God Wanted One of You: Individual Vocation

On tour with Eli Roberts Presents! in Boston, MA.  Musicians (from L-R) are: Eli Roberts, Dana Gretton, Tristan Allen, and myself.

I’m a musician.  I started out in high school playing in some different jazz bands and working as a recording engineer in Nashville.  I went to school for music and am now (with the Marists) working on a master’s degree in music.  Music is a huge part of my life, always has been, and always will be.

When I was discerning religious life, I thought and prayed a lot about the role of music in my vocation.  I felt called to religious life, but also really didn’t want to give up a musical career.  When push came to shove and I entered, I realized that I had ‘accomplished’ many of the musical things I had wanted to do.  I released an album, played on some other recordings, gone on tour, played for a huge audience in a stadium, worked with people who had won Grammys, etc.  God had given me the things I had wanted to do with music, so I could enter at peace with where my musical career was.  Little did I know what God had in store…

Picture from a session I worked as a recording engineer at the Rock House, Franklin, TN, in 2013.  Musicians pictured are Rob McNelley, Tom Hambridge, Reese Wynans, Kevin McKendree, Sean Chambers, and Tommy MacDonald.

The first couple years of my Marist life saw me using music, but in rather expected ways: I helped out with music ministry at a parish, helped out with music and liturgy at the DC Jail, accompanied a grade-school choir at a Catholic school, etc.  I still wrote some music on the side and was generally happy as I was sent to learn philosophy and sent on an immersion experience to learn Spanish in Mexico.  I was at peace.  The plan with my formation was to go to our International Novitiate in the Philippines in November 2017, and my formators gave me freedom to work on a ‘sacred music project’ during the summer leading up to that.  I collaborated with a number of musicians that I knew in Boston to form the Radiant Obscurity Collective, and we toured throughout the eastern United States in August 2017.

Over the summer, I learned that my novitiate would be delayed by a year, due to a lack of candidates for the novitiate and the political instability in Mindanao following the Maute/Abu Sayyaf uprising in Marawi.  So, instead of going to the Philippines for my novitiate, I began a master’s degree in composition at the Catholic University of America. All of a sudden, I was not only studying music full-time again, but ‘working’ again…I was hired to write arrangements for Leonard Bernstein at 100: The Theatre Songs of Leonard Bernstein, which was performed at both Arena Stage and the Kennedy Center.  Other, smaller arranging jobs for a youth orchestra at Strathmore and a Methodist church in Maryland came along, and I recently spent a week in Boston working on the Radiant Obscurity album and was a guest on WMBR (88.1FM) in Cambridge, MA, to preview this album.  I didn’t ask for any of these things.  I was ready to be content with my musical ‘career’ and go off to be a Marist, working on the border or in a rural parish in West Virginia, wherever God saw fit to place me.  Yet, God had something else in store, something that involved doing a lot more musical work.

Danny Miller (right) and myself (left) on tour with the Radiant Obscurity Collective at Marist School (Atlanta, GA) in August 2017.  

At the end of a busy semester, when I finally had a chance to deeply reflect on all of these gifts and blessings, my eyes welled up with tears.  What I had been ready to ‘give up,’ God gave right back to me.  I have no idea where God will lead me after I leave DC, but He seems to have made it clear that, at least right now, he wants me to be an artist, and I could not be more grateful.  This experience, however, has forced me to re-examine how I think about holiness.

One of the most striking paragraphs from Pope Francis’s latest apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, is as follows:

…The important thing is that each believer discern his or her own path, that they bring out the very best of themselves, the most personal gifts that God has placed in their hearts (cf. 1 Cor 12:7), rather than hopelessly trying to imitate something not meant for them.  We are all called to be witnesses, but there are many actual ways of bearing witness.  Indeed, when the great mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote his Spiritual Canticle, he preferred to avoid hard and fast rules for all.  He explained that his verses were composed so that everyone could benefit from them ‘in his or her own way.’  For God’s life is communicated ‘to some in one way and to others in another.’

Pope Francis’s Gaudete et Exsultate is well worth the read.

Holiness, for each of us, means discerning how it is that God wants us to unite ourselves with him, and that means recognizing that every aspect of our being is a gift from God, designed to bring us deeper into God’s own life.  On the ‘macro’ level, our Vocation can serve as an outline for this: if we’re single or married, a cleric or a religious, this Vocations give us the outline for how we live out or lives.  But that’s the thing: they only give an outline.  It’s the individual gifts that God gives to us that allow us to color in the outline and turn it into a work of art.  And the communion of saints is filled with folks of a thousand different colors: hermits, social activists, political figures, kings, peasants, drug addicts, martyrs, writers, lawyers, priests, religious, married folks, farmers, pacifists, and soldiers.  As James Joyce wrote, “Catholic means ‘here comes everybody.'”

I’m an aspiring religious and I’m a musician.  God doesn’t want me to be one or the other; he wants both.  It can be really easy to see the example of a saint that is inspirational and to try and conform our lives to that person’s path of holiness, when in reality that is not where we are called.  We’re called to something unique, a specific life and vocation that the world has not yet seen, and therefore everything that God has given is given for our holiness and sanctification.  That includes our desires, dreams, and passions, but it also includes our weaknesses, darkness, and sinfulness.  It includes our culture, language, and national identity.  And — because this is not said enough in the Church — it includes our sexual identity and the way that is lived out.  Whether we’re married, single, or celibate; whether we’re straight or gay, what God has given us is a blessing that comes from a God who is Love, and it is a blessing that is meant to lead us to holiness and unity with God.  It could not, after all, be anything else, since what God gives us is nothing less than himself.  As Pope Francis writes, “Every saint is a message which the Holy Spirit takes from the riches of Jesus Christ and gives to his people.”  All of us are called to be a message, sent by the Spirit, into the midst of the Church.

It seems fitting to close this reflection, then, with the commission that Pope Francis issues in Gaudete et Exsultate:

This is a powerful summons to all of us.  You too need to see the entirety of your life as a mission.  Try to do so by listening to God in prayer and recognizing the signs that he gives you.  Always ask the Spirit what Jesus expects from you at every moment of your life and in every decision you must make, so as to discern its place in the mission you have received.  Allow the Spirit to forge in you the personal mystery that can reflect Jesus Christ in today’s world.

May you come to realize what that word is, the message of Jesus that God wants to speak to the world by your life.  Let yourself be transformed.  Let yourself be renewed by the Spirit, so that this can happen, lest you fail in your precious mission.  The Lord will bring it to fulfillment despite your mistakes and missteps, provided that you do not abandon the path of love but remain ever open to his supernatural grace, which purifies and enlightens.

 

Dimly now, as in a mirror

To me, one of the most consoling verses in Scripture is 1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

I find the verse consoling because there are a lot of moments when I can’t see the way that I’d like to see.  These moments can occur on a personal level: wondering why it is that I seem to be asked to do things that I don’t think I do very well, wondering why I struggle so much to be consistent in prayer, wondering how to make sense of my life as an aspiring consecrated religious, etc.  The moments are more powerful to me when I see them in a wider context — either in ‘society’ or in the lives of people that I know.  Why, for example, did God allow for a young woman to be struck with mental disorders and lack of family support that leaves her living alone on the street?  Why does God allow such profound suffering and poverty?  Even if we form conceptual answers to these questions (as countless philosophers opining on the philosophical problem of evil have done), the conceptual answers are rarely satisfying on an emotional and/or gut level…leaving us realizing that we only see the faint embers of the all-consuming fire of God’s love while on earth.  Knowing that we see only embers of something much greater helps us to trust in the goodness of God.

