Brad Bursa

Seek God. Pursue wisdom. Unpack the mystery of the Christian event.

Recent Posts

  • How do you guys do it?

    When people find out I have eight children, the most common question I get in response is, “How do you guys do it? How do you raise all those kids?” My most common response is usually, “we don’t do it very well.” And, that is true. Most of the time, we feel like we’re barely hanging on. A friend of mine once told me that when he was growing up, his family knew a bunch of big families. He said they would show up and they were like a rugby scrum. Sound and fury, with older kids taking care of younger ones and the mom looking like she’d just gone through the spin cycle. Dad was out working so the scrum had something to eat. I think you get the picture and it’s more or less the picture for us.

    But, still, that question deserves an answer. How do we do it? How do we raise kids today? How do we try to raise them Catholic? Our big family is already, de facto, countercultural. Being Catholic feels like icing on the cake. As I’ve reflected on this, I believe I can point to four realities (not aspirations) that are part of how we approach parenting.

    • Relational: We try to have a relationship with each individual kid. They are all so different. If we didn’t enter into a real relationship with each one, we wouldn’t be attentive to their need and desires, their personality flaws, and so forth. In other words, we wouldn’t know who we were forming. Admittedly, this piece is tricky. There are a lot more of them than there are me and my wife. So we feel stretched thin most of the time.
    • Intentional: You can’t just “go with the flow” of the culture anymore. It’s not Christian in its vision or precepts. Consequently, a Catholic family has to be purposeful with every decision and make sure it aligns with overall goals. Inevitably, this kind of intentional living means living in an intentionally countercultural manner.
    • Incarnational: Last week, I reread From Christendom to Apostolic Mission (for about the fifth time), and I have been reflecting on a few lines, from chapter 4 which focuses on establishing and strengthening practices that incarnate the Christian vision. The verb “incarnate” means “to make flesh” or “to embody.” So, certain cultural practices somehow embody the Christian vision and help someone to see it. The book argues that “Ideas that are not incarnated in the stuff of the world soon lose their hold on our minds” (p. 49). In apostolic times, “Christians will need to find ways to create a societal architecture that incarnates an increasingly counter-cultural Christian vision” (p. 49). For us, this looks like a real attempt to live liturgically. It means chanting Compline. It means saying prayers in the car when we pull out of the driveway, and grace before meals. It means a basket of Rosaries and beautiful Catholic artwork sprinkled around the house. It means icons and relics. It means making the faith tangible.
    • Discernment: We’ve come to realize one-and-done decisions are a farce. Every good game plan is subject to adjustment. Catholic parenting is no different. We approach each school year, each sports season, and each week, really, as a new opportunity to discern: do these decisions align with our intention? Do these decisions help build up the relationships in our house? What is God asking us to do? What adjustments need to be made?

    That’s about all I got. The whole thing is shot through with prayer and a noble attempt to love the kids well. We don’t do any of this perfectly, which is perfectly humbling. But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.

  • Breaking the Silence

    Today we commemorate the breaking of the Word’s silence.

    The Word had freely confined itself to the mysterious quiet of the womb, foreshadowing the willful silencing of the same Word in the tomb. Today is Christmas, when the Word broke its silence not with a word of wisdom or an eloquent soliloquy, but with the cry of a newborn. At Easter we celebrate the Word’s breaking the silence and solitude of death with the language of a risen and glorified body.

    In both cases, the Word entered the depths of human vulnerability, indeed, the most vulnerable of human vulnerabilities. There, the Word embraced the mystery and revealed the dignity of silence, and spoke with his presence rather than with words. And in doing so, the Word reveals a profound, dual truth. In the first place, in the womb of Mary, the Word reveals a shocking dependence upon humanity. And in the tomb, the Word reveals a complete dependence on the Father and communion with him in the Holy Spirit. Dependence on God and dependence on others. These are profound truths of the human experience that allow for communication/communion even in the most silent of all experiences of solitude. In fact, the Word’s entry into the depths of our silence and his revelation of radical dependence reveals the way for us via communion that shatters the definitive silence of loneliness and non-communication that is hell. We depend on the one who communicates with us even in the depths of our most vulnerable experiences of silence — in the womb and in the tomb. 

