Pax Christi Mass for Peace 2013

Is 2, 1-5

Ps 72

Jas 3, 1-2. 4, 18

Mt 5, 38-48

Saint Augustine Church

Highland, N.Y.

March 16, 2013

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   Thank you, Fr. Tom (Lutz), thank you for hosting this Pax Christi Mass for Peace here at Saint Augustine’s, our grandchildren’s parish.  It’s a special pleasure for me to be with Fr. Tom again at the altar.  You may not know that Fr. Lutz took over at St. Mary’s in Marlboro when Msgr. Dugan was dying, and walked into a hornets’ nest.  The hornets were after me.  Fr. Tom stood up to them.  And thank you, Madeleine Labriola and all Pax Christi members who make this Mass for Peace happen every year.   

          The readings today are so familiar I hardly need dwell upon them, Isaiah’s vision of the Messianic Era when swords will be turned into ploughshares and all the nations will climb Zion’s holy mountain to learn the ways of peace and justice, and they shall study war no more.  This vision is an essential of our Faith.  We pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth….”  It will not be fulfilled by anyone other than Jesus himself when he comes again on the Last Day.  But we have a part to play.  We are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, and we are baptized into his mission as well. The Kingdom of God is then and there, but it is also here and now, because he said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17, 21). The Greek (entos uymon) can also be translated, “The kingdom is in your midst.” 

          We saw an in-breaking of the Kingdom last Wednesday when tens of thousands of people crammed into St. Peter’s Square on a cold rainy night.  The whole world was watching, and that in itself is proof that the moral leader of the Christian world is the Bishop of Rome.  Even non-believers look to Rome and hope for a word that will lead us out of the morass we are in, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the spread of fanaticism, a hardening of hearts against the most vulnerable, the poor, the aged and the sick and the yet-to-be-born.  And on top of that, the threat to the biosphere itself. 

          There is a sense, all over the world, that a page in the book of history is turning.  A new Pope, a new day, we pray, a new burst of faith and hope.  God is good!  God is love!  God has care of us!  It is fifty years since the Council that was supposed to renew the Church.  Fifty years and we are still waiting.  It takes time.  I have the feeling that this is the time.  Things are changing.  Fifty years ago the Council Fathers urged us to look upon questions of war and peace with a totally new attitude, a totally new attitude.  You here today, you of Pax Christi, are proof that it’s happening.  We are called a little closer to Christ.  If the New Testament teaches us anything about Jesus of Nazareth it is that he was nonviolent, he was a man of peace.  

         

          We fail in so many ways.  But especially at this season of Lent we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start over again, because we have the freedom to turn away from God in sin. There will be a reckoning.  We condemn ourselves when we turn away.  Let this time of penance, prayer, fasting and almsgiving heal and cleanse us to receive the Risen Lord at Easter!

           Something else is in the news these days, and it too points the way out of the mess we are in, and that is the Cause of our own Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint!  Cardinal Dolan asked the assembly of all our bishops in Baltimore last January to approve her Cause so that it can move forward in the Vatican.  He got it, unanimous endorsement!  St. Dorothy of New York!  Imagine!  She was our match-maker, Monica’s and mine.  We have spent our lives in her Catholic Worker movement, and we now manage the Catholic Worker Farm behind the cemetery on Lattintown Road.  Her message was peace, simplicity, poverty and community, like our new Pope Francis’s.  A template for survival, I dare say.

          Monica and I were on a lecture tour in Rome in 1998 when we were told that Cardinal Stafford wanted to see us.  He was the highest ranking American in Rome at that time, the President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.  Of course we were glad to oblige.  We had no idea what was on his mind, why he wanted to see us.  The Cardinal asked us about the current state of the Catholic Worker movement.  We were happy to tell him the Catholic Worker is in good shape, authentically Catholic.  We traded stories in a very relaxed and friendly, informal way.  We didn’t know that Dorothy’s Cause had to get his approval before it could go forward, and Cardinal Ratzinger’s too!  

