Moments of Grace

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

Old post:

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

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

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

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

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

Dwelling Richly

(Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

In the first reading for the Mass of Christmas Eve morning we hear how God takes the opportunity of David’s plans to build the house of God, the Temple, to turn the discernment around: it is God, rather, who will establish a house for David. (2 Samuel 7:11)

At Christmas we see this prophecy begin to come to its final fulfillment. Mary, in bearing the Lord in her womb, becomes the first tabernacle and the exemplar of the Church to come. She is, as St. Francis of Assisi puts it, the Virgin made Church. (A Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

Jesus Christ, who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, invites us into Holy Communion with him, that we, as the Church, might become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:22) In this way, the great feast of Pentecost, at which we recall and celebrate the Spirit as the abiding presence of Christ in his Church, peeks out even now at Christmas. Indeed, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the prophecy given to David; God builds for us a house in which he himself will dwell among us, our home and mother the Church.

As Blessed Isaac of Stella writes: “Christ dwelt for nine months in the tabernacle of Mary’s womb. He dwells until the end of the ages in the tabernacle of the Church’s faith. He will dwell for ever in the knowledge and love of each faithful soul.” (Office of Readings for Saturday of the 2nd week of Advent)

When you, faithful soul, discover the unique and unrepeatable way that Christ desires to dwell in you richly (Colossians 3:16), you have discerned your vocation.

Heralds of the Great King

(Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

Each year the 2nd Sunday of Advent recalls the preaching of St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner of the Lord, sent to prepare his way and announce his coming. In this way John is one of the principal characters of the Advent season, which has the “twofold character” of a time to “prepare for Christmas when Christ's first coming to us is remembered [and] as a season when that remembrance directs the mind and heart to await Christ's Second Coming at the end of time.” (General Norms for the Liturgical Year)

Between the first and final comings of the Lord there is a third—his quiet and hidden arrival in the hearts and lives of those who find the willingness to surrender to grace. This “middle coming is like a road that leads from the first coming to the last.” (St. Bernard, Office of Readings for Wednesday of the 1st Week of Advent). This is where we are in the Advent season, recalling with joy the Nativity of the Lord, looking forward with devout expectation to his final advent at the end of time, and witnessing to his desire to be born anew, here and now, in our own lives.

Francis of Assisi, while still experimenting and figuring out his own vocation, once fell prey to bandits in the woods. While attacking him they asked who he was. He answered, “‘I am the herald of the great King!’” (Thomas of Celano, First Life of St. Francis, chapter 7) Considering not his own misfortune, he saw in his attackers the suffering of being trapped by evil and sin, and announced to them the good news of God’s Kingdom. Like John the Baptist, Francis found his vocation in announcing the God who desires to arrive in our lives anew in each moment.

How am I being called to witness to God’s desire to come and dwell in the hearts of the men and women of our time? How will I be a forerunner of the Lord and a herald of the great King?

The Way of the Cross

A cross is first of all an intersection. The Cross of Jesus Christ reveals several: the intersection of deity and humanity, of heaven and earth, and of love and suffering. When love and suffering are joined, they become a sacrifice, a ‘sacer-facere’, a making of something holy. Discernment is the discovery, each day, of what will be the sacrifice I make of my own life, how I will follow in the Lord’s footsteps in suffering love. “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)

In loving prayer and attentive discernment we discover the particular, individual ‘way of the Cross’ to which God invites us. This ‘way’ comes to be revealed not only in the ‘big picture’ of our ‘vocation’ but also in the activities, relationships, and struggles of daily life, which, in the light of the Cross, take shape as opportunities for charity and holiness. Let us seek this ‘narrow gate’ (Matthew 7:13) of our salvation. In the words of St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan Doctor of the Church, “There is no way except through the most burning love of the Crucified.” (The Soul’s Journey into God, prologue)

(reflection for Good Friday prepared for our vocation department's social media)

Transfiguration

With Lent comes the Lord’s invitation: to let ourselves be led up the high mountain where we become our deepest and truest selves. The mountain is prayer. It is there that we discover the call that is God himself. In prayer we get to know God and ourselves, for our true identity is nothing more than who we are in God’s desire for us. This divine desire—or will of God—is revealed in how the call takes shape in our particular circumstances, and so becomes our vocation.

