Category Archives: Faith

Matters relating to the Christian faith in general

A Confession

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I have a confession to make.

I like the song “The Little Drummer Boy.”

No, really. It brings tears to my eyes.

Every so often this time of year I read snarky comments about it: “Yeah, I bet Mary was pleased as punch to have some punk kid come start banging a drum right when Baby Jesus had finally fallen asleep.” And yeah, I admit, it’s a bit of a stretch. But then the singer gets to this part:

I played my drum for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
I played my best for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Then he smiled at me, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Me and my drum.

And then I start to weep. I feel stupid, but I do it anyway.

Because that’s what Jesus wants from us: to play our best for him. What I have to offer might seem insufficient, or trivial, or foolish. But that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what he wants from me: that, and no less.

Of course, it has to be done right: the singer has to sing it like he means it…which is why my favorite version of the song is Ringo Starr’s. I don’t know whether there was any religious feeling there when he recorded it; but by golly he plays his drum, and he plays his best, and whether he meant to or not he’s offering his playing as a gift to Our Saviour. God bless him.

Vocations to Third Orders

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So yesterday I talked about what it means to be a Lay Dominican. Among other things, I said that it’s a vocation, something you’re called to. But how do you know whether you’re called to it or not?

I’ve been pondering that today, and I’ve got a few thoughts to share; but I hasten to say first that I can only speak authoritatively about my own experience, which is limited. Your mileage may vary considerably.

First, I think a strong desire is probably a good sign. I wanted to be a Lay Dominican as soon as I learned that there was such a thing; and that’s a desire that hasn’t gone away. And then, when I returned to the Church (which was, oddly, somewhat later), I wanted to make an additional commitment of the sort you make when you join a Third Order. I didn’t simply presume that the Lay Dominicans were for me; instead, I did some research. It turns out that the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Benedictines, the Jesuits, the Augustinians (the who?) all have third orders. It seemed reasonable to look into them. I was not at all attracted to the Franciscans, which is perhaps odd, as we’ve got lots of Franciscans in the area. Carmelite contemplation is attractive, at least in theory, and there are also Carmelites in our area. Next to the Dominicans I liked what I learned about the Benedictines most. Their motto, “prayer and work”, makes sense to me. Benedictines are also all about stability, blooming where you’re planted, and that describes me pretty well, too. And St. Andrew’s Abbey is within driving distance, and they have lots of oblates in this area. If there hadn’t been any Lay Dominicans in this area I might have gone that route.

But there were, and of course I looked them up first…and just kind of got stuck. Once I linked up with them, there seemed no reason to look further; I wanted to be a Dominican, and on acquaintance they wanted me to be a Dominican, and here we are. Point is, if you feel called to a deeper relationship with Christ, and the Third Orders have some appeal, it might be worth checking out the different varieties and finding out what your options are in your area. But if you feel called to a particular order, check that out first.

It seems to me that strong desire as a sign of vocation is not uncommon; both St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Edith Stein both had a passionate desire to be Carmelites for a long time before they were able to persuade anyone to agree with them. But that least phrase is key: a strong desire isn’t enough. There are lots of women in the news these days who have a strong, overwhelming desire to be Catholic priests, but the Church has said that it simply isn’t possible. And certainly there have been men who have been ordained priests, who wanted to be priests, who should never have been ordained. Desire isn’t enough; and discernment isn’t one-sided. While you’re discerning whether or not you’re called to a Third Order, the order in question is discerning the same thing. That’s their job.

An essential thing in all of this is obedience. By joining a Third Order, you’re promising to live according to a rule. If you’re not willing to be obedient to the rule, and to those over you in the order as called for by the rule, then you might want to think again.

The Dominican Laity

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Recently, two different people have asked me about what it means to be a Lay Dominican, and what’s involved.

First, to be a Lay Dominican is to be a lay member of the Dominican order. We used to be called the Third Order, or the “tertiaries”; the First Order was the Friars, and the Second Order was the cloistered nuns and active sisters. But the terms First, Second, and Third order are discouraged these days, and we are all just Dominicans together. (Me, I kind of like the term Third Order, but I wasn’t asked).

