To My Parish, From Prison

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty. Richard Lovelace

So, What Exactly is Father Nick Up To?

Sometimes it can seem kind of mysterious where it is your clergy seem to be going all the time––seminarians come and go, priests move about and disappear for months at a time. Most parishioners seem to take it all in stride; but perhaps there are some of you who are curious about how these things work. This post is for you.

As for how I myself have ended up back at the seminary after being ordained a priest for two years:

My undergraduate work took place at Thomas Aquinas College in CA, where I received a heavy background in philosophy in theology. When I applied to the seminary in 2006, the Vatican had just released a new set of guidelines requiring an extra year of philosophical education, bumping the normal seminary education track from 5 years to 6. My philosophy credits from college more than satisfied the requirements and so I was allowed to modify my course of studies to start on theological work right away.

This meant that I had worked my way through the theological curriculum in about 4 years, leaving me with extra time on my hands.

Fortunately, the seminary at which I was studying had, in addition to the theological faculty, what is known as a "pontifical" faculty––which doesn't refer to a separate group of instructors, but simply that the university has an accreditation to grant not just American degrees but Roman ones as well.

The American system grants seminarians a "Master of Divinity" degree (abbreviated M.Div); the PhD equivalent in this system is a Doctor of Divinity (D.D.). The American seminary system, for obvious reasons, is largely Protestant.  The Pontifical faculty, based in the Roman university system, grants a different set of degrees: the Baccalaureate, License, or Doctor in Sacred Theology (STB, STL, and STD). After completing the requirements for my M.Div., I began chipping away at a degree in the Roman system--taking a few extra exams, writing a few extra papers, and eventually receiving my S.T.B. and completing almost all my classwork for the S.T.L.  So, I graduated and was ordained with an M.Div and an STB degree––one American and one Roman degree.

The S.T.L., or Licenciate is somewhere between a Master's degree and a PhD in the American university system.  In addition to 2 years of classwork, one must demonstrate competency in Latin and at least one modern theological language (such as German, Italian, or French), serve as a teaching assistant, write a 60-80 page thesis, and take a comprehensive exam that demonstrates familiarity with the overall history of theology in general and a few select theologians in greater depth, in the areas of the doctrine of God, Christian anthropology, theological method, and sacraments. If you're really interested in the requirements, you can read about them  here. 

I really thought I had a shot to finish my STL while still in seminary, but I was wearing myself out getting the work done, preparing for ordination, etc.  Finally, I let go of the idea not long before getting ordained. I figured if the Lord wanted me to get the degree, he'd open a door, and let it at that.

Last summer, Father Brian and I were chatting and I mentioned that I had always had an interest in study. He asked why I had never finished the STL, and I informed him that I had very little left in order to complete the degree.  He was quite surprised at this, and immediately suggested I look into a summer study program to complete it.  (I took this as a divine sign and an answer to my previous prayer for God to open a door. The thought of Father Brian suggesting I leave the parish for 6 weeks two summers in a row to read some pretentious books would have been unthinkable by any stretch of the imagination.)  He spoke with the Archbishop, I checked with the registrar in the seminary, and two weeks later I had my academic schedule.  

Of course, this was all before there was any talk of Father Brian being transferred to a new parish.  My guess is that right now he is sincerely regretting his generous suggestion, being the only priest on hand to minister to the needs of the parish while trying to pack up and move!  Let's just say his life isn't neatly packaged into rubbermaid filing boxes; from what I can tell, for the most part it's crammed in large piles into the trunk of his car.

The plan for me, then, is to finish two classes this summer, and then return next summer for a final class and thesis preparation.  Hopefully I'll get a lot of the reading done for that during the year, as well; then, of course, at some point I'll need to take my comprehensive exams, which is a one hour oral interview with three professors.  That may sound intimidating, but it's nothing compared to being cornered by a parishioner after Mass who didn't like my homily!  If I can get through that, there's nothing to worry about ....

So I'm Not the Only One!

Here's a link to a short blog entry written by one of our seminarians, Matt Nagle, on his time in Rome this summer.  I'm not the only one on assignment! (And there's no fancy pasta and red wine for me.)

It's been hard getting back into the academic swing. It's a lot... a LOT of reading. Tonight, I'll be wading through Martin Luther's commentary on the letter to the Galatians. He's a feisty fellow, and it makes for fun reading. He prefaced his treatise on Christian Liberty with a letter to the pope, Leo X, with the following greeting:

That I may not approach you empty-handed, blessed father, I am sending you this little treatise dedicated to you as a token of peace and good hope. From this book you may judge with what studies I should prefer to be more profitably occupied, as I could be, provided your godless flatterers would permit me and had permitted me in the past. It is a small book if you regard its size. Unless I am mistaken, however, it contains the whole of Christian life in a brief form, provided you grasp its meaning. I am a poor man and have no other gift to offer, and you do not need to be enriched by any but a spiritual gift. (!)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is cheek.

Today I got out on the lake and did some canoeing in this beautiful weather. I figure St. Anthony would have wanted it that way.

Prayers and blessings for you all,

Father Nick

Gingersnap and the Licorice Whips

 

The brief run we had ended last night. Posted for your enjoyment.

Bygone

I had the chance to check out a dozen or so of the Tall Ships that were in Chicago this week, docked at Navy Pier.  It generated some fun photos, which I'll be posting over the next few days and cross-posting at the photoblog (linked at the bottom of the page as well).

Pride of Baltimore

Like I Never Left

After innumerable train and plane rides, walking through strange cities in the rain with luggage in tow, and meeting up with a seemingly interminable catalog of remarkable and inspiring people, I am back.  It's hardly believable that this trip of a lifetime, which has been a part of my imagination and hopes for years, has finally ended.  Laying awake at 3:30 a.m. this morning, jetlagged and racing through all the things that need to be done to re-settle myself here at the seminary, an intense feeling of gratitude washed over me--with the sort of intensity that only comes when you're alone with your thoughts in the dark.  Some days it's the sense that I need to engage in spiritual warfare and pray the Exorcism prayer of St. Leo; others, I'm just happy.  Go figure.

