Unmasked

The curious look that
I give to you when
you ask me about
prayer: it's
as if to say, "But
I thought you knew
that I don't love
God enough to be
a contemplative?"
Funny, what damning
false perceptions
this white habit
can give.

Younger than Death

Two kinds of youth:
the false youth who rejects
death's inevitability,
refusing to believe that
I will not live forever,
believing the body to
be a lie once it reaches
a certain age. This youth
makes me miserable
and old.
The true youth, however,
opens wide her arms
one day and swallows
death in love's embrace,
then lives each day
ever new.

Barren Beauty

Outside my window there is a tree
with no leaves. Yet the sun
still shines, and the rain
still falls. So I know that
in the springtime, this tree
will have leaves once again,
in a most magnificent
array, filling my heart
with sweetness and
delight.

But today I must learn
that even now,
empty as it is,
this barren tree is
beautiful.

Moving Right Along

Last week, on St. Augustine's birthday, we also marked the three month point of the novitiate. It's hard to believe it has gone by so fast. It's definitely a good sign that we are not at all counting down the days. While the year has had a certain amount of tumult to it, at least for me, spiritually speaking, that is exactly the reason why I am here.

To many people, to tell them that I am spending a year in semi-silence, a year dedicated to prayer and solitude without the rigor of an academic schedule, I think the first thought is something like, "Oh, that sounds so peaceful!" The truth is, peace is probably the last thing that this year has brought so far. Silence and prayer, at least at the beginning of this sort of spiritual journey (and I suggest that this journey is something to which in some way all Christians are called, if not always to the level of intensity that consecrated religious are), are places of confrontation, of battle, of spiritual warfare. It is in the silence that I am forced to confront all the darkness of my past, all the anger and violence still present in my heart, all the sin and vice built up over many years of living far from Christ, far from love. In the silence of prayer all of this comes to the surface, like a roaring river, and it has at times been everything I can do not to drown.

In fact, though, the only danger of drowning is if I try to do anything at all. That's just the point. I am here primarily to learn to trust in God, to surrender all of me, my entire will, over to God, and to let Him have free reign in me. But because I am a person of such strong ego, that ego has fought back violently, and strives ever so hard to maintain the stranglehold with which it has suffocated my soul for so long. It is my own ego that is drowning me, and it is only when I surrender to Christ that I can at last walk on water. Time and time again though I think that it is I doing the walking, and immediately my faith fails, and I sink. And of course it fails, because faith in myself is no faith at all, but only delusion. Faith in God alone can save me. Little by little this knowledge is passing from my head to my heart. Little by little.

In the beginning of the year I did a very good job of letting myself rest in silence, of simply letting myself be alone with God and sitting in that loving attentiveness to His presence within me. I was beginning to cultivate a good contemplative practice, which is what led to all of the tumult, to the releasing of the floodgates of the subconscious. For a while I waited patiently and endured the torrent, but in recent weeks I turned away from prayer, and began to act like one who does not trust in God. I began to spend less and less time in prayer, more and more time in distractions like the internet, and unsurprisingly, the turmoil went away. Some might see that as a good thing, but I know otherwise. The turmoil is a necessary step in the path of purgation, and it is precisely by turning away when it gets hard that St. John of the Cross tells us that so many fail to advance in prayer and in that road to union with God. He writes in Living Flame of Love:

There are many who desire to advance and persistently beseech God to bring them to this state of perfection. Yet when God wills to conduct them through the initial trials and mortifications, as is necessary, they are unwilling to suffer them and they shun them, flee from the narrow road of life [Mt 7:14] and seek the broad road of their own consolation, which is that of their own perdition [Mt 7:13]; thus they do not allow God to begin to grant their petition. They are like useless containers, for although they desire to reach the state of the perfect they do not want to be guided by the path of trials that leads to it. They hardly even begin to walk along this road by submitting to what is least, that is, to ordinary sufferings.

