What Makes It All Worthwhile

The meeting went phenomenally well. It was easy, seamless, and jovial--certainly not the stress-fest we thought it would be. The Candidates' presentation--both first and second year--was a joy and was something that got everyone in a groove. Our regional minister and our regional spiritual director were in attendance for the pastoral and spiritual visit, and I had met our minister before a couple of times, and I'd remembered where I saw Br. D before: the regional day of recollection at San Xavier del Bac back in May, 2006--he was our tour guide.

Yesterday evening, we all received the most beautiful email from our minister. She and her husband are the original torch bearers of the dream, and have rallied around them several top-notch people that have made the dream so close to reality. The email is so beautifully and prayerfully written that I think it's worth sharing. This is what she wrote:

Subject: Graces

You are a grace.

We have received many blessings and many of God's graces these past six-seven years as we have been growing our Franciscan community. I hope each one of you know that God put us together for many purposes - it is not, nor was it, by chance. You have been chosen.

The ongoing formation presentation was a testament to the power of sharing with one another, being vulnerable, letting go, and building up the Body of Christ. What joyfulness you brought to today's meeting and to the fraternity throughout its journey in becoming an established fraternity. God has given us you! You are a grace.

For the Council members and Commission and Committee chairs and members who unceasingly serve others, including one another and our fraternity and beyond, you, too, are graces.

Our fraternal and pastoral visit was another grace given freely today. Each of you helped to make our forming community into an emerging fraternity. Thank you for sharing the graces that God has given you with Saint Clare Emerging Fraternity so it can continue to grow in many ways and into an established fraternity. Special thanks to P__ B____ who patiently and skillfully took our reports and data and assembled them into a tidy and detailed notebook that is easy to follow and as R__ stated, sets the standard for all other fraternities regarding business affairs.

It appears that the Region at its February 2008 meeting will include on its agenda a recommendation to approve Saint Clare for establishment of a full fraternity. Your work you have done, through praying, persevering, letting go, willingness to share your talents, offering your skills, laughing, crying, all for the glory of God is a grace! We are called to serve as Franciscans. Thank you for embracing our commitment to serve. Celebrate!

Peace and joy.

I have had many struggles in the last couple of years, especially in the last year or so. Some of them have come directly from the politics inherent in any organization; some of them are just the Dark One working his mischief. I have a long way to go; however, I would never have gone as far as I have without our Minister, her husband (who is our co-formation director as of the last election), my current sponsor (the other co-director), and the incredible circle of women who comprise the current crop of Candidates, both first and second year.

After this moving weekend, I am re-energized and ready to tackle my several more months of candidacy. There is no doubt in my mind after this weekend that I am where I am supposed to be.

Cruising the Intertubes

I've gotten back into my habit of cruising several excellent blogs, including the perennial favorites of Curt Jester, Fr. Z's What Does the Prayer Really Say?, Roman Catholic Blog, and Whispers in the Loggia.

Here is a sampling of my recent favorite posts:

Deep Six the Sixties

Dissenting Cadre Quiz and PLRC-SAAM infection spreading???

California Catholic on the Motu Proprio

Letter-writers defend Fighting Father Malloy

No News

A satirical moving tribute to Marty Haugen, Pastoral Musician of the Year
Side Note: gads, and the plethora of his music I used to sing... you can almost make his music respectable when you have the organ accompaniment. Lil and David worked hard to obliterate the Kumbaya flavor of his music and did a fine job of it. The guy isn't even Catholic, for heaven's sake!

A Quaker on Defective Churches and "Subsistit In"

While We're All Busy Being Offended...

So I keep pretty busy with my reading. After a thorough confession (thank you Fr. David from the Fathers of Mercy, an Order of which I am a big fan--thank you, Fr. Hoorman for being so comfortable with your orthodoxy that you invite them back again and again), I'm back at Mass and back in the groove.

