2 Easter B #44 Divine Mercy
Acts 4, 32-35
Ps 118
1 Jn 5, 1-6
Jn 20, 19-31
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 15, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Christ is risen. He is truly risen! “What good would life have been to us had not Christ risen from the dead?” He rose to take us with him. Otherwise life has no meaning at all: death is the end, a void, nothingness, an absurdity, even a mockery. We have hope, we have faith, all due to God’s mercy. Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. We have never done anything to deserve God’s mercy. Nor can we ever. It is a free gift, grace: saved by the gift of faith and hope, saved from death, saved from meaninglessness.
We really don’t know much about the life of the world to come, heaven, hell, purgatory. George Bernanos said that hell is not to love any more, and Fyodor Dostoevsky said the same. We don’t hear much about purgatory these days. What if Hitler and Stalin had the grace of final repentance? Would they then sit at the same table with Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day in heaven? Not for a while, I venture to say, not for a while.
Our first reading today is about the Jerusalem commune. Yes, the earliest Christians were communists. It’s likely that many of their fellow Jews in Jerusalem thought of them as some kind of hippies, as we might say. People who really believe tend to look funny to an unbelieving world. They certainly weren’t living the way most people did. They shared their goods, everything they had so that there was no one needy among them, “to each according to his need.” They didn’t say, “Is this person worthy of our help? She’s a drunk. She brought this need upon herself!” Or “He’s a mooch, says he’s too fat to work. He made his bed now let him lie in it! Why should we pick up the pieces of their broken lives when it’s not our fault but their own?” The Jerusalem disciples didn’t ask these questions. They didn’t distinguish between the “deserving” as opposed to the “undeserving” poor; they just shared.
Karl Marx thought that was a good line, from Acts, “to each according to his need.” He adopted it and added, “from each according to his ability.” That’s not a bad idea either! Marx’s mistake was to deny God, and to deny the freedom of the children of God, and so millions perished, tens of millions, for a utopian dream! When Eleanor Roosevelt presented the Declaration of Universal Human Rights to the United Nations in 1948, even though that declaration did not admit the divine origin of human rights, Mrs. Roosevelt warned that these rights will never be implemented without the world’s churches and synagogues weighing in. And we do.
God created this world for all to share. That teaching of the Church is called “the universal destination of goods,” and it has been explicit Catholic doctrine since 1891: that God did not create this beautiful world just for the children and grandchildren of the rich and powerful, but for all, since we are all are God’s children. Does that mean that people don’t have the right to private property and the profits of their own honest labor? No, not at all! Human freedom and human dignity depend upon it. We have a right to the fruits of our labor. But not to the fruits of other peoples’ labor. Man is to live by the sweat of his brow, we learn in Genesis, not the sweat of other peoples’ brows. You see there is some tension between these two ideas. We must share with those in need but at the same time we have a moral obligation to try to make our own way in the world, to support ourselves and our families.
The right to private property is not absolute but must be harmonized with the common good. That’s a hard lesson for many people to learn. Unspeakable human grief has been caused in our own living memory by those who would force the issue with grand schemes. What if twenty or thirty million men and women and children had to be sacrificed for the utopian dream? The future would be heaven on earth! A heaven without a God! In other words, a hell. And by neglect too. Indifference is worse than hatred. Too many just turn their backs, and again millions die, 16,000 children every day die from hunger, malnutrition. It doesn’t have to be.
There is no safe foundation for human rights other than the Hebrew belief that we are made in the image and likeness of God and the Christian conviction that we are saved by the blood of Christ, saved for the kingdom of God, a kingdom that can not be built by human hands alone, a kingdom that will only be realized in the fullness of time by his own return when we will share Christ’s divinity, who humbled himself to share our own humanity. That’s what Easter means. God has been good to us, generous, so merciful. So let us stop judging and show each other mercy. If we got what we deserve, none of us would get off easy! That too is what Easter means. Can we live this faith?
