Some Time With The Novices

Our novices have been staying with us this week, having finished the novitiate program. They take their temporary vows tomorrow morning. In your charity offer a prayer of thanksgiving for their vocations, and for their courage as they go forward in our formation program.

Their presence reminds me of one of the ways I have changed my mind in the course of my religious life. In the community, we always make much of the young. Candidates and applicants are paraded around, and their 'vocation stories' get published in our newsletters. Brothers in formation are celebrated and treated quite well most of the time. I used to think this was a symptom of an unhealthy community; I worried that we were looking for our own validation through the young guys who were entering. It is they who should be excited about our life and work--presumably this is why they seek to join--rather than us finding our comfort in them. The classic tradition of religious life (across religions even) teaches that candidates should be discouraged in order to test their desire and resolve. Such was my worry.

I've changed my mind. I realize now that this behavior is the natural way families behave. As a sort of family in the spiritual order, the community makes a big deal about its babies, showing them off and trying to give them every good gift. Perhaps this is helpful and supportive for those who are going through the stresses of being formed into the community, but I now realize that it's mostly for us who are 'grown up' in the Order. To encounter and celebrate the guys who are younger in religion is just spiritually healthy. One sees their zeal and simplicity, and is reminded of these things in himself, before all of the internal compromises and friendships made with various forms of laxity and conformity to the spirit of this world. You are reminded of how you were once that way, and the desire to be so again peeks out from the stresses and details and all the anxieties of daily life and ministry.

So, as I've grown up a little bit in the Order, I realize now that we make a big deal about the new brothers at least in part because they minister to us, reminding us of how undivided our own hearts used to be in our desire for God in this life, and presenting a living invitation to accepting that zeal and simplicity once again.

Jarring

The room as it will look upon my moving out is starting to appear. Yesterday I had the state inspection done on the parochial vicar car, had it washed and filled the tank before turning over the keys to my successor. The move is starting to become very real. Though I have been expecting these moments for over a year, it still seems like a surprise.

I guess it has to do with the way I conceive the parish in the story of my life. When I came here it was like a landing. After the many steps and moves of my six years in the formation program, I had arrived. Here it was, my first assignment. The parish then took me into its embrace; the schedules of days and the cycles of seasons, the support and prayer of the people, the headaches, the fights, and the interior trials. The linear timeline of the formation program (postulancy, novitiate, temporary profession and its renewals, diaconate, priesthood) gave way to the cyclical time of the parish. I had landed. Whether I was happy or struggling, joyful or stressed, devout or in a rut, it was home and I could breathe with some new kind of peace.

Now I'm going back to Boston and back to school, into something very like the condition I was in before coming here to the parish. I was ten semesters at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology before my first assignment, and now I return to the same school's successor institution, the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. Writing this out makes me realize that jarring nature of the transition: the parish, which was a landing and an arrival for me up until now, will now become for me an interlude between two academic lives in Boston. Not that this cheapens anything about my experience and the graces of the past three years, but it changes their nature in my imagination, in how I understand and narrate to myself the story of my desire to convert to Christianity.

1964 Dominican Vocation Video

Via my favorite source for morning news, Anna Arco of the Catholic Herald, I just watched this 1964 vocation video posted on Godzdogz, another blog you should follow.

It's really quite beautiful and inspiring. Note especially how the narrator's account of his meditation after Compline illustrates the motto from the beginning: contemplata aliis tradere. 'To pass on to others what we have contemplated,' or, 'To give to others the fruits of contemplation.' It's the mixed life of mendicancy, both contemplative and active.

Notice also one of the distinctive marks of the Dominican rite: the simultaneous oblation of bread and previously prepared chalice with one prayer. The narrator speaks of uniting himself to the sacrifice at the offertory; this is the heart of conscious participation in the Mass, and something which we need to recover in our own time.



Why should one desire religious life? It is a desire for both prayer and for sacred Truth, with Christ impelling us to share these with the world.

Are You There, Lucifer? It's Me, Charles

I'm sure that I've shared in the singing of Dan Schutte's "City of God" more than any other single piece of church music, excepting perhaps the Sanctus from Marty Haugen's "Mass of Creation." With it's giddy activism and joyful sense of eschatological transformation, it's a classic. Besides, I'm pretty sure it substituted for the entrance antiphon (what a mercy from God was my ignorance of such things at the time!) at every Sunday Mass for the three semesters that I was a Catholic in college.

