When a Drunk Man Told Me All of My Faults

Catholic shrines have a kind of gravitational pull for those in the throes of conversion or a spiritual awakening.  This is true for non-Catholic Christians as well as those without any faith background.  Chris and I have had at least three profound encounters on the outskirts of The Grotto, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows.  These seekers may not go deep into The Grotto to find Christ in the Eucharist, but they do find us, anyway.

A few weeks back, Chris and I had just left The Grotto parking lot to head down Sandy Boulevard when we spotted a small man sitting on the sidewalk under the shade.  I nudged Chris, "Let's go talk to him."  The man was slightly rocking back and forth, cross-legged, with an open beer can at his knee.  I couldn't tell if he was homeless or not.  His clothes were clean and he was well-groomed, but he was well-past tipsy.  He complimented the Jesus Caritas heart/cross we wear and I settled down beside him on the sidewalk.  I hoped to do him a bit of good, perhaps hear his story, but he had something else in mind.  Perhaps we looked too somber, because he began a spontaneous rhapsody on the beauty of God's creation.  I thought he sounded very Franciscan, and I was edified when he transitioned from  the joy of created beauty to our simple response of thanksgiving.  He began exhorting us--and seemingly all creation--to recognize blessings and always give thanks.  I felt a pang of conscience, and thought, "I don't give thanks enough.  I take so many things for granted, and I miss the beauty and grace in life due to cares and little tasks.  I've gotten into a rut, a bad habit."

The little man continued and then transitioned again, thanking God for the kind hand of His providence.  He marveled that before God even created the world He knew and fore-ordained that we would meet him, David Becker from Chicago, on that day in that exact spot.  He explored this over and over again until he was satisfied that we recognized it as a great wonder and a great kindness.  For God can do all things and with unsurpassing good!

Then I felt another pang of conscience.  "My faith is weak.  I act like the fruits of this ministry only depend upon me, and I'm always focusing on people's obstacles to conversion instead of the power of the Holy Spirit.  If I could just get out of the way, this apostolate would bear more fruit."

Then David transitioned again, from God's goodness to Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.  He had already shed tears during his oration (and he had brought me to tears of gladness), but now he had the gift of tears in abundance.  He began to repeat with his head down, "Jesus took a whuppin' for me and he took a whuppin' for you."  Then he gave me a searching look and pleaded, "Jesus took a whuppin' for us!"  I felt the third string of conscience.  "I'm a lousy Catholic, with so little devotion to the Passion.  I take Christ's sacrifice on the cross for granted.  He gave it to us freely, and I just take it, run with it, and don't look back."

At this point it was clear that the Holy Spirit had given me David's prophetic words as a gift.  I inwardly laughed as I remembered sitting down some twenty minutes before as a humble gesture in the hope of getting David to open up.  But now who was ministering to whom?   When it was time to leave, David profoundly repeated, "I'll see you guys in Heaven." I couldn't help but think he was being prophetic again.  The Spirit goes where it will.

As we walked away, Chris said, "I couldn't hear him or understand him that well."
I replied, "Well, you were sitting further away.  I think it was meant for me, anyway.  That guy just told me all of my spiritual faults--all the holes in my spiritual life."

Thank you, dear Lord, for David Becker, and may we always keep him in our prayers.

Even the Birds of the Air

Today is the feast day of one of the greatest disciples of Jesus Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, the "little poor man".  It so happens that Chris and I have been reading The Flowers of St. Francis while walking the streets.  We take turns reading the chapters aloud, and delight at the often zany and wise adventures of Francis and his first companions.  Last Sunday we were walking SE 122nd, and rested on some stones while Chris told of the time St. Francis preached to the birds. Afterwards we reflected on God's hidden hand in nature, and shared some stories.  I told him of the time my wife believed she was pregnant (the test was positive) and then had some agonizing counter-signs of a miscarriage.  I prayed to God full of anxiety and confusion while I drove to adoration at St. Agatha's Church.  Then I was given a sign.  A hundred yards in front of me, birds twirled and executed playful loops as in delightful celebration.  I knew from a touch of the Holy Spirit that the birds were moved to play by the joy of Heaven at the conception of our daughter, Clara.