The Apostle Thomas’ faith faltered. He had followed Jesus through Galilee and Samaria to Jerusalem. He was there at the Sermon on the Mount. He was there when Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes. He was there at the Last Supper and so he was among Christ’s first priests. And yet he could say, “I’ll never believe unless….” Thomas’s doubt is a grace to all of us whose faith sometimes falters or grows weak. If we have the gift of faith, even as small as a mustard seed, we can water it, nurture it; it can grow, as the mustard seed, and shelter many. God has been merciful to us. Let us then be merciful to one another.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Prayer Is First
1 Lent 2012 B #23
Gn 9, 8-15
Ps 25
1Pt 3, 18-22
Mk 1, 12-15
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 26, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Have you lost any weight yet? Just last Wednesday I realized that I won’t be able to get into my suit trousers if I don’t lose a few pounds. Lent is just in time. It’s a very good idea to revive the old Lenten fast, not because we have to, but because we want to. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these cover a multitude of sins, and they are the three essential elements of the penitential season. Prayer comes first!
It’s really so good to see you here, every Sunday. You are the faithful ones. You are here. Where are the others? Father Bader and Deacon Vinny and I and the lay ministers of the Eucharist, when we stand at the foot of the altar to give you Communion: every time we feel the same warmth of recognition. We are native born and foreign born, liberals and conservatives, of many different racial and ethnic strains, but here we are all one, together, united in the love of God and Jesus Christ and all our differences fade away into insignificance. Communion: that’s what the word means. We are one with God in Christ Jesus who died for us, who showed us a way to live and who rose again to take us with him; and we are one with each other. The sacrament makes it real. Where are the others? Don’t they know what they’re missing?
Let’s get back to the subject, the penitential season of Lent, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Prayer comes first. If I fast seriously enough to get back into those trousers, that’s all well and good. But if my fast did not begin in with prayer, if it was not carried out in prayer and if it does not end in prayer, then it is of no spiritual benefit whatever. If I tithe and write a substantial check to the Campaign for Human Development, that’s all well and good. But if my charity does not begin in prayer, if it is not sustained in prayer, if it does not end in prayer, again, it avails me nothing in the realm of the spirit.
Saint Paul counsels “pray without ceasing” (1 Th 5,17). How do you do that? One way is to start the day with The Morning Offering.
There are many forms of that prayer. Here’s the one I learned as a boy:
O Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
I offer you my prayers, works, joys, sufferings of this day,
in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world.
I offer them for all the intentions of your Sacred Heart;
the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, the reunion of Christians; and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father this month. Amen.
The Rosary is a very good way to pray. We let our fingers do the walking, as it were, counting the beads. Giving our hands something to do helps us to concentrate on the prayers itself. The repetition of the words of the Hail Mary, especially, are supposed to become automatic, freeing our minds to concentrate on the mysteries, from the Annunciation to the Birth of Jesus, from the Agony in the Garden to the Crucifixion, from the Resurrection to the Coronation of Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth. If you want, you can concentrate on other events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. Of course your mind will wander. When that happens, just bring it back!
Then there is silent prayer, contemplative prayer. Don’t be frightened off by the idea that this form of prayer is only for the spiritually advanced, monks and cloistered nuns. Not at all; we can all do it. One way is to read a short passage of Scripture, just to get in the right frame of mind. You’ll have to have a quiet place, nobody else around, no radio or TV noise in the background. You’ll have to set aside a few minutes, just a few at first. Sit in a comfortable chair with your back straight. Take a deep breath in through your nose, as deep as you can, then let it out through your lips, slowly. Do it again, and a third time. Now as you empty your lungs, empty your mind. There’s a lot of noise in our heads, so many thoughts, a lot of busy-ness. Breathe it all out as best you can. Empty you mind. Some people focus on a word or a short phrase, a “prayer word” or a “mantra.” Many people use the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” I use the beads for this prayer too, repeating it over and over. Again, inevitably, your mind wanders. All right, just call it back. Shorten the prayer, to just two words, “Jesus, mercy,” or one word if you like, “Jesus”! If you try this once a day, you will find that you will need just the word to call you back when you are distracted. Then maybe you can try it twice a day.
Let us pray! By the end of Lent may we all be prepared to meet the Risen Lord; may our waist lines be a little smaller and may some people living in poverty have some relief from our giving in Jesus’ name.