    In entering into the human experience, the Word twice subjected himself to silence. In doing so, the Word enters into the profoundest depths of our humanity as a presence that bespeaks the silent “yes” of love. Yet, as I think about this further, I see that the Word also silences himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Last I checked, bread does not speak. Yet in the silent bread, the Word bespeaks his presence yet again. This time, he does not knock on the door of an inn, but he knocks on the doors of our hearts. There was no room in the inn when the Word broke the silence of the womb outside of Bethlehem. In the Eucharist, he asks to be let in and if we, too, enter into that silent encounter, we can hear him speak. He asks to be let in that he might be born in the depths of our hearts, that our hearts might be transformed such that our lives bespeak the hidden Word that transforms and animates the whole of our lives. Yes. In the silence of the Blessed Sacrament, with divinity not hidden by the humanity of a little baby but hidden behind a veil of bread and wine, the Word breaks his silence again by conforming our lives to his and by speaking through us — if we let him. He breaks his sacramental silence through us.

    Today is Christmas. Today, we celebrate the breaking of the Word’s silence. As we leave Mass today and engage with family members and friends, we become the means by which the Word breaks his sacramental silence, because we carry forth the Word in our thoughts, words, and actions.

  • No Worldly Ambition

    He more or less asked me what I was doing working for four parishes in the middle of nowhere. And, I get it. I have a PhD. I’ve worked for the Archdiocese. I’ve taught at and run theology programs at a university. I suppose I was on a certain trajectory in his mind, probably involving some national ministry effort or academic pursuit. And now, here I am, in over my head in parish ministry. Parish work is not glamorous and usually thankless. My friend’s question, from a career-path standpoint, was completely valid and one I’ve had to ask myself. 

    He continued by observing everything I have going on at Stella Maris and said it’s clear that I’m all in on the project, that I either believe this will work or I am just using this as a lab for a much bigger project I will scale for some regional or national effort. As he said this, I realized something. I realized I haven’t had anything like that in mind and that this differed from previous ministry efforts where “going national” was a kind of insidious ulterior motive. I guess God had been purifying me of my worldly desire to make something of myself in the eyes of the world and to do something with my career — you know, ambitions, accolades, success. Over the years, I’ve come to believe real evangelization is not scalable anyway, at least in our modern understanding of scale that gets caught of in the economics of efficiency, numbers, bottom lines, and the like. Real evangelization cannot be capitalized upon, because real evangelization is costly and wasteful. So if you’re going to do it, it’s going to cost you a lot (maybe everything), you’ll probably spend a lot of time doing it, and you may never see the fruits. Not a good ROI. 

    So, I looked at him and said I’m simply trying to do God’s will and to respond to the prompting of the Spirit right in front of me. I’m throwing everything I’ve got into that and I have no plan beyond that. Now, having no plan is a bit alarming, except that God has pretty much thrown all of my plans out the window most of my life and inserted his own in their place. All of this has been for my good and has opened new pathways for my deepest desires. I believe I have a long enough track record of trying to follow God to see this clearly and believe it is true. It’s freeing to let go of worldly ambitions, which is exactly what these desires for scale, recognition, etc. are. 

