This Week in Madonna House - July 4-10

This will be my last blog post for the next week or so, as I am heading on the road again, this time to the Nazareth family camp in St. Gabriel de Brandon, QC. Meanwhile, we had quite a full and rich week here at Madonna House.

Of course the most important thing this week was the death of Msgr. Thomas Rowland, which I wrote about earlier. The funeral is this coming Tuesday (I’m sorry to be missing it), so I don’t have much to add to what I wrote already. But of course a death in the community always focuses the attention of all upon that person, and so little photo displays of Fr. Tom have cropped up in various places, and he has been a topic of many a table conversation.

The other ‘big’ thing this week is the launching of our annual summer program, about which I wrote here. Our theme this year is “Love is Stronger: Hope and Faith in the World Today.” The mini-theme of the first week is “Love Chose Me: The Encounter that Shatters Loneliness”. Talks were given after lunch at the main house and the farm by various people, and yours truly gave a somewhat longer talk on Wednesday evening. Spiritual reading on the non-talk days has revolved around the general theme of love in the Christian life, drawing on Catherine’s writings and talks (it’s not exactly a marginal theme in her opus).

Friday evening at our usual fast supper there was a chance for our guests to reflect on the talks they had heard and what they had gotten from them. This week we had a weeding bee at the farm after that (weeding on an empty stomach - how barbaric!) followed by an evening of music up at the farm, just for fun.

And speaking of guests, I had mentioned a few times in this column that 2015 has been an unusually low year for guests coming to MH. The summer program has worked its mysterious magic on that front, and the walls of MH are bulging outwards with people, seemingly overnight. Honestly, it feels like people just sprung up from the earth, or perhaps they were all hiding in storage sheds and broom closets and sprang out all at once. One day the place was relatively empty, the next day, boom! Full house.

So that’s nice. From my point of view, it’s not that we have a lot of work to do here and our volunteer working guests are helpful with that, although that is no doubt true. But the bigger thing is that our MH life is so rich and beautiful, such a powerful instrument of grace and healing and a dozen other things for so many hundreds of people, that it always disturbs me a bit when our dorms are empty.

Of course the high point of the summer program is the venerable institution in MH of the Saturday Evening Seminar. This dates back to the heady days of the 1960s when youth began to ask questions and challenge authority and all that kind of stuff. Catherine Doherty and one of the MH priests began having a weekly Q&A session for the guests so that all issues could be tabled and hashed out in an open forum.

This has continued ever since, and now it is the three directors general of MH who are on the hot seat each Saturday in the summer to field questions on just about any topic around faith, the Church, MH, and so forth. This past Saturday there were questions about forgiveness, the value of manual labour, praying to saints, and more. This is always a lively and fun evening, and the MH staff get as much out of it as the guests.

Beyond that, MH is abuzz with work of all description. The addition to the farm house is moving along nicely, and the men are also installing an outdoor wood stove there, which will provide heat to several buildings. We have been moving in this direction on a number of our properties, as it seems to be a more efficient and easier way to move with our heating needs.

Meanwhile, gardens are weeded, the shops are full of customers, tours are a daily and sometimes thrice-daily event, and there is simply lots to do in the domestic front of cooking, cleaning, laundry, to keep the good ship MH afloat and habitable.

And with that, this man is going overboard for the next week, so I had better sign off now and get ready to hit the road. Know that all of our work, prayer, and life here is offered up daily for the world and for each of your intentions.

A Matter of Strict Justice

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will… It is Thursday and so time again for my running commentary on the Mass and our living it out in daily life. There is a marvellous sacred logic in the entrance rites of the liturgy—we begin in the sign that encapsulates our whole faith, the sign of the Cross, then are brought together into a communion by the ritual form of greeting. Then we, as a group, acknowledge our failure to live this communion of love with God and neighbour.

