Who We Are and Where We Belong

 

What does the Ascension mean to me?

“On the third day he rose from the dead. He ascended into Heaven, where he is seated at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. He shall come again to judge the living and the dead.” (Apostle's Creed)

I was taught as a child to believe the things we say when we pray the Creed. Having a creed has been a comfort to me all through the years. When things were difficult or confusing, it was nice to have something solid. I could say “This I believe!” Then I could get back to work.

It says in the Gospel for the Feast of the Ascension that our work continuues the mission of Jesus. We tell the world about “repentence for the forgiveness of sins”. When we are sorry for our sins, and make determination to change (with God's help), then God forgives our sins and really does help us. And in that back-and-forth we are transformed and made into new creatures, people destined to live with Him fully in his kingdom.

We believe that like Jesus, our life will not end with the death of our body. The Creed goes on to say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” The two come together in Jesus—our life now, filled with challenges, learning, community and opportunities to share the Good News—our our life to come after we are finished here. We already enjoy and experience that life-to-come here in this “valley of tears” by the gifts and fruits of faith, given to us through the holy Spirit. There's a lot to this life we receive in Baptism. Jesus himself accepted Baptism so that the holy Spirit could come and bring the fullness of life. Not because Jesus, the Son of God, was lacking anything when he walked among us, but because it is our work to give example that others can follow. Jesus was baptized. We are baptized. Baptism makes us one body, a fitting vessel for the Bread of Life, broken and shared with all the world.

If this Bread has truly been given, then our work is to “take hold of it, and eat, and never die!” It is food for this life, AND for the life that is coming. Like the prophet, we eat so that we may have strength for our journey. When we reach the end, we will enter fully into the life of Heaven.

No wonder the apostles left the place of the Ascension and went back rejoicing. For us that place is first the church and the Eucharist we bless, break and share. When we leave after Mass is ended, we rejoice because we know who we are, and we know where we belong.

Pasta and Family

There are as many ways to make spaghetti sauce as there are families. Some recipes are simple. Some are complex. Some don't even use tomatoes! (Imagine that!) It doesn't matter how you make your spaghetti sauce as long as you know what you like. And for the most part, we "learn what we like" from our ancestors.

    Pasta-and-sauce is a family meal. Most learn to make it with what's on hand, what's plentiful, or what needs to be used up soon. It can be made with meat, seafood, poultry, vegetables, eggs, even tofu! As long is your recipe tastes good over slippery, slurpy pasta (or eggplant, or fried chicken, or sausage sammies) you'll be the kitchen hero. 

    I just made pasta sauce (with sausage) for dinner and because I forgot to buy celery, I used some aging cabbage. I've never used cabbage in pasta sauce before, but I keep it in the fridge because we don't often use onions in our cooking and cabbage adds a good background flavor. Tasting the results I have to call it a success, though I think my family will figure it out. "Cabbage has a cabbage smell." Now (even though I've been sneaking tastes) I'll have to wait for supper to enjoy it with the rest. 

    Does faith have a flavor? Or is it a whole dish made of many ingredients? Can we mix and blend to see what happens? Is the recipe rigorous and invariable or open for experimenting...? I think, when we start adding people, we're into pasta-sauce country. You use what you have, and play with the blend.

    In our Catholic Church if you go from parish to parish you'll find a lot of variety--many expressions of faith--even in close neighborhoods. Taken together, we do have a recipe which is followed religiously and makes our community distinctive. We are not, after all, making barbecue. We share a common recipe called "The Creed" which lists all the basic ingredients. Without one or another, it just doesn't taste like home. 

    But we also add a lot of personalities, a lot of preferences, a lot of local expressions, cultural language and symbolism--even varieties of music. Most parishes attract people of similar tastes and backgrounds, but what we do is what has been passed down from Christ. For most of us, that's what tastes so good. That's why we come home for dinner. 

