A Pilgrimage to Eternity

 

 A Pilgrimage to Eternity

By Timothy Egan

 

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

–St. Augustine

 

“I was told I could find the saint’s relics at the comparatively small Catholic church of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The sacred scraps are behind glass about the altar in the Martyr’s Chapel. One object is a piece of cloth from his clerical vestment. The other is a bone chip, wrapped in jewels, though there is no explanation of what part of Becket’s frame this came from. The skeletal nugget could be anyone’s, and the cloth could be a fraud as well. In this dark and lonely chapel in Canterbury’s old town, you have to accept on faith that the two holiest items did indeed belong to Thomas Becket. I sit and take in what aura there is, the years and hopes imbued in these average looking objects. I think of all the people with tumorous bellies or sightless eyes, pleading, Sadly, I am not feeling anything. But then, I didn't ask for anything. Not just yet…” Tim Egan APTE p. 18

 

We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey. We look to Scriptures, reason and tradition to help us on our way. Whoever you are, we offer you a space to draw nearer to God and with us. –Sign in St. Martins, Canterbury. APTE p. 19

 

To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must allow himself to be amazed. In our relationship with God, in prayer, do we allow ourselves to be amazed or do we think that prayer is talking to God like a parrot? Do we let ourselves be surprised? Because the encounter with the Lord is always a living encounter, not an encounter at a museum.

–Pope Francis

 

The greatest danger is not that we aim too high and miss it, but that we aim too low and reach it.

 –Michelangelo

 

Hope guides me.

–Petrarch

 

“I believe in the Resurrection, and I owe this sentiment to the Via Francigena. I’d been moving in this direction for a month or so, even as I grew more and more disgusted with the powerful custodian of this life-affirming event. The evidence from the first century, the many people who shower they had seen the risen Christ and chose death rather than recanting, is a compelling argument–for who would die for a fraud? But what cinched it for me was something the young Lutheran minister in Geneva, Andy Willis, said about the message of Easter from Jesus, some that echoes Jewish sentiment on what happens after death: “Nothing can keep my love in a grave.” Tim Egan APTE p. 319.

 

Years ago when the desire to walk the Camino to Santiago was but a tiny seed, I came upon Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity at a bookstore. I had noticed it was of the Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome.  its subtitle is what caught my attention: from Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. I didn’t purchase the book (my work schedule made it hard to read recreationally) but I was left with the desire to read it.

 

As I leave for Rome in less than two weeks, where I plan to walk the Via Francigena from Siena to Rome, I recently read the book. It is an engaging and intelligent adventure as Egan recounts his physical and interior pilgrimage on the VF, as he calls the Via Francigena. As a “lapsed” Irish Catholic, he slowly reveals his reasons for the pilgrimage: his desire to reassess the faith in which he was raised and its relevance for a contemporary man. As he walks, he jostles the evidence for the opposing positions: how the Catholic church has brought value and benefits to the world versus the scandals and inhumanities it has committed in the name of Christ. He acknowledges the great achievements of the Church (the salvaging of knowledge and culture by the monasteries at the fall of Rome, the hospices for travelers, the fomentation of culture), while countering them with the failings of the Church (the Crusades, the Catholic-Protestant religious wars, the African slave trade, the Inquisition, the burning of heretics, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda). In the cases of the great horrors, he lingers, as we also want to do, on where God was in the face of such suffering and evil. As a journalist educated in Jesuit schools, he understands the free will of humans, but it provides little comfort in the great horrors of the 20th century and how God could allow this to happen. Egan also calls to mind the Church’s reluctance to accept the advances of science, as when Galileo postulates contradicted the Church’s understanding of how the universe functioned. 

 

Egan also shares his family’s challenges with the Church as when his mother was asked by her parish priest and local bishop not to have a hysterectomy even though her doctor recommended it for her health. He also recounts his family's horrific experience with a pedophile priest and the lack of accountability by Church authorities to keep children and minors safe, and the lasting trauma it left in the lives of victims. 

 

As Egan travels, he fleshes out the lives of saints–Thomas Beckett, Augustine, Francis + Clare, Ignatius, and many other saints who are remembered along the VF–and their acts of love and altruism and generosity. He points out the popular piety and faith of many present Christians to continue to bring their pleas to God and his holy ones. Egan is not without his petition–his sister-in-law has cancer and his wife is moving heaven and earth to find a cure. But ultimately, Egan’s primary question is around the role of faith in God.

