6 CONFIRMATION: AFFIRMATION BY THE SPIRIT

                               

We know that through sacramental Baptism we are plunged into the sacred mystery of salvation. Through the same sacrament we become participants in the history of the Church. Through Baptism we are configured by the Holy Spirit initially, and ever more completely if we co-operate with grace throughout our lives, to Christ, crucified and raised from the dead.

Baptism initiates us into discipleship. We are not only escorted through the gateway of sacramental life, but encouraged, as it were, by the same Holy Spirit, to hunger for the fullness, source and summit of the life of grace, receiving Christ in the Most Holy Eucharist.

Grafted as branches onto the Vine Himself we become members of His Mystical Body, members and children of Holy Mother the Church, participants in the life of the Communion of Saints, interceded for by the saints in heaven and benefiting the souls in purgatory by our prayer on their behalf.

At the same time, through Baptism, we become participants, co-workers, in Christ’s own priestly, kingly, and prophetic mission.

We become missionaries, first to our brothers and sisters in the Faith, then to all who, knowingly or not, are seeking the fullness of sacramental life, life in Christ, Christian life,  the anointed life.

Now, through Christ become true children of the Father, co-heirs with Christ, living temples of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit continues His work within all the Baptized, and within those chosen by Him to become priests, the process of our divine election.

In the context of our divine election the sacrament of Confirmation, being as it is the second of the three sacraments which indelibly seal the soul, is most worthy of our frequent meditation upon its continuous gift of the grace of fullness of the Divine Guest of the Soul and the consequent gifts and fruits which the same Holy Spirit lavishes upon us.

We alone, chosen by divine election and ordained in persona Christi, are blessed, sanctified, sealed with all three of the Holy Sacraments which indelibly mark the soul.

Marks: of holiness and beauty.

Marks: of communion of love.

Marks: of joy.

Marks: of no little responsibility to become what we are.

Haunting marks for all eternity even should we – may Christ have mercy on us – die unrepentant in the state of mortal sin.

Of course it may well be since for most of us it is many, many years since the day of our youth when we were confirmed, that the continuous reality of this sacrament is not always, nor even easily, present to our hearts.

The following may well help us recall that marvellous day when the Bishop, shepherd and father of our souls, anointed us with the Sacred Chrism, calling down the Holy Spirit who comes upon us laden with such heavenly gifts for us from the treasury of Christ’s Redemption:

   ….the reception of the sacrament of Confirmation is necessary for the completion of baptismal grace. For ‘by the sacrament of Confirmation, [the baptized] are more perfectly bound to the Church and are enriched with a special strength of the Holy Spirit. Hence they are, as true witnesses of Christ, more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith by word and deed. [57]

Completion of baptismal grace, more intimately bound to the Church, lavished with that strength which is of the Holy Spirit, affirmed in our reality of being witnesses of Christ and enjoined with the full range of joyful obligation to be evangelizers and defenders of the faith, with all our words and deeds!

It is the call to preach the Gospel with our very lives!

If we truly take this to heart, how much easier it will be as priests for us to labour joyfully, even in the heat of the day, in the vineyard of the Lord, to tirelessly tend the flock, and adhere with deep interior peace to all that Holy Mother the Church teaches and to submit with magnanimity to the demands of being called, rightly, Father; clerical dress; fidelity to rubrics.

Indeed we shall, through such little things done well, find within us that courage which has endowed the Church over the centuries with a vast cohort of sainted confessors and brave martyrs.

Further, we shall soon discover that the Spirit Himself blesses such fidelity on our part through the return of many souls to the sacraments and the conversion of countless others to the faith we proclaim with our lives.

How vital then, in light of this sacrament of Confirmation which binds us ever more closely to Holy Mother the Church, that we take deep into our hearts, and given the reality of the times grant pure intellectual ascent too as well, the Church’s own self-understanding:

                                                     …awareness of the mystery of the Church is a result of a mature and living faith. From such faith comes that ‘feel for the Church,’ which fills the Christian who has been raised in the school of the Divine Word. He has been nourished by the Grace of the Sacraments and of the ineffable inspirations of the Paraclete, has been trained in the practice of the virtues of the Gospel, has been imbued with the culture and community life of the Church, and is profoundly happy to find himself endowed with that Royal Priesthood proper to the people of God.

                                                  The mystery of the Church is not a mere object of theological knowledge; it is something to be lived, something that the faithful soul can have a kind of connatural experience of, even before arriving at a clear notion of it. Moreover, the community of the faithful can be profoundly certain of its participation in the Mystical Body of Christ when it realizes that by divine institution, the ministry of the Hierarchy of the Church is there to give it a beginning, to give it birth, to teach and sanctify and direct it. It is by means of this divine instrumentality that Christ communicates to His mystical members the marvels of His truth and of His grace, and confers to His Mystical Body as it travels its pilgrim way through time its visible structure, its sublime unity, its ability to function organically, its harmonious complexity, its spiritual beauty.

Images do not suffice to translate into meaningful language the full reality and depth of this mystery. However after dwelling on the image of the Mystical Body, which was suggested by the Apostle Paul, we should especially call to mind one suggested by Christ Himself, that of the edifice of which He is the Architect and the Builder, an edifice indeed founded on a man who of himself is weak but who was miraculously transformed by Christ into solid rock, that is, endowed with marvellous and everlasting indefectibility: ‘It is upon this rock that I will build My Church.’

                                            If we can awaken within ourselves such a strength-giving feeling for the Church and instil it in the faithful by profound and careful instruction, many of the difficulties which today trouble students of Ecclesiology, as for example, how the Church can be at once both visible and spiritual, at once free and subject to discipline, communitarian and hierarchical, already holy and yet still be sanctified, contemplative and active, and so on, will be overcome in practice and solved by those who, after being enlightened by sound teaching, experience the living reality of the Church herself. [58]

Christ loves His Bride the Church, pours Himself out for Her.

Confirmation binds us, as all Her children, more closely to Her, thus closer to Her Divine Bridegroom.

Ordination, configuring us in persona Christi, configures also in the person of He who is the Divine Bridegroom.

We are sacramentally blessed with a double grace of love for the Church.

Flowing initially from the sacrament of Confirmation for us, and for all the laity as well, this love for the Church means a deep respect and adherence to all the Church believes and teaches, celebrates and lives.

The Church is both communal and missionary by Her very nature, so we too are called upon to foster and participate in the communal, the family dimension of this pilgrimage through time as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and, to be evangelizers, missionaries, both to the de-churched and the un-churched.

True for all the Baptized, affirmed and strengthened in this mission of forming the community, the family, the civilization of love and spreading the Gospel, through the sacrament of Confirmation, how much more so does this become a sacred responsibility, and joy, for we priests in virtue of our sacramental ordination.

                                                           “It is the first task of priests as co-workers of the Bishops to preach the Gospel of God to all men…[so as to]…set up and increase the People of God.” Precisely because preaching the Gospel is not merely an intellectual transmission of a message but “the power of God for the salvation of all who believe” (Rm.1:16), accomplished for all time in Christ, its proclamation in the Church requires from its heralds a supernatural basis which guarantees its authenticity and effectiveness. The proclamation of the Gospel by the sacred ministers of the Church is, in a certain sense, a participation in the salvific character of the Word itself, not only because they speak of Christ, but because they proclaim the Gospel to their hearers with that power to call which comes from their participation in the consecration and mission of the Incarnate Word of God. The words of the Lord still resound in the ears of His ministers: “Whoever listens to you listens to Me; whoever despises you despises Me.”(Lk.10:16). Together with St. Paul they can testify: “The Spirit we have received is not the world’s spirit but God’s Spirit, helping us to recognize the gifts He has given us: we speak of these not in words of human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, thus interpreting spiritual things in spiritual terms.”(1Cor.2:12-13). [59]

In a deep and intimate way, through contemplation of the full meaning and continuous grace in our lives of the sacrament of Confirmation, we can become closer to the Divine Guest of the soul, the Holy Spirit.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, at least within the Western Church, there was a tendency to take the Holy Spirit for granted.

Some spiritual writers of the time often referred to Him as the forgotten Person of the Holy Trinity.

Here I will draw upon a classic work by the great and holy former Archbishop of Mexico, Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, whose profound work, written with deep devotion, is known in English as THE SANCTIFIER.

                                                         To the Artist of souls, sanctification and possession are the same act: for sanctification is the work of love, and love is possession.….the first relationship that the Holy Spirit has with souls is that of being the delightful Guest…..

                                                        The first gift of love is love itself, and all other gifts emanate from this supreme gift, as from their source. Therefore, the Gift of the love of God is the Holy Spirit.

                                                         The Holy Spirit brings to our souls the fruitfulness of the Father and binds us lovingly to the Son.

                                                       ….the Holy Spirit is truly the soul of our soul and the life of our life.

                                                          On the night when Jesus made us His friends, He revealed His secrets to us, and we heard from His lips the unfathomable promise that the Spirit of Truth would teach us all things. The operation of the Holy Spirit in our souls is motion. He sanctifies us by directing all our activities with the sweetness of love and the efficacy of omnipotence. He is the only One who can moves us in this way because He alone can penetrate into the hidden sanctuary of the soul, the enclosed garden, invisible to creatures.

                                                  ….in this very special movement the Holy Spirit takes up His abode in the deepest, the most intimate and most active part of our being. He constitutes Himself the immediate director of the soul, which in its full strength and freedom moves only under His inspiration. This intimate and very special movement is the work of love. It is founded on love, caused by love, and leads to love.

                                                   The Holy Spirit must be intimately united to a soul in order to move it. He moves us because He loves us……His movement is the caress of infinite love; …..the Holy Spirit moves us because in His intimate fusion with our soul, which is the work of charity, His divine movements, His holy palpitations, make themselves felt throughout the whole man, who is one with Him. [op.cit.p.60]

This IS communion of love with the Holy Trinity through intimacy with the Divine Guest of our soul!

This is our baptismal vocation in all its glory.

This is the affirmation lavished upon us in sacramental confirmation.

If, in being called upon as priest to celebrate any sacrament, and we find the celebration of that sacrament is a source of stress because it seems the people are lacking in faith or due reverence, or, if when it comes to discerning reception of sacrament we are tempted more towards abusive authoritarianism or lack of fatherly compassion: it is time to beg the Divine Guest of our soul to reanimate our own faith and charity.

If anything or anyone has become the prime object of our attention and affection, other than Christ and the things of Christ: it is time to beg the Sanctifier to renew within us His tender gifts of metanoia, kenosis and true contrition.

If our minds, hearts, souls are confused, swayed, or in bondage to any teachings which seek to overturn the treasures found in the whole deposit of faith and morals confided by Christ to the Church: it is time to beg the Spirit of Truth to renew within us all truth.

If our hearts and souls are in agony as we see Christ re-crucified in the Church, in the hearts of brother priests, in the hearts of the laity: it is time to beg the Spirit of courage and compassion to renew His strength and spirit of forgiveness within us.

If, after having laboured in the vineyard in the heat of the day, evening’s fatigue overwhelms, accedie claws at our hearts which themselves seem to have frozen over, as if we have forgotten our first love: it is time to beg the Spirit of Pentecost to renew within us our sacramental confirmation and set as afire once more.

In all these and other instances where our sinfulness and poverty seem to overcome us it is time to turn humbly to the Holy Spirit who will lavish love and comfort upon us.

The profound experience of being dedicated workers in the vineyard or the wheat field and there appearing before us no particular harvest or that the tares are choking the little shoots, this should neither surprise nor discourage us. Our Divine Lord Himself saw many leave Him when at Capernaum He first spoke of Himself as the Bread of Life, He Himself saw even His chosen ones flee in the face of fear.

We priests are human beings, men, ordained men to be sure, but men still, ordained to preach the Gospel of Truth and Love with our lives without compromise in a marketplace which is a culture of death.

We are missionaries to a secular world where people are deeply fearful, wounded, and almost incapable of seeing beyond their own immediate wants.

We are baptized, confirmed, ordained men, priests in a very visible vocation at a time in history when the sheer reality of our being priest is seen by many as justification to abuse, pulverize, reject, ignore, even martyr us.

We are Fathers to children who leave home in droves with nary a backward glance, Shepherds of a flock marred by cognitive disconnect from what is actual reality, Teachers and Sanctifiers for those who have suffered a profound loss of both the sense of faith and sense of sin.

How much do we need to draw constantly on the gift of our Confirmation and its attended grace which strengths us in the faith and binds us more closely to the Church, thus to each other, for we are but a little band of brothers expected to cover with love and truth such a vast world, such an huge extended family.

The attended loneliness of such a unique vocation as a divinely elected pilgrim amongst such a vast number of pilgrims and those who do not even know the ultimate purpose of life is to pilgrim with the Church, through Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, home to our Heavenly Father, can be a real discouragement and great danger for we priests.

We need to turn always to the Holy Spirit who is alive and active, in motion, within us.

Open to Him we can cry out that indeed, while it is true we are believers [1Jn.4:16] nonetheless we need, in our own words, with our own tears, always to beg of Him: faith-MORE, hope-MORE, love-MORE, life-MORE, truth-MORE, courage-MORE, even unto martyrdom.

Through the gift of faith we shall grow in trust.

Through the gift of trust we will open wide the doors of our being to the Holy Spirit more and more.

The Consoler, Councillor, Advocate, Spirit of Truth – whom the Father constantly sends upon us in the Name of Jesus our Lord and God – will dwell within us as Jesus promises. [Jn.14:26]

As such grace unfolds within us, strengthens and renews us, we will hear more deeply in our hearts the words also from the Beloved Apostle about the grace of remaining rooted in the words of Jesus, what He teaches us, so that we remain in Jesus and with Jesus in the Father. [1Jn.2:24-27]

Confirmation is affirmation by the Holy Spirit of our call to holiness, to oneness in and with Christ, a prelude to the even deeper configuration to and intimacy with Him which is ours when, as a result of our divine election, we are ordained in persona Christi.

That too is the movement of the Holy Spirit within us.

All of this, all sacraments, are for the glory of the Father and thus of deep intimacy with the Father.

All sacraments are Trinitarian.

Our vocation of joy is Trinitarian.

                                                                   …..we might say that the ideal of the acts performed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the Father. The ideal is the first exemplar of the work. The Father is the beginning; the work of sanctification is a work of paternity and adoption; from the Father ‘all fatherhood in heaven and on earth receives its name.’ And the end of perfection is Jesus, for Jesus is the image of the Father. During the days of His mortal life He sought the ideal of His acts in the bosom of the Father. The will of the Father, which He came upon earth to accomplish, and the glory of the Father, which formed the one great desire of His soul, appear in the Holy Gospel as His supreme norms. In the most solemn moments of His life the Son lifted His profoundly understanding eyes to the Father, and seemed to gaze with all intentness and sweetness upon that ocean of light. [60-a]

The sanctifying grace within us through Confirmation is primarily the work of the Spirit Himself within us.

The Holy Spirit: urging us to imitate, to participate in, Christ’s own relationship with His Father, our Father.

The Holy Spirit: setting us ablaze with the fire of divine love.

The Holy Spirit: crying out within us Abba! Father – that we might ‘live and move and have our being’, truly, fully, in the Father.

The Holy Spirit: striving to fill us with the utter fullness of God, with Christ, Light from Light, and True Light from True Light:

                                                                    In order to teach us, this unique light has to be dispersed. It has to be adjusted to the capacity of each one of the seven gifts, as the ray is diffused in the colours of the spectrum. Only God can contain Himself in His infinite unity; in us, especially in exile, the facets of His unique beauty must appear one by one. [See note 60-b]

Once we have renewed within us, by the Holy Spirit, an appreciation for, understanding of, openness to the reality of, the sacrament of Confirmation, and by the movement of the Holy Spirit within us co-operate with all He seeks to accomplish within us through His lavishing outpouring of all His gifts, what fire shall blaze within us, what divine light shall pour forth from us!

What a passion we shall have to diligently prepare all those seeking to receive such a splendid gift in the communion of love.

With what sacred urgency shall we go forth and seek out the lost to re-evangelize them, the non-believers to bring them the Good News of Jesus Christ.

How great shall be our courage to preach only Truth, our strength to make the gift of love and forgiveness to all, in particular our enemies, how unswerving our proclamation and defense of truth, especially the truth about the sacredness of life from the womb to the tomb.

                                            In the gift of fear, He is the sovereign we revere as the Master of life and death; in fortitude, He is the omnipotent force that delivers itself into the hands of weakness; in piety, He is the Father to whom we must adhere with filial affection, extolling His glory; in counsel, He is the eternal and supreme norm of human action; in knowledge, the inexhaustible exemplar of creatures; in understanding, the supernatural end that sheds light on all knowledge. And in wisdom, He is the focal point that illumines the soul because He is the focal point of love, and because He and Wisdom, united in an embrace of love, have revealed with love’s gentleness the secret of all truth. [60-c]

5 CLOTHED WITH CHRIST

                                                                        

In the evening as I left the rectory for a walk, praying the Rosary, I came near the main alley of this neighbourhood.

The alley runs between the abandoned warehouses and the school.

A man came walking by.

He walked as one bent over with fatigue. His clothing indicated he was probably working in one of the factories over the hill at the bottom of our street.

My heart was immediately moved to pray for him, and all men, women and children throughout the world who labour long hours, in often dehumanizing conditions, for barely enough to put food on the table.

Just as I was passing the alley down which the man had headed, I heard him call out a name, and noticed a small child running towards him.

When the child was close enough he leapt into the man’s arms, his father.

As the man lifted the small, living, joyful weight onto his shoulders I noticed he was no longer moving with heavy step of exhaustion, but walked tall, straight, as if filled with new energy. [Gal.4:6,7]

Before ordination sacramentally configures us as father, in persona Christi, we are, sacramentally in Baptism, born anew as children, sons of the Father.

Already in baptism we become participants in the priestly, kingly, prophetic mission of Christ.

Ordination impels us, with great love, to become fully missionaries to all our brothers and sisters, especially those who ‘labour and are heavy burdened.’

We priests participate in the mystery of being both children, along with all the children of God, thus brother with all our brothers and sisters, and father, shepherd, teacher, evangelist, for those same brothers and sisters.

                                                 Catholic doctrinal tradition describes the priest as teacher of the Word, minister of the sacraments and leader of the Christian community entrusted to him. This is the starting point of all reflection on the identity and mission of the priest in the Church.

                                   ….Many of the baptized live in a world indifferent to religion. While maintaining a certain faith, these practically live a form of religious and moral indifferentism, alienated from Word and sacraments which are essential for Christian life.

                                  …For the contemporary Church, Mother and Teacher, the mission ad gentes and new evangelization are inseparable aspects of her mandate to teach, sanctify and guide all men to the father.

                                     ….In a particular way, priests have this duty since they have been specially chosen, consecrated and sent to make evident the presence of Christ whose authentic representatives and messengers they become. [48]

Thus we need to be truly aware of, grateful for, that baptismal faith which makes us His children. [Gal.3:26]

We can never contemplate to exhaustion the incredible gift and reality of our baptismal faith.

Indeed if our baptismal faith is weak, uncertain, confused, tainted in anyway by the surrounding culture of death, or specious notions in theology or spirituality, then our ability to be authentic evangelizers as priests will be seriously compromised.

Long before we were ordained, indeed a necessary gateway, we were brought by the Holy Spirit into new life in Christ at our baptism. [Gal.3:27]

It is this first clothing which makes possible our later configuration to Christ in the fullness of divine election at our ordination.

Satan wages war against the followers of Christ, the children of Mary. This we know not only from Revelations chapter 12, but from life experience.

What is true for all the baptized is an even more constant experience for we priests. [Col.2:6-8]

Pope John Paul II constantly, in his writings on the priesthood, urged us to be aware of the authentic reality of the sacramental priesthood, just as he constantly urged all the baptized to be aware of the reality of baptism.

