Tag Archives: Love

7 EUCHARIST: FOOD OF LIFE-KISS OF LOVE

                                                                    

 

It is First Friday.

After celebrating Holy Mass and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, for a day of adoration, before leaving I led the people, three times in honour of the Holy Trinity, in the traditional invocation of faith’s trust:

                                                   O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving, be every moment Thine.

During that invocation my heart was surprised for the second time in less than a day by a procession of priests across my heart.

The first time they were in my heart was during prayer and meditation upon the Holy Eucharist last night as I prepared my notes for this reflection.

I recall saying to the Lord at the time I didn’t get the connection between these priests and what I was preparing to write about.

Again this morning I mention the same thing to Him.

The first of those priests who came into my heart was one, now long since entered into eternal rest, with whom I served when I was newly ordained and assigned to the cathedral.

This most compassionate and steadfast of priests bore in his physical being horrific scar tissue, while humbling admitting a constant struggle in his heart to forgive those who had so brutally tortured him, the SS guards in the camp where he had been held, with hundreds of other priests, many of whom we executed there.

The second priest, who these days with utter compassion serves as a chaplain for the military, carried in his heart the wounds inflicted by his barracks mates in the country where he grew up and was first a seminarian.

His country at the time was under the evil oppression of communism.

The communists, while barely tolerating the existence of the Church, liked to take men from the seminary and force them into several years of military service, ordering the other men in the barracks to attempt to break the spirit of any seminarian in their midst by whatever means they chose. Most of those means were of the kind which would truly render a man so deeply shamed and discouraged that often he would indeed have his spirit broken.

With this priest they failed: undoubtedly because of this priest’s devotion then as a seminarian and now as a priest, and trust in the protection of Our Lady of the Eucharist.

The third priest, as a child during the Second World War, was interred in this country along with his parents and thousands of others. Even though they had lived here for generations in the hysteria of war, because they were ‘ not like us ‘ and deemed a threat to national security, their property was confiscated and they were placed in camps under heavy guard.

Yet he emerged from that experience a loyal citizen still, eventually heard the call of Christ, became a Catholic, left behind an excellent career and became a priest, a priest of incredible gentleness.

The fourth priest when I first met him was in seminary a year behind me.

He was playing on the docks with a childhood friend the day Saigon fell and had but a few moments to choose to run up the gangplank of the last ship to manage to get away, or follow his friend back into the city and possible arrest and detention since he came from a military family well known for their Catholic faith.

He chooses to escape, leaving behind his family and his country.

Finally another older priest, this one also long ago called home to the Father.

He suffered much both in his childhood and in his early life as a priest. He too had tasted the horrors of war, but as a chaplain to those fighting against the Nazis.

More, he suffered from religious authority because of his unwavering advocacy for true justice for the poor and the oppressed.

Eventually he offered himself in response to a call from the Spirit and Our Blessed Mother, as a priest for a newly forming community of lay people who are dedicated to working with the poor, both the materially and the spiritually poor.

After some years in the field houses of this community he was recalled to the ‘motherhouse’ and for over twenty years served as Guestmaster for visiting priests, washing toilets, making beds, sweeping floors, until his health rendered even those simple tasks too much.

He spent the next near two decades living in a small room in the community’s infirmary, a victim soul of suffering and intercessory prayer.

He was instrumental in my own return to the practice of our faith, in particular to a return to the sacrament of reconciliation and remained my confessor for years.

In the last years of his life I had the privilege to help care for him and treasured every word he would say, most especially his constant statement that: “Once I have celebrated Holy Mass the day is complete, it is a divine day.”

These are the priests who processed across my heart as I was preparing to write about the splendour and mystery of the Holy Eucharist.

Each of them: a suffering soul.

Each of them: a priest of incredible compassion, love and courage to live and speak truth.

Each of them: a most beloved brother, some of them mentors, one of them my own confessor.

So I begged the Lord yet again: “What Lord is the connection?”

“Contemplate ground wheat, crushed grape, My broken open Heart.”

Then I began to understand a bit more deeply this mystery that, as priests, we not only celebrate and receive, not only offer but are offered.

Like Christ we too must be broken and distributed.

Like Christ Priest we as priests must have our hearts broken open.[Hos.6:6; Hb.10:5-7; Ps.51:19; Mt.22:37ff; Jn.19:34]

Christ loves us with a broken open heart.

The Church has always seen in the breaking open of His Sacred Heart the gushing forth of the sacramental life of grace.

Standing before our crucified Lord, this river of grace pouring forth, we contemplate the ultimate act of the virtue of trust in and abandonment to the loving will of the Father.

Christ’s Holy Resurrection is the glorious love-fulfillment of that trust.

Here we discover the source of our own trust and abandonment to the Father’s Holy Will for us, to His love.

Here too we are before the necessity of our own hearts being broken open in imitation of Christ priest to whom, through sacramental ordination, we are most profoundly configured by the Holy Spirit.

Once again with confidence we turn to the Holy Spirit, offering Him our hearts as surely as Christ offered His to the lance. [Jn.16:13-15]

After His Holy Resurrection Jesus comes to us, as He did to the Apostles, and finds us, often like them, doubting and struggling. He invites us in our pain and confusion to touch Him by touching His Holy Wounds that we might know He is real! [cf.Jn.20:27]

 

That we might believe.

It is through the locked door of our hearts, if we open to Him [Rv.3:20], into the deepest regions of our terrified hearts, that Jesus comes and it is in allowing Him to touch those deep wounds that we touch Him.

Our most tender Lord does not force Himself upon us, thus, as we read in Revelations 3:20, He comes only as far as the door of our being. There He patiently remains waiting, knocking, and seeking leave to enter.

The wonderful thing about allowing our hearts to be broken open is that henceforth there is no longer a closed and locked door ever barring His entrance!

We must allow Him to enter and touch us in the depths of our deepest wounds if we are to be healed, if we are to have abundance of life.

We can be more than a little anxious when we finally come to understand this mystery and truth that we can only truly love, in imitation of Christ, with a broken open heart.

Broken to us means something painful, like a broken bone, or promise.

We speak of marriages that have broken up, of friendships that have been broken off.

Broken things, in our consumer culture, are usually things thrown out with the trash, hence broken for many means devastating rejection or abandonment, a profound breach of trust.

Broken hurts.

Broken can mean being unlovable, or unforgiveable.

Original sin broke the original intimacy between man and God, broke the original unity between man and woman.

The result was fear and distrust.

Suddenly God, the loving one, became God the feared one.

When He came looking for His first children the response to His tender call became the first utterance of pathos and a sadness which remained unavailed until the Saviour should have His own cry become ours.[Gn.3:10; Mk.15:34]

Once again, if we yearn in the slightest to understand the wonder of our existence, the true meaning of life, the reality of our being in persona Christi, we are at the foot of the Cross.

We of hearts which must be broken open contemplating the Priest whose Heart they have torn asunder.

On the Cross Christ has taken all our fear, pain, vulnerability, loneliness, questions, tears, sins, and more than we can ever comprehend, upon Himself.

This is ultimate gift of Self.

Only if we open wide the door of our being, offer our own hearts to be broken open, will we experience the entrance of Christ into the depths of our hearts, spirits, souls wherein He shall fill us with His own light and salt us with fire that we, true priests, can then go forth and make self-gift as priest to all our brothers and sisters as salt and light [Mt.5:13,14] and truly lay down our lives, moment by moment, as gift of true love, as He has asked us: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Heavenly Father. [Mt.5:44, 45]

The breaking open of our hearts is in essence experience of Eucharist in the fullness of we, as priests, being both the one who offers and the oblation itself.

It is a deep configuration to Christ wherein the Sacred Liturgy becomes more than a sacred event we celebrate but a sacred reality we live in our very flesh, mind, heart, soul:

                                               Broken and distributed is the Lamb of God, broken and not dismembered, always eaten and never expended, but making holy those who receive It.

So exalts the Church in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom!

We priests must allow the Holy Spirit, in a real way, to break and distribute us to our people as surely as we break and distribute the Lamb of God to them.

In breaking open our hearts the Spirit will not dismember us, that is abuse our fear of trust, the fear of abandonment to Divine Providence as being a danger of annihilation.

Indeed the more we surrender, the more we allow the mystery of kenosis, the breaking open of our hearts which allows us to be emptied of the false and sinful self in imitation of Christ’s own self-emptying, the more we shall be filled with the utter fullness of God!

My heart believes there is a direct connection between the not uncommon resistance among priests today for the celebration of popular pious devotions such as Holy Benediction, Adoration, devotions to the Most Sacred Heart, and this fear of being, as one young priest likes to repeat: too priestly!

Translation: too clerical.

Yet St. Paul tells us that we are called to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ [Gal.6:2].

 Our people are heavily burdened and does not Eucharistic devotion ease their pain?

Is not the Sacred Heart their comfort?

And the Apostle adds that it is in bearing one another’s burdens that we fulfill the law of Christ. That law, we know, is simply: love one another. [cf.Jn.15:17]

We most likely would resist less the movement of the Holy Spirit within us to sanctify us with a broken open heart that we might truly love, if He were to break us open through some sweet mystical experience.

In reality our hearts will be broken open through struggle with faith, with God, as Jacob struggled before us [Gn.32:23-33], the reality of spiritual warfare as shown in Revelations chapter 12.

Yet when we receive Love’s wound then we enter into a depth of communion of love with the Holy Trinity where ours becomes the beloved’s own experience. [Sg. Of Sgs. 5:4]

Moment by moment too, in a manner which is quite hidden and a protection from any form of pride, we are broken open, and healed too, through the nitty-gritty of the sacred duty of each moment.

We are, after all, mere vessels of clay within which is this great treasure of our holy vocation of joy and all other sanctifying grace from sacraments received.

So we can rightfully say with the Apostle, and rejoice in its truth and be thankful for the experience[s] of being goaded by the Holy Spirit into humility! [2Cor.12:7-10]

Actually it is a protecting grace!

Jesus, with great joy, at the very beginning of His public life for our redemption, proclaims the truth of His being sent by the Spirit, the same Spirit who is active within us. [Lk.4:17-19]

Because we have free will, and thus a tendency to sin and to a persistent type of attempted self-protecting which actually is a closing of our hearts to Him, the Holy Spirit is necessarily persistent in His work of breaking us open!

That this is ultimately a gentle operation is made clear in St. Paul’s extraordinary Letter to the Romans, especially chapter 8, in particular verses 5-9, 14-17, and 26-28.

The Holy Spirit does this because of the Eucharistic reality that we are, as priests, both the ones who offer and are offered. He also does this so we in our turn, having been anointed in persona Christi, seek out the poor, the captive, the downtrodden, loving them, serving, announcing to them that since He is Risen, every year IS the year of the Lord’s favour!

Again, since we are endowed with free will Christ can only come to the door of our being and knock, begging admittance.

When we allow Him to enter it is the same as giving the Holy Spirit full consent to henceforth allow into our beings only Christ and the persons and things of Christ and to break open our hearts that all else may be removed from us, most especially our false self.

