Having a Servant Heart like the Heart of Jesus

That's the title of the retreat that I have been giving this weekend to deacon candidates of the Diocese of Tulsa. In my last talk today I talked about being servants.

Jesus shows us that service is the way that we return love for love. Jesus was filled with love for His Father and this was shown in His response to the Father's love. He returned love for love by uniting His will to the will of the Father and giving Himself in service to the Father's human children, His brothers and sisters.

Jesus told the apostles and us, "I no longer call you slaves, ... I have called you friends" (John 15: 15). Our service of God, then, is not servile but loving. It is not a service done in fear of punishment or as part of a transaction that demands payment for services rendered. Like the service of Jesus it is a loving service. Christian servants share time and work with the truest and best friend ever--Jesus.

When was Jesus a servant? Answering that question we probably immediately think of all His activities of teaching and healing. And certainly forgiving sins was part of His service. On the cross His service culminated with the suffering and death by which He reconciled humanity to the Father and to one another.

But what about when he was growing up? His learning how to walk and talk and read? What about when He worked side by side with His foster father Joseph in the carpenter shop or accompanied him on trips to fix other people's things? What about when He kicked back to relax at the house of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus in Bethany? Was eating and resting and sleeping also part of His service?

Yes. Every moment of His life was an act of love for the Father and for humanity, done in perfect obedience to the loving will of His Father and ours. Every waking and sleeping moment of His life was an act of redemptive love done as the perfect servant of God.

To have a servant heart like the Heart of Jesus means doing the same. It means making every act an act of love for God. It means making an offering of every thought, word, and deed, every prayer, work, joy, and suffering, every breath and every heart beat. Serving God is not a part-time occupation. It's our entire life. Only with the Heart of Jesus transforming our hearts will we be able to be a servant of God as Jesus was.

Subiaco

Subiaco is a place in Italy, famous as the site where St. Benedict, at the age of fourteen, withdrew from the world and began to live a monastic life. I'm in Subiaco right now, but not the one in Italy, rather, the one in Arkansas, where the Benedictine Subiaco Abbey is located. I'm here with 26 men who are in formation to be permanent deacons for the Tulsa, Oklahoma Diocese. We arrived yesterday for their annual retreat and will be leaving tomorrow. The title of the retreat is similar to ones that I've given to priests: "Having a Servant's Heart like the Heart of Jesus."

Offering up Golf

I am back from my brief golf vacation having played five times in six days. It mercifully rained one day so I could rest those muscles that don't get used for golf on a regular basis. Perhaps the title of this entry makes you think that I was in the rough a lot or had a lot of bad shots. After all, don't we normally think of offering up bad things? Truth be told, I did have plenty of bad shots and lost balls to offer up, but all in all I didn't play that poorly and there were enough really good shots to keep me coming back. There were also a lot of "joys"--also part of the traditional Morning Offering prayer--that I offered up.

Fr. John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., an avid golfer and professor at Marquette University, wrote an article in 1992 entitled "Golf as a Spiritual Exercise." In it he writes about finding God in the beauty of creation, in the game itself, and in his friends.

I thought of that article and a particular spiritual lesson that I took away from my recent rounds of golf. It has to do with staying in focus, living in the present, and taking one moment at a time. So often my mind starts racing off to the future or dwelling on the past. In golf I'll start thinking, after one bad shot or hole, how bad my score is going to be at the end of the round. Or after the bad shot I'll dwell on it and let it take my mind off the next shot. Or if I'm playing well I'll start thinking about how if I just keep it up I'll be able to break 90 for 18 holes or 40 for 9. Then I lose my focus and generally miss an easy putt because I get what are called the "yips." I lose my focus and put too much pressure on making that one putt in order to keep my good round going.

It's best when I hit one shot at a time and play it as though it were my only shot that day. It's best if I don't know how I'm scoring so I don't get distracted thinking about how well I might do, or how poorly I am doing and how I might not even break 100. It's best when I keep my focus on hitting that one shot as best as I can. One shot at a time. One moment at a time. Live in the present.

