From Ash Wednesday to Spy Wednesday to the End

This day of Holy Week---Spy Wednesday---takes its name from today’s Gospel in which Judas “spies” an opportunity to betray Jesus, inquiring of certain Jewish chief priests:  “What are you willing to give me if I hand Him over to you?”  The very question reflects a shriveling of this Apostle’s soul, that some thing could be exchanged for Someone.  For Judas eventually to cast away the “thirty pieces of silver” and then his own life demonstrates in a horrific way that truth which should give each of us pause along the course of what we call our life---that abysmal dissatisfaction is the ultimate result of rejecting the One Who is the Incarnate Way, Truth, and Life.  There is no gaining the world in the loss of one’s soul.

But today’s Gospel also indicates the mysterious intersection of the Lord’s own triumphantly salvific plans with the nefarious plotting of Judas.  Jesus too is on the look-out for new opportunities to further His own interests, which are precisely those of His Heavenly Father.  Christ thus sends His disciples “into the city to a certain man,” with the good news:  “My appointed time draws near; in your house I shall celebrate the Passover with My disciples.”  Perhaps the host of the Last Supper remains unnamed to allow each of us the privilege of sharing his surprise and joy---not unlike that of the greedy tax collector Zacchaeus when, at the outset of his conversion, he first heard Jesus insist:  “I must stay at your house today!” (Lk 19:5b). 

Today I conclude the written reflections that I began on Ash Wednesday.  In my meditation over the course of this Lenten season on how Christ has come to me in my infirmities, I have hoped to share with you how the Lord Jesus has brought the Paschal Mystery more deeply into the house of my life.  It has been a journey that has taken me away from home and brought me back again, in a type of “apostolic loop.”  Embracing the discipline of writing each day has been for me more than just a substitute for preaching on the daily readings; it has also been a personal accounting to the Crucified and Risen Lord of His goodness to me---both an examination of conscience and a proclamation of His grace and mercy.

Several people have asked me to continue this blog, apparently having grown too accustomed to this practice of Lenten penance!  I end it here where I do, first because that is what I promised.  Quite simply, I have said what I was given to say; this limit feels right for this purpose.  It is a perennial temptation in any form of communication to say more than needs to be said, for longer than it needs to be said.  More profoundly, these essays were always meant to be preparatory for entering the Sacred Triduum, where the Lord speaks most directly to us through the Liturgy. 

On Holy Thursday, I resume my preaching of the Gospel---live and in person---which I have always held to be at the happy center of my Holy Orders (cf., Code of Canon Law #762:  “Sacred ministers, among whose principal duties is the proclamation of the gospel of God to all, are to hold the function of preaching in esteem since the people of God are first brought together by the word of the living God, which it is certainly right to require from the mouth of priests.”).  In the wise and loving providence of God (and of my pastoral calendar conformed to it), there may be future opportunities for writing projects.  But for now---as of tomorrow---let the preaching resume!  Deo gratias.

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Although this completes the original series of Lenten meditations, I hope in the next days of the Sacred Triduum 2015 to offer some additional meditations of thanksgiving and summary update for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.  The timing of these will depend on my other pastoral responsibilities!

From Confusion and Anxiety to Glory

Today’s portion of St. John’s account of the Last Supper begins with the unsettling assertion that

“Jesus was deeply troubled and testified, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray Me.’”  It ends with Christ’s even more focused prediction not simply of His betrayal by one of the Twelve but also of a three-fold denial by Peter, the head of the Apostles:  “Amen, amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow before you deny Me three times.”  Between these two assertions, there is unspeakable confusion, attempts to find presumably preventative or at least ameliorative answers, and assertions that the problem will somehow be checked by the strength of one’s own resources.  From our vantage point, we see in this event that there are obviously many forms of denial taking place on the evening of Holy Thursday!

In this penultimate Lenten blog post, I look back on all of the forty-plus meditations in which I have in one way or another detailed the feelings of being “deeply troubled” by my own body “betraying me,” so to speak, in the failure of my jaw’s physical integrity.  This trial led in time to my having to prepare for surgery, undergo the TMJ operation, and then begin a new period of recovery to health.  I have also alluded at many points to the confusion I felt at not knowing all the crucial factors which brought me to this strangely slow-motion-yet-abrupt ending of normal life and my anxious, temporary-yet-drawn-out bafflement at how I was to move forward.

When we recall the most common artistic depictions of the Last Supper (as, for example, that of Leonardo da Vinci), we instinctively imagine figures with a certain static quality, seemingly frozen in place despite the troubled looks, the contorted gestures, and even the one hand guiltily dipping the morsel of bread into the dish with Jesus.  Likewise, the post-meal representation of the washing of the feet---Christ’s engagement of tending intimately and individually to the members of His Own Body---also often lacks the dynamic quality of the Apostles’ experience of the confounding unknown they were living.  It is even more disconcerting to consider them living these feelings with Jesus present rather than simply apart from Him in His seeming absence. 

It is well worth pondering in these final days of Lent, on the cusp of the Sacred Paschal Triduum, exactly how much of our confusion and anxiety the Lord Jesus invites us to bring with us into our observance of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday---and even into Easter Sunday and beyond.  The first followers of Christ make it abundantly clear that we are to bring everything with us---complete, unreserved emotional honesty and the most penetrating rational inquiry.  Such, and only such, is real faith seeking true understanding.  So often I have found that people expect, and even sincerely desire, that Christian life in general---and Priestly life in particular---have the reliably flat character of a two-dimensional reproduction of an all too familiar Last Supper tableau. 

I cannot count the number of people who have told me they were shocked that I could have been experiencing an almost two year medical ordeal and still have gone about my ordinary Priestly duties as if life was good and there were new reasons for joy to be found.  What other real choice is there for any of us in our Christian life of faith?  I have learned from my parishioners---many of whom have suffered far worse and far more for far longer---that short-term trading of prayers for comfort and miracles on demand are not in the evangelical offing for those who seek to follow the Master---the prophet Isaiah’s Man of Sorrows, “acquainted with grief” (Is 53:3).  As one of my professors once remarked:  It is impossible to finesse one’s way around Calvary!

But our Divine Savior does infallibly promise us light, even in what we think is deepest darkness.  Immediately after Judas’ departure into the “night,” Jesus proclaims:  “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.  If God is glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself, and He will glorify Him at once.”  I have witnessed this glory super-abundantly over the extended span of the “at once” that is God’s time---in the cascading love that has been given and received, multiplied and shared precisely in my having to pass with Christ through this malady.   

So now when I approach Holy Mass and look out at the congregation, I marvel so much more deeply at the rich complexity of the lives the Crucified and Risen One draws to be close with Him---embracing their confusion and anxiety (as well as their joys and hopes) in a boundless mercy which dares to accompany them redemptively to the end.  To put it another way, I see the Divine Artist as having no intention whatsoever to reproduce the Last Supper of the Upper Room according to our reductive imaginings; rather, He sacramentally insists on re-presenting the Eucharistic Banquet of Calvary to Heaven---on making the Sacred Mystery present in all of its dimensionality working through all of our dimensionality---according to the expansive fullness of His Glory.  And that is what brings joy to our sorrow and light to our darkness.

The Operative Words of Holy Week

In today’s Gospel, when Lazarus’ and Martha’s sister Mary “took a liter of costly perfumed oil

made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair,” her gesture of love was made in silence. Nonetheless “the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.”  The cutting remarks of Judas, by contrast, divide the house and fill it with a different odor:  “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?”  Judas’ heart is divided, “because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions.”  He is ultimately deaf to the Lord’s correction, because a short time later he too will touch the body of Jesus with a silent gesture---the kiss of betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

From yesterday’s reading of St. Luke’s account of the Passion, we learn that Judas’ evil action had immediate and infectious consequences:  “His disciples realized what was about to happen, and they asked, ‘Lord, shall we strike with a sword?’  And one of them struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear.  But Jesus said in reply, ‘Stop, no more of this!’  Then he touched the servant’s ear and healed him.”  Violence is, in a sense, both the result of spiritual deafness and the cause of the further spread of it. At the Easter Vigil later this week, the catechumens who have prepared for Baptism will have their ears touched and Christ’s efficacious words pronounced over them:  “Ephphatha”---“Be opened!”.  But to reach this point, the Lord must open our ears to receive all of the graces of Holy Week, including the painful and difficult ones.

