Father Christian

I go once a year to see my spiritual director.
He lives in South Carolina.
People think that South Carolina is for rejects, or, half breeds, or losers.
I do not.
One of the brightest, most Christ like men in the world lives there.
His name is Father Christian.
I am one of around 400 to 600 that he directs. Here is a flavor of him, seen through the eyes of a man named August Turak.

"Finally, I asked Father Christian if he could spare a few minutes. Father Christian is Mepkin's feisty 88-year-old former abbot and my spiritual director. Slight and lean, he has a shaven head and wears a bushy chest-length beard that he never cuts. Fluent in French and Latin and passable in Greek, he acquired doctorates in philosophy, theology and canon law as a Franciscan before entering Mepkin. His learning, his direct yet gentle manner and his obvious personal spirituality make him an exceptional spiritual director. And while he grouses once in a while about the bottomless demand for this direction, I've never known him to turn anyone away.

I told Father Christian of my experience with Brother John, and I told him that it had left me in an unsettled state. I wanted to elaborate, but he interrupted me. "So you noticed did you? Amazing how many people take something like that for granted in life. John's a saint you know."

Then he launched into a story about a Presbyterian minister having a crisis of faith and leaving the ministry. The man was a friend of his, and Father Christian took his crisis so seriously that he left the monastery and traveled to his house in order to do what he could. The two men spent countless hours in fruitless theological debate. Finally, dropping his voice, Father Christian looked the man steadily in the face and said, "Bob, is everything in your life all right?" The minister said everything was fine. But the minister's wife called Father Christian a few days later. She had overheard Christian's question and her husband's answer, and she told Father Christian that the minister was having an affair and was leaving her as well as his ministry.

Father Christian fairly spat with disgust, "I was wasting my time. Bob's problem was that he couldn't take the contradiction between his preaching and his living. So God gets the boot. Remember this, all philosophical problems are at heart moral problems. It all comes down to how you intend to live your life."

We sat silently for a few minutes while Father Christian cooled off. When he spoke, the anger in his clear blue eyes had been replaced by a gentle compassion. "You know, you can call it original sin, you can call it any darn thing you want to for that matter, but deep down inside every one of us knows something's twisted. Acknowledging that fact, refusing to run away from it and deciding to deal with it is the beginning of the only authentic life there is. All evil begins with a lie. The biggest evil comes from the biggest lies, and the biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves. And we lie to ourselves because we're afraid to take ourselves on."

Getting up from his chair, he went to a file cabinet in the corner of his office and took out a folded piece of paper. Turning, he handed it to me and said, "I know how you feel. You're wondering if you have what it takes. Well, God and you both have some work to do, but I'll say this for you, you're doing your best to look things square in the face."

As he walked out the door, I opened the paper he had given me. There, neatly typed by his ancient manual typewriter, was my name in all caps followed by these words from Pascal:

"You would not seek Me if you had not already found Me, and you would not have found Me if I had not first found you."