Fr. JC Maximilian

Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith

There is a basic format to gestures of Communion and Liberation. Whether it is the weekly “School of Community” or a retreat of a day or a weekend, there is a basic structure or format. First there is the lesson. In School of Community, like this “virtual School of Community”, the lesson is the reading from the book that is being covered; at a retreat it would be the conference given by who ever is leading the retreat. Then, after a period of quiet time for reflecting on what was said during the lesson, there is the Assembly. This is basically a time to ask questions about the lesson, and to give a witness to how what was said in the lesson helped you make a judgment about your life. Msgr. Guissani had a basic rule about questions during the assembly; “don’t ask question if they don’t refer to things that are felt, if they don’t openly express feelings that are experienced” (IPLW-Faith, p. 42). This helps keep you from becoming abstract about the material; the whole point is that Jesus is present NOW, HERE in our lives. Needless to say, an assembly can cover a wide range of issues. I am not even going to try to summarize all the issues discussed in this assembly, but rather only those that spoke to my heart.

Maybe it is because I am a psychologist by training, who tends to lean towards the more cognitive schools of psychology, but I feel that one of the biggest problems with too many people today is that they are too emotional. They are emotivists, placing their emotions as the most important think in their lives and the standard by which they evaluate everything. In my humble opinion, this leads to irrationality. The emotions are really just another part of our senses. While they are important, as are all the senses, for as St. Thomas says the senses enlightens the intellect, they are also what we have most in common with the animals. What makes us something other than mere beasts of another sort, is our intellect and will. We can make judgments about our senses, including our emotions.

When I first encountered Communion and Liberation one concern I had was there was a lot of talk about emotions; what do you feel? There is a discussion in this Assembly that gave me the best understanding and assurance that Giussani was not prone to devolving into emotivism. He defines emotion as “the psychological reaction in front of something you encounter” (IPLW-Faith, p. 44). Giussani says that in order to experience the exceptionality of an encounter more has to happen, namely the judgment of the mind. A judgment is a comparison between our heart’s criteria and the reality that you happen upon. The heart’s criteria are our existential need/desire for happiness, truth, goodness, beauty.

Msgr. Giussani acknowledges that for many people today, there is an impulsive, quick “yes” to experiences as corresponding to what they think their hearts desire. This leads to addictions. Basically emotions have become the same as a judgment, and as Giussani says, this only leads to our ruin. He affirmed my own belief about emotivism when he says that making emotion the same as judgment is the predominance of the beast, the animal. Emotion is a reaction; it needs to be judged.

I am sure that we have all have had the experience of falling in love. Yes, even as a priest, I have had the experience of falling in love. Falling in love is a very powerful emotion. In and of itself it is not good or bad. What do we do with such a feeling, such an emotion? If I allowed the emotion to become the same as a judgment, I am afraid I would have ruined my priestly vocation sometime ago. When I was in practice as a psychologist, more than once I had clients who made a huge mess of their lives because they fell in love, made that emotion the same as their judgment, and ran off to pursue the object of their love at the cost of a spouse and family. I know a few priests who have made the same mistake. The problem is not in the emotion of falling in love. The problem is in the failure to judge that emotion. We need to ask ourselves, “does this emotion correspond to the destiny that God has given me? Does it correspond to my path for happiness?” This means looking at the commitments I have already made in my life, especially if I have taken a long period of time to evaluate them. I mean, I was in the seminary for five years, a deacon for another year, and now a priest for nearly five years. I have spent a lot of time in prayerful reflection to come to recognize that God has called me to be a priest. If I met someone tomorrow and “fell in love with her” it would be rather foolish for me to just dump my priesthood to pursue a romantic relationship with her. It would be impulsive, and irrational. St. John’s Gospel, in the Prologue, describes Jesus as the Logos, and while that is Greek for “Word”, it also means “reason” (hence we get the word “logic” from it). God is Reason; to act irrationally is not following God.

This leads me to the other thing discussed in this assembly which struck me as very important — the idea of companionship. Elsewhere Giussani describes “friendship” as witnesses that point out the presence of Christ in your life. It is very easy to get carried away by our emotions. That is why it is important to have good Christian friends, who are also doing their best to follow the Lord. This companionship, which is the real beginning of Communion and Liberation, reminds us of the Presence of Christ in our lives. Our friends can help keep us grounded when our emotions want to carry us away, and we want to make emotion the same as judgment. The importance of the weekly School of Community is the formation of such holy, spiritual friendships who are are companions on the road. They can challenge our preconceptions, and affirm our judgments (in CL this is often called verification).

Personally, this has been the most important aspect of CL for me. Even now, when I am at a parish where I have not (yet) established a School of Community, I value my association with CL. A priest friend of mine, also involved in the Movement, we have decided to “meet” each week via video-chat (on Skype) to do School of Community. Of course it would be better if we could get together each week in person, but we are over 2 hours away, and neither of us can afford the travel time that it would entail each week. But the hour each week to pray and do School of Community together is something we have told each other is vital for living our priesthood. It also means that I do my best to make the time to go to the CL retreats and spiritual exercises. I cannot always make it, but the companionship is important. It helps me keep my priesthood, my life, grounded in reality.

All of us need that. We need at least one other person with whom we can be completely honest, and who will be completely honest with us. In 12-Step programs they call it your sponsor. It might be your spiritual director, or regular confessor. It might be that friend or two who you know are on the same journey as you are. It is the “Communion” in CL, and it helps us become truly free, truly liberated to become what God has called us to be.

Up to this point, Msgr. Giussani has been discussing how faith is a method of reason, and not something opposed to reason.  The presentation has used a lot of examples that we might find in our every day life, of how we come to know about most of the things in our life through the method of faith, because we come to know them through the testimony of witnesses.  From history and culture to more personal information like on how a schoolmate is doing, we often learn about them indirectly, from someone telling us about them.  Of course we want to have faith that is reasonable (since it is a method of reason), and not unreasonably, so last time I posted I tried to explain the two criteria for evaluating the lynchpin of the method of faith, namely the witness.  First we need to make a judgment as to whether or not the witness knows about the subject that they are talking about.  Second we need to judge whether or not the person is trying to deceive us.  If a person does know what they are talking about and we have no reason to think that they are trying to deceive us, then not only is it reasonable to believe (put faith in) them as a witness, but it would be UNREASONABLE not to believe them.

In this section, Msgr. Giussani starts to turn the discussion more directly to Christian Faith.  “Christ is the total object of our faith” (IPLW-Faith, p. 25).  What other reason would we have for walking the Christian path if it were not for Christ?  In one of my “stock” funeral homilies, I build on this idea.  I start by saying that many of our fore fathers believed in liberty and freedom and democracy, but how many of them would have put up their property and lives just for the concepts, the ideals of liberty and democracy?  Rather, it was because of their confidence in George Washington (and others) that they were willing to pursue the ideals, even at the risk of life and limb.  People really are not willing to die for doctrines, dogmas and ideals.  However, they are willing to make these great sacrifices for another person.

It was not because of some religious philosophy or set of doctrines that caused Peter, James, John, Andrew and all the others to give up their homes and livelihoods to follow Jesus.  Rather it was because of their personal relationship with Jesus, it was for HIM, that they were willing to leave everything, because, to quote St. Peter, “Lord, where else could we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”  Peter, James, John, Andrew and the rest came to know Jesus through their own direct, personal experience.  How do we come know Christ?

