Ora et Labora

My Dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Part of the message of the readings for this Sunday is the importance of hospitality. Being your new pastor, I want to thank everyone who has made me feel welcome to these parishes. Fr. Huber told me good things about you and I look forward to getting to know you over the next few years. I hope you will allow me to provide hospitality for you in the same measure that you have measured it out to me.

There’s a story told about an abbot of a monastery looking over all the monks in his monastery trying to decide which one should replace him. Brother Dominic, the person in charge of the kitchen, was very dependable, hard-working, and respected by the brothers. He was generally up before all the other monks getting the food ready for breakfast and stayed late in the kitchen getting ready for the next day. The abbot was so impressed with Brother Dominic that he often thought of giving him an assistant to help him with the work but he knew both that the number of monks didn’t allow for a second person and that Brother Dominic wouldn’t have wanted someone else around to have to supervise. The abbot also thought of Brother Francis who was the most deeply spiritual man he had ever met. Brother Francis, who worked in the small print shop with two other monks, would spend many hours in the chapel each day praying long after the other monks had left. His motto was that work can wait for prayer. The other monks all wished they had as deep a spirituality as Brother Francis, even if they sometimes had to do the work that he had neglected in favor of prayer. They felt privileged just to be in his presence.

The abbot decided to switch things up a little. He put Brother Francis in charge of the kitchen and Brother Dominic in charge of the print shop. After just one day, the entire monastery was frustrated. The monks were all starving because Brother Francis never did get the food cooked and the two monks in the print shop were frustrated because Brother Dominic had done a month’s work in a day and seemed to be changing everything. After just one LONG day, the abbot switched things back to the way they were confident that he knew who his replacement should be.

One commentator that I read summed up the issue from today’s readings in these words, “Is true hospitality found in giving personal attention to the guest rather than in being distracted from that person by the duties associated with hospitality?” In some ways, it would seem that Jesus is saying that one should definitely neglect household duties when a guest is over. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her. And yet, as many women have commented to me in the past, if all we had in church was a bunch of people who spent all their time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, our structures would be in pretty bad shape.

The real lesson that Mary understood is that, at that moment and in this situation, she needed to be at the foot of Jesus more than she needed to be in the kitchen preparing food for him. In the Gospel of Luke, there’s a point when Jesus turns his entire attention toward the cross in Jerusalem. Along the way, he stops in the houses of important individuals including Mary and Martha. While there, he wants to spend time with them and tell them all about what’s going to happen to him but Martha is so busy preparing the meal, that she misses who whole point of his visit. It actually kind of reminds me of a friend that I hadn’t talked to for a long time who called me a couple of months ago. I was kind of excited to hear from him but he was so busy working on his computer while we talked that I kind of felt like I was talking to myself. I wished that, in this situation, he would have been a little more willing to listen to what was happening in my life and been willing to tell me about his own instead of being distracted by his computer.

In the end, the Abbot realized that neither Brother Dominic nor Brother Francis would be good for the job. He needed someone who could be a prayerful worker, someone who could balance the demands of life with the important work of prayer. As I begin this assignment in these six parishes, I ask for your prayers that I may cultivate this same sense of balance in my own life and be the best father I can be.

Back normal and a few other things

I put the comments back to what I believe is normal. I changed it a little over a month ago because of a spammer and I'm hoping that person has found someone else to pester.

So, here's how a normal parish works. I left my rectory this morning at 7:00 am for 7:30 mass. After mass, we went to the local restaurant for some food and conversation. I get to do this three times a week in three different towns. At the diner, I got two phone calls. The first was my business manager telling me that I needed to pick up some stuff at the bank. The next was the business manager telling me there'd been a death in the town I was eating and they were wondering about arrangements. I finished eating and jumped into my car to find the house of the (now) widow. I visited with her and met some family. I went to another parish to finish filling out some stuff for the banks and then headed back to my rectory.

All in all, a pretty good start to the day. Of course, the fact that the tire for my truck decided to get a sharp piece of metal stuck in it kind of threw a wrench in it. But I got to figure out how to use my jack, which is always a good thing. And I got to drive onto the local car dealership to have them fix the thing and then they'll know who I am when I need to get a new truck. Plus, it could have been worse. I'm heading out tonight to meet a bunch of Winnebago Camper owners tonight as the local town has its WIT rally. I don't know what WIT stands for so don't ask. All I know is that it involves a bunch of people driving their Winnebagos back here where many of them were made. Should make for an interesting weekend with lots of visitors to town as I'm being introduced.

New responsibilities. New Opportunities

I've arrived in Forest City, Iowa and am officially the pastor of six churches. The strange thing is that, even as I type that, I can't help but think about how little has changed. I tend be a creature of habit and I was sort of able to set up a routine before I left Ames that is working (thus far) here in Forest City. We'll see what happens tomorrow when I have mass a half hour away at 7:30...in the morning. Up until the last six weeks in Ames, I was almost never awake at 7:30 in the morning. I have a few scattered reflections thus far.

1. I wonder when it will hit me that I'm really the pastor and not just subbing for Father Huber. This is my home not just a place I'm visiting for a few days.

2. I already miss the college students. I keep thinking about them because we had a death two days before I left. I wish I was there to help process some feelings. I wish I could give Bridget one more hug.

3. I moved way too much stuff. I need to make a list of stuff that a priest should move and stuff a priest shouldn't move so that I'll know that for when I move again in 12 years. Here's a start...

Do move:
Books
Computer
Clothes

Don't move:
Bed linens
Old liturgical furniture
A Bed

...probably the best thing I could do is fill my truck once with the important stuff and, whatever doesn't fit, isn't important. Of course, that just encourages me to get a bigger truck but I'll deal with that when it happens.

Learning from suffering

My Dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. For the past several weeks, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on the time I’ve spent here at St. Thomas. Sometimes it happens because a former student emails, text messages, or even calls to reminisce about old times. It certainly happened two weeks ago at the coffee and donuts when you threw me a going away party in listening to the stories that people told. It also happened when I was cleaning out my office and found a note reminding me of something that I should have followed up on two years ago. To be honest, I’m still not certain if it’s too late to call that person back or not. I guess I’ll just leave it for Fr. Jack.

On Friday, I was helping a former student roof his house and, one of the other roofers came up to me and said, “You’re the priest from St. Thomas, right?” I, of course, said that I was, although I’ll admit that I wondered where the conversation would lead. He said that he was present at church when I gave a homily about God’s love. He said, he remembered that one of my examples of showing love was the Obama fist bump with optional explosion. He said it was one of the best he’d ever heard. The funny thing is that I only vaguely remember giving that homily. I sort of remember walking into the congregation to display the aforementioned fist bump but not much else. And the really crazy thing is that, even though I don’t remember that homily, I’ll never forget the ones when I got a complaint email afterwards. I think it’s always tempting to hold on to the struggles and trials of life even when life is much better, the struggles behind us, and we have learned lessons from those trials.

The first reading today from the Prophet Isaiah is dealing with just such a situation. Despite being defeated in war, exiled to Babylon, and suffering as slaves, God tells his people “Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad because of her, all you who love her; exult, exult with her, all you who were mourning over her!” The people are told to not look back on past disappointments but to live in their current condition of renewal.

The question then arises, of course, what do we do when we are in the middle of suffering? Paul answers that question in his letter to the Galatians. This letter is somewhat unique compared to Paul’s other letters because he is so disappointed by the Galatians’ willingness to believe in these people called Judaizers who want pagans first to become Jews before they become Christian. You might remember me talking about this group in a previous homily. In this concluding passage, Paul is talking about how he has been marked with the marks of Christ. The suffering Paul has felt is that the Judaizers have put so much focus on the mark of circumcision that they have driven away people he evangelized who have been marked by faith in Christ. Paul exhorts them to remember that the only mark that matters is the mark of Jesus and nothing else. It’s rather doubtful that St. Paul was talking about this but this is the passage that was a source of support for St. Francis, St. Pio of Petriclina and others who were graced to receive the stigmata and truly “bear the marks of Jesus” on their bodies. Their stigmata are a sign of their faith in Jesus and his church. Nonetheless, most of us will never have actual physical stigmata but will wear the spiritual marks of Jesus on our bodies given to us in baptism by faith.

