Oblate Offerings

Moving Ahead

2011-02-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

I hardly think any of us really know where we are going, where we will find ourselves at points future, or where we will eventually wind down and return to the earth from which we were made.

This is especially true for wanderers, for souls that see life as more of a journey, for folks like us whose life's circumstances have groomed for the meandering pathways.

There is a part of us that longs for a place to finally settle but we are hard pressed to find it, one that fits our standards rather than the mold that social structures insists that we squeeze ourselves into.

So we move on, ahead up the hill, as best we can, taking the time to look, listen, and enjoy what we see and experience.

This is where we find ourselves at such a time as this. You can, if you so desire, follow our journey up the hill of life toward a simpler and more sustainable physical lifestyle at our Possum Holler blog. Psalty Coffee picks up where Oblate Offerings leaves off. Links to these two blogs have been added to Oblate Offerings side bar.

God bless you in your journey ...

We bid you peace,

David & Shirli

Melding Matters - Concluding Post

2010-08-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

I think the one word that best describes the life I’ve lived is one that has oft been used to describe the hard life of a farmer scratching out a subsistence living on a poor spot of land. Mine has always been a hardscrabble way of life, of making do and getting by, of having, thanks be to God, just enough with a little left over.

This isn’t to be viewed as a bad thing. It has, in fact, been quite an educational adventure, one with knocks and bruises that I’ve given myself, one with knocks and bruises others have given me. I’ve made some bad decisions that have had disastrous consequences. I’ve also made some very good ones. It seems that even the good ones have had their share of certain social consequences.

The truth of the matter is that personal success, in whatever slight measure, can often be a source of jealousy, envy, and their accompanying sundry rotten fruits. People are going to make judgments, whether they are looking up at our feet or down upon our heads; it matters not where we sit or stand, how low we go or how high we ascend. I am as guilty of judgmentalism as the next person and, like the next person, am quite adept at justifying my mental determinations and measurements.

I have not always tried to live up to the moral Christian upbringing that I received as a child growing up at home and in Sunday lessons at the little church down the road from the home place. No. My life-closet contains its own collection of hanging skeletons.

I have, and it pains and shames me to admit it, planted well-placed knocks and bruises onto others, both figuratively and quite literally. I have intimately known the life of the Prodigal Son and still, in one way or another, after returning to the Grand Estate of the Father, find that my mind has a propensity to wander a bit, albeit not too far from the barn where I’ve chosen to make my bunk in the hay loft.

Over the course of these past several years, I have been working through the difficult process of discovering, uncovering, understanding, and returning to the unadulterated original self that I am. Not only in matters concerning a more historical divine faith, but also in matters related to accepting the inheritance of my own cultural heritage.

These are greatly challenging and integrally related matters that I am no longer able to rationally and intelligently divest from one another. These are matters that have challenged me to deep consideration, demanded personal action, and also accrued divers and sundry consequences that I am more than willing to shoulder the responsibility of.

These matters essentially come down to one matter. It is a matter of recognition and integration, of melding all the known composite matters into their one strong form rather than trying to sift out one particular element deeming it better than all the others. It is, after all, the composite of strokes that paint the picture, not one single brush-stroke.

The conclusion of the matter is this: I can’t figure anything out for anyone else. That is something that every individual must do for themselves. Nor do I believe that figuring anything out for my self, if I honestly ever do, is going to make some tremendous earthquake impact on the world, up close or at large.

Perhaps one here and there may pick up on some crumb they feel is significant; find some signpost that assists them in hewing out their own path toward their own providential destiny. If that happens, or if that has happened, in some slight measure, well, God once used an ass to speak to a man so I have no reason for elation or self-inflation.

It is time to close this chapter and begin outlining and investing in the next one. This post will therefore be the concluding post to these many blog-pages. Oblate Offerings will however remain accessible as long as this electronic host continues as a free turn-out along the electronic highway, or until such that I feel it appropriate to relegate these pages to the historical section of a metal filing cabinet.

Lived Experience

2010-07-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

One afternoon last week the combination of temperature and humidity gave us a heat index of 109 degrees. It’s been hot all summer on the South Coast with the heat index topping out most days above 100. A body just doesn’t have much get-up-and-go when the heat and humidity is this high. I suppose it is part of the cost we pay for the mild winters we enjoy.

Work, the kind that I do to earn an income, becomes a grueling affair in this heat. I try to get done early so I’m out of the worst of the afternoon heat. It is a good plan. But it is a plan that doesn’t always pan out. Not with the amount of rain we’ve had this summer. Our frequent rains have kept the grass growing. Folks want their lawns to look nice. And keeping their lawns looking nice is what they pay me to do.

The economics of these times looms over our heads so, get-up-and-go or no, I push through and suffer the toll taking effects. I simply don’t have the luxury to do otherwise despite the fact that the process of aging has begun to exacerbate the effects. There is no avoiding it. Getting through the summer months sets itself up as the seasonal priority.

In a couple of months I will arrive at my third anniversary as an Oblate. That decision came after a few years of reading monk-thoughts and studying monk-life. Over these past several years I have spent quite a bulk of time pondering, writing, and leaving behind these close to 200 pages of a paper trail regarding this lived experience. These years and pages of reflections have brought me to some not so surprising conclusions.

The first is that very few people living in the world today, Catholics included, have any interest at all in things Benedictine. Monastic spirituality, in the eyes of the modern world, is looked upon as an outdated expression. It has no inherent value to the largest bulk of the people of these times.

Another is that, despite my efforts to emulate monk-life, I am not a monk. I do not live within a cloistered environment where all my daily needs are supplied from day one to day last. The Rule does continue to present itself as a marvelous guide filled with good advice. This is advice that must however be seasoned by the realities of life as it individually discovers us outside the monastic enclosure.

I have found that, in this world outside the cloister, attempts to adhere strictly to the fundamental rigors and routines prescribed by St. Benedict for cloistered monk-life is a sure course this side of the wall toward living with a constant sense of guilt for falling short of the mark. This is an arena wherein I am, with or without the help of the Rule, quite self-accomplished.

The sound of the gentle shower that fell on our roof before daylight this morning lulled me back to restful sleep. I needed it.

Personal Note

2010-06-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

No. I'm not AWOL or fallen into a deep hole. I'm simply working on another very personal project that involves a great deal of time and personal energy.

Peace,

David

Waking From An Induced Coma

2010-06-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

I barely knew my grandmothers. I was just a pup out of diapers when my maternal grandmother died and hardly more than one when my paternal grandmother went to her grave. I never met my paternal Czech immigrant grandfather and have no recollection in my earliest memories of my maternal grandfather. Both of these men made their way to South Alabama to scratch out their livings as hardscrabble farmers.

My dad was the youngest child born to Alois and Emily. He came to life in this world in Minnesota. The rest of his siblings were born in Europe. His oldest sister, already married, remained in Czechoslovakia when the rest of the family immigrated to the United States in the early part of the Twentieth Century. Tracing this lineage beyond the point of their immigration is not an impossible task. It is, however, a rather difficult one considering the language obstacle.

If there is one thing I regret about my Czech ancestry it is that my dad felt no necessity in teaching us the primary language that filled his family home. On the occasions when his siblings gathered together, their conversations were carried on predominately in the Czech language, interspersed briefly with English.

His mother learned only a very few words of the English language. Though she lived out her “old age” years in a little house built by my dad on our small farm, I was never able to carry on anything that resembled an intelligent conversation with her. I often walked over to visit grandma but suffice it to say that our conversations were carried on through a lot of primitive trial and error pointing and grunting. Without knowing the Czech language there are rivers without bridge crossings.

It is, however, in discovering and uncovering the long and very interesting American history of my mother’s paternal and maternal lines that I find my attention predominately arrested. It is a history that grows more detailed, interesting, and meaningful with each unfolding of the historical pages that have, until this point in time, been lost to my own awareness.

The awakening awareness of my own living personal heritage can be likened to finally waking from something of an induced coma of ancestral sleep, one that was imposed upon me in my formative infancy. This description, as good as it is, is still inadequate to describe this process that I’m discovering to be life-altering.

PHOTO: My maternal grandparents, John and Vada Harbison

Seeing In The Dark

2010-06-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

It is hard for most people to imagine, especially in these modern times, life as it was three or four or five generations ago. Life was, in many regards, much simpler and far less harried despite the lack of comfortable conveniences and technological advances that we know in our times. That, anyway, is my impression.

I have always been given to the desire to go back in time, to step out of the craziness that forms the character of the time-generation that I have inherited by virtue of birth. There is a part of me that has learned to content itself with the tools of our times. I haven’t yet had to trim the hooves on that fancy gas powered tiller and I don’t have to keep a crib full of oats and a loft full of hay to feed it when it’s not in use.

The desire to return, where I am concerned, to before-generations has some to do with the simplification of tools and lifestyles. It has, however, more to do with knowing and understanding the lives of the very real men and women whose character and nature has tricked down over the generations to inevitably and unavoidably find reposit in this modern day passer through time and in his progeny.

I think one of the greatest tragedies of these modern times, at least where my own passage through life is concerned, is the sense of generational unknowing that has, until these more recent times, held me captive within something of a time-suspension capsule. I knew there was more to my own personal reality, dimensions that I could not see, dimensions that I was incapable of rationally naming and understanding.

It has only been of late that recognizable images have begun to appear in the darkness outside this gelatin shell, names, people, and circumstances that I did not know. I am finding it more than interesting, more than a mere gathering of historical genealogical data. These are names, people, and circumstances that are becoming real to me, giving definition to my own inherent personal identity.

One Eye At A Time

2010-06-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

I can’t recall its name and probably couldn’t pronounce it if I could. I was born with it, learned to live with it, and was close to thirty when an optometrist in Houston told me the name of the predicament. His only advice was that I shouldn’t take up flying. I wouldn’t have any difficulty taking off or staying in the air. The problem would occur in landing. Touching down would tend to be a little bumpy.

The predicament is that I don’t look through both eyes at the same time. It’s not something that’s obvious to people. As a child, however, I spent a lot of time with one eye closed, usually my right eye. Some folks thought I had a lazy eye. Kids in grade school made fun of me. I gradually trained myself to keep both eyes open essentially to avoid lessening the social rejection and abuse that I received in school.

I go about my life and live in the world with both eyes open but the truth of the matter is that, despite appearances, I’m only looking at it with one eye at a time. Corrective lenses address other vision issues. This particular predicament does not lend itself to correction. There’s really nothing to correct. It is a matter that is just the way it is.

Perhaps the matter is something genetic. I am not an authority on that but it is interesting to consider, especially in light of the discoveries related to the mass of genealogical archaeology of late regarding my mother’s maternal and paternal lines.

It is true that we possess the potential to make ourselves into anything that we choose and put our energies to. It is also true that, despite what we are able to make of ourselves, or, for that matter, fail to make of ourselves, we are still inherently the product of our genetic chemistry.

One eye at a time. Perhaps the matter is integrally related to the irony inherent in my own divided historical Northern Alabama maternal lineage, a heritage that has, where I am concerned, for too long been buried in neglected cemeteries and shallow unmarked graves.

The ancient proverb teaches to “incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding.” For all my efforts to learn and to do, for all my successful and failed efforts at carving out a life in this world, I think I’m finally beginning to discover and understand something of the ancestral human spirit residing within and motivating this human carriage.

Connections

2010-06-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

I never gave the business much thought or consideration, until these more recent years. For meaningful and useful purposes, knowledge of my ancestral roots was limited to the generation represented by my mother and father, their immediate siblings, and a small league of first-cousins.

Most of my life has been lived in the proverbial here and now with a mindset that was essentially carried along by the concerns and currents, by the winds and waves, of contemporary life in these present times. Little of the oral history regarding my ancestry had been passed down to me. My genealogical roots were therefore necessarily short and shallow. That mindset began to take on something of a different nature a few years ago when Shirli started the long and arduous process of digging and unearthing the genealogical artifacts of my ancestral Southern lineage.

While it would be something of a truthful expression, to say that the fruit of her efforts have been interesting and historically revelatory would not adequately express the effects that her research and discoveries have begun to have on me. No. Their import is of much larger significance.

Their effects are life changing. They are reconnecting me with my own ancestral history, giving insight into the substance of my own animated human character, providing answers to many of the gnawing and haunting unanswered questions that have ever been integrally embedded deep within the fabric of my being, questions that I did not know how to ask. I will ever be in her debt for her inquisitive love of history, for her love for the hunt that compels her to invest multiplied long hours digging, searching for, and finding the real bones from whence my own genes derive.

Its inevitability is unavoidable. One of these days mortality will overtake me. I’ll be dead and gone. That inevitable crossing, one that makes me seriously ponder the worth of life and the manner in which so much of life in modernity reflects an orphaned nature, grows closer with each passing day. I’ll do my best to hold it at bay as long as I can but I must admit that the years seem to be stacking up faster. The time that we have in this world is a precious gift, one that pleads for wise investment.

An urgent question is raised in our Christian Scriptures. “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” It seems rather obvious to me that the proprietary impetus of this modern society is to treat our historic foundations of faith, honor, and loyalty with contempt, garnering in their place other obvious results. We have largely, as a society in these rapidly changing and uncertain times, become a society of wandering orphans.

I do not, for the sake of my progeny and for other interested souls, want to pass from this world without leaving behind something of an accurately reconstructed record of our personal historical Southern legacy, one that brings us to this particular and peculiar 21st Century juncture in time. I consider this record, one of garnered factual data necessarily interspersed with the most educated and intelligent surmise that we can possible assemble, to be the most valuable gift that I can possibly procure and lay on the table before them.

A Goliath With No Little David

2010-06-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

The smell is obvious. At times, when the southerly breezes kick up, it permeates the dense humid atmosphere that is so much a familiar part of life close to the coast during the summer. It smells like crude oil. No. It doesn’t have any rotten egg smell. It’s been aerating long enough for the smell of hydrogen sulfide to dissipate. It just smells like oil.

The full reality of this manmade catastrophe, something that looms on the horizon, is yet to be seen. We know it’s out there. We’ve seen bits and bands of it. We’ve already seen the effects of their small scale assaults on local economies and coastal wildlife. These showings, however, have only been teases. They’ve only been small sorties.

The bulk of the multiplied millions of gallons of crude oil that have belched from the belly of the earth into the Gulf over these past several weeks is still waiting for the right combination of conditions to make any kind of major claim or exact a most horrific toll.

The waiting is wearying, soul wearying. More so now that we’ve entered the time of year when the tropics are capable of producing the tropical storms and hurricanes that make life along the coast interesting enough. It’s like knowing an unstoppable invading hoard has amassed just over the hill and there’s no place to run to for safety, no Little David with a sling and a few smooth round stones to take it on.

Adding to the strength of this Goliath is the reality that nothing done to stop it dead in its tracks has worked. Dispersants have only exacerbated and complicated the problem. Despite this latest attempt to plug the hole, and despite the statements by the responsible agent that the latest attempt has slowed the blow by ½, oil is still gushing faster than skimmers on the water and crews on the beaches can clean it up.

Degrees

2010-05-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

I don’t need a meteorologist to tell me that it’s gotten hot and humid. All I have to do is walk outside. Those pleasant months of nice spring weather are behind us. Now it’s just sub-tropical heat and humidity until things start cooling down. It will seem like a long time before the cooler autumn breezes begin making their appearance in October.

June 2nd is Primary Day. The roads, highways, and front lawns are littered with campaign signs and placards. It’s really a “red, white, and blue” eye-sore. The smut and smear campaigns on the television have been an ear-sore. After the 2nd the ads will get really dirty. Then it becomes even more of a political party issue.

For the first time in the history of this “Cotton State” an African-American Democrat is running for the Office of the Governor. He’s a Senator. We’ve heard him speak to an audience at Spring Hill College a few years ago. He’s a good speaker and I have to give him a lot of credit for the accomplishments in his life. Things have changed a lot since the Wallace Era in Alabama. Are they about to change even more?

My day to day life is so far removed from all the politics and agendas that have folks stirred up. Personally, I’m more concerned about how many ears of corn we’ll get out of seven rows, how many bushels of potatoes we’ll dig from two rows, how many quarts of green beans we get from four rows, and getting a decent stand of field peas and okra growing in that dust in the garden.

There’s a lot that’s uncertain and I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot that I don’t know. There’s a lot that I don’t want to know. There’s a lot that I wish I didn’t know. There is a lot that I wish I could forget.

I do know that without a living and relational vital awareness of the Trinity, and the higher ideals inherently detailed in that awareness, narcissism, in its myriad assortment of inviting and deceptive degrees, inevitably becomes the dominating rule of life; an inordinate love of self that sets itself up front and in center as the stage that the whole of life plays out on.

Soul Drought

2010-05-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

God is not a God of coercion. He is the Great Lover wooing souls unto him.

If the world wants to go to blazes, that’s the world’s prerogative. The world has that right. I don’t know why it would want to exercise that right. Salvation is however a matter of choice and I have to be secure enough in my own self to let others choose their own life paths and eternal destinies.

The most serious global warming in our age is not that arena that concerns itself with the average daily temperatures monitored by weather stations and measured with modern digital thermometers. It is the arena represented by the instability in the moral climate of the age. It’s not just the poles that are rapidly deteriorating and melting away. I make no apologies in thinking the moral fabric of society is rotting and falling apart.

As for me, my soul is thirsty, like our gardens in need of a generous rain. I know the temporary solution for the drought in these small fields that supply us with food for our table. Turn on the faucet and let the life-giving water flow through the hose.

My own personal soul-drought, a condition exacerbated by the realities of living in a stress generating workaday world and by the emotional dimensions associated with living in relationship with people out of step with the Gospel Ideal, is not so easily tended to. It’s not as simply remedied as the problem affecting our gardens.

The daily rhythm of the tedium designed into St. Benedict’s guidelines for integrating the Gospel Ideal is not a matter of rigid performance for the sake of monastic appearance. It is as purposeful as keel ballast on a sailing vessel. It keeps the top up and the bottom down when the going gets rough and the wind blows hard against the sails. It sets the stage for longevity and stability not only within monastic enclosures but works remarkably well in the here and now of life in the world outside the monastery.

The “labor of obedience” (RB Prologue 2) calls for more than simply and occasionally turning on a proverbial faucet, something that I admittedly discover myself to be too often guilty of.

Square One

2010-05-13T05:12:00.000-07:00

No matter how studiously I may apply myself to spiritual reading, or how devotionally disciplined I may be to times of prayer and meditation, there remains constantly with me that part of my own self that remains illiterate, undisciplined, and unruly in the ways and means of God.

It is this part of this self of mine that constantly reminds me that I yet have a long way to go in a journey of becoming Christ-like. The spirit is indeed willing. I want to become “like” the Great Master in every detail of the ideals presented in his Gospel-life. The flesh, however, is what it is and it has a way of getting in the way of being that example.

The Apostle Paul mentions pummeling himself to keep himself on the straight and narrow pathway. He uses other dire terminology in describing his journey – pressing toward, dying daily. Although I do not believe Paul tortured himself in acts of self-pugilization, errors that some, over the course of time, have made in their efforts to emulate his example of following Christ, there is something of a literal nature inherent in his personal allegorical descriptions.

I’m discovering that I’m a square one. In things Christian, in things Oblate, I find that I am continually returning to square one. I’m continually returning to the simple basics, starting over again and again with the basic building blocks, returning to my proverbial “cell” to learn again how to keep my estate small and low, learning again how to crawl.

There is a large difference between presumption and reliance in God’s economy. I do not presume upon or take for granted the grace and mercy of God. I rely upon them and in my reliance recognize and admit, as the Psalmist in 65.3, that my own misdeeds prevail against me insisting my continuous pleas for mercy.

Living In The Land Of Ooze

2010-05-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

I like the smell of honeysuckle. It’s especially nice when blended with the smell of Ligustrum Vulgare, the common Privet that sets a lot of folks to sneezing and suffering other symptoms that resemble bad colds.

These flowering wild shrubs and vines, despite their invasive natures, add to the visual and aromatic beauty of these southern climes, especially this time of the year when myriad shades of spring green decorate the landscape. The sights and aromas are complimented by the happy melodies of birdsong. It’s things like these, at least for me, that go a long way in helping to grind the sharp goad-points from the gripping realities of the issues generated in our modern times.

Political issues. Economic issues. Social issues. All the heated finger pointing and blame laying. Issues. There was a time when I thought all I had to do was cancel my subscriptions. But no matter how I work to distance myself from all the issues, the undesirable things, something of a handed down inheritance, keep piling up on my doorstep.

And now this thick, black, toxic ooze belching a mile down from the floor of the Gulf that has “experts” scrambling to figure out “after the fact” how to turn off the flow.

How long before they are successful in stopping the contaminating flow that exceeds 200,000 gallons a day? How long will it take to clean up the mess? What are the short and long term effects on the Gulf-Coast environment and economy?

The staggering reality of the Gulf spill is personally saddening. All the present efforts at combating and rectifying the problem seem so small and futile in comparison to the size of the problem.

No. I’m not a sun soaking beach goer. Our hermitage-home is inland a few miles from the sugar-white Gulf sands. But this catastrophic real-deal is in our own back yard and in our neighbor’s back yards; an uninvited, unwelcome visitor begging to insist the uncertainty of life in the tumultuous 21st Century.

Same God, Same Hymns

2010-04-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

Dead.

630,000 family men, young men, and boys lost their lives in combat. The figure is much higher if you count the number that died from disease and complications from war wounds.

Countless homes and buildings were pilfered, razed, and burned leaving large populations of citizenry destitute and homeless.

The conflict didn’t happen afar off in jungles or deserts. No. It happened in our own front yards, in our fields, and on the streets of our towns and cities.

It staggers me to consider and think about it. There were quite a few issues involved. Once the ball started rolling it was impossible to stop. The emotional conflicts were as heated as the engagements on the battlefields.

Union and Confederate. US and CSA. In many cases it was brother against brother, cousin against cousin. Both sides speaking the same language. Both sides praying to the same God. Both sides singing the same hymns. Both sides believing their cause to be the right one to support and defending it to the point of violent and bloody death.

The historical scenario reminds me a lot of the heated conflicts of issues and opinions, political and otherwise, that embroil the hearts and minds of this modern day citizenry. It was hard to sit the fence during the 19th Century war that raged between the States. It’s no different now. Fence sitting is still a difficult proposition.

The spirit of that historical line, known as Mason-Dixon, is still a very real Line of Demarcation although it is not necessarily defined by flags, uniform colors, and emblems. The conflicts still rage as inescapable realities. Only now the sounds of rifle and cannon fire have been silenced, their resonance replaced with rhetoric and promises emanating from an even more powerful and growing centralized government.

Appreciation And Celebration Of Life

2010-04-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Fred flaps his wings. I know what he’s going to do next. His wing-flapping is always followed by a musical Bantam rooster-crow. Our neighbor’s rooster pipes in with his rooster-tune and they banter back and forth trying to outdo each other.

I’m not sure why roosters crow. But I enjoy listening to them and I’m glad they do. Birdsong of a myriad sort, and the sweet fragrance of our lemon tree blooming, punctuates the cool stillness. Laughing gulls, high overhead, contribute to the morning lauds.

An early Sunday morning stroll about our small Homestead Hermitage estate. The little three-quarter acre homestead has come a long way in the five and a half years that we’ve given to it. The more we give to it, the more it gives back. It’s an atmospheric relationship that lends itself to an appreciation and celebration of life.

Mornings are still quite cool for this late in the month. I don’t mind putting on an extra shirt first thing in the morning. It will be deep-south blistering hot soon enough and it will stay with us a long time. Garden planting was late but things are coming along nicely. The first buds have opened on the yellow climbing rose and the wild red rose in our memorial bed is showing some color.

A lot of things were late this spring. The frequent late winter heavy rains and bouts of cold blasts from the north kept the earth in its winter sleep longer than usual for this sub-tropical climate zone. In another week or so the beautiful colors of the wisteria, dogwood, and azaleas will be gone for another year. Ah. But other summer-blooming things will step up to fill in for them.

