Word for the Day: Confidence

When I was in my late teens, I was obsessed with self-confidence. I’m not sure I thought deeply about what self-confidence was. I only knew that I didn’t have it.

It seemed logical that to attain self-confidence I needed to bolster my self. This reasoning—which was less reasoning than a generalized assumption about how the world worked—directed me toward methods of self-actualization, a term from Abraham Maslow, the so-called father of humanistic psychology. In my case, Maslow led to George Gurdjieff and his work on oneself. 

Exactly! I thought, encountering the Gurdjieff Work. That’s just what I need to do! Work on myself!

In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about confidence again, but in a new way consistent not with Maslow or Gurdjieff, but with my Catholic Christian faith.

Word for the Day: New

We live suspended between old and new, past and future. Today’s readings point this out in a vivid way at a time in my life when I am shifting my focus forward.

In Hebrews (5:1–10) comes the high priest and his act of propitiation, a word I looked up when reading The Scarlet Letter about thirty-five years ago. No surprise there. The Scarlet Letter is all about Puritan guilt, the weight of the past, and our essential brokenness as human beings. Guilty for all this, we propitiate our God. We mollify Him, we make it up to Him, we beg His forgiveness. We propitiate.

The Gospel reading (Mark 2:18–22) shifts the focus forward. We are in the presence of the Bridegroom, so we do not fast, a kind of propitiation. We have new cloth, and we don’t sew it onto old cloth. We have new wine and need a new wineskin.

I often get value out of the short reflection offered in Living with Christ, which I use for my daily readings. Today’s reflection is by Patricia Livingston. I found it useful:

Word for the Day: Baptist

The word Baptist doesn’t occur in today’s readings, like many of the words that catch my attention in the early morning, but it is implied. We read that John [the Baptist] was “arrested” and that when Jesus heard this he “withdrew to Galilee.”

During Advent and Christmastide we hear a lot about John the Baptist, alias the Precursor, the cousin of Jesus of Nazareth. What else was he? What else was there between them—the last Prophet and the Messiah he foretold? Cousins they were, yes, but also friends, probably. If so, what a friendship!

I had a rare opportunity to doze an extra hour or so this morning, as I am visiting my elderly mother whose daily habits sometimes can be dozed around. Before dozing I read the Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) entry on John the Baptist. Such a resource makes me happy to be a Catholic, willing to listen to tradition instead of leaning strictly on the spare story lines of the Gospel.

If we pay attention to tradition, we can learn or can at least contemplate:

Word for the Day: Behold

Using Google to look up a word and its usage on line, you can quickly come to a graph like the one above for the transitive verb behold.

Behold means “to see or observe a thing or person, especially an impressive or remarkable one.” It has an intensity to it. From Old English the prefix bi- means to do so thoroughly, which I take to mean with one’s whole being. Like the injunction to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, et cetera.

Behold is the first word of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel passage (John 1:29–34). It is the thing John tells us to do as Christ approaches. Is it possibly the thing we must do if we are to receive Christ fully into our consciousness, make Him a part of our lives, and “be like him,” as the reading from John’s first epistle (2:29–3:6) suggests we can?

Word for the Day: Saints

“Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you,” writes John in today’s reading. The word I heard from the beginning of my pilgrim walk in the Catholic Church was saints. 

People are surprised by this. I did not hear the voice of God. I did not hear the call of Christ. I was not attracted by the Holy Eucharist or the sacrament of confession.

I heard about the saints. I was moved by the witness of certain men and women who had lived by the teachings of the Catholic Church since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. I was impressed by their example. Eventually, when another system of thought disintegrated within me, I leapt to join the saints. Thus the phrase in the creed that moves me most is the communion of saints. 

Joining the saints was a leap. I didn’t know much about the Church when I entered RCIA and started my six-month basic training in Catholicism. I only knew that I had always wanted God in my life, that the path I had been following led me nowhere, and that these holy folks seemed to understand where to walk. It was as simple as that.

I think of this today, as the New Year 2015 opens before me with its gift of possibility, because my daily mass reader reminds me that today we honor Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen. Who, you say? That’s what I said too. Never heard of them.

Word for the Day: Walk

As I’ve already told you, I identify with the Apostle John, though originally for all the wrong reasons. When your guru thinks he’s Jesus Christ and hints that you are his “beloved,” it may be time to check the exits. That’s what happened to me in the early days with Gulliver.