Of course we all know that as a result of our own sin-wounds and the wounds inflicted upon us by those who have sinned against us we often have hearts like something sealed in a jar or walled up in a tomb.

Ordination, as we also know only too well, is not some magic potion that suddenly renders us whole and holy.

Like all sacramental grace it demands constant cooperation for the Spirit to transform, transfigure us so we become what we are.

Christ knocks at the door of the tomb in which we have buried ourselves, or where we are held captive by some addiction or fear and He cries out to us: Come out! [cf.Jn.11]

Christ also seeks to shatter the jar of our fears and illusions.

If we but allow Him to do so, and allow the Spirit to accomplish His work within us, then we shall experience the joy of a broken open heart which becomes a wide open door through which processes the Most Holy Trinity in communion of love, filling us with the utter fullness of God. [Jn.1:16; 2Cor.4:11; Gal.2:19,20; Gal.3:27; Gal.4:6,7]

Faith is the gift whose fruit is trust. Trust is the willingness to say, and mean it no matter what our emotions may be doing at the time: “Yes, you may break me open O Holy Spirit and configure me ever more fully to Christ of the Broken Open Heart. You may empty my being of all that is not holy, set me free from what has me captive, heal my blindness which is so dark because I fear, fill in my poverty due to my sins with the Good News of Divine Mercy, free me from having been pulverized and downtrodden by the allures of the world. Declare within my deepest being the year of the Lord’s favour so that I live no longer, only Christ lives in me!”

It is to make St. Paul’s prayer, while on our knees our own! [Ep.3:14-21]

We are the stewards and ministers of the treasury of sacramental grace.

It is essential we willingly, and frequently, put our face onto the ground adoringly at the foot of the Cross, crying out in all truth: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Once we have soaked the ground with our tears, wept for our own sins and those of the whole world, we can then lift our eyes towards Him and contemplate with all the love of our broken hearts He who’s Heart they have broken open.

There, in the depths of the communion of love, we will come to understand a broken heart is both a loving and an obedient heart.

There too we will come to open ever more the depths of our heart to the ineffable reality of the Most Holy Eucharist.

                                                             ……all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate are bound up with the Eucharist and are directed towards it. For in the most Blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ Himself our Pasch and the living bread which gives life to men through His flesh – that flesh which is given life and gives life through the Holy Spirit. Thus men are invited and led to offer themselves, their works and all creation with Christ. For this reason the Eucharist appears as the source and summit of all preaching of the Gospel: catechumens are gradually led up to participation in the Eucharist, while the faithful who have already been consecrated in baptism and confirmation are fully incorporated in the Body of Christ by the reception of the Eucharist.

                                                Therefore the Eucharistic celebration is the center of the assembly of the faithful over which the priest presides. [61]

It is this reality of our sacramental consecration as priests, this sublime and central experiential truth of our communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity, which is celebrated by us as act of faith and reality, intercessory prayer and thanksgiving.

No matter how our raw humanity, our very clay-ness, may seem to weigh upon us during the sublime event of celebrating Holy Mass, we draw constant reassurance, affirmation and strength from the very Eucharistic prayer of Christ Himself, our High Priest who the night of His Passion prayed for us in particular: Jn.17:11-19.

Sometimes, it is true, because of the combination of all the preparatory things we need to, especially before Sunday Masses, weddings, funerals and other particular solemnities, and too often because of the daily celebration of Holy Mass, we can find it difficult to be truly reverential and attentive.

Celebrating the heavenly liturgy here on earth may at times be experienced as a rather blatantly human endeavour because, priest though we are, we remain men.

This can be particularly acute when, having received our Lord and God, the Divine Lover, in Holy Communion we are surrounded by a lot of activity, people, sounds, sights, and a certain pressure to quickly get about the business of bringing our Eucharistic Lord to our brothers and sisters.

Then, once they have been fed, all too quickly there can be a certain wave of restless. They want to leave. Or we want to flee. Either way we quickly move through the final prayer, sometimes followed by announcements which, if we be honest, truly have no place in the liturgy. The blessing, the recessional and greeting people as they leave.

There follows any number of things to do and before we know it we are back in the rectory.

However we need not remain stuck in such a sequence.

The ritual itself provides, indeed states, there should be time for thanksgiving. It need not be excessively long, but surely we can take a few moments to thank He who has just made such a comple As with Baptism and Confirmation it is important we remember our First Holy Communion. The first time He permeated our beings with His Eucharistic Self. Remember too the first time we celebrated Holy Mass.

Certainly we cannot, of our own effort, duplicate those first experiences, but we can beg of the Holy Spirit a renewed and ever deeper faith in and love of the One who gives Himself to us.

                                              …… Holy Communion is the most excellent means of living in Christo. Through it, the priest unites himself in the full spirit of love of the Saviour: ‘He that eateth My flesh…abideth in Me and I in him’ (John vi.57). Moreover, after Holy Communion he continues to live in the radiance of the heart of Jesus, enveloped, as it were, in the atmosphere of His love and of His grace. By remaining constantly united to the Saviour the priest makes the divine gift bear abundant fruit in his soul:  ‘He that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit’ (John xv.5). [61] As with Baptism and Confirmation it is important we remember our First Holy Communion. The first time He permeated our beings with His Eucharistic Self. Remember too the first time we celebrated Holy Mass.

Certainly we cannot, of our own effort, duplicate those first experiences, but we can beg of the Holy Spirit a renewed and ever deeper faith in and love of the One who gives Himself to us.

                                              …… Holy Communion is the most excellent means of living in Christo. Through it, the priest unites himself in the full spirit of love of the Saviour: ‘He that eateth My flesh…abideth in Me and I in him’ (John vi.57). Moreover, after Holy Communion he continues to live in the radiance of the heart of Jesus, enveloped, as it were, in the atmosphere of His love and of His grace. By remaining constantly united to the Saviour the priest makes the divine gift bear abundant fruit in his soul:  ‘He that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit’ (John xv.5). [61]

Our sacramental reality of being in persona Christi will fragment, indeed dissolve into a mere function unless we, like St. John the Beloved before us, nestle frequently, trustingly and lovingly, against His Most Sacred, and broken open for us, Heart.

We need this intimacy with the Divine Lover and there is no better time for this contemplative union between us than when we have received Him in the Holy Eucharist.

While such a lingering with Him may not be possible immediately after receiving Him during the liturgy or right thereafter, we should strive, and if our people know this is what we need they will respect the time we take, to be alone with Him as soon as possible.

Only through intimacy with Christ of the Wounded Heart will we ever overcome the fear of having our own hearts broken open. Only through that same intimacy will we willingly embrace the cross daily and follow Him wherever His love takes us.

                                                             The mystery of the Cross is the compendium of the beatitudes. In it are found, in unity of sorrow – the most perfect unity that exists after the unity of love in the bosom of God – the virtues and the gifts which the beatitudes produce in an incomparable and divine degree of perfection. The divine nakedness of the Cross is the consummation of detachment. The unutterable state of Jesus as victim, totally surrendered to divine justice in the sacrifice of Calvary, is the height of meekness. The immense desolation of Christ on the Cross is the depth of holy sadness of those who weep. The immortal victim is supreme justice and supreme mercy united on earth in an ineffable kiss of pain, as they are united in heaven in the divine kiss of love. The holy, unfathomable and infinite purity of the nakedness of Christ Crucified is the divine summit of purity on earth, as in heaven nakedness, divine simplicity, is infinite purity. And the sublime monument on the top of Calvary is the last word of love, both human and divine on earth.

                                                                When we contemplate Christ on the Cross with the enlightened eyes of the heart, we grasp this most profound and fundamental truth, that there are only two consummations of sanctity because there are only two unities: that of love in heaven and pain on earth. Sanctity is simplification. God is most holy because He is infinitely simple; souls are holy because they are simplified in God. In the discourse at the Last Supper, when He asked the Father for perfect holiness for His own, Christ said, ‘That they may be one, even as We are one.’  The Father and the Word are joined in the unity of the Holy Spirit, that is, in the unity of love. Souls are united in the Cross of Christ, in the unity of pain. [63]

The Holy Eucharist is communion of love.

Communion of love is Trinitarian.

“Pain”, cries out with affirmation and joy, teaches the Servant of God, Catherine Doherty, “is the kiss of Christ!” [Sg. Of Sgs. 1:2; Ps. 16:11]

Holy simplicity is that freedom which is the hallmark of the children of the Father, that trust which is the hallmark of hearts which know they are beloved of Christ the Divine Lover, that obedience which is the hallmark of wills and souls totally surrendered to the movements of the Holy Spirit.

The more we allow our hearts to be broken open the more we shall truly love Christ and the things of Christ, the Church and all she asks of us in truth-teaching, fidelity to ritual and the more we shall be true humble, loving servants of our brothers and sisters.

If we are not in the depths of this communion of love with the Holy Trinity, the source and summit of which love flows from the source and summit of our sacramental life, the Holy Eucharist, then we will, inevitably, seek a substitute.

The heart cannot be without love.

Either the heart embraces the reality of Real Love Himself and the Love offered us, or the heart will accept unreality and become captive by some other.

One of the most classically manly men of the two-fisted, hard drinking, no nonsense kind of the last century, who grew up through all the wars and other chaos of that bloody time, was touched in the depths of his soul by the Little Flower and our Blessed Mother. Subsequently another woman touched his heart and to make self-gift to her it meant embracing poverty, agreeing the apostolate she founded must come first and, eventually, it meant embracing chastity as well.

All the weight of the cross, all the pain of that aspect of his vocation was mingled with much physical pain because of his heart condition.

In both senses of the phrase.

In his professional life he had been one of the toughest reporters in a very tough era when newspapers where the main source of news for most people.

He was also one of the most highly paid and famous.

In the early days of the apostolate, by then known, as it is today around the world, as Madonna House, he helped keep the little community going by writing books.

Towards the end of his life his childhood dream was fulfilled when he was ordained a priest.

To participate in any Divine Liturgy he celebrated was to see the face of a man, a priest, totally in love with Love Himself.

It was to see in the radiance of his face, the tenderness of all the movements, gestures, words which the rubrics ask of us, the intimacy, confidence, faith, hope and joy flowing from the Eucharistic love affair.

Years before, while still a layman, as noted in his book I Cover God, he was walking in the forest, chanced upon a pine tree, kissed it and tasted a drop of resin.

His heart was suddenly moved with love and his heart heard the voice of love Himself:

                                                                I have kissed you with the kiss of all My forests …but I have been much more intimate than that. I have also kissed you with the kiss of My mouth! My Son! My Word!

                                                               My Son, My Word, was and is the perfect Man. He was and is the essence of humanity, as well as the essence of divinity. My Son, My Word, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, God and Man, is placed daily on your tongue by one of My priests – even as the lifeblood, the essence, of the pine, was placed on your tongue by yourself.

