Take with You Words

Choose Your Ruler

2012-01-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

In the first reading for today's Mass (1 Samuel 8:4-7, 10-22a) the prophet Samuel asks a question of the Israelites that he might just as well have asked us this morning: whom will you choose to rule over you? A king just like everyone else has? (That was their demand.) Or God?

Look around you, he says. Those who have chosen conventional rulers--in our day, maybe social approval, material success, power even on a domestic scale, or any one of the other little rulers who serve the great god Ego--how have they fared? Samuel suggests you'll find them impoverished victims, even slaves, of rapacious tyrants. The gospel story (Mark 2:1-12), under the image of the paralytic to hint that you'll found them bound and paralyzed, like the prey of poisonous spiders trapped and wrapped in shrouds of web.

And those who have chosen God as their ruler instead? The evangelist Mark suggests that you'll find them skipping down the road, mats under their arms. Free. And happily heading for home. Look! There's one. He and his four friends are chattering and laughing. And there goes another one. She just turned back for a minute to wave her thanks to Jesus. And there's another...

Copyright 2012, Abbey of St. Walburga

Dusty Hope

2010-07-04T08:59:00.003-06:00

Hope comes on dusty feet. God, speaking through Isaiah in the first reading, makes a ringing promise of great liberation for Jerusalem (Isaiah 66:10-14c). However, in today’s gospel (Luke 10:1-12, 17-20), Jesus sends seventy-two of his disciples out in pair with nothing to recommend them but their message: “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.” The seal on their verbal scroll is only the name “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Now, these are not men who can lay claim to Isaiah’s “well-trained tongue” (Isaiah 50:4). As far as we know, they are fishermen, a tax collector, and who knows what else—men who work with their hands and, in Matthew’s case, their cunning, not with the golden mouths of polished preachers like the later John Chrysostom. There may be a scribe or two among them, of course, but none is ever mentioned in the gospels. They go out as beggars, too: “no money bag, no sack, no sandals.” Why should anyone lay aside plow or baking bowl or fishnet to listen to such as these?

People did, it seems. They return jubilant with their success, only to have Jesus correct their misguided ideas of what real success is. After all, the bearers of hope come armed not with the tricks of the world’s wisdom, as Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 1, but with the unappealing message of the cross. Those first disciples didn’t know it yet, but the kingdom they were proclaiming came with a price tag paid in full by their Teacher, but with smaller shares left over for all those who would follow him down the same road through tomb to glory (e.g. Mark, 8:34). Yet even that unlikely comfort has been embraced down the years by multitudes able to sort the gold from the tinsel of false promises of ease.

Hope still walks on unlikely feet. A handful of men gathered on this day in 1776 to put their names to a document that was no more than words on paper, while the armies of a great empire guaranteed their defeat, as Rome before Constantine had guaranteed the defeat of the gospel. The clarion call of 1776, written with conviction on the air of improbability set fire to farmers, seamstresses, lawyers, housewives, gentlemen of property, able wives of willing participants. Men and women rose up, armed with no more than a claim to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and forged a nation out of mud, blood, folly and loss.

But even that claim is small compared with the one that belongs by even greater right to those committed not to any particular political entity, however admirable, but to the greater reality of the kingdom of God preached by those dusty-footed followers of a Galilean carpenter so long ago. Their names are written not on a yellowed piece of paper, however treasured, but “in heaven.” Their promise, though they hardly knew it then, is the conquest of a tyrant far greater than King George: death itself. That battle too costs blood, sweat and tears, as Churchill would say of a lesser war, but it has already been won in Gethsemane and on Calvary. We have only to make the victory our own, armed with weapons as unlikely as the bearers of comfort God seems habitually to choose: truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, word, and the readiness for peace (see Ephesians 6:13-17).

Today is a celebration of hope already confirmed and promises yet to be fulfilled, both in the United States of a flawed but still willing America and in the far greater, more important, and more enduring kingdom of God. The fray is not over in either case, but both struggles remain as worthy a challenge now as they were for those ready warriors of the pen at Philadelphia and, long before and after them, those dusty-footed disciples on the roads of Palestine. They are not unrelated. After all, the sweat-stained labors for “peace and justice for all” within the geographical boundaries of one nation do serve as one small contribution toward the fulfillment of God’s promise of peace and justice for all peoples of all times and places. Let freedom ring!

The Freedom of St. Francis

2010-05-25T03:04:00.003-06:00

At present, I'm living with a Franciscan community of Poor Clare Nuns of Perpetual Adoration. On the Franciscan liturgical calendar, May 24 celebrates the dedication of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. The ordo prescribes readings from the Common of the Dedication of a Church, but the readings for the day--Monday of the 8th Week in Ordinary Time--turned out to be much more appropriate for St. Francis.

The gospel was the well-known story of the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to gain the one thing he didn't have: eternal life (cf. Mark 10:17-22). Jesus answered, "Simple, just sell all you have, give to the poor, and come follow me." As you may remember, the rich man didn't find that simple at all, so he went away sad, but many saints, including St. Francis, found it the simplest thing of all, though it sometimes took them time and struggle to recognize it.

St. Francis and St. Clare wove a rich tapestry of interpretations of poverty undertaken for the sake of the gospel. One thread followed the notion that poverty means freedom: freedom from material possessions and all the preoccupations they lay on our shoulders; freedom for Christ. We get a taste of that freedom when we clean out a closet and give away all those clothes we know perfectly well we'll never wear again, or all those books we finally admit we will not actually read. (My monastic vows mean that I don't actually own anything, including books, but I often have to remind myself as I cart a load of "will-reads" back to the monastery library across from my room that, really, they will be just a few steps away if I finally do get around to taking one up!)

For some reason, this notion of poverty as freedom for Christ reminds me of a line from Psalm 119: "Blessed is the one who turns not aside after gain." A Christian's life trajectory is toward Christ, the one all-satisfying good. Blessed is the one who, like the disciples urged to dump even a change of clothes as they set off to preach the gospel, drops everything that hinders or slows that trajectory. But how sad the one who, like the rich man, sees the goal and turns aside after some lesser gain.''

From Outside In

2009-09-04T15:48:00.003-06:00

This morning I was reading a homily by St. Gregory the Great (d. 406) on Matthew 12:46, 50, the story of Jesus' family's vain attempt to visit him while he was preaching. Jesus' reply to those who were no doubt nudging and whispering and waving to get his attention to tell him that his mother and kinsmen were waiting outside was, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?....Whoever does the will of my father who is in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother." A bit hard on his mother, but surely she of all people understood.

Gregory turns this story into a really regrettable bit of anti-Semitism, as was, sadly, the custom of many Christian preachers of his time. Equating Jesus' Jewish relatives with "the synagogue," he says, "[Jesus] does not acknowledge the synagogue because when it clung to the observance of the Law it did away with its spiritual understanding and established itself outside, guarding the letter." I was about to close the book in disappointed disgust--I hold Gregory in high esteem and had expected better--a little sliver of light shot out from between the pages and stung me in the eyes. Suppose for "the synagogue" I substituted "Genevieve?" I thought about how easy it is for me to shut out the words of Scripture as we sing them in our seven daily services (the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours) while I brood about something else, like my ever-present and ever-unfinished To Do list. Am I not establishing myself outside the words, guarding their letter by chanting them, but abandoning any claim to spiritual understanding? And what about the days when I run madly across the surface of things, keeping our customs, observing the Rule of Benedict, doing what I'm supposed to be doing--but skating along the thin skin of superficiality that stands between me and all the depth and richness of this contemplative monastic way of life? In fact, I realized, I'm very good at establishing myself outside of genuine life altogether, guarding its surface and refusing to plunge into its depths.

Three other famous "outsiders" crossed my mind. The first two also appear in the Scriptures, each one quite well known in his way. Neither has a name, belonging as they do to a parable (Luke 15). The younger of the two has a nickname: we call him "the prodigal son." His older brother has nothing at all to distinguish him. Both of them also chose to station themselves outside. The younger brother packed up all his worldly goods and left home to spend them on wine, woman and song. No doubt visions not of sugar plums but of happy pleasures danced in his head: he would have the best to eat and drink, he would have a host of friends around his table, he would have company in the night, or anytime he wanted it. Visionary sugar plums don't feed real hungers, but he didn't know that. When the visions evaporated, and he found himself cold, lonely and hungry, he finally recognized that he had mistaken "outside" as the place where all the good things of life were stored. Instead, he discovered to his chagrin, "inside," back in the home he had left, was the place where the truly good things were kept, above all the astonishing love of his forgiving father. At least he was smart enough to go back in.

His older brother was not so bright. He had kept his feet rooted at the old homestead, but he had in reality shut himself out of his home all along. He had wrapped himself up in a cloak of jealousy and resentment. He had not even requested, never mind claimed, all the good that might have come his way because, had he received it, as he surely would, he would have had to leave the nasty feelings outside and go in by the fire with his father. Resentment is oddly self-justifying and so, in a peculiarly twisted way, satisfying. To the very end of the story, we never learn whether he was ever able to make the decision to go in, though his father urged and urged him. We leave him, as the parable concludes, still standing outside.

I thought about how easy it is to shut oneself out in the cold, out of the real home of the spirit God has opened to us, even when God stands there in the door begging us to come on in. Like the prodigal, we can let ourselves be dazzled by far mirages: that forbidden relationship, that dishonest job, that money--well, it's the company's, but no one will ever know, will they?--that sugar plum over there always looks better than what we really treasure when we're in our right minds. And we sell out the treasure for such tawdry goods, sometimes--another TV show instead of a few minutes of prayer, a glamorous friend instead of Suzy who has been our best friend since kindergarten, even though she's now a little the worse for the wear of the years on the outside, a new opportunity instead of the steady job we could hold for a lifetime if we would. Any kind of excitement instead of the only kind of fidelity: God's, to us. I often wonder after the fact why I thought x or y or z was such a good idea at the time when I knew perfectly well from a long life's worth of experience that it would go flat in the end.

Or take the older brother. Like him, we can so easily refuse joy for the thin pleasure of ugly feelings, like resentment. We can stand outside shivering and sulking because the brother or sister got a feast, never seeing that we were also invited. Again, it's so easy to trade in the real happiness we have--the pleasure of a beautiful morning, the touch of a child's hand, the look of love in the eyes of someone we care about--for the chance to revel in our envy of the happiness we imagine someone else has. I'm reminded of Edgar Arlington Robinson's "Richard Cory":

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

So, who is the third outsider, you ask? (Or had you forgotten there was one?) Ah, the third is another prodigal who recorded famously his discovery that he was standing on the wrong side of the door of home:

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace."

St. Augustine of Hippo (died 430).

His story ended happily. In fact, happily ever after, as far as we know. If he were here, and if he saw you or me standing outside, he'd be the first to say: "You don't have to stay out there. Come on in."

The Yen for Order

2009-08-18T05:47:00.004-06:00

Summer undoes my careful allotment of time parcels to this and that--this day, this hour for administration, that other day, that other hour for writing my blog, and so on. Actually, life, aka God, undoes my careful allotment of time parcels all the time. And I realized this morning that I spend far too much time trying to tie them up again.

According to Genesis 1, "making order" is a quick way of describing God's creative work. God spends five days out of seven ordering time, space, and the first pragmatic interactions of created beings in a life-sustaining food chain. Only then does God set human beings down into an ordered cosmos, suggesting that a certain amount of order is essential to human survival. However, if you read carefully, you begin to notice that God is not particularly tied down to the kind of linear order laid out in your typical planner. (I wonder if the proliferation of calendars, planners, time management seminars, how-to-organize-your closet-your-desk-and- your-life books, and other gems of the human gift for parting one another from our money reflects a love of order or a frantic but fruitless scramble to impose it.) God creates light and darkness quite awhile before coming up with sun, moon and stars, for example. God makes provision for seed-bearing plants both to feed animal life and to proliferate into an undefined future to feed future generations of animal life but offers very little for the sustenance of marine life (in Genesis 1, not in the actual cosmos. This may be one more sign of the Israelites' utter disinterest in having anything to do with the seas and their denizens.) And there is the forever unanswered question about how Evil, the force that runs around undoing all order, got into the picture at all.

God's work of ordering has two facets that tend to elude me when I sit down to plan the tying up of my careful time parcels into nice, neat, diagrammable pages in my various calendars, planners, and notebooks, which, of course, I can never find when it comes time to put the diagrams into practice because my desk is such a jumble. The first is that God's creative energy all goes into orders that sustain the always-untidy business of life and living on a very grand scale. If we don't understand where cockroaches and mosquitoes fit (God's gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do in heaven), why mountains sometimes fall into the sea as the psalmist notes, what good hurricanes are, and above all why human beings, charged with the task of continuing the divine work of creating, make such an all-fired mess out of it without calling down on our heads another cosmic flood (see Genesis 6!), perhaps it's because we don't really understand what life in all its richness is.

The second facet of God's creative work that eludes me when I'm "planning," is that it always starts with chaos: the rather terrifying primal chaos of Genesis 1:1-2, or the degenerate human chaos with which the biblical new creation begins in the prophets' promises of a new promised land after the return from exile in Babylon or in the gospels' testimony to Christ, the restorer of all that has gone awry. In both cases, chaos is the essential preliminary to the work of creation. The primal chaos is what I've often called "a seething cauldron of possibilities" out of which God draws everything.

I am a creative person. We all are, whether our creativity makes Michelangelo's David or Bach's Magnificat or a birthday cake to delight the hearts of a roomful of four-year-olds or simply that unappreciated gift, a clean, uncluttered space in which we can live, move and have our being. We must be. At the end of Genesis 1, when we know very little yet about God except that God is an incredibly imaginative Creator, God says "let us make humankind in our image." Christian reflected has heaped all sorts of things into that basket, "the image of God," but that image begins with creativity. As a creative person, I need to start where God started: with chaos, with "the seething cauldron of possibilities" as yet unnamed, unsorted, apparently purposeless. If we try to explain Genesis 1 from the belief that God created ex nihilo (out of nothing), then we have to believe that God first made the chaotic mess from the Divine Word then drew all of created reality. Contemporary thinkers who have given us the chaos theory propose that God never actually reduced all that primal chaos into order: it is still among us and around us, still seething with possibilities, still giving birth to beings.

I wonder, then, if "chaos" is really an enemy to be confronted with the chair and whip of my various planners and licked into submission so that I can get on with life. I wonder if chaos isn't rather the perpetual treasure chest from which spill out all the possibilities that spurn creative work in all its forms. Human beings do need order, especially the truly primal order of purpose, to survive. But I wonder what would happen if I were finally to succeed in wrestling every breath of time, every corner of space, every piece of paper and dust bunny in my own small universe into the kind of careful order for which I seem to hanker. I wonder if I would find that not chaos but excessive order, neatly packaged in linear rows, is sterile.

The Widow's Mite

2009-07-03T14:06:00.006-06:00

He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on."

Luke 21:1-4

She was a widow. And she was poor. In the scriptures, the two are often synonymous. Widows were bereft not only of their husbands but also of their primary means of support, unless they had children or other relatives able to care for them. There were rich widows, but they were rare. Poverty was the common lot of the woman left alone. Prudence would suggest that she conserve her resources. Neighbors would praise her for watching her pennies; relatives responsible for her would thank her; wisdom and custom would commend her. Yet here she is, bringing her last small coin to the Temple and casting it, unasked, among the offerings. Who would commend her for that bit of pious foolishness?

Jesus did. He saw something most bystanders would not: he saw that she saw something most bystanders could not. Ordinary folk, ruled by ordinary common sense, would look at the coin and see that it would not go far to feed and clothe her and keep a roof over her head. She looked at the coin and saw that God had given it to her to use for someone else’s good. Ordinary folk would look at her and see that she was in peril of perishing in her poverty. She looked at God and saw that divine providence would not abandon her. Ordinary folk would see that she had nothing. She saw that she had God. Ordinary folk would call her short-sighted. In terms of the reflection on short-sightedness in the previous posting, we might think of her as very far-sighted indeed.

Or so we might read her story. The gospel, in its usual maddening way, draws us into this tiny event by baiting it with unanswered questions: was she truly alone or did she have family? Why did she choose to give away her last coin? Did she know where the next one would come from? And why on God’s green earth did Jesus praise her? Surely he does not mean we should imitate her?

We can only wonder. Jesus left the scene without any explanation.

©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga

The Fog

2009-06-22T06:36:00.005-06:00

My usual summer apology for the infrequency of postings!

This morning I woke up to thick fog. From my window, all I can see is a hint of rock, a ghost of tree, and fog. My world has grown very small. My range of vision is constricted by cataracts of gray wet mist. I know the water-rounded, lichen clad boulders rise up in a high cliff to meet the deep blue Colorado sky. I know the Ponderosa pines and junipers spring up out of sheer rock, or so it seems, across the cliff face. I know there are black pockets that hide the possibility of mountain lions. But no matter how hard a squint, I can’t see any of it. All I can see is hints, shadows, ghosts—and the relentless fog.

The scene has set me to thinking about shortsightedness. It seems to me that all of us carry around our own personal fog, settled around the hidden recesses of the ever-probing mind and hiding from us a great deal of what we know or guess or hope to be there. We suspect the existence of a larger world than we can see, but all we see of it is hints, shadows, ghosts—and the relentless fog that shuts us in. The fog is thicker for some of us than others, at some times than others, in some places than others. But it never lifts entirely, this side of the grave.

In fact, so used to it can we become that we cease to believe or guess or even hope that there is more behind it. We then hunker down within our blinding circle of mist and grow comfortable in a deepening certainty that what we see is all we’ll ever get.

It’s an old story. I think of the Israelites, not too far into the desert, screaming at God (or telling Moses to scream at God for them because they sometimes recognize that God might be a dangerous Someone to scream at). They scream because they’re hungry and thirsty and afraid. They’re town dwellers, farmers and laborers, used to a world run by Egyptians, though they carry a dim memory of times when it was not so, of places far away, of heroic ancestors and their God. But so dim is the memory that it has lost most of its reality and all of its power to animate them. It’s mostly, now, a matter of a good story to tell around the fire at night, with the events and names getting scrambled over time until no one knows anymore what really happened or to whom, or if anything really happened at all. Suddenly, they find themselves thrust out of Egypt into the alien, hostile desert as nomadic herders who must live from oasis to oasis because there are no wells, no town squares, no homes to go to at night. All they can see is wasteland and more wasteland and more wasteland beyond that, as far as the eye can reach. And so, quite reasonably, they scream to go home. They might have been slaves—they were slaves—but when they got up in the morning they could see the food in their larders, the water in the water jars, the vegetables and fruits growing in vibrant orchards, the flocks and herds safely penned or tethered or guarded for meat, milk, wool, and skins. Here, all they see is a dry, sandy circle of death closing in on them.

They grew shortsighted. They saw here and now. They saw their children hungry, their animals thirsty, their breadbaskets empty. They saw, in other words, their need. They lost sight of the grand promise of a land running with milk and honey, of a God who could part water and drown armies and restore to them the homeland they had lost so long ago they had nothing left of it but their vague stories.

You can’t really blame them. Hunger, thirst, and the threat of death lurking behind them are very tangible realities. Survival is an overwhelming drive. Let Moses, Aaron, Miriam and God get out of their way to the life they craved. Not long ago I read a novel called Black Monday by R. Scott Reiss. The premise of the novel was that bad guys had created a microbe that ate oil. The villains disseminated it through most of the oil fields of the world. The results were catastrophic: airplanes suddenly fell out of the sky as their oil vanished, cars slid to a silent halt on freeways during rush hour causing multiple vehicle disasters, and all kinds of machinery began mysteriously to break down. (The author paints all this devastation in such gripping colors that one is distracted from asking why the planes even got off the ground or the cars out of the garage if the bacteria multiplied and consumed oil at the rate later tracked by scientists.) The by-product of these mechanical horrors is the rather swift disintegration of the social fabric as families are faced with starvation as food distribution, then food production, grind to a terrifying halt, and homes are threatened with hypothermia as fuel oil ceases to generate heat. Normally law-abiding parents turn into looters, hoarders, hard-hearted guardians of a dwindling food supply for their children. Marginally law-abiding men and women become thieves, raiders and murderers for the sake of the illusory wealth and power available to the “haves” in a rising sea of “have-nots.” Jobs disappear, police can no longer patrol in useless vehicles, soldiers commandeer horse carts to get from one place to the other. The law of the jungle—kill or be killed—becomes the norm of a desperate world. There are heroic exceptions, or near-exceptions, but they are very few and powerless. The picture was dreadfully credible. It made a few complaining Israelites look like small potatoes indeed. (And even a small potato is a very risky thing to be in a world defined by “eat or be eaten.”)

