The surest way to ruin your life. . .

28^th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Anthony of Padua/Our Lady of the Rosary

Here’s the surest way to ruin your life: never say “thank you.” Live as if you are entitled to everything you have, everything you receive. Live as if you are responsible for your successes, your moments of greatness (large or small). Live as if you are self-sufficient, independent, in need of no help, in need of no one else. Clench you fist when a hand is offered. Close your heart when a hand reaches out. Recoil in horror when someone suggests that you could use assistance. Believe that you can do it all by yourself. When you fail there is no one else to blame. When you succeed there is no one else to credit. And when you die, you die alone. Never say “thank you” and watch your days unravel behind you like an ugly scarf snagged on a barbed-wire fence. A life of ingratitude is a life without grace, without gifts and it is a life unworthy of holiness. It is better to be a leper willing to ask God for healing than a well man who cannot/will not come to God with thanksgiving. Therefore, “in all circumstances, give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.”

Paul writes to Timothy that he, Paul, is a criminal for the gospel, a man put in chains for preaching the Good News to Jews and Gentiles alike. And though he is suffering in chains for the sake of Christ and Christ’s body, “the word of God is not chained.” We can add here: “…and the word of God will never be chained.” Though courts, kings, governors, and states may strive to whip the Word with judicial rulings or bury it in paper prisons or poison it with the deadliest medicines, the Word will not be whipped, buried, or poisoned. In fact, Paul, noting the persistence of the Word for him, says, that because the word is not chained, “I bear with everything for the sake of those who are chosen, so that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus…” The Word endures, carries on, lives always. And for this, we must give thanks. You must be the one healed leper in ten who returns to give God thanks, or Christ will wonder about you, “Where are the other nine?” 

 

Before asking how gratitude works for us spiritually, let’s take a moment to explore the possible reasons for being ungrateful. Why do we sometimes fail to give God thanks? First, we may not understand the “giftedness” or “givenness” of our lives, that is, we may not understand the fundamental animating principle of human life. My life, your life is a gift, meaning that that we exist at all is a present from God. God did not need us at the beginning of all thing. He does not need us now. And will never need us. Reality’s creation from nothing was a gratuitous, singular event, a wholly unnecessary one-time occurrence. The on-going presence of Something rather than Nothing is gratuitous as well. That we are still here is a gift. Second, the psychological motivations we need to accomplish anything often rely on the notion that we achieve our successes and that we fail in our failures. In other words, it seems that in order for us to do anything good at all we must believe that anything we do well results from personal talent and hard work. Why give thanks to someone not directly involved in the work of my success? Of course, this denies the first principle of creation: everything I am and everything I have is a gift from God. My talent, my drive to work hard, my need to succeed—all are gifts. Third, so delighted are we in our successes we often need to claim total credit in order to feel worthy of the success. If I am to succeed again, I have to come to the conclusion that I am solely responsible for that success. To do anything less is to risk a future failure. Finally, since the first bite of the apple in the garden we have been tempted to believe that we can become god w/o God. One god has no need to thank another god for anything. Our declaration of independence from the engines of divine perfection means that we think we are capable of saving ourselves. All we need for salvation is determination, the right doctrines, sufficient work, and a heart cold enough to reject any outside help offered—human or divine. We fail to give God thanks out of ignorance, pride, a cold heart, and vanity. 

 

Why should we give God thanks? Given what we already know about our creation—that we were created gratuitously—we can see that acknowledging our existence is first and foremost a matter of justice: we owe God our gratitude. Our thanks is due. Our thanks to God is also a matter of acknowledging the most basic truth of our lives: we are creatures created by a Creator. We are not random collections of chemical and electrical processes. We are not genetic productions accidentally generated by ideal cosmic and climatic conditions. We are beloved creatures, loved by our Creator. And as creatures loved first by God, we love back and give thanks for that love. The spiritual benefit, that is, the advantage that accrues to us when we are grateful to God is an increase in humility, an increase in our appreciation of our givenness, our total dependence on God as our Creator and Sustainer. Humility is the measure we use to determine the degree to which we are radically aware of our dependence on God. Your humility means that you know you are a gift given for no other reason than to love and be loved.

Here then is the surest way to ruin your life: fail daily to give thanks to God. Get up in the morning and go to bed at night as if you are entitled to everything you have, as if you were owed everything you have received. Get up in the morning and go to bed at night as if you alone achieved all of your successes, as if you orchestrated all your moments of greatness. Go day to day through your life utterly alone, in need of no one, in need of nothing but your own ingenuity and hard work. Grit your teeth when help is offered and say, “No, thank you.” Lock up your heart when a hand reaches out and say, “No thanks.” Shrink back in disgust at yourself and everyone around you when you fall and refuse help. Know in your ungrateful heart that you can do it all by yourself. 

 

Or, you can be trustworthy. You can be grateful and flourish in blessing. You can be the one healed leper who returns to thanks to God. You can be Naaman, who is healed in the Jordan, his flesh like the flesh of a little child. And you will be the one to hear Christ say, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.” Our Lord has revealed his saving power to the nations. Whatever you do, do not be among the nine ungrateful hearts who think that their healing is an accident. There is nothing accidental about the Cross, or Christ’s death for us on the Cross. He died on purpose, with a purpose. For us, he died knowingly, freely. And because of his love for us, we are free. Give thanks to God and make your life, this life right now, a living sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving!

On the dangers of using secular partisan labels in the Church

Fr. Mark Massa, S.J. was the speaker last night at NDS' annual Msgr. Tekippe Theological Forum.

His lecture was titled, "A Pox on Both Your Houses: Moving Beyond Conservative and Liberal Labels in the Church." 

