Saint Charles de Foucauld, mission, friendship, and my cancer

The life of Charles de Foucauld and the communities which were inspired by his life have fascinated me since the early 1980s, especially when I met some Little Brothers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended Mass there many Sundays. My diaconal stole for my ordination bears the heart and cross which he sewed on his habit.

Yet there was one aspect of the life of Saint Charles de Foucauld that I never knew until I recently read Little Sister Cathy Wright’s book, Saint Charles de Foucauld: His Life and Spirituality.

About 1907, a severe drought hit the Algerian Sahara, including Tamanrasset, where he was living. His life was in danger and his poor neighbors helped restore his life. As Sister Cathy writes:

    Charles was at his lowest point, physically and as well as spiritually. He felt himself broken and a failure. Previously no matter how poor he was, he had always been the one who had something to give to others. True to the missionary customs of the day, he felt he should never receive anything from the people, never be beholden to them. Now, for the first time in his life, except possibly in Morocco, he had nothing left to give. 

    Brother Charles was now the one in need, and the Tuareg responded by scouring the countryside looking for a little bit of milk to nurse him back to health. Their sense of the sacred duty of hospitality moved them to care for the foreigner. Charles truly owed them his life. Weakness brought about a level of relationship that would not have been possible without this reciprocity. It was a conversion for him in terms of his own inner life — of accepting his weakness and need — and one that further transformed his theories about mission into a relationship of friendship. (pp. 92, 94)

This event in the life of Saint Charles de Foucauld has struck me deeply in the last few weeks. 

I've had some prostate problems since June last year. After some medication and later a blood test (PSA), my doctor in November sent me to a urologist. A young Honduran doctor whom I knew from his work with Honduras Amigas, a medical brigade that comes regularly to our area, arranged an appointment for me with a urologist in San Pedro Sula in December. 

After that appointment, it was clear to me that I had prostate cancer, though its extent was unclear. The urologist ordered a biopsy.

Because of Christmas holidays, I was not able to schedule a biopsy until January. A Honduran friend whom I’ve known for 15 years gave me a ride to San Pedro and refused my offer to at least pay for the fuel. The young doctor arranged for a place for me to stay with a friend of his and then accompanied me to the hospital for the biopsy.

The Saturday before the biopsy we had a meeting of the parish’s communion ministers. I asked our pastor, Padre German, for the anointing of the sick, which we celebrated at the meeting of the communion ministers.

Last Friday I went to San Pedro to meet with the urologist and later with an oncologist. I have to get an MRI (a full body scan) in Santa Rosa this week and then I’ll go see the oncologist to determine what treatment will be best.

I have been reluctant to share my medical situation publicly, partly because I did not fully know my medical situation and partly because I don’t like to call attention to myself, especially living in the midst of so much suffering. I shared information with some friends and family. I put a generic request for prayers for me on my Facebook page, but no more than that.

Early on, I did share my medical situation with some close friends here and in the US, with my spiritual director, and my pastor and the bishop. But Friday, I decided to share more broadly – first with a detailed e-mail to some friends and family and then with a Facebook post restricted to friends. 

The responses have been overwhelming. Some friends have sent me e-mails or private messages, several sharing their experience with prostate cancer. But over 100 wrote comments on my Facebook post and there are, as of now, more than 160 likes – from Catholics, Episcopalians, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others, from all over the globe, including people here in Honduras whom I know. These signs of solidarity, love, and accompaniment give me strength and courage. 

After the biopsy, I had thought my situation might be worse and was, as Nouwen and Rolheiser have written, “befriending my death.” 

When I thought of offering to host a night of the Posadas next December, I noted to myself, “if I’m still alive.” This was not a macabre fascination with death but, in the words of Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, “an acceptance of my vulnerability and mortality,” something which I have been struggling with for the past year or so. It has been a freeing experience.

Last year I came across this quote of Ronald Rolheiser in Essential Spiritual Writings, p. 22:

Henri Nouwen suggests that at a certain point of our lives, the real question is no longer: What can I still do so that my life makes a contribution? Rather, the question becomes: How can I now live so that my death will be an optimal blessing for my family, my church, and the world? We must leave home a second time, and this time we face a much larger unknown.

About three months ago, I began considering if God might be calling me to something more.

There are a lot of changes in my life: the Dubuque Franciscans left Honduras a few weeks ago; my pastor will probably be changed in April; I turned seventy-five last June. 