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the operation on my temporomandibular joints was performed, so to speak, from the outside in.  The surgeon made an incision along the cartilage of my ears to gain access to the interior of my jaw.  Many times over the past two months I have looked at the surgical photos taken of that procedure like I look at holy cards:  These images remind me in the most strikingly vivid (because somatically literal!) way how good and necessary it is for my ears to have been radically opened.  Dr. Piper was deeply knowledgeable, technically very refined, minimally invasive, and utterly decisive about (1) where he cut, (2) exactly what his salutary purpose was, and (3) even how best to repair the temporary damage caused by his healing art.  So it is---super-eminently---with Christ.

I cannot help but think of the starkly opposed yet tragically similar gestures of Judas’ kiss and Peter’s sword.  Both are botched surgeries.  Judas perversely makes of an expression of love its very severing, like a renegade doctor who would betray his profession by plotting to instrumentalize the patient and maliciously cause harm.  Peter, by comparison, wields the tools of evangelical operation clumsily, like a well intentioned physician who has not adequately appropriated the best practices of medical training---thus using the wrong means to the desired outcome---and in the process causes complications.  The Lord Jesus suffers “patiently” the wrongheaded interventions of both the good and the evil, in no small part to train us future generations in the salvific arts of the Divine Charity.

Today is March 25 [2013], ordinarily celebrated in the Church as the Solemnity of the Annunciation.  Because the date this year falls during Holy Week, its observance is transferred to April 8, the first day after the ending of the Easter Octave.  But we can, for all that, ask the Lord to grant us the hearing aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s receptive ears.  At the announcement of the Angel Gabriel which she did not at first understand, Our Lady--- full of grace and with consummate contemplation in action---inclined forward with her whole being to inquire:  “How can this be?”

How, Lord Jesus, can the days of this particular Holy Week be for our salvation?  What is the surgical procedure we must understand---and the recovery protocol we must follow---for the coordinated healing of our mouths (what we say) through our ears (how we listen) to form those gestures of love which permeate the whole House of Your Church and reach even to the ends of the world You have come to save?  As the Priests of our Diocese gather around Bishop Rhoades this evening at the Chrism Mass at St. Matthew Cathedral to renew our vows and share in the blessing of the Holy Oils, may these sanctifying gestures bear the fragrant form of the sacrificial service of Mary of Bethany and the all-sufficiently receptive grace of Mary of Nazareth:  May it be done unto us, O Christ, according to Your word.

The Gospel in Many Voices

On this Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion (as on Good Friday), the Gospel is ordinarily proclaimed in a multiplicity of speakers’ parts.  For most of my life, I have added my voice to what the “crowd” has to say:  “Crucify Him!  Crucify Him!”  In my eleven years as a Priest, however, it has always been my liturgical office and personal joy to speak in the person of Christ.  Today is the first day that I must assume the role of narrator of Christ’s suffering and death, because the principal celebrant at Queen of Peace---Fr. John Eze---properly speaks in the voice of the Lord (and with an African accent!).

In my meditations on this blog (now numbering forty), I have referred often---but usually only in passing---to this much beloved Nigerian Priest who has shepherded my flock with such care during the days leading up to, and now following, my jaw surgery.  He has literally been my voice as Pastor for over two months.  Beyond the obvious challenges of seeing another person performing tasks that are so dear to my heart for people who are so dear to my heart, I have consistently been overwhelmed---even to tears---at the depths of God’s goodness in sending to my people and to me such a good shepherd.  I have come to know and love the Lord’s voice in his.

To sit side by side with Fr. John in the sanctuary, hear him proclaim and preach the Gospel, stand near him during the Eucharistic prayer, and receive his updates each day at the rectory we share on the parishioners he has visited---all of these privileged stances have given me a new insight into the fathomless humility, extravagant generosity, and (dare I say) reckless boldness of God to entrust His saving words and deeds to each of us as members of His Body.  Out of infinite love, Jesus Christ actually lets us bear His voice and extend His gestures of saving charity.

In a conversation, it is so tempting simply to want to say one’s own part.  We often look to seize the moment when our interlocutor pauses so that we can interject ourselves into the opening.  To grant the other enough receptive silence to hear a voice beyond one’s own is a life-long discipline involving an on-going dying to self.   In the case of the trusting silence of God, it is a miracle:  He really allows us speak through Him and with Him and in Him---not just to (or at) Him! 

In our modern age, of course, the microphone has amplified the Priest’s voice to the point of distorting it by exaggeration.  The electronic pseudo “vox Dei” too easily pretends to fill the church, all the while risking overwhelming by its one-sidedness the prayer of those not similarly equipped.  It is an etymological paradox that the word “microphone” literally means “small sound.”    Overcoming the passivity of hearing that this device abets, we can be more receptive to the “still, small voice” of God (cf. 1 Kings 19:11-13).

For all of the rich liturgies of this Holy Week in which the Lord sacramentally speaks to us the words of everlasting life, we must prepare for each---and follow up on each---in contemplative silence.  When I was ordained, I never knew that a plastic mouth splint would become a personal sacramental, disposing me to receive the graces of Passiontide with more sensitive ears and a more open heart.  It has also been so spiritually fruitful for me to play the “narrator” of the Lord’s “mercies-through-trials” each Lenten day on this blog.  But to begin to hear the ineffable harmony of my soundless sharing of Christ’s words through another’s voice is to receive on earth something of the very reverberations of the Crucified and Risen Lord of Heaven:  “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”     

Non Vedo L’Ora

The Italian expression for “I can’t wait!” literally means “I do not see the hour!” (“Non vedo l’ora!”).  Today’s Gospel is filled with agitation mixed with competing expectations.  To those who have begun to hope in Jesus as a type of messiah, they speculate about whether He will come to the festival of Passover and work a sign to catalyze a popular throwing off of the yoke of Roman occupation.  On the other hand, those Jewish leaders who believe collusion with imperial forces furthers the interests of stability (and their own hold on power) see the capture and execution of Jesus as a possibility ripe for pursuing; in the words of the high priest Caiaphas:  “It is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.”  Neither Christ’s friends nor His enemies “saw the hour.”  In the face of all their fevered scenarios, we are simply told that “Jesus no longer walked about in public . . . but He left for the region near the desert . . . and there he remained with his disciples.” 

The day before Holy Week begins is a strange “desert day.”  On the eve of Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, the Church readies herself to re-present liturgically our renewed entrance into the culminating moment of our salvation in the Paschal Mystery.  We do have the privilege of “seeing the hour”---the “Hour” our Savior foresaw as God from all eternity and toward which His earthly ministry as man was oriented from the beginning.  But as we approach the reading and hearing of the Gospel of Christ’s Passion, we must avoid all temptations to see it as “scripted”---that is to say predictable and hence dismissible. 

Preparing for great events requires contemplation and a necessary retreat from public view and its attending expectations.  So does convalescing from surgery.  As I have shared with you, it is during this upcoming week that I am medically approved to begin preaching.  I have waited for this hour!  My TMJ difficulties and their on-going resolution have existentially persuaded me that the Hour of Christ’s Passion possesses us infinitely more than we think we possess it.  Our long prepared entrance---ready or not!---into this sacred mystery of the Lord’s redemptive spontaneity is what we must beg of our Divine Savior the grace to see.

Where the Way of the Cross Begins and Ends

The traditionally recognized Stations of the Cross are fourteen in number and begin with Pontius Pilate’s condemnation of Jesus to death.  This Lenten Friday evening at Queen of Peace we have kept again as a parish family---for the last time before the beginning of Holy Week---this devotion to our Savior’s Passion.  Tonight was particularly poignant, because the children of our school embodied for us, in a dramatic form all their own, the Via Crucis of the Lord.  Instead of merely gazing upon the beautiful hand-carved images hung on the stone walls of our church to remind us of the final earthly steps of Christ into His Paschal Mystery, we saw enacted in the lives of our own flesh and blood the work of our salvation.