This was the mistake that I had begun to make yet again, though thankfully this week I seem to have re-oriented myself, and have resumed my practice of silent prayer. It is important for me, this year especially, to dedicate at least two hours a day to this contemplative practice, which for me consists simply in breathing with the Jesus Prayer, as described in Fr. Laird's book, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, which has been my practical guide to prayer during this year. When those two hours of silence are combined with the regular praying of the Office throughout the day, with the Community and on my own, daily Mass, and trying the best I can to practice Therese's Little Way of Love, then I give God all the space He needs to work in me, to effect transformation in me according to His will. But when I turn away from this path, which I too easily do, then I shut God out, and I let myself become more and more cemented in my old ways and my old habits. I am like the young man in the Gospel who turns away from Christ, saddened because I have so much that I do not wish to give up in order to follow Him. My possessions are not material, but rather egotistical pathologies that are much more difficult to shun.

While, as I said, it is important for me to let God be God and effect this transformation in me, that is not to say that I have no cooperative role to play. It is important for me to work very consciously at love, to love my community, to love the people I meet, to love even those whom I find it so difficult to love. That is something St. Therese pointed out to me and with which I struggle so mightily. Loving someone who is really difficult to love is the most radical part of the Gospel, and also its most essential. Anyone can love people who are nice to them, or whom they really enjoy being around. But if someone annoys me, or is nasty to me, my first inclination - an inclination on which I quite frequently act - is to either avoid them entirely or to be nasty to them. This is often my biggest cause for sin, and the biggest stumbling block I place in the work God is doing in me. It is that violence in my heart that I have to trust that God is purging. For my part, I need to continue to exert such tremendous effort at trying to love, for it is something that I just do so poorly. I have, thankfully, some really wonderful examples in my life, and so I am doing my best to imitate and learn from them. But it's a slow, often backwards-moving journey.

As Wisconsin moves into the winter months, there will be perhaps greater temptation to flee the solitude, which now will attempt to force itself inescapably upon me. I pray only that God gives me the patience to trust in Him, even when He appears to be sleeping in the boat, and the perseverance to weather this stormy road to love.

Commemoration of All Saints of the Augustinian Order

Today is the 1,656th birthday of Saint Augustine. As Augustinians, we choose this date also as a special commemoration of all the saints of the Order. Perhaps it is just my newness to religious life, but these Augustinian feast days always fill me with such a special joy, and, as I believe is proper to their purpose, a greater sense of hope in my own final end.

The history of our Order really has two historical points of focus. First, we go back to Saint Augustine himself, who as a bishop and a monk wrote a rule for religious life that we follow today, the Rule of Saint Augustine. Augustine's great desire was to be a simple monk, living a pure monastic life. However, the fourth century Church recognized his talents and the great gift he would bring to the Church and so they drew him into the presbyterate, and later the episcopacy. As a bishop, however, he still very much lived as a monk, founding a monastery in his new diocese and inviting monks to live there with him. He was very much active in his duties as bishop, but when he returned to the monastery, he was very much the contemplative monk.

After Augustine died and left his great Rule, many monasteries around the world began following that Rule, and later communities of hermits began forming according to the Rule, as well. In the 13th century, the mendicant movement began, which saw the breaking down of the walls of the monasteries and sent religious out into the world in order to educate the faithful, serve as prophetic voices against the corruption in the Church, and offer sound preaching to counter various heresies rampant in the Church at that time. As part of this movement two different Popes, Innocent IV in 1244, and Alexander IV in 1256, the year known as our Grand Union, called together groups of hermits in the Tuscany area following Augustine's Rule and organized them into what is now the formal Order of Saint Augustine.

This rich and diverse heritage of ours has led to a variety of influences on the Augustinian charism and Augustinian spirituality. We draw deeply from the teachings and the spirituality of Augustine, who sought to harmoniously blend the active and contemplative lives; we draw from the eremetical roots of our pre-formalized life as Augustinian friars; and we draw from the many great saints, both before and after the union, who belong to our Augustinian family. It is these great and many saints whom we celebrate this day.

