On the Margins: Articles

"What you have" from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2011-12-08T09:41:00.000-08:00

From the October 2011 issue of Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

What you have

I unlocked the red steel doors of our parish building last Christmas morning, noticing a special holiday silence on the streets. The business executives were safely tucked in the suburbs and the night clubbers were sleeping off a Christmas Eve drunk. Only the drug dealers were roaming the city streets in the early hours on Christmas morning. More people purchase illegal drugs during the holidays because people have to spend more time with their families, I guess. I did notice one thing as I unlocked the panic bar of one of the heavy doors. A man was sleeping next to the door near the corner of the building. He was covered with blankets to protect him from the Christmas rain. However, his face was uncovered. I did not recognize him and there was no reason to wake him up and have him move from that spot. So I went back into the chapel to prepare for our simple Christmas Mass.

As the Eucharist ended, I processed outside to greet the humble assembly on the sidewalk. I noticed that my sleeping friend was awake with his belongings piled up and covered with plastic near the wall. He was bearded and exceptionally tall. He noticed me and I felt his energy standing behind some parishioners I was greeting. He approached me bashfully; his head swaggering from sided to side. He said to me, “ I hope you don’t mind, but I stood in the lobby and listened for about five minutes.” I immediately assured him this is the very reason why we are here on this corner. I then stopped listening. I started telling him that we were closed and would not open for clothing and supplies until after the New Year. He put up his hand to stop me. “No”, he inserted, “I am not here for clothing, I am here for what you have inside now. What do you call the service today?”

I was completely taken aback. I felt red embarrassment dance on my face. I was so quick to judge, so sure I was correct. Then I realized I had to explain what we have inside. I fumbled to explain the Eucharist, the God-made-flesh, the Christmas miracle among the marginalized of the city.

As I reflect on the Christmas scriptures again, his piercing question still unsettles me. I take what we have inside for granted. I now have a new sensitivity for people seeking God and who long for the simplest of praying communities. I was also tied up with my own Christmas loneliness, the holiday haze that still covers my heart and perspective on Christmas morning. His statement snapped me out of my holiday selfishness.

Christmas morning is time for John the Baptist’s testimony to the Light. Every parish community must give testimony to God even though we are exhausted trying to meet everyone’s spiritual expectations. Every worshiping assembly should stop mid-Christmas Eve and find the silence to understand what we are doing in our churches and try to articulate what we have. We have the Word becoming flesh even among the scraggly-bearded and the foul breathed. We have treasures of college students back home only going to church so to keep peace in the family. We need to feed people not only with the Bread of Heaven but also with words of welcome and actions of true acceptance. We need to sort out our disappointments and get over our hurts before we preside at the Eucharist or lead the tired, elderly choir. We have so much of what really matters.

Every worshipping assembly in every corner of the earth proclaims God’s saving power. Every corner may include a man tucked under a bridge or sleeping in the church entryway. Every corner may include a veteran just home from war and full of anxiety to be in a crowded church on Christmas morning. Every corner should include the lonely heart of the priest and the grief of a new widower sitting in the last pew of the assembly. Every corner may include the angry preteen that only wants acceptance from her parents after telling them of her first sexual encounter. Every corner may include the new gay couple that started coming to Mass after a friend’s suicide. These are the corners of the world in need on Christmas morning. People want so much of what we have but we do not see the miracles.

When I open the doors this Christmas morning, I will remember my friend from last year. I am sure I will not see him. I will be reminded of him when I meet the next stranger and invite him to join us inside the chapel. I will invite him to stay beyond five minutes and experience the treasure of all we possess inside our small community of people who believe God-with-us.

Competing Voices from Ministry and Liturgy September 2011

2011-11-11T08:36:00.000-08:00

Competing Voices

I learn the deep meaning of Advent from people who hear voices all during the year. For many people who experience lifelong mental illness, sorting out the voice of hope and love during the holidays becomes very challenging. Last Advent, I spent some intentional time with several people who regularly teach me the complexities of living in our culture and struggling to hear the voice of God.

The paradoxes between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day are legion. Last year on the day after Thanksgiving, the local news stations were reporting that the advertisements in the Oregonian newspaper weighed four and a half pounds. We were all expected to begin the season listening to the voice of consumerism, carrying the heavy load of a newspaper and the burden of purchasing gifts for loved ones. People living in poverty show me the problem of such expectations. Most people cannot afford such gifts. More importantly, most people suffering mental illness do not have loved ones to buy a gift for in the first place. Many families disown their members with chronic mental illness. Other families may be more supportive, but mental illness itself may cause a son or daughter, parent or spouse to break off contact completely. People living on the streets or in low-income housing have little family support and few friends.

I listen to the voice of the Advent gospels with a new ear. I hear the adult voice of Jesus telling us to be watchful and alert. These words get wrapped around much apprehension for many people who hear voices telling them that they are not worthy of Jesus. So many people become agitated and anxious because they feel they do not live up to Jesus’ standard already. Hearing the voice of Jesus in Advent becomes difficult when people already live with a deep sense of unworthiness and depression. The voice of the beloved Savior eludes so many people.

John the Baptist cries out from the desert to prepare us for Christ’s second coming. His clear and sharp voice may also be interpreted in many other ways. For many people who suffer from post-trauma related conditions, John’s voice may bring much fear to their lives. They clench their muscles and cringe when a sudden voice calls out in the night or when there is a knock on the door. I learn to turn down the volume of John’s insistency to straighten up our lives. John wears minimal clothing and eats little food as do so many people who already live outside and survive the cold nights.

Advent articulates the many competing voices of despair and hope, darkness and light, loneliness and communion. These are the mix of emotions so many families face in preparing for the holidays and the coming of Christ. These are the voices our parish communities must help people discern and sort through. We need so desperately to find the voice of God in our lives and parishes. So many people long to sort through the competing and complicated voices that shout that purchasing material things will make us all happy. We need to help people find life amid the overwhelming expectations that every person is happy, joyful and fulfilled in every way. We must sort out for our children their ingrained sense of entitlement that they deserve every toy, gadget and European trip during the holiday season. This is the real work of our worshipping communities during the time between Thanksgiving and the end of the Christmas season.

A twenty-something college graduate stood in line to be anointed after Mass during Advent. I had spoken to him only one time before. He told me that his mental illness was getting worse. He stood in front of me sobbing, leaning his head on my shoulder. I tried with all my faith to find the words of an angel that greeted Mary “Do not be afraid.” So many people are unable to receive the consoling voices of scripture when the many voices inside them are so convincing. The message of fearlessness must be interpreted in every parish community in so many different ways during the Advent season. We all need the many angels of consolation and hope.

Last year at the conclusion of the Advent season, I noticed a sign posted in our parish office window. “On Wednesday, December 23 we will be distributing sleeping bags and backpacks.” I stood before the sign and started to cry. The sign was a reminder of how people were going to spend Christmas, alone in the cold. However, I was also grateful for the small step to provide something warm for people. Advent and life come wrapped in many unfortunate realities amid God’s voice of love.

The Glittered Dead from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2011-08-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

The Glittered Dead

Published September 2011 Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

November in particular exposes memories of the dead. The liturgy celebrates what so many people experience out of doors as seasons change, that life itself gives way to death. The celebration of All Saints and All Souls opens a flood of recollections of the dead. As days get shorter our memories become more intense. The holidays become tender experiences for so many people unable to face the death of loved ones. Love is an incredible bond but so are guilt, regret and shame.

I realized this tension among people who straddle love and regret in the passing of a loved-one some years ago. Members of a family entered my office to prepare a memorial service for a relative. I noticed immediately hardened tension among the living. Each person told me that he or she was closer to the unmarried deceased man than the other relatives. The niece of the gentleman claimed to know him the best. The son raged against her claiming his spot among his father’s affection. The unnamed issues continued to do battle in the confines of my office space.

As the day for the funeral arrived, I felt the tension at peak level. However, what caught my attention before the funeral were the arrangements of funeral flowers that had been delivered to the church. A large colored ribbon flowed out of each traditional display of autumn chrysanthemums and long gladiolas. A word appeared on each ribbon describing the relationship between the person who purchased the flowers and the deceased, -“father”, “uncle” and “cousin”. Each name on the ribbon was written in glue and colored in glitter. The arguments over who was the most important heir continued over which floral design was most expensive and which ribbon carried the largest glittered name.

As I reflect on the gospels for the closing weeks of the liturgical year, I examine the priorities Jesus wants to instill within our discipleship. Jesus insists that the light of the Kingdom will shine brighter among the peacemakers, the poor in spirit and people who mourn humbly in the face of death. My experience teaches me that we need to give people the tools to mourn their losses and grieve prayerfully throughout life. The battles that were exposed during this family’s funeral tell me that we all struggle with our finite existence on earth. So many people are reluctant to believe they have a place in heaven and that relationships on earth can ever be healed, loved and forgiven.

Jesus reminds us that we need to be wise in our preparations for the Bridegroom. My ministry teaches me that we have lost sight of our basic belief that death gives way to life. Many families no longer celebrate funerals. Instead, “Celebration of life” parties have taken the place of the funeral liturgy. A local funeral home has been in business for 160 years. The owner recently remodeled the former chapel to act as a party room instead. Video screens, a grand piano and banquet tables have replaced the pulpit, pipe organ and pews. So many people coming to the funeral do not want any physical evidence of religion, ceremony or ritual. Party planners are replacing funeral directors. The wisdom of God’s invitation is replaced with our human control over how death will be celebrated on earth.

Jesus also tells us that in the end only a few things will be required of us. The kingdom will be offered to those who simply feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the prisoner and clothe the naked. As believers we will find our true light when we offer service to one another. The person on earth with least influence is our key to heaven. This is the hidden grace of our faith. The Kingdom is open for us who are willing to sit with the dying who make us uncomfortable. The Promised Land is prepared for us who see Christ amid hardship, loneliness, imprisonment and hunger. Christ’s words are clear and challenging, yet our fear of death and our guilt over how we live remain so unyielding. We do not serve people in order to inherit their earthly goods after they die. We serve people in order to discover our true home in heaven and real love now on this earth.

I remember cleaning up glitter for weeks after that funeral. Celebrating each Mass during that time period I saw a speckle or two of glitter somewhere in the sanctuary. I claimed again the family in prayer at the sight of each sparkle. During the month of November, every parish community is invited into people’s memories of the dead. We all minister among arguments and hurt feelings around death so that we may encourage families that our differences will be sorted out in love.

"Lost Among Translations" from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2011-07-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

Published in Ministry and Liturgy Magazine June/July 2011

Lost Among Translations

Last autumn I attended the annual priest convocation for the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Most of the agenda was focused on the new translation of the Roman Missal. We gathered in a familiar setting near the ocean and the structure of the week was similar to previous years. I overheard many priests express their anxiety about the new translation and how it would be received in their parishes. I heard many others speaking of the week simply as a time to relax and talk with one another. The view of the ocean through the window that led to the meeting room seemed a compelling enough reason to me to be present at the convocation.

We did receive an education about the translation of the Roman Missal. We listened to words of many of the presider’s prayers and people’s responses. We discussed our responsibility for implementing the changes. We discussed the need for more education about the liturgy in every worshipping community. However, these are not the issues that I found powerful and provocative about the meeting.

We adjourned for a fifteen-minute break after the last session on the new translation of the liturgy. The meeting then turned quickly to another topic. We reconvened to learn more about the dire topic of human trafficking. The sex trade in Portland is so bad that city officials asked the Archbishop if they could address all the priests of the Archdiocese. Portland is the place for pimps. The sex trade has found its home along the Interstate 5 freeway because Portland is readily accessible to Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. We learned how easily young high school girls are solicited in our local suburban malls by conniving johns. Pimps lure teenage girls into prostitution who seem timid or shy, who wander the mall looking lost, forgotten and in need of attention. These men may find such girls after school walking alone in a mall or a city sidewalk. Most often the young girls do not get along with their parents. They are easy targets for a john who promises freedom from parental authority, offers many material possessions and entices her with a chance to travel.

It took me more than a few minutes to make the mental transition from the Roman Missal to local prostitution. I could not comprehend the vulnerability of these young women and the brutality of their johns. In stunned silence we viewed a PowerPoint presentation on prostitution. The attention of every person in the room was directed on the horrifying statistics of poverty, neglect, abuse and prostitution. I realized during that meeting with my fellow priests how many people are lost amidst our inability to translate our faith into the real issues of life.

As we reflect on the liturgical gospels for the Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time until the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, I understand once again the connection of translating the gospel message into the messiness of real life. People need a second chance from the landowner who wants to hire workers for the vineyard. Those of us who listen to the gospels every weekend in the comfort of our sanctuaries must be able to welcome people who come to faith even in the eleventh hour. The addict from the suburbs speaks to me on the phone because he wants yet another chance to keep his children after experiencing a weekend blackout. God’s invitation supersedes our rigid rules and certain limits about who is worthy to receive a daily wage. The last will be first and the first will be last.

I hear the gospel of the son hesitating to work in the vineyard when I experience my own uncertainty accepting the smelly veteran or the woman who has stolen from us. I cannot put limits on people’s response to God and to the invitation to believe in miracles. Our worshipping communities must not write off people we label as lost, mentally ill, dirty, abused or people who just feel they do not belong. Everyone belongs within the mercy of God even when we wait until the eleventh hour to believe in God’s invitation.

Jesus tells us that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God ahead of other people. I see this with my own eyes in our parish community. The lives of the marginalized and destitute form our humble worship every day. This is the real, honest and genuine translation of the liturgy that our faith must be lived in real life. I realize my hesitancy to accept the girl who continues to cut her self and the one-tooth man with halitosis. Even when I am most tired, I hold on the holy words of Jesus to believe that God still loves our broken world.

The real translation of the Mass in every generation invites every person to the feast. From the byroads of Interstate 5 to the back roads of city alleys, the feast is always ready for everyone to attend. We gather with friends and strangers alike, filling our sanctuaries. The liturgy sends us out into the world to translate bread and wine into the living Body of Christ.

Advent: A housing project from Celebrate Magazine 2010

2011-06-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

Published from Celebrate! Magazine 2010

Advent: A housing project

My parents decided to sell our family home in Edwardsburg, Michigan the year after I was ordained a priest. Even though I had not lived in the cozy house for ten years prior to that decision, the news of my parents’ move devastated me. I was an adult having made decisions about my future, but my past seemed to be slipping out from under me. This charming white, renovated home sitting on the edge of Garver Lake was not just a commodity; it felt as if it were at the core of my identity.

I did not realize the emotional power of this piece of land and the house with the open view to the lakefront until I visited my parents just before they sold our home. I walked into the familiar setting to see cardboard boxes being filled with family heirlooms, everyday items and simple gifts I had given them. I saw antiques that my mother and I purchased at flea-markets through the years being carefully stored in bubble-wrap. The setting in which I felt safe, comfortable and protected from the world was being torn up and being sold to strangers.

I felt so alone walking through once-familiar rooms. I strolled through the home one last time before saying goodbye to my past and my parents. I ambled out of the house being stripped of so much of what I thought was important. Part of my angst was that I was being transferred for the first time as a new priest to a different state in the western part of the country. Not only could I not visit my old house, I would be living even further from my folks.

I stood on the driveway looking back at the house and wept like a baby. My mother held me and I felt my father’s arm on my back. This moment was a clear transition into adulthood. There was no going back on my decisions or my parents’ choices. At that moment I was a lost child, a homeless adult.

I remember my fear on the driveway especially during another transition into a new liturgical year. I hear the gospel writer Luke tell us again that people were speaking of the temple adorned with costly stones and votive offerings. Jesus explains that a day will come when there will not be one stone left on another at the temple site. I can imagine the fear people felt hearing these words. The temple was a place of security, community and faith. The panic of change overwhelmed many believers. Saying goodbye to my family home that last day crushed many stones in my memory of what I thought was secure.

As Advent unleashes its prophets’ voices, I hear Jesus spearheading the end of time. He commands our wakefulness. He cuts our ties on earth telling us that two men will be out in a field, one will be taken and one will be left. Two women grinding at the mill will be separated, one taken and one left. If the master of the house would have known when the thief was coming, he could have saved the home from robbery.

Panic must have been written on their foreheads and fear inscribed in their hearts. The one who was to come, the Messiah, first separates us from people we love. I still sleep with one eye open remembering the day that Jesus invited me to let go of the home of my youth.

John the Baptist insists that good fruit must be born in us from our change of hearts. This conversion remains costly as we try to adjust our attitudes about our human priorities and cling to God alone. The Advent wake-up call challenges even the most dedicated believer and the most sophisticated parish assembly to let go of earthly ties of safety and familiarity. This challenge for every individual and community comes at the time of year when we prefer to focus on our cultural nests of financial security, family relationships, warm memories and stable futures.

As I got into the car at my parents’ old house after saying goodbye, I wondered why I was really leaving. I questioned God’s plan for me to move, to live a vocation that would always separate me from my family and my past. I hear again in Advent the reasons for my growing up.

John the Baptist’s followers see that Jesus is healing the sick, getting the lame back on their feet and cleansing the lepers of all disease. They witnessed deaf people hearing and friends being raised from the dead. Jesus also preached news that the poor should always be housed in our concern and love.

I left the security of my childhood home to find my real shelter in God. Finding my life in God enables me to provide a home for others. Now I experience the need for people suffering poverty to always have good news preached to them. I see in other adults the devastation of childhood abuse and the deep grooves of generational poverty and loss. I let go of my childish ways to teach the illiterate, welcome the outcast and befriend the sinner.

Advent calls every worshipping community into adulthood. Our faith cannot remain in cozy corners of sentimentality or in rooms locked in the past. Our common faith is not a dusty antique packed away in our history. God calls our generation to open our eyes to people suffering mental illness and those who make their homes on the streets. We must show our children the real reasons why the Church exists. Advent calls us again to step into the unknown, to cling to God and to embrace people living on our cultural margins.

I celebrate now the gift of being an adult and leaving my hometown so many years ago. I still miss my deceased parents every day and I hold tight to the support they instilled in me as I left home.

As we enter into a new year of grace, some memories still stick to the pavement of our family’s former home. However, now as an adult I do not weep for my loss but instead grieve for people who have never known the security of love, self-worth and family integrity. I now understand my real home in Christ Jesus. He was born humbly on earth so we will know our relationship with heaven. Now I minister among God’s fragile who teach me to wait for a new earth where everyone will find our true home in Christ Jesus.

Wheels of Misfortune, Celebrate Magazine 2010

2011-06-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Published from Celebrate! Magazine 2010

Wheels of Misfortune

I often catch myself defining my life by my possessions. Sometimes I identify my success through labels of priesthood and the privileges that ministry offers me. I can measure my life and work by clerical perks. I can hide from others and myself by never paying taxes and not being responsible for another person or a family. I take my health insurance for granted in the present and my secure retirement in the future. The label of priesthood even offers me the ability to overindulge on food at our common table.

These external possessions do not provide the reasons for priesthood. If I live in this shallow clinging to benefits, then I miss my true self and my relationships with people. Ministering among people living with profound uncertainty changes how I relate to the external securities of my profession. I discover that other people’s struggles define my priesthood much more than my earthly possessions and privileges.

Each weekday people line up at our parish door asking for some basics of life, a toothbrush or underwear, a cup of coffee or a haircut. Recently a man in his early thirties came up to our front office window and asked a staff member for a backpack. She kindly offered him a small bag with wheels. He insisted on a backpack with growing frustration in his voice. The staff member assured him the bag with rollers could accommodate his belongings.

The exhausted man started to cry. He did not want to give into accepting the bag with wheels. He slowly explained that if he took the bag with wheels it would lead next to acquiring a shopping cart. If he possessed a wheeled cart, that would lead to pushing his belongings around the city. If he found himself piling his possessions on a metal cart, then he would have to admit to himself that he was homeless. He just did not want the label, the identity of being a homeless man.

Nearly every person struggles to find the appropriate relationship with what we think we own. The liturgical gospels from the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time until the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time prioritize our belongings. Jesus invites his disciples into an abundant life. The only scarcity is the number of laborers. He challenges his disciples to focus not on sacks and sandals but on the peace that will change people. He calls them to move around from house to house carrying little on their backs. Jesus assures them that the message of the Kingdom of God will be the real priority to share with everyone who pays attention.

Jesus shows us that we must be attentive to people on this journey. Focusing on too many earthly possessions keeps us from recognizing people in need who are directly in front of us. The wholehearted love that we are to offer God is the priority and it is to be lived out serving the needs of people. As I listened to the man who did not want a wheeled bag, I took my own personal inventory of what I consider my true possessions. I know well that my earthly stuff offers me an identity that often keeps me on the opposite side of the street from people who most need help.

Theses gospels reveal to us that our real possession is Christ himself. Our frustrations and concerns often stem from not being in relationship with Jesus in the first place. Martha and Mary battle for his attention with their activity and their contemplation. As I minister among people struggling for daily bread, I evaluate at sunup my relationship with God who first gives me the gifts to be attentive and active. I understand that if I am to be at the feet of Christ with my brothers and sisters in poverty, then I must change the way I see my life and all my resources.

Jesus warns us in these summer days not become greedy. He touches us with love so that we will believe that our lives are not based on what we own. We do not need bigger storage units and more closets, larger barns or plastic containers; we simply need a new priority to recognize what is enough in our lives. The man who did not want a wheeled cart unfortunately faced dire times and had recently become homeless. He was still learning to prioritize his needs in order to just survive. Jesus calls us again to look beyond the value of our possessions. This message is difficult to hear for many who do not possess the basic essentials of life.

Jesus tells us not be afraid. That request from our Savior is always difficult when we are faced with daily hunger, a lack of medication for depression, threats of nightly assaults and no money. He asks of us again to give away what little we have and to not be afraid of how we will live. The man at our window was so afraid to enter into the phase of his life in which he found himself, being homeless. He did accept the bag with the wheels. He just needed someone to listen to him. He needed someone to catch the meaning of his tears. I still learn lessons from our experience with him, to not be afraid to enter into the real issues of my life, the next phase of grace even when I am most afraid.

We cannot enter the narrow gate with all our possessions in hand, not even if we push them through the gate in a wheeled cart. Jesus continues to show us that the last will be first and the first will be last. If we realize that we do not create our identity from our many possessions, then we will rest humbly in God. We will discover that our real identity comes in knowing God and befriending our real selves.

No matter in which community we worship, God invites us to take a seat among the humble. As I reevaluate my attachment to my possessions, I see in our common prayer that I do not own these possessions anyway. All that we have in life is a gift from God. No matter how we live in the world, no matter how we store our supplies or find our identity in designer labels, God gifts us with all life. As the man left our parish center, our staff member assured him he was always welcome to park a wheeled cart at our door anytime in order to pray with us.

