The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I know it's a winter holiday song, but it fits my favorite week (outside of the Liturgy): the weekend-to-weekend Taste of Chicago. I am delighted to have some leftover tickets, and have been taking the long way home from Mass so I can get a tidbit (not to mention the freebies from various marketing groups). (You know me and free stuff!)
But what's so great about the Taste? Is it really the food? Actually, in a way it is: the food brings the city together in all its amazing diversity. It's a secular sacrament of communion, and those who drawn to it are equals who can look in another person's hands and just start talking (no introductions needed): "Hmm, that looks good! Where did you get it?" That's what I love so much about the Taste of Chicago. It's a relaxed, happy crowd, sharing discoveries freely. (My favorites? Tilapia tacos and hot, spice collard green egg rolls. Be sure to look for them.)
We'll have our Korean missionaries with us for a few days, and I am eager to take them to the Taste. No Korean food to be had, but what a chance for them to sample Mexican, Latin/Indian fusion, Greek, Italian, Polish, and variations of soul food, while seeing the whole city in one glance, in its people!

Peter and Paul

One of the delightful things about Church tradition is the way it keeps Peter and Paul together forever. The stories of their martyrdom insist on seeing them in prison together, taken on the same day to execution, dying on the same day... Not that history can really support that! But it's not about the history of their last days. The tradition wants you to always think of Peter and Paul together. Rome (where they both died; that part is history!) is full of twin images of Peter and Paul. They're even called the "founders" of the Church of Rome, although neither one was the first to preach the Gospel there. But Peter and Paul were the Apostles who established that Church in their blood, and so united it with the other apostolic Churches of that age, founded by Apostles who were "conformed to the Son" even in the image of his death.

"If [a saint] was privileged to follow the Lord so closely on earth, to have even here and insight into the mysteries of God, how much more fully now in heaven will he be conformed to the Son and share in the vision of the Trinity! And how much more of all this will he be able to communicate to others!" (Adrienne von Spery, The World of Prayer).

These words strike me as especially inspiring and hope-generating on the Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul. We usually expect from a saint's intercession some share in the particular grace that marked their life. Ideally, through that grace, we hope to be "conformed to the Son" ourselves. What is the grace the Church looks for from Peter and Paul? That we be "true to their teaching" from whom "we first received the faith" (from the Opening Prayer). True in words, yes, but especially in life.

Say again?

If you weren't paying attention when the Gospel was proclaimed yesterday, today's liturgy gave you another chance to hear Jesus' surprisingly harsh call: "Follow me and let the dead bury their dead."
This is our nice, sweet Jesus?
Jesus' call to discipleship was not widespread. At least in this account, Matthew says that Jesus saw "a crowd" and gave orders to cross the lake. He was getting away with his chosen followers. At least, those who would actually follow him.
His words are in response to a disciple's delay tactic: "Let me go first and bury my father." (Was his father even dead yet?) "No!" Jesus says, as elsewhere he said, no less harshly, "If anyone loves father or mother more than me, he is not worthy of me."
And yet this is good news. No, really. It means that Jesus is really enough. No other priority can outweigh him, not even things we automatically assume take precedence.
This is a good Gospel to recall if you're tempted to keep putting off something in the Lord's service for something "better" that just has to be done now. A few weeks ago I read a charming image of this from Adrienne von Speyr's book, Confession. No matter how many marbles a child has collected, if he should drop some, he would not shrug it off. Instead, the child hunts them down immediately. But the grown-up is so ready to say, "I can always pray later; I can always take care of that matter later...."
To follow Jesus is to be on the move. We can't, like Peter at the Transfiguration, offer to set up three tents. We have to be light on our feet (as Jesus was, with "no place to rest his head"). Detachment, freedom, following Jesus: they're all together in Jesus' insistent call: "Follow me and let the dead bury their dead."

whole books could be written...

When we start recounting experiences in community life and mission, sooner or later one of the sisters says something to the effect of, "Too bad we can't put these things in a book." And she'd be right. Some of the most hilarious things will have to remain community lore, for family enjoyment only. One example that is pretty safe to share... When I was going to be living in Italy I needed a special kind of visa called a "soggiorno" (since I'd be there longer than 10 months). Sr. Mary Antoinette took me to the Italian consulate on the particular day of the week for granting soggiornos. The person on duty at the time didn't know how to issue them, so Sr. Antoinette told him what to do.
But now there's someone else starting to tell these stories: the engineer at the motherhouse.
Tim was in Chicago this week, overseeing the testing of our elevator. (He looks after all our properties to keep up with issues like boilers and safety codes and such.) It was nonstop "stories from the motherhouse." Only five years on the job and he has enough stories to fill a book. Tim has more stories than any of us. Including, he says, a whole chapter's worth just on Sr. Mary Antoinette.

Taste of Chicago!