For us priests it is a call for us to be fully aware of both sacramental realities of our ‘grace in return for grace’ existence.

Thus we must strive always to be aware, with great humility, that before we are celebrants of Christ’s sacraments, we are recipients of His sacraments.

We encounter in sacrament the One whose sacraments we bring to our brothers and sisters.

It is one of the realities which make our Catholic religion the religion of glory.

                                                    The whole liturgical life of the Church revolves around the Eucharistic sacrifice and the sacraments. [49]

It is often a reality for priests that we encounter much stress around the celebration of the sacrament of Baptism because of the very loss of a sense of faith and faith practice among the people. Thus it can be difficult for us, when striving to properly catechize parents and godparents alike, to appreciate the reality of what is being asked for on behalf of the child.

It is to be prayerfully wished that instructing parents, godparents, adults seeking to be baptized will offer us the opportunity to re-discover anew the tremendous gift of grace which is our faith, our baptismal, sacramental life.

Baptism is, to be sure, being reborn in and through Christ as we are plunged into the mystery of His death and resurrection.

Baptism is also a renewal, sacramentally, of that communion of love offered us by the Holy Trinity at the moment of our creation by the loving act of God.

Indeed the Catechism of the Catholic Church, where we are taught in paragraph 366 that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God “also reminds us of our creation for the purpose of this communion of love as noted in paragraph 367: “…man is ordered to a supernatural end and…his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God”.

We are called to by the Trinity, in particular through Baptism, as St. Peter reminds us, to this communion of love through grace given us by, the All-Holy One.

We are all called to holiness! [1Pt.1:15,16]

The more we accept the love of the Holy Trinity, the more we become love for others, and through love’s humble service, the holier we become.

                                    There is one characteristic common to all the Saints and holy people of the Church – a characteristic that predominates in the lives of the Apostles. It is their personal love of the Lord.

                                   ….Our Lord’s plan for each priest is a personal partnership: ‘We: Jesus and I.’ This is how He would have each priest live and act – in the first person plural. Our Lord wants to share every moment of our life, especially every moment of our ministry. He wants us to live and work in complete dependence upon Himself and His love, never forgetting, never doubting it. He wants us to think of Him always in the second person singular – not the third as many priests do. He wants us to be His friend; but He wants even more than that. He wants us to find in Him and to give to Him, all the love that human hearts can give each other. [50]

This intimate love affair begins with baptism, is re-established in confession every time we remove ourselves from this love through sin, is nourished and fortified, deepened, indeed made more passionate, every time we receive Him, glorified, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in Holy Communion.

The greater the depth of our meditation upon the reality of our baptism and its gift of faith, the more profound becomes our understanding of this same holy sacrament, in particular when we are blessed with the opportunity to baptize.

Indeed the preparation for and the celebration of this sacrament will no longer be an occasion when satan may attempt to seduce us into the sin of arrogance through a too narrow interpretation of the requirements expected of parents asking to have their child baptized.

We will be moved in the depths of our hearts with a fatherly patience, a shepherd’s understanding, a teacher’s truth-speaking ability to form where formation is needed, to overlook where charity should prevail.

When we know we are beloved of the True Lover, we rejoice in the mysterious reality that sacraments are not only sacred events, holy realities, but wonderful places of encounter with the Divine Beloved.

Thus we will approach teaching of the sacraments fully aware the Divine Lover seeks to encounter their very persons, no matter their apparent poverty of faith practice, and we will trust the power of the sacraments themselves.

Our people, irrespective of the sacrament they approach us for, particularly irregular or non-practicing parents seeking baptism for their child, will see in our eyes the tender expression of Christ Himself, His love for them.

This will motivate and encourage them to be willing students of faith and eager to resume faith practice.

Not as some imposed requirement, rather as their response to Love’s call.

Holy Mother the Church, in her own tender wisdom, places the renewal of our baptismal faith in the heart of the Easter Liturgy.

It is a moment we should enter with extreme gratitude and celebrate for our people with due reverence.

With our hearts full of joy at His Holy Resurrection we actually celebrate the first moment of what Scripture elsewhere refers to as the love we had ‘at first’.

For us priests it is also reliving the moment when our divine election to our vocation of joy, in persona Christi, began.

A reminder too that above all we are apostles of Love.

                                                          People need to hear at least once a week that God truly loves them, that He wants a relationship of love with them, that He cares infinitely for each one, so much that He is present to each one’s joy and each one’s sorrow, to each effort and each failure, that He loves and loves and loves and loves, that He forgives and forgives and forgives. [51]

It is when we priests doubt that truth, fail to trust His love for us, we run the risk of appearing unloving to our people and frustrating them in their desire to return to baptismal faith practice or to grow ever more in their lives of charity towards all.

Ours must be the very words of Jesus Himself, poured forth from our hearts as ardent prayer that it be so! [Jn.15:8-11]

The more we strive to become what we are through baptism the more we shall become what we are by virtue of our sacramental ordination as priests.

I do believe in the depths of my heart there is a direct connection between that priestly angst which seems at the root of so much sorrow in the priesthood today, such confusion, being vulnerable to pressure from those who would reduce priesthood to a mere function able to be ‘performed’ in most respects even by the un-ordained, and a type of forgetfulness regarding the reality of our baptism.

                                                       Following Christ is not an outward imitation, since it touches man at the very depths of his being. Being a follower of Christ means becoming conformed to Him who became a servant even giving Himself on the Cross (cf.Phil.2:5-8). Christ dwells by faith in the heart of every believer (cf.Eph.3:17), and thus the disciple is conformed to the Lord. This is the effect of grace, of the active presence of the Holy Spirit in us. Having become one with Christ, the Christian becomes a member of His Body, which is the Church (cf.1Cor.12:13,27). By the work of the Spirit, Baptism radically configures the faithful to Christ in the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection; it ‘clothes him’ in Christ (cf.Gal.3:270: ‘Let us rejoice and give thanks,’ exclaims Saint Augustine speaking to the baptized, ‘for we have become Christ!’ Having died to sin, those who are baptized receive new life (cf.Rom.6:3-11): alive for God in Christ Jesus, they are called to walk by the Spirit and manifest the Spirit’s fruits in their lives (cf.Gal.5:16-25). Sharing in the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the New Covenant (cf.1Cor.11:23-29), is the culmination of our assimilation to Christ, the source of ‘eternal life’ (cf.Jn.6:51-58), the source and power of that complete gift of self, which Jesus – according to the testimony handed on by Paul – commands us to commemorate in liturgy and life: ‘As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes’ (1Cor.11:26). [52]

As these truths permeate our being our hearts will become ever more filled with that Divine Fire which so burned in the Heart of Christ!

Indeed we shall feel ourselves, and yearn evermore, to be compelled to spread that fire through evangelization, baptizing the newly born or converted, seeking out the lost, and giving ourselves over fully to the missio ad gentes.

In a word: to spread His fire as He yearns. [Lk.12:49]

This is our call to holiness, to be fire spreaders, to set the world ablaze with love in return for Love.

True there will be those moments, perhaps even hours, days, weeks or more, of struggle when it may seem our hearts have grown so cold we have barely a spark to spread, but even the tiniest spark can begin an immense blaze.

So, by grace, we live faithful to the duty of the moment, our hearts open to this heartfelt plea:

                                                    ……try to walk in the way of sanctity which God has chosen for you….The pursuit of sanctity is like an interior flame, a sacred fire which we bear within us. At times this fire seems to be only a spark, but, believe me, it can be revived and become bright again. If we wish the Father, when He looks at us, to be able to say, as He said of Jesus: ‘This is My beloved Son,’ let all our efforts and all our aspirations tend towards the establishment of the reign of charity in our hearts. [53]

The real and great tragedy, the true scandal, pulverizing the priesthood today is not, per se, those abuse or heresy scandals which receive so much media attention.

They are, to be sure, serious indeed as sin certainly always is.

The great tragedy, which is fundamentally the root cause of those sins which become the perhaps more obvious, at least to the media, is our failure as priests to willingly become saints.

                                                      The saints know a truth that sin keeps secret: the human spirit is robbed of its natural dignity when it is content to be only natural. Evil claims to be natural, and this is the heart of its deceit. [54]

Baptism is both the gateway to the fullness of the rest of sacramental life and the call to holiness.

By sacramental ordination we become in persona Christi; in the person of the All Holy One.

                                            So how is it that we are not gathering our forces together to counteract the strange forces that continue to infiltrate into the Church, which arise even within the Church to manipulate the Church. There is one way in which it can be done, and only one way: the way of holiness. For this we were born: to be holy. We are given every advantage by the Church to follow the path of the Holy One who calls Himself ‘the Way.’

                                              The priest is a shepherd. He has a flock given him by God. For this he was ordained. God asks from His priests one thing: that he himself cleanse his soul, that he walk the path of the Holy One, now falling down, now bruising himself, but since the path is made by God, God is around and He will help the priest to stand up and continue walking. [55]

Flowing from our first experience of the communion of love and our baptismal commission to be witnesses to Christ, His Holy Resurrection, His Gospel of Love and Truth, of Life, comes that constant call to holiness which the Spirit Himself speaks to the depths of our being every moment of our priestly lives.

It is the call to become a living flame of love.

Jesus, the night of His Passion, having arrived at the hour when He would indeed spread divine fire and set the world ablaze, told us the time had come to ask for everything in His Name.

In the very asking and receiving will come the enhancement of our joy. [Jn.16.24]

The ancient prayer to the Holy Spirit begs Him to come and kindle again within us the fire of our first love, our true joy.

To become a living flame: that is the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus the Master. That is what He Himself is, the blazing sun who lights the whole world…..

                                                          ….. there is no secret about the nature of that fire. It is simply love. Love is the fire the Son of God came to cast on the earth….the burning passion for His Father and for us that bore Him to the cross and through it to His resurrection. Love is the fire the risen Lord pours into the hearts of all those who follow Him, those who hear His voice as well as His first friends.

                                                         This love is more than a human word or metaphor. It is the living Spirit of the living God, alive in us. It is the Holy Spirit who pours God’s love into us and makes us living flames. If we want, then, we can become living flames of love because, as Jesus has promised, His Father does not refuse the Spirit to anyone who asks. If we ask, we shall receive abundantly.

                                                        …..we are not on fire. Why not? I think that there are two reasons. The first is that we are uncertain that such extravagance is either possible or desirable. The second reason is that we are honestly not sure how to ask for the Spirit, even if we do sometimes see clearly that we can have no real joy outside the fire of His love.

                                                       In the story of the Pharisee and the publican, the Master is responding to this bewilderment of ours. He is telling us how to ask for the Holy Spirit. He is revealing to us the only fuel for the fire that He wants to set in our hearts. That fuel is humility….The Lord wants to teach us how to be humble, by telling us the truth about our own wretchedness as He reveals to us the greatest truth – the truth enfolding and encompassing every other truth – that is the mercy of His Father. [56]

4 OFFERING AND OFFERED

                                                                  

Most likely every human being at some point in life, perhaps even frequently for long periods of time, feels deep within that God has forgotten us.

Our cry is never unheeded and always there will be those moments of sweetness when God who is Love speaks tenderly to the depths of our being, assuring us He is so close, keeps us so close, our very name is written upon the palm of His hand. [Is.49:14-16]

The name which He has written upon the palm of His hand is our real name. [Rv.2:17]

It is easy for our hearts to see Jesus in the Garden, in the intimate prayer for every soul offered by Him to the Father, raising His hands in the gesture of orans, and seeing on the palms of those Sacred Hands our true name.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches the truth about our real name, ‘the name one receives for eternity’, in paragraphs 2156 to 2159.

They are a beautiful source of meditation.

We, in the mystery of our divine election to this vocation of joy which is ours, receive not strictly speaking a new name but a defining indicator of our sacramental identity as shepherd and servant: Father!

We become priest and henceforth from the day of our ordination, thanks in large measure to the tender prayers of our people, with the intercessory help of Our Blessed Mother, and the lavishness of grace, struggle each day to truly become what we are.

A young priest came to speak with me the other day.

To use his own words he was ‘totally fragmented’.

He felt like bits and pieces of his self were scattered everywhere. The comfortable, secure, sense of wholeness, and budding holiness, of ‘completeness’, as he described it, had left him.

There were those days, weeks perhaps, immediately following his ordination when, as he said, ‘it seemed all was right with the world.’

Now all he seemed to experience each day was a relentless barrage of demands, criticisms from the laity, bad temper from the pastor, distractions in prayer, itself experienced as a burden, doubts about his vocation, and much, much more.

He ended with those words which most priests at some early juncture of our lives have been heard to utter: “Who knew being a priest contained so much suffering!”

Perhaps all of us are initially surprised to discover ordination is not some magic potion which removes the clay from our feet, the passions from our flesh, the distractions from our imaginations, and the need for approval from our emotional life.

Yet if we kneel beside and with Christ in the Garden, putting our face to the ground beside and with Him in offering to the Father, we would not be so surprised.

Jesus Christ, High Priest, is the One who offers.

Jesus Christ, High Priest, is the One who is offered.

So it is for we who are sacramentally in persona Christi.

The canticle from tonight’s Evening Prayer still sings in my heart as I compose these pages.

It is a canticle which consoles the heart of every priest if we would but take it to heart, for truly Jesus suffered not only for the collective ‘you’ St. Peter speaks of, but for the personal ‘you’, the ‘I’ and so ‘I’ am the one healed by His wounds. [1 Pt. 2:21-24]

This too is an example of divine intimacy with the entire human family, in particular for the baptized, even more deeply for priests.

We will frequently have great difficulty understanding and embracing the sacramental reality of being in persona Christi, as the one offering and being offered, if we are seduced by the modern relativism which leads to gross errors regarding the essential truth about the necessity of the sacramental priesthood for the entire human family: for the salvation of souls.

                                              Christ’s priesthood flowed from the paschal mystery. Our priesthood is not ours but His. We must therefore draw the most profound truth about life from Christ’s death and resurrection. “May He make us an everlasting gift pleasing to You.” (3rd Eucharistic Prayer): that is how we speak to the Creator, our Father, in the name of Christ and “in persona Christi”, and at the same time in the name of every creature. Because of its own meaning the priesthood will always contain within itself a profound “hermeneutics” of the mystery of the world and above all the “mystery of man”. Any world which sought to delete the priesthood from its structures would deny its own self, and above all would destroy human nature in its most essential aspect. [41]

We well know it is not only the secular world, the culture of darkness which seeks ‘to delete the priesthood from its structures’. There are those dioceses, parishes, religious communities which, sometimes openly, often under the guise of enhancing the role of the laity, are essentially deleting the sacramental priesthood from their structures.

Even many priests are caught up in this progressive deletion of their very own divine election.

This progressive deletion of the sacramental priesthood from life accounts in no small measure for the paradox of those who claim to be catholic while advocating the so-called ‘right to choose’ abortion, acceptance of homosexual practice, inter-communion without the prior true union of faith, etc.

It is even in seemingly small things, such as the refusal to wear proper clerical dress, or be called by our proper title of Father, that we become complicit in the process of deleting the sacramental priesthood from human life and become participants in the destruction of ‘human nature in its most essential aspect’. [Mk. 6:34]

The Good Shepherd, in whose person we are by ordination, instructs us to enter into intimacy with, Himself: ultimate experience of learning the depths of priesthood. [Mt.11:29]

We need to beg for the grace to be purified of the modernist notion of priesthood, which has prevailed since the late 1960’s. 

It is a notion which claims adherence to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, though in reality betrays a total ignorance of the Council’s document on the priesthood and the subsequent teachings of Pope Paul VI, and most particularly, Pope John Paul II.

Indeed it denies over two millennia of orthodox teaching and tradition.

This modernist notion of the priesthood is based on a minimalist, and very limited, functionality and decries any attempts to adhere to a specific priestly spirituality.

It is a reductionist notion bandied about under the guise of enhancing the role of the laity in the life of the Church, but actually detracts from the laity’s vocation by a type of co-option into that which is reserved for the ordained priest alone.

The result is a progressive diminishment of both the lay and priestly vocations.

Returning to the story of that young priest who came to speak with me, what became clear was he was in a particular diocese where the bishop and majority of the priests were completely in bondage to the modernist, minimalist ideas of priesthood.

The Holy Spirit calls us to surrender to the yoke, meekness and humility of the Sacred Heart, the Priestly Heart.

A brother priest likes to repeat: “We must serve the Church as the Church wishes to be served.”

This is more than a deep spirit of obedience. It is a true spirit of humility.

Holy Mother the Church wishes first and foremost for we priests to serve her as true priests, true shepherds of the flock, in the full reality of our being in persona Christi.

In that, we shall, no matter the depths of our suffering or the intensity of the struggle to be faithful, experience the true joy of our vocation, a joy which will come to completeness within the core of our very being, a real participation in the joy of the Baptist. [Jn.3:29, 30]

The simplest way for us to decrease, so Christ increases in every human heart we serve, is for us to set aside personal notions of what priesthood ought to be and surrender, joyfully, to being hidden in the reality of what priesthood is, set forth by Holy Mother the Church as was given to Her by Christ Priest Himself.

What can it be that lurks behind these modernist notions about sacramental priesthood which defy the teaching of the Church and the absolute reality of the sacrament itself?

Sin.

Sin expressed in our hearts as lack of faith, pride, and refusal to trust in the communion of love offered us by the Holy Trinity.

Sin, expressed as arrogance, anger, greed, and lust, and if not through sexual sin, certainly through other means of gratification.

In my interviews with laity, young, old, professional, working in factories, offices, on farms, believers and non-believers alike, I was struck by the common answer to my question: what most disturbed them about priests today?

I had expected they would address the issue of sexual scandal, extremes of so-called liberal or con Instead the most common issues which disturbed them were: priestly arrogance, refusal to be seen in clerical clothing, to be addressed as Father and a lifestyle deemed to be ‘high on the hog’?

Each priest has to look into his own heart to see clearly the root causes of his own sin, and confess the sins he commits.

Each priest has to embrace the reality that we are ‘vessels of clay’, and cry out constantly: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

                                          Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by the repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgement of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root. Vices can be classified according to the virtues they oppose, or also be linked to the capital sins which Christian experience has distinguished, following St. John Cassian and St. Gregory the Great. They are called ‘capital’ because they engender other sins, other vices. They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia. [42]

The final stress in his suffering the young priest referred to spoke about was the pain caused him by the mouths of his brother priests. They had labeled him as rigid, conservative, ‘clerical’ in the most demeaning sense.

What struck my heart was that this young priest was orthodox in his faith, dressed in clerics, insisted he be called Father, was devoted to Our Blessed Mother, believed the truth about and was devoted to Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, was loyal to the Holy Father, etc.

All those things deemed to be too ‘clerical’ by the modernists and minimalists.

That there was some rigidity about him was also true. Yet the rigidity was as much a defense against the disdain of his brother priests as it was to any degree a wound in his personality.

In my experience the fodder for clerical gossip, that most pernicious and destructive of priestly sins, is the individual priest’s bondage to one or more of the capital sins.

True, as vessels of clay, we will be constantly in the battle between sin and virtue, between truth-teaching and the struggle to live what we teach.

This is the reality of spiritual warfare within which each priest SHOULD be a good fighter.

It is when we, not just our people, have a cognitive disconnect which we fail to struggle to overcome that we become those who seek to delete the priesthood from humanity.

Disunity among the shepherds leaves the flock vulnerable to the wolves, for, obviously, if the shepherds are at war among themselves, who is there to guard the flock?

Satan is not only a liar and the father of lies; he is also the great distractor.

