Sometimes

When I went to seminary I went there in order to gain a better grasp on my already direct experience of God. What I found there were some people who in spite of being good-willed really had no such experience themselves and so could not speak to it. (And there were also a good number of people there who were psychopathic, enculturated, and doctrinal, and these made life miserable for me.) And while the former spoke of the need for formation in the Christian life, the practises to which they alluded were discipline-oriented and not genuinely helpful at all in better discerning the experiences the presence of God n daily life. Over the four years that I was there I came to feel like I was being given the resources to fill a very large backpack that I would carry with me for the rest of my life. Over the course of the future I could then draw on these resources to both address problems, as well as to explore future administrative, counselling, and educational possibilities for both myself as well as for the people in the churches whom I might serve. But I had already read a substantial amount of Thomas Merton: Every moment of every event in every person’s life plants something in their soul. This was the language that I could understand and that was in keeping with the Word. But the Protestant penchant for academia would have nothing to do with a Trappist monk, and to be honest, even the best professors at seminary were not interested in knowing or doing the Word. My university degrees themselves turned out to be marginal, enculturated attempts to manage both God and people’s religious lives. Having read the church fathers and the eremitic tradition, I turned to the Catholic educational system, but my contact with modern Catholics, on the other hand, eventually turned out to be as equally discouraging. In spite of the so-called modernization going on since Vatican II, Catholics remained chained to roles, convinced that it was by following the tradition/rubrics themselves that real inner transformation was not just possible, but a foregone outcome. Modern educational theories and traditional spiritual exercises alike, like their Protestant counterparts, shuttered Catholic consciousness on the real immanence of God and the possibility of God actually breaking through in daily life; the wisdom and self-emptying necessary to discern this and to live in expectant anticipation of it, simply was not there. All of these hope-filled explorations required a total of eleven years of full-time study (two masters and a doctorate while working full-time) and eventually ended up physically exhausting me and placed my family in one hundred thousand dollars of debt. That ended twenty-two years ago. Since that time I have resigned my ordination and withdrawn from organized denominational life. I still maintain my attachments to proto-Christian understandings of the sacraments. I attend Mass and partake in the real presence. And I certainly practise the traditional disciplines of eremitical and ascetic life. I am a part of a monastic community, living remotely, and follow a rule. And I am most committed to reading and actually doing the Word without dismissing it by imposing on it my enculturated, psychological selfishness on it. Every day I arise to carry out my work outlined by Christ in Matthew 25. And every day I live in expectation that God will show up in person in one way or another. I do my best to have the wisdom and insight and humility and psychological maturity to not impose myself enough to miss it. And most of all I stay away from people who have no understanding of this. The real miracle is that sometimes in spite of myself God actually manages to break through...sometimes.