It Ain’t Easy Being Green… Or Is It?

Kermit the Frog used to sing, “It ain’t easy being green” but today, in our eco-conscious climate, it seems being “green” has never been easier. It’s a regular agenda, and not just from the crunchy cons, or the liberal left. Enter Pope Benedict:

Contemplating the beauty of creation inspires us to recognize the love of the Creator, that Love which “moves the sun and the other stars”…. It is imperative that mankind renew and strengthen “that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying.
– Pope Benedict XVI

A Covenant with Creation?

For Catholics, this whole Green Movement isn’t just a passing fad. It was part of our marching orders way back in Eden; “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over all living things.” For most of our subsequent story, sadly, that call to stewardship, harmony, fecundity, and dominion, has decayed into a twisted domination. The word subdue meant to remember our headship as human persons and not fall into the trap of idolatry (the earth becoming an idol). But we went too far and laid waste to the land, like little Saurons creating our own little Mordors over and over again.

In the Holy Father’s Message for the Celebration of the World Day for Peace, given just a few weeks ago as we entered into the year of Our Lord 2010, he called attention to the pure gift of the environment we so often take for granted, saying:

“Many people experience peace and tranquillity, renewal and reinvigoration, when they come into close contact with the beauty and harmony of nature. There exists a certain reciprocity: as we care for creation, we realize that God, through creation, cares for us.”

That’s a uniquely Catholic vision… a sacramental vision. God, through creation, cares for us. The stuff of the earth, the swirl of molecules, the dance of matter, the splendid mosaic of earth and sky and water; all of this grand display is a storybook for us. God speaks through it all! What a wonderful thing. Everything is full of His wonders. A line from a Peter Mayer song comes to mind; “This morning outside I stood, saw a little red-winged bird, shining like a burning bush, singing like a Scripture verse. Made me want to bow my head… everything is holy now.”

I think a good dose of the natural world does wonders for the soul, especially in these days when it seems only the latest gadget is capable of instilling wonder and “magic.” Granted, we have some amazing works to ponder, but none are so magical as those that flow right from the Mind of God. Who can fashion a single seed, pregnant with the uniqueness of a rose, a giant Redwood, a human life? Only God. What a wonderful world! Great and wonderful are Your works O Lord! Let’s give them a second look, a long and penetrating gaze, and drink in the gratuitous beauty that God filled them with. For this cup overflows just for us!

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

Mist and Sun and the Meaning of Life

I love back roads. Swervy, windy, half in shadow, half in sun ribbons of asphalt. They’re like “mobile prayer” for Rebecca and I. Add a little Lord of the Rings or Dances with Wolves soundtrack music into a Sunday drive and you are GONE… floating away to Happy Land, the Land of Contemplation! And all’s right with the world! Well, mostly.

My drive into school each morning is a gift; back roads abound! There are a number of paths to take and I generally mix it up from day to day. Case in point: just last week, after passing it for three years in moderate “haste,” I decided to take “Grubb’s Mill Road” for a spin.

Now don’t judge a road by its name. As I made my way over hill and dale (what is a dale anyway?) I was literally captured by the sunlight streaming through morning mist over wet grass. I flipped on the hazards and with the handy iPhone (I know I know, Geek Boy Returns) I snapped a few pics. One is handsomely portrayed in this post above for your observation. Click on it and it should fill the screen…. go ahead, try it!

Now curiously, I was able to use this image as a teaching moment in class that very day. I start off my freshmen theology course light on the homework, heavy on the heartwork. I invite them into a fresh way of looking at the world…. into a “sacramental” vision. Afterall, this is how a Catholic sees the universe….. as a mosaic full of meaning, an icon, a Mystery wrapped in ribbons of protons, neutrons, and electrons. This is pretty dang exciting. Here’s that quote I love to quote… again:

To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane – it tells of something beyond….a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity.
– Bishop Fulton Sheen

Back to the back roads…. This image (above) was breathtaking. And I guess what intrigues me about an encounter like this is how the physical channels the spiritual, the visible can communicate the invisible. How does it happen that we alone in the universe can “see” this? Apprehend this? Comprehend this and be captivated by this? Objectively, the scene I saw was made of water vapor, chlorophyll, and a swirl of elements bending and twisting in the rising heat of a large ball of gas 93,000,000 miles away. But it was beauty that caught me. The squirrels didn’t stop and stare. Mr. Bluebird didn’t land on my shoulder and strike up a conversation on the matter, cool as that would have been.

For some reason, I saw in these elements a wonder, a story, a window that opened into my own experience. In this sacrament of the present moment, as the mist swirled before the sun, I thought of our sorrow thick and dank, sapping us of hope. The trees reached in and broke its cloudy mask, like the hands of friends praying for us, reaching into our lives and rooting us in hope. And then the Sun, beyond hope, pierced that mist of melancholy like a dozen swords of holy light that shone and fell upon the earth. And behold, there was light and heat and a new kind of “illumination.”

