As I sit here in my room at the seminary on this Holy Saturday, I am moved to look back on this year’s Lent and evaluate. How far did I come in my spiritual journey? How much progress did I make in letting go of my favorite vices? Am I ready to go to walk the via dolorosa with Jesus, to lie with him in the tomb, all the while having a solid hope in the resurrection??? As I ponder these questions, it occurs to me that I’m going to need another Lent… many, many more Lents, actually….
Now this is not to say that my Lent has been fruitless, by no means could I say that honestly. But as our “surprise” snow storm out here at Mundelein can teach us—conveniently orchestrated on the first full day of spring—the momentum of the past does not dissipate quickly or easily. Just like Old Man Winter can still sneak in those last-ditch efforts to cover us in fluffy water, so too our habits and the attachment to ways of living life can ensnare us time and again despite our best efforts.
I have grown this Lent in my devotion to daily prayer and keeping the Liturgy of the Hours. Yet, I am still so easily distracted or sidetracked in my prayer and I don’t really treat my one-on-one time with God as carefully as I treat that time with my friends. While I didn’t give up sweets entirely this Lent, I have gotten a lot better at telling myself “no” to this, that, or the other culinary delight and have managed to lose about five pounds. Nevertheless, walking through a store filled with Easter candy only leads me to think, “Hmm… this really is a time of celebration… and those little Peeps chicks are only out once a year… along with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, Cadbury Cream Eggs, malted eggs, jelly beans… oh, and how often to we get to eat chocolate bunny rabbits??? Like… never!” (To be perfectly honest with you, I know that I’d eat the grass out of the Easter basket if I could!) But on a more serious note, I have come to realize just how central the cross of Jesus Christ really is to the Christian’s spiritual journey. No matter what our particular vocation, be it to the married life, to Holy Orders or religious life, or to the generous single life, we’re all headed for the cross, folks. There’s no getting out of it.
Nevertheless, I’ve come to see how easily I’m tempted into forgetting that. For all of you out there who have doubts about the feasibility of actually living a celibate life, I’ll admit that there are nights when it weighs upon my heart that I will never know what it is to fall asleep and wake up next to the same person day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. But lest I get caught up in dreaming about just how green the grass on the other side of the fence could be, I think about the married couples I know. As in love with one another as they may be, their lives are not cakewalks by any stretch of the imagination. The young couples I know struggle to avoid bankruptcy while starting their families. Each pregnancy brings with it a whole host of questions about the future. How will we afford (insert your favorite absolutely necessary thing here) and our heat for the next ten years? What if the baby isn’t healthy and we’re faced with raising a special-needs child? How will we handle it? Older couples aren’t out of the woods either, they still deal with keeping their marriages alive and vibrant while living out all the decisions they made (for better or for worse) in their youth. Sure, Husband A hates his job, but it’s the only thing right now that’s putting food on the table and keeping the kids in a decent school. Wife B put her career on hold to raise the kids and now that they’re off to college she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Go back to school? Start a new job? Compete in the work-force with a host of cutting-edge-twenty-somethings? We won’t even go near the fact that the divorce rate among American Catholics is now the same as for the rest of the population at 50%. No… no, marriage is not an easier life than mine, especially not if one really wants to do it the Christian way.
What about the generous single life? There is a part of me, small but very vocal, that would like to be rich… no, not just rich… fabulously wealthy. Even as a seminarian, people open up to me about their various needs. They ask me to pray for them, and I do because I know it’s important and that it helps. Yet, I can’t seem to shake the suspicion that $5,000 would do a lot more to help the single mother with two children who needs a new furnace in the dead of winter than… say… a rosary. Along the same lines, I can’t get rid of the crazy, half-baked idea that $1,000,000 would help the Blessed Sarnelli Community in Philadelphia accomplish its building goals and get its residential volunteer component up and running a whole lot faster than my intercessions at Morning Prayer. On the other hand, though, I have yet to meet a single person who can say that their lifestyle embodies their “Plan A.” The younger single people I know just haven’t yet met the right person, or they are discerning a call to priesthood or religious life. They certainly aren’t planning on being perpetual bachelors or bachelorettes. The older single people I know are most commonly widowed or divorced; either way, they are single as a result of some very painful event. There are, of course, exceptions to this. I do know a small handful of older single people who have devoted themselves to careers, have achieved great financial success, and now are free to give the support to charitable causes that they (the causes) truly need. Yet, they do seem to be removed from the work itself at least one step. They are free to support the work but not really free to do it themselves. Surprise, surprise… it’s a trade-off. Nonetheless, it is a removal that I think I would find exceedingly frustrated. As comfortable with working behind the scenes as I am, I still want to be hands-on.
So, the process of elimination that is my discernment continues. I have so far to go, so much growth must happen before I truly have a single-hearted and single-minded love for my vocation to the ordained priesthood. At times, I do wonder whether it will ever come. I stumbled across something in the scriptures a few weeks ago, though, that is giving me a great deal of solace.
Near the end of Lent this year, we heard St. John’s account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It had never struck me before that there is a waiting period between the time of death and resurrection. For Lazarus, it is four days, and for our Lord, three days. Why? Within the context of the Gospel storyline, Lazarus’ downtime seems to have a very practical reason for being: Jesus wants to make sure that it’s clear Lazarus is really dead so that God’s glory can be more clearly revealed when he is raised. Jesus’ resurrection on the third day, of course, has significant mystical significance, jiving with Old Testament prophecies and so forth. But certainly, it is within God’s power to prevent death and to restore life at any time. Presumably, if God had desired it, he could have raised Jesus after three hours or three minutes post mortem. Yet, even Jesus lay in the tomb for three days, and depending on how one renders the Greek into English, one can even understand that Lazarus began rotting in his tomb before Jesus’ arrival.
It’s clear that before new life can come, old life must pass away. We are used to seeing this around us every day. Spiritually, it is apparent that before we can lead grace-filled lives, we have to die to sin. What has only become clear to me now is death, in a very sterile, clinical sense, is not all that it takes for new life to blossom. No, death followed by decay, that is, decomposition, must precede resurrection, a recomposition. In very tangible ways, we can see that death, in all its forms, does not immediately destroy all semblances of the life that was present. A corpse remains warm and soft for quite some time before rigor mortis sets in. The body itself, which has been composed throughout a lifetime of growth, persists for years, decades, even centuries. The spirit is no different. Talk to a “former” smoker. Most will tell you that even after some ten or fifteen years since having a cigarette, they will still get cravings. Talk to an AA group. Getting the alcohol out of one’s system is relatively easy compared to relearning how to face the everyday situations of life sober. As the saying goes, ‘Old habits die hard.’
As frustrating as it can be waiting to see the progress in my life, I can see now that it is reasonable to expect to need a great deal of patience waiting for new life. This will come, as will all God's graces, when God is good and ready to give it to me. But in the meantime, I will come to know death, in many ways, from the inside out while waiting for it.
Posts
