The Diary of a Country Priest

"Dear God, I give you all, willingly. But I don't know how to give, I just let them take. The best is to remain quiet. Because though I may not know how to give, You know how to take... Yet I would have wished to be, just once, magnificently generous to you."

"The Diary of a Country Priest" by Georges Bernanos.

I do not know how to give. The humility of this prayer is heartbreakingly beautiful. After all, it is not that I may give to Him, but that He might have me. That His will might be done, not that I might do it. That He may rejoice in making me what He wishes, not that I might become that.

Of course in actual fact the two are inseparable. He cannot make me what He wills unless I become that, and one of the things that He wills that I become is joyful, full of life. Nor is it wrong to desire fulfillment, to desire to be united with Him and to taste the joys at His right hand for ever more. As C. S. Lewis puts it, "A man is not mercenary for wanting to marry his beloved." Marriage is what the beloved is for (in a limited, human sense.) In a much deeper and more fundamental sense, Heaven is what I am for. It is not mercenary greed but deepest humility and gratitude to desire to receive all that God desires to give.

But it is very wise, and touching, and childlike, that this priest could see only his inability to give, and see the solution in God's utter ability to take. It is like the man who sees his lack of humility, and has finally come to realize not simply his lack, but his inability to supply that lack. He might be tempted to despair, but if he does then he has not learned the still deepest truth, that God's grace is sufficient unto us. God created us to receive everything that we are incapable of doing for ourselves. In other words He created us to receive Him. The proper response to that glimpse of our own powerlessness is joy, gratitude that we could provide God an opportunity to do what He delights to do, to give us what we lack.

"Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 2 Corinthians 12:9b.

Anyway, read "The Diary of a Country Priest," prayerfully and with gratitude, and pray not to be made like the humble Cure', but made into whatever God wishes to make you.

Tempted to Hatred

"Pray for me to be made more charitable: we're in the middle of a Faculty crisis wh. tempts me to hatred many times a day."

C. S. Lewis, in a Letter to Sheldom Vanauken,

Quoted in "A Severe Mercy," by Sheldon Vanauken

They provoked him at the waters of Meribah.
Through their fault it went ill with Moses;
for they made his heart grow bitter
and he uttered words that were rash.

Psalm 106:32-33

My wife and I are hosting a bi-weekly book club, in which we read and discuss Sheldon Vanauken's "A Severe Mercy." The C. S. Lewis quote with which I opened this blog is from last night's chapter. The two verses from psalm 106 were in the Office of Readings this morning. I have probably read Psalm 106 many dozens of times, maybe as many as a hundred, given its recurrence in the Liturgy of the Hours, which I have been praying daily for a couple of years. However, that particular passage stuck in my head this morning, as I prayed. It attached itself to that C. S. Lewis quote and refused to be separated.

It is easy to see how the two are related, but I didn't get the significance at first. Of course it is nice to know that C. S. Lewis was human and subject to the same petty temptations as the rest of us, but he made no secret of that. Indeed, for a careful reader, there is no doubt that he was not only tempted, but far more aware of the temptations than most of us are. 

He probably would demur my comparing him to Moses, but to me he has been a sort of Moses. He has been a prophet and a law-bearer. I thought about this for a bit, still not getting the significance. I felt that Moses should not have allowed the people to break his focus on God. He should not have allowed them to "get to him." Just like C. S. Lewis shouldn't let other people's uncharity tempt him to uncharity himself. 

But then a paradigm shift happened and I realized that what the Holy Spirit was getting at was not addressed either to C. S. Lewis or to Moses. It is addressed to me. I am not the one being tempted and tried by those under me, because I am not over anyone. I am not a spiritual leader or authority. I am not the tempted. I am the tempter.

For a brief second I saw myself, not as Moses being embittered, but as one of the children of Israel embittering him. I saw my grumbling, sarcasm, flippancy and nonchalance in a new light. How many times have I, by my behavior and words and attitude, or even just by my ignorance, tempted someone else to hatred? How often have my wise-crack comments, instead of enlightening or assisting someone, irritated them to the point where they thought unkind things about me? Probably far more often than I realize.

Doesn't that make me, in some way, partially responsible for their sin? How many times have I set out to share the great gift of Jesus; and gone from there to simply sharing "the Faith" which is facts about Jesus; to sharing "my faith" which is how I feel about those facts; to finally trying to force my views on others, or at the minimum looking down on them or judging them because they refuse to see things my way?

This is another example of psalm 90:8 "You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence." Or Psalm 19:12a "But who can discern all his errors?"

To which our response must be, "Deliver me, O Lord, from my hidden faults!" Psalm 19:12b.

His grace is sufficient.

In the Beginning

Words have lost their music, or so I hear.

Perhaps they never had any, or so they say.

I will never forget a soldier to whom I said,

“What is the most beautiful song you have ever heard?”

He stopped his talk, and looked at me in quiet,

For a precious half-a-second, before he replied,

“It never occurred to me that music could

Be beautiful.” Perhaps that is the point.

Words retain the music, but we’ve lost the ear

Because we’ve lost (or chased away) our silence.

Our silence? As if it were ever ours.

The Word draws power from the Silence Before The World,

The only power that is, the power of Music

The Music which is the Lord and Giver of Life.

When we become quiet, we begin to do the same,

But neither the words, nor the quiet, are ours;

And certainly not the Music which Is between.

Rather, we are Theirs, or else we simply are not.

Our words are lego miniatures of the Word

And even in them we play with Holy Fire.

If there be not music, then let silence reign

Or at least the rehearsal, barely attended to

By children playing bagpipes, violins,

Trumpets, drums and flutes, in eager cacophony

Always sharp, or flat. Some are merely young.

Others are always trying to play the wrong tune,

Or play their favorite tune at the wrong time.

Some expect they will likely do well enough

When the time comes, so they distract themselves

With sidebar talk; And some just like the noise.

