Am I a Searcher?

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Andrew, one of Jesus' first two Apostles (along with John). I have to admit to you that Andrew is probably my favorite saint. I hear about him so often during my weekly meetings with my friends of Communion and Liberation. Many times I have heard the Gospel reading from John.

The next day John was there again with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon. Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus. He first found his own brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed).

1 John 36-41

As I was sitting in a Communion service yesterday, I began to think about Andrew. What would have possessed him to follow this man? He probably was married and had a family. He was a hard-working man, one would assume. He had an established life. But I think that he was probably looking for something more. He was seeking something. And because he was looking for something, something for his happiness, the meaning of life, something more, he was able to recognize Jesus. So he was able to run to his brother Simon and with confidence say, "We have found the Messiah."

Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, wrote:

But imagine those two who stay there listening to Him for hours and then they have to go home. He says goodbye to them and they go their way silently, silent because full of the impression they have received of the felt mystery, about which they had had a feeling beforehand and then they had actually felt... And Andrew goes into his house and puts his cloak down, and his wife says: “Andrew, what’s wrong with you? You’re different, what happened?” Imagine that he burst into tears in her arms, and that she, upset by all this, continued to ask him: “But what’s wrong?” And he holding his wife, who had never felt herself held that way before: he was a different person. He was a different person! He was the same, but he was different. If anyone had asked him: “Who are you?” he would have said: “I understand that I have become someone else... after hearing that person, that man, I have become another person.”

Quotation is from "Recognizing Christ", a transcription of a meditation by Fr Luigi Giussani during the Spiritual Exercises of the Communion and Liberation university students in December 1994

Are we seekers? Are we looking for something more, or are we simply going through the motions of life, being swept up by the tide of day to day life. Jesus is calling us to an openness, to seek Him each day, to look for the ways He is revealing Himself to us. I can honestly say that recently, I have not been seeking Him as I should. Sometimes it becomes difficult in the day to day to continue to be open to looking, to searching. But that's what Andrew was about. We don't know much about him, but from what I do know, I can tell that Andrew was so open, that he was looking for Christ, and so he found Him!!!

St. Andrew, help me to become a different person through meeting Christ. Help me to be a seeker. Help me to be searching--to be looking for that something more that only Christ can fulfill in my life.

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Begging for Priests

This is an older post from another blog, but it is a post I re-read frequently because it helps me to reset my attitude and stance in prayer. My "laundry list" of intentions transforms as I humble myself to a beggar's pose, totally relying on Another, because I cannot do it alone.

And today is Thursday, which means tomorrow is Friday... so join us in begging for priests!

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Begging for Priests

Most of us resort to begging only when necessary. We see it as a last resort when all other efforts fail. The teenage plea for money begins with flattery then shifts to the use of reason followed by an emotional campaign and, when all this fails, the whole thing collapses into shameless begging.

It's not so different from the way we often approach our relationship with God. Begging is a last-ditch effort to get what we want. But I want to suggest that we take another look at where begging should fall in the timeline of prayer.

Clearly, begging begins with the recognition that what we need we cannot get for ourselves. For this reason I think it should be the first step of prayer rather than the last. To beg is to be aware of what we are capable of and to be aware that we are utterly dependent on Another.

With this in mind, I want to encourage all of us to start begging the Lord for priests. I hope that the religious sisters and brothers will forgive me for being exclusive here, but one of the clear desires that has emerged from the voices of our people is the desire for more priests to tend to our pastoral needs.

So as intelligent people, aware of our own limitations, let's start begging the One who calls young men to be priests. Lets not be too proud to beg and let's not think that we can do this on our own. God calls men to be priests. We can do what we can to help them to hear that call, but we cannot substitute ourselves for the voice of God.

So I am asking you to beg. Specifically, I am asking you to beg every Friday at noon. If you are in adoration, beg for priests. If you are sitting at your desk at work, beg the Lord for priests. If you are in Evansville and you hear the sirens going off for the emergency alert testing, beg the Lord for priests.

Then, once you have begged for priests, consider what you can do to help these young men hear that call. Our diocese needs priests and it needs beggars who are humble enough to recognize that only God can provide this gift.

This is not an act of desperation, it is an act of faith. So Friday, noon, wherever you are...stop and beg for priests.

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Fr. Alex Zenthoefer is the Director of Vocations for the Diocese of Evansville... with many other duties and titles, too. Read more of his blog here.