Fr. Massa argued that the use of secular political labels to describe ideological parties within the Church is not only historically and theologically inaccurate, it's destructive as well.

He pointed out that using labels like "progressive," "traditionalist," etc. to denote one's posture toward change in the Church suggests that change is somehow an option for us, something that we can legislate or avoid.  He surveyed the use of partisan labels in our history, noting that only in our very recent history have we adopted secular labels to denote ideological differences.

Part of the reason for this adoption of secular partisan labels has to do with the introduction and development of historical consciousness in late 19th and early 20th century theology (esp in Biblical scholarship).  Though historical consciousness helped the Church to better understand how our faith has responded over time to various cultural-political challenges, its introduction into ecclesial life wasn't pretty. The modernist crisis in the European Church after the French Revolution was largely the result of the historical consciousness of change crashing into an institution unprepared for its challenge. 

Our current ecclesial polarization results from the Church "putting off" dealing with the inevitability of change. VC2 gives us the tools for recognizing and managing ecclesial change; however, because we put off dealing with the inevitability of change for so long, what could have been a renewal post VC2 became a revolution instead.

Generally, I agree with Fr. Massa's view. It seems to me that change is inevitable and that a historical consciousness of how we respond to various challenges both inside and outside the Church is here to stay. 

Two points:

1). Though he didn't argue the point directly, it would seem reasonable to suggest that using secular partisan labels also places our anxieties about immediate change at the center of the Gospel rather than seeing these worries as peripheral to Christ's charge to go out and preach. In other words, as a Church, we risk damaging the Gospel message in this century by failing to think in centuries as the Church always has.  The use of secular partisan labels stunts our ability to think in centuries.

2). Whereas historical consciousness is primarily a way of describing changes in the Church, it came to serve as an argument for prescribing particular changes.  In other words, that the Church changes to meet various secular challenges has become an argument that the Church ought to change to meet various secular demands. This strikes me as a non sequitur. So, I wonder if those in the Church who advocate for particular changes using historical consciousness as their warrant recognize this is/ought fallacy as a fallacy?

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Advanced Preaching seminar description

HP 602 Special Topics in Homiletics/Preaching: Preaching to Nihilists

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it's the gas you breathe” (F. O'Connor, The Habits of Being, 1955). 

As the pervasive mood of postmodern culture, we might say that nihilism is less a breathable gas than it is a poisonous cloud. It erodes our already imperfect grasp on knowable truths; dissolves the bond between the goodness of being and our moral acts; and vandalizes our faithful efforts to understand the ordered beauty of God's Self-revelation in created things. Whether nihilism is taken to be a method of thinking about the world or a consumerist lifestyle-choice, its influence on the human person is pernicious. How does the Catholic preacher account for this influence? How do we preach the Good News to a culture that has come to understand the human person as nothing more than a thinking animal destined for annihilation after death?

This seminar will survey the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological origins/development of nihilism in western postmodern culture and explore strategies for responding to its cultural influence in our parochial preaching. We will read texts from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Vattimo, R. M. Rilke, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, the Death of God theologians, and J-L Marion. Students will write one seminar paper (10-12 pgs.) and two Sunday homilies. Prerequisites: HP 504, 505. Limited to 8-10 students.

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The modern homiletical crisis

Among the books and articles I'm reading to prepare for the Advanced Preaching Seminar at NDS this spring is an excellent book by Phil Snider, titled, Preaching After God.

The first two chapters of this book lay out what Snider calls "the modern homiletical crisis." Basically, he argues that the liberal/progressive theology of modernist Christianity has left progressive ministers and preachers with little to say about God.

He charts the development of modernist theology through several philosophical veins, including the usual suspects: Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and, of course, Schleiermacher. 

Despite his embrace of progressive theology, Snider laments the "death of God" in liberal Protestant preaching, noting that preaching in the mainline churches has become little more than politically tinged ethical exhortation. 

In theory and practice, Christian progressives have replaced theology with anthropology.*

He writes, "Activism became the rule of the day in modern preaching largely because God was not longer identified as anything other than a projection of the best intentions and ideals of the human spirit, if anything at all, and religion was reduced to activism. . .When one considers the import of Kant and Hegel on liberal theology, it's no coincidence that sermons that fall prey to the modern homiletical crisis (1) place primary emphasis on a Christianity that is boiled down to ethics. . .and (2) lose sight of the infinite qualitative distinction between God (the wholly other) and human beings. When God is just a manifestation or extension of our best selves on our best days, when there is no infinite qualitative distinction between human beings and the 'wholly other,' then God is, for all practical purposes, dead" (66).

To any Catholic who's been paying attention to parochial preaching in the last 40 yrs. this diagnosis of liberal Protestant preaching should sound eerily familiar. 

Having misinterpreted and misapplied the Second Vatican Council's invitation to engage modern culture in dialogue, ecclesial elites have so domesticated the Divine that it is almost impossible for them now to understand the Church as anything other than a social service agency.  

The task of Catholic homiletics in the 21st century is to explore ways of returning a sense of the "infinite qualitative distinction" btw Creator and creature to our preaching w/o portraying God as inaccessible. Part of this project then will be to re-establish the event of the Incarnation as a central theme of Catholic preaching.

* Snider sees some hope for progressives in deconstructionism. My sense is that this is a dead-end for Catholic preaching as a solution. There may be uses for deconstruction as a heuristic but ultimately Catholic preaching cannot jettison metaphysics. 

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"If they are going to follow Christ in today’s environment something more rigorous is needed. . ."