It was in faith that Jesus called 70 of his disciples to go forth in evangelization in the gospel today. He challenges them not to bring a lot of stuff but just to go and he gives them advice on how to handle those who aren’t open to the gospel message. It’s almost like he’s trying to help them to deal with the very things that Isaiah and Paul dealt with in their writings but trying to prepare them ahead of time. On the one hand, a lot of suffering comes from our own dependence of physical objects. Anyone who has ever packed up a house or apartment knows this is true. But Jesus knows that some of their suffering will come from people who are unwilling to listen to the gospel message. Jesus first says not to be concerned if people spurn your offers of peace because your peace will simply come back to you. He goes on to tell the disciples to say as they leave the hard hearted, “'The dust of your town that clings to our feet, even that we shake off against you.' Yet know this: the kingdom of God is at hand. I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that town." In other words, the disciples had to be prepared to let go of whatever unreceptive people said and did to them as they began to evangelize.

Suffering is a confusing and frustrating thing. We tend to try and avoid having to go through it, hate every second we are in it, and hold onto it too long once it’s done. Suffering gets in the way of our relationship to God and others and makes living a holy life a struggle. Our constant challenge as believers is to know that suffering is one of the marks of being a Christian. It’s what unites us ever closer to Christ who suffered and died for us on the cross. We cannot avoid it. We cannot ignore it. We can’t even always be prepared for it. But, when it comes, we can draw strength from the one who suffered for us.

Silent Passivity

I talked in my homily this morning how the real punishment that people get with excuses is being left behind. The gospel reading talked about Jesus recruiting his disciples and how several came up with excuses and couldn't go. Their punishment was being left out of the mission of Jesus and, ultimately, the Kingdom of God. But, the first part talked about how the disciples entered a Samaritan village that didn't accept Jesus so James and John, true to being sons of thunder, tried to ask God to destroy the city. But Jesus rebuked them. So, if you don't follow Jesus because you feel like you want the security of a home or want to bury the dead or want to say goodbye to family, the real way that you will suffer is by being away from God instead of something violent.

I remembered with fondness when Pope John Paul II apologized for injustices done by certain members of the church and said that we are supposed to be the persecuted not the persecutors. And then I used this to talk about Sts. Peter and Paul since this week is the patron of my little country parish where I was preaching. My point for them was that we should follow Jesus with our whole hearts just like the disciples Peter and Paul did.

I should have used incense, however since it was their patronal feast day. I regret not doing so. I feel like we only use incense at funerals and that makes it seem like something somber. But, in truth, it's a symbol of celebration and of our prayers rising to God. I'll have to think of that for the feasts of St. Patrick, St. James, St. Boniface, and St. Wenceslaus when I get in my cluster of parishes in just two short weeks. It's hard for me to believe my ride in Ames is coming to an end.

Figuring out how to say goodbye without needing to know you did a thing.

This coming Sunday morning between the 8:30 and 10:30 masses, I'll say goodbye to the people of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames. The strange thing will be hanging around for three more weeks after I've said goodbye. But, I'm sure it'll go a lot quicker than I think it will and I'll be settling into Forest City before I know it.

I really haven't had all that much to do with the party. It's my responsibility to get someone to talk at it. I'm still working on that. As I do so, the challenge that I feel is from my retreat spiritual director a couple of months ago. He said he was talking to a Protestant pastor after the death of John Paul II. The pastor said that the Catholic Church was in trouble because the next Pope would have big shoes to fill. My spiritual director immediately corrected him and said that the church hates personality. We don't like it when our popes and bishops and priests become celebrities. It distracts us from the real message of the gospel.

A lot of very good people have come up to me the past few weeks and said some really nice things. The most edifying thing they say is that they will really miss my presence to young people or my preaching or my singing or something else. And, the most difficult thing I know however is that, even though they are saying that now, in five years I will basically be totally forgotten. I'll be remembered as "that one priest...you know...the bald one." The college students will have all graduated and moved on. The residents will have either moved to a different town or found things to love about Fr. Jack. It's hard to think that I've given five years of my life to this place and will be lucky to be mentioned in a sentence about associate pastors in a forthcoming history book. 

But I guess that's the way it's supposed to be. It reminds me of a story that I heard when I was in Santa Fe New Mexico. There was a church that had a balcony that no one could get to. They figured you'd have to use a ladder since a staircase would take up too much space. The nuns prayed a novena to St. Joseph, patron saint of builders, and a stranger arrived on the ninth day and offered to build one for them. They obliged and left the stranger to his work. When completed, they had a spiral staircase with two 360 degree turns and no visible means of support. When they went to ask the stranger what it had cost to build the stairway, he had vanished. The nuns believed that St. Joseph himself came to build it. Maybe they're right. On the other hand, maybe it was just someone who realized the staircase should speak for itself and not have a builder's name attached. 

Last Sunday's Homily

I talked about the importance of women in the ministry of the church last weekend because of the woman who bathed Jesus' feet with her tears in the gospel as well as the separate list of women who were included in Jesus' ministry toward the end. I talked about an important woman in my life, my Mom, who kept me humble as a child and keeps me humble now. And I talked about how one of the great gifts women offer the church is an authentic sense of humility.

I had one of those moments where my mouth was saying something that it hadn't planned to say, however. In talking about the humility of the woman washing Jesus' feet, I suddenly realized that she was prefiguring the very act that Jesus would do on the night he was betrayed to symbolize the humility of the cross. I was caught up in spiritual ecstasy repeating over and over "She was doing the very thing that Jesus would do to his disciples at the Last Supper in order to show how we should all serve each other. She was doing what Jesus wants us all to for each other even before Jesus told us to do it..." I probably read that at some point in my history and it just popped into my head but it was definitely one of those moments where I sort-of had to "pull it together" in order to make the rest of the homily work.

Change in Blog Policy

As some of you may have noticed, I have an Asian pornographer who has become overly fixated on my blog. He or She will add a comment with Asian characters that are all links to various Asian-themed pornographic sites. At least I'm assuming they are as I only made the mistake of clicking on the links once. So, I'm going to limit comments to people who are followers for a while. I don't get many comments anyway so I doubt that it will affect anyone but you deserve to know not only that it is happening but also why it's happening. Hopefully, in a month or two, I'll remove this provision because the pornographer will find somewhere else to peddle their smut. In the meantime, please join me in praying for this lost soul.

More digging, more learning

I did a little research into the site of my future "home base" parish in Forest city, Iowa. It appears that the church was linked to several parishes and missions throughout it's life. It moved location at least three times from west of town to downtown to its current location north of town. The parish was founded basically because of a large group of Irish immigrants in the small town of Bristol, Iowa, which I can't wait to drive through to see if the first Catholic Cemetary is still there.

To me, the most intriguing fact of the history book I've been using (that unfortunately only goes until 1937) is, "The missions attached to Forest City at this time were: Lake Mills, Northwood, Thompson, Buffalo Center, and Armstrong." So, a previous priest was responsible for six ecclesial communities. I need to look up this Father John P. Taken and ask for his intercession as I begin this assignment. And, if anyone can find where Lakewood was, (No, not the one that's close to Des Moines! It'd have to be somewhere in North Central, Iowa), I'll appreciate it. I have a feeling I'll file it under the category of "places that aren't really towns in Iowa but the locals all call it that so I better learn that name if I plan to have any credibility with the locals."

The trinity: A Community of Hope

My dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the Power of the Holy Spirit on this Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. We give thanks this day for the revelation of God, which has made clear the divine and subtle mystery of the Trinity. This mystery is definitely one of those that defines who we are as Christians. To my knowledge No other religion in the world, believes that, without compromising the unity or the “oneness” of God, God is also a trinity of persons. We do not have three gods nor are Father, Son and Holy Spirit merely three names for the same person. God has made clear through Jesus that he is one God in three persons. In some ways, it would be a lot easier if we simply talked about God and ignored this dogma of our faith because of how difficult it is to explain. It would be easier if Jesus were merely a prophet, perhaps the greatest of all prophets, sent by God to open revelation to all the world. Unfortunately, it would also mean that we are not justified in the eyes of God and, thus, not saved. Or, it would be easier if we simply believed, like the ancient Greeks did, that the angels were gods so that there are innumerable gods capable of doing whatever we ask of them. But then we would face the difficulty of determining whose god is the strongest. This could be the source a very entertaining reality show but, thankfully, is not.

In the most recent round of sexual abuse, I’ve heard a rather consistent and somewhat disturbing message being spread. It is said that the Catholic Church has good people but a bad hierarchy. I remember reading a New York Times op ed forwarded to me by a staff member at St. Thomas that expounded this opinion. I can understand the frustration that would lead a person to believe it. As I said at the Holy Thursday mass, I feel a certain amount of sympathy for people who are really struggling to have trust in their bishops. I was ordained in the middle of the mess in Boston and there’s a part of me that worries about what you all are thinking every time I reach out and pat a kid on the head or get a hug from a grade schooler.