Laying there on my back, suddenly acutely aware of how awash with blessing and grace I've been these last weeks and months, it was hard not to believe that I'm in exactly the right place with exactly what I need to live God's will.  Part of that is probably the endorphin-like high I get when my sleep cycles are messed up, but another part is pretty sure that this little intuition is spot on.  I'm thirty years old, and set to embark on the great adventure of my vocation, and such confirmations are incredible treasures.  And it's not simply a pleasure at having seen wonderful things and been to wonderful places.  Pilgrimage was difficult, though not on the day-to-day basis; our guides and faculty took care of most everything we needed (doing laundry was the only real problem we had to deal with ourselves).  The real difficulty lay in the confrontation of realities of which I was aware but had never presented themselves as forcefully as they arise in that holy city.

Perhaps the greater challenge was, in a sense, taking a "break" from the identity of a seminarian.  It was never intentional, but it required an interior effort to continue seeing myself--ourselves--as men in preparation for priesthood.  All supports of this identity, both interior and exterior, were pulled away, and the edifice was left to stand on its own foundation.  And I don't just mean things like wearing the Roman collar or being known by others as "a seminarian"—it was more that were were not able to exercise that identity in the normal ways, through outreach and apostolates which are such an integral part of our formation at Mundelein.  As a result, questions about identity and motivation began to float to the surface.  Why am I doing this?  Am I freely choosing it or just going with the flow?  What am I giving up?  What am I gaining?  Is this really what I want?  Is it really what God wants?

There were definitely some days where I didn't know how to answer those questions.  Toss in the fact that the Holy Land isn't exactly Catholic Disneyland, and you have a recipe for frustration and confusion of all sorts.  The Church suffers from a chronic lack of growth due to the cultural and legal constraints placed on it, and the attrition that inevitably follows keeps the population at around 1.2% of the general census. Over the last fifty years, this percentage fell from 10% of the general population—meaning a net loss of over two hundred thousand. Stir in virulent and long-standing divisions within the Christian community—many of which are far beyond the lived experience of the typical Protestant-Catholic divide here in the U.S.—and what many visitors experience is not quite the overwhelming spiritual refreshment you’d expect. It feels more like a stab in the heart.

There's nothing like a trip to Rome to cure what ails you.

I was certainly encouraged and inspired by the beauty and grandeur of the churches we visited, and the relics of so many outstanding saints (we prayed before the relics of St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and St. Peter himself, all in one day), some well known and revered, others of which I'd never before heard.  I was bowled over by the frescoed naves bathed in light, opening up to a heavenly vision of angels and clouds and exquisitely posed figures absorbed in love and desire for the things of God, for His beauty and the peace it brings.  I received sacramental absolution on the Feast of the Chair of Peter in a small wooden confessional in the transept of St. Peter's while a soaring hymn of praise swelled to fill the towering spaces that dwarfed us.  The voices seemed to twist and dart playfully about the capacious dome, sidling down the fluted pilasters that sat on pedestals with footings the size of my room at the seminary.  Each edifice was more spectacular, more opulent, more jubilant than the last.  Inspiring as it all was, it wasn't giving the answers I was looking for.

The shadow of a hint of a clue to the answer came, as it usually does, in a far less dramatic setting. 

We were invited out to dinner by a priest who happened to be studying for his doctorate in dogmatic theology at the Angelicum.  Over delicious rigatoni and gnocchi, he related to us some of his experiences as a priest here in Rome, fully immersed in study and somewhat far removed from the daily pastoral responsibilities of a diocesan priest (a nice parallel to my own sense of having been cut off from what I'd been accustomed to doing and being as a seminarian).  He spoke to us of a series of short conversations he'd had with a young man employed in construction there at the American priests' residence in Rome, and of the reflection over his responsibilities as a priest in those conversations. 

Now, there was nothing deliberate about these encounters; he was a busy priest trying to finish his doctorate before departing the country and the Romanian fellow needed to work hard to keep his job, so there were no long soul-searching discourses being carried out.  But the attention and effort this priest was putting into these brief conversations demonstrated a deep care for the good of this young man.  It would've been easy for him to justify passing over the openings for a deeper exchange--the admissions that he'd been living with his girlfriend, for instance--and just telling himself that this wasn't the reason he'd been sent at great expense to Rome, or that it would be better to just build a relationship with the guy without launching into moralistic diatribes, or any number of perfectly reasonable trains of thought. 

But he would ask himself, what if this is the only spiritual connection this young man will ever have?  What if he's surrounded with people who will never speak to him of the grace offered to him in Christ? What if his only chance for a real encounter with Christ was to be on a scaffolding outside my window, and I missed it, or talked myself out of it, or just tried to ignore it?  If not me, a Catholic priest, then who?

This priest carried something with him that didn't disappear when he was engaged in mundane tasks or urgent matters of importance—an awareness that each and every person that came into contact with him was, in some sense, his responsibility, and that responsibility trumped everything else that he was accountable for.  In the midst of crafting a dissertation of some size, and all the deadlines and pressure that accompany this enterprise (not to mention offering hospitality to the droves of pilgrims passing through Rome and eager for a local connection), this priest was recollected enough to be attentive to the movements of grace that were eager to flow through us all, but find a conduit far too infrequently. 

And there it was—the shadow of a hint of a clue to my answer.  In my loss of identity, I'd turned inward, and there wasn't much there to sustain me, or even interest me, and that was scary.  It catalyzed some unhealthy navel-gazing when the antidote was to be found in an attentive turn outward, to the other.  It was then that I realized that on this pilgrimage, and by extension, during my time in seminary, I'd managed to lose sight of the mission.  

Those years of missionary work with FOCUS all came back to me—the months of preparation, the fundraising, the Bible studies, the awkwardness and the discomfort with my situation, the fraternity, the breakthroughs, the disappointments were all sought or endured on account of the mission, the hope against hope that the casual encounter we all usually miss would be caught, and something good, something divine, would enter into the world.  For all the struggle of those years, I realized that I missed it, because it had given form and purpose to my commitments.  It was the principle and purpose of everything we were doing.  It was the reason I wanted (and still want) to be a priest.  For whatever reason, I'd lost touch with it.  The consequences, while not drastic, certainly were real. 

I'm glad we've got priests around like the one I caught up with that night.  Oremus pro invicem.