Perhaps he cannot distract us from Christ through our committing mortal sin. He certainly will attempt to distract us from Christ by enticing us into committing venial sins until our will is so weakened we do indeed turn completely away from Christ through mortal sin.

Anything: to disrupt the unity among us, which should be the hallmark of our love for one another.

Anything: to keep us from decreasing so Christ may increase.

There is a beautiful passage from St. Paul which is a template for daily meditation, an encouragement for us to struggle to become what we are, and to love our brothers in the priesthood: Col.3:1-11.

Christ IS everything!

When that young priest had finished speaking what came to my heart was pretty clear: he had if not forgotten, because of the stress and suffering he was enduring, at least was having difficulty trusting who he truly was in persona Christi.

The modernists attempt to delete the priesthood from humanity most ardently does so by a denial of the vital importance of our sacramental priesthood as a real presence in the lives of all our brothers and sisters.

The Servant of God, Catherine Doherty, in her book DEAR FATHER, pours forth from her own heart, on behalf of the laity, her passionate love for priests, her faith in the reality of sacramental priesthood.

Catherine speaks to the reality of joy in an entire chapter, posing a basic question to our hearts:

                                            Do you realize that you are a joy to the world? [43]

To which I would add this question: Do I strive to be a joy to my brother priests?

Catherine connects our capacity to trust the joy we are to others with our willingness to be and move rooted in the virtue of faith. Thus, towards the end of the chapter where she teaches on joy, Catherine recounts the healing of a sick child, whose mother accredited his healing to the prayers of a priest.

Catherine then concludes with words which have seared my heart when I would hear her speak, such words sear my heart still whenever I read them:

                                              I am almost afraid to say the next sentence, but I have to say it because it’s the truth: Do you have that kind of faith? Have you really looked at yourself and understood who you are? Oh, you might be Tom, Dick or Harry. You might be fat, thin, old or young. You can look in a mirror until the mirror falls down, but you will not see in a mirror who you really are. It’s when your eyes are turned to the heart of Christ, which is your real mirror, that you will see that you are another Christ, with all His powers, amongst them the power of giving hope, joy, faith and love. [44]

It is our sacramental duty to exercise lavishly ‘the power of giving hope, joy, faith and love’ to all our people.

However if we are to avoid in anyway deleting the priesthood from humanity we must also exercise lavishly our power to love one another as brothers in the priesthood. We too need hope, joy, faith and love in our lives. Who better to be vessels of such grace to a priest than a brother priest?

Again and again we cry out all day long, in the reality of ‘praying always’: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Thus we beg the Holy Spirit to purify us of any and all things, choices, attitudes, sins which cause us to seek anywhere other than Christ the ‘everything’ our hearts have been created for.

It is a matter of embracing the cross, a willingness to be an offering, a victim, in imitation of Christ.

                                                       The priest is alter Christus and, like his divine Master, he must be a victim immolated to the glory of God, and delivered up for the salvation of souls…This is our program of sanctity…If we share in His priestly dignity, is it not right that we should take part in His oblation?….These, then, are our orders of the day: to follow Jesus in the absolute consecration of His life to the glory of the Father and to the salvation of  the world…We also at the altar present to God the whole course of our life, accepting it, loving it, dedicating it in the spirit of love to the cause of God and to the salvation of souls. Thus, by daily imitation of the offering of Jesus, it will be granted to us to enter, little by little, into the mysterious intimacy of the soul of the divine Master. [45]

Many, many years ago, when in fact I was a non-believer, I happened to be visiting a friend who worked in a charity hospital. One day my friend asked if I would go with them while they dropped off a message to their former pastor.

The pastor was a middle-aged priest who lived in the hospital.

I assumed he was living there as the chaplain.

In fact, and this really took me aback, he was living there permanently as a patient. He has been permanently disabled, in the physical sense, as a result of a car accident. The accident had occurred some ten years before the day I met him.

I understand now that this priest sensed immediately when I entered his hospital room, which was actually a ward and not a private room, that I was both uncomfortable in the presence of a priest and in the presence of a disabled person.

However he did not say anything directly to me until my friend and I were leaving.

At that point he said, with as I recall a true tenderness in his voice:

“A priest is not per se what a man does. Priest is who I am. I am a priest forever. Every priest is both the one who offers and the offering. It has pleased God to allow me truly to be a victim-priest. Life truly is beautiful and my life, well, it’s a real joy.”

Few of us are asked to embrace the mystery of being ‘ a victim immolated to the glory of God and delivered up for the salvation of souls’ to the extent of that particular brother of ours.

But the truth remains each of us is asked by the Holy Trinity, through the nitty-gritty reality of the duty of the moment of being priest, to embrace with joy being victim, oblation.

Mainly we are asked to be so in a manner which appears externally to be very ordinary, as the life of a priest goes, indeed. It is a blessed hiddenness which is a divine protection. In that ordinariness however we must strive for the ‘I’ to decrease so Christ increases.

Suffering then in all its dimensions should be a cherished companion of every priest.

For the young priest who came to speak with me that was my one word for him: become what you are.

Some of us will be asked to embrace even outrageously seeming, at least to the eyes of the world, perhaps even to our own emotions, immense depths of suffering. We may be invited to embrace immolation for the ‘glory of God and the salvation of souls’ a union with Christ in the mystery, for example, of the Tenth Station or the Eighth Beatitude.

We should not be afraid.

Christ is everything.

He is with us.

Any suffering we are invited to embrace is suffering for the salvation of souls, including our own.

It is part of the joy of our divine election to be one with Him in the vineyard during the heat of the day, in the Garden, on the Cross, even in the Tomb.

Christ’s love towards men was so great that not only was he willing to endure the most cruel sufferings for our salvation and an atrocious death on the Cross, but also He wished to nourish us eternally in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood…having loved His own beloved He loved them to the end…He instituted permanently His priesthood in the Catholic Church. He decreed that the same sacrifice He performed is…to remain until the consummation of the world. He decreed that it be renewed and take place daily by the ministry of the priesthood……

                                                       In the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass, celebrated by priests, the same life-giving Victim is offered up……No unworthiness or wickedness on the part of those offering it can ever defile this oblation. [46]

While we can be consoled by the truth that the effectiveness of what we celebrate does not depend on our state of holiness, or generosity, even our willingness, or lack thereof, to be a true victim, nonetheless how much more wonderful is it IF we strive, truly, to be full, complete, holy, willing oblation when we offer Holy Mass.

It is a matter of participating in the communion of love.

It is Christ’s love of the Father, and for us and for our salvation, which drives Him towards His Passion and Death.

The same love should drive us to ever more become what we are, in persona Christi, filled with the same passion for the Father and for the salvation of souls.

Such a passion fuels the fire of joy which burns within us as we love the Blessed Trinity, one another, and all our brothers and sisters, friends and enemies.

                                                      ….the Gospel insists especially on renouncing self, on accepting the Cross. Many were the crosses which presented themselves to the Cure of Ars in the course of his ministry: calumny on the part of the people, being misunderstood by an assistant priest or other confreres, contradictions, and also a mysterious struggle against the powers of hell, and sometimes even the temptation to despair in the midst of spiritual darkness. Nonetheless he did not content himself with just accepting these trials without complaining:  he went beyond them by mortification, imposing on himself continual fasts and many other rugged practices in order ‘to  reduce his body to servitude’, as Saint Paul says. But what we must see clearly in this penance, which our age unhappily has little taste for, are his motives: love of God and the conversion of sinners. Thus he asks a discouraged fellow priest: ‘You have prayed…, you have wept…, but have you fasted, have you kept vigil…?’ Here we are close to the warning of Jesus to the Apostles: ‘But this kind is cast out only by prayer and fasting. In a word, John Mary Vianney sanctified himself so as to be more able to sanctify others…..

                                                 Dear brother priests, let us not be afraid of this very personal commitment – marked by asceticism and inspired by love – which God asks of us for the proper exercise of our Priesthood…. ‘It seems…that in the difficulties of today God wishes to teach us more deeply the value, the importance and the central place of the Cross of Jesus Christ.’ In the priest, Christ relives His Passion, for the sake of souls. Let us give thanks to God who thus permits us to share in the Redemption, in our hearts and in our flesh! [47]

3 SAINT JOSEPH: MODEL FOR PRIESTS AS MEN

                                     
 
 

There is a cry and deep sorrow at the very center of our world. A sorrow: born of confusion, and abandonment. The cry is wrenched from the hearts of adults but is rooted in the hearts of children.

Someday a wise anthropologist, or someone versed in the human sciences, will do an in depth study of our culture of death and make the connection between the origins of this cry and deep sorrow. Perhaps then we will have a better understanding of the complexities of human intercourse which resulted in the 20th century being so soaked on every page of its history with the blood of the innocent. Perhaps then we will be able to come to grips with a generation or more of fatherless men, of boys growing up, in the words of Susan Faludi in her work: STIFFED, growing up in “…a culture that has them by the throat.”
The following statement is not offered in the remotest as an excuse for evil, simply as an observation: put an adult whose own experience of being fathered, being authentically masculine, was that of being father deprived, in close proximity to a child likewise starved for affirmation and completion as a male and you have a situation ready made for legions of demons to create the evil of abuse.
Place such an adult in any relationship and likewise chaos will result through domestic abuse, divorce, child abandonment, promiscuity, homosexuality, addictions of all kinds.
My purpose here is not to attempt to address the all too well known scandals among the clergy, the bitter attitudes towards men in general and priests in particular of some women, religious and laity alike, nor to debate with those whose particular agenda of chaos co-operates in things like the promotion of homosexual and abortion agendas. {Interesting how frequently those issues find companionship.}
Rather it is to suggest we have a model of manhood and an intercessor for all fatherless adults and children alike in good Saint Joseph.
To the point he is the model of priestly manhood and fatherhood.
Given the simple reality that many men entering the seminary these days do so without their virginity intact we must do everything possible to enable them to have their virginity restored to them through a deep healing of memories, the transformation of their inner selves, and a true openness to, acceptance of, that most manly of virtues: chastity.
Chastity: as a charism of our divine election.
Chastity: as a living witness to the Kingdom.
Chastity: too as the purifying of our hearts that we may be true fathers to all whom we serve.
                                                 The spiritual formation of one who is called to live celibacy should pay particular attention to the future priest so that he may know, appreciate, love and live celibacy according to its true nature and according to its real purposes, that is for evangelical, spiritual and pastoral motives………priestly celibacy….is profoundly connected with ordination, whereby a man takes on the likeness of Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and Spouse of the Church, and therefore as a choice of a greater and undivided love for Christ and His Church, as a full and joyful availability of his heart for pastoral ministry…the priest…as he witnesses to the evangelical value of virginity…will be able to aid Christian spouses to live fully the ‘great sacrament’ of the love of Christ the Bridegroom for His Spouse the Church, just as his own faithfulness to celibacy will help them to be faithful to each other as husband and wife. [30]
Such a clear teaching and invitation is based on the assumption that it is a whole man, a real man, a person comfortable in his skin as a man, who embraces the chaste life of our divine election.
In our culture, however, we have seen a progressive denigration of that which the Father has created man: that is the human person, in the God created beauty and dignity of an equality of person which flowers in the diversity of some persons being created male and some persons being created female.
Not here the place to explore any further the sheer idiotic stance of those who pretend there is anything right in debasing either gender, much less in those futile and sacrilegious continuing efforts, in particular, to un-male or un-female children to the point of making adults who are so totally confused about gender they no longer even know they are persons.
Here is the place for affirmation of our manhood taken on by the Holy Spirit at ordination and restored to us in the sacrament as consecrated manhood: priesthood.
Each person, each male his maleness and each female her femaleness, sanctified at Baptism.
We priests have our maleness consecrated at ordination.
Therefore we cannot participate in any impurity of thought, word, deed, action, in heterosexual or homosexual activity, participation in any cause which diminishes the human person, especially not in any form of exploitation of the young or the vulnerable, nor in any cause which advocates the denigration of any human person. Rather as true fathers we are to be the prime protectors of every human person from the moment of their conception until natural death.
We are irrevocably and indisputably the protectors of the domestic church, proclaimers of the Gospel of Life, defenders of the human person, especially in those stages of life – it’s very beginning and natural end, its childhood and old age, its times of sickness or weakness – when life is most vulnerable.
To do less is to betray our male personhood and the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Bl. Pope John Paul II placed before all men, and for priests most necessarily, Saint Joseph as a model of true manhood, true fidelity to all that is most holy in masculinity.
Saint Joseph is a powerful intercessor for us as we seek to be whole and holy as male persons, mature men with childlike hearts as priests who are at one and the same time son of the Father, father to all our brothers and sisters in Christ, brother to all the children of the Father, through the activity of the Holy Spirit within us by our sacramental ordination, in persona Christi capitis.
Commenting on the visit of the Angel to St. Joseph [Mt.1:20, 21] Pope John Paul notes:
                                                       The divine messenger introduces Joseph to the mystery of Mary’s motherhood. [31a]
It follows quite simply then none is better than Joseph to introduce we priests to, and teach us about, Our Blessed Mother, Queen of the Clergy, than this model of manhood. Indeed since St. Joseph is also the Universal Protector of the Church, who better to enliven in our priestly hearts a profound love, respect, and devoted service to, Holy Mother the Church?
                                                  It is to Joseph, then, that the messenger turns, entrusting to him the responsibilities of an earthly father with regard to Mary’s son…he became a unique guardian of the mystery…Together with Mary, Joseph is the first guardian of this divine mystery….Joseph’s way of faith… was totally determined by the same mystery of which he, together with Mary, had been the first guardian. [31b]
This is our vocation, to be protectors of the sacred as well as ministers of sacrament.
This requires we be real men, holy men, and fatherly men. Men capable of a husband’s and father’s, of a whole, holy man’s strength, courage, tenderness, love, wisdom, and generosity to provide for and protect those confided to our care by the same Heavenly Father who confided the Child and His Mother to the care of St. Joseph.
Our priestly vocation is an entrustment by the Most Holy Trinity, to our care, of countless immortal souls.
Our work is the salvation of souls.
                                                        Saint Joseph was called by God to serve the person and mission of Jesus directly through the exercise of his fatherhood. [31c]
That is an absolute truth which we should keep within our hearts as a template of our priestly lives.
We have been ordained to serve the person and mission of Christ with the fatherly care of our own hearts: Christ in the Church, Christ in all our brothers and sisters, in particular those whose material or spiritual lives are marked by such suffering they are deemed poor.
Being father, exercising holy fatherhood, is constitutive of our divine election.
Reluctance to being addressed as Father is a serious denial of sacramental reality and a gross lack of humility.
                                                       Joseph showed Jesus ‘by a special gift from heaven, all the natural love, all the affectionate solicitude that a Father’s heart can know.’ [31d]
Thus we are to love all those whom we serve.
Besides being a model of manly fortitude, solicitude, fatherhood and as a husband for us, St. Joseph is also a model of all the virtues, in particular chastity, humility, fidelity and absolute trust in Divine Providence, all essential in the life of a priest.
                                                      The total sacrifice, whereby Joseph surrendered his whole existence to the demands of the Messiah’s coming into his home, becomes understandable only in the light of his profound interior life. It was from this interior life that ‘ very singular commands and consolations came, bringing him also the logic and strength that belong to simple and clear souls, and giving him the power of making great decisions – such as the decision to put his liberty immediately at the disposition of the divine designs, to make over to them also his legitimate human calling, his conjugal happiness, to accept the conditions, the responsibility and the burden of a family, but, through an incomparable original love, to renounce that natural conjugal love that is the foundation and nourishment of the family.’
                                                       This submission to God, this readiness of will to dedicate oneself to all that serves Him, is really nothing less than that exercise of devotion which constitutes one expression of the virtue of religion. [31e]
Saint Joseph in all his manhood is the model for priests!
Fidelity is the day to day, moment by moment, willingness to give ourselves as gift.
This exercise of devotion, which is an expression of the virtue of religion, is predicated on joyful acceptance of reality: our vocation of joy is the vocation of communion of love with the Blessed Trinity.
Once again, naturally enough, we come face to face with a simple fact: we need faith!
Faith is a gift. 
This we know.
Increase of faith is a gift we must ask for.
The faithful St. Joseph will intercede on our behalf for a constant increase in this gift of faith if we, man to man, ask him.
Our joy in seeking Christ alone is that we might do all that which is pleasing to Him, the Father, the Holy Spirit, never forgetting the key to rejoicing the heart of God is faith! [Hb.11:6]
Because of the pulverization of our true understanding of self as a male person and living out of that gift, a pulverization inflicted upon us by the culture of death, we too, even as adult men, can be burdened by the sorrow(s) so common among our brothers, the widowers, grandfathers, fathers, husbands, uncles, brothers, sons: Christ’s faithful laymen in the world.
There seems to be, frankly, to a very dangerous degree – dangerous for the faith, the Church, for the vulnerable, especially for the unborn and those weak in anyway, for women and children in particular – such a lack of mature holy manliness among bishops and priests in our day that perhaps this is why a bishop and priest like Bl. Pope John Paul II was seen as such a sign of contradiction.
When bishops and priests surrender their vocation as men, as fathers, to the demands of those persons, mostly women but also many wounded men, who demand what amounts to a weak, indecisive, veritable androgynous presbyterate, truly when the Lord looks down upon our world His Sacred Heart must bleed again and He must again cry out to the Father: “Father, have pity on Your flock, for they are wandering about, sheep without shepherds, children without fathers!”
                                                  In our contemporary confusion we often overlook the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation for sexuality and gender. Human nature is sexual, and so the assumption of human nature by God would necessarily involve gender as well. Jesus’ gender expresses His identity and His mission. Jesus Christ was, and is, and will always be human. And His maleness is not an accident of history; it has important purpose in God’s plan.
                                                  The entrance of Jesus Christ into the human scene draws upon the Old Testament Image of God as a faithful, forgiving bridegroom and makes it concrete…..Men themselves are called to imitate Him precisely as a man…..Christ teaches us how to be men, good sons of the heavenly Father. A man has only to look upon Christ to see himself as God intends. [32]
                                                   On the mountain of the Transfiguration, God speaks from the cloud, as He had done on Sinai. But now He says: ‘This is my Beloved Son; listen to Him’ (Mk.9:7). He commands us to listen to His Son, because ‘no one knows the Father except the son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ (Mt.11:27). And so we learn that the true name of God is FATHER! The name which is beyond all other names Abba! (cf.Gal.4:6) [33]
Perhaps no other area has been such a deep cesspool of anti-Christ distortion of truth, denial of the truth about self and priesthood, refusal to humbly accept the truth than the area of debate, no now longer possible without engaging in lie and disobedience if prompting the matter, than the issue of women and the sacrament of orders.                                                       
The cognitive dissonance common among the laity, leading many to be cafeteria Catholics, finds its counterpart among those priests and religious who, regardless of the simple truth it is NOT within the competence of the Church to do so, insist the sacrament of orders be attempted upon women. 
Love and truth are inseparable.
Love is never interested in self.
Love is always servant of the other.
                                                                 Priestly ordination, which hands on the office entrusted by Christ to His Apostles of teaching, sanctifying and governing the faithful, has in the Catholic Church from the beginning always been reserved to men alone. This tradition has also been faithfully maintained by the Oriental Churches…..Pope Paul VI, out of fidelity to his office of safeguarding the Apostolic Tradition…reminded…[us]…of the position of the Catholic Church: “She holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the examples recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing His Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing men only; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for His Church.”….the Church “does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination”…Christ’s way of acting did not proceed from sociological or cultural motives peculiar to His time….”…in giving the Church her fundamental constitution, her theological anthropology – thereafter always followed by the Church’s tradition – Christ established things in this way.”….”In calling men only as His Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, He emphasized the dignity and vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time.” In fact the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles attest that this call was made in accordance with God’s eternal plan; Christ choose those whom He willed (cf.Mk.3:13-14; Jn.6:70), and He did so in union with the Father, “through the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:2), after having spent the night in prayer (cf.Lk.6:12)…the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the  mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lessor dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them. Rather, it is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe…………
                                             …..in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf.Lk.22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. [34]
 
