Yesterday was the first day of classes. I didn't have any, but I went to school anyway to explore the library and to find someone to help me register for courses (I couldn't figure out how to do it online.) Everyone was very helpful and it was a good day. The midday Mass at St. Mary's Hall was as devout and peaceful as I remembered; one feels almost hidden in prayer there and I love it.
But here's what was funny about it all: The Boston College School of Theology & Ministry is partly what used to be the Weston Jesuit School of Theology across the river in Cambridge. I spent ten semesters there. So as I wander around this totally new geography, I meet all the same people I used to know from Weston. I walk into an unknown library and the head librarian calls me by first name. I go to the new and shiny school office and I meet the same receptionist I knew from the old place.
All of this is striking because it is the opposite of how it is here at home in the friary. I lived in this neighborhood for five years when I was in studies for priesthood, and so I know the area and the friaries pretty well. But things are quite changed because it's a whole different set of friars. Most of all, the friaries have new guardians. (The guardian (i.e. superior) of a house makes a big difference regarding the mood of the place.)
So I'm grateful this morning to notice that I have something familiar and encouraging in both the school and fraternal aspects of my new assignment.
September 8, 2010
September 7, 2010
Brother Ass
"The devil sent into him a grave temptation to luxuria. So the holy Father, seeing it right away, took off his clothes and beat himself with cords saying, 'So, Brother Ass, thus should you remain, under the whip! The habit is of religion and you can't steal it; if you want to go away, go!'" (Thomas of Celano's second Life, chapter 82)
We often quote St. Francis's nickname for his body, Brother Ass, in the sense that the body is stubborn and often unwilling to cooperate with our spiritual aims. But as I've thought about it over the years, I think there is a positive side as well. Like an ass, the body is capable of bearing tremendous burdens and getting a lot of work done when trained properly. We have all seen this in hard-working Christians.
We often quote St. Francis's nickname for his body, Brother Ass, in the sense that the body is stubborn and often unwilling to cooperate with our spiritual aims. But as I've thought about it over the years, I think there is a positive side as well. Like an ass, the body is capable of bearing tremendous burdens and getting a lot of work done when trained properly. We have all seen this in hard-working Christians.
September 6, 2010
A Dream for the First Day of School
So I wake up on Labor Day, the last day before the real first day of school. (The days of so-called orientation don't count.) I am anxious, for sure, but I also had an encouraging dream.
I am anxious because I am not confident that I can manage the doctoral program. I learned well certain school-going habits as a small child that will have to be unlearned if I'm going to make it to the STD. These were a matter of survival at the time, and so I don't have any grudge against myself about them, but like many survival strategies we learn along the way, they have become maladaptive in later circumstances.
In the midst of this worry I've been having some rich dreams, full of people and places and teachers and schools from the past. As I was praying through some of it this morning, one moment seemed particularly revealing. I was with one of the professors whose disciple I hope to become this year. He had a son with him, maybe four or five years old. The child was babbling like an infant, full of syllables and seeming just on the edge of true speech. "He can almost talk," I said to the professor. It was the joy of the dream to announce it.
In my prayer I realized that the kid was probably me. By the discernment of the friars and the generosity of our benefactors, the transformation to speech is offered to me. If I can overcome what keeps me from working as hard as I can and if I can make myself a fruitful disciple of my professors, perhaps I can become a bearer of coherent theological speech, a doctor.
I am anxious because I am not confident that I can manage the doctoral program. I learned well certain school-going habits as a small child that will have to be unlearned if I'm going to make it to the STD. These were a matter of survival at the time, and so I don't have any grudge against myself about them, but like many survival strategies we learn along the way, they have become maladaptive in later circumstances.
In the midst of this worry I've been having some rich dreams, full of people and places and teachers and schools from the past. As I was praying through some of it this morning, one moment seemed particularly revealing. I was with one of the professors whose disciple I hope to become this year. He had a son with him, maybe four or five years old. The child was babbling like an infant, full of syllables and seeming just on the edge of true speech. "He can almost talk," I said to the professor. It was the joy of the dream to announce it.
