Unidentified Objects Were Not All Flying

I heard a discussion on race relations on public radio today.  I could not tell until the show’s end that one of the two women in the discussion was an African-American, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune.  She addressed briefly the issue of inter marriage in revealing the depth of prejudice with great insight. 

The concerns of inter marriage, if it reflected my own prejudice, if I was honest, was not so much about skin color as it was about identity.  What was your identity?  The religious tradition, if there was one, led to intimacy.  And men and women struggled, no matter what backgorund, with matters of intimacy.  The real issue of intermarriage in a secular nation called the question how deep you were intellectually, spiritually.  Everyone had a different dimension.  And family history influenced the formation of identity.   How well developed were these 2 young people?

The popular world, formed by media, was so surface oriented.  But one day people all suffered internal quakes.  What would be down below?  What would be shown as having been deep within all along but often unrecognized even by the the spouse you married.  What had history left her/him, whatever the color?  Without similar intellectual background, without a shared belief system, the chances of failure were increased.  It had nothing to do with skin color but everything that was located below the skin.  Though too often, the history of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, had been cruel beyond comprehension and had left a pressure below the surface, unidentified.  It was not the unidentified flying objects that was to be feared but those unidentified objects buried below the surface.  The earth was not just spinning each day but always moving.  My fear was of sinkholes and former toxic waste disposal left behind, internally unknown, through no fault of a spouse. 

THE BELLS ARE RINGING

 

 

There was an excitement of God.  That was what I learned through worship.  I came alive inside again with worship.  The world and all of its trouble, what I had done, what I had failed to do, they were all a downer.  It was the secular world and all of its trouble that seemed a summit not worth the climb that affected whether I was an optimist or a pessimist.  It was another cold May morning in the land of 10,000 lakes but one nice day would bring back the excitement of creation.  The lilacs were finally in full bloom.    

Feeling incomplete, feeling broken:  there was a certain theme to my morning as I reflected on my “career.”  I was feeling incomplete, wondering what I had to do to complete the stage of the journey.  Financially.   This feeling of being incomplete was a form of broken-ness.  I had joined the world.  I thought of my circumstances in lieu of the world’s.  Was God throughout history feeling incomplete, without union of his people? 

The offering I had accepted was of union through His son to all people, beyond the original Chosen People, with union by participation in His life called Church.   Through Him, with Him, in Him……

 

In the words of Pedro Arrupe,  love made it all worth while to get out of bed in the morning. 

 

“Nothing is more practical than finding God.  That is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.  

 

Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.”   - Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

 

That was the excitement about recognizing God in the world and my relationship to His creation.   The excitement in those church bells this morning was not in their sound but in the reverberations that I felt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praying on Contingency

I wondered if Americans should be required to pray on a contingency agreement.  I was moment away from getting ready for Mass on May 25th.  And I wondered if the same dull Prayers of the Faithful would be recited?  Those for our sick, for our dead, for our community?  I think lay people or a committee wrote the prayer that never quite reflected current events until a week later, unless it was about our city.  This parish could be worse than the local TV news, demanding a local angle to the world’s suffering.  Yet in the news, the suffering was beyond comprehension.  Dams were ready to collapse, millions were ready to starve…..from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune:

 

Burmese villages, people line the roads in the Irrawaddy Delta waiting for aid.  In village after village they endure the sweltering morning sun, the afternoon monsoon rains and the storm-pregnant evening skies, under which their ghostly figures are illuminated by thunderbolts.  When an occasional car carrying donations approaches, children swarm toward it holding out their hands. Mothers hugging babies, too ashamed or shocked to ask for help, just stare into the eyes of any visitors. Fathers and grandmothers stand by, watching the scene with eyes filled with nothing but humility.

And in China, earlier Sunday the Chinese Cabinet said the confirmed death toll from the May 12th quake rose to 62,664, with another 23,775 people missing. Premier Wen Jiabao has said the number of dead could surpass 80,000.  Millions have been left homeless, some now at risk of being inundated by floods from new lakes that have been formed by rivers blocked by landslides unleashed by the quake.  The State Meteorological Bureau said Sunday that parts of Sichuan would suffer “heavy and even in some areas torrential rains” later Sunday and Monday, warning of possible mudslides.  About 20,000 people had been evacuated in the disaster area due to risks of floods and the total who need to be relocated could rise to 100,000, the chief engineer at the Ministry of Water Resources told reporters in Beijing.  The ministry also said Sunday that 69 dams in Sichuan were in danger of collapse due to quake-related damage. It did not give further details.  The government had earlier said the quake affected 391 dams, mostly small structures. Authorities have said the world’s largest water project — the Three Gorges dam, located about 350 miles (560 kilometers) east of the epicenter — was not damaged.