                     Cardinal Dolan told the bishops, as had Cardinal O’Connor and Cardinal Egan before him, that Dorothy Day should be held up as an example of authentic Christian discipleship for our time and place.  That’s what canonization is for; it’s not to honor a person.  It’s to hold up a model of authentic Christian discipleship for our time and place.  Pope Benedict himself spoke of Dorothy and her devotion to the service of the poor in his Ash Wednesday sermon.  But there is more to Dorothy Day than that.  Lots of saints have served the poor.  Dorothy was different, different in a way that speaks to our time and our country.  She was not content to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless.  She asked:  Why are they hungry?  Why are they homeless?  Why in a country that prides itself on its wealth are there so many poor and why are they so poor and for so long, over generations?  And why are the poor cannon-fodder?  Is there a connection between an unsustainable life-style and the wars that we have been in almost without ceasing since 1950?  Is there a connection?  Pope Benedict seems to think so.  In his World Peace Day he condemned the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for usury, yes!  Usury!  He cited unregulated capitalism as a threat to world peace and a cause of war, as did Dorothy Day all her life long. 

        Dorothy Day was arrested and jailed seven times, the first for the women’s vote, then for peace and for workers’ rights in nonviolent civil disobedience against war and preparation for war, the last time when she was 75 years old, for the United Farm Workers, in California, in support of a strikers’ picket-line.  She served then two weeks in the county jail, a vacation, she said.  A jail-bird held up as a model of authentic Christian discipleship for our time and place?  Yes!  In past times the Church had to teach rude, uneducated barbarians how to live together in obedience to lawful authority.  Today we have to learn and teach when and how to disobey illegitimate authority in conscientious objection, non-cooperation and active nonviolent resistance, to obey God rather than men, as Saint Peter had it  (Acts 5, 29) .  Dorothy Day will be the patron saint of all that!

          The Gospel calls us to practice the works of mercy.  Dorothy pointed out, over and over again, that the works of war are the exact opposite of the works of mercy, both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty?  No!  Poison their fields and their wells!  Shelter the homeless?  No!  Bomb their cities!  Visit the prisoner?  No!  Put non-conformists in jail.  (J. Edgar Hoover asked Franklin Roosevelt to put Dorothy Day in prison three times!  He didn’t!) 

          And how about the spiritual works of mercy?  Again, the exact opposite of the works of war.  Instruct the ignorant?  No!  Lie to them.  The truth is always the first casualty of wear.  Counsel the doubtful?  No!  Threaten them with prison!  Draft them!  Console the mourning?  No!  Give them more to mourn about!  Forgive injuries?  No!  Make then pay ten times over!

        Dorothy Day of New York, our own saint, if she is canonized, and it looks better and better, Saint Dorothy Day of ,New York.  Learn more about her, you young people especially.  Read the new biography of Dorothy by Jim Forest, All Is Grace.  Cardinal Dolan bought 155 copies, and he gave one to Pope Benedict!    Or just ask Monica or me.  W

The Blind See, the Lame Walk

THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD  C  2013  #21

Is 40, 1-5. 9-11

Ps 104

Ti 2, 11-14, 3, 4-7

Lk 3, 15-16. 21-22

Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro, N.Y.

January 13, 2013

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   “The Lord will bless his people with peace.”

                   Our first reading from the Prophet Isaiah foretells the coming of the Christ “upon whom I have put my spirit,” says the Lord.  He will bring justice, a just peace, not just to Israel but to the nations as well.  And he will do it not by raising an army, but quietly, gently.  “A bruised reed he will not break.” He will not take advantage of anyone’s weakness but lift up all, friend and enemy alike.  Then in our second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to Titus, the Lord addresses his Christ and calls him “a light to the nations to open the eyes of the blind, to bring prisoners out of confinement and from the dungeons those who live in darkness.”  This has an eschatological meaning – that’s a fancy word that indicates it’s for the End Time, the Second Coming, the final establishment of His kingdom which will have no end.  But it’s also meant to point to present reality.  The mystery of the kingdom of God is that it is then and there but also here and now.  By that I mean the fulfillment of the kingdom can only come about by God’s own intervention at the end of time, in the new heaven and the new earth foretold in Scripture, but it is also here and now in embryo, if you will, because He said “The kingdom of God is within you, in your midst.”  Here and now, if we will have it. The blind see?  The lame walk?  Yes!

