Thursday, December 22, 2011
Into Great Silence
The greatest engine for communication ever invented is the one which most isolates us from each other. The Incarnation with all the consequences of the life, passion, death & resurrection of Our Lord connects all times with each other, eclipses, or should eclipse, the boundries of space & language, whereas the narrow concerns, the local language, the present moment, confine us even when we appear to be msot liberated.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Calvary as Life
The French writer Georges Simenon, known for his Inspector Maigret stories, wrote that "We're all failures, because we all die". Raised with the American faith that good work, fairness, rooting for the underdog would all lead towards a decent life, I only discovered gradually the opposite way, the life of Calvary, the way to the Cross accompanying the crucified & risen Christ. Life can only be a continual Passion, or it is not life, but only a sort of well-dressed, well-fed Death. Our society can only tell tales now about Death, in video games and in stories about war, murder, forensic detective work. "Whoever would save his life shall lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake shall preserve it alive."
Friday, April 22, 2011
La fille ainée de l'eglise
I owe so much to the French saints & to French Christians whose writings have resounded through the world. My patron saint, Thomas Aquinas, studied & taught in Paris; St. Therese of Lisieux, the next thing to a patron saint, has, since her relics were brought through the diocese a decade ago, constantly pulled me out of the muck. Sixteen years ago, during my trip to France, I'd get off the train in each city & go to a nearby church or cathedral to the Lady chapel in each to pray. In Paris, I stumbled across the chapel in which St. Catherine Labouré beheld Our Lady & received instruction to have the Miraculous Medal made and circulated throughout the country & the world. On at least two occasions when I had a severe fall while wearing the medal, Our Lady has prevented terrible injury from occurring.
Familiarity breeds contempt
The substance of the Holy Father's Maunday Thursday homily is excellent. But perhaps one reason people have contempt and indifference for Holy Church and for the Second Person of the Trinity is the terrible habit of casually employing when referring to Our Lord. Where is the reverence? It seems rarely present in papal locutions in the last thirty years -- as if Our Lord needed the kind of PR makeover that hitherto was the province of Protestantism. "At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess" -- but in the media world, the reverence due the Holy Name & God Incarnate is not habitual -- even for the sovereign pontiff and successor of St. Peter. Holy Father -- return reverence to your homilies and messages! We need to relearn the majesty & sanctity of the Holy Name!
Monday, March 28, 2011
Monk in the Ruins
Once, the Spanish brother who'd become St. John of the Cross, was journeying with another, who pointed out the beauty of a particular church. "A brother does not travel to see [the sights], but not to see," he replied.
In America, we are in the midst of ruins; even if we live in a city where the ruin is not as apparent as it is in the old industrial cities. The ruins are the ruins of the spirit; and the ruin is evident in all the delusory self-proclamation of our power. As yet another president orders up another round of bombing & war -- which, along with torture and secrecy, are the only things our rulers are equipped for -- the words of all the pundits & all the pretenders to the throne, all the eager frauds who piggyback their ambition on the Church, are the audible equivalent of ancient ruins. But they are contemporary ruins, they are spiritual ruins, and invisible to the camera of the news corporations. Those cameras avoid even the real ruins caused by our bombs and our mad national avarice, and those who sit or stand before them aren't about to discuss something which is far too real for the halls where the corporate kings reign in place of what once were deliberative assemblies.
Holy Mother Church, too, remains in ruins, those spread far & wide in the past half century. A certain part of the Church has fared better in the last decade or so than it did in the immediate aftermath of the debacle of the 1960s; but in the US, that part is swamped by its worldly alliance with the right-wing factions, and abroad, in Rome and elsewhere, compromised by the idol of ecumenism.