The book made me realize, though, that the short-sightedness that afflicted those Israelites can become lethal. If we cannot see beyond the small circle of the self and its survival, we become dangerous protectors and predators of “us” vs. “them” or, eventually, “me” against “you.” I suspect that this dynamic of short-sightedness may be one way of thinking about what St. Paul means when he writes about the “law of the flesh” vs. “the law of the spirit” (e.g. Galatians 5:16-18). We heirs of a Greek philosophical worldview have often confused this common biblical distinction with “body” vs. “soul,” but the biblical world didn’t operate by those categories. The human being is the clay into which God had breathed the breath of life on the banks of a river in Eden (cf. Genesis 2:4b-7): every human being, good bad or indifferent, is “enspirited matter,” so to speak. In the New Testament, particularly in Paul’s work, “flesh” usually means the world untouched and untransformed by the life-giving Spirit of God let loose by the death and resurrection of Jesus, whereas “spirit” means humanity seized, possessed and made new by that Spirit. “Flesh” is radically self-centered. It is therefore, by definition, very short-sighted indeed: it can see no farther than the feeble circle of light cast by “me” and “mine.” Paul lists a series of nasty behaviors that result from the radical assertion of “me” over “you,” but they are not merely sins of our bodily being (Galatians 5:19-20). They are, as Jesus suggests in the gospel, sins of the “heart” (Matthew 15:17-20). The “heart” in the bible is that center where we take in the random bombardment of experience that assaults us second by second and organize it into a worldview out of which we can understand, think, believe, decide and act. Sins of the heart are actions produced by the way we look at the world and everything in it (and beyond it), including ourselves. If all I can see in the surrounding fog is what I need to survive, then I can readily believe myself entitled to go after it, no matter what that might cost anyone else.

The Israelites did not remain slaves imprisoned in a hostile Egypt. In spite of themselves, they were delivered and sent on their way toward the land promised to their ancestors long before. Even their desert shortsightedness could not, in the end, keep their children from the Land, though it caused most of the Exodus generation to perish in the desert they had chosen (cf. Numbers 13-14). Neither are we condemned to spend time and eternity in the fog. Fog does eventually burn off in the sun. We can look forward to that moment long before it comes, because even the worst fog is permeable to the light while it still hides the landscape from view. St. Gregory the Great describes us in our fogbound existence as people of the dawn:

While we do some things which already belong to the light, we are not free from the remnants of darkness…. When he writes, the night is passed, Paul does not add, the day is come, but rather, the day is at hand. Since he argues that after the night has passed, the day as yet is not come but is rather at hand, he shows that the period before full daylight and after darkness is without doubt the dawn, and that he himself is living in that period. It will be fully day for the Church of the elect when she is no longer darkened by the shadow of sin. It will be fully day for her when she shines with the perfect brilliance of interior light. This dawn is aptly shown to be an ongoing process when Scripture says: And you showed the dawn its place [Job 38:12].

So, in the midst of our self-focusing fog, Paul encourages us to look beyond its dark circle toward the larger world lit up for us even now by Jesus Christ, “the light of the world” (John 9:5): “the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” We may not be able to see very clearly yet, but we have a lamp to guide us through the fog toward the arriving day: “Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). The Word maps out the basic route pretty succinctly: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).

It takes courage to step out into the fog, but Christ reassures us, out of the light we can barely see, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27).

©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga

A Little While

2009-05-30T06:41:00.005-06:00

"A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me" (John 16:16). So says Jesus to the baffled disciples gathered around him at the Last Supper. This game of holy peek-a-boo caught my attention recently as I reflected on the event we call “the Ascension,” celebrated in our archdiocese last Sunday. What was Jesus talking about? What is Jesus talking about?

Obviously, Jesus was warning his disciples about his impending death. In the most literal sense possible, he would disappear into the hidden realm of death on the cross and then disappear bodily into a sealed tomb. Then, after his resurrection from the dead, he would reappear to them. Seems simple enough.

But you never play peek-a-boo just once. You hide your face behind your laced fingers the first time to whet the child’s interest; then you pop out to one side, saying “peek-a-boo!” The child starts laughing. So you do it again. And again. And again. (This is how we stupid adults learn that once is not enough for a child, so don’t start something you don’t want to do over and over and over again.)

Jesus in fact did something similar with the disciples. Over a period of forty days, according to the chronology of Luke’s gospel, he would appear to them and then disappear again. Sometimes he appeared to an individual, as to Mary Magdalene in the garden (John 20:11-18) or to Simon Peter, an event of which we are told after the fact but do not witness (Luke 24:34). Sometimes he appeared to small groups, as to the women on the road from the tomb (Matthew 28:9-10) or the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Sometimes he appeared to the whole gathering, as in the upper room (John 20:19-23). They didn’t laugh. They had never played this game before. They greeted Jesus’ appearances with a mixture of surprise, fear, awe, and, as they began to realize he was really there in their midst, their beloved Teacher, with joy. They grappled with confusion: he was the same Jesus whom they had followed around Palestine for three years—he bore the wounds of the nails—but he was different. He wasn’t a ghost. What was he? How did he get into a locked room? Where did he come from? Where did he go? And just as they got used to the idea that he was genuinely around somewhere and might appear at any moment, he took off in a cloud and was seen no more (Acts 1:6-11). That is what we call “the Ascension.” But even then, messengers from heaven told the gaping disciples to shut their mouths and go on home. They would see him again, coming as he had left them, on a cloud. (The cloud is God’s favorite disguise in the scriptures.) The game was not over. It would pick up later. Children are always disappointed but consoled by that promise.

However, Jesus was not really playing a game, except insofar as we play games with children to teach them skills they will need to live in our rough old world. Through his various appearances, Jesus was teaching the disciples how to see him differently. They had been used to looking at him sleeping by the campfire like anyone else, or teaching on the hillside, or walking the dusty roads of their homeland. When they got up every morning, they had only to look over, and there he was (unless he was off on the mountain alone praying, but they usually seem to have known where to find him when they needed him even then.) Now, he began to instruct them on how to see him anew, not with their bodily eyes but with what St. Benedict might have called the “eyes of the heart,” had he thought of it. (Benedict speaks of opening the “ears of your heart.”) Jesus would, he said, be with them always (Matthew 28:20). If they looked and listened, they would find him in the familiar scriptures of their childhood, hidden but revealed in texts they had heard a million times but understood too literally to recognize him there (Luke 24:25-27). They would find him in the practical, familiar act of breaking bread with them at table (Luke 24:30-31), but the act would become the heart of a sacramental ritual through which he would always make himself present to them. They would even find him in the work they had always done, work that now took on a new meaning and a new shape, as John suggests in the highly symbolic episode of night fishing on the Sea of Galilee (John 21:7-14).

One reason biblical stories have held their power over the human heart for centuries is that they always look like they are “then”—a long ago, far away, alien “then,” with its own customs, its own geography, its own vocabulary—but they are really “now.” They pretend to be the story of the ancient people of God and the first disciples, but they are our story also. The game of peek-a-boo goes on. The annual retelling of Jesus’ stories spread out over the course of the Church’s year is in part an act of memory, but it is also the script for a rehearsal. As we commemorate the unfolding events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to glory at the Father’s right hand, we are learning how to read the true story of our own lives.

The period of time between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension is part of this narrative lens through which we can read something about the rhythms of our own experience. It is a time between seeing and seeing, between one kind of seeing and another. All of us reach a moment—usually more than once—when the old ways of “seeing” or imagining Jesus or God fail us. Familiar religious language, visual and verbal, sounds artificial, unrelated to our own very real struggles:

—The pictures that moved us dissatisfy. I remember when I became disenchanted with what I came to call “the Breck Shampoo Jesus” (no insult intended to a fine shampoo) who decorated the pictures in my Sunday school classroom or the holy cards the Sisters gave us to put in our prayer books. He was too perfect, too neat and clean and well coifed, too remote from my world, to get me through hard days and bitter lessons in other people’s frailties and my own.

—The biblical stories sound too much like “then,” too little like “now.” Jesuit Father Thomas H. King notes the comic effect of Don Quixote’s insistence on using (and living) the language of the golden age of chivalry from times long ago and far away. The language of the golden age may be beautiful, and often is, but, says King, we long sometimes for more of the language of our own iron age. It means something to us because it is born of our own world’s experiences. One of the demands of the prayer form known as lectio divina (prayerful reading of scripture) is that we work at bridging the gap between the world of the Bible and our own, with the ever-read help of the Holy Spirit. “Listening” as a way of prayer requires a willingness to work to hear.

—The rituals of worship seem archaic, removed, inaccessible. We have taken part in them so often that we know their surface well but have lost the key to the inner world they make present. Especially in a culture that prizes passive entertainment over the labor of active participation, we surrender to the role of spectator at a spectacle that no longer touches us.

What do we do in this “dark night” between seeing and seeing? My suggestion is that we look to the disciples and their experience between resurrection and ascension, ascension and Pentecost. After the resurrection, they were often as much at a loss as we are; they took off for elsewhere (Emmaus) or a past that comforts by its familiarity (the fishing expedition in John 21); but it seems that they never quite turned their back on the possibility of Jesus. When he appeared, they were glad, even when they remained frightened and confused. After the ascension, they put all their hope in the promise that the Spirit would come. They gathered and prayed—though for what, they likely did not know, because they had not yet experienced Pentecost. They trusted, they hoped, they prayed—and they waited. Above all, they waited.

And sometimes, so must we. The key to the waiting is the genuine expectation that we are waiting for someone who is really coming, no matter how unlikely it seems to our impatience, our desire for comfort, our temptations to look elsewhere for any easier way to fill our longing. Expectation is a vigorous hope that refuses the possibility of disappointment. Memory helps: we have seen Christ before, however imperfect we now find the modes of our seeing, so we know we could see him again. Trust, blinded but not suffocated by the cloud, matters. He did say, "I am with you always"--even in the dark. Expectation, memory and trust keep us looking in the places he showed his first disciples: scriptures, worship, and the ordinary activities of our daily lives. And we have been told that he will reappear out of the cloud that hides him. Then, once again, perhaps he will take our silly hands away from our eyes — his own were never covered— and say, “Peek-a-boo.”

Of course I find this much easier to write than to live, but the promise haunts me: “Again a little while, and you will see me….your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:16, 22).

Note: See Thomas M. King, Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (Sheed & Ward, 1989).

Beyon Emmaus: A Poem

2009-04-26T10:23:00.005-06:00

Today, the Third Sunday of Easter, we read the story of Jesus' appearance to the disciples after his meeting with the two unnamed disciples on the road to Emmaus. Like all the stories of Easter appearances, and like the Acts of the Apostles as it recounts the life of the early post-Easter Christian community, this one reminds us that Easter was and is a life-changing event not only for Jesus but for every life he touched and touches. We see the first disciples and the early Christians struggling to make sense out of what they have witnessed, to pick up the pieces of lives whose basic assumptions had been blown to bits, to forge a future out of hints and guesses (with lots of help from the Holy Spirit) in order to be faithful to their call. Any conversion that brings new life presents us with these same tasks. They may be exciting, life-giving, joyful--but they are always also confusing, sometimes frightening, even paralyzing as we fight to get our bearings in a whole new world we had not expected. This poem seeks to express Easter's effect.

On Easter’s road we meet the Mystery,

half seen, half hidden from unwilling eyes

that know the invitation but resist

lest we be burst asunder by surprise

and find ourselves made new before we take

farewell of what we were, before it dies.

The taste of daily bread seems passing sweet,

though yesterday we found it hard and thin.

New leaven makes a wilder loaf that breaks

in fragments we can barely gather in,

for all our baskets now have grown too small

to hold the feast we hardly dare begin.

The wine is heady as it spills from cups

that careful craft cut shallow by intent

to mete out life by sips too cautious now

to hold in check the vintage that has rent

our wineskins with a stone-displacing force

erupting from a fountain never spent.

We thought we knew you when you spoke to us

the word that seized our lives and turned them round

to face a different sun than we had seen

along the roads we tramped, eyes on the ground

to measure steps with care lest pebbles trip

or unsuspected crossroads, met, confound.

What fools we were—we never knew you then,

who hardly know you now by voice or face,

but only in the breaking of the bread

catch sight of what you are and were. The grace

spills through your wounded hands and floods the room

with fragrance from some strange, familiar place.

Lazarus Among the Dead: A Poem for Holy Saturday

2009-04-11T09:15:00.006-06:00

This poem was written during the fifth week of Lent, when the gospel of the raising of Lazarus is read either on Sunday or, as this year, on an alternative weekday. It was not written for Holy Saturday, but it seems appropriate as a reflection on one connection between the story of Lazarus of Bethany and the story of Jesus as we recall the line from the creed: "He descended into Hell."

Today I took the book in hand and read
the tale of Lazarus among the dead.

***
The darkness, gray, is tinted by the stench
of rotting souls. Their faces, white, drift in
and out of sight.

“Here we exist between
the day and night, our twilight timeless. Why?
Oh yes, we know. We are the ruin. Here
the garden stood, and we its trees. You have
heard tell the fruits that we were born to bear:
love, joy, and patience, peace and gentleness,
staunch faithfulness and generosity
and kindness, luminous upon the stem
of self-restraint.

Behold us now: the worm
found invitation in our discontent
with what we were but did not know we were.
We drank the wormwood and the gall, and lo!
the beauty blackened on the branch,
the sweet fruit poisoned to the core, the roots
sunk deep in streams polluted by our choice.
And we are legion. Look: our children’s seed
and theirs, down generations wasted by
our sin.

The tree of life is barred to us,
but we await in this gray world the spill of light
to flow from its pierced fruit.”

The Voice breaks through
their whispers. “Lazarus, come out.” Unbound,
he sees the sun. The Eyes are dark. They know
what Lazarus has seen. The others think
him pale from four long days of silence in
the dark of death. He wishes it were so.

***
I laid aside the book in cold and dread;
for I had seen my face—among the dead.

Genevieve Glen, OSB; ©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO. Once again the technical limitations of Blogger make it impossible to place the broken lines correctly. Here I have chosen to insert a blank line before each of the lines that should be indented to complete the previous line.

A Poem for Good Friday

2009-04-09T15:26:00.008-06:00

Pietà

And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him,
they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.
Acts 13:29

With careworn hands, the Mother tends her Son.
She does not notice, when she lifts the thorns
with tender care and wipes away the blood,
her fingers bleed. She smoothes the tangled hair,
sweat-drenched and limp. She pays no heed to stains
upon her dress where rests the tortured back,
red-cloaked, but not with majesty. His weight
lies heavy on her lap where once the babe
lay just as still in sleep, thirst satisfied.
She knows his hands and feet feel nothing now,
but her hands ache with something deeper than
the age of bones. When friends have lifted him
to bear him to his bed of stone, her feet
will follow, pausing now and then to rub
the bloodied footprints from the sand.
The chill
will never leave her once they roll the stone
across that charnel cold. Though he will rise,
the flesh that bore him will not ever lose
the imprint of that final dark. The hour
of night that seized the earth at afternoon
once light was quenched, will settle in her soul
as memory no morning sun will quite
efface.
And so, remembering, she tends
the wounded flesh of all the human race.

Genevieve Glen, OSB; ©2005, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO 80536-8942. Reprinted from On Threads of Hope (Portland OR: Pastoral Press, 2008). All rights reserved. Please note that the technical limitations of Blogger do not allow the proper placement of the broken lines.

A Hymn for Holy Thursday

2009-04-09T15:09:00.003-06:00

How could a friend betray you,
A follower deny?
How could they then forsake you
And leave you there to die?
How weak our claims of fealty,
How little does it take--
A handful of their silver
To put your life at stake?

Yet you, when handed over,
Accepted at the hands
Of brutal and dishonest
The pain of torture’s brands.
And when they crucified you,
You prayed, “O God, forgive”;
You knew the ones who slew you
And died that they might live.

How could we doubt the mercy
That bled for us that day?
When we have seen the nail marks,
How could we walk away?
Our sin deserves your anger;
You give us life instead.
Before your cross we tremble,
To take your wine and bread.

Your gifts have far exceeded
All human want or need:
You lay your life before us
With wounded hands that bleed.
You ask of us no payment,
You welcome us to eat
Like guests at your own table—
But first you wash our feet.

How can our thanks repay us,
Our lives make some return
For this vast debt we owe you?
Our hearts with longing burn
To offer you some token
Of all we cannot say—
Take these, the hearts that love you,
O Christ our God, we pray!

Meter: 7676D

The Sweeper: a Parable

2009-03-19T10:00:00.005-06:00

She filled the house with clouds enough to choke
all thoughts but this: “My coin is lost and must
be found! My last!” She lit the lamp, and woke
a dancing chorus of more blinding dust.
She swept in vain until a flicker caught
a hint of gold half hidden by old oak
where shelves well laden with what she had bought
bowed to the ground and moaned and all but broke
beneath their burden.
Overjoyed, she heard
a voice she knew. “What goods your wealth has brought!
What did they cost? Whose face is that upon
the coin you lost and in such frenzy sought?”
She looked. The face was hers. “And whose is drawn
upon the other side?” She looked once more.
The second face was his.

She flung the door

wide open, called her friends to celebrate
her find. She gave them gladly all her store
of precious treasures. When the hour grew late
she found the empty shelves and clean-swept floor
filled her with joy she had not known before.

One thing remained. She did not want to wait.
She went at once in haste to throw her last
best coin into the Temple treasury.
He watched her, knowing what this final fast
had cost --and bought.

She went home free.

Beware: this poem combines several New Testament passages--Luke 15:8-9; Matthew 22:20; Mark 10:17-21, 12:41-44, to be exact--and in doing so, changes the message of several of them, but stays within the general framework of the gospel, I think. I hope this won't get my poetic license revoked!

Kiss the Toad

2009-03-08T14:49:00.003-06:00

Forgiveness is a word we hear often during Lent. We are asked to think about our need for it, our responsibility to give it, and our stubborn resistance to doing either one. Forgiveness is an act of love. When given and received, it changes the giver and the receiver--except when the giver is God, who is unswerving forgiveness because God is unwavering love.

The other day someone quoted St. Augustine: "Love your enemies so that they may become your friends." Loving one's enemies--surely the most difficult of the Gospel commandments--is, of course, an expression of forgiveness. As St. Augustine suggests, it may make a surprising difference, either in our perception of our enemies or their perception of us.

I'm reminded of the fairy tale about the young woman who kisses a frog. The frog then turns into a handsome prince. And I'm sure they live happily ever after. It was a questionable tale. It belonged to the repertoire that convinced girls my age that we were all destined to find the prince and live happily ever after, apparently with no effort at all once little obstacles like frogginess were dissipated by true love. Moreover, true love required no effort after the dreamed-of day of white lace and promises. One little kiss, and bingo! You had your prince for life. The story also taught us that no matter what sort of ugliness of character our chosen prince exhibited, we could change him with as little effort as that heroine exhibited. You could safely marry the frog, even though your parents and friends thought you were crazy, because all you had to do was find the magic talisman, and again--bingo! The prince. A lot of grief has come of that story.

Nevertheless, the story has some truth to it. It was meant to teach us not to judge anyone by appearances. Even a frog could be a prince in disguise. It was meant to teach us to take risks to find the prince in the frog, to recognize the goodness under the skin of the toad. (If you are puzzled about the difference between a frog and a toad, just consult the article on "toad" in Wikipedia, which will leave you even more confused but will allow you to use the two words more or less interchangeably, as I am doing here.)

St. Augustine seems to have had the same notion in mind, though I doubt he ever heard the fairy tale. "Love your enemies that they may become your friends." Many of us may have people with whom we are at odds, but not real enemies of the "out-to-get-you" kind. But all of us have enemies within, the traits that make up our worst selves. In either case, we are apt to find those enemies ugly, unwanted, unkissable--in fact, toads. Moreover, we are apt to assume they are incapable of change.

However, St. Augustine believed otherwise. We can indeed love not only the people with whom we are in opposition but also those very parts of our own selves that seem to trip us up at every turn. Many of our most unlovely ways of seeing and doing things are misdirected gifts. (It's not a toad but a snake that does that kind of misdirecting.) If we spend some time with them, looking for the prince or princess under the skin, we may discover that they have some surprising good to offer us or others. Our inability to say no may simply be generosity in need of a little humble realism about limits of time and energy. Our tendency to be late may be a capacity to be radically committed to the people or task at hand, a capacity in need of a well-timed alarm. You can make your own list. Once we forgive them, discover their hidden possibilities, make peace with them as parts of our selves beloved by God but also sometimes in need of reformation by God, we may not turn into perfect people overnight, but we will certainly become more peaceful people, better able to assess our faults and perhaps to come up with creative strategies to turn them into friends.

Kiss the toad. You never know.

