Now I believe there comes a time
when everything just falls in line
we live and learn from our mistakes
the deepest cuts are healed by faith. – All Fired Up
I love Pat Benatar, and these are very busy days for me, so that is sufficient to justify using this brief interview for today’s post.
I’ve been listening to Coldplay’s We Pray a lot lately. It’s one of those songs that inspires me afresh every time I hear it. I’ve posted about it here before, but I felt moved to reflect on it again in a deeper way.
I did a bit of research and found out that the song was born as a collaborative project featuring Little Simz, Burna Boy, Elyanna and Tini — all artists from different parts of the world representing Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. This global lineup was chosen intentionally to underscore the song’s core idea that people across cultures are praying for the same things, i.e. peace, love, dignity, belonging and a way forward together in hope. Chris Martin has said the song came to him in the middle of the night while reflecting on contemporary conflicts around the world and how different people are collectively longing for the same things.
What strikes me about these lyrics is the way they balance personal spiritual aspirations with a radical social consciousness. The song doesn’t shy away from acknowledging fears and inner struggles, poverty and injustice. At the same time, it refuses to embrace despair or rebellion. Little Simz’s verse emphasizes speaking truth and empowering others to see their own worth, while Burna Boy brings a raw sense of inner turmoil with the need for grace amid psychological struggle. Unlike so much pop music that focuses on introspection, We Pray moves out into a broader moral reflection on suffering, human resilience and neighbor love. So refreshing.
The inclusion of Psalm 23, “…the valley of the shadow of death,” beautifully situates the song in an ancient tradition of human longing for guidance from God through darkness. You can feel at the gut level in the sound as you listen, the universal spiritual hunger for redemption and restoration in the face of life’s tragedies and hardships.
Then there’s the refrain “for someone to come and show me the way.” For me, that speaks both to personal guidance and a collective longing of peoples for leaders with gestures that point toward justice and peace. Oh how we long for that!
And lastly, there’s the repetition of “…and so we pray.” Ah! It’s almost like a liturgical chant or communal litany, with its rhythmic persistence. I think here hope, filtered through prayer, itself becomes a practice we return to again and again, especially when life pushes back. It promises no perfect endings, but it does seek a shared journey reaching out toward something Ultimately transformative that accompanies is in the darkest valleys.
That’s my take.
I’ve always found Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever” gripping, teeming with a poetic fury that refuses to sidestep the hardest questions about death and offer easy answers. It dares to ask whether endless life, stripped of human loves and time-bound meaning, would even be desirable. Does the idea of a timeless and placeless eternity abstract us away from the loveliness of life’s myriad passing particularities that make it all so worthy of our noblest desires? Is that what eternity is?
The song’s sound and pace feel like a pining lament, as beauty and love show themselves chained by fragility: “This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us.” And what does that mean in the light of “forever”?
The vocals seem almost prayerful at first. But they quickly become more of a crying out that grapples with the tangled paradoxes at the heart of our human condition. We ache for permanence, yet what would be lost as we see that real meaning is forged every day only in the face of our finitudes.
It’s clear the song doesn’t argue for immortality. But it does something I have so much reverence for: exposing the raw and irrepressible hunger humanity has for a love that can outlast death itself. Not willing to seek an easy resolve from this tension, the song brilliantly turns from the unsettling questioning of “living forever” into a settled meditation on what makes life worth living now.
Here is celebrated a love that’s strong enough to confront death in an open-ended protest, but still sure enough of love to embrace — with furious commitment — the present moment. And this love is also great enough to be worth mourning when it, in th end, sinks into the silence of the grave.
This kind of honestly makes ample room for the massiveness of faith in the time-marked Ground of the New Creation, an eternity not composed of mathematical abstractions but of all the finite goods of this life transfigured, built on the riven, risen Flesh of the Messiah who still eats and drinks, kisses our tears, and who loved us, giving himself up for us…
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.
Then he placed his right hand on me and said:
“Do not be afraid.
I am the First and the Last.
I am the Living One;
I was dead, and now look,
I am alive for ever and ever.
And I hold the keys of death and Hades. — Revelation 1:17-18
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There’s no time for us
There’s no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams?
Yet tips ’em away from us?
Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Who?
There’s no chance for us
It’s all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment
Set aside for us
Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Who?
Who dares to love forever
Oh, whoa
When love must die?
But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever
And we can love forever
Forever is our today
Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today
Who waits forever anyway?
This is an excerpt from an email I sent someone we know who had a baby in 2024…
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When our children were little, I thought Catholic parenting meant doing things “right,” like getting them to Mass, teaching prayers, enforcing rules, protecting them from bad influences. Those kinds of things. Oh, sure, there’s that. But now that they’re grown and gone, and it’s too late, I see more clearly that it’s less about doing right things to control outcomes and more about shaping a home life and culture where grace has room to work. Which means creating the free space in which the conditions for the possibility of love, joy and peace appearing organically exist. Good soils cultivation. And on that point, I’ve found joy to be the finest litmus test of the culture in our home. Is it a home full of joy, even in times of hardship?
