Getting to the Point: vocation

Showing posts with label vocation. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Vocation Recruitment

My ongoing research in Catherine's writings, in service of a book I hope to write over the next year of so, is turning up forgotten gems on various topics. From time to time I like to 'hand over' the blog to her and share some of these treasures.

This article is from our newspaper Restoration, from November 1964. It is on the difficult subject of vocation recruitment. Catherine has her own ideas about this topic, and is happy to share them here, after the break. Enjoy!

Madonna House Movie XII: Why Not Give It a Try?

Well, this will be my last blog post for a few days. The Easter Triduum I prefer to spend with a bit more quiet and prayerful reflection, so I will suspend blogging for those sacred days, and then take a bit of a break with the Easter feast. I'll probably be back to blogging the middle of next week.

So here is a video that has no discernible connection to the holy season we are entering, but wraps up our series of short films on the MH vocation. This one in particular is about the young people who are joining our apostolate and what has led them to make such a radical choice.

It is quite lovely, has lots of 'beauty shots' of our life in Combermere, and is a happy, hopeful video. The Lord is blessing us with vocations, both reasonably good quantities (eight applicants currently) and very fine quality (see for yourself!).

As I leave you with this, be assured of my prayers for all of my blog readers over the holy season - may God give you every grace of the season and a joyful, peaceful Easter.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Spirituality for Dummies

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by 'accidie' - lethargy - , and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, 'Lord, I want to be saved, but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?' A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, "Do this and you will be saved." At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved.

When the same Abba Anthony thought about the depth of the judgments of God, he asked, "Lord, how is it that some die when they are young, while others drag on to extreme old age? Why are there those who are poor and those who are rich? Why do wicked men prosper and why are the just in need?" He heard a voice answering him, "Anthony, keep your attention on yourself; these things are according to the judgment of God, and it is not to your advantage to know anything about them.'

Someone asked Abba Anthony, "What must one do in order to please God?" The old man replied, "Pay attention to what I tell you: whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes, whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the Holy Scriptures; in whatever place you live do not easily leave it. Keep these three precepts and you will be saved."

Desert Father Stories

Reflection – We have here some basic spiritual principles laid down by Abba Anthony, who was one of the first and the greatest of the fathers, one of the few of them who is a canonized saint on the universal calendar of the Roman church.

These three stories taken together clear up an awful lot about the spiritual life, it seems to me. They are like a kind of ‘spiritual life for dummies’, and aren’t we all a little dumb when it comes to these things?

‘Accidie’, usually rendered in English as acedia, is that horrible drag that comes upon all of us when spiritual life and spiritual effort just don’t seem worth bothering about, when it all just seems kind of pointless and useless. There are no lives entirely free of acedia; the greatest of saints battle with it, the worst of sinners are wholly lost in it, but everyone has it. And so the first lesson of these stories is the fundamental way of the Christian in the world, the monk in his cell, everyone.

Ora et labora—pray and work, work and pray. Attend to the tasks and duties of your state of life, and then say some prayers, and then work some more, and then say some more prayers. The monastic schedule, which of course is very rigorous in its long offices and not suitable in its details for lay life, is nonetheless a sort of pattern for all Christian spiritual life. We have to alternate prayer and work, work and prayer, and this is the way to live simply and humbly in the presence of God. It has been thus from the beginning, and has not changed in our times. We tend, we moderns, to be so sure that everything is different now and that these old stories don’t apply to us. They do, they always will.

And this prayer and work is what is meant by ‘keeping one’s attention on oneself’, the attitude recommended. It is not self-centeredness that is being recommended here, but basically minding one’s own spiritual business. This is a good bit of advice for us in the social media age, when it seems to be the norm to pry one’s nose into the details of everyone else’s spiritual and moral life without much regard at all for the privacy of conscience and the simple fact that we know very little indeed about the lives of other people, and particularly their innermost life with God.

I do an awful lot of spiritual direction, you know (it’s more or less my principal work in MH), and even when a person has spent hours and hours pouring out to me the most intimate details of their lives and hearts, I am verrrrrry slow to give counsel, to say that such and such a choice was wrong or that they should definitely go this way or that way or not. So I’m always a bit bemused when I see people on a Facebook thread or combox issuing rather sweeping statements about total strangers, based on next to nothing.

No, keep your mind on yourself and your own journey to God and be very slow to get involved in the spiritual affairs of another, and if they happen to invite you into their affairs, go in on your knees and with fear and trembling.

And the final story is such a good summary of spiritual wisdom—keep God before your eyes, take the Scriptures as a guide in all things, and be very slow to leave a place you are in. This latter may strike us as odd and ‘one of these things is not like the other’-ish. But the desert fathers knew very well the phenomenon of itchy feet and restlessness, and that human beings can easily think that if they just change things around, move here, move there, leave their spouse, leave their community, change their job… it will all be better.

