The Cardinal or the Headbanger?

Partly because they're sweet in their excitement for me in my coming transfer to Rome, and partly because they like to make fun of my long history of rocky relationships with spiritual directors, the brothers have been suggesting to me whom I might ask to be my spiritual director once I get to my new assignment. Two candidates have emerged:

First, Raymond Cardinal Burke:




No doubt the brothers thought of His Eminence because I share some of his opinions, but also because I am currently under the care of one of his seminary classmates.

Second, our Capuchin brother Cesare Bonizzi, sometime frontman of Fratello Metallo:




The real compliment in all this is the recognition of the sublime synthesis that is my particular vocation, and I'm sure that's what the brothers mean to say by their suggestions.

Thinking Inside The Box

To have an integrity as a religious person, one must be engaged in a continual struggle against the tendency of religion to domesticate God. Part of giving oneself to a life in community is the willingness to take up the sacrifice and difficulty of doing this not just against the background of one's own distraction and sin, but the cocktail of the collective distraction and sin of a group of Christians.

As if that weren't enough metaphors for one day, in reflecting on this I've been playing with another one: the box.

Religion is like a box into which we are supposed to put ourselves. It is a set of boundaries and definitions, practices and behaviors revealed by the Holy Spirit and built up by sacred tradition. Placing ourselves in this box helps us to hold on to the salvation we have received by providing practices that keep us mindful of the economies of grace around us and of the ways God wills us to be useful for the salvation of others. The boundaries and limits of the box help us to avoid the errors and confusions that lead us back to our former way of life, that we may be daily delivered from the misery of the vain way of life bequeathed to us by the legacy of brutality that is original sin, the vana conversatione a patribus tradita. (1 Peter 1:18. I love that phrase; it's one my favorite Easter slogans.)

Things turn around all too easily, however. Religion becomes not the box into which we put ourselves for our safety and in order to remain attentive to God, but the box into which we put God in order to domesticate him and protect ourselves from him. We can  use religion to make God into a safe and intelligible commodity, perhaps a nice resource that we as religious people are privileged to possess and even share with others (aren't we nice!) or a bean-counting judge who is happy with us and unhappy with everyone else. Or perhaps he is unhappy with us too! That's something one notices a lot as a confessor; how easily an idea of God is instrumentalized by human self-hate. Or we think that because we are religious people, we know exactly what God wants and what is expected of us. Perhaps this makes us into Pharisees, but sometimes it also makes us domesticate God by making him the nice and 'pastoral' mascot of our relativism, protecting ourselves from the discomfort and political incorrectness of ever having to say that anybody else is wrong or that their behavior is unacceptable.

The world and the flesh, in their infantile arrogance, want a God who can be safely stored and who will not challenge their rule over our lives. Of course the world and the flesh are wily; they will help us to think that we are being 'stretched' and 'challenged' even when we are growing ever more safe and comfortable with ourselves and the 'God' we have put in a pretty box.

Let us put ourselves in the box instead, the box of true religion that is God's means of freeing us for the salvation of our brothers and sisters.

Der Osterhase

I saw this over at WDTPRS and couldn't resist the re-post.






Now, this is not as bad as it looks. Not that my German is good enough to really tell what's going on, but it seems like the Easter Bunny's speech is devout enough, and my best guess is that he is invited to speak after Communion instead of giving the homily, which would be inappropriate. (Bunnies are not valid matter for ordination.) Also, he doesn't give out candy until after the blessing and dismissal, revealing that he respects the integrity of the Mass and the communion fast.

Rayos de Oscuridad

The conversion of St. Paul, as it comes to us in the version of Acts 9 in the first reading for Mass today, had me thinking about conversion. The play of light and darkness, of seeing and blindness, it really resonates with me.

The light and the voice aren't overwhelming for Saul in the midst of the experience; he is able to converse with the Lord. But afterwards he finds himself blinded. He must be helped to get where the Lord had told him to go, he has to pray and be prayed over, and only then do the scales fall from his eyes, leaving him free for the mission of Jesus Christ.

I think that this process is going on all the time in the spiritual life. Many times we see the light and hear the voice. At the same time, however, we are always being struck blind by the brightness that has found us. In our own prayer and in the prayer of others for us, ever deeper and harder scalings fall from our eyes. Indeed, the new vision that comes from such scales falling is often itself the occasion for a new blinding by the Light.

It is one of the ways the communion of saints operates in this life; we are always Paul who needs to be led by the hand and prayed over, and we are always Ananais who prays over others that they may see to embrace the mission to which God calls them. Each of us is praying Ananias for each of us who is blinded Paul.

On The Way Rejoicing

I love the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch as it comes to us in the first reading for Mass today. (Acts 8:26-40) It's just such a mysterious story. Why was an Ethiopian making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem? If he was a eunuch in the physical sense, would he have been allowed to visit the Temple? (See Deuteronomy 23:2) Where did he get a copy of Isaiah? Was he reading in Hebrew or Greek?

We don't know these things for sure. For me this is a reminder that in any encounter with another person, and in a ministerial encounter especially, we come into the presence of an ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, a creative work that was going on before we got there, and will continue when we are gone. Each person is a particular journey that the Holy Spirit is creating in the world, and to which we may become present for a shorter or longer time. Ministry, then, is just reverence for the operations of grace in another, and perhaps some assistance in naming them and taking the next steps that God reveals, if and only if we ourselves have been given the grace of such a ministry.

