The Sigh at the Heart of Worship

The last couple of months have been really busy for me: I received my formal letter of entrance into the Marist International Novitiate in Davao, Philippines; I premiered a new chamber composition at Georgetown University;  I’ve been preparing for comprehensive exams and working on my master’s thesis in composition; I , along with the Radiant Obscurity Collective, released a new album.  All the while, I continue in Marist community life, and in hospice and music ministry.  The late nights, anxiety about passing comps, anxiety about taking another step forward in religious life (oh, and of moving to a new continent in a month), and absorption in writing a piece of music that I feel is really important — all of these things took a toll on my life of prayer.  Through the grace of God, all of these things have also taught me about the centrality of holistic worship in the Christian life, making me realize how much I long for prayer, even when I can’t seem to get out of my own way when I try to pray.

Even in religious life, prayer is hard

I’ve often had friends come and visit me at Marist College here in Washington, DC, and invariably they make some comment about how amazing it is to be able to just walk downstairs in the morning and celebrate Eucharist with the community, how incredible it is to live with the Blessed Sacrament, how awesome it is that a community would gather to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.  And they’re absolutely right; all of those things are amazing.  What I often think is not understood, however, is that the challenges and obstacles of prayer exist even here.  I remember once, when I was spending a few days at a Trappist monastery, I went for a walk while praying a rosary.  In the woods, I ran into a fellow not much older than I who was working in the woods.  Though we had seen each other around the monastery in the preceding days, we hadn’t broken silence to talk.  Now, though, we exchanged a few words.  He was a postulant with the Trappists and was in his first month at the monastery and he said something like, “You would think that living in a monastery would make prayer easy … after all, that’s the life.  But once you account for the manual labor, the fatigue that comes with gathering together to pray the office several times a day, and the community obligations, there isn’t that much time for personal prayer, and what time is left is usually filled with distractions or fatigue.”  I smiled and nodded.  I’m not a monk, but my experience is similar.

Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, VA, where the monk and I spoke of the difficulties of prayer in religious life.

Writing music is a consuming experience.  Stumbling upon the right musical idea is exhilarating and it literally fills me with awe.  Working through all the wrong ideas that come before the right one is emotionally taxing — I frequently find myself pacing, beating piano keys as hard as I can, trying to get to the right idea.  Then, once the idea is there in the mind, the process of transferring it to paper is exceedingly difficult, because paper is an inherently limited medium and there’s a lot of doubt about whether the thing you put on paper is a remotely accurate representation of the sonic idea in your mind.  It’s a process that haunts me in my dreams, let alone at Mass or at times when I’m supposed to be in prayer.  The times for prayer come and go and I realize that, whether it was music or something else, I often have never actually entered into genuine prayer.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel refers to a phenomenon like this as “The Sigh” in his book Man’s Quest for God:

About a hundred years ago, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter of Ger pondered over the question of what a certain shoemaker of his acquaintance should do about his morning prayer.  His customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes.  The shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour, work on them all night and part of the morning, in order to deliver them before their owners had to go to work.  When should the shoemaker say his morning prayer?  Should he pray quickly the first thing in the morning, and then go back to work?  Or should he let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raising his hammer from the shoes, utter a sigh: ‘Woe unto me, I haven’t prayer yet!’?  Perhaps that sigh is worth more than prayer itself.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re a shoemaker or a musician, whether we’re single, married, or in consecrated life … genuine prayer seems to elude us most of our moments and days, and we’re left simply uttering that sigh: “Woe unto me, I haven’t prayed yet.”

The problem of prayer

Rabbi Heschel goes on to say that, “We do not refuse to pray; we abstain from it.  We ring the hollow bell of selfishness rather than absorb the stillness that surrounds the world, hovering over all the restlessness and fear of life — the secret stillness that precedes our birth and succeeds our death.”  I struggle to pray because I struggle to leave behind my own self-assertion; I struggle to pray because I allow my fears, my concerns, my work, my self to draw my mind and heart away from the God who simply is, the God who creates and holds together all of creation in constant, unfailing love.  Rabbi Heschel explains our problem:

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.  Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.  It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we life.  Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?  Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers — wiser than all alphabets — clouds that die constantly for the sake of His glory, we are hating, hunting, hurting.  Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature.  It is so embarrassing to live!  How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings!  Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, to fulfill.  It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.

However, we often lack the strength to be grateful, the courage to answer, the ability to pray.  To escape from the mean and penurious, from calculating and scheming, is at times the parching desire of man.  Tired of discord, he longs to escape from his own mind — and for the peace of prayer … But how can man draw song out of his heart if his consciousness is a woeful turmoil of fear and ambition?  He has nothing to offer but disgust, and the weariness of wasting the soul …

Trembling in the realization that we are a blend of modesty and insolence, of self-denial and bias, we beseech God for rescue, for help in the control of our thoughts, words, and deeds.  We lay all our forces before Him.  Prayer is arrival at the border.  The dominion is Thine.  Take away from me all that may not enter Thy realm.

To pray is to forget ourselves and return to wonder at the presence and love of God.  But to come to this place is impossible for any one of us: how could we possibly let go of our fears, thoughts, anger, or ambition?  How can we, who are selves, let go of our own subjectivity?  It is impossible for us, but “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).  Our plaintive sigh, our sorrow for being unable to escape ourselves in order to open our hearts to God, that sigh is taken up by the Spirit who begins the work of prayer in us.

One haunting image of being brought to union with God, John McCrady’s Swing Low (1937).

A return to worship

When I was a little younger, I used to think that spiritual discipline would help me to pray.  In some ways it did, but mostly it didn’t.  Having a set time for prayer is good, but it also can be something that plays into our ego: setting disciplines for ourselves and then meeting them can make us think that prayer is our work, and that we’re getting “good” at it.  Such a spirit contradicts the very heart of prayer, which is, at its core, an opening of the heart to God.  So, how can we learn to live in a way that supports an openness towards God?  I think that a fundamental view of life as worship can help us to be open to receive the gift of prayer.  It also requires us make a distinction between Catholic and Protestant theologies of worship and recognize the ways in which they are both true.

For Catholics, worship is something that is initiated by God.  The Eucharist, the “source and summit” of the Christian life, comes to us from God.  When we celebrate the Eucharist on earth, we participate in the heavenly liturgy portrayed in Hebrews and Revelation — not in a symbolic way, but in a real way.  We are, for a brief moment, actually worshipping with the communion of saints and angels, with all of humanity, at the heavenly banquet.  This should fill us with awe.  Liturgy isn’t about us, and it doesn’t come from us — it’s source is in God, and we are simply participants.

For many Protestants, worship is something that arises from the community of believers.  When we gather together, God is present among us, and worship is what we do to praise God, to express our gratitude, to present our prayers of supplication, to give concrete and communal expression to our experience of God.  In short, worship is our response to the love that God has shown to us.

Both of these theologies of worship are true.  As a Catholic, I obviously believe that the sacraments and the liturgy are things that are initiated by God, and given to us for our participation while on earth.  They are beyond us.  But I also know that worship isn’t limited to liturgy, and that, with the grace of God, we can choose to live a life of worship.  To quote Rabbi Heschel again:

To worship is to rise to a higher level of existence, to see the world from the point of view of God.  In worship we discover that the ultimate way is not to have a symbol, but to be a symbol, to stand for the divine.  The ultimate way is to sanctify thoughts, to sanctify time, to consecrate words, to hallow deeds.  The study of the word of God is an example of the sanctification of thought; the Seventh Day is an example of the sanctification of time; prayer is an example of the consecration of words; observance is an example of the hallowing of deeds.