What is the first characteristic of Christian Faith?  We can start by looking at the reading we had just a few weeks ago from St. John’s Gospel, when Andrew and John heard John the Baptist say about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God.”  Andrew and John most likely did not know what he meant by that, but they decided to follow Jesus.  Jesus noticed them following Him and asked them, “What are you looking for?” and they asked Him, “Master, where do you live?”  Jesus replied, “Come and see.”  They then spent a few hours with Jesus, and while not understanding everything He said, they knew that they needed to follow Him, and they immediately invited others to follow Him as well.

The first characteristic of faith in Jesus is a fact.  This is really the first characteristic of any kind of knowledge.  A fact is “the impact of consciousness with a reality If it’s not reality then its a dream, it isn’t knowledge” (IPLW-Faith, p. 28).  Now there are many different kinds of facts.  Tonight I had baked potato soup for dinner.  It is 28 degrees outside.  Faith in Jesus is a particular kind of fact.  It is a fact that had the appearance of an encounter.  An encounter is when I experience the reality, the presence of another person.

The second characteristic of faith in Jesus, is that this encounter is not with just some ordinary presence.  No, it is an exceptional encounter.  What makes something exceptional?  “Something is exceptional when it corresponds to the deepest needs for which we live and move” (IPLW-Faith, p. 31).  An exceptional encounter is when we find a person who corresponds with what we truly desire; those infinite needs we have for justice, truth, happiness and love.  The exceptional means the divine, because only the divine is infinite.

The third characteristic of faith in Jesus is that this exceptional encounter produces in us Wonder.  Wonder is always a question, even if it is a secret one.  It is a question that touches the ultimate fiber of our being.

This question is the fourth characteristic of faith in Jesus, because it takes the form of “Who is this man?”  This is the central problem of Christian faith.  The answer to this question is the answer of faith.  Many of the Pharisees witnessed many of the great works of Jesus, including the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead.  In the gospels we hear many people asking this question in one form or another, “Who is this man?”  Some respond like St. Peter and say, “Yes, You are the Christ!  You have the words of eternal life.”  Others say no to Jesus, they walk away from Him; maybe just sad, like the Rich Young Man, but others with a hatred that leads them to plot against Him.

When I was just a priest for a few months, and the doctor told me that I had cancer, why did I not curse God, or say that He did not exist?  Why did I say (and I explicitly remember saying this to myself, in my anxiety), “All for Jesus”?  I said it because I had had an encounter with Jesus Christ in my life.  I knew him not merely as a person of history, but a person and friend present in my life.  I did not know how things would turn out, but I knew that He was my Lord and Savior.  Sure, there were times during my treatment and recovery when my faith may have faltered, but it never failed.  And after my illness, and after my father’s death when I was experiencing a great deal of spiritual aridness, instead of giving up with God and looking for happiness in other people and things, I knew that I had to re-encounter Christ Jesus in my life, right here and right now.  It was then that I first heard of Communion and Liberation.  I did not know what it was all about, but in the life witness of Luca and Daniel (the first two people in the Movement I met), I recognized Jesus there and I knew that I had to follow Him.

This leads to the fifth and final characteristic of faith in Jesus:  the Response.  In this exceptional encounter I experience my ultimate freedom, freedom to become the person I was made to be.  This is what makes it a truly human action.  To be reasonable I must say “yes” to the exceptional encounter that inspires wonder and asks the question “who is this man?”  If I do not say “yes” I am basically saying that I cannot except what I see with my own eyes, what I hear with my own ears.  Those that walked away from Jesus, those that plotted against Him, heard His words and saw His miracles, yet they rejected what they saw and heard.  Why?  Because of their own preconceptions of what the Messiah was suppose to be like.

I spoke this morning in my homily about preconceptions; the gospel was about Jesus not being accepted in Nazareth.  We too can have preconceptions about Jesus.  Maybe we have the bad kind of fear of the Lord, expecting that He is a harsh judge just looking to punish us, and that is why we cannot forgive ourselves for the mistakes we have made, and we become depressed or embittered.  Or we face illness as a punishment from God, and add to our agony by asking, “Why?  What did I do wrong?”  Maybe Jesus is just a nice philosopher who taught good things, and we just allot Him an hour on Sunday, out of respect or simply duty.  Maybe God is just that “last chance” magic worker that if we say the right kind and number of prayers will give us what we want.  When we persist in these preconceptions, then we will say “no” to Jesus when He invites us to “Come and see” where He lives.

The idea of Faith being a type of Reason, or more properly a method of Reason, almost seems nonsensical in today’s world. For many people Faith and Reason are viewed as at least distinct, and at worse opposing ways of knowing something. In these few pages, Msgr. Giussani makes a strong demonstration that not only is Faith and Reason not in opposition to each other, but that Faith is the fullest flower of Reason.

First a couple of definitions. “The way to do something” is Giussani’s definition of Method, and he defines Reason as that energy peculiar to human beings by which we know. Faith is just one method of reason. It is an indirect method of knowing something, because it is mediated by a witness. Other methods of reason would include observation (the use of our senses), and the scientific method which is based on analysis and dialectic.

Msgr. Giussani argues that faith is the most important of all the methods of reason because it uses the entire person, my whole “I”. The other methods only use part of me — my intellect, my sight, my hearing, etc. Why does faith use all of my “I”? Because I have to trust the witness. This requires a relationship. I cannot relate to a witness with only my eyes, only my ears, only my intellect. For it to be a real relationship, I bring my entire “I” into it. It takes a love for truth, and such a love engages the entire person.

All of human society and history is based on this method of reason. If we do not trust each other, we would have chaos. We have faith that people will obey the traffic rules. Culture is simply the development of knowledge, which requires me to trust in the discoveries that others have made, and then in the future people with trust in my discoveries and add their own. All of this is based on the method of Faith.

The key in this method of reason which is faith is whether or not we can trust the witness. Trust in the person is vital, but we can trust unreasonably, as well as reasonably. The other morning a woman called me before 8 a.m. She started to tell a tale of woe and how she needed money for “personal items.” She slurred her speech as she talked to me, giving me the impression that she had been drinking. For me to believe all that she told me, for me to put faith in what she said, would be unreasonable. So by what criteria do we evaluate the witness? How do we know if we are trusting the witness reasonably? We know that it is right to trust a witness (1) when that person really knows what she or he is saying, and (2) when that person does not what to deceive us. If we believe that a person knows what they are talking about, and we have no reason to believe that they are trying to deceive us, if we make these judgments about the witness, then it is unreasonable NOT to trust what the witness has to say.

So what does this say about our Christian faith? Is Jesus Christ a trustworthy witness? Are the Apostles and the entire Christian culture for the past 2000 years?

As we begin this discussion of Msgr. Luigi Giussani’s book, Is it Possible to Live this Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, Vol. 1: Faith (IPLW-Faith), we need to keep some things in mind about Msgr. Giussani’s writing.  First, especially in this work, we need to remember that Giussani did not set off to write a book.  This book is basically the transcripts of a series of talks that he gave, over a course of a year, to a group of young people who were planning to dedicate their lives to Christ in the Secular Institute in the Church called, Memores Domini.  This is a group who work in the world, yet live together making promises of obedience, chastity (celibacy), and poverty, living the charism of Communion and Liberation intensely.  If you read this book, you will notice that the style of writing is not very formal; that’s because it is really spoken, to a group.  Msgr. Giussani was probably given the transcripts to do some editing to, but mostly this book is spoken.  The other thing to remember is that this book was spoken in Italian.  I am sure that the translators have done a great job — far better than I could do, since I do not speak Italian.  Yet, it is still a translation, and each language has its own idioms.  The translators seem to have kept those idioms, which I think is very fair.  It will encourage me, and those of you reading this blog, to connect our own experiences to what is being discussed.  This is what we should be doing anyway, otherwise it will just become abstract, and not connected with reality.  We must always begin with reality, which is our experience.

