Happy Saint Valentine’s Day to one and all…just remember the reason everyone is wearing RED today was originally because of a martyred priest who wrote a letter the night before his execution on February 14, signed “from your Valentine.” All that red out there today is a good opportunity for us to remember that true love is always measured by one’s willingness to take up the Cross. Saint Valentine, pray for us, especially for couples to discern God’s will for them and to know how God is calling them to become saints!

And…in case you’re feeling cold this winter…if it’s any consolation, the Pope is cold too – record snowfall has hit Rome THREE TIMES in the last several days!

 It’s the first time any snow has fallen in Rome since the 1980′s, and never in living memory has snow hung around for more than a day or two in the Eternal City.

I do have one question though, which anyone who has been to Rome must also be wondering… How do you ride a motorino in the snow???

So stay warm, everyone…Lent is just around the corner…and that means SPRING!!!

Mary, Star of the Third Millennium, pray for us!

Since several people have asked me about the picture on the banner for Live Greater, I would like to explain why I chose a parachutist and a sunset to be the primary image on the page. Here is the whole (crazy!) story…

In the summer of 2009 I made a directed Ignatian retreat in Rome, guided by a wise Jesuit priest who has given the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius to many priests and lay people in the Eternal City. I had just finished my doctoral dissertation after several years of intense work, and the last few months had been particularly difficult and exhausting. I knew that I needed a spiritual jump start, as my prayer life had been very unfocused during the final stages of writing and editing. I made this retreat “in the world,” that is, I was still working every day but I made time each day for recollection and spiritual focus. For thirty days I set aside two hours for meditation, following the plan of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, going through the life of Christ and asking the Holy Spirit to help me apply the insights contained in the Gospels to my present life situation. It was an amazing experience of God’s understanding and love present in the midst of the very specific crosses and challenges that I was facing at that particular moment in my life.

One of the themes that kept coming up in the retreat was, “What does it mean to be free?…Where is there freedom in my life?” It was a question that kept pulling at my heart…there were days when it seemed that I was trapped by the monotony of the daily grind of my vocation – sitting at a desk day after day, always the same, not terribly exciting, nothing “amazing” happening nor seeing any fruit, spiritual or otherwise, from what I was doing. This is of course the daily lived reality of many vocations, and it is no different for a priest. So I kept asking myself and the Lord in prayer, “What does it mean, Jesus, that you want me to be free?” Because in many ways it seemed to me that the overwhelming amount of work I had to do made me anything BUT free…obedience to God’s will seemed at times to trap me in the same boring place rather than let me be free to do amazing and exciting things….

OK, so for 30 days I wrestled with this and other questions. At the end of the retreat, I was blessed to be able to take three days to go to Assisi, the home of Saint Francis in the mountains of Umbria, to finish off the retreat. On the last day of the retreat (July 31, the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as a matter of fact!) I took a hike up the mountain above Assisi, stopping at the hermitage of Saint Francis where he often used to go and spend time in solitude and prayer.

So, I was hiking down the mountain, and I had finished saying the Rosary, and decided to turn on my ipod for a little inspirational music…and I looked out and saw…a PARACHUTE!! High above the little village of Assisi, a parachutist was twirling around (just like the one in the picture above!), going this way and that, slowly descending into the majestic valley below, as the setting sun beamed over the mountains and illumined the whole scene with a glorious and radiant light.  I stood there in awe at the beauty of God’s creation and the human freedom embodied in that moment. It is hard to explain exactly how I knew, but I instantly understood that this parachute was the answer to the question I had been asking in my prayer for the last thirty days:

Someone who is descending in a parachute is simultaneously the most trapped and free person imaginable! On the one hand, they are strapped in by all sorts of belts and buckles, and there is absolutely no way to go back! They made an (admittedly totally crazy!) decision to jump, and now they are “stuck” with their decision…they are not free at all to do “whatever they want.” However, having made that irrevocable decision to jump, that commitment if you will, they now enjoy the most amazing freedom a human being can know – the parachute opens up above them, and if they relax and enjoy the ride, they are going to see the most amazing views and enjoy the most incredible ride! Whatever fear they may have had about jumping is now best left behind – if they just surrender to what is happening, the fact that they are bound by the parachute actually increases their freedom to do what is impossible – to soar like an eagle and take in the immense beauty and grandeur of God revealed in his creation.  Is this not the way in which the Holy Spirit of God’s love and mercy carries us through the hills and valleys of this life? So much happens that is beyond our control, and we must always be faithful to our baptismal promises to be obedient to the Word of God in every moment, but if we have a good parachute, we can be confident that we will be held up in safety…and from that place of confidence and peace we can marvel at the view as, day by day, the amazing plan of Divine Mercy for our lives and for the entire world unfolds.

The icing on the cake was that just at that moment my ipod shuffle brought up “Oh Praise Him” by the David Crowder Band…which is pretty much one of the all-time most amazing blow-the-windows-out-for-Jesus songs of praise and joy at what God has done for his people!

