I am a sucker for many things. I love videos of soldiers coming home and surprising their kids; I’ll always stop for a lemonade stand that kids are running; and military honors at the end of funerals always get me. Another phenomenon that has begun to pull on my heartstrings in recent years is the star athlete/performer/musician finally getting the long sought-after feather in their cap. Seeing a ballplayer perform incredibly well for years on a terrible team, and then finally get to ride off into the sunset with a World Series ring is one of the things that makes me believe in goodness in the world. It speaks to the communitarian nature of teamwork; one man does not a team make, and they won’t go very far without everyone working together towards the same goal. Click on title for full column.
Saturday, October 15 is the feast day of St. Teresa of Jesus (or often referred to as Teresa of Avila). Through a roundabout manner, Our Lady of Guadalupe led me to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Carmelite Spirituality. Carmel has been answering many questions of my soul. It has helped me to see how to walk the narrow path with our Lord. I still have a lot to learn, and I am thankful to follow wherever our Blessed Mother leads me. In thanksgiving for all that Carmel has done for me and in honor of St. Teresa of Jesus’ feast day, I’d like to share some books that I am currently reading or have found fruitful (the list is in no particular order). Most of these are Carmel related, but not all. Any primary source Carmelite text, I recommend ICS Publications. Click on title for full column.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a rule follower, but I would say that my motives in following rules is usually less than completely honorable. A significant chunk of why I try to follow practices and procedures is because I hope it will protect me in the long term if someone takes issue with what I did; it’s always helpful to be able to point at the rulebook and say that I did what I was supposed to do. So I wonder what the mental process was for the lepers who were cleansed in the Gospel today when they realized that they had been healed on their way to show the priests. On the one hand, how could they not go back and give thanks to Jesus for healing them miraculously? But then again, He was the one who told them to go and show themselves to the priests,so shouldn’t they follow His orders? Click on title for full column.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, “Man adapts to anything, the scoundrel,” and I have found that to be true on numerous levels. In terms of the difficulties we can overcome and the struggles we adapt to, the human spirit is remarkable in its ability to quickly go from a task or situation being unbearable to it being just part of the job. The first time I looked at a finance report after I became pastor, I almost had a panic attack and crumpled into a pile of indecision. Now, I skim them for three minutes before finance meetings start and feel more than prepared to discuss the minutia of where money in the parish is going. That speaks to the indomitability of the human spirit. Less savory is the way we quickly become accustomed to incredible blessings that we should never stop thanking God for, and soon enough take them completely for granted. I do my best to offer prayers of thanksgiving after Mass and after receiving Holy Communion, but I still often find myself rushing off after Mass to the next thing/meeting/crisis. To allow the sacred to seem mundane in our hearts is a true tragedy and one that we must constantly be on guard against. Click on title for full column.
As some of you may know, the Catholic Church in the United States has recently entered into a multi-year Eucharistic revival aimed at reinvigorating our Faith in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. It is a great example of a core belief of the Church that we should reflect on every day but that can also use a tune-up every so often. Just as we should seek to enter more deeply into a life of prayer each day, it does us good to go on a retreat in order to get an additional boost. Click on title for full column.
A few months after I started my first assignment, I got a call on the non-emergency line from a family that had some big stuff going on that they wanted to process as a family. They were excited, nervous, and pretty much every other emotion on the spectrum, and they called me because they thought it would be nice to have one of their parish priests around to pray with them as everybody talked through important vocational stuff. I told them I’d be there, and when we got off the phone, I stared out the window for a few moments and thought about how much I love being a priest, precisely because of moments like that one. Getting called into moments when people see their need for God’s grace is what it’s all about. Click on title for full column.
This bulletin column covers everything from chairs to parishioners heading on mission to Mexico City. Those things go together, right? Definitely. Click on title for full column.
Hello friends, I fear that I don’t have the deepest of thoughts for you on this week’s Gospel, but hopefully I’ll have put something together by the time I have to preach. I do, however, have two things that I’d like you to pray about and consider, one big and one small. Click title for full column.
It is a natural human tendency to fight to be first. It manifests itself in many different ways, but perhaps my favorite is the relatively new option of ordering food ahead through apps and skipping the line. I’ve never done drugs, but I can’t imagine it’s better than the feeling of walking past six people waiting in line at Dunkin’ and grabbing my pre-ordered coffee off the counter and walking out smugly. I may well do time in purgatory for how much I enjoy it, frankly. Which is why Jesus’ words in the Gospel today should give us pause and invite us to step back and think about how we approach our relationship with the world around us. Click title for full column.
As we are about one month into our new Parish Family arrangement, I believe now is a good time to step back and look at where we are, where we’re going, and what we’ve learned so far. The stated goal of Beacons of Light is to unify Families of Parishes into one parish and one pastor, even if multiple campuses are kept open. We are in the early stages now of learning the differences between how our parishes do things like sacramental prep, handling intake for different things when people call the office, and even administrative responsibilities. It’s a lot to process, for sure, but we will get there. As we continue this process, we will also start moving the parish councils toward a unified body that can deliberate and discern together on issues that impact all of us and our shared future. Click on title for full column.
