Compassion and the Dark Night

I was recently asked about the relationship of the experience of the dark night in the spiritual life and growth in compassion. For some of my readers, this will seem a little esoteric. But the dark night really is not. The dark night refers to difficult spiritual experiences, especially in prayer. Most Christians experience this for greater or lesser lengths of time with both greater and lesser intensity. They are difficult to endure, especially if they last for a long time. They are also necessary for spiritual growth. Because the temptation is to abandon one’s faith during these periods of darkness, Catholic mystics and doctors through the centuries have developed special teachings aimed at encouragement. One of these is St. John of the Cross who develops his theology of “the night” throughout his poetry and in his commentaries: Ascent to Mt. Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul.

Spiritual darkness often involves backsliding, sliding back into sin. In every case, the confusion brought on by this kind of darkness is addressed by returning to the Lord through prayer and a converted life. But this is not the only kind of darkness Christians must endure. There is also darkness related not so much to sin itself as much to the wounds and imperfections sin causes. If these things are not addressed, our ability to love God and one another is impaired. So God in his mercy begins to heal us in this life – even when the medicine involves suffering what seems to be his absence or at least the absence of his consoling presence. He really is never absent but it feels like absence and even rejection. What is actually unfolding is a much deeper encounter with the Lord, deeper than our affections can feel or our intellect can know. It seems like darkness because we do not understand or feel what God is doing – but his power is at work accomplishing much more than we can ask or imagine.

John of the Cross speaks of two different kinds of night in this regard — the night of the senses and the night of the spirit. The night of the senses refers to the purifying work by which God heals the effects of sin on our five senses and our imagination. This night has two phases – active which involves taking up the discipline of the Christian life for the healing of our conscious level of existence and passive which involves a kind of contemplation by which the Lord heals unconscious levels of our existence. The night of the Spirit has these same two phases only that the passive phase is much more intense and heals the depths of the human heart which the term ‘unconscious’ does not quite capture. This article refers to both the night of the senses and the night of the spirit.

St. John of the Cross does not spend a lot of time describing the compassion of heart that develops in the Dark Night of the Senses because his focus is on progress towards the perfection of the Christian life in terms of union with God. But there are indications that in his thinking the soul that passes through this night, especially the passive phase of it, does become profoundly compassionate. One might say that compassion of heart is a fruit of this night.

One good places to explore this is in Dark Night book 1. Here he treats of 7 spiritual imperfections of beginners. He assumes that these beginners have already taken up all the difficult work of renunciation explained in Ascent to Mt. Carmel, book 1, Chapter 13. They are already in the active phase of the dark night – their lives have already begun to be hidden in God. But the Lord wants to hide them even more. These beginners are no longer inclined to comforts and satisfaction on a voluntary level. By renouncing everything that is not for the glory of God, they have come to a certain kind of freedom in the spiritual life. They are free from earthly things more or less. This means that merely material things no longer provide an obstacle to obeying the will of God as it is revealed through a superior or through interior promptings. But there is another level at which they are not free – there are still involuntary inclinations and attachments in their hearts which no amount of asceticism can purify. Only God can do this through the passive phase of the Dark Night.

St. John of the Cross does not describe this exactly but these seven spiritual imperfections are all obstacles to compassion. For example, spiritual pride involves putting one’s identity in the ability to master the Christian discipline of life instead of the Lord alone. As a result, those suffering from this are always comparing themselves with others and always desiring that others think highly of them. They do not do this willfully (not most of the time), but involuntarily. Thus, they are not moved to compassion but judgment in the face of the suffering or weakness of others.

Similarly with spiritual anger – in which one is involuntarily filled with righteous indignation over the faults of others, or imperfections in the liturgy, or pastoral mistakes. Likewise, spiritual acedia-sloth in which an unconscious sluggishness constantly gnaws at someone when they try to enter into the heart of someone who suffers – and at the same time they find themselves deeply disturbed when someone else gladly goes ahead of them to show love where they themselves failed in courage – spiritual envy.