Dead men fill the air with the burden of talk

Zombie conversations about nothing

And I, being dead myself, am fully complicit

In filling and killing the silence with empty talk

Struggling to empty words of all their silence

Lest we find ourselves confronted by

The aweful reality of nothing to say.

So conversations deaden, bore and stultify,

Wilt the critical function and reconfirm

Me in my headlong flight from bright reality.

This is not the courage of the bulwark picnic

In the cancer ward; nor yet the Socratic libation

Poured out for the gods; nor even of shaking the hand

Of a pretty girl. This is only fear

Conspiring to (just-so-happen-to) look

Out the other window at that precise time

As we pass the camo jacket with the cardboard sign,

As if we fear that poverty might be contagious.

Of course it is, but what we do not see

Is that we are already infected, and quite terminal.

Against all this we raise our timeless chats

Over tea and toast around the kitchen table;

Amid beer and pipes of aromatic smoke

In the cool of the evening, when the ancient garden echoes

Softly in the mind, tingeing words with music

Older than fig leaves. Conversations reach

Backwards and forwards into the now and always.

Silence dives still deeper in the single point

Where darkness dwells in unapproachable light.

Humility alone can bring us to this place.

Humility requires, demands, the incarnation

Of ineffable word in flesh of mortal deed.

The scandal of the particular is never more

Strongly felt than when at last we turn

From words to music, in this specific act

Of encountering the Word in scribbled sharpie ink

On a cardboard sign; or in the aching void

Between the lines of empty zombie talk;

And offering bread, not bread alone but Word

Eternally uttered forth from the Mouth of God.

 

Obstacles

Last week I wrote about the need to have a morning prayer time, and the obstacles that always coincidentally show up just when you want to set aside some prayer time. Ironically, the very next morning I had an unusually stubborn obstacle to overcome.

I got up at 4:30 and was driving to church for a holy hour. My truck was almost out of gas, so I stopped at the gas station to fill it up. I swiped my card, and the machine asked me for my billing zip code, and I blithely typed it in. I am not sure what I typed in, but it started with "28," which is a North Carolina zip code.

I haven't lived in NC for three years.

Of course it rejected my card and locked up the machine for a minute. I used my other card, but still couldn't remember my billing zip code. Time after time I tried, but I could not remember that stupid 5 digit number. Old zip codes from previous apartments? Got it. Old buddy's house from two years ago? Got it. House I live in now?

Uh.....

After five or ten minutes I was getting later and later for the holy hour. I hate being late for holy hour! I was getting more and more grumpy, I was tired, and I thought about just giving up and going back home for a nap before school. After all, I didn't have enough gas to get to church and back home and then to school. It was clearly the fact that I was tired that was causing me to forget my zip-code.

But then I decided not. After all, who needs sleep? So I went into the gas station and paid for gas at the counter. I am not sure why it took me ten minutes to think about that. At any rate, I finally did think about that, I paid for the gas, and got to church, and indeed had a great holy hour, from my point of view.

So, as I said, there are always obstacles. The thing is not to get grumpy or uptight about it, but just accept it with a laugh and trust. In all likelihood it was my grumpiness that kept me from thinking about paying inside, and made me later for holy hour. But live and learn. That also is material to be accepted and surrendered.

Everything is.

Mary, Martha, and the Primacy of Contemplation

As much as I hate to admit it, there is a certain hierarchy in the spiritual life, as in the physical world. It is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable thing about the faith, that some things are true, others are not, and there is no getting around them when they are. The second most uncomfortable thing is the knowledge that I am fallible, and therefore I never truly know when I am right, and when I am wrong. So, in yesterday's discussion of Martha and Mary, I came to the conclusion that the "one thing needful" was love and the trust that must follow it. This takes different shapes, depending on the situation, but love is always the central thing.

However, this does not fully explain the fact that Jesus did say that Mary chose the "better part." In fact, throughout the history of the Church Mary and Martha have been considered archetypes of the two broad vocational categories, if you will, the contemplative and the active lives. Mary, of course, is the proto-contemplative and Martha is the proto-active. A good deal was made out of this distinction by the Church over the ages, in holding up the celibate, contemplative life as the beau-ideal of the Christian life.

Ah, but isn't that rather an old fashioned way of thinking about it? Don't we now know that everyone Apostolic Letter "Novo Millennio Ineunte", the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, by Pope Paul VI, and Chapter V of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.) Wasn't Vatican II all about increasing the role and responsibility of the laity in the Church?

Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa 1979

is called to be a saint, and lay-people are called to the same level (although not "style" for lack of a better word) of holiness as everyone else? (For reference to recent emphasis on the "Universal call to Holiness), see Article 30 of St. John Paul II's

Heck, go back to the beginning and didn't St. Paul say, "For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose" 1 Corinthians 12:14-18.

Yes, but this does not change the fact that St. Paul was also the author of 1 Corinthians 7:32-34. And Jesus definitely did say that Mary chose the better part. Is the active life really second best?

I think the key is to be found in the two great commandments. We all know them: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength and all your soul," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." These are clearly hierarchically arranged. Love of God comes first, love of neighbor comes second. However, they are not arranged according to worth but according to primacy. First things first, if you will. Love of God comes first, love of everyone else comes second. 

For some reason, and I suspect it is diabolical in origin, almost everyone Christian I know will read that and hear, "Love of God is more important, love of neighbor is less important." The implication is that there is a competition for limited resources (love) and God has first claim so when there is not enough love to go around, well, sorry family, but God gets His first. This understanding is widespread, pervasive, but is a straight up lie. Hence my suspicion that it is diabolical in origin.  

In reality, there is not and can never be any sort of competition between creature and Creator, except in the imagination of the creature. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being!" There is no possible way in which we could ever have something that God needs, and there is no possible way God could ever not provide for His creatures what they truly need, and in any event, Love is the one thing that only multiplies the more you give it away.  The Creator vs. creature dynamic is not a valid construct. 

