The Master Has Need of It

During the reading of the Gospel at the Procession from today's Palm Sunday mass, I was thinking of the passage about the untying of the colt. The owners of the colt ask the disciples why they are untying the colt, and Jesus has already told the disciples to respond, "The Master has need of it" (Luke 19:34). This line struck me as a wonderful reminder of how Jesus calls each of us to serve Him in small, unnoticed ways, because He has need of us to do so. Just as He rode the colt in His triumphant procession into Jerusalem, we, too, can be instruments for the Lord to carry out His work in humble ways. Sometimes we are tempted to say that we are not important, or that we have no purpose. However, Jesus tells us that the this is not true. Jesus chose that colt for that occasion. This Holy Week, let us humbly submit to the Lord, serving Him in whatever way He asks, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant, knowing that the task He selects for us is meant to move us closer to eternal life with Him. Let us trust Jesus when He tells us that He has need of us.

Some Thoughts on Fasting

I don't like fasting. I'm of Italian heritage, and we like our food. This Lent I'm trying to fast on Fridays by skipping lunch. I have had some difficulty doing this. Last week I gave in and add some food (still not a whole lunch, but not what I had planned). Today I made it, with some help from the wisdom of others.

Fr. Mark, a Benedictine monk from the Tulsa, OK diocese has a wonderful blog, Vultus Christi. In his entry from February 23, he says that each Lent he chooses a saint (or actually, he asks the Lord each to choose a saint for him) to be his companion for the season. I thought that was an excellent idea. I am trying to walk with St. John of the Cross this Lent. Currently, I am reading his Sayings of Light and Love. Here are a couple of passages that are relevant for fasting:

If you make use of your reason, you are like one who eats substantial food; but if you are moved by the satisfaction of your will, you are like one who eats insipid fruit. (#46)

This way of life contains very little business and bustling, and demands mortification of the will more than knowledge. (#58)

Feed not your spirit on anything but God. Cast off concern about things, and bear peace and recollection in your heart. (#81)

I also thought about Philippians 3:19. Speaking of "enemies of the cross of Christ":

Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame.

Finally, I started taking a course in moral theology last night, and we discussed values. I thought to myself today, which do I value more, my God or my stomach?

When I am weak, I try to remember that I cannot do this (or any other thing) on my own. I need God's strength. I think of Habakkuk 1:11:

...guilty men whose own might is their god!

And so I will continue to try to learn the lessons of fasting, which Christian tradition highly values as a path towards God.

On the Prophets

I was reading Habakkuk, one of the "minor" prophets, over the last couple of days. It got me thinking about prophets and what they do.

Prophets listen to God

Samuel says to God, ""Speak, for thy servant hears" (1 Samuel 3:10). Prophets are people who are open to God's call. They live lives of prayer. They listen for the still, small voice (such as Elijah in 1 Kings 19:11-12). Sometimes they are reluctant to accept the call (such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Jonah). But ultimately, they submit to God's will for them so they can be His instruments.

Prophets tell truth to power

This is why the prophets endured suffering and death. "Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?" (Acts 7:52). "Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed" (Luke 11:47). One can understand the reluctance of prophets when receiving their call, because they knew that telling powerful people they are doing wrong is never popular. John the Baptist lost his head over telling Herod that his marriage was contrary to divine law. Jeremiah calls himself "a man of strife and contention to the whole land" (Jeremiah 15:10). This is not surprising, since God tells Jeremiah:

You shall say, "Hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon this place that the ears of every one who hears of it will tingle" (Jeremiah 19:3).

Leaders of any kind don't like to hear things like this. But God often has hard truths to tell us.

Prophets call the people to conversion

The powerful are not the only ones asked to change. Jonah's message to the people of Nineveh causes them to repentance from the king on down. On Ash Wednesday we hear from the prophet Joel:

"Yet even now," says the Lord, "return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments." Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil. (Joel 2:12-13)

Hosea, who uses spousal imagery to describe the covenantal relationship between God and His people, calls the people of Judah to conversion:

I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress they seek me, saying, "Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up." (Hosea 5:15-6:1)

When Judah's love proves false, God says, "I have hewn them by the prophets" (Hosea 6:5). The way a lumberjack would cut down a tree, the prophets cut down our defenses, our rationalizations, our self-deceptions. All falsehood falls before the prophets' words of truth.

