For Thoughts from the Guide for Catechists, With a Little Help From My Friends

The next time the Easter Vigil rolls around, I will have been a Catholic 4 full years. But those of you who have followed my conversion story know that I sat in the pews with my wife, and later with my children, for close to 18 years, and that I started exploring the faith in earnest in the Fall of 2006.

Eventually, around the Summer of 2007, I read The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton's conversion story that was published in 1948. It turns out that 1948 is also the year that Lou Tseng-Tsiang published his Ways of Confucius and of Christ, and his friend John C. H. Wu published his From Confucianism to Catholicism a year later in 1949. More on this synchronicity shortly.

For Thoughts on Our Adversary by Fray Francisco de Osuna

No, this isn't about Uncle Sam, patriotism, or anything like that. This is part two of a series on the work of on-going personal conversion that I started yesterday. Milk drinkers beware, because meat and potatoes are coming your way.  Bring your knives and forks and spoons. Napkins are optional.

Because of Christian Monasticism

—Feast of St. Benedict the African 

I've written here before that one of the many reasons that I became a Catholic was because of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. But the reason goes deeper than just this historical one-off. 

You see, one of the reasons that I became a Catholic was because of monks and nuns who have given up everything to follow Christ and God and still do so to this day. I admit that I used to think folks who did this were nuts. But a close reading of scriptures show that it isn't. 

For Bernard of Clairvaux's Bible Reading Program to Make Sense of the World

—Feast of St. John of Egypt

Back in October of last year, I shared thoughts written by a Doctor of the Church with you. It was from a homily St. Bernard of Clairvaux had written and preached to the brothers in his order about one of the books in the Old Testament. As I was re-reading the homily today, these words of truth leapt off the screen,

there are two evils that comprise the only, or at least the main, enemies of the soul: a misguided love of the world and an excessive love of self...

For Faith in Repose: Thomas Merton's Letter to a Young Activist

—Feast of the Chair of St. Peter

A little over a week ago, I shared a kind letter from Thomas Merton to a 6th grader. This time, I have another letter that Father Louis wrote someone. He share some advice for a "Young Activist." It too is kind, but geared toward a more mature soul.

As human beings, we are immortal souls in mortal bodies. The irony is that we feel compelled to do many things, and we are called to take actions. And yet, what the contemplatives like Father Louis help teach us is that we must pace ourselves.

For Faith in Action: Thomas Merton's Letter to a 6th Grader

—Feast of St. Catherine de Ricci 

I don't exactly remember where I found what follows, so forgive me for not providing footnotes. I was reading Jesuit Fr. Jim Martin's, recent blog post reflecting on today's gospel reading. The reading from Sirach applies as well.

The message is simple, yet paradoxically difficult, like most of the tenets of our faith. As Father Jim notes, it is simply "be kind." Simple, but my kids (and I) are still working on doing this so it is not easy!

While pondering this message,  the memory of this kind letter written by Fr. Louis (Thomas Merton) to a school child popped into my head. 

Because of Fully Baked Thoughts Like These by Algar Thorold

—Feast of Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen 

I've been pretty quiet as the year 2010 wound down and the New Year approached. Here is one of the reasons why: I have been searching for treasures that I can share with you.

My final post of 2010 was on resolving to choose, or more accurately, resolving to being open to being chosen by, a patron saint for the New Year. I hope many of you took me up on that resolution because the witness of the saints is one of the reasons that continually answers the question of the title of this blog.

Thérèse of Lisieux: the Mind of Lao Tzu, with the Heart of Confucius

—Feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus

Today we celebrate the feast of a Doctor of the Church, the little nun who could, the Little Flower, Thérèse of Lisieux. Responsible for countless conversions to the Faith, she bowled over Thomas Merton, pulled a fast one on Webster Bull, and sank, for all intents and purposes, John C.H. Wu's battleship, with a direct hit amidships.

Do you have friends that left the Church to follow the lights of Eastern Spirituality? Introduce them to the Little Flower. John was so impressed with her Story of a Soul, that he immediately resolved to become a Catholic as soon as possible.

For The Witness Of Dom Lou Tseng-Tsiang (Circa 1948)

—Feast of the Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The other day, I finished reading John C.H. Wu's Beyond East and West. It is a great story and one which sadly is out of print. Today I am reading the book written by his friend Lou Tseng-Tsiang, briefly Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister of China. Here he is as a Benedictine monk and priest named Dom Pierre-Célestin. Is it just me, or does he look like the very model of serenity?

His friend John Wu called him Dom Lou, and he mentioned him a few times in Beyond East and West. What follows are a few of Dom Lou's thoughts on his conversion from the, again out of print, book he authored entitled Ways of Confucius and of Christ. 