    This is not to say ambitious thoughts don’t creep into my mind or that I don’t feel a sting of disappointment, resentment, or envy when I hear about the successes of others. I do. And these are signs of a need for deeper conversion and opportunities for grace. But, over the last two-and-a-half years, I do think God has moved in such a way that these thoughts don’t work me up as much as they once did. I’m not as caught up in concerns about the future or how to scale everything and turn each initiative into its own non-profit (which seems to be the way so many people go). I just don’t care about it anymore. I don’t mean this in a weird, nihilistic way. It’s not a matter of acedia. Anyone who knows me knows striving for excellence and working hard is just in my blood. But striving for excellence is different than striving for worldly success. In these recent years, I’ve gained a deeper sense that God is doing something right in front of my face and he’s asking me to help, and I’ll miss all of this if I’m not attentive here and now. I call this the “asceticism of the present moment.” I used to think one had to practice rigorous ascetical practices and heap burdens on himself in order to grow in holiness and train the will. I’m now of the mind that my daily life and circumstances provide the way to holiness and, generally speaking, I do a bad job of living them fully and attentively. I do a bad job of loving my neighbor, responding to situations with patience, sacrificing my own will, and all that stuff. My prayer most days goes something like, “God, please help me. Help me to not say stupid things. Help me to be a better dad and husband than I was yesterday.”

    I’ve also moved away from seeking opportunities for myself — for speaking and publishing and whatnot. I find I’m much happier when I wait for opportunities to seek me out. I suppose part of this has to do with the lack of ambition, and the other part has to do with becoming more deeply aware of and convinced that I really don’t have much to say that needs to be said. That rather than “marketing myself,” I will simply wait to respond, and then try to say only what needs to be said and nothing more. I think this is the trend line and it seems right, but waiting is challenging. 

    I suppose all of this has something to do with a conversion experience that happened a few years ago, when I woke up to the fact that my marriage and family is my primary vocation. Ministry is always secondary. This was made abundantly clear to me one morning as I was praying with Mt 16:26 and God rearranged the words and proposed a different question to me: “What would it profit a man to save everyone else’s soul and lose those of his family?” That was enough to see where my personality could take a ministry effort if I tried to scale something nationally. 

    I believe God has protected me from myself. “God has looked upon you with favor,” as a good friend of mine told me the other day. I believe this to be entirely true and I am grateful for it. That we most often need to be saved from ourselves seems to be a fundamental truth. 

    Recently, I’ve read two pieces that have brought me a lot of peace, so I’ll conclude this reflection (which is nothing other than a testimony of something God has been doing in my life over the last few years) by sharing them with my readers:

    Once, Dorothy Day commented on how she had disappointed an interviewer when she admitted there was no clever plan behind The Catholic Worker or any real goal for the effort. She said, “I told him I’d never thought about it; I told him we never really thought too far into the future—we weren’t planners. We just went with our hearts, and we prayed and prayed for direction from God and his Son.”1

    Dorothy, who was a Benedictine Oblate would also, appreciate these words of G.A. Simon in the Commentary for Benedictine Oblates: 

    By our habit [i.e., investiture with the Benedictine scapular] and by our profession…we ought to be of those who, quite logically, with the pledges of their Baptism, put a separation between the world and themselves…Nothing obliged us to become Oblates. If we [have asked to become Oblates], it is not to resemble just any ordinary Christians who think they can serve God and the world. In spirit we are monks (let us recall the etymology of the word)…Let us have no ambition to be anything else. To frequent what is conventionally called the world, with its pleasures, its feasts, its futile preoccupations, is not befitting for true children of St. Benedict.2

    And…

    “O men, how long will your hearts be closed, will you love what is futile and seek what is false.” (Ps 4:3)

    1. Rita McClain Tybor, “Prayer and Work in the Light of Dorothy Day,” in Benedict in the World, eds. Linda Kulzer and Roberta Bondi (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 65. ↩︎
    2. GA Simon, Commentary for Benedictine Oblates on the Rule of St. Benedict (Post Falls, ID: Mediatrix, 2016), 403. ↩︎

  • Our Method Is Coffee

    Once, when pressed for his catechetical method for bringing individuals into the Church, my friend Lawain McNeil responded: “coffee.” Coffee is his method, and by this he means that the person and understanding the person in charity indicates the best way forward in accompaniment. He does this over coffee. So coffee is the method.

    For one, I thought his response was hilarious, so it has stuck with me. But, it stuck with me mostly because I think it’s right and it resonates with my experience. Contrived plans usually fail and they often tend to reduce people to projects. There’s a lot of steamrollering involved when you do this, and the collateral damage can be nasty. Coffee is the better method.