I also love how the Spirit disappears Philip after the eunuch's baptism. Letting go is so important in ministry. There's always the temptation to make disciples for ourselves rather than for the Lord. Some disciples cling to teachers because personalities are easier to follow than the living God, but this is a failure in courage. Some teachers cling to the work of grace in their disciples as if it were partly their own possession, but this is a failure in chastity. Whenever the economies of grace invite us into reverence and care for the work of the Holy Spirit in another, there will come a point when we are called to let go and thereby confess that the salvation we have served in another is God's work and not our own.

The Deepest Sadness, the Greatest Danger

In my current state of being between assignments, I've been able to get to several books I had meant to read but never did. One of the books I'm in now is Dom Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia, which has already shown up in a couple of posts. It's one of those books that I'm so grateful to have finally got around to reading. Sometimes I think this is an operation of grace; the Holy Spirit means for us to read a certain book at a certain moment in the journey, and makes it happen just that way.

Another book I had meant to read but never got to until now is Peter Steinfels' A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Whether you agree with Steinfels or not, it's an important book. Though still fairly recent (2003), it's a little jarring how dated it already feels, given certain events in the Church: the election of Benedict XVI, Summorum pontificum, the election of Timothy Dolan as president of the USCCB, etc.

I'm enjoying the book, particularly in its communication of a love and reverence for the whole of Catholic experience in the United States. As a convert without a family history in the Church, that's something good for me to sense and feel, and to hold in reverence.

What grabbed me for a post today, however, was a little line in the section in which Steinfels is correcting nostalgia for the liturgy before the reforms following Vatican II, as if this were a time of universal reverence and awe before the mystery of God. As an effective strategy for doing this, Steinfels describes the experience of being an altar boy in the days before the Mass of Paul VI: "Other priests quickly communicated to the altar boys a smug familiarity with all things sacred, a kind of authorized irreverence in which we were privileged to share." (177)

How that speaks to my experience! Not that I was ever an altar boy, but I have received the same initiation: 'Here you go, brother, accept this false liberation to which you are now entitled by being admitted to our little club. It will only end in sadness and is ultimately ordered to your damnation, but for now let me admit you to this happy irreverence that frees you from worrying about God and lets you relax and be yourself.' Boo.

I remember in one place I lived we had a public chapel where there was adoration of the Blessed Sacrament each weekday afternoon. I would often spend some time praying with the odd assortment (one has to admit) of folks who would come. One day when I was going to the chapel one of the priests asked me bemusedly if I was on my way to join those who spent their afternoons "quietly screaming at the wafer."

That comment hit me so hard that I could hardly pray for a couple of days. It's bad enough that a priest was making light of the real presence of Christ in the sacred species. In a way, though, I was even more bothered by the way he was mocking the prayer and piety of the people. Fine, maybe adoration isn't your thing, or not the way you pray. Maybe you even think it's contrary to the spirit of the reformed liturgy. (You're wrong, but that's not the point.) But none of this grants permission to treat the grace of prayer in someone--as imperfect and confused as it is in any of us--as an inside joke on which we build our own rotten and fleshly communion.

It just goes to show how vigilant and cautious we have to be in any of our disagreements and conflicts. The world, the flesh, and the devil get into them so easily.

When we invite each other into the false liberation of the "smug familiarity" and "authorized irreverence" for the things of God, it won't be long before we are also trying to build our rotten solidarity on irreverence for persons and their experience. And the incarnation has rendered all irreverence for the human person a sacrilege.

The Coming Martyrdom

Today is the feast of St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen, one of the great Capuchin saints. He was martyred in 1622, which was the founding year of the Propaganda Fide (now the Congregation of the Evangelization of Peoples) and thus became its proto-martyr.

Since I was blessed to have my turn to preach at the community Mass today, I was reflecting a little on martyrdom. It can seem like something far away, from another time or place. But this sense is false. I think of old Fr. Zygmund, who made such an impression on me with his personal knowledge of those Capuchins now numbered among the 108 Martyrs of World War II. Of course I also think of the current conflicts between the faith and our leaders here in the United States. Perhaps martyrdom isn't far behind. More and more one hears the sobering quote from Cardinal George: "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square."

Anyone who wants to live a devout life needs to accept the possibility of martyrdom. It might be the vocation which God wills for us in the end. The thing is, however, that we might not know this until the last days--or even hours--of our earthly lives. We must be prepared. This is part of the reason we try to practice charity and penance now, so that we might be ready to accept the vocation to martyrdom when it comes.

Around the time St. Fidelis was giving his final sermon, supporters recommended to  him that he run away. They knew he was in danger. No doubt these were good and devout people, and their recommendation was the fruit of a 'pastoral' and 'balanced' discernment. It was his prior life of charity, penance, and mortification that enabled Fidelis to overcome the prudence of the flesh and the 'pastoral sense' of this world at that moment, and to suffer the fullness of his own configuration to Christ crucified which constitutes him as our heavenly patron in the propagation of the faith.

By lives of prayer, charity, and penance, may we too make ourselves willing and available for the coming martyrdom, if it be God's will for us in the end.

St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen, proto-martyr of the Propaganda Fide, pray for us.