Last Sunday, I introduced a brief three-week treatment of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Rules for Discernment.  The first step, though not necessarily the most important, is necessary, for if we are not even aware of the thoughts, feelings, and desires that are moving within us, we will not make much progress in the spiritual life.  I hope you have been more attentive to these movements as they come up throughout the day.

The second step is to understand.  This is by far the most complicated, and it is really at the heart of the teaching of the Rules of Discernment.  The 14 rules that St. Ignatius proposes are ways of coming to understand which voice is speaking – that of the Good Spirit, or that of the Enemy.  By understanding whose voice is speaking, we are then better able to take action, by accepting or rejecting that voice (more on that next week).

We do not have the time or space to address all of the rules, so I will just make a few remarks that are, in my mind, the key takeaways from the rules.  Let’s begin by quoting the first rule, just so you can see what the rules look like, but also to point out an important qualification that St. Ignatius makes regarding these rules:

The first Rule: In the persons who go from mortal sin to mortal sin, the enemy is commonly used to propose to them apparent pleasures, making them imagine sensual delights and pleasures in order to hold them more and make them grow in their vices and sins. In these persons the good spirit uses the opposite method, pricking them and biting their consciences through the process of reason.

The important summary here is that the rules for discernment really only benefit those who are striving to grow in holiness.  If we are unconcerned about making progress, unconcerned about sins, then the voice of the enemy will leave us with words of pleasure that what we are doing is no problem.  The Good Spirit tries to break us from our complacency, stinging us with words that try to make us aware of the peril of continuing down this path.  But if we do not really care and we are not convinced that what we are doing is wrong, we will happily ignore the uncomfortable suggestion to repent and remain set in our sinful ways.  

On the other hand, the second rule says that when we are striving for holiness, these two spirits act opposite.  The evil spirit tries to sting us, telling us we’re wasting our time with prayer, following the teachings of the Church, etc.  He might say something like: “You’re missing out on so much!”, or “You can think for yourself, you don’t need the Church to tell you what you can and can’t do.”  I think you get the idea.  The good spirit, though, continues to offer encouragement, and even if we are stumbling, and the enemy is trying to distract us, our hearts are fundamentally fixed on the Lord, wanting to do His will, wanting to grow in holiness, and so we keep moving forward.

The next two rules treat the topic of spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation.  These are the ups and downs of the spiritual life that we are all subject to, no matter how holy we are.  There are times when God feels very close (consolation) and times when He feels distant and unresponsive (desolation).  We must understand that the evil spirit tries to use those moments of desolation to discourage us, but the good spirit will always be working to sustain us, always offering us the grace necessary to persevere through the darkness, to lead us back to a place of consolation in the future, and to eternal life at the end.

Perhaps a simple thing to remember is this: when we are earnestly striving to grow in holiness, we can be at peace knowing that the Lord always speaks with encouragement.  The enemy, on the other hand is, always trying to discourage us.  That may be a bit simplistic, but I think it’s a good place to start.

So as we go through this week, and as you continue to be aware of the thoughts, feelings, and desires, in other words the voices speaking into our lives – ask the question: Whose voice is speaking?  Understanding this is a key skill in the spiritual life and a means to being set free by the Holy Spirit.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: February 18^th | Religious Brother, Artist, Dominican| Patronage: Artists

Now we know him as Blessed Fra Angelico. “Blessed” because he has been beatified, though not yet canonized. “Fra”, a shortened version of “frater”, Latin for “brother”, the title for a mendicant friar. “Angelico”, a nickname given him for his devotion to God and attentiveness to his brothers in the order. But he had been baptized just Guido.

We know little about his family, but Guido was born in 1395 not too far from Florence Italy. He must have expressed an artistic bent from a young age because by the time he was 17 he had already joined an artistic guild in his hometown and was soon hired for a few projects at the Church of St. Stefano del Ponte. We don’t know what twists and turns led him from his paintbrushes in that Church to his joining the Dominican order, but 1423 he has taken the religious name Fra Giovanni (often surnamed “de Fiesole” distinguishing him from all the other Friar John’s throughout the order.)

Following the Lord always asks us to sacrifice our own will for God’s will. Did Guido struggle to make that sacrifice? Florence was booming with artists and painters – it was the epicenter of the budding renaissance movement! What would it cost him to become a religious? Would he lose himself, lose his joy, lose his gift? Yet didn’t Jesus speak directly to everyone wrestling with such questions: “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25) Jesus knows a key truth about us: freedom is not found in blindly following our desires! Were we to acquire for ourselves the entire world, were we to unrestrainedly follow our urges and instincts, were we to do whatever we wanted … we would not find ourselves free, but enslaved. 

And so Guido entered the Dominicans. He chose to trust God’s will above even his own. And soon he discovered that in following God, though we must entrust our freedom and future to Him, He does not leave out of His plan anything that is authentically ours, authentically good. There, in the Dominican convent, Fra Giovanni was asked to assist in illuminating manuscripts. Of the few pages we have of his, filled first with the words of scripture and prayer, the images that he weaves around and among those sacred letters leap from the page. We see not only his skill, but his love in carefully imagining the scene. The color, the lightness, the joy, the balance that pervades so many of his frescoes is visible in the tiny scene of the Annunciation crafted within the first “R”. 

