Love Is Stronger

Are you between the ages of 19 and 35? Are you in reasonably good health? Finding yourself at a bit of a loose end this summer, or part of it? Wanna have a spiritual adventure?

Well, don't just sit around looking at Twitbook, Feeding the Buzz,  Hashing the Tags, and uh, Flicking the Nets! Come to Madonna House!

We are hosting our annual summer program for young adults, July 4-August 9. Come for one week, two weeks, the whole five week shooting match, or whatever you can manage. We are offering a truly superb program this year (if I do say so myself) with the theme "Love is Stronger: Hope and Faith in the World Today."

The inspiration for this theme was this event way back in 1987, when most of the 19-35 year olds we are holding this program for were not born or were in diapers. For those who don't click, Pope John Paul II was saying Mass in Chile and was disrupted by violent protesters. At one point, he simply said into the microphone, over and over "Love is stronger. Love is stronger." And the million-numbered crowd there for the Mass picked it up and repeated it, drowning out the angry violent shouts.

Well, 1987 is a long time ago, but this all seems more than a little relevant to me in the summer of 2015. Militants are chopping people's heads off in the Middle East. White supremacists gunning down church goers in South Carolina. Serious tensions remain in Eastern Europe and many other places. Our social and civil discourse too often degenerates into angry shouts and hateful invective on all sides.

In the face of all this, MH chooses to proclaim, loud, long, and clear, for five weeks this summer (and the rest of our lives, too) that LOVE IS STRONGER. Stronger than it all - all the hate, all the killing, all the divisions and ugliness that more and more is the hallmark of our times.

Each week has its own sub-theme around the theme of love--the details of the program can be found here. The reason I am posting this on the blog is that, in spite of it shaping up to be one of our best and most utterly relevant summer programs yet, our registrations for it are way, way down. And this makes no sense to me.

So, come on, young adults! Come get a word of truth, of hope, of love and encouragement to radiate the charity of Christ into the world that so needs it. Or, if you are already fully booked for the summer, consider sharing this post on your social media site (buzz that face! snap that chat! tweet! tweet!) so that all your friends can see it and - who knows? - come and have a life changing, or at least life-enriching experience at MH this summer, as so many thousands of people have had over the years.

All details of how to contact us and register are available at the link.

This Week in Madonna House - June 13-19

When I wrote this column last Saturday, Josephine Halfman had just died. So, of course, this week in Madonna House was first taken up with the corporal work of mercy of 'burying the dead'. Josephine's family coincidentally had come up to see her just as she took a turn for the worse, and so were already here when she died. We were thus able to have the funeral fairly quickly, receiving the body and waking her on Sunday, then having the funeral Monday morning.

It was a small funeral, by MH standards. Josephine had spent the last 24 years of her life in our house in Toronto, and so the members of that house along with some of its close friends came up for the day. I had the wake service and Fr. David May had the funeral; both of us spoke in different ways of the mysterious and hidden quality of Josephine's life, and her steady fidelity to what God asked of her through it all. Trudi Cortens, the director of our Toronto house, gave a beautiful eulogy at the wake testifying to Josephine's many gifts and her apostolic generosity.

It is our custom on the evening of the funeral, after a festive supper, to have a 'memory night' where people can share their stories about the person who died. And so we did that, and it was a great thing especially for the considerable number of MH staff who did not know Josephine too well, her having been away so much in our houses.

Josephine was a true servant of the apostolate. Joining in 1958, she spent most of her first decade in MH in Combermere working in the office and as Catherine's assistant. She was a woman of high intelligence, trained as a chemist, and steady good humour.

In 1968 she was sent to open a house in Lima, Peru, which operated for four years. We lived in a barriada, or shanty town on the outskirts of the city, living among the poorest of the poor and living pretty poorly ourselves. It is our custom opening a house to not rush in with a thousand apostolic ideas and agendae, but to simply live with the people and get to know them first and see what they actually need from us.

