And whither then? I cannot say.

Closing Blog

2012-01-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

Hey all,

The fact that I now haven't posted in well over a year probably suggests that this blog was on its way out, but I'm officially closing it. However, before I do, I want to announce that I'm now working with a collaborative online project with other young Jesuits. The site, the Jesuit post, is a really exciting and creative venture, and I hope you'll take the time to stop in to see it! The Jesuit Post is located at www.thejesuitpost.org

It's been a pleasure to share this space with all of you, and I look forward to hearing thoughts on the new space!

AMDG,

Matt

St. Peter Claver

2010-09-10T17:36:00.000-04:00

While I was unable to complete a blog post in time for the actual feast of St. Peter Claver, September 9th, I was unable to let the day pass totally without comment!

For those readers who might be unaware, or less aware, Catholics celebrate "feast days" of saints and events on an annual cycle. That saint's feast day, often an anniversary of the saint's death, gives the Church a chance to remember that saint, to pay special attention to that saint's story, to learn from the example of that saint and to pray, to ask that that saint will pray for us in a special way.

Peter Claver was born in Spain in 1580 and entered the Jesuits in 1602, a time in which Europe was encountering much of the rest of the world through the "Age of Exploration." The many tragedies and crimes committed by Europeans of the era are fairly well documented, and Peter Claver would spend much of his life encountering the ugly and brutal side of European expansion. Shortly after his early studies, Peter Claver requested to be sent to the New World and, shortly after, arrived in what is now Colombia. There, Peter was ordained a priest and dedicated himself to working with the slaves in the New World, declaring himself to be, "the slave of the slaves forever."

The sheer volume of Peter Claver's activity is stunning. During his life in Colombia, it's estimated that he baptized in the neighborhood of 300,000 slaves, but only after having first catechized them using teams of translators, pictures and songs in order to overcome barriers presented by the multitude of tribes and languages used by the slaves. He also traveled far and wide to slave communities, administering the sacraments and defending the legal rights that the slaves possessed as Christians. During all these travels, he was careful never to stay with the planters or the overseers, but rather insisted on staying in slave quarters. Peter understood his role to be more than simply sacramental, however, and personally undertook the task of showing God's love to enslaved peoples in tangible ways. Whenever a slave ship would arrive in the harbor, Peter Claver would gather together medicines, food and drink as well as a handful of translators and set out for the ship. He never got used to the horrors and the smells of a ship's hold after the unspeakably horrific Middle Passage, but still he would descend into the hulls to try his best to alleviate some of the suffering of the slaves by administering food and water and giving some basic medical care. He and others would continue this care on land as an essential part of his ministry to the slaves, frequently noting, "We must speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips."

Greatness of heart and unstinting generosity have been hallmarks of many, many great saints, both people who carry the name "saint" and those whose goodness remains more anonymous. What makes Peter Claver so remarkable to me, however, is the way in which his commitment flowed forth so totally into the way he lived his life. Pope Paul III had already condemned the practice of slavery and Pope Pius IX would later blast the practice as, "supreme villainy," yet Peter Claver witnessed a form of European colonization that, to all outward appearances, was totally untroubled by the horrendous crimes that slavery perpetrated on human dignity. He found himself, in the great tradition of the prophets, saints and Christ himself, to be a voice crying out against injustice and oppression. And, maybe most importantly, when few would stand with him, he made a choice. He imitated Jesus, who said, "I am among you as one who serves," (Luke 22:27), even when that service meant climbing into the to the hellish hold of a slave ship to nurse people as they died.. He imitated the humble Christ, continuing to serve the poor and outcast even when it meant scorn and rejection. And he imitated Immanuel, "God with us," choosing with his whole being to enter into the lives of the slaves, to be with them, to stand with them.

Many Jesuits (and religious of other orders!) choose to take 'vow names' of a particular saint as a reminder of that saint's example, a request for that saint's prayers or maybe even in hope of imitating some characteristic of that saint. Saint Peter Claver's entire life testified to the humility and love of Jesus, a love that enters into the darkest corners of our world to shed light there. And on my vow day, I took the name Peter Claver, in hopes that I can learn to witness to God's love for people as Peter Claver did, as a humble servant.

Saint Louis University

2010-08-23T21:46:00.003-04:00

So what now?

After taking vows on August 14, I am officially a Jesuit. That is to say, I've promised "perpetual," that is, forever, poverty, chastity and obedience. In formal situations, I now write "S.J."after my name, indicating that I am a member of the Society of Jesus. For most intents and purposes, I am as much a Jesuit now as I will ever be in my life.

I am not, however, a priest, and it's worth pointing this fact out to people since many, including good friends and family, have been confused by this. In taking vows, I have promised to live those vows, live in community and be part of the mission of the Society of Jesus, but the ordination to the priesthood is something different altogether. In the Society of Jesus, there are Jesuit brothers, men who feel called to poverty, chastity and obedience and live in the Society who yet somehow do not feel called to priestly ordination. Likewise, most men who take vows in the Society of Jesus are not yet ordained priests, so there is an "in-between"time in which they are Jesuits but are not priests.

The Church requires that men who will be ordained must meet requirements by studying a certain amount of philosophy and theology. In addition, this time, called in Jesuit circles "first studies," is also a time in which some men will work towards an advanced degree that he and his superiors feel can serve the greater mission of the Society of Jesus. As part of my own formation process toward priestly ordination, I have been "missioned" to Saint Louis University to study philosophy and theology. The exact course of my studies is a little ambiguous, but my "formation director"and I have agreed that I will begin working on my philosophy and theology requirements and meanwhile be attentive to prayer and spiritual direction, trusting that God's continued call to particular areas will become more clear as I enter into studies.

I spent a lot of time in novitiate "discerning", often with the particular focus of trying to figure out if God was calling me to live my life in the Society of Jesus. However, the ambiguity of the course of my studies reveals something important. Discernment is not something that happens just with major life decisions, but is a way of letting God guide all facets of our lives. Jesuits, ideally, are always supposed to be in discernment, constantly seeking through prayer and reflection to understand how and where God is calling us to be.

Vows

2010-08-15T08:19:00.003-04:00

Almighty and eternal God, I, Matthew Christian John Peter Claver Spotts, understand how unworthy I am in your divine sight. Yet I am strengthened by your infinite compassion and mercy, and I am moved by the desire to serve you. I vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty and obedience in the Society of Jesus. I promise that I will enter this same Society to spend my life in it forever. I understand all these things according to the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Therefore, by your boundless goodness and mercy, and through the blood of Jesus Christ, I humbly ask that you judge this total commitment of myself acceptable. And as you have freely given me the desire to make this offering, so also may you give me the abundant grace to fulfill it.

At Chapel of the North American Martyrs, University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy on the 14th day of August in the year 2010.

Omena and Vow Triduum

2010-08-09T17:57:00.003-04:00

Upon return from Peru, my classmates and I have begun a mad dash to the finish. For me, this meant a) a trip to Cincinnati where I was privileged to attend the (beautiful) wedding of my cousin Katie to her new husband, Jon b) a week enjoying the stunning scenery of northern Michigan and the company of men in Jesuit formation and c) a departure to Manresa retreat house near Detroit, MI.

I'll be spending the next 3 days at Manresa, praying and preparing myself to take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on August 14. I'd ask for your prayers during this time as I prepare to follow the Lord into this life in the Society of Jesus, and know that, as always, the many people who have walked with me will be in my prayers as well!

Obedience

2010-07-26T17:18:00.001-04:00

Above: St. Ignatius of Loyola

In a famous letter to Jesuits in Portugal, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, writes the following:

In the case of other religious orders we can accept the fact that their members may excel us in fasting and vigils and the other mortifications that they observe, in all sanctity, following their way of life. However, when it comes to the authenticity and perfection of obedience, with a real deposing of our own wills and a denial of personal judgments, my great desire, dear brothers, is that those who have chosen the Society as their way of serving God Our Lord should be outstanding, and I would like this obedience to be the distinctive sign of the Society's legitimate sons.

Some shrewder commentators have noted that it was all very good and well for St. Ignatius to talk about obedience. He was always the superior! Still, both the writings of St. Ignatius as well as the long history of the Society's life and governance confirm that obedience is central to what it means to be a Jesuit. For Jesuits, obedience is about much more than following the orders of a superior. More than anything else, Jesuit obedience is an exercise in discernment. We pray and carefully examine our lives and in the midst of that examination we try to understand where God might be leading us, both as individual Jesuits and as a Society. The superior, then, is more than just a boss. Ideally, superiors in the Society are partners with whom Jesuits can work to understand where God might be moving. When the superior does give an instruction, it's an opportunity to understand that instruction as coming from Christ.

Like poverty and chastity, this vow tends to push buttons with some people. Modern people, and particularly modern people who have been influenced by American and Western culture, tend to be highly individualistic. We're highly protective of our rights, we dislike being told what to do and even more what to think and we're suspicious of many people who claim to speak from authority. While this form of individualism has distinct drawbacks (best addressed elsewhere), it also has some huge advantages. The recognition that the individual conscience is a sacred place and emphasis on freedom of thought and expression has in some cases enabled people to bring to light the profound ways in which God moves in each individual soul, which is a pretty cool thing. And yet, for Jesuits, there's still something critical about obedience. There's still something critical about understanding that my hopes, dreams, desires, thoughts and my will are not the end-all be-all of existence. God's will is always superior, but by placing my will at the service of the Society of Jesus, I also acknowledge myself as part of a greater whole in which my selfhood and my desires are honored and treasured, but also are not the only factor at work.

For me, the least interesting part of obedience is following an instruction given by a superior. It seems simplistic, but it's hard to imagine that there are too many orders I could be given where the actual act of following the order is the hard part. The hard part, more frequently, has to do with how I follow a mission or an order, particularly when the mission or order is difficult. Do I embrace the mission? Or do I go though the motions and do the bare minimum?

As I've noted before, my time on the Pine Ridge Reservation was both blessed and difficult. About a month and a half after I arrived, I found myself in a funk. I was simply having trouble adjusting to the place. I had made some friends, of the Jesuits in the community, some members of a local volunteer community as well as with Lakota people in the parishes I was trying to serve. On the other hand, I was also undergoing some struggles. The parishes had gone through a string of fairly tragic funerals, and we were struggling to find ways to bring life into a place that saw so much death. There had been over a foot of snow on the ground since I got there, making it difficult to get outside or even to get to Rapid City for recreation. I was stir-crazy, struggling to adjust, a bit lonely and above all frustrated with my work. I found myself wondering whether it was worth the frustration and heartbreak to keep investing in this work that saw so much sorrow and so few signs of life. "After all," I thought, "I could just check out mentally and emotionally. I could just put in my time and then move on towards vows."

The more I thought and prayed about the issue, the more it became clear to me that "checking out" simply wasn't an option. Obeying my superior, and obeying the prayer and discernment that led to his decision to mission me to the Pine Ridge Reservation, was about much more than physically coming to the Reservation. That part was easy. My mission was to come, to experience what the Reservation had to offer, to learn from the Lakota people and above all to pray and to discover what God was trying to tell me in that place. That mission was quite a bit harder. That mission meant that I had to get up every morning and recommit myself to the project of loving the place, knowing that even though many days it would make me smile and experience God, it would also frustrate me and break my heart. The act of obedience was not in physically following orders but was someplace else, someplace in the mind and heart.

Chastity

2010-07-17T15:39:00.003-04:00

"So wait. How do I put this? Don't you...want to have sex?" Chastity, as seen by a high school boy during a 'vocation talk' at his high school.

It may not come as a particular surprise to readers that, of the three vows, chastity tends to evoke the strongest emotional responses from people with whom I discuss. For some, like my high school aged friend above, the issue is sex, pure and simple. It's not just high school kids for whom that issue seems pressing either. For a whole variety of people I've encountered, males and females of all ages, a commitment to live one's life without sexual intimacy seems decidedly weird at best, a bit crazy at worst. Others put a slightly finer point on the issue. Marriage, says this group, and the emotional intimacy that comes with it is one of the more incredible human goods that exists. Why on earth would you give that up? Sadly, it's increasingly common in the wake of abuse scandals in the Church to find yet a third group, a group who is convinced that celibacy is unnatural and that the practice of celibacy in and of itself can be blamed for horrible instances of abuse within the Catholic Church.

This blog is not the place and I am not the person to treat this last issue comprehensively. The most that I can or will say on the topic here and now is that I have never seen any study that suggests that celibates are more likely to be abusers than other people. Still, my heart breaks whenever I hear of victims of abuse by a celibate. Among other things, celibacy is supposed to make one free to love and care for someone without the other person having to worry about mixed motives, and any act of abuse is a heartbreaking betrayal of that trust.

With that having been said however, people who wonder about the lack of sexual and marital intimacy in a celibate life have an incredibly valid point. While we as human beings are quite a bit more than our sexuality, it's also true that our sexuality is a deep and beautiful well of our personhood. This isn't just me talking, by the way; the Catholic Church has taught for a long time that our sexuality is good, beautiful and holy, and that sexual intimacy within the context of marriage is a beautiful sign of the human capacity to love and a living witness of God's love. Even more, the partnership of a marriage, while never easy, is by all accounts a deeply blessed experience. While I've never been married, I did experience long-term, happy dating relationships before I entered that at least hinted at how beautiful marriage could be. And, to be perfectly frank, celibacy is not easy. For any of the rewards of celibacy (and there are many) and for whatever the rewards of community (again, there are many), celibacy has challenges that even a vibrant prayer and community life can never replace. Even if I love hundreds or thousands of people and help them grow closer to God, I will never have an immediate family of my own with whom to share my love. Good day or bad, I will end it in a single room with no one else in my bed.

So why do it? A wise Jesuit once mentioned to me that I don't have to actually experience celibacy as being somehow "graced" in order to take vows. Rather, I simply have to desire to experience those relationships as graced. Wise words, but there's more to it than that, and I can honestly say that my brief time trying to live the vow of chastity has been beautiful.

A huge part of the value has to do with the availability for mission. Over the last two years, I've bounced from Detroit to Washington DC and to South Dakota, with month-long stints in Denver and Peru. I've worked with the homeless, prisoners, elderly patients and people on Lakota reservations. I've had days with nothing going on, and I've had days in which I put in a 14 hour shift. I've run away on a moment's notice to be with someone in a crisis or to attend a funeral. I've learned to clear my morning schedule to spend time with the Lord in prayer, knowing that when I'm with people, people don't just want my physical presence, but trust that I'm in contact with God in my own prayer life. All of this is beautiful and blessed, but I expect that the problem is probably obvious: I couldn't do that with a family. If I wanted to be a good husband or father, something in that would have to give. The hours would hardly be fair to a wife or children, and some of the "extra" things like prayer would either have to give way or be modified substantially. I almost certainly wouldn't be writing this blog. My choice of ministries might be affected. After all, jail chaplaincy or reservation parish work most often doesn't pay enough to support a family. I could forget about picking up at a moment's notice and running off to a different apostolate. In short, it's a situation in which there are two mutually exclusive sets of goods. On one hand, there's the totally awesome goods of marriage and a family life, and on the other hand is the good that is radical availability for mission. Neither is objectively better than the other, but each is exclusive of the other, and I'm convinced that God calls me to one and not the other.

Chastity goes even further though, and I think that the vow of chastity, and in some ways, vowed life, can be summed up by a moment I had when I was working as a jail chaplain. A man sat with me one day pouring his heart out. It was a case of the tragic ordinary, a traumatic childhood, lack of education, abuse, addiction, pain, yet no less painful for me to hear for being familiar. At one point, the man looked up with me, tears falling out of his reddened eyes. "Man, I don't mean to take up so much of your time," he said. "I'm sure you got other visits to do or family to get home to or something." I waited to see if he was finished and told him that I appreciated his generosity. "Actually, though," I said, "I don't have a family. I have nowhere else to be but here, so we can keep talking until the deputies kick me out." In that moment, the look on his face said it all. He was the most important thing I would do that day and that, that made all the difference.

Poverty

2010-07-11T19:24:00.005-04:00

Above: An image of St. Ignatius of Loyola (who often signed his letters, "the poor pilgrim")

There's an old Jesuit joke that tends to run something like this: A young Jesuit novice ends up in a community with some older Jesuits for a Thanksgiving dinner. After a pre-meal social hour with hors d'oeuvres and nice drinks, a stunning dinner and an equally magnificent desert, many (including our young novice) leaned back contentedly. One of the older fathers, concerned that the novice have a good experience of the Thanksgiving meal away from his family, asked the novice how it was. Without skipping a beat, the novice said, "If this is poverty, then bring on chastity!"

Poverty is a complicated, sticky topic. Jesuit poverty, like all of our vows, is basically 'apostolic' in nature. That is to say, it's meant to serve our mission and our ministry, whatever that happens to be. So, for example, a high school president most usually owns something like a Blackberry and has a car permanently assigned to him. He could probably do without either, but the mission is far better served if he takes advantage of technology to make himself a more effective president. Someone working in a prison ministry or a ministry to the homeless might not benefit as much from those things and choose to forgo them in order to live more simply. And yet, regardless of apostolic reasons, there's definitely supposed to be a sense in which material simplicity gives witness to our vows and allows us to be in solidarity with the poor. It's drawing the line that's complicated.

I should point out that most Jesuits I know would be very quick to laugh at jokes like the one above; it would never do to take ourselves too seriously! And, importantly, there's a certain amount of truth in the joke, even if it's a mixed truth. On one hand, many Jesuits live incredibly simply. One Jesuit brother I know and admire goes through all of his possessions every single year and gets rid of anything he hasn't used in the past year. In the same way, there are lots of Jesuit communities that talk regularly about the ways in which they are living poverty as a community. Balancing taking innumerable complicated factors into account, they try to balance needs of community members and the apostolate against the call for communities to live simply. And yet, on the other hand, this balancing act gets very complicated in the messy realities of apostolic life. Just having the bare minimum necessary to be an effective writer, college professor or administrator requires certain material possessions, and positive effect on the ministry is probably well worth the tradeoff with material poverty. I tend to agree with a Jesuit who works with an incredibly poor population. He suggested to me once that while we should live simply, it's not our "stuff" that keeps us from being poor. Often the thing that keeps us from really understanding poverty is our education. Regardless of the way in which we live, he says, we're simply too educated to understand the real powerlessness of poverty.

So what has poverty come to mean to me?

When I worked on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, I realized pretty quickly that I will never, ever experience poverty the way that many people there experience poverty. I could give up everything I have and live at just a bare sustenance level and still have more than some people do there. I am white, part of a majority culture, (comparatively) highly educated, well-travelled and experienced and have friends who are educated and influential. I will never be individually disempowered like some there or part of a process of collective disempowerment like the Lakota people have experienced. Ever. End of discussion.

Part of poverty for me starts with that humbling realization, to realize that I am incredibly privileged and will always be so. I have no use for a poverty that's just a castle in the sky, and real poverty starts with being humble enough to admit my privilege. And yet, there are many ways in which I can live poverty. On the reservation, I realized that there's a certain amount of poverty involved with being available for mission. After some time on the reservation, I realized that I'm very much a city boy and that living a rural lifestyle meant leaving behind some parts of an urban lifestyle that I take for granted. I've begun to learn how poverty pertains to things, but this was a good lesson in how poverty pertains to lifestyle. Likewise, I learned to simplify my lifestyle, to be conscious of how I dress, of how I talk and how I speak of my own very comfortable life.

The most joyous and fulfilling part of poverty was simply being with those who are poor, those who do struggle with material poverty. There was never, ever a question of my "being one of them." I wasn't. I'm not. However, something happened when I accepted a simple meal in a poor home, knowing full well that hospitality costs quite a bit for those who are on the margins. Something happened when I tried to empower those who are disadvantaged, letting them know that I didn't want to be either their boss or their overseer but rather a companion and friend. And something happened when I entered life on Lakota people's terms, on the terms of the poor, when I entered their life and let them change me. I'm not quite sure what that something is, but it changed me.

Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth as someone who was poor, missioning to those who are poor. I'm not very good at poverty, and probably will never be as good as Jesus was, but I'm trying.

Why a vowed life?

2010-06-16T23:03:00.009-04:00

Caravaggio's "Call of Matthew"

Everyone seeking to join the Jesuits today is subjected to a fairly rigorous process of evaluation. In addition to submitting an application which includes personal information, a spiritual autobiography and medical exams, an applicant also undergoes several interviews and a psychological examination. The process is grueling, but for good reasons. Thorough testing and questioning ensures that the Jesuits and the applicant know one another well before a decision is made to admit him as a novices. As a side effect, the process can sometimes serve as a crucible, prodding, questioning and generally testing his vocation, which means that the man who enters often arrives at a better understanding of his vocation before he even steps in the door of the novitiate. In my experience, the interviewers had a way of asking disarmingly direct questions that can still fester even today. The best of these was also one of the shortest-"Why this way?"

"Why this way?" indeed. When I tried to answer the question, 'Why do you want to be a Jesuit?' that simple answer could slash through layers of ambiguous wording like it wasn't even there. It still can today.

Why do I want to be a Jesuit? "I love Jesuits and Ignatian Spirituality." A good start, but it's not enough. Ignatius himself meant his spirituality to be for all, and Jesuits today are deeply committed to working with all kinds of people. So why this way? "Well, I'd like to serve other people." Not good enough. Laypeople, single and married, serve other people all the time, sometimes heroically-why this way? "I want to serve God and the Church." Same problem as before, since most of the Church is laypeople serving-so why this way? "I want to do the sacraments, to be a priest." Closer, but still not quite right-diocesan priests do ministry without taking the same vows as Jesuits. So why this way?

I could go on and on, but the point was that figuring out "Why this way?" became a point of unavoidable importance rather early in my experience with this journey. While my answer will (hopefully!) always be unfolding and deepening, here are the three big reasons that I'd give if someone asked me that question today.

Availability-
Availability is by far the easiest motivation for the vows to explain, and probably the easiest for people to relate to. It also has the great merit of being exceedingly practical. In simple terms, the explanation goes something like this: the Jesuit mission can be stated to be to pray in order to understand God's will and to be prepared to go anywhere and do any ministry that will be conducive to fulfilling God's will and bringing people closer to God. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are an indispensable part of this preparedness. If I had a lot of material possessions, I couldn't possibly be available to pick up and go elsewhere on short notice, and the vow of poverty ties me to that simplicity that makes me available. My ministries could take me throughout the world and demand that I fall in love time and time again with different people and places. That sort of lifestyle would be incredibly hard on a family, and many Jesuits I know live lives that would make having a healthy family impossible. The vow of chastity ties me to this sort of availability, reminding me that my call is to give my love away to the whole world and yet not have someone dependent on my love. I pray every day, and in the midst of that prayer and reflection on that prayer I can sometimes see a tiny piece of God's will. At the same time, my superiors often have a better understanding of the needs of the Church and the world, and my vow of obedience allows me to learn to see God's will in their instructions.

Before entrance and soon after, I was bothered that availability was so practical in nature. Wasn't there a deeper, spiritual reason for the vows? Of course there is. However, even after only living the vows for a few short years, I've come to appreciate the deep wisdom of availability and to embrace the fact that the vows do empower me to live a life of tremendous openness to God's will.

Witness-
I remember reading an account of Mother Theresa once that was written by a relatively non-religious man, a man who could probably be described as religiously disaffected. I found that perspective to be incredibly helpful in understanding her life, especially since he brought with him a hefty dose of skepticism (even cynicism!) and asked the hard questions that a more obviously admiring religious person might not ask. At one point, I remember, his frustrations with the intense poverty of Calcutta boiled over and he asked if what the sisters were doing would change anything. I wish I could remember the exact reply, but the content struck me with some force. Mother Theresa and the sisters simply pointed out that they were not social workers and wouldn't make very good social reformers; their vocation was simply to love the poorest of the poor and to try to see the face of God in the poor. The man was stunned.

Up to a certain point, even non-religious people can get on board with many of the missions that vowed religious people do. I try to love people and do some good, what's so bad about that? I might teach or work with the homeless or imprisoned, and what could be so wrong with that? And if I happen to have some religious ideas that strike people as weird or have made kind of a strange choice of lifestyles, what does it matter to other people? Other than people with extreme ideologies, I think most people have some admiration for the life, find it odd but not overwhelmingly so or else simply aren't that bothered one way or another by the lifestyle. Every now and again, however, the vows get to mean something bigger. For Mother Theresa, it happened in that moment above in which it became clear that the way she lived her vowed life meant an extreme obedience to her understanding of God's will, to the point where she forswore any hope of seeing the results of her work. The non-religious onlooker was forced to a crisis point-either this little old nun was absolutely crazy or else she really had a glimpse of something that was transcendent. In that moment, the vows and Mother Theresa's living of them made her a witness.

Let me be clear. I am not Mother Theresa. I probably never will be. And yet, I still have been privileged to have little glimpses of the witness value of Jesuit life. Different people get hung up on different things, whether it's the individual Jesuit vows (poverty, chastity and obedience) or the Jesuit willingness to be missioned anywhere in the world to do anything, I've occasionally seen people hit that same crisis point: either this guy is crazy or he's caught on to something. While I deeply appreciate the people who are moved by my vocation and will congratulate and thank me, I think that I'm most moved by those moments when people are simply stunned into silence and don't quite know what to say. In those moments, no doubt, some people walk away simply thinking that I'm mad, but I also suspect that in those moments that I'm a witness, that I believe so totally in God and God's call to me that I'll leave behind everything for that call.

Imitation of Christ-
This is the hardest reason by far to explain, and not least to those who might struggle with belief, faith or prayer. With that understood, I suspect it might be best to be as simple as possible here.

Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, has been a figure that has been part of my life since the beginning of my life, and raised in a Christian family I've had various understandings of Jesus throughout my life. Throughout my adult life, and specifically during novitiate through daily prayer, the 30 day Spiritual Exercises, other retreats and ministry, I've come to know this person as more than a concept, but as a friend, a trusted intimate. To me, Jesus is a supremely loving God-made-man, someone who is passionate, funny and head over heels crazy about the world. Jesus walked the earth as someone who was dirt poor, a joyfully loving chaste man and obedient to the will of God. There are many ways to imitate Christ and to follow Christ, and by no means do I think that my vowed life is the only way. However, for reasons I can't begin to fathom, Jesus is someone who has said to me, repeatedly and simply, "Follow me." (Matthew 9:9) I'm a poor imitator, but the call to follow is undeniable, and for me, the vows are one small step towards that.

Language and Vows

2010-06-16T20:50:00.008-04:00

Religious writer Kathleen Norris wrote an entire book based on language and the way we hear it. In Amazing Grace she notes that, especially as a poet, she spent years feeling very alienated from her faith in no small part due to the very language of faith. Coming back to religious practice as an adult, she reports that much of the religious vocabulary, even 'positive' words like "salvation" or Christ, "seemed dauntingly abstract to me, even vaguely threatening." (p. 2) Part of growing in faith for her was coming to own these words, "in an existential sense." (p. 3)

I have plenty of friends (and readers of this blog!) who struggle with their faith or else consider themselves to be atheist or agnostic. My friendships with so many of these people have long since taught me that Norris's experience is far from unique. I try very hard to respect that experience, and keep as far away from "scary" language as I can.

The trouble is, I have lots and lots of sets of shoptalk into which to fall. Whether I realize it or not, I'm usually wallowing in jargon. On a very basic level, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular provides a huge variety of jargon that can turn people off. Basic words like "Jesus," "Gospel," and "faith" can be abstract at best and terrifying at worst, to say nothing of words like "Church," "priest" and "sacraments." On top of that, I have a whole battery of jargon that is specific to Jesuits, like "novice," "formation," "province" and "experiment," not to mention language from Ignatian spirituality like "consolation," "discernment" and "contemplation." And, horror of horrors, none of this even takes into account the little tidbits of Latin that still lingers around our Jesuit vocabulary like, "secundi," "dux" and "vovendi."

I wish that I could say that vows are different, but I suspect the same problems still exist. Part of the problem is that many people have trouble understanding where vows fall into the formation process. People ask me, "Will you be a priest after you take vows?" No, but in taking vows, I do make a commitment to live the rest of my life as a Jesuit. Beyond that, however, even the general concept of vows can be confusing to people. When St. Ignatius lived and founded the Society of Jesus, he lived in a world in which vows of all sorts were relatively common. Not only were religious vows fairly abundant and well understood but people in all walks of life made vows with regularity on everything ranging from vows of allegiance to vows to perform a particularly task. They made vows and took them seriously. Today, language like, "vows," "profession," "religious life" and (for the hardcore Catholics) "evangelical counsels" are horrendously abstracted from our day to day life.

I'm no different than anyone else in this score. When I entered the novitiate, I had spent a fair amount of time thinking and praying about my decision to join the Jesuits. During the course of that process, I quite naturally spent a lot of time thinking about what the vows-poverty, chastity and obedience-meant. In fact, if memory serves, each of my 4 interviewers asked me what the vows meant to me. I had answers to give, but I'm quite sure that they weren't any good. I'm quite sure that they were academic, a dry, reprocessed version of something that I'd read in spiritual literature somewhere along the way. I can only imagine that my interviewers, and the ones who read their transcripts, decided that my answers were good enough to show that I wanted to grow in the vows, and that was sufficient. In the same way, I've spent quite a bit of time these three years trying to sort through my prayer and feelings, trying desperately to move from a mere academic understanding of what the vows are and try to understand what they mean in terms of my own lived experience.

A couple months back, I wrote a letter to my provincial superior, the man in charge of all Jesuits in this region. In this letter, I detailed my journey through the novitiate and requested that I be admitted to perpetual (permanent!) vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. I'm still growing into my Jesuit identity and will continue to grow into it for the rest of my life, but the fact that I wrote my letter and the fact that my provincial superior accepted me to take vows this August 14th suggests to me that I've begun to make them mine somehow.