Every order has its particular charism and focus, and the focus of the Dominican order is preaching for the salvation of souls; the order’s official name is the Order of Preachers. If you see someone write his name with an “OP” after it, you know he’s a Dominican. For us Lay Dominicans, it used to be OPL (Order of Preachers, Lay), and before that it was TOP (Tertiary, Order of Preachers), and now it’s just OP, because we are all just Dominicans together. Which means that if I use the OP after my name I have to say “Mr. Will Duquette, OP”, because otherwise the natural tendency would be to think that I was a friar, which (with a wife and four kids) I am manifestly not.

The Dominicans are a mendicant order, like the Franciscans, and I believe the friars do take a vow of poverty. But the vow of poverty isn’t part of the Dominican identity the way it is for the Franciscans. Dominicans are about four things, the Four Pillars:

Prayer. Everything we do has to be rooted and grounded in prayer. We pray the Liturgy of the Hours (Lauds, Vespers, and Compline) each day, and also the Rosary; and we are to attend mass daily if possible. (For me, it generally isn’t.) Additional private prayer is recommended.

Study. As Dominicans, we study. We study scripture; we study theology; we study the world around us. We study to know God better, and to know His creation better. Truth is what is, beginning with God; and the Dominican motto is Veritas, Truth. Study can flow naturally into and out of prayer; often the times I feel closest to God are when I’ve just been struck by some idea in the midst of study.

Preaching. As I indicated above, the mission of the order is preaching for the salvation of souls. Preaching can take many forms, and the most important thing is that it must be adapted to those to whom you’re preaching. Dominic adopted evangelical poverty because the Albigensians, those he most wanted to reach, were ascetics and much disgusted with the wealth and worldliness they saw in the secular clergy. Dominicans follow St. Paul, in being all things to all men in order to win some. For this reason, Dominic insisted that his rule be revisited over the course of time, so that it would be always fresh.

So different Dominicans preach in different ways. Me, I’m a blogger; and there are other things I do as well.

Community. Dominican friars, nuns, and sisters live in community. Lay Dominicans live in the world, in their own homes, but they come together in their chapter once a month, at least, to pray, study, and (usually) to eat together. You can’t be a Dominican on your own. Dominic sent his friars to the four corners of the world, but he sent them two-by-two. So we pray for each other, and support each other, and learn from each others.

Being a Dominican is a vocation. You have to be called to it, and you have to find a chapter that agrees that you’re called to it. Once you’re professed, you have to make your chapter a priority in your life, just as you do with your family. My chapter meeting is sacred; I’m a lector at mass, but I don’t read at mass on the mornings when my chapter meets.

Before I became a Lay Dominican, I had the romantic notion that the average Dominican chapter would be a group of budding St. Thomas Aquinases. ‘Tain’t so. Dominicans are people, and some are smarter than others, and some are holier than others, and some are sometimes just plain annoying. But as a chapter we have a shared task of growing in holiness together and helping each other along the way.

Lay Dominicans promise to live according to the Dominican Rule (a variant of the Augustinian Rule), and according to the “Particular Directory” of their province. Interesting, unlike other orders the Dominican Rule doesn’t bind on pain of sin: if you do not follow the rule on a particular day, it is not a sin. There are two reasons for this: first, Dominic wanted us to follow the Rule out of love, rather than out of fear of sin; and second, he wanted us to be flexible enough to put the salvation of souls before everything else. Even in the early days, friars were sometimes excused from saying the Divine Office so as to have more time for study; and if I were to be having a fruitful conversation with someone when it was time for Evening Prayer then by all means I should be free to continue it.

Of course, I do sometimes fail to live up to the Rule; and usually for no such good reason as Dominic envisioned. But each day is a new day, and as St. Jose Maria Escriva said, the interior life is beginning and beginning again. With prayer, and study, and (as best I can) preaching; and with community with my chapter. That’s how it all goes.