It is a terrible spiritual trap, one that many are in these days, which causes us to waste years and even decades of life trying to make all the externals of our life just so, when what needs to happen is interior purification and transformation. Commitment to a vocation, to a marriage, a community, a way of life, stability in a single place and occupation is vital so that the real work of life, the growth into freedom and joy, can happen without distractions.

And that’s quite enough for one day—but you can see how these wild monks from the deserts of the Middle East have laid down the path of holiness for all Christians, and how the study of these men and women is vital for our own walking of that path in confidence and security.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

This Week in Madonna House - June 5-11

This week in Madonna House was far from ordinary. Of course the week revolved largely around the events on Sunday—June 8, the feast of Pentecost coinciding this year with the anniversary of the blessing of the statue of Our Lady of Combermere (unofficially and strictly non-liturgically known here as the ‘feast’ of OLC), on which day the members of MH make, renew temporarily, or make forever their promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

‘For the glory of God, and because I desire with my whole heart to respond to the call of Jesus Christ to preach the Gospel with my life, I, N., promise with the help of Our Lady to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience for…’ The words rang out eleven times in our chapel, as three made their first promises and received the MH cross, six made two year renewals, and two made final promises to live this life ‘forever’.

It is my policy on the blog to not mention names of MH people, so I won’t go into who they all were. But friends and family of the promisers came to join us from all over the place—Italy, Washington, Arizona, and points nearer. The chapel was packed with a most diverse group of ‘friends we hadn’t met yet’, who stayed for a reception afterwards.

Those are the bare facts of the event; it is truly hard to convey the emotions and the inner spirit of the day. We journey very closely with one another in this community, and watching a beloved brother or sister standing up to commit to this life, be it the first plunge into those waters, a renewal, or for life, is deeply touching. To see anyone commit to anything in the world today is deeply touching. And MH, even though I consider it to be the most beautiful and wonderful vocation in the world (natch!), is truly a very small, hidden, mysterious place, few in number and very ordinary and humble in its approach to evangelical life. It is awesome to see people who have great personal gifts and could, truly, do other things with their lives throw their lot in with the rest of us in the way of Nazareth love and service.

So that was Sunday. It was also Pentecost, and so we had at supper that night the traditional distribution of Pentecost gifts and fruits. This is a custom we started I don’t know when—ages ago—of making up little ‘gifts’ cut out in the form of a flame or a dove or some such thing, with one of the seven gifts of the spirit written on one side, and one of the fruits on the other. We draw a gift from the basket, and consider it to be a word from the Holy Spirit for the year. This year, for example, I got ‘knowledge and peace’.

Beyond that major event, I guess the other big event was the annual work bee to set up our Cana Colony, the camp we run for families each summer. This is the one MH work we do that actually has a papal mandate. When Catherine was in Rome back in 1951, she had a private audience with Pope Pius XII, an event that she did not anticipate and that left her rather in a daze. He blessed her work, and her, suggested to her that the nascent MH community make the very promises we now have, and before she left implored her to do something for families.

That ‘something’ has evolved over time into a six-week summer camp where up to nine families can come each week for a time of combined vacation and retreat. There is Mass each day, a conference, an MH priest on hand for reconciliation or counsel, and otherwise lots of time just to be together with other families and recreate together as a family. The setting is rustic, but not primitive, and very beautiful. It is a popular apostolate, and the waiting list each year is long.

In fact, this year we decided to build an extra cabin to accommodate the growing numbers of families applying. We had always had two spaces for tenters, but we find that fewer and fewer people are up for the challenge of camping as a family for a week, and as a result it was rare to fill up both those spaces. Building an eighth cabin and still leaving a single space for camping will allow us to operate the camp at its maximum capacity.

So on Tuesday almost the entire community went out to Cana to scrub, scrub, scrub every inch of it and all the equipment, to repair and paint and generally get the place in sparkling order, in preparation for the camp’s opening in two weeks. Cana is a great joy and delight for us, and I personally am sure that the papal blessing upon it (unique among all the works of MH) is responsible for what a fruitful and beautiful apostolate it has been over the decades.

The other event that brought us great joy this week is that the renovations we have been doing in the upstairs chapel, the original chapel of MH, which necessitated the removal of the Blessed Sacrament from it, are largely completed, and we now have Jesus back with us in the tabernacle. The chapel has been considerably beautified, with the tabernacle moved to the center, a new altar, a new reredos, and lovely statues of Mary and Joseph. It is so good to have our chapel back – we all missed it, which I guess is a good thing!

