How Our "Saving" Takes Place

As lent blooms into Easter, we are very aware that we are being saved by God’s love. This is a fact. It’s right before our very eyes. The truth of the fact is one thing, but how it happens is another. We are not used to asking the how question, because it is asking for the explanation of functioning rather than the simple description of a fact of truth.

So let’s take a stab at it…let’s explore how we are saved by a magnificent Love. First, Love bends down. Bending is a function. Here is this poor Cinderella-soul, which finds itself in a drudgery state not of her choosing. Love bends down to her, and she “turns” at Love’s touch, her drudgery gone, and transformed into a princess in a party dress and at a “dance.” Locked in Love’s embrace, she follows Love’s lead on the dancefloor of her life. When she becomes “oh-so-tired-to-death,” Love sweeps her into its arms and carries her across the threshold into the safety of his Father’s “castle.”

Notice that even before bending down, Love sees her in her condition, and Loves her. Love starts everything off. Unable to get herself out of the condition she has inherited, Love bends to her. Love involves itself in her very wretchedness. Love bonds itself to her by touch. This transforms her. She becomes new, someone more than she was before, a new creation, clothed in a garment fit for a wedding. Love continues to involve itself in the dance of her life, holding her close. She dances “the night of her fears” away, held firmly by Love. As time passes toward the midnight of her life, she grows old in the dance. Love is ready. And when she collapses into Love’s arms, she leaves the dancefloor and is carried to “safety.”

Our saving is a process. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The flow of that process originates in a Mystery Jesus called “Abba.” Jesus is the touch-of-God to a wounded human race. When he bonds with our flesh in the incarnation, God is revealed as I AM the One Who Saves. We are transformed. All this happens by an outflowing energy of compassionate mercy that we call the “Holy Spirit.” So the mystery of our saving is an ongoing function of a merciful unending Trinitarian Love. And our response? Well, for goodness sake! Say, “Yes!”

You reach out your hand

And it is a human hand just like mine.

My blindness is gone.

You reach out your hand

And my deadness departs.

You join me even in the tomb

And then leap up and sweep me away with you into the heights.

Saving Love, seal my love-yes in the fire of your Spirit flowing from your open heart.

A Listening Heart

                                 

The context for all we are and do – charism, Spirit Marks, common life, common prayer, study, mission and ministry – is set by our vows, our commitments. Our lay associates witness to us their baptismal vows, and some, their marital vows of faithful loving. Sisters vow the counsels in addition to their baptismal vows, to witness to the entire Church a non-consumerist, wild loving, and obedient life-style in community.

So what is so distinct about vowing the counsel of religious obedience? We all seek to obey the voice of God in our life-styles, right? Indeed.

Yet that voice of God asks different things of different folks. Marital vows ask a listening heart for the needs of the spouse and family. The sister pledges a listening heart for the voice of God coming through her religious community. That means a deep listening to those she has elected into office to influence her. It means listening to the times, and how they cry out to her community for healing.

As it is in every life-style, the obedience asked of religious in our unique life-context might be very costly. It calls us to listen in the wide context of an entire community. It challenges us to bow the stiff neck of our individual ego preferences to where that community is moving. It might call us to consider something we think we cannot do. It might call us to consider what we don’t like or agree with. Make no mistake. Religious obedience in community stretches the soul. If sincerely lived it makes the religiously vowed person big-souled. The individual with her preferences and gifts is part of every consideration, yes, but always in relation to the wider common good.

And there’s the rub. What I want is discerned in the context of what we want and need. In a sense, we vow ourselves publicly to assume a we-consciousness in all areas of our life. We live with a heart that is dilated. It is always open and listening. It would be so simple to do what I want, when I want, as I want, if I want. But to always check out these wants in light of the community is a challenge. As we age, our physical hearing sometimes becomes compromised. But in this obedient listening, age often reveals one who has learned to hear extremely well – with a listening heart.

Loving – At White -Hot Heat

If vows added to the baptismal promises identify certain life-styles, and the counsel of poverty vowed publicly reminds the whole Church that “You can’t take it with you when you go,” what is this celibacy thing all about?

The married must be chastely celibate to all except their marriage partner. They sign the fruitful love of Christ Jesus in their marital love. But what does total celibate chastity mean for religious  who vow this counsel publicly? What does their vow of chastity mean in an age of recreational sex?

