What 'Wuz' and is to be
Longtime Dawn Patrol readers may recall that I wrote a series of blog entries about my spiritual journey from Reform Jewish child to agnostic young adult, to defiantly non-Catholic Christian, and finally to my home in the Catholic Church. In an (intentionally misspelled) tribute to the title of Father Richard John Neuhaus's conversion story, I called it "How I Became the Catholic I Wuz."
Ultimately, after a number of installments, I left the series unfinished. There is something fundamentally incommunicable about the experience of conversion. I became frustrated trying to put my experiences into words in a way that would have meaning for others.
Last summer, however, while writing My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, I started to think about my spiritual pilgrimage in light of those who had gone before. The saints' experiences helped me to better see how God's fatherly love had been with me throughout my life—during all the times as a child when I suffered by the sins of others, all the times as a young adult when I suffered by my own sins, and all the times when I was without hope.
So I started to write my conversion story into the pages of My Peace I Give You, intertwined with the saints' own stories of God's grace working in and through their lives. And I found that what I could not communicate on my own, I could communicate with their help. Looking back, I realize I was only doing what I had seen Pope Benedict do in his encyclical Spe Salvi—using the stories of saints (in the Pope's case, St. Josephine Bakhita) to help the reader understand "what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time" (Spe Salvi 3).
That is why I removed the "Wuz" series from the Dawn Patrol archives tonight. Instead, in the coming weeks, as the publication of My Peace I Give You nears, I'll share more about it as it relates to my own experience. However much I am able to comprehend this great gift of life in Christ at all, I can now comprehend it only from the perspective of living in the communion of saints.
Image: Detail of Passion sculpture at the Sanctuaire Notre-Dame-du-Cap, Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Canada. Photo by Dawn Eden.
1:11 AM
Friday, February 17, 2012
The bishop and Bakhita
Since many readers were interested to read about St. Josephine Bakhita in
the post I wrote about her last week, I thought I would share today a quote from a public appearance Pope Benedict made in 2007 where he related a story about the saint.
Speaking of the need "to understand that the true treasure of our life is living in the Lord's love and never losing this love," the Holy Father said:
"We have found, indeed, we have been found by the love of the Lord, and the more we let ourselves be moved by his love in sacramental life, in prayer life, in the life of work, in our free time, the better we will understand that indeed, I have found the true pearl, all the rest is worthless, all the rest is important only to the extent that the Lord's love attributes these things to me. I am rich, I am truly rich and borne aloft if I am in this love. Here I find the center of life, its riches. Then let us allow ourselves to be guided, let us allow Providence to decide what to do with us.
"Here a little story springs to my mind about St. Bakhita, the beautiful African saint who was a slave in Sudan and then discovered the faith in Italy, who became a Sister. When she was old, the Bishop who was paying a visit to her religious house had not met her. He spotted this small, bent African Sister and said to Bakhita: 'But what do you do, Sister?'; and Sr. Bakhita replied: 'I do the same as you, Your Excellency.' Astonished, the Bishop asked her: 'But what?', and Bakhita answered, 'But Your Excellency, we both want to do the same thing: God's will.'
"This seems to me to be a most beautiful answer, the Bishop and the tiny Sister who was almost no longer capable of working, who were both doing the same thing in their different offices; they were seeking to do God's will and so were in the right place."
St. Josephine Bakhita is one of the saints featured in my upcoming book of Catholic spirituality for adult victims of childhood sexual abuse, My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. The book is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
Image Stained-glass window of St. Josephine Bakhita, D R Art Glass Studio.
3:13 AM
Thursday, February 16, 2012
The right direction
Good to see the professor who directed my master's thesis, Father John Corbett O.P., among the moral theologians quoted today in the excellent Catholic News Agency article on moral theologians' rejection of USA Today writer David Gibson's defense of the HHS contraception mandate.
12:33 PM
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The greatest story never told
"The real story of human history—the story of the saints—has never been told. All our histories are about what the rich and powerful were doing because we don't really believe 'He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away' (Luke 1:51-53). We get glimpses of the real story (the biggest interruption in the monotonous narrative of power struggle being the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, of course). But the real story will not be known till That Day, when we discover who the real heroes of history were, what the real story of history was, and how much we owe all those obscure saints for saving our bacon from our own self-destructive lunacy so many times throughout history by their courageous imitation of Christ. There will be a lot of surprises. And yet we will also see that we shouldn’t have been surprised because the whole story is really all summarized in the story of Christ, played out again and again in the lives of his saints, ever ancient and ever new."
—Mark Shea, "The Real Story of History"
Image: Fra Angelico, "The Last Judgment," detail known as "Dance of the Saints"
12:59 PM
Making mercy visible
Today the Church honors St. Claude de la Columbière, the spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who in turn was the 17th-century mystic who received the revelation of the Sacred Heart. Confronted with Jansenism—a perversion of the faith that led many to believe they were beyond any hope of mercy—Columbiere championed the forgiving love of Christ. His "Despair Prayer" offers beautiful food for contemplation:
"Lord, I am in this world to show Your mercy to others. Other people will glorify You by making visible the power of Your grace by their fidelity and constancy to You. For my part I will glorify You by making known how good You are to sinners, that Your mercy is boundless and that no sinner no matter how great his offenses should have reason to despair of pardon. If I have grievously offended You, my Redeemer, let me not offend You even more by thinking that You are not kind enough to pardon me. Amen."
Image: Window at Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart, Georgetown. Photo by Gregory Gresko OSB.
1:57 AM
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Entering the tabernacle of the heart
On this Valentine's Day, I would like to share with you what is perhaps the most beautiful quote I have read about love this past year.
The quote is from the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic Johannes Tauler, and it touched me because it made me think about what it means to have a deeper union with God. Somehow Tauler captures how the very emptiness in a lonely heart may become a space where the spirit of Love can enter in:
"There are only some men who are able to consecrate or bless the sacred Body of Jesus, and no one else. In a spiritual manner, however ... a woman can offer this sacrifice just as a man, and whenever she wants, night or day. She needs to penetrate into the Holy of Holies and leave behind anything of the world. She must enter alone, that is to say enter into herself with a recollected spirit, and there, having left outside all things sensible, she must offer to the Father of Heaven for all that she desires and for all her intentions the all-lovable sacrifice, His own beloved Son, with all His works and words, with all His sufferings and holy life. She must, with a great devotion, include in this prayer all men, poor sinners, the just, those imprisoned in purgatory."
Source: Johannes Tauler, quoted in Charles Journet, The Mass: The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross, 104-105.
Image: St. Elizabeth of Hungary, window at the Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart. Photo by Father Gregory Gresko OSB.
3:00 AM