I don’t know who’s crazier: me for sticking with Gulliver after that, or you for sticking with “Witness” after everything I’ve told you.

Today, forty-three years after my “you are John” moment and nearly seven after being received into the Catholic Church, I have a more authentic love for John. This is partly because I want to be as close as possible to the real Jesus Christ, as the Apostle John was. It’s partly because, like John, I want to write in old age about my love for Jesus in his Church. With this blog and my other writings I continue to try to explain why it made sense for a 57-year-old former Gurdjieffian to convert to the Catholic Church, and why and how that now-63-year-old Catholic is happier today than ever.

That’s how I understand witnessing. You don’t have to understand it that way. This is my blog. As Ronald Reagan said famously, I paid for this microphone.

It touches me that the Church chooses for its post-Nativity liturgy the letters of John. Who better than the boy Apostle (he was surely the youngest) to offer the backbeat during the octave of Christmas?

Word for the Day: John

Today, the Catholic Church honors St. John, son of Zebedee, brother of James (Santiago), a fisherman who followed Christ. John was present at some of the most important moments of Jesus’s life, passion, and resurrection, and like another of my literary heroes, Norman Maclean, John wrote two great books late in life: his Gospel and the Book of Revelation. John gives hope to the unpublished sexagenarian Christian writer.

But that’s not what prompts me to write about John today. Instead, I want to share a brief story from my early years with Gulliver the Guru, a story not included in the excerpts posted above. This story demonstrates two widely divergent truths about Gulliver, which I hope to make clear by the time I’m “done” with my book, if I ever am. These paired truths are, in fact, the big wow of my life.

First truth: Gulliver was a manipulative messiah. (Wait for the story.)

Second truth: In spite of the first truth, and in spite of himself, Gulliver helped lead me to the Catholic Church.

Another way of saying the second truth is that the way, truth, and life offered by Christ in the Catholic Church can be so compelling as to overwhelm any other “spiritual” influences in one’s life. For me to overcome Gulliver was to overcome much. But I do believe I had help. As does anyone who searches sincerely. Knock and—

The story, a short one, comes from my first trip to Europe with Gulliver:

Word for the Day: Onceness

Writing about death, judgment, and hell in his book on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Karl Rahner S.J. says, “Our death is a culmination of the unrepeatable onceness of our personal human existence.”

That single, singular word onceness (in Greek hapax) brought me up short this morning. It snapped many things into focus. One word seemed all at once to distinguish Christianity from other so-called paths and to explain for me the meaning of pilgrimage, as well, as my pilgrimage on foot to Montreal grows near.

Onceness, as a distinctly Christian way of seeing the world, stands squarely, resolutely between the nothingness of the atheist and the everythingness of the Buddhist or Hindu—that Eastern sense blithely embraced by  so many of us Westerners that tells us “God is everywhere,” we are “spirit,” and our lives will somehow “repeat” themselves (get better probably) in this “spiritual” universe, as we turn in a cycle of reincarnation or eternal return or something or other.

This cyclic vision of life is buttressed by Joseph Campbell’s great, flawed work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which we’re all wannabe heroes on a sacred journey that will only bring us home again.

Christians don’t go home again. After death, we go to heaven or we go to hell.

Word for the Day: City

To read the Old Testament prophets is to take the long view. Zephaniah, today’s prophet, lived more than 2,600 years ago. When he says, “Woe to the city,” it’s tempting to think that he is not talking about our city. Zephaniah is talking about seventh-century BC Jerusalem, not Boston or New York, right?

But then you look at what Zephaniah (a/k/a Sophonias) says about his city and you wonder. Has anything changed since the days of King Josais (641–611 BC), when “Z” was shrieking loudly at worshipers of Baal?

The city of Jerusalem is “rebellious” and “polluted” and “tyrannical.” Zephaniah’s city “hears no voice, accepts no correction. In the Lord she has not trusted, to her God she has not drawn near.” That sounds downright familiar.

And we don’t even hear the half of it. Today’s selection from Zephaniah 3 lets the city off the hook by jumping from verse 2 to verses 9–13, with their promise of consolation. Verses 3–8 keep pounding at the city—

Word for the Day: Mercy

My favorite Gospel readings represent God’s mercy: especially the thief on the Cross and what I call the five-o’clock-worker parable, about the vineyard owner who pays all of his employees the same wage, no matter when they show up for work.