Competition, when it occurs, occurs in the imagination of the creature. The creature imagines that something is good for it, which God has warned is not, in fact, good for it. Promiscuous sexual activity or gossip, to pick two fairly common examples, one respectable, one slightly less so. These give pleasure, they make the creature feel good for the moment, so the creature thinks they are good. God says they are not, the creature does them anyway and reaps the consequences later on down the line. This is what we call "sin" and "punishment."

This brings me to what Fr. Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, calls "The Primacy of Contemplation." This is a concept that reconciles the two halves of the false dichotomy, admittedly by the rather mundane process of non-reinvention of the wheel. Simply put, pray first (commune with God), then go and do what He tells you (love your neighbor.) In the order of the Church as the Body of Christ we have contemplatives who listen to and commune with God, and we have actives who put that relationship into practice. This is an important area of study, but not really my topic at the moment. Right now I am concerned with the contemplative and active element in my own life.  

The Primacy of Contemplation means that my work must flow from my prayer. My relationship with people must flow from my relationship with God. This is not because God is more important than people (He is, but He doesn't insist on His importance) but because people are so important that anything but the best is not good enough for them. Therefore our service must be the highest, noblest and most loving service, which means is must be united with Christ's service (from Bethlehem to the Cross). To do this we must be united with Christ. As Vatican II proclaimed in Perfectae Caritatis, "Apostolic activity must spring from intimate union with Him."

This means that prayer, spiritual reading and the sacraments, while not the focus of our lives (for laity in general) need to be the foundation of our lives. As busy as we may become (and I have become very busy at various times in my life) we must never be too busy for dedicated time for prayer. The world attacks prayer time. It always will by design. When you make the decision to set aside time (five or ten minutes or an hour, it doesn't much matter) every day for prayer, the devil will attack that time. He will make you unusually tired in the morning, try to get you to stay up late so you will say, "Just this once I really need those extra ten minutes of sleep, so I am going to hit the snooze button. I'll make up for it tomorrow." He will wake the kids up early and send them to interrupt. He will offer distractions, diversions and downright despair of ever praying worthily. (I don't know whether all of those interferences are directly as a result of the devil or just coincidence, but I have noticed that they tend to occur with surprising regularity. I know as a matter of history that when my alarm goes off I can count on having at least one good reason not to pray every single morning.) 

The great thing is simply to keep trying, and not to be discouraged by failure. When prayer time is interrupted by tiredness, offer that as a sacrifice. When it is interrupted by other people, offer that to God. When you are secretly very glad that so-and-so came along and interrupted and got you off the prayer hook for today, and ashamed of that feeling, offer the feeling, and the shame and the interruption to God. Try again tomorrow, or later in the afternoon. 

Set an alarm on your phone for 3 PM, and when it goes off simply say the Divine Mercy prayer or a short form of it, such as, "For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us, and on the whole world." Pause, center your awareness on God (who has not ceased to be aware of you for all eternity) and look at Him with love. 

Talk to Him like Tevye. 

Talk to Him, listen to Him, then do what He tells you, and you will become an active contemplative, probably without even knowing it. 

You will also become a saint. Sweet deal!

Martha and Mary: Failure and the Five Love Languages

Jesus entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
“Lord, do you not care
that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
Tell her to help me.”
The Lord said to her in reply,
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her.” Luke 10:38-42

The Gospel of the day: As a good friend of mine said in Bible Study last night, "I sometimes feel like this is one of those passages that has been beaten to death!" I also think, for priests and deacons, it may be the passage most likely to offend the middle-aged ladies of the parish who are probably more likely to relate to Martha than to Mary. After all, it's all well and good for Mary to choose the better part. But, as another friend commented, "Oh! That's how it is? My sister chose the better part, eh? Do you want to eat tonight, Jesus? I hear there's a kid down the street with some loaves and fishes..." Can you imagine her face after He said that to her?

(Meaning no disrespect to Martha at all. She reminds me too much of the women of my family whom I love dearly.)

One thing that a priest once pointed out in a homily, and which has stuck with me ever since, is that Jesus never rebuked Martha for serving Him, or for cooking, or for cleaning, or for any of the work she was doing. He rebuked her for being "worried and anxious." That is why I like this picture of the incident so much, because it captures something of the tenderness and playfulness of Jesus' response. He knows that she loves Him, and that she wants everything to be perfect for Him. The question is, does she know Him?

Gary Chapman in his book "The Five Love Languages" posits that human beings express and understand love in five main ways: Physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service and gift giving. Everyone has one or maybe two main languages that they naturally gravitate towards, with the others being secondary or lesser importance. For instance, when I listed them above, I listed them more-or less in order of importance to me, with physical touch and quality time a tie for most importance, and gift-giving utterly meaningless to me.

Now it is easy to go from there and posit that Jesus (in His humanity, obviously, not His Divinity) acts of service, gifts, words of affirmation, and physical touch. Jesus was a whole and complete human being and He knew how to love as the situation needed.

Jesus knew how to love as the situation required.

was a "quality time" type and Martha was an "acts of service" type. He might have been saying something like, "Martha, a really big meal is all well and good but what I really want is just to spend some time with you." The problem with that is that it sets up a sort of false dichotomy between the two and it also misses the holistic nature of Jesus. The gospel has many examples of Jesus Himself loving with

No, it was the worry that was the problem. He says the same thing to me all the time when I complain about when am I going to have time for prayer, for spiritual reading, etc. I just have so much to do! "Peace!" He says to me. "You are worried about many things. One thing only is needful. Trust me."

Worry comes when we set goals for ourselves and measure our success or failure based on whether we achieve our goals. But, as I said last week, failure is almost the point of trying in the spiritual life. Jesus wants our goal to be loving Him, not achieving anything. Indeed, achievement of any kind, a goal of any kind, material or spiritual, or "for the Kingdom" or what have you, no matter how perfect is absolutely worthless without that one thing needful. As Saint Paul put it:

Earnestly desire the higher gifts.