My favorite week of Chicago summer is here! I went over (sad to say, with a packed lunch) to catch Mario Batali's demonstration at noon. Then the community and staff went for supper together to celebrate next week's feast of St. Paul (Sr Helena will be out of town on Wednesday when the feast actually falls). Leftover "taste" tickets guarantee that I'll be back a time or two... I remember last year, toting a Taste cheeseburger up to Northwestern Hospital for my friend, Fr. Fred. He's having cheeseburgers in heaven this year. (I wonder if it's true what they say about the gumbo.)

Earlier this month, Catholic media professionals held their annual meeting. I was (as you may remember) trying to pull a retreat together, so only today did I come upon a wonderful presentation by Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala on the role of Catholic media in today's world. He didn't just limit himself to official Church media, but also on the role of bloggers ("we [bishops] are very troubled by blogs .... that assume the role of Magisterium") and the role of the bishops themselves (especially what Church media staff members can and cannot expect of the bishops), and asked the media professionals to let the bishops know how they could "do a better job of letting you help us."

And speaking of Catholic media, I was finally (after uncounted attempts) able to get Sr. Julia's book review video together. This was recorded in late May, when she was in town for a meeting. I used a borrowed HD camera to see if I could get better quality (yes), but it sure wasn't intuitive! Anyway, enjoy:

Sisterhood

We have a guest sister with us this week, Sister Gabriela of the Franciscan Sisters of the Martyr St. George (the "Alton Franciscans," even though they'd rather go by their formal name). She's boning up on how to teach AP history as she transfers from teaching Spanish in Nebraska to the AP history track in New Jersey, where a high school classmate of mine will be her local superior. We've been enjoying the conversations that show us how alike religious communities are, whether Franciscan or Pauline. It's another proof, to me, of what our Lord said about the hundredfold: a hundred times as many sisters....
Not to mention the brothers, too. Had a brief meeting with Chris Coon from the new "Urban Village Church," a United Methodist community just forming in the South Loop. They have Sunday worship in an auditorium at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies on Michigan Ave. And next week our own dear Brother Al (Society of St. Paul) is coming for a few days: Sister Helena wants to interview him about our Founder, whom he worked alongside in the 60's. God willing, you'll be seeing Brother Al in that documentary she is writing! (Watch the trailer if you didn't see it yet.)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

That line from the old TV show "Mission Impossible" (don't know if it was in the movie) came to mind at yesterday's Gospel. You know, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must...take up his cross daily and follow me." Every cross that presents itself (daily!) is like that proposal: Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it.  Instead of just being a hurdle you need to break past somehow in order to get to the mission of the day, taking it on becomes the "mission." Everything else is icing on the cake.
I think this is going to really help me deal with my daily cross.

Mass in the Park

Not the Sunday kind..the Beethoven in C minor kind! Sr. Julia (from Korea) came with me and we sat with about 6,000 other people  under the shining moon to listen to heavenly music. My little camera wasn't quite up to getting the inside of the stage area, but ... there was an orchestra and chorus in there. You get the idea.

Bookshelf treasures

Yesterday I mentioned needing a new bookcase. Well, I didn't get one, but I did spend about an hour rearranging things so I could put more books on shelves (rather than on the floor, or criss-crossed on top of the books that are actually sitting on shelves). I do try to keep books in some sort of order: Pauline Family books on these shelves, books on St. Paul and his writings continuing from there, followed by... Ignatian stuff. And then Liturgy (which was already pretty together). I had a lot of work to do in  Spirituality: keeping von Speyr and von Balthasar together (appropriate, don't you think?), Pieper (to me, he counts as a spirituality writer), others of that ilk. And then Merton books kept popping up one by one.

When I picked up a torn, ancient hardcover of "The Seven-Storey Mountain," I got thinking about various kinds of earthly treasure. (Today's Gospel is "where your treasure is...") This old book (older than I!) wouldn't fetch much on eBay, but it was the most treasured of the books I had handled so far. It had been Dad's. (I laid claim to the whole Merton library at home; it's just a matter of bringing them to Chicago bit by bit...when I get a bookcase!)
What's your bookshelf "treasure"?  Why?

Catching up

I do a lot of odds and ends when I come back from a trip, especially if I had to really work  intensely to prepare for the trip, as I did this time. I had to pull so much together for the sisters' retreat (I spent three years gathering input and reflecting on the topic, but hadn't at all put it in any kind of order), so in the month before the retreat anything that wasn't (a) extremely urgent (groceries sometimes got urgent) or (b) retreat work got put on a distinct pile somewhere in my office.
So now I am addressing the piles. And baskets. And stacks of books.
One thing at a time. (Although I did begin praying for a new bookcase.)
I started small: the little scraps of notes of things to do. If you saw me hiking around downtown Chicago today in my sneakers, you know I was polishing off another to-do note. (By the way, I even turned down a free sample that was being offered on Randolph Street by smiling guys in matching polo shirts. "What?!" you say, "Sister Anne didn't accept something free?" Well, I was all ready to, until I realized it was Nicorette gum.)
Tomorrow I hope to remedy the community's refrigerator problem. Its empty state, I mean.
And it's a good thing Sr Lusia is in Samoa right now (visiting her family and helping celebrate Sr Fay's perpetual profession on July 5)... the "Mother Superior" computer decided to take a weird, blue-screen sort of break while its favorite user was away. My modest geekly skills were of no use, so the motherhouse technicians will see what they can do remotely.