For Your Enjoyment

New images are up at my personal photoblog (A Secret of a Secret), and a new series of photojournal entries and reflections will be posted on the official seminary site (A Seminarian's Tale).  Both are linked above, and will be posting continuously for the next week! 

On the Ground

Well, we're here, safe and sound ... a bit jetlagged, but that's nothing a couple of rest days haven't been able to fix.  The connection here is slow and tenuous so photos are going to be a luxury, I think.  That's not for lack of subjects, however!  The city of Bethlehem is a visual feast, and the weather has been outstanding thus far, enabling us to get out and enjoy the city (and its shrines) as we please.  The following is a short journal entry for our trip over.  More to come!

Ж

Wednesday, 3 December 2009

The first leg of our travels has brought us safely to Zurich.  I can safely say that the eight hour flight was one of the more pleasant ones I’ve ever taken.  We were offered most every amenity, including real silverware for dinner—though to my chagrin, I slept through the offering of the hot facecloth right before breakfast.  A lamentable disappointment.  Those unable to sleep whiled away the hours with the ample in-flight entertainment; Elliot managed a pretty convincing impression of a thirteen-year-old by playing Space Invaders games for hours on end, fueling his binge with one cup of apple juice after another.  A Jewish man moved to the back of the plane to offer his prayers, wrapped in a white shawl and rocking back and forth on his heels while turned to face Jerusalem.

It’s a sobering thought to recall how difficult our 8-hour journey would have been even a hundred years ago.  The rapidity of global travel has erased any real concept of distance we once had.  Whether dining on hot chicken and rice over Newfoundland, sipping a glass of red wine with Iceland on the horizon, or enjoying a hot roll and chilled yogurt while the English Channel sails by under the wing, there is no question that our experience is a far cry from the ever-tossing, frigid, cramped accommodations enjoyed by the passengers of yesterday.  I could almost picture them, green and shivering in the hold of a ship pitched over hard to leeward in a gale, terrified that the timbers would give way with each thudding wave that smashed into the bow.  Friends, I very nearly pitied them as I spread strawberry jam onto the warm croissant in my lap and took a leisurely sip of hot, black coffee.  The collective and sustained efforts of aviators, engineers, navigators, and entrepreneurs has whittled down the grueling, even life-threatening character of a transatlantic voyage to one night of mild discomfort offset by the consolation of any number of amenities at hand to keep the mind off the dreadful inconvenience of it all.  There are days when I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without the phenomenally advanced technology of our day, with all its tendencies to numb our souls and distract our consciences.  Today was not one of those days.

Zurich is tidy and quaint, but as one of my fellow pilgrims put it, I’ve only got so much pilgrim juice in me, and there’s no sense in handing it out indiscriminately.  It’s naptime at our hotel, a nice hot shower before dinner, then back on the plane this evening to Tel Aviv!  Bethlehem, here we come.

In and Out

As the school year draws to a close, I'm preparing to leave for a Spanish immersion in Santa Ana, El Salvador. The next few days are going to be crazy as I throw the most crucial material supports to my life (clothing, books) into suitcases and the rest into unused rooms in my parents' house. Before the madness gets too overwhelming, I did take the chance to touch up some photos from our diocesan pilgrimage to the cathedral of St. Paul, MN to commemorate the end of the Holy Father's Year of St. Paul.

Pilgrimage to St. Paul, MN

(The photos look the nicest in the full-screen slideshow.)

We popped in to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Lacrosse, WI on the way back. It was a fine week, with much conversation and the honor of having our own Archbishop Naumann in company.

I had fun taking the photos, and have been learning about my camera as I prepare to do more serious traveling. I hope to continue posting to my blog while I'm out of the country, so check back periodically for pictures and stories.

vaya con dios

Multiculturalism at its Worst and Best

This past Friday, the seminary took a break from classes to explore questions of Church and culture in a seminar on the multicultural setting of ministry. Many issues were raised that are of profound importance to the Church’s self-understanding and therefore to her relationship with the cultures in which she finds herself. I raised a number of questions with the rector during a brief conversation, and he made it clear that what was presented was not being proposed as an ideal for us, but a perspective that was to be critically evaluated and reflected upon. What follows is my attempt to do both.

Our presenter raised a number of very important points, but I will confine myself to a more abstract critique of the overall flow of his perspective. This perspective can be outlined as a description of the possibilities for interaction between cultures in an age of globalization, and a claim for which of those possibilities is the best one.

First, though, we have to pin down how the word “culture” was being used in our seminar. (A grasp of this is crucial for the full weight of my critique to be felt.) As it was discussed, culture is the man-made component of the external world in which human beings live. There are four dimensions in which each culture manifests its own proper characteristics, the first being its material aspect: artifacts and architecture are prime examples of this. Certain social institutions arise from culture, including family, government, trade, and explanations of the whole (such as religion or philosophy). It also includes the symbols assembled in language, stories, rituals, or writing. Finally, culture places emphasis on certain values, spoken or unspoken, good or bad, and exerts influence on society by holding them up as worthy of imitation either in the abstract or in concrete particulars. Being of human origin, all cultures are inherently limited and therefore biased (so it is said) in their grasp of ultimate values and realities. In other words, no one culture (religious or otherwise) has a stranglehold on reality; all cultures must collectively approach one another to gain mutual insight and approach the ultimate. While the Gospel transcends any one culture, there is always a danger that one dominant culture will insert its own bias into the Gospel and thereby place itself in a position of inherent superiority over all others.

In our age, technology has made it easier for people of different cultural backgrounds to encounter one another than in any prior age. Broadly speaking, the types of encounters can be placed on a spectrum. On the one end is monocultural interaction. This is simply the presence of one culture whose members are mostly homogeneous and unaware or uninterested in the existence of other ways of being in the world. By nature, most of us are comfortable in this situation and seek to reestablish it when equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of persons of a different culture. Next on the line is the bicultural, signifying the ability of persons to effectively live within two cultural settings without the difficulties of transition between them. Moving along further across the spectrum, the multicultural world is one in which many cultures exist side by side without any real interaction, in which each culture bumps up against the others but retains its own integrity. A cross-cultural interaction is one in which members of one culture insert themselves into another while doing no violence to it, operating within its own proper dimensions. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum is an intercultural encounter in which people of many cultures do not merely coexist but actively interact, seeking to understand one another’s cultural setting through dialogue, clarifications, common projects, and tolerance of ambiguity, pluralism, and mistakes.

