It’s a Miracle!

Jesus is a great mystery of faith

Jesus is a great mystery of faith

This year at Catholic University, I am taking a class called “Christology,” the systematic theology course devoted entirely to the person of Jesus the Christ. Among the many questions that we are being asked to investigate (Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Was Jesus God? What is his relationship to the Father? Why did God become flesh? Did Jesus have to die? Did Jesus know he was God? What do we make of the Resurrection?) there is one that has taken hold of my attention this week because, well, it perplexes me: what is a miracle?

Given the amount this word is used and its centrality to the Gospel narratives, this may come at a surprise. What kind of vowed religious doesn’t know what a miracle is? Everyone knows what a miracle is! Fair enough. It is certainly a largely understood concept in common language. But is our common definition(s) based on a) what we believe about God or b) are they largely influenced by popular religion and “Hallmark” notions? This is why I find a need for more investigation, and why I will say at the onset, that I plan to share more questions than answers in this post.

So let’s start with a common definition. What is a miracle? “A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered the work of divine agency.” So says my dictionary. Basically, there are things that God does in our world that are extraordinary and absolutely unexplainable because God has entered into our world and made something amazing happen, e.g. the parting of the Red Sea.

But is this really the definition we want to settle on? Known as the “God of the gaps” explanation, this definition relegates God to those areas that scientific study have yet to understand. But these “gaps” as it were, the filling in of what we cannot otherwise figure out, are narrowing; scientific inquiry yields much more information today than it did 2000 years ago. Also, given the fact that we don’t know everything about nature but are continuing to learn, we have to recognize that there is a huge difference between “things we can’t explain right now” and “absolutely unexplainable.” Putting things in the latter and claiming them to be miracles is first of all arrogant, but worse, it inevitably undermines the claim of miracle when in fact science is capable of explaining its cause years later.

The other problem I see is with the whole notion of God interjecting the world with something not-of-the-world. Do we believe that God is outside of our world, looking in from a far, periodically jumping in to mess with the nature that he created? Surely, the God who created the world and its natural laws is a God that continues to create and govern the world. Even if we want to posit that God is capable of transcending his own laws (He is God after all), it would seem illogical to think that this is the only way that God interacts with the world. Just because we can scientifically explain the chain of events that caused something to happen, isn’t it possible that God is ultimately the primary cause causing everything else to happen? In other words, we may be able to scientifically explain why a person was cured of a deadly disease, but God could still have been working through the doctor to come to the correct diagnosis, the pharmaceutical company to accurately produce the drug, and the nurse to administer it properly.

Understanding miracles in this way shifts the attention away from the undeniable, provable explanation of the “God of the gaps” onto the faith of the beholder. If God is ultimately the primary cause of all secondary causes, well then, it is up to the person of faith to have the eyes to see God’s work all around him/her. The beholder begins to see the world as Francis of Assisi did, not as innate objects following predictable laws, but as creation, the work of an ever-loving God that animates it into being. With these eyes, everything is a miraculous work that can overwhelm… if we have the faith to see it.

This end of the extreme also has some problems, unfortunately. With this “everything is a miracle” perspective, one has to wonder about the initiative of God. If everything fits within the laws of nature, either God is a) a micromanager that makes everything happen without any freedom allowed to creation, or b) the God of Deism, the watchmaker, who set the world in motion according to laws and then remained at a distance watching. In either case, “everything is a miracle” makes nothing a miracle: things only seem extraordinary because of our perspective, not because God has acted in a different way. God may still be its cause, but every act would be just as important as the one previous. This is not a “miracle” as we are investigating.

So what does that leave us with? A miracle could be something “unexplainable,” but we can never know that it is actually unexplainable. It could also be something entirely explainable and ordinary, but unless it catches our attention, one runs the risk of pure subjectivism not knowing which cases are “miracles” and which are ordinary natural laws (see Pat Robertson claiming that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath for a sinful lifestyle in New Orleans). God must clearly be the cause of all things, at least in the primary sense, but then what differentiates “miracles” from regular acts of God’s initiative?

