Works of Mercy: Counselling the Doubtful

Wednesdays on this blog are dedicated to the Year of Mercy, and specifically on looking at mercy as a ‘work’ – the traditional list of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

Today we come to the second spiritual work of mercy: to counsel the doubtful. And I have to be honest here that I am struggling a bit to know what to say about it. Not, as I said a few weeks ago with ‘visiting prisoners’, because I don’t do this particular work much. Quite the opposite, actually: this work of mercy pretty much is my principal job description in Madonna House.

I am a spiritual director. More and more all the time, this is my main work in MH, at least in terms of time spent on it. While spiritual direction certainly encompasses instructing the ignorant, admonishing sinners, and comforting the afflicted, it is principally a matter of counseling the doubtful. And so… what can I say about the work that takes up an ever-increasing chunk of my waking hours? Nothing, and everything?

It is also a bit delicate since I do realize that at least some portion of my blog readership is made up of… uhh… the ‘doubtful’ ones who I counsel, my directees. Hey, guys! How ya doin’? I suppose you’ll tell me that, next time we talk! And of course I have to be careful how I talk about the work that I do, since it is very much a work done in confidence.

To make some general statements, I would say first that ‘the doubtful’ are not necessarily or usually doubting the actual truths of the faith. That would be a strange circumstance, if everyone was continually revisiting the question of whether God existed, whether Jesus really is His Son, and so forth. And people don’t, usually.

Doubts can simply be doubts as to the next step forward. Or doubts as to whether a course of action already taken is indeed God’s holy will. Doubts as to one’s graced capacity to persevere in a task, a vocation, a life commitment. Or doubts, yes, not as to the truth of our faith, but as to whether or not God is truly trustworthy, whether or not we can truly yield our whole self to Him in this regard or that.

All of that are the primary ‘doubts’ that I find myself ‘counselling’ people on. My own experience of the matter is that almost always, people do know the next step forward. It does happen that sometimes a person is genuinely baffled by turns of event, but usually people do know the next move they have to make. My role as a spiritual director is to listen deeply to what the person is saying, and in that and through that and with lots of prayer, to what God is saying in them and to both of us.

I sometimes do wonder what it’s all about and how I am really helping the person (I am NOT fishing for compliments here). But it seems that there is indeed great value in this act of deep listening, prayerful discerning together, a simple careful word of advice, confirmation, perhaps (occasionally) caution or correction.

There is a real need for this in our world today. The proof of this is that people are willing to drive hours to come to a place like MH in the back woods of Canada to get spiritual direction from me and the other MH priests who offer this service. And that we receive many more requests for spiritual direction than we are able to accept.

After twelve years as a priest, I still am learning what spiritual direction is. In what I have written here, I have barely scraped the surface of what I have learned so far, mostly because to say more would begin to touch on the more confidential aspects of the thing, and I can’t go anywhere near there, obviously. But I know that there is a great an urgent need for it in our world, and at the very least, for people who are willing to sit and just listen to someone for an hour and maybe just say a prayer with them at the end, or give a word of encouragement or even a little bit of advice. This is something that can be done by anyone, not just qualified spiritual directors.

Catherine Doherty said that loneliness was the greatest poverty in the modern North American city. She opened up ‘listening houses’ in the 1970s as a direct way of assuaging that poverty. How I would like to see every Catholic and Christian house everywhere become a ‘listening house’, a place where anyone can just come and lay their burdens down at some kind soul’s feet, not to get answers but to get solace and maybe just a word or two of counsel.

The world would be a lot less cold and lonely if we all understood our ‘house’ to be a listening house and were willing to take up this great and beautiful work of counseling the doubtful, according to our abilities and opportunities.

This Week in Madonna House - January 10-16

This week in Madonna House began with a splash. Last Sunday we celebrated our monthly Byzantine Rite Liturgy, observing the feast of the Theophany in place of the Western Rite Baptism of the Lord.

It is the same mystery being commemorated in both feasts—Christ plunging into the waters of the world to claim them for himself and bless them, identifying himself with us in our lowly human state and in that the Trinity being revealed in the voice of the Father and the descent of the Dove.

The Byzantine Liturgy is very beautiful on this feast, which ranks in their tradition among the principal feasts of the year. After the Divine Liturgy itself there is a special blessing of water with a beautiful long prayer that involves a cross being plunged into the water three times, and the celebrant blowing on the waters in the form of a cross, evoking the moment of creation.

Then this specially blessed water is sprinkled on the congregation and on the four walls of the church, symbolizing the entire universe being blessed. After this, we process together to the Madawaska River where a crucifix is thrown into the waters, symbolically blessing all the waters of the earth. This too is a common tradition in the Christian East.