    Think about what you like most when you share The Mass. Is it the music? The decorations? Do you love (or avoid) incense? Does it matter what language your community uses when it prays together? Do you visit different parishes on different Sundays, relishing a buffet of flavors?

    Do you prefer the Mass to be reliable and unchanging? Do you crave variety and surprises? Is it even allowed to have preferences...?

    

    Franciscan prayer begins with the following premise: "Every person has the right to his or her own spiritual path." Which means that even in a close-knit community, there is room for variety, multiplicity, and experience. To try to create a one-size-fits-all community actually harms the life of the Spirit in that community. Maybe this is why I found a home among Franciscans. Certainly it's one of the things that challenges me, when I don't agree with someone about how, when or why we do things. It's been good for me, though, to taste other people's favorite recipes, or even their experiments. I know what I like best, but pasta is pasta, cabbage has a cabbage smell, and faith is meant to be shared.

    Dove saremmo senza la famiglia?

The Pot Hole

After surgery, there is a time of recovery that... well, it can't be skipped. Some moments you feel pretty good and say things like "Oh, I'll just mow the lawn..." or "I'll go shopping real quick." And you're off to the races... if you get that far. 

    No. Sorry. You are a patient, and it requires patience. Your body has been wounded (even if they use really good anesthetics.) It knows what you did. So whenever I have a "procedure" on my calendar, I always take a moment to apologize in advance. I talk it over with my body, I discuss what needs to happen, and I lay in a supply of soup and crackers (potato chips), whatever gets me through. And then I climb aboard for the journey.

    And I hate it. I hate the loss of control, the surrender of freedoms, the time spent laying down because I just can't do anything else until I start feeling better. I take it out on the people around me until they signal that they've hand enough of that nonsense. I spend some time in gloom, feeling sorry for myself. I watch tv to pass the hours, take my pills when it's time, go to follow-up appointments, etc. I become "Mister Bland" and my life seems to lose whatever identity it might have possessed. It's a pot-hole. I fall in. 

    So far, I've always recovered, regained, replaced whatever I surrendered and basically returned to normal. But each time I gain a little perspective, mostly about the fragility of life. A sudden turn, getting out of a chair the wrong way, a spot on an xray, a bip on a cardiogram. I'm not perfect. I'm not Superman. Time is my kryptonite. Everything is pushing toward the edge...

    Nobody likes to talk about this stuff, and as a topic for a blog, it's risky. But for a journal, it's important because you have to say, Yes, I was there. That was the year they found the cancer. That was the summer I couldn't travel, or eat bacon, or climb mountains. 

    And I found I was still there, weaker, drabber, less fun, less interesting, less in control. "The time is coming when they will tie your hands and lead you places you do not want to go." How will you handle it? Will you rise to the best quality of your personhood? Will you laugh with the staff at the hospital, the surgeons in their masks and gowns, the fine nurses who can make the beds just zoom along the millrace hallways, you the log, primed for cutting? Will they stitch you up into a fine cabinet, or a pine box...? Even this stuff has its interesting side. 

    I'm just glad that I don't have to go through this alone. When I'm over it, and all recovered, I'll be watching among my friends who live alone and maybe just ask them if they ever need someone to ride along with theme, would they feel comfortable asking me...?

I Dreamed Of A Monk...

 I wanted to write this down before I forget. During the night I dreamed of a monk, like a Budhist monk, in carmine-colored robes. His head was shaved and his face bright and happy. He reached over and touched my arm.

“Hey!” I said. “I felt that!” He looked at me with a beautiful smile.

“Yes...?” he answered.

This was the whole dream, but it was very intense. The colors of the sky, the clouds behind him; everything looked physical, like I could reach out and touch them. I woke up quickly, wondering what sort of dream it was.

I thought about our connections to heaven, to “the communion of saints.” While our Church says “Baptism is the way Christ taught us to be saved...” it also says in another place, “God cannot be limited to one way of saving.”

By “saving” we mean bringing us all into the fullness of relationship, something that gives the most lovely joy and peace. Who's to say who, where or when people are saved? God can save anyone, anytime, even people we don't expect.