In my prayer I realized that the kid was probably me. By the discernment of the friars and the generosity of our benefactors, the transformation to speech is offered to me. If I can overcome what keeps me from working as hard as I can and if I can make myself a fruitful disciple of my professors, perhaps I can become a bearer of coherent theological speech, a doctor.
September 5, 2010
More on Sunday Mass in Spanish
Today I celebrated Sunday Mass in Spanish for the second time. A funny thing happens.
Before my first assignment, I had been assisting at Sunday Mass in Spanish for almost my entire time of formation in the Order. For a year or two right before diaconate, I was even a lector. Over the years I learned and even half-memorized a lot of songs and settings for parts of the Mass.
So now that I am a priest at Sunday Mass in Spanish, an odd unevenness is revealed. I know all this music and can sing it freely, but I still have to be deliberate and careful with the prayers, even though they are usually simpler in grammar and vocabulary. For example, I work tensely through the preface, trying to pronounce everything properly while still maintaining my recollection and right intention. The comes the Sanctus, set into more complicated constructions and sung much faster, but since I've been singing one or another of them for years, I sing it right out easily and freely.
Before my first assignment, I had been assisting at Sunday Mass in Spanish for almost my entire time of formation in the Order. For a year or two right before diaconate, I was even a lector. Over the years I learned and even half-memorized a lot of songs and settings for parts of the Mass.
So now that I am a priest at Sunday Mass in Spanish, an odd unevenness is revealed. I know all this music and can sing it freely, but I still have to be deliberate and careful with the prayers, even though they are usually simpler in grammar and vocabulary. For example, I work tensely through the preface, trying to pronounce everything properly while still maintaining my recollection and right intention. The comes the Sanctus, set into more complicated constructions and sung much faster, but since I've been singing one or another of them for years, I sing it right out easily and freely.
September 4, 2010
Donkeys Who Give Homilies and Play the Zither
I have various systems for taking notes in class. One thing I do is reserve the margins of my filler paper for items that are apart from the point of the course. They might be odd or funny quotes from the teacher or one of the students, things I recall because of something mentioned in the lecture, or something funny that happened in the classroom. It's like how I write irrelevant things on baseball scorecards, e.g. whether the ceremonial first pitch was a strike, comments on the aim of the guy who tosses bags of peanuts, the price of beer, etc.
My academic adviser, who is far more optimistic about my potential than I am, has paved my way into a teaching assistant gig in a course I took some years ago when I was last in school. So today I have retrieved my notes and started to go over them, presuming that the professor will assume that I have learned what I was previously taught. I notice some particularly good marginalia from the course, some of which I thought I would share:
On accomplishment: "They might have done it wrongly, but they did it."
Mmm...spiritual horse ["Mmm" idiom is via Homer Simpson]
Meet the nominalist twins
Set bogon filter to high
Signal to noise ratio
Amo, amis, amit
Boethius: was exaggerating
The unseemliness of shrill violins
'Pickin' Up Change' is not a dance in classical musical proportion
Acrimonious debate on the Proslogion
The modern suffocating with theoretical possibility
Party foul: using starvation as an example on Ash Wednesday
Anastasius the librarian
"This morning I was reading Ecclesiastes..."
On objects: "That which throws itself against you."
The problem of inappropriate delight
Mmm...apex mentis
The deist football
On Cherry Garcia: "It is necessary to finish the whole pint and Pelagianism is made real"
"If you don't believe in the power of concupiscence, go get hooked on heroin and then come talk to me."
"I would rather starve than pay someone $11 to change euros."
