Contemplative Haven

I was recently contacted by a young man who has discerned a call to the priesthood, and who would like to share his story with all of you.  Neven Pesa has been accepted to the Order of Basilian Salvatorian Fathers in Massachussets, U.S.A., a semi-contemplative order of Catholics of the Eastern Rite.  Neven currently belongs to the Byzantine Catholic Church of the Virgin Mary in Brooklyn, New York. His personal story was recently featured on the site Catholic Exchange, and you can also read more about Neven’s background/calling at his personal site, A Priestly Vocation. 

In order to start his Novitiate in September 2008 he is required to be debt-free, and after a four-year course of study at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, this will be no small task.  Neven is working two jobs towards this end, but God has blessed him, and in turn ourselves, with yet another means of achieving his goal. 

Neven is a singer/songwriter who records under the name of Shekinah Hosanna; his first CD is available at CD Baby, where you can listen to samples of his tracks.  He hopes to have another CD available by this fall, on which he will have the “Hail Mary” in Hebrew as well as another Marian song.  Neven has a beautiful voice and is a gifted lyricist.  He has also set up a YouTube Channel called ShekinahHosanna in order to let people become aware of his music.  Here is one of Neven’s original songs, ”Dear God“, which he has set to scenes from the movie “Bella”.  Above all, Neven has asked for our prayers, so please consider supporting him in this way as well as by bringing his beautiful music into your lives.  His music is a gift to all of us, as will be his future priesthood.

  
[Edited to add:  Please visit my post of today at Consecrated to Mary for another beautiful song by Neven as well as a glimpse into the role Mother Mary has played in his life.] 

The mystical life of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) began early.  She was only six when she saw a vision of heaven in the sky, where Jesus appeared to her along with Peter, Paul and John the Evangelist.  Jesus smiled upon her lovingly while making the sign of the cross over her, and from that moment on Catherine knew that she wanted to devote herself and her life to God. Her continued absorption in God was profound, distressing her family very much, but upon finally realizing that Catherine’s mystical life was the will of God, her family conceded and Catherine was accepted as a Third Order Dominican with the Sisters of Penance. The Sisters of Penance were not cloistered, but lived withdrawn from the world in their own homes. In “Catherine of Siena“, by Igino Giordani, the author writes: “It seems curious that considering her absorption in God and her yearning to flee the world and conquer her flesh she did not seek admission into a cloistered convent. Instead, Catherine, whose only wish was to withdraw from the world, still determined to remain in it. The Lord had called her to a special mission: that of an apostle, whose vocation is to be in the world but not of the world.”

Catherine, continually absorbed in contemplative prayer and well-practiced in asceticism and mortification, reached the heights of love of God and experienced the mystical espousal with the Lord when she was only twenty.  Quickly thereafter, the Lord sent her back out into the world to care for the sick, give her followers spiritual direction, and teach the most learned and powerful.  Igino Giordani beautifully writes:

“Thus appears a second phase of Catherine’s life:  the phase of active life; but not as a change or turning point in her former life – rather as its increase and complement.  She merely joined action to contemplation; or, more exactly, her contemplation was so penetrating that it had to express itself in action.  She was united to God; therefore she had to be united to men.  And if she will no longer live enclosed in a cell with walls, [my note:  Catherine's bedroom] she will always live in the cell which is knowledge of self.  She will carry her cloister, her cell, with her wherever she goes; her rule will ever be love.”  

[For a beautiful prayer written by St. Catherine of Siena to the Blessed Virgin, please see my post of today at Consecrated to Mary.]

“God never does things by halves.  He does not sanctify us patch upon patch.  He does not make us priests or make us saints by superimposing an extraordinary existence upon our ordinary lives.  He takes our whole life and our whole being and elevates it to a supernatural level, transforms it completely from within, and leaves it exteriorly what it is:  ordinary.”

[The Sign of Jonas.  The Journal of Thomas Merton]  pg. 182 

“Saint Gregory Nazianzen calls the soul of the spiritual man – the mystic – an instrument played by the Holy Spirit:  organum pulsatum a Spiritu Sancto.  The Holy Ghost draws from this instrument harmonies and a melody of which reason and the will of man alone could never even dream.  It is this music vibrating on the well-tuned strings of a perfect human personality that makes a man a saint.  It is when special harmonies are wrung from a human instrument that the Holy Ghost makes a man a contemplative.  What part has reason in this silent song that God sings for Himself and for His elect in the soul of a mystic?  It is the function of reason not to play the instrument but only to tune the strings.  The Master Himself does not waste time tuning the instrument.  He shows His servant, reason, how to do it and leaves him to do the work.  If He then comes and finds the piano still out of tune, He does not bother to play anything on it.  He strikes a chord, and goes away.  The trouble generally is that the tuner has been banging on the keys himself all day, without bothering to do the work assigned to him:  which is to keep the thing in tune.”

[The Ascent to Truth:  Chapter XII, pgs. 181-182]

Today is my two-year blogging anniversary at Contemplative Haven.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford a party this year.  Oh, we had a grand time at my sixth-month anniversary, didn’t we? (I held it at six months because I didn’t know if I’d last a year…)  Brother Lesser, who had left many excited comments on previous posts in anticipation of the party never showed up until the next morning; Pia (forget me not), whom we were all expecting, had to deal with a very serious emergency with her son – he had a soccer eye-injury, which we didn’t find out about until the next day; Owen crawled in late, exhausted from teaching RCIA; and I had to physically go and get Kathryn Therese, who had a great time once she found out there actually was a party.  Just to let you know, if you read the old comments (which looks like one big comment, because I had to cut-and-paste them from the old blog), Honora is actually Carol, and ccheryl is actually teresa_anawim.