At this point, I think it’s important to look to the experts for some guidance. Cardinal Kasper, a renowned theologian in the field of Christology proposes a theological theory of miracles in his book Jesus the Christ:

  1. Miracles can be extraordinary, unusual, and amazing, leaving them up to interpretation. Drawing on the Second Vatican Council, he says that it is up to the faith community to determine the unity between act and word so that an act of faith measures up with all that has already been received by faith in word (Tradition, Scripture, Teaching).
  2. “A miracle is the result of a personal initiative of God.” A miracle is God attempting to reveal Godself to creation, doing so in symbolic physical form.
  3. “A divine intervention in the sense of a directly visible action of God is theological nonsense.” Something that is so clear that it cannot be disputed removes the element of faith, compelling one to know not believe. God does not want to force us to know or love him. The more powerful the miracle, the more powerful our independence to reject it.
  4. All miracles have multiple interpretations. Like the previous point, miracles do not compel knowledge, but “can only be seen as the act of God by faith.” One’s faith and personhood largely influence how one will understand the initiative of God, and that is okay, for it is the purpose of miracles to “turn people’s eyes upwards, towards God.”

If after reading this post you find yourself more perplexed than you were to start, welcome to theological study! The fact is, much of our faith is a mystery, an aspect of faith that surpasses our ability to know perfectly. But that does not mean that we cannot know anything at all. With careful attention and prayer we can enter into it and be changed by it. If you can live your life in this mystery, seeking God with all your heart so to be given the eyes to see God’s work in you and in the world, there’s only one thing to say: That’s a miracle!

 2 Comments

 Posted on February 7, 2015 by

 Prayer, Theology

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Can You Keep A Secret?

Part of being a good minister is knowing how to keep a secret

Part of being a good minister is knowing how to keep a secret

Over the past three and half years, I have been the recipient of more than a few conversations regarding sensitive material. With increasing occurrence, I find people “wanting to talk,” telling me very private information. Close friends and complete strangers alike have apparently felt comfortable enough to tell me their tragedies, embarrassing stories, questions of faith, and confounding moral dilemmas, without any intrusion on my part.

Why is this, I wonder?

In one sense, I see it as a sign of the speaker’s trust in me, his/her recognition of my character and maturity, and an attempt to be more vulnerable for the sake of fostering our relationship. I see myself as someone willing and able to have an intimate conversation, and people feel comfortable engaging me in a safe environment.

But that’s clearly only one, small part of the story. While I have obviously matured to some degree since entering the friars, I am generally the same person as I was before. Rather, I feel that it is much less who I am as a person as it is what I am as a person. I am a friar minor. I am a seminarian. I am someone who has devoted his life to God and serving God’s people. Most of all, I am someone who is expected to be trained in dealing with difficult matters and required to keep much of what I hear to myself. It is this, the title/position that I bear, that compels people to share their lives with me. Who I am as a person may account for the conversations I have had with close friends, but it certainly doesn’t account for the (non-immediate) family members and complete strangers that have all of the sudden begun offering intimate details about themselves in recent years. There is something much more than me here.

For the most part I welcome it all. It is a great privilege, and frankly, one of the main reasons I became a friar, to have the opportunity to enter into people’s lives so deeply. Being a friar, wearing my habit, gives people a very public and openly accessible opportunity to speak in ways that they would not normally feel comfortable. While some may find it exhausting to engage in these conversations in public, I actively welcome them.

For me, the thing that is much more exhausting is processing and holding onto what I have been told after the fact. While my experience has been nothing compared with someone hearing confessions on a regular basis, I have still heard some tough stuff to handle, situations that shake my sensibilities, shatter my preconceived notions about a person, or just leave me feeling very upset. In my very limited experience, I find that there are two issues to remain aware of.

The first is related to my post Growing in Solidarity. As one becomes awakened to a situation and person, one either chooses to remain distant or is moved towards a state of empathy, even solidarity. A major challenge for me is realizing that the latter is not necessarily the better option. If doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, counselors, police officers, and case workers took on the emotion and status of everyone they served, they would be overwhelmed and useless in a week. One simply cannot emotionally invest him/herself in every person and situation they meet. The toughest thing I think young people in each of these professions face, myself as a seminarian included, is knowing how to keep clear boundaries; we must balance our desire to be deeply invested in the lives we serve while remembering that the problems we hear are not our own. Some of them may be. Like I said in that post, some people or issues will inevitably move us, and as Christians, we are compelled to be converted by them. But not everything can have this effect. At times, being a good minister means being fully present in the moment but with a short memory.