If we consent to remain on this high mountain of prayer we will have glimpses, visions of Resurrection glory, of the Christ who transfigures creation. These moments will be short and obscure for they are only a touching of the hem of his garment, but they will also be beautiful beyond our own imagining and desire. They may also be frightening, for they call us to a new boldness and single-mindedness in following Jesus. But the vocation is not to be feared, for wherever it leads us, the call is only to him, to Jesus Christ, and to the life of the new creation that dawns in his Resurrection.


(Reflection prepared for our vocation office to post on its social media for the 2nd Sunday of Lent)

Priestly Vocations Ramble/Rant

Me: Have any sons?
Angry lady: Yes
Me: Did you ever suggest priesthood?
AL: No!
Me: That's why there aren't more Mass intentions to schedule

— Charles, OFM Cap. (@FrCharles) November 17, 2016

That tweet is from the other day. Given responses, it seems to have hit some particular nail on the head. In thinking about it I decided it needed some follow-up for fairness sake.

Twenty-Four Years of Brothers and Sisters

[an old post, updated]

Today is my twenty-fourth anniversary of baptism. I don't think I had any idea what I was getting into that Saturday midday when I walked up out of the basement of Freeman Hall at Connecticut College, made my way out the Williams St. gate and went down to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill. Perhaps it's part of the mercy of God that I had little idea. In any case, the Holy Spirit knew what he was doing and that's what matters.

As always, this anniversary reminds me to thank God and pray for all the people he has given me along the way, those who have been bearers of the graces God has willed in his generosity towards a lukewarm disciple like myself.

Communion of Saints

I received a note the other day from someone who said that this blog had helped him in his own discernment of a vocation to consecrated life. So I gave glory to God for having used this blog not only for various purposes for me over the years, but now and then to work some good in someone else as well.

Hope from Hyacinth

Two years ago today I put up this post:

Today at the Poor Clares I offered the Mass of St. Hyacinth Mariscotti, about whom I know nothing. 

Sister sacristan gave me the following brief account of Hyacinth's life and holiness, from which I drew great encouragement. 

Here's what sister told me. I have not checked any of it, but I do try to capture sister's hilarious tone in telling the story: 

When Hyacinth was growing up, she went to a certain convent school. The sisters found her to be a difficult and conceited child. Everyone found her very trying and annoying, and the sisters were glad to be rid of her when she graduated. 

Having grown up, she wanted to marry some important man, but was spurned. Out of spite, she decided to become a nun. (I guess there were wider limits on what counted as a 'vocation story' in those days.) When she returned to the convent seeking entrance, the sisters were alarmed. Somehow or other she was admitted, and the sisters discovered that the difficult and conceited child had grown into an even more difficult and conceited woman. 

After some years of religious life, Hyacinth had some sort of illness, and had a conversion experience. She apologized to the sisters for all of the years she had been such a pain, started to do penance, and thereafter became an exemplary religious. 

I find this story very hopeful. May God grant me to accept such a grace of conversion!

Two years later I find myself in a very different sort of life, one aspect of which is praying the Divine Office from the Liturgia delle ore secondo il rito romano e il calendario serafico, i.e. the Italian version of the Roman-Franciscan Liturgy of the Hours, and it turns out to have a little blurb on good old Hyacinth. It seems she was an Orsini, which is no small thing, and was baptized Clarice.

A quote claims to be from a "little diary" in her own hand, in which Hyacinth describes the first fifteen years of her religious life, saying that it was "of many vanities and stupidities in which I have lived in sacred religion."

