Day by Day in Boston

I was pretty pleased to learn yesterday that the retreat I am leading did not, in fact, begin today. It actually begins tomorrow afternoon, giving me even more time to pull my notes together. And I do mean "pull together."

The current state of the eight days' reflections is scraps of paper, Post-Its, torn out missallette pages and assorted other sources, divided into eight folders. I had been counting on the month of April for the work of editing this collection into a seamless garment of spirituality; instead, my siblings and I helped weave an altogether different garment--call it a wedding garment--for Mom. And as soon as I got back, we had the Theology of the Body series (which is all online now, by the way). So here I am, about to give a retreat and with only a sketchy game plan. You know the Holy Spirit is going to have to be really busy this week!

Besides working on my Intro and first meditation, I managed to take a walk around the motherhouse for my Rosary. The dogwood trees down the hill are at that perfect stage (those on the hill are yielding their flowers to leaves); the lilac are still in bloom, and as I crossed a barren stretch of asphalt an incredible perfume came wafting to me from the greenery on the side of the road. The rarest and loveliest springtime flower of all: lilies of the valley. Square yards of the tiny white bells waving in the breeze and making their presence known by that powerfully sweet scent. That was a real treat. And more signs of nature in the cackling of the robins and the stately strut of two wild turkeys, with their copper and blue-tipped feathers. Having come from downtown Chicago straight to our wooded hilltop here, I am overwhelmed with the beauty of the Massachusetts spring. And in great need of it, too.

Since I need to focus on preparing each day's talks and prayers, I will probably not have much time to spare for blogging, but I do hope to share each day a little bit of the content I'll be offering the sisters. Let that serve as a reminder for the prayers we need during this special season of grace, the annual retreat. (And thanks!)

Month's Mind

It was one month ago today that Mom left this life. As busy as this day was (last-minute errands before leaving for Boston painfully early tomorrow morning to give a retreat there), I couldn't help but see reminders of Mom everywhere: the food processor I was using to prepare some refrigerator pickles? Mom's Christmas gift. The suitcase I was packing? Mom and I got a set of three in 2005 (it was to have been for her and Dad's 50th anniversary trip to Europe; Hurricane Katrina changed their itinerary). You get the idea.

After supper, I called my sister just to connect with a sibling on such a special day. She had just left Mom's house and was walking back to her own home when my call came.

And just now, I was finishing up the packing when the strangest thing happened. My backpack suddenly began to emit loud music. It was old style American folk music. Sung by Anonymous 4, as it happened. I couldn't imagine what had suddenly turned itself on; generally I keep all my electronics on silent unless I am actually using their audio. But when I pulled out the iPad, there it was, singing away as loud as can be, just:

Oh when shall I see Jesus and reign with Him above

and from the flowing fountain drink everlasting love?

Oh, had I wings, I would fly away and be at rest

and I'd praise God in His bright abode.

And then silence. I still have no idea what on earth happened. That is, it didn't actually seem all that earthly, if you get my drift.

As I told my sister (and as I told you the other day right on this blog), Mom's death and the many other deaths that have in one way or another touched me during the Easter Season put Heaven on my mind in a way that has never happened before. And just to make sure it stays there, I've got a song going through my head that invites me not just to think about Heaven, but to long for it as the goal and crown of life.

TOB Tuesday: Is TOB just a proof-text?

An earlier post for TOB Tuesday inspired a comment:
Will you discuss the question that TOB is based on proof texting? I'm bothered about that possibility.

Here's what I answered in an off-the-cuff way:
     Re: proof texting, I assume you mean TOB is an attempt to establish a scriptural foundation for the 1968 document "Humanae Vitae."
     It is clear that Pope John Paul intended to give the Church just such a gift. But did he do so after the fact, relying simply on the appeal to proof-texts as his only basis?
     If you read "Love and Responsibility" first (published in 1960) you see that Karol Wojtyla had been doing studies in the area of marriage and sexuality for many, many years. That is why he was part of Paul VI's commission on the birth control question: he was an acknowledged authority on human sexuality before there even was such an area of study. Both the documents of Vatican II and "Humanae Vitae" itself reflect some of Wojtyla's characteristic phrases with regard to marriage.
     TOB was actually written before he became Pope; it is the "biblical" companion volume to his more philosophical Love and Responsibility. (Since he could not publish the work in book form on being elected, he adapted the content to deliver it in person, by word of mouth).
     He did not make this stuff up in the quiet of his office; couples who had been college students during his time as a campus minister were sharing their stories and experiences with him--for decades. The real authors of Theology of the Body are those Polish couples who bared their souls to their pastor and friend. TOB is the distillation of those families' lives, put in conjunction with the Scriptures through the heart of Karol Wojtyla.
     Simply reading the Theology of the Body would be enough, I think, to override the accusation of proof-texting. The content and correlations are simply too deep. Proof-texting is necessarily superficial and disconnected; there is no inner logic or harmony among proof-texts as there is in a genuine sapiential reading of Scripture (which is what Marquette scripture professor William Kurz, SJ, calls TOB).
     I hope you will join us for the program! Even if you missed the first classes Saturday, you can catch up by using the archived files.