    In a similar vein, Msgr. Frank Lane once told me that I can go into any course with the best syllabus and curricular plan, but that’s all those are. The classroom is going to take on a life of its own, and real teaching is dialogical, not monological. In other words, he was telling me that I may not want to have such a rigid plan, but receive the students and respond to them as real people.

    Finally, I turn to Joseph Ratzinger to close this out:

    After the end of the apostolic age the early Church had as yet developed only relatively little in the way of a direct missionary activity as a Church, that it did not have any particular strategy for proclaiming the faith to the heathen, and that nevertheless this became the age of the greatest missionary success. The conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church…The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians…The new evangelization we need so urgently today is not to be attained with cleverly thought out ideas, however cunningly these are elaborated: the catastrophic failure of modern catechesis is all too obvious. It is only the interaction of a truth conclusive in itself with its proof in the life of this truth that can enable that particular evidence of the faith to be illuminated that the human heart awaits: it is only through this door that the Holy Spirit enters the world.1

    Our method is coffee. It is dialogical and relational. One step at a time, God reveals enough light to see the next step on the journey. This is the way of faith; it is the way of Christian friendship, which is more effective than any programmed approach to evangelization, even if it’s messier and more unpredictable. Oh, and you can’t scale it, sorry. You can’t mass produce it. All you can do is enjoy it. It is a cup of coffee after all.

    1. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 34–35. ↩︎

  • On Culture and Idolizing It

    The moment you idealize culture and pursue culture as an end unto itself, you kill the possibility of its coming to fruition. Culture is not contrived so much as it is discovered within the personalities involved in and dynamism of a common pursuit. To idealize it and pursue the ideal usually amounts to idolatry. When this happens, when one loses sight of the whole point of a culture, that culture becomes institutionalized, hollow, and bloated. Why? Because culture is not an end, but a means — a means to obtaining a greater end. So, culture must be set in relation to something well beyond itself. It must be at the service of another and not itself. We even see this in the word’s etymology, which reveals its ties to the concept of “care.” The word culture literally means “to tend, guard; to till, cultivate” — preparing the soil for crops. One tends and guards and tills and cultivates for the sake of the harvest, not for the sake of tending, guarding, tilling, and cultivating.

    Pope Benedict XVI picks up on this in regard to the monastic pursuit and the resulting monastic culture. He says:

    First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.1

    Creating a culture or preserving some romantic memory of a past one would be an exercise in idealism and would take them away from the real. God’s revelation and the search for God was (and is) the primary thing. This is the distinctive feature of monasticism. It is this alone that the monk ultimately pursues in solitude, in a life marked, not by distraction, but by purity of heart. Seek God. Search for God. But how?

    Here, we begin to see distinctive elements of what would become a monastic culture always set in relation to, and subordinate to the fundamental search for God. Pope Benedict XVI continues:

    Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness. God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow. This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures…The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression. Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up. Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola. The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man – a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God. But it also includes the formation of reason – education – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.

    The search for God requires a culture of the word. Why? Because God meets us in his word (logos) and his Word (Logos), the Son, has taken flesh in the person of Jesus. This culture of the word involves learning, but it also involves liturgy — speaking or giving God’s word back to him, offering a word of response. Benedict XVI indicates as much when he says, “We ourselves are brought into conversation with God by the word of God. The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to speak with him ourselves.” The highest form of this response appears in the liturgy, as we join our words with the Word in his perfect response to the Father.

    So, we have established that culture emerges organically from the pursuit of a more fundamental thing. Culture is a means and not an end and the moment it becomes an idealized end to be pursued for its own sake, it risks becoming an idol and is effectively dead (which is what an idol is per Ps 115:4-8). Thus we can define culture, at least tentatively, as the organic (i.e., living) set of customs, practices, and language that allow a group of people to best pursue and accomplish a common aim. A culture ceases to be a culture when it loses sight of its aim and it becomes something else (a dead letter, an idol, etc.). The whole exhausting business of “corporate culture” and all the bells and whistles that many companies pump into propping up their “winning culture” (which is usually little more than creative efforts to satisfy the psyche of their employees through consumerism and boost morale) proves this point. Most people are taken with this stuff initially (because it feels good), but eventually realize it’s just a facade and the wizard is just a guy behind a curtain.

