Getting to the Point: evangelization

Showing posts with label evangelization. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Have I Got A Book For You!

Our Thursday commentary on the Mass and its application to daily life has reached one of the peak moments of the liturgy, the solemn proclamation of the Gospel. That this particular Scripture reading is different from the other two is obvious—it is preceded by an acclamation, often involves a procession with candles and even incense, and is reserved for the ordained clergy (properly, the deacon, but in the absence of one, a priest).

That we surround the proclaiming of the Gospel with such ritual solemnity communicates to us that here, Christ Himself is speaking to us. Here, God Himself has come down from heaven to directly communicate His truth and His will to us. It is not that the rest of Scripture is not inspired by God—it most certainly is—but that the Gospels truly are the words and deeds of God-made-flesh and so are indeed the core of the canon, the central Word of God, taken together with His living presence in the Church, by which we understand the entirety of Revelation.

And so it is proclaimed, week in and week out, day in and day out at daily Masses—the whole of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John laid out for the Church throughout the course of the three-year liturgical cycle. The Gospels, hopefully so familiar to the readers of this blog that I don’t have to go on and on about their content, are of course told in narrative form—stories, speeches, parables, miracles, conversations, arguments. All the normal way of telling the tale of who a person was and what He did in his life.

But in this, flowing through all of it, there is the revelation of a Person and Who He Is, and what He does continually in our lives, in all of our lives, in the life of the world. Written (as it must be) in human words and using human concepts and categories, the Gospels nonetheless contain the Divine life, the Divine presence. In them God draws very near to us and instructs our minds and hearts, and not only instructs them but shapes them, heals them, unites them to Himself. There is power in the Blood, the old hymn says. There is power in the Word, too.

And so when we come to talk about how to live this out, it is actually kind of hard to know what to say. We live it out… well, by living it out! God says ‘forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ So… we forgive those who have hurt us. Right? God says ‘if anyone asks for your cloak, give him your tunic.’ So… give to the point where it hurts. Right?

Don’t leave it as words on a page, or words you hear in Church, or you will be like the man building his house on sand (Mt 7:26), and we know how that turned out (Mt 7:27!).

But to be able to live them out, we have to be so familiar, so intimate with the Gospels. They have to be our second nature, so constantly present in our lives that whenever there is any serious decision to be made about any matter (or even just the daily grind and the choices it brings us continually), the words of Christ come to mind almost instantly, almost automatically.

So… we have to make the reading of the Gospels a daily event, a daily encounter with God in Christ in the sacred page. It can be as simple as having a missalette on hand and reading the Gospel of the day, or a sequential reading starting at Matthew 1 through to John 21 and then back again. Whatever—if Christ’s words and deeds are not continually informing our words and deeds, then our lives become continually less and less Christian. If His words and deeds are our daily ‘food for thought’, then our lives can become more and more a reflection of His life, and so we become a living Gospel for others.

It is so much the essence of our lives, if we are indeed His disciples, are indeed Christians. Along with the other, greater peak of the liturgy, which is the reception of His life into our life, His being into our being in the reception of Holy Communion, the receiving of the Gospel into our minds and hearts is the sine qua non of discipleship, that without which we cannot really say we are His.

Not to be pounding the book sale thing too hard, but that is indeed what I have just written an entire book about—how our own thoughts and ideas are all fatally flawed, and how the Thoughts of God, mystically and mysteriously communicated to us in the words of the Gospels, are the great healing of our own disordered thinking.

But you don’t need my book (shocking admission from an author!). You need The Book; I need The Book – the world needs The Book! And the best way to bring The Book to the world is for you and me to read it and live it and show it in how we treat people, so that just maybe our faithless confused world may once again ‘take and read’ and believe that God has indeed revealed Himself in Christ and made the path of life and salvation available to the whole human race.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Hidden Light For The Path

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. We are going through the Little Mandate, the core words of the Madonna House vocation and spirit, each Tuesday here on this blog. There is a lovely tension at this point in the Mandate—be hidden, be a light. Which is it?

Of course it is both, and when you think about it, lights are in fact ‘hidden’ things. A light that is properly placed and correctly calibrated does not draw attention to itself but to what it is illuminating. In a well lit room you don’t stare at the lamps and ceiling fixtures, but at the furnishings and the people. Lights are hidden, in that they exist not for themselves but for what they light.

I have a great love for this line of the Mandate in particular (not that I don’t love the whole of it, of course). It seems to capture exactly what it is we do around here so much—certainly it makes sense of the large majority of how I spend my time.

To shine a light on your neighbour’s feet—that is, to help illuminate the next little stretch of the path so that they can walk on it more easily—to me, that is the definition of what a spiritual director does, and that happens to be more and more my primary work in MH. It’s never about having enough light to shine forth for the next hundred miles of roadway, to provide all the answers and the big picture of life, the universe, and everything (42!), but simply helping the person discern the next few steps, the next little bit of the crooked winding path of God and man in the world.

