A little library of thoughts...

This morning during class, I had another instance of a thought that comes into my head from time to time. Fr. Dunne was working through one of my favorites lectures of his so far on the vulnerable-izing of the heart that occurs when you let another in, and he was working through the reintegration of the heart after that vulnerability ends in the loss or death of the other.

He pointed to the story of Solomon, which he told us from memory is found is 1 Kings 3. God asks Solomon what Solomon wants from God, and Solomon asks for an "understanding heart". Because of his humility, God gives him the wisdom of heart he requests and also the other more superficial things he resisted the temptation to ask for. This story fit our day's lecture beautifully, and I enjoyed the simplicity and centeredness of Solomon's reply.

As I soaked in the relevance of the story to myself and what we were discussing, I thought, why don't we trace back to these OT stories more often? We already have a tendency as Catholics to leave the Scripture for the first half of mass, and even then, we tend to focus on the epistle and Gospel (at least in my experience).

I would like a greater biblical literacy, especially in the OT, and I had the recurring thought to start reading the Bible cover-to-cover. I've come across a few people who have tried it, and I admire their efforts.

It'd be long and arduous but could be super-rewarding. As usual when this thought comes in, I considered it but nixed it, knowing I'd get into routine, rote reading and drag my feet. I haven't abandoned the idea, but I feel like I'd underappreciate it. (still gonna think about it because maybe I just need to do it and let it be whatever it is...)

Either way, I wish I had better OT knowledge. I wish I had taken OT here at Notre Dame; I wish theology required both scripture courses instead of one or the other. I wish I knew more stories intimately than the few like Solomon's prayer, the call of Samuel, and the small voice of God to Elijah in the mountainside. These stories open up a different perspective of God from the ancient Israelite perspective that can be so illuminative and supplements the bloc of NT stories (which are probably too few in quantity and quality in my conscience as well).

An interesting point popped out at me from Commonweal magazine after I sat down to read after class. A review of a comic-book form of Genesis opened with a striking conversation on the Bible that tangented from my thoughts during class:

"Despite our increasing unfamiliarity with its content, the Bible is constantly being punted between righty and lefty ideologues, atheists and believers, creationists and those who understand Genesis (for starts) as didactic fiction. What we think the Bible says is not half as important to us as what we judge others to think it says."

As the place of the Bible in public education is argued and secular interpretations of the Bible or even de-faith-ed historical-critical methods rise, so often the commentary of the Bible is directed to others and to what it is not.

I hope to stem my shortcomings in contributing to that. I am working with some guys in my dorm to solidify a weekly Bible-study/faith-sharing "Emmaus" group. I am loving my work on the Gospel of Luke and the idea of the Kingdom of God in Jesus' preaching/Luke's account of it. I am digging into the Apocalypse of John next semester in a grad-school-level class.

However, I know I have to get beyond just classroom stuff and keep bringing the Bible with me in life. Stuff like Emmaus is a good start; grounding liturgy planning on the readings keeps it going. Catholics must work to stay close to the two legs of the Church's teaching: Tradition and Scripture.

PS: This is the 50th post in just over a year of keeping this blog. Thank you so much to all of you who read and share the posts others. I thank God and all of you for being with me as I post these reflections.

Blogging on Blogging

Here is a candid, personal, unfiltered portion of my essay for Fr. Dunne's class. It is the last part of an essay talking about how a "spiritual journey" is my way of making death a fulfillment of life. This part talks about my love of writing and the joys and dangers of writing regularly/keeping this blog. I want to thank you all for reading as much as you do and for sharing the thoughts here with others. God bless you! ...

The most personally nourishing thing I do is write. I find happiness and joy in the sacraments, liturgies, and tradition of the Church, in the outlets for personal piety to practice my spirituality and faith, and through my relationships with wonderful people that uphold my life as beacons of Christ’s love. However, when it comes to what I do myself, how I use my gifts and all that I am, I feel most engaged and sure when I am doing spiritual writing. I do not really keep a regular journal. However, occasionally, I will make a note to myself, wait for it to fester a bit in my head, and then find some time to flesh it out in a short essay and post it to my blog.

I love the opportunity to sit down with a thought or a reflection progression and put effort into pinning down the essence of what is brewing within me. The process of moving from more general, abstract reflection toward the ownership that comes with articulation is a welcome challenge for me. I differ from Lewis in that I target no segment or part of any audience (his was the general Christian public), but I am like him in that I will explore whatever comes into my being and present it publicly, to anyone who is interested, using whatever terms I can conjure up.

I realize that the things central to the faith are complex and literally are mysteries; ergo, I never seek or claim to give definitive, final answers to anything. I do not venture into polemics or apologetics too much, but I simply try to give unfiltered, first-hand thoughts of a conscientious Catholic Christian taking in the full scope of his life. The top of my blog is subtitled with a quote that I pulled from Origen in which he seeks to remind himself of the “John the Baptist” kind of idea but in a way re-crafted to speak to writers: “The spoken word, even if it is true in itself and very persuasive, is not sufficient to affect a human soul unless some power is also given by God to the speaker and grace is added to what is said. It is only by God's gift that this power is possessed by those whose preaching is successful” (Origen, Contra Celsum, 6.2).

