Give Me a Word: Wisdom from Desert Monks

The de Chantal Society, "a group of women passionate about praying for vocations and for families in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, gathers three times per year at Saint Francis de Sales Seminary for eucharistic adoration and spiritual formation." Last spring, during Lent, Fr. Tom DeVries addressed the de Chantal Society with an inspiring talk on humility, sin and hope based upon wisdom learned from the desert monks.  Fr. Tom is a great speaker,  and at first I was so focused on listening to him that I didn't think to take notes on what he was saying, so the first section on humility is a little scant as I didn't completely catch all of what he said. Most interesting to me is the Mystery of Sin.  As one who usually beats herself up over sins and mistakes, I had never before considered the fact that our sins could be the beginning of our salvation.  Although these notes are from a Lenten talk and are not complete, the knowledge they contain can be useful to us at any time of year.

Give Me a Word:  Wisdom from Desert Monks
A Talk by Fr. Tom DeVries

The Necessity of Humility

Without God I am nothing, can do nothing.  Humility is being plunged into God.  Without temptations no person can be saved.  With temptations we realize how weak we are and we know without grace we cannot be saved.  We must lose at something, be brought to the edge of all of our resources and realize we can’t control, fix, explain or even understand some of the things that happen to us.  Do not be afraid of failure.  It’s required for us if God will exalt us.  We don’t exalt ourselves; God does.

Realize we are not self-sufficient.  Only God’s grace gets us through.  Then we come to the important place where we say “God, I surrender to your grace.”  I can agree in my head, but it’s hard in my life to get to those places.  God will keep drawing me to the end of my resources.

The Mystery of Sin

The Ambrosian Rite of the Church which was begun by St. Ambrose and is still celebrated today around Milan, Italy, has a prayer for the 16^th Sunday of Ordinary Time that helps us to understand the mystery of sin:  “Lord, you bent down over our wounds and healed us giving us a medicine.  In this way, even sin, by virtue of Your invincible love, served to elevate us to divine life.”  This is echoed in Romans-Paul says where sin increases grace abounds all the more.  There is a mystery to sin, a paradox.   It separates us from God but it’s precisely the route He uses to have us come back to Him.  If we’re honest it’s really our sin that keeps us coming back to God.  We may think we have failed or we are so wounded but it doesn’t stop God’s mercy.  God will use everything to bring us back to Him.

Everything I had deplored about my life was precisely how God kept pulling me back.  I realized what a grace it was that I even became grateful for my sin. 

It sounds heretical but we sing about it at Easter when we call the sin of Adam a Happy Fault.  Even when I was turning away from You, You were more powerful and were drawing me back to You.

We base salvation upon woundedness to level the playing field where everyone has access to God.

Julian of Norwich said:  “Our wounds are our very trophies.  They are the holes in the soul where light breaks through.”  Leonard Cohen, in the song Anthem says, “Forget your perfect offering.  There is a crack in everything.  That is how the light gets in.”

The Mystery of Sin follows on the heels of our understanding of humility but it takes it one more step.  God uses sin to draw close to us.  Julian of Norwich tells us that both the first fall and the recovery from the fall are the mercy of God.  In falling down we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.  All of the things that are achievements feed our ego too much.  There are things we keep so secret because they are just horrible, but if we own that one day we will even see our sin as our trophy.  It is falling upwards.

We often have a hate relationship with the faults, wounds and failures of our lives but take heart; God will use it and we’ll be able to thank God for the circuitous route and for all of our sins because God never left you and He used your failure as the route to Him.  People who don’t get close to God never admit their sin and their failure.

Make a chart of your own life-the ups, downs, failures, wounds, great times and bad times.  Realize in the woundedness and failure that you learn most about your spiritual life.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds even more.

The Challenge of Hope

Julian of Norwich says “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” St. Paul tells us that “Hope does not disappoint because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”  St. Matthew says, “Behold!  I am with you always even until the end of the age.”

Christian hope is ultimate hope when we know what our destiny is meant to be and that’s why we can go through humility and sin because God is using it all to lead us beyond this world.

Transitory vanities won’t furnish us with our deepest longings.  We are eternal and hope is ultimate and it’s God.  St. Benedict tells us that the present, even if it’s arduous, can be accepted if it leads the way to a goal and the goal is God himself.

