Franciscan Quote of the Day

It was my first introduction to the application of the Gospel to something besides myself. The first understanding that as a collective group, we’re complicit in people’s sufferings because of the decisions that our government’s making with our approval, our blessing almost, even if we don’t know it. We really sort of have to be more responsible to know what the government’s doing in our name.

~Dennis Apel in an interview with Heather King posted on her blog Shirt of Flame

Here’s how you know your life in Christ is bearing fruit:

In spite of your own suffering, loneliness, and pain, you’re welcoming. You’re warm. You’re kind (or you’re at least shooting for those things, and not just toward the people who can “do” something for you, but everyone). You’re in immediate, intimate contact with a few active drunks, someone who’s headed into or has just emerged from a psych ward, an incarcerated felon or two, several porn addicts, a young girl who’s pregnant out of wedlock, several women who have had abortions and are in silent, excruciating mourning, at least one stripper, several people in desperately unhappy marriages, about to be evicted from their apartments, or dying, a minimum-wage worker or two, at least three people who are certifiably insane, at least one U.S. Army chaplain and one peace activist (even better if they’re both priests and the latter is in solitary confinement in a federal prison), several homeless people (the more the better) and a whole TON of gay people, transgender folks, and sex and love addicts of all stripes…

If that’s not part of your circle–in my case, that IS my circle–you’re not getting out enough. If you aren’t sharing your struggles and heart with that circle, at the very least in prayer, something is wrong. Because those are the people Christ hung out with. Because “those people” are us: the people, the only people, suffering, struggling humans. Because if we’re going to be inviting people to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, we sure as hell better be inviting each other into our homes, our tables, our hemorrhaging, conflicted hearts.

If you’re afraid all that is going to “lower your standards,” you’re very much mistaken. There’s no lower standard than self-righteous fear.

Heather King, Shirt of Flame, The Homily I’d Give if I were a Priest

So it’s not a matter of being right on social justice and wrong on sex (nor of celibacy being a higher calling than marriage): it’s a matter of the ground of existence, whatever our station in life, being love. It’s a matter of worshiping an entirely different Master than the world, whose gods are security, comfort, efficiency, power, property, prestige and control. I wanted to say to my friend, Haven’t you ever wanted to bow your head in wonder? Haven’t you ever looked around for Someone to thank? In so many words I did say those things, and then I wrenched my hands, for I could feel her embarrassment for me and my “archaic” views, and stammered: “I actually believe it…I believe Christ is the Savior of the world”….

Heather King, Shirt of Flame, “Pope Francis”

No, no I never expected that there is a short-cut that bypasses the drudgery of human experience. I don’t want one, I want to drink to the chalice of my Lord. In my case (and isn’t this the common, ordinary state?) how non-glamorous, how ignoble this chalice! What does it amount to me with me? A sense of inner fragility and faintness which taps, knocks at the wall of my body too. I seem unable to face up to any pressure. I feel faced with an immense ‘trial’ utterly beyond myself, and yet when I look, where is the trial? What have I to suffer compared to so many people? I have good health, am surrounded with love, have everything I need, and yet life itself seems more than I can bear—the unutterable loneliness and emptiness, the mystery and obscurity. Yesterday, I heard of a poor woman enduring humiliating helplessness for ten years, and now, faced with new symptoms, her splendid spirit is breaking and she can take no more. Just one of millions similarly suffering from seemingly unbearable afflictions. And what relation has my life to hers? By comparison I have nothing to suffer. It is my hope that this ‘suffering’ of mine which is nameless, which really has no right to be called suffering, this inner ‘dissolution’ should be a way through which Jesus comes to others in grief and pain. I feel overwhelmed with everything: with the beauty of the world, with its terrible pain, with its evil and ugliness, the devilish brutality of man to man–with the word of God so mighty and so obscure. I could weep my eyes out with–I don’t know what! Oh, how fragile I am, without achievement; no human victory, no human beauty, only that which is he, who experienced in all its raw bitterness the human condition.

~Carmelite Ruth Burrows quoting a friend named Petra in Guidelines for Mystical Prayer via Heather King’s fantastic blog Shirt of Flame.

To be forgiven when we know we don’t “deserve” to be forgiven is radically transformative in a way violence can never be. To be forgiven does another kind of violence: to our whole tit-for-tat notion of crime and punishment. To be forgiven makes us realize that, unbelievable as it may seem, God needs us for something. We have a mission.