Chris and I continued on our journey, praying, and wondered whether there were signs all around us in nature that we miss by living in the city.  We took up the book again, and just as we passed under the roof of a building we were met by the strikingly rich and pure chirping of baby birds.  We turned in stunned silence as though Jesus himself had called to us. A mother pigeon was tending to her brood in a nest.  She raised up and fluttered a wing at us, and I waved back.  Chris and I continued on in laughter and wonderment.  The birds had sounded so different than the usual background noise of busy birds.  An atheist might chalk it up to a coincidence or "confirmation bias", but life is different for those who walk in faith.  For us, the whole world is infused with the Spirit and laden with meanings both delightful and dark (earlier a pitbull had lunged over a fence to try to grab my tunic sleeve).  Thanks be to God that He is always with us.

Chris and I have had a remarkable string of Spirit-filled encounters on the streets, including moments of real conversion by those we meet.  I hope to share some of them in the coming weeks.

A Catholic Diversity

Many people (including some famous philosophers) reject the Christian faith because they believe it entails unhealthy, unnatural constraints that will steal the joy out of their life.  Nietzsche certainly thought this (his father was a dour Lutheran pastor), and there is no doubt that there have been grim Christians and deformed christian cultures since the beginning.  But the true faith gains everything, and only surrenders to God our sin and its ugliness.  Similarly, many contemporary people forgo having children out of the same fear of constraints (never mind how unnatural this is), and rather than having more freedom and more life they actually have less.  Little children, like the faith, open up the rich tapestry of life and it's possibilities.  Each child brings with him a new world of insights, talents and adventures, something his sister or brother did not see or understand or pursue.  The author Jennifer Fulfiller has described this: that in the Catholic home you are "surrounded by so much life".  In fact, it is really a foretaste of Heaven.  Everything in Heaven brims with life--even the colors seem to share in the very life of God.  We know from scripture that Heaven is a feast, and in their little way, children are a feast as is the Catholic life with its abundance and great diversity of delights.

On our honeymoon, my wife and I enjoyed an amazing feast every morning at the Hotel Cavallari in Rome

In a similar way, the very life of the Church--with all of its diverse vocations (lay, religious, consecrated virgin, widow, married) and religious movements and charisms is a great feast for the honor and glory of God.  It is "man fully alive" as St. Ireneaus described it over 1800 years ago.  In fact, our diverse patrimony and history across cultures and time is a feast to study and contemplate.  If you read about different saints in every century of the Church, you will witness them come to life in your imagination as they descend from Heaven to kindle your soul.  Every saint was different because they had their own bundle of experiences, their own formed character, and because God had a unique call for each of them. This "call" was often to do one thing but not another (even if the other thing was praiseworthy and needs doing).  

We often fall into the trap of following something we haven't been called to do, or trying to shoe-horn other people into our pre-conceived idea of what they should be doing.  I once had a fellow prayer witness at 40 Days For Life become angry with me when I resisted her notion that God had called me to be a professor, and so evangelize in the university.  But that wasn't my call (though at one time I hoped it was) and we must honor the diversity and singularity of God's call.  As another example, here in Portland there is a good Catholic man, a former protestant pastor, who closely attends to the homeless population and lobbies for them in courts and state benefit offices.  That's what he has been uniquely formed and called to do.  It is not my calling, and my apostolate is not his call.  This difference in "calls" reflects the beauty and wisdom of God's plan, and we should marvel at it instead of nosing about and wondering why other people aren't doing what we think needs to be done.  Many people have criticized Mother Theresa for not building hospitals and massive infrastructure for the sick, marginalized and dying, but as she simply responded: "That's not my call."

Don't Quench The Spirit

In the past few years I have been troubled as faithful, vibrant movements in the Church have been suppressed for dubious reasons (Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, Fraternity of the Holy Apostles, and now a priestly exorcist society founded by Fr. Ripperger).  This is nothing new in the Church as we know from reading the lives of founders of religious communities.  It has also been common for holy men and women to be misunderstood and persecuted by the Church (Sts. Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Jean-Marie Vianney, Padre Pio, Mother Angelica immediately come to mind, though a full list would number in the hundreds).  Padre Pio's main opponent, Fr. Edoardo Gemelli, did God's work in founding and steering the Catholic University of Milan, and yet he wrote awful things about Padre Pio.  It is a terrible thing to die--even in sanctifying grace--and then have the Lord show you that you have been persecuting some of his chosen souls. One of the Vatican monsignors who was sent to evaluate the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate was over-heard in a restaurant mocking their penances and lowly lifestyle.  He remarked in a humorous tone, "You wouldn't believe it, but at night you could hear the echo of lashes throughout the friary.  All night long!"  Now I don't take the discipline (unlike Blessed Charles de Foucauld, our patron), or lash myself, but I have a tender fear of disappointing God, and so would never mock those who do.  Who knows what God has called them to?  If it is orthodox and comes from our lived faith tradition, then tolerance is the better part of wisdom.