From a personal standpoint, our lives are defined by a search for meaning and purpose.  It is, indeed, what separates humanity from other living beings: through our intellect and will, we are given both the ability to discern and choose the Good.  Yet, this characteristically Thomistic language might make religion seem rather automatic and easy: as long as we simply make rational decisions that are oriented towards God, we will always be happy and not suffer a crisis of meaning.  I can’t speak for others, but this is not consonant in my experience, for it doesn’t quite seem to leave enough room for the overpowering presence of God’s grace.  Perhaps it is better to say that our intellect and our will allow us to begin to die to our selves (or, better yet, our false selves) and open us to receive the transforming grace of God.  Once that happens, however, the result is rarely predictable or stable.  In The New Man, Thomas Merton writes:

To find life we must die to life as we know it.  To find meaning we must die to meaning as we know it.  The sun rises every morning and we are used to it, and because we know the sun will rise we have finally come to act as if it rose because we wanted it to.  Suppose the sun should choose not to rise?  Some of our mornings would then be ‘absurd’ — or, to put it mildly, they would not meet our expectations.

To find the full meaning of our existence we must find not the meaning that we expect but the meaning that is revealed to us by God.  The meaning that comes to us out of the transcendent darkness of His mystery and our own.  We do not know God and we do not know ourselves.  How then can we imagine that it is possible for us to chart our own course towards the discovery of the meaning of our life?  This meaning is not a sun that rises every morning, though we have come to think that it does, and on mornings when it does not rise we substitute some artificial light of our own so as not to admit that this morning was absurd.

We use our intellect and will to chart a course, and we probably experience some sort of consolation as a result of this choice, some sense of peace that tells us we’ve made the right decision.  In choosing religious life, I remember vividly the first couple weeks of postulancy: I was living in Boston, and, after evening prayer and supper, I would go out with the Back Bay Mobile Soup Kitchen, providing sandwiches, socks, rosaries, and conversation to the homeless around Boston.  I would return to the tabernacle and spend time in prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and I felt a deep sense of ecstasy.  What could possibly have been better than those moments?

Fritz Eichenberg’s Christ of the Breadlines, a woodcut that originally appeared in the Catholic Worker.

I return to those moments and thank God for them.  They were gifts, small ‘suns’ that rose and gave a sense of profound meaning to the choice to enter the Society of Mary.  Needless to say, not every morning has been like those days.  In fact, on the whole, relatively few have held such blissful recognition of grace, purpose, and meaning.  More common, even, are the days of sheer existential terror: in choosing celibacy, one chooses to ‘die’ to the most central, natural purpose of life — the desire to be with another and participate in the creation of new life…it is not a ‘death’ is accomplished easily.  In such moments of questioning why we have made the most foundational decisions in our lives, our response is critical.  The “artificial light” response would be to run away from these decisions and pretend that “everything’s fine.”  In the religious life, that would be a run to our breviaries and rosaries, insisting that if we just focus hard enough on that next “Hail Mary,” all our troubles will be over.  As long as we focus on keeping our rule of life, as long as we’re strong enough and holy enough, we can conquer the terror…

So we build our own sunsets out of artificial light.  Such responses can never save us, for they are ultimately the result of our own agency.  What, then, is the better response?  Merton tells us:

Meaning is then not something we discover in ourselves, or in our lives.  The meanings we are capable of discovering are never sufficient.  The true meaning has to be revealed.  It has to be “given.”  And the fact that it is given is, indeed, the greater part of its significance: for life itself is, in the end, only significant in so far as it is given.

As long as we experience life and existence as suns that have to rise every morning, we are in agony.  We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of the darkness.  For this there are no fixed times.

The darkness of our terror, dread, and confusion, then, is itself an enormous gift from God, for, properly understood, it keeps us from building up palaces of artificial light in which we would gradually lose the ability to see and marvel in the beauty of the real sunrise.  In the same way that an addict fills this ‘void’ with a substance and becomes numb to deeper joys in life, our insistence upon creating meaning and purpose in each moment when it fails to present itself to us fills our own ‘void’ with a meaning and purpose that can never match the gift of God.

Let’s return to 1 Corinthians 13, the famous “Gift of Love” passage: St. Paul tells us that, “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”  The passage juxtaposes the passing nature of the things of this earth against the enduring nature of love.  If God is Love, then this juxtaposition is between the (good) things of this earth, and ultimate union with God: prophecy, faith, knowledge, tongues…they all fade away in the presence of the God who is Love.  They are all dim lights that allow us to see but a reflection of the totality of God.  It therefore stands to reason that if we substitute a lesser good — such as knowledge or prophecy — for the total Love of God, then we confine ourselves to life in the shadows.

What remains, then, is for us to wait for this meaning to be ‘given.’ We know that God is a Good Father who gives abundant gifts to his children.  Sure, if you’re like me, you probably need to be hit with a 2×4 multiple times each day to remember this, but we know that God is good, and we therefore know that God will summon the light at the moments when we most need it.  If we make ourselves available to this — instead of barricading ourselves inside a palace of artificially constructed light and meaning — we will ‘receive’ a gift beyond all measure.  Just when we sense that we’ve reached the threshold of terror, we’re given a joy so deep that we could not imagine.  Then, even if it is for just a moment, we catch a glimpse of the fullness of reality and the totality of the boundless love of God.

“Have you thanked God for this failure?”

 

Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt

Recently, one of my fellow graduate students in the Composition division at the Catholic University of America turned me on to this commencement address, given by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, NY.  In it, Pärt recounts this story:

It was July 25, 1976.  I was sitting in the monastery’s yard, on a bench, in the shadow of the bushes, with my notebook.  “What are you doing?  What are you writing there?” the girl, who was around ten, asked me.  “I’m trying to write music, but it’s not turning out well,” I said.  And then, the unexpected words from her: “Have you thanked God for this failure already?”

“Failure” in the human sense of the term is something that we probably have some experience in handing over to God.  When we aren’t good enough, we’re reminded of how much we need God in our lives, and perhaps we can muster up the strength to thank God for this reminder, and thus, to thank God for our failure.

But do we thank God for our sin, for our moral failures?

For me, when I sin, when I fall into bad habits, when I do anything of which I am ashamed, my first tendency is to run away.  Following the tendency to run away is the turn to prayer and the asking for forgiveness, and, if appropriate, sacramental confession.  After confession, however, I find myself wanting to pretend that the sin never happened, that this time everything will be better and I just won’t fall down again. Invariably, however, I fall again.  Rinse, wash, repeat.