I also see so clearly now that the deepest logic of parenting is all wrapped up in the beauties of Baptism. At the font, our children were cleansed, freed, reborn, adopted, justified, sanctified, made into temples of God, claimed by Christ and anointed priests, prophets and kings/queens. Everything else we would do from that moment on was simply elaboration, making room for this wild Kingdom to do its thing in their and our worlds. Our task was never about “manufacturing” holy kids, good lord no; but about cooperating with the God who was LONG LONG ago at work in our children, calling them (back) to himself. Our parental role was simply to show our children the way Home by making our home, as best we could, a reflection of the Way.
Here’s some spin offs I have played with reflecting on this recently…
The priestly work of parenting was first of all to teach our children how to pray. If we could do that, they were set. They could fish. And it’s not just making sure they knew that prayer mattered, but that they felt in their guts that prayer was absolutely normal fir us. It’s just what you do as a human. We mixed it up, praying formally and informally, at meals and in the car, in joy and in frustration. We lit candles, burned incense, lavishly used holy water. Godding their senses as much as possible.
We tried to let prayer be simple and human, not a punishment or deforming art. But it’s really all about letting children see that you pray, yes because you need God and his assistance to make haste and help you. But far more, because you delighted in God’s friendship and terrifying company. Routines like the Sunday Eucharist, occasional drop-by-Jesus visits to the Chapel, monthly Reconciliation as a family (followed by “prodigal son” ice cream), or the small habit of “offering up” daily annoyances, I think, taught them that their lives were swimming in God-in-all-things and giving them the sense that giving everything back to God was a mighty good idea.
Or so it seemed.
The prophetic task was to help our children learn how to see the world truthfully. Which meant getting at black heart of the Big Lie out there, whichever guise it took on a particular day. This meant encouraging their uncomfortable comments or questions rather than silencing or dismissing them, because were “in a hurry.” Allowing their challenging beliefs without any fear because fides quaerens intellectum.
Oh, and then setting to work from infancy on forming their moral imaginations long before moral arguments were needed. Scripture stories, great art, music, the lives of the saints, dramatic great tales of good and evil, i.e. Narnia, fairy tales, films, stories told at bedtime. There for sure did more for shaping of their secret consciences than our rules and sermonizing ever could.
See, we weren’t trying to not just raise neurotic rule-followers, but children who could instinctually, viscerally, JOYFULLY recognize goodness when they encountered it; and feel fascinated-and-repelled by what deforms the human heart. As Dr. Vigen Guroian argued, virtue grows first in the imagination. The spacious and deadly playful imagination. And the one who captured their imagination first and biggest, won.
The race is on.
The kingly work of parenting turned out to be the hardest: cultivating in them the art of self-mastery. First of all, they’re all so different, and you know, you gotta know them super-well to be helpful here. Which means, yup, lots of time spent with them in all kinds of ways. No way ’round that. Time, as love is spelled by children, T-I-M-E. The self-mastery arts also meant pedantic things like chores, taking on responsibilities more and more, facing natural consequences, learning to suffer, keeping grandma company at length, figuring out how to make choices … only then to fail, fall, repent, get up, try again, fail and fall better. Forming sons and daughters of the King of Love meant mightily resisting their understandable claims to entitlement, while teaching instead the reflex of gratitude. It meant letting our children regularly undergo various small hardships and disappointments, not saving them, so they would be able to undergo well the BIG ones later with grace. Yes the family is the premier school of virtue, no substitute. But only if parents are willing to say no, demand action or resist the temptation to rescue children from every difficulty.
Freedom must be learned, trained, tested and strengthened.
Oh, and if I could do one thing differently, I’d definitely worry more about rhythms. Be relentless about setting rhythms from the ground up. Annual, seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily rhythms that shape one’s inner clock and deepest-core felt sense of meaning. The one who controls your calendar (with its imaginative view of meaning-full time), wins. Sundays matter most. The axis of time established by the Resurrection. And doing Sunday well.
Not just Mass, but all the rest, literally. And things like family-table feasting overflowing with acts of mercy, fun and games, music, lots of wasted time together (where real life happens). Screen-free Sundays, liberated from LED chains. Yes, they were often resisted by child and parent alike, but they exposed us all to the glories of boredom, opportunities for creativity, conversation and useless play. Gardening, building, fixing, fishing, hiking, biking — a slew of ordinary activities, followed by reflective conversations that danced with life’s meta-meanings, formed our sacramental imaginations to become more capable of seeing far more dimensions. More capable, then, of revealing a world charged with divine glory.
But only for those who slow down long enough to notice.
We also learned that families are messy as places of spiritual combat. This should not surprise us. Original sin entered the world first through a marital act of mistrust and rebellion, and the first murder was a familial act of anger and envy between brothers. From the beginning, then, marriage and family life have been wildly contested ground, war zones before they ever become safe havens. And the work of redemption God works must pass directly through them. Making it all a wild ride.
Soul care of children is a refined art. Temptations are subtle, and begin with things like thoughts, images, mistrust, resentments, bad influences. Teaching our children to recognize such things, how to deal with them before they snowball — helping them see their weaknesses, celebrate victories, name their temptations, avoid near occasions of sin, confess failure quickly and start again –was far more effective than moralizing, rule-making or brow beating. Again, this only happens when you know your children well, which demands you spend lots of time with them. Be students of your children, absolutely fascinated with their little worlds. And if that’s not natural, beg God for it every day.