As I'll be unable to provide any regular updates about my adventures in Peru these next few weeks, I'd like to share some of these reflections, thoughts and experiences about "vowed life" and the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience with all of you. My hope is that it will lend some understanding into what this sometimes mysterious-looking life means to me. And, above all, I hope it reflects the ways in which these strange words-poverty, chastity and obedience, have become mine.

Retreat and Province Days and Back Home, Oh my!

2010-06-14T12:04:00.003-04:00

Back in Berkley, MI after a beautiful time at retreat and Province Days.

As mentioned before, every Jesuit makes an annual 8-day retreat as a way of renewing one's spiritual life and seeing where the Lord is at work and may be calling the man. The Tri-Province (i.e. the Chicago, Detroit, Wisconsin) formation retreat was an opportunity for the men "in formation" of those three provinces to make their retreat together, with all the participants assigned to one of several excellent Jesuit spiritual directors brought together for the purposes of the retreat. It was a silent retreat, yet in many ways it was still a bonding experience. It never ceases to amaze me how sharing prayer can bring people together, even when that prayer is in silence!

The Tri-Province Days and Ordinations in Milwaukee were likewise very moving. It can be exhausting and overwhelming experience to be immersed in that many people. At the same time, I found it to be deeply confirming of my vocation to see so many Jesuits who have touched my life since I first met the Society as a freshman in high school. Likewise, the ordination Mass itself was incredibly moving, beautifully organized and spiritually powerful.

The gameplan now is to spend a few days in Detroit before leaving at 1030 AM on Friday for Lima, Peru!

Annual Retreat and Province Days

2010-06-01T05:43:00.003-04:00

Jesuits make an annual 8-day retreat, and I'll be joining other men in formation from the Wisconsin, Chicago and Detroit provinces at the Siena Center in Wisconsin. One of the many awesome parts of Jesuit life is that contemplation and prayer are not an extra but a requirement. However, in the course of being a "contempletive in action," I think that most Jesuits I know find it easier in their busy schedules to do the "action" part than the "contemplation. " It's a bit easier for me as a novice, as my schedule allows for a lot more in the way of prayer and recollection, but opportunities to spend time with God are still more than welcome! It's also quite a blessing-not many people are able to take 8 days a year to pray and collect themselves, and I'm keenly aware of the fact that the retreat is as much about the people I serve as it is me.

Like the 30 day Spiritual Exercises, it's an 8-day retreat where I will spend most of the day in silence and break it to meet with a spiritual director, a priest of one of the three provinces. After it's all said and done, I'll head to Milwaukee to see the ordinations of a number of men from the three provinces.

Please pray for me during this time!

Discernment: On Likes and Consolations

2010-05-20T15:40:00.018-04:00

"I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly." -John 10:10

For much of the two full weeks that I've spent back at the novitiate in Berkley, Michigan the novices have been occupied with the busy, fascinating and long process of hearing each other's stories from the last four months. I say long because it's hard to digest any four months of one's life easily, particularly when the four months have been very deliberately crafted to be formative, even transformative. Inevitably, this leads to a critical problem: how do you broach the topic? "How was it?" seems woefully inadaquate and simplistic, as does the seemingly inevitable "Good!" but one has to start somewhere.

Clumsy as they can sometimes be, one of these entrées offered me a critical insight. One night in the kitchen, one of the first-year novices, a bright and prayerful guy, modified the 'how was it?' formula ever so slightly and said to me, "Did you like it?" The slightest bit taken aback, I pondered, rummaged around my memories and feelings, which were still quite immediate at the time. Then, as thoughtfully and simply as I could manage, I looked at him and said, "No. No I didn't."

If the novice had asked me, as many others have, if the reservation was a good experience, I would have unhesitatingly said 'yes!' Likewise, if someone had asked if the the experience was formative, I would have been able to give an unequivocal affirmative. But I don't think I liked it.
As nearly as I can tell, when someone asks me if I "like" something, they're probably asking whether I found something to be fun or enjoyable. In all fairness, there were parts of the experience that I liked very much, that I found to be both fun and enjoyable. I really 'liked' planning Holy Week liturgies. I 'liked' the priest with whom I worked very much, as well as the community of Jesuits with whom I lived. I'm incredibly fond of the Parish Life Coordinators at both of the parishes at which I worked, and during the time that I spent with them and other parishioners, their companionship made me laugh, reflect and be joyful. I 'liked' the people and their company, very much. Difficult as it was, I even 'liked' the experience of encountering another culture, in which I learned much about the way that God can work in other people and in me.

Still, though I 'liked' things about my time at Pine Ridge very much, I cannot say that I 'liked' the overall experience. The reservation was an indescribably difficult place for me to be. Statistics on the Rez vary, but they're almost universally grim. Unemployment and poverty is rampant, and at least some 2006 number suggest that 97% of the population lives below the federal poverty line. Disease and addiction are absolutely rampant, over 50% in some studies and spiking to well over 80% in some communities. Lack of education and employment opportunities dominate, and the picture gets rounded out with high rates of suicide, domestic violence, gang violence, abuse, neglect. Statistics can provide a backdrop or give a suggestion, but they simply can't convey the actual sensation of seeing those horrible numbers incarnated in the lives of people in the communities in which I worked. The statistics are shocking, but not so devastating as seeing what it means to see lives ravaged by poverty, addiction and brokenness, to attend burial after tragic burial. Worst of all was seeing how normal that kind of tragedy could be to some members of the community, of how prevalent resignation and despair could be. I'm painting in broad strokes here, and these dynamics do not tell the full story of the Rez, but they tell a part of the story. Many people there, too many people, barely had life, let alone 'life' in the fullness.

I couldn't 'like' being on the Rez, despite the many fond memories I have of people, places, culture and events there. This, however, poses a very serious and worthwhile question about discernment. Discernment, in spiritual terms, is a process of prayer and reflection on that prayer that seeks to understand God's will in a particular situation and act out an understanding. It is a way of making decisions that specifically asks God, "What is YOUR will?" and looks for answers to that question. People in discernment of any kind, whether about major life choices or simply day to day life, will pay special attention to movements in prayer. Sometimes, the movements are consolations, movements that tend to move us closer to God, movements that increase faith, hope and love. Sometimes the movements are desolations, movements that tend to make us feel more removed from God, movements that move us away from God. It's important to note that fluctuations in these movements are a natural part of any prayer life and have nothing to do with whether a person is spiritually healthy or not. Still, it's useful to be aware of these movements. Paying attention to the specific patterns of these consolations and desolations over time can be a powerful way to seek to understand where God is leading us.

So why is liking or not liking something a discernment issue? Why would it be important for me to even be able to make a distinction between my enjoyment of a particular ministry and the conviction that God is calling me to that ministry?

Basically, this is a problem because "liking" something so often goes along with being fulfilled, which in turn can often indicate a state of spiritual consolation or else the sense of well-being that comes from being where God has called us to be. St. Irenaeus, an early Church Father, wrote simply and beautifully that "the glory of God is man fully alive." While many holy people have done the will of God and experienced spiritual distress in the midst of it (Mother Theresa is a great example), most of us can tell when we're doing what God wants us to do, what God created us to do by the simple fact that it brings us to life. We feel satisfied, alive, fulfilled and often 'like' what we're doing. This can be a great way of discernment too. Sometimes people will take inventory of their lives, taking stock of where they find fulfillment and what parts of their lives they find dry, frustrating and unfulfilled. While even the most fulfilled life will usually have areas that are more difficult and less enjoyable, those patterns can still be a useful way of telling where the spirit is active in a particular life. Men and women considering a religious vocation often use this method of discernment. When considering whether they want to enter the priesthood or a religious order, someone might ask what the sources of his or her "deepest desires" are. What are the things in life that give the man or woman a feeling of lasting satisfaction? What are a person's dreams, the big dreams that well up from the deepest depths of the heart? And, critically, does it seem like these dreams and desires could be best fulfilled in religious life, or in that particular order? St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, first came to talk about consolations and desolations doing exactly this kind of discernment. While recovering from a wound suffered in battle, he imagined himself doing great acts of chivalry but found, to his surprise, that while these visions excited him for a time, the feeling was fleeting and he was ultimately left feeling empty and sad. On the contrary, when he read the lives of saints and imagined himself serving God in the way of St. Dominic or St. Francis of Assisi, he found himself excited and fulfilled with a feeling that endured.

Here's the catch: discernment, is far, far more complicated than figuring out what makes us happy on a superficial level, figuring what we "like." For many of us, the feeling of fulfillment that comes from following God's plan for us is a truly exciting sensation, one that we "like" a lot! Still, liking or not liking something isn't a primary way of discerning what God's will is. It's not even a primary way of figuring out whether we're experiencing consolation-remember, the primary definition of consolation is a movement that brings us closer to God, a movement that tends to increase faith, hope and love. A movement of repentance for something we've done wrong betters our relationship with God and increases our faith, hope and love, even though it's not particularly pleasant. Most of us can think of difficult experiences in our lives that may not have been at all pleasant but still made us deeper, wiser, stronger and more loving people. That too can be a consolation.

During my time on the Rez, I experienced a lot of darkness and a lot of heartbreak. It was emotionally and psychologically draining, but it was also a time of some spiritual darkness. While there were moments of great consolation in my prayer, all of the baggage came with me to prayer, and I often found myself wearily asking God, "Where are You?" Sometimes, the silence was deafening. And yet, seeing where God was moving during that experiment has been like trying to trace the movements of a ship at night. Standing on the bow of the ship and looking all around, it's almost impossible; the darkness is consuming and there's no way to see where I'm being taken. However, looking backward at the churning white wake in the moonlight, it's easy to see where one's been. In the same way, in the midst of the experiment, I couldn't begin to see where God was taking me. However, looking back, I'm able to realize that God's been more active than I could have known. I may not have liked the Rez, but praying and carefully reflecting on that prayer has helped me to realize that it was exactly where God had called me to be.

The Outsider

2010-05-03T16:50:00.007-04:00

Recently returned from a burial, myself, the Jesuit priest with whom I work, and a host of friends and relations of the deceased waited for the traditional "feed" to begin. The food is ready, but most people remain seated. Eventually, a plate is put together, with small portions of all the dishes on the plate. The Spirit Plate. I'm asked to say the meal prayer and do. The Spirit Plate is taken outside and set in a "safe" place (presumably a place where the spirits can feed on it and the dogs cannot) and the meal begins.

It's probably not necessary to note, but my meals growing up never actually included the creation of a Spirit Plate. "Sweats" were things that happened after mowing the lawn, not something that referred to prayer. Funerals did not typically include drum groups, Masses and prayer services never involved burning white sage in a scooped shell and if phrases like "pow-wow" were ever used outside of a history or cultural studies class, it was usually metaphorical.

To state the obvious, things were just different on the "Rez," and while the list of concrete and observable cultural differences could go on and on, the truth is that the big, easily-noticeable customs were not what set me apart as an outsider. Likewise, it wasn't the sheer fact of being the only white face in a room that made me feel so distinctly an outsider on the reservation. After all, I've worked with African-American populations and other groups, and while I would never seek to minimize the difference in experience and culture of minority groups from American whites in the United States, the truth of the matter is that the feeling of being outside, of being on unfamiliar ground was more acute with the Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. It wasn't even the fact that, by governing structure, I was legally a guest on the reservation who could, in theory, be asked to leave at any given point.

No, what made me an outsider in this case was the the many tiny nuances that reminded me throughout the day that I was immersed in a distinctly non-Western culture. It's the way people joked, the different way one shakes hands, the pattern of conversations, how one greets, thanks or says goodbye to someone, and a thousand other little nuances that I've totally taken for granted throughout my adult life. Many of these adjustments would no doubt be familiar to those who have lived for extended periods in non-Western cultures. Also, to be fair, the differences in culture between where I've lived before and the reservation were not as extreme as it would be if I'd gone to, say, China. Lakota culture has interacted and commingled with white America long enough that while Lakota culture still is appreciable as a unique culture, the difference from white culture now is nowhere near so extreme as it might have been a century ago.

With all that having been said, however, there was very rarely a time in which I did understand myself as an outsider on the reservation. At most points, I was acutely aware of my own lack of awareness in basic social situations. Lakota culture is a "high context" culture, and cues or statements that would seem entirely obvious to other Lakota people would often blow straight past me, just at they would other outsiders. A statement that struck me as being oblique or vague would be both glaring and critical to a Lakota person. By the same token, I would frequently do the wrong thing. I would shake the wrong person's hand, in the wrong order, or fail to shake that person's hand, give a firm handshake and look someone in the eye (overbearing!) or talk too loudly or speak too directly. I was an outsider, blundering my way through a culture different than my own in ways both prominent and subtle.

A primary grace of this experience is learning to exist and be comfortable as a guest. Even though the Jesuits as a group have been on the reservation for over 120 years, all of us, and especially me as a newcomer, exist on the Rez as guests. We have no right to be there, either in a legal sense or in the sense of being part of a culture that has oppressed this people for nearly a century and a half, and our sense of being a guest is only emphasized by the fact that we remain cultural outsiders. As an outsider, I had no status, little authority to speak of and questionable credibility. I was a guest, an unknown guest at that, and the very best that I could do is to allow myself to be welcomed, be quiet and learn.

The Long Absence

2010-04-19T13:54:00.003-04:00

If my rough calculations are correct, the last several months represent the longest stint of non-blogging I've had since creating this blog. My instinct is to apologize for this. For many of my friends and family, this blog is a primary way in which I keep in touch with these friends and relations with whom I may not correspond regularly. It's more, much more than I deserve, but I'm blessed with many people in my life who want to keep up with what's going on in my Jesuit life. I strongly suspect that most of the credit there is due to God, who blesses my life in such abundance and provides ample graces to be shared. The bottom line, however, is that, as much as I would like to be able to make phone calls and write letters and emails to everyone in my life, the reality is that doing so is simply impossible.

At the same time, my silence on here has by no means been out of simple neglect for the blog. This blog has become a tool for me to share my vocation and the graces that God gives me through my vocation. I'm consistently humbled and touched by the way in which elements of my story have touched friends, family members and acquaintances. With that said, though my blog is a beautiful tool for sharing my vocation, I should be crystal clear that my blog is not itself my vocation. The mission of Loyola House Jesuit novitiate is to help the novice foster an intimate union with Jesus Christ, confirming his vocation in the context of that transformative relationship. Furthermore, we as novices are missioned to our various 'experiments' with more or less specific assignments, at the center of which is what I understand to be a three-fold purpose: 1) fostering a deeper union with Jesus Christ 2) allowing myself to be formed in the ministerial and community life of the Society of Jesus 3) Testing and confirming my vocation and 4) serving the people of God. In practical terms, this often means that since I'm not missioned to be a writer or a blogger, this often takes a backseat in my chain of priorities.

I don't really plan to excuse my absence from here-I don't think that there's much to excuse and I think that frequently I've made the right choice in not blogging these last few months. At the same time, a brief explanation of these factors might be instructive and would go a long ways towards explaining both the nature of the ministry here as well as how I understand myself as a Jesuit novice blogger. So, without further ado, the major factors:

1. More 'out' time means less blogging time- I have had more limited time for blogging here than other places. Much of my work here has been done at the small parishes of St. Agnes in Manderson, SD and Christ the King in Porcupine, SD. These parishes are, on a good day, a solid 45 minute drive from the community at which I live, which means that I'll spend around 2 hours in the car on a typical day. It's not at all atypical for me to spend as much as 3 hours in the car just doing daily ministry and shopping excursions or other trips can involve as much as 4-5 hours in the car. This is a lot, and these kinds of distances come with distinct challenges. It's a challenge just to spend that much time in a vehicle. It's a challenge to really be present to the parish communities when they're so far from my own community and from each other. It's a challenge to my schedule. Spending a full day at the parishes quite frequently involves a 14 hour day from departure to return, and I tend to treasure the few precious hours that I do have every day at the community for prayer time, workout time and community time. Blogging simply hasn't fit into the schedule.

2. Ministerial concerns and blogging- The blogosphere can be a vicious place, and I regret to say that religious blogs (of all stripes) can be some of the worst offenders. This has never been a blog that was about my opinions, but rather one about my experiences. I try rather hard to confine my posts on here to "I feel" or "I experience" types of sentiments, rather than "I think" statements or attempts to state what is. However, there's a catch here. Much of my novitiate work has been in the fields of pastoral ministry, which means that I consistently enter incredibly intimate and vulnerable parts of people's lives. It is in precisely these encounters that I often have seen God's face most clearly, and to truly convey my experiences means to somehow convey these experiences.

Still, entering these parts of people's lives involves a huge act of trust on the part of the person to whom I minister. Common human decency demands respect for these people, but the importance of trust in ministerial relationships demands that my respectfulness and confidentiality be absolute, sacrosanct. When I ministered in a jail or a center for the homeless, this was easy. The encounters (especially in the jail) were relatively anonymous to begin with and large populations could be counted on to safeguard anonymity. The same simply isn't true here. The Oakland County Jail in Pontiac, MI reports an average population of around 1700, though the jail was working on overflow during my time here, packed with people who were relative strangers to one another. The entire population of the Pine Ridge Reservation is estimated to be around 40,000, spread over an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, a sparse population for so large an area. Communities are small and tight-knit, frequently interrelated, and this shrinks even more when the sample is reduced to the Catholic population. In short, while I could easily protect the anonymity of an inmate by simply saying "an inmate" or "a person with whom I worked," there's a far, far lower likelihood that I could protect someone's confidentiality out here on the Rez.

3. Self and substance: Why I try not to process in an external forum- Intimately related to the above two reasons is a final reason. Simply put, even though this tends to be a fairly personal blog, I try very hard to maintain good divisions between my interior life and my exterior life. I hope very much that over the last couple years I've been able to convey something of my own interior life on these pages, both because I feel that we live in a world that cries out for vulnerability and transparency as well as because I feel that my 'interior' experiences are the best expression of my experiences as a novice. At the same time, a blog is a very, very public space. For any questions on that, simply take a look at other blogs in which comments on people's posts can quickly balloon into war waged against the blogger himself. Discretion is always advisable.

With that in mind, I try to be careful about what I post both for my own sake and for the sake of the apostolate. One of many questions I ask myself while posting is whether I would want a particular post to be printed on the front page of the New York Times. If not, I shouldn't post. Likewise, I try to keep in mind that, as a novice, I'm a man in a very particular period of discernment, one in which my prayer and feelings tend to be swirling as I encounter radical new the decision to take vows looms more imminently. This is good and natural, but the dramatic, public forum of a blog is definitely not the place to work through these feelings.

So how does this relate to my Long Experiment in South Dakota? As I hope to explain at a later point, the experiment here has been by turns one of the most blessed experiences of the novitiate and most difficult. I've encountered periods of intense personal, emotional and spiritual barrenness and also moments of intense joy. I've struggled with a dramatic encounter with a new culture and yet found life in it. All of this is very much in the natural trajectory of a novice experiment. And yet, the particular nature of these struggles are such that they should not have been broadcast. Even four months in, I'm only barely getting a feel for Lakota culture and what it means to minister there. Given intense cultural sensitivity issues, it would have been wildly inappropriate for me to muse about the culture as I was working through it. Likewise, my own feelings were meaningful, but here, in this place, was not the place to explain them.

In short, I regret not having been able to share more during this time. Around the time I stopped blogging regularly, my readership was fairly regular, and I suspect that some of that has dropped off. Still, I'd do it all again-this was a decision made with prayerful discernment, and I only hope that I can begin to share more again with the people who read this regularly.

My First 'Sweat'

2010-02-09T13:42:00.011-05:00

Note: This was a post I started some time ago...the recollections are nowhere near as fresh now, but it does help to have some perspective!

Two Fridays ago was my first experience praying in a sweat lodge.

Unfortunately, sweat lodges have made their way into the news rather frequently in the last few months, due to terrible tragedies that occurred at an event in Arizona. I'm by no means an expert on sweat lodges or sweats and I can't even claim to have read extensively into the case at the 'Spiritual Warrior' camp. Still, given the amount of publicity that the incident has received in recent weeks, I think it's important to mention up front that many people here on the reservation have expressed frustration that "sweat lodges" have gotten such negative attention in the last few weeks. Far from being an extremist practice of a fringe, sweating is a relatively common way of praying here, in which participants are encouraged to be safe. In my own experience, we were all encouraged to use the customary phrase, "mitakye oyasin" ('all my relations') if we needed to excuse ourselves. In short, there was no shame in taking care of ourselves, and the prayer leader was careful to ask if we were doing ok after each round.

My own experience with the sweat lodge was overwhelmingly positive.

A collection of Jesuits, Red Cloud Indian School students making an Ignatian Spirituality Retreat, Red Cloud faculty, Red Cloud volunteers attended the sweat, which was led by a school administrator. We gathered outside, near the sweat lodge set up a little ways away from both the high school and community. There was a large fire in front of the lodge that had been burning for a long time, in the center of which were the stones that would be used to heat the lodge. At the signal of the leader, we got ourselves ready to enter the lodge. I and the other men stripped ourselves to our shorts and stood there shivering as we stood in bare feet on ice in 10 degree weather. Women (who wore long skirts and t-shirts, incidentally) entered first, entering the left side of the entrance and then proceeding clockwise around the perimeter of the lodge. The men followed, filling in the available space on the outer ring of the lodge before others filled in to create a second concentric circle.

The lodge looks much like the one above (though it's not quite the same). Inside, the ceiling is low, and the ground covered in slightly soggy carpet squares. In the center of the lodge was a large bowl lined with brick that had been dug into the ground to hold the hot rocks. In a twist that I hadn't entirely expected, the lodge was entirely dark when the flap was closed.

As we settled in, the leader welcomed us and gave us a brief introduction to what would be taking place. He noted that each of the elements involved in the sweat (the fire, the rocks, the water and the steam) all had profound spiritual meaning in their own right, both in a Lakota way but also in a more universal sense. The prayer would proceed in 4 rounds. During the first round, the leader did much of the praying. During the second the men prayed aloud as the women prayed silently with them, During the third, the women prayed as the men prayed with them and during the fourth, all sung along. Most of the "rounds" were begun or summarized with a Lakota song. As the round progressed, the leader would pour water on the hot rocks piled in the middle of the sweat lodge, causing steam to rise and the lodge to get intensely, intensely hot. We concluded by stepping outside, greeting one another with a handshake and smoking a Lakota ceremonial pipe.

My experience of the sweat was overwhelmingly positive. I found that in spite of the unfamiliarity of the situation, the intensity of the heat (and the cold outside!) were actually incredibly helpful for the overall focus of my prayer. It was a fantastic immersion into the way that many Lakota (and other native peoples!) pray. Most of all, however, I loved my experience with the sweat lodge because it was such an embodied way of praying. A fault of mine and, if I can be permitted to generalize, about many Western people is that I/we tend to get caught up in our heads in prayer. That is to say, our meditation tends to be internal and not particularly physical. What I loved about the sweat lodge is that it embraced the physical part of our beings, through the intensity of the sensations, through the songs, through the pipe. The body wasn't a distraction but rather was an integral part of the prayer, united with the soul in the process of praising God and allowing God to enter and cleanse the body and the soul. A reminder to me of several important truths. Different people, including different Catholics, pray in different ways, and most ways have merits to them. And for myself, it's good to remember that even if my primary mode of prayer is internal and meditative, I should not forget that my soul is tied up in my body, and that remembering my own physicality can be a great boon to prayer, rather than the opposite.

The Long Experiment

2010-01-15T16:12:00.008-05:00

My first day in my new ministry I buried a five week old child. Literally.

This spring, my classmates and I will be distributed across the Midwest for our "Long Experiment." Lasting from January till early May, the Long Experiment is an opportunity before vows for us to be immersed in Jesuit apostolic life, living in a Jesuit community and working full time in some apostolate. For this experience, I've been missioned to live at Holy Rosary Mission, a Jesuit community that lives and works on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Lakota. More specifically, I'll be doing the bulk of my ministry at two parishes on the reservation, St. Agnes and Christ the King, working on special projects for the parishes and getting to know the communities the best that I can.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with United States reservations probably realizes that many reservations face pretty grave issues, and the Pine Ridge Reservation is no different. The county that contains the reservation is listed many places as the second poorest in the United States, an there are perennial problems here of poverty, addiction and despair. I'm not sure whether or not I agree with the position, conclusions or even the presentation of the following articles, but this article from the New York Times and this article from the UK's The Guardian offer at least some idea about what life on "the Rez" can be like. It suffices to say that the community that I've been missioned to enter into, the people with whom I've been asked to be a companion for the next few months, face tremendous and devastating issues, and I've been asked to enter into that experience for a time.

My first day here gave a stark introduction to what the next few months might hold. After arriving the night before, unpacking and meeting the community, I went out the next morning with the pastor to one of the two parishes at which I'd be working for the funeral of a 5 week old child. Arriving at the church hall at which wakes and funerals are typically held, I was surprised to see only the mother, father and a small child there. I was even more surprised, and saddened, when only one or two local people trickled in to offer their support. We said some quiet prayers for the child, father offered some brief words of comfort, that Jesus promises in the scripture that God, Tunkaschila (literally "Grandfather) takes special care of innocent children, and then proceeded to the burial.

It was here that the poverty of the experience struck me. More than not having friends or relatives present in this devastating time, no support in what had to be misery, the family was going about the business of burying the child without even the benefit of a funeral home. The trip to the graveyard was accomplished as father and I drove with the tiny casket in the backseat, carefully wrapped in a pink "Star Quilt." We made our way up to the cemetery only with difficulty, revving the engine and picking up speed so that our small car could make it up the snowy, slippery and unpaved hill to the burial place. And, having said prayers over the body and the grave, the father of the child jumped into the grave and received the casket that we handed down, after which the three of us took turns shoveling freezing dirt into the ground as icy winds whipped around us. We talked a little, but not much, and when the sad job was done, we shook hands and parted ways.

My time here on the Rez offers a wealth of experiences. Lakota culture is quite distinctly a non-Western culture, and my time here offers the opportunity to learn what it means to be a Christian in a non-Western context. The many social problems facing people on the reservation offers many opportunities to continue work done in other experiments in ministering to those who suffer from poverty and injustice. My work in the parish and time in community will offer critical insights as I draw nearer to making decisions about perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the Society of Jesus.

At the end of the day, however, I'm not here as a "problem-fixer" or as an anthropologist. Despite any help I might offer the parish, I'm not even here to be merely an extra set of hands.

St. Ignatius of Loyola called his group the Compania de Jesus, the companions of Jesus, and I understand my mission here largely in terms of that companionship. Sometimes that means sitting with someone in a jail as he bares his soul and tries to find God in the midst of his misery. Sometimes that means being with third-graders as they seek to learn more about the Lord. And sometimes it takes even less glamorous forms, standing on an icy hill and shoveling dirt. In a way both simple and sublime, I got to be a companion with the father of that child, and through it be a companion of Christ. For whatever work I will do (and there's a lot that I plan on doing!) I hope that I can keep sight of that fact that I am here to enter into the experience of the people of Pine Ridge, to become a companion of Christ by becoming a companion of the Lakota people here.

The 3rd Annual Spotts Family Tacky Ornament Contest

2010-01-09T11:41:00.029-05:00

It all started 3 Christmases ago when my Dad was working on Christmas Day. As a family, we decided that we wanted to wait and celebrate Christmas together, which left us with the altogether difficult question of what to do with Christmas Day. My brother announced his nostalgia for grade-school arts and crafts tacky ornaments. After some musing, the tacky ornament contest was born. This year marks the third year of the tacky ornament contest, and it was a doozy.

After heavy-duty surgery on his throat, my brother Ben was laboring under some seriously adverse conditions. Nevertheless, he turned in this unquestionably tacky effort, dubbed "Candy cane/seahorse?" Very nice.

My sister Michelle managed to overcome her unfortunate tendencies towards cuteness and turned in this fine submission, "Snoopy with Bling." Not too shabby from someone with unfortunately good tastes.

Mom's effort, "Star of Bethelehem Part II" had some really solid features. Note particularly the furry outline the sequins and the glitter glue.

Grandma's submission, "Birds Will be Birds" broke exciting new ground into the area of tacky concept as well as tacky execution. Not only was the actual visual effect rather horrifying, but the concept itself was deliciously crass. Note the sequins underneath the birds. Tacky droppings...nice Grandma, nice.

My sister Emily's went with a more traditional model, working with a basic concept and relying with lots of glitz to back it up. Her entry, "A little bit o' this, a little bit o' that" did the tacky ornament contest proud.

Dad's entry is also one for the annals. The fur, leaves, sequins, orange paint and shiny fabric would have been garish under any circumstances. However, his, er,buxom "Dolly Parton Angel" threatens the boundaries of good taste even more than is the norm in the Tacky Ornament Contest.

However, one entry finally rose above the rest....

Fueled by viewings of various versions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," the entry "Jacob Marley: Christmas in Vegas" rose to the occasion. Note the glittering chains with glitzy packages, the furry mantle lined with glitter, the stogie, the bowler hat, and the martini glass. Out of an excellent field, it's truly an honor to be, for the second year running, the winner of the Spotts Family Tacky Ornament Contest.

Advent Triduum 2009

2009-12-19T13:06:00.003-05:00

Starting tonight after dinner, both the first and the second year novices of Loyola House will be making a three day, silent retreat at the lovely Manresa Retreat House. A Jesuit of the New England Province, Fr. Joe McHugh, will be preaching the retreat, offering reflections on which we can base our own prayer. The couple days of solitude is a time to reflect and pray over the last semester, a chance to take stock of the graces that we've recieved and to look forward to the coming weeks and months.

Strange as it seems, this blog has become an important form of ministry for me, a way to share my experiences with my friends, family and people I may never have met. Know that all of you will be in my prayers these next few days, and I ask for yours.