To drive this home, I need to refer to my own experience and I am sorry that it is so insipid, but it will serve to illustrate the point. It is an unconscious movement that I often catch myself in. Whereas before I set my identity in being the best at intellectual or athletic or social achievement, these things are not as important to me because I have renounced them for love of Jesus who died for me. If I am faithful to the discipline of the Christian life in terms of prayer, asceticism and works of mercy, these things no longer have the power to attract me away from the Lord. So I have a more spiritual object for my desires – serving the Lord. But the desire with which I desire this more worthy object is still quite broken.

I desire to serve the Lord not for his own sake, but for my sake, my ego. And this I do even though I do not want to and know that it is imperfect. There is so much to this – a lack of trust in God’s loving plan, an idol of perfection that God has never willed, fear of completely surrendering to God and letting him show me the path to perfection, fear of myself. As long as I do not accept who I really am before the Lord even if involuntarily, how can I possibly be compassionate to another? I cannot accept others and share their misery with them if I lack the courage to face my own misery and accept the truth about myself before God. Yet the kicker is that I do not consciously will this state of affairs – it is simply the way things are, the way I am.

St. Bernard sees this as a very imperfect way to be. My compassion for Jesus is held back because my love is merely mercenary. I have not learned to love God for his own sake – how can I love others for their own sake? He teaches that only special mystical graces can raise me above this kind of love so that I learn to love God, not for my own sake, but for his sake alone. How do I dispose myself to this new kind of love, a love not polluted by unconscious movements that hold it back from God and through God to others?

To progress to a better love, St. John of the Cross says I need to pass through the passive phase of the dark night of the spirit. He calls this a ray of darkness, a certain spiritual nakedness, in which I have no satisfaction in observing the discipline of the Christian life. In prayer, it will seem as if God were completely absent, as if he were ignoring me. And isn’t this just what I need for a little while?

On an involuntary level, I think I am so impressive to God and everyone else – I will continue to think that I am the absolute center of the universe until I suffer a sort of Copernican revolution. Such a revolution Until I am stripped of this, I cannot see that God is the true centre and until I see even on an involuntary way that God is the true center, I cannot have compassion – that is, because of my unconscious egoism, I am trapped in my heart and unable to suffer the feelings of God who mourns for his people in their misery and who rejoices when they taste his love for them. I am also unable to suffer the misery of all those God has entrusted to me. Caught up in myself, I am impeded from seeking the hidden presence of the Lord calling out to me in my children and my wife and my colleagues – and even in my enemies. To free me from myself, God in his tremendous love will hide himself more deeply within me than I have ever gone or can ever go with my own efforts alone.

Here, I am like the bride in the Spiritual Canticle, who awakened by her beloved just as he runs off into hiding. She must find him – and the more she seeks him the freer she is of herself. She experiences a certain Copernican revolution in this journey towards her beloved. All of a sudden, she realizes that she is not the center of the universe anymore than the earth is the center of the cosmos. Because her love for Him becomes greater as she searches for him, mysteriously she comes to see herself for who she really is – as the one who needs her Beloved. Just as the earth revolves around the sun, she discovers that the real truth about herself is that she revolves around Him, and Him alone. As she sees this truth about herself through this night, she is finally able to be compassionate towards others. She knows the truth about who they really are in the eyes of the Lord – true compassion is able to speak this truth by suffering the misery of the other so as to affirm their dignity.

Compassion is part of mercy by which we suffer the defect or evil or misery of another to affirm their dignity. On a natural level aided by grace empathetic people can do this to some degree. But even they are limited by their own short comings from being able to do this in a transforming way. The other person remains trapped in his own misery even if he knows he is not suffering it alone. In order to really be merciful, we must be prompted by the Holy Spirit. Through his gift of counsel, he shows us the secret sorrows that our neighbors bear, that they struggle with in isolation. They feel like no one else knows their suffering. But God does and the Holy Spirit yearns for us to be an instrument through which the Lord might reveal his merciful love. As long as involuntary imperfections, like lack of self-knowledge, block the movement of the Holy Spirit in our heart – even though he shows us, we cannot see. But as the ray of darkness penetrates our depths and as we realize that God alone is our deepest center, we begin to understand what the His Spirit reveals to us and we find the courage to enter into the heart of another. Under his impetus and by his power, even our weakest attempts at empathy and compassion are transforming.