We also learned that honoring each child for their unique gifts and successes was oh-so-powerful. We had the Beatitude Awards, the Virtue Victories and other such gravely silly things. Such joy in celebrating the diverse gifts and unique goodnesses of your children.
But it was our GREAT goal for them to believe and see us as always ready to hear anything, in all naked honesty, knowing we would never shame them. “You can tell us anything. There’s nothing you can’t tell us.” These became among the most important promises we made as parents. A promise I have always been terrified to break. Kyrie eleison.
But, I can see MOST clearly of all now that what mattered most of all, in the end, was our witness, our consistency, our humility in keeping it real. Our children were watching us, sniffed out hypocrisy. They’d watch how, after our pious monthly Confession, we repented to each other when we failed, accepted correction when we were wrong. Or was it all a sham? They caught how we spoke about the Church or the Mass or clergy or coworkers or our neighbors far and near. How we handled dislikes and conflict, how we treated the poor, how we prayed when stress raised its head and life was hard — or did we just turn TV on, scroll the phone, drink, calumnize, complain.
Hence, the white-hot core of it all was found in admitting our faults and, when called for, asking forgiveness from our children. On this all else was, is leveraged. OK, well maybe that’s not quite right. But close. The real white-hot core of it all is to love your wife first and best, and then to love them as best you can every single day.
After my wife, I love each of my children more than any other human being in the entire world. That doesn’t require me to force myself, it’s not some crazy heroic thing. It just is. And that itself is the greatest gift I’ve been given, greatest privilege, greatest delight in all of life. And yes, it will stretch you and pull you and rip your heart out of you and knock you down and pick you up. And so you must. never take it for granted. Pray, pray, pray for that love always to remain and grow and evolve, beg that God the Father place something of his love for your child in you. What else is there?
My wife was and is the spiritual heart of our home. I have fitfully tried to live out the things I say above, and live mostly begging that I be worthy to be a parent, a dad , now a grandfather. You don’t have to be perfect in all of this, you never will be. Not even close. But be a really good pauper, epiclesis virtuoso. God help me is a good first three words to start with every day.
… OK, so all of this idiosyncratic rambling is just the tip of the iceberg obviously. There’s so much more I could say, not sure how much of it is useful. But this is what came to mind. Thank you for asking, I’m extremely grateful to be able to share what I have learned. Most of it from other great humans. God bless you on this new and amazing journey you and your wife have begun.
From an email I sent someone a few years ago sharing insights on leadership. It’s a very summary look at a remarkable man.
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Leaders live surrounded by both yes-men and critics. They must constantly choose and improvise. So even more than experience, a good leader needs character and self-knowledge. — David Brooks
Several years ago, I invited Andreas Widmer to speak to one of my classes at Notre Dame Seminary about leadership and what he learned during his years serving as a Swiss Guard for Pope St. John Paul II. He had captured those reflections in his book, The Pope and the CEO. But man, hearing them firsthand from him left a deep and lasting impression on me. Ever since that conversation, I have returned again and again to his book, reflecting on my own attempts to lead — and hoping to embody it, however imperfectly, in my own life.
In his book, Widmer offers an insider’s view the inner life of the Vatican, the disciplined rhythms of the Swiss Guard and what it was like to accompany the immensity that was JP2. He introduces the reader to a very personal portrait of the Pontiff — unguarded moments, small gestures, long hours in prayer, physical suffering and beautiful interactions with countless people. All of which formed Widmer’s understanding of leadership which, in a word, is a way of life ordered toward God.
In our class, Widmer introduced his unique framework for thinking of life built around three levels of vocation. First is a universal vocation that is shared by all, which is to know, love and serve God in this life so as to live with him eternally. Then there is our primary “state in life” vocation — marriage, priesthood, consecrated life — which becomes the concrete form through which that love is embodied. Only then comes what he calls our “secondary vocation,” the arena in which our gifts and talents are exercised, most often through our professional work. Widmer laments how easily this order is reversed, and so how professional success eclipses holiness and one’s state.
He also shared a theology of work, in which he argued that work does not merely produce external outcomes (like profit) but forms the inner character of the worker. Through work, we either become more capable of love or become deformed in our capacity to give ourselves in love. Regularly evaluating why we work and how we work is integral and essential to work serving our humanity and not degrading it.
The heart of his book, that he reflected on in my class, entails reflections on moral integrity. Watching John Paul II those years, he learned that leadership requires a moral compass that holds firm even (and especially) when no one is watching. Standing guard for hours at a time became, for Widmer, a school of integrity and self-denial. He saw how easily leaders speak boldly of values while secretly exempting themselves from their demands. John Paul II’s authority flowed from his inner coherence that joined belief and action, word and witness.
Widmer also reflected on the paradoxical tensions involved in constantly planning for the future while remaining fully present in the present moment. John Paul II, he said, was always fully present where he was. You knew when he spoke to you that he was with you. He also said the Pope surrounded himself not with flatterers, but with people who challenged him. The Pope knew exactly where he stood on things, but knew that he could always enrich his vision with more eyes.
But in the end, Widmer told us, it’s the interior life of the leader that is paramount. Leadership, he argued, is especially sustained by detachment, i.e. freedom from compulsions, attachment to comforts and the need to control outcomes. He distilled this into a set of aphorisms, like: obey small rules, accept correction, endure affliction quietly, confess weakness, practice contentment, cultivate silence and imitate the humility of the saints.
