Finding conviction

Recently I was cut to the quick by a good friend. I was commenting about how inadequate I felt in proclaiming the uncompromising values of the Gospel. I know that God gave me certain gifts, and not without a reason. He wills, I am sure, that what He gave me be used for His purposes and for His glory. Still, there is the matter of my own relationship to the truth, a matter of conviction.

I wonder, for example, if in my speaking I am more showman than messenger. I wonder, if in my writing, I do not strive more for melody than for lyric. I am, I told my friend, at odds with myself. Who am I to hold up the Gospel when I fall so miserably short of it? Who am I to urge others to accept it when I am powerless to live the truth on my own?

You can't be righteous, my friend said, when there is a secret sin in your soul, an indulgence in wrong you are saving to the side. It may be pride. It may be lust. It may be a lack of forgiveness. Whatever it might be, you know what it is: an area that is unyielded to the light. That, my friend said, compromises your conviction.

It's not a matter of victory over some defect of character; it's the unwillingness to acknowledge that it is a defect. No one can speak with conviction and be yielded to darkness at the same time. Perhaps a too-cute image: You can't play footsie with the devil.

My mind flashed on Father Boehmike, an assistant pastor who used to come around to our classroom in grade school. "Do you see?" he'd say. "Do you understand?"

Like I said, my good friend cut me to the quick. I saw. I understood. The Gospel is not an ideal. The radical message of Jesus Christ was that all this was possible.

I sat in my parish church on Holy Thursday night and read, as I am wont to do on Holy Thursday night, the Last Discourse in John. In a deep and intimate and powerful way the Lord veritably pleads with the apostles and with us who would be His followers to understand who He is and why He has come. It is a conversation profuse with love and with hope, but at bottom, uncompromising:

"If you keep my commandments..."
"If you do all that I have commanded you..."
"The reason the world hates you is that you do not belong to the world..."
"He prunes away every barren branch..." 

I came away from my prayer that night with my heart yearning for conviction. I wanted to hide myself in the Rock, to stand firm on the Rock, to believe past the soft soap and the middle of the road and the half-hearted. I wanted His light to shine not only on my face but in my heart, to reveal every hidden thing now, not waiting for the last day and the certain judgment.

The world is covered in darkness, but that darkness must not extend to some secret alcove in my spirit. I know my entrenched attitudes, my compromises, my unyielding diffidence cannot be overcome on my own. I know it is Jesus who will gain the victory. But I must let Him in. Then my darkness will be unable to coexist with His light.

I know I am called to be a witness to His light, even as it shines on my weakness and failure. Of that I can write boldly and speak forthrightly and with conviction. -T.R.


written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on an unknown date

Nothing to say

I wrestle with a tide of issues that continually circulates in ecclesial circles. So many of these relate to the Church as institution: policies and procedures, legal matters and public positions, things the Church ought or ought not to be doing.

At bottom, though, I think people find themselves members of this Church for a more intimate reason. Apart from the swirl of issues and the din of debate, people seek God. And while some of us stick our noses in where we have little savvy beyond bluster and gall, we, too, stand before God, silent and alone.

There is, it seems to me, a kind of economy of religion akin to Gresham's Law. This principle, set forth by the 16th century financier Thomas Gresham, holds that when two coins have the same debt-paying ability, yet one has more intrinsic value, people will pay their debts with the less valuable coin and hoard the other one. For one modern example, people will pay their bills with federal reserve notes, but keep their silver certificates.

So, too, with the two coins of religion. I will enter the public debate with my reasoned arguments and righteous reasoning — all very lofty and irrefutable. My public coin reads "Our Faith teaches..." However, my personal coin reads "My faith is..." While both will buy me a place in the debate, spending the personal one costs me more. Besides, I may find myself bumbling and sputtering when I speak from the intimate hold of my faith, wherein what is of authentic value is often ineffable.