And I will show you a still more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 

1 Corinthians 12:31-13:3

Love, then is the one thing needful, and trust as a consequence of that love; implicit trust, which

refuses to become distressed when our prayers are not answered, our evangelization efforts are met with indifference, and our attempts at love go unnoticed. This trust even extends to our efforts at trust, refusing to become distressed at our inability to remain trustful. In other words, even when we fall off the trust bandwagon and start worrying up a storm, we don't get worried about our worrying. We just pick ourselves back up, calm the body, then the mind, then the heart as best we can (it's a useful technique, remind me to tell you about it sometime) and leave the rest in the hands of God. This is the way to true mastery in the spiritual life, through loving, trusting acceptance of failure. Through it all we sit humbly on the ground like a little kid at story time, and look up at Jesus and wait for Him to explain the punchline. That is all that is required of us.

Isn't He great like that? :-D

Art as Prophecy

 "Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still..."

T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton."

 If art is communication of vision, then true art is prophesy. Each human person sees, or at least is called to see, some aspect of God that no other creature in existence can ever see. I believe that this is the true basis for that mysterious quality which we call individuality, but that requires a good deal more thought. What I am certain of is that God communicates a part of Himself to us that He communicates to no other person. Or to put it differently, He communicates His whole being to us in a way that He does for no other person. Whenever a human being sees a glimpse of that communication and tries to share it with another human being, art is born. This transcends the formal arts, music, writing, painting, sculpture, acting and so forth. This permeates all truly human activities down to the most mundane. Thus we can speak of an "art" to good conversation; an "art" of letter writing; an "art" to hospitality; an "art" to flipping burgers. When we say that someone does some mundane task artfully, we meant that he or she is doing it purposefully, meaningfully, in the best manner possible and this raises their activities to the level of art. 

humanly.They are not simply tying a shoe, they are tying it well, with attention to the shape of the knot, the length and balance of the loops and tails. They are seeking to do what must be done

Art is prophecy, in this sense, because the beauty that one person sees in the restrained elegance of the Japanese tea ceremony is a reflection of God. The beauty that another seas in the barely controlled chaos of the mudroom when the kids come in from a ramble through the woods in mid-March is also a reflection of God. To share either beauty with the other, to translate it so that they can see and appreciate it, is to broaden their appetite for beauty, to show them a truth they were not aware of, or had forgotten, or simply had never exercised. It shares a part of God with them that otherwise they would not have seen.

It is this that I mean when I say that art is prophecy. It is usually unconscious, I suppose, a reaching after "we know not what." That is what makes art universal when it is at its best. It is an expression of longings that remain inarticulate. The methods of art can be used as a distraction from those longings, which I would classify as entertainment rather than art. This too has its place as a rest, to help us refit until we are strong and ready to begin the pursuit once more. Art, however, should not distract from the longing, the not-enough-ness. It should point it out, set a finger on it and say, "I try to capture the 'more' but it will not be captured."

It need not be unconscious, though.

"The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."

  T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages."

An artist may know what he is truly striving after, put a name to Him, and by discipline, prayer and observance, the "lifetime's death in love/ ardour and selflessness and self-surrender," bring himself more and more to mirror that light, to enter into that relationship, and to gaze upon the beauty he seeks to communicate. It is necessary, in the end, or else he runs the risk of being more in love with his communication of the beauty than with Beauty Himself. In the end I suppose he will come with Thomas Aquinas to know that everything he has ever created has been only straw, valuable to God only because God loves Him. In the end, the reader, the viewer, the sharer of the art will also be drawn beyond the art. They will leave behind our best works like forgotten toys, and that which once inspired us will be no longer relevant, loved for old time's sake, as a grown up may keep a teddy bear in the box in his closet.

This is to be expected, even to be hoped for. Our glimpses are partial, shadowy, incomplete. They were never meant to satisfy. They were meant to introduce, to excite, to tease and urge onward. The reality is "further up and further in."

If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing;
if tongues, they will cease;
if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
For we know partially and we prophesy partially,
but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
When I was a child, I used to talk as a child,
think as a child, reason as a child;
when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.

Prophecy: Your Own Kind of Crazy

A Leader

is a fellow

who refuses to be crazy

the way everybody else is crazy

and tries to be crazy

in his own crazy way.

                                Peter Maurin, "Easy Essays."

The idea of prophecy has been rolling around in my head for a while now. I am not sure why. I remember in my early days of blogging, coming across Christian bloggers who would write about "prophetic words" that they had been given, or which their pastor had uttered, or some writer had shared. Some were concerned with the end times. I passed over them. Jesus seemed pretty adamant that worrying about the end of the world was not our business, and was rather a distraction than anything else (Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32). 

Perhaps the issue was that I, and all of these bloggers, seemed to interpret prophecy as a prediction for the future. I have very little to say about that. I acknowledge that such things are possible, by God's grace, but am not much interested in it. I know that the future is in God's hands. My task is to live it with Him as it happens. The same goes for the end of the world. In all likelihood, whether the world ends any time soon or not, I will die sometime in the next 70 years or so. My task is to die a little bit every day in order to live more fully the Divine life. The world ending or continuing is largely irrelevant to that task.

However, recently I have been drawn to considering prophecy outside of the strict theological sense of a prediction of future events, or revelation of unknown events, and drawing a broader meaning. For instance, very little of the work of prophets in the Bible relates to predicting the future. Predictions occur, but they seem to be a highlight of the job, rather than part of the day to day grind. Instead, the much of the times the prophets of the Old Testament seem to be more concerned with reminding, correcting, exhorting, warning and admonishing. They give concrete instructions, and they bring the law back to mind. 

In a sense, they communicate the idea of a living relationship with God, based on dialogue, rather than simply a set of rules that no one remembers anyway. I am most struck by the fact that being a prophet in the Old Testament is an uncomfortable proposition. People don't like being told they are not just wrong, but dead wrong, and they are going to pay the price if they don't shape up. "They say to the seers, 'See no more visions!' and to the prophets, 'Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.'" Isaiah 30:10. 

This admonishing of sinners can be thought of as a reminder, call back to their true desires. Of course, in strict mystical theology, a prophecy is a direct revelation from God, in this broader sense it is the birthright, and indeed the calling, of all Christians. In my last blog I spoke of the central aloneness of each human being, created as we are in calling to a "unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God Himself." In the blog before that I spoke of art as a sort of prophesy. Both of those posts anticipated this one. 

In the poem I posted on August 10th I dimly saw the necessity of prophecy as a reminder. The question, "Are you happy?" is a prophetic question, because the answer for any thoughtful, honest person can never be an unqualified, "yes." There is always some dissatisfaction, some incompleteness. We do not live as fully as we might live. We do not give as fearlessly as we might. To be reminded of that is uncomfortable. It makes me squirm. To be shown the gifts that currently sit stagnating in the abandoned warehouses of my life is to be reminded that I have never done enough. I fall short of total gift. The thought makes me squirm and I turn on the x-box and play Nazi zombies to distract myself. I putz about on youtube, clicking from one epic rap battle to the next, as all the while precious moments slip by, moments in which I am not praising God or serving my fellow man. I am not creating art, or absorbing beauty. I am being entertained. I do not want to be reminded. I want to be "distracted from distraction by distraction."

But this reminder is a spiritual work of mercy. If I cannot be holy yet, I should at least be uncomfortable. I should not be content with mediocrity. "Let a righteous man strike me—it is a kindness; let him rebuke me—it is oil for my head; let my head not refuse it. Yet my prayer is continually against their evil deeds." Psalm 141:5.

I think this is why I talked the day before yesterday about the necessity of doing something radical. I remember saying once, at a party of all places, when the conversation had turned to tricks and gimmicks that people resort to in order to seem mysterious, that a human being should not need to try to be mysterious. Each human person is a mystery. If you live as you were meant to live, true to the face of God that you alone and no one else can see, then you will be mysterious. People will not get you. You will be asked to explain yourself. 

In fact, if you have never done something that seemed absolutely crazy to everyone else, but which you knew you had to do, it is probably a good indication that you have never lived.

Conversation

“If you don’t mind my saying,” my Friend said to me, “I have noticed something about these little visits you make. You know you have been coming to visit for quite a while, and I always enjoy our time together immensely, more than you can possibly imagine. But I must say, I notice a strange thing about how you converse. Do you mind if I share it?”

“Not at all,” I said, surprised and pleased. “Please do.”

“Well, I notice that you come to visit and you always have such things to talk about, really very deep things, although most of them you do not understand in the slightest. You seem utterly determined to keep the conversation on those topics. Why is that?”

“I am afraid I don’t understand,” I admitted, slightly puzzled and, truth be told, just the tiniest bit offended, though I reminded myself that my Friend’s bluntness was just exactly what I needed most. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Well, you will be going along, chattering away about metaphysical hogwash and yadah yadah, and you will start to go off on a tangent. Maybe you will start to talk about the leaky faucet and how you have been meaning to get to that, or that bill that is going to be overdue in a week; but then, right as you are about to get going, you stop, you apologize, and you go back to your high-falutin’ talk.”

“I suppose I do,” I said, somewhat stiffly.

“Why? Why do you always cut the tangents short? And why the apology?”

“Well,” I answered, “For more or less the same reason I don’t answer my cell phone here. I don’t want to be distracted from the conversation. It is out of courtesy to you.”

My Friend laughed. “Oh, but Bless your Soul, did you really think this was a conversation? Goodness, a conversation implies two-way communication, and thus far you have done most of the talking. But let me explain it this way. Suppose you were in the middle of one of your ‘conversations’ with me and one of the children came in and asked for a drink of water? Or your wife asked you to grill some hamburgers. What would you do? Would you say, ‘Oh, sorry, go away, don’t bother Daddy now, he is talking to his Friend? Sorry, babe, I am in the middle of a VERY IMPORTANT CONVERSATION!’ Or would you get up and do as they asked?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I hope I would get up and do what they asked.”

“You would,” he agreed kindly. “Rest assured you would do it, and I know you would. Why?”

“Because you would always want me to fulfill the duties of my state in life before any other consideration.”

“Very correct,” my Friend said with a hint of irony. “Do you think that I am not within the children? Within your wife? Within each and every person, down to the very least of these who has a claim upon your service? Do you think you could serve them without serving me?”

“No,” I answered. “I know that in serving them I serve you.”

“And do you not know that when I come to you disguised as a child it is no less me than when I come to you disguised as bread and wine?”

“I know this.”

“Then apply that same logic to your tangential thoughts,” He said. “Do you think any thought arises in your mind that I have not allowed? Do you think any thought, even the least stray imagining of yours, is uninteresting to me? Who gave you this list of approved topics of conversation that you follow so scrupulously?”

I knew not what to say, so I said nothing.

“Perhaps instead of biting off those tangents and shoving them back into a corner somewhere (where they will either go bad or go to seed, but never go away), maybe you should take up one or two of them? I already know what is worrying you, far better than you do. Let me see it (by which I mean, ‘let me show it to you’) and share it with you, and we can deal with it together. Who knows, perhaps this conversation thing might become an actual conversation after all.”

Mercy

Lord, I worship you, crucified

In the bodies of your children, and

Crucified still more terribly

In the souls of your children
Who crucify them,
And in the souls of your busy children
Who do not intervene.

In all these, still you abide,

In perfect love.

Hail Mary: The Catholic Gateway Drug

Once upon a time I was a teenage Catholic who wanted to go to heaven when I died, someday. I figured I would get the going to heaven thing taken care of and then get down to the business of living life, knowing that I had the afterlife under control. I suppose there was a sort of wisdom in that. That is, I recognized a fundamental principle that "what does it matter if one gains the whole world, if you pay for it by losing your soul." I realized that it would be a bit embarrassing if I made it through life acheiving all sorts of great things, and found that I had missed the grade by a few Masses or a good confession. So I set out to find for myself what I had to do to get to heaven.