One of my former professors at University of Michigan, Scott Page,  wrote a theoretically rich and wide-ranging book on the unique benefits of diversity in different institutions.  As a secular academic, his jump-off point was a famous passage from Aristotle, but it might as well have been St. Paul on the Body of Christ.  Even the ancient pagans and the new pagans get it!  St. Philip Neri certainly got it as he assembled his great oratory full of talented and holy young men.  The great saint had the grace to see each man as he was, and wisely drew from each the unique talents and vocation that God had given them. Each person has gifts and a calling and we must not stand in the way of it because we have cramped views on liturgy, or mortification, or the modern world, or ecclesiology.  There has often been a confounding diversity in the life of zealous Catholics, and this comes from the very hand of God.

Don't Run From The Light!

My friend Josh Kusch was the first man to join in this apostolate, and I was glad to send him a tunic sewn by my late mother.  Josh has been graced with a hungry, clear intellect and a heart for the suffering and those far from Christ.    This might seem like a dual call or gift, but it is really the same invitation from the Blessed Trinity to share in the one life in God.  Nowadays it is fashionable in and out of the Church to fudge or set in opposition the relationship between reason/intellect and the compassionate heart of Christ (or dogma/doctrine vs. pastoral practice) but that is nonsense since Jesus is both the Eternal Word (the Logos which is Truth itself) and the One whose side was opened on the Cross to reveal his Sacred Heart.

Paradoxically, when we think about the deep things of God, we should do so with the attitude of a child: innocent, receptive, trusting, and eager to embrace what our Father reveals.  This is how we are given wisdom, which is nothing other than the knowledge of God and his divine order.  In yet another paradox, many of the truly wise are also the unlearned.  Did you know that during the Enlightenment, God raised up many lowly Franciscan saints (especially Capuchins) to confound the intellect of the learned?  I wear a relic of one such friar, Blessed Didacus Joseph, otherwise known as the "Dunce of Cadiz".  Did you know that Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta began her Nobel Prize speech with two cringeworthy (but harmless) errors about St. Francis?  Yet she had more wisdom than her entire audience!

We should read scripture and receive the life of the saints with the same spirit: the spirit of a child and not the "spirit of the world".  The worldly man plays politics, watches public opinion, acts coy, trusts in his cleverness, seeks not to offend even as he offends Truth Himself.  We all have to resist the worldly impulse, that gravitational pull of our wounded nature.  We must be vigilant because we shouldn't tinker with what God has revealed.  As I saw first-hand at the time of my conversion, the wisdom of the world is rubbish.  God and his ways are so different than ours.  God's vision for us is so much grander than we'd allow.  With that in mind, our brother Josh has recently written two excellent articles to defend God's neglected word.  He has reached out and taken hold of two of the "third rails" of our time: divorce and "re-marriage" and the relationship between husband and wife.  Both articles have been enthusiastically received.

UPDATE:

Peter Kreeft, a wise and humble philosopher, recently echoed some of my thoughts: "A German cardinal who is very scholarly and often quite wise said one of the worst things I ever heard a cardinal say when trying to justify relaxing the Church's demand to live in chastity even if one is civilly divorced.  He said that the Church does not expect everyone to be a moral hero.  That is exactly what the Church does expect, because her Lord expects it."

Amen!  Thank you, Peter Kreeft.  Also, thanks to Josh, Chris, Felix and all men who aim to be "moral heroes" as husbands, fathers, teachers and street evangelists.  God looks on in delight as you fight the good fight.