Formation starts again next month, and I finally have an active mentor. The formation duo has added texts to now more fully supplement "Catch Me a Rainbow Too": "To Live As Francis Lived," "Francis: The Journey and the Dream," and the "Secular Franciscan Companion."

I have a prayer request: please pray for Bernadette, the formation director of the St Francis Fraternity in Phoenix, and her family. Her son-in-law was tragically killed after one of our monsoon storms.

Peace.

Its Just My Blue Blue Mood*

I don't know quite how to say it, but I guess I'll just say it: I'm discouraged.

This weekend I was slated to present Chapter 5 of "Catch Me a Rainbow," the soft-cover (spiral) text used by many Fraternities for Formation. The title is "Listening to Scripture." I thought it a great topic to ruminate on in our usual round table way that we do things. There are great things to discuss in the first part of the chapter, especially in terms of asking, "How do you listen? What are your methods?"

I really liked the chapter because it has a subtopic on fundamentalism, and within that text in CMaRT I sensed subtle jabbing into those who observe the Tridentine rite. I wanted to explore that phenomenon within the Church, that movement that pushes for ecumenism with the non-Catholics, but refuses to be brotherly to those of our brethren--separated or not--who do prefer the Latin Mass.

Well, that didn't happen. See, our formation director... well, let me state for the record that her teaching methodology and her knowledge and background in terms of Franciscanism is second to none--she learned under Regis Armstrong, OFM Cap., that great Franciscan scholar. There is one other who recently transferred who has the same background, and we are so very blessed to have them. They make the Saturday formations and the ongoing formations wonderful and edifying.

That said, our formation director has this one little flaw: she is adamantly against anything that existed prior to Vatican II. If any of us bring up the Latin Mass in general conversation, she gets this wild look in her eye and a set to her jaw. I know she knows of my position in terms of my growing respect and understanding of the Latin Mass (I never have figured out how we went from there to here in terms of Liturgy, but that's beside the point). So, knowing she knows this, and sensing that she knows I know of her aversion to anything to do with the Tridentine era, she proceeds to hijack my chapter to vent about her peeves regarding all sorts of things with the 'fundamentalists' within our own faith.

For an example, she was going on about if a woman had uterine cancer, she had to ask her priest if it was within Church rules to have surgery, the conflict being that she had to be open to children. She often speaks of how demeaning the robes nuns were required to wear, and how they were to conduct themselves, and all their restrictions. These and other things were brought up, my chapter taken WAY out of context and I was given no opening to get it back on track. I was astounded at her vehemence--tolerance indeed!

Franciscanism is all about peace and joy... and demonizing the Tridentine Mass and those who prefer it?

I look at it this way in terms of my formation: it is the closest we have in this modern day to the Mass that Francis heard. It has not, and never has been, declared illegal; in fact, I was reading earlier this week that Papa Benedetto is moving closer to making the Latin Mass on a more equal footing with the Novus Ordo. After this weekend, I'm inclined to cheer the fact more than usual.

If I may digress...

The dawning of a new age that Vatican II was to open has instead gone awry: the overflow of lay participation they imagined has never materialized--every parish I've been in constantly scrambles to fill serving spots at Masses; vocations are down in most areas; attendance is down; scandals perforate the very fabric of faith; people do not know their faith. One of the things the formation director criticized was the memorizing of the Baltimore Catechism; my argument is that if it's Truth, what is wrong with memorizing it? It's not saying you can't further explore, but if you can't even get the facts out, how can you ever defend the Faith?

[a phenomenon I have observed out here in Phoenix is that the parishes that allow either the Tridentine Mass to be said or the Novus Ordo in Latin are extremely healthy parishes. St Thomas the Apostle on 24th Street in Phoenix and Corpus Christi in Ahwatukee come to mind, parishes that are happy and healthy and seem to have a greater number of seminarians compared to most]

All I remember of CCD was sitting in McCready Hall and singing "If the devil doesn't like it, he can sit on a tack--OUCH!" I remember coloring a lot. Nothing formative remained with me twenty years down the road. My catechism kids, though, are getting a much better grounding: they went to the Perpetual Adoration chapel last week; they have gone through a Seder meal; they know the difference between the Old Testament and the New (I barely did until I was in my twenties); they have picked saints from a broad range of choices for their Confirmation names with excellent reasoning in their essays, things of this nature. I quiz them from my copy of the Baltimore Catechism and they do pretty good--I didn't know and couldn't explain the answers when they were my age.