Remembering

2009-02-21T10:02:00.001-07:00

Memory is a tricky business. It is fully owned and operated by an independent editorial staff on duty 24/7. Or so it seems to an outsider looking into the workings of his or her own mind. The Acquisitions Editor begins the process. Picking through the experiences of the day—what we have seen, done, thought, read, said, heard—it sorts them into baskets labeled: RECALL, REPRESS, REWRITE. Contrary to our experience, there is no basket labeled: FORGET. (I suspect, however, that there is one labeled MISLAY IN THE BACK ROOM.) The REWRITE basket is full to overflowing with manuscripts in progress, the work of the Content Editor, who is also a skilled artist and writer, particularly of fiction. No need for a copy editor—memory doesn’t bother to check facts, references, spelling or punctuation. The supervising Editor-in-Chief takes the finished work of the Content Editor, arranges it for publication, and files it in the most useful spot on the vast shelves of our interior library. The CIRCULATION EDITOR takes it from there, selecting what we remember at any given moment. This busy editorial staff never sleeps, since a lot of their work is done in the night workshop of the unconscious. Dreams are often their rough drafts.

The business of memory would be of only passing interest if it did not shape so much of our waking lives. Various schools of spirituality stress the importance of living in the present moment. Certainly taking conscious responsibility for life at hand in the moment is important. However, living exclusively in the present seems a task outside the competence of the human mind. By the design of the God who put order into the primal chaos by creating lights in the firmament to govern the day and the night, the times and the seasons, that is, who created time as past, present and future, the human psyche lives in a multi-layered present where past and future are always in conversation with “right now.” When I am washing dishes, I may focus consciously and intentionally on the task at hand, but the order in which I wash and rinse, the attention I pay to food remnants stuck on a plate, or to ardor with which I do battle with the black stuff on the bottom of pots, depend a great deal both on the style of the parent who first taught me dishwashing and on what I plan to do with dish or pot later. My mother’s voice says in one ear, “Scrub all that black stuff off the bottom of that copper-bottomed pan so it will look nice hanging up there on the wall.” (My mother didn’t really say that.) My uncle’s voice says in another ear, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. A good dish-dryer should be able to take off whatever the dishwasher leaves.” (My uncle, the family dish dryer, did.) The past speaks through those family voices; the future speaks through the image of the copper-bottomed pan hanging on the wall or the faithful dish dryer wiping off the stubborn particles of broccoli. We live in a time-rich tapestry. The notion of liturgy as memorial in which past, present and future meet and interact NOW is simply an objective extension of our subjective experience of living in time.

That being the case, it matters a great deal what we remember and how and why because those departments of memory give our daily life its textures. If we remember this morning’s conversation with the accent on hurt taken, belittlement perceived, or disdain for the ignorance of the other speaker, and we keep rehearsing it with the intention of returning wound for wound, of defending ourselves against disparagement we fear might be justified, or of chalking up points by putting the other person down[1], we will live the day under a dark cloud of hurt, anger, pride, and contempt. That’s rather an unpleasant prospect for most of us. If, on the other hand, we remember the conversation with the accent on gratitude for the other’s insight or honesty or creativity, we live in the sunlight.

I said in the beginning that memory is the work of independent editors, but, true as that seems, it is not in fact the only truth. We do have the capacity to choose our attitudes. In fact, Viktor E. Frankl, in his classic description of life in a World War II concentration camp, says that only freedom that cannot be taken from us is the precisely the freedom to choose our attitudes. It is a difficult freedom. It demands conscious work in examining and forming or reforming the decisions of our memory’s editorial staff. We may not be able to control what the Acquisitions Editor takes in, but we can attend to the way the Content Editor writes it, shapes it, and colors it insofar as it can be made accessible to our conscious mind and will, and we can exercise some authority over what the Circulation Editor presents to us for rumination. I can learn, with the grace of the God of truth, to look for the good in people, circumstances, and events. Both gratitude and humility will follow and perhaps become habits of mind. I can learn to choose which door to walk through when the mind presents me with one labeled “Resentments” and one labeled “Gifts.” The same events may lie behind both: behind “Resentments” they are colored dark, behind “Gifts” they are illuminated by the light of the Spirit (cf. Psalm 36).

The psalmist lament what happens to God’s people when the editor in charge of selection feeds them on memories of the good life in Egypt rather than the great deeds God has done for them. (See, for example, Psalms 78 and 106). The result is rebellious sulks rather than the grateful praise that makes obedience a joy and not a chore. [2]

Our primary love and obedience to God are expressed through obedience to the two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37, 39; NRSV). “Heart, soul, and mind” take in the whole of our inner life, including memory. So remembering, too, must become an act of love. I don’t know about your editors, but mine still need a few lessons in that department. Lent is on the doorstep. Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. It’s a good season to provide them with some continuing education.

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

[1] Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, rev. ed., tr. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), xi.
[2] See “Tenting on a New Campground,” posting for 12/28/08. An expanded and revised version of that posting—with typos removed, I hope—appears in Pebbles on the Beach: Reflection for Lent and Easter by Genevieve Glen, OSB (Virginia Dale CO: St. Walburga Press, 2009). This newly-released book also includes revised versions of some other postings from this blog. It will be available today or tomorrow at www.store.walburga.org. Watch the sidebar for an announcement of our opening!

Town Folk of the Mind--Part III

2009-02-08T10:09:00.005-07:00

Please read Parts I and II, posted below, first!

Because the paralytic was, in fact, unable to help himself, he would never have reached Jesus without the four men who not only carried him, on his pallet, to the house where Jesus was preaching and healing but, when they couldn't get to Jesus himself, managed to get the pallet up onto the roof of the house and lower it down at Jesus' feet through a hole they had made in the roof.

From time to time, all of us find ourselves paralyzed at heart, if not in body, and unable to help ourselves out of the circumstances that have frozen us in place. Perhaps the cause is indeed sin, as the story in Mark's gospel suggests--not that paralysis, inward or outward is punishment for sin, as the town folk believe, but that ill-doing is apt to trap us, like squirrels in a cage, on a treadmill that takes us around and around in the same circle of repetition and guilt. Kathleen Norris, in her recent book Acedia and Me, repeats a story told to her by a teacher of a classroom full of young children who were out of control. Likely they were chasing each other, yelling, shoving desks out of the way, maybe throwing things, and generally leaving havoc in their week. One little girl, when asked what was going on, answered, "We're being bad, and we don't know how to stop!"

When we're being bad and can't figure out how to stop, or when we're simply feeling helpless to be genuinely good, or when we long for Jesus but can't seem to get our spiritual feet to the place where we can meet him, we need pallet carriers like the four men in the gospel. We know very little about these men. We don't know if they were friends or relatives or simply neighbors. We don't know why they agreed to carry the paralytic to Jesus. We do know that they were generous, determined, and inventive. We also know they were strong. It was no easy task to get someone who could not move onto a roof, pallet and all. It took strength to lower him through the roof without dumping him on Jesus' head. Jesus spots their main quality: their faith prompts him to forgive the paralytic's sin (Mark 2:5).

Since we've been considering the town folk of the mind, both the crowd that blocked the paralytic's road to Jesus and the paralytic himself, we might cast around in our own inner world for the pallet carriers. They are the insights, the qualities, the characteristics that can carry us to the One who can heal us even when we feel utterly unable to walk their ourselves. They include, the story suggests, generosity toward ourselves, determination, creativity, strength, and, of course, faith. Generosity toward ourselves when we are in trouble is essential to protect us from trying to solve our need by simply punishing ourselves. Guilt is heavy. It will not help us to walk. Determination moves us to get up and go without any clear picture of what will happen when we get there. Creativity of heart will free us from the squirrel's treadmill but giving us a different perspective on the issues at hand. That is already a form of liberation and healing--and it is the gift of a creative God to every human being made in the divine image. Our strength may not be apparent to us in our weakness, but most of us are stronger than we imagine, if only we would call on the inner resources God has given us. And, in this case, faith is trust to take the whole sorry mess to Christ without having any idea how he will heal it. For the paralytic in the story, he did the unexpected--he forgave his sins. For us, too, he will quite likely do the unexpected. Let him!

However, lest we imagine ourselves to be self-sufficient and curse ourselves when we find we're not, it would be wise to look outside ourselves for the pallet carriers we need. Who are the generous helpers? Where will we find them? The obvious answer is among relatives, friends, pastors or other religious figures. However, sometimes they might appear in the form of a wise novelist, an insightful poet, or an artist or musician who can lift us out of our entrapment in our small selves. Their commitment to the integrity of their own craft, their creativity, their strength of vision, their faith may carry us into the Presence for which we long. And they are only suggestions--as moments of disaster always demonstrate, generous human beings with helping hands outstretched are everywhere, if only we allow them to see our need and to help us out of it.

An interesting lot, the town folk of the mind, our constant companions, our friends and our foes. And, more often than we know, our saving grace.

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

Vigil

2009-02-01T06:45:00.008-07:00

The bones of aspens, trailing widows’ veils,
lean eastward, where the sun shone till the shroud—
wet, gray and heavy—smothered it. Thick cloud
hangs dripping in the branches. Mourning wails
are quenched by fog. Half-hid, the abandoned trees
sink roots in memory for anchor, tilt
their heads toward vanished dawn, and tuck the silt
of springs and summers past around their knees.

Snow fell last night. Dark morning is the price,
but all the aspen trees stand wreathed in light,
each upstretched fingertip ablaze with white
where frozen flame engulfs the grove in ice.
It does not matter now if sun returns.
Who stares into remembered fire, burns.

Part II of "Town Folk of the Mind" will be posted later this week.

Town Folk of the Mind--Part II

2009-01-25T06:45:00.007-07:00

This posting will make more sense if you read the previous one, "Town Folk of the Mind--Part I" first.

And the paralytic? Who is he among the town folk of the mind? In the story, he is an interesting figure--unknown but known. We are given only one fact about him: he is unable to walk unaided. We are given two hints. First, either he is a man who inspires friends or relatives to go to great lengths to help him, or his carriers are the kind of people who pop up in the wake of fire, famine, flood and earthquake to rescue their fellow human beings for no apparent reason other than generous kindness. Secondly, either he is a sinner, or Jesus is working from the assumption popular at the time that any misfortune, but particularly sickness, is God's retaliation for sin. (Jesus contradicts this assumption elsewhere. He was patient enough to work within the given frameworks of his hearers and only gradually to expand them or shatter and rebuild them.)

Among the town folk of the mind, the paralytic stands out as radical dependence in radical need. The dependence in this case is on others. The paralytic is utterly unable to act in his own behalf. The need, though, is for Jesus. No one else can heal his paralysis. No one else can forgive his sin. In other words, no one else can set him free from all that constrains him within the small circle of his own helplessness. Perhaps he knows that himself. Perhaps only his friends put their trust in this new Healer. It doesn't really matter: need is need, whatever the motive that plants us at last at the feet of the One who can meet it.

Perhaps the need is what causes the crowd to ignore him. The "thoughts" or "passions" that drive us wear a mask of self-sufficiency. That is part of the ruse they use to snare us: “You can get what you want if you get out there and fight for it.” They are intolerant of powerlessness. Greed grabs more than its share; lust dehumanizes both its agent and its object into fodder for sheer abusive use; anger arises in response to the frustration of powerlessness. Vainglory is embarrassed by any manifestation of helplessness: it makes us look so bad when compared with the achievers around us! Pride simply refuses to accept powerlessness: it can do all things unless thwarted by the perversity of others who will not give in to us. These "thoughts" and their companions don't want to see or know that part of us which cries out to God, "O God, come to my assistance! O Lord, make haste to help me!" Only weaklings show that kind of neediness. The strong, the beautiful and the good do for themselves.

In his helplessness, the paralytic has another strike against him. He is quite unable to produce any tangible fruits through his labor because he is unable to labor. That part of us that seeks God out of deep need is not, apparently, productive. That in itself is a capital sin in a techno-consumer culture. The demon of productivity is not listed per se among the “thoughts” identified by Evagrius Ponticus and the other desert sages because productivity was not one of their goals. They worked at weaving mats and baskets out of local reeds, but they did so both to earn their own living and to earn money to give to the poor. They were useful, but they were not driven by the need to be useful as we so often are. There may well have been some among their number who surreptitiously compared his or her basket output with that of the neighbors to satisfy the competitive spirit of pride, but I haven’t come across their stories in the desert literature as yet. Perhaps enslavement to usefulness does belong to pride, but it seems to be ruled by a desire to be accepted as often as it is by a desire to win the race to achieve the most toys or the biggest cheese. It is certainly a major roadblock on the road toward God. No one can measure the “accomplishments” of prayer, particularly the prayer that asks for nothing but deeper communion with Christ. As spiritual writers often lament, it is perceived as a useless waste of time. “Get out there, get busy, contribute!” scream the voices in our head. As contemplative nuns, we are often forced to wrestle at least inwardly with the judgment, implied or sometimes even stated, that we are nothing but parasites wasting God’s gifts by shutting ourselves up in our cloister and spending too much time in prayer. Paralytics in a society where success is defined by product, men and women who seek God in their need for that sometimes unnamed “more” and who contribute nothing to the world but love poured out in prayer, in the cloister or in the marketplace, will get many a cold shoulder from the crowd, sometimes even the crowd gathered around Jesus’ door.

Yet need our paralytic. We need our powerlessness. We need the recognition that only one is God, and we are not the one. Otherwise, we are apt to spend our whole lives turning our back on the radical Love that can heal us and free us--if only we will allow others, and even that Love itself, to carry us up on that roof and lower us down at the feet of Christ, who shows an uncanny knack for honoring what we despise in ourselves and others by touching our weaknesses, speaking to them, explaining them, pardoning them, and converting them into strengths.

To be continued: Part III—The Pallet Carriers

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

Town Folk of the Mind--Part I

2009-01-22T15:44:00.004-07:00

In the story of the paralytic with the ingenious friends (Mark 2:1-12), our attention usually goes immediately to the clever determination that leads the men carrying the paralytic to lower him into Jesus’ presence through the roof. Their faith, says Mark, prompts Jesus first to forgive the paralyzed man his sins, to the consternation of the scribes, and then to heal him.
However, before the action really begins, the evangelist sets up the necessity for drastic action by saying “they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd” (Mark 2:4). Think for a minute about the scene. Having discovered that Jesus was home in Capernaum, “So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them” (Mark 2:2). You can imagine people jostling one another for a better spot so they could hear. A few well-placed elbows and a little toe-stomping could probably get a determined person to the front. Some of the crowd may have brought their own sick to be healed. Others were no doubt looking for something exciting, some action or some word that would liven up their day-to-day existence and give them something new to gossip about. This rabbi was new on the scene, after all, and had been known to work wonders already. Whatever their motives, they were apparently not ready to make way for a paralyzed man carried by four other men. Although Capernaum seems to have been a good-sized place that drew business from the surrounding area, chances are that a lot of people gathered knew one another, but they don’t seem to have been exhibiting much neighborliness.

Why not? What sort of people would ignore and even bar the road to such obvious need? Were they so preoccupied with hearing and seeing for themselves, so blinded by their own determination to get close, so hungry themselves that they could not make space for a man whose need for Jesus was so much greater than their own? Evidently so.

This troublesome little scene stuck in my mind like a burr when I heard it read in church lately. In the context of the gospel, the story is neither parable nor allegory, but it forced my thoughts toward the town folk of my own mind. Are there in me preoccupations, plans, purposes that stand in the way of my own need to seek and find Christ in the busy marketplace of my days? Of course there are. Usually, they look like harmless squiggles in my planner, but the ancient monastic tradition of the early Christian desert prods me into recognition that some of them are more than squiggles and far from harmless. Those unforgettable voices of a wisdom that knew all too well the foibles of the human spirit spoke plainly about the “thoughts” that drive us. Conventions of translation used to call those “thoughts” the “passions”, but once “passion” was generally co-opted by the literature of sexual morality, it lost the real flavor of what the desert fathers and mothers were talking about. They meant the inner forces that invaded the peaceful harmony of mind, heart, spirit, and body and drove those powerful faculties into a focused preoccupation that shut out prayer, charity, wisdom and balance in order to concentrate all energy on whatever “thoughts” consumed and drove the hapless human taken up with them. The desert teachers eventually named them gluttony, lust, avarice, acedia (a sort of restless, unfocussed dissatisfaction that guts initiative and perseverance in anything worthwhile), anger, despondency, vainglory and pride. The list is familiar. These are not passing whims but the gathered energy of imagination and body toward the fulfillment of some need perceived as urgent, with the collaboration of a mind happy to provide all sorts of convincing rationalizations.

Wait a minute! We began by considering the mindset of people so eager to hear and see Jesus that they block the way of a paralytic carried on a pallet. Surely these “thoughts”—which, in fact, do become passions—do not apply to the mind in quest of Christ? Of course they do. I won’t speak for you, but I am perfectly capable of setting up an imaginary Christ sketched from the gospel but cleverly twisted by my own thought processes to represent the fulfillment of all the desires of the almighty Me. The crowd in Capernaum was likely as driven by curiosity, hope of break from their normal routine, avidity for wonders, undefined desire for something more, competition with the others to get the best place, and anger when someone else got there first as they were by pure religious impulse. Most of us are sometimes, aren’t we? The town folk of my own mind don’t differ much from the town folk of Capernaum or of any crowd collected to hear and see any celebrity.

To be continued...Part II: The Paralytic

Evening Toll

2009-01-10T06:14:00.004-07:00

After a day that was far too busy....

I long for stiller places than the mind
where hubbub’s rowdy children will not sleep.
The day recites its deeds, too many marked “undone”,
too many labeled, “Urgent! Will not keep!”

Night’s rest has fled the clamor, fingers stuffed
into her ears, with chatter at her heels,
a pack of puppies nipping her to flight,
a ceaseless rough-and-tumble. Nightfall feels

like battlefield where neither army won,
but none can find a way to halt the fray
no one remembers starting. Why the hours
were slain and scattered, fruitless, none can say.

But more than hours are dead as day dies down.
Among the wasted victims, none left whole,
lies one who should have lived. Beside the ash
of fires burned out, I kneel and mourn my soul.

Genevieve Glen, OSB
©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

Epiphany 2009: A Star in the Clouds

2009-01-04T15:25:00.005-07:00

The piece I started for this week's posting turned out to be too long for a blog and too hard to shorten without losing the sense, so here is just a short sketch of a thought for the feast of the Epiphany (celebrated in the US Roman Catholic liturgical calendar on the Sunday nearest January 6, rather than on the traditional January 6 date).

A day or two ago, the news on the web carried a dramatic photo of heavy brown clouds billowing above the ground in the wake of an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. It brought back memories. When I was a child, the mushroom cloud from the first hydrogen bomb tests appeared in Life Magazine (yes, I'm that old). My mother hid that issue from me because she thought it would frighten me. Why, I'm not sure. I wouldn't have understood the implications, although I already knew about the A-bomb. We had regular air-raid drills at school. What I remember from them is learning to fear a flash of white soundless light (by the time you heard the explosion, it would be too late to run); filing out of the classroom and crouching down along the wall with my face hidden in my knees and my sweater pulled up over hands and neck to protect them from burns. It seems a pitiful gesture now, to use a sweater to shield yourself from an A-bomb. I think the drills did give me nightmares, so perhaps that was why my mother hid that issue of Life. The web photo reminded me of the terror a bright light and a mushroom cloud could stir up in a small child.

I wondered about the children of Gaza. I wondered about the children of Afghanistan. I wondered about the children of Iran. They make a discomforting picture in the background as we sing Christmas carols about the newborn Prince of Peace.

Iran, the former Persia, may in fact have been the home from which the three Magi of the Epiphany story (Matthew 2) set out to follow a bright light in the sky to faraway Bethlehem in Judea. Very little is known about them or their journey. Imagination and scholarship have filled in lots of details: they may have been astrologers, they may have been descendants of the Jews exiled to Babylon "in the East" centuries before, they may therefore have know of Balaam's from the Book of Numbers: "I see him [the deliverer], though not now; I behold him, though not near: A star shall advance from Jacob..." (Numbers 24:17), there may have been three of them because they carried three gifts, they may have been kings, they may have been named Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, one of them may have been black...a lot of "may have's", almost no known facts.

Surely they travelled through their fair share of clouds--dust storms, thunderclouds, even snow clouds in high passes, clouds of dust raised by fast bands of brigands in search of unprotected travellers, clouds of flies feasting on bodies left on the road by thieves or local wars. A strong Roman Empire ensured a certain amount of peace in the territories within its reach, but the legions probably couldn't suppress local blood feuds, and probably didn't try. The world was not a prettier place then than it is now, but it couldn't broadcast its violence and tragedies live across the world as they happened, so we don't have much of a record to go by. The three travellers must have weathered discomfort and danger as made their way "from the East" to that little Palestinian town.