    The Monastic Charism at the Service of Relationship with Christ

    Michael Casey, OCSO helps drive all these points into a deeper, personal space in his book on the Rule of St. Benedict entitled Strangers to the City. Fr. Casey says, after reflecting on various facets of monastic culture:

    We have to be careful in speaking about the monastic charism. There is a danger that we objectify it to the extent that it becomes a commodity rather than a relationship. In fact, the heart of all monastic observance is communion with Christ realized in prayer, in love for the brothers and sisters, and in the sacramental overlap of these relationships in the liturgy. Christian monasticism is not a system of spiritual self-improvement; it is a means that some people need to sustain and deepen their relationship to Christ. Everything else is secondary to that goal.2

    Like Benedict XVI, Casey explains monasticism specifically, and Christianity in general, in terms of relationship. God, and contact with him, is the fundamental thing. Communion is the fundamental thing. This communion is realized in prayer. It is realized in charity. And, it is realized in the overlap of prayer and charity that is the liturgy, a prayer wherein God’s charity meets ours (i.e., our love of God and neighbor) and gathers up our meager offerings and brings them, through himself, to himself. Christianity is not a self-help, self-improvement plan. Even if the self is improved, its not by becoming a kind of idealized version of itself. Rather, the best version of the self is not the self, as a kind of highly individualized and self-sufficient monad, at all. The best version of the self involves coming out of the fallen and broken self and becoming someone else entirely. Thus, we can say monasticism and the resulting monastic culture serve conversion and is effective only insofar as it cultivates conversion.

    Let’s listen to Fr. Casey as he finishes his assessment:

    Christianity defines self-realization in terms of relationship with God. We also affirm that the “way” or “road” by which human fulfillment is obtained is a dynamic and deepening personal relationship to Jesus. Juridicizing theology has been able to void this distinctive imperative by making salvation a matter of some objective work that Jesus did on our behalf (“redemption” which supplies us with “grace”) or, alternatively, the effect of our moral adherence to what Jesus did and taught. Any system of spirituality based on such extrinsic benefits is superficial and unable to sustain life in hard times. Christian religion is a matter of following Christ, being formed by his teaching and imitating his example. In time we become more Christlike and move towards that state of communion in which we can say, “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

    Becoming oneself, becoming who you are, happens in communion — in a dynamic relationship with God. More specifically, the “way” to such self-realization via relationship is with Jesus himself — the “object” of Christian faith who reveals God as the true “subject” who loves us deeply. Stiff, transactional, and extrinsic theologies block spiritual arteries causing a kind of spiritual heart attack. The spiritual life dries up, the free movement of the Spirit coagulates. Conversely, we find Christianity marked by a profound sense of discipleship and a willingness to be open to boundless conversion offers a path forward. This is what it means to seek God, and to seek God with one’s whole heart so as to find him (see Jer 29:12–14). And through such seeking and the purification of heart that comes with it, one becomes more Christlike and identifies with the one who, in all humility, identified with us.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, I believe I can say this: idealizing culture and substituting it as an end unto itself is to idolize it and is the surest way to kill the very possibility of authentic and organic culture. True culture emerges in response to a pure seeking of a real, yet not completely attained, good. In other words, culture is the living set of customs, practices, and language that allow a group of people to best pursue and attain a common, given aim.

    As Pope Benedict notes, monastic culture results from nothing other than seeking God, and it serves this end. Undoubtedly, coming into contact with God, in this case, renews the culture, which opens new vistas for encountering him. We see the organic dynamism, then, between a Christian culture and the purpose it serves, insofar as the roles between means and end are not inverted and the whole thing collapses under dead weight.