In a certain way, I can’t choose to pray, but I can choose to worship.  I don’t have real control over my thoughts and feelings; feeling fear about the upcoming novitiate, being distracted by musical ideas, being anxious about comps or finishing a thesis … these things are a reality, and they keep me from prayer.  Only if God sees fit to lift me out of them (and to lift me out of myself) can I be free from them.  But I do have at least some control over worship.  I can choose to consecrate time by giving it to God; I can choose to read Scripture or to say prayers; I can choose to try and live in a way that sows peace and love among others; I can choose to try and pray.  I can choose to at least try and live a life of worship, but I can’t make it succeed.  That depends on God alone.  And in realizing that, I realize the depths of my poverty and helplessness, and I can begin to utter that sigh that may be worth more than prayer itself.

Perhaps the most appropriate artistic representation of “The Sigh”: Jean-François Millet’s painting, The Angelus (1857-9).

A Broken Body

I haven’t written much in the last few weeks.  Truth be told, I had some posts lined up and drafted a couple weeks ago, but it just doesn’t feel right to post them now, with what is happening in the Church throughout these days.  I keep feeling like I’m in some nightmare that doesn’t end: more allegations of abuse – particularly by bishops; an archbishop accusing the pope of covering up abuse; conspiracy theories about sexual abuse, homosexuality, and the Vatican bank; the scapegoating of LGBT Catholics, coupled with actual allegations of some priests and cardinals hiring male prostitutes in Rome. It’s a mess.  For reasons I won’t treat here, there’s an aspect to all of this that is also somewhat personal for me.  I’m horrified, sad, confused, angry, and hurt, and the feeling doesn’t go away. When I was visiting my family in Tennessee, I found it legitimately difficult to go to Church – not because I doubted God, or the reality of the Sacraments, or even the goodness of the priests and people in my parish – but because setting foot inside a Catholic Church right now just brings to the forefront all of this pain and confusion, and I find it difficult to focus on God in the midst of all of this.

It’s also made me think about my vocation – I’m headed off to the novitiate in the Philippines in mid-November, and somewhere in my mind, I haven’t been able to stop asking if this is really where I feel called to be. The reality is that, in the midst of everything going on right now, I know, maybe more than ever, that I need to be Catholic, and that I am called to continue in this vocation.  Why? Because in the middle of betrayal and hatred, I cannot deny the overwhelming reality of the love of God. It’s the reality that leads me to pray the psalms, to be present at Mass, to kneel down in a dark chapel and pray for the victims of abuse and for our Church before I go to bed.  In truth, to not follow through right now on my sense of vocation would be to follow something other than the love of God, which seems to impel me forward.  I continue because I believe in Love.  Philosophers may talk of God as an ultimate reality, as ipsum esse, as a first cause – but right now it all seems like bullshit.  If God is not Love, then this institution is dead, and there is no hope for the future. If God is not Love, we might as well pack up our things and go back to whatever we were doing before God found us.

A Love Story

Lately, my spiritual reading has come from The God Who Won’t Let Go, a fantastic book by Peter van Breemen, S.J. He begins the second chapter with a quote from philosopher Jorg Splett: “Every person needs more love than he or she deserves.”  What follows is a beautiful exploration on the reality of God’s love – that love is, “revealing to someone else that person’s own beauty” (Jean Vanier) and that:

God’s love is based on nothing.  That may sound somewhat disappointing.  We prefer to think: God loves me because I am so dedicated and unselfish or because of my personality, my special qualities.  When we are told that God’s love does not depend on these ‘things,’ the very natural and legitimate question arises, ‘Does the love of God, then, go out to me?’ The answer is an unqualified yes.  You, in the singular uniqueness of your personality, different from all others, are loved by God with an unconditional love and an inconceivably great fidelity and earnestness.  But you did absolutely nothing to arouse, elicit, or earn this love of God.  It was there before you existed.  God’s love is based on nothing!  Let us be very grateful for this truth.  If God’s love were based on something and this something broke down, then the whole structure would collapse.  But we are sure that this cannot happen, precisely because God’s love is based on nothing.

Not only is God’s love for me based on nothing, but “in our creation, we had a beginning, but the love in which God created us, was in God without beginning” (Julian of Norwich).  In short, what I believe beyond any shred of doubt is that I exist only because of an overflowing love that is God’s own nature and self – the same love that created all the people around me, who I also love.  The same love that created the gifts of music, mountains, and rivers, where I’ve felt ecstasy.  The same love that I feel when I encounter someone whose life differs from mine (and differs from the Christian ideal), in whom I see nothing but beauty.

Seven years ago, I recognized that what I experienced was the love of God.  Seeking truth – and oscillating between belief and unbelief – I decided one day that I was done with God and done with the Church.  By the time evening came, God had brought me to a pew in front of the Blessed Sacrament for Sunday Mass, and had revealed to me that he would move heaven and earth – and even suspend the laws of physics – just to draw close to me. Since then, some of the most intimate moments I’ve had with God have come in adoration, or simply in front of a tabernacle.  A few weeks ago, while I was on retreat, I was sitting in front of the tabernacle, and I experienced a moment where all the times when I had felt the touch of God on my heart, as I sat in front of the Blessed Sacrament, became real.  I was no longer in that chapel in southern Maryland – or, rather, I was, but I was also in the dark chapel at Marist College in Washington, DC; I was also in the chapel at Isabella Street in Boston, praying after coming back from an evening spent with the homeless; I was also at St. Clement’s Eucharistic Shrine, on the day God brought me back to the Church; I was also at the MIT Tech Catholic Community, where we were chanting the “Tantum Ergo” in front of the Blessed Sacrament; I was also back at St. Philip, the parish in which I was baptized and confirmed; and I was at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky; and in Marist chapels in Mexico and France; and all of those moments were one – God revealing how he has shown me his love through his presence in the Blessed Sacrament, “at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world, even to the end of time.”

Chapel at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Trappist, KY, USA.

And love doesn’t stop there – indeed, the Eucharistic love of Jesus is a culmination of the love that I’ve experienced with real people: friends who have consistently stood by me; a family that always loves and supports me; a dying woman from Senegal at whose bed I sat during her final days; “Ms. Francis,” another dying woman who would say the most beautiful prayers of thanksgiving before breakfast, despite having just grumbled about us being slow to bring her coffee; a self-interested, deeply sinful man who died doing – for maybe the only time in his life – an act of self-giving love; a family who, despite poverty and health issues, welcomed me into their home and who serve God always with joy – everywhere I turn, there is love.

Abuse is so horrendous precisely because it preys on our need for love, and then betrays us.  It’s really easy for me to understand why, given that, many would not want to come back to the Church.  And I don’t blame them; we (the Church) are to blame, not them.  We failed them and betrayed them.  Even so, for me turn my back on this Church and this vocation would be to deny that real love exists, to deny the most central reality of my life – that I am loved by God.  Once, when I was going through a difficult stretch, I remember confiding in a friend, which I had been hesitant to do.  We spoke, and his words were comforting, and later on, he texted me: “I’m not afraid to say ‘I love you’ because it is simply true.”  I can’t make sense of the abuse, hatred, and infighting in the Church, the likes of which I have never seen before.  In spite of that, I can’t deny that the love of God is here, because it is simply true.  I’m well aware that it sounds and seems ridiculous and absurd, but is that not the wisdom and foolishness of the cross?  I still believe in love.

A Broken Body

 If we’re honest with ourselves, the Eucharist should be a very disquieting thing.  I spoke in this post about feeling the touch and the love of God in the Eucharist, yet, the Eucharist is also one of the most violent realities we might encounter. The Body and Blood that we are invited to consume are the Body and Blood of a God who became flesh to show the way to light, and yet we preferred the darkness.  Humanity scapegoated the flesh of the Son of God instead of dealing with their own sinfulness and folly.  Humanity killed the Son of God to keep going along their earthly ways with their earthly wisdom, and now the Body that we consume has been beaten and broken, and the Blood shed for us.  That’s what we eat – and in eating it, that’s what we become.  Far from being some magical protection from the powers of darkness, consuming the Eucharist means that we take on the broken Body and Blood of Christ.  We become, in a sense, the Body of Jesus being scourged at the pillar and hung on the cross.  To accept the Eucharist is to accept the cross, and if this isn’t accepting the cross, I don’t know what is.