On Saturday, our Marist community went to a day retreat given by Robert Ellsberg, who had the distinction of working with Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker for five years.  He subsequently edited and published her letters and diaries.  It was a fantastic little retreat, and during it, he reminded me of how Dorothy Day’s conversion had come about: Dorothy had become pregnant.  She wasn’t married, and her common-law relationship with Forster would be, in the eyes of the Church, “living in sin.”  In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day describes her relationship with Forster, the joy that it brought her, and how that joy, in turn, led her to God:

I could not see that love between man and woman was incompatible with love of God.  God is the Creator, and the very fact that we were begetting a child made me have a sense that we were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him…Because I was grateful for love, I was grateful for life, and living with Forster made me appreciate it and even reverence it still more.  He had introduced me to so much that was beautiful and good that I felt I owed to him too this renewed interest in the things of the spirit.

He had all the love of the English for the outdoors in all weather.  He used to insist on walks no matter how cold or rainy the day, and this dragging me away from my books, from my lethargy, into the open, into the country, made me begin to breathe.  If breath is life, then I was beginning to be full of it because of him.  I was filling my lungs with it, walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm bay, walking through the fields and woods — a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life and filled me with joy.

Day makes clear that this joy inspired her to pray — she did not pray because she felt unhappy and needed God, but rather because she was happy and so desired to thank and praise God.  She recognized that this ‘natural love’ was leading her to love of God:

It was all very well to love God in His works, in the beauty of His creation which was crowned for me by the birth of my child.  Forster had made the physical world come alive for me and had awakened in my heart a flood of gratitude.  The final object of this love and gratitude was God.  No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child.  With this came the need to worship, to adore.

Dorothy Day was in a relationship that the Church would undoubtedly consider sinful, and yet who can deny that the grace of God was at work in her through every moment of her time with Forster?  While their romantic relationship ultimately ended — Forster objected to having their child baptized and refused to marry Dorothy — their love endured for the rest of their lives.  Dorothy came to care for Forster’s next partner as she was dying, and, as Dorothy was in her final years, Forster would call her almost daily.  Who could deny that the grace of God was at work in them?

Dorothy Day (right) with her partner, Forster (left) near their home on Staten Island.  Day maintained that it was the joy of her common-law relationship with Forster that inspired her to begin praying.

Evil is not a thing in and of itself; it is a perversion of something good, of a longing and yearning for the ultimate Good that is God.  Beneath every sin is a longing for God, and beneath every sinful desire is a yearning to be with God.  When I run away from my sins and my sinful desires, I run away from my humanity and from my call to share in God’s divinity, for these desires themselves (even if ‘impure’) still are rooted in a desire for God.  Such is the sacramentality of the Catholic faith: we bring God ordinary bread and wine, and He gives us His Body and Blood; we bring God our humanity, and He gives us His Divinity.  Likewise, if we bring him our lust, will he not gradually purify it into love?  If we bring him our greed and our attachment to material things, will he not purify this into a love of the things of heaven?

More times than I can remember, I’ve prayed to God asking him to take away the ‘obstacles’ that stand in the way and keep me from holiness.  More and more, I’m learning that these aren’t ‘obstacles’ to be removed from the path.  Instead, they are the path.  More and more, I’m learning to bring them to God, not asking him to remove them, but asking him to endow them with his presence and grace that they may lead me to him (moreover, I’m also learning how God is already present in my weakness and sin).  For, “…power is made perfect in weakness.  I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9b-10).

Thanks be to God, I’m learning to thank him for my failures, and for my sins.

Te Deum laudamus!

“To Whom Shall We Go”?

Religious formation is a tough thing.  Just recently I was exchanging messages with a friend of mine who is in formation for a different congregation, and we stumbled upon the topic of ‘self-discovery’ in formation and the type of Pandora’s Box that it opens.  Let me set the stage:

Our basic call in Christian life is to learn to love, which, as we understand it, means learning to pour out our ‘selves’ for the sake of others, just as Christ did for us.  Christian love is total self-emptiness: “Jesus Christ did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).  Our vocation to self-gift is clearly stated by Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15: “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.  And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”

For most people, this call to self-emptying is realized through family life.  In marriage — and especially with children — one has no choice but to leave the self behind for the sake of those who one loves.  In this way, those in married live grow in holiness and learn to live out authentic, selfless love.  But what about those of us called to celibate life?

It’s a tough question to answer…one that I’m still learning more about each day.  On a basic level, the ‘rule of life’ is thing that holds us accountable to look beyond ourselves, and this definitely helps.  For Marists, it includes a daily Examen, as well as Mass and the breviary, and 3 Hail Mary’s and 1 Sub Tuum upon rising and resting.  But the discipline and practice can only take us so far: when we get lazy and distracted, frequently nobody else notices.  There aren’t the same ‘reminders’ and accountability that exist in family life, and it is really easy to slip into going through ‘the motions’ and doing the minimum, which never sustains us spiritually.

Yet, there’s another level to this mystery: in religious formation (not to be confused with religious life), there is a strong focus on the self, which can be dangerous.  Much of formation is centered around self-discovery and self-growth.  Since a religious community cannot meet the intimacy needs of the individual — and the ultimate impetus to strive towards holiness comes from within — the formation process centers around answering deep questions about who we are and who we are called to be, and why we have chosen the path of religious life.

I entered religious life to go out into the world and share the deep, profound love of Christ.  When I was in college, a dear friend of mine inspired me towards this (by the way, the Boston Globe had an article on one of his many, selfless acts), and I found myself — through the Back Bay Mobile Soup Kitchen — starting to leave myself and grow in genuine love.  In religious formation, because of the introspection necessary to make the decision to remain, it is harder, and I find myself having to pray more and more for the grace to put others before myself.  Even though I am involved in hospice and parish ministry, it can be really easy to not enter those with the same sense of ‘self-gift’ as I previously had.

Recognizing some of the depths of my own selfishness, coming to a deeper understanding of sexuality and intimacy, and becoming more aware of my constant need for conversion, while going through a period of focus on self-discovery in Christ raises a lot of questions.  Is this really what I’m called to?  Couldn’t I be doing more good elsewhere?  If marriage and family life are the ways in which we generally learn to be selfless, shouldn’t I go down that road, too?  In a life where we confront ourselves (the good, the bad, and the ugly) daily, the desire to flee can be strong…after all, aren’t there other places we could go that might make this journey easier?

It’s in this light that I read the Gospel for this past Saturday.  After Jesus’s famous “Bread of Life” discourse in John 6, he asks Peter, “Do you also want to leave?”  and Peter answers, “Master, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:67-69).  Peter’s trepidation catches me — the bold Peter, the one who told Jesus that, “you will never wash my feet” (John 13:8), who said to Jesus, “even if I must die with you, I will not deny you” (Matthew 26:35), and who proclaimed, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you” (John 21:17) — this Peter is reduced to saying simply, “To whom else shall we go?”  He doesn’t give his usual enthusiastic response; he doesn’t say, “of course we will follow you to the ends of the earth”; he simply says, “to whom else shall we go”?