Yet, one of the realities of having one God in three persons is that it means that community and relationship are at the very center of our Faith. The persons of God are in relationship to one another just like we are in relationship to one another. One formula that I heard in seminary was that the Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit is the love that binds the two. The Holy Spirit’s love does not destroy the individuality of the Father or the Son but amplifies it so that it spills out into our lives. The Trinity’s relationship built upon love is, thereby, communicated to us, the faithful, in our daily lives. We are called to live lives that value community and take us away from selfishness.

Part of living a life of community is, to use a word coined by St. Paul in the second reading today, affliction. Relationships are wrought with affliction. It could be the affliction of being a teenager and wishing you had more freedom or the affliction of watching your teenager make bad decisions. It could be the affliction of watching an aging parent grow old and feeble or the affliction of job loss. It may be the affliction of being part of a church struggling to deal with sexual abuse or the affliction of hearing an Archbishop tell you that he needs you leave the parish you love to take on a new assignment. If we try and deal with this affliction alone, it is meaningless. When we do so from the perspective of Christian Community, from the perspective of being the body of Christ, then our affliction connects us to the Hope of Christ in Faith. And, as St. Paul reminds us, Hope does not disappoint.

Part of why we have a Christian Community, a church, to guide us that is hierarchically ordered is to keep us united by the wisdom of God. I love the first reading today which describes wisdom as existing before and during creation; joyfully playing at the foot of God and finding delight in the human race. I think this is why Jesus, in the gospel, tells us that the Spirit’s main job is to continue the wisdom, the truth, that he has begun to give to the Apostles. The Apostle’s job was to teach the truths revealed by the Holy Spirit to their successors, the Bishop’s. Yet, wisdom’s job is not done and there is always more clarification that needs to be done. We certainly need to pray for our Bishops as they struggle to understand the best way to deal with this latest round of sexual abuse. Yet, I would hope we can all see that, even as hurt and upset as we may justifiably be, we shouldn’t go to the extreme of getting rid of part of our community because they have caused us affliction. To paraphrase St. Paul again, let us pray that affliction leads us to endurance as we put up with unfair stereotypes and oppression and that the endurance leads us to the proven character of being the first large institution to deal with sexual abuse in a way that protects people and that this proven character will give us hope to help others. Because, truly, hope never fails.

Something from my next assignment

As a Campus Minister, I could sleep until 8 or 9 in the morning because I would stay awake until midnight or one o'clock. Now as I start to prepare for a new assignment in July, I've been waking up earlier and going to bed earlier. My new pattern is to wake up at 6, pray, breakfast, and be on the bus by 7:30 to that I'm at work when I used to wake up in the morning. I somehow feel a lot more productive since I get all my clerical work done in the morning and go back home around 2 or so. It's amazing.

In my leadership class, I learned that the first thing I should do in the morning is do something that's not urgent but is important. So, I've been researching my future parishes one at a time. In the process, I found out that there were two parishes that have closed that used to be connected to a parish I will be responsible for. It makes sense considering what the current pastor was talking about when he said he's got a couple of extra cemeteries that he oversees. It seems like we're often willing to sell the church building but not the cemetery. One of the things that impresses me about where I'm going is that the three I've researched so far are all very old churches. All three were organized before 1900, even if their church buildings didn't get built until after. And there's a history of cooperation between them before they were eventually separated. Being a fan of history (and historical churches), I can use this as a way to bring about greater unity.

What does it mean that the Holy Spirit is an Advocate?

My Dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit be with you as we conclude this Easter Season today. Today is Pentecost, a term that can be literally translated as 50 days, describing the number of days that have elapsed since Easter. We borrow the term from our Jewish brothers and sisters, although our Pentecost feasts are very different. The Christian understanding of Pentecost, as we heard in the first reading today, is the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles in the upper room. The Jewish understanding of Pentecost, or what they call Shavuot, although taking place 50 days after Passover, is actually a feast of the grain harvest. During the time of the Temple, the Jewish people would have offered some of the harvest back to God on Shavuot as a thanksgiving for the good things God gave them. Of course, we are just starting the planting season on Pentecost so we’re far from harvest time.

Several times during the Easter Season, we heard the same chapter of John’s Gospel, chapter 14, which is a brief explanation by Our Lord to explain all the events that happened between Good Friday and Pentecost. If I were to give it a theme, I would say Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples exactly what he means when he says, “Peace be with you” and “Do not be afraid.” He is trying to explain to them what will happen so that they will be prepared. The apostles have been Jesus’ followers and will now take on the yoke of leadership that Jesus had provided for them during his earthly life. In our calendar, we believe that 40 days after Jesus’ resurrection, he ascended into heaven and that 10 days after that (50 days after Jesus’ Resurrection) the church was given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. To prepare them to receive the Holy Spirit, Jesus used a very unusual word to describe her, a word that has caused me to ask the question: What did Jesus mean when he called the Holy Spirit the Advocate? This term is usually used describe a lawyer in a trial, someone who is meant to present the best case for us to a judge. I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually think about my relationship to God in legal terms. Yet, I think this is the context that Jesus is using today. And, while we may be tempted to believe we have outgrown this image of our relationship to God, let’s investigate what Jesus is saying when he uses it.

Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth in the verses right before our reading begins today. If we view the Holy Spirit as our Advocate before the Father, the first thing that we need to know is that it is the Spirit’s job to get to know our true selves in order to plead our cause. She wants to be in relationship to us throughout our life. St. Thomas Aquinas said regarding this that grace builds on nature. In other words, it’s not as though the Holy Spirit forces herself into the lives of those who don’t want to get to know her in order to force them to a life of holiness. The Spirit comes into our lives as we strive to grow in holiness and builds on and perfects the good work we are already doing. That is why Jesus said the Holy Spirit will, “teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” She not only has placed into our heart a natural law sense of goodness but remains with us in order to tell the Father all that we have done to grow in holiness.

Yet, the Holy Spirit is not only our Advocate to the Father. She is also our Advocate to the world. The Spirit of Truth guides us in our daily interactions to be beacons of light and faith even if we aren’t necessarily speaking about God, faith, or the church. The Holy Spirit gives us gifts that we are, in turn, invited to put into the service of the church. In some ways, this is what connects this celebration to the Jewish understanding of Passover: we are all given gifts and are invited by God to build up the kingdom with those gifts. Part of our challenge is to listen intently to the Spirit to make sure that the gifts we think we have correspond to the gifts we truly do have and to make sure we aren’t so involved in so many things that we cannot effectively use the gifts God has given us. As we celebrate this feast of Passover, let us be reminded of our need to get to know the gifts God has given us and to make sure we are doing our best to use them to build up the church.

Being an Iowan

I am an Iowan, partially by birth and partially by attitude. I've taken sides in the famous debate over whether Iowa or Iowa State is better (Sorry UNI...you'll always be our cute younger sibling even when you beat both of us), I have visited every part of this state, and I consider pig poop a normal smell that people just need to put up with while driving.

Last week, I was on retreat. I spent a week in Missouri visiting the monks at Conception Abbey. It was an awesome week of prayer and reflection with some truly holy men. But, the crazy thing is that on Friday I felt the greatest joy at crossing the Iowa/Missouri border. It was just so good to be back home.

There's a part of me that hopes that's what heaven is like. I don't really need the perfect city with gems for roads and perfect symmetry in its construction, although if that's the way it is that's cool. I just hope I look around and feel truly at home. No more suffering. No more worrying that something was left undone. No more lying awake knowing that people will send nasty emails to you because you've got to take a stand on a controversial issue. It's like seeing the big sign saying "Iowa, Fields of Opportunities" and realizing that you belong there.

Peace which is Christ’s and not of the world

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

May the Peace of Christ be with each of you, especially the mothers during this Mother’s day weekend. On my retreat this past week, I spent some time reflecting on the phrase from our Lord in today’s gospel, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” I couldn’t help but pause to ponder what made Jesus’ peace different than that of the world. I looked in a concordance to see other instances of the use of the word peace in the gospels. For the most part, it is used as a greeting, a use which is still done by both Jews and Muslims to greet one another. “Shalom,” in Hebrew and “Salaam” Arabic. Jesus would have greeted his Jewish followers with peace each time that he saw them just as we greet each other with a hearty hello.