Ministry and Mourning

2009-12-18T08:25:00.008-05:00

Sitting in a hallway between lower-security 'pods,' an inmate and I sit on matching, molded plastic chairs with our heads bowed towards one another in prayer. As with the rest of our meeting that day, the location is anything but ideal for such an intimate encounter. Deputies walk back and forth, shuttling inmates to various locations, and minimum-security "trustees" wheel supply carts back and forth, making our meeting place highly-traveled in addition to being public. Still, I'm not distracted, and my friend, the inmate, seems deeply immersed in prayer.

At his request, I lead the prayer, a prayer that in many ways is not unlike the prayers with which I closed many of my previous meetings with this man. I begin by thanking God, for the great gift that the relationship has been to me, for the gift of God's self, the gift of our lives and the gift of the ways in which my companionship with my inmate friend has shown the face of God to both of us. I ask God's blessing on both of us, that our hearts may be more and more opened to love God more fully, to know God's will and to let our lives be transformed so that we can become more fully the people God calls us to be.

At some point during this prayer, I hear a sound and look up, only to see tears falling from my friend's face. And, as I conclude the prayer, he looks up sobbing. "Don't forget me, Matt," he chokes out. "Don't forget me!" Quickly, he stands up, wraps me in a strong hug (not encouraged by jail protocol) and walks away. As for me, the dam that was holding back a full reservoir of emotion took a substantial blow, and it was all I could do to hold it together for the next inmate I visited.

A huge part of what makes a Jesuit a Jesuit is an availability to go anywhere and do anything that will be for the good of souls and God's greater glory, and so very much of our life and vocation must be understood this way. While the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience have a spirituality of their own, most Jesuits also understand the vows as a way to make us available for mission. The fourth vow taken by 'professed' Jesuits to go wherever the pope might send them on mission is especially emblematic of this desire to be free for mission. Through it, professed Jesuits suborn their own will to the needs and global perspective of the universal Church.

Maybe most profound of all is the way that Jesuit and Ignatian spirituality relentlessly seeks a knowledge of God's will and the freedom to do it. In the First Annotation to the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola says that, "every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all the disordered tendencies, and, after it is rid, to seek and find the Divine Will as to the management of one’s life for the salvation of the soul, is called a Spiritual Exercise." For any of the other graces that an individual Jesuit receives during his Long Retreat, a major grace for which which he hopes is an intimate knowledge of God's will for him and for the freedom to do that will. Likewise, the continuing exercise of discernment of God's will is the ongoing process of seeking to find God's will and the interior strength to be free enough to do it. For St. Francis Xavier, this meant the freedom to pick up with 24 hours notice and spend the rest of his life travelling thousands upon thousands of miles to live and preach in cultures that were not his own. For Sts. Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion, it meant the freedom to return to their own homeland to minister, though their martyrdom was a foregone conclusion. For St. Aphonsus Rodriguez, freedom meant allowing himself to be missioned to be the porter in a college for the rest of his life. Availability and freedom, in the Jesuit sense, mean that one seeks the will of God and allows onesself to let go of anything, exterior or interior, that might keep one from following that will. It means being willing to fall in love with the world wherever one happens to be and, through it, fall in love with God.

Every way of life, I suspect, has it's own 'way of being' that allows one to cope with the particular and peculiar contours of a specific vocation. For married couples, the way of being involves an ever deepening knowledge and love of the other, growing together over the years and a constant willingness to fall in love over and over again. The difficulties, even neroses, that emerge involve ways in which couples deal with domestic life, with a lifelong exposure to personal needs and foibles and the ways in which the couple reacts as a couple to life as it happens. For monks and people in monastic, both the grace and the challenge of the vocation involves their commitment to stability. It's a commitment to find God in a particular place through prayer and work in that place, and the struggles and neuroses that emerge have to do with precisely that commitment to one place, one community.

The Jesuit call to availability for mission and the spirituality that calls us to a love of the world wherever we happen to be is riddled with great graces. It allows a flexible understanding of what it means to be a Jesuit and empowers us to live rich, varied lives. At the same time, this way of being has brought me face to face with our neuroses during my own short time as a Jesuit. Whether it was working in nursing homes during my first semester, teaching children last spring, working with the homeless in DC or now, concluding my time at the jail, I've found myself falling in love with the work and with the people in the experience. The only way I know how to be a good minister is to invest myself, which has led to very graced encounters with other people. At the same time, there's a price to pay that comes with this experience. It means a certain amount of heartbreak during the ministry. To see patients at the nursing home suffer made me ache. The poverty and addiction of the homeless in DC tore me apart almost on a daily basis. And my experience with inmates at the jail struggling with loneliness, guilt and despair shattered me routinely.

More than those daily exeperiences of the other, however, the specific experience of these as a Jesuit ministry has its own struggles. As I invested in each of these ministries and felt myself falling in love, I knew that the ultimate heartbreak would come when I left the ministry. Therein lies a great trap, a difficult neurosis of the Jesuit vocation. Our call asks us to fall in love daily, to find God in everything and especially in our ministry, yet at the same time, to be free enough to move on when God calls us elsewhere. Just as it can involve the ecstasy of love and finding God, it can also involve the dull ache of heartbreak and loss.

My inmate friend was sobbing, and inside, so was I. For the last couple weeks, I've felt myself begin to mourn the loss of the jail. By the experience of trying to extend God's love and mercy to others, I've experienced God's love and mercy at the jail in ways I never have before. By being companion of inmates, I've learned something of what it means to be a companion of Jesus. The ugly, harsh environment that is the jail became a house of God to me over the months I was there, because I found God in every corner. And now, completing the cycle of a Jesuit, I'm following God's call to go elsewhere. I'm mourning but mourning with the full realization that this too is what it means for me, myself, to live the Jesuit vocation.

One Day at the Jail

2009-12-15T20:07:00.010-05:00

Monday, my second to last day at the jail, was a day like many others there.

I showed up as close to 8am as I could and was cheerfully buzzed through the first door by the deputy working reception. I passed through the metal detector, signed in and waited until the next door, quite heavy and mechanical, slid aside to let me through. A short walk down the hall and I waited until the third door buzzed unlocked, at which point I passed through and walked into the chaplain's office.

Two of the volunteers were already hard at work. One, a friendly yet focused deacon was hard at work, running through inmate records in the computer system as he assembled the lists of those approved for that night's church services. Time consuming and tedious, the step is necessary to ensure that individuals who have had conflicts do not end up in near proximity to one another. The other volunteer, a layman who has been volunteering at the jail for some years, greets me. He is busy organizing his morning's visits and sorting out the "kites" or inmate communications that we've received this morning into different piles, paying special attention for those that might require more urgent attention than others. "Hey Matt," he says. "Here's one that looks like he could use a visit." I take the kite, and go about the business of planning my own visits. It's a tricky thing. While I'll be at the jail from 8-3 or 3:30, the window, the window during which I'm allowed on the floor is incredibly limited, and while some visits (dropping off Bibles or rosaries) go quite quickly, other cases can take a lot of time. Most often, I make a note of 5-6 people whom I could visit in the morning, but most typically only get to 2 or three of them. I take down the inmate's names, inmate numbers and cell block, load up my stylish Kroger grocery bag with Bibles and other readings and head out. The Kroger bag is key-unlike a backpack or a briefcase, there are no pockets or zippers, which means that I'm far less likely to be stopped, searched or even turned back by the deputies.

First Visit: A man charged with criminal sexual conduct has requested a visit. I'm a little leery, for fairly obvious reasons; those visits are far from comfortable for me, but I steel myself, reminding myself that God still loves this individual. It turns out to be an easier visit than I expected. The man was mostly interested in getting a pair of reading glasses. I explained to him that our office no longer could provide the glasses for liability reasons. We chat for a bit longer, I let him know about other services from the office and I leave.

Second Visit: This visit was in 'main jail,' which tends to be where those facing more serious charges are housed. The man who'd asked for a visit comes in, obviously distraught. As he explained, he is a recovering alcoholic who'd relapsed, and was facing serious feelings of fear, shame, frustration and loneliness, over his own inability to recover and worries over what would happen to his kids. This visit is a long one. My role here is one of active listening, and it takes a fair amount of energy over the next hour and a half to listen to what he's saying, to ask gentle questions, to affirm statements and, very occasionally, to try to offer him spiritual resources that he can access back in the cell. I leave feeling drained. His brokenness is painfully similar to what many in the jail have expressed, but poignant. I pray and hope that the visit did more for him than it visibly seemed to do.

Third Visit: Not an easy finish to the morning. This visit is a repeat visit with a man who, for many reasons, is incredibly angry with his church and the local leader. As with the first time I'd visited with him, the story didn't seem to quite add up based on a variety of cues I was picking up and the fairly stormy anger directed against his church and religion in general was difficult for me to continue to listen to. Nevertheless, he had specifically requested that I come back to visit him. It was a classic example of the ministry as one of presence, that I had to trust that somehow my presence with the man was making a difference, even as he cursed church and God, swearing he'd never pray again.

At 10:45, the deputies ask me to leave the floor. Meals are served at 6-hour intervals, including at 11, and during that time we need to be off the floors for security reasons. I head back down to the office and set to the paperwork. Kites have been put into stacks, including those requesting church services, those wanting clothes or a bus ticket upon release, those wanting to be part of a Bible study, and those with requests for Bibles, other literature or visits. Much of the next hour is spent recording these requests, writing responses to inmates and filing the paperwork. There are a few interruptions. A supervisor for the food service comes down, and asks for some input about an inmate who is unsatisfied that his meals meet kosher requirements. We scratch our heads for a while and ultimately recommend that she either contact the inmate directly or else contact his rabbi to find a way to resolve the issue. Also, another volunteer comes in with donated clothes, which we take down to 'Property' for those inmates who are insufficiently clothed for the weather. The rest of the time moves by slowly, and by the time the 1:30 visiting window opens again, I'm relieved to get back out on the floors.

First Visit: My first afternoon stop is to the medium security 'pods' to see a man who had been a regular with me. I don't really know what to expect here, since the last meeting he had declined to see me and the meeting before that he'd gotten up abruptly after only a few minutes. This time, he comes out to see me. He suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and is on a number of medications, which means that conversations tend to jump rather erratically. Still, it's a moving conversation. He asks how it is that he might tell that God is speaking to him, leading to a long conversation about the 'discernment of spirits.' Parting is hard, but it was good that that complicated ministerial relationship ended on a high note.

Second Visit: I wrap up the afternoon with a brief visit with a young man who was my first 'regular.' Since I started meeting with him, he's been transferred to a 'dorm' for low security inmates who work as "trustees" in the jail, doing basic cleaning or food service jobs. It's a good final conversation, but like many in the 'dorms,' strained. We meet at one of the tables, sitting amongst the other inmates as they watch TV, play cards or converse. In short, a really terrible place to try to talk with someone, especially since jail culture is terribly unforgiving on the vulnerability that tends to make these visits fruitful. We talk briefly, say our goodbyes and I head out.

Other days might yield other dynamics. Some days I led a Bible study group, which in practice turned into more of a discussion/prayer/faith sharing group. Other days I might spend more time with one inmate, or visit many inmates, dropping off Bibles and rosaries. Some days I might have several inmates in a row refuse visits. Ultimately, though, the ups and downs were not unlike the day I described above. There are rewarding visits and frustrating visits; sometimes it's not so easy to tell the two apart. There are visits where I feel like I've helped and there are visits where I seem to consistently say the wrong thing at the wrong time. There are visits where I get positive feedback and visits where I'm left wondering whether I was able to do anything at all. Regardless of anything else that went on in the visit, I'm painfully aware that the situations that the inmates face are daunting, and the odds against them long. As I walk out of the jail, I quietly pray for all of them, knowing that my efforts are nothing more than a beginning, an opportunity for God to enter and to do the rest. And, as I walk through the cold, squinting into the blinding natural light after hours of fluorescence, my heart swirling with a curious admixture of gratitude, self-doubt, regrets about things I might have said or shouldn't have done and frustrations with my inability to solve problems, I remember the famous line of Mother Theresa of Calcutta:

"We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful."

A Day in the Life

2009-11-25T15:51:00.006-05:00

Recently, a friend of mine mentioned that she would be interested to hear more about what daily life is like in the novitiate. She mentioned that that comes through a little bit in my posts, but she still wouldn't mind knowing more about what things look like around here.

Gladly. When looking at Jesuit life, some Jesuits will talk about prayer, ministry and community as the three major components of our way of life. Each supports the other and each is important in its own right. So, while prayer and community often leave plenty of room for conversation or blogging, community is no less a part of Jesuit life than either of the first two.

With that having been said, there's a reason that I don't often stick things about day to day life up here. Just like anywhere else, the routine of our lives here is, well, routine. Still, for the sake of anyone's curiosity, I'll throw up a few tidbits up here.

Prayer

Maybe the most obvious difference involving life in a religious community involves our life of prayer in community. In addition to our own daily personal prayer, our day is bookended with community prayer. We gather at 7:15 every morning to pray Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. For any who might be unfamiliar, the Liturgy of the Hours is the universal prayer of the Church, a series of prayers meant to be prayed throughout the day consisting of psalms, canticles readings and intercessions. Many orders pray most, if not all, of the canonical 'hours' together, but because of the 'charism' or way of being of the Society of Jesus, we frequently pray many of the hours seperately. After our daily ministries, usually around 5:15, we gather again for our community liturgy. One of the three priests in the house usually presides, and the reflections/homilies are offered by one of the novices, a way for us to practice our skills and hone our ability to share our prayer with others. In addition to these major daily sessions of prayer, we gather together once a week for evening 'creative prayer,' where novices take turns organizing a prayer service for the community that doesn't use the liturgy of the hours.

We also share our lives of faith, most formally by means of regular 'faith-sharing.' For these, we gather in groups (divided by class this year) and talk a bit about our lives. There's a seal on these groups, and it's meant to be a safe place where we can discuss where the Lord is working in our lives, where we're finding God, where we've been consoled and where we've struggled.

Community

Maybe the next part of daily life that most non-Jesuits would think of as "different," "interesting" or even "weird" would be the many facets of life in community. By turns, community has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life in the Society and one of the most challenging. As married couples, families, college roomates and other people living together can testify, living with other people in any circumstances takes work, and community life involves lots of effort.

On an obvious level, there's practical work to be done. In the novitiate, Saturday morning is "house jobs" day, in which, as the name suggests, we take a couple hours to do the work that running an older building occupied by 24 people entails. Each of us is assigned a job. Some scrub the kitchen, while others vacuum and clean "common areas," while still others maintain our house fleet of cars. For the last two years, I've been one of the house shoppers, responsible for keeping us stocked with basic food, laundry and cleaning items. In addition, there are day to day tasks to be accomplished, and we take turns doing things like washing dishes, setting the tables and preparing guest rooms for visitors. Like many people, we occasionally have parties or open houses, events that require everyone to chip in.

More than just the physical work, life in the novitiate requires effort put into the social, emotional and spiritual dimensions of living in community. While the experience of community is overall very graced, the mere existence of so many personalities living in close proximity to one another means that some friction is inevitable, even in our best attempts to live out charity for one another. As in a family or a marriage, this means developing the skills to confront issues both charitably and effectively, learning patience and tact in dealing with people and putting in the effort to confront issues if they arise. In addition, Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are lived in community, as well as individually, which means that the task of living the vows well is a constant project. A clear example is the vow of poverty. Each Jesuit needs to discern for himself whether his own life reflects simplicity, but poverty is also lived through community decisions. Community purchases and choices about how community resources are used reflect our living of the vow of poverty, which means that the difficult task of bringing people together to have these difficult conversations is a necessary part of life in community.

Free Time

It's a constant shock to people (especially high school students listening to vocations talks!) that we spend our free time much like anyone else might. Our big limitation is financial. Each month, a novice is given 75 dollars in personalia (Latin for 'allowance') from which he is expected to buy basic clothing items and toiletries. The rest of the personalia is his for personal use. Obviously, what's left over doesn't stretch indefinitely, but it does allow for some outings and purchases. I try to make some effort to donate at least some of my personalia, but after that, I tend to spend it on outings. Periodically I'll purchase a book for myself or else buy an item as a present for someone, but most of the time my money goes to the local Coffee Beanery (alone or with someone else), meals or drinks out and about or even things like movies. My quest to find a good soccer pub in Detroit continues to be unsuccessful, but I haven't given up hope yet!

In general, my patterns since joining the Jesuits haven't changed much from before I entered, which means I'm fundamentally a homebody. I spend a lot of time reading, relaxing with community members in our 'rec room' (Jesuitish for 'living room'), watching sports, compulsively following soccer online and corresponding with friends and family. I work out regularly, and like playing pickup sports with other guys in the house. In short, much of my free time looks almost exactly like it would elsewhere.

For those who were curious, hopefully this gives a little bit more insight into what day to day life as a novice can look like. Feel free to forward questions to me, and I'd be glad to write more on this at another date in time!

Through the Looking Glass

2009-11-25T11:15:00.005-05:00

Sometimes physical surroundings say a lot about other things too.

Last week I was having a day not unlike many others at the jail. In the chaplain's office, I rummaged through our 'inmate request book,' paying special attention to those inmates who hoped to have a chaplain do a one-on-one visit, but also looking for those who wanted Bibles, rosaries and religious literature. In addition to my 'regulars,' one other man had requested a one-on-one and a Bible. I took down the names, cell block locations and inmate numbers of the people I hoped to visit, loaded up my Kroger grocery bag (no metal or pockets, unlike a backpack or a briefcase) with Bibles and daily devotionals (staples removed) and headed out. As usual before meeting someone for the first time, the fact that I had no idea what to expect or what I would hear gave me just the slightest case of nerves. I said a quiet prayer, thanking God for the opportunity to minister and reminding God (and myself) that I am God's instrument, not my own. I asked God to give me the words, to speak through me.

I arrived at "Charlie" Block and was admitted through the first gate, a large, mechanically sliding door of metal bars, and asked the deputy to see the man on the list. She grimaced a bit. "He's..a bit much," she told me. No surprise there, and I told her that that didn't matter much to me.

"No, no, I mean really!" she repeated. "He's already had a fairly exciting morning. I mean, I don't think he'd attack a member of the clergy, but I'm not positive. I'm sorry. I can let you talk through a window though."

Better than nothing, I said. I'm not sure that I was correct.

The man was taken into a tiny booth of a room, and I was escorted to the glass on the opposite side. The picture above give some idea, though ours was darker, dingier and we had to remain standing. No phones on ours; we bellowed through a muffled little hole, which meant that it was incredibly hard to hear, and there was even less privacy than usual. To call it sub-ideal would be a gross understatement.

The first question out of his mouth was the one I was most dreading and the one for which I was least prepared. "Why are they making us meet like this?"

"I'm not exactly sure," I said. "Unfortunately, I have to do what the deputies say. " True, but not transparent by a long shot.

He sighed, shrugged, and leaned forward, pressing his mouth up close to the hole through which we were conversing. Then came the comment that haunts me: "Well see, the thing is that I've been sinning a lot. I kinda wanted to talk about it." A man was hoping to bare his soul to somebody, anybody and there was an ugly, solid piece of reinforced glass in the way.

Sin is an ugly thing. Sin usually happens when we turn in on ourselves, when the focus of our world is us in some way, big or small. Sin shatters relationships-our relationship with God, with others and even with ourselves, ourselves as we are meant to be. Sin builds divisions, barriers, leaving us so trapped in ourselves that we can't reach out to God or to other people. The opposite is true too, though. Trapped in sin, we frequently feel like God can't love us, God forgive us, God can't want us.

It's a refrain I hear far too often at the jail. Many of the people there struggle with truly horrific brokenness, lives marked by poverty, lack of education, psychological scarring, abuse, addiction and mental disease. And whether or not that's the case, so many, so, so many come to me and end up admitting that they feel like God couldn't possibly love them, not for who they are, not after what they've done. "If you only knew," people tell me. Whether because of brokenness beyond their control or because of their own sin, they are experiencing a barrier between them and God's mercy.

In as literal a way as I can imagine, my friend experienced that barrier that day. As plainly as I've heard, he was begging for help in being released from sin, yet tragically, there was a barrier in the way that neither he nor I could remove.

I did what I could that day. I listened as best as I could and I offered some passages from the Bible that my friend could reflect on, but there wasn't much else to do. As a minister, a confrontation with a physical barrier reminds me of the same thing as does an encounter with an emotional or a spiritual barrier: God's grace overcomes sin, divisions and barriers, not my own paltry efforts.

Sometimes community is just plain awesome...

2009-11-07T12:55:00.002-05:00

The second-year novices have been taking a once-weekly class at the University of Detroit-Mercy on the social context of the contemporary Jesuit mission. One of the nicer parts of the course has been that we spend most a good bit of time down at the university's Jesuit community. We arrive, stay for Mass, a social and dinner before beginning our class, all of which provides a really wonderful opportunity to get to know the men who live and work from that community. Despite the differences in age, experience and where we are in our Jesuit lives, I'm consistently struck both by how welcoming the community is and by how often I find something in common with one of the men.

Last week, I mentioned something about a soccer game that I'd seen one of the fathers watching. It turns out that, like me, this man is a pretty big fan of Arsenal FC. Finding another soccer fan in the area was a surprise to me, but finding another Arsenal fan was almost too good to be true. In what had to be a truly bizarre scene for anyone watching, this older, Maltese professor of religious studies and me, a young novice, began animatedly discussing all things Arsenal, the state of the team, the upcoming rivalry match, even how, where and why we came follow the club.

Jesuit community brings together a wide, wide variety of interests, personalities and talents, and that diversity can be a source of great strength. It also means that, now and again, one finds someone whose interests simply "click" with your own. Thank God for that!

Awkward Celibacy Conversations...

2009-10-19T15:29:00.002-04:00

The scene is the sign-in desk at the Oakland County Jail. Two intrepid young novices have made their way through the first of many remotely locked doors and passed through the metal detectors, and are busily signing into the jail and making small talk with the friendly guard.

Me: How was your weekend? Do anything exciting?

Female Guard: Not really, I was here for most of it. *Pause* How about you, you do something nice for your sweety on Sweetest Day?

Me: Um....Catholic clergy. No Sweetest Day for us.

Female Guard: Oh...ah.....oh.

Me: [Cheerfully] I did see Zombieland though!

On Experience and Openness

2009-10-18T11:45:00.007-04:00

The primary purposes of the novitiate experiences (experiments) are firstly to test a novice's vocation and secondly to provide an opportunity for personal and spiritual integration and growth. Buried somewhere in the midst of the realization of these purposes is the inevitable process of gaining experience and growing up.

I would hesitate to describe myself even before I entered the Jesuits as 'sheltered.' Going to school and living in a big city (New York City) brings with it a certain amount of experience, as does traveling quite a bit. I've read broadly enough that I'm at least conceptually aware of major issues, and that combined with the experience gained through various jobs and service projects I did throughout my high school and college years meant that while I was by no means reaching new depths of wisdom, savvy and experience, I also probably wasn't as naive as I could have been. Still, experience is something gained through time, and no matter how much I thought I knew or how much I thought that I had experienced, there was bound to be residual naivete. As I've realized since entrance, knowing a little bit about illness and confronting the illness of a family member is quite different than ministering to the sick and dying day in and day out, having read something about cognitive development is wildly different than explaining theology to third graders and having studied systematic problems of poverty and addiction don't help much when ministering to those who are experiencing hunger, exposure to the elements and destructive cravings.

In short, I had (and have) a lot to learn. Still, even the short experiences I've had since joining the Jesuits have offered remarkable opportunities to flesh out my bare-bones knowledge and experience, which has been a remarkable process both in terms of what it's done to me as well as the way in which, in general, it's made me a more effective minister. However, there's a dangerous flip side here too. The realization of the fact that I've become more wise, more experienced is a short step away from becoming proud of that fact (as though I had anything to do with it). More dangerously, getting caught up in my own experience can leave me less than open to the unexpected in a situation, leaving me exposed to being surprised.

This week at the jail, the chaplain's office received a "kite," an inmate's way of communicating with the various offices at the jail, from a man with whom I'd met a couple times. The man requested to see Matthew, a "member of the clergy" (sidebar: this description still doesn't seem right, somehow!) and informed me that he'd just read Matthew 18:19, and wanted me to come pray with him.

Whatever scriptural knowledge I have doesn't involve instant recall of most chapters and verses by number, so I grabbed a Bible to try to figure out what had so grabbed this man's attention. The NAB translation of this passage reads, "Again, (amen,) I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father."

'Uh-oh,' I thought.

Many of the people I meet with in the jail have deep and profound spiritual needs and spiritual movements. The needs are maybe more obvious, but the wisdom and insights of these men and women never ceases to amaze me. Still, their wisdom, spiritual desires and needs are deeply embedded in a context. They are in a jail, a place few would choose to be. Frequently, they have deep concerns for their family and familial fractures that either preceded arrival in jail or were strained by the inmate's process of being jail. And, many arrive in jail having come from a background fraught with poverty, a lack of educational opportunities, joblessness, addiction and general social disadvantage. In short, they have a lot of things going against them, and many of our conversations and prayers together will eventually reveal concerns with deeper spiritual ills, but almost always begin on the level of the immediate and tangible-my house, my family, my friends, my car, my lawyer, this place.

Looking at Matthew 18:19, I began to worry about how in the world I was going to explain the passage to the man who had requested my visit. I knew from previous visits that this was a man struggling with many of the classic worries and problems of the jail, and that he had requested my help with some of them. How was I going to explain to him that prayer is more than just a request line, and that just because the two of us prayed that his family be taken care of and that they find a place to live, that didn't mean that it would happen quite that literally?

So, nervous, I went to his 'pod' to visit him. After some small talk, he asked if I had a Bible, took it, found the reference, read it aloud and then closed the Bible. He then closed his eyes and began speaking, but then stopped, paused, opened one eye and said, "By the way, we're praying now." So much for my chance to explain "the way prayer works." Then he began again, as I closed my eyes, centered myself for prayer, and tried very hard not to expect the worst.

Then out of his mouth came one of the most unexpected and most beautiful things I've heard in a long, long time: "Lord, here are two of us praying together, and you said that if we agreed on something to pray for, you'd grant it, so here we are. Lord, I need you in my life, and I want to pray that I be humble enough to let you into my heart and that I can bring myself more and more in line with your will..."

I was floored. Every part of my prayed with him for the rest of the time that he prayed, but for the life of me, I can't remember a single other thing for which he prayed in that brief, 20 minute meeting. My expectation had been completely shattered, and my, alas, jaded expectation of what was about to happen was instead met with one of the most profound statements of need, dependence and hope that I have ever heard anywhere from anyone.

The lessons, the reminders for me were simple. No matter how much I think I know, there's always going to be something new that surprises me. And, more importantly, no matter how much I think that I know about my own relationship with God, or the way that God is working, the Almighty is "able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine, by the power at work within us." Ephesians 3:20.

Locked Up

2009-10-05T21:47:00.005-04:00

My classmate and I walk in at 8 o'clock sharp, entering a visitor's entrance not yet busy with the day's arrivals. We show our Sheriff's Office ID's to the deputies on duty, doing our best to be polite through Plexiglas. Having turned in our driver's licenses and locked up our wallets and other prohibited items, we walk towards the first of many remotely sealed, heavy metal doors. The deputy buzzes us in, and I take one last look back at the morning light. I won't see sunlight again until I leave in the afternoon. We pass through a metal detector, its buzzing leaving a decent chance that my lunch will be looked at to ensure that my can of V8 isn't anything more lethal. We sign in at another desk, and wait as a heavy metal door slowly slides aside. We walk down a corridor, nondescript cinder blocks lit by harsh flourescent light, only to stand at yet another gray, metal door. This time we wait, staring up at a ceiling camera. Like most of the doors in the jail, deputies we cannot see sit at the other end of a video monitoring system and control the lock. It's a stark reminder that most steps we take for the rest of the day will be monitored remotely. I'm also reminded that we are guests-as soon as we cross that threshold, we have only privileges, no rights. The door buzzes, and we step inside, and take the first left turn into the chaplaincy office. And the day begins.

I suppose that over the long run, as usual, I'll probably walk away remembering the human aspects of this experiment. I'll remember the people and their stories. I'll remember the moments that I was able to share with them. I'll remember those times when I saw God most clearly in them. I'll remember what my encounters with them did to me.

At the same time, I would err considerably if I tried to describe any of my experiences in the jail without first having properly contextualized them. Part of the awfulness of the place, no doubt, it what people bring with them: shattered lives and relationships, the deepest forms of guilt and shame, addictions, mental illnesses, unimaginably savage emotional and psychological woundedness and, worst of all, hopelessness and despair. For people carrying this sort of inner darkness, however, they find themselves in a physical manifestation of that inner condition. Jail is cold, harsh, regimented, unforgiving. The brief workdays I spend in there leave me physically drained, and I couldn't comprehend what it would be like to spend day after day in there, returning to the cramped confines of a cell rather than the chaplaincy office and, ultimately, the outer world.

Nothing about ministry in the jail, therefore, can be understood without first grapsing the context in which it happens, a place in which both the inner and outer landscapes are tortured, soul-crushing. Maybe more than any other, it's a ministry where it's clear that the brokeness and despair that I encounter is far, far beyond my own meager ability to change, no matter how good my intentions. Christ can shed light, or no one can; I'm just along for the ride. When the door slams behind me, it's a call for me to die to myself so that Christ can live, for the good of the many people yearning for light in the midst of their own dark nights.

: "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me. " Galatians 2: 19-20

Our Mission Today

2009-09-27T17:33:00.006-04:00

The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement. For reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another.

In short, our mission today is to preach Jesus Christ and to make Him known in such a way that all men and women are able to recognize Him whose delight, from the beginning, has been to be with the sons of men and to take an active part in their history.

-General Congregation 32, Decree 4

For me and the other second-year novices, this 'semester,' the period that started in early September and will last until right around Christmastime, is our OMT semester, "Our Mission Today."

