Tomasino Blog

I’ve had a lot of interviews over the past couple weeks, interviews with several Jesuits, a wonderfully funny nun, and a few doctors. They’ve asked a lot of questions about a lot of things and I’ve said a lot of words back. I think I’ve talked myself out, if that’s possible. I guess there’s a limit, even for me.

There’s been a lot of questions about the vows in particular. How do I see poverty, chastity, and obedience? What do they really mean, and why are they so fundamental? How do I see myself living them? What is it about my call that feels particularly fitting to the Jesuits?

Like I said, I feel talked out. These are easy questions, but the answers are not short and simple. It takes time to explain fully the reasons I see obedience as the cornerstone of an active faith, to split apart the different forms it takes in our lives and differentiate and explain the necessity of each. I can’t rely on theological answers like that anyway. Instead, it takes even more time to convey the sense of helpless panic that hit me in the Navy, where I had no control over my life or death and the only choice I had in the morning was which of the same uniform to put on. How long does it take me to show how that helplessness transformed into a peace and a beauty of simplicity and acceptance. How long it takes to demonstrate how all these little moments in my life when I have stopped thinking and planning ad infinitum and simply listened with an open heart… Moments of obedience to God are easy to recall, but never simple to explain.

There’s no quick way to talk about how living in poverty is more than a simple rule for emulating the life of Christ, or how it brings a closer relationship to the poor, suffering, and meek in the world, or even how removing the clutter from your life removes the noisy barriers that keep you from hearing God’s whispers like Elijah. Indeed, to really explain my personal relationship to the vow, I need to talk about my time in Alaska, my constant yearning for movement, the deep quiet of meditation I find in long car rides or sitting alone in an empty room. It takes so many words to draw these pictures and make them accessible and clear enough that they can be felt. How can I make you feel the amazing power of Grace that fills me until I am overflowing with the essence of everything, the mystical numinous power that terrifies me into awareness of my smallness and yet embraces me with a personal affection more powerful than any single love. Or how I see the shadow of a flower draping across newly fallen snow, and it is a metaphor for the calling I feel. Unencumbered. Profound. Draw me a haiku that can bring that depth in 17 syllables.

And there is the ever present question of sexuality, as pervasive in interviews as it is in society. Where do I begin to talk about celibacy and its neighbor chastity? Do I repeat them the go-to reply of religious, that living the life doesn’t make you love less, but opens you up to love everyone even more? It is true, but again it is only part of an answer. It is the answer of the Church explaining a doctrine, not of a person explaining a call. Why am I called to celibacy? Because God has shown me that is the type of Love I excel at and find true grace in. I am not just a bad boyfriend and a good friend, it is deeper than that. I am called to celibacy because I have an affinity and natural skill at it. Sexuality and individual romantic love doesn’t bring me closer to God the way it does so many people. But it’s also hard to explain, as you can probably see already. It takes time and energy and a deeply reflective emotional examination that pulls and pulls at you. It’s exhausting.

So, as I said, I’m a little talked out these days. So in closing, let me just say: things looking good, need sleep, prayers welcome.

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[It] is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.
    - St. Ignatius Loyola – Spiritual Exercises, Second Annotation (1522-1524)

A week ago I met with the Vocation Director for the Society of Jesus. The interview was long, incredibly personal, and quite draining on both of us; but in the end he invited me to continue my application for the Novitiate. Now I have approximately four weeks to complete another 5 interviews, arrange for 5 letters of reference, get a physical, dental exam, opthamologist exam, transcripts from everywhere, military service records, church records, a psychological evaluation, and a partridge in a pear tree. How am I taking it? I’m glowing with excitement.

This past week has been a blur of scheduling, e-mailing, phone conversations, distracted prayers, and insomnia. It’s been a long time since the excitement of good things has kept me from sleep. I’ve missed it.

Tonight, a friend from Atlanta talked to me about patience. He’s doing a study on it that sounds fascinating. He said something very important to me that reaffirmed what I’ve been feeling through the discernment so far, and what I’ve been feeling more than ever since that meeting last week. He said, “a patience person is an active person…active in standing either against something…or in the face of something.”

It’s the active part that resonates so well right now. This application has certainly not been something to passively let happen. The Jesuits have all been very up-front with me that to get through this process in the right mind to move forward, I need to keep up my prayer life and spirituality. I think that might be the action of patience my friend was referring to—actively standing (or praying) in the face of the challenge of constant discernment, interviews, and paperwork.

There is a certain quietness that comes from it, though, that reminds me of the sense of calm, passive patience I’m used to. Rather than being the core of the virtue, though, I’m beginning to see it more as the result.

The remarkable thing is how the process has done more than just force me to consider my call. It’s already begun changing my behavior, readying me for a life to come. A lot of close people have started remarking about the changes, and the support has been amazing. Whether from close people now or those far into my past, all the prayers and sentiments give me strength.