On a personal note, since I am NOT copying the text of the book into these posts, I am writing a summary.  By definition a summary leaves some things out.  What I leave out is probably a factor of my own experience, of what struck me as I read (or for the first third of this book, re-read) the book.  Please read the book for yourself if you find this interesting.  Even better, find a School of Community (SoC) and read the text with them.  The interaction with other people, breathes life into this journey of faith.  In fact Msgr. Giussani speaks of the importance of doing this work in a group of other mature friends, because they help us limit the deceptiveness of our lives.  Too often we try to kid ourselves, keep ourselves blind to the reality in our lives.  Others can help us keep it real.  I hope that some of the discussion and comments that I hope that these posts generates will help me keep it real.

One concept that Giussani uses all the time, that we really need to have a basic understanding of just to begin, is the “heart.”  He will speak often of the “deepest desires of our heart,” and of making a judgment as to whether a fact “corresponds with our heart.”  When Msgr. Giussani speaks about the heart, he is using the term in the Biblical sense, and not it what is often common for us today.  So often today, when we speak of the heart, we see it as the seat of emotions, so the heart has to do with all things emotional.  It is often seen as being in opposition to the “head” which deals with all things intellectual and reasonable and logical. This is NOT the Biblical sense of the word, it is not how Jesus used it, and it is not how Giussani uses it (nor should we).  The heart is the totality of the individual person:  their emotions, their intellect, their memory, their will, everything about the person.  It is what unites us into a whole being.  We are less of a person if we ignore our intellect and will, and just focus on our emotions, and we are less of a person if we ignore our emotions and just focus on logic and intellect.  Both extremes reduces the human person.

Just the other day I received in the mail a free CD of some of the works of Mozart.  It is an offer to collect some of the best of classical music, and each CD comes with a small book to learn more about the composer and the individual works on the CD.  While reading the book about Mozart’s life, I came across a line that bothered me, and which addresses the beginning point of this book of Giussani that I am reading and sharing.  Early in his life, Mozart was the court musician for a cardinal.  This cardinal promoted the arts.  The author of the book made a statement to effect that “despite being a church official, the cardinal was also a man who promoted science.”  Did you catch what bothered me?  It is the common bias that suggests that people who have religious faith are not really reasonable, at least not in what they see as being higher reason — science.  This is the starting point for Msgr. Giussani, particularly in this work.  He wants to demonstrate that faith is reasonable.

A more precise way of stated what Giussani says, it that faith is method of reason.  That there are many different methods of reason, the methods depend on the object being examined, and faith is one of those methods.  In fact, instead of being a “lower” method, Giussani demonstrates that faith is the most complete method because it engages all of the person’s “I” and is the foundation of all society.

Allow me to use Giussani’s example.  Let’s say I went to high school with Nadia, Carlos and Tom.  After graduation, I do not see Nadia and Carlo for 20 years, though I keep in touch with my friend Tom.  One night I get on a plane heading to Chicago (I am using different cities that Giussani), that first stops in New York.  I get on the plane, which started in Athens, and Nadia is in the seat next to me.  Of course we are going to talk; we are going to share about what we have been doing for the past 20 years.  She tells me that she is married with 6 children and works in insurance.  She then asks me if I remember Carlos.  I tell her, yes, but I have not heard from him in 20 years.  He was the class clown, and never took anything seriously.  Nadia tells me that he is now living in New York, and has become a very successful and responsible banker.  That because her work takes her to New York several times a year, she and Carlos get together when she is in New York.  Nadia gets off in New York, and I continue to Chicago where my high school friend Tom picks me up.  As we are drive to his house, I ask Tom if he remembers Carlos, the class clown.  Tom says of course, but he has not heard from him in 20 years.  I proceed to tell him that he is now a very successful banker in New York.

Now, I still have not seen Carlos in 20 years.  Why do I pass on this information?  Because Nadia, someone I know and trust, told me the information about Carlos and I accept as true what she told me.  Her testimony gives me, indirectly, knowledge.  This is the method of reason that we call faith:  indirect (but certain) knowledge obtained through the testimony of a witness.

We are not talking about religious knowledge, at least not yet.  Just knowledge.  Just think about all the things that you know by this method.  Fr. Mick, the pastor I live with, called me for dinner tonight.  He made pasta.  I do I know that it was not poisoned?  I did not observe him make it.  I trust him.  Likewise, when he opened the jar of sauce how did he know that it was not poisoned?  Because he trusts the grocery store.  To not trust someone we have no reason to distrust is unreasonable (as a psychologist, I might even say, depending on the degree of distrust, that it is paranoia, a mental illness).  When we drive down the road, and we have a green light, we know with a high degree of certainty that the cars on the cross streets are going to stop and not hit us.  If we have been in an accident because someone ran a red light, we might not be so trusting, but generally the only way that society can function is by its members trusting each other; by us having faith in each other.

How do I know that George Washington was the first president of the United States?  Because that knowledge has been handed down to me by my teachers and my history book.  I never observed directly George Washington being president, nor did my teachers.  Nearly all of the knowledge that I have is because of faith.  And unlike my knowing that 2 + 2 = 4, which I can demonstrate for myself and only uses part of who I am, knowledge by faith requires all of me, my total “I”.

This does, of course, lead us to religious faith.  Religious faith is knowledge we have about our destiny.  We will never meet our destiny on the street.  Destiny is a Mystery, yet it is a Mystery that we can come to know through faith.  I have given some vocation talks, and while I can point to events and circumstances in my life that pointed towards reality that God was calling me to be a priest, it certainly is not something I can demonstrate or prove scientifically.  These events and circumstances, along with the testimony of my spiritual director, helped me to discern my vocation; it helped me to make a judgment as to whether the proposal corresponded with the desire of my heart.  First I needed to quiet the distractions in my life so that I could hear my heart speaking, and so I could see the events of my life in reality.

As Msgr. Giussani says, “we can’t begin to discuss these things without some part of our heart praying, asking the Mystery of Being for light, affection, sincerity, and the simplicity to say ‘yes’ to what is true and ‘no’ to what is false” (IPLW-Faith, p. 15).

I have always wanted to do a bit more with this blog. Mostly I have just been publishing my homilies here, and I really appreciate the feedback that I get from those of you who read and comment. Yet, when I started this blog I hoped to also have posts discussing books that I am reading, maybe films that I see, etc. Of course the focus would be on the spiritual life, but more than just my homilies. I have never really gotten to do that, mostly because parish life can keep me very busy.

However, for New Year’s I wanted to make a resolution. While I am still busy in my parish assignment, I know that I can find time to do more spiritual reading, and then share some of my thoughts about what I am reading. This has become more important to me since coming to St. Theresa’s because I have become separated from what had been the spiritual highlight of my week for the past three years; School of Community. What is School of Community (SoC)? It is the basic gesture of the new ecclesial movement known as Communion and Liberation.