Many of our saints are quite well known: Augustine, Monica, Rita, Thomas of Villanova, Nicholas of Tolentine, Clare of Montefalco. Many are recognized by the Church but lesser known universally. We have St. Ezekiel Moreno, the great 19th century Spanish missionary who evangelized the Philippines and then Columbia with great zeal and holiness. We have Blessed Stephen Bellesini, also from the 19th century, in Genezzano, Italy, who lived during times of great oppression, and dedicated his life to the formation of youth, both young parishioners in need of Catholic education, and the novices in formation with the Order. He is the first parish priest to be beatified in the Church. We have a great history of martyrs, including the wonderful African martyrs of Gafsa, perhaps my favorite, a group of seven monks who suffered barbaric tortures under King Hunneric in 484, and after continually refusing to renounce their faith in Christ, were finally put to death in Carthage. We have the 98 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During this time of great oppression of the faith in Spain, among the Augustinian martyrs who offered witness unto death for their faith are Blessed Avelino Rodriguez, who was the Prior Provincial, and Mariano Revilla, the Assistant General of the Order.

While these great saints are recognized by the universal Church and commemorated in special ways by the Order of Saint Augustine, this day also calls to mind those great many men and women of the Order who receive no recognition, yet whose lives left such a powerful imprint on so many souls seeking Christ. In my own lifetime I can look back with great admiration and inspiration on men like Tom Martin, who died only three years ago from cancer, and whom I had the great honor of visiting the day before his death, where in dying it seemed that his vocation as teacher and holy minister of the faithful was only strengthened. I think of my first spiritual director, Gerry Duff, whose kindness, compassion, as well as his brave and courageous confrontation with certain struggles in his own life, will ever live in the memory of my own heart and I pray will inspire me to greater holiness and virtue each day.

In all of these wonderful examples of the Augustinian saints, men and women, from throughout the past 16 centuries, we are all reminded that sainthood is in fact each of our vocations. So often I find myself afflicted with a false humility which says that I can never be a saint, and that is exactly what the world, and the devil, would like me to believe. The reality is, however, that it is precisely to be a saint that I am called, as are each of us, as part of our universal vocation to holiness. There is a wonderful passage in Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain that speaks just to the apparent absurdity, yet utter magnificence, of this call to sainthood. His friend had asked him what he wants to be, and Merton first responded that he just wants to be a good Catholic. His friend didn't buy that answer, and so we read:

What you should say" - he told me - "what you should say is that you want to be a saint."

A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said:

"How do you expect me to become a saint?"

"By wanting to," Lax said simply.

"I can't be a saint," I said. "I can't be a saint." And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: "I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin," but which means, by those words: "I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments."

But Lax said: "No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don't you believe that God will make you wwhat He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it."

In these many beautiful examples of the saints, we have such powerful examples of women and men throughout the history of the Church who did not settle for mediocrity, but who radically surrendered themselves to the will and the sanctifying grace of God, who said, "Lord, by myself I can do nothing good, but since it is goodness, holiness - sainthood! - to which you call me, I trust in your grace to make me so." Like these wonderful examples before us, we need only pray each day for the grace of radical love and radical surrender in response to the movement of the Spirit of God within us. Then we, too, will become the saints we are called to be, and we too will participate lovingly and fruitfully in the building up of Christ's Kingdom.

Joseph as a Model of Trust

Hanging in my room is a picture of Joseph holding the infant Jesus. I'm not sure of the artist, but in this particular painting Joseph is portrayed exactly as I think of him - he has a look in his eyes that is in part troubled, in part disturbed, yet somehow conveying a sense of trust, or at least surrender. There is very little said about Joseph in the Scriptures, and yet from those few things I believe we can learn a great deal about what it means to surrender ourselves to the will of God, trusting even amidst the greatest confusion.

It is from Matthew's Gospel that get most of our information about Joseph. What strikes me particularly is that while he, a holy, righteous man, a just man, is engaged to be married to a young girl whom he believes also to be holy and good, he discovers one day that she is pregnant and knows that he is not the father. Matthew simply writes, "When his [Jesus'] mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit" (Matt 1:18). Of course, while Matthew makes clear that the child is of the Holy Spirit, Joseph knows no such thing.

