A great day

We've been preparing Coming Out of the Desert - a (hopefully) more accessible and less intimidating variation and expansion on the Life in the Spirit Seminars - for a few months now, though it's clear that the groundwork has been laid over several years.  Since January the core team has been praying and fasting and listening and meeting and planning, privileged to participate in whatever work the Lord is doing.  Our hope is that by encouraging people to be open to the gifts of the Spirit in a less confrontive way - and unfortunately, no matter how lovingly presented, the LISS can feel confrontive - we can help them allow God into their lives more fully.

The response so far has been more than double the maximum number of folks that we were planning for, so already for our first meeting last night we were forced from the day chapel into the main sanctuary of the church.  As it turns out, many of the attendees have been very active in church and outreach ministry, and have strong relationships with the Lord already.  But there are also many with real needs, who are deeply thirsting, and all of us can use more growth.  Last night we heard a great talk on God's love, and a very nice lay testimony to follow it up.

Next week I'm on tap to follow up the teaching on salvation with a testimony of what that has meant in my life.  Is it possible to do this without touching - at least obliquely - on just what I've been saved out of?  While this has long since stopped being super-secret, neither is it public knowledge, something that I share regularly or lightly.  A few dozen folks who think they know me would learn something about me very . . . well . . . unpalatable and dark - any adjective less than "shitty" is too polite, really - that they don't suspect.  At least none of those people are newcomers.  Still, I must be sure not to have an agenda of my own with this, neither avoiding my shame nor seeking affirmation for myself.  The only good reason for sharing would be to contrast my darkness against the light of salvation that Christ provides!

Once I have that testimony together I imagine I'll post it here.

The gift of praise

I keep forgetting what a difference the act of praising God makes in my life.  It lifts my spirits, raises my perspective, and puts me back in touch with what I believe.

I'm a bit concerned about the gap between my faith in my heart and in my head at the moment. The gift of praise helps get my heart back where it belongs. But I'm a little cautious now, and dare not investigate too closely where my head has been since Sunday morning liturgy. As I said last week, for me, to believe in Christ is to live, but the converse is this: to not believe depresses me, even brings me uncomfortably close to despair.

My life outside of Christ just isn't anything I want to live ever again.

From light to darkness

It's amazing how one well-intentioned sentence can pluck a man from the midst of Easter joy and plunge him back into the dryness of the desert.

"If you can believe this," Fr. Dave said about the resurrection, "and not everyone can, but if you can believe this," and I don't know if he was pleading with us to believe or, more likely, to grasp the implications of what we say we believe, "it makes all the difference."

A Lent full of reflecting on Christ on the cross had me no longer considering whether I believe or not.  My year had started off with a book - also well-intentioned but not working for me - that knocked me spiritually off balance.  A good friend shared another book that I've been reading and reflecting on ever since.  My eyes back on Christ at last, I'd so immersed in the Triduum that I'd finally forgotten the issue of whether I believe.  After an emotionally and spiritually challenging Lent, I was filled with the joy of Easter, the glorious music and the amazing empty tomb and the bright light of Christ banishing my darkness.

And it all seemed to extinguish in an instant.  I know that many saints have struggled with the silence of God in their lives for prolonged periods, with the darkness of not sensing his presence and having to rely on what they believe rather than what they feel, with questioning whether they truly believe.

I cannot feel my faith right now.  I'm going to try to trust that I will again, and to live what I do not feel.  I'm going to go do some dishes for my wife now.

The mission of Christ

The Church does not have a mission, as though missionary work were one of its programs or projects.  The Church is the mission of Christ, who continues to seek and to save the lost who do not know their story.  Their story is Christ, the way, the truth and the life of all.  The Church does have many programs and projects, some of which she shares with other institutions and communities.  But the proclamation of God's love in Christ is the most important thing the Church does, because it is what she does uniquely.  If the Church did not do this, nobody would.  She does this simply because she is the Church and this is what the Church does.  She does this because she lives and breathes and is sustained in being by God's love in Christ, and love is either shared or lost. 


What we have we are obliged to share.  Others have a right to it, even if they don't know that. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


If this is what the Church does, it is only so to the degree that it is what I do.  The Church is its members.  I live and breathe and am sustained in being by God's love in Christ.  To know Christ is to live.  For me, to not know Christ would be to despair.  My love for Christ is either shared or lost, and so I sing and pray, play my guitar and write blog posts, send messages of encouragement, talk about the wondrous love that caused the Lord of bliss to lay down his life for me.

Yes, I am obliged to share.  As St. Paul says, The love of Christ compels us.  When we fall in love, we tell our friends, and share the relationship.  Yet as much as we want to share our beloved, for those we love to love and value each other, we don't want them to have the same relationship as we do with our beloved.  But when we have encountered Christ through the Holy Spirit, we want our loved ones to know him as personally and intimately as we do!

This Triduum provides a precious opportunity to connect to my Savior's love, and to share it with those around me.  Each of us has a right to experience the love which Christ has manifest in its fullness in willingly laying down his life.