Communion and Liberation (CL) really started in a high school in Milan, Italy in 1954, although it was not called CL at the time. It was started by Fr. Luigi Giussani, who had decided to start teaching in high school after having taught theology at the local Catholic University. Msgr. Giussani stated that he never intended to start a “new” spirituality or movement in the Church. Rather he wanted to re-propose the Christian event in a way that would be interesting and provocative to his students. He was concerned that for too many of his students, Christianity had become a mere abstraction, a set of rules and dogmas. For Msgr. Giussani, Christianity has always been about encountering Jesus Christ, the Divine Mystery, as a real presence in the everyday experiences of our lives. The Church, instead of just being another institution, is really a life — it is the life of Jesus who gave His Spirit to the Church.

“A charism,” Fr. Giussani has written, “can be defined as a gift of the Spirit, given to a person in a specific historical context, so that this person can initiate an experience of faith that might in some way be useful to the life of the Church. I emphasize the existential nature of charism: it makes the Christian message handed down by the apostolic tradition more convincing, more persuasive, more ‘approachable.’ A charism is an ultimate terminal of the Incarnation, that is, it is a particular way in which the Fact of Jesus Christ Man and God reaches me, and through me can reach others.” Else where Msgr. Giussani said, “I tried to show the students what moved me: not the wish to convince them that I was right, but the desire to show them the reasonableness of faith; that is, that their free adhesion to the Christian proclamation was demanded by their discovery of the correspondence of what I was saying with the needs of their hearts, as implied by the definition of reasonableness. Only this dynamic of recognition makes whoever adheres to our movement creative and a protagonist, and not simply one who repeats formulas and things they have heard. For this reason, it seems to me, a charism generates a social phenomenon not as something planned, but as a movement of persons who have been changed by an encounter, who tentatively make the world, the environment, and the circumstances that they encounter more human. The memory of Christ when it is lived tends inevitably to generate a presence in society, above and beyond any planned result.”

Of course these high school students went to college/university, and then they entered into the adult world, and they continued to follow the “method” Msgr. Giussani taught them, of looking at the experiences of their own lives in order to recognize Jesus’ presence. Part of this method was to meet weekly for “School of Community,” which aims at being a true school which, through the reading and discussion of texts indicated by the Movement’s Center, shapes in its participants a clearer understanding of the nature of the Christian fact and illuminates their life. Since 1954, Communion and Liberation has grown into an international association of the faithful.

I “met the Movement” three years ago. As the regular readers of this blog know, the first couple years of my priesthood was “different.” A few months after my ordination I was diagnosed with cancer. Oh, it was a very easy to treat cancer, and I have been cancer-free for four years now, but it was still pretty scary to be told that you have cancer. And for most of the first year of my priesthood I felt crappy as I was being treated. I really felt as if I had been robbed of the “honeymoon” of being a newly ordained. Then, just after I was told by my doctor that all my “numbers” were where they wanted them, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died two months later.

After my father’s death I felt very dry spiritually. I desired a way to rediscover my priestly zeal. A priest friend of mine, in another State, casually mentioned CL. I did not know what it was, so I Googled it. As I read about the Movement, something within me stirred. I thought, “This might be what I am looking for spiritually.” I saw that there was a local contact, and one month after my father’s death I was in a coffee shop in Princeton meeting with Luca and Daniel. After that meeting I really did not have any better idea of what CL was, but something about them made be want to follow. In CL language, in them I found a correspondence with what my heart was truly desiring.

We started to meet weekly for SoC, and I found my zeal and joy. My faith became less intellectual and abstract, and more alive with my own experience. After sponsor a lecture series at my parish, others joined our SoC. It was not a huge group, but that group helped me to grow as a person, a Christian, and a priest. They continue to meet each week. But now I am over an hour away, and it is just too difficult for me to block out what is essentially 3-4 hours each week to travel there for SoC.

Of course I am still involved with CL. I formally joined the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation this year. I attend the yearly Priest Retreat, and try to attend the yearly Fraternity Exercises. I read Traces, the monthly magazine of the Movement. And the parishioners here at my new assignment often hear me talk about CL. Several have become interested in learning more, and I would not be surprised if we form a SoC here in the future (forming friendship is first, then the desire to do SoC).

Yet, I still miss reading from the designated text and discussing it in SoC (not in an abstract way, but in terms of how it corresponds with my own experience). They had been reading, Is it Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, Vol. 1 – Faith, and I had only gotten through the first third when I was transferred. Since then Vol. 2 – Hope, has been released and is the current text for SoC. Both are available from Amazon.

It is my intention to do a kind of “virtual SoC” on this blog. It will help me discipline myself to reading the text, and reflect on it. It might also give some of my parishioners more of an introduction to CL. In the original Italian, Is it Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, is a single volume with the three parts being “Faith, Hope, and Love”, but I they are translating it into English as 3 books. It is really a series of conferences that Msgr. Giussani gave over a course of a year or so, to a group of women and men who were consecrating their lives to the service of the Church, in the charism of CL, in a secular institute called Memores Domini. Since it is basically the transcript of those talks, the book(s) have a bit of an unusual style, especially to American readers. But it is also very accessible because it has a lot of examples. What I hope to do is a few times a week give a summary of the section I have read, and then my own reflections on the section. I welcome comments from readers, but try to remember to avoid abstraction and speak from your heart, your experience. I will start with the first volume, Faith, just because I hate not finishing a book, but if I read and post several times a week, I should be able to finish the first book quickly and then get in sync with Vol. 2, Hope.

Please, do not think of this as real SoC. That really is about developing community, friendship, companionship. But maybe this will help spark an interest in CL in others, who can look to join a SoC near them, or start one.

We all have cravings of our hearts, desires that are just so profound, that we get to a point where we feel as if these desires and cravings are just going to cause us to erupt.  I am not talking about simple needs like for food or drink or even for companionship.  Those needs we can satisfy, at least for a time.  When we are hungry, if we grab something to eat, then that desire, that craving or need is satisfied.  Of course we will become hungry again, but at least for a brief time our need for food will be satisfied.

While those needs are very important, they are not the deepest desires and needs of our heart.  No, those deepest desires of the human heart are for Truth, Beauty, and Love.  We can never get enough of those.  In fact, we have an infinite yearning for those goods.  Often we might try to fulfill those deepest, infinite needs with finite things – such as food, drink, material possessions, drugs or sex – and when we try that they become our addictions, because in the end those finite things never satisfy the deepest desires of our heart no matter how much of them we get.  The deep desires and cravings just continue to build within us until our hearts reach a point of eruption within us.  At that point we can either embrace reality or slip into delusion.

If we choose to embrace reality and reason, then we humbly acknowledge that we do not have inside us what is needed to fulfill and satisfy our deepest longings and desires.  We come to recognize that there MUST be a being that IS infinite Truth, Beauty and Love.  We come to recognize that there is an Infinite Mystery, an Infinite Presence that alone can satisfied our deepest desires.  It is then that we encounter God, and like the Prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading, we cry out to the Infinite Mystery, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.”

Advent is a time of desire.  Advent is the season when we recognize our need for the Infinite Mystery, who alone can satisfy the deepest yearnings of our hearts, and we cry out to God.  Often we do not realize that Advent is a penitential season in the Church’s liturgical year.  It is the reason that we wear violet during this time, and we prepare ourselves for the celebration of Christmas.  Advent is a time for us to look at all the things that keep us from recognizing our infinite need and desire for God, so that we can let go of them.  We prepare our hearts for the Infinite Mystery who alone can satisfy our deepest desires, by turning away from our sins, and we pray, “Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.”