A friend shared this article on Facebook, and I simply can't keep myself from sharing with all of you, too - it would be an injustice to keep it to myself. (It is written mainly to those who work with youth in parishes, but I found it extremely relevant to my life... perhaps because I am precisely a young adult who works with youth and other young adults in many areas of my life!)

This article calls to me as a verification of something I know to be true in my life: the call to a challenging life is far more attractive than coasting along "easy street." I have been blessed to have a community of people who daily challenge me to examine my life and live in a true and open way. It is a struggle, but it is a happy struggle (as strange as that sounds) because I know it leads me closer to Christ.

I think this article points out something that resides deep within every human heart: the call to something - some One - greater than ourselves.

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Click here for the full article and citations: http://catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0105.html

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Ah, Youth: When the Church Was Young

MIKE AQUILINA

The Church Fathers had a distinctive approach to youth ministry. I discovered it in the course of an afternoon's research.

Scouring the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, I found nothing to suggest that Ambrose had ever led teens on ski trips to the nearby Alps. Digging through the Eastern Fathers, I came up even drier — no junior-high dances — not even a pizza party in either Antioch or Alexandria. In fact, in all the documentary evidence from all the ancient patriarchates of the East and the West, there's not a single bulletin announcement for a single parish youth group.Yet the Fathers had enormous success in youth and young-adult ministry. Many of the early martyrs were teens, as were many of the Christians who took to the desert for the solitary life. There's ample evidence that a disproportionate number of conversions, too, came from the young and youngish age groups.
How did the Fathers do it? They made wild promises.
They promised young people great things, like persecution, lower social status, public ridicule, severely limited employment opportunities, frequent fasting, a high risk of jail and torture, and maybe, just maybe, an early, violent death at the hands of their pagan rulers.
The Fathers looked young people in the eye and called them to live purely in the midst of a pornographic culture. They looked at some young men and women and boldly told them they had a calling to virginity. And it worked. Even the pagans noticed how well it worked.
The brightest young man in the empire's brightest city — a teenager named Origen of Alexandria — promised himself entirely to God in virginity. And, as he watched his father taken away to be killed, Origen would have gone along himself, turned himself in, if his mother had not hidden all his clothes. . . .
I searched volumes on the ancient liturgy, and I was unable to find a scrap of a Mass we'd call "relevant" today. There were no special Youth Masses. Yet there was an overwhelming eucharistic faith among the young people of the Church.

What made the Church attractive in the third century can make it just as attractive in the twenty-first. In the ancient world and in ours, young people want a challenge.

Tarcisius was a boy of third-century Rome. His virtue and devotion were so strong that the clergy trusted him to bring the Blessed Sacrament to the sick. Once, while carrying a pyx, he was recognized and set upon by a pagan mob. They flung themselves upon him, trying to pry the pyx from his hands, wanting more than anything to profane the Sacrament. Tarcisius' biographer, the fourth-century Pope Damasus, compared them to a pack of rabid dogs. Tarcisius "preferred to give up his life rather than yield up the Body of Christ."Even at such an early age, Tarcisius was aware of the stakes. Jesus had died for love of Tarcisius. Tarcisius did not hesitate to die for love of Jesus.
What made the Church attractive in the third century can make it just as attractive in the twenty-first. In the ancient world and in ours, young people want a challenge. They want to love with their whole being. They're willing to do things the hard way — if people they respect make the big demands. These are distinguishing marks of youth. You don't find too many middle-aged men petitioning the Marines for a long stay at Parris Island. It's young men who beg for that kind of rigor.
The spiritual writer Father John Hugo told a cautionary tale, not from the ancient Church, but from the German Church of the early twentieth century. Youth leaders faced a country depressed and dejected from its defeat in World War I. Teens seemed aimless, with little hope for professional opportunity and no clear sense of patriotism or other ideals.
The German clergy made a conscious effort, then, to accentuate the positive. They decided to accommodate the country's weakness, avoid mentioning sacrifice, and downplay the cross and other "negative" elements of Christianity. They were big on nature hikes.
At the same time, there arose a man who called upon those same youth to give up everything for the sake of their country. "He put them in uniforms, housed them in barracks — in short, he demanded that they live a hard and laborious life." This man, Adolf Hitler, won the hearts of the youth. Because no young man or woman really wants to give his life away cheaply.
Tarcisius knew better. So do the kids in your parish.
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