Category Archives: Autobiography

Autobiography

37 TRANSFIGURATION BEGINNING


 

MY HEART JUST, this instant, became suddenly aware of the extent to which this feast of the Transfiguration, and the events surrounding its celebration was a lavishness of His love, His mercy.

 

Graced gift, wherein I was suddenly some twenty years ago, granted yet another moment in which to choose!

To choose between the blessing or curse placed before me, that embrace of love or His refusal, of life or the continued death I was living [Dt. 30: 11-20]!

It was a day in the year dubbed in the press as the “year of three popes! “

IT IS ONE of those sunny, yet cool, spring afternoons as I begin to write again.

In this house of the infirm, where I have been living and serving for some time, along with my duties as chaplain for the hospital, we are holding, today, a fund raiser through the sale of flowers.

Thus the whole place is ablaze with beauty!

My heart looks at the faces of the elderly and the infirm.

Before the beauty of any human face all other beauty fades into the background.

It is the reflected radiance of Your Holy Face, O Incarnate One, O Transfigured One, O Suffering One, O Most Glorious Risen One!

I ponder many mysteries in my heart today: human suffering, sin, death, grace, conversion, ordination, priesthood, hiddenness, this moment!

It is striking, the insistence of St. Paul, that the transformation of the person is connected to the renewal of our mind — in a word — a radical conversion of the way we think. [Col. 2: 6-8]

It is a matter of opening wide not only our hearts but the entire resource of our intellect, imagination, memory, to Divine Wisdom, that we become purified of the shackles of any philosophy, mode of thinking, attitude, rationale, which is contradictory to our God given sacred dignity and person.

During that mysterious long, hot summer, so many decades ago, I was indeed, not merely captivated by, but an advocate of, empty philosophy, and the sheer weight of that emptiness was crushing my being.

I remember that August was ferocious with its heat and humidity, as if the doors of hell hadbeen opened and the heat from that infernal fire was loosed upon the earth.

At the beginning of the month the man who was at that time my companion, left, as they say: ‘for the coast ‘.

For a few days I gave into my old habitual patterns, but there was within me a distinct lack, both of energy and enthusiasm.

Some weeks previous I had gotten word my spiritual director — whom, frankly, I long had considered to be my ‘former’, spiritual director — would be in the city to address a national Catholic Charismatic rally and that he wanted to see me.

The event was to take place in the local sports stadium on August 6th.

For the world: the horrific anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb against human beings, against our brothers and sisters.

It was a day I’d normally be in some protest against such weapons.

For the Church: the celebration of the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

As the sun rose, that particular morning, it was already extremely, brutally hot.

The light and heat sweeping across the balcony, through the open glass doors, slammed into my face with such hot force I awoke feeling my face was blistering.

Opening my eyes the intense light burned as if I had my face right against a strobe light flashing before my eyes.

My being shuddered with a dual sensation of fear and anticipation.

There were hours to go before the rally where my former spiritual director would be speaking.

Time enough to go to that other rally where I would join my voice with others, and groups across the globe, crying out for an end to the seemingly relentless lemming-like drift of the militarists towards a nuclear holocaust.

By mid-afternoon I left the rally and headed towards the stadium.

The city, it seemed to me, was already broiled to a crisp.

The ravaging by the extraordinary beating down of sun’s heat and light seemed to have inflamed my entire being.

When I arrived at the stadium I was astounded not only to see the place packed, the large numbers of Bishops and priests processing towards a raised platform in the middle of the football field, a platform on which was an altar, but even more so by the impassioned energy and enthusiasm of the assembled people.

This was too much religious fervour for me.

I climbed into the higher rows of seats, figuring if I stayed away from the density of the crowd, and especially far out of line of sight with that altar, I’d be protected from whatever, all day long, my being seemed to sense was about to happen.

I was sensing within me an odd mixture of fear, and anticipation.

Suddenly a mitred Bishop approached the makeshift pulpit and motioned for everyone to be quiet.

He announced he had just been informed Pope Paul VI was seriously ill.

The Bishop then called for prayer as a strange murmur washed across the crowd, a murmur not unlike that of a family who has just been told their father is dying.

Suddenly I was thrust back in my imaginative emotions to the sixties and the horrendous anger which I carried when this Pope came out with Humane Vitae.

I had never read the actual encyclical, of course.

I uncritically believed everything both the secular and the rebellious ‘catholic’ press of the time had to say.

After all I was a champion of social justice and what the Pope had done, refuse the pill, was unquestionably an injustice.

How darkly ignorant was I in those days about the extent to which I had been captivated by a secular, empty philosophy, by lie.

After what seemed about a half hour the Bishop interrupted the Mass and approached the microphone once more.

I remember sitting there in that instant as if I were reviewing my entire life and an immense hunger to be real was welling up inside of me.

Yet at the same time there was a strange taste in my mouth as if an immense, sour, blackness was being regurgitated.

I had no idea who I was.

It was as if I were standing beside that seat, looking down at a pathetic lost child.

In a broken voice the Bishop announced that Pope Paul was dead.

Suddenly all around me people were sobbing.

I sat there, stunned, rigid, as if I had no idea what was happening.

Bishops, priests, nuns, old men, women, younger people, children, the police doing crowd control, everyone, it seemed, was sobbing.

How could this be?

How could these people weep over the death of that man?

Only these decades later do I see clearly now, understand, they were weeping over the death of their father, their shepherd.

Perhaps the first awareness was that the wetness on my face felt different from the sweat that had bathed me all day long; perhaps the first awareness was the hug given me by a woman who herself was weeping.

Perhaps it was that I too had been looked at. [Lk. 22: 61]

I don’t recall much after that, not until the whole event was over and I went to search out the priest who still saw himself as my spiritual father.

When I found him near the exit, where he had sent word weeks before we were to meet, he instantly apologized for being in a rush. Then before I could say a word he said he was leaving The Community but would be in touch and he ran to catch the bus!

Jesus had come to Jericho.

I had, so I thought at any rate, started to climb the tree.

Before I did so, Jesus had just taken off on a bus!

In that instant the immense heat seemed to engulf me once more. Within my being it seemed too that whatever I had unknowingly anticipated had been snatched away, or rather taken off on that bus.

How utterly wrong, as time would tell, I was.

How utterly ignorant too of the way the Divine Lover works, in the garden enclosed.

Sin is a terrible burden, the weight of the whole world’s evil pulling our hearts into a darkness worse than annihilation. It begins so simply with little acts of rejection or mere non-acceptance that hook into our infantile need for total love and create in us fear and rage, guilt and sadness. By the time we reach adulthood, even if we have been baptized as babies and raised as Christians, almost all of us have chosen again and again and again to be accomplices in our own rejection. We choose to be woven into the web of selfish fear that is the world’s darkness. We choose to believe in the absence of God, and that absence weighs on our hearts with such constant force that we think it is as normal as gravity.

Then one day, who knows when, we hear that Jesus is passing by. Perhaps we have heard it every Sunday of our lives, but this day that weight of God’s absence in us at last wearies us beyond pride, beyond fear, breaks through to that core of us where we are all emptiness, all longing, and we want only to know one thing; what kind of man is this Jesus? Suddenly, without knowing how we got there, we are up in that tree with Zaccheus, our whole being in our eyes, looking for the face of Jesus. And Jesus looks at us and says, ‘ Hurry up and come down! I MUST stay at your house today. ‘ [Lk.19:5]

All that waiting, all those dreadful years, and it turns out that God has been waiting for us.

…….REPENT means to turn around, to stop believing in the absence of God, to stop building a life without Him, to stop trying to find rest by our own efforts –and, like Zaccheus, to start climbing the tree of salvation so that we can see the life-creating face of Jesus. [by]

 

Autobiography

36 EIGHT YEARS OF THE DARKNESS OF IGNORANCE


THERE IS WITHIN me today a gentle, yet persistent, sense of urgency once again to complete this work, to progress towards the other manuscripts to be written during this sabbatical.

 

As I walked about this workers’ neighbourhood this afternoon, praying the rosary, my heart was filled with awareness of, love for, the working man, the working woman.

This is a city of factories which run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months of the year.

In those factories the average worker makes as much per hour as half of what my weekly pay packet was when I first worked as a postman — yet they are burdened with debt and a sense of irretrievable, daily, slipping away of their dignity, the purpose of their lives.

How urgent my heart feels the need to, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, find the words, the means, the example, which will encourage them to turn to Christ and live; to turn to Christ and have their dignity restored; to turn to Christ and know the holy, purifying, purpose of human labour:

….man’s life is built up every day from work, from work it derives its specific dignity, but at the same time work contains the unceasing measure of human toil and suffering, and also of the harm and injustice which penetrate deeply into social life….man eats the bread produced by the work of his hands….he eats this bread by “the sweat of his face“….[bv]

 

So I came back here and began writing from my notes once more:

HELL IS THE darkness of ignorance, which envelops sentient creatures, when they have lost the contemplation of God. — Abba Evargrius.

 

Back in this country after several weeks past the encounter with Our Lady of Guadalupe, I resumed my frantic existence and entered in that darkness of which the holy Abba speaks.

An ignorant darkness, in which I would remain entangled, shackled, deeply in bondage, for eight terrible years.

An idealized and eroticized image of the same sex plays a large part in homosexual relationships. When in love, the homosexual is really enamoured with his heart’s idealized image of his own sex…..The homosexual’s relationship with his same-sex partner is based more on a projection of an illusory image from his heart than on real love for another person. [bw]

The pursuit of that phantom ideal man would occupy the near totality of my psychic, affective, physical being during those terrible years.