It is at this point that one of the most powerful realities of the communion of saints is realized. The unconscious imperfections are purified and healed, but they do not go away exactly. Instead, they are transformed.  My egoism does not magically disappear when I realize that I am not at the center of the universe.  Nor, when I am prompted by the Holy Spirit to enter the heart of another, is the effort ever easy. But when I prayerfully recognize the gravity of my big fat ego holding me back from loving someone God has entrusted to me, rather than blocking me, my otherwise destructive self-love becomes an occasion of grace which causes me to turn to the Lord with greater trust in Him.  It simply requires a simple movement of the will, an act of trust, a persevering belief in the faithfulness of God.  This loving movement informs my efforts with an invincible hope, even when my efforts appear completely futile.  My poverty is filled with the riches of God’s grace in such moments.  His power is made perfect in our weakness if we persevere and believe in his love even when continuing to love seems impossible.  

Our weaknesses and trials, far from undermining our faith, make our faith mature and fruitful.  St. Therese describes such trials in terms of “the wiping of [Christ’s] Face” in poem 17:

Living by Love – the wiping of your Face,
That sinners of their weight of sin be rid:
O God of Love! May they return to grace
And bless your Name as ne’er before they did…
Blasphemy strikes my heart, I hear it still;
To blot it out, I’ll sing for evermore
‘Your Name, your Sacred Name, I always will
Love and adore!”

The “blasphemy” that “strikes” her heart is not merely something she sees in the “weight of sin” that sinners suffer. She experiences this in her own heart. Rather than leading her to sin, however – we see this description where it leads her to praise. We can compare her song which blots out this sin with the mystical grades of prayer described by Teresa of Avila – where one is so filled with God’s presence he can’t contain himself and wants to shout out praises. But this prayer, beyond what St. Teresa describes, actually helps others (beyond herself) as St. Therese explains “return to grace and bless [God’s] Name.” As St. Paul would say, it is in her weakness that the strength of God is brought to perfection.

In other words, God wants to transform the involuntary weaknesses we suffer into doors that lead into his heart and the hearts of others. He can only do this by the dark night first of the senses (where it begins) and then of the spirit (where it is brought to perfection). So for anyone suffering through the nights, the great Catholic mystics encourage you to hang on and not lose hope. Trust in the Lord and persevere in the Christian life – God is doing immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine.

/2 Comments/by

John Paul II and the Paschal Christ


John Paul II had an enormous impact on my own spiritual journey and today marks the 4th anniversary of his death. This picture is from my friend James Baca of the Denver Catholic Register. It is a statue outside the Cathedral in Denver – where the pope visited in ’93. My parish, Good Shepherd (and the surrounding neighborhood), helped host about 5,000 of the c. 300,000 people who particpated in World Youth Day. The Holy Father told us to be bold in proclaiming the Gospel of Christ – “Shout it from the rooftops … of the modern metropolis”

I like to reflect on his apostolic zeal and special concern for young people. I especially love his teaching. Some of Pope John Paul II’s most powerful theological insights included his vision of mercy. Mercy, he explains, is love that suffers the brokeness of another so as to affirm that person’s dignity. This idea is beautifully explored in his encyclical on Mercy (http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0215/__P9.HTM).

“In His resurrection Christ has revealed the God of merciful love, precisely because He accepted the cross as the way to the resurrection. And it is for this reason that-when we recall the cross of Christ, His passion and death-our faith and hope are centered on the Risen One: on that Christ who “on the evening of that day, the first day of the week, . . .stood among them” in the upper Room, “where the disciples were, …breathed on them, and said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.'”99
Here is the Son of God, who in His resurrection experienced in a radical way mercy shown to Himself, that is to say the love of the Father which is more powerful than death. And it is also the same Christ, the Son of God, who at the end of His messianic mission – and, in a certain sense, even beyond the end – reveals Himself as the inexhaustible source of mercy, of the same love that, in a subsequent perspective of the history of salvation in the Church, is to be everlastingly confirmed as more powerful than sin. The paschal Christ is the definitive incarnation of mercy, its living sign in salvation history and in eschatology. In the same spirit, the liturgy of Eastertide places on our lips the words of the Psalm: Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo.100 “

/0 Comments/by

Coming into Lent’s Home Stretch

As we come into the end of Lent, its time to renew our resolutions for the Lord and to draw closer to Him. One way of doing this is by renewing our efforts to love those who are closest to us, and this is best done with the help of prayer. This kind of goes with the traditional connection between prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Let me explain.