I think it was Dostoyevsky who once wrote that, in the end, “Beauty will save the world.” Well, Beauty has arrived, and often lies waiting for us on the back roads, in places least expected, in sudden and sharp turns from shadow into light. Perhaps all we’re asked to do is stop and look with love and gratitude.

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

Sun and Shade

When I was a kid, we used to play a game called “Sun and Shade.” It was only possible on those extraordinary summer days when school was out, the clouds were high, and the wind was strong.

The game consisted of a race from a shady patch in the neighborhood (point A) to another shady patch (point B) up the hill. You could move anywhere, run in any direction, as long as your feet were touching shade. Under trees, shrubs, the shadow of a mailbox, a car, a trash can…. all were like stepping stones on the way to the coveted Goal. If you ever stepped into the Light, you were “fried,” and back to the Starting Place you ran.

My favorite part of the game was when a massive bank of cloud would race across the face of the sun, and a half dozen kids would bolt like mad up the hill before the shade fell over us again; screaming, arms flailing, laughing, leaping up to land at the last second into the shady patch of a tree when the sun came out again. Ah, youth!

Let’s Get Spiritual

Now if you are like me, you wouldn’t mind a little experience of the Divine once in a while (or how about every second?) as we make our Monday to Friday runs from the Shade into the Sun of a weekend. By experience of the Divine, I mean a glimmer of eternity in time, a sense of peace even in the midst of tragedy, or a strong dose of Warm Love, the kind Van the Man sings about:

Look at the ivy on that old clinging wall. Look at the flowers and the green grass so tall. It’s not a matter of when push comes to shove. It’s just an hour on the wings of a dove… Its just warm love… And its ever present everywhere… That warm love.
– Van Morrison

Now mind you, I’m not talking about gooey “religious feelings” – it’s a heightened awareness of the Sacrament of the Present Moment. In the old spiritual classic of Brother Lawrence, it’s the Practice of the Presence of God. For us kids growing up on ‘ole Jefferson Street, even the Sun and Shade invited us into the Dance, into the vision that the Universe was made superfluously, for us, for FUN. It’s meant to be as transparent as stained glass. That’s the definition of a sacrament. A visible sign that houses a spiritual reality. Maybe that’s why the saints were so crazy, so happy, even in the Shade of Suffering; the cold darkness seemingly devoid of the Sun. They praised even there, oftentimes especially there! They knew, in the immortal words of that little redhead Annie, that the Sun “would come out tomorrow” – or at least eventually…

So look at the ivy on that old clinging wall, look at the flowers and the green grass so tall. Look at the suffering with its power to shape. It’s all Warm Love… and it’s ever present everywhere.

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

Automated Confessionals?

Here’s a ridiculous and very funny video… and yes, I’m stalling. It’s been so busy I need time for some real meat and potatoes posts! In the meantime, ponder the potential of… AUTOMATED CONFESSIONALS!

“Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.”
– St. Isidore of Seville

“God gave Himself to you: give yourself to God.”
– Blessed Robert Southwell

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

God All in My Face

We have Mass every morning at Malvern Prep. Last week, because of a spring concert and the need to set things up in chapel, Fr. Steve had to make a makeshift altar and bring it down in front of the first row of pews. Now I usually sit in the front row for Mass to get up and read, so when the altar came down, my entire field of vision was filled up with the sacred stuff of the Lord’s Supper; the linen cloth, chalice, candles, the paten with the host on it, the hands of Fr. Steve moving over the wine and the water and the bread at the moment of consecration. I could almost reach out and touch the altar if I tried. God was all in my face.

This was a little overwhelming; I was drawn in, captured. There was no escape and no chance for distraction. When God is all in your face, you have to look at Him. And when I looked I didn’t see a big scary Overlord coming to dominate me or show commandments down my throat. I saw a God Who became little, to liberate me and give me the dominion over my weakness that I desperately need. He’s so tiny that He can fit inside me and fix me from the inside out.

This experience got me thinking about the way God works. God loves stuff. He loves the material world, His first gift and testament to us. And even though we’ve scribbled all over it and torn out some of the pages, He still sends us love letters through this book. He comes to us through the things He’s made; bread and oil and water and wine. He’s redeemed us with their help, especially in the physical sign and reality of Jesus’ very flesh and blood!

So it strikes me that God doesn’t want to remain forever distant from us, “out there” past Orion or lodged merely as a thought in the cerebral cortex of men and women. He wants to get into our blood, get under our skin, and He firgured out how to do it in the Eucharist that I was only 5 feet away from last week. Isn’t this nuts? Isn’t He crazy about us? That’s the only explanation for me that works. He’s not the dominating Judge with a beard beaming white and flowing robes pointing a gabel at me. He’s a God Who’s become so small just for the love of me.