Gn 9, 8-15
Ps 25
1Pt 3, 18-22
Mk 1, 12-15
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 26, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Have you lost any weight yet? Just last Wednesday I realized that I won’t be able to get into my suit trousers if I don’t lose a few pounds. Lent is just in time. It’s a very good idea to revive the old Lenten fast, not because we have to, but because we want to. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these cover a multitude of sins, and they are the three essential elements of the penitential season. Prayer comes first!
It’s really so good to see you here, every Sunday. You are the faithful ones. You are here. Where are the others? Father Bader and Deacon Vinny and I and the lay ministers of the Eucharist, when we stand at the foot of the altar to give you Communion: every time we feel the same warmth of recognition. We are native born and foreign born, liberals and conservatives, of many different racial and ethnic strains, but here we are all one, together, united in the love of God and Jesus Christ and all our differences fade away into insignificance. Communion: that’s what the word means. We are one with God in Christ Jesus who died for us, who showed us a way to live and who rose again to take us with him; and we are one with each other. The sacrament makes it real. Where are the others? Don’t they know what they’re missing?
Let’s get back to the subject, the penitential season of Lent, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Prayer comes first. If I fast seriously enough to get back into those trousers, that’s all well and good. But if my fast did not begin in with prayer, if it was not carried out in prayer and if it does not end in prayer, then it is of no spiritual benefit whatever. If I tithe and write a substantial check to the Campaign for Human Development, that’s all well and good. But if my charity does not begin in prayer, if it is not sustained in prayer, if it does not end in prayer, again, it avails me nothing in the realm of the spirit.
Saint Paul counsels “pray without ceasing” (1 Th 5,17). How do you do that? One way is to start the day with The Morning Offering.
There are many forms of that prayer. Here’s the one I learned as a boy:
O Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
I offer you my prayers, works, joys, sufferings of this day,
in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world.
I offer them for all the intentions of your Sacred Heart;
the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, the reunion of Christians; and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father this month. Amen.
The Rosary is a very good way to pray. We let our fingers do the walking, as it were, counting the beads. Giving our hands something to do helps us to concentrate on the prayers itself. The repetition of the words of the Hail Mary, especially, are supposed to become automatic, freeing our minds to concentrate on the mysteries, from the Annunciation to the Birth of Jesus, from the Agony in the Garden to the Crucifixion, from the Resurrection to the Coronation of Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth. If you want, you can concentrate on other events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. Of course your mind will wander. When that happens, just bring it back!
Then there is silent prayer, contemplative prayer. Don’t be frightened off by the idea that this form of prayer is only for the spiritually advanced, monks and cloistered nuns. Not at all; we can all do it. One way is to read a short passage of Scripture, just to get in the right frame of mind. You’ll have to have a quiet place, nobody else around, no radio or TV noise in the background. You’ll have to set aside a few minutes, just a few at first. Sit in a comfortable chair with your back straight. Take a deep breath in through your nose, as deep as you can, then let it out through your lips, slowly. Do it again, and a third time. Now as you empty your lungs, empty your mind. There’s a lot of noise in our heads, so many thoughts, a lot of busy-ness. Breathe it all out as best you can. Empty you mind. Some people focus on a word or a short phrase, a “prayer word” or a “mantra.” Many people use the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” I use the beads for this prayer too, repeating it over and over. Again, inevitably, your mind wanders. All right, just call it back. Shorten the prayer, to just two words, “Jesus, mercy,” or one word if you like, “Jesus”! If you try this once a day, you will find that you will need just the word to call you back when you are distracted. Then maybe you can try it twice a day.
Let us pray! By the end of Lent may we all be prepared to meet the Risen Lord; may our waist lines be a little smaller and may some people living in poverty have some relief from our giving in Jesus’ name.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Love at the End
7 Sunday B #80
Is 43, 18-19. 21-22. 24b-25
Ps 41
2 Cor 1, 16-22
Mk 2, 1-12
February 19, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Lent begins this Wednesday! Sing Alleluia today, because we won’t sing it again until the Easter Vigil.
