Getting to the Point

It was 25 years ago today that I stood up in the St. Mary’s chapel and, along with my seven classmates, promised to live in ‘poverty, chastity, and obedience, according to the Madonna House spirit and mandate.’

While the MH community will celebrate our jubilee later in the summer (today’s focus being those making their promises now), this is the actual anniversary of my commitment to this community and spirit.

And it was nearly five years ago that I began this blog, first as a vehicle to bring the writings of Pope Benedict to a larger audience, later taking other forms.

Today’s blog post is my final one, due in an indirect way to the promise of obedience that I made 25 years ago. I have not been put under obedience to stop blogging, but I have been given a new assignment in MH that will require me to stop this particular apostolate for the sake of what I am being asked to do now.

The day after tomorrow, I will be moving from the priest staff house where I have lived off and on for the past 15 years, into the poustinia of Our Lady of Combermere on Carmel Hill. (For those reading this who know MH well, this is the poustinia built for and occupied for many years by Fr. Patrick McNulty.) I am going to be a poustinik, and this, simply, changes everything.

What is a poustinik, some may ask? The Russian word ‘poustinia’ literally means ‘desert’; a poustinik is a ‘desert-dweller’. A Russian style poustinia is a simple one-room house, sparsely furnished and minimally adorned, where one goes to pray and be fast and be silent before the Lord. 

Many MH members make a weekly poustinia; some are called to live in poustinia and dedicate themselves to this way of prayer and silence more completely.

Practically, this means I will be completely in prayer and solitude three days each week. The remaining four days of the week will begin and end in poustinia (I will be living there full-time, in other words) but be otherwise spent out in the community doing my usual priestly ministry—spiritual direction, celebrating Mass, preparing talks, and the like.

When I was given this new assignment, which factually is an entirely new way of life for me, it was immediately clear that I could not enter into the kind of silence and prayer I am being asked to do and still be writing and interacting in the public sphere of social media as I have been. So in addition to my blog ending, I will also shortly be deactivating Facebook and Twitter and essentially leaving all of that behind.

As someone pointed out to me, the author of the book I-Choice on the perils and challenges of technology is now, well, choosing! I have come to believe for some time that the real and necessary work of our times with all their challenges and anguish is to be fundamentally spent on our knees before the Lord, and not before a computer monitor. Now I am being asked to act on that conviction.

I realize that there are many who will miss this blog sorely—I have been told as much by the few people I have mentioned all of this to. Well, I am sorry about that, and I am very grateful that my writings have been of some help to some people. But, ya gotta go where the Lord sends ya, and do whatever He tells ya, right? And I have absolutely no doubt that this is God’s will for me right now.

I am very happy and excited about this move into poustinia—it has been my heart’s desire for some years, but in all honesty I did not expect it to happen for many years yet to come. When my director general told me that this was his assignment for me, it came as an absolute shock… and a great joy.

What is on my deepest heart about all of this can be best expressed in verses from the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross that I have always cherished, that probably, when I first read them many years ago, planted the seeds of this new life in my heart. I do not claim the lofty heights of these lines for myself—I am no John of the Cross. I am a lot closer to being a mistake than a mystic!

Nor do these lines entirely apply to me—I will still have flocks and work, for example, still have priestly ministry and directees and such. But these verses are nonetheless the deepest aspiration of my heart. They capture for me the scope, the ambit, the goal of what I am being called to in becoming a poustinik priest in Madonna House. Here they are:

Forever at his door

I gave my heart and soul. My fortune too.

I've no flock any more,

No other work in view.

My occupation: love. It's all I do.

If I'm not seen again

In the old places, on the village ground,

Say of me: lost to men.

Say I'm adventure-bound

For love's sake, on purpose, to be found.

And so, as I am (please God) found at last by Love in the silence of God in the poustinia, I pray that I will find all of you there, too, in the mysterious communion of the Mystical Body of Christ. Please know that I will be praying for all of you, and for the whole world, and offering my life daily there for that intention.

