Modern Day Michelangelo

Discovered this video on a fantastic new service called H2onews - "a Catholic news service on a worldwide scale that creates and distributes multimedia news, every day, in eight languages. The news focuses on the life of the Church and on social and cultural events that directly pertain to Catholics living in the world."

Island of the World

A few months back, a friend recommended I read Michael D. O'Brien's novel Island of the World. Familiar with his work (Fr. Elijah and Strangers and Sojourners being my favorites from his Children of the Last Days series), I said "Sure, I'll have to pick that up." Little did I know it would take two hands to do so (it's 839 pages) and a good couple of months to finish it. Today, I read the last sentence, closed the cover, and am utterly and completely exhausted.

I feel like Frodo, lying in that soft bed of grass in Ithilien after his torturous trek through the pits of Mordor. In some ways, I'm reminded very much of the feelings that the Lord of the Rings stirred up in me at my first reading. It was a sweet melancholia, and in some ways I didn't want the tale to end. With Island of the World the pain was much sharper. It's realism pierced like a sword. Here was not a myth but a man, and I grew up with him, from the age of 8 or 9 until his late 70's, through love and sorrow, pain and poetry; the span of his life and experiences is massive and deeply moving. O'Brien's craft is growing more tender with the years. His characters seem to palpitate, their heartbeats pound right off of the page as they move through the world, taste and dance and sing and suffer. I suffered right along with them, and these wounds will be with me, I think, for some time. Reading this book was like open-heart surgery, and I didn't even realize I needed this operation! But the wound revealed is what St. John of the Cross called the Wound of Love. This book preaches without preaching our need for the tonic of forgiveness.

Wow.... I can't say more but to suggest committing to the work of reading this novel. And pack tissues... yeah, lots of 'em.... and you'll throw the thing down a couple of times too, by the way. It's crazy.... a crazy powerful tale of rapturous beauty rapt in frail mortality.

Peter Kreeft, one of my all time favorite authors had this to say about Island of the World.

"You will not want to put this book down until you finish it, and you will continue to live in it even after you close its covers. This story will change you. It will make you a wiser, better person. Is there any greater, rarer success we can hope for in a mere book than that?"
- Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., Boston College. Author, The Philosophy of Tolkien

Write up from O'Brien's website:
"Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium. The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces that resist them—the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and Communist Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the young and the innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only remaining strength is their religious faith and their families... Ultimately this novel is about the crucifixion of a soul—and resurrection."
- from O'Brien's website

WILD MAN

Yesterday the Church remembered and celebrated the birth of St. John the Baptist, who was crazy.

He lived in the desert, which is a sweltering stretch of HOT SAND and SCORPIONS with little water and lots of wild animals, in addition to the scorpions. He had a huge, ZZ Top, bird's nest of a beard. He ate bugs and wore camel hair, which I imagine was a wee bit abrasive on the flesh. St. John the Baptist was a wild man. He was crazy.

And yet, people flocked to him. Beyond those exterior and eccentric markings, there must have been a deep well of peace, and a truly magnetic personality. What else could have drawn not only the carnival curious but the learned, the leadership, the local government, heck, everybody living in an enemy-occupied land and longing for the freedom that this crazy man seemed to be swimming in down by the Jordan?

Something must have shone through those ragged clothes, that behemoth beard. Some fire burned out from his spirit that illumined every act and action of this wild man of southern Palestine. They say "clothes make the man." But the man also makes the clothes. The body of the Baptist, like our bodies, was the outward sign of the invisible reality of his person. It's like a sacrament; well, it is a sacrament. The body is the first marriage made by God of the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, and we perceive and encounter spiritual realities through the physical sign of the flesh. Wow.

So what is this wild man saying with his body? What truth is revealed in and through the radical posture of his personality?

A Totally Intentional Digression...

I was in Manhattan last Saturday giving a talk to engaged couples on the Theology of the Body. At the end of the day we discovered that there was a ton of leftovers from lunch. Probably 100 little sandwiches, chips, soda. So we loaded up the car and drove up to the Bronx to drop off the food at the Franciscan Friars house, knowing the boys in the hoods would know plenty of hungry bellies to fill. I drove through an amazing microcosm of humanity on the way to the Bronx; faces from all over the world, clustered together, crammed into row homes, bustling through the streets, music from three continents playing from windowsills and cars and little corner shops. When the door of Our Lady of the Angels Friary opened, I kid you not, the scent of incense poured out and over me like a river, like the odor of sanctity! The Holy One was in the heart of the city. Isn't He always at the heart of things?

A young friar named Brother Joachim greeted me in bare feet, gray robe, a huge ZZ Top bird's nest of a beard, and a smile that said peace in the midst of all the noise and haste. We brought the boxes of sandwiches into the friary and set them on a massive wooden table in the dining room, beneath a beautiful crucifix and shelves of books. The exchange was simple and then I was on the road, heading back to Philly, left thinking of the Wild Men that lived in that wilderness of concrete and glass and noise, and of the Wild Women, living in cloisters and convents, serving the poor, taking radical vows of poverty and chastity and obedience in the midst of a culture too often bent on amassing wealth, indulging lust, and breaking the rules whenever the rules try to break us.

What are these Wild Ones saying in and through their bodies for the Church and the world at large? Some thoughts....

