Take a Breath, Take a Break

I’m so busy.

I wish I had more time.

I’m stressed out.

It never ends.

There’s always something.

I need a break.

Then take one.

September is a crazy month, I know. It ushers in the busy season for many of us. School’s back in, buses are clogging up the morning streets again. Sports, lessons, homework, teaching, grading, running to those meetings that the summer kept at bay, holiday preparations, transitioning the house for the new season, for the coming cold.

But something else in September is present to counteract this hectic pace. Cold crisp air, burning blue skies, leaves afire, the mournful song of geese overhead, the scent of leaves, of wood-fires, sunsets that throb with color, and starry nights. These are invitations to stillness and to watching. And it only takes a moment to breathe them in, to slow down, to drink freely. Each of these encounters has power in them, because they are natural. And Nature is seldom in a hurry.

I was walking to the parking lot after a long and busy day, with the prospects of a long night of grading and planning ahead of me, when I saw this single leaf in a tree on a patch of grass at the corner of the road. I looked at it. I took a deep breath. And behold, it was good.

Let nothing trouble you, let nothing make you afraid. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains everything. God alone is enough.

– Saint Teresa of Avila

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

A Sacred Space – Mary Immaculate Center

From the fall of 1996 to the spring of 1997, I had the absolute grace of spending a year on retreat, high on a hill of over 400 acres of field and forest overlooking the Lehigh Valley. Along with my class and other seminarians from NJ and NY, we were invited “into the deep” of our walk with God; an unprecedented opportunity for silence and reflection, and the time to probe into the mysterious call to priesthood. It was called the “Spirituality Year” and was part of the seminary formation for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

It was a defining year for me, and helped so much in my discernment of God’s will for my life. Looking back now as a husband and father, I can see how the moments of quiet and prayer that called me into the seminary in 1993, were now preparing me for the unexpected turn away from a call to priesthood. Men come and go in this discernment, and in my mind it is always a win/win situation. You ask the question head on, you “taste and see,” and you grow from the experience, no matter how the end of that discernment spells itself out. To this day, I feed on the formation and the spirit of my time at Mary Immaculate, and St. Charles in Overbrook.

Just a month ago, I heard that Mary Immaculate Center, that place of deep peace and prayer, was closing its doors. The land and all the structures on it, including an incredible chapel built in the 1930’s, is up for sale. Needless to say when I read about this transition, it hurt.

Thoreau once said “We need the tonic of wildness… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

I could say the same for the acres of wildness at Northampton, without, in the corn and bean fields and dark woods below the hill, and within, in the shadowy stillness of the chapel in the wee hours of the morning, when only the sanctuary lamp flickered. I could almost hear the Divine Heart beating with an unfathomable love for me.

Last month I called a friend, a classmate who experienced the year with me, and who also felt the call out of the seminary. We came home again to Mary Immaculate, and with me was my wife and baby boy. We spent hours taking pictures and walking the halls, while a heavy rain fell outside and soaked the fields and the trees. The video above is my thanks for the time that I was given at Mary Immaculate. Please pray that it remains somehow untouched, in good hands. In the heart of the Church. We need this “out of the way place,” this wilderness for the body and the soul, lest we forget who we are and where we are going.

The most generous choices, especially the persevering, are the fruit of profound and prolonged union with God in prayerful silence.
– Pope John Paul II

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

Peace Out

“Maintain a spirit of peace and you will save a thousand souls.”
– St. Seraphim

We just finished a week’s vacation in Maine with the family “from the north” – my dad, brother, wife, and two little ones. My brother Sean manages a summer camp “up they’ah” and he took us all on a little pleasure cruise last night. We slipped over the glassy surface of Washington Pond, just as the sun was tipping his hat to the day on the western rim of the world, in a pontoon boat. It was recently “kitted out” with new carpet and new cooshy seats, each equipped with a snazzy drink holder. In essence, it’s like taking your living room out for a drive (or float I should say).

Our little guy is just 11 months old now (we can’t believe it), and Sean and Amy’s little ones are each under 5. Needless to say, the down time for us adults is few and far between. It comes in dribs and drabs, like scattered coins that we’re quick to pick up. Last night’s cruise, brief as it was, came like a shower of gold.