Circumstances beyond our control led to the house closing after only a short time, really. Meanwhile, it was an experience that marked those who were part of that house, a true immersion into living among the very poor and indeed feeling quite helpless and poor in that living situation. Josephine returned to Combermere and had various short assignments, eventually going to our house in Cleveland.

This house was also located among the very poor in the inner city, and closed in 1986 when a man broke in and brutally assaulted the two women who were assigned there at the time--Josephine and Mamie Legris, who just died two months ago. Both of them were undaunted by this and promptly went on to their next apostolic assignments; Josephine in short order was ensconced in MH Toronto where she would remain until old age and ill health required her return to Combermere a year ago.

In Toronto she was part of the (in MH) famed group who lived without a house for over a year, splitting up and staying with friends all over the city while searching for a permanent location and somehow keeping an apostolate and a community life going all the while. The house they eventually found was only affordable because it was about to be condemned and torn down, and so the whole place had to be rebuilt from the inside out. And Josephine was in the middle of all of that, a tireless worker who met every situation with a sharp intellect and good humor expressed with a ready wit.

The Toronto years were the best years of her life, as she was able to just pour herself out in a thriving bustling apostolate. She hated--absolutely hated--leaving Toronto even though by the end of her time there she was blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, could hardly walk and (unbeknownst to us) had a brain tumour that would eventually kill her. She was an apostolic servant all the way and would have liked to die with her boots on. 

So honouring this wonderful woman was 'the main event' of the week, of course. But come Tuesday life resumed with its increasing summer intensity. The farm is going great guns, and the food processors--the women who preserve the harvest for the winter--are already at work, putting up the rhubarb. Meanwhile, of course, the gardens are in full swing with most crops planted and a nice combination of warm days and rain making everything grow beautifully. The shops are picking up speed, as are the summer tourists. Besides growing and preserving the food we need, hospitality is the principal work of our summer season.

We have had a little influx of guests, with more on the way in weeks ahead, and that always brings a lovely energy of its own, of course. And... that's about it for us this week. Be assured of our prayers for all of you and for the world. 

Shall We Gather At The River (And Everywhere Else, For That Matter)?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

And with your spirit.

I have begun to go through the Mass bit by bit on Thursdays, to show how every bit of the Mass is something to be lived and not simply a ritual to be undergone.

So we are still in early days here, with the ritual greeting of the priest and the response of the congregation. As I said last week, these ritual forms are important, theologically charged and meaningful. It is well meant, but a terrible mistake for a priest to substitute them with ‘Good morning!’ and similar glad handed informality.

The point of these entrance rites is to gather the community, coming from different directions and filled with different concerns and problems and attitudes, into a single body to offer God the worship in spirit and in truth. All the entrance rites are for that purpose.

And so we begin, as we did with the sign of the cross, by acknowledging that it is the Trinity that brings us together into unity. Jesus, the Father, the Spirit – in our quest to become a unity of faith, we have to know that God is the starting point, not nice human feelings or any other human efforts.

No, it is the gracious gift of Jesus Christ that places us in the love of the Father, a love that is sustained by the abiding presence of the Spirit in and among us, not anything of our own doing that is the source and strength of Christian unity.

I want to reflect, though, on our living out this one moment of the Mass. This is not exactly a part of the Mass we devote much time to, or think about afterwards. Even if the priest is extraordinarily slow of speech and super-duper reverent, this ritual greeting clocks in at under a minute.

It’s too bad, on one level. Because if we Catholics who are at Sunday Mass simply took this moment of the ritual greeting and applied it to our daily lives, factually the world would be transformed in a month’s time. In other words, if our guiding principle as we went through the day was to draw everyone we meet into a space of communion, if our basic principle of action was to extend grace and love to every human being who comes into our ambit, the results would be dramatic and world changing.