Depending on how you count, I'm up to either twelve and a half or thirteen years of religious life, so there's still hope that I might accept the grace of conversion from a life of vanity and stupidity!

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.

Perfect Faith, Imperfect Understanding

Some of this post I already wrote about four years ago. I apologize in advance.

A couple of things have come together in my reflection today: Jesus' encounter with Nathanael (John 1: 45-51), which we have as the gospel for the feast of St. Bartholomew today, and an outing I took with one of the friars yesterday.

One Year In Italy Post

There's still a week left to go until I will have been here in Italy for a calendar year, but in liturgical time the anniversary has come. It was the Monday after Pentecost, the first day of the greater stretch of Ordinary Time, that I left the USA.

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.

Tents

Ever since I figured out that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, the day has felt special to me. Not that it often falls on my actual birthday, but that's something I would prefer not to think about anyway. It only reminds me that I'm getting older without yet having made a solid start in serving God or doing anything with my life. But that's just pride, and in one of his uglier masks.

Lost, Unworthy, Burning, and Sent

I was thinking about the calls of Isaiah and Peter as we have them in the readings for Mass today.

It's funny; we tend to think of heaven as pleasant, or at least comforting--at funerals we are consoled by our hope that the faithful departed are now on their final journey to heaven and we take courage for our own lives in looking forward to heaven ourselves--but the prophet Isaiah, faced with the heavenly court, is afraid. Finding himself in that blessed firmament, the first thing created after the light, Isaiah can only say, "Woe is me! For I am lost." (Isaiah 6:5a, RSV)

Make Sure You're Right

On Saturday nights some of the friars here watch a movie on TV. Last Saturday it was Falling in Love (1984, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro). Not my kind of thing at all, but I sat through it because it's the sort of movie that's good for foreign language practice, with lots of scenes with just two characters and slow, predictable dialogue. To be honest, it made me feel a little homesick, structured as the story was around rides on the Metro-North Hudson Line. I know it well. When I was at the parish one of my standard day-off itineraries was to take the #2 bus to 242nd St., where I would take the subway into Manhattan. After the last stop of whatever it was I wanted to do, which was often a pilgrimage to the altar of St. Thérèse at St. Patrick's Cathedral, asking her prayers that I might learn how to be a good religious, I would go to Grand Central and take the Hudson Line back to Yonkers Station, where I would catch the #6 bus back up to the neighborhood of the parish.

Well, the images must have stuck in my heart because last night during meditation another Metro-North memory came into my prayer. It was an evening in the winter of 1994, and I was traveling from New York on the New Haven Line. Of course the New Haven Line is also dear to me as the context of many adventures over various stages of my life. I don't remember if I was going home to New Haven or on my way all the way back to school in New London. I was a senior in college at the time. It had been my third meeting with the vocation ministry of the OFM. My first meeting was with a kind of regional vocation director in Hartford, but there wasn't much to it; I think it was just a screening thing. For my second meeting I had gone up from New London to Arch St. in Boston to meet with the real vocation director, an old gent of a priest who was retired from military chaplaincy. But this meeting had been a little odd too; mostly he just expressed his relief that I didn't present as overly strange and then catalogued some of the curious characters he had met in his current ministry. But my third meeting was wonderful. I went down to St. Francis of Assisi on 31st St. and met with the assistant vocation director, who struck me was a wise and spiritual man. (I was fortunate to have him assigned to me as a spiritual director when I was a postulant.) We talked, I prayed, I worked the famous bread line in the terrible cold of the early morning. Returning from this visit on the train I prayed from my Shorter Christian Prayer and read from Julien Green's God's Fool: The Life of Francis of Assisi, which Father had given me. I was so happy, so full of dreams and excitement for the Franciscan life, so fervent. In some ways, I feel like I was a better religious then than I am now; more prayerful, more detached, more poor, chaste, and obedient.

Eighteen years and many twists and turns later, have I lost something?

It's a hazardous thought.