S[acred] S[cripture]: the poor man's Aristotle
donkeys who give homilies and play the zither
My academic adviser, who is far more optimistic about my potential than I am, has paved my way into a teaching assistant gig in a course I took some years ago when I was last in school. So today I have retrieved my notes and started to go over them, presuming that the professor will assume that I have learned what I was previously taught. I notice some particularly good marginalia from the course, some of which I thought I would share:
On accomplishment: "They might have done it wrongly, but they did it."
Mmm...spiritual horse ["Mmm" idiom is via Homer Simpson]
Meet the nominalist twins
Set bogon filter to high
Signal to noise ratio
Amo, amis, amit
Boethius: was exaggerating
The unseemliness of shrill violins
'Pickin' Up Change' is not a dance in classical musical proportion
Acrimonious debate on the Proslogion
The modern suffocating with theoretical possibility
Party foul: using starvation as an example on Ash Wednesday
Anastasius the librarian
"This morning I was reading Ecclesiastes..."
On objects: "That which throws itself against you."
The problem of inappropriate delight
Mmm...apex mentis
The deist football
On Cherry Garcia: "It is necessary to finish the whole pint and Pelagianism is made real"
"If you don't believe in the power of concupiscence, go get hooked on heroin and then come talk to me."
"I would rather starve than pay someone $11 to change euros."
S[acred] S[cripture]: the poor man's Aristotle
donkeys who give homilies and play the zither
Post-Christianity?
I got into a conversation the other day on the question of whether or not some of us Catholics, especially some religious and clergy, have absorbed (perhaps unwittingly) or even embraced a post-Christian theological mood.
It's a tough question, I think. I have written before about how I sometimes see religious relativism and indifferentism creeping into our Catholic life and discourse, especially in the form of the comfortable and civil theology of 'many paths to one (alleged) truth.' I have argued before that this must be resisted. For one thing, it doesn't stand up to sacred scripture. It also suggests that God is an incompetent revealer; what God reveals about himself cannot be understood on its own, because (for example) it is irreducibly bound into culture, patriarchy, language, etc. In the end then, because all "religions" (the problem of what counts as a religion is not asked) aim at some truth or transcendence which is imagined as a unity, God is ultimately unknowable. So we end up with a funny kind of relativistic, post-modern gnosticism which is so vague as to have almost no spiritual utility apart from helping us get along and avoid arguments while we strive to build up the kingdom of man.
But that's enough ranting. To get back to the original question raised by my friend, I think we have to be attentive to the language we use. Does our religious speech affirm the scandalous particularly of Christianity or does it slyly water it all down into generic terms? Do we say 'faith communities' instead of 'churches' so that we can hold up the political correctness of 'inclusivity?' When we say 'churches' are we saying what the Catholic Church means by this term, or are we also speaking (uncarefully) about Christian bodies that are properly not churches but 'ecclesial communities?' Do we use terms like 'minster' and 'ministry,' which have specific meanings in Catholic Christianity, in the generic sense of any religious service or work? Do we use generic spiritual language like 'growing in faith' and 'making meaning' rather than talk about holiness in Christ and proclaiming the Kingdom of God? Has Jesus Christ Himself begun to slip out of our speech, in favor of a generic 'god' or a 'spirit' which is whatever anybody wants him or her to be?
Let us discipline our speech, and resist the forces of relativism and indifferentism.
It's a tough question, I think. I have written before about how I sometimes see religious relativism and indifferentism creeping into our Catholic life and discourse, especially in the form of the comfortable and civil theology of 'many paths to one (alleged) truth.' I have argued before that this must be resisted. For one thing, it doesn't stand up to sacred scripture. It also suggests that God is an incompetent revealer; what God reveals about himself cannot be understood on its own, because (for example) it is irreducibly bound into culture, patriarchy, language, etc. In the end then, because all "religions" (the problem of what counts as a religion is not asked) aim at some truth or transcendence which is imagined as a unity, God is ultimately unknowable. So we end up with a funny kind of relativistic, post-modern gnosticism which is so vague as to have almost no spiritual utility apart from helping us get along and avoid arguments while we strive to build up the kingdom of man.