Our experience of helplessness before the reality of our boundless desire “moves us to ask for fellowship with God’s Son, Jesus Christ the Lord” (P.J. Cameron, Magnificat, Vol. 10, No. 9, November 2008, p. 409).  We come to recognize our need for a Savior, so we should “Be watchful! Be alert!”

Today we are joined by six people on a journey.  They have been looking at the deepest desires of their hearts, and they have come to recognize that Jesus is the Infinite Mystery who alone can fulfill their deepest longings.  They have discerned that they need to follow Jesus; the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  Four of them are preparing themselves to receive the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and Eucharist at the Easter Vigil.  We welcome them, and will be accepting them into the Order of Catechumens; members of the household of God.  The other two are already a brother and sister in Christ through their baptism.  We now welcome them as candidates for full communion in the Catholic Church.

Together we prepare our souls from the coming of our Savior.  Let us be watchful and alert, so that we will not miss welcoming Christ who comes to be present among us.

["Doubting Thomas" by Caravaggio] 

This past week I was on retreat with a group of priests involved in the Church Movement called, Communion and Liberation.  Our retreats are somewhat atypical of what one might think a retreat is like.  In the morning we do keep silent, with a conference and Mass.  However, one of the beliefs of Communion and Liberation is the importance of friends, or companions, as we follow Christ, so we also spend time socializing with each other; sharing how we encounter the presence of Christ Jesus in our different ministries.  Another aspect of Communion and Liberation is the full embracing of our humanity through contact with reality.  Since the Word of God became flesh, we too, need to experience the reality of God in the flesh, so we embrace expressions of beauty and culture.  On this retreat we attended a concert of classical music, and went to one of the Catholic Missions established by Blessed Junipero Serra; in fact the Mission where he is buried.

While on retreat I did have my copy of Magnificat, so I was able to pray over this weekend’s readings, but I did not the various commentaries that I look at in preparing my homilies.  Of course today’s Gospel is one that we are all familiar with; the story of “Doubting Thomas.”  As I prayed over this Gospel reading a question came to my mind, was St. Thomas’ doubt, his wanting to “see the mark of the nails in his hands” and put his hand into Jesus’ side before he would believe in the Resurrection really all that outrageous?  I think the answer to that question is by “yes” and “no”.

Let’s look first at the “no,” that it was not outrageous for St. Thomas to want some proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  As I mentioned earlier, one of the themes frequently discussed in Communion and Liberation is the carnal, in the flesh, reality of Jesus.  St. John’s Gospel begins with the beautiful song of how the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.  Throughout His preaching mission Jesus is frequently eating and drinking with people; in fact some of the scribes and Pharisees used that as a critique of Him, saying that Jesus was a glutton and drunkard.  Jesus often physically touched people in healing them.  In several of the post-Resurrection accounts Jesus reveals Himself, and that He was not a ghost, by eating with His disciples.  In today’s Gospel reading, when He first appeared to the Apostles and said, “Peace be with you,” Jesus then showed them His hands and His side, and it was only then that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

St. Thomas was not at that first appearance of the Risen Christ to the Apostles, so it seems quite normal for him to want some tangible proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  And Jesus is not bothered by this doubt of Thomas; when He next appears to the Apostles and says, “Peace be with you,” Jesus right away turns to Thomas and tells him to touch Him for Jesus is eager for Thomas to have believe in Him; “do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  Jesus knows the importance of Faith in order to share the new life He came to bring to all people.  How often during His public ministry did Jesus say, “your faith has healed you,” or “your faith has been your salvation.”

Yet, there is something a bit outrageous in St. Thomas’ doubt, but I think Jesus uses that to help us so that we will “not be unbelieving, but believe.”  St. Thomas’ doubt seems to fit right in with our modern world.  We have seemed to so embrace science and technology, that most people want to only believe what they can see, touch, hear, taste or smell.  They say that they want “proof” and by proof they mean something tangible.  They seem to relegate faith as being just sentimentality and not connected with reality.

However, there are two general methods of knowledge; both direct and indirect.  Science relies on direct knowledge; we know something because we observe it, we experience it ourselves.  This is a powerful method for knowing something, indeed, but it is actually not the most common method for knowing something.  Most of the things that we know, we know indirectly.  Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic work, Democracy in America, made this wonderful observation:

“If man were forced to demonstrate for himself all the truths of which he makes
daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory
demonstrations without ever advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his life,
he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to act in this way,
he is reduced to take on trust a host of facts and opinions which he has not had either the
time or the power to verify for himself, but which men of greater ability have found out,
or which the crowd adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his
own thoughts; he is not led to proceed in this manner by choice, but is constrained by the
inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher in the world so great but that he
believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.”

So most of the truths that we know come through this indirect method.  This indirect method of knowledge is called “Faith,” and we can define Faith as knowledge that we get through the testimony of a witness.  While it is obvious how this applies to religious matters, just think about your own life; how do we know what is in that soda can we are about to open and drink?  By faith in the testimony of a witness, a label, we know that it is soda and not poison.  Of course we need to evaluate the credibility of the witness in order to determine if we should believe what they say, but most of the truths we know in life is through this method.

And this is how St. Thomas’ doubts is a kind of failure, but one that Jesus uses for our benefit.  St. Thomas should have believed the testimony of the other Apostles.  He had lived with them, as they lived with Jesus, for three years.  Theirs was an intimate community of companions.  He should have known that their testimony was credible, and to not accept the testimony of credible witnesses is unreasonable.  However, his failure to believe through the testimony of the other Apostles, and needing direct knowledge, is for our benefit for it demonstrates to us, who did not live with original Apostles the credibility of their testimony.  So when they went out and preached the Good News it was reasonable for their listeners to have faith in their testimony, to come to know Jesus through their testimony.  It has been through this method of knowledge that we have come to know Jesus — by faith, that gives us “a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Something else struck me by this Gospel passage; namely the context of the encounter with the Risen Christ.  Both appearance occurred on Sunday.  The Lord welcomes them by saying, “Peace be with you,” a phrase we hear during Mass.  Jesus speaks to them, as He does to us through the Scriptures, and He shows the Apostles His body, as He shows us His body and blood in the Eucharist.  Our communal celebration of Mass on Sunday is a participation in this experience of the Resurrection of the Lord.  It is a direct experience of Jesus’ presence that requires Faith, and builds up the Faith.

This experience of Jesus places a demand on us.  Pope Benedict XVI recently commented that Faith is both instructive and performative.  By instructive, the Holy Father means that by Faith we learn about Jesus and His teachings so that we may have life to the full, so we even learn more about ourselves.  However, this knowledge must bear fruit in our lives.  This is what he means when he says that Faith is performative; our Christian faith should change the way we live life, for we have been given new life.  We should give what we have received, so as we have received the gift of Faith through the testimony of witnesses, we are called to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection.  The resurrection of Jesus should touch our lives, so that we live differently.  Even when we are tested by suffering through various trials, our Faith in Jesus should cause us to “rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,” as St. Peter says in today’s second reading.  Be witnesses to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

[Henryk Siemiradzki. "Christ and the Samaritan Woman." 1890. Oil on canvas. The Lvov Picture Gallery, Lvov, Ukraine.  Found on the web at www.abcgallery.com.]

Have you ever grumbled because you were thirsty?  It was probably on a hot summer day, when you were outside working hard on something — maybe cutting the grass, doing some gardening, maybe painting the house — but you became so thirsty that you grumbled at someone to get you something to drink.  I think that all of us can remember a time when we were so thirsty that we grumbled.