For those moments that absolutely rock us, those situations that move us to the core or upset the way we once viewed the world, this presents another problem: processing the issue with another. For situations with complete strangers outside of the context of confession, the fraternity is an excellent outlet for advice. It’s the whole reason we choose to live in fraternity in the first place. We are in this together and we look to those who have lived this life to guide the new brothers along the way. But what if the situation relates to a well-known parishioner? What if it is a highly sensitive matter to the fraternity? What if it is about another brother? The reason that people invite us into their lives so willingly is that they trust us not to make their story open knowledge. To share a story with a wise brother, even if it is solely for professional advice, still spreads information that was held in confidence. However helpful, it is not always appropriate to go to our brothers for help.

What do we do then? For me, as in all cases of gossip, the first place I have to take anything is prayer. Throughout our lives, ministerial or personal, each of us hears things that we “just have to tell someone.” A lot of times, it is better that we don’t. Taking this to prayer has been an excellent way to release the burden of knowing something I cannot tell and a great way to come to peace with whatever it may be. As I develop my relationship with the triune God, I find that I can bring whatever it may be, trashy or deathly serious, and process it with someone who will not be scandalized by the information or in any way changed in relationship with the person about which I speak. And do you know what? God understands. God understands more than anyone I could possibly speak with, and, if I am right to listen, will help me process the situation and my own feelings better as well.

Ultimately, strictly “offering it up to God” as they say may not be the final solution every time, as serious situations require serious measures. But that doesn’t negate the importance of prayer nor does it diminish the expectation of secrecy many have when they open up. In fact, it is for these very reasons that people open up to us in the first place: they know that we will take their lives with us to prayer and that we will not share their story unless it is in their best interest. Thus, when I look at it this way, it’s very easy to answer the title question: a good minister never has to be the sole possessor of precious information, carrying the burden alone, but knows that God and God’s people are always there to guide along the way.

 Posted on January 19, 2015 by

 Ministry, Prayer

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Finding Some Quiet

Words words words

Out here, all I could hear was the wind and my own breathing

After a long semester of school, ministry, and fraternal gatherings, it was time for some reflection, some peace, and most of all, some quiet. Do you ever stop to think about how much noise is in our lives? It’s everywhere. From the sounds of the city, to the television or music that is constantly playing, to our phones that allow (and demand) constant contact. We are constantly being bombarded with sound, moving from one distraction to another.

Last week, I got away from it all. Traveling with another student friar, I spent the week at Mt. Irenaeus, the secluded spiritual center of the friars in western New York. Miles from the closest town, set on 387 acres of woods on a hillside, I spend five days in a cabin with nothing to do but relax and pray.

Wow.

Words cannot describe the peacefulness of the week. Snow fell lightly but constantly for two days, muffling any sort of sound there might have been. A walk in the woods rendered nothing to the ear but the wind through the trees and my own breathing; even the sounds of chirping birds were nowhere to be found. There were no cars. No televisions. No radios. For much of the week, it was just me and nature.

And oh how relaxing compared to the daily grind. Although I spent a couple hours with the friars each night for dinner, prayer, and fraternity around the fire, I was free to do whatever I wanted for much of the day. Part of my focus, I’ll admit, was simply not having a focus at all: I woke up when my body woke up, I read what I wanted to read, and prayed when and how I felt compelled to pray. Much of the semester was so full of structure and deadlines that it was a true joy to simply unwind and relax in a prayerful way.

That being said… I knew I needed some order in my life; no focus at all would have killed me after 12 hours! I decided that the retreat would have a loose theme to it: “How have I done so far at being a friar, and in what ways might I still need to convert myself to the way of St. Francis?” In other words, where have I been, and where do I need to go. As a Franciscan, the task was simple: bringing a Bible, the Rule of St. Francis, the General Constitutions of the Order, and the Ratio for formation (basically the plan for training friars), I reflected on my own life and either “checked” things that I do well or circled things that I needed to try better. I know what some of you are thinking. “That’s incredibly juridical and boring!” In a sense, maybe. There is always a fear that we will turn into Pharisees, conscious only of the letter of the law and becoming proud of our ability to fulfill it. Point taken. But at the same time, these documents are not simply a list of narrow laws, they are spiritual documents to guide us in the way of St. Francis. Written very generically, they speak of values and ideals, encouraging us to live and act in a way that best fits our time and place. “Law” in this sense is fundamentally important to being Franciscan and Christian.

What more does one need?

What more does one need?

I’ll leave the details of the evaluation up to my formators, but I’ll just say that it was a really fruitful experience. Not only did I find that much of what was written was already fully integrated into my person, an encouraging step in my formation, I was able to spend a lot of time reflecting on those aspects of my Franciscan life that were left wanting and to come up with ways in which I could make my life more “authentically Franciscan.” While I think there will always be a discomfort within me when comparing my ideals to my lived reality, this experience grounded me in who I am, and inspired me to continue becoming who God has called me to be. In the quiet of the forest, the Holy Spirit spoke and I listened. It was a wonderful experience.