But that's enough ranting. To get back to the original question raised by my friend, I think we have to be attentive to the language we use. Does our religious speech affirm the scandalous particularly of Christianity or does it slyly water it all down into generic terms? Do we say 'faith communities' instead of 'churches' so that we can hold up the political correctness of 'inclusivity?' When we say 'churches' are we saying what the Catholic Church means by this term, or are we also speaking (uncarefully) about Christian bodies that are properly not churches but 'ecclesial communities?' Do we use terms like 'minster' and 'ministry,' which have specific meanings in Catholic Christianity, in the generic sense of any religious service or work? Do we use generic spiritual language like 'growing in faith' and 'making meaning' rather than talk about holiness in Christ and proclaiming the Kingdom of God? Has Jesus Christ Himself begun to slip out of our speech, in favor of a generic 'god' or a 'spirit' which is whatever anybody wants him or her to be?
Let us discipline our speech, and resist the forces of relativism and indifferentism.
September 3, 2010
Mystical Moments
Ever since I was little I've had what I have come to call, somewhat clumsily, 'mystical moments.' Over the past couple of years I have become convinced that these moments form a part of what God has been up to with me, both as a remote preparation for my conversion to Christianity and as an ongoing support and encouragement within it.
I had one of these moments tonight. I left the subway station. It was dark and rainy. I began to walk through the park pathway that forms part of the way back to the friary from the train. I suddenly became very mindful of the moment. I felt the hardness of the path beneath my steps. I felt the thickness of the air as I breathed it in. I noticed the curtain of rain falling around the edges of my half-broken umbrella. (No thought or judgment of the umbrella at this moment; it just was as it was. To say that I accepted its brokenness (how correct in our ministerial parlance!) is too coarse; the question doesn't even arise. Here is the model of freedom.) I see a yellow pencil on the path. It is very yellow. That's its joy in the world, and to notice it is mine. For a second or a minute I am utterly mindful of where I am and what is around me and nothing intrudes from within. I am in the now, the nunc stans that was the image of eternity for the medievals. And in this mindfulness I get a glimpse of what is behind, or below, and above it all. (Pick your metaphor; it doesn't really matter.) It is there, subtle and quiet, but nonetheless insistent: the 'Why' in the most basic of all metaphysical questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? And I get a sense, a hunch, a suspicion that this Why, this Reason behind the fact of being itself is gentle, and benevolent, and wise, and forms what He forms with and as Love.
And this is what I have tried to follow, and the experience to which I have tried to be faithful.
I had one of these moments tonight. I left the subway station. It was dark and rainy. I began to walk through the park pathway that forms part of the way back to the friary from the train. I suddenly became very mindful of the moment. I felt the hardness of the path beneath my steps. I felt the thickness of the air as I breathed it in. I noticed the curtain of rain falling around the edges of my half-broken umbrella. (No thought or judgment of the umbrella at this moment; it just was as it was. To say that I accepted its brokenness (how correct in our ministerial parlance!) is too coarse; the question doesn't even arise. Here is the model of freedom.) I see a yellow pencil on the path. It is very yellow. That's its joy in the world, and to notice it is mine. For a second or a minute I am utterly mindful of where I am and what is around me and nothing intrudes from within. I am in the now, the nunc stans that was the image of eternity for the medievals. And in this mindfulness I get a glimpse of what is behind, or below, and above it all. (Pick your metaphor; it doesn't really matter.) It is there, subtle and quiet, but nonetheless insistent: the 'Why' in the most basic of all metaphysical questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? And I get a sense, a hunch, a suspicion that this Why, this Reason behind the fact of being itself is gentle, and benevolent, and wise, and forms what He forms with and as Love.
And this is what I have tried to follow, and the experience to which I have tried to be faithful.
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