of love and my outrageous selfishness and sin, perhaps there is a heart that would turn to God without a thought or reflection if only I would get out of the way.

It is through the only-begotten Wisdom of the Father that we are created, and the imprint of divine wisdom is on our hearts and minds. We have only to let go of the unwisdom of the world, to let the waters of our baptism wash the mud of distraction and sin from our eyes and ears and heart. Then we will find that we are becoming ourselves, the blessed humanity which God has regenerated for his glory, and that we have known who we really were all along.

The Grind, The Mercy

Refold alb and amice. Tie it all up with cincture fitting for the next liturgical day. Put it in the book bag, hang the book bag by the door.

I go places and I say Mass. It's what I do.

Monasteries, parishes, chapels, route 9, Orange Line, Green Line, 9 bus, 7 bus. Break the trip in half to go to confession at St. Anthony's. Here's the intention for today. No, there's no offertory procession today. Yes, the ministers receive the Precious Blood. No, they do not. There will be announcements. Yes, the children need to be blessed as they go to hear the Word. The catechumens too, after the homily. The coordinator will remind you to give the pyxes to the nursing home volunteers. Sunday Mass one. Thanks for coming, Father. Have a good week. Sunday Mass two. Thanks for coming, Father. Have a good week. Sunday Mass three. Thanks for coming, Father. Have a good week. Binate, trinate, live your faculties to the fullest.

I go places and I say Mass. It's what I do. After a while I feel scattered and a little homeless and I have that funny interior vertigo of someone who does the same thing over and over and I start to wonder if I'm really praying right, or even praying at all, but I don't care because I know this is God's mercy for me, a mercy he has been working in me since long before I had so many vain ideas to get in the way.

Refold alb and amice. Tie it all up with cincture fitting for the next liturgical day. Put it in the book bag, hang the book bag by the door.

House Cooling

I'm moving into a transitional space at the end of month in preparation for my big move to Rome in the spring. So in these days I've started to think about how to deal with and store my stuff. In this effort, I'm trying to give some things away. The student friars in the neighborhood can make good use of some of the books and religious equipment. It's better than packing things up to sit lonely in a friary basement.

I love the feeling of letting go of stuff. There's a liminality to it, and  a certain primal sensation of freedom. I always feel curiously alive when I'm packing up and moving.

So for any of the brothers who check this blog, come by if you can use: a brand new, black, Samsonite backpack, a complete set of astonishingly ugly Roman-style vestments, also black, a set of gaudy cruets complete with plate, or a baseball card display case. (See this old post for why I had such a thing.)

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.

First Spanish Mass

This morning I offered Mass in Spanish for the first time. I had concelebrated at Spanish Masses a few times before, but had never been celebrant until today. I was fairly nervous this morning as I paged up my little Spanish travel ritual and reviewed the orations in my Spanish hand missal.

Though I'm very out of practice, I think my several years attending Mass in Spanish on Sundays carried me. It's all in the ear even if I'm not used to pronouncing the words myself, or looking at them in the missal. I also had a deacon to preach, for which I was grateful.

I've always felt a gratitude for hospitality in the Lord when I've had a chance to pray or work with communities of another culture or language, but today I felt it even more. To be received in the role of priest, a role that sets me both below the community as servant and at its head as presider, put a sharper point on the graciousness of the people's welcome to me. It's very humbling.

Maybe it was Br. Matt's reflection on itinerancy that had an effect on me, but I was also seeing the Mass as a moment in the homelessness of my own mendicant life. Pronouncing the Lord's words in a language-home not my own, I felt something deep about the itinerant, mendicant vocation: we are meant to live the truth that are home is not here, but in heaven. (Latin doesn't count as a foreign language in this regard; as Roman Catholics Latin is everyone's mother tongue and nobody's at the same time.)

As a Franciscan my home is everywhere, but also nowhere in this world. It's a gospel challenge, but it's also a gospel freedom.

Returning to Boston

Coming back here is fascinating in some ways. On Friday I did several errands which had piled up in the wait for better weather. As I rode the "T," I found myself automatically walking to certain spots on platforms even though I couldn't remember the advantage of exiting the train from the same spot. I only remembered when I arrived at the next station. Things were more or less as I remembered them: the Thai food stand I've always liked, the friars at Arch St., The Chinatown CVS which was new last time I lived here and still seems more orderly and easier to deal with than most, St. Paul's by Bow and Arrow in Cambridge, the Central Square post office. I noticed that Rodney's Bookstore was going out of business, which made me sad. Having told a precise employee at Schoenhof's Foreign Books how long I had been out of town, he was able to explain to me the changes in the layout that had occurred since.

This morning I returned to the parish where I lived and prayed for four years during studies. I concelebrated the Spanish Mass with the pastor. It was all so familiar. There were people I remembered gratefully and fondly, and others I remembered only by sight. Names had been forgotten; others weren't really known before anyway. Children had grown up. The permanent deacons were still as unlike each other as one could imagine. The same man lumbered off to the bathroom during the homily, just as I remembered he always had.

So I'm grateful to be starting to feel at home again.

Moving the Lord in First

I've crossed the line in my packing; my room now looks like I'm moving out. The shelves are empty and an obelisk of Corona and Brooklyn Brewery IPA boxes dominates the middle the room. Everything is off the walls except for the crucifix, because I shall need it to move.

See, I have some little rituals that go along with moving, and one of them is that I try to move the Lord into a space before anything else. I walk in with the crucifix and put it somewhere before I move in anything else. This particular crucifix is dear to me; it's a simple one of olive wood that I bought in Jerusalem in 1994. Because I was so picky about the plainness I was looking for, I got into a big conversation with the shopkeeper and ended up having to look at a photo album of his relatives in the States while we shared some bread and water.