But in Minneapolis, the Faithful really did not know how to pray yet if it was only for ourselves.  No wonder the pews were not always very full with this pastor overseeing or not overseeing his committee.  What if we were first required to pray with fervor on a 1/3rd contingency for people far away. 

AN IRISH KADDISH

It was a prayer that I had modified around the death of my father.  I still see his name all the time.  It was not just a name.  Too often a man did not want to think about the experience of loss, what it was that I really had had, and what it was that I really had lost.  

 

A prayer was composed not in the sound of words but in true feelings.  I had thought of the relationship of my dad’s life to God.  I thought of my relationships that had led to his God.  I had posted this on the National Day of Prayer.  Relationships were based upon true feelings. 

 

I thought how the children of a father, a mother, were so God-like in both the human and the divine.  I thought of how in this prayer, creation moved from birth into some form of action.   Or inaction.  It was action that gave life purpose.  It was in work.  Or in rest.  In re-creation.  In leisure.  I once heard a rabbi say that the Jewish word for work was the same as that of either leisure or rest.    Or I think I had, in a lecture at the University of St. Thomas. 

 

Family called the question on love:  How can you love without true feelings? 

  

Father.  You created me.  In Your Image.  You formed me.  In Your Likeness.  You put me on this earth for a reason.   

 

Jesus Christ, you are that reason.  You set the captives free.  You gave sight to the blind.  You healed the sick.  You taught us how to live and love.  You lived, you died, YOU ROSE.  For me.  And you somehow move me to complete your works.    

 

Holy Spirit.  You help me complete the works of Jesus, the Messiah, and find my purpose on this earth, in the real world today.  In action. 

 

 

MAGNIFIED AND SANCTIFIED

MAY HIS GREAT NAME BE

IN THE WORLD THAT HE CREATED,

AS HE WILLS,

AND MAY HIS KINGDOM COME

IN YOUR LIFE AND IN YOUR DAYS

AND IN THE LIFES OF ALL THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL,

SWIFTLY AND SOON,

AND SAY ALL AMEN.     

  

 

AMEN!

MAY HIS GREAT NAME BE BLESSED

ALWAYS AND FOREVER.

 

There seemed to be a relationship in my family name, which carried on the tradition from one generation to the next, in relationship to this God of creation, that connected me to all of history.  And to all of creation. 

 

THE DROUGHT & THE SHORTAGE OF SPIRITUAL FOOD

Rule number one in life, if you are good in your profession, people will seek you out. Until now when the parish priest was going to be worked to death.  There had been no leveraged buy-out, following by lay-offs of personnel.  There was just no support from above to the work load, and little support in the way of young men signing up for a new profession.  It was a job with little financial reward and no family life of your own.     

 

Thirty, forty and fifty years ago, this country was coming out of a Great Depression and World War II.  And that generation saw something maybe in a guy who had grown up in the same neighborhood, who had once been at a parish.   And parents and children identified with the priest as normal.  That did not happen so much any more.   Especially when the archbishops came from far away. One hundred old churches were given new names, without any appreciation of history in this community. The archbishop did not seem to care. They say all politics was really local.  So the church…..or it used to be.  Now it seemed indifferent, with leaders in Rome suggesting that it was the masses were indifferent.  The masses were menu selectors, spoiled.

 

To Be Professed in a Profession.  There were only 4 professions.  Medicine, Law, Teaching.  The Clergy.  What happens when you cannot keep your vows? Judas seemed to be the first who failed to come to grips with his own failure.  It was as if he left in the 7^th inning of that playoff game in 1951 between the Giants and the Dodgers, with no idea of the ultimate outcome.  He missed the excitement of the death and Resurrection.  What happens today to a Catholic priest when he finds he no longer can be celibate?  When he really cannot be normal as every other man?  When it was your “profession” to the public?  Does it mean complete failure?  What happens when this career based upon your relationship with God comes in conflict with the required vow to be celibate?  When the vow seemed historically artificial?  What happens when a man faces professional failure, even when the priest’s desire to marry was what was usually considered the normal development of a man?  Why was this church law, which had not existed in the first millennium, considered paramount to priesthood, especially in lieu of every man, every woman’s struggle against loneliness?  Why was this church law considered to be just?