Very enlightening interview with the Eastern Province Dominicans* about their phenomenal growth in vocations. . .

One fact I didn't know and kinda shocked me:  "Right now our Province has 70 men in formation for the priesthood and cooperator brotherhood."

Seventy?!?! Wow. "70 men in formation" means that the EDP has a total of seventy men in the novitiate and studium, i.e. novices and seminarians.

Oh, and they have charts too!

* Oddly, the friar giving the interview isn't identified, though I'd bet it's Fr. Benedict Croell, OP, vocations promoter for the EDP.
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My Anxious Monday of Waiting

One week ago today at 5.50am, I was driving down the Carrollton Ave exit off I-10 when I felt a weird sensation from the brake pedal. . .sort of like a pause in the braking-grip.

Just as I was noticing this weirdness, the Check Engine light on my dash lit up. 

After suppressing a spike of panic, I waited for the engine to erupt in flames, or to simply fall out of the bottom of the car and leave me pedaling the Toyota a la Fred Flintstone. . .

No explosion. No wrenching crash of metal.

When I got to my office, there was an email waiting for me from the place where I get a three-month oil change. Ah, I thought, The Car is in cahoots with the Oil Man. Easy fix. Regardless, I spent the rest of that day dreading the drive back to the priory.

Being a good postmodern-sort, I googled, "Check Engine light" and discovered that this phenomenon could indicate anything from a sticky fan belt to a diseased transmission.

Great. My history with car repair is a long, sad tale, involving thousands of dollars, weeks of anxiety, and lots of begging for rides.

Saturday: got the oil changed. "Check Engine" still shined brightly from the dash.

Monday: off to see Mr. Ray at Fleur de Lis Auto Care. 

I spent the morning in my room dreading the call from Mr. Ray. 

In my head, the news went like this: "Father, your transmission is attached to the engine with a bent paper-clip and the axles are held together with chop-sticks and duct tape."

Me: "Great. I'll bring over a new box of paper-clips and a roll of duct tape!"

When the call came. . .I jumped. 

Mr. Ray: "Father, we put the scanner on your car. . .[thundering drum roll]. . .the gas cap was loose."

So. All it cost me was a little humiliation and a lesson in Gas Cap Tightening Procedures.

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California's neo-feudalism

And they did it all w/o any GOP "obstructionism"!

". . .the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population."

A fascinating read. 

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Seeing with faith

27^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA

In a homily delivered in Assisi, Italy on the feast of St. Francis, the Holy Father asks, “Where did [St.] Francis’s journey to Christ begin?” His answer to this question is frightening. His answer shows us why Paul must encourage Timothy: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice.” And why the apostles beg the Lord: “Increase our faith.” His answer even shines light on why the prophet Habakkuk wails at God: “How long, O Lord?. . .Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?” Where did St. Francis begin his journey to Christ? The Holy Father answers: “It began with the gaze of the crucified Jesus. With letting Jesus look at us at the very moment that he gives his life for us and draws us to himself.” To look and see such misery and knowing all the while that Christ's ruin is our repair. . .no one possessed by the spirit of cowardice could watch this. No one lacking in faith would be pulled into his gaze from the cross. Accepting and living the Good News of Jesus Christ is one life-long act of courage, one small act of faith after another. But neither Christian courage nor faith in God deserves applause or gratitude. Why? B/c we are drawn to Christ. . .by Christ. 

 

Our Holy Father says that our journey to Christ begins “with letting [the crucified] Jesus look at us at the very moment that he gives his life for us and draws us to himself.” What does he mean by “letting Jesus look at us”? No one needs my permission to look at me. They just look at me and here I am, being looked at. All of us are seen everyday without even knowing it. We look at others all the time w/o their permission. But couldn't we say that the difference btw Looking and Seeing is the same as the difference btw Hearing and Listening? What's that difference? Attentiveness, intention? I can hear but do not listen; I can look but do not see. Does this sound familiar? Jesus teaches his students that they will meet people along the Way who hear and look but do not listen or see. These people will hear with mistrustful ears and look through cowardly eyes. Attentiveness and intention make a difference, of course, but the difference that makes The Difference is faith. Jesus doesn't just look at us from the cross; he gazes at us. He looks with intent, with purpose, and if we let him gaze at us, we return his gaze in kind. We are drawn to him and our looking becomes seeing with faith.

Notice why the apostles suddenly beg the Lord to increase their faith. They ask him how many times they should forgive a brother who sins. Jesus says, “. . .if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.” The apostles immediately see the connection btw forgiveness and faith, and they immediately recognize the weakness of their faith. To forgive someone who sins against you over and over again requires a great deal of confidence in the power of mercy to correct error. It also requires a strong sense of one's own sinfulness. But the purpose of forgiving others is to draw us back to the Cross and the merciful, dying gaze of Christ, the one who makes all forgiveness possible. When you forgive someone who sins against you, you bring the merciful gaze of Christ to them. You become Christ for them in that moment. That takes courage. It takes courage and a deep trust in the fact that not only are their sins forgiven but so are yours. The apostles know this, so they beg Jesus to increase their faith, to add to their ability to trust. Unfortunately, the apostles don't yet quite grasp how faith works. They still see faith as a quantity, a measurable amount of something that can be increased or decreased. Jesus, as usual, reveals the truth.