He would go on to paint that scene – the Annunciation – many more times. Every single one is different. Each shows that he had returned again in his prayer and heart to the place where Mary said “yes” and God was conceived. He also took up anew the person for whom he was painting. When illustrating that manuscript, he uses exquisitely small brushstrokes to give features to Mary, Gabriel, and God, to let the reader come face to face with them. When painting for the altarpiece for a church in his hometown, the scene is vivid, exquisite, colorful, and tender. He uses perspective and light to captivate anyone who would look upon it, and places to the side Adam and Eve in their rejection of God’s plan. And when painting for a simple lay brother in his own monastery, the scene is reminiscent of the choir where that friar lived and prayed and welcomed the Lord into his own heart. 

Our talents, gifts, joys, and desires are also places to encounter the Lord, and help others to encounter Him. The question is whether we will entrust those parts of ourselves to God’s will?

–  Fr. Dominic Rankin routinely looks for freedom and fulfillment in the wrong places. Once again, the saints remind us that it is found only in God.

As I have mentioned in a previous bulletin article, I have been involved for the past two years in a Spiritual Direction Training Program offered by the Institute for Priestly Formation.  At the heart of the teaching is understanding and applying the 14 Rules of Discernment proposed by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises.  These rules have their origin in an experience the saint had while recovering from an injury.  As he thought about different directions he might follow in life upon his recovery, he became aware of an important truth, described in his autobiography:

From experience he knew that some thoughts left him sad while others made him happy, and little by little he came to perceive the different spirits that were moving him; one coming from the devil, the other coming from God. (Autobiography, no. 8)

The fact that we have two opposing voices speaking to us is something we as Catholics generally acknowledge, but perhaps our best image of this is those cartoons which depict a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, leaving the person to try to figure out which voice to follow.  While this image may capture the reality generally, it is far more complex than that, thus the several rules of discernment proposed by St. Ignatius.  All the rules of discernment can fall under a basic formula that we as Catholics can follow.  The formula involves three steps:  1) Be aware  2) Understand  3) Take action.  

For the next three weeks, before we begin Lent, I would like to reflect briefly on these three steps, one each week.  While there is so much more that can be said, I am hopeful this introduction will open us all to a more attentive experience of prayer, such that we are able to discern when the Holy Spirit is speaking, and when another voice, not of God is speaking.  In knowing which voice is speaking, we can choose how to act based on that understanding.

The first step is being aware.  Whether we know it or not, there is always a voice that is speaking into our lives.  That is the first thing to acknowledge.  By knowing that, we can pay closer attention to what has our attention.  In other words, we are invited to notice our thoughts, feelings, and desires as they come up throughout the day.  This is the raw data for the discernment of spirits.  Having thoughts, feelings, and desires are not inherently sinful.  It is rather what we choose to do with them that determines their moral value (more on that in a later article).  

Living a life of spiritual maturity is more than just taking time to pray each day at specific times, necessary as that is.  A truly spiritual soul is one who is always aware of God’s presence, and the moment-by-moment opportunity that we have to consciously choose to love Him and follow Him as He communicates to us.  But we will never make those decisions to follow Him and reject the voice of the enemy if we are not aware of what is going on in our hearts and minds throughout the day.

Perhaps an exercise you could try this week is set an alarm or a reminder at some fixed intervals throughout the day – perhaps every hour, or a few times a day.  Then pause and just notice what your thoughts, feelings, and desires are.  Don’t think too much about them, or try to figure them out.  Just notice them, perhaps jotting them down.  This does not take much time or effort at all, but it is an important start to realizing what St. Paul encourages us to do, that we should “pray at every opportunity in the Spirit.” (Eph 6:18)

Father Alford     

Feast Day: February 5^th | Virgin and Martyr| Patronage: Sicily, Malta, & Gallipoli; Nursers, Jewelers, Rape Victims, Sufferers of Breast Cancer,  Sterility, Natural Disasters, and Torture | Attributes: Maiden mistreated, imprisoned, visited by St. Peter; tortured by pincers, amputated breasts.

St. Agatha is one of those saints that we know desperately little about except that where she was from (Sicily) and when she was killed (under the Decian persecution, around 251 AD). We have legends of her beauty and purity, accounts of her choice to remain a virgin and the angry reprisals inflicted upon her by the powerful (spurned) Quintianus. It seems she was miraculously cured, for she survived for a time the horrible injuries and indignities before dying imprisoned.