There was, nonetheless, one passage that I found in the gospel of Matthew that says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” This verse prompted a question for me: Is Jesus talking about his own peace or the peace of this world when he said the above? Edward Gibbon in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire notes that, at the time of Jesus, there was relative peace throughout the Roman Empire that was largely kept by the sword. There were no major wars or uprisings between 27 BC and 180 AD because, in general, the Roman Emperors favored consolidation ahead of expansion. The Messiah was supposed to come and bring true peace to his people by driving out all Gentiles from the Land and set up a United Israel as a world government. That’s the peace of this world that Jesus is talking about in both the Gospels of Matthew and John that is won by the sword, the kind that he didn’t come to bring. Instead, the peace that he will bring is one brought to the church by the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.

So, how will the Holy Spirit’s peace be different than that of the world? One person described the Roman understanding of peace as not so much the absence of war and conflict as the point when your opponent has been so decimated that he or she is wiped out. I think the difference between this and Christ’s gift of peace is clearly seen in the first reading today. This story from the Acts of the Apostles tells about the first real controversy in the church. While Paul and Barnabas are evangelizing in Antioch, certain Jewish Christian believers claim to have authority to explain what it means to be a Christian. They claim that you have to first be Jewish in order to be considered Christian. It would be like an excommunicated priest coming into Ames claiming to have authority to speak about who should be ordained, especially if his view contradicted the views that the bishops and pope have stated over and over again. Of course, such a person would have no authority to speak for the church and would only be causing the same division that the Jewish Christian believers did in the first reading. It’s too bad that the Gentile Christians didn’t simply pay more attention to Paul and Barnabas and simply ignore those who would try to divide them.

Nonetheless, I find Paul and Barnabus’ reaction instructive. They could have simply taken up a counter stance to say that there needs to be a division in the church’s practice. This was the way the Apostles had handled the situation with the deacons, for instance. There were deacons to deal with the Greek speakers so that the Apostles could be focused on the Aramaic speakers. Paul and Barnabas could have said that the Jewish Christians needed to maintain the Jewish laws while the Gentile Christians were free to live a life of grace, basically dividing the church in two. However, that’s not what Paul and Barnabas did. Instead, they went to Jerusalem, to the seat of Apostolic authority at the time, to get a ruling from Peter, James, and John: a ruling that removed almost all of the Jewish ritual laws for all believers in favor of the life of grace offered to the church by the Father through the Holy Spirit. They trusted that the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit and given the charism to lead the church, would not lead them astray. This action of trust ultimately lead to the peace of the church so that we could move forward with the mandate to evangelize the world.

Jesus says to us, his church, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” The peace of Christ doesn’t mean that there will not be war or conflict. As we have seen almost continually since the time of Jesus, there have been and probably always will be conflict, fighting, disagreement, and war. The peace that Jesus offers is a peace that gives us assurance that we are not so separated from God through sin that he would stop loving us. It is the peace of Christ whose death and resurrection has inextricably connected us to the Father in his loving, Spirit-filled plan of salvation. It’s the peace that calls us to trust in the teachings of the church and her apostolic successors who guide us through the violence and strife still present in this world. And it’s the peace that this world cannot give because it deals more with our internal ability to trust the church than our own ability to control and manipulate.

Learning how to be comfortable as sheep

My Dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, through our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. When I was at Loras my first year, one of my friends basically forced me to go on the Antioch retreat. I say she forced me to go on it because, in all honesty, I had made up my mind that Antioch was not going to be my thing when I first heard about it. I didn’t do retreats. I viewed them with the same kind of suspicion that one has for a cult, that simple-minded people needed them so that they could stand around and sing Jesus songs. But this friend was both particularly persistent and one of those people you just didn’t want to upset so I headed out to my first Antioch during October of my Freshman year. I can remember being surrounded by a bunch of people that I didn’t know, which was intimidating. I can remember seeing a priest not walking around in a polo shirt and jeans and thinking that that was a really weird thing. But, the thing that would have sent me driving back home had I had a car, the thing that I’ve resolved never to do at our Antioch retreats, was when they came around with a brown grocery bag and had us throw our watches into it because we were on “God’s time.” I actually tried to put my watch in my pocked quick before they came by but I got caught. I hated the idea of being deprived of my God-given right to know approximately where the sun was in the sky and what relation we were to Grenwich, England. It was just wrong and unnerving that this cult thought they could take my watch away. How dare they?

This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday. Both the responsorial psalm and the gospel called God the Shepherd and called us the sheep. When I was in seminary, we had a rather heated debate about the usefulness of this image. In some ways, it is rather patronizing. Sheep are not exactly the most intelligent animals in the world. Being a sheep is often equated with unquestioning loyalty to the point of being willing to jump off a cliff if your friends asked you to do it. It’s what you call the person whose viewpoint you don’t agree with. Democrats believe Republicans were sheep to President Bush with the war in Iraq and Republicans believe Democrats are sheep when it comes to health care. Let’s face it, if we were writing the gospel today we’d probably say something like, “We are the dolphins, the intelligent, helpful, charming herd of the Lord”. Or “We are the Koala bears, the non-threatening, eucalyptus eating, hugging marsupials of the Lord.”

And yet, I’d like to contend that, despite its shortfalls, being a sheep isn’t really that bad. The second reading from the Book of Revelation reminded us of a deep theological reality tied to this image of sheep. The vision that John, the writer of Revelation, is having appears to be of heaven. There is this large gathering of all the saved, a group that is so large that it is beyond counting. The group are all wearing pure white robes, robes similar to the ones you may have see our newly baptized put on during the Easter Vigil and which they continue wearing in church during the Easter Season. This gathering is surrounding God who is referred to as one seated on the throne. Yet, Jesus, being depicted as a lamb, is also seated on the throne because, as we know, Jesus is fully God, “of the same substance with the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God…” And the Lamb will shepherd us by leading us to the life-giving streams of baptism and Eucharist just as blood and water flowed from Jesus’ side on the cross.

It seems to me that the writer of Revelation is saying that we are sheep because Jesus was the lamb. In case you didn’t grow up on a farm, a lamb is a sheep that has not bred more sheep. One could say that Jesus is the innocent sheep while we are the sheep who bring the baggage of original sin. Yet, we are sheep because we are the sinning but redeemed body of Christ on earth.

Part of what I find helpful in the image of being a sheep comes from the last line of this reading. Not only will God give us what we need, it also says that the Good Shepherd will, “wipe away ever tear from (our) eyes.” We, the Iowa State community, have suffered a lot over the course of the last few weeks. We’ve seen three students die: one on spring break and two last week. I’ve been visiting with a lot of you who have friends and family who are either seriously ill or have died and I have a hunch that a lot more of you are hurting about that or Jon, T.J. or Tyler than we here at St. Thomas will ever know. Just know that if you do need to talk to someone, my door and the doors of all the staff members are always open here at STA. We can’t quite wipe away all the tears but our shoulders may be able to take some of them.

Part of what is so difficult about the image the sheep is the loss of control, the same loss of control I felt by giving up my watch on Antioch. And yet, that weekend turned out to be the best thing I would do during four years at Loras College. I connected with God on a deeper level than ever before and I made friends there that would become my roommates for the next three years. I had to give up some of that control and trust God for that to take place. I had to let God be the shepherd in order to be led to life-giving streams and have my tears wiped away.

To go boldly where men have gone before...

The Archbishop of Dubuque has appointed me to a new assignment. In July, I will become pastor for St. Patrick Parish, Britt; St. Patrick Parish, Buffalo Center; St. Wenceslaus Parish, Duncan; St. James Parish, Forest City; St. Boniface Parish, Garner; and St. Patrick Parish, Lake Mills. If you're not sure where any of those towns are, look at most northern and central two counties of the state of Iowa and you'll find all of them. I'm very excited by the prospect of becoming pastor and a little overwhelmed by the Archbishop's confidence in me. I'll have the responsibility of pastoring six parishes and helping a brother priest (my associate pastor) continue his formation to become a pastor. There's a part of me that wonders if the Archbishop has made a mistake. I mean, I still make mistakes and say stupid things. Lieutenant Riker was still second-in-command to Jean-Luc Picard after like 20 years on the Enterprise. And, trust me, I'm no William T. Riker.

Thankfully, as I have done since June 22nd 2002 in the beginning of the American sexual abuse crisis, I trust in the Archbishop's statement that my own feelings of inadequacy are reminders that being a priest really isn't about me. I didn't choose to become a priest, God chose me. To put it in the words of the ordination liturgy, "Remember that you are chosen from among God's people and appointed to act for them in relation to God. Do your part in the word of Christ the Priest with genuine joy and love, and attend to the concerns of Christ before your own."