 I knew, of course, from my years in catechism class, that if you died after making a good confession you would eventually end up in heaven, by way of purgatory. Bonus points could be acquired by receiving communion and last rites at the hour of death, and, if all else failed there was always an "act of perfect contrition." At the moment of death I would simply make an "act of perfect contrition" and be forgiven and end up in heaven a few minutes later. (My naivete in that regard is subject for a whole other blog!)

All of this was well and good, but I had a sort of idea that I wasn't doing enough. I didn't want to put the whole Catholic thing on autopilot until I was sure it was on the right course with a little wiggle room to left and right, just in case. Given that life could last for a while and unforeseen circumstances might arise, it seemed wise to me to have a fallback plan, a little something that would put me over the top.

In the course of my extensive reading of somewhat childish hagiography I had somewhere come across the idea that if you said three Hail Mary's a day, every day, you were guaranteed to save your soul. There were other options out there, such as wearing the brown scapular or the medal of the Immaculate Conception, but three Hail Mary's seemed the least bother and most reliable. After all, a medal or a scapular can break and fall off, but I am not likely to lose my ability to say the Hail Mary. So I said, "Three short prayers a day, about two minutes of praying if I really stretch it out, in exchange for guaranteed eternal life? Deal!!!"

Little did I know! You think you're just going to say three a day, no big deal, not super crazy or anything. You can rattle through them no problem, and it needn't interfere with your busy schedule at all. It's a sweet deal, but you need to read the fine print.

That is really the reason I am writing this, to warn other innocent teens out there to be careful about saying Hail Mary's. It like the marijuana of the spiritual life. (All sorts of jokes about "Mary-uana" are being consigned to oblivion in my brain right now.) You start out with three a day, and you go along just swimmingly for a bit, but sooner or later a little voice in your head is going to start saying, "Well, three are nice, but wouldn't five be nicer? What about ten? That's only about five minutes of prayer time a day, and then they become a decade of the rosary, which is super extra bonus points!"

But you cannot say just a decade, you have to say the "Apostles Creed," "Our Father" and "Glory Be" as well. And then you have to have something to think about while you are making your way through those five tedious minutes, so you start looking up the mysteries in the Gospel to read about them. Then you start feeling like maybe you should at least try to pay a little bit of attention at Mass, you know, not like getting into it or anything, but maybe, you know, like actually thinking about the Mass and stuff instead of video games.

Who knows where you go from there. You see, it starts out with a little Mary-uana, and then you decide to try out some Eucharist, maybe some spiritual reading, even a holy hour now and again. It is a slippery slope, and, all jokes aside, it is utterly terrifying.

I remember two such instances, both from when I was 19 in Korea. That was when I committed to saying a decade of the Rosary every day, and when I committed to reading for chapters in the Bible every day. Both choices scared the Hell out of me (in the most literal possible sense). In the case of the Bible reading I was afraid of failing, and getting bored with it. I argued myself into it on the grounds that it was not a valid argument against. After all, how is trying and failing in any way inferior to not trying at all? And why would I fail? What was there to prevent me from following through other than my own laziness?

In the case of the Rosary I was frightened because I had a feeling I would like it, and then it wouldn't be enough. I would then be called to a whole rosary, five decades, every day. I was okay with offering God 7 minutes a day, but not 20, and I knew if I gave Him the 7 it would not be long before He would demand the 20. It is the same with giving money or time to ministry or the Church. It is not enough, and we know it is not enough when we give it, and we know that as soon as we are accustomed to this level of "generosity" a higher level will be required. Best not even to mess with it.

This is how it has always been. I have come a long way since my three Hail Mary days, and I know that I have not gone far enough. I have become a hardcore user, I am into Mass, Eucharistic Adoration (the ecstasy of the spiritual life), and spiritual reading. This is where it becomes a slippery slope. You lose the "what is He going to ask from me next" and you turn a corner and you just want to give it all to Him. Not give away, necessarily, because in reality He takes very little from you. Instead you want to give it to Him in the sense that you want everything you have and are to be available to Him for His use, every second of every day, 24/7/365 until the end. You lose all fear of being drawn deeper, and instead fear not being drawn deep enough. Instead of asking "How much do I have to give to make the grade," you ask, "How can I squeeze out just a little bit more to give?" You look back on all the times you have held back and they break your heart. I look back and see how even as recently as this morning I held back, I did not give everything, and I wish I could go back and change it. You see how far short you fall, how enough is never enough because we are utter emptiness waiting to be filled with utter fullness, and anything that at present seems to fill us is nothing but an appetizer. The insane abandon and reckless radicality of St. Francis, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. John of the Cross, and St. Therese of Lisieux, begin to make sense, and to accuse you. When St. Paul's hardcore zealotry begin to make sense, you know you've hit a new low.

Then even the weaknesses in your prayer become the subject of your prayer: "Lord, I pray so poorly. Make up what is lacking in my prayer. My lips are moving but I do not know you in my heart. Reveal yourself to me. I think great thoughts but do not live them in the office, at home, in the world. Live your life in me."

And the descent continues. 

Perspective

-->

It was a weekday Mass, and we were spread

Pretty thin. You know, one to a pew

Or maybe two.

The Our Father came, time to hold hands

And the elderly Korean lady in front of me reached

Out to her left to her equally ancient friend

And grasped her hand. Then reached back to the right

Towards me, and left her hand outstretched.

I took it.

We never held hands at Our Lady of Good Counsel.

Father was old school and did not approve.

But I could not help but notice that in reaching

And stretching herself for her neighbor, left and right,

She shaped herself into a cross.

Nunc et Hora Mortis

When I have been taught, when I have learned,

Truly been taught, been silenced so as to learn;

When I have ceased to babble and to quibble

Ceased to quarrel, grouch, gripe, grumble

Ceased to mumble

Ceased to fumble about for words, ceased to frustrate

The prostrate center by the erect mind,

Ceased to demonstrate, remonstrate, illustrate

(As even now I seek to illustrate my own absurd

Illustrations by the multiplication of words)

When, I say, I am silent and learn to turn inward

Out of words, away from myself, and burn with thirst,

With urgent yearning for that which is not I…

In short, when I number my days aright

Then shall I concern myself with two moments only:

Now

And the hour of my death.

