Chestertoons

Uncle Gilbert is now a cartoon. Check out Chestertoons.

ht to American Chesterton Society.

Sacramental Moment

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a 'sacramental moment.' Needing some healthy brain-chow to mull over, I think trying to explain what I mean by this is just the thing.

No doubt thousands of poets have tried to express how our days seem flit from moment to moment. Yet looking back on our days, we do not witness a blur of activity extending even as it fades from recollection. Specific moments stand out: pivotal moments, laughter with friends, discovering a new friend, reconnecting with an old friend, homecoming, leaving home, beauty, tragedy, success, abysmal failures, death, and life. Intervening days, weeks, even months seem to compress out of thought. What matters are those moments that we felt alive in. These moments define us.

A sacrament is merely a sign. Yes, there are the Seven Sacraments of the Church (Praise be for them!). But I want to reflect on the idea of sacrament as a sign. These signs, as a transcendental moment enrich our prayers, reflections, and eachother.

Vignette: One Sunday night, during my all-too brief tenure as a youth minister, someone (perhaps myself) said something that struck the entire group as extraordinarily and honestly humorous. At once, all we could do was laugh. After a few moments, one of my older students tried to get everyone to pay attention to me after the bout of uproarious laughter. I still had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. I motioned to this well-intentioned leader to relax.
After a few more minutes of laughter I managed to say was something like, "all of your vocations, as high-schoolers, at this moment, involve laughter, joy, and growth! My plans only matter so long as they move you closer to God. Right now we need to laugh, that is our path to holiness right now. There'll be other times to be serious." I really have no idea what started the laughter. What I remember is the burning sense of love for my youth group kids and lifting them up in prayer as we all rolled, doubled over, and gasping for air from laughter.

That was a sacramental moment. It was moment of feeling supremely alive, but also a moment pregnant with that sense of the ordinary tripping face first into the extraordinary.

Other moments are quiet, some intelectual, bittersweet, romantic, and others merely leave us gaping in awe. But what sets these times apart is they fill us with that sense of life that tastes the misty boundaries of the everlasting and eternal. They are moments given to us, as pure gifts, to remind us that we are not cogs, numbers, or someone else's means to an end or profit. They are foggy foretastes, simple signs, of what awaits when we do finally make that last pilgrimage home.

Notes from mid-transition

39 more days before I wrap up my time in Middle America and move to the Abbey.
And all I can think about is how ridiculously finicky I am.

Sunday: rapt attention at Mass, calm sense of joy and peace following Eucharist. (mild annoyance at losing my voice and not being able to really sing at Mass and having to skip on cantoring for vespers). Enjoyed a fun breakfast with a seminarian (who I just happened to sit next to at Mass) and a good friend. Just feeling good to be a Christian.

Monday- starts well, except miss morning prayer and daily mass (both totally my fault). Go on with the day, its a decent day, but nothing spectacular. Ignored a quiet voice that began to insist on prayer. BAM. Fall. The same old stuff, there again.

Surprising? Hardly. Disappointing? Very.

It is disappointing because I blatantly ignored an internal call to prayer that likely would have negated that near-occasion. Thing is, I'm happiest at prayer and in sacramental moments (I'll try to describe what that is later; its broader than many would think). So why do I constantly opt out of such times? What in me thinks, "I know I'm happiest with scenarios A,B,C. BUT, I'll choose these empty and desolate situations X,Y, or Z." How is this a good plan?

OK, God. Can we try again? I hope you're planning on giving me many days in this world. I'm going to need all of them to even begin to grow in holiness.

Ave Maris Stella

HT to Ironic Catholic

Thoughts from Fr. Jaki....

The Church was founded by Christ to be the embodiment of extraordinary faith or perspective. And it should seem nothing short of extraordinary that in spite of most ordinary churchmen - from popes through bishops to priests - that extraordinary perspective or mental vision was kept alive as time went on. The times were at times dark indeed. The history of celibacy is a case in point. Countless councils went on record against priestly concubinage. Canonical punishments of the harshest kind were leveled at offenders - apparently to no avail. At even worse times the abuses were tacitly condoned from the highest places. But even then there have been shining examples to the contrary. There were times of drastic shortage of priests, such as the years immediately following the Council of Trent. As a remedy, Emperor Maximilian begged the pope, Pius V, to permit priests to marry. The adamant refusal of the pope (he was adamant because he was a saint) was amply justified by the end of the sixteenth century. God once more produced children of Abraham out of an apparently barren landscape covered with stones. New orders - Jesuits, Piarists, Oratorians - and renewed old ones, Capuchin Franciscans in particular, and the seminaries set up by the decree of the Council of Trent, began to bear ample fruit.
[Jaki, "Man of One Wife or Celibacy" in Catholic Essays, 84-5]

Borrowed from the Blog of the American Chesterton Society.

Reminds me of Chesterton's fantastic reflection on the 'five deaths of the faith.' Whether we're in the midst, beginning, or end of this dark time of history (perhaps all of the above?) its to us faithful to pray. In faith, we know the victory is Christ's. No power on Earth or Hell can strip it away from him.

