Welcome to the Trailer
Fr. John Riccardo
January 6, 2021
"One of the critical areas we need to rethink is the relationship between prayer and action. We have to move beyond juxtaposition to subordination. Juxtaposition is when we pray first, and then we act. Subordination, on the other hand, is when we pray first and then do what emerges from our prayer!"
~ Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa
Several years ago, when four of us on the ACTS XXIX team were serving together in parish ministry, we embarked on a rather large expansion of our campus. After literally years of trying to discern what we most needed, and how we were going to fund it, the day came when we finally broke ground. The excitement in the parish family was palpable, as we knew this expansion was going to greatly help us accomplish our vision of offering every person in our community a life-changing encounter with Jesus.
A few days after we broke ground, out of nowhere, or so it seemed, a trailer showed up in the parking lot on the campus. It was one of those portable trailers, able to hold a few people, some work tables, and other miscellaneous odds and ends.
The next day, very early in the morning, I watched as two men entered the trailer. About 30 minutes later, the men exited the trailer, hard hats in hand, and proceeded over to the construction site to supervise the work. Over the course of the rest of the day, these two men went back and forth from the trailer to the site and back to the trailer until, finally, they headed home. The next day they repeated the same routine and continued to do so until the project was complete and we had our wonderful new expansion.
Now, what was in the trailer that was so important? Blueprints. Each day, the builders made it a point to start by looking at the blueprints for the project, and only then head over to the site.
We found this experience of watching the builders to be a most helpful image for the work necessary in the Church today if we are to be all that the Lord is calling us to be so as to reach the world of our day and age, a world riddled with confusion, disunity, discouragement, and despair. We firmly believe that God already has a “blueprint,” if you will, for every diocese and every parish. What is urgently needed is for us to make and take the time to consult the Architect—God—and to confidently ask Him to show us the plan.
Among the many Scriptures that help drive this point home are the ones found in the Book of Exodus, where God instructs Moses to build the Tabernacle “according to the pattern” He will show Moses. In other words, there was already a “blueprint” for the Tabernacle Moses was asked to construct, and his task was not to sit around a table and have a brainstorming session with some really smart people to see what they thought they should build. Rather, Moses’ task was to get on his face in prayer and ask the Lord to reveal the pattern to him. It was also to trust that the Lord had equipped people around him with the gifts necessary to actualize what He had revealed.
Similarly, we think the urgent task in the Church right now is to ask the Lord to show us the blueprint necessary for the transformation of our dioceses and parishes that He wants more than we do, so as to be better equipped to accomplish the mission that is ours in this day and age.
Now, this might sound ridiculously obvious, but our experience of parish and diocesan life is that, tragically, prayer is often reduced to an agenda item before the “real work” begins. However, “Unless the Lord builds the house,” the Psalmist warns, “the laborers labor in vain.” We couldn't agree more. Cardinal Cantalamessa once reminded us that, "The apostles and saints prayed in order to know what to do and not merely before doing something. For Jesus, praying and acting were not two separate things."
The problem, oftentimes, though, is that parish and diocesan life is so unwieldy, so unmanageable, that there hardly seems time to pray in the way that is necessary so as to “see” the plan the Lord is asking us to construct. And if there’s not sufficient time to pray, there’s also little time to robustly and charitably argue to clarity over what God is calling us to do.
We describe ourselves in ACTS XXIX as a team of men and women whom the Lord has called out of parish and diocesan ministry so as to care for parishes and dioceses, much like the Lord calls a man as a priest to forego marriage and family so as to be able to (primarily) care for marriages and families. When our work is fruitful it is because we make it a point to regularly and intentionally “waste time” in prayer and then have spirited conversations with one another about what we think the Lord might be saying to us in prayer so as to best help the Church right now. In short, we have time to pray and think on behalf of those who often do not, simply because they go from fire to fire to fire day after day after day..
A sign hangs above the chapel in our office that reads, “The Trailer,” and another above our conference room that reads, “Construction Zone.” These new weekly articles flow from our experiences in both places and aspire to help provoke prayer, conversation, and thought about how the Church can be transformed to better meet the needs of the age in which we live.