In the Garden, 2010

Each year I've been blessed to spend an hour (or more, some years) starting around 2 a.m. Good Friday morning in adoration in our Blessed Sacrament chapel.  Our men's group makes sure that someone is there throughout the night, in case anyone wishes to come pray.  For me, it's typically a unique time of special connection with my Lord's suffering and love, and it was this morning, as well.  I usually  end up with several pages of reflections based on what I'm reading and praying, but that wasn't as much the case this morning.  It has been a tumultuous Lent for me personally, and for my wife and I together.  So my prayer time this morning was a closer uniting of the challenges we've tried to face lovingly this season with the far greater ones of my Savior, of getting things more fully into perspective.  Still, there was some written reflection, too (parentheses reflect expansion on the words on my page):

The "cross" which I consider mine to bear, this cup I'm treating as mine to drink?  I could not live without it!  How can that which God has given me - through which God has saved and sustained my life - how could it be a burden?  If I will truly die to myself it will not seem so.

(I then read:)

The way of the Christian life is cruciform.  Jesus did not suffer and die in order that we need not suffer and die, but in order that our suffering and death might be joined to his in redemptive victory . . . The Christian way is not one of avoidance but of participation in the suffering of Christ, which encompasses not only our own suffering but the suffering of the whole world . . . Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, wrote, "When Jesus calls a man, he calls him to come and die.

To many, this does not sound like good news." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

(pretty cool how we get such confirmation when we earnestly seek the Lord.)

(Indeed.  But these words must be seen in the light of my previous post, which I simply didn't develop to completion, another victim of my recent prolificacy.  Perhaps it was also the challenges to which I've alluded above that kept me from getting there yesterday.  That post should have moved onto the joy that abounds when the love we bear for others finally bears fruit.  Our formerly-estranged son-in-law's return to our family, to his wife, and to the church is one of the most tangible recent examples we've seen of this.


As for this morning's reflection, it occurred to me immediately that Jesus invitation must be expressed more completely than this quote from Bonhoeffer, who we must understand was struggling to rouse up complacent Christianity in opposition to the rising influence and evil of the Third Reich.  I'm not criticizing this 20th century martyr in the slightest - whose writings I have not read and who very well may have gone on to make a similar point himself - when I suggest that Jesus would probably say something more complete.  Perhaps, he'd say something like:) "Come and live fully! Come and love completely!  Come and die to yourself, and so live!"

Lord Jesus, for my sake you have borne so much more than I can imagine.  From your cross, your sacrifice, and your death to yourself you have brought forth the ultimate victory!  Holy Spirit, let me be so united with Christ that I see and experience this victory in my life.    My God, break every part of me that you must in order to love through me more fully.

On my knees at the end of my prayer time, this occurred to me: focusing so long and so intently on my past failings and unworthiness, I have in some ways neglected to allow Jesus to be Lord of the remainder of my life.

Death and resurrection

I have said we should not rush to Easter, yet Easter is the necessary presupposition of our contemplating the derelict on the cross.  Apart from Easter, such contemplation would reflect nothing but a morbid, macabre fascination with suffering and death - however "noble" his sacrifice.  Because of Easter, the words from the cross are words of life.  The cross is not merely the bad news before the good news of the resurrection.  Come Easter Sunday, we do not put the suffering and death behind us as though it were no more than a nightmarish prelude to the joy of victory.  No, the cross remains the path of discipleship for those who follow the risen Lord.  It is not as though there are two paths, one the way of the cross and the other the way of resurrection victory.  Rather the resurrection means that the way of the cross is the way of victory.  - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


I think I hear Fr. Neuhaus saying that just as there can be no resurrection without dying, the purpose of this death is the resurrection.

Maybe that's the point of all death, really.  My father's despairing death.  My sister's tragic death.  My mother's peaceful death.  My eventual death.

That is the point, too, of dying to ourselves, of placing my daughters' and grandchildren's and wife's and neighbors' needs ahead of my own.  The death of my wishes, of my selfish will, somehow conveys the risen Christ.

Proposing the truth

If by "impose" is meant that we try to force people to agree, then we certainly must not impose the gospel.  In an encyclical on mission - Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer) - John Paul II says, "The Church imposes nothing.  She only proposes."  But what she proposes she proposes as the truth. This is basic.  It is so basic that, if we don't understand this, all talk about mission really is no more than arrogance and presumption.  The one who said "I thirst" and received on the hyssop the wine of the new covenant, representing the blood shed and the blood shared by the eucharistic community to which he surrenders his spirit, this one is either Lord of all or he is not Lord at all. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Okay, I've posted separately on the significance of this last phrase for me individually.  Fr. Neuhaus isn't saying that unless all acknowledge Jesus as Lord that he isn't Lord at all.  Rather, if we don't all owe Jesus acknowledgement as Lord, very Son of God from before the universe began, then no one does.  

I love Fr. Neuhaus' explanation of the hyssop, and the connection this draws between the blood of the Pesach lamb first applied to the lintels of the Hebrew homes in Egypt, Jesus' physical blood shed for us on the cross, and Jesus' Eucharistic blood now made present for us in the physical guise of wine.  The Jewish understanding of the Passover feast is crucial to seeing how these, once united, can never be truly separated again.  Even today the Jewish people celebrate at each Passover their own delivery from slavery in Egypt, though they are thousands of years removed from that slavery.  Likewise, we do not offer the sacrifice of Christ over and over again.  Rather, we unite ourselves with his sacrifice when we come together for Eucharist, at which time we are present at the first Passover, and at the cross, and at the empty tomb, and at the heavenly banquet which we will one day see in its fullness and of which we now catch only the most fleeting glimpse.

I can't wait until we're not locked into time anymore!  Only then will we see the fullness of what we celebrate.