Prayer is bound to an authentic love of neighbor. Prayer that does not lead into the hearts of others remains immature and is inclined to selfish preoccupation. Love of neighbor without prayer cannot draw strength from God and is inclined to hubris. True prayer informs charitable works for others so that those needs much deeper than the merely material can be met. Such prayer is already in itself a supreme act of charity, a profound experience of mercy. It goes deep into the sufferings of others and suffers with them, even when nothing else seems to be possible to do.

Through prayer, sometimes by prayer alone, those in distress discover that they are not alone and that their existence matters. This is because prayer is essentially a movement of divine love, or at least a movement in response to such love, even when that love seems absent. It is also true, however, that sometimes prayer is not enough by itself. Sometimes prayer needs to be expressed in action – and this is especially true for those who do not know they are loved.

But prayer is not something purely subjective – it is rather inter-subjective by nature. I mean that prayer involves persons – not only me and God, but me God and neighbor. This is an aspect of prayer that comes in handy as we close in on the end of Lent.

St. John Bosco says it is not enough to love children, children need to know they are loved. What is true of children is also true of about everybody in our life. When we join prayer and love for others together, a question that I like to ask, “Lord, how can I let your love be known.”

To be honest, the answer is not always clear when I ask the question. But when I find myself in a situation, what needs to be done becomes very clear. It is a matter of being attentive, of being vigilant about what the Lord is doing in a given situation.

Recognizing how to be an instrument of God’s love for someone is exponentially easier when it involves someone we do not know. When it is someone we know, I find myself not as willing. This might be because people we know expect more from us, especially when we do not feel like giving anything. Quite often when an acquaintance or stranger is involved, their expectations are pretty low. Then, after one has given what one has to give, there is the safe escape. This kind of love, the love we can escape from, is not a great love.

Those who are dear to us demand a great love, that is why we do not like letting others get close to us. From those who are bound to us in love, there is no safe escape. The needs of the human heart are infinite and the greater its expectations, the more we will disappoint. Long after our hands are completely empty, I see those whom I love the most need more than I have to give.

This is a great place to be. It is the place where God calls us beyond our human limitations and into the greatness of his Love. God the Father wants us to love like the widow Jesus praises. So this characterizes the kind of almsgiving that goes with prayer and love of neighbor. While everyone else gives from the extra they do not need, Christ calls Christians to give out of their own need, like the widow. This means, He commands us to love beyond our human capacity to love. This transforming place is so very painful, but it is also our finest moment, the moment when we are most like God, when we image God perfectly. God the Father stands before us with empty hands because he has given everything to us in his Son. When love demands everything from us, we become the living icon of God the Father – for we too stand before him with empty hands.

How do we do this? When we have reached the end of our humanity, beyond which there is nothing more to give, what else can we do but go to prayer? Only through prayer can we go beyond the limits of our self-reliance to rely on the Lord alone. Prayer opens up the possibility of a new kind of love, a supernatural love – which loves beyond what our human nature can give. This is very humbling to experience. To allow this kind of love requires we create room in our hearts, space that can only be created through self-denial. This is where fasting comes into the mix. Here it is not only a fasting from food or abstaining from meat. This kind of fasting also includes fasting from what is comfortable for me to do, allowing myself to be pushed into those uncomfortable sacrifices others need if they are to know they our loved. Such sacrifice is impossible without prayer.

When we love with this kind of love, God is in control. It is Him, not us, His power, not ours. That is why our prayer must be constant. Prayer is an act whereby we rely on the Lord and draw our strength from Him, from doing his will. So this is the acseticism I propose for this home stretch of Lent.

/0 Comments/by

The Annunciation and the Undivided Heart in Prayer

Today we celebrate the Annunciation — when Gabriel announced to Mary that she was favored to be the Mother of the Messiah. (see http://tiny.cc/mCylH.) This is the moment when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is also the finest moment of humanity – a moment when one of us was able to say “yes” to God with an undivided heart.