There is a difference between wishes and hope.  Wishes are temporal and hope is eternal.  Optimism is the expectation that things will get better but hope is a trust that will lead us to true freedom.  Hope is based upon God’s promise.

We shouldn’t lose the virtue of hope in our world today.  We look at the near future and we can get pretty depressed, but we should not ever, ever, ever be people who have a message of despair.

Hope is for the long road and we need to believe in God’s promise.  Presumption and despair are sins against hope.  We don’t want to wait; we don’t want to live through difficult times.  But as Julian of Norwich reminds us “The Lord did not say you shall not be tempest tossed but he did say you shall not be overcome.”

Advent Retreat with Bishop Donald Hying

“Christianity starts not with us looking for God but with God looking for us.”  ~Bishop Donald Hying

The always humble Bishop Hying and Fr. Tim Kitzke doing the dishes following dinner at my house last August.  Bishop Hying always insisted upon doing the dishes whenever he'd come to dinner.  He's certainly well-qualified to speak about humility as he did during his recent Advent reflection shared in this post.

This Advent I treated myself to an afternoon retreat of Reflections on the Advent Gospels with Bishop Hying at St. Joseph’s Parish in Wauwatosa.  It was a bittersweet occasion in which I had an opportunity to learn from a spiritual giant and a beautiful friend, in person, one more time, before he leaves Milwaukee to become the Bishop of Gary, Indiana on January 6^th.  I felt compelled to take notes so I wouldn’t miss one bit of his wisdom.  I've certainly learned an awful lot from him in the past seven years that I've been blessed with his friendship and I'm hopeful that I'll continue to reap many spiritual benefits from all that he has taught me over the years.  What I’ve gleaned from his Advent talk follows.

Being Present to Now

Bishop Hying often speaks of St. Bernard’s Three Advents:  the Advent when we prepare for Christ’s birth, the Advent when we prepare for the final coming of Christ and the Advent of the Present Moment.  He said that it’s easy to always be somewhere else in our mind and not to be fully engaged with where we are.  But it’s essential that we try to focus on the present because this moment will never come again.  We’ll never be in this same particular place with these same particular people again.  The greatest enemy of the spiritual life is the intensity of the stimulation around us.  The secret of the saints is that they were profoundly engaged in the present moment.  It’s in the present moment that God speaks to us.  On Mount Horeb God doesn’t tell Moses, “I was” or “I will be”.  He says “I AM.”

Bishop Hying spoke about the difference between Kairos time and Kronos time.  Kronos time, he said, is like when we go to work and the day drags because we’re not enjoying what we’re doing.  Kairos time is like being on vacation or spending time with someone we love.  Six hours of Kairos time can feel like only one.  The Mass is Kairos time where we are united with all of heaven.  We are never alone at Mass.  All of the angels and saints are right there with us.  When we step into the Eucharist, we step into the vast eternity of Christ.  The mystery of the Christian life is to see the unfolding of our lives as Kairos time.  We live in a culture that is spiritually asleep.  If we can abide in the present moment then life unfolds as it is meant to be for us.

“How do we live in the world but as a monastic at heart?” he asked.  John the Baptist reminds us that our faith must be public and inculturated.  Our faith is personal but it can’t be private.  If the apostles kept their faith private we would never have come to know Jesus.  The generations that follow us are dependent upon our public testimony.  In the New Evangelization we look at people who are already in our lives and give witness to them.   We need to cultivate the soil of another person’s life and bring them into a community of faith.  We are to lay the groundwork for Jesus to begin His work like John the Baptist did for Jesus.

Humility as a Way of Life

Bishop Hying went on to speak about humility.  He said that virtues are like a salad buffet and humility is the plate you put everything else on.  If you don’t have humility, nothing else will stick.  Humility is knowing who we are and knowing both our greatness and our littleness.  How do we respond when we’re not noticed or recognized or when someone else gets thanked for something we did? 

Humility sets us free.  We don’t have to try to be anything more than we are.  God is more humble than we are.  If I can’t let God be God in my life, then I always have to be strong and right and in control.  How freeing it is to acknowledge my weakness and my need for God and to let the Lord carry me!  It’s freeing to say “I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m a sinner, and I’m weak and needy and uncertain.”