As regards that last paragraph, the solemn definitive word of Peter, we priests, especially if we have been pulverized into saying or doing anything to the contrary  must beg for the grace of love’s truth speaking courage and the grace to take deeply into our hearts this definitive teaching of the Holy Father:
                                                            With divine and Catholic faith is to be believed everything contained in the word of God, written and in Tradition, that is to say, in the unique deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, and proposed as divinely revealed, whether by the solemn magisterium of the Church or by her ordinary and universal magisterium, or which is manifested in the common adherence of the faithful under the guidance of the sacred magisterium: all these are to be held and any teachings to the contrary are to be avoided.
                                                          Each and everything concerning faith and morals which is definitively taught by the magisterium of the Church must be firmly embraced and held, that is, whatever is needed to defend and explain the same deposit of faith in a faithful and holy manner; therefore whoever refuses to accept such definitive propositions is opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. [Canon 750 as amended in 1998 by the document Ad Tuendam Fidem]
As we seek to enter ever more deeply into communion of love with the Blessed Trinity, to become ever more engaged in our consecration as men endowed with the virtue of religion, sons of the Father, priests in persona Christi capitis, shepherds, fathers, teachers led by the Holy Spirit, we must enter more fully into union with Christ the man, the obedient son of the Father.
It is to journey, with steadfastness and honour, the pilgrim’s way.
Fidelity to our reality of being male persons, in the whole and holy authentic truth of this reality; fidelity to being and willing to be called that which we are, Father; fidelity to only teaching, shepherding only by, truth and truth-speaking in love; fidelity to being, often, pulverized by a culture of death which in general, and often in particular from both lay and religious women who carry the burden of much pain which is reality based, and much which is rooted in the culture of lies, as a willingness to be vessels of compassion, all this is fidelity to being in persona Christi.
Sometimes true love means uttering a simple truth word: no!
No, even though your pain is real and immense and perhaps makes it very difficult indeed, beloved sister and daughter, to understand equality of person does not mean sameness of sacramental vocation, I will not pretend to love you by telling you lies about contraception, abortion or sacrament.
No, even though your pain is real and immense and perhaps my truth-speaking will become the excuse you seek to leave the Church, no I will not pretend to love you by telling a lie such as ‘definitive’ teaching means only until the ‘next’ pope…for there is never, in reality, a ‘next’ pope, simply another priest is called to be Peter.
No, even though your pain is real and immense and perhaps my truth-speaking by simply being a male person is experienced by you as the reawakening of every hurt ever inflicted upon you in reality, or upon your sisters throughout history, and made worse by those whose agenda often distorts the truth of such things, I will not pretend to love you by telling the lie of denial about my gender, nor about the sacramental reality of priesthood which makes me, even more than by being a human male person, even more than through baptism, your brother and thus you my beloved sister, and, as priest you my beloved daughter and I your father-shepherd, teacher and servant.
                                                      The example of dedicated clerics is the best inspiration for the faithful….It is better to have a few ministers who are upright and effective than many who labor in vain to build up the Church. [35]
                                                      ….by presenting the word of truth properly and by preaching not themselves but Christ crucified, they should clearly proclaim in their preaching the tenets and precepts of our most holy religion in accordance with the teaching of the Catholic Church and the Fathers. [36]
Love costs.
It costs the life of Love Himself upon the Cross.
Can we priests love anyone any less?
In the Litany of Saint Joseph, after praising him, as most just, chaste, etc., and most faithful, among the other titles listed is: terror of demons.
The holy man noted earlier in the Litany as being strong, obedient and faithful, is also the terror of demons.
When we, as true holy men, as priests, are by grace also strong, obedient and faithful we too shall be a source of terror for demons, in particular those demons of the culture of death.
Likewise when the Litany notes that St. Joseph is the mirror of patience, guardian of virgins, pillar of families, solace of the wretched, hope of the sick and, as patron a comfort to the dying, are not all these manly virtues also aspects of our divine election, our priestly vocation of service?
To become ever more completely that which we are, by gender, baptism and ordination, we must, like St. Joseph the good and just man before us, constantly be attentive to the movement of the Holy Spirit within our beings. 
The Sanctifier at work within us, calling us to ever more complete abandonment to Divine Providence, ever deeper metanoia, that total kenosis where nothing remains in or about us but Christ.
Though not mentioned specifically in the Litany as one of his titles St. Joseph, like every saint, can be turned to as patron of joy!
A significant aspect of interior joy, itself a virtue and gift of the Holy Spirit, is the joy of repentance, of confessing our failure to be faithful and, through the actual grace of each duty of the moment, and when needed, the sanctifying grace of absolution in the sacrament of confession, beginning in Him each moment, again and again and again.
Even the secular world is full of expressions about it ‘taking a real man to admit he’s made a mistake’ etc., how much more then is it a reality of manhood to come to Christ for forgiveness.
It is at one and the same time to be a man, like St. Joseph, of courage and humility.
Indeed there is a direct connection between the frequency, or not, of our being priest-penitents and the frequency, or not, of our being available, like our patron St. John Marie Vianney, examples such as St. Padre Pio, for all those seeking sacramental absolution.
In the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, in chapter 15, we discover three remarkable teachings from Jesus where He reveals again the Father’s utter love for us, how He welcomes with joy those who return to Him.
We return to the Father because Christ has found us.
We return most fully through the reality of sacramental absolution – through being on our knees as one admitting our need of God and of Divine Mercy.
There is no greater antidote to the arrogance of the culture of death, nor to the, even among we priests, cognitive disconnect between orthodox teaching and the way we tend to do things, than to open wide the doors, of our being, in particular through sacramental confession, to Jesus’ own words imploring us to always be one with Him. [Jn4:5]
The fidelity of which St. Joseph is our patron and model was not for him, nor is it for we priests, primarily a matter of ‘doing’ what needs be done, as important as that is.
Fidelity of the true and sacred kind, which implies explicitly the nitty-gritty doing well of the duty of the moment, is first of all a matter of ‘being’: being totally trusting of, and abandoned to, the love and will of the Father for us.
It is impossible to do that act of abandonment without humility and it is well-nigh impossible to be humble without admittance, like the man at the back of the temple, that I am a sinner constantly in need of Divine Mercy.
Thus when Jesus speaks about the reality of what transpires when a sinner opens wide the doors of their being to repentance and forgiveness, He is also teaching about fidelity. [cf.Lk.15]
There is no doubt in my heart about the direct connection between the apparent joylessness in the lives of so many priests and the lack of priests being truly repentant and going humbly to a brother priest for sacramental confession and absolution.
My heart also suspects far fewer of our good Catholic people would abandon their Catholic faith in search of the so-called evangelical experience if they were granted more joy in their lives through being able to receive sacramental absolution.
Indeed we will never turn things around when it comes to men saying yes to divine election, to re-evangelizing the fallen away, evangelizing those not yet in the fullness of true faith, unless we rediscover the importance and reality of sacramental confession, absolution, in a word unless we repent.
Fidelity must always begin with repentance.
We are not always faithful.
We need to not only admit this to ourselves but to confess this in sacramental confession.
Even if our infidelity is ‘venial’ it remains an aspect of our hearts to which we refuse the gift of mentanoia, a door of our being we keep shut to Christ.
If our infidelity involves mortal sin then, of course, there is no option but sacramental absolution.
Here, through the treasure of St. Joseph as our patron and model of holy manhood we also imitate him in the mystery of holy fatherhood in our vocation of joy as priests.
There is within the exercise of our sacramental authority to absolve from sin, and to deliver from demons for which we should be an absolute terror, another truth on fatherhood:
                                                        As the steward of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the priest fulfills the command given by Christ to the Apostles after His Resurrection: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (Jn.20:22-23). The priest is the witness and instrument of divine mercy! How important in his life is the ministry of the confessional! It is in the confessional that his spiritual fatherhood is realized in the fullest way. It is in the confessional that every priest becomes a witness of the great miracles which divine mercy works in souls which receive the grace of conversion. It is necessary, however, that every priest at the service of his brothers and sisters in the confessional should experience this same divine mercy by going regularly to confession himself and by receiving spiritual direction.
                                                  As a steward of God’s mysteries, the priest is a special witness to the Invisible in the world. For he is a steward of invisible and priceless treasures belonging to the spiritual and supernatural order. [37]
Saint Joseph is the patron of the interior life, having lived and served the person and mission of Christ with fidelity, courage, strength, obedience, selflessness and humility.
While being the teacher of Christ in the ways of a man’s life on earth St. Joseph was undoubtedly also a ‘student’ at the feet of the Master, learning communion of love with the Father.
This is the essence of spiritual direction for us as priests: to learn what we must teach.
To learn: that we are beloved that we might love.
To learn: truth that we might be truth-speakers.
Recently a brother priest described to me within him a growing hunger to be truly faithful. He begged me to pray he be granted the grace of perseverance.
I was deeply moved.
This priest is my senior by many decades in age and many decades, over sixty, of service to the Church and Her children. He is exemplary in his faith, courage, humility, selflessness, manhood as brother and father.
He is a true priest.
Yet here he was humbly revealing his heart to me, a heart acutely aware fidelity is a grace given, never presumed. A heart fully aware we are indeed but weak vessels of clay, always in need of repentance, always in each moment needing to begin again in Him.
Another reality which struck my heart as I listened to this good and humble priest was his clear awareness we have not been created primarily, nor ordained primarily, to do great things but rather to rejoice we are greatly beloved and to greatly love.
We are called first to be faithful to Someone.
It is through fidelity to the One who loves us so we are urged on by grace to be faithful in all else.
                                                        The response to the divine call is an answer of love to the love which Christ has shown us so sublimely. This response is included in the mystery of that special love for souls who have accepted His most urgent appeals. With a divine force, grace increases the longings of love. And love, when it is genuine, is all-embracing, stable and lasting, an irresistible spur to all forms of heroism. [38]
We know it is through the grace of divine election that we have been called.
Through ordination we have been consecrated.
The desire to be always filled with the grace of ever more complete self-gift to the Church and to all people as servants and heralds of the Gospel is itself the ever more ardent yearning, the ‘longings of love’ which within us become that ‘irresistible spur to all forms of heroism’.
Fidelity is heroic, for spouses, parents, religious, priests.
Fidelity is heroic especially in our day when we witness to the Gospel of Life in the darkness of the culture of death.
Fidelity is that manly heroic courage lived at a time when both as men and as priests we are pulverized from all sides, often simply because we are men, because we are priests.
Here too we turn to the good Saint Joseph as our model and patron, for he carried within his very being the history of a pulverized people, a history marked by deliverance as well. 
In his own life St. Joseph suffered much but was also faithful to his vocation of being both spouse and protector of his wife Mary and foster-father and protector of the Child Jesus.
We men who are priests are likewise called to embrace, with courage, the mystery of suffering, the blessedness of suffering. Likewise are we called to be faithful to our spouse the Church and to be Her protector, protectors of all that is sacred. We too are called to be father and protector of the Child Jesus: Christ who comes to us as every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.
No human being should be an orphan of our priestly, fatherly, manly hearts.
Because the reality of our very existence, essence of being, is that we are beloved of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, fidelity is our response to this communion of love, to love Himself.
We need constantly to remember, in the depths of our being and by the way we live and move and have our being in Him, that we are greatly loved and therefore, with joy, is our vocation to love greatly.
Through the intercession of St. Joseph we will be granted the grace to always remember it is in and through Christ that we are in relationship with the Father; our lives are for being in relationship with Christ, seeking and doing only the things of Christ; the Spirit is always at work within us to sanctify us and through us to sanctify all those whose lives we touch, most especially through the celebration of Holy Mass and the sacrament of Reconciliation. [Jn.14:26]
We are in relationship through our very creation by Him, in the inexhaustible reality of baptism, that lavish outpouring of the Holy Spirit configuring us to Christ in His death and resurrection, and for us priests in the incomprehensible reality of intimacy through sacramental ordination in persona Christi capitis!
Our relationship is communion of love with Infinite of Infinite Love Himself! [Jn. 1:29, 36]
St. John also notes Jesus is in motion, coming toward, as He does within us, towards us, every moment of our life. [ibid: 29, 26]
How the heart of St. Joseph must naturally have pounded with the pride of a father every time he saw Jesus coming towards him and how the soul of Joseph must have leapt with joy every time he saw Jesus coming towards him.
Jesus comes towards us in every moment of our lives too.
Likewise St. Joseph must have watched Jesus every time He walked by, that is, contemplate Jesus moving about in every moment of his life.
Jesus walks about in every moment of our lives too, thus every moment is a moment of contemplation in love.
So overtaken by the beauty of Christ, the holy allure if you will of Christ, the fire of His love radiating from His Holy Face, those eyes revealing the love of the Father that His disciples couldn’t bear being separated from Him and cried out to know where He dwelt. [ibid: 38]
Should not our manly, priestly hearts likewise yearn to ask Him that question which is simply the cry of a heart yearning to be in communion of love?
Love’s invitation to intimacy is given, inviting us to ‘come and see.’
Always Love gives us freedom.
We are free to follow Him, or not.
Yet the essence of fidelity is to choose to always be inclined towards Christ, to follow Him; being always with Christ wherever He is in the moment.
Where is Christ in this moment?
Awaiting us precisely, where the Father wills us to be.
The place where Jesus dwells is there.
It is to be one with Him in that place He invites us to when He says: ‘come and you will see.’
Only when we follow Him, as St. Joseph did, into the reality, mystery, grace, of each moment, through fidelity to what the Servant of God, Catherine Doherty rightly named: the duty of the moment -–will we dwell truly, live and move and have our being completely, in Him, with Him, through Him, for Him!
Then all that we hunger for, seek, do, will be in accord with the fullness of our baptismal and priestly vocation.
Then, like our model and patron St. Joseph, will we be true whole and holy men.
Then, in the reality of being in persona Christi, will we know joy! [Jn.4:34; 5:30; 6:38; 14:9-11]
Fidelity is being in relationship with the Father in the place, manner, of Christ’s own relationship with the Father.
While this is true for all the baptized, its particular emphasis in our priestly lives is precisely rooted in the reality of our being consecrated by sacrament in persona Christi.
Our divine election assures us of the needed sanctifying grace of fidelity, in Christ to the Father by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Our fidelity is within the reality of communion of love with the Holy Trinity.
As the courageous and humble man chosen to be the earthly father-protector of the Child and His Mother, we too must strive to be faithful in the reality of every moment wherein Christ is always ‘walking towards us’:
                                                      …..you are always and everywhere the bearers of your particular vocation; you are the bearers of the grace of Christ, the eternal Priest, and bearers of the charism of the Good Shepherd. And this you can never forget; this you can never renounce; this you must put into practice at every moment, in every place and in every way. [39]
It is when we choose, or attempt to, as it were, deny for the purpose of some form of self-indulgence or lack of truth-speaking courage, to be unmanly that we at the same time choose to forget who we are as priests.
This is when fidelity itself becomes unbearable.
The first aspect of fidelity which suffers frequently is our being visible, hence the roman collar goes; then proper ritual fidelity, followed by a less and less willingness to remain steadfast in the confessional, all the while our interior life unravels.
Ultimately, unless we repent, unless through the grace of conversion in the sacrament of reconciliation where we fall on our knees confident in the gift of Divine Mercy through absolution and the grace of every moment in Him being the moment of beginning again, all will be lost.
Saint Joseph, even before the Angel was sent to affirm the choice of his heart, a selfless, manly, loving choice, was faithful. [cf. Mt.1: 18ff.]
St. Joseph was the first ‘steward’ of the Treasury of Grace Who dwells among us into the world!
                                                      As a steward of these treasures, the priest is always in special contact with the holiness of God…..in the priesthood a man is as it were raised up to the sphere of this holiness…At the same time, the priest experiences daily and continually the descent of God’s holiness upon man….[40]
This is the greater truth, the greater reality.
Though we may live at a time when we are pulverized by the culture of anger, blame and death which surrounds us, pulverized because we are male, because we are priest, it is a little thing to suffer for and with Christ.
St. Joseph suffered and remained faithful and chose the path of love, before he was ever consoled by the angel.
Dare we be less of a man than Joseph?
Dare we love less?
St. Joseph is our dear heavenly companion, our heavenly brother, patron, protector, model of all the manly virtues essential to priestly fidelity. He also is a living witness to the joy of complete self-gift which is also the reality of our priestly vocation. [Jn.15:12, 13]
 
 
                                               
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                                                 

2 CONTEMPLATE AND BECOME

 

A few years ago one morning I had an experience which penetrated deep into my heart. It was one of those particular moments of grace we all experience.

A sort of gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit to notice the implications of a particular routine we have fallen into without much reflection. But a routine which overtime has come to have an effect upon us which has, little by little, altered the depth of our intimacy with the Holy Trinity.

That morning, as usual, upon rising I had prayed briefly and then, like a reflex action, turned on the tv for the morning news.

Once I’d caught the main items I proceeded down to the rectory kitchen to make some coffee.

In that particular rectory this meant passing by the suites of the other priests assigned to this large and busy parish.

Once I’d caught the main items I proceeded down to the rectory kitchen to make some coffee.

In that particular rectory this meant passing by the suites of the other priests assigned to this large and busy parish.

I noticed, clearly this particular morning rather than that usual ‘notice’ of familiar sounds where we don’t actually ‘take note’, each of the other priests had their tv on.

What came into my heart was this sudden question from the Lord: “Why do you linger before the tv at the dawn of each day, yet are so briefly with Me?”

I protested of course, in my heart, that I was before Him, first thing each morning!

“True you utter prayer to Me, but almost in passing, on your way to hear what the world has to say.”

It was true.

I did pray first thing each morning. But not with real attentiveness, passion, thought, wonderment, desire, or intimacy.

What a shock when I began to figure out the hours spent in front of the television compared to the actual amount of time spent in His Eucharistic Presence in quiet intimacy, or ardent petition on behalf of souls.

One of the teachings often repeated by Archbishop Joseph Raya in his homilies and writings is: WE BECOME WHAT WE CONTEMPLATE.

If I am contemplating for longer periods, in front of the television for example, the images and ideas of the world, this will necessarily have a profound effect upon my entire being.

It certainly will affect my prayer life, which is my relationship with the Holy Trinity.

Obviously it will also impact my relationship with self and others, including the way I view the Church and Her teachings.

Indeed how often do we hear ourselves or others expressing attitudes towards the Holy Father, for example, clearly formed by the influence of the media, rather than by actually having read the official text of some papal teaching.

Perhaps we need to take a close look at which magazines, types of music, web-sites predominate in our lives.

What are we contemplating? [Rm.8:5-9]

Television news reports and programs present to us specific points of view, ways of living, attitudes towards Jesus and the things of Jesus: God, the human person, morality, Church, Pope, ourselves.

Almost exclusively the ideas and attitudes presented are only those concerns of the flesh that are, indeed, ‘hostility toward God.’

If I spend more time each day contemplating what appears on television then I am spending much more time in communion with the ‘concerns of the flesh’, than I am in communion of love with the Blessed Trinity.

If I spend more time each day contemplating before the television screen, or listening to particular kinds of music, visiting particular sites on the web, reading books and magazines of similar ilk, all of this predominating in my life rather than contemplation of, in communion with, Christ and the things of Christ, then I will find my entire prayer life is profoundly wounded, my relationship with Holy Mother the Church, my dwelling within the depths of the very Gospel I am ordained to proclaim, all weakened, perhaps bleeding away until within I am as dry as dust.