Given its reality, and thus its inherent disorder, it is a sterile pursuit and hence it is a will-o’-the-wisp mode of existence, leading inevitably to promiscuity, for virtually always the familiarity of a relationship leads to a denouement, which leads to a renewed search for the ideal.

Thus, not long after our return, my companion and I ‘freed’ each other, (being disillusioned towards one another, having both failed to sustain the illusion of the ideal), to seek out the ideal.

We would remain friends, continue to share the apartment, but we would no longer be lovers.

Neither of us, of course, surrounded as we were by an increasingly philosophically, apologetically, politically, astute sub-culture, were in a position for sober second thought about any of our ideas, actions or choices.

Thus muted into almost total silence, the conscience itself became smothered by the weight of the darkness of ignorance.

The frenetic state of being which was mine as I pursued the ideal was paralleled by the frantic way in which I spent my working nights as an investigator for the child protection services.

At night I would enter more and more dangerous situations on my own without armed officer back-up. I took on more and more extra, and double, shifts, while on my nights and days off I sought out the ideal with the same frenzy of a heroin addict seeking their next fix.

Within a few months I encountered someone who became the concretized ideal and moved out of the situation I was in, remaining friends nonetheless with my former companion, and into this new one.

Shortly thereafter one evening I was at home and felt a strange sensation, a tingling in my arms, a tightening in my chest, sweats, yet cold.

I phoned a friend who was an analyst but not a medical doctor, figuring I was cracking up.

He said it sounded like a heart attack.

Within minutes I was in the hospital, in ICU, hooked up to monitors, oxygen, IV’s.

In my young life death, in all its natural and inflicted ways, was familiar.

In my young life already I had been in four situations where someone had tried, by violent means, to end my life.

Somehow on none of those occasions, in the core of my being, had death seemed imminent.

This time was different.

It was not so much that I believed I was about to die as that there, alone in that unit with those monitors and the oxygen and the IV’s — well I needed little time to tell myself this could well be it.

Thus began within me a survivalist debate — ask for a Catholic priest, repent, confess, be anointed, accept Holy Viaticum and die peaceful ( or not die and confront reality ) — tough it out, die during some personal plea-bargain session with God, assuming there is such a Person ( or not die and not have to confront reality ) — or die without the repentance and sacramental forgiveness, die without having had a chance to formulate a definitive plea-bargain and burn forever in hell ( but since I do not believe in God or heaven or hell or an afterlife I won’t even know that I’m dead so what’s the debate about ) — or……..

Exhaustion and morphine took hold and I drifted off, the debate unresolved.

Within ten days I was released from the hospital having promised the cardiologist, with no intention of actually doing so, that I would quit smoking, loose some of the stress, eat better, get regular sleep.

He had said the ‘event’ had been a warning.

Looking back across the decades I see now it was not just a warning but another attempt by the Holy Spirit to get my attention.

So thick and dark was the ignorance I was in I both failed to hear and failed to heed.

I belonged to the generation which was in the process of achieving and defining absolute freedom. To admit there was any cost to our pursuit would be tantamount to admitting our freedom was illusory.

Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheistic. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal or moral judgement which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one’s conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one’s moral judgement is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘ being at peace with oneself, ‘ so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgement.

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person’s intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgement about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualistic ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience, and between nature and freedom. [bx]

What the Holy Father is teaching here is classic from the treasury of Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, and, if reflected upon objectively, is basic common sense wisdom.

What we were asserting, by’ we’ I mean those involved in the articulation of argument to justify our lifestyle, and indeed what is articulated still by those opposed to truth, that is, frankly, opposed to Christ, were the following notions which flow as the extreme consequences of chaotic individualism: a] sexual orientation is a genetically pre-determined pre-disposition and therefore is irreversible, yet it is also a matter of free-choice; b] to deny us anything is to discriminate against us and therefore everyone must be forced by law to deny us nothing; c] truth is what I determine it to be for me, therefore I cannot determine it for you, presuming of course you never challenge nor impede my notion of the truth; d] if you are guilty of opposing my ideas in b and c then you are an irrational, bigoted, conservative Christian of cruel temperament who couldn’t possibly understand me anyway, unless you willingly subscribe to, nay participate in, my notions and experience of my reality; e] nothing is against nature nor is anything immoral if it fulfills my wants unless, of course, it is something I don’t want and therefore am free to declare it as being against nature and thus immoral; for all social institutions exist to fulfill me.

It is a basic notion in the economics and physics of energy that if it takes more of the matter to produce the energy, thus the cost to produce will always exceed the profit derived from the use made of the energy, you either abandon that process or go broke.

It is the basic necessity of the product of lie, the denial of truth and the consequences of that denial, the cost if you will, that you must willingly expend un­calculated, yet paradoxically in a very calculated fashion, energy, inventiveness, scheming, protesting, asserting the rightness of your cause, lest there be a breach in the constructed dikes in the intellect and soul against the breaking in of the light of truth which might become a stream of living water washing away the morass of the darkness of ignorance.

So for almost the entire seventies I lived in un-availed ignorance.

Increasingly I slept less, ate worse, and drank more.

Increasingly I worked more, cared less.

Increasingly disillusion tore at the relationship I was in, disenchantment infected my relentless promiscuity.

Increasingly I became dark in my personality, aggressive in my profession, callous in my relationships, bitter in my writing, hopeless in my poetry.

I was burning-out, long before such became a flavour of the month neurosis.

Eventually I had to quit my job, the stress was too much.

I sought out a therapist as the exhaustion had brought on severe agoraphobia.

To make money I worked as a free-lance essayist, did pre-publication book reviews so there would be something to put on the dust jacket of first editions, and, once the agoraphobia was somewhat under control, did club and theatre reviews for an arts magazine.

I agonized a lot too.

 

Autobiography

35 OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE CARES


IN THESE EARLY DAYS OF THE GREAT JUBILEE I am profoundly conscious that it is the Jubilee wherein grace is intensely Eucharistic.

Catching up on my reading over the recent feasts of the Christmas season my heart leapt with joy as my eyes fell upon these words of Pope John Paul II:

 

The Eucharist constitutes the culminating moment in which Jesus, in His Body given for us and in His Blood poured out for our salvation, reveals the mystery of His identity and indicates the sense of the vocation of every believer. In fact, the meaning of human life is totally contained in that Body and in that Blood, since from them life and salvation have come to us. In some ways, the very existence of the human person must be identified with them, so that this existence is fulfilled in so far as it can, in its turn, make of itself a gift for others. [bt]

I resume the telling of this story of Divine Mercy and Divine Persistence in the life of one soul, one sinner — but a Mercy and Persistence lavished upon every soul, every sinner — writing during this night of the Eighth Day, His Holy Resurrection.

When I arrived here in The Community yesterday, Easter Sunday, at noon, I was told my dear Father Confessor of so many years, and whom while I lived here I had the honour to serve and watch over while he was in the main infirmary, had just entered his final sanctifying agony.

For the next twelve hours I kept vigil, praying over him the ancient prayers for the dying, giving him the Apostolic Blessing, and, as I prepared to leave in the early hours of yesterday morning, I bent down and kissed his feet in honour, his hands in gratitude, his forehead in love.

Early in the morning, just before dawn, like Jesus who at that hour would arise and go off to a lonely place to pray, this holy priest, who had faithfully served in persona Christi for sixty-one years, showed himself faithful to the end, as he arose and took the hand of the Risen One and Our Lady and was taken up into heaven.

Today I write in late afternoon.

These past couple of days the men have dug through the frozen earth in the new cemetery by the iced shut river, so that the body of this holy priest might be placed in the earth beside the much younger priest we buried just a few weeks ago.

Brother priests, local people, Community members from far and wide, we all gathered for the sacred ritual of human grief and the sacred mysteries of the heavenly liturgy of hope.

Prayers, holy water, incense, tears — all were lavished with love.

Then, so quickly it seemed I was standing at the mouth of the grave, a shovel full of earth in my hands, my stole gently dancing on the wind as I spilled the earth down and upon his simple wooden casket and the business of burial was done.

I walked off by myself then across the snow covered field, among the birch and pine to the river’s edge.

How many spring, summer, fall days had I worked this area, cutting trees, hauling rocks, smoothing soil, to prepare this final resting place for my brothers and sisters, without truly appreciating in the depths of my being that it would be indeed, brothers and sisters, beloved ones who would be laid to rest here.

How often it is in life we do things without truly understanding what it is we do until there is a moment such as when I stood by the river, when the full impact of what we have done, what we are about, sears across our mind, imagination, heart.

It is a moment of sacred illumination when we come to understand, at least a bit, that true reality is more invisible than visible.

All is grace.

It is thousands of miles between that frozen river’s edges, that moment of profound grief and gratitude, perhaps somehow though not such a great distance in the heart, and Mexico!

All is grace.

So dear confessor, dear priest, dear brother, dear friend, dear Father, who came to know the secret depths of my utter need of Divine Mercy, and through the sacraments of your priestly ordination and dispensing of mercy in confession, you too of the poetic pen, who showed me, taught me, formed me to be a compassionate confessor myself, encouraged my writing, told me constantly to trust I am a child of the Father, who always spoke so trustingly of Our Blessed Mother — adieu: to God!

AN intense winter rain pours down this afternoon as I write these notes from so many years ago.

It is the same time of year as the Mexico blessing.

Almost thirty years since that mysterious encounter with Our Blessed Mother and as I re-read the notes and write them up in a readable form my entire being is struck once again by the immense lavishness of Divine Mercy!

