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.”

Continue the Journey

"Stand up and go; your faith has saved you."  ~Luke 17:19

Fr. Luke Strand (source)

This past Wednesday, Fr. Luke Strand, the Vocations Director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, presided at Cor Jesu, the popular  Holy Hour with confessions and contemporary Christian music, which is followed by Mass.  Cor Jesu is held every Wednesday evening beginning at 7 pm at St. Robert's Parish in Shorewood, Wisconsin.  It was the last time that Fr. Luke will be present at Cor Jesu, which he founded, for the remainder of the year, as he takes some time away to receive necessary treatment for the colon cancer with which he was recently diagnosed.

Please do hold Fr. Luke deeply within your prayers during this time of his healing, praying especially for the intercession of St. John Paul II and St. Luke.

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Poignantly, he spoke about healing in his homily; not physical healing, but spiritual healing.  We enjoyed Luke's Gospel account (Lk 17:11-19) about the ten lepers who were healed, but only one of them returned to offer thanks to Jesus for his healing.  Fr. Luke said that we, like the lepers, are all in need of healing, not necessarily from leprosy, but from our sin.  And like the lepers who were afraid to come too close to Jesus, who stood at a distance calling out to Jesus to have pity on them, we are often afraid, too, of coming too close to the Lord.  We're afraid that our sins are too terrible, that Jesus can't really heal us, that we are too enmeshed in the darkness of our sinfulness.

Fr. Luke noted that the lepers weren't healed at the moment when they called out to Christ, but rather, their healing occurred as they journeyed away from Jesus to show themselves to the priests.  The journey is what seems to be the key.  Regardless of where we are in our walk of faith at the present moment, despite our sinfulness and infirmities, we need to continue the journey, to carry on without stopping, for it's only in the journey that our healing will occur.

The leper who returned to offer thanks to Jesus, wasn't necessarily healed for all-time, according to Fr. Luke.  His illness may have returned at a later time, and he might have had to return to the Lord to seek healing again.  And, once again, he may have been afraid to come too close to the Lord.  We, too, once healed from our sinfulness, might find ourselves falling back into sin again and again, and will need to go back to the Lord to seek spiritual healing many times over the course of our life's journey.  But journey on in faithfulness we must go, trusting that the Lord will always be waiting to lovingly heal us if we but turn to him in humility and trust.

Dear Lord,

We ask that you allow your faithful servant, Fr. Luke, to continue his journey of faith.   As he turns away from Your service to show himself to the doctors for medical care, heal him from his cancer.  Keep him from fear and allow him to enjoy many return visits to You, unabashedly coming close to Your Heart, to ask for whatever healing he may need.  Assist him in carrying his cross and allow him to use this time of suffering to enhance his already holy service to those who are burdened with crosses and leprosy of their own.

Thank you for blessing our Church with this holy, wise and faithful priest.  In deep trust, we pray.  Amen.

Dust

I had volunteered to lector for the Ash Wednesday Mass, and when I arrived in the sacristy before Mass, Dave, the sacristan, asked me if I would help distribute ashes.  With forty-eight years of experience as an ash-receiver to my credit, I had never once distributed ashes before, and I found the experience to be deeply moving.

Dave handed me a small card with the words "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel" written upon it.  I clutched the card tightly during the first half of Mass and glanced at it over and over again, afraid that I would forget the words.

When the time came to distribute the ashes, Fr. Joe invited those who were helping to come to the front of church to receive their ashes first.  When he firmly placed the cross of ashes upon my forehead, Fr. Joe said, "Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return."  Maybe he didn't get the cue card, I thought.  But I decided that it would be easier to remember to speak about dust as I was smearing it upon foreheads and so I followed Fr. Joe's example.  After the helpers received their ashes, Fr. Joe turned to me and asked me to place the ashes upon his forehead.

My hand trembled as I shoved my thumb into the dish of ashes, and faintly drew a cross upon Fr. Joe's forehead,  whispering the reminder to him that he was dust.  Something about this sinful woman reminding a holy priest of his littleness felt extremely humbling.  But maybe it wasn't because he was a priest.  Maybe, I was soon to discover with each forehead that was presented to me, distributing ashes was meant to humble the distributor as much as the receiver.  

The church was standing room only, and soon I was smearing crosses upon the elderly, children and babies.  It wasn't long before it felt like a physically taxing exercise as I bent down for the children and reached up for those who were tall.  When my two youngest children and my husband stood before me, all smiles, I recalled all of the moments when I had traced the cross upon their forehead in a blessing, with a clean and dry thumb, sans the ashes, and the words, "God bless you" instead of "You are dust."  

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With each person who stood before me, waiting for the reminder of their sinful humanity as they embarked upon yet another Lenten season,  I thought of Christ, with his face down in the dirt of the Via Dolorosa during his three falls and I wished I were wiping the dirt off of their faces, like Veronica, instead of marking them with it.  And yet, when I washed the ashes off my own forehead before I went to bed that night, I prayed that a faint shadow of the cross would remain, reminding me of my need for Him and my gratitude for all that He suffered for the likes of me.

Marked

I receive the ashes that label me as His child, His own.

The dust flakes down into my eyes, flirting with my lashes and
blurring my vision of worldly things, reminding me that the
spiritual realm can often contain that which is dirty, dusty and dark.

The ash that marks me settles deep within my soul,
mingling with the sorrow and joy that God's love
has carefully placed within my life.

I am marked as His own and will carry that mark
from my forehead to my soul
beyond this season of Lent and into forever.