To put it plainly, it scares me to plumb the misty, vulnerable realms of my faith, the point at which I have union with God. At least in public, it is a coin too valuable to spend. Yet I know it is there, and there alone, that my faith is.

It is one thing to quote the great teachers and theologians, to point to the papal documents, to call up the philosophical treatise or the wise dictum; it's quite another to experience and to share from the faith in which intellect fails: to say with Mary: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior;" or to say with the psalmist: "From out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord..."

I'm no anti-intellectual; but I'm also no gnostic. My faith is edified by knowledge, but it is my unknowing which has brought me to God. My faith has been formed in the classroom, to be sure, but more, I think, outside of it: in the patient, inexplicable acceptance of a caring priest; in my mother's enduring reliance on God through unbearable pain; in the recognition of holiness in a friend broken by sin; in the victories only God could have gained in my powerless life.

Publicly, I'm ever at the ready to say what I know. Inside, though, in the tender and precious sanctum of a child before God, there linger awe and struggle, fear and comfort, a magnificent reality that informs my intellect better than my intellect informs you. It says, "Be still." -T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in 1990

What’s up? (Part 2)

Last week in Part 1, I presented a synthesis of views from priests of my acquaintance (with some of my own idiom to be sure) offering a certain somber view of Church and world. At one of the side altars in the cathedral of my mind a monument is inscribed: "Even wisdom and understanding are useless unless guided and perfected by God's grace." I try to remember that as I hear opinions expressed, or as I express my own; just as I am aware that many may consider my mind a prie-dieu in a closet rather than a cathedral.

As was expressed in this space previously, its seems to me also that something is up in the Church that's difficult to define. I don't pretend to have a prophetic view, but I am something of an aficionado of current events. Considering those, I'm not prepared to say whether matters have been stirred by the evil one or his henchmen. However, confusion and disorder are not fruits of the Holy Spirit. While the Church always has considered herself human, meaning imperfect, it looks to me that conditions are more grave than could have been fostered by mere human fumbling.

I do know that many people of goodwill are working very hard and very prayerfully within the Church to unite the children of Adam and Eve with the heart and mind of God. They listen intently to what people are saying. They work indefatigably to respond. However much damage has been done to our collective sensibilities, our faith confirms that God's still in charge.

Perhaps the very struggles about us are God's winnowing fan, a call to choose sides. Far be it from me to take credit for all the evil in the world, or to accuse you of it. But I am responsible for my part in it, whether by complicity or complacency. Parents have a responsibility to teach their children; but children also are bound, at some point, to take the lessons to heart and to be obedient. I can’t stand on the fence with God. He said be holy.

It's hard to listen to prophetic voices recounting the dire circumstances of our times. Particularly nowadays, we want no part of anything “negative." Sometimes I think we believe more in the power of positive thinking than in the power of God. What's up is being "up." But if being “up" is just a smokescreen for my own secret sin, or a dead conscience, or an indifference to the needs of others; then being “up" is false and Godless and empty.

This point makes sense to me: If someone says something that offends me – shaking his finger, say, calling on sinners to repent while looking me in the eye – then one of two things is true. Either he's right or he's wrong. If my relationship with God is good, then what could unsettle me – even the perorations of some modern day John the Baptist. If, however, I'm too proud for words, and my terms with God are not good. Then perhaps I'd better heed what Jesus said: Watch out!

The Church is still the place to be, for all the faults of her own making and for the confusions abounding because of the enemy. It's better than the darkness outside or the fair-weather friendship of mammon. Inside there's still faith, there's still hope. There's still love. Yes, besides all the issues that vex our modern consciousness, the Church still teaches that the most important thing we can do is to love God.

My priest-friends from last week are right. No program is going to solve the problems that beset the Church. No program is an end in itself. But community activities just might help us to do the very thing the priests insist must happen: They may help us to pray, to repent, to get right with God.