In the center of every human heart, the depths of the soul, the garden enclosed where the Triune God and the real I, the true self, are alone in intimacy, God Himself is there, seeking always to invite, engage, the soul in a dialogue of such profound intimacy we discover there the essence of actual relationship: creature to Creator, child to Father, sinner to Redeemer, beloved to Lover.

It is here, in this sacred solitary aloneness where no other being, no catastrophe may enter, where the soul is most purely free to ascent or refuse Divine Intimacy, that the Holy Spirit Himself, the Sanctifier, the Purifier, may, if only the sinner will cry out for mercy, enact the holy activity of repentance and conversion, quickening the soul deadened by the crushing weight of sin, back to real life — the life of sanctifying grace, the life of participating in the life of the Blessed Trinity, a restoration of being child of the Father, disciple of Christ, responder to the action of the Holy Spirit.

Evangelicals have a notion of this in their concept of ‘being born again ‘, Roman Catholics experience this every time we avail ourselves of sacramental confession, every human being, not yet baptized, enters into this splendour the moment they open their being to the invitation to accept Christ as Saviour and fulfill the necessary steps for preparation for, and then receive Baptism.

No soul is, in a sense, immune to this Triune Divine urgency which is a continual action of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to awaken in each soul a response.

Every soul, because this same God has so generously endowed each of us with free will, is free to refuse to respond.

Horrifically such a refusal, if persisted in until death has overtaken us, results in the eternal damnation of the soul, for such persistence is a refusal of Divine Mercy and only those souls who have given their ascent to their need of mercy can receive mercy.

This is the essential experience of the God-given endowment of what is referred to as the conscience, which is NOT some self-generated moral compass but rather is the very voice of the Holy Spirit within us.

At its most basic it is the very Law of God inscribed upon our hearts at our creation.

Baptism and Confirmation enhance this actual grace of conscience into the sanctifying grace of dialogue with the Holy Spirit.

The essence of such dialogue is that we have a listening heart.

Thus, as a man created in the image and likeness of God, possessed of an immortal soul within which is the garden enclosed, the place of encounter and intimate converse, and further as a baptized and confirmed man, one who had frequently in his younger years been bathed anew in grace through sacramental confession, nourished and sustained by the Very Person of Christ Himself in Holy Communion, when I boarded the jet, making use of leftover funds from the insurance claims after the robbery, for the sojourn in Mexico with my companion, it was as one still being sought by my Father, still being sought by the Good Shepherd, still being called to by the Holy Spirit.

No salutary purpose would be served by detailing anything about that sojourn other than the key event.

God has so lavished Himself upon us at our creation, which is itself a true experience of ex nihilo, for while it is true that He has ordained a human mother and father must be the providers of the physical material, collaborators in the creation of a new human person, He Himself creates each soul, therefore each person, breathing His self into us. So we come to be. In this Divine Love-Lavishness He makes it so that no matter what surface agitations of mind, will, imagination there may be, deep within the garden enclosed is a calm clarity.

We are free to choose to open wide our being to the clarity, to open wide our being to what the Spirit speaks in the intimate dialogue in the garden enclosed, or not.

If we heed, we co-operate with grace.

If we do not heed, He will speak again and again, so long as we live on this earth.

The emphasis, in the truth that with God every moment is the moment of beginning again, must be on God!

He, as it were, begins anew in every moment of our existence, calling us into relationship with Himself.

It is the hallmark of Divine Mercy that He never ceases, as long as we live on this earth, to invite us into relationship with Him.

I cannot emphasize this too much because, as must be apparent already in this story of one sinner in need of mercy, my unheeding, my resistance, my fleeing from Him, my constant dissipating of my inheritance from my Father, seems never ending.

What, I pray, is more graphic, more obvious, most consistent, is the consistency of graced-moments of opportunity to begin again.

All from Him.

All from His love.

All from His lavishness of mercy!

Some twenty-years before this trip, one summer’s afternoon when the elderly man, later in this life to become himself a priest, who was my teacher and mentor as a writer, was showing me how to make an article tauter, he spoke to me of his own conversion experience and the importance in his life of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Indeed at the end he stated in a way which I never forgot, and which exploded anew in my heart as the jet came over those mountains and strenuously dipped towards the Mexico City airport, “ If you are ever in Mexico go to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and open your heart to her love! “

Now I was arriving in Mexico.

Now I was arriving in the city of her shrine.

Now I was remembering.

Now resisting, determined to have any and all experiences but that of going to her shrine.

Grace operates within even that which seems absolutely in opposition to grace.

There is perhaps no better example of this, though not necessarily as a clear answer to the question of why or how God could operate in such a manner, than the life of Job or that of Hosea the prophet.

In the former we see how God permits evil to befall his beloved Job, not as punishment per se, but so Job may exemplify absolute trust in, and surrender to, the loving will of the Father.

In the latter we see through Hosea, called by God not to abandon his adulterous wife, the exemplification of the Tremendous Lover Himself who will constantly grant a new beginning to each one of us IF we will allow Him to take us back, again and again and again, like the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the woman who washed His feet with her tears, like the prodigal son, like frightened servants at Cana, like Peter after his repeated denials. We must come to that moment of truth where we admit to Him our adultery, our arrogance, our running; our denial has so exhausted us, because we have finally tasted fully of His mercy and strive to “go and sin no more.” [cf. Jn.8:11]

Perhaps the hardest thing to admit, to accept, in this mystery of the life of grace, is that conversion does not mean He will prevent us from ever again experiencing sin or weakness or the damage done to ourselves by our sinning — hence, for example, an adulterous spouse may still find themselves divorced; an alcoholic may still die of liver ailment; someone else may suffer from aids, smokers from cancer; thieves and murders and others still be sent to jail; consecrated persons be evicted from their religious communities or the active exercise of their priestly ministry in public— and Pope John Paul II, famously recorded by television cameras forgiving the man who tried to kill him still did not walk the man out of his prison cell.

Sin has consequences and His Divine Mercy does not necessarily, nor I would suggest normally, spare us from the purifying opportunity of those consequences.

That is perhaps the hardest of lessons for Christians to learn and accept.

I have learned it intellectually in my life, that is, I know it to be true.

I have not yet accepted it emotionally and still have this attitude that God is not playing fair, a sort of ‘why I am being punished since I said I was sorry ‘childishness, which itself is the experience of the consequences of sins perpetrated against my being in childhood.

Thus once again I can only, in my MISERIA lay face to the ground and wait in trust upon the fullness of HIS MISERICORDIA!

Thus it was that upon our entering into the airport reception area we were met by two young men, clearly out to hustle tourists.

Thus it was that through them, due to the battle raging in my soul over to, or never, approach the shrine, we ended up with my asking to be driven past there in the dead of night when the place was safely shut-down.

Thus it was that my companion determined since the next day was Christmas day we should return there for Mass.

Thus it was that in spite of my fearful reluctance I ended up at her shrine.

NIGHT HAS fallen as I resume this writing.

It is, for this northerner, a seemingly strangely warm night for January, but apparently not, as I had assumed, typical for this southern city in winter. Nor in the north, as I saw on this evening’s news, where it is warm like late spring. The prognosticators suggest this is further proof of global warming.

My heart simply recalls these words of Pope John Paul:

When man disobeys God and refuses to submit to His rule, nature rebels against him and no longer recognizes him as its ‘master’, for he has tarnished the divine image in himself. The claim to ownership and use of created things remains still valid, but after sin its exercise becomes difficult and full of suffering.[bt1]

Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him. [bt2]

Everyone we human persons are in relation to: God, other, self — as well as everything created, the whole order of nature — all our relating is impacted in a determined way by our sinfulness to increased chaos, by our holiness to increased restoration of all persons and things to Christ.

If we are indeed in a period of unnatural global warming, it is because those of us with the dominate cultures of the industrialized world are greedy. Our sin of greed is the prime source of environmental chaos.

When we willingly, motivated by the highest degree of charity, simplify our standard of living, the natural environmental balance will be restored. A Christ-centric restoration alone will bring this about.

CLOSE TO noon the next day, which was Christmas Day, we traveled across the largest city, at least in population, on the face of the earth, to the shrine.

As we journeyed, by subway, bus, taxi, on foot, I observed the people and was struck by something in my heart I could not exactly define, save to say that even among the poorest, perhaps particularly among the poorest, I saw a radiance in their eyes my being could only yearn for.

Yet seemed to fear at the same time.

When we arrived in the plaza my friend said he would find out when Mass was.

I shuddered interiorly.

I urged him to climb the great stone stairs, go to Mass if he wished, I would wait for him right where I was.

He tried to get me to go with him, but knowing full well how utterly stubborn a person I am, he finally went ahead without me.

The plaza was filled with people, with families, many of whom smiled at me as I stood there at the base of the steps, some even calling out to me the traditional greeting for the feast.

I began to look all the way up the great staircase to the basilica itself, to notice the many pilgrims, some black clad old women alone, some men by themselves as well, dressed in their best, many poor people dressed in all they appeared to have, children, adults, large groups, small family groups, some people dressed in classic peasant garb, all of them ascending the stairs on their knees, praying the rosary.

Was it that I was becoming intrigued by what could be drawing them?

Was it a type of shamed unease as a result of standing there like some rock in a fast flowing stream of people, around whom they were forced to find a path?

All is grace.

Slowly, experiencing a persistent and ever more violent interior shudder, I climbed the great staircase.

The closer I got to the basilica entrance, the more I could hear a chorus of human voices, speaking, praying, and singing.

