My Advice For Those Discerning

With the transfer of the Postulancy program from Wilmington, DE to Silver Spring, MD, the postulants and simply professed will be under the same roof once again. Holy Name Province is blessed to have eight incoming postulants this year. Their arrival sparked this reflection.

Two years ago I started my journey as a Franciscan. Tomorrow, eight more men will do the same.

Two years ago I started my journey as a Franciscan. Tomorrow, eight more men will do the same.

Having now completed two years of the six-year formation process to become a Franciscan friar, I feel that I have learned a thing or two worth sharing with those discerning religious life. Obviously, my experience is quite particular to my Order, province, gender, and age, but I think that there’s something universal that can be shared with all who are discerning religious life: Give it two years.

What I mean by that is be patient. The entire formation process to become a Franciscan Friar is long (one year of postulancy, one year of novitiate, and four years of temporary profession.) It doesn’t happen overnight, and for good reason. Discernment takes time. Spiritual growth takes time. Building relationships in fraternity takes time. It takes so much time, in fact, that there is a two-year period between entering postulancy and making one’s first official commitment, simple profession. Be patient.

Being patient means giving yourself completely to the program. The first two years are not like the rest of friar life, nor does it claim to be. It is a period of deep spiritual discernment, exposure to a new way of life to try new things, the transformation of self, and the laying of a foundation that will last the rest of your life. These are all critically important. These are all critically tedious and frustrating at times as well. There will be workshops, sharing sessions, confrontations, suggestions and critiques, activities, and people in general that will seem so useless and trivial at the time that you’re going to ask yourself, “What the heck am I doing here?” Sometimes, it’s simply humility and patience that will get you through it. And you will. But I cannot stress it enough: stay open, especially in these times! There have been countless grace-filled moments over the past few years that I didn’t recognize at the time, and had I not been open to try new things, even in the frustrating times, I would have never seen them. Give yourself to the program.

Lastly, most important of all, giving yourself completely to the program means giving up thinking about “all the things I could be doing.” I could be getting a degree; I could be helping the poor; I could be dating; I could be making money; I could be furthering my career; I could be out with friends doing the things we used to do. You’re right: you could be. But you’re not. You’re a part of a once in a lifetime opportunity in which people will take care of everything for you so that you can better know God, yourself, and how that relationship fits with others. Trust me when I say that this is an invaluable opportunity for anyone, even for those who discern away from the friars.

And so I say again, give it two years. What’s two years of your life in the grand scheme of things? Sure, you could discern out, and you would “lose” two years, but think about how much more of an attentive husband, faithful and knowledgeable layperson, effective boss, and empathetic neighbor two years of such an in-depth spiritual program could make you. And if the worst-case scenario were only that, you discern out of religious life after two years a better person, it would seem that you’re risking almost nothing in order to gain everything. What if, on the other hand, that tiny spark of a calling you feel now becomes so enflamed after two years that you can’t think of anything else to do but devote your entire life to God and neighbor? What a wonderful two years that would be.

I now leave you with a prayer that has been very helpful over the past two years in my own discernment, a prayer that has kept me patient in my vocation in good times and bad. May it give you the same peace that it gave me to know that God is working in my life, even if it’s not always obvious.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

 5 Comments

 Posted on August 25, 2013 by

 Discernment, Formation

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Yet Another Transition

Unlike the last two years, the room I'm moving into will be mine for long enough to settle in.

Unlike the last two years, the room I’m moving into will be mine for long enough to settle in.

After two great weeks of vacation, it’s on to the next step of initial formation: post-novitiate studies. (For those keeping score at home, you’ll remember that this is the third stage of initial formation as I discussed it back in 2011. If not, check it out here!) And so for the third time in three years, I packed up all of my belongings and moved into a new house with new people and new responsibilities.

Of these new responsibilities, the most time-consuming, if not most important, will be attending school at The Catholic University of America. In order to be ordained a priest in the Catholic Church, something that I have discerned to be a call of mine, candidates are required to complete 30 credits of undergraduate philosophy and obtain a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree, among other things. Let’s just say that I’ve got a long way to go… The good thing is that I like school, and that I’m actually excited to get back in the classroom.

As friars, there is much more to post-novitiate formation than academics, however. Along with our regular 12-15 credit course loads each term, we will be expected to work in a ministerial setting for roughly eight hours per week, including a bi-monthly supervision meeting and reflections. Supervised ministry such as this allows us an opportunity to apply the theology we learn in the classroom to real-life situations, as well as to gain crucial pastoral experience that simply cannot be learned in a classroom. As of yet we do not know where we will be assigned, but typical ministries include teaching religious education, youth ministry, or Catholic high school ministry; visiting hospitals, nursing homes, or prisons; direct assistance to the poor; and parish work. I will be sure to share extensively about my experience in this area throughout the years.

