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From Matthew Chapter 16, verses 24:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

This does not mean that we wish pain and punishment upon ourselves, or that we directly seek such things.

I used to think wrongly that the example of Christ is a kind of masochism. I could live my life my way, or I could live it God's way. And my way would be easy and feel good, at least by comparison, while God's way would hurt and be very difficult. It might even make me miserable. So what. I deserve it, right?

I thought God's way meant foregoing all my desires, even those which He gave me that are not sinful. The result was that in trying to decide which path I would choose in life -- ordained priesthood, marriage, whatever -- I could not admit to myself what I really wanted.

Lots of people are afraid to admit to themselves what they really want. I'm convinced a lot of guys out there are afraid to admit that they really do want to be ordained priests. They're afraid to do something so radically different with their lives. Still others are afraid to admit that they really want to get married and have kids. Others are afraid to admit they want to do missionary work, or that they want to write, or be a doctor or a musician or an accountant. The main reason devout religious folks are afraid to admit what they want is because they think -- again, wrongly -- that it is somehow selfish. To admit what I want means I focus on that instead of what God wants for me.

That may be a common error to find amongst Catholics, but that does not mean the error is itself Catholic.

Let me put this very simply. God does not play games. If He wants you to do something in particular with your life, He will place that desire in your heart. It is Satan's chicanery that makes you believe you are selfish to follow it. Admit to yourself what you want, because chances are* you want it because God wills it.

But the key is, once we admit to ourselves what we want in life, and once we start pursuing that good that God wants for us, we have to really pursue it. We can't take a detour from the suffering that we encounter in pursuit of the good because we think God wants us to never encounter any suffering.

Jesus came with a clear mission. He pursued it and it was His joy, and His Father's joy -- the salvation, redemption and sanctification of mankind. He did not directly seek to bring suffering upon Himself. But as it began to appear that He would face great suffering and revilement and defilement for His pursuit of this mission, He did not flee. That, His apostles did. It is Jesus who shows us "God's way," and the disciples who show us "our way." It is not that the disciples did something with their lives that they really did not want to do. They wanted to follow Jesus and share in His mission. But they shared in it only until the threat of suffering and death revealed itself. Then, they ran.

Jesus begged His Father to spare Him suffering and death. So we may.

But when, if He was to do the will of His Father, His suffering proved inevitable, He did not run. He did not retreat in the face of pain. John Paul II wrote in 1995** that our current cultural climate

... fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs. This is especially the case in the absence of a religious outlook which could help to provide a positive understanding of the mystery of suffering.

The Holy Father was saying not that suffering is the greatest thing in the world, but that it is not the worst thing in the world. What is the worst thing in the world is to retreat, to at one moment enthusiastically pursue the path down which God is calling us, only to run in fear the next moment. We may know that the one will hurt for a time, but we know with even greater certainty that fleeing like cowards will surely make us miserable wretches for the rest of our lives.

Because deep down, we want to follow God. We want to live our lives the way He wants us to. We know that the only way we can really be happy is to follow Him, even if, and perhaps partly because, it will often require great courage.






*It is necessary to examine, of course, the moral legitimacy of the desires in our hearts. For example, it is possible that someone may desire something which is morally illegitimate, like the death of his roommate***. In those cases, one often has to look deeper for the good that he hopes to achieve by killing his roommate, and find morally legitimate ways to achieve it.
**Evangelium Vitae -- "The Gospel of Life," paragraph 15
***Don't worry, roommate. We're cool.

Earlier this week the Catholic Diocese of my hometown, Austin, Texas, received a new shepherd: Bishop Joe Vasquez.

From the Austin American Statesman:

ROUND ROCK -- Bishop Joe S. Vásquez became the official leader of the Diocese of Austin on Monday afternoon in a two-hour Mass of installation at St. William Parish.

The ceremony attracted an estimated 2,000 guests, among them Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dew­hurst.

"Above all today, I thank God the Father, our lord Jesus Christ, and I ask that you pray for me that I may be a good shepherd," said Vásquez, 52, who is the fifth bishop and the first Mexican American to lead the diocese. "As the new shepherd of the Diocese of Austin, I will do my best to follow the model of the good shepherd Jesus Christ."

Pope Benedict XVI selected Vásquez to lead the Austin Diocese, which serves more than 450,000 Catholics, in late January. Vásquez is a West Texas native who served as a priest for 17 years in the San Angelo Diocese and most recently worked for the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese, which serves about 1.3 million Catholics.

Bishop Vasquez comes to Austin from the Archdiocese of Galvestion-Houston, where he served as auxiliary bishop under Daniel Cardinal DiNardo. News 8 Austin reported that a group of Houston Catholics bussed up to Austin to bid Bishop Vasquez farewell.

