Father Esposito: ‘The Lord is with you’

Catholic Schools Week (Jan. 30 to Feb. 5 this year) is a time to reflect on the gift of Catholic education and to support the many men and women who work so hard to offer that education to children throughout the world.

St. Benedict concludes the Prologue of his Rule for monks with an uplifting exhortation: “Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts expanding with the inexpressible delight of love.” For Benedict, the monastic life is a school in which the monks, who graduate only at death, never cease learning how to love the Lord. The relentless rigors of work and prayer stretch the heart, pushing it outward and generating an ever-greater capacity to love and be loved.

One of the shibboleths of our times is the word diversity. Our use of the word can easily signal our social, political and philosophical sympathies. It is ubiquitous in our culture, advertising and corporate life, and it is frequently portrayed as a moral value, one of the few claimed by our ostensibly secular society.

A curious pattern of exile is evident in the endings of several Old Testament books. After God promises Abram the land of Canaan, the patriarch must immediately flee to Egypt because of a famine (Genesis 12); his descendants, the sons of Jacob, repeat the expedition for the same reason (Genesis 42-47).

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, declared in a book of prose that “the Scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.” For Milosz, whose life was scarred by the Nazi and Communist takeovers of his native land, the moral authority and literary beauty of the Bible was a refuge against the lethal and banal propaganda spewed forth from those godless governments and armies, even though he could not bring himself to believe in God.

This Lent I’m studying the “wilderness” or “desert” in Scripture, and especially in the journey of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. The dangerous wild is a powerful image for the spiritual life, and it plays a large part in the lives of figures like Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist and Jesus. What about in yours?

Our world needs Christian faith. A book that proved this to me regarding the medical field is Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality by Charles C. Camosy.

Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends to John’s presentation of Jesus’ ministry, and highlight the role of Mary as mother both of the Church and of every individual Christian.

Plans are well underway for the 2024 Synod — that big meeting to advise the bishop about the spiritual, material and administrative situation of the Dallas Diocese. Essential to its success are the “listening sessions” now taking place: two years of honest and charitable dialogue for the good of the Church and her mission in the world.

Being a father requires a man to acknowledge his mortality. From a purely biological perspective, the sexual drive is a program for reproduction that presumes the death of the one generating new life. Leon Kass, a brilliant physician and philosopher, asserts this truth in a stark manner: “Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, points to an end that is partly hidden from, and ultimately at odds with, the self-serving individual: sexuality as such means perishability and serves replacement. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. This truth the salmon and the other animals practice blindly; only the human being can understand what it means.”

For a while, I have been studying the topic of race in American and Catholic history. It is a difficult topic for obvious reasons, but it is also a rewarding one. In fact, I have been greatly edified learning about figures like Venerable Augustus Tolton, St. Katharine Drexel, Servant of God Thea Bowman and others. If you’re looking for a way into such stories, check out “Black Catholics on the Road to Sainthood.”

The future is not simply an adventure; it’s the adventure, according to the Latin roots ad, “to, toward” and ventura, “what will come.” While many students eagerly anticipate the start of a new school year and engaged couples impatiently count down the days to their wedding, dread of the approaching unknowns is familiar to virtually everyone. Regardless of one’s age, fear of the future is a dominant emotion that inhibits our joyful living of the blessed adventure that God wishes every life to be.

Every moment becomes a kind of sacrament, so to speak, since the treasures of grace lie concealed beneath what is very plain and visible.

I reached a new low recently when I felt an overwhelming and irresistible itch to catch up on emails mere minutes after my first check of the day, which happened mere minutes after I finished celebrating Mass. I had long lamented the sight of my students reaching addictively for their phones as soon as class ended, but the realization that the contagion had spread to me was a sad revelation.

One of the most laudable questions I receive is about how to discern God’s will. A decision is easy to make when the choice is between something right and something wrong. But a decision can be difficult when the choice is between two goods and I have to discover the specific will God has for me. I recently read a great book on this topic, and I want to share its theses. The book is “Discerning the Will of God: An Ignatian Guide to Christian Decision Making” by Father Timothy Gallagher.