Singing it today at Morning Prayer, though, an uncomfortable lyrical parallel came to mind. Consider the second verse:

We are sons of the morning, we are daughters of day
The One who has loved us, has brightened our way.

Now consider some 'horror punk.' This is the beginning of the later Misfits song "Speak of the Devil:"

Traded in my bible for a little black cat
The time of Armageddon's here
Some call me the son of the morning
God knows I'm the angel of light

The reference is to Lucifer, who is indeed sometimes called the "Son of the Morning." This is an uncomfortable parallel for sure!

Overheard in the Friary

This conversation is so religious life:

Father Guardian: What do you want for dinner for your going-away party?

Me: That depends on who's cooking.

To Parishioners

Today is my last Mass here at the parish. I don't know if I will be called upon to make a speech at the reception, and I don't feel the need to do so, but I prepared one in my head just in case. Here it is.


Thank you very much. Thank you for gracious welcome into the life of your parish, for the opportunity to pray, to work, and to open the Word of God with you. Thank you for the opportunity to give reverence to the presence of God within you as we prayed together at the baptisms and weddings in your families, as well as at the funerals of our friends and loved ones.

Most of all, though, I want to thank God. I believe that Providence arranged for me to be ordained priest in the course of my assignment here. As you know, I didn't grow up Catholic, and so when it came time to think about where to offer my first Mass, there was no traditional 'home parish' to go to. So it was a great gift to me to have already made a home here, and to have been graciously received into this parish by the weekend of my ordination. I was very grateful to you on that day of my first Mass, and remain so. Many of you were there. I'm happy to say that all of the altar servers from that day remain devout and active altar servers today.

So I'm very grateful. Because of all these particular contours of my first assignment, my religious life and certainly my priesthood will always belong to this place, to you, and to this church in a very special way. I believe that I have a good record of returning to places that were home to me, and so you can be sure that I will see you around.

I ask forgiveness of anyone whom I may have wronged or taken lightly during my time here, and for any moments in which I may have not fully returned the graciousness and kindness shown to me through my own failure to look after my spiritual life. Probably those folks for whose forgiveness I really need to ask aren't here right now, but--knowing how word gets around this place--I'm sure they will hear that I asked for it.

Thanks as always for your prayers and good example, and I ask for your prayers as I go forward to my next assignment, in which the interior challenges and trials may be more intense for me than those I have been through here. Be assured of my continued prayers for you, and may God bless Sacred Heart.


First Mass, September 9, 2007

Tracy on Mystery

This passage from David Tracy has been sticking in my conscience for a couple of days. It's the sort of thing that is good for me because it both affirms and challenges.

When Catholic Christians speak of mystery they either mean an uninteresting and basically irreligious datum, muddle, or puzzle. Or they mean--as Karl Rahner so clearly means--that radically mysterious dimension to our lives which limits and grounds the rest of our activities.

When I read the first sentence I want to cheer; longtime readers will recall my annual Trinity Sunday rant on the cheap substitution of mystification for mystery. On the other hand, I'm not comfortable with the second sentence either. I am very afraid of the pervasive operative theology that embeds human religiosity too far into anthropological or existential categories, because I believe it leads to different "religions" as mere human cultural expressions and thus without any real distinction among them in terms of truth. (It also requires, at least it seems to me, that we see God as an incompetent revealer, but that's another story.) I'm not saying that this is the claim of the text; it just brings up a worry in me. But I have to admit, I haven't worked some of this out for myself, and am still trying to un-muddle my thinking, as it were. I'm still puzzling my way toward a way between the politically correct dogmas of the so-called liberals on the one hand, and fundamentalist-style habits of thought on the other.

To be fair to the text, the passage continues with an equally interesting--though less pressuring for me, obviously--parallel pair of sentences on Protestants:

When Protestant Christians speak of the "scandal of Christianity" they either mean some uninteresting and basically irreligious tenet of fundamentalism. Or they mean--as Bultmann means--the dialectical, the limit scandal that this God of Jesus the Christ is also and always my God.

Both passages are from David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology.

When posts like this start to come to mind, I guess I have to admit to myself that I am going back into student mode.