I feel a need or a call to not only be closer to the poor but also to devote myself to more quiet – for contemplation and for some writing projects I’d like to finish. I have even begun looking for places to make an eight-day Ignatian directed retreat.

But now this comes along – provoking a change, though I have no idea where this will lead me. But, as if to push me into unknown waters, earlier this week I came across these words of Patrick McGrath, SJ, in An Ignatian Book of Days (p.29):

Looking back on our lives, can any of us honestly say we knew exactly the path our lives would take? Isn’t it true that God has moved about in each of our lives and surprised us with all manner of twists and turns we could not have predicted or perhaps even desired? Ignatius reminds us that we must remain ever open to the new ways God is inviting us to live our lives. If anything impedes our ability to remain open, then we must prayerfully consider what to do. When Ignatius instructs us not to fix our desires on health over sickness, for example, he prods us to consider whether our faith allows us to trust that God can be experienced even in frailty and sickness—and that good can come of it.

What are the new ways God is inviting me to live my life? 

I don’t know, but I feel surrounded by a community of love that is accompanying me into uncharted waters. I also feel that these experiences are helping me move forward, becoming more open to the people around me. 

This is a blessing. 

I want to share two other thoughts,  seemingly unconnected. 

First, in a meeting with Padre German, my pastor, a few days ago, as I brought him up to date on my situation, he told me what a Jesuit once told him. 

The Jesuit was talking of where one wants to be buried. He noted that these are the people whom we will see on the day of the resurrection of the dead and so we should ask to be buried where we will be surrounded by people we know and love.

That touched me, because I have told people that, when I die, I want to be buried in the cemetery in the nearby aldea of Candelaria where I have assisted at the burial of people from Plan Grande and Candelaria – my neighbors. 

Second, a few days ago, I was reflecting how I see my ministry as opening spaces for grace. Then, I remembered the ending of Georges Bernanos’s novel, The Diary of a Country Priest.

A friend who had left the active priesthood and was married had given the country priest a place to stay for the night. His condition worsened, and he was vomiting blood. He asked his friend for absolution which his friend did with some trepidation: “Although I realized that I had no right to accede ever hastily to this request, it was quite impossible in the name of humanity and friendship, to refuse him.” 

Afterwards, his friend sent for the parish priest and apologized for the “delay that threatened to deprive my colleague of the final consolations of the church.” Shortly after, as this friend tells it, the country priest “put his hand over mine, and his eyes entreated me to draw closer to him. He then uttered these words, almost in my ear. And I am quite sure that I have recorded them accurately, for his voice, though halting, was strongly distinct. 

    ‘Does it matter? Grace is . . . everywhere.’ 

     I think he died just then.

Yes, grace is everywhere. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to recognize.

Saint Therese of Lisieux and unbelievers

A few months ago, I read Tomáš Halík’s Night of the Confessor. I had bought it a while ago but never got around to reading it. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it. I found it intriguing and helpful. After finishing it I began another of his books, Patience with God. I am now reading another, I Want You To Be. 

 This is a short and somewhat hurried reflection on an amazing insight he has written on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast we celebrate today. 

Print of Ade Bethune

 In a chapter of Patience with God, Halík reflects on St. Thérèse of Lisieux and what some have described as her dark night of the soul. But for him, it is not merely her personal struggle but a path toward solidarity with unbelievers, in the dark night of nothingness. Might St. Thérèse’s experience and Halík’s reflections, combined with Pope Francis’ call to go to the margins, reveal an opening to a new path of faith and mission.

For me, it has been important to open spaces for those on the margin to encounter the presence of God. Most recently, it has been personally important to reflect on those times when God seems absent. Saint Thérèse is important for this. 

As Halík notes, she describes how Christ led her into a subterranean space “where no sun shines any longer.” She experienced months of darkness, even until her death of tuberculosis. 

But what is striking is what Halík describes:

“Little Thérèse's” principle was “to accept even the strangest thoughts” out of love for God. What is therefore most remarkable about Thérèse is the way she accepted and perceived her contest with God, with darkness and forlornness, her experience with the absence of God and the eclipse of her faith. She accepted it as a mark of solidarity with unbelievers.