The world did not consecrate us, give us life, and configure us to Christ.

Why then do we surrender so much of ourselves to the multi-channel, internet, universe of flesh and concerns of the flesh? [Rm.12: 1, 2]

Sometimes we can stand before such words and find ourselves exhausted, perhaps even a little angry.

It can seem in our priestly lives that there is a type of no escape, no rest from ‘spiritual’ things.

Nor from the constant ‘goad’ of the Holy Spirit.

At such moments, difficult as it may seem, maybe even weighing upon us like the proverbial straw on the back of the camel, truly our hearts should choose to rejoice: what a Divine Lover we have who pursues us so! [1Cor.2:10ff.]

One of the striking things about the letters of St. Paul, rarely focused upon by commentaries, is the depth and passion of his intimate relationship with Christ, and through Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

More than the theological, moral and even liturgical teachings in the letters of St. Paul, this passion, this intimacy, this communion of love between him and the Holy Trinity, is striking, and should encourage us all to likewise allow ourselves to be pursued!

The person, or thing, which has the greatest influence on us is the one with whom we spent the greatest amount of our time. Spending it actually with them, or preoccupied with the idea of them.

Again, as Archbishop Raya teaches: WE BECOME WHAT WE CONTEMPLATE.

Contemplation of Christ and the things of Christ should then be more necessary to us than food and water. In reality contemplation of Christ and the things of Christ is just that necessary, and more.

Indeed, if we are not nourished by the Trinity through prayer we shall starve, or seek different nourishment, and, become what we eat. [Mic.6:14; Lk. 12:34]

When a brother priest comes to me expressing difficulty accepting anything about Christ and the things of Christ, and truly everything about who we are and what we do is encompassed in ‘Christ and the things of Christ’, I always ask about his prayer life.

We know a marriage cannot last if it is devoid of intimacy, if any other person or thing preoccupies either of the spouses more than their beloved.

So it is with us and Jesus.

So it is with us and the Father.

So it is with us and the Holy Spirit.

So it us with us, for everything should flow from our communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity. [Ep.4:17-24]

Without a deep, constant, consistent, prayer life we will falter.

We will become disenchanted, discouraged, seek in an unholy manner, in unholy pursuits, unholy places, consolation and affirmation in persons and things other than Christ and the things of Christ.

We will lose child-likeness, purity of heart and hope.

The dialogue of prayer is not only the intimate dialogue of communion of love but it is also the daily means of purification from the dust and dirt, confused thinking, of that ‘hostility towards God’ which is the hallmark of the world. It is inevitable, even though we are not ‘of the world’ that since we proclaim the Gospel in the world, we have a constant need to be purified again and again and again. [1Pt.1:13-16]

We must trust, and constantly beg the help of, the Holy Spirit who comes. [Rm.8:26, 27]

As priests we are asked to trust that one way the Holy Spirit fulfills this interior groaning within us is through our praying as Holy Mother the Church mandates us to. First and foremost this entails the prayerful, faith-filled daily celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Secondly, as of great importance for our own and the salvation of all souls, the needs of the Church and in particular of the souls we are responsible for, is the daily faith-filled celebration of the universal prayer of consecrated souls in the Church, the Divine Office, commonly called the Liturgy of the Hours.

What a wonderful phrase that is, the Liturgy of the Hours! It reminds us that at every hour, in every time zone and country on the face of the earth, the Church is at prayer.

Ours is a vital voice co-mingled with the entire choir of the Church at prayer.

Never to be diminished either in their importance as a means of our becoming authentically what we contemplate, those forms of prayer and meditation commonly referred to as ‘pious/popular devotions’.

Pope Pius VI connects learning and holiness as two aspects of our divine election we should strive to excel at:

A man who is going to be a priest should excel in holiness and learning. For God rejects as priests those who have rejected knowledge and only the man who unites moral piety with the pursuit of knowledge can be a suitable worker in the Lord’s harvest. [10]

Fidelity to popular devotions such as the Stations of the Cross, the Holy Rosary, the Litanies, all of which can both be prayed alone but even more profitably be celebrated with our people, opens the door of our being to incredible teachings, the gifts of wisdom and knowledge, from the Holy Spirit.

At the same time such a contemplative approach quiets the mind and enhances our ability to transfer from our intellects to our hearts what we study through meditative reading of Sacred Scripture, the classic works of the Fathers of the Church, Fathers of the Desert, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Documents of Vatican II and the other Councils, Papal teachings, the writings from across the millennia of those orthodox holy men and women, priests, religious, laity, who have poured their holiness and wisdom through writings into the vast treasury of the Church for our use as means of becoming more and more who we truly are.

Wisdom and knowledge themselves become ever more profoundly within our beings aspects of the joy of our vocation!

Wisdom and knowledge, as we know, are gifts of the Holy Spirit. Through our prayer life, our sacramental life, contemplation of Christ and the things of Christ, the Holy Spirit constantly imparts to us more and more, and forms us more fully according to these same gifts of wisdom and knowledge. [Sir.24:1-3; 18-21]

When we pray with faith, and faithfully pray, the Liturgy of the Hours, each day at the appropriate hour, we find Holy Mother the Church has placed before us this encounter with Wisdom. While this is reality in each of the Hours it is perhaps most striking within the Office of Readings.

Pope Pius IX reminds us that:

….priests are the best examples of piety and God’s worship, and people tend generally to be of the same quality as their priests. [11]

Therefore for we priests a true life of prayer is not an option, and certainly never to be considered as a mere duty, but is in fact an essential instrument of proclaiming the Gospel with our lives, being that necessary and salutary example of piety to our people. We are called to lives that are not only prayer filled in private but to lives which are visibly prayer filled before the eyes of our people, and within praying with our people. Thus as true as it is that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is our central communal act of worship and prayer we do a great disservice to the virtue of piety and to the piety of our people if we fail to pray with them through popular devotions, such as Benediction, Litanies, the Stations, the Holy Rosary, as well as urging them to participate communally in the Liturgy of the Hours.

…..nothing instructs others more in piety and the service of God than the lives and example of those who have dedicated themselves to the divine ministry. [12]

Given our propensity in this generation to exaggerate individuality and a curious approach to ‘my’ rights, it is not surprising that we often have a type of knee jerk reaction to anything that appears to us as an imposition. Hence it is quite possible: expect perhaps for those covering marriage law, most priests would not turn to the Code of Canon Law as a source of inspiration, comfort, or spiritual sustenance. Yet there are within those paragraphs delineating the laws of the Church some quite exquisite treasures which bear serious meditation.

Thus, for example, the following is truly a beautiful invitation to frequent concelebrating not only of Holy Mass but of the Liturgy of the Hours, and even of ‘pious’ devotions with our brother priests:

Since they all work toward one end, the building up of the Body of Christ, clerics are to be united among themselves by the bond of brotherhood and of prayer….[Canon 275:1]

In leading their lives clerics are especially bound to pursue holiness because they are consecrated to God….they are to nourish their spiritual life from the two-fold table of Sacred Scripture and the Eucharist….to fulfill the liturgy of the hours daily….conscientious in devoting time regularly to mental prayer, in approaching the sacrament of penance frequently, in cultivating special devotion to the Virgin Mother of God, and in using other common and particular means for their sanctification. [Canon 276:1; 2.2; 2.3; 2.5]

Within the same section of the Code referring to our splendid divine election we are likewise encouraged to grow in wisdom and knowledge, to:

….continue to pursue sacred studies…to strive after solid doctrine which is based upon Sacred Scripture, handed down by their predecessors and commonly accepted by the Church and which is contained especially in the documents of the councils and of the Roman Pontiffs; they are to avoid profane novelties and pseudo-science……to attend pastoral lectures…opportunities to acquire a fuller knowledge of the sacred sciences and pastoral methods…..to pursue a knowledge of the other sciences…as such knowledge contributes to the exercise of their pastoral ministry. [Canon 279]

There is no doubt, with what can be experienced at times as virtually relentless demands upon us, that the Liturgy of the Hours can be experienced as a burden. No doubt we all know priests, perhaps even such thoughts have wandered across our own minds, who consider the Liturgy of the Hours, and pious devotions, as anachronisms from before Vatican II best left within monastery walls or the lives of simple lay folk.

If we give into such a lies of the evil one we will experience profound interior dryness of soul, loneliness of heart, and a mind closed to the gifts of wisdom and knowledge.

Here, as in so many aspects of our vocation, we need to be very meek and humble of heart, in imitation of Christ who submitted Himself to the will of the Father in all things. We need through such humility of heart to willingly trust the wisdom of Holy Mother the Church, articulated for us most clearly in our day in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Code of Canon Law and most tenderly in the annual Holy Thursday Letters to his brother priests from Pope John Paul II wherein he always called us to a deeper life of prayer, closer union with Our Blessed Mother Mary.

Approached and fulfilled with an open heart the Liturgy of the Hours, as well as pious devotions, become a critical experience of our daily lives of prayer and fidelity to our vocation of joy. Indeed the Liturgy of the Hours in particular becomes like a sweet oasis in the desert, cool shade in the depths of the Lord’s vineyard where we labour devotedly in the heat of the day, a wellspring of cool water to slake the thirst of our hearts for communion of love!

The document of the Second Vatican Council on the Sacred Liturgy has an entire chapter, chapter IV, dedicated to teaching upon this treasure of the Liturgy of the Hours. It invites a careful The divine office, in keeping with ancient Christian tradition, is so devised that the whole course of the day and night is made holy by the praise of God….it is the public prayer of the Church…a source of piety and nourishment for personal prayer….[13]

The Council’s document on the Life of Priests also notes:

By their fulfillment of the Divine Office priests themselves should extend to the different hours of the day the praise and thanksgiving they offer in the celebration of the Eucharist. By the Office they pray to God in the name of the Church for the whole people entrusted to them and in fact for the whole world. [14]

In our culture, which is so prone to emphasize doing over being, we priests can fall into that very mind-set which so hobbles the world. It is when we have become so hobbled ourselves that our attitude towards daily celebration of Holy Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, time spent in adoration and pious devotions, closeness to Our Blessed Mother, all falter and we begin to spend more and more time in front of the television or surfing the net rather than contemplating Sacred Scripture, engaged in mental prayer, reading and studying books which enhance the interior life and our pastoral ministry.

Soon there is such an ache in our hearts, such a hunger in our minds and imaginations for communion of love, affirmation of being, for hope, that we find ourselves looking everywhere rather than to Christ and the things of Christ.

We become what we contemplate, and if we contemplate that which no-thing, emptiness, is, ultimately, ever more acute emptiness, becomes our lot.

Indeed, if we be honest, once such a source of comfort, and inspiration, as the Liturgy of the Hours goes, the rest of our life of prayer and sacred study quickly follows. For the dam has been breached, the deep pool of faith and joy, that reservoir containing the true treasure of our hearts, begins to empty out and our whole attitude towards God, Church, orthodoxy, vocation, others, self, quickly sours.

It is a simple undeniable reality, the less we pray the less time we find we actually have to DO all the stuff we believe we need to do, are supposed to do, even if we remain rather sincerely devoted to all that our divine election implies and demands of us.

Even more wonderfully is the far greater reality that the more we pray the greater the expanse of time to BE who we are, priest!

Within that grace of expanded time there is then all the time we could ever need through being priest to ‘do’ the work assigned to us in the vineyard of the Lord.

Our pastoral activity demands that we should be close to people and all their problems…it also demands that we be close to all these problems ‘in a priestly way’. Only then, in the sphere of all those problems, do we remain ourselves. Therefore if we are really of assistance in those human problems…we keep our identity and are really faithful to our vocation….Our brethren in the faith, and unbelievers too, expect us always to be able to show them this perspective, to become real witnesses to it, to be dispensers of grace, to be servants of the word of God. THEY EXPECT US TO BE MEN OF PRAYER. [15]

Several years ago I was made aware of the situation of a young priest who served in a remote area.

He was greatly discouraged, filled with frustration, felt his vocation slipping away.

His being hungered to participate in unity of prayer with all his brothers, for the whole Church and the whole world, for his own spiritual sustenance, but he could not.

He was, truly, interiorly starving to death.

The problem was very basic, and tragically in our day not that uncommon.

There was so little respect for the wisdom of the Church when it comes in particular to the priest’s life of prayer, in the seminary that he had attended, none of the students were taught how to prayer the Liturgy of the Hours, in a word no one had shown him the basic process of knowing what ‘day’ in the liturgical year and how to find the right place in the breviary.

The priest who brought this story to my attention described how, once he took the time to show the younger priest the basic ‘mechanics’ of the breviary the young priest embraced the Divine Office with all the energy of a starving man offered food!

Within a short time the discouragement had left him, the joy of his vocation, our common divine election, had returned.

Our struggles, as men and as priests, in this 21st century are fundamentally no different than they were for the Apostles or any of our brothers who have preceded us in this splendid vocation across the millennia.

Fundamentally all struggles, all temptations, all sins, are rooted in idolatry, that is in a crisis of true faith, true trust.

Much of our restlessness, a significant amount of the exhaustion we experience, certainly a high degree of the struggle, definitely our propensity to sin, venially to be sure, mortally, as horrific as that is having the same root cause, comes back to the raw result experienced by that young priest.

Though in his case not because he was refusing to pray.

What excuse have we easily accepted in our own hearts to manufacture as an attempt to stifle the goading of the Holy Spirit?

Long before the Second Vatican Council, long before the very public angst in the lives of so many priests today, another priest wrote on the truths of our divine election.

His clear and tender words aren’t as well read in seminaries or rectories in our day, perhaps because of this tendency of moderns to disparage anything deemed out of date.

Nonetheless his words return their tender wisdom, encouragement, truth about the treasury of grace which is the Liturgy of the Hours:

…this prayer can only rise to heaven if it passes through our lips and through our heart……..you know the words of Christ, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart…..and with thy whole mind’ (Matt.xxii.37). He did not say ‘with thy heart, with thy mind, but with thy whole heart’: ex tota corde. This word totus, repeated like this, is a true expression of devotion; devotion is love carried to its highest point…..

…We have the charge of souls. The priest who recites his breviary with fidelity and devotion will often find that he is helped in a surprising way by the Lord in the works which he undertakes for His glory…..if you recite the breviary without rushing it, the phrases of Holy Scripture which you pronounce will finally become, as it were, part of yourself. You will find the ensemble of the texts of the Old and New Testaments…a treasure-chamber filled with graces and light. These illuminations will enlighten your faith in the mysteries of Christ, of the Church, and even in the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

Finally, the Office, well-recited, is a source of great joy for the priest. Why? Because the breviary makes him live every day in the hope and in the possession of the supernatural goods which God has given to His Church. The liturgy is filled with that fathomless joy conferred on the Spouse of Christ by the divine benefits which have been

showered on her. The priest who recites this prayer in a worthy fashion shares in the current of joy which vivifies the holy city….[16]

Among the ‘supernatural goods’ which God has given to His Church to dispense, taking from Her storehouse goods which are ‘ever old and ever new’ are the sacramentals: everything from particular blessings to Holy Water, from scapulars and medals to holy foods such as the Eastern tradition of Prosphora, to rosaries and chatkies and other types of Christian prayer ropes and chaplets, blessed candles, icons, statutes, and as well all those blessings, all the grace which comes to souls through prayerful celebration of popular devotions, Benediction, recitation of Litanies, the Stations of the Cross, use of blessed candles, events like the crowning of statutes of Mary in schools and homes and an appreciation and proper use of those prayers which are indulged as well as that most ancient and important devotion, the pilgrimage.

I do believe in my heart there is a direct connection between emphasis on doing over being, crisis of faith, neglect of the Liturgy of the Hours, and related weakness in the spiritual life of a priest, and the continuous despoiling of our church interiors, paucity of celebrating Benediction and other popular devotions, decreased quality of preaching, neglect in our own lives of our availability for the sacrament of penance, dissent towards Church teaching, poverty of homilies, shortage of men saying yes to the call of divine election and the empty pews which surely haunt us every time we approach the altar to celebrate Holy Mass.

Personally I have never encountered a lay person who has asked for the despoiling of a parish church through the cessation of popular devotions and the removal of sacred images, hiding of the tabernacle, virtual shutting down of the confessionals.

We priests have no right, before God, Holy Mother the Church and her children, to destroy either the external patrimony nor deny access to any of the sacraments, sacramentals, or popular devotions approved by the Church for the sanctification of the children of our Father.

We must honour, and be faithful to, with meek, humble, and, when needed, contrite hearts what Holy Mother the Church deems necessary and appropriate for the people, and do so with a witness of trust and piety, trust in the efficacy of each sacrament, the sacramentals and devotions, and a pious heart obvious to all.

When it comes to the external patrimony of the Church, as well as to the treasure of millennia of prayer and sacramental life, we need to have a clear understanding when we are about to stripe anything away of just what it is we are touching, why we are about to destroy, remove, tamper with or cease it, to whom we shall be held, open-hearted, meditative reading.

accountable, and do we really have any business doing this at all, and just which ‘spirit’ is urging us on.

Margaret Visser in her book THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE, illustrates eloquently what the subtitle describes as ‘space, time, mystery and meaning in an ordinary church.’

One of a church’s main purposes is to call to mind, to make people remember. To begin with, a church sets out to cause self-recollection. Every church does its best ….to help each person recall the mystical experience that he or she has known. Everyone has had some such experience. There are moments in life when – to use the language of a building – the door swings open. The door shuts again, sooner rather than later. But we have seen, even if only through a crack, the light behind it….

Now a church…knows perfectly well that it cannot induce in anyone a mystical experience. What it does is acknowledge such experience as any of its visitors has had, as explicitly as it can. A church is a recognition, in stone and wood and brick, of spiritual awakenings. It nods, to each individual person. If the building has been created within a particular cultural and religious tradition, it constitutes a collective memory of spiritual insights, of thousands of mystical moments. A church reminds us of what we have known. And it tells us that the possibility of the door swinging open again remains. [17]

The reality is before we tamper with such holy memory, such space of sacred recall, such time and means of renewed encounter with the Holy Trinity, we must remember it has been our ancestors in the faith, by the work of their hands, the sweat of their brow, the spilling of their blood, all turned into participation in the sacramental and Gospel life, as well as turned into ‘bricks and mortar’ that has paid for the patrimony of the Church, and passed on the life of faith, and the devotional life, from one generation to the next across the millennia.

Perhaps not all of the images, statues, stained glass, furnishings, etc., have been, or even are, all that ascetically precise as seems to be the preferred minimalist approach to sacred space today.

One wonders though, given our heavenly Father’s obvious prolific approach in filling the world with colour, flowers, snowflakes and people if perhaps He truly wants His house to be sparse, even stingy, of beauty, devotion, and people.

Is it not so in far too many of our parish churches today, in the life of our parishes, that the structures are increasingly empty, cold, devoid of classic Catholic devotions, sacred symbols, sounds and, yes, smells; places where the Blessed Sacrament is shoved off into some corner as if It were an awkward embarrassment?