 

In the end he affirms his faith. He cites how early Christians were witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection and were willing to die for their faith. Certainly, there was something there. He also appreciates how present Christians live out the Gospel in helping their fellow man in contradiction to the prevailing culture and attitude, e.g., those to feed and shelter migrants who are presently unwanted in Western countries. He has a fond appreciation of the late Pope Francis, whose openness to migrants, scientists, agnostics, atheists, queer folk and those on the margins stand in stark contrast to the present science-skeptism and anti-immigration of the present US administration. Ultimately, he recognizes the need to forgive the many sins those in the Church have committed to his family and those through the ages. 

 

I appreciate the book as it describes well those Catholics whose parents were devout Catholics, who had an unwavering trust and faith in the Church and its teachings. While the following generation of Catholics desired to keep the faith of their forebears they were more educated, and more skeptical of the Church’s pronouncements and less defensive in regards to the failings and scandals of the Church. In some cases, these Catholics became more selective of the Church's teaching, “cafeteria Catholics” is a common derisive term. But I would venture to say that these Catholics are using their conscience (reason, current knowledge, and the rationale for the teaching) to come to discern whether a tenet should be followed. We are called to choose that which brings us life and leave what does not.  

 

As a life-long Catholic who is grateful for the faith given me by my parents, I have sought ot articulate and live the Gospel in a manner and in a language comprehensible to the contemporary person. One can see the Pascal Mystery in the cycle of life, from the clear example of the metamorphosis of the butterfly to all organisms who live out their life cycle giving life to the next generation of organisms. Life after death is present in the many memorial services of individuals whose love and actions continue to live out in the hearts and minds of those who remain. But ultimately, the belief in the Resurrection, perhaps the most difficult and the most central part of the Christian creed, is a mystery, a tenet based on faith. Fr. James Martin S.J. has stated, “One of the best explanations is that the Jesuits explain the Church to the world and the world to the Church.” I would say that explaining the Catholic beliefs to the contemporary person is an ongoing personal vocation; it starts in the interior reflection with God and is evangelized in word and action.

The Long Loneliness

(c) Wikipedia Commons

(c) Bob Fitch Photography Archive / Department of Special Collections / Stanford University Libraries

 

The Long Loneliness

​​“People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.” TLL p. 84

 

Every strike was an unjust strike according to the newspapers, and every strike ended in failure to achieve the demands of the workers according to the same papers. The reader never took into account the slow and steady gains, wrung reluctantly from the employer by virtue of everyone of these strikes, the slow advance made to appear in the wrong when on the picket line. This is the most I had suffered in the cause of labor.  TLL p 100

 

When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us, even while we wrote about it. TLL p 115

 

…of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction. This I had been thought to think and this I still think to a great extent. ‘Too often,’ Cardinal Mundelein said, ‘has the Church lined up on the wrong side.’ TLL p 149

 

… I wanted to be poor, chaste and obedient. I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ. I loved, in other words, and like all women in love, I wanted to be untied to my love. TLL p 149

 

“The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order—these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” they seemed to say in respect to the social order. There was plenty of charity but too little justice. And yet the priests were the dispensers of the Sacraments, bringing Christ to men, all enabling us to put on Christ and to achieve more nearly in the world a sense of peace and unity. “The worst enemies would be those of our own household,” Christ had warned us.”

But I know nothing of the social teaching o the church at that time. I had never heard of the encyclicals. I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built for the pennies of servant girls, day nurseries, hos of the Good Shepherd, home for the ages but at the same time, I felt that I did not set its face against a social order with made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and work, and what was to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so might a sum total of Catholic institutions. TLL p. 150

 

Many times we have been asked why we spoke of Catholic workers, and so named the paper. Of course, it was not only because we who were in charge of the work, who edited the paper, were all Catholics but also because we wished to influence Catholics. They were our own, and we reacted sharply to the accusation that when it came to private morality the Catholics shone but when it came to social and political morality, they were often conscienceless. Also, Catholics were the poor, and most of them had little ambition or hope of bettering their condition to the extent of achieving ownership of home or business, or further education for their children. They accepted things as they were with humility and looked for a better life to come. . .. TLL 210

 

Peter’s plan was that groups should borrow from mutual-aid credit unions in the parish to start what he first liked to call agronomic universities, where the worker could become a scholar and the scholar a worker. Or he wanted people to give the land and money. He always spoke of giving. Those who had land and tools should give. Those who had capital should give. Those who had labor should give that. “Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.

