Priesthood: to do or to be?

St John Vianney: Ezekiel 3.17-21 and Matthew 9.35-10.1
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Serra Club

PODCAST!
Our teacher, a twenty-something yuppie, asked me in class about my career plans. I answered, “I’m going to be a Catholic priest.” He gave me a blank stare, snickered, and then became openly hostile, grilling me aggressively about my vocation. When he insisted that I prove God’s existence by rubbing some of my Lourdes water on his tennis elbow, I ended the harassment with my own openly hostile stare.

Jesus tells his disciples to pray for more laborers for the field after he notes with pity, with compassion the sorry spiritual state of those gathered in the crowd. Looking out over them he sees diseased, abandoned, troubled souls who need the cure and healing of their Father’s mercy. They are sheep without a shepherd, a nation without a purpose. And so, Jesus provides both shepherds and a purpose.

Notice the pattern: Jesus goes around teaching and preaching, curing every disease. He sees the need of the crowd, is moved by compassion, orders his students to pray for vocations, gives them his authority over unclean spirits and then they go around teaching and preaching, curing every disease. In receiving Christ’s authority, the disciples become Christ’s priests; they minister to God’s people in persona Christi Capitis—in the person of Christ the Head of the Church. In effect, they are Christs!

We cannot forget this when we promote vocations to the priesthood nor can we ever allow those ordained to the priesthood to forget this. The temptation to reduce the ordained priesthood to an ecclesial function, a job with a skill-set is not easily resisted these days. Our American penchant for pragmatism and egalitarianism moves us very easily to the conclusion that “being a priest” is merely “acting as a priest.” In other words, “I am a priest b/c I function as a priest.” If my function is my identity, then anyone capable of functioning as a priest can be a priest. Questions of a legitimate call to service, proper spiritual disposition, gender, marital status, willingness to submit to ecclesial authority—all of these are irrelevant. The only question that matters is: can he/she do the job?

But is this the pattern we find in Matthew’s gospel? No. Jesus did not call the crowd to be laborers for the harvest. He called The Twelve. Jesus was not moved by political indignation at the treatment of marginalized groups He was moved by compassion for troubled souls. Jesus did not empower his disciples to challenge entrenched structures of social oppression and economic injustice. He gave them the authority to heal, the power to make the troubled whole again.

I am absolutely confident that no member of the Serra Club would treat a young man called to priesthood or anyone called to religious life the way my teacher treated me! But the temptation to clerical functionalism is more subtle, more seductive. It seems right to our hard-working, middle-class ears. It seems right to us when we ask one another: “What do you do?” rather than “Who are you?” It seems right to assume that the job the priest does—pastor, campus minister, professor—is who he is.

So, I will end with this question: do we truly understand what we are promoting when we promote vocations to the priesthood?

Field, pearl, treasure

Blessed Jane Aza: Jeremiah 15.10, 16-21; Matthew 13.44-46
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

HEAR IT!
The gospel has a price. No, I don’t mean that we ought to be charged admission to hear the gospel read and preached. What I mean is that though our redemption is freely given, a gift from God for His greater glory, the call to serve the Lord as apostolic witnesses to His truth and mercy comes with consequences and tasty temptations.

Jesus tells his disciples what will happen to them when they go out into the world to preach: rejection, persecution, violence, death, and the occasional, glorious conversion. Though they will be strengthened by his Holy Spirit, they will also be dogged step by step by forces contrary to the Word, forces dedicated to the slavery of the human heart and mind. These forces will flash meaty temptations to distract and to discourage the vigorous delivery of the gospel These forces will exact a price for the apostles’ obedient focus and their zealous hearts.

But Jesus also tells the disciples that the kingdom of heaven is worth the work, more than worth the price. Buried in a field the kingdom is a treasure worth the price of the whole field. The kingdom is a pearl worth one’s entire fortune. The question now is: you have the field with its treasure and the pearl worth your fortune, what do you do with them? I think our answer to this question shines a bright light on two temptations we face as a Church right now. The temptation to assimilate and the temptation is isolate.

Jesus charged his disciples with the task of preaching his Word. He did not charge them with the task of preaching the gospel of popular culture nor did he charge them with the task of hoarding the Word. He did not tell them to blend in and tell pleasing stories. Nor did he tell them to build walled cities and keep the gospel-treasure a secret.

We are tempted in our anxiety to isolate, to hold-up in safe and solid walls of familiar routine and rote formula. The treasure is too precious to tarnish with exposure and so it must be well-guarded. And here we succumb to disobedience. Go out and preach, Jesus says. Go out and preach. We are also tempted in our desire for popular approval to assimilate, to dissolve into our culture by dropping the difficult teachings of Christ. Surely it is easier to simply wave over potentially divisive teachings like his claim to be our only Messiah than it is to preach the uniqueness of the salvation he offers us. Both of these temptations are red meat for the beasts of our arrogance, our laziness, our pride, and our self-righteousness.

The treasure we have given our souls to possess is kept rich, plentiful, well-stocked, and desirable in the sharing of it, in the giving of it away. To hoard it for ourselves in our anxiety or to destroy it in our need for cultural approval is joyless, empty waste. When we hoard the gospel we cannot be heard behind our walls. When we prostitute the gospel to the our culture we have nothing worth saying.


God says to Jeremiah: “If you repent…if you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you; and you shall not turn to them.”

ad majorem Dei gloriam

St. Ignatius of Loyola: I Cor 10.31-11.1 and Luke 14.25-33
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

HEAR IT!
You can only witness faithfully to what is first in your life. So, you had better think before you sign on to be a student of the Master of Charity. You had better consider carefully the price of his education.

