Why Are you Standing There?

While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going,
suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
They said, “Men of Galilee,
why are you standing there looking at the sky?
This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven
will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”

Today’s first Mass reading from Acts records Jesus’ last words to his disciples and his ascension into heaven. The language above immediately follows Jesus’ ascension.

Jesus gave his disciples a charge before he left them: Go out into the world and proclaim the Gospel; make disciples of all nations. The angels words are a reminder of that charge. When I hear those words, what I hear is: What are you doing standing around here? You have work do to. Don’t be looking up there – he’s not going to be doing the heavy lifting from now on – he’ll come back in his own time. Right now it’s up to you.

We have been given of the same Spirit as the disciples. And we’ve been given the same charge. As John Paul II wrote in his Apostolic exhortation, Christifideles Laici: “The entire mission of the Church, then, is concentrated and manifested in evangelization. Through the winding passages of history the Church has made her way under the grace and the command of Jesus Christ: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation” …and lo, I am with you always, until the close of the age”….

Don’t just stand there looking up at the sky. Celebrate Christ’s Ascension as he instructed us to do.

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Intentional Discipleship and the New Evangelization

As part of a four-week faith formation series on the new evangelization, I gave a talk yesterday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church in Minneapolis on the theme of Intentional Discipleship and the New Evangelization.

In his Apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici, Pope John Paul II wrote that the entire mission of the Church is concentrated and manifested in evangelization. The question fo rus is ow do we evangelize in the world in which we live today?

I began my talk by discussing some of the challenges we face in evangelizing today’s world, such as the secular society in which we live, the reality that religious identity s not static, and that most American Catholics are (in the words of Sherry Weddell in her book Forming Intentional Disciples, which I referred to a number of times in my talk) are “still at an early, essentially passive stage of spiritual development.” I then talked about the fact that active, personal discipleship in Christ is not optional or reserved for the few, but something we are all called to.

For us to be able to help others to be conscious, intentional disciples of Christ, we ourselves must encounter Christ in a direct way. I talked a little about how we encounter Christ and what difference that makes in our life. Finally, I shared several suggestions for helping others to do the same. Following my talk, we had a lively discussion about how all of this plays out in the lives (and parishes) in which the participants are involved.

You can access a recording of my talk here or stream it from the icon below. The podcast, which does not include the dialogue that followed my talk, runs for 30:17.

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Reggae Priest, Ghetto Priest

This past weekend I read Joseph Pearce’s Candles in the Dark: The Authorized Biography of Fr. Richard Ho Lung and the Missionaries of the Poor, which had been sent to me for review by St. Benedict’s Press.

I had known very little about the work of Fr. Ho Lung before reading this book. Given my deep commitment to the Vincentian charism, I confess that the first person who came to mind as I read about Fr. Ho Lung was St. Vincent de Paul, whose commitment to serving the needs of the poor and seeing Christ in the faces of the poor seems very much in evidence here.

While there are certainly matters on which Fr. Ho Lung and I would not be in agreement (he seems to bemoan women in the workplace), there are many inspring things about him presented in this biography. First and foremost, he is a model of “love as self-sacrificial giving of oneself to the Other.” He seems to seek nothing for himself and everything for the sake of those to whom he ministers. At the same time, like Vincent, he understood that “Catholics who give themselves in service to the poor are not merely social workers. They are not motivated primarily by the desire to make people more comfortable physically,” although they do that also, “but by the desire to serve Jesus in His presence among them.” And he has attracted large numbers to minister with him; his Missionaries of the Poor now have more than 500 brothers serving in various places around the world.

Second, his combining prayer and action is something that comes through clearly. His call was to social justice but at the same time, a call to a serious prayer life and deeper spirituality. As someone with an Ignatian spirituality, I was struck by the description of his referring to figures such as Merton and Hopkins, “not as an intellectual or academic exercise. No, he gave them flesh, made them live, so as to enliven a passage of scripture or a point for meditation.”

Third, Fr. Ho Lung is presented as someone who had a sense of humor. He was serious about his faith, but knew how to have a good time. Not only in his music – although that is a not insignificant part of his story (the “Reggae Priest” received many awards for his music), but other times he could be extremely playful. Many people could benefit form the reminder that being a good Christian does not mean walking around somber all of the time.

One of the things that struck me particularly was Fr. Ho Lung’s response to the question whether he feared for his life. It was a legitimate question given his willingness to take public (and confrontational) stands on issues of social justice and to be direct in fighting the drug rings in his locale. His response to the question was, “Oh no! I have to die for something.” There is something very powerful for me in that response. We all have to die, after all. But better to die for something that matters than not. I’m not saying his response gives me a desire to affirmatively purse martyrdom, but it does, I think, help provide strength to fight even when doing so carries a cost.

Two things minimized my appreciation of the book, which may be related. First, there are a number of points at which the author has a very defensive tone in talking about different aspects of Fr. Ho Lung and/or his ministry, as though he needs to defend him against attack against his orthodoxy or fidelity to the Magisterium. Yet I see no indication of any need for such defensiveness, no indication anyone has seriously challenged his fidelity. Amusingly, the defense of the connection between Fr. Ho Lung’s orthodoxy and the vernacular style of his music seems to be in response to the author’s own misgivings rather than anyone else’s.