From December 2nd, 1974 to March 7th, 1975, the Thirty-Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus convened in Rome. A General Congregation is the highest governing body in the Society of Jesus, typically convoked in order to elect a new Superior General, but also possessing the important authority and responsibility to make major decisions concerning the governance and direction of the Society. Among Congregations, the 32nd stands as being particularly noteworthy, most especially within the life of the Society of Jesus, but also in many ways in the life of the Church as a whole. The Jesuits at this Congregation took a hard, serious look at the governance of the Society of Jesus and famously chartered a new course forward for the Society. The quotes above, taken from the overwhelmingly powerful Decree 4 of the Congregation (full text here, well worth a look!), sum up quite nicely the Congregation's call to renewal. The authentic and credible living of both our vows as Jesuits as well as our call as baptised Christians require that our preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ be seamlessly matched by a tireless striving for the justice of God's Kingdom and marked particularly by a deep concern for the poor, vulnerable and marginalized.

In response to the Society's understanding of our mission in the world today, defined at the 32nd General Congregation and affirmed by later Congregations, both Congregations and Superiors General have asked that novices be exposed to this facet of our mission today, coming to understand the mission as part of our discernment, but also living the mission in some practical way, encountering the poor. So, as we enter our second year as novices and as our discernment of whether we feel called to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience becomes more and more concrete, we spend a full semester trying to engage this mission.

Our program this fall puts me to work on three levels. The first area of our OMT semester is academic. We'll be spending one night a week taking a graduate course at the University of Detroit-Mercy, spending time studying and discussing the contemporary context and issues surrounding Catholic social thought. The class will hopefully provide a springboard for becoming more aware of major social issues and Catholic teaching, providing an intellectual context into which we can situate our prayer and work. The second aspect is our apostolic work. This varies amongst the guys in the house. Some are working at our inner-city high school doing tutoring work. Others are working at community centers. Still others are doing GED tutoring for young women. I and one other classmate will be spending the semester working as jail chaplains. I've only just started, and the work merits at least a few posts of its own, but suffice it to say it's been quite the immersion into a whole new world. Third and last, we're expected to integrate our activities into prayer and share them by way of preaching, especially in our in-house homilies. Living out the call to faith and justice involves an active immersion in the lives of those who are vulnerable and the issues of the day, but it also demands that we grow in our ability to take our experiences to prayer, and to share those experiences with the world.

A busy semester, but one filled with new experiences and ways to experience how God is calling me. As always, your prayers are appreciated, and know that all those who visit this site remain in mine.

9/11 and the Spiritual Exercises

2009-09-11T14:47:00.009-04:00

I hesitate to even set finger to keyboard on this topic. Given its position as a watershed moment of modern history, much, maybe even too much, has already been written about September 11. Insofar as I don't know a single American peer who can forget where he or she first heard the news or saw the visuals, I rather suspect that I have little new to offer on the subject.

Still, this morning rocked me. I hadn't totally forgotten that it was September 11th, but maybe mostly, and I was rudely shocked to glance up at the gym TVs this morning and see the all too familiar image of smoke pouring from the Towers. Gut punch. Despite not directly knowing anyone who died in the attacks, despite not living in New York and developing a bond with the city until well after the attacks and despite the passage of healing time, those images still wield the power to evoke from me feelings of powerlessness, anger and heartache. 8 years later, and I still found myself shedding a quiet tear during prayer this morning. It may well be true that I have nothing new to offer on the topic, but this may also be one of those times where I'm writing mostly for myself.

It so happened that the psalmody this mornings Morning Prayer (Lauds) spoke powerfully to the movements of the day. For those who might be less familiar, Morning Prayer is one of the liturgical "hours" of the Liturgy of the Hours, an ancient practice by which the Church follows St. Paul's injunction to "pray without ceasing." The Liturgy consists of a series of prayers, taken from the psalms, biblical canticles and other prayers that are said worldwide. The Liturgy is foundational to the life of those who have a monastic vocation, but other religious orders, diocesan clergy and lay people pray as well as a way of joining the prayer of the Church.

A psalm and a canticle from this morning spoke chillingly to the day. From Jeremiah, there was a lament over the destruction of Judah. I think that it would be worth quoting nearly in its entirety.

Let my eyes stream with tears
day and night, without rest,
over the great destruction which overwhelms
the virgin daughter of my people
over her incurable wound.

If I walk out into the field,
look! those slain by the sword;
if I enter the city,
look! those consumed by hunger.
Even the prophet and the priest
forage in a land they know not.

Have you cast Judah off completely?
Is Zion Loathsome to you?
Why have you struck us a blow
that cannot be healed?

We wait for peace, to no avail;
for a time of healing but terror comes instead.

Incurable wound, a blow that cannot be healed; not much more need be said there, least by someone like me whose wounds come only from spatial and personal distance. Maybe even more, I'm chilled by the Jeremiah's description of the city, of priests and prophets foraging in a land that they know not. It's hard for me to forget the images of our priests and prophets, literal and figurative, as lost as the rest of us in a suddenly unfamiliar world cultural and political landscape.

Those who know anything about the Spiritual Exercises tend to know that it frequently takes place over 30 silent days, and may know that it's broken into four Weeks, periods of prayer, each with its own distinctive spiritual movement. People who know just a bit more tend to remember that the First Week of the Exercises is spent wrestling with the spiritual dimensions of the retreatant in relation to God, specifically the movement towards the understanding that he or she is a sinner, yet loved by God.

In order to do this, there are several movements and meditations, even more when one considers the virtually limitless approaches that could be offered by various directors. Given this, perhaps the less that I say about my own experience and my own director's approach, the better. At the same time, I think it's nothing more or less than a foundational spiritual truth that sin, apprehended in its entirety, is never, ever purely personal. To be a sinner means to participate in a world that is full of sin and is constantly propagating sin, and to be a sinner means to participate in a world that constantly rejects the love and grace offered by the One who created the world out of love.

I don't imagine that many people struggle to see evil in the images of 9/11. Not a bit hard to see Sin written across every shattered piece of planes lying on the ground, evil in the images of people trapped in buildings and forced to choose their way out, and the very image of hell in the smoke rising from the shattered buildings. Maybe, just maybe though, it's a bit harder for us to imagine our own sin in the midst of it all.

Now I need to be perfectly, unmistakably clear here. I do not mean, as any number of people have suggested, that the United States deserved what it got. Most especially, I need to make it perfectly clear that the victims themselves did nothing to deserve what happened that day. The actions of those responsible were evil, and the sufferings of the victims of that kind of evil can never be deserved.

But we would make a catastrophic mistake by distancing ourselves from that kind of evil, that kind of sin. When we vilify and make a monster of those who perpetrate great evil, we have a terrible tendency to forget the simple, yet excruciating fact: we are all of us, every one, sinners, and as such we participate in the sins of a world that God designed to be so good. The consequences of our sins ripple out far beyond us, and shatter the world, not just our own souls. With that in mind, Psalm 51 from today's prayer speaks volumes to the movements of today: "Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness. In your compassion, blot out my offense...O see, in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived." Have mercy God-Domine, miserere. We are broken by our nature, but through our nature and our free choice, we can return brokenness to the world. And therefore the cry is one of pleading to God, whose mercy is indispensable.

Sin is catastrophic, and on days like today, when we apprehend the evil that our human sinfulness can bring, we remember that truth more clearly. There is, however, another and greater truth, one embedded in the Spiritual Exercises and the Gospels. We are sinners, but loved sinners, sinners who time and again are extended God's gratuitous mercy far beyond what we could possibly ask or deserve. The truth is that God's grace and love are greater than our capacities to sin.

John 1 puts it thus: "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Transitions

2009-09-01T21:01:00.003-04:00

So, looking back, it seems that I'm way, way behind on updating this. Partly this just has to do with the nature of our schedule for the last couple weeks. During our time in Omena, my computer access was fairly limited, which meant that blogging was mostly out of the question. Upon our return, I stayed pretty far away from the computer for the most part. Part of this was a matter of practicality-there was quite a bit of work involved with preparing for Vow Weekend as well as for welcoming the new class. Part of it, though, was a conscious choice. Bidding my secundi farewell, enjoying the transition with my classmates, welcoming our two new classmates from Wisconsin Province and welcoming the new class have all been privileged community times, ones in which I've deliberately tried to immerse myself.

By way of catching up, these are the big movements of the last few weeks:

August 15: The three second-year men of the Chicago and Detroit Provinces pronounced their perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

August 22: Two rising second-year men and their director from the Wisconsin Province moved from their former novitiate building in St. Paul, Minnesota to our house in Berkley, Michigan, as a step moving towards the combination of the Wisconsin, Chicago and Detroit Provinces. I'd known these guys at least somewhat from making the Exercises with them and spending time together in Denver, and I have to say that I'm really excited to have them living with us.

August 29-30: Entrance day weekend for the 13 men from all three provinces who have joined the Society this year. Again, a busy weekend, but deeply blessed. It's an inspiration to see so many of the men who have chosen to open themselves to God's call in this way.

Busy times here. In the next couple days, I hope to have pictures up from the major events, but I'll also be dedicating a good bit of my time to the process of creating a new community.

Omena and Vows

2009-07-30T08:30:00.002-04:00

Today, the novices depart to our 'villa' in Omena, Michigan, right on the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan. We'll spend the next 2 weeks there with other men in formation, quality vacation time that's designed to give us all a chance to refresh but also to grow in our relationships with the other men around our time.

Saying that we hit the ground running when we return is an understatement. Within a day of returning, the first-year novices will be holding a Vow Vigil for the second-year novices, and the day after the second-year men will take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Our second years are three very good men, with a wide range of gifts, talents and desires. All are prayerful men, with a deep love of the Church and the Society and the generous hearts to serve both faithfully and well.

I'd ask that you keep them and all novices preparing to take vows in your prayers these coming weeks, that the time of anticipation might be blessed and that they might be graced as they move into the first stages of their vowed life as Jesuits.

Pilgrimage: A Thumbnail Sketch

2009-07-30T07:47:00.004-04:00

In my mind, I would have plenty of time these couple days to take care of practical, around-the-house details as well as do a pretty fair bit of writing. Not only did I need to catch up on general correspondence, but I planned on writing thank-you letters and a version of my pilgrimage story to send to those who had helped me along the way as well as putting a version up here for online consumption. I just ran out of time, on both of the last two writing counts. Both are still forthcoming, especially the letters to the many good people who helped me, but for now, a brief outline of what happened will have to suffice.

Part 1: The Southwest

The setup of my pilgrimage was that I would get a one-way bus ticket to a city and $25 dollars without knowing the destination of the ticket in advance. I was bound to be surprised in any event, but was really, really surprised to see Santa Fe, NM on the ticket. Not only had I never been, but it seemed to be going in the opposite direction! The six hour bus ride, therefore was full of anticipation-what would happen? where would I go?

The anticipation wasn't helped by the arrival. Santa Fe doesn't have an open bus station, so my classmate John and I were dropped off at a gas station outside of town. Not particularly reassuring, but there was nothing really to do but to start walking towards what we hoped was the center of town. After a couple miles, good things just started to happen. We were picked up by a couple sixteen year old kids, who gave us a lift to the Cathedral Basilica in Santa Fe. There, a minister of hospitality put us in contact with the Monsignor who was rector of the Cathedral, who offered us a room for the night as well as an amazing dinner.

The next morning, John and I decided that, despite the generous invitation to stay around for the parish's picnic the next day, it was time to get moving to a city that we could travel east from, perhaps nearby Albuquerque. Two different people helped give rides to get us back to the gas station we started at, but we found out that there was no bus until late in the day, a5-6 hour wait for a bus that wouldn't get us to an unfamiliar city till around the dinner hour. We decided to try hitchhiking first, and after a healthy meal straight off of the Dollar Menu, John wrote the word 'Albuquerque' on our Wendy's bag and we posted ourselves at the road.

Again, grace was working overtime. We were probably out there for about 10 minutes when an incredibly nice young married couple, Ted and Mandy, picked us up, cheerfully explaining, "You two were so pale, we knew you couldn't be from around here!" Not only did they give us a ride to Albuquerque, but they used a phone to look up the Jesuit parish and insisted on taking us all the way there, along the way providing us with a list of every relative between Albuquerque and Detroit in case we got stuck. We spent the night in the parish rectory, meeting the New Orleans Province novices and their director on the way, as well as the a young man accepted for entrance and his family.
Part 2: Departure East

People in Santa Fe and Albuquerque had been incredibly generous to John and I, making it possible for us to hit the road with relatively few limitations on destination. We discerned that it was probably time for us to go separate directions, and I got on a morning bus to New Orleans, Louisiana.

The bus was a fascinating experience, to say the least. I met everything from a young nuclear engineering student traveling back to school, to an aspiring mixed martial artist, a couch-surfing New Zealand to a young woman who was using hard drugs during brief stops on the bus, to another young woman who listened in on my conversation with someone else and interjected to begin interrogating me about a truly stupendous range of Catholic conspiracy theories, all of which, it seems, she was a proponent. It was a long 28 hours on the bus.

I arrived in New Orleans at around 3 in the afternoon and eventually was picked up by a college friend wrapping up his year of Jesuit Volunteer Corps work in New Orleans. I spent two nights with his community, a really great group of people, and one day working at his site, an amazingly well-designed day center for the homeless. I also spent an additional day in town, mostly with Jesuits who were kind enough to show me hospitality and the city, and got myself ready to get on the move again.

Part 3: The Midwest and Home

I caught another 24 hour-plus bus ride, this time from New Orleans up to Columbus, OH. This one was going to be a challenge for me. I was so close that it was tempting just to bolt back to the novitiate, but Columbus is also a familiar city for me, which meant that the temptation was to simply cling to the familiar. Again, God and God's people were SO good, so quickly. Within 20 minutes or so of arriving in town, I made my way to a Catholic bookstore across the street from the Cathedral, where the proprietors cheerfully informed me that they also ran the diocesan retreat center and offered me a place there for the night. I had a really beautiful time in conversation with these remarkable women, but also had some time in prayer and solitude in the great atmosphere of the center.

The next morning, it was time to set my face towards Detroit. My plan for some time had been to make my way to Toledo and walk towards Detroit, and that's how it started. I arrived in Toledo and started walking around 2:30 in the afternoon and by about 9:30 pm had covered about 25 miles. I had a problem though-I wasn't in a rural area, where I could simply lie down in a field or tree grove and have it be OK, and I hadn't found a place to stay either. I had no objection to sleeping outside-in fact, after walking that far, I probably could have slept just about anywhere. The issue was simply that everywhere in obvious range was commercial property, without even so much as a public park to offer a place to stay.

The discernment was the hardest one of the trip, simply because it was the first time that I'd had a firm plan that I liked and to which I was attached. In the end, the decision was easy: no getting arrested just to carry out my own plans. Only a little ways from Detroit, I called the novitiate and had someone pick me up.

Going Forward

For 8 short, wonderful days, I found myself in God's hands while on the road. It was a powerful, prayerful experience, about which I'll hopefully have a chance to say more. In the meantime, I have all manner of prayers of gratitude to God and to those who helped me along the way, a heightened sense of my own dependence on God, and a sharpened sense of my love for the Society. All in all, not a bad 8 days.

Back from pilgrimage, but still (hopefully) a pilgrim

2009-07-28T09:30:00.002-04:00

He said to them, "When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack or sandals, were you in need of anything?" "No, nothing," they replied. -Luke 22:35

8 days and just under 3,000 miles later, I'm back at Loyola House in lovely Berkley, MI.

The nature of setting out on the road with 25 dollars in pocket and a one-way bus ticket generated an extraordinary set of encounters for me, be they encounters with people, with places, with events or, most especially, the interior encounters with the One who lead me. Much to say, too much to try to do justice at the moment, especially when I have thank-you letters to pen for the many good and generous people who helped me at various points along the way. My hope is that in the next day or two before we head out from here to spend some time at Villa, I'll have the chance to post at least a sketch of what transpired.

In the meantime, many thanks for all your prayers and know that I've made a point of it these last few days to pray for those praying for me!

Pilgrimage

2009-07-17T22:34:00.003-04:00

As hard as it is for me to believe this, I'll be leaving Denver tomorrow morning at about 7:40 am local.

It's hard to believe on any number of levels. Hard, as usual, to believe that one of the many small segments of time into which my novitiate is divided is again closed. Hard to believe that I'll be on the move again, to new things even if in familiar places. Hard, most of all, to believe that all of the friends that I've made from around the US, Canada and Jamaica will be all going our separate ways, not to see one another for some time to come. Much, much more to be said about all the amazing things that this experience has been to me, but in the meantime, praise God for all of the amazing consolations that this experience has been.

Tomorrow morning, I leave on my pilgrimage experiment. The pilgrimage is one of the experiments that St. Ignatius recommended, stemming from his own life as a pilgrim, working his way slowly to the Holy Land, begging for his bread. He kept it as part of the curriculum for Jesuit novices, asking that the novices somehow experience the life of a pilgrim, on the road and deepening dependence on and knowledge of God.

The modern incarnation of the pilgrimage has a variety of incarnations even across the US, Canada and Jamaica. In my own novitiate this year, our pilgrimage is short, lasting only a week to ten days, and can take any number of forms. The individual man is responsible for discerning where God is leading him for his own particular pilgrimage. For some, this is a journey to a particular holy place. One of my classmates is heading to Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky, the place where Thomas Merton spent much of his life. Another of my classmates feels drawn to travel to a place of quiet, as where the Lord invited the disciples after they returned from having been sent out.

My own motivations in my discernment were twofold. More and more, I find myself in my prayer wanting to offer myself to God in a totally trusting way. It was a movement that started during the fall last year, deepened dramatically during the Spiritual Exercises, and has continued since. I feel drawn to offer myself to the Lord, but in such a way as to let go of my own frailties and failings and to trust in God's love, guidance, mercy and providence. Moreover, this combined with both prayers and experiences I had during my short experiment working with the poor and homeless in Washington DC. During that time, I found myself desiring the kind of dependence on God that so many of the people with whom I worked had. Perhaps more profoundly, I felt drawn to share in some small way in their own way of being. I desired to experience real solidarity, both with those who are homeless, and, through them, with the Christ who said that he had no place to lay His head.

So tomorrow, when I leave on pilgrimage, my own model is one of abandonment, itinerancy, homelessness. I'll be put on a bus in Denver around 8 in the morning. One of the novice directors. Fr. Dave DeMarco, will hand me a bus ticket to a location I won't know until I see the ticket, and with about $25 dollars in my pocket and that ticket, I'll head off, on the road until I reach Berkley on or around the 28th of July. I'll be dependant on the grace of God and the love, compassion and charity of strangers to do so. I'll be a pilgrim.

I'm excited in some sense-for all that I pray for the grace to trust God, and try my hardest to assure God in my prayer that I trust Him, the truth is that in some ways I never quite know until something like this, where I have the chance to abandon myself to His will. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm also scared-where will I sleep? What will I eat? Where will the bus take me? I have no idea, and I simply have to trust...the fear and the grace desired, therefore, are both the same, which makes me think that I'm on the right track.

Please pray for me, and know that I'll pray for all of you as well.

Novices at Play

2009-07-05T21:54:00.010-04:00

The classes at Denver continue to be gripping, but I thought I'd include the first of what I hope are many pictures from the seminar.

We spend several hours a day in class, but, as we've been reminded more than once, a good part of this experience is the chance to get to know the other novices. Correspondingly, we have a couple hours worth of recreation time built into the middle of the day, which many of us have taken to using for pickup sports, including pickup softball, basketball and soccer. Mighty athletes that we are, a team of novices squeaked by the resilient squad of the Regis summer staff during our first week here in what appears to be the first of a series of softball games.

Our competitive urges couldn't be so easily put to rest, though, and some California Province novices organized the first bi-annual Fr. Adolfo Nicolas Cup, a soccer tournament named after our Fr. General and played at a skill level that, no doubt, would shame him deeply.

I, for one, had a complete blast, not least because I happened to be surrounded by a super fun group of guys and because, you know, we won. Below, for your viewing pleasure, is the squad made up of novices from the Berkley Novitiate (Chicago/Detroit) and those of the Oregon Province, bathed in glory and clutching the highly coveted, and supremely classy, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas Cup.

Sanctity in the Ordinary

2009-07-05T20:28:00.004-04:00

I went to a remarkably ordinary Mass today.

Lest I be unclear, disedifying or downright scandalous: the miracle of the Mass is that God makes himself physically present in the Eucharist, an event so incomprehensibly big that it entirely defies almost every use of the word 'ordinary' with which I am familiar and could not under any circumstances descend to the level of the commonplace or the banal.

Accordingly, when I say that Mass today was 'ordinary,' I'm talking about the externals of the Mass. I had been told about this. The novice who attended Mass with me had given me the description, telling me in advance that it may be the most 'ordinary' Mass he'd seen in a while. The term here wasn't meant to be pejorative, but rather descriptive, and turned out to be right on. The music was unspectacular-well done, but not exceptional, a pleasant rendition of the standard songs from the Gather hymnal that I grew up with. The deacon's homily was nice but unmemorable. The priest's presiding style wasn't really noteworthy -no major gaffes, no quirks, nothing that would draw attention to him for good or ill. So too with the congregation. It was just ordinary.

And, sometime during reflection after Communion, I found myself struck by the beauty of that.

Before leaving for Denver, I had the opportunity to have a cup of coffee with a dear high school friend. As it turns out, he and I have both been diving into American Catholic writers, and he shared with me a fascinating reflection on Flannery O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost."

In the short story, a young girl is taught that we are all temples of the Holy Spirit, but seems to wrestle with the concept more than most. The sheer incongruity of the notion of the divine taking up residence in flawed humanity troubles the girl deeply. 'How?' she wonders. And, typical of O'Connor's writing, the issue is explored in the extreme-the girl goes to a circus, and there attends an old-style "freak" show, where she confronts a transvestite. It's clear that the girl lacks the concepts to process what she's seeing, but in the midst of the chaos, she can't stop meditating on the catechetical lesson: we are all temples of the Holy Ghost.

The little girl, my friend reflected, gets it. In the story, the townsfolk clearly do not get it, as they drive out the whole circus because its freak show is unfit for Christians. The little girl gets it though. In thinking about how the Holy Spirit dwells in someone her town considers to be a "freak," the girl also begins to apprehend in some small part the mystery of God dwelling in humanity. It's the scandal of the Incarnation, my friend reflected. Reflecting that the Holy Spirit dwelt in someone her own society considered "broken," made the little girl realize how truly mind-blowing it is that God would become incarnate into the silly little thing that is humanity.

And that, the "scandal of the Incarnation," is what struck me so hard today as I prayed during this "ordinary" Mass. I can find it easy to be moved by the presence of God in exceptional liturgy. A stirring homily can awaken my sensitivity to God's presence in the Mass and the world. The strong community and infectious energy of a Gospel-influenced liturgy I happen to like in Detroit somehow makes it easy to attune my senses to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the community. And the deliberate motions of formal liturgy at any number of placesI've been to, the incense, bells, and deliberate solemnity frequently succeed in reminding me that Jesus himself is on the altar. Wow.

It's easy for me to remember these sweeping, even mystical truths in the drama of liturgy. The "scandal of the Incarnation" that hit me so hard today is that, even in this most "ordinary" of parishes, God still makes himself present, no less so than anywhere else, no matter how majestic. And what a miracle that is.

Mission in Community

2009-06-28T22:56:00.003-04:00

As part of our course in Jesuit History, we're asked to take some time write a paper 'integrating' or appropriating the material from the presentation. The emphasis is not so much an intellectual one as it is spiritual-what has this stirred up in us? What has it exposed about our deep desires and how God is working with us?

As I mentioned in my last post, the presentations on the missions blew all kinds of spiritual doors wide open for me. I feel like I need some kind of retreat just to begin dealing with all! However, I found myself this week completely engrossed with the nature of the Jesuit mission (and Missions) as being so rooted in community.

A few weeks ago, I had found myself captivated by my provincial's statement in a homily that we in the Society of Jesus are missioned in community, but for the early Companions of St. Ignatius, as Fr. Coupeau noted, there wasn't even a question of individualism in missioning. St. Ignatius immediately gathered a group around him, first in Spain and later in Paris. The decision to form the Society of Jesus emerged from a group discernment, where all of the companions went into prayer, all of the companions discussed and a decision was made as a group. The discussion and group discernment was a check on individual discernment, and its shortcomings, but more importantly was a powerful way to hear the Holy Spirit at work.

Nowhere was the importance of community as clear to me as in discussions of written correspondence. I'd heard of it before-St. Ignatius is notable for being an incredibly prolific letter writer, penning thousands of letters during the 15 years he spent as Superior General. And, while St. Ignatius' total is a superlative, other Jesuits weren't slouches themselves, and the extant written correspondence from all over the Society is just incredible. Letters to and from the missions, letters from around Europe, letters all over the place.

I think this rather dramatically shows something of the importance of community for two big reasons.

The first is simply the sheer effort involved with letter writing. Serious writing of any kind takes time and energy, which is perhaps why we tend to so favor a quick email or text message. Even a lengthy, thoughtful email or (dare I say?) blog post is time-consuming, but my experience is that letter-writing is all the more demanding. And yet, they made time and found energy. These men, immersed in the heart of the world and frequently doing heroic amounts of ministry while maintaining fidelity to prayer and the sacraments, still found time to write. St. Francis Xavier had days in India in which he could hardly raise his hands for having baptised so many. How do we know? Because he wrote. The sheer fact that the Jesuits used their precious time and energy to maintain communication suggests the paramount importance of maintaining community over distance.

The second reason is that the Jesuits took the reported experiences of their brothers seriously, integrating it into their own lives. When St. Ignatius sent St. Francis Xavier to India, the Father General probably knew next to nothing of India, or the nature of the mission, and even less when Xavier took off for China and Japan, but he learned quickly from reports. Sometimes this was practical-St. Francis Xavier reported that the highly literate culture of Japan probably needed highly educated missionaries, and so it happened. But it was also a spiritual discovery. While St. Ignatius had introduced the Jesuits to a charism of availability and indifference though the gift of the Spiritual Exercises, he couldn't possibly imagine all directions in which the Society would go even in his lifetime. He learned about the missions by hearing of Jesuits living their vocations today. As Fr. Coupeau pointed out, we don't learn about what the Society is simply from reading about it-we learn from the lived experience of Jesuits.

General Congregation 35 reminds Jesuits today that "Jesuit community is not just for mission; it is itself mission." (Decree 3, Paragraph 41) Without claiming in any way to speak for the Congregation, I think that I feel especially called to the importance of robust community life as a way of hearing the Spirit. How can I know how God is moving my brothers in their Jesuit vocations unless we're willing to be vulnerable with one another, to share and discern together? How can I claim to know the Society even a little unless I also hear how God is at work in the men of the Society? How can I hear how God might be calling me beyond my own puny comfort zone unless I first open up? I'm sure that if I said things like "faith-sharing" or "community discernment" to many of my friends outside the Society, they'd probably think it touchy-feely fluff. However, I'm increasingly convinced that its critical, oh so critical, to the Jesuit vocation. One can't be available to God if one isn't listening to God, and community seems an indispensable place to do just that.

Jesuits and the Missions

2009-06-28T21:49:00.003-04:00

Our sessions here in beautiful Denver started off with quite a bang.

Each week, we're treated to a different presenter, each covering a different area of Jesuit history. This week's presenter, Fr. José Carlos Coupeau SJ, was (in my humble opinion) nothing short of amazing. The topic was Jesuits and the missions, a subject area that, even taken at face value, is rich, shot through with majesty and tragedy, triumph and tribulation, innovation and generosity, weakness and failure. As a historian, Fr. Coupeau didn't disappoint, competently presenting the material, but peppering it with penetrating questions. What does "mission" mean, and how has the understanding changed? What about "apostolic"? Are the categories used by the Jesuits of those time still operative? Should they be?

Where he really blew things open, however, was Fr. Coupeau's powerful, and fluid, integration of spirituality into the heart of the course. Day by day, we were challenged. What did our understandings of mission mean for us? More, what does martyrdom mean? And so on. Hard to convey without too many specifics, but I found his presentation to be packed with spiritual dynamite. Perhaps some reflections to come, but a great start!

Go west, young (men)!

2009-06-21T18:34:00.003-04:00

Ok, so most of us came west. Not all though. This is east for some of us.

I'm writing from Denver, where the novices from the 9 current US provinces of the Jesuits, as well as the Canadian novices and the Jamaican novices have all converged on Regis University. We'll be spending the next several weeks here as different distinguished presenters regale us with Jesuit history.

I'm more than a little excited. The historian in me is downright giddy about the actual content of the course-the Jesuits have a rich, storied history that is deeply revealing of many different periods of the Church, the history of the world and, if it's not overstating, of humanity itself. The course content is also exciting to me as a novice-in the midst of my continued discernment, nothing could be more important than to learn more about the origins of the Society and the shape it's taken over time. If the novitiate can be (crudely) likened to an engagement, this is a little like meeting the in-laws and hearing the some of the stories.

On top of all that, it's an amazing experience to meet these men from all over the hemisphere. Useful, of course. These are men that I'll meet time and again in formation, such as (God willing) in a little over a year in First Studies and later on in theology, and so the opportunity to meet and bond is well worthwhile. The bigger picture is that being around so much energy and so much diversity gives me great hope for the work of the Society all across the country. We're very blessed to have such a talented, diverse group together with our hearts on fire.

Enough for now, but more to follow these next few weeks!

Just Passing Through...

2009-06-16T09:12:00.003-04:00

Last weekend were in Cleveland the Chicago-Detroit Province Days, where Jesuits based all around those provinces (and some stationed elsewhere in the world!) gathered to celebrate the ordination of two men to the priesthood, Fr. Martin Schreiber SJ and Fr. Cyril Whitaker SJ. Many congratulations to them-we're blessed to have them as part of the Society and beginning their priestly ministry.