There are a lot of thirsty people in today’s readings.  In today’s first reading, from the Book of Exodus, we are told that the Israelites, soon after being set free from slavery in Egypt, started to grumble against God and Moses because they were thirsty.  They started to ask themselves if the Lord was in their midst.  Then in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus tell the Samaritan woman that He was thirsty.  Our Lord did not grumble at her, but He did ask her for a drink.  So why all this talking about being thirsty?

Through our readings today God is trying to help us understand the difference between two different kinds of thirsts; two different kinds of needs.

The first kind of need is what we can call a finite or horizontal need.  These are the needs that we all have for the good things of this earth:  food, drink, companionship, safety, fun, a good income, medical care, success at work or school, etc.  These needs are all part of our nature as human beings, and there is nothing inherently wrong with desiring them.  These are needs that we can usually fulfill through our own effort.  We are hungry so we get ourselves something to eat, and then we are satisfied; at least for awhile.  We are thirsty so we get something to drink.  As long as to do not go to extremes, and we use proper means for satisfying these needs there is nothing wrong with having them.

However we also have another kind of need; ones that are deeper, infinite or vertical.  These needs are part of our desire for meaning and purpose.  These would include our need for love, truth, beauty, justice, and integrity.  These needs are also built into our nature as human beings, but unlike our finite or horizontal needs, there is nothing that we can do to satisfy these needs by our own effort.  Only God Himself can satisfy these needs, because only God is infinite Love, infinite Beauty, infinite Truth, infinite Justice, and perfectly One.  These are the needs that we can never get too much of; the more we experience them, the more we desire them.  God created us with these infinite, vertical needs in the very core of our being so that we would be constantly drawn toward Him, towards intimate, personal contact with His eternal, transcendent and infinite Love.

It is because of these needs that we are always restless, even when we have satisfied all of our horizontal needs.  It is when we forget this, when we try to satisfy our infinite, vertical needs with horizontal stuff that we put ourselves on the road to disappointment, frustration and even tragedy.

The Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel is an illustration of a person who has made the mistake of confusing these two kinds of needs.  Jesus notes that she has had five husbands and that she was not married to the man she was currently living with.  She was coming to the well in the middle of the day in order to avoid the other women of the village, so she had become isolated from her community.  Jesus, in His thirst — not only for water but for healing wounded souls — saw that this woman was living a life of frustration and alienation.  A life of loneliness and inner turmoil.  She had been trying for years to satisfy her vertical needs, which only God can satisfy, with all kinds of horizontal stuff:  human love, comfort, earthly pleasures.  She had started to learn the hard way that that formula does not work.  She started to have the spiritual awakening to realize that she needed a Savior, a “gift of God.”

Then she had an encounter with a man sitting by the well.  She had an encounter with Jesus, and she came to recognize in Jesus the embodiment of that which could fulfill all the deepest desires of her heart; all of her infinite, vertical needs.  While she did not get all the answers, she recognized Jesus did have all the answers, that He was the Christ, the gift of God.  He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that if she truly wanted to take seriously the deepest desires of her heart then she needed to follow Him.  And she did not keep this treasure, this gift, to herself.  No, she went to all the people that she typically tried to avoid, and shared with them the Good News that she had encountered in Jesus, and she brought them to Him.

What can we learn from the Samaritan woman?  Maybe that we too have been trying to satisfy our vertical needs with horizontal stuff, and that doing so will only leave us feeling disappointed and frustrated.  Maybe we can learn from her to have the spiritual sensitivity to recognize the gift of God, to answer the question the Israelites asked in today’s first reading, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”, with a definitive YES!

As we approach the Altar of the Lord, let us be people who worship what we understand in Spirit and truth.  Let us encounter Jesus, the great Gift of God, who is thirsting to heal our wounded souls.  Then, like the Samaritan woman, let us testify to all those around us — even those we typically avoid — that Jesus Christ is “truly the savior of the would.”

[The following is a talk that I gave to the Communion & Liberation community in Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 2007.  I thought I would share it since I did not have to preach this weekend since the deacons were]

Advent is a time for preparation and waiting.  It does not seem as if the modern world is very good at waiting.  We seem to want fast food, overnight express delivery, on-demand TV and  movies.  Ours seems to be a culture of instant, or at least near instant, gratification.  Jesus told His Church that we would be a sign of contradiction, and one of the ways that the Church holds up a big red flag to our culture that is just rushing along, is to have this season of Advent — a sacred time of waiting.

But waiting for what?  Rather waiting for whom?  Of course our wait is for the encounter with the Mystery.  The one who speaks with authority.  The one who fills all of our deepest desires.  The one who reveals us to ourselves.  We are waiting for the encounter with Christ.

One of our simple gestures, when we gather as a community of believers, is to pray the Angelus.  Why this prayer, of all the many beautiful prayers in the Church’s treasury?  I believe that Msgr. Giussani had an affinity for the the Angelus because it reminds us of the center of time and being — the Incarnation, when the eternal Logos in love of us became Flesh.  While the Mystery had always made itself known to humanity, in the Incarnation the fullness of Divine love is manifested to humanity.  Of course the Incarnation did not happen at Christmas.  That first encounter of the Logos-made-Flesh was an intimate, personal encounter when the Blessed Virgin Mary said “Yes” to the invitation by God to participate in an absolutely unique way in His almighty will.  For nine months this great event, this wonder of wonders, was experienced only by a few people — most intimately by Mary and Joseph, but recall that even John the Baptist leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when he encountered the Mystery in Mary’s womb.

Yet Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for Christmas, when the great Encounter manifests Himself for all the world to see — from the poor shepherds tending their sheep to the wealthy wise men from the East.  While the waiting for the Messiah was over at the Incarnation, we who are often slow to realize the greatness of God, celebrate the end of the waiting at Christmas.  Our Salvation has Come!

One of the ways that we can best celebrate Advent is to nurture this need for waiting within ourselves.  We need to recognize our desire for Christ, our longing for Him, in order to recognize His Presence among us.  Without anticipation, without waiting, we might miss Christ passing by.  We might miss our opportunity to say, “Master, where do You live?” so that He can say, “Come and see.”  Of course Christ never stops making Himself present to us, He continually invites us to encounter Him, yet we can repeatedly miss Him in our blindness, in our rushing about, in our not being willing to wait.

What can we do to be better wait-ers?  First we can learn to better appreciate beauty.  The theme for this year’s Exercises was “Christ in His Beauty Draws Me to Him.”  That is a powerful statement, and one that we should not rush past too quickly.  It seems to me that our culture has dimmed in its appreciation of beauty.  After all, look at some of the things that pass for art today; a Crucifix in a jar of urine, a mosaic of the Madonna made out of elephant dung, music that seems to glorify using people, or just taking care of “my own.”  We have been lead astray by the saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, which so many people seem to interpret as meaning that there is no universal standard of beauty.  Yet we know that God IS Beauty!  Please note well that I am not saying that God is beautiful, but that God in His Being is the Being of Beauty.  I am not a great philosopher, in fact I nearly drove one of my philosophy professors mad, because I just kept telling him I just did not get it, so I am sure that this is not the most philosophically exact definition of beauty, but beauty is the correspondence between the artistic expression and the mind of God.  It is a response to God’s love that tries as best as it is able to correspond to God’s love.  It is this correspondence, or more properly put, relationship with God that was the theme of the first lesson of this year’s Exercises, and will be the theme of our Advent reflection as we prepare and wait — for Christ, in Christ, with Christ.