That's the lesson that I've known but need to have reinforced from time to time. That's the lesson I take away from my annual Fourth of July golf vacation with Jesuit friends from the East coast. And I'm reminded of something that Bishop Nguyen Van Thuan wrote in his little book "Five Loaves and Two Fish." He wrote it after South Vietnam fell to the communists and he was arrested. Wondering about how he was going to be able to serve his people now that he was under arrest, and what possible purpose his life could have now that he would not be able to exercise his ministry, he wrote:

"I will seize the occasions that every day presents to fulfill ordinary actions in an extraordinary way. Jesus, I will not wait. I will live the present moment, filling it to the brim with love. A straight line is made of millions of tiny points united to each other. My life too is made of millions of seconds and minutes united to each other. I will perfectly arrange every single point and the line will be straight. I will live perfectly every minute and my life will be holy. Like you, Jesus, who always did what was pleasing to your Father."

Bishop Thuan spent the next thirteen years in prison, a number of them in solitary confinement. After his release he went to Rome, was made a cardinal, and became head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He died of cancer in 2002 and the cause for his beatification was opened in 2007.

Holiness can be found anywhere, in prison or on a golf course. It all comes down to living each moment well and making of it an offering to God.

Updates

The Board of Directors of the Apostleship of Prayer met in St. Louis on Tuesday. Archbishop Robert Carlson of St. Louis attended his first meeting and showed great interest in getting other Bishops involved so that the Apostleship of Prayer might continue its revival in the U.S.

The Jesuit Mission Band has had two blessed events in Milwaukee and in Iowa City. One of the Jesuit scholastics who has been working on the these events wrote about them at a blog that he and several other Jesuits write called "Whomsoever Desires." Check it out!

Fr. Rigobert Kyungu, S.J. came to visit today. He is the Apostleship of Prayer director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and he also coordinates the work of all the national directors in Africa. He is on the new international council that met in Rome last February. He came to the U.S. to attend a conference on the liturgy and he stayed some extra days in order to visit a friend in Chicago. We talked about the various activities of the Apostleship of Prayer in our respective countries, especially in terms of reaching out to young people.

Tomorrow I leave for the Jesuit villa in Waupaca, WI where I'll spend about six days on vacation. I wanted to spend a longer time there but a ministry opportunity came up that I couldn't pass by. More on that later....

John the Baptist

Yesterday we celebrated the Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist. Once a month I am the spiritual director for the call-in spiritual direction show called "The Inner Life" on Relevant Radio. I began yesterday's show by talking about St. John the Baptist and what he has to teach us.

1. Humility. As the crowds came to John in the desert and wondered whether he might be the much-anticipated messiah, he could have claimed that title and had a great popular following. But he didn't. Committed to the truth, he pointed to the real messiah, his cousin Jesus. Humility means that we are honest with ourselves (and others) and that means recognizing that we are creatures in need of God. The world does not revolve around us. Or, as the common expression goes: "It's not about you!" The best definition of humility that I've heard is this: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less." In other words, humility does not mean putting ourselves down or beating ourselves us. When we do this we are still the center of our attention. True humility is taking the focus off ourselves and putting it on God and neighbor. That's exactly what Jesus said the greatest commandment was: loving God and neighbor. Humility is the foundation of the other virtues. Without humility, other virtues--patience, chastity, temperance, faith, hope, and even love--can become sources of the pride that precedes the fall.

2. Dying to self. John the Baptist shows us that the way to humility and holiness is to die to self. This means dying to our self-centeredness. It means drawing attention not to ourselves but to Christ. It means making an offering of ourselves to God for His service and glory. This is the meaning of John the Baptist's famous phrase which would be a good Scripture quote to memorize and keep in mind throughout the day: "He must increase; I must decrease" (John 3: 30).