Jesus asks all of us this same question: “Do you also want to leave?”  Maybe it’s about religious life, maybe it’s about the life of faith, maybe it’s about something else.  We may want to leave, we may even have many good reasons for leaving, but something within the core of our being tells us that we can’t.  We may not even be able to muster great enthusiasm for remaining, but where else can we go?  We feel the tug of the Lord on our heart, and we know we cannot let go, even if we don’t have the enthusiasm to fight to hold on.  We trust that there’s a reason, and that, after the process of purification, we will come to realize the ‘why’ and so we move forward through darkness and into light.  Sr. Ruth Burrows, in Living Love, explains the process like this:

We live a caterpillar existence and are completely incapable of conceiving of a butterfly existence.  It is an awful thing to be told — or rather asked — to be willing to die to our caterpillarness in order to be something we have no notion of and no desire for.

We like being caterpillars — we have cabbage leaves to feed on, our world is circumscribed and manageable, it’s solid.  “What’s all this about a new way of being…?  Flitting about in the air…?  No thanks — I’d rather be as I am!”

God’s agonizing struggle is to get his human creatures to love and trust him enough to make the decision, to accept to die to their caterpillar life…

But Jesus accepted.  This is the great triumph.  He accepted, with all the adoring love of his heart, to lay down his life.  This act was his supreme expression of the greatness of his love for his Father — that he, the Father, mattered alone, and that all Jesus wanted was to do his will, and to allow the Father to do in him and through him whatever he pleased.

And it is then God’s good pleasure to fill his creature with blessings.

And so we make our way through the world, trusting in something that we don’t understand, because we realize that we could not go elsewhere.  Nothing less than Our Lord can satisfy our heart, and however dark the process of realizing this may be, we see that there is no other way.  It is the lesson of the young parent learning that date nights and sleep aren’t in the cards when a child enters the family; it’s the lesson of the one in religious formation who must confront all the darkness of self in order to learn how to love; it is the darkness of any Christian learning the profound starkness that the Christian call means laying down one’s life.  However much we may want to let go, we instead recognize that there is nowhere else that we could turn; only God will satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.

Rediscovering Vulnerability: From Prayer to Mission

Viktor Vasnetsov’s take on the crucifixion…the ultimate vulnerability.

Perhaps the title of last week’s post was a little bit cryptic.  “Rediscovering Vulnerability.”  I titled it that because, simply put, it is not easy for me to share the thoughts that are in my heart with the larger ‘world.’  I am happy to share them with close friends, as friendship needs vulnerability in order to be strong, but I don’t share them at large.  Lately, I have been seeing that I need to change in this way; I need to be willing to share the things that move my heart, the way that God works in me.  If not, and if I just stick to the ‘heady’ or academic or philosophical…sometimes that obscures God.  Further, if we do not share the way that God speaks to us, then we also must ask: did God really speak to us?  If God is transcendent, if his Word is truly what fills us, then — as a popular Quaker hymn reminds us — how can I keep from singing?

So what stops us?  I think that it is a sort of well-intentioned fear.  Consider this gem from Thomas Merton (Thoughts in Solitude, ch. VII):

Why should I want to be rich, when You were poor?  Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men, when the sons of those who exalted the false prophets and stoned the true rejected You and nailed You to the Cross?  Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me — the hope for perfect happiness in this life — when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair?

My hope is in what the eye has never seen.  Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards.  My hope is in what the heart of man cannot feel.  Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart.  My hope is in what the hand of man has never touched.  Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers.  Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself.  Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support.  Everything will bring me to heaven.  If I do not trust You, everything will become my destruction.

If we are Christians, then we want to be holy; we want to be cured of our faults, of our hypocrisy, of our false selves.  The problem is that our false self is not discarded so quickly…it creeps back in during the midst of real desire for spiritual “progress.”  Instead of really wanting to be holy, we also want to be seen as holy.  We want to be people of prayer, but our false self creeps in and hopes that we’ll be seen as people of prayer.  For every virtue, there is a sort of shadow-side.  If we are aware of the shadow-side, this can make us want to shy away from talking about holiness or prayer, concerned that our motives might be impure and that it might be self-egrandizing and not self-effacing.  The problem is that these desires, and the ways that God helps them to come to fruition in us, are part of our authentic selves.  Thus, if we are to be authentic, really open to other people in love, then we must share who we really are and what we really experience, how God really speaks to us.  Instead, maybe we resort to mere intellectual babble or the moral lessons of Scripture, and it is no wonder so many fail to be moved by our witness — it isn’t real witness.

So, moving to mission, I had an opportunity to put this into practice a couple weeks ago.  As part of my pastoral formation, I have various apostolic works that I do.  Among them is music ministry, and among the places where I minister is the DC Jail.  Most of the men who come for the Sunday Mass are Latino, and thus the Mass and the music are in Spanish.  Every so often, a priest is unable to come and celebrate Mass, and on these occasions, I lead a Liturgy of the Word.  I am usually asked to give a short reflection or homily after the Gospel.  Preaching is really hard, and I’ve never felt as though any of my preaching really struck a chord with the men.  But on the feast of the Epiphany, something special happened:

Fr. Mike, the chaplain for the jail, called me at the last minute and told me that he was sick and couldn’t celebrate Mass.  Could I lead a Liturgy of the Word?  OK, fine.  But I had no reflection prepared, no time to make copies of the readings, no time to review all of the prayers in Spanish, but the Word of God must be proclaimed regardless of my preparedness, and so I go.

As I’m driving, I realize that there is something I can do for a reflection.  I can just say very simply that during Epiphany, we celebrate how we come to recognize Jesus: this is what the wise men did, and this is what we can do in every moment of every day.  When we find him, we rejoice, as Isaiah exhorts us to: “Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!  Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you” (Isaiah 60:1).  And then I can tell a story about when I was in Mexico:

After coming back from World Youth Day, things were rough.  I was tired, I was lonely, I was sick of being away from my native land, my native tongue, my native food, my native friends.  We were on retreat in the countryside of central Mexico and had a few moments in between retreat sessions.  I went outside where a farmer was grazing his cows in front of the old monastery that is our retreat house, and I was sad.  I prayed to God and told him of my sadness, and I complained to him.  But at that moment, he reminded me how lucky I was: I was without my close friends, but that meant I could draw close to him at every moment; I was without my native land and culture, but I got to really live with a group of Mexicans for a couple months and go to parts of Mexico where nobody goes for vacation; I was without my native language, but I had the grace of learning a new one.  In short, happiness is (mostly) a choice: I could choose to be lonely and sad, or I could choose to rejoice because Christ was present with me.  It was a small epiphany for me.

The Mexican hillside where — in the midst of cows — God showed me his presence

It struck a chord with the men at the jail.  They appreciated my honesty.  In an environment that encourages toughness and not vulnerability, a small moment of vulnerability was appreciated.  I asked some of the inmates if they would like to share any experiences of God’s presence in a moment of darkness, and more stories were shared as we all grew to see that God is indeed really present in all of our lives.  If we really believe that Jesus is present in our lives, how can we not share?  How can we be silenced by some fear of our own darkness?  Of appearing vulnerable?