“Solidarity with unbelievers” – unbelievers are not seen as threats or as opponents to be conquered. As Halík notes:  

However, if I am correct in my understanding of Thérèse and of her path through paradox and constant reinterpretation, then her concern was something else: not simply to draw these unbelievers back into the heart of the church, but rather to broaden that heart by including their experience of darkness. Through her solidarity with unbelievers, she conquers new territory (along with its inhabitants) for a church that has previously been too closed.

I get frustrated when people dismiss or minimize the concerns of atheists or agnostics. I get even more upset when people rail against secularism or blame it for the problems of lack of interest in the church. I wonder how much of discontent or opposition to the church flows from what those in the church have done, not only the abuses of many kinds, but even more the failure of many to take seriously the concerns of those outside.

I think Halík offers us a serious challenge.

“Hasn't the time come for Thérèse's spiritual path, and particularly “solidarity with unbelievers,” to be an inspiration as a hermeneutic key toward new theological reflection on present-day society, its spiritual climate, and the church's mission at the present time?”

We need to take the darkness of Saint Thérèse seriously. This cold lead us in a very different direction. As Halík notes,

I can't help thinking that the world and the church would look very different if there were more people willing to view the Council's call for solidarity with this world (including the world of the “unbelievers,” those who are most radically “other” and different), not as a cue to superficially modernize the rhetoric and external resources of “evangelization,” but as a profound awareness of God's hiddenness, of how He “reveals” Himself through the experience of “unbelievers,” as we were taught by Thérèse de Lisieux on her deathbed. Thérèse could only indicate the path—which is what any good teacher does in any case—and bequeath to us the task of thinking through and accomplishing the spiritual journey.

----------- 

 Thomas Halík is a Catholic priest, who, while practicing as a psychotherapist in Czechoslovakia, was secretly ordained. After the fall of Communism, he worked with the Czech Bishops’ Conference and was an adviser to Vaclav Havel. He has been a professor of sociology and philosophy at Charles University and taught in other institutions.

Novena of Saint Francis of Assisi Day One

The Message of Christ at San Damiano 

It is a Catholic custom to prepare for a feast with a novena, nine days of prayer. The feast of Saint Francis of Assisi is on October 4, although he died on the evening of October 3. So today is the first day of the novena to honor Saint Francis.

In 1973, I took the summer off and bicycled around Europe (mostly, France, Italy, and Greece).

One of the highlights was my time in Assisi. One day I went down to San Damiano, the church where Francis heard Jesus speaking from the cross, “Go, repair my church, which you see is falling into ruins.” Francis began to work on the repair of the church.

The church of San Damiano

At San Damiano, I encountered a British Franciscan friar who spoke with me and a few young people. He told the story and remarked that Francis’ response was what the saint needed. 

Francis had spent time as a prisoner of war, after an unsuccessful war between Assisi and its nearby rival, Perugia. He returned a broken young man. After an attempt to join the army in support of the pope, he returned home after a strange dream. He also went on pilgrimage to Rome where he spent time with the beggars at St. Peter’s Basilica. 

Returning again to Assisi, he wandered the countryside, where he came upon the ruined church of San Damiano and experienced the call to Jesus. 

The Franciscan friar explained that Francis needed the physical work in order to be healed. I now wonder whether Francis was experiencing a form of trauma, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Getting out of himself, doing something was what he needed. 

This made a lot of sense to me – and I see the wisdom of God in calling Francis, the privileged son of a prosperous textile merchant, to begin to heal.

After spending some time at San Damiano that day, I went up to the Basilica of Saint Francis where the saint is buried and where the frescos of Giotto in the upper church detail his life. 

There I heard a Conventual Franciscan friar speaking to a group of pilgrims. He described the event at San Damiano but added that Francis got it wrong. His real mission was to repair the universal Church. 

My immediate reaction was that the friar in San Damiano had it right, not the friar in the grand basilica. Francis needed physical work, needed to repair what was around him, so he could be healed.

The way of healing begins where we are.

Any future mission arises from a faithful response to the small mission at hand. For Francis, this meant hauling rocks to the site and rebuilding the walls of the church. 

By working with his hands, Francis experienced the healing power of God. This was his mission at that moment. Rebuilding the universal Church by living a life of poverty and preaching to the people flowed from his response to the voice of Christ that day at San Damiano.

Can we repair the church if we don’t undertake the simple tasks of rebuilding the church around us? This includes letting God repair us, heal us. 