For the next day or so, I'll be at home in Cincinnati for a brief home visit, at the end of which I'll be on the road again. My classmates and I will converge on Chicago, departing from there to Denver, where all of the Jesuit novices from the US, Canada and Jamaica will participate in a monthlong course in Jesuit history. It's a great chance to learn more about the storied past of the Society to which I'm discerning, as well as to get to know the people who represent my contemporaries in this part of the world. Because of the nature of the schedule, my updates may be a bit sporatic for the rest of the summer, but I'll do my best! And, as always, prayers are appreciated.

The Soloist

2009-06-11T13:44:00.008-04:00

Far from timely, as I suspect that its run in major theatres is either done or quickly expiring, but I would highly recommend the film 'The Soloist.'

The film, based on a book of the same name, depicts the unfolding relationship between a jaded LA Times reporter Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and a mentally disturbed homeless man, Nathanial Ayers (Jamie Foxx), who happens to be a musical genius who had spent time at Julliard before his disease drove him to the streets and the two-stringed violin on which he labors. Fascinated by the prodigious musical talent of Mr. Foxx's character, the naive reporter finds himself drawn into relationship with Nathanial Ayers and, through him, into the gritty, disturbing and shockingly complex world of the mentally-ill homeless. To the film's great credit, there are no simple solutions or Hollywood endings, only a thoughtful and generally sensitive exploration of only some of the issues of homelessness, as well as a more thorough look at the people involved.

Before I go too far with my own less-than-expert look at the movie, it should be noted that people who review movies for a living were far from a consensus about the quality of the film. Most, even those who liked the film overall, had quibbles with the direction of the film. I won't take issue with that-I'm far from an expert, but I can see the points made that it's a bit heavy on the visuals and just a mite too slick. In addition , many of the less reputable reporters (read:online news/blogs) found on Rottentomatoes.com and even a handful of reviewers from major papers take issue with the narrative thread of the movie, as well as grouse about Jamie Foxx's portrayal of schizophrenia.

In my opinion, the latter complaints are off-base. I can't claim any extensive experience with people suffering from schizophrenia, but my limited encounters would suggest that Jamie Foxx was, at minimum, believable. More importantly, I think it's a mistake to focus on Mr. Foxx's character, however played. It would be a huge mistake to expect any movie, no matter how well directed, to give a satisfactory exploration of mental disease or homelessness. Way too much to do, and I think that it's no wonder that even with all of Jamie Foxx's talents, the writers/director chose to leave Nathanial Ayers a relatively static character. The movie is best seen, in my opinion, as a look at what happens to Steve Lopez throughout the encounter.

Fact: Most of the people watching the movie, like Steve Lopez, are not homeless.
Fact: Most of the people watching the movie, like Steve Lopez, have not worked extensively with the homeless (I include myself here...in 6-7 short weeks, I barely began to scratch the surface of my own naivete)
Fact:Most of the people watching the movie are as flummoxed by encounters with mental disease as Steve Lopez.

What am I driving at? Most of the people who are lucky enough to be watching the film are likely to be far more sympathetic to Mr. Lopez's perspective. Many of the people watching the film, like Steve Lopez, would probably be surprised to learn that on the street, one is likely to encounter a startling number of bright, accomplished people, and even the occasional genius. Many, if not most, of the people watching would be rightly appalled by the kind of squalor, drug use and extreme danger that characterizes the life of many on the street, portrayed brutally straightforwardly in the film (As an aside, I rather suspect that some critiques of the 'visuals' suspected hyperbole in the portrayal of the streets. "Come on, it can't be that bad." Yes, it can. And it is.).

So, since most viewers have those sympathies, unless they're totally flatlined in the theatre or the couch, they'll probably ask themselves the same kinds of questions. What can someone do about all of this? Why doesn't he want to live in a house, or be on meds? How can someone this talented be on the street? And so on.

What I liked best about the film is that Downey Jr. masterfully portrays the emotions and experiences of someone encountering homelessness, or any new and unfamiliar 'ministry.' He begins with a sense of disorientation, and a willingness to do little things-he has a conversation, he delivers a cello.

And then: Lopez's instinct for control kicks in. He tries to lure Mr. Ayers to a center for the mentally ill homeless. He tries to lure Nathanial Ayers out of the streets (and Ayers' comfort zone), taking him to a concert, to an apartment. A powerful contrast for me was the introduction of a fundamentalist Christian cello instructer, brought in as yet another Lopez 'project' to recover Mr. Ayers' playing form. Lopez, and presumably the filmmakers, betray nothing but disgust for the Christian's attempts toprostylatize to Ayers. How dare he act like he knows what's best? And yet, grippingly, Lopez is blind to that battle in himself. His attempts to manage Nathanial's life become more and more heavy-handed, all of which culminate in a brutal betrayal of friendship. Nathanial declares that Mr. Lopez is his 'god,' and Steve Lopez gleefully siezes the opportunity to issue orders to Nathanial. All the while, a power dynamic has subtlely been in play: Nathanial Ayers always addresses Steve as "Mr. Lopez," while to Steve, there's always just "Nathanial."

It's not a suprise then, that the situation spirals out of control, and Steve Lopez learns the hard lesson that just because one seems to be the privileged one, the minister, if I may, that in no way means that one can control the situation in which one is ministering. Here too is where the grumbles about a lack of narrative thread break down; my limited experience is that the process of entering into the unfamiliar to serve only aquires a narrative thread given the long, retrospective view. Up front, there tends to be a lot of chaos and disorientation, and most frequently the path through the morass is far from clear.

I found the movie to be a profound commentary on my own experience. I'm a controller. I like to have projects with defined parameters and markers for success. I'm an achiever. I like to be able to measure my successes. And I like to be in a position to be available to help people, which means that I'm always in danger of seeing myself as a provider. None of those characteristics are necessarily all bad, and I think many people would struggle with the same sorts of things. But as The Soloist shows, to enter into the brokeness of the world is itself a messy process. No matter what good intentions or ideas one has, it rarely is a recipe for succes to simply sieze control, and even if it happens to work, it's still a bad idea. Seizing control, trying to become a god for others destroys the very possibility of profound person to person relationships. Moreover, it cripples the ability for us to allow the living God to enter the situation, whose grace can accomplish "more than we can ask or imagine." (Eph. 3) And, as with The Soloist, we rarely get the benefit of moving through the chaos in an orderly way, or wrapping things up tidily at the end. Our work, at its best, is nothing more or less than a beginning, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

Praise God for that.

Parting Words

2009-05-16T14:08:00.002-04:00

I found my parting conversation with one man to be telling of my overall experience.

I came to love the men, and the Center, quite deeply, but always tempering this love was the reality of the situation. My love of the men is best realized when they no longer need the Center. My love of the Center is tied to the need, and noone will be better pleased than I in the day of the Lord when the Center is no longer necessary. In short, my love is always mitigated by my frustration with the situation.

My friend (if I can be so bold) is a remarkable man. Very wise and spiritual, knowledgable of Scripture, experienced enough to have put daughters through college, himself quite obviously educated. Early in my experience, he helped me greatly by being willing to sit and talk with me, helping facilitate a critical moment of grace in the midst of the settling in process. And, now in years where he should be looking forward to retirement and time with his daughters and grandchildren, he's addicted and homeless.

As we began to part, he had only very generous things to say to me, and said that he hoped I could come back someday.

I'd love to come back someday, I said. The thing is, my friend, that when I do, I really don't want to see you here.

I was worried. Some of the men had gotten their feelings hurt by this kind of line, but in this case, I was worried that this would be interpreted as a hint of condescention in what had been a respectful relationship.

My friend's face was sad, but he looked at me and said, 'You know what? I appreciate that.'

Amen. And may it be.

Parting Images, Parting Feelings

2009-05-16T13:17:00.002-04:00

My last day or so at the Father McKenna Center provided me with a fascinating array of experiences that show, in microcosm, the wide battery of emotions that I tended to experience during my time there.

Humor- I laughed till I cried as my friends from the Night Shelter, themselves homeless men who have temporary housing at the Center while working to transition out of their situation, teased me relentlessly, or else did hilarious caricatures of the kinds of idiosyncrasies common to social interactions in the Center. I'll miss these men and the staff greatly. They're amazing people, and have become good friends.

Heartbreak-I was just shattered when a man walked through the door looking for services. He was clearly fairly hardcore 'street,' someone who doesn't come in often. Exposure had ravaged his face and hands, his clothes stank to high heaven, he struggled to communicate and was in desperate need of a shower. Human beings are not supposed to live like that; Christ's body there had been savagely neglected.

Confusion- A client holed up in the bathroom for close to 40 minutes, periodically sticking his head out the door to announce that he needed '8 more minutes,' eliciting groans and complaints from his fellows. The Center is many things, but never dull...

Outrage/Anger- Toward the end of lunch, a man with whom I wasn't acquainted was walking around the Center, approaching various men and making a somewhat mysterious offer of a job. The code, which I picked up on after a moment, is that he was being sent to recruit men for evictions crews, a common enough exploitation of the homeless to make others homeless. Hard up homeless folk, like our clients, are offered well below minimum wage to empty apartments and houses, wage rates that encourage stealing to even make the venture worthwhile. The whole thing infuriates me on any number of levels, and the Center does not allow recruiting for these crews in the Center or on the grounds. I, and some of the other staff members, sent the gentleman on his way, none too gently, but the frustration remained.

Peace- I experienced deep peace in any number of spiritual conversations with any number of men that day. One man in particular shared with me his memories of teaching bible classes, and we compared notes on the joys and struggles of accompanying people on their spiritual journeys.

Frustration-After weeks of working with the men at coffee time, trying hard to create an environment where respectful, humanizing exchanges can be part of morning caffeination, I still found myself groaning as regulars would grunt and point at the coffee pot or mumble, "gimmie coffee."

Acceptance- Many men took it upon themselves to thank me for my time there, even (praise God!) remarking that I'd become a fixture there, and that it wouldn't be the same without me.

Distance-Like every day, there were some barriers with most men that there were just no getting through in 7 weeks, and conversations always had a difficult edge to them.

Tiredness-Always more physical labor to be done. In this case, my last big contribution was helping unload a huge amount of canned food provided for our emergency food aid by the USDA.

Affection- I was blown away the last few days here at how warm my friends at the Center were, from staff members, to our clients and the men who live in our Night Shelter. All of the above, especially the staff and men in the shelter, are loving people, but not typically 'warm.' Their love is lived in other ways, and especially in deeds, but on those days, I was deeply blessed to have them both express and receive verbal expressions of the friendship that I feel. It came out of nowhere, but I'm leaving friends here.

I was told often that I'd be missed. That may be, but I'll miss this like crazy. The formation process as well as Jesuit indifference weighs heavily against my staying here, and I'll look forward to seeing my brother novices. However, its a hard thing leaving a ministry that I could be completely happy giving my heart to for a long time to come. God has been good to me, and I now shift my spiritual energies both to gratitude and to renewed trust that God will also be gracious in other times and places.

"...and any other works of charity..."

2009-05-14T21:23:00.002-04:00

"Moreover, he should show himself ready to reconcile the estranged, compassionately assist and serve those who are in prisons or hospitals and, indeed, to perform any other works of charity, according to what will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good."
-Formula of the Institute (1550)

Lest anyone think that novice experiments are all glory and spirituality, it should be noted that while my high-minded reflections and deep emotions tend to be what makes its way into the cyber world, my days in the McKenna Center also include more than a little bit of manual labor. In a given day, I scrub pots and pans, haul buckets of ice down from Gonzaga High school, wipe tables, take out trash, move crates of food and any other job that needs to be done. This week, that included...rat removal. Thats right folks...those rats that fell victim to the astonishing array of snap-traps and poisons at our disposal became my job to handle.

There have been great and tender moments with my homeless brothers, but if that's your only image, let me add another: me, rooting through a torn out section of wall, working with one of the night shelter men to dislodge the decomposing rodent from the wall, all culminating in my pulling the four-pound carcass out by its snake-like tail and depositing it in a garbage bag.

AMDG, indeed.

Preventing Homelessness

2009-05-13T21:54:00.003-04:00

One of the hardest works we try to accomplish at the McKenna Center is to prevent homelessness from occurring in the first place.

Three times a week, we meet with clients by appointment to assess our ability to provide emergency assistance with their rent and utility bills. They come to us from all sorts of backgrounds. Some are our more "traditional" backgrounds. That is to say, folk from the lower end of the economic spectrum, usually just scraping by, or not quite scraping by, people who are hard up under any circumstances and are supremely vulnerable to any sort of crisis. However, an increasing number of our clients are displaced middle-class folk, folk completely unused to having to ask for help to make payments.

All, however, have one thing in common-need. It's more common than not for people to come to us with an eviction notice, or a notice corroborating their report that the gas or electric has been cut off. Some have staggeringly high bills, well beyond the ability of the center to cover. And, looking at the raw data and hearing the jaw-dropping stories, it's the heartbreaking job of the Center's staff to decide what we can do and, hardest of all, what we cannot do.

I've sat in on interviews since coming to the Center, which was itself quite an experience, but I don't think the full weight of the task was brought home to me until the staff member who typically does the intake interviews had to miss work for medical reasons, and I found myself pinch-hitting. The task itself wasn't too difficult-I simply had to ask the clients for basic personal information, as well as to go through a fairly detailed budget for the household, which helped us as a staff determine the need of the individual, but also had the added benefit of allowing us an opportunity to do basic financial counseling.

For example, upon completing the budget with one family, I discovered that the household's expenditures were roughly double their income. It's not that the spending was extravagant or wasteful anywhere. In fact, if what they reported was accurate, they were actually living quite frugally, and the brutal, ugly reality was that there just wasn't enough money. Still, what shocked me most is that when I went to address this fact, those members present were completely confused as to what the issue was. Several explanations later, I finally made it clear that it wasn't an accident that they were behind, and that unless they found some way to raise their income or somehow drop their expenditures even more , they would continue to be behind. The whole thing broke my heart. Bad enough that these people were barely making enough to scrape buy, but it was absolutely devastating that they hadn't been equipped enough to read a budget when presented to them, let alone make one for themselves.

That, unfortunately, was par for the course, and the stories typically didn't get much better, only worse.

The memory of one young man haunts my thoughts, dreams and prayers. When I say 'young,' I mean a man not much older than I. Early in our interview, he apologized to me, and, somewhat out of the blue, explained that certain behaviors of his could be explained by brain damage he had suffered recently from being stabbed in the head. He went on to explain that he wasn't yet recieving disability, that his case was still pending. This was a problem, because as it turns out, he was in the midst of a divorce. His estranged wife had left their 5 kids (there had been 6, but one had passed recently) with this young man and left, but continued to recieve the aid checks as the custodial parent. The hearing wasn't until next month, so he had no recourse to get the aid to help support his kids. To sum up, he had lost a child, suffered brain damage, and was doing the best he could to raise 5 kids with no aid in sight.

I've found it impossible not to be moved by this particular ministry. Sometimes I could do things for people: I was a listening ear, or, more practically, could explain a budget. However, that was balanced by the awesome knowledge that I was, truly, an interviewer. The final decision was made by senior staff members, but questions I asked, or even impressions I had and relayed to the final interviewer, played a key role in determining the final decision. Sounds easy enough, until one realizes that that decision can be the difference between someone staying in an apartment or not.

The work fuels a range of emotions, from heartbreak, to anger at the situation, to frustration at *some* individuals who have put themselves in the situation, to empathy for those who have no control. It's also a deeply unsettling work, to have that much control over someone's life just by your participation in a decision to help or not. The grace has been to have my eyes opened to the struggles of so many people. The challenges have been to let my participation in these unbelievable decisions be guided by the Holy Spirit, and, hardest of all, to look into the lives of people engaged in desperate struggles and somehow still see the God who hears the cry of the poor.

Of Friends, Dreams and Desires

2009-05-07T19:07:00.002-04:00

Just a brief side-note tonight...

A couple weeks ago I attended the National Championships of the American Parliamentary Debate Association. (most commonly, APDA). For those who may not know, I spent a fair amount of time on APDA as an undergraduate competing in the debate circuit. The time was well spent, and in addition to the enjoyment from the activity itself, I also made good friends from universities across the circuit.

It's a bit of a tradition on the circuit that the strength of a judging pool for most tournaments, and especially for the National Championships, is made up of alumni debaters, 'dinos' in the parlance of the circuit. Of course, living in the novitiate in Detroit, I had more or less settled on not being able to participate in that way on the circuit, and even having come to DC (most of the schools on APDA are clustered on the East Coast), I had no real thoughts of attending a debate tournament of any kind. So, I was a bit surprised to find myself asked if I wanted to attend Nats, but after some prayer, discernment and the permission of my superior(s), I attended.

God was quite good to me in leading me there. I reconnected with dear friends from both Fordham and around the circuit, got to meet the newest generation of Fordham debaters (wonderful folk all) and got to share my story with people and to hear theirs.

To this end, I wanted to share the soundbite from the weekend that's stuck with me. I don't have much to say about it. I rather think it speaks for itself, this one person's observations about a fairly large group of brilliant, talented and highly motivated people. While it seems like the quote says something about me, I rather think it says something about many of us. Are we all selling ourselves short?

This friend of mine, a graduate of another APDA school, asked how I was doing, how I was enjoying novitiate. Told that I was doing wonderfully, and that I'm incredibly happy with my life, he responded with the following in his generous, incisive and utterly candid way:

"Thats great! You know, you're the first person around here I've heard that excited, who's said that you're happy. Everyone else is like, 'Oh, you know, getting along, work kinda sucks, same old, same old. I'm just so glad to hear someone happy!"

Tough Loving

2009-05-03T14:20:00.002-04:00

"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble." -Mohandas Gandhi

Printed in simple black font on a plan white sheet of paper, the above quote hangs at the desk of a staff member at the McKenna Center. It's not the quote itself that grabs me as I walk into the office. Whatever sagacity is contained in the comment is diluted by its lack of direct applicability to my immediate situation. Nor is it any particular sort of reverence for Gandhi. For better or for worse, my once borderline-obsessive affection for Gandhi has mostly faded into more casual respect and intrigue.

Actually, the reason is far more pedestrian than either. The real reason the quote catches my eye is that, for the first big time in my life as a novice, the nature of my apostolate has asked me, with some regularity, to minister Christ's love through asking hard questions, gently yet firmly maintaining boundaries and, periodically, administering a loving refusal-NO.

Of course, many centers and shelters that minister to those who are homeless will have some boundaries, a necessary step in maintaining basic levels of safety and order. Most will have no-tolerance policies regarding violence, and many will have similar policies regarding drugs or alcohol. However, it's even a bit more complicated at the McKenna Center.

My time at the Center has been spent during a time in which the staff of the center are evaluating the mission and means of the Center. The work is incomplete, and in any event it would be a bit presumptuous of me as a temporary guest to say too much. In very general terms, however, the McKenna Center seems to be moving in the direction of shifting the balance of its ministry to those who are homeless toward empowerment as opposed to simply hospitality. That is, even though the Center ministers to the physical needs of our clients as best as it can, there's also an understood desire to encourage, sometimes rather directly, those who are able to seek the help they need to move on. In the words of a staffer, the Center wants to be a way station, not a final destination.

The Center incarnates this desire in ways both great and small. Senior staff members periodically do 'interventions' with clients that they know well, conversations in which they speak fairly frankly with the men about issues that are keeping them homeless. Also, while all are invited to join us for the hot lunch served Monday-Friday, the men are asked to attend a support group meeting led by staff and guest speakers before lunch, at which issues relating to addiction and homelessness are discussed at some length.

My experience of administering love in the form of challenges, boundaries and expectations is quite a bit less glamorous, and not a little difficult. I serve coffee every morning, and wrestle with this kind of love client by client.

It happens when a guy who's likely gotten nowhere near enough sleep last night shuffles to the front of the line and grunts, "coffee," I'd just as soon give him his morning caffeine. There's more to it than that, though. The minimalistic, demanding level of communication betokens the attitudes that many of the men adopt, having been treated as less than human for some time. More practically, experience teaches the staff that the same man who says "gimmie coffee" will also someday say, "gimmie a job" in an interview. So, not a little to my discomfiture, my answer is NO. The niceties please-good morning. How are you.

It happens when I spoon the sugar into the men's coffee. Staff are required to serve the sugar, for both health and cost reasons. Still, it leads to all sorts of issues over something apparently trivial. "Can I have an extra?" No. "They were too small, gimmie one more!" No. "I want three sugars!" You put yourself in a coma here last week-no.

It happens with deadlines and and rules all over the place. "I know I'm late; can I still come to the meeting?" No. "Can I read here in the church where it's quiet?" No. "You mean to tell me that I can't say motherf*** in here?" No. No, no, no.

I struggle with it all. Even without these rules and expectations to administer, there are plenty of gaps between me and the man, barriers of age, race, background, culture, experience and frequently education. I'm as obviously an outsider as I could possibly be, amidst a population slow to trust...and I'm making requests of the men that range from the inconvenient to the ones that seem downright patronizing.

It's a bit of a pickle. I don't blame the men a bit for being irritated. They live tough lives, endure things day to day that I can't even imagine, and I can't blame them a bit for being irritated when I add apparently petty things on top of it. At the same time, to back down, to show ambivilance about the rules would compromise both my position as a minister with the men as well as the overall efficacy of the staff. More importantly, as petty as the rules can seem, there's a good rationale for most of them. There's a need to emphasize the small things in our interactions.

I find myself held in a series of tensions. How can I be firm about the rules, even the small ones, while still giving these men the dignity that they deserve as both human beings and as grown men? How can I convey the love of Christ while still being assertive enough to be a thriving presence amongst tough talk and, occasionally, tough actions? How can I find compassion somewhere between the dangerous extremes of blind pity callous indifference?

There are never easy answers for these questions, but it's been a beautiful point of growth in its own way. It's forced me to grow in my devotion to that great Ignatian prayer practice, the Examination of consciousness or Examen. The prayer is a bedrock of Ignatian Spirituality. St. Ignatius thought it so critical that he instructed that, should one have time for no other private prayer in a day, it should be the Examen. In it, one takes a thorough, prayerful look at one's day, mindful of moments in which God may have been working in events or others, dwelling on consolations and desolations, thanking God for graces, asking pardon for shortcomings and making a prayerful recommitment to the Lord. For me, the prayer has always been a bit difficult, but it's taken on a whole bredth of meaning since this experiment began. In addition to the usual reflection, I find myself asking specific questions about the love in my ministry. Did I give compassion or merely pity? Did I give tough love, or was I merely tough? Was I firm, or merely rigid? The Examen has been a deep grace as I seek to express my desires to love the men to whom I minister in ways more and more appropriate to the mission.

It's tough love, and I'm willing to bet quite a bit that it's quite a bit tougher on me than on the men. They, after all, have the luxury of simply forgetting about me, whereas my life is built around this mission for the moment and moments of frustration for them are moments of small heartbreak for me. However, I'm feeling a call to explore ways of expressing the love and generous desires that God gives me, learning what that means in the context of an active apostolate. I don't like saying 'no' to the men, but I can learn to deal with it if it means saying a deeper 'yes' to the man and to Christ.

Easter and Homelessness

2009-04-16T20:35:00.003-04:00

Happy Easter to everyone! I hope that everyones' Holy Week and Easter were prayerful and blessed.

I was fortunate enough to enjoy a very prayerful Holy Week and joyful Easter. The highlights for me have to include the beautiful (and haunting) Tenebrae service at St. Matthew's Cathedral here in DC, the jubilant, intimate and moving Holy Thursday Mass here at St. Aloysius, the solemn and impressive Good Friday at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and a wonderful celebration of Easter Vigil with my Uncle Dennis in Virginia. I was also lucky enough to spend wonderful time with my Uncle before the Vigil and the next morning, as well as time with my grandparents and my Uncle Dave, Aunt Chris and my cousins the next day. All in all, everything I could ask for in celebrating the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord!

So here I am in the midst of the Octave of Easter. For those of you who might be unfamiliar, in the Catholic Church, Easter is celebrated through the Sunday following Resurrection Sunday, and the Easter season continues for a long while afterward. Relative to my ministry here in DC, it's been a strange transition to make.

To back up a bit, a description of my ministry is in order. The Father McKenna Center (so named for a saintly Jesuit of beloved memory who ministered there) is located in the basement of St. Aloysius Church and provides a fairly staggering range of services to those whom it serves. A large part of the Center, and the work that drew me in the first place, is its work with homeless men. During the week, the McKenna Center opens its doors for any to come in, offering morning coffee, breakfast and lunch, shower facilities, laundry facilities, an available phone, a location to receive mail and a wide variety of other services. During the winter, the Center also provides rooms for men seeking to avoid the cold. The Center also tries to work with the emotional and spiritual needs of the men, addressing reasons for their homelessness or need where possible.

In addition, however, the Center also provides assistance to other groups. Several times a week, representatives from the Center meet with people in need of assistance with rent or utility payments, helping wherever possible. The Center also provides emergency food aid to those in need, and lastly, though certainly not least, is the location for a weekly "Peace Meal," an event in which volunteers feed very large quantities of people.

All the work I've done is very much to the good. It's good work, I think, but it's also forced me to grow and given me plenty of fodder for prayer; this, I think, makes it a good experiment.

For now, though, the contrast between the joy of the liturgical season and the difficulty I'm encountering with the work is striking for me. I actually found it quite easy to enter into the prayer of the last week of Lent as well as into the Passion, given my day to day encounters with the people of the McKenna Center. As a staff member said well, we don't see anyone who doesn't need some kind of help. Most need material help, from the obvious like food, a place to warm up or dry off, to the less obvious, like a quiet, safe place to get the rest that they don't get in shelters or the streets or else a place to get their mail, including documents that can allow them to get help. However, the needs frequently run far more deeply than that. A large percentage of our clients have mental health issues; many have addiction issues. All struggle in some way with being marginalized, of barely having their material needs met, let alone their human needs.

It was easy to enter into Lent and the Passion here. The more time I spent around the men, the more I got to know them and their stories, the more that I heard their stories, the more I saw Christ suffering, being Crucified. The transition to the Resurrection is a bit more difficult for me. There is joy in the liturgy, of course, but overall I find it difficult to reconcile that joy with the cross that so many of the people with whom I work bear on a day to day basis. This Easter, therefore, has been a good, if difficult, one for me, in that it forces me immediately to consider that the joy of the Resurrection is not apart from the crosses still born but rather to give meaning to them, in hope and anticipation.

I'm not there yet. It's still hard for me to be joyful in the face of so much need and in the face of my own powerlessness to help it in so many cases. But maybe the Resurrection will ultimately mean more for me because of that. If it's hard now, would I even be able to go down there without that hope?

Holy Triduum

2009-04-10T07:13:00.006-04:00

Last night, I attended the Liturgy of the Lord's Supper at St. Aloysius Parish, a lengthy affair filled with both joyful praise from the Gospel choir as well as moments of profound quiet and reverence. As I enter into these days, the most sacred of the Church's liturgical year, I think I'll resist the temptation to make it an occasion to share my thoughts/reflections. There's much to say about my first week or two in the McKenna Center, and not least in the ways in which I encounter the poor Christ in the men who visit the Center, walking their own Via Dolorosa, but I think I'll let it marinate until after we celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord.

In the meantime, I wish everyone a very blessed Triduum!

Why here?

2009-04-04T10:23:00.003-04:00

While there are certain types of experiences that all Jesuit novices are supposed to have based our of our Institute, most of the different novitiates in the US Assistancy, and presumably the world, have different ways of going about it. One of the experiences common to at least some of the American novitiates is a 'Short Experiment," one that gets the novice out of the novitiate, living in an apostolic community (as opposed to a formation community) and working in some kind of apostolate.

In the current model used by the Chicago/Detroit Novitiate, the model is especially flexible. We make the Exercises in January, and spend the month teaching at Lasalette. The apostolate is certainly important while we're at Lasalette, but that time is also deliberately structured to be a lighter schedule. We take the time to begin processing what went on in the Exercises, and also to discern if and how God might be calling us to incarnate the fruits of the retreat in an apostolic setting, and then actually find a place to live and work. Ideally, the ministry would be something to which we are attracted, but also perhaps something in which we would encounter our "growing edges."

I experienced the call to work with the homeless rather clearly. As mentioned previously, I was deeply affected by my experiences with Labre in the fall, encountering people whose images stuck with me. However, I also experienced the desire in the context of the retreat.

The most clear moment for me came in the context of a contemplation I was doing on the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. The parable is one that tells of the almost incomprehensible generosity of the Owner of the vineyard, and of the corresponding shortcomings and selfishness of the tenants. I didn't really get to that part of the parable, though; I found myself drawn to the incredible vulnerability those last tenants, the ones who had come in at the end of the day and now stood in line, hands extended, hoping and praying for the unexpected generosity of the owner. What would he pay? A pittance was all they'd earned. Would it be enough? Will they be able to feed their families? Themselves? Their hands extended, it all depends on the Owner...

The tenants are the most vulnerable in our society, the homeless, the impoversished, the jobless, the sick, the uninsured, the undereducated. Most people, I suspect, are a bit more vulnerable than they like to think. Sociological research and anecdotal evidence bears out the fact that even the relatively well-to-do are frequently only one or two major disasters from being amongst the most vulnerable themselves. Still, many(and I include myself in this wholeheartedly) like the illusion of being in control. An education or a particular job can wrap us in the illusion that we are somehow in control of our lives. The most vulnerable have no such illusions. They live with need, even crippling need, but perhaps even more devestatingly, they frequently live with the paralyzing uncertainty of not knowing if or how their needs will be met, and the embarassment of being deeply dependant on others to make ends meet. These are those 'least ones' that the Gospel calls us to time and again.