“If Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

Rediscovering Vulnerability: An Ignatian Meditation

Greg Olsen’s “Walk With Me”

Hello friends.  It has been a long time since I updated this blog.  After adventures in Mexico, France, and Poland over the summer, a busy academic semester started up, and while I thought about writing, I did not ever put pen to paper.  Further, I was in a little bit of a dark place, spiritually…not a bad place, but a more intellectual, less heart-felt place.  God became a little bit more like an organizing concept than a true “point-vièrge” — that place at the center of our being where, as Thomas Merton points out, there is, “a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God.”  It’s the point where we are paradoxically most our true selves precisely because we have decentralized our consciousness to focus on the ultimate other, the ultimate Thou — God.

A little bit more on my own journey a bit later, but this evening I wanted to leave you with a reflection from my own prayer, concerning tomorrow’s Mass readings, following the method of meditation recommended by Saint Ignatius (n.b. reading the Mass readings before reading my meditation would be very helpful):

My Lord, I imagine you walking along the Sea of Galilee.  You are barefoot and the sea gently washes back and forth over your feet, and the water tickles between your toes.  It is a calm moment for you, one where you surely feel close to God, perhaps like how I feel when I walk and pray a rosary…that feeling where God is near, and there is just a real certainty that all will be well in the end, true confidence in God.  Just a little way off the seashore, you sea a boat and two men hauling in a net.  They struggle and strain to pull the net inside the boat.  Something in your heart says, ‘these are the ones.’  Why them, Lord?  What about them struck you?  Nevertheless, you just know that they are the ones that you must call.

A painting by Russian artist Mikhail Nesterov

Your words must sound so strange to these men who have never seen you before.  ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’  And yet, they drop their net back into the sea, and come immediately to shore.  They begin walking with you.  What was it about you that made them drop everything and follow you?  There is something about you — maybe your gentle eyes, maybe your smile, maybe just that sense of peace that you have as you walk — but something about you pierces their heart, and they cannot return to their lives of fishermen.  They cannot stay the same.

James and John are cleaning nets with their father, a task that I’m sure they wish they didn’t have to do.  And yet the boredom of cleaning nets doesn’t explain everything, for they leave behind their father.  What is it about you, Lord, that they see?  What pierces their heart to follow this stranger that they have never seen before?  What pierces my heart and causes me to follow?

Whatever it is, it is something that makes me whole.  Only in you, Jesus, am I one; only in you am I complete.  Only in you does my life have meaning.  You are my “light and my salvation,” the only one through whom I am able to see my lust, my pride, and all the hypocrisy that dwells inside of me.  Only in seeing you am I able to see how I always complain about other people — their politics, their lack of awareness, their lack of faith — and yet not think that I still need conversion.  Only in seeing you is the darkness that covers up all the things about myself that I don’t want to see dispelled.  Only in you is that darkness scattered so that I can see all the things about myself that I hate, all the conversion that I need.  Only in you, Lord.  Only in God Alone can I see all of this.

In Christ Alone.

P.S. — If you’re into this whole Ignatian prayer thing, you should check out Stephen Colbert’s interview with Andrew Garfield, who played the lead in the outstanding Martin Scorsese film, Silence.

Salvador Dali’s “Lighthouse”

Dare to Dream: 200 Years of Marist Life!

First of all, I want to apologize for being away from posting for the last couple of weeks; I had hoped to write something previewing the adventures of the last couple of weeks, but was unable to do so in time.  What adventures, you might ask?  Let’s begin by taking a trip to Lyon, France…

One of the most important dates for Marists to remember is July 23, 1816.  This was, for all intents and purposes, the founding of the Society of Mary.  On this day, 12 young men — all either seminarians or newly ordained priests — ascended the hill of Fourvière in Lyon to sign a pledge, promising to found a new congregation of priests, brothers, sisters, and laity, working together to accomplish the work of Mary, the Mother of God, on this earth.  While the dream would not come together exactly as the first Marists had hoped, and while Rome would not approve the Society of Mary for another 20 years, the signing of the Fourviere pledge remains a critical moment in the history of the Society: on this day, the first Marists “put out into the deep.”  Young men with little plans or experience, they heard the voice of God and responded, looking beyond the earthly challenges involved in building the society, and entrusted their efforts entirely to God.

To commemorate the bicentennary of this pledge, 460 young Marists gathered in Lyon to share experiences of Marist life and to look towards the future.  We were joined by many Marist priests, brothers, sisters, and missionary sisters who shared some of their experiences of Marist life, and the celebration finished with the celebration of the Holy Mass commemorating the bicentennary of the Fourviere pledge, celebrated by Fr. John Hannan SM, Superior General of the Society of Mary, on July 23, 2016.

The activities of the week started on Monday, July 18, with the presentation of the various groups of Marists from around the world that had traveled to attend Dare to Dream.  Young Marists from as far as Fiji and Tonga, Sri Lanka and South Korea, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Brazil and Chile had all made their way to Lyon to celebrate Marist life.

On Tuesday, we had the opportunity to visit various Marist sites in and around Lyon.  Having come with the Marist Fathers, I was able to visit La Neylière, a house that our founder, Jean-Claude Colin, purchased in 1850 that is currently being used as a retreat house.  The house is important in Marist history and contains two different museums: one of our foundation and the life of Jean-Claude Colin, and the other a museum of Oceania and the Marist mission there.  In the afternoon, we divided into language groups (English, Spanish, and French) and made a walking pilgrimage through the countryside, reflecting on some of the more important tenants of Marist spirituality.

Fr. Tom SM, from Australia, leads the English speaking group on a walking pilgrimage, reflecting on the life of Fr. Colin and Marist spirituality.

After spending Tuesday listening to the voices of our founders, the group spent much of Wednesday listening to the voices of today’s Marists.  I was particularly moved by the testimony of Fr. John Larson SM.  Currently serving at our international scholasticate in Rome, Fr. Larson spent many years as a missionary in Burma.  When the Burmese government ordered that all Christian missionaries leave the country, he went across the border into Thailand, where he began a ministry for Burmese refugees and migrants.  But what was perhaps more moving than his story was his take on mission and Marist spirituality.  Recalling that Mary of Nazareth was a simple woman, whose mission was simply to be present and loving to those around her, Fr. Larson said:

We have to remember why we do these things.  We don’t run around the world for our own adventure or even for the experiences, as rewarding as they may be.  We go to the ends of the earth to find the forgotten, to learn their names.  Yes, this is why we go on mission: to learn the names of those that the world wants to forget.

The afternoon saw a round-table discussion with the Superior Generals of the four Marist congregations: the Marist Fathers and Brothers, the Marist Brothers of the Schools, the Marist Sisters, and the Marist Missionary Sisters.  The Superior Generals sought to tie Marist spirituality into topics such as climate change, migration, prayer, community life, and involvement of the laity.

The theme for Thursday was “listening to today’s world,” where we ventured out into the city of Lyon to explore the history of Christianity.  In the afternoon, we broke up into small groups and each visited with non-Marist folks who are working to advance the Christian mission in Lyon and our world today.  My own small group visited with two members of Pax Christi in Lyon, a Christian organization that seeks to be peacemakers, through the promotion of non-violence, nuclear disarmament, and Christian ecology.

