Tag: Discernment

Split Personality

It’s not a pathology, but there is a dual aspect to the life of a priest—he is both a man of God and a man of the church.
The vocation to priesthood itself has this same dual aspect—the priest candidate is called both by God and by the church.
During my college days, I wrestled long and hard with whether God was calling me to be a priest. My problem was whether I was good enough for such a job. Could I be a man of God? It took me a long time to acknowledge to myself that with the grace of God it could be possible.
Later, in the major seminary the call of the church was much simpler and easier. I was invited, called to enter the clerical state—the “civil service” of the church—by the seminary authorities through the ceremony of tonsure. Subsequent calls to receive minor and then major orders with successive ceremonies of ordination culminated in priesthood.
Fidelity to these two calls and these two commitments is a constant challenge and a continuing vital tension for any priest.
To be a man of God means to be a holy, a sacred or “separated” person, not living by worldly values or ways. (In the Western Church, this is understood to involve a renouncement of marriage and family by a permanent commitment to celibacy.)
To be a man of the church means to be a public officer of the institutional church with a certain degree of authority and responsibilities for leadership, teaching and administration.
Faithfulness to the promptings of the Spirit may strain the priest’s relations with the community he serves or with ecclesiastical authorities.
Conversely, the priest’s solidarity with the local Christian community or ecclesiastical authorities may conflict with the promptings of the Spirit.

It’s not an “either-or” but a “both-and” situation. God spare us from a priest who serves people and institutions well, but not the Lord! And, a good priest may be considered a holy man, but he can’t neglect carrying out effectively the responsibilities of public office in the church.
An often neglected aspect to responding to the call of God is that it is a continuing, never-ending challenge of discernment. It’s not that God changes his mind but that his plan for us may have many twists and turns, up and downs, and successes and failures (due to our blindness, deafness, and insensitivity to his providential action in our lives).
The call of the church generally presumes a “death till us part” type of commitment-unless, of course, the priest is disabled, retired, or severely disciplined by a kind of discharge or “reduction to the lay state.”
But, the call of God isn’t quite the same. For sure, our response to the call of God must be a forever commitment—but from the merely human point of view it can appear very changeable indeed. Even if it involves walking through the valley of the shadow of death, it’s still the way to go.
The church may limit or revoke its call to serve, but, as the gospel hymn says, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.”
When all is said and done, the real issue for the priest—or anybody—is not duality but priority.
No matter how unexpected the promptings of the Spirit—whether leading us into or out of ministry or anywhere else—no turning back!

12 May 2019
(Developed in part from
“Guru vs. Cleric” published in
CNEWA World, 28:4, July 2002)

On Purpose

Several years ago I saw a two-hour science-fiction television drama called The Questor Tapes. It was a pilot program for a series that never materialized later.
In the story, a famous scientist had disappeared, but left behind instructions for the manufacture of an android and programming tapes to activate it. His students decided to try to create the android according to his plans. Ultimately they were successful, but the last programming tape was damaged.
As a result the android, who called himself Questor, functioned as a human being, but did not know what was his purpose. The rest of the story concerned Questor’s search to discover the design of his creator.
The story can be taken as a kind of parable. Each of us is a work of creation by another — God — and the most challenging and important task of our lives is to discover his design for us, our purpose.
In our technologically advanced modern society, there is hardly anyone who has not been confronted with the challenges of programming, be it a television receiver, VCR, digital watch, or household appliance, not to mention a computer.
In other words, to make it work, you have to figure out how to operate it according to the manufacturer’s design.
It’s curious isn’t it. We take for granted that you can’t type without learning the keyboard, you can’t drive without learning to manipulate the car’s controls and the rules of the road, you can’t even set your alarm clock without checking the instructions — but when it comes to living your life, anything goes.

In the Old Testament, the wisdom books give us a vast accumulation of practical experience about how to live well. A wise man or woman was one who had discovered the great design that was built into our very natures and learned to live accordingly. Wisdom itself was considered a great gift of God.
Modern science looks for order and design, be it in DNA or in galaxies, but curiously the notion of seeking to discover design and purpose in our lives is considered old-fashioned, outdated, and outmoded.
Besides the personal challenge to discover the Creator’s purpose for our individual lives, we also are confronted with discovering his plan for the whole human race.
Does it make sense for any country or national group to seek whatever it wants for itself? Should any supranational corporation or organization choose its own goals arbitrarily? What’s the purpose of all of human society?
St. Paul gives us his answer. In the letter to the Ephesians (1:8b-10), he writes:

In all wisdom and insight, [God the Father] has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with the favor that he set forth in [Jesus Christ] as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 25:3, May 1999)

The Hand of God

In Psalm 31 the Psalmist cries: “Into your hands I commend my spirit; you will redeem me, O Lord, O faithful God . . . But my trust is in you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ In your hands is my destiny; rescue me from the clutches of my enemies and my persecutors.”

In hand: 1. In one’s immediate grasp or possession. 2. Under control. 3. In process of execution.

In the press of our daily personal concerns, in seeking solutions to the weighty problems of human society, in our anxiety to achieve justice in the midst of oppression, in the quest for peace, we sometimes forget to leave things in the hands of God and to trust that “he has the whole wide world in his hands.”

Evenhanded: Treating all alike; impartial.