He says, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Faith isn't measured in quantities; it's measured in acts of courage and obedience. As the good habit of trusting in God's loving-care, faith—even the size of a mustard seed—can accomplish the seemingly impossible. If this seems improbable, then consider the strength it would take to forgive someone who sinned against you seven times, or seventy-seven times. That's not a feat of brute physical strength but rather a feat of spiritual strength. What does it say about you and your relationship with God that you can show mercy to a person who's hurt you seventy-seven times? It says that you are painfully aware of your own sinfulness and your own need for mercy. That you can forgive them—even just once—is an act of courage, an act done in fear despite that fear. If you trust that Christ died on the Cross for you and even now draws you into a life of holiness with his dying, merciful gaze, then that trust must be shared, given out. We cannot follow Christ unless we are ready to become Christ. And that kind of trust can be large or small so long as it is also strong.

You might be thinking right now: I'm not THAT strong. Lord, give me strength! Excellent prayer. Paul writes to Timothy, “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice. . .So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord. . .but bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.” The spirit that God gives us is His Holy Spirit, the spirit of love. When we call upon the strength we need to endure and thrive, we are not calling upon any created power, any merely human reserve of energy or vigor. We call upon the gift of God Himself, the freely given presence of Love Who is God. Like faith and hope, this love is bound to us in our human nature; that is, wired into each of us from the moment of our conception. There is never a question of whether or not we “have faith” or whether or not we “have love.” We do, by nature. The question is whether or not we will use God's gift of freedom to love freely, forgive extravagantly, and bear witness to His mercy! Any and every strength we have is from God, but it is only with our cooperation, our permission that faith, love, and hope mature. IOW, we allow the crucified Jesus to see us. And we look back at him, seeing, trusting. 

 

What do we do when our trust is weak? What do we do when, like Habakkuk, we hear ourselves crying out to God, “Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?” In that same homily in Assisi, our Holy Father says, “The cross does not speak to us about defeat and failure. . .When we let the crucified Jesus gaze upon us, we are re-created, we become 'a new creation.' Everything else starts with this: the experience of transforming grace, the experience of being loved for no merits of our own. . .” Being loved for no other reason than that God is Love is the transforming grace—the life-changing gift—we need to endure, and not only endure but prevail. When your trust in God is weak, invite Christ to look at you and to see you and to gaze into your heart and mind. Let him see—truly see—your weakness. Let him take it to the Cross for you. And let him make it holy in sacrifice, give it to his Father as an offering. Return his gaze; let yourself see—truly see—what he did for you on the Cross and all that his death and rising again accomplished. Then, remember Paul's words to Timothy: “Do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord. . .”

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On being set aside. . .

NB. From 2009. Alas, never preached this one. . .I was looking for an example of a meditative homily to show my students.  What do you think?

7th Sunday of Easter: Acts 1.17-17, 20-26; 1 John 4.11-16; John 7.11-19
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Walking the streets of Rome can teach you a lot about negotiation. Walk up the Via del Corso on a Saturday afternoon. Sidewalks jammed with idly strolling citizens. The street choked with wandering tourists lost in their maps. Fashionistas linger in front of the shop windows, damming up traffic, sending thousands into the street to play catch with the taxis. For someone with a destination in mind, a purpose and a goal, taking the del Corso is an adventure in paying attention, dodging threats of bodily harm, and negotiating the perils of polite society. Will that bus stop at the crosswalk? Will the group of trendy ladies in front of me stop suddenly to squeal over a pair of Ferragamo pumps? Do I need to say “excusa” every time I bump into someone? What degree of impatience do I express when zipping past the amorous couple clogging up the sidewalk with their public display of sloppy affection? You have a goal, a purpose; you have a destination and a mission. You don’t have the time or the patience or even the inclination to suffer these social obstacles lightly, to indulge these worldly distractions with anything less than haughty contempt! How often do you sigh in angry exasperation and imagine yourself screaming: “For the love of all that is holy: move!” When you are a Christian and the world you live in is the Via del Corso on a Saturday afternoon, how do you negotiate the traps, the potholes, the slippery curbs? How do you weave through the foot traffic without landing in the street dodging the buses? Do you surrender to the flow, slow your pace, assume your place in the crowd, and hope your destination comes to you? What happens to the urgency of your mission? Your schedule? One vital point to keep in mind when thinking about these questions: as Christians, we are set apart; we are not set above.

Knowing that his time draws near, Jesus commends his people to the Father. Lifting his eyes to heaven, he prays to God: “I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely. I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.” What could Jesus mean? Of course, we belong to the world! We need food, drink, clothing. We are as much affected by gravity, the weather, and the passage of time as anyone else. We have jobs, kids, taxes, and all sorts of worldly ties. We are bound to all the physical necessities of living well in our skins. How exactly do we not belong to this world? What sets us apart? In other words, how are we consecrated in truth? And how does this complete our joy in Christ?

Many of the great heresies in Church history are deeply rooted in a distorted view of the relationship between heaven and earth, body and soul, world and Church. Like most heresies, these distortions exaggerate a distinction, mutate a vital difference, and privilege one extreme over another. In the early Church, most heresies exaggerated the spiritual over the material, leaving us with a disembodied Christ and a purely mystical, intellectual faith that proclaimed the evils of the flesh and demanded radical asceticism. Today, we tend to the other extreme, privileging the material and historical, leaving us with a Christ who is just some guy who said some interesting stuff about the need for social change. Among those who saw the world as a place of greed, lust, and gluttony, the only way to combat murderous distraction was to withdraw into the desert to seek out a spiritual purity in extreme practices of bodily mortification. Among those today who see the spiritual, especially the moral, as a kind of straight-jacket, a fuddy-duddy fussing about mythical codes of behavior, the world is a place of license, freedom, unlimited choice. Even among some Christians, the world is to be revered, imitated, and lauded, if not worshiped. What both the desert-dwellers and the world-worshipers fail to see is that the “world” Jesus implicitly condemns is not the material world, the cosmos of stuff and physical law, but that time and place where the powers of rebellion and strife hold sway, the material and spiritual battlefield where obedience to God and the temptation to disobey God compete for our allegiance. This is the world we are in and yet the world we do not belong to.