Having shown up in this vineyard known as the Catholic Church pretty late in the day myself, this parable gives me great comfort.

So too today’s parable of the one lost sheep, the shepherd who “goes in search of the stray,” and the Father’s “rejoicing” over our being found. It is the image of a merciful God who loves us.

And what a contrast it provides from the other two readings: Isaiah 40, which heralds a God of great power and glory, awesome in his creative majesty; and Psalm 96, in which the Lord “comes with power . . . to rule the earth.”

I think sometimes people get hung up in the image of an overpowering God, a mighty and potentially punishing God. But then sometimes I think one must have had a good father oneself to understand that one God the Father can contain both qualities.

My dad was pretty tough on us as children. As I have written in my memoir, he was a member of the last generation to spank children righteously.

But my dad was also a merciful man. When I strayed for many years from the hearthside and from the church he loved, his gaze was always accepting, always forgiving. And as he became sick in his final months and then as he lay dying and his six children gathered around, each of us saw the true father lying before us.

That father would have “left the ninety-nine in the hills” and walked to the ends of the earth to find me. And so through Dad I have a different understanding of this Gospel passage.

Word for the Day: Desert

Memoir writing and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises have this in common: each helps you see the patterns of your past life.

“A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the Lord!’

Undertaking them together, as I am doing now, has revealed one striking feature of my personal landscape.

It is today’s word: desert, heard in both Isaiah and Mark’s gospel. I walked through a desert from sometime before June 2002 until March 2008.

In June 2002, I officially left the spiritual program I had been following for more than thirty-three years. I had been leaving mentally for “sometime before” that, but in June I turned in my keys, literally and figuratively.

Word for the Day: Spread

There is no more convincing proof of the truth of the Christian message than the spread of the Word like wildfire across the Mediterranean basin in the first centuries AD. It’s undeniable that, as Stephen King repeats ad nauseam in his latest book, “Something happened.”

“But they went out and spread word of him through all that land.”

Something unique in human history happened during and immediately after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Otherwise, why would news of Him have spread as it did, like a pandemic of divine love?

The news spread without violence, except, of course, to the news-bearers. An excess of martyrdom overtook the Christian community during the first three centuries after Christ. This can’t be said of every monotheistic religion, but it can be said of Christianity:

During the era of the Word’s first spread, the swords were all pointed inwards.*

Word for the Day: Rock

Before Alan Freed* and Tina Fey**, the word rock had a common meaning for people of all times, places, and races. Rock wasn’t an archetype in the C. G. Jung–Joseph Campbell sense. It didn’t need a learned book for you to understand what it meant.

Rock was a universal human experience. Or must have been. (In fact, I wasn’t always here.)

On every continent, rock was the thing on which a man or woman could rely, could stand, could be sure, could safely build a home. It still is, although we forget. A Boston builder once told me that he thought “the Big One” (as in earthquake) was more a threat to Boston than to San Francisco.

“People don’t realize,” he said. “Boston is built mostly on fill. If a big earthquake hit, everything would just slop around.”

Word for the Day: Kin

“I will praise you, Lord, among the nations; I will tell of your name to my kin.”

Today’s antiphon contains a disturbing juxtaposition. On the day when the Church honors St. Francis Xavier (pictured) who praised the Lord “among the nations,” we vow to tell of the Lord’s name “to our kin.”

Which feat of evangelization is more difficult?

1) Saying eternal farewell to everyone and everything you know, including your best pal Ignatius, and hopping a rickety wind-driven vessel for a port halfway around the globe, where no one speaks your language or knows your God, and evangelizing them? Francis Xavier (1506–1552) did that. For this feat of faith, the Church honors him as patron of all foreign missions.

Or—

2) Talking about faith with your family, your “kin”?

Six years a convert now, I have lectored before hundreds of strangers and (more difficult) I have taught religious education to a handful of fourth-graders who knew me only as Mr. Bull.

I have walked five hundred miles in Spain on the Camino de Santiago, and talked along the way with people from twenty nations about the religious reasons for my pilgrimage.

I have blogged about my faith and (according to Blogger stats) been read, or at least eyeballed, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as the Americas.

But—

In a large extended family largely unconvinced about the Catholic faith, how good a job have I done “telling of His name to my kin?”