Last Sunday

I really didn't like my homily from last Sunday so I didn't put it here. It was one of those homilies that started out rough on Saturday and never really got polished in four times.

What was cool, however, was being part of a very unusual confirmation. In this diocese, we have three priests who have the title of Episcopal Vicar. They stand in the place of the Bishop for certain events like this. Monsignor Russ Bleich is one and he was supposed to confirm the kids. But, then he got sick. Laryngitis, to be specific. He couldn't talk, one of he few traits still absolutely necessary in order to celebrate mass. So, he gave the authority to the pastors here. The kids got to be confirmed by their pastor. That was very unusual and I'm sure they'll remember it for a long time.

I'm not saying that it should happen every year...maybe once every 20 years or so. It was nice to see the pastors working together in the same way that we ask the confirmation students to do so for the prayer.

What prompted the change in Peter?

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

He is Risen! He is truly Risen! May the grace of the risen savior, Jesus Christ, come upon you this Easter day and remain with you throughout the 50 day Easter celebration. I’d like to especially welcome those of you who haven’t been here in quite a while.

For one of my summer jobs during college, I decided to become a short-order cook in a small country restaurant in Marshalltown. It was one of the hardest summers I ever had because I had to be awake at 5:30 to be to work at 6:00. I’m not a morning person so this was quite a challenge. The other challenge was the job itself. I would be handed a ticket with a list of food to prepare and I had to know the timing that it took for one piece of food compared to another. For instance, I had to know how long it took to make eggs over easy so that I could have hot hash browns and toast to be served at the exact same time. That was the hardest part of the job for me and, to be honest, I quite often had to call the owner in the kitchen to help me catch up because I’d fallen so far behind. But, I can still remember the day that I finally succeeded. Several tickets all came up at once and I started all the things that took a lot of time right away. I remembered to flip the eggs quickly for the one woman who liked her eggs runny and even remembered to push the toast down. As I completed the last ticket that day, I had this tremendous sense of accomplishment. The owner, who was not known for his warm loquacious demeanor, came back to the kitchen, patted me on the back, and said, “Good job, kid.” I had made it. It felt good.

The focus of the gospel is always Jesus. But, in the background, there are a bunch of people who interact with the savior and we see quite a transformation in one of these people today. Peter, the rock on whom our church is built, has his good times and bad times during Jesus’ ministry. Sometimes he seems to comprehend things perfectly, like when he recognized Jesus for the Messiah he is. Other times, he seems to get things very wrong, like when he thrice denied knowing Jesus during Jesus’ trial. And the amazing thing from today is that the background character is called up to the front in the course of today’s readings. In the gospel, we hear about Peter’s reaction to hearing about the empty tomb. Whereas Mary Magdalene seems to react with doubt and fear by running to tell the disciples that they have stolen his body, Peter runs to the tomb, enters it and sees the burial clothes neatly wrapped up. For him, this is the beginning, a call to faith that will continue to grow for the next several years through the careful fertilization of the Holy Spirit.

Peter makes five speeches in the Acts of the Apostles, all of which are creedal catechetical statements of belief. In other words, the student becomes the teacher by the Acts of Apostles. His bumbling errors are a thing of the past and he now speaks with the clarity of our first Pope, telling the world all about the forgiveness given to us by the cross and resurrection of Jesus. He was a witness and now he’s got to witness.

And, he calls each of us to witness to the faith. We are called to live our lives affected by the resurrection of Jesus by loving one another, especially the persecuted. We are to reach out to the lost individuals in our life and invite them to come to church with us. Maybe for some of us, the best witness you can give is to make church on Sunday a priority in your life on more than just a monthly basis. Maybe for some of you, you need to get the demons such as addiction to drugs, alcohol, or sex out of your life in order to be a witness and you need to join a group like AA or SA in order to kick the habit.

The challenge always is that we don’t feel like we can do it. Maybe we feel energized and excited now but there will be a time when reality will set in and we’ll have to commit to actually doing it. We may even remember past failures and use them as an excuse as to why we can’t witness today. Let us use the inspiration of Peter, the one who first failed before he succeeded, to commit to being witnesses to the resurrection.

Good Friday...heck it was a GREAT FRIDAY!

I've been a priest for 8 years now. I've done mass almost daily for 8 years of priesthood. The one day that I'm not allowed to do mass is today, Good Friday. For the last three years in a row, I've been out at my little rural parish, Sts. Peter and Paul in Gilbert, Iowa. I know my people out there and they know me. They trust me and I trust them.

We didn't do anything unusual at Sts. Peter and Paul. But there's something awesome about knowing what to expect because I've done it all before. The Passion Gospel was so powerful. I love to speak with the people, "Take him away! Take him away! Crucify Him!" It emphasizes just how privileged we are that Jesus really died for our sins.

Probably the most touching thing that happened was during the veneration of the cross. There were several parents holding children allowing the children to touch the cross. There was even a number of High School students that came forward and kissed the feet of Jesus.

I closed my homily with a quote from an early Holy Saturday Homily. "Something strange is happening -- there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear."

The Year of the Priest/Holy Thursday

My dear brothers and sister in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ who sent his Holy Spirit to fill us with his grace. This year, Pope Benedict asked all the faithful to pray for priests. As a priest, I really haven’t done much about this. I’ve felt encouraged by people who tell me that they are praying for me and thinking about me. And, as a priest, I can be honest enough to admit that it is always a joy to come here and celebrate with you because so many of you are complimentary of me and my ministry. Nonetheless, I have struggled to preach about the year of the priest because it seems like it would, in some ways, only affect me. Yet, in the past week, I’ve been paying close attention to the unfolding events in Europe regarding clergy sexual abuse. It’s been very interesting to find that our older brother in the faith is just now dealing with the same problems that we started dealing with eight years ago. In this light, I think it’s important to preach about priests on this Holy Thursday, this day that is considered the Institution of the Priesthood.

When the Pope asked us to reflect on priests, he told us to do so through the lens of St. John Vianney so I looked up what he taught on the matter. I found a really great passage from his writing entitled Catechetical Instruction. The Saint says, “(Holy Orders) raises man up to God. What is a priest! A man who holds the place of God - a man who is invested with all the powers of God. "Go, " said Our Lord to the priest; "as My Father sent Me, I send you. All power has been given Me in Heaven and on earth. Go then, teach all nations. . . . He who listens to you, listens to Me; he who despises you despises Me. " When the priest remits sins, he does not say, "God pardons you"; he says, "I absolve you. " At the Consecration, he does not say, "This is the Body of Our Lord;" he says, "This is My Body.”

This is an interesting point about being a priest: We don’t speak on behalf of ourselves. We speak on behalf of God. For me, this has two ramifications: it means that priests need to be cautious about what we say because people will take it as authoritative. And, I ask for your prayers for the priests who have decided to misstate church teaching because it better suits their disposition or beliefs. We should not do that. St. John Vianney says that we must be willing to speak the truth of the gospel even if it means receiving the contempt of the people and, as he says, being shot upon leaving the pulpit.

The other reality is that the priest must be the leader and model in holiness. St. John Vianney says it in the negative, “Leave a parish twenty years without priests; they will worship beasts. If the missionary Father and I were to go away, you would say, "What can we do in this church? there is no Mass; Our Lord is no longer there: we may as well pray at home." When people wish to destroy religion, they begin by attacking the priest, because where there is no longer any priest there is no sacrifice, and where there is no longer any sacrifice there is no religion.” In other words, the priest reminds people of God’s presence and makes God present. One of my favorite things to do as a priest is to wear my clerical clothes to things like sporting events, plays, and even a bar or two. The priest should be a reminder that God doesn’t just want us for an hour each week but wants to be in relationship with us in all aspects of our life. Since the Second Vatican Council, I’ve think this aspect of priesthood has been on the decline. Many of my brother priests say that the document on the church said that not only the priests should be holy but that all the people should be holy. And, while I agree with them on this point, it did say that we are all to be HOLY, not that we are allowed to be as unholy as we think our people are being. We are to model holiness for our people so that they will likewise want to be holy.

As a priest, I have to admit that I’m not perfect about this. I give in far too often to secular concerns and find it way too easy to allow my tongue to slip towards unkind speech. In this year of the priest, perhaps what we priests need most is for our lay people to remind us of your need for us to model God’s love and mercy. Remind us that you don’t need an entertainer or a best friend, you need someone to bring the grace of Christ into your life in the sacraments. Continue to support and love us but also call us to be the image of the Father that you want us to be.