Just as the Way of the Cross does not end in the tomb of the Fourteenth Station, it does not really begin with the Roman Governor’s infamous judgment of the penalty of death for Jesus.  In today’s Gospel we hear that Christ’s adversaries “picked up rocks to stone Jesus.”  They hold in their own clenched hands and hardened hearts what will form the painful way that the Way must travel, the error that the Truth must engage to correct, the plot of death that Life must pass through to rise above.  The Gospels are unanimous in their witness that even in the events surrounding His birth and childhood, the Lord Jesus began tracing for us the path to Calvary.

In participating in our children’s Living Stations, I could not help but think of the injuries of childhood.  Whether it is physical pain or mental anguish, the young possess a sensitivity that we who have grown calloused to the blows of life often lack.  In several of my previous blogs, I alluded to the fact that the surgeon who operated on my jaw was persuaded by what he saw that my damaged TMJ was ultimately consistent with childhood injury.  This “trauma” (as it is medically termed and has been spiritually felt) is one I do not remember.  It nevertheless halted the full and proper development of my lower jaw, leaving me prone to the later adolescent and adult complications which led to my debilitating pain and seeking of surgical remedy.

That pattern also seems to me consistent with the ordinary course of our spiritual life.  We bear in our souls the primordial wounds of sin---that of others first and then, ineluctably, our own---as we do the childhood scars on our body.  In being unable to recall exactly how my jaw was injured and when, I am prevented from even attempting to calculate my share of the blame (I was in fact a willful terror as a child!), the potential part played by another/others, or even simply the role of troublous circumstance.  Such is any life as lived along the Way of the Cross.

For six Lents in the church of Queen of Peace, I have witnessed class after class of children trace the same movements of Jesus across the passage of these years.  Each and every year Pontius Pilate condemns Jesus from my presider’s chair; Jesus falls where I genuflect; the little body of Christ is laid on the ground in a burial shroud on the very spot on which the tiny Sacred Host of the Risen Eucharistic Lord is daily distributed in Holy Communion.  The young girls dressed as first century women always pretend to cry, as their parents in the pews shed real tears.  The older have carried longer the ancient, tragic secret of the passing of youth in growing up and the myriad threats to innocence which surround those of fewer years.

I shall never forget the first time I saw this children’s Passion Play in miniature.  A boy by the name of Sean Casey was dressed as a Roman soldier, and he was whipping the back of a child-Christ with cords made of bright red tissue paper.  The perfect absurdity and absolutely just depiction of it all overwhelmed me.  What are our blows and insults to the impassible One?  Yet how our Lord must expose the impotence of our evil designs by exposing Himself to our nugatory venality!  With each passing year, I see the generational dimension of our participation in Christ’s Passion.  Our church is a school for teaching the Divine Charity over the course of a lifetime, even as our school exists to prepare students to worship in Spirit and in truth by walking the Way of the Cross.

I went to Our Lady of Grace School in Highland, Indiana and rode the bus to school until I was old enough to ride my bike.  More often than not, that enclosed trip from home to classroom was---call it what you will---a living hell or a Way of the Cross.  There were no cameras monitoring and controlling bullying in the 1970’s!  There was many a day when my ear lobes would be twanged to redness and my heart to rage; all of my winter hats had the strings of the pompon pulled out one by one, like so many threads of self-respect.  But on the bus was the bull’s eye target named Karl, who in his perceived slower mental development became a lightening rod of rejection and venomous hatred.  One day so many older kids spat on him over the few miles of the trip that when he stood to get off the bus at his stop, his coat was literally covered and dripping with the darkly shimmering collective contempt of his tormentors and the guilt and cowardice of the rest of us.  Even through my grade schooled eyes, I saw in the boy Karl the Man of Sorrows.

“Trauma consistent with childhood injury” is not simply a speculative causal evaluation of a broken body part but a description of what has happened both to connect us to---and alienate us from---each other in our shared history, which is a prelude to our restoration in Christ.  On this final Lenten Friday, which only Good Friday can succeed, we confess that our whole life---singly and corporately---is the Way of the Cross.  Christ has borne it to form and reform us into spiritually healthy members of His Mystical Body.  He carries us on shoulders so broad and powerful and grown up as to hold the universe in existence, yet with a fresh and gentle innocence most passionately and vulnerably felt---even if not yet completely remembered---in the earliest joy of children’s play.

The Sight and Gladness of Abraham

In the Gospel readings of these days, we see that the road to Calvary is paved with the shards of fragmented, unresolved arguments and misguided, abandoned hopes.  Steadfastly conversing on this via Crucis with whomever will listen and remain to follow Him to the end, Christ offers these mysterious words pregnant with covenantal promise:  “Abraham your father rejoiced to see My day; he saw it and was glad.” 

In today’s first reading from Genesis, the scope of this promise is sketched by God:  “I am making you the father of a host of nations.  I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you.  I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.”  Jesus Christ is, of course, as man one of the earthly descendants of Abraham, even as He is the very same Lord Who created the world and forged its covenants:  “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

It is striking that before Jesus’ opponents pick up rocks to stone Him, they attempt to beat Him up with the brute (and brutal) fact of time:  “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?”  Our Divine Savior is actually mocked by what we might call “chronological bullying.”

People who suffer a physical malady like jaw pain are in a very elemental way bullied by time, in that their suffering seems to know no end (thus shutting down any future of gladness).  If the illness is chronic, it can even ruin the happier past pre-dating the suffering, precisely because the health of once-upon-a-time seems irrecoverable.  But the sick---especially when they are diagnosed or being treated---endure in addition yet another perversity of temporality:  Their sense of time is incessantly determined by medical timetables and therapeutic milestones.  Having “two months to live” or “seven more months until the cast may come off” can appear to a given patient to be either heartening or soul-crushing (or both simultaneously).  Moreover, when there are multiple agonizing stages spaced over stretches of time to attain the restoration of health, the temptation to bouts of frustration or even despair is an ever-present possibility. 

Two weeks ago, for example, I had a phone appointment with Dr. Mark Piper to discuss my progress in healing, which has been excellent and right on schedule.  Up to that call, my sense of time had been governed by: 1.) when I can begin to preach regularly again (= Holy Thursday); 2.) when I can be both the principal celebrant and homilist at all of the Sunday Masses (= end of April); 3.) when I can be off of my anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxing medications (= beginning in May); and 4.) when I can get my surgical braces off and be splint-free (= October). All of these milestones were enthusiastically confirmed as I spoke with Dr. Piper.  But then I made the mistake of asking him how long he expected I would have to wear regular braces to refine my new bite pattern.  I had been thinking perhaps three more months.  In one corrective sentence, Dr. Piper broke my heart:  He predicted another year of metal in my mouth to finish the job---Lord, have mercy! So now my medical horizon of hope recedes to October 2014!  In the grand scheme of things, and certainly when compared to the suffering of countless millions, my “slight momentary affliction” (as St. Paul would put it---2 Cor 4:17a) is as nothing.  But in time it does feel like a heavy something.

I was thinking of these matters today when I was able to meet up with a good high school friend, Leo Meskis, whom I have known for twenty-seven years but have only seen perhaps three or four times since graduation.   After giving him a tour of Queen of Peace, we went to Elia’s for a great Mediterranean lunch.  Of course as we talked, time disappeared and the years melted away in memories as vividly present as yesterday.  Leo is currently in the orthotics business, traveling great distances to fit people who have very serious medical malformations of their bodies to those devices which will best relieve their pain and optimize the normal physical functioning of their lives.  My friend sees suffering on a daily basis and---in seeing solutions the patients may not see---fits people with hope.

As Leo and I reminisced, our conversation turned to a certain Priest we had as a teacher at Bishop Noll Institute.  Fr. Stephen Gibson regularly and aggressively interrupted any number of Saturday mornings of our adolescent laziness to goad us into joining him on “religious mini-field trips.”  Somehow this cleric’s gentle pushiness made it easier to accept these suburban pilgrimages than to refuse them, and one of his favorite spots to meet was a Carmelite shrine and monastery in Munster, Indiana.  The more I talked with Leo today, the more I realized that---like Abraham---Fr. Gibson saw what we didn’t see:  In the week by week, month by month spiritual formation this Priest was offering us, he saw that the Lord had a blessed and life-long mission for each of us to discover.  Clearly our teacher saw in each student of our little group at least the potential of a Priestly vocation, and in my case his sacrifices have borne precisely this fruit (Leo is happily married in Indianapolis with a beautiful wife and daughter).