And yet, I am that tenant too. With all the securities that my comfortable upbringing, excellent education and open fields of opportunity can bring, I'm still only an accident, a health problem or a economic shift from being in the same position of those to whom I minister.

However, my greatest poverty is one of spirit. Ps. 127 says, "Unless the LORD build the house, they labor in vain who build. Unless the LORD guard the city, in vain does the guard keep watch. It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night." And so it is. I'm competitive and achievement-driven by nature, but also by nurture. Our culture asks us to show results, to meet goals, to achieve, and I've absorbed that. The truth of the matter, though, is that I'm never going to be good enough. As the psalmist notes, no amount of work or skill can make a ministry bear fruit. No accomplishment or achievement can justify me before the Lord, and both in prayer now and ultimately when my time comes to stand before God, I am and will be infinitely weak, needy. I am, and will always be, radically dependant on God for His grace and mercy, without which I can do nothing for myself and for others; I am and will always be that tenant, hands extended toward the Lord.

And so it is that I was drawn to work with the homeless. I get to confront issues far bigger than I am, issues far beyond my humble ability to change or even affect, running headlong into my own limitations and forcing myself to abandon attachments to results. Moreover though, I get to daily confront a very concrete image of that tenant, men living in need and uncertainty with hands extended. By being present in the physical need of these men, I learn more and more of my own spiritual need.

Departure: Part II

2009-03-28T16:02:00.002-04:00

What a crazy week! We arrived back at Loyola House this afternoon after having spent the last week on the road doing vocation promotion and visiting various Jesuit communities and apostolates throughout the province.

By way of a rough itinerary, the schedule for my group looked something like this:

Saturday-house jobs and departure for Cincinnati. Dinner with my family, but spent night at Faber community, near Xavier University.
Sunday-Morning/Early afternoon spent with family. Attended 5pm Mass at St. Xavier Parish in downtown Cincinnati and met with young adult group there. Spent night at St. Xavier High School community
Monday-Spent full day (all 8 periods) speaking to theology classes at St X (my alma mater); ran with track team in afternoon, spent some time around the city in the evening.
Tuesday-Spoke with primary school kids at St. Elizabeth Seton School, Milford Ohio (my primary school, home parish); spent afternoon with Claver Community, an urban ministry in Cincinnati; attended Mass at Bellermine Chapel, Xavier University and met with discernment group there in the evening; departed around 9:30 for Indianapolis and arrived at Brebeuf Prep around midnight.
Wednesday- Spoke to 2-3 large groups at Brebeuf about vocations and spent afternoon/evening around community. Departed after dinner for Chicago, arriving at Taylor St. Community near St. Ignatius College Prep to spend night.
Thursday-Spent day speaking to groups at SICP; spoke to Chicago area discernment group in evening at community before departing for Loyola Academy to spend night.
Friday- Spoke to classes all day at Loyola Academy. Toured Loyola University Chicago in the evening before returning to LA for the night.
Saturday-Mass with the community and departure, arriving here at Loyola House at about 3:30.

Estimated time of departure tomorrow morning: 5 AM.

It was a deeply rewarding experience, and I found it to be quite confirming, but I have to admit that I'll be glad to be settled into one place and something resembling a schedule for a while. Moving around as we were, it was hard to budget time for things like prayer and exercise, and I was grateful for those moments where I could snag either; exercise, alas, tended to suffer more, since I judged that it would be disingenuous at best to talk about my interior life to groups while ignoring it. So, long story short, I won't mind having a home base for a while.

Speaking of which, my home base is going to be changing a bit. I mentioned above that I'm departing at 5am tomorrow, and earlier that it will be for Short Experiment. I'll be living in the St. Aloysius community in Washington DC, working at the Fr. McKenna Center there, an outreach to those who are homeless. I'm incredibly excited for the opportunity, and looking forward to seeing what the Lord reveals to me there in the place to which I've been led.

Departure: Part 1

2009-03-21T09:44:00.004-04:00

It's been an increasingly busy week here. Out of nowhere (or so I tell myself) my brief experience of teaching primary school came to an end. Many graces, challenges and wonderful moments that will probably make it onto a later post or two.

For now, though, I'm bracing myself for a true whirlwind of a week. Today (actually in just a short hour or two) we will be departing Loyola House for the beginning of our Vocations Tour. Basically, it's just like it sounds; the six first-year novices will be splitting into two groups of three and traveling to see the province's parishes, universities and, especially, high schools, giving talks and telling our own vocation stories. It's a chance for us to see the many apostolates outside of our own Detroit area, as well as a chance to get to know some those Jesuits whom we may not have met. Most of all, the week is an opportunity for us to raise awareness about vocations, and even simply to share our stories about the many ways that God has worked in our lives. It's a busy week, but I'm truly excited to get going.

Please pray for us as we begin this travel, but most especially I'd ask for prayers for any whom we will meet. More vocations would be fantastic, and praise God if that's the result. My deepest hope though, is that some whom we will meet will simply be touched enough to begin asking themselves that simple, beautiful, dangerous question: "How is God working in my life?" I truly believe that even to ask that question opens the way for great things in our lives. Regardless, prayers are appreciated!

As a little teaser to conclude, the first-years will be returning next Saturday to Loyola House for approximately 12 hours before departing our various destinations for Short Experiment....much more to follow on that, but that's at least a little bit about why things are so busy!

Contempletive Prayer- Third Grade Style

2009-03-10T20:28:00.007-04:00

Every day I spend with my 17 third graders at OLLS reinforces my conviction that to be a primary school teacher is a truly powerful and demanding vocation.

Even the short 45 minutes that I spend with the third graders drains me. I've spent no time around that age group before now, so I've expended more than a little time and energy trying to figure out just how their minds work, what they know and don't know, what sort of material is age-appropriate and the like. The energy level is high, which means that I usually need to come prepared with a number of different activities for each day.

And, not least challenging of all, the curiosity level of these kids is incredible; I frequently find myself asked really sticky questions in a disarmingly direct, innocent way, which means I struggle pretty much daily to explain hard concepts in third grade terms. "Mr. Spotts, which came first, Adam and Eve or the dinosaurs?" "Mr. Spotts, why did Jesus have to die for our sins?" or even, "Wait, you just said that in the Sacrament of Matrimony people promise to love and care for each other forever! So...what about divorce?"

Yikes!

With all that said, there's something deeply special about working with this age group. Answering questions like the above in terms a third grader can access taxes my abilities to their limit with mixed success at best. Still, the total authenticity, innocence and directness of these kids is a wonderful breath of fresh air for someone like me who's more used to older kids and adults, whose questions are often bound up all sorts of social propriety or are pointed, masks for an agenda or an opinion. As the Good Book says, the kids are so often, "an Israelite indeed, one in whom there is no guile." (Jn 1:47)

Nowhere is this more evident than in their prayer. I've spent some of the time doing catechetical work with them, especially as questions emerge, but I've also tried to expose them to some of the riches of prayer offered in the Catholic tradition. Maybe they'd remember it and maybe not, I reasoned, but hopefully, hopefully it might begin sink in that prayer can be, should be and must be much more than marching through Our Fathers, Hail Marys and the table blessing. So, we talked about prayer, kinds of prayer and where/when the kids liked to pray, but we also practiced doing simple guided meditations.

The results were, if I may say so, the only unmitigated success I've had in my few weeks tenure teaching.

Mind, when I had the kids disperse across the room, there were some attempts to giggle with their friends, some became fascinated with a spot on the ceiling, and some groaned at the prospect of quiet time. Still, as I walked them through, the focus was actually rather incredible.

One of the meditations we did was on the Baptism of Jesus. I had them all close their eyes. I first asked them to imagine a river, any river. "Is it wide or narrow?" I asked. " Deep or shallow? Muddy or clear? Now imagine the banks. Rocky or sandy? Trees or not?" And so on. I was very careful to ask specific questions about the scene, but I left the details to their imagination. Finally, I read the story of the Baptism of Jesus slowly twice, and left (egads!) the kids in silence for a whopping 2-3 minutes.

Then came the more adventurous part. I asked the kids questions about their experiences. What was it like when you saw Jesus? What was it like to see Jesus baptised? What about the voice from Heaven-how did that make you feel? I concluded by asking them to imagine standing alone with Jesus far, far away from the river, and invited them to talk to Jesus about their feelings. Did the scene you just imagined make you feel a certain way? Tell Him about it! Was there a question, something that confused you-ask Him!

I was a little tentative as we ended the meditation and gathered to talk about it, but the truth of the matter is that the kids were way, way better at this first foray into contemplative prayer than I ever was.

With no hesitation about sharing whatsoever, these kids rattled on uninterrupted about their experiences for the rest of class. Their vivid imaginations were completely uninhibited by the way things 'should' be. "John the Baptist had black skin, long hair and a long beard!" "No, he was totally bald and had white skin!" "He looked like you Mr. Spotts!" Same way with their feelings. Some were scared by the Voice from heaven. Some were excited. Some were confused by the message from the Voice. All said that they were happy to have had the opportunity to talk things over with Jesus.

Prayer is hard for me, as well as for a lot of other people I know. I know from my own experience that I learned, at some point or another, to distrust my feelings and focus on the mind, what I should be praying and what I ought to be feeling. I have a full agenda for my prayer and a firmly embedded sense (to which I still too often cling!) of what is and is not a reverential conversation with the Almighty, all of which cripples my ability to be authentic before God and to let the Spirit move me. Not so with the third graders; they brought the same unassuming energy and innocence to their prayer that they did to their questions in class, and as a result, the Lord was able to work in wonderful ways with them.

I'm not a great third grade teacher, but these few weeks sure have taught me just a little bit more about what Jesus means about the kingdom of heaven belonging to such as these.

Oh, the JESUITS...

2009-02-28T16:31:00.004-05:00

Last week, the Jesuit novices were asked to be a presence at the Our Lady of Lasalette Open House. Like many smaller private schools, OLLS's is enrollment-dependent, and especially given the current economic conditions is quite concerned to keep or even raise the number of students who attend. As far as I'm concerned, it was good to be able to be there as an additional presence at the school, if for no other reason than to advertise the fairly unique (and good!) relationship between the novices and the school.

In the midst of all this, I ended up in conversation with a man checking out the school for his kids. We were dressed in clerics for the purpose of the event so, not terribly surprisingly, the man greeted me politely as "Father." I smiled a bit (inside, I'll admit, I was resisting the temptation to just play along) and told him that, actually, it's Mister or better yet just Matt, and explained that I was a Jesuit novice, training to be a Jesuit priest.

And here it came:

'Oh I know the Jesuits. You see, I studied at [insert Jesuit institution here]. I got to know Fr. [insert Jesuit here] very well; in fact, he presided at [insert major life event here] '

This part of the conversation (which I've already had more than a few times even at this early point in my formation) actually is always a very pleasant one for me. It's nice to see these concrete signs of the ways in which people's lives have been touched by my brothers in the Society. Even more than that, it's deeply confirming to my own vocation to be able to see concrete manifestations of God's grace at work in people's lives, and helps make it just a little bit easier to trust that just maybe the work that I do now can help touch people's lives years down the road.

The part that always makes me cringe a bit inside, and forces me to do any number of delicate smalltalk tap dances, comes with the next bit:

'Oh, those Jesuits are so smart. I mean, really well-educated. You guys are like degree machines, I knew guys with two, three advanced degrees. Say, what are yours going to be in?'

Ouch.

It's not the worst stereotype that anyone's ever expressed to me about the Society. After all, many Jesuits do great, important and holy work for the Church in the intellectual apostolate. Think Karl Rahner, the recently deceased Avery Cardinal Dulles or any number of Jesuit fathers and brothers worldwide whose work helps draw believers closer to God as well as equips the Church to meet the rapidly shifting cultural climate of the world.

At the same time, there's still something inside of me that winces when I hear that. I want to cry out about all the Jesuits who fled from the confines of a university the first chance they got. I want to talk about the recently deceased Br. Bruno Karpinski, a carpenter who labored for years in India and delighted in making toys for the children there. I want to rave about the work that Fr. Bill Creed does in Chicago, bringing the Ignatian Exercises to the homeless. I want to talk about pastors, spiritual directors and campus ministers who labor day after day to help souls get closer to God with nary a degree or a book release to herald the work they do. I want to scream that while the intellectual apostolate is what some of us do, it's by no means who we are.

I held my peace, then and most times. The nice man I was talking to couldn't possibly be expected to be an expert in Jesuit self-identity, and the fact that he was so touched by a Jesuit was itself moving.

But if I had my druthers, I'd a million times rather someone tell me about how You Jesuits are so on fire with love of God, you have such a passion for people's souls, you're so good at helping make God available to the world.

Lent Reflection-Intimacy and the Cross

2009-02-27T13:52:00.004-05:00

I'll admit it. I'm finding myself more than a little resistant to Lent this year.

Part of this, no doubt, has to do with the dynamic of the Long Retreat. Over the course of the retreat, I experienced typically "Lenten" movements quite deeply. That is, I had a long, hard look at my own sins and sinfulness, fasted on some days as part of a regimen of prayer and spent powerful, deep and difficult hours meditating on the last week of Jesus' life. All of this took a considerable amount of emotional and spiritual energy, and certainly contributes to the resistance I feel to plunging into the season.

But really, that's not all that's going on.

No matter how many times I confront that 'unfreedom, ' that disordered attachment, to my own desire to achieve, I still find myself battling that annoying tendency to think of the spiritual life as a project. I start to think things like, 'Haven't I already checked off my Lent box for the year?' Or, even more disastrously, 'Isn't this supposed to get easier as I move on?'

Wrong and very wrong.

Luke's gospel (9:22-26) lays down the law on the first point quite simply. To follow Christ is to take up our cross daily and follow Him. Not once in a while, not during Lent. Daily. Bam. But I think my bigger problem this Lent is the second part, that suspicion that the Cross gets easier in time.

The proliferation of the Cross in Christian iconography, jewelry, art, music and speech makes it easy, I think, for me to unconsciously trivialize the Cross. It's not deliberate; I know I try hard to meditate on the Passion when I see the Crucifix, or when I put on my own simple pewter cross necklace in the morning, but most of us, if not all of us, lack the kind of emotional energy to feel Christ crucified each and every time. Going even deeper though, I find that my own lack of response to the Cross most often correlates directly to my own lack of intimacy with Christ. That, I think is where the real snag is. If Christ is just an idea, an abstraction, then it's no wonder that the Cross lacks potency; it's just a story with a bit of a grisly end.

This is the hard reality for me right now: Intimacy with Christ does not make the Cross easier, it makes it harder.

On Long Retreat, I experienced the humanity of Christ in a deep, moving way, experienced Christ as a companion for maybe the first time. There was a cost then, though. I experienced Christ's passion and death not as an abstract concern, but as the deep wounding that comes from walking a dark road with a friend. All of a sudden, the story that I've known by heart since my early years had the potency to shock, confuse and alarm me. Why God, why?

A meaningful relationship with Jesus makes it harder for me to share with Him the loneliness and fear of the Garden. Companionship with Christ makes me fear the long walk to Cavalry. And that life-giving intimacy with my Lord makes it more confusing, not less, when I confront my own Crosses. Why are people I love struggling with illness, even painful illness? Why are dear friends groping about for meaning, with none of the guiding light I've had? Why is an old high school friend celebrating a memorial Mass today for his own young brother, killed tragically and suddenly? Intimacy with Christ is life-giving, but discipleship is anything but easy.

The Cross, after all, would hardly be a Cross if I wanted it, and my resistance to it may actually be a good sign that I'm taking it seriously. My prayer this Lent and beyond is that I have the courage to accept the cost of discipleship, and all it entails.

Candidate Weekend

2009-02-22T15:47:00.002-05:00

It's been a frenzied sort of weekend this weekend with a house full of 5 men investigating the Society as well as one other actually in application. It was a joyful kind of busy, though. Seeing the many and varied kinds of men that the Lord has drawn to even look at this least Society and hearing about the ways God is working in their lives is a deep source of consolation for my own vocation. As usual, I'd ask for any and all prayers available for these men and for all those men and women discerning a vocation to any state of life whatsoever, whether to the priesthood, the consecrated religious life, the single life or to married life.

Missioned to OLLS

2009-02-17T09:27:00.005-05:00

I suspect that if there's anything in the world that could remind me that I'm no longer in the contemplative silence of retreat, it's a room full of third graders.

Travel back to Loyola House, and the ensuing process of settling in, was fairly traumatic to the sense of calm that had settled over me during the course of retreat, but my encounter at the grade school finished it in short order. Within days of our return, we spent time touring Our Lady of Lasalette School, meeting the faculty and were finally assigned to our kids last week. I was given third grade.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that the kids are really great. Already, I've been kept hopping by their inquisitive questions and their high (very high) energy levels, but I've also had my heart melted by how sweet and welcoming the kids can be. At their Valentine's Day Party which I dutifully attended in festive red sweater, several of the kids surprised me by lavishing hand painted (and still a little bit wet!) Valentine's day crafts on me as well as a plethora of Valentines. And here I thought that all my future Valentines were going to be signed "Mom and Dad" in Mom's handwriting...

Still, teaching third grade is pretty darn far from my experience. I've done some work with junior high students and tutored high school students in the Bronx, and have really found that work to be incredibly life-giving. However, after my introduction to the class last week, I quickly realized that I haven't really had any interactions at all with that age group since my siblings were that age, and that was quite a while ago now.

The more I've prayed about it, though, the more I've come to realize that this is a graced assignment for me. On the Long Retreat, I had to again encounter my own disordered self-reliance, especially my tendency to believe that I'm in control and that my ministries will rise or fall on my merits. I tend to hold on so tight that I forget to leave room for God to come in and do the work.

In this sense, 3rd Grade is perfect for me. It's certainly a critical time, one in which they are learning to love God and learning about their faith. On the other hand, my involvement leaves me no room to harbor the illusion that my contribution is in any way a final effort. By the time the kids are my age, the overwhelming likelihood is that they won't even remember that I was there for four weeks. They won't remember what I taught them, the insight I offered them, the conversation we had. The seeds I plant will be anonymous, and I'll simply have to learn to give myself generously knowing that the Lord will be working for years to come through their parents, teachers and a host of people not even on their radar screen yet to bring them more and more closely unto himself. It's a humbling and beautiful work, and is going to force me to grow in my trust in God.

I'm reminded now, as I often was over retreat, of a section of a reflection often (and, I suspect, falsely) attributed to Oscar Romero. The reflection has been part of my prayer life for years, and has only deepened in meaning through the first semester here and retreat. The section I'm thinking of goes as follows:

This is what we are about: We plant the seeds that will one day grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

The Scene of Long Retreat

2009-02-15T15:34:00.011-05:00

I've thought long and hard about what I would or would not like to put up here regarding Long Retreat. People keep asking me, "How was it?" While I deeply appreciate the interest, and understand that most people asking me understand that there's no sufficient explanation for such an experience, it's helped me to realize that it's just a difficult thing to explain. For a whole host of reasons, I just don't think that it would be a great idea for me to try to sum up the retreat in a form conducive to this space. I'm not remotely qualified to talk about the retreat in a general sense, and it would take a considerable level of hubris to even try. Even on a personal level though, I haven't really finished digesting the retreat, and am only beginning to pray out of the movements of the retreat. Inasmuch as it's affected me and changed me in deep ways (and it has), it will no doubt inform future posts. But for now, no grand summary.

However, the setting of the retreat is worth a little bit of description. The town, for those who don't know, was once a major center of the Atlantic fishing industry, and it continues to hold onto a lot of that character, even though the industry isn't nearly so big as it once was. For our purposes (that is, for free days before and after the retreat, as well as for our two "days of repose,") the town was a neat place with a lot of character to visit.

The retreat house (like so many Jesuit retreat houses!) was once a really beautiful private residence used for summer gatherings out on the Eastern Point peninsula, and after some fairly considerable alterations now accommodates a fairly high load of retreatants year round, including many 8-day retreats and two separate rounds of 30-day retreats.

Per the current staff, it was one of the last houses built on the peninsula, the site having been thought to be too inhospitable for human habitation. We got a little taste of that, and sometimes more than a little bit it seemed! As one would expect in that part of the Atlantic coast in January, we ended up getting quite a bit of heavy weather, especially in terms of the snowfall and icing. I'm told that the winds weren't all that high compared to what they usually get this time of year, but there were plenty of times where the retreat house seemed to be getting buffeted. The downside of this is that it sometimes made it hard to get out and about and enjoy the scenery, but the upside was huge. Sometimes I was lucky enough that the weather, and especially the most ferocious weather, would correspond remarkably with the internal dynamics of my retreat, and my internal storms were mirrored by the fury that nature could muster.

Even when I couldn't count on nature to provide a movie-like backdrop to my own internal dynamic, the setting was still wonderful. I suspect that given thirty days of contemplative silence, it wouldn't be too hard to discover God just about anywhere, but it makes it really easy for me to remember the Lord is there when surrounded by natural majesty more or less constantly. My favorite time of the day was the time right before dawn. The dining room of the retreat house had one wall of windows, which faced the Eastern horizon. Every morning I and a fairly regular contingent of the other retreatants would be downstairs. I find it difficult to pray straight out of the gate in the morning, but even without a formal "prayer period," it was hard for me not to be struck by the Lord's presence there at the beginnings of the days. All in all then, I couldn't have asked for a much better place for the experience.

Back at Loyola House!

2009-02-08T14:52:00.002-05:00

Last night at about 6:30 we arrived back at Loyola House, and boy did it EVER feel good to be back. We were welcomed most warmly by members of the staff who had stayed behind, as well as Tom and Janet O'Keefe (Janet is the assistant to the Detroit Province Vocations Director and both Tom and Janet are like members of the community). As nice as that was though, like the end of any trip, it couldn't quite match the joy of plopping down into my own bed, which had been nicely made by someone, complete with a fresh stick of gum on the pillow in lieu of a mint.

Much more to follow at some point of course, but now that I'm back in the land of the living, I just wanted to say a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who prayed for me and all the retreatants during this time. I was very mindful of your prayers throughout the Exercises, and know that I prayed for you every day.

Long Retreat

2009-01-02T16:02:00.004-05:00

I'm taking a break during what's been a fairly frenzied couple days of preparation just to note, as many, if not most of you know, that I'll be out of contact for the next few weeks as we, the first-year novices, journey to Glouster, MA to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The Exercises are Ignatius's great gift to the Church and are the bedrock on which Ignatian spirituality is built. More directly relevant to my experience, they are the single most important part of the novitiate experience of a Jesuit novice. We will spend 30 days making the retreat in silence, save only to speak with our spiritual directors once a day and having a few short "days of repose." The rest of the time will be spent in meditation, contemplation and prayer, all designed to allow the retreatant to have an immediate encounter with his or her Creator.

A powerful strength of the retreat is that the experience of it is designed to be so personal, so unique to each retreatant, but as such it's very difficult for me to form expectations. I'm feeling a bit anxious going in; 30 days of silence in what, by most accounts, can be a fairly overwhelming experience, is certainly far from anything I've experienced before. On the other hand, however, I'm tremendously excited to see what the Lord has in store for me.

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning, Jan. 3rd, and the Exercises begin on the 5th, meaning that I'll be out of contact till the first or second week of February.

If I could, I'd like to make a request here for any who might read this. The request is simply this: please pray for me and all the novices who will be making the retreat.

Even as I write this, I suspect that some who read this might not be in the practice of prayer for one reason or another. Some of you aren't believers. This is ok, but I'd still invite you to do what you feel comfortable with, even if it only means taking 5-10 minutes of contempletive silence a day or a week during that month. Some of you aren't Catholics or even Christian. That's also ok; I'd simply invite you to pray out of your own tradition. And some of you aren't much different than I've been for most of my life, in the sense that offering to pray for someone usually means thinking well of them. Again, totally ok, there's totally no judgement coming from this unworthy novice. As someone who values your readership, and in most cases, your friendship, I guess that I would just extend an invitation to you to use this as an opportunity to try something new. Take 5-10 minutes, a day if you can, or at least a couple times over the month, to silence yourself, to listen to the Creator who's always speaking to you and, if you're willing, to remember me and all the novices in those prayers.

I can absolutely promise that you will be in my prayers during this time, and am more cognizant than ever of how truly blessed I am by the many deep and moving friendships I have in my life. May God bless you abundantly as this new year begins and I look forward to hearing from you when I return.

Preparations and More

2009-01-02T11:10:00.004-05:00

A very happy and blessed new year to all of you!

I had intended on posting any number of things that have come up in the last few weeks. I had hoped to reflect on my last days at apostolates, conversations with visiting Jesuits and give more extensive details about the last few weeks of the semester. Alas, no time.

By way of the briefest of updates, I was able to spend a few days at home for Christmas, the first that I've been home since entering. It was a whirlwind of a visit; I left the novitiate at about 4 am on Christmas morning and was picking people up from Detroit Metro Airport by 1230 on the 29th, but it was still a very blessed time, and I was fortunate to be able to spend really wonderful time with my parents, siblings, grandparents, extended family and dear friends of whom I've seen far too little the last few years.

Upon return to Detroit, I proceeded directly to Formation Conference, a gathering of all Jesuits "in formation," that is, roughly from the first year of the novitiate up to a couple years after ordination. It was a beautiful time, time to reconnect with old friends from various places as well as to meet many of the men who will be my companions for years and years to come. It was inspiring to be around so many, and such talented men...our liturgies and prayer services were powerfully beautiful and our time spent in fellowship rich.

Now it's back to Loyola House for the briefest of periods to unpack, clean and repack. Frenzy!

2nd Annual Spotts Family Tacky Ornament Contest

2008-12-28T13:41:00.017-05:00

As mentioned before, a new and deeply beloved Spotts family Christmas tradition is the tacky ornament competition. Last year, due to my father (a Delta pilot) having to work on Christmas day, we postponed the celebration till he returned. Ben, my brother, proposed that we hold a tacky ornament competition, and so the contest was born.

It was only right that last year's competition was won by the brains behind the whole event. But it was close. This year, the stakes were higher, and for your viewing pleasure (or something), I've included the entrants here.

Last year

To give a sense of history, it's worth examining last year's entrants. I thought that my (truly deplorable) snowman on the bottom was a strong competitor. However, my brother had paced himself during that competition, and, recognizing just how strong the competition really was, he created the monstrosity of a "reindeer" that you see on top. Well played sir, well played indeed.

Christmas 2008

The stakes were considerably higher this year. Not only was there a new entrant (my father) and a new judge (my Grandma and Grandpa Spotts, who are temperamentally incapable of tacky), but we'd all been eagerly plotting our tacky for some time.

Interestingly, both of my sisters, Emily and Michelle, went for a Christmas tree ornament. Michelle, on the top quickly found herself out of the running because her tree was, well, not really tacky. It was actually kinda...nice. Big no-no. Emily did a bit better-not only did she find some garish bangles to stick on there, but she wrapped the bottom in red fur.

My Mom, whose entry is above-left, certainly managed tacky, pushing toward gross. Her main problem was that there was some debate as to whether her entry was actually an ornament or whether it was merely a "decoration." My Grandma McVey (Grandma Gorgeous, as she's often called) submitted the other entry featuring birds. Hers was certainly disgusting, and was mentioned as one of the finalists...my suspicion is that if the judging had taken place while the neon bracelets were still glowing brightly, she might have been closer to winning.

The reigning champion, Ben, submitted the sleigh on top, complete with a fuzzy, googly-eyed thing above. However, the judges held that, tacky as the folk and fur sled was, it didn't make it to the top 3. For a first year entrant, Dad surprised us all...if I'd been judging, I probably would have given him the nod for the Christmas spider on a sled, complete with golden bangles, Cossack hat and scarf.

However, the winner this year was, *ahemahem,* yours truly, for the entry pictured from multiple angles above. The ornament is a television set, depicting Charlie Brown and a Peanuts teacher saying, "Mwow-mwow mwowww." Note, as the judges did, the exquisite tackiness that comes from the fastidious attention to detail that the artist paid to each individual tacky element, from the wrapping paper cover and ribbon, to the icicle bangles, to the neatly placed fuzzy balls. I, dear readers, am most humbly and gratefully, your Tacky Champion of 2008.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-28T09:11:00.006-05:00

I know that this post is coming a few days late for the Feast of the Nativity itself, but I'm still within the liturgical Christmas season, so I figure that I'm still ok.

First and foremost, I want to wish everyone a very merry and blessed Christmas. This year as I spent time in prayer over Christmas, some of the things that couldn't help but surface surrounded just how difficult Christmas would be for some people this year, and for some every year. I thought about the homeless I've met this semester, for whom Christmas might mean nothing more than a small bump in charity availability. I think of my residents in the nursing home, some of whom I saw on Christmas Eve and only to be told that they wouldn't get visitors. I think of all the people who are tightening their belts this year, spending less in response to economic conditions.

But the thing is, all of this only makes Christmas more important, not something to be minimalized or skipped for a year. The joy of the Incarnation is that when Christians say that Christ came in the fullness of time, that didn't mean when the world was most holy, most ready. Christ came into a profoundly broken and weary world. So, as we celebrate this year, my prayer has actually been helped by the conditions of the country and of the people I've met, if for no other reason than it's much more urgent for me to beg for Christ to come into my life, my world and to rejoice when I see that He does.

As for my own Christmas, I'm in the last day of a whirlwind home visit. I spent Christmas Eve at Loyola House for our (very lovely!) Christmas dinner, celebration and gift exchange. We were requested to spend at least most of the night at Loyola House, but permitted to leave early-so it was that James (a fellow first year) and I were Cincinnati-bound at 4 am Christmas morning.