If we were to look about one day soon and notice that, hey, people are praying, people are repenting and receiving the sacraments; they’re loving God and one another – if that were what were up, that would be okay, wouldn‘t it? Who knows, there may be some of that up right now. – T. R.  

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on February 7th, 1988

What’s up? (Part 1)

Something’s up, they say. It's difficult to pinpoint: a current, a wave, an atmosphere. It's not business as usual anymore says one. No program is going to fix it, says another. There's an air of urgency and concern.

Concerns spring from deep within. They grasp for words to say what they mean, to describe their discomfiture. Perhaps Yeats’ words fit the times: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The story gets told in these terms:

Catholics are confused and torn - the ones hanging on. Half have quit. The faithful don't know who or what to believe anymore. They hear a prominent archbishop say the Holy Father is out of touch. They hear mixed messages about sin and morality, if they hear about sin at all. Respected theologians speak about moral conduct in situational and relativistic terms. Catholics have bought into worldly standards for marriage, sexuality, lifestyle. Never mind that rock music holds traditional values up to ridicule. the kids need “their" music. Love has become puppy love, more concerned with selfish pleasure than with sacrifice, patience and dying to self.

Homes for runaway young people are finding a new caliber of clientele. Sacred absolutes are falling on rebellious, indifferent ears, despite the utter hopelessness of circumstances. Failures to reach some of these young people are increasing. Some are going back to the streets from probably their last-chance safe havens. People in places of help use words like “diabolical" to describe what they see happening.

Even priests are sniping at priests. A holy brotherhood is becoming infiltrated with an undercurrent of defensiveness or suspicion or polarity. Condescension replaces dialogue. Smugness replaces tolerance. Hauteur replaces humility.

Everybody agrees that values have lapsed or gone dormant, but nobody thinks it's anybody's fault. It's not the teachers’ fault; it's not the young people's fault; it's not the parents’ fault; it‘s not the priests’ fault; it's not the bishops’ fault.

So the story gets told…

A priest has a faraway look of reflection. His tone is quiet. People don’t come to the sacraments, he said. They don’t come to Mass. They're bitter, angry. They don’t want to hear anything I have in say. They could care less about God or religion or the Catholic Church. They’ve turned it off any they’re not about to turn it back on. Many are full of hate. Many more are simply indifferent toward the Church

Catholics are having abortions, living together before marriage and they are very vocal about their rights in this regard. Their rights… they’re not interested in what the Church has to say about women in priesthood. They don’t care. They want what they want, so that’s their value. They say the Church is repugnant, but they want to be a priest in it.

Something is terribly wrong and putting a Band-Aid on it won’t fix it. One more program putting people on one more spiritual high, feeling good about themselves one more time – it's all useless. Do it. I don’t care. It won't matter, he said. What matters is what's underneath all this: the malaise, the emptiness. Only one thing is going to work and that's for people to change their lives and get right with God. The communion lines are long, but the confessionals are vacant.

Another priest shook his head. It's not business as usual anymore, he said. We‘ve been asleep too long. Satan is in the world and in the Church, too. You can laugh if you want to, he said, shrug, it off if you want to. The intellectually arrogant will go on with their mush, but the word of God still stands, yesterday, today, tomorrow – if there is a tomorrow. God’s not going to stand for 20 million abortions, rampant idolatry, moral decadence so depraved it’s unspeakable. God’s not going to stand for teaching elementary school children that choosing to act out homosexually is like choosing a new hat, and then teaching them so-called safe ways to indulge in repulsive practices.

The solution is simple really. We have to repent. We have to get on our knees. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 31st, 1988

Proposed beatitudes

I want to propose a couple of new beatitudes. Here’s the first:

Blessed are they who were born without will power, for they shall have to depend on God.

Spiritual power and will power are two different things. Some of us, myself included, have none of the latter, but all of us have the former in abundance – if only we choose to appropriate it.

