In order to download the slides from this retreat, which centered on the necessity of discernment in our lives, just click here. My lecture notes for the major talks follow.
I
Discernment with Christ: in the Desert and the Garden
Following my commentary on the slides for this talk, I concluded with the following:
Christ discerned in the desert, before assuming his sacred ministry.
The Fathers suggested that he may have gone out into the same place where, after God had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, they first rebelled from him. Where they wandered in the desert in search of the Promised Land, and were are thirsty. So, we are told they grumbled and quarreled with Moses, to the point where he was fearful for his life. Grumbling and quarreling are translated into Hebrew, by the way, as Meribah and Massah.
Christ also discerned in the Garden of Gethsemane, agonizing as he stood before his passion and death, preparing to offer the perfect sacrifice upon the altar of the Cross. That Cross, set atop Golgatha, is said by the Fathers to be the site of the grave of Adam, our first parent, whose disobedience condemned the human race. From the wood of the Cross, the new Adam, Christ’s blood dripped into the soil and upon our first parent’s desiccated bones, redeeming us by the blood of the Innocent Lamb.
So do I invite you to enter your own deserts and gardens this weekends, seeking God’s will for your lives.
Accompanied by Christ, may you hear his voice, discern his will and receive the graces you need to do it.
II
Discernment and the Cross
Saturday, 9:30am
What do I need to be happy?
To do God’s will, certainly. And most of the time I go around convinced that his will is that I have a really good time…that he give me all the gusto I can take.
That he make me powerful and famous.
Many of us think like that.
But the truth is, while the road to success may be satisfying for brief moments, but it’s not the key to happiness.
Well how about money? Will money make me happy? There’s a friend of mine who likes to say that if money can't buy happiness, at least it can rent it for a little while.
What if I won a million bucks; would that be enough to make me happy? Would it? Maybe not. One study shows that most young people who win the lottery or inherit a windfall will, after just five years, lose half of the money through poor spending and bad investments.
Another study tells us that 10 years after winning the lottery, the average winner has only saved 16 cents of every dollar originally won. Even worse, around 70 percent of people who win the lottery or get a big windfall eventually end up in bankruptcy. 70% of the time!
So neither money nor success will make me happy. But something else, or rather, someone else, will.
Do you remember when Jesus told his disciples how to preach the Kingdom of God? Go from town to town, he tells them, and proclaim at the top of your lungs: “the Kingdom fo God is at hand!” But then he says something strange: “take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in your belts.” Don’t even bring a change of clothes.
Because none of those things are necessary. None of those things will bring happiness. The only thing we need, and the only thing that will make us happy is the love of God.
The Psalmist says as much: “The LORD himself will give his benefits; [in him] our land shall yield its increase.”
So, you wanna be happy? Just listen to Saint Paul: “be holy and without blemish before him.” Love God and love everyone he sends your way. It’s that simple.
Saint Francis of Assisi understood how to be happy. One cold winter’s day he was walking with Brother Leo, coming down from the Carcere, the winter retreat where he would pray for weeks at a time (even in the wind and the snow). Brother Leo turned to him and asked, “tell me, Father Francis, how to be happy? What is perfect joy?”
That’s a good one! Francis replied. For if we could perform all sorts of miracles, cure the lame, exorcise demons, make the blind see and bring speech to the dumb, and even raise people from the dead, if we could preach sermons that would convert the world…if we were successful enough to do all these things, we would still not have perfect joy.”
Then how do we find perfect joy, the puzzled Leo asked him.
Trudging through the snow, the shivering monks could see smoke coming from the chimney of a farm house in the distance, and as they got closer they could see a family gathered around a table before a roaring fire, each with a big dish of pasta in front if them, laughing and singing.
Ahhhh, brother Leo shouted. Now I understand, for soon these folks will invite us to sit by the fire and warm our frozen fingers and feed us a big bowl of pasta and sing with us and laugh. That is, assuredly perfect joy!
No, Father Francis said. That is not perfect joy. So they trudged on toward the monastery, where from a distance, Brother Leo could smell supper and knew that after the prayers the brothers would gather around the fire and sing together as brothers do and eat and be merry. That, he turned to Francis again, now I know what perfect joy is, Father Francis.
No, Father Francis replied. Now would not be perfect joy.