In reading a biography of St. John Vianney, I read about an episode in the saint’s life when someone, noticing that the Cure’ of Ars spent many hours of devout prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, asked him what he prayed before the Blessed Sacrament.  St. John Vianney, simple, holy man that he was, replied, “He looks at me and I look at Him.”  What an absolutely wonderful description of contemplation.  First, Christ looks at me.  Then I look at Him.

What does Christ see when He looks at me?  He sees my need.  He sees my longing for infinite happiness, my desire for infinite love.  He looks at me with compassion.  Over and over again in the Gospels we hear that Jesus looked at people with compassion.  Whether it was the Rich Young Man who wanted to know what he needed to do to gain eternal life, or the woman caught in adultery, or the crowd that followed Him like sheep without a shepherd, or looking at Jerusalem soon to be destroyed, Jesus always looked with compassion.  And He still looks at us with compassion.  As you have probably heard, the word compassion means to “suffer with,” but I think we need to broaden that definition for when we use the word “passion” we often mean more than “to suffer”.  We say that we love passionately.  We might say we have a passion for football, or knitting, or hiking, or reading.  Often when we use the word “passion” we mean something like, “to burn with desire,” so when we think of Jesus looking at us with compassion we need to see Him as burning with desire for us.  Jesus loves us.  That really is the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  Jesus REALLY, REALLY loves us.

Now, if you are going to cry when I say that Jesus loves you, please let it be with joy.  Once I was helping at another parish as their children made their first Reconciliation.  Many children come feeling nervous and anxious, and this one child really looked scared and after they told me all their sins, I looked at them with as tender a look as I could, smiled and said, “Jesus loves you.”  With that this child burst into tears.  I have to wonder what people thought as they saw this child crying as they left the confessional.  Maybe that is why they haven’t invited me back to help with first Reconciliation any more.

Seriously, when Jesus gazes on us, He burns with desire for us and with us.  He knows what fulfills our deepest desires.  He lays bare our need to be happy, our need to be loved, together with all the illusions we create around us that we think will make us happy.  Our sins are one type of illusion, a false love, a false happiness that just leaves us empty.  But there are also other illusions in our lives, which often are not sinful per say, but do not satisfy.

Almost 20 years ago I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology.  This was long before I was a priest.  While there I had fallen in love with a woman.  Her name is Juliann.  I know that there was some real love there, because only people who love each other can hurt each other as much as Juliann and I hurt each other.  Looking back in hindsight, we both were looking for the other to be the source of our happiness, and this just put too heavy a burden on the other.  Of course we failed to fulfill each others’ deepest desires, after all we were both fallible and finite human beings.  And when we failed, we got angry with each other.  We broke up, and for a long time afterwards I was in a depression.  I just wondered if anyone would ever really love me.  I was just absolutely sure that if I just found “Miss Right” my life would be happy.

During this time, in addition to going to a counselor — hey, remember, I was studying to be a psychologist, I continued to go to my spiritual director, Fr. Bob, a Dominican priest.  For a very long time I was “in the desert” as they say.  While in my head I could accept the fact that there was a God, I just could not feel His love.  He seemed distant and unconcerned about me.  And I got really tired of hearing people say, “Oh, even Jesus spent 40 days in the desert.”  One day Fr. Bob and I was talking about all the “sand” I was eating.  I remember getting angry and saying, “Jesus was only in the desert for 40 days.  I feel like I have been here for a year.”  Fr. Bob asked me to think about why Jesus was in the desert.  I said to be tempted, and he said, “Yeah, but think about when in His life He was in the desert.”  I said, right before He started His public ministry.  Fr. Bob said, “Yeah.  Did you ever think that God might be calling you to that kind of public ministry?”  I remember staring at him thinking he must be insane.  I mean here I was having what I thought were some serious doubts about God, and he was asking me if I had ever thought about becoming a priest.  He said that he noticed that I seemed to be more at ease, more at peace, when I was helping out there at the university Neumann Center.

I left that session of spiritual direction still thinking that Fr. Bob was nuts, but it broke something in me.  It laid bare some of my illusions about what happiness was.  I eventually came to realize that I had an encounter with Christ that afternoon.  That Jesus had spoken to me through Fr. Bob.  Jesus looked at me.  Of course Jesus was always looking at me, but this time I started to look back.  My needy heart, which was at first “needing” the wrong things, helped me to recognize the Presence of Jesus and my desire to be loved by Him and to love Him.  Now, I have only been a priest 3.5 years, and this encounter was over 15 years ago, it has been a long journey.  It has been a journey of passion — both the suffering kind and the joyful loving kind — but Christ’s compassion for me has kept me going.

One of the things that we need to do as we wait and prepare this Advent season is to recognize Christ gazing at us, and we must gaze back at Him.  We need to allow Christ to lay bare our need to be happy, our desire for love, and our illusions.

Related to this gaze of Christ is the value of the human person.  If we were of little value, why would Christ look at us with compassion?  After all, God does not need us.  God is complete in the Trinity.  Yet for some reason He has not revealed to us, God chose to create the universe.  I almost said, “the universe in general and each of us in particular,” but the truth is that in His perfect love God creates everything “in particular.”  While we can talk, scientifically, of processes of cosmology and evolution, we should never fall for the illusion that God just started these processes and has just allowed them to run without giving things much of His attention since.  That would be a deistic why of thinking:  God the great clock-maker who now just lets the clock run on its own.

No, God loves us as an “I”.  While He loves all of creation, He does so in a particular way, not a general way.  That means that He loves each of us, not just in general, but in particular.  As another priest once told me, “God knew every sin and mistake I was going to make in my life, and even though He could have made the universe any way He wanted, He did not want to make it without me.”  Well, that goes for each of us.

Just as we should never look at cosmology and evolution as processes that God just started and has now step back from, we should not look at our lives in that way.  There is a real tendency to try to explain away our behaviors as due to forces beyond our control.  In the early 70’s the comedian Flip Wilson had the famous saying, “The devil made me do it.”  Now we blame our DNA and/or our environment.  We want to reduce everything that we do to mere reactions.  As a psychologist I see this often, even within the Church.  I work as a psychological expert for the diocesan marriage tribunal, and so often in annulment cases the argument is made that since depression or anxiety or substance abuse or you name the diagnosis from the DSM-IV runs in the family the person was incapable of entering into a valid marriage.  I am not sure what the judges on the tribunal think of me, because I frequently say in my reports that people are not cogs in a machine.  That God has given us this tremendous gift called free will.  While not wanting to completely dismiss the influence of DNA and prior learning, we cannot throw out our freedom.  We cannot be reduced to being just like the animals.  We are made in the image and likeness of God.  We are His children.  He counts the hairs on our heads.  God loves us!!!  Christ desires to enter into an exclusive relationship with us.  Jesus wants every individual to be happy.  Our desires stem not from the senses, like the brute animals, but from that spiritual power we call the human will.

In the famous passage from St. Paul’s Second letter to the Corinthians, in which he talks about the thorn of the flesh that he begged the Lord to remove from him, he writes, “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me” (2 Cor. 12:9).  Here is another example of how the Church stands in contradiction to the spirit of this world.  Weakness, dependency are bad things according to our culture. We are told that we need to become autonomous and independent.  That we are responsible for our own happiness, our own satisfaction.  If this is true, why would we have any relationships at all?