The two really have nothing whatever to do with each other. I can certainly not bend God to my will any more than God needs me to accomplish His purposes. If, however, I abandon my will in favor of His, then I have the opportunity of being an instrument in His hands – if He chooses to use me. My faith confirms the certainty within me that He desires my instrumentality, albeit that we both know He has a poor workman on the staff. Puny as I am, I’m reminded of what Pope John Paul II once told the priests in Florida while visiting the U.S. We have a tendency to forget, the Pope said, that God can use not only our strength but also our weakness – that our weakness can be most effective in His service.

Along these same lines, I know that there is much about me that I am powerless to change. Even though I want to, I can’t, no matter how many resolutions I make. Left to my own devices, I’m beat, whipped, doomed – a hopeless case.

Go ahead, scoff. Say I could change if I wanted to. Browbeat me. Say I’m the master of my own ship. All the old chidings. They will do no good. I know that my only hope is not in will power, but in spiritual power. Not that I live, but that Christ lives in me. Not that I accomplish, but that God accomplishes in my behalf. I know that my victory will come in and through the beneficence and grace of Jesus Christ the Lord. He’s the real power.

My second beatitude says: Blessed are they who don’t make people their project, for they shall make some authentic friends.

It seems to me that there are so many religious programs around these days that some of them have begun to run their course for want of adherents. In the wake of this shortage of applicants, people have abandoned certain bounds of authenticity in an effort to lure others onto the roles of commencing experiences. I don’t think there’s malice in this: there’s just something cold about it. Recruitment activities seem to me to objectify “pigeons,” rather than spring from sincerity of wanting to offer a genuine friend a genuine opportunity to grow closer to God. Even as we are moved to share our faith with others, should we not begin by accepting them just as they are? In my own zeal to recruit, I have had ulterior motives in establishing relationships. I have found myself being less that honest. Better, I think, to have a sincere, unrecruited friend than a disillusioned acquaintance.

Maybe what it takes is more spiritual power and less will power. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 10th, 1988

Lent is a season, and not a deadline to be met

So how is your Lent going?

You say you forgot to get ashes on Ash Wednesday?

You say you obeyed the rules for fasting, but you had two big small meals and one gigantic main meal?

You say you abstained from meat, and for your penance you had the smoked salmon filet, or was it the king crab?

Is that what’s troubling you, friend?

I have a tendency to focus on the wrong things. I feel disheartened because I have not made a good start for Lent. I feel discouraged, and I want to give up before I have even begun. I focus on the letter and not the spirit. I have had some faint glimmer that this Lent would be different, but even so soon it is a weakening ember of hope.

I need the Lord’s help to abandon my scrupulosity. I need His help to understand that Lent is not a rigid schedule of fixed dates, a make-it-or-break-it deadline to get going or bust. I need His help to see that Lent is a season, like springtime. The calendar says that spring has not yet come, but already I have felt the warmth of sun amid the cool days. I have been invigorated by air that makes life worth living.

Would that the Lord would let me see that it’s always now, and never any other time. Let this day be that springtime day that comes unannounced, off schedule like a child’s hilarity, like a crocus in the snow.

I would be free of the shackles of my own rigidity, the smokescreen of excuses for my unwillingness to change. I need the Lord to show me in my heart that Lent didn’t begin without me, that Lent awaits me like a kind friend rejoices as his tardy companion arrives.

It’s funny how desperately I cling to the old way, as if I refuse abundant life. I can’t understand how I let myself be strapped by the lamest reasons like: It’s too late! I didn’t start on time! Bosh. Have I forgotten that the Christians sang in the Colosseum? Did not all the saints speak always and everywhere of joy? St. Augustine cried out, “How late have I loved thee, Lord!” St. Augustine, intercede for this foot-dragger.

The Lord made this day just as He made all the others. I need Him to open my eyes to the great power that comes from Him to turn my heart away from habit and self-seeking.

I have bought into the ways of the world, and my justification system is elaborate. Rather than renounce it, I have found ways to incorporate its values into mine. Surely my ideals have become gilded and spread about with cushions and lots of articulate and wise rationale.