I am blessed, humbled, and excited to have a pretty solid readership. Through some word of mouth, including a link in my e-mail signature, and posting links on my Facebook page, many friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers read my blog and take in my thoughts. I see this as an opportunity and do not abuse my privilege: I strive for quality over quantity; I do not push an agenda or self-promote; I keep my writing centered on Christ, the Church, and Christianity. I thank God for the compliments and comments I receive, but I need to ground my actual work more concretely in prayer so that my writing pours forth from me in the most intentional way.

In addition to that, more profound dangers exist as possible traps. The quest for deeper understanding and for real articulation of belief is right and good. However, the danger grows when it becomes something insisted upon, when the centrality of mystery is jeopardized. Ultimately, I must remember that the Christian faith is founded on mysteries and miracles—the Incarnation and Resurrection are real, historical events that allow us amazing access to the God that is Love, but I must always remember the ultimate transcendence of these things that are the foundation of my faith. I am committed to that deep in my heart, but the trouble arises when I am treating the things that are less clearly mystery, the secondary and simpler things. The reality that human reason is limited and needs faith with it is what will keep me humble and grounded as I write about my ongoing spiritual journey.

The greatest danger that increasingly troubles me is the pervasiveness of my reflection. Taking time to be with oneself and with God, before God, is of utmost importance and is the crux of a life of prayer. The problem for me comes in naturally, instinctively, without prompting myself, reflecting on everything, almost instantaneously. It inhibits me from being fully present to moments as they happen and moves me into processing-reflecting mode before the moment has even passed. It troubles me when I can tell in a moment that I have already moved on from it as it is still happening. I have found greater peace and remedy in engaging myself with people and moments in order to not retreat so quickly into that place of reflection. When I am paying good attention to the people I am with and residing in a ministry of presence, I let the reflection wait until later on, when there is actual experience to reflect upon.

Christ's Inculturating

In my World Christianity class, we have talked a lot about the process of inculturation, which is basically the process by which Christianity engages a culture and seeks to incorporate some of its customs, rituals, etc.

This semester's class load has been a wonderful synthesis of learning between World Christianity, my Theology of Benedict XVI class (Benedict writes a lot on modernization, secularization, relativity, and much more), and my poli-sci class on Globalization. The crossovers have been wonderful, and I enjoy when each class doesn't have to be isolated to a corner of my brain.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and go after a crossover that might be a bit of a stretch but cool to consider nonetheless...

The Incarnation--God becoming man as Jesus Christ the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit and the motherhood of Mary and establishing for us the Church as an eschatological and social institution for His believers--is the first and ideal form of inculturation... eh? eh?

My basis: another crossover--my work on the Kingdom of God, especially in the Gospel of Luke, has made me really sensitive to any considerations of the Kingdom. Maybe I was just oblivious before, but the Kingdom is everywhere in theology, more so than I previously imagined.

My sensitivity to the Kingdom piqued my attention when reading Benedict's treatment of the Our Father. Scrutinizing each part of the prayer, Benedict's attention to "on earth as it is in heaven" opened up a new idea for me. Here's the bit that got me:

"[W]here God's will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God's will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes 'heaven' when and insofar as God's will is done there; and it is merely 'earth', the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that it may be on earth as it is in heaven--that earth may become 'heaven'." (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 147-148)

The way that we most profoundly and effectively have access to God is through Jesus Christ, the Son, who became flesh, who walked where we walked, who did the same things God asks us to do, the reason why we sing, "Let us go, where he has gone, rest and reign with him in heaven." (Jesus Lives, a Folk Choir favorite).

Christ invites us into our earthly mission--love, in both suffering and triumph--and to our eternal salvation with Him in Heaven. The beauty of His love, of our Incarnational Christology, and of the Trinitarian God that reigns in Heaven, came to earth, dwells with us as Spirit--all of this has come to us in fullness through Christ.

Meanwhile, we endure, seeking to love and serve Him through the Church, the bride of Christ that is the fullest means to salvation. The Church was instituted by Christ and left in the hands of Peter and his successors under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit. The Church is not the Kingdom, but it is an eschatological reality that unites us with Christ in anticipation of the fullness of heaven. The Church is how we manifest our faith and our Tradition and "do this is memory" of Christ.

Christ came from heaven and engaged the culture of earth. It is by His Incarnation, ministry, Passion, and Resurrection that we have gained the fullness of Truth. The human, earthly culture has the fruits of Christ's presence. It is up to us to incorporate the elements of heavenly culture into what we practice on earth.

The basic way we can do that is through the mass, in which we praise God with the angels and celebrate the Paschal feast with the high priests and heavenly choirs that we hear in the Book of Revelation. Branching out from the Word and Sacrament, our Church seeks to make real and evident the power of Christ.

It is up to us to consider the heavenly elements of our faith and our Church. Only if we truly believe that the Church can prefigure heaven will this become more strongly realized, for it is only inasmuch as we do God's will on earth that we experience heaven in this life. So may we go where He has gone, both on earth and in heaven, and enter the cultural exchange between earth and Our Father in heaven.