Outside the noon sun pounded heat and light upon me, each step became a twin effort against the exterior heat and the interior angst.

As I approached the portico my ears detected, from amongst all the other sounds and voices, the words of the central moment of Holy Mass, the consecration.

The urge to enter was immense.

The fear, of a more weighty immensity.

Now I was standing inside, at the very back, and as my eyes adjusted to the shift in light could make out high and way at the front the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I made to flee!

Only my extreme upper body appeared capable of movement.

I could tilt my head, raise my eyes, look towards the image.

All other movement was impossible.

Terror seized my whole being.

Yet it was not now a fearful terror so much as an experience of awe, of desire.

Suddenly from the very core of my being an awareness which urgently rose to a thought which gave way to a yes of my will:

‘MADRE — MOTHER! BRING ME BACK TO YOUR SON! ‘

Suddenly, with a gentle jerk, my body had movement again.

I was stunned.

I turned, fled down the stairs, bumping into a black dressed elderly woman who grabbed my wrist, looked deep into my being, and assured me Nuestra Madre had heard my cry. As Our Lady herself said to the holy Juan Diego: I am the Mother of all who love me, who cry to me, who have confidence in me.

This is, as St. John tells us in the Holy Gospel [ Jn. 19: 26,27]how Our Lady fulfills the mandate Jesus gave her from the Cross, indeed how we fulfill our part for the ‘home’, into which St. John and we are to welcome her, is the very depth of our being, heart, soul.

 

Autobiography

34 A SOUL ENTERS THE NEW MILLENIUM

O HEAVENLY FATHER it has pleased You in the mystery of Your incomprehensible — yet as tangible as the very reality of my existence — love for me, and the billions of my brothers and sisters on the face of the earth in this moment — that we should have crossed the portal into this new millennium, the third of Your Only-Begotten Son’s Holy Incarnation.

Father, my mind can describe relevant theological facts, my mind can list pertinent observations from nature, even my imagination can gaze as far as my eyes are able into the night sky and marvel that wherever that place is where what is created is not there You are still, You who reveal to us the ultimate purity of being: I AM WHO AM.

Father, both faith and reason sear across my being as the double-edged sword of Your word, revealing yet not defining, touching yet not overwhelming, inviting me to be Yours through obedience to Your Holy Will, written in tenderness upon my heart in the moment of my creation by You — a tenderness which in the same moment blesses me with free will.

Father, for my existence, for the blessing of every moment of life, for the gift of Your Son, for trees, water, stars, snow, rain, food, shelter, for all that is life, for my brothers and sisters, for my enemies, for those who love me, for those who do not, for the gift of the Holy Spirit, for everything — thank-You Father.

O LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, how aware I am that through the mystery of Holy Baptism I, as a member of Your Mystical Body the Church on earth, am a living treasury of faith, of the Holy Gospel, and as an ordained priest, of the treasure of sacramental life.

Jesus, how my being yearns to truly know You, to follow You into the depths of Your Holy Mysteries, to live the Gospel with my life without compromise.

Jesus, how my being yearns, how I burned with love and desire as I watched the television images of my brothers and sisters across the earth welcome the new millennium. I burned with love for every human being, burned with a desire everyone should not only come to know You and Your Holy Gospel, but that everyone should be in relationship with You and that we should all love and serve one another.

Jesus, by the will of the Father and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit I have been ordained in Your person as priest — in the pure stillness of this dawning of the New Year, New Century, New Millennium, in the rushing lavishness of grace in this Great Jubilee Year — grant I be not only a good and holy priest but truly priest of the poor, the wounded, the anawim.

O MOST HOLY SPIRIT, if we are to move across this new year, century, millennium, with lives that are peaceful, holy and without sin, then we must come not only to know You, but to love, trust, accept and obey all Your movement within our beings.

Holy Spirit, illumine everyone on the face of the earth, not as judgement or condemnation, but as gift of that enlightenment which renders us desirous of surrendering to Your sanctifying activity within our lives and all creation.

O MOTHER MARY, Mother of the Children of this new time, of this new opportunity to begin again in Christ in this moment of grace, intercede for us that we may open wide the doors of our being to Him, without fear.

Autobiography

33 THROUGH THE HOLY DOORS!

CHRISTMAS EVE 1999 and I sit in the tv room of the house of priests.

We have gathered because of the live broadcast from Rome of the Opening of the Holy Doors in St. Peter’s, the Proclamation of the Holy Year, the Great Jubilee 2000 by Pope John Paul II.

Even now as I write these words several days later my heart is still seeing so brightly the person of Pope John Paul, now called in my heart: The Great!

The image which most shines in my heart is the moment when this elderly man, priest, bishop, Vicar of Christ, Peter in the flesh, was kneeling on the threshold of the Holy Doors which he had just pushed open.

At first the camera was behind him, showing the interior of St. Peter’s still in darkness for the Pope had not yet walked through the doors carrying the Holy Gospels — Christ our Light had not yet entered and torn asunder the darkness.

Then suddenly there was a camera view of the Pope from within the basilica, which showed him bathed in light!

There he was, aged, kneeling, vested in a brilliantly coloured, cope which shimmered in the light coming from behind him.

The Pope knelt very still, head bowed.

Suddenly my heart was transported back across the decades and I beheld the younger man, the forced-labourer in the Solvay chemical factory under the Nazi occupation:

Fellow workers also remember Karol Wojtyla praying on his knees at the Borek Falecki plant, unafraid of ridicule and seemingly able to tune out the racket around him to concentrate on his conversation with God. [bq]

It snows now as I resume these notes.

It is a storm worthy of the majestic ones in Mark Helprin’s “A Winter’s Tale “!

Perhaps it comes from the long winters where I grew up, the joy of being all dressed in white, more so bathed in the purity of grace at my First Holy Communion. Maybe the connection placed in my heart by Our Lady of the Snows between the onset of winter and the wonder of His Incarnation — whatever the originating blessing, I love winter!

It is for me the season of tranquility, contemplation, journey inward, vast expanse of the great liturgical feasts, one expectant stillness after another, prelude to the spring explosion of Easter joy!

Lavishness of snow.

Lavishness of grace!

From this Lent’s extra spiritual reading, an apt description of how I came to be, for more than a decade, mired in the ever deepening chaos of sexual depravity, emotional confusion, all under the guise of modern personal, individual freedom.

It was, of course, in truth, a living in the constant state of mortal sin.

The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for things I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to ‘ leave myself ‘ in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of His life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest. [br]

It would be years, and take a complete exhaustion of my physical and emotional resources, before I would lose my love of my own captivity.

It would take the death of Pope Paul VI before I would begin to accept in my own being the sowing of His grains of life and more, only by His grace, surrender to their taking root.

In those days the man I lived with, and thought I was in love with, [though in reality it was desperately needed affirmation from him rather than love], he and I, kept getting promotions in our different professions.

This made it possible to eventually move from our small apartment into a much better one, in a more upscale area of town.

The point of work, for us, was to have money for indulgence.

The point of indulgence was to relieve the inner fear and desperation for affirmation which was a constant of my existence.

Those were the days before aids; hence any deleterious impact by the prevailing std’s could be dealt with by antibiotics.

Emotional strain was dealt with more by cover-up than facing reality.

Perhaps as a society, certainly as individuals, and I was guilty of this at that time myself, we were overly adept at denial.

Cross-culturally internationally we are still in denial over even the most blatant costs of hedonism, which is destructive and sinful, so far-reaching in its inevitable, tragic consequences.

What of the souls lost?

Those were also the days of what I have come to call, among otherwise well intentioned priests, religious sisters, even significant numbers of non-catholic Christians, the bondage of relevance.

Everyone, it seemed, experienced an urgent need to make the Church relevant to the modern world, according to the so-called ‘spirit’ of Vatican II.

Most of those who wandered into the subculture of hedonism, anger towards God and Church, found themselves subsumed.

Recalling those years and begging God’s mercy not only for my participation in those sins, but for my time as an advocate for legal and theological change to accommodate the culture of self-centered hedonism, my heart cannot refrain, since I would suggest as we enter the 21st Century, the 3rd Christian millennium things are still grossly disordered, from posing the question, first to my own heart, but as priest necessarily to all: WHAT WILL SAVE US FROM THE WRATH OF GOD IF WE DO NOT SOON REPENT? begging of the Holy Spirit that He penetrate the depths of our souls with this truth, a truth which is hope-filled, which calls to true conversion of heart: 1 Peter 2 :24.

The other day I was in a local parish church. The pastor needed a time away to rest and recover from severe bronchitis and I was asked by the Bishop to cover for the priest.

One afternoon, I was sitting in the confessional, the curtain slightly ajar that I might see clearly the tabernacle to contemplate He who dwells there.

In those quiet moments I could also observe the people, mostly elderly women, who slipped quietly into the Church, knelling before Him in silent prayer.

Often they prayed their rosary beads.

I found myself reflecting what a powerhouse of prayer they are, radiating as only another woman can, utter confidence in the maternal intercession of the woman who is the Mother of God, our Mother Mary.

I often think, when those good women add the prayer of the Angel of Fatima, given to the three Fatima children, and through them to the whole Church, therein is to be found the prayerful intercession of thousands of ordinary Catholics throughout the century, praying for souls like my own, even in those days when I was an atheist-hedonist: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.

Of course my heart clearly knows, and accepts, the truth that I am that sinner most in need in the first rank. Nonetheless I am also confident when I pray the rosary that Jesus accepts the plea for whichever soul He chooses.