The kids were strapped, secured, and seated, and under the watchful eyes of five adults. So for a few moments, slipping out across the cool water, we each in our turns could let the mind wander….

Water lapping up on the hull.
Wind over the face.
Dark pines on the edge of the water.
Sunshine peeking through the trees. Sunshine pouring honey on the
lake’s skyward gaze.
A loon in the distance.

The face of my father looking out and up as he held the throttle that muttered bubbly commands to the engine below. And on the deck, quiet submission. For just seconds at a time, a quiet surrender to the peace of the moment.

Then words. Then a laugh or a thought. Then stillness again, and a loving glance at Reality. I heard Rebecca say to our little niece, “Nature is God’s book for us to read.”

The dance of light on the surface. The cool evening breeze. The clear sky turning deep blue and orange at its edges.

Isn’t this what all our work is for? Aren’t these quiet movements of the body and soul through the world the moments we treasure? This stillness. This pause. This breathing pace. Not long. Not belabored. They come fast through the dark fields of our space like the Perseids and then they are gone. But the memory stays. The flash, the awe, the wonder of the thing leaves its indelible mark on the soul. And if we’re still, open, listening, these fleeting seconds, I believe, can change us. Strengthen us.

In the flurry of our work in the “real world” these moments of peace can keep us afloat.

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

I Love This Nun

I’m sure you’ve had times in your life when you stumbled onto something great, something refreshing, amazing, ennobling, uplifting; something even today you keep going back to for solace or inspiration…. and you don’t even remember how you found it in the first place.

One of those treasures for me is Alba’s Pizza in Browns Mills, NJ. Just kidding. It’s the poems of Jessica Powers, aka Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit. Give yourself a coffee break and soak your weary soul in this one. This is what it’s all about! This is why we are here, why we exist! Our souls like mirrors are made to reflect the One, the Only, the Love that shaped the universe. Here’s my objective for the day…. reflection, reflection, reflection…. Enjoy…

The Pool of God

There was nothing in the Virgin’s soul

that belonged to the Virgin –

no word, no thought, no image, no intent.

She was a pure, transparent pool reflecting

God, only God.


She held His burnished day; she held His night

of planet-glow or shade inscrutable.

God was her sky and she who mirrored Him

became His firmament.



When I so much as turn my thoughts toward her

my spirit is enisled in her repose.

And when I gaze into her selfless depths

an anguish in me grows

to hold such blueness and to hold such fire.


I pray to hollow out my earth and be 

filled with these waters of transparency.

I think that one could die of this desire,

seeing oneself dry earth or stubborn sod.


Oh, to become a pure pool like the Virgin,

water that lost the semblances of water

and was a sky like God.

– Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers)

______________________________
The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers

ICS Publications 2131 Lincoln Road, NE Washington, DC 20002-1199

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

The Catholic Vote

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

Love Your Enemies

I remember vividly this day 7 years ago. I remember who first told me about a plane hitting a building, then another. I watched in disbelief as the TV screen showed that mighty tower slide down and diffuse itself and hundreds of souls into dust and ash through the streets of New York.

I remember the smallest details, the emotion, room I was in, the bright blue of the sky that day, the turns on Lincoln Drive as I sped along to get to Rebecca at Mount St. Joseph’s. That was the only thought. Find loved ones, be safe. I remember making scattered phone calls, then calls not getting through. Everyone scared, blank expressions, whispers… “What is happening?”

Then prayers welling up, pews filling up and overflowing; the tenderness of people’s words, the slower pace we gave our steps, and how that lasted for a time. Then another thing crept into the place of silent shock; anger, bitterness, and a searching gaze into the world to see who would “pay” for this.

By coincidence, or Providence, you can decide, the gospel for today in the three year cycle that the Church planned long ago happens to speak of love for our enemies. “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you… turn the other cheek.” Jesus uses a dramatic rabbinic method of teaching here to wake up his listeners. We’ve heard this a thousand times, but how should we on this day of remembered terror and attack respond? When these words filter through our emotions and trickle down to the sanctuary of the soul, what are we led to do?