    Finally, and along the same line, Fr. Michael Casey reminds us that the whole monastic pursuit is a particular manifestation of Christian self-realization in relationship with God through Christ Jesus. Monastic culture serves this relationship or it is nothing at all, because, at the end of the day, it’s God or nothing.

    1. Benedict XVI, September 12, 2008. His address can be accessed here. ↩︎
    2. Michael Casey, Strangers to the City, 145–46. ↩︎

  • Prepare Him Room: It’s Christmas Again 

    “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). 

    For many of us, these words cushion sweet, sentimental, and (probably) cartoonish images we have of a snuggly baby Jesus in soft blankets. But, with these words, Luke actually depicts a harsh reality. The Christ-child was born into utter poverty, in a shepherd’s cave in no-man’s land. He had no crib. No heat. No creature comforts. Why? Because there was no room for him. 

    We Missed It

    The fact that there was no room is shocking, given the history and the anxiety of a people awaiting the Messiah. God had long promised that he would do something about humanity’s predicament, its falling out of God’s family in the garden with that original sin of Adam and Eve. God promised to put enmity between the serpent and the woman, and their offspring — and that the woman’s son would crush the head of the serpent (see Gen 3:14-15). Throughout the history of God’s people, we see God making covenants and raising up patriarchs, judges, kings, and prophets to guide his people back to him. Sometimes the people listened. Sometimes they didn’t. But none of the rulers or prophets, and none of the covenants, could fully restore the people to God’s household — even if they could prepare the way for that homecoming. And so the people waited. They waited on God to make his move, for God to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between fallen humanity and the divinity to which we are called. They waited on God to move, and when he did, they missed it. In part, they missed it because nobody could have expected God to assume human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Nobody expected him to bridge the chasm so personally. But, maybe they also missed it because they wanted to miss it. They didn’t want an incarnate God, one who would come so close. John’s Gospel captures this: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (Jn 1:11). There was no room for him in the inn. 

    But, are we just talking about those people back then? Are we just talking about the inhabitants of Bethlehem at the time of Christ? Certainly not. So, the question inevitably arises for each of us: if Mary and Joseph knocked on my door, would I let them in? Is there room for them? Back in his 2012 Christmas homily, Pope Benedict XVI elaborated on this: 

    Do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist…There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so “full” of ourselves that there is no room left for God.

    This is the harsh reality of the post-Christian time we’re living in. The Christian event is no longer a real concern for us — whether its meaning in world history or in the history of our lives. Instead, our concerns have to do with curating the next Instagram Reel or reeling in the remaining items on our Christmas lists. Our concerns have to do with how to get more done in a day, make ends meet, or figure out how to get what we want. Or, maybe we’re simply distracted or forgetful; we don’t think much about God. All of this is a regurgitation of the same old, same old. God wants to do something and we don’t want it, or we don’t want it the way he’s offering it. So we push him away. We box him out. We try to solve our own problems through AI, politics, technology, dieting, medicine, self-help gurus, or science. We numb ourselves through chemicals or the new, chemical-free drug that puts all sorts of images in front of our eyes as our minds float into the ether under the cool glow of our bluelight screens.  

    Despite all this, here it is, it’s Christmas again. Pope Benedict XVI reflects on the meaning of this: 

    Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you…so now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.

    Why? Why does God still come to us though we don’t seem to care most of the time? Why does he still come if it seems like we don’t really need him? Why does he come if we don’t want him? Why does he embrace the harsh reality of being born on the fringe of society, as a pariah? Why? 

    Because he wants to. 

    Because he wants to reveal to us the extent of his love, such that he will even be born outside the scope of our concern. In fact, he was even born into the sphere of our rejection of God, precisely to reveal the depths of his concern for us. 