To all of my “old” friends, as well as to so many new ones I’ve had the pleasure of meeting since then, thank you for making this such a worthwhile experience; and I would just like to say:

In her book, “This War is the Passion” [1943], Caryll Houselander writes:  “The modern world has opposed poetry.  A mechanized world, a world of greed, a world at war, hard youth, art itself soulless and hard, all this is against poetry, the wonder of life.  Christ keeps poetry alive in the world, in its essence and in its outward form.  The Liturgy of the Church is the form in which Christ, God’s word of love, is sung continuously.  There is the rhythm of Christ, the Christ-voice, the continual utterance of the Word on earth.  Rhythm is not mere repetition.  It is the gathering of energy to the culmination of its own intensity.  It moves in a cycle, spending its life only in renewing it.  The rhythm of Christ is love moving on a circle of light from birth to death, from death to resurrection.” 

Many decades later, we find ourselves in an ever-more mechanized world, overwhelmed by technology, still filled with greed and war; but the cycle of life continues, and the wonder, the soul, is there for all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.  Christ’s poetry is ever-present - His rhythms, His cycles, His circle of Life.  Christ’s poets, in tune with His rhythms and cycles, with His very Life within them, restore our wonder, refresh our spirits, and replenish our souls. 

One such poet is fellow-blogger Ann, of Poetry, Prayer, and Praise.  Ann’s poetic gift is well-known to her readers, inspiring reflection, meditation, and the simple joy of soaking in the beauty of her imagery.  Much to our delight, Ann has recently published a book of her poetry entitled, “The Blueness Above:  Poetry, Prayer and Praise“.  All proceeds from the sale of her book are generously being donated to worthy causes, so from Ann’s poetry, we have blessings all around.  After months of reading Ann’s poems on her blog, I would be hard-pressed to choose a favourite, but let me leave you with a small sample (readers may see several of the included poems by clicking on the preview button at the Lulu site to which I have linked).
 
A Time for Praise

There is one God, 
One who loves and goes on loving
One whose love abounds.
He is here and near
As He once was yonder and hither,
He breathes life into the day
And warmth into the darkness.
His is the light that floods the heavens,
His strength is in the tides
And His mercy streams from age to age,
His is the voice of the bleating lamb,
The beauty of a hillside trapped in light,
The river in its rage;
There is a God
And now as ever is a time for praise.

[The second picture is Ann's back cover.]

In a recent homily, our priest told us we should, “look more redeemed“. 

Darn.  Just when I’d got my “mother-is-a-martyr-and-if-things-don’t-change-around-here-I-am-going-on-strike“ face perfected.

It’s a tremendous benefit having a large body of work available from a writer such as Merton.  We can identify with the material at so many points along the journey.

Most assuredly Merton would eventually arrive at answers to his musings in the following excerpt, yet it brings us solace and comfort in knowing that early on, he dealt with many of the same questions, frustrations and heartaches as we do:

“Just because a cross is a cross, does it follow that it is the cross God intends for you?
Just because a job is a nuisance, is it therefore good for you?
Is it an act of virtue for a contemplative to sit down and let himself be snowed under by activities?
What am I doing in that room over there: piling up fuel for Purgatory?
Does the fact that all this is obedience make it really pleasing to God? I wonder. I do not ask these questions in a spirit of rebellion. I would really like to know the answers.”

[The Sign of Jonas.  The Journal of Thomas Merton].  pg. 46.  Entry of May 1, 1947.  Merton has been five years in the monastery at this point, and is approaching the time when he will take his solemn vows.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Merton was perfectly serious, as am I… but it’s Monday morning, so I simply can’t resist. Just a little something to get us through the week.  It’s a catchy tune, with a refrain you might find very familiar.

The Church should daily take up Jesus’ persuasive and demanding invitation to “pray the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Mt 9:38).  Obedient to Christ’s command, the Church first of all makes a humble profession of faith:  in praying for vocations, conscious of her urgent need of them for her very life and mission, she acknowledges that they are a gift of God and, as such, must be asked for by a ceaseless and trusting prayer of petition.  This prayer, the pivot of all pastoral work for vocations, is required not only of individuals but of entire ecclesial communities.  There can be no doubt about the importance of individual initiatives of prayer, of special times set apart for such prayer, beginning with the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, and of the explicit commitment of persons and groups particularly concerned with the problem of priestly vocations.  Today the prayerful expectation of new vocations should become an ever more continual and widespread habit within the entire Christian community and in every one of its parts.  Thus it will be possible to re-live the experience of the Apostles in the Upper Room who, in union with Mary, prayerfully awaited the outpouring of the Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14), who will not fail to raise up once again in the People of God “worthy ministers for the altar, ardent but gentle proclaimers of the Gospel”.

[Shepherds After My Own Heart: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of His Holiness John Paul II on the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day. 1992. pgs. 102-103]

Yes, the meltdown in the backyard has begun, and just in time. There was really nowhere else to put that gorgeous white stuff anymore.