Why did they do it? No one really knows. Sermons and hymns have assumed they came to worship at the crib of the Savior, Son of God and Son of Mary. Their three gifts--gold, frankincense and myrrh--were all things prescribed for worship in the Jerusalem Temple. (It was later Christian imagination that attached to them allusions to Christ's kingship, divinity and passion.) But the Magi did not come from Jerusalem. And they did not come to worship, according to Matthew's gospel. They came to pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews. Homage is the honor due a ruler. Why would they want to honor an infant king of a small province of the great Roman Empire? The gospel does not say.

Perhaps the gift they give us is their perseverance. They saw a star. They believed it pointed to the newborn King of the Jews. They felt they must take the long road to Israel in its wake, no doubt at great cost to themselves in terms of time, effort and money. Perhaps they themselves didn't know why. Sometimes we chase unlikely goals simply because we believe we must. They may have met obstacles that frightened them. They may have met landscapes, beasts and men who threatened them. They may have grown weary and discouraged. They may, sometimes, have lost sight of the star when the clouds were heavy. But they never turned back. They found the child, they paid their homage, they gave their gifts--and then they went home. And that's all we really know about them: they followed their vision, they gave what they had to give, and then they left. If they were hoping to get something out of that for themselves, we don't know what it was or whether they found it. All we know is: they followed, they gave, they left and then disappeared from history.

There is something to ponder in their stubborn fidelity to the star and its promise, even when the clouds are heavy, blinding and menacing. Even when they are great clouds of brown dust rising over a ruined town, or mushroom clouds threatening to rise over a ruined world. Even when everything in us wants to turn back and run for the safety of home. Even then, especially then: remember the Magi.

Two disclaimers are in order here:

About chronology: A child's memories are not historical records, obviously. We did have air raid drills in school during the Korean War because we lived on the San Francisco Peninsula, not far from the Naval Air Station at Alameda. There was some fear, apparently, that the air station might attract enemy bombing. As I look back, I can't imagine anyone really expected North Korea to drop an atomic bomb on California because the only country that had shown itself able and willing to commit that atrocity was the United States. However, I do remember that the teachers instructed us in how to recognize and take shelter from an atomic bomb, or A-bomb as we called them then. (The more I think about it, the more I wonder that adults who must have known the cataclysmic effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could possibly have dreamed that we could do anything to protect ourselves in a small school a few miles away from a possible target. That makes me think that, whatever I think was said, the air raid drills must have been based on fears of some lesser kind of bombs.) The other point in which I am not clear and did not have time to research is whether the first pictures of hydrogen bomb tests on the Pacific atolls appeared before, during or after the Korean War. The point really is the memeory, not the history.

About the Magi: This reflection is drawn from the story of the Magi as it is told in Matthew 2, without reference to any kind of biblical scholarship that offers a much more sophisticated picture of the story's significance. The Magi are in fact presented as representatives of the Gentile nations streaming to Jerusalem (Bethelehem was near enough) to pay homage to God after the restoration of the exiled people of God to a Jerusalem restored to splendor. See, for example, Isaiah 61 and Psalm 72, whose promises the Magi from the East seem to fulfill. They are therefore intentional characters in the messianic drama of promise and fulfillment on which the gospel story is based. But they are no less mysterious figures of human interest for all that!

Tenting on a New Camp Ground

2008-12-28T10:17:00.005-07:00

The story is told in the Bible of the Israelites camped in the desert. They have escaped from the slaveholders of Egypt. They have walked dry shod through the sea, with the water standing like walls to their left and to their right. They have been given water from a rock in the parched and parching wilderness. They have been fed daily with the mysterious manna—the word means “What is it?”—in a land that offered little food. Their response? "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." (Numbers 11:4-6)

In fact, they started grumbling the day after they left Egypt, before ever they crossed the sea. Complaint became their daily chorus. The psalmist says of them: “They complained inside their tents and would not listen to the voice of the Lord” (Psalm 106:25). I imagine them camped in their tents, in the dark, the tent flaps firmly zipped shut. (Anachronism is no bar to the imagination!) There they sit, day after day, muttering to themselves and to each other, breathing the stale air of their own laments, sweltering in the heat of the anger they seem to stoke up every morning and refuel all day with their complaints: “We’re tired of this desert, we’re tired of the sand getting into everything, we’re tired of this boring old manna, we’re tired of each other, and, what is more, O Lord, we’re getting very tired of you! When are you going to get us out of here?” Their tragedy is that, when Moses does lead them to the borders of the Promised Land, they complain about that too: “Sure there are figs, sure there are pomegranates, sure there are those gorgeous grapes Caleb brought back, but there are giants in there!” And they refuse to go in (see Numbers 13-14). As the psalmist says, they would not listen to the voice of the Lord, who has done nothing but take care of their every need in the most startling ways; they couldn’t listen to God. They were too busy listening to themselves.

Unfortunately, that scenario is all too familiar. In how many homes was heard this Christmas something like: “You made bread dressing! I wanted rice!” or “I only got an I-pod! I wanted a Playstation!” or “This sweater is red! I wanted green!” In our local paper, on the Friday after Christmas, cartoonist Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse) poked gentle fun at a young wife saying to a friend, “Sure I gave him some hints, Anne! I said—buy me something frivolous and expensive, something I can show off to my friends.” And, in the final frame, “I was thinking suede coat—while he was thinking dishwasher.” The cartoon was amusing. Real life grumblers aren’t. Theirs are the voices of the spoiled children in us who have never grown up. Grumbling is one of those occasional vices that grows all too easily into a habit of mind.

The way out is simple. God says to Israel in distress: “Enlarge the space for your tent, spread out your tent cloths unsparingly; lengthen your ropes and make firm your stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). In other words, “Open up, make room, I’m bringing you more gifts, more possibilities, more riches than you could possibly imagine. But you’ve got to unzip that tent!” Zipping is easier than unzipping, I’ve learned. Sometimes it takes a lot of help to unfasten the elaborate system of zippers, buttons, snaps, padlocks, cords, ropes and chains with which we secure our suffocating safe zones. Other people can help. God will help. But no one helps without an invitation. After all, you never know when walls, or tent flaps, are guarded with weapons and booby traps. I usually discover, though, when I finally manage, with help, to unfasten the tent flaps that close me into the small, dark, stale circle of my own hungry, thirsty, angry self-interest, that the sun is shining, the air is clear, and the desert floor is littered with manna as far as the eye can see. Change of perspective is everything (see the poem below). The trick seems to be to start by letting in a little laughter. Laughter is the best air freshener I’ve ever found. I recommend especially the kind that comes in the can labeled, “Laugh at yourself.”

The best long-term cure for a bad habit seems always to be to cultivate its opposite. The real antidote to the habit of complaint, once you’ve got the tent flaps open, is to cultivate the habit of gratitude: “Gosh, what great rice dressing!” and “I LOVE this Playstation” and “This red sweater is gorgeous! Thanks!” Grumbling and gratitude can’t co-exist in the same tent or even the same desert. Love doesn’t actually mean never having to say you’re sorry, as a thousand parodies have pointed out since that unfortunate line appeared in Eric Segal’s Love Story. Love seems rather to mean often wanting to say thank you.

********
Perspective
This face of rock was roughened by the wind
before time’s ears were blistered by the wail
of my small self protesting. Waters pinned
the boulders into place, but now rains fail.
Dry cobwebbed lichen spreads its tufted lace
in gray-green veiling over dusty pink
of granite knees that offer ample space
for juniper to feather the design with fragrance, sink
its twisted roots where stone has pocketed
small scraps of earth undreamed of from below.
Oh, look! A red-tailed hawk just rocketed
from that dark tangle where fall berries grow.
It seems to me I came out here to cry
that life is foul. I have forgotten why.

2002

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga
The poem “Perspective” is reprinted with permission from Genevieve Glen, OSB, Landscapes (Virginia Dale CO: St. Walburga Press, 2006, rev. ed. 2008).

Christmas 2008: A Poem

2008-12-25T16:04:00.003-07:00

INCARNATION

Christmas 2008

The Word takes flesh in inward hours
when Mother nurses Child and prays
that children everywhere will joy
through length of days.

The Word takes flesh in seasons when
no spring rains fall, when harvests fail,
when winter eats our hopes, when we
learn life is frail.

The Word takes flesh in newborn love,
in days of wonder, in the long
fidelities that losses test,
in trust grown strong.

The Word takes flesh in burning years
of war, when splintered heartbreak learns
the price of lust for others’ lands
whose lives greed spurns.

The Word take flesh in questions and
in doubts that ask why buildings fall
on playgrounds, why a loved one dies,
if this is all?

The Word takes flesh in darkness
and in light, in tears and pain,
in laughter bubbling like the sun
through falling rain.

The Word takes flesh in living centuries
of human struggle to discover how
to weave the hours into real life. The Word
still takes flesh now.

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T22:39:00.005-07:00

And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:4-7)

So very small, so woefully inauspicious, the beginnings of salvation. There they are, the shepherds trooping in from the fields, the magi traveling from the exotic east, and hosts of angels pouring through the skies to sing hosannah--for what? The shepherds had been told to look for a savior, the magi for a king, but all they found was an infant, a newborn, one of no doubt many born in Bethlehem that year. The shepherds wondered, the magi paid homage, but in later years the villagers of Nazareth would shake their heads in disgust and turn away--"A wonder worker? Him? He's just the carpenter's son." His family thought him crazy. Some of his followers thought him extravagant. The authorities thought him dangerous, not because he was the Son of God but because he thought he was, and said so, to others who thought he might be right. They executed him for it, a criminal among criminals. No one special, just another failed messiah.

We still make that same mistake, sometimes, in our search for salvation, whatever that word means to us. We look for the prophet clothed in camel hair, hurling imprecations, or we wait for a voice that speaks in thunder from the top of a mountain, but we miss a simple question asked by a friend, a question that might have turned our lives around had we been paying attention. "Why are you so angry?" or maybe "Do you really have to work all the time?" or "Have you ever thought of....?" We scan the heavens for a star to show us the road, but we pay no heed to a news report on the homeless in our town tonight. We expect a blinding light on the Damascus road, but we fail to see the small, clear illumination shed by a word on a Bible page or the look in a loved one's eyes. Nothing special, the question, the news report, the word, the look--just another interruption in the real business of getting somewhere in life.

Tonight we probably won't see a stream of shepherds heading for a local motel, or a strange band of pilgrims holding up freeway traffic as they follow a star. It's unlikely we'll hear choirs of angels in the sky over the house, or even over the church. But tonight we will hear the same quiet invitation that has been following us around, perhaps for years, tugging at our sleeve and asking simply, "Come. I have what you're looking for." Nothing extraordinary, just our incredibly patient and persistent God, focused tonight in a baby laid in a beat-up food trough in a long-ago town in a faraway place, but in reality everywhere. Even right there, where you're sitting. "Come."

The Unasked Question

2008-12-20T14:07:00.004-07:00

Jesus told a story once, about a man just bursting with success. He surveyed with satisfaction all the grain piled up to the roof of his barns, the yield of the land he owned. Only one thing troubled him. The barns were full, but the harvest was not yet all gathered in. “Where would he put the waiting wheat?” he asked himself. Left in the fields, it would rot. “I know,” he answered himself. “I’ll tear down these barns and build bigger ones to hold all this harvest gold.” Then he made plans for the perfect retirement: “And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). (He was obviously a man much given to talking to himself.) However, God had plans for a different kind of retirement: “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' (Luke 12:20). The moral of the story, Jesus says, is this: “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21).

The man’s real problem, it appears, is the limited circle of his conversation. He talks to himself, listens to his own advice, and acts on it. He does not even think of consulting God. There is a telling passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Here God is speaking to the city of Jerusalem as it prepares for a siege: “In that day you looked to the weapons of the House of the Forest, and you saw that the breaches of the city of David were many, and you collected the waters of the lower pool, and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall. You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to him who did it, or have regard for him who planned it long ago” (Isaiah 22:8-11). In other words, you asked yourself what you needed to protect the city, and you listened to your own answer: you gathered weapons, you strengthened your defenses, you collected water. But you did not ask me, who gave you the city and lived there with you. The Jerusalem war committee had a good reason not to ask God. God had already told them to trust in him and not in their own utterly inadequate resources for war against a far more powerful enemy, Babylon. They didn’t like that answer, so they didn’t ask the question. Perhaps that was the rich landowner’s strategy also, for he belonged to the nation whom the prophets had chastised in God’s name for centuries for hoarding wealth rather than using it to care for the orphan and the widow and the starving poor. If you don’t ask, you won’t hear the unwanted answer you suspect is coming.

We see a different version of this story in the life of Joseph, husband of Mary. When Joseph discovers that his betrothed is pregnant with a child not his, he finds himself in a dilemma. According to the law, she could be stoned to death, although scholars say that it is not clear how often that law was invoked by the time of Jesus. Even if she was not condemned to death, she would certainly be disgraced. So, apparently, he asks himself what he should do.

He is a just man, St. Matthew tells us, and does not want to see her shamed publicly. So he answers his own question by deciding to divorce her quietly. (It is a little difficult to imagine how this might save her from public disgrace—she is still a single pregnant mother, probably a young teenager.) That night, of course, God sends an angel with a different answer: “Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:20-21).

Joseph was a just man, that is, an observer of the mosaic Law. He did not exactly ignore God in his debate about what he should do, but he assumed he knew what God would say because he knew his options under the law. (Scholars point out that the opinion that the law obligated him to divorce Mary is not justified, but he could not, as a just observer of the Law, unite himself with a woman who had offended so seriously against it.) But, as far as the story goes, he did not actually ask what God wanted him to do in this troubling situation. God told him anyway, as God told the rich man and the leaders of Jerusalem—and God’s way was not Joseph’s way anymore than it was the way of the landowner or the city: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). (One of God’s irritating habits is to answer questions he has not been asked, so persistent is he in his desire to lead us to happiness despite our best efforts to go somewhere else.)

The first moral of Jesus’ story is to lay up treasure not for ourselves but for God, but the second moral goes even deeper: if any of these biblical characters had asked God rather than themselves what they should do, they would have found themselves sent down surprising roads, not always to their own comfort but always to their good. The unasked question is the one that traps us in the dead ends of our own too-small minds.

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga

Guadete Sunday 2008

2008-12-14T10:55:00.008-07:00

Gaudete Sunday takes its name from the first word of the Latin entrance chant of the Mass: gaudete, meaning rejoice.

Today is also sometimes called "pink Sunday" because the priest may wear pink, or more properly, rose vestments.

Not being fond of pink, the sudden blossoming of color in our chapel put me to thinking. Our Advent wreath is rather a sober affair: a bronze ring, time-darkened to the point where the colored enamelwork has become invisible, hung by black chains from a tall, graceful black tripod. The traditional candles--three purple, one pink--stand out against this darkness, but they too are muted in color. Beneath it, deft hands have planted a gaudete garden: a froth of carnations, white, pale pink, dark rose, against a dense bush of juniper top a pink-wrapped pot set amid folds of medium-rose cloth. Outside the windows, the heavy gray clouds of winter storm are edged in radiant rose by a sun not yet risen.

Rose, I suddenly realized, is a lightening of the red strands that, woven with blue, form the traditional Advent color of purple. Rose offers a hint of light in a season of gathering darkness. Rose makes a promise: the night will end, the day will break, the Sun of Justice will arise out of the Christmas midnight to come. Wait. Hope. These darkening days are not the end of the story.

That's a promise we can use these days. Not only are the days around us growing shorter and the nights longer, but the hope of solstice is waning amid the fears spawned by growing violence and a failing economy. The specter of unemployment sits at many a family table. For the fifth year in a row, there are empty places at those same tables, marking the absence of family members sent off to war. A new government waits in the wings, promising change--but what changes will it bring? What changes can it bring? Will they really better our lot? Will they come in time to save us?

The Advent prophet Isaiah also acclaimed a new government waiting in the wings, a government promising change:

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government will be upon his shoulder,

and his name will be called

"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

Isaiah 9:6

That is the government whose coming we really await, the rule for which we really hope, the dawn for which we really long. In fact, it came a long time ago, an inauspicious solstice on a night in Bethlehem, very little noticed at the time. That small dawn, which we will celebrate again this Christmas, is still growing toward the fullness of the promised day we yearn for. The dark clouds still obscure its brightness as they roll in and out, sometimes thinning to wisps, sometimes thickening again to smothering blankets of fog.

Nor are we mere hapless observers of the dramas of our skies. Sometimes the clouds above us are smoke from our own fires, smog from our own freeways, choking fogs from our own battlefields. We can't make the waited sun rise, nor can we prevent it. But we can and do clear the way for the light or force it into hiding behind the oil residue from our ego-driven works of darkness, as the Bible often names them. We, who live at the heart of the rising Sun, are called to light up the world with its blaze, said Jesus. He said that no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel basket. He lights the lamps--whatever goodness burns in us--but we can be expert basket weavers, covering it up and even smothering it to ashes because fire does burn what holds it.

I personally would be just as happy to see the pink come and go on this one Sunday of the year. To be part of the work of lightening the heavy purple of the gathering night every day is another matter entirely. However, I recognize, at least some of the time, if I clamp down the bushel basket to hide me safely, I too will have to live in the resulting darkness. And so must we all, if we refuse to burn with the light of Christ, the dawn that edges our night with reflected fire.

Thanks, But No Thanks...(Matthew 16)

2008-08-08T13:55:00.006-06:00

In Matthew 16, Jesus makes the statement: "Whoever wishes to come to me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." In the wake of his own death on the cross, the statement took on a stark reality. We learn what the cross means for those who choose to follow Jesus: death. As our homilist this morning, Father Robert Williams of Dallas TX, reminded us, the challenge is not physical death but death to self.

As Father Robert said, it's a challenge we don't really want to hear. Death of any kind gives the shivers to the human spirit. Jesus' challenge sounds like one more offer from God-the-party-pooper whose main desire is to quench any sign of joy under a great wet blanket of misery labeled "Thou shalt not" and, on the reverse side, "Thou shalt." It's an idol we cling to rather stubbornly, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, including the number of times "joy" is mentioned in the New Testament (never labeled "Christians need not apply")--even among the fruits of the Holy Spirit, where gloom appears not at all. In the beginning, God made human beings in the divine image, and we've been returning the favor ever since, but we often seem to clothe the images of God we create in the drab wardrobe of the most repressive of Puritans. When this false god makes an offer like the one Jesus quotes, our preferred response is "Thanks, but no thanks..."

What we fail to realize, though, besides what rotten image painters we are, is that in refusing death, we are refusing life. The cross is a two-sided coin. Flip it on Good Friday, and it comes up "death". Flip it on Easter Sunday, and it comes up "resurrection". You can't have one without the other, says the gospel.

You'd think the promise of new life, physical or otherwise, would make the business of death at least a little more tolerable, if not downright inviting. However, I'm currently reading an old book that everyone I know seems to have read years ago, except me. It's entitled The Road Less Travelled. The author, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, points out how hard we sometimes work to refuse not death but life, especially new life. He tells story after story of men and women who have refused to accept options that would bring a solution to a miserable situation, or to take responsibility for decisions that have put them in unhappy circumstances. Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, his post-WW II classic describing his concentration camp experiences and deducing from them the absolute human need for meaning if we are to survive, said something to the effect that the one freedom that cannot be taken from us is the freedom to choose our own attitude. How sad that it is often we, not the God of the Bible, who prescribe the attitude of misery as a must. It seems no wonder that Jesus asked the long-term sick man at the pool of Bethesda, "Do you want to be well?" (John 5:5). The answer is not always yes. If it's no, even Jesus' hands are tied.

So, the question lurking behind the challenge to take up the cross seems to be "Do you really want to live?"

Transfiguration

2008-05-17T11:29:00.004-06:00

This morning, Saturday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time, we stumble suddenly across the startling story of Jesus' transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13), which we with greater solemnity on the Second Sunday of Lent and on the Feast of the Transfiguration (August 6). The story is startling not only for its own inner drama but also for what it tells us about ourselves. On the high mountain of the gospel, Jesus makes manifest the fire that burns always within him. In the Scriptures, that fire signifies the burning presence of God, the Mystery that illuminates all creation with inner light. With the resurrection, Jesus in his personal human individuality was transformed into the Christ whose glorified humanity opened to receive all humanity. Incorporated into Christ, we must now recognize that the Fire that burned within him on the mountain now burns within all of us.

Think of our own earth as tangible macrocosm: its core is fire. We who are born of the earth and reborn of the Spirit can say the same of ourselves: our core is Fire. What radiance could shine upon the path before us and the world around is if we only allowed our deepest truth to break out!