Catherine of Siena believed that poverty was the most basic of the counsels, for if the human heart if fixed on a relationship with the Holy One as its one non-negotiable, then celibate love and a listening heart fall right in place. Sandra Schneiders, IHM, takes another view. She is convinced that only someone wildly in love could vow poverty and obedience as a life-style.

I think they are both right. Catherine, from the angle of a basic value, and Sandra, from the angle of desire. Most view celibate chastity as something one does not do. One vows to fast from genital sex. But why would one do that? Only when the longing tells the person it would not be enough, when one’s desire is fixed on something more. So heated is that desire, that it stops at nothing short of union with the Holy. Nothing else will do…no matter how long I have to wait. This takes a love of white-hot heat…a love stronger than death. The totally celibate lover is a sign in the Church of its ultimate union, whatever the life-style each of us have lived.

This wild love-in-waiting can hardly be imagined in today’s world of “If it feels good, do it!” To fall in love with a beautiful human being and not have to “have” them is counter cultural. But it is real. It happens to both the married and to religious. Celibates, married or religious, know. Healthy religious celibates too are wild lovers. Ask them. You might be amazed at their stories.

Going…Where we might not want to go.Going…Where we might not want to go.

It’s here. Lent has come. We’ve been here before. What might be different this year? What might be different is that we are different. We are in a different place. This is most obvious nationally and politically. But what about spiritually? What about the hidden garden of my heart?

Lent is the time for cleaning out the garden…of the soul. It’s time to get rid of the trash, the old growth, the dead stuff. Why? Well, if you look carefully, you will see all sorts of new growth starting underneath the trash. So, clear it away…give the new a chance to grow!

But if I’m honest, I may not want to go there and do that. So, where am I going to go in this garden of mine? The wise Mother-Church takes us by the hand in the scriptures and leads us through the gate. First, there will be the desert, and we will learn that this is going to take work, and forces are going to gather to stop us. Then we climb a mountain, and surprise! We are shown what we will look like when the work is done! Next, we are shown the Fountain in the midst of our garden, and it is a living Person. Out of him flows the Spirit-water that gives life itself to the garden. By the fourth week we are pretty clear that we really don’t see too well, and we need this life-giving water to clear our vision as we do our clean-up work. By the fifth week we are led to face something we want to avoid: dying. We are shown there is no need to fear. The One who has the living water will take care of that too.

Then we enter the final week, where before our very eyes, he shows us how we will come through the key-hole of death into a new life. We call it Holy Week, for it indeed is holy. We watch as he gets sweaty and bloody, working beside us to clear our garden of whatever gets in his way. So, in this Lent of 2017,  we’re going. We’re going where we might not want to go.

Loving Gardener,

Desert Dweller,

Transfigured Human,

Living Fountain,

Vision Healer,

Death Destroyer,

Saving God,

Lead me where I might not want to go.

Sweat beside me

as I work to clear away what hinders the new growth in me you want to bring.

Clothe me in your new life

that with a radiant face

I might be a laser-light to pierce the dark with a just word.

The Light that Shines in the Darkness

We are into “ordinary” time, which only means that we are in between the two great mysteries of our salvation: the incarnation and the redemption. But make no mistake. Things are far from ordinary. The light has just been toned down just a bit. We walk by faith.

What is faith? We are used to thinking it’s an intellectual acceptance of what we cannot see. But if we go back to the original Greek that the evangelists used, we get a surprise. The word is pistis, and it means “to cling to, to adhere to as with glue.” Now I don’t know about you, but that grabs me, no pun intended. Faith means we cling to God and God’s Word as a magnet clings to the refrigerator door. Faith means we “sniff out” where life is, like the newborn puppy with eyes tight shut, pumping its little legs until it finds where to nurse. Faith is newly hatched baby birds, eyes tight shut, and no feathers, with mouths wide open, waiting for the food that comes after they feel mom or dad land on the branch. Faith is another way of knowing. It is a knowing with another part of our consciousness. This might be a surprise to an atheist.

Early in our young life we learn how to use our consciousness to figure things out. We learn problem solving. We learn to think things through to be responsible. We learn how to deal with time-space. But beneath that practical reason is just being aware that we are aware. This is the place of awe, of wonder. This is our contemplative consciousness. This is where the Light shines, this is where we come before it in faith. It is knowing what we cannot see. What we cannot see is real, but our senses cannot grasp it. Here in this deeper level of consciousness, we do not hold, we are held. We do not figure things out, we are figured out. We do not grasp, we are grasped. Faith is being held by Mystery…and we don’t want to let go.