Beyond these two responsibilities, there is always the responsibility to be “A Brother, Even When Busy,” as I’ve mentioned before. Simply put, we’re a fraternity, not a dormitory. There is a responsibility among each member to add to the life the community by attending prayer and meals, taking on house chores, and simply being present to one’s brothers in a fraternal way in whatever way that may express itself. Certainly is will be the busiest year (so far) when it comes to external responsibilities, and I hope not to place too lofty of expectations on myself and others, but it’s a value that must always be kept in mind.

For now, I’m focusing on getting to know a new community, becoming acquainted with a new (and busy) city, and trying to get my year in order before it starts. I will most definitely continue blogging along the way, continuing to share some experiences from my novitiate year along with new experiences as they happen, but their frequency may not be as regular as they were during the postulant year. I thank you for all of your continue support in prayers and affirmations, and ask that you continue to pray for me as this year gets underway.

 1 Comment

 Posted on August 20, 2013 by

 Post-Novitiate

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This Is Not What I Signed Up For!

Screen shot 2013-08-17 at 9.47.34 AM

Realizing that we bring our own baggage to community life can help prevent resentful comments such as these.

There came a moment during this past year when the luster of novitiate began to fade, and community life became more of a burden than it did a joy. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I looked around at the inane and constantly occurring conflicts in the friary, the unbearable idiosyncrasies of some of the strangest people you will ever meet, and the dysfunction of leadership that still struggles to understand and live the charism of our founder after 800 years of fighting, and just screamed, “This is not what I signed up for!” I signed up to be a part of a group of men that live, work, and pray together to bring about the kingdom of God; a group of men that are identified with and work for the poor and marginalized of society; a group of men that recognize the wonder of creation, the power of the incarnation, and the joy of experiencing it all. That’s what I signed up for.

That same week, I found a letter written by Fr. Jose Carballo, the former minister general of the Order of Friars Minor and the current secretary for the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, to the Poor Clares on their 800th year anniversary. Fr. Carballo writes,

If there is anything that destroys our fraternities it is the pretension of being above others, becoming judges of our brothers and sisters. This is due to our projecting onto them our dreams, and we demand of God and others that they fulfill them. Loving our dream of fraternity more than real fraternity, we turn into destroyers of fraternity. We begin to be accusers of our brothers, and then we accuse God, and finally we become desperate accusers of ourselves. We must remembers that there will never exist the ideal fraternity that can accept our dreams of pretentious pride, and that the fraternity is built on the basis of pardon and reconciliation, since it has so much to do with our own limitations and those of others.

Obviously I knew that there would always be conflicts when it came to differing levels of cleanliness and work distribution, as I’ve written about before, but when I searched further, I found that many of the things that frustrated me the most were not other people; they were the result of things that I brought to community life. Of the most notable was that I brought with me unfair expectations of others, exactly has Br. Carballo writes. Both consciously and subconsciously, I had determined how they should act, what they should believe in, what they should and shouldn’t need. Because I was unable to be flexible with my expectations, they quickly turned into judgments, which turned into condemnations, eventually ending in resentment, something that did not leave me open to new experiences of love.

It was then that I found a book by Jean Vanier that described every feeling, thought, doubt, hope, and situation that I had experienced so far in novitiate. Entitled Community and Growth: Our Pilgrimage, Vanier offers insights and wisdom from his many years of founding communities that are both practical and spiritual. Here’s how he opens the book:

Community is a terrible place. [Good start, right?] It is the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others, we discover our poverty and out weaknesses, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks, our affective and sexual disturbances, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. While we were alone, we could believe we loved everyone. Now that we are with others, we realize how incapable we are of loving, how much we deny life to others. And if we become incapable of loving, what is left? There is nothing but blackness, despair and anguish. Love seems an illusion. We seem to be condemned to solitude and death.

So community brings a painful revelation of our limitations, weaknesses and darkness; the unexpected discovery of the monsters within us is hard to accept. The immediate reaction is to try to destroy the monsters or to hide them away again, pretending they don’t exist, or to flee from community life and relationship with others, or to find that the monsters are theirs, not ours. But if we accept that monsters are there, we can let them out and learn to tame them. This is growth towards liberation.

If that’s not powerfully wise first page, I don’t know what is. The best part? It only gets better. Throughout the entirety of the text, he simply has an eloquent way of weaving together his own experiences of success and failure, insights he’s learned along the way, prophetic condemnations of unhealthy communities, spiritual nourishment, and his own hopes for the future, while maintaining a humble tone throughout.