For all of the Teresian Carmelite graces I have pointed out in several of these blog entries, never until today did I think of the roots of these gifts extending back through time to my half-hearted and even reluctant teenage prayers at that Carmelite monastery all those years ago.  I also mentioned to my friend Leo that I have never expressed my gratitude to Fr. Gibson for all of the unrewarded labor and countless hours of prayer he put into us as a spiritual father trying to raise good spiritual sons.  To this day we are able to imitate this Priest’s quirky speech patterns; we have only begun to imitate the confidence of his faith which emboldened him to share it in such straightforward, life-changing ways with the young and the clueless.

It gives me so much joy this night to know that the Lord Jesus Christ is not intimidated by time.  He can be patient with His adversaries---even unto death on a Cross---because He sees and accomplishes in His own Person the boundless promises made to Abraham to be fulfilled over the course of centuries and millennia into eternity.  I am not yet fifty (seven more years to go), but I can testify that today I recovered a Carmelite joy hidden for me from of old.  The weight of a quarter century was lifted by a single conversation with a good friend to reveal that the infinite happiness of my Priestly vocation was already being prepared in long-forgotten visits to a silent monastery during the time in my life when I was wearing my first set of braces, restricted to the small horizon of hoping---just hoping---that I would finally get them off for my high school senior year!  In seeing now what Fr. Gibson saw then, I am truly glad with my Father’s joy.

 

Communication: Broken Down and Raised Up

In the Gospel accounts leading up to the Lord’s Passion, the truth of Christ is revealed with greater clarity, even as it is misunderstood and rejected by some more vehemently.  Jesus teaches:  “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  Those to whom His words are directed refuse to recognize that they are in need of liberation from slavery; moreover, Christ exposes the rebellious root and ultimate consequence of this denial:  “But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.”  The breakdown in communication is, in other words, deadly for all involved.

In my on-going recovery from jaw surgery, I have become by necessity more attentive to the words which---so to speak---“make their room in me.”  Very simply, more words come into my ears and mind and heart than are able to come out of my mouth.  When I was recuperating in Florida in the week or so after my operation, my “conversational world” was radically limited largely to two people, Larry and Judy Garatoni.  Of course, I was able to phone a few folks and my parents were able to visit.  But even the addition of those few extra people was exhausting, because each embodied a whole universe of sharing that seemed naturally to demand verbal back-and forth.  It felt so peaceful and good to be given the blessed privilege of minimal demands on my speaking.

Such situations of convalescence can lead, if overly indulged, to an unhealthy retreat from the world and its responsibilities.  Church history is filled with men and women who initially sought the fuga mundi---the flight from the world---in the desert, on the pillar (the Stylites or pole-sitting saints, including St. Daniel the Stylite), or (at least as romantically imagined) the monastery.  Paradoxically, the more successful these people became at living their aspiration to contemplative silence, the more the crowds from the world would find them and engage them incessantly in conversation about the spiritual life!  Even a married couple ordinarily discovers their intimate dialogue of two “challenged” (leavened? stretched? opened up? tortured and mortally threatened? crucified and buried?) by the addition of children’s voices---and the wills those voices express.

During my silent time at the Garatoni home, I had ample opportunity to read.  The words of the written page were principally what filled the “inner room” of my heart and exposed me in a more guarded way---almost like my protective plastic mouth splint---to the disputes and other conversational vicissitudes of the world.  Although I mentioned in a previous blog some of the books I read during my convalescence, I also had as a silent companion John W. O’Malley’s Trent:  What Happened at the Council.  The whole monograph has as its leitmotif an extended narrative amazement that any substantive consensus on Church reform expressed in doctrinal formulations implemented over the succeeding centuries was attained with any success at all!  The Council of Trent took place, off and on, for eighteen years---interrupted by every conceivable manner of internal and external strife.  And yet the Holy Spirit was present throughout as safeguard and guide.

All of these thoughts have been constantly in my mind since my return to Queen of Peace a month and a half ago.  I have been, of course, thrown back into the swirl of conversational back-and forth that constitutes the heart of parish life.  Within this I have also returned to the family disputes---many and varied and intense---which are also part of sharing a common life.  Queen of Peace’s strength is that we are a family; and our weakness is that we are a family.  And disagreements among intimates can often be the most painful, potentially volatile, and sometimes intractable, precisely because there is so much at stake in the closeness of sharing a home and facing the challenges of agreement on what is most important and how best to attain it.  My greatest Lenten suffering has been my current inability to use my previously unfettered and practically unlimited speaking opportunities when such challenges arose.  As much of a Pastor’s work of reconciliation takes place outside of the Confessional as in it!  For now, at least, more difficult words of others are brought to the inner room my heart than can be resolved from my mouth; they and their resolution must be given to God in more silence than I would initially have offered to the Lord.

Today’s readings about the conversational frustrations of Jesus Christ---the very Incarnate Word of the universe---are strangely comforting.  Not every problem or misunderstanding can be resolved by words---still less by the electronic substitutes for personal exchange to which we have grown so accustomed to think we are adequately expressing ourselves (e-mails, texts, tweets---even blogs!).  It is the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection---leading to the sending of the Holy Spirit Who leads us into all truth---which establishes graced structures of communication unto Holy Communion in the life of the Church.  If the mortal verbal sin of our age is conversational divorce by slicker and more various technological means of ultimately uncommitted verbal sparring, Christ nonetheless still chooses to wed Himself to us in a way that opens up greater demands for---and possibilities of accomplishing---the “conversion” that transforms the most challenging “conversations” about matters of deepest truth.  On the Cross, His expiation of our refusal becomes the living and perennial condition for the possibility of our conciliation with each other in Him.

In the first reading from the Prophet Daniel, the “white-hot furnace” into which King Nebuchadnezzar thrust the three faithful Jewish men of God was the direct result of the tyrant’s becoming “livid with utter rage,” because he had no fruitful place---no faith-shaped outlet---for his passions.  Through all of our frustrations at failures of adequate communication, we know in Christ that the Lord accompanies us “unfettered and unhurt, walking in the fire” not simply through the damnable flames of human rage which threaten to consume us, but by purgative fires of His own Divine Charity.  This fiery purification refines our hearts, tempers our tempers, and transforms our communication break-downs into evangelical heights attainable only by the Holy Spirit’s descending tongues of flame.  On the conversational far side of Calvary is nothing less than Pentecost---the Church in the Upper Room simultaneously in hidden, silent prayer and joyful public sharing of the Risen and Ascending Word.

Less is More

In the recorded words of the Gospel, St. Joseph is silent.

I have come to embrace silence in the past months as never before and now yearn for more of it.

Together in prayer we share the gift of silence, which---like Our Lady’s spouse, St. Joseph---lovingly treasures the Word of God and provides a home for Him.

What good things can we say today without speaking?

Teaching in the Treasury of the Temple

Most of today’s Gospel is an apparently insoluble argument between Jesus and His co-religionists.  Life at times, too, can seem like an intractable back-and-forth.  But Christ precedes what would seem to be frustration with the brilliant declaration:  “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”  And once the claims and denials have been exchanged, we finally find out the setting in which it all took place:

“He spoke these words while teaching in the treasury in the temple area.”

It is a great joy to know in faith that the One Who first created the whole world by saying, “Let there be light” has become flesh to bring illumination to whatever we must face---even, in my case, if this has meant facing the mandibular troubles and healing of my face.  It is also an ultimate consolation to know that our lives together are intended by Christ to constitute the infinitely precious and endlessly circulating treasure in the Temple of the Church. 

My reflections this Lent are each and all premised on these “alpha” and “omega” truths.  Whether we know it or not, we go about our business today under Christ’s beneficent light, drawing as need be from His treasure, even as we by His grace are given to make our own contribution to it.  The first thing one does in the orthodontist’s chair is place oneself under the bright light so that everything, good and bad, can be optimally seen.  And then one is literally handed sunglasses, because in the end---as the song goes--- the “future’s so bright I gotta wear shades!” 

Three Meditations on the Miracle of Lazarus

I. 