Second, the author’s own biases come through strongly and I think his recounting of the life and work of Fr. Ho Lung would have been more effective without the distraction of those biases. One could, for example, explain Fr. Ho Lung’s decision to leave the Jesuits and form is own order without painting the entire population of Jesuits as modernists who have lost a focus on Christ. One could explain Fr. Ho Lung’s approach to his ministry without wholesale degradation of liberation theology. (And in this context, I found the author’s treatment of the Catholic Social Principle of solidarity to be woefully incomplete.) One could applaud the way Christianity has taken route in some of the places in which Fr. Ho Lung ministered without dismissing “the West” as having disintegrated “into deconstructed particles, devoid of faith or reason and lusting after nihilism of the culture of death.” Many of us do not share the author’s views on these or any number of other matters, and those who don’t may very well be turned off by his tone.

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Why Follow Jesus?

Yesterday was the last gathering of Weekly Manna at UST for this academic year, as classes end next week. It was a bittersweet session, as my dear friend Chato Hazelbaker, who has been the guiding force behind Manna will be leaving the law school next week to take a new position at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington.

After we offered a little tribute to Chato, I gave the reflection for the day. I began by reading a poem I shared here last month, Follow by the late Roland Flint, which asks why the disciples left everything behind to follow Jesus.

With that introduction, I talked about relationship with Christ as the motivation for discipleship. In my reflection I also shared descriptions by Thomas Merton and C.S.Lewis of experiences of God that affected them deeply. My hope in doing so was to encourage the students, as we approach the end of another academic year, to take some time to reflect back on their experiences of God over the past year, to focus on where their life’s landscape has been transfigured by God’s presence and love.

You can access a recording of my reflection here or stream it from the icon below. The podcast runs for 13:03.

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Changing the World with Love

Yesterday morning I attended the 53rd Minnesota Prayer Breakfast, a gathering patterned after the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Seventeen hundred people gathered in person at the Minneapolis Hilton, joined via internet by thousands more around the state for communal fellowship and prayer around the theme Unity Through Love.

There were many moving aspects of the breakfast, not the least of which was the keynote address by Heather Flies, who began by suggesting the term love be reserved to signify our emotional commitment to the betterment of another, rather than using it to refer to our love of the Vikings, our favorite food, etc. More significantly, she spoke about the interrelationship between loving God and loving one another, making the point that the more we invest in deepening our relationship with God, the more natural will be the outflow of that love relationship into our love for one another.

Flies also spoke about Jesus as a model for our love for one another. Jesus, who noticed those unnoticed by others – the marginalized, the outcasts. Jesus, who stopped to interact with those he noticed, making them feel like they were the only person in the world. Jesus, who called people by name, letting them know they were worthy of being remembered. That is our model – noticing, interacting, calling by name.

Several speakers, including Flies, reflected on how the world would be changed if we truly actualized the command to love one another. And, as more than one observed, if Jesus could change the world with 12 apostles, imagine what he could do with a ballroom of 1700 people!

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There is Always Time

I’ve been thinking about an excerpt from Charles Hummel’s Tyranny of the Urgent that Chato read at the beginning of Weekly Manna this past week.

We all lead very busy lives, making it easy for us to say, with respect to one thing or another, “I don’t have time for that.” The truth, however, is that there is always time; we always time for the things to which we ascribe importance.

Hummel makes this point in the excerpt Chato read, saying that when we say we have no time for something, what we are really saying is that the something in question is not a priority. What we are saying is that we choose to spend our time on something else. Hummel observes, “our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities. We confess, we have left undone those things that ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

Hummel goes on to say that there is no single set of correct priorities for Christians. Rather, we need to be intentional about what we are spending our time doing, intentional about using our time as best we can in our discipleship.

“I’m too busy,” or “I have no time,” is really a way of letting ourselves off the hook. (“I would do x if only I had the time.”) It lets us get away with failing to prioritize.

So be honest: instead of saying “I have no time,” admit: “It’s not a priority.” The honesty might have an affect on what you devote your time to.

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What We Have Seen and Heard

In this Easter season, our first Mass readings come from The Acts of the Apostles, a book that gives us a history of the early period of the Christian community.

In today’s reading, the “leaders, elders and scribes” who had brought Peter and John before the Sanhedrin because of their acts, order Peter and John not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. However, Peter and John, in no uncertain terms, proclaim: “Whether it is right in the sight of God for us to obey you rather than God, you be the judges. It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.”

It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.

When I read those lines, I think of the feeling I have at the end of a retreat. I come to the end of a retreat, filled with all of the blessings of the experience, overflowing with joy, and marveling about how great God has been to me. And sometimes when I leave whatever retreat house I’ve been in with that feeling and then observe what is going on around me in the world, I experience a sense of almost bewilderment. I watch people driving to work or doing their grocery shopping, walking their pets or otherwise carrying on with their life as usual and wonder why they don’t see what I see. Why are they just going about their business? And I want to climb to the highest mountain and yell out to all the world, Hey, don’t you know what is going on here? Can’t you see that (in the words of the Hopkins poem) all the world is charged with the grandeur of God.

