Franciscan at Home

To order these books and films from Ignatius Press click here.  Or call 1-800-651-1531. Let them know you saw the ad here.

This is a paid advertisement in the October-December 2020 issue. Advertisements should not be viewed as endorsements from the publisher. 

As a catechist, you hopefully talk about Jesus constantly. You talk often about prayer: teaching people how to pray, leading them in prayer, and organizing retreats and times for your students to encounter Christ. You study Scripture to prepare for your lesson and ground your teaching in the Word of God.

But do you know him? Do you talk to him?

It is easy to confuse our work for Jesus with our time with Jesus. But if we are not careful, we will pour ourselves out day after day until we find ourselves dry.

Talking about Jesus all day or studying the Scriptures for the sake of a lesson can give us the false impression that we have a healthy prayer life. Continue to pour yourself out without frequent attempts to refill, however, and burnout is inevitable. The burned-out catechist will lose his temper, say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or be a bad example of Christian charity. Even worse, a burned-out catechist will become disillusioned with the Church and lose faith.

This is not something that only happens to others. We are not immune. Even if we are talking about Jesus all day, our spiritual life can suffer.

Words of Caution

C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend, Sheldon Vanauken, with some words of caution. Vanauken was asking Lewis’ advice regarding theology as a career. Lewis suggested the following:

I think there is a great deal to be said for having one’s deepest spiritual interest distinct from one’s ordinary duty as a student or professional man. St. Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I should have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation: and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap. Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring and repellent in the job may alienate one from the spiritual life. And finally, someone has said, “None are so holy as those whose hands are cauterized with holy things”: sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want truth for her own sake: how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm.[1]

It might be helpful for catechists, particularly those whose primary occupation is working for the Church, to read this quote often. What is he cautioning against?

First, we might confuse our work for our prayer. Simply because someone loves studying Scripture does not mean they love God. Just because you are energized after teaching a great lesson about Jesus does not mean you are advancing in the spiritual life.

Second, he warns that hardships in the job will turn us away from the faith. Perhaps we become bored. Even worse, we may become scandalized by something that eventually turns us away from God and the Church. 

Third, he warns that it may all become monotonous or “just part of our job”, rather than sacred, beautiful, and special.

Life is a Journey

We are on a journey. Our life, we know, is not meant to be static. It is rather an ever-deepening growth in union with the God who created us. He deliberately left an emptiness within us, a chasm, a desire. That longing is an invitation to set out and begin to seek God, to develop a relationship with him, which grows and develops in stages.

If you look at books on the interior life, you will notice that they are riddled, if not titled, with words such as navigating, journey, passages, heights, depths, valleys, nights. This is the language the Church uses for the journey of union with God in her attempt to explain what is mystical in earthly metaphors. The journey is spiritual, but because of sin, it is arduous and a struggle. The Catechism tells us, “Prayer is a battle.”  It is also, of course, in every way worth it.

Begin with the End in Mind

This journey also requires some supplies and preparation: prayer, sacraments, formation, grace; but perhaps the first thing we need is a map, so we know where we are going. The map must be unrolled all the way, past all of the benchmarks of conversion which we have become so familiar with lately in our work of formation: trust, curiosity, openness, seeking, and the big one: discipleship.[1] This benchmark, disciple-making, “drop-your-nets” conversion point (think St. Edith Stein reading St. Teresa of Avila and declaring, “This is the truth!” or St. Peter falling to his knees crying, “depart from me Lord, I am a sinful man”) is the focus of much of our missionary efforts. The movement into a place of intentional discipleship is absolutely essential and fundamental. The problem is when we begin to see discipleship as the end goal.

The end of our spiritual life is not discipleship but union with God. This union finds its fulfillment in the beatific vision of heaven but is meant to begin and deepen in stages here on earth. When we help people reach a place of discipleship, we have to be careful not to leave them on the side of the spiritual mountain without a guidebook, stranded because they haven’t learned to recognize the signposts. What may seem like an insurmountable peak or an impassible precipice or a never-ending night might just be a sign that they are about to reach a milestone in their journey.