Because Once Upon A Time, The Premier of China Was A Catholic

Imagine that you woke up to the news this morning that a former President of the United States, say Jimmy Carter for example, has just held a press conference saying that he has entered the Abbey at Gethsemane to become a Cistercian monk. Would you be flabbergasted? Amazed? Incredulous? Or would you be intrigued? That's how I felt when I learned the news that I am going to share with you today.

I am humbled, though,  to report the following story to you, but here goes. Just like the title of this post claims, at one time the Premier of China was a Catholic. And I'm not talking about the Island of Formosa either. I mean mainland China, before Mao Zedong took over. Why, you may ask, is this humbling to learn?

For All the Saints: Bernard of Clairvaux

Today we celebrate the feast day of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval monk, writer and a gifted preacher. This Doctor of the Church was born in Burgundy in 1090.  I  heard about him earlier this year over breakfast with  a dear friend who is a medieval historian and an expert on the Crusades. The only St. Bernard I remember hearing about  prior to that conversation was a dog. That breed is named after a different St. Bernard.

There is much to learn about and from the life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, considered one of the last Fathers of the Church. His father was a knight who died in the First Crusade. Encouraged by his devout mother, St. Bernard joined a Cistercian monastary when he was 22. His enthusiasm for the cloistered life was so great his four brothers and nearly 30 friends joined the monastery too. He later founded and became Abbott of Clairvaux Abbey. While St. Bernard was a contemplative, politicians, bishops and kings sought him out. Consequently, his life was woven in with the politics of the the Second Crusade and of the Papacy.

For All the Saints: The Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne

Guest post by William “Mac” McCarthy
Blogging makes surprising connections. Back in the day when I was a lapsed Episcopalian and he was the rare Catholic at our New England school, Mac lived down the hall from me. Forty years later, now an attorney in Bakersfield, California, he read YIM Catholic and quickly promised me a write-up on an extraordinary group of Catholic martyrs, whom we honor on July 17.

“Permission to die, Mother?”
“Go, my daughter!”

During the French Revolution’s Reign of terror, on the evening of July 17, 1794, in Paris’s Place de la Nation, a hardened crowd waited at the guillotine for the carts carrying that day’s “batch” from the Palais de Justice. A heavy stench from the putrefying blood in the pit below the scaffold hung over the plaza. During the five weeks the guillotine had stood in the Place de la Nation, a thousand severed heads had fallen into the blood-stiffened leather bag of Sanson, the Paris executioner. The blood pit had been enlarged once already but had quickly filled up again.

For All the Saints: Paulinus of Nola

St. Paulinus was born to an aristocratic Roman family in the fourth century after Christ but his saintly life is revered to this day, particularly in southern Italy, where he is remembered for his devotion to the poor.

(Pictured here is La Festa dei Gigli in Nola, where several large statues in honor of the saint, placed on towers, are carried upon the shoulders of the faithful around the city.)

Two aspects of Paulinus' life intrigue me. First, the writer's correspondents are a who's who of fourth century saints : Martin of Tours. Jerome, Ambrose  and, most notably Augustine. Second, my paternal grandparents grew up a stone's throw from Nola, in a region beset by wrenching poverty and natural disasters. Nola sits outside Naples on the plain between Mount Vesuvius and the Appennines.

Thanks to Dog Training Tips from the Monks of New Skete

On Memorial Day, I tried to sit on the front steps of my parish to watch the town parade. But our 10-month-old puggle, who had just joined our family, wouldn't sit still. Riley ran all over the stairs, annoying other families, knocking over water bottles, tangling her leash with the leashes of other small dogs calmly watching the parade. My friend Dan, who witnessed the unfolding drama, said to me: "You've got to lose that retractable leash and start reading the monks' books on dog training." After the parade, he offered to walk Riley part of the way home  I walked behind them, astonished to see how Dan was able to keep Riley calm and walking right beside him.

 I have spent the intervening weeks poring over  "How to be Your Dog's Best Friend" by the Monks of New Skete. In the process, Riley and I have been transformed.

Because Here in Nashville, God Is With Us in Our Deepest Need

Guest post by Julie Cragon
 
Nashville has pulled together as a family. This is due, in no small part, to the prayers of the faith-filled and the Holy Spirit working through our hands and feet.

Last Saturday, I sat in this very spot at St. Mary's Bookstore and worried as creeks and drains began to fill due to the heavy amounts of rain. By late in the day, we were hearing of families pumping out basements due to flooding. Soon, stories of flooded basements turned into stories of moving furniture from first to second floors, which became stories of evacuations and boat rescues and then stories of total losses and even deaths.

A Question of Order

TGIF! Time for us laymen and women to indulge in fantasy! Let’s say you were going to be a priest. (It’s OK, ladies, you can play along here, no foul.) Let’s say further that you were going to “enlist” in an order. Which one would you choose? Augustinian, Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit? Benedictine, Carmelite, Cistercian? Or would you opt for what Frank calls “hard corps”—the Carthusians?

