Sayings of Light and Love #25

Withdraw from creatures if you desire to preserve, clear and simple in your soul, the image of God. Empty your spirit and withdraw far from them and you will walk in divine lights, for God is not like creatures.

Saint John of the Cross

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How much should a priest own?

Q: Dear Father John, I am a Catholic priest. Because I am in studies and do not have a rectory to call ‘home’, I’ve temporarily moved all my personal belongings back into my parent’s house. Looking over all the ‘stuff’ I’ve collected over the years, it’s dawned on me that I have A LOT. Too much, so that I am even nauseated at the amount: especially books, vestments, and clerical clothing, and some secular clothes. My regular spiritual director and I have been trying to discern what exactly a diocesan priest ‘needs’ as opposed to ‘wants’. How many books does a priest truly ‘need’? How do you discern needs vs. wants? How do you practice detachment, even radically if necessary?

A: The tricky part about this issue is that the principles are clear, but they can be – and need to be – applied in myriad ways.  It’s clear from your question that you know what the principles are: 1) material goods are not ends in themselves, and so we should never seek our soul’s satisfaction in their possession or enjoyment; 2) material goods are means to an end, and so if ever a possession or a practice is inhibiting me from achieving my end (holiness and spiritual fruitfulness as a father in Christ’s Church), then those possessions or practices need to be curtailed or eliminated.  The famous Ignatian “tantum quantum” comes into play there: material goods should be sought, welcomed, and used insofar as they help us achieve our purpose of glorifying God and helping to save souls.

The virtue that governs the application of general principles to specific situations (your situation, or mine, or your spiritual director’s) is prudence.  And there is the rub.  Prudence involves making a particular judgment, so it is always linked to the concrete circumstances of an individual’s life.  As a result, gospel simplicity may look very different for two different priests, and each one of them may be living in complete fidelity to what the Holy Spirit is asking of him.

So that doesn’t help you very much – at least not directly.  The development and application of prudence in our lives is linked to our spiritual maturity.  That means, basically, the more I grow in temperance, fortitude, and justice – which translates into “the more faithful I am to my life of prayer and to God’s will through fulfilling my basic responsibilities” – the more prudent I become.  Keep growing spiritually, and you will keep developing prudence.  As prudence grows, we are able to identify more easily and quickly the proper application of general principles to our particular situation.  Bottom line: there is no formula I can give you; you have to keep seeking God in your heart, and seeking his guidance in this area, and every other area, of your spiritual life.

That said, here are some thoughts that may help you reflect and discern.

1.      Money is the great deceiver.  So we need to keep it on a leash.  This consists primarily in having a personal annual budget.  A budget allows us to be responsible with our money – to decide ahead of time, based on life-priorities and not on spur-of-the-moment impulses, how much we will spend and on what.  This helps protect us from the latent materialism that’s always trying to seep into our hearts and minds through whimsical and indulgent culture of consumerism in which we live.  I don’t know if you are familiar with Veritas Financial Ministries, but they seem to offer some excellent tools for making and following budgets and tying money-matters into faith-matters.  I would recommend checking out their services and making a commitment to govern your money habits with a budget: http://www.veritasfinancialministries.com/.

2.      Keep in mind the possibility of scandal.  This matters.  As fathers of a spiritual community, we need to embody the principles we preach, to be good examples.  Everyone knows that Father needs a car.  But if a Toyota Camry will do the job for him, why does he have a BMW?  Everyone wants Father to have a refreshing and renewing vacation.  And they will be overjoyed and understanding if he takes a trip to Rome or the Holy Land for his time off, making a pilgrimage out of it.  But they may furrow their brows in confusion if he goes to the Bahamas.  They will be edified by his taking a fishing trip, but they may be confused by his taking a gambling trip.

3.      Gospel simplicity is not opposed to dignity and distinction.  A priest is a representative of Christ, and his bearing, along with his clothes, manners, and paraphernalia, should reflect the dignity and propriety of the King he serves.  Jesus’ tunic was of good enough quality that the soldiers didn’t want to tear it into pieces to pawn off the material, rather they threw dice to see who would get the whole thing.  When people see the Pope, they expect his cassock to be clean and well-ironed, and they rejoice in the elegance and dignity of the papal surroundings.  On the other hand, they also know that none of that belongs to Joseph Ratzinger – it belongs to the Church.  And it will stay in the Church after the current Holy Father has gone to his heavenly home.

