Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open. The sword is taken away and we do not know it: we are off: "one to his farm and another to his merchandise." Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric razors filling radios with static. "Wisdom," cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend. -Thomas Merton
It’s a chilly Friday morning and the flurries flaking down on the National Shrine Christmas wreaths, the Sedes Sapiente statue, my own uncovered head lead me to reflect on the last three years. Michigan and 4th, place of my discernment, setting of my first encounter with living in the institutional church!
My spiritual director, my friends, even the parking attendant mystic I speak to on my way to class seem to be stretched thin these short December days. Maybe they sense my unrest. Maybe they don’t rest themselves. Maybe they understand without being asked that they can’t answer my question, the one that led me here to seminary in the first place. God. Man. Why?
“Mysss—teery,” says Fr. Regis, emphasizing his point over and over in my spirituality class. “To be baptized is to invite martyrdom, to be plunged into the paschal mysss—teery.” Regis is a brilliant man. It’s because he asks the right questions, and though he has opinions, he doesn’t pretend to have the answers.
Fr. Jerry, my old, dead spiritual director, resting in the middle of Georgetown’s campus once told me that to be a priest was to make your life a sacrifice to God, and to facilitate Christ presence in the lives of others. If this is true, the object of the spiritual life is to continually accept the reality that you are to be as gift given to the world through the Church.
If this is the case, it doesn’t seem to be enough. While we are renewed and full of joy one day, we are old and worn out the next. We become like last year’s Christmas gifts: used up, broken, lying in the trash heap, diminished by the terror of living.
But God invites us to renewal, to live the present, to forget our worries and cares. Consider the lilies in the field. If God cares thus for them, will he not care for you? We are promised a light yoke and an easy burden. Are these choices or realities?
As I sojourn on in formation it seems more and more seminary is something to be endured. Give the right answers on the tests, present the right face to the community, attend the right events for the diocese. Every item in its box, every box in its place sealed covered and properly stored to be examined if authority deems it fit at a later date. It is organized and neat, and they are organized and neat, walking around in their dainty white collars acting holy. The greatest sin of all might be that I am perceived as one of them.
If the institutional Church is the condemned and the people of God are the woman then I am Peter in the courtyard, denying the truth over and over, shouting louder than the cock can crow. I am a free thinker, my mind is mine, and I refuse to conform to another man’s rules. To the unthinking clerics I say, I am with you, but I am not one of you. I will seek the paradise that is open, lasting and free for the taking.