The artist Hieronymus Bosch is a mystery of Art History. His role in the Northern Renaissance has made him a curiosity who has been admired, copied, and perhaps disdained as a madman. His paintings are fantastical always and religious usually, but religious in a unique, sometimes troubling and psychologically dark manner. He left no written documents or letters that might explain his ideas about painting, but he is mentioned in the archives of the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, a Netherlandish religious confraternity. His father was an artist, as were three of his brothers. He rarely dated his paintings and there has been endless speculation about his work, his life, and the meanings of his paintings. However, his work is full of intense expressions of the urgency of the human condition, of which Death and the Miser is an exceptional example.

While most of Bosch’s famous works include many figures crowded into strange environments, this scene of the miser’s bedroom is focused on one person, the man who has lived a life of greed. He has come to the last moments of his life; the final battle for his soul is happening. We are given an opportunity to watch his life unfold in a simultaneous narrative.

In the foreground, we see him in the fullness of life depositing money into a lockable chest, the keys for which are hanging from his waist. Also hanging from his waist and passing through his hand is a rosary. This indicates a moral conflict: praying and hoarding wealth do not go hand in hand except in the disordered mind of the miser. The room includes other attributes of worldly prestige and gain such as armor and documents sealed in wax (likely contracts or loan documents). Remember that usury was, and is, the sin of lending money at exorbitant rates of interest, a likely source of income for this miser. In the chest a demon holds open the bag for the coins. Indeed, demons are everywhere in the room, lurking around and poking their heads from behind a curtain, from under the chest and from over the canopy. Above the canopy is a vaulted passageway and the bed seems to be receding into a void of darkness. Death itself, with the face of a skull, enters through the door with an arrow. In the bed the miser, emaciated with a sickly color, is at the end. It is time to for him to decide: repentance or damnation. Salvation hangs in the balance! Which will it be?

To order any of these Bishop Fulton Sheen books or dvds, call 800-651-1531 or visit www.ignatius.com.

This is a paid advertisement and should not be viewed as an endorsement by the publisher. 

To learn more about and to download the free Discipleship Quad Kit in English click here, and in Spanish click here. Or call 740-283-6315.

In December of 2009, I was hospitalized for four days in two different hospitals with a blood platelet crisis. Platelets cause your blood to clot when necessary and I didn’t have enough of them (ITP). I had been fighting 3 separate occurrences of cancer since 2003, and while the cancer was no longer present, the treatments (including two stem cell transplants) had been so brutal that I was constantly in the hospital for something.

This particular hospitalization occurred the week before Christmas and came on the heels of a deep inner darkness, a time of great difficulty both spiritually and emotionally. However strange as it might sound from the outside, I found this stint in the hospital to be a great blessing. Having spent many long periods of time in hospitals, I am at home in them. This four-day period became a sort of retreat for me where the darkness lifted and I felt renewed in body, mind, and spirit.

Just a couple days before Christmas, I was released from the University of Chicago Medical Center. My wife drove me back to our home in South Bend in the afternoon. That evening I needed to go to the drug store to get the five prescriptions that awaited me. I was feeling well enough to drive and, frankly, I wanted to experience some autonomy and independence so despite my weakened condition, I decided to go and get them myself.

While I was waiting in line, I noticed a short little Christian book on fasting which seemed like it was jumping out from the stand in the waiting area. (Yes, in Indiana you can still find Christian books in drug stores.) If books could talk, this book was shouting at me! As I browsed through it, I saw that it laid out biblical reasons for fasting and included testimonies about how fruitful the practice of fasting has been in the life of this pastor-author and his congregation. Longing desperately for more fruit in my own life, I purchased it and spent most of the night reading it. The next day, I drove to a local convent’s Eucharistic Adoration chapel and finished reading it, using the Scripture citations in the book to look up and read all the passages directly myself. As I studied them, I could feel my heart burning.

Now it’s not like I’ve never fasted. Fasting was a part of my “re-version” twenty years previous as a young college graduate. But I was a different person then, much more youthful, naïve, and prone to excessive enthusiasm. As my Christian conversion deepened and moved from a lot of emotion toward a more lasting and quiet commitment, I encountered a Catholic Church which seemed rather unenthusiastic about fasting. Except when I was around people who had gone on pilgrimages to Medjugorje, whenever the topic came up, the topic of fasting was usually met with so many warnings and calls for prudence, moderation, and caution that it seemed like fasting was something the Church actually wanted to discourage. My impression was that in the eyes of most Catholics, fasting was really something only for zealots and extremists. To even bring up the topic made people look at you funny. Well, I didn’t want to be a zealot or an extremist, so I avoided fasting altogether, except during Lent when it was “safe” or perhaps secretly for special occasions. I pursued other “safer” routes towards closeness with Christ.