To be consecrated in the truth in this world is to be set aside by grace to achieve a divine purpose wherever you find yourself. You will not fulfill your divinely gifted purpose by hating the material world and living only for the spiritual. You will not fulfill your divinely gifted purpose by hating the transcendent world and living only in the flesh. We are body and soul. Neither one nor the other wholly without the other. If you are only your soul, then what you do materially is irrelevant to your spiritual growth. Be spiritual! And be as you please. If you are only your body, then what you believe about the spiritual is irrelevant to your material growth. Just do it! And do anything you please. Christians are saddled with a much more difficult task: as embodied souls consecrated in the truth, we are bound materially to a world ruled by sin and obligated to achieve spiritual purity in the midst of physical temptation. What we do materially affects us spiritually. What we believe about spiritual truths affects us materially.

If this is true, and it is, what good does it do us to be consecrated in the truth? We are set aside not above. “To consecrate” means “to aside for a specific purpose.” We consecrate things, people, places. We don’t use the altar as a card table. We don’t use a chalice to chug beer. Priests and religious do not participate in government as elected or appointed officials. As baptized priests, prophets, and kings of the Father’s Kingdom, we are set aside to work toward and achieve a specific goal, an end that perfects us in all His gifts. Notice that Jesus does not say that he has removed us from the battleground of this world. He does not elevate us above it or subject us to it. He does not say that we do not belong in the world. He says that we do not belong TO this world. We are not slaves, citizens, or subjects of the dominion of the Enemy. Our purpose is not defined by the laws of nature or the rules of engagement followed by the Enemy. We are free. We are free from this world in order to be free for this world. Not above the world. Not of this world. But in it and beside it, not belonging to it, but free to show a better way, a divinely gifted Way.

Our joy is completed not by worldly victory or political conquest. We are not given a completed joy by winning elections or getting federal funding. There is no joy in making ourselves slaves to a world we do not belong to. There is no joy in raising ourselves above it all, or fleeing into the desert to watch it all burn. Our consecrated work, our baptismal duty is right in the middle of the mess, squarely centered in the heart of the world, right where the Enemy is strongest. We are chosen to be vessels and conduits of God’s love for the world and to the world not because we are morally superior or spiritually invincible. We are neither. We are chosen because we chose to answer His call to be everything He made us to be in love. A choice anyone can make.

To this world, we are dramatic, pathetic failures. Lost and hopeless zombies driven by superstition and irrational religious mythology. In this world, we can be tragic examples of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and religious zealotry. For this world, we are a comedic scandal that brings salvation and peace. But for this to work, we must be set aside in truth. Engaged but detached. Involved but distant. Who and what we are most fundamentally is found in our end not in the means we use to get there. But our means must always prophesy the truth of the gospel. How else do we witness to our divinely gifted end if not through our divinely gifted means?

We are consecrated in the truth so that our joy may be complete. We are set aside in Christ by Christ so that we may come to him in the end wholly joyful, perfected in love. John writes: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.” Our nearly impossible task is to love God and one another in a world ruled by the Enemy. Tempted though we are by passions unruled by reason, we are set aside for a purpose. That purpose and its pursuit is how we succeed—in our witness, in our ministries, in our duties to Love Himself.

In and beside this world, shining out the love and mercy we have received, we bring our joy to its highest human perfection. Beyond this world, having done as we promised to do, we become Joy, seeing Truth Himself face-to-face.

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The Mass: Line by Line

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The Mass: Line by Line

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Director of Homiletics, Notre Dame Seminary

A series of six one-hour classes on the Missal text of the Mass*

(We will read and discuss the text of the Mass, focusing on the theology of the Eucharist)

Starting Wednesday, Oct 16 at 7.00pm and meeting for the next five Wed's

St. Anthony of Padua Church

4640 Canal Street

New Orleans, LA

 * Copies of the Missal text will be available

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The moral failure of the Wounded Healer

Just had to share this. . .

The Shea (and his Enormous Beard) was recently seized by the Holy Spirit and inspired him to write the following:

The priesthood is about service, not about clerical voyages of psychoemotional self-discovery in which laity and their children play bit parts while an ordained narcissist and his pals take center stage as the stars of their own spiritual drama. 

Though Shea wrote this bit of brilliance in response to a specific case of moral cowardice, the sentiment applies across the board.

The priesthood is NOT: 

-- a social club

-- a therapy-encounter group

-- a frat 

-- a Mean Girl Clique

-- a Wounded Healer lobbying group

-- or a Narcissists Fanboy Drama.

The Baby Boomer clerical obsession with psychobabble and therapeutic solutions to moral problems has left us with at least one generation of priests and religious who see repeated moral failures as nothing more than opportunities for "voyages of psychoemotional self-discovery."  

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The Counterfeit Christianity So Many Prefer

From Archbishop Caput. . .words of Wisdom:

The words and habits of religion are easy. We can sometimes use them to fool ourselves. We need to drill down below the counterfeit Christianity so many of us prefer into the substance of who we are and what we really treasure. We need to let God transform us from the inside out, and conversion requires humility, patience and love. It requires letting go of the desire to vindicate ourselves at the expense of others. So much of modern life, even in the Church, is laced with a spirit of anger. And anger is an addiction as intense and as toxic as crack.

Pharisees come in all shapes and sizes, left and right. We need to be different. As Pope Francis said in his La Civilta Cattolica interview, the Church needs to be more than “a nest protecting our mediocrity.” We prove or disprove what we claim to believe by the zeal and joy of our lives. What we need to do in the years ahead is what God has always asked us to do: forgive each other; encourage each other; protect the weak; serve the needy; raise the young in virtue; speak with courage; and work for the truth without ceasing—always in a spirit of love.

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Pantheistic Harmony ain't Franciscan Peace

Once again, defying the desperate/vain hopes of CathProgs. . .

Pope Francis in Assisi:

Franciscan peace is not something saccharine. Hardly! That is not the real Saint Francis! Nor is it a kind of pantheistic harmony with forces of the cosmos. . .  That is not Franciscan either; it is a notion some people have invented! The peace of Saint Francis is the peace of Christ, and it is found by those who “take up” their “yoke”, namely, Christ’s commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. This yoke cannot be borne with arrogance, presumption or pride, but only with meekness and humbleness of heart.

Hear, hear! 

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Is he the Pope, or isn't he?

HEAR YE! I'm tired of orthodox Catholics bitchin' about Pope Francis. I'm sure the Devil loves hearing the self-righteous wailing of Catholics who think that they know the faith better than the Vicar of Christ. 

Francis isn't interested in America's culture war. . .he has an international to Church to run. The Church in the US is NOT the center of the Catholic universe.

BOTTOM-LINE: He's the Pope, or he isn't. Choose.

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For Fr. Blake & Mundabor!

Just a quick note to give a shout out to my British readers at Fr. Blake's Blog and those arriving here from Mundabor's Blog. 

God's abundant blessings be upon you all!

_________________

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Woe to the spiritually complacent!

26th Sunday OT 

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 

Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA 

Pursue righteousness. Fight hard for the faith. Lay hold of eternal life. Paul lays bare for his student, Timothy, the path of perfection, the way through to Christ, and writes to him, “I charge you before God. . .to keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. . .” Do this and you will keep the commandment until he returns. The prophet Amos shows us the way of those who chase after the world, move along with the world, and follow strange gods: “Woe to the complacent. . .Lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches. . .They drink wine from bowls. . .Therefore, they shall be the first to go into exile, and their wanton revelry shall be done away with.” Amos is chastising those who waste their time with material luxury, but we can easily see time—and lives—wasted in wanton spiritual revelry as well. Woe to the spiritually complacent. . .for they live in exile already. 

God's prophets were never ones to mince words or shy away from preaching tough love. Amos' “woe to the complacent” is the Third Woe of his three woe prophecy against God's people. The First Woe (or curse) is a curse against the unjust: “Woe to those who turn justice into wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground.” The Second Woe is a curse against those who long for the Lord's day of judgment: “Woe to those who yearn for the day of the Lord! What will the day of the Lord mean for you? It will be darkness, not light!” This Second Woe is directed against those who believe themselves to be righteous but are in fact only self-righteous. They yearn for the Lord's judgment against those they see as sinners but fail to see their own sin and the dark judgment they bring upon themselves. Injustice against the poor and self-righteousness in judgment arise out of spiritual complacency, what Amos might call “wanton revelry” and what we usually experience as religious pride. Our relationship with God is established at His initiative, governed by His will, and directed toward His purpose. Religious pride tempts us to believe that we control our spiritual lives; that we are in charge of how and when we will see and hear the Lord. Such pride is born of complacency, a self-serving self-satisfaction. 

Spiritual complacency can take on many forms. For example, when we pick and choose from among God's truths those that we find pleasing and reject those that we find inconvenient, we lend aid and comfort to the enemy. It's just easier to pick those divine truths that make our lives in this world less turbulent. We can coast for a while but eventually our accommodating niceness to the world isn't going to be enough. We hear louder, more strident demands for concessions; louder, more strident cries that we renounce even those truths that once pleased the world. Before long—just to get along, just to survive—we find ourselves immersed in wanton revelry, a pride-soaked spiritual binge that destines us for exile. How does this happen? Besides all of the smaller truths we surrender, we give up the larger truths as well, and the foundational truth—that our relationship with God is in His hands—even that truth falls. And our exile is complete. How do we avoid spiritual exile? Pursue devotion, not popularity; faith, not security; love, not vengeance; patience, not passion; gentleness, not severity. Pursue Christ, not the world! Chase after holiness, not hypocrisy. Walk with the Church. And in all things, follow him. 

Luke gives us a vivid illustration of what happens when we pick and choose from among God's truths, when we surrender the whole truth of what He has to teach us for the smaller satisfaction of believing we are in control. The rich man is richly blessed by God. Such blessings require a special dedication to charity and justice for the poor. The man celebrates his blessings in wanton revelry but ignores his obligations to charity and justice; specifically, he ignores Lazarus, a diseased beggar, and ends up in everlasting torment after he dies. The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus down with just a drop of water to cool his burning tongue. When Abraham denies this plea, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers about the reality of hell. Abraham's replies: “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.” If the rich man's five brothers have Moses and the prophets to teach them righteousness, how much better then are we taught when we have Christ, his Church, his Blessed Mother, and the saints to show us the Way? If any one of us should choose to exclude ourselves eternally from the company of God and His blessed, we cannot claim that we didn't know the Way to heaven. At most, we can say that when we picked the truths we wanted to believe, we picked the wrong ones. 