Sometimes the path is so gnarled and tortuous all the light can do is show the way forward for the next day, sometimes there is a straight level stretch of road ahead and the light illumines quite a bit of road indeed (this is called ‘vocation discernment’).

Of course this line has a particular resonance for me and the work I do right now, but it is bigger than that. It seems to me that what shines a light for the feet of the other is authenticity, Christian witness, fidelity in little things, and personal love and hospitality. All of which is the very substance of our life in this community, and is utterly applicable to anyone’s life. We all are (or should be trying to be, anyhow) living out our faith in the small choices of our daily life—acts of service, forgiveness and kindness, prayers and humility. Nothing big and showy, pretty ordinary and even ‘blah’ most days.

But there is a quiet light shining forth from that, and it is a light on the feet of our neighbours. It is so important for all of us to take seriously the impact of our choices on those around us, and in particular of those who do not share our faith in Jesus Christ. If they see Christians wrangling and acrimonious, selfish and greedy, bitter and hateful, lazy and complacent, it doesn’t shed much light on the path for them, does it?

But the quiet hidden light shed by people who at least strive to go through their days loving and serving, praying and being merciful—this is what has the power to convert hearts and change the world. And it has been our consistent experience in MH for over 60 years that it is this, in fact, which has the most lasting and deep effect on the many people who have passed through here over the decades.

It is not the words we speak, not the homilies the priests preach, not the good teaching or brilliant exposition of faith and moral we present, but the quiet witness of a hidden life that convinces people of the truth of the Gospel.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Playtime is Over

As I mentioned yesterday, I am heading out to Cana Colony later today for a week of ministry to families. So I won’t be blogging this week. I did want to post this, though.

I am thinking particularly of my many American readers who of course have had to face the Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage earlier this week. My own thoughts on this issue I have expressed extensively on this blog, and have no need or desire to go into all over again.

Rather, I want to share this article from 1966 by Catherine Doherty, which I think takes the whole question to a much deeper level, a much more vital and essential point than this or that social issue or moral crisis. So I leave this with you as I leave to go and serve the families at Cana, asking for your prayers for them and for all families trying to live the Gospel in these difficult days:

This Little Piggy Goes to Market

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Pray, fast. Pray always, fast. Last week in our journey through these words that are the heart of MH spirituality and way of life, I focussed on these same words, but wrote about the aspect of prayer and its essential role in our life.

But what about fasting? What is it, and why is it? Why is it important? Is it? How does it fit in with going into the marketplace, being plunged into the human situation and its bargains and trade-offs, its cold calculations and tragic compromises? Why is fasting a right Gospel response to our being deeply immersed in the affairs, concerns, joys and hopes, sorrows and distress of all men and women, all of humanity?

I write about this in my book Idol Thoughts. Fasting essentially is a matter of establishing a spiritual order, or rather healing a deep spiritual disorder in us, by a bodily action. It bears witness, therefore, to the essential unity of our bodies and our spirits, that the two are not and cannot be at odds with each other, but form a single reality, a single person. What we do in our bodies directly affects our souls and vice versa.

The disorder that is then expressed in the more unsavoury aspects of the marketplace—the buying and selling not of goods and services, but of personal integrity and dignity—is essentially the disorder of idolatry. Human beings are inveterate idolators. That is, we look everywhere else but to God for our happiness. Whether it is sex or food or power or revenge or riches or fame or chemical stimuli or a host of other variations on those themes, we slip into idolatry as soon as we complete the sentence ‘Happiness is…’ with something other than God, something other than our living communion with the Father in our Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Food is one of the lesser idols, in many ways, but our habit of overeating is nonetheless a sort of anti-sacrament of this false religion of happiness. That is, we have all sorts of desires and hungers in us, too many to count really. But when we keep shovelling ‘it’ in, when every little twinge of physical hunger is immediately filled by some morsel of food (or perhaps rather more than a morsel), then our bodies are telling our spirits that there is no happiness available outside of creatures and what they can give you.

So this little piggy goes to market, then! Off we go, confirmed by our bodies in our spirits that what we really need to be happy is to get whatever our grubby little hands can lay hold off and take it to ourselves by whatever means necessary.

Fasting, then, is the great sacramental of the true religion, the truth about human happiness and fulfillment. By choosing to embrace a little bit of hunger (we’re not supposed to starve ourselves), by choosing to have just that bit of weakness, just that bit of unsatisfaction in our flesh, we form our spirits in the deep truth of our need for God, and of God’s faithfulness in meeting that need.

