Category: Behold Vancouver

What would you do if the end of the world was coming? Would fear, uncertainty, or discouragement make you give up? St. Paul says we don’t need to give in to despair: we have a true source of hope. 

In this episode, Fr. Columba Jordan explores St. Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians and the struggle of an early Christian community facing confusion, despair, and anxiety. In response, St. Paul gives practical solutions which can still work for us today.

What makes a parish or community truly alive? It’s not impressive programs, gifted leaders, large crowds, or even extraordinary spiritual experiences. According to St. Paul, the essential ingredient is love. 

In the second episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba explores how St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians reveals a practical vision for transforming our parishes and communities: rather than waiting for other people to create a more loving Church, the work begins within each of us.

Is it really possible to experience joy even when your circumstances are painful, uncertain, or overwhelming? 

In the third episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba Jordan, CFR, explores St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians and the surprising freedom that allowed Paul to rejoice while imprisoned and awaiting trial.

God doesn’t see you as a stranger, a servant, or merely a guest. He sees you as family. He rescued you, cares for you, and wants you to know that you truly belong. 

In the first episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba explores this incredible truth, unpacking St. Paul’s writing on our relationship with God, how God’s family has been restored, and how we can accept that gift and live in freedom.

I walked the streets of Jerusalem as a skeptic, unsure what I believed about the city, Jesus, or the biblical stories. I had stopped going to church years before the trip, but when my policy job offered me the chance to accompany state policymakers to Israel to learn about the region’s politics, I felt the stirrings of my childhood and a long-held fascination with the Holy Land. 

My spirituality has guided me since I was a little girl. Raised in a devout Catholic household, our family always sat in front at Mass, even when we arrived late — which was most Sundays. As much as I wanted to slide into a back pew, my parents would march my four siblings and me up to the front. We’d kneel until Mass started, then kneel again after the final song as everyone else filed out of church. 

LISTEN: Holy Land Pilgrimage: On the Path Where Jesus Walked

I attended Catholic schools and have journals of prayers and conversations with God, dating back to when I was about 11. I felt the sorrow of Holy Week and the anticipation of Advent, recognizing the liturgical seasons reflected in my life. I remember tearing up, more than once, when “Here I am, Lord” was sung, sensing that my life journey was divinely guided, including its hardships and challenges. I dedicated my career to helping the disadvantaged, beginning with a job at Catholic Charities. 

As a young adult, I attended multiple Catholic churches, seeking that sense of home I had as a child. But as a single woman, I felt like an outsider, unable to relate to the young families around me or the older couples in the pews. After Mass, I would look around, hoping to make eye contact with some nice soul who would come over and say hello. But the families were busy corralling their children, and the older couples gathered in their little groups. I’d walk out alone, still scanning the crowd for any connection.  

I eventually stopped attending Mass. I didn’t stop believing; I just no longer had a community of people or a dedicated place to share that belief.  

I carried this history to Israel, along with questions about what was being asked of me at that moment. The trip took place not long after I had recovered from stage four cancer, and I was struggling to go back to normal life. My illness and recovery awakened something in me, a faith I couldn’t articulate, and I wasn’t sure what it meant for my career or life as a whole. But I resisted the temptation to turn the trip into a spiritual pilgrimage.

The words “parenting” and “relaxing” never fit together naturally for me as a father. And with all of the pressures weighing on me right now — debt, bills, and rising prices — they had drifted even further apart. They went from being quarrelsome siblings to two completely different people living on opposite sides of the world. This disconnect had always seemed natural to me, though, especially when I reflected on what Scripture had to say about laziness and sloth. 

But I had made an all-too-common mistake. I had been focused on just one aspect of what I read, while ignoring something equally as important: Giving glory to God through relaxing. 

RELATED: Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith on ‘Sacred Rest’ 

The example of St. Joseph

My idea of being a good father, and husband, entailed being a good provider. Any minute I took away from working, I felt like I was falling behind in these roles. This inability to relax got to the point where it would even interfere with me spending time with my family. I would be there physically, but mentally I was nowhere to be seen. My wife and daughter could see it, too — as quickly as the joy of seeing me there would wash over them, their smiles would turn serious. 

I would beat myself up about it, but to me it was just a natural sacrifice I had to make. I never imagined St. Joseph — a saint I always looked up to — relaxing. And if he, as a righteous man, didn’t relax, then certainly honoring God could never be associated with taking some down time. St. Paul’s succinct words, that “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10), only solidified my distorted view. 

