Prayer Against Depression

On this feast of a most admirable man converted by reading of the saints before him, I would like to share with you one of his lesser-known prayers that I find very beautiful:

O Christ Jesus
When all is darkness

And we feel our weakness and helplessness,

Give us the sense of Your Presence,

Your Love and Your Strength.

Help us to have perfect trust

In Your protecting love

And strengthening power,

So that nothing may frighten or worry us,

For, living close to You,

We shall see Your Hand, Your Purpose,

Your Will through all things.

By Saint Ignatius of Loyola

May any who struggle with difficulties or challenges find in this prayer, and in the intercession of its author, new hope and strength.  He was a warrior of incomparable ability in the service of God and I pray that his example may inspire you to dedicate yourselves to that same life of sacrifice however our Lord may call you.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam! For the greater glory of God!

Fool for Christ

"Imagine if you were in love with goodness itself—what wacky things you would do."

This quote resurfaced and I have no recollection of who spoke it or where I heard it.  That matters little enough, though.  It is the thought contained in the quotation and not the speaker to which I wish to draw your attention.

I will digress for a moment first, however.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to go on a spontaneous adventure with a couple of friends.  Having decided upon hiking in the forested park in the middle of the city, we had no expectations of unusual adventure; considering our limited time, it seemed reasonable to enjoy a tamer sort of adventure.  After a brief stop at another friend's house and a dishtowel prophecy—"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson—we continued on to the trailhead.

As we started hiking up the hill, we soon found ourselves scrambling up a ravine with a few pools and trickles of water left within it.  The trail lost its façade of officiality and turned into no more than a deer path.

We might have turned back to find the actual trailhead, but instead we continued on, scrambling over fallen trees and crawling through brush and ferns, following the rocky bed of the ravine in what seemed like a tropical adventure.  The faint trail grew fainter, twisting back and forth across the ravine, sometimes disappearing entirely.

In retrospect, it would have made much more sense to find the trail proper and likely we would not choose that path again knowing what it held.  Yet that makes us all the more grateful for the experience.

You can extrapolate from this story to the adventure of life.  So often we choose to follow the well-beaten trail.  We give in to the pressure of society or the expectations of our friends—or what we imagine them to be—and find ourselves trudging on doggedly, clamping our jaws in the face of the monotony that drags us down.

Let us return now to the quotation with which I began:

"Imagine if you were in love with goodness itself—what wacky things you would do."

It speaks to the heart of what it means to be a fool for Christ.  When you fall so deeply in love with Him—when you learn to trust Him so entirely—you no longer care so much for the security the world offers.  You learn to leap out in faith, knowing that He will catch you.  You embrace every cross and every trial because you know that behind it lies the Providence of the One who loves you more than you love yourself.

Go my friends and be fools for Christ!

Faith is Easy When You Don't Need It

FAITH IS EASY WHEN YOU DON'T NEED IT

I passed this sign as I biked to Mass this morning.  It seemed particularly relevant in light of my recent experience.  Also its message is uncomfortably true.

When we see the winding paths of our lives wending into a straight course toward the heavens, we do not need faith, for we can see and recognize that God is at work.  We need faith in the darkness when we seem to have lost the path.

Yet sometimes in that darkness faith does not seem enough.  We can have faith certainly—indeed we must have faith—but we must also know how to act.

For example, I recently held auditions for a play to be performed in honor of the feastday of Saint Philomena.  I had been praying that Saint Philomena would bring the actors necessary and trusting that if she wanted it to happen she would indeed bring them.  So as I prepared to audition the fifteen or so people I needed along with my stage manager and designer there to support me, I found my expected cast reduced in the face of only one auditionee.

How would faith have me respond?  It seemed entirely unreasonable to have faith that the rest of the cast would miraculously appear.  Why would God make happen in extraordinary ways what He had chosen not to bring to fruition in the ordinary offered way?

Yet would faith have me turn back?  Certainly faith must be tested and tried and not give up when it meets the very first obstacle, no matter how great an obstacle it may seem.

Often through our lives we face this dilemma: faith gives no answer.  God's will seems muddied beneath our own efforts and desires.  We do not know whether to go on or to turn back.  Is it a roadblock that means we should take the detour or is it only a decoy put there by the enemy to make us lose hope?