I’ll put my two cents in the offering plate and then leave it to readers to vote (poll at right) and comment (below).

To Pray for Vocations Like This

Each of our two grown daughters is facing the question of vocation. One is oriented to the arts, one to business; neither is presently a Catholic. So the idea of a capital-v Vocation does not figure. Still, watching a joyous interview (in four installments below) with a Carmelite nun, Sr. Cushla, put a prayer in my heart for my children, and yours, today.

Because Monks are Just Soldiers in Awkward Clothes

Three days among the Trappist fathers and brothers of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, convinced me that monastic life is both less weird and more difficult than I had previously imagined. It was like discovering that monks are not space aliens, but are instead an elite unit of Navy Seals. (The photo is Abbot John O'Connor, whose life spanned the Civil War and World War II, 1864–1945.)

I described Spencer and some of my personal experiences on retreat there in a previous post. The first evening at supper in the retreat house, ten retreatants, all men, ate together. I looked around the small dining room and saw a typical distribution of American males, young and old, fat and thin—just guys. Except for the silence, and a lecture on the Gospel of Matthew piped in while we ate, it could have been anywhere. After dinner, we might have headed to a sports bar. I knew we were missing the Steelers-Broncos game on Monday Night Football.

The following morning, we attended Lauds together at 6 a.m. It was our first chance to sit at the rear of the nave in the abbey church, looking past the choir monks toward the main altar (as in the above photo from the abbey Web site). Mass follows Lauds, and during the Benedictus I knew that the priest traveling with me would be going to the sacristy to vest, so that he could concelebrate Mass. Then, as the Benedictus began, not one but eight of my nine fellow retreatants went to vest. All but one of these American guys was a priest! I had had no idea.

If these priests on retreat were just guys, I started thinking that the monks were super-guys. I talked Wednesday morning with one of two friends from Beverly who accompanied me. We shared impressions from two days of sitting at the back of the nave for Lauds, Mass, and Vespers. (For the offices of Vigils and Compline, we sat in side chapels off the main altar.)

I commented on the diversity of the monks. It was another experience of seeing "just guys," maybe with shorter hair and longer shirts than most, but guys all the same. One could see the age range: everything from just out of school to doddering on a cane. One could see the ethnic and racial mix: an African American priest, several Asian brothers, what looked like a Nordic youth.

I commented to my friend that I suspected the 1947 memoir The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (left) had led to a huge increase of vocations to monastic life following World War II. He agreed, adding, “And I bet the war had a lot to do with it too.” I immediately thought, Yeah, all those GIs looking for something to do with their lives, but my friend added a different spin. He said, “I bet some of those returning soldiers had some pretty heavy things on their consciences.”

Whether or not this was true, it got me thinking seriously of monks as soldiers. This sense was confirmed by my experience of Vigils, the longest office of the day, lasting usually from 3:30 a.m. sharp (monks are prompt) to about 4:10.

I set my alarm each morning for 2:50 so that I could arrive in the side chapel by 3:00 and say a rosary before the office began. I was the first to arrive in the church, even before the sacristan could be heard shuffling about in sandals, lighting the few lamps used for Vigils, ribboning the lectionaries, and so on. In these twenty minutes before the first brothers began padding almost inaudibly down the stairs from their dormitory into the choir, I realized something about night, about monks, about courage.

God made the night. He separated the darkness from the light, calling the dark times “night.” Night is dark, mysterious, and even in this abbey church before Vigils, a bit terrifying. The silence here in Spencer, in high grazing country fifteen miles from the hum of truck tires on the Mass Pike, is intense. The faint humming sound I hear is some combination of breeze off the abbey walls and the current of my own cardiovascular system. There is something to be sought here, perhaps something to be found, maybe even something to be feared. Yes, it does put "the fear of God" into a man.

Anyone, monk or man, grunt or Navy Seal, who enters this darkness every night and makes it his own personal patrol is moving in a realm most mortals would prefer to sleep through. I don't wonder that the monks of St. Joseph Abbey pray side by side, virtually shoulder to shoulder, in long uniforms that keep them warm and probably comfort them. This is hard man's work they are doing. And like the men and women of our armed forces, they are doing it for you and me.

Thanks to St. Martin, Thanks to Fr. Matthew

It's a surprising path that leads a man from a 4th-century saint to a 21st-century monk and home again, but that's a summary of my week—on retreat at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, beginning Monday evening; home in Beverly on Thursday afternoon, a day ahead of schedule. Of such minor miracles this Catholic life is made.

Like many Catholic guys, I suppose, I have wondered about the monastic life: would I? could I? (though never) should I? The answer to that third question is, of course, I shouldn't. I am married. Not gonna happen. Retreats, though, allow a man to dally with monasticism, like reading a good novel over a four-day period, then putting it down and going out to rake the leaves.