So far, so good. It can be safely acknowledged that this last kind of interaction is something the Church can hold up as desirable; being the sacrament of unity between God and men, it follows that her mission requires her to set aside coercion and violence while re-establishing harmony within humanity as a sign of the ingression of the kingdom into our historical existence.

Yet there is reason for caution here. By viewing the intertultural ideal through the lens of the four cultural elements listed above, it becomes clear that this ideal is itself a sort of culture with its own artifacts, institutions, symbols, and values. In this respect, the spectrum I outlined above bends back on itself to form a circle or an ascending spiral in which intercultural symbols and values become established as the elements of an over-arching meta-culture that exerts its own influence on the colliding cultures and subcultures within it while resisting any influences that oppose.

We must recall at this point that, being products of human activity, cultures are inherently biased; this is no less true, then, of our ideal of interculturalism. To the degree that interculturalism imposes its values, symbols, and institutions on its constituent cultures and subcultures, and is not open to other perspectives, it is guilty of the same absolutism it is meant to ward off. Anyone with eyes to see is very familiar with this imperialist enforcement of cultural (and by extension, religious) relativism. The prevailing winds of our media and higher educational system reek of such dogma—the turgid and tiresome political correctness, the obligatory endowed chair of religious studies held by an agnostic, the at once prolific and banal prophets who sermonize on the glories of diversity while failing to catch through the sea of fluttering rainbow flags the ironic smiles on the faces of “fundamentalist partisans” shifting from foot to foot in the wings. It is precisely this ideology that a certain Joseph Ratzinger named the “dictatorship of relativism” in his opening homily to the conclave which elected him pope, and this dictatorship is itself an institutional artifact of the Culture of Death.

The reason why we as Christians must qualify our assent to the intercultural ideal, then, is that there a real possibility that the values, symbols, and institutions of this ideal be derived from attitudes and philosophies antithetical to the Gospel. We can see the results of a premature and naïve embrace of the ideal in those once great missionary orders that now confine themselves to teaching missiology instead.

Yet if this possibility exists, then there is also the possibility that the intercultural ideal be informed by the Gospel and hospitable to it. This possibility echoes out from among the “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” standing before the Lamb and the throne, crying out in a loud voice, “salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb” (Rev 7:9-10). The “stepping-out-of-oneself” which is so necessary for true intercultural harmony is a discipline integral to the giving of oneself that is humanity’s highest calling. Indeed, it is “law of the gift” that John Paul the Great so tirelessly preached, inspiring in the flock the paramount desire for the civilization of love that called upon each person—no matter how great or small in the estimation of the world—to discover herself through a sincere gift of herself (Letter to Families, 14). Yet this is not to be achieved through the de-mythologization of religion and the bracketing of our own very concrete origins in the person of Jesus, but through standing firmly upon those origins as upon rock. For the one who sees him “sees the Father” (Jn 14:9), and in him “the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9). We ought not kid ourselves about the possibility of achieving for ourselves what is first and foremost the work of the Holy Spirit.

__________________________

Recommended reading and works referenced in this essay:

Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily to the conclave
“Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today” (PDF), an address given by Cardinal Ratzinger during the meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops' Conferences of Latin America, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in May 1996. A very perceptive diagnosis of the conflict as it now stands, though light on solutions (as indicated by the title). You may disagree with Benedict but there’s few who can cast the conflict in such an illuminating posture. I would suggest this specifically to those who attended our seminar this past week.
John Paul II’s Letter to Families

On the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

For our homiletics class, I prepared and delivered this homily to my seminarian brothers this past week. I've touched it up a bit here and there but it's substantially the same as it was delivered. Being that the Feast of the Dedication of the Cathedral Church of the Bishop of Rome doesn't exactly speak to a whole lot of people, I tried to work in the significance of this event for the history of the Church.

As to how it was received: my professor said that the greatest thing about my reflection on this gospel passage was that I'd written a paper on it. He then said the worst thing about it was that I'd written a paper on it. What can I say ...

_______________________________________

Jesus' words in today’s Gospel were used to charge Jesus at his trial. They are dangerous words. To the Jews of the time, they could be explained away as the ranting of a deluded maniac at best; at worst, they were treason and blasphemy deserving the penalty of death.

This, of course, is a very different sort of understanding than the usual one. We usually hear it described as the exercise of righteous anger. Jesus, they say, was correcting the sinful use of the sacred precincts of the temple for transacting business, and the Jews were just steamed because he called them out on their failure to reverence the sacred.

Well, not exactly. Since this event took place near Passover, there were literally tens of thousands of pilgrims coming to the Temple to participate in this feast, and there was simply no way each of them could bring their own lamb or kid to sacrifice all the way from home. It would have made an already chaotic situation unbearably messy. So, in order to fulfill their religious obligation, they had to purchase animals on site. And they had to pay the Temple tax, but they couldn’t use coins with the image of Caesar—so they needed to change their money into a currency that could be used for sacred purposes. There was a suitable place ready-made to provide for these needs already—the huge plaza known as the Temple Mount, recently completed under the patronage of Herod (the “46 years” it took to build the “Temple” actually refer to this architectural modification to the Temple building itself).

So what was Jesus getting at if this wasn’t about shoveling manure next to the Temple?

Contrary to what we often hear, this incident should not be referred to as the “Cleansing of the Temple” but the “Abrogation (or Rejection) of the Temple.” The words that accompany Jesus’ actions explain why this is. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” What the Jews do not understand, but which the later Resurrection fully clarifies, is that Jesus is speaking “of the temple of his body.” In effect, John is saying that Jesus puts his own person on par with the Temple; indeed, he’s going even further than that: he himself makes the Temple obsolete. He is now the definitive dwelling place of God among men. Jesus’ Resurrection passes judgment on the Temple and its rituals. It declares that HE is the full revelation of the Father’s love to the world, NOT the Temple.