Today I was especially struck by the Our Father's insistence on forgiving. I recently remembered an incident from about a year ago for which I truly need to experience God's forgiveness and mercy, and today he told me how to begin to set my heart right for it. In a way, everything we ask for in that prayer depends on that "as we forgive." Why? Because God is a stickler for rules? Or because when we forgive, our hearts are open in the very same place they need to be opened in order to welcome God's kingdom, praise his name and receive daily bread from his hands?

Sr Helena to me: "While You Were Away..."

Sr Helena is still all pumped about the Blackhawk's Stanley Cup; you'd think she was a lifelong Chicagoan! The triumphal march passed right by our doors; Sr Helena and some friends were upstairs, and this is what they saw...

Retreat Report: Recap

I'm down in the music studio with Sr. Bridget, Sr. Sean and Sr. Maria Kim while two reps from Decca Records visit the various departments of our publishing house here in Jamaica Plain. They really came to audition the choir (I guess you can say that), but there are only three of the actual singers here today. Good thing we have CDs (and YouTube videos) to share! 
The producer, Guy Gilbert, came before noon. He was telling us that they have been to a number of ancient monasteries. "It was like going back a thousand years," he said. He couldn't understand why the nuns in these cloistered communities would not come out from behind their grilles. "Don't they want to get the Word out?" It's certainly not always easy to "get" the idea of the vocation to the strictly contemplative life. It is a life that says, "Even here and now, God is enough." And the whole validity of the life is in that: God is enough. They don't have to point to works, activities, accomplishments. Their "work," their "activity," their "accomplishment" is telling the world "God is enough."
Which is a retreat in itself.
The sisters have been saying many good things about the retreat talks I prepared. (I think they especially appreciate that the conferences didn't last more than 40 minutes a day.) As for me, I am very moved to receive thanks from sisters who actually knew the Founder, whose message I was basing everything on. In fact, only a few of the sisters on retreat were my age or younger; most were older, and many had known the Founder, even made their novitiates in Rome when he used to preach to them every day. So it's good to know I'm on the right track!
Speaking of tracks... let me get back to the control room and set up my little video camera for the arrival of the music people. I want to have something to share with you later in the week!
(I return to Chicago tomorrow.)

Retreat Report: The Eighth Day

In the Liturgy, Sunday is always the "eighth day," the beginning of a new cycle of days, like the first day of a new creation. And so today is, literally and liturgically, the eighth day for the retreatants: the last day of retreat launches them back into a new year of service. For this special day, the focus is on a prayer composed by our Founder in 1919. We call it the "Pact," because it is a kind of covenantal formula, even a pious "contract" with the Lord. The bottom line of the Pact is that God is calling us to something we cannot achieve on our own; therefore, we will give God all we have, and we will count on God to, in Paul's words, "make it all work out for the spread of the Gospel." 

So the penitent heart is a confident heart.

Paul is a great example of a penitent heart, not simply because he had something so dramatic to repent over, but because he did not let that realization block him from carrying out his call to be an apostle. “I am the very least, less than the least, of the holy ones” could have been a really good excuse to stay home in Tarsus and quietly end his days in prayerful solitude and self-effacing reparation. Instead, it was “I am the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called apostle, but anyway.... that is what I am” Evelyn Underhill wrote about the temptation to focus on discouraging self-assessments to the point that one is afraid to get involved in the Christian mission, because you know you'll only mess it up. If that's the case, she says, “the primary failure is in our relationship with God,” who's really the one who expects to act (p 225). And von Speyr (Confession, p ?) says that this is characteristic of the temptation to scruples, and that what it betrays is, paradoxically, that the person “underestimates grace...[because] he thinks there is such a thing as human sufficiency and adequacy. He overestimates himself because he thinks he's capable of lending his own words the proper weight.... He trusts God as little as he trusts himself.”

But the penitent heart is a bold, confident heart, like Paul's. The penitent heart is founded on love, not on fear—because what would it be afraid of? Losing the good it it focused on? That won't happen if you are focused on the “one thing necessary.” Punishment? “Love is not perfected in one who is afraid.” Loss or suffering? “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” Punishment? “Who will condemn us—Christ Jesus, who died and raised from the dead, who himself intercedes for us?”

What about failure? Over at Pixar studios, they have special project meetings for their multi-million dollar movies, and when they find mistakes, there is a general sense of satisfaction, no matter how far along the movie is. The director of Toy Story 3 said, “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That's why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” And the Design Director for the online New York Times told a graduating class last year, “Every success is the culmination of a series of failures. You cannot have success without failing. If you want my advice, fail early and often. Don't waste any time, get out there today and start failing.” You know what Primo said: “If you do things, you will make mistakes. But if you do not do anything, you are living a mistake.”