The Silence of the Word

2008-03-22T14:29:00.004-06:00

During Holy Week, we hear: "The Lord has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak a word to the weary, a word that will rouse them." (Isaiah 50:4-7)

Throughout Jesus' public ministry, we hear him speak again and again a word to the weary to rouse them: "Blessed are the poor in spirit," "Go, your faith has saved you," "The kingdom of God is at hand". We probably all have a list of our favorites, words that have sustained us, inspired us, impelled us. As the evangelists note, Jesus spoke these words with authority, not simply because he had the prophet's well-trained tongue, but because he himself is the Word in human flesh. When he spoke a word of healing, the sick were cured; when he spoke a word of command, demons were driven out; when he spoke a word of forgiveness, the burden of sin was lifted. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council claims that when the gospel is read in the Christian assembly, it is Christ who speaks. His words continue to heal, to liberate from evil, to forgive.

We could sit back now and bask in consolation, but the prophet doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, " I gave my beard to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting." (Isaiah 50:6) After Jesus’ arrest, his words grow sparse. He limits himself to a few stark statements of the one truth for which he stands, but he does not explain or justify them. Otherwise, to his questioners, his tormentors, his mockers, his executioners, he says nothing at all. He gives himself into their hands without a word of protest or self-defense. Ultimately, he ceases to speak at all. On the cross, the Word “goes down into the silence,” a phrase the psalmists use for death (cf. pss 92, 103, Grail translation). What an incredible triumph: evil has silenced the Word itself.

Holy Saturday is the day of great silence. The second reading from Matins quotes an ancient homily for Holy Saturday: “Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.”

I am reminded again of the final scene in the film On the Beach, when the last human being has been snuffed out by the silent spread of the nuclear fallout from the last world war. (See the posting “Bells”, November 17, 2007) In that silence, one hears the flapping of a banner in the wind, the rustle of crumpled papers blowing through the streets, the clanking of a bottle driven against a curb—but one does not hear the one sound sought: the sound of the human voice. And one knows that cherished sound will never be heard again.

The silence of Holy Saturday is not that silence. It is the silence of expectation. We know the end of the story, and we know it is not the final fadeout of the sealed and desolate tomb. In that tomb, life stirs. Tradition speaks of Christ’s descent into the realm of the dead, where all humanity awaits deliverance. I like to think that in every place where the death of the human spirit has imposed the dreadful silence of despair, Christ has gone before us and awaits us, stirring up new life even as the old life falls silent. No matter how great our darkness, Christ has been there before us, and is still there with us, kindling the spark that can explode into the great fire of Easter. We may not see it; we may not feel its warmth; but it is there—the silence of death has not snuffed out the human voice forever.

Tonight, in all our churches, we will sing peals of “alleluias”. They may or may not come from hearts reborn. Life doesn’t always follow the church calendar. There will be people at the Easter services who have tasted the bleak darkness but not yet the light; there will be people whose hearts are keeping vigil with loved ones dying even as we proclaim the victory of life; there will be people who know for sure that the tomb is real but aren’t so sure about the resurrection. It isn’t just the flame of our little candles we are asked to pass on to one another. Whether we are living Easter or still mourning Good Friday, we reach out with the inextinguishable light of Christ and hold hands with one another in the night. “Alleluia” is the sound of faithful people daring to whistle in the dark because, once upon a time, a handful of faithful women rushed back from the tomb with the news, “He is not there! He is risen!” And a handful of sorrowing disciples believed them. And they all passed on the living Word.

Easter Triduum: Disciples

2008-03-21T09:06:00.006-06:00

Jesus' disciples make a poor showing in the stories of Jesus' passion and death. After the Last Supper, which must have baffled them as well as fed them in a way they could not have named, they accompany Jesus to Gethsemane. There, while he prays in the agony of decision, his three chosen companions, Peter, James and John, fall asleep, not once but three times--just as Peter, later in the wee hours, will deny him three times (Matthew 26:36-43, 69-75). Are we to read their sleep as denial? After Jesus' arrest, they all "left him and fled" (Matthew 26:56), though Peter hung around for awhile on the fringes of things. Are we to read their flight as cowardice?

Perhaps their sleep was denial, but perhaps it was not denial of their association with Jesus. Overcome with confusion, pain, indecision, have you never chosen to blot it all out in sleep? If not physical sleep, the kind of sleep of the spirit kindly provided by alcohol or escapist entertainment or a thousand other anodynes ready to hand in our pain-denying culture? At the supper, they had heard him say in various ways that his death was at hand. They had followed him from the familiarity of home into the strange waters of a new world promised; they had revered him as their rabbi, perhaps even as the Messiah, perhaps even as something more than that; they had, presumably, loved him. They had never really, it seems, expected him to fail, never mind to be put to death. It was all too much, surely. Can you fault them for sleeping? I can't, having all too often slept myself in one way or another when the world has become more than I could face.

Perhaps their flight was cowardice. John clearly thinks so. In John 20:19, he says they were hiding behind locked doors "for fear of the Jews". They had good reason to be afraid if they thought the authorities were out hunting for the followers of the so-called messiah they had put to death on Good Friday. The gospels give us no reason to believe that the authorities cared one way or another, beyond making sure a guard was posted to keep those followers from stealing the body and claiming resurrection. The synoptic gospels give us no reason to believe that the disciples were hiding, either. Perhaps on Thursday night, they were afraid they too would be arrested. But perhaps they were also afraid of what they would see if they stayed. If the three, at least, fell asleep in the garden because they couldn't cope with the imminence of his suffering death, perhaps they all fled because they couldn't cope with the prospect of watching the trial, the torture, the execution carried out. Charles Dickens has painted an immortal picture of Madame deFarge and her company of ghoulish women knitting at the foot of the guillotine in order not to miss the glorious sight of aristocratic heads rolling, but the heads did not belong to their beloved friends. Have you always been willing to stick around to watch a loved one endure anguish, shame, torment, even death? Even if you've chosen to stay, haven't you sometimes gone for a walk to escape for awhile the sight of a suffering you could not prevent? If the thought of that suffering sends us to the nearest drugstore for something to make us sleep, doesn't the reality sometimes have the same effect? It isn't fear but love that sometimes demands that escape.

We do the disciples, and ourselves, a disservice if we turn them into cardboard figures, capable of only a single reaction in every case. They were the same complex human beings we are. In the previous posting, I posited Judas as a mirror in which we can see the faces of our own betrayals. If we allow the disciples their full humanity, they become a mirror in which we can see our own ambivalence. Sometimes, maybe, the cross strengthens and comforts us. But sometimes, maybe, it overwhelms us with dread or sends us running in fear. The disciples came back. We will too. Jesus forgave them their moments of weakness and entrusted them with the gospel. We needn't be ashamed of our own moments of weakness. They don't negate our discipleship; they simply make it real.

Judas Iscariot

2008-03-15T13:54:00.004-06:00

On Passion (Palm) Sunday this year, we read the passion narrative from the gospel according to St. Matthew. The reading opens with Judas Iscariot:

"Then one of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, 'What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?' They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. " (Matthew 26:14-16, NAB)

Judas is a question mark: why did he do it? As the evangelists so often do, Matthew tells us in two stark sentences what Judas did, but he doesn't tell us why. Down through the centuries, readers and commentators and artists and poets and librettists have filled in the blanks: he did it for the money, he did it because the devil made him do it, he did it because Jesus had failed to live up to his expectations of a political messiah, he did it...well, no one knows why he did.

As we read, Judas becomes one facet of the mirror the gospel holds up to us. Looking in that mirror, we see the face of our own betrayals looking back at us. Piety may forbid us to see anything but horror in Judas: he sold Jesus Christ to his killers. Honesty might require us to admit that he is not alone in having sold down river the one thing that mattered. How many of us have sold our prayer for entertainment, our integrity for power or prestige, our life's work for an easy ride? Is selling God's gifts to us "for a handful of silver" any less heinous, really, than selling the Savior?

Come now, you're probably saying, there is no comparison. I've made my little compromises, sure, but nobody died for it. As I grow older, I've begun to wonder whether that's true. Jesus died in a few hours on one unforgettable day, but we die no less decisively when we trade away our own truth over a lifetime of little compromises. St. Basil the Great defines sin as the use of God's gifts for purposes other than those for which they were given. Most grievous, he says, is the misuse of love. Someone is a gifted storyteller and puts the gift to use writing trash for cash. Someone is a gifted singer but remains mute for fear of jealousy. Someone is a gifted homemaker but abandons the satisfaction of using the gift for the comfort of sitting in front of the TV. Not major crimes, surely? The serpent's tooth may poison us by small bites. And the serpent is well disguised by "everybody does it" or "you've got to take care of number one" or "come on--don't be a prig" or "look, it's easy".

After awhile, maybe, we forget that we have options. The good news that seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the tragic Judas is laid out before us this week in all its urgency. We all have hidden somewhere our little stash of silver coins, the reward for our betrayals of the self we were made to be, but it's never too late to trade them in again for forgiveness, freedom, life. The loss may be painful, the prospect of change frightening, the way back long and hard. But the offer is always there.

If Judas remains a question mark, so does God's mercy. Peter also betrayed Jesus, but he regretted fiercely his moment of weakness, and found forgiveness from the very one he had betrayed. Why didn't Judas? Why didn't God save him from his own despair? I wonder if it was because he had so eroded his soul with a lifetime of betrayals that he could no longer see the outstretched hand. Having walled himself into a very small cell, perhaps he could no longer recognize the window or the open door. And who knows? Maybe, in the privacy of one of those moments of anguish and grace that go unreported by the evangelists--who had reason to think ill of Judas anyway--God's fingers finally managed to catch hold of Judas' fist and fill it with something far better than thirty pieces of silver. We know as little about God's response as do about Judas' motives.

Why did he do it? Why did he sell out Jesus? Why did he hang himself after three years in the company of God's mercy made flesh? Perhaps he didn't know himself. If Judas is question mark, puzzle, thorn in the flesh of Christian mind, he is also, like all of us, mystery. How many of us can really fathom in ourselves the depths where betrayal and grace meet? I would rather not reduce Judas to a simple explanation. I would rather allow him to remain a mirror. If I can't see into his soul, perhaps he can let me see into mine. My prayer is for the courage to look.

Note: The phrase "for a handful of silver" comes from Robert Browning's moving poem about betrayal and forgiveness, The Lost Leader. See http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/282.html

Before the Fire: Stability

2008-03-09T15:33:00.004-06:00

Once again, I apologize for an unintended hiatus in postings. The responsibility lies with that familiar villain, "circumstances beyond my control".

Benedictines make an odd commitment: we promise "stability". What's intended is stability of place. Those of us who live in monasteries promise to stay put there as the central locus of our monastic life. Of course we may come and go, depending on the monastery's lifestyle, but we always remain members of this particular house.

We might, on equally odd terms, consider Moses a primary figure of stability. Think about his first encounter with God at Horeb. Upon catching sight of a bush that is burning but doesn't turn to cinder, Moses ambles over to take a look. God calls out to him from the heart of the bush and orders him: "Take off your shoes! The place where you're standing is holy ground!" (cf. Exodus 3:5) What a strange command! Are bare feet really a better sign of reverence than feed shod in sandals? Most of our finer restaurants don't seem to think so: "No shirt, no shoes, no service". Islamic custom dictates taking off one's shoes to enter the mosque, but Christian churches are traditionally more concerned about covering up body parts than uncovering them. Why bare feet?

Whatever the original reason for the custom, bare feet may be interpreted as signs of honesty and commitment. To allow anything to be seen uncovered is to allow a part of ourselves to be seen as we are, minus the masks and makeup. To take off our shoes, especially in a stony wilderness replete with nasty things like scorpions, is to make it impossible for ourselves to run away. We accept a position of truthfulness, powerlessness, and stability on this holy ground, which we can feel as it is through the soles of our bare feet.

Moses remained faithful to the commitment he made in taking off his shoes. Certainly, he put them back on again after a while. Certainly, he became a powerful leader. Certainly he lived a nomadic life from that moment to the very end. However, he lived all his life in unveiled truth before the Holy One in whose footsteps he traveled always. He carried the center of his stability with him. Or rather, the center of his stability carried him. God accompanied and led the people always, in the same form of fire, whether as fiery cloud by day or as column of fire by night. When God stopped, the people stopped and encamped near God's own tent, which God sometimes filled with fiery Presence.

Geography is not the point, then. Stability of presence is. Wherever God goes, we go; wherever God stops, we stop. Wherever God is, the surrounding ground is holy--even if the place where God stops is in the midst of our very imperfect monastic communities or families or whatever place we make our home.

This is as true of our inner lives as it is of our outward lives. All of our monastic commitments concern our inner world as well as our outer surroundings. In prayer, for example, wherever God goes, we go; wherever God stops, we stop; wherever God is, the surrounding ground is holy, whether it looks that way to us or not. Perhaps we don't care for a particular style of liturgy, a particular section of scripture, a particular form of prayer. If God is there for us, we had better be there for God--and take off our shoes, and settle down, and feel the reality of the holiness that pervades this "place" through the soles of our naked and defenseless feet. The Sinai wilderness was not, in Moses' day, the Sinai Hilton: it was wild, threatening, low on human comforts--and holy, once the bush began to burn there.

Psalm 23: A Roadmap

2008-02-16T06:01:00.002-07:00

This weekend, I am giving a retreat at our Abbey Retreat House. Its title is "Roads: a Lenten Poetry Retreat." What follows is a sketch of one of the retreat conferences. Think of it as what Wikipedia calls "a stub": a basic nub to which you are invited to add your own reflections (though not online, alas!) The translation given here is the King James Version, on which I grew up as a Presbyterian until a quirk of the divine sense of humor landed me in a Roman Catholic religious community. The divine sense of humor sees no need to explain its quirks.

Although very few of us now live among sheep, Psalm 23 remains one of the most cherished jewels of the psalter. Somehow its imagery touches a core that does not seem to depend on our surroundings. There are, of course, countless ways of reading this psalm. By a quirk for which I will not hold the divine sense of humor responsible (God is responsible for enough!), I have begun to think of it as a map of the life journey of the human spirit. Maps sketch the land. They don't tell us which roads we have to choose to travel it, but they tell us something about what landscapes we can expect to find as we do.

Psalm 23 (KJV)
1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

These verses have always provided comfort to us human wanderers as we weary of roads that sometimes seem to be going nowhere except perhaps in circles, or roads that seem so long we have forgotten their beginning and their end. We just want to lie down and rest for awhile. Let someone else be responsible for running the universe, never mind my small fragment of it.

In Jesus' day, I imagine, shepherds still led flocks from place to place in search of food and water. JesuIn times and places where shepherds still care for sheep, a good shepherd can sense the flock's fatigue. One option is to drive them on despite it: they have a destination to reach before sunset. I don't know about you, but that's an option I too often choose for myself. In our goal-and-achievement oriented world, I want to get the job done on time, no matter how tired I get in the doing. It takes a very strong shepherd indeed to make this stubborn sheep lie down in the grass, let the mountain breezes play over it, and the refreshing sound of running water lull it to sleep. Yet, like Elijah in 1 Kings 19, I can travel so much faster and farther if I take the refreshment offered. One of my humbling discoveries in life is that God's timetable differs from mine. There will be time to reach the destination, although it may not be the time I planned.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

The pastures carpeted in green grass and watered by running streams are oases, not journey's end. The temptation of the desert road on which the scriptures concentrate during Lent is to pitch our tents, settle down, and refuse to budge. "I like it here, in whatever oasis of the soul I happen to have been led to." Why move on? But if we don't, we'll never get to the Promised Land. Luckily, the resources of every oasis are limited. Eventually, we sheep run out of food and water. The Shepherd picks up his staff and leads us on.

The publication of Mother Teresa of Calcutta's private journals and letters caused great consternation among those who believe that the good always walk in the light. Here she was, a cultural icon of spiritual heroism, admitting that she traveled a good long ways in darkness. How could her community allow the world into that secret (which, I gather, she made no real effort to keep a secret from those who might care)? Perhaps it was a clever bit of shepherding on the Shepherd's part to allow us all to see how real and how inevitable is the valley of the shadow of death through which all of us must travel. In part, the shadow is cast by our enlarged egos. (See the posting "The Valley of the Shadow of Death I) In part, though, the shadow is cast by the awareness of our own very real (and unwanted) mortality. We cannot really live until we have embraced the fact that we are going to die. St. Benedict, in his Rule, urged us, without a hint of morbidity, to keep death daily before our eyes. It's a great curative for our self-inflated illusion that we are the rulers of our universe. Death is one reality we cannot rule. Embracing its inevitability frees us from that illusion. Illusions shed like useless baggage free us to travel on with a lighter heart. The language of the psalm reminds us that travel we do. Death is a passage, not a doorless wall. Many people are really afraid to negotiate that passage alone, although my grandmother was wont to say, "Dying is the one thing you have to do alone". Not really, though, as she herself might have added, diligent bible-reader that she was: the Shepherd goes first and goes with, to lead us through.

5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Here is the reason for getting up out of that refreshing field and moving on: there is a better feast awaiting. The psalmist transforms the Shepherd into the best of hosts, one who anoints the parched and weary arrivals with oil (often read as an image of the Spirit of God by the Christian imagination), sets the table and fills the cups to overflowing. This vision of journey's end, rich in biblical allusions to the great and final feast, reveals the Shepherd's "goodness and mercy" in goading us out of our comfortable oases and making us brave once more the burning desert sands and the icy night of the valley of the shadow of death so that we can finally come to rest in the House of God.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

Back to the unfinished present. We aren't there yet. But the Shepherd's care and the Host's promise give us the courage to believe that we don't have to travel on our own resources. "Goodness" and "mercy" are biblical ways of describing God in shorthand. We still have all the days of our life to get through, but even the valley (or maybe valleys) of the shadow of death don't look so terrifying with goodness and mercy along for company. This seems to me a perennial warning against choosing cynicism or bitterness for traveling companions. They are so inclined to feel more at home in the valley of the shadow of death than in the house of the Lord. I imagine them dragging at our coattails to keep us from leaving the valley for the House of Light.

Glory Road

2008-02-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, intending to leave my office to run an errand, I opened the door only to find my way barred by a postulant on a ladder. "Oh no!" I thought. "The revolution has begun! They're on the barricades! We're under siege!" In reality, she had climbed up there to clean the dusty corpses of moths out of the light fixture over the door.

Poor moths! They never learn. They die by the thousands in light fixtures all over the house, impelled by what Percy Bysshe Shelley described in a phrase now famous:

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow.

I wonder, though, if the moths are not wiser than we. They perish in the realization of their greatest desire: communion with the light. I'm reminded of another often quoted stanza, this one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.

This morning at Matins we read the passage from Exodus where Moses, intrigued by the sight of a bush that burns unconsumed, swallows the bait and finds himself with a whole new, unexpected, frightening life on his hands. He is one of the moths: from that moment on, he is plunged into God's "burning yes" to the liberation of humanity from slavery to the powers that rule the valley of the shadow of death. (The phrase "burning yes" is borrowed from Stephen R. Covey--see yesterday's posting). It consumes his life until he dies a very old man on Mount Nebo, looking out over the promised land. Although he had some acrimonious arguments with God about the whole thing along the way, he seems to have considered the land worth the burning. In contemporary language, we might say that he died fulfilled. (Or almost fulfilled: some of you will surely remind me that, in punishment for disobedience, he was allowed only to see the promised land but not to enter it. I wonder, though, if the punishment was not a reward in the larger schema of things. Joshua and the others still had years of slogging and fighting ahead of them before they could take possession of the land. Moses was given a shortcut, not to Canaan but to the real Land of Promise that lay hidden in Canaan's skin.)

Back at our own burning bushes, sitting round the bush plucking blackberries is certainly safer than hurling oneself into the fire. You get light, warmth, and a tasty snack. Nothing else changes.

I wonder, though, if the "will-to-meaning" so poignantly explored by Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning doesn't impel us into the flames, on the principle that a life worth living requires that we have something we believe worth the burning? This is Covey's point about the "burning yes" that enables us to say no to all the lesser invitations that can clutter our days into purposeless chaos. To have a dream worth living and dying for is the stuff of greatness. For Christians, it's the pull of the cross, that narrow gate that opens out into a quality of life and love we hardly dare even dream of.

In our second reading at Matins, we heard St. Irenaeus paraphrasing John's gospel: "I wish that where I am they also may be, that they may see my glory" (see John 17:24) See it, and share it: "I have given them the glory you gave me" (John 17:22). In biblical terms, the "glory" is the fiery presence of God in our midst, first made known to Moses at Horeb in the burning bush. We see it again and again in the Old Testament and the New.

To share in Jesus' glory is to leap into the fire. It is to become a part of Jesus' "burning yes". Like the moths, we will perish, but what perishes is not our true selves but the all-ruling ego to which we are enslaved, like the Hebrews in Egypt (see the posting The Valley of the Shadow of Death-I). Out of those ashes, the phoenix rises. In Christ burning with the presence of God, our true selves, the selves made capable of the love the gospel commands, burn greener.