“To make love,” Peter liked to study phrases, and to use them as though they were newly discovered. (Honest to God was the title of one of his series of essays).

The strangeness of the phrase “to make love” strikes me now and reminds me of that aphorism of St. John of the Cross, “Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.” I’ve thought of it and followed it many times these eighteen years of community life. TLL p 224

“Eat what you raise and raise what you eat” meant that you ate the things indigenous to the New York climate, such as tomatoes, not oranges; honey, not sugar, etc. We used to tease him because he drank coffee, chocolate or tea, but “he ate what was set before him.” TLL p 227

 

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” TLL p 286

 

While I was in Puerto Vallarta, my friend Richard was reading The Long Loneliness, the autobiography of the Catholic social activist, Dorothy Day. I have always been intrigued by her–a devout Catholic who sought not just to serve the poor but address the social structures can made them poor. Even as a youth, she had yearned to be with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. This led her to be associated with leftist activists, communists and labor leaders, supporting their efforts to address the root causes of want. She worked as a journalist, writing about labor strikes and labor conditions; she protested with suffragettes in their cause to give women the right to vote, and supported pacifists during World War, not a popular stand. As a young woman, she had many tragic relationships and had an abortion. She finally found happiness with Forster Batterman, her common law husband, with whom she had a daughter, Tamar. But ultimately, she listened to her interior callings of the divine, and ultimately converted to Catholicism, which caused Batterman, who was an atheist, to break with her and her daughter. While Dorothy grieved the loss of the great love of her life, she believed that this was the price for following Christ.

 

A few years after becoming a Catholic, she was introduced to Peter Maurin, a peasant scholar, who aligned with Dorothy’s inclinations to the poor, to live simply and put into effect the Beatitudes. Peter, who at one time had been a Salesian brother, taught her of Catholic culture and understandings: the Desert Fathers, the Catholic Church’s social teachings and theological understandings of the common good. Peter, who at one time had been a Salesian brother, sought to create a society where it is easy for people to be good. Together with other like-minded folks, they sought out to live out the radical teachings of Jesus, e.g. loving one’s enemy, turning the other cheek and living out Matthew 25’s commands. Peter and Dorothy founded The Catholic Worker, a newspaper that highlighted their lived Gospel values, papal encyclical teachings, contemporary labor disputes, and pacifist views. Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality, run by single and married lay persons living simply in community, were established in many cities to feed the hungry and provide shelter for the unhoused. Some houses were established in rural areas for workers and families to live in community and till the land to raise crops and livestock.

 

I appreciated reading Dorothy’s first-hand account of her life. She strikes me as refreshingly human and real. She longed to have a man by her side that she loved and loved in return. “It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.” And like all of us, she made mistakes and sinned. “Aside from drug addiction, I committed all the sins young people commit.” She struck me as a contemporary woman feeling empathy for the marginalized and disenfranchised even as a young person. She tells of protesting and participating in a hunger strike for women’s right to vote. She spoke of her admiration of communist and atheist colleagues who sacrificed lives of comfort for a greater cause, for the sake of others.

 

As a Christian, Dorothy seemed practical, not theoretical. Her words were rooted in the Gospel and her actions in seeing Christ in fellow human beings, and  loving them. Once a woman came to her door asking if Dorothy had visions and ecstasies, to which she responded curtly, “I have visions of unpaid bills.” Like St. Francis of Assisi, she presented a radical return to simplicity in how she lived her life: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Clothe the naked.

 

She speaks embracing poverty and being depending on the providence of God. She refers to the miracle of the fishes and loaves, taking the little that you have and sharing it and watching it multiply. If you have $100, give it to the poor and watch it come back two-fold, five-fold, even ten-fold. And she speaks of community, as the early Christians lived or as a lay community of monks, living out the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience while serving the poor. She has no illusions that working with the poor or living in community are easy. The poor are often smelly and ungrateful. She cites many incidents where living in community fell apart, but the desire to love continues to be borne out in with others sharing a common purpose. 