Now, having received the assurance of God’s mercy and forgiveness in the conclusion of the penitential rite, we break forth in a hymn of jubilant ecstatic praise—the Gloria. It all makes perfect sense and sheds light on how we are to conduct our whole spiritual life—living in the mystery of the Trinity and the Redemption, ordering our whole action towards communion and love, deeply humble in light of our failures, but in that knowing his mercy and so continually praising Him.

While the Mass will of course go on and all of this will just get deeper and more beautiful, the whole of our Christian life is found within the first few minutes of a normal Sunday liturgy. Isn’t that great? While there is a great need for catechesis and evangelization throughout the Church, isn’t it wonderful that an attentive and thoughtful presence at any old Sunday Mass anywhere in the world can potentially give a person adequate instruction on how to live their lives, at least in the basic pattern?

So, praise and thanksgiving. The Gloria is all of this on overdrive, an outpouring of repetitive euphoric delight in God for His goodness, His mercy, His awesome might and majesty and beauty and power and love and goodness and, well, glory.

What is this about? Why is it so vital to praise and thank God? It is my firm conviction, to be quite honest borne out by long experience, that when we are praising and thanking God continually, there is a peace and order in our lives even if we are in trial and anguish. And when praise and thanksgiving grow weak and faint, there is a heaviness, a hardness, a shallowness or a deadness, a loss of vitality or a rising of anger in us that is inevitable.

The reason for this is as simple as simple can be: to praise God and thank Him is to live in reality. To fail to praise Him, or worse yet to refuse to praise Him, is to step out of reality. Because the reality is that, even when life is full of troubles and sorrows and pain, we have a God who loves us, who gives us being, and who has poured out Himself not only to sustain us in our own being, but to communicate to us His Being, to give us His Life.

And there are natural goods all around us, too. If you are reading this blog post, you are probably not starving to death. You probably have adequate shelter and clothing. You have clean water to drink. I personally live in a place that has so much natural beauty of water, earth, flora and fauna that I am quite honestly dazzled by it every day of my life.

And the people who do lack these things—well, our experience in MH has been that the poorest of the earth among whom we have been privileged to live and work actually are the most inclined to thank God for everything and praise Him in all things. So they don’t need to be told; they need to tell us.

So the most basic response of honesty, of personal integrity, of strict justice for crying out loud, is to thank God for all of the above and for so much more—for all the decent good people we know, and those we don’t know but who keep the world afloat just by showing up each day and doing their jobs. And I could go on, and on, and on. There is literally no end to all of what we really should, really must give thanks for.

And thanking God for His gifts, we come to know that God is the Giver, that God is truly the source of all that is, that God is truly great, that there is something There that is beyond our capacity to even give thanks for. And so thanksgiving yields to praise, to rapturous exultant praise that the Reality which is at the center of all reality is ‘all that’ – all good, all love, all beauty. Simply, all in all.

It is this spirit of praise and gratitude that then places us so deeply in reality that we are rightly positioned to really understand and tackle the real problems, the real evils, the real work that we need to do to make the world the beautiful place, the place of communion and love that it is meant to be. 

We cannot do that if we are fuming and fulminating, bitching and complaining and stewing and sulking. Internet culture fosters that, unfortunately. But liturgical culture, understood and lived out, heals that, and out of that empowers us to be people of action and mission, in a spirit of love and genuine care for the world and all who dwell therein.

Msgr Thomas Rowland - 1926-2015

Well, we are in a time of it in Madonna House, with yet another of our members going to meet Jesus last night. Msgr Thomas Rowland died last night around 9:30, after a long struggle with acute leukaemia.

This is our third funeral of the year (fourth if you count Fr. Jim Duffy who died at Christmas time late last year). So we are in a season of saying goodbye and giving thanks, really, for the beautiful men and women who God has allowed us to share life with in this community.

Fr. Tom was a great man in many respects. He was first and foremost a man of the liturgy, a pioneer in the liturgical renewal movement following Vatican II, and a strong advocate of the active participation that was and is at the heart of this movement.

I don't have facts and dates at my disposal as I write this, but he was very active throughout the American Southwest in promoting precisely the kind of liturgical education and sacramental theology that the Church mandated in its constitution Sacrosanctum Consilium. He was a pastor through and through and in his home diocese of El Paso, Texas did great work in building up parish life around the celebration of the Eucharist and the other sacraments.