Back from Chicago

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I’m just back from a week in Chicago, at this year’s Tcl conference. If you left a comment on a recent blog post during the last week, I might just have responded today.

I visited St. Peter’s in the Loop a couple of times, and hey, Julie, they have two copies of your book in their bookstore.

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Perseverance

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One of the hardest things to do in the interior life is to persevere: to keep going, to keep praying every day, especially when, for some reason, we miss a day.  It’s only natural.  If you’re learning to play an instrument, and you don’t practice, you don’t want to face your instructor; and if you continue not to practice, you’ll soon not be taking lessons.

But the fact is, you’re sometimes going to miss a day.  Sometimes you’ll just not feel like it, and you’ll go with that; other times you’ll honestly forget; other times something will come up that fills up the time you had available.

This morning, for example.  I was a little under the weather yesterday, and so I really needed my sleep; and I woke up about 4 AM, and when that happens I usually have trouble getting back to sleep.  Now, my alarm goes off at 5:45, so that I have time to pray Morning Prayer; and then I wake up the rest of the family at 6:15.

This morning, I not only got back to sleep, but I woke up at 6:15.  The alarm was going, but it’s a clock radio, and the volume had been turned down all the way.  I hadn’t heard it.  Instead, I woke up at the last possible minute I could get up without inconveniencing my family, having gotten the maximum possible amount of sleep.

Me, I call this a blessing.

But it meant that I didn’t have time to pray this morning.  This happens, and in this case it’s not that I forgot, or that I chose not to.  Sometimes it is.

The important thing, regardless of why you miss a prayer time, is to let it go.  Forget it.  Don’t let it make you feel guilty.  It happened; it’s past.  Instead, be sure to pray next time.  When you think of God, remember that He’s calling you, and respond.  The interior life is beginning, and beginning again.

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Dryness

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The interior life is just like anything else that you begin with excitement and enthusiasm: the excitement and enthusiasm wear off, and you end up with dryness. You don’t want to sit down and pray; when you do, it seems meaningless and pointless and boring and no fun. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the dryness will come and go.

There are two reasons for this, one human and one divine.

The human reason is what Uncle Screwtape called “the law of undulation”. In any human endeavour, your energy levels go up and down. When you’re feeling energetic, the activity is easy; at other times, you just don’t have as much energy for it. And then, if you’ve got some reason to be tired or sick or exhausted, it’s just so much worse. It’s the same thing that applies to housework, say. Prayer is a human activity, and subject to all of the same circumstances as any other human activity.

The divine reason is that prayer isn’t wholly a human activity; God plays a role, too. Sometimes He makes His presence felt; that’s called “consolation,” and it’s delightful when it happens.

Now, the interior life is about learning to love God with all your mind, soul, heart and strength, i.e., more than anything else, and then to love all other things in due proportion. And here’s the thing: the consolation God grants is not God. It is heady, delightful, intoxicating, and so we naturally want more of it; and it is all too easy to learn to love consolation more than God who grants it. We must learn to love God with our wills rather than with our feelings.

And so God grants us dryness, times when we can choose to love Him even though our feelings rebel. In short, as annoying as it is, dryness is a good thing.

(You might have heard of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Dark Night of the Senses. I’m talking about something much more basic, something that you’ll almost certainly experience on a regular basis. All I have to say about the Dark Nights is that I don’t understand them well enough to say anything worth listening to.)

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Adore

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Several months ago, I discovered that the Catholic church around the corner from where I work has a presence chapel that’s always open during the work day. This is unusual in my area; most of the churches in my area are locked unless there’s a Mass or other service in progress. The chapel has one of those tabernacles with a little door on the front, so that the Blessed Sacrament can easily be exposed for Eucharistic Adoration.

Since then I’ve gotten in the habit of stopping by there on my way home several times a week. Some days I only stay long enough to say Evening Prayer, and maybe finish my daily rosary. Other days, I’ll stop and sit a spell. I especially like it when the tabernacle is open, but whether it is or not, He is there.