Later, I put a link to the post and comments on Google+ and got this input:
...a comment that Alice von Hildebrand made about TOB once struck me very strongly -- that TOB is about much more than birth control, much more than sex or marriage.  The parts of TOB relating to the glorious body, for example, go far beyond these narrow issues.  Could reducing most TOB conversations to birth control/sex feed the argument that it's an after-the-fact excuse for Humanae Vitae?  Maybe.

Good point! The sections of Theology of the Body that don't deal in an explicit way with marriage are often completely ignored, giving the impression that TOB is only about the hot-button issues. I am afraid I have been guilty of continuing that impression, assuming that these are the only areas in which most people have reservations about Church teaching that TOB addresses. There's not a whole lot of controversy right now with the resurrected life. Maybe there ought to be: Sister Helena tells me that in her work with young adults, there is very little recognition that that line in the Creed ("I believe ... in the resurrection of the dead") is about our future, body and soul.

What do you have to add to the conversation?

Not-so-Ordinary Time

Today we return to "Ordinary" time, liturgically speaking. This year, after such an Easter Season, it's kind of good to be back. I didn't want all those reminders, day after day, week after 7 weeks, of dying and rising. But the Lord kept sending them, and not only in the liturgical readings. While Mom was in the hospital (on the mend, we thought), the mother of another of our sisters was admitted for emergency heart surgery. As Mom died, this other mom seemed to be recovering. (Boy, did that reality call for surrender!) But on Mother's Day, Mrs. Connor too entered the fullness of life. Seven days later, my sister called to request prayers for a missing child, the son of her co-worker. The boy's body was found yesterday.

An Easter Season full of death: what meaning can there be? For me, especially after having to say good-bye on this earth to my mother, it has been a repeated call to focus on Heaven. As Mom, as Mrs. Connor, as little Owen all experienced during the Easter Season, this life is not the "fullness" of what we are made for. As beautiful as it can be, it is only the starting block.

So I re-enter Ordinary time with a very different perspective than I had when we left it back in February.  "We are God's children now. What we shall later be has not yet been revealed."

Post from the Past: Lead us not...

This is the conclusion of a series I first published on Nunblog in 2005. Original post here.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

The usual interpretations of “temptation” can be individualistic, short-sighted and superficial, referring simply to the urge to violate a precept. But the word can be translated “trial” or “test.”  The same set of circumstances could be a temptation leading to evil or an occasion of purifying, strengthening trial. Whether we are faced with a “temptation” or a “trial” can be known only by the outcome and not in its midst. Contrary to the consumer culture with its emphasis on “having arrived,” this petition of the Lord’s prayer places us squarely “en route” in a “status viatoris.”

Even more than the plea for daily bread, this petition asserts our utter dependence on God “We are God’s children now” (cf. 1 Jn. 3:2), but even that is still a work in progress.  Do we accept this state of things? The challenge is “not to run or attempt to run from the inescapable fact of the contingency of our being” (Ulanov, Primary Speech, p. 62). Face to face with fear, even ultimate fear, we may try to short-circuit it in many ways. What if “temptation” refers to our attempts to circumvent life’s incompleteness—our refusal of the greatness of our filial condition in the vain attempt to make ourselves complete, self-enclosed, secure in intransitiveness, rather than to live in the incompleteness of an ongoing gift of self that is the creaturely form of Trinitarian life? We are tempted to take an off-ramp from the via humanitatis, which is a way of pilgrims. As Teresa of Jesus noted, concerning the security of one “who fears the Lord,” “I say ‘security,’ but that is the wrong word, for there is no security in this life” (Interior Castle, Third Mansion, Chapter 1). Earlier, she had written, “We here, so far as outward things are concerned are free; may it please the Lord to make us free as regards inward things as well and to deliver us from evil” (First Mansion).

It is here that the Lord’s Prayer completes itself, having begun with the invocation of God’s transcendent and holy name and the plea for the fullness of God’s kingdom. Before all that would substitute that kingdom and in which we could seek to ensconce ourselves, secure and unmovable, we pray: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Amen.

Amen is the genuine, filial expression of security: not in ourselves, not in our accomplishments, but standing confidently on the “one in whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). And the Lord, the “Amen, the faithful and true witness” (cf. Rev. 3:14) responds, “I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord” (cf. Ez. 36:36).

Earlier posts in this series:
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Will be Done on Earth...
Give Us this Day
Forgive Us our Trespasses...

Cultural bonanza: Mark your calendars, Chicago!