The Gospel for the catechumens this Sunday is that of the miraculous raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus from the dead.  But the narrative of the miracle which has become synonymous with this name begins very simply:  “Now a man was ill. . . .”  Certainly not every bout with sickness leads us immediately to think of death, especially in those parts of the world where the practice of modern medicine has attained so many successes (however partial or temporary).  But serious illness can in fact focus the mind to consider the certainty and nearness of the horizon of our mortality.

Several years ago I was playing in the waves along the shore of Lake Michigan.  Others were on the beach, and in the extended delight of my pretend battle with the elements I did not notice the gradual increase of the frequency and intensity of the waves.  Before I knew it I was unable to move back to shore and realized to my horror that I was trapped in a rip current.  The people on shore apparently did not see me, still less realize that I was entering panic mode.   And then I recall thinking with mysterious serenity and clarity:  This is it.  This is the end of my life.  So this is what it feels like to die.  In this moment which seemed both beyond time and encompassing the whole time of my life, I then received the presence of mind to swim along the rip current rather than struggle against it.  It so happened that the lake house at which I was staying---aptly named “Providence House”---had a yellowed newspaper clipping on the kitchen refrigerator warning of rip currents in Lake Michigan and what to do when caught in one.  I walked back to shore alive, spent, grateful, and wiser---thanks to obeying that old news.

My experience with the initial TMJ diagnosis and the description of the serious surgery and its very challenging, lengthy recovery process also evoked in me similarly powerful feelings of “illness-unto-death”---but with a subtle and profound difference:  I realized that I needed to face (and actually grieve) the loss of my “healthy” forty-some years of life as I had known them.  And through all of the occasional panic and frequent waves of anger, there emerged in prayer---my own, and surely through that of others---a great and growing peace beyond my mortal misery, so strangely similar to what I felt in the midst of mortal danger in Lake Michigan.  In prayer it became clear that whatever I had to go through was not outside of the Lord’s plan but taken up into it.  Many of my personal superficial cares and plans simply disappeared, as did the weight I gave to the larger churning of events in the so-called wider world. 

The response of the Lord Jesus to the “bad news” of Lazarus’ illness was exactly the “Good News” that came to be my peace:  “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God,
that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”  Yes, I would live whatever came “for the glory of God,” having learned to walk this path not from a faded newspaper in someone else’s house, but from first sharing the lives of so many of the chronically and mortally ill people of my Parish Home.   As they walked this path from panic to peace ahead of me, they became---by the grace of the Crucified and Risen Lord---my teachers (often unwitting but always expert) in the Way of the Cross leading to Easter.  So it must continue this Lent in the life of the Church, moving together toward the tomb to rise from it in Christ.

II.

The body of Lazarus, the Gospel tells us, was in the tomb---a cave---for four days.  It was here Jesus came to face His friend in a new way, as old as the tears of human mourning for the apparently final loss of one who is loved. 

Son of suburbia that I am, my first viscerally serious staring of death in the face (expired hamsters and permanently sleeping Skippy the dog notwithstanding) was at a strange Roman church located behind Piazza Farnese, along the Via Giulia in the Eternal City.  The name of the small chapel is Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte---Holy Mary of Prayer and Death.  It is not a famous tourist attraction (like the better known Capuchin “bone church” of Rome on the Via Veneto) but a silent little sanctuary administered by a group of pious Christians.  Historically this association of the faithful had as their apostolate the dredging of dead bodies from the Tiber to give unclaimed lives---first created in the image and likeness of God---a worthy Christian burial.  This work of fulfilling the last corporal work of mercy continues in this community’s on-going enfolding of the dead in the prayers of the Church.

In any case, as a sophomore on the St. Mary’s Rome Program in 1988 filled with all sorts of questions about life and faith, I hunted down this church with the be-skulled façade from directions in a guide book and was told to be sure and visit the crypt to see some REAL BONES!  So, upon finding it, down the stairs I went with my friends, and we marveled at the macabre spectacle.  The crypt was dark and filthy, with a variety of bones layered in years of dust arranged in a gruesome chandelier; countless other bones were just strewn about.  I remember picking up a femur, only to put it back down immediately.  This was surely a memento mori---a reminder of mortality---alla romana!

A few years after I was ordained, I came back to this church, not as a practitioner of gawking tourism or detached forensics, but as a pilgrim and a Priest.  When I entered what had once seemed to me an empty, neglected place, there was by contrast on this occasion a be-habited Sister at prayer before the Tabernacle.  She gave every appearance of being part of a living religious congregation staffing this place, so I made bold to ask permission to go downstairs to the crypt to pray.  Consent granted, I descended to behold---to my happy surprise---that in the intervening decades since my first visit, the burial chamber had been cleaned up.  The walls were white and the bones reverently arranged.  This enormous tomb had been transformed into a lovingly cared for place of Christian prayer. 

I remember looking at a row of skulls, some of them neatly labeled on the brow with information like names and (presumably) dates of burial.  I must admit that I picked one up and held it in my hands for the sheer marvel of cradling so intimately the mortal frame---bone which once housed thoughts greater than the universe---created and redeemed by Christ for immortal glory.  Setting the skull back in its place next to its neighbors, I blessed the forehead of each one, claiming for them (and through them for me) the graces of Ash Wednesday and of Easter.  The custodian eventually came downstairs and eyed me suspiciously, so I finally went back up and out of that church into a world less real for being revealed as so superficially alive.

During my initial evaluation at the Piper Clinic last September, I spent quite some time with Dr. Mark Piper reviewing the CT-scans and MRIs of my skull obtained earlier that day.  I was beyond amazed at how on the computer the doctor and I were able to explore the complex design of my very own skull, with all of its little abnormalities and injuries.  It was such a mysterious privilege to “look inside” my head with one who, at least medically, knew more about---and was able to help---me far beyond my abilities.  To this day, I have a CD copy of these three-dimensional photos of my skull on my computer---thank God, not to contemplate the dead but to quicken my understanding of what it means to be alive!

I think of how Martha and Mary and Lazarus were friends with Jesus precisely because they allowed Him to look within them with love; and they in turn dared to accept Christ’s invitation into the intimacy of His life.  In these days leading up to the Passion, we do not neutrally examine for the sake of fulfilling curiosity a Head crowned with thorns, or Hands and Feet nailed, or a Heart pierced.  We are invited into this Mystery of mysteries like the Apostles, so that we “may believe”---and in believing we might be healed and saved for life eternal.

III.

The Gospel narrative of Lazarus being raised from the dead concludes with what can properly be called a “Divine Comedy.”  A comedy is, after all, a drama with a happy ending.  But here there is more:  Lazarus is alive but still bound; he must “hop” to Jesus wearing his burial bands even before he is able to see everything new that has happened to him!     

In my weeks and months of recovery from surgery, I must say that I sympathize more with the crazy predicament of Lazarus.  Being bound by my surgical braces and the accompanying macramé of restrictive rubber bands has given me a deeper sense of how one’s problems can be both essentially “fixed” yet temporally still “on the mend.”  My jaw just needs time to rest and fully heal into its new, healthy position; but this also requires periods of necessary freedom and a regimen of self-initiated physical therapy several times a day.

When Jesus points to Lazarus and commands His disciples---the nascent Church---to “untie him and let him go,” our Savior is using the same word regarding the freeing of His friend that He employs in His commission to St. Peter to “bind” and “loose” sin.  To our great joy, Pope Francis is the latest in the Petrine succession to guarantee that this divine gift of mercy is safeguarded and extended in the life of the Church.  Many secular observers hope that the new Pope will have an “open mind” to give them something different from the Catholic Faith---that Papa Francesco will “loosen up a bit” on aspects of faith and morals which conflict with the spirit of the age (which ignores death and shuns dying to self, even as it furthers a “culture of death”).  The maxim of the late Catholic journalist G.K. Chesterton---who at about 300lbs. had a lot riding on the resurrection of the body!---is here freshly apropos:  “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”  I long for the day when my mouth can once again literally do what my intellect bound by faith has been freed by Christ to do, all along and forever.

