Which agenda comes first?

The attitude of putting our agenda ahead of others is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to the manner of seeing and hearing the word of God within us, to really listen to our soul consciousness. Practicing soul consciousness allows us to see blessedness around us; the mystery of the cross cuts through the blindness of egocentricity to see what is most precious in life, to notice the subtle sensitivity around us, to feel connected with ourselves, with others and with creation. Paradox of paradoxes: what is felt as death-dealing is in fact life-giving. Isn’t this why we surround the cross with flowers during the feast of the Holy Cross? The cross viewed in this light is blessedness in the deepest sense of the word. It is the path to the deep-seated learning to live in the spirit of the beatitudes. (NS)

Pope Francis notes Beatification of Fr. Michael McGivney

Pope Francis today noted the October 31, 202 Beatification of Fr. Michael McGivney.

The Holy Father’s comments came after praying the noonday with the limited crowd in St. Peter’s Square.

“Yesterday, in Hartford, in the United States of America, Michael McGivney was proclaimed blessed: diocesan priest, founder of the Knights of Columbus. Dedicated to evangelization, he did everything possible to provide for the needs of those in need, promoting reciprocal aid,” Pope Francis said. “May his example be an impetus for us to always be witnesses of the Gospel of charity. Let’s give a round of applause to this new blessed.”

All Saints

We are called to be saints. “The saint is not an isolated individual. There is no sanctity without belonging.” Today is the feast proposed by the Latin Church by which we realize that sanctity is the vocation to which we all are called. (The Byzantine Church celebrates the Sunday after Pentecost as All Saints Day.)

From a sermon by St. Bernard: “Calling the saints to mind inspires, or rather arouses in us, above all else, a longing to enjoy their company, so desirable in itself. We long to share in the citizenship of heaven, to dwell with the spirits of the blessed.

Come, brothers, let us at length spur ourselves on. We must rise again with Christ, we must seek the world which is above and set our mind on the things of heaven. Let us long for those who are longing for us, hasten to those who are waiting for us, and ask those who look for our coming to intercede for us.”

Here’s the point of the Christian life on earth and in heaven, and the point of sanctity which we recognize in the saints: “a longing to enjoy their company” in the communio of the Divine Majesty.  But in order to get to the point of a communio with God there are things we have to work on. What are our desires? Are our desires purified or are they riddled with disordered affections? Do we have a poverty of spirit? Do we want to dwell with the spirits of the blessed? Or, are we satisfied with our current circumstances? Do we speak of divine things, things of God, or are we obsessed with the things of this world (gossip, self-centeredness, personal sin, anger, etc.)?

Saying ‘yes’ to Christ is saying yes to being in communion with Him, to love Him above all else, to follow in the footsteps of the saints. Having the companionship of the saints shows us the path to the beatific life. The saint is the ‘the saint is the true man.’ Do you want to be true?

St Alphonse Rodriguez

Among many saints and blesseds liturgically honored today (e.g., Saint Wolfgang & Blessed Theodore Romzha), we have the feast of the Jesuit Saint Alphonse Rodriguez, known for his extraordinary holiness that shone out of his ordinary work as the doorkeeper of a Jesuit school. Tremendous opportunities for holiness in the ordinary.

Why is Rodriquez’s feast so important? Because in him I see how Grace expanded the horizon of a person’s humanity shining the love of the Savior. He met the high and low at the door as the Lord wanted: with love and dignity. Plus, many thought that a laybrother of the Society of Jesus and a man with a very humble assignment of doorkeeper could be a saint; he produced no summa, no great record of baptizing or being martyred in a far away land. By the way, the Capuchins have several saints who were doorkeepers and we also have the noteworthy Saint André Bessette, a Brother of Holy Cross. Many times, I believe, the laybrothers are supreme witnesses to Christ and the promise of salvation; religious brothers show the Hundredfold as realizable.

What is memorable of Alphonse is a poem written by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, number 49:

HONOUR is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.

Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

If you don’t know St. Alphonse, do yourself a favor and look up his biography.

People of the Psalms

This past week I spent some time Portsmouth Abbey. My time at the Abbey was a beautiful time of grace. Following the rhythm of the house is vital: the silence, personal prayer, communal prayer, reading, Lectio, leisure, conversation, listening, enjoying a meal. While the life of the monks life cannot be romanticized it is worth noting that you grow in awareness in following. The point of this post, however, is digging more deeply into the psalms.

Praying the Divine Office with the monks had me reflecting on importance of the place of the psalms in our lives. When you pray the Office you become very aware of how the day gives God glory and challenges us to attend to reality as it is. The unfolding of the day is God’s revelation to us. Psalmody dives into our humanity in a radical way that other literature can not because it is here with the Psalms we speak to God, the Psalms speak to us of Him, and they speak of Jesus, image of the invisible God Who fully reveals the Father’s face to us. As Oblates, I believe we need to be real people of the psalms.

The experience of prayer in community, whether with the monks/nuns or with others, you come to see that the Psalms are both personal and communal. As St. Augustine says: “if the psalm prays, pray. If it laments, lament. If it rejoices, rejoice. If it hopes, hope. If it fears, fear. For everything which is written here is a reflection of us.” My own experience mirrors what is said by the Church, “the Psalms mirror human emotions and simultaneously reveal God’s heart for us.”

