The Heart of the Matter

What a way to die!

Sometimes a man dies in such a way as to sum up his entire life in the very act of dying.  Such is the case with Brian Mahon. 

Everyone here knows what a wonderful man Brian was: a loving husband, a devoted and attentive dad, a great boss, a generous volunteer both at church and in the wider community, and an extraordinary enthusiast about skiing who ensured that all kinds of people would be well served on the Eldora ski slopes.

            It is his absence that makes us want to lament in the manner of our first Scripture reading:  This death makes us feel “deprived of peace.”  It’s easy to share his family’s pain so powerfully expressed in the words, “I have forgotten what happiness is; I tell myself my future is lost.”

            But if we wallow in our own pain we will miss the extraordinary thing that has taken place in Brian’s death.

            Those of you who were in that room at Eldora’s pump house know: Brian took the bullet that in all likelihood would have found you.  Wasn’t it just like Brian to run to the problem instead of running away?  Wasn’t it just like him to walk into the room and take charge of the situation and take the venom that was aimed at everyone in that room.  Those two shots that took Brian’s life gave the rest of you the chance to escape and save your lives.  

            “Greater love no one has than to lay down his life for his friends.”  This is exactly what happened and this is exactly how Jesus died.  Imagine the privilege to die as Jesus died: saving others!

            There is something more at work here that needs to be voiced:  Brian’s death was a martyr’s death.  Let me explain.

            Because of some extremists in our world the name martyr has lately been tarnished by its identity with crazed terrorists who think an act of violence would merit them heaven.  That is truly crazy thinking.

            But for a Christian, a martyr is someone whose whole life bespeaks an authentic identity with the our Savior who rejects violence, does what is right and good, and lays down his life for the sake of goodness and so that others may live.   

            Dare I declare that Brian is a martyr for the faith?  You decide: instead of running away from the gunshot, he ran to it.  Instead of acting fearful and timid he bravely encountered the gunman who, it is said, asked him what his religion was.  Most people would probably not know what to say to that question at gunpoint.  “That’s my business” would be a likely reply; or “what does that matter?”  

            A martyr in the Catholic Church is someone whose profession of faith results in his death.  Our Church’s 20 centuries of history include instances in every century and all over the globe of people who died for our faith.  Who would have thought this would happen in

Nederland?

Yet, Brian’s last words were, “I’m a Catholic.”

            A senseless random act of violence by a man who was obviously out-of-his-right-mind?  Perhaps.  Still, it is not what is done to a man, or even who does it, that marks the quality of the death; it is rather how a man reacts to violence that makes a man a martyr as we understand it in the Catholic Church.  

            Our Church’s liturgical calendar and practice commemorates feasts of martyrs every month.  The apostles were martyred for the faith.  Missionaries bringing the good news of the enduring love of God to people all over the world were martyred, like St. Denis of Paris, St. Boniface of Germany, St. Isaac Jogues in New York, St. Paul Miki and his companions in Japan, St. Andrew Kim and his companions in Korea, the Vietnamese martyrs, the Chinese martyrs, St. Maximilian Kolbe at Auschwitz.   And the liturgical color of vestments for a martyr’s feast is red.  

            If Brian is indeed a martyr, then start looking for miracles.  That’s the way Heaven tells us that such brave witness is a delight unto the Lord.

They all fall down!

They all fall down!  

   

How many times is Wall Street going to take a nose dive?

Years ago there used to be a certain respect for and loyalty to institutions.  Large banks, investment houses, companies, government agencies, and the Church earned great allegiance because of the benefits that came from the institution: a sense of belonging, respect from valued people who held the institution in honor, a track record of doing good and attending to the people involved.  

In our age of individualism more and more people are choosing to value their privacy and aloneness than, as in days of old, value the sense belonging and contributing to something grander than oneself.  This drift away from institutions is exacerbated by so many institutional failures, be it in Wall Street, government, business, athletics, academia or the Church.

It’s popular today to say, “Oh, I believe in God but I don’t need the Church,” until some crisis hits when we do indeed need the Church!  Maybe our present economic crisis will entice people to rethink such disdain for the Church.  Our Catholic Church has lived through such times before, so we have some accumulated wisdom on how to survive in an anti-institutional era.  

I suggest a bit of wisdom from Carlo Carretto, an Italian 20^th century priest, mystic and writer, who articulates what, for many people today, will beautifully and honestly describe our love for the Church, especially in an age of crisis:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely with you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.  (Translation from Forgotten Among the Lilies – Learning To Love Beyond Our Fears, by Ronald Rolheiser)

Goodness and badness are both contagious

Today's saint, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, lived in the first half of the 1100's.  He was so full of the love of God that he attracted all kinds of people to become in love with God as well.  His influence was such that his whole family became saints.  In fact, there is an out-of-print book about him entitled, "The Family That Stormed Heaven."   He had extraordinary influence in his lifetime and in all sectors of society, both religiously and politically.  He is a powerful example of how goodness can be contagious. 

So, by the way, is badness contagious, as in how an evil mentality can take over a whole society, like Nazism in Germany or abortion in our own time. 

People really like to think they are their own person and decide their own path in life.  But we too often fail to realize how easily we allow ourselves to be puppets and swayed by public opinion.  Sanctity is the victory of courage to be faithful to goodness in the face of a wave of badness overtaking a society.  St. Bernard, pray for us.

A lesson from history

July 11th is the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order.  He lived roughly from 480 to 547 AD.  A reflection on the impact he had on history will help us understand why Pope Benedict chose his name when he became pope.

During the lifetime of Benedict, the Roman Empire was collapsing and Western Europe was heading into the Dark Ages. 

To help us understand today what Benedict's word was like, let's say it was as if these things happened in our day:

• Imagine if our United Staes government collapsed, and with it the economic and security systems also collapsed.
• Imagine if there were no money to fix the highways, no money to ensure the safety of air travel, no money to fund educational institutions, no money to provide for any healthcare whatsoever, no money for the military and police, no money for ensuring health standards for food and no means to get the food to hungry people, and no money for the hungry to buy food.
• Imagine if the boundaries of states collapsed and city-states started fighting over resources with no one to stop the strongest from violating the weak.
• Imagine if traveling became impossible not only because of a broken infrasture but also because travelers, even from one town to another, would be faced with attacks by violent robbers.
• Imagine that the whole order of how things operate fell apart. That's what it was like in the time of St. Benedict.

No wonder Benedict went to a remote spot to get away from it all and to pray, begging God to show the way.  Other men sought him out, also realizing that the times were disastrous.  So, Benedict gathered whoever came to him and formed a community, an abbey, within which education would continue, structure would be provided, security would be found, food would be provided (and wine too, maybe even brandy!), and God would be praised almost hourly in psalms and hymns.

This was such an appealing life in those dark times that many men came to join, and women in separate monasteries with similar structures.  As they grew in numbers they spread out all over Europe, setting up abbeys and monasteries by sources of water, building not only buildings but centers of hope for the dispersed populations who were living in terror.  These abbeys and monasteries "hired" the local people to work the farms, trim the vines in the vineyards and make wine, eventually training the people with some talent in the skills of the monks and nuns.  And in time these settlements came to be the great cities of Europe, preparing their world for the eventual emergence of Western Civilization.

This is what St. Benedict started, by the grace of God.  1500 years later, our pope sees that we are in a time similar to the dawning of the Dark Ages when education is failing by being focused only on the material, when security is being threatened by a backlash against the relativism that says that anything is OK, and when the light of Christ is being extinguished by a secularized society that has "tired of its own culture, a world that has arrived at a moment in which the need for God is no longer felt, and much less so of Christ, and in which, consequently, it seems that man might construct himself." 

This is why Pope Benedict chose this saint's name as his own. 

How willing are we to witness to Christ?

One of my friends is a Capuchin friar from Kansas who served as a missionary in Papua New Guinea for 30 years.  Near the end of his time there he heard the noise of a gang of young criminals invading the mission compound with the intent to rape the nuns and nurses who took care of the mission hospital.  My Capuchin friend jumped into his Jeep and drove to the road where the evil doers were.  He got in between them and their target so they turned on him and picked up rocks from the roadside and stoned him.  His intervention saved the women, but the right side of his face was crushed and he lost his right eye.  I tell my friend that the only reason he's not a martyr is because he is still alive.

Did you know that there were more Christian martyrs in the 20th century than all of the other centuries of Christian history put together?  Yes, even today people are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of Jesus.  Even today there are people who are so devoted to the Lord that they are willing to go to the most primitive and violent parts of the world to make Him known.  Why?  Because He matters that much. 

Last Friday evening our Stations of the Cross were done outside.  It was a procession from the church to Pearl Street, with the group's members taking turns carrying a sizable cross.  What they were met with was ridicule, mockery, and they were spit on.

In your own Lenten journey are you discovering that the Lord matters so much to you that you are willing to bear witness to Him more than you presently are?

Requiescat in pace. That's Latin for: May he rest in peace.

I went to a funeral this morning for the oldest priest in the diocese.  He was my family's pastor for years; and I had the privilege of living with him for about 6 months when I was a young priest.  That's about 30 years ago: back in 1978.  Those were rough times to be a priest.  (Ah, but every year since has seemed like a rough time to be a priest, but I'll leave that for another time.) 

This gentle, gentle man that I am honoring tonight was a not a skilled preacher, if we measure preaching by words spoken in a pulpit.  He used to compare his preaching to that of the Cure of Ars (St. John Vianney) who must have thought he wasn't a good preacher either.  But like St. John Vianney, the patron saint for parish priests, it was this priest's integrity, his kindness, his living up to the call to be holy, and his gentleness in confession that made him an echo of the Cure of Ars.  Except for preaching skills, this priest had everything else that makes a pastor a man of God in the eyes of his people. 

30 years ago this kind man had been savagely disrespected by some people who wanted a better preacher.  He was yelled at publicly and insulted and driven out of the community he served.  Those were the days when charity seemed to be a lost art for many people.  So he came to our rectory, at the invitation of the pastor I was serving with, so he could heal and regain his equilibrium.  What stunned me then, and stuns me now, was that he held no ill feelings towards anyone.  Instead, when he left his flock he wrote to them asking them to forgive him.  He genuinely harbored no ill will.  I thought at the time, at first, that he was in a state of denial; but as I got to know him, I found out that forgiving was who he really was.  Now that's someone to learn from!  Requiescat in pace. 

The Epiphany

“I had an epiphany. . .”  It’s an expression people use when they gain some clarity of mind, or some new insight, or some deeper understanding.  Perhaps you’ve used the expression yourself.  Well, at the Christmas Masses I had an epiphany, a sudden new realization that has changed me. 

            Every year, in every parish I have served, people show up in droves for the Christmas Masses.  And for many years I’ve had this slight nagging unspoken thought that goes something like this: Where are all these people during the rest of the year?  In fact, we priests have an expression: “C and E Catholics: meaning Christmas and Easter Catholics.”

            This year, however, I had a different reaction, what I call “an epiphany.”  I’ve now been in the parish long enough to look at the congregation of each of the Masses and see faces I know well and see all the time, as well as faces of people I have not seen for a goodly amount of time, but faces of people whose stories I know.  I saw, besides you, people whose family has been ruptured by a divorce, families whose now-grown children went to school here, people who have been ill, people who have moved out of Boulder but came back here for Christmas Mass, and lots of people whose religious light has not yet been turned on.

            What was missing in me this Christmas was any sense of judgment.  Instead, what was in me was understanding and love: understanding people’s plights, their circumstances, their confusion, their struggles, their indifference, their standing point along the spectrum of religious awakening, and some of them living with longstanding destructive habits.

            Epiphany means manifestation, or making some reality manifest, or apparent, or observable.  And this Solemnity of the Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of this great mystery of our faith, the Incarnation, the En-fleshment of God, to the Magi, that is, to Gentiles, which means every other human being who is not Jewish, and that means most of us.

            Part of our faith is that everyone who is baptized is a temple of the Holy Spirit and a member of the Body of Christ.  In other words, we encounter the Lord Jesus in our own prayer, most sublimely in our Eucharist, and also in each other.  What we have on Christmas is a fuller sense of who it is that makes up the Body of Christ, the Church.  Some are passionate about the Lord, like you and me, and we know that "we cannot live without Sunday," without partaking in the Eucharist.  Some, however, have terribly complicated lives, or are torn by conflicting desires, like desiring God and also desiring things that pull away from God.  Some are feeling isolated or rejected or are confused, or are resentful and in need of healing, and so on.

            Some have interpreted our faith as rules, as obligations, as duties, as something to be worn like a coat.  For whatever has gone on in their lives, the veneer of the faith has not yet seeped into the marrow of their bones. 

            So, being judgmental of them seems now, in my epiphany, to be ludicrous.  Now it seems more imperative than ever to assist them to know the Lord as He truly is, to know His love and forgiveness, and to perceive His calling to be more than superficially Catholic.  We don’t need brighter people; after all, our parish and our county are filled to bursting with extremely bright and gifted people.  Our challenge today in an age of superficiality is that we need deeper people, people who allow the grace of God to enter and dive into the depths of our souls and supply what our culture cannot: the meaning and purpose of Christ.

            So, Lord, forgive me for many years of tsk, tsking in my heart of hearts the “C and E Catholics.”  Instead, lead me and my flock to a point where we are available to You to make you more manifest in our lives so that those who are searching, like the Magi, may find in us – not judgment, but an encounter with You and with your understanding and patience and kindness.  Give us the depth of soul to see in every human being another manifestation of You, Lord.  And help us treat every human being as if he or she were You Yourself.  In Your Holy Name, I pray.

Today would have been my father's 102nd birthday

He was 55 years old when his wife, my mother died; and he still had to finish raising 2 of his 4 sons.  We younger sons, number 3 and me, number 4, were 14 and 13 years old.  Gone was the heart of our family, the one who gave us warmth and understanding and encouragement.  Gone was the mainstay of our family, our mother, the steady rock in calm and turbulent times.  A lesser man would have farmed us out to someone else and let someone else handle two teenagers in the soon-to-be turbulent 60's. 

How did he do it?  How did he manage to keep it all together, all alone, without support, without the wisdom that came from his life's partner?

Well, one day, when I was 16, I barged into my father's room heading to the large upstairs back bedroom that could only be accessed by going through my father's bedroom.  I surprised him, but I was all the more surprised because I found him in intense prayer.  And this 16 year old suddenly understood how he did what he was doing for me and my brother.

His strength came from the Lord.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

If you had the power, what would you change in the Catholic Church?

Mother Teresa, now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, was once asked, "If you had the power, what would you change in the Catholic Church?"

Before giving her answer, I ask you the same question: what would you change?  Lots of people want many things changed, from institutional discipline, to theological freedom, to less emphasis on moral teachings, and so on and so on.  What would you want to change?

With the most succinct and profound grasp of what the church really is, Mother Teresa answered the question of what should be changed by saying, "You and me."

The Dark Night of the Spirit

In yesterday's posting I wrote about the first of the 2 dark nights that St. John of the Cross wrote about in his book, The Dark Night of the Soul.  Now I'll give a little spiritual direction about the second dark night, "the dark night of the spirit." 

Let me preface this description of this kind of spiritual darkness by saying that very few people undergo this dynamic.  So, relax, chances are that it is not you who will go through this experience.  It is reserved for those whom the Lord chooses and is only given to those who are not only proficient at prayer, but are faithful to love of neighbor and to daily prayer, and are well on the way to sainthood.  Mother Teresa went though this as is described the collection of her private writings recently published as Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light.

In the "dark night of the spirit" the person experiences the withdrawal of all internal and external support for believing in God.  Gone are the consolations of faith, gone are the sureties that faith can give, gone are the delights of communion with God, and mysteriously gone are the usual persons who ordinarily are very supportive.  The soul is left alone by God, like Jesus on the cross crying out, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"  The project for the soul is to believe, anyway.  It is an invitation to naked faith.  It is an extremely difficult stage of spiritual growth and is frequently described by those who experience it as like doing your purgatory on earth.

A good book to read about this is Mystical Theology: The Science of Love by William Johnston, SJ.