22

That's how old I am today. In the Lord, anyway. Twenty-two years ago this afternoon I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where I was baptized into the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was the most important moment of my life, and I had little idea of what I was getting into. And this was mercy on the Holy Spirit's part.

It's been quite a journey since then. If you had told me then that on the twenty-second anniversary of that day I would get up in Rome, pray Morning Prayer and Mass and then descend to the secret life of an office where I would translate news blurbs from Italian to English and prepare letters for bishops in Ethiopia and Eritrea, I don't know what I would have thought.

After twenty-two years, my greatest challenge is getting too comfortable. For better and for worse, I am fully socialized to religious life. I could live this life without devotion, without real prayer. I could do the assignment the Order has given me on natural talent alone. The few times I have to preach in my current circumstances I could manage on natural cleverness, though it would be a betrayal of the Church that has ordained me. The great danger is to get comfortable saying all my prayers and doing what I have to do, all without God.

In this regard I am fortunate that God permits me certain afflictions, angels of Satan to beat me and keep me from getting comfortable. (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:7) Though I have put on Christ in baptism, the old Adam still haunts me, carrying on because he doesn't realize that he's dead, drowned at the bottom of the Jordan.

But, though occasionally tempted, I don't despair. On the contrary, I have joy because God gives me the desire to pray each day, and I know that this is the Holy Spirit praying in me, if only I surrender to the grace. When I have to preach the same Holy Spirit gives me the words. And above all I know that God is faithful, and that if he has put into my heart the desire to be a 'convert' he will bring this grace to fulfillment, in this life or the next, and convert my heart to him.

Y el ventalle de cedros aire daba

I was quite struck by the homily of the friar whose turn it was to be principal celebrant at Mass today. I guess it was the Holy Spirit's way of taking me down a bit after last night's vanity of re-linking on Twitter my own Trinity Sunday homily from three years ago, in which I make fun of Trinity Sunday homilies as an opening device before stumbling around in my own doctrinal brambles.

Palm Sunday Fragments

The Lord gave me, brother Francis, thus to begin to do penance: for, when I was in sin, it seemed very bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them and I had mercy on them. Leaving them, what had seemed bitter was changed into sweetness of soul and body, and I lingered a little and left the world. And the Lord gave me such faith in churches that I would pray simply and say: We adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, and in all of your churches that are in the whole world, and we bless you, for by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. (Francis of Assisi, Testament, 1-5)

Ad Vesperas Sancti Laurentii

Between Flaminio and Kendall/MIT

I think I miss Boston a little bit. The other morning I must have been half asleep or at least spacing out when I was riding Metro A from Cornelia to Termini. As the train plodded out of the earth to cross the Tiber, I opened my eyes half expecting to see the Museum of Science or the Hatch Shell. I guess I not only didn't know what city I was in, I didn't know which side of the train I was sitting on. I guess ten semesters of Red Line rides from Downtown Crossing to Harvard Square leave their mark on the soul.

It's funny though...Rome and Boston have their similarities. Sure, the thick mythology on which the idea of each city rests is somewhat different, but think about it. The Metro and the T, the Tiber and the Charles, the GRA and Route 128, the neighborhood identities, the tourists.

Maybe it's just that my new job here reminds me of certain classic Boston tunes.

My Despicable Beard: A Capuchin Dubium

In the course of this past winter Ordinary Time, a confluence of factors led me to stop shaving altogether. Since the spring semester of 1993, around the time of my twenty-first birthday, I've been sporting the Grunge-inspired Van Dyke, and I just decided--as I say, for a number of reasons--that such was over for me.

So I started to let a full beard grow. Such is, of course, como Dios manda for a Capuchin.

But here's the problem. It's not going very well. It's patchy, incomplete, and looks pretty bad. At least it looks pretty bad so far. Of course the brothers don't point this out to me. This is because they are gentle souls but also because they know well the anarchistic and contrarian tendencies that will make me want to do something even more once it is criticized. Be strong, be wrong, as Nomeansno famously put it.

So here's my question. In the oft-quoted precept from our Constitutions of 1536, Capuchins grow beards because they are "manly, austere, natural, an imitation of Christ and the saints of our Order, and despised." If my beard is despicable, and thereby all the easier to despise, doesn't that make it more Capuchin?

What Eric Thunk

For a 'music captures prayer' post, mutatis mutandis, "I saw a hippie girl on 8th Ave." by Jeffrey Lewis

I Feel Like Lovecraft in Brooklyn

Over The Falls

Breaking Up With First Fervor

In one of the places I've been along the way there was a diocesan priest in the neighborhood who always seemed unhappy. One of the friars there knew the priest a little bit, so I asked about him. "You know what he told me once?" said the friar, "That he's never gotten over the loss of his childhood faith and the first fervor in his vocation." It struck me as very sad.