So the penitent heart is “half-blind” and prone to failure, with only enough light for one step at a time. The whole way is not clear. The penitent heart has to keep monitoring its direction, its movements. It cannot set its own path and stride confidently forward. No matter which way it turns, it finds that it is “weak, ignorant, incapable and inadequate in every way” (from the Pact). Flannery O'Connor wrote (MM 131) “I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.” And a few months ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about an art exhibit of the work of Tim Burton. (His characters include “Edward Scissorhands.”) The art critic said that the central theme of Burton's images is “ever and always the nobility of failure.... He seems to believe that all of us, even those who outwardly seem most successful, are infinitely frailer and more bruised than we care to admit, and it is this fact that constitutes our human dignity. But … Burton's art is somewhat happier than one might expect” (“In Goth They Trust” by James Gardner, WSJ 2/3/2010).

The Pact is not built on some extravagant spiritual notion: it is grounded in universal experience.

“More than ever in this culture of the success brought about by the media, we are forced, in order to evangelize, to rejoice in our weaknesses.... This ministry should be entrusted only to those who have decided to embrace the cross.... Our communication should be rooted in a twofold attitude: success and flight, immersion in media and solitude.... Without the cross we are unable to relativize our ego and without it people cannot see what animates us from within" (Babin, p. 30).

So our weakness is not a problem for the mission; it's one of the criteria! It is the presence of the Cross. Our inconstancy and weakness are not ultimate or absolute: the power of the Holy Spirit is. Even sin is already taken care of: “the worst has already happened, but it has been remedied” (Julian). “What is most helpful to the Church,” Pope Benedict wrote to priests about the scandal, “is not only a frank and complete acknowledgment of the weaknesses of her ministers, but also a joyful and renewed realization of the greatness of God's gift[s].” The focus goes back to God: God's call, God's grace, God's presence.

Books referenced:

   

Time for a commercial break

While I'm here giving retreat conferences, Sr Helena is bringing things forward on the documentary about our Founder, whose spirituality you have seen echoed in my little talk summaries. The movie is being entrusted to Spirit Juice studios, and in particular to ... Rob, who can speak for himself:

Retreat Report

It's the next-to-last day for retreat, and the theme for the day was "The Penitent Heart is an Apostolic Heart." The penitent heart is not penitent merely for the sake of purifying ourselves of defects and sin; the most important aspect is not the negative but the positive: the heart must be penitent so it can be free to love God and neighbor; free to put aside immediate self-interest or concrete advantage for the sake of another.

Jesus in the words by our tabernacles tells us that he wants our hearts to be free: delivered from fear and filled with light. So we have the positive and negative aspects of the penitent heart. What is the fear that freedom casts out by its excess. Scripture speaks of fear as a slavish quality. “The fear of death makes us slaves our whole life long”; “You have not received a spirit of slavery leading you back into fear.”

Freedom is our favorite word as Americans, our greatest shared value. And it was Paul's favorite word, too! Paul says we become free when we are obedient to the Gospel Freedom and obedience are both aspects of Paul's concept of being a servant. And yet he could say, in almost the same breath, “Am I not free? Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Pope Benedict also wrote, “I must learn... to keep myself available for whatever he, the Lord, needs of me at a given moment, even if other things seem more appealing and more important to me: it means giving life, not taking it. It is in this very way that we experience freedom: freedom from ourselves, the vastness of being. In this very way... our life becomes important and beautiful.”

In freedom, the person's gifts are released for full and expanisve expression, not as requirements, not “exacted,” but springing freely and abundantly and without interior force or effort. Even if they require immense energy and work, it is not grinding effort, but life-giving, with the fruits of the Spirit as side effects.

 

When Sr Helena and I met with Brother Al last November, I had a chance to ask him for some insights about the "penitent heart" based on his long years of acquaintance with our Founder. Right away he connected that exhortation, "Live with a penitent heart" to the apostolate. He said that the “be sorry for sins” wasn't merely a “be sorry for YOUR sins”; that there was a broader understanding of sin and grace involved, including the way the media play into that. So “live with a penitent heart” can mean, “have a heart!” Have a heart for what is behind the signs of the times; have a heart for what is going on in a culture produced by the use of these means; respond from the heart to the needs of that are manifested in the way peole interact in this culture; respond from the heart to the compromised glory of God and peace of humanity. Have a heart for the whole world of media, and every person affected by the misuse of these gifts of God. And that means to have a spirit also of reparation, which is the spiritual counterbalance for the harm that is spread when people use communications technologies without regard for the whole truth about the human person.

Doing penance and offering reparation is a is a sign of the clear awareness that:

1. all is not as it should be, and
2. we can make a difference. Even at the cost of sacrifice.