Fasting is hard. Our world today is all about instant gratification, instant quelling of need. Many of us were raised in such an ethos, and so self-control, embrace of moderate hunger does not come easy to us. But the spiritual profit is huge.

And in the context of this part of the Mandate, our going into the marketplace, fasting is utterly essential. How can we preach the Gospel of divine love and mercy, of the God who meets us in our need and brings us to the happiness of the kingdom, if we are busily stuffing ourselves with whatever we think we need? Our witness to the Gospel will be hollow and unconvincing, if we are not ourselves living by the faith we profess.

So that is why we fast, essentially. The other benefits of fasting are very good and real—the mastery of the passions, the virtue of self-control and discipline, even the physical health benefits of not always being full up. But Christian fasting is essentially evangelical and kerygmatic, proclaiming the sufficiency of Christ and of God to a world mad with consumption and worshipping of creatures. So… let’s watch what we eat today, OK?

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The Real Meaning of 'Inclusive'

I’m late with the blogging today, as my brain had not quite woken up at the time that I usually write my blog post (6.30-7.00 a.m., if you’re keeping track of these things). On Wednesdays we’ve been reading through the Pope’s address to the Roman Curia from way back before Christmas. People took it at the time as a stern rebuke to those nasty so-and-sos in Rome; I am taking it on this blog as a darned good examination of conscience for all the nasty so-and-sos who read it (and the one who writes it).

We are getting close to the end of this exercise, with ‘disease number fourteen’, which is:

The disease of closed circles, where belonging to a clique becomes more powerful than belonging to the Body and, in some circumstances, to Christ himself. This disease too always begins with good intentions, but with the passing of time it enslaves its members and becomes a cancer which threatens the harmony of the Body and causes immense evil – scandals – especially to our weaker brothers and sisters. Self-destruction, “friendly fire” from our fellow soldiers, is the most insidious danger. It is the evil which strikes from within; and, as Christ says: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste” (Lk 11:17).

We always have to watch out, don’t we, for the tendency for the Church to become a club. For what is meant to be the sacrament of Christ’s presence in the world, his very Mystical Body operating in time and history, his voice in the voices of its members preaching the Gospel unceasingly, his hands and feet in the hands and feed of its members going out continually into the world to do good, his heart in the hearts of its members continually loving, continually striving to grow in love, to extend the boundaries of love to encompass the whole of the human race—for all of that to become a social circle, a guild, a nice little cozy enclave to feel safe in.

Even more so can this happen in groups within the Church, be it the parish choir, the altar guild, the Knights, or (ahem) Madonna House. Every single group in the Church is meant to be patterned on the whole of the Church, and so is called to that same expansiveness, that same open door, open heart, open welcome, open arms reaching out to gather in.

There is no room for cliques in the Church, but alas they do find their way in, don’t they? It is perhaps the single great failure of the Church as a body, as a group, that we fail to maintain that depth of openness and hospitality, inclusivity and welcome that we truly are called to be.

I realize that in using the ‘i’ word in the previous sentence, I need to clarify. I would prefer not to, but such is our confused times. Inclusivity does not mean that everyone gets to come into the Church and remain just as they are; it does not mean that the Church ceases to teach what is true and good, as has been revealed to it from all time by the Holy Spirit in Scripture and Tradition; it does not mean that we cease to call every man and woman, no matter what, to ongoing conversion and repentance and heroic virtue.

Inclusivity does mean, however, a deep compassion for every man and woman as they struggle with whatever their sins may be. Inclusivity does mean that we are very slow—very slow indeed, glacially slow in fact—to say to any person “Your sins are too much for our Church to handle.” Inclusivity does mean that we get over our squeamishness, our prudishness, our delicate sensibilities and be willing to get down in the mud where people actually are, not so as to abandon all notions of purity and get all muddy ourselves, but because that is where people need to be helped the most.

And inclusivity does mean a great patience, a great tolerance, a great willingness to suffer with and for and from the ‘other’, be it someone labouring with some terrible sexual sins or someone labouring with a bad temper, a miserly purse, or a rigid harsh judgmentalism.

All are welcome, indeed. All are part of the Church, indeed. And all are called to die in Christ so as to be born again in Him, all to be changed by the grace of God, all to turn away from sin (whatever it is) to be remade in the image of the Pure One of God, Love Incarnate.

Cliques, claques, and clubs put an end to all of that, no matter what form they may take. We are called to Christian maturity, Christian adult missionary and evangelical responsibility—all of us, lay people, clergy, everyone. And that call to maturity means embracing deeply and with totality the call to radical hospitality, outreach, warm personal love for every human being, and to give ourselves wholly to the mission of the Shepherd to gather all the sheep into the one sheepfold.

This is our call, and the way to that call is as near and obvious as the person in front of us right now who needs our attention and our love. So let’s do that, right now.