I was feeling guilty. I have not written anything for a couple of weeks. It seems longer.

Easter was harder than usual and it is always at least very hard. Some pastoral and organizational issues remain wrecked and lying across the road and I am running out of ideas and running out of words. I sat one day for an hour and nothing came.

So I might as well write about writer’s block.

As soon as I wrote that sentence everything I was going to say about writer’s block disappeared.

I do wonder if polyglots go blank in all their languages.

Liturgically it is a good time to be silent. The Easter Triduum is loaded and packed tight. It is also income tax time. And I changed offices at Wesleyan. I have windows on two walls…east and south so light actually comes into the room. Oil and pastel pictures of Hawaii…ocean and beach and Kuliouou and mountains and off shore islands are on the walls. But the move took three of us and then three weeks for me to remember what I did with “things.” A bought a new floor covering for my bedsitter office in the parish and have still not finished with that move nor located everyhing.

Is there a good time to celebrate Easter and move offices? Somehow it seems better to do all this in the spring, paschal time than in the dead of winter, Christmas time. The world is supposed to have started or been peopled by creator or creators in the spring. Winter would not have done. The new creatures would have starved. Fall is too late. Nothing planted and nothing to harvest. Summer is too hot. So we must begin in the spring. Only lambs are born in the winter and are ready to eat in the spring. Especially the usually superflous male lambs. They get turned into spring time meals and picnics and Passover and cosmetics. Lanolin. Look in the bathroom and see.

Well, there is a parable here.

The Wednesday that used to be known as “Spy Wednesday”…just before Holy Thursday…is the saddest day in the calendar. Good Friday is part of Easter, the second day of the Triduum. But this Wednesday the scriptures are about betrayal.

Now Catholic doctrine, at least as far as Thomas Aquinas goes, says that no one does evil for the sake of evil. Nobody gets up in the morning and says what evil can I do today. The evil is always taken as a good. So here is betrayal and the betrayer is sure he is doing something good and getting paid for it!

The abuses in the Church always fall this way. The mediocrity falls the same way. We can be teetering into the drink, gashed by an iceberg all the while we think things are going to be ok.

I have no answers for this. I used to but I am exhausted now and I have know way of knowing how to get around the constant attraction of evil disguised as good. We are like the royal Bourbons. We  learn nothing and forget nothing.

So, Judas, step right up.

Tags: Evil, good, Judas

Diary of a Country Priest is that name of a French classic by Georges Bernanos. It is also a movie by Robert Bresson. The country priest, young, holy, abused dies in the dirty apartment of a classmate who has left the priesthood and is barely able to support himself and the woman he is living with. His last words are from the Little Flower: “everything is grace.”

His mentor is a rough old priest. The two talk after the funeral of their agnostic friend, a selfless village doctor, who has killed himself. In the office of the dead, there is a quotation from the Douay Version of Job: 14….”all the days in which I am now in warfare, I expect until my change comes…” the old priest grieving terribly for the loss of their doctor friend, wants them now to buck up and he says to the young priest…”this is war” some days we advance, most days we retreat…but it is war.

And so the parish priest getting up in the  morning heads for the trenches where he cannot even trust his back will be covered.

Tags: Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest, Job

NIKE, the shoe people, have a new product that carries “Black and Tan” along with the NIKE logo. Ben and Jerry ice cream tried the same incredibly ignorant thing. The news media, so very careful every once and awhile, say the Black and Tan are accused of killing civilians in Ireland. “Accused?????” How about pulling into a stadium of crowded with  rugby fans and opening fire? Not the least, but the most typical of things Black and Tan are “accused” of.

Tags: Ben and Jerry, Black and Tan, Ireland, Nike

Tags: Chesterton, Lowell, politics, War

When I was full time at the Spiritual Life Center I had miserable living conditions and a great ministry. But since it was not a parish many could not figure out what it was we managed to do all day. When asked, I said our job was to rescue contemplatives. There are folks out there led by the Spirit into a kind of prayer that is little understood despite our huge amount of material culled from tradition.

So someone blessed or cursed with contemplative gifts can easily get into trouble. Teresa of Avila went so far as to say that if she had the choice between a pious but ignorant advisor and a merely well-educated advisor she would choose the latter because ignorance was really dangerous. And so few could claim the knowledge that is helpful to contemplatives.

But contemplatives are not the only ones in danger. People grieving can easily be damaged by well meaning but shallow attempts to pull them out of the abyss created by loss.

Then there are also the people who with the best intentions in the world chose a vocation that amounted to nearly a total loss of self and feel that they have wasted their lives. The common response to these sufferers: oh, you do not know the good you may have done. True. But that is not the question. The doubter grieving like this is never asked “well, what else could you have done? What is it you turned from in all good will to embrace this vocation which has been a disaster?” This would be a good way to talk to the one suffering but I rarely hear of anyone being counseled this way.

So we as a community are not very well prepared for questions about loss and doubt, about the tragic side of life. What prevails is so cheap and hallow as to be a mockery of the depths of the life of faith. I believe that the community does not want to be challenged by really deep questions that would call it to question itself. Not even in Lent. When we could and should question.