St. Paul spoke of the thorn in his side and how, when he asked God to remove it, God told him he had to keep it so that he’ll know that power is made perfect in weakness.  Allowing God to be God allows us to be us.  Humility is a gift.  It’s a gift to be hidden, unknown and misunderstood.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what others think of us, it only matters what God thinks of us.

Bishop Hying compared the Annunciation and the Agony in the Garden as examples of humility and openness to God’s life-changing plan.  Both Mary and Jesus are asked to accept something impossible.  Mary said yes to the Incarnation and Jesus said yes to our salvation. They both occur while they are radically alone and they are both asked to embrace the impossible and say yes to it.  It’s tempting to think that everything was easy for them because of their holiness and who they are, but their humanity had to tempt them to say no, and yet, they both said yes. 

For this reason we honor Mary because in her we see perfect discipleship. In her maternity, which is predicated on her faith and attentiveness to God’s impulses and initiatives, she gives herself to that plan.  In the Immaculate Conception she is a stainless piece of glass, immaculate with no stain.  The light shines through her.  Because of her clarity, we don’t see the glass but are overwhelmed by the light of Christ that shines through her.

The bishop asks, “In what ways am I still striving to be God, to be at the center of attention, more important than I am?  How can this Advent take that desire away from me?  Like John the Baptist, we need to say, “I am not the Christ.”  What is it in my life now that God is inviting me to embrace, that seems difficult, and that I should say yes to?  We need to ponder this question all our lives because God is always asking something new of us.  The saints were so free of self that they allowed God to use them however He saw fit.

Advent is realizing that in the Incarnation of Christ everything has changed for us.  If we can understand this and accept it, if we can be truly present in the now, and live our lives with humility, then Christmas becomes more fully what it was meant to be.

Humble Presentation/Guest Post-Fr. Don Hying

It seems that I am in a continual battle with myself; just when I really think I'm somebody special, full of puffed-up pride and self-proclaimed importance, God loosens the leg on that wobbly stool of falsehood upon which I sit. Soon, I am tottering down to the floor as I am brought to remember that I am really a weak and small human being, one who makes frequent mistakes, wears her foot in her mouth far too often and is really very ordinary and simple, meant to be the servant of others; not the one being served. I am called to follow the example of our Lord and to make a humble presentation of myself before God and others.

This past Sunday's readings (Zep 2:3; 3-12-13, Ps 146:6-10, 1 Cor 1:26-31, Mt 5:1-12a) were a great example of the joy that can be found in embracing the ordinary and simple life, and my friend, Fr. Don Hying, has graciously allowed me to share his reflection on those readings. As you prayerfully read his words and consider their meaning in your life, I ask you to also include a prayer for Fr. Don, himself a model of humility. Today, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, is his special day on the Monthly Prayer Request for Priests calendar in Milwaukee.

When the great and powerful army of the British Empire surrendered to General Washington and the rag-tag Continental troops at Yorktown, Virginia, Lord Cornwallis ordered his military band to play a tune entitled “The World Turned Upside Down.” Who would ever have imagined at the beginning of the Revolutionary War that a group of weak and disunited colonies would defeat the most powerful military force in the world?
That dynamic of the minority, the marginal, the weak, the least expected one somehow emerging from the bottom and becoming God’s chosen instrument to bring about the victory of salvation, mercy and freedom is abundantly present in the Scriptures. Abraham and Sarah are too old to bear children. Moses stutters. David is too young and unimportant to even be present at the feast. Mary is an unknown virgin from an obscure village. The apostles are fishermen, tax collectors or political zealots. God chooses the nobodies of this world to bear the triumph of his love.

In today’s first reading, Zephaniah proclaims that the Lord will leave a faithful remnant of people, humble, lowly, small and poor. In the second reading, Paul reminds the Corinthians that they are not wise, powerful or noble and yet God has precisely chosen them to humble the proud, to reduce all human pretension, to show forth a new kind of power that only loves and serves rather than oppresses and shames. The Gospel is the familiar account of the Beatitudes where Jesus calls blessed the poor, the sorrowing, the meek, the merciful and those who suffer for the sake of righteousness.

Only those who have lived on the margin, experienced minority status of some kind, suffered in the dark, have had their hearts broken, watched their world fall apart, been pushed aside and ignored can taste the joy of Jesus’ beatitude. When we are complacent, satisfied, self-sufficient, insulated and powerful, it becomes so difficult to realize how much we need God and to let him act in our lives. As St. Augustine writes, those who have had their hearts torn up by the roots can know the mercy and truth of the Almighty.