                                                             You felt the pine sap. You felt its pungent, aromatic taste; its oily pleasantness; its enduring flavour. You do not, ordinarily, taste anything in the Host except the taste of bread. And this taste is neither pungent nor long lasting.

                                                           Only your soul knows the wondrous strength and sweetness in the Communion Wafer – in the Body and Blood, in the Soul and in the Divinity, of My Son, My Word.

                                                          You cannot taste Divinity!

                                                          Jesus is the essence of humanity, the essence of all the people I have put upon your earth. You are part of it, and it is part of you. The pine you tasted is a perfect tree. There is no taint in its essence. The Host you swallowed was, and is, human and divine perfection. There is no taint in it. There is no taint in Mary. There is no taint in her Son.

                                                         I am I. I am God. Out of My mouth comes the Word. The Word I utter is I. I am the Father of the Word. I am the Concord, the Love, that exists between the Voice and the Word. I am the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I am the Three-in-One, the One-in-Three. I am the Crucified. I am the Resurrection and the Life.

                                                        ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.’ ‘The Word made flesh.’ The Word I uttered is a kiss. The kiss of My mouth. The kiss of peace. The kiss of pity. The kiss of boundless mercy. The kiss of consolation. The kiss of love. The kiss spurned. The kiss betrayed by a kiss, and sold and slain. The kiss of redemption. The kiss triumphant over death. The eternal kiss of God. This is the kiss I give to free you, My slave. I am God and you are but a slave. You kneel before Me at Communion. You are My subject. Yet I am your subject too, for I come to you at your bidding! I come to you gladly. I stoop to you. I visit you. I kiss you with the kiss of My  mouth. I give you the kiss of eternal life. [64]

The Cross is the Tree soaked with the resin of His Precious Blood, poured forth from Love’s broken open Heart.

Every time we approach the altar and celebrate the Sacred Mysteries we are in Love’s embrace, in communion of love.

Let us stop resisting the invitation to be so plunged into the reality we celebrate that we fear the ever more complete breaking open of our hearts, or resist the kiss of His mouth.

The Holy Gospel reminds us that one of the reasons for the breaking open of His Heart is for the purpose of our being still in love’s contemplation of Love poured out. [Jn.19:37]

We know that it is our own sins which break open His Heart.

But He only wounds us with redemptive love.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned some priests who were much on my heart. Among them the eldest who had been my confessor for decades.

One year during the party we had to celebrate his birthday, and his more than fifty years as a priest, I was sitting beside him when another priest approached and said with great affection: “Well Father, just imagine all the Holy Communions you have received in your life!”

The old priest looked up.

His face was brilliant with a shimmering radiant light.

He simply smiled a smile of one who absolutely trusts he is beloved. [Jn.6:27]

When we truly love someone and that love is real and holy we yearn to be with them always, we think about them, make choices with their best interest at heart.

In a word we make a gift of ourselves to them.

Thus with each Holy Communion our hearts ever more humbly, ever more generously, ever more zealously ask the question about the ‘to do’ aspect of our being [Jn.6:28,29] and live it out precisely by being who we are!

At the heart of everything is faith.

Faith, as we know, is not only ascent to the truths of faith, but it is also a deep trust in all that the Church asks of us.

Faith does not tinker with the content of truth, nor the truth of proper sacramental form.

Faith not only believes that what we consecrate is His Real Presence, but never alters anything within the Sacred Liturgy.

Humble obedience is the external witness of faith.

When we are disobedient, even in little things, we begin to distance ourselves from that obedient intimacy with the Father which Jesus offers us in communion of love.

What should be the humble, untainted, celebration of the Heavenly Liturgy becomes pockmarked with our own egos and there is a real sadness which envelops our good people when they see an incomprehensible twisting of what should be only of and about Christ into something which becomes a paltry performance rather than a sublime celebration of the mystery of faith.

When we do such things we join interiorly at least in a type of return to our ‘former way of life’ and in a sense begin to no longer accompany Jesus in the depths of fidelity.

Who among us would ever want to hear Love Himself ask: DO YOU ALSO WANT TO LEAVE?

That question, in John 6 verse 66, speaks to the heart of our struggle to be truly humble, faithful, obedient servants of the very mysteries we celebrate.

In 1990 Cardinal Godfried Danneels, addressing himself as much to his priest sons as to his people, wrote a pastoral letter of clear truth-teaching and exquisite tenderness on the holy sacramental priesthood. It has been published in English as: Messengers of Joy.

In this great pastoral the Cardinal speaks about what can cause the heart of a priest to become emptied of joy, seek to flee the Cross, the lance, the tomb. He also addresses the reality of our being priest in the midst of the culture of death in what is seen to be the post-Christian era. In so doing he faces straight on the pain of many priests who struggle with what swirls around us, distracts or tempts us in raw contradiction of the truth alive in our hearts.

                                                           ….priests must often pass from great joy to deep sadness within a few moments. This need to shift gears, to empathize alternately with joy and sorrow, makes great demands on their hearts. It can be exhausting, but is also gives them a special serenity, a certain satisfaction. Pastoral work often means that we must stand in mid-stream, half-way between two shores. Every priest is familiar with the tension between justice and mercy, between doctrine and practice, between requirements and compassion; between what the Church teaches and what is possible to the poor believer. Some people expect priests to be rigorously orthodox, adhering literally to every detail; others expect realism, a recognition of the need to adapt and of the need for ‘inculturation.’ Priests can be trapped between liberals and conservatives. Poor St. Christopher carrying the Infant Jesus between two shores which want nothing to do with each other! [65]

Even during the celebration of the source and summit of our faith we can experience that immense stress of which the Cardinal speaks and it can drain our capacity to be fully present to the reality of who we are and with Whom we are in communion of love.

During those times when we most experience this pulverization is the moment when in fact the lance is breaking through the outer shell of our hearts and we are being wounded with love!

When all we want to do is flee, to hide, to find some place where we are not being torn at, our hearts should take comfort in the very cry spoken by our predecessor in the sacred priesthood, and share in his faith. [Jn.6:68, 69]

Since reality is we cannot love without a broken open heart reality also is that when our hearts are truly broken open we become icons of charity and icons of communion of love.

This is when we become truly what we are, shepherds, teachers, and can then form with our people, who receive Christ in Holy Communion, that community of living and humble charity which builds the civilization of love.

Then, once again across the earth, for all to see, for all to discover as the pilgrim’s path, their true home on earth, a place of refuge and hope, a house of love, will the Church, in each parish, be what She is and we priests will truly become what we are.

Thus will our people be what they are called to be through their own baptismal vocation to holiness. [Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-35]

If we are to build up the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church on earth, to form true community, build the civilization of love, then it becomes necessarily urgent we priests be of one mind and heart with Holy Mother the Church, the Holy Father and have true communion of love among ourselves as bishops and priests. [1Jn.4:12]

The icon of the perfection of God’s love within us is the obvious love we have for each other.

So necessary to the full proclamation of the Gospel, and so much is this unity in charity also the essence of the lived mystery of faith we celebrate, that it forms part of Christ’s own priestly prayer to the Father on our behalf. [Jn.17:20-23]

Disunity between our hearts and the heart of the Church, the heart of the Pope; lack of love for our brothers in the holy priesthood, is the evil spawn of negativity, egoism and usually is fuelled by that most common and pernicious of priestly sins: gossip.

        Negativity and gossip are potent satanic weapons which discourage hearts from true devotion and generosity, leading to the destruction of the shepherd and the scattering of the flock.

As much damage as can be done when we fail to preach orthodox catholic teaching, mess around with the rubrics, deny that we are indeed Father, hide behind the porous veil of secular dress, nothing equates the damage done when our people see we fail to truly love one another.

There is really, in spite of the very serious others which have wounded the Church across the ages, no greater scandal than disunity among the shepherds.

Only when we live the Gospel command of love and its adherent unity, with our lives without any compromise, will our people be united in charity. [Jn.15:8-17]

Having just instituted the sacraments of the holy priesthood and the Holy Eucharist, heading with an obedient heart towards the fulfillment of the will of the Father even to having His Heart broken open on the Cross, Jesus pours out those words of life for us.

This is the detailed description of our divine election, our vocation of joy through ordination.

               Jesus here tells us completely who and why we are in persona Christi.

The Holy Eucharist can truly be called our very reason for being!

Yes, if we allow our hearts to be broken open our own hearts will become Eucharistic hearts, filled with the fire of the Spirit, the selflessness of Christ, the love of the Father.

                                                   In the resurrection of Jesus God has poured the fire of His love into the entire universe….

                                                  …If we who have been baptized with fire allow that fire to consume us, if we simply allow God in us to be God in us, then everything we touch and every person we gather into our arms and hearts will feel the risen flesh of Jesus.

                                                ….Catherine {the foundress of Madonna House Lay Apostolate} has always said, “I can endure anything between two Masses.” Jesus never asks us to endure anything without His Body and Blood….

                                               …..Between two Masses: because Jesus did not count the cost, He baptized time itself with the fire of God’s love. The time between one Eucharist and the next becomes the time of the towel and the water, the time of washing my        brothers’ and sisters’ feet. At first we do not understand, but as we wash –grudgingly counting each minute – we begin to discover that through this washing, in the very act of loving so humbly, Jesus is feeding us with His risen Body. As He makes the commonplace bright with His glory, our minds fall silent, and only our hearts can grasp what He shows us: that in loving as He loves we are offered with Him to the Father and are received with Him as the Easter bread by all those we serve.

                                                                              After the Supper with His friends, Jesus went to the garden, where He said, “My heart is breaking with sorrow” (Mk.14:34). He is risen, but to live the joy of His resurrection is to experience the heartbreak of Christ. We say, “That’s it. I’m finished. I follow the Lord and look what He has done to me.” We are not finished, however; we are just beginning, as Jesus was. As that tiny little cramp that you thought was yourself breaks open, you discover that within there is this radiant stillness of everlasting life – Jesus Himself, the Lord, with His Father and the Holy Spirit.

                                                              You discover that stillness by washing the feet of others every day. You may well see only the naked, dirty feet until, by the great tenderness of the Father, the Easter bread begins to purify your heart, and the Easter light begins to cleanse your eyes. Then you begin to see whose feet you are washing, and who is washing your feet as you wash others’. Then the time between two Masses becomes what the Mass itself is: loving sacrifice transformed by the Father’s love into perfect joy. Then the Lord’s word – “that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete”. (Jn.15:11) – is fulfilled in you because, as you let Him feed you with His love and let Him make you too the bread of love, your heart becomes what His heart is: an icon of that love that makes the sun rise on the good and the evil alike, that lets the rain fall both on the just and the unjust. [66] 

 

52 DESERT GIANT – LITTLE FLOWER – POOR WOMAN


WALKING FROM the Post Office back home yesterday afternoon, adjusting to new tri-focal glasses, I was wary of the ice on the sidewalk, increasingly irritated at the man approaching, riding his bicycle towards me. Irritated that someone would place my arthritic knees at risk by invading MY space with his bicycle.

