Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity and Advent

Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity invites us to take on an attitude that goes with these days of Advent.  So much happens during these days that can rob us of our peace.  We can quickly become irritated or anxious about the smallest things or about other things we cannot do anything about.   When this happens, prayer can sometimes become very difficult or very easy to forget.  It is with regard to the busy pace of daily life that Blessed Elisabeth encouraged her sister Marguerite, a married woman with two young children, to try to remain prayerful and recollected.  Elisabeth proposes the attitude of the Virgin Mary "during the months that elapsed between the Annunciation and the Nativity" as "the model for interior souls":

In what peace, in what recollection Mary lent herself to everythign she did!  How even the most trivial things were divinized by her!  For thorugh it all the Virgin remained the adorer of the gift of God!  This did not prevent her from spending herself outwardly when it was a matter of charity; the Gospel tells us that Mary went in haste to the mountains of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  Never did the ineffable vision that she contemplated within herself in any way diminish her outward charity  Heaven in Faith #40, translator Sr. Aletheia Kane, O.C.D., Washington, D.C.: ICS (1984), 110-111.  

To adore the gift of God and to serve those He entrusts to us with our whole strength and effort, these are not contradictory endeavors -- one feeds the other.  Prayer is not an escape from responsibility - it is a pathway to deeper faithfulness.  Mary's hidden witness hurrying through dangerous hill country to help her cousin with an unexpected pregnancy shows us that those who keep an awareness of the Lord alive in their hearts discover much deeper graces when tough circumsances challenge prayer.  If we think about the greetings exchanged between Elizabeth and Mary, these secret graces that transform the most trivial everyday moments into moments that give the world God.  This is what Advent is supposed to be for all of us.

Mary, the humble virgin of Nazareth is a model and a sign of this Advent attitude:  God has chosen ordinary people to live lives pregnant with a deep awareness of the depths of His Mercy to divinize the mundane, the earthy, the annoying, the irritating, the smallest things - all of this, so that the world might know, in this present moment, that ineffable love by which alone it might be saved.

For those who have been following the podcasts on Blessed Elisabeth's Heaven in Faith produced by Kris McGregor of Discerning Hearts, the final reflections on the last day of this retreat can be found here:

Day 10 First Prayer
Day 10 Final Prayer 

Father Ralph Drendel, SJ - R.I.P.

On December 2, God called home a good and faithful servant, and today, at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, we had a special mass for Father Ralph J. Drendel, S.J.   The celebrant and homilist for the liturgy was, Father Jim Thermos, one of the priests whom he formed in the spiritual life when Father Drendel worked as our spiritual director from 2000 to 2008.  It was a beautiful moment of thanksgiving for the life of a man who dedicated himself to the service of the Lord.

A lion in the pulpit but a lamb in the confessional, Father Drendel introduced many to the boundless mercy of God throughout his nearly sixty years of priesthood.  He lived to see the Catholic faith become more part of the cultural mainstream through the fifties and he lived to see our culture completely lose itself in the 60s.   By the time I met him, he has cultivated a profound confidence in the power of the Cross to confront not on the evils that one must deal with in own heart, but also the social dangers that threaten the Church and humanity.  He was of the opinion that ongoing and deep conversion to Christ was the medicine both the Church and the soul most needs -- and it is to give this medicine that he dedicated himself in his priestly ministry.

He was a man of peace and helped many seminarians overcome some of the insecurities that often haunt men preparing for the priesthood.  He could be challenging in the pulpit, especially when it came to half-heartedness, complaining, and any failure to teach the truth to the faithful.  If he demanded a lot, it was because he believed in what God was doing in the new generation of young men who felt called to the priesthood - the John Paul II generation, perhaps because like John Paul II he saw them as living signs of hope.   In fact, he saw our seminary as a place for the renewal of the priesthood, a renewal that could only happen through a disciplined life rooted in love for the truth and devotion to the Lord.

On the other hand, in the confessional, he always had great compassion and conveyed great confidence in God's mercy. He even saw the penances that he assigned as acts of love he would share with the penitent, and I suspect he carried the greater part of that effort, more than his penitents might suspect. He was constantly praying for souls who had poured out their hearts to him, and constantly taking up the most menial chores, especially the one's everyone else wanted to avoid.

The old Jesuit also gave lots of retreats and offered spiritual direction to many religious and lay faithful. He was especially popular with various lay Carmelite groups. To this end, I helped give a retreat with him. I provided the conferences and he, Mass and Confession. He was so encouraging to work with and so humble about how the Lord was working through him.  Whatever he did, whether in a homily or in private conversation, what he offered was heart-piercing. You could tell by the tears his penitents shed and the silence after his preaching. I think this is because everything he did in his priestly ministry only magnified the love of God - and he had a way of making people confident in that love no matter what they were struggling with.

In 2008, the rapid progress of Parkinson's compelled him to return to a Jesuit retirement community in Los Gatos. Years before, he had been Novice Master at the same location when it served as the Jesuit Novitiate. I looked in on him on occasion in the last few years. It was difficult to see the lion weighed down by an earthly tent that was falling apart.  His gentle eyes could betray a fierceness even as they hid behind a gentle smile.  I had the sense that something in him was straining for what lies ahead even as he humbly accepted the debilitating effects of his disease and age.

The hope that lived in his heart was no longer commensurate with what this earthly existence could sustain. And so, the Lord brought him through the veil where an even greater love awaits us.  Father Thermos pointed out that Father Drendel would end every homily with the same three words, and so I end this reflection about this holy priest, good religious, and prayerful man with the same prayer for him with which he would bless all of us, "God love you."