In the last few weeks, Jesus graduated his friends from disciples to apostles, making missionaries out of students. In the commencement address on graduation day Jesus exhorts them to go out into the world relying solely on the abundant goodwill of those to whom they will witness, taking no second cloak, no sandals, no money. He warns them carefully that their witness will not be always be heard as faithful testimony. Sometimes it will be heard as blasphemy, sometimes as sedition, and sometimes as an inconvenient truth. Regardless of how their witness is heard, Jesus tells them that they are to give glory to God first and only and speak as ones who have seen and heard. And this simple act of fidelity is guaranteed to get them all killed. And it does.

If you will apply for this program in the School of Wisdom and Love, Professor Jesus has some words of advice for you at the beginning of this school year: if you will not put aside your parents, your siblings, your children, even your own life, you cannot be admitted. This program of conversion and witness requires dedicated focus, undivided loyalty. If you will not carry your own cross and walk gladly to your own execution, then you do not meet the perquisites for admission. If you will not calculate the cost of your discipleship, you are not ready for these final exams. You pay tuition in blood, sweat, and tears. There is no financial aid.

Now, all that seems just a little dramatic for us sitting here in Irving, TX in 2006. No one is ever going to ask any of us here to put aside a husband or wife, or abandon our children, or to take up a cross and hang for our witness. Our situation is more subtle, and therefore, far, far more dangerous.

Here’s the point for us in our postmodern comforts: if you will do this Christian thing, if you will move from being a student to being a missionary and move with any sort of integrity, any sort of fidelity to Christ, you will do so for one reason only: ad majorem dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God…and for that reason alone. You will not do this for the love of husband or wife or children or mother or father. You will not do this to avoid trials, to avoid persecutions. To put anything before the glory of God, to put anything before your witness to the truth of the faith—a science, a philosophy, an ideology, a family—is to ruin everything you are, everything you are as his disciple.

You can only be a faithful witness to what is first in your life. If that is Christ, the Glory of the Father, then everything else—family, friends, career, your cross, everything else makes perfect sense in your discipleship. Our families do not save us. Our friends do not save us. Our careers do not save us. Our degrees do not save us. Our ideological commitments do not save us. Our charitable works do not save us. We are saved in the single historical act of self-sacrifice of Christ on the cross. We are saved in this witness of love and we are saved for the greater glory of God.

Be imitators of Christ: you can only witness faithfully to what is first in your life.

Stop blaming the dirt!

16th Week OT (Fri): Jer 3.14-17; Matthew 13.18-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


Brothers and sisters, it’s time we stopped blaming the dirt! It’s time we stopped shaming the soil! For too long we have shunned the sandy soil, the thorny thickets, and the rocky rolling hills. It has become too easy, too simple to explain away our failures as the Lord’s Farmers by saying, “It’s not me, Lord, it’s the dirt!” It’s easy to blame the dirt. Easy to point a finger at the soil and say, “Too rocky!” Or, “Not rich enough!” Or, “Too many thorns!” The dirt just is. It’s just there waiting to do whatever it is by it’s nature capable of doing—being rocky, being sandy, being thorny. So, let’s hear no more whining about Bad Ground, or Poor Soil.

Who’s to blame when the seed doesn’t sprout or doesn’t hold root or fails to blossom? Read the Gospel! The Evil One steals the tender sprout from the row. It is the Devil who robs the first budding of faith from one who receives the seed—from one who hears the Word—but doesn’t understand it. Tribulations yank the joyful, sprouted plant from its rocky ground. It is the Big Test, the Trial of living the Word in a hostile world that weeds this rootless hearer, this believer without a firm foundation. Anxiety and the temptations of Mammon choke the tiny leaves of the seed planted among the thorns. It is the failure to trust God and serve Him first and only that saps vital nutrients from the believer, kills his blossom, and withers his spiritual fruit.

But, again, it is not the fault of the dirt. Soil can be rocky, sandy, thorny. The hearer of the Word may be ignorant, shallow, skeptical. Soil can be dry, acidic, hard packed. The hearer of the Word may be despairing, hard-hearted, stubborn. Where the seed falls is where the seed falls. Where the Word is heard is where the Word is heard. He is heard. Planted. He is seen. Planted. But it is not enough to broadcast seed and make wishes on stars for a good harvest. It is not enough to broadcast the Word and cross our fingers for jam-packed churches.

The point of this parable is that it is our job, our mission and ministry to make sure that we ourselves are properly tilled, properly weeded, properly watered and mulched so that when we walk into the fields of the Lord to do what he told us to do—to go make disciples—we are the richest soil we can be, we are producing the finest fruit we can produce, we are yielding a hundredfold and working hard on a thousandfold!

To be blunt: the ignorant, the shallow, the skeptical, the despairing, the hard-hearted, and the stubborn out there will not receive the seed, will not hear the Word if they look at us and see ignorance, shallowness, skepticism, despair, hard-heartedness, and stubbornness. Nor can they receive the seed, hear the Word if they see us coming at them with disobedience, infidelity, dishonesty, dissent, anger, and quarreling. And why should they? Who in their right mind wants to hear whining dissent or wounded bawling from those who are supposed to be flourishing in rich soil!?

I’ll end with this question: assuming that you (that we) are broadcasting the seed, spreading God’s Word, are we also preparing the soil to receive it—are we ourselves noticeably thriving in the rich soil of the Father’s will, producing good fruit for others, and tending His fields with fidelity?

What will we leave behind?

Saints Joachim and Ann: Sirach 44.1, 10-15; Matthew 13.16-17
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


How does God prosper the Church? This is not a question about mere survival. It is a question about how the Church merits, receives, and uses God’s blessings for her inevitable perfection. So, how does God ensure that the Church will not only prevail but flourish, not only “win out in the end” but increase, thrive, boom?