When I look at leaders across the many sectors of life — ecclesial, civic, professional, familial — it is these qualities I instinctively look for: interior freedom, moral coherence, presence, humility and a life ordered toward love and truth. Truly great leaders are rare, likely because the cost is great, egos are powerful and the places of true leadership formation equally (and tragically) rare.
Christianity, however, should be the premier birthing-ground for great leaders, as it offers a singular fulcrum for such a formation of greatness. In Christ, our Good Shepherd, every authentic form of leadership is gathered up and perfected. It is in his Heart that men and women are shaped for a kind of leadership that gives life rather than uses and consumes it. In his Heart is an authority that commands respect by attraction and not by coercion or manipulation.
Each day in prayer with the Scriptures is for me an incessant petition: Christ, form in me your Heart, so as a husband, as a father, as an ecclesial leader and as a citizen I might lead others to the greatness found in you alone.
I’ve been thinking lots about an essay a friend sent me recently by Freya India, a Gen Z writer who writes from the “inside” of the screen-saturated, anxious and flattened world many young people inhabit. I loved reading it, as she writes with a moral seriousness that is strikingly rare in what I experience as the detached and irony-drenched online culture.
The essay opens as a cultural critique of this emerging “age of AI,” that she sees as marked by a deep existential weariness expressed in questions like: Why strive? Why practice and learn to speak or write or create with care, when machines now do these things faster and without struggle or frustration or fatigue? But she answers herself:
When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one?
Freya’s proposal is marvelously simple: be human, boldly, fearlessly, deliberately. She starts with the refusal to let language be flattened out into something frictionless and safe:
Stumble over your words…get your metaphors tangled…say something real, put something on the line.
Yes, and yes. We have learned, so it seems, how to speak without risking exposure of our fractures and incompetencies. But human speech has always been frayed, fraught with vulnerability, risking misunderstanding and incompleteness that relies on others to help me complete my idea. India makes the point that in an AI world of perfectly calibrated prose, our rebellion of imperfections suddenly shine bright — and testify that someone is there.
From reflections on writing and speech she moves to judgment, conviction and taste. She says,
Develop your own opinions, especially if you’re young; don’t outsource your thinking before you’ve even lived, don’t try to win approval at the expense of being human. You won’t be liked by everyone but that’s the point, no human ever has been. Not everyone will get you, you won’t be for everyone, but you will be someone.
There’s such sadness in young people being trained out of strong judgments or firm and unafraid commitments. Such is a great failing to subject children early in life to the possibility of mistakes, of facing correction or consequences or the art of flailing in debate in search for the unfolding truth of things. India contends that we’ve learned to soften every claim or preempt any possible offense in order — instead — to adopt an agreeable and robotic voice.
What’s lost in all this? Well, we lose true discernment, which requires courage. We lose the decisiveness of making a judgment, which requires assuming personal responsibility. Without these, we cannot become more charitable, which requires courage, but can only manage to become more amenable. Like a chameleon.
India then presses us on further still, from the mind into the body:
So go outside, say yes to things, be scared and excited and uncomfortable. Feel your hands shake before you speak, your legs ache after a long day, your face flush when asking her out. Experience it all, the real world with all your senses, the fear of getting lost, the relief of finding your way, the hands of another person. Look people in the eye and learn about the world from living in it.
Pure poetry to me.
While AI can recombine the data harvested from past experiences endlessly, it can’t ever undergo one. It doesn’t know the ache of fatigue, the embarrassment of mistakes, the catharsis of forgiveness, the existential education that happens only when one risks the rough and tumble of failure — and survives. To be human is to have lost in love, to live at the speed of life in physical proximity to the world and to others. Close enough to smell bad breath, close enough for friction, boredom, misunderstanding or the small cuts and bruises life together brings.
These are what really form us, but they demand that we move from our inhuman obsessions with efficiency toward a willingness to suffer actual graces our enfleshed God pours out on his children of flesh and blood.
All this is marvelous for meditation. But for me, the most striking moment in the whole essay came when Freya observed that we haven’t simply invented automation, we’ve internalized it. She says:
We became less human. We became anxious and insecure, afraid to say or do the wrong thing, unable to live. Constantly monitoring and managing ourselves, protecting our personal brands, making sure we were never too contradictory or confusing. And we never realized there was something more at stake, more than the risk of offending, more than the risk of getting things wrong, a danger of becoming like bots, automated and standardized. Now here we are, many of us functioning like autocomplete, capable of thinking and saying only the most acceptable and predictable things.
Oh how well she captures this relentless inner drive to manage our tone and monitor people’s reactions to protect our very deeply disordered need for approval. In doing this, we surrender the most human of freedoms: to grow through error and correction, and stretch through the tortuous tedium of remediation. We’ve become so safe and so anemic.
What a stinging and depressing diagnosis this is! But, gratefully, India’s final words offer us well-grounded hope. And what she says I echo from the core of my being:
So to the next generation: This is your opportunity. The best defense you have is being human. Write in a way AI can’t imitate. Come up with ideas it couldn’t generate. Believe in something when bots can’t believe in anything. Speak from the heart because you have one and AI doesn’t. Don’t live on screens because it’s the one thing AI has to do that you don’t. Venture into the real world, as much as you possibly can, because it’s your advantage, a place you have actually felt and touched. Do things that make your heart pound. Feel and love and risk. The future belongs to those who can.
