I am on vacation.
Sleeping as Blogger so beautifully automatically posts this at 7:30 a.m.
Thank you technology. Thank you Catholic Herald for the 5 vacation days. And more importantly, thank you sleep.
As is usually the case, any trip home to visit my family and the farmland of Minnesota brings much introspection on my part, as I step back from my downtown city lifestyle and return to my sleepy hometown, population 3,922. With Seth in my life now, after a week of watching my older siblings interact with their spouses and children, the introspection only seems greater.
My plans...our plans...oh wait, have I been paying attention at church lately?
It's about His plan.
I'm all about cruising the Catholic blogs and columnists, and some priests are even wonderful enough to post their homilies online.
Father Nathan Reesman, associate pastor at St. Mary's Visitation, Elm Grove, delivered this homily Labor Day weekend, and it seems an all too appropriate kick-off to my vacation, and perhaps an early kick start to your weekend.
My challenge to all you busy bees: Find at least 10 minutes this weekend. Carve out some time for silence and reflection. Just sit. Not with an ipod, not with the TV on in the background, not with the vibration of your cell phone. Just sit. Listen. Breathe. Don't consult your planner. Consult His planner.
On Surrendering to God, by Fr. Nathan Reesman
When I was a kid I used to take long walks. In grade school, high school, by myself in the woods, or around this large cul de sac we lived on, walking for hours as the sun set around me. This is how I would think -- process the day -- ponder what I was going through or facing in life.
Fundamentally though, on those walks, I often found myself anticipating what something would be like -- what it would be like to be in high school, to be in college, to be an adult. It's amazing how many conceptions of things we can conjure up in our mind -- what we expect they will be like. And from these we assume and we plan. At one point I was going to be a landscape architect, and I was going to live somewhere in this area, and have a car and a house and a wife and kids and a cat -- maybe two. I was going to go to Madison to learn this trade and I was going to have certain professors, classes, experiences, challenges, etc. I anticipated all of this on my walks into the night.
So you can imagine how unsettling it is, sometimes, to run up against the reality that all of this stuff I just sort of planned on, anticipated, expected, prepared for -- wasn't reality. In fact, none of what I just described came to pass. High school wasn't at all what I'd expected. College was not at all what I expected. Adulthood is not at all what I expected.
Has this ever happened to you? You begin a job, thinking it's what you know you want and need -- and six months later you hate it. You move into a neighborhood not knowing anyone. Soon, you have one neighbor you can't stand, and the other one becomes a lifelong friend. You imagine what it will be like to be a father or mother -- and everyday your children surprise you, and parenting challenges all your expectations. You enter into a marriage thinking you know someone, thinking you know how certain things are going to work. You have a picture of a set of years stretching out ahead of you -- and you reach your 35th wedding anniversary realizing that you were wrong about so much.
If you asked me in 1998, 10 years ago, if I would ever go to a seminary, spend five long years in formation, be ordained a Catholic priest -- I would have thought it was crazy. All through seminary, few things happened as I planned. I've been a priest now just over two years. I arrived at St. Mary's Visitation Parish in June of 2006 with a variety of images and notions about what my life was going to be like here -- how I would preach, spend my day, how I would or would not make friends, how events would unfold. As I look back now, really, I had no idea what I was getting into.
God surprises us at every turn -- both for good and bad in a way that knocks us over -- as if to say: if we really knew what we were getting into, perhaps we'd never try things that we need to try -- as if to say God only lets us believe and know only what we need at the time. We are on a need to know basis with God for most of life.
All of this, I think, is what Jeremiah is talking about in the first reading. "You duped me God, and I let myself be duped," he famously says. This prophet thing is tough. It's going to cost me my life -- and I so naively told you I would go and preach boldly in your name -- had I only known, Lord. And yet, how can I refuse to keep going? Because after all, it is what you ask -- this is your will for me.
We wind up thinking, like Jeremiah, that God has tricked us -- that life has shifted, that the plan is disrupted, that something is heading out of control, not so much because God tricks us, but more because we all do what Peter did in the Gospel -- we think, all the time, as men do, and not as God does.
God spends our entire lives trying to re-shape our thinking. It's always our own expectations that we run up against -- our own plan and set of goals -- and we get really good at thinking that our plans are God's plans too.
Imagine Peter. He decides to follow Jesus. Probably imagines him to be a smart rabbi or a political reformer. Maybe he's "the Christ," but he has his own ideas about that, and about how his many years as a student of this wise teacher will unfold. He probably thought he'd get a job in his cabinet or something, and they'd die quietly of old age.
Well didn't Jesus mess him up. Die? In Jerusalem? Rejected? Suffering? Persecution? Peter says to him, "No, no, no, that's not the plan. It's supposed to unfold THIS WAY, Jesus."
So Jesus points out to him the simple reality of what he is doing -- "Peter, you are imposing your plans on me. That makes you an obstacle. Why are you trying to hang on so tight to your own plans, notions and your life?" He puts Peter in his place. Which only happens definitively on Calvary.
So he does with each of us. "You are thinking as men -- not with me -- that's why you think I'm continually full of surprises."
Question is: If God continues to challenge our plans and expectations, if God continues to be amused at my late night walks as I plan life -- why on earth do we keep doing it -- "thinking as men?" And how do we think like God instead? To quote Paul in today's second reading -- to discern what is God's will -- what is good, pleasing and perfect? The answer to the first question is that we are slow learners. Original sin has made us all want to be in control, have the plan, grasp the knowledge of good and evil. That's what happened as reached for the fruit -- we decided our plans made more sense than God's. And that attitude became so ingrained in us, that God has to take our whole lives to help us unlearn it.
Which goes to question two -- how do we adopt God's plan? How do we know what he wants? How do we discern his will? Certainly it requires the careful advice and support of others, a spiritual director, holy, trusted friends. It requires listening to the teachings of the Church. It requires getting to know the scriptures. It requires paying attention to the fruits of the Spirit -- learning to see which persons and situations bring us joy, gentleness, kindness, trust, peace. All of those things help us think and act more as God wills.
But there are two other crucial things. One is the cross. Jesus says it -- there is no escaping the cross. There is no escaping the need to work, practice self-denial, to have willpower, to tell yourself or others the word "no." As in -- if some plan, or job, or vocation, or person, or situation, or expectation, is continually fun -- then you're probably heading in the wrong direction. If there is no cross, then it's not how God is thinking, it's likely how fallen man thinks.
Which leads to the final crucial and most essential piece of discernment -- prayer. We go nowhere without it. And not a prayer that goes like this: "Dear God -- make this, make such and such happen."
No. This is imposing our plans on him. We can end with that prayer, but only after years of starting with a different one. It's the prayer of Christ on the cross. It's the posture of Jesus before the Father. It's the only prayer that seems to make sense to me after years and years of walks into the night have turned out to be so wrong -- so many expectations and plans so mistaken. It's the prayer of our Blessed Mother.
And it goes like this:
"I surrender."
"Thy will be done."
"I surrender."
That's the goal of Christian life and discipleship. That's the way to not be duped by God. That's the prayer Peter learned the hard way. That's the prayer I still haven't gotten down. It's a prayer that requires the cross -- to let go of control -- that always requires the cross. That's the only prayer that lets us think as God does, and not as men do.
Thy will be done.
I surrender.
Amen.
To read more of Fr. Nathan's homilies, visit the St. Mary's Visitation
website.