For they are the same moment.

The same point of intersection, the same cross

Between the horizontal and the vertical,

Between the point which is my “I” and something

Someone

Probably quite dimensionless

Or at any rate beyond all dimension.

Now is the timeless hour of death,

The hourless moment of utter decreasement

To make way for His increase.

Now!

The hour of my death, which is His Life

As His death is my life and my life is now no more mine

Since I have been nourished on flesh and blood

Not mine. The only food

The only medicine to do me any good

Is Him. And He is only here and now

Which is everywhere and always.

Holy Crap: A Post Chiefly About Poop

This morning, as is I my habit, I awoke and made my way to the chapel for morning prayer. On the way there I paused at the chowhall to mix myself a bottle of instant coffee. Yes, it is quite as disgusting as it sounds, but I had a reason for it. I usually do not stoop to such depths of degradation, however, today I was planning a run down to the river (not, alas, to pray and study about that good old way, but merely to turn around and come back. At least I did not stay to live down there in a van... but I digress.)

Now, the run route leads through a local village for a mile and a half, and then into the jungle for a about half a mile, but even in the jungle there are several little bamboo huts with people living in them. With this information, the discerning reader will readily see why it would behoove the early morning runner to take care of business (from a solid waste perspective) prior to embarking on this run. It has been my experience in most Asian countries that defecation tends to be an all or nothing proposition. I do not react as violently to the local food as most white people do (not racist, just saying) but still, when it is time IT IS TIME!

Accordingly it becomes necessary, when a run is planned, to attempt to coordinate the morning poop for sometime before the run. Just my luck to have it hit in the middle of the village, a mile and a half from a civilized toilet. Not that I would not use the local facilities. I have before. However, that would certainly be disruptive to the locals' routine, and I try to avoid being disruptive.

Well, about two minutes into my chapel time, the criminally dreadful instant coffee accomplished the end for which it was consumed. There are, unfortunately, no bathroom facilities in that chapel, so I began my morning fitness routine with a record setting 400 meter clench-and-waddle, and finished morning prayer and the office of readings in my room. As I was making for the only refuge available to me at the fastest pace I could safely maintain, this clever little couplet introduced itself into my brain and danced around and around in high glee at my predicament:

"Even your morning poop can be poetic
If you start your day with a diarrhetic!" 

The Office of Readings today consisted of Ecclesiastes (yeah!) 5:9-6:8 which is cleverly summed up in the one line, "The Vanity of Riches!" The first responsorial is:

"Keep falsehood and lying far from me, O Lord
  --Give me neither poverty nor riches, provide me only with the food I need
I have put my trust in you, O Lord; my destiny is in your hands.
  --Give me neither poverty nor riches, provide me only with the food I need." 
(Proverbs 30:8, Psalm 31:15)

My brain immediately inserted that quote from Hello Dolly: "Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It ain't worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow."

My brain then asserted that human manure was definitely not appropriate for that function. Of course Victor Hugo, in his book Les Miserables, in the chapter in which Jon Valjean escapes through the sewers, digresses for a good chapter or two on the benefits of human manure as a fertilizer for crops and laments the financial waste that was the sewers of Paris. I particularly remember him vehemently

asserting that gold is lost to the agriculture of France "with every cough of our cloaca." Victor Hugo, however, was not aware of the serious health risks of using night soil as a fertilizer, (i.e. Chinese liver flukes, cholera, and any number of other fecal contaminants, which are a constant concern when buying produce in many rural Asian countries. But I digress.

So according to both Solomon and Dolly Levi, riches are basically crap and hording them makes about as much sense as hording big steaming piles of $#!+. Of course, I have hoarded big steaming piles of manure before. My family could never have been accused of hoarding money. Indeed, my father's pay check was purely theoretical money. It was always budgeted, allocated and spent before it even hit the bank. Poop we did collect, though. I remember the twice annual manure spreading that we used to do on the farm, in which we would load 4-8 months (depending on whether it was spring or fall) worth of manure from the manure barn onto spreaders and take them out and spread them all over the fields. I never minded the smell. It was a strong smell, but not a bad one. It smelled of fecundity, richness, and all the potential for life and green growing things, that was secreted (and excreted) by its myriad marvelous microbes with their curious chemical conversions. Have the humility to find humorous the humble, rich black humus deposited under a pile of manure after a year of the action of such benevolent bugs. (Humus is not the same as hummus, but I suppose if you were to feed your livestock on hummus for a year, then hummus could become humus. And then if you grew garbanzo beans in the humus, mashed them up into a paste, and flavored them with basil and sun dried tomatoes you might make some very excellent hummus from the humus.)


Money is more or less the same. It can be hoarded for a time, to be spread later, but spread it must be or else it becomes a terrible waste, and it stinks.

As I think back, I inherently grasped this principle when I was a child. I felt like poop ought to be spread, and some of my siblings even invented the art form known as the "fecal mural." Alas, as with most avant garde artistes, our visionary methods were ridiculed, discouraged, and even actively suppressed by the staid, stuffy establishment.

I have never minded poop. I have even written before, in my book for guys, about the necessity of changing diapers for a full growth in humanity. There is something about taking care of such an aspect of human nature that really encourages a beautiful, cheerful humility without which there is no true humanity.

As my morning prayer came to a close and I prepared for my run, I couldn't help but reflect with some ruefulness, almost apologetically to God, on the slight oddity of my meditations for the day. On the other hand, I felt like God replied, these meditations are no odder than His own original move, which was to stick a spiritual (and therefore meditative) soul into a physical (and therefore defecative) body. As surprising as these thoughts might be to me, they are not to Him. If anything, He is amused by my amusement. I suppose that's a good thing.