Friday was a day set aside for dialogue.  All 460 of us journeyed to L’Hermitage, a Marist Brothers site founded by St. Marcellin Champagnat, to discuss what we had taken away from the week, in advance of the closing Mass, celebrating the bicentennary of the Fourviere Pledge on Saturday.

Fr. Bernard SM, superior of the Marist community at La Neylière, gives our group a tour of “L’Espace Colin” — a museum dedicated to Fr. Colin and the foundation of the Society of Mary.

For me, this was an experience of joy, hope, and fun.  Something about actually being in Lyon, and seeing the places that were so instrumental in the founding of our society was extremely moving.  I’m often tempted to be discouraged by the lack of other vocations in the Society, but this gathering helped me to see how truly far the Marist mission has spread, literally to every corner of the earth, and that gives me a lot of hope for our future.  Finally, to share in the experience of so many other Marists from around the world is really enriching.  I remember sitting with a Marist Brother from Zimbabwe one morning, and he told us stories of how they often have to deal with cobras and baboons showing up in their classrooms…experiences that, as an American, I can’t really begin to fathom.  And yet, in spite of enormous cultural differences, we are all bound together by the Marist vision of a welcoming Church, a Church of Mercy that “beats with the heart of a Mother.”

El Hombre Sol (Part II): The Gospel of Creation

If you haven’t read last week’s post, I suggest that you go back and read it before continuing on.  But, as a brief refresher, last week we looked at the Cosmovitral, designed by Mexican artist Leopoldo Flores, and tried to see what philosophical/theological conclusions we could draw from that.  From looking at his panel “Birth,” I proposed that we could take two philosophical conclusions from this:

1. The universe is seen by the artist as emerging from something.
2. That from which the universe emerges is somehow related to an act between two beings.

From there, I suggested that, if the universe emerges from something, then we must ask two questions: from what does the universe emerge?  And, what is our relationship to this origin?  Christian belief proposes that God is that from which the universe emerges.  We’ll explore our relationship to God in this post.

After this, I argued that Flores is trying to show that there is an action that is at the core of all things within the material universe, from the smallest subatomic particle all the way up through mankind.  Following Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, I argue that love is the most basic principle of Being Itself.  From this, we see that the universe is evolving towards Love (that is, towards God), and then I proposed that this is the reason why God must be a Trinity: love requires both a lover and a beloved.

Today, I want to move beyond these philosophical/theological ideas and move into the realm of spirituality.  As such, we’ll look at two questions: what is our relation to our origin?  And what does all this business about love as a principle of Being Itself mean for our lives?  For both of these questions, I will draw heavily upon Pope Francis’ recent encyclical letter, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.

We’re Creatures; not the Creator
So, if we assume that the universe emerged from something, and we want to inquire as to our relation to the origin of the universe, this seems like a daunting task.  Indeed, I think it’s a question that has left many people earnestly seeking God in the dark for a long time.  But the question gets a lot easier if start with one obvious fact: if the universe emerges from something, and we are part of the universe, then we emerged from something.  As such, we are not the origin of the universe.  In short, we’re not God.  Let’s consider this passage from Paul:

“He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities — all things were created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the Church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” — Colossians 1:15-19

Leaving aside for the time being the question that this passage seems to raise about the divinity of Christ, let’s examine this passage a little more closely.

Love as the Principle of Being Itself
Last week, we looked at Teilhard de Chardin and the idea that love, that is, the desire of all things to unite into a larger whole, is at the basis of all created things.  To me, the aforementioned passage from Paul seems to confirm this idea.  Paul tells us that “in him, all things were created.”  While I am not a Biblical scholar, it seems like we could take this to mean that, in the love of the Father for the Son, all of the universe is created.  We are born from the love of the Father for the Son, and created by the Father for the Son (“all things were created through him and for him”).  As such, it is in Christ alone that we find our purpose (“and in him all things hold together”).  Furthermore, not only is he the head of the Church, the body of believers, but ALL THINGS are held together in him.  As such, if we adopt Teilhard’s view that we are all journeying towards a moment when all creation will look upon the face of God unveiled, Christ is that point.  To use Teilhard’s language, Christ is the “Omega-Point” of our universe (if you’re tempted to think about this as pantheism, please see my explanation of why this cannot be seen as a pantheistic whole in Part I).

In summary, Paul gives us, with the passage from Colossians, some really important principles of our relationship with our creator:

1. We were created in the love of the Father for the Son.
2. We were created for (read: as a gift to) the Son*.
3. In Christ alone we find the purpose for our lives.
4. Together with all of Creation, we are held together in Christ; he is our beginning and our end, and we are only truly ourselves when, alongside all of Creation, we are united with Him.
5. Through Christ, the broken relationships between us and God, between each other, and between ourselves and the rest of creation are reconciled.

* One of the great joys of the religious life is the daily nourishment of the Psalms, which we pray 5 times/day.  This point reminds me of a line from one of my favorite Psalms (Psalm 104): “There is the sea, vast and wide, with its moving swarms past counting, living things great and small.  The ships are moving there and the monsters you made to play with.”  For me, it’s a reminder of God’s omnipotence: even the most powerful, scariest, largest creatures are ultimately made so subordinate to God that they are his play-things…

Pope Francis and the Gospel of Creation
One of the most awesome things I’ve read in a long time is “The Gospel of Creation,” the second chapter in Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’.  I think that the five points of relation that we mentioned between ourselves and our origin in the previous section can be summarized well by Pope Francis’s words:

“…human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself.  According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us.  The rupture is sin.  The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations.”

In short, we’re not God.  And as such, a well-lived human life is one that acknowledges this and lives accordingly, in harmony with God, our fellow human beings, and with all of creation.  To do this, our spirituality (and spiritual lives) need the following parts: Praise, Thanksgiving, and Communion.

Praise
“Nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion.”

“When we can see God reflected in all that exists, our hearts are moved to praise the Lord for all his creatures and to worship him in union with him.”

The above excerpts from Laudato Si’ touch upon what I think are the most important components of a Christian spirituality.  We are made to praise God; we are made for Him.  And, indeed, all of Creation is made to praise God.  But authentic praise can only arise our of a spirituality that is aware of the grace of God, that sees the face of God in all things.  This is an attitude that we ought to ask God for, and it is an attitude we ought to try and cultivate.  I’m convinced that we have to do this by developing a spirit of thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving
What happened in the last five minutes that you’re grateful for?  For me, this isn’t an easy question.  I want to lean on the usual stuff: family, friends, music, the consolations of God, my life…

But what if I narrow the spectrum?  What if I was alone, working all day?  What if God feels really distant?  What if I’m sick and feeling like crap?  What did God give me today for which I’m grateful?  This is a hard question.  But if we really believe in God, every day is a re-creation of the first day; every day is a new beginning, a moment of intimate communion with God that never was before and never will be again.

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Alexander, wrote this post.  Even though he’s an atheist, I think he touched on a very important spiritual truth (though I’m sure he interprets it very differently than I do): “Once the pattern-matching faculty is way way way overactive, it (spuriously) hallucinates a top-down abstract pattern in the whole universe. This is the experience that mystics describe as “everything is connected” or “all is one”, or “everything makes sense” or “everything in the universe is good and there for a purpose”. The discovery of a beautiful all-encompassing pattern in the universe is understandably associated with “seeing God”.

