Two of the brothers here at the friary are to be ordained deacon tomorrow morning. Each in his own way has had a long journey toward the sacred ministry, and I'm very happy for them both. Pray for them, in thanksgiving to God for their vocations and for their openness to the graces that will open up for them in the days and seasons to come.
The occasion reminds me even more strongly that it was five years ago today, on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, that I was ordained deacon. It was at St. Peter's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, together with one other Capuchin and my Jesuit classmates through the laying on of hands of F.X. Irwin, retired auxiliary bishop of Boston. I have a few vivid memories of the day: How it was one of the only times I have ever worn a regular clerical outfit, since the dalmatics the Jesuits supplied for the ordination did not fit well over our Capuchin hoods. How when I prayed Midafternoon Prayer later in the day my spirit rejoiced at the first time I was praying the Liturgy of the Hours according to the promise of my ordination. How my provincial minister not long after the Mass informed me that I would be ordained priest on the Blessed Mother's birthday the following year.
That's five years in the clerical state, and what a journey it's turning out to be.
Reflecting on the whole business does a lot for me in appreciating grace. I didn't join the Order with any strong idea about being a priest; I just knew that I wanted to be a Franciscan. In fact, when I got into studies I found it hard to know how to even discern the question of whether or not to present myself as a candidate for Orders. Nevertheless, as I have prayed through the experience of priesthood these past few years, I have become convinced that it is a grace and vocation that God has been working in me for much longer than I ever knew.
This helps me to remember that our discernments and reflections on God's will for us are never complete, and that God's purposes in the greater economies of grace are larger than our own consciousness of what we call our spiritual life. Remembering this helps me to trust. All that is required is openness to what is at hand and faithfulness to the next step God reveals.
October 7, 2011
October 6, 2011
What I Learned At Supper Tonight
We had some guests for supper tonight and in the fertile conversation that ensued, I learned many new things:
Beard and union suit is an acceptable fire-fighting outfit.
Your confreres in religion many not find it as funny and lighthearted as you do to jump in a fountain with your habit on.
Electricity may, or may not, have a hard time going up hill.
Italian bats are smarter than you, so don't even think about it.
Magicians who give magic shows in Latin have no need of stage names.
In the olden days when a young and liberated man would grow his hair long, it made the conferral of tonsure very entertaining.
Germans always want to sing.
There are places, houses of Franciscan friars to be more precise, where one is only allowed to smoke inside.
Beard and union suit is an acceptable fire-fighting outfit.
Your confreres in religion many not find it as funny and lighthearted as you do to jump in a fountain with your habit on.
Electricity may, or may not, have a hard time going up hill.
Italian bats are smarter than you, so don't even think about it.
Magicians who give magic shows in Latin have no need of stage names.
In the olden days when a young and liberated man would grow his hair long, it made the conferral of tonsure very entertaining.
Germans always want to sing.
There are places, houses of Franciscan friars to be more precise, where one is only allowed to smoke inside.
Day in the Life of Fr. Guardian
I call company A, in the business of service X, to take care of X for the friary. Representative of company A informs me that my predecessor fired company A, telling company A that service X would now be taken care of by company B, which is in the business of service Y, but also, apparently, able to take care of service X. Unfortunately, my predecessor later fired company B, in favor of having service Y rendered by company C. Company C, though highly competent at service Y among many others, does not deal with service X. So I would have to re-hire company A for service X, if it weren't for an issue asserted by civil government entity Z demanding resolution before service X can be rendered. So now I have to call company D to take care of the assertion of civil government entity Z before I can call company A again to re-retain them once again for service X.
This is leaving the world?
This is leaving the world?
Being a Unique Snowflake
Thinking on St. Bruno for his feast day this morning, I opened up the home page of the Carthusian order. I don't know if it's some kind of quote or motto or something, but I was struck by the greeting to visitors:
"Friend, whoever you are, whatever led you to this site, welcome. You will not find anything fashionable, not even a concern for being different."
I find that profound and challenging. Anyone who wants to live a devout life of any sort must forever struggle with the rotten intuition of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men. This is especially true in a society that has given up not only on the truth of eschatology but even the erstatz eschatologies of the worldly philosophers of history and thus craves novelty and celebrity as the only things left to provide temporary relief from the general aimlessness.