The time here has been blessed. I'm very close to my immediate family, so to spend time with them was a deep joy. A noteworthy event now in its second year is the Spotts family Tacky Ornament Contest, in which we recreate our grade school ornament-making days and try to make the ugliest, most garish ornament we can imagine. Another great moment was the evening of the 26th, on which I was blessed to be able to have many of my dear friends from home come and visit. It was truly graced time to realize I have such great friends, especially since there's no telling if or when such a group is ever likely to get together again. In addition, there were wonderful visits with my cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides. Chaotic, but a wonderful time.

One more day here and then it's back to Detroit for Formation Conference, in which all the men in formation (novices to newly ordained) from the Chicago, Detroit and Wisconsin provinces will gather. I'm lookin forward to seeing many of my friends from Fordham, even though I'm sad that my visit is coming to an end so quickly.

God bless everyone in this Christmas season!

Labre

2008-12-22T08:51:00.006-05:00

Last night was the final night this semester for Labre, a homeless ministry that has been spearheaded by one of the second-year novices. In the current setup of the novitiate, the first semester of the second year is the "OMT" (Our Mission Today) which calls the second year men to more deeply examine the direction and contemporary Mission of the Society as defined in recent General Congregations, with a particular emphasis on understanding current social justice issues and reaching out to those who are somehow marginalized. Among the various apostolates that each has undertaken, one of the men has worked to establish Labre at a local Jesuit High School and the University of Detroit-Mercy.

Labre takes its name and its mission from St. Benedict Joseph Labre, an 18th Century mendicant who left behind wealth and status to live as a poor pilgrim, dedicated to prayer and to sharing what little he had with the homeless.

Both prayer and work are integral parts of the ministry. In a typical Labre evening, we begin putting together a simple meal from donated items late on Sunday afternoon, the ideal being to have a sandwitch, fruit, dessert and a hot drink for the people we meet. Having done so, we then gather in the Loyola House chapel near the Blessed Sacrament to pray before leaving. We gather and ask the Lord to be with us, and most especially to help us to see the suffering Christ in the people that we meet and to whom we minister, after which we spend several minutes in silent prayer and depart. The rest of the night is spent driving around downtown Detroit and nearby areas. If we see a likely person (a large number of plastic bags is one example of a sign we look for) we simply stop and ask the person if he or she would like a meal and a hot drink. If the person is interested, we pop the trunk and begin to serve. We talk with the folks, see how things have been for them, maybe to hear their story and share ours. At the end, if they seem open, we pray with them.

After a few weeks, we started to get an idea for where people tended to be, and consequently were able to meet some of the same people on a semi-regular basis. This is the ideal. To be sure, the food that we offer is a corporal work of mercy and is quite needed by many of the folks that we meet. At the same time, noone involved has the slightest illusion that the food we offer is making the slightest dent in the monstrous material reality that is poverty and homelessness in Detroit. Because of this, we make sure not to operate like a mobile soup kitchen. Rather, our biggest mission is to be able to meet people, to provide human companionship and the dignity of knowing that they are loved, important enough for someone to want to sit down, talk and hear their story.

There are a host of experiences that were somehow meaningful to me over the course of the few short weeks in which I was able to participate in the ministry. I'll share two here as being particularly formative:

The first was simply my encounter last night with the brutal realities of material poverty. The Weather Channel estimated that with the windchill it was several degrees below zero last night. In practical terms, this meant that at any moment we stepped out of the van, every inhaled breath froze in my nostrils, but that only served to accentuate the brutal conditions of the people we met. Joseph, whom we had spoken to before, declined a meal. He was on the steps of a Church, almost completely exposed to the elements, covered in a filthy sleeping bag and dirty blankets, but wearing only what looked like a threadbare pajama top. Writing this, I find myself simply praying that he survived the night. Willie, whom Andi (the second-year spearheading this ministry) recognized from yet another homeless ministry, accepted the food and drink, but a bit despondantly reported that he had no idea where he was going last night. Chris, whom, again, we had met before, gladly took a drink and a meal, but when he pulled the scarf down from his face, I was rocked to see that either his breath or his mucous had created a several inch icicle on his scarf. Christ suffered bitterly in Detroit last night.

The second experience is perhaps more uplifting. Two weeks ago, we met Carlos near a bus stop. Carlos reports that he's not homeless, but all signs suggest that he's a very short hop, skip and a jump from it. That very first night, when we offered him a hot drink and a meal, he accepted gratefully, and to our surprise was tearful in just a moment. "You know, I got laid off at the plant a while back," he said. "And I've been working hard to get back on my feet; it's just so hard! But you guys restored my faith tonight." We talked a long while that night, and more again the next week when he said, "It just makes such a difference, being able to tell people I know that there are guys out there fighting the good fight." Both times, Carlos gladly agreed to lead us in prayer. We held hands and put our right feet forward, "Showing that we're stepping on the right path, closer to God," Carlos said. And he led us, as only the son of a southern preacher (which Carlos is!) can. And it was spiritual dynamite as we prayed for Carlos, for our ministry and for all those in need of help.

Carlos was certainly the most heartwarming of the people we met, but I don't recall him here because he was the most heartwarming or the most appreciative. To be appreciated is the very last thing for which the ministry strives. Rather, Carlos exemplifies what we do because of how deeply the companionship and prayer touched him. It was nice that he appreciated us, but knowing that we made an emotional and spiritual difference to him meant the world both for our time spent with him and with the ministry as a whole.

Ukrainian Divine Liturgy

2008-12-21T20:31:00.003-05:00

As with many Sundays at Loyola House, for today, the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we were ad libitum (literally "at our pleasure") for Mass...in Loyola House-speak, that means that we could pretty much go wherever we felt for Mass.

Andi, one of our second-year novices, was raised in the Ukrainian Catholic tradition, and since he's leaving shortly after the new year to begin his "Long Experiment," this was the last weekend I had a chance to tag along with someone knowledgeable to Divine Liturgy. So, not wanting to pass on this particular experience, I went.

The Ukrainian Church, for those who might not know, is one of a number of what are called Eastern Catholic Churches, autonomous, particular Churches that are in full communion with Rome. In other words, they are Catholic in the sense of being doctrinally and affectively in communion with the Pope and are of equal dignity with all Churches that are part of the one Church, but preserve considerable differences in canonical or sacramental discipline, spirituality, practices of piety and, most notably for my experience this weekend, liturgy.

I should admit, first and foremost, that my experience was anything but a rapid immersion experience. The Divine Liturgy we attended was in English (as opposed to Ukrainian or Church Slavonic), so I was able to follow what was going on with little difficulty. Given current weather conditions in Detroit (buried in snow and freezing) many stayed away from the Liturgy, so many of the optional parts of the liturgy were simply omitted, including many of those parts that would have occured to me as being different. And, as Andi pointed out, the Church was bizarre as far as Eastern church buildings go. The parish was named for the Immaculate Conception, a spiritual emphasis that would tend to be deemphasized in the Ukrainian Rite. The church had, among other typically western elements, the Stations of the Cross (indispensable in the Latin churches, highly unusual in Eastern) as well as images of the Sacred Heart (again, Latin influenced).

With all that having been said, there were still rather differences. First and foremost, the Church was stunning, and very identifiably Eastern. A huge amount of energy and money must have been expended once upon a time to make the Church into the monument to faith that it is. Not only is the artwork and iconography gorgeous, however, but it's simply riddled with symbolism, and all quite deliberately placed throughout the Church so as to create and promote meaning in the context of the Liturgy. The front of the Church had a screen, not unlike what the rood screens would have been in the medieval Latin Church, the doors of which were opened at the beginning of Liturgy and which had important meaning to the overall context of the Liturgy.

And, comfortably complacent in the Novus Ordo in which I was raised, I had to struggle to keep up with the liturgy while still maintaining a prayerful attitude. There were a considerable number of litanies, for which the response was frequently "Lord have mercy." We were expected to cross ourselves with some regularity. Andi had informed me beforehand that in the Eastern Rite, one crosses oneself going first to the head, heart, then right side, and so on. For those reading who are Latin Catholics, try it...yea, not easy. And, every time the priest said, "the Lord be with you," (which happened a few times) and every time the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity were named, (that is, constantly) we were crossing ourselves in what to my poor, habituated mind was a bizarre, backwards way. Last but not least, come communion time, those who chose to receive approached the priest and, doing a strange crouch thing, turned our heads up and opened our mouths while the Precious Body, soaked in the Precious Blood, is spooned by the priest into the open mouth. Talk about throwing a cradle (Latin) Catholic for a loop!

It was a fantastic experience for all the reasons one might expect-it was a good reminder of just how big the one Chuch is, and how far it extends, as well as a beautiful opportunity to understand better the background from which my brother novice comes.

One last thought comes from the priests announcements at the end of Divine Liturgy. He exhorted us, expectedly, to remember the meaning behind Christmas and the power of the mystery that is celebrated. At one point during his reflections, however, he offered this rather interesting remark. "You know, it's so common right now to hear people talk about the financial crisis and the 'hard times' we're having. I don't know...last week I was on the phone with someone in Ukraine and she said that she prays that they might have a 'financial crisis' like the one we have." I don't mean at all to downplay the hardship that many people well and truly feel. On the other hand though, it's not a bad perspective to keep in mind as we move forward in this season and this time in our country.

Advent Triduum

2008-12-19T09:14:00.002-05:00

As mentioned in previous posts, the past few days were spent on a three day silent retreat designed to give all of us novii (ok, maybe it really is 'novices...') a chance to reflect on the semester. For my part, the time was very well appreciated. Even though our day to day schedule allows for plenty of time to pray, reflect and digest, the opportunity to step back and take a long view and reflect over the semester as a whole was beautiful, and well-appreciated!

There are any number of thoughts and feelings that welled up during the course of the retreat. Some related to our fall apostolates. We finished those last week, on Thursday, and I've been absolutely blown away by how hard it was to say goodbye. As far as those were concerned, it was nice to simply have a few days to digest how deeply in love I fell with that experiment. Some related to my prayer life. I was able to spend time in prayer and in reflection, looking over old journal entries and seeing not only where the Lord is in a particular moment or day, but rather where my prayer movements have consistently led me over the course of the semester.

As far as initial reactions go, however, the thing that I've been most surprised by has little to do with the movements that I experienced over retreat, but rather with the retreat itself. My experience with silent retreats is as yet rather minimal. While discerning, I made an individual, undirected 3-day retreat at Gethsemene Abbey in Kentucky, as well as an 8-day discernment retreat here at Loyola House in January before entering. With those, while there were highly constructive prayer moments, I also experienced the silence to be almost deafening, and the raw unfamiliarity of that much silence to be a distraction in its own right.

My experience of the Triduum retreat made at the end of our First Probation period in early September was likewise a tricky experience, for entirely different reasons. With the advantage of hindsight and a journal, I can look back and see what a tricky time that was for me. I was caught up in a storm of emotions. I was experiencing loneliness, the acute poignancy of having said a number of major goodbyes not just at entrance, but in the several months before with graduation from college still fresh in mind. I had both healthy and unhealthy levels of apprehension, doubt and fear about my new life and my classmates. In short, I was an emotional trainwreck, but what made that experience truly wrenching is that I lacked the spiritual equipment to really deal with it then. Even more than now, I was new to prayer then, and was unable to invite the Lord into my own chaos in a constructive way. Moreover, I was also unable to figure out that my desires at the time for sweeping and dramatic spiritual movements or vocational confirmations were not the movement of the "good spirit," but rather a form of desolation, a desire that moved me away from faith and hope in my Creator.

The difference, then, with this Triduum, was striking. I was comfortable enough in my own spiritual skin that I didn't feel any dramatic urge to hear voices in the silence or to have sudden moments of metanoia. Growth happened, of course, but it was the slow, patient work of the One who's been working on me throughout the semester and well before, who used the time there not to bedazzle me with insights but rather to help show the work that was already there, to move me along paths already begun.

I think though, the retreat helped show me at least one brand new area in which I've grown. At each of the aforementioned retreats, the silence was overwhelming. During discernment, it was a rude shock, whereas during the first weeks of novitiate it was petrifying, cutting my lifelines loose and forcing me to flounder around in the stormy seas of my interior life. And this time, my thought was simply "Is this all?" More comfortable in the silence, and more equipped to make constructive use of it, this time I found myself realizing that 3 days isn't really sufficient for me to even find myself in any kind of external silence, let alone the deep internal silence that I'd been hoping for. It's a fantastic lesson in just how noisy my life is, but also a neat realization of growth...not only am I not as scared of the silence as I once was, but I also find myself enjoying it! That, for now, is a good place to be.

Gaudete!

2008-12-15T15:56:00.002-05:00

In the liturgical calendar, this previous Sunday was the third Sunday of Advent, the day in which the priest wears rose-colored (ok, maybe it's just plain pink!) vestments and those who use Advent wreaths light the pink candle. Gaudete Sunday it's called, or, "Rejoice!" The period of waiting for the Lord is waning and the celebration of his birth is close!

Here at Loyola House, we had plenty to celebrate, but the rejoicing took on a special tone by its proximity to the Loyola House Christmas Party. Much of the week was spent in preparation of the event, and then on Saturday night, we finally opened our doors to a whole host of people with a wide variety of connections to the novitiate. Members of local Jesuit communities came, including even some of the men from Columbiere. We also had folk from the local parish (Our Lady of Lasallette is right across the street from us!), the local JVC community, and our cook Kris and her daughter. A huge part of the party was made up of folk from the various ministries of which we are a part, including our supervisor from the nursing home, Sister Bonnie, various people from Columbiere, and people from the second year's ministries at the jail and warming center.

All in all, it was an extraordinary group of people, but what made the whole thing so beautiful for me was to be able to spend time with so many of the people that have made my first semester in the novitiate so extraordinary. A huge, huge variety of people have contributed to making my experience so exceptional, and to be able to simply enjoy their company, to relax and enjoy all the experiences we've had was truly a blessing to me. And so, in prayer on Sunday it was easy to rejoice! I've had so many concrete signs of Christ's coming into my life this semester, it's difficult not to rejoice.

These next few days, the novices and I will be on a short Advent Triduum retreat, which hopefully will be quality time to spend with the Lord, to take a deeper look at the ways in which I've been moved this semester and to begin to dispose myself for the arrival of the Lord at Christmas. Pray for us, and I will also pray for all the people in my life who mean so much to me!

Music and Ministry

2008-12-05T19:52:00.006-05:00

I'm bad at music. Like, really bad. My only attempt at an instrument, piano, came crashing down in my youth mostly due to the fact that I was too lazy or undisciplined to put in the requisite practice, much to my enduring regret. When I open my mouth and make what can be charitably called an 'attempt' at singing, dogs howl and children cry. It's not that I don't like music. Quite the contrary, I find even the mere appreciation of music to be a beautiful artistic outlet. Frequently, music is a deeply moving part of my prayer, whether it's contemplation with Taize, praise and worship stuff, especially as integrated into Eucharistic Adoration, or even just using music to help me turn my jogs into quality prayerful, reflective time. The problem isn't a lack of enjoyment of music or a lack of appreciation; the problem is simply that I'm no good.

The reason I bring this up this week is simply because I had two entirely separate occasions this week to consider the value music can actually have in ministry to people. In each, I participated to the best of my limited ability, but in the end, I just had to step back and watch the awesomeness unfold.

The first was at the nursing home at which I work. Thursday, Br. Jim Boynton (Detroit Province Vocations Director) and his friend Tim returned to play music for the residents, singing and playing either a combination of guitar and fiddle or else just two fiddles. Br. Jim's been doing this for some time now, and to put it mildly, hes wildly popular with the residents. One of the iconic moments that I'll take from the nursing home was the visual of my 98 1/2 year old resident wheeling herself to the acvtivities assistant, the head administrator, the pastoral care office and everyone else who would listen, doggedly trying to convince them to cancel all other activities for the day so that Jim would have an appropriately large crowd. Despite his popularity though, circumstances have always prevented me from actually being present while he played for the residents.

Thursday was finally my chance, and after getting home from our other apostolate at Columbiere Center, I pulled myself together and got over to the home, just in time for the last 45 minutes or so of the performance. In short, it was aweseome. Br. Jim and Tim played music from the 30's, 40's and 50's, and it was nothing short of amazing to see the way that the folks responded. Many were singing every word, some were clapping all were responding. Mind, nearly all of these folks are limited physically and/or mentally. If able to carry on a nearly normal conversation, a resident would be considered comparatively high-functioning. Some are difficult to reach by any means, including basic conversation and touch.

And yet, there they were, singing and clapping along. When Br. Jim and Tim showed up that day and sang songs written well before they were born, I'm sure that they were simply doing as musicians do, enjoying the music and enjoying each other's company. But as I sat there watching, I was absolutely melted by the pure, unadulterated joy that they brought to the people there. These people, cut off from so much of what their lives have been, facing their own frailty and mortality day in and day out, feeling loneliness, frustration and anxiety had a moment where they just got a taste of joy. And, in that moment, the music sailed straight through the veils that I labor to peel back through pastoral ministry. And there was the Lord.

For the second, today the novices and I went down to Sts. Peter and Paul Church, a beautiful Jesuit parish building in downtown Detroit. In an annex to the Church, the parish helps sponser what's called the Warming Center, a rather unique ministry for the homeless that provides for some of the physical needs of its guests. More importantly, it also tries to provide a quiet space and the pastoral support necessary to help someone coming out of the street culture begin introspection necessary for spiritual growth and perhaps life change. At any rate, one of the second-year novices had spent his semester down there, and we joined him to put on a Christmas concert for many of the guests.

Again, magic. There are some truly spectacular musical talents in the novitiate (and a few who are right there with me!), but it didn't matter to me a bit. Watching folk come in out of the cold for a while and sing along a bit quietly was beautiful in its own right. But for me, the best moment came at an interlude that we offered where the guests could offer their own prayers, well-wishes to the community or thoughts. Hearing them offer their thoughts was incredible. One man talked about the hard times that they were going to face this winter and how grateful he was to have that time to gather. A woman got up and praised Jesus. An older man quietly wished everyone a merry Christmas.

One man, though, melted my heart. "We've all felt a little joy welling up in us just now," he said. "How do we take that with us. Can we hold onto it?" This man lives as hard a life as I can imagine, living day to day, hour to hour. By any type of reason, the man would have every right to simply indulge in a few minutes out of the biting December cold. But that's not what happened. Rather, take him out of the threatening, hard realities of street life and allow him for a few minutes to in habit a space of peace and prayer and he becomes a contempletive. As with all of us, give us a few minutes of silence and attentiveness to our deepest selves and the change can be incredible. The Spirit moves, and that man was listening closely enough to hear it. For my part, if our stabs at carols were enough for just that one man to hear God whispering in that one homeless man's heart, then the whole day was worth it. Bottom line though, is that it's a great example of the way that music can help draw things forward from the deepest wells of our selves.

I may never be a decent singer, though I am working at it. It's likely that I'll never be a musician of any kind, let alone one to wow folk. But this week has left me in awe of the way that music can reach people on a deeply spiritual level. It's also left me wondering; what other gifts can I reach others, and myself, with?

Thanksgiving at Loyola House

2008-11-30T15:44:00.002-05:00

This weekend was the first major holiday that I've spent in the Society, and it was a wonderful experience!

The day itself was a full event, including...

1. Mass in the morning. During the 'homily' that was both fun and moving, all the novices, staff members and some guests shared an item that reflected something for which they are grateful. Mine was a small icon of St. Francis Xavier, given to me by the community at St. Xavier Parish in Cincinnati. For me, it symbolized my vocation's beginnings (at St. Xavier High in Cincinnati, the first place I met the Jesuits), my ongoing growth (representing one of my Jesuit heroes) and, by virtue of where it came from, all of the expected and unexpected support I've gotten over the last year that helped get me where I am.

2. Turkey Bowl! By tradition, novices from the Chicago and Detroit Provinces (both in this shared novitiate) square off in an epic touch football showdown. Detroit acquitted themselves well, playing a man down but still keeping the score quite close until the early minutes of the second half, after which Chicago pulled away. Awesome time thing.

3. The dinner. Of epic proportions, the dinner (as coordinated by second-year Jim Riordan) was nothing short of wonderful and nibbling and conversation stretched on well into the evening. The downside of a major meal cooked entirely in our house, however, was that the cleanup was likewise massive...well worth it though!

4. Having feasted and cleaned, we all collapsed and watched various films, enjoying each other's company. The selections on offer were Elf and The Sound of Music. I ended up in the former, largely due to a lack of seating for the latter, but I'm keenly aware that my former roommate and good friend Hans would no doubt have done differently, and will no doubt accost me when he gets the chance. In the meantime, I'm simply going to post his love for Julie Andrews' performance up here for all the world to see.

The rest of the weekend was likewise full. Friday and Saturday, my parents and siblings were able to make it up to visit for the first time since I've entered the novititate. We didn't do anything complicated...our only real outings were to breakfast on Saturday morning when they left and a trip over to my nursing home apostlate on Friday so that I could show them where I do my ministry. However, it was really blessed time...I'm quite close to my family, so the chance to sit, talk, laugh and share my life with them was invaluable in ways I couldn't begin to fully express. In addition, after my folks left, a college friend happened to be in time, and I was able to meet up with her and snag a cup of tea and talk for a while. All in all, very graced time!

I'm very lucky for all the blessings I've been given this year, the gift of my vocation, my friends, my family and my life here in Loyola House.

When the Well Runs Dry

2008-11-25T08:39:00.004-05:00

My prayer life isn't always fun or easy.

When conversing with people or blogging on here, it's easy for me to lapse into the habit of talking about clear moments of transformation or growth or moments of deep insight into myself and the Lord. It's easy, in other words, to focus on interior movements that St. Ignatius would call 'consolations,' spiritual movements that tend to increase faith, hope and love. There are generally good reasons for this. They're much more fun to discuss, and frequently they make a describable impact on my self-understanding and my understanding of the Lord. Most importantly, however, I tend to describe the consolations because the movements in them far outweigh any negative movements.

On the other hand, the truth of the matter is that 'desolations,' movements that tend to compromise faith, hope or love are also a very real part of the spiritual experience. In my case, I have a tendency to fall into any number of false assumptions in the spiritual life. I somewhat unwittingly assume that if I'm doing what I ought to be (e.g. being at the novitiate) then that will be confirmed by consolations in my spiritual life. I assume that if I'm praying "properly" (whatever that means!) I'll be able to feel God's presence in my prayer. And, most arrogant of all, deep down I assume that even if I don't understand all of what's going on in a set of prayer movements, I'll usually have some idea of what's going on. Wrong, on all counts! On a rational level, I know it's ridiculous, but the reality for me is that those assumptions still drift somewhere in the back of my mind and come roaring out in doubts and insecurities the very moment I encounter a rocky spot in my prayer life.

Last week was just such a difficult patch in my prayer life. And, like many of my experiences of such difficult times, it had little to do with any pinpointable problem. It wasn't that I was encountering unpleasant truths and it wasn't that I was feeling movements pulling me away from where I am or what I'm doing. God simply felt distant. When I went to pray, I felt alone. My deepest, most generous desires were inaccessible to me. It was a desolation in the fullest sense, in that faith, hope and love were, for the moment, frustrated by my feelings of being distant from the Lord.

Of course, not all such moments are the same for me, so my initial reaction was to simply sit with it a while (a few days) without making any substantial changes to my prayer. After all, external factors like mood, amount of sleep or simple physical factors can (and do!) impact prayer from time to time. After that didn't seem to work, I moved on to check out other factors in my prayer. When was I praying? Was it in a hectic time or was I settled? In what location was I praying? In what posture? How was I praying? With Scripture? With an exercise or meditation? Or simply in silence with the Lord? Prayer is mostly about what the Lord does with us (rather than vice-versa) but it was worth examining whether I was disposing myself well to the Lord, setting myself up to be open and available in prayer. Many times, these kinds of adjustments can help me, this time...nope.

In the end, I had to settle myself into the desolation, and to do with it what I'm slowly learning to do in these situations.

First, I sat with it. I find that for myself, the worst thing I can do with a desolation is to run from it. It's so easy to back off, to tell myself that I'll simply come back when I'm more well disposed. Wrong! Even if the Lord is generous and meets me the next time, I've still helped reenforce the idea that the Lord is somehow obliged to meet me on my terms. In my most generous moments, I know that the right thing to do is to accept what the Lord is giving me, and, moreover, to appreciate that I don't know the full story. So, I sat with it, through long, uncomfortable, upsetting hours in prayer, day after day.

Second, I named my feelings. In any number of ways, it's difficult for me to get out of my head in prayer, to experience God and relate to the Lord, rather than thinking my way through a prayer. In these sorts of situations, I want to recall basic catechesis, to murmur the beautiful words of the psalmist, "O LORD, you have probed me, you know me; you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar." (Ps 139) And, while it's quite true that God is omniscient, omnipotent and all the rest, it's not particularly helpful for me in my relational prayer to reduce the Lord to a mere concept. So, even though I "knew" that Jesus is deeply aware of my feelings, and probably better than I am, I still named my feelings. "Lord, I feel lonely; I feel distant from you! I feel confused as to why this is happening. I feel hurt and abandoned. I feel worried; are you trying to tell me something by your distance?" And so on. It's important for me that I not sterilize my feelings, sanitizing it into what I'm "supposed" to feel, or what I'm "supposed" to pray. That sort of attitude leads me to say prayers, versus really praying.

Third, in a great insight of Ignatius, I named my desires. "Lord, I desire to know you, to be intimate with you, to feel your presence." Again, the less I sanitized this, the better it was for me. Piety is good, but for me, it needs to emerge from a deep place, else it's simply me mouthing words.

Fourth and finally, I visited the Scriptures. I visited the psamlists who felt and prayed out of anger and frustration as well as joy, the psalmists who pined for the Lord like a dry, weary land without water, or who cried "My God, why have you forsaken me!" I visited the Lord in His own moments of desolation, in the desert, in Gethsemene, on the Cross. And I stayed for a while.

None of this was a panacea for spiritual desolation. The feeling of seperation from God continued for some time and, just as unexpectedly as it came, departed. I don't have any explanations now, but it's a worthwhile experience in realizing that letting the Lord work on me sometimes means abandoning my anticipations of what's going on. It's also a call to me to take courage, that the Lord is there even when God seems most silent.

The Unskilled Pastor

2008-11-17T21:44:00.004-05:00

One of the most challenging aspects of the hospital experiment for me has simply been the assumption of the roll of pastor. It's true that I've had mild brushes with roll confusion up until this point. For example, the novices were giving presentations at University of Detroit Jesuit High one day early in the novitiate, when I happened to witness a young lad be castigated and jugged for using rather salty language. He seemed unrepentant to the disciplining teacher, but then turned around, saw me, turned five shades of scarlet and apologized profusely. My own reaction was shock and confusion. Mentally, I was still more than a little bit in undergrad life and all that entails! But then I remembered. I was wearing clerics. I wasn't just Matt; I was a role.

Nowhere has this been more poignant than in my role as a pastoral minister at the nursing home during the course of the hospital experiment. We do some informal, on-the-job training at the nursing home, but much of what I've learned has come from on the job experience. And boy, what experience. The plain fact is that the ladies I work with don't much care that I'm 23 years old or how much (little!) experience I have. They know my role, and act accordingly. A few quick examples.

Last week, having gained valuable alone time with a resident (privacy is at a premium in the nursing home), my resident tearfully asked me, "Matt, what do you think about death?" What unfolded was a lengthy conversation in which the resident related to me a complex mix of thoughts, feelings and worries involving her own near-death experience, her own death and her experiences of the deaths of family members.
Also last week, I was asked to come help out at a prayer service at a wake for one of my residents who had passed. Bill, my director/novice master, came and did most of the prayer service, but I did lead a rosary and say a few words about the deceased. Afterward, I found myself talking to some of the family members about all the complicated issues that emerge from grief.
Today, I arrived at the nursing home to find that one of my residents had passed away. One of my other residents, while not friends with the deceased, was rather down, and after some probing, confided that she was sad and frightened, afraid that she would be next.

In short, intense stuff! I find it a little hard to say what exactly I feel when fielding these kinds of issues. It's humbling to be trusted, and moving to feel like I'm "really" doing serious ministry. However, its also terrifying and overwhelming! I'm 23 and (praise God) pretty darn healthy...what do I know about death, the real experience of it or imminent dread of it?

Br. Dan, a Jesuit brother who spent over 25 years in hospice ministry, sat down with me at my request last week to talk about his work and his perception of my roll. And, in short order, he clarified many of the things that my supervisor at Alexander, my spiritual director and even my own prayer had begun to bring into focus.

It turns out that feeling overwhelmed is precisely the correct feeling for me to have, and feeling insufficient to the task of 'answering' these questions or concerns. As Br. Dan said rather directly, they just don't want to know what you think, even though they themselves might think that they do! What they want, what they need, is to explore their own feelings, to be able to name what's going on inside of them. Hard as it is for me to accept that I'm not the great problem-solver with all the right answers and insights, the truth is that the Great Problem-Solver is already at work deep in the hearts of those to whom I'm ministering.

My role then, is a simple, humble and beautiful one...I simply talk with my residents and love them. I help them to work out their feelings and to name their fears, struggles, pains, hopes, desires and needs. I sit and pray with them, and help them open those same inner movements to the One who can do far more than I can even imagine. Unskilled as I am, I don't always do even this small role perfectly, or even well, but just knowing that I'm merely a companion, a passenger along for the ride allows me to love more genuinely and be more open to the workings of the Spirit.

The Hospital Experiment

2008-11-14T19:50:00.004-05:00

Looking back over the last several posts, it occurs to me that I haven't much of anything about the Hospital Experiment. Mea culpa. I've intended to for some time, but kept putting it off in the interest of "getting settled in." Now, less than a month from the end of the experiment, I'm realizing just how much my experience of the experiment has already changed over the course of it, and, consequently, that it was a silly thing to try and wait and give something comprehensive. Consequently, this will serve as a bit of an introduction, and hopefully I'll be able to follow up a bit more in the next few days and weeks.