But to me this dream was also a message. How long must we live—how many years of wandering and learning—before we know enough to sense heaven's presence? Instead of being “across the boundary line of death” is it possible that heaven can be here and now? Do we simply need to fall awake to see it? And if so, what's our next step in living...?

Wonder is also a gift.

An Epic Life

 I was watching a video clip of Anna Lapwood performing at Sir Albert Hall. She wrote an extra piece for their presentation of music from The Lion King, and when she played it I was transported back to the morning we walked into the Oncology center at University of Arizona. It was to be the first day of Marie's bone-marrow transplant journey, and they were playing Lion King on the speakers in the waiting area. I remember clearly how the music lifted me up to a special plane I rarely experience. Hearing the music again today--so many years later--I began to cry. There was no defending against the swell of emotions, repressed, ignored, bargained-against for so many years in order to be present, to companion her. Everything that's happened since that day has happened in the context and reality of cancer. Marie lived a tremendous journey, most of it impossible to share. But I only realized today, in the flow of the music, that the moment we walked into the hospital, our lives became epic...

    I think a lot about the meanings of life (there are many) and how we must learn to flow from event to event much like a canoe in a violent river. It's not always about accomplishing things; most times it's about surviving. Marie survived until her natural end. When she left, I continued maintaining my composure, downplaying her death and its impact on me, and ignoring the thousands ways I dip and dodge. After all, who wants to wind up piled on the rocks? The question keeps coming back: did my life have meaning...?

    We tend to value ourselves with prejudice and even ignorance. We allow others to say what's important: money, power over others, and "being right". Time on The River has taught me that the real values are mercy, self-understanding and knowledge of God, who alone sets our value. In many ways the world has been wrong about these things, and it will continue to be wrong. So each of us needs to look at ourselves with some intensity, and to stand against the appraisals of the world. The only opinion about our value that matters is our own opinion. 

    Are we teaching children to find their true value...?

Live Life With Christ

 Several years ago I took a vacation trip to Oklahoma to visit an old school friend. His name is Brother Damian and he lives in a Benedictine abbey. He ran out to the parking lot to welcome us, then took us indoors.

The heavy doors of the abbey closed behind us with the  echoing sound of a bank vault. Inside everything was polished and scrubbed, shadowed and silent, gilded with rainbow hues that fell through stained-glass windows and bearing the faint scent of incense. For a week we lived there with the brothers and fathers--a very special world indeed, nearly howling with the breath of the holy Spirit. Needless to say, I felt out of my element. 

Coming back home to Phoenix after a week inside the abbey was like falling into a cacophony of sound, movement, action and strain. We live in a noisy, busy world where it can be very hard to hear or even find God. I can't say abbey life is easier, because the brothers, like old sailors, learn over the years how to walk, eat, pray and live in the shifting and changing wind of grace. I've seen this in other places and other ways. Elijah experienced it (1Kings, 19) Just because on the outside people (and places) look quiet, serene and well-grounded doesn't mean God isn't working with great fierceness for the salvation of souls. If you want an image of a monk (brother, sister, priest, servant-of-the-Lord) think of sailors who roll with the pitching deck in the heart of the sea's great storms, or fire-keepers tending the furnaces of the universe...

It took a long time for me to understand what was going on. The difference between my friend's life and my own was stark. In the world his life is very humble and simple, but in the Kingdom he is a dedicated, brilliant worker, skilled in the boundary-world of faith. In my secular world I often feel pummeled and torn by fierce external storms, but inside I seem to always be searching for the slightest sound and sign of God.

Neither of us is wrong. We are each living the life God chose for us, both seeking most heartfully to do His will. And in each of our journeys God is present, completely and entirely. We struggle to see and hear Him, but he never fails. He is never absent. This is the Great Sign of faith, fulfilling the promise of Christ: "Lo! I will be with you always, even to the end of the age!" 