You can understand why the earlier Gospel writers didn’t put this claim on the lips of Jesus himself, but phrased it as a charge by his accusers during his trial. It didn’t exactly contribute to Jewish-Christian relations! Only John attributes them to Jesus himself—after a healthy distance between Jews and Christians had come about some decades after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70.

We read in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that the elders and the scribes brought charges against St. Stephen for “speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God,” and for constantly “saying things against this holy place [i.e. the Temple] and the law [i.e. the Torah].” For they had heard him claim that “this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.”

These ideas weren’t incidental to the Gospel; they were on the lips of our savior and the first martyr within hours of their deaths. They were of such importance that they clearly found their way into the Church’s proclamation almost immediately.

So those early Jewish converts to Christianity knew the radical decision it took to follow Jesus. Everything had made sense until this Jesus guy had come along. Within a few decades of the Resurrection, Christians and Jews no longer worshipped together. Family members were set against each other by their decision to resist or join this new way of faith. Jews were worshipping side by side with Gentiles. Everything was new. Faithful Jews despised them; the Jewish authorities persecuted, imprisoned, and killed them, thinking they were rendering service to God. Converts from Judaism to Christianity were no longer covered under the legal allowance for religions older than Rome, because Christianity was considered a new religion—and so the Romans could legally persecute them as well. And for all practical purposes it was like they had broken with the thousand years of tradition that stretched from Moses to Judas Maccabeus. These Jewish convents must have asked themselves again and again, “what in God’s name are we doing?”

Fast forward two hundred and fifty years to the dedication of the church of St. John Lateran. Things couldn’t look more different. Christianity isn’t being persecuted and reviled because the emperor, Constantine, has become a Christian. Sixty years after that, Christianity would be the official religion of the entire empire. In just a few hundred years, this despised and persecuted religion had flooded the Roman Empire.

Imagine the joy of the Christian people on receiving the news that what had been withheld from them for so long was finally being granted. It was the granting of a wish soaked in the blood of the countless martyrs, known and unknown, throughout the hundreds of years of Christian existence. If they had been at a loss for words, they might have prayed with today’s Psalm:

The Lord of hosts is with us;
our stronghold is the God of Jacob.
Come! Behold the deeds of the Lord,
the astounding things he has wrought on earth.

For us, the basilica of St. John Lateran stands as a reminder of their joy. It’s easy to lose sight of this memory underneath the many layers of meaning this church has acquired in the 1700 years of its existence. We have to hold fast to its meaning for us as a monument to the faith and radical commitment of all those who staked everything on Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church.

And what fueled this faith? What was the source of their commitment? It was what came to mind every time they asked that question, “what in God’s name are we doing?” It was the conviction that each disciple had to follow his crucified master. They knew that if they were to be the dwelling place of God on earth, the Temple of the Lord, they had to be chiseled, and shaped, and smoothed in order to be fitted into their appointed places within this Temple. They were living stones willing to undergo the process of transformation, as the Scriptures encouraged them:

Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:4-5

While for some this meant heroic acts of generous, self-sacrificing love, for the ordinary people of the time it simply meant having an extraordinary love for God and neighbor.

So it’s very appropriate that this feast day follows only a week after the celebration of All Saints. It is another reminder that we have inherited absolutely everything we need to be extraordinary in love. Are we making use of that inheritance, or do we behave like spoiled children who are ungrateful when every need has been provided for them?

The seminary should be what the Christian community could be. There are all sorts of men here that constantly inspire me with their curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their conviction. Seek those men out. Befriend them. Try to be that kind of man for your brothers. Allow God to stretch your desire for his kingdom. Believe with every fiber of your being that the Holy Spirit is here, now, speaking to you in the Scriptures, giving you desires for faithfulness and glory, of which you had never dreamed? Are you willing to desire things that because of your weakness are so impossible that they become a manifestation of God’s power in the world?

There will come a time when our posterity will think upon us as we think upon our own fathers in the faith. What will the Christian people yet to come say about us? Will they remember our extraordinary love? Will they remember and rejoice over the revelation of God’s power that took place through our weakness? Will they be glad that we weren’t content to rest on our laurels and live off our savings? Will they recognize that we didn’t float with the current and allow the secular humanist agenda to compromise the Gospel? Will the Church flourish on account of our faithfulness?

We are standing on the shoulders of giants. And if we don’t love more than most, if we’re not even able to do the little things with great love, we have to ask ourselves:

What excuse do we have?

Quote of the Week

Scene: A moral theology classroom. The sun streams in through the windows as groundskeepers run their mowers around the manicured lawns. A well-aged Jesuit with cropped hair and a thick southside accent slouches in the corner while a student presents a short summary of the day's assigned reading to his classmates.

Presenter: Given the choice to either stick with the clear definition of marriage present in the 1917 Code of Canon Law or shift to a more ambiguous but theologically cogent description, the Council Fathers resisted the counsel of the canonists to hold to the ultimately impoverished view.

Jesuit: Those lawyers always need something to sink their teeth into. They can't stand the gray areas, can they, counselor?

Former Lawyer: [short pause] There's a lot of money to be made on the gray areas, Father.

Please Direct Your Attention to Everything

Our very own Father Robert Barron is working on a magnificent project worthy of your support. You can watch a short preview of his landmark series "Catholicism" at his website, http://www.wordonfire.org/

Keep an eye on this. It's going to be huge, I think.

Wednesday, Part Two

Here's the rest of what I've got. If you like it, you might enjoy another post about Ruth I wrote last January.
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Each Wednesday, the new seminarians take a hiatus from class and go out into the local community to get involved in some form of service; this is referred to by the formation faculty as “field education”. I’ve been assigned to a group called the Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly, whose mission is visit isolated, homebound, or otherwise neglected elderly. Today is my first day on the assignment. After morning prayer and breakfast, I get in the car to drive down from the far northern Chicago suburbs, to the North Side, where I am to meet up with my program coordinator who will then introduce me to the first of the elders I am to visit regularly over this year.