An Awesome Responsibility

Chris Huling and I continue to hit the streets, and yesterday we even passed out free Gatorade in the mid-day sun.  Our offering was gratefully received, but our most compelling encounter happened after we emptied our cooler and stripped off the wool tunics in The Grotto parking lot.  A black man in his early thirties approached us, and said that he saw us kneeling in prayer.  He wore a hiking backpack and bore a few other signs of being homeless.  He said that he needed prayer, and asked if we could pray for him.  Chris and I glided past his words and asked whether he needed food or some money.  With a hint of impatience, he corrected us, "No, no, none of that."  You see, by a grace he understood that his greatest need was spiritual assistance--even deliverance from evil.  As far as being homeless and jobless, he said, "I can handle that.  You see, I'm the problem."  We walked over to the statue where Chris and I had been praying, and knelt down.  The statue captures the last moment of the Crucifixion, where Jesus died for our sins before heavenly and earthly witnesses.

The statue at The Grotto

I told our new friend about the figures below the cross, and asked if he prayed to his angel who accompanies him wherever he goes.  He said he does.  Then he painfully described how he's plagued with issues of "self-control".  He said he tries to fight it, but it almost seems like there are two of him--not in the sense of a split personality, but in terms of a struggle in his soul.  He hates how he sometimes hurts people when he loses control, if only he would never lose control again.  Then he prostrated himself before the Cross, just as the angel had taught the little children at Fatima.  By a grace I offered an extemporaneous prayer on Christ's faithful love for him and all his children, and how we ask for Christ's love to heal his heart so he might love others like Jesus, always doing right by them. I joined him in prostration for a few moments of silence.

Afterwards I gave him a rosary that belonged to a recently deceased priest.  I asked the priest (whether he's in heaven or purgatory) to watch over and pray for the young man.  He then asked what kind of place this was, that had such statues in a parking lot.  Chris and I were floored.  The man had no idea that he was at a national religious shrine--he had just noticed the trees and taken cover from the sun.  Only a grace could have led him there!  Then it was time to depart, and the last time we saw him he had tightly wrapped the rosary around his wrist like a bracelet.  On the way home, Chris and I prayed seven St. Michael prayers for him, as well as some Marian prayers.  I ask readers of this blog to offer him spiritual assistance as you can.  The young man's name was "Chris", and he's undergoing intense spiritual combat.  You might also pray for those he's hurt.

Later that evening, Chris Huling sent me the following e-mail about the privilege and responsibility of street evangelization:

"I was sitting home thinking about today and I'm trying to process it and took a little walk and it hits me! Do you have any idea what we witnessed? We were privileged enough to get to see the Holy Spirit in action! It's freaking me out a little in a good way of course. You had prayed that we might be the face of the LORD, I remembered. And here this young man comes out of nowhere and expresses what looked to me like perfect contrition to a statue of his savior! Is that not a textbook definition of grace? Sorry...it just hit me and the power of it is a little overwhelming!"

Yes, it blows the mind.  We're not worthy!

Going Where The Pain Is

Apologies for the sparse postings.  The unexpected death of my mother sucked some of the wind out of my sails. Nevertheless, the street apostolate is still going strong even if I don't find the time to write about it.

Last week I walked for the first time with Chris Huling, a recent revert to the faith who has a military background and love for the traditional practices and expressions of the faith.  Like myself and many other men (often younger than us), he has dived head-first into the new oasis that is St. Stephen's parish.  When I asked him why he wanted to walk the streets, Chris said that he didn't want to be rejected by Jesus at the Last Judgment for ignoring Christ in the "poor, imprisoned, widowed and orphaned".  I was mildly shocked:  "Wow!  Someone who actually takes the words of Christ at face value!" Then Chris told me of an an inspiration from the Holy Spirit: that he should walk the streets on hot days with a rolling ice chest and distribute cold drinks and a prayer meditation.  The meditation is extraordinary.  It's the "I Thirst" meditation attributed to Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and it is really the Gospel in miniature.  In the meditation, Jesus is speaking directly to his lost children (that is, all of us at one time or another).  Here is how it ends:

"Now matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake.  Come to Me with your misery and your sins, with your troubles and your needs, and with all your longing to be loved.  I stand at the door of your heart and knock...  Open to me, for I THIRST FOR YOU..."