First, we have to look at what the Church is not in order to understand the Church’s mechanism of survival and growth. Jesus did not leave us an institution grounded in prophecy and miracles. We honor God’s prophets and we accept the reality of miracles but we are not governed in our daily lives by the constraints of prophecy nor do we thrive together as Christians waiting breathlessly for the next miracle and the next miracle and the next miracle to confirm and reconfirm our faith.

Jesus did not leave us an institution grounded in scientific investigation or academic disciplines or psychological theories or private revelations. We are happy to learn from science, happy to take our places in the universities, happy to delve the human mind and human behavior and even happy to hold that individuals can receive special insights from God. But we do not flourish as Christians based on lab results or votes from college faculties or productive therapy sessions or instructions from apparitions.

Jesus gave us a Church grounded in faith, rooted in trust—a faith grounded in him, rooted in him as the Son of God, sent by God to be our Lord and Savior. That’s where we begin and end as a Church. We are his people, his body, his nation, his priesthood. And we thrive, we prosper when we remember, when we bring into this day a living faith, the trust of those who before us struggled, who won, who failed, who surrendered, who persevered, and who were graced, gifted by God to endure in His ways, live and die in His peace, and, finally, to join Him and become witnesses from eternity for us.

Sirach says that the godly are not forgotten. Their wealth, their heritage remains in their families. In God’s promises their progeny glory forever; the names of the godly live on and on. And perhaps most importantly for us as a Church: “At gatherings their wisdom is retold…” God prospers His Church by giving us the living witness of tradition, the canon of a breathing trust from our families—our Jewish family, our Greek family, our Roman family, all the families of the faithful whose memories, whose wealth of struggle and defeat and victory have added the historical treasury, the riches of our present trust, the legacy of wisdom and love that we know to be our unassailable Covenant with the Father.

Jesus tells his disciples that the prophets and the righteous do not see and hear what they see and hear. They hear a living Word and see a living Word. In the memory of his sacrifice for us—this eucharistic sacrifice—we hear and see a living Word and in our trust we pile onto the heaping horde of faithful riches our own gems, our own masterpieces of victory and defeat, ensuring that the families who follow us will flourish in the art of surrendering to God, prospering in His ways.

We cannot leave less than we’ve been given.

Hearing the Word spoken

7th Week of Easter 2006/Visitation of Mary: Romans 12.9-16 & Luke 1.39-56
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


Carrying the Word in her body, Mary speaks the Word, praising the work of her Lord in human history, preaching, if you will, the greatness of our God, our Savior who favors the lowliest of His servants by choosing her to be His mother. She is the Blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus in the flesh and our Mother in the spirit—growing the Christ Child in her womb, giving him birth, and at the foot of the cross, accepting from her crucified Son the commission of mothering his Church to maturity.

Because she heard the Word spoken by the angel, Mary is filled with the Holy Spirit. Because they heard the Word spoken by Mary, Elizabeth and John are filled with the Holy Spirit. And because we have heard the Word spoken by John, Christ’s herald, and by Christ’s apostles and disciples and his prophets and witnesses, we too are filled with Holy Spirit. Blessed are we who believe that what is spoken to us by the Lord will be fulfilled.

Our Blessed Mother’s soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord because she surrendered her life to the Father’s will, surrendered not only her service and her affection but her flesh and blood, giving back to Him everything that He has given to her. She herself is a gift from the Lord who is given the Lord as a gift to give to us. And because of her surrender, because she heard the Word and gave herself to Him, we are free.

If we are to mature spiritually as individuals and as a Body we must hear the Word! Hear the Word spoken in our history, in our tradition, in our worship; hear the Word spoken by those given to us as leaders, teachers, and saints; and hear the Word spoken to us as His children, as His preachers, and as His friends. His Word to us, Christ Himself, is His greatness, His mercy, His strength, His abundance and His generosity. And Mary is how He chose to come to us. When we look to her, we see the Church grown up. When we look to her, we see His Word to us fulfilled, His promise of salvation kept.

All of this, however, is fairy tale and fable if we will not hear the Word spoken, surrender ourselves flesh, blood, and spirit, and bear His Word of Good News, giving birth to his greatness, his mercy, his strength, his abundance and his generosity, giving his gift to those who have not heard, those who have not been spoken to.

All of this is fairy tale and fable if we will not do as his mother did: hear His Word, surrender to His will, bear Him to the world, and, in the end, give Him to the crowd, give Him to the multitudes for their salvation.

Last will and testament

7th Week of Easter 2006: Acts 20.17-27 & John 17.1-11
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


Paul tells the priests of the Ephesian church that he cannot consider his life of any importance until he finishes his course, the ministry he received from the Lord Jesus: to bear witness to the good news that God has asked us all to share in His divine life. To share in His divine life means to know the Father, the only true God, and the one whom He sent, Jesus Christ. Know Jesus, know the Father, know eternal life. And knowledge of eternal life, truly knowing in the Spirit, is what reels us in; it is what draws us across our years, through our troubles, around the devil’s obstacles, over the temptations of despair, and to the Father in glory. Jesus’ prayer for us is his bequeathal of our inheritance as children of God: now he will no longer be in the world, but we are in the world and he leaves to us everything he said and did, everything that needs to be said and done again. Can you count your life as important until you finish your ministry—given to you and accepted by you—your vow as His child to witness without ceasing to His love?

Are you ready for a revelation?

Ascension Sunday 2006: Acts 1.1-11; Eph 1.17-23; Mark 16.15-20
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX


Jesus left us on Good Friday, dying on the cross, praying to his Father for us, praying that we might be forgiven in our ignorance. His Father raised him up from the dead three days later, emptying the tomb, and Jesus, newly glorified, newly transfigured, again prayed for us, for our maturity in faith, for our mission as apostles, and for our unity as his body as we witness to the world.