Brother Andre: Saint Doorkeeper

2011-06-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Published by Celebrate! Magazine 2010

Saint Doorkeeper

Every morning various groups of people anticipate the unlocking of the front doors to our parish building. People seeking a change of clothing or fresh hygiene products line up beginning at 6:00 a.m. Members of the staff arrive one by one beginning at 7:30, but struggle to approach the only door their key will open because a man is sleeping under a tarp in front of the door. Volunteers line up before 9:00 a.m. greeting one another and meeting the new group of nursing students who will volunteer in our morning hospitality center.

The unlocking of our red steel doors at our urban parish, the Downtown Chapel in Portland, Oregon ritualizes the opening of our two-hour weekday hospitality center. After one of the large doors is propped open, over a hundred people stream single file to our front office. They inquire about emergency travel, money for prescription drugs, or wait to receive a pair of clean white socks. People living in the single-room occupancy hotels gather to socialize or to receive a weekly voucher to a local Laundromat. A staff member then opens the hospitality center leading everyone in prayer so people may voice their pain and needs.

On Friday evenings, our parish community hosts a soup line in our very small lobby. Strangers and friends gather to socialize and to feed on a banquet of homemade soup and peanut butter sandwiches. We serve the anticipated food at our front door because some people suffering mental illness may feel trapped by coming into a public building. At our red doors even runaway teens who fear the church trust the hands that offer them hearty soup and hot chocolate.

Opening our parish doors ritualizes our ministry among God’s people living in poverty because the Congregation of Holy Cross staffs our parish. On October 17, 2010, my religious community will celebrate a man of weakness becoming a saint for everyone in the Church. Blessed Brother Andre Bessette, C.S.C. from Montreal, Quebec, in Canada whose only formal ministry was being a porter, will be the first canonized saint in the Congregation of Holy Cross.

Brother Andre officially welcomed all people at the door of Notre Dame College in Montreal beginning in 1872, the year of his profession of vows as a Holy Cross religious. Andre’s humble presence to strangers and firm devotion to Saint Joseph compelled him to believe in God’s healing power. Saint Joseph is the patron of Holy Cross Brothers as he humbly lived in the presence of Jesus. Brother Andre believed that our lives on earth should reflect this humble posture of living, working and serving always in the presence of Christ Jesus.

Brother Andre (Alfred) was born eighth of twelve children. His parents baptized him immediately after birth since he was so tiny and frail, and wasn’t certain to survive. He grew up with fragile health and became an orphan at twelve years old. The Congregation of Holy Cross even postponed his religious profession because of his ill health. He lived with the sensitivity of illness that turned him to greater reliance on God. He was singled hearted in his life of penance, simplicity and devotion believing that healing was possible for all kinds of pain and illness. By May 9, 1878, the first written testimony of five cures attributed to Brother Andre was published.

The ministry of our many volunteers, staff and parishioners teaches me that faith must be grounded in real suffering. Our work among people living in poverty and brokenness is not pious, fake or self-indulgent. The issues we face in our parish starkly remind us that we carry no real answers to people’s addiction to drugs. We do not have sure-thing answers to people living with severe mental illness as a result of being sexually abused as children. We cannot protect the short-skirted street princess, the stoned dealer roaming ruts in our front sidewalk or the strung-out Iraq veteran shouting obscenities on our corner. I cannot even protect myself from the loneliness I feel living in the midst of my homeless neighbors. However, people’s suffering must lead us all to greater faith and service no matter on which corner of the world we find ourselves.

I cling to the image of Andre welcoming strangers at the door. He stood for hours each day speaking with people for just a moment because he believed in God’s compassion to those who are suffering. This image forms our ministry here at the Downtown Chapel and should form the core of every parish no matter how much we want to hide our individual anguish from one another. The model of ministry of this humble man opens the doors to every worshiping community and crosses the boundaries of race, culture, education and national borders, and any other way we might seek to divide ourselves from one another.

Celebrating sainthood is never easy for the rest of us on earth. We tend to create new images of these people because we are afraid of how they challenge us today. I see this in how we reinterpret Brother Andre in art. He was a sickly, illiterate man, short in stature. In stained glass in our Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland, Oregon, Andre sits among other North American saints looking healthy and robust. In the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angles, California, an image of Brother Andre processes in the communion of saints woven in tapestry. There the image of Andre is six feet tall, broad-shouldered and looking as if he worked out at Muscle Beach. The image of Brother Andre in our midst must be grounded in the humility and love he personified on earth.

Even in my own religious community in the United States, as members of our American culture, we struggle to be changed by Brother Andre’s work among the poor. We prefer most often the well-educated rather than the illiterate, the prosperous rather than people suffering poverty, and the wholesome student rather than the addict or person suffering mental illness. When we honestly celebrate the saint’s mission in the Church, then we have to change our lives of privilege into greater dependence on God. We have to translate our community’s politics into real mission among the poor. We have to cultivate our vocations of love over our desire for self-promotion.

Brother Andre worked tirelessly to build Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, Quebec. Yet, he really opened the door there for the sick, lonely and poor to find a home in the healing power of Christ Jesus. When he died in 1937 over a million people made a pilgrimage to Montreal for his funeral. Miracles of healing still occur today. I witness these miracles welcoming people suffering poverty, isolation and illness every day as we open once again our red, steel doors of our parish and rely on God alone. Our holy doorkeeper still lives among God’s poor. Saint Andre of Montreal, pray for us.

"She keeps calling out" from Ministry and Liturgy

2011-05-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

She keeps calling out

I so admire the Canaanite woman. I always look forward to hearing her strong voice calling out to Jesus and the disciples (Matthew 15:21-28). She was crippled in fear because of her daughter’s illness. She desired the healing touch of Jesus even though she was not a lost sheep of the house of Israel. The strong-voiced mother clamored at Jesus’ side to change his mind about who could receive his love.

We enter into this courageous story again on the Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (August 14). This nameless woman’s voice bellows out to us from long ago and it is still not silent. From her suffering comes a profound model of persistence and hope. Her love for her daughter was not going to be neglected, put aside or buried in society’s rules. Her voice rings out to Jesus’ ear and across the generations to our day and time.

This persistence and patience rises from deep faith. Her determination was fueled by the fact that she was out of the bounds of Jesus’ love because of her heritage and background. I am so intrigued that someone from the margins of Christ’s care teaches the rest of us how to pray tirelessly and how to bring our deepest suffering to the person of Christ. This woman, like so many women, teaches us how to believe and how to come to God with profound honesty.

I am reminded now of my dear friend, the Canaanite woman, because a year ago we welcomed a new pastor to the Downtown Chapel. His installation as pastor took place during our Saturday Vigil Mass. Parishioners presented him with the Gospel Book, the Sacramentary, a green stole, the Oil of the Sick and the collection basket. At the exact same time, a group of prostitutes were meeting in the basement directly below the chapel. I kept hearing people enter the building from the side entrance. I wondered if our new pastor really understood where those liturgical symbols were going to lead him if he accepted them with his whole heart. The voices of women caught in human trafficking were right under our feet. All during the liturgy, my mind kept going downstairs, deep into the darkness of the building where the women in need were stirring. Our parish hosts this group every Saturday evening. On that evening I really heard the voices calling out for new life, change and healing.

The Canaanite woman’s persistence celebrates for me the many voices of women who beg us for acceptance, healing and belonging. I see this persistence in our chapel, our basement and in every part of our parish community. A group of retired women nurses wash feet, cut curly-long toenails and offer advice for caring for diabetes every Wednesday morning, also in the basement. These women act out the Scriptures, speak up about people’s needs and offer prayer for people in profound need. This hidden, often silent action of our community helps us all transform our indifference into genuine prayer and concern.

I pray I never become deaf to the cry of the Canaanite woman. As I hear the prayers from a homeless mother whose child needs diapers, medical care and shelter, I know I cannot rest. I must continue to work to bridge the lives of suffering people into the mission of the Church. I hear the cries of tireless immigrant mothers having to leave their children back in the home country. I cannot turn a deaf ear to a middle-aged child who has to leave behind her aging mother in a nursing home in another state because she has to care for her fatherless children. I must open my ears, heart and prayer to the woman who struggles for food, rent assistance and education for her children. The strong voices calling out for new life are all around us, even in the basement.

Our ministry among God’s people surviving poverty encounters much resistance. We struggle with health care, other people’s prejudice, indifference and apathy. However, I take great consolation from a woman who had no power, authority and voice in the culture of Jesus’ time. In the midst of her powerlessness, she changed Jesus’ mind. She told him that even dogs receive table scraps. Her faith saved her and healed her daughter.

I cling to the fact that there are enough scraps from our common altars to feed the needs of all people. There is enough love from us, the Body of Christ, to hear the voices of people calling out in need well beyond our common sanctuary steps. From the basement to hospital beds, from migrant worker camps to the suburban poor, we must all have the courage to help change the mind of Christ by our faithful and humble prayer.

"Urgent Care" from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine April 2011

2011-04-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Urgent Care

Every morning our parish welcomes lost street pilgrims into dry shelter. Our staff and dozens of volunteers strip away our preconceived notions about stinky people and jobless wanderers. We hear the frightening outbursts from homeless sufferers of undiagnosed mental illness and we welcome all people to rest awhile. Our acceptance of these forgotten people barely holds back the waves of citywide discussions of the undesirable homeless teens, the filthy street urchins playing guitars while sitting on public sidewalks. Our open-door hospitality barely sways public opinion about the lazy, crazy and filthy people who do nothing for society. We welcome people because stomachs are empty, bodies are tired and naked, feet are dirty, wives are abused, jobs are lost and friends are still imprisoned. This is the urgent, daily work of hospitality in our parish community.

Living the gospel call to true, authentic hospitality challenges our parish community daily. Our morning hospitality remains scrutinized by the judgmental opinions of so many jobholders walking by our building. Some people in long-term recovery accuse us of being in denial and label us as “enabling.” Welcoming the lost and forgotten, without bias, judgment or superiority tests our faith to the core. This core of authentic welcome lies within the persons of God, the relationships among the Trinity.

I rest in this message of the Holy Trinity. I believe with my whole heart that the hidden relationships among God the Father, Christ our Savior and the communion of the Holy Spirit offer all Christians a definitive model of hospitality. As I reflect on the liturgical gospel for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, I feel this urgency of hospitality. I capture a glimpse of eternal life when tired folks rest with a cup of hot coffee, enter into an honest conversation and receive some clean clothing.

Every Christian community must take the risk of living the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Sign of Cross is not just a mark on our mortal bodies, but radical welcome for all people to live within the love of God. The Trinity is not an obscure concept celebrated in our sanctuaries, but an invitation for all people to risk love, kindness, compassion and true hospitality. Radical acceptance among strangers enables people to experience a glimpse of eternity. Living the mystery of the Holy Trinity suggests that all people must be welcomed no matter their place in life.

Every morning we circle our volunteers around a table to reflect on the upcoming Sunday gospel. College students, retirees, parishioners and other volunteers from all walks of life hear the sacred text proclaimed in our hospitality center. The formation from these gospels propels even non-believers to connect the foundations of the Christian faith to service among God’s beloved. In these morning sessions, we all experience this urgency of hospitality because we understand we may only have one opportunity to welcome a stranger.

Our parish is just a few blocks from the train station and bus terminal. People step off the train and hear by word of mouth that our parish is the place to go for basic needs. A young unwed mother hops off the bus and is told that we can help with diapers for her infant. An elderly man needs a blanket for the night and a runaway teen is looking for someone to listen to his story. The Trinity manifests love in the simplest of places, among outcasts searching for basic belongings.

I also feel this urgency because so many young people do not experience the Church as a meaningful place for their lives. Our staff connects with over fourteen colleges, universities, seminaries and schools of nursing over the course of a year. Hundreds of high school students participate in formation sessions that invite students into the depths of people’s suffering. Hospitality is not wasted among the young, the lost and those who question everything.

The celebration of the Holy Trinity in every parish must open us all to the overwhelming compassion and mercy of God. We must not allow our fearful judgments and familiar prejudices to put boundaries on God’s relationship with people, or to suggest that some people are more deserving of love than others. The liturgical celebration reminds me to calm down among situations I cannot control, fix or heal. I must remember that God longs to be in union with God’s beloved.

I enter more deeply into the mystery of the Holy Trinity and experience an insistent need to welcome people who think they live far out of the bounds of God’s love. Every Christian becomes a messenger for the hidden life of the Trinity, an expression of deep love, commitment and belonging. I discover every day that the true mission of the Church is to live in the tight circle of the Trinity, accepting everyone into the life of God’s redeeming love.

Holding On: From Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2011-04-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Ministry and Liturgy Magazine, March 2011

Holding On

I hold much fear within my body. I struggle to find my way out of the self-doubts and worries I carry with me from the past. Fear clings to me when new situations demand more of my attention or concern for others. I even realize how selfish I can be when one door closes in my life. Waiting for new life makes me impatient and restless. I wait for the depths of Pentecost in my own life.

I cannot imagine the fear that locked doors and huddled the disciples together after the death of Jesus. Painful uncertainty cramped their future plans. Grief suffocated their thoughts about living the example Jesus offered them. They crouched down in fear and hung on to the hands of each other behind those barred doors. The room and their lives seemed forever darkened.

Pentecost was birthed from this hand wringing and sweat about the future. Christ appeared in the stuffy room behind the closed and locked doors of their hiding. He opened up their lives with his very presence and the offering of his lasting peace. The key to stepping out of the dark room and into their future was the healing balm of Christ’s love and forgiveness. The hands of Christ’s followers opened up to receive him. Fear seemed forever useless.

I heard a new image of clinging to fear a few months ago. On First Fridays I lead a daylong retreat exposing people to matters of faith and poverty. The retreat includes a tour of our neighborhood that reveals controversial issues of adequate housing, nutritional food and affordable healthcare for people surviving poverty. I led this particular tour with a group of deacon candidates and their wives.

After the tour, one of the candidates shared that a deep memory of his mother surfaced during the tour. He remembered his mother taking him by the hand on a street corner and crossing to the other side to avoid homeless, smelly people. He began to cry as he realized that holding his mother’s hand taught him to fear people who were different from him. He acknowledged his mother’s instinct to protect him. He then confessed to the group that it was time for him to grow up, to let go of the hands of people who teach him to be afraid. This was Pentecost for this middle-aged man preparing to be ordained to serve the needs of people. This wake-up call released him from years of prejudice and ridicule toward God’s people living on the streets. This memory opened the door to discovering Christ’s peace within him and in people he has been called to serve.

Every worshipping community must let go fear in order to serve people in need. Pentecost pries open our fingers and challenges us to embrace God alone. Every community must let go of preconceived notions of people considered to be society’s outcasts. Pentecost invites us all to let go of the relationships that still teach us to stingingly criticize other people. We must not believe that separation and isolation are Gospel values. We must release our grasp from people who keep us in our childish ways. When we wake up to the Gospel our old patterns of negative thoughts and inaction fade. We welcome the Spirit as adults in full, active membership within the Body of Christ.

Pentecost vibrates our conscience and activates our hearts. Pentecost is not about shrouding the sanctuary in red silk, but celebrated when people have enough food to eat and sufficient clothing and adequate housing. This great celebration happens when our negative attitudes are replaced with genuine community, the Church. This solemn feast continues to break down walls and barriers. We must believe that we are called to welcome people who have given up on the Church, who are tired of the fight of being isolated because of mental illness, sexual orientation or living below the poverty line. We must listen to the sojourner no matter her experience. We must walk among the brokenhearted no matter how he has been treated in the past. Pentecost cannot be tapered to fit our prejudices or slip comfortably into our oppression of other people.

I witness doors flying open to new life every day as I am changed living among the marginalized. Only God heals people from destructive patterns of drug abuse, prostitution, broken marriages and thoughts of suicide. God’s beloved people teach me to let go of the hands that intended to protect me but also taught me to fear. Ministry among people who have no power in society is celebrated with great joy not only on Pentecost Sunday but every day, when we all decide not to live in fear and darkness.

Foot Crossing from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2011-03-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

From the March 2011 issue of Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

Foot Crossing

Every weekday morning more than one hundred pairs of tired feet cross the threshold of our parish building. A newly homeless couple trying to find resources for survival stands on their weary, callused feet waiting to enter our hospitality center. A man drenched from the morning rain and reeking from alcohol limps into the familiar lobby hoping to get a dry pair of socks and a jacket. A heavy Vietnam veteran wearing an unbuttoned shirt and feathers tied to his long hair waits for a new pair of shoes to fit his swollen, infected feet.

People’s feet tell the stories of homelessness and disease. Some of our guests carry within them deep secrets of how they landed on hard times. Others may be silent about their past physical traumas or how they have abused drugs. They may even try to hide their need for food, companionship or a new pair of underwear. Our volunteers and staff understand that people often do not want to admit their vulnerability. However, people cannot hide their homelessness, illnesses and defenselessness when our nurses and volunteers deal with people’s sore, filthy feet.

Every Wednesday in our hospitality center at the Downtown Chapel Roman Catholic Parish in Portland, Oregon, the staff and volunteers provide foot care. This once-a-week offering affords people an opportunity to make sure their feet are given proper medical treatment. This ministry of our parish began not with the notion of medical assessment and management, but in the ancient tradition of foot washing and welcome.

Roy contacted us nearly a decade ago from a suburban parish. He inquired about offering sessions on Centering Prayer for people surviving poverty. Roy told our staff that he had already facilitated groups in local jails and also with various groups of people living with HIV/AIDS. He wanted to pass on what he himself had discovered in his own life, the deep and abundant love of God. Roy quietly spoke his own story to our staff of his years of wretched anger and hatred toward family members. He told us that his hardened, heated life had been transformed with prayer. Roy assured us that God was still healing his relationships with his wife and children. He was also the foster father of over a dozen at-risk children. So the members of the staff agreed to his request of offering a time of contemplative prayer among people who live outside and who suffer the many issues of poverty.

After several months of facilitating group prayer, Roy came back to our parish staff with another request. He and his wife longed to discover why Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. Roy said to our staff, “I know that Jesus ate with his disciples everyday, but on the night before he died, he ate with them one more time and then washed his friends’ feet.” He said with an intense desire, “I have to find out what that means.”

Thus Roy and his wife began our foot ministry. They welcomed people into a small room with gentle conversation and intentional hospitality. The couple was shy and intimidated at first as they provided soothing salts to soak putrid feet. They trimmed long, yellow toenails and provided clean white socks that they had purchased themselves. While they stooped before people with aching feet, they internally prayed for each person. Our foot ministry was born of a man who admitted both his selfishness and that his life was completely transformed by personal prayer.

After several months of washing rank and sore feet, the couple came back to speak to our staff. The holy couple explained that they glimpsed a reason why Jesus washed his disciples feet. Roy quietly said to us, “I believe Jesus washed the feet of his beloved so to see their faces at a different angle, in a new light, in the intimacy of genuine humility.” Roy and his wife continued their service back in their own lives by receiving two more foster children into their home.

After the couple left our foot ministry, our parish nurse continued our foot-washing ministry. Today, Sharon and other volunteer nurses, student nurses and other volunteers receive people on Wednesday mornings. Now the focus is not only to bathe people’s feet but to also provide more medical assistance.

Sharon provides soothing Epsom salts, healing lotions and soothing creams. The nurses look for deep infections and open wounds that will not heal. They know when to send our guests to a doctor or an emergency room. The volunteers fill plastic bins with hot water and sudsy healing salts. They invite people to soak their feet while volunteers enter into people’s lives through the story of their feet. Sharon and others listen to the words people share and become attuned to their hope that someday homelessness, poverty and addictions may also be soothed and cured. They wipe each toe with bleached towels and each foot is examined and dried. They teach our guests how to care for their feet when disease and infection are present because of diabetes. They cut curly-long nails and wipe scaly skin with care and concern. The nurses deliberately dress each foot with new white sweat socks.

Our foot ministry is an extension of our morning hospitality center because feet are the main source of transportation for many people living outside. Most of our guests cannot afford appropriate health care and in most cases health care is not accessible to people living on the streets. We also provide this basic foot care because people live in the reality of Portland rain and cool weather all year long. People’s feet are not only damp every day, but squishy wet. People come to us with prune-like skin, with yellow, tough nails. The rank smell of feet permeates our entire building and lingers long into the day. People expose their secrets by crossing our parish threshold and offering their feet to be cared for by our volunteers.

Our volunteers and nurses enter into the mystery of the Mandatum from Holy Thursday every Wednesday morning. This ministry in our parish extends the mission of Jesus from the ancient liturgy of the Triduum. The Gospel of John reminds us that our foot ministry is not just a reenactment of the past, but a vital ministry in our generation. The ritual gesture is neither fake nor meaningless in our community. Our foot ministry puts into daily action the call of Jesus to become people of hospitality, to enter into the mystery of people’s stories. Our foot care volunteers still show us that intimacy happens when we see people’s faces from the perspective of love and service. People’s feet tell us all stories, especially when we listen from the angle of looking up into their weathered, beautiful faces.

The liturgy of Holy Thursday invites people in every parish into the role of hospitality. The act of washing feet is still a sacred form of worship. Some parishes are quick to replace the foot washing on Holy Thursday with hand washing or shining shoes. These replacements seldom work. They do not bear the weight of the intimate act of exposing dirty feet to the community. Those other acts do not reveal vulnerability or suggest that people actually need God or the community for survival in daily life. Naked feet expose the Body of Christ in real need on Holy Thursday.

Entering into the mystery of the Mandatum on Holy Thursday evening invites every person into the earthy, human need for Christ’s redeeming love. Our parish sets up chairs in our three aisles before the liturgy begins on Holy Thursday. After the Gospel and homily, the people designated for foot washing go to their pre-assigned chair and remove their right and left shoe and sock. Every person who attends this Mass should see a naked foot. People should be able to enter into the action of this rite. The presider and servers process around the chapel to hold, wash and wipe the human foot. The feet of our people are seldom beautiful and their nails hardly ever receive a pedicure. The smell of sour feet needs to be part of the rite and not perfumed, perfect feet.

The Mandatum tells the story of every worshipping community. People’s feet reveal how each parish community listens to the Gospel during the entire year. The stories of vulnerability revealing naked feet connect to the ways the parish serves people. The foot washing is linked to a young mother wiping the bottom of her infant after a bout of diarrhea. Foot washing connects to the middle-aged child who washes the aging body of his father after he suffered a stroke. A mother holds the forehead of a grade school daughter vomiting in the toilet. A wife washes the blood off her husband after surgery. A husband cleans up food from his wife’s body after feeding her stomach through a tube. The Mandatum on Holy Thursday connects the human vulnerability we all face in caring for those we love to the public ritual of the church.