The moths seem to "think" the hall light worth the perishing, though it's only plastic they've mistaken for a star. A good bucket of blackberries will earn us that pale sort of imitation "glory" we offer one another as a reward for achievement, but Jesus makes impassioned efforts to convince us that the gain is not worth the loss: " What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?" (Matthew 16:26)

He does not lie to us. Like the moths, we will find that the fire we so long for will hurt. Our falsities do not lie down and die quietly. Still, I think somehow the moths have it right. The need for a star worth the time, the effort, and the sacrifice of those blackberries is built into us, as the need for communion with the light is built into them.

Lent seems a good time to stop and check that it's not just the hall light we're headed for. The Easter Exultet sings of Christ, the Morning Star. Christ, the light of the world, offers us no one-dimensional plastic surface, here today and gone to recycling tomorrow. As the gospel insists, Christ offers us instead the multi-layered and multi-textured reign of God, where there is no need for candle flames because God will be the light (cf. Revelation 21:23, 22:5). Which aspect of that rich reality becomes the star that draws us will depend on each one's story, call, personality, experience. There may be only one light, but it shines through many windows, as one the sun shines through the glorious windows of the great cathedrals and the cracked and broken windows of the poorest hovels. In no case, though, is it worth less than the price of all the blackberries in the world.

In every case, as the moths seem to know, communion with the Light is worth the burning.

©2008, Abbey of St. Walburga

Fasting: an Afterthought

2008-02-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

This piece is an addendum to the previous posting. Whatever chance it has of making sense depends on your reading that posting.

What good does fasting do, my "practical" voice demands to know. It can help me to lose weight. It can strengthen the habit of discipline. Well, ok, but those ends both seem far too self-serving to survive the vision of fasting developed in the last posting.

It can free income that would have been spent on food. That money can be given to the poor. That's better. But it's not quite enough.

Christ's "burning yes" is still setting alight the force of life that consumes the old gods of darkness and death, whatever masks they wear. Wherever that force of life flares up in any human being or any community of human beings, the old gods are forced to loosen their hold on all of us. To participate in and be shaped by that "burning yes" in order to become some small part of the spark, the candle flame, the bonfire of life seems to me to be the deepest reason for fasting and the greatest contribution fasting can make.

©Abbey of St. Walburga

Lent Thoughts: Fasting

2008-02-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

This is not the promised posting on "The Valley of the Shadow of Death"--Part II. That will come. However, I hope to post short thoughts for Lent a bit more frequently, beginning today.

Lent requires that we give some thought to the traditional practice of fasting. On this first Friday of Lent, it occurred to me that one way of looking at fasting is to consider it as a way of becoming more deeply integrated into Christ on the cross. There he fasted not from the pleasures that add spice to life nor from the food that sustains life but from life itself.

It must have been a fast as dark as the skies over Golgotha. Every fiber of his will as human being and as divine Person must have strained toward life. The will to live is our deepest and most tenacious drive as human beings. The will to life is inseparable from the being of the life-giving God. How could Jesus have willed instead to die?

The only thing that could have overriden his will to live was his will that we should live. Stephen R. Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, says that only "a burning yes inside [makes it possible] to say 'no' to other things." In the absolute selflessness of his love, Jesus' "burning yes" to our becoming fully alive made it possible for him to say "no" to his own will to live.

The word "burning" recalls that the most powerful and consistent image of God in the scriptures is of One who stands among us as fire. Fasting, it seems to me, is one small way of taking part in Jesus "no" to his own deepest drive for the sake of God's "burning yes" to the life of all that lives.

Thomas Aquinas said that to love is to will the good of the other. Jesus' "burning yes" on the cross is, it seems to me, an icon of that love which John Cassian calls purity of heart: the unwavering eye on the good of the other that is blind to any demands of the self. Fasting is, from this perspective, an iconic act that captures in a nutshell the goal of Lent.

Note: Stephen R. Covey. The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. New York: Free Press, 1989, 2004. p. 149

The Valley of the Shadow of Death-I

2008-01-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

For those of you who checked this blog on Sunday, January 28, and found something different than is now posted, let me explain: for want of time, I put up a hasty piece of reflection, unfinished and slapdash, for which I later repented. I've now transformed it into a 2-part reflection, the first part of which appears today.

The shadow of death haunts us as we read the scriptures. Psalm 23 invites us to pass through it, whistling bravely in the dark, as we look around to make sure the Shepherd is there with crook and staff. The Canticle of Zachary (Luke 1:68-79) promises a rising sun that will break upon us who live in darkness and death's shadow. On the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A (January 27, 2008), the first reading and gospel team up to paint a portrait of this sun in its advent (Isaiah 8:23-9:3; Matthew4:12-23).

To appreciate this daybreak, let us ponder first the night. The "people who walked in darkness" are named literally as the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali who lived in northern Palestine, in the area the gospel identifies as "Galilee of the Gentiles". The area had been subject to domination by successive invaders, a fact at which Isaiah hints.. In Jesus' day, it still included a large non-Jewish population. It was then, a land where Jews mixed fairly freely and frequently with those who were not people of the covenant--not unlike us, who live among and mix freely and frequently with many who do not share our Christian beliefs. Ours is a rich world, like an exotic bazaar filled with doors that open into enticing glimpses of silks and spices made by worldviews different from our own. In Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the Second Vatican Council challenged us to abandon the fortress of monolithic thought—a temptation rather than a reality even in the pre-Vatican II Church—for the marketplace, as Jesus abandoned the small safeties of Nazareth for the synagogues and markets of a wider Palestine. However, neither Jesus nor the Council advised indiscriminate shopping of the sort that fills our consumer homes (and minds) with all sorts of useless, ill-matched, and sometimes dangerous goods. The clutter of an unreflective syncretism casts its own kind of darkness over our inner world.

The early Christian world, reflected in the Rule of St. Benedict, held a strongly sacramental view of the world. Ancient Christians believed firmly that God was not only present but at work in all of creation, not just church interiors. A delightful book by Robert Louis Wilken, entitled The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University, 2003), captures in its subtitle the purpose of Christian exploration in those first centuries. St. Benedict might have attached the same subtitle to his Rule, had subtitles been in fashion then. Those early thinkers were courageous adventurers into the bazaars of a widely diverse Greco-Roman culture, but they went armed with that one single purpose that enabled them to choose wisely what they brought home and how they integrated it into their homes: seeking God’s Face. Theirs is a wisdom that serves us well in a world reminded by Teilhard the Chardin that the Word of God made flesh provides us with a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” to borrow from Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: "By virtue of creation and still more of the Incarnation, nothing is profane to those who know how to see." But to see, we need light. The shadow blinds us.

However, the deepest shadow is not the one cast by a cluttered world but the one cast by the truly monolithic realm governed by the great god Ego. There is no shadow quite so blinding. Ego imagines itself the ruler of all it can see, but in reality, it rules a narrow, cramped distorted domain no bigger than ourselves at our smallest. That domain is a prison disguised as a kingdom. C.S. Lewis’ now-famous reflection on love takes an unvarnished look at its dynamic: " To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will be become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." (The Four Loves. Harcourt, Brace, World, Inc:1960. 169) The inward landscape darkened by the shadow cast by Ego, enlarged as the Wizard of Oz was enlarged by pretence and illusion, is indeed the valley of the shadow of death.

However, the gospel announces that we are not condemned to darkness: the Light has come.

See the next posting for the sequel!

©2008, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO

The Ax at the Root

2008-01-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

The gospels recount a poignant meeting between John the Baptist and Jesus that invites us to look toward Lent as it creeps over the near horizon.

The meeting is mediated by two of John's followers. John sends them to ask Jesus, "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?" (Matthew 11:3; Luke 7:19). Why John asks is anybody's guess. Some think he knew the answer but wanted his disciples to hear it for themselves. Some think he himself was genuinely puzzled: this Messiah was not the figure he had expected. That might be true. In Matthew 3:11, John threatens the Pharisees and Sadducees with a violent end: "Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire" (cf. also Luke 3:9). The locus of the fire is pretty clear: "He (the one who will come after John) will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." Well, maybe there's hope, if this "brood of vipers" (Matthew 3:7) is to find its way into the baptismal waters under the Messiah's ministration. But if they don't, this fearsome figure will sort them out accordingly: "His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:13).

(A small aside: two of our city-born postulants recently confessed that they had no idea what a winnowing fan, a threshing floor or chaff were. If you're reading this from a stone-walled urban world, threshing is that moment during the harvesting of grain-bearing crops such as wheat and rice when the grain is separated from the rest of the plant. Farmers in Jesus' day would throw the cut stalks onto a flat, hard-packed floor and toss them into the air with a large rake to shake the grain loose. The empty husks left over after threshing were the chaff, which was good for nothing but burning.)

Back to our story. Along comes Jesus. No winnowing fan, no threshing floor, no fire-breathing prophet wearing a sign that says: "Your end has come." Instead, Jesus proclaims the good news of a kingdom governed by God's unwavering love and then gives a hint of what it will look like by making all sorts of broken human beings whole. We might well imagine that John would question whether this preacher and wonder-worker could indeed be the one he had promised would come after him.

Jesus' answer does not deny John's prophecy. It deepens it. Jesus tells the messengers, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them." He adds, "And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me" (Matthew 11:4-6). We can almost see Jesus looking over the heads of the messengers to the faithful prophet lying in his prison cell, wondering if he had wasted his breath and his life on a prediction that had failed to come true. We can almost hear Jesus saying to this greatest of those born of women (Matthew 11:11): "Don't worry, John. You had it right--you just didn't have the full picture. The ax does lie at the roots of the trees, but the trees are not Pharisees and Sadducees. The trees are that twisted, tormented growth born of a lie believed in a garden. The trees are all the harm wrought by sin and death among the beloved children of God. The ax--and I wield it-- is already at work cutting down that growth at its roots. Ultimately, it will destroy the poisoned seed that has robbed my sisters and brothers of their ability to see reality as it is, to walk freely and without fear through the reign of God, to live together without biases or barriers, to discover that poverty need not be poverty nor wealth wealth. What you hear and see me doing is only a sign, real enough for now, of what I am really doing. I will destroy evil. I will destroy sin. I will destroy death. Oh yes, the ax is at work, and only the trees that bear good fruit will survive it. Don't be shocked that it is taking time. The roots are old and tough and deeply buried. And meanwhile, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the bereaved, and the poor need what little I can do for them now so that they and all sufferers who come after them will believe the promise." One hopes John heard and understood the answer, and died satisfied in work well done.

That was then. Now we have seen what the ax was truly intended to accomplish. Now we have known the fire Jesus came to cast on the earth (Luke 12:49)--the fire that is God's living presence among us (cf. Exodus 13:21). However, the work is not finished. The ax and the fire are still laboring to remove the ancient undergrowth and leave the crop of righteousness and peace free to grow to harvest time (cf. Zechariah 8:12; 2 Corinthians 9:10, etc.) Lent hovers before us as a season for pruning away all that hinders that growth. Lent invites us to throw all the chaff, all those possessions, habits, thoughts and activities that are empty and feed no one, into the consuming fire of God's forgiving love.

It would be a pity if it were we, and not Jesus, who left John's ardent hope disappointed after all.

The Work Impeded

2008-01-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

THE REAL WORK

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry
(Collected Poems)

On January 13, we celebrate the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. It's a moment of glory, isn't it? Jesus emerges triumphant from the water. The dove descends. The Fathers of the Church made much of that dove. The last time we saw it was in the story of Noah. Or rather, the last time we lost sight of it was in the story of Noah. After the rains, Noah saw only floods where the earth had been, but --ever a hopeful man even in the face of hopelessness--he sent out a dove in search of dry land. The first dove returned: it had found nowhere to land. Then he sent out a second dove. The second dove returned bearing an olive twig. (One strand of much later rabbinic tradition thought the Tree of Life had been an olive tree. That thought adds a real kicker to the story.) That dove no doubt appeared on more than one Christmas card in your mailbox this year, bearing the hope of peace. That dove is the one that figures in some of the patristic homilies about Jesus' baptism also. However, there was a third dove. That dove flew out and never returned. Noah knew then that creation the earth had emerged new-born from the flood. It was time now to start over. I like to think that it is the third dove we see descending on Jesus, the new creation emerging from the waters of chaos, like Israel emerging from the twin waters of the Red Sea and this very Jordan that bracketed the desert years when they were forged into a new creation, a new people. The dove is, of course, the image of the Spirit/Breath that hovered over the primal sea, bearing the word that would summon forth all created things. In the story of Jesus' baptism, another word is spoken: God claiming the Son. It is, indeed, a glorious story.

But not for long. In less than a month, we will celebrate Ash Wednesday. On the First Sunday of Lent, we will read the story that actually follows immediately upon the baptism in the gospel story: Jesus is driven into the desert to be tempted by Satan. The work is no sooner announced than it is impeded. The road is barred by the tempter, whispering that old familiar love song--"Come to me, come to me, I will lay at your feet power, wealth, glory...You shall be like a god." The script has never varied; only the wording has changed.

Life is like that. The warmth of Christmas is quickly succeeded by the frosts of desert nights. The angels leave, the shepherds go back to their sheep, the magi take off for parts unknown, the baby and family are sent into exile-- in Egypt, as a matter of fact, whence the young man "returns" at baptism, crossing the Jordan to claim the land of promise. On the day of baptism, the voice of God replaces the song of the angels, announcing that the promised messenger has come; the crowds replace the shepherds, wondering at what they have seen and heard; the magi don't show up this time, but the scribes and the Pharisees, the wise hearts of Israel, do. But the wonder is once again short-lived. The voice of God is silent as Jesus himself takes up the task of proclaiming the good news. The crowds grow fickle, one minute wanting to crown him a king, the next minute wanting to throw him over a cliff. The wise are uncertain that they have indeed found the one they sought. Many of them decide they were mistaken. There are no soldiers with swords going after babies this time, but there will be plenty of soldiers of one kind or another with blood on their minds as the story unfolds. And always there is the tempter, doing evil's utmost to undo the creative work of God, not in Jesus only but also in all disciples.

Wendell Berry's poem suggests that in the impediments lies the way that Jesus must follow, and we after him. Evil often defeats its own purposes. When the new life-giving impulses that arise from the moments of chaos on our lives are right, evil is waiting around the corner to block the way. The roadblock is the confirmation that we are on the right road. If we weren't, evil wouldn't care. (This is, of course, an overstatement: all serious decisions require discernment rooted in facts, because sometimes the road is blocked because it's the wrong one.) Moreover, in finding our way over, around, and through the impediments, we grow strong in our convictions and our creativity and our courage to carry them out. I am reminded of the familiar warning that if you very kindly assist the butterfly in its struggle to emerge from the cocoon by breaking the cocoon open for it, the butterfly may emerge, but it will be unable to fly. I like to imagine that only the butterfly with torn wings can fly into the sun.

Only the gospel-bearer impeded is strong, courageous and creative enough to sing.

Note: Wendell Berry's poem is no doubt under copyright, but it appears in several places on the web, so I have taken the liberty to reprint it on this website too. If there are objections, I will remove it.

From a Far Country

2008-01-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

The magi, whose story we tell on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, came from "the East" to do homage to the newborn "king of the Jews" (Matthew 2:2). The Christian imagination long ago turned them into three kings, though the gospel text says nothing about number or royalty. Christian scholarship has suggested them to be astrologers from somewhere as far away as Persia or as near as Arabia or the Syrian desert. No matter: they were and are exotic figures, cloaked in mystery, who came from a far country do pay honor to the newborn Christ and then disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

If they came from a far country, how much farther is the country from which we have come to worship the Word made flesh. Our journey originated somewhere east of Eden, in the hostile land to which the primal human beings were banished after that unfortunate picnic on a menu of forbidden fruit (cf. Genesis 3). Aelred Squire devotes a chapter of his classic Asking the Fathers to "the land of unlikeness" in which original sin landed us after Eden. The chapter is not about geography but about exile from our own truth as men and women created to live in God's likeness. God, say the scriptures, has been laboring ever since to persuade us to come home again. The moment when we turn from worshipping at the ancient shrine of the great God Ego to worshipping the God enshrined in Christ marks a milestone on the long road back to where we belong. It's a fragile moment: we tend to come and go between one shrine and the other for a lifetime. But it's a decisive moment. We can, like the Magi, go back to where we came from, and sometimes we do, if only for a visit, but we do not go unchanged.

When we first arrive at the house where we see "the child with his mother" (Matthew 2:11)--whatever the shape of the house, whatever age our image of Jesus--we are not likely to produce gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, at least not if we come as adults. We may more likely offer, embarrassed, a rather shopworn heart, some tatty prayers that vanish as quickly as the smoke of burning incense, and plenty of reason for the mourning myrrh signifies. We are always astonished to find that the gifts are not only received but welcomed and cherished. It was only that old hissing whisper from Eden days that tried to convince us that only high class, undamaged goods are acceptable at that "throne". We may be persuaded to snatch them back again after all, but we will find them as great a source of delight to the One we want to honor every single time we present them again. The Receiver may even throw a party--as long as the giver is the first of the gifts (see Luke 15).

Every year, Epiphany reminds us that the journey is not over. We still have a ways to go on a road likely to be marked by all sorts of detours, backward looks, even times when turn back altogether and have to retrace our steps to the place of meeting. All that matters, really, is that we keep forging ahead. Because we are not headed backward to the Eden from which we like to imagine we came, an Eden of childhood innocence unmarked by tears or pain or struggle -- or the growth that demands all three. We are headed forward toward a place much farther than Bethlehem, which even Jesus left long ago for the road to Calvary. It is a place which will not even fully exist till all of us get there, or so we are forced to think from within the narrow confines of a reality defined by time past, time present and time future.

Whether or not the magi were kings, they were, as we have always called them, wise. Fittingly, then, they have left us a legacy not of material treasures but of wisdom gleaned from hard experience. They have taught us that we may have to travel a long way to get from the far country to the place to which the star is leading. They have taught us that the journey is worth the trouble. And they have taught us one thing more: to see the star, we have to be willing to travel in the dark.

Note: Aelred Squire's book, Asking the Fathers, was originally published by Morehouse-Barlow in 1973. A new edition was published by SPCK in 1994. I am under the impression that I've seen a more recent edition published by an American house, but I can't find any information to substantiate that.

©2008, Abbey of St. Walburga

Apologies!

2007-12-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

My deepest apologies for those of you who have been waiting for the next installment on the topic of, er, waiting! Other responsibilities have prevented me from posting any new entries since early December. I hope to get on with the business of blogging later this week! Meanwhile, I wish all a very blessed Christmas season and a joyful New Year!

Advent: the Wait

2007-12-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

Advent, we say, is the season of waiting. We might more truly say that Advent is the season of desire—and desire unfulfilled, at that. Waiting is form of emptiness, but it’s an emptiness that implies expectation: we wait for someone or something, do we not? And we desire the arrival of what we await.

As anyone knows who has sat at a traffic light clearly controlled by an electronic switch that is out to lunch, waiting is not always constructive. There are at least two ways waiting can be warped out of true. Neither one results in real advent waiting.

Waiting Warped
First, waiting stripped of expectation is a resigned passivity. We’ve all experienced it when we’ve waited too long and see no sign of the arrival of whoever or whatever has kept us waiting. In Samuel Becket’s play Waiting for Godot, life is painted as waiting drawn out to absurdity because Godot never comes. The one who never comes fades into fantasy. Waiting pales to mere wishful thinking. Life goes on as usual without much hope of change.

There is a second, more active form of waiting that is still not Advent waiting. It happens when expectation has become dread because the watcher does not look forward to the arrival of the one awaited. The apocalyptic passages read during the last weeks of the liturgical year and the first week of Advent give voice to this dark side of our waiting. When Christ comes, they say, the world as we know it will fall apart. Complacency stands up and cries “Amen! That’s exactly what I was afraid of! Let him take is time, life is fine just the way it is. Not perfect, maybe, but tolerable, familiar, comfortable as an old pair of slippers that my feet have grown to fit. We can wait awhile longer.” As long as we can envision Christ’s dreaded coming as something far in the future, we can remain as we are. What we perhaps don’t want to hear from these readings is that they are not necessarily about the cosmic future. They are about the moment Christ becomes real in our lives, and we fall apart in that radical makeover we call conversion. Waiting in dread for this kind of change to afflict us becomes a matter of warding off what we do not desire.

Waiting stripped of resignation becomes a destructive apathy. How many Advent seasons are undermined from the start because we don’t really expect anything to be different when Christmas arrives, except that we’ll probably be a little tireder, a little more frazzled, and a lot poorer. We might as well fill up our time as best we can because we’re going to be waiting a long time. Let’s make ourselves useful in the meantime, or at least let’s make ourselves happy. Waiting shaped by dread becomes an even more destructive impetus to frantic distraction from the underlying abyss of despair. Let’s keep ourselves busy enough to shut out the unsettling fear that what we see might not be all we get and that what we get under the artificial Christmas tree might not be the goodies we asked for but might, instead, be Christ—a consummation we devoutly do not wish.