Outside the St. William Catholic Church in Round Rock, just before the Mass of Installation began for new Austin Bishop Joe S. Vasquez, a crowd danced, sang, and played music.

The large painted signs they held read "Thank you for your support, Bishop Vasquez" and "We will miss you."

About 150 people had crowded onto three buses in Houston and traveled to Round Rock to honor Vasquez, who served as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston for eight years.

The Holy Father and other Church leaders last weekend concluded their Lenten retreat. Pope Benedict spoke of the prayer of Solomon, for "a heart that listens."

Solomon's prayer is from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 3 verse 9:

Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?

Said Pope Benedict:

It really seems to me that this sums up the whole of the Christian vision of the human being. In himself man is not perfect; he is a relational being. It is not his cogito [I think] that can cogitare [think] of the whole of reality. He needs listening, he needs to listen to the other and especially to the Other with a capital "O", to God. Only in this way does he know himself, only in this way does he become himself.
From my place here I could always see the Mother of the Redeemer, the Sedes Sapientiae, the living throne of wisdom with Wisdom incarnate on her lap. And, as we have seen, St Luke presents Mary precisely as a woman with a heart that listens, who is steeped in the word of God, who listens to the Word, meditates on it (synballein), composes it and preserves it, who cherishes it in her heart.
The Fathers of the Church say that at the moment of the conception of the eternal Word in the Virgin's womb, the Holy Spirit entered Mary through her ear. In listening she conceived the eternal Word, she gave flesh to this Word. And thus she tells us what it means to have a listening heart.
Here Mary is surrounded by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, by the Communion of Saints. And thus, in these very days we have seen and understood precisely that it is not in the isolated "I" that we can truly listen to the Word but only in the "we" of the Communion of Saints.

I may try to unpack some of this as the week goes on.

Meantime, as we continue through Lent, let's pray for a heart that listens for God, and when it hears Him, listens to Him.

From the the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes*:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.

A common mistake among Christians, including myself, is to think that Christ is very different from ourselves. That He is distant. That to be anything like Him is unachievable under any circumstances whatsoever. Not so.

Yes, I know, He is God. And Yes, I know, He is sinless. And we are certainly not God and we are certainly sinful. The question though is whether sin is a defining characteristic of humanity.

If it is, then Adam was not human until he sinned. Neither was Eve. And neither Mary nor Jesus were ever, for even one second of their lives, human.

It is more accurate to say that until Adam sinned, he was not fallen. It is also more accurate to say that Adam was more human before he fell than afterwards. It is also more accurate to say that you and I are more human when we do good and avoid evil, than when we strike and reverse that. It is most accurate to say that Jesus was the most human human ever to walk the earth.

And by walking the earth, so fully human, he reveals to us what humanity really is, and by necessity who we really are.

Christ shows me who I am.

Reread that sentence and repeat it to yourself. More than once if you have to or want to.

Christ shows me who I am. Not some abstraction or fantasy -- who I really am deep down. He shows me how I am meant to live. He shows me that I am a good person. And by doing that, He shows me that when I sin, I am not being true to myself. He shows me that my heart is strong and capable of loving and giving to others in a way that can transform lives. He shows me that I can suffer no violence so terrible as to force me to hate those who perpetrate it. He shows me that as long as I focus on my Father in Heaven, no matter what hardships befall me, I will be a force for good in the world.

Christ shows that to me by being who He is. He is a mirror into the hearts of all of us. If we want to know who we are, we must get to know Him.

*the Church's constitution on the Church in the modern world, published in the late 1960s.

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied."

One of my favorite beatitudes. Because everyone understands hunger. We feel it every day to some degree.

Hunger means we need something. We need food to keep our bodies from starving. If we go too long without food, we grow restless and uneasy. We get uncomfortable, even irritable. We become more prone to sickness or physical ailments like headaches. We weaken.

Just as our bodies hunger, our spirits hunger. If our spirits go without food too long, they weaken. Our spirits grow restless and uneasy, uncomfortable and irritable, more prone to inner sickness (think temptation and sin).

The key to avoiding that is, Jesus says, righteousness. That means that it is not enough just to keep our noses clean and avoid wrongdoing. If all we do is go through life trying to avoid sin, then eventually sin will find us wherever we are hiding. We will find ourselves not fulfilled, not satisfied. It's not enough just to not drink poison. If we get thirsty enough, we'll drink sulfuric acid. If we avoid sin but do not replace it with something that satiates the desires of our hearts, the desires that God has placed within us, then eventually we will settle.

