Passion Sunday

One time I was out with another friar and somebody came up and, with a tone both quizzical and a little sarcastic, asked us, "what do you get out of this?"

The brother I was with gave the tone right back to him and asked, "I'm supposed to be getting something?"

That stuck with me a long time. It comes back to me today as I start to think about the celebration of the Lord's Passion this weekend. Perhaps in order to understand the Passion, I need to let go of any sense of "getting something out of" prayer, ministry, and the life of the disciple.

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!

Pessimal Solution

My novice master once said that he felt like I was always "waiting for the other shoe to drop." That is to say that my general expectation was that things would go wrong and end up in disaster.

I guess it's true, in a way, that I have a pessimistic view of the world--but I would protest that it's based on experience. On the positive side, a pessimist is better prepared, both materially and spiritually, for actual crises and disasters when they do arise. This is the attitude that one of my high school friends used to call the theory of the "survival of defeatist."

Today is one of those days. I have to go to school because my "second reader" has promised to have the latter two chapters of my STL thesis marked up with comments and revisions. Everything has already passed through the director. So this is really the last chance for anything to go really wrong with the whole project. Hopefully her corrections will be simple fixings of awkward or overly colloquial constructions, filling out places where I have elided logical steps or committed a non sequitur, etc. and hopefully nothing that demands structural or wholesale revision and re-write.

God's Will

There is a very good discussion going on over at Historical Christian. Check it out.

The question is the specificity of God's will in discerning one's vocation in life. Does God will a specific vocation for each human life? Or does God simply wish us to be happy and loving and then gives us the freedom to decide for ourselves the best way to do it? After all, as Augustine famously put it, "love and do what you will," since, if we are loving, we can hardly stray from the will of the God who is Love.

Certainly one doesn't fuss about the will of God in little, inconsequential decisions. I doubt if God cares whether you have butter or honey with your bread, or both, as Winnie-the-Pooh famously opted. But what about the big discernments of life, like whom to marry?

I'm very grateful for the specificity of my vocation, that I find myself today as a Christian, a Roman Catholic, a consecrated religious, a Franciscan, and a (transitional) deacon. But does God insist that I do this with my life? Is it his choice, or is it mine? Or, better, in what sense is it a confluence of our two wills together? Wouldn't God be just as happy with me if I was a loving witness to Christ in the secular or married vocation? After all, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden is about my age and still unattached. Or was I theologically destined to be the friar minor I have become?

All kidding aside, these are not easy questions, and I have heard different opinions from similarly thoughtful people. Click the link and check out the discussion. But keep in mind too that these kinds of discernment questions only make sense when you are rich enough to not be concerned with keeping yourself and your children alive in the first place.

Rant

Last night I started to think about how to preach on Easter. To my surprise I felt a little bit of panic. But then I remembered something I've heard over and over from priests over the years: Easter and the easter season are the hardest time of year to preach.

I've always wondered, why should this be so? Why should the central mystery of Christian faith be hard to preach on?

I think that it might have something to do with our general style of preaching. In my experience, most homilies are moral exhortations, words of general encouragement, or explications of the general contours of the spiritual life. These are fine things, certainly, but they have no need for God the Trinity.

In other words, my critique of much of the preaching I hear is that it is functionally unitarian. There's us, and there is a God who loves us, and this is how we might respond in gratitude. That's fine, but it doesn't take note of the central mystery of Christianity: That God is somehow a manifold Spirit, a "part" of whose intentionality identifies itself with human nature in general and suffering and death in particular, but whose indestructible nature as God prevails and thus destroys death from the inside.

I opine that some of this is a symptom of a more general problem: that often we buy into the seductive philosophy of religion offered by this world. This philosophy says that we Christians are part of the genus, "people of faith," or worse, "spirituality" of which the particularities of Christian revelation are the secondary specifics.

But it's not as if we have faith in some abstract "God" whom we then come to believe in as Trinity. It's that our humanity is taken up into the humanity of Christ, and we come to experience the faithfulness of Christ as the existential experience of faith. We are people of faith because of the faithfulness of Christ, through the Spirit that is praying in us to the Father.

Book Review: Envy

Believe it or not, I'm still working through the Seven Deadly Sins. Joseph Epstein's Envy is a short and light treatment in a style that combines literary history and autobiographical reflection. It lacks some of the philosophical history and theological exploration that I enjoyed in some of the other volumes, but is a pleasant book nonetheless. The final paragraph is particularly good:

If theological thinking is unavailable to you, if the very notion of "sin," original or unoriginal, as damning simply makes no sense to you, I would invite you instead to consider envy less as a sin than as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks out clarity, both about oneself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything that he or she envies. Envy clouds thought, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart--reasons enough to fight free of it with all one's natural strength.

Appearances

After morning prayer one of the brothers looked out the window and announced that the orange cat had been run over. He's one of our neighbors. We all looked, and there he was, lying there flattened on the street. The gray tabby, another neighbor, was sniffing and poking at him.

We discussed what to do, and decided we ought to go scoop him up and dispose of the corpse. But when I went outside, I discovered that it wasn't a cat at all. It looked like some kind of orange ferret. Another brother came out with a shovel and when we had scooped it up, despite being flattened, it showed no sign of injury.

So we couldn't decide if it was real or not. Finally we agreed that it was some kind of furry creature that had long since been slaughtered and turned into a scarf or some other fashion accessory. Then we threw it out.

It was still kind of sad, to think of this bright orange ferret-looking thing being killed to become somebody's tacky decoration, only to end up flattened and wet in the middle of the street, being inspected by confused cats and friars.