But the Holy Spirit wasn’t done speaking when I turned the final page and felt that my “life plan” was all in order. No, the Holy Spirit is funny like that: s/he can’t be contained by my silly plans. Having nothing more to “do” by the end of day three, I picked up a book by the prolific Christian writer Henri Nouwen to fill the time. Here’s what he wrote in the first few pages:

If you can’t find God in the middle of your work–where your concerns, worries, pains, and joys are–it does not make sense to try to find Him in the hours set free at the periphery of life. If your spiritual life cannot grow and deepen in the midst of your ministry, how will it grow on the edges?

Prayer is not a preparation for work or an indispensable condition for effective ministry. Prayer is life; prayer and ministry are the same and can never be divorced. If they are, the minister becomes a handyman and the priest nothing more than another way to soften the many pains of daily life. (Introduction of Creative Ministry by Henri Nouwen)

I found myself indicted by his words. In a sense, wasn’t that exactly why I was here on this retreat, to escape the burdensome school, ministry, and fraternal life in order to find God? Wasn’t I here to recharge so that I had something to bring back to those parts of my life?  While it is never a bad thing to seek God in the context of a silent retreat and recharging is an essential part of anyone’s life, I wondered at that moment why I hadn’t heard God speaking as clearly in my busy life as I did in my quiet retreat. Surely, God was equally as present and speaking in both situations. Right?

What I realized on the mountain was that it was me who had changed: I was quiet enough to hear Him speak. You see, what I realized when I left the noise of the world and entered the quiet of the mountain was that I became quieter, too. I turned off my phone. I gave intentional time for prayer. I was content with the present moment to simply be with God. The way I sought God was entirely different on the mountain than it was in the city. And I wonder: why? Sure, the snow was beautiful and the woods were quiet, but why must my external surroundings be quiet in order for me to be quiet on the inside? It doesn’t. It just requires me to be a bit more Franciscan.

When I read this quote from Nouwen, it immediately reminded me was my own Franciscan charism. For Francis, one did not need to flee the world to find God for God was so clearly in and through the “concerns, worries, pains, and joys,” even the most mundane experiences of life. God could be experienced anywhere at anytime if he was quiet enough to hear: “The world is my cloister, my body is my cell, and my soul is the hermit within.” Whether he actually said these words or not, the essence of the quote is purely Franciscan: Francis was someone who brought an inner quiet to every place he went, a peacefulness in the midst of chaos, and saw God no matter where he was. This is what I will take away from my retreat at Mt. Irenaeus. It was there that I truly found some quiet; funny thing is, it was there inside me all along.

 5 Comments

 Posted on December 21, 2014 by

 Formation, Prayer

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Prepare the Way of the Lord

How are you preparing for the Lord?

How are you preparing for the Lord?

Before Easter, the Church universally prepares for the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord with heavy fasting, extra prayers, and almsgiving. The thought is, given the solemnity of such a celebration, everyone should be adequately prepared for such an event, so we examine our lives, see what needs to be converted, and purify ourselves for our Lord’s day. It can be a bit grueling, but we’re better for it.

As we enter the season of Advent, the time of waiting and preparation for the celebration of our Lord’s Nativity, I want to call attention to the lack of preparation we do as a Church. Sure, we light a candle each week; we sing O Come O Come Emmanuel; some of us might keep an Advent calendar in anticipation. Things are definitely different, even special, this time of year, but is there any significant preparation? I may be mistaken, but it is my experience that Advent is not taken too seriously: the Christmas season begins immediately after Thanksgiving with Black Friday shopping, insufferable Christmas music on every station, and Christmas decorations everywhere (including three different trees at the Catholic University of America… C’mon! Even the school run by the bishops doesn’t get Advent!) There is very little waiting involved in our “season of waiting” and even less preparation, at least in comparison to Lent.