St. Paul had the right idea when he “begged the Lord” three times, for to have an authentic relationship with Christ we must become beggars.  We must recognize our utter dependence on God for EVERYTHING.  I mean every beat of our heart, every breath we take is a gift from God.  We need God.  No amount of money or power or things or human relationships is going to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts.  Only Christ can make me truly happy.

Now, I am not saying that everyone needs to become celibate like me.  Of course marriage is a blessing, a gift from God, yet I am sure that you married couples here can verify that if it all depended on the two of you, your marriage would be over.  I know that if it was just up to me, J.C. Garrett, I could not forgive sins or make present the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.  All vocations must be rooted in God.  That’s just another way of saying, that we need to recognize and live in a unique relationship with Christ Jesus.  We must allow the power of Christ to dwell in us.  This is what Msgr. Giussani called “religiosity” and religiosity is what Jesus insists on as the only condition for being human.  “Man has a choice:  either to conceive of himself as free from the entire universe and dependent solely on God, or else as free from God, and therefore he becomes a slave to every circumstance” (L. Giussani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim [V. Hewitt, trans.]. Montreal, Canada:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998, p. 86).

As a priest I certainly feel close to Christ when I celebrate the Mass, hear confessions, and anoint the sick.  Fr. Stephen Rossetti, in his book The Joy of Priesthood, calls this “reflected grace,” for while the person receiving absolution or anointing or the Eucharist is the principle recipient of the grace of the sacrament, the priest, as the instrument that God uses to bestow the sacramental graces, also receives grace.  Maybe it is the grace of recognizing our dependence on God, because as I said before, I know that on my own I cannot forgive sins.  To be an instrument is humbling, and it is in humility that we draw near to Christ.  God does not want us groveling before Him.  No, He wants us to embrace the our dignity of being children of God, to come to our loving Father with our needs in utter confidence that God will fulfill all our needs.

This dependency on God can be an extremely difficult lesson to learn, and it is one that we often need to learn over and over again.

A few months after I was ordained a priest I was diagnosed with cancer.  I have to say, hearing that you have cancer can be one of the most frightening things you will ever hear.  It really did not matter that the doctor told me that it was one of the most easily treated kinds of cancer.  All I heard was, “I have cancer.”  I had just turned 40 years old.  The details of that night remain fresh in my memory.  About 10 days prior the doctor had removed half of my thyroid, though he told me that the chances that it was cancer was very small.  Mom and Dad, who had stayed with me a few days after the surgery, had gone home.  The other priests in the rectory were all at a neighboring parish to assist at a Penance service.  The doctor said a lot of other things, including that I would need more surgery followed by radiation, but mostly I just heard “you have cancer.”  And I came home to a big, dark, empty rectory.  I tried calling some friends, but no one was home.  I was very scared and panicked, but then a calm came over me and I said quietly, “all for Jesus.”  At first I did not know where that came from, but then I realized in my aloneness that I was not alone.  Christ was there.  He did not tell me that He would take the cancer away.  He did not tell me that I wouldn’t die.  He was just present with me, and I knew that He would always be present with me.  The fear and anxiety did not magically go away, but they were transformed.  I had a new appreciation for what Jesus means when He says, “See, I make all things new.”

When we are humble and embrace our dependence on God, Christ fills our lives in a superabundant way.  God who is Love fills us with love.  But if we are all filled with ourselves, striving to be so autonomous, we leave no room for Christ.  He knocks at the door of our heart, but He will not kick it in.  We must open the doors of our hearts, invite Him in, and He will sup with us.

Christ, who reveals us to ourselves, comes as a little baby, born in a manger.  The King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Babe of Bethlehem, showing us that it is in dependency and weakness that the power of God dwells in us.

This religiosity, which Christ insists on, this unique relationship in which Christ looks with compassion on us as we depend on Him, is ever new.  Christ is present to us through His Church, which is nothing but His Mystical Body enlivened by His life, by His Holy Spirit.  As members of the Church we invite each other into this unique relationship with Christ that we have been discussing.  Msgr. Giussani says that a friend is someone who opens up this religiosity in us.  Fr. Bob, my old spiritual director, was a friend because in his challenge, he opened me up to the gaze of Christ.  The reason we gather for School of Community is not simply to participate in some kind of Adult Faith Formation or study group.  We are called to be friends to each other.  We are called to help each other be open to the relationship that Christ desires to have with us.  We help lay bare each others’ need for love, for happiness, and our illusions that keep us from Christ.

Our religiosity, our relationship with Christ that embraces our dependence on Him who looks on us with compassion, expresses itself in prayer.  I am sure that most of us remember being taught, probably sometime in our childhood, that there are four kinds of prayer:  Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication (ACTS).  At times it seemed to me as if the prayer of supplication or intercession or asking was treated as the least good kind of prayer, because it could be seen as selfish.  In reading the lessons of this year’s Exercises, and reflecting on them, I have come to realize how wrong that way of thinking is.  While we certainly should be mindful of all of our brothers and sisters around us, and not be selfish, but all prayer really is asking.  When we ask God our Loving Father for something — whether for ourselves, or our families and friends, or for the world — we are recognizing our dependence on Christ.  We are inviting Him, who is constantly knocking at the doors of our hearts, to enter into relationship with us.  It is always an asking to be aware of the Divine Presence.  We should always pray, that is ask, in the words of that Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

Beginning Day

I have mentioned on this blog that for about the past year and a half I have become involved with one of the new ecclesial movements in the Church called Communion & Liberation. Now, you may be wondering “What is Communion & Liberation, or simply, CL?” I’ll allow the National Office to provide a good description:

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement whose purpose is the education to Christian maturity of its adherents and collaboration in the mission of the Church in all the spheres of contemporary life.

Communion and Liberation began in Italy in 1954 when Msgr. Luigi Giussani established a Christian presence in Berchet high school in Milan with a group called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), GS for short.

The current name of the movement, Communion and Liberation (CL), appeared for the first time in 1969. It synthesizes the conviction that the Christian event, lived in communion, is the foundation of the authentic liberation of man. Communion and Liberation is present today in about seventy countries throughout the world. There is no type of membership card, but only the free participation of persons. The basic instrument for the formation of adherents is weekly catechesis, called “School of Community.” The official magazine of the Movement is the international monthly, Traces – Litterae Communionis

While the weekly School of Community, which usually involves reading from one of Msgr. Giussani’s books may lead one to think of it as a theology study group, it really isn’t. The purpose of reading from the book, a very short section each week, is to provide a provocation so that we can look at our own experience to see if what was said “fits” with my life experience. It causes the members to reflect on their own life as a Christian so that we can both support, and when needed, challenge/encourage each other to live a more dynamic, authentic Christian life. To be honest, there have been weeks when my School of Community is what has gotten me through, and has helped me “stir up the flames” of my priesthood. School of Community is to help foster a community of companions on the road with and to Christ.

The first link in this post should take you to a PDF of the flyer for this year’s “Beginning Day” in NYC. This is one of the gestures of the movement for starting the new School of Community year. It is a great opportunity to learn more about CL and just meet some terrific Christian friends. The NYC Beginning Day is October 27 from 2-5 p.m. at Holy Family Church, 15 E. 47th St., NYC. Everyone is welcome.

If you are close to Philadelphia, the CL community there will have its Beginning Day on October 20 starting at 2 p.m. at the Lemon Hill picnic ground in Fairmount Park (near Boathouse Row off Kelly Drive). In addition to spiritual witnesses there will be food and games.

Unfortunately I cannot attend either Beginning Day, since I have Altar Server Training. I do, however, encourage folks to check them out.