Don't judge between vocations or seek outside yourself what is yours to do. Live the life God offers you, but live it in Christ, who makes all things one in himself. Then we can enter into the life to come rejoicing at the great reunion of all who seek Him. 

The Word

 The work of blogging is simple enough. Just sit down and write something. Reading the blogs later proves that more thought and less haste is a pretty good way to live. 

    While some blogs are specific, to find and share information about a skill, commodity or adventure, my own work is more self-serving. I've been fascinated by the ways my mind and heart connect with the world--it's an "inside-outside" story.

    Since the day I learned to write my name, I've been a writer. Words have always been powerful to me, rich with endless avenues and pathways to explore. My early exploits in poetry investigated the way words connect, like threads in a web. Later stories investigated ways words are woven into cloth, whole, rough or broad. It makes no difference to a "word wielder". 

    But behind all these less-than-meaningful explorations, there was another power, a broad and diffuse force, like the breeze that comes before a summer storm. It touches, and you sense what is to come. Writing has always had that, for me, and I'm only coming to understand now that the "force" I sense behind the words is their very Source. As it says in the Gospel, "In the beginning, was the Word..."

    I am not a professional writer. I have never earned a dime for my words. And so I am a less-disciplined writer. I slop things down in untidy journals of every shape and size. I type endlessly at all hours of the day and night. I dream up new stories (and fuss over old ones), relegating them to drawers, files, boxes, bins and satchels until the mountain elves come and carry them off. Emily Dickenson wrote about how she "hit a world at every drop." I line up worlds and drive straight into them. Someday I'll probably go so far as turning off spell-checker. Why should words be perfect? Life is full of dents, scratches and rough-ends...

    But like a Forty-Niner chipping through granite to follow a vein of gold, I keep at it whenever I have time, looking for one or two perfect words, unhewn gems of absolute quality. "God said 'Let there be light!' And in that single, primordial act, all time and all of history began." (Catechism of the Catholic Church)

    There's power in words. 

We Are The Church

Today our Church leaders elected Pope Leo the XIV. We heard about it on the way home from the doctor office so we rushed inside and turned on the news. Then we waited. JoAnne says he was getting dressed. I said he was writing his speech.Either way, when he stepped out on the balcony and they said he was from America, my jaw dropped and it stayed that way for nearly an hour...

    I know and I firmly believe that God helps the people he chooses to lead by giving them grace. Even when I don't understand I believe God's choice is the right one, the best one for us and for our situation at every time and place. So I'm really interested in seeing what comes next. What I really wanted to do first was to sit down and write Leo a card, thanking him for saying "yes". 

    Yes is a wonderful word. We all use it. We say yes to jobs, to relationships, to new cars (or used), to friends, to our doctors (ahem, ahem...) to the good and to the not so good. We even say yes to our confusion or our inability to understand. I believe that we said yes to this life we are living--but don't bend your brain on that one, it can be really confusing. Life is a journey. Somewhere along the line we said "Yes! This is what I want...!"

    And we can say yes in many ways, often without even using words. Like the story about the father with two sons. He wanted to get a job done so he told one son to go do it. The son said "yes" but never went. He told his other son to do it and that son said "no thanks", but changed his mind and did the job. I want to be like the second son. Let my actions inform my words. (See Mat 21:28)

    Teresa of Avila said "God writes straight with crooked lines." He leads his Church with uncertain servants. The holy Spirit works in the world and will not be denied worthy results. This is a powerful hope for all of us. Working together we form a net with all the holes covered--my weakness is covered by your strength. We are "hole-y people". Together, we are perfect for the job. 

    And this is what our Church teaches us. The mission of believers is to do God's work in the world. For ideas about that work, we look to Jesus (and his brothers), teaching, healing, feeding, protecting. "The work is great," he says, "while the workers are few. Come and see where I live." (Mt 9:37 with Jn 1:39) Pope Leo, and Pope Francis before him, make that work real. Serving so close to Christ they remind us every day that this work continues uninterrupted from the night of the Last Supper. My work, your work, our work is all woven into one Work, which is Christ, working in and through the holy Spirit, to unite all humanity with himself. 