4.      Practice self-denial on a regular basis.  We have to keep ourselves in spiritual shape.  We have to consciously and proactively exercise detachment on a regular basis in order to be able to exercise detachment in the face of unforeseen temptations.  As priests, we should be offering small sacrifices, the kind we offer during Lent, on a regular basis.  But this can also feed pride.  Be close to your spiritual director on this point (well, on all these points!).

5.      Consider your time to be a material possession.  Just as you budget your money, budget your time.  Plan ahead.  Enjoy the freedom that comes from knowing that how you are spending both your time and your money accurately reflects your life-priorities and is not just a function of spontaneous and whimsical improvisation all the time.

6.      Create a wish-list for your library.  Every time you want to buy a book, put the title on your wish-list.  Let your wish-list grow.  Don’t buy any books from the wish-list until you have finished the books you are already reading, or the ones that you have already bought and put on the “to-read-next” shelf.  Here again, planning ahead is incredibly freeing.  What will your reading goals be for this coming year?  You will want to read a couple of books on current issues, maybe some classical and contemporary literature (if you like that and find it enriching), definitely some books on theology or philosophy or church history or apologetics (whichever is your area of expertise), and probably some other books of social commentary or self-help.  Then you also have the books you will be using for spiritual reading and meditation during the year, in accordance with your program for personal spiritual growth.  Pick out the twelve or fourteen that you want to read this year.  Get them.  Put them on your “to-read-next” shelf.  Don’t buy any more until you have read those.  All the new ones that come onto your radar screen – add them to your wish-list, but don’t buy them yet.  If you want to change your year’s list mid-way through, run your reasons by your spiritual director (or some kind of accountability partner), not because you need “permission” strictly speaking, but because you want to keep your book-habit under control, so that it doesn’t create turbulence in your heart and clutter in your life.

7.      Know your weak points.  We all have them.  From your question, it seems like you are a book collector.  Other people just have to have the latest clothes.  Others just can’t resist buying new luggage all the time.  For others, its electronic gadgets – the latest, no matter what, no matter whether it will really help me be more efficient in my mission or not!  For others it’s music – the CD collection is gargantuan!  We don’t need to go into the psychological reasons behind these personal tendencies (though that would be an interesting study!).  But in whichever area you find yourself most tempted to be over-indulgent, keep vigilant.  Get an accountability partner to help you stay objective (maybe your spiritual director).

8.      Support ministries or charities that mean a lot to you personally.  If we have income, we should tithe, just like we recommend to all Catholics.  I have always been struck by the example of St. John Vianney in this regard.  He spent a lot of time and effort raising money to bring his parish up to snuff.  Once the chapels and church and other accoutrements were in place, he continued to raise money, even begging the many pilgrims for money.  And what did he use it for?  To endow annual missions in other parishes.  He kept track of how much he needed to endow a mission, and would raise money continually for that purpose.  And once he finished one, he would start right away on another.  Here is a man who understood that money is a means to an end!!

9.      Be proactive in your entertainment.  What activities really help you relax and provide you with your necessary recreation?  How often do you need to engage in them to keep your mind and body keen and focused?  We need to be very careful in this area, because of our special responsibility to be spiritual leaders.  Our interior life directly affects thousands of people – the people we serve.  We can’t afford to be careless about what we let into our minds and imaginations.  And we have to make sure that we don’t start depending on entertainment for our happiness.  Our happiness is to be found in loving and serving God and his people.  Entertainment (TV, movies, video-games…) can serve as necessary recreation (“the bow that is always strung soon loses its strength,” as St. John the Evangelist put it once), but it can also become a drain on our energy, and even an addiction.  Other forms of recreation can often be even more beneficial – sports, real games (cards, Scrabble, ping pong…) played with real people, reading literature, hiking or walking outdoors in nature…  In this area, it’s also very healthy for us to find a small group of friends with whom we can recreate and relax together.  Unhealthy obsessions with acquiring or using material goods can stem from a psychological thirst for rest, companionship, or relaxation that we are not meeting in a proper way.

Well, as I said, I can’t give you a formula. But I hope that those reflections are of some assistance.  With this email I am sending along a prayer for you and your ministry.  God bless you!

I know we have a lot of holy priests and religious who read our blog. I would also like to invite them to provide insight into how they make these decisions.

PS from Dan: The book “Happy Are You Poor” by Father Dubay provides a fantastic treatment of this subject.

Consolation and Desolation: What does it really mean?

Q: Dear Father John, I know you wrote before about consolation and desolation in the spiritual life.  But I have a follow-up question.  When we experience some kind of desolation, how do we know where it’s coming from?  I mean, how do we know whether it’s really from God or not?

A: This is a great question – and an important one, for Christians in today’s society.

Consolation and Desolation: Grasping the Terms

First, we have to have a quick review of what we mean by “consolation and desolation” in the spiritual life.  Usually, these terms refer to the felt presence of God in our soul (consolation), or the absence of that feeling (desolation).  By faith we know that God is always thinking of us, with us, interested in our lives, and loving us with a personal, determined love.  We know that by faith.  But we don’t always feel that in our emotional world.  In fact, sometimes we can feel an intense and painful emptiness inside.  Sometimes we can feel absolutely no excitement or pleasure at the thought of spiritual things.  Sometimes we can feel dry as a desert even when we are at prayer: emotionally, we don’t even want to keep praying.  We are like children with their homework: they know it is good for them to do it, and they know they should do it, but they just don’t feel like doing it.

This lack of the felt presence of God, a lack of emotional pleasure or resonance regarding God’s will for us, is usually referred to by spiritual writers as sensible desolation.  The contrary is sensible consolation.

Now we can get to your question.  If you are experiencing desolation, it can come from a variety of sources.  Simply knowing what those sources are can help us reflect on one’s personal situation and, usually, identify its source.

Our Own Fault

First, desolation can be caused by our own sin.  We may be inordinately attached to something: some habit, some relationship, some hope, some fear, even some hobby or pastime that may not be evil in itself… Or we may have committed some sin that we haven’t confessed or repented of yet.  Sooner or later, disordered attachments will interfere with our relationship with God.  God loves us too much to let us idolize anything for long.  If we are following him, when the time is right he will speak to our conscience about putting that disordered room in our soul back into order.  During the struggle to decide whether or not to obey what he is asking of us, we can experience desolation, because as we dilly-dally, our hearts are divided.  In this case, we are actually pushing God away, and the desolation is our own fault.  This happens frequently in the early stages of the spiritual life, but can return with a vengeance even after much growth, when the spiritualized capital sins attempt to re-conquer the soul.

At times, it is hard to identify disordered attachments.  If you are praying regularly (including at least an annual spiritual retreat), doing a regular examination of conscience, going to confession on a regular basis, and receiving some kind of spiritual direction (or at least you have a friend or small group of friends to whom you make yourself spiritually accountable), and following the commandments of God and the Church, you should be able to recognize these disordered attachments when the Holy Spirit points them out to you.  If you are not following those basic spiritual practices, your desolation may have this cause, and I would recommend renewing your commitment to these means for spiritual growth that all spiritual writers recommend.

Our Fallen Nature’s Fault

Second, desolation can flow from advancing self-knowledge.  As we grow in the spiritual life, God allows us to know ourselves better and better.  We begin to see just how deep our self-centered tendencies really go.  We begin to see just how vulnerable we are to temptations of vanity, pride, and sensuality.  We begin to see just how helpless we really are, when it comes to growth in holiness, without the constant aid of God’s grace.  This can create a disturbance in our relationship with God, because we no longer feel worthy of the great love he has for us.  We truly love God.  We truly want to follow him.  But when we resist approaching him because we have discovered that we actually don’t “deserve” to be loved so unconditionally we begin to stumble. It’s like the spouse who has been unfaithful and has difficulty accepting their spouse’s forgiveness, or the mother who has aborted her child and simply can’t seem to accept God’s mercy.  But in this stage of the spiritual life, the specific cause of the interior resistance is often less clear.  Here again, we end up separating ourselves from God.

This hurdle has to be faced and overcome, in order to become spiritually mature.  You have probably already detected the real source of the spiritual reluctance that comes from this situation.  It is a subtle form of pride.  And the enemy of our souls will often seize on this, stir it up, and try to exaggerate it.  The truly humble soul responds to its own unworthiness with peace and joy, throwing itself into God’s arms with total abandon, totally conscious of its absolute need for God’s grace, and contentedly aware of God’s delight in showing mercy to his needy children.

The deep interior resistance so many people experience when it comes to activating that kind of abandonment shows just how difficult developing the virtue of humility really is.  It is the bedrock of the spiritual life, and digging foundations is never fun.  But you can do it.  Read the lives of the saints (especially St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul and St. Faustina’s Diary).  Read the Psalms.  And get on your knees in front of the Eucharist, simply learning to trust more deeply in God’s goodness by exercising whatever level of trust you can as you gaze at Our Lord, who has chosen to be there for you, no matter what.