So the puzzled companion approached the big door at the front of the monastery with the the equally frozen Saint Francis. It seems that the door was manned by the youngest and newest of the monks, who had not yet met Francis or Leo, both of whom now looked like two scruffy and smelly bums, half frozen by the wind.
So when they knocked on the door, the young porter answered, and thinking them ne’r do wells, grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck and threw them into the snowbank, slamming the door behind them.
Brother Leo dusted himself off and ran to Father Francis, who smiling, looked up from the snowbank and said, There Brother Leo is perfect joy. To share in the suffering of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the most rejected of men. That, brother, is perfect joy.
Not in money. Not in success. But only in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. As Saint Francis tells us in his prayer before the crucifix:
Most High and Glorious God,
give light to the darkness of my soul.
Give me right faith, certain hope and perfect charity.
Lord grant me wisdom and insight
that I might always discern,
your holy and free will.
III
Discernment and Authority
As most of you know, I spent more than twenty years of my life working in one way or another with the translation of the Roman Missal, and of the thousands of words with which we struggled, perhaps the hardest to understand was the Latin word Supplices
As in the Roman Canon, the First Euchristic Prayer:
Súpplices te rogámus, omnípotens Deus
In the end, the Bishops rendered supplices with the words “in humble prayer.”
In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God
Supplices is the word of a supplicant, one kneeling, begging, entreating in humble submission…beseeching God. That’s why it's used where it is in the Roman Canon. There’s a wonderful poetic ballet played out as we bow low saying supplices and ask that Christ bear the gifts we have placed upon this earthly altar to his altar in heaven!
The supplices of the Roman Canon thus signifies the joining of our sacrifice to his, a union of heaven and earth, and even a glimpse into what we shall know, God willing, in the eternity of heaven.
And it all starts with supplices. But I’m afraid, we're not very good at it.
We’re not very good at facing the fact that I am little and God is big: that God is greater and more beautiful, omniscient, omnipotent, all loving…Bigger than I could ever imagine.
The hardest thing for our culture and time (let’s face it, the hardest thing for us!) is to recognize our littleness and God’s greatness, our utter dependence on his grace.
Supplices means I have to obey, and obedience is not exactly one of my favorite things. I'm not too thrilled by littleness and obedience, and it comes out in the strangest ways sometimes. Ask my best friend, who turned to me one day after a long period of my spouting all knowingly and said, you know James, you're the only one I know who can make me cry with frustration.
Yet, we are made for obedient love, and from the moment we went down into those waters of Baptism with Christ were joined to his death, it's all we've been about. A constant conversion to life from death, and to purity from sin, and to light from darkness.
Such a continuing conversion is rooted in a sense of self that emerges from a radical humility, an assuredness that I am not God....the Shema Israel, which heralds and caps every act of Jewish worship, says it all: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one." It's a takeoff on the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God and you shall have no false Gods before me.”
But we fight against it all the time. Indeed, is there anything which I fight against more instinctively than the sense that I am not God. I once heard a certain Roman cardinal utter the ultimate sharp rebuke to a staffer who was heatedly trying to convince him of something: “Suppose, Father, just for a moment, that you were not God.”
We fight against those incontrovertible truths with our every waking breath. Just like our first parents, whose sin, ultimately, was not the fruit stolen from the tree, but the disordered conviction that they could be God if they just ate the right kind of fruit.
You see it in every three year old, possessed by the absolute conviction that he is the center of the universe, the ultimate arbiter of meaning, justice, and truth, in other words that he, stamping his feet, screaming and crying is God.
It happens to us all. We scream and threaten and hold our breath until we turn blue.
But then we reach the point where we stop stamping our feet and find ourselves knocked off of our high horse and on our knees. That’s why those moments in life are such a blessing, because they knock you off your feet and onto your knees.
We are made for obedient love. It is our dignity. It is our destiny. It is our purpose for being.
A practical note, drawn for the Saint to whom this year of Saint Joseph is dedicated.
Why are we called to be obedient to our legitimate superiors? Is it because they are always right? They are always brighter than us, more talented than us and always more capable of making the right decision?
Not necessarily. Because sometimes your legitimate superior will be less bright than you, less experienced and sometimes even less capable of making the right decision.