Because we are so familiar with the story and we know that it was in a dream later on that an angel revealed to Joseph that Mary had not been unfaithful, it is easy to lose sight of how intensely he must have suffered when he realized that she was pregnant. He was planning on spending his life with this woman, raising a family with her, and believing her to be holy, and to be a virgin, he suddenly has no choice but to believe that she has slept with another man. The anger, the confusion, the sense of betrayal he must have felt, that is something of which we too easily lose sight. Yet nonetheless, aware of what this revelation would mean for Mary under Jewish law, he decided to act out of compassion and send her away quietly.

Of course, as we know, the angel did indeed come to Joseph and reveal to him the nature of Mary's pregnancy and the identity of the child she was to bear. Yet even with that revelation, what trust, what courage, what faith, what love it must have taken for Joseph to stick with her and with the child, to be a true husband to Mary and a true father to Jesus, and to allow his life suddenly to turn out radically different than he had ever expected.

Despite the angel's revelation, I think it is only natural that Joseph still would have suffered doubts. He could have convinced himself that the angel was only a dream, and that he had every right to leave and find a woman who could provide him with the life he had expected to have, a woman who would be able to bear him children of his own. Yet even if he did suffer these attacks of doubt occasionally, he nonetheless put his life at risk, uprooted his family and brought them into Egypt, the very land from which his ancestors had fled, and lived a quiet life there until it was safe to return.

Even then, when finding that he could return to his beloved Israel, he was not able to return to his hometown, but rather relocated to Nazareth instead. Needless to say, Joseph's life did not turn out at all like he had expected it.

Scripture tells us nothing about Joseph's family, other than that his father's name was Jacob. But I do not think it is a stretch to suggest that his family would not have understood at all why he made the choices that he did. Joseph's family very well may have encouraged him to leave Mary, to forsake the child Jesus, the child who was not his own. His own family may have felt as if he was abandoning them, that he was wasting his life. But Joseph persevered, because he trusted in God even when nothing made sense and when he had no idea where ultimately God was leading. He never knew anything beyond the next step, and so as a just man and a man of deep faith, deep trust in God, he took that step with absolute surrender to the will of God.

Joseph was indeed a son of David, and so like David Joseph could pray from the depths of his heart, "I kept my faith, even when I said, 'I am greatly afflicted'" (Ps 116:10). And again, he could say with confidence, "I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. O Lord, I am your servant" (Ps 116:14-16). Joseph indeed publicly lived his life in fidelity to the will of God, in spite of how contrary those vows he made were to the wisdom of the age. He did this only by allowing his own will to die, a death of holiness that was indeed precious to God, and for which not only was Joseph ultimately greatly rewarded, but more importantly, it was a death of the will that brought joy and salvation to all mankind. Joseph was indeed a true servant of the Lord.

For our part, we too must learn to listen in the silence of prayer to the word God speaks to our hearts, to discover where God might be calling us. It is often the case that this calling takes us places that puts us at odds with our family, at odds with the wisdom of the world, and indeed requires a certain death of our own will. When we know this to be true yet still struggle with the practical reality of it, with the great challenge it places upon our faith, let us then look to Joseph, not only as model of faith and trust in God, but also as a powerful intercessor whose prayers can guide us along the path of righteousness, so that we too may be great servants of God who bring the love of God and the salvation of Jesus Christ to all.

Creation's Smile

I arise today with dawn in my heart,
as the frosty dew of nighttime's tears
settles into the silent waiting
of morning sun's warming rays.
I arise today with love in my eyes,
as the beauty of coming winter's
icy reflection casts a prism'd
remembrance of our Creator's guiding hand.
I arise today with new hope alive
and a song of thanksgiving strumming the strings
of my melodious soul. For this day is God revealed
anew and my heart delights in His
morning embrace, in the grand
splendor of frost covered blades
and the soaring heights of fragrant noble pines
and the chill of gentle breeze brushing against my cheeks
and the joyful song of valiant cardinals
and the splendid rays of rising sun over barren trees -
indeed in the requiem chant of all
creation He reveals the secret longing
of my once broken, now healed heart:
"You are precious in my eyes, and I love you."
And to my God this day I smile.