 

In baseball, when the supply did not equal the demand, you grew your own.  You developed a farm system.   You went to the Domincan.  In families you had kids.  When something was not working in the business world, managers were held accountable to find out why.  Otherwise people were going to quit coming out.  And then those managers would be looking for new work.  And now these rules were stacked against the home team.  It had not always been so.  Priest had been allowed to marry throughout the first millennium, although the folks in Vatican City did not want the people to know that.  The people in Vatican City seemed indifferent to church closings.  No consideration was being given to changes of the rules.  Nothing visible was being done to examine why men had quit signing up.  In South Africa they had a Truth & Reconciliation Commission to address wrongs of the past.  Government had to find a way to unite a fractured people.  When men and women long ago quit signing up, no one in Rome had sought to find out the truth about why.  Rather than playing the blame game, rather than close churches throughout the wold, it was time to show some authentic collegiality to break a communication problem that comes out of a dysfunction family that acts solely on issue of authority.  On the ultimate matters of faith, and sharing that faith through the Eucharist, the seat of Rome had failed to communicate with great honestly.  It was a failure to listen to the people, to respond in some way for at least 25 years, which would put the availability of the Eucharist at risk.    

 

The masses had never been better educated.  Especially by priests and nuns.  But not any more. The cost of parochial schools was eating into the financial statement of parishes.  And that dried up the reservoir from where many a vocation had come. Experience showed that it was hard to lead an educated group of people, and especially if you were not considered as one of them.  The new archbishop here was going to learn that lesson.

 

How do you minister to a church of one billion with a diminished priesthood? Pope Benedict had called the question in the modern era of what exactly Catholic identity was if it was not practiced in every day life.  The modern Catholic had become like the American Protestant who lived down the street 40 years ago.  They went to church maybe 4 times a year. In a sense, this frequency of worship casts doubt on the intensity of worship.   Pope Benedict had called the question in his recent travels to New York and Washington.  We now wait for his answer to the real crisis in the church as to how a true Catholic identity which desired the availability of the traditional Eucharist would be served by priesthood over the next 25 years? 

Fragmented Catholics, Fragmented Protestants

Pentecost in this Gospel reading was all about priesthood.  “‘Peace be with you.’  When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.”  Priesthood was all about putting the hands and feeling people’s pain inside.  The institution of the church usurped the focus on priesthood in the readings to call attention to itself.  But the day was about real people who had committed their lives to the formation of others, coming together in the name of love.  It was a day that honored the Spirit of God.  Words seemed inadequate to simply call this Holy Spirit.  With all the sound and fury given to Christmas, little is given to Pentecost. 

The Spirit of God was all about the interior development of the soul.  What we called the 3rd Person of the Trinity was the mortar between God, me and the real world.  In that sense it was the church within me.  The Spirit of God was why I wanted to belong to a church of the past, of the present, and of the future, the church where my great grandfather worshipped, where the Irish had always worshipped, and where I hoped my children would one day worship.  I was not here today to celebrate the Papacy but to find God, within others, within myself, in a world where faith had always been a struggle, individually and communally. Because looking at his hands and side, I was more likely to find joy than pain inside. 

The incredible part of the story was that the corps of 11 men, an uncounted number of women, and various disciples had created a church that now nearly 48,000 months later had well in excess of one billion Christian people, many of them Catholic but just as fragmented amongst us as we were with the Protestant churches, all called not to be consoled by God that we were the new Chosen People but asked like the Jewish people always have been to take  life as seriously as Jesus of Nazareth did.   We were called by The Spirit to witness the hands and the sides of those who suffer in this world, to respond and share with kindness some aspect of my identity, that Christian identity, so it did not evaporate without ever having been opened.  Those 48,000 months had gone by fast. 

 

That 11th Commandment

 

Penecost was a feast celebrating the first cuttings of the grain harvest.  This feast of Weeks was Thanksgiving Day in those times, a feast uniting the community. It was in this setting that the big Novena began.     

 

Unity:  It was a challenge to everyone.  It was one area, the last area—on matters of sex—that a priest, a rabbi wanted to talk to people.  People did not seem to accept advice well on matters of intimacy in their lives.  Secular people responded the same way on the matter of abortion.  Government, church should butt out.  The holiest men of the Torah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all practiced polygamy. Holy men.  There has always been a struggle on men with sexual appetites.  But sex was the thing that united men and women.  And sex gives meaning and purpose to your authentic love. It took time to learn the lesson.  Some of us never did.

