Under the Fir Tree

A Continuation # # # The previous post gave us a mirror. The Parish Examen didn't issue a verdict. It asked us to look honestly at parish life: what's strong, what's strained, what bears fruit, what merely fills the calendar. That kind of honesty is uncomfortable and necessary. It's also just the beginning. A mirror doesn't renew a parish. What we do next does. So this post asks the first practical question after any honest examination: What kind of parish are we becoming, and what does it take to get there? The answer isn't more programs. A few more definitions help before going further. Program: an organized activity with a start and stop. Discipline: a steady habit that forms parish life. Fruit: visible growth in faith, hope, and love. Health: the parish's life working as it should. Programs matter. Alpha matters. OCIA matters. Bible studies, youth nights, service projects, retreats, sacramental preparation: all of it matters. But programs are means, not ...

Over the coming weeks I'll be sharing a series of reflections on the Parish Examen, part of Mission Renewal in the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon. The Parish Examen was a prayerful and practical look at parish life: what's healthy, what's strained, and where the Lord may be inviting us to deeper renewal. The Examen asked: What's strong? What's weak? What bears fruit? What merely fills the calendar? The process wasn't a report card. It was a mirror. A parish, like a soul, needs examination before renewal. We can't strengthen what we won't name. We can't heal what we refuse to see. And we can't follow the Holy Spirit with closed eyes. What did we actually hear? That's the question after any honest examination. Not: What do we wish we had heard? Not: What can we spin? Not: What will make everyone comfortable? Just this:  What did we hear? So this series will ask one steady question: What kind of parishes are we becoming—and what faithful step...

You know that hour at the end of the day when nothing has quite exploded, and yet something in you is already on its knees? The dishes are still in the sink, filmed with grease. The email lies unanswered like a small accusation. Your body is tired with a fatigue no pillow can absolve. The phone keeps shining in the dark, that little chapel of demands where no mercy is ever offered. Someone you love needs more from you than you think remains. And under it all, deeper than irritation, quieter than despair, there’s the ache. Not catastrophe. Not the grand collapse one could almost respect. Something poorer, more humiliating. A low humming in the soul, like pain behind a closed door. Saint Paul gives it a name: “We ourselves… groan inwardly” (Romans 8:23). Not creation only. Not the world out there, bleeding through its wars, its sickness, its rot, its injustices, its children frightened by adult madness. We ourselves. We who have tasted the Spirit. We who pray, or try to pray. We who be...

The words are small enough to pass unnoticed, like a match dropped in the dust: “ unclean spirits came out ” (Acts 8:7). There was no committee formed to study them, no delicate arrangement made to preserve their dignity, no little room left for them at the back of the house under the name of temperament, fatigue, realism, family history, or “the way I’ve always been.” They came out. That’s the intolerable simplicity of the Gospel. Christ doesn’t enter a soul as a guest invited to admire the curtains. He comes as fire comes into straw, as daylight enters a sickroom, as truth enters a mouth that’s grown tired of lying. And we, being reasonable people, have made our peace with so many little demons. Not the theatrical sort, no. We’re too respectable for that, too educated, too careful with our faces in public. Ours wear clean shirts. They pay the bills on time. They know when to smile at Mass, when to lower the eyes, when to say, “I’ll pray for you,” with just enough warmth to pass for ...

A man opens his Bible at the kitchen table. The cereal bowl sits there like a little domestic altar; beside it, a bill folded once, twice, with the neat cruelty of a summons. His phone stains the room with that bluish light of hospitals and morgues. He wants guidance. Reassurance. A sentence clean enough to carry into the office like a heel of bread hidden in his coat. There’s no wickedness in that hunger. God knows it. God has pity on it. But it’s too little for the dreadful book lying open beneath his hands. For the lie underneath his desire is older than his fear and more patient than his prayers. It whispers that Scripture is a holy object placed politely inside a world already explained: matter below, God above, religion indoors, politics outdoors, death waiting at the end of the lane, and private meaning crouched in the middle like a poor man warming his fingers over a stolen fire. But the truth is stranger, and far less obedient. Scripture presumes an opened heaven, a creation c...