The Lenten fast of years gone by was strict and imposed upon the faithful under pain of sin. Today we are expected to act like grownups and adjust our penitential acts according to our own needs and judgment. We are all held to abstinence from meat on all Fridays of Lent, and for those of us between ages 14 and 60, the fast, not much of a fast really, two small meals and one main meal with no snacks in-between on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Some of us would benefit by observing the fast every weekday of Lent. It might even help many of us lose the excess wright we have been carrying around.
There are three elements to the penitential season that we should all observe: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Pray more often and more deeply; curb all appetites; and give to the poor. These are still and always will be key elements to our preparation for the great mystery of the Resurrection and our salvation. And if your conscience is burdened by serious sin, come to the sacrament of reconciliation. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these three cover a multitude of sins and make us open to the grace of God. Now let’s look at today’s Gospel reading.
We find Jesus at home in Capernaum on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum was the center for Jesus’ Galilean ministry, his home away from Nazareth. His first disciples, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew lived in Capernaum too. He preaches in the local synagogue and goes about healing the sick. It doesn’t take long for Jesus’ fame to spread. Today he is at home. So many people come to see him, hear him, petition him that the one most in need of his help can’t even get in the door. So his friends climb up onto the roof, pull away bundles of thatch and open a large hole in the roof. It had to be a pretty big hole to lower a man down on a mat. Imagine the people in the room below with Jesus, with dust and dirt and pieces of wood and bits of straw falling on their heads. They look up to see people taking the roof apart! This is not the way petitioners were expected to approach someone for help. Last Sunday we saw a leper approach Jesus. The leper bowed down low and knelt at Jesus’ feet. That’s the way to do it, not opening a hole in the roof. But Mark is setting the stage to make a point here.
We are only into the second chapter of his gospel today. Mark wastes no time. Jesus tells the paralytic his sins are forgiven. The scribes accuse Jesus of blasphemy, making himself equal to God. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they complain. To quiet them, Jesus answers: “Which is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven? Or take up your mat and walk?’ ” To prove to them that he has the power to forgive sins, he commands the paralytic: “Stand up, pick up you mat and go home.” And so he does.
Mark wrote about thirty years after Jesus’ life on earth. The first Christians were still trying to figure out what had hit them. Just who was, or who is this man, Jesus? Mark begins his gospel with the words, “The gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” Jesus had changed their lives. He had turned them upside down. Near the end of his gospel, Mark records the centurion at the foot of the Cross saying these same words, “This truly is the Son of God.” Mark calls him Jesus Christ, as if Christ were his last name. Very early on, Jesus was seen as the long awaited Messiah. So Matthew and Luke see Jesus as Messiah too. John will identify Jesus as the Word, eternally begotten of the Father, through whom all things were made. It took until the 4th Century of the Christian Era before the Holy Spirit inspired the Church to formulate the words we will recite in a few minutes, “the only begotten son of God… God from God, light form light, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things were made….”
During this Lent, maybe the best way to observe it, is simply to pray, to ponder the mystery of God revealed in Jesus more deeply, with a Bible. Can you picture God in your head? Don’t! Make no image of God, not even a mental image! Fix your mind on Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God, Lord and savior, the merciful, the forgiving, the loving, the one who invites us to follow in his footsteps, the one who conquers death itself and gives our lives meaning, forever, eternal meaning.
The life we will live in eternity is forged right here and now. You know in The Divine Comedy, Dante has the condemned pitched upside down in vats of boiling oil and such tortures as that. He drew those terrible images as metaphors to drive home a point. That point is the same as in the wonderful novel by George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest. Its hero explains, “Hell is not to love anymore.” If Hell is not to love any more, then what is Heaven? The ancient Jews pictured heaven as a banquet, a love feast. If Hell is not to love any more, then Heaven is to love forever.
What are the Two Great Commandments but to love? Love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus’ great commandment at the Last Supper was to love one another as he has loved us, even unto death. And most astoundingly, to love of neighbor, Jesus adds love of enemies. “I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Lk 6, 27) and again, he repeats, “Love your enemies” (Lk 6, 35).
And in John , we read, “God is love” (1 Jn 4, 8). Love, love at the end.
Is 43, 18-19. 21-22. 24b-25
Ps 41
2 Cor 1, 16-22
Mk 2, 1-12
February 19, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Lent begins this Wednesday! Sing Alleluia today, because we won’t sing it again until the Easter Vigil.
