CTD2 – The Desert of Ordinary Life – Crossing the Desert: Lent and Conversion with Deacon James Keating – Discerning Hearts Podcasts

DescerningHearts.com presents Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion, with Deacon James Keating.

Deacon Keating has a PhD and is a professor of spiritual theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kendrick Lennon Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.

He has led more than 400 workshops in areas of morality and spirituality and has authored numerous books, including The Way of Mystery, Listening for Truth, and Spiritual Fatherhood.

Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion, with Deacon James Keating. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Deacon Keating. Thank you.

In your book Crossing the Desert, Lent and Conversion, the chapter entitled The Desert of Ordinary Life is actually quite a compelling title because in ordinary life, who would have thought we'd be in a desert?

As you point out in the chapter though, people have a tendency to try to make life easier by separating real life from religion.

Is that how we end up in that desert?

Yeah, the Second Vatican Council noted the greatest error of our time is the separation of faith from everyday life.

The healing of that separation truly is the work of the Holy Spirit in each one of our individual lives because the Spirit is the Spirit of union, unity, communion.

Christ sent His Holy Spirit so that we could have union with Him, with one another, with the Father.

And God is very interested, by way of the revelation of Jesus Christ, that we don't have some type of religious holy time and time that is separate from God, a secular time.

There is a distinction that's legitimate.

So we don't all have to be thinking about Jesus or calling our hockey teams, the Holy Ghost hockey team or something like that.

We can definitely have unique and distinct events in life other than an explicit or that carry other than an explicit reference to God.

But God, for those who believe, is always in the fabric, even of that secular time, is an implicitness to who is guiding us and who is leading us and who we consult with, the divine.

So we have a legitimacy to say that this is a public school and perhaps God ought not to be brought in here explicitly.

Or this is a store that I run and I don't have to be talking about God 24 hours a day in the store that I manage.

So there's a legitimate distinction between the religious and the secular.

But there should never be a separation in our own lives, our own personal lives, between the fact that we believe that Jesus is our Savior.

The fact that that belief affects are becoming holy. It should never be separated.

It's just like, again, analogically, a man goes to work managing a store.

Well, his wife isn't with him, but he's always a spouse. He's always a spouse.

He's not babbling on about his wife every day as he's managing the store.

He may be thinking of her. And the fact that he goes home at a certain time and doesn't go off with his friends is evidence that he carries her needs in his heart.

And those needs have been with him throughout the work day. And his love for her defines him.

So the way that we would look at our vocation as spouse is very similar to the way that we would look at our vocation as believer.

That God certainly affects us and defines us. We love God.

Our decisions about how we spend our day of their life based upon that love of God.

Just like a husband basis his decisions upon how it affects his spouse.

So there is a distinction but not a separation. And ordinary life becomes a desert when somehow we make religion private rather than personal.

When we talk about religion, we also enter into that public worship of the church that we participate in.

And there's a real danger that that can be something ordinary.

And I mean that in the more negative connotations of the word that we stop participating in the liturgy in a way that it is something that builds us up that it's extraordinary.

I think the again routine and then also our own unreachability as public worship.

A lot of times we're even closed to God when we're at mass. We're not supple. We're not vulnerable to God.

Even in his sacramental presence. And so then of course worship becomes ordinary because it's more me. It's more of me again.

It's more of my ideas. It's more of my worries. It's more of my anxieties, my agenda.

And then after a while people just slough off and no longer worship. Well that's perfectly understandable.

I mean how much you can you take? It becomes sickening after a while. So if even in the presence of God you're thinking about you and you're closed.

You're closed to his influence. Well of course then worship becomes ordinary and perhaps I no longer attend.

All of liturgy is supposed to be a conspiracy that pulls the self toward God.

Whether it's the gathering of the community. Hopefully in a beautiful architectural space.

Making the mind go to beauty and transcendence. Music assisting us.

Revelation being proclaimed. Hopefully a homily that continues to reveal God and not conceal Him.

Further deepens are affection for God and our sense of being pulled out of the self toward God.

The very elements of bread and wine become body and blood.

The whole movement of the community together toward reception of God.

So that God transforms the whole community. All of these elements are in place so that the ego will not vie for space in worship.

But notice how strong, how much weight, sin in the self hold.

Because even in an environment dedicated totally to the losing of the self in God, you can still retain the self.

It's quite frightening actually. That how stubborn we are to receive our own salvation.

And so of course worship can become ordinary. If we make ourself the center of it.

And then of course we'll get sick of it and we won't go back.

Because implicitly we're all looking to be saved from the self.

But if we drag the self to the center of the mass.

We'll only recognize the self there and we'll say that this is useless.

So we need to go with a disposition of vulnerability.

A disposition of suppleness so that God can reach us, be open, be malleable.

That's why the penitential right is there in the beginning.

Oh, God, I'm sick of myself. Save me from myself.

Don't let this mass go by without an encounter.

And of course we can say the same prayer for Lent. Oh, God, I'm sick of myself.