Yet for all the noise that has been made, and keeps being made, that this is what ‘the church’ wants and what is ‘best’ for the people as a means of ‘returning the focus’ on Christ…where are the people?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches on the power of sacred images:

Christian iconography expresses in images the same Gospel message that the Scriptures communicate by words. Image and word illuminate each other. [para.1160]

In this ‘house of God’ the truth and harmony of the signs that make it up should show Christ to be present and active in this place. [para.1181]

When we tamper with the things under consideration here we interfere with that mutual illumination of ‘image and word’ and disrupt the ‘truth and harmony of the signs’. [Mt.6:23]

Pope John Paul II, the great teacher of the realities of the dignity of the human person, the need for God, the truth about our divine election and evangelization, taught:

…..the utilization in catechetical instruction of valid elements in popular piety. I have in mind devotions practiced by the faithful in certain regions with moving fervour and purity of intention, even if the faith underlying them needs to be purified or rectified in many aspects. I have in mind certain easily understood prayers that many simple people are fond of repeating. I have in mind certain acts of piety practiced with a sincere desire to do penance or to please the Lord. Underlying most of these prayers and practices, besides the elements that should be discarded, there are other elements which, if they were properly used, could serve very well to help people advance towards knowledge of the mystery of Christ, His redeeming Cross and Resurrection, the activity of the Spirit in each Christian and in the Church, the mystery of the hereafter, the evangelical virtues to be practiced, the presence of the Christian in the world, etc. [18]

We need to look deep into our hearts at our own attitude towards sacred images, popular devotions, sacramentals, sacred space, etc. We need to examine closely the connection between deep personal faith, or lack thereof, and the way we approach the patrimony, both exterior as regards sacred space and that interior sacred space, the hearts of our people, and be truthful about how we are enhancing or diminishing the beauty, the sacred beauty, of both.

Are we illuminators or extinguishers of the light?

Certainly gutting church interiors and ceasing popular devotions, another form of interior gutting, is perhaps less demanding than a careful catechesis.

However the basic human need for sacred space, symbols and popular devotions, i.e., communal prayer, will not go unsatisfied. If it is not being met where it should be for our Catholic people, hunger will force them to go elsewhere.

A man whose vocation is to Holy Marriage, thus to being both husband and father, understands, as does his spouse, the woman who, joined to him in sacramental mutual self-gifting enters into fullness of being woman, knows along with him they cannot be fully present to each other, nor to their children, if they are hobbled by a 9 to 5 mentality or a compulsion to refurnish the house and change the parameters of family communication every time the whim strikes them!

Parents, obviously, are called by their vocation, as they are in the first instance as spouses, to be so twenty-four-seven, as contemporary lingo expresses it.

Indeed they are called to be both spouses and parents so long as they live, not just in the formative years of their children.

In point of fact, their vocation is not to raise children, per se, but rather to enable their children to become, wholly, holy, adults.

Love does such things.

Parents are intended to raise their children in the fullness of baptismal life, passing onto them the Tradition and traditions of our faith, thus becoming the living domestic church.

Love does such things.

Ours too is a complete vocation.

We too must do what love does.

When we refuse to be designated as Father, or to wear proper clerical dress, and not some tiny cross on the collar of some a la mode shirt or jacket, we are refusing the complete gift of self to other which every love relationship that is authentic and holy necessarily requires. Further we are negating our divine election as shepherd, teacher and father of the People of God.

It is a refusal to serve.

Love never refuses.

Love does not refuse to do little things well, such as humbling ourselves by wearing the black suit and roman collar so we are always a visible witness to the Gospel, equally important so we can always be found and sought out by any of our brothers and sisters.

Love does not refuse to be called Father since reality is we are in persona Christi capitis, the living icon of The Father.

Nor does love refuse to be immersed, both personally and communally with the people, in a life of constant prayer, adoration and popular piety.

Love does not tamper either with Tradition nor those traditional images, furnishings, spaces, songs, etc., which enable people to draw ever closer to Christ, and through Him to the Father, led by the Spirit throughout their lives to ever greater heights of charity.

Certainly if as priests we have difficulty, if not an outright reluctance, perhaps even a type of anxiety, about giving our people orthodox Gospel and Church teaching, drawn from Tradition, the Fathers, the Councils, in particular Vatican II, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the papal teachings, we may well need to examine objectively the depth of our life of prayer, devotions, lectio divina and spiritual reading.

It is a matter of the depth, or shallowness, of our communion of love with each Person of the Blessed Trinity. [Ep.1:3-14]

Part of the sheer joy of lectio divina, and of all authentic spiritual reading, is that we can never plumb the absolute depths to the last precious drop of grace to be found therein.

The Holy Spirit Himself, when we open wide the doors of our being to His guidance, brings forth from the treasury of Sacred Scripture especially, and of orthodox spiritual reading, ever new illumination of truth.

The Holy Spirit always does this in accord with what He Himself gifts to Holy Mother the Church, to us, the assurance of the reliability and charism of the Magisterium.

The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures as she venerated the Body of the Lord, in so far as she never ceases, particularly in the sacred liturgy, to partake of the bread of life and to offer it to the faithful from the one table of the Word of God and the Body of Christ. [19a]

In the sacred books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet His children, and talks with them. [19b]

This is such a key and tender truth about what actually happens when we are immersed in the ocean of truth in Sacred Scripture, in the meditative act of lectio divina.

It IS THE FATHER who comes to us in those moments more than it is we ‘doing’ the reading.

Such reading is thus primarily a time of receptivity.

It is time for LISTENING!

…such is the force and power of the Word of God that it can serve the Church as her support and vigour, and the children of the Church as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting fount of spiritual life. [19c]

Scripture verifies in the most perfect way the words: ‘The Word of God is living and active’ {Heb.4:12}’, and ‘is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified’ {Acts 20:32; cf. 1Th.2:13}. [19d]

When I was a boy growing up at ocean’s edge, we’d often go at low tide and meander through caves which became exposed at low water.

These caves seemed endless to us.

In our boyish minds there were always further adventures awaiting us the deeper we would go into those caves.

True, the incoming tide would determine how far we went on a given day.

But even as we left, we knew we could return.

The older and more experts we grew, the further, the deeper we were able to explore.

And enjoy!

In our day, many, and not always for their sanctification, explore the endless expanse of the internet.

When we are children it is appropriate, even a necessary part of growth towards adult self-discipline and confidence, to explore both actual spaces and the space of our imaginations. Because of our youth and inexperience, wandering into places of peril is not unexpected, and, provided there is no serious harm done, should be easily forgiven by our parents.

But we, as priests, are no longer mere children and must draw upon and exercise the Spirit’s gift of prudence. [1Cor.13:11]

We have access to the fullness of sacramental grace, to the fullness of His Word. [Ep.4:14-16]

All that is said about lectio divina can be applied, to the extent of its use by the Holy Spirit as an instrument of grace, to authentic spiritual reading.

The spouse of the Incarnate Word, which is the Church, is taught by the Holy Spirit. She strives to reach day by day a more profound understanding of the sacred Scriptures, in order to provide her children with food from the divine word…..This nourishment enlightens the mind, strengthens the will and fires the hearts of men with love of God. [19e]

One of the very ancient sacred images for the Self-gifting of Christ, as classic example of image illuminating truth, is that of the pelican immolating herself that she might feed her starving brood.

While this image was common in both stained glass and mosaic when I was a boy it is not one I find easily in churches today.

Always shown as a symbol of Christ’s Eucharistic Self-sacrifice, the pelican, as in the ancient legend pre-dating the Christian era yet adopted as a Christian image, is shown tearing her breast open that her starving children might feed and live.

We can apply this image also to Holy Mother the Church.

We can apply it to ourselves as well.

As priests this self-immolation, this self-gift, in imitation of and precisely because we are configured to Christ, are in persona Christi, is our life, our being, our joy!

But if our hearts are empty, when we rip them open, or rather allow the Holy Spirit to break them open, what will there be to flow forth to nourish the people, our true children?

Or if our hearts are filled with anything other than the pure blood of a deep spiritual life, what kind of food will flow forth?

Therefore…particularly priests of Christ…should immerse themselves in the Scriptures by constant sacred reading and diligent study. For it must not happen that anyone becomes ‘ an empty preacher of the Word of God to others, not being a hearer of the Word in his own heart,’ when he ought to be sharing the boundless riches of the divine Word with the faithful committed to his care, especially in the sacred liturgy. [19f]

Here, as in all aspects of our lives as priests, we should have recourse to our Blessed Mother, she who is the Seat of Wisdom:

Christian prayer tries above all to meditate on the mysteries of Christ, as in lectio divina or the rosary. [20]

A contemporary term used to denote the experience of many Christians who hear one thing on Sunday yet live something else the rest of the time is the term: cognitive dissonance.

That is the living and shuttling, as it were, back and forth between two stances, two views of life, an attempt to have two mutually opposed ‘truths’ co-exist.

We priests can find ourselves in bondage to cognitive dissonance when we attempt to live a basic secular life while attempting to ‘do’, rather than ‘be’ that which we are by divine election.

Spiritual understanding centers on the acceptance of a divine truth, which gradually reveals itself, rising on the horizon of the mind till it pervades all. If the mind and its reactions are brought into willing obedience to that truth the divine truth continues to permeate the mind even more and the mind develops with it endlessly. “To know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph.3:19). It is clear from this verse that the knowledge and love of God and divine things in general are immeasurably above the level of knowledge that is human knowledge. It is therefore futile and foolish for us to try to ‘investigate’ the things of God in an attempt to grasp them and make them yield to our intellectual powers.

On the contrary, it is we who must yield to the love of God so that our minds may be open to the divine truth. It is then that we will be prepared to receive surpassing knowledge. That “being rooted and grounded in love [you], may have the power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breath and length and height and depth.”(Eph.3:17, 18). [21]

Reading to fill up our hearts then with food which sustains us and can be poured forth is a matter of humility. A crying out from the core of our being, constantly, to the Holy Spirit that He would ‘help my unbelief’.

It is also a humble willingness to heed the cry addressed to us by all the children of the Father, those who believe, yearning in their hunger to be strengthened in the faith; by those who do not believe, because no one has yet spoken to them of Christ.

As the Foundress of the Madonna House Lay Apostolate pleads on their behalf:

Teach us God because you have met Him in prayer and in the study of the Word. The Word is like a tremendous mysterious teacher. You might be a Scripture Scholar, familiar with every passage, but if you read it on your knees the light of the Holy Spirit will fall on a Word and it will open itself before you like a flower or a nut cracked by an immense nutcracker.

Teach us to know God, because you know Him. Teach us to pray because you are men of prayer. [22]

Here the connection is made for us by the Servant of God, Catherine Doherty, between our being nourished and our ability to feed the flock confided to our care. To teach truth with love, love with truth, to all our brothers and sisters.

The connection is that of our being truly men of the Word to bring the word, with and through all our words, to His children.

Being men of prayer: so that our words are His, His alone.

The words He has for all the children of the Father.

Among the spiritual reading done for this chapter one which truly rejoiced my heart was the book of Pope John Paul II, another of his many gifts to us his brother priests: GIFT AND MYSTERY.

In this work, written to celebrate his 50th anniversary of priesthood, he stresses the importance of study in general for priests and connects everything we do with our role as servants. Thus, this statement from the Holy Father, struck my heart as applicable to lectio divina, and indeed to all our spiritual reading as a means by which the Holy Spirit guides us to, forms within us:

…a deeper awareness of how each individual is a unique person. [23]

And the Holy Father adds, simply yet to the point:

I think that this awareness is very important for every priest. [ op. cit.]

Meditation upon the persons who emerge across the pages, through the unfolding of salvation history, of Sacred Scripture – from those who are direct proto-types of Christ such as Moses, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah to those representative of each individual soul such as Job, the bride in the Song of Songs, from the New Testament, the woman at the well, each person needing healing and deliverance, etc., – these are all used by the Holy Spirit to open ever wider the doors of our being to Christ and to open ever wider the doors of our hearts as portals of compassion for all our brothers and sisters.

Indeed such meditation should enable us also to become ever more compassionate towards our own selves in the depths of our poverty and need for Divine Mercy. [Rev.3:20; Lk.24:32]

When we open our hearts to any moment of intimate encounter with the Father, of Christ coming ever more fully into the depths of our being through the Sacred Text, in that moment we also will hear the teaching voice, the configuring voice, of the Holy Spirit seeking to set our hearts aflame within the communion of love between the Holy Trinity and us!

Holy Scripture, carefully read, and even learned by heart, will always be like a living fountain in the heart of the priest. In the Eucharist the Divine Word hides Himself under the sacred species, clothed in majestic silence; in the Scriptures He communicates Himself to us under the form of human speech, which expresses itself according to the manner of our expression.

The Word of God in Himself is incomprehensible. Is He not infinite? In His Son the Father gives expression to all that He is and all that He knows. In the Scriptures we read only one small syllable of the incommunicable Word pronounced by the immensity of the Father. In heaven we shall contemplate this living Word, we shall be introduced into its secret, but even here on earth we must keep our intellect in a state of respectful attention to what has been revealed and to that portion of divine wisdom which has been made known by the holy Writings. [24]

Through Sacred Scripture, and indeed through all our spiritual reading and study of the sacred sciences, we are truly being invited into an ever deeper intimacy of communion of love with the Blessed Trinity. This grace leads to an ever deeper passion for the Gospel lived in humble service of all our brothers and sisters, in particular of the poorest among them, most especially of our enemies.

This grace leads us to be priests of the ‘truth-speaking’ hearts and mouths, feeding our people with absolute orthodox Catholic teaching.

Because we love them, and, desire the salvation of souls.

Our lives then become lives only of and for Christ and the things of Christ.

Once again here, as in everything in the lives of all Disciples of Christ, we turn to our Blessed Mother, the first disciple and the Mother of we her priest sons.

Mary is our example of Sacred Scripture internalized and lived as moment by moment blessing of life.

When our Blessed Mother approached her cousin Elizabeth, as we know, Mary already contained within her the living and true God, the Incarnate One, Jesus.

In that immediate moment, as Scripture tells us Elizabeth cries out in full experience. [Lk.1:44]

Our hearts too will leap for joy as the ‘sound of greeting’ of Scripture itself permeates our being when we contemplate the sacred text.

Approached on our knees, in the same spirit of expectancy and stillness of the whole of creation on the night of His birth, and through the reality of opening wide the doors of our being through the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we shall no longer feel like observers of the history of salvation, of the mysteries of our redemption, but true participants!

Thus, for example, when the eyes of our body, of our hearts, fall upon the words of the text, in the depths of our souls we shall hear and respond to what we see and hear.

Thus, not only to the shepherds, but to each one of us the Angels announce the Good News. [Lk.2:10]

Filled with the fire of the moment, in the fulfillment of our divine election, when we come to preach upon the reality of Christ and of our salvation we shall indeed discover we bring great joy to all the people!

Spiritual reading, meditation, mental prayer, divine office, lectio divina, and contemplation, study of the sacred sciences and related authentic reading and study: these are all ways of cooperating with the Holy Spirit at prayer within us as He teaches us all we need to know to be true servants of the Gospel.

It is a struggle to be faithful each day: likewise is it a struggle to be faithful each day to the life of continuous formation, growth in prayer, wisdom, knowledge, love.

Pope John Paul II speaks to us of the daily struggle in these words:

…..we must all be converted anew every day. We know that this is a fundamental exigency of the Gospel, addressed to everyone, and all the more do we have to consider it addressed to us. If we have the duty of helping others to be converted we have to do the same continuously in our own lives. BEING CONVERTED MEANS returning to the very grace of our vocation; it means meditating upon the infinite goodness and love of Christ, who has addressed each of us and, calling us by name, has said: “Follow Me.” BEING CONVERTED MEANS continually “giving an account” before the Lord of our hearts about our service, our zeal and our fidelity, for we are “Christ’s servants, stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God.” BEING CONVERTED ALSO MEANS “giving an account” of our negligences and sins, of our timidity, of our lack of faith and hope, of our thinking only “in a human way” and not “in a divine way.” Let us recall in this regard the warning Christ gave Peter himself. BEING CONVERTED MEANS, for us, seeking again the pardon and strength of God in the sacrament of Reconciliation, and thus always beginning anew, and every day progressing, overcoming ourselves, making spiritual conquests, giving cheerfully, for “God loves a cheerful giver.”

BEING CONVERTED MEANS “to pray continually and never lose heart.” In a certain way prayer is the first and the last condition for conversion, spiritual progress and holiness. PERHAPS IN THESE RECENT YEARS…there has been too much discussion about the priesthood, the priest’s ‘identity’, the value of his presence in the modern world, etc., and on the other hand THERE HAS BEEN TOO LITTLE PRAYING. [25]

Perhaps in the lives of we priests there is ‘too little praying’ because we are more deeply infected by the ‘world’ than we care to admit. Or perhaps because we find it difficult to rejoice in the power and beauty of the Liturgy of the Hours, maybe even of the Divine Liturgy itself there is within us a type of resistance that needs that ‘being converted anew each day’ of which the Holy Father speaks.

A friend told me recently of how a friend of his family’s became converted to our Catholic faith.

The man was a serious Protestant Fundamentalist, so filled with anger and hatred of the Catholic Church he decided he would begin to confront the local priest about the errors of the Church. To do so this fundamentalist Christian, armed with the Bible, opened to the Book of Revelations, sat at the back of the church during Holy Mass. While Holy Mass unfolded this good man became aware that what was transpiring before him was the heavenly liturgy as described in the very sacred text he held open before him. Once Mass was over he did indeed approach the priest.

For instruction!

When I think of prayer, the sentence that comes to me is this: Hold the hand of the Lord, and talk to Him any time you wish. There is not a time to pray and a time not to pray. To pray is to pray always. You hold the hand of God. Sometimes you talk to Him and sometimes you don’t, but you are there with Him all the time.

That is what our basic approach to prayer must be.

…..You give your time to everyone and to everything, but in your heart, you pray continuously. You know that the Lord is very near, and that He holds your hand, as it were, while you go about your business. That’s the way you should pray.

…..The Mass is the outstanding prayer for all Catholics. In the Mass, you find the Lord. He comes to you joyfully and gladly. Can you feel how glad He is to come to you? He is happy to have you there. It is very important that you be there, for the Mass is your rendezvous with God.

…..The Mass encompasses you totally and absolutely. It is such a beautiful time. In some profound sense, you become the Mass. Do you ever think about it that way?

Between two Masses – the Mass of today and the Mass of tomorrow – you spend your time talking lovingly to God. There is the prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours ….One can always ‘take time’ to pray before the Blessed Sacrament….real prayer is simply the communication that constantly passes between you and the Lord. Prayer is conversation with Him. You don’t need to understand how to talk to God. You just do it. He loves to listen to you and He especially delights in your silence when you listen to Him. [26]

We certainly have a lot to DO every day in our lives as priests.

But when we allow those duties which do NOT require sacramental ordination to overwhelm us, rather than trust the charism of the laity to handle those things which do not require sacramental ordination, we will easily find therein the rationale for excusing ourselves from daily celebration of Holy Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina, prayer, etc.

Saint Pius X, throughout his pontificate wherein he sought to engage everyone in restoring all things to Christ, speaks to us when he wrote:

….all who bear the seal of priesthood must know they have the same mission to the people in the midst of whom they live as that which Paul proclaimed that he received in these tender words: My little children, of whom I am in labour again until Christ be formed in you.(Gal.iv,19) But how will they be able to perform their duty if they be not first clothed with Christ themselves? and so clothed with Christ be able to say with the Apostle: I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.(Gal.11,20) For me to live is Christ.(Phil1,21) Hence although all are included in the exhortation – to advance towards the perfect man, in the measure of the age of fullness of Christ(Ep.iv,3), it is addressed before all to those who exercise the sacerdotal ministry; thus these are called another Christ, not merely by the communication of power but by reason of the imitation of His works, and they should therefore bear stamped upon themselves the image of Christ. [27]

The more we plunge ourselves into prayer, spiritual reading, and meditation, contemplation { in particular of His Passion, Death and Resurrection }, the more we shall become intimate with Him, clothed with Him, enabled by the Holy Spirit to imitate only Christ, to desire, to seek only the things of Christ.

Devotion, true faith, is not therefore per se things I believe in, adhering to, much less why I do anything; rather it is who I am: a true believer!

This is my state of being because I am beloved of Him and in this communion of love I have been ordained in His person.