The loss of one's first fervor can be very hard. There can be a lot of confusion and interior vertigo, what John of the Cross calls the 'dark nights.' A healthy grieving and letting go are necessary. Nor is it a one-time thing; someone may think that he has passed out of his first fervor only to realize later that he hadn't really dealt with the loss at some deeper level. There's a sense in which a spiritual person is always passing out of first fervor, in the same way that an adult always remains the child he was in his family of origin.

But to manage all of this in a healthy way is critical to spiritual growth. If we have not let go or grieved well, we can continue to indulge the part of ourselves that pines away for the clarity, energy, and excitement of our time of first fervor, distracting us from the grace and work of the current moment in our journey.

For whatever reason, the romantic metaphor works for me. My first fervor in my conversion and my religious life was like a fun and energetic girlfriend. She took me to new places and introduced me to new experiences. She was sweet and attractive. But, as time went on, troubles started to appear in the little spiritual playground of our relationship. I began to see how she was possessive and exclusive; our relationship was a spirituality that didn't lend itself to begin shared with others. She had no interest in children; ours was a relationship just for us, a spirituality just for me to enjoy. More than anything, she couldn't seem to handle prayer when it began to cease having a lot of feeling or affective reinforcement. As prayer began to turn into the 'uninteresting wilderness' (as Thomas Merton called it) she started to break up with me for good.

I was a little lost at first, but over time I worked through it. At this point, coming up on nineteen years baptized, having spent the majority of that time in religious life, I look on my first fervor with fondness, knowing that it was the right relationship at the time, but without any longing to go back.

Not to be on a Mr. T. Experience kick, but this song captures a little of my attitude toward my first fervor in religious life:

Some Favorite Franciscan Theology Fails

Any scholarly drivenness I might have--and I have precious little, unfortunately--clusters around my desire to know what it means to have a Franciscan approach. What is a Franciscan theology? A Franciscan pastoral stance? Commonplaces abound, but I have never arrived at a rigorous and satisfying account. But since it's Friday and it's late, it's better just to tell funny stories from various points along the maladventure of this personal quest. As Dean Ween put it, "When it's time for bed you shouldn't think about that stuff."

In between my religious lives I had a bumper sticker on my car that said, "Perfect Joy Is Being Franciscan." (I removed it before going to my first interview with the Capuchins, for fear of appearing presumptuous.) One time a lady on the street questioned me about it. "Perfect joy is being Franciscan? Franciscan...is that related to the Melchizedekian priesthood?"

A lady on the subway asked me if I was a Franciscan. I said that I was. "What's the Franciscan position on the three and a half year period prophesied in Daniel?"

A man carrying a large amount of art supplies intervened in a conversation I was having with a young woman who was a religion student at BU. She had thought I was a Jesuit. "He's a Franciscan. Jesuits read books, Franciscans talk to birds."

A man was telling me about how his dog had died. "Now the Franciscan position is that dogs have immortal souls, right?"

Sick of Myself

I love St. Augustine for his ability to capture in a few words a deep sense of an interior spiritual condition:

non ego vita mea sim: male vixi ex me, mors mihi fui: in te revivesco.

"May I not be my life: I have lived badly my way and have been death to myself: in You I will grow to live again." (Confessions, XII:X)

I myself am the worst enemy of my peace and spiritual joy, and only by losing this false self in the best of friends, God, can I even begin to live.

"It is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily, you yourself do now know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is preventing you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself." ~Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 112.

Where Would I Be?

I'm introducing a new tag which I've been considering for a while. It's called "Music Captures Prayer" and marks posts about songs that sometimes seem to express how I feel or what I am going through in prayer.

18th Anniversary of Baptism

It was eighteen years ago today that I exited the Freeman dormitory by the back basement stairs and walked through the still-empty campus of Connecticut College to the edge of North Lot on my way to Williams St. and the little church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill. There I was baptized, and an odd and meandering ongoing journey--long hidden in God and only obscurely revealed to me--suddenly became my public life.



What did I think I was doing that day? Perhaps I imagined that I was putting to rest a question that I had long wondered about, i.e. what religion was I? I hardly realized that this was to frame the question all wrong; in fact I was trying to begin to surrender to a call that had always been there in some form. Have I progressed in that surrender after eighteen years? Most of the time I don't feel as if I have. In some ways I feel as though I have regressed! But none of that is the point. Who cares about me? This is a story about God, not Charles. Besides, Jesus came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Perhaps I thought I was following the first tastes of the newly discovered horizon revealed in prayer. True enough, but I had not spent enough time in prayer to realize that these experiences called me so strongly because they hearkened back and resonated with certain confusing but attractive and intriguing interior experiences I routinely had as a small child. God had been there, a Mystery subtle and obscure on the one hand, but overwhelming and undeniable on the other.