Each day as a priest I lift up with gratitude all those, as yet unknown to me, faithful people of prayer, living and dead.

Such prayer-warriors, such uplifting assistants, trace their mission back through the ages to Moses at prayer on the hill: Exodus 17: 11-14.

The most dramatic grace I experienced in the period of which I write here was due, I truly believe, to the intercession of such prayers as those of people faithful to the rosary, being offered even in this moment all over the world.

This prayer is particularly efficacious because Christ suffered for us and is therefore our perfect prayer Himself to the Father.

All prayer comes to the Father only through Christ, which grace then was to come into my being after the robbery.

It was a Friday evening and I had the weekend off from my duties.

My roommate happened to return to the apartment at the same time I did.

He noted the door was ajar and at first thought he or I had left it opened when the splintered wood around the lock made a different scenario obvious.

We stepped into the foyer and it was bare.

Even the carpet was gone.

Indeed the whole apartment, save for a near dead geranium tossed with its now broken clay pot into the kitchen sink, was all that remained of the furnishings, carpets, dishes, cabinets.

Though our personal papers were left scattered on the study floor, the filing cabinets in which they had been contained were gone.

Subsequent investigation by the police revealed neighbours had seen a moving van and assumed we were moving out.

Those thieves were never caught, our possessions never recovered.

But then, the truth be told, another thief had long before stolen what alone was of value from the depth of my inner being.

It was simply that now the apartment resembled my soul. [cf. Mt. 6: 19-21]

Standing in that cleaned-out apartment there had been a flicker of light somewhere deep in my being. In the true self, my soul.

That could have been a moment of metanoia had I simply said: Yes!

I preferred my captivity.

My heart recalls as I write that a line from a poem:

For sin’s so sweet, As minds ill bent

Rarely repent, Until they meet

Their punishment. [bs]

Autobiography

32 IN THIS MOMENT

32 IN THIS MOMENT

SO ONCE again I draw upon the original notes for this work.

The notes I have turned to today speak of the struggle which writing was then, often still is.

 

Sometimes writing is an intense experience, as if I had to squeeze my being to extract from somewhere deep inside the flow of words, while at other times the struggle is to stem verbiage!

Sometimes too writing is as a purifying fire: resisted because the dross of my wounds recoils, not wanting to die, while at other times there is a graced impulse to plunge into the fire of grace!

IT HAS BEEN so long since I have written any of this, I can hardly remember, without checking my notes, where I was in the story, or, when I last wrote.

Certainly months have passed.

Months of extreme humid heat, which seem to have incised a languid spirit in me.

Nights, called so often to the ER, I have seen more death of late than any priest should face…because this priest does not want to face his own mortality!

We are at war, in war.

Not the perversely logical impact of bombs and battlefields where a wandering chaplain would at least have the stench of blood, the wail of the wounded and dying to say: ” We are at war.”

This war is disorienting in its invisibility, though in some ways its casualties are no less visible: it is spiritual warfare.

In my youth I was among the enraged marchers against a previous war, among the determined advocates of nuclear disarmament.

I seem these days to be enraged again, not per se against the reality of spiritual warfare, but rather confronted with my own poverty, my experience of weak-faith powerlessness faced with the suffering victims.

I gaze into the eyes of a teenager who is dying because cancer devours his future as relentlessly as it devours his body. Suddenly his eighteen years have passed in a flash, the futility of it all tears at his spirit, he never paid much mind to mortality –even less to what has been not even a concept of immortality. God is but a myth vaguely heard about, now suddenly to be confronted as an urgent panic question.

Dreams not to be dreamt, and the dreamt ones not to be realized; loves hungered after never to be satiated; life tenaciously clung too with the strength of youth now as malleable as a fist full of water, dribbling away no matter the youthful rage denial.

What of this God?

Who is He?

Where is He?

Why would He allow the outrage of a tumour that eats a young heart?

Where is the answer to unanswered prayer?

Where is the miracle we are told to expect?

What, at least, of some magic?

What of this aging, bald, fat, priest who sits on the edge of the dying youth’s bed, appearing to him not so much as priest of the Risen One as angel of death?

Am I not the too wordy proof of religion’s impotence when what is needed, demanded with justified youthful outrage, is power over death?

Yes!

Sometimes I get angry with You too, though I remain always loath to admit that.

I know You love that child, that in Your dying You are power over death, and have died and risen for him.

I know deep in my heart You would not allow death to take him were it not for his good, the good of being taken up into Yourself and divinized in fullness of real life, forever.

But often times we experience Your good as our bad.

The youth asks me if this has happened to him because of something he has done wrong — what we priests call sin, he insists — or failed to do, what he himself refers to as: the waste.

In spite of 2000 years of Christian faith, how we cling to the age old myth about sin, and fail to see the Resurrection has forever changed all previous implications.

Yes.

Death is the result of sin, but not all sin results in death.

So, who has sinned Lord, that this should have happened? [Jn. 9:2,3]

I sit here, equally wounded writing these notes, presuming the lack of miracle for this young man is because of my sins and lack of faith.

Such an egotistical statement.

I am poor and powerless to heal this young man because Your desire to embrace him for eternity is greater than anyone’s urgency that the boy should be denied You!

Yet I would argue for a miracle.

I must argue for a miracle.

As surely as I must anoint him for THE miracle: forgiveness of sins and resurrection from the dead!

I work day in and day out with the broken, the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the victims of self or other inflicted violence, the despairing, the elderly. Face the broken hearted parents when the new born dies, and sobbing children when the parent, young or elderly, dies.

I am battle weary Lord.

Damn tired Lord.

Lord Jesus I do believe, help my unbelief.

The war within myself is a reluctance to go deeper into the desert of the heart, the real poustinia.

Jesus is always inviting us to come higher friend, higher, deeper into communion of love with the Blessed Trinity.

But it is a journey deeper into the self’s absolute need of His mercy — and that’s the struggle!

My spiritual father, tenderly to be sure, nonetheless emphatic for all that, reminds me I must become a desert dweller within, before I can go into the desert of a log cabin in the bush, in the heart of The Community.

There are no short-cuts!

Fleeing the battlefield does not lead to rest within the Father’s embrace.

In this life the battle IS His embrace which gives rest!

Why do I struggle against the hunger I have to be with You alone in the aloneness of the desert within?

If I were humble enough to answer that, in truth, truthfully, I’d struggle no more.

I celebrate Holy Mass every day.

It is true what my mentor-confessor, says: ” Once I have said Mass the day is complete. It is a Divine success. It is a perfect day. “

It IS a perfect day, for You are the Mass.

You ARE the success, You ARE the perfection, You ARE the day!

You are my life.

You are everything.

The truth then is that I don’t want to step into the desert of my heart because my faith is weak.

I still ask who has sinned, rather than state, with simple trust: Lord, have mercy on me, the sinner.

….a poustinik will be a martyr…and he must be prepared for it. It is the martyrdom of facing one’s emotional self. No one wants to face his emotional self. [bp]

Once aspect of the struggle is clear: The more I write this book, the deeper I am drawn, or at least wander, into, if not deliberately enter more deeply, the desert of the heart. I do so overly weighed down, like any novice in a desert, with things I must discard or I shall not be able to journey far: sinfulness, clung to wounds, many possessions which prevent true poverty.

This, then, is not so much a writing remembering of His past mercies as it is the merciful metanoia and kenosis of the present moment.

No wonder, then, such emotional upheaval.

Now we know which man-child rebels against death, which heart is being incised, not by tumour but by the Holy Spirit.

Resistance then is not to writing but to dispossession.

In this moment I am the sinner in need of Your mercy.

In this moment I am the dying man in need of Your Resurrection.

In this moment I am the emotionally wounded in need of the oil and wine of Your very Self.

In this moment I am the desert wanderer parched for You.

Mother Mary comes and picks up this broken child and lays him in the manger beside You so that therein I shall not fear the cross, Your Cross.

She takes me then in her maternal embrace and lifts me up, places me beside You on the Cross, the true desert.

In this moment I must dwell, for it too is the great desert, it too is the wilderness wherein, because You entered, there, first and engaged in spiritual warfare, I must engage battle, the one You have already won!

This wilderness is both interior-desert-lover’s-rendezvous, Nazareth, and Golgotha, the place which is no-place, where You are Healer of we the wounded, Saviour of we the sinner.

In this moment, Your grace!

Autobiography

31 THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

31 THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

IT IS just a few days before the celebration of the Birth of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the first of the new millennium, for it is the beginning of the Great Jubilee, the Holy Year of the Lord’s Favour, the third millennium of Christian Faith!

 

COME, O HOLY SPIRIT, COME

BY MEANS OF THE POWERFUL

INTERCESSION OF THE IMMACULATE

HEART OF MARY, YOUR WELL BELOVED SPOUSE.

As the eleventh century was ending, the second millennium barely begun, there was throughout Christendom much suffering: that of serfs at the hands of feudal lords; of thousands as the Crusades consumed both aggressor and victim; death by plague, civil strife; and so within the twelfth century wounds were deep, dislocation of persons extensive, the embryonic stirring of national identities, scientific, philosophical and other thinkers challenging the presumed foundations of religion, cosmology, politics; the Church herself, East and West, desperately needed reform but that was lost in the dust of internecine struggles which fuelled the Great Schism, emboldened Islam, weakened Rome, divided Europe.

Yet in the midst of all the turmoil would emerge a Little Poor Man/ the Poverello Francis of Assisi and his companions, why even his girlfriend would repent of her dissolute life and show remarkable passion for True Love, while another young man would enter a relatively new monastic order and eventually become a leading force in the affairs of Rome and in medieval monasticism: Bernard of Clairvaux.