Those who are victims of abuse are being broken and crying out for justice.  Priests and religious who are being spat upon for their vocation take upon themselves the broken Body of Jesus.  The LGBT community, being scapegoated for the abuse of children, also take upon themselves the cross of Christ.  American Catholics, suddenly losing all faith in the institution of the Church take upon themselves the broken Body of Christ – much as Catholics in Latin America, Africa, and Asia took upon the broken Body of Christ when they persisted in their faith, despite the Church justifying and supporting their oppression and colonization.  Maybe this is our moment – coming from a wealthy, privileged nation and Church that has rarely faced real hardship or persecution – to take on Christ’s broken body, the way our brothers and sisters around the world have since the earliest days of Christian persecution.  I don’t know.

Crucifixion scene from the Martin Scorsese film, Silence.

Karl Rahner, during a Christmas sermon, said:

God has entrusted his last, deepest, and most beautiful word to the world, in the Word made flesh.  This Word says: I love you world, man and woman.  I am there.  I am with you.  I am your life.  I am your time.  I weep your tears.  I am your joy.  Do not be afraid.  When you do not know how to go any further, I am with you.  I am in your anguish, because I suffered it myself.  I am in your need and your death, because today I began to live and to die with you.  I am your life.  I promise you: for you, too, life is waiting.  For you, too, the gates will open.

What I do know is that love brought me into this world, and the love of God has been the deepest reality of my life.  Love gave its Body to be broken that I might live; let me be broken if it will mean that others have life and know the Love from which we come.

N.B. One of my favorite albums is “Ars Moriendi” (The Art of Dying”) by the Collection.  It seems like a particularly appropriate album for this time in the Church.  Especially the song below:

Lyrics can be found here.  God bless, friends.

On the Abuse Crisis, Homosexuality, and Celibacy

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here … after returning to Brownsville, I was on an 8-day silent retreat at Loyola on the Potomac in Faulkner, MD, then spending a few days visiting with my soon-to-be novice master, and am now visiting family before starting up the academic year again.  But a lot has happened within the Church since that time, and I feel some obligation to write about it, as emotions are (very understandably) running high, and it seems like a fitting time to bring some things together.

Sexual Abuse Crisis

July 28 marked one of the worst days in the sexual abuse crisis that the Catholic Church had faced, when Theodore McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals after credible reports surfaced about his abuse of a minor and several adults, especially during his days as a seminary rector in New Jersey.  This was the most personal the abuse crisis has been for me — I had met McCarrick on a couple of occasions and been to several Masses that he celebrated.  He had struck me as a good, kind man and a good preacher.  Clearly, he had me (and much of the rest of the Church) fooled.  The McCarrick scandal also highlights one of the great failures of the Church’s 2002 response to the sexual abuse crisis: a lack of accountability for bishops.  The American Catholic Bishops created a comprehensive plan for abuse prevention and clear standards for dealing with priests and deacons accused of abuse.  As someone who is bound by these standards, I can tell you that they are fairly strict.  They include:

• Spending literally days being analyzed and questioned by psychologists and psychiatrists to determine if I was a threat to children (or had other psychological issues that would prevent me from exercising ministry).
• Spending days of training on abuse prevention — including listening to abusers talk about the process of grooming children for abuse.
• Being bound by strict diocesan policies (that change slightly in every diocese) that require me to report to ecclesial and civil authorities even the slightest suspicion of abuse (this includes, by the way, being required to report abuse even if the victim is now an adult).
• Background checks, social media checks, and drug testing.
• In certain dioceses, not being permitted to close a door when somebody comes to meet with you.
• Windows everywhere to make sure that anywhere where a priest/deacon/religious might meet with somebody is never actually private.

The Church did a lot … but they never created standards for dealing with bishops accused of abuse.  Admittedly, it is nebulous whether a conference of bishops actually has the canonical authority to create such a policy, but at this point, it doesn’t matter.  Change some damn canons if you have to.  Accountability for bishops needs to happen immediately.  While the latest press release from the USCCB does seem to outline a good start, we (the people of the Church — laity, religious, seminarians, and clergy) need to demand more.  As the National Catholic Reporter editorial so strongly put it:

The revelations of the last two months make undeniably clear that it is time for the laity to reclaim our ownership of this church. We are the body of Christ, we are the church. It is time that we demand that bishops claim their true vocations as servants to the people of God. And they must live that way.

At this time, it seems laity can do very little to effect the changes needed to bring about the solutions to the large issues that plague the church now — careerism, abuse of power, lack of transparency, no accountability. The fact is laypeople in our church today have little power.

That said, as any community organizer would tell you, we have the power of the collective. Now more than ever, we — the laity — need to speak with a united voice. We must turn our anger into resolve.

It is shocking that after decades of revelations of sexual abuse of children, there is still no clear accountability for bishops. We must demand change.

First, tell our bishops that we no longer trust them, individually or collectively. The trust we may have had is now shattered.

Second, tell our bishops that regaining our trust requires reform in how the church as an institution operates.

This is not the time to play defense.  This is the time to acknowledge the horror and scale of this atrocity.  While many of the Pennsylvania cases do stem from prior to 2002 (thus prior to the plan most recently enacted to deal with this crisis), at the very least, this is a moment to renew our shame, sorrow, and righteous anger with the Church, and to ask what we — individually and collectively — can do.   No more shying away, no more not coming forward.  Real honesty and transparency, not in press releases, but in real life.

It’s clear that real accountability for bishops needs to be put in place.

On Homosexuality

While everyone is scrambling around to find people to blame and solutions to make this better, invariably some in the Catholic world seem to find this an appropriate time to hit on their favorite punching bag: homosexuality.  Let’s be really, really clear about something from the beginning: homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with the sexual abuse of children.  That is not up for debate.  Move on.

While I haven’t seen too many people directly blaming the abuse crisis on homosexuality (recently), this article from Fr. Dominic Legge OP seems to suggest that we will all be better off if we just stop admitting men with predominantly same-sex attraction into the priesthood.  Now, to give credit to Fr. Legge, he is absolutely write that sexually-active clergy are a stain on the Church, and that their crimes do perhaps rise to the level of sacrilege.  He’s also right that any “networks” of sexually active, homosexual priests need to be shut down immediately.  He’s not right that those with “deep-seated same-sex attraction” should not be admitted as candidates for priesthood or religious life (depending, of course, how you define the nature of this attraction).

Here’s why he’s wrong: we’re not judged by our thoughts or by our attractions.  They aren’t sinful.  Homosexual attractions may be “disordered,” but only in that the homosexual act can never fulfill the telos of the conjugal act of man and woman that is both procreative and unitive.  In the same way, if I am drawn to lust (after either a man or a woman), my attraction is disordered; it’s oriented towards empty pleasure, not towards the proper telos of sex.  Similarly, if I’m drawn to drink or eat too much, this desire is disordered; it’s not ordered towards healthy enjoyment and nourishment, but towards drunkenness and gluttony.  Thoughts and attractions are not things for which we can judge another person, and they certainly cannot be permitted to stand in the way of fulfilling an invitation to a vocation given by God.  In short, if one senses that God is inviting that person to a religious vocation (and God calls all manner of people into this life), then are we really supposed to suggest that a person’s thoughts and attractions — and not actions — could disqualify them?  Do we really think we know better than the God that invites them to consider this vocation?

Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior.  Somebody dealing with same-sex attraction — but who has been living chastely for a significant period of time — should not be told that their thoughts and feelings should keep them from this vocation.  People of all sexual orientations struggle with chastity.  The primary question for determining suitability of entering a celibate vocation is: do your patterns of behavior show that you are becoming more and more chaste, and that you could live this life without acting out in unhealthy ways?  If the answer is yes, there does not need to be any more thought given to the matter.

Yesterday, First Things published a similar article by Daniel Mattson: “Why Men Like Me Shouldn’t Be Priests.”  I first want to say that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Mattson.  He writes from experience, he’s not afraid to share his experiences, and he makes compelling arguments.  I respect him, I’m grateful for his powerful (and public) witness of trying to live chastely within the Catholic Church.  Still, I disagree with him.  Mr. Mattson admits that he knows several homosexual priests who are good and holy men, including one, “with a special charism for men dying of AIDS, which I am convinced comes from his love for others with deep-seated homosexual tendencies like him.”

Mr. Mattson goes on to say that chastity may be harder for men with deep-seated homosexual tendencies to live out.  He may well be right.  He mentions, courageously, how he has tried to live chastely and has fallen.  His conclusion seems to be that, because of these difficulties (and because a number of priests accused of abuse have been homosexual), the Church would do well to heed certain directives to not ordain homosexual priests.

My problem with Mr. Mattson’s argument is that the reasoning is fundamentally anecdotal.  He speaks of the difficulty of chastity, and says that men experiencing such difficulties probably shouldn’t be ordained.  In this, he is correct.  Again, to me, the judgment comes down to behavior.  Regardless of somebody’s attractions/orientation, if the individual shows reasonably strong promise to be able to grow in celibacy and live a chaste, celibate life, then that individual deserves to be considered for ordination.  Look at past behavior and the trends in the individual’s behavior.  If those trends suggest that the individual could live this life, great!  If not, then suggest that he take more time or look to a different vocation.

I also want to draw attention to the phrase that Mr. Mattson used: “a special charism.”  He knows at least one example of a homosexual priest who has “a special charism,” that is, whose sexual orientation not only doesn’t detract from his ministry, but actually renders him a better minister.  There may be individuals who have a particular tenderness, a particular charism for working with individuals who experience same-sex attraction, a particular egalitarian nature — and all of these things may even come from a disposition that is connected to one’s sexual orientation.  In short, we should always remember that it is God who gives a vocation, and God may have reasons for calling certain men who experience same-sex attraction to the priesthood.  Who are we to interfere with that?

Finally, there seem to be three propositions surrounding homosexuality that cannot all be true:

1. God gives us, at all times, the grace to live holy lives.
2. Individuals who experience deep-seated homosexual tendencies are called to celibate chastity.
3. Individuals who experience deep-seated homosexual tendencies have particular difficulty in living out chaste celibacy, and so we should not admit them to vowed celibacy, where their failures could constitute deep scandal in the Church.

One of those three propositions must be false; I tend to think it is #3.  If we the Church really believe that God gives to those with homosexual tendencies the grace necessary to live chastely, can we really turn around and say that we essentially don’t trust that grace to provide in candidates whose behavioral history suggests that they would make good candidates for the priesthood?

There is, however, a word of caution to those with such tendencies who are discerning a call to priesthood/religious life: make sure that you’re discerning celibacy because you sense that God is calling you there, and not simply as a way to make sense of the mandatory celibacy that homosexual tendencies entail (within the Catholic moral tradition).  Religious celibacy is a vocation in its own right, and each individual who experiences these attractions must be careful to discern between the call to live chastely with homosexual tendencies and the call to religious celibacy lived for the Kingdom of God.  Two different vocations, even though they can overlap.

On Religious Formation

Part of the reason why homosexual candidates for priesthood are coming to the forefront is also stories like this one.  Clearly, there are some seminaries where priests and seminarians alike have problems with homosexual acts and with heavy drinking.  Obviously, such environments need to be corrected … but I urge restraint on the thought that the root problem is homosexual attraction.  Instead, here are some of the problems that I see:

1. Do not admit individuals to seminary before they have graduated from college.  I’m nearly 26.  My understanding of my celibacy and sexuality has changed a lot in the years between 18-25.  I entered postulancy at 22, and even the difference between 25 and 22 is significant.  The implications of life-long celibacy come about slowly, and it takes time to come to know one’s self and be able to integrate one’s sexuality into chaste, celibate living.  This can’t be done at 18 or 19 years old.  When Mr. Monaco talks about young seminarians (also being introduced to alcohol around the same time) “cuddling” and “fondling,” part of me thinks that the environment is to blame.  Were these guys really the same ones who were hitting gay bars, keeping pornography, and having sex with each other?  Or were they 18-20 year old guys, deprived of contact with women, in an environment where talking about or opening up about sexuality is nearly impossible, and under the influence of alcohol?  While I don’t condone the behavior, people need time to understand their sexuality and be able to make a commitment to celibacy.  Starting seminary at 18-19 years old doesn’t allow that to happen.
2. Make sure seminarians are taken outside of the “Catholic bubble.” 
   Once again, this is primarily an issue with individuals who enter the seminary at a very young age.  The world can be a rough place, and alcohol abuse and sexual immorality abound.  Yet, we find the Jesus always spending his time with the lowly and the sinners — drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors.  There can be a tendency in seminary to be “polite” and “proper” and “refined.”  But this doesn’t correspond to the reality of the real world, and younger guys (especially) can be shocked by what they see outside the walls and fences of the seminary.  This leaves them ill-prepared to minister to these people, and vulnerable in their personal lives.  Give people a real education in places where they will see serious sin and poverty.
3. Don’t tell people to run away from their desires/identity.
   Early months (and maybe years) in celibacy are hard.  Thoughts and feelings surface that I never would have expected.  But bringing those desires to God and asking how they might lead me closer to Him has been one of the most enriching spiritual experiences of my life.  Sometimes those desires may not always perfectly align with Church teaching.  There can be a tendency to repress these in a religious house, and that doesn’t really work.  What works much better is to face them head on, to not be afraid to admit to myself and to God what I feel, and to ask how that desire can by purified so that I grow in self-giving love.  When I say that a desire is “bad” and try to run it out of my mind, I repress it; when I recognize that I ought not act on a certain desire, but ask God how that desire (again, even if sinful) can be purified and lead me towards him, I begin the real work of holiness.

This post is long, it’s a lot of stuff, and it’s anything but comprehensive.  We’re hurting as a Church right now.  We’re staring into the midst of our weakness and the very worst of our humanity.  Let’s take a good long look.  Then let’s ask for forgiveness and the grace to really love.

 

The Parish as the Center of the Community

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

— James 1:27

San Felipe de Jesus, as I’ve mentioned before, is a busy place.  My time is mostly spent with Sembrando Alegría, our two-week summer day camp for the kids of the parish, but also loading and unloading trucks of food for the parish food bank, which provides groceries to around 600 families each week.  When the camp and the food bank don’t need any help, I pitch in with music ministry, office work, and the spiritual life of the parish.  More recently, the unaccompanied/separated migrant kids from Central America staying at Casa Padre (if you’re not familiar with this, please go back to this post) have returned to the parish.  They come for Mass at 8:30am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (and 12pm on Sunday), and then they are given a snack in the parish hall, and I do some musical activities and games with them.

Working with the migrant kids is the most joyful part of being here in Brownsville.  I’ve done these activities and games with many different groups of kids, from all sorts of different backgrounds, and these kids just seem to get into it and have fun in a way that no other group I’ve worked with has.  It’s impossible not to have deep affection for these kids: they’re kind, playful, they care deeply for each other, they have fewer inhibitions than American kids, they’re hopeful and just seem to be really good souls.  I feel grateful and blessed to be able to spend time around them.

