Which Marriage are You Called To?

This week I've been co-teaching with Fr. Brett Brannen a course on the Theology of the Body designed specifically for priests. It's been such a blessed experience as a married man to enter into the great gift and mystery of this equally spousal call for men to love and serve their bride, the Church (which is made up of each and every one of the laity). 

Each of us in our own way, as we've been reflecting, is called to become a gift, a spousal gift in and through our masculinity, for a bride. Fr. Brett likes to ask young men who are discerning a call to priesthood with a question, and it's not "Are you called to priesthood or married life" but rather "Which marriage are you called to?"

Each vocation reminds us of the spousal call - each contains the call to be a free, total, faithful, and fruitful gift in seed form - single, married, consecrated or ordained for the Kingdom. And the marriage we are all oriented towards, ultimately, is in Paradise. There the hole in the human heart will be filled. So let's pray for our fathers, all of them, that their gift might bear fruit in this world and in the next!

Faces and Names

I want to begin today's 40 Days of Blogging post with an extended thought by Pope Francis, interspersed with the captivating photography of Lee Jeffries, the man whose tender images of homeless souls from around the planet continues to inspire me in this year's Lenten journey. To put it bluntly, I'm getting schooled by both of these men. Francis calls me to look up and truly see others - to learn their "faces and names" - and Lee offers them to me, in all of their gritty and gripping power. 

"If we are to share our lives with others and generously give of ourselves, we also have to realize that every person is worthy of our giving. Not for their physical appearance, their abilities, their language, their way of thinking, or for any satisfaction that we might receive, but rather because they are God’s handiwork, his creation..."

"God created that person in his image, and he or she reflects something of God’s glory. Every human being is the object of God’s infinite tenderness, and he himself is present in their lives..."

"Jesus offered his precious blood on the cross for that person. Appearances notwithstanding, every person is immensely holy and deserves our love..."

"Consequently, if I can help at least one person to have a better life, that already justifies the offering of my life..."

"It is a wonderful thing to be God’s faithful people. We achieve fulfilment when we break down walls and our heart is filled with faces and names!"

- Pope Francis, Joy of the Gospel, #274

Lent is, in many ways, a symbol of our entire earthly pilgrimage. It's our movement through history, our personal one with all of its ups and downs, its fog and its light, and that of the whole human family. Lent gives us a lens, a wider scope of vision, inviting us to see the whole picture of our existence, our dreams, desires, our aches and longings for intimacy, and our often futile attempts to fulfill these desires on our own. That's why we fast. We fast during Lent to focus more clearly on this desires. 

If we truly fast, allowing ourselves to be stripped so that God's glance can "pierce our naked hearts" then these hollows make us hunger for faces and names. Faces and names that we can say we know, intimately, and whom we can say know us. For when Easter breaks like match-fire over this our dark history, when that Resurrection Day finally dawns, this is all that will really matter, isn't it? The faces we met, the names we came to know and learn by heart. 

When Lord, did we see You cold and hungry? Ah, there all along! In the faces and names that were surrounding me... And all of these now sing as a great cloud of witnesses...

We are made for one another. 

We are meant for one another. 

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To see more of Lee Jeffries work, visit: http://leejeffries.500px.com

To read more of Pope Francis's Joy of the Gospel, visit: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_en.html

Enduring the Glance

I had FaceTime with my daughter Clare today. As you can see in the screenshot above, she OWNS FaceTime. She literally IS FaceTime. 

There's something so beautiful about children at this age (she's 3). There's an intensity and an exuberant joy in everything. It comes beaming from those eyes like barbed lightning. Those all expressive eyes! It got me thinking about this incredible insight from Von Balthasar that I've been meditating on this Lent:

"Holiness consists in enduring God's glance.  It may appear mere passivity to withstand the look of an eye; but everyone knows how much exertion is required when this occurs in an essential encounter. Our glances mostly brush by each other indirectly, or they turn quickly away, or they give themselves not personally but only socially.  So too do we constantly flee form God into a distance that is theoretical, rhetorical, sentimental, aesthetic, or most frequently, pious. Or we flee from him to external works. And yet, the best thing would be to surrender one's naked heart to the fire of this all-penetrating glance. The heart would then itself have to catch fire... it would be yielding, declaring oneself beaten, capitulating, entrusting oneself, casting oneself into him."

What an incredibly insightful thought. And then it gets even better!

"It would be childlike loving, since for children the glance of the father is not painful: with wide-open eyes they look into his. Little Thérèse - great little Thérèse - could do it. Augustine's formula on the essence of eternity: videntem videre - ‘to look at him who is looking at you.’"

- Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

I think our earthly life is a practice for this eternal "FaceTime" with the God of Beauty. 

The Way to Be as Happy as Pharrell Williams (actually happier)

The ancients knew we were made for it, we moderns are constantly seeking it: Happiness. It's often associated with peace, rest, contentment, or completion. It's the nunc dimittis we all hope to whisper at the end of our day. No matter who you are, where you are, it appears as the Lode Star for all human activity and is the final sentence when the conversation is ending and the decisions have been determined.... "Well, as long as it makes you... happy."

We are often deceived into thinking this peace or happiness can be crafted by us. That we can "make it happen." But when the word is "baptized" or completed, it's spelled beatitude or blessedness. This blessedness is a gift. It is "bestowed" upon the heart as a gift, not as something we manufacture. 

But let's just cut to the chase. How do we get there? How can we prepare the soil of our hearts for the seed of happiness? Here are three ways to "get happy."

1. Stop trying to be happy. 

2. Stop chasing after things to make you happy. 

3. Just be..... and you will be happy. 

I'm thinking you're thinking this is too simplistic, but it is. Thank God. 