So what should we do? Should Advent be just like Lent? Well, no, not exactly. While both are times for conversion, they have completely different focuses and responses. Lent, a preparation for celebrating our salvation, focuses on the reason we need for a savior in the first place, our sinfulness, and calls us to turn from our vices. Christmas is quite different. Even though some say that it is merely the precursor to the Salvation event of Easter, as a Franciscan, I can’t help but marvel in the Incarnation as an event in itself: The invisible, all-powerful, largely unknowable Creator became the created. God became human. Seriously, think about it: how incredible is that? It is something that many Franciscans have argued would have happened regardless of our sin because God always intended to reveal godself to us. (For more, I wrote a post on this last year.) Our response to such a wonderful gift? I think our reflection during Advent should be more like John the Baptist’s: Prepare the way of the Lord. It’s a time to add virtues rather than remove vices, to open ourselves up to the joy of the Incarnation rather than the need for our salvation, our sinfulness.

For me, that meant looking at my life and asking, “What could I add to my life that would improve my relationship with Jesus?” My answer was quite simple: give Him more time. As a Franciscan, I know that I am first and foremost a man of prayer. Everything that I am and do must come from my relationship with God. And much of it does. I pray morning and evening prayer everyday without question. I evaluate everything I do against the life of Christ. I try to find time for private contemplative prayer each day. But I could do better. Unlike school work, ministry, and exercise, things for which I set schedules and commit to without fail, prayer often gets relegated to “free time” and is the first thing dropped when I’m busy or tired. (I have also written about this before.)There we go, my Advent preparation: spend thirty minutes in private prayer every day, without question. Make it as important as food and sleep. Commit to it like a workout plan or school schedule.

So far, it’s been going really well. (I say “so far” because it’s been a month. Since Christmas was arguably the most important feast for Francis, he had it written in the rule that all friars were to prepare for Christmas for two whole months: “Let them fast from the Feast of All Saints until Christmas” (Rule of St. Francis III.5).) For me, the difficulty is not praying for thirty minutes; this is something I do very often anyway. What’s difficult is committing myself to this each and every day, even when I’m tired, busy, or just don’t want to pray. This is something that I had in novitiate and unfortunately lost. Commitment. Being present to the God that is always present to me. Giving time to accept the grace that is always and already present in everything I do. I just have to show up.

For me, Advent is all about preparing the way of the Lord. I guess the real question is what do we mean by that: are we preparing the way because Jesus would otherwise not be able to make it us, or because we’re not prepared to welcome him in? Our Lord is coming whether we’re ready or not. May you be ready to welcome him when He comes!

 Posted on November 29, 2014 by

 Prayer

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Pray with One Voice

“May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 15:5-6)

“Wherever friars live or come together, the Liturgy of the Hours is to be their common prayer and as a rule it is to be celebrated in common.” (OFM Constitutions Article 23 §2)

As members of the Catholic Church, we come together on a regular basis to glorify God. There are times to do this privately, but as Christians, and certainly as a member of a religious fraternity, it is critical to who we are that we also do so together. But as I said in the conclusion of my last post, doing things together isn’t always the most efficient way to do something: there will almost inevitably be disagreements. Sure, where two or three are gathered, God will be there, but so will about two or three different opinions about how to worship “him”! (A word that I will get to shortly).

One can imagine, then, that prayer is not always easy, even in a religious house of friars. Quite the opposite, actually. Prayer can actually be the most contentious time of our day if competing values are pitted against one another. What does one do in this situation? Which value is “right”?

Universal Church

I think the starting point of every conversation related to communal Church participation has to be with the official, universal statements. What does the Church proper say about prayer? How has the wider Church, people of different times and places, decided to pray? As members of the Catholic Church, we must always remember that the worshiping community expands far beyond our walls, and as the “universal” Church, Catholics are privileged to be able to take part in the same prayer as people all around the world. This is a tremendous gift as well as an honorable duty to our brothers and sisters to maintain solidarity with them. Because of this, it is a great value of mine that one not stray far from the rubrics at mass or the instructions for daily prayers, even if it means losing a bit of creativity.

That being said (you knew this couldn’t be a post about following rules!) it is important to note that  “universal” Church and “uniform” Church are very different notions, and that the Church has rarely sought uniformity as a value. Besides an emphasis on praying in one’s own language and from one’s culture, the existence of more than ten liturgical rites indicate that there are many “official” ways to give praise to God, and that pastoral concerns to the immediate community are as important as uniformity to the wider church. Liturgy is a living, ever-changing expression of our faith, something that must change and adapt to new understandings. What causes this tension?

Multicultural issues

In the three years that I have been a friar, I have lived with men from the Philippines, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Columbia, Canada, and many regions in the United States. For many of these men, English is not the language that speaks to their heart. What do we do?