Traffic has me in its clutches for an hour and twenty minutes. Inside my head, I rail at the drivers alone behind the wheel of each of the hundreds of cars obstructing my way, and then rail at myself for being one of them. Our lack of options does not absolve my conscience. Overhead, the sky is clear and solid. As I approach downtown, massive clouds hang low and thick over Lake Michigan, a snowbank corralled by the imposing skyline. Memories of the approach to Denver from the east drift along before me. Checking myself, the vista regains its immediacy. Say what you will about the Midwest and its paucity of grand scenery, but the vaulty sky reveals itself here in ways not glimpsed elsewhere. The crags and preposterous bluffs of the Cumulus Range are more precious for their precarity.

Stiff and cranky, I make my way into the central office of the Little Brothers, just inside the Loop. A National Geographic on the table occupies me as I wait for Seth, my program coordinator.

A perfunctory “You have a car?” jolts me from my world of burning sands and barefoot Bedouin guides.

We grab a few flowers from the cooler in the kitchen and throw them in the paper bag he’s got with him. On the way to our first visit, I learn a little about Seth in the awkwardly close quarters of the front seat of my vehicle. Having met him only moments before, we proceed to have somewhat of a disembodied conversation as I negotiate the traffic and pump the clutch. He’s a skinny guy, built pretty much like I am, and not much older. His arms swing through a long arc in time to his undulating gait. Three-day scruff grows in patches, and tones of enlightened foreign policy and human interest seep through his voice, the sort that would do well against a backdrop of ambient city noise or a hammer dulcimer on NPR.

“So, you like working with the … ah … old folks, huh?” I make a mental note to come up with better slang as I await the inevitable rejoinder: “Dude, ‘wrinkly hags’ is not the preferred nomenclature.” It doesn’t come.

He ended up with the Little Brothers after wandering a bit, getting ordained out in California from a school well known for its willingness (as he described it) to confer orders on pretty much anyone. As I stare down five years of post-graduate preparation for the priesthood, I teeter woozily at the edge of the chasm that runs roughly halfway between my passenger and me.

Seth’s not a Chicago native but has adapted well to the city life, with which I am not overly familiar. He recently moved after getting jumped by eight kids outside his apartment on his way to the corner ice cream stand one evening. He maced one.

“You maced him?”

“Yeah, I carry it all the time, now. I swear by it.”

This obviously isn’t terribly remarkable to him. I have to prompt him to get the facts that he doesn’t consider worth mentioning.

It turns out he had to use the mace another time on the ‘L’.

“A crackhead got in my face, yelling and screaming at me. I tried the apologetic back-down, telling how I didn’t know what I did to offend him, but that didn’t seem to work, so I got up and started screaming back at him.”

Chuckles.

“That didn’t work either. I sized this guy up, and he wasn’t that big, but who wants to roll around on the floor of the ‘L’ with a crackhead? So I maced him.”

More chuckles.

“Did you just leave him there?”

“Well, mace doesn’t really knock you out. I moved back in the train a couple of cars and hoped he wouldn’t come after me. A few minutes later, I saw him coming—is this Addison? Uh, take a left here—so yeah, I headed to the back of the train. I grabbed a bottle on the way. You never know. He was definitely coming after me. There’s a bottle in his hand. I had nowhere to go ‘cuz the train was moving, so we just … stand off, you could say.”

Seth hints at to some of the tactical maneuvering of two bottle-wielders in a stalemate, neither willing to risk losing his one element of defense in a bold projectile offensive. He ended up jumping through the doors of the train just as they closed, implying a studied familiarity with their timing. His adversary pounded them in frustration, screaming with sunken-eyed ferocity as the train rumbled, hotshoes arcing, from the platform.

We make our way to an apartment building run by the Chicago Housing Authority just a few blocks from the lake in one of the nicer parts of downtown. Seth is new to the job, too, and so we’ll both be meeting these folks for the first time. Ruth comes to the door with a smile on her face. That is good; you never know what’s on the other side of that door the first time you knock. The fear of a really difficult encounter subsides as we take in the décor—every horizontal surface is crowded with trinkets and fleamarket baubles. Around her neck are necklaces of every conceivable variety, obscuring the pins, buttons, and ribbons on her blouse. Her wiry hair is pinned up close to her head and twin folds of skin hang from her neck like they did on my grandma; there was a day when I would sit on her lap and play with them until she got tired of it. I never did. They were so soft and parallel. We only saw her once a year when I was young.

Ruth is sweet and chatty, so she is well into her life story by the time we have been there fifteen minutes. She doesn't offered us a seat as there is nowhere that isn't already covered with stuffed animals. She tells us of how she grew up in an orphanage, made her way to Florida working for a wealthy family as a nanny, then went west to Texas and up through Oklahoma and Fort Gibson where she met a soldier who never wanted kids but got her pregnant every time he was home on leave to visit his young wife. She couldn’t support them on the money she earned from waiting tables so she gave them up for adoption when he didn’t come back from the war, and was reunited with them both in her old age.

Later I found out that he had not died in the war, but simply left her; yet that was not how she told it, and therefore not how I remember it. I believe that it’s not how she remembers it, either.

As the years sweep by in her story, the circumference of her life gradually shrinks in on itself until it scarcely reaches beyond the walls of her little apartment, like the interplanetary wanderings of a comet that has slowed to a tight orbit around the star that would eventually swallow it up. All the kitsch is the last sentimental remnant of a more widely distributed existence; age and weakness had served to concentrate whatever freedom remained to her and bind it to her tightly, and so she had populated these few square yards with the things that could still please her.

And slowly it dawns on me, as it probably dawned on her at some point in the past, that she is preparing for herself a small army of attendants and well-wishers to see her on her way when at last the time came for her to lie on her bed, never to get up again, and let this life of hers dwindle to vanishing.

We leave her the flowers. I’d lucked out. Ruth is a peach.

Wednesday, Part One

My first year in seminary, I would travel into the city each Wednesday for what we call "field education," referred to in a bygone day as "apostolate," to carry out some form of service in the local community. It certainly had value as service, but I experienced it as a healthy way to keep our feet on the ground and make sure we don't get too stir-crazy going to classes all week long. It's a good balance to our academic and spiritual formation. The following was one of a couple different stories I wrote about one Wednesday in particular; seminary starting again reminded me of them and I thought I'd post them to get me off the hook from coming up with something original the first week of classes.

Enjoy! I'll post the next one in a little while.