Beyond that, MH is a hopping place—the farm is in full swing with the gardens especially, the men are doing a wide range of outdoor maintenance projects, the food processing has begun with the first harvest of the rhubarb, and everywhere you look there are people, work, energy, and action. We are an apostolate in motion, never more so than in the short Canadian summer months. Good thing the Holy Spirit showed up when He did – not a moment too soon.

And that’s what happened this week in MH.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

How I Came To Join Madonna House, Part Three

I should mention here that I am by nature a cautious individual. Risk-averse, even. This has served me relatively well in life—I really haven’t made too many genuinely dumb decisions, because I’m just quite slow in making any decision whatsoever until I’m quite sure that it’s the right decision.

This has served me well… except for when the time came for me to make the decision, the vocational decision, which always, necessarily, and by definition involves a level of risk and a lack of total certainty. I had had the excuse of having debts to pay off, and so had not had to decide definitely about MH in the three years since I had first come. The debts were gone, though, and my cautious, careful, risk-avoiding self was faced with the moment of choice.

So on May 31, 1989, I sat down with my spiritual director. We had talked about all these things in general for a couple of years already. And I eagerly told him about everything that had happened to me in the past four days (see yesterday’s post). I concluded by saying, “So, you know, maybe I could finish my month here, and then go home, quit my job, then come back here again, and then maybe become an applicant next year.”

I looked at him eagerly, certain that that was the perfect plan, prudent, sensible, and generous to boot, and one he would definitely agree with. He looked at me, paused. And said, “Yeah, you could do that. Or you could talk to Albert (the director of the lay men) and ask him to become an applicant next week.”

I nearly fell off my chair. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that you could just show up a week before applicancy began and ask to be received. I had assumed, I guess, that there was some kind of process, procedure, forms to be filled out in triplicate, letters of reference, medical checkups… well, something anyhow. (There is, but MH is emphatically a community that is never bound by its own rules and policies).

Anyhow, I stammered something out to that effect, and he shrugged it off as something of little account. I was absolutely floored, dumbstruck, and virtually incapable of speech at that point, so he simply blessed me, told me to pray about it, and sent me on my way.

The conversation had been no more than 20 minutes. I staggered out of the place, and wandered vaguely across the parking lot. I was in a state—all my cautious, careful nerve endings were exploding—and the refrain in my head was single and simple: what-am-i-gonna-do-what-am-i-gonna-do-what-am-i-gonna-do.

(In my defense, I should point out that actually becoming an applicant on June 7 would be a fairly disruptive event – I would have to quit my job, quit my parish responsibilities, leave my family, including my dying grandmother, rather abruptly—in other words, it would be pretty much like Peter and Andrew dropping their fishing nets and following Jesus.)

At that point my MH training kicked in, and I said, ‘I know what I’m gonna do. I’m going to do veggies!’ The MH men guests do vegetable prep after supper each night for the kitchen. Yeah, the duty of the moment – that’s what I’ll do.

I don’t remember the rest of the evening, which must have passed in a blur. What I do remember is that night, back at the dorm, lying awake in a fuss and fret of anxiety. I think I inadvertently invented planking that night, I was lying there so stiff with fear, positively rigid. It was around midnight, and I was wide awake. Finally, about six hours after the fateful conversation, it occurred to me that perhaps I should try praying about this (besides being cautious and risk-averse, I was also kind of dumb back then). So, right then and there I prayed the following prayer: “Uhhh, so Lord, what do you think? Should I ask to be an applicant or not?”

What happened next is one of the few times in my life I would actually classify as a mystical experience. I believe every serious believer has one or two of them at least in their lifetime; this was one of mine. The moment I asked this question to the Lord, lying there in the darkness of the dorm, the other guests all fast asleep around me, an answer welled up within me, from a depth of my soul that I can not possibly describe. It was an answer that was so strong, so resonant, so triumphant that it should have been audible, should have woken up the whole dorm. Should, in fact, have been accompanied by flourishes of trumpets and organs and perhaps a few hundred angels singing ‘Glory to God in the highest’ or some such thing.

For all that, the answer was one simple word. ‘Yes’. But it was more like ‘YYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!’, if you know what I mean. And with that answer, at which I had to laugh a little (‘what was that again Lord? Could you speak up a bit?’), peace came. Anxiety, gone. My whole body, relaxed.

As a result, I had to get up to use the facilities (from the sublime to the ridiculous here, I realize). The dorm I was in had no indoor plumbing, so I had to step outside to do that. It was a cool night, starlit, moonlit, a gentle cool breeze moving across the earth. And as I used the primitive outhouse and walked the few steps back to the dorm, both the reality of the physical poverty of MH and the incredible beauty of the life overwhelmed me. And so, in response to the YES of Jesus, I said yes back at Him.

