What’s a Saint Look Like, Really?

This week’s Mission Moment comes from Leon Bloy, a French intellectual from the nineteenth century. He said “There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.”

Wow. A tragedy… not to be a saint? I mean, wouldn’t it be more realistic to say, what a shame, or a pity, or wouldn’t it have been “nice” if, in the end, people thought I was saintly? Tragedy sounds a little too… dramatic, right? We are surrounded by what many call tragedies these days; they are accidents that take young lives, crimes that take away our sense of safety, tsunamis, earthquakes, genocide. This thought, that in the end the only tragedy is not becoming a saint, this shifts our entire way of thinking, our entire view of the universe. It sets up a hierarchy whose peak reaches beyond our earthly lives and into eternity itself, reminding us that in the end, there is something more tragic than the loss of home or property or even our very waking and breathing here below; the loss of Heaven.

St. Stanislaus Kostka once said “I am destined for greater things. I want eternity.” This is what Mousiuer Bloy is pointing us to. The loss of that robe of glory that we are called to be wrapped in; the danger that exists here and now is that we should ever trade it in for a cheap set of rags, this is what amounts to our deepest loss. Pope John Paul II said we should not be afraid to become the saints of the new millennium.

Now the next question is, what do we envision when we hear this word “saint?” Is it a stoic, cookie-cutter marble statue with hands clenched in prayer? Is it a person who is always “nice” and never has a beer or laughes out loud or watches goofy movies? Is it someone who is really uptight about keeping all of the rules? Or is a saint a person from whom a mysterious joy radiates like a summer sun in Avalon? Is the saint the one person you know who always leaves you feeling better, deeper, refreshed in the soul? Who draws others in, and cares to listen and learn about you because you are you and you are speaking to them? Is the saint a person who is so enraptured by the Mystery of God that it makes you blush? Are saints the crazy ones who believe life is pregnant with God’s life and that the victory of Truth is certain. If this is a glimmer of what sanctity really is, and it is, then it is indeed tragic not to join their company!

So let’s open wide to the mystery. What have we got to lose?

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Martha, Martha!

No, that wasn’t Cindy Brady yelling to her older sister. Today’s the Feast of St. Martha, sister to Mary and Lazarus of Bethany. This is a well known and oft quoted story from the gospels, and Pope John Paul II gave it some great press in his letter Novo Millennio Ineunte at the dawn of the new millenium (check it out here). The lesson we learn is crucial to a full life, because it captures and cures that seeming dichotomy we all experience between work and play and sets it right. The quick answer to which position is preferrable? We were made for play.

When Jesus comes to visit, Mary sits at his feet; wide-eyed, wonder-filled, doing nothing but gazing upon the Face of Jesus. She’s already in Paradise! The Bryan Adams song comes to mind, “And love is all that I need and I found it there in your heart. It isn’t too hard to see we’re in heaven” (gotta love that song). Martha on the other hand is worried, anxious; “Oh the timing stinks! What if he needs to use the bathroom, I have to clean it up. He must be hungry. I should get a meal ready. There’s dishes in the sink! I look like a mess! The house is a mess! Aaaaahhhhhhhh!” So Mary sits and Martha splits.

(A seeming digression) – Yesterday, a powerful storm blew through the Philadelphia region, sweeping in from the west, guns blazing with wild abandon. Thunder, lightning, sheets of rain. I love a summer storm. I raced home just in time to unplug the computer (aka “my precioussss”), shut the windows, and set myself down on our back porch: wide-eyed, wonder-filled, doing nothing but gazing upon the face of the storm. The rain beat upon our metal awning like the arrows of orcs, the wind whipped and sprayed through the trees and around houses and up alleyways, curling and lashing out at me in my little watchtower. Bright bombs of lighting split the sky, and my heart started bouncing around in my chest like a hackey sack in the middle of a bunch of teenagers. It was awesome.

I was planning on writing that afternoon, but the storm came to call. So I let go of an hour of “work” and gained a rich experience of “play” in its stead. There is so much more here to talk about, to reflect on. But the bottom line is this: our hearts are fitted more for contemplation than for keeping busy, for opening up and letting Guests in than for keeping them out until we’re “ready.” In a given day, how many guests come to call on us? Are we caught off guard? Why are we even on guard in the first place?