Ultimately, forgive. And another thought came to many even on the day of September 11, 2001. Self-reflection…

Why us? Though the nature of these horrific acts is rooted in chaos, something sparked this madness. Perhaps it should drive us into a deep collective examination of conscience as a people. How does the world see us? What good have we done that has merited this action? What good have we failed to do that has drawn such anger and destruction? Are we stewards and allies or have we grown fat on our riches and bullies in the eyes of other nations? It seems to me that we have both weeds and wheat growing in our amber waves of grain. A day like September 11 is a day to walk through these fields and ponder these questions, wrap them in bundles of prayer, and turn them over to the Harvest Master Who knows our hearts better than anyone.

I’ll close with a few lines from David Wilcox’s poignant 9-11 song “City of Dreams.” It’s on iTunes and well worth a listen today. I pray we can make it’s closing thought a reality.

All the flags on front porches

And the banners of unity

Spanning the bridges

From the top of the fence

As we heal up the wounds

And take care of each other

There’s more love in this nation

Than hate and revenge…

– David Wilcox

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

Don’t Just Do Something! Sit There!

“Run, run, run” said the automobile, and we ran. “Run for your life. Take to your heels…. Foolish school of fish on wheels…”
– James Taylor

Hmm. I am guilty of this. I move too fast, even in the summa’time! I get up early, my mind swimming through a swarm of ideas. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, I “live too fast just as we eat too fast and do not savor the true taste of food.“ I am often awakened to the fact that I don’t make enough time for prayer. Real prayer; the real crying out to God and opening up to God that makes us look like little birds in a big nest, wide mouthed and waiting for Him to feed us. I keep picking at the nest, milling around for scraps. My saving grace and the fuel for my soul is daily Mass (which I missed this morning, dang it). There’s the most real prayer of all, the Perfect Prayer, as the saints and mystics tell us. They also say that all of life should be either a preparation for or a thanksgiving after Holy Mass. That’s where Life becomes a rhythm around the Song of the Lord’s Supper, a ring around the altar.

Fr. Paul Dressler (stationed in Rome for studies, and boy is he missed by the Philly crowd!) once said in a talk that when he was young he’d hear that famous phrase “Don’t just sit there, do something!” But when it comes to Grace, it’s best to flip that phrase around. “Don’t just do something! Sit there!”

St. Dominic used to say (back when Latin was cool, and I think it still is):
“Contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere.”
Contemplate and hand on to others the fruit of your contemplation.

Imagine if that well of prayer and meditation was the source and step from which we launched into every thought, word, and action of the day? Whoa, what a world it would be.

EXODUS, STAGE RIGHT
Moses answered the people, “Fear not! Stand your ground, and you will see the victory the LORD will win for you today. These Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again. The LORD himself will fight for you; you have only to keep still.”

The answer God gives through Moses to these poor, unarmed, homeless, afraid People who are under attack is:

“Stand still!” Be Still… and Know that I am God. From the perspective of the world, this is INSANE. Imagine the initial reactions of the Israelites! Moses, what have you been smoking? And can we have some. All hell is breaking loose, the Egyptians are about to wash over us like a tidal wave, and you say…. Stand still?

I love this. I stink at this, but I love this.

This is our entrance into ABSOLUTE TRUST – into the Mystery of God and His Power – our entry into Eucharistic Adoration!

In the midst of our crazy culture, the Church says to us: Stand still! Now, some think that Eucharistic Adoration is akin to “doing nothing.” I once met a priest (a priest God help us) who called Adoration “bread watching”… UGH. Does he believe in the Real Presence?

Moses reminded the Israelites that there was Another Presence with them, besides the rumbling charioteers who were about to mow them down. God was with them! And they needed to see Him, own their relationship with Him, BE with Him.