Sex is a great example. It's a deep hunger that many people have, God knows. God gave us those desires. The Church has many examples of sinful ways of satisfying the sexual appetite. Most of us know what they are. Many people believe such prohibitions are unreasonable. The truth is they are perfectly reasonable and eminently wise. The problem is what's missing. The problem is that we have forgotten in many ways how to satisfy our sexual appetites -- again appetites that are from God Himself -- without resorting to these sinful methods. We've forgotten how to really relate to one another as men and women. We've forgotten how to appreciate and embrace the things that make us different and the things that make us fit together so beautifully. So when the Church tells us we must not do things like have intercourse outside of marriage or self-gratify, we think the Church is telling us to starve ourselves. Not so. The Church is inviting us to pursue what really satisfies, not what tides us over for a time but has poisonous long-term consequences.

We have to actively seek out opportunities to do what is right -- to love our neighbors as Christ loves us. We have to search like starving people, because the truth is we are starving. We need to find opportunities to love other people, and to show our love for God above all. We have to make it so there is no room in our lives for sin, because when we are living on a truly healthy and holy appetite, if we have truly loving relationships and are truly serving others, then we won't hunger for anything else.

Because why compromise? Why settle for anything less? Righteousness satisfies.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Here's a clip from John Paul II addressing World Youth Day on August 19, 2000.

It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

There's a lot of confusion these days about what is meant by "happiness." Is it a feeling? Is it a state of mind? Or is it an objective state of being?

I can say confidently that happiness in the sense that John Paul II spoke about it is what happens to us when the deepest desires of our hearts are satisfied. One is happy not necessarily when one feels warm and fuzzy. In fact, happiness that comes with the satisfaction of our deepest, most powerful appetites can coincide with suffering that comes with the dissatisfaction of our lesser ones.

This kind of happiness, which overcomes any suffering we may face, is what Jesus calls being "blessed." The classical term for it is "beatitude."

That's what I'll be looking at for the next few days.

I'm going to go easy on myself on Sundays, since Sundays are not included in the 40 days of Lent and, it's true, those observing Lenten penances are not obliged to do so on Sundays. A scriptural basis for the practice can be found in Luke 5:33-35*:

And they [the Pharisees etc] said to him, "The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat and drink."
Jesus answered them, "Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days."

For purposes of the Lenten season, it is my understanding that Catholics consider Sunday to be a day that "bridegroom," i.e. Jesus, is with us in the most intimate and ultimate sense. This is a time for celebration, and there is in some sense a mournful, and-or an anticipatory dimension to fasting that is not quite compatible.

Of course, some people prefer to continue their penances on Sundays. I'm not aware of any hard and fast rule against that. I just know that some in the past have said that suspended our fasts on Sundays during Lent is "weak." I don't think so, especially when Jesus Himself is providing a rationale to do exactly that.

*See also Matt 9:14-15, and Mark 2:19-20

Good on ya!:

Australian Catholics were jubilant last night at the Vatican's announcement that Mary MacKillop has become the nation's first saint.

A consistory of cardinals and Pope Benedict XVI voted late last night, Melbourne time, to declare the founder of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart among the company of the saints.

A ''deeply pleased'' Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart said St Mary was a woman of holiness, a great educator, an advocate for the poor and a visionary of Christianity.

''It will be a great encouragement,'' he said. ''The nuns were loved by the people because they shared their battles and their poverty. She and her sisters have always been very close to the people.''

The formal canonisation ceremony will take place in Rome on October 17 to allow the expected thousands of Australian pilgrims and church leaders to plan to attend.

There will also be celebratory services in all Australian capital cities and most big Catholic churches, according to Australian Catholic Bishops Conference secretary Brian Lucas.

''It reminds us of the possibilities of heroes and heroines who can make a difference,'' he said. ''We often get cynical, and celebrities attract our attention - we don't often see virtue as attractive. That's what is special about Mary MacKillop.''

St Mary of the Cross, as she may be known from now on, founded her order in Penola, South Australia, in 1866. On her deathbed in 1909, Mary - earlier excommunicated by another Australian bishop - was hailed as a saint by the Sydney Archbishop, Cardinal Moran.

Pope Benedict's Lent 2010 Message.

I want to consider the meaning of the term "justice," which in common usage implies "to render to every man his due," according to the famous expression of Ulpian, a Roman jurist of the third century. In reality, however, this classical definition does not specify what "due" is to be rendered to each person. What man needs most cannot be guaranteed to him by law. In order to live life to the full, something more intimate is necessary that can be granted only as a gift: we could say that man lives by that love which only God can communicate since He created the human person in His image and likeness.

This reminds me of what I wrote a few days ago about the assertion I read that "You deserve love." But if something is inherently a gift, like love, then it is by definition given despite the fact that we have done nothing in particular to warrant receiving it. In the case of God's love, we have done quite the opposite. We have given Him reason to justly withhold His love from us.

And that is, in a most unsettling sense, what we really "deserve." So when it comes to love, it is not a question of what we deserve. It is a question of how we might escape what we deserve. The answer, simply, is we need God to save us. We don't deserve His saving love. We simply need it.