 

As someone who is both drawn to and repulsed by those who are unhoused, Dorothy Day is a local saint. I recognize how dirtiness and bodily odors repel me but I admire their vulnerability and how they live with so little, wholly dependent on the kindness and generosity of others. And in this time of horrendous ICE raids on the undocumented in this country and the demonization of refugees, I look for her guidance. 

 

*****

“Aside from drug addiction, I committed all the sins young people commit today.”

 

“It is people who are important, not the masses.”

 

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”

 

“I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.”

 

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”

 

“I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.”

 

“I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.”

“It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.”

“I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.”

“Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness.”

Habemus Papam: Pope Leo XIV

While I was at work, I got a text that a new pope had been chosen. I was searching to see who it was but I, and the whole world, was waiting for the announcement. The new pope was Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the second pope from the Americas; he was born in the US and a naturalized citizen of Peru. He was from the Order of St. Augustine; he has been bishop of Chiclayo in Peru for 20 years and was elected prior general of the Order from 2001-2013. Most recently he had been appointed to head the Discastery of Bishops, the office responsible for selecting priests to be bishops. Pope Leo XIV.

 

I was actually surprised and not a little worried that the pope was from the United States, as the hierarchy of the US has become increasingly conservative, often aligning itself with the Republican Party, for its support for abortion restrictions, anti-gay restrictions, and other cultural issues. I have become disappointed with the US Catholic Conference of Bishops for its tepid response to President Trump’s treatment of immigrants, refugees and blind eye to corruption. The word on the street is that the cardinals would elect a pope who would temper the progressive initiatives of Pope Francis who championed dialog and people on the margins.

 

We have to see how Pope Leo guides his flock. There are indications that are hopeful. While he comes from the US, which is often parochial and self-referential in outlook, Pope Leo seems to have a global outlook; he has been a missionary, who speaks five languages (English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese), and has served the universal Church.

 

He has chosen the name Leo, in reference to Pope Leo XIII, who initiated the Church’s social teaching with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which defended the rights of workers to fair wages, safe working conditions and rights to form trade unions, while defending the property rights and free enterprise. This began the church’s advocacy for the social conditions that are necessary for the full development of the human being. Sin was not only a personal failing; sin was also evident in the structures that oppressed and destroyed human lives, and as such the Church had a role in decrying such structures. 

 

But ultimately, it is how Pope Leo XIV comes to bear Christ in our modern times. What does Jesus have to say to us in these times of war in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan? What does the Gospel have to say to us in this time of political upheaval, closing borders and stark economic inequality? What we need now is a shepherd that speaks the gospel with clarity in these dark and confusing times. We need a shepherd that smells like sheep because he is among the sheep and knows the signs of the times. We need a shepherd that goes to the margins and is dirty, and smelling, and exhausted because he is not afraid of being with his flock. We need to hear words of faith, love and hope. In his first homily, Pope Leo XIV speaks of advocating for the poor and migrants, of aligning himself with ordinary people and not the rich and powerful. 

 

This photo of the Vicar of Christ gives me hope.

 

via James Martin SJ

 

Pope Francis 1936-2025

(c) Getty Images

It was exciting to that on March 13, 2013, Jorge Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, named after St. Francis of Assisi. He was the first Latin American pope, the first pope of the Global South, the first Jesuit pope, and the first non-European pope in over 1200 years.

 

But nothing in his past, indicated that he would be revolutionary pope. As a Jesuit superior he governed authoritarian hand that he was sent to Germany to reflect. He was also criticized for not defending his fellow Jesuit priests who had been disappeared. But when I read his interview by Antonio Spodaro, I was taken by a pope who was open and in touch with contemporary life. I found a prelate who was not brining the past ecclesial beliefs and practice to the modern world but was adapting Jesus gospel to the present time. He saw holiness in the lived out lives of ordinary people: the father who works, the mother who raises children, the sick, the unemployed, the homeless who struggle for a space in society. The article moved me to conduct a reflection event at St. Agnes.

 

Additionally, Pope Francis made outreach to LGBTQ folk. When asked about gay priests, Pope Francis responded, If a person is gay and seeks out the Lord and is willing, who am I to judge that person?” He added that before all else, LGBTQ folks are persons who must be treated with wholeness and dignity. God loves all his creature and they are destined to receive God’s love as God first attribute is mercy. He did not change the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, which is defined as “intrinsically disordered” in and sexual activity outside of marriage is grave sin. But there was a recognition that gay people need relationships and families, even if it didn’t live up to the norms of the Church, gay people were to be welcomed in the Church. Todos, todos, todos.