If someone had been able to tell me what would become of my baptismal vocation, about all of the twists and turns and griefs and struggles up to this very day, I probably wouldn't have believed it. If I had, I might have feared to accept the sacrament. Sometimes it is an expression of God's mercy that we don't know what is to come. God knows knows that perhaps we can better accept our struggles for Him a little at a time, one day at a time.

My fear was just a shadow
And then a voice spoke in my head
And she said, "Dark is not the opposite of light
It's the absence of light."

And I thought to myself
She knows what she's talking about
And for a moment I knew
What it was all about.

(Beastie Boys, "Namaste")

Desperate, But Not Serious

One of the greatest challenges I have with penitents--and with myself!--is those who struggle with discouragement over committing the same sins again and again. Often it's a habit of misusing our speech, such as lying or gossip or detraction, or maybe it's a sin against purity. It's the same confession over and over, and sometimes there comes to be a dullness and a frustrated boredom that is often more spiritually dangerous the sin itself.

What can be done in this situation?

First of all, we must remember to treat internal invitations to discouragement or despair as temptations themselves. But when it comes to the patterns of sin themselves, sometimes I think our troubles were described by one of those early MTV songs by Adam Ant: We are 'desperate, but not serious.'

We are desperate to do something about our trouble; we don't want whatever it is in our lives. But, for some reason, we have not yet found the willingness to fearlessly re-arrange our days and mercilessly refuse to make provision for our habitual fault. Maybe we need to avoid the occasions and near occasions of sin. Maybe we need to avoid certain places or people. Maybe what we really have is an addiction over which we have lost any hope of control and need to find the humility to ask for help. Our desperation tells us that we no longer want the misery of sin, but our failure to get serious reveals that we aren't yet ready to make holiness an absolute priority in our lives.

The Small Hours

Apparently, a religious priest who grew up as a Heavy Metal kid is considered an oddity. So much so, in fact, that someone who writes about Metal music professionally is coming to meet and interview me tomorrow. He's thinking about writing a book about the Metal ethos, or something.

In my curiosity about this situation, I have been reflecting on what connections there might be between my conversion to Heavy Metal around age fourteen and my conversion to Catholic Christianity six years later. Perhaps they are more and deeper than I had previously imagined.

For whatever reason, I was reflecting on the lyrics to "The Small Hours" by Holocaust, a song famously covered by Metallica.

Look hard at the darkness,
And you will see,
Just call my name and I'll be there.
You cannot touch me,
You would not dare,
I am the chill that's in the air.

And I try to get through to you,
In my own special way,
As the barriers crumble,
At the end of the day

This is such a vivid description of my experience of prayer. Peering into the obscurity of being, of one's own existence and that of the world, Something is found, Something that is more a Who than a what. But this finding is itself an illusion, and as "barriers crumble" you realize that is you who are being found and Sought all along. Nevertheless, the One Who finds us will not be possessed or grasped: "You cannot touch me." Noli me tangere. But this retreat draws us further in to the Mystery, and ultimately to the goal, the eschaton, the resurrection destiny of the New Jerusalem, the "end of the Day."

The Creative Melancholy

My mind and heart work and discern at their best in a state I have come to call 'the creative melancholy.' For whatever reasons I have decided would be coarse to try to articulate, the music of the Pixies has always captured this mood for me.

As anti-emo as I am, I like Sense Field's cover of Caribou, the haunting and pretty opener from the first Pixies release, Come on Pilgrim. (1987)

Not Fit To Touch

I admit it, for a long time I've been fascinated by the music of the band Cake. I guess it's because of the odd instrumentation, or because it's light and fun and melancholy all at the same time. I think that anyone who knows the oscillations of the spiritual life can relate, in the darker moments, to their song, "Hem of Your Garment:"


(All right)

I am intrinsically no good
I have a heart that's made of wood
And I'm only biding time
Only reciting memorized lines

And I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment
no, no
I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment

I have no love but only goals
How very empty is my soul
It is a soul that feels no thrill
It is a soul that could easily kill

And I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment
no, no
I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment

(yeah, yeah, no, all right)

I am intrinsically no good
I have a heart that's made of wood
And I'm only biding time
Only reciting memorized lines

And I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment
no, no
I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment
no, no
And I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment
no, no
I'm not fit to touch
The hem of your garment

(Yeah, yeah, no, no, all right, etc.)