Today, he ascends to the Father, bringing to an end forty days of appearances to his frightened and befuddled disciples, forty days of shoring up their strength, squashing their worrisome doubts, and proving again and again that he is who he says he is: the only Son of God, killed, resurrected, transfigured, and now ascended all for one purpose, all for one reason: so that you, that we, might be saved from the slavery to sin and live forever.

Are you ready for your revelation? Are you ready for your eyes to be opened? Are you ready to hear what the Lord would have of you?

Paul writes to the Ephesians: “Brothers and Sisters: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in the knowledge of him.” This seems a fairly innocuous prayer, something you might expect any priest to mutter over someone seeking a blessing; a small prayer of sending or maybe a prayer for discernment. Hardly. This is a prayer for salvation, a prayer for your eternal life with the Father. Paul is not just muttering a simple prayer here. He is pronouncing the descent of the Holy Spirit on his brothers and sisters, asking God the Father to split the heavens and show Himself to his children so that they might know Him and reveal Him to others.

Notice the order of the prayer: first, they require a spirit of wisdom; then, they require a spirit of revelation; and only then do they receive “knowledge of him.” What is a spirit of wisdom and a spirit of revelation? A spirit of This or That is always a share in, a participation in the thing itself. To be given a Spirit of Wisdom is to be bonded to wisdom, to be given a Spirit of Revelation is to be bonded to revelation. The idea here is that Paul is asking the Father to impart to, to gift the Ephesians with a glimpse of His Divine Nature, a peek, a BIG peek at His Face.

Wisdom is the gift of being able to arrange everything in your life—family, work, recreation, religious duty—everything in you life in light of, according to divine expectations, the will of the Father for you, and according to how the Father is perfecting your human nature in His grace with your cooperation. In other words, to possess a spirit of wisdom is to live aligned with God, seduced by His grace, and obedient to His Word. In this spirit of willful cooperation, full assent, and active participation, He will make Himself known to you, give you a Spirit of Revelation.

If to be given a spirit of this or that is to share in this or that fully, then to be given a Spirit of Revelation is to share in Revelation Himself. The Father has revealed Himself to us in scripture, a closed revelation; in created things, a revelation we continue to struggle to understand in our natural and human sciences; and, finally and uniquely, in His only Son, Jesus Christ. In granting us a Spirit of Revelation, the Father both shows us Who He Is and makes us Show-ers; meaning, in the act of revealing Himself, he makes us revealers as well, witnesses; we become a means of revealing Him, ways of showing others His divine nature. You and I are revelations of God to one another! Incomplete revelations, of course—no person has fully revealed God or can reveal God fully but Christ—so, of course, we’re incomplete revelations but we are uniquely revealing in our particular, perfecting natures.

How else can you do what Jesus has ordered you to do? Go to the whole world, proclaim my gospel to every creature, preach everywhere! How do we do this except as those possessed by the spirits of wisdom and revelation, sharers in the one purpose, the one way, the one truth, and the one life?

To know God is know the hope that belongs to His call to us to be His voices. If He calls us to witness, then our faithful witness cannot fail. Hope is our desire for God and an assurance from Him that we have Him now and that we will have Him forever. Hoping is not confident gambling; hoping is resting, relaxing, trusting in a God Who has never and will never fail us. Hope is just one of the riches of His glory, just one treasure we inherit as His holy ones, as His sons and daughters—it is the habit of doing good knowing that good will be multiplied; it becomes for us the habit of confidently expecting good things to come from our obedience, from our eager willingness to be signs of God’s presence in the world.

Are you ready for your revelation? Are you ready for your eyes to be opened? Are you ready to hear what the Lord would have of you?

Christ ascends to heaven forty days after his resurrection. The work of the Son in the flesh is done on earth and so he returns in the flesh to his Father and prepares to send the Holy Spirit, prepares to set his disciples on fire and give birth to the Church. He leaves them with the admonition to preach his Word universally and then promises to accompany them with wondrous signs, confirming their authenticity and authority as his voice in the world.

Go and proclaim the gospel. This is your charge as well. His ascension to the right hand of the Father marks the moment that you were ordered to an apostleship, given the command to be one who reveals God to the world. So, why are you sitting there looking at the sky? Why are you waiting to do what Christ would have you do? And if you are doing what Christ would have you do, are you ready to work harder, longer, and more sacrificially? Are you ready to be the star of this day’s paschal mystery? Are you ready to receive the power promised by Christ? The power to royally serve, the power to reveal Christ to those who have closed the eyes of their heart, the power to hope unconditionally—without looking to the sky for signs—to hope for his return to us in glory.

Are you ready for a revelation from God? Are you ready to be a revelation of God? If not, get ready: that rushing wind you hear and that distant rumbling you feel, that, brothers and sisters, is the promised coming of the Holy Spirit!—the guaranteed arrival of authority, power, and dominion; the promised breath of wisdom, our Advocate, the very fire of our witness.

The odor of sanctity? A perfectly cooked heart!

6th Week of Easter 2006 (F)/St. Philip Neri: Acts 18.9-18; John 16.20-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


The Second Apostle of Rome and the saint of joy, Philip Neri, was a very odd man. Likely, he would find pictures of himself posted on today’s blogs with captions like “Another nutty priest being a hippy” or “Why won’t the bishops put a stop to this nonsense?” Philip had a certain way of bringing joy to stodgy hearts, crashing through reluctant spirits, and burning away pretension and guile. Story after story of this joyous priest emphasizes his joy in the Lord. My favorite: after his death, an autopsy revealed that he had died as a result of an enlarged heart—his heart had grown too big to be contained in his chest and it had broken free!