I say that because the reflections and discernment that follow on the thought are very delicate and not so easy.

On the one hand, you can't go back. First fervor goes away and you have to let go of it. The flesh longs for the interior consolations and lush experiences one has at the beginning of the journey because it doesn't understand that God gives these only to get the soul to the point where he may offer her the real nourishment of the broken and forsaken Body of Christ crucified in the 'uninteresting wilderness' of quiet prayer. Certain forms of feeling energetic go away too, until you only have your weakness to offer to God. Finally, you get to the point where you even feel sacrilegious asking for the graces you need because you know you won't accept them anyway, and this is the true sorrow of compunction. And in the midst of these sorts of trials it's easy to want to go back to a place where everything felt fresh and exciting and the heart delighted in every pious sentiment. You can try it, but after a while you will feel even more sick and empty, and you will know that you are trying hard to lie to yourself. And this knowledge is the mercy of God resting in your heart.

On the other hand, though, there are genuinely valuable things that get lost, compromises with the world and with sin that get made, interior fatigues that creep in and harden the heart. There are forms of doublethink one learns in religious life, such that you don't even think any longer about things that were totally confusing when you first encountered them in your innocence. But you never get away from them, because God in his mercy puts them back in your face each time somebody totally new comes around and asks a question. For example, as goes the famous line of one candidate for the Order, now a successful public official, "If this is what you guys call poverty, I'd hate to have to see chastity." Over time one also realizes that there are subtle vainglories, gluttonies, idolatries, and unchastities of the spirit that the flesh is just as happy to have in the place of the more gross and obvious forms of sin. Indeed the devil is happier for you to indulge these latter, because it helps him make you into the sort of person that is a counter-sign of God's Kingdom and the sort of character that makes religion odious to humanity.

New Vocation Video

Those are the current postulants from my province of the Order. I was impressed with their work in the video. A couple of things in particular struck me.

First, the saints. Why join the Capuchins? Because the Order has produced so many saints and blesseds. That's a great answer, and one that I would have been too ignorant and self-involved to think of when I was first entering religious life. It reminded me of the conversation with Robert Lax recalled by Thomas Merton in which Lax challenges the newly-baptized Merton to want to be a saint. To be a 'good Catholic' was hardly worthy of human desire; one ought to want to be a saint. And in fact, said Lax, it was a very simple thing; one only had to want it.

(I think it also has to be said, in course, that the Capuchin Order has the sort of life in which sanctity tends to get noticed by the Church and the world, and so canonized saints happen. I'm sure that, for example, cloistered institutes produce plenty of saints. We just don't know about them in this life.)

Second, prayer. I'm encouraged by their emphasis on prayer and it calls me back, making me remember some of my first love and fervor in this life. It brings back to me the greatest compliment I have ever received: when I was applying to the Capuchins one of the things I needed was a recommendation from my pastor. I had been a parishioner of St. Lawrence in West Haven, Connecticut (I lived right near the church on the corner of Main and Washington) but I didn't know the pastor very well. I had hardly spoken to him, apart from the occasional confession (I usually went to the Dominicans at St. Mary's.) But when I approached him to explain that I was applying to religious life and to ask for the recommendation, he said that he would be happy to do it. He said that I seemed to 'have a desire for prayer.' That might be the most encouraging thing anyone has ever said to me.

After all, a desire for prayer is nothing other than a desire for God, for prayer is nothing other than our surrender to the life of the Blessed Trinity and his holy manner of operation within us. By our baptism we are folded into the Dynamics of the Source, the Father eternally speaking the Word by the breath of the Spirit, the Son praying through the same Spirit back to the Father. And if the desire for prayer is nothing other than the desire for God, the desire for God is the same thing as the desire to be a saint.

Vocation and Pathology

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

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

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

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

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

Franciscan Ramble

I've taken to breaking up my uphill walk to school in the morning. I set out from the friary and walk up as far as the Piazza del Comune and there I sit for a spell in Santa Maria sopra Minerva before heading up the stairs between the bars on the north side of the piazza to get to the Via Tiberio and the Via Santa Maria delle Rose where the school is.