Contemplation and Joyful Expectation

Advent is a beautiful season for mental or contemplative prayer.  The season is about keeping vigil with joyful expectation for the coming of the Lord.  This is the same movement of heart that one takes into contemplative prayer.

Even in purely natural contemplation, the contemplative gaze which is not yet prayer, we gaze on what we see with our senses or else the light of reason in expectant wonder.   Something has drawn us -- even if we are not sure what it is that discloses its beauty.   All that is, including being itself, evokes wonder and mystery: a dazzling sunrise kissing snow covered peaks, a night sky showered in the brilliance of starlight, the wild crash of surf against a rugged shore, the parched silence of hot sand in a isolated desert, the lonely eyes of a hungry beggar on a cold busy street.  Our hearts are drawn into the splendor of the truth, even in its most earthy manifestations, because the truth enriches the spirit that has the courage and patience to embrace it -- even if the truth also challenges the heart to something more.

While this purely natural gaze helps many cope with life, in that grace-filled contemplation that becomes prayer, natural wonders - like angelic messengers - can also open hearts to divine splendor.  For the Word of the Father spoken into Creation echos in and through all that is.  God's justice, mercy, goodness and grandeur resound all the time, and contemplative prayer is that tender openness of heart that catches these hidden harmonies.   He, the Word, calls to our hearts through both the most sublime and most gritty things, and this even in what might seem to be the most banal or even the most painful of moments.   His call has the form of an invitation and moves us to search for Him -- and this especially when fierce trials threaten those we love.

Sweet Truth is manifest in every joy that delights our being -- for every real joy promises something more: in the same moment elation grabs us, we also know a kind of holy sorrow.  And just when such sorrow seems most crushing, the most beautiful cause for joy discloses its secret to us in some new way.  And so a cycle of deeper sorrows and deeper joys draws us beyond ourselves and into an ineffable mystery of divine mercy.  The contemplative lives exposed to this blessed paradox of joy and sorrow.

The attentive soul realizes we live still deprived of that for which we were summoned into existence.  No matter how free we believe we are of hardship or trial, the absence of what ought to be haunts us.  Without the truth about who we are and the great purpose entrusted to our care, we live but a dying life, a shadow of what we were meant to be.  This is a truth that we must suffer if we are to be free and live life to the full.  The contemplative suffers this truth in the deepest center of the soul.

What is it we were created to live, to know and to love?  The fullness of beatitude God has fashioned us to know contains yet to be discovered joys.  These discoveries can be anticipated in this life by prayer, if only momentarily, even to the point of jubilation.   But no matter the extent or intensity of such passing graces, they are given only as a pledge of future glory, of something more that this life is not big enough to hold.  We can trust what is pledged nonetheless because the One who makes this promise knows the joy of the Father and knows what He yearns for us to know: a contemplative looks into the most difficult misery with these same resurrected eyes of hope.

The Bread of Life has chosen to manifest Himself not as much in the mansions of our achievements and the strongholds of our riches but instead in the manger of our poverty, our inadequacies, our voids, our failures.  This is the ground wheat and crushed grapes the Lamb of God has come to transform and offer to the Father.   In our weakness His power is made perfect -- so the Visible Image of the Invisible God comes as a helpless baby full of trust and abandonment to rest deep in our lowliness.   So we contemplate Him more not in what satisfies but in what does not satisfy, not in what comforts but in what does not comfort, not in what we understand but in what we do not understand.   And in this darkness, the magi followed their star -- and so do we when in this we joyfully watch for Christ.

St. Nicholas

I wanted to write something edifying about this wonderful beard pulling saint who fought for the poor and for the truth of our faith - but Christopher Warner, a former student and a long time family friend beat me to it -- Read about the real St. Nicholas and the traditions honoring him by clicking here!  And Happy Feast Day to the wonderful readers of this blog - I hope your Advent is filled with hope and joy, and that peace that only God can give.

Sober Vigilance and Unconquered Hope

Times of tribulation require sober vigilance.  Hardships drive many to various forms of insobriety.  For others, these trials excite all kinds of anxiety.  If we are not watchful, we can easily find ourselves insnared in all kinds of evil.

Our faith in Christ demands that we not allow ourselves to be overcome by evil but rather we must find ways to overcome evil with good.  If we allow ourselves to be dissipated by either anxiety or insobriety, we will not have the interior fortitude we need to escape the spiritual traps that are set for us.   How are we to preserve our strength and not lose heart in the face of great evil?  Jesus exhorts us to pray if we are to find the strength to stand firm with Him.

Unceasing prayer is the secret of a vigilant heart.   In the beginning, this kind of prayer does not exempt us from moments of anger or distress.   What it does do is permeate these movements of heart with hidden riches of hope.   Likewise, unceasing prayer does not decrease exterior trials - if anything, souls that attempt to pray without ceasing must face more trials than do others.   I think this is because God is mercifully at work in all the hardships in the world and when a soul is joined to God by prayer, the Lord constantly draws that soul into His work, allowing the prayerful heart to participate in his plan of love - which is to overcome evil with good.

The soul that keeps its eyes fixed on Christ crucified through all of this acquires the secret of not being overcome and learns how to not lose heart.   No matter the evil - the sudden discovery of cancer, the unexpected death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a horrible accident, a failed marriage, a betrayal of a friend, a public humiliation, a false accusation, the mockery of the oppressive - a soul that constantly hopes in the love of God might suffer a moment of dismay but never remains trapped in disappointment.  Instead, the vigilant are continually caught up in surprised wonder over the astounding ways the Lord shows forth His faithfulness.