Stand Up

I was paging through my Magnificat during Zahm-Cavanaugh Emmaus Monday night, and I came across a startlingly beautiful bit of text that jarred me a bit.

The prescribed Gospel Acclamation verse for Sunday, November 14th (33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time) is, "Stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand."

The phrase "at hand" has kicked me around a bunch in life, especially as I dig into my thesis research on the Kingdom of God and the complexities of the idea of the kingdom being "at hand". On a simple level, it means happening and present but in progress, implying a lack of completion or fulfillment.

In this case, I understood it to be a case more so of incompleteness on my (our) part. The Word is there, being proclaimed in the mass, the words of everlasting life. However, we kind of casually or inattentively let it wash over us, grabbing a nugget of wisdom from the homily or maybe straight complaining about it.

This acclamation is a beautifully stark and plain reminder of the reality that kinda really jarred me from my daze. Unfortunately, our conversation had gotten away from the readings before us at Emmaus, but I am hanging on to this beck and call.

We stand at the time of the Gospel reading to elevate our focus and attention and sacramentally demonstrate the high truth proclaimed therein. I think it's a sweet way to refocus after 10 minutes of sitting and listening. As long as this idea stays fresh, I think I'll be much less likely to lean on the back row of the risers up in the loft on Sundays or hesitant to lean on the pew or shuffle my feet as I acclaim the Gospel.

The Gospel Acclamation can become such a mechanistic kind of thing, especially as the mass parts settle on using the Celtic Alleluia week-in, week-out--a beautiful setting but one that lends itself to absent-minded recitation after so many uses. This is a pretty dang sweet snap-out-of-all-that text for us to have.

Often times, we bow our heads and close our eyes to enter a space of quiet deeper within and seek prayer there. In the case of the Gospel and its acclamation, it is an opportunity to be communal and enter the public space of the Church and its celebration of the Word and Eucharist.

Stand erect.
Raise your head.
Your redemption is at hand.

Seeking Quiet for the Will

"The virtue of charity brings quiet to our will, so that we only want what we have, and thirst for nothing beyond that" (Dante's Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto III, 70-72).

There is so much in life that I don't have. I'm not rich. I don't have a 4.0 (or a degree from Oxford). I'm not best friends with every person in the world. My faith is incomplete at best. My life is not perfectly peaceful. But why should all that disrupt the peace that is there?

I've been far too sensitive to the things I don't have these days. It's not so much possessions as it is abstract things that are harder to quantify. Even worse, I create super-lofty criteria and unnecessarily high/tough standards that are realistically impossible to meet. The result: disappointment and disruption of peace. The delusion: that imperfect peace is ok and that it's the best I can do.

The reality: thinking everything is fine and ain't getting better is garbage, and to quote a friend of mine, "if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards". Wait, but what about contentment in what one has? It appears this boils down to another case of moderation, finding the balance point between two ends, which is basically the story of my spiritual journey.

Right now, my balance is way too tilted toward focusing on the not, the missing, and that is too dominant. The work against complacency is what keeps us/me moving forward. The source of imbalance in my case, and probably many others, is an error in the end sought. My focus had shifted too much off Christ.

My faith is not passing through any raised intensity of doubt or thinness, but the centrality of Christ was waning to make Christ too incidental to the daily's of life. Or, in the cases where He remained foremost, it had become too much of a company line--as with discernment, where I've reached such clarity amid the unsureness that I have it down too much to a pre-fabricated response.

The answer: reorienting. Having the ability to drag myself onto a self-made retreat is a gift I am blessed to have from being on so many wonderful retreat experiences, and I was able to have that time today before the Lord in Adoration. I love the variety of ways one can be before Christ, especially in physicalities: looking right into the monstrance, bowing/burying one's head, blocking out the rest of the room around your eyes to only see the Eucharist, kneeling down, prostration, etc.

I went with Christ on retreat, going into my prayer knowing that getting away from thought (more objective, personally/internally originated processes) and entering reflection and prayer (concretely including God by addressing Him, considering His will, considering Christ's response) would calm the choppy waters within. It would spread the peace wider and deeper.

I, like any other, struggle to let God speak, but after my half hour, I knew the answer was asking Christ to follow me out of the chapel and beat my self-constructed criteria to the punch. I need Christ to be within more than ever to remind me of what is and can be before I focus on what is not. It is in re-grounding it all in love and presence that the sometimes-interrupted peace becomes more pervasive again. The only thing I know I heard God say was in response to my concluding prayer of thanks: He said, "You're welcome."

I cannot get too low when I have Christ with me, but I had pushed Him to the sidelines too much. I am happy every day, but the blips on my radar were increasing in frequency and intensity to distract me from feeling the joy therein. Christ is at the helm much more now, and my prayer is that I can keep Him there bigger and better than before.

Ultimately, God's will is our peace (also Dante). So if we tap into His will, we reach our peace. And by virtue of His love, we find satisfaction in what we have and seek in right proportion and manner to maximize the love there, wanting nothing more than God, who is Love.

Note: I'll pick up the ministry discussion later on sometime, perhaps during a break when I can start reading The Godbearing Life again.