The debacle of the 1960s and 1970s was the product of the oaths of obedience that all monks were bound by. It had never been foreseen that a wave of purest unbelief would sweep through those at the head of those orders, and that they would be bidden to abandon the ancient mass, rather than defend it, dirty themselves with the world, rather than despise it. An acquaintance who was seeking regular priesthood in the 1970s was told by the vocations director at the time to "go and get laid" before he would be considered a candidate for priesthood. It was that atmosphere that created the horrors of the recent scandals that have swept the Church: sin and disobedience all along the middling seats of authority, with a dreadful, inert, indifferent, incompetent pope watching the collapse & never acting except at the instance of those who were causing the decay, and leaving his successors to try to handle the catastrophe.
I'd wished for the monastery before I was officially Catholic, even tho' the sect I was in believed all the Protestant idiocy about monastic life. But by the time I was moving toward the Church, the orders that would have seemed best suited to receive & shape my life (the Jesuits, the Dominicans) were largely passing on the contagions. Rather than in their advance positions, they had suffered a rout, attacked from behind and everywhere making little bargains with large devils to keep at least their titles or positions.
In a time of pure chaos -- and it was not even yet pure chaos -- it requires faith, not just assent, to believe that God is provident, that He works in the midst of the catastrophe. He intends our faith to be strengthened by confronting the realities directly without trying to explain them away, as Job's comforters try to do.
So I spent my adult life as a monk in the ruins, without order or rule, aspiring to regular spiritual life, tumbling badly, and throwing myself into horrors, ultimately, in despair of God as well as of my self, in the hopes of wresting some life from the World.
I think of Fray Juan from Ypres, before he was the acclaimed mystic, suffering less from the World than at the hands of those in the Church who had appointed themselves judges in his case. To suffer at the hands of those consecrated to serve Christ & His Church is the worst of suffering -- and over these decades, first from one side, then from the other, those hungering and thirsting for righteousness have been turned away as spiritual beggars. Many have sought shelter elsewhere, abandoning and denouncing the Church, damning her as a reactionary force, brutal and insensitive, or, in other places, as too tolerant & forgiving.
But this World, and all its servants and minions, all its multitude of megachurches & preachers & impostors & clowns, are slated for destruction, nor is their destruction sleeping, as St. Paul tells us. As Our Lord told those who were appalled by the collapse of an older tower, "Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? [5] No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."
It's Lent in the Church's year, but it is also Lent for all, a time when there are no remedies. Penance is not a remedy, but simply the fruit of recognition of our own sin, our own part in making the ruins, and the only just & true response towards God -- we have stolen, murdered, ravaged, destroyed, or benefited from all these while remaining quiescent, or worse, enlisted in the armies of bandits and brutes in the name of some 'godly' crusade.
Sixteen centuries ago, St. Benedict of Nursia began the small work which would, at length, save not that civilization but the seeds of a new way, and today the same is true of all the work of monks: not our direct purpose, which is solely to fulfill the prayer in this world that God's will be done here as it is in Heaven. This does not contract us out to political candidates or parties or movements that claim to be doing God's will: that would be just more idolatry. The Our Father, in its simplicity, is part of the other prayer, that in the Upper Room, which gives us the pattern, and the imperative, of our existence. Abandoning the world for God, abandoning ourselves to God for the sake of those who are also being damned by and in the world, learning in our flesh and in our sorrows and in our lives that Deus caritas est -- it is THE human search, what all human beings, whether monks by vocation or not, are drawn to do.
In America, we are in the midst of ruins; even if we live in a city where the ruin is not as apparent as it is in the old industrial cities. The ruins are the ruins of the spirit; and the ruin is evident in all the delusory self-proclamation of our power. As yet another president orders up another round of bombing & war -- which, along with torture and secrecy, are the only things our rulers are equipped for -- the words of all the pundits & all the pretenders to the throne, all the eager frauds who piggyback their ambition on the Church, are the audible equivalent of ancient ruins. But they are contemporary ruins, they are spiritual ruins, and invisible to the camera of the news corporations. Those cameras avoid even the real ruins caused by our bombs and our mad national avarice, and those who sit or stand before them aren't about to discuss something which is far too real for the halls where the corporate kings reign in place of what once were deliberative assemblies.