The Lenten fast of years gone by was strict and imposed upon the faithful under pain of sin. Today we are expected to act like grownups and adjust our penitential acts according to our own needs and judgment. We are all held to abstinence from meat on all Fridays of Lent, and for those of us between ages 14 and 60, the fast, not much of a fast really, two small meals and one main meal with no snacks in-between on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Some of us would benefit by observing the fast every weekday of Lent. It might even help many of us lose the excess wright we have been carrying around.
There are three elements to the penitential season that we should all observe: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Pray more often and more deeply; curb all appetites; and give to the poor. These are still and always will be key elements to our preparation for the great mystery of the Resurrection and our salvation. And if your conscience is burdened by serious sin, come to the sacrament of reconciliation. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these three cover a multitude of sins and make us open to the grace of God. Now let’s look at today’s Gospel reading.
We find Jesus at home in Capernaum on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum was the center for Jesus’ Galilean ministry, his home away from Nazareth. His first disciples, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew lived in Capernaum too. He preaches in the local synagogue and goes about healing the sick. It doesn’t take long for Jesus’ fame to spread. Today he is at home. So many people come to see him, hear him, petition him that the one most in need of his help can’t even get in the door. So his friends climb up onto the roof, pull away bundles of thatch and open a large hole in the roof. It had to be a pretty big hole to lower a man down on a mat. Imagine the people in the room below with Jesus, with dust and dirt and pieces of wood and bits of straw falling on their heads. They look up to see people taking the roof apart! This is not the way petitioners were expected to approach someone for help. Last Sunday we saw a leper approach Jesus. The leper bowed down low and knelt at Jesus’ feet. That’s the way to do it, not opening a hole in the roof. But Mark is setting the stage to make a point here.
We are only into the second chapter of his gospel today. Mark wastes no time. Jesus tells the paralytic his sins are forgiven. The scribes accuse Jesus of blasphemy, making himself equal to God. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they complain. To quiet them, Jesus answers: “Which is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven? Or take up your mat and walk?’ ” To prove to them that he has the power to forgive sins, he commands the paralytic: “Stand up, pick up you mat and go home.” And so he does.
Mark wrote about thirty years after Jesus’ life on earth. The first Christians were still trying to figure out what had hit them. Just who was, or who is this man, Jesus? Mark begins his gospel with the words, “The gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” Jesus had changed their lives. He had turned them upside down. Near the end of his gospel, Mark records the centurion at the foot of the Cross saying these same words, “This truly is the Son of God.” Mark calls him Jesus Christ, as if Christ were his last name. Very early on, Jesus was seen as the long awaited Messiah. So Matthew and Luke see Jesus as Messiah too. John will identify Jesus as the Word, eternally begotten of the Father, through whom all things were made. It took until the 4th Century of the Christian Era before the Holy Spirit inspired the Church to formulate the words we will recite in a few minutes, “the only begotten son of God… God from God, light form light, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things were made….”
During this Lent, maybe the best way to observe it, is simply to pray, to ponder the mystery of God revealed in Jesus more deeply, with a Bible. Can you picture God in your head? Don’t! Make no image of God, not even a mental image! Fix your mind on Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God, Lord and savior, the merciful, the forgiving, the loving, the one who invites us to follow in his footsteps, the one who conquers death itself and gives our lives meaning, forever, eternal meaning.
The life we will live in eternity is forged right here and now. You know in The Divine Comedy, Dante has the condemned pitched upside down in vats of boiling oil and such tortures as that. He drew those terrible images as metaphors to drive home a point. That point is the same as in the wonderful novel by George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest. Its hero explains, “Hell is not to love anymore.” If Hell is not to love any more, then what is Heaven? The ancient Jews pictured heaven as a banquet, a love feast. If Hell is not to love any more, then Heaven is to love forever.
What are the Two Great Commandments but to love? Love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus’ great commandment at the Last Supper was to love one another as he has loved us, even unto death. And most astoundingly, to love of neighbor, Jesus adds love of enemies. “I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Lk 6, 27) and again, he repeats, “Love your enemies” (Lk 6, 35).