Prophets know who is in charge

They do this through prayer: "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). They come to know that they are prophets because of God, not because of themselves, in contrast to "guilty men, whose own might is their god" (Habakkuk 1:11).

Prophets are faithful

Despite the difficulty of their missions, they persevere. Even Jonah, who fights God every step of the way, fulfills his mission. Their faithful witness is an example to a faithless people.

All the baptized are called to be prophets

We often think of prophets as "other people," in the same way that we too often think of saints. We think that these are people we can never aspire to be. However, such a view is an abdication of our baptismal heritage. In Lumen Gentium from the Second Vatican Council, we are reminded that

...all the faithful, that is, who by Baptism are incorporated into Christ, are constituted the people of God, who have been made sharers in their own way in the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ and play their part in carrying out the mission of the whole Christian people in the church and in the world. (31)

The prophets who came before us are our examples. God the Father Who gave us His Son is our love. Christ Who died for our salvation is our strength. The Holy Spirit who inspires us is our wisdom. We are called to be prophets. The key is to pray, listen, and follow.

Mother of Prophets

One of the titles of Mary in the Litany of Loretto is "Mother of Prophets." As the litany goes, "Mother of Prophets, pray for us."

Winter Thoughts of God

We have had two snow storms in a week, with a third on its way tonight. Last night as I was praying through lectio divina, I came upon this passage in Isaiah:

Yes, as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide see for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do. (Isaiah 55: 10-11)

There is also a passage from Daniel that is applicable to these dreary winter days:

Cold and heat! bless the Lord:
give glory and eternal praise to him.
Dews and sleet! bless the Lord:
give glory and eternal praise to him.
Frost and cold! bless the Lord:
give glory and eternal praise to him.
Ice and snow! bless the Lord:
give glory and eternal praise to him.
(Daniel 3:67-70)

Finally, I was thinking of the opening to Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God:

That in the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the providence and power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul. That this view had perfectly set him loose from the world, and kindled in him such a love for God that he could not tell whether it had increased during the more than forty years he had lived since. (p. 15)

What I like so much about these passages is that they help us to keep in mind that the natural world can point us towards the supernatural world. Creation can orient our vision towards the Creator. The unpleasantness of winter can be transformed into a penitential experience: we can offer up our frustrations (such as waiting in traffic when it snows) and our discomforts (such as the bitter cold winds). The bare trees can make us think of the coming spring, which can enhance our Lenten preparation for Easter. As Brother Lawrence points out, God is watching out for us. Let us watch for God, in the falling snow, in the hanging icicles, in the wind that blows where it will.

Swindle and Salvation

I'm reading through Anne Rice's novel, Angel Time. I came across this sentence that I thought was quite apt: "People swindle themselves out of Salvation with great regularity" (p. 58). How true. We've been doing it since Adam and Eve. The sad and troubling part of free will is that no one else but ourselves can swindle us out of salvation. We like to blame others (we've been doing that too since Adam and Eve) rather than accept responsibility for our own actions. Salvation is a gift that we either accept graciously or throw back in God's face. Fortunately, God gives us many opportunities to accept that gift. But we do not have an unlimited number of opportunities to accept that gift. So often we harden our hearts. Or else we become so distracted in our daily lives, that we simply overlook the gift. We are our own worst con men and women. May God's penetrating love turn our stony hearts into natural ones, and may we accept His gift of salvation which came at such a dear price.

Here Am I

Today I went to the archdiocesan seminary in our neighborhood for Eucharistic adoration. While there, I thought of a passage I have been meditating on for the past few days:

I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, "Here am I, here am I," to a nation that did not call on my name. (Isaiah 65:1)

I thought about how Jesus substantially resides in the Eucharist, calling us, waiting for us, and how often we are deaf to that call, or ignore it. I thought, "How crazy is it that the God of the Universe is in that box up there? And yet, there He is."

After leaving the seminary chapel, I remembered a winter's scene from years ago when I was in graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I was an atheist then, so very far from God. And yet, somehow, I felt drawn toward what I did not understand. It was a cold evening, and snow had begun to fall. It was falling hard and accumulating fast. Around 11:00 PM I went for a walk on campus to enjoy the scene. Students were out, playing in the snow like children. I walked past where the students were and went to the chapel. I heard organ music being played inside. The organist did not seem to be playing hymns, but rather classical music (although it may have been sacred music composed by the likes of Bach, for all I knew). I stood on the portico, outside the front doors to the chapel. With a roof over my head, I was dry, but I still felt the fresh, cool weather, and I stood and soaked in the music as I watched the peaceful, falling snow. It was such a beautiful experience.