It is not a question of dramatically declaiming in the checkout line or the doctor’s office ‘PEACE BE WITH YOU ALL!’ But it is a question of having that sentiment within your heart towards the people in the checkout line and the harried cashier. Which will come out in one’s countenance, tone of voice, choice of words.

It’s about treating people as if they are, you know, people. Not automatons or avatars or annoyances. This is particularly acute in our on-line communications, where the actual human being at the other end of the media can recede into a dim abstraction. I don’t have to belabour what we all know, that digital communications are harsh and nasty and rude in a way that face to face communications never could be, as people would be punching one another in the face if they talked that way to one another within arm’s reach.

Well, we’re Christians, and we’re supposed to do better, folks. No exceptions, no excuses, no ‘but he did it first’ infantilism. Our mission is to spread the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit to everyone we meet – period. Whether we like them or not or think they merit such treatment from us or not.

But it’s not primarily the on-line stuff I’m thinking about. I really am thinking about the supermarket cashier, to be honest. We have this awful tendency to reduce people to functionaries, to simply go through our days not really treating human beings as human beings. Obviously we are not to strike up a conversation with someone who is checking our groceries through while a line snakes behind us all the way to the dairy case. But… a smile? A sincere thank you? A basic warmth, a kind look, a simple acknowledgment that this person is not just a menial worker but a brother or sister? Is that really beyond us?

My experience is that being deliberate and purposeful in this way makes the routine tasks of daily life lighter and more pleasant, that people more often than not respond with smile for smile, warmth for warmth. And then the same thing with co-workers, with neighbours, with fellow commuters, with… well, you get the point. EVERYONE. And don’t forget the people you actually, you know, live with. We can lose sight of the basic call to build communion and family spirit with them, too, taking them for granted or consigning them to the category of ‘burden’ or ‘problem’.

Grace, love, and communion. To go through one’s day putting it out there, and receiving it back when it is reciprocated (‘and with your spirit’), and not fussing too much when it’s not. Gathering everyone in, bringing everyone into a space of communion, or at least trying to do so. If every Catholic who is at Mass on Sunday even tried to do that Monday-Saturday the whole world would be transformed into a much kinder, gentler, and warmer place in a fortnight. So let’s you and I try to do that today, OK?

This Little Piggy Goes to Market

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Pray, fast. Pray always, fast. Last week in our journey through these words that are the heart of MH spirituality and way of life, I focussed on these same words, but wrote about the aspect of prayer and its essential role in our life.

But what about fasting? What is it, and why is it? Why is it important? Is it? How does it fit in with going into the marketplace, being plunged into the human situation and its bargains and trade-offs, its cold calculations and tragic compromises? Why is fasting a right Gospel response to our being deeply immersed in the affairs, concerns, joys and hopes, sorrows and distress of all men and women, all of humanity?

I write about this in my book Idol Thoughts. Fasting essentially is a matter of establishing a spiritual order, or rather healing a deep spiritual disorder in us, by a bodily action. It bears witness, therefore, to the essential unity of our bodies and our spirits, that the two are not and cannot be at odds with each other, but form a single reality, a single person. What we do in our bodies directly affects our souls and vice versa.

The disorder that is then expressed in the more unsavoury aspects of the marketplace—the buying and selling not of goods and services, but of personal integrity and dignity—is essentially the disorder of idolatry. Human beings are inveterate idolators. That is, we look everywhere else but to God for our happiness. Whether it is sex or food or power or revenge or riches or fame or chemical stimuli or a host of other variations on those themes, we slip into idolatry as soon as we complete the sentence ‘Happiness is…’ with something other than God, something other than our living communion with the Father in our Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Food is one of the lesser idols, in many ways, but our habit of overeating is nonetheless a sort of anti-sacrament of this false religion of happiness. That is, we have all sorts of desires and hungers in us, too many to count really. But when we keep shovelling ‘it’ in, when every little twinge of physical hunger is immediately filled by some morsel of food (or perhaps rather more than a morsel), then our bodies are telling our spirits that there is no happiness available outside of creatures and what they can give you.