It is Thursday, and regular readers of the blog know that means it is Liturgy Day. We are going through the Mass each week here, with an eye to showing how each little bit of the Mass, besides being part of the perfect act of worship of Christ to his Father into which we enter by grace, is also a catechesis on Christian discipleship.

Last time we were here we had finally reached the anaphora, the great Eucharistic Prayer. I am using the Roman Canon (aka Eucharistic Prayer I) on the grounds of its antiquity and the fact that it was for over a millennium the only prayer used in the Latin Church.

As so we come to today’s text, in which we offer the gifts of bread and wine “firstly for your holy catholic Church. Be pleased to grant her peace, to guard, unite and govern her throughout the whole world, together with your servant N. our Pope and N. our Bishop, and all those who, holding to the truth, hand on the catholic and apostolic faith.”

Right away, at the very outset of the prayer (unlike the other anaphoras in use in the Western Church now which place this after the consecration), we acknowledge the presence of the larger Church. We are not simply offering this act of worship and intercession as our little group, St. Whatsit’s parish or wherever we happen to be. ‘Madonna House’, offering its Mass to God.

No! It is the Church, the whole Church, the Church extended throughout the world Who offers this worship to God. And so we begin by praying for this Church, its peace and unity, its conformity to God’s holy will in all regards. Special mention is made of the Pope and of the local ordinary bishop.

This is not simply because these two guys have a really tough job and we should be praying for them. 

That may be true (it certainly is true!), but that’s not exactly why they’re mentioned here. The Pope is the safeguard, if you will, or the great effector of our unity with the Church universal. By our communion with him, we are vouchsafed not simply a unity in charity and spirit with all other Catholics (we can enjoy that kind of unity with all men and women of good will, and hopefully do), but an external visible unity with the entire catholica, the whole Body of Christ in the world. And our unity with our diocesan bishop (in my case, Most Rev. Michael Mulhall), vouchsafes our visible unity as a particular church, a local expression of the Body of Christ in (for me) the diocese of Pembroke, ON.

Well, this matters greatly, in terms of our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. It is a matter of Catholic faith—a dogmatic non-negotiable—that the Lord Jesus Himself established the Church on earth and constituted it as a hierarchical structure to be governed by the apostles and their successors, with a particular ministry exercised by Peter and his successors. If you truly do not believe the above sentence (as opposed to, say, struggling with it or finding it a hard one to understand or live out, all of which is perfectly normal and fine), I hate to break it to you, but you are actually not Catholic.

Jesus is the Savior of the world, but the means by which He saves us is by gathering us together into a body, into a communion that is not only with Himself but with one another, not only invisible and mystical but a visible union, which necessarily implies structure and organization.

This is why the saying ‘no salvation outside of the Church’ is, in fact, still binding Catholic doctrine. We do understand in our current development of that doctrine that there can be ways of being incorporated into the Church that are invisible and mysterious, but nonetheless membership in the Church is the form of salvation in Christ—he saves us by making us members of His Body, and if we are not members of that Body, we are not saved.

While this is a matter of great mystery for those who are outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church, for those of us who are Catholic, it is perhaps no less mysterious, but at the same time the implications are obvious. We have to safeguard our unity with the Pope and with our local bishop. We have to strive greatly for our own unity of mind with them in matters of faith and morals. I am profoundly aware that this can be a matter of great struggle for many people, but at the very least it should be a struggle we are engaging in.

To simply say, rather casually and flippantly, “Oh, the Pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Who cares what he thinks?” is not a Catholic attitude, not in the slightest. To bridle at every statement that comes from the Vatican or from one’s own bishop, to have a reflexive posture of opposition, resentment, rebellion, hostility (truly adolescent in its reactivity) to the men occupying these positions of authority—all of this signals something gravely amiss spiritually in us. All of this seriously impedes our ability to live as disciples of Jesus Christ who establishes His Church on earth in this way, with these structures of authority. 