When we decide each day that we want to live a spiritual life, the devil will do everything he can to stoke our vainglory and encourage us to think it zeal and righteousness. The injury of original sin has left each of us with a little narcissistic celebrity inside. It's easy to get convinced that this person is our 'leadership potential' or our zeal for the reform of others. Since it's easier to worship a celebrity than to worship the living God, the devil sees a lot of potential for damage to souls through ministers who let themselves become their own worst selves.
The good news is that God wills to save us from ourselves. The very work of prayer teaches us interior poverty because God refuses to be a commodity or a possession. A life of prayer doesn't make us special, but instead teaches us that the need to be special is a dead end that leads only to alienation. The God who desires us in prayer is no-thing that can be had and no credential that can be pinned to our insecure heart. Prayer delivers us from the horrendous cut-throat system of this world in which I can only be somebody if everyone else is a nobody. Prayer opens us to the truth that we are all somebody only because of the Someone who is the Ground and Love out of which we are all spoken into being. The spiritual life exists not to help us indulge our need to be special or different, but to let go of it.
'Be yourself', as we were told as children. True enough, but they didn't know what they were talking about. Being yourself does not mean what the world thinks it means, namely indulging one's quirks and so-called individuality so as to wrap a certain uniqueness around the meaningless and moral chaos that the world asks us to accept. No, being yourself means letting God love the person he created, and discovering the liberating humility of journeying through the discovery of who that person really is.
"The way to contemplation is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 250)
"Friend, whoever you are, whatever led you to this site, welcome. You will not find anything fashionable, not even a concern for being different."
I find that profound and challenging. Anyone who wants to live a devout life of any sort must forever struggle with the rotten intuition of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men. This is especially true in a society that has given up not only on the truth of eschatology but even the erstatz eschatologies of the worldly philosophers of history and thus craves novelty and celebrity as the only things left to provide temporary relief from the general aimlessness.
When we decide each day that we want to live a spiritual life, the devil will do everything he can to stoke our vainglory and encourage us to think it zeal and righteousness. The injury of original sin has left each of us with a little narcissistic celebrity inside. It's easy to get convinced that this person is our 'leadership potential' or our zeal for the reform of others. Since it's easier to worship a celebrity than to worship the living God, the devil sees a lot of potential for damage to souls through ministers who let themselves become their own worst selves.
The good news is that God wills to save us from ourselves. The very work of prayer teaches us interior poverty because God refuses to be a commodity or a possession. A life of prayer doesn't make us special, but instead teaches us that the need to be special is a dead end that leads only to alienation. The God who desires us in prayer is no-thing that can be had and no credential that can be pinned to our insecure heart. Prayer delivers us from the horrendous cut-throat system of this world in which I can only be somebody if everyone else is a nobody. Prayer opens us to the truth that we are all somebody only because of the Someone who is the Ground and Love out of which we are all spoken into being. The spiritual life exists not to help us indulge our need to be special or different, but to let go of it.
'Be yourself', as we were told as children. True enough, but they didn't know what they were talking about. Being yourself does not mean what the world thinks it means, namely indulging one's quirks and so-called individuality so as to wrap a certain uniqueness around the meaningless and moral chaos that the world asks us to accept. No, being yourself means letting God love the person he created, and discovering the liberating humility of journeying through the discovery of who that person really is.
"The way to contemplation is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 250)
October 5, 2011
39. For Chastity
Back in this post I remarked on my discovery of the Mass formulary ad postulandam continentiam in the 2002 Missale Romanum, and how it doesn't appear in the soon-to-be-replaced American English sacramentary. With a little more research I found that this set of prayers appears in older missals, and had been restored by the 2002 missal.
Now that we finally can have our hands on the new translation, I see that this Mass does indeed appear, under "Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions 39, "For Chastity." I like the Prayer after Communion the best:
Through the Sacraments we have received, O Lord,
may our heart and our body flourish anew
by a keen sense of modesty and renewed chastity,
so that what has passed our lips as food
we may posses in purity of heart.
Through Christ our Lord.
I appreciate these sense in which chastity and modesty are the flourishing of body and heart, and that the end of both is our appreciation of Holy Communion.
Given the world we live in and the state of the Church, why would someone have thought it a good idea to get rid of such a set of prayers?
