Summer hiatus (June 14 – August 14)

{if you wish to receive posts again when I resume, please feel free to submit your email over here —>}

A random “Far Side” comic that well sums my deepest math-phobic fears. Taken from calculushumor.com

This is my 897th post since I began. Hard to believe. My son said to me the other day when he saw me typing, “Dad, that your Blog?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t you ever run out of things to say?” I said, “Well, why don’t you read them and tell me if I do.”

I have discerned that the Lord is calling me to a hefty bloggus interruptus, and though it sounds sinful I promise it’s not. It is a grief for me to stop, and a friend of mine warned me that I will probably lose a lot of readers. I have family vacays coming up, I am teaching a course in July on Liturgy and priestly spirituality, I am leading 2 retreats, I am preparing for a new course to teach this Fall at the seminary (Pastoral Theology) and bracing for a new year as Academic Dean (administerium meum est ad mortem). Then there’s sleep and such.

Discernment very often is about judging limits that protect one’s own personal limitations and primary vocational responsibilities. Such limits ensure that I do not become unfaithful to the few good things God is calling me to do by doing other good things He is not calling me to do. It’s among the Evil One’s favorite tactics, and the one most easily rationalized.

Right Gratitude

I truly love this template. It permits me to paint on a digital canvas the theological storm that swirls about on my “inscape,” mostly within my imagination. As I frequently say, I am never not amazed that people find in Neal Obstat a source of spiritual nourishment. For me, there is no higher purpose I could imagine for any of my theological work than for it to become viaticum, food for the journey to our Father’s house. Deo gratias, “Thanks be to God”!

I must say that since I began writing this Blog in 2010 I have had more fresh theological insights than in the previous twenty-something years of theological study combined. Part of that is the natural gift that comes with the discipline of writing — as you write, you express and create ideas. But another part, I am convinced, is that the impulse to write daily, the superabundance of fresh insights, flows (on better days) from the Lord for you. So many times this or that idea will seize me in the midst of a relatively innocuous task – taking out the garbage, sitting in a budget committee meeting or while I’m taking a shower (tmi) — and it will not leave me alone until I write it here and edit it for posting. Not in an oppressive way, but with a gentle insistence that remains until the task is completed. Now and again, some kind reader will leave a comment that affirms they “needed” a certain message, or received a certain grace from what was said in a post. That makes it all worth the labor.

In this, I find confirmed again and again a truth my first spiritual director drilled into me long ago:

Tom, if people some day compliment you on your work, on your teaching, and they thank you for this or that grace they received through you, I want you to say to yourself at once, “How much God must love them to give me these gifts!” Because any gift you have been given is not about you, Tom, it’s about them; it’s for them. If you make the gifts about you, think you’re special because you have them, then those gifts are ruined and they will become the very reason for your condemnation. But if you make them about others, then they will sanctify you. Remember what I told you: the premier sign of holiness is humility; and the premier sign of humility is that others’ needs and welfare populate your thoughts more than your own do. And remember, if God can speak through Balaam’s jackass [Numbers 22:21-39] he can even speak through you…

A new patron saint.

“Balaam and the Ass,” Pieter Lastman 1622. Taken from morenormalthannot.com

Favor?

If I might ask 2 final favors from you:

1. Who are you? Though I enjoy immensely the steady stream of comments from a core of a dozen or so friends and other people whom I feel I know a bit, I always wonder who is out there on the digital continent reading. If you could leave a brief comment here sharing who you are, I would be grateful!

2. Kindly pray for me and my family. I will include you in my daily prayer for a new Pentecost:

Father in heaven,
renew your wonders in our time,
as though by a new Pentecost,
by sending down your Spirit upon us.
Grant that by the same Spirit
your holy Church in [name your diocese],
praying with one mind and one heart
together with Mary, the Mother of Jesus,
and guided by Sts. John XXIII and John Paul the Great,
may make present in our world
the kingdom of your Divine Son:
a kingdom of truth and life,
a kingdom of holiness and grace,
a kingdom of justice, love, and peace. Amen.

[I adapted this from Archdiocese of Detroit prayer found here]

Yad Vashem

Let me leave you two texts — (1) Pope Francis’ awe-inspiring words spoken at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial during his recent journey to the Holy Land and (2) Pope Benedict’s equally awe-inspiring words spoken at Auschwitz (which I have posted before). Note the remarkably different, yet complementary, vantage each takes on the same mysterium iniquitatis, “mystery of evil.”

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Address of His Holiness Pope Francis
Visit to the Memorial of Yad Vashem
Jerusalem, 26 May 2014

“Adam, where are you?” (cf. Gen 3:9).
Where are you, o man? What have you come to?
In this place, this memorial of the Shoah, we hear God’s question echo once more:
“Adam, where are you?”
This question is charged with all the sorrow of a Father who has lost his child.
The Father knew the risk of freedom; he knew that his children could be lost…
yet perhaps not even the Father could imagine so great a fall, so profound an abyss!
Here, before the boundless tragedy of the Holocaust,
That cry – “Where are you?” – echoes like a faint voice in an unfathomable abyss…
Adam, who are you? I no longer recognize you.
Who are you, o man? What have you become?
Of what horror have you been capable?
What made you fall to such depths?
Certainly it is not the dust of the earth from which you were made.
The dust of the earth is something good, the work of my hands.
Certainly it is not the breath of life which I breathed into you.
That breath comes from me, and it is something good (cf. Gen 2:7).
No, this abyss is not merely the work of your own hands, your own heart…
Who corrupted you? Who disfigured you?
Who led you to presume that you are the master of good and evil?
Who convinced you that you were god?
Not only did you torture and kill your brothers and sisters,
but you sacrificed them to yourself, because you made yourself a god.
Today, in this place, we hear once more the voice of God:
“Adam, where are you?”
From the ground there rises up a soft cry: “Have mercy on us, O Lord!”
To you, O Lord our God, belongs righteousness;
but to us confusion of face and shame (cf. Bar 1:15).
A great evil has befallen us, such as never happened under the heavens (cf. Bar 2:2).
Now, Lord, hear our prayer, hear our plea, save us in your mercy.
Save us from this horror.
Almighty Lord, a soul in anguish cries out to you.
Hear, Lord, and have mercy!
We have sinned against you. You reign for ever (cf. Bar 3:1-2).
Remember us in your mercy.
Grant us the grace to be ashamed of what we men have done,
to be ashamed of this massive idolatry,
of having despised and destroyed our own flesh
which you formed from the earth,
to which you gave life with your own breath of life.
Never again, Lord, never again!
“Adam, where are you?”
Here we are, Lord, shamed by what man,
created in your own image and likeness,
was capable of doing.
Remember us in your mercy.

Address by Pope Benedict XVI
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 28 May 2006

To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible —and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany. In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence — a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.

I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people — a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation — first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.

How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?

The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes: “You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness … because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep,O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down tothe dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Psalm 44:19,22-26).

This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age — yesterday, today and tomorrow — suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!

We cannot peer into God’s mysterious plan — we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No — when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!

And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence — so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.

Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God’s name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.

Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence — a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.

Pope Benedict XVI entering the Auschwitz camp. Taken from bp.blogspot.com

Pope Francis praying at the eternal flame, Yad Vashem. Taken from yadvashem.org