And in John , we read, “God is love” (1 Jn 4, 8). Love, love at the end.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Something New Is Happening
2 Sunday B #65
1 Sam , 3b-10. 19
Ps 40
1Cor 6, 13c-15a. 17-20
Jn 1, 35-42
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 15, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Three weeks ago it was Christmas. Last Sunday the Three Kings visited the Christ Child in the manger. Today we see Jesus a grown man walking by the Jordan River. John the Baptist and two of his disciples notice him. John had a large following. His disciples stayed with him, studying his interpretation of sacred history and preparing for the next stage, some of them for years. Jesus probably joined John’s school for a time. But John says he didn’t recognize Jesus at first, that is, he didn’t realize who he really was. But he sensed that something new was happening, precisely what neither of them knew, neither John nor Jesus. But at his baptism, it became clear that yes, something new was happening.
In today’s reading, Andrew goes to his brother Simon and says, “We have found the Messiah!” Astounding, powerful words! Jews had been waiting for the Messiah since the time of Moses, for God’s anointed, in Greek the Christ, who would deliver them at last and forever from oppression, foreign domination and shame as a conquered people. They thought of the Messiah as a warrior king who would drive the Romans out and re-establish the glory days of Kings David and Solomon and maybe even make Israel an imperial power.
Something new was happening. Jesus did not understand his mission at first. Although the only begotten Son of God, one in being with the Father, true God from true God, he was also a man like any other man except sin, and so he had to grow in wisdom, age and grace before God and man. After his baptism he was driven into the desert for forty days by the Evil One to be tempted, recalling the forty days Moses led the People through the desert. There in the wilderness it was revealed to him: the power of spirit over the power of brute force. That is something new. Jesus will overcome the power of darkness by the Cross, not by imposing it upon others, even his killers, but by taking it upon himself.
Something new is happening now. Tomorrow we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. It’s debatable when it started. Some would say it started with Thoreau in 19th Century Massachusetts when he wrote the Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Others will say Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent campaign to free India in the first half of the 20th Century. Others will say December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. I say it started on Calvary two thousand years ago, and I know Martin King would say that too. But it takes time for something really new to be recognized for what it is. It’s been two thousand years, but with God a thousand years is as one day. So we, our church, are only two days old.
Down in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965, a Unitarian minister, James Reeb, a white man, had been beaten to death by a racist mob. Martin King knew this was the time for an all-out push. He called everybody who could to come to Selma for a March to Montgomery. Monica and I agreed I had to go.
It wasn’t the first time I had been in the Deep South. Not long after college, I went to South Carolina to work on a refugee resettlement project. Small-scale, successful family farmers in the Po Valley of Italy had been ruined by floods. The National Catholic Rural Life Conference determined to resettle them on the land in America. We had 2,500 acres and 45 Italians. The project was run by a priest of the Rock Hill Oratory. He rented a modest house in a small town between the farm and the Oratory, and invited me to share it with him. The Catholic population in that area was .5%. We did not have a church. The local parish, a very small one, met for Sunday Mass in the chapel of a Catholic hospital run by nuns. Fr. Maurice said daily Mass there as well. One morning, as we approached the hospital, I saw a dead body on the lawn, a man, shot. “”What’s going on, Father?” “They dumped him here because they have a morgue; they can put him on ice.” “Where’s the sheriff?” I asked. “There won’t be a sheriff!” “The police?” “There won’t be any police!” “An inquest?” “Tom,” he said, “there won’t be any inquest. Look at him. Don’t you see? He’s black! They’ll bury him. That’s all!” That’s the way it was, the way it was in the land of strange fruit.
Tomorrow is also Monica’s 70th birthday. She had given birth to our son just one month before Martin King called us to Selma. None of us knew what was going to happen, or whether we would ever come home. She let me go, and I am eternally grateful to her for that. Monsignor Dugan was there too. He slept on the gymnasium floor of Saint Edmund’s parish. I snuck a hospital bed into an unfinished X-ray lab in the Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and made a comfortable space for myself until we set out on the March to Montgomery. It took four days, as I recall, along Alabama Route 80. We were sitting ducks. Nick Katzenbach, the U.S. Attorney General, sent the National Guard to protect us, and I must admit, I was glad. I wanted to get back home to Monica and raise my son. My father didn’t get to do that.