 

I am moved to tears how he taught by his actions. He gave up living in the apostolic palace to live in Santa Marta, the papal apartments. He didn’t ride in a a fancy car but chose to ford escort. His first overseas trip was to Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean where, many African migrants go arrive to get to Europe. While riding in a pope mobile, he stopped to embrace Vinicio Riva, a man disfigured by a non-infectious genetic disease. He consoled the a boy who had doubts if father had died as an atheist was in heaven. The pope told Emanuele, if his father was able to make his children courageous and strong, he was a good man. He continued the practice of washing the feet of women prisoners for Holy Thursday. His gestures spoke volumes.

 

Te estañaremos Papa Francisco. Rest in Peace

 

Quotes:

 

“To change the world, we must be good to those who cannot repay us.” October 2014

 

“The promise (of trickle-down economics) was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefiting the poor. What happens instead is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger, but nothing ever comes out for the poor.” 2014

 

“It's hypocrisy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of my help.” October 2016

 

“Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love … The death and resurrection of Jesus is the heart of our faith and the basis of our hope.” 2025

 

 “Let me say this once more: God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy … Time and time again he bears us on his shoulders. No one can strip us of the dignity bestowed upon us by this boundless and unfailing love.”  2013

 

“Without this joy, faith shrinks into an oppressive and dreary thing; the saints are not ‘sourpusses’ but men and women with joyful hearts, open to hope … Blessed Carlo Acutis is likewise a model of Christian joy for teenagers and young people. And the evangelical, and paradoxical, ‘perfect joy’ of St. Francis of Assisi continues to impress us.” 2022

 

“You who live by always giving, and think that you need nothing, do you realize that you are poor yourself? Do you realize that you are very poor and that you need what they can give you? Do you let yourself be evangelized by the poor, by the sick, by those you assist?”  2015

 

“We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” 2015

 

“The Lord entrusts to the Church’s motherly love every person forced to leave their homeland in search of a better future … In this regard, I wish to reaffirm that ‘our shared response may be articulated by four verbs: to welcome, to protect, to promote, and to integrate.’” 2016

 

“There are always problems and arguments in married life. It is normal for husband and wife to argue and to raise their voices; they squabble, and even plates go flying! So do not be afraid of this when it happens. May I give you a piece of advice: Never end the day without making peace.” 2016

 

‘When the votes reached two-thirds, there was the usual applause, because the pope had been elected. And he gave me a hug and a kiss and said: ‘Don’t forget the poor!’ And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being counted, till the end. Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. … How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!’ 2013

 

‘Who am I to judge?” — Francis, responding to a question about a purportedly gay priest, in a comment that set the tone for a papacy more welcoming to LGBTQ+ Catholics, July 28, 2013.

 

‘In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, ‘I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy.’ I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.’” 2016

 

It’s an honor if the Americans attack me.” Sept. 4, 2019.

 

I am sorry. I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.” 2022

 

Being homosexual is not a crime.”— Jan. 24, 2023.

 

“We must not let ourselves be robbed of hope!

 

“Hope is life, it is living, it is giving meaning to the journey…”

 

“Faith makes us open to the quiet presence of God at every moment of our lives, in every person and in every situation.”

 

“Because faith, which is always God's gift and always to be asked for, must be nurtured by us.”

 

“God never tires of forgiving. It is we who tire of asking for forgiveness.”

 

“Situations can change; people can change. Be the first to seek to bring good.”

 

“Let us get up, therefore, and set out as pilgrims of hope… we too can bring news of joy.”

 

“A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.”

 

“This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.”

 

"The most serious sins are those that are disguised with a more 'angelic' appearance. No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, which is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual – this is hypocrisy.” 2024

 

'I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.I am one who is looked upon by the Lord. I always felt my motto, Miserando atque Eligendo [By Having Mercy and by Choosing Him], was very true for me.” 2013

Jesus calms the Storm at the Sea

 ³⁵On that day, as evening drew on, he said to them, “Let us cross to the other side.” ³⁶ Leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat just as he was. And other boats were with him. ³⁷ A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. ³⁸ Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” ³⁹ He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm. ⁴⁰ Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” ⁴¹ They were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

 

