Take Counsels

You may have heard of a Catholic thing called the “Evangelical Counsels.” They are called “evangelical” because they are rooted in Jesus’ teachings as found in the Holy Gospels (ευ', "good" + αγγελίον, "message"). They are called “counsels” as opposed to “commands,” because Our Lord didn’t make them mandatory; but one might say that, for the person who seeks holiness, they are as optional as a life preserver on a stormy sea. 

They are three in number: Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. Together they form three prongs of a single plug that connects us to, and keeps us grounded in, holiness--likeness to Jesus Christ. You might recognize them as the vows that men or women take to align themselves with a religious community.

The Scripture readings of last, this, and next week wonderfully illustrate this threefold way of life. Last week’s words on the Creator’s intention for marriage (sexual complementarity, fidelity, permanence, exclusivity, and openness to new life) concern Gospel Chastity; This week’s exhortations against dependence on wealth and other possessions deal with Poverty; and next week’s story of James and John in their search for status speaks to Obedience, our need to "render an account" to another person throughout our lives.

Again, the Church has called these “counsels” because Jesus presented them as paths to perfection, to become the clearest channel of divine mercy. To be perfect, however, is to be steadfast in striving toward their realization in our particular lives. In a sense, one can strive toward evangelical poverty no matter how big your bank account or home, or if you have neither. Evangelical chastity is possible for married or unmarried persons. A company’s CEO can seek evangelical obedience as readily as its janitor can.

The key is to place our individual skills and ills at the Lord’s service. Skills and ills, because God can use both for His glory and for another’s benefit. We cannot cling to anything we have as if we made it happen and it would go away if we loosened our grip. Our treasures, our plans, our institutions—whatever occupies our minds most of all–we must continually offer to God with full appreciation for it, and with a sense of its preciousness and fragility, as if He would take it away the moment we offered it. It’s not that we don’t want it, and it’s not that God will necessarily take it; but when God Himself reserves the place of priority, all else falls into place for His sake.

Just Another, Unintended, Vocations Homily

There was a significant number of young people at my second Mass yesterday morning. It turns out that several of them had attended a parishioner's wedding the day before. Hearing and reading these readings for the third time in less than 24 hours, I set aside my notes and this is what more or less came out. As I continue to reconstruct that homily, the more it is becoming a paraphrase and even something considerably different. Ah, well.

I was happy to see this church full when I arrived at the altar, especially noting the young adults who are here. I can't help but suspect that, somewhere in the assembly, there is at least one vocation to the priesthood or consecrated life.

I often wonder what keeps that from happening: the desire for worldly success, or for grandchildren, or possibly the fear of such a commitment? Here's Solomon at the threshold of ruling over Israel, dumbfounded. "All these people, all this responsibility! How am I going to do this?"

The answer: he's not. Here as always, credit is due to God "whose power at work within us can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine" (Eph 3:20), if we but ask.

Earlier in Hebrew history, Moses became overwhelmed by the prospect of liberating his people from Egyptian slavery to the point of refusing outright. Later in the saga, he became so fed up with the people's wilderness whining that, eventually, he pleaded for support; and this came in the form of seventy elders.

To accomplish the task at hand, we must rely on the Lord and on others--the two sources of assistance are not incompatible.

"Those he called, he also justified" (Rom 8:30b). God dares not wait for us to become worthy or acceptable in order to entrust us with our life's tasks. Rather, He justifies us--sets us straight--and this is not a "once-and-done" action on God's part. It can't be, only because we so often knock ourselves out of alignment by sin.

The priests I've known from my earliest years did not give me the impression that the priesthood would be an impossible calling for me. That's no insult to them; if anything it's a testament to how effortlessly, though imperfectly, they celebrated the Sacraments, proclaimed the Gospel, and gave people care and direction; and all because of God's power at work in them--and all because of the personal gifts they placed at the service of God and people.

This area traditionally was known for the production of many religious vocations. In bygone days there were many more children in general; that change is worth a homily of its own! But we can't rest on our laurels; we can't base our reputation on yesterday's vocations. Yes, Jesus promised that He'd be with the Church until the end of days; but there needs to be serious, prayerful consideration of this calling right now.

Working persons are the basis for "Social Security"; they are the living guarantee that the nation and her citizens will go on. So, too, we need faithful, passionate Catholics who invest in the Church's physical and spiritual flourishing.