It’s gotten dry, bone dry since we started our spring garden planting. The gardens would look pitiful was it not for the irrigation they receive to slake their thirst. Our already knee-high corn patch is getting a good dowsing this morning, as will the fenced main garden, before the warming atmosphere begins creating the coastal breezes that make it difficult to efficiently lay down water where you want it to land. It’s not an expensive and elaborate irrigation system but it works well enough. I don’t mind dragging hoses.

We struggle against the elements and tend these gardens partly for the fun and emotional health of it. We also do it as a hold out against pesticide laden and G.M.O. food crops that we personally believe are not fit for human consumption. It requires some work done in a timely fashion and there are some financial expenses. The return, weighed in hundreds of pounds of food each year, greatly outweigh the monetary costs. It’s time to start putting in summer peas and okra.

I know he’s gone to a better place; a reality of being that makes me glad he’s no longer languishing and wasting away. Had my dad made it a few more months, he would have celebrated his ninety-first birthday today. In honor of the occasion we’re having a noon meal family get-together at the home place.

It’s one of those happy-sad occasions. I miss my dad. He did have a contrary stubbornness about him, a little character trait that I see a bit of in myself. The best we can do with it is to simply keep moving on, pledging to live our lives as fully and faithfully as we can. I think that’s what he would recommend.

Roaring Against The Tide

2010-04-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

I believe in the democratic process. I also, in affirming this belief, have no doubt that the democratic process, in a profligate society vainly disposed to its own moral and ethical demise, will continue to reflect and impose its desires on a dwindling minority that labors to hold onto the hope that rests securely only in the healthy realm created in and fostered by righteous thinking and living.

It’s hard for me to think of these post-modern times without personally concluding that something of a cataclysmic era has fallen upon us. The restraints of former times seem to have largely passed from favor in the eyes of the public majority. Western society, once a bastion of morality has, at least in the limited opinion of this one tired simpleton, managed to successfully become a licentious free-for-all.

I didn’t ask for this perceived external environment. It is, however, the one that I find surrounding me, the one in which I must daily labor to work out and integrate the faith born and growing in my breast. It’s not an easy proposal. As Milt Grannum once said as the opening proposition in a sermon, perception makes a difference. The way we perceive things will have a definite effect on the way we go about living our lives.

What I perceive as a cataclysm in modernity motivates me. There are times when I find myself verbally and vocally roaring against the noise created by the post-modern tide. My own roaring involvement as a member of this post-modern larger society, though at times seemingly purposeful and necessary, most often has a way of generating its own prideful and distracting self-punishing afflictions.

Peace and contentment reside at the heart of Benedict’s model of monastic spirituality. The old Saint tells me to avoid situations that create strife and contention (RB Chapter 69). My own societal roaring creates a personal scene of interior strife and contention, sets me on edge, and robs me of the peace and contentment that grows best in solitude and simplicity.

Techno Concerns

2010-04-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

It concerns me that people read what I write and post in this venue that is open to the public. Oblate Offerings didn’t begin that way. It began as a simple little reflective means to share personally and intimately with a dear friend that lives far away.

One concern that I have about this is that I have an international audience. No. It’s not large like some mega-site but it’s larger than some of the churches that I pastored during my Protestant pastoral career. Some are frequent readers. Others stop by infrequently. Some show up accidentally, others curiously. Many don’t come back. A few leave comments. Most don’t. It’s amazing what a good stat counter tells you.

Over these few years of blogging I’ve had only one person roast me on a spit. He did it with a succession of argumentative and accusing comments. His last comment was an apology for roasting me.

I’ll admit it. I’m human and there’s still that carnal part of me that is capable of being flattered. There was a day when I would have really fed on this and found a self-righteous way to justify my vanity, a character trait that I’ve worked hard at overcoming, yet one that is still very much alive and at work within me.

Another concern is one that rests in the realm of personal accountability, one of those “be not many masters” things that the Apostle James talks about in chapter three of the little biblical book that bears his name. I live with a healthy fear of one eventual but certain day finding myself indicted for leading any one astray in matters of faith and morals.

I did in fact, a few months ago, consider taking a long hiatus, aspire more to anonymity and smallness, work at satisfying another character trait and become much more of a hermit-type recluse, and leave off doing this reflective journaling in a public venue altogether. It’s still a consideration but it isn’t quite as strong as it was a few months ago. Is this Providence at work or my own vanity steering me?

I prefer to think that it is not the latter in control of my little vessel.

Arrested

2010-04-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

It was already late in the morning but the breeze was still quite cool. I wore my comfortable old plaid sleeveless insulated vest as I headed out on the small lake. I had hopes of enticing a fish or two to attack a spinner bait, of one sort or another, that I repeatedly flipped toward the earthen dam and along the southern lakeshore.

The fish proved to be as uninterested as they had been the previous two days. Not a big deal. I was fishing for the fun of it. Just being out there was reward enough. We had plenty enough food in the camper, our little rolling cottage. Sure. There’s always something about that anticipated jerk on the rod when a sassy bass tries to demolish a lure. Fish on the line or not, it was alright.

A group of Boy Scouts, I counted twelve of them, were side by side on the fishing pier casting their lines. They were a well behaved group of boys around the campsite. Here, on the pier, their adult leaders were out of ear shot and they carried on some foolishness amongst themselves. Occasionally one of the older scouts had to remind someone to watch their language. I found that to be a little humorous. Why? I’m not sure. It just was.

My own fishing gradually took me far enough away from the pier that the sounds of the water lapping against the boat and the wind whistling in the pines pretty well drowned out the boy-noise coming from the pier. What I could hear from the pier was easy enough to ignore. I put my rod down and dug a Gideon Testament out of my inside vest pocket. With the water lapping the side and bottom of the aluminum jon-boat, the wind whistling in the pines, and the sounds of woodpeckers going about their hole-making in the surrounding forest, I read Psalm 19.

I read it quietly but aloud as a prayer. And, just like so many other times that I’ve read it, I couldn’t help but to wonder why. Why? With all of creation declaring the glory of God, why do so many fail to sense God’s closeness and care? I couldn’t help but to wonder why I can so often be so dense and unreceptive to God’s presence. I couldn’t help but to think how often the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart betray my profession of faith.

My thoughts arrested me. For a few minutes I simply sat there unable to think about fishing.

Faith In The Face Of Futility

2010-03-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take a genius to see that what we are facing in the opening decade of the 21st Century is a moral crisis of major proportions, something being manifested in political and economic catastrophes. We shouldn’t be surprised. Nor should we forget that civilizations have gone modern before, only to collapse into heaps of ruin.

Is the demise of society as we now know it on the brink? I don’t know. It seems to me that it does make sense to be prepared for whatever may come down the pike.

Pardon me for thinking so simplistically but problems are never solved from the top down. Treating symptoms is not a remedy. The problems of these modern times are organic in nature. They have tenacious roots that continue growing wider and deeper. Disguising them in new dress won’t make them go away. Lopping them off won’t kill them. The roots must be laboriously dug out and discarded in a way that leaves them no potential of taking root and reestablishing themselves.

Personally, I think the moral, political, and economic problems facing post-modern society have grown so large and are so deeply entrenched that any little bit of hand digging any of us can do, even if we commit ourselves to full-time digging, are beyond excavation. It seems to have been well proven that cussing them into hell or preaching them into heaven, two extreme means exercised toward the post-modern moral dilemma, have been and will continue to be efforts in futility. I’ve got to do more with my life than spend it in futile exercise.

Faith fashions itself into a number of forms and I hardly think there is a soul on the planet that doesn’t exercise faith in one fashion or another. Granted, faith can be misguided and poorly invested. It is, nonetheless, a valuable gift that all souls are endowed with, at least in some measure. According to the ancient biblical writer, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith is, as one old preacher entitled his sermon, “life’s great essential.”

I don’t know what the outcome of these cataclysms will be. I do know that there is a sure Grander Scheme, one that all of humankind’s preferences have never been able to derail.

Wisdom In Weariness

2010-03-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

The marauding and noisy icterids have arrived like a dreaded army in full-force, gorging themselves at our feeders, depriving our better feathered friends of the diet that keeps them hanging close to Homestead Hermitage. They show up every spring about the time the robins begin their spring migration, flapping their way back toward the northern states to announce the coming of spring to folks sequestered by long winter weather.

I used to try chasing the unwanted birds away but all my efforts were efforts in futility. When the feeders run empty they will sit in the trees and squawk at me, scolding me because they can’t get an easy handout. I tried to keep feed out so the better birds wouldn’t do without at a time when nature’s supply train is pulling empty boxcars. But the cost efficiency fast became apparent. It costs a lot in bird seed to feed the droves of unwanted moochers that never get enough and always demand more.

Maybe I’m judging, placing a higher value on some feathers while discounting others. No. I am definitely being judgmental, counting the cost, weighing on a balance. It so happens that the few lifted by the grosser weight are the more valuable lot. And they suffer because of the greedy mass congregated on the other side of the scale, squawking and pushing their weight around as though their volume and noise is indicative of some privileged classification.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Handwriting on an ancient wall. The handwriting is indelibly scribed all over the post-modern wall. More often scoffed at when it is read. But mostly ignored and unread. Weighed in the balances and found wanting. Who wants to hear that in this age of hedonism, self-gratification, and rampant self-indulgence?

I keep a supply of bird seed on the porch and dole out a little now and then during the lulls between the droves that quickly hone in. It’s the least I can do for the gentle little ones that accompany us and bless us with their pretty songs.

Loosening And Limbering The Lees

2010-03-11T05:11:00.000-08:00

If the objective of Lent is to cultivate a deeper awareness and appreciation of the grace of God, epitomized in the marvelous Salvivic Act on Calvary, then I’m having a pretty successful Lent.

If the objective of Lent is merely to mechanically sacrifice and do without in a prescribed or calculated manner, whatever aspect or aspects that particular doing without happens to involve, then I can only conclude that I’ve blown the liturgical season altogether this time around.

I recognize and affirm the need that we have as human creatures to shake things up a little. We so easily settle into the humdrum of day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year living. We get into our comfortable and preferential ruts. It’s easy to “settle on our lees” as Zephaniah talks about in 1:12 of the prophetic book that bears his name.

Then some bad stretches of life-road come along, even successions of bad stretches of life-road.

We don’t plan for them, can’t plan for them. Life happens and confronts us and we don’t, for all our self-confident effort and well rehearsed philosophies and theologies, have much control over what life does or does not do. The very nature of living life in a very real world imposes refining forces on us that move us into a type of the continuous Lent that our Patron talks about in RB 49. We don’t have to look for or select ways or means that test or try us.

Life quite often has a way of doing a really good job of selecting our trials for us. And all we can do is go with the flow, bash against the boulders, take getting dunked in the whirlpools, and ride the rapids in hope of calmer water. I’ve been wet and banged around for a while now. Is that a stretch of still water that I see?

It’s easy to fight against the bruising turbulent forces of life, to wish them away. They, after all, seem to extract so much from us. Maybe, just maybe, they are what we need to loosen and limber our lees from their settled and concretized positions, the wetting and kneading agents used by the Skillful Potter in an effort to fashion us more in his making.

Exspectans Exspectavi

2010-03-05T06:16:00.000-08:00

I waited patiently for the Lord,
and he inclined unto me,
and heard my calling.

He brought me also out of the horrible pit,
out of the mire and clay,
and set my feet upon solid rock,
and ordered my goings.

He hath put a new song in my mouth,
even a thanksgiving unto our God.

Psalm 40:1-2 KJV

Bearings

2010-03-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

Somewhere along the way I realized how lost I was, how futile my efforts to change people, how inept all my outward actions directed at changing the world. I realized how well-intentioned others had deceived and used me, how I had deceived my own self, how skilled I had become at criticizing and ostracizing those that failed to share my own well groomed and culture-warped narrow opinions.

I’ve changed a lot over the past decade of searching my soul, diving into the depths of my interior regions, seeking and searching for the Christ who is not concerned about time or culture or my personal egotistical preferences.

It’s not been easy. It has been relationally expensive, costing me quite a number of what I thought were friendships, a hard price to pay for simply walking an unexpected but divinely ordained path. Nor is the search anywhere near complete. Though an overwhelming peace permeates my soul, every wakening day draws me to the conclusion that my spiritual journey is far from complete.

I think we are all pretty badly bent. The world’s conglomerations of people-folk remind me of buckets full of rusty bent nails eroding away by the effects of the atmospheric conditions, no longer able to recognize the growing rust devouring them. Only it’s not oxygen and water that are the destructive culprits.

It’s the preferential forces of social and economic time unmercifully hammering and bending and pulling and discarding people. This alone, I think, reinforces the imperative, the need and necessity, to rest one’s soul’s eternal welfare upon the truths contained in the ancient and unchanging creedal statements that define the Christian faith, and in those models that most aptly characterize these truths.

Destruction will come to an eventual and perpetual end. So intimates the Psalmist. But how many will be consumed before it does?

Soul Healing Solitude

2010-02-26T06:11:00.000-08:00

The first signs of spring are beginning to make their appearance along this latitude.

Our blueberry plants are loaded with blossoms about to bloom. One lonely daffodil is offering its yellow smile to us. Some of the hardwoods and undergrowth are beginning to pink up in the woods. Patches of clover are coming alive and an occasional dandelion is sending up its little sphere of yellow sunshine. It’s time to pull out the tiller and prepare the garden earth to receive the little seeds that will become food on our table.

It’s good to see these things, especially after this past winter season.

It’s been a long cold winter for us, its climatological conditions exacerbated by the extent of the difficult emotional things that pummeled us these past several months.

There is a sense of irony to it all.

The hard things that have a way of freezing us in place, hardening and tempering us to the harsh realities of life, will, if we allow them their course, soften and make more pliable our deeper sensitivities, always directing closer to Center and Source the soul invested in pilgrimage.

I find it interesting how these things have a way of driving me deeper into simplicity – simplicity of life, simplicity of faith – where the smallest of things are the greatest of things. These things have a way of increasing my need and desire for soul healing solitude, that realm of interior and natural geography that is so easily trespassed and trodden upon by the ebb and flow of life in a modern society devoid of an understanding or appreciation of this important matter.

Everything is white with frost again this morning.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am weak: O LORD, heal me, for my bones are vexed. Psalm VI.2

Revisiting Thoreau

2010-02-22T06:17:00.000-08:00

I’m reading Walden again. I’ve read it before but that was decades ago as part of the required reading in college. The reading was sandwiched into a lot of other required reading during that semester. I didn’t, needless to say, get much out of it at the time other than the idea that one day I’d revisit Thoreau.

More than three decades have passed since I was first introduced to Thoreau and this time I’m taking Walden in more of a leisurely fashion. Studying on it. Reflecting on it. Taking it in little doses. Letting it simmer and distill.

I no longer have to cram until my brain hurts solely for the sake of making passing grades. That’s a course in living that I have no desire to repeat.

I find it a little funny, in a strange sort of way, how a book like Walden was made part of a life-directing program that was so at odds with the realities communicated by Thoreau. The lives of the program proliferators and professors in no way resembled the life represented in the book.

Revisiting Walden, at this particular intersection in life, may be more providential than accidental. Thoreau reminds me a lot of my own self. Here’s someone looking at the world and saying “this is really messed up”, someone grappling with the terms of the world’s gluttonous frenzy and wanting no part of the terms, someone totally discontent with having his life micro-managed by all the systems and institutions insisting on their rights to set and govern all the details and intricacies of life.

In this present age, like in that earlier age, there is no shortage of people content to simply accept the status quo of the terms and become slaves of systems that are never satisfied with the daily output of bricks. Personally, if mixing straw in mud is all there is to life, living life has then become a caricature of something that it wasn’t meant to be. It has lost and completely forgotten its center.

Unpaved Avenues

2010-02-22T05:08:00.000-08:00

When I look at the woods
I see an elaborately designed invitation
inviting me to enter a challenging yet perfectly natural world
filled with unpaved healing avenues
where every breath and sight becomes a prayer.

A slowly but constantly changing world,
one resounding with the music of natural sounds, brimming over with tonic for my weary soul,
governed not by bureaucrats and industrial magnates but by the natural seasons that make up the course of time.

It can be a hard place for the unprepared,
for the uninitiated,
a place that requires its own special tool chest,
its own manual of principles and guidelines,
demanding its own set of skills.

These possessions
make for something akin to an unhurried love affair.
Their lack is bound to create
a mishap that you avow never to return to.

Shucking Oysters

2010-02-09T05:07:00.000-08:00

These past few months have been one mean emotional ride. A succession of events. A series of up close hard things. Exacting. Toll taking. Unavoidable. Mind and heart numbing.

Life is real. Life can be hard. Life can be real hard when it’s made of the stuff that reduces you down to the bare essence of who you are. Maybe that’s the hidden pearl inside the oyster of life. You have to shuck the oyster to find the pearl. Sometimes things get turned upside down and the oyster shucks you.

In all the shucking I’m given to wonder more why I do the things I do. It makes me wonder about the practical value of all the goods and commodities that form the outward appearances of life, points and produce of pride – the things most people use as indications of success in a world that is, as Mark Twain said, a multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

When it comes right down to it, it’s all a bunch of shiny butt fodder that people sell their souls to accumulate for the sake of appearances. Earth awaits its opportunity to swallow us all.

What of any real value will we leave behind when the earth’s mouth is opened and we are laid at the bottom of a hole filled with cold dirt? In the cold hole there is no distinction between rich or poor, color of skin pigment or life creed. The hole is unconcerned about what we dined upon as our finest table fare or the magnitude of our personal holdings.

The little birds come to our feeders. Sometimes they come in small droves; sparrows, finches, cardinals, wrens, and a host of others. Watching the birds at our feeders is one of our simple joys. It’s something we are given to and take pleasure in. It’s hard to find a day when the atmosphere around us isn’t filled with birdsong.

In my present state of mind it causes me to wonder if we are really doing them a favor by feeding them; tempting them, holding them close just to satisfy some elusive sense of need within ourselves.

Fingerprints

2010-02-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

It's hard to content myself in a world of same looking houses separated by asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks.

Look at the trees.

Ponder the birds.

Listen to the wind whistling in the trees and the yips and howls of the coyotes as daylight wanes.

Notice the change - how the day sounds fade to silence, how a marvelous quiet pervades the moments just before the night critters begin filling the woods with their songs.

It's here that it's easy to believe that "God is in his heaven and all is right with the world." At least in this part of the world, one touched by human hands but not recreated in a way that erases God's fingerprints.

Joe's Gone On

2010-01-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

Joe Kralik, my dad, breathed his last breath Monday night around 7:00.

Had he made it until April he would have turned 91.

He was a good man. No. He wasn't perfect. He had plenty of contrariness in him. But he was a good man. Fathered five children. Three sons. Two daughters.

We put his body in the ground tomorrow afternoon. His soul has gone to reside in heaven.

Still Breathing

2010-01-25T12:39:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a long time since my last post. No. I did not expire. The computer breathed its last. It took a while to replace it.

I've honestly enjoyed the hiatus. It gave me time to work on other things, time to think on other things, time to evaluate. These three, like 1 Cor. 10:13 are never complete. Maybe it's time to travel a different road, visit some new vistas. Maybe crawl into a hermit hole. I'll make that decision over the course of the next month.

Pax,

David

The Key

2009-11-20T06:51:00.000-08:00

Jesus wept over Jerusalem as he drew near. His words on that occasion are still echoing through the corridors of time. “If you only knew what makes for peace.”[1]

During the life of Christ on earth, the religious, political, and economic powers at hand failed to recognize the time of their visitation. The general populace failed in this recognition as well. Their focus was on matters other than the Ideal that epitomized the ideals of faith, hope, and charity.

On that last fateful day, Christ was abandoned by all but his mother and a deeply devoted pitiful few. Anger and rejection gripped the masses of folk that Christ had miraculously healed and fed. The one thought to be their liberator had turned out to be nothing more than a docile lamb. Fear and confusion filled the hearts and minds of his carefully chosen inner circle of disciples driving them into hiding behind closed doors. Peter, the one Christ called Rock and placed over His Church, picked up his nets and went fishing.

Today’s Gospel causes me to pause and wonder.

Has anything really changed over the ages?

Is there any practicality in thinking that lasting and meaningful peace is possible without the Prince of Peace who infuses measures of himself into the lives of believers through the holy virtues of faith, hope, and charity?

There is no way to count the lives that have been changed through the Gospel over the Christian ages. There have been multitudes of life-changes in this regard and these changes continue to occur here and there where souls hungry for the truth accept and receive the living truth contained in the Scriptures. Despite all the diversity of dogma and doctrinal opinions, Christ continues to influence and change individual lives.

What of the second question?

I hardly think that it is and it is not that we don’t have the opportunity and means for it. Christ’s words still echo, calling out to ears that refuse to hear. Christ still offers his image to eyes that refuse to see. “If you only knew.”

It is here, in a world torn by conflict and strife, in a world ripe with injustice and inequality, in a world filled with the antithetical actions that work in opposition against the divine activity of God that I find myself laboring.[2] And I must confess that, more times than not, I perceive this laboring as swimming against an extreme outgoing tide that seeks to drown me in its dark depths – against a secular world that is diabolically opposed to Christ, against my own fallible and susceptible self.

Without the Death of the Victim, a Death that overcame all death, there would be no possibility of salvation for humanity. Christ’s foreknowledge of his suffering and death, the free offering of himself as the Victim, and the presentation of himself as the Model for all victims in all ages[3], something implicitly contained in Benedict’s ideal of conversatio morum[4], form a life-image that is both beautiful but difficult to personally realize.

It is, however, in the personal commitment to self-death and in the personal realization of this life-image that faith, hope, and charity are infused and find their greatest fulfillment.

[1] Luke 19:41-44
[2] RB Prologue 14-17
[3] Philippians 2:1-8
[4] RB 58:17

A Difficult Proposition

2009-11-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

The theological virtues - faith, hope, and charity – are integrally and inseparably related. It is through the impartation of the theological virtues, the action of grace that leads to and participates in our profession of faith in Christ, that we receive, enter into, and become the nature of Christ in the world.[1] [2]

The whole of the Christian experience revolves around the relational aspects inherent in the theological virtues, in the divinely infused gift of faith, hope, and charity that works mysteriously within the interior being to form believers in Christ into the image of Christ.

I’m hard pressed to find a time in my cabinet of remembrance when I did not have some degree of assent to the actions of divine reality. It has, granted, been a lifetime of development. I have to admit that the developmental process includes times when I chose exercising my will in resisting the truth.

Alternatives, avenues that are easily chosen through ignorance and often chosen for one reason or another through willful defiance, are alluring and can seem so attractive. There have also been times when my best reasoning, thinking that I was discerning the will of God and living out that direction, brought about a crop of difficult and even victimizing consequences.

Dying to self[3] is a difficult proposition. It is, however, the proposition that presents itself. To be remade and staid in the image of Christ necessarily means losing the image of this self that I, and the world, have and would continue to make of me.[4]

This is not something that I can accomplish in my own strength. Nor is it a conflict won in a few skirmishes. The victory inherent herein is the antithesis of all that is held in esteem by the world’s ideals of success.

[1] Acts 17:28
[2] Ephesians 2:8-9
[3] 1 Corinthians 15:31 A.V.
[4] Mark 8:35

Waiting

2009-11-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

There are times when life's demands are such that it becomes all one can do to

. . . simply breathe

. . . simply rest

in faith,
in hope,
in the charity of God.

Thoughts become a jangled tangle. Words just a string of meaningless incoherent run-on symbols not worth the ink to print them.

And we wait. Doing what we can to simply manage life on its own uncertain terms.

Yet,

it is here.

More than anywhere.

That very life itself becomes a wordless prayer.

That we discover and experience the sustaining grace and mercy of God.

And waiting becomes our expression of the theological virtues.

And Now Abideth These Three

2009-11-03T05:08:00.000-08:00

And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.[1]

They are the foundation of all Christian moral activity giving it animation, providing its special character.

The theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) inform and give life to all the moral virtues. The theological virtues are infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and of meriting eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being.[2]

I do not recall any of the contemplative writers saying so in so few words, but I am coming more and more to understand, or at least suspicion, that it is the infusion of the theological virtues, accompanying spiritual reading, meditation, and prayer that carry the prepared and receptive praying soul into the desired but fleeting fruit of contemplation. The contemplative state, however, as a gift that challenges intellectual reasoning, can and will defy our best efforts to catalogue, define, or outline steps that it must follow.

Though it may involve multiple stages, the performance of the Christian life (and I use the word performance because living out the tenets of Christianity is indeed a personal performance[3]) is not something arbitrary or guided by chance. This is a performance written and orchestrated by God who knows where we are, considers where we are, and leads every honest searching soul in respect to these personal life-conditions.[4]

Accepting this, how then ought I to live as a follower of Christ on the stage that God has prepared for me?[5] Answering this question is integral to all that I am and all that I do as a Christian, as a Catholic Christian, and as an Oblate in the Order of St. Benedict.

This is the great pressing question that I must continually ask myself.

This is, I believe, also the great pressing question that spans the course of time and comes to bear most heavily on the whole of these turbulent modern times as the most important question imploring an answer. It’s the question that reaches over the obstacles created by borders, hedges, languages, and creeds and has no respect of national origin, sect, or race.

Over the course of the next several posts I will be making a little personal journey of reflective exploration into the values inherent in the theological virtues, virtues and their values that adapt human nature for participation in divine nature. It’s the theological virtues that dispose Christians, in monasteries and in the world, to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity and provides the substance for every human virtue.[6]

Although we exercise disciplines of various sorts and in various measures in the course of our spiritual journey, and although we practices various human virtues in varying degrees and in sundry circumstances, it is through the infusion of the theological virtues, more than anything else, that the soul enters into fellowship with God.

For an increase in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity … let us pray to the Lord.

[1] 1 Corinthians 13:13 A.V.
[2] CCC, 1813,
[3] James 2:14-26
[4] John 15:16-17
[5] 2 Peter 3:11
[6] CCC, 1812

Calm Sailing

2009-10-30T05:11:00.000-07:00

A lot of dynamics come to bear on the Protestant soul that is drawn to Catholic Christianity. The dynamics involve both interior and exterior dimensions. This multi-dimensional journey can indeed be quite a crisis of faith, not only for the soul on the journey but also for the host of spectators viewing from up close and far away.

It is a journey filled with inexpressible joy, something that I personally liken to the parable told by Jesus about the Prodigal.[1] The implicit life-parallels contained in this parable are striking.

This joy has a deep personal and intimate fullness about it that is more easily experienced than it is described. But, at the same time, the journey is also replete with levels of sorrow and sadness, elements that have a way of creating their own set of defining characteristics.[2]

Rejection is definitely one of the characteristics that earmark the journey of a Protestant into the world of Catholic Christianity, something that is particularly heightened when the one being led on the journey happens to be a Protestant minister. It’s just simply part of the course. Although the pains of rejection have a way of sharpening awareness and firming resolve, it also necessitates practicing generous amounts of forgiveness and living more deeply centered in the love of Christ.[3]

Life’s journey is a course of discovery. I am discovering, along with these telltale marks of natural aging, that I am growing quite the more sentimental and sympathetic as I traverse these proverbial hills and hollows in pursuit of Christ and my own soul’s redemption.

I must admit however that there was a season on this journey when it was easy for me to meet rejection with equal amounts of its kind. Perhaps that was paraptoma on my part, fault that had a way of clouding over a lot of good memories of beautiful relationships and fruitful ministry that found themselves surrounded by camps of other well-intentioned but belligerent forces that caused me much personal hardship.

But perhaps it was also something necessary along that particular stretch of an extremely difficult climb, one that amounted to nothing less than a feat of spiritual, emotional, and even physical survival.

The dire straits inherent in that part of the journey have lost their keen edge. The major storms have abated. Those difficult straits are now more of a historical matter than they are present lived reality. The fabric of my life is yet being woven.

The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, a natural sign filled with profundity. “Live in fear of judgment day and have a great horror of hell. Yearn for everlasting life with holy desire. Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die. Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you, wherever you may be.”[4]

[1] Luke 15:11-32
[2] Romans 8:31b-39
[3] Matthew 5:3-12
[4] RB 4:44-49

Mea Culpa

2009-10-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

I CONFESS.

The beginning words of the Confiteor will ever be an incomplete statement of the process of self-examination and, at the same time, the doorway that opens to ever-deepening depths of interior healing and health.[1] It is a process that we are simply never done with, though it is easily set aside, avoided, or rejected for one reason or another, especially in our pressing post-modern culture with its gross overemphasis on individualism and independence.

I do not like to admit my own culpability. Not to myself. Not to anyone else. I am, after all, a human being and I am as susceptible as any other person to the sin of self-justifying pride, the plank that leads only to the inevitable short plunge into an unforgiving sea of self-destruction.[2]

John Cassian, born about 360 and ordained to the diaconate shortly after 400 by John Chrysostom, writes poignantly about the vice of pride, something that is found listed first on the list of the seven capital sins.

“There is no other vice which so reduces to naught every virtue and so despoils and impoverishes a human being of all righteousness and holiness as does the evil of pride. Like a kind of pestilence in its noxious universality, it is not satisfied with disabling one member or one part of the body; instead, it wastes the whole body with its deadly corruption and seeks to cast down and demolish by the most utter collapse those whose place is already at the summit of the virtues.”[3]

Poignant words. Blunt and sharp in the same instance. Words that implore self examination.

St. Benedict[4] cautions against the sin of superbia throughout the Rule. He applies these cautions to every level of personal monastic status: Abbot, cellarer, deans, prior, priests, reader, monks. I must, as an Oblate of St. Benedict, take to heart the wise counsel from “a father who loves me, welcome it, and (work to) faithfully put it into practice.”[5] The context of an obedient life as an Oblate of St. Benedict, housed within the framework of the historic Catholic faith, has defining and refining characteristics that I cannot ignore or slight.

The practical truth of the matter is that none, regardless of their point or position of Christian experience and service, are immune to pride. I am certainly not above it, must own up to it, and include myself in this group of none. Pride, cloaked with its insidious and deceptive nature, has a way of always showing up. It simply has my number, knows how to dial it, and is constantly ringing it up in one way or another.

Cassian tells us that no one can attain the end of perfection and purity except by true humility.[6] Benedict spends quite a few words in the Rule[7] outlining twelve steps in the ladder of humility. It seems to me, despite all the efforts and arguments made to downplay, avoid, and even justify omiting the subject, there is only one legitimate prescription available that can allay the effects of pride.[8]

Perhaps, if I keep taking this prescription long enough, one day I’ll finally slay this dragon named pride that shows up all too often on my doorstep. I can offer no legitimate excuse for opening the door and welcoming him in.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

[1] James 5:16
[2] Proverbs 16:18-19
[3] John Cassian, The Institutes, Twelfth Book, p. 255
[4] c. 480-547
[5] RB, Prologue 1
[6] Book Twelve, XXIII
[7] RB 7
[8] Phillipians 2:5-8

Onus

2009-10-23T05:17:00.000-07:00

Daybreak marks the Eastern sky and a Mockingbird is singing its part in the morning chorus. I love this time of day. It’s beautiful.

For a while an owl was hooting down in the bottom. The air is filled with the aromas of autumn’s earth scents. The world of people is waking, at least in the natural sense, and beginning to go about its frenetic course while monks assemble to pray the morning offices in unhurried fashion.

They pray for themselves. They pray for the Church. They pray for me. They pray for the whole world. From a distance I enter into and join in the spirit of prayer with them.

Laud the day. Christ is Risen and the graces of God’s mercies are renewed afresh!

O God, come to my assistance.
O Lord, make haste to help me.

I’m reminded in today’s Gospel[1] of the partitive nature of the Christian experience, that entering into and living the life of Christ is to choose a life replete with what appears as paradox. But it really is not paradox. There is no contradiction in Pure Peace, in the one who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”[2]

Far be it from the Prince of Peace to be the generating source of division. Yet, in his own words, he tells us that his coming was to announce division. He did not come as the creator or author of division.[3] That’s a project that humanity does well enough at on its own.[4] He came as the Light to penetrate and illuminate the darkness that separates mankind from God. He came to illuminate the darkness that separates humankind from one another.

I have to own up to my own onus where this matter of darkness is concerned. The owning up is much easier though at this point in my life-journey. What, after all, do I have to lose?

[1] Luke 12:49-53
[2] John 14:6
[3] 1 Corinthians 14:33
[4] James 3:16

Moving Beyond The Sesquicentenial Post

2009-10-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

To say that the journey of faith is an interesting and challenging journey is perhaps one of the greatest understatements that can be made by anyone. How can it be anything but interesting and challenging? It is, after all, a journey into the heart and mind of God.

It’s a journey that begins with the premise that trusting in God’s ability takes precedence over any ability that I may possess. It’s a journey that takes into graceful consideration my own inability and fallibility. It is a journey of continual discovery, of continual conversion. Then, one eventual day, the journey as we now know and understand it concludes on the same note that it began with.

Then, even and especially then, what seems to be the conclusion of life is only a beginning, a brilliant and new beginning of consummate union and fulfillment in the Very Source of our being. This ultimate union and fulfillment is, I believe, the hope and goal of all believers in Christ regardless of their denominational affiliation.

It’s really a shame, considering that the whole of Christendom shares in this single hope and goal, that so many wedges pry Christ’s Body apart. A lot of wedges have been cast since the Reformation. Not just wedges that separate Protestants from Catholics, but also wedges that separate Protestants from Protestants.

Christian people have their differences of opinions about certain matters of faith and doctrine. Maintaining and furthering differences of opinions has a way of necessitating the forging of larger and heavier wedges. It’s wise to remember that the deeper a wedge is driven into a block of wood the harder it is to remove it. Even if it is removed it always has a way of leaving behind a gaping scar.

Hammering wedges is not on my list of intentions. Christ’s Church is already badly fractured and scarred enough. But, at the same time, I cannot but speak and write objectively and with integrity about my own personal faith journey, one that was for a lot of years deeply involved in the Protestant faith realm before my conversion to Catholicism.

This was a conversion that did not happen in an instant. It wasn’t a change made in haste. It came only after years of study, prayer, and discernment. It came only after a long season of “counting the cost.”

I owe a lot to my former life as a Protestant and I give credit to every teacher and mentor that I had along the way. I consider, at this point in my faith journey, that the sum of the various parts of my Protestant experience were preparatory for the day when I, with my Baptist background wife beside me, would be confirmed in the Latin Rite.

This journey of faith, in many respects, has only just begun. It’s a journey replete with all the inherent aspects of a life-long love affair. It’s not a fickle romance based on infatuation and changing emotions. It’s deep, soul and marrow deep. It involves the intellect but transcends the capacities of intellect to anticipate and enter into Divine Mystery where faith becomes unclouded sight, where I am better able to “see as I am seen” and “know as I am known.”

So here’s a toast to all the miles and memories that reach back to the days of my earliest memories. And, looking ahead at the miles that are hidden within the misty Cloud of Unknowing, I follow the toast with a prayer looking forward to God’s continued grace and guidance.

Spiritual Discernment

2009-10-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Discernment is not always a pleasant process. It’s also a process easily complicated by attempting to inject what I think is in my best interest, what will suit my own preferential desires, or even what I think is God’s will, according to my own perceived and conditioned notions, into the process.

The process of discernment is something very fluid and its outcome, quite often, can be far different from what one may think. The involved fluidity can be something of a challenge, especially when we are conditioned to think in concrete and systematic terms, terms that can place personal limits on the illuminating capabilities of the Holy Spirit.[1]

It was a stark and numbing reality that I awoke to. Although it was a quite sudden awakening, it was predicated by a long road littered with the debris of multiple personal crises arising from the process of trying to faithfully serve God in what I honestly understood to be my vocation in life as a Protestant minister.

For all my best efforts and personal sacrifices, despite all my best efforts and sacrifices, the road in my rear-view wasn’t a very pleasant sight to behold and I no longer possessed the emotional and spiritual stamina to keep riding the waves of disaster that beat against the shore of my life. I simply could not keep doing what I was doing and accruing what I was accruing.

I didn’t see a pathway when I consciously stepped off the road that was familiar to me. It was, in fact, more like blazing a trail through the brush and bramble. I did not know where I was going and had no idea or inclination that the trail that I was blazing as a mere act of survival would intersect with monastic spirituality, solitude and contemplative prayer, and the Catholic Church. But I was satisfied in knowing that I was going.

Discernment is a process that bears its precious fruit over time. Its fruit blossoms and develops “in the going.” It has its moments of epiphany, those little rays of brilliance that penetrate our hearts and minds to give us hope. The process of discernment takes us into ourselves to show us where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going. It offers us opportunity to grow deeper in our understanding of ourselves. It takes us out of ourselves to help us better understand God and his will for the life we’ve been given to live in this present world.[2]

“All sorrow, hardship, difficulty, struggle, pain, unhappiness, and ultimately death itself can be traced to rebellion against God’s love for us.”[3] My own rebellion. Other’s rebellion. It’s really a simple but nasty matter.

I, for the most part, credited the cause and fault of the multiple crises to others. It was, after all, from others both in marriage and ministry that the leaping flames of disapproval reached out to singe my heart and blacken my emotional skin. At this point now, in the course of my life, I can own up to my share of the causes and faults that worked covertly deep within my ill-prepared self.

And, more honestly, pray ... forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

[1] Romans 8:7
[2] Phillipians 3:15-16
[3] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 267

Religious Dissension

2009-10-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

It really is something of a spiny horned dilemma, one that centers itself in the issue regarding the bread and the wine offered on the altar – in its presentation by the priest, in its consecration and sanctification by the High Priest who comes miraculously and mysteriously to inhabit the bread and wine, and in those who are able through the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation to share in the reception of the true and living Body and Blood of Christ.

There are, quite naturally, other issues that arise out of this primary one. One of the most significant of them is the ideal that governing spiritual authority was vested in Peter and the other apostle-bishops, and subsequently in those upon whom they laid their hands in ordination.[1] Rejection of Apostolic Authority in the priesthood, the priestly spiritual lineage of leadership traceable back to Peter[2], along with the spiritual authority vested in him by Christ, opens a proverbial Pandora’s Box filled with divisive moths that eat away at the very fabric of the leadership model ordained by Christ.

Authority, of any kind, is a major issue with a lot of people. Especially in this age of independent thinking and living. It’s important to remember that the antithesis of authority isn’t freedom. Far from it. The antithesis of authority is anarchy and when anarchy is the rule of the day nobody is free. Everyone lives in fear, even its promoters and proliferators. The worst possible form of anarchy is the one that births schismatic spiritual dissension.[3]

It is, in my mind and understanding, a climate of spiritual dissension that affects all of us in the realm of modern Christendom. A lot of it appears on the surface to be well-intentioned dissension. But even well-intentioned dissension has a way of getting out of control. It has a way of side-stepping and ignoring historical Church norms and, in their place, fashioning its own sets of congregational and independent norms that more readily allow for individual preferences and human expressions.

The sad and dangerous reality about these replacement-norms in the realm of Christendom is that all of them incorporate the Scriptures as their source to justify their being. The Holy Scriptures, in the multiplicity of their denominational usages and independent interpretations, have sadly become the single greatest tool used by the Enemy to fracture and divide the Church. I hardly think that religious dissension was Christ's holy plan for his Body or God's intentions in giving us the Scriptures.

All of us who take on the nature of Christ, through belief in and profession of him as Savior and Lord, are called to become bearers of the Light.[4] This is a tremendous task and responsibility, one that is exacerbated by the reality that we live in an inherited climate of hostilities created by the fruit of several centuries of religious dissension.

[1] 1 Timothy 4:14
[2] Matthew 16:18-19
[3] RB 1, The Kinds of Monks
[4] Matthew 5:14-16

Ecumenism

2009-10-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

Ecumenism.

It’s an interesting word. It’s an especially interesting word to bring up on the heels of the last quote from the 1955 Manual For Oblates where we are encouraged to pray for the extirpation of heresies and schisms.

The word ecumenism does have a nice ring to it.

Ecumenism, as an idea and as a movement, boasts of being an endeavor to unify. It offers something in the way of a remedy for the fractured brokenness that realistically characterizes the multi-denominational church world. Relationships can be built with others of differing doctrinal mindsets. Bridges can be built through inter-religious dialog with religions differing from the Judeo-Christian faith.

Relationships, communication, understanding and acceptance are all important dimensions of life in the pluralistic world of religious faith. But, for all the effort, can ecumenism ever serve as the vehicle that achieves Christ’s deep desire reflected in his priestly prayer?[1]

Personally, from the little corner where I live out of my own experiential frame of reference as a Protestant convert to Catholicism, I hardly think that it can. Not in an ultimate fashion. Not in a fashion that will become the catalyst for the conversion of the long list of ancient “other than Christian” religions. Not as the means that will bring all the “separated” Protestant brethren back into the sheepfold of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Ecumenism, as with every other item and issue that concerns my life as a Catholic believer and as an Oblate of St. Benedict, comes down to one simple matter. It is simply a matter of legitimate spiritual authority. Not only a matter of legitimate spiritual authority. But of personally yielding to its Christ given position in His design for the Church.

For me as an individual, mere mental assent in these matters without a total life response is a sure and compromising course leading toward an ever deepening emptiness full of self-deception.

Somewhere, somehow, there simply has to be a final and definitive voice of authority that can herald an authoritative yea or nay. I find this voice of authority in the Supreme Pontiff and his bishops and priests as they rightly divide the word of truth[2] and its accompanying traditions that keep my own interpretations of it from going askew and leading me into anathema. I also find this voice of authority in the Abbot of St. Bernard Abbey where he leads the monks and Oblates in the way of the Gospel set forth by St. Benedict and contained in the Rule.

Ultimate and absolute spiritual unity cannot exist without ultimate and absolute spiritual authority. We can have plenty of individualism and denominationalism without it. We can have plenty of lively and meaningful inter-personal and inter-religious interaction without it. We can do plenty of altruistic good works without it. There is a lot that we can have and do without it. But the one thing that we cannot have or achieve without ultimate and absolute spiritual authority is true, ultimate, and absolute spiritual unity.

This presents something of an unavoidable predicament, one of those inescapable horned dilemmas. No matter how we dress it up, pare it down, or rationalize it.

[1] John 17 (particularly verses 20-21)
[2] 2 Timothy 2:15

Out Of The Wilderness

2009-10-08T05:19:00.000-07:00

A dear friend, serving as a fellow Protestant clergyman, showed me his copy of New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton almost a decade ago. He handed the book to me, opened to chapter 3, and asked me to read. I had never so much as heard of Merton and had no idea that he was a deceased Catholic, Trappist monk, and priest.

I read the first paragraph while standing in the middle of the parsonage living room. Merton’s words warmly massaged my sore bruised heart. I sat down on his living room floor, continued reading the chapter, and experienced something of a challenging infusion of peace and grace that, unbeknown to me at the time, marked the beginning of my journey out of Protestantism and into the world of Catholic faith.

I live daily with thanksgiving for that providential landmark, etched into the fabric of my soul, at a crossroad that was dry, windswept, and otherwise noted for quite an assortment of interpersonal relational hostilities.

Ten years ago I would have scoffed at the notion of converting to Catholicism. Nothing in my Christian lineage supported such a notion.

I was reared in Calvinism in a small independent Bible Church. As a young man in my twenties, after a hard romp in the world, I crawled out of the pigsty and sensed a calling to ministry. I enrolled in a denominational Bible College that was staunchly opposed to the Catholic Church and, for that matter, every other denomination. Upon graduation I was ordained as a minister in that denomination. The latter years of my Protestant ministerial career found me preaching and pastoring in the independent charismatic arena.

I had become, for all practical purposes and in all signs and appearances, a Protestant in full bloom.

It’s not my intention to scathe the realm of Protestantism. That is not my purpose in life as a Catholic follower of Christ. Nor is it an inherent aspect found in the Rule of St. Benedict[1]. Oblates of St. Benedict are directed to live with an ecumenical orientation.[2] It was, however, out of the world of Protestantism, that I providentially found my way home to the healing fullness of the Catholic Church, St. Benedict, and St. Bernard Abbey. It is a fullness that has definite distinguishing characteristics that Catholics and Catholic Oblates are encouraged not to lose.

I’ll admit that all of the aforementioned does have a way of objectively coloring the way I see and address the bigger picture of Christianity and the Church. It is a picture that helps me see that it is altogether too easy to lose a sense of mindfulness about where we are at the moment - a sense that takes into consideration the direction we are heading and where we have come from. To have this lack of sense in a natural wilderness setting means that we are lost and our very life could quite possibly be in jeopardy.

How can the Christian faith-journey parallel be considered any different? Especially considering the tremendous disunity created by all the fissures, fractures, and factions that, once begun, have continued to multiply themselves over time into such a vast wilderness of divided doctrinal opinions.

“Let them (Oblates) pray earnestly for the triumph of holy Mother Church, for the spread of religion, for the extirpation of heresies and schisms, for the conversion of infidels, for the repentance of sinners, for the perseverance of the righteous, and for the relief of the souls in purgatory.”[3]

[1] St. Benedict, the Rule, and monasticism do happen to be of the Catholic orientation.
[2] Guidelines For Oblates Of St. Benedict, Section A, para. II
[3] .27, Statutes And Declarations Of The Oblates Of St. Benedict, contained in the Rescript of the Sacred Congregation of Religious, granted March 24, 1927. Manual For Oblates, St. John’s Abbey Press, p. 18, © 1955

Pathways Of Contradiction And Hope

2009-10-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

Quite a number of years, investigating and pondering the roots and history of monasticism, predicated the day that I eventually knocked at the door of St. Bernard Abbey, an event that coincided with a parallel journey of beginning RCIA[1] classes at St. Lawrence Catholic Church.

These parallel paths first appeared as paths of contradiction. And they are. They contradicted much of what I had been taught as a Protestant believer. They also appeared, bizarre as they may seem to intellects groomed to oppose them, as paths of hope in a deep and dark forest crisscrossed with so many trails and the echoing voices of a confusing chorus of denominational and independent criers.

I could not though, for the spiritual life of me, once my weary pilgrim feet had started walking these parallel paths, turn aside or cease the journey. This journey, replete with certain pending costs in regard to personal relationships, was far too important. Its dividends were far too valuable to trade for less valuable tender.

The voices of the criers in the proverbial woods no longer appealed to my ears. The many crisscrossing paths were no longer inviting and held no attraction to my eyes. The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist had become real to me. The need for the authority vested in Apostolic Succession had become real to me. My own deepest personal need, after decades of professing Christ and serving him as a Protestant minister, had become real to me.

It was in the realization of my own deep personal need and the means[2] to satisfy my own deep hunger and thirst that I also began to realize my vocation in becoming a layperson in the Catholic Church and in becoming an Oblate of St. Benedict.

Though I’ve known Christ throughout most of my life, I found my spiritual Mother in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Mother Church established by her Son. In the monastic way of spirituality, particularly through St. Benedict, the Holy Rule, and a daily horarium of prayer, lectio, and manual labor, I found an effective, time proven, and unchanging way[3] to live the Gospel Ideals in this crazy and fractured modern age.

And I endeavor to do this in relationship with the monastic community at St. Bernard’s and with other Oblates living outside the cloister. This is a relationship that readily assists in keeping me from my own easily accomplished errors in interpreting the Gospel to meet my own fickle and changing moods and desires.

A life given to the practice of holy obedience and conversion of life, when viewed in the context formed by monastic spirituality running alongside the framework authoritatively provided by the governing Church that is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic[4], is something far removed from any ideas of a life hedged by religious subservience. Its perimeter and bivouac host a spiritual freedom filled with its own characteristics that are more easily experienced than explained. It is a freedom easily resisted, neglected, or taken altogether for granted.

The labor of holy obedience and its subsequent fruit of conversion of life is honestly the only means available to deliver me from my own sloth of disobedience.[5] So I do my best, as an Oblate, to keep the monastic pathway under my feet. And, when I do wander off the path, it doesn’t take long for the brambles and briars to get my attention.