His one book, God Acts, We React, contains his insights around these subjects, and has been well regarded in liturgical circles. His concern always was to not overly focus on the precise rubrics and texts (although he was a stickler for doing things correctly!), but to understand the mystery of faith being expressed within them - the reality of God acting in Jesus Christ and this action creating in us a 're-action' - an imitation of the action of Christ that is both worship returned to God and sacrificial love and service for the world.

I would simply say on a personal note that Fr. Tom was my great teacher on the liturgy, and my writings on that subject on this blog and elsewhere are simply my own regurgitation of his basic insights.

How did this man get to MH? He came quite early, actually, to visit his sister Mary Catherine who had joined the fledgling community. He himself joined it in the late 1950s for some years, but was recalled to his diocese by his bishop. He remained an associate priest in the subsequent decades. It was in the late 1980s that he was allowed, finally, to pursue his sense of call to be a full-time member of MH.

Here, he worked in a variety of jobs--he was the bee keeper for a while!--wrote his book and travelled extensively giving workshops on liturgical theology all over North America. He went to Ghana and taught in a minor seminary there, and later was assigned to our house in Edmonton. He had unflagging apostolic zeal, and in fact the one thing he could not do easily was sit still. He loved parish life and was always the first one to volunteer to go out and fill in whenever a local parish needed a substitute.

It was just about two years ago that he went down to the West Indian island of  Carriacou, at age 87, to help out, since they had no priest on that small island. And he was quite ready to stay there as long as needed, and was unflagging in offering the sacraments, and bringing communion to 'the old people', most of whom were considerably younger than him. It was there that he began to feel tired and sick for the first time in his life. As he put it to me, he finally went for a blood test, since he had no energy, and found out that "I didn't have none!" Blood, that is. Upon returning to Combermere, he was quickly diagnosed with acute leukaemia and told he would live for a month or two more.

That was a year and a half ago. He was a strong man, and death did not come easily to him. But the last weeks his strong heart and iron constitution finally began to lose the battle, and he quietly slipped away last night into the arms of the Lord who he tried to serve all his life.

Fr. Tom was a unique character, an original. His other passion aside from the priesthood and the Mass was flying--he was a licensed pilot all his life. Coming to MH meant giving that up, so he become an avid hobbyist building remote controlled model airplanes which he flew all around the priest house on any fine day. He was famous for his prodigious appetite and could pack away ice cream (pralines and cream!) with the best of them. He was a lively conversationalist, a very funny man, a great story teller with an unbelievably detailed memory for past events. He was a Texan through and through, long and lanky and with a drawl that was undiminished no matter how much time he spent in lesser environs than the Lone Star state.

He was unlike anyone else in MH, really, and he will be missed. For those who might have known Fr. Rowland and who are in the area, I will be posting funeral information on my Facebook page when we have it. Pray for us as we say goodbye to another of our family, and pray for Fr. Tom that he quickly find his place at the banquet feast of heaven, the liturgy that knows no end.

Hidden Light For The Path

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

Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. We are going through the Little Mandate, the core words of the Madonna House vocation and spirit, each Tuesday here on this blog. There is a lovely tension at this point in the Mandate—be hidden, be a light. Which is it?

Of course it is both, and when you think about it, lights are in fact ‘hidden’ things. A light that is properly placed and correctly calibrated does not draw attention to itself but to what it is illuminating. In a well lit room you don’t stare at the lamps and ceiling fixtures, but at the furnishings and the people. Lights are hidden, in that they exist not for themselves but for what they light.

I have a great love for this line of the Mandate in particular (not that I don’t love the whole of it, of course). It seems to capture exactly what it is we do around here so much—certainly it makes sense of the large majority of how I spend my time.

To shine a light on your neighbour’s feet—that is, to help illuminate the next little stretch of the path so that they can walk on it more easily—to me, that is the definition of what a spiritual director does, and that happens to be more and more my primary work in MH. It’s never about having enough light to shine forth for the next hundred miles of roadway, to provide all the answers and the big picture of life, the universe, and everything (42!), but simply helping the person discern the next few steps, the next little bit of the crooked winding path of God and man in the world. 

Sometimes the path is so gnarled and tortuous all the light can do is show the way forward for the next day, sometimes there is a straight level stretch of road ahead and the light illumines quite a bit of road indeed (this is called ‘vocation discernment’).

Of course this line has a particular resonance for me and the work I do right now, but it is bigger than that. It seems to me that what shines a light for the feet of the other is authenticity, Christian witness, fidelity in little things, and personal love and hospitality. All of which is the very substance of our life in this community, and is utterly applicable to anyone’s life. We all are (or should be trying to be, anyhow) living out our faith in the small choices of our daily life—acts of service, forgiveness and kindness, prayers and humility. Nothing big and showy, pretty ordinary and even ‘blah’ most days.

But there is a quiet light shining forth from that, and it is a light on the feet of our neighbours. It is so important for all of us to take seriously the impact of our choices on those around us, and in particular of those who do not share our faith in Jesus Christ. If they see Christians wrangling and acrimonious, selfish and greedy, bitter and hateful, lazy and complacent, it doesn’t shed much light on the path for them, does it? 

But the quiet hidden light shed by people who at least strive to go through their days loving and serving, praying and being merciful—this is what has the power to convert hearts and change the world. And it has been our consistent experience in MH for over 60 years that it is this, in fact, which has the most lasting and deep effect on the many people who have passed through here over the decades.

It is not the words we speak, not the homilies the priests preach, not the good teaching or brilliant exposition of faith and moral we present, but the quiet witness of a hidden life that convinces people of the truth of the Gospel.

A Psalm For The Morning After

 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and appear before God?

 My tears have been my food day and night,

 while they say to me all the day long,

“Where is your God?”

 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:

 how I would go with the throng

and lead them in procession to the house of God

with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?

 Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you

 from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

 Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls;

 all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,

and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

 I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me?

 Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”

 As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me,

 while they say to me all the day long,“Where is your God?”

 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

Psalm 42

Reflection – Well, I am back from a lovely week at Cana Colony, the MH-run family camp, and the blog is back as well, with this lovely psalm. As a matter of fact, the Church prays this psalm as part of its Morning Prayer on this very day, Monday Week 2.

It is a psalm well suited to the morning, especially the morning after a difficult night, a night spent tossing and turning in a fever of anxiety, perhaps, or some deep trouble. As usual in the psalms, we don’t know what the exact problem is the psalmist has, and this is good, as we can apply the psalm to whatever our troubles may be right now.

This psalm is particularly good due to its fine poetic imagery—‘as a deer pants for flowing streams… deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls… why are you cast down, O my soul...’ And in this imagery, we can see the constant message of all of the psalms: whatever the specific trouble, whatever the details of our lives and their burdens and sorrows, what is really happening in and through all of them is one simple and basic thing.

Namely, we are touching the radically incomplete and broken nature of creation as it is, and in that feel keenly and deeply our need for God’s redemption, His radical intervention in our lives and in the life of the world.

It is all in there in this psalm—the fear that God is actually absent or even non-existent, the desire to see all humanity united and entering the house of God to praise Him, the memory of past graces to sustain us in current hardship, the relapse nonetheless into deep despondency and doubt, and the final message of hope and out of hope, praise of God.

All in all, it is a fairly typical morning after the night before (so to speak) in MH, and perhaps in your life, too! And that is as it should be—until we are at the end of the pilgrimage and do enter and see the face of God, we will be in some place in Psalm 42, somewhere and in some fashion engaged with the broken ‘not yet’ quality of the world as it is, and needing to move in a spirit of hope to the world as it will be, the world as God is fashioning it to be in Christ.

That’s what we’re all doing today, or at least are supposed to do in the midst of whatever else we are about, so let’s get at it.