Foot washing on Holy Thursday reminds every parish community that we begin each ministry from Jesus’ call to prayer and service. Many parish communities resist entering into such filthy concerns. We are all called to enter into local hospitals with prayer and willingness to be changed by the suffering of our friends and neighbors. We are challenged during the Triduum to get our own feet wet from sweat by building a home or painting a garage. We must walk the extra mile to support fundraising efforts for breast cancer or AIDS. We run marathons and climb ladders for people who need service in our communities. On Holy Thursday, we are reminded that we do all of those things because of the intimate love of Jesus who offered his life for each person.

I recently asked Gwen, one of our regular foot-washing volunteers, to articulate how this ministry has changed her. I wish everyone could see her in action using few words as she carries tubs of sloshing water in our basement to prepare for our guests. She washes and bleaches towels, wipes up floors and invites people to experience foot washing. These actions go well beyond her words. She said to me, “I appreciate the trust our guests develop in our abilities as well as limitations to provide for what they need.” She also added, “The community helps me to maintain an attitude of grateful living, to not take things for granted and to do what I am able.” Gwen does so much without the notice of so many. Gwen will also be seen on Holy Thursday serving the Eucharist or reading the scriptures.

Gwen’s daily actions guide our Triduum. Her actions along with all of our volunteers speak the reality of John’s Gospel. She and the many nurses and volunteers live the Mandatum every week. The connection of prayer and service is lived on Wednesday mornings in our parish basement. I do not have to look very far to preach the Gospel on Holy Thursday. The feet just under my feet are signs of the Crucified Savior. The smell of feet reminds me always to walk with people who suffer. The feet of our friends surviving poverty cross our threshold each day.

Food for Friday

2011-02-13T14:31:00.000-08:00

Published from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine, February 2011

Food for Friday

I crave the Eucharist on Good Friday. Perhaps my hunger is most pronounced then because Good Friday is the only day of the year in which the celebration of the Eucharist does not take place. Nevertheless, my hunger grows strong. I intellectually realize that the Body of Christ is distributed on this sacred day consecrated from the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. Even with that knowledge, my hunger pains cry out. These liturgical arguments do not take the longing away from my soul. Nothing really soothes my hunger on Good Friday.

I experience great hunger on Good Friday because I pray with people who feed only on their loneliness and suffering on most other days of the year. People stream into our chapel at high noon on Good Friday. Some cross the line from the business world to the world of poverty by simply walking across Burnside Street. Some people stroll into the chapel after spending the morning in our Hospitality Center seeking clothing, a new backpack or clean pair of underwear, or just to be acknowledged by name. Some people stroll in recalling childhood memories of kissing the cross, inhaling bellowing incense and humming long Latin chants. Still others are curious about what Catholics do on Good Friday since Jesus stays on the cross all year long in our sanctuaries.

No matter the curiosity of some people or the memory of others, there remains a collective hunger for God. For so many people the hunger is bone deep because they are crushed by relationships of abuse. Many of our worshippers hate themselves for how their lives have turned out from serving in wars or selling their bodies for drugs. The collective hunger in our worshipping assembly settles into our common songs and liturgical responses. People remain emotionally empty and are looking for a way out of the circumstances that have brought them down. We are all hungry for God’s love and compassion on the day when we remember the death of Christ Jesus.

Several years ago our staff tried to address this common hunger in a different way during the Good Friday liturgy. We looked to a common item that we distribute each day that comforts people, yet a reminder of hunger itself - a bag of food. On most weekdays, our community distributes food bags to people living in single-room occupancy hotels. These single rooms are no larger than a parking space. People need food to get by because the monthly rent remains outrageously high. So our community offers bags of canned goods and items that can be warmed on a small hot plate.

These food bags are a reminder of poverty itself. They speak volumes about our inability to feed people’s needs. We only offer them a few cans and packages to survive a long month of high rent and skyrocketing food prices. The presence of these brown bags reminds people of their own hunger as they also symbolize our help for them. The bags tell the stories of severe loneliness that eats away at those whose lives are so tenuous. Living alone in a bug-infested, noisy room destroys one’s dignity. The bags of food become a sign of hope even in the midst of poverty and loneliness, of hunger and broken dreams.

We stationed members of our staff carrying bags of food on each side of the cross as people came forward to reverence the cross. We then invited people to also touch the bag, to pray for our starving neighbors and the millions of starving people around the world. Since so many people count on our bags of food this was a simple reminder that the Cross of Christ is lived here on this block amidst great hunger. Many visitors ignored the invitation; some did not get the connection to Christ’s presence. However, for many people the Cross of Christ and the bag of food became the source of real and substantial nourishment.

I realize this gesture would not work for every worshipping assembly. I know it may even confuse many people. However, I keep trying to discover ways that people in poverty can find their home in any of our worshiping communities. I am at a loss to feed people’s unfathomable and lasting pain. This is Good Friday. Only God can restore people’s lives and feed their deepest needs. This is the place in which I learn to trust God. The Cross of Christ is the place for real, rich and sustaining food even though I remain so hungry on Good Friday.

Lenten Rhythm

2011-01-05T03:23:00.000-08:00

Published in the December 2010 issue of Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

Lenten Rhythm

Several years ago I sat around the kitchen table in the rectory with a friend discussing our upcoming Lenten discipline. My friend taught Scripture at a Catholic university and she had been received into the Catholic Church the previous Easter. She challenged me to look at Lent differently. We stumbled on an image of Lent being a delicate dance, a relationship with God who longs to offer us healing and love.

Our discussions led us into this unique dance of partners that Lent offers us, sacrifice and grace, sin and forgiveness, contrition and change, suffering and love. We discussed our need to understand the Scriptures differently than in previous years. We realized that we needed to go beyond taking the gospels for granted, beyond our automatic responses and our usual patterns of praying and living them.

We then tripped over the idea to actually take a few dance lessons for our Lenten offering. Somehow I agreed to sign up for Tango, the most complicated dance of all. All of a sudden I found myself in a downtown dance studio just after Ash Wednesday. The instructor assumed we were a couple and just could not quite figure our motives for pursuing dance since neither of us was at all a natural.

We laughed more than we danced, we tripped over our feet more than we felt the rhythm of the music and we embarrassed ourselves during the three weeks of lessons. Real dance is more complicated than we thought, the footwork, the balance and the emotions. Our insights and discouragements led us back to the Lenten gospels to examine the relationships that are crucial in this season.

Jesus encounters a delicate relationship with the temptations of the devil. The two tango with the scriptures and God who promises support even when we dash our feet against a stone. We partake in this sacred dance when our two left feet deal with our sin against helping people who cannot stand up for themselves or feed their children. In Lent our relationships with overeating, drug use and extramarital affairs stop us in our tracks. Our convictions must speak louder than the din of anger, rage and neglect. Lent must be centered on the real pain of our people, the disillusionment of our spirits and the temptations of our emotions.

Lent calls us to get a new perspective on our lives. This perspective is not from a high mountaintop, but an inner awareness that a new vision is possible even for the most stubborn among us. Fear is the culprit we must all deal with in Lent. Dancing with fear can lead us to self-absorption, lack of love and empty relationships. Taking fear by the hand can lead us all into the love that God has for even the most callused or confused partner.

The woman of Samaria danced around her past in the presence of Jesus. He knew her heart and the real person behind the water jar and the fear. He named her real thirst, gave her hope to drink and sent her on her way to set others free. This marvelous dance at the well at noontime still shows us that Christ is in relationship with sinners, doubters and outcasts. This holy dance is for everyone. Christ opens up faith to be about people, not certainty, correct rubric or dancing the tightrope of politics.

Jesus still spits on the ground making clay with saliva in order for us all to see. We are still blind to teenagers having sex in schools, adults shooting heroin in movie theaters and gangs murdering our elderly grandparents. We still do not think people suffering homelessness are our sisters and brothers nor do we really see that children need food in an era of severe obesity. The Lenten dance takes us by the heart, puts spittle on our ears and courage in our souls.

We also realize we cannot dance in the dark. Jesus finally goes to his friend Lazarus and teases him out of the grave. Lazarus slowly moved his body in a divine dance, being released from the burial clothes and the bonds of death. We too, shake ourselves from even the fear of death in order to live a new life in Christ. We wake up to life when the bandages of fear are slowly unraveled in faith, hope and love.

Lent beckons the soul in a dance of new life. We discover our faith again in the radical rhythms of Christ’s death and resurrection. These gospels of the Lenten season take us by the hand and form in us authentic life.

This is the beginning of conversion for us no matter where we worship. Even though my friend and I did not master the Tango, I entered that year more deeply into the invitation that God takes the lead of every aspect of my life. The task for us all is to keep dancing in the love God offers each person no matter our stumbling, no matter our falling and no matter our lack of rhythm.

Saving Face: Article from Ministry and Liturgy 2008

2010-12-05T14:59:00.000-08:00

Saving Face

I grieve my father’s face in Advent. He died one December in the cold Midwestern days. His mother also died years before in the same Advent month. I remember his expressions becoming frozen not from the weather outside but from the numbing effects of Parkinson’s disease. I cringe at the memory of his furrowed brow from his disappointments and regrets in his old age. His old-man face haunts my memory because his disease creased his spirit and shrunk his perspective on a life of hard work and dedication to his family.

My Advent heirloom can not escape my father’s long years of blank stares and the generational grief that has formed the life of my brother and me. Every year these days before Christmas remind me that I do not wait for a baby to be born in a manger. I long instead for a new expression on my own face that reflects God’s intervention in me now that I am not a lost child, not an heir of only loss and failure.

Every year before Christmas, I view similar faces in our urban parish that reflect subsurface suffering and losses that extend from parents to children. Many people who make their home outside often hide their longing to be connected to their past. To begin to unveil the stories behind some of the faces in our daily hospitality center, a parishioner initiated one late autumn the “Portrait Project”.

Our parish staff called upon a professional photographer and his students to sit with our guests and capture their faces on camera. When the day came to shoot the photos, some people cleaned up, and others asked if a friend could join them in the frame. Some women dabbed on makeup which so changed them I could hardly recognize their worn expressions. People felt excitement wearing grins and smiles because we wanted to capture their features, their present story. Their entire bodies lit up standing opposite a lens for the first time in years.

The finished photographs arrived back at the parish in the dark shadows of Advent. I viewed each face with a tender respect. The paper icons revealed the dignity and emotional energy of each person. Personalities jumped out from the 5 X 7 portraits, each face glowing off the golden background. From what was previously a group of wet, darkly clothed, anonymous poor who line up every day at our church door, I now see individual people. Their faces teach me to see them for who they are, with individual histories, with stories of suffering and being lost, stories that are not so different from my own as I might have thought before.

All the labels I put on others peeled away as I held that stack of portraits. I realized the variety of violent names and tags I put on other people. These human faces unmasked my own fear when I squeeze others into categories such as uneducated, smelly, or lazy. I saw in my heart the fear that keeps others at bay to attempt to protect myself from being in relationship with the real world, with people beyond my own history and comfort.

Advent reveals the faces of our ancestors because Jesus’ birth confirmed the dignity of the human condition. Our preparation for Christmas invites us to explore within our communities how we view the people around us. These four weeks stir our hearts for the God who lives behind each human face, underneath our expressions of unworthiness, fear, and loss.

When the photographs were distributed, volunteers wrote letters dictated by those who had had their portraits taken, provided Christmas cards, and addressed envelopes so people could send a loved one this very personal gift. One volunteer received this dictation, “Please forgive the wreckage I left behind. Someday I hope to come home.”

I believe if we are all honest in this Advent season, this sentiment may very well be ours. We stumble around our own conscience unable to fully believe that the Christ who once was human still heals and forgives. The Savior still is being born among all of us who need him the most. Without this faith, we will never see the true dignity of other people and never realize our own true home.

When I step out from behind my mask of success and authority, Advent reveals in me the hidden face of God. This grace opens me to a new power greater than myself and calls me to forgiveness, love and hope. The liturgies of Advent shake all of us out of our slumber and wake us to recognize the gift of people around us and our ancestors before us. My brow relaxes, my expressions become free, when finally I experience God’s saving face.

October issue of Ministry and Liturgy 2010 "Advent Alarm"

2010-12-04T14:32:00.000-08:00

Advent Alarm

I wake up every morning to the sound of a dozen or more people talking as they line up around our parish building. Some people are still sleeping in the shelter of the inset near our front door. Others pack up quickly to claim a place in line for our morning hospitality center. Still others will sleep off the cheep booze from the night before.

Waking up to this reality wears me down, especially during the Advent season. Sleeping in a heavenly peace seems like such a dream. This reality seems more like nightmares for people carving out a warm place to be safe under mounds of damp cardboard. Others go weeks without slumber because of drug overuse. Other people sleep all day long due to deep depression. A few people sleep at our door with no blankets, no possessions, no cardboard box or coat or hat, just the concrete for a pillow.

The issues of sleep and waking up create real problems for our parish community. Every morning members of our staff come to work and nudge people out of sleep who are blocking the entrance to the building’s door. During the noon Eucharist when our offices are closed, other people obstruct the exit trying to catch a quick nap. Some people fall asleep in our pews during the noontime Mass - especially the corporate executives.

Advent is the time for people in every parish community to wake up to the reality that surrounds us all. Stay awake! This command in Matthew’s Gospel challenges us to wake up to our timidity toward people’s needs. Advent instills in our communities the deep passion for why Jesus came into the world in the first place. We need to get off our common couches and do something about how people are living in the world.

Advent calls us to claim the dignity of all people. We do this by waking up to the real paradoxes of our day. In this time of year when we overeat, we are called to acknowledge the billion people in the world starving for basic bread. In this time of buying, accumulating, fussing over the correct gifts, Advent scriptures should claim a new awareness of our possessions no matter in which community we live.

No believer wears camel hair and feasts on locusts anymore, but the Sunday gospels need to capture our imaginations about whether or not people have decent clothing. We need more than ever in a downward economy to rouse new attitudes about how we care for elderly people or the mentally ill person who needs a community in which to rest. As members of any worshipping community, we need to find new ways to welcome our homosexual children back from college, our cousin who lost everything gambling on the Internet and our uncle who walked out of his marriage. We all need to come to grips with our real possessions, our relatives and friends.

The Advent Gospels proclaimed in every parish shake us up to see that the lame walk, lepers become cleansed, the deaf hear and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. This is the time to rouse communities from the sleep of apathy and complacency. We need to preach about the needs of people living in poverty even though other people do not want to hear about it. We need now to invite our children into real and dedicated service so that they can witness the parish community doing something worthwhile. We need to invest not only in people who cannot make ends meet, but also in our children who are walking away from our worshipping communities.

Waking up is never easy, but the issue of our sleepy attitudes is the core of the Advent season. We open ourselves to real people because Christ became flesh and invested himself humbly in our human world. He took on the humility of flesh so that we could see all people as divinely loved.

A couple of Christmas’ ago a strong-willed, homeless woman, Bonnie, blocked our only doorway during Christmas Eve Mass. She piled up blankets and carts in a matter of minutes by our red doors. She opened containers of food and invited street people to join her. She smoked a few cigarettes and spoke loudly to passersby. She prepared a place to sleep while members of the parish sang carols and broke bread and shared the cup and proclaimed that Christ is born for people.

I walked out into the lobby as Mass ended and could not believe my eyes. No one could exit the chapel. I scurried to persuade her to move her belongings. Some parishioners helped her move her camp to the side of the building. Knowing Bonnie and seeing her bright eyes, I am convinced she held us captive in the chapel so we could wake up to the meaning of the Incarnation, the Body of Christ in our real world

Blessed: from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

2010-11-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

Article reprinted from November 2010 issue of Ministry and Liturgy Magazine

Blessed

I regret many of the words that fly out of my mouth. The sarcastic one-liners, the zingers and the offensive phrases that effortlessly role off my tongue. I catch myself only when my comments have already hurt another person. I hear myself and then realize I had better options. I could have used words as precious instruments of blessing. Rather than being put-downs or the continuation of gossip, my words can build up people from their hurt or misfortune.

I often fail to connect the daily words I speak with the gesture of prayer I model at the end of Mass. My hand rises up in the sign of the Crucified to bless people in all aspects of daily life. My fingertips reach for my forehead and then touch my chest then rest on my shoulders. I understand in my heart that God wishes to transform every aspect of my life and relationships as well. This blessing is not just a perfunctory gesture, an empty ritual or an ancient archaic rite, but the reality that God has already marked us with blood in Christ’s death and resurrection. This intention to offer ritual blessing on the community is simply expressing our true identity.

This holy gesture shelters nameless sinners, defiant unbelievers, stubborn children, rowdy teens and helpless elders in God’s forgiveness and mercy. The blessing reminds us how Jesus lived out his Father’s mission to offer welcome to outcasts, kindness to the weary and acceptance to the undeserving. The words of blessing invite our worshipping assemblies into living out God’s plan for all people. These words consecrate people’s lives, bridge relationships and invite people into the community as God’s beloved.

As I listen to the liturgical gospels from the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time until the Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I am reminded of Matthew’s desire to bless the meek and lowly. John the Baptist points us into the direction of the Lamb of God. Jesus will bless us not only with water as John did, but with the Holy Spirit. This blessing will bring fire and compassion to peoples’ lives.

Jesus then calls the disciples out from the ordinary means of life. No longer will they haul heavy nets of fish, but they will carry the burden of fishing for believers. These days of heavy work will only be carried out by the grace and blessing that is offered them from Christ’s life and example.

Jesus also calls his new followers to a mountainside and he begins to teach them about how to continue this message of blessing, healing and love. These words of beatitude, of extraordinary blessing come directly from Jesus’ mouth. These words come as a shock, so much so that to this day we have yet to put them into practice. The people who will fall under the arms of Christ’s blessing are the poor in spirit. They include people who mourn the loss of a loved one in death, the meek who cannot inherit land by law and people thirsting for the springs of righteousness. Jesus names those whose intentions are honorable and whose hearts are clean of anger, hatred and violence. He calls peacemakers those who will be blessed by God. These people stand in the shadows of any culture, yet are called into the light of God’s rich blessing.

Jesus blesses his believers to become salt and light for the forgotten and the doubtful. He tells us still that no light can ever cast a shadow over this bright light of faith and goodness. He continues to tell his followers that real blessing comes in authentic forgiveness even when wronging a brother. He commands followers to turn the other check when wronged, give the extra coat to warm a stranger, walk the extra mile for the needy and give something worthwhile to the beggar.

Jesus also tells us that we cannot receive such blessings by serving two masters. If we all in fact give ourselves to God then worry shall be stripped from our hearts. This blessing will enable us all to have adequate clothing, enough food to eat and be sheltered from the cold and even our sorrows.

Every day I feel my fingertips at my forehead and my hands on my shoulders being blessed under the love God has for every person. I know from my ministry among the marginalized that today brings many problems. Blessings of food, shelter, kindness and companionship become real miracles. Reaching out to bless the lowly, the ill and impatient become the reasons why any Christian community exists. The blessing that Christ offers us transforms not only our thoughts about what we own but about other people who long for us to serve them.

Advent: A housing project

2010-11-11T04:52:00.000-08:00

(Reprinted from Celebrate! Magazine, November/December 2010)

Advent: A housing project

I did not realize the emotional power of this piece of land and the house with the open view to the lakefront until I visited my parents just before they sold our home. I walked into the familiar setting to see cardboard boxes being filled with family heirlooms, everyday items and simple gifts I had given them. I saw antiques that my mother and I purchased at flea markets through the years being carefully stored in bubble-wrap. The setting in which I felt safe, comfortable and protected from the world was being torn up and being sold to strangers.

I remember my fear on the driveway especially during another transition into a new liturgical year. I hear the gospel writer Luke tells us again that people were speaking of the temple adorned with costly stones and votive offerings. Jesus explains that a day will come when there will not be one stone left on another at the temple site. I can imagine the fear people felt hearing these words. The temple was a place of security, community and faith. The panic of change overwhelmed many believers. Saying goodbye to my family home that last day crushed many stones in my memory of what I thought was secure.

I celebrate now the gift of being an adult and leaving my hometown so many years ago. I still miss my deceased parents every day and I hold tight to the support they instilled in me as I left home.

Besmeared

2010-08-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Ministry and Liturgy Magazine, August 2010

I cringe when I notice the dirt on the door windows leading into the chapel. Our janitor cleans these windows daily and staff members occasionally wipe them spotless during business hours. However, by Sunday morning, handprints, coffee, food, body grease and makeup keep the windows smeared and dull. I often think that these greasy windows reflect on the staff and our ability to keep our chapel clean and appropriate for people to pray.

As I reflect on the Gospel passages beginning on the 25^th Sunday in Ordinary Time until the 29^th Sunday in Ordinary time (September 19-October 17), I see through my own ego. I also see through the smears on the windows and some aspects of faith much more clearly. I see the reasons why the greasy, ugly prints show up in the first place. The grunge on the windows speak loudly about our ministry among those who sleep at our doors, the dozens and dozens of people who come to us needing our attention and the basics of life.

Luke’s Gospel reminds me that to be concerned with my own ego is to serve two masters. When the besmeared windows cast a light on our staff, we serve ourselves rather than the people we are called to befriend in the first place. We must not fritter away our property and not squander our accountability of our stewardship. However, the real property and the authentic stewardship are the people who struggle for clothing, food and a warm place to rest on weekday mornings. To see these people clearly is to become trustworthy in small things. Jesus reminds us that we will become children of light when we see through the opaque nature of our mistrust. When I see through my own foibles, insecurities, failures and moments of self-protection, I serve God and not mammon. I see then more clearly even through the dirty windows to the people who are looking back at me.

Another passage in Luke’s Gospel challenges me to see Lazarus at my door. Jesus’ story is also reflecting back to the fact of my physical safety, emotional comfort and abundant resources. Jesus tells the story of the rich man encountering the poor man at his own door. This story retells itself every day at our urban chapel. Not only Lazarus, but Ethel, Joe, Irene, Bill, Big-Feather, Isaac and Beshawn come waiting at our red steel doors. Some of these people sleep at our doors, leave food, press their greasy foreheads to the windows to peer inside and even urinate on our doors. Pet dogs provide companionship to many homeless people but they also leave their waste near the entrance to the chapel.