A famous Crusader slogan was “Deus lo vult,” God wills it. Whether with the same or similar words, explicitly or implicitly, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus — all believers — have at times invoked God on their side in the midst of human struggles and rivalries. Why should the one Father of us all favor any of his children over the others?

To keep one’s hand in: To continue an activity or interest so as not to lose skill or knowledge.

How long did it take God to create the world? Often amid the different points of view there is an underlying presumption that the Lord made the world and then flung it out to spin like a top on its merry way.

We may well be living our lives in that spirit as well. We need to remember that he still has his finger in our human pie, that he still has his hand in the affairs of this our troubled world.

Openhanded: Giving freely; liberal.

Would you believe that some of the criticisms CNEWA’s charitable work receives are:
“Why are you helping them? They’re not one of us,” and “What do you get out of it? What’s in it for you?”
The lesson of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard is that the Lord is generous and free to do as he wishes — and that we followers of Jesus must imitate the Lord’s liberality.

To lay hands on: 1. To seize violently; do physical harm to. 2. To bless, consecrate, ordain, etc.

A prayer I learned in my seminary days still lives in my heart: “Lord, come and possess me.
“Take hold of my faculties. Immolate my selfishness. Shape my life according to your ideals.
“Impress yourself on my soul. Work in me. Shine through me. Make me a light and savior in union with all the saints for the glory of the Father.
“From your generosity let me learn to keep giving — the world to God, God to the world, and myself to both.”


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 23:4, July 1997)

My Goodness

In June, I was invited to attend the Panis Vitae Awards Dinner of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. Several hundred people gathered to honor a group of exceptionally good people who have generously shared their hearts, their time, and their means to help other less fortunate than themselves.
Special events like that have to do with the recognition of achievement, success, and goodness. Curiously, events like that don’t make the headlines; in fact they’re often not considered newsworthy at all.
Popular newspapers and television news programs often offer us as “news” stories of destruction, failure, and wrongdoing. Evil seems to be much more newsworthy than good.
To put it in religious terms, there appears to be a fascination with the mystery of evil. We seem morbidly interested in the mindless violence of ethnic groups and individuals, whether at home or abroad.
Evil seems to attract our attention as flame does a moth. Like the black holes astronomers speak of, evil tends to absorb our relaxation, recreation, conversation, and emotions.
The great theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that evil was not a thing in itself, but the absence of good. Maybe it is because of our fundamentally healthy instincts and nature that the absence of goodness so intrigues and fascinates us.
I often recall a silly little rhyme that I first saw in a well-known restaurant chain:

As you wander through life, Brother,
whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut
and not upon the hole!

The first chapter of the Bible tells the story of the creation of the world. It says that, at the end of each day of creation, contemplating His work, “God saw how good it was.”
If we want to learn to see the world with the eyes of God, we need to learn to focus our attention on goodness and not on its absence.
And, that applies to looking at ourselves too.
In the fairy tale of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, the wicked queen used to look into her magic mirror and ask, “Who is the fairest of us all?” She seemed to be the epitome of vanity and evil.
But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look honestly into the mirror of our lives and recognize the goodness that is there.
“Only one is good,” Jesus said. So, if we find goodness in our lives, it is through the grace of the one God who is good. Rather than demurely denying our goodness with false modesty, we should learn to rejoice in it and give thanks to God for it.
With so much goodness concealed, small wonder that the world has become fascinated and absorbed by its absence — whether in our own lives or in those of others.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his disciples, “Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”
So, rise and shine!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 21:4, July 1995)

Providence and Peace

When Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, captured Babylon in 539 B.C., he initiated two centuries of Persian rule of the ancient Near East. As a matter of policy, he tolerated and even promoted the religions of his subject peoples.
The Bible testifies that he issued a decree that allowed Jewish exiles in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and to resume the worship of the Lord there.
They saw in Cyrus a providential answer to their prayers. “The Lord inspired King Cyrus,” the Chronicler soberly affirms. The prophet-poet, Isaiah, declares Cyrus a “champion of justice.” He boldly claims that God called Cyrus “friend”, “shepherd”, and “anointed”, ancient titles reserved for Abraham and the house of David.
Isaiah’s reflection on Cyrus witnesses to the workings of divine providence:

For the sake of Jacob, my servant,
of Israel my chosen one,
I have called you by your name,
giving you a title, though you knew me not.
I am the Lord and there is no other,
there is no God besides me.
It is I who arm you, though you know me not,
so that toward the rising and the setting of the sun
men may know that there is none besides me.

Twenty-six hundred years ago, the region that we now call the Middle East looked grim and hopeless. No political solution presented itself. Yet God made a way where there was none.

People of faith trust in God that solutions are possible in situations which, humanly speaking, seem hopeless. Such confidence doesn’t justify inaction — for God expects us to do all that we possible can — but frees us from paralysis and despair.
In geology the theory of plate tectonics holds that large segments of the earth’s crust are moving, even colliding. The scale of these colossal motions usually exceeds our perceptions — except for an earthquake or volcanic eruption — yet they really are taking place.
God’s interventions in the lives of individuals, families, and nations have a certain similarity. The movings of His Spirit exceed our immediate perceptions, yet they are the most fundamental of realities.
We often speak of praying to God for peace. This is no pious platitude. Though human peacemakers have their role, and blessed may they be, peace comes as a work and a gift of God in history.
May the troubled world CNEWA serves – Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Ethiopia – be blessed with peace, “God’s own peace, which is beyond all understanding.”


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 15:4, October 1989)