[1] Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
[2] John 6:22-69
[3] 1500 years of usage surely deems something reliable.
[4] The character of the Church as defined by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325.
[5] RB Prologue 2

Oblate Retreat 2009

2009-09-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

I almost didn’t go. Mostly because of the anxiety generated by vehicle problems and family concerns. There was something of a mean mental thing going on that insisted that I needed to stay home. But, at the same time, there was something deeper and compelling whispering in my spirit - a voice that’s easily overlooked or ignored.[1] I yielded to the whisper and made the 300 mile trip to the Abbey for our Annual Oblate Retreat.

Expectations? Of course. How could there not be? But too many expectations can ruin spontaneity and surprise so I’ve learned to be cautious with them. Suffice it to say that I’m always deeply blessed through spending time with my monastic family. Praying the offices in choir. Listening to the conferences presented by the conference leader. Being in community for a few days with monks and other Oblates. Listening, as St. Benedict says, with the ear of the heart.[2]

I also anticipated the opportunity to visit the grave of Father Thomas O’Connor, something that I’ve not been able to do since he died. I became an Oblate through Father Thomas in the late latter years of his life. He was quite an example of faith to all that knew him.

Father Bede Marcy OSB, our newly appointed Director of Oblates, served as our retreat conference leader. Unlike Father Thomas, whose life and ministry as a priest was near its end, Father Bede is much younger and recently ordained to the priesthood.

It wouldn’t be appropriate to compare their dynamics, to hold one man up against the other. It is, however, of interest to note that Father Thomas was reaching the end of his priestly road when I came along knocking at the door of the monastery. Father Bede is beginning his. These particular points in life’s journey present their own valid individual sets of dynamics, dynamics that are never out of place or out of time in God’s greater plan.

There are differences in these sets of dynamics and we need the differences to be whole and complete as a community. We need the elderly grandfatherly wisdom and presence of those who have long walked the way of St. Benedict. And we need the youthful vigor and vitality of our brothers and priests who are stepping in behind them to not only keep the Benedictine fires burning inside the monastery but to also hopefully kindle these fires in the hearts of a younger on-looking generation.

We had five conferences over the course of our retreat weekend. The themes of the conferences were 1. Wasting Time With God, 2. Waiting For Christ To Burst Forth, 3, Watching For Providence, 4. Wanting To Love, 5. Walking In Faith.

Father didn’t speak with lofty high in the sky platitudes. There was no hardcore academia that could possibly pass over anyone’s head. There was only direct but gentle “toward the heart” spiritual direction making practical and usable application of Scripture and the Rule. Father Bede’s conferences dealt with the heart of what it means to be Benedictine and what it means to live in the world as the Benedictine face of the monastic community.

Hopefulness. I think this is one of the words that best defines the sense of being that I came away from the retreat with; a renewed sense of hopefulness and an even firmer resolve toward my vocation as an Oblate of St. Benedict. The other word is purposefulness, a renewed sense of purpose, that my life as an Oblate of St. Benedict has personal and collective definition and purpose within the Benedictine community that I'm part of and in the world where I live outside the cloister.

[1] Mark 6:31
[2] RB Prologue 1

Transition

2009-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

It’s a beautiful sight. At least I think it is and it’s something that a few of us have been waiting all summer to see.

The blossoming goldenrod is one of the early signs that summer has nearly past us by and is finally standing on its last leg. Refreshing cooler weather is on its way. Judging by the timing of the goldenrod we should have our first frost around the second week of November. That’s an early frost for us.

It is a sign of relief for those of us in the Deep South where winter poses hardly a day inclemently harsh enough to keep us hunkered down next to a hot fire. We do have some days that keep us looking out the window. But they generally involve looking at the rain coming down.
Don’t get me wrong. It gets plenty cold. Cold enough to be miserable if you aren’t dressed for it and the high humidity generated by the prevailing southerly winds complicates the matter. But it’s not the kind of hard cold that sets in before Thanksgiving and lasts until the spring thaw. It’s not the kind of cold that makes freezing to death the likelihood.

Occasionally, only extremely occasionally, things will set themselves up in the atmosphere in such a way that we’ll see a little sleet or maybe a snowflake or two. In all my years though I can recall only one winter here that was cold enough to freeze the ground and set enough ice on small shallow ponds that was thick enough to support the weight of man. That snap busted a lot of water pipes in this land where most do-it-yourself folks trenched their water lines in just under the sod.

In the natural world we are experiencing a transition, one, I’ll dare to say, is going by unnoticed by the weakened masses involved in their busyness of synthetic artificiality.

Following Spiritual Direction

2009-09-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

I live more and more with a purposeful sense of direction and responsibility toward the self that I am. It’s a multi-faceted sort of thing taking quite a lot into consideration.

This multi-faceted nature does however focus primarily upon developing my own perceived spiritual vocation, something carefully discerned, promised solemnly in spoken word and signed by my own hand before Christ, and celebrated by the monks that form the actual nucleus of my greater spiritual family.

Having said this, I also have to admit, when it comes to all the structural elements that are characteristic of monastic life, even those minimally prescribed for Oblates, I am far from the model of Oblate perfection.

It was not, however, a model of perfection that I offered on the Altar at the monastery. It was the struggling self that I was and am that was offered. It was this same struggling self that was accepted by Christ and by my monk brothers.

At the center of this life-path I’ve discovered the particular element of “this works for me.” I am able, with the aid of Sacramental means, to rationally assess and embrace the self that I am, replete with my shortcomings and failures, without bludgeoning myself or walking through life harnessed like an ox to a sled load of guilt. In accepting my own imperfections as part of the process of grace, I am also able, most of the time, to view less critically the imperfections of others.

The process of grace is not, however, something that is self-excusing or so individualistic that I discover myself to be living a life of spiritual or religious anarchy, something that I’ve come to conclude, after decades of being a willing participant and promoter thereof, is the greatest problematic condition fracturing the Body of Christ into so many splits, schisms, and sects.

I am no longer fighting against the spiritual and religious norms foundationally established in Christian antiquity. I accept them. I also accept the legitimate Apostolic Authority given to safely guide me in my faith-journey. These are no longer my personal conflict and it’s altogether difficult to describe the freedom found in finally giving up the strife of that long fight.

Nor do I necessarily feel the urgency to labor as a defensive apologetic or to follow a course that leaves me lost in the Wilderness of Eclecticism. I do though find it is rather difficult to communicate the values inherent in this life of faith without honoring their Christ-given Source and the clear streams through which they have flowed to finally reach the needy dark and murky waters of these modern times where we find ourselves.

A Bigger Bowl Of Rice

2009-09-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

Max was a strange fellow. I met him in Germany in the early 70’s.

He wore stripes on his sleeves, Staff Sergeant Stripes, and had earned them through time and service in the armored cavalry in Viet Nam. He somehow managed to make an MOS change when he found himself stationed in Germany and secured a transfer into the Military Police.

I liked Max. A lot. Despite the fact that his several tours of combat had affected him direly. It had turned him into one of those people who, if war could go on forever, would have been at home in the middle of it. Now that it was over, he was like a fish out of water. At least in the MP’s he was afforded the occasional opportunity for a little hand-to-hand, even if it was against fellow Americans, G.I. fights and brawls usually occasioned by too much imbibing at the EM Club or in the civilian establishments in town.

Despite the psychological damage caused by several tours of combat, Max had a genuine humanness about him. It was this, not his war stories, stories that came out only when he was plenty lubricated, that I remember most about him.

I remember him talking about a conversation that he had with some of the impoverished old Vietnamese folks over there. He had asked them their opinion of the war. The response of the old people was really quite profound in its simplicity. Their response was, “If the North wins, we eat rice. If the South wins, we still eat rice.”

Today’s economic-political theatre, at least where the life that I live is concerned, isn’t so far removed from the S.E. Asia theatre and Max’s old folks a half decade ago. It simply doesn’t matter who’s at the top of the pile. It doesn’t matter what political insignia they wear. Honestly, the way I see and understand them, neither big business or politics have my best interest in mind. Both make promises of a bigger bowl of rice. But, when it comes down to it, I’m still the one sweating in the muddy water.

Notes Of Change

2009-09-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve never read the Koran. It’s something that I’ve never felt any need to do. I do, after all, have the Holy Scriptures that predate the Mohammedan text. The Holy Bible, from my earliest childhood until now, has been and remains the single most important influence upon this feeble life of mine.

So I have to rely on what I see going on, on the lived out reality of the issue as it is portrayed in history and in the present day workings of today’s civilizations.

Based on these observations, albeit observations made from my own Christian biases, I am unable to think too favorably about Islam as a religion. I see it more as a system of human subservience that, historically and now, moves and governs through conquest and domination.

But, at the same time, I have to admit that Christians have used the Bible to the same end. So, in defense of my own faith-group, I don’t have any stones to throw at the Mohammedans. I’m only trying to peacefully live out my faith in Christ and pray for the grace to persevere until my last breath.

An awful lot is being made these days about the influence of Islam in this country’s “highest” office. A lot of Christians are angry. A lot of Christians are afraid. I am neither of these about this matter. Nor do I profess or desire to sit on either side of the line that is graphically drawn between the Republican and Democratic parties.

Where all this is concerned, I have to step aside from the heat and debates and live as a non-combatant. It’s simply that I find it impossible to honestly intercede for the dire needs of the world while, at the same time, covertly or overtly despising and condemning those for whom I am praying.

Personally, as only one of several notes being played on the instrument of change, I find this issue rather interesting in the life of this seething smelting pot that, dismembered as it may have always been after one fashion or another, is called the United States. These issues serve to remind me that faith in Christ is not predicated by the changing political and economic schemes of any national social unit.

These changes, those presently manifested and any that will appear on their falling tide, do not possess the strength or weight to curb or crush Christianity. They may, indeed, present some challenges in the public realm of faith-life, in outward displays of superfluous personal preferences and opinions. But, with history as teacher, even the most extreme times have a way of exciting interest and reviving vitality in the life of the Church.

Guilt By Association

2009-09-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

Advances in technology have a two-fold effect upon humanity. We are, in the same breath, softened by the ease of life they present and dulled to more essential realities. The very good that these advances could afford, for all practical purposes, circumvents what could be and turns it into the means and motivation for greed and its first-cousin pride.

I’m not an economist or political analyst. But it seems to me that the farther along we move as a social human race the further we get from the core and organic ideals set forth by Christ, the ideals exemplified by so many Saints whose lives passed muster for Canonization. Not only these, but also the multitude of unknown saints whose lives of quietude now form the vast choir singing the Song of Salvation to this generation.

This is my opinion and in the midst of my opinion I discover myself as one among many others. Guilty!

It happens to be a contrary sort of guilt, one that I find forced upon me at every turn by the maddening march made by the progress of sated civilization. The march has gained so much momentum that its flow has a telling effect, something that is terribly difficult to stand against or save myself from. Its germs have been so well propagated and released that none are immune to their contagion in this modern economy.

Not even, perhaps especially, those who are finally able to recognize, name, and fight against the germs that infect their soul. The Seven Deadly Sins, or The Eight Principle Vices defined and so well outlined by Cassian in The Institutes, have become the common lifestyle practices of society as we now know it, one that will not be satisfied by its lusts even when empery has been totally achieved.

Summer is almost gone. A number of signs in nature indicate an early frost. We were in a terrible drought this time last year. Not so this time around. The few rows of fall crops planted in the garden are up and doing nicely and the soil is so wet from rains that I can’t get in it to plant the rest of our winter garden.

Stepping Out Of Vogue

2009-08-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

“But for him who would hasten to the perfection of that life there is the teachings of the holy Fathers, the observance of which leads a man to the height of perfection. For what page or what utterance of the divinely inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not a most unerring rule of human life? Or what book of the holy Catholic Fathers does not loudly proclaim how we may come by a straight course to our Creator? Then the Conferences and the Institutes and The Lives of the Fathers, as also the Rule of our holy Father Basil – what else are they but tools of virtue for right-living and obedient monks? But for us who are lazy and ill-living they are a source of shame and confusion.”[1]

Outside the realm of Catholic literature, and the examples that produced it, there is pitifully little in the world of modern Christendom that focuses on solitude and the contemplative dimension that accompanies it.

It’s really no surprise that those who embark on the adventure of living contemplatively in solitude are viewed by the larger society as strange and out of step with the times. Even within the context formed by modern Catholic culture, with so much of its emphasis on activities to keep the faithful engaged and busy in the life of the Church, as good and needful as these may be, solitude and contemplative living seldom get an honorable mention as a viable way of life.

It’s not such a bad thing to be out of step with these modern times. However, a vocation to solitude and contemplative prayer, perhaps especially in a lay capacity, is a difficult challenge to actualize in this present complicated economy. Monastic spirituality simply isn’t vogue in the 21st Century. Though we are never surrounded by large crowds of like-minded pilgrims on a common journey, we are not alone or engaged in something onerous.

Neither are we are pioneering something new. The pathway was hewn out of the rough and hard terrain by faithful men and women long before we happened upon the slight traces that caught our attention and invited us upon this faith exploration, to this journey back to the very heart and soul of the Christian experience.

Benedict begins the Holy Rule with a simple but hard word. “Listen.”[2] Herein is found the greatest difficulty challenging modern human minds attuned to the myriad stations playing pleasurable and inciting music that drowns out the tunes heard best in silence and solitude.

[1] RB 73:2-7
[2] Prologue 1

Solitude

2009-08-26T05:07:00.000-07:00

“Walking up and down in Bardstown outside Krogers, in the cold, saluted by man, woman, and child. I thought that never, never could I make sense of life outside the monastery. I am a solitary and that is that. I love people o.k., but I belong to solitude. It was so good to get back and smell the sweet air of the woods and listen to the silence.”[1]

Although easily perceived as one, I’m honestly not an anti-social person. I am happily married and enjoy life with my wife. In my work I am engaged with people on a day to day basis and I find it rather interesting that so many of the people that I work for want to sit and chat with me about more than lawn care nuances, despite my being often soaked with sweat and covered with lawn debris.

Although I garner an income from my labor, what I do is also a platform for sharing life in the Gospel, with a Benedictine orientation, in a theologically non-threatening way. Canned evangelistic tactics and proselytizing have no place in this venue. It does, however, bring about numerous opportunities to encourage people to simply trust God when the winds of life blow contrary. The solitary nature of my outdoor work also provides me with plenty of opportunities to pray for people while I am physically working on their lawns and shrubbery.

For these opportunities, and for the income, I say thanks be to God. It’s a pretty neat deal.

Merton’s journal entry on December 13, 1958 strikes quite a harmonious chord with me. He was searching for something when he entered Gethsemani, though I hardly think he could have verbalized it so well early on in his monastic career. But he found it, embraced it, and lived it. Solitude. Both interior solitude and eventually the solitude of his hermitage in the woods.

It took quite a number of years for me to finally recognize and embrace my own solitary nature. I ran from it for most of my life and in my younger years my running put me into a lot of troubled waters. Jonah wasn’t the only one to see a whale’s innards. His literally. Mine proverbially. But a whale just the same.

Once my whale finally literally deposited me on my face crying out to God for mercy and forgiveness, I busied myself in active ministry roles that I perceived to be vocations. Even so, I was always struggling interiorly with something that I couldn’t name, and struggling with it within the context of faith traditions that had, long ago, renounced it as a viable means of Christian faith expression.

Solitude had no name in my young, tender years. But it definitely had a friendly face and form. Though I had experienced it often as a child growing up on the small family farm, I grew so estranged from its reality that solitude became beyond my recognition and embrace.

[1] Thomas Merton, A Search For Solitude, p. 239

Good Beans

2009-08-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

Following God’s will for one’s life is not as simple as deciding what brand of pre-ground and pre-packaged coffee gets brewed in the pot each morning. Inevitably, if one is dire in their pursuit of their simple interest in a living and vital union with God, the pathway will lead to the fields in the higher regions where grows the choicest beans.

It’s not the easiest walk to reach the high fields, and reaching the high fields is only the initial steps involved in a lengthy process. Fruit in the basket is a long way from the finished product in the cup.[1] The greatest care can be taken in picking, fermenting, and drying the fruit only to have it wasted by bad roasting, careless blending, or diluting it with fillers to stretch it out and make it go farther in the consumer world of marketplace.

I suppose, for most, that it really doesn’t matter what’s in their cup. I also suppose that it’s a good thing that everyone’s cup isn’t empty. In the large and small scheme of things we are where we are when we happen to be there. Or, as I heard one wise sage on the prairie often say regarding his understanding of God’s will, “we get what we get when we get it.”

Being roasted in God’s oven is, in itself, a hot, lengthy process. It’s a pretty good analogy but it is an incomplete one. It doesn’t take into account the grinding that follows. Or the perking. It doesn’t consider the possibility, or the necessity, of being re-formed and re-sent through the whole process again and again.

This bean, the bean of my own self being fashioned into the image of Christ, is a bean that is never fully finished in this life. It is, in one and the same breath, the most important and most easily neglected process inherent in every human life.

[1] Matthew 13:44-46

Wrestling A Hard Saying

2009-08-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

Today’s Gospel reading[1] is, for me, probably the most haunting few verses in the Bible. The reading concludes:

“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.”

Yeah. I know all the rationalizations and justifications that follow the proverbial ‘BUT’ that is so easily regurgitated when these words fall upon our eyes and ears. It does seem to be an extremely hard standard - to trade a wealth of material possessions for a life of material poverty.

The standard imposed on this fellow by Christ seems to be made even less palatable when held in the light of the modern day prosperity doctrines that have been proliferated during the past century. Yet, for all the resistance and argumentation, here is an individual upon whom this standard was imposed. Who can authoritatively say that Christ does not still impose this standard upon individuals as their measure of obedience in following him?

It seems rather obvious that living in poverty does not instill holiness in a person. It also seems rather obvious that wealth and prosperity generate their own distinctive and deceptive brands of impoverishment, things that are perhaps more dangerous and debilitating than possessing absolutely nothing in this world except the promise of the fulfillment of the desire for everlasting life in the eternal world.[2]

It’s a hard saying and I wrestle with it in this world that keeps me sticking my nose to the grindstone for the sake of scratching out a meager livelihood in this sated and inflated economic setting, a setting not of my personal choosing. It seems, where this setting is concerned, that we have all been taken captive to Babylon with hooks in our jaws.

Yet, despite the challenging hardness of Christ's words, it’s more than interesting to consider the strides that have been made for the Kingdom of God over the centuries by men and women who took Christ literally at his word, even when accepting his word meant challenging the setting of their time.

[1] Matthew 19:16-22
[2] Mark 8:36

A Day Well Spent

2009-08-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

There will always be no shortage of things that need to be done. Work is, for us, something of an unending thing, especially this time of year. Bookkeeping and lawn care are two worlds apart but they share one thing in common – when you get it all caught up, if you ever do, come Monday you start all over again with the same old pencil pushing or sweat generating grind.

No complaints. It’s that grind that allows us to pay the bills and maintain some slight modicum of a modest standard of living in this crazy economy.

There comes a point, however, when the best thing anybody can do is to simply spend a Saturday doing something that you want to do. Leave the home chores undone. Forget the honey-do’s and getterdone’s. Just hop in the car and burn a tank of gas.

No. That doesn’t sound like the “green” thing to do. But it can flat buy a break from the grinding routine that’s always exacerbated by the daily sub-tropical thunderstorm activity that sets itself upon us this time of year.

We took the slow route meandering our way across country to the Conecuh National Forest in Covington County. We could have gotten there faster but zipping along on the Interstate isn’t our idea of a Saturday leisurely drive. The CNF has been on our radar screen for some time now, particularly the Conecuh Trail with its 20 mile loop and its several shorter trails.

The terrain is characteristic of the canebrake, dense sub-tropical forest, maintained by the good folks at the Forestry Service. There are a generous amount of campsites, both primitive and full-service and, at first glance, I can’t imagine the place being overrun by tourists. No sandy, white beaches and salty surf. No noisy theme or water park.

Don’t look for any fancy dining establishments. We’re talkin’ a fur piece out in the country. We can, however, recommend the Blue Lake Café. Great cheeseburgers. Drinks are quart sized and served in wide-mouth mason jars. No. Crickets are not on the menu but are available for fishin’ folks.

It seems to be a quiet place visited by people interested in getting away from all the hustle and bustle – a great place to tow our vintage ’73 Sprite, hike some trails, and breathe some air. And the 30 acre fishing pond bids me to drown a few crickets.

Holy Dis-Ease

2009-08-05T05:09:00.000-07:00

There is a large gulf of difference lying between contentment with the here and now and the recognition of it. Both contentment and recognition involve degrees of acceptance, however different their respective fruit.

Recognition, and its developing fruit, pierces the lie inherent at the heart of so much of the insanity that fills the world. It also strikes a hard, punishing blow at the world inside my interior dimensions where my own corrupting imperfections originate.[1] It’s only as I begin recognizing and grappling with the workings within this personal dimension that I am able to more clearly distinguish their effects in the world outside of and around me.

Commenting on “the desire of advancing to eternal life urgeth them,” Father Sause wrote,

“For the monk, as for the ordinary follower of Christ, there is no progress that does not tend toward an everlasting union with Christ. The whole plan of monasticism is as simple as that, for it is the perfection of the formation of solid and true Christians.

It is only at death, of course, that the monk’s supernatural life, life in Christ, is to receive its perfection. But in his sojourn on earth it is already part of his very being. To be true to his calling he lives for Christ. He constantly seeks to express that union by works of love, performed out of a desire for an increasing intensity of union. Zeal, motives, action all bespeak a spiritual restlessness.

The monk who is content with the here and now is a contradiction in terms. He has failed to grasp St. Benedict’s plan.”[2]

It seems rather obvious that the world outside the monk, or garnering the comforts, luxuries, and gratifications of the world, is not the monk’s driving life-motivation. The way of the world, at least in principle, is left behind, traded for the higher calling represented in the monastic vows. The monk’s desire becomes a lifelong daily adventure in furthering an ever deepening union with Christ, a course in life that, when conscientiously persued, is never completed inside or, more especially, outside the monastic enclosure.

[1] Matthew 15:19
[2] Rev. Bernard A. Sause, O.S.B., The School of the Lord’s Service, p. 160

Faith In The Fire

2009-08-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

Jon Meacham’s article[1] was more than interesting. I can’t say that it was really illuminating. It was, if anything, more of an affirmation of things that I’ve come to believe, or at least suspect, after observing the trends that have led to where we are today as citizens of the 21st Century.

The trends show no sign of abating. They have, at least in my observation, strengthened to the point of becoming the social norms of our modern society. Reality is what it is and it’s rather evident that the modern democratic state isn’t too concerned about what the Church thinks about matters of faith and morals.

Some Christians are dismayed at the state of things. Change is, after all, something that is difficult to accept, particularly this order of change. It’s rather obvious that Christianity, or those versions of it that were important in the lives of the English speaking men and women who braved the process of coming to settle in this country for the sake of religious freedom, has had to make room for a growing assortment of other faith traditions and life orientations.

“A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us. The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.”[2]

Is this a crisis “threatening the very heart of our culture” or an opportunity for a more genuine and historic expression of Christian faith?

I don’t personally find this so threatening to my Sacramental Christian faith and Oblate Promise. What I do find in it is motivation to pursue more deeply and persevere more intently in what I believe and experience in the grace of Christ that transcends the agendas of politics and economics, two realms that both God and Satan seem to generously employ in their service in ways that leave me with little, if any, determining influence.

A genuine Christian identity is not determined by the popular politics, economics, and social norms of any given cultural age as if it was a marionette dancing at the ends of these three temporal strings. Despite our preference for friendly governments, plenty of cash in our pockets, and a citizenry that espouses our own personal views, the practice of the faith embodied in Christ and taught by the Apostles is well equipped to flourish even under the most hostile political, economic, and social conditions.

[1] The Decline and Fall of Christian America, Time Magazine, April 2009
[2] R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, quoted by Meacham in the article.