This, Fathers, IS the joy of our being, our vocation of joy!

Among priests of another generation I have often heard the bravado statement of having ‘never opened a book of theology since I left the seminary’; sadly I have also heard from priests of this generation that they can find more ‘truth’ in novels and on the internet than in books of theology.

Lastly there is the mindset that will only study the latest notion in the field of sacred science, or other fields, hot off the press, without necessarily exercising due discernment about the orthodoxy, or lack thereof, to be found in a given work.

Once again the heart and desire of Holy Mother the Church, therefore the will of the Holy Trinity for us, as regards ongoing study, itself a means of a more affective understanding of the needs of people and how to serve them with love in truth, has been articulated clearly from the very first days of the development of theology:

The fathers see in the pursuit of sacred learning the priest’s most powerful natural contribution to preparing the way for divine grace in his own life and the life of others. Besides they find in devotion to the sacred sciences his surest safeguard against worldly influences. Hence it is, as St. Gregory observes, that sustained attention to the study of the sacred sciences assures the priest of faithful devotion to his sacred duties:

“The priest lives up to all these sacred responsibilities if he is filled with the spirit of heavenly fear and love, and daily meditates on the commands of Holy Writ. This he does in order that the words of divine warning may re-enkindle the fervour of his watchfulness over his people and of his farsighted attention to the life of heaven within him. In all this he is motivated by the realization that whereas his contacts with the world are continually leading him away from his first fervour, he may by the spirit of compunction acquire a new love for his spiritual home in heaven.”

…the office of priest is to find answers to the questions of human life in the language of God. His next step is to express the language of God in terms that will be grasped by the people. In a word, he is an interpreter between God and man. Consequently, to be well-versed in the language of God he must be deeply devoted to the study of sacred science. Only in this study can he familiarize himself with the ideas and terms which will translate for the people God’s answers to the questions of life. [28]

This means, as we become ‘well-versed’ in the language of God we will inevitably find ourselves more courageously speaking the true, proclaiming the Gospel of Life in the midst of a culture of death.

We know that every Christian through Baptism is called to be, in imitation of and with Christ, a sign of contradiction at the very core of this culture of death.

How much more are we priests, by divine election called and by ordination created in persona Christi, to be the surest and clearest voice, the most visible sign of contradiction?

The sign of life!

When as priests we seek by any means to live other than in the reality of being such a sign, to hide behind secular clothing or the parsing of our words so as not to offend ‘the world’ we become at war with our very own being.

True, the more we strive to live fully our vocation, to live in reality, we will suffer.

Perhaps even at the hands of confreres, or of our people.

Certainly the culture of death, satan and his minions, will attack us.

Here too we simply are becoming more fully Disciples of Christ, are following Him more closely, being drawn more intimately into union with Him.

We are thus blessed! [Lk.6:22]

It is natural as human beings that we should seek the immediate gratification of acceptance by our confreres, our people, by the world around us. No one wants to be hated, excluded, insulted, and denounced.

No one naturally wants to be crucified.

In truth, the Cross is our joy!

The struggle to be faithful is the only lasting gratification.

Christ is our comfort, our love, and acceptance.

He includes us in the communion of love of Himself, the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Finally much of our struggle is very simply because we feel pressing against our hearts the weight of the sin and sadness of the world which lives in a vast darkness. The darkness of sin and death, the darkness of billions of human hearts having forgotten who they are, why they exist, because they are forgetful of the very Father in heaven who loves them so much He sent to us His only begotten Son.

While it is true, as the Holy Gospel teaches, Jesus is the One who pours His Light within us; it is also terribly true not all embrace Him, His Light! [Jn.1:9; 10, 11]

In humility we need to accept where within us there is darkness still, where we still refuse within our beings to accept Him and allow Him to shine within us, to heal and restore us.

In union with Our Blessed Mother this shall come to pass through the deep interior life of prayer, lectio divina, etc., as discussed in this chapter.

If we struggle each day to be faithful and are ever more willing to both offer and be offered, then we shall come not only to understand but to experience continually that communion of love from the Risen Christ which is communion of illumination love of the Holy Trinity:

Our world lives in a darkness so vast, a forgetfulness so dreadful, that only a kind of global healing of memories can enlighten it. The healing of memories is in fact a healing of forgetfulness and the resurrection of memory. When the glory shining on the face of the risen Christ shines in our hearts, we are set free from the terrors that roam in the darkness, and the darkness itself flees away. Each moment of our lives is touched by the healing light of the Lord, and each becomes a moment in the history of salvation. The moment of rejection shines now with reconciliation; the moment of anger becomes bright with forgiveness; the moment of lust is filled with the radiance of love; and the countless moments of loneliness are radiant with the presence of Him who will never leave us. Bitterness vanishes when we see the wounds others have inflicted upon us begin to gleam, like those of Christ, with the pure light of compassion. As He gazes upon all that we have tried to keep in darkness, His brightness touches too the wounds we have given others, not only the pain we have consciously caused, but the numberless hurts caused by our indifference, our coldness, our fear, our seemingly unbreakable absorption in our own poor selves. The human eyes of the Invisible Light fall on all of this, and we see the broken ones restored and raised up, and our shame itself is broken up, carried away into the darkness that lies behind the back of God. [29]

1 – CALL AND RESPONSE

 

In his very first encyclical, Pope John Paul II, drawing on the wisdom of Holy Mother the Church from the beginning, teaches:

For the whole community of the People of God and for each member of it what is in question is not just a specific ‘ social membership’; rather, for each and every one what is essential is a particular ‘vocation’….we must see first and foremost Christ saying in a way to each member of the community: “Follow Me.” [1]

 

Since Christ is then calling every baptized person to follow Him we can joyfully assure ever boy and man who ask us if they are being called: Yes!
Specifically: to holy sacramental priesthood?
Discernment over time will make that clear, but our initial ‘yes’ to them, coupled with urging them to pray for clarity, will encourage them to continue to listen to the Holy Spirit who leads us to follow Christ.
Certainly some of our brothers are being called not to priesthood but to holy marriage, consecrated religious life, the lay apostolate or the consecrated state of virginity while living and working in the world.
But many more of our brothers, be they still children, youth, young adult or even older, are being called to holy priesthood.
Perhaps many more than we know because we are not consciously, publicly in fact, encouraging them to voice the call they are experiencing in their hearts.
There are those, priests and laity, some claiming because of published studies to have this nailed down as absolute fact, who for years having been pushing the notion that there is a critical shortage of vocations to the priesthood.
Frankly I think that is dangerously close to insulting the Holy Spirit.
The implication is that He is NOT calling forth generosity from among the baptized boys and men of this generation.
That is simply a lie.
There is no crisis of ‘call’.
There is an apparent crisis of ‘response’, mainly, if we be humble about it, in those countries, dioceses, parishes, where there is little in the way of orthodox catholic teaching, sacramental practice and a lack of Eucharistic adoration and true devotion to Mary.
The fundamental problem is one of holiness.
To the degree that we priests are holy, faithful to the teachings of the Church, visible in our own faith practice, and obviously devoted sons of Mary, Queen of the Clergy, to that degree those being called to priesthood will take note and be encouraged.
To the degree that our parishes are holy, our families are holy, to that degree boys and men sensing the call in their hearts will find encouragement to say a generous, indeed an heroic, yes!
We all know that someone who is obviously content, joyful, dedicated in their chosen profession/vocation, encourages the young to want to not merely imitate them but to join them in that life.
No secular profession would send dour, angry, dissatisfied, representatives on a recruitment drive.
Why do we?
It may seem a type of unfair stress but the reality is we are always recruiting, or discouraging, priestly vocations.
There’s no way around it for ours is a most public vocation.
We live in the main in rectories, which are at the very least quasi-public places.
Every sacrament we celebrate involves at least one other person {confession} and our dear people notice everything we say and do!
Even our ‘uniform’, which in humility we should always wear, renders us visible wherever we go.
Thus like Christ in whose person we are, we truly have nowhere to hide.
Not that we should ever be involved in anything we’d ‘need’ to hide for.
Thus each contact, direct through sacramental celebration, hospital visits, school visits, home visits and somewhat indirect, such as just walking around town, can be either an encouraging act of recruitment or a serious discouragement to he who senses the call of the Spirit.
How true is this when in particular we are celebrating Holy Mass!
The young in particular are extremely observant, and better informed about authentic sacramental ritual and orthodox catholic teaching than we perhaps realize.
They have, after all, grown up in an era that has made them media savvy.
They also have access to the internet and are used to a Holy Father, the world’s parish priest, who is accessible to them and to whom they listen far more intently than a lot of priests understand.
Indeed Pope John Paul II showed himself an astute encourager of vocations when he celebrated his fiftieth anniversary of priestly ordination by publishing his book GIFT AND MYSTERY, in which he beautifully illustrates the reality of call and response:
The story of my priestly vocation? It is known above all to God. At its deepest level, every vocation to the priesthood is a great mystery; it is a gift which infinitely transcends the individual. Every priest experiences this clearly throughout the course of his life. Faced with the greatness of the gift, we sense our own inadequacy.
A vocation is a mystery of divine election: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.{Jn.15:16}” [2]

Our very existence as created persons is the beginning, for we priests, of this ‘mystery of divine election’.
Thus our very existence should suffice for an exhilarated heart.
All the more then should our gratitude be all the more joyous for the immense gift of Baptism and the totality of sacramental life.
Most especially for our entire Eucharistic life, from our First Holy Communion, to our first Mass celebrated when we were newly ordained, to this day’s Holy Mass and Communion!

We live in sacramental reality:
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 itself a gift for others. [3]

Not only our response then, but the very gift we make of ourselves, and the very way in which we encourage vocations to the priesthood, is irrevocably Eucharistic.
Thus the example of a priest with a true love of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, who celebrates Holy Mass with ritual fidelity, reverence and joy, who visibly radiates his being in persona Christi capitis giving the living Christ to his brothers and sisters in Holy Communion, becomes a true icon of the splendour and joy of priesthood to those boys and men sensing deep in their hearts the call.
As priests we know true Eucharistic piety deepens daily our own fiat.
Naturally the critical environment for the first responsive stirrings to the invitation from the Holy Spirit for a yes to the priestly vocation is the family.
A truly orthodox, faith living Catholic family is the ideal environment to nurture the future adult male’s vocation response.
How vital is our priestly support and service for families.
It is the Domestic Church which is the bedrock of the universal Church.
Look at this more closely: a faith-filled family nurtures faithful adults.
In particular, men who will enter the seminary with hearts open to formation towards sacramental ordination as priests in persona Christi capitis.
We priests do a grave injustice to Holy Mother the Church, as well as a serious disservice to men contemplating the priesthood when we are constantly telling horror stories about seminary life.
The seminary is not supposed to be either a mere college dorm, an ecclesiastical frat house any more than a pretend monastery.
Seminary is a serious experience of intellectual, moral, philosophical, theological, liturgical and spiritual formation. It is the place and time of deep encounter with the Holy Spirit who purifies a man’s soul that He might configure the man to Christ Priest. Thus seminary formation itself is a constitutive dimension of our vocation.
Seminary is the soul’s journey with the shepherds to the cave, the wise men to the home where is the Child and Mary and Joseph. Seminary is Nazareth, the Desert, the house at Bethany; it is to be in the company of the Apostles, learning from the Master Himself; it is Tabor and the Upper Room, the Garden, the Cross and sometimes the tomb, that place of utter stillness trust awaiting to be called forth, like Lazarus, to life renewed.
We are led by the star to Mary who presents Jesus to us, we adore Him with the gifts of our body, heart-love, and soul-will [Mt.2:9-11].
This stirring in our souls noted by the Holy Father as ‘divine election’ is akin to the star which guided the Magi and the seminary must be the place of encounter with the Child Christ, the Teaching Christ, Christ who heals, forgives, with Christ Priest, Christ on the Cross, Christ Risen, Christ ascended to heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father.
The man who is now a seminarian brings the gifts of himself, body, mind, heart, and soul.
Seminary is both epiphany as encounter with Christ and a gradual inner epiphany for the man being formed.
It is to be fervently desired, as in prayed for, that the man will enter a house which is a place of profound encounter with Jesus and Mary; a place of orthodox teaching, love of the Church, loyalty to the Holy Father, liturgical fidelity, joyful chastity and absolute charity.
Seminary years should be marked by a willingness on the part of the man to enter more deeply than ever before in his life into the ‘garden enclosed’ where alone are the soul and the Trinity. There, in intimate converse and love, the Holy Spirit brings about the necessary radical conversion of heart, metanoia.
The false self, so bound by the sin of the world, by personal sin, wounded by the sins of others, perhaps uncertain about relationship with the Trinity, is taken by the Spirit into the very heart of Christ’s own kenosis that the man be emptied of all that is not of Christ.
Seminarians must begin here to take as the normal ebb and flow of daily life that we need to have our face to the ground in both a constant plea for mercy and a heart’s love-adoration of the Triune God. Equally vital is a heart which listens and learns from the wisdom, faith and fiat of the Blessed Virgin Mary, having a devoted son’s confidence in her maternal love, guidance and protection.
Thus, like the Magi, the man will eagerly lay at the feet of the Child the gift of himself, and as a true disciple will embrace the cross and follow Christ, surrendering himself totally to the movement of the Holy Spirit who configures us to Christ Priest.
Lived authentically, seminary life itself is an ever more generous and joyous response to ‘divine election’.
It is a period of particular grace.
The attitudes towards self, other, Church, orthodoxy etc., developed in the seminary are the template of priestly life.
Jesus teaches us how it should all come to pass, for we are ‘scribes’ instructed by the Holy Spirit [Mt.13:52].
Naturally enough to be properly instructed presupposes a willingness to learn, that humility which admits it knows not everything!
Seminary is, after all, the place where we are to be formed as shepherds according to His own Heart:
The seminary can be seen as a place and period in life. But it is above all an educational community in progress:….to offer to those called by the Lord to serve as apostles the possibility of reliving the experience of formation which Our Lord provided for the Twelve. In fact, the Gospels present a prolonged and intimate sharing of life with Jesus as a necessary premise for the apostolic ministry. Such an experience demands of the Twelve the practice of detachment in a particularly clear and specific fashion, a detachment that in some way is demanded of all the disciples, a detachment from their roots, their usual work, from their nearest and dearest [cf.Mk.1:16-20, 10:28; Lk.9:23, 9:57-62, 14:25-27]….
In its deepest identity the seminary is called to be, in its own way, a continuation in the Church of the apostolic community gathered about Jesus, listening to His word, proceeding towards the Easter experience, awaiting the gift of the Spirit for mission…..
The seminary is, in itself, an original experience of the Church’s life……
From the human point of view, the major seminary should strive to become “a community built on deep friendship and charity, so that it can be considered a true family living in joy………
It is essential…..that the seminary should be experienced not as something external and superficial, or simply a place in which to live and study, but in an interior and profound way. It should be experienced as a community, a specifically ecclesial community, a community that relives the experience of the group of Twelve who were united to Jesus. [6]

Thus throughout our lives as priests we should be able to recall our seminary years as a period of graced formation.
Most important from those years should be our recalling of the beginning stages of a more intimate relationship with Christ.
Remembering, therefore, this precept of salvation and everything that was done for ours sake, the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the enthronement at the right hand, the second and glorious coming again…..[7]

Essential to our remembering, that we might live in the profound reality of ‘living, moving and having our being’ in the Father, with Christ, led by the Holy Spirit, this seminary formation, immersion in the Holy Gospel, is crucial and should be frequently drawn upon from a joyous memory.
Prayer – in particular intimate communion of love with the Holy Trinity – is the atmosphere we must live in for our souls as surely as we necessarily live in an oxygenated atmosphere for our very lives sake.
Prayer – especially Holy Mass, adoration, Divine Office, lectio divina, pious devotions, in particular meditative praying of the Stations of the Cross and the Holy Rosary, with Mary as our teaching guide deep into the mysteries of our redemption and faith, is not only foundational during seminary life but in our daily lives as priests.
If we have not already become men of prayer during the formative years in the seminary, immediately is a good time to begin!
Pope John Paul II, with great wisdom and joy, sadly with much misguided criticism, amplified the ranks of Saints through the canonization of priests, religious and laity from all possible vocations and nations. This in turn has led to a greater awareness of, and telling the stories of, holy ones in our midst who may, or may not, be presented someday for canonization, but whose lives bear specific witness to the joy of holiness.
The joy of self-gift, of fiat, for the sake of the Kingdom, charity towards all and for the love of God!
One such soul whose story is now being told is a particular witness to the critical importance of seminary formation and of a profound life of prayer for seminarians and priests alike.
He is also a witness to the joy of divine election and willing response to that call.
His name is Father Eugene Hamilton.
Father, on this earth, was a priest with us for barely a few hours.
In heaven, priest like us, he remains, as we shall, priest forever.
Since at every Holy Mass, at each altar, we are celebrating on earth the heavenly liturgy, he is with us still.
Any man, at least of high school age, certainly all priests, cannot fail but to be inspired, encouraged, by the example of this young priest. Even in his barely formed youth Father understood that configuration to Christ Priest means precisely that!
His story is admirably told by Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R. in his book: A PRIEST FOREVER.
It is a book to be highly recommended as a gift to any young man considering priesthood.
These words of Fr. Hamilton stress prayer as constitutive of our response to divine election:
The importance of prayer to me is rooted in my upbringing and life experiences. Chief among these is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is from the Eucharist that my daily prayer takes root. Praying the Liturgy of the Hours for me is an extension of that high point of prayer, the Mass. From such an appreciation comes a better understanding of Christ’s Presence in the other Sacraments as well, especially Penance. The Rosary provides an opportunity to meditate on the mysteries of Christ’s life, while walking in faith with Mary…
Thus my personal prayer life has been developed with the goal of union with God, recognizing that I have been called to serve Him and His Church. My prayers motivate my thoughts, words, and deeds towards this end…..
Intellectual examination of the importance of honesty, chastity, docility, humility, charity, and prudence has translated into the application of such virtues in everyday life. All of this takes place while being grounded in prayer.
The ability to give Christian witness, especially in the area of perseverance and quiet charity, is something which stems from my trust in God. [8]
Prayer is the experience of encounter with the Divine Lover, Christ Priest. From this flows a wellspring of prayer lived: fidelity, openness to Christ in all His Sacraments, the teachings of the Church, service to Her, loving service of all our brothers and sisters with a heart which is honest, chaste, docile, humble, charitable and prudent.
It is faith lived.
Faith, noted exquisitely by Fr. Hamilton as the ever deepened experience of encountering Christ in the mysteries of our salvation, the mysteries of the Holy Rosary: ‘walking in faith’ in the company of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
…many of us – to the grave detriment of the Church, to the great sorrow of the faithful – have forgotten who we are, have mis-learned what the priesthood is all about or have been mis-taught the realities of the holy priesthood of Jesus Christ……
…Of course many priests are faithful to the traditional ideal of the priesthood, the ideal of the priesthood as developed by the early Christians, as presented to us by…the true believers of all times, the saints who have laid down their lives century after century that priests, ordained priests, should be truly ministers of Christ’s benefits, graces and love for the people of the church and for the whole world.
Yes, saints know what a priest is. Saints have always had a total faith in the transformation which takes place in a poor sinful man at the moment when the bishop imposes hands upon him. Saints have always seen in the priest a great glory, the glory of Tabor, the glory of the risen Christ shining through the personal sinfulness of a man. We have hands of clay, feet of clay. We stumble and fall like every other human being. We commit sins, any one of the seven capital vices, including all their ramifications. True, but saints have seen in us something beyond the sinfulness, beyond the intelligence or stupidity of a man, beyond his immense weaknesses. They have seen Christ. They have crawled to priests on their knees for forgiveness. They have adored with all their might the sacrament he confected at Mass. They have given their lives for that sacrament. They have hungered and thirsted for the bread and wine which he alone can provide to feed them and strengthen them in their terrible spiritual combats, in their life of total self-giving, of sacrifice and ever increasing life….
Catherine Doherty….with all her heart says to priests, “I love you. I believe in you. Be who you are. You are Christ….I believe in priests. I always will. For I know they are Christ. Christ’s love and mercy and tenderness made visible upon earth and multiplied all over the world wherever there is a priest.”[9]

This is our divine election.
This is our vocation.
This is our joy [Mk.16:19, 20].