Tags: vocation, Waster

We are pestered by thoughts or more likely by emotional judgments not particularly rational. In any case, Lent is a time to take a chance on a change of consciousness. Meditation is not what you think. It is simply not paying attention to what you think or feel. Picking a “heart” word that is a symbol of your surrender to God and sitting with that  and repeating it as thoughts and feelings pass through is a way to take a desert vacation and to fast from all those things that bug us or that we think are brilliant but can’t remember once they pass through our brain. The desert is not a place to think or a place to preach…there is no one there! We do not even preach to ourselves.

Tags: desert, Meditation

I have started to notice flaws in the revolution and flaws in the reformation. Saul Alinsky, by the way no leftist he, used to ask community organizers if they wanted a revolution or a reformation. Alinsky believed in the American Revolution and the US Constitution but he did not buy anything so contrary to (falllen) human nature as a reformation. He thought people in power would do the right thing for the wrong reason and organizers had to find the wrong reason since catering to a “better” nature was a dead end. Even revolutions, alas, alack, seem almost as idealistic as reformations and their effects slide around the teflon surfaces of historys  like fried eggs in a pan pam sprayed by a fire fighter.

Of course Alinsky knew more about this than moi. He used to say that if you wanted to help the poor you would help them get the corrupt middle class, middle brow goodies as fast as you can. And so…

I have noticed that members of previously excluded categories turn around and do unto others as they were done to and they do this without blinking. If it were done to them they would try to nail and do in fact succeed in nailing the perpetrators of the injustice…all the perpetrators except themselves, of course. I am a child of the 60s and it hurts to think that all that struggle for more rights has simply spread the pool of oppressors around.

Then there are the other contradictions…I am a liberal Democrat who is pro-life and a very conservative Catholic surrounded by reactionary Catholics. Very uncomfortable. I think the so -called pro-lifers usually choose methods that will promote more abortions including dropping bombs on pregnant women or executing people who never stood a chance in life and ended their lives after taking the lives of others.And then there are the animal rights people…nobody could be more emotional on this issue than me but I wonder why cute baby seals rate ahead of human fetuses in danger of termination. I would like to save the seals, the spotted owls, and the fetuses. Not by criminalizing abortion, but doing everything that would make the conception of the candidates harder and their care complete should they be born. I worked in poor parishes where out of wedlock babies were the norm (as they are now among the general population under 25) and abortion unthinkable. Babies were the responsibility of the community. This irks people who do not want to pay for the sins of others. St Vincent de Paul fought this battle over and over again as did Mother Teresa.

We say the sin of Adam was a felix culpa…a happy fault because the remedy was Jesus. It still is but the faults do not seem so happy anymore.

Tags: contradictions

It is impossible to convey the joy that this small book, Hidden in the Same Mystery: Thomas Merton and Loretto, has brought me…Loretto is in fact Sister Mary Luke Tobin, one of the first women auditors at Vatican II, president of the Religious Women’s Conference, head of the Loretto Sisters (HQ foundation down the road from Meton’s monastery), activist, dancer, and mentor to people who wanted to be activists without losing faith and joy.

The pictures alone are priceless: from the 1960s until Luke died a few years ago at age 98!!!

The intelligence and joy of the nuns even in the tough times and in the pioneer days after Vatican II radiate all over the place. If there is a hermeneutic of continuity before and after Vatican II, it is the joy, spontaneous, attractive and unfeigned that shines out. I think it comes from the discipline of the old days, the bonding, and the emerging of a loving intelligence that knew changes, humanization, deeper witness, creativity was emerging. Sisters and hers were bold and honest.

I had a summer in t987 with her as mentor of the Catholic group as a Coolidge while I was preparing my Oxford University Press edition of Newman’s Via Media. There were Protestant and Jewish groups each with their mentor and daily sharing of all the groups. The elders among us were most inspiring though I did find a decades long friend in Carondolet Sister Annette Moran who died a few years ago quite unjustly and in her prime. Annette was my peer who inherited the treasure of these Sisters and would have made a great old lady like Luke.

Do I sound like I have no male counter parts? I hope so. It is the truth, but these women carried us orphan priests along and helped give us a spine that is missing a lot these days. Anyway, I highly recommend the book. It is a true to say we will not see their like again.

Tags: Annette Moran, Joy, Luke Tobin, mentoring, Thomas Merton, Vatican II

The New York Times is edited by two elderly sociologists, one of whom has been deaf for ten years or so they say. It might be true. Once I could not get the NYT so I bought the Los Angeles Times for my Sunday reading. I could hardly understand anything in the LAT because it was so hip or I was so square. The movie reviews were the best…film is the home town industry so the detail was delicious. If a bit player had a great three minutes the paper covered it within a lengthy review.

There was also the West Coast sensitivity to humanistic psychology. Not only were the typical man bites dog stories in the LAT but the witnesses were asked how they felt about what they saw.

Now the NYT is coming in with something new: the family extension, the International Herald Tribune, has a blog…Rendezvous, or as they say in the Bronx, Rendezvouse. It is actually fun and thorough. Do we need another blog? International living as ex-pats know, is lively and expansive. More is going on than the American public usually wants to know. But falling trees in a forest do make a noise…ask the squirrels…and the noise makes a difference. Perhaps Rendezvous will entice readers to investigate the rest of the neighborhood on this planet.

Tags: International Herald Tribune, LA Times, NY Times, planet, Rendezvous