Somehow, even when sent off by the thousands to the Crusades, or impressed into the feudal armies because they had no land left to till, or widowed, orphaned by plague or marauding bandits, the common people, that great backbone of any civilization, the ordinary persons alive who are the glory of God, kept the treasure of faith in their hearts and daily living, especially their devotion to, and trust in, the Holy Mother of God Herself, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary.

I mention those two centuries because each year at this time I am struck by how many of the Christmas cards I receive portray images of faith as seen through the eyes of the great artists of the period — and the not so great.

Too, my heart was struck when completing the previous chapter of how immense the role of Our Blessed Mother has been, is, in my own life and how I always feel so inadequate when it comes time to extol her praises.

But then who among us ever feels they have done justice to the memory of their mother?

Finally, when my heart was moved to pause momentarily, in the writing of this story of Divine Mercy being greater than our capacity for sin, and to speak of Mary, I was overwhelmed by the possible reference texts, since my own words in her regard always, as mentioned, seem to me woefully inadequate.

Then I remembered the simple yet shining faith of the twelfth century and the particular love of Our Lady which burned in the heart of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. I went to an ancient translation of his sermons on Our Lady.

Moderns may smirk at the type of language used, but then we smirk at most things that originate in the heart rather than in the intellect.

Non Byzantine or Latin Catholic Christians may shudder at the apparent over prominence given to a woman who is NOT one of the Divine Persons, indeed is herself a redeemed creature.

My only response to the former would be to ask of any mother which means more to her heart, the so-called primitive art and poetry of her children given on mother’s day when they were small, or the list of their adult accomplishments and impersonal gadgets mailed to her in latter years?

My only response to the latter would be to ask all Christians to stand in silence with St. John at the foot of the Cross and listen to Jesus: “Behold your Mother! “

As should be apparent already, and will be again, Our Lady has been, is, an ever consoling and encouraging presence in my life, constantly saying to my heart the words she first spoke at Cana: “Go and do whatever He tells you. “

BEHOLD, O man, the counsel of God; acknowledge the counsel of His wisdom, the counsel of His love. Designing to irrigate the floor with the dew of heaven, the Lord first poured down upon the fleece all the precious liquid {Jg.6:37}: designing to redeem the human race He placed the whole ransom in the hands of Mary. Wherefore this? Possibly in order that Mother Eve might be excused by her Daughter, and that the complaint of the man against the woman might be hushed for evermore. Never again, O Adam, never again shalt thou say to God, ‘The woman whom Thou gavest me to be my companion gave me of the forbidden fruit ‘ {Gn.3:12}; but rather let thy words be henceforth: ‘ The woman whom Thou gavest me fed me with fruit of benediction.’ Here indeed we have a counsel full of love. But perchance we have not yet seen it all, perchance something remains still to be discovered. That which I have told you is true undoubtedly, yet — unless I am deceived — it is not enough to satisfy your desires. You have enjoyed the sweetness of the milk: perhaps if we labour the subject a little more we shall succeed in extracting there from the fatness of the butter.

Let us, therefore, look more deeply into this matter, and let us see with what sentiments of tender devotion the Lord would have us honour Mary, in whom He has placed the plenitude of all good; so that if there is anything of hope in us, if anything of grace, if anything of salvation, we may feel assured it has overflowed to us from her who ‘ went up from the desert flowing with delights ‘ {Sg.of Sg.8:5}. Oh, truly may we call her a garden of delights, which the Divine ‘South Wind’ not merely ‘ comes and blows upon ‘ (Sg.of Sg.4:16}, but comes down into and blows through, causing its aromatical spices, that is, the precious gifts of heavenly grace, to flow out and to be diffused abroad on every side. Remove from the heavens the material sun which enlightens the world, and what becomes of the day? Remove Mary, remove this Star of the sea, of life’s ‘ great and spacious sea ‘ {Ps.103:25}, and what is left but a cloud of involving gloom, and ‘ the shadow of death ‘ {Job 10:22}, and a darkness exceeding dense.

Therefore, my dearest brethren, with every fibre, every feeling of our hearts, with all the affections of our minds, and with all the ardour of our souls, let us honour Mary, because such is the will of God, Who would have us to obtain everything through the hands of Mary. Such, I say, is the will of God, but intending our advantage. For exercising a provident care for us, her poor children, in all things and through all things, the Virgin Mother calms our trembling fear, enlivens our faith, strengthens our hope, drives away our distrust, raises our pusillanimity. Thou wast afraid, O man, to approach the Father; thou wast terrified at the mere sound of His voice, and soughtest to conceal thyself amongst the foliage {Gn.3:8}. Therefore He gave thee Jesus as thy Mediator. What shall not such a Son be able to obtain for thee from such a Father? Doubtless He shall be ‘ heard for His reverence ‘ {Hb.5:7}: for ‘ the Father loveth the Son ‘ {Jn.3:35}. Surely thou are not afraid of approaching Him also? ‘ He is thy Brother and thy flesh ‘ {Gn.37:27}, ‘ tempted in all things like as thou art, but without sin ‘ {Hb.2:17}. Him Mary has given thee for thy Brother. But perhaps thou standest in awe of the Divine Majesty of Jesus? For although He has become man He has not ceased to be God. Perhaps thou desirest to have an advocate even with Him? If so, have recourse to Mary. In Mary human nature is found entirely pure, not alone pure from all defilement, but pure also from composition with another nature. Nor do I deem it doubtful that she likewise shall be heard for her reverence. Assuredly the Son will listen to the Mother and the Father will listen to the Son. My little children, behold the sinner’s ladder, behold the main source of my confidence, the principal ground of my hope. What? Can the Son refuse aught to His own Mother or be refused aught by His Father? Can the Son deny a hearing to her or be denied a hearing by Him? Both suppositions are plainly impossible. ‘ Thou hast found grace with God, ‘ said the Archangel to Mary. Happy Virgin! Yes, dearest brethren, Mary shall always find grace with God, and grace alone is what we have need of. Prudent Virgin! she does not ask either wisdom, as did Solomon {1Kgs.3:9}, or riches, or honours, or power, but only grace. For it is by grace alone we shall be saved. [bo]

Autobiography

30 LAST DAYS – EARLY DAYS

30 LAST DAYS – EARLY DAYS

THERE ARE A mere fourteen days left of this century, this millennium, as I write these lines.

It is hard to discern what has people more preoccupied, their dwindling fears that the world is about to end soon or that there will be come so-called Y2K catastrophic event.

 

My own heart seeks to focus rather on the soon to be upon us celebration of His Birth and the beginning of the Great Jubilee Holy Year!

The world has been renewed by the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and every Christian, in order to achieve his own salvation and sanctification, must be in spiritual communion with the mystery of this death and this life restored. [bm]

ONCE AGAIN I have some free time in which to put pen to paper and resume work on this book, already several years in the writing — which causes me to smile because it is at times akin to chasing a leaf in a fast running stream!

I am back in the south after my week visiting The Community.

Back at work as a hospital chaplain.

The other night as I returned here, picked up the beeper from my brother priest who had covered for me while I was away, I’d no sooner gotten in my car to head here, when the beeper went off.

I drove to the hospital ER, praying for whomever was in need that they live until I could get there and give them the Anointing.

The person I was called to see had tried to take their own life.

How immense the pain of one like ourselves, another human being, a person who has come to believe they are so alone, so not beloved, their pain so overwhelming, they have no option but to mortally wound themselves.

What added weight of sadness, what effort of Self-control over divine anger, must You have endured in the Garden as the crush of such terrible darkness which flows into a person about to immolate themselves for sheer despair, pressed down upon You.

The two basic needs, if I was to satiate my multiple wants, when I got back to the city, were accommodation and food — which, after a few weeks crashing with friends — I achieved by taking work as a janitor and security guard in a college residence.

At the same time I began the ever deeper journey into the labyrinthine world of drugs, homosexuality, Marxist and atheist thought, the latter actually not so much a matter of thought as surrender to the Zeitgeist.

Little by little through contacts at the college I began to resume my poetry, essays, and started work on a novel and a play.

Very quickly the toll on my physical and emotional health of poor diet, drugs, heavy drinking, countless escapades in the pre-aids world of deviance, began to make me even more interiorly angry and anxious.

Thus when the various ‘liberation’ movements, the anti-nuclear war movement, and the ‘free’ clinics ( legal, medical) movement began I was more than willing to participate, sometimes as a volunteer, sometimes as a ‘hired-hand’ — because I need the intellectual justification for my deviance on the one hand, my restless, seemingly purposeless, existence on the other.

When I look back across the decades at the lectures I used to give, the articles written, the drivel I expounded with such authority — well St. Paul’s word to the Romans 1:18-32 tidal waves me to my knees!

The simple truth is in those days I had become completely split from my true self, had lost all sense of personhood, and was thus constantly walking beside myself.

Indeed there would be times — for example in the so-called throws of passion — when it was as if I were a mere observer of the actions of a stranger.

I had entered a type of night of the living dead.

I had become a walking-wounded, too shocked by the violence done to my being to simply lay down and die.

Eventually — perhaps inevitably — I met a particular man with whom I attempted the simulacrum of marriage.

I lied to myself that this was an attempt to give love rather than simply be a taker.

The truth is you cannot make any kind of order out of a constant whirlwind of disorder.