But you obey with docility because God has made this man your Bishop or your Pastor and its up to God alone to make sense of it. And for now God calls that person to make the decisions and you to obey them, as a participation, if nothing else, in the kenotic self giving, the obedience unto death which is at the heart of Christ’s perfect sacrifice of love upon the Cross for our salvation.
Saint Joseph helps us understand obedience in a very real way. Actually Origen does, when he writes:
"Joseph understood that Jesus was superior to him even as he submitted to him, and, knowing the superiority of his charge, he commanded him with respect and moderation. Everyone should reflect on this: frequently a lesser man is placed over people who are greater, and it happens at times that an inferior is more worthy than the one who appears to be set above him. If a person of greater dignity understands this, then he will not be puffed up with pride because of his higher rank; he will know that his inferior may well be superior to him, even as Jesus was subject to Joseph.”
I think of another Joseph, Joseph Ratzinger, our beloved Pope emeritus. After experiencing the increasing weight of his physical limitations he set aside the Petrine office for a life of prayer. "I am,” he told us, now a “simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this Earth.”
And then he, the Pope did a remarkable thing. Joseph of Bavaria made a promise of obedience, “unconditional reverence and obedience,” to whoever his successor will be. A promise he has kept.
Did he do it because he knew his successor would be a better theologian than him, a more powerful preacher or a more effective Pope. No. He did it because there could be only one Pope, and he, the emeritus, would render him unconditional obedience and respect.
He did it because he belied the words he preached years before:
“Only if we know how to lose ourselves, if we give ourselves, may we find ourselves. When this occurs, it is not our will that prevails, but that of the Father to which Jesus submitted himself: ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.’ (Lk 22:42)…. This is what St. Joseph has taught us, with his renouncing, with his abandonment, that in a certain sense foreshadowed the imitation of the Crucified Jesus, the paths of fidelity, of the resurrection, and of life.” (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, homily 19 March 1992)
Let me close with Saint Benedict's description of the three ways of loving God. You remember it. At first, Saint Benedict tells us, we love God because we love ourselves. I don't want to go to hell, so I do what he wants.
At the second stage, I love God because he is lovable. I have no choice. I have so deeply fallen in love within him that I want only to do his will.
And then there's the third stage of loving God, the one which few reach but the only state in which true holiness and purity reside, wherein I love me only because God loves me. Only then does my every waking moment seek the will of God. My next breath has value only if it is part of God's plan. My fondest hopes and my deepest desires are but cinder and ash unless they are a part of his plan. In other words, it is not my will but his, not me, but Christ Jesus in me, it is I, like John the Baptist, who must decrease and he who must increase.
IV
Discerning the Voice of God
Saturday, 7:00pm
I begin with story. From the Book of the Prophet Samuel. One day Eli was asleep in his usual place. His eyes had lately grown so weak that he could not see. The lamp of God was not yet extinguished,* and Samuel was sleeping in the temple of the LORD where the ark of God was. The LORD called to Samuel, who answered, “Here I am.” He ran to Eli and said, “Here I am. You called me.” “I did not call you,” Eli answered. “Go back to sleep.” So he went back to sleep. Again the LORD called Samuel, who rose and went to Eli. “Here I am,” he said. “You called me.” But he answered, “I did not call you, my son. Go back to sleep.” Samuel did not yet recognize the LORD, since the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. The LORD called Samuel again, for the third time. Getting up and going to Eli, he said, “Here I am. You called me.” Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the youth. So he said to Samuel, “Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’”
When Samuel went to sleep in his place, the LORD came and stood there, calling out as before: Samuel, Samuel! Samuel answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” Samuel grew up, and the LORD was with him, not permitting any word of his to go unfulfilled. Thus all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba came to know that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the LORD.
Holiness means listening for the voice of the Lord. And answering him.
Saint James: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
And again, in the rule of Saint Benedict: “Listen carefully…and incline the ear of your heart.” Listening with the ear of the heart is what every good therapist or a great spiritual director does, one of whom once described his work as “listening people into health.” It’s what friends do, as the old saying says: “Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.”
So you begin the healing by listening….not listening for what you to hear, but listening to what they want to say. Listening with your heart.