Who knows what’s going to happen to writing, to my craft. But what I do know, what we all know, is how to be a person. You can try, you can create, you can impress, you can achieve. You only have to be human.
People are looking for someone to listen to them. Someone willing to grant them time, to listen to their dramas and difficulties. This is what I call the “apostolate of the ear,” and it is important. Very important. ― Pope Francis
Pope Francis’ identifying the apostolate of the ear sounds almost too simple to be important. And yet! As I have said here countless times, stating the obvious, in a culture addicted to high speed on demand entertainment, self-expression and distraction, deep and active listening may be one of the most demanding — and rare — acts of love we can offer.
To listen to another person attentively is a way of saying, without words: “You matter. Your world is worth my time.” And authentic listening is not easy, it costs us something. It asks us to bracket our inner monologue, resist the urge to fix or rebut or outdo, and suspend — at least for a moment — our own importance. In that sense, active listening is a form of asceticism that takes special aim at what Augustine called the incurvatus in se, the ego curved in on itself. When we listen well, we are pried open and pulled out of ourselves.
Even more profound, there’s something sacramental about this. Listening becomes a sign of God’s own way of being with us. I once met Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, a longtime close friend of Pope St. John Paul II, and when I asked him what he thought was the Pope’s greatest quality, he did not hesitate. He said John Paul II was the greatest listener he had ever known, when you were with him, the rest of the world disappeared. It’s a capacity he traced both to the Pope’s phenomenological discipline of radical attentiveness as well as to a prayer life shaped by encounter with a God who listens so deeply that the Pope once said to him, with great conviction, “God’s silence is not divine indifference but his exquisitely careful listening.”
Scripture repeatedly portrays a God who “hears the cry” of his people. The stillness of God invites us to practice inner stillness needed to pay attention. When we listen with patience and reverence, we participate — however imperfectly — in that same divine posture. We become, for another person, a living icon of a God who does not interrupt.
I believe his is why listening so often becomes a channel of actual graces. Anyone who has truly been heard knows the strange balm it brings, the “balm of Gilead” for a wounded heart. Long before any solutions emerge, something already resolves when a person realizes they’re not alone with their thoughts. Active listening creates the space in which people discover insights about themselves, about others, about their past, and sometimes about God — even if its implicit. It’s why therapy, spiritual direction and other forms of pastoral accompaniment really are, at their core, listening ministries.
Here the Jewish tradition has something profound to teach us. One of the most important — and untranslatable — words in the Hebrew Scriptures is shema. It doesn’t just mean “hear.” It means to listen, to attend, internalize, respond and even, obey. “Hear, O Israel” is a relational invitation into the beating heart of the covenant. Judaism is, at its heart, a religion of listening.
This stands in sharp contrast to the dominant visual metaphors of Western culture, inherited from ancient Greece. We prize visual metaphors like insight, perspective, illumination. We say “I see” when we understand. But biblical faith insists that the deepest knowledge comes not from observing, but from listening … in relationship. Speaking and listening bind us together, create intimacy. God isn’t an object, a spectacle to be examined. He is a subject who addresses us and waits for our reply.
And for the Jewish disciples of Jesus this is intensified, not diminished, by their understanding of the Incarnation. God gives himself precisely as the Word-made-flesh who took on human ears and spoke the divine word, calling and inviting a response. And faith, which binds our hearts to this Word, comes through hearing. Again, God isn’t an object but a Subject who addresses us and waits, so patiently, for our mustard seed reply.
A last point. My first spiritual director taught me that listening with care to people every day trains the capacity for attention. And attention is the secret sauce of prayer. Of “mental prayer.” If we can’t stay present to a human being across a table, or on the phone without scree0multitasking, we will struggle mightily to stay present to God in silence. Learning to listen well in teh flesh is a school for contemplation in the Spirit.
In the early 1990s, that same spiritual director once gave me a striking Lenten discipline. Each day, he said, identify one person you find difficult to listen to. Make time to call them, visit them, have lunch with them, and ask questions; and then simply listen. No correcting or steering. Just give them your undivided attention, and then pay attention to what happens to you in the process. Ah! it was definitely harder than fasting, but far more revealing. I could write a book on what I learned.
Pope Francis is absolutely right: the apostolate of listening is real apostolic work. It changes relational dynamics, softens conflicts and opens doors that grace alone can enter. And it has an amazing capacity to manifest the Love that hiddenly animates the whole of creation.
So … here is an invitation today: choose who you will listen to with patience, or “willed” curiosity and compassion. You may discover that in giving someone your ear, you’re also lending them the Heart of Christ. Only to find that God is there, listening with you.
By sharing in the mystery of poverty, by making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love. — Servant of God Dorothy Day
I am still reeling from Sunday’s proclamation of the Beatitudes at Mass, so I thought I would sustain my reflections here.
This is a selection from a talk I gave to a Pax Christi group on Pope Francis’ commentary on the Beatitudes in the must-read Gaudete et exsultate.