It is a temptation to think we have to wait for a grand mission to begin the work of Christ in our lives. 

This reminds me of one of the entries in Markings, the notebook of Dag Hammarkskold, the United Nations Secretary General who was killed in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961.

“The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one — and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart.... 

“The ‘great’ commitment all too easily obscures the ‘little’ one. But without the humility and warmth which you have to develop in your relations to the few with whom you are personally involved, you will never be able to do anything for the many. Without them, you will live in a world of abstractions, where your solipsism, your greed for power, and your death-wish lack one opponent which is stronger than they – love. Love, which is without an object, the outflowing of a power released by self-surrender, but which would remain a sublime sort of super-human self-assertion, powerless against the negative forces within you, if it were not tamed by the yoke of human intimacy and warmed by its tenderness. It is better for the health of the soul to make one [person] good than ‘to sacrifice oneself for [hu]mankind.’ For a mature [person], these are not alternatives, but two aspects of self-realization, which mutually support each other, both being the outcome of one and the same choice.”

Francis responded to the immediate need – and thus opened himself to a mission larger than himself.

Where is God calling us – in little missions of our daily lives– to serve, and to let God repair us, the Church, and the world?

San Damiano in the mural of St. Clare in the church of Dulce Nombre de Copán, Honduras 

Mission Sunday - Iowa, Honduras, Bolivia, the Amazon, and the world

Today is Mission Sunday in the Extraordinary Month of Mission that Pope Francis called for to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Maximum Illud, an apostolic letter of Pope Benedict XV on the missions.

Today is also the end of the week of mission in the deanery of Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras. About fifty members of the parish of Dulce Nombre de María went on mission to the parish of Corquín, Copán, more than an hour away from Dulce Nombre. They spent the week – without money and without cellphone – visiting homes in scattered villages throughout that parish.

Missionaries of the Dulce Nombre parish

I had a less gruelling mission – visiting our sister parish, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Ames, Iowa, and a visit to the Iowa City Catholic Worker.

At Thursday Night Liturgy at St. Thomas Aquinas, Ames

We prepared our missionaries with four sessions. At one of them, our pastor had asked me to share some thoughts on the letter of Pope Benedict XV.

The letter does respond to the situation of the early twentieth century, but there were several points that clearly redirected the sense of mission. One that I particularly appreciated the call to separate missionary activity from nationalism of any sort.

Part of the problem of missionaries has often been that they have come with the invaders – Franciscans and others came to the Americas with the conquistadors. I wonder if sometimes the native peoples identified them with the mother country and not with our real mother country – the Reign of God. A few like the Dominican priest and bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas, were exceptions.

But Pope Benedict XV advised missionaries to avoid nationalism. He noted that

“…such a situation could easily give rise to the conviction that the Christian religion is the national religion of some foreign people and that anyone converted to it is abandoning his loyalty to his own people and submitting to the pretensions and domination of a foreign power.”

And so, “it is not our vocation to expand the frontiers of human empires, but those of Christ, nor to add any citizens to countries here below but to our fatherland above.“

Pope Benedict XV goes on to characterize the missionary as humble, obedient, chaste, and a person of prayer. Meeting the unbeliever,

“...his bearing toward them is neither scornful nor fastidious; his treatment of them is neither harsh nor rough. Instead, he makes use of all the arts of Christian kindness to attract them to himself, so that he may eventually lead them into the arms of Christ, into the embrace of the Good Shepherd.”

In my meeting with our parish missionaries, I noted how they were going to different places not to impose our way of being a parish but to help open spaces for God to work.

As I look at the Synod of the Amazon, I see a part of the Church struggling to be a Church in place, not a church which is tied to any foreign nation or culture. I believe that some of the opposition comes from trying to hold onto a European/North American cultural expression of the faith – without noting that the Church in those places took much from the local culture in the early centuries of the Church.

What is important is to be open to the presence of Christ Jesus who was born into a particular culture and political situation but who transcends these. Christ and his message can find echoes and reception in many cultures. We should live in hope – and not in fear.

This afternoon, I had a few hours between Mass and dinner with some friends and so decided to spend time at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Student Center, here in Ames. I decided to visit the room dedicated to the Dulce Nombre de María parish, acknowledging our sister relationship, and also the room dedicated to “Cigar Box Ray.”