Stemming from experiences of the original companions (Ignatius, Xavier, Faber, and so on) in Italy, the hospital experiment has been one of the experiences that novices are supposed to have since the earliest days of the Society of Jesus. In the early years, this often involved entire novices being lost in particularly virulent plague years. Thankfully, the plague is a bit less robust than it once was, but perhaps less thankfully, medical malpractice lawsuits are a bit more common than they once were, which means that its a bit of a struggle to enact the experiment today.

To get around liability issues, the first year novices from Loyola House spend two days out of the week working that Columbiere Center, which houses the Chicago/Detroit Province infirmary as well as the community for other older and less active Jesuits. To be around the men is a real privilege; it means that we regularly get to interact with, hear wisdom from and share experiences with men who have been in the Society for 50, 60, even 70 years or more, which for us, at the beginning of our own journey in the Society, is nothing short of a gold mine. The work, on the other hand, isn't quite a picnic. Much of the time, we functionally work as nurse aides, under the direction of the Columbiere staff. We change catheter bags, empty colonoscopy bags, change diapers, give baths, hand feed men and sit with those whose minds are fading. For someone like me, who's spent most of my life removed from the more earthly realities of the world, and especially spent these last four years locked up neatly in a sterile, academic ivory tower, the initial encounter with this service was a bit rude and certainly humbling. But perhaps even more jarring than the raw physicality of the work was the emotional aspect. In a way, it's quite easy to relate to the men; even separated by several generations, we still share so much! At the same time, that similitude only makes encountering the frailty of these men all the more poignant. The sturdy missionary who labored for decades in a developing country needs to ask me to wheel him to his room, help him out of his chair and tuck him under blankets. The brilliant and prolific author is silent, communicating only through gargles, hand squeezes and barely discernible gestures, needing extensive hands-on care. The once-bright chemist and pastor (and Tolkein fan-talk about making it personal for me!) is trapped in his own mind, alternating between muttering and agitation in the grips of severe dementia. Encountering this kind of frailty this way brings home my own mortality with some finality. These men have lived the lives I aspire to, and, should God will that I live as long as they, their frailty will one day be mine too.

The other two days out of the week are spent at another, more typical, nursing facility, where we provide pastoral care to the residents. Similarly to Columbiere, I had a bit of a jarring experience in terms of encountering the sickness of mind, body and spirit at the nursing home. If anything, the level of sickness is even higher. Only a very few of the 11 ladies with whom I visit are capable of anything like ordinary communication. Most are so ill of mind or body that communication is limited at best, and some are completely beyond reaching on any overt level. With the ones who suffer limitations, I reach out as best as I can. With those trying to communicate, I talk with them, trying as best as I can to soothe what seems to be a high level of agitation and confusion with many of them. Often, though, the best that I can offer is my presence, a hand to hold, a soothing voice and, especially for those beyond reaching, a prayer. In many ways, the experience with those who can communicate is even more intense, and I find many of them wanting to discuss difficult issues of pain, suffering, depression, loneliness, and thoughts and fears on death and dying. If there was any doubt that I've been chucked in the deep end, well above my feeble capabilities, let it be laid to rest!

The experiment would be a phenomenal growing experience under any circumstances, but it's worth situating it back within the context of the novitiate and what I'm doing here. My job at Loyola House is to develop an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ and, through this transformative relationship, continue to discern His call in my life. The experiment, then, needs to be understood in terms of this overall aim. The experience and skills I'm picking up are no doubt useful, but even more importantly, the experiment is helping to bring my spiritual life into sharper focus. It's a sonar, whose motions and experiences rattle through me, which, as they do, bringing my own interior movements into sharper focus. It's a growing edge that cuts through the many and convoluted layers of my mind and soul to help expose the more generous movements of my heart as well as the disordered sort of attachments that hold me back from being the person I'm called to be. To this end, I'm only starting to see the way the Spirit is moving through the experience. As mentioned above, the jarring impact of the unfamiliarity of the whole experience was certainly useful in helping give me a much-needed dose of humility as well as giving me a healthy perspective on my own mortality. As I've moved past the movements generated by the shock of the experiment, however, I've noticed deeper interior movements and attachments. On one hand, I'm realizing just how bound up I am in my mind, in intellectual achievements and my own achievement-driven mentality. There's an element of frustration in encountering a situation in which what I happen to know or what ambitions I have doesn't matter at all. The simple, generous act of loving does matter, and in that, I'm afraid, I have a lot of growing to do. Still, there's a sense of freedom in discovering those attachments in myself. Placed in a situation where there is no glory or recognition, I'm learning to deeply love what I do. There's a balance then...I'm more aware of my attachments, but I'm also seeing the generous movements of the Spirit that are helping lead me away from the attachments, and thus, to Christ.

Chalk one up for the U.S. of Freedom...

2008-11-09T22:35:00.003-05:00

I couldn't let the night pass without hoisting a huge shoutout of congratulations to my dearly beloved from the inimitable Fordham Debate Society, specifically to the team of Meg Shaughnessey and Greg Padin, who this weekend managed to advance to the quarterfinals of the prestegious Oxford IV debate tournament. For those readers who don't speak debate, this is a HUGE accomplishment. This novice, for one, is supremely content that his successors have managed to overcome the deficient legacy he helped leave them, and attain levels of eloquentia perfectia hitherto unexplored in the history of FDS. Well done!

A shoutout to friends...

2008-11-05T22:44:00.003-05:00

As a sidebar, in all of this talk of England, it's only right that I give a shout-out to my friends on the illustrious Fordham Debate Society, who are abroad in England at the moment to compete in the prestigious Oxford IV. Though you probably won't see this till you get back to 'Murrica, I'm, as always, proud of you all and you're always in my prayers FDS! Godspeed!

Nov. 5th: The Feast of All Saints and Blesseds for the Society of Jesus

2008-11-05T14:33:00.002-05:00

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I can think of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot...

If you'll indulge my inner historian briefly, I find a considerable amount of historical irony in the Feast of All Jesuit Saints falling on November 5, sharing dates with Bonfire Night, the traditional British recollection of the Gunpowder Plot. Popularized in recent years by the film V for Vendetta (whose depiction of the actual event is loose, to say the least), the Gunpowder Plot was a rather ill-considered plot by dissident Catholics to assassinate King James I of England and most of the Protestant aristocracy by blowing up the House of Parliament during the opening of a session in 1605. The plot failed, not just in the sense that the conspirator's plans fell through, but also in that the lot of Catholics in England worsened quite considerably. Until that point, James I had pursued a policy of toleration for most religious denominations, and oppression of Catholics was considerably less vigorous than under his predecessor, Elizabeth; after the plot, England resumed actively hunting down practicing Catholics with some vigor, taking the conspiracy as a sign that Catholics were the destabilizing influence that they had previously been thought to be.

I mention that background in part because I'm a history nerd with a particular affection for that period of English history, but also because it makes a fascinating counterpoint to the many Jesuit saints and blessed whom the Society celebrates today. When I recollect the story of Guy Fawkes, I'm struck by just how ill-considered and frankly the whole plot was...without belaboring the point too heavily, it was most decidedly political, not pious, and undertaken with exceptionally poor discernment of consequences. Writing spiritually now, and not as a historian, it strikes me that the action flowed out of activism, not a genuine desire to serve as God's good servant. Conversely, in the lives of the saints that the Society celebrates today, quite the opposite is true. Famously, St. Edmund Campion was the star orator of Oxford, winning the Queen's personal favor before converting, leaving the country and joining the Jesuits, only to return as a clandestine priest. He went to the gallows as a cheerful servant of both God and Queen...no fanfare, no fireworks, just a humble service that placed the results in GOD'S hands, not any temporal gunpowder, literal or figurative. So too with the host of Jesuits made martyrs in England and Ireland in this period, Robert Southwell, Dominic Collins, Nicholas Owen and others.

It doesn't begin or end there. I think of St. Francis Xavier, who went as a missionary to India and Japan and died trying to reach China. Adjusting to the new and foreign cultures in which he found himself, he sometimes struggled to win any converts at all, but rather than relying on colonial muscle, he patiently perservered and put trust in God. St. Peter Claver was called the "slave of slaves," giving his life over to serving those who survived the brutal Middle Passage to make it to South America. His ministry often involved giving only basic comfort, but even when he had opportunities to do more, it must have broken his heart to see the people to whom he gave himself chained as slaves. His answer, again, wasn't violence but rather was to make himself a slave for Christ and for those to whom he was missioned. And, throughout history and all over the world, many other Jesuits have given themselves over to service under the Banner of the Cross, giving of themselves to Christ.

Now, I won't say that there's never a time for political action or the creation of just social structures. Quite the contrary, I think that the Gospel calls all Christians to just that. Rather, the juxtoposition I'm trying to draw out simply pertains to motivations. Guy Fawkes & Co. clearly didn't discern the consequences of their actions, and through a distant lens, seem for all the world to act out of ambition, anger, everything except the Gospel. They may have been Catholics, and Catholics may have borne the brunt of their choice, but they weren't acting out of faith. On the other hand, many of the great saints of the Society and many of those laboring today do so without the hope of seeing their own finished work. They are laborers in the vineyard, who lovingly place their service at the disposal of the Master, and leave the fruit for the Lord to collect. Today, I'm thankful for all of them, humbled to share in their mighty company and inspired to keep walking the road before me.

Of Deaths and New Beginnings

2008-10-30T21:21:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow will be an interesting first for me...my first Jesuit funeral. Fr. Dermott Rabaut, SJ passed away at Columbiere Center this Sunday. I met Fr. Rabaut on my very first day at Columbiere. At the time, he was able to communicate, but only with some considerable difficulty. Still, we were able to share a simple and beautiful moment as I held his hand as he struggled to articulate basic questions about the incoming novice class as well as biographical details about myself. Seeing that kind of love for the Society and its future even near the end of his own journey was inspiring. I'd ask for prayers for Fr. Rabaut and his family, especially tomorrow...even expected passings can be hard.

In a more global sense, this bit of news raised a bit of stir amongst Jesuit communities here, and presumably worldwide. To summerize, two Jesuits in the Russian Region were killed in their apartment, apparently at different times and with no obvious signs of theft. Hopefully details will emerge. In the meantime, Fr. General has asked all Jesuits to stand in solidarity with the Jesuits of the Russian Region, and has asked for prayers for the eternal rest of the souls of these Jesuits and an end to violence everywhere. In addition, I've found it to be powerful to reflect that plenty of Jesuits, like these two men, exist on the frontiers of the Church and as such, live with a certain amount of danger as a reality of living their vocation. It's something for me to take to prayer...living my daily life in the novitiate can allow me to forget the cost of discipleship is quite high. What am I willing to give?

Not to end on a dour note, however, this weekend is also one of some new beginnings for the Society. Here at Loyola House, it's another candidates weekend, and we have a smaller group but also a great group coming. All good signs for the future!

Two Homilies in Two Days

2008-10-30T14:53:00.006-04:00

The ministry of the Word, including education, catechism and especially preaching, has been a central task of the Society of Jesus since its founding. In fact, the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus, approved and then slightly amended in two mid-16th century papal bulls, lists various forms of the ministry of the Word first among tasks of a Jesuit (emphasis mine):

"He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching, lectures, an any other ministration whatsoever of the word of God, and further by means of the Spiritual Exercises, the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity, and the spiritual consolation of Christ's faithful through hearing confessions and administering the other sacraments."

In the time of the first Jesuits (for more details/annotation, I recommend John O'Malley's excellent history), this meant that considerable time and attention was devoted to forming the novices to be effective public speakers who were well grounded in the Exercises and the love of Christ- "articulate hearts," to borrow their own phrase. Today, much the same is true, in the sense that we take time as part of our own training in the Institute to practice giving homilies and preaching, usually in the context of in-house homily but occasionally as part of our public ministries, perhaps in a prayer service or elsewhere.

At this point, I've found homilizing/ preaching to be a mixed sort of experience. On one hand, those of you who've known me a while know that I've done a fair amount of public speaking, including lectoring for years for both parish and school, competing in high school mock trial and with the Fordham Debate Society and generally making a point of it not to pass up an opportunity to speak in public in front of groups of people. As a result, I'm quite comfortable with the mechanics of speaking. I can *generally* construct a clear message and am reasonably cognisant of my tone, demeanor, volume, posture and language choice, many of the basic tools for a public speaker. Maybe most importantly, I like being in front of people. I enjoy a chance to speak publicly, and find it to be a particularly humbling honor to place the skills I've begun to develop over the years at the service of God. On the other hand, though, my comfort with speaking in general hasn't necessarily translated into being a reasonably polished homilist. Some skills for a good homilist I'm still well in the midst of acquiring, and I've also had to actually unlearn some old debate/speaking habits! For example, for any part of the ministry of the Word, my job is quite simply to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit, which in my case means that I need to expend extra effort in prayer to make sure that I'm letting the Spirit speak, not myself. Likewise, in a sermon, but most especially in a homily, my job is to explicate and deliver an empowering message, but doing so in the context of prayer. In other words, my old debate habits of trying to muster all my oratorical prowess and overpower the listener is precisely the opposite of my task when preaching, where my task is to prayerfully invite people into the Word. So, while I'm loving it all, it's taking some adjustment to go from debater to homilist!

This week, unusually, I actually had two homilies to deliver. The first was on Monday and was actually my first time preaching in public. The nursing home at which we're working as part of the hospital experiment holds a memorial prayer service every couple months for those in the community who have died (in this case, almost a dozen since June/July!). I have to admit that it was a daunting task for my first public homily. Not only was it hard to know that I was out and preaching "for real," but in this case, I was having to preach on the difficult emotional and spiritual issues surrounding death and human mortality to family members of the deceased, as well as the residents themselves, who in many cases were friends with those who had passed. Quite a tall order! The readings, taken from Thessalonians and the Gospel of John, were profound as ever, but also standard fare for such occasions, and I found myself worried that I would preach at people instead of speaking to them, especially at a difficult time. Full credit to the Spirit (and certainly not to me here!), I think things went ok...I was moved by Thomas' question in John's Gospel: "Master, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus replies to this with the justly celebrated "I am the Way..." but I found myself first moved by the question. It seemed so human, so honest! It moved me to an image of a child not wanting to take a necessary action, be it eating a piece of broccoli at the dinner table or going down a slide. The resolution, in my limited experience, tends to come when the parent models the behavior and works with the child. That is, the parent takes the first bite, or the parent (sacrificing dignity!) climbs up the slide and comes down with the child the first time. No, we don't know the way, especially into life beyond, but as Paul reminds us in Thessalonians, we don't have to. Jesus went before us to prepare a place and returned for us. Jesus walked the lonely road to Cavalry so that he could walk with us on our own last road. Death makes us apprehensive, and naturally so, but like children, we have someone who modeled it for us and someone who goes with us.

The next day, I also had to preach at home, this time on the rather challenging Gospel for the feasts of Sts. Simon and Jude which basically outlines the call of the Apostles as described by Luke. Again, the Spirit moved me a direction I didn't really expect! CS Lewis, in the Screwtape Letters (another recommended read!) never let his tempter fret overly that a subject was a churchgoer. There were too many advantages! Send him round looking for a church to suit his taste, making him so picky that he ultimately forgets that he's ultimately meant to suit the Church and not the other way around. Even better, move his mind from a phrase like "the body of Christ" to the people sitting around him...so much the better for him to love the Church in the abstract and hate the people in the pew next to him. I found myself praying on the fact that we don't know a whole lot about the Apostles, save that they were really misfits in every way (imagine the Zealot/hyper-nationalist in the same group with the tax collector/collaborationist!). What moved me though, was that Jesus spent a full night's vigil in prayer to come up with this motley group; it was no accident! Remembering that has quite a bit to do with life in the Church right now. We tend to be really, really good at finding ways to divide ourselves. We start to think that our little corner of the Church is the only one, forgetting that the Church extends over a very wide world and many different cultures and experiences. We like to borrow political language to insert into the Church, speaking of "liberal Catholics" or "conservative Catholics" as though there were somehow different Church. It's not an easy thing to live in such a diverse Church, let alone live day to day with the various personalities that inhabit any local community. But the fact of the matter is that we're not made to be many, but to be One, one in he who is the capstone of the Church built on the cornerstone of the Apostles.

Mass at Gesu

2008-10-26T19:28:00.005-04:00

In the "ordinary" course of things, whatever that means, the weekend ordo calls for us novices to find a Mass for ourselves. Of course, between Candidate's Weekends, weekends spent traveling and other aberrations in the schedule, normal order weekends have been few and far between. When they do happen, however, it's been really neat to get back out into parish life. Even though we're sent out for apostlates and make a concerted effort to have guests in the house, every now and again I feel like we're living in a little liturgical bubble world, which makes it nice to get out and about from time to time. With that said, I've still struggled to find a parish liturgy at which I really felt at home. Not that there's anything wrong with the Masses. The Masses are still good and prayerful; the problem really has to do with me, and with both partly missing the 9pm Mass at Fordham's University Church and partly just not being settled enough into the routine here to transition easily from intimate Loyola House liturgy to weekend parish Masses.

This weekend, for a change, I went with one other novice to Gesu Parish, a Jesuit parish that's directly across the street from the University of Detroit Mercy. It's a neat parish. I find the building itself to be very beautiful, but what was neatest was the congregation. Those that I encountered were, to a person, incredibly personable and welcoming, expressing the kind of warmth and hospitality that one would hope for in a parish. Moreover, it was a very diverse parish. A majority were black/African-American, but a substantial enough minority were white that I think it would be accurate to call the parish integrated, which was a joy to see. Most importantly the liturgy was dynamite.

Bryan (my fellow first-year) and I were lucky enough to stumble into a Mass with a Confirmation, which meant that it was a two-hour extravaganza, complete with the auxilary bishop and all the extras that go along with such a Mass. Despite being surprised, I wouldn't have changed a bit of it. The bishop was warm and personable, incredibly down to earth, and his homily captured the notion of continuing formation and growth that touched me quite deeply and, God willing, the confirmandi as well. Both Bryan and I were deeply moved just at seeing the young men and women coming to be sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit and become adult members of the Church. One of the kids even chose Issac Jogues (one of the Jesuit North American martyrs) as his confirmation name! A future Jesuit perhaps? At any rate, the whole thing was very prayerful for me...it helped me recall my own confirmation at St. Peter in Chains in Cincinnati, with my wonderful Uncle Steve standing as my very patient and dedicated sponsor, remembering how he, along with my parents, were so key in letting me grow but also calling me to fuller love of the Church over the years. Somehow, just getting to be present for the Confirmations helped me bring my own increasing understanding of God's work in me to prayer in the Liturgy, making the whole thing very moving.

Beyond the just Confirmation, though, I can't say enough about how prayerful and dynamic the Liturgy was. The entire congregation was deeply engaged in the Mass throughout, both in a more typically 'prayerful' way as well as in a deeply personal way. The exchange of peace took a solid 7-8 minutes, with people vacating their seats and joyfully wishing everyone the peace of Christ! The choir was large, and had a very definite jazz/gospel feel, but worked in a range of styles of liturgical music to excellent effect. The 'Hosannah' just about knocked my socks off...Bryan and I were both quite literally moved to tears. That part of the Mass is always a bit incredible, the participation with the Church both here and eternal in the worship of the Lord, but because of the sheer maginitude of the act, I sometimes find it hard to connect to it, at least on the level that I think I "should." However, today when we sang that part (a different musical version than I've ever heard) it rocked my world physically, emotionally and spiritually, and I was left with the incredible sensation of my whole self praying that part of the Mass in a way I just haven't before. To steal Bryan's description, it was epic, in a way both deeply consoling as well as different than the quieter ways in which God tends to work with me.

To cap it all off, on the way back to Loyola House we saw an incredibly beautiful rainbow, capping off an incredible morning of prayer.

Now, I've mentioned this morning's prayer because it seemed like a good way both to give a bit more insight into our weekly routine as well as to discuss a moving experience for me. However, even though I'm not a liturgist, I feel like there's something about the above that needs just a tad of clarification. It's tempting (a temptation into which I fall all too often!), when evaluating how an experience of Mass or any ssacrament or public prayer was, to talk about externals. The homily was good/bad, the music was good/bad, the congregation was attentive/distracting and so on and so forth. And, true enough, our experience of the liturgy only improves when all bring the full force of our talents to God in prayer. Still, the externals are NOT the important thing. The homily could be rotten, the musicians/choir could be the caliber of Yours Truly (which is to say, deplorable) and the congregation could consist entirely of screaming babies, ill-dressed teens and inattentive adults and the miracle of the Mass would still happen with no less potency and beauty than at the hands of the Holy Father in St. Peter's in Rome. No, while the extras were certainly wonderful at Gesu, what made the experience best was that it was never a show or a demonstration...it was all part of a focused, communal prayer that emerged from the hearts of the congregation there and helped lift me to the miracle that was already there.

Taizé Prayer Service

2008-10-21T08:36:00.003-04:00

Last night, a couple of my fellow first years and I attended a Taizé prayer service at the Shrine Church (National Shrine of the Little Flower). Taizé, for those of you who might not know, is a Europe-based, ecumenical Christian community, made up of both Catholic and Protestant members devoted to Christian prayer and meditation. A pretty wonderful byproduct of this movement is that they've managed to produce what I find to be incredibly beautiful and prayerful music. The music is simple, in accordance with its aim to aid prayer and contemplation. Using fairly simple accompaniment, such as a few string instruments, a reed instrument or a piano, the song is much more like a chant than anything else, sung simply and repetitively, with perhaps a verse from a cantor or some other simple variation (though not always!). The lyrics, too, are quite simple. Sometimes, the lyrics are a sung version of one of the psalms or a canticle, such as last night when one was built around Ps 139. Sometimes, the lyrics are just the simple repetititon of a Mass part (Kyrie eleison). And, sometimes, the lyrics are a simple prayer, usually one resting in God's presence and expressing hope and trust in the Lord.

I experienced the whole evening as being incredibly prayerful and moving. It had been a long-ish day, and by the time I got to the Shrine, I was seriously craving some constructive prayer time. What took me by surprise though, wasn't that I enjoyed it. As beautiful as the music is, it's hard not to be moved on some level. What I wasn't quite prepared for was the way that so much of the prayer was speaking to me. Usually, the interior movements of my private prayer are fairly slow and focused...I'm not likely to drift from passage to scriptural passage, image to image, thought to thought, for no other reason than that focusing and listening is a discipline that keeps me from thinking my way through prayer. However, in the context of this service, I let my prayer drift with the music and the prayer of the assembled group, and it was AMAZING. "My soul is at rest in God alone..." went the prayer, and I found myself reflecting on my (continued) feelings of being a bit unsettled. But that's ok! As I found myself resting in Jesus' presence, I also remembered that I'm only truly at home when I rest in God, and that focusing on that, everything else will take care of itself. Psalm 139, a big favorite of mine, was also moving, but again, in a surprising way that I haven't been moved before with it. I found myself drawn to one of the verses, "If I fly with the wings of dawn and alight beyond the sea, even there Your hand will guide me." Despite not being a very visual person, I had a clear image of a horizon and Jesus walking with me towards it. It was a beautiful moment of realization. Despite struggling with growing in the last few weeks, despite experiencing some things that are, frankly, painful, I've also experienced God's presence deeply in the midst of it all. That consolation, I think, is key. Feeling God's presence with me doesn't make the experiences any easier, perhaps, but it certainly lets me accept or even embrace it.

Finally, wedged in the midst of all the prayerful music was a reading from the 1 John 3, very busy passage in which quite a bit is said. What moved me most, and what I seized on for prayer both at the service and for later last night, is the simple and comforting line, "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed." It's an unbelievable grace to be able to think of myself as God's child. Not unlike my prayer this last week over "patient trust," it's sufficient to know that I'm with God now. And, looking to what has not been revealed, it's also a comfort to think that something great and unknown is coming around the bend. This might mean that I need to let go of myself; even harder, this might mean that I need to let go of other things too, but the promise is sufficient for me now.

To Omena and Back

2008-10-20T21:44:00.003-04:00

This weekend, my fellow novices and I were privileged to spend the weekend at our house in Omena, MI, which is on the Leelanau Peninsula, right by Lake Michigan. Actually, the Society owns a couple houses up there, some of which, I gathered, were donated by neighbors after they passed or moved on. In short, the location was stunning. We got to drive through northern Michigan foliage at its peak which, even as a proud Ohioan, I'll cheerfully admit was breathtaking. This weekend got to the point where jaw-dropping scenery was just par for the course...God's grandeur was on full display!

Moreover, it was wonderful just to have the time to relax with the rest of the novices. Whether it was low key things, doing morning /evening prayer looking over a spectacular horizon and gathering around a roaring fire under a brilliant night sky, or more adventurous things, like the six of us who tackled a hike over Sleeping Bear Dunes all the way to the (frigid!) Lake Michigan, the weekend provided an incomperable opportunity to solidify the bonds that have already grown between us. In short, a fantastic weekend (and hopefully I'll have pictures to follow!).

Patient Trust

2008-10-16T23:08:00.000-04:00

A prayer by PierreTeilhard de Chardin...

Above all, trust in the slow work of God

We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end withour delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of progress
that it is made by passing through
some states of instability ---
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually --- let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and cirsumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Trust, in Real Life

2008-10-16T22:02:00.002-04:00

I know that in my last post, I promised a glut of things on which I'd to blog. And I will eventually, but for the last week, the rather complicated business of experiencing, digesting and praying through a whole range of experiences has taken precedence over the important, but secondary, business of sharing. With that in mind, there are still plenty of details to follow...as I settle into the hospital experiment, I'll share such reflections as I can offer, but for now a couple thoughts about the interior activity of the last few weeks, hinging around two basic thoughts.

Thought #1: We don't live busily here, but we do live very fully

My spiritual director shared this gem with me, and it's been fairly useful for explaining life to my friends and family, not to mention understanding why I feel like I'm so busy/worn out despite not a lot of activity. As we've started apostlates, I've been blown away by the fact that despite only "working" a bare 4-ish hours a day for 4 days out of the week, I constantly feel wiped at the end of the day, as though my day was jammed. And of course, in terms of what I "did," it certainly wasn't, especially relative to the frantic pace of my college schedule the last few years. The difference is that every day, with the elevated amount of time spent in prayer and reflection, not to mention supplementary activities like spiritual direction, retreats and group faith-sharing, we tend to experience the interior movements very deeply and fully, in ways we might not if we weren't taking the extra time to do so. Again, its powerful to do this. As my encounters with Christ deepen and become more familiar, I'm also finding aspects of myself open up that I never really would have expected. But goodness, can it ever be draining.

In the last couple weeks, a couple events have been particularly poignant. The first, and probably the biggest as of now, was that we recieved a write-up of our pre-entrance psych eval. Much of what was discussed wasn't particularly surprising to me...much had already come up in prayer. And, ultimately, I thought it was fantastic to have many of the suggestions of the report in black and white, as they crystallized much of what I already knew nicely. On the other hand, the report was fairly stark, using clinical language (as was wholly proper). What was hard was that a couple parts of the report dealt with aspects of me that, frankly, I don't like very much, and are subtle enough that I've rarely been forced to confront them, and seeing them laid out in rather blunt language was, while very healthy and good, also very hard. I found myself feeling very vulnerable, a rather unusual feeling for me. Other things going on include the conclusion of our vow classes with the classes on chastity. That probably merits another reflection in its own right, but suffice it to say that confronting the reality of life in that vow even just a few months in is fairly heavy stuff, emotionally speaking. On top of it all, the hospital experience is itself profoundly moving, but again, draining.

Bottom line is that even with a fairly small amount of activity, there's a fairly high level of experience...it's fairly full time work just to make sure that the swirling emotions keep coming to prayer in order to find some meaning and order in the midst of what can be difficult feelings, but definitely are complex feelings. Which brings me to my next point:

Thought #2: Growth is good and great; it's growing that can be a drag

Bill laughed at me a bit this week when I reported that I wasn't sure that I was enjoying all the growth that I've been asking for in prayer. I got exactly what I asked for, and all joking aside, I'm quite sure it will be good for me in the long run. Still, the meantime can be a bit of a struggle. There's the aforementioned feeling of vulnerability that came with confronting, well, myself. But there's also a feeling of insecurity of coming to my friendships in the novititate, my relationships in my apostlates and, most especially, my prayer life with a newfound sense of my own shortcomings. It's profoundly humbling, and very difficult for my pride, to come to Jesus with that new insight and be like, "Yea, Lord, so you know what? I'm really REALLY imperfect." Again, it's back to my achievement-driven worldview, in that it's incredibly hard for me to accept gratuitiously offered love, of which I'm staggeringly undeserving. On top of this emotional turmoil, there's the sense of helplessness and humility that comes from confronting the real frailty of the human body in age and sickness at our apostlates. And, in the midst of this, I'm starting to have to reconcile myself to the realities of my lifestyle, in terms of the reality of some lonliness that's just a part of the chaste life. It's a lot to hit me in a fairly short amount of time, and some days I don't know quite what to do with it all. Often, I've found myself praying, "Lord, I sure hope I know what you're doing, because I'm not so sure right now." The first couple weeks of novitiate were, by comparison, getting my feet wet...now, I feel much more as though I've been tossed in and am being tugged by a tide.

Trust is fairly easy in the abstract. The abstraction of saying, "Lord, I trust in you," can be a profound statement, but all too often I've uttered it in cases where I keep my hands firmly on the steering wheel. Now that I've put myself in a position where I've lost a lot of that control and can, emotionally, spiritually and physically, be swept off into any number of directions I can't possibly anticipate, the notion of trusting God has become a lot more real. Still, I take great consolation in the fact that every day, and every night as I do my Examen, when I go to Jesus with those feelings, he's right there. It doesn't mean I know what's coming, but at least I know He's working on me.