                   I saw it happen, yes I did, in Selma, Alabama, almost 47 years ago.  It was Jesus Christ who led the March to Montgomery in the person of Martin Luther King.  Most of the white people of Alabama were and are good Christian people.  But many, very many were blind, blinded by the racist propaganda fed them by those who knowingly profited by setting race against race, worker against worker, by reinforcing negative stereotypes of black people and by propagating scare stories.  Fear is a powerful weapon, and the root of war, as Thomas Merton put it.  It’s still going on, mass media blinding people, making them believe that the poor are their enemies, that Muslims are their enemy, or the Chinese.  Back then, in 1965, the stories they spread about us in the news media made us look like degenerate hippies or Russian Reds, wild.  But as we marched through town and out on Alabama Rt. 80, the frightened people saw us for real, not as we were portrayed, ministers and priests and rabbis, nuns in full habit, and nicely scrubbed young and middle-aged and old men and women, black and white and who knows what, but normal, disciplined people, joined in a great cause for which we were willing to put our lives on the line, and I saw, as they watched us, I saw the scales fall from their eyes as Black people previously lame walked, as young and old Black people imprisoned in the dungeons of segregation walked out into the sun, heads held high.  It was a glorious time.

         We won, and we didn’t fire a shot, killed no one, injured no one, lied to no one, humiliated no one.  And we won, through the power of nonviolence, the ethic of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount put into practice.  The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, a Southern white man, addressed a joint session of the Senate and the Congress, and the American people, and the world, and demanded the Voters’ Rights Bill of 1965 and he got it, and everything changed.  The legal structures of racial segregation were dismantled.  The sad, tragic irony is that today, more than a generation later, racial segregation is again the order of the day, not just in the South, but in Northern cities where more than ninety percent of some inner city schools are minorities.  God does not show partiality, even if people still do.

                   Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles has Saint Peter come to the realization that God’s saving grace is available to people of all nations, not just the Jews, as he had been thought. The very first Gentile Peter will baptize is a soldier, a Roman soldier, a centurion in charge of one hundred men of the occupation force.  That is startling!  The first recruit among the Gentiles to the cause of the Prince of Peace was a Roman soldier!  Did Cornelius renounce the use of weapons and refuse to kill?  Military converts were required to do just that, even if their superior officers ordered them to do so, but we do not know.  The Roman Army performed many tasks other than war-making, mail-delivery, for instance, and flood-control.  We do know that Cornelius was of good conscience and the grace of God fell upon him.  Many other soldiers, upon baptism or after deeper conversion, refused further military service, among them Saints Achilleus and Nereus, Saint Camillus and Saint Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers who refused to be a soldier.

                   The Gospel reading simply affirms that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the one, the long-awaited Messiah, Christ.  It is he who will usher in the kingdom of justice and peace.  If the evening news does not reflect that truth, whose fault is that? Jesus Christ is our peace.  We are his body in the world.  Let’s show it, let’s prove it!  The nonviolent Civil Rights movement offers a template.  Jesus is the Commander in Chief of the nonviolent army.  Yes, that is an army too, the nonviolent movement.  We used to sing, “We are soldiers in the army; we have to fight; we know we have to die.”  But far fewer die in the nonviolent struggle.  And it ends in reconciliation and healing, not bitterness, resentment and envy. 

                    The Lord will bless his people with peace!  “The Lord has blessed his people with peace!”  That is the Paschal Mystery, the meaning of the birth of Jesus, his ministry, his death and resurrection.  He is our peace.

                                                             W

                  

Newtown Tragedy

GAUDETE SUNDAY 20012

3 Advent  #9

Zep 3, 14-18a

(Ps) Is 12, 2-6

Phil 4, 4-7

Lk 3, 10-18

Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro, N.Y.

December 16, 2012

Deacon Tom Cornell

                  

                   It’s a challenge to faith, the problem of evil.  How can a good and loving and all-powerful God allow such things as happened in Newtown last Friday?  On the other hand, how can we bear such loss without faith, and without a community of faith, our church?  Our own parish family is still staggering under the loss of our Sarah Saturday before last, a sixteen year old girl killed in an automobile accident.  Now this, so close to us, ten miles over the Connecticut border, twenty first graders and six teachers.  I did my teaching internship at Newtown High School in 1959 and I was student counselor and English and Latin teacher in the next town over, Brookfield, for three years after that, and might well have stayed there but for Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.  You couldn’t ask for, you couldn’t imagine better towns, better public schools, peaceful, orderly, safe.   And yet…. 