Jesus calms the Storm at the Sea (Mk 4: 35-41) is a short passage in the gospel of Mark where the miracle Jesus performs addresses his followers’ fear. It is interesting that Jesus initiates the voyage to “cross to the other side” of the lake. And the disciples took him “just as he was.”  The narrative relates that as they crossed, a violent squall arose and the waves were breaking over into the boat; it was filling up. Incredulously, the story continues that Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion! If I were asleep on a boat, I certainly would be awake by the time the waves and the water were crashing onto the vessel. (I am told that Jesus asleep on the stern demonstrated his trust in God.) His friends and disciples make their desperate plea to the sleeping Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” to which he wakes. Then Jesus rebukes the wind and the sea: “Quiet!” “Be still!” Still wind. Great calm. To the disciples Jesus says: Why are you afraid? Do you not yet have faith?” Disciples: “What the …? Who is this dude, that even the wind and sea obey?”

It has been my prayer during these uncertain times.

The Pilgrim's Story

(c) https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-voices/st-ignatius-loyola/

July 22, 2024

The Pilgrim's Story.

Reprinted from https://stignatiussf.org/news/the-pilgrims-story 

by Fr. John Whitney, S.J.

 

Up to the age of twenty-six, he was a man given over to the pleasures of the world. Out of a vain, vehement desire to win renown, he took special delight in the career of a soldier.

-The Autobiography of St. Ignatius

Nearly every year since I first entered the Society of Jesus, I spend part of the month of July re-reading the Autobiography of St. Ignatius, in preparation for his feast day on 31 July. It is, for me, one of the foundational books of my Jesuit life; the story that reminds me, both in its form and substance, of what my vocation to the Jesuits entails, while challenging me to avoid settling for anything less. At times touched with self-deprecating humor and alive with a mature humility, this story of his years of pilgrimage and discovery—of the ways the young Iñigo was gradually and lovingly led to surrender all he was to God—consoles me in the twists and turns of my own journey. I can appreciate the false starts and the failed attempts of the Pilgrim whom Ignatius describes. And though, as a young man, I was stunned (like many modern readers) by the excessive acts of mortification and penance in which Iñigo engages, yet I recognize today the desire of youth, and I am moved by the journey he makes from mere external penances to the deeper mortification that comes from mission. The older I get—and I am older now than Ignatius was when he dictated the text—the more I see the pattern in the story, a pattern that incarnates the Spiritual Exercises in the life of the Pilgrim, and that ends just as the Pilgrim becomes a part of something greater than himself, just as the Lord takes and receives all he is and puts it at the service of the Church. For Ignatius, the Exercises as prayed or studied was only the beginning: it was the Exercises as lived which mattered—that journey from narcissism to humility, from vainglory to surrender, from the illusional happiness of self-determination to the real joy of love and the giving of oneself to others.

Ignatius never intended to write an autobiography, believing that he was merely the agent of God’s grace and that Jesus was the true founder of the Society. Yet, urged on by Nadal and other Companions—and after asking them to offer three Masses each in prayer about the matter—he reluctantly agreed, and in 1551—ten years after the founding of the Society of Jesus—Ignatius agreed to narrate his story, choosing Luis Gonçalves da Camara as his scribe. Though it would take him another five years to finish the relatively short narrative (his full-time job of running the young Society often kept him from the work) he declares it complete at the establishment of the Society and the beginning of its ministries in Rome. His last words on the subject to da Camara—“Master Nadal can tell the rest” (99)—reveal his sense that, with the start of the Jesuits, his personal story, i.e., the story of the Pilgrim, is completed. He was now part of the Company of Jesus, a worker in the presence of Christ.

