Freedom

Today I am off to the church where I am to make my final vows tomorrow morning.

At school they tried to teach us a lot about freedom. They told us that our real freedom did not consist of our ability to revise our lives over and over, but in the freedom to dispose of ourselves definitively in and for God.

In fact, our possibilities for revising our life decrease with every moment and every year until finally, one day, we reach our death. When that day comes we have no more choices and we have to say, with our friend Pontius Pilate, like it or not, "what I have written, I have written" and what I have done, I have done.

So if my real freedom consists not in the illusion of having as many options as I can have for as long as possible, but in my liberty to dispose of myself once and for all for God and for the Body of Christ which is the Church of God, well that's what I'll try to do tomorrow.

Pray for me, my friends.

Night

I couldn't sleep on retreat. Maybe it was the unfamiliar place, or the noisy house, or the cycles of the central air conditioning, who knows. But it made me reflect a little on trying to make spiritual friends with the night hours.

I find it curious. Religious life is definitely for morning people. Morning prayer and conventual Mass are usually early in the morning. When you live in community, the early morning is often the best (or only) time to find quiet for peaceful prayer or reflection.

On the other hand, the two greatest mysteries of our faith, the birth of the Lord and his Resurrection, happened in the middle of the night. Jesus was born in the night, presumably with only Mary and Joseph as witnesses. Of course it's normal to be born at night. The Resurrection seems to have happened at some moment in the night following the Sabbath of Good Friday night and Holy Saturday. Jesus, good Jew that he was, rested on the Sabbath, and didn't want to start the work of renovating the world until it was over. And there were no witnesses to the Resurrection itself.

On every feast and solemnity the psalmody for morning prayer declares, "On my bed I remember you, on you I muse through the night." (psalm 63) And in the night prayer for each vigil of Sunday we pray, "Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord through the night." (psalm 130)

With so much spiritual mystery to the night, it's funny that religion is so based on getting up early in the morning!

Final Profession

One night on retreat I was pacing outside, thinking about the very idea of taking my final, perpetual vows in religious life. Then I saw the big tree in the center of the retreat house's circular driveway and for some reason I addressed it:

"Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Tree, seeing as you're perpetually professed?"

So then I reflected on the perpetual profession of the tree. The tree receives the sunlight and the rain from God, but it doesn't agonize over what to do with these graces. It doesn't need to discern what to do with the rain and the sun. It doesn't need to journal about it, or wonder how someone with its particular Enneagram number or Myers-Briggs letters would handle them.

The tree has a form of life, or a rule, through which it already knows how it will use the sunlight and the rain. It will grow and flourish and provide shade for the driveway and for those who pray to Our Lady at the grotto across from the house. The tree is committed to its form of life, to its rule. It's perpetually professed.

(By the way, I am 5, INTJ.)

Obscurity

Thank you everyone for your prayers for my retreat. I'm back and moved into a new friary, with several other transitions to go. But how can I complain? I'm supposed to be an itinerant and a mendicant. Francis was fond of a brother who refused to live more than a month in one place. After a month he would get up and go, saying, "Our home is not here, but in heaven."

I worked a lot on retreat with Jacob's encounter with the Angel of the Lord in Genesis 32. I reflected on its nature as a model for prayer. "Some man," who turns out to be the angel, or the presence of God, approaches Jacob when he is alone at night. They struggle, or wrestle, until dawn. In the same way I've often experienced prayer as an obscure and mysterious encounter initiated from somewhere, I know not where.

In the end Jacob demands two things from the angel of the Lord, but only gets half of what we wants. He demands a blessing and receives his new name, Israel, and thus his new vocation. He asks to know the name of the one with whom we has been struggling, and doesn't get it. To me it speaks of the fruits of prayer. Through prayer we can receive discernment of our next step and something we call our vocation in the Lord. But when we hope to penetrate the mystery of the One with whom we struggle, the obscure presence of God only retreats further. We're left with great blessings, but also the frustration of feeling that we know less about who God is than when we started.

Of course there are other famous details in the story, but I didn't have any inspirations about their meaning for me.

Enjoy the feast of the Assumption today. If anything, it's a beautiful affirmation of the blessed possibilities of our bodily existence.

Retreat

I'm going off on retreat today, in preparation for my upcoming final religious profession. I intend to be more or less off the grid during this time, so I won't be posting for at least a week.

Enjoy the feast of the Transfiguration today. I've always thought that it was one of the more mystical of our celebrations. In the synoptic gospel tradition, I take the Transfiguration as a Resurrection appearance that comes before the Resurrection itself.

It goes to show that the Resurrection in not a discrete historical event, but an inbreaking of the transcendent into time and history. It's the same with us: the mystery of our risen, transfigured life is hidden within our mundane existence. To notice it at all is already a lot. To live it is to be a saint.

Portiuncula

Today is the feast day of the mother church of the Franciscan order. It was at the little church of the Portiuncula, dedicated to Our Lady of the Angels, that Franciscan pre-history became the story of a great religious order. The first friars were staying there in 1209 when the so-called primitive rule was said to be verbally approved by Innocent III.

You may be more familiar with Our Lady of the Angels as a title for Mary than you might think: I believe that Santa Maria de Los Angeles is the full name of the city of Los Angeles, California. There's a lot of Franciscan influence out that way, you know.

Nowadays that tiny church of the Portiuncula is located inside a larger church dedicated to Our Lady in the modern city of Assisi. There are some good pictures in the Wikipedia article.

Summer Reading

I'm not much good for reading fiction, except that sometimes during times when I'm on the road a lot like this part of the summer. It's nice to have something to read on trains and planes. Also, for some reason I've gotten into the habit of reading The Catcher in the Rye each winter. I don't know why; it seems very funny to me in some way.

During this trip I've been reading Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. It's a lot of fun. I only mention it as an addendum to my comments on The Da Vinci Code. Foucault's Pendulum strikes me as what Dan Brown's book might be like if it was not only about mystery but mysterious itself, wasn't so tediously linear, and actually had interesting characters.

But I warn you, it's a little hard to figure out what Foucault's Pendulum is actually about, or even to follow the plot. Nevertheless, the language and construction is a joy.