As God's love is manifested in this valley of tears as mercy, our love of God in this valley of tears is expressed in sacrifice.What is the spirit of sacrifice of the penitent heart? It is love that will not be held back or limited by discomfort or suffering or loss of personal advantage. Love speaks in terms of sacrifice: “I will climb mountains for you! I would slay dragons for you! I would throw myself in front of a train to pull you from harm! I would die for you.” The “for you” makes all the difference. Without a “for you,” there isn't a sacrifice. And there can be plenty of sacrifice in extending the word of God to others

Evelyn Underhill has such a charming expression of this self-emptying missionary sacrifice: “Redemption does not mean you and me safe and popped into heaven. It means that each soul, redeemed from self interest by the revelation of Divine Love, it taken and used again for the spread of that redeeming work.”

Referred to in this talk:

Retreat Report

Today we moved into the heart itself: what do we have "at heart"? And it's a good day for a reflection like that, being the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart! The theme was "The Penitent Heart is Poor in Spirit." In other words,  "non-negotiables and the one thing necessary." What's a non-negotiable? What are our non-negotiables? Sometimes we can determine these priorities for ourselves, or maybe it starts when we establish much-needed personal boundaries... that then take over more and more territory in our hearts, until we are practically identified with them. 
Obviously, that can become a huge impediment to living with others and working in a shared ministry. There's even the risk that we assume that these good things (they usually are good) are "the" good thing our life is meant for. Merton wrote, “Idolatry is the basic sin. Therefore that which is deepest in us...most likely to deceive us under the appearance of true worship, or integrity, or honesty, or loyalty, or idealism. Even Christianity is often idolatrous without realizing it. The sin of craving the God who is other than he who cannot be made an idol—i.e., an object.”

People set on the one thing necessary are free: Bonhoeffer commented, “They do not set their hearts on their possessions, but are inwardly free. That is why they are able to make use of the world without withdrawing from it all together (1 Cor. 5:13). And that is also why they can leave the world when it becomes an impediment to discipleship” (p. 301). First things first: the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. The onje thing necessary: to cling with all our heart to “glory to God, peace to humanity,” and to take things very lightly if they are not, really, “Glory to God, peace to humanity.”

It's so easy for us to convince ourselves that we are seeking one or the other of these exalted goods when we are really directly compromising some genuine good. I have found that I am most likely to do this when the good I am compromising relates to my neighbor, I have even learned that the higher the motivations I claim for myself in the case, the more I ought to suspect myself of pulling the wool over my own eyes, hiding from myself what is really at stake. No one else is fooled, of course. In situations like this, our intransigence is a dead giveaway that love of God and neighbor is not really what I am seeking or protecting.  

Rather than ask what our personal “non-negotiables” are, it might be better to name the value or wound we are trying to protect with them, because I suspect that quite often our non-negotiables are really strategies for self-preservation. It's important to separate the strategy from the need: we can name, affirm and uphold the value without insisting on the strategy we have in mind—which may or may not even be helpful: after all, we can be mistaken in our strategizing! We are fixing our gaze on this life, in its most limited expression!

Christian psychologist Robert Roberts reminds us: “For the mature Christian the kingdom hoped for is the focusing goal of life, to which everything else is subsidiary. In the [negative] attitude I have just described the kingdom is not the pearl of great price, the crown of life, the one thing needful, but a sort of consolation prize for those who do poorly in the race. The person I have described does not have the joy and peace of Christian hope; rather, he combines a comically mild form of resignation with a false conception of the kingdom” (Roberts, p. 151). 

Here's a final observation from Ven. Solanus Casey: “What I'd like to stress is the very insanity of trying to reckon on anything material these days as amounting to anything of importance aside from its use in promoting the glory of God in charity toward lifting humanity—and the necessarily very short time such material things hold their value.” 

Books referenced in this talk:

Among Women

Podcaster Pat Gohn came over for Mass, lunch and a podcast interview today. We talked about the Angelus: what it is, how to pray it and why. I invited her to come back to visit our community in August, when the choir is scheduled to record a new album. She's already been to the motherhouse, having interviewed Sr. Kathryn Hermes, one of our most prolific authors.

We set up a "studio" in the retreat house library; that way we could talk our hearts out without affecting the universal reign of retreat silence... However, we did not take into account the clock on the wall, ticking loudly. LOUDLY. And no matter how we tried to just remove it from its place, all it did was spin around on the nail or whatever was keeping it there. (Finally, I stood on a chair and investigated matters more thoroughly, discovering the secret for dislodging the thing.) Naturally, we had no trouble filling a twenty minute podcast segment with information and insights about the prayer I think is our best, smallest evangelization and catechesis tool ever.

I'm thinking of taking advantage of VistaPrint's special offers and getting some Angelus postcards printed ups, for wide distribution. I already created a pdf template for two-sided business cards, but the print is so small.. and deskjet ink is not very stable. Another project for when I return to Chicago!

Problems solved...maybe!

Decca Records rescheduled the taping with our choir--it's now set for Monday. I changed my Monday flight to Tuesday (God bless Southwest Airlines), and realized that the delay solves a couple of small problems for me. Like how I was going to return the Evelyn Waugh biography of Ronald Knox to the motherhouse library, and get Sr. Margaret Charles' camcorder and supplies back into their specific places in her office. Not to mention get to Logan Airport.