The Voices Of Ruins

2009-07-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

Although impressive, it wasn’t the evangelistic fervor of St. Patrick that made the greatest Celtic impression on me. Patrick did some extraordinary things and I mean not to detract from or make little of his faithfulness. Worthiness of his Sainthood is obvious. There were, however, multitudes of other Celtic saints, some canonized and others not.

It was the Celtic hermit-monks that made the greatest impression on me - a large crowd of souls whose names will forever remain unremembered. Though most of their names have long been forgotten, a few rocky ruins of their hermitages, and other ruins of their monastic surroundings, remain as a testimony of their devotion and commitment to wholeheartedly turn to God once the light of God penetrated the pervading darkness of their times.

Only after a lengthy exploration of Celtic monasticism did I visit my attention upon the hermits of the desert, people whom my Protestant professors insisted were well intentioned but quite deranged. In looking into the lives of these pilgrim followers of Christ, I find it difficult to consider them deranged. Devotion and commitment to God motivated the Desert Fathers and Mothers to abandon the comforts of civilization and make their hermit-homes in remote desolate regions. Their sole purpose in life was to prayerfully seek God.

Such devotionally heroic acts are difficult for our 21st Century minds to grasp. Our air-conditioned and pillow-mattress rested minds have a way of immediately focusing on the physical hardships endured by the Celtic coracle riders and the desert basket weavers. Our “practical” nature insists that such heroism isn’t possible in our day. It also insists that it isn’t necessary in these illuminated times.

We are, after all, a modern society and turning to God in our modern times is something that we do according to the social climate and economic conditions of our times. Are we not supposed to orient our spiritual lives in such a way that we don’t lose contact with the world that we are hoping to save? Doesn’t the world need us so badly that we can’t afford to abandon it? Besides, unless we cooperate with the world, how are we supposed to maintain what we’ve accumulated and keep acquiring more. We are, you know, supposed to be industriously good stewards.

That, at least, is the general direction most of the basic modern arguments tend to go. Even the Church, in its maturing intellect, has determined that vocation to the religious life is not the only sure means to avoiding the pains of hell. That is a comforting thought although it has created a tendency to downplay the historical and present importance of turning to God through the means and disciplines of monastic spirituality.

I suppose there is some merit to these self-defense arguments. I find it kind of funny though, now that I’ve joined the ranks of the Centrum Silver crowd, how weak and feeble these arguments are becoming.

“If it is permitted to judge from the principles of the Holy Rule, one may reasonably believe that if St. Benedict were among his followers today, he would insist even more than does the Holy Rule on ‘the hard and rugged things’ because the forces that tend to keep one from God are so numerous, and powerful, and ubiquitous. It is certain that he would correct many present-day ‘broader interpretations of the spirit of the rule’ as out of harmony with the purpose he set for himself: to make men share in union with Christ.”[1]

These words come to us from over 60 years ago. The forces described by Father Sause have not diminished. To the contrary. The pervading darkness of our times is even more intense and even more accepted by a sin sated modern society.

Despite the arguments, the testimonies of the hermit-monks, and the testimonies of multiplied generations of cenobitical monks and religious sisters living out their vocations within monastic cloisters, toll loud and clear like steeple bells. These tolling bells can only be interpreted to say … “there is more.”

[1] The School Of The Lord’s Service, Rev. Bernard Sause O.S.B., p. 132, © 1947

Conversification

2009-07-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

It’s one thing to profess that I am something. It’s altogether another thing to become and to be that something that I profess to be.

I admit a certain infatuation that bloomed when I first began to explore monastic expressions of the Christian faith. There was an attraction, a drawing of sorts, something that made a lot of sense to me. Monastic spirituality offered, and still offers, a stable spiritual climate in a world filled with all the changing currents and turbulence generated by centuries of divisive denominational development.

Exploration tends to be a romantic thing, an inviting thing. It is also a very purposeful thing whose invitational challenge is often too great a hurdle to surmount for most people in our modern age of preferential ease and convenience. As vast and varied as this exploration’s field may be, its focal point is very small and refined. It’s not somewhere “out there at some point in time.” It’s always “right here and right now,” another shiny facet of its challenging multi-dimension.

It’s easy for infatuation to fade away like yesterday’s sunset. Unless efforts at self-abandonment are taken to deepen infatuation into maturing love, the immediate thrills of infatuation will soon become like memories of other romances and endeavors that didn’t work out. Though I have sure and worthy guides, I am largely responsible for my own “labor of obedience.”[1]

My own conversion, something that develops in my own interior regions before it surfaces in exterior realms, must be given priority and right of way lest it become sidelined, or worse, altogether derailed.

“More than mere sentiment urges the preservation of the terminology converse brothers, the more happily chosen term of a former age, in preference to today’s use of the more prosaic lay brothers. Conversi described those who had turned to God. Every Benedictine worthy of the name has done so.”[2]

[1] RB Prologue 2
[2] Bernard Sause, OSB, The School Of The Lord’s Service, p. 116, 1947

Pockets Of The Soul

2009-07-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

Turn us then,
O God our Saviour.
And let thine anger cease from us.

There is no doubt about it. It is a sure reality and happens many times every day. Even the most well lived life, where the natural sense of life is concerned, must eventually come to an end.[1] Not just the most well lived life, but also the life that is pillaged by a lack of concern for eternal affairs.

There is another sure reality. Not a single material garnered good can follow with us as we pass through the gateway of the grave where the eternal grandeur of heaven awaits the faithful and eternal sorrow awaits the faithless, perverse, and disobedient.[2]

There is really nothing morbid or morose about contemplating the final rite of passage that all of humankind must experience. It is, in fact, something that the founder of our Order recommends as a daily exercise of reflection and recollection.[3] What, after all, is the purpose of this temporal physical life if it is not considered a brief preparation for the unending life that is to come once we pass through the transparent veil?[4]

In a moment, in a “twinkling of the eye” as the Apostle says, one by one or altogether at the Parousia, we meet the One who examines the contents of the pockets of our souls. And what will be found in them? Treasures that will commend our souls to eternal paradise? Or sand that will garner reproof and possible rejection from the place of eternal rest and peace?[5]

God’s mercy and grace, granted, is efficacious and far reaching. His alone, despite our best theoretical rationalizing, is the ultimate and final say. His judgment alone will measure the degrees of my obedience or disobedience to his revealed will.

Where admission into eternal glory is concerned, it would be inordinate for me, as a sincerely believing Christian, to live in abject fear of the eventual moment that I should be living to embrace. It would, at the same time, be inordinate for me to put aside the “fear of hell.” I cannot be satisfied with a mere “getting in by the skin of my teeth” attitude, an attitude that seems to be prevalent in the mixed bag economy of contemporary Christian culture.

I cannot dismiss my sinful condition. I must accountably embrace it as part of my own personal reality, as part of the greater reality at work in all of humankind. In accountably embracing it, I come to know and understand my sinful condition. In knowing and understanding is born the will to change and the courage to make amendment.[6]

[1] Hebrews 9:27
[2] Romans 14:10-12
[3] RB 4:47
[4] James 4:14
[5] 2 Corinthians 5:10
[6] RB, Prologue 36

Living In The World

2009-07-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

Creating and maintaining a personal environment that is conducive to the goals of the monastic expression of Christian experience is not an easy proposition. Here, in the world outside the monastic enclosure, life is pockmarked by a myriad of demanding inconsistencies and variables, a continually changing dimension where the institution and actualization of the discipline of monastic expression finds itself constantly challenged.

It is, however, within the challenges of this changing dimension that I endeavor to lay claim to the scriptural life-ideals and historic traditions prescribed by St. Benedict and those holy examples whom he emulated. It is here in the midst of the madness that compels a world living on its head that I endeavor, as an Oblate of St. Benedict, to enter into the discipline and peace of Benedictine spirituality - something that I’ve discovered to be both a curative and a preventative for my own spiritual ills.

I do this, first of all, for the sake of my own salvation and sanity and, secondly, as a piece of the fruit growing from this planting, to present to that portion of the world, represented by my own concentric circles of influence, something of a model for living that is representative of its parent model.[1] I have to often remind myself that people are examining my life before paying any attention to what I am saying. The Master of Montecassino said so much of himself.[2] How can I think otherwise about myself?

I think it is an understatement to say that this is a terrific task. Its largeness, at least in my opinion, lies in the Benedictine aspect of pursuing a continual, deeper, and more complete conversion toward Christ-likeness – a code of life that seems to be foreign to the minds and lifestyles of modernites drawn by the attractive influence of amoralistic humanism.

To choose to genuinely and objectively live “as Christ” in this world, one that is diabolically opposed to the ideals inherent in Christ’s life among us, may not necessarily mean a sudden and bloody end to us. There are, thankfully, still civil laws about such as that. We do set ourselves up though and it does, however, involve embracing the degrees of white-martyrdom that are certain to ensue experientially embracing, as totally as humanly possible, the life-example of Christ and that of his disciple St. Benedict.[3]

After all, not all people are people of faith. And, for that matter, fewer and fewer people of faith have any understanding of Benedict’s monastic spirituality.

[1] Guidelines For Oblates of St. Benedict, Constitution, para. 4
[2] RB 2
[3] Luke 23:31

Holy Wars

2009-06-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

It is not my intention or ambition to be an apologist for the Catholic-Christian faith. First of all, I do not consider myself nearly educated enough to take on such a daunting task. In close second place is the conclusion that I no longer thrive on disagreement and argumentation.

Inherent in this first and conclusion is the reality that insists upon the importance of knowing enough about this faith-issue, historically and experientially, to be able to convey its wealth to others whether through spoken or written venues.[1] The same realization, I think, is true regarding Oblation as a lay-member of the Order of St. Benedict.

A person simply must be able to tell their gospel story. The great challenge is to be able to tell it from a middle ground that declines both offensive and defensive positions. This presents a dilemma that, quite honestly, demands generous measures of love and acceptance by all parties concerned.[2] We are, after all, individual pilgrims being led by the One Spirit on a common journey toward an Uncommon Destination.[3]

There is a principle however that has proven itself time and again. It’s simply that the inevitable will always, at some point, inevitably rear its ugly head in one fashion or another, even within the ranks of quite likeminded people. Opinions will differ. Disagreements will arise. Even, perhaps especially, within the ranks of religious expression where controversy has historically resulted in more than a few “Christian” burnings, hangings, and widespread bloodbaths.

It is my observation that even the most liberal forms of ecumenism have polarizing effects that are as handicapping as the forms found in the antithesis of staunch fundamentalism. Polarization always tends to become one of those “I’m right and you’re wrong” things that builds camps surrounded by well constructed and fortified walls of protection.[4]

I suppose it’s one of those unavoidable “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” sort of things that, more likely than not, will be with us until the day Jesus returns. And I suppose it’s one of the things motivating me to study more closely and understand better those earlier times before the schisms that began spiking out the Church into so many opposing camps boasting such an array of controversial theological and traditional opinions.

[1] 1 Peter 3:15-16
[2] RB 53:1-5 may very easily be applied to all relationships.
[3] Ephesians 4:4-6
[4] 1 Corinthians 1:10-13

Personal Re-Formation

2009-06-22T04:28:00.000-07:00

Faith is not decided merely by personal ideas or theories, but by what God has taught through his Church. It’s not enough to lay claim to a scriptural verse or two about faith, or about any other scriptural topic, inspired and valid though the verses be. These claims, as necessary and important as they are, must be accompanied by a willingness to accept the larger collective picture that a verse here and there explicitly or implicitly points toward.

Although we do individually possess the heavenly resources to discern God’s will[1] for our lives, what we perceive to be God’s will is best validated by subjecting it to the wise scrutiny and governance of the Apostolic Authority ordained by Christ[2]. Without this scrutiny and governance, something that should always direct toward spiritual maturity and unity in the faith, it is altogether too easy to go running about on well intentioned tangents that accomplish little, or nothing, of either temporal or eternal value.[3]

Not only is this the best validation, it is honestly the safest approach to testing my own personal cognitions. This approach makes two assumptions forthright. The first assumption is that there is such a thing as divinely ordained Apostolic Authority. The second assumption is that my own cognitions, as right as I think they are, no matter how much I cherish and promote them, may not be worth the effort to think them or the paper to print them on.

I’ve not always thought along these lines. The largest portion of my Christian life was lived after something of a Sola Scriptura fashion, a concept that I’ve come to think of as delusional since it denies the necessity of both the Teaching Authority of the Church and the rightful place and understanding of Sacred Tradition. To think that the Church and her legitimately ordained representatives know better for me than I know for myself is something that has come about over this past decade of my life. It involved a lengthy transitional process replete with its own set of difficult growing pains.

This trusting in Apostolic Authority really is not such a contrary thing. Nor is it a selling out of my self to think this way. I was more so a seller of self in my life before Christ and in my Protestant career – seeking the freedom to satisfy my own base urgings, believing this one and that one, following one cause or another, yielding my self to the sway of this denominational interpretation or that one, putting stock in people whose lives possessed not a thread of the kind of authority that Christ invested in the Apostles and in the succession of his appointed Apostolic leadership.

It is quite clear to me now that I have the advantage of retrospect. I was, all along, desirous of and looking for the resting place that Christ had ordained and placed into being. I longed to discover and reenter the realm of faith-expression that gave the early believers in Christ their character and personality, a faith-base that still motivates the historic Church although it seems to be viciously coming under attack by modern influences from within.

I was desirous of and looking for the “missing something” that I did not understand and could not name. How could I have possibly understood? How could I have possibly named something that I did not know anything about?

I was, after all, reared in a Protestant style of formation that left me without a personal frame of reference that would allow me to understand it. It was a style of formation that called into question and refused to recognize the work of the historic Church, the lives and efforts of the rightfully canonized Saints, and one that elevated reforming protesters to a kind of pseudo-heroic saint-like status despite the undeniable and degenerative ongoing process of continual fragmentation inherent in their ambitious reformational activities.[4]

[1] 1 John 2:27
[2] Matthew 16:18, Ephesians 4:11-16
[3] See RB 49:8-10 regarding presumption and vain glory.
[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 817-818, p. 235

Intelligent Choice

2009-06-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Though there are multitudes that fall into the category labeled “Unbelievers”, and multitudes that profess to be “Believers” but whose lives and actions betray their profession, I find it hard to imagine how anyone could not believe in God, trust in what he has revealed, and have at least a kindling growing desire to want to live in a way that pleases him.[1]

I realize that it’s difficult in our educated times for the human mind to wrap itself intelligently around realities that can’t be ordinarily seen with natural eyes, around things that are spiritual and heavenly rather than physical and earthly, around things that will ever remain mysteries until we cease to exist in our present mortal form.[2] Some things, though they seem however irrational to the natural mind, simply, even in this life, begin making a lot of rational sense when we stop trying to flee them or explain them away to our own personal satisfaction.

There has never been a time in my memory when I didn’t believe in God. Granted, and I admit this to my own shame, there have been times when I’ve lived as though I didn’t. I’ve never seen God as he is in his being but I have seen, and daily see, plenty enough of his handiwork to convince me that God is actively involved in redeeming humankind despite humankind’s inattentiveness to divine activity.

The same memory reference is true regarding his, and our, archenemy and the league of fallen rogues that he employs to carry out his schemes to destroy humankind. His seething jealousy and hatred of all goodness is real and it behooves us humans to realize that this reality[3] is no myth being spun to scare little children into being good.[4] His schemes are all directed to one end – the agony of eternal captivity and the unending pains of death where the soul never ceases to exist in consciousness.[5]

Perhaps it is naïve of me to hold to such simplistic basic ideals. I could as easily deny the grace of God by accepting as truth the ideals of relativism and rationalism that so fill and motivate this modern age. I could as easily consider the accounts of the Old Testament as fables and myths and the poignant words of Christ regarding eternal destinations as mere allegory, fanciful stories, meant to help me get in touch with my better self. I could as easily view The Acts of the Apostles and their Epistles as the fruit of Christ’s overly zealous hearers, people that really didn’t understand Christ’s intentions nearly as well as today’s sated and educated minds are capable of understanding.

There’s a lot that I could do if I chose to. Somehow, though, all the alternative choices, all the alternative lifestyles, all the alternative theological theories, as inviting and promising as they appear on the surface, simply do not resonate with the clearer clarity found in holding onto the unalloyed basic simplicity found in the earlier examples of the historic Judeo-Christian faith and in those that have carefully modeled their lives after them.

This does present some interesting dilemmas and challenges. It’s easy to garner an understanding of the biblical principles that motivated the early seekers of Christ, and not only them but multitudes of believers over the span of the Christian ages. It’s altogether another thing to allow understanding the privileged freedom to mature and become contemporary life-practice.

[1] 2 Peter 3:11
[2] 1 Corinthians 13:12
[3] Ephesians 6:12
[4] Luke 10:18
[5] Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 24:51, 25:30

Vigilance

2009-06-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Obedience to God and his higher intentions, particularly in this age of decadent disobedience where spiritual authority and personal responsibility toward it have become significant issues, is a difficult theme to wrap our minds around. It somehow conjures up images of tyrants enforcing their dictates upon less powerful others who yield themselves only in a half-willed sort of way to the perceived dictatorial sway out of fear of being discovered.

Living in a half-willed subservience, however, is a miserable way of life. It’s a way of life that leaves open vast plains of room to roam about in self-justification. Its fields are always full of the tares that society appreciates and thinks of as ideals. Each generation of seeds develop and grow into larger crops of degradation, despair, and moral bankruptcy.

Gradually, a half-will dilutes itself further to become no-will towards God’s higher intentions for created beings. Light is shunned and Darkness is embraced. The line of demarcation between the two is not so easily seen in a world where neo-paganism dresses in stylish apparel and speaks its own dialect of Christianeze.

As a follower of Christ, and, in these latter years, a fledgling follower of his servant St. Benedict and other monastic role models of Christ, I must be ever vigilant lest I be found succeeding in mixing within myself the toxic brew formed by blending the ideals of the world’s economy with the ideals of God’s economy.[1] Or, as Cassian puts it, - lest I be found “mixing the injustice of fleshly passion into the divine limitless and the source of all purity.”[2]

It really is a narrow pathway to walk and a narrow gate to enter[3] despite all the efforts made to broaden the path and widen the gate to accommodate human nature. Human nature always seeks ways to promote and justify itself within the framework of its moral dilemma and it salves its reprobate conscience by surrounding itself with like minded others in an effort to hide its own shame.[4]

I think this is one of the reasons that St. Benedict places so much emphasis on the theme of obedience in the Rule. And it’s not something that he dreamed up in his lifetime. It’s a prevalent theme found in the monastic rules and ways of life that he patterned Western monasticism after in the 6th century.

We have to live in this present world. There is no escaping it, even for cloistered monks living behind tall walls in the most remote monasteries. Human nature follows us wherever we go. The challenge that is set before us is not so much one of escaping from the world as it is one of evading and avoiding the fallen nature of the world, a nature that is even more difficult to recognize when its tangled roots penetrate and undermine the historical foundations of the Christian faith.[5]

[1] James 4:4 –
[2] John Cassian, The Institutes, p. 194
[3] Matthew 7:13-14
[4] Romans 1:24-32
[5] Psalm 11:3

Soul Affair

2009-06-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

Lauds, according to Benedictine tradition, begins with the Deus Misereatur and the Miserere Mei Deus (Psalms 67 and 51).[1] Their Latin titles may be unfamiliar but it’s hard to escape their familiar basic theme. They contain a plea for God’s mercy because of sin that pollutes the soul, violates God’s higher intentions for created human beings, and places humans in peril of not only eternal separation from God but also a life of emptiness and misery here.

These Psalms, as prelude to the rest of the daily prayers, establish a penitential base that, carried through the day, affects the whole of life. They bring us, if we allow them, to the surest reality of ourselves until we find ourselves, as modern 21st century creatures, standing in the sandals of the ancient Psalmist imploring God’s mercy on our soul on account of our many offences.

It seems rather obvious that the unredeemed modern secular world is unconcerned about this issue of human sinfulness. This is no real surprise. The unredeemed world lives in an on its head false reality anyway. Nor does it really surprise me that the world outside the Church has constructed inroads into the modern Church bringing with it its contempt toward honestly reckoning with the primary issue of the sinful self. Christians, for some reason, want to rationalize away words of warning such as “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”[2] Hell simply doesn’t seem to be a destination to be avoided anymore.

Left unreckoned with, or whitewashed to make it appear acceptable, there is little use in trying to manage the multiplicity of secondary issues that arise by neglect of the primary one. “However high the walls may be that protect a city, and however unyielding its shut gates, it will be destroyed by the betrayal of even that smallest back door. For what difference does it make if the wicked enemy enters the city over its highest ramparts or through its broad portals, or if he does so through narrow and hidden passages?”[3]

Professing the historical faith of the Church does not necessarily mean that one possesses that same historical faith. Personally, I can’t find much contentment in merely talking about the lives of the Saints without also giving myself to attempting to emulate them, if only in faltering attempts, in spits and spurts that reveal to me the depths of my own spiritual impoverishment.

I find myself though, in these fledgling attempts at understanding and emulating the examples of holy models from earlier centuries, growing more and more uncomfortable with any modern day theological notion regarding unconditional grace and mercy. These notions, although quite popular in our modern culture, deface the value of the necessity of cultivating the human soul through the means and works that yielded such holy character in those men and women.

Not that these are ever to be viewed as means and works that earn rights to salvation.[4] Rather, these are divinely designed tools that cultivate the soul in the good works of salvation worthiness represented by faith, hope, and charity – the three essential Theological Virtues and elements of goodness that are made unrecognizable by the action of personal sin.

[1] Monastic Diurnal
[2] Ezekiel 18:4
[3] John Cassian, The Institutes, p. 123
[4] Ephesians 2:1-10

Destiny

2009-06-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve always found change to be a difficult matter to deal with, especially when it has to do with the reorientation of my acquired personal dimensions of theological belief and conditioned lifestyle. I also have a difficult time believing I’m a unique example where this is concerned. I think it is a “one size fits all” kind of hat that comes in a gender neutral style and color.

There is a certain sense of security in remaining comfortable, in clinging to ideals that have enough of the truth in them to make them appear viable and realistic. It’s easy to opt for culturally acceptable ideals - social, relational, and religious ideals - that have enough applied lubricant to reduce heat and hold down friction.

It’s all too easy to choose the options that do little more than lead in tiny small circles, never going far, while always moving. And we think we are getting some place when in all actuality we are going no place.

The road that stretches before the feet of people is a challenge to their heart long before it tests the strength of their legs.[1] It’s easy to faint from fear long before we begin to experience the roughness and rigors of a course that takes us to points and places we’ve never been.

The faith-life, represented particularly in monastic spirituality but practically applicable to the whole of the Christian life, is an adventurous journey. It is one that calls us to fulfill a destiny that stands in stark contrast to the world’s concept of human fulfillment, one that challenges every secular notion of human success. It is one that is not content with building upon the faulty foundations of human whim and fancy.

Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weaknesses, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.[2]

[1] Walter Farrell O.P., My Way of Life, p. 1
[2] ibid

Pursuit of Holiness

2009-05-29T05:19:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to imagine, particularly in this modern age, monastic communities that resembled small cities.

There was, however, a time when men and women in large numbers, in heartfelt pursuit of personal holiness, abandoned the cacophony, luxuries, and comforts of their own contemporary times adjoining themselves to monastic communities that did indeed resemble small cities with populations numbering in the thousands.

There were no promises of fame or fortune, writing contracts or royalty checks. Monastic meals were, according to our tastes, a lot less than meager. Monastic garb was of a coarse fashion of its own. Despite these things, it is rather interesting how many of the well-to-do class turned their backs on their pomp and prosperity and chose the poverty, obedience, and humility of living in monastic community.

There were no lords and ladies here. No people living lifestyles of glamorous self-exaltation and self-absorption. There were only men and women spending their entire lives, as obedient living sacrifices, praying the Psalms with their hearts and lips, working with their hands, disciplining their thoughts, and conquering the desires and ambitions of the flesh.