Now that we finally can have our hands on the new translation, I see that this Mass does indeed appear, under "Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions 39, "For Chastity." I like the Prayer after Communion the best:
Through the Sacraments we have received, O Lord,
may our heart and our body flourish anew
by a keen sense of modesty and renewed chastity,
so that what has passed our lips as food
we may posses in purity of heart.
Through Christ our Lord.
I appreciate these sense in which chastity and modesty are the flourishing of body and heart, and that the end of both is our appreciation of Holy Communion.
Given the world we live in and the state of the Church, why would someone have thought it a good idea to get rid of such a set of prayers?
October 4, 2011
St. Francis and Me
The feast of St. Francis. How this funny little man has driven my life in so many directions!
I first met him in a history class in the spring of 1992. I was a sophomore in college. The first Iraq war had left this punk rock kid longing for a way to opt of the horrendous cut-throat system of this world. On the other side, Christianity was starting to tug on my spirit. Francis synthesized an example for me that captured both. I was set on the path of my Franciscan journey, without even yet being baptized.
A year later, a newly initiated Catholic Christian, I found myself wandering through Europe with a friend who was a student at Marquette. After a wonderful Easter in Verona, we came to a disagreement on our next stop. He wanted to go to Switzerland to try to go skiing. I wanted to go to Assisi. So we went to Assisi where we celebrated my companion's birthday, and then he went off to his own adventures. Alone I was in Assisi for almost a week, praying all day, taking it all in. In the vainglory that I called being romantic at the time, how I wanted to throw away my wallet and just crawl into a cave like I was brother Giles or somebody, giving the rest of my life to the praise of the Most High who had made all his creatures so good and beautiful in imitation of Himself!
Returning to the States, I finished college and then went off immediately to become a friar myself. Filled with zeal, I made a good go of it. But it was too much too soon. When my third anniversary of baptism rolled around, I already found myself an invested, novice religious. The interior work of the novitiate revealed my lack of roots. I had to leave, and did so on Christmas morning, 1995. It was one of the hardest moments of my life. It was the first time I was off the pre-set, linear path. I had no idea what to do next. But the Most High himself revealed to me that this was the Franciscan poverty I had been desiring the whole time, to have to depend on God even to know who you were and what you had to do next.
Soon the Holy Spirit got me a job where I could serve humble folks and learn for myself patience, humility, and dependence on God. A few years went by. Around the winter of 1999, several people asked me if I had ever thought about the priesthood. I took at as a sign, and went up to meet with the vocation director of my diocese. Praying in the seminary chapel beforehand, I asked God to reveal his will to me through the interview. It went so poorly that I had to suppress laughter after it was done. I thought I was a good candidate for seminary: young, coming with an undergraduate transcript eminently suited to the requirements, active in my parish, etc. But the vocation director was right: I hadn't seem to have thought the whole thing through.
What did the bad interview mean, given that I had asked God to reveal himself through what I would experience? Going home, I picked up the Testament of Francis. That was it, I realized: I was a Franciscan. Having met the Capuchins while I was a novice in the OFM, I called them up.
That's some of how Francis has been with me. I continue to pray to him, read his writings, and read about him. In some ways parallel to my relationship with God himself, Francis becomes more compelling over time, but harder to pin down. He was a curious person.
St. Francis, pray for us.
I first met him in a history class in the spring of 1992. I was a sophomore in college. The first Iraq war had left this punk rock kid longing for a way to opt of the horrendous cut-throat system of this world. On the other side, Christianity was starting to tug on my spirit. Francis synthesized an example for me that captured both. I was set on the path of my Franciscan journey, without even yet being baptized.
A year later, a newly initiated Catholic Christian, I found myself wandering through Europe with a friend who was a student at Marquette. After a wonderful Easter in Verona, we came to a disagreement on our next stop. He wanted to go to Switzerland to try to go skiing. I wanted to go to Assisi. So we went to Assisi where we celebrated my companion's birthday, and then he went off to his own adventures. Alone I was in Assisi for almost a week, praying all day, taking it all in. In the vainglory that I called being romantic at the time, how I wanted to throw away my wallet and just crawl into a cave like I was brother Giles or somebody, giving the rest of my life to the praise of the Most High who had made all his creatures so good and beautiful in imitation of Himself!