So we stumble on in faith as best we can, step by step....

Life is a Storm

"Life is a storm, my young friend.  You will bask in the sunlight one moment,

be shattered on the rocks the next.  What makes you a man

is what you do when that storm comes."

~Edmond Dantés

This quotation comes from the protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  It illustrates beautifully the tossing waves of our lives in this world and the peaks and valleys of our emotional experience.  Even more than, that, however, it points to our responsibility to respond to the storm.

Often we try to extend the sunlight as long as we can.  We seek to avoid at all cost begin shattered on the rocks.  Yet we cannot maintain that control.

Sooner or later the sun will be hidden by the dark storm clouds blown by heavy winds, threatening to swamp us and break our ship apart upon the rocks.  We take in sail and strain at the helm, but the current rushes us onward.

As Edmond Dantés said, what matters is not that these things happen, but what we do when we must face them.  Will we throw ourselves overboard to perish in despair?  Will we curse and blame those about us for our peril?  Will we jump into the lifeboat and row away with all our might in an attempt to save ourselves, leaving the rest to their fate?  Or will we entrust ourselves to the One who has power over the storm?

And Jesus saith to them: Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?
Then rising up He commanded the winds, and the sea,
and there came a great calm. But the men wondered, saying:
What manner of man is this, for the winds and the sea obey Him?

Matthew 8:27

Is Jesus Following You?

There is an image of Christ that has been drawing my attention in various ways as I travel about.  One painting in particular—the one above—started the trend.

Since then, I have seen that painting and at least two others with a similar presentation.  In all of them, Jesus is holding out His heart and staring right at me, offering His heart with no conditions save that of acceptance.

In one of the images, He extends His hand, as if to say: "Here is My heart.  Will you give Me yours?"

On this Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, that is exactly what He is asking us, just as He does every day of our lives.  He longs so much for our love that He has given Himself to the last drop.  Now He asks the same of us.

Will you give Him your heart?

Powerlessness

So many times we question God.  Either we want to know why He allowed something to happen or why He did not do something in response to our prayers.

We ask why because we feel helpless.  We feel powerless.

Of course we do not like this feeling, so we try to gain control in any way we can, scrambling in search of something that will give us security.  We build up facades, collect things and friends, and so on, all to counter that loss of control.

Still, in the end, we cannot seize control, but only a deceptive shadow of it.  Only God has the power to rule the universe.

Ultimately our condition is one of powerlessness.  We may experience it when we feel our own lives spinning out of control.  Or we may see a friend struggling and desire to lift him up out of that darkness, to win by our own prayers his release.  Yet God does not grant light.  He allows us and our friends to suffer.

For both of us, that is an experience of complete helplessness.  It may even be the proverbial rock bottom.

God brings us there that He may win our surrender.  It is often only when we cannot trust even ourselves that we learn to trust Him.  If we have nowhere else to turn, we will go to Him.  So He remains silent until we are brought to His feet and know that He alone is King.

Coinciding of Celebrations

Today's coinciding of the secular celebration of Fathers' Day and the solemnity of Corpus Christi leads me to reflect upon the beautiful gift of spiritual fatherhood—of the priesthood in particular.  I am so grateful for all the wonderful priests who have touched by life.

These are the men who have reflected not only the light of Christ, but the image of the Father.  They have helped me to understand in a deeper way how much our Father in heaven loves us, how much He provides for us in giving us priests to stand before us with the very human love we desire, to meet us face to face as He cannot do until we finish our time of purification and come before Him at last.

Our own fathers reflect that same image of the Father.  For they too are priests in a sense—by their baptismal priesthood—and carry out their vocation of fatherhood in the domestic church of the family.

I think today also of those who have never had an example of a good father and whose ideas of God the Father have therefore been skewed.  I pray that they will find the Father they seek.

May our Lord bless abundantly all those who reflect His image of fatherhood!  I carry in my heart today in a special way all the priests who have touched my life, particularly as I go to approach the altar and to receive the Body and Blood of Christ on this blessed solemnity.  I pray that all priests may remain faithful to the voice of the Father within them that He may continue to speak through them and to transform them ever more into His face upon this earth.