Personally, I’ve never been all that comfortable using a visual focus during prayer; I’m simply too aware that what I’m looking at is just an image, and not the real thing. But during Eucharistic Adoration, it’s all different. Yes, I see a wafer of unleavened bread; it looks much less like Jesus than the corpus on the crucifix does. But it isn’t bread; it’s my Lord. Being in His presence makes me happy. And even when the tabernacle is closed, and I can’t see Him, I know that He’s there. I can look at the tabernacle and know that He’s within, just as I can look at the semblance of bread and know that it’s Him.

There are two particularly glorious things about being in the Presence outside of Mass. The first is that there’s a grace and a peace there that really does pass understanding. I don’t see it working, but over the weeks I can see that it really does make a difference in my life. The second is, being in the Presence is compatible with almost any other form of devotion. Sitting in the chapel, I can gaze at my Lord; I can listen; I can say the rosary or the Divine Office; I can pray spontaneously (and do); I can tell Him about my day; I can do spiritual reading; I can just sit.

Sure, I can do all of those things elsewhere, just as I can call Jane on the phone or send her a text when I’m away from home. But it’s nicer to be home.

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Body

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It’s tempting to think of the interior life as something that takes place entirely within your mind and heart, but as I pointed out last week, it ’tain’t so. We are not souls who happen to be stuck in bodies for a while; we are human beings, a composite of body and soul, and whatever we do, we do with our whole beings. There’s always been a tendency within Christianity to forget this, and act as though the soul is really what we are; this is called angelism, and it’s simply a mistake. More than that, Christ came in the body, and sanctified the body; and Catholicism always and everywhere emphasizes this incarnational aspect of the Christian religion.

So when we pray, we mustn’t neglect to pray with our bodies as well as our minds and hearts. Kneeling in prayer is an obvious way to do this; another way, when praying an existing prayer like the Rosary or the Liturgy of the Hours, is to say the words out loud.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is sometimes inconvenient. I’ve been known to pray the Rosary or Morning Pray on airplanes and in airports, and when I do that I keep my mouth shut. I can’t very well go into my closet, as Jesus tells us to do, but I can at least not draw attention to myself. And even at home, if I get up early to pray Morning Prayer, it might be rude to pray it out loud.

But fortunately, there’s a middle ground: say the words silently, under your breath, but really say them. Move your lips. This felt odd to me at first, but I soon got used to it. While doing it I’m really praying with my body; and there are two additional advantages. First, if you read the prayers silently to yourself, all in your head, it can be easy to skim them; moving your lips slows me down and helps me to pay attention. Second, if someone walks in while you are praying and sees you moving your lips while looking at your iPad, they can easily guess that you’re praying rather than reading a novel or playing solitaire, and they will leave you alone until you finish. At least, that’s how it works at my house.

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Listen

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Usually in this series I’ve talked about things that have worked for me; today I’m going to talk about something that I wish worked better for me.

My spiritual director told me of a man—I think he was a Benedictine, but I really don’t remember—who spent an hour with God every morning. Sometimes he talked to God for five minutes, and listened to God for fifty-five minutes; other days he talked for fifty-five minutes and listened for five. It depended on how much he had to say. But that last five minutes was sacred: he always listened for at least five minutes. My spiritual director told me that I should do something similar: whenever I prayed, I should spend at least a little while just listening.

The thing is, just listening is hard. Knowing whether I’m just listening is hard. If I try to sit quietly, and focus on God, and not think anything, and I start free-associating, and it occurs to me that I need to pray for so-and-so or about such-and-such, is that listening? Can I assume that God is guiding my free-associations? Or, since praying for so-and-so is undoubtedly a good thing to do, is He simply redeeming my free-associations?

It’s clear that God sometimes speaks to people audibly, and it’s equally clear that this isn’t the usual way. So I have to assume that God speaks to me through scripture, through my reading, and through my own thoughts, especially the random ones that just seem to pop up. In that sense, responding to God when He reminds you that He’s there is a kind of listening.

This is an area where I feel very much at sea; and yet it’s very important.