Archbishop Levada

I read this lengthy article while watching TV tonight. With a great deal of clarity, it describes the muckraking that has been happening to the Holy Father by the press.

No real homily this weekend

So, this weekend is Palm Sunday. Go to church to get your palm so that you can make your cross. It's a big Sunday. We read the entire passion narrative from one of the gospels, which takes a lot longer than normal. That comes after we read the gospel about the procession with palms from the gospel of Luke.

My homily generally goes like this: This is the week where we remember the central mystery of our church. From Holy Thursday's Institution of the Eucharist to Good Friday's focus on the Cross and death of the Lord to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection, we remember all of what is at the heart of the church. I strongly encourage you all to make a point to come to church to celebrate all three days. This is our Holy Week.

To be a compass

For some reason, the following dialog from the movie Mr. Holland's Opus keeps coming up in my conversation. In case you forget, Mr. Holland is played by Richard Dreyfuss and is the new music teacher and Mrs. Jacobs is played by Olympia Dukakis and is the seasoned principal...

Mrs. Jacobs: “Mr. Holland! Just the man I was looking for. We’re forming a textbook committee for next year’s curriculum and I would like to have your ideas and suggestions. We meet next Tuesday in the library.

Mr. Holland: Oh, I’m sorry Mrs. Jacobs. I’m I’m I’m very busy.

Mrs. Jacobs: You know for a good four or five months now I’ve been watching you Mr. Holland. I’ve never seen a teacher sprint for the parking lot after last period with more speed and enthusiasm than his students. Perhaps you should be our track coach.

Mr. Holland: Mrs. Jacobs, I get here on time every morning. I’m doing my job the best I can.

Mrs. Jacobs: A teacher has two jobs: Fill young minds with knowledge, yes. But more important, give those minds a compass so that knowledge doesn’t go to waste. Now I don’t know what you’re doing with the knowledge, Mr. Holland, but as a compass, you’re stuck.

I keep thinking about it because that is what I feel to be the difference between a normal parish and a good parish. A normal Catholic parish either seems to just want to do the basics of the faith or has such deep divisions within what is happening that you have to be part of a "camp" in order to feel a part. It seems that the pastor's constant challenge is to be the compass that keeps the parish together walking in the right direction.

Jesus calls us to conversion not tolerance

My Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father and Jesus, our savior through the reconciling power of the Holy Spirit. A generation ago, it was quite common for certain derogatory terms to be used when describing people of certain races and ethnic backgrounds. In the course of the last 20 or 30 years there’s been a constant changing of terms in an effort to clarify what you can call a given racial or ethnic group. Oftentimes, this is called political correctness, a term which itself is decidedly not politically correct. Of course, the goal of all of this is to get people away from seeing others as the terrifyingly, different “other” in order to see how all of humanity is connected. The difficulty has been when it becomes obvious that there are legitimate differences in the way two different groups of people look and do things. In other words, regardless of how hard I concentrate on the similarities, the life-experiences I have and the morals and values I have imprinted on me are different than what someone growing up in the inner city of a major metropolitan area has. For instance, I often laugh at people who turn on car alarms in this town. Do we have a rash of car theft taking place in our tiny little town? When I look at the cars whose alarms are going off, I quite often see an Illinois license plate. I have to admit that my first thought is that the person must be from Chicago and hasn’t quite figured out that there’s no need for a car alarm in Ames.

There are other several areas of life where our experience and culture make it difficult to live next door to someone different. Quite often, we are then called to live out the moral precept of tolerance. I’m supposed to be tolerant of the guy who leaves his car alarm on because he was raised believing that’s essential and he’s supposed to be tolerant of me when I wear my priest clothes across campus on my way to an IRB meeting. Tolerance is, in some ways, a very useful attribute toward morally neutral things. A girl from small town Iowa who believes there are two types of music: country and western, comes to college in part to learn how to be tolerant of other people’s music and cultural traditions.

The problem I have with tolerance is when it comes to morals. We are told that we need to be tolerant of other people’s attitudes and behaviors when it comes to sex, money, and politics. And, ironically enough, this gospel is often used to substantiate this attitude of tolerance. I, however, don’t believe we are using it correctly when we do. Jesus is teaching in the Temple area. Let’s not forget that this is taking place in the Temple because I think it’s crucial. He is teaching his followers and probably reaching out to others to convert them. In the midst of this, the scribes and Pharisees bring him a guilty woman. They ask him to be the judge in her case. According to the law, she deserves to be killed because she was caught committing adultery. But, the Roman guards, who are watching from a high watch-tower close by, believe they are the only ones who are allowed to carry out the death sentence. In some way, Jesus can’t answer correctly. If he gives the scribes and Pharisees the order to kill her, he will likely be killed by the Romans for disobedience. If he says to turn her over to them, he would have basically been acknowledging to them that he is not the Messiah as they expect him to be who has come to overthrow human power and they would have killed him for blasphemy then and there.

In a move reminiscent of Solomon, Jesus says that they can kill her but the one of them who has no sin should be the one to cast the first stone. Of course, they all judge themselves as having sinned and walk away leaving her alone. But, this is not a lesson in tolerance. If it were, the story would have ended there with the lesson learned. What happened next is crucial. Jesus turns and asks where they have all gone and she says they all left. He then gives her something that the others didn’t even get: forgiveness. “Go and from now on do not sin anymore.” It’s a lesson in repentance and forgiveness not in merely allowing an adulteress to continue sinning and learning how to put up with her. It’s about getting her to reform her life and seek a life of holiness.

Let’s be honest, each of us could be in the same place as the woman for something that we’ve done. We all have events and actions in our lives that we keep hidden away because we are ashamed of them. We’ve learned to tolerate them because it’s easier to do that then to go and sin no more. It could be something as major as adultery or an addiction to pornography and masturbation or something as small as gossip and telling lies. Whatever it is, we should feel jolted today by Jesus to reconcile ourselves to the church and go and sin no more.

St. Joseph Day

For all of you who aren't particularly Irish and who kind of feel both like you don't particularly care about St. Patrick's day and/or the Irish in general, today is the feast of St. Joseph. In the Catholic Church, you might consider the anti-Irish celebration. It's claimed by the Germans, Itialians, Poles, and others who basically got tired of the Irish polluting rivers and making a fool out of themselves two days before.

I heard a great presentation on St. Joseph when I was visiting my good friend Fr. Henry Huber in North Central Iowa where he is pastor of six parishes. He does something called 13 hours involving prayer, reconciliation, and catechesis. The person doing the catechesis talked about St. Joseph, mostly in the context of the Old Testament patriarch Joseph. she really did a great job. There was only one thing with which I kind of disagreed.

She assumed that St. Joseph died surrounded by Jesus and Mary who mourned his loss. Of course, scripture is silent on the matter. Yet, I have often thought that it's possible Joseph died without understanding Jesus' ministry at all. In the gospel of Luke, there's a story of Jesus bar mitzvah where he is found in the Temple by his mother and father. Mary and Joseph ask where he was and he responds, "Didn't you know I'd be in my Father's House?" It then goes on to say, "and Mary kept these things in her heart." Why not Mary and Joseph? What if Joseph's job wasn't to understand Jesus? What if his job was to protect him when he needed to be protected and then get out of the way? I find hope in this St. Joseph because he says that even people who had a close relationship to Jesus may not completely understand how it all works. It doesn't mean we can slack off and not even try. In fact, it should impel us to work even harder knowing that St. Joseph is helping us to know as much as we can about the mystery of Jesus' salvation.

Did the Father learn a lesson?

It's spring break here at Iowa State so I knew that the crowd would be almost entirely "the converted". That heavily shaped this homily.

My Dear brothers and Sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Sprit. So, great! I get to preach on a gospel that is a part of almost every talk on conversion and/or reconciliation for Christians. This passage of scripture is so often preached that, if you’re like me, all you have to hear is “A man had two sons…” and you kind of glaze over. Maybe you start making your grocery list or asking yourself if you remembered to write in that ATM withdrawal and whether it was for sixty or eighty dollars. Let’s face it, this story is THAT familiar, especially in our modern church. Part of the reason for this is because it kind of typifies the way that most of us envision the God. God is a kind older fatherly-figure who smiles a lot and wants to forgive us even before we ask. And, to be honest, I think a lot of reason for that image comes from this gospel. In every homily I’ve ever heard or preached, God is the forgiving father who welcomes back those of us when we sin both by our actions and by our unwillingness to forgive someone else.