Even at Mass, Pope John Paul II, in an address to Bishop of the United States in 1998 told us about the essential value of listening. “Active participation,” he suggested, “does not preclude the active passivity of silence, stillness and listening: indeed, it demands it. Worshippers are not passive, for instance, when listening to the readings or the homily, or following the prayers of the celebrant, and the chants and music of the liturgy. These are experiences of silence and stillness, but they are in their own way profoundly active. In a culture which neither favors nor fosters meditative quiet, the art of interior listening is learned only with difficulty. Here we see how the liturgy, though it must always be properly inculturated, must also be counter-cultural.”
The fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew begins with the beatitudes. Then Jesus speaks of salt and light, teaches about the law and about anger, adultery and divorce. Then he speaks about retaliation against out enemies, concluding this remarkable series of moral exhortations with the simple phrase. "So, be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.”
It’s just like what the Lord said to Abraham when he established the first Covenant: “I am God the Almighty. Walk in my presence and be blameless.” God’s part of the bargain is to reveal himself to us. Our part, is to become like him.
Our beloved Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI suggests we can find the secret to this holiness by imitating the lives of the saints, who “let Jesus so totally overwhelm their life that they could say with St Paul “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
The Saints, like St. Francis, who when he heard the voice of Jesus speak to him from the crucifix in the crumbling church of San Damiano, set out with a naïve stubbornness, taking the Lord’s command literally: Rebuild my Church!
He set about literally rebuilding the church of Saint Damien and then the little chapel we now call the porziuncula, the site of both the birth of the Franciscans and the death of their founder.
I have always loved the porziuncula as a prototype of what a church could be. Unpretentious but washed in grac; beautiful, but with a beauty which points beyond itself, its walls encrusted with the prayers and the tears of generations of folks like you and me.
But what impresses me the most about this impressive little chapel is what it says on the floor at the door as you enter. Hic Locus Sanctus Est. “This Place is Holy.” It is the ultimate iconium to a building, and the ultimate purpose of each man’s life: to be called holy, beatus, sanctus.
Of course, only God is truly holy, as the angels who stand before the throne understand. But the Saints who aspire to join their voices with the heavenly hosts know that they were made by God to reflect his glory, to shine with the splendorous light of the face of God. It may be only a reflection, but we were made for this great work.
And we spend our lives polishing our souls and refocusing our hearts that we might be worthy of the work.
The Council fathers wonderfully envisioned the whole world called to holiness: priests and popes, and parents and toddlers, even politicians and pawn brokers, each called to holiness, preparing themselves for an eternal destiny of praising the God whom they have spent a lifetime seeking to reflect (as in a mirror, darkly), day by day.
“...all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God, should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”
Classically, the holy life is described as characterized by the exercise of the Cardinal virtues:
Temperance
Fortitude
Justice
Prudence
“Temperance,” Saint Augustine wrote, “is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved.” It is seeking balance, letting go more than clinging to the things of this world and valuing the way of God more than the way of the flesh.
“Fortitude,” Saint Augustine insisted “is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object.” It is hanging in there despite the cost. It is loving in the face of rejection. It is perduring to the end because it is the right thing to do.
“Justice,” he advised, “is love serving only the loved object.” It is wanting to do the right thing rather than the expedient thing. It is thinking of love before thinking of self-interest.
And “Prudence,” the Bishop of Hippo insists, “is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it.” Prudence is probably one of the hardest won of the virtues, for it is not biting the head off the person who says something to hurt us. It is thinking before we act. It is considering the implications of what we are about to do before we do it.
Like Eli, we seek to live a life of holiness, that we might hear the voice of God, whispering into our souls.
V
Can you drink the cup?
So here we are at the end of our retreat. We have spent these days with Christ in the garden, seeking to drink from the cup which God has given to us and discern his will.
In doing so, we seek only the will of God and to turn away from everything which keeps us from him. In other words, we seek to go to the Lord with clean hearts.
“Create a clean heart in me, O God,”1 the Psalmist prays. But how does that happen?
The surest way to a clean heart is hinted at in the Book of Revelation when we read that the Saints have washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb. Robes that become sparkling white when washed in the Blood of the Lamb. The Blood of the Lamb. The Blood of Jesus.
And where does Jesus’s blood flow from? It flowed from the heart that beat within his very human chest. A Sacred Heart, which sometimes broke.