Meanwhile, the retreat proceeds apace. As I was delivering this morning's talk, I realized that I didn't have the final version in my hands; instead, I had a draft with some of the sections still pasted in. (I wonder if tomorrow's talk, which I thought was all set, is in the same shape...) I pretended all was well, and just carried on. Only after the fact, when one of the sisters picked up my folder to copy a quote, was the truth betrayed.
I asked Sr Sylwia, our novice from Poland, to take a few pictures of the goings on so I could have something to show while I figure out the video files...and get my next talks together. You can thank her for the illustrations...

From today's talk on the Penitent Heart as a "Convicted" heart:

In a 1935 meditation on Penance, the Founder commented that we tend to put too much stress on the confession of sin: sorrow for sin is a “heavenly gift.” We have to pray for it, and have much hope, based on Jesus having died for us.

Sorrow for sin is a “heavenly gift.” Pope Benedict said the same thing in an off-the-cuff homily on April 15: “penance is a grace. There is a tendency in exegesis that says: In Galilee Jesus announced a grace without conditions, absolutely unconditional, so also without penance, pure grace, without human preconditions. But this is a false interpretation of grace. Penance is grace; it is a grace that we recognize our sin, it is a grace to know that we need renewal, change, of a transformation of our being. Penance, to be able to do penance, is a gift of grace.“

This is very true, and it is part of the Gospel, the good news; it is a truth that the world denies. The world knows only punishment for what it considers wrongdoing--which may or may not involve actual evil, although quite often, they are spot on. (Just not often enough!) So repentance is a grace. ("Peace I give you. Not as the world gives, do I give to you...")

Pope Benedict continues: “And I must say that we Christians, even in recent times, we have often avoided the word penance, it seemed too harsh to us. Now, under the attacks of the world that speaks to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace. And we see that it is necessary to do penance, that is, recognize what is wrong in our life, to open up to purification, to transformation, this pain is grace, because it is renewal, it is the work of divine mercy. And thus these 2 things that St. Peter says -- penitence and forgiveness -- correspond to the beginning of Jesus' preaching: "metanoeite," that is, convert (cf. Mark 1:15). This is the fundamental point, then: "metanoia" is not a private thing, that could be substituted by grace; "metanoia" is rather the arrival of the grace that transforms us....In...this 'transformation' that penance gives, in this conversion, in this new way of life, we find life, true life. “

So there is a movement toward something new: not sitting on the dung-hill of regret, but a work of transformation in progress. St. Paul said, “Do you not realize that God's mercy is directed to your repentance?” And Jesus reproached the towns where he worked most of his “mighty deeds” because of “their failure to repent.”

...

The “convicted” heart is an enlightened heart. And to “live in continual conversion” it must remain accessible to the light coming from the tabernacle, penetrable to the light. If you want to be enlightened, you cannot stay in the shade, protecting yourself with all sorts of strategies, like spiritual sunscreen.

“I feel convicted!” Because the truth will set you free. That's what an encounter with a living word does: convicts, but does not condemn. Convicts in a life-giving way: it gives a life sentence (in the literal sense!).

Retreat Report... Still Talking!

Can't believe we're halfway through the retreat at this point. The novices are videotaping the sessions (do you say that with a hard drive camera), and I was hoping to post a snippet of today's talk, but it is more complicated than I anticipated. These hard drive cameras save everything in proprietary formats, so you can't just open it in any old program and save the bit you want as a distinct file. I had to download a new program, and then import the files directly from the camera (again...) and I still can't figure out how to edit them. I hope there's some way to at least open them in the Mac when I get back to Chicago so I can edit them in QuickTime or something.
Anyway, today I gave the talk about Merton's "point vierge," which to me corresponds to Teresa's seventh mansion. And to which "sin in us" goes, as St. Paul says, "the full way as sin" to undo the beauty of God's work, attempting to lead us down the path of despair through acedia. About which books are beginning to be written once again. (That probably hasn't really happened since John Cassian's interviewed the original Egyptian desert mystics.)
Tomorrow's talk is "The Penitent Heart is a 'Convicted' Heart." I get the language from the evangelicals, who in turn got it from a translation of a term in the Bible. It's a great way of referring to the personal acknowledgment of sin in oneself; sin is not "out there," it is something I know up close and personal. Awareness of the particular quality of sin in me is pretty essential in the spiritual life. Not that you stare at it; not that you can eradicate it. But you can be more on your guard when what the Catholic tradition calls "near occasions of sin" come around. And you can use this knowledge to your advantage, because generally a person's greatest weakness is a sign of their greatest strength. And that strength is meant for the love and service of God and neighbor. (How sad it is when a person is so little in touch with herself that she doesn't know what she has to offer, but keeps trying to imitate the service other people offer.)
I'm drawing tomorrow's talk in part from blog posts from days of yore. (Is that cheating?)