Returning to the States, I finished college and then went off immediately to become a friar myself. Filled with zeal, I made a good go of it. But it was too much too soon. When my third anniversary of baptism rolled around, I already found myself an invested, novice religious. The interior work of the novitiate revealed my lack of roots. I had to leave, and did so on Christmas morning, 1995. It was one of the hardest moments of my life. It was the first time I was off the pre-set, linear path. I had no idea what to do next. But the Most High himself revealed to me that this was the Franciscan poverty I had been desiring the whole time, to have to depend on God even to know who you were and what you had to do next.
Soon the Holy Spirit got me a job where I could serve humble folks and learn for myself patience, humility, and dependence on God. A few years went by. Around the winter of 1999, several people asked me if I had ever thought about the priesthood. I took at as a sign, and went up to meet with the vocation director of my diocese. Praying in the seminary chapel beforehand, I asked God to reveal his will to me through the interview. It went so poorly that I had to suppress laughter after it was done. I thought I was a good candidate for seminary: young, coming with an undergraduate transcript eminently suited to the requirements, active in my parish, etc. But the vocation director was right: I hadn't seem to have thought the whole thing through.
What did the bad interview mean, given that I had asked God to reveal himself through what I would experience? Going home, I picked up the Testament of Francis. That was it, I realized: I was a Franciscan. Having met the Capuchins while I was a novice in the OFM, I called them up.
That's some of how Francis has been with me. I continue to pray to him, read his writings, and read about him. In some ways parallel to my relationship with God himself, Francis becomes more compelling over time, but harder to pin down. He was a curious person.
St. Francis, pray for us.
October 3, 2011
The New Translation: What of the Hours?
The new translation is afoot. At the parish where I celebrated Mass yesterday the new Gloria was sung. Here in the States we are now allowed to have to the books, and who knows how many are in the mail. Very soon sacred ministers and seminarians, sacristans and liturgy coordinators will be perusing and inspecting the new missal with delight or disgust, depending on what they have decided upon for themselves.
As I've looked forward to all of this myself, a question keeps bugging me. What of the Liturgy of the Hours? On both rubrical and theological grounds, one might presume that more general changes like and with your spirit will flow to the whole of the liturgy as it is celebrated in English. But what of, for example, the collects? Eight weeks from now, when the first Sunday of Advent arrives, we will pray the Opening Prayer for Mass in the new translation. But we will still have the 1975 American English Liturgy of the Hours on that day, in which we will find printed the old version of the same prayer. So will it happen that the American-English speaking Church will pray, on that day, the new version of the prayer once (at Mass) and the old version for the other five times it is to be prayed on that liturgical day? (I.e. Evening Prayer I, Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer II)
Sundays are, of course, the most glaring case with regard to this problem, but the same question arises for almost every day outside of ferias of Ordinary Time--and even on those days the collect for the Sunday of the week is presented as the ordinary option to conclude the Office of Readings.
In the end, this presents a fine opportunity for a new edition of the Liturgy of the Hours in English, which would be a chance to fix and update some other things as well. It could also be a moment to follow the lead of the new English missal and let go of the division between Commonwealth and American English.
So, if you pray the Divine Office with the American English Liturgy of the Hours, what will you do on the first Sunday of Advent?
As I've looked forward to all of this myself, a question keeps bugging me. What of the Liturgy of the Hours? On both rubrical and theological grounds, one might presume that more general changes like and with your spirit will flow to the whole of the liturgy as it is celebrated in English. But what of, for example, the collects? Eight weeks from now, when the first Sunday of Advent arrives, we will pray the Opening Prayer for Mass in the new translation. But we will still have the 1975 American English Liturgy of the Hours on that day, in which we will find printed the old version of the same prayer. So will it happen that the American-English speaking Church will pray, on that day, the new version of the prayer once (at Mass) and the old version for the other five times it is to be prayed on that liturgical day? (I.e. Evening Prayer I, Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer II)
Sundays are, of course, the most glaring case with regard to this problem, but the same question arises for almost every day outside of ferias of Ordinary Time--and even on those days the collect for the Sunday of the week is presented as the ordinary option to conclude the Office of Readings.
In the end, this presents a fine opportunity for a new edition of the Liturgy of the Hours in English, which would be a chance to fix and update some other things as well. It could also be a moment to follow the lead of the new English missal and let go of the division between Commonwealth and American English.
So, if you pray the Divine Office with the American English Liturgy of the Hours, what will you do on the first Sunday of Advent?
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