I'm sure I will write again before the weekend is up about my experience of Trappist life, viewed from the outside as a visitor to Spencer. But what is burning to be written right now is why I came home 24 hours ahead of schedule.

If I had been blogging Wednesday, instead of under enforced lockdown (no internet service in guest quarters at the abbey), I might have written about St. Martin of Tours. That's him on the horse in an El Greco painting of his—legendary?—meeting with a beggar. He gave the beggar half of his cloak. Wednesday, November 11, is Martin's feast day.

There's enough written about St. Martin elsewhere that I can focus on the things Martin and I have in common. He was the son of a Roman military officer (check, Dad was a WWII veteran) who moved west into Gaul, or present-day France, to follow his father's career (check, we moved from Minnesota to Connecticut when I was 10 and Dad took a new position). Martin was a convert (check) who favored the life of a hermit (check, or at least Katie thinks sometimes that I want to be a hermit, and perhaps I give her reason). But here's the thing: Continually through his career as a hermit, then as a bishop, then as what amounted to an international statesman, Martin found himself pulled into the public arena, into engagement with his fellow men, while all the time feeling drawn to a quiet life of contemplation. It is in this tension between retirement and engagement, between the hermit and the man of action, that I recognize Martin of Tours as my brother.

Already by Wednesday, St. Martin's feast day and only my second full day in Spencer, I was thinking much and fondly of my engaged life in Beverly, my vowed life as husband, father, bread-winner, and lay Catholic.

Then came Father Matthew. Our retreat director has been living on the grounds at Spencer for 58 years, or since the year I was born. I use the phrase "on the grounds" advisedly because St. Joseph's Abbey has a long history that began in Nova Scotia in 1819. In 1950, the abbey, long since moved to Cumberland, Rhode Island, burnt to a Gothic cinder. By the following summer, just as I was being born 3,000 miles away in Oakland, California, Matthew (then a novice) and others were building new abbey buildings in Spencer, from fieldstone they quarried themselves. The abbey church (above right) and chapter house (triangle, left-center) are the public face of a huge property that today includes four going businesses: Trappist® Preserves, The Holy Rood Guild (manufacturers of high-end vestments), a bookstore, and year-round retreats.

Father Matthew (right) led three conferences, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning—after serving us breakfast in a true gesture of Trappist hospitality. He proposed to teach us a few things about Pope Benedict's theology, and each morning offered both nuggets of general interest and (for me) personal insights. This is not the place to get overly personal, and some of the insights were deeply so. The upshot of Thursday morning's conference was that I went afterward to Father Matthew for confession. Again, let's not get personal; it's enough to say that for my penance, Father Matthew asked me to sit before the Blessed Sacrament in the small Adoration chapel in the Spencer guest quarters and meditate on a particular matter.

I spent about half an hour in the Adoration chapel. About fifteen minutes in, I shifted my attention from the Blessed Sacrament, beautifully placed inside a silver dove that hovers over the altar, to an icon of Jesus on the right wall of the chapel. I had never really looked at an icon before, I mean looked at one, but as I did so now and continued to meditate on the matter Father Matthew and I had discussed, a clear thought came to me: Go home. Go home now. Swirling lights and ethereal music were conspicuously absent from this experience of looking and thinking. I only knew that it was time to go home. I arranged for my two friends from Beverly to drive home together and made like the Lone Ranger, disappearing before lunch.

After I finish this post (and she completes a Costco run), Katie and I are going out for a movie-and-dinner date. My experience in Spencer was, for me, a minor miracle, without the lights or heavenly choirs. My life in Beverly is the major miracle, and after three-plus days of "monastic" living, I'm engaged again, and married more than ever.

On Retreat

This blog will go quiet now, at least until Friday 11/13, perhaps as long as a week. With two friends from the parish, I am going on retreat at a monastery nearby. I may have some things to say about the experience when I get back. Meanwhile, if you are relatively new to YIM Catholic or just want to click around for a few entertaining minutes, here are some early posts that you might find worthwhile and/or enjoyable:

• Two more friends from the parish who convince me that Catholicism is good for you
• Why I generally steer away from discussing politics, especially here (others do it far better anyway)
  
• The greatest influence in my religious life, my father
• The Episcopal minister who served as a role model when I was young
• Other influences that kept me moving toward the Church, even when it was the farthest thing from my mind  
• The movie that was my favorite before I became a Catholic and still is
• The book that, in the end, tipped the balance
• How the people I see in front of me every day at Mass inspire me more than almost anything
• The poem, written by a non-Catholic, that somehow captures what the Church means to me
• The most convincing reason to be Catholic: happiness
• And just for fun, a U2 concert in Raleigh NC
  

Or you could just go to this post and follow all the links. It pretty much says it all.