    Here, we start to see how the no-room-in-the-inn birth of the outcast child at Christmas foreshadows his death on the Cross. When his hour arrived, the people had definitively decided there was no room for him. Rejected, he was dispelled from the city and his body laid, not in the wood of a manger, but on the wood of a cross. When he died, his dead body was wrapped, not in swaddling clothes, but in burial clothes. Gifts befitting a king — gold, frankincense, and myrrh — befit the preparation of the King’s body for his funeral. The manger (literally a feeding trough) held the Word of God who is the Bread of Life outside of Bethlehem (which literally means “house of bread”). With the Last Supper and on the wood of the Cross, Jesus definitively gives us his Body to eat as the true Bread of Life. Even in what looks like our final rejection of him — God is dead and we have killed him — he still gives himself as a sign of the extent of his love that even reaches out to embrace the sinner. Thus the mysteries of Christmas and the Cross converge in the Eucharist, the Sacramental manner in which he still comes to us today. 

    Who is waiting for whom? 

    Advent is a season of waiting. To be sure, we are waiting for him. But, in all reality, I wonder if it’s not the case that he’s waiting for us. He’s waiting for each of us to invite him in. Or, maybe he’s waiting for us to come out of ourselves and our selfishness so as to see the gift he is giving us, which is nothing less than himself. In these remaining days of Advent, God is waiting for me and for you to open some space for him, to prepare him room. Will I? Will you? 

  • Problem

    In Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton writes:

    In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

    Merton wrote these words in the 1950s. If they were true then, they are only truer now. We tend to work up ourselves about this and that, and now we have platforms to make our internal anxieties publicly and widely known with little personal consequence. Everything has to be a problem and our job is to analyze the snot out of it and “figure it out” — or at least point it out. This seems to be a symptom of post-modernity. All our analysis paralysis is real and usually results in only more anxiety.

    When I was writing on Substack, I noticed that all my posts about push–button issues and hot topics all “performed better,” meaning they got more clicks. But, I do wonder if they really performed better or if they were just better at fueling my readers’ anxiety. I also noticed that nearly every article that showed up on my Substack feed, almost all of them were anxiety-inducing, critical analyses of this, that, and the other thing.

    Let’s return to Merton:

    Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety.

    Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.

    Here, I think Merton strikes gold. The ease with which social media and mass media allows one to speedily express him or herself — it allows one to get his or her interior noise and chaos “out there.” But “everyone” expressing his or her anxiety “out there” results in a kind of widespread and heightened anxiety. Noise and more noise and little silence. Yet silence is the answer. This harkens back to Pascal’s claim in his Pensées, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

    Merton continues:

    Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

    Silence, then, belongs to the substance of sanctity. In silence and hope are formed the strength of the Saints.

    Contradictions have always existed and will always exist, but they need not all become anxiety inducing “problems” which are then made public. Anxiety fuels anxiety. But silence and hope — entrusting to God the good of my future, our future, in prayer — these are the real antidotes to today’s problems that flood screens, and consequently our minds and our hearts.

  • The World Upside Down

    The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead…He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.1 — GK Chesterton

    With these words, Chesterton describes the interior transformation — one fired by humiliation — that took place inside of St. Francis of Assisi as he sat, imprisoned. His hopes and dreams of military success and the resultant fame had been overturned. Upended. Dashed onto the ground. Yet, amid the burning flames in this crucible, something began to change inside. Chesterton describes this as a kind of radical reversal and one that flipped Francis’ entire world on its head. He became a fool. And Chesterton knows he’s walking on holy ground where few have trod. “We cannot follow St. Francis to that final spiritual overturn in which complete humiliation becomes complete holiness or happiness, because we have never been there,” he says. Still he conjectures what this experience might have been like:

    If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars.2

    From the cave, Francis gained a new way of seeing. He saw everything in a new light. He saw things, not from above, from a godlike, powerful position, but from below — as the completely dependent creature he was. In fact, from this position, he could see that all of creation was completely dependent. In effect, this shattered the illusion that he was in control of things. In his overturned world, he could see the more anxiously we anchor our ideas and plans to heavy structures of control, the faster those foundations will be ripped from the sky and the whole thing crash to the ground.