Will your heart grow too big for your ribs to contain? Will your joy in the Lord splash around in your soul until it sloshes over the sides and soaks those around you? Philip Neri often spoke of burning from within, a fire that had settled into his body and consumed him in the Lord’s love, a fire that passionately and patiently licked at his spirit until he could only burst out in sobbing ecstasy, pleading with Lord is give his fire of joy—just a little—to others.

What is this joy that so diligently and delightfully consumed Philip from the inside out? Aquinas teaches us that joy is the proper effect of charity, that is, joy follows love, joy is an act of love, the behavior one would expect from loving properly. The opposite of joy is sloth. Sloth is not just physical laziness as we tend to think, but, as Aquinas, paraphrasing John Damascene, argues, sloth “is an oppressive sorrow, which…so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing”(ST II.II.35.1). Sloth is a sorrow, an aversion to the spiritual goods of love and joy, a sorrow that robs us of our passion for seeking, finding, and doing the good and from seeking, finding, and being with the Father—our final Good.

If sloth is an oppressive sorrow, then love is our liberating joy—we are freed from weeping and mourning our losses, our condition, our pasts, our pain; freed from our grief, our suffocating anguish and our frozen hearts unable to move in mercy for others. Jesus tells the disciples that they are mourning, weeping for his absence, enduring the pain of his murder on the cross, and the prospect that, despite his time with them after his death, he will ascend to the Father soon. Their sorrow makes sense—a woman in labor feels intense pain until the baby is born, then joy! The disciples’ sorrow will end: “…I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.”

What robs you of your joy? What is it in your life that prevents you from benefiting fully from the effects of the Father’s love for you? Sin, certainly. But what specifically? Do you nurse disappointment and grief? Do you wallow in being wounded? Have you become your wounds, living day-to-day as a sorrowful injury? Maybe it’s betrayal you nurture. Or has someone denied you something you feel entitled to? What do you mourn? Why do you weep? What are you getting out of your anguish, your anger, your grief?

Are you joyful? Will we open you up after death and find that your heart, having grown too large for your chest, has broken free and spilled its joy, its love into the world?

Pray that we find your heart nicely roasted, perfectly cooked in the fire of Christ’s joy.

Telling us what we need to remember

6Th Week of Easter 2006 (M): Acts 16.11-15, John 15.26-16.4
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m telling you this secret so that you will think I am important and you will admire me. No, that’s not right. I’m telling you this secret so that you will repeat it and look like an idiot in front of others. No. Got it! How’s this: I’m telling you this secret so that when our enemies come for you you will remember both the secret and my willingness to share it with you and both will comfort you and give you strength.

Jesus has been very busy these last few days, sharing secrets with the disciples, telling them important things so that they will know who and what he is and remember who and what he is after he is gone and the real trouble with the Powers That Be begins. Jesus tells the disciples that there is no greater love than to die for a friend. He tells them that no slave is greater than his master. He tells them everything the Father has told him so that they may know joy and know it completely. And now, this morning, he tells them that he will send from the Father an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to testify to him and this Spirit of Truth will help his disciples to testify to him as well. Why? So that they may not fall away when they are booted out of the synagogues and killed as offerings to God.

Here’s what Jesus knows all too well: that the good news of salvation he preaches is possible only b/c he and the Father are one and b/c he will suffer, die, and rise again to bring that good news to its perfection. Those who fear this playing out of history fear him and his task b/c they do not know him nor do they know the Son. To bear witness to the Father and the Son with the spirited help of the Advocate is the principal job of those Jesus leaves behind And so, Jesus says to them: “I have told you this so that when your hour comes you may remember that I told you.”

All that the disciples remember of the Lord, everything he told them, taught them, showed them, everything he left with them is touched by the Spirit of Truth and is now our history, our back-story and the foundation stone of a faithful memory that not only comforts us in trial but pushes us out there to serve and witness, to be useful to our world as a people freed from sin and turned to love.

Watching this nation’s culture we are tempted to despair—our Enlightenment liberal democracy has become an Orwellian babysitter state! But here’s what we must remember: history trumps culture, salvation history trumps particular culture everytime; in other words, in the hearts and minds of the Christian witness living in the world, what matters is the memory passed on, the memory, the testimony of our creation, our fall, God’s faithfulness in calling us back to Him, our failures to hear his voice, His scandalous incarnation as Jesus Christ, and his even more scandalous death and resurrection for us.

This is what we must remember in a culture with a may-fly memory and an insatiable appetite for unruled passion: the Spirit of Truth is with us not to make us citizens better than most or enlightened souls suffering the flesh or self-righteous prigs driven to moralism; no, the Spirit of Truth is with us so that the history of our salvation, the memory of who and what is Jesus Christ is to us and for us might live in us and so that when we speak his word of mercy, his word of love, that Word crashes into the world as so obviously True and Right that no one may deny it.

Our witness to Christ in the world is our memory, handed on. And it cannot be a secret left untold.

Ridiculous Commandment

6th Sunday of Easter 2006
Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4.7-10; John 15.9-17
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX


Jesus concludes this farewell in John with a simple enough admonition: “This I command you: love one another.” He has called his disciples friends and told them everything that he has heard from His Father. He’s told them that they are the chosen not the choosers. And he’s admonished them to bear fruit and ask of the Father what they need. Can’t you see the disciples sitting there with him, wide-eyed, expecting another astonishing revelation, some thundering pronouncement on the nature of divinity or redemption or the end times. And what does he say? He commands them to love one another! Uh? Love one another? Sure. Says you. You’re God. You are Love. Loving is what You do b/c Love is Who You Are. Not so easy for us poor creatures. Have you looked at these people you want us to love? Have you talked to them?! Do you know what you’re asking?