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Among the many things I’ve noticed as I’ve grown older is how infrequently I laugh. There was a time in my life when it was rare that I did not find myself doubled up over some foolishness, especially when in the company of those further along on the march – which, happily, seemed like just about everyone. The world was new and fresh enough to my youthful perspective that the slightest hint of a jaded or cynical outlook caught me off guard. When in the sixth grade, I would sputter and choke at eighth graders’ open defiance of authority. When in high school, the thought of the college student’s lackadaisical life, pompous and derisive of this or that professor, or class, or author was comical in its unfamiliarity. When home from college over the summer, working with blue collar tradesmen, the descriptions of their home lives, the relationships with their bosses and wives, their life-philosophies did not measure up with what I thought was appropriate for men of that age, and so, bewildered, laughter was all I could come up with. At the risk of sounding a little too philosophical, laughter was how wonder at people’s loss of a sense of meaning found its way to the surface. Not that I was aware of it then. Thankfully, my instinctual response was more disarming than anything.

Though there seemed to be no shortage of such opportunities to ignite my seemingly boundless mirth, these days encounters like these are more depressing than anything–not only because of their monotonous frequency, but because I sense the possibility for their settling into my own life. When I find myself genuinely laughing, as I did when a bit younger and more susceptible to the absurd, it’s refreshing. The dross is, from some hidden surface, buffed away and the luster is freed from beneath.

This week has been one of much laughter.

Breakfast has been with a handful of seminarians who have all by chance ended up around the same table each morning. A rich eruption of guffaws would boom through the subdued atmosphere of the refectory as it took its first meal of the day, like a lab reaction that had gone haywire. Echoing across the glassy smoothness of the nearby lake, a groggy heron or two was sent squawking into the air, flapping resentfully.

Mornings are always more likely times for mirth. At morning prayer, the chants were intoned by Drew, a late vocation who had spent ten years as a Chicago cop. The formal, Hebraic poetry acquired a new grandeur as it was recited in his South side accent. My insides twisted up as unusally forceful snorts and splutters clutched at me.

At breakfast today, the man of the hour was Ben, a seminarian from the upper peninsula of Michigan. Ben has the same inexhaustible storytelling ability as the sort possessed by my relatives of eastern Wisconsin, and the same accent. Bright eyes burned attentively above a thick, brown beard with streaks of clay and a round belly they call the Milwaukee Goiter. It’s common knowledge that the remote surroundings of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula attract many remarkable types; Ben has a number of stories of the unique individuals that inhabit that place. Among them, Otto, a neighbor of his, occupies a notable place. Otto has a number of exploits to his name, but of importance to us is the Day Otto Fed His Garden.

Otto is quite the outdoorsman, and outdoorsmen of this part of the country pride themselves upon their ability to keep in check animal populations that, without salutary and benevolent management, would multiply themselves with such ferocity that entire ecosystems would be no doubt rapidly annihilated in the ensuing feeding frenzy. This particular day, Otto has been plucking carp (commonly regarded as a pest) from the native waters at a pace commensurate with a woodsman of his skill and experience; that is to say, the water level of the lake in question is dropping at a noticeable rate in proportion to the loss of carp volume. With a reckless abandon matched only by stunt drivers and soldiers who’ve lost the will to live, Otto continues his haul with no regard for what he’s going to do with all these massive fish, flopping pathetically in the bed of his pickup. This is not important to Otto; he is a man of principle. The delicate balance of nature must be maintained, however dire the consequences might be.

Soon, Otto tires. Even sinewy woodsmen like Otto tire! He is, of course, a man of principle; it will not do simply to let these fish lie. They must serve their purpose in the circle of life: how, he cannot say. He is but nature’s humble servant; she will reveal her inscrutable purposes in her own good time. For now, the carp come home with Otto.

His ‘82 Chevy rumbles into the housing development, laden with prey. Carp are no good to eat though they can grow to be quite large fish. Surveying his lot, admiring his massive flower and vegetable garden with satisfaction as he muses over the problem of the carp, something is triggered … Blurry connections begin to form in his head.

As the earthy reek of fish guts mingled with two-stroke exhaust slowly permeates the neighborhood, one by one people come to their doors to investigate the persistent source of their discomfort. Very quickly do they learn it. For from not far down the street comes the sound of a small engine laboring under a heavy load, and the sight of Otto loading carp into his ten-horsepower chipper/shredder. Ragged, meaty fish parts chunk out the chute into a wheelbarrow. Fish too large for the hopper are cut to size with a chainsaw. And Otto, clad in running shorts, aglow with the vision of eight foot vines heavy with produce, calls out over the throb of the machine with all the certainty of a prophet:

“It might smell like fish now, but in a few weeks you’ll be smellin’ my roses!”

The Desk Chair Review of Books, Continued

The Hidden Wound
Wendell Berry

In order to provide a meaningful summary of this book, I need to fill you in on some details about my classwork, so please indulge a brief digression. The last ten weeks of classes were fairly typical for me—a few intense academic courses and a few that, while necessary for my education, didn’t seem to demand as much from me. One of these less important classes, “Pastoral Practice and Racism,” was in my schedule because one class I had initially enrolled in was intended to satisfy a cultural requirement but was obviously geared towards students of another background who came to the United States. “Racism” worked in my schedule, and so I took it, though it was the in the dreaded once-a-week time slot, from 1-4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons.

My basic sense of the class was this: there is something to all this talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination, but none of the prevailing explanations (power, politics, xenophobia, etc.) taken by themselves held any water. All the talk about “celebration of diversity” and “learning from non-white communities” sounded enlightened and welcoming, but no one could ever tell me outright what it was we can learn, or what they have to offer. There was plenty of call for dialogue (which was taken up with even greater vigor when the Reverend Wright began his crusade), but I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be talking about as long as we made sure we were talking. Now, most of this was due to the fact that the class was being taught by a local priest who was committed to the civil rights movement but didn’t have a formal grounding in it. He also conducted his class in the interrogative mood, answering questions with questions; this certainly got us talking, but at a cost of accumulated frustration. I wanted something to chew on, but all this added up to a buffet of statistics and good intentions that spread about a heavy malaise as we sampled from it.