The Doctor at Work

Finally, desolation can flow from God’s direct action on the soul.  God can take away the consolation of his presence, without actually taking away his presence.  This is a method he uses to purify the soul and to increase the soul’s capacity for love.  If we can keep following God’s will in our lives even when we are passing through “a valley as dark as death” (Psalm 23:4), we will emerge with a much more mature faith, a more vibrant hope, and a deeper love.  These are the theological virtues that unite the soul to God – and union with God is what we were created for, and what God yearns us to achieve and deepen.

So when he takes away interior consolation in this way, we can rest assured that his wisdom and goodness will permit us, when emerged from the darkness, to undergo greater consolations than we ever imagined, because our soul’s capacity to experience God will have been increased by God directly.  These periods of purification initiated by God are often called the “dark night.”  We can have dark nights of the senses, of the spirit, of the intellect… It is when God, the doctor of our soul, lays us on the spiritual operating table and takes direct action.  Our job in this case is to trust and endure by continuing to seek and embrace God’s will in our lives (the commandments, the duties of our state in life, etc…).  The recent book on Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, chronicles a truly amazing journey through this kind of darkness.

I hope these reflections have helped you identify both where your current desolation is coming from, and how to react to it.  If not, I recommend taking up the prayer Jesus taught us through St. Faustina, and making it the constant refrain of your heart and mind throughout this season of your spiritual journey: “Jesus, I trust in you.”

Sayings of Light and Love #22

A bird caught in birdlime has a twofold task: It must free itself and cleanse itself. And by satisfying their appetites, people suffer in a twofold way: They must detach themselves and, after being detached, clean themselves of what has clung to them.

Saint John of the Cross

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How do I deal with issues of advancement and self-promotion at work?

Dear Father Todd, regarding Father John’s post on “Give and Take” how does this combine with trying to be successful in a career, a type where if you do not make your accomplishments known, you will not advance?

A: Your question is a good one because when we are trying to faithfully follow Christ in a world where competition is fierce at times, it can seem like we are caught between a rock and a hard place: I want to follow Christ and have a successful career. Christ tells us in John’s Gospel that we are in the world but not of it (cf Jn 15:19); that is, that we have to live and work in it but that we don’t adopt its godless ways. It is a challenge for us.

First, Christ is calling Christians to have the attitude of self-detachment. What do I mean by this? I mean it in a two-fold way. There is nothing wrong with recognizing the gifts and talents we have received from God for the good of others and in having them recognized by others- unless we are bragging in an arrogant way- but our identity should never be based on this recognition. We are first and foremost sons of God by adoption. This is our primary identity. Also, we need to have an attitude of gratitude realizing that God is the Author of all that we have received and we are called to use our gifts and talents wisely but in a detached way. We need this spirit of detachment so as not to allow our abilities or duties to interfere with our union with God and cloud a proper vision of the human person. With our fallen human nature often the tendency is to let success and money replace God. St Luke tells us in Lk 16:13 that we can’t serve both God and money.

Second, we need to foster purity of intention in all our actions and achievements. This is hard at times as we can easily find ourselves doing things out of pride or vanity. To maintain purity of intention we need increase our union with Christ through prayer, sacrament (Eucharist and Confession) and self-examination (examination of conscience). These means help us to always give our best by putting our talents and gifts at the service of God and others. They also help us not to become self-centered, not to use others for personal gain and not to think we can do it without God’s help. A person with purity of intention is committed to God and to the common good. He doesn’t seek rewards.

Third, we need to be humble. Humility doesn’t mean weakness; it means recognizing that God is in charge, that He is God and I am not. All too often, people can live as if there was no God and can do atrocious things to others (ie: slander, calumniation, criticizing, etc) to get ahead in a career or because the other got the job and they didn’t. The competitive spirit is good but never at the cost of charity. As a Christian we can never stoop to those levels just mentioned. We may also experience our own sufferings along the path of life due to others who will try to get ahead at all costs, who will try to trample us underfoot or undermine our efforts. We need to be humble and upright before God and others and let our integrity speak. Humility helps us not to compromise faith and morals and to avoid deceiving ourselves.

With these three essential points that can help us to work hard on our career choice, keep God at the center of who we are and all we do and maintain a healthy consciousness of using all that God has blessed us with personally for the good of ourselves and the good of those we serve.

Yours in Christ, Father Todd Arsenault, LC