Permeating the celebration of this occasion is the very nature of Christian prayer’s efficacy. So often we pray for things and are disappointed by the results. It seems like our prayers a re not doing anything, like we wasted our time. I suppose cultural thinkers like Hitchens and Dawkins would say, “Why, in fact, you have.” Some people even lose their faith because prayers seem to go unanswered, especially when they have come to God with their anxieties for those they love. Why is it that our prayers do not seem efficacious at times?

The efficacy of Christian prayer is based on discovering the will of the Lord through a conversation with Him. In his own mysterious plan there are things that He yearns to give us, only if we ask. One of the problems is that when we pray, we are not usually concerned about what God wants to give. Rather, we are occupied with what we want. This makes for a tough dialogue – especially when what we want and what the Lord wants to give are not the same.

Thus, one sure way to begin to pray more effectively is to consider what God wants. This is revealed in the Scriptures. Jesus expressed profound concern that his followers intimately know the Father and, at the same time, share a deep communion with one another. Mystics like Elisabeth of the Trinity see this as the Lord’s supreme desire. For example, in the Gospel of John, the night before He died, Jesus offers his great prayer to the Father, “that they may be one as we are one.”

Now, as we come to understand what this means, it has an impact on our prayer – we have a standard to judge whether what we want is really what God wants. As long as our heart is divided, wanting God but also wanting things he does not want for us, the Lord’s ability to answer our prayer is impeded. We are not free to ask for the gift He really desires to give, the gift that is greater than what we think we want. What we want is the lesser thing, and as long as we are attached to that we are not free for what is greater. The greatest thing God yearns to give is his very life and love.

Mary seems to have learned this lesson and that is why she is a model of efficacious prayer. The Archeangel who greets her calls her “full of grace.” Grace is God’s pure gift – a sharing in his very life and love. Mary was full of this life and love when Gabriel spoke to her – and she is even more so now. Because she was filled with this life and love, her heart was undivided. She was free to yearn for what God desired, “Let it be done to me according to your word.”

/1 Comment/by

The Sign of the Cross

No one knows how old this sign really is. It may well go back to the apostles. Jean Danielou discusses its origins in The Bible and the Liturgy. Suffice to say that for Catholics, prayer begins and ends with this sign of blessing. This sign is where one traces the cross from head to gut, from left shoulder to right shoulder while declaring that the blessing is given in the name of the revealed Trinity. This blessing is entrusted to us before our baptism and traced on our foreheads. As a blessing, it confers identity and mission – whenever we make this sign, we renew our awareness of who we are and the great purpose that God has for us.

The sign itself recalls what Christ has done for us: he died for us and gave his life for our sakes. The death of Christ for our sakes is a dynamic gift, a supreme value, evoking a response of total faith, of conversion to God. Conversion involves a certain kind of death, and a new kind of life: we must die to what naturally motivates us so that we may be moved by God alone.

In addition to the physical sign, we bind ourselves in the name of the Triune God by declaring Him the very source of the blessing. By this declaration, we recall that God has given himself to us, that his very presence lives in our hearts. At the same time, these words recall our baptismal promises. In these promises, we pledge our whole lives to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This pledge means that we live for the Trinity, that this communion of love has the ultimate call on our existence, that it is the final purpose of our life.

Some are a little squeamish over making such a sign – the sign in fact is an act of surrendering to God the whole of our lives. But for most Christians, especially the persecuted and those who are facing death, this sign is an occasion of hope and a source of strength. For them, there is no other sign which is worthy of Christian prayer. It is the sign of their forefathers – of countless men and women who courageously accepted every trial, persecution, rejection, imprisonment, torture and even death. When we make this sign, we also join ourselves to these holy men and women who went before us — we enjoy a certain solidarity with them in their sacrfice to God. Their complete trust in God all the way to the end helps us to see that God Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is worthy of the whole of our lives and the depths of our hearts. Thus, we too find the courage to accept this blessing and to stand firm in our faith.

/0 Comments/by

Making a Good Beginning Each Day

In his book, Path to Rome, Hilaire Belloc starts out by criticizing a French proverb that basically asserts that the most important thing about doing anything is getting started. Belloc believes this to be basically false. From his perspective, getting started is easy. Persevering is hard. And this is how he begins his book on his 750 mile walk from France to Rome over the Alps and the Appenines.