Oh, God, save me from myself. Do not let these 40 days go by without an encounter, without communion with you.

We'll return in just a moment to crossing the desert, went in conversion with Deacon James Keating.

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The Memorary

Remember almost gracious Virgin Mary that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection implored thy help or sought thine intercession was left unated.

Inspired by this confidence, I fly to thee, a virgin of virgins, my mother, to thee do I come before thee by stand, sinful and sorrowful.

A mother of the word incarnate despised not my petitions, but in thy mercy year and answer me, amen.

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Thanks and God Bless.

We now return to Crossing the Desert, Light and Conversion, with Deacon James Keating.

The word that jumped out at me when you were speaking was the malability of ourselves to be open.

It doesn't let give us a unique opportunity to become even more malleable per se because of the traditions that we have within our parish.

Those devotions such as stations of the cross and those moments of reconciliation.

The church shifts just like it does with all its liturgical seasons.

It shifts in a noticeable way to bring us up short.

It's abrupt.

It's now purple and it's penance and it's simple.

And especially during the Trito woman, Good Friday, there's sparingness to the altar, there's simplicity.

Everything is streamlined down just to the communion, just to the encounter that we're hoping to have with Jesus.

And then, of course, the jettison of sin in the sacrament of reconciliation, the liberation, the freedom there.

It's all focused differently.

It's all focused on penance and regret and guilt.

And, of course, people hate that or a certain generation of people hate that.

Oh, God, guilt, oh, regret.

And those are the ones who can no longer name sin.

The whole generation of people in their late 50s and 60s.

Don't even know how to name sin.

Because they were so afraid of psychological neuroses.

They were so afraid of scrupulosity.

Some of it, well based on our previous generation of legalists.

But they haven't heard.

They haven't heard the regeneration of the love of truth brought to us by Pope John Paul II.

They retained a closeness to guilt and regret.

And a lack of facility with naming the truth about themselves.

I am an adulterer.

I'm a liar. I'm a thief.

I can't name that.

I'm unchased in my marriage.

No, they can't.

They're afraid to go there.

And yet, the whole movement of the 40 days of Lent is a movement to a sturdy naming of who we are before God.

Not who we want to be.

Not who know the whole resurrection people stuff.

But that's in the future, sorry.

Who are we?

We're those who are still crucifying.

Crucifying fellow members of the parish by our selfish choices.

By our idiocy at home with our family.

No, we stand before God as who we are.

He'll raise us later.

He'll move us later.

But right now,

we need to get into the truth of who we are.

And even if you're greatly advanced in holiness, especially if you're greatly advanced in holiness.

Even a venial sin will chafe.

That's very different than a generation of people who have amnesia over how to name sin.

Amnesia is not a virtue.

Forgetting our sins and forgetting the capacity to name sin is not a virtue.

It doesn't mean you don't have sins.

It just means you have no capacity or virtue or skill in naming them.

You're still hurting people.

You're still hurting yourself.

I don't think I need to go to confession.

What would I say?

I don't have any sins.

Real living human beings say that asinine sins.

They do.

It's pathetic.

They've lost touch with truth.

So they don't know where they stand in their relationship with God or one another.

And length roars in with a cleansing breath to help us to see clearly again

that all disruptions of human community and all disruptions of the human heart

are affiliated with our alienation from the will of God.

And by the grace of God in his light,

our intellect lights upon our sin through conscience.

And we name it.

And he takes it up to the cross and he heals it.

And he gives us back hope.

And he gives us back the strength in our memory.

Not to hurt again.

If we do, I've seen Francis to sales taught,

never be surprised by your sin.

Never be surprised that you sin.

Always look to the Lord.

Don't look at yourself after you sin.

Look to him.

If you look at yourself, Satan will then pull you down.

Now, of course, that's if you're aware that you just sinned.

Again, many, many people among us have no awareness even after they sin

that they've done something horrible to the fabric of the body,

torn at the body of Christ.

But never be surprised that you sin,

because then Satan will have a field day with you

and make you depressed and sad and continual beating up of your self-esteem.

You fall, you sin, you look at the cross.

You get back to Christ immediately.

Immediately, you return to Christ.

And so in our sins,

we are coming into the light.

In our naming of the sins, we're coming into the light.

We're coming into a source of hope.

Let the cleansing breath of the Holy Spirit during light.

Let that great wind of God,

that great breath of God, the Spirit.

Deepen your consciousness of where you stand before God.

Rush to Jesus in the sacrament of reconciliation.

Know where you stand in truth.

And then Jesus gives you back hope, healing, strength to overcome habits and patterns of sin.

The whole movement of Lent is a conspiracy of joy.

But first you have to stop the games.

Stop fooling yourself.

Stop living in the ideologies of the 1970s.

Come, come to the truth of who you are.

And Lent will then be a time of great elevation of Spirit.

It's not a downer.

And of course, everyone was always worried about that.

Oh, it's such a heavy downer.

It's only a downer if you stay in your sins.