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Over the years, I’ve kept returning to this papal document because of its compelling vision of the call to become very human saints. In particular, Francis does something very important in his commentary — he rescues them from being treated as a lofty “spiritual moral code” and restores them to what they really are: a revelation of the Heart of Christ and a radically social map of authentic human holiness in our messed-up world.
It may seem at first glance that the Beatitudes are an impossible set of ethical ideals — certainly to be admired, but only from a distance, and rarely attempted in “real life.” Well, Pope Francis will have none of that! He insists, instead, that the Beatitudes are both intensely personal and eminently realistic.
They’re not first and foremost about what we do, a behavior code. Rather, they’re about who Christ is and who we are called to become in him. They are inner attitudes, visionary orientations. And Francis reads them with a striking psychological lucidity. He sees clearly that they take dead-seriously the kind of humanity we actually are. The words of Blaise Pascal apply:
What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.
And he knows that all this cannot just be whisked away by coercive laws or abstract moral exhortations.
Precisely for that reason, the Beatitudes give shape to a community designed for triage in a Church equipped as a Field Hospital, stocked with the resources of mercy, truth and sacramental grace gushing from the torn Flesh and Bloodshed of the Christ. The Beatitudes name the inner dispositions necessary for a people capable of rehabilitating broken hearts, transforming victims and perpetrators alike into missionaries of mercy, pouring Pentecost’s sacramental oil and Eucharistic wine onto the gaping wounds of the broken world.
In par. 63 of Gaudete et exsultate, Francis writes says, “Jesus explained with great simplicity what it means to be holy when he gave us the Beatitudes … the Beatitudes are like a Christian’s identity card.” Even more! The Beatitudes are a summary portrait of the entire Gospel, a rethinking of the whole Old Testament through the theandric imagination of the Messiah.
But, the Pope adds, if these 8-fold refractions of holiness ever feel vague or elusive just continue to read on in Matthew’s Gospel to discover Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount and find “a portrait of the Master, which we are called to reflect in our daily lives.”
This is why I like to describe the Beatitudes as the “CV” of the Messiah; or maybe, more precisely, as his obituary. They’re not a list of résumé accomplishments or accolades, but a disclosure of his own character (imago Dei) freely given in advance. In a most profound sense, Jesus left this “obituary” to the Church at the Last Supper, inscribed in the Priesthood and Eucharist, and then enacted fully in his blessed Passion where every Beatitude is brought to its perfection: poverty self-emptied on the Cross, meekness that refused violence, mercy poured out on killers and cowards, purity of heart able to see the Father even in abandonment, peacemaking sealed in Blood.
They chart the inner terrain of his Heart and so, in this sense, are a cartography of divine love made human. The Way of Truth that leads to Life.
The world’s fallen logic prizes self-assertion and resists obedient trust, seeks control over every outcome, hoards rather than receiving life as gift to be shared, treats retaliation as strength and mercy as weakness, and measures worth by being “seen” rather than by faithfulness. Francis asserts that this logic leads to depression, sadness, pain, division and a loss of meaning.
He presses this point even further in par. 64, “The word ‘happy’ or ‘blessed’ thus becomes a synonym for ‘holy’.” And here is a signature ‘Francis theme’: holiness is not dour or grim but joyful. This streaming joy comes, first, from knowing oneself as beloved by the Father; second, from the self-giving love that flows from that blessed assurance; and third, from fidelity to God’s word in the concrete and unnoticed circumstances of daily life. The Beatitudes, in this way, reveal the paradoxical happiness of a life aligned with the grain of Christ-wood rather than with the splintered logic of a fallen world.
And that logic, Francis contends, runs decisively against the cultural flow. The Beatitudes confront our deepest instincts for self-protection, self-seeking, manipulation, pleasure and prestige. The world pushes us towards this way of living, and unless the Holy Spirit frees us from our attachments and our complacencies, the Beatitudes will always remain beautiful ideals completely unrealized. Holiness demands hard change, otherwise it becomes an empty word.
A final thought.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Poverty of spirit, the first of the Eight, is the key that unlocks the others. In a very real sense, the other seven are simply declensions of the same noun: poor.
In the Jewish prophetic tradition, the poor of Yahweh, the lowly and powerless who place their trust entirely in God — the anawim — are supremely praised. To be “poor” before God is the highest spiritual compliment in this tradition. It describes a heart unencumbered by false securities, not grieved by loss of possessions, open to dependence on Providence and always ready to receive God’s reply to their ceaseless cries for deliverance.
Mary’s Magnificat is, in this sense, a hymn to the triumph of the anawim. Just think of Luke 1:48: “…for he has looked upon the humiliation of his woman-slave” (tapeinōsin tēs doulēs auton) whom “all generations will call blessed.” Blessed slave-woman! Her joy springs not from power seized, but from poverty received as a gift: tout est grâce.
Spiritual poverty is ultimately about where we place our security. Wealth, status, comfort and self-sufficiency all create the illusion of control, but they leave no room for God’s word. Poverty of heart, by contrast, creates space for God’s perennial newness.