However with this man I did get some semblance of focus into my turbulent life — I moonlighted with him as a DJ and with his encouragement made use of my talents, training and experience and applied for and was hired on as an investigative-social worker with the local child protection services.

That latter gave some purpose to my otherwise totally dissolute existence.

The relationship was, however, fraught with its own inbuilt fatality both because, as all such relationships un-exceptionally are, it was unnatural. Also, because it is constitutive of the lifestyle to seek always more, and different, experiences.

It lasted only the norm, which is about three years, for such a relationship, for it is impossible in such a relationship to make a true and complete gift of the self — because the very nature of the same-gender basis means that the only constant possible is sterility.

That did not stop me from becoming ever more adept at arguing the contrary as I became ever more deeply involved in the radical politics of so-called liberation.

Not all of my activism was to justify a disordered lifestyle. Some of it was genuine advocacy for the very poor, the homeless, etc.

Through such work I volunteered with a street project for the homeless, a project run by a woman who had previously been a missionary with the Church in the now non-existent country of Biafra.

Age was forcing her to cut-back on her work, indeed she was about to retire, when she asked me to come by and visit her office.

What follows is another example of how He is always at the door of our being, knocking {Rv.3:20} — and how Our Blessed Mother Mary is always saying to every human heart the words she spoke at Cana of explicit trust in Him [Jn.2:5].

All who knew this woman, were inspired by her, benefitted from her love, indeed she was a totally committed Catholic who took seriously the Gospel mandate of service to others, gathered on her last day for a surprise retirement party for her.

It was a pleasant enough gathering until she and I were alone in her office as things were winding down and she gave me a gift!

It was an ivory statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

An old non-Christian African man had carved it for her by way of gratitude for her care of his people during those horrific months of Biafra’s seemingly interminable agony which ended, as history shamelessly records, with that little country being wiped off the map.

As the woman gave it to me — I the deeply wounded, neurotic, atheist sinner — she said very gently, and with a respect which, frankly, awed me as much as unintended I am sure, shamed me: ” I pray to Our Lady every day for you. I pray you will return to the Church. I pray you will become a priest. “

I refused to take ‘it’ — actually was refusing to touch Our Blessed Mother.

She would not allow me to refuse and insisted if I had any respect for her at all that I accept the statue.

When I got home I stuffed it in the bottom of a trunk.

However over the years I could never, for long, forget that it was there!

Years later, after I had begun the journey of return to the Church, I took it out one day and put it in a place of honour, lit a candle before it and, of this my heart is sure, Our Lady smiled!

Many years after that, when I had been a priest for some time, I met a man who was in the same state I had been in when that woman first gave me the statue.

I told him the story, gave it to him, asking that someday when he was ready, secure in his return to the Father, he would pass on this presence of Our Blessed Mother.

There is one other event from those early years back in the city which had a tremendous impact upon me, at least insofar as the matter of drug use was concerned, for it scared me straight off drugs.

The man I was living with being away on a business trip, and I being such a pleasure and novelty addict — the two being inextricably linked — I went to a typical party for those days where nothing was taboo.

Besides the obvious drinks and drugs which were being consumed by one and all in great quantities, and the usual atmosphere in such a gathering, my deep inner being from the moment I arrived, detected a presence I was trying to deny, but must admit now that even then I knew, though again refused to pay attention to, it was an actual evil presence.

Sometime just after midnight I was aware I was ‘tripping’ on something I had not knowingly consumed and would find out much later someone had deliberately put large doses of LSD in people’s drinks, mine included.

Avoiding unnecessary detail suffice to say when I was alone in my apartment, some twenty-three stories above ground, it was as if the exterior walls were gone and I was being urged to step into the abyss.

I remember being utterly terrified beyond describing and yet somehow deep inside of my being knowing as well the only way I would survive what was happening was if I somehow anchored myself physically, and mentally willed myself immobile.

Thus I lay down on the bed and kept repeating to myself: “I will not move. I will not move. I will not move. “

I have no accurate memory of how long that went on, though I do have a sense of night turning to day, to night, to day, to night. Knowing it was over by the excruciating pain in my hands.

I had held on to the edge of the bed so tightly, actually grasping the steel frame, that I had cut both hands.

For years I lied to myself that I had survived by grit of my own will.

The truth is I survived because long before a single drop of my blood hit the floor of the bedroom during those hours of terror Someone else had stepped into terror and bled upon the ground for me:

We participate in this mystery only when we realize and admit that its content is our sin. Mankind’s sin constantly being relived in our own deeds and omissions today and yesterday and always; in all our daily rebellion and lassitude, interestedness and sharpness; in the indescribable evil deep at the root of our whole attitude towards existence. We understand here as much as we understand that in the agony of Gethsemane the ultimate consequences of our sin had their hour. Not before we have surrendered ourselves to the dreadfulness of that hour will we understand, really, what sin is. In the measure that we comprehend sin, we comprehend Christ; and we comprehend our sin only in the measure that we experience what he experienced when He sweated blood in the night.[bn]

Autobiography

29 THE CITY AGAIN

                                                  29    THE CITY AGAIN

IT HAS BEEN an unusual day!

In spite of my doing my best to be hidden, I got called by a friend to attend a home in the neighbourhood to anoint an elderly man.

 

Walking back from the home, carrying the man, his wife, their family of three generations in my heart, I was struck by the great mystery of having grown up in the city through whose harbour and streets most of the immigrants to this country passed in the days of steamships.

Because of the first major civil war in their country after the Second World War I came to know many of their countrymen, children like myself.

Then some decades later one of their number, as a Bishop, taught me much on how to be a true priest-father.

Thus, this day, my heart knew the right words to comfort the old man!

Truly, as the Scripture says: HIS ways are not our ways!

THE RETURN to the city was again, but on a deeper, angrier, perverse, determined level, the fleeing from the Father of the prodigal. Therefore it was a more complete wasting of my baptismal heritage.

Indeed, it was a more profound waste of my very personhood.

Among the multiple manifestations of evil, one can discern three symptomatic aspects — parasitism, imposture and parody. The evil one lives as a parasite on the being created by God……..An imposter, he covets the divine attributes, and substitutes equality for resemblance…….a jealous counterfeiter he imitates the creator and constructs his own kingdom without God……………Evil, as a parasite, sticks to being, vampirizes and devours it. [bl]

It must be faced, told, confessed, that by returning to the city I was deliberately offering myself as a host being for that diabolical parasite.

This is the choice of a baptized person to be anti-Eucharist.

It is to choose a life of mortal sin.

Christ offers Himself to us, the True Vine, of which we become the branches, grafted onto Him in baptism.

Christ offers Himself to us, Head of His Body the Church, of which we become members at our baptism.

Christ offers Himself to us, Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity, in the Holy Eucharist, becoming our Real Food, our Real Drink, without which we actually die from real starvation, real dehydration — for if the soul is starved, if the soul endures a thirst never satisfied — life becomes unbearable, for we have chosen to exist, but not to live.

Fullness of living means a life in Him, with Him, through Him, for Him, until, in truth, we no longer live, Christ lives in us.

The first step in re-entering this communion of love with Him — since love and truth are inseparable — is to stand before Him, bow low, prostrate ourselves face to the ground — like the woman in the Gospel who placed herself at His feet and washed them with her tears — and say, simply, truthfully, seeking no excuse, none other to blame: LORD JESUS CHRIST, SON OF THE LIVING GOD, HAVE MERCY ON ME, THE SINNER.

But, like most moderns, steeped as I was in the relativistic rationalism of the modern era, what I should have seen with clear eyes — for the truth of this was experienced daily in my exhausted interior being, ragged emotions, desperate search for gratification, despair of purpose and meaning in life, constant physical ailments, the stress of never enough money, things, pleasures, distractions, the relentless effort to develop ever more detailed philosophical, scientific, political, psychological, historical, cultural argumentation to justify my increasing enraged and depraved existence — I refused to contemplate as assuredly as the Romans to whom St. Paul wrote about the consequences of denial of truth and darkening of mind. [cf. Rm. 1: 18-32]

This is no judgement of the heart of anyone else but myself, though I would declare quite frankly that this Pauline observation is an astute assessment of contemporary culture, society, philosophy and the basic mind-set of a tragically significant portion of the population, irrespective of their chronological age or even their ethnic/religious background.

I am, of course, alone in my responsibility for my own sins.

I generate my own MISERIA when it comes to choosing sin.

True, there may be suffering, misery in my life, caused by the sins of others — here Jesus tells me what I am to do is to forgive.

 We experience mercy and are called to be merciful.

 

Mostly, if not virtually exclusively, the miseria of my years in the city was of my own making.

So, I remember: I remember the journey back to the city, daylight ebbing ever faster as the spires of the great financial towers, the squared jawed outlines of apartment blocks, spiked the horizon, their windows filled with cat’s eyes yellow light, as if the city were a jungle in whose branches lurked a thousand panthers.

Because of the way I would choose to live, and the work I did for almost all the years I was in the city, all but a very few of the memories of those years take place shrouded in the pall of night.

 

Autobiography

28 BETWEEN UNREAL AND THE REAL

                            28            BETWEEN UNREAL AND THE REAL

FROM VESPERS of this Advent Sunday of Joy:

Creator of the stars of night,

 

 Your people’s everlasting light,

 

 

 

 Jesus, Redeemer, save us all,

 And hear Your servants when they call.

 Now, grieving that the ancient curse

 Should doom to death a universe,

 You heal all men who need Your grace

 To save and heal a ruined race.

 {Anon., 7th Century }

 

As I continue to draw from the reams of original notes for this book, written originally nearly a decade ago, it has become clear to me that back then I was not exercising proper discernment about detail.