Having the Last Word

Today’s Gospel reports some of the argumentative ferment surrounding Jesus.  Various people and factions of the crowd make speculations about His identity (prophet?  Messiah?) and question His origins (Galilee?  Bethlehem?).  Apparently there are “guards” in the crowds colluding with some Jewish authorities (themselves in collusion with the Roman occupation?).  The summary verdict of these particular chief priests and Pharisees is that Jesus is “accursed.”  By contrast, Nicodemus pleads---as a voice of both faith and reason---that it is not just to condemn someone without first hearing him and finding out “what he is doing.”  This whole narrative of confusion and speculative confrontation (here there is no mention of directly and impartially questioning Jesus) ends strangely and abruptly:  “Then each went to his own house.”

When I first went to the Piper Clinic in St. Petersburg, Florida last September for the initial evaluation of my TMJ problem, my heart was filled with conflicted feelings about my medical care up to that point, as well as substantial worries about the future of my jaw’s health for my Priestly ministry (how could I continue to preach or teach or administer the Sacraments in such pain?).  My temporary home for these troubled thoughts was the Ponce de Leon Historic Hotel, the cheapest place I could find within walking distance of the Clinic.  As the name would imply, it had a certain Latin American accent in its décor, which I would describe as heavily trafficked contemporary---renovated to be slick minimalist, yet frayed-around-the edges.  The rooms were small, simple, and clean.  And the cast of characters that checked in and out were worthy of a novel (my favorite was the bridal party standing at the front desk with bags full of vodka and high expectations for the pre-nuptial evening, if not for the following wedding day).

In any case, the hotel was quirky and satisfactory, so---creature of habit that I am---I also returned to stay there in January of this year in the days before my surgery.  As reading I brought along an eclectic assortment of books, including John Zmirak’s The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism:  A Faithful, Fun-Loving Look at Catholic Dogmas, Doctrines, and Schmoctrines; Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson:  The Art of Power; and two books by Charles C. Mann---1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and 1493:  Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.  Zmirak’s book was a hilarious and profound---post-modern yet utterly traditional---presentation of the Faith which seemed somehow tailored to fit my surreal medical situation.  The Jefferson book was the literary equivalent of comfort food, because our third President was the intellectual obsession of my adolescence.  But it was Mann’s two histories of the Americas that were a perfect fit for my place and time in Florida. 

Without doing book reviews, the genius of Mann’s historical/archeological/sociological/(even biological) reporting of the “Columbian Exchange”---the infinitely variegated interactions between, and changes resulting from, the encounter between the “Old World” of Europe and the “New World” of the Americas---opened my mind further to the endless complexities of human interaction and the constantly revised historical narratives which must be the fruit of deeper, more comprehensive research and honest debate.  In terms of the Catholic Church’s 15-16^th century missionary efforts, I detected in Charles Mann’s secular account no particular love for---or special interest in---the Catholic Church; nor did I detect overt animus; he was overall rather indifferent to it.  But I was continually impressed at Mann’s human sympathy for trying to understand what the different protagonists of a given place and time were trying to accomplish, and the intended and unintended results of their actions or inactions.

When on March 3, 1513---almost exactly half a millennium ago---Ponce de Leon set forth by ship from Puerto Rico, he discovered without knowing it at the time a new way to a new place.  In secular terms, his mission was both extractive and contributive; but the Spanish explorer was part of a spiritual movement much larger than his mixed motives---to fulfill Christ’s mandate to share the Catholic faith with all people of all nations.  Seeing the extraordinary beauty of its fauna and flora---and knowing that this moment of arrival was enfolded in the celebrations of the Easter season (which the Spaniards called “Pascua Florida,” the “Festival of Flowers”)---Ponce de Leon called the place La Florida.  To this place I came, not exactly to find the fountain of youth, but to receive healing of my jaw and restoration of my normal life.

I have been thinking about all of this in the past few days as I read the media caricatures of Pope Francis and his involvement as a Jesuit superior in the complexities of the Argentinean military upheavals of the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Apparently he is blamed for ordering two Jesuit Priests under his care not to engage in political action in a dangerously volatile area.  The Priests were disobedient, subsequently kidnapped and tortured by governmental authorities (for which, utterly incomprehensibly, Francis is also held up by some for indirect blame).  And when this Jesuit superior risks his life by secretly and successfully pleading for safe release of these Priests, he is finally accused of “not speaking out” with sufficient vigor to provoke (convert?) governmental authorities. [For further commentary on these points, see Edward Peters’ essay at the end of this blog post.]

When Pope Francis visited the Basilica of St. Mary Major this past week at the very outset of his Papacy to pray, he entered a church whose ceiling is literally covered in the first gold brought over by the conquistadors from the New World.  Pope Francis---like every single one of us---walks under the heavy weight of a very complex history in which weeds and wheat, sin and sanctity are often inextricably mixed, this side of Judgment Day.  The Basilica of St. Mary Major is also the place where St. Ignatius Loyola celebrated his first Mass, on Christmas Day in 1538.  As Pope Francis well knows from his Jesuit religious life, St. Ignatius wanted to begin his Priestly ministry by offering the Holy Eucharist at the chapel containing the relics traditionally associated with the manger of Bethlehem. 

Like St. Francis of Assisi before him, St. Ignatius staked his life on the belief that the humble earthly origins of our Divine Savior can in every age create a “new beginning.”  As we walk with the saints---and now Pope Francis---through the vicissitudes and ambiguities of history scarred by sin, we can do so with serenity and joy:  We know that Jesus Christ has gone before us---through every misunderstanding and beyond every argument---to explore every way forward to our true home, and in so doing to lay rightful claim by His grace to the realm of Easter (where the fruit trees always yield and their medicinal leaves never fade [cf. Rev. 22]).  The Lord has bigger plans for us than arguing and going back to fume in the private houses of our own imaginings; we are meant for the many mansions of Our Father’s House.  Even though life can seem---as St. Teresa of Άvila famously put it---like “a bad night in a bad inn,” we know in Faith that the Redeemer of history has the last word because He is the last Word:  “Behold, I make all things new!” (cf. Rev. 21:5).

+++++++

Bonus Reflection on Today’s Topic

When Nothing Else Will Work, Accuse a Catholic Prelate of NSO

Edward Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.---March 15, 2013

The mainstream media is in panic over Pope Francis.

The new pope is solidly opposed to everything big media wants (contraception, abortion, ‘same-sex marriage’, etc.), but it can’t simply write him off as an out-of-touch academic (Benedict) or as a provincial Slav suffering Nazi and Communist induced post-traumatic stress disorder (John Paul II). Worse, the first prelate of the Catholic world is a man of proven commitment to the poor (far more demonstrably than are his limousine liberal critics), and has lived his whole life in a simplicity that is utterly beyond the ken of Manhattan or the Beltway sophisticates.

So, confronted by a major Catholic prelate of such palpable integrity, what’s the media to do? Only one thing: Look up what country the prelate calls home, find out what trauma that country suffered (that’s not hard to do, all modern countries suffer from traumas, generally those organized by their governments), and accuse the prelate of—wait for it—Not Speaking Out.

NSO is the perfect accusation: first, it can only be levied by history, that is, by folks with access to much more information than was possessed by those against whom an NSO is aimed; indeed, as NSO is almost always raised well after the trauma and its agents have passed from the scene, retaliation by such agents for reminding folks of their travesties is unlikely or impossible; very importantly, NSO allows the media to claim the moral high ground by implying that, had it been on scene during the trauma, it would surely have “spoken out”. That last claim is, of course, the most laughable (as—to take just one example of ignored victims of modernity—hundreds of millions of baby souls will attest on Judgment Day). Best of all, even if evidence of “speaking out” can be found, it can always be dismissed as “not enough”.

Totalitarian regimes (whether left or right) act like rabid dogs in that their behavior, while irrational, is often predictable. Now, if one can, according to the information available to one at the time, predict that “speaking out” will provoke an act of irrational savagery, pray, where exactly is the obligation to speak out such that one’s “failure” (a judgmental word, notice) to speak out is later sanctionable by those not remotely confronted with the crisis? What if, moreover, one directly confronted by a crisis, on the basis of the information available at the time, makes the choice to oppose the savagery in other, even hidden, ways, though not in a way that big media pundits, separated from the crisis by decades and oceans, are so sure was the “correct” way to act?

I figured that an NSO would, sooner or later, be visited upon Francis, but that it comes so quickly underscores, I think, how really, really worried big media is about the influence that Francis will wield against their vision of the world.