Now, if all of this sounds a bit depressing, it should. We are not only encouraged by our culture to be spiritually complacent, we are rewarded for it by the powers of this world. If that's not enough to frighten us into repentance, then maybe the story of the rich man will. If that's not enough, then all we have left is our gifted desire to seek out and find our perfection in God through Christ. In an interview last week, Pope Francis said, “The most important thing [for the Church] is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.” The fullness of God's truth, the Everything of His plan and will for us, the All of His method and purpose in our lives is given flesh and bone in Christ Jesus. We offer on that altar this evening the whole body and blood of Christ in thanksgiving. Not just his thumbs or his ears. Not just precious memories or a version of his teachings. We offer him, whole and entire. Not parts and pieces. Not symbols. But Christ. The one truth of God that cannot be divided, cannot be picked over and carefully parsed for our convenience. His Passion, death, and resurrection brought to life in us a seed planted at creation: the obtainable desire to live forever with our Creator. 

And this is where the Universal Church finds herself in the year of our Lord, 2013: always tempted; frequently challenged; persecuted at times and pressed on every side; offered compromises, negotiations, and treaties. Disparaged and demeaned, we respond with our best efforts, and our greatest weapon: our steadfast obedience to the first commandment—love. Not some fluffy-cute-little-kitty-mushiness but Divine Love! As far as we are capable, we love our enemies as God loves us. . .and our enemies. We love despite opposition, oppression, and persecution. Paul writes to Timothy, “. . .pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness. Compete well for the faith.” We can none of these if we spend our days in wanton revelry, in spiritual complacency, picking which of God's truths we will believe and which ones we will discard. We accept Christ—the whole Christ—and follow him, or we do not. He died to save us from the darkness of the world. The world has its own plans for us. But we can love it, even as we leave it behind. 

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I resent beggars. . .

Here's a homily from 2010 preached at Blackfriars, Oxford U.  

26th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Blackfriars, Oxford

I resent beggars.* I avoid them when possible and ignore them when they can't be avoided. When they can be neither avoided nor ignored, I simply refuse them. Since I live in Rome most of the year, avoiding, ignoring, and refusing the Eternal City's legions of panhandlers has become something of an art for me. It is almost possible for me to make my way to and from the priory without feeling as though I have damned myself eternally. Almost. Living in the mid-town district of Houston, TX helped to train me for the running the begging gauntlet of Rome. Daily, nightly, all through the day everyday, the doorbell of the priory would ring. My wife and kids are up on the highway in our broken down car. I need $7.82 to buy a bottle of oil. I am stranded on the interstate and need just $5 to buy some fuel to get me home. Same story, different dollar amounts. Day in, day out. Once, just once, an honest beggar said to me, “I'm losing my buzz. Need a few bucks to buy some beer!” Without fail, I refused to give them cash. Most of the time, they accepted my offer of food and water. I don't resent beggars b/c they interrupt my work or cause me a bit of trouble in the kitchen. I resent them b/c they remind me just how far I am from attaining the holiness that brings the peace of Christ, just how much more there is for me to work on, to perfect, in order to achieve the necessary detachment from fleeting things. Like Lazarus outside the rich man's door, these beggars are a sign, a memento of impermanence—no less worthy of God's bounty than the rich man in his fine garments or a friar in his only habit. In this world, we too are impermanent, a vanity made to die. How should we live knowing this truth?

The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is not a story about the blessedness of destitution and the evils of wealth. Billionaires can be saints and beggars can be sinners. Jesus makes it clear that holiness is more readily achieved in poverty b/c a beggar's heart and mind are not focused on earthly treasure. However, a billionaire who shares her wealth in love for the sake of Christ does holy work. Beggars and billionaires both can lie, cheat, and steal. And both are perfectly capable of great charity and mercy. We could say that the question here is not what does one have or have not but rather what does one do with one's wealth or poverty. But these miss the point as well. Maybe the question is one of attachment. Is wealth or its absence the whole focus of your life, the defining quality of your existence? Closer but still not quite right. What if the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is a story about how you choose to love, that is, how you choose to manifest love in the world? By what means—tangible, palpable, really-real—what ways do I, do you leave evidence of God's love behind? Giving a beggar in the Corn Market a pound or two may assuage my guilt, but have I loved? Organizing meetings on the causes of poverty, protesting corporate greed, and calling for the redistribution of society's wealth, all of these might edge me closer to a feeling of “getting things done,” but am I doing any of these for love, for God's love?

Let's ask an existential question: whether you are 16 or 60, who do you hope to become? Since you are here this morning, we can wager that you hope to become Christ! That's what you have vowed to strive for, promised to work toward. You died and rose with him in baptism, and you eat his body and drink his blood in this Eucharist. If you are not intent on becoming Christ, then you have come to the wrong place. Why? By participation in the divine, we become divine—perfected creatures made ready to see our Creator face-to-face. Let's break that down a bit. If God is love (and He is), and we live and move and have our being in God (and we do), then it follows that we persistently exist in divine love. Whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, we live and move and have our being in the creating and re-creating love of God. If we are to become Christ—fully human, fully divine—, we must participate wholly, fully. . .heart, mind, body, strength, intention, motivation, completely and without reservation, holding nothing of ourselves back, and shedding everything that prevents the light of Christ from shining through us: false charity, self-righteous indignation, token works of mercy, vicarious poverty, the delusions of worldly justice. Becoming Christ is always and only about becoming Christ for others and doing so for no other reason than to be a witness to the love that God is for us. To become Christ for any other reason is to become the Rich Man who steps over Lazarus on his way to yet another sumptuous feast.