The rest of the story is simple. I asked Albert a few days later; he said yes (really, my vocation to the place was so obvious to any impartial observer that it was pretty much a no-brainer for him). The three or four days ensuing I spent in a state of anguished anxiety—I think God knew what He was doing by springing all this on me at the last minute, as my nerves would never have stood that kind of thing for much longer.

And on June 7 (as it was in those days), the director of the women’s department, Jean Fox, presented us with the ceremonial cake with a cross on it (the symbol of applicancy—the bitterness of the cross which is sweet once it is embraced), and said ‘Welcome to Madonna House.’ At that moment, my nerves and anxieties vanished and have never returned, and I have not had a single moment’s doubt about my vocation in 25 years, and count my life here to be blessed beyond my wildest imaginings.

And that is how I came to join Madonna House.

Monday, June 9, 2014

How I Came to Join Madonna House, Part Two

Yesterday was a glorious day in MH – three beautiful new staff workers with shiny new crosses, two making their final promises, numerous renewals, and lots and lots and lots of people here to witness and celebrate it all. I will talk at more length about this in a day or so.

Meanwhile, back to my own story, continued from yesterday. So I had received the word before I came here to listen to what everyone said to me, as God would speak to me in the voices of other people this time.

So I was all ears as I began my ‘month’ at MH, now into its 26^th year. The first thing I heard of note was the Gospel at the first Mass I attended upon my arrival, on Monday afternoon. I always smile to myself when the 8^th week of Ordinary Time rolls around each year and I hear those readings again, as these were the words that I heard at the crucial moment: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Jesus and the rich young man—the very same Gospel that moved powerfully in Catherine Doherty’s life when she was being led to found this vocation, fifty years previous, in Toronto.

So that rocked me back on my heels a bit. The Gospel the next day was on the same lines: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields” (Mark 10: 21-30). So… OK. It appeared that I was on the right track.

The next thing I was hearing was a bit odd, actually. We have a rule in MH, pretty firmly observed, that we don’t ask our guests personal questions. MH is to be a safe place where people can just come and not be interrogated, pestered, labeled, and so forth. People often come to MH in difficult life circumstances and crises. So we just don’t pry into our guests’ lives outside MH – if they want to volunteer information, that’s up to them.

Well, for some strange reason (I suspect the Holy Spirit) that rule got thrown out the window as far as I was concerned on this visit. So many people said to me some variation of ‘Oh, it’s you again! You’re back. Ummm… why are you here again? Why do you keep coming? Good to see you… but why are you here?’ It was more funny than anything else, it was such a weird departure from normal MH form… and God was pushing on me through it. Why exactly did I keep coming back here?

Then we had a guest speaker at the men’s dorm for our Tuesday early night. She was the director of one of our mission houses, and a pioneer member of the apostolate. And she talked about… commitment! Vocation! The need to plant your feet firmly in one place, in one thing, out of which you could do all sorts of different things. As she waxed eloquent about the need to eventually settle down in life to one thing, one of the other guests asked her if that wasn’t playing it safe. She wheeled on him and said with some force, ‘That’s not playing it safe! You try it, mister!’

Then the housefather gave a little spiel on discernment. His approach was to look at something you want to do, and then ask yourself why you want to do it. If there was some shallow or silly reason for it, it was probably not from God. So that evening I was thinking about my fairly strong desire to join MH, and I began to apply that advice. Why did I want to join?

Was it the people, and how nice and lovely they were? I thought about that. No, not really. MH people are nice, but I had been around the place long enough to have seen the human frailty of the community. Was it the work? Definitely not. At that point, I was a layman with no thought of being anything else, and the laymen of MH do manual labor primarily. I don’t object to that, but at the same time I was and am a clumsy, hapless man on that front, and have little to no aptitude for it. So I was wanting to join a community where, as far as I could envision it, I would be fairly incompetent at what I would be asked to do, for the rest of my life. Was it the food? Uhhh, no. Definitely not the food. What was it, then? Could it be… God?

I still hadn’t seen my spiritual director yet. It was Wednesday evening that we sat down to talk. Wednesday, May 31, the feast of the Visitation. Blessed is she who believed… the Mighty One has done great things for me… He has lifted up the lowly. As I sat across from my spiritual director and we prayed for guidance and wisdom, the Holy Spirit quietly took the gloves off, took a deep breath, and wound up to deliver the blow, the words that would irrevocably change my life and launch me into the vocation He had planned for me.

"So, Denis, what's happening?" I took a deep breath, and started to tell him.

To be continued