Their holy desire was simply to live in Christ and to have Christ live in them. They realized their human condition, that their human condition was filled with inherent impediments keeping them from the realization of their holy desire. They chose the harder course, realizing that it would be a difficult course. They were well aware of the “buts”. But they didn’t get stuck on the “buts”.

Those first desert dwellers were something of an oddity. They were quite “out of the norm”. One here in a cave. One there in a cave. The development of their personal holiness became attractive. Others seeking personal holiness began to seek them out. It didn’t take long for this eremitical oddity to become an acceptable norm in religious life. Their pursuit of personal holiness, and their abandonment of the social ills of their times in this pursuit, laid the foundation that monastic culture and spirituality has stood upon for these many centuries and must, if it is to remain viable, stand upon in this century.

The clamoring confusion created by the world in its pursuit of the antithesis of personal holiness has a way of blinding the eyes and deafening the ears. Brazen sinfulness does not want to see or hear the truth, nor admit the truth when its rays of light penetrate the depths of the heart.

However, despite the clamoring confusion, and humankind’s willful acceptance of it, monastic culture and spirituality stands before us as both a historical event and as a present prophetic voice calling the world to return to Christ.

Monastic communities, by their very existence as microcosms of the Church and as the Church’s greatest collective prophetic body, call the Church to return, in a real, tangible, ongoing lifestyle, to the singular purpose found in the pursuit of holiness.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the pursuit of personal holiness, in this modern culture that thrives on self-promotion, sensuality, and carnality, is rejected and laughed at. Even the mention of the Evangelical Counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience) in the faith-realm, despite the historical significance of their faith-orientation, generates tirades of prideful self-justifying excuses.

First Business

2009-05-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

We get busy doing this and that and thinking we are doing God’s will. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes our activity turns out to truly be God’s will. Sometimes, though, it turns out to be God’s will only in some general way that gives us enough room to justify what we are doing so we can call attention to ourselves when what God really wants us to do is to simply commune with him, enjoy him, and let him love us. I don’t think this, in any way whatsoever, short circuits or compromises our calling to “be about the Master’s business.”

But I do, more than ever, believe that learning to rest in him is the first business about being about his business. I also think that this first business can be the hardest part about being about his business because, in most circles, it simply isn’t being taught as a viable means to serving the Lord.

They didn’t teach it in the Bible College that I graduated from. Oh. They did a great job of teaching us the Bible and Theology and the mechanics of pastoring and preaching and soul winning and marrying people and burying the dead. They even taught us how to wave our hands and lead singing according to the appropriate time signatures in the hymn book. They taught us a lot of stuff. All of it good and necessary stuff for the line of Christian service we were headed into.

Then they turned us out and sent us forth both as products of themselves and as representatives of the Lead Shepherd.

But they didn’t offer the first class on resting in the Lord. It took some dead monks and some dead and gone Saints from way earlier centuries to introduce me to this first business of serving God. And, like all other worthwhile spiritual pursuits, it’s a journey that leads to a lifetime of exploratory participation.

I have only just begun this conscious journey of resting in God, but, in this beginning, I sense that this journey of learning to simply rest in God is what he has called me to. I think maybe it is what he has always called me to and it’s taken me this long, a lot of trial and error, a lot of humps and bumps, to finally figure that out. And it’s not that I can’t see God’s signature of approval on all the former years of my trying to serve him. It’s there. No doubt about it. But it’s kind of like something that I heard T.D. Jakes say in one of his preaching messages. “It took all that to get to this.”

Make no mistake about it though. Resting in God is no lazy man’s occupation. I’ve found that it’s a constant fight against my own laziness. It’s a constant fight against the devil. Temptation is more real to me than it has ever been although it doesn’t seem to be nearly as attractive as it used to be.

We have the Holy Scriptures and Tradition to guide our steps. We have prayer to unite us with God. We have the Holy Spirit who gives life to our spirit to lead and guide us in the truth. That’s a pretty powerful package. I think the thing that a lot of people miss is that it is also a very gentle package.

Benedictine spirituality, boiled down to its essence, has a simple three-point focus. Ideally, it’s a daily focus that takes all of life and centers it within a balanced framework of prayer, spiritual reading, and work – a personal spiritual program for life that goes back to the first hermits in the deserts and monks in monasteries in the early centuries after the Church was born.

The program sounds simple. And it is. But it’s far from easy since the whole point of it all is to grow deeper in Christ and become more like him. St. Benedict said it this way. “The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.”[1]

This is what I hunger for. This is what I need. Obedience that is solid enough to deal with the only person that is standing between me and God. And that person is me. To become more like Christ, I have to become less like the “me” that me and the world has made of me. It’s a real journey but it’s not a popular journey because there are so many other self-gratifying paths that appeal to people.

I’ve grown to deeply love and admire Thomas Merton. He’s one of those dead monks.

Merton wrote:

“A man who is not stripped and poor and naked within his own soul will unconsciously tend to do the works he has to do for his own sake rather than for the glory of God. He will be virtuous not because he loves God’s will but because he wants to admire his own virtues. But every moment of the day will bring him some frustration that will make him bitter and impatient and in his impatience he will be discovered.

He has planned to do spectacular things. He cannot conceive himself without a halo. And when the events of his daily life keep reminding him of his own insignificance and mediocrity, he is ashamed, and his pride refuses to swallow a truth at which no sane man should be surprised.

Even the professionally pious, and sometimes the pious most of all, can waste their time in competition with one another, in which nothing is found but misery.”[2]

Conversion of heart. Conversion of life. Total surrender to God’s will. These bring us to and fulfill us in our Sabbath Rest.

I find that these things are easy to talk about. They are, after all, part of our Christian and Benedictine vocabularies. Christians do need to talk about them. Should be talking about them. Some are talking about them. Personally, for all the talking, I find that they are more difficult to achieve than most want to admit. They are, though, the very essence of what it means to be a follower of Christ.

So I keep following. Sometimes stumbling. Sometimes crawling. Sometimes reclaiming something of that “me” that I’m trying to lose. But always committed to following.

[1] Prologue 2-3
[2] New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 58

Benedictine Stability

2009-05-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

We were poor. Not the grinding kind of poverty experienced by Native Americans on reservations or the instability that grips urban slums or third world countries. But it doesn’t take any stretching of the imagination to see that we were some of the poorer in our community. The small farm was very resourceful though. We may have never had a lot of money for luxuries, but we always had enough to eat.

Reflecting on those earlier times, I have to say that those years, centered in animal husbandry and the agricultural seasons, were some of the most stable years of my life. Time was oriented around the seasons of the natural year. There was a lot of hard, hot work in the summer, firewood cutting in the winter, and an occasional scramble before an approaching storm.

It has taken decades, and more lately the help of Benedictine ideals, for me to see and begin to understand the psychological effects of the stability that I experienced in the environment I grew up in - something that was soon traded for its antithesis.

In my teens I traded a stable environment for the instability of the 60’s revolution. Then, in the military in the 70’s, I was never in one place very long. The years that I spent in pastoral ministry were characterized by frequent moves. I’ve spent most of my life on the move, headed down the road, starting over again and again.

My surroundings were always changing. People in my life were always changing. Deep roots and relational strong ties were both impractical and impossible. With places and people always changing, I soon developed a fear of growing attached. Instability, too, has its own set of psychological effects, effects in my own life that I am only now honestly beginning to understand.

Benedict’s spiritual economy, one that chimes with structure and order, offers an effective remedy that holds antithesis at bay. To profess or promise to live by Benedictine standards is far more than simply accepting the rules of a club. “It is, above all, an act of self-dedication to God, made out of love since, as St. Benedict tells us (Chapter 5), it is love that impels the monk to pursue everlasting life.”[1]

I felt the significant importance at the time but I must admit that I really didn’t understand the fullness of it. It’s an understanding that I’m still trying to grasp but my awareness of it is much more fleshed out today than it was when, on the altar before the Tabernacle, I signed my First Promise as an Oblate at St. Bernard’s.

“The monk, after making his promise, draws up a written document and places this on the altar. When we celebrate the Mass, gifts of bread and wine are placed on the altar. These gifts are received by the Church and will be used exclusively for the honor and glory of God, as they are destined to become the Body and Blood of Christ. Like the bread and the wine, the monk’s document is placed on the altar. It becomes a symbol of the monk’s self-giving to the Lord. Monks, through making their profession, are totally dedicated to the honor and glory of God, and to his service.”[2]

[1] Benedictine Handbook, p. 124
[2] ibid

Benedictine Environment

2009-05-11T05:23:00.000-07:00

Oblation and living the life of an Oblate of St. Benedict hinges on purposeful devotion and personal commitment to the Gospel ideals of Benedictine spirituality. Monastic spirituality may not affect the weather but it does generate a climate that creates personal environmental changes.

It’s not something that I can take for granted and go about in some willy-nilly fashion. Oblate life is, after all, a distinct vocation or calling to a lifestyle that is set apart from the normalcy of the world while still living in the world. It can easily very well be a lifestyle that is set apart from the normalcy of most modern day Christians while remaining in ranks with them[1].

“Just as the monk takes the vows of obedience, stability, and conversion of life at the time of Profession, so does the Oblate implicitly promise at the time of Oblation to live by these values through the commitment to “dedicate myself to the service of God and neighbor according to the Rule of St. Benedict. These promises of Oblation, while not binding under pain of sin, should be taken seriously as part of a carefully discerned lifelong commitment.”[2]

Investiture in the Benedictine community has a conditional nature about it, one that is surrounded by the perimeters that are both recommended for and expected of Oblates. There is a certain gentle performance factor involved in Oblate life. It is one that must not be confused with the trap of mere fundamental legalism that compromises individual human personality and spiritual growth.

The ethical rubrics and liturgical codes prescribed by the Church and our Order, things we might as easily refer to as sound advice from a mother and father who loves us[3], are important aspects that must be taken into consideration where a balanced Oblate life is concerned. I find that it’s altogether too easy to begin listing too far in one direction or another without the assistance of their leverage. They keep me from wandering far off on tangents that do little or no good at all toward furthering a true lay apostolate.

[1] Guidelines For Oblates Of St. Benedict, Constitution, para. 4
[2] Formation Booklet, St. Vincent Archabbey, IV., C.
[3] RB, Prologue 1

Virgo Mater Domina

2009-05-09T05:07:00.000-07:00

She was endowed with special graces and responded to her gifting by saying yes to God’s will for her life. Her virgin womb became the tabernacle where Christ became Incarnate. Mary became the mother of God in the flesh. Then, in no way exalting herself over him, she humbly followed him as one of his faithful disciples. We know her today as the Coronated Queen of Heaven.

I am, in my own Christian journey, discovering the tremendous value in devotionally honoring our Mother. I must admit though that this devotion comes after decades of personally rejecting and neglecting Mary, some of the trickle-down economics of my own Protestant formation and tutelage.

My first significant encounter with Mary, one that spurred me on toward deeper inquiry, happened at a garage sale in Northern New Jersey. I found an old book entitled Mary in the Documents of the Church, published in 1952. I think it cost me a quarter. Its author, Paul F. Palmer, S.J., used few of his own words in the book. He chose rather to use the words of a host of historically significant and reliable sources, some that take us back to the beginning of the Second Century.

I found it hard to argue with the disciples of the Apostles and the disciples of the Apostle’s disciples. It is, in fact, foolish to argue with people that knew the Apostles personally or with those souls entrusted with the task of carrying on the Gospel Mission immediately after them. Who, after all, would know the truth better?

Devotion to Mary has always been present in the Church in one way or another. Despite arguments against her grace filled role in the Salvivic Event, both historic and ongoing, Mary continues to lead multitudes deeper into the heart of Christ, deeper into God’s plan of salvation, deeper into the meaning of life.

“Placed by the grace of God, as God’s Mother, next to her son, and exalted above all angels and men, Mary intervened in the mysteries of Christ and is justly honored under the title of Mother of God, under whose protection the faithful took refuge in all their dangers and necessities. Hence after the Synod of Ephesus (431) the cult of the people of God toward Mary wonderfully increased in veneration and love, in invocation and imitation, according to her own prophetic words: all generations shall call me blessed, because He that is mighty hath done great things for me.”[1]

According to the Statutes And Declarations of the Oblates of St. Benedict, Oblates are to “cultivate a tender devotion to the Immaculate Mother of God and love to pray the Rosary.”[2]

The Guidelines For Oblates Of St. Benedict (1973), written with ecumenical overtones after Vatican II, although not explicitly restating this statute verbatim, do speak to the necessity of maintaining the distinct historical flavoring of our Canonical status. “They (Oblates of St. Benedict) harmonize their private and public prayers and devotions with the liturgical seasons and feasts of the year, as Vatican II recommends.”[3]

Mary is firmly situated in the liturgical seasons and feasts of the year. The month of May is dedicated to honoring the Virgin Queen Mother, the Saint of all Saints. Where liturgical seasons and feasts are concerned, Mary is honored daily by the Church in the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The themes for each day of morning and evening prayers call attention to particular aspects of her Motherly life.

[1] Lumen Gentium, Ch. VIII, Sec. IV, 66.
[2] Manual For Oblates, © 1955
[3] Guidelines For Oblates of St. Benedict, Sec. D, para. 4

Thanks Be To God

2009-05-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

It was a small crowd. At least in comparison to what it is at times. Perhaps 200 souls gathered for Sunday evening Mass.

I try to refrain, as much as possible, from doing a lot of looking around. Focus. On worship. On the liturgy. Genuinely enter in. Honestly, with the best of my attention and intention, assist (in spirit) in the offering and celebration taking place. Open myself to the reality of the miracle and mystery of Christ’s literal living presence.

Something that I’ve come to after a long life of denial. Adamant denial. Preaching against it denial as a Pentecostal Protestant preacher.

I can’t help but to think of the condition that I found myself in on the prairie, now nearly a decade ago, as something akin to a “Road to Damascus” experience. I was knocked off my high horse. Blinded and rolling in the dust. Brought, in my own foolish zealousness, to the point where I was able, in my condition of dire need, to hear and finally see.

It’s hard not to notice some things though. It’s hard not to form opinions through observation when noticing: revealing clothing worn by some of the communicants, facial expressions devoid of joy, attitudes that seem to indicate mere obligation. And in a mix that transcends age and gender.

These observations don’t apply to all. There are other people-observations that are genuinely heart-warming, ones that grip my heart, ones that generate deep emotions that will, if allowed, result in tears on my face. Perhaps my tears should be redirected toward those whose observation makes me really wonder where their heart is during the Eucharistic Event.

It doesn’t happen all the time. It does happen often enough that I’m reluctant to speak of it. Those moments of ecstasy where crowds and surroundings completely disappear and I am beautifully lost, absorbed by the warmth of God’s love.

Just me, consumed and alone, basking in the radiation of God’s love.

I was still kneeling and unaware when the priest stood for the Benediction until I felt my wife’s hand on my back.

“Bow your heads and receive God’s blessings.”

Prayers over the people and responses of “amen.”

“The Mass has ended. Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

How could I not, in genuine thanksgiving, respond by saying … “Thanks be to God?”

Agendas

2009-05-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Expectations become driving forces in our lives. We are taught to expect certain results from actions and pursuits. The more the results meet perceived needs and satisfy self-perception, the more the inclination toward the pursuit. The end result of the pursuit really depends upon the perception of needs and self.

There was definitely a Larger Hand working behind the scenes of my own stumbling and groping about for simplicity and sustainability where spirituality is concerned. I prefer to think that I stumbled upon St. Benedict Providentially, that I was being led, unbeknown to me, toward a guide that would lead me on in my pursuit.

My own love affair with monastic spirituality began several years before I discovered and began studying Benedict and the Rule. This love affair began during a season of circumstances, circumstances that necessitated living in seclusion in the hills of Northern New Jersey for two years. It was a season of recovery, a season of discovery.

It was, in numerous ways, some quite obvious and others still budding, a season of new beginnings after years of being pummeled and bludgeoned. Over the decades I had been emotionally and spiritually beaten to a raw pulp. Some of it by my own stupidity. The most debilitating of it though came at the hands of well-intentioned others carrying out their own hidden agendas, agendas perceived by their own selves as Christian.

There really wasn’t much left of me. Even physically. I was practically penniless and clerking a midnight shift in a convenience store. Except for my old camper, parked on the back of a friend’s yard, I would have been homeless on the prairie. I was down to little but skin and bones.

Desperate days. Firmly believing in the Gospel of Christ but no longer knowing just what to believe about it or how to go about living it. Firmly desiring to pray but no longer knowing how to pray.

Thinking back, I have to think that Providence was also involved. Not to reduce me to desperation, confusion, and nothingness. But to deliver me from it.

A lot has changed since then. Exteriorly. Interiorly. Geographically and in the realm of the heart.

I’m still recovering and discovering these years later. In terms of Benedictine monastic spirituality, recovery and discovery, conversatio morum, are never ending. Conversatio morum, continual conversion, becomes our life-agenda and our expectations tend in its direction.

Stewed down to its simplest intent, I think these are the two life-processes that the whole of the Rule focuses on – recovering our true self out of the mess of falsehood that the world heaps upon us and discovering how to live in the dimensions created by realizing our true self in Christ.

Community

2009-04-30T05:12:00.000-07:00

It’s an awful long way to the monastery from where I live. A solid half day’s drive each way. It’s a distance that prohibits frequent visits for me.

There is a small group of Oblates that meet together once a month about an hour from here. The group is part of the fruit of the faithful long-term labors of a Benedictine priest that has recently been transferred to another mission church at the other end of the state.

The basic format for the monthly meeting is saying Vespers before gathering in the church hall for some snacks. For a long time I was quite faithful to attend, I’ve not been to one of the Sunday afternoon meetings in several months. Simply because it’s hard to get there on a Sunday afternoon when there are so many things close to home that call for personal attention.

St. Lawrence is a beautiful and thriving Catholic church. Well over 1200 families. Daily weekday morning and evening Masses. Three Masses on Sunday. A multitude of societies, programs, and activities. There is also a group of Secular Franciscans, one Secular Carmelite, one Sister of St. Joseph, and one Oblate of St. Benedict - me.

There are now around 8,000 Benedictine monks living in monasteries and 25,000 Oblates living around the world. That may sound like impressive numbers. But it really isn’t. I’ve not done the math but the reality of it would reveal just how small and insignificant our percentage relationship is with the population of the world.

As far as that goes, where percentages are concerned, we represent a very small percentage of the Church.

In my own church community I’m only 1 person in about 4,000 people. I’ve done that math. I am .00025 percent of my home church population. Not much of a presence, an important presence nonetheless, though not one that’s taken seriously by the greater popular majority. Outwardly, there’s nothing that really distinguishes me from the rest of the crowd.

In the context formed by these realities, becoming an Oblate of St. Benedict, stepping onto and walking along this primitive pathway, although personally positive in its every aspect, is also a sure step toward isolation and obscurity.

Isolation and obscurity are not my enemies. Far from it. They happen to be right and left shoes that fit my feet well. They don’t pinch. And they don’t rub blisters. They wear with quite a nice fit, considering my personal disposition at this stage in my life.

However, the isolation and obscurity in my own world of oblation do very little when it comes to forming and maintaining genuine, successful community – something that depends upon ongoing, collective, and responsible accountability in the cenobitical traditions set forth by our Sainted Founder. Benedict well understood the necessity of one’s maturity in community before thinking of or daring to embark on an adventure with eremitical characteristics.

It’s kind of obvious though that many of us on the Oblate pathway are left to fend for our selves. It’s a long way to the monastery for many of us. Oblate Chapters are few and far between. Oblates are, for that matter, few and far between in the Church world. Many of us, for all practical purposes, by-pass cenobitical nurturing and go straight to plowing solo in a terribly hard and stony field.

It makes me wonder how many Oblates start this journey with a solemn promise only to throw up their hands and give up because of the lack of dynamics that come only in close community.

Stability

2009-04-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

We are, without a doubt, living in a time marked by exponential changes. It’s all around us, changes that have an effect on all of us in one way or another, a lot of blowing and shifting sand in the air.

In my own mind I reckon today’s moral and economic climate as something akin to the dust bowl era - the Dirty Thirties when so many lives were changed, many lost, because of physical climatological changes, Black Tuesday, and the Great Depression that had global ramifications. Will we see such dire degrees of hardship? Who knows.

These modern moral and economic changes may be new to our sated and spoiled times. Even a little trying and scary. I have to remind myself that there is really nothing new about them. They’ve happened before, numerous times over the course of history. Regionally, nationally, and globally. Who’s to say they can’t or will not happen again?

Benedict entered onto the stage of life at such a time in history. The world that he lived in was a big mess of an upheaval - a moral, economic, and political mess. His response to the climate that surrounded him? Leave it. As much as it was possible to leave it. Trade it for a balanced life of prayer, study, and manual labor.

That was 1500 years ago and multiplied tens of thousands are safe at home in heaven after following the pathway marked out by St. Benedict. In these shifting and changing times I can’t help but to feel safe following his fatherly advice, even if it does go against the grain of contemporary thought.

In Benedict’s mind prayer, study, and manual labor are the basic Benedictine ingredients for stability. They sow and cultivate the interior stability of the heart that makes for the possibility of a congenial stability within the context formed by a community of individuals.

The latter stability really isn’t possible without the cultivation of the former personal stability of the heart.

Benedict’s Rule prescribes:

Set times for prayer.
Set times for study.
Set times for work.
Set times for sleep.
Set times for eating.
Set times for leisure.

Joint participation by all community members at the prescribed times. Every day. Without fail. No excuses.

Routine. Balanced routine. Routine that contains only slight seasonal variations. Routine that, like good liturgy, accomplishes more than the mere orchestration of time. Routine that honestly partners with God’s deepest intentions and most intimate desires.

It’s easy, in these modern times, to balk at or even totally dismiss such an ideal life-program as unrealistic. Perhaps an exact replication of it this side of the cloister is unrealistic for most. It is unrealistic for me. At least at this point in my life. It does, however, keep presenting itself as a target to be shot at. Even here in the layman’s world.

But, in their simplicity, the basic principles found in the rings of that target, implemented and applied, are far from unrealistic. Difficult to attain? Yes. Unrealistic and unattainable? No.

Basic Benedictine principles fit themselves quite fluidly and substantively into my workaday life tethering me to the Gospel Anchor. They do, practiced over and over, over time have a definite life-molding effect, showing up more and more not only in the way I think but also in the way I respond to life’s circumstances.

No. I don’t consider myself a master at the Benedictine craft. Far from it. My Oblate Novitiate may be several years behind me now. But I’m still very much a novice in need of the tutelage of the masters. It’s always easier to talk a straight line than it is to walk one.

Wandering The Straight Line

2009-04-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to walk a straight line, to be totally true to God, to my most genuine self, to others. There are so many influences that cut in and run interference against such total self-surrender. Yet, it is to the depths of the pathway of total self-surrender that Christ, setting forth the example, calls humanity.

The liar of all liars though has so filled the world with leasing. He has constructed so many self-satisfying alternative pathways, so many deceptions, so many illusions. Truth can be difficult to see when staggering on paths leading in aimless circles.

When the light of truth does break through the clouds of confusion to present itself, it’s easy to choose some lesser and more inviting counterpart, one less challenging, one that makes fewer demands. We call it compromise. It’s something that none have any immunity to.

Compromise, in the context of spirituality, has nothing to do with choosing between the lesser of two evils. It has everything to do with choosing that which is truest over that which is merely a counterpart, something possessing enough of the truth to look real but, in reality, is only a mere reflection of the truth.

I’ll admit that lesser counterparts can be stepping stones that God uses to lead us, to bring us to something that is more genuine and complete. Equally, counterparts can turn out to be heavy lead weights of our own choosing, toxins in our minds and souls that diminish our sight, grinding tools that dull and blunt our capacities of receptivity.

I think one of the most refreshing things about being a practitioner of Benedictine spirituality is that it affords me the opportunity to avoid so many counterparts that, over the course of my life of struggling to be genuine, kept me from my most earnest desire. Not that I profess advanced degrees of accomplishment. However, the Rule of St. Benedict, and living in the spirit of the Rule, fashion an indelible straight line that I can see and follow.