 

It was in union with God, with others, that we found love.  Amidst the struggle.  I felt needed amidst what I felt to be a new poverty in 2008 by paying for college for a girl in the Phillipines.   The readings this Sunday were all about unity.  There was reference to Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia. Whereas the Torah had discussed the loss of mortar at the Tower of Babel, for the first time in the name of God people were united again.  Inhabitants of Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, all were once again in search but a search together. And somehow all of this was going to be tied to that 11^th Commandment, the last one heard.  “Hey!  Hey you!  Go baptize all nations.  In the name of the Father.  And of the Son. And of the Holy Ghost. Why are you standing and looking at the sky?  Go! Yes, you.  Now!” 

National Day of Prayer

For the National Day of Prayer

 

 

Father.  You created me.  In Your Image.  You formed me.  In Your Likeness.  You put me on this earth for a reason.   

 

Jesus Christ, you are that reason.  You set the captives free.  You gave sight to the blind.  You healed the sick.  You taught us how to live and love.  You lived, you died, YOU ROSE.  For me.  And you called me to complete your works.    

 

Holy Spirit.  You help me complete the works of Jesus, the Messiah, and find my purpose on this earth, in the real world today. 

 

So I begin this day.  In the real world.  In the name of the Father.  And of the Son.  And of the Holy Spirit.  May all my thoughts and actions be directed to your glory, to your presence in this day, in this world without end.  Today.  Amen. 

Catholic Identity

Another school term was coming to an end this week.  In college, finals had ended at my Catholic alma mater and kids were returning to their place of origin.  It was May.  There was something about a morning in May.  In my place of origin, May was when spring really began.  It was a time of re-birth, of starting over.  One year had ended, in the life of the soil, another was beginning.   For me, there was always a time of the day, a season of the year, when your sense of God was greater.

 

 

Speaking of a place of origin, the greatest commandment was once described as involving a knowledge of God. We were all compelled to know God, to love God and to respond to His love.   And the degree of that knowledge was determined to a large extent by both how much time was dedicated to the pursuit and the institution that provide the setting, a place of origin, for that pursuit. 

 

 

The challenge from these commandments, from a perspective of the institution, of the generations before, was a response –a love for God. It was about trying to teach generosity, based on honed, long–time academic pursuits at an institution.  It was not just a “tradition.”  This weekend, about three days late, the liturgy was centered on Ascension Thursday.  There the last commandment was heard from God.  “Go!  Teach all nations.  In the name of the Father.  In the name of the Son.  In the name of the Spirit.”  Thus the mission that was not foreign to this soil.   It was about what made this land, our land, holy. 

 

 

Graduates, Catholics and non-Catholics, at some point after graduation were asked to lend some financial support to such an institution of learning.  It was how the institution survived. And those in what was now called institutional advancement, once known as the development office, knew it was one thing to write a check, but entirely another to really get the emotions of a donor, the passions, involved.  And that was how relationships impacted the future of a Catholic institution.   I read a quote from a wise man, a philanthropist, who said that it was “in these relationships and with the people that are really impacted by some of the things we’re involved in.”  There were not many young people who could claim to be passionate about life.  It was a true lifetime acchievement, true institutional advancement, to care deeply for the entire community, and not just the tribe, the denomination that share your beliefs.

 

 

Young people, some more than others, got caught up in their credentials that they might one day earn a living.  Scholarship needs a bit of retirement from the spinning of the world’s revolution that kept us from falling off the earth.  A sense of retreat, fleeing from the world, is necessary to truly being scholarly, in search for the unknown.  And the time for scholarship ends to many on the day of graduation.  But first, at some point, a student was required to offer some form of service, with credits extended, in real life experience. 

 

 

So this week, at a Catholic law school, the local paper featured a blog item concerning a student who tried to get approval for time spent working at Planned Parenthood.  When it was rejected by the dean, a tempest broke out at the teapot.  In another age, this student would have been kicked out for her arrogance to challenge institutional identity, that her own personal identity, self-image trumped the law school’s.  There had been a time in her life when she wanted to attend this law school.  The controversy was so self-centered, where the anger of one student arose when her own personal beliefs could not trump the instituion’s.  A number of student felt that because they paid what seemed to be a lot for tuition, they could determine how and where they earned credits.  After all, it was the student’s time, the student’s money, as if the money would determine new ideals of the institution, as it seemed to in much of the leveraged buy-out world they had grown up in.