I carried my new crucifix when we made the Stations of the Cross, and I have had it in my room ever since. That's a lot of places; since going away to college twenty years ago, I have lived at twelve different addresses, not counting summers. Throw summer assignments in there, and I have lived at seventeen addresses in five states and four countries.

My habit of 'moving the Lord in first' once helped me hit it off with a building superintendent and his assistant. One of them said, "Wow, a cool tenant." I consider that to be one of the greatest compliments I have ever received. To be fair, since they were still finishing up some painting, I took a break from moving to go across the street to get a sandwich from the deli, and I offered to get them something. So even if it was the sandwiches that made me seem cool, I like to think some of it was moving the Lord in first.

Letter to Parishioners

Fr. Pastor asked me to write a letter to our parishioners to be included in this weekend's bulletin. Here it is:

Dear Parishioners,

Last fall the Order asked me to consider applying to Boston College to pursue the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology. I made the application, have been accepted, and will begin studies there this fall. Over the course of the month of July I will be making the transition back to full-time study and my new home at St. Francis Friary in Boston. I hope that in my last couple of months with you I have the chance to thank each of you personally for your encouragement and support these past three years. It was a special privilege to be ordained priest in the course of my assignment here, and my priesthood will always belong to you in a special way. As I enter into this transition and a new set of challenges, I will take encouragement from the knowledge of the prayers and good example of the people of Sacred Heart who have been so good to me.

Walking

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

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

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

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

16

Here I am receiving the post-baptismal anointing with the Sacred Chrism, having been a neophyte for no more than a minute. That was sixteen years ago today.

Trying to follow the Lord has been a wild ride; it's a good thing I didn't really know what I was getting myself into that day. Since then I've lived at seventeen addresses in six states and four countries.

In Migrante Veritas

Packing up and getting ready to move reveals a lot. For instance, you just might have just spent five years nerding it up in theological study if:

1. Boxes of books accounts for a greater volume of stuff than all the rest of your things combined.

2. There is a whole box labeled, "dictionaries."

3. In getting to the bottom of a pile of notes, you realize that the uneven corner of your desk is being leveled out by St. Bonaventure's Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ.

Keys

I always know that I'm in a transitional moment when I start to run out of keys. I was used to having five keys on my everyday key chain: two for school, two for the parish where I worked, one for the friary where I live. Now school is done and I've quit my current parish gig, so I'm down to one key.

Friars always say it's challenging to be in transition. I like it. Pulling together loose ends and cleaning are gratifying to me, and packing and moving always makes me feel curiously alive.

What I'm not good at is the landing. That is to say starting up in a new place. But the mendicant life is supposed to be an itinerant life.

Suspense

One of my favorite old jokes is, "how do you keep an idiot in suspense?" When the person asks how, you say, "I'll tell you tomorrow!"

I expect to receive my first assignment in the Order today, and the suspense and speculation are intense!

Wrong

Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk to clear my head of a paper I was trying to write. On the way back I went by two police officers who were attending to street repairs around the corner from our house. As I passed them I said hi. One of them looked at me and said, "You don't look right walking around here." I smiled, but I was speechless at the comment.

I hardly think about it, but it's true. I live in the wrong neighborhood. By the world's standards, I don't belong here. And I'm proud of it. Proud of it in the Lord, of course.

It reminded me of a band I used to listen to back in college, Nomeansno. Their best album, "Wrong," contained a poster or something that said, "Be Strong. Be Wrong." I hung it in my dorm room, and I think it might still be pasted to the inside of the lid of my footlocker.

Sometimes that's just the attitude that the disciple of the Lord needs. To have the strength and courage to think and do the wrong thing in the eyes of the selfish and glittering ideologies of this world.

Franciscan Love of Animals

The new friary that I moved into last week is not what you might call a miracle of good housekeeping. In fact, it's a bit dirty and somewhat infested.

Yesterday I spent the morning cleaning out the pantry, washing all of the canned goods free of mouse droppings and throwing out dry goods that had already been through the nocturnal sampling of our little furry friends. This morning I am washing all of the cleaning rags and dish towels, some of which the mice had already used for their little toilet.

After morning prayer today my first duty was the dispatching of two little mice, lured to their mortal crippling by their interest in a bit of chocolate chip cookie. Some Franciscan I am!

This house desperately needs a cat, and there is a perfectly good stray cat who hangs around outside. He's moderately friendly, seems domesticated, and looks like he could use a bath and a snack. I'd like to invite him in for our mutual interest in getting rid of the mice, but it's been my experience that pets don't do well in houses of men religious. We travel too much, and the poor creatures usually go mad or at least become nervous wrecks in their inability to comprehend why some of the brothers love them and others don't.

St. Francis was once reported to have responded this way to a brother who wanted the friars to have their own house to live in: "When we have a house, we will need weapons to protect it." Francis understood the violence inherent in the idea of appropriating the goods of the world to oneself. That's why we Franciscans profess not poverty, but to live sine proprio, without appropriation, without anything of our own, without self-appropriation.

Today I feel like paraphrasing Francis and saying that when we have a house, we will have to kill the little creatures who come to sample our cereal.

Travel

Today is one of those mornings when I'm off on a trip. That means packing a bag, turning off the alarm clock, changing the voice mail message, taking out the garbage, hitting the road for a week or two.

There's something about this process, even if I'm only going to some tedious workshop somewhere, that makes me feel curiously alive and optimistic. Maybe that's why the Holy Spirit made me want to join an itinerant order.