Zeus

Last night some of the brothers were watching The Amazing Race, so I checked it out. Usually I don't watch "reality" TV. I watched a whole season of one show once, and was alarmed at how emotionally involved I became with the fate of the contestants! As the winning team was approaching the finish, one of them started praying that God would let them win so that they could have the prize money.

So I thought: is God like that? Does God intervene in our affairs to create winners and losers, whether it be in game shows or families or history?

When I heard the first reading today, the scene from the Acts of the Apostles in which the people try to proclaim Paul and Barnabas as Hermes and Zeus, it all made sense. Zeus is the kind of God we often want; a God given to making winners and losers, a God whose actions confirm our own desires by imitating them.

But this is not the God revealed by Jesus Christ. Here is a God who insists on giving people their freedom and who refuses to control human affairs: "If you are the Messiah, come down from the cross!"

Our God is not a God who makes winners out of those who love and serve him, but who asks those who love him to identify themselves with the losers of history, with those who serve and wash feet.

Book Review: Pride

It's taken almost five months, but with Michael Eric Dyson's Pride, I've finished the Seven Deadly Sins series.

This last book is of a very different sort from the others. It's not so much a treatment of pride per se, but a discussion of race in America. Of course this topic touches on pride very deeply, and when it comes to whiteness and blackness one finds an effective place to examine both healthy and destructive forms of pride.

If you would like a thoughtful, honest and brief treatment of blackness and whiteness in contemporary North America, this is your book. After all, white privilege and the far-reaching, brutal legacy of slavery are a necessary part of any discussion of social issues in the United States. If you want a book of about pride as a sin, or about the history of reflection on pride as a sin, it's not.

Jerusalem

From today's first reading from the Acts of the Apostles:

For even though they found no grounds for a death sentence,
they asked Pilate to have him put to death,
and when they had accomplished all that was written about him,
they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb.
But God raised him from the dead,
and for many days he appeared to those
who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem.
These are now his witnesses before the people.

If we want to be witnesses to the Resurrection, we must be willing to travel with the Lord from Galilee to Jerusalem. Galilee is where we're from, where we know how things work and how to relate. It's home.

Jerusalem, on the other hand, is the place where the Name of God has chosen to dwell. It is the place where God's glory dwells in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the beauty of the Liturgy. But it is also the place where the Lord is tried and executed for failing to live up to the human expectations of deity. And this is why being willing to go to Jerusalem often means going to place where Jesus Christ is crucified in the poor and suffering of the world.

To see the Risen Lord, we must hit the road, leaving the place that's home and where we "get it," and make our way to Jerusalem.

Special

Jason's comment on my post about my averageness made me feel like it needed a follow-up. To risk becoming a priest or religious is something special, something remarkable, as is trusting not only God but another human being enough to enter into a sacramental marriage. The same goes for any vocation that we take up in response to the grace of God.

Each human person is a unique creation. Since grace builds on nature, adapted to and blended to it, as it were (the humanity of Christ!), the grace of each person is also unique and unrepeatable.

So, it is true what your kindergarten teacher told you: you are special. Just by being ourselves we are special, and especially by responding to the unique grace and paths that are ours in the Lord.

On the other hand, we must not take our specialness in the sense that the world gives. It does not make us any more important or remarkable than anyone else. It is not an excuse to think of my needs or desires or security as any more pressing than anyone else's.

This latter sense of being special, of being special in relation to others, is the sense against which we must begin to do penance. This is why my favorite anti-hero, Tyler Durden, drilled into each of his disciples the teaching that they were not "a special and unique snowflake!"

We are special because of the perpetual newness and freshness of grace, not because of anything that we can say is our own.

Yes and No

It's that time of the school year, and two friars were looking at the final, take-home exam for Canon Law.

"The answer is always no," said the first, "and we just have to figure out why."

"The answer is always yes," said the second, "and we just have to pray for the perspective to see it."

Average

One of the guilty pleasures of pursuing a religious or priestly vocation is thinking that you're special, different, or doing something heroic or remarkable. In fact it's more than a guilty pleasure; it's a genuine spiritual danger.

In this light I had to laugh when I read the report of the Center for Applied Research into the Apostolate on the priestly ordinandi of 2007 in these United States. Of the 475 transitional deacons to be ordained to the priesthood this year, I am totally typical and average. Like most, I am a white, European-American. I am exactly the average age (35), had the typical educational background when I came to the Order (college) and, like most, had previously worked in some kind of human services or education.

So my 474 brother transitional deacons have given me a little gift to help me avoid the sin of Luke's Pharisee:

"Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, `God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, `God, be merciful to me a sinner!' (Luke 18: 10-13, RSV)

The lesson on prayer is, for me, Luke's genius. The Pharisee prays to himself, because the prayer is all about him, while the tax collector is the one who is really praying to God.

You can check out a pdf page of the CARA report here.

Blog

Paula turned me onto Dying Man's Daily Journal. I'm grateful, because it is a beautiful witness to faith and grace, done in a simple and honest way. Here's the beginning of the latest post:

I came to a realization today. I have become part of this world or ours that expects instant gratification. I want what I want, and I want it now. Yesterday, I was in the hospital and they gave me a prescription for a couple of medications to help me feel better. I am almost embarrassed to admit but this morning I was a little disappointed when I woke up. I took the first of the new medications last night and I really don’t feel any different this morning, whats up with that?

What makes this an important spiritual reflection is not the depth of the problem-an attachment to instant gratification-but the way in which such things are laid bare when we are facing the ultimate.

That's why we're called to heal our attachments and little maladaptive patterns of behaving. Sure we can work around them in ordinary life, but when we are faced with ultimate questions like permanently committing our life or illness or the final act we are called to accomplish, our death, little spiritual foibles magnify themselves. Check it out!