Summer storms are a reminder of our own smallness and utter lack of control. Stuff gets wet and thrown around. We lose electricity, we get “inconvenienced.” I think Our Lord likes to stir things up too; he likes to pop in unexpectedly, not to bother us but to be with us. That’s what lovers do, they surprise each other. Today let’s look for him, wide-eyed and wonder-filled in every encounter, and let’s let him look at us.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Oreos and Milk: A True Story

Yesterday I had the chance to catch up with a good friend, Fr. Peter, home from Rome, now serving as a young pastor of a small town parish in Nebraska. It’s a real small town, he says. A church, a bar and four streets. He says there are tumbleweeds sometimes too. In the course of our reminiscing at the Irish Coffee Shop in Darby (great scones!), I heard some riveting tales of the power and the pains of priesthood.

One of the tales Fr. Peter told yesterday was actually one he had heard from another friend, an elderly priest. This older priest told a story of one of his early moves into a new parish assignment back in 1976. At that time, he was newly ordained and hustling boxes up and down stairs late at night in the rectory. Looking for a quick break, he went into the kitchen and found a man around 50 years old or so, wearing a t-shirt, sitting at the kitchen table. He was eating oreos and drinking milk. He introduced himself as Karl, and began a pleasant conversation with the newly ordained. He asked him what it was like being a young priest, ministering to people, sharing their lives. What was it that people were looking for, what was their response to his own vocation and life of faith?

About a year or so later, this brother priest of Fr. Peter’s watched in amazement on the television when a Polish cardinal named Karol (aka ‘Karl’) Wojtyla was elected Pope! It was the oreo man, who was actually Cardinal Wojtyla on a visit to the US at the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia!

What a great image: the future Pope John Paul II, eating oreos in a t-shirt late at night, but always ready to encounter others, and to ask those fundamental questions about life that made him such an amazing priest, with such a gift for knowing hearts. I loved this story!

And tonight’s dessert? I’m having oreos and milk…

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Try This Today

This week’s Mission Moment was from Mister Rogers: “Love begins with listening.” If the man is right, and wasn’t he always right?…. then I have a feeling many of us are not in love these days. Many of us are not good listeners (oh, this is me, this is me!). We are all very good at asking the question “How are you?” (or how YOU doin’? for my Philly friends), but how many of us actually stay for the answer?

Love begins with listening; but lust, loves opposite, says listen to ME.

Love receives, lust takes. Love sees a gift in the other’s presence (no matter who they are), while lust grasps at the other for a selfish end. I speak of lust here at all levels, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Today, let’s try and listen to others, and by really listening come to love them. Let’s stay for the answer and enter into the other before us; loved ones, co-workers, cashiers, and strangers on the train. Even if it’s a simple smile, an acknowledgment of their humanity, let’s listen. Let’s look. There is a deep well of experiences and stories and hope and heartbreak in every human heart. If we listen, we can hear God moving over those waters. What a treasure each day can be if we try this new way of loving, this listening of the heart!

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

An Ancient Treasure found in Ireland

From the news today:

Irish archaeologists are celebrating the discovery of their own Dead Sea scrolls after a bulldozer unearthed fragments of a psalter that may have lain in a bog for more than 1,000 years. The book of psalms was found last Thursday when an engineer excavating bogland in the midlands noticed a bundle near his digger’s scoop. It turned out to be the animal skin pages of an early Christian psalter that appears to date back as far as AD800. One psalm – number 89 – was still legible.

Click here for the full story

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

By the Sea

Sometimes in our terrible rush towards those very important places or events or tasks we have to get to every day, we miss the wonder of the present moment. We know this. We all KNOW this… and we tell ourselves to slow down, and we say we will… soon. Because inside we know that when we slow down, we see more. When we walk rather than run, we notice things we didn’t notice before. We catch our breath and that feels soooo GOOD.

But there’s so much to do! I have to get all this “stuff” done! So we get up and start running, and in the midst of the 130 billion e-mails that are sent worldwide every day (I’m not making that one up!), we often fail to recognize, receive, and take in like rich dark soil, the one richest of Words that will really give us PEACE.