How often and how painfully do I need to learn the lesson of the Beatitudes! In my human vulnerability, I seek security, popularity, money, certainty, status and comfort to cover over my poverty and fear. Time and again, the Lord allows life to strip me of what I so desperately cling to, so that I can grasp anew the fundamental paradox of the Gospel. I must be emptied out of self so that God can fill me. I must feel the despair of spiritual darkness so that I search for the light of Christ. I must be thrown on some cross of poverty and pain so that I can taste the sweetness of the resurrection. I must sense the dreadful absence of God in my sin so that I can cast myself on his mercy.

How exhausting it is always striving to be somebody in the eyes of the world, needing to impress, influence, be noticed. We step closer to the radical freedom of Jesus when we seek to be hidden in him, to be enveloped in his heart, to be part of the silent and often unnoticed torrent of divine love which nourishes the world. John the Baptist got it right when he said about Christ: He must increase and I must decrease. Humility sets us free to be our true selves, a reality both greater and smaller than we often imagine ourselves to be.

Almost 1800 years before the British surrender at Yorktown, an unknown pregnant girl exulted in a poetic proclamation that sang of a world turned upside down. In her Magnificat. Mary understands well that God always subverts the proud, the satisfied, and the pretentious by breaking in from the margins with unexpected grace and power, in ways often unexpected. The baby growing in her womb was the Word made flesh. Who could have ever guessed?

1. Emily Dickinson, a premier American poet, wrote: “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.” In light of the second reading, what does Dickinson’s writing mean?

2. How have you experienced being marginalized? How do you see God’s grace in such moments?

Humble Love

Again...He holds my sins and failures before me...reminds me that all I need is humble love.

Why is it so hard to remember? Like a child with attention deficit disorder, His lessons go through me and disappear. I need reminders-and they always include pain.

A rebuke from my supervisor.

An argument with my son.

A little word of restraint from a friend.

I wince when I learn once again that this life is meant to include sorrow, that this journey to the perfection of heaven means that I am not perfect yet, but must continue to work towards that ideal.

And then He brings me to silence. Bowed before Him in adoration, watching the blood spill from His side, wanting so much to stop it, to cup it in my hands, to hold it forever...but it drips right through my fingers.

He wants me to stay small and to give my love to others over and over again, even when I grow weary and would rather not put any effort into loving. Like His blood that keeps on flowing, my love is meant to continuously be given to others, not pridefully kept to myself.

Humble love...grown in the silence that follows hurt pride and embarrassment...requiring restraint of tongue and abandonment of self...it's His gift to me; the one thing that I can hold on to forever, if I will only remember...

“At some ideas you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of human sins, uncertain whether to combat it by force or by humble love. Always decide, ‘I will combat it with humble love,’ If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force; it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.” — Fyodor Dostoyevski

The Pharisee

"My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and be glad." Psalm 34:2

she holds her head up high
as if she’s someone special
and complains when others don’t notice

afraid that if they don't see
anything special about her
what they will see is that she is
really just a fraud
an imposter

pretending to be better
than she really is
not wanting others to know
that she is simply a sinner
like everybody else

waiting all day for praise that never comes
she fails to see the good that others do

perhaps a little kindness towards others
would go a long way toward building
true self-esteem, rather than false pride

instead of crying, “Look at me!”
she should be saying, “Look at them!
how wonderful they all are!"

Lord, open her heart to the good in others
break down her pride
and craving for attention

teach her your gentle humility
and remind her that You are the only reason to boast

"Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

Humble Acceptance

In the world to come I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"
Rabbi Zusya

“There must be a king over us.
We too must be like other nations,
with a king to rule us and to lead us in warfare
and fight our battles.”
When Samuel had listened to all the people had to say,
he repeated it to the LORD, who then said to him,
“Grant their request and appoint a king to rule them.”
1 Samuel 8:19-22

This reading has my name written all over it! I am like those people of Israel, wanting to be like everybody else. When I read the lives of the saints, I fall into despair because I am not as holy as they are and fear than I never will be. When I see that others are granted spiritual favors, I grumble in disdain because I haven’t received those same favors. I am forever dissatisfied with myself and the gifts that God has given to me, always believing that the grass is greener on the other side. It’s not the material gifts of others that I envy, but rather the spiritual gifts that are bestowed upon others that bring out that green monster of jealousy.