When we came back from the March, I went to the old folks’ solarium in the hospital to see if we made national TV news that night. We were so often ignored by the media. But there on the screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressing a joint session of the Congress and the Senate, and all the country and all the world. He was talking about us. He named us. He said we were right. A white man with a Southern accent said there was no longer any room in this country for bigotry and racial hatred. He demanded that the Congress pass the Voting Rights Bill. He would sign it into law. He came to the end of his speech, put his papers down, looked into the camera, paused and said, “We shall overcome!” Astonishing, powerful words from that mouth! With those words, he stood with us, the President, a Southern white man stood with us! We knew in that instant that we had won and the South, and America would never be the same. We would have the vote, all of us! It had taken ten years since Emmitt Till had been murdered and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Forty-two of us had been killed. But we never struck back, and we won, faith and nonviolence had won! I looked around the room. It was crowded with students and clergy and old radicals from the labor movement, some of them hardened veterans of terrible battles, and there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen. Tears poured down their faces. Martin King was never seen to cry but that once. We had won. Nonviolence had won.
Something new is happening in North Africa and the Middle East and in American cities now. Or is it new? Maybe it’s so old it looks like new. It’s the power of spirit, the power of love, the power of the Cross, the power of nonviolence. Christ has overcome. Jesus is our peace. There is nothing to fear. Peace be with you.
1 Sam , 3b-10. 19
Ps 40
1Cor 6, 13c-15a. 17-20
Jn 1, 35-42
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 15, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Three weeks ago it was Christmas. Last Sunday the Three Kings visited the Christ Child in the manger. Today we see Jesus a grown man walking by the Jordan River. John the Baptist and two of his disciples notice him. John had a large following. His disciples stayed with him, studying his interpretation of sacred history and preparing for the next stage, some of them for years. Jesus probably joined John’s school for a time. But John says he didn’t recognize Jesus at first, that is, he didn’t realize who he really was. But he sensed that something new was happening, precisely what neither of them knew, neither John nor Jesus. But at his baptism, it became clear that yes, something new was happening.
In today’s reading, Andrew goes to his brother Simon and says, “We have found the Messiah!” Astounding, powerful words! Jews had been waiting for the Messiah since the time of Moses, for God’s anointed, in Greek the Christ, who would deliver them at last and forever from oppression, foreign domination and shame as a conquered people. They thought of the Messiah as a warrior king who would drive the Romans out and re-establish the glory days of Kings David and Solomon and maybe even make Israel an imperial power.
Something new was happening. Jesus did not understand his mission at first. Although the only begotten Son of God, one in being with the Father, true God from true God, he was also a man like any other man except sin, and so he had to grow in wisdom, age and grace before God and man. After his baptism he was driven into the desert for forty days by the Evil One to be tempted, recalling the forty days Moses led the People through the desert. There in the wilderness it was revealed to him: the power of spirit over the power of brute force. That is something new. Jesus will overcome the power of darkness by the Cross, not by imposing it upon others, even his killers, but by taking it upon himself.
Something new is happening now. Tomorrow we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. It’s debatable when it started. Some would say it started with Thoreau in 19th Century Massachusetts when he wrote the Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Others will say Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent campaign to free India in the first half of the 20th Century. Others will say December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. I say it started on Calvary two thousand years ago, and I know Martin King would say that too. But it takes time for something really new to be recognized for what it is. It’s been two thousand years, but with God a thousand years is as one day. So we, our church, are only two days old.
Down in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965, a Unitarian minister, James Reeb, a white man, had been beaten to death by a racist mob. Martin King knew this was the time for an all-out push. He called everybody who could to come to Selma for a March to Montgomery. Monica and I agreed I had to go.