Ultimately, when all's said and done, this maddening, swirling, sometimes beautiful, often times busted up enigma we call human life is simple; it's either a yes, or it's a no. It's a humble, gracious, Job-like "Thank You Lord for everything You've done for me!" or a stubborn, restless, job like "Now everything's up to me!" With the first path, He Who is Love, not happiness, is the goal, and happiness is the fruit of that encounter. In the second way, happiness, not He, is the goal, and there is actually seldom any substantial encounter at all. One way is totally receptive in all things to the Love of the Other, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to death so us part. The other attempt at happiness is  deceptive for the love is turned towards myself. My contentment, my completion. My needs. 

Opening Door #1, that is to the Other, means we become more conscious of ourselves, of others, of the Great Mystery, and we realize we are here solely to love. We see complications melt away and learn to live each present moment as a gift. We don't try to manufacture joy the way we once did, with elaborate schemes, or expensive trips, or restless amd fruitiness encounters. 

Door #2 opens not into the Grand Ballroom of a Wedding Feast but into a closed in closet of our own small pleasures and plans. 

So to be happy, stop trying so hard. Looking so hard. Cramming things into the God-shaped hole in your heart expecting them to "make you happy." That's not how it happens. Open the door to Love. Or rather, let Love open the door and come to you. For He has yearned long to share a meal with you. To share Himself with you. 

Now "clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do..."

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM

Strangers in Paradise?

I read the first couple of lines from today's gospel (Matthew 25) and, for a moment, could get no further.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne,and all the nations will be assembled before him."

In the end, the final consummation, with the closing of one seemingly massive book of history, and before the opening of Another Book which will in fact be the Beginning of All Things, we will find all of humanity and all of the angels (an immense mass of trillions and trillions of persons) gathered before the Word Made Flesh. Not a single person that ever existed will be excluded, human or angelic. You and I are included in the mix.

You and I, and your entire family tree, and mine, and the cashier at the grocery store, and the girl you had a crush on in the 8th grade, and Adolf Hitler, and your Guardian Angel, and Brad Pitt and that homeless lady you always felt uncomfortable passing on the way to the office, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, and well, you get the idea. Wow. A total reckoning. A total and definitive conglomeration of the unique and unrepeatable personal mysteries that we all are.... gathered before the Divine Heart from whence our essences we first came forth.

But at this final gathering, as seen in the gospel of today, this crowd seemed, if I might say... a little... clueless.

‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."

Huh? Why? How?

"For I was hungry and you gave me food,I was thirsty and you gave me drink,a stranger and you welcomed me..."

What? "Lord, when did we see you... Hungry. Thirsty. Naked. Locked up. Alone. Isolated. Ill. Aching for intimacy?"

When you saw another, you saw Me.

Wait, whaaaat.... YOU were in our mix? Here? Beside us... all along? I thought You were in the clouds, in my mind, in my "spiritual life" but what? You were mixed up in it all? In the blood, sweat and tears? The pots and pans, the dark nights, the bright mornings, the magnificent joys and the mediocrity? You? Here?

Yes. Where else would I be? Where else would Love desire to dwell than with the Beloved?

I discovered a man named Lee Jeffries this morning. He is a photographer who has given us a beautiful and sometimes disturbing window into the reality of the God Who is in our mix, of the naked, poor, broken, bruised and beautiful God Who is among us through his visual meditations. Find his work here. And may the portal he has opened up through his camera lens fill in the rest of these words. May the fruit of your meditation blossom into a new way of seeing today.... of seeing everyone. It's preparation for that final gathering, it's the social before we enter the Main Hall where the Feast and the Dance begins. So let's introduce ourselves to one another now. There can't be any strangers in Paradise.

The Noble Life, the Double Life of a Priest

“A priest must be a reservoir before he can become a conduit.”

- St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Tomorrow I will begin co-teaching with Fr. Brett Brannen a unique course on the Theology of the Body and the Priesthood. It's focus is on priestly identity. 

What does it mean to be a celibate man, and still a true father in the deepest sense of the word? To be a man set apart and yet at the same time to be a part of every family, connected deeply to evey heart? 

We will mediate on the priest as son, brother, spouse, and father. With the insights of Blessed John Paul the Great, as well as the scriptures, the saints and the mystics, we will clarify what is in fact not an outdated and irrelevant vocation but an essential and irrevocable sign of humanity's ultimate call: the call to become a gift.... a fruitful, life-giving gift for the world. Prayers are appreciated as we begin this 5 day course, and prayers for the class of men coming from across the country and beyond. Please pray for a renewed vision of this most beautiful of sacraments! 

"A priest is mysterious, he lives in two worlds. He is at his best when he leads a double life, at once both human and divine. No life is more adventurous, for at every moment, like the trapeze artist, he is swinging between time and eternity.”

- Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Reach Out and What?

I remember these ads. And I remember what a heartwarming feeling they conveyed. There's some good marketing there; tapping into the humanity of the consumer. Our longing for connection, for communion and for intimacy. 

"Reach out and touch someone."

Today, living in such a hyper-sexualized culture as we do, with sarcasm and cynicism always a hairs breadth away, a phrase like that has a whole different feel to it. But honestly, the Pharisees in Jesus's time had their own converse fears about touching others. 

The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus said to them in reply, "Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners."

- Luke 5:31-32

So here we are, caught between two extremes. Touch without even knowing a person (an anonymous culture of sexual encounter) or never touch because of the KIND of person they are. 

What does Jesus do? He touches the heart and soul of every person. And so should we in our love and charity. 

"At the end of time, those who will be allowed to contemplate the glorified flesh of Christ are only those who were not embarrassed to touch the flesh of their injured and excluded brothers and sisters."

- Pope Francis