If I may be so bold, I would like to suggest we take a slightly different tack today as we mine the depths of meaning for this story. Rather than ascribe divine attributes to the Father and human attributes to boys, let’s just assume that each of these figures are, in fact, human. Let’s assume for a second that Jesus really was telling us a parable and not a story using different names for definite people. Last Sunday night and Monday, I gathered with our Archbishop in a quarterly priest council meeting. I rather enjoy these get-togethers because it allows me to play some Bridge with his Excellency and be amazed at his technique. On Monday, Monsignor James Barta, another superb Bridge player, presented to us some demographics and population trends for the state of Iowa. Monsignor had us read summaries of several books that have been written about this phenomenon and looked at the census data from 2010 in preparation for the upcoming census this year. One of the trends is that, with the exception of a corridor between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, the population of the rest of the State of Iowa is declining. He then had us look at parish data to see if we had similar phenomena. In other words, if a particular county has lost 50% of it’s population, you would expect the Local Catholic Church to do the same.

The trouble is we’re actually doing much worse than the local population. In most instances, we were 15-20% higher in loss than the county population. In other words, there are a lot of Catholics that aren’t coming to church on Sundays. Big surprise, right? When most priests hear that, we tend to look around at the guy next to us and ask what he’s doing wrong. In other words, we don’t think it’s our parish that has the drop. Or, if we do, it’s not because of us. And, it’s my experience that most parishes have the same attitude toward nearby parishes.

To me, that’s one of the dangers about believing that the Father in this parable is God and we are one of the kids. The truth is, it may be better to think of ourselves as the forgiving parents who have watched several of God’s children leave the house. Sometimes, we let them go because it was clear they had no intention of living a Christian life anyway. They wanted to squander the inheritance of holiness given them in baptism. We pray that someday they will come to their senses and return. In other cases, we saw our people leave the church and didn’t do anything about it because we were intimidated at the prospect of seeming to be judgmental. In either case, I’d like to suggest that we may learn a lesson from the forgiving father about how we are to react when our children leave, because I do think the Father learns something in the gospel today. By all appearances, the Father lets his younger son leave and simply washes his hands of him. He may have been so angry at being asked to cough up his share of the inheritance that he was more than willing to let this ingrate go. Who knows? The only thing I do know is that the Father was so anxious for his son to return that he spotted him while he was still a long way away from home. He was keeping an eye out for his prodigal son and he even joyously ran to welcome him back home. I think the Father might have learned a lesson from his experience with the younger son that influenced the way he treated the rebellion of the older son. He doesn’t just let the older son walk off angry. He goes to meet him too!

As I said before, I imagine we have all experienced prodigal children leave the church and I wish I could be like that loving Father and chase each one of them down to convince them to stay but I can’t. There are too many and I don’t know them all. I believe God calls each of us in the church to be his forgiving parents to reach out to the prodigals among us to help welcome them home.

The story of the prodigal son ends with the father and older son out in the field. The father has made his case that the son should return but we never find out if the elder son actually did. I’d like to believe he did come back because his Father went to him and invited him. Who can you reach out to this week to invite back?

The importance of retreat

This past weekend, I helped lead the Confirmation retreat for our high school students. We started at noon on Saturday and finished up after our 7:00 mass on Sunday. There were a lot of good things that happened there including students opening up to prayer and quiet and getting to know their fellow confirmandi. As I prayed over the readings for the Sunday mass, I realized that it was really appropriate that we were having our retreat. I mean, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John off by themselves to do everything that we hope happens on a retreat. They have an encounter with God through great wisdom figures. And Peter even wants to extend the experience but that's not why Moses and Elijah are there. So, one of the things that I encouraged the people at our rural parish to do was to make some kind of retreat every year.

It occurred to me that we tend to frame things in two types of world view: play and work. And we want to maximize the amount of play in comparison to the amount of work. But, a retreat really is a third category of life: contemplate. If we don't take time to reflect on how our lives are meaningful then life can quickly become meaningless. We need to know how much God, the author of meaning, loves us in order to have God be meaningful.

Welcome Bishop Pates

When I was in seminary, two men were ordained as auxiliary bishops for the Archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis. One of those men was named Richard Pates. I didn't know much about him. From my priest-supervisor, I learned that Bishop Pates had had several assignments in his time as a priest and had proved himself very pastoral throughout them all.

Little did I know that Bishop Pates would be assigned to a neighboring diocese (Des Moines) and would be coming to celebrate mass here for the college students. I'm very excited. There's something exciting about having a successor to the Apostles celebrate mass for you. I hope he helps the Des Moines students feel more connected to the church by visiting them here and hope they take up his offer to pilgrimage to World Youth Day!

From a magazine for liturgy

I'm in the process of preparing a response to an article in a Catholic Liturgy magazine exhorting the need to move toward a new model of church. I usually just laugh at these magazines but I really feel like this type of attitude needs to be addressed. Here's what got my blood boiling...

"...The ongoing process of ecclesial renewal is impoverished when all issues are reduced to one: namely, abortion. I detest this evil because it contradicts the biblical tradition that creation of life is God's business, and humanity is not empowered to interfere in God's business. But the behavior of some in the Christian community on this issue echoes the self-righteousness of the fundamentalist: 'I am right and you are wrong.' This has become such a banner cry for some church leaders that abortion as a pro-life issue is morphing into a pro-fetus movement and the violent rhetoric fuels lynch mob hysteria. This does little to restore respect and confidence in the hierarchy who practiced a different form of pro-choice when they chose to harbor pedophile priests rather than provide pastoral care to sexual abuse victims. voices loud in defense of the unborn but silent in defense of the living whose lives were emotionally aborted in childhood as victims of sex abuse are not grounded in a Christology that teaches a Jesus who never ridicules the violence or injustice he seeks to change. An ecclesiology with a biblically rooted Christology is the tradition that will push a model of church as dysfunctional family to become a model of church as healthy family."

Here are a few of the obvious errors:

1. Saying that the bishops shouldn't make a stand on abortion because of the sexual abuse scandal shows extreme desperation on the part of the author to avoid an issue he doesn't want to deal with. If anything, the bishops need to be encouraged to stand up for those whose lives are being destroyed (the powerless) over those who are choosing an occupation or a "normal life" over life (the powerful).

2. To my knowledge, pro life bishops haven't ever convened a lynch mob and characterizing things like the National Right to Life March as a lynch mob shows that this author has no idea about a largely lay movement in the church.

3. We believe that the fetus is alive. You don't have to choose between advocating for the unborn and the living. This is what philosophers call a false dichotomy.

4. The danger of saying that Jesus never said something is that there's always someone who will point out that he did. Luke 13:34-35 for instance, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling! Behold, your house will be abandoned. (But) I tell you, you will not see me until (the time comes when) you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

I hope to have a complete critique worked up for this particular magazine article by the end of the week and sent off. But I ask for your prayers. It's often hard for me to be charitable in these types of endeavors and I tend to give up easily fearing that I'll come off looking like the jerk. But I think it's important for me to try to articulate a few criticisms so that the publishers may be more hesitant to offer anticlerical rants in the future.

Christ is the man who knew human suffering

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you in fellowship with the Holy Spirit. On Friday night, I had an opportunity to hear Boston College Philosophy professor Peter Kreeft talk in CY Stephens Auditorium on the problem of evil and suffering. To be honest, I wish I would have advertised for it in our bulletin because he did a superb job of articulating what I believe to be the Catholic understanding of evil and pain, an understanding that is also consistent with our readings today.

Part of what Dr. Kreeft was addressing was the relationship of faith with the existence of suffering or how can an all good God exist in a world where there is the evil of pain. Dr. Kreeft talked about four statements from C.S. Lewis that, in the mind of most atheists, cannot all be true. 1 God exists. 2 God is all powerful. 3 God is compassionate. 4 and Suffering exists. If God exists and he is all powerful and compassionate, then we shouldn’t have suffering. If God exists and is compassionate but we have suffering, than he cannot be all powerful. If God exists and he is all powerful and there is evil, than he must not really care about us. And, the atheists favorite, if God must be all powerful and all loving as we Christians believe he is and yet there is still suffering in the world, the suffering for instance of the Jewish people from the first reading who suffered under the Egyptians as slaves, then God must not really exist.