Beginning the music workshop for the parish kids during Sembrando Alegría.

Those two paragraphs are just a little snapshot into the real joy that I’ve experienced over the last few weeks, and as I reflect about it, I recognize that the joy comes from being a part of a parish that really is the center of the community.  In many American parishes, the church provides sacramental and spiritual nourishment for the community, a limited sense of social community, and perhaps some outreach to the needy (who always seem to be ‘other’ or ‘outside’ of the parish).  Here is different: it was the church that registered people to vote and got the streets paved and lit; it’s the Church that takes care of feeding needy families (and frequently those who volunteer are also people who need assistance); it’s the Church that becomes a place for social and community gatherings; it’s the Church that provides people with work and a living wage; it’s the Church who directs people to assistance with getting documents to enter/stay in the country.  And, of course, it’s the Church that provides spiritual and sacramental nourishment to the people.

The book of James says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  Too often, I think that Catholics look at social/material ministry as a means to an end — a tool to invite people into the ‘real’ sacramental life of the Church, or even a way to feel good about ourselves.  Yet, the social and material ministry is every bit as indispensible as spiritual ministry, for in it we find the heart of Jesus among the poor.  Moreover, we realize that, when we serve those in need, they minister to us just as much as we minister to them.  All of us are poor in some way, and when we stop creating walls between material poverty and spiritual poverty, we open ourselves up to see the presence of God in the other, and we allow the kingdom of God to come among us.

Sembrando Alegría — the name of our camp for the kids — means ‘sowing joy.’  How much would all of us increase in faith, and how much better would our Church, nation, and world be, if we stopped distinguishing so much between material and spiritual poverty, and simply took it upon ourselves to sow joy in everyone around us?

Pool time at Sembrando Alegría.

What’s Really Happening On the Border

Casa Padre, one of the many shelters run by Southwest Key that is used to house unaccompanied minors and separated minors.

In my mind, anytime we pay attention to media or politicians, we ought to take what is said with at least a couple grains of salt … particularly when it is something that is designed to make us angry.  The reason for this is simple: media and politicians both profit when you and I are angry.  It’s far less clear that the world profits from our anger.  With that in mind, it is becoming clear to me that there are no media outlets — on any side of the political spectrum — that actually understand what’s going on with family separation on the US/Mexico border.  Last week, I had the opportunity to accompany Fr. Tony O’Connor SM to Casa Padre, one of the shelters being used to house migrant children (both those who came across the border unaccompanied and those who have been separated from their parents).  Casa Padre is one of many shelters that is run by a company called Southwest Key, which the government contracts to care for these kids.  In talking to Fr. Tony, sitting in on a meeting at Casa Padre, and reading some news articles, this is my best account of what’s going on at the border:

Background of the Crisis

The very first thing to understand about the migration crisis at our border is that most of the people seeking entrance are not from Mexico.  Many are fleeing violence in other Central American countries (e.g. Guatemala and Honduras).  The United States has a long history of meddling in Central American countries and has, undoubtedly, created many of the problems that lead to migration al norte.  This is a good overview of some of the problems, but there’s plenty more information out there, both in the form of mainstream media and academic research.  In short, the United States is largely responsible for creating the conditions that cause people to flee to the US.  We are responsible for the border crisis.

In more recent times, the trouble at the border stems from the Trump administration’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy at the border.  Basically, what normally happens is that families without papers — but many with a credible fear of facing violence if they return home — had been permitted to enter the country to apply for asylum.  The Trump administration is now saying that the United States will not accept any asylum seekers in the US, and that all who cross illegally will be subject to criminal prosecution.  As such, there is a logjam at the border, as Mexican border officials try to tell all those coming north that their asylum cases won’t be heard.  In the interim, those coming north have usually spent most of their money coming here (in case you’re curious, it costs about $800-$1000/person to cross the border illegally) and now find themselves stuck.  They’re nowhere close to home, without money, and without the ability to apply for asylum.  So, bridges are full of people (in the summer heat, no less) with nowhere to go.  It’s really bad.

Migrants wait to cross into the United States on the Matamoros International Bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, TX.

For those who try and cross and are arrested, the government policy has meant that minors are separated from their parents, because children are not allowed to be held in federal detention facilities (and since their parents are being apprehended and charged with a federal crime, the law dictates that they be held in a federal detention facility while they await trial, unless they can post bail — which nobody in that situation really can).  President Trump signed an executive order to stop family separation, but with at-capacity family detention services, it’s not clear how exactly the separation of children can or will stop.  A fairly good story that provides some more detail on this situation can be found here.

Detention Centers vs. Shelters

One of the media’s biggest failures in covering this story has been their failure to distinguish between detention centers and shelters.  As previously mentioned, the government (through the Refuge Resettlement Program) funds licensed shelters that take in unaccompanied (or separated) minors and holds them until their fate is decided by the government.  These places aren’t perfect, but they do their best: they have licensed counselers, provide food and basic necessities, offer educational and recreational programs for the kids, and the people who work there really do care about the kids.  As previously mentioned, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting at one of these shelters, Casa Padre, last week.

Casa Padre used to bring the kids out to our parish, San Felipe de Jesus, for regular off-site programs.  This — along with all offsite programs — has stopped in recent months, primarily do to security threats (at Casa Padre, a man showed up and might have been armed, saying that they should “take those kids out back and shoot them”).  The media has confused Casa Padre and other shelters with the actual detention centers in McAllen, TX, where some overflow children are being helf.  One of the chief culprits of this misinformation is Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who showed up unnanounced and tried to get a tour of Casa Padre and was denied entry.  As one Casa Padre employee that I spoke to put it, “if a guy came to your kids’ school unannounced demanding to take pictures, would you let him?”  This has led to many protests outside Southwest Key shelters, leading to an increase in security, and makes Southwest Key unwilling to reinstate off-site trips for the kids (though we are hopeful that this will soon change).  So, congratulations media and Sen. Merkley, you have succeeded in using children for your own personal gain, and have prevented them from having access to better quality of life while separated from their parents.  Southwest Key is not perfect, but they’re doing the best they can.

To be clear, the “kids in cages” story isn’t completely wrong; it’s just misplaced.  Detention Centers and the proposed ‘tent city’ in McAllen are real, and in those places, kids don’t get the level of treatment they do at Southwest Key licensed care facilities.

Botched Reunification

A federal judge mandated last week that the Trump administration reunify separated families this month.  The deadline for reunifying children under 5 years of age was last Tuesday; the deadline for older kids is later this month (July 26).  This mandated reunification has proven difficult because the federal government has either deported or ‘lost track of’ many of these childrens’ parents.  Furthermore, there are legal complications: the government has a right to deport the kids’ parents, but not necessarily the kids themselves.  As such, if the government reunites the families, it would make it more difficult to deport the parents.  This story from the New York Times sheds a lot of light on the highly secretive process used to reunify the kids and parents.

A couple days before the reunification of the under-5 kids was to take place, we were actually made aware of a location that was to be used for this reunification.  The proposed location would have made it possible for us and a few other 3rd party observers to make sure that everything happened according to plan.  At 9:30am on Tuesday — only a few hours before the reunification was to take place — the government abruptly changed to an undisclosed location.  No 3rd party observers, no press, no ACLU.  No way for the Department of Homeland Security to be held accountable.  Were civil rights respected?  Who knows.  What will happen in the next few weeks is anyone’s guess.  For now, the best we can do is continue to pray, advocate, and provide aid when/where possible.

Families arriving in Guatemala City after being deported from the United States in 2016.

This is a big mess right now, and who knows how and when it will be sorted out.  But while we continue to demand that our government be held accountable, it will do us good to remember that media and politicians have their own agendas and they have a vested interest in making you mad.  You can’t always believe everything you read and hear.  Furthermore, while the administration is making poor decisions that hurt people, there are a lot of folks who are trying to do good — and this certainly includes the employees at Southwest Key and the many volunteers working with organizations in the Rio Grande Valley that provide care, advocacy, and government accountability in this horrifying situation.