It was a bit of a challenge this year, since last weekend we had the traditional ‘January thaw’ – lots of rain and above freezing weather, all of which made it very slippery and slushy underfoot. But no injuries.

After all of that we enjoyed our usual Sunday, and then happily entered Ordinary Time the next day. The great seasons of the year are wonderful and beautiful and joyful here… and we are all quite happy, thank you very much, to get back to more plain living afterwards.

Our unstable climate seems to have finally decided that it is, in fact, winter, and so after the weekend rain it went back down to normal seasonal temps and a nice blanket of snow falling. The men have been able, then, to finally get in operation the outdoor skating rink off of the tea dock. Hockey games and the like are the recreation activity of choice for our young guests and younger staff.

The guest numbers went up for a little while over Christmas… and then they went right back down. We are a quiet little house right now. If any young adults find themselves at a bit of a loose end this winter, why not come to Madonna House and have a spiritual adventure? We have room!

This time of year the work really is pretty much keeping the place maintained and going. There is always snow to shovel, wood sheds to fill, meals to cook, laundry to do. One job that is a hidden part of our winter is processing the wool from our sheep. Every day a few of the women are down there, cleaning, ‘picking’, carding, all to prepare the fleeces to either be sold to local crafts people or for our own people to then dye and spin it for sale or to make our own handicrafts, themselves sold. It is all about the missions, of course, as the proceeds from everything we sell go to the poor through the work of our shops.

Well, really we are in such a quiet and ordinary time of year that I hardly know what else to say. One of our priests accompanied by an MH lay man are giving a retreat to thirty-plus men this weekend, something we have been doing yearly for quite a few years now. On a personal note, I have a few such things coming up in the next weeks, so my life has suddenly become all about that—preparing talks and such things.

But really, this time between the end of Christmas and the beginning of Lent is one of the most quiet and ‘normal’ times of year for us (so much so that it is quite unusually normal, if that makes any sense). In the midst of it all, do know that we are offering all our work and prayer for the glory of God and for the needs of our troubled world at this time. God bless you all!

Do You Have A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ? Well, DO YOU, HUH, HUH???

O God, you are my God, I seek you,

 my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,

beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life,

my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live;

I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,

and my mouth praises you with joyful lips,

when I think of you on my bed,

and meditate on you in the watches of the night.

For you have been my help,

and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

But those who seek to destroy my life

shall go down into the depths of the earth;

they shall be given over to the power of the sword,

they shall be prey for jackals.

But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult,

for the mouths of liars will be stopped.

Psalm 63

Reflection – And so we come to one of the pivotal psalms of the whole psalter. This psalm has such a central  place in Christian worship that its importance can hardly be overstated. It is the first psalm at Lauds for Sunday Week One of the psalter, but this means that it is prayed on virtually every major feast day of the Church year, and for each day of the Octaves of Easter and Christmas.

It is chock full with imagery that for a Christian are sacramental, Christological, and pneumatological (uhh, that’s a big word for ‘referring to the Holy Spirit'). There is water and thirst, so baptism. There is hunger and feasting, so Eucharist. There is the shadow of God’s wings, so the Spirit, the Crimson Dove. There is the King, so Christ.

But all of this is in the context of a great personal love and delight of the believer in God. If you want a Scripture that is all about having a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ’, to use the modern parlance, this is the one for you. Pray this psalm out loud, mean it, take it to heart, really meditate on its verses and its imagery, and you will begin to awaken a personal love for God and for Jesus Christ in yourself. His Word can do that for you, and this Word in particular can do that for you.

What does it mean, anyhow, to have a ‘personal relationship’ with God? I have to be honest and admit that I don’t really like that phrase, for reasons that I’ve never been able to fully articulate. There’s something about it, and especially about the fact that it is often presented as being the most important thing possible, the very question on which hinges our whole faith life, that makes me uneasy.

I think it is because in our culture of sentimentality and feelings first, it translates to having all sorts of appropriate emotions about Jesus Christ on any given day. Myself, I have never been able to summon up appropriate emotions about any subject on any day (I seem to be wired a bit differently from most people that way), and even if I could, I simply refuse to believe that the health of our spiritual life is contingent on having the right emotional response to God. It just makes no sense to me.

But a personal relationship with God seems to me, in its better meaning, to mean precisely what this psalm says: knowing our poverty, knowing that we are dry and weary land indeed, that we hunger and thirst and need… and that there is One and One Alone who can meet that need, who can make our life fruitful, who can fill us. And from that knowledge of our poverty and knowledge of His fullness, our hearts and minds turn to Him, simply, continually, naturally.