This little book from the drug store rekindled some long smoldering embers. It pointed me towards the biblical basis for fasting. I was familiar with many of the biblical stories, but it was like the scales were falling off my eyes and I began to notice things that I have never noticed. During the ensuing month, I spent many hours in that convent chapel reading and praying about fasting, as I sat in the presence Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

Then a couple weeks later, I had a conversation with a devout Catholic doctor friend about the spiritual practice of fasting. I wanted to make sure that it would not hurt my health to fast as I had made a commitment to my wife that I would always do what the doctors recommended. (This promise was to alleviate her stress about her husband having cancer.) As anyone with medical issues should do, I asked him if I could fast. He replied that nobody had ever asked him that. He requested that I give him a little time to read and think about it, and I said, “Of course.” Then only a day or two later, he emailed me some material that actually encouraged the practice of fasting from a physiological point of view. I was surprised but excited as I really wanted to begin as soon as possible. This was the green light I needed to overcome my fear of being a zealot and a fool, a great step forward towards the practice of fasting for me.

“Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” How often people have said this with a wry smile as they cope with an untimely interruption to their well-ordered (or not-so-ordered), scheduled events.

Once, now many years ago, I met the chalice. Of course, I had seen many, but I met one when I was at Beuron, when a friendly monk, who had charge of the sacred vessels, was showing me the treasures of the sacristy.

Every Ash Wednesday around the globe—in lavishly tiled basilicas, in wood planked chapels, in modest oratories with dirt floors, and in carpeted and cushioned suburban parishes—Catholics are called by Christ himself to reflect on the three great activities of Christian discipleship:

“When you pray…”

“When you give alms…”

“When you fast…”

For nearly two thousand years, Catholics have read, re-read, and reflected upon these three passages from the sixth chapter of Matthew. When the Ash Wednesday Mass concludes, the following forty days—all of Lent—is observed within this context.

How many Catholics understand that a normal living of the Christian life is to be composed of a healthy dose of all three? Sure, we’re supposed to pray. Everyone believes that. Giving alms (once we get past the archaic word) is also commonly accepted. In the United States and many other countries, giving to charities and doing service work is considered a normal part of our civic life. Nothing too unusual here.

But fasting? Who fasts? And if we do fast, isn’t it just obedience to some minimal Church norms during Lent? But where does Christ or the Church say that fasting is to be done exclusively during penitential seasons such as Lent? Where does Christ say that it should be so rare and so minimal? And where does he say that it is to be exclusively penitential? Nowhere. Yet for some reason these things are precisely what most of us think. Let’s take another look at what he and his disciples actually said and did when it comes to fasting.

When Jesus was preparing for his public ministry, where did he go and what did he do? He went out into the desert and spent forty days praying and fasting. Was Jesus doing penance? Of course not. He never sinned. He was preparing himself spiritually, seeking closeness to his Father in heaven. So, while doing penance is a very good reason for fasting, Jesus gives us other good reasons to fast.

How important was his fasting in this time of preparation? Consider Matthew 4:1-4: when the devil appeared to Jesus to try to thwart his mission, the very first thing he tried to do was to get Jesus to break his fast! Yes, fasting is that powerful and the devil understood this profoundly.

Later in his ministry, when Jesus’ disciples discovered that certain demons could resist their prayers of deliverance, Jesus informed them that some demons can only be cast out by prayer and fasting (cf. Mt 17:21). Obviously there is a power in fasting that goes beyond prayer alone.

To pray is good. To give alms is good. But fasting is the glue. In striving for holiness, prayer lifts us up. Almsgiving coupled with prayer is a selfless movement of love that powers us higher; but fasting allows us to soar to supernatural heights otherwise unimaginable! This is not because we ourselves are in control, but because fasting is an abandonment of control. It is a radical letting go that, coupled with sacramental confession, allows all barriers to our acceptance of God’s love to be broken.