These two texts were tremendously helpful in my formation this year, and I strongly recommend them to anyone entering community life. For me, they made me realize that what I was getting out of community life was in fact exactly what I signed up for. I signed up to be a penitent with men who recognize their limitations and sinfulness; men who bring with them brokenness and imperfection; men who realize that love is messy; men who know that it’s worth getting on each others’ nerves and letting each other down every once in a way if it means going through life together. I did not sign up to be in a group of perfect men without any need for God, nor did I sign up to be in a group of men exactly like me! Sure, there is a burden to community life some days, but in the end, even those burdens can be entirely grace-filled if you let them. Community life can definitely be a struggle, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 2 Comments

 Posted on August 17, 2013 by

 Fraternity, Novitiate

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Seeking Insecurity

CoinPoverty as a virtue is a difficult concept to define, and an even more difficult concept to get a group of friars to agree on. My concept of poverty is different from Br. X’s whose concept of poverty is different from Br. Y’s. Do we imitate the poor, or do we attempt to eradicate poverty? Is the cheapest option the best, or should we seek the longer lasting and human-conscious options that are more expensive? I present these conflicts not to trivialize or relativize the issue (as I plan on giving my own answers to these questions at some point), but to point out that “poverty” as a goal is very vague, is difficult to define, and is easily spiritualized until actions are no longer virtuous at all. In order to remain faithful to Gospel and the spirit of St. Francis, I think that additional language is necessary to focus our efforts.

One of these words that I have written about before is sufficiency. While the post itself focuses primarily on being content with the present moment, This Moment is Sufficient was stirred by a desire to have only what I needed, spiritually and physically, without any excess. Over the past year, this has been a much more helpful word in terms of evaluating my life as a friar than the word poverty. “Do I have more than I need?” is a much easier question to answer than “Is this keeping with ‘poverty?’” Asking myself this on a regular basis has helped me to live more simply, and to remove any and all things from my life that I do not need.

But with my reflections around kenosis throughout this past year, I found that an ethic of sufficiency needs additional direction in order to live a Gospel life. To be sufficient, is by definition, to have enough. To have this as a goal, while it does limit the possibility of living with excess, is to also never experience deprivation of any kind, to never feel worry or doubt about one’s livelihood, and to never relate to those who do not have enough. On it’s own, it can allow us to be too safe. Even if we live within our means and without extravagance, when we have “enough”, especially when “enough” is accompanied by security and predictability, we are allowed to live a life that is comfortable, and worst of all, complacent. When this happens, we begin to fail Gospel poverty and our communities will inevitably fail with it. With high security and predictability, there is no room for trusting God or looking to God to provide because we become the rulers and suppliers of our own wellbeing; there is no need for a sense of urgency in our work or in our communities because the status quo does not bother us; there is no opportunity for solidarity with the poor (or even with middle class) because we can no longer relate to the anxiety of not being able to make ends meet.

Our natural response, however, is to do the complete opposite. Not only do we not seek the fruits of insecurity, we do everything in our power to rid every ounce of danger from our lives, often times going to great lengths to acquire it: we work too much, we attack others as a way to defend ourselves, we store up treasures that cannot save. We believe that our youth, skills, health, possessions, and social bonds, will last forever, that they will keep us happy and safe from all harm. This is a façade. It is the acceptance of the lie that the gift is more important than the One who gives that gift. It is the acceptance of the lie that we are capable of controlling our own fate, that all that we have acquired is somehow our own to possess, and that we received it based on our own merit. It is the acceptance of the lie that we our own saviors. 

So what does “seeking insecurity” look like? First of all, it does not look like being irresponsible, frivolous, or lazy. When we seek insecurity, we’re not making bad decisions to squander away the gifts we’ve been given. One does not strengthen their relationship with the Gifter by misusing his gifts. The real virtue lies in simply accepting that insecurity is all around us. When we accept the poverty that we have absolutely no control over our fate, that all we have is freely-given, unmerited favor from God, we begin to relate to our possessions, to others, and to God in a completely different way. With this realization, all is gift, and God is the only one worth relying on. In times of great favor, we give glory to God; in times of trouble, God is the first we seek for help; at all times, we are unwilling to waste our lives acquiring, maintaining, and protecting possessions that fade at the expense of relationships that last.

Obviously, there are just as many holes in this ethic as there are with an ethic of sufficiency, but I think together they offer greater grounding in Gospel poverty than “poverty” alone. They force us to look at the issue outside of dollars and cents alone, and focus the discussion on the purpose for the virtue in the first place: relationship with God. In the end, I think that we are only truly free when we accept that we are not in control and choose to seek the One who is. That’s true insecurity worth seeking.