We gaze upon Him in the sanctuary (great psalm to pray at Adoration!), His praise is on our lips (Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!), we think of Him in the night (pray the name of Jesus on those nights when sleep eludes you), and sing of Him (whether you can carry a tune or not).

Not because we are all emotional and wrought up about God, but because, well… because we believe this stuff is true. Like… really, really true. Not some nice idea or the power of positive thinking or foolishness like that. Truth. Him. Real. God. That kind of thing. And this psalm is one of the great masterpieces of inspired Scripture, one of the great ways to express and foster that faith in ourselves, and that is why the Church has made it such a prominent part of its common prayer, and why we should make it part of our personal prayer lives, too.

The Big Picture

I am writing a commentary on the Mass each Thursday on this blog, looking at how the rites of the liturgy inform our lives as disciples. We have now reached the following part of Eucharistic Prayer I:

Remember, Lord, your servants N. and N. and all gathered here, whose faith and devotion are known to you. For them, we offer you this sacrifice of praise or they offer it for themselves and all who are dear to them, for the redemption of their souls, in hope of health and well-being, and paying their homage to you, the eternal God, living and true.

Now, while all of this is worn familiar by time and repetition to us Catholics, it is nonetheless quite a remarkable thing the Church is doing here. We are, after all, at the very center and reality, at the Great Altar of God, in heaven itself. We are at Calvary, at the empty tomb, at the Throne of God. The liturgy is cosmic, grand, sweeping, all-encompassing.

And we pause here to say, “Oh yeah Lord… remember my Aunt Gertrude? And then there’s Nancy who works at the office… and Frank my dentist’s cousin’s son…” I mean, we don’t quite get that informal—it is still liturgy and there is a formal ritual language and tone we maintain here.

But still… we are at the throne of God, the center and heart of the cosmos, and yet we pause to remember and offer our worship for this one, for that one, for the other one. All of the sudden, in this grand cosmic sweep of liturgy, it all gets very personal and small and particular.

This is very important. This says a great deal about who we believe God to be, and from that, who we believe ourselves to be. The great God we worship, the One before Whom all flesh bows… well, He cares about Gertrude and Nancy and Frank. He really does. And His Grand Offering, the offering into which we enter at the Eucharist, the offering which is for the whole universe and which has power within it to save and transform every atom of creation… well, it is for those three little people, and every other little person (you, me) as well, in a way that is deeply personal and individual and solicitous of our well-being.

This is the God we worship. And as it is with God, so it is with us. This is why Catherine Doherty placed so much emphasis on the person-to-person apostolate, on simply attending to humanity one at a time. Of just getting to know people with great respect and reverence, and only out of that knowing, that friendship (the first name of our apostolate was Friendship House) do we try to meet the person’s needs.

We do not love humanity en masse, because God does not love humanity en masse. Those who are especially engaged in various forms of mass movements, of social justice efforts such as the pro-life movement (to name the one dearest to my heart) have to be vigilant about this. How can we love the unborn baby and care about the sacredness of human life… and ignore callously the actual person who we live with?

How can we be overwrought with emotion and compassion over the plight of the refugees… and then contemptuously treat like dirt someone who, perhaps, is struggling with this issue and is truly concerned about the safety of their children? How can we pretend to care about ‘the poor’, and then be scornful of the human weaknesses and follies, failures and sins of those nearest and dearest to us? How is that loving the poor? Or are the poor just some abstraction to us that we pretend to care about, while we loathe the actual poor people we encounter each day?

God is so personal, so very, very personal. He loves you, He loves me, He loves Tina and Stan and Maria and Evelyn and Mike. Our discipleship always has to be primarily at that personal level, and we need to take that to heart especially if we are inclined to be swept up in big causes and social movements, or get lost in intellectual abstractions of one kind or another.

At the very heart of reality, at the very foot of the Cross, we have time and breath to spare for personal intentions. On His Very Throne of Grace, the Lord has ‘time’, so to speak, for those personal intentions. There is nowhere in this world where our focus and our energy is more taken up into universal and cosmic concerns, and yet it remains personal, intimate, concrete.

A whole theology of love and discipleship, of presence and hospitality and friendship, emerges from this one paragraph of the Eucharistic Prayer. So… let’s try to just love the person in front of us today, whoever they are and no matter what challenges that might pose to us. Because there’s no one else to love, no other time to be loving, and in fact when we make that choice of personal love and friendship, we are indeed touching the cosmic, the universal, the big picture of life and of God, and in fact there is no other way to do that.