Living in this “holy indifference,” one leans into a radical interior freedom that refuses to absolutize health over sickness, riches over poverty, honor over dishonor, pleasure over pain. This is the freedom of Christ himself, the freedom he came to bring. Christ could give everything to us only because he clung to nothing. This itself is a whole revolution of life that Fr. Thomas Dubay, in Happy Are You Poor, offered a sketch of. But that’s for another day to discuss…
In the spiritual life, no battle is more consequential than the fight against vice. In a class I’m currently teaching, we’ve been examining this struggle, and I’ve summarized my notes below in a way that’s hopefully both practical and readable. I was not going to post today, but when I saw the readings at Mass for today reminding us that the kingdom of God belongs to the poor and humble, I thought: I MUST!
Especially in a time when hubris and self-promotion are prominently celebrated as cultural virtues, and humility is parodied as weakness, the call to beg Christ to heal the pride in our own hearts feels urgent and necessary.
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Pride is called the “gateway” of all sins for good reason. St. Thomas Aquinas calls it the “beginning of all sin,” an inordinate desire for one’s own excellence (for one’s own sake), and a sense of self-sufficiency that can easily mask itself as rugged virtue. Pride, often undetected, undermines our integrity, clouds our judgment and damages our relationships. Especially for those in positions of authority, pride is a spiritual danger that can sabotage both the mission one is tasked to serve and one’s own moral character.
What does pride look like in daily life? It’s often not the boisterous and obvious arrogance we might expect, but hides in subtler forms. This might look like the constant need to be right, a constant internal comparison to others or the obsessive drive for appreciation and admiration. Adolf Tanquerey warns against the pride that masquerades as confidence and ambition, or especially piety.
Pope Francis reminds us that pride refuses to endure humiliations, recoiling from correction or failure. Even someone who prays, serves and leads can harbor pride if they believe their achievements, wisdom or virtues are ultimately their own. Vanity, which is the desire to be seen as great, can be one of its most visible manifestations, while spiritual pride often remains hidden as it is easy to hide beneath religious language and practice.
Leaders, in particular, must be vigilant. The higher the influence, the greater the temptation to self-exalt. Pride is insidious because it can be mistaken for confidence, decisiveness or competence. A helpful gauge, my spiritual director once reminded me, is to notice how much time someone spends dominating conversation, speaking about themselves, or showing little interest in what others have to say.
Healthy self-assertion, Aquinas argues, is entirely distinct: it acknowledges one’s gifts and responsibilities without displacing God or trampling over others. Pride, by contrast, always seeks to place the self at the center. As Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “a principal sign of holiness is when the thought of others’ welfare populates the mind more than thoughts of one’s own.” Leaders who cultivate this disposition protect not only their own souls but also the integrity and flourishing of those they serve.
So how can we root pride out and cultivate humility? There are practical remedies. First, regular self-examination helps identify pride’s subtle forms. Ask yourself: Do I need others to see my accomplishments to feel at peace? Do I resent correction? Do I claim as my own what is God’s gift? A. Tanquerey emphasizes this inward honesty as the foundation of spiritual growth.
Second, embrace humiliations as teachers, as Pope Francis stresses. Disappointments, criticism and everyday ordinary failures are effective instruments to cultivate humility. Leaders who can accept correction and setbacks gracefully develop inner stability, deeper empathy and keener insight into what is best in any given circumstance for benefiting others.
Third, practice service and hidden obedience. Acts of charity that go unnoticed, small gestures of patience and “giving way” in minor matters cultivate the interior freedom needed to counter pride. St. Benedict frames pride as self-will opposed to humble obedience, so consciously practicing obedience (even in small and ordinary ways) trains the soul to live rightly under God’s authority.
For the laity, this can take many forms: following the speed limit even when you’re in a hurry, honestly reporting taxes, respecting workplace rules or the employee handbook, complying with a supervisor’s reasonable request even when you disagree, or yielding in minor household disagreements. These seemingly mundane acts shape a character that does not insist on having its own way and gradually weakens the tendency to place oneself at the center of every situation.
Fourth, actively seek the perspective of others and welcome honest feedback. Ask those you respect for critical insights into your behavior and receive unsought criticism as a gift. A vivid biblical example comes from King David and Shimei. After David flees Jerusalem during Absalom’s rebellion, Shimei, a member of Saul’s family, runs along the road cursing David, throwing stones and insulting him (2 Samuel 16:5–8). David’s men urge him to take immediate revenge, but David restrains himself, saying, “Let him curse, for the Lord has told him to.” Later, when David returns to Jerusalem, Shimei comes to apologize, and David again shows measured restraint, holding off judgment.
This episode is powerful for two reasons. First, it demonstrates how a leader receiving criticism, insults and correction (deserved or undeserved) can be a powerful tool for humility. Second, restraint in responding to any provocation protects the soul from pride and anger — and rash judgment! Leaders must always listen carefully, considering the truth in what others say and allowing even an unwelcome critique to refine character. This strengthens judgment, justice and charity. In short, humility grows when we resist the instinct to retaliate or dominate, but instead allow God — and the wisdom of others — to shape our responses.
Finally, grateful acknowledgment of gifts keeps the heart oriented toward God rather than the self. Pride is rooted in disordered self-sufficiency, humility in healthy and just dependence. Recognizing that all talents, achievements and opportunities are gifts transforms ambition into vocational stewardship.