There are few worse feelings in the world than being caught unprepared for something important: showing up underdressed, or forgetting to do an assignment and not realizing it until class starts, or the family you’re house sitting for coming back early and you haven’t cleaned yet, etc. It makes one feel helpless, and I’ve spent much time kicking myself in these and other awkward situations. Yet none of them are on the level of what Jesus warns us about in the Gospel today when He speaks of the Kingdom of God being at hand and what we must do to be prepared. The thought of not being ready for the Lord’s second coming is the ultimate example of being caught off guard. Jesus speaks about the need for the master of the house to be watchful and the consequences for the faithless servant who did not follow his master’s wishes, but we all hear a call to prepare our own hearts. Click on title for full column.
Today marks the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who has long been one of my favorites, though the reasons for that have changed somewhat over the years. When I was in college, I read his autobiography and was impressed by both his zeal and the way he used knowledge of self to deduce his call to holiness and see more clearly the places where God was working (and not working) in his life. It’s fairly short, if you’re looking for some beach reading. While those aspects of St. Ignatius’ life still appeal to me, I turn to him more often now in search of understanding how he went about such a massive undertaking in the midst of what must have been great discouragement. Click on title for full column.
One of my professional side interests is ice breaker type conversations and activities. I’m not necessarily the best at them, but since there are many times when I have to get to know people quickly in semi-awkward situations, I definitely have my go-to tactics. One of my favorites is to propose a mundane category, come up with examples within that category, and then make a bracket to determine the best whatever it is you’re arguing about. Take chairs, for example. Rocking chairs are the best, and Adirondack chairs are the worst, hands down.The other chestnut I lean on is almost the opposite: come up with a list of things the group hates, and then fiercely debate on which one is the worst. If you don’t know the other people in the group beforehand, you certainly will afterwards. Click on title for full column.
To be perfectly honest with all of you, the implementation of Beacons of Light has frequently put a spotlight on my inadequacies, at least for myself. I’m hopeful that most of you aren’t out there thinking about all the things I’m not great at, but I definitely find myself reflecting on them regularly. I’m sure that if the muckety-mucks in charge of all this were to read this they would feed me a line about how I’ll be fine, and I’ll get through it, and so on and so forth, but there’s times when I question whether or not I’m the man for the job. I bring this up not to go fishing for compliments and reassurance, but because I think there’s a powerful way that this connects to the lesson we learn from Our Lord in this week’s Gospel. Click on title for full column.
It has become incredibly cliché to point out how polarized the society in which we live has become. Everyone has heard it a thousand times, and I certainly don’t mean to diminish it, because it’s true. But it would be a mistake to believe that this is the only time in human history that it has become more or less impossible for neighbors to function together. The Parable of the Good Samaritan that we hear today illustrates how the inability to look past our tribalism or biases stunts our capacity to live as Christians. Click on title for full column.
Each of my assignments as a priest has come with apprehension, though somewhat different in how that nervousness bubbled up. When I was first assigned as a vicar at St. Ignatius, I had already moved my stuff out of the seminary to my home parish weeks earlier, and was chomping at the bit to get started. I had six weeks off to enjoy being a brand new priest and travel around to parishes where I had lived and say Masses all over creation. I hit the ground running, and life was the fun sort of chaotic. Becoming a pastor so quickly didn’t deter me too much, and even though my moving in process was stalled by preparing the rectory (and having my banjo stolen…) I was determined to do everything in my power to be absolutely everywhere in my three new parishes. I wanted people to get sick of seeing me, and then see me some more. I quickly started to run into the hard differences between being a vicar at one parish and being a pastor of three. It really took it out of me, and I wondered if I had what it takes. Click on title for full column.
One of the things I have repeatedly had to learn in my life at every stage is that people always respond better if they know they are cared for. As a catcher on numerous baseball teams, the pitchers had to know that they could trust me and I wanted them to succeed before I could yell at them, since, as we all know, pitchers are prima donnas. If they didn’t believe that I cared about them, it became harder to get on the same page and succeed together. The same is true of engaged couples I work with, people in the confessional, staff, volunteers, the whole gang. If, as a pastor, people don’t think I care about them, then I am a resounding gong, a clashing cymbal. The whole thing falls apart without love and respect. Click on title for full column.
Like most people, I sometimes find myself completely overwhelmed because I catch myself thinking too many steps ahead. When I start down the road of thinking about Beacons of Light and what the next five years might look like, I quickly branch off into the thirty-one categories that the Archdiocese has given us and the ten-thousand things that I am worrying about at any given moment. I would be better off, as would pretty much everyone, if I remembered Our Lord’s wisdom in saying, “Sufficient for a day are its own troubles.” Do what you can to grow in holiness and help others grow in holiness today, and maybe tomorrow we will see things differently. Click on title for full column.
TOTUS TUUS (Totally Yours) TOTUS TUUS (Totally Yours), a parish mission for youth, is coming to Our Lady of the Rosary the week of July 17-22, 2022. Click on title for full column.