So this little piggy goes to market, then! Off we go, confirmed by our bodies in our spirits that what we really need to be happy is to get whatever our grubby little hands can lay hold off and take it to ourselves by whatever means necessary.

Fasting, then, is the great sacramental of the true religion, the truth about human happiness and fulfillment. By choosing to embrace a little bit of hunger (we’re not supposed to starve ourselves), by choosing to have just that bit of weakness, just that bit of unsatisfaction in our flesh, we form our spirits in the deep truth of our need for God, and of God’s faithfulness in meeting that need.

Fasting is hard. Our world today is all about instant gratification, instant quelling of need. Many of us were raised in such an ethos, and so self-control, embrace of moderate hunger does not come easy to us. But the spiritual profit is huge.

And in the context of this part of the Mandate, our going into the marketplace, fasting is utterly essential. How can we preach the Gospel of divine love and mercy, of the God who meets us in our need and brings us to the happiness of the kingdom, if we are busily stuffing ourselves with whatever we think we need? Our witness to the Gospel will be hollow and unconvincing, if we are not ourselves living by the faith we profess.

So that is why we fast, essentially. The other benefits of fasting are very good and real—the mastery of the passions, the virtue of self-control and discipline, even the physical health benefits of not always being full up. But Christian fasting is essentially evangelical and kerygmatic, proclaiming the sufficiency of Christ and of God to a world mad with consumption and worshipping of creatures. So… let’s watch what we eat today, OK?

Reality Bends

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust,

who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!

You have multiplied, O Lord my God,

your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;

none can compare with you!

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear.

Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

Then I said, “Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.”

I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation;

behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O Lord.

I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;..

But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you;

may those who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the Lord!”

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

Psalm 40

Reflection – The ‘30’ series in the psalms has been, I will admit, kind of a rough one—lots of psalms of distress and anguish and cries of lamentation. All of that is part of life, and so all of it enters into the psalms which capture the whole of human life. But… it has been a bit of a rough go.

Things are looking up here with Psalm 40! This is one of the most beautiful psalms in the psalter, full of many poetic images that resonate deeply in our spiritual lives. “He drew me from the pit… set my feet upon a rock… put a new song in my mouth’ And then, later on, ‘Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required… I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is in my heart.’

And so on and so forth—a truly lovely psalm of deliverance and praise expressed in obediential love. The Letter to the Hebrews explicitly puts these words into the mouth of the Son of God coming into the world (Heb 10:5-7). And because our life is in Christ and Christ is our life, these words are ours, then, in a very particular way.

Obedience—the word we shy away from, the word that in our post-modern world is so very anathema to us. We are supposed to be able to create our own reality now, to decide for ourselves just what is true, what is false, what is good, what is evil. That these things should, and in fact do, come to us from outside ourselves, and that our fundamental response in life is to obey, to submit, to bow down before realities we did not make, cannot change, cannot control, but to which we are called to make a response, to act in concert with this God who is the author of all that is—this is (we are told) deeply repugnant to many people today.

Well, reality may bend, but it doesn’t break. And we can only bend it so far before it lashes back at us. We can choose contraception and abortion over many decades, but then we cannot choose not to live in an aging and bankrupt society. We can choose euthanasia, then, to get rid of all the expensive old people (let’s be honest – that’s what the push for it is about now), but there will be unintended consequences arising from that as well.

Reality bends, but it doesn’t break, and when we choose to shape reality according to our devices and desires, it will eventually break us. Meanwhile, God awaits for patiently, too, to pull us from the pit of destruction and the miry bog and to make our lives secure on the rock.

The rock is Christ who is Truth, and the result of living in truth is to live in praise, gratitude, and a new song that never grows old. And out of that song, a great desire to tell all the assembly of the saving power of God. So let us pray for the grace and courage, first to obey God and know His power in our lives saving us, and then to be evangelizers proclaiming this power to all our post-modern brothers and sisters, who need to hear about this, don’t you think?

Vocation Recruitment

My ongoing research in Catherine's writings, in service of a book I hope to write over the next year of so, is turning up forgotten gems on various topics. From time to time I like to 'hand over' the blog to her and share some of these treasures.

This article is from our newspaper Restoration, from November 1964. It is on the difficult subject of vocation recruitment. Catherine has her own ideas about this topic, and is happy to share them here, after the break. Enjoy!

This Week in Madonna House - June 7-13

Life, death, and everything in between—such was this week in Madonna House. I haven’t actually written this column for some weeks now. In recent weeks life in MH has been fine, but pretty basic and ordinary, and to be honest I just couldn’t think of anything to say about it. There are only so many times you can write ‘the-farm-is-busy-and-we-are-planting-our-crops’ in a row before it starts to sound a little monotonous, even if the work itself is absorbing.

Well, this week was filled with all sorts of things that are anything but basic and ordinary. Sunday last was Corpus Christi, and we had our annual Eucharistic procession from St. Mary’s chapel to Our Lady of the Woods. We have been doing this for years now—in fact it holds a special meaning for me since I arrived at MH to stay on that feast day and actually arrived during the procession. My life has been one long walk with Jesus ever since.

We are joined in this procession by our friends and neighbours in this Valley, and it seems to get bigger every year. We are surrounded by many young families, and some not so young, and so there is always a great aspect of community and joy in this event. Little girls carry baskets of flower petals that they scatter at the feet of the Lord as he passes in His Eucharistic body, while we pray the rosary and pause at Our Lady of Combermere mid-route for Benediction.

Of course it was even bigger than usual this year because the date was June 7, and the following day was our MH Promise Day, the anniversary of the dedication of the statue of Our Lady of Combermere. Many family and friends of the eight people making first and final promises had already arrived.

So we had a cookout supper that evening. This year many of our guests were from Nova Scotia, as two making first promises were from there. Where Maritimers are, there is always music, and so an impromptu ceilidh happened in the basement that evening.

The next day, of course, was Promises Day, and a beautiful day it was. Bishop Mulhall came to celebrate the Mass, and stayed around quite a while for the reception afterwards. There were a great many people with us to celebrate the day and witness four make their first promises in MH and receive the Pax-Caritas cross which is the symbol of our vocation, four make final promises for life, and three others make temporary renewals (another three renewed their promises in our mission houses).

What is there to say about such things? Nothing, and everything. Later we gathered at Our Lady of Combermere once again to pray the rosary there, followed by a festive, joyful supper.

So we received four new members on Monday… and bid farewell to one member on Friday. Josephine Halfman, one of our pioneer staff, had been quite sick for some time, and had been sinking in the past week or so. In the early hours of Friday, the feast of the Sacred  Heart, she peacefully slipped away. So we are now preparing for the funeral rites—the wake on Sunday evening, the funeral on Monday.

It does all connect, of course. Final perseverance is the goal of our promises. We pledge our lives to God, and the Pax-Caritas cross we receive is the sign of that pledge; Josephine will be buried with her cross.

In the meantime, there is indeed much ordinary life going on in the midst of it all, and lots of hard work. It takes a lot of sweat and muscle to keep this place going. The farm is very busy, of course, with planting and field work at full steam. The carpenters are building an extension to the farm house, providing much needed extra living space for the farmers. We have a few more guests than we’ve had in recent months, but our dorms are far from full still (hey – any young people looking for an apostolic adventure? Come to MH this summer!).

And so life (our new vocations), death (RIP, Josephine) and everything in between (at the moment, a whole lotta work!) has been ours this week. There is great joy in it all, and great love. And great prayer, for all of you and for the whole world which stands in such need of it right now.