What Things?

Before I came here to Rome, a friar reported to me a comment about my assignment that another friar had made. The latter friar said that perhaps I was suited to a Roman assignment because I didn't seem 'easily impressed.' When I heard this, I didn't agree. I'm often impressed, I objected. I'm just not easily seduced, I remember saying.

Sister Ash

Our Ash Wednesday Mass provided a charming instance of omnis traductor traditor.

One of the preacher's points included quoting St. Francis as he comes to us in the fifth chapter of the Legend of the Three Companions:

Whenever he would eat with seculars, and they would give him some delicious food, he would eat only a little of it, offering some excuse so that it would not seem he was refusing it because of fasting. When he ate with his brothers, he often sprinkled ashes on the food he was eating, telling a brother, as a cover for his abstinence, that "Brother Ash" was chaste. (FA: ED II, 77)

Shrimp and Blindness

Ash Wednesday. My twenty-first Lent. Every Ash Wednesday I write some version of the same old post. So this year I won't. But if you want to read it anyway, here's a simple version and here's a more baroque one.

This morning I was praying on the fast today, and praying for inspiration about fasting during Lent. Into my thoughts came a memory and a new understanding. With the new understanding, came a new repentance.

Lost, Unworthy, Burning, and Sent

I was thinking about the calls of Isaiah and Peter as we have them in the readings for Mass today.

It's funny; we tend to think of heaven as pleasant, or at least comforting--at funerals we are consoled by our hope that the faithful departed are now on their final journey to heaven and we take courage for our own lives in looking forward to heaven ourselves--but the prophet Isaiah, faced with the heavenly court, is afraid. Finding himself in that blessed firmament, the first thing created after the light, Isaiah can only say, "Woe is me! For I am lost." (Isaiah 6:5a, RSV)

Overheard: St. Francis Is Not A Mushroom

From an edifying friar:

"I turned to study the Church fathers because, when I was a young friar, St. Francis started to give me indigestion. Not St. Francis himself, but the way they used him. Without an idea of the tradition of religious life they would justify any crazy thing they wanted to do with, 'St. Francis says this...' or 'St. Francis says we have to...' as if St. Francis was born like a mushroom."

Apparently, to be born like a mushroom is a French saying that suggests someone or something born ex nihilo, without provenance or parentage.

Amen.

Apostolic Non-Adventure

Warning: this is something of a non-post.

Recently I went on my first errand to procure a papal blessing, and I thought it might result in one of my 'Italian Adventures' posts. You know what I'm talking about, those papal blessings. You've seen them. People get them for special occasions, big anniversaries and things like that. Here's a picture of one I found on Wikimedia Commons:



Obtaining these things for purposes associated with the English-using Capuchin world is part of my new job. You can arrange for them in lots of the gift shops around the Vatican, but because I thought it would be more prone to having an interesting adventure, I decided to go right to the office in the Vatican itself, the Elemosineria Apostolica. How would you translate that? The 'Apostolic Almonry,' I guess. Unfortunately, no great story emerged.

Idea For A New Religious Community

One of the things that makes religious life in common a rich adventure is that we all tend to play out our family of origin issues in community. Since religious life is a highly idealistic enterprise and bears--for better or for worse--the idea of the 'pursuit of perfection', but since we all come from families made up of imperfect people, ourselves included, it can get a little messy. Nonetheless--and I think this is what God wills--it can be redemptive; inner children are re-born of the Holy Spirit and souls re-parent themselves into flourishing and fruitful celibates. Sometimes, though, it doesn't work so well. Most of us, of course, end up somewhere in the middle, blessed messes of wheat and weeds. As my first priest once said to me, one of the hardest things about our life is finding ourselves neither remarkably holy nor remarkable sinners. Nevertheless, our hope is in a God who promised to burn the weeds and harvest the wheat for eternal life.