The key here is that the great Chritian mystics, those that are intimately connected with God, are those that are aware of His presence in every moments.  In non-spiritual terms, those who make use of their pattern-matching faculty.  So, if we want to cultivate a life of praise, where we are praising God with all of Creation for all time, then we need to cultivate an awareness of the presence of God.  For me, I find that the easiest way is to figure out what I’m thankful for in any given moment, then I’ve found the presence of God.

We take on faith that God exists and gives us this moment.  From there, we move to seek His presence.

Communion
Lastly, we need communion.  I remember a friend of mine was once dismayed about a mutual friend of ours who wasn’t Christian.  He said to me, “I just can’t imagine it would be all that great to share in the beauty of God without [friend’s name].”  And, he’s right.  I love a lot of people really deeply.  And if you asked me if I wanted to be united to God without them…if I said yes at all, it would be only after a very long struggle.  Luckily though, we don’t have to.  Somewhere along the way, Protestantism got this idea that everything was about a “personal relationship with God.”  Don’t get me wrong, that’s an important part, but equally important is our communion with each other and with all creation.

“God wills the interdependence of creatures.  The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient.  Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other.” – Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 340

We all, individually and together, belong to God.  And as such, “Every creature is…the object of the tenderness of the Father, who gives it its place in the world.  Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection” (Laudato Si’, p. 77).  We’re all connected, our actions make differences in each others’ lives, and we all have to love each other and take care of each other.  We have to do so because we were all created to praise God, to worship him together.  We were created as a Communion, and it is only because of sin that we lost this Communion (and continue to lose it).  And the idea that we can praise God outside of this Communion of caring for each other and Creation is a lie; as Roland Rolheiser powerfully states: “You cannot deal with a perfect, all-loving, all-forgiving, all-understanding God in heaven, if you cannot deal with a less-than-perfect, less-than-forgiving, and less-than-understanding community here on earth.  You cannot pretend to be dealing with an invisible God if you refuse to deal with a visible family” (The Holy Longing, p. 98).  Like it or not, we’re bound together for eternity, so we damn well better figure out how to love each other and praise God together.

Consequences
The sub-title of Laudato Si’ is “On the Care of Our Common Home,” and I would be remiss if I talked only about cultivating attitudes within ourselves and never mentioned the actions that these attitudes necessitate.  As Pope Francis points out:

“A sense of deep communion with the rest of nature cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings.  It is clearly inconsistent to combat trafficking in endangered species while remaining completely indifferent to human trafficking, unconcerned about the poor, or undertaking to destroy another human being deemed unwanted…Everything is connected.  Concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society” (Laudato Si’ p. 91).

All of that, of course, is in addition to the environmental problems that Pope Francis points out: loss of biodiversity, loss of clean drinking water, a warming climate, and global poverty.  And others that aren’t specifically mentioned: excessive violence in the world (and excessive gun violence in the U.S.), unjust war, abortion, capital punishment, violence that targets people by race or sexual orientation…

We have to cultivate an attitude: an attitude of awareness and gratefulness for the presence of God in every moment of our lives.  That comes first.  But from this attitude, there are actions that must follow: first, we have to honestly look at and repent of the evil of which we are guilty in our own lives.  Secondly, we have to see the grave social sin that surrounds us.  This should sadden us, but not cause us to lose hope and not cause us to lose joy, for, “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” (Romans 5:20).  But it should make us ask: what can I do to help with these problems?  Then we have to take the action we can and entrust the rest to God.

Eucharist
The greatest form of Communion that we have on earth is the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.  Whenever we receive, or even just visit the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus is there.  And in him is the “Omega-Point” that we talked about earlier; in him, we find our true selves, and in him we worship him in communion with the whole Church — and, indeed, with all of Creation.  But, just as God is beginning and end, so too is the Eucharist a beginning and an end.  It is the end because it is the most perfect form of praise, thanksgiving, and communion with God; but it is the beginning because it commits us to change our attitude and to change our actions.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“The Eucharist commits us to the poor.  To receive in truth the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us, we must recognize Christ in his poorest, his brethren: ‘You have tasted the Blood of the Lord, yet you do not recognize your brother…You dishonor this table when you do not judge worthy of sharing your food with someone judged worthy to take part in this meal…God freed you from your sins, but you have not become more merciful.” – CCC 1397

One Last Thing (last one, I promise)
If you’re wondering how I got all the way here from the Leopoldo Flores exhibit, I leave you with two things: a picture and the ending of a short-story by Flannery O’Connor.  The rest is up to you to figure out.

“The chapel smelled of incense.  It was light green and gold, a series of springing arches that ended with the one over the altar where the priest was kneeling in front of the monstrance, bowed low.  A small boy in a surplice was standing beside him, swinging the censer.  The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the ‘Tantum Ergo’ before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God.  Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically.  Hep me not to give her so much sass.  Hep me not to talk like I do.  Her mind began to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it….On the way home…the child’s round face was lost in thought.  Her mother turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods.  The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.” – Flannery O’Connor, “Temple of the Holy Ghost”

 

 

El Hombre Sol: Birth (Part I)

Probably the most recognizable symbol of Toluca is a “El Hombre Sol,” stained-glass window located in el Cosmovitral, a botanical garden in downtown Toluca designed by Mexican artist Leopoldo Flores.

The “El Hombre Sol” Panel, created by Mexican artist Leopoldo Flores, is the highlight of the Cosmovitral, located in downtown Toluca.

Located in an old market, the Cosmovitral is one of the most beautiful places that I’ve had the chance to visit in Mexico.  While the building is a botanical garden, it is encircled by a magnificent stained-glass mural, which explores the theme of man and his place in the universe.  Towards the back of the building is a large panel, called either “Birth” or “Genesis,” that features a man and a woman, with an egg in the center.  As the name suggests, this panel explores the origins of mankind.  To one side, the mural takes on brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows, symbolizing the day; on the other side, Flores makes use of more somber blues and purples, symbolizing night.  But the most striking panel is directly at the front, and features a naked man surrounded by the sun.  This panel, “El Hombre Sol” (the Sun Man) has become the face of the exhibit, and quite possibly of Toluca itself.

This is a really awesome work of art, and if you’re in Toluca, you should totally check it out.  But I want to focus more on the spirituality and symbolism of the art than I do on the history and construction of the piece.  But you should totally read more about the history and construction.  You should also check out this panoramic view and these photos (which are a lot better than mine), and you can read more about Leopoldo Flores here.

Birth and Genesis
Now, on to symbolism and spirituality.  Here’s the first panel, “Birth”:

At the center of the panel is an egg, symbolizing something from which the universe emerged.  The egg is encircled by a man and a woman, whose hands appear to be in the act of grasping the other’s.  To me, there are two important philosophical points made by this panel:

1. The universe is seen by the artist as emerging from something.
2. That from which the universe emerges is somehow related to an act between two beings.