CONTENTS

1- CALL AND RESPONSE – P. 1
2- CONTEMPLATE AND BECOME – P.11
3- SAINT JOSEPH: MODEL FOR PRIESTS AS MEN – P.39
4- OFFERING AND OFFERED – P. 57
5- CLOTHED WITH CHRIST – P.69
6- CONFIRMATION: AFFIRMATION BY THE SPIRIT – P.79
7- ECUHARIST: FOOD OF LIFE-KISS OF LOVE – P.89
8- RECONCILIATION: PLACE OF METANOIA AND KENOSIS – P.107
9- HOLY ORDERS: A SUPERABUNDANCE OF MERCY – P.125
10- ANOINTING-HEALING-DELIVERING – P.135
11- HOLY MARRIAGE – P.147
12- FREEDOM OF POVERTY – P.158
13- LUMINOSITY OF CHASTITY – P.165
14- JOY IN THE GARDENS OF OBEDIENCE – P. 173
LAST WORD – P.189
FOOTNOTES – Page 191 but listed as 1-9

Preface

PREFACE

From the earliest days of the Church until our own day many worthy writers have written on the gift and mystery of the priesthood.

Obviously I am indebted to them.

 

 

These reflections have come both from my years in parish ministry and my years living, as I do now, the hidden life of an urban hermit and servant of the poor in a local soup kitchen.
To my brother priests: in some little way I pray these words will help rekindle within you the joy of our immense vocation.
To all men and women who may read this: pray for your priests.

Fr. Arthur Joseph
1ST Sunday of Lent 2011
St. Padre Pio Hermitage

BRINGERS OF JOY

BRINGERS OF JOY

 pantokrator

Rev. Arthur Joseph

Dear Fathers, do you realize that you are a joy to the world? ~ Catherine Doherty

 

The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus. ~ St. Jean-Marie Vianney

Placed in the hands of Our Blessed Mother: Queen of the Clergy, and Mother of all Priests.

Dedicated to my Spiritual Father who teaches me to be son, to Phil, who teaches me to love and serve with a Dad’s heart, to Monique who teaches me to love without counting the cost.

HE MUST INCREASE,

I MUST DECREASE.
{Jn.3:30}

57 “YOU FEEL LIKE A TOP….”

 

IT IS A BRILLIANT, unusually warm, winter Sunday afternoon.
Little rivers of water were racing across the parking lot after this morning’s Mass.

The Church was packed!
The people prayerful, attentive, and when I was distributing Holy Communion their faces were radiant and I thanked God for this incredible lavishness of His Mercy which makes that I am His priest, their priest.
Given the mystery of my life as recorded in these chapters, and after the exhaustion felt when the previous chapter had been written, the First Reading of today’s Holy Mass pierced my heart with a light of understanding, causing my being to exult, how great are the ways of the Lord as He calls us through the mystery of His Son’s death and resurrection to a complete communion of love!
It was the lament of Job found in chapter seven of the Holy Book.
What struck my heart was not his lament per se but the reality of suffering, the consolation of suffering, the grace of suffering.
Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. [dq]

 

It MUST be stated here and now and clearly: THE HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FINISHED WITH ME YET AND I DO NOT CLAIM, NOR MEAN TO INFER, IN ANYTHING WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK SO FAR, OR FROM HERE ON, THAT I HAVE COMPLETELY SURRENDERED, AM HEALED OF ALL WOUNDS OR ACHIEVED SOME ETHEREAL LEVEL OF UNION WITH THE BLESSED TRINITY!
Once again the only claim I make with confidence is: CHRIST IS EVERYTHING!
He is faithful indeed!
Where sin abounds (our own or those committed against us), grace abounds all the more!
As I come towards the end of this half of the story [for recent events already are prompting a second book], pray encouragement for whoever may someday read it to trust completely the love and mercy, personally and intimately in your own life of the Father, the Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit, my heart has been struck by this insight from Father Hardon:
….This price that we are asked to pay for our proclamation of Christ in word and in deed is not only the price of endurance of pain. Nor is it simply the patient acceptance of criticism and rejection, or perhaps of open persecution. What we are also asked is to sacrifice what we personally like and have a natural right to enjoy. In order to confess Christ before men as He would have us do, we are invited to give up many things to which we are naturally, and legitimately, inclined……But as the beauty of Christ takes possession of our hearts, we become different men and women. Our personality is literally changed. We take on the quality of martyrs ready, if need be, to die for Christ. And we acquire a capacity for sacrifice that smiles at logic and rises above the desire for pleasure in this world in order to bring as many souls as possible to the Heart of the Saviour whom we love. [dr]
Only now as I come to the end of this work do I begin to understand what Fr. Hardon means, for only now in my life have I experience of the Beauty of Christ and all that flows from being in communion of love with Christ the Beautiful, as Beautiful on the Cross, in the beauty of complete suffering surrender to the will of the Father, as He is Beautiful in the Glory of His Holy Resurrection wherein, and this must never be forgotten, Divine Radiance pours forth from the wounds which He has within His Glorified Body.
Since we become what we contemplate, when we are suffering we should not only contemplate the wounded Christ on the Cross but the Risen Christ with wounds in glory!
As with my original account of my time with The Community, so with this second sojourn in my life with them, I do not believe in my heart much detail is needed, since their lives are not mine to write about.
Suffice to say I was reintegrated into the normal routine, though because of the extreme traumatic shock of what I had been through, some days it was very difficult for me to participate fully.
My anxiety level was very high pitched and sometimes those attacks would be so severe I could not do simple things like sit still at table and eat a meal but would flee in utter terror, not knowing why or of what I was terrified, but feeling convinced that if I did not flee I would go insane or die.
When this happened during Holy Mass it was most distressful.
When this happened during Holy Mass it was most distressful.
I was given simple jobs with the men in the bush: I’d burn the unusable branches from the trees felled for either firewood or to be cut into lumber; help sort donations, record and file books in the library.
All the while the appeal was slowly grinding its way through the system.
After some months my spiritual father, in agreement with the Bishop, felt a smaller, simpler, setting would ease the stress and so I was given assignment to a house of prayer in the west.
There I lived with simple duties in a community with three others, all of them laywomen.
I had a type of chaplain’s quarters which allowed me time for rest.
My duties were simple, daily Mass, help in the gardens, be available for sacraments.
The town was very tiny, the people wonderful and I began to heal from the trauma.
However I remained stuck in intellectual pride, that is, dealing with everything by thinking about it, figuring it out, avoiding emotion. The result was, for there is no greater pride than intellectual pride, I was not, as I thought, protecting myself from further pain, a lifelong survival skill learned in the traumas of childhood, rather what I was doing was frustrating the healing action, the purifying through suffering activity, the sanctifying fire of the Holy Spirit.
In truth, in spite of all that I had been through, I was saying to the Holy Trinity: You may come into my being, into relation with me, thus far but no further. I shall not feel, for that is to be vulnerable and being vulnerable means pain.
No more pain!
Frankly I still needed to embrace humility and the courageous strength of meekness! [Js. 4:6; 1 Cor. 8:1, 2; Mt. 11:28-30]
I knew there had to be some point to His allowing all this to have happened to me but I was so afraid it might be because of my sinful past or my failure to be a great priest that I dared not be still long enough to hear Him.
PRIDE.
I knew a lot about God, or thought I did, certainly I was at least well informed through my studies.
But I did not know Him.
All I had to do was ask Him :’Are You real?’ and He would have shown me but to ask would have been to admit I needed Him, couldn’t handle things on my own as I had since I was a child.
Since childhood I had protected myself by never loving nor allowing myself to be loved, hence I was philanthropic but never truly charitable and the gulf between the two is immense. The former is certainly a benevolent love for mankind, but it can lead to a type of the ‘better’ being kind to the ‘lesser’ whereas true charity seeks the suffering Christ in all who suffer and sees self as a servant, that is as the lesser, with a passion for others, true love.
Because of my self-protection from true love, since abandonment and rejection seemed to always assail me when I risked love, I had no experience, non-intellectual that is, for I knew it to be a factual truth but not experiential reality, of God’s love.
To have that I would have to risk being a child, something also foreign to me, and I dared not risk being that powerless.
PRIDE.
Indeed before going further I was praying this morning and a list, in no particular order, came into my heart of why all this had to happen to me, in a word why I needed such a grace of purifying, sanctifying, suffering, and, to be honest, why this work of the Holy Spirit I see, even ten years after the events first happened to me, is still keeping me, as it were in kindergarten, that is, I am still a mere beginner.
For the rest of my life I must be, and am willingly, in school, the school of the Holy Spirit and Our Lady.
What I would experience as the absence of Christ from my life because of what I was suffering was in fact the fulfilling in the depths of my being of what Jesus spoke of at the Last Supper — for I now understand Scripture is both universal reality, the recounting of our Redemption, and deeply, intimate in each soul, the personal experience of being redeemed:
I did not tell you this from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to the One who sent Me, and not one of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’ But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts. But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send Him to you. And when He comes He will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in Me; ( I had intellectual assurance but not heart/soul faith ) righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see Me; ( having no natural sense of what it meant to be a child I had no idea at all of God as my Father, much less self as His child) condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. ( because of what I was going through, the protracted legal process, and had been through, the false accusation, trial, condemnation, I doubted in the extreme God was more powerful than evil.)
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. ( this because of my pride rendering me unable to trust, so somehow He would have to intervene in ways which would break open my defences until I would trust.) But when He comes, the Spirit of truth, He will guide you to all truth. (This is the great grace of my sabbatical and is a continuation of what began in that western town, which I’ll note momentarily.) He will not speak on His own, but He will speak what He hears, (what does that Spirit hear and speak to us if not the dialogue of love between the Father and Jesus, and the communion of love they speak to us, hence, He IS the Spirit, the Communion of Love.) and will declare to you the things that are coming. (fullness of redemption, sanctification, communion of love in our own beings IF we open wide every door, every aspect of our beings to Him.) He will glorify Me, because He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you. (this happens must fully in the Spirit’s taking what is Christ’s, i.e. Sacraments instituted by Him, especially Baptism, Holy Eucharist and Confession, for some of us Priesthood, others Sacramental Marriage, and declaring them, that is making them efficacious in our lives, sanctification being the work of the Holy Spirit and when we no longer live but Christ lives in us then truly has the Spirit glorified Christ within us!) Everything that the Father has is Mine; for this reason I told you that He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you.(our Christian life is through Baptism life lived in ever more complete union and communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity.) [Jn.16:4-15]
THE LIST:
I had repented before entering the seminary but had never opened to the emotion of true penthos, that is contrition with tears; I had learned, vowed, was faithfully obedient but had never surrendered interiorly, abandoning myself to and trusting absolutely Divine Providence; I was living chastity but was not pure of heart; I’d embraced voluntary poverty but failed to yield to kenosis/self-emptying, dispossession, especially of my own agenda; I knew how to say Mass, but not how to celebrate Mass, to preach but not proclaim the Gospel, to endure pain somewhat stoically but not to be one with the Suffering Christ, knew I was created by God but without any understanding or experience of being child of Abba, God my Father; yes I was a hardworking disciple of Christ but was not in love with Him nor given over to Him as the Tremendous Lover; intellectually I knew it was true through Baptism I was a living temple of the Holy Spirit but I was not trusting enough to be motivated only by Him, to live and move with Him; I saw conversion as what I had done when I stopped my hedonistic/atheistic way of life, not as what it is in truth, a continuous life reality of metanoia/an ever more complete, profound, change of heart; I was faithful to saying my prayers but resisted that purification which allows the Holy Spirit to make me prayer; I could meditate, that is think about the mysteries of our faith, but would not let go of my intellect long enough to be swept off my feet by the Trinity, into the depths of contemplation; I read Scripture, thought about it, but was not permeated by the Gospel to the point where I could preach the Gospel with my entire life, being, without any compromise; I was a good pastor¬/administrator but had never learned how to be a shepherd-father and thus while I was a good care-giver failed to be a humble, hidden, loving servant of His people, my people; I knew about God but did not know Him or truly believe I was known by Him; intellectually I was open about the need for some professional help to deal with the ravages of the traumatic events of my life, but failed to risk opening to the Holy Spirit so He might purge me of the bitter-roots of those events and the inner ¬vows I had made to survive life by my own wits; the Cross of Christ was something I endured, not a gift I took up, nor embraced, childlike, in-joyful-suffering following Him; being a priest was a type of contented fulfillment but because I was so proud and self-reliant I had no experience of the ineffable joy of priesthood, hence it was my identity-profession rather than my vocation-being; in a word I ‘did’ priest rather well, rather than being priest well; faced with any demand, problem, issue, pain I’d get going intellectually and solve it, indeed was often told there seemed no challenge I couldn’t deal with, which was not true, because the central challenge of trusting God, simply put, of letting go and letting God, was beyond me; each day I’d check my list made the night before, my agenda, but failed to put my face to the ground and ask: what Father is Your Holy Will for this day?
Simply put while the traumatic events of the false accusation and its immediate aftermath had cracked my defences, by the time I was in that western town I’d pretty well shored up the breeches, so that Holy Spirit was going to have to pulverize them!
It began simply enough.
We were working to rebuild a stone fence in the broiling late summer heat far from any shade and I was so into the work I failed to drink enough water.
The next morning when I went to get out of bed I collapsed onto the floor.
Within a few minutes the women had me rushed to the hospital where it was determined I’d suffered heatstroke.
Once I was well enough to travel I returned east to The Community.
The severe vertigo did not clear up however and that is how it happened, as noted in earlier chapters, I endured a series of medical tests as a tumour was suspected, and hence how I came to have the original time to begin this journey inward through the notes which form the foundation of the major part of this work.
At the same time, weakened physically by the heatstroke, my mind took advantage of my vulnerability and I entered a period of emotional panic and depression. My spiritual father, seeing this, said to me one evening I should be sure and take my medicine. I asked him what medicine was that. When he realized, for the first time since somehow it had never come up in any discussion over the years, I had never been treated medically for chronic anxiety attacks, he immediately phoned a doctor friend, who was also a Christian Therapist.
I saw this wonderful Doctor the next day and began both medicinal and talk-therapy and within a few months was much better.
Then suddenly the appeal was ruled upon and I was fully vindicated by the Judges who heard the case.
Re-called by my Bishop, assigned as a hospital chaplain it seemed all was well.
In point of fact I’d been through a type of spiritual MASH Unit experience, which is I’d responded enough in therapy and spiritual direction to be patched up and returned to the front lines.
The Holy Spirit, however, is a much more through surgeon and within a few months the anxiety attacks returned and under obedience to my spiritual father I began long term talk therapy because I had never grieved the sorrows in my life and at the same time I began spending more time in silence with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
All culminating in this sabbatical: to write, pray and paint.
Which brings me to the source of the title of this chapter: “You feel like a top…”and the single, outside of Sacred Scripture, most important source of teaching me to begin the beginning of trusting and surrendering to the Father’s love, to trusting that where sin abounds grace abounds all the more, to opening wide the door of my being to Christ and submitting, freely, joyfully, to the activity of the Holy Spirit.
I speak of a letter written in 1970 by The Servant of God Catherine Doherty entitled: PARADOXES OF THE SPIRIT.
It was my spiritual father who, in the midst of all that happened, told me to truly take this wisdom into my heart.
Ever since then, for more than a decade now, it has been a constant source of meditation.
I am only barely beginning to open up to all Catherine teaches here, but the peace and joy which is ever increasing in my life as tangible experience of the Father’s love, the love of Jesus and the Spirit’s love, makes being pulverized not so bad a grace after all!
Here I will only excerpt some lines from this tremendous teaching letter, for, as said, in this, as in so much, I am but a beginner.
….Whenever you experience inwardly any annihilation of yourself, you will feel an overpowering urge to assert yourself outwardly, to imprint yourself on life. “Look, folks, I exist! I’m here. I haven’t disappeared. I’m a person. Listen to me!” [ ds-1]
That is certainly how this writing began, until it was blessed by my spiritual father and I radically re-wrote so the emphasis, please God, is not on me but rather on how our loving Father, our loving Redeemer, our loving Sanctifier transforms abundance of our sins, and the impact of sins committed against us, into an even more lavish abundance of grace, of mercy, the communion of Love Himself.
The Holy Spirit seems to annihilate your spirit, you see; or so it will appear to you. Sheets of flames and raging wind and all types of symbols will come into your imagination. You see they are terrible, terribilis, in their power to overwhelm you. You suddenly feel like this: “Where is the Kingdom which He calls me to, which He has promised now, for today?…It is not true, what’s happening to me!…This can’t be right!….It’s too heavy…Make it go away and come gently.” [ds-2]
When Jesus allowed the disciples to travel onto the lake and be caught in the storm which raged, no doubt they experienced what Catherine describes happens in our emotions, mind, soul. We can see clearly in the Holy Gospel their fear. When Peter challenged the reality of the Lord and the Lord showed him His reality, Peter walked on water until he allowed the wind and the waves to overcome him with their terribleness. Then Peter sank, but the moment he cried out to the Lord the Lord rescued him. In that moment of rescue came the profession of faith[Mt.14:22-33].
It is we who are afraid. It is Jesus, true God, who comes to us telling us NOT to be afraid.
For over twenty years Pope John Paul II, indeed since the beginning of his pontificate, has cried out as well, beseeching us to not be afraid of God, of self, of life, of other, but to open wide the door of our being to Christ.
This call to open wide the door of our being is not just for the un-baptized, but for all Christians, not just for the laity, but for religious and priests as well.
Indeed it is the call of Love, offering love, to every human being!
Because of original sin, the first aftermath of which is fear of God and the terrifying, vain, attempt to hide from our loving Father, here we are two millennia after our Redemption and the Gift of the Holy Spirit, still so terribly fearful.
…you’re devastated inside…utterly devastated. And it is in these devastations, and in this being touched by God, then you feel dizzy. You feel like a top, because you don’t know where a top is going to end up…..Slowly, slowly you sink down to the floor because it gets harder and harder to move…Now the grace is that you are on the floor, that you haven’t turned your back to God and walked away. That’s the grace. That’s the beginning of your growth in faith: you’re there! He was on the cross, and you are on the floor. After you get up, your soul feels like a thousand sponges that have been squeezed out, but it doesn’t matter. Grace can go through inward sponges like water goes through outward ones……..[ds-3]
Catherine has written elsewhere that in God every moment is the moment of beginning again.
This moment!
I am learning each moment is grace.
THIS MOMENT IS GRACE AND WE RECIEVE GRACE FOR GRACE JOHN 1:16 AND SO ALL IS GRACE!
A final word:
I began this work on sabbatical towards the end of the last year of the 20th century and have worked on it intermittently since then.
In the nine years since that sabbatical I was vindicated by Church and the secular courts, return to active priestly ministry, taught, gave lectures and missions in many, many places, wrote and eventually was made a pastor of several places.
Then, without warning, everything was turned upside down across the Church with scandal, across the world with 9/11 and eventually in my own life.
Currently I am working on a second book about this first decade of the 21st century in the Church, the Priesthood and my own life and ask your prayer for this new project.
Rev. Arthur Joseph
Holy Easter, 2009
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