Ah. You see, there’s the problem: he isn’t asking us to love one another. He’s commanding us to love one another. And the difference between asking and commanding tells us all we need to know about the nature of Christian love, of charity in the Spirit.

Jesus says to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” How does the Father love the Son? The Father and the Son love one another absolutely, unconditionally, without prejudice or complaint. They are One in the love that is the Holy Spirit. And Jesus loves us in exactly this way: completely, categorically, without reservation or criticism. When we keep his commandments, we too remain in his love, we too are One with Him in the love that is the Holy Spirit. So, Jesus commands us to love one another, commands us to live day-to-day in the love of the Blessed Trinity.

Why? Why does Jesus command us to love one another? On the face of it, it is a ridiculous command. Love cannot be commanded. It can be encouraged or exhorted or reciprocated or found. But commanded? How can a passion be commanded? You either love or you don’t. Simply put: love can be commanded, ordered when we understand that love is also about acting, willing the good for another.

Love is not just a passion; it is also the movement of the body and soul toward goodness for another, a movement of the body and soul toward needing the best for others, wanting deeply what is right and true for your neighbors. If we limit love to the smallness of a cuddly tingling in our bellies, make it into little more than a physical reaction to physical attraction, we make it impossible to obey Christ; essentially, we make it impossible for us to know and live joy. Think about it: if love is only about the passion we have for those we find attractive, then we cannot love one another in the way that the Father loves the Son nor in the way that the Son loves us. We fail in joy.

Jesus tells his disciples outright: if you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love. He explains: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” The commandment to love is a revelation, it reveals to us and for us the way to perfected joy, our means of achieving finished delight, total peace. To fail in joy, then, is spiritual suicide; it is the death of our peace, the impossibility of ever finding delight in the Lord—to fail in joy is to fail to love.

Ask yourself: how do I fail to love? When do I simply refuse to will the good, refuse to move body and soul toward others in mercy? When do I narrow my love to immediate family, friends and fail to emulate the Father’s love for His Son by failing to love effusively even the apparently unlovable? Who is it that I cannot love, will not love? Who is it that does not deserve my love? Who will I not love until he/she loves me first? Do I withhold my love in exchange for favors, good behavior, attention? Do I use my love as a weapon to hurt enemies and friends? Is my love a costume for show or a mask for the public or a flashy piece of glass pretending to be a diamond—dazzling and deceiving?

Ask yourself: did Jesus fail to love? Did he simply refuse to will the good, refuse to move his body and soul toward others in mercy? Did he narrow his love to just his immediate family, friends? Did he fail to emulate the Father’s love? Did he fail to love effusively even the apparently unlovable? Who is it that Christ cannot love, will not love? Who is it that does not deserve Jesus’ love? Who will Christ not love until he/she loves him first? Does Jesus withhold his love in exchange for favors, good behavior, attention? Does Jesus use his love as a weapon to hurt enemies and friends? Is Christ’s love a costume for show or a mask for the public? Is his love for us dazzling and deceiving?

We are commanded to love one another in the same way that the Father loves Jesus and in the same way that Jesus loves us. When we disobey this command, when we choose apathy, spiritual sloth, we choose the death of our joy; we kill deliberately our peace, our delight, and we rot the fruits of the Spirit. Rushing in to fill the vacuum left by dead and dying fruit: anxiety, anger, restlessness, dangerous curiosity/ears itching for spiritual novelty, despair, melancholy, loneliness, mistrust, desperation, pain, and a life in lived in constant emergency, constant distress.

If love brings perfect joy and you are not joyful in the Lord, then perhaps you need to think seriously about how you love or about how you fail to love. It is not too bold to claim that most, if not all, of our spiritual diseases can be diagnosed as failures to obey our Lord’s commandment to love one another. John writes to us in his letter this morning: “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.” No love, no God, no joy, no peace.

The disease of spiritual apathy, to be without a passion for goodness, to be willfully despairing, this is the greatest gift we can give the Devil. He wants our disobedience, our rebellion against the Father’s love but what he wants more than our disobedience is our allegiance to the lie that our Father will not forgive us our violence against His mercy, our resistance to his love. The Devil yearns for our Yes to the proposition that this or that sin is too big, too deep, too horrible, too frequent to be forgiven, to be forgotten in love. Reach this point in your spiritual life and you have delighted the Devil; his joy, perverse and twisted though it is, is complete when you fail to love and when you come to believe that God is capable of failing in love. To believe that God will not, cannot forgive you is atheism.

Love one another because you are commanded to love. Love one another because you are made to love. Love one another because you are no longer slaves but friends. Love one another because Christ loved us in his suffering, his death, and his rising again. Love one another because to do anything less, anything smaller or meaner is to delight the Devil and forsake your soul.

Being pruned in truth

5th Sunday of Easter 2006: Acts 9.26-31; 1 John 3.18-24; John 15.1-8
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas


That summer I sat on a five-gallon pickle bucket all day everyday pruning tomato vines. The hothouses in the field lined up like barracks and buzzed in the heat. Each of the twelve houses, covered in thick plastic, fluttered as a huge fan pulled the air through, cooling the plants. I started at the first house nearest the road and worked slowly each week from the first house to the twelfth house, pruning the suckers that grow in the between the branches and the vine. Cutting the suckers away is a necessary step in the growth of the plant. Suckers drain moisture and nutrients from the vines. They look exactly like the productive branches; however, one bears fruit, the other doesn’t. Cutting the branch that bears no fruit makes the whole plant healthier.

