Called to Conversion

The busy Lenten season culminating in the wonderful celebration of the Easter Triduum is behind us.  Hopefully this will leave me time to write more here.  I really just want to post a short note here to welcome my new friends whom I met helping with the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) at my parish both as friends into my life and home to the Church of Jesus Christ.

I apologize for the times I was caught short or seemed unprepared for your questions.  If ever in the future you have questions or concerns about the Faith, feel free to contact me. 

I also want to thank you, for in teaching I learned so much.  You made me delve deeper into the faith with your questions.  This has been a great gift and I don;t know how I can ever repay you for that.

Now the task before you is great.  You must live the Gospel.  To this end, never stop learning, never stop questioning and seeking answers.  You are the heirs of two thousand years of thought pondered by some of the greatest minds the world has known. 

Preach the Gospel.  And, when necessary, use words.

Pray without ceasing.  Remember that our work can be our prayer when we perform our work for the greater glory of God.  Place yourself with Jesus Christ becfore the Father for the sake of your loved ones and the whole world.

Persevere.  My favorite Catholic writer of the last one hundred years, G.K. Chesterton once wrote that "the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, but has been found difficult and left untried."

Finally, know that you and yours are in my prayers daily.  I ask that you do the same for me.

God bless you all, and til next time, all the best.  Joe

Truly, He is Risen!

What an incredible seventy hours the Easter Triduum is! All the mysteries and perplexities, all the hopes and dreams of the Church compressed into a three day period of prayer and contemplation. Numerous reflections have been written on various aspects of the Triduum by better minds than mine, so I won't dwell on any of those right now. I do, however, want to relate to you what, for me, was one of the most moving episodes.

My parish, St Mary's, is an old parish downtown. The population of the parish is about 60% Hispanic, and special Masses are celebrated in both Spanish and English. At the Easter Vigil Mass, the church was filled to capacity and we had failed to reserve enough pews for the RCIA catechumens and candidates and their families, and since I was busy helping prepare for the Mass, I found myself sitting in a side pew by myself. In front of me a sizable Hispanic family filled the pew to overflowing. The oldest son, a boy of maybe 11 or 12, was forced to sit next to me, a stranger. I prepared to be distracted, as one must especially at the three hour Easter Vigil Mass, to be distracted by fidgeting and fussing youngsters. This isn't a complaint, simply an observation. And there was indeed some fidgeting on the part of a toddler, there was a seven year old who made about three restroom trips.

But the boy next to me was the joy of the night. I've never seen such attentiveness and devotion apparent in a youngster, I've seen it very few times in adults. I think my attempts to participate with my weak "liturgical" Spanish were pretty amusing to him and he was kind enough to help me keep up with the readings and hymns. I was amazed, especially during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. This kid, this child, was quite clearly in love with the Mass. as we knelt side by side on the bare floor, his eyes never seemed to leave the hands of the priest and he quietly whispered the words of the Eucharistic Prayer along with Father. He was tranfixed by the drama unfolding before him on the altar and through him I too was taken into that mystery. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

Near the end of Mass, the strangest thing happened. As the boy paged through our shared missal looking for the closing hymn, I leaned down and barely aware that the words were coming out of my mouth, but not feeling the least bit awkward about it I said, "God is speaking to you. You should think about being a priest." He smiled a broad and beautiful smile and replied, "Thanks, I am."

As the closing strains of Jesus Christ Has Risen Today echoed through the church, the boy turned to me and extended his hand. As we shook hands he said, "Happy Easter. He is risen."

"Truly, He is risen", I replied.

Truly, He is Risen.

Til next time, all the best. Joe

Naked on the Golf Course

Don't ask me what nudity and the golf course have in common. I really have no idea. But my 15 year old friend has somehow experienced these two things together. I must really give him credit since he seems to have done so recently and lives in the middle of Montana. Now that's fortitude of the type that one only finds among adolescent males. I'm glad his clothes were nearby.