 1 Comment

 Posted on August 11, 2013 by

 Novitiate, Poverty, Vows

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Kenosis: What Could I Let Go Of?

At the beginning of the year I was moved by Jesus’ Kenosis, his self-emptying of his divine privilege, to become human:

“Though he was in the form of God,
[Jesus] did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross.” (Phil 2: 6-8)

Jesus, the second person of the Triune God, chose to empty himself of his power, his will, his security, his appearance, and his life, in order to take on our humanity. What an act of humility! Rather than being called king and worshipped by angels, he was born into poverty, disrespected by many, and executed an innocent man. What an act of trust! Instead of being able to rely on his own authority or ability, Jesus left himself at the mercy of his Father, and remained obedient to the end. What an act of love! John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Jesus’ self-emptying is the perfect act that Francis spent his entire life attempting to imitate. It is the reason that our Order is called the Order of Friars Minor, the “lesser brothers,” and why poverty is so crucial to our charism. Our lives are an act of emptying anything and everything that could leave us feeling self-reliant, in control of our own fate, proud, or above others, in order that we may be totally reliant on God’s love and mercy.

Moved by this, I decided to make an inventory of absolutely everything that I could claim as my own. If I were to follow the example of our Lord with my own act of kenosis, what would I need to give up in order to be completely reliant on God in humility, trust, and love?

At the top of the list were all of my possessions. These were the easiest to think of and included my laptop, camera, music, pictures, and clothes, among other things. I’ve reflected before on the need to keep possessions simple and to make sure that I use them in keeping with Gospel poverty, but now I wonder what it would be like to renounce ownership or use of everything. Luke’s Gospel mentions a number of times that the disciples of Jesus “left everything and followed him.” Could I do this?

As if that question isn’t difficult enough to answer, the rest of the inventory only got harder as I went on. What about all of my legal assets? I have a driver’s license, a decent credit score, US citizenship that includes a right to vote and protections under the law, and as a religious I am tax exempt. The list goes on. I have physical assets such as good health, all of my limbs, working senses, free of any malformations, and fit enough to perform all basic tasks on my own. I have intellectual assets such as normal memory skills, basic brain functioning, and an ability to study at a university. I have social assets that allow me to keep a desirable reputation, friendships, respect from peers and superiors, and the occasional praise. Lastly, I have assets related to the Church: personally, I am in good standing, have a right to teach and preach, and have the backing of an Order, and structurally the Church is alive, it is organized, and there are many opportunities to be active in it in this country.

So I ask myself: What if, like Jesus, I was an alien in a foreign land, was an innocent man treated as a criminal, or was an outcast in society? What if I were to contract a disease that left me physically or mentally dependent on others for basic tasks? What if my reputation was ruined, people no longer liked me, or I was left without any friends? What if the Church was to reject me, the Order was suppressed, or the Church structures were to crumble? Or what if, in a much more likely situation, I was given a direct order to do something without consulting my desires?

In moments of loss, whether it be life-changing or normal day-to-day disappointments, self-inflicted or imposed, there is the possibility for the greatest gain. In recognizing the futility of all of the many things we claim as our own and divesting of ourselves the ownership, feeling of entitlement, and need for any one of them over God’s love, we become free. In these moments, we are being asked to focus less on the gift that has been taken away from us and more on the One who gave it in the first place, the One who wishes to give us even more in return. In times of self-emptying, we realize how futile it is to put our trust in money, good looks, education, or a host of other things that have meaning to us, things that do not last, and how even more ridiculous it is to fight endlessly to maintain control over them.

My goal in all of this is to free myself of any need to control, appropriate, defend with violence, or hoard any gift from God as if that gift were an end in itself. In making this inventory, I seek not to rid myself of all of God’s many gifts, but to recognize the generous bounty of God in my life and to be more dependent on him.

The image I leave with is one that I recently heard in a homily. God’s abundant generosity is like the air all around us. We are gifted freely with more life-giving air to breathe than we could ever consume, and yet, we have a tendency to hold onto this breath, to claim it as our own, and to be afraid to exhale. What good is that gift to us if we hold onto it? We will eventually suffocate, and the air will leave us whether we like it or not. What I’ve learned from Jesus’ experience of kenosis is that it is only in the exhale, the letting go of all that we have, that we are ever able to receive anything else. It is in the letting go of all that we cling to, and the trust that God will provide for us just as he did before, that we are free to love and be loved by God.

 6 Comments

 Posted on August 5, 2013 by

 General Reflection, Novitiate

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Breaking In The Habit

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