Earlier on, I asked, how should we live knowing that we are impermanent beings? We can take the Rich Man as our anti-example. Why does he find himself in Sheol? Not because he's rich. But because he failed, repeatedly failed, to love. Like us, the Rich Man lived and moved and had his being in Love Himself. He was gifted, freely given, all that he had and all that he was. While living and moving and being on earth, he refused to allow the light of God's love to shine through his words and deeds. Lazarus was for him a sign, a memento of impermanence, a story about the vanity of all the things he held dear. But he refused to see the signs, refused to read Lazarus' story, and God honored his choice to reject His divine love by allowing him to abide forever outside that love. Sheol, or hell is by definition, one's “self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed...” God does not send us to hell, we send ourselves. Just as the Rich Man places a limit on his love, so God honors that limit after death. The chasm that separates the Rich Man from Lazarus after death is precisely as wide and deep as the chasm the Rich Man placed between the freely given love of God and the beggar, Lazarus. Failing to participate in divine love while alive, the Rich Man chooses to deprive himself of that love after death. And so, he finds himself in Sheol begging the beggar for just one drop of water. 

Our Lord commands us to love one another and to go out and proclaim his love for the world. He does not charge us with ending hunger or fighting poverty or ending war. Our goal as followers of Christ on the Way is not is turn Lazarus the Beggar into Lazarus the Respectable Middle-class Worker. When we heed our Lord's command to love, feeding the hungry and standing up for justice come naturally; these arise as works uniquely suited to the witness we have to offer. What could be more just, more perfectly humane than helping another to see and enjoy the image of God that he or she really is! Poverty, hunger, war, all work diligently to obscure the image of God placed in every person. But they are all just effects of a larger and deeper evil: the stubborn, cold-hearted refusal to manifest the divine love that created us and re-creates us in the image of Christ, a refusal that God Himself will honor at our death. 

How should we live? As if we were Christ himself among the poorest of the poor, enthusiastically loving because we ourselves are so loved.

*When I preached this homily, the irony of this opening sentence struck me.  As a Dominican friar, I am a beggar!

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Generous Souls

Multitudinous Mendicant Thanks to the kind souls who sent me:

Pieper's Enthusiasm & Divine Madness  

Craddock's On the Craft of Preaching

BXVI's The Transforming Power of Faith

Also, just today someone bought two books of poetry from the Wish List!

I never cease to be grateful for and humbled by the generosity of the Catholic faithful.
________________
 
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Religious Life: nobody buying what you're selling?

Want vocations? Here's your plan. . .

Under the heading, "Best Practices in Vocation Ministry," we find this eye-opening paragraph:

Although these practices can have a positive impact on attracting and retaining new members, the research suggests that it is the example of members and the characteristics of the institute that have the most influence on the decision to enter a particular institute. The most successful institutes in terms of attracting and retaining new members at this time are those that follow a more traditional style of religious life in which members live together in community and participate in daily Eucharist, pray the Divine Office, and engage in devotional practices together. They also wear a religious habit, work together in common apostolates, and are explicit about their fidelity to the Church and the teachings of the Magisterium. All of these characteristics are especially attractive to the young people who are entering religious life today.

Allow me to break these characteristics out for easy digestion. . .

What attracts young vocations to religious life in 2013:

--the example of members [of the institute]

--the characteristics of the institute 

--a more traditional style of religious life

--members live together in community

--participate in daily Eucharist, pray the Divine Office

--engage in devotional practices together   

--wear a religious habit

--work together in common apostolates

--explicit about their fidelity to the Church and the Magisterium 

We can easily derive from the list what young vocations are NOT attracted to:

--angry, bitter, rebellious religious

--religious life circa 1983

--"lone wolf" religious living by themselves

--institutes where Mass and daily office are avoided, mocked, or suppressed

--where devotional practices are dismissed as "so pre-Vatican Two"

--religious who dress to "blend in," i.e. hide

--"do their own thing" in ministry

--institutes whose members are explicit in their dissent from the Magisterium. 

Given all of this, I would add that religious institutes/provinces/congregations that refuse to admit vocations who long for a more traditional religious life, or actively persecute tradition-minded vocations they've already professed, do so b/c they fear the changes these young vocations will eventually bring their preferred way of life. 

IOW, the grand rhetoric of Vatican Two tolerance, diversity, and openness crashes on the sharp shoals of progressive ideology and the rhetoric is exposed as a lie.

We either believe what we preach about being open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, or we do not.

To put all of this in crass commercial terms: religious life today is a buyers' market. If no one is buying your product, you need to seriously consider radically changing what you're selling.

The alternative is a slow but inevitable corporate suicide. 

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25 Contemporary Writers of Faith

Excellent List To Consider:

The Image Top 25 Contemporary Writers of Faith

The project of rebuilding/preserving Christian culture will require the generous assistance of Catholic writers. . .and the generous support of Catholic readers!

Good Letters of the blog-journal of IMAGE, a Christian literary publication.

Check it out.

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Francis sounds a lot like Benedict!

For those freaking out about Pope Francis' interview:

Does the following sound like one of the more hotly discussed sections in the America interview with Pope Francis? 

We should not allow our faith to be drained by too many discussions of multiple, minor details, but rather, should always keep our eyes in the first place on the greatness of Christianity.

I remember, when I used go to Germany in the 1980s and '90s, that I was asked to give interviews and I always knew the questions in advance. They concerned the ordination of women, contraception, abortion and other such constantly recurring problems.

If we let ourselves be drawn into these discussions, the Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions; we give the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears. I therefore consider it essential always to highlight the greatness of our faith - a commitment from which we must not allow such situations to divert us.

In this perspective I would now like to continue by completing last Tuesday's reflections and to stress once again: what matters above all is to tend one's personal relationship with God, with that God who revealed himself to us in Christ.

[. . .]

Read the whole thing.


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