Baby Got Book

I saw this video on Sci Fi Catholic, who seems to have picked it up from the Art of Apologetics; two blogs that are worth a look if you haven't already. Evangelization always demands new forms after all.

"Ladies, do you wanna save some people from Hades?"

"And if you're Catholic, there's even more."

Now give some traffic back to White Boy DJ for letting everyone post his track.

Just for the record, my favorite Sir Mixalot track was "My Hooptie," from his 1989 album with one of the most hilarious cover photos ever, "Seminar."

Entering Religious Life

One of the immediate trials for most who enter religious life is a crisis of expectation. It's not exactly as you thought it would be. I think this is because religious life, even in our time of greater openness and contact with the world, remains somewhat opaque to outsiders. This is compounded by the insistence of so many religious on the invisibility of religious life, e.g. going about in secular clothes, etc. Because of this, I think a lot of us got our idea of religious life from books and movies--books that might be have been written hundreds of years ago, and movies that might be more romance than reality. I know that for me, my expectations of religious life prior to my entrance were formed mostly by the Lives of St. Francis by Thomas of Celano and Thomas Merton's The Sign of Jonas, all filtered through the trials and tribulations of the beautiful Sr. Luke (that is, Audrey Hepburn) in The Nun's Story.

It's embarrassing to say all this, but I think it's a reality for a lot of us. So as soon as someone enters a religious community, there is often an intense culture shock or existential crisis of expectations. (Admittedly, some of this is due to the unfortunate bourgeois and decadent state of much of mainstream religious life here in the United States.) Sometimes this shock at the real vs. expected religious life is so bad that a new brother will leave within 24 hours.

I went through this, and continue to do so on some level. And I don't think I'm an unusual case in this regard. I once asked a spiritual director about it, complaining that the spiritual trials and crosses of my religious life were entirely other than those I expected to have. He told me that this was, in fact, an expression of God's mercy. If we were allowed the carry the crosses we imagine ourselves bearing, or would like to carry, it would be too much an occasion for vainglory. So, in his mercy, God gives us crosses that we would not want, and are unglamorous and not even interesting.

I imagine that in our world of sitcom families and so-called "romantic comedies," a lot of this is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to married people as well.

I'm thinking about this stuff this morning because today is the funeral of my first vocation director, the friar who handled my application for my first go at religious life, when I spent 18 months in the formation program of the Friars of the Leonine Union (the OFM.)

Obama and the Holy See

This will come as a shock to some Catholics, but the Vatican seems happy about Barack Obama's election as president of these United States. Last night Pope Benedict sent him a congratulatory telegram, and today's issue of the Vatican's newspaper has an exceedingly laudatory front page article. Pdf in Italian linked here.

Joe Biden, Signing Bulletins, and the Pastoral Dance

One of the hardest and most delicate tasks in the pastoral ministry is what I call the "pastoral dance." It's the subtle balance you have to achieve between being encouraging and affirming on the one hand, and trying to be strict in the values you hold up on the other. It's easy to retreat into one of the simple extremes, to be the legalist on the one hand or the "whateverist" on the other, but to maintain a balance between the two is terribly hard. Here's two illustrations, one from my own life and another from someone else's (thank God.)

Signing bulletins for children is one of those random little Sunday rituals. Kids often need a signed bulletin to prove to their religious education program that they attended Sunday Mass. This is especially true if they attend classes in one parish and worship on Sunday in another. I don't sign automatically, though. I demand an account from the kid. If they are preparing for a sacrament I ask them why they want it and what they think it means. If they are between sacramental preparations, I ask to know what they are learning. If they can't tell me anything--in the worst cases they don't even know if they are preparing for a sacrament or not--I refuse to sign. I tell them that it's ordinary wisdom not to put your signature on something if someone can't tell you what it is. However, I almost always sign in the end, and I do the whole script in a lighthearted way, so as not to embarrass the kid's poor mother who has diligently brought the kid to church. That's the pastoral dance. You have to affirm and encourage on the one hand, but you have to make sure the value is held up on the other, to avoid the great scourge of the "spirit of whatever."

