Write for God

The Berrigan brothers on the cover of TIME, 1/23/71

An Irish-born Norbertine monk spelled out the mission of the contemplative to me while we were having dinner at a Catholic retreat center some years ago. The young monk told me how he thought his vocation would take him out of the world to focus on prayer only, but the opposite happened.

People need salvation so much that his presence in public would draw people to him. They would ask him to pray for them or for a loved one. Others would be curious about his habit, his life in the monastery and its rituals. Even when he returned to the monastery, he would be drawn to praying for humanity and its problems. He had taken himself out of the world only to become a part of it in a more significant way, he said.

He discovered, as Thomas Merton did, that the contemplative life can’t help but draw you closer to the world. Long before the Internet and with very limited access to a telephone, Merton stayed in touch with the world. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Daniel and Philip Berrigan and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn made the pilgrimage to this little house on the grounds of the Abbey of Gethsemani. Merton’s cinder-block house is a mile from the monastery which, in itself, is miles from the nearest small town. Merton could not love God without also being involved in the world God created.

Being in the world means caring about the least of our brothers and carrying out the mandate that Jesus gave us to love one another. That’s very different from being of the world, which means giving in to the sins and temptations presented to us every second. We are of the world when we get ours first at the expense of others, when we preserve our egos instead of humbling ourselves before others. As the poet William Wordsworth said, “The world is too much with us.”

Those of the world see easy solutions in judging others and in mocking God. This world is all there is, they will tell you, and we’re deluded fools for knowing that God is alive in us. Charles Darwin becomes their prophet because they claim evolution offers “proof” that God didn’t create the world. They will argue Darwin and atheism to such a degree that those become their gods. The distance from a chimp to their own well reasoned spoken argument becomes very short to them. We share some DNA with chimps, but we don’t share the divine spark of God that makes us fully human. Their decision to deny God comes from the free will He gives us.

St. Francis urged us to always preach the Gospel, and to use words when necessary. Our lives and our actions preach in a more realized way than our empty words if no actions back them up. How many politicians who say they support Christian values have found themselves enmeshed in scandals that showed their words were just lip service? If our lives aren’t truly a prayer, then we can’t call ourselves Christians. Unless true repentance for sins committed and forgiveness for the sinner are in the equation, then we are not acting as Jesus would have us do when he told us to love one another.

We know that Jesus ate with sinners and was criticized by the uber-religious for breaking bread with the less-than perfect. He knew that it’s the sick who need a physician, not those who are well. How many of those sinners did Jesus save just by dining with them? We know that a former tax collector became the Evangelist Matthew and that a woman tortured by demons became Mary Magdalene. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas made millions from movies that were incredibly raunchy and violent. In his latest work, Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, he tells how Jesus brought him back to Himself and changed his life. If there’s hope for the writer of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, isn’t there hope for every sinner?

A holy little priest we knew from parish life some years ago once told a story during a Sunday homily about his experience with sinners. The previous night, he had received a call to minister to a sick parishioner. He drove to an unfamiliar part of town and got lost. It was late at night and the only open store was the Banana Boat, a bar known as a rowdy hangout. He went in to ask for directions and was overwhelmed by bar patrons who wanted him to pray for someone; some even wanted him to hear their confessions. After getting directions, he left the bar to visit the ill parishioner.

With an Irish twinkle in his eye, the priest told us, “Maybe I should minister at the Banana Boat every Saturday night!” We laughed, but perhaps it wasn’t accidental that he ended up there looking for directions. Maybe someone’s life was changed that Saturday night that he walked through those bar doors in his priestly garb.

We all have the opportunity each day to be in the world doing for others as best we can. Sometimes we are so poor or overwhelmed that the best we can do is to send prayers up like incense for someone. We may not have the means to feed someone at that moment or to stop armies from marching, but we can pray. When we are in the world and we are praying for the salvation of others, we are also saving ourselves.