Father John’s Speaking Schedule

As many of you know, Father John is an exceptional speaker. As such, you have asked for audio postings of his sermons etc. Well, we are working on that. In the mean time, if you would like to find out if Fr. John is coming to your area, just click on the link on the upper right side of this site just below the “About Us” link. There you will find his latest schedule.

God bless!

Dan

Blog Around the World…

I haven’t updated you in a while regarding the readership of this humble effort to serve Catholics who desire to deepen their faith through authentic Catholic spirituality. Since beginning last January our readers have spent almost 2,000 hours reading our posts! As well, the world map here reveals that we have readers in more than 109 countries/regions. All the areas in green reflect where our readers come from. The dark green indicates the locations where the majority of our readers come from. This is particularly amazing in light of the fact that we have yet to invest any $$ in promoting the site.

What is truly exciting to us, is that what began as an experiment, has really become a transformational reality. Here is a quote from one of our readers:

Father, no question, just a sincere thank you for the clarity of your answers and the pastoral way you present them. Much, much appreciated and I find myself making notes of many “gems” for use with my RCIA candidates either as background or as direct quotes and reference to your website. Many blessings upon you! Mark

Mark is a great example of many Church leaders who read our materials and use them in ways that impact even more people than we can touch directly.

Without a budget, just by word of mouth and other humble means, we have connected with thousands of Catholics looking to deepen their faith.

The challenge at this point is how to take this effort to the next level. Several generous donors have kept this ball moving forward thus far. If you have been blessed by our efforts here, would you consider a donation? What will we do with your donation? That depends a bit on you and what you are able to give. Here are a few things we need to keep growing:

• Computer and Software Upgrade
• Promotion: This is an area where we have yet to invest but we are ready to serve a larger audience. Any donations here would go to improving our search engine rankings and beginning some outreach efforts.

Another way you can support us is to purchase your spiritual formation and Catholic supply materials through this blog via our partnership with Aquinas and More. For more titles and almost 20,000 Catholic supply items, click anywhere on the bar on the lower right. The great thing about what we offer through Aquinas and More is that we guarantee that you will not find a single item that offers teachings contrary to the magisterium of the Church.  Just to be sure – in order for us receive some support from your purchase, we need you to enter their site through this blog (that’s how they track how people come to them).

Times are tough – any amount or effort helps – if you are unable to help us financially, please keep us in your prayers as we work together to Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him.

Pax Christi, Dan

Introduction to spiritual warfare… Part I

Q: Dear Father John, I have been working on my prayer life consistently for a few years. During this time I have been on retreats and other similar activities. I have noticed a strange pattern: the conservative groups I have had contact with talk a lot about spiritual warfare, but the less traditionalist groups don’t. Until now, I haven’t paid much attention to the discrepancy. But lately I was wondering if maybe I should look into it – maybe understanding it better will help me grow spiritually?

A: It is so encouraging to hear from yet another blog reader who is committed to praying and growing in their prayer life. Keep it up! We are called to be salt and light in this world, and we can only do that by maintaining our flavor and keeping our lamp full of oil, and that means praying.

Before getting into the core of the issue you raise, I would like to comment on the terms “conservative” and “traditionalist.” In the context of your question, I think I know what you mean, but sometimes those terms (along with the term “liberal”) can cause more fuzziness than clarity. The same words are used for political and academic discussions, and so they carry a lot of baggage. When we bring them into our conversations about the Church or the spiritual life, we use them at our own risk – we simply don’t know if our listeners (readers) will think of the same reality as we are. In general, therefore, I have found it useful to be as specific as possible. For example, if I say, “my parish priest has a great respect for papal teaching and often explains it to us in his homilies,” I am being clear and precise. If I say, “our retreat director advised us to avoid using the Our Father and gave us some centering prayer techniques instead,” I am also being clear. Admittedly, this kind of language is more cumbersome and inconvenient than one-word labels, but in the end, exercising a little discipline here may benefit all of us in our conversations about Church issues. At least, I think so. But maybe this is just a pet peeve and I’m being too conservative…

As regards spiritual warfare, your instinct is right. The concept is at the heart of the Church’s identity, and so it is also at the heart of our efforts to grow in the spiritual life. Understanding it better will be a major help for every aspect of your Christian life.