Fb Instant Messange:

From a conversation with one of the monks over facebook this afternoon:

C said:

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2009/ga090427.gif

This comic is the story of my life, right now

Monk said:

You will fit in great in the monastery

Love alone...

You know, world, you try to put on a big face about being above it all, jaded, and slick. But when you are faced with beauty and innocence, you reveal your heart. Susan Boyle demonstrated that. I'm probably late to get on this bandwagon, but check it out at youtube then come back here for the rest of my reflection.

Ms. Boyle revealed the aching heart behind the cynical faces of our modern society. We don't really want the universe to be dumb and meaningless. There is an ache, a terrible, horrible ache for meaning. Yes, we 'take revenge on it and call it names, like adolescence,' as CS Lewis once said. We cannot bear to see this weak, pitiful voice yearning for something we cannot name. So we hide. We hide behind titles, salaries, possessions. We hide by using others to get ahead or maybe just to have some fun. Everything that can be done to hide the hurt and yearning inside, is done. For we have learned to despise weakness.

The soul of mankind is not dead. Despite the deadliest century in all of history, a century of dreams crashing, repeatedly, into nightmares, we retain that quiet, insistent inner voice that dreams a dream. Faced with unexpected beauty, our walls crumble down; our inner flesh revealed. Though it lasts only a moment, in that moment a seed is planted and maybe takes root.

The way to evangelize this culture, to save it from its 'debonair nihilism' is not a method of intellectual rigor, not at first. God is not logic. God is love. What Susan Boyle showed us is that even in the heart of British pop-culture, in a society tearing itself apart, beauty can stun and shake the prophets of modernity. As Catholics, we must regain our heritage of beauty: architecture, music, liturgy, prayer, the natural world, even our mode of life must exemplify all that is true, good and beautiful.

Ah, we first must be evangelized. We must first acknowledge our desire for transcendent beauty. Have I the humility to expose that weak voice inside that aches and yearns? Can I repent of all the cynicism and lazy thoughts that have stripped away at innocence? For only the innocent can apprehend beauty in its fullness. Only the innocent can show forth beauty without the stain of hypocrisy.

Many blessings to our sister in faith, Susan Boyle. May her example be one more light in this dark time. Rise up, good Christian, this Easter season. Repent and find beauty. Then, share it and give it away. For through beauty, we may yet make something true and good out of this world of ours.

I Dreamed a Dream
[Fantine is left alone, unemployed and destitute]

[FANTINE]
There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Facebook Status...

Friend #1's status: "Somebody save me"

My comment: I know a guy who does things like that... I think you've met him too... although, he is a carpenter and I'm not sure he could help much with the plumbing fiasco in your basement... ;-)

Friend #2's comment: See, I know this other guy who does things like that... an all American boy, lives on a farm... always seems to show up right when you need him, in his blue shirt and red jacket. ^_^

(FYI: Friend #1 discovered a leaky pipe in her basement the day before.)

My life in tuning

I remember hearing in high school a speaker (Jesse Manabusin, I believe) once opine that even if you're absolutely tone deaf, you should sing at church. God made your voice. God loves how your voice sounds. If you are a little off-key, He will listen and say, "that is harmony." If you are absolutely off-key, God will listen approvingly and exclaim, "that's Jazz!"

Discernment, I believe isn't that way. Discernment, it would seem, is a process of 'tuning' your life to the true pitch God made you to sound at.

When I was younger, and didn't have the faintest idea who God wanted me to be, I was, in a sense, out of tune. For the longest time, I may have been so far out of tune, that it did indeed sound like harmony, or at least a tone not wholly horrid to the true pitch of my life. Yet, as I grew in prayer (listening to my Maker and the Composer/Conductor of all), I began to notice that my pitch seemed out of place.

At this point, I had a choice. I could have gone on sounding the pitch I had settled on. It was not wholly out of key with how I heard God. There was some good, no doubt, that could have been accomplished in that other pitch. My other choice was to begin to try to tune my life to a pitch I could not even clearly hear. My 'ear' had not been trained to discriminate between on and off key that well. Yet, in my deafness, God would sound that true pitch. When I heard that near and far off sound, peace, joy, and love would echo throughout my entire being. My pitch had nothing comparable.

This was the crucial point. Faced with such inexpressibly beautiful music, how could I settle for anything less? My music was fits and starts, flat and sharp, minor when it should major, and major when it needed to be minor. It reflected my best efforts, but my best efforts fell short of the beauty I heard far off and away, deep in my soul.

Have you ever tried to tune two instruments? When they are far out of tune, it sounds bad, but not terrible. Yet, as they come closer to being in-tune, the pitches begin to push against each other. We hear this as waves in the sound. The closer you get to being in pitch, the faster the waves beat. To a well trained ear, this isn't neccesarily a pleasant sound. Yet, a well trained ear also knows that once the two pitches match, the obnoxious waves will cease and a true tone will ring out all the louder.

My life in tuning: I can hear the waves of my pitch fighting against God's true tone. I feel it in my heart as a dark night or a desert. I feel it in my body as a heaviness in my heart but a lightness in my smile. I know I'm getting closer: the beating waves are getting worse. It is painful, at moments, yet I'm confident that these pitches will resolve as mine gives way and tunes to the tone I am meant to be.