TO ENTER INTO THIS EUCHARISTIC MYSTERY, WE MUST LEARN TO STAND STILL….
– to calm down and see things for what they are
– to let God be God
– to hear his Voice like Elijah in the cave

This is how we enter into His Stillness. This is how we enter Eucharistic Adoration. Our culture is nuts! There are 130 billion e-mail messages transmitted worldwide every day. We can’t sit still. We need detox. We need to enter the White-Hot Furnace of Silence. But let’s understand what this therapy of silence means. We don’t mean silence as a vacuum, just the absence of sound… Silence is not an absence but a presence, your presence of mind & heart to Life and God and creation! My favorite quote from Scripture may well be Isaiah 30:15….. By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies.

We are living in a world that is starving for TRUE LOVE, and Love is tasted in silence, like a cool stream seeping into the heart through the eyes and ears. Love is an interior gaze. We MUST enter into this Mystery, give witness to the Real Love of the Eucharist through this silent, still gaze.

The presence of Jesus in the tabernacle must be a kind of magnetic pole attracting an ever greater number of souls enamoured of him, ready to wait patiently to hear his voice and, as it were, to sense the beating of his heart. “O taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps 34:8).
– Pope John Paul II, Mane Nobiscum Domine

Amen.

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

New Year’s Resolution #4 – Letting Go

Letting go of things is never easy.
Letting go of our addictions is never, ever, easy…

Even when they are burning hot Rings of Doom, made by the Enemy, emblazoned with the fiery script of the Black Speech of Mordor, and pretty much telling us in so many words that they are in fact Evil, we are loathe to part with our precioussss “fill in the blank.”

We cling so often to what we know is not good for us, to what we know in our minds and hearts is unhealthy for us. We wantsss it, precioussss…. we wantssss it… Perhaps because it gives us a sense of control or some comfort or it nurses our pride, or becomes the envy of our enemy. What makes the letting go so difficult is the fact that we have poured so much of ourselves into the Thing (whatever, or whoever, it is), just as Sauron poured his malice and his cunning and all of his art, twisted though it was, into the Ring of Power. What happens when we pour ourselves into a creature and not the Creator? Then the possession, the creature or created thing, becomes the possessor. It gets a power over us, and the possessor gets possessed! By refusing to give ourselves freely in love, we lose ourselves tragically in lust; for a power, or a plaything, or even a person that we have made into a god.

We need to break these addictions. We need someone to unfold our knotted fists and open them up to freedom.

Frodo of the Shire. Even Mr. Baggins failed in the end, didn’t he? At the end of all things, it appeared that even Frodo could not resist the power of the Ring, and succumbed to its weight, there at the very Crack of Doom. “Just let it go!” cried the ever faithful Sam. But Frodo could not loosen his grip and let such a small thing fall away from him.

I’ve often pondered Tolkien’s decision in writing this ending. After all, they had come so far, proven themselves over and over again, starved and staggered, fasted and fumbled through countless miles to come to this point. Why did Frodo fail in the end?

This is the melancholic tone that sounds throughout Tolkien’s writing, the sadness and sense of what Tolkien himself called the “long defeat.” It’s a reflection of our human story. We are all of us prodigal sons and daughters. Original Sin should be the one dogma of the Catholic Faith that needs no defense or apologetic. Its echo resounds in every one of our endeavors, every task, every ambition, encounter, effort and ache in the heart. We are wounded, and we need help. We can only come so far, give so much and then, when the leap is wider than our eyes can fathom, or the task to heavy for us to bear, we choke. We hold back. We don’t want to let go, jump, trust, abandon. And the discordant music that ripped a black hole in the fabric of the cosmos swells up again in the human heart. “I will not serve.” – “I won’t let go!”

Thank God another hand was there that day, when Frodo refused to let the Ring fall. But it was an unexpected hand, a gnarled and withered hand that saved the day. Gollum clutched and grasped at his master and bit the hand of Frodo, causing the Ring to plummet into fire and out of memory.

How often does it seem that Providence puts these unwelcome hands in our way, gnarled and withered hands that take things away from us, tear at us and tease us. It should be stressed that this is not the Hand of God… directly. He wills only our good and we must believe this, we must trust this. But we must know too that God is a jealous Lover. And He may from time to time unbind and allow the hands of the Devil to act. This is the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil, and the mystery of Good as well. The puzzling Plan of Providence.