Heather King, SHIRT OF FLAME: THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

One morning just before dismissing us, the priest said, “Stay as long as you like. This is your home.”

Oh, this IS my home! I thought, and wandered around for a bit, then went and sat before the Blessed Sacrament myself. Of course the Church is no one building; every Catholic church is my home. But that I could leave my earthly home, drive eight minutes, and sit before Christ is a sacred mystery and gift beyond all imagining.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame

To dare to believe that we are truly loved, not for anything we have accomplished, earned, produced, learned, achieved, or sacrificed for, but simply for existing is a reality that can hardly be borne. We want that love more than anything; we search for that love all our lives. Yet we’re somehow not able, not equipped to see it, perhaps, except by prolonged, sustained suffering—and uniting our suffering to Christ’s. Thérèse did seem to be able to experience herself as fully loved—because she loved so much herself—and in the end that was perhaps her greatest gift: to God, to us.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

But on the earthly plane the ascension into paradise seems to begin in just such homely acts as putting on a good face and pretending to enjoy the Christmas candy. Someone breaks a lunch date to which we’d been looking forward for weeks. Instead of showing we’re hurt, we can say, “I’d so still love to see you! When can we reschedule?” A friend inadvertently upstages our birthday party with the announcement of her pregnancy: we take a bit of a back seat and rejoice for her with the rest of the guests. That’s not dishonesty; that’s maturity. That’s refraining from making every little thing about us. That’s caring about the spiritual well-being of the other. That’s wearing the world like a loose garment.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

But as Day, whom I’d long admired, well knew, true poverty is never, ever voluntary. Poverty consists precisely in all the ways you absolutely don’t want to be poor. Poverty consists in a long succession of events not going your way. Poverty consists in being stripped down to nothingness.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

We do not come to Mass to have a social, an aesthetic, or even a spiritual experience (though sometimes we do, and that’s beautiful); we come to beg for mercy. We come to stand in back of the church, beat our breasts, and realize it is a complete and utter miracle that we are allowed even to be in the same room with the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings; the Great Physician, the Great Priest, the Savior of the World, our One, our Only, Friend. That is why it doesn’t matter whether we have any friends at church, whether we know the priest’s name, whether he even speaks our language.

It only matters that we come, in fear, in trembling, in as much purity of heart as we can muster. It matters especially now.

Because we have to prepare for the baby.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame.

I wonder whether, when the desire for Christ burns bright enough and hard enough, loneliness isn’t the inevitable ash. I wonder whether to follow a Savior who subverts all power systems—social, political, economic, even familial—does not lead us into a kind of necessary and terrible exile.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

The world laughs at such people but as a friend who is undergoing a genuine conversion observed the other day, “Christ’s love is…extravagant, isn’t it?”  That Christ’s love is extravagant means that it is always better to err on the side of hungering too much, rather than too little; better to wear our hearts on our sleeves rather than let them harden from cynicism and despair; better to be willing to let our hunger make us look like fools  than to pretend we have life under control and that our hunger doesn’t matter. To love Christ is to suffer the full unanesthetized pain of not being in control, not being able to “make” things go our way, not being able to make the edges of life match up. To attend Mass is to bow to mystery, not certainty.

~Heather King, “Vespers”

Religion isn’t something we tack on to life like a crumbling doily, in other words: religion suffuses life, drives life, sets life on fire. “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” said Christ (Lk. 12:49). “Religion consists of the belief that everything that happens to us is extraordinarily important. It can never disappear from the world for this reason,” noted the Italian poet (and suicide) Cesare Pavese.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

This movement from the immature, fretful craving to have things the way we want them, to the way that is patient, cheerful, nonobtrusive, and oriented toward others, is a true death: the death of our egos, the death of our identities as people who respond—can only respond—a certain way. Grace is needed, to be sure, but preparing the ground for continuing grace requires prayer, meditation, and consenting to the long, hard work of pruning our will in such a way that we are open to maturity.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

To choose violence is not to cut off the possibility of suffering, in other words, but rather to cut off the possibility of good. It’s to forestall the transformation that always comes about when we refrain from violence, for Christ’s sake, when violence would be expedient. Christianity has never, ever claimed to be expedient. Christianity has never remotely claimed to be about results, efficiency, numbers, worldly success. Hitler was efficient. The death camps got results. Christianity is about the one lost sheep.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame