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St. Bonaventure: The Legacy, The Challenge, The Inspiration

Posted in Franciscan Spirituality, Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , on July 15, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Friday 15 July 2011

Today marks the end of the Solemn Vow retreat and the Solemnity of St. Bonaventure. What a notable day indeed! This month has been an interesting experience, spent in a part of the country in which I’ve not spent much time previously (I’ve been to the greater LA area three times before, but for much short stints).

Last night we celebrated the Eucharist in the chapel of the former minor seminary of St. Barbara Province, St. Anthony’s Seminary. It was an odd place in that it is well known in this area as “ground zero” of the clergy abuse crises nearly half-a-century ago. Yet, as we were setting up for our closing mass, the vigil for St. Bonaventure, a man showed up who was a high-school student there decades earlier who happened to be driving through. We invited him to stay and he did, praying during the intercession in thanksgiving for his four years as a student there because they were some of the best years of his life.

It was striking that such a place could both be incredibly significant, holy and meaningful for some and yet painfully associated with some of the most horrendous crimes of decades past. It was indeed a microcosm of our world: both a blessing and a place perpetually suffering from the imperfection and sin of human finitude.

Today my thoughts are with my friends, brothers and sisters at St. Bonaventure University in Western New York, as well as with the thousands of alums that “bleed Brown and White” around the globe. Today is our Feast Day and I celebrate the legacy of such a fine institution of higher education in this country. Founded in 1858, years before the Civil War, St. Bonaventure University – small as it is – remains a place of peace and education. It has, as so many small private schools in the Northeast have in recent years, suffered the challenges of declining enrollment and financial struggles, but it moves forward, educating yet another generation in the Franciscan tradition.

My hope is that the current and future administrations will wisely recall the mission with which they have been entrusted, placing the university’s energy and effort into highlighting the Franciscan charism that remains at its institutional core. Now is not the time to acquiesce to the ages-past notion that a small Catholic school must distance itself from its Catholic and Franciscan identity to attract students. Instead, quite the opposite is needed. Today’s students are looking for those places that distinguish themselves among the overabundant and nondescript schools that blur together like milemarkers along a highway. The premiere Franciscan University in the Americas, the entire Western Hemisphere, is better than that.

Today my thoughts are with my brother and sister friars throughout the world. Those who struggle to carry on the tradition that Bonaventure himself was entrusted with safeguarding as Minister General. It is quite something to have spent the last month living with Br. John Vaughn, OFM, the former Minister General (successor of St. Francis) of the Order of Friars Minor. He is also an inheritor of the position of fraternal service once held by St. Bonaventure himself.

Today my thoughts are with my friends, some professed Franciscans of one of the three Orders, others joined in charismatic sympathy, who study the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure. I think of the hard work and dedicated scholarship that has resulted in the emergence of excellent research in recent years. I am deeply honored to call many of these Bonaventurean scholars my dear friends.

Today my thoughts are with St. Bonaventure. He is my brother and an inspiration. I recognize Bonaventure’s intercession and presence in my life. He managed to negotiate three very different, yet individually important and intertwined worlds: the Order of Friars Minor, the Academy and the Roman Catholic Church. As a Minister General, as a theologian and teacher, and finally as a Cardinal of the Church, Bonaventure is remembered for his pastoral sensibility and humility – oh, how so many friars, theologians and bishops could learn from his example!

St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, ora pro nobis! And “Go Bonas!”

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Jesus Never Chastised the Poor: But He’d Have a Problem with Politicians and Wealthy Americans!

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

This reflection is now available in Daniel P. Horan, OFM’s book Franciscan Spirituality for the 21st Century: Selected Reflections from the Dating God Blog and Other Essays, Volume One (Koinonia Press, 2013).

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Not Needing God Anymore

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , on July 13, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

 

Wednesday 13 July 2011

My blog posts during these last four weeks have not included my typically occasional social, political, ecclesiastical or cultural commentary. That is not by accident. While I have remained true to my word to regularly post here, I do not have the same access to the news and other media that I ordinarily would. That is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that, at least in theory, such occlusive action would provide me with more freedom for prayer and reflection; and to a certain extent it has. The curse is that, at least in practice, I feel removed from both the “joys and hopes” as well as the “anxieties and grief” of the world. I’m not entirely sure of what is happening daily in the world.

As the number of days shrink until I return to the East Coast and once again return to my daily consumption of information and news, I’m sure I will have much to share and many things about which to reflect. Until then, I thank you for your continued reading, comments and prayerful support.

One of the things that we began to discuss today seems as relevant today as at any other time, a realization that is made without much knowledge of the most fleeting worldly news. As we reflect together on the composition of the world-wide Order of Friars Minor (OFMs), several trends supported by centuries of data raise questions for me.

It is well known that the numbers of “vocations” (in this case commonly used to describe the people entering religious life. A common definition, but one that so often leads to the general presumption that the term “vocation” can only refer to those who respond to a religious path of life) in the United States have not been as numerous as they had in previous decades during the twentieth century. Likewise, the Canadian and European provinces of the Friars – and quite likely among other religious communities in those national and geographic areas – have experience even starker declines in the entrance of young men into professed religious life.

While this phenomenon is much discussed in the “West,” one sees a boom in the number of young men in the developing world or the global south. Here one thinks particularly of Eastern nations such as India and Korea, but the trend is also reflected in some countries on the continent of Africa.

Similar trends, for various reasons, were once the case in the United States just as the number decreased rapidly in Europe. Immigrant populations, post-war social conditions and other reasons provided the nexus for religious-community growth in those years. But that stopped.  Why?

I should say here that I believe firmly that the Holy Spirit has always, in every age, called a certain number of women and men to live a form of professed religious life. Some respond to that invitation, while others do not. We’ve also seen socio-economic and cultural reasons for artificial increases in such numbers for a short time until many of those who, I would argue, were never actually called to this way of life left their communities in what has been remembered as the mass exoduses of the 1960s and 70s.

The Holy Spirit continues to invite young women and men to live as members of professed religious communities. The problem is that it is increasingly more difficult to hear that invitation, let alone know how to respond in an age when professed religious are hardly seen in the public square and commitment to such a way of life is rarely supported within the wider culture.

Part of the problem is the amount of wealth in our society. The affluence and comfort that comes with the way we live in the “post-industrial world” masks our fragility, finitude and dependence. Like so many Europeans during the industrial age before us, we have found ourselves “not needing God anymore” from social standpoint.

On the other hand, in those places in our world where the luxuries that so many take for granted in this nation hardly register as a dream, there is only God who can provide the hope amid suffering, the release amid pain and the promise of life unlike the destitution experienced by so much of the global population. I can’t help but wonder whether this daily existential encounter with one’s own poverty helps explain the large numbers of those willing to respond to the Holy Spirit’s invitation in our time.

This raises certain challenges, the solutions to which I do not yet have. One major hurdle in trying to wrap my head around this sort of trend is why abject poverty is the seeming ground for bountiful religious life. I wonder if it isn’t really abjection that God desires in providing the condition for the possibility of women and men responding to the Holy Spirit’s invitation with an echo of Mary’s Fiat, but instead a reminder of everyone’s need to embrace evangelical poverty.

Living as Christ teaches us in the Gospel – without anything of our own – is what all are called to do by virtue of baptism. This evangelical poverty serves, as liberation theologians so keenly remind us, as both a protest against abjection and as fecund grounding for Christian growth. In distancing one’s self from the overly hyper materialistic and consumption-driven culture of our society, one begins to recognize the neo-Pelagianism that summarizes the popular spirit that says: “we no longer need God. We can do (buy) it ourselves!”

Sure, one doesn’t say so with as many words, she or he continues to say “in God we trust” and sings some cheery songs at Church each week. But it is not our words that mark us. Jesus warned that it would not simply be our saying “Lord, Lord” that will cut it. Our actions indeed speak, shout, proclaim so much more than our words. We act as if we no longer needed God. We can afford to do so.

I don’t know what the answer is or even how to make sense of what I’ve been reflecting on here. I certainly wish to avoid romanticizing material poverty, that indeed threatens human dignity. Yet, there is something to be said about the distance that evangelical poverty can provide for those who seek to follow God more perfectly. Perhaps only then might the next generation of women and men religious be able to hear the Spirit and respond to Her invitation.

Photo: Stock

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Of Christ and Us: Who Do You Say That I Am?

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , on July 12, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Tuesday 12 July 2011

The question that stands at the heart of the Incarnation, the question that Jesus poses to Peter and the rest of his disciples in the middle of Mark’s Gospel (Mk 8:29), is not simply the most fundamental Christological question, but it is also the most fundamental question of theological anthropology – who is it that we are, who is it that I am? There is undoubtedly an overlap between the two, for as the Eastern Christian tradition recalls much more readily than we do in the West, when we become most human we become most like Christ (from the tradition of theosis or huiopoesis).

I’m thinking about this question today because we have begun the last week of our interprovincial Solemn Vow retreat. This week we are invited by Fr. Jack Clark Robinson, OFM, of the South Eastern Our Lady of Guadalupe Province to consider this question within the framework of two others: who am I in relation to the family of the Franciscan Order and who am I in relation to the Church more broadly.

There are indeed times when I believe that the question of Jesus to Peter in Mark’s account of the Good News was not simply a handy way to get at the messianic mission of the Son of God, as if to remind his followers and, millennia later, us of who Jesus is. Instead, I think that Jesus also needed a reminder of who he really was. We mustn’t forget that Jesus was also fully human and, like all human beings, grew into a fuller understanding of who he was as life went on. Scripture says as much in Luke’s account of the young Jesus with the teachers, after which he “increased in wisdom and in years” (Lk 2:52).

How is it that we increase in wisdom when we inevitably increase in years? Do we? The answer to the question of both who do others and who do we say that we are changes with those years. What does the answer look like? Does the wisdom in which we grow reflect the Divine wisdom that St. Paul talks about or does it reflect more closely the so-called wisdom of the world?

These are questions we can all grapple with along the pilgrimage of life. In so doing, may our journeys be ones that do bring us closer to becoming Son-like (huiopoesis), more and more like the children of God that we were created to be. While neither our response nor the response of others to us should sound exactly like Jesus’s (“you are the messiah”) because each person has a unique and unrepeatable identity, it should highlight the ways in which we are drawn more closely and personally into relationship with God, others and creation.

Our response should move more and more closely toward the response: “I am me, individually and uniquely loved into existence by God. As such, I am called to be evermore Christ-like in all aspects of my life and in whatever situations life places me.”

Photo: Church of Christ

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The Politics of Insecurity: Forgetting the Holy Spirit

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , on July 11, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

This reflection is now available in Daniel P. Horan, OFM’s book Franciscan Spirituality for the 21st Century: Selected Reflections from the Dating God Blog and Other Essays, Volume One (Koinonia Press, 2013).

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Fr. George Zabelka: A Military Chaplain Repents

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , on July 8, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

A friend forwarded this interview and it is certainly worth sharing…”In August of 1945 Rev. George B. Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Army Air Force, was stationed on Tinian Island in the South Pacific. He was assigned to serve the Catholics of the 509th Composite Group. The 509th Composite Group was the Atomic Bomb Group. He served as a priest for those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After 22 years as a military chaplain he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. What follows is an interview with him by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. Rev. George B. Zabelka went to meet his God on April 11, 1992.”

McCarthy: Father Zabelka, what is your relationship to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945?

Fr. Zabelka: During the summer of 1945, July, August and September, I was assigned as Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group on Tinian Island. The 509th was the Atomic Bomb Group.

Q: What were your duties in relationship to these men?

Zabelka: The usual. I said Mass on Sunday and during the week. Heard confessions. Talked with the boys, etc. Nothing significantly different from what any other chaplain did during the war.

Q: Did you know that the 509th was preparing to drop an atomic bomb?

Zabelka: No. We knew that they were preparing to drop a bomb substantially different from and more powerful than even the “blockbusters” used over Europe, but we never called it an atomic bomb and never really knew what it was before August 6, 1945. Before that time we just referred to it as the “gimmick” bomb.

Q: So since you did not know that an atomic bomb was going to be dropped you had no reason to counsel the men in private or preach in public about the morality of such a bombing?

Zabelka: Well, that is true enough; I never did speak against it, nor could I have spoken against it since I, like practically everyone else on Tinian, was ignorant of what was being prepared. And I guess I will go to my God with that as my defense. But on Judgment Day I think I am going to need to seek more mercy than justice in this matter.

Q: Why? God certainly could not have expected you to act on ideas that had never entered your mind.

Zabelka: As a Catholic priest my task was to keep my people, wherever they were, close to the mind and heart of Christ. As a military chaplain I was to try to see that the boys conducted themselves according to the teachings of the Catholic Church and Christ on war. When I look back I am not sure I did either of these things very well.

Q: Why do you think that?

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Finding Peace in the Eucharistic Prayer

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , on July 7, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Thursday 7 July 2011

While not used all that often, there are alternative Eucharistic prayers in the Roman Missal including settings categorized for Masses with Children and the, all-too-often underused, Masses for Reconciliation.

Given that our whole lives call for reconciliation, the acknowledgement of our individual and collective wrongdoings as well as the striving toward returning to right relationship with ourselves, others and God, it seems that the Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation (options one and two) should or at least could be used more often.

Last night I went to bed thinking about the Second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation. I have found myself thinking about the various Eucharistic Prayers rather often lately. Perhaps this is because my friar classmate and I will be ordained – God willing – in just a few months. The structure of the prayer, an adaptation of the Jewish table prayers made new and different at the Last Supper, has especially caught my attention.

Our collective prayer of thanksgiving, through the prayer of the priest speaking on behalf of all those gathered (for the priest is the presider and principal celebrant, but the entire Body of Christ is who offers the prayer of the Eucharist, a prayer of thanksgiving), recalls the entirety of salvation history and all for which we are grateful.

The so-called Institution Narrative provides an opportunity for the community to enter into the memoria, the “calling to mind,” what happened that night before Jesus Christ was betrayed. What follows is the entire prayer of the Church, the intercessory offering of our desire to be in communion with God and one another, scattered as we are throughout the world (Lumen Gentium no. 13).

It is the setting of the Second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation that I wish to share today. The words are to infrequently prayed, but the preface which I share with you below offers us much to consider. May we take the time to hear the words of the Eucharistic Preface anew, finding peace and the impetus for justice in the Eucharist we celebrate together.

Father, all powerful and ever living God, we praise and thank you through Jesus Christ our Lord for your presence and action in the world.

In the midst of conflict and division, we know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace.

Your Spirit is at work when understanding puts an end to strife, when hatred is quenched by mercy, and vengeance gives way to forgiveness.

For this we should never cease to thank and praise you.

We join with all the choirs of heaven as they sing forever to your glory…

Each Eucharistic Prayer Preface includes this basic structure, but this particular setting highlights the pneumatology (the focus on the Holy Spirit) in a way that strikes me as particularly relevant for our day. May we indeed find ourselves working to end strife, end hatred with mercy and forgive: then we will be living as Christians, proclaiming with our words and deeds the Kingdom of God.

(FYI: Tomorrow Prince William and Kate Middleton will be less-than two miles away from where I’m staying for the month on retreat. I wonder how chaotic Santa Barbara will be because of their visit).

Photo: Stock

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The Parable of the Young Adults (or, of Sheep and Harvests)

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , on July 6, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Wednesday 5 July 2011

I was struck by yesterday’s Gospel. Taken from the ninth chapter of Matthew, a few of the closing verses of the selection for the day caught my attention and spoke to me of the state of the world today. Isn’t it something how Scripture continues to speak to us in our own day? The images of sheep and harvest remind me of today’s young adults, those men and women from about 18-35. Those who are just setting out in life around college age to those who are a beginning to find their way in their careers and starting families of their own.

The passage from the Gospel of Matthew reads:

When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:36-38).

Having just spent a year teaching at a small liberal-arts college in New York, the first image that came to mind was that of the young college students first starting out on their own. Most of the freshman students were experiencing life “on their own” for the first time, having been reared in an age that is typified by the helicopter parent and the doting overseer.

So sheltered are some of these students prior to (and sometimes during) college, that they at once appear as sheep without a shepherd, children without parents to tell them what to do, how to do laundry, when to go to bed and what to eat. It can be a stressful time for many.