Aid for Women, for 39 years an incredibly effective provider of services to women in crisis pregnancies here in Chicagoland, just announced its Benefit Dinner, and you want to be there, even if I can't make it (I'll be in Rome, God willing).

The event will be at the Union League Club in downtown Chicago on Sept. 19. The keynote speaker is Father Robert Barron. As if that were not enough, the honoree of the evening is Barbara Nicolosi. That's right: two brilliant, articulate, spot-on culture watchers offering an intelligent and witty Catholic perspective on the issues. Please get your reservation in early.

If you can't make it to the dinner, please consider donating to Aid for Women.  They take no federal funding, as that would put restrictions on the spiritual formation they offer. Right now they especially need used cars in working condition to help the women in residence at Heather's House get to and from doctor's appointments, classes and work. You can also contribute items to their Baby Registry at www.babiesrus.com (registry # 46439641).

Post from the Past: Forgive us our Trespasses

Still running my reflections first published in 2005 for a class; the book cited was one of the texts.  Original post here.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive...

Now Jesus brings it home. We do not get off the hook: we are involved in the answer to our prayer. “As we forgive.” Are we asking God, the infinite “Creator alme siderum,” to be reduced to our level, to restrict forgiveness to our own limited reach? That can hardly be possible. God “gives the gift of the Spirit without measure” (cf. Jn. 3:34). But how do our limits effectively prevent us from receiving the full extent of mercy God offers? How can God’s forgiveness reach someone who has closed his or her heart to a neighbor who needs forgiveness (cf. 1 Jn. 3:17)?

As with the Bread of Life discourse, “this is a hard saying: who can accept it?” (cf. Jn. 6:60). But the Lord’s Prayer invites us to an examen of consciousness. Those who “find God in all things” can even find the hand of divine mercy and goodness in human experiences of injustice, ill-will, cruelty or (perhaps hardest of all to deal with) unmitigated stupidity. The attempt to move toward forgiveness is fraught with risk. As the Ulanovs remarked, “When we pray for our enemy…we feel again all the hurt and anger and anguish gathered around that person. Yet we pray that God’s good will may operate in the situation, and in that person” (Primary Speech, p. 43). What a remarkable thing this is! In our own prayer, we are turning evil to good. Forgiveness becomes a form of the “complete gift of self” in an emptying of our false self—the self that would cling to the injustices we have suffered, rather than allow them to be transformed. But it is an ongoing journey toward “total inner transformation,” a journey on which we set out 70 X 7 times; that is, as C. S. Lewis commented, every time we remember the offense or its harm revisits us.  And every time we do this, our own hearts are opened to receive a fuller measure of God’s love in the form of forgiveness of our trespasses.

Rather than focusing on the immediate source of their suffering in the neighbor who hurt them, Christian witnesses throughout history have been awed by the mysterious presence of providence making all things work together for good. This vision offered them an angle that, while not at all diminishing the real evil of the offense, revealed it as relative and contingent. Evil cannot have its full impact if I do not absorb it and make it a part of me. In spite of itself, that evil “works for good” (cf. Rom. 8:28). And when we have seen the power of God at work for good in the sins and trespasses of others against us, we no longer have to hold on to our own sins to shield us from grace. We can allow them, too, to “work for good.” We can allow God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”


Earlier posts in this series:
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Will be Done on Earth...
Give Us this Day

Me, on Memes

Last week I had an entertaining conversation with Peter Jesserer Smith about a most entertaining subject: Internet memes. Specifically, Catholic memes. I have a whole collection of these visual tongue-in-cheek evangelization tools; I share them with missionaries and priests and sisters on sabbatical in a social media workshop.

As I told Peter, the best ones, in my opinion, play with your cultural awareness. All they do is tweak it a bit to remind you in an unexpected way about some dimension of Catholicism.

Here are some of my favorites; share yours in the comments. (Don't know too many? Scroll through CatholicMemes.com!)

Jesus was here.

Posts from the Past: Give us this Day

Revisiting a series first published on this blog in 2005; original post here.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We return to the first person plural: the language of “we” and “our.” And in the verb “give,” we hear the universal voice of our primordial desires. It is the voice with which all creation groans, a voice calling out to God from the ends of the earth. Our desire is to receive; our call is “give us”; our longing is for “bread.” Not just any bread, but “daily” bread, to meet our constant need. “Supersubstantial” bread, to be literal. What else is this daily bread, then, but the very God we call “Father”? It is God, our origin, who alone nourishes and feeds us, whose life we long for.

Our desire, then, corresponds to and expresses a great truth which becomes prayer in the Our Father. “One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (cf. Dt. 8:3). This is “the bread of God come down from heaven” that “gives life to the world” (cf. Jn. 6:33). And this Word, made flesh, is “real food” for us, bread given for the life of the world. Daily bread. Supersubstantial bread, “one in being” with the Father. The only bread that satisfies the hungers of the world, and for which we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Earlier posts in this series:
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Will be Done on Earth...

TOB Tuesday: How Youth Ministers can approach the book Love and Responsibility

From our Vocation Director, Sister Margaret Michael (here's the link if the embed fails again):


More about Love and Responsibility (including some images to share on social media) here.
Get the book (new translation!)

The missing posts, and missing the point

Just realized that all the posts I had scheduled for last week were not actually scheduled at all. So this week I am picking up again the "Posts from the Past" thread on the Our Father. (I have a sneaking suspicion that they may not even appear in the right order, but such is life.)

Speaking of life, it was deja vu all over again around me this week. My superior got a phone call from home: her sister (age 55) had died. Then on the evening of Mother's Day another Daughter of St. Paul from Louisiana gathered with her brothers and sisters as their own mom was invited to follow the Ascended Lord. And today I got a sympathy card from yet another sister whose mom died within the past year. All reminders to take Easter seriously--something I steadfastly (and rather expressly) refused to do during the first two weeks of the season, when I was more interested in hopes for this life than the next in Mom's regard, even though the Liturgy itself, day by day (especially in the Gospels at Mass) was sounding a clear and consistent message about where true life can be found. (I'm glad I'm starting to come around while it is still the Easter Season!)

Have you found yourself turning away from a message in the Scriptures that is so to the point, so timely, and so unavoidably clear that there is no mistaking it is directed to you? How did you "come around"?

Post from the Past: Thy Will be Done

Revisiting a series of posts from 2005; original post here.

Thy will be done.

This petition naturally flows from “thy Kingdom come,” and redeems our notions of “the will of God” as something to be resigned to, to be borne with or suffered through.  

Pope John Paul’s Theology of the Body offers a lovely image of the kingdom of God lived on earth as it is in heaven. For John Paul II, the mutual and complete “gift of self” of the persons of the Eternal Trinity was meant to be lived “on earth as in heaven” through the mutual gift of self in life-giving sexual love. To be a person, according to John Paul, is to be a “gift.” This is how God lives in the unceasing and complete self-gift of the Father, the unending receptivity of the Son (whose receptivity is a complete self-rendering in return), and the Person-Gift of the Spirit. “In the divine image, male and female,” human beings have the vocation to live God’s will of perfect love that gives everything without reserve, and receives everything (including the gift of new life) with complete openness. Sin has wreaked untold damage on our capacity for gift and receptivity, and so we continue to pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Earlier posts in this series:
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name
Thy Kingdom Come

Post from the Past: Thy Kingdom Come

Continuing a series originally published in 2005; original post here.

Thy kingdom come

Citizens of a democracy may be really tripped up by this petition. For many of us, God-as-King is strictly a biblical concept, unrelated to anything we have ever known or experienced. We are used to self-governing, to a vote, to majority rule. We are at the very least suspicious in the face of claims to royal prerogative. “Kingship” doesn’t go over real well. But St. Paul commented “the Kingdom ofGod is not a matter of eating and drinking” (i.e., a matter of the “rule of law,” or of kingship as external government). Instead, it is about “justice, peace and the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit” (cf. Rom. 14:7).

When we ask “thy Kingdom come,” we are asking to be “led by the Spirit of God,” with a resultant outpouring of the “fruits of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience…”  (cf. Gal. 5:22). Earthly rule cannot impose requirements for life on that level. All an earthly kingship can hope to do is limit harmful behavior and coordinate whatever good there is. The indwelling Spirit of God establishes us in an entirely different realm. It is the Spirit within us who cries out “Abba” (cf. Gal. 4:6), and in this Spirit we pray “thy Kingdom come!”

Earlier posts in this series:

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name

Post from the Past: Hallowed Be Thy Name

Continuing reflection on the Lord's Prayer from 2005; original post here.

What’s in a name?

A name could be just a label: canned “TUNA” and not canned “CHICKEN”; “John SMITH” and not “John DOE.” But that’s not the real point of a name. “Name” bespeaks relationship. To withhold one’s name, to remain deliberately a-nonymous, is to refuse relationship, to cut off future possibilities, and even to thwart memory. 

On the other hand, how meaningful it is to hear our name from the lips of a person who knows us well, and who treats one’s name like a treasure. Like Mary Magdalen in the garden, we may not even recognize the other until we hear our own name pronounced. That sound brings to the fore the whole weight of the relationship: its history, its depth, its extent, its yet-to-be-realized hopes. 

Amazingly, the Our Father hints that we can, as it were, awaken all this in the very heart of God when we “call upon the name of the Lord” (cf. 1 Cor. 1:2), the name by which God has introduced himself to us.

May your name always be uttered by those who love you: “Hallowed be your name.”




Earlier posts in this series:
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven