The Heart of the Matter

Istanbul

Greetings from Istanbul.  (If you are checking on my blog for information about SHJ parish's restructuring, scroll down the page and you'll find what you're looking for.)

The Istanbul area is where many of the early Church councils took place defining our faith for the ages.  Every Sunday we recite the Nicene Creed which was formulted just a few miles from here and put into its final form right here in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople.  The largest church in the Church's first millennium was right here.  It was called Hagia Sophia, i.e. Holy Wisdom, referring to the second person of the Holy Trinity because Jesus is the Wisdom of the Father.  The original Hagia Sophia was built by Constantine in the early 300's AD.  The present building was build by the Emperor Justinian in 532 AD.  And it looks that old.  When the Muslims took over Constantinople in the 1300's they made Hagia Sophia a mosque and changed the name of the city to Istanbul, meaning something like "plenty of Islam."  In the 1920's Attaturk made the remains of the Ottoman Empire into a secularist country, Turkey.  He also turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum.  That's all for now.

Saying good-bye to my great friend Malachy

It was my privilege to preach at Father Malchy McBride's funeral this morning at Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora, where I served for 14 years some time ago.  Here's some of what I said.  At least this is what I wrote ahead of time.  A few other things came in as well.

            One of the best decisions I ever made in my life was to go to St. Louis in 1995 to persuade a recently returned Capuchin missionary to accede to his provincial’s offer for him to work with me in serving the people of Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora.  Little did I know during that trip that I had just met someone who would be one of my most treasured friends in life. 

            You know that he went to Papua New Guinea in 1963 to serve people whose meager clothing was made out of grass and who were only recently aware that there were people who had white skin, who wore clothing their whole bodies, who wore shoes, and who believed that God became a human being.  He, and other Capuchins like him, would hike into “the bush” to find clusters of people, wherever he could find them, make friends with them, learn their language, love them, and teach them about Jesus. 

Father Malachy McBride spent 30 years among the natives of PNG teaching about Christ, initiating people in the sacraments of the Church, building hospitals and churches and schools - for and with them.  He became a ham radio operator so as to be able to connect with other mission compounds since travel between communities took days and days of hiking, before there were roads.  He learned how to make electricity and set up mini power plants to flood the compounds with light and all that can happen thanks to electricity.

            When he left the U.S. back in 1963 on his journey to PNG for the first time, he was scared to death.  Would he be meeting cannibals?  How primitive were these people he was being sent to?  At one of the stops, perhaps in Guam, he celebrated Mass and was blown away by the Introit for that Mass:  “If you love me, Simon Peter, feed my lambs.”  When he read that Scripture, he knew it was a message meant for him, sent directly from the Lord to give him his purpose for living.  All fear left him and never returned.

            He embraced another Scripture that fleshed out for him his reason for fearless confidence.  It was our 2^nd reading that I built my life on, so much so, that I had a synopsis of these lines engraved on the bottom of my chalice when I was ordained:  “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  

Malachy had many tastes of heaven not only in doing his ministry in PNG, but also here after he returned home from having been stoned almost to death by a gang of bandits who were out to violate the nuns and nurses living at his mission compound.  Malachy saved the women, but lost his eye in the process.

            His tastes of heaven were both mystical and relational.  Who here has not been profoundly touched by Malachy, almost as if touched by the love and kindness of God Himself?  How many people do you know who had as much joy in living as he did, and a joy in responding to people in need, whether for an anointing, or a confession, or a funeral, or a hand reaching out for assistance.

            How fitting that he died on the true day of Ascension Thursday!  The Ascension is all about heaven.  Let me explain Malachy’s desire for heaven.

He often told me of his favorite poet, St. John of the Cross who described heaven in sublime poetry; and Malachy and would quote him often to me: “I die because I do not die!”  In other words, he loved God so much that he yearned for the day he’d see the Lord face to face.  How could a man who so thoroughly enjoyed life say, “I die because I do not die”?  You see, Malachy was a mystic.  His habit of getting up at 4 AM and communing with the Lord made his heart fixed on heaven, fixed on Christ, so much so, that this relationship with Christ transformed his interpretation of everything else.  You see, if we keep our focus on heaven we begin to taste it here on earth.  If our heart’s first desire is the Living God, then we begin to live in joy here in this life.  In other words, the hope for heaven makes us come alive in this life in such a way that even death cannot stop that life we find in Christ.  Did we not hear just Sunday, “Where Christ has gone, we hope to follow.” 

I’d like to close by reciting part of that poem that was like Malachy’s life put into lyrical form.  It’s a description of someone yearning, even suffering for want of seeing God face to face.  It’s a poem about heaven, which is what the Ascension is all about.

1. I no longer live within myself
and I cannot live without God,
for having neither him nor myself
what will life be?
It will be a thousand deaths,
longing for my true life
and dying because I do not die.

2. This life that I live
is no life at all,
and so I die continually
until I live with you;
hear me, my God:
I do not desire this life,
I am dying because I do not die.

3. When I am away from you
what life can I have
except to endure
the bitterest death known?
I pity myself,
for I go on and on living,
dying because I do not die.

5. When I try to find relief
seeing you in the Sacrament,
I find this greater sorrow:
I cannot enjoy you wholly.
All things are affliction
since I do not see you as I desire,
and I die because I do not die.

May Malachy’s passion for life, and even greater passion for heaven stir into flame the love in our hearts for all the people God gives us, and stir into even greater flame our yearning for seeing God face to face.

More on our Parish Town Hall Meetings

This week's Parish Town Hall Meetings were held to bring everyone in the parish up to speed on the crossroads our parish is facing.  We discussed conclusions that have been made and how implementing these conclusions will bring about the future sustainability of our parish and a greatly increased reliance on each other as well as a greater reliance on the Lord.

Here is an update about our Parish Town Hall Meetings.  If you click here, you will be able to view the slides of presentation made by members of our TAG Team (Trusted Advisors Group).  If you click through the slides, you will get a good take on what was discussed. 

And if you click these YouTube links, you'll see me giving a thumbnail sketch of an explanation of the slides.  There will be two parts, so be sure to click both links.  Th view needs to be better lit, but it's not all that bad for my first attempt at doing a YouTube manner of communicating with you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ4GXsKdLI4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdgZtb8HdT0

A coming hiatus

Next week I will be traveling for a few weeks to Turkey, Greece, Sicily, Croatia and Italy; and I am not sure if I will be able to post a blog while away.  I'll try, because I enjoy this.  In the meantime, this space will have a YouTube version of my presenting the meat and potatoes of our Parish Town Hall Meetings.  If you subscribe to this blog and get it in your e-mail, the YouTube may not show up.  If that's the case, go directly to the blog at www.fatherbillsblog.com and check out what I have to say. 

Malachy McBride, OFM, Cap. - R.I.P. 5/1/2008

Very early this morning, May 1st, at 1:00 AM, "Malachy McBride, Capuchin," as he called himself, died peacefully in his friary, one hour later than he told me ahead of time.  "Saints of God, come to his aid.  Come to meet him, angels of the Lord.  Receive his soul and present him to God Most High."

On April 29th I had the privilege of giving him Holy Communion (perhaps his last).  Before giving him the Host, when I entered his room, I had said to him, "You're still here!"  He said, "Just one more day."  He was off only by one hour.  How do the dying know that? 

Another privilege I get to have is to preach at his funeral.  I'm sure I will include this magical story:  When he as just one year ordained he was assigned to do missionary work in Papua New Guinea, aka PNG.  On his journey he was scared, very much afraid.  PNG was only recently opened up to the outside world and was still very primitive.  He was afraid.  On the journey to PGN the Latin text of the Introit of the Mass on that particular day was, in English, "If you love me, Simon Peter, feed my sheep."  Suddenly while reading this, all fear dropped off of him because he knew this line of Scripture was sent from the Lord for him to know his mission clearly with the grace given to him to be fearless.

And so he fearlessly met new and strange people, making disciples of people who never had met a white man, never had heard anything about Jesus Christ.  And his love for them was so deep and so profound that they encountered Christ in him all during his 30 years of being a missionary there.  There will be great mourning in PNG today.  And also at Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora, Colorado.  But I'll save that for another time.

“What Can We Learn From the Religious?”

Earlier this week there was an article in our local newspaper about a researcher coming to town to study a growing trend, that many people prefer to be spiritual rather than religious; a trend that is prevalent in our Boulder community. It is indeed very prevalent.  The researcher gave a talk at a local Methodist entitled, “What Can We Learn From the Religious?”  I couldn't get to the talk because we had Confirmation here that evening. Let me offer a few reasons why being religious is as important as being spiritual. 

First, I define “being religious” as being connected to a faith community of fellow believers who engage in regular worship of a personal God.  Here are benefits of such membership and participation.

• “I am not alone.”  All by itself this benefit of belonging to a faith community can enrich one’s life by broadening one’s perspective beyond one’s own. 
• “The universe does not revolve around me and my opinions.”  Belonging to a faith community can steer us clear from self-obsessing and from having our own views go unchallenged. 
• “Keeping hope alive.’  Most religions are centuries old, if not millennia, and have witnessed every epoch’s reasons to bury oneself in pessimism.  Belonging to a faith community is to belong to a people who have faced everything we face today.  To belong to a people who have survived and even thrived, no matter what the historical situations were, is to gain perspective so as to live with hope. 
• “Dare to be different!”  It takes courage these days to belong to a faith community because these are the days when “organized religion” is demonized as the purveyor of intolerance and other evils.  Come now, let us set things aright.  Intolerance and injustice are not the sole domain of those who profess membership in a religion.  Intolerance, injustice and every other imaginable evil are part of the human condition.  Was not the 20^th century filled with horrors from those who professed no faith in God or in religion and even persecuted those who did?
• “Seeing through the fog.”  Caricatures of faith-filled people are presented in our culture as rule-bound, negative, intolerant, narrow minded, and unthinking.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The people of faith I know are deep thinkers, reflective, purposeful, discerning, and highly intelligent.  Today’s “cloud of unknowing” leaves too many people unwilling to enter into the deeper issues of life, like the meaning of life, the ultimate destiny of the human race and of every individual, and so much more.   

No, being a believer, and belonging to a community of faith today is only for people of very great depth. 

She said, "I had no idea that's what's going on in a Catholic funeral."

I was really exhausted on Sunday.  Three Masses, a class to teach, Spanish Confirmations, a Sacrament of the Sick to confer, a fascinating dinner with an Eritrean family celebrating Easter according to the Eritrean calendar, First Holy Communions, and inviting everyone at all the Masses to our upcoming Town Hall Meetings.  I was pooped. 

Then at 10 PM, I got a call to give Last Rites to a man who was in the actual moment of dying.  I went immediately, but he had died right after the family hung up from calling me. 

After the prayers for the dead, I visited for a while with the family, asking what their husband and father was like.  As the conversation moved along, the new widow said that she really perferred Presbyterian funerals.  (She belongs to a parish that used to share a worship space with a Presbyterian congragation.) 

So I asked, "Why?"   "Well," she said,"we have so much ritual in the Catholic Church but in the Presbyterian church the funeral service is more a matter of everyone getting up to tell what the deceased meant to them."  Her son piped up and said, "Mom, that's what a Vigil is for." 

So I used this moment to do some teaching:  "Oh, I don't think you understand the meaning of the Mass.  What we are doing at a funeral Mass is gathering around the loved one as he or she is meeting God, face to face, perhaps in the judgment scene.  And these gathered loved ones are joining the deceased along with themselves in the Sacrifice of the Altar as the gift Jesus gives to the Father.  Even the incense bespeaks the prayers of these family members and friends going up to heaven just as Jesus gives the Father the gift of Himself, along with the deceased loved one, and us, as His idea of the best gift He could give the Father.  So, the funeral Mass in the Catholic Church is not the time to talk nice about the deceased; that's done at the Vigil the night before the funeral Mass.  The funeral Mass is the time to unite the deceased one by our faith, hope and love to the sacrifice of Christ."   

The widow said, "I had no idea that's what's going on in a Catholic funeral."  So, I told them I'd put this exchange in my blog.  I hope they read it.

Parish Town Hall Meetings - this week!

I'm sure our parish is not the only one needing to go through a paradigm shift in how we operate.  For years we have operated as a "Program Parish," with paid professionals in the fields of Liturgy, Youth Ministry, Religious Education, and Hispanic Ministry.  We also have a school with 28 teachers.  To help me look at the best possible way to manage our sustainability and the revitalization of our parish, a TAG Team (i.e. Trusted Advisers Group) researched and spent 6 months looking into best practices and good business and parish models.  We also had a RAG Team (Revenue Advisers Group) made of a number of SWAT Teams looking into specific areas where we could enhance our parish income.

We are now ready to present the decisions we have made to honor the 132 years of our parish's members who have handed on to us the patrimony of dedication and investment in keeping the Catholic faith alive and well in Boulder, Colorado.

All members of our parish and school families are invited to come to our Parish Town Hall Meetings this week.   All meetings will be in Jubilee Hall; and all four meetings will be cover the the same information, so just choose the one that is best for you:

Wednesday morning (4/30) at 8:30 AM (for school parents); 

Wednesday evening (4/30) at 6:00 PM; 

Thursday evening (5/1) at 6:00 PM; 

Sunday afternoon (5/4) at 2:30 PM (for our Spanish speakers)

A great weekend!

This weekend we have the conferral of two very special sacraments: First Holy Communion and Confirmation.  So, this is a great opportunity to reflect on own our own fidelity to these sacraments. 

Let’s look first at what Holy Communion means to us who approach the altar every Sunday.

            Did you notice that at every speech Pope Benedict gave, when he was in New York and Washington, he emphasized again and again the importance of our relationship with Christ and our need to nurture that relationship by daily prayer and by silence so as to give the Lord the time to speak to us.  When we listen to Him in silence He assures us that He has not left us alone, that we are not orphans, that we are his beloved ones.  St. Peter tells us in our second reading today: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”  Do we realize that the term “altar call” refers most extraordinarily to our approaching the altar to receive our Lord in Holy Communion?  Is there a better way to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts? 

            Think of the exceptional union we have with the Lord in Holy Communion.  The Lord Himself comes to dwell within us so as to be the One with whom we share our confidences, our hopes, our disappointments, our fears, our joys and our reasons to be so very grateful.  The minutes after Holy Communion are the most important minutes in our lives.  This is the trysting moment between us the Beloved and the Lord who is the Lover of our souls.  This is the time, after having been incorporated into the sacrifice of the cross, when we can surrender into the arms of the Lord of Love who will fill us with gentleness and reverence, and enable us to have a clear conscience.  The minutes after receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior, are part of “that day” when as Jesus says, “you will realize that I am in the Father and you are in me and I in you.”

            And what about our Confirmation?  When the people of Samaria heard from Philip the message of the Gospel and were baptized, they still needed to have the apostles go down to them and lay hands upon them so that they might receive the Holy Spirit. 

That was Confirmation which will be conferred here today in Spanish and tomorrow in English.

In today’s Gospel the Holy Spirit is called “another Advocate” and “the Spirit of truth.”  What the sacrament of Confirmation enables us to do is to have the assurance that the Holy Spirit will be, as it were, our attorney before eternity, to guide us to keep our consciences clear, and to get us back on then right track when we have strayed.  This Advocate is interested in our welfare at all times and is invested in helping us abide in the truth, particularly the truth that we are sons and daughters of God.  It is when we forget our dignity as a son or daughter of god that we get caught into wrongdoing.  It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to see that Jesus Christ is the reason for our hope because He will never leave us as orphans.  And this Advocate will give us the wisdom and courage to endure being defamed or maligned for our concern for the sanctity of life at all stages of human existence, or for the insistence that we care about the poor and the hungry and the immigrant among us. 

            Both of these sacraments, the Eucharist and Confirmation, are God’s gifts to us to help us fall in love with the Lord; and if that love is to be real, we hear Jesus say in today’s Gospel, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  A good examination of how we are doing with living out these sacraments would be to see how we are doing with abiding by the commandments.  In an age when the truth of the high moral ground of living by the commandments is debunked, we hear Jesus tell us, “Whoever has my commandments ad observes them is the one who loves me.  And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”

This year's Conference on World Affairs

The other day the weather was so fine that I took a few minutes on my front porch.  Being in this part of Boulder, almost always a very engaging encounter happens even during a few minutes of sitting on my front porch.  So, along comes a very erudite parishioner who had just days before successfully defended his doctoral thesis.  Later that same day he attended an event called "Evangelical Atheism," put on by the University's Conference on World Affairs. 

He expected that there would have been a more academic understanding of "evangelization", meaning "spreading the good news."  He thought the speakers would talk about what they perceived to be the good news of throwing off the shackles of religion and the importance of proselytizing so others might get free.

Instead, it became a series of presenters and audience bashing or mocking "religious people" who had done some dastardly deed, or said some absurd, hurtful thing, or, well, one thing after another about so-called religious hypocrites.  No one spoke about God, or not believing in God, or why atheism is the way to go, or anything germane to the question of God.  It was all about anger against some religious people.

There is a very important imperative here for religious people.  It's not only what we say about our faith that wins people over to believing in God.  It is also the integrity of living what we believers say we believe that wins people to God.  Likewise, it is our failures to live up to our beliefs that throws a stumbling block in front of doubters or non-believers.  If you'd like a serious look at what evangelization really is, check out this apostolic exhortation (click here) by Pope Paul VI, written back in 1975, but still packed with meaning today as much as ever.