          No one is safe.  Every breath we take may be our last.  Be prepared!  And remember the words of Julian of Norwich, “The worst has happened and been repaired.” 

          This is Gaudete Sunday.   Gaudete is Latin for rejoice!  Rejoice?  How rejoice?  We are more than half way through Advent, the period of waiting, waiting for the repair.  The worst has happened?  The Fall!  And been repaired?  How repaired?   Jesus Christ, Christ himself, Christmas, Emmanuel, God with Us, come to suffer, die and rise again. 

          Evil entered that classroom in Newtown, but God was in that classroom too, and he is the stronger.  He has taken the little ones to himself.  We weep for ourselves!  They are our children too.  All children are our children.  Their families have only their memory.  They will not see those beautiful children grow and learn, see them at First Communion, Confirmation!  There will be no weddings, no grandchildren!  It is for ourselves that we weep.  They are in bliss, eternal bliss, forever innocent, to rise in glory on the Last Day.  That’s a Promise! 

          Last week a similar number of children in Afghanistan were killed by a bomb blast near their school.  Was it unexploded ordinance?  There have been so many more.  Drone strikes are not surgical, as we have been led to believe.  Many children have been killed by these fiendish weapons, nearly three hundred in the Afghan-Pakistan border area.  Afghani and Paki mothers and fathers feel the same anguish, anger, grief and loss as American mothers and fathers do.  Does this in any way diminish our loss, our pain?  Of course not!  Are those kids our children too?  God’s children?  Of course they are.  So why do we let these things happen?

          The Popes have spoken of a culture of death that pervades our society, a culture of violence, violence against the most vulnerable among us, the unborn and the elderly, against the poor, against immigrants, against children, against women.  We will balance the budget they say, but not by pulling out of unnecessary and unwinnable wars paid for on the credit card.  Let the old, the sick, disabled war veterans and children pay.  We have been lied to by politicians as long as I can remember, consistently, by Democrats as well as Republicans, and that’s a form of violence in itself.  I refer also to child pornography, widespread and easily available to feed unnatural lust and loathing, and the trafficking of women. 

          Too many guns, too little mental health evaluation and care in this country.  The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in his first address to the diplomats assigned to the Holy See, announced that the Church’s first priority in the field of international relations is the building of a culture of peace, a culture of nonviolence, a culture of life.  Do we need any more evidence that this is what we need in our country today?

          “His winnowing fan is in his hand,” John the Baptist announced.  Even here in an agricultural setting we may need to explain what a winnowing fan is, and what it means to winnow.  Before mechanization, the way a farmer removed the grain of wheat from its husk, or chaff, was to spread the wheat stripped from the stalk on the barn floor.  He would then take a large fan and stir the air over it all.  The dry husks, or chaff, are lighter than the grains of wheat, so the breeze the fan creates lifts the chaff and scatters it a few feet away from the heavier wheat.  The farmer can then gather up the wheat for storage and sweep up the chaff to compost or to burn.  That’s what it means to winnow, and the fan used is called a winnowing fan.  John’s words are harsh.  “The chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire!” a terrible judgment.  We have to take his words seriously, for we will be called to account. 

          Think on these words, think on what we have just experienced in that first grade classroom when you are selecting toys for your little ones this Christmas.  If you have already bought a war toy, or a violent video game, TAKE IT BACK!  Exchange it for a teddy bear, or a chess set!  Teach peace! 

          Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace!  Peace  be with you!     W

Cast Your Whole Ballot

26 Sunday B   #137

Nm 11, 25-29

Ps 19

Jas 5, 1-6

Mk 9, 38-43. 45. 47-48

September 30, 2012

Peter Maurin Farm

Marlboro, N.Y.

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   Imagine this passage from the Letter of Saint James being read aloud at a recent national political convention.  I won’t say which one.  We just heard the words, God’s words.  They’re important.  So let’s hear them again and take careful heed:

                   “Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries.  Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver have corroded and that corrosion will be a testimony against you, it will devour your flesh like fire…. Behold, the wages you have withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.  You have lived on the earth in luxury and pleasure and you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.”

                   Word as harsh as these might well have been directed at the other party convention too, I won’t say which one, words of condemnation for the crime that cries to heaven for vengeance, the slaughter of the innocent yet-to-be-born.  The legal right to abortion at any stage of gestation or even birth for any reason whatsoever is now part of that party’s orthodoxy.  How long will the hand of God’s justice be stayed?  "God is not mocked."  (Gal 6, 7)  “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay!”  (Deut 32,35;  Rom 12, 19)

                   The president from one party declares that anything the president does is by that very fact legal.  The president from the other party acts upon that and authorizes assassination by drone missile, targeted assassination of individuals he chooses to designate enemy combatants without any judicial process, appeal, oversight or review, and ten or more innocent women, children and other by-standers die as “collateral damage.”  Obscene!  And some people wonder why they hate us. 

                   Our bishops have given us guidelines, guidance, not in how to vote, but in how to weigh the candidates and party platforms.  It is not their place or mine or anyone else's to tell you how to vote.  But we who are ordained to teach the faithful the principles of social justice based on Scripture and natural law have it laid upon us to do just that.  The bottom-line is this: how will your choice affect the most vulnerable in our society?

          Catholic social teaching holds that all citizens have the right to participate in the political life of their communities and nations, that is, among other things, to vote.  The right to participate entails the responsibility to participate.  Any who fail to exercise that right endanger the right of others to do so.  Catholics make a better showing at the polls than our fellow citizens.  We make up 20% of the population but 27% of the voting public.  There was a time when we tended to vote as a bloc, for the New Deal, for instance, up to 80 percent!  But we are not beholden to any party, nor should we ever be!  And voting is not the only way we participate in public life. 

                   Here we are about five weeks from Election Day.  I confess to you, I haven’t made up my mind yet, whom to vote for or even whether to go to the polls at all, the choices are so bad.  Choosing the lesser of two evils is choosing an evil, after all.  Maybe a third party.  But they’re all compromised.  Then again….

          I am consoled by the words of a great American once scorned but now seen as a national treasure, Henry David Thoreau.  “Cast your whole vote, not just a piece of paper.”  If we live the life that Jesus taught us to live, a life centered on the works of mercy, we cast our whole vote every day of our lives.

                   God be with you and God be with us all on November 6, a day of tears for the poor, the aged, the sick and the unborn.  God forgive us! 

                                             W

The Subversive Lord

25 Sunday  #134

Wis 2, 12, 17-20

Ps 54

Jas 3, 12-4,3

Mk 9, 30-37

September 23, 2102

Peter Maurin Farm
Marlboro, N.Y.

Deacon Tom Cornell

                    In last Sunday’s Gospel we heard Jesus predict his passion and death.  Peter objected.  Then Jesus rebuked Peter, “Get behind me you Satan; you are thinking as men do, not as God does.”  Today we hear Jesus predict his passion and death once again.  The chief priests and the scribes would betray him.  The disciples, who had been with him through his travels, didn’t know what to make of it!  How could that be?  What had Jesus done or said that would turn the Temple authorities against him so that they would turn him over to the Romans for execution?  He had cured the sick, cast out demons, he had done all things well, had made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.  His words – they were the most sublime anyone had ever heard, or would ever hear, the Sermon on the Mount.  What was wrong with that?  Where is the crime in that?   

                   Plenty!  That’s the point.  The world teaches us to seek power, wealth, influence, control.  The Beatitudes, the whole Sermon on the Mount, turn the world upside down.   Jesus puts forward a little child in today’s reading.  Who welcomes a little child welcomes me, and not me but the one who sent me, God!  Power, wealth are not evil in themselves, they are in fact good if, and only if, they are used for the common good and the relief of suffering.  But how easily we fool ourselves, making necessities out of luxuries!

          In this story, the disciples are mirror images of ourselves.  They failed to see how Jesus was upsetting the apple-cart, until perhaps, he upset the tables of the money-changers and the merchants in the Temple precincts.  The Sanhedrin feared Jesus would bring down Rome on them so they handed him over.  So Rome had to take him down.  The Roman authorities were in fact very liberal in their administration of the provinces of their vast Empire.  They allowed conquered peoples to retain their own legal systems, their customs and religious rites insofar as they did not interfere with Rome’s ultimate control.  But at any sign, at any hint of insurrection or subversion, Rome came down hard and fast, ruthlessly, crucifying hundreds, thousands, to make any example of them.  