The antiphon, stated in future tense, gives me hope. There is still time.

I will—

Word for the Day: Father

I often think that there is no greater tragedy than a child born with an abusive father. In addition to the physical and psychological damage done to the child, there is another effect of abuse: the difficulty that child will have trusting any other authority figure. Ever.

Which of course includes God, above us all.

Ultimately, this is why the priest abuse scandal was so deadly. If the damage had been limited to the young people directly affected, it would have been horrible enough and forever a crime. But thousands or millions more have been alienated, partly or wholly, by the scandal. It has served to separate them both from the Church and from the Christian God it represents.

In chapter 15 of his brilliant Jesus: A Pilgrimage, James Martin SJ discusses the miracle of the loaves and fishes. One of the messages of this miracle, Martin writes, is that a single act (“loaf of bread”) can multiply and feed thousands, meaning that it can have many unsuspected, untold consequences. The good deed you do today may benefit others elsewhere years from now. You just don’t know.

Likewise a misdeed. Likewise an act of abuse.

Word for the Day: Watch

I love the liturgical year. It’s one of the truly beautiful things about being Catholic: following the lives of Christ and His saints through the seasons.

Here we are on Day 1, the beginning of our year, the first Sunday in Advent, watching and waiting for the birth of Jesus Christ; and in today’s Gospel, Jesus Christ is alive and well, already preaching to us to keep watch for the end of things.

And here I am, trying to get in tune with our Lord and Savior, doing my readings for 7 am mass, and I can’t get a third meaning of watch entirely out of my mind:

Watch the Patriots and Packers at 4:30 EST. But then isn’t that just Catholic life all over?

Word for the Day: Gratitude

What else could the word be? Football? Food? Family?

Gratitude.

According to Jim Manney’s simple, life-changing book A Simple Life-Changing Prayer, St. Ignatius (left) “considered ingratitude to be the deadliest sin.”

Out of all sins and evils, he wrote, “Ingratitude is one of the things most worthy of detestation.” So much so, he continued, that ingratitude is “the cause, beginning, and origin of all evils and sins.”

Back in my lay-it-all-out-there “Why I Am Catholic” days, I would have now given you a list of the 342 things I am grateful for, but I have learned that I can keep it simpler than that, and avoid violating the privacy of friends and loved ones.

So I will simply say Thank you to my God this Thanksgiving day for all His many blessings. These include football, food, and family.

Word for the Day: Prepare

Prepare the list. Prepare the feast. Prepare for Black Friday. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

“You are not to prepare”

’Tis the season of preparation. In Massachusetts today, we are preparing for the first winter storm, snow tires aligned and balanced, shovels poised.

But in today’s Gospel from Luke 21, Jesus tells us not to prepare. What gives? Is He that out of step with the rest of us?

As always, context is everything.

Word for the Day: Scattered

What a strange and glorious set of readings we have for the last Sunday before Advent, the feast with the grandest of titles:

Our Lord Jesus Christ, 

King of the Universe!

It would be easy for me to settle serenely into the assurance of Psalm 23, my favorite and maybe yours. It is so comforting with its verdant pastures and restful waters, my head anointed, my cup a-brimming.

But most of the rest of what we're going to hear at mass today is somewhere between challenging and deeply disturbing.

Word for the Day: Scroll

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the brilliant, childlike, and undeniably hilarious devotional classic that I can’t get out of my head, the pilgrim, Christian, is guided by Scripture.

Like everything else in PP, Scripture is personified by a character, in this case “Evangelist.” Just when Christian needs him most, Evangelist can be counted on to appear to show Christian the way.

Bunyan was embroiled in all sorts of religious currents, counter-currents, and brouhahas in 17th-century England; he was jailed for his religious beliefs and wrote PP mostly in jail; and I don’t know but what he wasn’t probably one of those Protestants who say sola scripture, baby. No need for church tradition to guide me! 

Evangelist is the only guide you need! 

Today’s Catholic mass readings are all about, if not scripture exactly, then the word. In Revelation 10, John is told by an angel to eat a scroll. How, I wonder, does he do that, with the long dowels on either side getting stuck in his throat? John’s nothing but tough, though, so he eats the scroll—“sweet” in his mouth, “sour” in his stomach—like me and Mexican food. It’s a mixed experience.