It’s always there. It never changes or alters its course to satisfy some contemporary whim or fancy of my own. It’s not opaque. It keeps me from swinging wildly at most of the curve balls thrown at me, checks my tangents and tantrums before they get out of control to lead me where I don’t want to go.

It’s apparent to me when I wander off course. And I do wander a bit. I do happen to be a meanderer, something that I accept and am comfortable with. Sometimes I need to wander a little. Wandering a little can really be a healthy thing provided it doesn’t become a bear trap of a destination.

It’s always a simple thing though to retrace my steps and return to walking closer to the straight line that cuts across all the wandering pathways.

Forasmuch

2009-04-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

I write.

That’s not all that I do.

Actually, where measurements of time are concerned, I write very little in my course of juggling time. There are a number of other things that occupy time in the days and weeks of my life. More often than not, it’s more than a little difficult to strike a balance where the best, needful, necessary, and superfluous are concerned.

Why do I write? More importantly, why do I write and have the audacity to post what I write on a blog?

I certainly don’t think I have anything cute, unique, interesting, or popular to write. Personally, I think I’m really redundant and out of step with the times we live in.

I have little interest in arguments and really don’t have any axes to grind. I’ve done a lot of ax grinding over the years and I’ve found that grinding axes is a good way to make sparks but usually does nothing more than that.

It’s not that I’m practicing some art form for the sake of garnering popularity, fame, or fortune. I’d rather enjoy my obscure life and at this point, for the life of me, I don’t know why anyone would invest their time reading what I write. Let alone spend money to buy what I write.

Forasmuch.

What I write has something to do with the word that St. Luke begins his Gospel with. His forasmuch was more a recounting of the life of others, of forth-telling an account of the lives of Christ and those immediately impacted by the Shepherd-Lamb.

Me? My forasmuch is more of a means of working it all out in this modern setting without losing or diminishing its historicity, without watering it down to make it contemporarily relevant and palatable to my 21st Century tastes. It’s a meager attempt at understanding and making application of it all without getting lost in a labyrinth where some proverbial Minotaur waits to gore and stomp me to death.

Yeah. The Minotaur of mythology is one ugly dude. Hollywood has created some horrific images as well. The images of mythology and modern science fiction have a way of making it easy for us to downplay the reality that we are engaged in a spiritual war, fighting against a very real fallen entity. The Minotaur, however, that we fight against is no myth.

And the real one doesn't present himself as mean and ugly.

I can think what I want, write what I want, in private. But it’s an extremely dangerous thing to lead anyone astray by thoughts and words. There are others, maybe not a lot of others, trying to figure it out, working things out in their own forasmuch, fighting a daily battle against a beastly enemy.

I see responsibility and accountability as integral aspects of this meager forasmuch of mine, parts that cannot be left out, especially when I dare to step into a public venue where innocent souls are apt to stumble across thoughts and words expressed by me.

Epiphanies

2009-04-16T05:22:00.000-07:00

Faith defies conditioned mentality. It challenges educated intellect. Faith issues an invitation to believe. Belief sends forth the challenge to change pre-conditioned thought patterns and lifestyles.

Change is a hard thing.

I fear it. I avoid it. Even small changes because I know that small changes set motion into action, motion that possesses a building potential, motion that will, if allowed to build, move me out of my chosen comfort zones and into zones that are much more radical than I would choose on my own.

Miracles and mysteries.

Realities difficult to believe.

Realities difficult to grasp with the mind alone.

Myriads of miracles and mysteries on the pages of Holy Scripture and in a lived life of wonderment and wandering.

Evidences of poured out graces that my heart desires to believe while my mind wrestles with arising questions like ...

Why does the Immaculate Conception and Virginal Preservation of Mary present problems in the minds of people?

Or the Apparitions of Mary?

Or the thought that Christ inhabits, in actuality and not merely symbolically, the hosts of bread and wine that can be consecrated on the Altar only by the consecrating hands of those given the authority to do so through Apostolic Succession?

No. Please don’t think that I’m trying to be an argumentative apologetic. I’m not. I’m discoursing with myself on matters that concern me. Telling my own story. Honestly. Sincerely. Unalloyed. No pretenses. These are questions that I ask myself in my own wandering wonderment.

I’ll admit that Marian doctrines and the doctrine of Apostolic Succession are, for Protestants, hard pills to swallow. I know this first hand, in the first person. I, too, was a Protestant Fundamentalist that argued hard and long against anything that remotely resembled Popery and ancient Catholic belief. I, too, was a victim of the degenerative breakup that fractured the Church into so many small divisive factions.

Then one day, during an extremely difficult season in my life, a time when I was finally bruised enough and open enough and searching for spiritual hope and meaning in the midst of my own mess of Protestant confusion, I met Christ’s mother. Not in the literal sense. I’m not so fortunate.

The meeting was more in the form of an epiphany - something undeniably real, something that I could no longer deny. Like meeting Christ by faith in the power of the Spirit and knowing his undeniable reality.

And in meeting Mary I realized, as the ancients professed, that she is truly Theotokos. The Mother of Christ. The Mother of God. The Mother of the Church. My own Mother whom I had never known because, without first knowing her, without first wanting to know her, I had written her off and rejected her.

It’s hard to describe the mix of elation and shame that I felt in the first moments of that epiphany, something closely akin to that first born-again experience where I met Christ as Savior.

She loved me. Despite myself. She loves me still. As only a mother, as only the Mother, can love.

Begin Again

2009-04-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

It’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to not believe.

Oh. There have been times in my earlier life when I lived as though I didn’t. Thinking back, those were the hardest and saddest times in my life. Particularly in my late teens through my mid twenties. The allurements of an existence that leads only to life in the pig pen.

There have been, too, shorter seasons over the course of this life of mine where the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity have been seriously neglected. Devotional discipline has slipped more than a bit. Flat. Bottomed out. Holes in my bucket.

Transparency is a dangerous thing. It is, however, the most honest thing, the only thing that makes for true health. To live an opaque life is to live a life of lies. Always hiding. Always covering up. Always disguising. Always putting forth some kind of false front. But who is willing to risk the inevitable rejection that comes with living transparently?

I admit that most folks that know me really don’t know me. They see only what they can see, only what they are allowed to see. I try to live a transparent life but most of the time, with most of the people that I associate with, the business of being social gets in the way of real, honest transparency. If they did really know me, I wonder if their appraisal of me would be the same.

Yeah. I’ve come an awful long way to get to where I am in my faith life, in my awareness of my self, in my awareness of God. It’s been quite a journey. One that involves a great deal of self-crucifixion, one that I’ve realized is a journey of always beginning. Any point of arrival is never the destination. It is only another calling, another invitation to self-crucifixion.

I must admit that I’ve never been able to completely escape the old self. The life that I lived as a young man embedded thoughts and haunts deep within my mind that simply refuse to leave me. I could easily consider myself the worst example of a believer.

Maybe I am.

Maybe we all are.

But I choose, instead, to think of myself as one of the most prime candidates for grace, a soul that recognizes his own need for the deep working action of continual conversion in his life. It is my own need that compels me to keep returning to the place where I am served the True Life that comes to me in the form of bread and wine.

Not that I merit such a privilege.

Not that any effort of mine earns me a right to such a Divine Gift.

But that He calls me.

He calls me every time to lay down all that is my self and start anew, begin again, be born again, in Him.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

I believe.

Despite my foolish self.

Intensely. Intimately.

I am moved deeply within the fabric of my being because I believe.

I’m elated at the thought of being accepted by God.

I’m humbled at the cost paid to ransom me from my personal imprisonment and eternal death sentence.

Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?
And why do the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth stand up.
And the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed.[1]

Some despised him.

Some laughed at him.

Some gloated over their supposed victory.

It’s interesting, in a sick sort of way, how some things haven’t changed. Even after two millennia.

He’s still despised.

He’s still laughed at.

Untold millions live their lives gloating over their sins and sinful choices.

Crucified.

The Light that came and walked among men was physically extinguished and darkness, literal darkness, replaced the light of the noonday sun as a sign of the grief felt in the heavenly realm.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.[2]

It is more than a little distressing to look at the condition of the world that we live in, at all the spiritual darkness that seems to prevail in its efforts to hide the Light of Life. But I’m really not surprised at any of it these centuries away from those years when Christ walked among us and taught us how to live.

He that dwelleth in heaven will laugh them to scorn.
The Lord will have them in derision.
Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath,
And vex them in his sore displeasure.[3]

Presumptuous?

Maybe.

But.

If the Scriptures were correct in foretelling the Messianic arrival in the first place, then it makes sense to accept the truth that things as we know them will have a point of culmination where Divine Retribution will be justly administered to its due recipients.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

[1] Ps. 2:1-2
[2] Jn. 1:4-5
[3] Ps. 2:4-5

Old Dinosaur

2009-04-07T04:29:00.000-07:00

I really can’t help myself. I just happen to be one of those people that seem to be moving backwards in a number of ways. No. I’m not ready to give up my micro-wave oven or hot showers and air-conditioning or return solely to bi-pedal locomotion. I’m simply not quite that radical.

I am, however, tired of being duped. Somewhere along the way I grew weary of being simply carried along, tossed about by all the contrariness created by howling winds and crashing waves. I’ve ceased, for the most part, putting my trust in promises of security made by morally compromised contemporary modernity.

Yeah. I’ll take a chance on being labeled a cynical dinosaur. Even cynical old dinosaurs have a constitutional right to their opinion, popular though it may not be. I’m not really cynical. I prefer to think of myself as analytically critical. That has a nicer ring to it.

As an analytical critic, something that I do not charge a dime for, I happen to be of the opinion that society has no new problems. We have only old problems exacerbated by the inordinate desires and affections of these modern times, problems that affect us personally, nationally, and globally - age old problems hidden inside clouds of deceptive hype that we’re encouraged to accept and go along with as the proper moral standards for the 21st Century.

Yeah. I can see myself in the reflective mirror.

Maybe I do resemble a large lizard. But this old dinosaur needs more to graze on than the low growing emptiness created by progressive modernism.

I need the depth and ballast of objective truth that takes into consideration the long, drawn out, trial and error processes that are indelibly laid down in history, in both secular and Church history, history that reveals a lot more than equity, justice, and fairness on the part of its purveyors.

The simple truth sets people free. So said Christ.

The truth, the real truth, will also make you angry enough to refuse to continue playing the political game, personally participating in the plans of men, supporting divisive systems that serve only to advance selfish goals and ambitions that are fueled to a blazing flame by human pride and greed.

It’s amazing how insidious and deceptive these two cardinal sins are, how they so easily infiltrate even our most earnest and holiest endeavors.

Pardon me. No. I’m not preaching at you. I’m talking to my own fool self.

It was Pilate that met Christ’s testimony with the age old question that is still bantered from the lips of self-excusing mankind. “What is truth?”

Yeah.

This does open that old proverbial can of worms.

Bahia del Espiritu Santo

2009-03-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

It must have been a beautiful sight, something that none will ever see, as it was, when the first Spanish explorers entered Mobile Bay. Of all the sights beheld by early explorers, this one must have been a real jewel. They called it the Bay of the Holy Spirit. The name appears on the earliest maps of the New World.

Like all things touched by the hands of civilized man, the bay has gone the way of civilization. Today it is only a pale reflection of what it was before Hernando de Soto sailed into the bay in 1540 dealing destruction and death to the native populations that resided here.

I view the bay through different eyes than those who only visit here, or who have moved here to retire, or those who really don’t care one way or another. I must admit that I’ve not always seen this way. My vision is changing. The more I read. The more I know. The more I look and observe. Conversatio Morum.

I’ve been around it long enough to have fifty-year memories. A half century, in the greater scheme of time, really isn’t much more than a breath. Some places, like mountains, change little in that breath of time. Other places, like the bay, change a lot. A lot for the worse in the case of this bay.

When I was a kid, Bahia del Espiritu Santo was a prime and productive fishery. On this side of the bay, places like Fly Creek, Weeks Bay, and Bon Secour were home to hundreds of small fishing boats. Small shrimp boats. Small oyster boats. Small mullet boats. Crabbers. A lot, if not most, of them hand built from cypress planks by their careful owners. The same is true for the other side of the bay.

The bay waters were beautiful and clear back then. Even as late as when I was a teenager I could wade belly button deep in the bay and still count the toes on my feet. Not so these days. The water is always cloudy. Murky.

Some people blame the demise of the fishery on all those small boats, on the people that eeked out a slight living in the heat and cold of Mobile Bay summers and winters.

Me? I see the demise of the bay coinciding with all the progress upstream and surrounding it. Paper mills and chemical plants. Clear cutting and development. Modern agricultural practices and sewage spills. Everything in Alabama flows to Mobile Bay via creeks that feed the rivers that empty into the bay. Not to mention the multiplied numbers of cargo ships entering and leaving the Port of Mobile daily. Daily churning the muddy channel like huge egg beaters.

It’s hard to see these things. I’m not surprised by them though. Pay day. It’s inevitable. Some day. Sometimes we pay for our sins in an instant. Sometimes it’s a cumulative thing played out over time.

Scratching A Thirty Three Year Itch

2009-03-24T04:54:00.000-07:00

It was back in ’76 that I found an old, dusty copy of Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around The World and read it. In its wake I also read Robin Graham’s account of sailing the Dove around the world solo. Small boats. Big water.

Slocum was an old, weathered sailor retired from a lifetime of captaining sailing ships. His Spray was a 36’ sloop. Graham was a 16 year old kid at the outset of his journey. The Dove was a 24’ sloop. Both had their reasons for doing what they were doing. Reasons plenty legitimate to them though there were plenty of people that thought both of them were a little touched in the head with something bordering on lunacy.

Captain Slocum’s journey took three years. Graham’s was a five year trek that involved a generous amount of island hopping. Both encountered treacherous seas and conditions that most people would consider harrowing. Both experienced life and enjoyed adventures in ways that far exceeds the biggest dreams of most dreamers.

Slocum returned to his point of departure only to launch out again after a short time of walking on land. He never arrived at his destination in South America. Some think he may have encountered a hurricane and gone down in the deep.

Me? I don’t know. Nobody does. I do consider though that old Joshua may have simply turned the wheel and sailed Spray to one of those out of the way places that he knew of where he lived out his days in either absolute solitude or in the company of friendly natives that vowed to never disclose his whereabouts.

Graham returned to his point of departure, put the sea behind him, attempted college on a generous scholarship and, in a sense, turned the wheel and moved to a remote mountain location in Montana. He’s still there.

Both Slocum and Graham realized something of the futility that most people immerse themselves in. Graham so much as says so. Both refused to be drowned in the dark, murky waters of futility. They dared to chart their own courses in life in ways that cut across the lines drawn by safe and comfortable avenues.

There are few books, one is the Bible, that I ever read more than once. Slocum’s and Graham’s I’ve read three times and will read again. Maybe this year.

Thirty three years. 1976 – 2009.

It’s really hard to find the words to describe what it feels like to have a thirty three year itch scratched. It’s an itch that has never left me. Oh. I learned to ignore it. Deny it. Pretend it wasn’t there.

But it has always come back. Every time I’ve stood beside a body of water large enough to launch even a sailing dinghy on. Or motored on the water. No little surface rash. Something bone deep. At times it’s come on with a vengeance. And there has been no possible way to scratch it.

Until.

I was expecting a nice little excursion as a guest onboard a 35’ sloop complete with a pot luck lunch on the water. Little did I know that only a few minutes after the sails were filled with wind that I’d be standing the helm.

North winds 10 to 20.

Making hull speed of 8 knots.

Across the Bay and back again.

Close to 4 hours at the wheel.

I knew others were onboard and I did carry on a little conversation as we sailed. For the most part, though, I was alone with a dream.

At last.

Listening to sails filled with wind.

Boat heeling quite sharply at times when the gusts would come.

Small waves pushing against the hull.

Feeling the effects of the wind and waves on the boat and holding course.

Passing to the stern of a cargo ship in the channel.

Steering to avoid logs and debris on the west side of the Bay.

I missed lunch on the trip. I didn’t mind. There’s plenty of time in life for eating. But this? I needed both hands on the wheel.

Some itches are incurable. Scratching only drives them deeper into the bones.

Mile Markers

2009-03-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

They tell us some things if we pay attention to them. They tell us where we are so we have some geographical perspective as to our whereabouts. They tell us how far we’ve traveled. They remind us of how far we have yet to go to reach a particular distant destination.

Thoughts on the occasion of turning 55 on this first day of spring:

Oh yeah. Thank you. I’m doing quite nicely for a ’54 model.

It’s kind of funny how we expect things to be a certain way at a certain point in life. As though we really have some control over the way life is supposed to pan out. I’ve tried it. Several times. Time and again. Oh the best laid plans of mice and men! Foxes. Little foxes. Running everywhere. Not to mention the occasional wolf dressed in sheepskin. Or my own plain stupidity.

Time and again I thought I had it figured out. Time and again I launched myself in one direction or another. Relationships ended disastrously. Ministerial careers paths swallowed, digested, discharged, and left me feeling like ... . Secular jobs? More than a few in diverse categories.

Don’t misunderstand. There is no “crying in my beer” going on here. No poor, poor pitiful me syndrome. I’m one of the most fortunate souls plodding the sod. Academically educated. Scarred by the hard ugliness of life. A pioneer. A survivor. Multi-crafted. Multi-skilled. Happily mowing grass and doing lawn care in a very God-real world. Content. Honestly content.

Life?

Something fluid and flowing and meant to be lived with a sense of casual anticipation.

Questions?

Plenty of questions begging for answers. More questions than answers, enough to generate generous levels of insanity.

Dilemma?

Not many simple yes or no answers.

Two grand conclusions at the 55 marker:

I’m not as smart as I thought I was. I suppose there are some people that are glad I finally figured that out. Oh. I’m still plenty smart. I prefer to think of it as refined intelligence. But admitting my own shortfall in the knowledge department, avoiding showing my ignorance by trying to act real smart, has really begun to spare me some of the difficulties that I’ve always had a way of incurring for myself when I lived in the “fixing people” realm.

In some ways I’m smarter than I think I am. Maybe smarts have nothing to do with it. Maybe I’ve fallen onto a streak of luck after all these years. No. Luck has nothing to do with the life I’m living. I prefer to think that I’ve found a hidden bag of pearls. Paid the price for the field. Learned to honestly count the cost involved in building towers. Some towers take a lot of coin. A lot more coin than I have in my pocket.

Beyond Feelings

2009-03-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

There are days, plenty of them, when the least thing I feel is … how do you say … spiritual?

Most days I feel pretty common. No shiny gold nugget here. More like another dull green copper cent in a barrel full of corroded pennies. The things I do and how I feel in my workaday world are not so far removed from that of others scratching for a few specks of grain in today’s economy.

Thank God my subjective feelings and perceptions honestly do nothing to determine, define, and decree Reality. God doesn’t depend on my feelings and he’s honestly never asked me my opinion about his business. He simply asks that I walk with him in the midst of life as it is. Feelings are not an accurate indication of spirituality.

“I Am That I Am,” says God.

It rained today.

It actually started raining night before last.

But today it rained more. Mostly all day. Unbroken clouds. Low clouds. Water filled clouds. It’s still raining and supposed to rain more tonight. 5.5 inches in the gauge since it started. We needed a good rain. It’s been dry for several weeks now.

I enjoyed the rain-out from my regular work routine today, especially considering the work schedule that I’ve kept for the past couple of weeks. The rain-out gave me “time” for other important things that made a fruitful day.

Going to an early dentist appointment.

Spending some time with my aging parents where I ate lunch with them, and with my sister, albeit with a sore mouth.

Taking the truck to the mechanic down the road to find and repair a brake fluid leak.

Important stuff that’s easy to neglect, re-schedule, or put on the back burner until it’s more convenient, turns into an ache, spends its life, or totally breaks down and has to be towed.

Good Company

2009-03-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

How does a person, or a people, undo and make right generations of injustice?

What does it take for a person, or a people, to see and honestly feel aghast at the inhumanities perpetuated by agendas of conquest and domination, regardless of their source, regardless of how right they may superficially seem, regardless of their public popularity?

When does the rape and murder of another person or people become justifiable for the sake of the preservation and perpetuation of another person or people?

* Inquisitions.
* Holy wars.
* The calculated and orchestrated repression and extinction of Native American civilizations.
* Unholy wars to protect “our” interests.

A short and very incomplete list.

Enough of a list to quickly generate a label.

“Subversive.”

Operating outside the norms of popular social acceptability.

Oh well.

If questioning the validity of things as they appear makes one a subversive, if empathizing and identifying with the unjustly wounded makes one a subversive, I suppose I will gladly wear the label and gladly be counted among the subversives over in the left hand corner.

Over on the left. Far away from popular social norms.

Come to think of it, that’s where Christ stood and still stands. Regardless of where Christianity, as the organized pluralistic religion it has become, may stand.

I like the company that I’m keeping.

Pray And Work

2009-03-13T04:40:00.000-07:00

Every day.

A timed event.

A timely event.

Begging for attention.

Without fail the eastern sky begins to lighten. Daybreak dawns with renewed opportunity as part of a Plan that is bigger, greater, and grander than any of our peanut intellects can possibly grasp in its totality. Our best understanding will always find itself rooted in mystery.

God residing in heaven.

God residing in the hearts of people.

God at work in the world.

Some people live with shade covered eyes and cotton filled ears. Not wanting to see. Not wanting to hear. Not ambitious for anything that will rearrange and reorient their dreamful lives.

Some have, in one way or another, by one means or another, lost their dark shades and the light of God is able to strike the lenses of their eyes. They have lost the cotton in their ears and are able to hear at least some of the fine tunes broadcast from the realms of heaven and from realms deeply embedded in all that heaven has produced.

Today? Like other days.

Pray and work.

I think my prayers are becoming more and more humility filled. I note this with some reluctance because of my own innate tendency toward pride and the insidious pseudo-humility disguise that it can cloak itself in.

I work appreciatively, growing even more appreciative, considering the vast numbers of people without employment or with insufficient employment. Life is real, sometimes all too real. For a growing number of people unable to make ends meet, life is real hard and growing even harder.

I am, indeed, a fortunate soul.

The first yellow light of the sun is bathing the earth. Kiss the Son. Pray. Work. Allow God room to expand his Plan in my heart and mind.

Grant to me, Savior of Glory,
The fear of God,
The love of God,
And His affection,
And the will of God to do on earth at all times
As angels and saints do in heaven.

Dancing With Phantoms

2009-03-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

“It would be so easy and consoling to say, at every moment: this thing I am doing is regarded by everyone as a sure means of attaining to perfection and to the possession of God. But would the peace and consolation I felt have anything necessarily to do with perfection or the possession of God? Might it not after all turn out to be the greatest of all illusions? A surrender to the authority of common opinion – “They say.” How weak our consciences are! We give in and shut our eyes. We have conformed to “them.” We are at peace. “They say” this is perfection.

Much more to the point: The prayer that struggles to get out of myself and reach God, in obscurity, in trial, fighting down the phantoms.”[1]

There will always be those who think that some “other” has managed to get it all together, perfected themselves in a way that makes them worthy to be admired as an example. Too, in this age of media and modernism, there is no shortage of people declaring themselves to be examples of Christian perfection, life coaches, and spiritual directors.

I must admit, when following lesser models, that I joined the ranks of those who “think” they are such examples. I was, after all, emulating, imitating, the modern models that “seemed” to be doing everything right, those that best fit the mold of the modern mindset. I was dancing a dance that borrowed steps from the best of the institutionalized and non-institutionalized church world arenas. I was dancing the dance.

What I didn’t realize was that I was stepping all over my own feet and the feet of others. My own well-intentioned desires and purest ambitions created a blindness that kept me from seeing the faces, the forms and characters, of my phantom dancing partners.

[1] Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude, p.75

Morphing

2009-03-10T04:30:00.000-07:00

When I was a younger man, going through those stages of becoming an evangelical preacher, I looked for models to emulate. I had, after all, never been a preacher. I was interested in being a good model. I wanted to make an impact on the world. I wanted to do my part in proclaiming the Gospel. I wanted to look the part and I think my motives were pure.