Emergence
Let’s consider the first point: the universe is seen by the artist as emerging from something.  If the universe emerges from something, then there is inherently some sort of relationship between that which emerges and that from which it emerges; the two are forever linked in some way…but what is that relationship?  How are we linked?  This is ultimately the question that all religion and spirituality — and to some extent, philosophy — tries to answer: Where did we come from?  What is our relationship to our origin?

From a Christian perspective, the answer is quite obvious: the universe is that which emerges, and the universe emerges from God.  Therefore, there is an inherent relationship between God and man…a point that I think Deism misses; if God created the universe, it seems as though he would have had a reason for which to create it.  As such, the idea that we are created by God, but that he doesn’t really care about what we do, or interest himself in the world that he created seems rather strange to me.  As for the question of our relationship to our origin, that is a question for Christian spirituality that I will address in Part II.

Action
Now, let’s consider the second point: “that from which the universe emerges is somehow related to an act between two beings.”  The fundamental idea here is that action, as a cause, is at the core of our existence.  Is it fair to call this action love?  The French Jesuit and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, argues that it is:

“Considered in its full biological reality, love — that is to say, the affinity of being within beings — is not peculiar to man.  It is a general property of all life and as such it embraces, in its varieties and degrees, all the forms successively adopted by organized matter.  In the mammals, so close to ourselves, it is easily recognized in its different modalities: sexual passion, parental instinct, social solidarity, etc.  Farther off, that is to say lower down on the tree of life, analogies are more obscure until they become so faint as to be imperceptible.  But this is the place to repeat what I said earlier when we were discussing the ‘within of things’.  If there were no real internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in ‘hominised’ form.  By rights, to be certain of its presence in ourselves, we should assume its presence, at least in an inchoate form, in everything that is.  And in fact if we look around us at the confluent ascent of consciousnesses, we see it is not lacking anywhere.  Plato felt this and has immortalized the idea in his Dialogues.  Later, with thinkers like Nicolas of Cusa, medieval philosophy returned technically to the same notion.  Driven by forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.  This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry.  Whether as a force or a curvature, the universal gravity of bodies, so striking to us, is merely the reverse of shadow of that which really moves nature.  To perceive cosmic energy ‘at the fount’ we must, if there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radial zone of spiritual attractions.”

Chardin’s point is quite simple: at every level of material existence, there exists a principle of “love” — that is, a principle of an attraction to another that seeks to unite with the other to form a larger whole.  On the atomic level, sub-atomic particles have a tendency to join together to create atoms; atoms join together to create molecules; molecules to create compounds; living things to create new living things; living things group themselves into society; societies establish relationships with other societies, etc.  At the core of being itself seems to be a desire to come together to form something new that is more complex than what originally existed.

Moreover, if we take love as the core action of the material universe, then we begin to see that man evolves!  Love is the action from which we are born, and perfect love — found in God alone — is the action towards which the entire universe is moving and evolving.  Unlike an Aristotellian “Prime Mover,” we don’t believe in a God who simply sets the world in motion and then leaves, but rather a God who is, “Alpha and Omega…who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8).  All of us, and indeed all creation, is being drawn towards God, and evolving until we will finally be “home.”  And, indeed, our home is the love of God.  As St. Augustine says,

 “[Love] is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest.”

As such, it seems fitting for Flores to try and illustrate the birth of the universe with a man and a woman, hands reaching towards each other, representing this fundamental property of all material reality.  They come forth from the universe, and by nature they seek to love, and in so doing they participate in the evolution of the universe towards Love Itself.

But, as an aside, we should be careful not to confuse this idea with Pantheism.  Yes, the whole universe is in motion, evolving towards God, but that doesn’t mean that we simply sink into some pantheistic whole; indeed, the opposite is true.  If to love is written into the fiber of our being — and that of all material beings — then it becomes our identity.  In short, we are most ourselves when we love others.  Love, being an action between two beings, cannot exist in some pantheistic whole where we all fade into one; on the contrary, it demands individuality in order for there to exist both lover and beloved.  As such, yes, we journey towards God, and we journey together towards God, but not to fade away into some faceless whole.  Instead, we journey towards a Communion, where all will share in the Beatific Vision of the face of Love Itself, and in that Communion we will be most perfectly ourselves, for we are most truly ourselves when we love.

One in Three
Furthermore, this sheds some light on why Christians must believe in a Trinitarian God.  If the basic concept of creation entails love between beings, a love that seeks to come together for the sake of creation, then God (as Creator of the universe) cannot be only one person.  For how can love exist if there is not another who is the object of love?  Rather, God must have multiplicity at some level; as the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions teach, the Eternal Father and the Eternal Son are bound together in a dance of love, and the Holy Spirit is the love that flows between them.  The Father and the Son are both lovers and beloveds, since they have both existed for all eternity.

From one God, who is three persons because he is Love Itself, emerges the universe.  It is a universe where every being — from mankind down to the tiniest sub-atomic particle — has the desire to love and be loved written into its very nature.  And God, who is Love, teaches the universe how to dance, and as time passes, we become better dancers, living in the hope of one day being part of the dance of Love Itself…

 

Maristas Caminando: Pilgrimage, Gift, and Journey

A pilgrimage with the Mexican province of the Society of Mary — along with Marist Laity — to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City on June 18, 2016.

Is it fair to say that all of life is a pilgrimage, a journey into an unknown and foreign land, where the next step is not taken in certainty, but in the only slightly illuminated path of faith?

If we look to our common prayers and hymns with which we feed our spirituality, the answer would seem to be yes.  After all, in the “Hail, Holy Queen,” we pray, “Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”  Perhaps that is a little too steeped in medieval spirituality of exile and suffering for us, but what about this hymn: “We are pilgrims on a journey, we are travelers on the road…”

If we are all pilgrims journeying towards unity with Christ, then we are all fellow travelers.  And, along the way, we’re pleased to encounter other fellow pilgrims; sometimes they’re our family, other times they’re lifelong friends, and sometimes they’re pilgrims whose paths cross with ours for but a brief moment.  Regardless, when we encounter someone during pilgrimage, our eyes are opened — if we allow them to be — to the grace and gift of God.  This is, I believe, one of the important themes in the Emmaus story (Lk. 24:13-35): two disciples are traveling on the road to Emmaus when a stranger joins them.  They begin to talk about Jesus’s death, and the stranger begins to reveal the meaning of the Paschal Mystery.  In the evening, they invite him to stay for supper, and as he blesses and breaks the bread, their eyes are opened, and they see that it is Christ who has been journeying with them.  “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Lk. 24:32)

This is the story of our lives; as we pass through our days, we encounter Christ hidden all around us, and our fellow pilgrims reveal Christ’s presence to us.  My name is Nik Rodewald, and I’m a seminarian for the USA Province of the Society of Mary (the Marists).  At present, I’m living in Toluca, Mexico, and am trying to learn Spanish, and I would like to take you with me on my pilgrimage of Marist formation.  My first year in the Society, mostly spent studying philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, was full of many blessings, and some darkness, and I would like to share those with you, but I also live in the hope that, through each other, we will come to see the grace of God in our lives a little bit better.  So please, feel free to comment and to share your own story, or shoot me an email.

I’ll see you on the road to Emmaus.