One answer would be to say, “Well, in American houses we speak English. Learn English better and it will speak to your heart.” This is a common answer, and while it seems harsh, it does have a strong practical dimension to it. On the other hand, how can we as English-speaking Americans be so inconsiderate to the needs of our brothers that we wouldn’t make sacrifices for the sake of their prayer lives? Obviously we can make compromises so that everyone feels included. But how, and to what extent? A tagalog song (that no one else would know)? Mass in Spanish (that would leave some unable to participate)? Liturgical dance (that would seem foreign and even a mockery to many Americans)? Culture is critically important to one’s prayer and makes for a very tricky situation when multiple cultures come together. Where are lines drawn and expectations set?

Style: Words and grammar that make sense

Once a community has chosen the language, there are still major problems with translations and word choices. One look at the new translation of the Roman Missal reveals a world of words unfamiliar to our daily speech (consubstantial), images that do not make sense (dew fall?) or sentences that follow Latin grammar rules rather than English ones. For many, there is a sense that the words we use are not the words that we understand or that speak to our hearts.

For instance, here is the final prayer of the Angelus prayer:

Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord.

What did we just ask for? I challenge you to find a person that has used “beseech” in common language in the past year (or better yet, randomly ask the next person you see if they even know what it means!) The same can be said for the Our Father in which we begin by saying, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” When we use words that do not speak to our hearts, they will not speak from them either; prayer that is memorized but not understood is prayer that lacks the meaning we desperately need in our worship.

Inclusive Language

Which brings us to our final point of contention: what happens when we understand the language, but the images they invoke are contrary to our conception of God. What do I mean by this? Gender-specific language. When we speak of God, God is always masculine. “He” is Father, “He” is Creator, and “He” is Brother. But does this reflect the totality of our theology of God? The official Church says that God is neither male nor female, that words such as “Father” are analogous that attempts to explain what we know about “him”. If that is the case, that human language could never fully capture the essence of God, why not mix in a few feminine words for God to express God’s motherly, sisterly, comforting, wise nature? I’m sure God would love it if we called her our Mother. What did he say?! Our sensibilities have been questioned! How dare he?! God is not feminine! Right. But God is also not masculine and we seem to be okay with that.

For many friars, there is a sensitivity to the fact that neither God nor God’s people are ever described with feminine words despite the many feminine images of God found in the Bible, and the fact that the majority of the people in our Church is female. Even when it would make much more sense to be inclusive (such as praying for “humanity” rather than “men” when there are clearly women present) masculine images prevail over even neutral words in the official prayers. Placed as a high value, one can imagine how this has caused many problems in the way that we prayer.

So what do we do?

What I have presented is three of the MANY ways in which we find ourselves not praying in one voice (along with disagreement on tempo, song choice, frequency of prayer, level of solemnity, and so on). It may sound cynical, but prayer is never going to be a perfect experience in which everyone is in full agreement about what to do. That, then, is not the issue: the issue is how we handle the inevitable conflicts.

On the one extreme, some could say that the community should pray exactly what is said in the book at all times because that is what we’re supposed to do; while I would definitely err on the side of obedience to the larger Church and is the easiest solution, it fails to acknowledge that there may in fact be true stumbling blocks in our prayer and never allows for the liturgy to grow organically through the Spirit.

On the other extreme, some have chosen to simply pray the words that are in their heart and expect everyone around them to do the same; at any given psalm, then, this leads to multiple words being spoken at one time (the one, man, him, woman, her, humanity), failing to ever come together for the sake of the immediate community.

Honestly, the only thing that we can ever do is to engage these issues as a community in a prayerful and open environment. What is it that this community needs to authentically praise God? What can we do as a community to hold ALL of these values in our hands at the same time? These questions are by no means easy to answer. What’s important, it seems to me, is that the conversation be had. As brothers and sisters in this together, nothing could be worse than allowing the cornerstone of our life, communal prayer, be something that is dry, emotionless, exclusionary, incomprehensible, or means for contention; when it is a place of passive aggression or apathy, we have missed the point. Prayer is a unitive activity. Done right, prayer is the activity in our communities that forces us to engage one another around a profoundly important focus, to share what we truly need and to be there to provide for the needs of our brothers and sisters. Thus, it is only when we are able to come together as a community in this way, speaking from the standpoint of commitment, sacrifice, and mutuality, that we truly able to pray with once voice. Let us not be many voices clamoring at once, let us pray with one voice, the voice of a community profoundly committed to God and one another.

 Posted on September 16, 2014 by

 Fraternity, Prayer

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Breaking In The Habit

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