That is the urge that I think Peter and John are expressing. Once we’ve experienced God, we can’t not share what we have seen and heard. For me, that urge prompted me to become a spiritual director and retreat leader. For others, it plays out in a different way. But however it plays out, it is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.

Update: The penultimate paragraph of the post as I wrote it this morning is phrased badly, as pointed out by Kathy in her comment. She is quite right that I do not know what it actually going on in another person, and I didn’t intend my comment as judgment. I was trying (badly, I admit) to convey a reaction to what to all appearances is “business as usual” in the face of an experience of everything being different.

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Follow Me

I tend to accumulate scraps of paper with notes to myself, some of which I actually look at again, although I confess that sometimes I can’t actually remember what the note means (and sometimes can’t even read the scribbles).

Cleaning out some excess papers from the folder containing things relating to my book talks, I came across one that said “Roland Flint follow.”

Roland Flint was a member of the English department at the time I was an undergraduate at Georgetown. He was both a wonderful teacher and an extraordinary poet.

When I saw the note, I remembered a woman coming up to me at one of my talks and talking to me about him. Since I wasn’t sure about the “follow” part of the note, I did what I’m guessing most of us in this internet age would do: I put “Roland Flint follow” into Google. And what I discovered was this poem, titled Follow, written by Flint:

Now here is this man mending his nets
after a long day, his fingers
nicked, here and there, by ropes and hooks,
pain like tomorrow in the small of his back,
his feet blue with his name, stinking of baits,
his mind on a pint and supper – nothing else -
a man who describes the settled shape
of his life every time his hands
make and snug a perfect knot.

I want to understand, if only for the story,
how a man like this,
a man like my father in harvest,
like Bunk MacVane in the stench of lobstering,
or a teamster, a steelworker,
how an ordinary working stiff,
even a high tempered one,
could just be called away.

It’s only in one account
he first brings in a netful -
in all the others, he just calls,
they return the look or stare and then
they “straightaway” leave their nets to follow.
That’s all there is. You have to figure
what was in that call, that look.

(And I wouldn’t try it on a tired working man
unless I was God’s son -
he’d kick your ass right off the pier.)

If they had been vagrants,
poets or minstrels, I’d understand that,
men who would follow a different dog.
But how does a man whose movement,
day after day after day,
absolutely trusts the shape it fills
put everything down and walk away?

I’d pass up all the fancy stunting
with Lazarus and the lepers
to see that one.

I know nothing about Flint’s theology or his relationship to God or Christ. So I have no idea if what the poem captures is his own feeling.

What I do know is that the poem captures a question that can only be satisfactorily answered by experiencing Christ. What made those men drop everything is not something that can be explained intellectually, in a manner satisfactory to someone who has not had a personal encounter. (And if you’ve had the personal encounter, you know what it is that made them put everything down and walk away.)

The only answer is the one Jesus gave to the disciples of John when they first inquired about who he was: “Come, and you will see.”

This week, our invitation is to continue to follow Jesus all the way to the cross. And the same thing that caused those fisherman to drop their nets and follow Jesus is what allows us to stay with him all this week.

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Taken Possession Of, Not Possessing

In today’s second Mass reading, St. Paul writes to the Philippians that he has “been taken possession of by Christ Jesus,” in the next line writing that he does not consider himself “to have taken possession.”

Although in the context of the passage I’m not sure St. Paul intended what I see when I read those two lines, it struck me reading them that the two lines draw an important distinction. That it, that there is an enormous difference between being taken possession of and taking possession.

I think we too often think of ourselves as the possessors, thinking we possess our faith, our beliefs, and even God. We forget that God is bigger than we are, our words and ways of understanding sometimes making God smaller than God is.

If we understand, instead, that we are the possessed – that we have been taken possession of by Christ, that invites us to greater receptivity, and surrender. A stance of allowing Christ to work through us, rather than thinking we need to force something. I don’t mean that we are to be completely passive, but to understand that the initiator is Christ, not us.

I have not taken possession, but am possessed by Christ.

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Either It Means Everything Or It Means Nothing

I had never phrased it exactly that way before, but that’s the way it came out of my mouth in a recent book talk.

We had been talking about relationship with God and finding time to nurture that. I don’t remember the comment or question that preceded it, but I stopped, looked around at the audience and said, “Either it means everything or it means nothing.”

And I think that is an absolutely correct phrasing, that there is no in between. Either our relationship with God is everything, motivating everything about who we are in the world or doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, I can’t see what meaning it has.

God is not one thing among many, one priority on a par with others. Nothing else matters the way our relationship with God does. And that means that we have to make time to nurture the relationship. We can’t be satisfied with a once a week observance or treat God like a “get out of jail free” card to be pulled out in time of need.

We can nurture the relationship in many ways. Individual prayer. Group prayer and worship. Bible and other spiritual reading. Conversation with spiritual friends. But, however we do so, there can’t be anything as (let alone more) important as that.

Either it means everything, or it means nothing.

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