Belloc’s sobering insight goes with something that Antony of the Desert explained in his own teaching on how to live the Christian life. He said that each day we must take up the discipline of the Christian life as if for the first time. Every day is like a new beginning, as if we were beginning to pray for the first time. If we have this attitude, we do not get so discouraged when we fail – for we often will. The Christian life is not one of instant success but rather constant effort, the effort to begin to love because of the love that has been given us. This very effort glorifies the Lord even when it seems like we have utterly failed. The Apostle Paul indicated something like this when he explained that the power of God is made perfect in our weakness.

How do we make this new beginning a persevere in it? The secret of course is prayer. Prayer was at the center of Antony’s view of the the discipline of the Christian life. It is also the unspoken heart of Belloc’s pilgrimage. When we take time to turn our hearts to God in the midst of triumph and tragedy – we find a strength to hang in there, even when we do not feel we can.

/0 Comments/by

Interviewing Father Conrad

I had the honor of hosting Father Conrad Osterhout at my house on occasion. He has had quite a life as a religious. He has helped form men for the priesthood and religious life. He has been arrested and imprisoned for praying in front of an abortion clinic. He also recieved a special call to live out his Franciscan vocation in an even more radical manner than he had done before – so he joined the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Now he lives with his community in New Mexico and comes to Colorado to give parish missions on occasion. It was during one of these visits that he first spoke to me about what the Friars call, “radical fraternity.”

To support one another in becaming saints, the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal have sought to recover a brotherhood more deeply rooted in Christ. This kind of communion demands humility and patience with one another. It also requires a lot of prayer. But this discipline is also the fertile soil for becoming more authentically human and, thus, a more authentic witness to the power of the Gospel.

/0 Comments/by

Elements of Radical Fraternity– an interview with Fr. Conrad Osterhout, C.F.R.

I asked Father Conrad what the essential elements of radical fraternity were and what they might mean not only for priests or religious, but also the lay faithful like me.

Christ is the foundation. He changes everything. People today speak of their rights, the ability to follow their own way, but in the Gospel and in Christ we find a way of life revealed to transform us. We are called to a humble life, to hold God above all things and follow where He leads. The gift of faith and a life in Christ is to say that my will, my body and my plans are not mine. I use what I have been given, but I surrender it all to Christ, to the Holy Spirit and to God. His truth in my mind allows me to make decisions on those truths. The Holy Spirit guiding me, I can change my plans, my way of thinking, to conform to God. We have to hope for humility if we live in accord with this.

Prayer. We search for, and find, Him in prayer. I fulfill my obligations as the ritual; the practice is something alive and connecting to the mystical union. Christ is present in the power of prayer. To quote St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” Each vocation has its demands, but they are all filtered through Christ. I am not enlivened by my will, or my cultural surroundings, but through the true voice of God, the Church, the Holy Spirit. Think on the church. Quo vadis? Remember the church where Peter, as he fled from Roman persecution, stopped? The name of the Church means “where are you going?” If the Lord asks you where you are going, then you are going the wrong way.

The sacramental and mystical union we have—‘do this in remembrance of me’. We are told how to love Christ through the covenant. His love is manifest through the covenant and Eucharist. He is offering the tangible reality of his presence in the Eucharist, which is both his humanity and his divinity. If we come to the Eucharist prepared for it, ready to receive the Lord giving himself to us in all our smallness and completing us through Him, we are giving ourselves as he did, prepared to be in service to others.

Confession. This, despite the fear we have of it, should be approached with humility as it offers us mercy and renewal. We are able to move forward, to put things in the past and let them stay there and we are totally loved by a merciful Father. He takes us for our weakness and loves us anyway.