When writing or speaking about martyrs, we often run out of details, or simply cannot fathom their endurance, and conclude our account with the simple truth that “they died for the faith.” But when I look to try and then apply the example of their lives to mine, or seek to incorporate something of the grace they were given, I come up short. How does one “die for the faith”? What could possible carry me from an ordinary Morning Offering to standing steadfast before the worst tortures and still saying “yes”? Would I have their same endurance? Did it hurt as much as I imagined it did? ‘

To unravel this conundrum, I want to turn to the Church’s wisdom as regards martyrs. We start as always from Our Lord: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” Jesus calls out in His most famous sermon (no jokes to be found here!)  Later, before His own passion: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” These were realities that the Early Church endured: its members encouraging those hauled into the arena, praying for those who abandoned the faith, and honoring those who had been killed. Quickly it was these, the highest of witnesses to Christ [martyron in Greek] who were hailed as the greatest of saints.

St. Augustine sharpened this definition, clarifying that martyrdom is not based on the punishment you endure, but the reason for the punishment. (Plenty of Donatists were going around claiming to be martyrs because the government was being hard on them … Heads up: unfair taxes don’t bump you to the highest ranks of heaven, and neither does being penalized for heresy…) St. Thomas Aquinas further hones the Church’s definition of martyrdom to being killed for a truth of the faith. (In this way, John the Baptist is a martyr, not because he was killed for faith in Christ per se, but because he was killed for his denunciation of adultery). This logic has been applied more recently to saints like Maximilian Kolbe (a “martyr for charity”) and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (technically killed for her Jewish ancestry, but who remained imbued by Christian love until the end). Neither were killed specifically for their faith. They could not have apostatized and saved their lives. But because they did hold onto Truth and Love to the last, and by God’s grace had both the fortitude and charity to do so, we acclaim them not only saints, but martyrs.

What do we discover amid all these developments over the centuries, and all these examples of martyrdom? I take away one simple truth this week: every martyr died for Christ, but never generically, never ambiguously. Agatha died because she chose to live as a perpetual virgin. John the Baptist died because he had the chutzpah to call Herod (and Herodias) out for their fornication. Maximilian Kolbe because he offered his life in place of a doomed father. Teresa Benedicta because she refused to evade the Nazi’s, saying instead “come, we are going for our people.” 

Each died for a particular way that they chose Jesus and followed Jesus – perpetual virginity, the truth of marriage, self-sacrifice, accepting the cross – our discipleship must be similarly particular! We cannot be generic saints! The Lord is calling us to a particular way of following after Him, and only a “yes” to that specific emulation of our can carry us through whatever persecutions may come our way. 

– Fr. Dominic Rankin has only slowly realized that the particular way he is called behind Jesus is often found in his inbox or on his desk (or floor!). I would love more precision (or maybe what I’m really hoping for is greater glory…), but it seems that fortitude and charity, and truth and love, currently intersect there.  

A few years ago, there was quite a dustup in the Catholic world when headlines started coming out that Pope Francis was thinking about changing the Lord’s Prayer!  In fact, a quick Google search resulted in the following headline: “Pope Francis made this big change to the Lord’s Prayer.”  I even remember somebody telling me how upset they were that the Pope was changing the most familiar prayer that we as Catholics know.

The rumor of the Holy Father’s change came from an interview that he did in which he was asked about a new French translation to be used in the liturgy.  The new translation addressed the petition: “lead us not into temptation”, and it would now take the form (in French) to be more like: “do not let us fall into temptation.”  When asked about this change, the Holy Father was supportive of the decision the French bishops had made, reportedly saying: “It’s me who falls. It’s not Him who pushes me into temptation, as if I fell. A father doesn’t do that. A father helps you to get up right away. The one who leads into temptation is Satan.”

The Holy Father’s comment was in no way a suggestion that the Lord’s Prayer should be changed for everybody, but it did give an opportunity for us to better appreciate this sometimes confusing petition in this prayer we love so well.  So how are we to understand it?  As is often the case, we can find a more than adequate answer from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

This petition goes to the root of the preceding one, for our sins result from our consenting to temptation; we therefore ask our Father not to “lead” us into temptation. It is difficult to translate the Greek verb used by a single English word: the Greek means both “do not allow us to enter into temptation” and “do not let us yield to temptation.” “God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one”; on the contrary, he wants to set us free from evil. We ask him not to allow us to take the way that leads to sin. We are engaged in the battle “between flesh and spirit”; this petition implores the Spirit of discernment and strength. (CCC 2846)

This petition, along with “thy will be done” upon which we reflected last week, is a very helpful one to invoke each day.  As human beings, we are constantly subjected to temptations, both from within and without.  In those moments when we come to understand that we are being tempted (not by God), we should not try to rely on our own willpower.  Rather, we cry out to the Father who loves us: “lead us not into temptation”, which is a cry for His protection and strength, for as He reminds us: “without me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) We make this prayer with the confidence that St. Paul had in the Lord when he wrote: “I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me.” (Phil 4:13)

Speaking of temptations, it strikes me that all of this confusion is a subtle tactic of the deceiver, Satan, trying to distract us, even to the point of distrusting this petition, for he knows how powerful these words proposed by Jesus are in thwarting his attempts to lead us off course in doing God’s will.

Father Alford