*****

Holy One,

I seek your Light in my darkness.

Shine, and draw me to Yourself

with the bonds of love.

So fix me to Yourself that nothing can pry me loose.

Hold me tight when the winds of doubt blow.

Grasp me by the hand when the waters of sorrow rise to drown me.

Teach my reasoning mind that faith has reasons reason doesn’t understand.

Quiet me with the fact that you are God.

Fresh from the Anniversary...

As we inaugurated our 45^th president of the United States, 600 Dominicans from around the world gathered in Rome with Francis to close the 800^th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the Dominican Order. We are fresh from that wondrous anniversary.

The challenges we face now often draw from our charism, from our ministerial situations, or from our cultural realities. I’d like to ponder the “background music” to all of these. I mean the counsels we have taken upon ourselves by vow. The counsels are radical Christian values that identify us as folks living within the lifestyle called consecrated life. Like the married, we have a set of vows added to our baptismal vows. These public vows witness to something, just as the married, by their wedding vows, witness to the faithful love of Jesus for his people. Those in religious life witness to the counsels as signs of the kingdom already in our midst.

The counsel of Poverty has nothing to do with destitution. Destitution is not a sign of the Kingdom. But a non-consumerist stance in daily life is. The vow of Poverty means we live simply so that others can simply live. We live open to the needs of others making a claim on us. Now this witness is not just for us. It’s for the entire Church…indeed for the whole culture that is home to us. The mutual care we daily extend to one another, the sharing of material goods, the goal of reducing waste, and recycling what we can, is a value catching on gradually across the globe.

 What is unique to us as publicly witnessing to this value is its focus. We have one non-negotiable: we cling to the Divine Mystery that has captured our hearts. This is why everything else can be negotiated. This focus makes us quite free. There is only one thing that we cling to. When we clarify that focus for ourselves, then we can sort through those boxes…we can ask honestly whether our living space is uplifting and beautiful or merely cluttered…we can ask whether we really need something or whether we simply want it. This counsel, if it is truly operative in our daily living, gives us the clarity to discern wider community decisions. What challenges ahead keep us focused, and what is becoming a distraction?

We’ve been around for 800 years…but we are just beginning.

 

 

Pioneering...?

Pioneering in 2017...?

In a recent article on religious life sent to us by the Executive Team, the word “pioneer” is used several times. It brought back an image that was used after Vatican II to describe what was happening in the Church as a result of the Council. From being quite “settled” as a result of colonization, writers were calling us to become “pioneers,” a “Church in the World.” So we roused ourselves from our security and “got on the road.” We began to go to public universities. We started talking to folks in other faith traditions. Dominicans founded Network in Washington, D.C., and the term “political ministry” became part of our vocabulary. Women’s Dominican communities took this pioneering call very seriously. 

We are entering a new year. It is 2017. What might the term “pioneer” mean for us now, 52 years from the close of the council? In a time in our history when religious life as we have known it is not receiving candidates? Where are we to “go?” What is being asked of us as we continue “on the road?” What are today’s frontiers, those fringe areas of our culture calling to us?

Pioneering folks have to be ready to leave a familiar place to go to a new one. They gather what is precious to them and set out. They use whatever transportation is available. They pass through unknown territory. In the past they would now and then circle the wagons, build a fire, share food, and tell stories. They may not have known what their destination was, but they trusted they would know it when they got there. They were ready to “be” a new way in a new place, and it would be all right, because they had one another.

Being itinerant has always been part of being Dominican. We go out from our prayer to be truth-seekers and truth-tellers. Our personal prayer is fed by the fact that we gather, hear and share the bread of the Word. Then we go out to bring that good Word to wherever it is needed. Are today’s “frontiers” reaching out to people society would just as soon overlook? Those who are spiritually lost? Those whose lives have lost meaning? Those burdened with shame and guilt? Those belittled and voiceless? Those who don’t know who to believe? Those despairing over the election? We are committed to truth. What can we bring them? We are compelled to justice. How can we prevent it from being trampled?  It’s 2017. A new time, a new situation. Time once again for us to decide how to go pioneering.