Soupy Spiritual Danger Ramble

Yesterday I went out for my walk. As I usually do when I have some, I offered treats to the feral cats that hang around outside the kitchen. The folks who work in the kitchen seem to feed them, more or less, leaving them this or that: chicken scraps, rabbit heads, old gnocchi. Perhaps they do it out of kindness or perhaps because cats hanging around the kitchen are better than rats. All the usuals were there yesterday--the big, grizzled, black and white tom I've come to call 'Big Meanie,' the one-eyed calico, the tabby that's funny-looking in some way I can't articulate. They seemed hungrier than usual. Then I realized; they must suffer somewhat on fast and abstinence days when there's not much to be cooked in the kitchen.

Having now lived through two fast and abstinence days here in Italy, I can now share with confidence what one eats on them. For the main meal in the middle of the day, you get a bowl of vegetable soup. That's it. For supper, there's spaghetti (with just a little oil and garlic) and scrambled eggs.

I share this partly because of certain recent disappointments I've had with the press. How can you interview someone about having an intimate Holy Thursday lunch with the Pope and not ask him what he got to eat? And if you did ask, how can you leave it out of the article? There's a little Manichean in all of us, friends, of whom we need to beware. The heresy can be subtle and is very seductive. Just watch Star Wars.

Part of our Holy Thursday lunch here was a lentil and potato mush that was pretty good. Or at least I thought so. As I often share with the brethren when we eat lentils, I once made lentil soup for a girl and after she ate it she brought up the idea of marriage. To be fair, she had consumed two glasses of wine and I think she was lonely, but still. After trying to tell this story one of the friars said, very seriously,

"That's not true love."

He's right, of course. But how much easier it is to live in a world of conditional and transactional love, of doing to others as they do unto me, of helping out those who have been helpful to me, of doing good in the hopes that it will dispose others to help me in the future. And how much easier it is to live in such an imagination before God, as if God were the landlord who lets us live a 'state of grace' as long as we pay the rent of our good behavior, instead of surrendering to the God who makes himself our servant and saves us precisely as the unworthy sinners we are, such that we might become liberated servants of one another.

My Trip To BC

My informal meeting with the director of the doctoral program which I am to begin in the fall was a very interesting encounter for me. The Boston College School of Theology and Ministry will my twelfth educational institution, but I can already tell that this feels like a very different thing. In trying to think about it, I came upon the word pastoral, which I will try to explain.

Up until now, school has been about someone telling me what I ought to read and write, with evaluation based upon how well I have managed to understand or apply the things I was told to learn. The tasks and questions are different now. It's not what I am supposed to read, but whose influence I want to form me and make me want to read things. It's about mentors and finding people who can help me know how to read the things I want to read and write about. It's about building connections that will help me get to the sort of campuses and libraries that have the people and books I want to form me. The director made me feel like someone who was going to be initiated into a conversation and shepherded into a culture.

I know this a corny thought and betrays my shallowness, but I came out of the meeting feeling like I had received the words of Obi Wan Kenobi, "You've taken your first step into a larger world."

The director also bought me a cup of coffee and a pistachio cookie.

An Exorcist Tells His Story

Today I have finished reading Fr. Gabriele Amorth's An Exorcist Tells His Story, which I read on the advice of one of my favorite people, an extraordinarily devout layman. Frequently shocking and sometimes frightening, you have to admit that it's an entertaining read.

The book is a collection of several representative accounts of the possessions, obsessions, and supernatural illnesses that Amorth has encountered in his own ministry as exorcist, presented thematically so as to offer the reader what he has learned about the strategies and behavior of the devil and his demons. Along the way one realizes that the book is also an extended and sustained rant against the pastors of the Church for not taking the problem of supernatural evil seriously, and for not taking up Jesus' commissioning of his disciples to expel demons.

I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, I agree with the accusation that the church does not treat supernatural evil seriously. My own experience and my brief work in the care of souls have convinced me that struggles with demonic presences and diabolical temptations are not as unusual as you might think. People just don't talk about it much, and still less do they tell priests about it, which is surely a testament to their common sense.

On the other hand, it is also my experience that many times those who complain of supernatural evil do so in such a way as to absolve themselves of responsibility. It is much easier, for example, to blame troubles in one's marriage on the presence of imps or harpies hiding in the bedroom than on denial, addiction, or the unwillingness to communicate. I once asked a spiritual director if he thought a particular temptation I was going through was of diabolic origin. He said, "What does it matter where it's from? Your task is the same."

Above all, when we are reflecting on these questions, we must be careful of the temptation to imagine the universe in a Manichean way, as a kind of raging, balanced struggle between good and evil, both of which have being in their own right. One has to look to further than Star Wars to see how easily we are charmed by this model of reality. "The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural," said Chancellor Palpatine. Unnatural or not, this is not the conception of good and evil taught by Christianity. Evil does not to lead to any abilities at all, but only to misery, death, and non-being.

The good news of Christianity is that there is no cosmic battle between good and evil because it's over. The Resurrection is the revelation of the victory of divine humility over the arrogance of sin. The Resurrection not only awaits us as the final, blessed, victorious destiny of creation, but has broken backwards into history in the Resurrection of Christ to snatch up into the first fruits of the new age anybody who is willing. From now until then there are still skirmishes and even souls that are needlessly lost, but the struggle itself has already been won.


As we read in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers:

A brother asked Abba Sisoes, 'Did Satan pursue them like this in the early days?' The old man said to him, 'He does this more at the present time, because his time is nearly finished and he is enraged.'