He has other problems right now, of course. We all do. His other problem is rooted in that oldest of human issues, the problem of evil. It seems that he's abandoned his faith in God because of evil, specifically because of the fact that two young girls he knows were killed by a drunk driver. "Where was God," he demands to know, "when this happened?"

I must admit that this an easy question to ask. Of all the reasons for doubting the existence of a benevolent and powerful God, the old "problem of evil" is certainly the most sympathetic. We've all wondered the same thing. I asked this question long ago and I abandoned God myself. I sought other solutions. The idea of a loving God didn't make sense when I held the hand of my dying mother; it didn't make sense when my wife died in my arms; it doesn't make sense in the suffering of my daughter in her illness.

But giving up on the notion of God poses a new and serious perplexity. We've gotten rid of God, but the evil, the suffering, still exists and we seem to be powerless to do anything about it. We have made ourselves gods, and a pretty sorry excuse for gods we are. There is no God, and hurricanes ravage our coasts, we can't stop that. There is no God and illness strikes down our loved ones, we can't stop that. There is no God and drunk drivers plow into teen aged girls, we can't stop that. Now what? Our suffering is meaningless. Where is our hope?

In order to find our hope, I would suggest that we have to re-examine the question of God. For us to have hope in the face of the evil and misery in the world any deity we seek would have to have suffered for and with us. Only in the Christian tradition do we find such a deity, that is Jesus Christ and "Him crucified." Only in the Christian tradition, and most especially in the Catholic tradition, are we exhorted to join our sufferings to that of our God. In this way, and only in this way, does suffering, does evil, have any meaning whatsoever. In fact, our suffering takes on an infinite meaning.

Without that hope, left to our own devices limited as we are by our faults, we're left as naked as a fifteen year old boy on a Montana golf course in the dead of winter.

Til next time, all the best. Joe

Do You Think Jesus Would Like All the Crosses?"

The title of this post is taken from a question I was recently asked on an atheist forum I visit occassionally. My answer to the question was simply "yes". One poster responded wanting to hear further explanation and commenting that my belief was a bit presumptious. I offer further explanation here.

In fact, I think it is the crucifix, with the corpus hung upon it which is the most potent symbol. 'The man known as Jesus' spoke repeatedly of crosses.

Matthew 16:24 'Then Jesus told his disciples, 'If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me...'' Then He proceeded to set the example by doing exactly that. When taunted by bystanders to save himself and to come down from the cross, He desn't. He remains and fulfills His mission.

St Paul in his letter to the Romans speaks of the Cross as a a scandal to the Jews and a stumbling block to the Greeks, yet he continues to preach '...Jesus Christ and Him crucified...'

For Christians, specifically for Catholic Christians, one of the great lessons of the Cross is that suffering has a real value. Suffering came into the world through an act of the will of Man via the Fall, for some reason that suffering cannot be alleviated, but must be endured. Somehow, suffering figures into God's plan of salvation and is so central to salvation history that even God is not above suffering. Like Christ, we do not seek suffering, but when it is necessary, when it is unavoidable, we accept it willingly. Like St Paul, we unite our sufferings to the sufferings of Christ; hence that uniquely Catholic concept taught to Catholics by their mothers to 'offer it up'.

In the heaveny liturgy revealed to St John in the book of Revelation it is the sacrificed Lamb who sits upon the throne. It is the crucified Christ who reigns as King."

It is the Cross of Christ, then, whic becomes for Christians the central point of history, the focal point of all that has transpired and all that is to come. We view the world through the lens of the Passion, but not just the Passion, since the Passion of Christ is inextricaly linked to His Resurrection. It is through the suffering of the Cross that the hope of the Ressurection, that promise of Christ to make all things new, is realized. There, at the Cross, the "scandal" and the "stumbling block" become our hope.

And, as Pope Benedict XVI tells us, "He who has hope lives differently."