Psalms express all human experience. Pope Benedict once said, “All the truth of the believer comes together in those prayers, which first the People of Israel and later the Church adopted as a special way to mediate their relationship with the one God, and as an adequate response to His having revealed Himself in history“. Thus Christians, by praying the Psalms, pray to the Father in Christ and with Christ, seeing those songs in a new perspective which has its ultimate interpretation in the Paschal Mystery”.

At Matins this week we were listening to the Book of Esther and St Augustine’s Letter to Proba on prayer.

What is your experience of praying the psalms?

Blessed feast of All Saints!

Benedictine Oblate Formation

Recent years I have heard from other Benedictine Oblates there is little formation to become an Oblate. In many respects, it is true that Oblates are not well-formed when you compare what many monasteries do for them and what other groups like the Lay Dominican Fraternities, the Secular Franciscans, the Avila Institute (founded by Dan Burke) and the ecclesial movements (Communion & Liberation, Focolare, or Opus Dei) provide. Adult Faith Formation has never been as important as it is now. The point is not question the deficiencies as much as it is to fill-in the gaps. The urging here is to encourage all of us to take our spiritual and theological formation more seriously because it puts us in relationship with Someone Greater.

There is supreme need for an ongoing formation the spiritual life that leads to a firm communio with the Triune God and a spiritual life that is generative, holy and diaconal.

To this end, Dr Maxwell Johnson provides four brief videos in which he explores central themes in being a Benedictine Oblate. Himself an Oblate of Saint John’s Abbey, Max Johnson is a professor of Liturgical Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Johnson’s work in Benedictine Spirituality is accessible.

part 1: Benedictine Spirituality, Spiritual Values of a Benedictine Oblate – https://youtu.be/MzLgbbc6o6A

part 2: Benedictine Spirituality, The Liturgical Nature of the Benedictine Life – https://youtu.be/hkl2OaFNwQU

part 3: Benedictine Spirituality, Lectio Divino and the Scriptures – https://youtu.be/klcRcVnDIxA

part 4: Benedictine Spirituality, Ecumenism and Benedictine Spirituality – https://youtu.be/ik3x_rOxqs0

Being watchful

“Being watchful is intimately connected with a sustained and disciplined practice of meditation. Taking the time each day to try to discern the movement of the Spirit prepares us to recognize, to intuit God’s presence and respond wholeheartedly. No matter the form your external meditation takes, the fruit of dedicated practice comes in being able to knit together the various moments of each day in conscious, fully awake action.” (NS)

An authentic and fruitful formation in the spiritual life requires us to develop a capacity to be watchful, an awareness, a contemplative gaze. We are bombarded with images and noise: distractions to the point we forget that we are in communion with others. Being watchful as it is noted in the quote above, “sustained and disciplined by practice of mediation.” The Lord revealed to us of the necessity for us to be watchful casting off our sleepiness. The sleepy ignores the Kingdom of God; the person who is not watchful is unconcerned for salvation, that is, our salvation.

Father Luigi Giussani recalls for us that the Gospel says, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come,” it means be conscious of your destiny, of your relationship with God, with the source, the substance, and the end of what you are…. If we immediately want to feel ourselves filled with richness in our contemplative life, we must always start from the original truth: we were not and now we are. Therefore being—living, existing, moving—is participation in something else. How peacefully exhaustive it is to be able to say with clarity (clarity regarding your motivation, not regarding content, which is the mystery that Christ has revealed to us) that everything we do participates within something else. This is where gratuity is rooted: everything that we do and that we are is given to us; we participate in something else. I believe that there exists nothing more evident than this: no instant in our life do we make ourselves. It is in the vibration of this self-awareness that the possibility of real prayer is developed within us.

St Paul of the Cross

St. Paul of the Cross is likely one of those saints who gets overlooked a bit while his spiritual children are more recognizable. St. Paul of the Cross, in my opinion, needs our closer attention. We know that he had devoted his life to the service of the poor and the sick; we know his apostolic zeal in Italy, and his great penances. We know his charism overflowed to the point of founding the congregation of the Passionists: the nuns, sisters, brothers and priests dedicated to the preaching the Lord’s passion. As the Mass Collect (see below) says keenly, Paul, whose only love was the Cross, did so with courage. May we beg the Spirit for the same grace.

Next time you are in Rome, be sure to visit St. Paul at the Church of Sts. John and Paul in Rome.

The indefatigable missionary of Italy it is said that God lavished upon Paul many graces of the supernatural order. One of the stimulating pieces of Paul’s life, however, was the rigor with which he lived a life: of penance –understanding himself to be a useless servant, a great sinner. Sound familiar? The self-perception was the same as that of the Apostle Paul; this viewpoint is also similar to other saints and blesseds who lived in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries (and before and after). Today, we give ourselves a pass on this matter. Not that we ought to beat ourselves up but we could use a good dose of humility and that’s probably one of the things we can take away from Paul: how do we understand ourselves before the Lord and do we bear our cross with simple joy and honesty. In 1867, Pius IX canonized Paul of the Cross.

The Mass Collect reads:
May the Priest Saint Paul, whose only love was the Cross, obtain for us your grace, O Lord, so that, urged on more strongly by his example, we may each embrace our own cross with courage.