Everyday Prayer

I sing from a poetic soul, there is no such thing as a pathetic role. A gift from God, I nod and lift my prayer from where I stand, gleaning grand meaning from cleaning my kitchen. What need of bitching and whining? I am freed! My creed is twining to heaven in warm surprising smell of leavening, rising well formed doughs. My nose preaches and teaches my part in the psalm to my heart. Without a qualm I count my rosary on grocery lists and chubby, grubby fists. My holy water fount tossed across the floor by my toddler, waddling to gaze up at crazy me with big, wilting, guilty eyes over the half-spilled mop bucket. Sigh. I chuck it out the door to bless the weeds and address the mess on the floor and the wild needs of my child. Somehow content (at least for the moment) this seriously proves God moves in mysterious ways through my days.

Praise Him!

Nada te Turbe

Nada te Turbe.

Neither depths nor heights,

Neither length nor breadth,

Neither pleasure nor pain,

Nothing can separate

The ocean from its bed.

Nada

I shall not be perturbed,

I shall not be turbulent,

I shall not be disturbed,

Neither shall my soul be turbid anymore.

Nada te Turbe

Once I looked up to see the point

Of an iron spike in a sinister hand

Stabbing down upon me. I shook with fear

And thrashed and splashed away, but the spike passed

Through my heart and left not a single mark.

Nada.

And now I rest in limpid clarity

For well I know no evil in the world

Can harm me. No knife in the world

Can harm the sea.

Nada te Turbe.

I rest undisturbed, calm, at peace

Salt made sweet and ever filled

By water flowing from the Temple’s side

Opened by a Lance.

Transparent, the all but infinite sea He holds

In the hollow of His hand. And I drip

Through the hole left by the spike,

Mingled,

Lost in His Blood.

Nada te Turbe.

Totality

"I am the Lord's poor servant; to Him alone, the living God, I have offered all in sacrifice; I have

St. Lucy, after her eyes got gouged out during her martyrdom.

nothing else to give; I offer Him myself." Antiphon for the Canticle of Zechariah from the Divine Office for the feast of St. Lucy.

This morning during my Holy Hour the antiphon above really stuck in my mind. It is fitting for Saint Lucy, since she is both virgin and martyr. She truly did give everything to God, both during her life and at the end of her life. By including this antiphon in Morning Prayer, the Church obviously means me to pray it, but the truth is I cannot honestly apply it to myself. In truth, I doubt anyone ever could strictly apply it to themselves, except for Jesus and the Blessed Mother. No one else can claim truly to have given everything to God. Even the greatest saints have held something back at one time or another. All are conscious of their sinfulness.

If this is true even of the greatest saints, how much more so of myself? I cannot even give him a full hour totally. Even thinking about this during my Holy Hour I noted the trend I have to be extremely distracted for about the first 50 minutes. It is generally only the last ten minutes or so that I really feel like I engage in on any affective level. The first 45-50 minutes are just me trying not to be distracted as I work through the Liturgy of the Hours. I cannot even claim ever to have given Him an undivided hour. Can I really claim to have "offered all in sacrifice?"

In thinking about this another similar experience came to mind. I have been doing a lot of kickboxing lately, working the heavy bag a couple of hours every week. I am right handed but I box left handed because I got into that habit when I first started out. My left hand would not learn to jab very well, so I just jabbed with my right and used my left for power punches. I also liked having that surprise power shot with the right, and I liked messing with right handed sparring partners who aren't used to fighting a southpaw.

In my sessions on the heavy bag I have been having trouble getting my left cross up to scratch. It doesn't have the speed or power that I want at first, it is slow and stiff. It takes about four or five rounds on the bag to get it snapping the way I want it to, and only then does the real practice begin.

I sometimes wonder if my distracted prayer isn't a bit like that. I only really get into the last bit because it takes me the first 45 minutes just to get warmed up. With the boxing the cause is fairly straightforward. A punch flies properly when it is loose. It starts from the feet, legs and hips and translates out from there to the end of the fist, but in order to do that the power must be generated in the large muscles of the lower body and transferred smoothly through the muscles and joints of the lower body. It isn't hard to teach those muscles all to fire. That takes about five minutes to learn. What takes much longer, years and years in fact, is teaching the other muscles not to fire. When I throw that punch, my body wants to tense up and push harder, thinking that will make my strike more powerful; but that simply does not work. Instead, muscles end up fighting each other, competing instead of cooperating. Instead of transferring smoothly back and forth between different groups at different points in the movement, all groups want to be controlling all parts of the punch. I have the strength. I can deadlift 400Lbs quite easily and do multiple sets with it. That is more than enough power to hit as hard as I want, if only I would stop getting in my own way.

This, ironically, is why small, lean fighters often hit with more force than large, muscular ones. They have less muscle to get tangled up with itself, and it is easier to train them to work in cooperation. This is the secret behind Bruce Lee's incredible"one-inch" punch that was reported to be able to knock a sumo-wrestler off his feet (note the guy in the picture is not a sumo-wrestler.)

To apply this to my prayer life, what the antiphon is talking about is a similar kind of totality, where every single part of me, body, mind, emotions, will are all engaged in just one thing. As with boxing, I am beginning to think that perhaps it is less a matter of training myself to do and more a matter of learning not to interfere. The simple decision of the will is there. I get up in the morning. I go to the chapel. I kneel down. I make the decision to pray, which is a response to the call of God to pray. That call is the power. That generates all the power needed to crash through any barrier or overcome any enemy, if only I wouldn't get in the way. But my mind refuses to be still. It wants to think, because when you are a mind that is all you know how to do. My body wants to move, because that is what a body does. My emotions want to feel things, because that is their only experience of life. My will wants to choose things, without knowing that all that is required is not to un-choose.

The truth is that the prayer is not any of these things. All of these things may enter into the prayer at any point, for a specific purpose and then they must be prepared to give their all in that moment, but they are not the prayer. The prayer is that single, downward rushing desire of God to come to me and dwell in me and make His home with me.

The rest is just me learning not to get in the way.