I don't usually go for baroque, but there's something I like about Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Maybe it's just that it tends to be relatively cool in there. The teal and gold novus ordo altar and attendant appointments are a misfortune, but it could be a lot worse.

Anyway, I was sitting there this morning, praying a little bit, reflecting on this and that, and--as I always do--indulging my compulsion to count the number of stars around Our Lady's head to make sure there were twelve. It was then that I recalled the anniversary that is today. I'm pretty sure that today was the day, seventeen years ago, when I first put on the Franciscan habit.

So there I was this morning, seventeen years later, wearing a Franciscan habit. It's a symbol one is acutely aware of here in Assisi, not just because the place is lousy with friars, but because of the overpowering Franciscan-ness of the place. But what does it mean to say such a thing?

And who was this funny little man who grew up here eight hundred years ago? What is this Franciscan thing?

One thing I notice living in here in Assisi is that there a various Francises. And there are various Franciscanisms that flow from each of them. And there are all kinds of senses of the relationship of these Francises and Franciscanisms to Christianity, to religion, and to humanity.

And then there's me, somewhere in the midst of all of it. That's just a fact of history; for better or for worse--or for both--my own adventure of Christianity has been very much bound up and woven together with this Franciscan thing. What was it that convinced me so strongly, on the way to this day seventeen years ago, that I was supposed to be a Franciscan friar? Is it the same sense that keeps me at it today, struggling with and yearning for and resting in this seductive and searing mystery we call God, according to the Franciscan pattern and footprint?

In whatever way it seems better to you to please the Lord God and to follow his footprint and his poverty, do that with the blessing of God and my obedience. (Francis to brother Leo)

God Is the Bigger Elvis

In the quiet of a Friday afternoon yesterday, I finally got around to seeing Rebecca Cammisa's God Is the Bigger Elvis, the short film about Dolores Hart which came to everyone's attention when it was nominated for an Academy Award this past year.




I appreciated several aspects of the little documentary. Most simply, as a Connecticutian myself, I had always been curious about the Abbey of Regina Laudis, but had never visited or known much about it.

On a deeper level, though, I was grateful for the way the film treats of the religious vocation in an individual life. In addition to the story of Dolores herself, the vocation stories of a couple of other nuns are touched upon as well. There's a reverence about the treatment, in the sense that a religious vocation is, on the one hand, something for which no apology needs to be made. On the other hand, the film communicates well that the experience of vocation touches upon certain intimacies and mystery that defy being shared with an audience.

I also appreciated how religious life is displayed in all of its unglamorous plainness. I was reminded of the Trappist who told me that his favorite aspect of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence was that it showed the monks with unsightly nose and ear hair. "Religious life is not so pretty as it usually seems in the movies, brother." (Of course I also loved seeing the Abbey liturgy. The sisters were praying in Latin (according to the spirit of Vatican II)  and were shown receiving Holy Communion by intinction--and I mean the right way, on the tongue and without illicit self-communication.)

Most of all, the film made me reflect on celibacy. In it one meets Dolores's former fiancé, with whom she broke up in order to enter the Abbey. He is even shown making a visit. Almost fifty years later he admits that he isn't over Dolores, and doesn't appear to have ever married. The whole business sits at the awkward intersection of sweet and sad. Anyone in professional ministry will have their boundary buzzers go off during these scenes, but perhaps it reminds us that boundaries are often messier than what our textbooks taught us.

Even though I reflect on it from time, I don't blog on it because I don't have anything solid to say, but the film certainly convinced me even more that female and male celibacy are somewhat different things. Maybe some readers have thoughts on that.

Maybe I missed it, but one thing I was surprised to miss was a mention of Dolores having played St. Clare in Francis of Assisi (1961).

God Is the Bigger Elvis is really worth a look if you have a chance.