I want to encourage everyone reading this to try letting Him in even more. Open up. Come closer to the altar, that place of fire and healing. I’ve discovered there’s no other way to be cured of my arrogance, pride, fear, doubt, guilt than to let Him in. He’s the cure, the antidote for all the poisons we’ve taken into our bodies and souls, knowingly or unknowingly. And He’s not going to yell at us for being so foolish. All He wants to do is set things right again.

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

Crazy Love

Today is the day! Holy Thursday is the Catholic Valentine’s Day! This is the day Jesus longed for. He “eagerly desired to eat this Passover” with His disciples. His Sacred Heart was bursting to bring them this greatest of gifts. It was, and is, the gift of His crazy love for us.

Only Jesus Himself could have thought of this gift. Catholics believe (and this is apostolic baby!) that the Eucharist is not a little trinket or a keychain that says “Jesus loves you” – it’s not just a memory or a symbol, like a painting of Him or a crucifix – not a little photo album of snapshots from the old days of miracles and wanderings and teachings from Galilee. It’s…. Him, in the FLESH. When we open up the present of the Eucharist, surprise! It’s His Real Presence!

This gift is so real, so present, that I fear many of us might be afraid to open it.

The Eucharist is such an expensive, exotic, exorbitant gift that sometimes I think we don’t know what to do with It… Him…. this gift! “Wow… thank you. Thank you, thanks…” And we put this gift in a safe, dust-free place in our heads or hearts (or on a shelf in our churches) and we move on to the next thing.

The Eucharist is scandalous love. The Eucharist is crazy. As the saints and mystics have told us, It is love to the point of folly! I believe that’s why we either get it or we don’t. We’re lost in this love (like the Air Supply song) or we’re embarrassed by it and feel like we’d rather just say “amen” and scurry back to our pew and read the bulletin or something.

Now sometimes the love of my wife completely overwhelms me. What did I do to deserve this much attention, this much devotion, this much care and concern? I’m just a goofy guy from New Jersey! Then I sit back and say, “Thank you… thanks… for loving me, even in all of my unloveableness.” Other times, I just sit back and wonder. Love is a crazy thing, isn’t it?

When I sit down and think about the Eucharist…. oiy! I once heard a kind old priest on a retreat talking about some topic of faith. He said “Don’t even get me started on the Eucharist! You’ll have to get out the mop and clean me up off the floor!” Wow, that guy was in love. Even after so many years of service at the altar, he was IN love. Because the Eucharist IS Love. Love magnified and multiplied. Love dropped like an atom bomb or blossoming like a supernova in the center of our being. When we get it, we can’t resist It. Worries and fears of worthiness are blown away, and we enter into the burning love of the Father and the Son; we’re caught up in the dance of the Holy Spirit.

Tonight we can hear, in a thousand churches, the Heartbeat of God. And if we’re ready, if the heart is washed in the showers of Reconciliation, and the table cleared of clutter as best we can clear it, we can enter into this embrace. Let’s not turn away in shame or embarrassment thinking His Love is too much or our hearts are too distracted. Tonight, He beckons us to come and eat.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me.”
– Revelations 3:20

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

Spring Cleaning

Are you a back roads kinda person, or a main roads kinda person? Maybe a bit of both?

I had a great commute when I was studying for my associates degree. I’d stick to the back roads for as long as I could on that almost hour long drive; Georgetown to Sykesville, Chesterfield to 130, and sometimes Route 68, in the days before it was cluttered by golf courses and condos.
You see more life on the back roads. More trees, more fields, more bizarre lawn art. And there’s always the added bonus of those little mom and pop convenience stores (the ones that carry “Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies”… deeeelicious!).

I was on such a back road drive one day, in my classical-music-and-opera-are-actually-amazing phase, when I was seized by a flash of beauty. At the exact moment that Puccini’s “E Lucevan Le Stella” was roaring from my radio, I was passing a farmer’s field where soil was being peeled back by a rusty old tractor. It was the springtime of the year. The smell of earth lifted up like incense, just as a flock of white gulls hovered above the farmer in an earthy paraclesis. What a sight! The music was deep and mournful, the earth open and naked under heaven, and the mystical attentiveness of the birds over it all; the scene breathed like a sacrament.

I think we have seasons, like Lent, when Jesus wants to stir things up in us. Perhaps we’ve gone fallow as a field and the fruits of our labors have become a little scattered. Maybe the soil of our souls has grown old and cold from a winter away from Him and we need tilling.

Christ is the Divine Gardener, the Tiller of the Soil of our hearts. If we let ourselves be open to Him, then He can literally plant new life in us. He cares so deeply for us. He will show us the roots and stones that are causing us trouble. Sometimes we can move them together, sometimes He asks that we move around them. It takes patience. But the Holy Spirit will be working in us as well, hovering just above us, carefully removing the sin and the roots of sin, as the birds clear fields of what does not belong.

If we let Him have His way, what a fruitful harvest it will be!

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