For the people we typically meet on the streets, this message is probably the most shocking words they could ever hear. They would be less shocked if we cursed them or berated them.  But to hear that God intimately knows and loves them and yearns for them?  Unthinkable.  That has never occurred to them, and yet it's at the heart of the Gospel.  You can hear the full meditation by clicking on the video below.  The meditation is read by Fr. John Riccardo, an ascetic priest who always reminded me of Christ Crucified when I attended his parish in Michigan.

Since St. Stephen's parish is located in a trendy neighborhood full of hipsters and the "resolutely unchurched", I was considering going "uptown" and walking amongst the "children of this age".  Perhaps I could be the "Apostle to the Hipsters" since I already live in "FoPo", the hipster neighborhood of Portland.  Then I realized I'd be awful at that, and am better suited to meaner streets, to something more "real".

A cross-section of PDX (Portland) hipsters.  This is not real life, though the pain they try to hide is very real.

If you're looking for real life, watch this movie about the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal living amongst the most wretched among us.  Kyle Turley, my favorite Catholic journalist, has a great write-up of the movie at Catholic World Report.  Apparently one of the friars who ministers to a Honduras HELLHOLE prison is himself an ex-convict.  Hurrah for him!  These men are living the faith that we try to walk.

Fr. Peter Carota: Strange Like a Saint

The late Fr. Peter Carota was always burning.  He yearned for a greater knowledge--a greater closeness to our Lord--for himself and for whomever he met.  Now that he's passed on and has beheld the shining face of Christ, he burns even brighter.

While he was with us, we thought of him as strange, foolish, unpolitic, of rude zeal.  He was foolish when he cashed in his wildly successful real estate practice to open a soup kitchen and homeless shelter.  Then he made another leap and was ordained a priest of Christ.  For a time he was a more or less typical parish priest, but then the burning started again when he discovered the old mass, that ancient highway between man and God.  He shared it with his congregation, and then he was driven to share it with everybody else.  He left his unknown parish in Ripon, California and set about to form a missionary society of priests to spread the old mass, and even broadcast it on a dedicated satellite channel.  He burned, brighter than ever, but neither of the dreams came to pass.  He did burn lots of bridges though, especially with brother priests.

I first learned of him through the indignant rant of a celebrity priest.  I was at a local Catholic Men's Conference, and our widely traveled priest/speaker couldn't stop blasting this "very confused" and "way off" priest down in "middle of nowhere Ripon".  Apparently Fr. Carota had urged him to learn Latin; that it was important for his priesthood.  The celebrity priest bristled, and warned us not to come up to him after his talk and tell him "goofy sh*t" like "the devil hates Latin".  Now since the celebrity priest was full of ugliness of all kinds I reasoned that his judgment was backwards and that the lowly Ripon priest must be someone worth reading about.  I was right.



Fr. Carota was never boring and this was reflected in his blog.  His frequent stays in Mexico made for fascinating reading: they were part cultural study, part missionary journal and simple stories of local people.  Fr. Carota also took to prickly situations like a hummingbird to a cactus flower.  If there was an abortion provider nearby, he was outside the building in prayer.  If a couple were "shacking-up" while raising their kids, Fr. Carota would bring them to the altar.  If young women dressed for mass like they were at a nightclub or in a Univision soap opera, Fr. Carota would remind them of their baptismal dignity.  Then there were the blog posts on the Illuminati, Freemasonry and the New World Order.

I began to grow weary of his exhortations and forays into strange topics and so gradually stopped reading his blog.  Fr. Carota burned too hot for prudence, for gradualism, for tact, for the "art of the possible".  If only he'd been educated at elite schools like myself--that would have cooled off his brain!  But the art of the possible is the province of politics (as Tip O'Neil had it), and not the faith that can move mountains.  So much the worse for us, so much the worse for me.

While many turned their backs on him, Jesus Christ was always at his side.  Especially when he was offered up like a victim lamb on our behalf.  He was afflicted with a mysterious illness that would not let him keep his food down.  It had echoes of my favorite movie, Diary of a Country Priest.  The medical profession was unable to diagnose and resolve the malady and he slowly wasted away.  Fr. David Nix put it starkly, "Fr. Peter Carota starved to death today."  He starved so that the Church might be fed.  He was a chosen soul, holy in God's sight but an embarrassment to men.  Fr. Peter Carota, forgive my arrogance.  Fr. Carota, ora pro nobis!