And real Advent waiting? Look for the next post ...

Obey Whom?

2007-11-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

Today is the solemnity of Christ the King in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar. The feast was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical letter Quas primas. The “war to end all wars” had itself ended a few years previously, but another loomed on the horizon as the issues unresolved by the Treaty of Versailles continued to fester. Political instability, masked by a frenetic cultural quest for meaning or, lacking meaning, pleasure, drowned out any intimation of peace. A worldview devoid of God prevailed in many parts of what was once considered Christendom. It found political embodiment in communism. Pope Pius diagnosed rejection of Christ’s sovereignty as the root of this illness of the western spirit. He created the solemnity of Christ the King to promote an alternative—and, he believed, healing—view of the universe.
We no longer live in the political, social and ecclesial world of 1925. Except in those countries fortunate enough to be governed by upright working monarchs, the imagery of kings and queens has been relegated to the realms of fantasy and distasteful journalism. Nevertheless, the question raised by Pius XI remains: whom do we obey? It was not a new question when he raised it. It is as old as Eden. Although we customarily label the primal sin of the first human beings as “disobedience”, we are speaking in shorthand. Genesis 3:1-7 paints the human tragedy not simply as disobedience to God but as the transfer of obedience from one “god” to another. The serpent, who may in fact have represented a Canaanite deity in the world of the biblical storytellers, persuades Eve to obey him rather than the Creator-God by eating the fruit that God had forbidden. The serpent’s argument awakens a god every human being can recognize: the god Ego. The serpent appeals to the human desire to be autonomous and in charge. Thereby, in a move characteristic of evil in every age, the serpent subtly redirects human desire from a desire for communion with God to a desire for the supremacy of the self created in the image of God. Therein lies the heart of the tragedy: the reader familiar with the first chapter of Genesis knows that in the story of origins told there, Eve and Adam are, in fact, already “like God”. They have been made as the very image of God cast in human being (Genesis 1: 26-27). Eve, and apparently Adam, have forgotten it, but perhaps the serpent has not. He calls upon their own inmost but unrecognized truth to destroy them. This sleight-of-mind which distorts a good into its travesty is evil’s thumbprint. According to the story, Eve, and then Adam, were the first to fall for it, but they were certainly not the last, as the unraveling of the world in Genesis 4-11 is intended to show.

Their dilemma is still alive and well: whom do we obey? No longer in humanity’s first naïveté, we need no actual serpent to prod us into abandoning one God for another. Sadly, we are often all too ready to burn the incense of our lives to the god Ego, who guarantees the satisfaction of our desires as we misunderstand them. A little devil dust astutely sprinkled into our inner eye, and we are suddenly blinded to our own history, never mind the larger history of the world. We forget not only who we actually are but also what misery we have called down upon ourselves in the past by obeying a god other than the One in whose image we are made.

Take the recent U.S. celebration of Thanksgiving as a small but potent example. If we were among that small portion of the world’s population fortunate enough to have the means to eat well, we may very well have eaten rather too well, or at least too generously. The aura of holiday seasons the array of festal foods with a sense of carefree irresponsibility. Calories and cholesterol be—well, consigned to a warm climate. It’s Thanksgiving. Eat, drink and be merry. Add some beer and chips with the football game—the one we watch from the couch, not the one we play with our kids. Consequences? Not to worry. When this year, like last year and the years before, the god Ego, whom we have obeyed in its bodily disguise, exacts its ugly penalty in the form of the physical ills caused by overindulgence, the pharmaceutical industry rushes to our assistance with promises of immediate relief in the form of antacids, anti-gas capsules, analgesics, and maybe even a little sleeping pill to help us to sleep it all off in blissful unconsciousness. Stripped of the golden haze of holiday nostalgia, it’s really not a very pretty picture.

In his rule of life, St. Benedict (480-ca. 547 CE) proposes a different (but unpopular) antidote: just don’t overindulge in the first place (Rule of Benedict 39:7). Good advice, and not only for Benedictines. It is actually part of Benedict’s larger campaign against the worship of that alien god, the self out of place and out of proportion, whom psychology has baptized “ego”. Obedience is one of Benedict’s central tenets of life. What he really means by obedience, though, is undoing Eden by choosing to obey the real, life-giving God this time. If you shake off the devil dust, this alternative is no loner as unpalatable as it once seemed The God we are to obey is the God who, unlike the serpent, has our genuine long-term well-being at heart. Benedict works constantly to dethrone the ego that has taken God’s place by advocating every form of stamping out self-will. The goal is not dishrags or doormats but healthy human beings living life fully in the image of the God by whom and for whom they were created. The means is radical adherence to Christ as the source and center, the rule and ruler, of our daily lives. Christ is the image of God embodied in humanity brought to its full maturity. Within the limits of our created human being, Christ is who we want to be when we grow up.

Centuries before Pius XI, Benedict did actually challenge us to honor the sovereignty of Christ: “This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord” (RB Prologue 3). Benedict makes it clear that lip service won’t do it. A once-a-year-and-then-forgotten celebration of Christ the King is not enough. In fact, although the word “king” would have had real-life meaning in Benedict’s day, he uses it only twice, both times in speaking of Christ. What he repeats instead is the one all-sufficient directive that puts even obedience in its right context: “…prefer nothing whatever to Christ” (RB 72:11). Nothing. Even and especially not the self-in-isolation who has wrought such havoc in our lives and in the world around us. The full sentence reads: “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life. (RB 72:11-12). That is a petition no other god can grant.

©2007, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO

In the Storm Cloud

2007-11-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

You called in distress and I saved you.
I answered, concealed in the storm cloud

(Psalm 81:7, Grail Translation)

Human beings are born seekers. Over the centuries, countless men and women in monasteries and outside them have found a valuable direction for their search in the Benedictine mandate to “seek God in all things” (cf. Rule of St. Benedict, 58:7). The phrase occurs in a short list of criteria Benedict provides for judging the authenticity of a novice’s vocation. The last criterion on the list is the stumbling block for most of us: does this novice “show eagerness” for trials. The phrase is variously translated and interpreted, but it identifies the stumbling block which causes many of us to fall flat on our faces in our efforts to “seek God in all things”.

When the storm cloud of suffering settles round us that task becomes most difficult. How can we seek God when we have the pressing issue of pain on our minds? The chaos blinds and deafens us. We flounder, unable to find the path on which we walked with such confidence yesterday. We cry out for deliverance. At such times, we remember the story of Jesus stilling the storm, once the disciples succeeded in waking him up (Matthew 8:23-27). Perhaps if we pray louder, we can wake God up and get this storm taken care of so we can get on with the business of seeking God. What kind of protest, cajolery or bribe will stir Jesus out of his irritating sleep? What will it take to get him up and moving? Maybe if we promise to give up smoking or late-night TV…maybe if we promise to be kind to that irksome neighbor or to listen to that deadening bore…maybe if we promise to make nine novenas…maybe…Maybe we should stop looking for our own solutions and listen.

In a minute. Ok, if God is not going to still this storm, let’s ask for deliverance of a different kind. Meaninglessness is intolerable to the human spirit. To find something meaningless is either to find no explanation for it or to find no purpose for it.

The suffering would not be so bad if we could understand the reason for it. Often, in fact, the first form of deliverance we ask for is an explanation: “Why are you letting this happen? Why me? Why now?” What we really want is a compelling self-justification from the all-powerful but not, at the moment, all-merciful Providence. We are Job, crying out to God to come to his own defense at the bar of our notion of justice. However, if God is silent, we often scurry after a scapegoat. If she hadn’t given me that cold…if my superiors had understood that I was overworked…if the school staff had paid more attention to my child…if Al-Qaeda had left the World Trade Center alone so we wouldn’t be tempted to go to war…if it hadn’t been full moon. Casting the blame on someone or something else—even our silent God—does nothing to still the storm, but it does sometimes make it more bearable because it provides some sort of indirect rationale for the trouble. It also absolves us of any responsibility. That matters because our last recourse, if no other explanation is forthcoming, is to probe our own shortcomings. If I had lost weight…if I hadn’t gone out of town just then…if I had paid more attention…if I hadn’t irritated my boss…if I had voted for the other candidate…

If no explanation is forthcoming from any quarter, we may then turn to the task of finding a purpose for it all. Here the “comforts of religion” can be a poor excuse for evading God. Many of us were taught, when faced with pain, to “offer it up”—usually meaning that we should use it as intercessory prayer or gift for someone else’s need. That is an admirable ideal when, in fact, we have plumbed the pain to its depth. In the hands of saints, it is a powerful tool for good. However, when we are simply looking for a way out, it’s a cheap exit. It invites a kind of resignation that is often a thin veil for passive-aggressive resentment. Muttered behind our hands joined in prayer, are whispers of “Ok, God, look, I’m offering it up, aren’t you going to do something? At least console me for my piety? At least let me know that I’ve sprung someone from purgatory or made my son go back to the sacraments!” This is mere bargaining in disguise. Bargaining is a normal stage in the grief process, but it’s healthier if we call it what it is. The introduction to the Church’s rites for the sick and dying, Pastoral Care: The Rites of Anointing and Viaticum, urge the sick to unite their sufferings with Christ’s. That’s actually the theological point implicit in the notion of offering something up –we make our offering in communion with Christ’s self-offering on the cross. Here again, though, the goal is not to eliminate the suffering by baptizing it with religious language. Communion with Christ on the cross includes communion with the One who cried out in absolute darkness of soul, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” This is the food of highest holiness through truly redemptive suffering, but it’s not for the faint-hearted seeking an escape from the unbearable.

In the end, out of solutions of our own, perhaps we must indeed stop and listen. There is a point at which, brought to our knees, we must abandon the search for deliverance and, instead, seek God. Up until now, we have been seeking not God but something from God: escape, explanation, purpose. Those are all natural, normal, healthy responses to suffering. And, in fact, we are unlikely to give them up. However, we might pause for a moment and come to rest at the stark fact that the Benedictine mandate is to seek God in all things. All things. Not just the joyful things. Not just the pleasant things. Not just the reasonable things. All things. All things include the storm cloud. If we are truly to seek God, without a shred of our own well-being disguised in the search, we must at some point seek God with no strings attached.

The psalmist has captured both dilemma and grace: “You called in distress and I saved you./ I answered, concealed in the storm cloud”. We may not recognize the salvation. We may not hear the answer. We may not see the storm cloud swirl aside, even for a moment, so that we can glimpse the face of God. Nevertheless, in the darkness of faith, we reach out and touch God in the irreplaceable split second when the heart knows beyond doubt that we have found the one we seek. It changes nothing: the suffering closes over us again. It changes everything: we who suffer will never be the same again. As Job discovered in his moment of truth, it is enough.

And it is gift, not achievement. All we can do is lay aside our frantic quest for our own fix and, in the poverty and nakedness of faith, stand before the door concealing God and knock. It will, we have been promised, open.

See Job 38-41; Matthew 7:7

©2007, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO

Bells: a Monastic Apocalypse

2007-11-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I was walking down the short hall through which the nuns pass from our monastery to the chapel. The fall day was warm. Sunlight fell through the wall of windows lining the hall and warmed the tiles, all in variegated shades of dusty red, dusty rose and gray. The moment seemed endless.

Across this sunny idyll fell the sound of the monastery bell summoning the community to prayer. It provoked an unexpected memory. In the film version of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, set in Australia between the world’s final nuclear war and the inevitable moment when the last remaining lives will be extinguished, one scene shows a revival in which an evangelist harangues his listeners to prepare for the end. Above his head hangs a banner on which is printed, “There is still time, brothers!” At the end of the movie, when everyone is gone, the camera pans the streets of the city, all deserted. Finally, it leads the viewer into the empty square above which flaps the banner: “There is still time, brothers!” Seeing it on television in the early 60’s, when apocalypse was in the air, was an arresting moment. I have never forgotten it.

Fall carries its own poignancy. On that late fall day, remembering the movie, I heard the same message in the bell: “There is still time”. The mundane meaning was that there was still time to get to the chapel in time for the appointed Office in the daily round of Liturgy of the Hours. Nuns in our monastery develop an uncanny sense of timing: “There goes the bell. Five minutes. I still have time to…” We admit it, we laugh at ourselves, we wish we were a bit more prompt about dropping our work and hurrying to the chapel as St. Benedict exhorts in his Rule: “On hearing the signal for an hour of the divine office, the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity and without giving occasion for frivolity. Indeed, nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God.” (RB 43:1-3) Still we find ourselves, sometimes anyway, squeezing in that last word on the computer, that last swish of the mop, that last paragraph of the book, with just enough time to be in our places when the signal is given to begin the Office. The bell is our friend: it tells us that there is still time.

On that late fall day, however, with the closing scene of the movie on my mind I heard the message with a difference urgency. In the prologue of the Rule, Benedict himself spells it out: “If we wish to reach eternal life, even as we avoid the torments of hell, then—while there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things by the light of life—we must run and do now what will profit us forever.” (RB Prologue 42-44). The bell does tell us that there is still time to get where we are going, but that isn’t exactly where we think. Nor is the time between here and there as endless as it seems on a warm, sunny lazy autumn afternoon. The bell tells us to drop the small tasks we imagine to be so important—and many of them are, in their time. But their time is not now, says the bell. Now is the time to leave them behind and go at once to attend to the great work, the work of prayer, which is our rehearsal for an eternity in communion with our beloved Christ and our service to all those we hope to gather up with us into that eventual delight.

During these closing weeks of the liturgical year, we read a good bit of the apocalyptic literature of the Old and New Testament. Its language can be frightening: temples falling, wars and rumors of wars, earthquake, plague, the moon turned to blood. Not a pretty picture. Its purpose, though, is not to scare the socks off us and send us skittering into the nearest air raid shelter, there to sit out the end-times in relative safely, emerging only when it’s all over. Its purpose is the purpose of the bell: to tell us that time as we know it is not a permanent abode but a ribbon that is unwinding toward its end, whether that end for us is death or universal nuclear destruction. Whether it unwinds slowly or with the speed of light is not given us to know. What is given us to know is that we still have now. “Now” is not to be held lightly. “Now” is not a mere way station through which we pass without noticing it as we hurry on to somewhere else, which always looks more important before we get there. “Now” is the time for our conversatio, our conversion, our shedding of the inessentials that hinder us along the road where, Benedict tells us, “we shall run [toward our end] on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love” (RB Prologue 49). “Now” matters.

But we don’t have to wait for the apocalyptic readings of the final weeks of the liturgical year to remember what “now” is for and why we cherish it. Daily, every day, the bells—or their equivalent in lives lived outside the monastery—remind us with their kindly urgency: “There is still time, brothers. There is still time, sisters. There is still time.”

Quotations of from the Rule of St. Benedict are taken from RB:1980, ed. Timothy Fry, OSB (Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1981)

Doorstep Demons

2007-11-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

In a rather entertaining opening to the parable of a dinner invitation gone awry (Luke 14:15-24), Jesus describes the unexpected response of those first invited to a feast. One said, “Sorry, I can’t come, I just bought some real estate, and I have to go look at it, please excuse me”; the next one said, “Sorry, I can’t come, I just bought a team of oxen, and I have to go look them over, please excuse me”; the third one said, “Sorry, I can’t come, I just got married, please excuse me.”

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a bit of land, a pair of work animals, and maybe even an evening à deux for the newly-weds could wait long enough for those invited to go to a party? But no, all of them have fallen prey to the sleight-of-mind typical of doorstep demons.

A retreatant first introduced me to these household pests when she said, “The hardest part of contemplative prayer is getting over the threshold.” In fact, the hardest part of every form of prayer, and of many another gospel work besides, is getting over the threshold because of the doorstep demons camped there. One cannot say what they look like because no one has seen them. One can say, though, what they do. They spread a miasma of ill-feeling between you and what you’ve been inspired to do. The miasma is a distorting fog through which what you were planning suddenly looks much less attractive.

Let’s say you heard the parable of the dinner invitation read in church. It made you laugh, and then it made you want to take a look yourself at an invitation of grace you’ve refused. Come prayer time, you plan to sit down with that parable and use it to help you take a look at what it was you turned down and why. As you open the bible, the story no longer seems either funny or compelling. In fact, it begins to look boring. You’ve heard it so many times. You know what it says. You know what you’re supposed to think about it. “Been there, done that, I think I’ll go get a cup of coffee. I’ll come back in a minute and find something else to pray.” But the headline on the paper sitting by the coffee pot catches your eye. “I’ll just sit down and read this for a minute while I drink my coffee. Otherwise I might spill it on the rug in my room.” The headline story is really interesting and reminds you of an article you’ve been meaning to read on famine in China. You go and look for the article, coffee cup in hand, the well-being of the rug forgotten. You can’t find the article, but your eye falls on that letter you meant to answer yesterday. In the blink of an eye, prayer time is over, the parable is forgotten, and you’re deep into your correspondence. You missed the feast of the Word altogether, but, except for a twinge of guilt, you don’t even give any thought to what you’ve missed. The doorstep demons chalk up another win.

Most of us are a bit less honest than the invited dinner guests. They at least named their doorstep demons honestly as they refused the invitation. We’re a bit more apt to sidle away from the threshold so mysteriously blocked by the demons “boring,” “hard,” “too-much-work-to-get-into-right now,” “painful” (who is usually disguised as one of the others), or downright “you-just-don’t-want-to-go-there-and-you-know-it”. We throw out excuses behind us as we go, creating our own trail of fog, which deceives neither God nor ourselves, really. And always we are the losers. It was a great party. We just didn’t go.

The most effective way to deal with doorstep demons is to recognize that they’re there and pray for the miasma to clear. If God could blow the Red Sea aside, God can blow away a little fog. Then look the doorstep demons in the eye, call them by name and then walk right through them. They aren’t actually very substantial. You say, “Look, you ‘fake-sense-of-urgency’, that pair of oxen you’re throwing across that doorway really could wait. They’re bought and paid for, they’ve been stabled and fed, they don’t need me right now. I’ll take care of them as soon as prayer time is over.” And you’ll find the little pests have disappeared, leaving the threshold clear for you to cross.

The feast is worth the effort.

©2007, Abbey of St. Walburga

All Saints

2007-11-01T17:48:00.000-06:00

Today is the Solemnity of All Saints--the day when we remember all those, publicly acknowledged or known only to a handful, who have completed their journey into the fullness of life in Christ.

We celebrate, and rightly, their fidelity to Christ, but when their stories are honestly told, these men and women serve also as living signs of Christ's unwavering fidelity to us. None of us needs much convincing that God is with us when times are good, but it's a different story when times are bad. It can be heartening, then, to recognize that God stood by them in every painful circumstance: political and religious persecution (the apostles, the Carmelite Nuns of Compiègne, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross [Edith Stein]), material poverty(St. Francis, Blessed Juan Diego, St. Benedict Joseph Labre), desolation of spirit (St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux in her last months of life, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta), political disaster (St. Edward the Confessor, St. Bernard, St. Louis, King of France), the death of a beloved spouse (St. Elizabeth of Hungary), misunderstanding, mistreatment, betrayal either by their religious communities (St. Francis, St. Bernadette, St. Alphonsus Ligouri) or by family (St. Clare and her younger sister) exile, whether voluntary (St. Francis Xavier and countless other missionaries) or involuntary (St. Athanasius, St. John Chrysostom), threats of sexual abuse (St. Charles Lwanga, St. Maria Goretti). Whatever the cross that befell them, Christ was with them always, as he promised in the gospel--even when they felt entirely abandoned, as he did on the cross.

This list, a tiny fragment of the roll of canonized saints, includes only those men and women whose names are known to history and honored publicly by the Church. As we read the papers or watch the news, with their endless chronicle of human suffering, we could find the faces of many more whose names we will never know--believers of every time and place who hung in there when there was every reason to abandon love of God and neighbor for the sake of self-preservation, believers with whom God hung in there when there was no reason even to imagine there was a God.

On our own bad days, we might remember and draw strength from these our older "brothers and sisters," as the preface of today's Mass calls them. St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that they are eagerly awaiting our coming to join them and adding their own prayers to ours that we will see them one day. They never forget us, he said, even when we give them not a thought. Everyone can use older brothers and sisters like that when the going gets tough. Today is a good day to thank them for being there.

Will We?

2007-10-21T15:03:00.000-06:00

Today, Sunday 29C in Ordinary Time, the gospel selected by the Roman Catholic Lectionary is Luke 18:1-8. The story of the recalcitrant judge worn to acquiescence by a persistent widow is familiar. So is the story's motto: "pray always without becoming weary". The NRSV translation, "to pray always and not to lose heart," seems to catch the flavor of the story a bit more sharply. Weary or not, says Jesus, keep on praying!

Jesus concludes the story with a powerful assurance: "Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily."