It is also a time when young adults really are able to embrace their own identities and establish relationships on their own terms. Previously, most had the compass of their families to orient their paths. Now they find themselves standing at a magnetic pole, equally able to move in any which direction. Statistically, it is clear that many, if not most, of these young adults are “un-churched,” largely unfamiliar with organized religion, dogmatic positions or religious practices. Simultaneously, these young adults are searching for meaning and desire to understand better what their lives are about.

What was planted, while perhaps occasionally nurtured by artificial fertilizer, as seedlings previously has begun to sprout and bloom. The harvest is upon us, but there are few there to gather the bounty. Instead, so many young people are left in the field, their roots planted wherever one is able to dig in, they lie in the harsh sun and cold night, full of fruit and potential, life untapped. They go to waste.

So many young people simply need a model or guide for the journey. They need a harvester who will recognize the bountiful harvest that has blossomed from the seedlings planted by their parents. But who will do this? Who will pay attention to the young adults? Who will teach them? Who will guide them? Who will shepherd them?

Today we cannot lose sight of the Spirit working through the Word of God. The harvest remains plentiful, the potential for justice, peace and God’s Reign in this world is abundant – but it requires laborers for the harvest. I understand some part of my own vocation to be one such laborer. Like so many others, I too was (or perhaps, still am) a sheep without a shepherd, yet the Franciscan tradition offered me a pathway and guidance for the journey. I believe it is partly my responsibility to serve the younger members of my generation and those who will come afterward as I have been so served by my peers and elders.

So many of today’s young adults are “harassed and helpless,” as hear from Jesus in the Scripture. So many factors lead to this state. What are we going to do about it? Are you willing to be a laborer in the field of God’s Kingdom?

Photo: Stock

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St. Francis, Humility and Preaching by our Deeds

Posted in Franciscan Spirituality, Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , on July 5, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

This reflection is now available in Daniel P. Horan, OFM’s book Franciscan Spirituality for the 21st Century: Selected Reflections from the Dating God Blog and Other Essays, Volume One (Koinonia Press, 2013).

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Praying With Karl Rahner: An Unexpected Grace

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , on June 29, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Wednesday 29 June 2010

On this Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, I found myself curiously reading a lot of Karl Rahner. It was initially some more “heady stuff” along the lines of his theology of grace, something that I wanted to return to as I was working through some other reflections of late. What had started out being a return to his theological insights on the presence of God in creation as Spirit led me to read some of his more spiritual and prayerful writings. Coming across his book Prayers for a Lifetime, I was struck by the prayerful reflections this theological giant left behind.

In the introduction to the text, Karl Lehmann, then bishop of Mainz and former student of Rahner’s, recalled a conversation someone had with Rahner about prayer.

To the question, “Do you pray?” Rahner once replied: “I hope that I pray. You see, whenever I actually notice, in all the big and little moments of my life, how close I am to that unutterable, holy, and loving mystery that we call God, and whenever I place myself there, dealing with this mystery, as it were, in confidence, hope, and love, whenever I accept this mystery, then I pray – and I hope that I do.”

The collection of his prayers I find very inspiring. Rahner’s theological genius is hardly disputed, even by those who do not care for his rather optimistic conclusions, yet his spiritual wisdom, the clarity with which he seemed to understand the ordinariness of humanity’s relationship with its Creator, is far too often overlooked.

These prayers, some rather lengthy reflections on a particular theme or season, have allowed me to return to one of the great theologians whom I’ve studied rather thoroughly since my undergraduate days. I never cease to be challenged, impressed and inspired by his work. Among his prayers are found an attempt to praise creation, consciously modeled after Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures and a prayer to the God of his vocation – two reflections of timely quality, both of which will likely provide some material upon which to reflect here in the future.

For now I wish only to provide the opening section of his book titled, “Opening.” It is enough for now, reflect on it – you will not be disappointed.

It is both terrible and comforting to dwell in the inconceivable nearness to God, and so to be loved by God Himself that the first and last gift is infinity and inconceivability itself. But we have no choice. God is with us.

On this feast of the two most revered Apostles, may we too find the terror and comfort that Peter and Paul knew in recognizing their proximity to Christ. May we never forget that God is indeed with us.

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