 

As the man got closer I noticed he had the facial features common to a particular type of mental handicap and became more interiorly irritated, this time against myself for being such a sidewalk hog.

In the same instant the man past me, at a clip, while saying, with a great smile on his face: “Hello there! How are you? “

The other day in my mediation I was seeing myself as Zaccheus and rejoicing that Jesus called to me as He passed by — the moment that man called out his greeting I felt as if Jesus Himself was passing by and felt, of myself, like one of those proverbial cartoon characters who sits on a tree branch, merrily sawing away, until too late he discovers he has severed the limb, and thus himself, from the tree.

HE LIVED until he was over a hundred years old. He was born in Egypt of Christian parents but orphaned at an early age, with a younger sister to care for. One day in church his heart was broken open when he heard the words of the Gospel, spoken by Jesus to the rich young man. So moved, he immediately gave away all but what was needed to care for his sister. Yet sometime later, his heart further opened by the Gospel passage not to worry about tomorrow, he gave away what was left, saw to the care of his sister and went deep into the desert.

There he became the greatest of all spiritual warriors and the great Abba of monastic life.

He is ABBA ANTHONY and today is his feast.

Divine Wisdom was fused into his heart in the crucible of decades of solitary life in the desert, battling evil spirits, being emptied of his false-self by the Holy Spirit, who illumined Abba Anthony and, with fire, configured him to Christ, so that, as is recorded:

They said that a certain old man asked God to let him see the Fathers and he saw them all except Abba Anthony. So he asked his guide, ‘Where is Abba Anthony? ‘He told him in reply that in the place where God is, there Anthony would be.[cv-1]

Now THAT is what it means to be a friend of God!

So here, then, wisdom from the ‘desert great ‘, Abba Anthony:

…whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures…… ….This is the great work of a man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God and to expect temptation to his last breath. ….Whoever has not experienced temptation cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven….Without temptations no one can be saved. ….I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, ‘What can get through from such snares?’ Then I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Humility.’….Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ. ….A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us. ‘…I no longer fear God, but I love Him. For love casts out fear. [cv-2]

The life of Abba Anthony was preserved from the oral tradition and written down by another giant of the faith, himself a saint, St. Athanasius. Thus by the time another young Egyptian man was struggling, the story of Abba Anthony would influence his conversion and he too would become a saint. That man was Augustine!

The first mention St. Augustine makes of Abba Anthony comes when he speaks of being introduced to the saint by a friend named Ponticianus. During his friend’s visit Augustine spoke about his meditations upon Sacred Scripture and notes:

…..a discussion arose in which he narrated the story of Anthony, an Egyptian monk. His name was famous among Your servants, but up to that very hour it had been unknown to us…..We in turn stood in amazement on hearing such wonderful works of Yours, deeds of such recent memory, done so close to our own times, and most fully testified to, in the true faith and in the Catholic Church. [cw-1]

Abba Anthony had died around 356 A.D., aged about 105. St. Augustine was born just two years before Abba Anthony’s death. St. Augustine was about thirty years old when he was baptized. Thus when Augustine speaks about ‘deeds of such recent memory, done so close to our own times ‘ he is marvelling not only at what Christ has accomplished in the life of Abba Anthony, but he is also revealing something vital about the mystery of the Communion of Saints, namely, while many have lived seemingly distant in time from our own era, others have lived close to our own. What is even more incredible is that many are alive in this moment in our very midst.

The Communion of Saints is part of the living treasury of the Church’s life, the storehouse of wondrous works of grace from which the Church brings forth models of hope and holiness for us, which are ever ancient and ever new.

When, in the powerful account of the pivotal moment of conversion grace where he, St. Augustine, hears the voice of a child, and is able to attune himself to this gift of the Spirit he remembers:

……I had heard how Anthony had been admonished by a reading from the Gospel at which he chanced to be present, as if the words read were addressed to him……and that by such a portent he was immediately converted to You. [cw-2]

Of course, in truth, such moments of grace are never something ‘chanced’ upon.

So-called ‘chance’ and ‘coincidence’ are terms only rightly applied to the dark ignorance of the tea leaf reading mentality.

With God all is opportunity of grace and graced opportunity.

Closer to our own time another saint emerged from that great tradition which has streamed across the millennia, developing into various forms of monastic-desert life, as well as various forms of religious orders of teachers, nurses, etc., and the modern new forms of consecrated community life in the Church today.

One of the more ancient, tracing itself back to Mount Carmel and Elijah, at least within pious memory if not hard fact, is the Carmelite order, from whose religious sisters in nineteenth century France came a woman known popularly as the Little Flower, whom Pope John Paul II made a Doctor of the Church, namely, St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.

Her autobiography is a record itself of the marvels and wondrous deeds of the Lord close to our own day.

Called “The Story of a Soul “ it was a treasure of my youthful reading, a source of inspiration when I was a monk and moved me to open my heart to Abba Anthony and the wisdom of the desert.

On my journey of return to the faith, before I entered the seminary, it became a source of hope and courage and I renewed my devotion to this holy woman companion.

A few words of wisdom from her:

At the beginning of my spiritual life when I was thirteen or fourteen I used to ask myself what I would have to strive for later on because I believed it was quite impossible for me to understand perfection better. I learned very quickly since then that the more one advances, the more one sees the goal is still far off. And now I am simply resigned to see myself always imperfect and in this I find my joy. [cx-1]

How often in life has the distance of the goal been a source of discouragement, when in fact, as the saint notes, embraced humbly, humbly embracing our weak selves, the journey becomes joy!

How sweet is the way of LOVE…True, one can fall or commit infidelities, but, knowing HOW TO DRAW PROFIT FROM EVERYTHING, love quickly consumes everything that can be displeasing to Jesus; it leaves nothing but a humble and profound peace in the depths of the heart.[cx-2]

This is the most difficult truth about actual conversion for many souls to accept. Hence, as can be seen in certain evangelical/charismatic circles, emphasis is placed upon external manifestations of faith and love, such as sudden cures, falling faint ‘ in the spirit ‘ and more bizarre forms of shaking, laughing, as well as an increased emphasis on financial security, all attended by a type of xenophobia regarding those who are not of like ilk.

To achieve the fullness of illumination, divinization, sobornost with the Trinity, as exemplified in the lives of the Great Desert Father Abba Anthony and in the Great Doctor of the Church the Little Flower, means a lifetime of spiritual warfare. A lifetime which in the case of Abba Anthony lasted more than a century, in the case of the Little Flower, barely a quarter of one.

It is not the length of the journey, but the inward depth of the journey; it is not the quantity of the battles but the willingness to open wide the doors of our being to His transfiguring touch.

Too often, infected as we Christians are with the Zeitgeist egocentric selfishness pervading our culture, we deny the reality of configuration to Christ by the Holy Spirit as meaning cross and death precede tomb and resurrection. That contemporary Zeitgeist flays about in the quicksand error of love as what I experience from another, rather than soaring into the communion of joy which knows and lives love’s truth: love is gift of self to another first in imitation of God who is Love and first loves us, makes Himself First Gift!

In order to live one single act of perfect Love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLOCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your love, O my God! [cx-3]

It is her example of love why Pope John Paul II has urgently begged all bishops and priests to introduce the Little Flower to the youth of this era.

It should be clear too, now, why the elderly priest who took me in and fed and clothed me that stormy night so many decades ago, gave me, along with the Bible, a book of the Lives of the Saints.

It is in their lives that we see in concrete terms of human life the marvellous deeds of the Holy Spirit, brought to ultimate fruition in a manner which should encourage our wounded souls and hearts with the joyful acceptance in our own beings that nothing is impossible to God.

Once I was beginning to commune again with the Saints I was enabled to commune with the process of formation that awaited me in the seminary.

An even closer contemporary of this generation, whose importance in the deepening of Gospel life in the lives of ordinary Christians cannot be overly stressed, and herself a pioneer of the new forms of consecrated life in the Church, is the Servant of God Catherine Doherty.

Born in Czarist Russia, forged into adulthood as a nurse in the bloodletting of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, she was led by the Spirit into the desert of external poverty and service of the poor. Through those experiences she also was plunged into the purifying fire of internal poverty.

A modern Desert Mother she remains, after Our Blessed Mother, the most important woman in my life.

She herself is now in heaven, among that great company of the Communion of Saints where Abba Anthony and the Little Flower preceded her.

Often referring to herself as a poor woman, she was incredibly rich in her passionate love of Christ and all human beings, especially the anawim, those bent over by the burden of external or internal impoverishment.

From the mystery of Christ in the desert, through the life of Abba Anthony, the self-offering as victim of the Little Flower, to the treasury of practical spiritual wisdom from her own heart, poured out in service of the poor and filled with illumination from the Holy Spirit in her days spent in contemplation in her hermitage — always called by her according to its Russian name: Poustinia — comes a clear description of what the desert is all about, what conversion is about, and the central issue of freely choosing to open wide the doors of our being to the Most Holy Trinity, or not.

The teaching is stark, frank, admitting the exhaustion which is constitutive of spiritual warfare.

It contains both an echo of Abba Anthony’s admonishment that we shall endure temptations until our last breath and the passionate willingness of the Little Flower revealing the Little Way of complete self-offering as victim of love:

The more I behold this freedom of mine, poised between these two choices, the more tired I get. Everything suddenly becomes very clear, very simple, and that kind of simplicity is intensely tiring to us human beings. For the vision is clear. There is the burning desert, and there is the other side of the desert which appears so restful. I am somewhere in between. I must decide to either go to the right, into the will of the Father, or to the left, into my own will and the desert of satan. Yes, I am tired because the sight is so clear. I see confusion and demonic powers calling me to do my will contrary to the will of God.

Then, suddenly, all these thoughts leave my mind and I simply realize that God has given me the freedom of choice and a free will, and that He has sent His Son to show me how to do His will. That is what His Son came down to do — to do the will of the Father freely, without compulsion, at the request, as it were, of His Father. I was like that too, like Jesus. I had a free will, and I was not being compelled.

Now my mind begins to clear and my meditation becomes simple. Yes, I am the sister of Jesus Christ. Yes, I have come to do the will of my Father. Yes, that is what I am going to do. I have made the decision. I know that my fiat will have to be repeated again and again, but I am ready, with the grace of God, to do so. [cy]

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FATHER’S LOVE LETTER

 

 

My Child,

You may not know me,
but I know everything about you.
Psalm 139:1


 

 

I know when you sit down and when you rise up.
Psalm 139:2

I am familiar with all your ways.
Psalm 139:3

Even the very hairs on your head are numbered.
Matthew 10:29-31

For you were made in my image.
Genesis 1:27
 

In me you live and move and have your being.
Acts 17:28

For you are my offspring.
Acts 17:28

I knew you even before you were conceived.
Jeremiah 1:4-5

I chose you when I planned creation.
Ephesians 1:11-12

You were not a mistake,
for all your days are written in my book.

Psalm 139:15-16

I determined the exact time of your birth
and where you would live.

Acts 17:26

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:14

I knit you together in your mother’s womb.
Psalm 139:13

And brought you forth on the day you were born.
Psalm 71:6

I have been misrepresented
by those who don’t know me.

John 8:41-44

I am not distant and angry,
but am the complete expression of love.

1 John 4:16

And it is my desire to lavish my love on you.
1 John 3:1
 

Simply because you are my child
and I am your Father.

1 John 3:1

I offer you more than your earthly father ever could.
Matthew 7:11

For I am the perfect father.
Matthew 5:48

Every good gift that you receive comes from my hand.
James 1:17

For I am your provider and I meet all your needs.
Matthew 6:31-33

My plan for your future has always been filled with hope.
Jeremiah 29:11

Because I love you with an everlasting love.
Jeremiah 31:3
 

My thoughts toward you are countless
as the sand on the seashore.

Psalms 139:17-18

And I rejoice over you with singing.
Zephaniah 3:17

I will never stop doing good to you.
Jeremiah 32:40

For you are my treasured possession.
Exodus 19:5

I desire to establish you
with all my heart and all my soul.

Jeremiah 32:41

And I want to show you great and marvelous things.
Jeremiah 33:3

If you seek me with all your heart,
you will find me.

Deuteronomy 4:29

Delight in me and I will give you
the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:4
 

For it is I who gave you those desires.
Philippians 2:13

I am able to do more for you
than you could possibly imagine.

Ephesians 3:20

For I am your greatest encourager.
2 Thessalonians 2:16-17

I am also the Father who comforts you
in all your troubles.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

When you are brokenhearted,
I am close to you.

Psalm 34:18

As a shepherd carries a lamb,
I have carried you close to my heart.

Isaiah 40:11

One day I will wipe away
every tear from your eyes.

Revelation 21:3-4

And I’ll take away all the pain
you have suffered on this earth.

Revelation 21:3-4

I am your Father, and I love you
even as I love my son, Jesus.

John 17:23

For in Jesus, my love for you is revealed.
John 17:26

He is the exact representation of my being.
Hebrews 1:3

He came to demonstrate that I am for you,
not against you.

Romans 8:31

And to tell you that I am not counting your sins.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19

Jesus died so that you and I could be reconciled.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19
 

His death was the ultimate expression
of my love for you.

1 John 4:10

I gave up everything I loved
that I might gain your love.

Romans 8:31-32

If you receive the gift of my son Jesus,
you receive me.

1 John 2:23

And nothing will ever separate you
from my love again.

Romans 8:38-39

Come home and I’ll throw the biggest party
heaven has ever seen.

Luke 15:7

I have always been Father,
and will always be Father.

Ephesians 3:14-15

My question is…
Will you be my child?

John 1:12-13

I am waiting for you.
Luke 15:11-32

Love, Your Father,
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Inflamed by Love

 

I remember, in the mid-sixties, when she first arrived in Combermere, having served the poor in both the inner city and overseas.

 

There was a radiance about her which, in near forty years of friendship we shared on earth, and now seven years of her heavenly intercession, seemed to grow stronger.

It is of Jean Fox [1931-2204] of whom I speak.

Successor to Catherine Doherty the Foundress of Madonna House, she was personally formed by Catherine.

In December 1985, just after Catherine’s funeral Jean came to me, knowing she was to be the first Director General of Women, and asked me to pray over her that she might share Catherine’s charism.

Jean was to be re-elected time and again, serving as Director General until her own death at the beginning of Holy Week in 2004.

Over those  years she gave many talks, wrote many letters and some of her writings have been gathered into a wonderful book: INFLAMED BY LOVE meditations for spiritual pilgrims.

One sample of her words: “All of us must go through the agony in the garden and walk the Via Dolorosa to be glorified through God’s mercy. There is no other way. Let’s walk hand in hand into that glory quickly, for the salvation of souls.”

Her book is available at: http://www.madonnahouse.org/publications/fox/ibl.htm

 

44 DISEASE IN THE DARK IGNORANCE


IN THE FIRST encyclical of his pontificate, Redemptor Hominis, Pope John Paul II gives us a definitive teaching on the reality of the human person.

 

It is a bold, concise, clear, Gospel and Sacred Tradition rooted, teaching on Christian anthropology, the meaning and purpose of human life , the great sacred mystery, reality of God become man, the Incarnation.

Pope John Paul teaches:

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This…is why Christ the Redeemer ‘ fully reveals man to himself’…this is the human dimension of the mystery of Redemption……The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly…..must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into Him with all his own self, he must ‘appropriate’ and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process take places within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he ‘gained so great a Redeemer’, and if God ‘gave His only Son’ in order than man ‘should not perish but have eternal life.’[ci]

Now that is what, though of course I could not have articulated it at the time, my being was yearning to discover and participate in during the period in my basement cave as an urban desert dweller.

The problem was that rather than enter into the mystery of placing my face to the ground and being humble before the Incarnate One with my weaknesses and sins, in a word being still, I approached the whole matter by and large as an intellectual exercise.

My being was hungering for an authentic experience of love, and of self.

My thinking, my attempts to rationally come to grips with my life to date, bereft of the essential simplicity, childlikeness of heart, required for true inner healing, came almost, though by His mercy not totally, to naught, as I took, as it were, a turn not of responsive docility to the prompting and illumination of the Holy Spirit, but into the disease of introspection.

 

I WAS essentially, (and only saved from total disaster since my spiritual father was always there, by letter, phone, visits in person, doing his best to break through my very sophisticated intellectual, ego defences), in this desert experience by my own ‘flight’ determinism.

Thus my uniformed, unformed, immature, fearful state of being, even endowed as I was with a ferocious autonomous will, could not long sustain the struggle.

The wise monk, a true modern desert dweller, indeed a true latter day father of the desert, Matthew the Poor, articulates it best:

Because of this hidden deceit and the fraudulent methods the devil uses, all who do not cleave to the Name of Christ and the Holy Spirit — that is, the Spirit of truth, knowledge, understanding and divine guidance — easily fall prey to the devil’s wiles and do his works quite unaware. Instead of rightly perceiving the works of the evil one, they see them simply as the way of the world or the prevailing custom or the natural product of human nature or perhaps the result of sickness, chance, unintentional error, or rash speech or action. These are the threads the devil cleverly weaves together till they invisibly encircle the mind, gradually and fiendishly shutting out the light that brings discernment between truth and falsehood. Then they close in upon the conscience, stifling it till it slowly and almost imperceptibly loses its sensitivity to truth. Finally these perceptions penetrate so deeply that they enslave not only the mind, but even the body itself, and in the end the law of sin occupies a person’s very being and controls mind, tongue, conscience, body and behaviour. [cj]

In the latter part of the seventh decade of the twentieth century the impact of materialist-hedonism, rejection of faith, in particular among Roman Catholics the development of a rejection of the sacraments, in particular confession and belief in the Real Presence, and the general spiritual exhaustion and malaise in society, was expressing itself in a desperate attempt to find meaning in the existence of self, in life in general.

Several well-known trends began to dominate the popular culture, and as well to penetrate, in various degrees, the centers of higher learning, including seminaries.

On the popular front, given the high cost of therapy with trained professionals, a whole plethora of self-help books became best-sellers, as did the expansion of so called ‘ eastern ‘ techniques. Some of the latter were rooted in actual ancient forms of religious belief and practice, such as Buddhism.

Among disenchanted Christians, including Catholics, looking for emotional solace, that feel-good aspect of life which so obsessed the decade, various forms of evangelical groups, some equating faith with material success — God as the ultimate middle-class capitalist — others became personality cults — began to pervade the air-waves.

The self-help books, and latterly in the eighties their attendant get-rich-quick offspring, will prove themselves to have been a mixed benefit — helpful to some, terribly destructive to others.

I found myself caught up in the general atmosphere of introspection, which is destructive to the baptized person — for the Holy Spirit, while He does invite us to a truly, contrite, examination of conscience, which includes a truthful awareness and assessment of one’s ‘consciousness’, nonetheless does not aid and abet introspection as a turning in upon the self.

The Holy Spirit invites us on a journey inward to encounter with Christ.

Again the ultimate point of the journey being our transfiguration by the Holy Spirit to where, in truth, we not only exult, but in reality live the sacred mystery: I LIVE NO LONGER, CHRIST LIVES IN ME.

The disease of introspection has many levels, some more lethal than others…. It is amazing how perfectly and methodically some persons can go about destroying every experience of life (i.e. the power to be), even every thought experience, through turning an introspective, analytical mind to bear on it….. a vicious and continuous mental obsession… an exercise in..continually looking inward to find some sort of a personal truth or reality… …inner dialogue..full of an irrational sophistry that [can] only tear concepts apart, but [can]never put the fragments back together in any kind of satisfying whole…..floundering in serious mental and spiritual darkness…filled with fear when he first sought help through prayer. [ck]

Of course at the time I was unaware that was happening within me, and my spiritual father, prudently, did not pressure me in anyway. He continued to work with me through the healing of memories and a constant encouragement that I strive to grow in trust of, and docility to, the Holy Spirit.

The turmoil of introspection, and the evil one’s use of that to sow confusion and a type of spiritual exhaustion, itself the step-child of emotional exhaustion, eventually led to an acting out of my old addiction and I began to lead, once again, a type of double life — struggling very hard to lead a chaste life of prayer in my basement-desert-cave, the introspective-performance oriented struggle — and straying, though only occasionally, into the fringes of the sub-culture which I was trying to leave behind. The result being I sometimes surrendered to the disordered addiction to hedonism, thus causing even greater inner turmoil, deeper introspection leading to a more determined ‘performance’ of my self-assumed ‘desert’ vocation.

I was, then, less and less Christ-centered, more and more egocentric within the false self.

To fail to be centered is to ‘walk alongside ourselves,’ a stance whereby we live out of an activism separated from being and therefore from meaning. A person split in this way can never live in the present moment. He can only live for a future that never quite arrives, one that he is perhaps feverishly trying to control in order to avoid the pain of his past. [cl]

This expressed itself within me through a growing conviction, aided and abetted by the growing trend in some circles within the Church, advocating the notion that it was indeed possible to lead an active homosexual life and be a true Christian.

This extended so far as to seeing the lifestyle as itself a vocation and I bought the ideas wholesale.

This in turn led to a determination to be re-united with my companion and thus the inner turmoil increased exponentially as the introspective turmoil fed the new notion of embracing the duality — so contradictory as to make me shudder interiorly today that I could have ever believed it to be true — of a Christ-centered existence while giving myself over to mortal sin.

The only way out of the disease of introspection is to place love in right order, namely God first, my brother and sister next, myself last.

For this to happen, of course, we must know true love.

This demands surrender, a childlike surrender and trust to the reality that love is God loving us first. Through the reception and acceptance of His love then we are able to love.

I was, as so long practiced in my life, substituting, frankly misunderstanding,  gratification for love— taking superficial emotional consolation from someone for the reality of love.