The parish doors remain dirty all day because of our hospitality, our welcome to the Lord’s Table. My preoccupation with having clean windows remains a deterrent to my place in the bosom of Abraham. The place in the next world is already being prepared for the staff and the people who wait at our doors. This relationship of those on the inside and those on the outside remains important to the salvation of everyone. This Gospel story reminds me again to listen to the one who has already risen from the dead, the one who will provide a place of welcome for everyone in the next world, Christ Jesus.

The apostles want to know for sure how to increase their faith. They think it will be all up to them to finish the race. Instead, Jesus tells them to put on an apron and get to work. There are more people at the door, more food to prepare, more hospitality to provide, more kindness to offer, more clothing to give away. He asks us to be servants of his Word and stewards again of his real property, the people at the door. The call to serve will always be our obligation, our way into the door of heaven.

Jesus also touches lepers and heals them. He breaks down limits, boundaries and borders to get to people in need. Jesus shows us that getting dirty, touching sores and seeking after the afflicted will provide for us a new way of life. He calls us in the meantime to be grateful. Jesus warns us to be careful whom we consider a leper. It might just be people who remain ego centered, caught in the trappings of cultural expectations, preoccupation with appearance, and people who cannot recognize the value of people.

I peer through the besmeared windows of our doors and see the dignity of dirt, the purpose of our community and the need for my own growth. As I invite people into our chapel, I see the light. In the chapel sanctuary itself there are no windows. I cherish the bright light of my relationship with real people.

Lifting Up

2010-05-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Originally Published in Ministry and Liturgy

Ministry in our parish introduces me to some threatening forms of power. I see the pecking order for dominance and survival each day even among people our society claims have no power. People who sleep in their cars look down on people who sleep under the bridge. People living under the bridge often ignore people living in the doorways along our street. People who are not addicted to alcohol or drugs put down those who are stoned or drunk standing in line at our church door.

Every day I observe the deep human need for people to look down on other people. This moment of control defines so many human situations. This power struggle is seen in prostitution, child abuse, drug use, gangs, wars and even on a grade school playground. The misuse of power happens in marriages, workplace relationships and among children of wealth as well as children of poverty. These struggles for control and dominance separate the employed and the jobless, the well educated and the illiterate, and the dominance of one race over another. This battle for power happens among siblings and between adult members of religious communities.

As I read the Gospel passages beginning on The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary through the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I see Luke assessing our use of power. Luke puts very strong words into the mouth of Mary, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.” These prophetic words place opposing people on the same plane, on the same level ground, with the same view of life. To live a life of faith then, we must be able to look other people in the eyes, to recognize their worth, to honor their dignity, to serve people simply because they are human beings.

These Gospel passages help us all, even in the Church, to sort out how we may put other people down by our unkind words, knee-jerk reactions, obsessive thoughts and threatening gossip. Luke reminds us when we think our way is the only way that some who are last will be first and some who are first will be last. Luke’s message is not just that we need to watch out for people living in poverty, but that we need to quit putting down others whom we think are beneath us. He is asking us for a change of attitude, a conversion of heart, a transformation of reaction and a new way of living our faith.

Jesus invites people who have chosen the place of honor at a banquet to sit elsewhere. He unseats the proud and haughty. He offers a new seat of honor to the man who humbled himself. Jesus lifts up those who know their real place in life. These stories remain not just proper etiquette, but invite us to a deeper conversion of how we live our faith in the world. These passages mold our view of how we see the stranger at Mass and the kinds of judgments we place on people who look different from ourselves. These Gospel words form us into true believers when our automatic response is to put others down. This changes our instinct when we think false power makes us look better, or feel more worthy or deem us more acceptable.
Jesus says to us, “Anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple”. These possessions are not only physical, but even include negative thoughts that cloud our judgments of people. These are not just possessions we store in our hope chests, but the dreams of other people that we destroy by prejudice, bigotry, sexism and homophobia. Our possessions include all the ways in which we speak about people, making them less than ourselves.

Jesus runs a mile for a lost sheep, leaving the rest. He expects us to search our homes for the lost coin and to run far and wide to embrace our lost child. This is the real mystery of God, to ponder the unthinkable, to retrieve the cast-off, to reunite the lost and to forgive when forgiveness is unthinkable.

We risk letting go of false power because of Christ’s dying and rising. The Paschal Mystery is not just a way of worship and belief for us, but a radical new way of thinking and treating other people. The power that Jesus broke through was death itself, so there are no other deaths of put-downs, biases, threats, bullying, abuse or neglect that will ever win. Our parish communities must find our balance of power again after scandals, sex crimes and our judgments of people.

Every day I observe people striving to claim their place in life through false power. As followers of Christ we can live beyond our instincts to put people down, to put destructive labels on others to make us righteous. My ministry among people living in poverty shows me these power struggles and teaches me to love.

2010-05-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Behind Illusion

I wake up to the reality of my own selfishness every day. People living under bridges or under caves of cardboard reveal to me how I take for granted the easy life I live as a priest. People suffering severe illnesses of the mind model for me a sincere trust in how life unfolds.

I worry about my own survival even when my religious community pays for my health insurance, even when I sleep in a safe, heated room on a clean bed each night. I cling to my internal fretting even though I overeat each and every day. I remain anxious even though I have friends to shelter me from the bitter cold of loneliness and self-pity. Each day I see more clearly beyond my illusions of fear as I look into my own heart, as I ponder the incredible gifts God gives me.

Living and working among people suffering poverty allows me to realize that I cling to my external possessions and fears. I hold on because I believe that these possessions identify me in the world. Without these labels I fear I would lose my place in society, my status in the Church, my image among my friends. I live the labels of priest, preacher, friend, writer, or cook because without these names I fear I would not be known to God or to myself.

I listen to the Gospel of Luke in these four weeks of mid-July through mid-August realizing our possessions do not name us. Luke invites us again to examine our relationship with all that claims us. Our real identity rests in letting things go to discover God behind our illusions.
Jesus tells us to not be afraid any longer even when we are asked to sell all we own and give alms. Jesus promises us that our lasting treasure, our authentic identity and relationships will come in this action. In fact, we will also find our genuine selves, our hearts’ desire and even eternity in Christ.

Many Church leaders live in fear today. It is our natural instinct to want to protect our children after the crisis of the sex crimes of the clergy. We worry over fewer young people attending Mass, and we fret over vocations to the priesthood when we bury our aged clergy. We agonize over the rules of the Church in days when our faith seems watered down as we struggle to find our authentic Catholic identity. We stew over mixed- culture parishes when downsizing and consolidation seem to be the only answers for survival.

Luke invites us not to worry over our struggles, our identities and our futures. He challenges us to view even our faith as a possession. We are called to welcome those who challenge us, love those who hate us, and offer hospitality to those who cannot repay us. Luke shows us that we must rid ourselves of everything that gets in the way of living the passion, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

If we listen carefully to these passages of Luke’s Gospel, we will learn to rely on the daily bread that is offered us and even in turn offer it to someone who begs at nightfall. He teaches us in these summer weeks not to worry about the externals of the church and not to hide our deep trust in God’s love for us. We may fret and be anxious as Martha was serving the person of Christ. However, we must realize that the true presence of Christ is within us forever.

We must learn from people in poverty who Luke calls us to serve. This knowledge offers survival to our communities of faith. We give alms to realize our trust in God. We do not give alms to make us feel better about our own generosity. We offer people faith and love so we may be converted to even a deeper love. We do not offer the marginalized food, shelter, clothing and communion to show other people how much faith we have or to make us look good to someone else.

If we are to live the model of the sacramental church, then we must be converted when the Bread of Life is broken and shared, when the Cup of Salvation is poured out for the many. This sacramental action will allow us to release our grasp on many of our possessions and allow us to become the people we claim to be, followers of Christ who gave up even his life for our sake. The action of the Eucharist becomes Luke’s message for us to give up our pretense, our security and everything we own to become people of authentic trust and deep love.

People who live on the edge of survival teach me to trust this genuine life God gives me. This process of self-stripping, of letting go of my false identity, gives me courage to live out the gospel message to serve people in poverty and to receive my portion of God’s offering of daily bread.

Connections: May Column from Celebrate! Magazine

2010-05-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

Heavy Lifting

I often feel embarrassed standing at the altar alone on Sunday morning. I lift my arms out from my sides, hold my palms up and offer verbal prayers on behalf of the community. My body assumes this posture while everyone in the community is kneeling. I sense my feet on the ground, my hands raised up, my voice projecting and so often I feel alone.

I experience this deep loneliness because I take seriously this responsibility to offer people’s lives to God. When I feel my arms weaken and hear my voice quiver, I know that the emotional weight of people’s lives bears down on me. Every Sunday I feel this profound body workout as I lift up my heart in prayer standing at the altar of celebration and communion.

Ministering among people who suffer poverty and loss in our urban parish has formed in me a deeper understanding of celebrating Eucharist. Praying with people who have no power in our culture strips me of any assumption that being at the altar is about my own authority, talent or ego. I come to realize that the gesture of opening my arms in prayer is my real work, my daily confrontation with God and myself.

At the altar I come to grips with the fact that people suffer beyond my ability to offer solace, change or even consolation. Praying amid people suffering homelessness connects me to real human need. Here, I am united in heart and soul with people who kneel in prayer. I do not think more of myself as the only person standing.

Looking into the faces of people bent over the pews during Mass changes me. I stand at the altar on behalf of people who do not know where to turn with their pain, uncertainty and challenges of life. I feel in my bones a deep connection to people’s unanswered questions. I pray every Sunday that there will be enough grace to fill the void in every heart.

I look to the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ for solace among people starving for the basic needs of life. The disciples knew of the hunger of the crowd gathered to hear Jesus. They approached him, scratching their heads about how to feed the vast number of people. Jesus tells the disciples to give people food, taking responsibility for helping people get through their hunger. Of course the disciples complain to Jesus that only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish will not be enough. Jesus offers a blessing on the measly portions. Everyone finds satisfaction, and leftovers fill twelve baskets.

I complain weekly to Jesus that people need more than what I can offer them. In our small parish, hunger for companionship fills the chapel on Sunday. I often wonder if Jesus is listening to the parents who have just lost their lonely, gay son to suicide. I question the compassion of Christ when I hear of the gang rape of a teenager after a school dance. I want Jesus to be around for the elderly man who was beaten by his son for a measly inheritance.

Standing at the altar on Sunday, I feel the weight of all these needs on my outstretched arms. This is the heavy lifting of my ministry as a priest. I learn from the hungry disciples to bring these needs to the person of Jesus. I trust even in moments of profound hunger and need that together we will all be fed; we will all discover love and we will all find the healing we need.

As I pray at the altar on Sunday, I also view people torn apart by the judgment of other people and the condemnation of society. This need for reconciliation bears down even more on my extended arms and open hands. I realize every Sunday that my posture at the altar remains so countercultural. Here, my open hands must also be a gesture of hospitality and welcome. This goes against our human instincts to clench our fists at drug users, prostitutes, street teens or people who threaten the status quo.

In Luke’s Gospel, a woman comes uninvited to the home of a Pharisee. She arrives with an alabaster flask of ointment because she knows that Jesus is dining there. Her reputation as an outcast threatens everyone. She bends down to the feet of Jesus and weeps. She dries his feet with her long hair and kisses them. She anoints the person of Jesus, the feet of the Savior. She peels off the labels that people have placed on her as she reveals the love within her. Her action of love and tenderness becomes our moment of reconciliation.

I learn from this woman that if I am to remain at the altar with open-handed prayer, I must also wash the feet of our culture’s outcasts. I must learn even more to bridge the gaps among people who judge others. I must anoint people’s fear when unkind labels condemn them. I must kiss the feet of people abused by our society’s outpouring of hate.

My arms outstretched in prayer modeling the sign of the Crucified also tells me that I must take up my cross daily. I carry this burden when I welcome the lost sheep and embrace the homeless veteran. This heavy lifting will never end. I see in my gestures at the altar on Sunday the connection of how I live the limits of my life during the week. I discover at the altar that I am to lose my life in order to save it.

I understand now amid drug users and people suffering mental illness that standing at the altar on Sunday is not just a perfunctory rubric. This is the place of genuine love. Jesus tells me to keep my hand on the plow and never look back. So I keep my arms out from my side and my palms empty. I keep my eyes on the faces of people kneeling in the pews. I enter more deeply into my loneliness and discover again the people of God, the Body of Christ.

The Deep Prints of Secrets

2010-03-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

I hold sacred many people’s secrets. The elderly mother whispers in my ear after Sunday Mass her dreams for her handicapped son. The eye-shadowed addict stops me on the street and confesses amid the blurring noise of a passing bus the reasons why he does not enter a church building. I hear the hushed voices in our confessional on weekdays admitting with deep wounds their personal grievances of the past. The parish volunteer catches me before the morning opening of our weekday hospitality center to entrust to me the secrets of his weekend.

All these holy encounters teach me to walk the path toward God’s healing and mercy. The only path I know to carry these fragile encounters is the path toward the Eucharist. Some days I am weighed down processing to the foot of the altar. There I find the deep prints of the secrets I carry with me. Often I am overwhelmed with love for the people who share their complex lives of suffering with me. I also worry about many people who are asked to carry burdens beyond which their hearts can bear. At the foot of the altar, I leave the dusty prints of my body carrying the grief, hardship and tragedy of so many people.

I carry people’s heart disclosures to the Eucharist because the Gospel of Luke teaches me to do so. These stunning passages we proclaim during the Sunday Eucharist in June open up for me the profound grace hidden in each of the secrets I carry.

A woman from the city comes to the table where Jesus is eating at the home of a Pharisee. She carries an alabaster flask of ointment in her arms and her secrets in her glass heart. Her secrets seem to be known publicly in the village. Word is on the street about her life and how she lives. Nevertheless, she carries with fragile reverence her secrets to the place where Jesus is sharing a meal.

She makes her way to his feet, grasping her flask at her chest to protect what is inside of her. At the sight of Jesus, she breaks through; her secrets spill out along with her bottled-up tears of regret, shame and years of being isolated. The sacred flow of water and secrets intermingle and together cleanse the dusty feet of Jesus. She seems to understand already that her life will be carried by Jesus along with other people’s lives to the cross. The path to the cross will bear the deep prints of sin, known and unknown. She realizes already the depth of forgiveness and mercy that comes from his unflinching presence.

Jesus also reveals love to the Pharisee. Simon believes the woman’s identity comes from her sin. Simon sees her only through the label that he and other people have placed on her. Jesus says to Simon that he did not wash his feet or give him a kiss or anoint his head. Jesus reminds him that the woman bathed his feet with tears, kissed them and anointed them. In this encounter, Jesus teaches Simon and everyone at the table, that the woman crying at his feet is worth more than her sin.

This profound story teaches me that Jesus wanted the woman to be restored to real joy. This joy is not a label nor is it fake or flashy. This joy comes from the honest love of God where all of us are more than our sinfulness and more than the everyday mistakes we make in our relationships. This joy is not a label. This joy comes from being at the feet of Christ and knowing and believing in our inherent worth as a child of God.

I know firsthand how our labels keep people separate, at a distance from our sense of belonging. The person with mental illness is easily labeled incapable of understanding life so is not taken seriously by others. I hear a wealthy executive blame a man experiencing homelessness for the man’s inability to keep a job. I see a responsible parent not wanting her child to associate with people living in poverty because her child might be exposed to “those people”. The long-time parishioner’s opinion is cast aside, the young tattooed youth who meditates daily receives disparaging looks at Eucharist and the pregnant thirteen-year-old absorbs her portion of stares – and more. We easily cast our worries on others and put public blame on the weary and the downtrodden.

We are all servants of God who asks us to lose our lives so to find the joy of life. Even our deepest secrets and unresolved pasts cannot keep us from the tender heart of the merciful Body of Christ. At the foot of the altar we learn to rest our pride, our arrogance, our prejudice and our corruption because of those who teach us that tears and remorse reveal the real presence of Christ Jesus.

Someone else’s clothing

2010-03-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

I still hang on to several pairs of jeans in my closet that do not fit me anymore. I should say I have gained too much weight to fit into my old jeans. However, I cling to the illusion that someday I will learn how to take better care of myself. This is the self-talk that keeps those perfectly good jeans hanging out of my sight. I do not want to admit that they need to be given away to people who need them today, to survive the cold springtime of Portland, Oregon.

The longer I minister among people who live outside or who suffer beyond my imagining with diseases of the mind, I realize my sickness of clinging to clothing that does not fit me anymore. I have yet to fully comprehend that it is not only the clothing that does not fit me anymore, but my view of who I am as a person and as a priest that has changed ministering among our society’s fragile, vulnerable and physically naked.

I evaluate the contents of my closet every Saturday evening as I unlock the chapel door on our urban corner in downtown Portland, Oregon. I open the steel doors and Irene is always waiting there to enter. She carries with her in a wire cart the contents of her entire closet. All the clothing she owns from her single-room-occupancy apartment is wadded up in the shopping cart and in several bags she carries on her shoulder. She tells me she brings her belongings to Mass because she fears someone will break into her apartment and steal everything. She lives in great fear that her second-hand clothing will become another hand-me-down to a thief.

I do not know if the thief is coming. However, she provides for me serious reflection about what I carry with me, not only the clothing on my back but the attitudes, values and lived reality of my priesthood. She stands every Saturday as a reminder that I do not own my possessions. I am not what I wear. My true identity comes from my real nakedness, the intentions of my heart and life.

Several years ago after welcoming Irene into the chapel and helping her carry her clothing to her pew, I entered the sacristy to vest for Mass. I opened the closet in the sacristy and reached for my alb that is twenty-eight years old. The familiar beige cloth comforted me and reminded me of these many years of liturgical prayer. I have clothed myself with the same alb to bury strangers and family members. I have worn the alb to witness the commitments of hundreds of couples and to receive the heartfelt confessions of strangers. The dark stains on the sleeves reveal the illnesses of people who have been anointed with holy oil. It smells of sweat and aftershave. I have stood at the altar in dozens of churches amidst varieties of circumstances. Holding the garment next to my body, I realized how I have been changed, not from what I wear, but from the many people who have challenged me, taught me, and shown me how to become a real person beneath the alb of prayer.

I reached for the green chasuble that the parish owns. I stopped, held the garment, and realized for the first time in all my years of priesthood that I was wearing someone else’s clothing. I am also a person of poverty. Not only did I realize I did not possess the garment, but I understood that the garment would never be fully owned by any person. This garment belongs to everyone. This garment has been handed down for centuries, not as a sign of separateness, but as a witness that nothing belongs to us. At that moment, I felt profound joy and relief that I have not physically grown out of the clothes I wear to celebrate the Eucharist.

Now, every time I reach for a colorful chasuble, I am reminded of all who are naked, those who wait in lines and have to ask for the basics of life. I bring to mind the grueling fact that so many people in our country of privilege have to ask someone else for clean underwear. Everyone in church leadership should witness the humble faces of people who have to ask another person for such personal items. These people’s humility and courage would teach us all how to relate to the entire worshipping assembly.

My liturgical vesture calls me to prayer by showing me that so many people own only the clothing on their backs and another person first owned that clothing. These vestments tells me not to claim false power, or find privilege in leading prayer, or get caught in the trap of how some people want to treat me with privilege.
I wear a stole for liturgical prayer that calls me first to stand emotionally and spiritually naked in moments of quiet, personal prayer. I must be ready to acknowledge the source of my life in God before I can lead other people to the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising. I must know firsthand that the piece of cloth around my neck does not provide for me places of honor. I cannot place burdens on people that I would not carry myself. The longer I wear the stole, the more I see it as a means of self-stripping, letting go of so much that separates me from real people. The stole calls me to prayer so I may become more honest in my life as a priest and as leader of the Eucharist.

The stole, a yoke around my neck, speaks to me now in ways it never has before. I live a life of advantage, education and benefit. The yoke that I carry around my neck must be connected to the suffering of people who wait in line, not only for the Eucharist, but also for every daily meal. The heaviness of that simple piece of material around my shoulders must connect me emotionally to people’s suffering. I must join my prayer to people locked in the chains of prison. I must begin to feel the weight of unemployment on the shoulders of a single mother and her little girl. I must hear the story of people and feel their lost dreams of education and a solid future in this downturned economy.

Before I was ordained a priest, my mother hand sewed two chasubles for me. Her gift to me was the joy of dressing me as a priest as she had dressed me as an infant. I remember purchasing the white light-wool material, the thread and the decorative banding. My mother figured the cost of each chasuble was $9.00. I certainly did not realize the true value of those liturgical garments at the time, the handmade vestments for Eucharist sewn by my mother.

I wore both chasubles for years being reminded that ordination is so deeply rooted in the garments of baptism. Every time I put on one of the vestments over my head and on to my body, I am reminded of how my parents clothed me for many years. The vestment shows me again that I will never really out grow my baptismal garments that have called me into a life of service.
I draped one of the chasubles over my mother’s casket when I celebrated her funeral. The funeral director tucked it into her coffin before burying her. I had to let it go. In some ways I had to grow out of the garment and into another phase of life. I needed to leave it with her as a reminder of her years of love and care for me. I knew it really did not belong to me, but to her support and encouragement for my ministry.

I connect my Eucharistic vesture to many moments of ministry and to many ways our bodies are covered with gowns of suffering. I see my vesture calling me into service when I encounter an elderly man wearing a hospital gown just coming out of surgery. Finding our bodies in someone else’s clothing no matter how new or clean is always difficult. Wearing such garments is difficult for patients when the material does not completely cover the naked body. These strange gowns are always associated with body pain, loss and bland hospital food. When I see someone in a hospital gown, I pray for them when I cover my own body in the garment of love and sacrifice at the altar.

I pray for newborns in diapers, the garments that create fathers out of ordinary husbands. I connect my prayer with the clean white handkerchief I give to the young woman on the streetcar because her nose is bleeding and she has enough trouble navigating her mental illness. I associate my vestments of service with the white bandages the medics use to stop the bleeding of a man too drunk to stand up near our chapel door. In all these moments I see in my heart the white cloth that was tossed aside in the empty tomb on that morning when the disciples could not find the dead body of Jesus. The living Christ, the Spirit of God, connects me to that garment first worn by someone else.

I recently noticed a runaway teen and his girlfriend sleeping on bench near the river in downtown Portland. As I walked by I noticed the young man wearing a T-shirt that read, “The University of Notre Dame.” By seeing his tattered, baggy pants, and large over-sized shirt I realized that his clothes were obviously first worn by someone else. They both looked as if they had been living on the streets for years. I wondered if my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross, knows where the clothing from Notre Dame goes after the football games have ended and the students have gone home. I would have ignored this youth before realizing that I also wear clothing that once belonged to someone else.