I entered the room and immediately saw the display in honor of Father Ray Herman, a graduate of Iowa State University, a priest of the Dubuque archdiocese, and a missionary to Bolivia. Reading one plaque I realized that today is the anniversary of his martyrdom in Morochata, near Cochabamba, Bolivia.

I wrote about him a few years ago here. He lived among the poor, responded to their needs, and died after getting a hospital built. And he did it with great austerity. His body was brought back to be buried in Iowa. His personal belongs fit into a cigar box.

I am far from that but he and many other missionaries, such as Blessed Stanley Rother and Blessed Tulio Marruzo, ofm, inspire me and encourage me to deepen my commitment to mission.

And so, today is a special mission Sunday for me, a time to recommit myself to the mission we all have as missionary disciples. For, as Pope Francis wrote in The Joy of the Gospel/Evangelii Gaudium (120):

"In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19)."

New Orleans, Honduras, and the African-American woman

How an African American woman in New Orleans 

got me to Honduras.

During my twenty-third year in campus ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, Iowa, something happened that changed my life. Maybe I should say some things happened.

The first was Hurricane Katrina that devastated the New Orleans area in August 2015.

We responded in the parish with aid and Dee Thompson, a good friend who is a nurse, went and served those who left and were housed in Texas.

But a young man, Nate Stein, insisted that we ought to go and help. He had been involved in our student service projects and was, for a while, on our student justice and service team. He had been to Appalachia.

Finally persuaded, Nate and I began to plan to get a group to go to New Orleans during the March 2016 student break. Fifteen of us went and worked with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

The first days we gutted and cleaned a house that was empty. Then we went to another part of town to clean out a house that had not been touched for months. The waters had reached halfway up the wall and remained there for weeks. The house, the furniture, the clothing - all wreaked of black mold.

We arrived and met Sandra, an African-American woman in her sixties, who had raised her children and grandchildren in this house. She was ill just before the hurricane and thus had to stay in her house until the waters forced her out. Then, she fled to a neighbor’s roof to escape the rising waters. She and others were rescued by helicopter. She then went to Houston and she had just come back to New Orleans.

As was our custom, we prayed before we began. I asked her to join us. Her response was most welcoming. She noted that she was a Baptist but was very happy to be joining us in prayer.

Then we began the long work of taking all her possessions out of the house.

 As we took out all her possessions, Sandra stood there with a serenity I could hardly believe.

She stood there – with a sister and a grandson. Occasionally we came across something personal that was not very damaged and offered it to her. She gracefully declined.

What struck me through all this was her tranquility, her calm in the face of seeing almost all of her possessions, her life, being carried out to the curb, to be taken to the dump.

That night the students and I sat around in a church sharing our thoughts on the day. Many of the students remarked on Sandra’s tranquility, her calm. Some asked. “How would I feel if I lost all my possessions?”

But I began to think about my house and my possessions. I began to think of my mortality.

What’s going to happen with all my junk when I die? Who’s going to have to go through it?

It was a moment of detachment.

When I got home, I began to wonder if I might leave my ministry in Ames. I had been in correspondence with Dubuque Franciscan Sister Nancy Meyerhofer, a good friend whom I had first met in El Salvador when I was on sabbatical, volunteering for six months in the parish of Suchitoto where she and four other US sisters served. I sent her an e-mail, asking if there was any way I could be of service there.

This was not something I had thought of. In fact, in February, my spiritual director had asked me if I would think of just leaving my ministry at St. Thomas. I was happy in my ministry and even had the opportunity to teach a class about once a year in the university. I was comfortably ensconced in a nice small house. My immediate response to my director was “No.”

Yet two months later I was seriously considering leaving for Central America

Somehow, while we were emptying Sharon’s house God opened something in my heart. As I look back, I realize that while we emptied out Sandra’s house, I was being emptied.

This emptying raised a deeper question in my heart: Am I called to do something more? (How typically Ignatian.)

Somehow, while we were emptying Sharon’s house God opened something in my heart.

This happened almost fourteen years ago. And now I find myself in the hills of southwestern Honduras, older than Sandra was when we met her. But I still need to keep pondering – What does God want me to let go of? In what ways need I to experience the emptying of God? What more?

In all this I return to a passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians2: 5-7, that has formed me – since high school.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave…

Help me, Lord, to remember the roots of my missionary vocation and an inspiration of my diaconal calling.

Help me, Lord, to empty myself.