Aquí esta el reino de Dios

Last Thursday, I boarded a plane to Brownsville, Texas, to spend the month of July at the Marist parish here on the U.S./Mexico border, San Felipe de Jésus, in Cameron Park.  Cameron Park is a neighborhood comprised almost entirely of Latino immigrants (mostly from Mexico) and is one of the lowest-income communities in the United States (roughly 61% of residents live below the poverty line and the median family income is around $17,000/year).  The parish is served by Fr. Tony O’Connor SM, Br. Albert FMS, and an incredible staff of lay workers and volunteers.  Br. Albert has been in Cameron Park for decades, and he is one of a few people responsible for registering many in Cameron Park to vote and, consequently, being able to petition the county to pave the roads and light the streets.

My own time here is mostly spent working in the parish food bank (which provides groceries for around 600 families each week) or doing odd-jobs around the parish.  These include moving furniture, cooking, counting the Sunday collection, and crushing aluminum cans.  And it’s those cans that I want to talk about today …

Every morning when Fr. Tony and I walk to the parish, we are on the lookout for discarded beer and soda cans that we can take, crush, and sell to a scrapyard for $0.60/pound.  Many others bring cans here, and we accumulate quite a lot of them (crushing and packaging them for the scrapyard takes several hours each week), and it is in doing this little, menial job that I am coming to experience more and more la reina de Dios (the Kingdom of God).

The money from these cans goes towards paying salaries for employees of the parish.  The money from these cans makes the difference between being able to pay somebody a living wage and not.  Being entrenched in a community means not just providing spiritual and sacramental ministry, but also seeking to be with the community as it builds itself up.  Being able to hire people from the neighborhood to work in the parish helps to build up justice and peace in the neighborhood, and it helps create the strong community center that can help to provide groceries to those who need them to make ends meet.

St. Paul writes that, “The Kingdom of God is justice and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17) and these little activities — crushing cans and distributing avacados — help to make the neighborhood a little more just and a little more peaceful.  They allow those who live here the freedom of spirit to come to Mass and enter into the joy of the Holy Spirit, and thus the Kingdom of God comes alive in Cameron Park.

Back in DC at the Ivory Tower of Catholic Academia, it’s common to hear disputes about Aristotle and Thomas, about liturgy and sacred music, about vestments and ritual.  Over in Cameron Park, such things seem of so little importance, knowing that each avacado helps a family make ends meet and each aluminum can helps to pay a salary.  En verdad, Dios esta aquí.

Some friends playing in the backyard of the church on Sunday afternoon.

Doing Nothing: The Key to Ministry

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit St. Anthony of Padua Church and School in Greenville, South Carolina, to visit and participate in ministry there for a few days, alongside four young adults serving as summer interns.

For much of the week, we helped out with the school summer camp, which serves largely inner-city kids.  The young adults served as something akin to teacher’s assistants, giving some one-on-one tutoring to different kids and just helping out in the classroom.  I bounced back and forth between first, second, and fifth grade.  While most of the time was joyful and pleasant, I also had one experience that proved to be really challenging.

I was asked to help a fifth grade boy with his math work.  I introduced myself, tried to be pleasant and engaging, and we sat down to work.  He wouldn’t look at me, nor would he speak to me.  He simply sat down and worked on his math problems, not really responding to any invitation to work together.  When he came across a problem he didn’t know how to solve, instead of asking for help, he would simply read the problem aloud; I took that as my cue to offer some help.  That was how we proceeded for about 40 minutes … 40 minutes of uncomfortable silence and passive hostility.

When we go out in ministry, we’re called to take the love of Christ to those that we meet; we become the hands, feet, words, and face of Christ here on earth.  As such, failure can be a hard thing to deal with: if I fail in my ministry, I have let the person I minister to down, and I’ve even let God down.  As Dag Hammarskjold, a man of deep faith (perhaps even a mystic) and former Secretary General of the United Nations, said to himself on the eve of a Security Council meeting:

Your responsibility is indeed terrifying.  If you fail, it is God, thanks to your having betrayed Him, who will fail mankind.  You fancy you can be responsible to God; can you carry the responsibility for God?

Dag Hammarskjold, former Secretary General of the United Nations.

Such is, perhaps, the ‘natural’ disposition of one in ministry.  But is it the proper one?  The founder of the Marists, Fr. Jean-Claude Colin is quoted as saying the following:

I asked God what the Society of the blessed Virgin should do, and these words came forcefully to mind: ‘Nothing’ — Yes, nothing.  Otherwise it would seem that the Society could achieve something by itself, whereas we can do nothing.  You know well what I mean by that: ‘To do nothing.’

In the spiritual life, particularly from the Catholic perspective, we are always taught about our duties and obligations, those things we must ‘do’ in the spiritual life: attend Mass each Sunday; go regularly to confession and prepare through a regular examination of conscience; perform spiritual and corporal works of mercy so that you may be united with Christ; be faithful to personal devotions and to some form of private prayer, etc, etc.  All of those things are important, but it can be really easy to lose the spirit of the action when we see it as an obligation.

Prayer and good works are gifts that come to us from God’s grace.  We could never pray or act unless the Spirit was already stirring in us.  Living the spiritual life means living in the consciousness that our holiness comes to us from God, and that we are helpless without God’s grace.  As Thomas Merton puts it:

A supernatural experience of our own contingency is a humility which loves and prizes above all else our state of moral and metaphysical helplessness before God.

“In God we live and move and have our being.”  My very life — not to mention whatever holiness and prayerfulness happens to be manifested in my life — comes from God.  A truly spiritual life consists in recognizing that, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  When we live in this consciousness, we understand what Fr. Colin meant by ‘doing nothing’: I do nothing because I am simply an instrument of Christ, and therefore all prayer and action in my own life is really the prayer and action of Jesus Christ, working within me.

As has been said before in this blog, the greatness of Mary lies in her nothingness.  In allowing herself to be ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit during the Annunciation, Mary became a pure instrument of God, united to God.  If we, like Mary, become instruments of God, then “everything else would take care of itself.”  Our ministry, our work, our prayer … all of that ceases to become ‘ours’ and becomes ‘God’s.’

Mary, ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit.

For this reason, Fr. Colin urged Marists to “breathe Mary’s spirit” so that we might “think as Mary, judge as Mary, feel and act as Mary in all things.”  In breathing Mary’s Spirit, we mystically live the life of Mary in the world today.  As Fr. Justin Taylor SM said in a recent retreat to American Marists:

Thanks to this mystical identification with Mary, we can act, as it were, ‘in persona Mariae’ as she carries out her mission in the Church and the world.  Marist hearts today will be especially touched and inspired by these lines of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’: ‘Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world.  Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power.’  We can offer ourselves, individually and collectively, to Mary, to be her eyes, her heart, her speech, her hands and feet as she brings motherly care to a wounded world and her suffering children.

In this spirit, we might see a solution to the ‘problem’ of ministry: if I am open to receiving the spirit of Mary, the model disciple, and I have acted as she would act, then the fruits are not my own, but rather God’s.  It is his job, not mine, to cause the fruit to grow, and then to harvest.  I am responsible only for opening myself to receive the disposition of Mary so that I can be overshadowed in this world.

Of course, this spirit doesn’t relieve the pain of not being able to help, nor does it relieve us of the inevitable question of whether we might have done more or done something differently.  Such pain and questioning is a part of our human existence…but what would Mary do with the pain and questioning?