I have accepted the cravings of the flesh, preferred the darkness, the solitary prison of half-measures. Innuendo is okay. Off color is funny. I don’t want the jeering labels of radical, prude, straight-laced.

I have listened to the devil’s lies, though I know that God’s kingdom is not a democracy.

If you didn’t get ashes and your fast was more like a feast; if your abstinence has been a delicious change of pace, Lent was made for folks like you and me. This isn’t late. This is now. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 8th, 1987

We know what Lent is all about, if we admit it

Back in my wild days of the barroom, we used to celebrate everything: anybody’s birthday, Tuesday, the full moon. You name it, we celebrated it.

Children were easy to love in those days in the warm glow of a couple or three whiskies after work. The feelings were all gushy and sentimental and fond, uncluttered by the realities of dirty diapers and having to feed them at ungodly times.

Come to find out, though, that celebration without accomplishment is so very empty, and fuzzy feelings don’t have anything to do with love. Love is something you do.

Lent starts this week, and like most Catholics, I find myself face to face with the great challenge of conversion, again. Somehow I think we Catholics have always known the real challenge of Lent; we can feel it in our bones, something very familiar and personal. Before the Great Council, there was a lot of hype about the rules and regulations and pious practices. Since the Council, there’s a lot of hype about there not being so many rules and regulations anymore and talk about pious practices is more loosely construed. Always, though, Lent was really something else: something inside and inexplicable and important, and we knew it. It has to do with little old me and God.

Here soon, Jesus will be going into the desert and beckoning me to follow Him. The desert, the vast, quiet, uneventful place devoid of the incessant messaging of the ear which has become our society. The desert, where there’s nobody to talk to but God, and I don’t want to go there.

It’s spooky out there, and hard and lonely and no good shows on. I stand at the edge and everything in me cries out forget it! No big deal! Who needs it! Bunch of nonsense! Why bother! Keep on keepin’ on, man!

Am I alone in this? We know the challenge of Lent, I’m sure. Fasting doesn’t have anything to do with some rule that says not to eat. That’s dumb. Fasting has to do with focusing our attention away from everything familiar and therefore distracting to us, even something as basic and ordinary as eating, so that we can satisfy our real craving, our hunger for God. Lenten practices, if you will, whether doing something or not doing something, whether required or self-imposed, are surely empty if they are so much stagecraft. We’ve always known that. The buzzing about the rules or lack of them is just one more delaying mechanism for coming to terms with what we know Lent is all about: seeing the truth about ourselves in relationship to God.

I’ve spent a lot of Lents letting things slide, and sure enough Easter was a zero. I did not rise with the Risen Christ because I had not died with Him. It was like those empty celebrations of yore. The new fire burned brightly and I was witness to it in my community, but the new fire did not burn in me. Oh, I wanted to celebrate and rejoice, all right; but I had eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear. I could not celebrate because I had not accomplished.

My friend Pete enjoys motocross, but he as little patience with people who want to talk about motocross who have not experienced motocross. They haven’t done it, he says, so they don’t know about it.

It’s one thing to feel all gooey and nice about my kids in the neighborhood tavern. It’s quite another to come home and have my kids give me a wide berth because of my ill humor and impatience and lack of interest in their affairs.

We’ve always known what Lent is about, and if you’re like me, you fight it tooth and nail. If you’re like me, you make small talk about the rigors and do whatever else you can to avoid confronting what your heart is screaming at you. It’s true I don’t know just what it’s screaming, what it’s saying, what the truth is. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to go into the desert where I can hear and see clearly.

I took one step into the desert one time, from the grass at the edge to the sand. Some journey, huh? Ah, you know what a journey it was. We Catholics, we’ve always known the challenge of Lent, known in our hearts. You don’t get to be an Easter people, with joy unsurpassed, with no sand in your shoes. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 1st, 1987