    This brings us, fittingly, to Christmas, because God invites all of us to do a spiritual somersault at Christmas. If we let it, Christmas flips our way of seeing upside down. Why? Because in the Nativity of Our Lord, God reveals the truth of his power. It does not appear in a cosmic light show, rain of fire, or a reign of terror. It does not appear in a pillar of cloud and fire, or in the parting of a sea. No. God reveals his power in a helpless, dependent, and poor baby. He reveals his power in humble love. He reveals that the really powerful thing is not might or force or politics or wealth, but the complete and humble gift of self. The cosmic nothing — a poor baby born of poor parents in a cave in the middle of nowhere and with no room in the inn — is the cosmic everything, because this is the love that makes the world go round. This is the love on which everything, however great or small, depends.

    Perhaps this is why St. Francis held dear the image of the Nativity and why he brought it to life through replication in Greccio. He wanted to remember God’s humility in a palpable way and to invite others to become small in order to see it, too. Only in following the small Christ-child into the cave of humiliation and get turned upside down — which is actually the right way up — can we become who we are and see things as they are. Only from this position of complete dependence can we really see.

    Seeing things rightly requires humility. When we begin to obtain humility, we begin perceiving the greatness of small things. We begin understanding the greatness of loving God and neighbor in simple gestures and with simple words. When we emerge from the Christmas cave this year, may we, like Francis, begin to see everything differently. May we see everything, not according to our preferences, figments of imagination, visions of control, or nightmarish fears, but as they are — completely dependent upon God. And may this new vision continually convert our hearts.

    The real wonder Christmas lies in this, that in the strangest of reversals, the Creator became creature, the One on whom everything depends became dependent, and thus revealed the truth that all things hang suspended on humble love. And in manifesting such a mystery, Christmas beckons us to become small and take up the powerfully foolish way of love.

    1. GK Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 37. ↩︎
    2. GK Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 39-40. ↩︎

  • Few Words

    Today, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, as I read the Gospel and worked into some lectio divina, I was struck, not by a particular word or phrase, but by how few words Mary speaks in the dialogue with the angel Gabriel.

    Mary speaks three sentences to the angel’s eight.

    Mary speaks 30 words to the angel’s 171.1

    I suppose there’s a lesson, here. Mary listened. She allowed the Lord the first word and the enduring word, and she spoke sparingly. She used few words. She did not babble like the pagans (Mt 6:7).

    In this regard, I’m reminded of a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict (20:1-4):

    Whenever we want to ask some favor of a powerful man, we do it humbly and respectfully, for fear of presumption. How much more important, then, to lay our petitions before the Lord God of all things with the utmost humility and sincere devotion. We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words. Prayer should therefore be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace.

    In other words, generally, our prayer should involve fewer words on our part and a lot more listening.

    1. In the NAB translation. ↩︎

  • Christmas: The encounter between our desire and God’s response

    A quiet ache — a nostalgia for the infinite — resides deep in every human heart. We tend to forget about it. The noise and activity of our lives drowns it out. Our masks cover it up. Our attempts to control and curate every aspect of life dry it up. We pack our schedules to the brim and climb the social ladder to try to satisfy the ache, but these attempts are futile. We connect with others incessantly, only to find ourselves more disconnected. We numb away the ache with the drug of distraction and find our lives are a collection of fragments, and we are stressed and exhausted trying to hold it all together. 

    This is the human state after the Fall — that primordial wound of our separation from God. It is the noise that is not just outside of us but has taken up residence within us, a noise that drowns out and confuses and distorts the quiet longing of every human heart for God. 

    Christmas is God’s completely surprising response to our wounded humanity. It did not come from the closed system of our broken world, but from beyond it. God broke through the ceiling of our expectations and shattered our limited possibilities when the Word became flesh and was born in our midst. God’s response is a person. He does not shout from the heavens. He does not remain a distant unmoved mover. In an act of unsurpassed humility and love, he draws near. He becomes small. He makes himself accessible. He who fashioned the cosmos from nothing,  the God who holds the stars in their places, he is here with us. 

    This is Christmas: the encounter between our desire and God’s response.

    It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. — St. John Paul II