Yet, if the end of the Autobiography seems brusque—as it did to da Camara—the story that precedes it demonstrates why Ignatius might end it so; for his entire life, as he reflected upon it, was a journey out of self-centeredness and into Christ. Thus, he begins as Iñigo de Loyola, the youngest son of a minor noble in the Basque region of Spain in 1491, who exemplifies the personal heroism romanticized at the end of the feudal age. As a young man, Iñigo thought he would become one of the great heroes he loved to read about in the literature of his day: fighting for the just cause and winning the struggle for his beloved. Chivalric and charming, he was both brave in battle (as the Autobiography tells) and courtly in his approach to women. Indeed, even after he was critically wounded in the battle of Pamplona and began his path of conversion, the change was largely superficial. Laying his arms at the foot of the Black Madonna of Montserrat and standing vigil there, he changed the object of his affection, but not his understanding. Though he now saw himself doing great things for God instead of the Emperor, and serving Mary instead of a noble lady, Iñigo de Loyola still believed that to be someone great he must first become the medieval idea of an individual hero—replacing Lancelot or Amadis of Gaul, with St. Dominic or St. Francis. However, God saw that what was needed for Iñigo was not to achieve the personal glory idealized in his heroes, but for him to surrender his ideals and become fully himself. Rather than doing great things for God, Iñigo needed to allow God to do great things through him. Though he seeks to be honest in the Autobiography, Ignatius is often betrayed in this desire by subsequent generations of followers, who want to make him, instead of Christ, the center of his story. Thus, when they tell the story of Montserrat, many in the “cult of Ignatius” miss the gentle humor which undercuts the nobility of this lonesome knight, or fail to mention the episode with which the story ends. As Ignatius tells it, the Pilgrim, who had traded his clothes for those of a pauper, travels a short distance from Montserrat when he is overtaken by a man who asks him about the trade, since the poor man, appearing in the fine clothes, had been arrested shortly after Iñigo’s departure. So it is that Iñigo, seeking to pursue his own sense of noble poverty and imitate the great saints of whom he had read, becomes a source of punishment rather than grace. He has not yet surrendered to God, not yet turned to the Jesus who loves him, but remains caught in his ideas of God—ideas that have more to do with him than with God.

Throughout the rest of the text, the Pilgrim slowly learns what true conversion entails, and comes to recognize that God’s love for him precedes and overwhelms any love he can earn for himself. God loves him because God loves him, not because he deserves that love; and all Iñigo’s efforts to deserve it or control it, to comprehend it or direct it—all the attempts to make God go where he thinks God should go—end in unhappiness and despair. Whether in Manresa, where Iñigo considers suicide because he cannot live the life of Dominic or Francis; or in the Holy Land, where his desire to work among the infidels is thwarted by the authorities who don’t need another religious zealot in their midst, Ignatius portrays his younger self as learning by experience the hard lessons of humility and the deep grace of surrender. Even in the foundational moment of La Storta, where, in a small roadside chapel on his way to Rome, Ignatius is blessed by a vision of the Trinity, God demonstrates to Ignatius that grace will be different than he imagines. For though he had been praying to Mary for years to “Place me with your Son,” it is not Mary, but the Father who comes to him, placing the Pilgrim in the presence of Jesus as he carries his cross and tells Ignatius, “I want you to be in my Company.” This small but significant transition, reminds Ignatius that not even his best desires determine God’s actions; rather, it is always about God’s will, given to him in love and communion. “Like a master with a schoolboy,” as he says of his experience at Manresa, Ignatius is led by God into moments that seem at times like failure or a revelation of his own smallness, but are filled with the grace by which he becomes Christ’s Companion, united in the joy of surrender.

Though the stories of Manresa and La Storta are wonderful examples of God’s action in the life of Ignatius, one very small story, rarely recalled from the Autobiography, has become a favorite of mine in recent years—in part because it lacks the grandness of the others. It is told late in the text, when Ignatius is on his way to Bologna in preparation for ordination. He leaves Genoa and begins climbing along a mountain path when he somehow manages to get lost. Walking on, he finds the road growing more and more narrow, and he becomes nervous looking down the steep cliff towards a raging river. As it grows dark, the little path virtually disappears, and Ignatius, in terror, ends up crawling along the mountainside, the roar of the water rising from below. Somehow, though, he makes it through, and comes to the outskirts of Bologna after what the Autobiography calls, “the greatest of all physical efforts he ever made” (91). At this moment of heroic victory, he makes ready to enter the city; but as he is crossing a small wooden bridge, he slips and falls into the muddy, muck-filled waters—giving, as he says, “a good laugh” to all around.

Terrified, muddy, and wet are hardly the images of the great saint that we expect; yet of all the stories in the Autobiography, I think I like this one best because it speaks to my experience of being both a human being and a Christian. We live in an age filled with terrors and muck, with narcissism and unwarranted cruelty. And there are days we will be terrified or humiliated, when we will be made objects of derision for the path we follow. But, as Ignatius came to know, God is still God, and the love of God—even when it seems hidden—is at work in us for the salvation of the world.