Pride is subtle and pervasive and dangerous, but by cultivating greater self-awareness, embracing humiliations, serving without applause or giving God (or other people) credit for what we are and do, we can guard against the “root of roots” of spiritual destruction. And pride is not only a personal danger, but, in leaders, it becomes a poisonous contagion. Humility, by contrast, communicates integrity, fosters cooperation and builds strong communities built on justice and love.
This week, identify one area where pride might be directing your thoughts, words or decisions. Confront it with a counter-act of humility, accept the correction or inconvenience humility brings and then turn it over to God. In doing this, you will uproot a deadly passion that, left unchecked, can steal away so much good.
(I will post again Feb 3rd or 4th)
One of the most enduring gifts I received from my time with the Institute for Priestly Formation was a simple and, I find, very effective method of prayer designed especially for time spent in Eucharistic adoration. It moves through four interior acts: Acknowledge, Relate, Receive, Respond. Over time, by regular practice, this flow became almost second nature to me. Its logic gave voice to the demands of recollection, and helped reign in my distractions and focus my meandering thoughts on God’s presence
And yet, after years of this method I always found myself wanting to add one final movement — I added an O at the end: Offer. With that addition, ARRRO became both a way of praying and a way of activating my baptismal priesthood shared out to me by Christ. I once wrote of it in my journal as a way of preparing the “raw material” of daily life for entry into the new creation.
Here’s a sketch I created for use in a retreat once:
Prayer begins with attention, and so to acknowledge is to notice what is actually present in my heart right now. Thoughts, feelings, desires, resistances, hopes, distractions, fears. Nothing more and nothing less, very simple. It’s not analysis or self-correction or self-evaluation. I don’t sort through things, rank, explain or fix what I notice. I simply allow it to be seen. Prayer here begins with honesty before the Face of God. If I want to receive what God desires to give me, it must be ME that is present to him, and my awareness is crucial to opening myself to him freely.
Ask simple questions: What am I thinking. How do I feel. What do I desire. Grace always meets us where we are, not where we imagine we should be.
What I acknowledge, I then relate to God. I gather up what I’ve found in my heart and speak of it directly to God. I bring it into his presence and entrust it to him. I speak without editing or concealment.
This step is important as prayer is not just an interior monologue but a colloquy, a dialogue, a conversation between friends. Yes, God already knows what is in my heart, but prayer freely permits God to enter my knowledge as his own. When I speak my thoughts, feelings and desires to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, my inner life becomes shared life. The hypostatic union is realized in a unique way in me.
If the same thought or concern returns again and again, I speak of it again. God never tires of my heart, never grows weary or bored. Over time, this honest repetition trains the heart in transparency and trust. Nothing is too small, too ordinary or too tangled up to be brought into the presence of God.
Only after acknowledging and relating am I now disposed to receive from God. This is the most counterintuitive movement of prayer as I don’t ‘perform,” I receive. And receiving can take many forms. A sense of peace may emerge, or confusion may begin to stir. My inner desire may be clarified or gently redirected. Sometimes, maybe often times, the change is barely perceptible. But movements that draw the heart toward God, toward truth, toward love, toward virtue are signs of his action already at work within me.
Faith makes alive for us that Jesus is present in our hearts through the power of his Holy Spirit, waiting for us to be with him, to hear his voice and to receive strength. This is all God’s initiative, prayer only disposes me to welcome what God gives rather than being a “striving” to generate spiritual results on my own.
Sit for a time in silence and slowly repeat a simple phrase of receptivity, like “Come, Lord Jesus. Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Father of the poor. Speak, Lord.”
Grace always calls forth a response, beginning with gratitude. When God gives, the heart answers without strain, flowing from what has been received. This response may take the form of praise, acts of faith-trust-love, a renewal of desire or just an act of thanksgiving. It arises organically from graces given.
At this point, the original ARRR method could conclude. But, as I said above, I believe any prayer shaped by the Holy Eucharist presses Upward and does not end with interior fruit alone.
Here’s where the final “O” becomes essential. To “offer up” is to place my entire life into the hands of God through-with-in Christ. My work and responsibilities, my marriage and family, my vocation and limits, my health, fatigue, successes, failures, joys, sorrows. Even my vices that may have manifested during my prayer, now given up to God as gift through contrition. Nothing is excluded.
This allows God’s love to re-orient the whole of my life as an oblation, as an act of surrender and trust. It says that everything I am and have is pure gift to be freely returned to the One who gave it.
This is where my prayer becomes explicitly priestly. Every baptized Christian shares in Christ’s priesthood. Not by standing at the altar in the sanctuary of the Church, but by offering on the altar of the heart the entire world back to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Second Vatican Council expressed this beautifully in Gaudium et Spes 38, teaching that when the faithful unite their daily lives to Christ’s Eucharistic offering, even the most ordinary human activities become material for the kingdom of heaven.
So in this sense, “offering” is my interior prayer aimed at the universal new creation. What I place in God’s hands, however incomplete or fragile, he will take up and transform. Nothing offered in Christ is wasted.
ARRRO opens the soul up to a Eucharistic rhythm of life. Becoming aware, speaking honestly, receiving grace, responding with gratitude and then offering everything back to God. It is the best preparation for “full, conscious and active participation” in the Liturgy. In this prayer, enacted in Christ, you pivot the world back to God so that the world itself may be drawn toward its final fulfillment and be made new.
Awesome truth.
Neal Obstat Theological Opining 