Traveling Unknown

Today’s Gospel is about predictable public movement and changed, secret plans: “Jesus moved about within Galilee; He did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill Him.  But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near.  But when His brethren had gone up to the feast, He Himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.”  The Jewish feast of Tabernacles or Booths involved one of three annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple.  This feast was distinctive as a combined festival of gratitude for the harvest and a sacred recalling of how the Israelites had to live in tents as they crossed the desert from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. 

These obligatory rituals were known to all, and yet Christ chose to enter Jerusalem in secret.  He was, nonetheless, recognized:  “Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said, ‘Is He not the one they are trying to kill?’”  The Gospel explicitly indicates that the murderous plotting had already begun but did not thwart the Savior’s divine purposes, which were ultimately deeper and more mysterious than the ordinary movements of pilgrimage.  In Jerusalem during a later celebration of the Feast of Passover, Christ will establish at the Last Supper the Holy Eucharist as the definitive “Thanksgiving Feast” of the New and Eternal Covenant, accomplishing in His saving Death and Resurrection the all-encompassing “Passover” from sin and death into our true and lasting Homeland of Heaven.  But in our meditation today, we simply pause to contemplate our Lord’s travel for a time in secret.

Anyone who has ever been to an airport these days knows the soul-crushing obsession with identity verification to prevent murderous plots, paradoxically combined with seemingly endless movement through the wasteland of anonymity between home and destination.  It is not, in other words, a generally happy adventure to travel a long distance alone, especially to a new place.  Such was my first experience traveling this past September for my initial jaw evaluation at the Piper Clinic.  By design I tried to keep this trip a secret from all but a few staff members of Queen of Peace; not even my parents knew that I was going, still less for what purpose.  Why worry my parishioners and my family, I thought, until I know more answers and am chronologically closer to the recommended surgical resolution of my TMJ problems.  Of course, predictably, some people did find out!

It is my practice always to travel dressed as a Priest, for the simple fact that I am a Priest.  So while most people do not know my unique identity as the Pastor of Queen of Peace Parish, they are given unmistakable visual clues (ecclesiastical advertisement?) that I am ordained and somehow supposed to be about the Lord’s business.  Arriving at the airport for the first time in St. Petersburg, for example, all of the cabbies jokingly wanted me to ride in their cab for “good luck” and gladly accepted a blessing instead.  The technicians at the Piper Clinic were amazed that I always showed up in the same outfit (except in post-operative visits when---to their complete surprise---I arrived wearing shorts and a t-shirt [not even black!] to make the medical exam and removal of stitches from the abdominal fat graft site easier).  And yet throughout my first days in Florida---before my parents and some friends arrived---it was so oddly difficult to be both “known” as a generic Priest and at the same time virtually unknown as Fr. Daniel Scheidt.

In these first days of Pope Francis’ papacy, we must pray for his personal movement into St. Peter’s succession.  From the beginning, the Christian life in general---and the election to the papacy in particular---has always involved the taking up and transformation of one’s familiar identity into a new mission.  As this mission opens up and demands to be “filled in,” the living of it opens one up to receive a new identity:  You are a Disciple of Christ; you are Peter.  There is so much about the papacy that the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio knew last week; but there is now even more of that unique secret of his new identity and mission that remains for him to seek and discover and live---all day by day.  And so it is for us.

You may recall my account of seeing many years ago then-Cardinal Ratzinger secretly slip into a certain side chapel of Rome’s Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray before the Mass on October 11, 1992 at which St. Pope John Paul II would promulgate the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Today, Pope Francis---at the very outset of his assumption of the Petrine Office---chose to visit discretely (with only ten minute’s notice to the Basilica staff!) the very same chapel in St. Mary Major to pray.  In this holy place is kept an icon of Our Lady holding the Christ Child, under the title of Salus Populi Romani (“Salvation of the Roman People”).

We would be wise in following more closely these two shepherds in prayer, separated in mysteriously identical pilgrimages by decades, yet visibly united in complimentary missions as Bishop of Rome to safeguard and pass on the one true Faith in the one true Lord.  In entrusting the unknowns of their future to Our Blessed Mother Mary, each points us to Christ, Who first chose to be carried in the secret of the Virgin’s womb.  The murderous plots against Jesus were already afoot from the outset of His earthly life---as the mortal dangers and countless lesser threats to our faith and well-being ever seem to surround us and the Church.  But our confident freedom in moving through this Lenten wilderness to the particular new graces of Easter 2013 is the knowledge that Christ accompanies us in hidden closeness every step of the way---assuring us that in our shared faith, walking on the blessed and secure foundation of St. Peter’s faith, we never travel alone to the festival of the Heavenly Jerusalem, where everyone is fully known and eternally loved. 

Transferring Loyalty and Accepting Testimony

In today’s Gospel, Jesus proposes to all who will listen to Him a testimony---not simply of words but of the deeds which He was first given to share:  “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”  Many of Christ’s interlocutors, having grown so accustomed to their own interpretations of the Mosaic law, simply refuse to recognize its fulfillment in this man Who seems to speak and act in the prerogatives of the Almighty.

Loyalty is not transferred easily, and it necessarily involves an act of faith based on the trusting acceptance of another’s testimony.  In the medical realm, I have found that people have either a deep (even fierce) devotion to this or that doctor (who is, of course, the best!); or, in other cases, they have a visceral hatred toward a particular doctor (who is simply incompetent and untrustworthy---the worst!).  Rarely is a physician assessed as being merely average or just acceptable. 

Changing doctors can be a trauma in itself, precisely because there is a serious judgment about whether a transfer of loyalty is warranted, and on whose testimony.  In my own case, even through the worst of my orthodontic travails, I trusted my doctor to make sound recommendations of what he thought best for me.  And at a certain point in my treatment, when he had reached the limit of his abilities to help me himself, my doctor had the humility and professional expertise to point me to (i.e., testify on behalf of) just the right specialist.

I still remember going to the website of this recommended specialist, Dr. Mark Piper.  The site was unimpressive (nothing fancy, just the basics), and his photo immediately for some reason struck me as odd.  I was happy to see who I would be contacting, but Dr. Piper had a handlebar mustache that looked like it was right out of the 1930’s.  His curriculum vitae (Harvard, Vanderbilt, a plethora of professional organizations and awards) was about as reassuring as any institutional testimony of medical excellence can get; yet still I wondered about his humanity.  And in so doing, I wound up adding up all of my external data points into a picture that was ultimately confirmed in some ways but utterly debunked in others, as I got to know him personally over time through my medical treatment.  I would never have guessed, for example, that someone so talented and utterly focused on the cutting edge of his specialty could at the same time be so unpretentious (even laid-back) and superabundantly generous in the time he gave to his patient’s concerns, no matter how small.

All of these thoughts have been on my mind as I---with the rest of the world---try to begin to accept the gift of our new Holy Father, Pope Francis.  Seeing him for the first time as he approached the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica and looking at his face, my first impression was of seeing a strangely “generic pope.”  It wasn’t just the very well defined contours of my very deep love of Benedict XVI or St. John Paul II which prompted my reaction; it was more the simple fact that I did not know anything about this new Successor of the Fisherman, whose life will necessarily forever shape mine and that of the whole Church.  I was being asked in faith to accept the testimony of the Cardinal-electors who chose this particular man.

In the flood of information and analysis that will flow from today on forward, I think it is worth pausing to ask the Lord to refine---to the point of utterly burning away in His divine charity---our expectations, presuppositions, and projections of who we think Pope Francis should be.  His initial gestures (the name and the first blessing, for example) are a sufficiently rich and suggestive introduction to bring to our prayer.  To have the boldness to select a papal name never before chosen suggests a courageous opening to new promptings of the Holy Spirit (Who bears final testimony to Christ’s Lordship, through the water of Baptism and the Blood of the Eucharist [cf. 1 Jn 5:8]).  But in harkening back to St. Francis of Assisi---who was passionately devoted to an absolutely undivided love of both the “hierarchical-institutional” dimension of the Church and the Church’s mission of radical service to the poor---Pope Francis makes in his choice of name a profoundly traditional choice.  In short, St. Francis of Assisi unreservedly---and at great cost to his plans and timetables---loved the Petrine Office through all of its limitations and even the scandalous defects of its temporary occupants. 