Most likely, she would shed tears that she wasn’t able to stay longer with the boy and build up trust, showing him that God’s love is real and lasting.  She would pray for him.  She would mourn for those who don’t have anyone in their lives to manifest the love of God.  She would reflect on her actions, and sincerely ask God if she was allowing herself to be overshadowed by the Spirit in that moment, and she would “take all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

“Drop, Drop Slow Tears” by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)

Doomed, but living in the agony of will

Sean Penn as Willie Stark in a film adaptation of All the King’s Men.

I recently finished reading Robert Penn Warren’s definitive novel, All the King’s Men.  What strikes me as I finish the novel is how misunderstood — and probably misread — the novel is.  On the back cover of the book, The New York Times calls it “the definitive novel about American politics” and the Los Angeles Times Book Review says that, “there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction.  That is Robert Penn Warren’s lush All the King’s Men.”  To be sure, the novel and its characters have a prominent place in American political history.  All the King’s Men won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize at a time when Governor Huey Long was still in the American consciousness, and comparisons between Long and the fictional Governor Willie Stark abounded.  Warren’s characters seemed to embody all the good, bad, and ugly in American politics, and so the novel was deemed a great novel about American politics.  During the Watergate scandal, the tale of political corruption inspired journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to title their (nonfiction) tale of Richard Nixon’s corruption All the President’s Men. 

Former Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who may have influenced the creation of Willie Stark’s character in All the King’s Men.

There’s just one problem with this assessment and reception of Warren’s novel: All the King’s Men isn’t really about politics.

Personally, I was drawn to the novel because the narrator (Jack Burden) is a romanticized version of my shadow self.  Burden is a wandering writer, journalist, and historian who drinks too much, is disgusted by the Good-Ole-Boy way of politics, but aware of the corruption of human nature.  He wanders through life without a sense of purpose, content (though depressed) that he can be an intelligent observer of humanity, and he takes a sort of pride in being ‘above’ the world, even though he himself is very much ‘of the world.’  Towards the beginning of the book, however, Burden reveals a certain insight into human nature, an insight that serves as a paradigm for his own quest that unfolds through the rest of the novel:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second.  While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself.  The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too.  But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope.  It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.  The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.  He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.  He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him.  There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

Thus, more than simply the story of Willie Stark, All the King’s Men is the story of Jack Burden opening this envelope.  As Warren writes:

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too.  For I have a story.  It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a very long time and then it looked another and very different way.  The change did not happen all at once.  Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for anything and there was no God but the Great Twitch.

The Great Twitch is a metaphor that Burden uses for some unknowable, unpredictable form of causality that underlies the human world, giving us an illusion of choice and free will in our own lives, but that secretly is controlling all of our actions.  Burden recognizes that:

At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.

This sounds like the common sort of stoicism that underlies much of our own culture today: we don’t really have free will; we’re driven by instincts and desires that are beyond our control, and any sense that we have the capacity to act differently is simply an illusion designed to give a greater ‘purpose’ to our life.  As such, the best we can do is simply enjoy the moment and not fear death when it comes.  Yet, if we’re paying attention, we recognize the failure of this philosophy, just like Jack Burden:

But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch anymore.  He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die.  He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch.  He had seen his father die.  He had seen his friend Adam Stanton die.  He had seen his friend Willie Stark die, and had heard him say with his last breath, ‘It might have been all different, Jack.  You got to believe that.

He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live and die.  Each had killed the other.  Each had been the doom of the other.  As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try and use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age.  But at the same time Jack Burden came to see that his friends had been doomed, he saw that though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch.  They were doomed but they lived in the agony of will.

Jude Law as Jack Burden in a film adaptation of All the King’s Men.

To me, this is one of the most profound explorations of the dynamics of the human will I have ever read.  It recognizes the force that seems beyond us (and is, in a way, beyond us), and that seems to be in control of us, but yet it recognizes that it is indeed our will that chooses and that makes decisions.  We have real freedom, even in the face of overwhelming forces in the universe that seem to cause us to make decisions that we do not really want to make.  Thus the “thorn in the flesh” of St. Paul, the tragic flaw of Hamlet or Macbeth … these forces seem to “doom” us to a course of action, and yet we live in the agony of will.

Mindfulness practice calls this “radical acceptance.”  The idea is that, if we desire to change, we first must accept that we are responsible for our actions.  While there may be influences acting upon us, we hold the power to act and to choose.  For Christians, we might accept this principle to a limited extent: we recognize our free will, but we also (more importantly) recognize our profound poverty — our total metaphysical and moral dependence upon the grace of God.

The ‘grace’ that God gives is not some superpower that allows us to simply resist the temptations of the world; the ‘grace’ that God gives is His very Self, and that Self is Freedom and Love.  Grace becomes an icon and a sacrament: by grace, we see the true nature of our selves that lies both within and beyond our humanity.  We recognize that all things human are a seed of the divine, and when we allow this divine grace to “overshadow” us (the way that Mary, the model disciple, allowed herself to be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit), then our humanity transcends its limits, and we begin to share in God’s own divine life.  Such is the path of real union with God which the Christian calls heaven.

To recognize this need for grace is ultimately itself a gift.  But the realization starts with the paradoxical conclusion of Jack Burden: we are “doomed but live in the agony of will.”  The forces of the universe press down upon us, seeming to dictate who we are and how we shall act, and yet something — some remnant of the breathe of life that God breathes into us — tells us that we actually have choice and responsibility for our actions.  We wish that it would be otherwise, that the Great Twitch is choosing for us and determining our lives, but we know that this is an illusion, not reality, and yet we seem powerless to change.  It is this recognition of poverty that can plant the seed of conversion, for “power is made perfect in weakness.”

 

An Ignatian Examen Based on ‘Gaudete et Exsultate’

Recently, our Marist community in DC held a Day of Recollection centered around Pope Francis’s latest Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate.  I was asked to lead the day, and, as part of our prayer, led an Ignatian Examen based off of Gaudete et Exsultate.  If you aren’t familiar with the Ignatian Examen, here is a basic guide offered by the Jesuits. For a deeper dive, I’ve found two books to be helpful: Timothy Gallagher’s The Examen Prayer: Ignatian Words of Wisdom in Our Lives and Mark Thibodeaux’s Reimagining the Ignatian Examen.  The examen that we used in our Day of Recollection went like this:

I begin this examen by recognizing that I am in the presence of the God of Love. I may begin with a deep breathing exercise and allow the concerns of the day to pass away, that I may be ever more aware of God’s presence.

I call to mind the blessings, large or small, that God has placed along my path this day. Perhaps it is as simple as being given the grace to enter into prayer, or perhaps I recall a specific friendship or relationship that God has given me. As I allow a few of these blessings to enter into my mind, I thank God for them and let them pass; I may even consider a verbal, “thank you, Jesus,” after each one.

Recognizing that I am a small creature, fully dependent upon God for my being, I look at the face of Christ. I may have a particular image that I view, or I may use my imagination to be taken by His face. Basking in his loving gaze, I allow him to set my heart on fire, for I know that only when the flame of his love has poured over my heart will I be able to recognize Him and the ‘hidden ways’ with which he is working in my life. I ask that the fire of his love be the light that illuminates my examination of the day He has given; perhaps I even make this request verbally, with full confidence that if I ask, I will receive. Before moving on, I bask for just one more moment in the light of the face of Christ.

Armed with the light of Christ, I begin to examine my day. Almost as if I were watching a movie, I allow the events, thoughts, and feelings of the day to unfold before me, as best I can recall them. At the present moment, I simply note that they have occurred, and avoid dwelling on any specific experience of the day.