/0 Comments/by

Radical Fratenity: Making the Sacrifice

Over on http://www.Fire.blogtownhall.com I posted a reflection on St. Paul’s call to spiritual worship. It involves our bodies into sacrificial offerings to God. The nature of this sacrifice is love. Today, in another interview with Fr. Conrad, he gave me some insight into how this kind of spiritual worship is key to radical fraternity.
In our conversation, he relayed to me a comment made by Fr. Groeschel to the Friars. He explained that as he has come into his 70’s, he suddenly realized how little he has done for the Lord. He exhorted the Friars to make heroic sacrifices while they are still young. He asserted, “It doesn’t get any easier.”
My mind goes to something that Mother Theresa explained. Namely, one cannot love except at one’s own expense. When our love does not really cost us anything, it is not really love. Real love pours out until it hurts. This is what Jesus did for us on the Cross — it is what St. Paul says we need to do with our lives in return.
How is this related to radical fraternal? Radical means to go into the “roots.” Radical fraternity goes into the roots of fraternity itself — and all Christian fellowship is to be rooted in Christ – or its not. When we root our fellowship with one another in Christ, his sacrificial love for us becomes the standard and the source for the way we love one another – a love without measure. Most of us shy away from this kind of life. It demands too much at least for now. We imagine taking it up, later in life, when we are ready. But this is the putting off game. Fr. Groschel’s words to the Friars are words we all need to hear — it doesn’t get any easier the longer we wait. We need to make our great sacrifices for God now – while we have the energy and the time to make them.

/0 Comments/by

Radical Fraternity

On Saturday, I interviewed Fr. Conrad Osterhout of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who is giving a retreat in Boulder, Colorado this week. He and Brother Simon stayed with us after completing another mission in Craig, Colorado. Father Conrad has had decades of experience as a Franciscan, first with the Third Order Regular and later as a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal. I first met Father Conrad at Steubenville. He oversaw the pre-theology program household of which I was a founding member. He later was involved in the pro-life movement and imprisoned in solitary confinement for protesting and counseling at abortion clinics. His stories about those experences are quite profound, and I hope someday to write about those. What I asked him about this time, however, was his spirituality. His answers, a small part are presented here, will be part of a book on prayer that I am preparing.

I have always been impressed with the joy, the prayerfulness, the discipline and the poverty of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. I once asked Father whether the reason community looked so attractive and was so effective in the ministry was its rediscovery of a more austere form of poverty. Simplicity of life is something they work on together as a community, and they do this in the spirit of Francis of Assisi who himself had a love affair with Lady Poverty. According to Francis’ ideal, whatever is not necessary for a friar’s apostolic work is renounced for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Following this, the Friars of the Renewal do not own much by way of personal property – basically, the clothes on their back (which mainly includes a very simple habit) and what can be held in a small hand bag, and a toothbrush, if necessary. I suspected that Franciscan joy was the freedom from the anxiety that owning a lot of material things can bring.

Father Conrad thought I only had a part of the picture. He explained that he was also first impressed with this freedom from things. He said there was a lot more fluidity and hospitality that living simply made possible. He gave as an example on of his first experiences as a Friar of the Renewal. In his previous religious experience, travel between houses had to be planned, and they were not really set up for taking guests on the spot. This was probably because each house felt responsible to provide proper hospitality to visiting Friars, and spontaneous visits did not help in preparing for this. But as a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal, while he was visiting one of the houses, his brothers asked him to stay the night. He complained that he had not prepared for an overnight stay and thought he should get back to the convent he had come from. His brother asked him simply, “God has provided everything. What else do you need, a toothbrush?”

Father Conrad was impressed by this experience. Because of the greater simplicity the Franciscan Friars lived out, he really did not need very much at all. He had all he needed, and he could trust God and his brothers to provide the rest. He discovered an aspect of Lady Poverty’s beauty which Francis himself must have also appreciated. Freedom from things allows for a greater freedom to be with one’s brothers.

This is where Father Conrad shared an important insight about his way of life. The recovery of the Francican Tradition, which the Friars of the Renewal have devoted themselves to, is really a rediscovery of genuine fellowship in the Lord. By placing their fraternity above material comforts, they are rediscovering how to live with one another as brothers in Christ. Father Conrad explaiend that it was not their radical poverty but their radical fraternity which was the true witness of their way of life. The real question their community was committed to answering together was not so much how they could live more simply but how could the simply build one another up in the Lord. By eliminating material distractions, they could begin to work on being more patient with each other. Father Conrad, reflecting on the richness of this experience, quote psalm 133: “Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.”

/0 Comments/by