It is fine to struggle with this teaching or that. It is fine to struggle with the human personalities of the men who occupy the Chair of Peter and the cathedra of the local cathedral. It is fine to wrestle mightily with God and with man, Jacob-like, in our own poor efforts to live as disciples of Jesus Christ.

What is not fine is snark, cynicism, reflexive hostility, hermeneutics of suspicion and flat outright rejection of the teaching authority of the Church. And this is, alas, all too common in the Church today on all sides of the theological spectrum. All of this is many things, but the one thing it is not, is being a disciple of Jesus Christ. So let’s try to be what we are called to be, and understand the centrality of our visible communion in and with the Church in that call.

Thursday’s on this blog is Liturgy Day. I am going through the Mass, bit by bit, to see how each small part of the Mass shows forth the pattern of Christian discipleship in the world.

We are at the very end of the offertory rite, with the prayer over the offerings. This is one of the changeable texts of the Mass, varying according to the season or feast or saint of the day. The liturgy always does this, referring back to where we are in time while pulling us into the contemplation of eternity. I will talk more about this next week when we discuss the preface.

This Prayer Over the Offerings sums up everything we just did, and so it is a good place to review what I’ve been talking about the previous weeks. We bring bread and wine to the priest, and he brings it to the altar. He gives thanks to God for these natural gifts ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’, and in various ways prays for God to mercifully accept this offering and make it His own.

The concluding prayer encapsulates all these themes in various ways. The prayer for today, for example is this: “Accept, O Lord, the sacred offerings which at your bidding we dedicate to your name and, in order that through these gifts we may become worthy of your love, grant us unfailing obedience to your commands.”

As I have discussed in past weeks, there is a certain path of Christian discipleship laid out in this simple and fairly short rite of the Mass. Going on from here, we will see what Christ does with the offering, and the emphasis surely and deeply shifts to His action, and rightly so. But at this juncture, we see our own part in it, what we are to do.

We are to bring whatever we have—the bread and wine that is the whole substance of our person, our lives and everything in them—and give it to Christ (symbolized by the priest) who brings it to the altar (to His own place of love and gift, the Cross). We are to give thanks to God for everything we are and have, that which delights us and brings us pleasure, that which is heavy and burdensome.

We are to be utterly mindful of our complete unworthiness, that the gifts we bring God—our whole life—is marred and marked by sin and selfishness. His acceptance of the gift and His choice to unite Himself to us and transform our lives into His life is a gift of mercy on His part, not anything we deserve.

We see in the prayer I quote above that He does graciously make us worthy of His love, and that He does this by giving us the grace to obey His commands. Boy, do we ever have to take this prayer to heart! I am always a little perplexed these days at some of the conversations around ‘communion and who may receive it’, when churchmen who are older than I by far do not seem to acknowledge in their positions that… well, that God’s grace is real, you know?

That we are not left orphans. That we are not left without help from on high, and that this help is specifically given to us that we may obey His commands. There seems to be some disconnect somewhere—that somehow God’s moral law is over here, but the messy reality of people’s lives is way over there… and that’s all there is to it. A gulf separating the moral law, the Divine Law which springs from the eternal Wisdom of God, and the ‘real world’ of human stumbling and striving and mess. And since it is an unbridgeable gap, let’s just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Everyone come to communion, yay! Really?

Do we not believe that Jesus really has come to us to bridge that gap? That we can bring Him our messed up lives, our moldy bread and cheap vinegary wine, and He will help us to make it into pure fine wheat and choicest vintage? And that it is worth it? And that we need to have come to some basic point of obedience before we can enter the fullest depths of communion? But that even while we’re on the way, there is mercy and grace surrounding us in the process?

We have to bring our bread and wine to the Priest and lay it on the Altar—basic surrender, basic discipleship. Everyone has to do that—people whose lives are in some kind of sort of basic order… well, sort of (we’re all sinners, after all), and people who may have some terrible disorder to some degree baked into the structure of their lives—irregular marriages, homosexual orientation, cohabitation, work situations that are unethical.

