August 26, 2007

Okay, there are two things on my mind today, my friends. The first is cool and amazing, the second is neither cool nor amazing but one of the worst tragedies, as I see it, in today’s world. Let’s start with the good one.

It really amazes me how intense and rich and deep the life of a seminarian/priest can be. If one can look with spiritual eyes at the depth of the unseen world around us, you can see the hand of the Lord in even the most ordinary of situations. The Lord has really opened my eyes to see grace moving powerfully. I had an experience this past Friday of how incredibly powerful and deep our life can be:

From pretty much the time I woke up (ridiculously early, I might add – I had the 6:30 am Communion service), I felt like I was under some seriously heavy spiritual warfare. I’ve never felt such an incredible distaste for prayer, so many distractions, all kinds of intense temptations. It was very strange – it came out of the blue and really felt like a weight on my shoulders.

I couldn't figure it out for a while. What the heck is all this stuff? Then in my Holy Hour, something struck me – we were having the parish Crab Feast that night!

What’s the connection between spiritual warfare and a crab feast, you ask? I didn’t know either at the time, but I had a glimmer of hope that the Lord was going to use me to minister to someone very intensely at the crab feast. Kind of bizarre, huh? That God would use a crab feast to draw souls closer to Him? Well, after following the Lord for eight years, I’m not surprised any more by the very strange ways in which He acts!

So what happened? Well, the crab feast went off very well. After eating a bunch of crabs and chatting with a very wonderful family, I started playing some sports with some of the school kids. We played a pretty smash-mouth football game (no injuries, luckily!) and then a very, very long soccer game.

After the soccer game, it was about 10:30, and we were all pretty tired. Most of the families went home, so it was a sparse smattering of people cleaning up from the feast. I lay down on the grass, pretty exhausted, staring up at the stars. All of a sudden, a couple of boys who had just finished playing soccer came over and sat down on the grass near me, relaxing from the taxing game. Now, you have to understand, these two boys were twins who were going to be in my fifth-grade class this year (I’m chaplain to the fifth and sixth grades in the school), and I had met them both at Sunday Mass the week before. Both of them struck me as huge troublemakers, with really big attitudes. Maybe I was being judgmental, but with the backwards baseball caps and cocky eyes, I thought that I was a pretty good judge of character. I don’t say this to put them down, because since I met them a week prior, I had prayed for them every day, that they might know the Lord and come to love Him.

So as we lay there in the grass in utter exhaustion, I started talking to these two boys. We got to discussing life and its deep mysteries. The boys started asking me questions about God and about my own faith journey. I was surprised – these boys were genuinely interested in a relationship with the Lord! We started talking about prayer, and they shared their struggles with Confession and with keeping a regular prayer life. We spoke on the importance of getting to Mass on Sunday, and what we thought Heaven would be like. It was really quite surreal – having this deep discussion of faith with two eleven-year-old boys, late at night in the middle of a large field under a sky full of stars. It was one of the most oddly enriching experiences I’ve ever had, and I think that in some small way, the Lord used me to witness to these boys about the love of God.

At about eleven o’clock, we all parted ways, and as I walked back to the rectory, I finally understood what all the spiritual warfare was all about. The Evil One knew that I would be able to be a conduit of God’s grace to those two kids in a profound way that evening, and so he tried to do everything in his power to get me to give up, to fall, to sin.

Really, every day in this vocation is an intense spiritual war. But unlike real war, which is an awful and destructive experience, I’ve never felt so alive than when I know that I’m fighting on the side of the Lord against the powers of darkness. And I have hope and confidence because it’s not me who’s fighting, ultimately, but the Lord Who has already won the battle! If it were all about me trying to be holy and save souls, I would have failed a long time ago. But in Christ, we can do all things!

So I just wanted to express the incredibly awesome depth that every day is. When I worked in the world, I would often ask myself, “What is the meaning of all this? We earn money so that we can spend it so that we can earn it all over again. What vanity!” But in this vocation, I have found that every single day, every single experience has meaning and depth. By uniting and offering every success and failure to the Lord, in some small way I hope to be doing good. This life is so exciting!

The other thing on my mind, not nearly so cheery, is the depressing reality that people don’t seem to think that Sunday Mass is an obligation anymore. This truly grieves me! The Eucharist is the heart of my life – I can no longer go a day without receiving Him in His true presence! And yet so many people see no problem with skipping Sunday Mass if “something more important” comes up.

This, I think, is the test of whether or not a parish is healthy – are the people hungering for the Eucharist? Ultimately, it’s not about the bank account of the parish, or how many programs we run. It’s really about how people hunger for the Lord!

Unfortunately at this parish I have met many people who see no problem with skipping Mass. As I see it, to correct this problem, it will be fruitless to simply point out that it is a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday (though it certainly is), but more than that, we need to awaken the primordial hunger for God that is present within every human soul. I believe with all of my heart that every human being can only be happy in the exchange of love between ourselves and the Lord.

Oh Holy Spirit, open up our hearts to our hunger for Jesus! Let them hunger for You more than for life itself! Lord, increase my hunger for You!