But then he adds a poignant twist: "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" The Son of Man is to be God's answer to those who cry out for justice. The Son of Man is to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, as we profess in the creed. The Son of Man is to be the vindication for which the chosen ones plead. Jesus could be wondering, almost as a muttered aside, "But will there be anyone with sufficient faith to pray for that vindication always, without losing heart?"

Without denying that reading, the text lends itself to another. "Will there be anyone with sufficient faith to receive the Son of Man when he comes?" From a gospel perspective, faith seems to include the power to grant God permission to act for us or on us. It's part and parcel of the trust that faith implies, I suppose. You might think that of course anyone would trust God to do whatever God wanted, but it's not as easy as that. You never really know what God will actually do, but you can be pretty sure it won't be exactly what you expect, and it might not be what you think you want, either.

It might sound a bit odd to say that we have to give God permission to do something for us. But you'll recall the story of Jesus' Nazareth homecoming, told in Luke 16. After announcing his mission in the synagogue, he must have heard the whispers in the crowd. In Mark's version of the story (Mark 6:1-6), their murmuring is reported more fully than it is in Luke's : "They said, "Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" In Luke's version, he takes the words right out of their mouths: "Doubtless... you will say do also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did in Capernaum." Although both gospels say that the townsfolk heard him with wonder and amazement, he must also have heard the doubts that underlay their applause and known that all they wanted was a show to rival the show he had given in Capernaum. He in his turn was amazed--at their unbelief (Mark 6:6). In the face of that unbelief, he could do very little for them. He did not have their permission. And the Lord, who respects our freedom far more than we do, would not act without it.

When the Son of Man comes again, wonders Jesus in today's gospel, will he again find his hands tied by unbelief? Will he be unable to bring the vindication God's chosen ones desired because no one desired it with enough faith to receive it?

Of course Jesus does not wait till the dramatic moment at the end of time to heap God's blessings on us . He is with us always, as he promised, hearing our prayers and providing us with far more than we can ask for or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). The question remains: will we meet him with the faith to receive it?

©2007, Abbey of St. Walburga

Surely Not I, Lord?

2007-10-17T07:21:00.001-06:00

Today is the memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch, a Syrian bishop who was martyred at Rome around 107 A.D. On his journey from his home to his death, he wrote seven letters to various churches. He wrote on a number of subjects, but he spoke with vivid eloquence of his ardent desire for martyrdom. Certainly, in this epoch of religious violence, many contemporary Christians from St. Ignatius' part of the world and elsewhere are suffering torture and death for their commitment to Christ and the gospel. But those of us who live less threatened lives might squirm a bit at the vehemence of Ignatius' plea to be allowed to die the death to which he has been condemned, without the intervention of well-meaning fellow Christians.

Nonetheless, Ignatius recalls for all of us the discomforting challenge of Jesus, who said there was no greater love than to lay down one's life for the others. He himself, of course, lived and died by that uncompromising love. And, lest we give pious thanks and go on about our business untempted to follow his example, he left us the commandment to "love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34).

Ignatius responded to that commandment according to his personal call at a time when Christians were actively persecuted. We are asked to respond to the same commandment according to our personal call in our present circumstances, whatever they might be. For some , the response may very well be fidelity to Christ in the face of torture and death. For many of us, it will rather be fidelity to Christ in the face of the humdrum demands of everyday life. It will likely be a fidelity that requires not drama but simple perseverance in ordinary things. If we are asked to lay down our lives minute by minute by spending the precious wealth of our time, our energy, our company, our attentiveness, our talents, or simply our willingness to be of service, the sacrifice is not as spectacular as Ignatius' death in the arena but it is just as authentic. Washing dishes so someone else doesn't have to has none of the aura of being torn to bits by wild beasts--but it may demand just as much love.

Ignatius gave a unique twist to the reason for it, though. He understood his martyrdom not simply as a death died willingly in imitation of Christ. He understood it as a death died willingly for the same reason that Christ died. He left us a graphic description of his purpose, quoted in the communion antiphon of today's Mass as well as in the Liturgy of the Hours: "I am God's wheat, and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure bread of Christ." The reference is, of course, to the Eucharist. Ignatius laid down his life not to copy Christ but, in Christ and with Christ, to feed the life of Christ's Body with his own.

Ignatius' words raise two questions we must ask ourselves: when I "lay down my life for others," who am I feeding? who am I seeking to build up? Whatever offering we make of our time, energy, company, attentiveness, service, we make not simply to do what Jesus would do, but, in obedience to Christ, to do it to feed Christ's Body with his own love visibly embodied in ours. Anything less is apt to feed and build up only our own ego--a ravenous beast, to be sure, and perfectly capable of grinding us down to fine flour for bread, but not to build up the Body of Christ in love.

Arrest, torment and death were the price Ignatius paid for his fidelity to Christ. Because we don't expect martyrdom, we ought not to imagine that our own fidelity to Christ's command to love as he did will always be rewarded with gratitude, blessing, praise. There is a telling line in Psalm 38: "attack me for seeking what is right". "They" may be the resentful, the jealous, those who fail to understand, or our own doubts, hesitations, failures of nerve in the face of hostility. And "they" may be just as frightening to face as the wild animals in the arena.

Lay down my life? Surely not I, Lord!

You know the answer.

Lectio Divina: Brief Overview

2007-10-07T10:17:00.000-06:00

The Rule of St. Benedict allots a significant place in the daily monastic horarium to the practice of lectio divina, or divine reading. This style of prayer was in fact common practice among Christians of the first centuries and has returned to popularity today. You don't have to belong to a monastery to do lectio.

It's a very simple approach, really, readily available to anyone interested in praying with the bible. Commentaries written to describe common experience generally identify four "steps" or aspects of the prayer, but these are descriptions, not rules. If you choose to do lectio, you should follow the promptings of the Spirit in deciding how long to devote to each aspect. In fact, quite often it isn't possible to tell which aspect you're engaged in, as they flow fairly freely into one another as you pray. And you can move back and forth among them as you feel drawn to do so.

In general, before beginning to pray, it is helpful to decide on a time, place and environment conducive to quiet concentration and to follow a regular routine, especially when prayer grows dry and uninteresting.

FIRST STEP: LECTIO
The first step is lectio, which means reading. You can take any section of the bible, or even some other piece of religious reading. Some people prefer to use the readings provided in the daily lectionary for Mass. Others prefer to follow a particular book of the bible from beginning to end. Others prefer to move among related passages. Whatever choose, forget everything you've ever learned about speed reading. Lectio requires that you read it very slowly to allow it to sink below the surface of your mind. You can mouth the words, or even read them aloud, to help you to slow down and focus. You can read a whole passage to get an overview and then go back and repeat parts of it, or you can read very slowly from the beginning. What matters is that you read attentively, prepared to pause for meditatio and oratio when something strikes you.

SECOND STEP: MEDITATIO
The second step is meditatio, which means meditation. Meditatio can take one of two traditional forms. Perhaps the oldest is the simple repetition of the text without a lot of analysis, allowing the words to sink deeper and deeper into the heart as you memorize them. It's amazing how much work they can do to rebuild our inner ways of looking at the world without a whole lot of conscious effort (or control!) on our part. The other form of meditatio involves thinking about the text actively -- questioning the text in light of your experience and allowing your experience to be questioned by the text. Either or both forms of meditatio can be useful.

THIRD STEP: ORATIO
The third step is oratio, which means prayer. This is the point at which reading and thinking turn into explicit conversation with God, either in words or simply in wordless directing of thoughts and feelings to God.

FOURTH STEP: CONTEMPLATIO
The fourth step is contemplatio, meaning contemplation. The word can mean many things, and it can sound frightening, but contemplation isn't a matter of esoteric knowledge, mind-breaking labor, or exotic experience. During lectio, it's the point at which words give way to silent presence, either briefly or for longer periods of time, depending on the individual and the gift of God. It is the part of prayer in which God is more active than we are. It can't be commanded, only accepted. When it ends, it's time to go back to reading again.

LECTIO AND DAILY LIFE
Lectio divina is really a way of surrendering the imagination to God. We all know that our minds are busy all day long, sometimes with worthwhile thoughts, sometimes with destructive ones. The habit of regular lectio divina provides food for thought to which we can return throughout the day, repeating a phrase or a line or two of what we've read or reconsidering reflections, whenever the mind falls idle or starts down the path toward unkind thoughts, criticisms, worries, and all the other unhealthy inner habits that stand between us and the gift of dwelling in God's presence in peace.

This posting is a revision of an article on lectio divina from our monastery’s website at: http://www.walburga.org/Lectio.html.

Discovery: a Light Moment

2007-10-04T06:27:00.000-06:00

One of my assignments is to cook part-time in our monastery’s retreat house. This poem is the product of a bout of refrigerator cleaning.

DISCOVERY

The lovely leaves of gray and green
Float softly on a bed unseen,
Its edges hid by tufted fuzz.
The stench, alas, is rather strong.
Perhaps it has been here too long?
I wonder what it was.

©2007, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO 80536-8942

I Lift Up My Eyes to the Mountains

2007-09-30T16:52:00.000-06:00

I lift up my eyes to the mountains:
from where shall come my help?

(Psalm 121:1—Grail translation)

Mountain-dwellers recognize the paradox of their mountains. They offer both protection and danger. To some extent, they wall out the unwanted, but they also conceal predators. In winter, they hold the possibility of avalanche; in summer, the peril of flash floods. Still, their beauty both stirs and answers an unnamed longing in the human spirit. And something about their lofty indifference to the doings of the mortal two-legged flies that presume to “conquer” them draws human beings to risk life and limb to climb them or simply to seek shelter in their shadow.

The psalmist belonged to a people for whom the ambivalence of mountains was rooted both in paradox and in a tradition of conflict. Not only did human beings seek the strategic superiority of the heights over military opponents, but also the gods competed for the high places. The prophets make clear that people succumbed from time to time to the seduction of alien gods who were worshiped at hill shrines. In contradistinction, their God claimed the highest place. The God who had made covenant with them on Mount Sinai took up residence among them on Mount Zion, in the Temple built in Jerusalem. The prophet Isaiah announces God’s primacy over the competing gods of the surrounding nations:

In days to come,
The mountain of the LORD'S house
shall be established as the highest mountain
and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it.

(Isaiah 2:2 (NAB))

This is not a geographic claim but a theological one.

The New American Bible commentary suggests that in Psalm 121:1 the psalmist may be looking up to Mount Zion for God’s help or looking up to the surrounding mountains with anxiety about who or what might be lurking there. However, in verse 2, he answers his own question with the categorical assertion: “My help shall come from the Lord/who made heaven and earth”(Grail) The remainder of the psalm addresses to the psalmist a series of poetically beautiful and fortifying assurances about God’s help:

He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand.

The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore.

(Psalm 121:3-8[RSV].)

How will God keep us? How will our help come from the mountains?

The prophet Isaiah maintains that God will keep us by teaching us his ways so that we may walk in his paths: “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). The paths of God will lead us safely through whatever hazards may surround us, especially, of course, the ultimate hazard created not by those who can slay the body but by the one who can “destroy both body and soul in hell” (Matthew 10:28). This is the expectation that animates the psalmist in Psalm 23:4 to walk without fear even through the valley of the shadow of death. Indeed, the shadow of death will be lightened, says Isaiah, for the word that will go forth from Jerusalem will be the terms imposed on many people, that “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; /One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again (Isaiah 2:4 [NAB])

However, the prophet Joel opens the door to an even deeper answer to the question of how our help shall come from the mountains: “on that day, the mountains shall drip new wine” (Joel 3:18 [NAB]). The Hebrew word used to describe the wine may be translated either “new” (NAB, KJV) or “sweet” (RSV, NRSV). The image of “new wine” evokes two key New Testament passages. First, "new wine" brings to mind Jesus' saying that you don't pour new wine into old wineskins (cf. Matthew 9:17 and par.). Secondly, in the Last Supper account in Matthew 26:26-30 and Mark 14:22-25, Jesus says of the wine in the cup that it is his “blood of the covenant” and that he will not again drink of the fruit of the vine until he drinks it new in the kingdom. But for us who receive it, this is new wine, the best saved till last. Taken together, the passages from Joel and from the gospels evoke the image of Mt. Calvary, dripping with the blood of the Crucified, the new wine that fills the Eucharistic cup of the new covenant. It is the blood of the covenant “poured out for many” (Mark 14:24; Matthew 26:28 [NAB]). In Matthew, Jesus adds “for the forgiveness of sins”. The help that will come to us from the mountains is not merely instruction in walking safely in the paths of God but the blood of the Lamb that will wash away the damage that sin and evil have done us.

So when the psalmist asks, in Psalm 72:3 “May the mountains bring forth peace for the people and the hills, justice” (Grail), we may understand God’s answer to the prayer as a petition not simply as an edict of peace (Isaiah 2:4) but as the very life of the One who is our peace (Ephesians 2:14), poured out for all of us, that we may indeed be brought into the one new humanity of the risen Christ, all hostilities and divisions forgotten.

Note:
Jumping from one translation to another, as this artcle does, yields poor scholarship but, sometimes, rich reflection. That is my apologia for the procedure I have followed.

Gone Fishing--Part 1

2007-09-28T20:01:00.000-06:00

y vow or oblation, Benedictines make a commitment of conversatio morum (see note below).This Latin phrase has long given scholars headaches and Benedictine candidates much food for thought. It means literally “change of ways”. St. Benedict says, in the sixth-century rule of life which Benedictine men and women have followed ever since, that conversatio morum is what one does when one enters a monastery: one changes one’s way of life. More broadly, the phrase includes the basic Christian commitment to lifelong conversion, not only of one’s ways of daily schedule and activities, but, more fundamentally, of one’s ways of being, seeing, understanding and believing. Conversion is an in-depth makeover that does not end until we have passed through the transforming gates of death into the fullness of life in Jesus Christ.

Good preacher that he is, Jesus often uses a pattern of “tell and show” in the gospels. In Mark’s gospel, he inaugurates his mission with a single dramatic announcement: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." (Mark 1:15 [RSV]) That says it all, as we will discover when the gospel unfolds. But it says too much for us to take in. We get a first glimpse of what it means in the next few lines, when Jesus says to the fishermen Simon and Andrew, "Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men." (Mark 1:17 [RSV]). And, quite literally, they do: “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Mark 1:18[RSV). And, just as literally, he does: slowly he turns them into “fishers” who trawl not for sardines and telapia but for human beings.

Their story gives us an interesting insight into conversion. We sometimes thinks it means becoming a different human being entirely: the lazy become type-A achievers, the sloppy become neat freaks, the 98-pound weaklings become Olympic gold medalists, those for whom school is one of the punishments for original sin become rocket scientists, and so on. In other words, we identify conversion’s end product with our own dreams of a perfect self, that is, whatever self we are not but would like to be.

Jesus seems to have a different picture. Simon (Peter) and Andrew apparently fished for a living, a lucrative profession in those days. They seem to have given it up rather dramatically to take up discipleship instead. Consider, however, the odd wording of Jesus’ call to them: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” The call implies that they are not being asked to give up their interests, their skills and their experience but simply to apply them to a new trade. Their weather sense, their eye for a promising catch, their patient cunning as hunters of the sea, their physical strength and stamina, their willingness to work long hard hours under difficult or even dangerous –remember those storms on the Sea of Galilee!—will all stand them in good stead. They will need to judge the figurative climate of places they had never dreamed of; they will need to look over a crowd and spot likely friends and followers; they will need to create innovative strategies to attract their hearers and await with patience the moment when the hearers take the gospel bait; as we learn from St. Paul’s accounts of his own adventures, they will have to travel far, live under duress, endure physical dangers of all kinds, and, ultimately face the certainty of a cruel death.

Perhaps conversion does not make us into impossibly different characters after all. Perhaps conversion makes the very best of what we already are. My experience of life in a monastery suggests to me that God wastes nothing. Whatever interests or skills or experiences we bring with us come in handy somewhere along the line, usually in the most unexpected ways. When one of our newcomers mentioned that she had apprenticed as a plumber’s mate, the nun in charge of maintenance lit up like a Christmas tree. When another admitted that tailoring had been a favorite hobby while she pursued a business career, she found herself making habits as well as balancing checkbooks. A third who majored in fine arts but worked in an office to make a living became an iconographer and, oh, by the way, typed the pages for revisions in our prayer books. The stories go on and on.

If God doesn’t waste simple work skills, why would God waste anything else about us? In fact, God appears to treasure the very personalities we are so eager to shed for some alien skin. What they require is conversion, not annihilation. Simon Peter’s impetuosity, forged under the harsh hammer of failure, guilt, and forgiveness, became the steely but humble courage that enabled him to face all comers for the sake of the gospel. In the end, he was able to stare down even death itself as he perished on the cross, upside down, so legend says, because he felt unworthy to imitate his Lord. Once his bold self-reliance was transformed into reliance on God, he became a truly memorable “fisher of men”. Even our worst flaws can be made into greatness by the alchemy of God’s creative love.

The conversatio morum of the Benedictine, like the conversion of every Christian, can fly in the face of conventional wisdom. We might not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes. But God can. And does. Or, better said, God makes saints out of the most unlikely of sinners.

Note:
Benedictine men and women follow the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480-ca. 547). Monks and Sisters or nuns make perpetual vows of obedience, stability and conversatio morum. Laymen and women may commit themselves by oblation, whose root meaning is “offering”, to live according to the spirit of St. Benedict’s Rule in whatever walk of life they are called to. They make that commitment in affiliation with a Benedictine monastic community, but they do not live in monasteries. For more information: www.osb.org or www.walburga.org .

The Tricky Steward (Luke 16:1-9)

2007-09-25T14:02:00.000-06:00

Tricksters abound in the scriptures. There is Abraham who lied to Pharaoh about Sarah’s status. There is his grandson Jacob, who impersonated his older brother to con his father into giving him the birthright that was his brother’s due. There is Jael, who lured her people’s persecutor into her tent and murdered him while he slept. There is Judith, who tricked the enemy leader into getting drunk and then cut off his head while he lay in a stupor. Heroes and heroines all, they achieved good, but their means were less than admirable.

Then along comes the tricky steward of Luke 16:1-9. Threatened with dismissal for dishonesty, he summons his master’s debtors, persuades them to rewrite their promissory notes for less than they actually owe, and thus assures himself of a place to go when he is turned out. (One wonders what he thinks they will do for him—take him in as a hanger-on of some kind or offer him a job? He hasn’t exactly commended himself as an honest employee! But this is a parable, not a history, so it need not answer such questions.) To every reader’s astonishment, Jesus commends him for his prudence! He even holds him up as an example: “I tell you, make friends for yourself with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9, NAB).

What kind of advice is this from the One who is the way, the truth and the life? It is, appropriately enough, tricky advice. The Roman Catholic lectionary’s selection of Mass readings for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A, exposes the trick. In the first reading, the prophet Amos rails against the dishonest merchants who swindle the poor out of the little have, caring only for their own profit and not for the ruin of their victims (Amos 8:4-7). Now that sounds more like it! That's what we expect to hear from the Bible! But the dishonest steward of the gospel dupes only his own wealthy master, and not for financial profit but for some guarantee of a tolerable future for himself. He does not take anything: he refuses, in his master’s name, to take the full amount the debtors owe.

Refusing to take is a form of giving. Basically, the steward gives away goods—admittedly, his master’s, not his own—to make friends for the days to come. Indirectly, even the goods are in some sense his own: they would enable his master to pay him his wages, or , less creditably, they would provide him with more property to squander for his own gain, the crime for which his master is planning to fire him. Perhaps we might even think they represent the “extra” he intended to bilk the creditors out of to line his own pocket, but then the master would not have discovered the steward’s trick. In any case, the wealth these goods represent is “dishonest wealth,” as Jesus notes, but it is real wealth nonetheless. And the steward gives it away.

In fact, he follows the familiar gospel advice Jesus gives the person we remember as “the rich young man,” though Luke says nothing about his age: “ sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have a treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me" (Luke 18:22, NAB) In other words, give away your wealth, and you will indeed “be welcomed into eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9, NAB). The point, it seems, is not how the steward acquired the wealth, but what he did with it: he gave it away for the sake of a better future.
Parables are characterized by a sting in their tail. The parable of the dishonest steward certainly qualifies, but it’s the second reading of the Mass that adds the real sting. In 1 Timothy 2:6, St. Paul speaks of Christ as one “who gave himself as a ransom for all”. This is the One whom the rich young man—and we-- are to follow. First, says Jesus, give away all you own, for, as we all know, what we think we possess too easily comes to possess us. Then, says Jesus, you are free to come, follow me. But where is he going? To Jerusalem, where he will give away his last and greatest possession, his life, to assure all of us real treasure “in the eternal dwellings.”
And, as always, the final word is spoken from the heart of the mystery of the cross: “Do this in remembrance of me.”