I ask God to show me now how I have allowed the inner strength of my faith to give me perseverance in the face of trials, and to be patient and meek in my interactions with others. In particular, I focus on ways that I was able to hold onto the presence of Christ in the midst of a fast-paced life. I also call to mind ways in which I have not clung to my inner strength as I am called to do, times when subtle forms of violence, especially the desire to teach and correct others, and the desire to speak ill of others, have taken over my life. I review my telephone and electronic communication and ask whether the de-personalization of communication led me to display an unguarded tongue, or to treat another with anything less than their dignity as a daughter or son of God. If I perceive any moments of embarrassment or humiliation, I thank God for this moment, and I ask if I was open to being humbled or humiliated, or if my pride and the desire to ‘be right’ has interfered with my love of God and of those around me.

I now turn my attention to the difficult moments of the day, moments of pain, sorrow, loneliness, or unhappiness. I recall these moments and allow myself to sit with them for a moment. If appropriate, I allow myself to mourn and to suffer with another. I permit myself to intercede for them, or to pray for my own needs and desires, and I ask God to reveal his presence among the poor and suffering that I have encountered. If I have avoided encounters with Christ’s beloved poor, I ask for the grace to be placed near them tomorrow. I also remember that sadness can sometimes be born from a lack of gratitude, and I once again recall that the presence of Christ in and around me is reason for joy. Indeed, joy is a choice and a sign of life in Christ, and I recall all the ways in which God has blessed me, and the reasons that I have for sharing joy. I think about those for whom I had the opportunity to be a sign of the joy and hope of Christ, and I thank God for giving me that opportunity.

I now ask God to remind me of the boldness of the mission on which I have been invited. I ask God to remind me (or to show me) how I am called to be a sign of his love in this world and I ask God to show me any inertia that may be present in my life, and I ask to be shown anything that leads me away from holy boldness of heart and spirit. I am reminded that “the only tragedy in life, is not to become a saint,” and I thank God for calling me to be one. I spend a moment in silence, asking how I might better live my calling.

Finally, I consider my life of prayer and in community. How was I able to be present to others in simple, ordinary ways? Were there occasions that I missed? I ask God to help me to see these things more clearly, and to give me the strength to overcome my shortcomings and to be a sign of his love and compassion. I remember that “contemplation of the face of Jesus, died and risen, restores our humanity,” and I ask if I have given myself sufficient time to be transformed by the face of Jesus in those I encounter, and in my encounters with his Word and Sacrament. I thank God for another day in my own journey of faith and I ask for strength to be faithful to him tomorrow. Recalling that all of creation is called to praise God, I conclude with a “Glory be…” or any other prayer I feel called to make.

Mary, Mother of the Church

This year, Pope Francis added a new feast to the liturgical calendar: the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church.  The feast was designed to foster a devotion that might, “encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety.”  The Marist world rejoiced in this feast as it cuts right to the heart of the Marist charism.  Let me explain how:

One of the options for the first reading during the Mass of Mary, Mother of the Church (now the Monday after Pentecost) is Acts 1:12-14:

After Jesus had been taken up into heaven, the Apostles returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away.

When they entered the city they went to the upper room where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.  All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

On the surface, it seems a bit odd that one of the most significant Marian passages in Scripture is Mary’s name being listed along with those of the disciples, and yet the passage strikes to the very heart of Mary’s identity.  Mary is great precisely because she is, in a sense, forgotten.  She is simply added to the end of a list of disciples, and it is in that that we recognize her greatness.  As Thomas Merton put it, in his poem “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window”:

For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.
I vanish into day, and leave no shadow
But the geometry of my cross,
Whose frame and structure are the strength
By which I die, but only to the earth,
And am uplifted to the sky my life.

Mary’s greatness lies in her nothingness; in allowing herself to be “overshadowed” by the Spirit at the Annunciation (and then continuing her fiat throughout her life, even as her Son, the Hope of the World, lies dead upon a cross), her total poverty of spirit is what allows her to become the model disciple of all, and thus the Queen of Heaven.  As Queen of Heaven, Mary is glorified above any other saint, and yet she is only glorified because she became absolutely nothing; she is glorified because she died, “by transubstantiation into light.”  As such, she stands before us, beckoning us to follow her in her own “hidden and unknown” way, by which the light of Christ shines perfectly onto the world.  It is this mystical participation in the hidden and unknown life of Mary that marks Marist identity, and has from the Society’s foundation.

The Society of Mary traces its history back to a specific moment in 1809.  A young French boy, Jean-Claude Corveille, had suffered from an attack of small pox and he went to the shrine of Our Lady at Le Puy to pray.  There, he received an inspiration to rub his eyes with some of the oil in the votive lamp burning in the shrine.  Corveille was healed from his blindness through this act, and he would return each year to give thanks to God and Our Lady.  In 1812, he reports receiving a vision that contained some form of these words:

This is what I want: I have always imitated my Divine Son in everything.  I followed Him to Calvary.  Now in heaven, sharing His glory, I follow His path still, in the work He does for His church on earth.  Of this Church I am the Protectress.  I supported the Church at its birth; I shall do it again at the end of time.  I am a powerful army, defending and saving souls.  When a fearful heresy threatened to convulse the whole of Europe, my Son raised up His servant, Ignatius, to form a Society under His name, calling itself the Society of Jesus, with members called Jesuits, to fight against the hell unleashed against His Church.  In the same way in this last age of impiety and unbelief, it is my wish and the wish of my Son, that there be another Society, one consecrated to me, one which will bear my name, which will call itself the Society of Mary, and whose members will call themselves Marists.

Within this vision, we have an implicit reference to Acts: just as Mary was simply “present” with the disciples, it was this “hidden and unknown” presence that was supporting and upholding the Church.  And it is this “hidden and unknown” presence of those who follow in her way that will uphold the Church even until the end of time.  Because it is poverty that leads to glory.  In becoming nothing, we (individually and as a Church) gain everything.

To become nothing is to live the life of a mother — to live the life of one who is constantly sacrificing, constantly loving, even if that love goes unnoticed.  The mother is the one whose intuition guides her to the lost and the broken, the poor and the suffering.  The mother is the one who is the image of compassion, love, and mercy.  The mother is the one who is the image of action, constantly at work in small, barely noticeable ways, all for the sake of those she loves.  But Mary, Our Good Mother, is no longer with us, and so we must be her hands and her feet on earth (reminiscent of this poem by St. Teresa of Avila).  This is what it means to be Marist, to help renew the Church that it might “beat with the heart of a mother.”  Fr. Pat Bearsley SM, in a retreat given to Boston Marists, paraphrases Mary’s desire in this way:

I’m distressed that in the world today, the great treasures of grace and salvation that my Son won are not getting through to the people he intended them for.  I want that none of my children be lost, not one!  And yet, so often the message is not being heard.  The Good News sounds awful to too many people.  I’m concerned about that. It distresses me.  My son’s work is not being done.  And yet, I’m there.  I’m supporting, I’m sustaining, I’m encouraging the work of my son’s church.  It’s not being effective.  I need another Society, one completely dedicated to that work.  I want it to bear my name because its going to be my Society, it’s going to do my work, and I want them to call themselves Marists.

When Marist founder Jean-Claude Colin said that it was the aim of the Society to “make the whole world Marist,” this is exactly what he had in mind: that all would come to know the compassionate love of Mary, that all would recognize that her greatness lies in her absolute nothingness, and yet to be constantly in action, making the compassionate love of Jesus Christ known to all.

Ultimately, love is an action.  In creating this feast, Pope Francis says that he wanted to encourage “growth in the maternal sense of the Church.”  In looking at the life of Mary and her nothingness, contemplating how her glory is a result of her nothingness, and recognizing how she lived a “hidden and unknown” life, constantly supporting and upholding the Church, we recognize our call to take her life as our own, that we might give the Church a more maternal heart, that all may know the deep and profound love of God.

(P.S. – If you think you might be called to live out the Marist way in a more formal way, consider reading more about vowed Marist vocations and lay Marist vocations).