We all bring whatever we have to Christ, but the bringing it to Him is the surrender of it to Him so He can purify us, not so that we can arrogantly demand He take us as we are so that we can take Him as we like. All are welcome, all are called, but the welcome and the call is to the obedience of faith, which takes the incarnate form of obedience to the moral law and to the Gospel.

On Thursdays on this blog we are going through the Mass, bit by bit, to see how the liturgy and its rites informs and forms our life of Christian discipleship.

We have reached at last the end of the Liturgy of the Word, with the General Intercessions. In the Mass itself, this is a fairly simple thing—we have come together as an assembly, as the People of God. We have acknowledged our sins, praised the Lord in the Gloria, gathered ourselves together in prayer, and listened together to the Word of God at length. Hopefully the homily gave us something to think about to make some sense of all this, and then we stood and professed our faith together in the Creed. It is obvious and sensible that at this time we bring to the Lord our needs and the needs of the world.

Having been instructed by his word of his goodness and love for mankind, having professed our faith in that, it is normal that we now bring our needs to Him. Now this part of the Mass is probably the one part of the Mass that the ordinary devout Christian has no problem living out. The one thing we all do, if we have faith in God at all, is bring Him our needs and intentions. It is what is called a no-brainer. You believe in God? You tell Him what’s on your heart, what you need, what the people you love need, what the needs of the world are.

I think it is worth pointing out, though, that this aspect of prayer and of faith—intercession—occurs in the liturgy in the context of a whole lot of other prayers and ways of being with God. Sometimes in our spiritual lives, intercessory prayer can become the whole sum and substance of our relationship with God. This is a mistake.

While in itself it is commendable and indeed commanded by God that we should bring Him all our needs and ceaselessly ask His help in all things, a prayer life that consists of nothing but that is impoverished. Intercessory prayer, by definition, focuses our attention on what is not, on what remains to be done, on what is disordered or broken or needy in this world.

It is good to care about all of that, but what about what is? What about all God has done, is doing, will do, all that is given to us continually and constantly? What about praising God and thanking Him? A prayer life that is all ‘God do this! God do that! God do the other thing!’ and has no awareness of ‘God, you have done so much for all of us’ is lacking badly in balance.

And what about suspending our words to God altogether? What about shutting up and letting God get a Word in edgewise? What about lectio divina – the prayerful engagement with Scripture? A prayer life that is all us telling God stuff and has no space for God to tell us anything is pretty thin gruel.

And what about expressing our own penitence and humble contrition to God in our prayer? How about the Jesus Prayer, for example: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’? Again, a prayer life that is exclusively intercessory prayer tends to give an impression that the only person not doing His job in the world is God. I mean, we keep telling Him all the problems and what needs to be done, and He just isn’t getting on it! And so our prayer has to include a frank and simple acknowledgement of everything that we are not, everything that we fail to do in our own pursuit of the true and the good.

And how about simple prayers of faith? Again, intercessory prayer lacking this can become a veiled criticism of God. We don’t really believe He is up there, listening to us, but we’re going to doggedly keep bugging Him until He comes through, right?

The liturgy teaches us all this, when we see how the General Intercessions follow upon the rest of these ways of prayer. A humble person, aware of his or her sins, praising God for all He has done, listening to His Word and professing faith in His steadfast love—this is the person who knows best how to bring before the Lord all the needs of the world.

Intercessory prayer done rightly—done in the context of the whole attitude of prayer and faith—then becomes what it truly is, a sharing in the offering of Christ to the Father, His obedience and love for the world expressed in an ongoing oblation of love and sacrifice. The General Intercessions, simple and obvious as they are, lead us directly into what follows in the Mass, as our offering of love is joined to His, and our prayer blends with His prayer from the Cross.

Intercessory prayer then goes from its worst and most banal forms—gimme, gimme God!—to being an actual work of the Body of Christ in union with its Head, an ongoing sharing in the work of Christ in time and in eternity, a gift of love for the world. All of which is expressed in the most simple and obvious way—God bless this one, God help that one, God heal her, God have mercy on him, God have mercy on us all. Amen.