Only when I would finally recognize not only my need for professional therapy to deal with neurotic damage, a true inner healing through real faith and sacramental living, would I begin to experience, taste, accept, the gift of the Father’s love, and only then would I begin to emerge from the quagmire of the disease of introspection, the bondage of performance, the dark ignorance of autonomous self-will.

I called my companion who, with some conditions such as I find a job, agreed to take me back.

A friend said he would drive me and my few belongings to yet another new city in my life.

Christmas came and went and instead of going to Midnight Mass I went out with a priest friend, who was struggling between the option of leaving the priesthood and going overseas as a missionary.

He arrived late Christmas eve begging me to go and have a few beers, shot some pool, chat.

By the end of the night he was more settled and had made his choice.

He chose Christ and the missions. [Mk.10:21, 22]

I had chosen flight from trusting in Christ alone.

 

 

I LIVE NOW, NOT I

                                                               I LIVE NOW, NOT I

 

 

Subtitled: Life as it is now becomes the mystery of Love in Christ – this brief work by Father Pat McNulty witnesses the power of grace, the true hope of baptismal life.

 

 

 

 

 

Published by Madonna House Publications it is readily available through: www.madonnahouse.org/publications

There are some autobiographical hints in this work but the real focus is how grace works within the reality, sometimes painful, experiences of our lives.

In essence this book is about the love affair between each of us and our Crucified Lover.

One brief quote:  …..in the darkness, the solitude, the desert when there are no more answers because there were no more questions, “someone” teaches us in That Place that our suffering and pain is no longer just about us. It is also about Christ and thus about everyone else because we are one in Christ.”

This is a book we highly recommend.

 

19 EXISTING EXISTENTIALLY IN THE MYTHOLOGICAL SIXTIES

MY SPIRITUAL FATHER recently reminded me that: “ A priest is a real fighter when he can begin again at every moment! “

He is here paraphrasing the wisdom of those most wondrous of all fighters in spiritual warfare, the Fathers of the Desert!

What does it mean to be a real fighter?

 Who has shown us how to fight?

 Why must we fight and whom?

 

 

 

 

There is within us..a warfare…[aq]

It is by means of thoughts that spirits of evil wage a secret war against the soul. For since the soul is invisible, these malicious powers naturally attack it invisibly. Both sides prepare their weapons, muster their forces, devise stratagems, clash in fearful battle, gain victories and suffer defeats. But this..warfare lacks one feature possessed by visible warfare: declaration of hostilities. Suddenly, with no warning, the enemy attacks the inmost heart, sets an ambush there, and kills the soul through sin. And for what purpose is this battle waged against us? To prevent us from doing God’s will as we ask to do it when we pray ‘Thy will be done’. [ar]

We know from Sacred Scripture the evil one is the real warring enemy [Rv.12:17] seeking always to seduce us into forgetting whom we truly are and by Whom we are truly loved [Rv.2:4, 5].

 St. Paul, for example, [Ep.6:11, 12] is clear on precisely what this warfare really is.

The reality of spiritual warfare is on my heart today not only because of this section of the story of Divine Mercy at work in my soul, just as He is lavishing Himself upon you in this moment, but also because in the mail today letters arrived from souls for whom I am spiritual director.

I see in their lives the battle rages on.

It is a day to dwell humbly in the virtue of trust, to admit that Christ alone is the Real Fighter, the True Warrior, the Victor. Our only weapon is Him, His Holy Name. Our constant battle cry, simply: LORD JESUS CHRIST, SON OF THE LIVING GOD, HAVE MERCY ON ME A SINNER.

It would take decades after I stepped down from that train which brought me back from the monastery, – decades after I sought out the hanging tree and gave myself over to the enemy, became a traitor to the Gospel, embraced the death of distrust rather than the solace of the embrace of Trust Himself, – before I could even admit there was such a thing as spiritual warfare.

As I turn again to the original notes which I use in this writing I am struck time and again by how often, as I lay severely wounded on the field of battle, Jesus and Mary came to my rescue.

SOME years ago I was visiting one of the many cities which, during the sixties, had within it one of the large concentrations of hippies, of flower children.

I strolled in that former area of hippies, now given over to expensive shops, restaurants, galleries, lofts.

In a small urban square is a large bronze figure, put there during that decade about which no one seems capable to recall the truth that, once ideals were displaced by drugs the flowers became thorns, the communes places of rage and despair, where a generation of children were born never sure who was their actual mother and with no hope of certainty as to whom had fathered them!

The statue is charcoal coloured, neither male nor female, bent in upon itself: rigid, hardened by time, mute.

Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home —

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene — one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on.

I loved to choose and see my path; but now

Lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still

Will lead me on,

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone!

And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.

 — John Henry Cardinal Newman

 

To say that I was in a state of culture shock, future shock, traumatized by the speed at which I had gone from seven years of total isolation from the world of the late fifties into the world of the mid-sixties, is to hardly convey the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, linguistic, attitudinal, confusion which I experienced.

It was not only among my family, the very city streets and people on them, I moved as a stranger in a most strange land.

The Church itself seemed to be casting off all that had held secure within her for the centuries since Trent, in favour of some apparently ill-conceived attempt, at least by clerics and nuns, to become so relevant they no longer appeared to have a clue as to whom they really were.

Though since I had abandoned faith this latter was rather irrelevant.

Within a week or so of being back in the city I was on the prowl, with limited success.

The appetites were similar to before the monastery; the skills of the hunter were less.

Seven years of chaste living had taken their toll.

Thanks to the tradition of nepotism in the postal service I soon had a job as a postal worker.

I was the typical postman from hell — interested only in the money, often getting addresses wrong, not caring at all about how I did the job — and thanks to the power of the union I had no fear of being fired.

Typical of my attitude was the day I broke a tooth during lunch and so I just dumped the undelivered mail into a corner box and took the rest of the day off to find a dentist.

I was years away from understanding, let alone accepting, the implicit moral contract between employer and employee — a just day of labour for a just wage.

With the good money I was making I soon was able to buy fine cloths, lots of books, material for writing, painting, indulge my passion for movies, going to bars.

I was getting a rapid education into this new culture and learnt quickly how to hold down a job during the week and blend into the hippie culture on the weekend.

Authentic religion was a no go, yet my being hungered for some intellectual affirmation of purpose, of existence, so I studied existentialism and Marxism in my spare time, bought the whole angst idea and Marxist theory.

The imperative impulse for revolutionary re-ordering of society was intensified within me through the experience of delivering mail in the projects, the allegedly wonderful alternative to tenement clusters of inner city slums.

The buildings themselves were not that old but since the poor had been put in there with no change in their educational opportunities, social skills, employment, as is all too well known they quickly became jungles of violence, despair, abuse of drugs, alcohol, children, each other, peopled by the hopeless and the angry.

The buildings were filled with graffiti, garbage, unsupervised children, sullen and violent juveniles, mainly fatherless little families cared for by overworked and exhausted women.

It is the coal I’ll never forget.

The coal which lingers, is treasured, deep in my being as the rock hard symbol of why welfare fails as a substitute for true charity — the dignified loving service of one another.

In the old slums, the thick tenements, part of the rental deal was you kicked in your share of bags of coal or slum-lords would cut the heat.

I had a court-order registered letter which had to be signed for. When the woman had me step inside her apartment, as she searched for a pencil to sign for the letter, I could see the usual chaos of a poor little home, right through to the bathroom and the tub filled with coal.

Had no one from the housing authority bothered to explain oil or gas fired boilers?

THE gas furnace in this little house kicks in regularly as I write this very chill late fall evening.

One great thing about being a priest is I can, during Holy Mass repent, of my failure to be a good, caring postman and rest in the mystery of His Mercy, pray for that woman with the coal filled bathtub and trust in the mystery of His Mercy, rejoice in the Church’s predilection, Her preferential option for the poor.

Her preferential option for everyone!

As my wonderful teacher of writing used to say: “Interruptions ARE my work!”

A soul, utterly fearful of everything about life, just phoned long distance. So I stopped this writing to be attentive.

The Church’s, every Christian’s, preferential option MUST be for everyone, for, truly, we are ALL poor.

IT IS LATE in the night as I resume this writing.

The two main rail lines which run through this neighbourhood rumble as great freight trains haul the materials and goods from this industrial city across the expanse of this great continent.

The factories run twenty-four hours, churning out a seemingly endless supply of cars, trucks, vans, cd players, stoves, refrigerators.

On and on relentlessly workers produce in order to consume what their sweat has made.

Their fear of being alone, poor, urges them to consume, consume, consume, until their muscles burn out from the effort, their hearts suddenly stop beating, drained of all life because they have been devoured empty by their very consumption.

Instead of going into a church and stillness before the Real Presence, when I needed solitude, which an inner ache seemed to be pushing me towards, I’d go back to those places of the waterfront, the old fortifications, abandoned factories, the breakwater, sit, gaze out at the ocean, wonder were the freighters were headed, and what had become of me.

I was living in the family’s home, which was terribly crowded and where I felt like a boarder among strangers.

Parents and siblings alike tried valiantly to assimilate me back into the family as if those seven years of separation had not happened. But I was unwilling to be assimilated.

Even when my father announced he had retired from the navy and accepted a foreman’s job at a major factory in the industrial heartland and the whole family would be on the move again, I welcome to come along, and I agreed, it was simply as one accepting passage in steerage to yet another foreign land.

Deep in my heart was the inner hope that in that place of workers I could affect a Marxist stirring of great social change in the thriving city of factories.

It was also a city of universities, tv and movie production, theatre.

It would be a good place for the restless, needy, famished heart of the hunter to prowl.

The house we were to live in was not quite ready so we all crammed into a little cottage some miles outside the city.

My father traveled back and forth to work each day, while my younger siblings were bussed to school and a couple of the older ones found jobs.

I initially seemed unable to function.

 

Perhaps it was that the stress of the past few months seized the silence of that isolated cottage.

Perhaps it was simply I finally had no fight left within me.

I had some type of nervous collapse the first weeks there, surely, for I did nothing except sleep for eighteen hours at a stretch, rising only for a bit of food, some water or pop, then slept again.

By the time we moved into the city, ( I had a small room in the basement with the elder of my younger brothers), my brain was mush and I knew if I didn’t force myself to find work and stimulate my intellect I’d sink into such a complete depression I might never recover.

The fastest way to get work, money for books and other pleasures was to take the easiest job, so, back to the Post Office.

The city we were in had lots of flights to other cities, such as the not so distant one where the exploding so-called sexual liberation was at its most unbridled.

My job often afforded me a four day weekend because of alternating shifts and I was making an unnecessary huge amount of money given I had none of the usual expenses of a single person.

 Living at home as I was, long weekends of dissipation were easily indulged in.

Here is a peculiarity of a man with appetites:  he is always dissatisfied and bitter, like someone who is hungry……it is plain that the appetites are wearisome and tiring for a man. They resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing or that, and never satisfied……A man with desires wearies himself, because he is like someone with a fever whose thirst increases by the minute and who feels ill until the fever leaves. [as]

 

In the city where I traveled most often to satisfy my appetites lived a cousin whose own confused hungers were a cover for mine.