To take a hypothetical and more difficult example, what would I do if I were the pastor of the new First Catholic, vice-president elect Joe Biden? I understand that he attends Sunday Mass diligently, so I presume I would be able to ask him for an appointment. But what would I say? How would I affirm and encourage him in his apparent effort to lead a Catholic family, but still explain that his unwillingness to defend the rights of the unborn is unacceptable? How does the public and notorious element play into it? Would there be a pastoral strategy to affirm what's good, like Sunday Mass attendance and being a Catholic family, while still making it clear that the notorious failure to use public influence is intolerable? If this were me, this question would be pretty heavy on my conscience.

The pastoral dance is hard. But you have to do it if you don't want to be the scribe that binds up heavy burdens on the one hand, or the person who casts their pearls before swine on the other.

Bad Thoughts

I know that this is becoming a bit of a pet rant, but I am increasingly convinced that the problem with our practice of the Catholic religion is that the faithful have not been taught the sacred mysteries in such a way that they become practically portable into their individual lives. I get the feeling that people look upon the great mysteries of our faith--the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of the Lord--as beautiful and miraculous events to which we are spectators. The Word of God descended into our humanity in order to provide our humanity with path into God, not just to give us something beautiful to contemplate in itself.

One area that reveals to me the lack of basic spiritual formation for the average Catholic is the question of "bad thoughts." Many times people say that they are troubled by their evil thoughts and worry that they are sinful. To me this is a very unfortunate situation, because evil thoughts are actually one of the most useful things in the spiritual life.

Every time an evil suggestion pops into our head, whether it comes from the world, the flesh, or the devil (to name the classical suggestions for sources), we have the gift of an opportunity for worship and obedience. By rejecting the evil suggestion rather than nourishing it, we make a beautiful act of worship and recognition of a God apart from ourselves. Even better, if we replace the evil thought with a good one, we are practicing metanoia, changing our minds. This is the practice that the Buddha called "changing the peg." If we practice this over and over in our lives, we will eventually not only convert our minds from evil to good, but we will become that much more free of the tyranny of our thoughts and detached from our own internal discourse.

This freedom and detachment will be invaluable in our prayer. I once went to hear a meditation teacher and during the question period some kid asked him about being frustrated by distractions. The teacher said, "You are too possessive of your own mind." I didn't get it then, but I get it now. The teacher was pointing out that the problem is not the presence of absence of distractions, but being overly-identified with our own thoughts. I'm not exactly my mind, just like I'm not exactly my body. I'm certainly not the stream of conscious thoughts that roll through my head all day. Let go of distraction by letting go of all your thoughts. As Thomas Merton said, "In an age when everyone talks about 'being yourself,' I reserve the right to forget about being myself."

Evil thoughts aren't a good thing, but we can use them to discover the freedom and conversion that God wants to give us.

The Friars' Cemetery

One of the perks of my current assignment is that I live and work on the same campus as the cemetery for the friars. I can easily visit the deceased brothers from time to time. I can also visit my own final resting place and contemplate the day of my burial in a pretty concrete way. If I die in the Order, that is, thanks to many who must be praying for my perseverance.

Yesterday I spent some time in the cemetery for All Souls Day, hoping to receive the indulgence for someone I wanted to give it to. I counted 36 friars who had concluded their pilgrimage in this world in the eight years since I entered the Order. Most I knew to one degree or another; a few I had lived and prayed with in community. I went through each of them, praying for them and thanking them for the prayers and example. When I went to pray the Our Father and the Creed prescribed for the indulgence, the "Our" and the "We" with which they respectively begin really struck me. I felt as though I was praying with the deceased brothers, wherever they found themselves in their journey. I thought, as I often do, of the last words my formation director said to me before my priestly ordination: "Reflect on the communion of saints...that's the only this makes sense."



Oremus pro invicem, fratres.

Purgatory

This year the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, All Souls Day, falls on a Sunday. To pray for our beloved dead is to recognize the mercy of God shown to the elect who need to continue their preparations for heaven after death. My homily for this weekend is posted here.