Grappling with Spiritual Warfare

I am tempted to bombard you with Scripture quotations in order to clearly reveal that we, as followers of Christ, are by definition soldiers in an ongoing spiritual battle. But there are so many passages that I wouldn’t know where to stop. Instead, I will share one of my personal favorites from the documents of the Second Vatican Council. It’s from the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, better known as Gaudium et Spes, paragraph #13:

Although he was made by God in a state of holiness, from the very onset of his history man abused his liberty, at the urging of the Evil One. Man set himself against God and sought to attain his goal apart from God. Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, but their senseless minds were darkened and they served the creature rather than the Creator… Therefore man is split within himself. As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. Indeed, man finds that by himself he is incapable of battling the assaults of evil successfully, so that everyone feels as though he is bound by chains. But the Lord Himself came to free and strengthen man, renewing him inwardly and casting out that “prince of this world” (John 12:31) who held him in the bondage of sin.

This “dramatic struggle between good and evil,” whose primary arena is every human heart, is what we mean by spiritual warfare. Every day, we are faced with decisions about how to use our time, talents, and treasure, about how to treat those around us, about how to respond to difficulties and opportunities. Our ability to make those decisions, those free choices, is what makes us human – squirrels don’t make free choices, they are driven purely by instinct. The quality of those choices determines who we are as human beings, both now and for all eternity. If we repeatedly choose what is good and right, we grow in our communion with the Author of all that is Good and Right, God. If we choose what is evil and self-centered, we distance ourselves from God. And since the very purpose of our existence is to live in communion with God, it is these choices, these free decisions that we make every day, in the most normal circumstances, that determine our everlasting destiny.

As a result, the forces of evil (the devil and his minions, the demons – these are fallen angels who exist in permanent rebellion against God) are interested in influencing those decisions. They want to lure us away from God, expanding their rebellion. They work their influence through temptation. At the same time, God and his servants (the angels and the saints) are working to strengthen us against temptation, so that we can overcome the attacks of evil. This is the normal state of affairs here on earth, and it will be so from now until our Lord comes again at the end of history.

An Imaginary Exercise

If there were a “Spiritual Warfare Daily News,” its headlines would differ wildly from the headlines of our newspapers. Earthquakes, forest fires, wars and rumors of wars, stock prices, sports scores, fashions – all these external realities that tend to monopolize our attention would only appear in the background of the main stories. Instead, headlines would say things like, “Plumber Endangers Soul by Overcharging Widow,” or “School Teacher Conquers Greed by Cancelling Credit Card,” or “Girl Opens Flood of Grace by Being Patient with Her Brother.”

From the point of view of spiritual warfare, which is the point of view of eternal life – God’s point of view, the circumstances of the world around us, however dramatic they may appear, are like the stage sets of a theatre play: what really matters is how the characters, you and I, respond to them, confront them, work with them, and carry out our life-mission (to know, love, and follow Christ and helps others do the same) within their parameters.

I would like to write more about this topic. But before I do, I would like to see how you and other readers respond to this post. Let me know what you think.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

The second most important thing…

Let’s face it; life is fast-paced. We never have enough time to do everything we want to. We rush around from commitment to commitment and still can’t squeeze everything in – especially something like prayer, which is not only difficult and demanding, but its results are most often intangible. So, if you’ve decided to run the adventure of your life on its proper fuel (prayer), you need to purposely schedule in your fill-ups. A firm decision to pray every day will soon evaporate if you don’t DECIDE AHEAD OF TIME WHEN you will pray. You schedule in your classes, your workouts, your meals, your appointments, your studies – have you scheduled in your prayer time? Why not? “I just pray whenever I feel like it; you know, God is always around, so I just talk to him when I feel inspired.” Hmm. Sounds like a cop-out. If you really care about someone, you make a point of spending time with them, and you don’t let other things get in your way. Besides, if Jesus himself habitually reserved time just for prayer without compromising the spontaneity of his love for the Father, don’t you think it would be wise to follow suit? “Rising very early before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.” (Mark 1:35) If you’re still not convinced, be scientific: do an experiment. Schedule your daily prayer ahead of time for a week, follow through with it, and see what happens. It will change your life.