She was only too happy to accommodate my need for secrecy as she knew I would likewise never reveal her life either.

Little by little, with my poetry, looks, intellect, radical ideas, capacity for drink and drugs, I began to move in circles of the art world, hippie world, emerging radical politics, the drug world, with ease and increased popularity.

Not knowing, but when I suspected suppressing, that each movement in those various worlds was splitting me off from myself more and more, I came to accept the constant terror of knowing I was incessantly walking beside myself.

The double life I was leading, dutiful hard working son in the city of my family, acting out various roles in the city of my degradation, meant a constant increase of tension and anxiety.

Fear was the only constant in my life which transcended all the roles I was acting out.

The only antidote to such inner fear is exterior terror and so, like most addicts, I became addicted to danger.

In a movie theatre.

Early afternoon.

Maybe six people in the place.

Hunters all.

Man sits right next to me in a row where all other seats are empty.

Makes his gesture, and then gets up.

I know where he is going.

Accept the invitation even though all my instincts scream: danger.

It is the scent of danger which has me seduced.

Mid-activity I am being strangled with my own scarf.

Couple of vice-squad wandered in at that point.

The man and I covered for each other.

The cops left.

The man had lost interest after that and left without saying a word.

The real horror of that experience is not what it appears to be, that I was almost murdered.

In so far as that fact goes it was not my first brush with a possible violent death.

Nor would it be my last.

The real horror was that I was getting so out of control, becoming so controlled by my appetites and addictions that the experience of being strangled was a hedonistic elixir.

Torment and affliction is the…kind of damage the appetites cause in an individual…similar to the torture of the rack, where a person has no relief until freed from the torment of being bound by these cords…A person is tormented and afflicted when he reclines on his appetites as is a man lying naked on thorns and nails. Like thorns, the appetites wound and hurt, stick to a person and cause him pain….[at]

 

FINALLY the urgency to get beyond the passages written this day has eased and blessed fatigue is setting in.

How hard it is to recall those terrible years, knowing that they are not the darkest yet to be written about.

Were it not this sabbatical duty of the moment to write this I would likely have taken the binder notes and burned them…then suddenly my heart understands it is a good and holy thing that confession be wearying, painful, cause for weeping, experience of true penthos.

What a gracious and all merciful Father You are to forgive us so much!

How You infinitely honour the sacrifice of Your Son who poured Himself out drop by drop to the last drop of redemptive love that we might have mercy, again, again, again, again.

THROUGHOUT human history, within the ebb and flow of every civilization, cascading across time as bearer of the nation’s, the tribe’s, a family’s hopes, dreams, joys, sorrows; erupting from the deepest regions of the human heart; firing the imagination, pleading for mercy, lamenting, praising, vibrating a tiny bone which electrifies the brain and shudders the heart; soaring across the planets; strolling through the seasons; as solitary as a single voice lulling the Newborn to sleep in ancient cave, after the glorious clamour of celestial hosts, as tempestuous as the heated blood of opera, music is as if there were a permeable spot within heaven’s veil through which, under no doubt the incalculable interior pressure of the infinitude of Beatitude eternally sung, drips into creation angelic love song to Love.

Resonating within the human heart and soul, man takes his own capacity for speech and it is uttered melodiously, mingling with the sound of wind, dance of sunlight, choral of bird, tintinnabulation of first rounded metals, sensing too if tree were but dried and shaped and strung the very tears of angels would vibrate as violin, viola and join the every growing orchestra of the Children of God crying, crying, crying: Hear us O Father, bring us through the veil into the eternal dance and never ending song of Your glory!

These thoughts began to stir in my heart as I strolled about the neighbourhood along the railroad tracks, praying over the pulsating city, this dark, wet, late fall evening, praying the Sorrowful Mysteries as the millennia of sorrow seeps away into the dark mists of history’s night, while among the small houses of the countless factory workers strings of Christmas lights perform their own dance of anticipation that He will be born anew and hope will be the most universal aspiration of the human family as we cross the threshold of the new millennium.

Then I sat here at my desk, fired up the old computer to begin this writing and was moved to place a new CD in the machine…..ah how this poor priest is humbled by the stuff of his art…no music of fountain pen as it dances across paper, not even the experience once mine to sit, eyes closed, fingers barely touching a friend’s violin as I, the hearing one, kept my other fingers on the cheek of a deaf child to show her how the fingers could hear and through my fingers on that shaped wood, bowed with love by the elderly musician I heard for the first time!

 Now I listen as Chopin’s Ballade No.1, Op.23 in G minor, played exquisitely upon a finely tuned piano, travels through the mystery of lazar and electrical wire, magnified in headphones, sweeps through my ears, and dances across the pathways of my mind, dagger like plunges into my heart wounding my being with sheer delight!

….the pilgrim Church on earth lifts her gaze to heaven, to the immense throng of men and women to whom God has given a share in His holiness……Dear friends, this is our future! This is the most genuine and universal vocation of all humanity: to form the great family of God’s children……[au]

 

The sixties!

Sometimes I wonder if all of us who were young adults in the sixties need some kind, still, of spiritual purging of the impact upon us, physically, psychologically, intellectually, socially and above all within the depths of our souls.

Art, literature, music, hair styles, scientific effort, weapons of war, terrorism, drugs, sex, religion, Berlin Wall, Cuban missile crisis, drought, revolution, civil wars, Viet-Nam, assassinations, riots, Vatican II, the pill, Humane Vitae, the love which dare not speak its name by then never hesitating to scream, the Green Revolution, the millions of Red Guards terrorizing an entire nation, walking on the moon: and seemingly an entire generation either face down dead in rice paddies or walking dead stoned all across the globe in search of the ultimate affirmation of their being, denied them by the very means, mostly, of their searching.

My heart sees in the sixties generation the breaking out from the dusty shelves of philosophical disputation in the lives of the children of flowers and communes a nexus between the theories of the Enlightenment and the completely selfish determinism of the Utilitarianism mindset, resulting by century’s end in the inevitable materialist satiate of soul.

It is said that modern man has lost the experience of sin; unfortunately for him, he has not. Frequently he has no experience of anything else………Where sin goes unrecognized, so does salvation. More precisely, when the Christian word ‘sin’ no longer  evokes the modern experience of that reality, the offer of ‘salvation’, so expressed, will find few takers. People will look elsewhere for what they need to be saved from time experienced as dread and the bringer of death. [av]

 

Only now in my life do I dimly begin to understand that the immense effort and energy expended, so I thought, in the search for self and for some tangible affirmation of my being, was indeed that horizontal opposite: flight from true self.

Because I was fleeing the true self, my very being, this necessarily drew me into the constitutive flight from the Original Being, the Eternal One, the unique source and sustenance of my being: God the Father.

By this time in my life flight became not only a pedestrian activity, an interior struggle, nor merely flight by means of the drug induced wings which sheared the normal functions of the human brain off from any true experience of the mind as a touchstone for grace, but, the actual experience of flying.

With the need to replace immense inner panic with some more controlled fear, hence a powerful antidote to the fear I could not, would not face, flying was the ideal solution being at one and the same time terrifying in its experiential definitude and symbolic in its obvious aloofness.

Of course it also allowed me to extend the range of my hunter’s roaming for hedonistic adventure and enhanced anonymity.

I began to fly to various cities virtually every weekend, exhausting myself with terror and pleasure, arriving at work the following Monday barely aware of my environment, pulsating with the determination to forge through time with a frantic rapidity towards the advancing Friday of flight.

To use the old adage I was indeed burning the candle at both ends and my life was as a result becoming a pool of pungent tallow.

Like most other human beings my first flight was of those incredible first experiences which become a litmus test before which subsequent repetition of the activity always fails to excite as sweetly.

The jet left the city near midnight during a snowstorm and seemed, by sheer force and shudder of its engines to claw its way up some atmospheric mountainside until it reached the peak!

I was as one inside a Jona whale’s belly of steel and aluminum, not though as fleeing prophet, though now I understand the prophetic aspects of flight.

Once we were high enough in the night storm that I could no longer marvel at the toy-town aspects of lit city beneath I became so totally aware there was, discounting the jets hull, nothing beneath my feet, nothing but this throbbing jet belly between me and the ground, the sought for definable terror took hold and overwhelmed the normal state of panic in which I existed.

Some hours later as we began the descent towards the city I was traveling to the sheer beauty of flight, its mystery, the incongruity of the earth bound out distancing the winged creatures for whom the sky was originally blessed, took hold and I almost prayed.

But I did not.

To pray implied a taste for reality, for which, at that juncture, I had a total aversion.

For this is a characteristic of the person who is blinded by his appetites; when he is in the midst of the truth and of what is suitable for him, he no more sees it than if he were in the dark. [aw]

 

IT IS, [as I continue this written pilgrimage across the mystery of a life wherein the truth where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, must by now be surely self-evident], the last morning of the last day of the last Liturgical Year of the last century of the Second Millennium of His Holy Incarnation!

For some weeks now I have written many letters, articles, poems, traveled, in a word struggled against this, which means frankly I have struggled against the ‘goad’ of His Holy Will, until finally grace conquered.

Truthfully I was given the grace to say yes to grace, and these past couple of days I have resumed this work, having been granted the further grace to accept a particular poverty, difficult for any writer, that my obedience is NOT, per se, for my writing ever to see the light of day.

No!

{There was just a phone call, which has left me smiling, for I had outlined my whole day on a separate sheet, alternating this work and prayer, and planned an evening’s painting. My spiritual father has stressed the need during this sabbatical for suitable time for recreation and friends have offered a movie, right in the middle of MY schedule! }

No!

My obedience is the Holy Will of the Father, which is, that I write.

Publication is His will to permit or not.

{I said yes to the movie.}

Again I draw from the original notes for this:

THE OVERCAST sky is swollen with yet another winter storm, soon to be born upon the wind.

The chickadees gorge themselves on seeds from the feeder outside my window, while frequently blue jays swoop down from the cedars trying to steal the food of the little ones.

Here in this priests’ dorm the raspy coughing of brothers not yet healed of the flu mingles with the constant hum of the blower, pushing wood furnace heat from the basement into each of these small rooms, which house the awesome mystery of weak men strengthened by sacramental ordination so that even our experience of the flu becomes a fragment of oblation!

It is the seventh and last Sunday of this season of Ordinary Time.

We have touched today the threshold of Great Holy Lent!

Lent!

The turning, returning, season of grace.

The time to turn away from sin, self-preoccupation, other idols, and re-turn, or rather by a yes to grace be turned once more towards, enter the embrace of, the One Holy God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

O that every breath I take be Triune!

The season of metanoia, conversion, change of heart.

Those embraced in my childhood with all the passionate exuberance of giving up candy and saying extra prayers with exhilarating fervour; the less childlike Lents of my monastic days, when the fasting was deep, the hunger true, the silence profound, the metanoia exquisite, if painful.