If you give your sins to Christ,

Lent is the greatest time of elevation and to joy.

For many of us,

it's difficult to understand that sense of sin that we even send

because this ordinary life has robbed us of the sense of shame.

We no longer use the word shame in our actions,

because somehow through psychology,

that's something that is a negative and that harms us.

And yet when you look in the scriptures,

anytime there has been this separation that's been caused by sin,

whether in that original story, our first parents,

or even that of Peter and his actions in the New Testament.

There was always a company with that sense of shame.

And yet today we're told, don't feel shameful.

There are reasons for your behavior.

It is not your fault.

Right, in shame is the public response to our individual guilt.

I mean, it's people looking at you.

I mean, the experience of shame is people looking at you

and looking at you in judgment.

And we have a right to judge actions that are wrong.

But the kernel of truth in the dissipation of shame

is that we don't want to bear the look of others in our imagination and in our heart,

because that is the ground wherein despair can take root.

So it could be an initial kickstart to conversion

where the community reminds us of our guilt.

But we cannot stay there.

We cannot play that photograph over and over again in our mind.

I am bad, I am bad.

People think that I'm bad.

Because that's where, again, the satanic can enter.

And so fill you with despair that you'll forget

the ever upward movement of Jesus calling you to change and repentance.

So shame has up a role.

But it can't become an abiding habitual place to live.

That's when it becomes dangerous.

And you can think of examples today where there's no shame,

particularly around the area of sexuality,

where the community actually does not look upon anyone with any guilt anymore.

And so there's a lack or an absence of public judgment.

Again, is that healthy for the community?

Possibly not.

Possibly not.

Because we lose a facility for judging our behavior against the common good.

And we can never lose that facility between judging our individual behavior

against the common good.

Because if we do, of course we're living in a culture

that has no capacity to see moral goodness, moral truth.

And then that's when the culture begins to decay.

The lack of shame, the lack of public judgment against immoral activity

is a sign perhaps that the community is decaying.

Because we have no common language about right and wrong.

And so nobody makes the judgments anymore.

So I think that we have lost the community's judgment

because the community has lost its understanding of its role

as the protector and preserver of moral truth.

Now truth, of course, is itself a word that is vacant of meaning.

All we basically use when we talk about moral issues is personal expediency

on what furthers your own personal goals and what does not.

The objective truth is gone.

So the objective truth is therefore gone from the parish community as well.

And so the community that has no sense

if it's overly Americanized rather than being Catholic.

But a parish that's overly Americanized will lose this sense

that the community protects the truth, furthers the truth, hands on the truth.

And therefore there is a role for the community

to make a judgment about behavior.

Along, of course, with the individual

who knows the precise circumstances of their own mind, their own knowledge,

and their own freedom.

The community can never replace the individual.

And the individual can never replace the community

but we're living in a time where we're more likely to see that happen

that everything is left to the individual.

If the community replaces the individual, you get totalitarian communities.

There is this beautiful revelatory interplay

that the Catholic Church really treasures between the communal discernment of truth

and the individual appropriation of that truth in conscience.

And that tension has to remain and the tension stays

as a creative tension in the Eucharist and in the Holy Spirit

and doesn't collapse into some type of authoritarianism

or totalitarianism or subjectivism or individualism on the other side.

It keeps that tension in the power of the Eucharist

and the power of the Holy Spirit.

You say in crossing the desert that by participating in this sacrament

we are bid to not simply commune with Christ but to go in peace.

It will be Christ dwelling within us that supports us

in this transformation of character,

a transformation that ultimately affects the character of society as well.

Yeah, there's the interpenetration again.

We are persons in community and we are our community of persons.

So when we are told to go in peace,

that is to bring that peace to the community that we have become

by our own discipline, our own conversion.

We have become peace.

You are at peace.

Your identity is drawn from the peace that you have between yourself

and Christ in the depths of your soul

because you are brave enough to stand in the truth.

Name the truth about yourself.

Have Christ forgive it, heal it,

and then go forth into the community to be a witness to that healing

and to be a contagion of peace

at the very deepest levels of your heart,

at the level that nobody can take from you

because it is secured by Christ Himself.

So you are not flustered by moodiness

and you are not flustered by fashions and trendy thinking of our day.

You are not flustered by political expediency

because you are living out of this deep peace

that nobody can take from you

because it is continually given to you

at that deep level by Christ Himself.

So you actually stand as a beacon of peace for others,

as a witness that there is another way to live

these brief years that we have on earth.

We are not victims of this thinking,

this trend, this ideology,

this fashion, we are free

and we are free at the very core of our being

because we are continually receiving the gift of peace from Christ.

How do we receive that gift?

We receive it by naming the truth

of who we are in His presence.

In other words, we don't hide from Him anymore.

When we stop hiding from truth and Christ,

we start receiving peace.

Thank you, Deakin Keating.

Thank you.

You've been listening to Crossing the Desert,

Lent and Conversion with Deakin James Keating.

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