Holy Mother Church, too, remains in ruins, those spread far & wide in the past half century. A certain part of the Church has fared better in the last decade or so than it did in the immediate aftermath of the debacle of the 1960s; but in the US, that part is swamped by its worldly alliance with the right-wing factions, and abroad, in Rome and elsewhere, compromised by the idol of ecumenism.
The debacle of the 1960s and 1970s was the product of the oaths of obedience that all monks were bound by. It had never been foreseen that a wave of purest unbelief would sweep through those at the head of those orders, and that they would be bidden to abandon the ancient mass, rather than defend it, dirty themselves with the world, rather than despise it. An acquaintance who was seeking regular priesthood in the 1970s was told by the vocations director at the time to "go and get laid" before he would be considered a candidate for priesthood. It was that atmosphere that created the horrors of the recent scandals that have swept the Church: sin and disobedience all along the middling seats of authority, with a dreadful, inert, indifferent, incompetent pope watching the collapse & never acting except at the instance of those who were causing the decay, and leaving his successors to try to handle the catastrophe.
I'd wished for the monastery before I was officially Catholic, even tho' the sect I was in believed all the Protestant idiocy about monastic life. But by the time I was moving toward the Church, the orders that would have seemed best suited to receive & shape my life (the Jesuits, the Dominicans) were largely passing on the contagions. Rather than in their advance positions, they had suffered a rout, attacked from behind and everywhere making little bargains with large devils to keep at least their titles or positions.
In a time of pure chaos -- and it was not even yet pure chaos -- it requires faith, not just assent, to believe that God is provident, that He works in the midst of the catastrophe. He intends our faith to be strengthened by confronting the realities directly without trying to explain them away, as Job's comforters try to do.
So I spent my adult life as a monk in the ruins, without order or rule, aspiring to regular spiritual life, tumbling badly, and throwing myself into horrors, ultimately, in despair of God as well as of my self, in the hopes of wresting some life from the World.
I think of Fray Juan from Ypres, before he was the acclaimed mystic, suffering less from the World than at the hands of those in the Church who had appointed themselves judges in his case. To suffer at the hands of those consecrated to serve Christ & His Church is the worst of suffering -- and over these decades, first from one side, then from the other, those hungering and thirsting for righteousness have been turned away as spiritual beggars. Many have sought shelter elsewhere, abandoning and denouncing the Church, damning her as a reactionary force, brutal and insensitive, or, in other places, as too tolerant & forgiving.
But this World, and all its servants and minions, all its multitude of megachurches & preachers & impostors & clowns, are slated for destruction, nor is their destruction sleeping, as St. Paul tells us. As Our Lord told those who were appalled by the collapse of an older tower, "Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? [5] No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."
It's Lent in the Church's year, but it is also Lent for all, a time when there are no remedies. Penance is not a remedy, but simply the fruit of recognition of our own sin, our own part in making the ruins, and the only just & true response towards God -- we have stolen, murdered, ravaged, destroyed, or benefited from all these while remaining quiescent, or worse, enlisted in the armies of bandits and brutes in the name of some 'godly' crusade.
Sixteen centuries ago, St. Benedict of Nursia began the small work which would, at length, save not that civilization but the seeds of a new way, and today the same is true of all the work of monks: not our direct purpose, which is solely to fulfill the prayer in this world that God's will be done here as it is in Heaven. This does not contract us out to political candidates or parties or movements that claim to be doing God's will: that would be just more idolatry. The Our Father, in its simplicity, is part of the other prayer, that in the Upper Room, which gives us the pattern, and the imperative, of our existence. Abandoning the world for God, abandoning ourselves to God for the sake of those who are also being damned by and in the world, learning in our flesh and in our sorrows and in our lives that Deus caritas est -- it is THE human search, what all human beings, whether monks by vocation or not, are drawn to do.
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