Looking back, I see it as the still, small voice calling to me. As the remnants of my shattered conscience calling to me. As the Holy Spirit, still there from my baptism and my confirmation, calling to me. And yet, all I could do was stand there outside the doors, unwilling to go in, unable to understand why I was there, and what that meant. However, God gave me the snow; God gave me the peace, as signs, as tokens. These were some of the bread crumbs that God left for me to lead me home. Fortunately, Satan, unlike Hansel and Gretel's hungry birds, could not take these crumbs away to keep me off the path that God was leading me on.

This memory coincides well with a book I am reading. I've started reading Anne Rice's novel, Angel Time. It is about an assassin who grew up Catholic but lost his faith. The description of this character resonates deeply with who I was once (without the assassin part). Here is a passage, where the narrator walks into the Serra Chapel at the San Juan Capistrano mission in California:

I loved the red sanctuary light burning to the left of the tabernacle. Sometimes I knelt right up there before the altar on one of the prie-dieux obviously intended for a bride and a groom.

Of course the golden retablo, or reredos, as it's often called, hadn't been there in the days of the early Franciscans. It had come later, during the restoration, but the chapel itself seemed to me to be very real. The Blessed Sacrament was in it. And the Blessed Sacrament, no matter what I believed, meant "real."

How can I explain this?

I always knelt in the semidarkness for a very long time, and I'd always light a candle before I left, though for whom or what I couldn't have said. Maybe I whispered, "This is in memory of you, Jacob, and you, Emily." But it wasn't a prayer. I didn't believe in prayer any more than I believed in actual memory.

I craved rituals and monuments, and maps of meaning. (p.7)

Like Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," God seeks us even when we are not being sought. He is always here, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we believe it or not.

One of the ways in which He moves us to seek Him is through these impulses that are knit into our deepest selves that we do not understand. We crave rituals and meaning, and this craving leads us to God. If we are lapsed Catholics, then this sense of ritual and meaning has at least been somewhat nurtured in us. As Rice elaborates a couple of pages later:

Maybe when you're brought up Catholic, you hold to rituals all your life. You live in a theater of the mind because you can't get out of it. You're gripped all your life by a span of two thousand years because you grew up being conscious of belonging to that span. (p. 9)

I have always referred to what tugged at me during my apostasy as "ritual and repetition." I used to say "I believe in belief" even when I could not believe in God. Rice is doing a good job of laying out that dynamic interplay of belief and unbelief. "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24).

Writing Our Own Prayers

Sometimes we may feel that the only prayers worth praying are one written by other people. We certainly should feed on the treasury of prayer that has developed over the centuries by people who have diligently pursued closeness to God. The Psalms have been such a treasury for both Jewish and Christian believers for millennia. The Lord's Prayer has a special place, of course, because it came from the lips of Jesus. The Hail Mary is the foundational prayer of the Rosary. Prayers by such saints as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Patrick, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, St. Teresa of Avila, and others can be tremendous helps to guide our thoughts towards God and deepen our relationship with and understanding of Him.

However, it is important that we learn to pray from our own hearts as well, to speak to God in our own words and through our own thoughts and feelings. We can even write our own prayers that we can pray again and again. Without any prompting, my daughter has written two prayers of her own in the last couple of days.

While the grammar and theology of these prayers may not always be precise (it is of course not possible for us to love God as much as He loves us), they are beautiful expressions of love for God.




Here is the translation into standard English:

God's Praying Prayer

Lord, let us praise you from our hearts. We love you as much as you love us. We promise to bow before you and worship you. I will show you love in the name of my heart. My family will praise you and so will I. Amen.

The Holy Prayer

Store up your minds with all your love. We will worship you as the holy king of heaven. I love you as Mary, your mother loved you. Your father God has been a friend to all people and so have you. We thank you for all your help and teaching. Amen.

My daughter is teaching me a great deal about a contemplative life saturated with the presence of God. Hopefully, I can store up my mind with such love.