3. Being the voice of the Word. When asked who he was, John replied, quoting Isaiah: "I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord" (John 1: 23). We are called to be People of the Word, people who pray with the Scriptures so that the Word of God becomes part of us. Then, as we go about our daily lives, we will give voice to that Word. That doesn't mean quoting Scripture passages at people as much as living the Word and expressing it through our words and the deeds which speak louder than words. It means giving flesh to Gospel values and witnessing to those values in the way we live.

4. Witnessing to the truth. John witnessed to the truth. He witnessed to Jesus who called Himself "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14: 6). He also witnessed to the truth of the moral order, confronting King Herod who was living in sin. This led to the ultimate witness of his martyrdom where he showed that moral principles are greater than physical life. We can paraphrase Jesus here: What does it profit a person to gain a few more years of earthly life and in the process lose his or her integrity, conscience, and soul? For most of us, witnessing to the truth won't lead to death but rather rejection or hurtful words. People will get angry at us or make fun of us and we will have an opportunity to die to human praise and our own vanity, our need to be accepted and liked. In that way, we will decrease but Jesus will increase.

St. John the Baptist, pray for us that we too may be courageous voices for Jesus in the world today!

Bread Broken for Others

The idea behind "offering it up"--taking the moments and events, the sorrows and the joys, the sufferings and the consolations of each day--is Eucharistic. It's the way that we live the Eucharist in our daily lives.

As I was preparing my talk for last weekend's Sacred Heart Communities in Collaboration conference in Willimantic, CT, I ran across some words of Pope Benedict that confirm this. Here's what he said to a conference that was held by the Diocese of Rome last week:

"The celebration of the Eucharist challenges us and at the same time empowers us to become, in our turn, bread broken for our brothers and sisters, coming to meet their needs and giving ourselves. Because of this, a Eucharistic celebration that does not lead us to meet people where they live, work, and suffer, to bring them the love of God, does not show the love it contains. To be faithful to the mystery that is celebrated on the altars we must, as the Apostle Paul exhorts us, offer our bodies, ourselves, as a spiritual sacrifice pleasing to God (Romans 12: 1) in those situations that require dying to our "I" and which constitute our daily 'altar.'"

Summer Time

"Summer time, and the livin' is easy." So goes a song of George Gershwin that premiered in the 1935 musical "Porgy and Bess." It's summer time at the Apostleship of Prayer and it's not the fish that are jumping, as in the song, but all of us.

The dream of several young Jesuits, priests and scholastics, is being realized this summer with "The Jesuit Mission Band." It's not a musical band, but a group of Jesuits that is going around the Midwest offering to young adults (18 to 35) a brief (Friday night and Saturday) retreat based on the "Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius" and the practical spirituality of the Apostleship of Prayer. They've been in the office this week preparing their presentations and it's been exciting to see their energy. It's all part of the revival of the Apostleship of Prayer in the U.S.

This weekend I'll be at a conference run by a group called "Sacred Heart Communities in Collaboration." This national conference is entitled "Hearts on Fire: New Beginnings; New Challenges," and I'll be the first of three speakers. My talk is entitled "Wells of Love: Our Covenant Relationship with the Father through Jesus."

The 14 talks from my preached retreat based on the "Spiritual Exercises" are now posted online at Creighton University's Online Ministries site. They were recorded last April at the Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, also known as Demontreville.

After receiving encouragement from a publisher to whom we submitted a book proposal, I've begun writing a book. Right now the title is "The Power of Praying for Others" and our hope is that it will fill a void that exists among the many books on prayer. Our ambitious hope is that this book will inspire people with what we call "the simple and profound way of life" of the Apostleship of Prayer in the same way that Jesuit Fr. Henri Ramiere's classic book of the late 1800's ("The Apostleship of Prayer") did.

Along with these tasks there are the monthly and daily radio and web reflections.

There's certainly no moss gathering around the Apostleship of Prayer this summer.