Sweeping up the pruned suckers at the end of each day seemed like confession or bathing, an exercise in cleaning up, unloading, or perhaps a sacrament of clearing away, brushing out the debris, pushing along the stuff of distraction, diversion, and disease. Each day ended in fire—the dried suckers burning at the edge of the field, sending acrid smoke into the trees and making my eyes tear.

Jesus reveals to his disciples that he is the true vine and that his Father is the vine grower. His Father cuts away branches that do not bear fruit and prunes the ones that do. Then Jesus says to the disciples: “You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.” Because I have revealed the Father to you, because I have taught you the way of salvation in mercy, because I have given you to one another as a Body, because I am the Word speaking the Word to you, because you have died with me and will suffer for me, because you will rise again with me and see the Father face-to-face, and because I am the way, the truth, and the life—because I have taught you, given you, shown you, lead you, and because I love you, you are pruned, cut, productively wounded and more than ready to bear the fruit of the Spirit that marks you as mine.

Are you pruned to produce the fruits of the Spirit that mark you as a child of Christ? In his letter to us this morning, John writes: “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth[…]this is how we will know that we belong to the truth[…].” We know that we belong to the truth—to Christ the true vine—when we produce the good fruit of charity, when we not only talk about doing good for others, but when we actually do the good for others. To produce the good fruit of love is to fashion from the Word given you a life wholly surrendered to the service of the truth, to the service of Christ, the true vine. To keep his commandments of fidelity—to believe in his Name, Jesus Christ, and to love one another—this is what pleases him.

Are you wholly surrendered to the service of the truth? Being good postmodern folks, I bet most of us heard a little whisper in our hearts just then, the small voice of Pilate asking: what is truth? Aren’t we conditioned to ask these sorts of questions, trained to a certain skepticism about claims of this or that being true? We know that a truth demands our obedience, morally obligates us to believe, so, eyes askance and lips pursed, we ask what any sensible soul would: what is truth? In his letter this morning, John writes: “Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from Him whatever we ask[…].” The NRSV says that we have “boldness before God” because we believe and pray in obedience to His will for us. The disciples in Jerusalem did not believe that Saul was a son of the true vine. Only after he had spoken boldly, confidently, in the name of Jesus, teaching the faith in truth and love to the Hellenists, only then did they recognize him as a brother in Christ.

Truth, then, is a relationship, the way that we live and move in the love of Christ, the way we witness publicly to him. Truth is that love that the Father and the Son have for one another, the love of the Holy Spirit. John writes: “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us.” Those who surrender their lives to the service of the truth—to the service of the love shared in the Blessed Trinity—are true branches, fruitful in charity, ready to be pruned.

What do you need God to prune? What suckers are sucking the life from your branches, depriving your good fruit of nourishment? What falsehoods have attached themselves to the truth? What lies scar your relationship with Christ? What sins block your roots from receiving the good food of the Spirit? What do you need God to prune?

Do you need God to prune away the false notion that there is another way to Him other than His Son, Jesus Christ? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that conscience decides truth rather than merely recognizes it? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that love is just a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes us cuddly to others? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that loving means unconditional acceptance and approval of any and everything any and everyone wants to believe or do? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that you can earn His love, work for His approval? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that He will condemn you in anger, in righteous fury, or disinterest? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that you can live fruitfully in love without truth?

We cannot bear the fruit of love without the vine of truth. Cut off from truth, our love withers. Cut off from the true vine, from the vine grower, we find ourselves in the fire at the edge of the field, burning, sending up acrid smoke and puffs of ash. Our assurance that we remain in Christ and he remains in us is our life in the Spirit, our participation in the life of the Body, the Church. How else do we maintain a fruitful confidence, a boldness before God that we are loved? With hearts schooled in the Word, hearts strictly poised for obedience, eager to hear and listen, we are one mind, one spirit surrendered to truth, given to the service of God for one another, and brought to perfection as disciples who greatly please our Teacher. Surely we can look around and see the drying suckers of falsehood pruned from our branches. Surely we can see the suckers that still need pruning. But more surely, most certainly, we know that so long as we remain in Christ—believe in his name and love one another—he will remain in us.

Boldly ask for what we need. Start with what needs pruning. Start with what clogs your roots, what prevents your growth in love and truth. And then in all humility ask to love more, to love larger, deeper, wider, longer, to love in greater truth, to bear much good fruit and to love, always to love, for His glory and His glory alone.

The lie that kills

4th Week of Easter 2006(F): Acts 13.26-33; John 14.1-5
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation


Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills?

Jesus tells Peter that he, Peter, will deny him three times. Peter cannot follow Christ nor can Peter lay down his life for Christ. Who and what Christ is for Peter, the disciples, and for us is not yet fully revealed and won’t be fully revealed until tongues of fire lick their souls and they and we are set ablaze with the Holy Spirit and witness the birth of the Church. Peter’s desire to follow is undeniable as is our own. Our deeply-hooked hearts long for the privilege of walking behind our Lord, taking on his teachings, preaching his words and his Word, but, like Peter the desire to follow him, the desire to die for him—no matter how hot, how large in our souls—is not enough. What we must recognize, take in and make part of our very being is the radical assertion made by Christ to his disciples: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

What does Peter deny in the chaos of the garden on the night of Christ’s betrayal? He denies that he knows Jesus. He denies that he is a disciple of the Teacher handed over to Pilate and the Chief Priests. He denies to all who ask that he follows Christ. In every word he speaks and by fleeing the garden, he denies that Christ is his means to the Father; he denies his certainty for salvation, and instead lays claim to death as his Master. Peter denies that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And so, he is lost in a lie that kills.

Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills? This is a dangerous question. Dangerous because it requires us to believe several unpopular truths. First, that there is truth. Second, that we are morally obligated to believe the truth. Third, that the moral obligation to believe the truth and actually doing so will give us life. Fourth, that to fail to believe the truth will lose us in a culture where undifferentiated assertions about truth weigh equally against our conscience and we are told to choose the one prettiest to our eyes.

These truths about the Truth are dangerous to hold and teach because they identify you, pick you out, and label a desire for certainly, clarity, and righteousness—all elements alien to a culture (and some parts of the church!) given over to spiritual and religious indifferentism; a culture that hugs itself to moral wandering and calls it an ethical path; a culture that enshrines relativism and calls it tolerance of difference; a culture that habitually chooses death and calls it choice, or retribution, or defense.

Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills? The way, the truth and the life that is Jesus Christ is the way to the Father, the truth about the Father, and life in the Father. Jesus assures his disciples that he goes before them to prepare the way, he travels on ahead, leading the way. Wanting to walk the way and walking it. Desiring the truth and seeking it out. Yearning for a holy life and living a holy life. Wanting, desiring, yearning…and doing. Different sorts of things. Peter desired Christ powerfully. And denied him easily.

The lie that kills is that there is another way, another truth, another life, something or someone other than Christ who will clear the path for us, assure us in trust, and give us eternal life. There is no other. And you are his witnesses before the people that he has brought you to this fulfillment: that you are found, that you walk the way, and that you have eternal life because you desire it from him and because you live it with him!

Holy Pyromaniacs!

4th Week of Easter 2006: Acts 12.24-13.5; John 12.44.50
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

[Fair warning: preaching the gospel of John sometimes makes me weird!]

Get comfortable, breath deeply, let go of all fear, guilt, anxiety, thought, and surround yourself with bright, white light. “Run to the Light, Carol Ann! Run to the light!” Focus on your inner child and project a ray of light into the world. Hold hands in a circle, clear your minds, and generate a barrier of brilliant light around Earth. When I died I saw a welcoming, nonjudgmental Light at the end of the tunnel, urging me forward. Lord, give us your Light…small “l” light, capital “L” Light, and “lite,” l-i-t-e.

Sun, moon, stars. Fire, electric bulbs, phosphorus. Exploding gas, erupting volcano, lightning flash. Radiance, illumination, glow. Morning, day, noon. Rescue from Darkness, lamp at midnight, candle against the pitch. All of these are images, words, ideas linked to our primitive need for light, our primordial search for knowing, seeing, figuring things out. We reach for light switches, table lamps, headlights in order to cook, read, drive to work. In seeking out and finding what is lost, we manage it best in the light--distinguishing between this and that, avoiding danger, stepping around obstacles and over limits, seeing edges, relative positions.

Darkness is a vast sameness, an infinite indistinction, an absence of shapes, sizes, limits, edges. To be in darkness is to be without definition, without clarity or contrast. Light, however, shines on reality, brightening what is there, making the stuff of Here and Now visible—height, length, color, identity. To be in the Light is to know definition, clarity, contrast. Darkness is ignorance…light is knowledge.

Jesus concludes his public ministry by declaring rather sharply what has only been hinted at up until now: believe in me and what I have taught and you accept my Father who sent me. Do this and you step into the light of our salvation. Disbelieve in me and what I have taught and you reject my Father who sent me. Do this and you remain in darkness. Come into the light or dwell in darkness. The choice is stark and easy. And it is one we make daily, hourly against the temptations of despairing of God’s mercy, surrendering to the passions, submitting to false teachings; choices against the temptations of setting up idols and altars to our egos, our inordinate desires, our failures to love; choosing against the temptation to blind ourselves to the shapes, sizes, and edges of the truth.

When we believe the Word, we take it in, we plant it, we let it grow—wildly, without fence or tie—we feed it our love and obedience, letting its brightness shine out, radiate through the words of our mouth and the work of our hands to light the way for others. When we believe the Word, it sets us ablaze, urging us to spread the fire. We become Holy Pyromaniacs—crazy for speaking the truth, thirsty for righteousness, hungry for heaven. And possessed by a spirit of holiness that needs for us to speak the Word to the world, to talk about the light of Christ, to make what we do illuminative of his saving work for us.

The Father’s command to us is eternal life. To live in His glory, his splendor. Hear Jesus’ words then, believe them, observe them, and know that you are rescued from the dark.

Fr. Corbon's quote on deification

In my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (below) I quote from Fr. Jean Corbon’s book, The Wellspring of Worship (Ignatius Press, 1988). This is one of the most beautiful books available on the Church's understanding of our redemption as deification.


The full quote (i.e. without my editions) follows:

“Following these three pathways of the transfigured icon, we are divinized to the extent that the least impulses of our nature find fulfillment in the communion of the Blessed Trinity We then "live" by the Spirit, in oneness with Christ, for the Father. The only obstacle is possessiveness, the focusing of our persons on the demands of our nature, and this is sin for the quest of self breaks the relation with God. The asceticism that is essential to our divinization and that represents once again a synergy of grace consists in simply but resolutely turning every movement toward possessiveness into an offering. The epiclesis on the altar of the heart must be intense at these moments, so that the Holy Spirit may touch and consume our death and the sin that is death's sting. Entering into the name of Jesus, the Son of God and the Lord who shows mercy to us sinners, means handing over to him our wounded nature, which he does not change by assuming but which he divinizes by putting on. From offertory to epiclesis and from epiclesis to communion the Spirit can then ceaselessly divinize us; our life becomes a eucharist until the icon is completely transformed into him who is the splendor of the Father”(223).

This comes from Chapter Sixteen of the book. A large portion of the chapter is reproduced on the Ignatius Press blogsite here.

Enjoy!

Fr. Philip