I stood there on Mount Subasio above Assisi, my eyes transfixed by the parachutist descending into the plain below, listening to the words, “Oh praise him, he is holy!” and the tears just streamed down my face. “Trust me, my son,” our heavenly Father seemed to say to me in that moment, “if you persevere in following me, I will show you the immense joy and freedom that my Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love, wants to anoint your life with! Day by day, my plan of goodness and love is going to unfold in your life, not without the Cross, but always with the abundant outpouring of the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit: joy, love, mercy, peace, and all the rest.” It is a moment that I have not ceased thanking God for since.

And that’s why there’s a parachute at the top of this blog…

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” – 2 Corinthians 3:17

Mary, Star of the Third Millennium, pray for us!

 “A light to reveal you to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.”  (Luke 2:32)

Today Joseph and Mary bring Jesus to the temple to present him to the Lord, and Simeon takes him in his arms and blesses the God of Israel with these prophetic words. Today is known as Candlemas, one of the cross-quarter days of the Celtic calendar, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The light has grown by nearly an hour since Christmas and will continue to grow by leaps and bounds as we make our way to Easter, just nine weeks away! In other words…spring is coming!!

These flowers are called Candlemas Bells…also known as Snowdrops – they are a sign of hope that spring IS going to come and IS going to push winter away! (Although this year we have barely had anything resembling winter around here!) There is a tradition that an angel helped these Candlemas bells to bloom and pointed them as a sign of hope to Eve, who wept in repentance and in despair over the cold and death that entered the world after she and Adam had been cast out of paradise.

The custom of blessing candles on this day is an ancient one. Blessed candles have a sacramental nature – physical objects which contain a spiritual reality and draw us into the presence of the Holy Spirit who shines his light upon us. They reveal to us both the nature and the cost of our Christian vocation.

Today marks the anniversary of death of one of the great witnesses of our times, Father Alfred Delp, S.J., hung in a Nazi prison on February 2, 1945. Throughout his life, Father Delp had a great devotion to the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. He prayed constantly for the grace to become like a candle, spending the wax of his life so that others could behold the light of Christ in the midst of the darkness that was the Third Reich. During the final Advent of his life, he wrote a series of sermons from his prison cell about the ultimate personal coming of the Lord which he was about to experience:

“The fate of humankind, my own fate, the verdict awaiting me, the significance of Christmas, can be summed up in the sentence ‘surrender yourself to God and you will find yourself again.’ Others may have you in their power now; they torture and frighten you, hound you from pillar to post. But the inner law of freedom sings that no death can kill us, life is eternal.”

Father Alfred Delp, and all martyrs of the culture of death, orate pro nobis…teach us and obtain for us that freedom in the Holy Spirit which will enable us to joyfully surrender to the sword of the Word of God that pierces our heart and draws us to the Cross.

Mary, Star of the Third Millennium, pray for us!

After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the conversion of Saint Paul was probably the most important event in the Church’s history. The preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, the evangelization of the Roman Empire, and the writing of the majority of the New Testament all flowed from this personally transforming moment of grace. At the opening of the Year of Saint Paul back in 2008, Pope Benedict preached at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls about what exactly happened to Saint Paul in the moment of his conversion:

“We have gathered near the tomb of St Paul, who was born 2,000 years ago at Tarsus in Cilicia, in present-day Turkey. … For us Paul is not a figure of the past whom we remember with veneration. He is also our teacher, an Apostle and herald of Jesus Christ for us too. … Let us not ask ourselves only: who was Paul? Let us ask ourselves above all: who is Paul? What does he say to me? In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul gives a very personal profession of faith in which he opens his heart to readers of all times and reveals what was the most intimate drive of his life. “I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2: 20). All Paul’s actions begin from this center. His faith is the experience of being loved by Jesus Christ in a very personal way. It is awareness of the fact that Christ did not face death for something anonymous but rather for love of him – of Paul – and that, as the Risen One, he still loves him; in other words, Christ gave himself for him. Paul’s faith is being struck by the love of Jesus Christ, a love that overwhelms him to his depths and transforms him. His faith is not a theory, an opinion about God and the world. His faith is the impact of God’s love in his heart. Thus, this same faith was love for Jesus Christ.” (Homily for the Opening of the Pauline Year)

I know myself as one loved by Jesus Christ. In essence, this is what we are saying when we profess the Creed, pray the Our Father, open up the Bible, or invoke the Holy Spirit. If at times we might struggle to see this love in our daily lives because of the presence of suffering, that difficulty in no way changes the truth of our identity we have received in our Baptism.  Let Saint Paul’s example of receiving God’s love, from which everything else in his vocation flowed, inspire you to have the courage to do the same. Holy Spirit, as you burned brightly in Saint Paul’s heart and soul and inspired his courageous witness to the Gospel, we ask you to fill each one of us with the same confidence in the Father’s love, so that we can bear every hardship with courage and boldly show others how immensely and abundantly they too are loved.

Mary, Star of the Third Millennium, pray for us!