The point of this book is to show how, in one particular life, where sin has abounded His grace has abounded all the more.

For that it is neither necessary, nor salutary, to include details which would distract hearts from openness to metanoia, true change of heart, conversion.

Details then are not as important as excerpts from a life which show that no matter what we may consider to be our capacity for sin, His mercy, is greater.

God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, is never outdone in generosity.

True, my obedience is to write, not to get published.

Hence this work may never be seen by anyone other than my spiritual father and a few persons close to me.

Discernment applies however, for there is always the danger when remembering of forgetting, forgetting to name sin for what it is and having an equally sinful type of romantic notion of a past for which the only proper attitude is contrition for my actions, unrelenting thanksgiving for His.

So once more from the original notes:

IT IS THE FEAST OF CORPUS CHRISTI!

Feast of The Real!

The opening prayer for Holy Mass of the feast acknowledges this mystery of Christ dwelling among us, alive in the Holy Eucharist, as we make a pledge to offer ourselves to the Father, an undivided love to all our brothers and sisters.

Our lives poured out for them.

The life we are called to pour out is our very selves vivified by His own Self-Gifting in the Holy Eucharistic wherein we receive Him, communion of love, and because He fills us with His own Self-Gift we are enabled to make the gift of self, especially upon the poorest of the poor: our enemies.

I am on a doctor ordered rest before resuming my duties back in my own diocese.

Resting here in this small town air-conditioned rectory of a dear friend, and brother priest, there is time to resume this writing.

From time to time I leave this air-conditioned coolness to go, stand upon the porch, gaze about the neighbourhood of this southern town, which is sweltering in the unique mixture of heat and humidity that seems to form the very cadence of life in these parts.

I have been here long enough to recognize a — what is the day’s politically correct term, mentally challenged? — man who delivers flyers for local businesses.

If he sees me outside when he comes by he will smile, greatly, and rush towards me with genuine excitement: “Here Father!”, thrusting a fist full of flyers towards me, rushing away instantly I take them, my ‘ Thank-you.’ chasing him down the sidewalk.

Today was a flyer day and after the benediction of his smile I suddenly was transported in my heart back to the old neighbourhood of my childhood and saw again the little girl, challenged as this man, in the days when having a retarded family member was cause for shame.

But, perhaps because in our neighbourhood every family had been devastated through two World Wars and the Depression, by polio epidemics and the vagaries of life in general, there was no shame for her or her family.

 Indeed even the majority of we children saw her as joy, and she was indeed a joyful child.

She would always run up to me whenever I saw her and announce: “I pray for you all the time.”

 

Between my original leaving the neighbourhood, and my eventual return some few days after my priestly ordination, a quarter of a century would elapse.

The child’s now elderly mother, came to my Mass of thanksgiving.

Not seeing her daughter I asked about her.

I was told she had died the previous winter but, her mother assured me, even to the last day of her life, every evening, she had prayed for me by name.

…suffering…has a special value in the eyes of the Church. It is something good, before which the Church bows down in reverence with all the depth of her faith in the Redemption………TOGETHER WITH MARY, Mother of Christ, who stood BENEATH THE CROSS, we pause beside all the crosses of contemporary man…….. …we ask all YOU WHO SUFFER to support us. We ask precisely you who are weak TO BECOME A  SOURCE OF STRENGTH for the Church and  humanity. In the terrible battle between the forces of good and evil, revealed to our eyes by our modern world, may your suffering in union with the cross of  Christ be victorious! [bi]

After that noxious incident with the voice from the phone I eventually started going to the out-patient psychiatric clinic at the main city hospital. Unfortunately the doctor assigned to my case had such a hatred for the Church he claimed nothing was wrong with me. It was all ‘them’.

Just before that happened my former superior tracked me down, how I forget. At any rate when he learned of my plight he contacted a friend of a friend and soon I was on the move again.

This time far out in the country to work as a hired hand on a farm.

Only these decades later do I realize how truly proverbial that was!

It was late fall when I arrived there.

 The situation I found myself in was terrible.

Suffice to say the elderly couple appeared to hate each other.

The old woman was an awful cook who favoured lumpy porridge, salty beef and boiled potatoes, never varying the fare the whole winter I worked that farm.

My whole time there I was denied access to all but a small attic alcove when it came to the house.

It was so cold at night I’d sleep with all my clothes on.

Eventually, to cope with the isolation and loneliness, I bought a transistor radio with a little earpiece.

During the long cold nights I would lie there in my attic room, listen to the radio station from the city, so far away often times the static cut out the music.

 I’d yearn to be back in the city.

IT IS eight months since I wrote the above, beginning with reflections on the feast of Corpus Christi.

I remember seeing around the same time a film version of one of my favourite Graham Greene novels: Monsignor Quixote.

Most powerful scene in the film, which remains on my heart, is the final struggle of the priest to surrender to faith in The Real.

The dying priest, clad in pyjamas as vestments, fire filled eyes as candles, the passion of his struggle compelling him to approach the seemingly barren stone altar, he celebrates Holy Mass with no book, no chalice, no un-consecrated bread upon paten.

He is there, going through all the gestures as if he were at the high altar in St. Peter’s, or in the poorest chapel in the most remote of mission territory, and was at table with Jesus in the Upper Room.

In order to become healthy, we must honestly narrate our heart’s love story to God and seek His insights as to how our hearts became so confused…..we can look at the past in total honesty and see it as it truly was….[bj]

 

This moved my heart to recall a powerful teaching of Pope Paul VI:

WE ALL – YOU, ME, EVERYONE – need a solid basis on which to build the edifice of the spiritual life.

The foundation for me comes in two words, two concepts of St. Augustine.

The great mystery of God for me has always been this: that in my MISERIA I still find myself before the MISERICORDIA of God; that I am nothing, wretched; yet God the Father loves me, wants to save me, wants to heal me out of this MISERIA, something I am incapable of doing left to myself.

Then the Father sends His Son, a Son who represents God’s mercy (MISERICORDIA), Who translates it into an act of love towards me, an act of complete self-abandonment to the Father because He must save me too, wretched as I am. But a special grace is needed for this, the grace of conversion. I have to recognize God the Father’s action in His Son in my regard. Once I acknowledge that, God can work in me through His Son: He gives me grace, the grace of Baptism. After the grace of being reborn to God’s life, my life becomes a tension of love, with God drawing me towards Himself. And the loving hand of God draws me onwards towards His mercy, which raises me up when I fall; I have to fix my gaze on Him to be drawn upwards yet again.

Always in all of us, there is this tension between my MISERIA and God’s MISERICORDIA. The whole spiritual life of every one of us lies between those two poles. If I open myself to the action of God and the Holy Spirit and let them do with me what They will, then my tension becomes joyous and I feel within myself a great desire to come to Him and receive His mercy; more than ever I recognize the need to be forgiven, to receive the gift of mercy. Then I feel the need to say grazie, grazie, grazie, thanks, thanks, thanks. And so my whole life becomes a grazie (gratia/thanksgiving/Eucharist) to God because He has saved me, redeemed me, drawn me to Himself in love. It is not anything I have done in my life that saves me, but God’s mercy. [bk]

Towards the end of that winter I had occasion to be in the city.

 I had a day off and was on the prowl.

I did not score either drugs or sex and as the time came to take the bus back to the hinterland, the job and living condition I hated, I was in a rage.

Running to catch the last bus in such a state I was incautious and tripped over a snow bank, crashing onto the street with such force I smashed my glasses and cracked open my skull.

Pressing a handkerchief against the wound to stop the blood, stubbornly I got on the bus, ignored the headache, was further enraged at what ‘deity’ would allow pain upon pain in my life.

 A few weeks later, winter past, my rage enduring, I quit that farm job and returned to the city.

Within weeks I was fully committed to such a depraved existence even the proverbial prodigal son would have been embarrassed by the depths of depravity and anger.

I had chosen to wallow in MISERIA, denying and declining any openness to His MISERIDCORDIA.

Suddenly I pause in this writing, and I see that young man, face smashed against the pavement in his rage, so utterly convinced in his broken being he is un-cared for, un-wanted, even of God, and I see YOU!

You, battered and beaten by the soldiers, in Your passion, took upon and into Yourself the real force of every blow, physical and emotional, self or other inflicted, which ever comes against us.

I see You kneeling beside my crumpled form, and it is Your hand, rather than a dirty self-held handkerchief, which stems the flow of blood.

Your shimmer this night of Your Holy Resurrection Octave Day, to the farthest reach of my consciousness, to the most profound depths of my being. Within the mystery of Your communion of love You are closer and more intimate to me than I am to my very self.

You lavish Yourself, but never overwhelm.

You gift Yourself, but never impose.

You love me so ardently I then yearn to be loved by You who has already, first, loved me, and in the loving You render me ardent to love everyone!

In the giddiness of being loved by You I yearn to run throughout the earth, crying, shouting, singing of You to all: HE IS RISEN!

Suddenly my heart understands there is no depth of miseria within which You hesitate to descend to seek us — and You will seek and find us again and again and again — even among the dead You descend and seek and seek and what can we do but cry out: Lord have mercy!

 

Allow my heart this night O Risen One to go with You into every street, to kneel with You beside every man and woman who has fallen, believes they are so crushed none is there to care or lift them up — let me be Your hands to lift and comfort them —

This pen must stop. These words, this night, must cease.

GLORY TO YOUR HOLY RESURRECTION, O CHRIST OUR GOD, GLORY BE TO YOU.