The times are a'changing... thank God.

But anyway...

We were given time in this session to discuss our May presentation. This has been a bit of a heartbreaker as well. I have a fellow Candidate who treats me as a leper (oh, the irony! and was one of those who nominated me for chair! gadzooks) because we didn't select the topic offered, and pretty much refused to participate; barely speaking to me isn't an answer either. Then the formation director steered our subject matter--not that the topic was bad (it's actually excellent), but it was the passivity with which it was accepted by the majority--and the minimization of the role of the priest we were hoping to have come to be our guest speaker really saddened me. I guess I'd better tell old Padrino not to bother.

So... in my state of mind by the time we dispersed on Saturday, I couldn't bear to attend Sunday's meeting. I was disillusioned and frustrated and disappointed. I know everyone at some point goes down this road when they're on this journey, the turn to that road prompted by individual things. And I know it will get better.

But for now, I'm in a blue mood.

~~

Two ironies in the past couple of weeks:

I ran across a beautiful San Damiano cross in a gift shop, gold paint on white resin in a pretty bas-relief; I don't usually buy things on impulse, but I did buy this and have Fr Alonso bless it for me. I didn't find it at the Franciscan parish, nor at the usual places: I found it at the gift shop of a Jesuit parish, St. Francis Xavier's Marian Shop on Central Avenue. Go figure.

Then the score today became Jesuits 2, Franciscans 0, when I opted to bypass the Franciscan parish. I can't bear to deal with leaving Mass angry at the showboating and the disrespect of people's work time (he made Ash Wednesday Mass almost two hours--people had some explaining to do, unfortunately) during work week by a particular priest. I couldn't chance it on the most holy of weeks. My boss later told me that Mass was said by Padrino, but it's a crap roll, and... no. No, I opted out of that, and took a different chance: I went to St. Francis Xavier today for Mass--and the third of Tony's Tuesdays (although I left my Novena stuff in my Christian Prayer book in the car). I don't know who the priest was, but it was beautiful, appropriate, orthodox, quiet and--get this!!!--thirty minutes even with the extra Gospel excerpts. There was no circus on the altar--mostly just Father doing what he needed to do to say Mass, not a Sacristan trotting across every five minutes, and things of that sort.

I am blessed to work for an attorney who frequents Mass during the week and who usually goes to Franciscan Parish, so now he knows what I mean when I return from there and say, "it ran long," with a roll of the eyes. On Ash Wednesday, the normally unflappable Boss was seething, and finally understood my frustrations.

Listen: I'm not one of those who advocate what my husband calls "drive through Masses"--I'm not a toe-tapper or a watch-watcher. But it's rude when it's a weekday Mass and it runs past, say, forty-five minutes. I'm all about GOOD music and appropriate liturgy, but if the Church wants people to continue to come to Mass during their lunch hour, they need to respect that time. Today I found that respect.

Thank you, Father Wonderful Jesuit (I don't know his name) for a beautiful Mass that I needed badly.

Yes, a Candidate for the SFO trumpeting the Jesuits! What is this world coming to? *chuckle*

~~

I leave you with this, from the Gospel of John from today's Mass:

My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. You will look
for me, and as I told the Jews, ‘Where I go you cannot come,’ so now I say it to
you.

Simon Peter said to him, "Master, where are you going?"

Jesus answered him,“Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, though you
will follow later.”

As sad as this passage is and to the sadness to which it leads, I can see the hope.

We will follow later.

_____________________
* Thank you, Mr. Orbison.