How do we Christians believe in God, believe he is all powerful and all loving and yet explain suffering in the world, whether it be the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti or the suffering of the parents of missing Iowa State student Jon Lacina? The remarkable thing that Dr. Kreeft said was that we cannot know why these things happen. And, in fact, if we did know than it would contradict the very notion of an all powerful God. Suffering is a mystery. We have to trust that, in the end, there is meaning to it even if we don’t know what it is.

As I read over the gospel for today, I couldn’t help but think how true this is. Jesus didn’t run away from suffering. He starved himself for forty days, just like Moses and Elijah had done before him, and he suffered hunger. He walked out into the desert, a place where thieves, the sick, and demons hung out. Even before he began his ministry, he wanted to be with and know the pain and suffering of being in the desert. And, while in the desert, he felt temptation to alleviate his suffering. But, he refused, even when the devil used scripture as a temptation. This man, whose life is nothing but mystery, taught us all about the mystery of suffering, both in life and in death. He taught us about the all powerful God who exists and loves us so deeply that he is willingly enters into the suffering with us, to know it firsthand.

Ash Wednesday

Well, we've arrived at the beginning of the Lenten journey and I find myself reflecting on the ashes. Why do we rub a cross of ashes on our forehead. I think we can sort of decide the meaning since we, Americans, don't really have a tradition of intentionally rubbing dirt on ourselves.

The easiest association is with sacrifice and fasting. That's what we're doing on this Ash Wednesday, after all. But I'd suggest that the very scriptures we read tell us that, if we use it in this manner, we are being hypocritical: seeking to wear the outward sign of humility while proclaiming to everyone that we are the most humble of all.

I think that the point of that ashen cross isn't to proclaim that we are so humble/sacrificial. It's to remind us and everyone that sees it that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. All shall die and all must rely on the mercy of God. That's the real point of the Lenten journey after all. It's not an escapade into self discovery. It's an escapade into discovering God's mercy.

Can you be Catholic and Pro Choice?

For our bulletin, I get to answer questions that my parishioners pose. The above one was posed and here's my answer. In advance, I realize that my part of the answer is short and that I basically answered it by using other people's quotes. But they're great quotes, much better than I could ever do.

No.

Historically, abortion has never been considered morally permissible. In the early church, authors like Athenagoras, Tertullian, Hippolytus, John Crysostom, and others listed it among other serious, grave sins. In fact, up until the last 40 years, no serious Christian group would have ever considered abortion moral. Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical on how it, euthanasia, death penalty, and other threat to life, are having effects in this world. I’d encourage anyone who doesn’t understand the Catholic Church’s consistent ethic of life to read this document called The Gospel of Life.

I found two quotes from other sources that have helped as I approached this question. The first comes from Pope Benedict XVI, “In the radical version of the Enlightenment’s individualistic tendency, abortion appears to be one of the rights of freedom; a woman must be able to have control over herself. She must have the freedom to bring a child into the world or rid herself of it. She must be able to make decisions concerning herself, and nobody else, so we are told, can impose upon her, from without, any ultimately binding norm. It is a matter of the right of self-determination. But, in an abortion, is the woman actually making decisions that concern herself? Is she not in fact making a decision about someone else – deciding that this person should be allowed no freedom, that she sphere of freedom – his life – should be taken away because it is in competition with her own freedom? And thus we should ask: What kind of a freedom is this that numbers among its rights that of abolishing right from the start?”

(Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions pps. 245-246 c. 2004 Ignatius Press)

Also, from Mother Teresa, "America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters" And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."

(Mother Theresa, “Notable and Quotable”, in Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14)

Holiness not the same as happiness

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and peace to you in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the SpiritI hope that you all receive some token of the Love during this Valentine’s Day/weekend. It’s good to feel loved, isn’t it? I know that one of the most exciting and hopefully parts of my ministry here at St. Thomas is being able to celebrate a wedding with a couple and watch them celebrate their love for each other. It just sort of warms your heart to hear them profess their love for each other and know that the love you are witnessing is God himself uniting them together.

In a past assignment, I used to do something else that warmed my heart, celebrating mass for Catholic grade school children. It was always an exciting and loud experience for me. However, around this time of year, Fr. Dennis would kind of become Father Downer. I would start talking to them about sin and how the children should look out for their neighbor. I remember being approached by a mother after a mass who asked a question that I think many parents can sympathize with. She said that she knew kids have a really tough time with self-esteem issues and so she was always trying to affirm her daughter and let her know how special she was but that she also knew that there were times when the gospel seemed to indicate that that was not exactly the right attitude to have, gospels like today for instance.

Because, let’s face it, this is a really hard gospel. You can overcontextualize the message by saying that the Gospel of Matthew adds “in spirit” to the first beatitude, thus making it a statement all about the spiritual realm. We should be spiritually poor. In other words, we shouldn’t become so dependent on our wealth that it becomes our god. But, Luke is different. He only has four blesseds; the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and those who are hated and persecuted but has contrary “woes” for each of these.

In some ways, the real challenge from this gospel to us today is that we have become a little too…accepted. We think that the whole point of religion should be to make us feel good about ourselves, to make us feel happy. But, happiness is not synonymous with holiness. And, the gospel challenges those of us who are the most comfortable. It’s easy to see how the poor, hungry, weeping, and despised of the world are suffering like Christ suffered. How are we who are sitting in our comfortable apartments, dorm rooms, and houses suffering? How are we preparing for the Kingdom of heaven if we have heaven on earth?

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, a time in which we Catholics tend to reflect on the areas of our life that are broken, whether that be instances of sin in our life or times when we have taken for granted the gifts God has given us. I invite each of you to take some time this week before Ash Wednesday to really think about what specific act you are going to do as a Lenten observance. Don’t just make it some arbitrary exercise of giving something up in order to feel better about yourself. Instead, do something that will help you understand the suffering of Christ better by becoming poor, hungry, sorrowful, or persecuted. And don’t do it for some great earthly reward or recognition. Your reward will be great in heaven.

Love means being willing to speak the hard truths

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the prophetic power of the Spirit be with you. This Sunday’s gospel is a continuation on last Sunday’s gospel. Last Week, Jesus walked into his hometown and went immediately to the synagogue. He reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” As Jesus sat down to preach, he gave one of the shortest homilies in the history of organized religion, “Today, this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” This Sunday’s Gospel starts right up from that point and focuses on what happens next in the Synagogue.

It reminded me of a somewhat popular show on television now, especially popular among social scientists. The show is called “Intervention” and the premise of the show is that someone has become so addicted to some substance that they need their friends and family members to intervene for them in order to get them so they aren’t addicted. I’ve actually only seen one episode of this show involving someone hooked on huffing aerosol from computer dusting cans. One of the things they did on the show was show you just how addiction changes a person. The addict in the show I watched was a good student who seemed to have her whole life together until she got addicted to this drug. Then, it changed her. She let her whole life revolve around looking for the cans of aerosol and it affected her appearance, attention, speech and every other part of her life. It was hard for me to believe that it took the friends and family of this beautiful woman created in the image and likeness of God so long to do this, that they watched her spiral downward so that she was begging for food until they actually had the intervention.

Jesus in the Temple sort of has to do an intervention for the people there. His fame has spread everywhere as a miracle worker and, as he gets home, he probably thinks that he can start to tell them the central core of why he’s really there. He even goes to the heart of local religion, the synagogue, to do this. But, instead of being surrounded by serious religious folk who wanted to know what was really going on, instead of hearing the same faith statement that Simon Peter would eventually make, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Most High”, they turn to him to keep doing the healings and mighty acts that he has already done. And, when he tells them that he won’t, they get angry and threaten to kill him. Yet, Jesus was trying to tell them about how he had fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy by doing those healings, not just keep doing them.

There are times in our lives when we have to speak hard truths to people who would rather just have a good time, times of intervention. And, it’s much easier to just ignore these times and pretend that nothing is wrong. But, when we were baptized, we became part of the body of Christ and were called to be a prophet for the world. The prophetic role is first and foremost one of love, the love that Paul was talking about in the second reading today. It’s a love that is willing to tell a friend that he can’t hit his girlfriend. It’s a love that is willing to tell someone who has had too much to drink that she shouldn’t drive. And it’s a love that asks for the help of counselors, family, and friends when someone is addicted to drugs and alcohol. It’s not easy and, as we saw in the gospel, we can probably expect anger on the part of the person who needs the intervention. But, to paraphrase what St. Paul said in that second reading; When we were children, we used to talk like children, think like children, reason like children; when we became adults, we put aside childish things. Part of being an adult, part of being a prophet is being willing to lovingly help someone whose life is out of control.