Father Marty Lukas, OSFS and Father Jack Loughran, OSFS, with Steve Fox.
My secrets out! I've been caught. Last week I was on a Zoom conference with several other Oblates, and not wanting my location to distract from the business at hand, I did my best to disguise it. Then, in the middle of the meeting, one of the participants said, "Jack, is that a palm tree outside that window behind you?"
It was, and my attempt to conceal the fact that I was at a resort in Cancun was foiled. I couldn't convince them that palm trees do grow in Michigan. And, of course, once I admitted where I was, I got a bit of grief from the guys stuck in the cold and snow of Michigan and Ohio. "Must be nice!" "Aren't you special?" "Wish I could get away in the middle of winter." I took the expected ribbing in the spirit of fun in which it was expressed.
My classmate, Father Marty Lukas, OSFS, and I have been traveling to Cancun with friends, Steve and Mary Fox, who own a number of time-share weeks at a beautiful beach resort, for over 20 years. It is beautiful, especially in February when the sun and 84 degrees beat the pants off frigid Michigan.
I am a bit sheepish about having such a wonderful and extravagant vacation. But, upon reading the following from the Introduction to the Devout Life by Saint Francis de Sales, I claim the wisdom of this Doctor of the Church!
Francis states in his classic work:
“It is sometimes necessary for us to relax both mind and body by some kind of recreation. As Cassian relates; When a hunter one day found Saint John the Evangelist holding a partridge in his hand and stroking it by way of amusement, he asked how a man like him could spend time on so common and trivial a thing. Saint John replied to him, ‘Why don’t you always carry your bow taut?’
“‘If it were always bent I’m afraid it would lose its spring and be useless when I needed it,’ the hunter answered.
“To this, the apostle replied, ‘Don’t be surprised then if I sometimes relax my close application and attention of mind a bit and enjoy a little recreation so that I may afterwards apply myself fervently to contemplation.’ It is undoubtedly a defect to be so strict, ill-bred, uncouth and austere as to neither to take any recreation ourselves nor to allow it to others …It is the common prudence that gives due order, time, place and measure to all things.”
Some more wisdom from Saint Francis de Sales that serves body, mind and spirit. I love it.
Father Jack Loughran, OSFS
Provincial
Toledo-Detroit Province