RELATED: Turning to St. Joseph as a Rookie Father

Relaxation versus laziness

But I was wrong. Because there’s relaxing, and then there’s being lazy. Growing up, I never took the time to understand the difference between the two. To me, even when I was relaxing, I felt like, at the core, I was still embracing laziness — a sin abhorrent to God (Proverbs 18:9). But there is a difference when it comes to honoring our heavenly father. 

The fourth commandment tells us to keep holy the Sabbath. I understood the work and relaxation part, but what did the key word “holy” actually mean? The dictionary defines it as “exalted or worthy of complete devotion,” and herein lies the answer: God gave us the gift of relaxation to rejuvenate us, so we can give complete devotion to him through praying, giving thanks, and appreciating what he has given us. 

Fifteen centuries before the smartphone, the monks of Egypt named a spiritual illness that strikes hardest in summer heat. Their diagnosis is uncomfortably accurate.

It comes in the middle of the day, in the heat. The monk in his cell feels a creeping restlessness—an inability to stay, to pray, to work, to read. He looks out the window. He looks again. He decides he would do more good somewhere else. He begins to feel that his cell is uniquely unsuitable for spiritual progress, that his situation is exceptional, that moving would solve everything. He does not move. The feeling intensifies. The afternoon stretches out like a desert.

The Desert Fathers of 4th-century Egypt had a name for this condition: acedia. From the Greek akēdeia—lack of care, indifference—it is one of the eight logismoi, or disordered thoughts, catalogued by Evagrius of Pontus, the great theorist of desert spirituality, and it has a specific physiological marker: it strikes hardest at noon.

Evagrius described it with the precision of a clinician: “First of all, the demon makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and that the day seems to be 50 hours long. Then he compels the monk to look constantly toward the windows, to jump out of the cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is from the ninth hour, to look this way and that.” His contemporary John Cassian, writing in the Institutes, completed the portrait: the monk “fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell.” Any number of plausible reasons present themselves—his health, his relationships, his effectiveness, his duty to others. All of them, Cassian says, are the demon talking.

Both Evagrius and Cassian associated acedia with “the destruction that wastes at noonday” of Psalm 91, which in the Greek and Latin Old Testament can be read more literally as “the noonday demon.” The association with heat and the middle of the day is not incidental. The monks spent their days fasting, working, and praying, often in total isolation, in a climate where the afternoon sun made everything more difficult. Acedia was the temptation that arrived at the point of maximum physical discomfort and minimum social support—the moment when staying put felt most unreasonable and escape felt most justified.

What does Jesus mean when he tells us to “bear fruit”? 

Fr. Mike Schmitz explains that bearing fruit isn’t simply about being productive or avoiding laziness, it’s about who we are becoming and allowing God to transform our lives. 

How can you bear fruit today?

In our human relationships when we ‘get closer’ with someone, it can feel genuinely lovely. We begin to feel more trust and more openness to vulnerability and emotionality. We may share more experiences and invest more time in these relationships. Our human psyche is wired for connection and love; we are wired for intimacy because of who our Creator is. 

I believe this is also why when we have a growing relationship with God, we desire even more closeness with Him. And also why I think it can really hurt, even feel defeating at times, when it seems like He isn’t returning that closeness. Sometimes, I start to believe the lies that sound like: “God is not listening or speaking to me as a punishment for something because He’s mad me”, or “ He doesn’t have time for me”, or “He is holding out on me”.

Most recently, in this season of new motherhood, I have felt my prayer life do a complete 180. My son was an anomaly at first, sleeping through the night until he was about four months old. During this time, I still got up before him, prayed for an hour like I did before and loved every second of it. Then came the sleep regressions. The teething. The growing out of his bassinet. And all that came to a halt. I could not wake up before my baby. I was in survival mode. I remember crying and missing prayer, missing God, asking Him why I have this desire to be with Him but can’t seem to have the time. If I took an honest look at myself, I did not like who I was without time with God. And yet, I did not even try to open my Bible, I was on my phone more than anything else. I told myself I was too exhausted to pray. I was grumpy and content staying that way because I felt I had every justification to. 

Yet my desperation moved me to surrender. There was a certain desperation for Jesus that I have never felt before. I tried praying during nap times. But sometimes my son wouldn’t nap or I had a work deadline to complete. I tried when the day was done, but sometimes I was so exhausted that I fell asleep putting my son to sleep. The promise to wake up before my son even for just ten minutes meant he woke up too. 

How am I supposed to pray, contemplate, take time for silence when my days are filled with tears, a little child always needing me and I am never alone? Or even once I nailed a routine, the next developmental leap occurred and I had to pivot…again!