P.s. As evidence of my earnestness in this matter, I bet I'm the only priest you know who has a copy of the new De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam.

Retreat Notes: Quotes

A collection of quotes read and heard that I wrote down during the retreat.

"...it's when I am with people that I am lonely, and when I am alone I am no longer lonely."

--Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas


"The Word of God is a light to the mind and a fire to the will."

--St. Lawrence of Brindisi, from his sermons for Lent


"I cannot think what harsher curse I could call down upon a man than that he should always get what he asks for when he tears away from sweet repose out of a curiosity which revels in restlessness."

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Conversion, a Sermon to Clerics (trans. Bernard Saïd, OSB) (In my margin it says, "like when you realize you've been surfing Wikipedia articles for 20 minutes".)


"Grammar is not for me. I am a free dancer. Life begins beyond the rules. I am a free dancer."

--Foreign born, not so young Trappist opening an Amazon box containing a book of English grammar, after explaining, in perfect English, that he now has to learn English.


"I think it is likely that much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress."

--Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me


"Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter!"

--retreatant waiting for the dishwasher, quoting Yoda in half-mockery of the taped lecture we heard during the meal.


The tools of retreat: The Sacred Scriptures, breviary, rosary, and journal.

Jacob Wrestles

I know I have written similar posts before, but every time Jacob's wrestling with the Presence of God (Genesis 32: 23-33) comes around in the readings, I am just overwhelmed by the intensity of the passage as a model of prayer.

The incident happens at night, signifying the obscurity of the experience of prayer. Our intellect before the Divine Light is like the physical eye staring into the sun; it is blinded and becomes nearly useless; nothing can be made out in the intensity of the light. Divine Illumination is so bright that we only experience it as an interior darkness.

Jacob asks two things from the Presence with Whom he wrestles. He asks for a blessing, and this he receives in the form of his new name, Israel. Within his new name is his vocation, his calling and privileged role within the history of salvation and the economy of grace.

He then asks to know the name of the One with whom he is contending, and this he does not receive. "Why should you want to know my name?"

So it is with us in prayer; we receive one thing but not the other. Through prayer we receive the blessing of our vocation. Perhaps we will know only the very next step, but this is how it is with God. God is in eternity, and exists in an eternal Now, the nunc stans of the scholastic theologians. But this too is part of God's mercy; if our whole journey were revealed to us ahead of time, many of us would leave the path in dread. Nevertheless; this is the primary grace of prayer: to hear the quiet but insistent voice of God within.

But the Presence itself remains mysterious; indeed, He will seem ever more mysterious and alien over time. Our minds yearn to understand the experience of God, and this is nothing to be ashamed of, because it is the nature of the mind to want to know. But the understanding of the Presence retreats from us, and many times we leave our prayer blessed, but feeling as if we know less about who God is than when we started. "Why should you want to know my name?"

Finally, Jacob leaves the experience injured. Having been struck in his hip socket, he goes through the world with a limp from then on. So it is with all who set themselves earnestly on the path of prayer; the experience of God opens up a new wound in our being, and we are pierced with the knowledge that the world in which we have lived thus far is not the last word. We have lost the innocence of those who go through this life knowing only the visible world. As Ben Kenobi put it so well, "You have taken your first step into a larger world." After we become true practioners of prayer, we will always limp a little bit in this world, because from then on we will a always be alien and stranger.

The Ascesis of Preaching

For me the greatest challenge in preaching is finding the right ascesis for preparation. To paraphrase Master Yoda, it requires a good deal of 'unlearning what you have learned.'

Ever since I have been able to read, I have been conditioned to read a text as fast I can (while still comprehending it, more or less) and to think of something clever to say or write about it right away. The quicker and the more clever the better. This is the relationship to a text that going to school has taught me, from the first grade all the way through theological studies.

The trouble is, you just can't go about preparing to preach on the Sacred Scriptures in this way. To skim the text and go with the first clever thing you think of is a serious error, and one that has caught me many times in the hundred or so weekends I've spent so far in the clerical state. Many times I have gone to an ambo to proclaim the Gospel and only at that moment realized how I ought to have reflected and prepared to preach on it. I realize that this is partly because this is when the printed word becomes the Word of God most eminently, i.e. when it is proclaimed in the assembly, but it's also because the Scripture simply has to be heard.

Through all of this I have learned that I need to employ all kinds of practical strategies to make myself slow down in the course of my weekly preparation. I need to read the Sunday Scriptures out loud, for one thing. I need to refuse to have an idea the first time. Ideas make you miss things, as you begin to conform the text to the thing you want to say. I need to play with several ideas and refuse to choose one right away. Finally, I need to keep reading the text as I prepare, to make sure it's not drifting off into my idea. For we are not meant to preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord. (2 Corinthians 4:5)

2084

The news frightened me yesterday. On and on with the killing in Iraq, and now you have to wonder if a conflict with Iran is coming. Not to speak of a new "spring offensive" in Afghanistan. I just wonder if we are heading to a world of permanent warfare, like the Oceania-Eastasia-Eurasia war in 1984.

Everyone says that they want peace, but their problem is they don't know what peace is. To the world, peace is just the absence of annoyance and conflict. It is the absence of anything which would interfere with their own selfish projects and plans for exploitation of others.

Real peace isn't just the absence of conflict. It is an active, provocative force. It "turns the other cheek," putting the power of peace and non-violence in the face of those whose misery and self-hate explodes into the all the violence of the world.

As long as we live in fear, there can be no peace. But the answer to fear is not war, is not the "Cheney doctrine" of destroying threats before they can arise. Perhaps Yoda put it best: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."