In the words of the late, great Pope John Paul II, we must learn to “chill out” (a loose translation from the Latin). We must learn to BE before giving in to so many temptations to DO; to rush, to run! I am writing this today, because I need to hear this myself. Today, I did hear the Word. It was in the gospel from today’s mass. I got zapped by the Incarnation; that historical moment when the God of the universe pulled back the blue veil of Heaven and took on our flesh, et Verbum caro factum est. He learned to walk, and he spoke Aramaic, and he sang songs, and he worked under the same hot sun that we do, and “looked up in wonder at the same moon.” The line that grabbed me was from Matthew 13: “On that day, Jesus went out of the house and sat down by the sea.”

That was it.

Whoa.

Jesus, the Eternal Son of the Father, sat down by the sea…. Jesus looked out on the very creation that tumbled forth from his own hands. He gazed upon that same movement of the waves that we love to lose ourselves in. He heard the cry of gulls that remind us of the great open expanse of the water, the womb of the world. Jesus sitting by the water, the sea that gushed right out from the Love in his heart, the Love that sang to Love in the very beginning when the world was newly made; he looked out upon it with human eyes.

I believe that in our hurried lives, we often miss Jesus, this Incarnate Word, who shared our very soil and air. He can sometimes slip past us like a stranger on the street. Or perhaps we tell ourselves he is too far away to even see at all down here; he sits on the 100th floor while we scurry about our business in the alleys below. It’s only afterwards, when we sense him, in grace, brushing past, that we are struck by the reality of the Incarnation, and we do the double-take… “Was that? Who? What the?”

The passage from Matthew continued, “Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd stood along the shore.” What a vision. The multitudes of humanity, the people coming to see him, standing there by the edge of the sea, and seeing him, in a boat, looking back at them… each of them, one by one. Looking at each other.

God has become one of us. He has entered in, and forever he has wed himself to a body. Divinity has married humanity! Let me sit here awhile and look out at this mystery! Let me allow the wave of this love and this mercy and this absolute gift wash over me, still my frantic soul, and cleanse me from all my busyness. Let me be rest by the sea for awhile with Jesus.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

I just read a heartbreaking story in the news of a young man who survived a massacre in Burundi, Central Africa. The link is here …. It’s a tribute to the power of grace and the healing that comes through forgiveness. An unbelievable story!

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

The Art of Wonder

We spent this past weekend with family in NY state, celebrating a birthday for one of the little ones (13 nieces and nephews on the Byrons side, and 2 more in utero!) Saturday morning, Rebecca and I went out for coffee and settled into a corner seat for a little caffienation. A small girl was guiding her father through the shop, over to a waterfall that streamed down a small stone wall. “Look” she kept saying. “Look!”

My wife whispered to me “when did we ever stop saying “Look!”? The question struck us both so deeply. So often, it seems, we rush through our days without a second thought for all the simple wonders around us. Thoreau once said “The millions are awake enough for physical labor… only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

If we allow ourselves moments of childlike simplicity, if we allow ourselves the time to simply “look”, what wonders will we see? Pope John Paul II said “We must open our eyes to admire God who hides and at the same time reveals himself in things and introduces us into the realms of mystery… we must be pure and simple like children, capable of admiring, being astonished, of marveling, and being enchanted by the divine gestures of love and closeness we witness.” It’s this wonder that can penetrate through the surface of things, and all the world and the people around us become in a very real way, “sacraments.” Each and every thing, in a certain sense, is a visible sign of an invisible reality. What a life of mysticism we are called to! To see in every stroke of color and texture in our lives the movement of a Masterful Hand!

Later that day took us to the family’s lake house in upstate NY. We love watching the many little encounters and discoveries the children make, in a place so simple, natural and wide open to sky and water. On an adventurous trek across the lake, via tubes, noodles and plain old fashioned swimming, a bunch of us explored “the island” – a tiny pine and blueberry choked oasis in the middle of the lake. We joked about being in an episode of Lost, found ourselves some sweet walking sticks (essential), and crammed blueberries in our mouths as we darted through the labyrinth of sweet smelling pine and mountain laurel. Then Daniel, my wife’s eldest brother said, “Look!”