My choice to live my call is a continuous struggle to make the right decisions, the decisions to follow what the Spirit is asking of me each and every day. They are hard choices sometimes, taking me farther away from the familiar and sometimes hedonistic past experiences and out on to a limb where I am surprisingly exposed. That’s where God likes to keep me, though. It’s part of the humility I’m always learning more about. When we are exposed, weakened, without comfort, it is easiest to turn to Christ for assistance. “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt. 19:24)

These next four weeks will be difficult to schedule, but they will also be spiritually full. Every day I learn something new about myself and my relationships with those around me. Spiritual indifference comes a little closer. Contemplative prayer becomes more natural. Some people call the application the true Jesuit postulancy, and I can see why.

As always, please keep me in your prayers. I’m praying for you too.

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I’ve been doing a lot of spiritual reading lately, the sort that makes its way into your daydreams and forms elaborate connective metaphors with everything around you. It becomes easy to see the way all the patterns in your life add up in simple, elegant equations to one another, and tempting to let those harmonies overwhelm your concept of God. It’s easy to think of God as the connective force, or the connections themselves, or maybe just a power moving behind them. It’s a part of so many spiritualities, and it feels so right; but in living with these sorts of thoughts for so long, I’ve come to find it somehow shallow. God is so much more than that.

One of the most basic concepts in Ignatian Spirituality (that is, the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola) is the ability to discern God’s active hand in our lives through discerning the spirits. Does this spirit, this concept / act / path in life, lead you closer to God, unite you with the virtues of faith, hope, and love? Or does this spirit lead you someplace else? It’s not a matter of whether thinking about something makes you happy or sad, righteous or indignant, but rather about how it interacts with your soul.

When I am filling my nights with spiritual reading and my thoughts are on my own discernment, the role of Jesus and his sacraments in my life, and looking for God in all things, that’s exactly what I find: God in all things. I see him in the way a conversation suddenly turns, or in the way a new friend opens up to me unexpectedly. He’s there when I drive to work and when I’m remembering each of my friends in my prayers. His presence is more than just with me, though, it’s active and guiding if I pay attention. It leads me to things and away from others. Sometimes, like it has been in the sense of my discernment to religious life, it is “leading my path away from all, and too my love,” as the poem says.

Jillian of Norwich says in her own spiritual writings that we are closer to God than we are to our own Spirit. It is because our spirit is made of and by God, not of the earthly things like our bodies. The only way we can come to know our spirit is by first coming to know God. In the view of Ignatian Spirituality, that makes such beautiful sense. It is the way of God to illuminate his path for us through reason and faith together, and so what better way to come to know ourselves as well?

Which brings me to this past Monday night. I had mass and dinner with the Jesuit community at the Arrupe House in Philadelphia, and a wonderful discussion afterward about St. Ignatius’ spirituality. We were talking about these very things and I asked them something that had been on my mind. In the Examen, the daily practice of prayerful reflection on the day to discern God’s presence and direction, I told them I found it easy to spot God’s active and guiding hand in the big moments of my life, like joining the Navy, moving from one place to the next, or volunteering for certain things; but at the end of a day when I did nothing but work from my chair at home, write a blog post, draw a map for a D&D game, and watch some Hulu, how do you sense God’s presence? One of the priests talked a bit about his own experiences in the Examen and described something wonderfully helpful to me. He said he spends his time trying to find the “scent of God.” He doesn’t look at the actions, necessarily, but for something else. He looks for an element of presence in his day via a different sense than scrolling through your day like it’s on Tivo. To sense a scent requires a different tactic, more passive than active, an opening of yourself to the things in the air around you. When I think of it, I want to close my eyes and think of nothing but the deep inhalation and the questing search for something I know is there. It’s not a game of Where’s Waldo.

Tonight as I settled down to do the Examen, I kept this idea in my mind. I sense God’s presence in the little conversations I had over instant messenger, and in the choices of my reading, but there was something more. A general scent of God being with me, encouraging and guiding despite the lack of decision making. He was there with me in force, though no force was necessary. He was filling me up, illuminating my benighted soul at the very moment while I watched a simple episode of the Dick Van Dyke show on Hulu. When the plot revealed that Laura’s long-lost love, her boyfriend before Rob, was now a priest, I saw it in his light. And finally, when she realized that all those love poems he had sent her were not about her at all, but were about God, it was that sense of loving companionship that I was already experiencing that brought me tears.

So yes, in a way I do see God as the connecting force between everything I experience, and as a guide in that journey, but I also see him as a light of insight into who I really am, a companion on my constant pilgrimage, a teacher, father, friend, and confessor. He is all these things and so much more! I guess it’s like I told the Jesuits on Monday. Sometimes sensing his presence is pretty easy.

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Hey bloggers! It’s that time of year again when we all get to look back over the past year of our lives and take special note of the beauty and the beast that has been our previous 365 days.

Fellow blogger, Elizabeth Esther from “Kids, Twins, and Laundry Bins” is hosting a special Saturday Evening Blog Post where people are asked to submit their favorite blog entry from 2009. I chose The Most Beautiful Thing in the World. What will you pick? Pop on over here and make your choice.

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This Christmas I was lucky enough to have my Grandma make her famous Red Sauce with Tuna, a Lenten favorite of my Dad’s. She made this sauce for her pasta every Friday in good Catholic tradition. It tastes like a regular meat sauce, with a hint of something special. The following recipe yields enough sauce for a pound of pasta.

If you try it out and enjoy it, let me know! Merry Christmas!

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