Does this frighten us? Is this an unsettling thought for us? To consider that God would ever allow us, His children to be burned, to be hurt, to suffer like Job? It takes tremendous faith, and a laser focus on that one thing needful, that pearl of great price. It is, we find in the end, not the pearl that matters, but the Person holding it. All else must fall away. Everything must fall away and we must be stripped, just as Frodo and Samwise on their journey through Mordor, and Abraham through the countless miles to Canaan, and Moses in the wilderness, and Hannah in her tears, and David in his battles, and Anthony in his barren cave, Clare in the cutting of her hair and all the ties that bound her to comfort. Everyone must pass through Mordor, through Calvary. And there, if we are to be free, we must lay down the Precious. Cast it into the fire, let it burn upon the altar of the Cross.

And then will be free. Then we will cry with Samwise when the Ring was destroyed and he passed from death to unexpected Life “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

For when our hands are truly empty, God can finally fill them.

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

Deer in the Fence

I was driving out of Malvern Retreat Center about two weeks ago, from a meeting that took me into the twilight time of the day, when a massive buck came leaping across the fields that buffer Malvern Prep’s campus from the road. It was a powerful, agile creature, bounding like Mercury over the grass, and straight for my car. I was spellbound for a moment, then looking to my right, I saw traffic approaching. I honked my horn and they slowed. To the left, more cars were coming; they too saw the deer and soon a window was open for this beautiful creature to slip through. And slip it did.

At first it brought to mind the old Far Side cartoon “Nature Scenes We Rarely See” – where a beautiful buck is leaping over a fallen log with his antlers an inch from another tree branch (and we imagine the awkward pain of the next two seconds when the two meet). The grounds of the Retreat Center were surrounded by a high, green, chain link fence. The deer cut to the right away from my car and smacked right into the fence. Deer are color blind, I’m told, so perhaps the green of the fence blended in with the deep green woods of freedom beyond them.

Ouch.

We all watched from our cars as its beautiful body crumpled to the grassy shoulder. Then to our amazement, it jumped again, and again… and again, each time launching itself back into the fence with no success. I found myself cheering him on… “Look over here! You’re so close! Freedom is just 20 feet away!” Finally, after what seemed like a dozen attempts, the deer ‘s own body weight managed to tear away the bottom of the fence and it slowly edged through it backwards, unravelling its antlers from the chain links in a slow and painful twisting movement. Once free of the fence, it simply turned and jumped again, this time into the clear air and off into the deep woods.

Crazy.

It was a couple of days later that the image came back to me. I was thinking of a friend who was in the midst of a real crisis, and I felt again like I was sitting in my safe and secure car, observing something of great power, beauty and freedom suddenly caught up in anxiety, pain and confusion. All I could do was watch, wait, listen…. and point to the freedom just 20 feet away. I was removed, could see more clearly, could see the range of colors that offer through contrast a greater clarity. Even though the path to freedom and to open fields seemed so close, I could only pray and point to it. We can no more force others to choose (a contradiction) than I could have picked up that deer and set him onto the open path. That move would have damaged us both.

How quickly life can turn us into those tangled knots, dark places, and seemingly unsurmountable walls. And we leap again and again into the knot, into the darkness, into the mess of it all for we cannot see beyond it. But I know we’re made for open fields; we are meant to be free. Even in the midst of what seems insurmountable, inescapable, even life-threatening, there is hope. And we can find it, sometimes by passing through the pain and darkness, sometimes around it. But the deer could not see this, reason it out, step back, breathe, or pray in the middle of its crisis. It couldn’t make an act of faith that this struggle would work out either. But we can step back, pray, sit with the Mystery…. listen. And we should in every and all circumstances as we make our way through this world.

What fence of fear or confusion or dread has locked you in? What boundaries are you seeking to go beyond? What comfort zone is He calling you out of and beyond? And which side of that fence offers you true freedom?

To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting….
-Pope John Paul II

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

Music Shared

Thanks for sharing this one Frances. A real beauty.

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