High in an old pine tree, was the large shadowy shape of a bird. And I mean large. I’m a birder, and I love spending time seeking out new species and I rejoice just to catch the flash of an oriole or the crimson fire of a Scarlet Tanager. But this! This find was golden. It was an eagle! A juvenile bald eagle, 30 feet above our heads. We stood motionless in the bushes below and just stared up at him, each lost in our own thoughts for a time. What a moment of wonder. Across the lake, through the breaks in the trees, we could here the shrill cries of another eagle, and it’s ancient and unmistakable white head reflected in the water as it flew. Wow.

What wonders will we see if we simply “look”? What treasures await us out in the wilderness around us, and within us. Isn’t this the call of the gospel, to “come and see”? To leap, to launch out into the deep, to let go like children trusting our Father will catch us and carry us? Let’s not allow the summer to slip past without a renewed commitment to this wonder. May the God of Wonders rekindle in us a eucharistic amazement, and the joy of a new evangelization! For as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta said, “Joy is a net of love by which we catch souls.”

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

MASTERPIECE MONDAY #4

Many works of art can shake us deeply if we are still before their mystery, like lovers facing the sea. Henry O. Tanner’s Annunciation is one of these works of art. It’s hanging like a jewel on a wall in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and happens to be my wife’s favorite painting. Mary, painted as a quiet and tender young girl, sits in light-dappled robes at the corner of her humble bed. All about her speaks of earth; course fabrics woven with callous hands, hard stone fitted into a cold earthen floor, and walls cracked and veined by the passing of time. But across the room hovers the Timeless. An immortal spirit, Gabriel, Messenger of God, splits time and space in two and peers gently into Mary’s room, saluting her with a greeting that still echoes throughout the world, millions of times a day…. “Hail, full of Grace!” The Ambassador of Heaven is carrying a message, and the answer to it will split even earthly time in two.

The light of Gabriel’s presence pulsates on the canvas, casting a warm glow into the cool space of Mary’s dwelling. Like a heart beating, waiting for a word that can bring tears too deep for words. And we, the ones who look on with bated breath, can almost enter into this pregnant pause, this womb where the world will be remade. If we are still before the Mystery.

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

"I SOUGHT HIM WHOM MY HEART LOVES"

The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene was celebrated recently, and given the recent and growing amount of books, articles and internet sites that are seeking to reveal the mystery of the Magdalen, I’m excited to dive in and prayerfully reflect on what makes her beauty shine; she was such a faithful disciple and the first recorded to have seen the Risen Lord.

I’ll be going to the Scriptures for my thoughts, however, not a pseudo-history written 1980 years after her death, or a “historical” thriller novel that was historically a mess. (Oiy!) The Church has selected for this feast a powerful reading from the Song of Songs. The Bride is seeking her Beloved, and the ache in her heart in the searching is deeply stirring. We see her move through the city streets with a yearning for communion that echoes in our own hearts. For me this brings to mind an insight from G. K. Chesterton. “Our religion should be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” After all, this Songs of Songs is passionate and this love poetry is SCRIPTURE! God’s inspired word! (I love it, love it, love it!).

But how seldom do we see life this way? Do we see God as the Husband of our hearts, or as a cold Overseer, or a Grandpa who is always “nice”? Mary Magdalene saw life as a romance. She was passionate in her following of Christ, and passion led her to the Cross, and that same passion led her through early morning darkness to a desperate place, a darkened tomb. Let’s sit in silence with this one. Are we not called to such passion, such intimacy?

Novels like the DaVinci Code portray Mary Magdalene as a literal wife of Jesus. It’s a sad distraction from the Real Truth. Jesus came to seek a Bride, but that Bride is all of us, a lost Bride who has wandered the streets of sin and refused the gift of the Bridegroom for too long. Our hearts ache for his infinite and intimate love. All our loves here below are pale glimmers of this deeper intimacy, this selfless and self-giving love of God for us. What a wonder! And our passion and devotion for each other is meant to point us upwards to the True Love of Heaven! God is Love, and this love is beyond all telling! But still we must tell it! And to a world that seeks love in all the wrong places. We must know Him and listen to Him calling our names as He called out to Mary at the tomb. Then touched by such love, we too can run to the others and share the good news!

______________________________________

Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org