When I ponder Christ’s testimony to St. Peter (“You are Peter and upon this Rock I shall build my Church . . .”) combined with His testimony centuries later to St. Francis (“Rebuild my Church, which you see is fallen into ruin”) coming together in the person of our new Holy Father, I see the outline of a figure whom the Lord has given to fill us with joy and hope and zeal for the New Evangelization.  But it all will surely take getting used to---for everyone. 

Lent requires radical openness to the Lord’s surprises.  As today’s Gospel cautions, it is all too easy for us this side of Paradise to be scandalized by, and hostile to, divine gifts---especially when they may come in a human profile not immediately tailored to our liking.  Nonetheless, our earthly loyalties must be open to transfiguring conversion, and the testimony of the Apostles’ successors must be accepted afresh---as if for the first time.  We have as the people of God been placed in the care of an Argentinean who from the outset of his papacy has himself entrusted his person and the exercise of his Petrine authority to our prayers. 

As a simple point of history, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio has astonishingly become the first Pope from the New World.  But, then again, considered from the standpoint of the Risen Christ, it is nothing short of a miracle that every Pope is created from the New World, to shepherd us toward the New World---encouraging us along the way to extend this New World by our shared testimony and the loyalty borne of love.

Working for the Rest

In answer to those who criticized His miracles for being performed on the Sabbath, Christ responded:   “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”  In essence, Jesus announced His divine essence, Which alone can be both “at work” and “at rest” in perfect simultaneity.  What the Jewish day of rest pointed to chronologically, Christ actually demonstrates in the flesh theologically.  For us, however, work and rest are often experienced as an endlessly negotiated either/or.

To have one’s plans for good work interrupted by illness is, of course, a trial---the personal details of which I have been elaborating on in these meditations since Ash Wednesday.  I share with you today some words I received upon my return to Queen of Peace from my jaw surgery.  The words came in the form of a long letter written by a former student of mine.  Although she is currently studying theology in graduate school in California, she penned this extended encouragement (which at twenty-nine pages is no small amount of work!) over the course of a long retreat which happened to coincide with my pre- and post-operative days in Florida.

I was struck by how our respective times away from ordinary duties coincided.  At one point she wrote:  “Oddly enough, several people that I know from different times in my life are in India right now.  I’ve asked all of them to pray for you---particularly if they see any Missionaries of Charity.  I know Mother Teresa is your 2013 saint friend, so I thought that might make a nice ‘Happy Speedy Recovery’ gift.”  Recall that in an earlier post I recounted receiving Mother Teresa as my “saint of the year,” along with her words:  “Yesterday is gone.  Tomorrow has not yet come.  We have only today---let us begin.”

It is wonderful to think in our rounded globe of a world that our yesterday is someone else’s today, even as our today is also another’s tomorrow.  As I type these words, the Cardinal-electors of our Church are gathered in the Sistine Chapel to do the work in prayer of discerning the next Successor of St. Peter.  Our prayers---half way around the world---help sustain them in their responsibility.  They also prepare, in God’s plan, the “tomorrow” of the Church.  In fact, every child born and sacramentalized and educated today also contributes to the “tomorrow” of the Church, which will be lived in a world ever changing, yet for all that remaining so much the same.  Florida is connected to California is connected to India is connected to Rome is connected to Indiana, and so it goes. . . .

To be a “missionary of charity” through time is to recognize Christ’s work in what one might contrast as our active accomplishments and our passive diminishments.  In another entry, my friend entrusted me to the care of the late Jesuit missionary, Fr. Walter Ciszek:  “I just figure that since you’ll be spending so much time in silence, having a friend who spent years and years in solitary confinement [in the Russian gulag after WWII] might not be a bad idea.  It’s not the same thing, but maybe it’s close enough.  And I think he’s a good example of a priest who was able to live out his vocation in creative ways and under adverse circumstances.”  Fr. Ciszek’s autobiographical With God in Russia and He Leadeth Me are spiritual classics.

In all of the endless commentary pre- and post-conclave about the impossible tasks that the next Pope faces (as every Pope must face)---all of the crushing work that awaits him in what can so often feel by any leader as “solitary confinement”---we should each reflect in prayer on our own daunting responsibilities and unfulfilled tasks---all in light of the saving action and redemptive Passion of Christ.  For the consummation of Jesus Christ’s healing ministry to be His Crucifixion and Resurrection shows us that God’s work is not limited by our abilities or lack thereof.  In Him we each are the one specially “elected” to bear witness to the victory of Love, which gives itself to us and through us---in both our resting and our rising.   

   

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses . . . and Miracle!

The Lord Jesus in today’s Gospel encounters a man at the five-porticoed pool of Bethesda who has been “lying there”---surrounded by “a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled”---for thirty-eight years.  Christ’s question is bracingly straightforward:  “Do you want to be well?”  But His query is met by the paralyzed man’s egregiously---pardon the pun---“lame” excuse that “I have no one to put me into the pool.”  For almost the span of years that the Israelites were trudging through the desert, this guy can’t network with anyone to get help?  Come on!  After the man is finally cured by Jesus, the Lord must seek him out again with some salutary follow-up scolding:  “Look, you are well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”  Clearly there was a more serious spiritual paralysis which had come to underlie this invalid’s physical limitations.

On my first visit to the Piper Clinic for an initial consultation about my chronic TMJ problem, I had to spend several hours watching videotaped “pain lectures” produced by Dr. Mark Piper.  In these presentations, the doctor described how the different systems of joints and nerves and muscles were inter-related.  A malady in one of them quite frequently, if not inevitably, cascaded into problems with the others.  Of particular interest to me were the facial photos of patients who had suffered chronic pain for many years; their mouths had a tendency to form into a permanent frown.  The drooping at the sides of the lips gradually but inevitably became the most comfortable position for the damaged muscles and nerves to be in.  Put another way, for those suffering jaw problems for a long time, it became---for many reasons---virtually impossible to smile.  And, as one might imagine, this physiological condition led in turn to emotional and (although the videos did not allude to them) spiritual problems.

My ultimate diagnosis from the Piper Clinic was two-fold:  I had slipped cartilage disks in my jaw joints, but I also had a “syndrome of pain patterning” that had to be addressed as well.  Fortunately in my case, the latter was not as advanced as the former.  I was actually amused to find out that Dr. Piper’s initial observations of my “nice smile” and happy looking face were not at all small talk or polite niceties intended to put me at ease; they were in fact physiognomic medical descriptions of what was going on “underneath” my skin.  Much of my post-surgical recovery involves the reversal of this syndrome of pain patterning through a temporary regimen of anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxing medications, combined with physical therapy exercises I can do on my own.  I expect to be fully back to easy smiling---exteriorly and interiorly---over the course of the next few months.

The Lord Jesus knows as our Divine Physician that we have more than one single problem that needs to be cured.  He also knows that any serious sin---or chronic indulgence of the same, small bad habits---in fact typically catalyzes a whole “syndrome of pain patterning” which threatens to deform every aspect of our lives, paralyzing us in the endless negative feedback loop of limitations followed by excuses, followed by more limitations followed by more excuses. . . .

Only in recent years has the five-porticoed pool of Bethesda been re-discovered and systematically excavated.  It is one of the few places in contemporary Jerusalem where one can literally descend to the very depths at which Jesus Christ moved in His public ministry to work His cures.  Today the Lord wants, so to speak, to excavate the rubble of years (and perhaps decades) of excuses under which we have been lamed or paralyzed or even crushed. 

Our Savior allowed Himself---Isaiah prophesies---to be “crushed for our iniquities” (Is 53:6) that we might be made whole.  The Lord enters our pain to reveal its patterning and to propose His sacramental remedies leading to fully restored life in His Church.  Jesus wants to repeat His miracle in us of making a zealous evangelist out of a half-hearted beggar.  To accomplish this, Christ gives us St. Peter as the “Rock” on whom He will build His Church, so that we can have a foundation of people to help us in our need.  Thus we pray fervently for the Cardinal electors as they gather in Conclave today to select a new Pope under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  In the historic drama of this particular day---in this pivotal Lenten moment in our life---the time for lying around is passed:  Thanks be to God, Christ will accept no more of our lame excuses.