I was ordained at the University of Notre Dame but I have deepened my formation into the Gospel by entering the mystery of people’s suffering. The T-shirt was just a T-shirt to the lad on the bench. It covered his body. The shirt looked stained with vomit from over drinking alcohol. He did not wear the shirt to prove an affiliation as a football fan or an alumnus of the school, but for sheer survival. I saw the shirt and immediately connected it with the vestments that call me into working for justice and to care for people like the youth on the park bench.
I risk being spiritually naked in front of people at the altar every day. The ancient vestments protect me from the holy fire that stirs on the altar, the Real Presence of God. This fire creates community from suffering, pain and longing. At the altar of God there are no distinctions of rich and poor, we are human beings longing to experience our real identities in Christ Jesus. The vesture is a sign of our common lives clothing us in the dying and rising of Christ. The liturgical clothing becomes our baptismal dying to human power and rising to the real presence within us of God’s healing and saving life.

Even after all these years of priesthood, I am still growing into the clothing that has been passed down to me for centuries. These hand-me-downs teach me not to get stuck in my human ego and false concerns. My vestments clothe me in overwhelming humility. Vesture is not a liturgical carapace, but a connection to our lives of human poverty. The vesture hanging in the sacristy shows me the connection I have daily to people living in poverty and who have no choice as to always wear someone else’s clothing.

I will be buried in a chasuble. I will wear someone else’s clothing for all eternity. However, my ill fitting jeans may still be hanging in the closest waiting for someone else to benefit from my inability to let them go.

The Spirit's Note

2010-02-22T07:12:00.000-08:00

Originally Published in Ministry and Liturgy, March 2010

When I lived in Southern California, I walked every week along the promenade between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. The famous beach pathway is not only well-known for its sunshine and beautiful sand, but for all the colorful people who make their living selling unique items. Many people will also offer their small or individual talents in exchange for a money offering. Some people who are homeless ask for a donation of coins or paper money dropped in a bucket or hat or tossed on a blanket.

One Friday morning as I was making the return trip to Santa Monica, I noticed a homeless man blowing on a trumpet with a small, rusty coffee can at his feet. He caught my attention because his trumpet looked as if it had been run over by a truck. The smashed instrument looked unplayable at best. However, my fascination became centered on the fact that he was playing just one musical note. I stopped in my tracks and watched him play for awhile. I could not believe my eyes or ears. After listening to his one note concert for a few minutes, I moved on along the path back to my car.

After walking about a half-mile away from the horn player, I stopped cold. All of a sudden something dawned on me. I said out loud on the path, “Now I get it! It was not that he was playing just one note on his trumpet, the man had the courage to play his note!” I am not sure what the people around me must have thought when they heard me talking to myself. However, the new insight sent me racing back to the one-note gentleman to put some money into his rusty container. Unfortunately, he disappeared before I could make a donation to his flat trumpet.

As I look back to my experience on the beach that day, I hold this man’s courage firmly in my heart. He was so humbled by his communication with his trumpet, yet he was fearless in offering to the world what only he could offer. This note speaks to me now of our upcoming celebration of Pentecost.

On Pentecost Sunday, we will proclaim from 1 Corinthians, “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.” This is manifest in my friend’s trumpet playing. The cumbersome note grasped my attention. It was not a note from a wealthy person, or an educated musician, a cleric or a teacher. This sound of belief and even longing came from a homeless man struggling for a dime in the hot sun.

Because I heard this man’s trumpet, I only imagine how many people I have ignored before him. His dire poverty struck me. I catch myself judging people for expressing themselves, or discounting their voice because of their background, their financial status or their lack of formal education. His humble poverty changed me and my belief about how the Holy Spirit changes me.

At Pentecost we must reconsider the people crying out to us who long for our attention, who beg to be heard, understood and accepted. We must welcome the teenager lost in the foster care system, the elderly suburban woman being abused or the manic housewife caught in addiction. If we believe that the Spirit is not dead, then we must be able to hear the Spirit in the lives of people we have ignored, shunned or have turned a deaf ear.

Many parish communities are paralyzed with fear faced with people in poverty. We have built fences around our schools, locked our church doors and protected our parish gatherings from strangers. We are called again this Pentecost to break free of our fear to welcome the lost, the smelly, the ragtag and the neighbor next door. Pentecost is not a past experience; it is an explosive grace capturing the hearts of people today, in our time and generation.

The Spirit still blows the hinges off our doors, still knocks us off our pedestals, still whips the wind out of our preconceptions and heals our hurtful judgments of one another. The celebration of Pentecost must create the Church from the lives of those who are waiting for a new dignity of life, for those who long to be accepted and for those who cannot wait to pray with us.

The golden age of the Spirit does not exist. We must not believe that a certain time in history is more infused with grace than another. We cannot get stuck in our parish communities believing that the Spirit was more present when we had the cute pastor, or when we had stricter rules, or when priests wore cassocks, or when we wore tie-die.

The gift of Pentecost costs us our thinking that we are in charge, that life will be better without the stranger or that our false security will bring us peace. Pentecost reminds us all as individuals and worshipping assemblies that our lives are a mystery and we are made lovingly in each note of the Spirit’s love.

Pastel Breakthroughs

2010-02-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

Originally Published in Celebrate!

Every month a large brown cardboard box arrives in the mail in our parish office. Every member of our parish staff recognizes the return address immediately. The container is postmarked from Boston, Massachusetts and travels the miles across the country to Portland, Oregon. The box is shipped from Holy Cross Family Ministries, an apostolate owned by my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross.

Without opening the box, we all know that the delivery contains three hundred plastic rosaries, each one enclosed in a small plastic bag with paper fold-out instructions on how to pray the rosary. The rosaries come in white, as well as pastel colors of pink, blue, and green.

Even though we are a small parish of only a hundred or so people, the large number of rosaries is a welcome sight. Every weekday morning over a hundred people come through our doors searching for the basics of life. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the resources to meet every person’s needs. Some people come enraged that they stood in line for hours only to be turned down for a bus pass to travel out of town or money for medication or resources to find shelter for their children.

Often when people are most frustrated, some of them may still select a pastel rosary from a small wicker basket placed at the office window and something happens inside them. They begin to feel connected to us anyway, even though we were not able to provide them with the item or assistance for which they stood in line.

I find in these small plastic bags many connected moments of miracles. These encounters with strangers become pastel breakthroughs that awaken my heart to the real needs of people. Not many of our guests will ever actually sit down, take out the instructions, read the small print, and learn how to pray the traditional prayers. Some of our guests are lucky to find a relatively safe place to sleep or to be able to find a quiet moment at all in the neighborhood single-room occupancy hotels. It is the message of the rosary itself that counts. Every day I learn that the Paschal Mystery comes in shades of anger, hopelessness, discouragement, frustration and uncertainty. I rely on the plastic beads to be more than mere objects, to be genuine moments of faith and hope somehow strung together.

As I ponder the Gospels for March and April, I notice a string of awakenings, breakthroughs that unlock our search for God. Jesus tells us a story of a simple fig tree, one that people have ignored because of its lack of fruit. Jesus is patient, cultivating the soil, fertilizing, waiting and believing in the natural process of growing fruit. The Lenten Gospels tell us that God is not finished with us. We cannot give up on people in poverty whom we judge, ignore or insist that they are not living up to our standards. This acceptance of other people in these Lenten days shows us that Christ’s dying and rising still produces much fruit in our human hearts.

A woman weeping in our chapel told me she just wanted a blessing for her children. I sat with her, listened to her abusive story and prayed with her for our Father’s care. I handed her a packet with the pastel beads and she pondered them as if heaven had opened. I could not help but see in her tears the woman standing in the sand accused of adultery. Her friends had given up on her, people turned their backs on her actions and others could not take responsibility for their own decisions. Her tears still teach me that women remain ravaged by rumors, finger pointing and accusations in our society and church. Jesus, bending down to write an unknown message in the sand sets her free with words that breakthrough the lies.

Our staff realizes that not everything goes according to plan. When we first received the rosaries some years ago, one staff member noticed that the rosaries themselves were being left in the lobby. However, the plastic bags were always taken. It dawned on us that some people were discarding the rosaries and using the plastic bags for drugs. Not every moment comes out perfectly as the father realized with two lost sons. In the least-predicted places and times, we can all wake up to our sin and misfortunes. We can find our true inheritance by finding our way home to God’s love. Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them and even today among people in every parish community. Even when the drug users took the rosaries for their purposes, I must believe in these unexpected moments that the faithfulness of God rests upon them as well.

Jesus threatened many people and was sentenced to death because he disturbed people’s comfort in order to welcome outcasts, sinners and strangers. I think of Jesus’ reputation when I see for myself rosaries hanging from the necks of people living in poverty in our neighborhood. I notice them at bus stops and street corners, in coffee shops and while riding the streetcar. The rosaries reassure me that we had some contact with people who need the basic message that God cares for the people living in poverty on the streets of Portland.

Some people may be disturbed that many of these rosaries are not being prayed as they were intended. However, I see them as glimpses of faith, real breakthroughs of love that unite us with people suffering homelessness, incredible addictions and various degrees of mental illnesses. Perhaps their example of wearing faith on their bodies for everyone to see is really an extension of the prophet not being accepted in his own native place, or street corner, or homeless shelter.

I remember when Bonnie camped at our doorway for two months. Because of her kleptomania I estimated that she took nearly four hundred rosaries during her stay. I am convinced that Bonnie poked her head into Jesus’ empty tomb and wanted for herself the warmth of the white garment left in the corner of the grave. She became a sign for so many people in our community that Christ is still near, that death still gives way to the breakthrough of compassion and hope for people. I wait for the day when we will all find ourselves wearing our baptismal garments witnessing to Christ breaking bonds of apathy, injustice and insincerity.

I saw a commercial on television for a local CBS affiliate that asks people on the street about the needs of Portland. One gentleman wearing layers of clothing responded by saying that Portland needs more public restroom facilities. If you notice very closely under all the layers of clothing you will see the pastel rosary beads around his neck. “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Jesus revealed his resurrection among fisherman along the shore. He told Peter to remain in love and to act justly toward all people who remain lost and forgotten. When I see people wearing the rosaries all over town, I discover deep within my own heart the true presence of Christ. The rosaries and the people remind me to open my heart further, to follow more closely and believe in the pastel Easter presence of Christ our Savior.

Almost white garments

2010-01-20T06:58:00.000-08:00

Ministry and Liturgy: February 2010

I relish a moment of quiet in the chapel early on Easter morning. Every year at the Downtown Chapel I sneak downstairs, flick the switch of a single altar light and sit on the sanctuary steps. I relax in this sacred space as I have done in various other places in the 27 years of my priesthood. I savor the prayer and excitement, the longing and grieving, and the memories and peace of the Triduum. Every year the Triduum captures the real life of every parish, and I try to soak up the lingering hope of people who believe in the dying and rising of Christ Jesus.

Last Easter morning I tried to recall the names and faces of our friends who courageously extended their feet to be washed on Holy Thursday. I captured again the longing on those faces that ache for Jesus to truly wash them of suffering, poverty and loss. I remembered the fresh smell of the bleached towels. I heard again the gentle music, the soft singing. I felt again the anxiety of some people worried about publicly exposing their imperfect feet. The naked feet reminded me again of the sinners and outcasts who ache to be called among His followers. These memories help me realize one more time that everyone longs to be cared for and acknowledged as followers of the Christ who still washes us clean.

I remembered the folks who processed down the chapel aisle to kiss the cross on Good Friday. Some people from our hospitality center reverenced the cross for the first time. Other people who live on the margins of society hoped that this gesture could spark healing for them and for the Church. Still others sought out the wood because it has been a deeply significant ritual all the way from their childhood. Last year I sensed my own fear of death as I remembered an elderly woman who hobbled up to the cross. She died just a few short weeks later.

I also held up to the Divine my memories of celebrating the Easter Vigil. I smelled the Chrism now mingled among the bright aroma of the white lilies. I pondered the wax from the peoples’ candles now on the carpeting. I remembered the new fire capturing excitement on the faces of the Elect and the Word of God echoing our ancient history in our small chapel. I remembered the joyful faces of people renewing their baptismal commitments. The deep joy of new life echoed back to me on the quiet step.

My reminiscence ended abruptly last Easter morning with a knock on the chapel door. Julie, a volunteer and parishioner, arrived in the rain with a load of clothing donated from her coworkers. As I opened the door she said that a young man she encountered down the block really needed help. We invited him through the lobby doors. He was in his early twenties and told us he was just passing through town. He stood in front of us wearing jeans, a T-shirt and filthy, wet white socks. He explained that while he had slept in a doorway all of his possessions were stolen, even his shoes. He begged us for at least a pair of socks and any kind of shoes.

Julie and I escorted him into our men’s clothing pantry, a small dark space in our basement. I assisted him in sorting out some options for shoes. Julie ran upstairs to acquire a new pair of white sweat socks. His name was Chris, and the smell of booze covered him as he sat down on a bench to try on his new shoes. We chatted as he peeled off the soaking wet, filthy-grey socks from one foot then the other. His face lit up as he slowly put on his new socks and tried on a couple of pairs of shoes to find the right size. The donated canvas shoes fit him perfectly.

Julie and I engaged Chris in conversation as he relaxed on the bench enjoying the warmth of his new socks and shoes. He was alone, seeking a job, lost in alcohol, running from family issues and not sure he would stay in Portland long. He thanked us over and over again, for the new white socks and the shoes that felt even better than the boots he had been wearing.

As we were leaving the men’s pantry, Chris picked up his old white socks and tossed them to the side of the room into a small waste basket. I saw the gesture in slow motion, this young man tossing the white garments off to the side. I slowed down and took a second look at the socks in the trash can. I turned off the lights to the small windowless room, acknowledged his smile, closed the door and gave thanks for the Easter morning memory.

Block Blessing

2010-01-09T23:43:00.000-08:00

January/February 2009
Ministry and Liturgy

Last summer our parish community welcomed Archbishop John Vlazny of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon to bless and dedicate our new icon. The icon of Christ the Healer was written for our parish community that serves people living in poverty in Old Town in Portland. The writer of the icon, Rev. Jon Buffington, incorporated images unique to Portland so that many members of our community could better relate to and pray with the healing Christ offers to every person.

Christ touches a crippled man wearing a backpack sitting in front of the Burnside Bridge. This sacred gesture calms many of our people who sleep under that same bridge. Christ casts out seven demons from Mary Magdalene who holds a jar of perfumed oil. Many of our people suffering from mental health issues take refuge in her beautiful, serene appearance. Many people suffering chronic illness also come weekly to the chapel to be anointed for such unrelenting anguish. A series of roses under Christ’s feet calls to mind the City of Roses, a trademark name for Portland. That same image can be found in our Cathedral just a mile from our parish community.

After the reception of Eucharist, the Archbishop blessed the artist, and called everyone into a silent moment of heartfelt compassion for our parishioners and neighbors who live in dire poverty. The central piece of the dedication was a sung litany which washed over the assembly rousing deep prayer and passion for many people in the assembly.

I offer now this Litany of Blessing so that every community may learn in any time of year to enter more deeply into the healing message of Christ Jesus. This blessing prayer spoke to the particular needs of our parish community. Other parish communities may name their own poverty and suffering in addictions, elder abuse, divorce, or rural unemployment. Every parish community must be truthful and name their experiences in real, honest and authentic prayer.

The assembly responded in song, “Heal us, O God” to each chanted line of the litany. I felt the emotional tug of each statement settling into the hearts of the people. Each line seemed to go deeper into the truth of how we experience life every day in our parish. The bold statements opened our eyes to reality and profound trust in God. I felt a sacred hush under the chant. The prayer touched tender places of compassion and faith for all of us. We seemed humbled by our heartache and even more so by taking the risk of opening our lives to God. We listened, prayed and received the words sincerely in our hearts as we cried out in response.

We lift up our prayer in the healing touch of Christ….
We lift up our community in the healing touch of Christ…

Protect us when we cling to revenge and violence………..
Transform us when hatred overtakes our actions…….
Teach us when we jump to false conclusions…………….

Lead us when we are afraid to follow……..
Inspire us when we fear our own talents…..
Sustain us when we turn from your mercy……

Unite us when we would rather go our separate ways…..
Clarify our thoughts when our thinking becomes destructive….
Bond us together when prejudice tears us apart…..

Create life in our culture of death and destruction…….
Penetrate our stubbornness when self-hatred makes a home in us….
Discover new potential in us when we grasp power and authority…….

Soothe our hearts when illness claims our bodies…..
Rest in us when anxiety penetrates our souls……
Cleanse our consciences when sin overtakes us….

Refresh our hope when we are absorbed in doubt and guilt ….
Wash our feet when we stumble and walk away from love….
Believe is us when we no longer trust in your love….

Forgive us when we do not serve our neighbors….
Provide for us when we loose our employment…
Shelter us when become homeless…..

Recover our lives when addiction and compulsion overpowers us….
Touch us when we cannot bear our pain…..
Cry for us when we grieve those we love…

Weep for us when sorrow blankets our hearts and futures…
Anoint us when our bodies are too weak to pray….
Live in us when we are dead to ourselves….

We lift up our prayer in the healing touch of Christ….
We lift up our community in the healing touch of Christ….

After the litany, the Archbishop prayed the words of blessing for the community and the icon itself. He then sprinkled the icon and the assembly with blessed water. Archbishop Vlazny knelt lovingly on the concrete floor and dipping his thumb into the Oil of the Sick, anointed the four corners of the icon. His humble posture created in me deep concern for all the people we serve and longing for our reliance on God alone.

After the final blessing and dismissal of the Mass, we carried the icon immediately to the outside of our chapel. The entire assembly gathered on the corner of 6th Street and Burnside for the procession around our block to offer Christ to the four winds, for the needs of the entire world. This moment really captured my imagination and the awareness of our assembly. Taking this healing message literally to our neighborhood certainly was a new experience for many visitors and parishioners. Even though we pray at sites of murders as a community and even feed people outside, this was a special way of bringing the message of the Eucharist to a waiting neighborhood in need of love and tenderness.

We huddled silently on the first corner. When people gathered we sang boldly the next texts of the litany. After pausing to allow the prayer to sink into our hearts we then processed along the sidewalk to the next corner and continued the same process on each corner. We sang our truths, anguish and reliance on Christ in the midst of passersby, people pushing their belongings in shopping carts and strangers staring at the large group of us. A few patrons of the local gay bar thought we were condemning gay and lesbian people and drug dealers and several parishioners assured them we were praying for love.

We stand in our streets and offer Christ to the south…..
We pray for immigrants and refugees……
We pray for all people in third-world countries……..

We cry out for the needs of the prisoner, the veteran……
We carry on our shoulders the weight of unemployment….
We ask you to guide our homeless youth and pregnant teenagers….

We carry the cross for people who line up daily for our hospitality center…
We bring Christ to people who line up here for Brother Andre Café…..
We ask you to heal the people who do not trust this community….

We stand in our streets and offer Christ to the east…
We pray for the end of war…
We pray for reconciliation among all faiths and religions…..

We ask healing among agencies serving people experiencing poverty…
We ask healing for the elderly, the crippled and bedridden….
We lift up drug-dealers and pimps who roam our streets…..

We carry the cross to those who cannot help themselves…
We bring Christ to those who feel judged by our faith community….
We ask you to heal the divisions within our neighborhood….

We stand in our streets and offer Christ to the north……
We remember Brother Andre and the people of Canada….
We pray for our Holy Cross institutions of learning…….

We pray for people struggling with sexual identity….
We pray for adequate housing and employment….
We pray for the safety of all women in Old Town….

We pray for reconciliation among neighbors housing the poor….
We pray for all businesses in Old Town……
We long for the unity of believers and the consolation of the oppressed

We stand in our streets and offer Christ to the west….
We pray for navigators of the sea, travelers and sojourners…
We pray for our dead who have traveled to the eternal shore….

We pray for all people suffering mental illness…..
We pray for people living in the sunsets of depression and loneliness.
We pray for all the grieving and lost…..

We pray for patience for a new day of love and concern for people…
We pray for all our neighbors, benefactors and believers….
We wait in joyful hope for the coming of Christ Jesus…….

We offered back to God the healing that comes from God. We gathered as believers who know all too well the pain of life and the unanswered questions of suffering. We took our pain and our faith to the streets. We extended the healing of the Eucharist to the neighborhood and revealed our concerns in public. We blessed the block because we are confident the suffering does not have the last word among us.

After we prayed circling the block, we processed back into the chapel. The artist and some helping hands hung the icon above our Tabernacle. Everyone present burst into applause with sheer emotional release.

Christ the Healer; pray for us.

Testing the Waters

2009-11-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

I was shocked at the results of my eighth-grade aptitude test. I thought for sure when I sat through the exam that it would easily reveal my future career. I figured my entire life would be outlined in this simple assessment completed even before high school. Instead, when I received the results, I knew my future was not going to be so easily defined. The test revealed only one area of real strength in the 90th percentile range, everything else was in the 20-30th percentile range. The graph revealed that “agriculture” was my strong point and that my identity would rest on these skills.

I glance way back to the eighth grade because I now have perspective on God’s grace and sense of humor. Life is not as cut and dried as I hoped as a child. I could never have predicted my life’s tests, sacrifices and wrong turns or the beauty of experiences and relationships. The irony of my life now is that I live on a concrete farm in an urban parish in downtown Portland, Oregon. I minister in an environment where there is no grass, no potted flowers, no home-grown spices, and no garden vegetables and not even visible soil. It is also the place where my faith is put to the test and where my life is open for surprise.

This test goes well beyond my eighth-grade exam. Each day brings new demands beyond my abilities. People here are embedded in fear about how to survive the unfortunate circumstances of their lives. They live with the hard lessons of economic pitfalls, horrible addictions and the blame that their homelessness is their entire fault. There is no time here for pretense or false piety. There are no black and white answers to issues of poverty. We have no patience in this setting for power struggles and stodgy clericalism. The soil here for ministry takes many years to plow. Reaping is in God’s hands alone.

The real test for me centers on my ability to let go of my preconceived notions of my strengths, weaknesses and even my ability to trust God. Here, God calls me beyond my imagining, leaving me clinging only to the everyday seeds of trust, fidelity and gratitude. My real life test is to live the life reflected in love of the sacraments and my commitment to the poor.

Working among the poor has tested my faith completely. Several years ago I had the idea of offering a day of retreat for people preparing for initiation from around the Archdiocese. I wanted people who are searching for identity within the Church to discover even for a few hours what I have found here. I wanted people to learn about God’s fidelity among people who have less than themselves. So for the past half-dozen years our parish has hosted this five-hour Lenten retreat at the Downtown Chapel.