So I looked for models, models that I thought were appropriate, models that met the bill for life as a preacher of the Gospel in these modern times.

It’s interesting, at least to me, how we are influenced in our decision making processes, how we select models that appear to be successful and labor hard to incorporate their appearance into our own. The dress. The walk. The talk. Styles and appearances. The things that attract a dull mind and shallow heart.

It’s funny. One day I was living in jeans, t-shirts, and walking with flops on my feet. The next day I was wearing wing-tips and 3 piece suits. Well. It wasn’t actually a transition in a day.

The morph occurred during my Bible College experience. I entered school a plain version of myself in my early conversion. I walked out a sleek and groomed subversion of myself, armed with an acquired doctrinal bent, set loose by my trainers like a dog on a hunt. I really thought I looked the part. And I really thought I could sniff, bark, and howl with the best of the contemporary pack.

Several years ago, my wardrobe changed again. A lot, besides outward appearances, changed. Though to most that knew me at the time it appeared as an overnight change, it really was a cumulative thing that involved several variables working together over time. Hard stuff. Drive you to your knees stuff. Stuff that makes you really think and sort through more than the clothes closet. Stuff that makes you dig deep into the heart closet.

Stuff that makes you look for models that are more representative and more accurate portrayals of the life of the Original Model, a Model and models more worth emulating. It’s funny, in a sad sort of way, how easily we can emulate lesser models and how difficult it is to follow the Model and those that are most like him. It just simply goes against the grain of contemporary thought, patterns, and styles. It cuts, like a rasp, against our own grain.

The SDS Brand

2009-03-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Brands.

We wear them whether we want to or not. They are burned indelibly onto us, into us. Some of them are markings of our own making. Some of them are forced upon us by the societies that surround us. Some brands are more insidious, marking us little by little, so we aren’t aware of them until they become conspicuous, usually to others before we are aware of them ourselves.

I’m scarred by brands that I’m not at all proud of and do my best to keep them covered, keep them secret. Cover them as I may, they are still there. They are etched into my mind as reminders, sometimes constant, sometimes occasional, of stupid choices that I’ve made in the course of my life.

I wear brands that I once boasted of but now view in a much different light. These are more difficult to cover. They have a way of bleeding through their coverings like bloody wounds soaking through a white shirt. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it presents problems.

I do wear some brands that I am proud of and I’ve grown evermore careful of what brands I choose to wear. I’m watchful these days of loose branding irons waiting to sear my flesh and blister my backside. Oh. And there are times when I take pleasure in rending my brand covering garments just to show people that I’m really nothing more than a brand scarred freak.

The world that we live in is one big mess. I offer no apologies for thinking most of the time that its case is hopeless. Yeah. There are those moments, almost shining moments, when I start wanting to think that some overall hope for society is glimmering on a distant horizon. But the glimmering just doesn’t last. It quickly fades. One mirage is replaced by another. The real issues, those terrible Seven Deadly Sins (SDS), are sidestepped and the whole reeling mess of confusion overtakes itself with another round of the deadly seven.

There is only one Antidote possessing the potential to undo the effects of the ill created by the aforementioned seven. One. Only one. Easy answer? No.

Hard answer. Yes. Complicated by all the decimating and detracting divisions that render the Unus Voce practically null and void in the clamor and clanging of this modern world where individualism reigns as a demi-god.

It’s a hard pill to swallow answer. One dose is not the cure. It takes many doses of that one hard pill and that’s just for starters. The SDS disease is incurable and prone to flair-ups at any given moment. Its insidious nature makes it easy for SDS to disguise itself, wrap and conceal itself in garments of pseudo-righteousness that deceive its host victims.

Icterids

2009-03-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

Icterids. I can’t stand them. They aren’t around all the time but, when they come, they come in droves and hang around for seasons that are entirely too long. Noisy, squawking, voracious, devouring, flying creatures that flaunt their physical size, exercise their mass supremacy, overrun our feeders, and deprive our small, musical, beautiful feathered guests of the food that we supply them.

They empty our feeders in a matter of minutes, leaving not so much as a grain for the other birds. Once they’ve devoured everything in sight they sit high in the tops of the trees squawking their coarse and grating notes. It’s as though they are demanding that I refill the feeders at their command.

I can’t shoot them. Oh, there was a day! The noise of a gun would frighten away the gentle ones that our feeders attract. Plus, we have too many close neighbors that wouldn’t appreciate low flying projectiles buzzing through their yards.

Shooting Icterids is a hopeless resort even if it does provide a momentary sense of personal gratification. They just keep coming, drove after squawking, migrating drove. I know a man that finally quit feeding the birds. He grew weary of replacing his feeders after destroying them year after year with rifle bullets.

When the Icterids are around it costs more to feed the other birds. I keep feeding. At least the more important birds have an opportunity to scrounge for a grain or two of sustenance.

I’ve not learned to live with Icterids. That would indicate certain depths of acceptance, degrees of co-existence, places I’m not willing to go. But I live with them, nonetheless, in a relationship that will ever and always be an adversarial one. Yes. They, too, are God’s creatures.

So are mosquitoes and fleas. Pit vipers and Brown Recluse spiders.

Centennial Post

2009-03-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

It’s been a year to the day since I began this blog.

I think it a little interesting that today’s post will also make the 100th Oblate Offering post since this little endeavor began. That, to me, is something of a milestone. At least a small one, perhaps a very insignificant one, in the self-published literary world made available by wwwdotwhateverdotcom where anybody with a computer and internet connection can vent, proclaim, ponder, or otherwise blog their thoughts on a zillion topics.

I honestly have no idea how many people take the time to read what I place here. When I started this blog I considered placing a counter on it but decided that such a thing would be counter-productive to a certain “unknowing” nature that I’ve grown to appreciate.

Occasionally what I blog generates a kind comment from someone or another. On one occasion I received a rash of mean and scolding comments from some badly bent fellow that honestly were not worth approving. Honest and objective criticism I can take. Rash and demeaning criticism? Though there is plenty of it being dished out, no human being deserves it. It accomplishes no good at all.

I do know how many times someone has looked at my profile. Good? Bad? Indifferent? I don’t know. I prefer not to attempt drawing any conclusions from such anonymous and narrow statistical data. I respect anonymity. I prefer only to consider that there is at least that number of people seeking something and I can only hope that maybe, just maybe, someone found a morsel that helped them along to wherever they are going.

Me? I’m just a road-weary pilgrim limping along, stopping to enjoy whatever shade I can find, learning to discern the difference between sweet and bitter water, and trying to put into practice the truth as I understand it.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an odd fellow, an opinionated person. I’ve been bent by the harsh winds of life. My bark has been peeled more times than I care to think about. I have, time and again, foolishly leaped into the fire and suffered for it. Some of us, more likely most of us, are hard-learning. I am one of most prime examples.

Through it all, unmerited grace has sustained me and my faith continues to develop and grow. It is, more and more, losing its theoretical nature and dressing itself in more practical terms. Faith is for living. What good is something that we talk about if we don’t live it?

God has, and continues to be, very kind to me.

Deo Gratias.

Roots

2009-03-03T05:10:00.000-08:00

Truth involves more than our heads. It goes beyond our ability to think and decide for ourselves, although these faculties and processes are integral in discovering and knowing truth. There is much that is decided for us in the embrace that conceived us and long before the moment when we begin recognizing something as valid and valuable.

Mathew and Melinda. Alabama Tories. I never met them. Somehow, though, I feel like I know them and have always known them. Mysteriously. Intimately. Ancestrally. It’s something uncanny, hard to define with words. Yet it is something unavoidable and as real as my own breath and pulse. It is, after all, their genes that have trickled down to me via my maternal line.

I rate finding my Great, Great Grandmother’s grave in the same category as my meeting the Great, Great Granddaughter of Chief Red Cloud. Accidents? No.

We were on a quest to find graves of my maternal ancestors. The Chief’s granddaughter crossed my path on the plains of Western Kansas in 2002 at a time when I was becoming aware of the terrible injustice dealt to the First Peoples by the greed filled European immigrants that knew how to deal in lead and gunpowder to get what they wanted. Both of these were personally moving experiences, spiritual events in my life.

No. I’m not talking about some kind of weird metaphysical hocus pocus, connecting with spirits, or any of that sort of witchery. I don’t have visitations, visions, or hear voices in the dark … the stuff that surrounds dabbling on the dark side, séances, or spiritual mediums. Heaven forbid. And it does forbid.

It has more to do with understanding, having a mind for history, and a heart hunger to know the real deal, the honest truth, truth that has a way of peeling the scales off our eyes, truth that rises like the sun to burn away the fog that keeps us from seeing where we’ve been, where we are at, or where we are going. Sadly, most people, practically all white people, live in a dense fog.

Truth involves matters of the heart that are not easily scientifically defined and explained. Roots stuff. Roots that are attached to and anchored in generations that have gone before. Roots tapping into resources that have a definite determining effect on life as it is lived today.

Roots that bring the best and the worst in us to light.

The Rose

2009-03-01T07:09:00.000-08:00

Christ taught that those who listened to him would know the truth and that truth would set them free.[1] Truth, though universal in its implications, is not easily accepted. Its very nature has a way of completely rocking our personal world.

Truth has a way of calling us to take an honest and skeptical look at things, at systems, at governments, at ways of life and agendas that pervert the truest senses of freedom by creating and maintaining enslaving environments. Truth calls for consideration, for reconsideration. It calls us to take some kind of affirmative action on the conclusions arrived at in the revelation of itself.

When the truest senses of freedom are perverted, injustice, the product of degenerated freedom, becomes an economy of acceptable human behavior. Socially approved and licensed greed, pride, and fear driven behavior. At all levels of society. Personally, nationally, and globally.

The more I unpopularly seek and question, the more Truth ferrets me out, the more I realize how I’ve been lied to by the spin doctors purporting to have good in mind, the more I realize how easy it’s been for me to believe the lies and live the lies.

I was born into blindness. It is part of my natural cultural heritage. I had no choice in the matter. In my own blindness I allowed blind leaders to lead me into a maze of sewage filled ditches where I learned to accept and appreciate the stench as though it were the fragrance of a garden of roses.

Somewhere along the way, wafting above all the human stench in the ditches, I caught a whiff of the fragrant and unmistakable scent of a rose. I sought it. When I finally found it I grasped and clutched it by its thorny stem to pluck and keep it for my own.

[1] John 8:32

Fasting And Abstinence

2009-02-27T07:17:00.000-08:00

Friday. A day to remember and revisit the beautiful tragedy of Calvary.

Christ’s agony in the garden. The scourging at the pillar. Christ being crowned with a crown of thorns. The Lord carrying a cross much heavier than its wooden composition. Christ’s Crucifixion.

Nothing pretty. So much pain. Interior and physical.

Globally, every Friday in the Catholic Church is set apart as a day of fasting and abstinence as a means to respectfully honor that day when Christ’s physical life was totally consummated. Somewhere along the way the American Bishops concluded that American Catholic’s are too weak to endure such rigors and lifted the element of abstinence on Friday's except during the season of Lent. I must admit that I don’t understand their reasoning. I accept it. I must accept it. But I do not understand it.

Imagine that. While impoverished and undernourished Third World Catholic’s are required to fast and abstain from meat on Friday’s throughout the year, spoiled and gluttonous American’s are able to savor a steak or pork chop. We are, albeit, encouraged to offer an extra prayer or make some other token offering.

Me? Weak and often undisciplined me? Though I don’t understand their reasoning, and judicially I really don’t have to understand their reasoning, I’m grateful that the Bishop’s have lifted the “pain of sin” from eating meat on Friday’s the rest of the year. Though I do not seek to justify my human American condition, I confess that I am a lazy and undisciplined American.

It just makes me wonder though. How real, how significant, how relevant is the Crucifixion in the hearts and minds of people? Is the Historical Event so far past that its Reality has faded into historcal oblivion or been hidden by the fog of life in these modern times?

“The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent. Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.”[1]

Friday. One day. One day out of seven. One day to fast and abstain. Six to feast.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

On me.

[1] RB 49:1-3

Pier Pressure

2009-02-26T06:25:00.000-08:00

I finished up work Tuesday afternoon around three. It was more like arriving at a stopping point, a good place to stop and pick up again. Pressure washing. Something that I don’t mind doing. But this house involved a lot of ladder work and I was pretty exhausted.

I had been preparing myself for the beginning of Lent, this season of reflection, recollection, and repentance. On the drive home I was thinking particularly that Wednesday would be a day of fasting and abstinence. Ash Wednesday. Not a Holy Day of Obligation but, still, an important day in the life of the Church. Much more than just another opportunity to live up to the Catholic reputation of eating fish.

Thanks to a couple of cast nets, we enjoy a nice supply of fish. Throwing a net is a pleasurable thing to do. It’s also something that demands some physical exertion, something that I was thinking about avoiding after working all day. There’s fish in the freezer. No. I’d go try to catch some fresh even if it meant throwing the net, pulling it in, and then cleaning fish once I got them home.

I usually plan my net fishing around what the tide is doing. By minding the tide I do, more times than not, catch fish. This time I didn’t check the tide chart. I just loaded my stuff in the truck and went. When I got to the fishing pier I met three older fellows. Likable locals and it was obvious that drinking intoxicating beverages was as much a part of their outing as fishing. They had been much more successful at getting bent than they were at catching fish. One had caught nothing. One had ruined his net on a snag. One had caught one fish.

He had two fish in his bucket. One had been given to him by someone earlier. They were picking up and getting ready to leave and before they left he put his two fish in my bucket. I was grateful and expressed my appreciation.

Net fishing is usually productive at this spot when the water is moving in or out with the tide. It was almost still. I worked my net for a while without any success. Another fellow joined me on the small pier. He worked his net. Nothing. I was beginning to think that I’d put my two gift fish into his bucket and pull out some frozen fish to thaw overnight.

As I stood there with my net made up and ready to throw I began to think. My thoughts were more in the form of prayer thought, thought directed toward God. I thought, “Lord, we are trying to be faithful to the expectations and ideals of the Church where fasting and abstinence on Ash Wednesday is concerned. And we are trying our best to provide our food through our own labor. It would really be nice to catch some fish.”

I threw my net. It opened nicely into a perfect circle, hit the water, and then settled to the bottom. I felt something bumping in the net as I pulled on the hand line. When I hauled it onto the pier it held 4 nice fish. I was humbled and grateful for the provision.

Fishermen. It seems like we are never satisfied. Hey. If I caught these 4 maybe I’ll catch 4 more the next throw. Friday’s coming. I’ll need fish for Friday. More fish. I need more fish. Keep throwing the net. And I did. Throw the net. Pull the net. Numerous times without netting another fish. Thinking all the while that maybe, just maybe, grace for the day was already in my bucket. Accept that grace, be grateful for the enough that you have, and hold greed at bay.

I felt convicted. It wasn’t a gripping and arresting conviction but conviction nonetheless. I stuffed my net in the bucket and came home. There’s plenty of time for fishing between now and Friday.

“Dear friends, at every moment the earth is full of the mercy of God, and nature itself is a lesson for all the faithful in the worship of God. The heavens, the sea and all that is in them bear witness to the goodness and omnipotence of their Creator, and the marvelous beauty of the elements as they obey him demands from the intelligent creation a fitting expression of gratitude.”[1]

Deo Gratias.

[1] From a sermon by Saint Leo the Great, Liturgy of the Hours, p. 60

Riding The Wheel

2009-02-24T06:38:00.000-08:00

Tuesday of the 7th Week in Ordinary Time. Shrove Tuesday in the year of our Lord 2009. Tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, marks the beginning of Lent, 40 days of reflection and preparation for Holy Week and the grand celebration of the Resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday.

It’s all beautiful. I appreciate the wisdom of the Church in setting forth these liturgical seasons that give focus. These are seasonal focal points that assist in maintaining a distinct and holistic orientation in the life of Christ, much like a holy wheel of life that is both fixed and constantly revolving around its Axle, a process of continual death and rebirth.

St. Gregory’s commentary on Ecclesiastes 3:1-22[1] could not be more appropriate or on time for such an occasion as Ash Wednesday Eve. Or, for that matter, my own personal point of revolution on the wheel of life.

I am, anymore, simply content to ride the wheel. Most of the time, it doesn’t seem like I’m going anywhere or getting anywhere. The wheel, on its own, generally revolves slowly, except on the calendar. I’m learning to not hurry the wheel. I’m learning to allow it its slow but effective process that may or may not coincide with the 12 month calendar. I may not always see the occurring progress but the process is sure. The process is certain.

At times it seems like I’m stuck in the mud. But when I carefully look at the mud I discover that it too is part of the process. There must be something that I need to learn in the mud, maybe something that I failed to learn the last time I was in the mud. It’s interesting how many times it’s the same mud that bogs me down. I’ll learn the intended lesson one day. Maybe.

Here a little. There a little. Breathing in the Breath of Life. Appreciating life's unfolding nature. Praying and working one day at a time. Enjoying the desert. Continually arriving at a re-beginning. Distinct but incomplete arrivals.

It will be a good Lent.

[1] Liturgy of the Hours, p. 236-237

The First Word

2009-02-23T06:26:00.000-08:00

Sounds are important.

The wind in the trees. The gurgle of water flowing in a small stream. The rustle of something in the underbrush. Thunder in the distance. The faint beginning of a squeak in a bearing. Each has a message. Each of these, and a myriad of other sounds, tells something. Messages that we miss when we aren’t listening.

Listen. The first word in the Rule of St. Benedict says more in truth than entire volumes written by many modern authors suggesting themselves to be spiritual directors. This is not intended to be a scathing remark. It is, at least in my mind and in the realm of my own reality, more simply a matter of fact in a syncretistic faith-world.

One of the predicaments, something that is really an inverted blessing, that I discover inherent in attempting to follow the Rule of St. Benedict is its potential for creating a desert effect. It has the potential to create an environment both within yet apart from its surrounding environs. Although it fits perfectly into any geographical setting, it concerns itself not so much with natural geographical landscapes as it does with the deep interior regions of the conscience.

There is, albeit, a distinct relationship between these that motivates and propels me toward jaunts in isolated woods and wilderness where I feel more naturally at home than in these cities and suburbs that surround me.

In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.[1]

The parallelism seems rather obvious, the natural and spiritual ramifications.

[1] Isaiah 43:19

The Desert

2009-02-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

I really have a difficult time “playing the game” anymore. Any game. It matters not which one it is. Political, economic, social, or religious. All the tit for tat that so easily usurps the genuine place of the Consuming Fire. Though I have a difficult time with it, I find myself always dancing on the edge of something that makes me uncomfortable, sharpening my awareness that though God is in his heaven all is not right in the world.

Personally, I find the life of Christ and his teachings incompatible with all the hypocritical poppycock that fills the world’s societies, parties and factions bent on conquering or dominating one another in one fashion or another. Fluffiness. Stuffiness. Arrogance. Deceit. None of these describe Christ or the way of life taught by him. He chose not the high and mighty for his consort. Rather, we find him surrounded primarily by a much more lowly crowd, generally despicable in the eyes of the more elite. Harlots. Tax collectors. Fishermen. Ruffians. At least one thief that we know of. But not many high and mighty.

JESU, the beauty the angels see, the ear’s ecstatic minstrelsy, the nectar of the heavenly home, the lips’ delicious honeycomb:

It’s no wonder to me that those early men and women ran to the desert once the Church became a respectable and popular place to hang out. They ran to escape all but their own selves where they could reckon with these selves. They also ran to encounter the Only Fire that could purge the dross that contaminated their selves.

I find it no wonder that their dire and stark example opened the monastic avenue within the realm of Christendom. Monks and monasteries. Masses of men and women religious owning nothing. Sharing everything. Vows. Poverty, chastity, obedience, stability. Until death did their soul depart from their mortal frame. Much has changed concerning these ideals. People want some social cause to follow that diverts their attention from the real interior issue.

For they who taste thee hunger sore, and they who drink thee thirst the more, desiring naught below, above, save Jesus whom their spirits love.

I struggle. I wrestle every day. I have a deep longing for the Saviour and I recognize the reality that the more I partake, the more I enjoin myself to him and him to me, the more I long for him. Yet so much remains amiss within me. The journey is ever a beginning. There is always still far to go. I am full and empty in the same breath. My enemies never give up their pursuit, like hounds fast on a trail.

I recognize the discord and disharmony within the fabric of my own being, within my own self. It’s as though a part of me is caught in an inescapable steel trap forged in the furnace constructed by the world’s system, a system set on fire with the kindling of desire and fueled by inexhaustible stockpiles of pride and greed. It is a system that baits its victims, coaxes them into the trap that holds them securely while the fire blazes.

Jesu, most desired and dear, the hope of longing spirits here, to thee my earnest tears shall turn, for thee my inmost heart shall yearn.

Room. Plenty of room. Vast fields of room within my interior regions. A landscape of changing seasons, each with its own set of peculiarities. I admit that I'm not the most disciplined disciple. Theory and practice are not always equivalents of one another.

I work at it. Some days, some seasons, discover me more disciplined than others. At times I have no devotional discipline. Life is all too real, pressed upon from every side, most of the time by life’s daily grinding ordeals. I accept and admit my faults without slighting or justifying them and recognize that Reconciliation will ever be a need in my life.

I have, perhaps, finally discovered and entered the desert.

Living In The Dark

2009-02-13T05:19:00.000-08:00

There is a natural cycle of day and night that I have no difficulty acclimating to. There is, so it seems, also a spiritual cycle of day and night. I experience great peace during the spiritual daytime. For some reason I think I am accomplishing something in its brightness. I feel inspired to walk in my vocation as an Oblate and have a certain sense of stamina during these seasons that propels me along as though I’ve been gifted with wings.

I’ve learned though that dark nights can fall at any time and catch me by surprise. It seems they often, in one degree or another, come after seasons of brightness and clarity. Things seem to be going so good. One day I’m are on a mountaintop and the next I’ve fallen like an avalanche to the floor of a deep dark valley.

One day I feel like I’m floating on the clouds above the mountain peaks and the next I feel like I’m buried beneath the weight of the mountain. To know the freedom of the Spirit during the brightness of the spiritual daytime on the mountaintop and then to experience the deep heaviness of the spiritual nighttime in the dark valley can be nearly debilitating. There is a certain sense of depression that accompanies it. This heaviness, this season of spiritual nighttime, is often referred to as the dark night of the soul and I ought not to be surprised by it. Who am I to think that I have some immunity?

When I encounter this spiritual nighttime it becomes more difficult to do the same things that I do easily during the spiritual daytime. It becomes harder to pray. I feel like the heavens have become brass and simple prayers become difficult to express. Reading, even reading the Scriptures, becomes more of a chore than a delight. Though I know and am confident that God has not abandoned or taken his Spirit from me it’s difficult, or even impossible, to sense God as a living reality within my own being.

These can be pivotal times. There is a definite turning taking place and I can either yield myself to its process or I can yield to the temptation to fight against it. It’s much easier to fight against the process than it is to simply wait on it to accomplish its divine purpose.

I am afflicted with the human tendency to want to control my destiny, my direction in life, and this is something that the world supports as personal maturity. But personal maturity, in the spiritual sense, has more to do with surrendering to the Greater Will than with insisting upon my will or interest. Nevertheless, not my will. Dark nights are not necessarily unproductive seasons. They are more intended to be productive seasons where egotism, along with its accompanying cousins of pride and selfishness, are carefully pulled from the furrows of life.

Pressing through the darkness, pushing toward a fresh season of daytime, should not become my objective during these more difficult seasons. I do need to continue, perhaps a little more casually, maintaining some fashion of spiritual discipline. My prayers need to be simplified to more childlike expressions of prayer. Devotional reading from the Scriptures, and other resources, need to be taken in smaller measures.

What I do devotionally is important. But the greater importance resides in what God is doing behind the scenes of my life in places and ways that I am not aware of. In this context, the words of a prayer by St. Philaret are very appropriate. “Give me strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day with all it shall bring. Direct my will. Teach me to pray. And you, yourself, pray in me.”