But God didn’t make me to pray with the perseverance of St. Monica, to fast and mortify myself like the desert monks or to write with the creative flair of Ann Voskamp. He didn’t make me to rise to the high ranks of Catholicism or to be a superstar of Christianity. God made me to be a simple wife and mother, waking each morning to the ordinary tasks of cooking, cleaning and loving. He made me to be myself and no one else. I am reminded of the words of St. Francis de Sales "Be what you are, and be it well." And by simply living each day with gratitude, accepting the life that God has given to me, I am pleasing Him immensely. All God asks of me is to accept myself and the life that He has blessed me with. I pray that I will have the humility to do just that.

My Lord Jesus, there will always be someone who is blessed with gifts that I do not have. Help me to enjoy their gifts, be inspired by their gifts, and to be drawn closer to you through their gifts. Help me to realize that the gifts with which you have blessed me are the ones you have meant for me alone and for no one else. Teach me to be grateful for what I have, for what I am able to do and for being the person you made me to be. Amen.

OCD

Exhaustion. That’s my excuse and I guess I’ll stick with it. I frequently suffer from insomnia and this past month I feel as though I have suffered from this malady with increasing frequency. In addition to lack of sleep, things at work have been very busy and stressful. The economy sure has a lot of people down these days and WIC is a tremendous blessing in the pocketbook for those who qualify. This past Wednesday was a particularly stressful day that ended with a sick baby vomiting on me, and his very overwhelmed, homeless mother crying in my arms. I arrived home later than usual, but still had to take on a huge baking task. My daughter Mary and I have the annual chore of baking kolaches for our upcoming family reunion, and this was the night we had scheduled to bake the treats, all 12 dozen of them. We were rolling dough and filling pastries until 10:30 at night. I should have gone straight to bed after that, but I didn’t. Instead I thought I’d just take a few minutes to look over the some of my favorite blogs.

God seems to be drawing me to Carmelite blogs with more and more frequency. Perhaps He was doing this because I needed a lesson in humility. Whether that was His intention or not, humility is what I got! I found a beautiful new blog written by a cloistered Carmelite nun. You can find the blog link in my list (lounge de sa gloire). The prayers and pictures are lovely! I just had to leave a comment. Unfortunately, I was not thinking clearly and I made an absolute fool of myself! Her bio described her as an ocd sister. In a world of abbreviations, the first thing those initials brought to my mind was “obsessive, compulsive disorder” to which I can completely relate. So, I told the sweet sister, “don’t feel bad about being ocd, I am too! As long as we are obsessed with Jesus and compulsive about prayer, its all good, isn’t it?” Then I went to bed.

The next morning, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I was driving to work and thinking about the feast day and all of the lovely Carmelites I had been coming to know when my mistake hit me like a ton of bricks. OCD…Order of Carmelites, Discalced! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so for the entire day, I vacillated between both! I couldn’t believe my ignorance! Of course this happened at a time when I was thinking pretty highly of myself, so getting knocked down a few notches was really what I needed.

That night it was back to the blogs to offer a humble apology. How do you show a red face with your words? Of course, the dear ocd sister forgave me and actually had a good laugh about it herself. And the lesson I learned? When you are tired, do not leave comments on blogs. When you are tired, do what comes naturally; go to bed! And now, good night from an OCD (obsessive compulsive) mom who may someday become a much better kind of OCD (Order of Carmelites, Discalced) Secular mom! Now I need a nap!

Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

“Learn of me,” He said, “because I am meek and humble of heart.” These two are the master attributes of the Sacred Heart. But the root of all its other virtues, furnishing nourishment even to meekness itself, is humility. If the Heart of Jesus had not been humble, it could not have been made meek.

Sermons by Fr. John Kelly



My Jesus, when I am tempted to pride and vanity, as I often am, draw me into your Most Sacred Heart and hold me close. Fill me with the virtue of humility so that I may become more like you. Let me use this virtue to comfort others who suffer from the humiliations of life. Help me to always remember that when I am meek and humble, I become a reflection of your gentle love to others. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me. Amen.