THE BEARD: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. A crazy beard says I am not consumed with how polished I look, I am consumed by the Mystery of the Living God.
THE BARE FEET: Feel the earth, walk in simplicity, suffer the chill and the heat, and remember from whence you came. Thanks St. Francis!
THE ROBE: It's penitential, it's poverty, it's simplicity (and it has cool pockets in the sleeves)
THE ROPE: Wild men and women are bound to the Heart of God with three promises of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the rope holds three knots to remind them of this every day.
THE SUFFERING: The radical life of the Wild Ones brings many disparaging looks. Why are they so different? Why are they giving their lives to what can't be seen or touched? (so they think). And hasn't the experiment of Christianity been tried and failed? In the words of G.K. Chesterton, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found too difficult and not tried."

Thank God for the Wild Men and Women of the Church! May they continue to be a sign of contradiction for us all, a sign pointing to Something More beyond the circles of this world! They inspire and encourage us all to be that voice crying out in the wilderness "Prepare the Way of the Lord!"

Tonight's Show: Serra Club and Vocations

Spirit of Serra from Serra Boston on Vimeo. My guests tonight on the Heart of Things radio show are Bill Taylor and Gene Boggia, members of the leadership team of the Serra Club, an international organization dedicated to fostering, affirming and promoting vocations to priestly and religious ministry in the Catholic Church. The Serra Club's Objectives & Purposes are: - to foster and promote vocations to the ministerial priesthood in the Catholic Church as a particular vocation to service, and to support priests in their sacred ministry; - To encourage and affirm vocations to consecrated religious life in the Catholic Church; and - To assist its members to recognize and respond in their own lives to God's call to holiness in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

Cosmo or the Cosmos?

Think for a moment of all of the seeds of human knowledge that have been poured out into our hands; thoughts that have filled whole libraries can now be accessed through our cell-phones. All the yearnings of the human heart, the unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the human mind is just a click away. And yet, so often it seems, we shy from these depths, and stick to the shallows. We avoid Thoreau’s advice to “Read not the Times, but the Eternities.” We’d rather flip through Cosmo than gaze in wonder at the cosmos. For some reason, the staggering achievements and absolute wonders of technology achieved in the last few years have not drawn our hearts into deeper truths, but left us numb in mind and heart. We’re not just couch potatoes, glued to the tube, but pew potatoes, hearing the fire of the gospel at church on Sunday and barely catching a spark. Our depth perception is off.

Deep down I think we know this. We know that an authentic human life is one that steps into those shallows in order to launch out into deeper discussions, richer thoughts, into mysteries as infinite as the sky. Into the questions of our origins, our history, our destiny.

One step beyond mediocrity and we are saved.
- Unknown

Let Go, Let God and Woohoo! When You Do

I'm back at Black Rock Retreat Center in Lancaster County, PA for
another amazing week of prayer and study on Pope JPII's Theology of
the Body (for the previous post, search this blog for Black Rock; it's
an August post of last year... For more on the TOB, just click the tag
on the right side o' the blog).

One of the highlights of this week of intense theological study and
discussion is the trip to the 300 foot water slide on the retreat
center's grounds. Sounds random, right? What's a 300 foot water slide
got to do with God's original plan for creating us male and female and
calling us to love, our fall into fear, shame, and sin, then His
coming into the world in the flesh to redeem us and make us one again
with Him in the Body of Christ? Well, uh... everything!

The slide is buried like a hidden treasure in the deep woods, and
spills into the tea brown waters of Lake (a generous term) Hiawatha (a
Native American term). Man, it's awesome.

After two days of rigorous reflection and a challenging invitation to
trust and walk ever more deeply into the gospel call to selfless
surrender and love, we are invited to leap quite literally into the
deep! To let go and let God take us into the deep waters of mercy!
What an exhilarating journey past the shallows, past the lies of the
culture about what it means to be human, and into beauty. Into a
dignity and a reverence for life and creation that brings real joy!
But it takes a letting go. A surrender to this new gravitational pull
of Grace. And we must abandon the old orbits around old habits, and
take our hands off of the weathered, worn, wooden handles of our life
and feel the rush into a divine life! To dive into our destiny, which
St. Peter said is a "share in the divine nature"! When St. Irenaeus
jumped onto the water slide of grace in the second century, he too
cried out with joy ("woohoo" in the ancient Greek) with words that
sing: "The glory of God is man fully alive!"

To Sea is to Believe

It's day three of our little Cape May getaway; the weather is
gorgeous, the beaches have alien creatures on them, and this morning I
watched dolphins leaping around in the surf just 20 yards off the
shore. Holy squid, that was beautiful! A nice little gift from the
sea, since I was robbed of the sunrise due to cloud cover. It was a
big red yoke in the high heavens by the time it broke through. But
there's always something to see by the sea for the early risers;

1. My aforementioned friend, the horseshoe crab above
2. Birds piercing air and water like needles through an unseen cloth
3. A young surfer catching waves at 5:30am (that's dedication... or
insanity)
4. Other beechcombers like meself, zigzaging the waterline like
sandpipers, looking for glossy treasures the sea tosses up and then
drags back again into her frothy curls

What a wonder. The sea giveth and the sea taketh away. And what can we
do but sit at the salty hem of her dress like kids and listen to her
stories? Just sit and stare at this Lady of Water, so deep, so
ancient, so full of power and mystery and life, and death. She has a
mystic music too; a secret song that the elves could not forget, that
Adam could not name and therefore not hold dominion over... But Eve
and her daughters know the music - they hold it within them.

Water is the womb of worlds. And from water we all have come. And
through water we all must pass again, if we want to enter into Life.

"Put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of
the New Evangelization."

- Pope John Paul II