Books I refer to in the talk:
   

Retreat Report

Continuing to put the talks together--I have tomorrow's ready (and the next two days' as well!), which leaves me the final two, and a surfeit of time for the task. 
In general, the topic is ongoing conversion. A "penitent heart" is a heart that hears and responds to the Gospel, which begins with a hearty "Repent!" Naturally, there are obstacles. One of the most insidious is the topic of Kathleen Norris' wonderful book, The Noonday Demon. (It's much better than it sounds!) The old desert mystics called this "noonday demon" acedia (later identified as plain old sloth, but really much more than mere laziness). Finally, today, I recognized that this is none other than what the spiritual masters in the western tradition, especially from around the 1600's on to about 1950, bemoaned as "tepidity." I find the notion of acedia to be a bit deeper, and way more useful, even if tepidity has the advantage of being related to a dramatic biblical image...
Norris writes about an experience she had: “I did not recognize it as a temptation, something that I could resist. I was not aware that even as I maintained a busy and productive life, sloth [as it has been named] had a firm grip on me. For I had become aware that it was possible to reject time, as well as embrace it. If I wanted to, I could live just barely, refusing the gift of each day” (p 12). Russian Orthodox liturgist Alexander Schmemann (another favorite of mine) writes in his journal, “The basic disease is sloth. It is that strange laziness and passivity of our entire being...which constantly convinces us that no change is possible and therefore desirable. It is in fact a deeply rooted cynicism which to every spiritual challenge responds, 'What for?' and makes our life one tremendous spiritual waste. It is the root of all sin because it poisons the spiritual energy at its very source.” 

If you've read any old western spirituality, sermons, exhortations, and the like, doesn't that sound just like the tepidity they warn against? Something in us just wants to be left alone! We want to live like "normal." The Carmelite writer Ruth Borrows (in “The Essence of Prayer”) wrote that we ought not assume that what seems “normal” or “natural” is, in fact, innocuous—that our unquestioned assumptions are very likely to be hiding places for primordial selfwardness: self-centered, self-seeking, self-serving.

Naturally, we tend to resist.

And we don't only have one of these passages to go through in life. Our inner life can be traced as a series of these conversions that we experience as death-matches. While we live in time, we are called to continuing conversion of mind and heart; to continually be transformed by the renewal of our mind.
Do you find the concept of "acedia" more spiritually helpful and hopeful than that of tepidity? How, why, why not? 

Books referenced here:

Retreat report

Yesterday's theme was "The Penitent Heart is a Grateful Heart."

Kathleen Norris (page 280) cited an ancient monk as saying that “Repentance without thanksgiving would be despair [and]...thanksgiving without repentance would be presumptousness.”

The founder wrote: "Keep in mind to fulfill the duty of riconoscenza [“grateful acknowledgment]. St. Paul is the one who suggests it to us: 'And be grateful!'”  "A decade or two later later he speaks of it again in the context of the particular judgment: “Oh! If only we were to reflect on our past life and picture a twofold story: the story of God's mercy [key word] towards us; in other words, how 'the hand of the Lord which is over us' has guided us, and the story of our response to the Lord's countless graces”. This is his definition of the examen of consciousness: “It is to recognize our benefits and thus be able to say: Thanks be to God! Because everything comes from him. It is to recognize our failings and be able to say: with the help of God's grace I want to remove this or that from my heart. It is to recognize what remains to be done in order to keep on working to make progress.” “We have sincerely to reflect on all the gifts that the Lord has given us,” natural and supernatural.”

Alberione is in line with the best of them in giving this kind of importance to thanksgiving, something I have to admit I fall very short on this point. I treat thanksgiving like an act of politeness before getting to the stuff I really want to pray about (er, "for")... but the saints tell us that the prayer of thanksgiving is also a preparation for new favors from God. St Teresa (Interior Castle, 4^th mansion, Chapter 3) wrote, regarding the beginning of interior prayer, “Anyone who is conscious that this is happening within herself should give God great praise, for she will be very right to recognize what a favor it is, and the thanksgiving which she makes for it will prepare her for greater favors. One preparation for listening to him...is being intent upon discovering what the Lord is working in the soul...”

The penitent heart is stirred to love by the recognition of what good has been done for me. So the first stage of the penitent heart is this grateful recognition. The examen starts with thanksgiving—otherwise, instead of responsiveness, everything is reduced to dry duty, almost a mathematical transaction. Robert Roberts (Spiritual Emotions, p 144): “You get what you pay for and you earn what you get” is not a Christian worldview. “The obstacles to Christian gratitude are human resistances to acknowledge our dependence on God, and the failure to appreciate the gifts he gives us and the beauty of relationship with him."
Books cited:
     

   

Retreat Report

Retreat opened yesterday afternoon, with thunder rumbling overhead. Today we had a perfect late spring sort of day: cool breeze, blue skies, puffy bright clouds, bird calls and the scent of flowers in the air. I'd rather be out there than inside continuing to put my talks together! Which is, as I told the sisters this morning, quite literally what I do: I gather notes and quotes, type them up, print them in whatever order they happen to be in and then use (yes) an actual pair of scissors and a glue stick to cut and paste them after I've sorted them into the topics that the notes themselves reveal. Probably not the most efficient way to get the job done, but I've found it helpful. Otherwise, I tend to procrastinate ever more, always feeling the need for more research before I attempt to write a paragraph. This way, it comes together before my eyes and tells me what needs to be written by way of transition and illustration.