Yours In Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

The fruits of my meditation are not clear – What should I do?

Q: Dear Father John, I have a question about preparing for meditation. I have been deeply blessed by the insight you and have provided with respect to meditation recently. I wonder if what I am seeking as a fruit of meditation is too lofty. Why? Because it doesn’t change day to day and I don’t perceive that I am making much progress. Is it normal to seek the same fruit for weeks at a time or longer? In this case, essentially, the fruit desired does not change day to day and the exercise becomes a bit repetitive. Is this an indication that I would do better to seek fruit that is lower on the tree?

A: This is an excellent question. Here’s the deal. Usually, those who are beginning the spiritual life change their fruit often. Those who have been striving consciously and conscientiously for holiness for a longer period of time tend to grow in spiritual simplicity as time passes. This involves having a clearer idea of one’s spiritual state. That in turn involves knowing one’s own weaknesses and tendencies better. When that happens, all of our spiritual work takes on a more unified character, and the fruit we seek in prayer tends to be the same for longer periods. Sometimes, it even happens that you try to switch fruits, but the Holy Spirit won’t let you, and you keep coming back to the same thing, even when you were consciously trying to go somewhere else! By focusing on the same fruit for longer periods, the soul actually drinks more deeply of the knowledge of God, of some particular characteristic God’s love that the soul needs most.

In fact, it is often a good idea to fix the “fruit” of your daily meditation as a part of your program of life, so that you don’t flit around according to whims and distractions.

A gold prospector will look all over the place for a rich vein of gold – panning streams, exploring caves, tapping into rock faces… He just can’t settle down in any one place, because he is convinced that there is a rich store of gold somewhere nearby. But as soon as he finds the mother lode, he sinks down a deep shaft and stays put, mining it diligently until every last flake of the precious metal has been extracted.

That’s a bit what it’s like for the soul that God is leading to deeper spiritual wisdom. At first, the thirst drives the soul after every possible virtue – humility, charity, purity, fortitude, contrition… But gradually the Holy Spirit shows us a more detailed profile of our own spiritual needs, and guides us to that “aspect” of God, of the Gospel message, which will meet that need most effectively. I am sure that if you think about some of the saints you are familiar with, you will see how this works. I once visited a church in an ancient little hill town in Italy and talked to the parish priest there (I think he was older than the church). He told me that he only meditated two things: Calvary and Heaven. Calvary filled him with mourning for sin, and Heaven filled him with joyful hope – these were the fruits God wanted to see flourish in his soul, and he was delighted with them.

That said, there is room for variation on another level, that of the specific resolution that you make at the end of the meditation. As we finish our daily meditation, we should look forward to the day ahead, and try to see, with God’s help, a particular, concrete action that we can commit to as a way of living out in our life whatever we were meditating on. Often this resolution is one of the points of the program of life, and sometimes, especially if our daily life is predictable and stable, the same resolution will come to mind day after day, or even week after week. But at other times the circumstances of daily life will provide new opportunities or challenges. In this case, our resolution can vary, even though the fruit stays the same.

For example, if the fruit I am seeking is greater confidence in God’s goodness, my resolution may be something as simple as: “Today when I feel anxiety because of my financial difficulties, I will make a spiritual communion.” But when the financial difficulties go away or diminish, my resolution may end up being something like: “Today when I get stuck in traffic I will turn off the radio and praise God for the beauties of nature that I see on the side of the highway.”

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC