Jesus Loves You

Today's gospel is a great encouragement to anyone who lives or desires a devout life:

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement, his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
(Mark 10: 17-22)

There is such beauty and good news in St. Mark's little detail that Jesus looked at the man and loved him. For what does Jesus have a special love for the devout soul?

Not for its perfection, certainly, for this man lacked what he still needed to do to be perfect.

And not for any perfection that it will later have either, for Jesus certainly knew that this man would go away sad.

So for what does Jesus love the devout soul? Simply for the eager desire to want to be open to the next step, regardless of relative success or failure in the spiritual life. That's it.

From My Confessor: On Trials and Maturity

'So you find yourself in the position of someone who is partly spiritual mature, but not fully. And both can be used to your advantage.

'You are fortunate in that you have the spiritual maturity to recognize that your trials and challenges are a gift from God, and you trust Him enough to know--at least in your head--that they are for your own good and serve His purposes for you in your vocation. On the other hand, you recognize that you are not yet fully mature because you do not always receive and use well the difficulties and sufferings presented by your trials, and sometimes these become occasions of distraction and sin in your failure to accept them. So, let your recognition of your spiritual maturity give you the strength of gratefulness to God, and your recognition of your weakness give you the security of humility and dependence on Him.'

Soteriological Hijinx in the Friary

Coming downstairs this morning, I noticed that the crucifix over our refectory table was missing. In its place was a ransom note: $20,000 was to be dropped at a certain corner in our neighborhood, or Jesus would "get it."

I don't know what it was about but nonetheless I thought it somewhat odd and hard to imagine any meaningful sense in which Jesus could 'get it' any more than he already has in the Passion and death he endured for us, and I noticed how the demand tried to reverse who is paying a ransom for whom. As as a licensed dispenser of sacred doctrine, I had to amend the note.

I wrote: 'Jesus already got it, and paid us back with a New Creation.'

No ransom is demanded of us, for one has already been made for us.

Extra Miles and New Girdings

I received an encouraging gift after Mass this past Sunday: a little girl presented me with a drawing she had made in crayon. I didn't quite understand what it was supposed to be, so I asked her to explain it. It was the person going the 'extra mile' from the gospel of that day, she explained.(Matthew 5:41) Here were the people, and there was the road--complete with cars, trees, and a little pond with fish in it.



I put the picture up here above my desk. I had been thinking of putting a crucifix there, to help me remember to work hard at my current obedience and unite its trials to the Lord's Sacrifice, but this picture of the extra mile is just as good. Of course it reminds me to pray for the little girl and her family, in thanksgiving for their devotion and good example, and to remember the basic goodness of children, but I think that God is also inviting me to reflect on the hard teaching of this gospel.

I remember going to one of my very first meetings with a formation director in a very agitated state. I had only been in religious life for a few days, but I had already seen a lot that had confused and scandalized me. The director gave me some saving advice: in each case I should ask myself what the Holy Spirit had asked me to look after, and leave the rest to God. If some aspects of religious life did not seem very religious, or even appeared irreligious, I should remember that the Holy Spirit had not asked me to be a superior or a spiritual director, and that only my own soul and my own religious life was my worry. I need not be scandalized by anybody's behavior, because it wasn't my concern.

This bracketing strategy saved my vocation, and enabled me to finish religious formation (on the second try) to become a perpetually professed friar and ordained priest. But many times strategies and behaviors that we learn in order to survive at one moment of life become maladaptive later on. I'm wondering if this is what God is telling me through the little girl's picture of the extra mile. I am grown-up religious now. I am a priest. Perhaps it's no longer enough to limit my attention to a narrowly defined set of concerns in my own personal obedience, to what, specifically and formally, the Holy Spirit has asked me to look after. Thank God that I have not (yet) been asked to be a superior or a pastor, but I do have a certain voice, a certain obligation to give good example in a way that I have not had before. Perhaps it's time to let go of interior bracketings and boundaries that help me to preserve my recollection and protect me from being scandalized, dismayed, or having to fight about things all the time. Perhaps I should look at my letter of obedience and ask myself what the 'extra mile' might be.

It edges into another reflection I've been having lately. I'm aware that statistically, I'm at a moment in my vocation when many guys leave. It's a well known phenomenon, and has been well-researched. I never understood how religious or priests could leave just a few years after final profession or ordination, but now that I find myself in that moment in my own life, I think that maybe I understand. Or at least I understand what would be the nature of that temptation for me. I'm not thinking of leaving, or, perhaps better, my temptations in this regard aren't relatively fierce for me at this moment. But maybe now I get it.

In religious formation and study for priesthood there are a ton of trials. They aren't the trials you had imagined for yourself, and nor are they the ones you would choose. But there is also a lot of reinforcement, and there is an increasing freedom and facility with the life as you move on. There are ceremonies that mark every little movement and achievement. Sure, you get up there and announce in your vows that you are renouncing this and that, and giving yourself over to God in this or that way, but there can still be some ego in it. I make this big, counter-cultural, glamorous decision to enter religious life. There are vows of renunciation and the ordinations of service, but they are still my vows and my ordinations. They are things that I do on some level.

Two or three years after all that, as all of the being made much of and the big days of ceremony and celebration fade into the past, a new challenge to self-renunciation begins to come into focus. God continues to invite me into a deeper renunciation of self, but now without the natural and supernatural encouragements that went with the initial training and initiation into this life. The experience reminds me of another gospel passage, Jesus speaking to Peter in John 21:18-19:

"Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God. And when he had said this, he said to him, "Follow me."

Being in my second assignment out of formation feels something like that. The challenge is to remember that the invitation to the deeper renunciation of self is an invitation to glorify God through such a death.

Still Got It

I'm visiting the friary attached to the parish where I was assigned before being sent to my current assignment of full-time study. Looking at the parish schedule last night, I noticed that the pastor was to have both morning Masses today. So I volunteered to take the early Mass, which I had last celebrated back in the middle of July.

I'm so glad I did. So many things reminded me of graces and signs of graces I miss from being a parish priest: the lingering smell of incense in the corridor that goes to the church, reminding one of the great mysteries of God's mercy celebrated in funerals, the quiet solitude of entering the dark church early in the morning to open up and set up, the privilege of being witness to the deep and durable faith and devotion of ordinary people.

I thanked the early crowd for their prayers, and asked for more.

Brevity is a value for the typical early Mass-goer, so I was happy to hear that I still had it: "Thanks, Father. Good to see you. You're one of the good ones; you don't talk too much."

Best Compliment

This has to be the best compliment I've ever received on my preaching.

"I usually write my check for the collection during the homily. Today I forgot!"

A Child's Questions, Lovecraft, and God

Like a lot of people, I received an Amazon Kindle e-reader for Christmas. I've really enjoyed it and have found several uses for it. One of my favorites is that it is for me like an ever-accessible version of the bin of random paperbacks at a used book store. So I've used it to pick up--mostly for free--all kinds of random old things I might want to read or read once again. One of these was a big collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories for only a couple of dollars.

I was really into Lovecraft for a spell in my middle teen years, and as I've read a few of these odd stories once again, full as they are with both fantastical beings and pointedly conservative old New England prejudices, I have wondered why they were once so enjoyable for me. I think I have an idea.

When I was little, like during recess in elementary school, I used to wonder idly sometimes about a lot of questions I had. Some of these were cosmic. Why was there something instead of nothing? What would it be like if there was nothing? I used to be fascinated by how hard it was to think about it. Others were about how the world seemed to be set up. If fog was the same thing as clouds, as I was told, why did the two look different? Did the water in the ocean go all the way to the bottom? How come you could sometimes feel the air, and sometimes not, but you could never see it? How come if you thought about it, you had to breathe on purpose or hold your breath and die (as I was told) but at other moments you realized that you were breathing all along without thinking about it? Still other questions, and in some ways the most interesting and frustrating ones, centered around my experience as an individual self-consciousness. Could this particular self-consciousness--which I am--have been born in another place or time? Or could it only have come to exist in these particular historical circumstances? When I was dead, I was told, it would be just the same as before I was born. But could that be?

I don't mean that I had the proper language for these questions at the time; mostly I felt them more than I was able to articulate them. Not having the language, my attempts to ask adults about them were mostly pointless. I remember in particular that when I tried to ask questions about the 'individual self-consciousness' I only had language to talk about particularity in terms of location and vision, and so I talked about my 'outlook.'

All this is just to say that ever since I was little I have had a kind of sense that there is more to the story, that we live in the midst of a much larger reality and history of which we are only dimly aware in our day-to-day lives. This is very much the sense one gets in Lovecraft; there is much 'more to the story,' to the history of the earth and the cosmos, and it is very, very sinister and will threaten your sanity even to become aware of it for a moment.

A few years later in life I would realize that the 'more to the story' of which I had always been aware and curious about at some level, was the Ground of all being that religious people call 'God.' Far from being sinister, this 'more to the story' was entirely benevolent. As one of my professors likes to translate what the medievals call the benignitas of God, it is 'aggressive goodness.' I was grateful to discover that this reality, which turned out to be more a reality than anything else, could be stepped into through the Word made flesh. And so I got to be the Christian.