Here's what I opened the retreat with:

I have a plaque in my room, lettered in gold over a kind of gold rainbow. It says, “The place is here. The time is now.” “When the Byzantine liturgy begins, the deacon says simply, 'Kairos!'“ (Schmemann, Eucharist, p. 217). Kairos! It doesn't just mean “roll 'em” or “On your marks, get set, GO!” It means both “Now!” and “Good timing!” St. Paul used that word when he wrote, “Now is the acceptable time.”
….Just a couple of weeks ago at Fatima, Pope Benedict spoke of making “ a journey to the core of one's being and to the nucleus of Christianity, so as to reinforce the quality of one's witness to the point of sanctity, and to find mission paths that lead even to the radical choice of martyrdom” (woah). That is also a good definition of retreat. It sets the bar really high, but “Now is the acceptable time.”

The overall theme of the retreat is based on a message our Founder received in a mystical experience of Jesus in the Eucharist: Do not be afraid; I am with you. From here (the tabernacle) I want to enlighten. Live with a penitent heart.
Since the first three phrases all fall in the general category of divine promises, and the last is all that is asked of us, that's the part we're focusing on this week. Each day will consider a different quality of the "penitent heart" that corresponds to the Lord's call.
I'll try to keep you posted--a task rendered a bit more challenging by my laptop's seeming inability to find the retreat house wireless signal! (Good thing everyone else is on retreat; that means that the community computer is free all day!)

Closing the Year for Priests

On this closing day of the Year for Priests, I have two priestly "vocation stories," over a hundred years apart. The first is from our Founder, who tells his story in the third person:

One day in the 1890-1891 school year, his teacher...asked the pupils what they wanted to do in the future... He was the second to be asked. He reflected for a while; then, feeling enlightened, he answered resolutely, to the amazement of his classmates, 'I want to be a priest.' ... It was the first clear light. Before that he had felt some inclination, though obscurely, in the depths of his soul, but without any practical result. From that day on, his companions and his brothers began to call him 'priest,' sometimes to make fun of him, other times to recall him to his duty. That incident had consequences for him: his study, prayers, thoughts, behavior and even his recreation were directed to this goal. ... From that day on, everything strengthened him in his decision.

Last week, I met a lovely family from the Chicago metropolitan area. The parents are affiliate members of a religious community, so the faith is lived intensely in their household. The mom told me about her seven-year-old Timothy. It seems that at the Easter Mass, something at the preparation of the gifts struck him. He paid careful attention to every detail, and then turned to his mother and whispered urgently, "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a priest." Now, after the children's Liturgy of the Word he rushes into church for the preparation of the gifts (and is grieved when the LOW runs too long!).

How many vocations to the priesthood can still be stirred in these final hours of the Year for Priests?

See you later.

I'm at the motherhouse in Boston, ensconced in an upstairs room that overlooks... the gap between two buildings. Fortunately, there's enough light to continue working on my retreat talks for the sisters. Which is what I will be going off the grid to do for a few days. (Retreat begins Sunday afternoon.)
Meanwhile, one of the best things about coming back to the motherhouse? Seeing all the sisters, some of whom I have known since I entered. (Which will be 35 years, come August 14.)
See you later!

Clearance

I popped onto our publishing house website to get a link to our new iPhone app (a highly developed Rosary app), and found that we are having a 50% off sale--some of the selected titles really deserve wide distribution. You might consider ordering some to leave in adoration chapels, keep on hand to give to people with questions, and so on. There's even one of our Marian CDs--and a full-sized, generously illustrated children's bible.
Meanwhile...here's the Rosary app I meant to tell you about... 

En route

I'm on my way to Boston today. I'd be going anyway (to lead that retreat I'm still working on for the sisters), but I changed my flight to accommodate the taping with Decca. (Decca wants to reschedule. Maybe.) So I will just arrive a few days early and continue to do my work. The odd thing is that this is happening precisely when my sister and niece have managed to come to Chicago for a few days, so they will be helping me get my luggage up the stairs for the L train to Midway.
As we pray "en famille" when anyone is flying, "Angels on wings!"

What is God's

Had all day to reflect on that "throwaway" line (really a "takeaway" line) from today's Gospel: Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.  How do we give to God what is God's? Sr Helena last year hit on a profound "hint": when Jesus is first asked the question about paying taxes, he holds out his hand and says, "Show me the money." They give him the prescribed coin, and he shows it to them: the profile of an emperor. "Whose image?"
Whose image, indeed.
Give to God what is God's: God's image in us.
But the image was tarnished; Jesus was there to restore that image. To "give to God what is God's" means we have to accept the transformation Jesus offers. That means change. But as Pope Benedict reminds us (quoting von Hildebrand): "Unreserved readiness to change is the indispensable prerequisite for the reception of Christ into our soul. "