    We really need each other. We are the Church.

Holiness 101

 I was thinking about something I read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

People who die in God's friendship but require purification undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness they need in order to enter the joy of heaven. (1030) This final purification is what our Church calls “purgatory” which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. (Council of Florence, 1439; Council of Trent, 1563; Benedict XII, 1336.)

The Catechism connects this concept of purgatory to Matthew 12:31, where Jesus says "Whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirt will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come."

The logic is simple enough. If something can't be forgiven in the age to come, then a) the Age to come is real and b) things can be forgiven after we die. It is possible, then, that we can come to the end of our lives with incomplete holiness. Holiness is so important and so desired for us by God that Catholics believe in Purgatory, a time after death for learning, training, perfecting in whatever we still lack in holiness. That doesn't sound anything like hell, does it?

But it begs the question, why wait? Why not learn all we can about how to be holy right here, right now, starting today, sort of cutting the line when we reach the Great Entrance to Paradise...?

What would that look like?

(More to come...)

New Friends

Today, after much effort, I had my first blog visitor. It's a cool feeling to know I can put my thoughts somewhere and other people can share them. So it occurred to me that I should give you a little background to help my posts make more sense. (Things You Need To Know)

I am a Catholic (maybe that's obvious). So I often talk about Catholic things. I have a moderate-liberal Catholic perspective. Other Catholics can be different. We make mistakes. We struggle with our human nature. On good days, we try to be nice. 

As a (Roman) Catholic I am also a Secular Franciscan. Franciscans are a religious order of Friars who follow the wisdom and inspirations of Saint Francis of Assisi. It's a lifestyle, within the Catholic community. Secular Franciscans are people like me (married or not married) who admire the friar's way of living and praying and adapt it to our everyday lives. Currently there are about 12,000 Secular Franciscans in the United States with about 40K world-wide. Our Church also has Franciscan sisters who also live the Franciscan lifestyle. The important thing to know is that among these three simple expressions there are many, many smaller groups, teams, communities, houses, and convents--most with slight variations in emphasis and styles. All of us, and many more from other Christian communities, think of ourselves as "The Franciscan Family" and are united by mostly-common beliefs, attitudes and convictions. I once heard someone say  "What do you get when you put two Secular Franciscans in the same room?"  The answer is "A potluck..."

I became a Secular Franciscan in 2012 by making my "profession". Profession is not a vow, it's more like a willing agreement. For instance, I was asked "Do you want to follow Christ in the footsteps of Saint Francis?" and I answered "Yes. This is what I want!" Ever since then I've spent much of my time scratching my head because Saint Francis lived eight hundred years ago and Seculars can be every sort of person from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal. I would say we fall naturally to the "left of center" because Francis worked to ease some of the problems in the world, His story is really interesting.

Since I professed I've been learning more about myself, and the Church, than I ever thought was possible. I like to tell people, "I didn't know how much I needed to be converted until I became a Franciscan." By conversion I mean "to go a new direction". For a higher meaning and purpose I guess you'll have to go ask God because I still don't really know. I just know that God wanted me to be a Franciscan, so I am.

Franciscans believe and value many things. I've been trying to sort them out and here are some of the most important.

• Mercy is more important than "being right..."
• Minority means, given two paths to choose from, Franciscans choose lives of service...
• Community: No matter how crazy your life is or how far away it takes you, you always have family. No one gets left behind...
• Church. God made it. It's good. It's also alive, so expect it to grow, change and bear fruit...
• Christ is the Boss. Without him, none of the other stuff makes sense.

So, this is where I stand and where I come from, even when I'm blogging about hamburgers or roller skates. Because for Franciscans, God is everywhere in everything, and if we pay attention, we can find him wherever we are!

Think it over.