In one of our assigned readings, the author made a passing reference to the book I am reviewing now, and having read one of Berry’s books before, I set out to lay my hands on a copy to supplement the coursework. It was the best decision I made all quarter long, and saved me from personally writing off the class as unsalvageable. For the first time, I was reading an informed and reflective opinion about what white racism did to whites and what whites had to learn from blacks. He is a southern writer dealing in southern racism, and so not all of it was clearly applicable to our own situations of a primarily urban setting, but after the shadowboxing I’d been engaging in for weeks, I was delighted to have a sparring partner.

The first third or so comprises Berry’s reminiscences of growing up as a white child with black mentors. It’s not immediately appealing, but stick with it—much of the rest of the book will operate on this body of experience. Berry ranges wide as he catalogues the ramifications of racism. He takes up the effect slaveholding had on southern Christians and their leadership, insisting that the heavy emphasis on faith and the soul in southern varieties of Christianity was necessary to gloss over the contradictions inherent in attending church with one’s slaves. He discusses the American culture and its superficiality born of smoothing over the festering sore it must conceal. He points to Tolstoy, Twain, and Homer as offering exemplars for what is possible (and necessary) for contemporary relations between classes and races.

But by far the most compelling treatment is the way he ties the race question in with his passionate defense of the land and humanity’s relationship with it. The greatest loss the white race ever suffered from its slaveholding was the loss of contact with the land as a lived experience, substituting the capitalist’s abstract management for the sake of profit. Actually working the land was relegated to “nigger work” and hence was unworthy of the white man. While this did much to enrich whites, a corresponding impoverishment fell upon them (as is so often the case with sin—nobody wins).

Berry describes this impoverishment this way: “It seems to me that the black people developed the psychology, the emotional resilience and equilibrium, the philosophy, and the art necessary to endure and even enjoy the hard manual labor wholly aside from the dynamics of ambition. And from this stemmed an ability more complex than that of the white man to know and to bear life. What we should have learned willingly ourselves we forced the blacks to learn, and so prevented ourselves from learning it.” Interestingly enough, this is a perceptive investigation of the mechanisms and anthropological effects of social sin. In an age when we are only beginning to recognize and dismantle the structures that undermine human flourishing, these insights are valuable even thirty years after they were written.

In short, I found Berry’s insights to be unrecognized more than a quarter century after they were put into words. To his credit, he continues to be a vocal defender of the same ideals he puts forward here. Those of you who get through The Hidden Wound might want to pick up his 1996 book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, which doesn’t deal directly with racism but articulates in greater detail the dehumanizing forces at work in the culture and economy of our own day. It is an equally informative (and pleasing) read.

The Cloud of Unfeeling

Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him,
and let none of his words fall to the ground.

1 Samuel 3:19

As I rounded the corner into her room with a red poinsettia in hand, the gold foil in which it was wrapped crinkled in my grip. Here, there was no smell to get used to. Both the nursing home and the senior housing project, my two previous visits, had rancid air that clung on me for several minutes after stepping outside into the crisp snowfall. In the hospital, nothing stayed around long enough to get rancid—a new bed, a spongebath, fresh sheets, then off to a new ward. Yet when left to themselves, the elderly do not change unless they have to. It is a survival mechanism, I think. At times I wonder if the only reason some people live so long is that dying would disrupt their routine.

For instance, I had called Larry (the one in the project) the night before to let him know I would be coming; the neutral voice of the phone lady informed me that 3-1-2-2-5-6-2-7-5-6 had been disconnected and that no further information was available. The only two possibilities quickly crystallized: a protracted stay at the VA precluded his usual timely bill payment, or the chronic pulmonary obstruction had finally asphyxiated him. Larry doesn't skip on his bills; quite the contrary. I have a hard time convincing him that I can't take any money from him when I run little errands he can't do himself. This time, I bought him a smaller poinsettia and didn’t buy him a box of chocolates like I did for the others, figuring that either way he’d be in no condition to enjoy them. The attendant at the door informed me he was still around, 313, same as usual. As I pounded on his door, hardly wanting to open my mouth for the taste of the air, there was no response, and the door was locked. I assumed I’d just missed him, until one of the neighbors stepped out and informed me he’d moved up to 413 two days earlier, and the phone company hadn’t hooked up his new line yet. (Apparently there was a third possibility.) I found him in 413 with his headphones on, leering into the TV set, and his pale eyes filled the lenses of his glasses as he tried to recognize the sound of my voice. I sat as he griped and cursed and laughed at my jibes, just like old times.

The elderly do not change unless they have to.

Ruth had sounded horrible on the phone the evening before, but she seemed happy about my promise to visit the next day so I assumed the subdued tone was because she had her teeth out. Seven hours after our conversation, a neighbor heard her shrieking for help and the paramedics brought her to the nearby hospital to recover from massive dizziness and pain from her recent falls. She had shrunken visibly since I saw her five months ago, now bent nearly double in her bed, the crown of each knob of bone whitening the skin along the horseshoe curve of her spine; speechless with pain and horrendous vertigo, unable to lift her head for more than a few moments to acknowledge that she recognized me—and in so doing she revealed through the neck of her shift bowls of skin hung around impossibly thin bones whose arrangement I did not recognize. Her chin sunk back to her breast, and she whimpered for the dizziness. As I greeted her son, who had driven many days to be with his mother during what may well be her last days, every word we exchanged in the vicinity of this contorted woman had the tone of a blasphemy.

There was not much time, as several inches of impending snow and a good portion of Chicago still lay between me and evening Mass. Ruth was insensible so we chatted for a few minutes as if she was not there, and the abyss gaped wider. This woman was in a sorrowfully shrunken world of her own, isolated from us, and we from her. I was as desperate as I was unable. When I took my leave, I put the beads that had slipped into a crease in the sheets back into her hand, and told her that he would be with her; keep fighting, it would be better soon.

As I uttered them my words rebounded back into my face as if I were speaking alone in a silent room with my nose against a plaster wall.

They dribbled off my lips and ran down my chin, splattering on the bedrail and running along the leg of the bed into a puddle on the floor, unnoticed, forgotten, dull, worthless, absurd, like the red poinsettia wrapped in gold foil that sat beside her, out of the range of her crippled vision, on the bed tray.

amdg

First Snowfall of the Year