As Lent most often in these climes occurs in the dead of winter, one of my un-Lent-Lents, my non-turn-return ones, was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a lent of great grace in the person of a woman.

I’d been doing community work with ex-cons, becoming rather close to one in particular. Sadly, not from any altruistic motive. He shared much in common with me, age, artistic talent, brokenness.

One day he suggested I come with him to the city where his family lived and meet THE woman in his life.

At first I was disturbed by this, rather desiring there be no woman in his life. But in spite of my own weirdness we were friends and I was always up for another trip.

It was an uneventful journey, and no surprise at all his family lived in the local projects.

His family embodied all the unfortunate stereotypes of project housing family life, yet their kindness to, and acceptance of me was genuine, though I was a bit taken aback at their casual assumption my friend and I would be sleeping together.

It was an approach to homosexuality I’d never encountered before and its affect upon me was to cause an inner sense of shame and confusion, feelings I immediately suppressed due to their potential danger of twisting into mature reflection.

After being there for two days and still not having met the woman of his life, in the evening while we were having beer and shooting pool in the neighbourhood hall I pressed the point, suggesting she was a mythical cover-up among his wider group of friends, those ignorant of his actual predilection.

He ignored my dig by assuring me I was to meet this very real woman the next day.

Morning came and he awakened me early.

We had some coffee and then got in his car and drove to the downtown, stopping in a lot across from an immense grey stone building, clearly built at the end of the nineteenth century.

It was a hospital!

Even at this very moment as I write these lines, reliving what I now know to have been, with the woman, a major graced friendship in my life, I recall nonetheless the deep sense of unease, indeed of being appalled, as we walked ever deeper, it seemed, into the bowels of that huge hospital complex, filled with the chronically, terminally ill.

Not the well insured ill either, but the poorest of the poor.

The hospital itself was poor: paint peeling, worn linoleum floors, ancient, rebellious elevators, windows of cracked glass in warped wooden frames which teased light through brownish grime to the music of incessant drafts while the entire place smelled heavy of the detritus human beings.

After walking some time down a particularly pathetic corridor in that palace of pathos we entered a room which seemed medieval in its atmosphere of the dark and hopeless rage of a putative existence.

I could not have been more wrong.

The putative existence was not that of the person in this room, rather it was the chosen state of attitude, purpose, of late twentieth century medicine which seeped into that room like some overflowing cesspool, whose waves slapped against the diamond hard soul of the room’s occupant, yet were incapable of drowning her.

As my senses tried to interpret the paradox experience of repulsion and being drawn towards the image before me, ‘ it ‘ , moved slightly and announced ‘ I AM ALIVE.’, and I staggered backward a step for the announcement was not of the fact of this woman.

It was He who spoke within me.

That was too much to bear.

On the bed before my eyes lay a mere hint of a human being, a woman whose body was all skin, bones, every limb twisted out of normal shape, eyes sunken as if they almost were not there, yet as they moved to search who has entered the room they flashed like the turning lamp of a lighthouse!

Tubes were running from various parts of her body, some upwards towards glass bottles of clear fluid, or cylinders of oxygen beside the bed, or downwards towards containers hidden under the bed.

The tv, small, black and white, fuzzy of picture, hung from a short chain embedded in the ceiling. It swayed ever so slightly, as if asserting it would un-expectantly crash to the floor. All the while the sound blared. A film of plastic was crudely tapped over the window, billowed by the pressure of winter’s wind, sounding as if enraged at its denied entry. An old iron radiator leaked steam with a constant hiss, but appeared unwilling to heat the room, which was cold indeed.

My entire being wanted to flee.

My entire being wanted to be accepted.

THIS was THE woman?

My friend motioned me closer to the bed in which lay what appeared to my rational being as more a creature of some medieval peasant’s nightmare than a human being, must less a woman whom I had just seen my friend bend down and kiss as if she were the Blessed Mother herself!

Indeed my friend, as he turned and motioned to me after he kissed her, was radiant. His eyes, normally hard, cold, cosmic black-holes, shimmered with brightness and tears.

I approached as easily as one cutting a path through dense jungle or swimming in a sea of molten lead, trembled as I bent down and barely brushed with reluctant finger tips the protruding collection of small bones which hinted at being a woman’s hand.

I would have been safe had I not dared glance towards the face and was struck in the core of my being by a glance from those heart-reading eyes.

She smiled silently and landed a dried flesh extremity upon my hand and declared: “ I think we shall become the best of friends. “

This was too much.

The leper’s kiss.

I fled in a heat of outrage that my friend had dared subject me to this encounter with horror.

Indeed I was in such a rage that when, about a half-hour later, my friend emerged from the hospital and was walking towards me, leaning against his car in the parking lot across from the hospital, I screamed my rage. We almost came to blows.

When the next day we returned to the city in which we were living, and he dropped me off, I walked wordlessly away from the car.

It didn’t take long after that incident for the friendship to dissolve.

Years later I heard he died in some prison.

Some years after my first meeting with her, in the meantime she had started writing to me and I was, at first strangely, almost as one mesmerized, compelled to write back, I found myself living in the same city.

By then the power of her insights, the passion of her compassion had touched me deeply and we were, indeed, the best of friends.

During the years I lived in the city I would see her often.

Many of her friends became mine, for she little by little roped us all in as volunteers in the seemingly endless projects she organized for that phenomena we have come to accept as a whole class of putative persons: poor, handicapped, elderly, homeless, unborn.

Though I was an atheist at this juncture she unabashedly spoke of the Suffering Christ, of the Loving Christ or the marvel of a life lived in complete union with Him.

These conversations were not easy for it could take her ten minutes of immense struggle to weave together the few words needed to form a complete sentence.

This created silence between the words, a silence like the jewellers cup bearing molten gold and each moment of silence tipped that fire-fluid into the recesses of my heart.

From this, the first of several “THE” woman-women in my life, comes my own passion for the anawim.

She told me once of the only gift she begged from her Divine Lover, having been crippled and abandoned at the outset of her teenage years with a disease that promised death, but failed to deliver: “ My one is to walk once more before I die.”

The last time I saw her was a few days before leaving the country on a planned Christmas holiday.

I had just completed the last of her Christmas cards, which I would write and then she would somehow manage to sign with her name. We agreed I would visit her immediately on my return and tell her all about the trip.

On my return I was met at the airport by my best friend, whom I’d met through her, and he told me what had happened:

       He and a couple of her friends had brought her to the hospital chapel for Midnight Mass.

At Communion time she had suddenly stood up and out of her special wheelchair and walked up to the astounded priest to receive her Lover Christ in the mystery of Holy Communion.

That evening she had died in her sleep.

She was not the first woman to have crawled a great distance in faith and hope to touch Him [Mt.9:20ff]!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priestly Mission: An Apostolate of the Heart

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

                                  Priestly Mission:  An Apostolate of the Heart

Many years ago, in the first attempt at this site for hope in the lives of priests, we ran the start of a series urging all priests, in particular those enduring punishment for actual sins/crime as well as those falsely accused, but suffering the same fate nonetheless, to embrace a life of expiation, becoming living oblations, victim-souls, holocausts of love, of Love Himself.

 

In the intervening years the site underwent a couple of revisions, this being the latest.

To be honest, abandoned because I, Fr. Joseph, endured a prolonged period of discouragement within five years of struggle for vindication of innocence, which, like most falsely accused priests ended in being exiled nonetheless – for in this current climate an accusation is tantamount to automatic conviction, at least in the eyes of the institutional church!- the aforementioned series was abandoned.

Some months ago a truly faithful Catholic Layman, the webmaster of this site actually, challenged Fr. Joseph to face reality, in a word to embrace the full implication of being, irrespective of ‘official status’, or living conditions, In Persona Christi.

So, as you have already seen, the entire site has been upgraded.

 Admitting I gave into discouragement, here I am, ready to walk with my suffering brothers into the mystery of unsought after suffering, to struggle to embrace the cross, to be truly one with Christ.

The Servant of God Catherine Doherty, Foundress of the Madonna House Apostolate, taught repeatedly: In God every moment is the moment of beginning again!

Going over the struggles of the past few years and the final decision of the CDF barring me from ever again exercising ‘public’ ministry, such as in a parish, but allowing me to live as a priest, celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass [ alone in terms of the presence of another human person, of course wherever and whenever Holy Mass is celebrated the entire Heavenly Court is present] and, with spiritual direction, a good therapist and support prayers, encouragement of family, of friends as well finally coming out of discouragement [ just a first baby step on this journey],  the beginning again moment is here!

Before writing this I spent time reflecting on the central lines in her offering as an oblation, of the Doctor of the Church, St. Therese of Lisieux:

In order to live one single act of perfect love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLOCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness  shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God!

In the great Easter Sequence we begin our joyous praise and love of the Risen Jesus Christ by crying out:

Victimae Paschali laudes immolent Christiani!- Christians, offer to the Paschal Victim sacrifice and praise!

Cross and Resurrection, suffering and joy, love and pain – these are inseparable realities of a fully alive Baptized human being and even more so are they constitutive of  life of a priest.

However it has come to pass, because of our own actions/choices or the caprice of those with power over accused priests, all caught up in the maelstrom know the stark reality, in the depths of our beings, indeed as a daily challenge, of having before us the choice between blessing and curse, life and death [cf. Deut. 30:1 & 30:19].

On the very threshold of the beginning of Resurrection history, the very threshold of the beginning of the pilgrimage through history of the nascent Church, the threshold of the beginning of priestly life and service across the millennia, in the full light and joy of His Holy Resurrection the first offering, even before praise, we are called to offer is sacrifice.


 This opening stanza of the Sequence echoes the cry, the supplication, we all offered at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday in company with Our Blessed Mother, herself a holocaust of love, for Love, to Love:

…..Listen to my fond request: let me share your grief….in my body bear the death of your dying SON…wounded with His every wound……

When life was unfolding as apparently it was meant to, within the rhythm of parish life, I daresay all the above prayers, words, about joy and suffering, choice, sacrifice, etc., while no doubt embraced with a sincere heart, were nonetheless sort of benign – certainly not as excruciating close and raw as any priest suffering imprisonment, abandonment, rejection, exile, banishment from ministry, reputation of good name lost, enduring poverty, illness, old age, depression, discouragement, etc., etc., now experiences as daily reality.

It may well seem we have not chosen curse, it has been thrust upon us; we have not chosen death – depression is a living death; life seems to have ended, at least the life we assumed would be ours when we were ordained; blessing? Where is that?

But, in point of fact, the choice IS ours to make, no matter what our circumstances are, in prison or not, reduced to the ‘lay’ state or not, indeed whatever our situation the choice is ours: anger, resentment, etc., etc., which is to chose curse and death – or – without counting the cost, without self-pity, denial, bargaining etc., etc., to choose to become, truly in persona Christi oblation, victim, holocaust.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit….By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit….As the Father loves Me, so I also love you. Remain in My love…” [cf. Jn. 15: 5-10] 

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in His footsteps. [cf.1Pt.2:21]