I am in fact convinced that some of you are called to total and immediate service of the Church, in much the same way that a man forsakes all other women for the knowledge and choice of this particular woman. We take inspiration from Our Lord's comparison of the Kingdom to a treasure that is worth the sale of all our possessions. Is it worth it? You bet it is!

Reading "The Wreck," Stanzas 19-23

19             Sister, a sister calling	145
A master, her master and mine!—
And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine	150
Ears, and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.
20             She was first of a five and came
Of a coifèd sisterhood.
(O Deutschland, double a desperate name!	155
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,
Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:
From life’s dawn it is drawn down,
Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)	160
21             Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their birth,
Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;	165
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.
22             Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ.	170
Mark, the mark is of man’s make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,
Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—
Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token	175
For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.
23             Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
Drawn to the Life that died;
With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his
Lovescape crucified	180
And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters
And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,
Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances. + + + + + Hopkins considers the nun a "sister" to him by virtue of their common religious consecration.  They share a divine Master, as well.  Amid the continued brutal assault of the waters, the nun remains steadfast in the consecration of her spiritual vision.  If it helps the reader, in line 149, mentally insert the word "through" or "amid" such that the sense of the line conveys: "but she through that weather sees one thing, one."  Fetch: as a noun, it means a "trick" or "stratagem," even an "interest" or "attraction" (see 2c of the linked definition).  There are nautical meanings, too, suggesting appropriate wordplay: "holding a course," "the distance traveled by waves with no obstruction."  With respect to her relationship with her Redeemer, this nun has received a nihil obstat.  Her pleas pierce the tempestuous atmosphere, such that God and man alike can hear them. There were five nuns aboard the ship, and her designation as "first" likely derives from her role as superior of the community.  She emerges, moreover, as the moral leader of the pack by her heaven-piercing cries. For most of the 19th stanza Hopkins meditates on the significance of "Deutschland."  It is the name of both the foundering vessel and the country where its final voyage began.  St. Gertrude the Great and Martin Luther were born there (although Gert's Catholic Encyclopedia article says otherwise).  The evidence of their lives' outcomes--obedience and revolt, respectively--is enough for Hopkins to drastically polarize these two figures, setting up a sort of dualism or rivalry that traces all the way back to the primordial fraternal fracas. The nuns and other Catholic exiles on the Deutschland are German.  The Falk Laws were responsible for the Rhine refusal.  The Thames torrents were the proximate cause of their death.  Yet Hopkins suggests a higher wisdom at work: the "Orion of light," the Trinitarian constellation that somehow catalyzed the whole event.  More than a mere cluster of stars, God is Personal--has "palms" that lifted these nuns from their sanctuary (chancel) and held them so as to express reverence for their self-offering.  By no means their first self-offering (that was their profession of vows--or rather, it extends to their baptism), God estimated it as their best, precisely as it happened amid the tempest. The number five is multivalent: Five nuns boarded the Deutschland; five wounds grace the Crucified Body of Christ.  The wounds were dealt by all sinners (CCC 598), not merely by the Roman soldiers or those whose clamors led Our Lord to the slaughterhouse.  By the same token, all sinners are invited to return Him their own precious offering.  What else can we render to the Lord that is purely our own, except our sin?  And yet it is this very offering that the Lamb takes unto Himself, by becoming our sin (2 Cor 5:21). The Crucified left His five-fold mark on the worthy Father-Deacon Francis of Assisi, whose company these sisters joined.  Drawing near to Francis who drew near to Him, Jesus branded him with the stigmata (Greek plural of stigma, seal).  These five holy nuns, bonded by their consecration, are now united in their death.  We need not posit a masochistic God who delights in the bleak death of the nuns and their fifty-odd counterparts on the ship (or, for that matter, any tragedy or inconvenience); rather He delights in the way they "capitalize" upon the fact, by suffering well--offering it for His glory.  Such a manner of dying bespeaks their manner of living: habitually (pardon the pun) disposed to the radiance of Christ, whenever and however it appears among men. The single-mindedness of the nun appeals to me in my lukewarmness.  "Blessed are the pure of heart," Jesus proclaims upon the mountaintop.  To maintain an integral focus is essential to discipleship and, a fortiori, to priesthood.  The saints among us preserve this focus, to the degree that they are "seared" with the reflection of the Love-beam returning to them from the mirror.  Indeed all baptized persons enjoy the "indelible mark" of Grace.  As we grow in awareness of this unfathomable blessing, we will allow the dross of us to drip away so that the Pure Sacrifice remains.