The Elect and Candidates, sponsors and team members are offered the opportunity to assemble in our urban setting where ministry puts us all to the test. The purpose of the retreat is to expose everyone’s vulnerability in prayer. This emptiness or loneliness in God allows us to serve those who are physically poor. Our neighborhood in return then shows everyone on the retreat that we are all the same; we all need God no matter how much money, power or possessions we own.

Many of the Elect from other parishes are not exposed to how the Church responds to people on the margins of society. They have not yet experienced the social Gospel and have not been taught the lived history of social justice within the Archdiocese. I discover that people want to test out whether or not the Church is practicing what it preaches.

I begin the retreat asking people about their experiences of prayer. Many faces go blank because they fear they will give a “wrong” answer. I ask them not to test them, but to find some bedrock of truth to explore our relationship with God. After a few minutes of surface answers and polite conversations we get down to the real issues of life. A sponsor finally opens up about how difficult prayer can be when guilt suffocates her. A young candidate from the suburbs whispers that surrender is most difficult because of her addictive and controlling behaviors. A mother reveals that her prayer is still about the grief she carries because of her miscarriage. One man acknowledges his experience in prayer as, “Fits and starts.” A young woman struggles in her prayer to listen. An elderly woman admits her “Restlessness.” And an admitted addict speaks of prayer as “Only love.”

I struggle to authentically articulate how the poor teach me to pray. If I am honest about my own life, I know how I push God away and then complain that I do not belong within the boundaries of God’s fidelity. I hear every day from people who have next to nothing in life. However, they reach out to touch even the hem of Christ’s garment because that is so often their last possession.

To demonstrate this I ask someone in the group to “play” God. I usually ask a woman to stand up and I introduce her to the group as God. God who is all love, not just “sort of like love”, but all love stands with open arms. I walk to the other side of the room, face against the wall and yell out how we all live in our own power leading to addictive behaviors, isolation, and false authority. “God” calls my name and I slowly turn into the direction of love, finally being reconciled into the loving embrace of God who accepts me and brings me home.

I learn this honesty in new ways from people who suffer mental illness, severe loneliness and even from people who suffer unimaginable abuse. I speak as openly as I can about my own inability to be honest in my quiet moments with Jesus. My challenge in silence is to pray the truth of my life and not try to reach God from the emotional masks and even sin I hide behind.

I try to get across to our visitors that if we are going to serve authentically, we must pray with genuine hearts. We cannot serve thinking we have solutions to other people’s problems. We cannot be convincing if we have not first found ourselves in the embrace of God. Otherwise we become just a church of, “Do-gooders” instead of people who are compelled by God to serve others in the world.

My colleague from another parish, Deacon Brett Edmonson, fashions the vulnerability that has been raised in conversation into a model of prayer. He takes these seeds of honesty and opens people’s lives in the model of prayer called, “Lectio Divina.” This process of slowly reading the Scriptures offers people an opportunity to sink soul-deep into the consolation of the Holy Spirit within the Scriptures. The loneliness and fear that rises up from the discussions rests in the Holy texts, not to resolve the fear, but to allow God to receive it.

These contemplative frameworks for prayer suggest to people that our complications and worries are lived and supported in the mystery of God’s love for us. I watch people’s attentive facial expressions as they realize their prayer comes from their vulnerability. They seem to relax into God’s care when they confront these tender life issues. They rest in a new silence that seems full of insight when people make the connections to their own poverty.

These genuine discussions and silent moments seem to relieve the anxiety people had initially about coming to this urban area in the first place. Their eyes light up when their own questions of life are acknowledged and their fears are spoken openly. This creates a new place in the hearts of all the participants now to leave the confines of the parish building and go into the streets to tour our neighborhood.

Members of our staff lead the participants in small groups from our parish lobby into the streets to discuss the issues of our neighbors. Since our parish does not have any free-standing homes in our boundaries, we speak about the struggles people face within the single room occupancy hotels. We tell stories of people dealing with exploding numbers of bedbugs, over-priced rooms, lack of insurance, minimal health care and drug-induced violence. I tell stories of engineers, contractors and workers cutting corners in their work because the building they were building was to house the poor. People are introduced to the nightclub adjacent to the parish that plays music until 6:00am on weekends and are told of how the sound reverberates in my bedroom.

We walk with a new awareness of what the poor face every day and the issues so many people want to ignore. We stop in front of several non-profit organizations, similar to praying a public Stations of the Cross. We pause, tell stories and pray for the care the agencies provide. Slowly our friends on retreat realize the complexity of life for people who are homeless, addicted and mentally ill. Our participants speak of how they have been so blind to people around them and how their families still cultivate fear about poor people.

I explain on our pilgrimage that even one issue would be enough to speak about for our retreat. If we just focused on homeless women, the stories would be vast about the lack of shelters and care for women. We could spend days speaking about the horrific issues of domestic violence and how the women roam the neighborhood at night so not to be raped. We could spend the rest of the day speaking about the women who sit at night around the perimeter of our chapel building hoping to be safe.

When the groups end the pilgrimage they walk back into our building to debrief their new experiences in the chapel. There is a new silence, a hush of observations and insights that fill the space. Some bear the weight of the test with tears, with a new desire to volunteer, and a new realization that suffering must be surfaced in every parish community. One woman shared that her grandmother was homeless and that the walk around the neighborhood was extremely exhausting and painful. All along the way, reminders of her relative’s struggles pierced her conscience and pulled at her heart. She felt so much guilt because she could never fix her grandmother’s pain.

We close our day with ritual prayer. I speak to them about showing up with every emotion, tension, sin, heartbreak and joy to the Easter Vigil. I invite them to “show up” to the feast of the Sacraments, not only physically, but with every aspect of their lives. Then the Holy Spirit will heal what needs healing and open for them a new path of fidelity and love. They will be tested beyond their abilities, loved further than they can imagine, and called to serve in ways they least expect. We end our day with the Elect and Candidates standing around the altar and the sponsors and team surrounding them. We chant this litany of blessing for all people who will be initiated into the Easter Sacraments.

Response: Bless us, O Lord
In our waiting for love,
In our longing for integrity,
In our searching for hope,
In our striving to belong,
In our wanting to serve,
In our bridging the rich and poor,
In our working for peace,
In our serving the outcast and forgotten,
In our befriending the destitute,
In our speaking words of healing,
In our embracing the sick and marginalized,
In our walking with the tired and lonely,
In our committing our lives to others,
In our standing in truth and fidelity,
In our hearing the cries of the oppressed,
In our asking for forgiveness,
In our hungering for the Eucharist,
In our believing in the Word,
In our claiming your prophetic message,
In our calling to live Gospel justice,
In our daring to speak the truth,
In our living in community,
In our reconciling with our enemies,
In our renewing our Baptismal promises,
In our hoping to be saved,
In our calling to die and rise in Christ,
In our following the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
In our relying on God alone,
In our remembering of saints, prophets, martyrs and guides,
In our resting in your loving Kingdom,

Every Lent after the retreat I escort people to the red doors of our chapel to say goodbye. I believe God is continuing to test me through my fear and loneliness by planting seeds of new relationships. I stand in the doorway grateful for new people believing in love and listening to the Baptismal call to serve within the Church in ways we all least expect.

Line Dancing

2009-11-23T03:54:00.000-08:00

Ministry and Liturgy: December 2009

On most early mornings I smell cigarette smoke in my bedroom. I smell it not because I smoke or that anyone in the rectory smokes. The hint of cigarettes slowly drifts into my third-story room from the line of people forming below my window. People line up every weekday morning at our urban parish to enter our hospitality center seeking the basics of life. The queue forms in rain or shine, in good economic times or bad, in every liturgical season.

The row of friends and strangers becomes a profound presence of prayer for me even before our hospitality center opens. Low-income neighbors come very early because they have to make decisions about how to spend their day. A young man living outside needs clothing; a single mother wants a laundry voucher so they both wait in our line. A man seeking a job interview steps into a row at another service center to perhaps get one of the few showers available for that day. A stranger in town waits in a different line to get a new identification card because all his belongings were stolen during the night.

Every morning I acknowledge my own lack of patience waiting in lines. I grow angry when I have to wait at a grocery store check-out counter. I feel offended when I have to wait in a restaurant to use a restroom. I have no patience waiting in line to fill my car with gasoline. Every morning in my room and office, the smell of cigarettes and echoes of conversations from below my window remind me of my own stubbornness, small-mindedness and lack of patience.

One of the major differences between when I wait in line and when my friends wait in line is that I will eventually get what I need. I will fill up my car with gas, pay for my groceries and be able to use the restroom in a restaurant. There is no guarantee that people below my window, no matter which line they stand in, will ever get what they need. Our parish can afford only so many laundry vouchers per day, only so many resources for clothing. Our one volunteer can only cut hair of a limited number of people on Wednesdays.

The queue under my window offers a profound reflection especially during the Lenten season. We begin this forty-day retreat with varieties of people in all parishes waiting in line. A cultural mix of people stand in the same procession waiting to be touched, to be given the ash-mark, the sign of the Crucified.

There are as many reasons for coming to Mass on Ash Wednesday as there are people. An immigrant family wants their foreheads to be smeared with ashes because they cling to traditions from the old country. A poor, elderly man believes that if he does not get ashes and dies during the year, he will not go to heaven. An exhausted business man strains to connect again with his childhood. Some gay members feel they can only be part of the sinful fringe of the Church. A neglectful mother feels genuine guilt. An unemployed couple has grown scrupulous and Ash Wednesday continues to make them feel unworthy. For some people suffering abuse, Ash Wednesday is one of the only days a year that they are physically touched in a positive way. Some believers want to keep all the rules, some want to be reminded they are still sinners. Most people want to be found in the love that God has for them.

No matter the reasons we all wait in line to be marked with the Sign of the Cross, every parish must welcome every person. No parish assembly can take for granted that people ache for new life and the security of belonging in the Church. We must not judge people whose reasons for being in the Church seem out of place, too liberal, too conservative or not authentic. We cannot judge folks who come to our parishes only once a year just to receive ashes. We must not shun people who sneak in the doors after Mass on Ash Wednesday and want someone to mark their foreheads.

The queue for the sacred ash mark should remind all ministers that we accept people struggling with mental health, regretful pasts, overwhelming poverty, infidelity, and insincerity. The line dancing down the aisles of our churches to begin the Lenten season teaches us that people have made real decisions to be there, to show up once again to be claimed by Christ’s death and resurrection within the Church.

Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Sock Exchange

2009-11-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

November CELEBRATE! Magazine article:

Preaching on Christmas Eve frustrates me. I never know how to reach the exhausted, “perfect mother” struggling to bring her newborn baby to Mass because her in-laws insist. The tired father drenched with worry over paying for the family’s gifts strains to hear the evening Gospel. The single relatives back from college often feel most alone on Christmas Eve. The aging parents grieve the loss of Christmas’ past and the recent death of their only daughter. Some people scurry into the church building at the last minute feeling their place is only on the margins of the community anyway.

Christmas evokes mostly tears of loss for me as I look behind people’s smiles and sugar-induced enthusiasm. Behind the red scarves and new neckties lies the reality of people often forcing their way into happiness and love. On Christmas Eve real life comes to the surface when we least expect. I uncovered this authentic life several years ago when I tried a different approach to preaching during the holy Eve of Christmas.

Before Mass, I wrapped three items as gifts to be opened during the homily. I carried the three gifts in a colorful shopping bag and explained I had just received these gifts and wanted to open them at Mass on Christmas Eve. I ripped open the first gift with wide-eyed enthusiasm. My childlike approach revealed a new teddy bear. I reminisced about our sacred memories as children and the holy bonds of family. I spoke softly that Christmas also conjures up memories of grief, loss and unhappiness with many people we love. The grace of Christmas heals the past and makes room for Christ to be born even in our brokenness and sadness.

The second gift revealed a bag of candy. I preached the sweetness of God’s covenant of love even in times of war and uncertainty. After I spoke about each of these first two gifts, I gave each gift to a different stranger sitting in the pews. What you receive as a gift, give as a gift.

I tore off the wrapping paper from the third gift which revealed a pair of nylon socks. The assembly laughed as my face fell and I muttered about getting such an ordinary gift. I told the assembly that the Incarnation demands a lot of work on our part. I explained that Christ was born on earth to reveal the divine and human dignity of all people. I held up the dark socks and begged them to serve people who long for such dignity. The socks called people to action to serve others who go without adequate clothing, food, shelter, purpose and relationships. Walking in the footsteps of the Crucified demands a life commitment for all believers. I handed the pair of black dress socks to a stranger, a stocky, older man sitting at the end of a crowded pew. His rugged features, deep wrinkles and sparkling eyes revealed a man who had obviously made his living working with his hands with diligence and care.

The Advent Gospels prepare us for this holy night. Our hearts cannot weary while we wait for the face of Christ. Anxieties must not catch us by surprise like a trap. Great signs and wonders will tell the story of redemption. After Mass I introduced myself to the working class, kindly man and his wife. She had suddenly begun to feel ill after everyone had left the church. The three of us sat in the pew for a few minutes until her heart felt better and she felt strong enough to leave.

Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy in waiting for the Lord. I was seeing before me a woman making crooked ways straight, waiting for Christ’s promise to be fulfilled. I saw in her eyes the readiness to see the salvation of God. Her heart was preparing to be birthed into eternal Light. I felt drawn to this couple. I knew I had given this man the socks for a reason. I could already feel in our first encounter that our relationship was only just beginning.

A few days later I received a phone call from the gentleman who received the socks. His wife was very ill and in the hospital. I raced over to the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit to find her entire family at her bedside. She looked up at me and whispered to her husband, “It’s the sock-priest.” A few days later she died in her sleep.

At her funeral, her husband walked into the church to greet me. He pulled up his pant legs and told me that he was wearing his new socks for his wife’s funeral. We hugged each other and we both wept in our newborn friendship. I heard the Prophet John’s words rattling in my heart. If you have extra socks, give them away. Stop hoarding possessions and give them freely to others. I felt deep within my soul the reason for the giving. His grief was now being aided with the parish’s presence. The socks had now become the instrument of healing. He would always remember and grieve over the Christmas his wife died. He would also remember the Christmas Eve the parish reached out to both of them.

Every Christmas and every Easter that followed, the elderly widower wore his black dress socks to Mass. After Mass he made a point of stopping me in the lobby, shaking my hand with one hand and pulling up his pant leg with the other. He greeted me with gratitude and with tears. I looked forward to those holy greetings each year, where kindness and peace embraced. The holy greeting was a reminder for me that God is still coming to earth to save us from ourselves.

I preach now on Christmas Eve with even greater sensitivity to peoples’ stories. I realize the sock exchange with a kind-hearted stranger will never be duplicated. So I strive to break through the cultural wrappings that hide the season’s love. I reach out to tired parents, the bickering relatives, the ill single man or the couple drowning in debt. Now I wait for the gift God gives me, this authentic life, in the apprehensive stranger with cold feet sitting at the end of the crowded pew.

Hand Dipped

2009-10-13T23:39:00.000-07:00

November 2009
Ministry and Liturgy
Bridgework by Fr. Ron Raab

I reluctantly dip my fingers into our small baptismal font when I enter our chapel before Mass. There are many reasons for my hesitation. The water itself is the first problem. No matter how often we change the blessed water in the porcelain bowl, some people will use it to wash their hands, faces and belongings.

A scum forms along the edges when a mentally ill woman washes her plastic rosary in the font. Another person puts wildflower pedals, grass and dirt in our bowl of life. Rough dirty hands of a homeless man dip into the same waters as the manicured fingernails of the executive secretary from across the street.

The water is not my only hesitation. Some days I am not sure I want to dip my hands into the water because faith is just too difficult. My reluctance to put my fingers in the water is a reminder of my hesitation to open my life to God. I have a deep reservoir of resistance. My resistance accumulates here in our urban chapel because I hear every day the unanswered prayers of people living on the streets. I see firsthand the effects of our culture’s blind attitudes about healthcare. My hands shake with fear as I dip my fingers into the white bowl remembering Jesus’ baptism and realize I am being called to live and serve well beyond my comfort or capability.

I hesitate for a moment going to the font because I also am aware of my own lack of courage. I feel the cool water on my fingers and the sting of guilt on my soul. The water splashes up fear in me about being a priest in such a place of rawness and fragility. On most days I do not feel prepared to enter into relationships with people who challenge me so much.

I also feel the challenge of the Gospels in these new weeks of Ordinary Time. Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine shows me again that I must turn my reluctance to dip my fingers into baptismal water into real service. The water in our simple font must also be turned into direct care for people who cannot serve themselves. The shallow font is deep with hope for people if I could just get over myself. My wet fingers begin the challenge to ready my heart to sip from the Cup of Salvation.

The Gospel from Luke completely challenges me. I hear Jesus stand up in his place of prayer and declare liberty to captives, sight to the blind and glad tidings to the poor. He has been anointed to say things I experience here every day. If I dip my fingers into a baptismal bowl, does this mean Jesus will cure our addictions and take away the horrific effects of mental illness? I wait with wet fingers and sweat on my brow for the answer.

Jesus’ words always confused people. His prophetic words, healings and miracles stirred up people’s fear. He tells me that no prophet is accepted in his native place. So I rely only on Joseph’s Son to show me what to say to a young woman who sells her body to pay rent for a rat-infested apartment. I wait for Jesus’ words to respond to a young man who sleeps at our door who speaks to me about being sexually abused by family members. There are days that I want to rise up with fury and toss any notion of faith into the Willamette River in downtown Portland. I hear the prophets telling me to be patient as I wash my fingers in our dirty bowl.

I splash water on my body and I also feel the tug of the nets thrown into the Lake of Gennesaret. The disciples were making a living doing what they knew best. They were fisherman just like their ancestors. Jesus challenged them to toss their nets into a deeper place. When their nets were bursting with a catch, he told them not to be afraid. I so wish I could walk with this fearlessness among the deep waters of hypodermic needles, rain-soaked back packs and shopping carts filled with people’s only possessions. I must rely on Jesus who challenges me through our shallow bowl of water that deeper faith will someday wash up in me.

Jesus gathered his friends on dry, level ground and told them that the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the grieving will all be blessed. He also warned those who were well-satisfied not to expect satisfaction in the Kingdom. I hold on to these Beatitudes. I believe that what Jesus said that day on dry land can be found in our baptismal waters. I splash filmy water on my forehead and shoulders ready to be led into places I least imagine under the sign of the Crucified.

Handwritten Texting

2009-09-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Ministry and Liturgy, October issue 2009

I watch people every noontime handwrite their prayers in a book near the entrance of our chapel. Parishioners and strangers pen thoughts, worries, and hopes for a better life on white paper in a simple black three-ring binder. People hope that God will soon respond. They wish that God could text them back.

There are no instructions, icons or lit candles or kneelers or holy cards, but people have come to understand that being present to this black book is an experience of the holy. These pages include a printed prayer for the ministry of our urban chapel and blank spaces to be filled in with personal thoughts and petitions.

This collection of prayers handwritten in Advent especially breaks my heart. There are no quick replies from God. These words on cheap paper, however, change my life. I read the scratchy printing of a mentally ill woman who begs God to release her boyfriend from prison. The flowery penmanship tells the story of an elderly woman praying she will receive money to pay her rent in the single-room occupancy hotel. The tiny print swears at God for giving the author mental illness. Some prayers I read beg for food and others echo a longing for the end of war. In small print one prayer storms heaven asking God to get rid of deep depression. No matter the penmanship or requests, these sacred cries open me up to profound prayer from the tragically lonely voices of people in poverty.

These prayers are written by people who have no voice in the world. Very few people listen to poor people with mental illness. The man sleeping at our front door gets no response from anyone in our society who can foster change. These prayers speak the loudest to our parishioners who work hard to build a community where people are welcomed.

I read the blue-ink prayers, petitions and expressions of anger and realize these prayers are words of prophets. God planted into the throats of the ancient prophets cries to help people remember the poor, the starving and the prisoner. The ancient reformers called people to look again at the needs of ordinary people. These prayers at our doorway call everyone who reads them to cultural reform and honesty.

Zephaniah told his people not to be discouraged, to live without fear and rejoice in God who loves His people. I hear the same from many of our parishioners who live outside and still rejoice in the smallest kindness. Jeremiah spoke out that the Lord shall be of justice and mercy. I hear this cry from friends who reassure me that they are cared for by God even when nights are wet and cold.

John the Baptist pointed his words and life into the direction of God and screamed his concerns to reform and to repent. These written prayers for me act as agents of renewal for our community. They beg us to rely only on God and to act quickly, lovingly and with integrity. These prayers alarm every community to wake up from self-concern, overindulgence, and needless materialism. The prayers of the poor activate my conscience, stir my anger, and show me only God is in charge. I feel all the injustices of the world in these simple prayers.

The prayer texts of the poor also remind me of the sins of the Church. These sins go deeper into communities beyond our small neighborhood. We can no longer ignore people who suffer mental illness or who remain caught in drug addictions. We must speak out of the reality of war when homeless veterans show up to write prayers in our chapel. We have a sacred duty to help men and women who sell their bodies for drug money. Advent calls us to provide shelter, food and hospitality because even the Holy Family was once in need. Our sins are embedded in the prayers of the poor.

I learn from these prayers that Christmas is for the poor. Christmas through its advertising, economic forecasts, and bottom lines so often promotes the notion that love is for only beautiful, thin and wealthy people. The voices of our friends living below the poverty level, in transitional housing or under cardboard huts along the street, must not grow silent in the dark days of Advent.

I read these black-book prayers with hope. They are written so all of us can eavesdrop on personal conversations with God and learn to pray more honestly. These Advent intercessions ignite my faith to work on behalf of people who need the basics of life. I know God responds to each prayer, not through written texts, but through the work of us all.

Good Mourning

2009-08-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

On most mornings I walk the concrete path along the river. I saunter the familiar course in downtown Portland in pre-dawn hours. The real, determined athletes run past me wearing the latest sporting gear, the newest materials to keep warm or dry. I seldom catch the faces of these sprinting gazelles. I nod to familiar faces that walk at my pace. I also notice intently the azaleas blooming crimson in mid-April and the maple leaves turning golden and sharp red in autumn. The years now have brought a familiar rhythm of walking and reflecting, noticing and being quiet.

There is one consistent moment in my morning sojourn. At the furthest point of my walk after I have crossed the bridges and have come back to the west side, I stroll through a beautifully tended garden. This garden has become my cemetery. Since I have moved nine times in my priesthood, I’ve missed the funerals of so many people I have known and loved in life. This simple year-round garden with paths of concrete and gravel becomes a place where I encounter all the dead. I walk with anticipation to get closer to people I try to let go of in my heart but can never seem to do so. As I step into the varied groupings of Northwest foliage, I talk out loud to my parents, my aunts and uncles and my mentors and saints.

I do not hesitate to speak out loud about what is going on in my life. I shout out to Thomas Merton for guidance in prayer or ask my mother about how to handle a relationship. I sing to Sr. Amadeus who taught me how to use my voice. I pray for help from St. Luke when I prepare a homily or St. Francis to help me let go of possessions and daily irritations. I ask for what I need from people who loved me on earth and from strangers whom I am convinced advocate for me in heaven. Relatives, friends, sinners and saints converge in this finely kept garden in spring or winter, at sunrise or midday.

My daily practice has changed my life and my grieving. As I approach the ground of remembrance, my entire body feels the presence of people I love. My body and spirit have claimed this place like no other to relax into the memory of people and the process of letting go of love. I feel energized when I remember friends from parishes years ago. I know Dorothy could help me with a concern about a friend now who suffers mental anguish. Ann could help me listen to a man I just met with chemical addictions.

In these days of November, we remember from where we have come. Most people in the United States live miles and states away from where home once stood. In the moving across country, multiple job opportunities and the frequency of divorce, we have become so separated from the family we turned to for love and advice.

Our parish communities need to find creative ways to take up the slack on our grieving. This should be one of the parishes’ main missions and priorities. We need to allow the liturgies to speak full volume about death and the end times. We need preachers who hold their own losses with love. We need to be more honest in November days that death is part of life and it is of love that we let go, cherish and remember.

Now is the time to allow parishioners to recall their own paths toward grieving. Many people in the secret of morning light and evening darkness create walkways through loneliness and horrific grief. Let us be the ones who help people shed the darkness of shame and denial, of depression and anger. Collect people who have lost loved ones into a forum of faith and sharing. Research various organizations that help with grief awareness and counseling, public speakers and referrals. Find the secret rituals of mothers who face miscarriages, fathers who lose their sons and priests who let go of their mentors. Teach people to pray through the treacherous paths of pain and loss. The role of the parish must foster the secret gardens of grief and loss. We must create more honesty in the turmoil of keeping our grief secret and suspect.

I discover my good mourning practice every day at first light. I saunter and speak in my garden of memory. My body remembers, my spirit sings and I learn from those who still love me.

I contact

2009-08-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Every Wednesday evening at our 5:05pm Mass, a small group of people comes to our small chapel to pray for recovery and healing from addictions. Fewer than a dozen gather quietly through the steel chapel doors to open their lives to one another. People assemble from all walks of life - office workers, our volunteers and people just entering a recovery program down the street.

I listen with my soul to these people in recovery. People struggling through the maze of alcohol addiction slowly speak aloud their confusion. Others speak openly about how they were abused emotionally as children and the chilling effects from the past that linger as they age. Some sit silently, listening to others and praying. No matter what is said or not said, I stand in our urban chapel with people’s life issues caught in my heart and voice as I pray to God for healing.

We celebrate the Eucharist with special simplicity and intention. After the Gospel proclamation, I offer brief words of how the Gospel penetrates our selfishness or how Jesus is offering us a healing touch. I offer questions for people to ponder or to verbally respond to with the story of their lives. I am always amazed at people’s honesty and the risk they take in our dimly lit chapel to expose their past to Christ’s light.

Every week this celebration of Eucharist feeds me with a bounty of honesty and compassion. I see for myself how the snares of our addictions are only untangled in the presence of Christ Jesus. This encounter takes radical honesty and raw faith. Face to face encounters with Christ in this public setting show me that the Gospels are still telling tales of healing, faith and change.

The Gospels for the Twenty-Third to the Thirtieth Sundays in Ordinary Time especially reveal to us all a personal contact with Christ’s healing touch. People bring a deaf man to Jesus and they beg him to lay his hand on him. The deaf man approaches Jesus with an obvious need. He exposes his vulnerability before others and to Jesus. Even though Jesus takes him apart from the crowd, people have already acknowledged his deafness. Jesus uses fingers, spit and touch to open his human ears and restore his speech.

The same Christ listens to our deafness. I seldom want to admit my own brokenness. My compulsive behavior, jumping to false conclusions or cultivating my feelings of not belonging are all pieces of life I usually want to hide or not even acknowledge. As I listen to the voices of people caught in fear, I realize we all long for Christ to take us aside, calm us down and reassuringly touch us with his loving hands.

I also realize every day working among the poor that I have enough money and education to hide many aspects of myself, to hold the pieces together. I can deny my deafness to others’ stories, my blindness to people’s requests and even my own selfish concerns. My role in ministry enables me to hide from the demons I know so well. So as I celebrate the Wednesday evening Mass, I am reminded that only Christ can reach us behind our masks of pain, our nervous control, and our abilities to hurt other people.

Jesus asks us a question face to face, “Who do you say that I am?” I see the courage of people who need a new freedom of heart answering this question every day of their lives. They do so because addictions attack even the root of faith. Fear can keep us all separated from admitting our need or even naming the person of Jesus. We can lose our lives in this heart-wrenching fear or we can decide to take up our cross and believe suffering will lead us out of darkness.

Many people argue with Jesus about their recovery. They bargain with God to hold on to fear. Jesus gives us all a model of the child, who comes openly, freely, willingly to the feet of Christ. Addictions cause us all to feel we are last, but we become first in knowing God’s love and mercy even well beyond our childhood.

Jesus reminds us that if we can even give someone a drink of water we will step out of our own selfish ways. We then admit that our bargaining, our callousness, our self-sufficiency are the crosses we carry all the way to the Kingdom. We carry these negative issues as millstones around our necks, as reminders that only God can heal or cut away our harmful behaviors.

Jesus also tells us that our inheritance is more than reciting commandments or words memorized from our youth. Christ shows us that we will inherit the mercy of God when we finally give up our control of everything and truly give ourselves over to those who most need us. Addictions break their bonds on our souls when we are serious about letting go of all the internal possessions of fear, regret and anger. Then we will know the freedom to serve the poor, listen to the lonely and accept people who threaten our place in life.

Every Wednesday at the evening Eucharist I pray for the courage of Bartimaeus. I hear all of us crying our eyes out for the miracle of Christ to heal every aspect of sin, division, heartache and isolation. I ponder how Bartimaeus’ blindness helps us all see Christ and hear his haunting question, “What do you want me to do for you?” I ache to speak out on everyone’s behalf that we all want to see!

On Wednesday evenings I am in direct contact with God. Exposure to the bitterness of drug addiction and even the entangling web of food addiction changes my belief in God and turns my heart toward compassion. These Gospels also teach me that direct contact with Jesus still opens our ears, still releases tongues and still casts millstones into the sea. Contact with people’s honest suffering, mingling with my own fear and insecurity, shows me the healing hand of Christ Jesus.

Fr. Ron Raab

2009-07-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

Fr. Ron Raab

Bugged

2009-07-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Deciding to follow Jesus is never easy for me. Giving in to the demands of ministry always takes extra courage and real gumption. Sometimes I want to plug my ears to the challenges of the Gospel and hide from Christ’s request to offer more of myself to others. Growing into an authentic discipleship takes guts.

I realize this call to go deeper into my own commitment when a new challenge strikes me in the face. Last year while concelebrating Mass, I preached a homily one Sunday on the demands of discipleship. I spoke to our weary congregation about the daily challenges of Matthew’s Gospel to visit the sick and imprisoned, to clothe the naked and to feed the hungry. It is obvious to our community that we find Christ in the center of these actions as we raise up those who are weighed down by illness, poverty and oppression.

After the homily, I went back to the front pew where I had been seated and noticed a man sitting in my place. I took a seat next to this gentleman who usually comes to our weekday hospitality center. After a few seconds, one of our hospitality center volunteers seated behind me whispered in my ear, “Fr. Ron, the man next to you is covered with bed bugs! What do we do?”

I immediately started to itch. Just as I was basking in the glow of preaching my heart out, I was confronted with a deeper, more profound way of serving someone in need. In an instant, the naked, the hungry, the ill, and the imprisoned all converged in these words that were spoken in my ear and the man who was seated not a foot away from me in the pew. Bedbugs suddenly became Jesus’ call to follow. This required an immediate response. There was no delaying, no time for self-reflection, no pious solitude and no waiting until the end of Mass.

The invitation from Jesus to follow his ways may come to us from a whisper in the ear or the demands of violence, the obscenities of war or the destruction of joblessness. A radical trail from Jesus’ life leads to our quiet morning prayer and the turmoil of our injustice. Discipleship takes it shape by truly living the life that is set before us, the radical unfolding of grace, and the beauty of each breath, the mystery of each moment.

Our common worship must feed the fires of discipleship. We must continue to set before our congregations the risks involved in following the paths of the Risen Christ. We face the demons together that keep us from giving up everything so to capture the face of Christ. Our love must not be whimsical or fancy, fabricated or insincere. The love that Christ has for people is spoken every week in our parishes and usually falls flat. We are reluctant to challenge people, hurt their feelings or have people feel the bite of discipleship lest we lose their presence or limit their financial contributions.

Our liturgies remain the only face of contact for Christ’s concern for us. Together we hear the demands of Gospel life and together we must face the difficulties of living that message in our troubled world. We all must realize how people are waiting for us to become activated by Christ’s fire. The poor often see in our weak actions only the watered down version of discipleship. We are often more concerned with keeping the parish sidewalks clean and making sure the specialty coffee is perfectly brewed. Parish life must go beyond the creating of a comfortable community turned in on itself.

The gentleman next to me was not homeless. He lives in a decrepit single-room-occupancy hotel in our neighborhood. His room had been fumigated many times, but the bugs keep coming back. Fortunately, another parish staff person was at Mass that day and provided him clothing, soap and all the basics to start over again.

I itched for hours and washed my alb and clothes. I also laughed at the witty God who continues to challenge me and keep me humble. Our friend, infested with bugs, reminds me of the horrific needs of people in the world today. These basic human needs shake me from the comfort of my pew and challenge the words I preach.

I never know how people will challenge me in ministry. I am surprised everyday by my reluctance to follow Christ and to see behind the bed bugs to the real beauty of people. Bold discipleship teaches us to give everything in order to discover the person of Christ Jesus.

Bridge Work, August 2009
Fr. Ron Raab
Ministry and Liturgy

Sidewalk Soup

2009-07-20T14:36:00.001-07:00

I learn every day from people on our narrow, urban sidewalk. Many of our low-income neighbors line up in the very early morning to enter our hospitality center to receive clothing and hygiene products. From my third-floor bedroom window I overhear a man arguing about his place in line and another homeless man telling stories about being beaten up during the night. The sounds of the sidewalk echo back to me a simple truth - I cannot eliminate the reasons why people are hungry. Nothing that I plan changes joblessness, increases salaries or offers people adequate health care. Providing suitable housing or employment after prison is out of my bounds. Lessening money mismanagement of people suffering depression or alcoholism is beyond my expertise.

Our parish community nonetheless continues to learn from this simple walkway around our building. Since we have no parking lot or parish garden, no school or separate rectory building, the sidewalk becomes our place of hospitality. On Friday evenings, parishioners and volunteers collaborate from our small urban parish in Portland, Oregon to provide a simple soup meal outside our building. For a couple of hours our sidewalk becomes not just a passage to bars and strip clubs, but a place where people can find friendship and real nourishment. Even though we do not provide long term solutions to poverty, we respond from faith to provide a kind ear, a friendly conversation and a hot meal.

This outdoor meal is truly the work of many people. Parishioners and volunteers prepare a hearty homemade soup and dated packages of pastries arrive from a local grocery store. A parishioner from a produce company delivers boxes of fresh fruit and retirees spread peanut butter on donated bread. Volunteers set up our small chapel lobby with pots of hot water for chocolate and strong coffee. In summer the hot soup is paired with refreshing cold lemonade from large plastic containers. A volunteer sets up a couple of long tables and wipes clean the old plastic tablecloths already used dozens of times.

We serve the feast from the tiny confines of our lobby, the smallest public space in our building. Our guests receive their meal and sit in plastic chairs lined up against the green outside wall. Even in the cold winter rains of Portland, people wait in line for the 7:00pm opening of the red steel doors on the corner of 6^th Avenue and West Burnside Street.

Amid the food set-up, the volunteers and guests gather cramped into this small lobby space and narrow sidewalk for many reasons. One reason is the name of the soup line. Our evening hospitality is called the Brother Andre Café, after Blessed Andre Bessette. Andre was a Holy Cross Brother in Montreal, Canada who died in 1937 with over one million people attending his funeral. He was a man of small stature with an overwhelming dedication to Saint Joseph. Assigned by our religious community to be the Porter at Notre Dame School because of his sickly nature, Brother Andre became a healer. People with crippling diseases traveled for miles to stand in line in order to speak with Brother Andre for just a few minutes. Andre was the first member of our Holy Cross community to be named “Blessed” by Pope John Paul II in 1982.

We carry on the ministry of hospitality Brother Andre showed the Church. Members of the parish welcome friends and strangers with food at our front doors. Our guests may not be healed of illness or infirmity, nor are their crutches and canes left at our door, but strangers are welcomed and our friends are fed, named and appreciated.

This street meal is more than merely a handout. I find profound connections at the bottom of the empty bowls, in the evening interactions. When I first came to the Downtown Chapel, drug dealers stood on our corner convincing people that addiction would be their real food. We pushed the dealers aside. On Friday evenings we present people with an alternative beyond broken needles with friendship and a full soup bowl. This dynamic ministry speaks loudly on our corner as we witness also to onlookers, shoppers and corporate executives strolling by on Friday evenings.

Our narrow sidewalk extends well beyond our own neighborhood. Our ministry of hospitality reaches far into wealthy suburbs and many other parishes. Every week members of different parishes take turns preparing their recipes for soup. The visiting parishes provide some of the volunteers to set up and clean up, to host the evening and to welcome our neighbors. Many volunteers also bring blankets, socks, hygiene products and clothing to be handed out during the weekday hospitality center. I understand more profoundly with every passing week that our narrow sidewalk meanders into the consciences of many people in various parts of the city and beyond.

These volunteers appreciate that our sidewalk soup line becomes a place for people to become known. For many suburban people, these sidewalks are a place of fear and anonymity. Our Brother Andre Café remains a place where the poor have names, faces, life stories, real fears and dimly-lit dreams. The middle-aged soccer mom begins to understand the stories of a young former prostitute living in a single-room occupancy hotel in our neighborhood. As her fear diminishes, the mother relaxes about her children coming to volunteer in our parish. Creating relationships becomes a key source of change, hope and healing for everyone involved.

Our Friday evening outreach is also a place where high school and college students encounter a meaningful mission of the Church. Our parish staff connects with a half-dozen colleges throughout the year. Some undergraduate classes serve food on Fridays and some stay for a week-long plunge in the neighborhood. Nursing students wash people’s feet on Wednesdays. Some high school students meet their volunteer requirements by sorting canned foods for our daily pantry. Others volunteer in our daily hospitality center handing out laundry vouchers to a local Laundromat. They all experience interactions with people who suffer greatly and who live on the margins of our society.

However, nearly all the students go back to their families and schools telling stories of the reality of life. I hear later that they talk about foot fungus, the lack of housing for former prisoners, and the inadequate facilities for homeless women. Our students leave here realizing that the mission of the Church is about people. They admit to me the stereotypes about the poor that their parents and classmates have been passing on to them and their growing realization of the injustice of many aspects of our culture.

Our food-stained sidewalk also helps give direction to the future clerical leadership of the Church. Graduate school seminarians are placed here by the seminary of the Archdiocese of Portland for our Friday night ministry. I lead undergraduate seminarians in a thirteen hour immersion into our work once a year. I watch as the soup begins to break down the notion that the Church is for only the well-educated and well-deserving.

By the end of the academic year the seminarians realize the terrifying issues of people locked in poverty, ill health and sustained unemployment. I watch barriers tumble down and I see that these future clergy gain real insight that ministry involves building real relationships with people. They are stripped of thinking their future priesthood will be about living apart from unemployment, adequate health care and alcohol abuse.. As always, food becomes the vehicle to bring all people together on the same level, the sidewalk becomes a place for equality and authenticity.

Our parish is not the only place that serves food on Friday evenings. In fact I tell new volunteers that food is not the real problem in our neighborhood. The true misfortune, perhaps the real hunger or disease, is loneliness. Social isolation among the homeless and especially people living in the single-room occupancy hotels feeds continuing addiction and crime. People who suffer any form of mental illness may also lack the desire or motivation to remain on medication, to take care of their personal hygiene or to make necessary financial decisions. Loneliness spirals people into further depression. Loneliness creates a path of hopelessness about the future. This isolation also destroys trust, keeping people from reaching out when they are most in need.

However, our volunteers often arrive believing they can change people. They want to solve their situations or zealously promote food or blanket drives. Some become visibly angry that we are not doing more to get people medical help and dental care. Miracles become visible to me when our wealthy volunteers realize that our staff know the names of our guests. Volunteers gradually understand people when they get to know their human stories. Poverty is not easily solved. The issues of mental illness and homelessness are a tangled network of real issues not solvable by any good intentions. Our volunteers who share a bowl of soup realize that if poverty is to be changed, relationships are the key ingredient. This recipe for change starts with broth, onions, carrots, chopped meat, and a warm smile.

The source of these relationships on the streets comes from inside our chapel building. The Eucharistic Table, the center of any faith community, provides the risk to take love beyond the sanctuary. Our community is loved into service. Every day as I celebrate Mass, I break the hosts and pray that grace may sustain everyone present. There is grace enough for everyone because of Christ’s relationship with all believers. God also provides grace which compels us into feeding people who hunger for food, love and a sense of belonging. I realize that God’s love is plentiful if only we can give it away. I ask God every day for the courage to put Eucharist into practice, to take love to the streets of the city and into the households of everyone - even unbelievers.

Even though our parish community serves from God’s love, we still do not have the resources to change policies concerning health care for everyone, adequate housing for the mentally ill and decent employment for veterans. However, I believe that if policies are ever going to change in our cities or for the rural poor, we must first be in relationship with people who are poor. And the source of all these relationships is the sanctuary in all of our churches, the place in which we profess our belief in the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Leaving our sanctuaries to minister on street corners is never easy for any worshipping assembly. Entering into the unknown is always risky. Leaving the security of ritual and breaking down even the invisible communion rail takes deep and profound faith. The priorities for every faith community must remain in service to people who suffer. The call of Jesus to wash feet, heal the sick, touch the leper, and encourage the sinner is not a false piety. This call is not for warm-hearted liberals or staunch conservatives, but for us who pattern our lives after Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. This mission is Christ’s love made flesh, to build community, engage the suffering, and sustain the orphan and widow.

The sanctuary is the place where service and justice are birthed. The sacred liturgy calls us to live beyond the threshold of our comfort, to open doors beyond our ignorance. Our parish community continues to call us into our streets and neighborhood even beyond serving soup. Our community processes to a murder site when violence strikes our neighborhood. We sing a litany that names forms of evil on the sidewalk where the stabbing or shooting occurred. It is the very same litany we sing when we celebrate the Scrutiny Rite for our catechumens. Members of our staff take people on tours to educate volunteers and strangers about the issues of poverty we learn from being in relationship with people inside our chapel walls. The sanctuary and streets are both places of conversion and hope.

I realize sharing soup and stories on the streets does not solve every aspect of people’s suffering. Our staff did not have the insurance or medical care to keep Jane from dying on our streets from gangrene. Our parish cannot solve Jim’s problems of severe mental illness which keeps him in the same clothes for months without showering. We cannot clean people’s teeth or offer a root canal. We cannot fix the ongoing problem of bedbugs in the single room occupancy hotels.

The sidewalk outside our chapel building is more than a corridor to the neighborhood. The concrete path is an extension of the Eucharist itself. The food we share gives us hope when everything else fails. The soup served from the cold streets unites lonely people on Friday evenings and changes priorities of volunteers. The common walkway leads right back to the sanctuary when we are all exhausted from our efforts and need to be fed again with real sustaining food, the Body and Blood of Christ Jesus.

Ron Raab

Originally published by Ministry and Liturgy, August 2009.

The Yellow Pages

2009-06-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

by Fr. Ron Raab, C.S.C.
Originally published in Ministry and Liturgy, September 2008

I proclaim the Gospel during Mass holding on to the lectionary for dear life. My right thumb presses tightly along the lower corner of the page while my left hand glides along the sentences yet to be read. I caress the written words because I understand my life depends on how I interpret those words which I yank out of my throat. After twenty-five years of Gospel proclamation, through translations changes and varied lectionaries, I ponder the yellowing marks on the corners of the pages left by my greasy prints.

My soiled fingers also leave the pages of my Liturgy of the Hours book brittle with shades of yellow decay. They tell the tale that I have been faithful to the same book since the fall of 1976. Those same marks tell the story that I am more faithful to Morning Prayer than to Evening Prayer. I pray more often at the beginning of the week rather than at the end. The dirty-yellow marks on the edges of the thin pages reveal the direction of my past faithfulness. They also reveal my end-of-the-week infidelity.

With little detective work even the sacramentary traces my path of prayer. Those same greasy-yellow marks creep onto even the newest books. Our parish sacramentary, however, tells a tale of years of true-to-life prayer because the cover is being held together by white masking tape. Inevitable wine spills mark the red and black texts with a few bread crumbs hiding in the folds of the pages. Many prayers have come from the written rubrics from this book evoking responses from the faithful listeners in the pews.

Now that I have some years of experience leading communities in prayer, I realize that a liturgical spirituality may be revealed in the ordinary, tangible articles of how we pray in any community. The commonplace artifacts of liturgy speak honestly and boldly, beyond the script set out for me in graduate school or the seminary, more profound than liturgical workshops and much more interesting than discussions on prayer being “liturgically correct.”

I form liturgical ministers by teaching them to act with this same sense of intentionality. I instruct them to caress the sacred texts with fidelity and love. Lectors hold on to the lectionary because they understand now after years of proclaiming the holy Word to our needy assembly, that we all need God. The readers grasp the edges of the sacred book because on some days many of us forget that God loves us. They learn that the written words in a book become something more than a history lesson. The lectors become instruments of God’s intentional love for all His people.

These readers in our worship may also get lost in the swirl of life’s indignities. When lectors lose hope, they proclaim the Word anyway. They hold tight to the holy words even on days when they do not believe they can manage life or believe in something more than themselves. They grasp the lectionary tightly because they never know how much other people need to hear the Word of freedom and healing.