          Jesus knew his days were numbered.  His insight into the meaning of the kingdom of God made it clear to him how opposed it was to the kingdom of mammon. But it remained a mystery to his followers how anyone would not love Jesus as they did, even as they failed to grasp the depth of his meaning. 

          Their failures, their unwillingness to understand, prefigure the patterns of future generations of disciples over the ages, people just like you and me, slow to understand the radical message of Jesus, and slower yet to follow.  The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Gospel is subversive, subversive of every pattern and structure of oppression, domination, discrimination and war and the piling up of superfluous wealth when any of God’s children are starving.

           Jesus didn’t give up on the first disciples.  He won’t give up on us either.   Jesus teaches us to stand with the powerless, the marginalized and the disenfranchised rather than seek favor by catering to the rich and the powerful to feather our own nests. 

          They had to kill him.  But they couldn’t keep him dead!  “He rose again on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures.  …. His kingdom will have no end.”  It begins here and now, when we embrace that little child.  W

Joshua Casteel, R.I.P.

Tom Cornell

posted on America Magazine blog
and Independent Catholic News, London 
August 27, 2012

Joshua Casteel died, August 25, in New York City, after a long, brave and painful battle with cancer, another victim of the war in Iraq, at age 32.    

If ever there was an “all-American boy!”  A photo of Josh as president of the Young Republicans in his high school is charmingly naïve.   Tall and handsome, blue-eyed and blond-haired, of Norwegian stock, he must have looked quite at home as a cadet at West Point Military Academy.  But he couldn’t take the mindless chauvinism, he told me.  No critical thinking!  “I could take orders, but I can’t give them in an outfit like that,” he said.  He thought it only right to fulfill the commitment he made when he signed his enlistment contract, so he asked not for release but for reassignment as a common soldier.  He was sent to language school, in California, where he learned Arabic well enough to be assigned to Abu Graib Prison in Baghdad as an interrogator.  He arrived there just after the prisoner abuse scandal broke in 2004.  He had over one hundred interrogation sessions with prisoners, 90% of whom, he determined, were guilty of nothing but being Arab.  General Janis Karpinski, in charge of the prison at that time, disagreed, maybe 80%.  One was 14 years old, another nine!

Joshua was brought up in a fervently Evangelical family.  But Josh’s Christian faith began to falter.  He read Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity.  That not only revived but strengthened his faith.  He was received into full communion with the Catholic Church.  An admitted jihadi prisoner challenged Josh’s commitment to the New Testament ethic of nonviolence.  The jihadi had the better of the argument, Joshua decided.  He came to the conclusion that he was in fact a conscientious objector to war and to military service.  He applied for early discharge as a conscientious objector.  His commanding officer recognized the sincerity and validity of his claim.  Joshua was released with an honorable discharge and returned home to study and to write plays and stories based upon his experience. 

Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired, of Galveston-Houston, arranged for Michael Griffin, theology professor at Holy Cross College in South Bend and editor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship The Sign of Peace and me to present Joshua to Pope Benedict in Rome, March 2007 at an outdoor Mass.  The Holy Father was obviously impressed with Josh’s story.  As he was led away, Mike Griffin told the Holy Father the purpose of our trip to Rome, to spur further development of ministry to conscientious objectors, support and encouragement.  “You mean men like him?” said the Pope, pointing to Joshua. “Yes, Holy Father, men like him!”

Having earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, Joshua started advanced studies at the University of Chicago when he suddenly took sick.  It was lung cancer, 4th stage, metastasized.  The disease progressed rapidly.  He was soon in excruciating pain and dependent upon strong opioids.  Treatment seemed at times hopeful.  He was admitted to an experimental therapy program at a secret location in Lower Manhattan.  He responded very well.  Then a sudden downturn, due to pancreatitis.  In little more than a week, attended by his mother, Joshua slipped away. 

 A victim of the war?  Yes, probably, but there is no proof.  Joshua believed that his cancer was caused by living at Abu Graib near an open burn-pit operated by the US military.  All manner of refuse including plastics was dumped into open-air pits to be incinerated.  The fumes are toxic. 

Let Joshua have the last word, or words he spoke to Aaron Glantz, in a radio interview on Pacifica Radio KPFA, San Francisco, on our trip to Rome:  “We were seeking pastoral guidance from the Holy See as to how to best address the issue in America, which at the core is an issue of spiritual formation and catechesis, that people don’t know the history of Catholic conscientious objectors….  And this is where the issue of nationalism is front and center….  In this country, Catholic Christians often don’t act as if their Catholic identity is their primary identity – that somehow it’s ok to closet your Christianity when the State tells you to.  That’s not the history that Christianity hails from; it’s simply not the case.”

Pray for us, Josh, that God will grant us even a small share of your faith and courage, and consolation to your bereft mother Kristi and sisters Naomi and Rebekah.    

Bread of Life

20 Sunday B  #119

Pvb 9, 1-6

Ps 34

Eph 5, 15-20

Jn 6, 51-58

Peter Maurin Farm
Marlboro, N.Y.
August 19, 2012

Deacon Tom Cornell

          Our first reading from the Book of Proverbs speaks of the Temple of Wisdom built upon seven columns, or pillars.  But it doesn’t tell us what those seven pillars are.  Let’s say they are the seven virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, and faith, hope and charity. 

          Or they might be what scholars of religion call the pillars of all major religions:  the contemplation of God, the ultimate mystery;  then where do we come from  and where are we going and why;  the destiny of the universe itself;  salvation, redemption, from what and for what;  and what other planes of existence there might be.  Christians will deal with these questions from our understanding of Hebrew and Christian Scripture and our own and our common experience, Sacred Tradition, and ultimately, through the person of Jesus Christ.  Wisdom, Sophia, Logos was with God and danced at the Creation, to become man in Jesus Christ.

            For the past three weeks, now four, we have been hearing “The Bread of Life Discourse” from the 6^th Chapter of the Gospel according to John.  Jesus speaks of himself as the bread of life, his own flesh and blood as food for eternal life.  Many of the Jews who heard these words found them intolerable; they couldn’t bear to hear them. They walked away; they would listen to him no more. 

          The bread of life come down from heaven will be offered to you in minutes.  This is the whole purpose of the priesthood.  Jesus would leave this earth, go back to the Father, sit at his right hand until he comes again to judge the living and the dead.  But until that time, Jesus remains with us.  “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in their midst.”  Jesus is present in the poor the sick and the suffering. “When you did these things for the least of these my brethren, you did them for me.”  Jesus is also truly present, body, blood, soul and divinity in every particle of the bread and wine consecrated by a valid priest at the altar.  He remains with us in sacramental sign because, no matter how badly we go astray, no matter how foolish we become, he wants to be with us, to nourish and guide us even despite ourselves.  Such is the infinite mercy of God.  

         God the Father did not directly will that his only begotten son should die, mocked and scourged, upon a felon’s cross.  But it was inevitable.  It was God’s will that Jesus submit and resist not the evil of men.  This would be the ultimate sacrifice which we commemorate at every Mass. 

          If the Incarnation had been postponed for two thousand years and Jesus had been born in Bethlehem, Connecticut or Marlboro, New York instead of Bethlehem in Juda, the outcome would have been the same.  We would have killed him.  One way or another we would have killed him.  That’s what we do to the lambs of God. 

          And Jesus would forgive, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” just as he did at Golgotha.  And we would be forgiven, saved.  Saved from the consequences of our own blind stupidity, willfulness, pride, greed, gluttony, lust, envy, sloth and anger, saved from the isolation we put ourselves into when we hide from each other’s pain and want and need. 

          The bread of life!  Communion!  The word means oneness with God and oneness with each other.  So we must bear one another’s burdens, live as brothers and sisters, not judging, but sharing, just as God has shared with us, shared his own very self!  Such a gift we have been given!  How can we not share with others then?  Our hearts should be so full of gratitude that they open and pour out whatever we have, even foolishly.  God will not be outdone in generosity.  His eye is on the sparrow.  I know he watches you and me!   W