The Gospels tell us of two times the Lord’s heart broke when he went to visit his friends in Bethany. You remember the famous times, when, a few weeks before today’s Gospel, Jesus witnesses the dead body of his friend Lazarus. He trembled, the Gospels tell us. The Lord trembled, and then he wept. Not sniffled. Not cried, But wept. For weeping is a sign of a broken heart.
And in today’s Gospel, back at Lazarus’ house, the Lord’s heart breaks again, as he contemplates the suffering and death he is about to endure.
”I am troubled.” he tells his disciples in a remarkable admission. And what troubles him is the suffering he knows he will soon endure. The scourging, the nails and the excruciating death. And, perhaps even worse, the rejection, the condemnation and the execution of their wrath.
“What should I say?” he blurts out, giving us a window into the storm of agony which inflicts his heart. “What should I say?” Father, save me from this hour?' But it was for this very purpose that I came to this hour.”
Jesus’ heart is negotiating with itself, the way human hearts do. This or that? Saint Paul describes what’s going on:
"In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered."
And, of course, in the end Jesus chooses obedient love, faithful love: “Father, glorify your name.” And he opens his arms on the Cross. He wills to become the stone rejected by the builders, the suffering servant and the grain of wheat, crushed and buried for love of us and the glory of God’s name.
✴︎
Saint Patrick, whom we too often consign to shamrocks or witty cards, understood the deep struggle of the human heart.
In his Confessions he writes about one of the most important turning points of his life. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Having escaped his enslavement to the Irish, he has returned home, where his family begs him to stay. But then he has a vision of a letter being read to him by an Irish saint, saying: “We ask you, holy boy, to come back and walk among us.”
Patrick tells us that the vision cut him to the heart. For he was torn between answering God’s call to convert the Irish (a life which promised frustration, suffering and exhaustion), or living a nice comfortable life back home with his family. So he prayed. And this is how he described it: “deep within me…I heard this: He who has laid down his own life for you is speaking in you. And I was thus awakened rejoicing greatly. And again, I saw him Praying within me,”
Who did he see praying within him? “He who had laid down his life for you,” the Lord was praying within him. He goes on: “and I looked…way down deep inside my body…and there he was praying earnestly within me with groans…”2
As Patrick was agonizing, struggling to find the strength to be faithful, he was not alone. But rather deep within his heard, Christ was praying alongside him. The one whose heart was troubled was right there groaning along with Patrick…the one who knew temptation and fear and dread, was as close to Patrick in his agony as he had ever been, with (as Patrick wrote) “unspeakable groans which could not be expressed in words.”
And you know just what Patrick was talking about.
✴︎
Think back to the most desperate moment in your life. The time you were convinced you did not have the strength to do the right thing. The Cross was too heavy, the fear was too great and you knelt there bleeding from the eyes with a broken heart.
Maybe it was the day you were betrayed, or you had to bury the one so cruelly taken from you. Maybe it was when everyone else believed the lie about you and scoffed and whispered behind your back. Maybe it was when they told it was malignant and terminal and all that stood between you and the grave was suffering. Maybe it was…
And there you knelt, like Patrick, with a knife in your heart. And it hurt like nothing else had ever hurt before.
But at that moment, whether it was yesterday, tomorrow or even today…like Patrick, you were not alone. For the one who wept blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, knew what it meant to have a troubled heart, to doubt, to tremble from the inside out in fear…
And he is the faithful God of infinite love, the Son obedient unto death out of love for us, the Lord who walks his Passion with us when we are too little or too weak or too poor or in too much pain. He walks there beside us and he strengthens us, for he is never so close to us as in his Passion and Cross.
For here is the great mystery of our lives: that “suffering is the inner side of love…”3
So the next time your heart is broken and you weep the prayer of suffering, look to your side and you will see Christ there, kneeling beside you, joining your Passion to his own.
And remember the advice once offered to us by St. Francis de Sales:
“The everlasting God has, in his wisdom, foreseen from all eternity the cross he now presents to you as a gift from his inmost heart. He has gazed at with his all-knowing eyes…to see that it be not one inch too large, not one ounce too heavy for you.
He has blessed it…taken one last glance at you and your courage….and sent this cross to you from heaven — a special greeting from God just to you — a gift of his all-merciful love.”
And that is how God creates a clean heart in you.
FINAL BLESSING