My heart aches for the elderly woman grasping the written text with arthritic fingers because she remains so tired of caring for her husband with Parkinson’s disease. She cannot lift him out of bed and she barely has the strength to lift the holy book up to her fading eye sight. On those days she proclaims the Word in the hope that someday she may believe in God’s love again.

One day Bonnie stormed into the sacristy before Mass disheveled and frantic. Her puffy eye lids told me she had been crying and not sleeping. She screamed out at me that she could not take her daughter’s drinking anymore. She threw off her coat and complained that she was tired of always rescuing her daughter after late night drinking binges. Bonnie could not handle her verbal abuse and the effects on the family. Quickly before Mass started, I tried to suggest that her entire family needed help. I could not calm her. I forgot that Bonnie was scheduled to be the first lector for the Eucharist. Bonnie walked up to the ambo after the opening prayer, held on to the lectionary with both hands and proclaimed from Isaiah, “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.”

On that day, Bonnie left her finger prints on the Scriptures and most of her worry as well. The Scriptures in turn marked her soul. These moments reveal to me that God’s presence in the Eucharist is real and sustaining. Her proclamation of the Word also showed me that seeds of faith are nurtured and brought to fruition by God alone. Our role is simply to be present to life honestly, lovingly and understanding that we cannot force faith on anyone. On that day I grasped the Gospel book with intentional gratitude, leaving on its white pages the prints of my pride and deep concern for Bonnie and her family.

Our extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers also carry with them this ministry of intentionality. They hold the Cup of Salvation with a firm grasp that understands their fragile place in life. Even on days when life erodes their self-esteem and purpose they stand on the holy ground of our worshipping community as if they owned the place. The ministers stand solidly on the earth, breathing deeply, and realizing God is using them for His purpose. The noticeable prints on the communion cups tell me the story of our minister’s grasp for dear life, especially on the days when they do not believe in God’s presence within their pain.

Jane holds the goblet, the miracle of Christ’s real presence, in her hands with great intention because she is allergic to alcohol. Even though she does not receive the Eucharist from that vessel, she holds on tightly to the fact that she must offer the cup of freedom to other people. She stands intentionally on this place of level ground where all people are equally treated. Jane looks into the eyes of each person who approaches her and invests her prayer in people she knows by name. Jane prays especially for people who remain bashful or timid or feel unworthy to look at her in the eyes. She prays through her addiction and into the hearts of strangers who need God in ways that are beyond her imagining. Jane prays at the sight of every lipstick mark on the purificator and every fingerprint left on the sacred cup. She realizes she holds the source of love to many who feel they do not belong in the church, those who cannot forgive themselves and for those who wait to believe again someday. She waits for the day when we are all in communion with one another.

Our ritual books reveal the marks of many other profound moments of prayer. There are a few pages dusted with black marks from my thumb from Ash Wednesday after dabbing burned palms on people’s faces. I leave the dark splotches on the pages because they remind me of the fragile lives behind the greasy foreheads that long for change. These people let go of previous conclusions about sin, division and heartache. Those black-grey ashes under my nails remind me that I will join the club of heaven with all past believers when my body becomes dust.

Every week in our urban parish we celebrate the Anointing of the Sick after the noon Eucharist because so many people long for courage. I pray for healing as I ponder the oil spots left on my chasuble or the sacred oil spills on the maroon carpet in the chapel. In those greasy sights I still see my friends who suffer from mental illness or are recovering from strokes and congestive heart failure. I pray focusing on the crusty oil dried on the glass container that stores the oil during the week. The container waits again for our friends who line up in a row so to be touched with sacred oil blessed by the Bishop. I celebrate every week wearing garments spotted from past encounters of this loving sacrament and touching the foreheads in their need of Christ today.

Even the pages from the ritual book of the Rite of Funerals are warped from blessed water. The crinkly pages from the opening of the funeral mass remind me of all the times I sprinkled baptismal water on the caskets of loved ones and strangers. The texts of this ritual book are blurred from the drops of water and tears that have flooded the opening rituals of bringing dead bodies through the church doors for the last time The pages connect me to people’s lives and the hope I will be sprinkled with new life when my body enters the church door for the last time. These old, worn, faded pages celebrate for me so many lives and teach me again to let go of everything I want to cling to that is not God.

I observe the pen-marked pages of the ritual book from the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults which remind me of all the new followers of Christ. I celebrate my twenty-five years of starting ritual fires in parking lots and on street corners. I remember these years of blessing fresh water in bowls and fonts. I pray again in memory of drenching people with this holy water and ruining their hairstyles. The dark marks on the pages remind me of the sacred chrism which connects all believers from around the world. I wait for the day when our connection to human community gives way to the true unity in our places in heaven. In God’s Kingdom we will not have to worry about our hairstyles or regret our roles in the community or fret about the correct rubrics of our worship.

I believe we must ponder the finite, ordinary aspects of our prayer to find the God of infinite love and mercy. Every aspect of the liturgy must lead us into two directions, first to people’s hearts and then ultimately to the unbelievable mystery of God. Our community worship must shed light on the here-and-now and our future with God. If people or God are missing then our prayer becomes disengaged and meaningless.

As I look back over my years of ministry, I see that the ordinary and even the trite aspects of our common worship help make our prayer honest. This is one of the first fruits of living an intentional life, being honest with God. I see His mercy in the sweat stained purple stole hanging over the chair in the confessional. I understand courage pondering the tattered edges of our chapel’s carpeting. The fringe reminds me of my friends who pray in wheelchairs that get caught along the frayed corners.

When I am transferred from this parish I will leave behind the stains, tears, and smeared pages of all our ritual books. The books will outlive my stay and they will remind others that we all prayed here with gusto and grace. I am not sure the second grader stepping on the kitchen stool to read the Scriptures at Mass will notice yet the greasy marks on the pages. The confirmation student may not even be aware of the oil spilled on the ritual book. On First Communion day the children may not be aware that the adults are holding on to the chalices for dear life. They will in time, when God settles into their lives, find grace in the ordinary, connecting their real lives to fingerprints on the chalices and the smeared, yellowing pages of the lectionary.

Advent Vision

2009-06-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

by Fr. Ron Raab, C.S.C.
Originally published in Ministry and Liturgy, September 2007

Joe waited ten arduous years for his cataract surgery. Living alone and struggling with addictions, he battled negotiating with insurance companies, balancing medications for depression, and securing shelter for his recovery. Four days after his surgery, he came back to the RCIA group and read out loud for the first time in a decade. Trusting his new eyes, he proclaimed authentically the Gospel for the First Sunday of Advent.

When Joe pounded on the chapel doors to begin the Rite of Acceptance later that morning, I opened the red doors with tears in my eyes. The entire community loudly voiced their support when I asked for their willingness to pray for Joe. The community already knew Joe, his struggles, his blindness, and his courage to wait for a better life. We all saw his situation more clearly as he walked through the doors without his thick oversized glasses.

Joe continues to remove the scales from my own eyes. He leads me by example to show me that my stock answers about faith and church need to be replaced with other, less simple answers, ones based in my incomplete humanity. My desire for God emerges when I pay attention to my real need for love and intimacy. I learn to trust others when I finally realize faith is not about my self-sufficiency. I speak the Church’s tradition authentically only when I learn to listen to others and speak the truth that can heal people.

My parish community continues to learn that Advent is about people. The season reveals our longing for God to take our flesh more seriously. Through our aches and pains, we are all learning to turn to the God who entrusted His son to our weary nature. We have no easy answers to our homelessness, our alcohol addiction and our desire to sell our bodies for money. So we turn to the only source of love we know, the power of grace in the fragile community we call the Church.

We are all learning to trust one another through the thick uncertainty of our longing. God reveals healing, peace and security only in the center of fragile lives and inconsolable hearts. We live as Advent people waiting to hear prophets’ voices and feel the consolation of hope in our bodies. This trust becomes flesh because we need to find housing for one another, health care to stay alive, or to offer a simple change of clothing.

Advent can also open the eyes of your community of faith. Even though anyone can get caught in the trappings of worrying about the appropriate shades of purple for the priest’s chasuble or argue about the pros and cons of artificial greens for the Advent wreath, we can still begin to see things differently. Advent is the process of cultivating deep longing for God. We find that craving when we trust that even in our weakness, God has not abandoned us.

If your community celebrates the Rite of Acceptance during the Advent season, allow your assembly insight into why people want to be baptized into the Church. Find new ways for the community to hear their stories, become acquainted with their pasts, and learn to support their physical and spiritual needs. Your assembly should already know your catechumens or candidates before this rite is celebrated. Call people to a deeper honesty about why they are willing to support new members in the Church.

Many assemblies celebrate the communal Rite of Reconciliation as a community or with other local parishes. The Rite provides an opportunity to articulate some of the real concerns of our culture during the months of November and December. Use this rite to reflect back to people their despair about war, or concern for the orphans and widows left behind. The fragile peace we all carry because of our chronic depression, children born prematurely, or hurtful childhood memories needs to be spoken and embraced. We all must take the risk of naming the darkness around us so the Light of Peace can open our eyes.

Every liturgy of Advent must break through the culture’s lies that materialism and over-consumption will lead to happiness. When we pray deeper into the mystery of Advent we find that entering into the darkness is the only thing that will banish it. No office parties, bulging credit lines, or over-indulging on sugar cookies will ultimately satisfy our needs. Advent calls us into a deeper trust in the human condition, because that is where Christ births within us a new vision of ourselves.

Final Blessings

2009-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

by Fr. Ron Raab, C.S.C
Originally published in Ministry and Liturgy, August 2007.

I was two thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon when my mother, Rosemary, died in the Midwest. On the flight home I thought about all the goodbyes we shared in my lifetime. Mom sent me off to school everyday with a hot breakfast and a full brown bag lunch. I pictured her holding my head when I was sick as a child and listening lovingly when I was confused about life and my future. I remembered her from my last visit home, suffering from a debilitating stroke and heart failure. All the transitions in our relationship collided in this one moment of fear and regret for me. I was not there to feed her the last meal, to hold her head, or to send her off from this world.

As the journey continued, I sorted out all the transitions, the regrets, and something beautiful struck my heart. I realized in all those goodbyes, Mom always waved to me with both hands. In airport terminals, on the driveway of our family home, and through all the uncertainty of being sick, she always waved both hands over her head. This was her way of blessing me. I never before saw the connection or felt the full reality of her blessing until coming home for the last time.

This time I was home both as her son and as a priest to celebrate her funeral, a summary of all the fragile transitions, and a statement of everything we ever believed. I carried my grief across the country, but I felt something different arriving in the midst of my family and friends who also loved my mother. Being with my family helped me feel assured that I, too, would experience a newness of attitude, well being, and comfort.

For years I imagined what it would be like to celebrate Mom’s funeral. Even though I knew I would straddle the line of son and priest, I needed to send her off with the faith, symbols, and ritual of the Church we both loved. The day arrived for her funeral and all the pieces of me fit together. As her son, I preached the story to the hundreds gathered at her funeral of Mom always waving her goodbyes with both hands. Every face perked up, tears ran down cheeks, and I was surprised that her gesture was not only for me, but a sign of love in all her goodbyes.

Mom not only diapered me when I was an infant, swaddled me at baptism, and dressed me for the cold Midwestern winters as a child, but she also dressed me as a priest. She sewed the chasuble I wore celebrating the Eucharist for the first time. I wore the same garment for her funeral liturgy. At the Final Commendation, I took off the handmade garment and laid it on her coffin to thank her for all the times she dressed me up for life and to thank her for all the blessings she gave to us all.

I fear the fact that numbers of funerals are on the decline, at least here on the west coast. Many people are opting out of the faith, rituals and traditions of their ancestors that honor the life of those they love. However, I believe the problem is deeper than not wanting a church service when death occurs. Many of us are separated from community. We have lost ourselves in our personal goals, moving out of our childhood neighborhoods, and grasping at a culture that says we can have it all. We are trained not to show emotion or weakness, not to convey any need of the heart, and not to claim vulnerability that would show anyone we are not in complete control.

As a culture, we are stifling the passion of life. Suffering is something we throw money and resources at so it will not invade our lives. However, we cannot avoid the passion that ultimately brings death and that will always give way to healing and love. If we are removed from the moments in life that arouse vulnerability and change, we will not want to celebrate the faith we have in Christ who taught us that this is the only pattern to freedom.

Celebrating funerals teaches me that Christ’s rising from the dead is not just for the person who has died. New life is also for those who survive. Most of us do not know what to do with the healing that may occur from death. We can be stubborn and hold on to family grudges, long term regrets, and anger about our inheritance. There is something vital we are missing when funerals are not celebrated. We miss the healing that can happen when two or three gather in faith to honor life as it is, not the life we think we should have lived. Funerals teach us many things about the dead, but they teach us most about our ambitions in life and how to live a life that is more overwhelmingly generous, grateful and loving.

I continue to learn most about life working among those marginalized by society. Poverty and addictions teach us all that we need God to survive. This vulnerability also reveals its face when death occurs among those clinging to survival and sobriety. I entered this process again when members from a narcotics sobriety group knocked on the Downtown Chapel’s door because their friend Tony died of an overdose.

Tony’s friends wanted a safe place that would allow their expression of faith and grieving of their friend. He spent thirty years in prison and was clean and sober only the last nine months of his life. Sixty people memorialized him in a service reflecting many faith denominations and cultural backgrounds. Native American drummers wailed out in grief, former prison mates told stories, and those just clean from drugs spoke about their fragile recovery.

Even though Tony’s memorial service was out of the norm of Catholic funerals, the message for the believers was the same. People need to know their search for a drug-free life could be possible by sharing their grief and loneliness, and telling the truth of their suffering. I was overwhelmed as I heard words I never heard before in church, “I walked the yard with Tony for over twenty years,” and “I knew him in the only clean months of his adult life.”

I have come to believe that all pastoral ministers are fragile caretakers of the passion, death and resurrection of the Christ we serve. We are called to enter into life’s most vulnerable times and fragile moments. We must tread carefully where pain longs to change us, where faith can ultimately set us free. However, the healing balm of our weakness is not denial or power. The grace we seek comes from telling the truth. This power in death allows the community to heal from the inside out, from digging deep into wounds from a lifetime of hurt, to find the Christ that binds us together.

When celebrating funerals we find this truth when we confront the real and ordinary issues of death. It is tempting to all of us who plan funerals to squeeze death into socially acceptable terms. The causes of death may be a genuine invitation to allow healing to happen among the living. Death from suicide threatens the status quo of even the most confident among us, so we think our hushed tones will not rock the boat of the survivors. When alcohol poisoning results in death it makes us all question our consumption, so we ignore the truth to those sitting in the pews. When mental illness is the cause of death, we often sidetrack the truth so not to disturb those who cared for the person who died. We must admit our role in bringing survivors to God is not to scratch the surface of life but to confront the authentic issues surrounding death so everyone will not miss the blessings revealed to the rest of us.

As ministers of the Gospel, we are called to find our security through the darkness of sorrow that leads to new light. Often we cling to the false notion that celebrating funerals that are clean, correct and perfect will bring us to the saving presence of God. There are no strict guidelines to heal grief, nor perfect formulas from our files to solve the faith journey. Our real safety rests in opening the wounds of uncertainty so the grace of Christ can show us how to live differently right here on earth.

We are the ones charged with the mission to help people bury their dead. We are also the people responsible for allowing the community to heal itself. I am confident that every community that prays has in its life the grace to find blessings in death, the blessings that will heal all wounds. As ministers to the living, we need to check our egos, stand out of the way of grace, and watch the healing take place. This demand from us is a lifestyle of daily prayer, an attitude that trusts people, and a deep gratitude that God will provide the healing that is necessary for survival.

One of the most challenging moments of my priesthood came with a phone call one evening to meet the parents of a young man at the hospital who was dying of AIDS. His folks were flying in from their home state to be with their son in the last moments of his life. I arrived at the hospital naïve of what was about to happen. I met Tim and discovered we were the same age. Words were difficult for him to form. I listened the best I could. I anointed him at his request and assured him of a Catholic burial.

Within minutes of the anointing, Tim’s elderly parents rushed into the room exhausted from the journey and their fear of their son’s dying. They held their son. They sat on each side of the bed and wiped his face. However, their anger was directed toward me. His mother’s face became tight, anguished, and full of sorrow. I ushered them into a waiting room as soon as I could and offered them comfortable chairs and coffee. They took off their coats, sat down and were suddenly silent. Tim’s mother looked me in the eyes and said, “Father, I am not angry that my son is dying, or that he is dying of AIDS. I am angry because the priest at my home parish told me not to go to my son’s deathbed because he was going to hell anyway”

His cruel words wedged between mother and child left me scrambling to allow Tim to die in peace. Tim died early the next morning in the midst of the chaos. For the next four days, his family and I spent our days talking and listening, planning and educating, and our evenings celebrating the gift of their son.

We buried Tim on my birthday. The funeral became the work of the entire parish. We struggled to sit beside a family confused about a disease that alienated them from their own community that brought fear to the last days of their middle child. After all these years I still receive a birthday greeting from Tim’s mother thanking me for the hospitality of the parish and the kindness of my actions.

I never felt so betrayed by another priest. His soul-scratching words rippled across the country and brought great heartache to a suffering family. He shredded everything I ever learned about ministry and became an obstacle to this family’s healing. Now that some years have past, I try to commend him, the fragile caretaker, and his community to God as I celebrate my birthday and reread the hand-written note from Tim’s mother.

We are agents of the Word-made-flesh. Death is inevitable. Our mission in the church is to allow God to heal us in our grief and open us to the blessings death can offer us. We are compelled into life even in the center of losing those we love. Blessings from the past form our future and it is up to us to keep reaching beyond our grasp for the God who loves us and brings us the hope we need.

My family and my mom’s friends gathered under the shade tree at the cemetery on a warm July morning to offer prayers at my mother’s gravesite. My white chasuble draped the coffin. White and pink flowers piled up against the grave. After the command to go in peace, I invited everyone to wave goodbye to Rosemary with both hands.

Death in the most unsuspecting places, as in an empty tomb, becomes a blessing. Rosemary, Tony and Tim, pray for us.

Trinity Blest

2009-06-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

by Ronald Raab, C.S.C.
Originally published in Celebrate!

I usually cringe when an engaged couple asks my advice on planning a wedding. Discussions of turquoise dresses, unity candles, and thousand dollar floral arrangements send me fleeing the church. The expectations of parents, the search for the longest church aisle, and the guest musicians often make me feel like my presence is another accessory, another “check” on the list of wedding preparations from the latest bridal magazine.

Kim and Charlie gave me a new perspective about wedding preparations. Kim explained to me that she spent a year after college graduation working among the poor. Charlie also shared his desire to live out his faith in a more challenging way. They wanted their wedding to express their deep conversion into God who changed everything about their lives. The engaged couple desired to profess their vows in our small urban chapel which welcomes people who struggle for the essentials of life. This decision drew a line in the sand about how they wanted people to view not only their wedding but their marriage. She stepped out of her family’s expectations that their ceremony be held in their home parish.

Preparing for their marriage became an act of God’s faithfulness. God so often becomes a cultural accessory at a wedding. God’s action is invited as a stamp of approval, or an inconvenient guest, hidden among the fake flowers and candelabras. Kim and Charlie’s plans stepped out of the cultural norm and into an authentic expression of faith and service.

The couple also wanted to make sure that the people present at the wedding did not feel like observers or well-dressed adornments. They asked people to bring to the ceremony white socks, bags of new underwear and clean blankets for people who come daily to our hospitality center. Their friends and family received the message that this wedding was a call to action, and that action of service comes from the covenant of God’s faithfulness.

The Eucharist remained the centerpiece of the couple’s commitment.
The crystal clarity of hospitality, the simple music, the contemplative pace, all revealed to the congregation that God is the one who brought them together, and God’s initiative would lead them beyond the church doors and into a life of fidelity and purpose.

This wedding unmasked a deeper understanding of God. It was not a ceremony that talked about God, but explored God’s real activity in Three Persons. We moved beyond the quirky images of how people often think about the Trinity, as shamrock or triangle, into a deep, profound action in people’s lives. No one left our simple worship space unaffected by deep grace or an ache for justice. The frivolous, cultural wedding accessories were replaced with breathtaking awareness of love and compassion for the poor and suffering.

Now is the time in your parish community to unveil people’s relationship with the fidelity of God. The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity summarizes the liturgical journey from Lent through the gift of Pentecost. It reminds us that the marriage of heaven and earth in Christ is truly our path to change, commitment and reliance on the Three Persons of God.

The liturgical Gospels after the Solemnity of the Trinity now open for us the profound call to base our lives in the continuing action of God’s faithfulness. The marriage covenant of the Trinity in our earthly ways shows us the path to building our commitments on rock. We first must have the courage to listen to the echoes of God in the course of real life. Kim and Charlie revealed to me that the storms of wind and rain are nothing compared to the shelter of truth and honesty.

We often think our faith comes from our own decisions. God’s initiative calls us beyond ourselves. The courage to follow Christ beyond our selfishness is also God’s gift. This marriage bond of God and His people continues to show me that love is real even in the midst of my doubt and insecurity. My fragile earthy ways can become a new identity in God’s love for me.

There are few people who have the courage to risk everything to hear God’s call. To be a laborer in the harvest means we let go of the stifling images we have of God, ourselves and people in need. God is in relationship with us. We in turn keep the heavenly marriage vows alive by entering into profound relationship with the marginalized, the anxious and the doubtful right here on earth. God calls us each by name, beyond the labels of our sickness, past our notions of sin and our own self-reliance.

God’s initiative in our lives is not a pious accessory but takes place deep within our human fear. This marriage promise from God gives light to our human ways. When fear keeps our hearts concealed and in the dark, authentic faith counts us more valuable than the sparrows.

Kim and Charlie’s vows expressed their desire to build their marriage on rock. They replied to the question of Jesus, “Who do you say I am?” They showed the rest of us that God’s call does not come in one occasion. The call of God satisfies us in all stages of life, in all sorrows, in good times and in bad.

I received the vows of Charlie and Kim in the midst of people they loved. My heart was glad as I heard their words of commitment to follow God forever. Words which I now understand bind their earthly desires to heaven’s promises. These words were more than fancy frills from a ritual book but the deep passionate response of a couple who understood their love flows from God.
I believe we must dig deeper into our human experience to sift out the love of God from our fear. Kim and Charlie’s lifetime commitment teaches me that the Trinity is still surprising us, continuing to teach us that love from heaven changes everything on earth. Blest be God, forever.