It wasn’t the first time I had been in the Deep South. Not long after college, I went to South Carolina to work on a refugee resettlement project. Small-scale, successful family farmers in the Po Valley of Italy had been ruined by floods. The National Catholic Rural Life Conference determined to resettle them on the land in America. We had 2,500 acres and 45 Italians. The project was run by a priest of the Rock Hill Oratory. He rented a modest house in a small town between the farm and the Oratory, and invited me to share it with him. The Catholic population in that area was .5%. We did not have a church. The local parish, a very small one, met for Sunday Mass in the chapel of a Catholic hospital run by nuns. Fr. Maurice said daily Mass there as well. One morning, as we approached the hospital, I saw a dead body on the lawn, a man, shot. “”What’s going on, Father?” “They dumped him here because they have a morgue; they can put him on ice.” “Where’s the sheriff?” I asked. “There won’t be a sheriff!” “The police?” “There won’t be any police!” “An inquest?” “Tom,” he said, “there won’t be any inquest. Look at him. Don’t you see? He’s black! They’ll bury him. That’s all!” That’s the way it was, the way it was in the land of strange fruit.
Tomorrow is also Monica’s 70th birthday. She had given birth to our son just one month before Martin King called us to Selma. None of us knew what was going to happen, or whether we would ever come home. She let me go, and I am eternally grateful to her for that. Monsignor Dugan was there too. He slept on the gymnasium floor of Saint Edmund’s parish. I snuck a hospital bed into an unfinished X-ray lab in the Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and made a comfortable space for myself until we set out on the March to Montgomery. It took four days, as I recall, along Alabama Route 80. We were sitting ducks. Nick Katzenbach, the U.S. Attorney General, sent the National Guard to protect us, and I must admit, I was glad. I wanted to get back home to Monica and raise my son. My father didn’t get to do that.
When we came back from the March, I went to the old folks’ solarium in the hospital to see if we made national TV news that night. We were so often ignored by the media. But there on the screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressing a joint session of the Congress and the Senate, and all the country and all the world. He was talking about us. He named us. He said we were right. A white man with a Southern accent said there was no longer any room in this country for bigotry and racial hatred. He demanded that the Congress pass the Voting Rights Bill. He would sign it into law. He came to the end of his speech, put his papers down, looked into the camera, paused and said, “We shall overcome!” Astonishing, powerful words from that mouth! With those words, he stood with us, the President, a Southern white man stood with us! We knew in that instant that we had won and the South, and America would never be the same. We would have the vote, all of us! It had taken ten years since Emmitt Till had been murdered and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Forty-two of us had been killed. But we never struck back, and we won, faith and nonviolence had won! I looked around the room. It was crowded with students and clergy and old radicals from the labor movement, some of them hardened veterans of terrible battles, and there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen. Tears poured down their faces. Martin King was never seen to cry but that once. We had won. Nonviolence had won.
Something new is happening in North Africa and the Middle East and in American cities now. Or is it new? Maybe it’s so old it looks like new. It’s the power of spirit, the power of love, the power of the Cross, the power of nonviolence. Christ has overcome. Jesus is our peace. There is nothing to fear. Peace be with you.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Iraq War Is Over -- Sort Of
Captain James, the son of the Bellameys in the Upstairs Downstairs BBC series comes home from World War I disillusioned. He knows the war is a massive criminal waste. He is at his wits’ end to process his bitterness. But when dear Rose, the upstairs maid, loses her fiancé and her only hope for a life of her own to the war, Captain James feels constrained to comfort her with the ancient lie. She can be proud; her beloved died a hero’s death for king and country. He can not tell her the truth. It’s too hard for her to hear.
Imagine President Obama addressing the troops at Fort Bragg as US combat forces withdraw from Iraq. Could he have told the truth: the invasion was the most grievous criminal act in international law, a crime against peace itself? Can he tell more than four thousand families that buried a son or daughter or spouse or parent it was all in vain, and worse, a criminal plot to control the natural resources of another country? Or the tens of thousands of families torn apart by PTSD suffering veterans? And what of the Iraqi victims? NPR and Reuters count the Iraqi dead in the tens of thousands. For shame! Multiply that by tens! Hundreds of thousands Iraqi dead, more than a million if excess morbidity is factored in. Between five and six million Iraqis have been driven into exile, many of them impoverished, unemployed in neighboring countries. For them the war is not over. The Christian community, Chaldean Catholics in the majority, a church that traces its origins back to St. Thomas, has been drastically reduced.
Iraqis were the best educated people in the Arab world. The education and the health care systems, once among the finest (and free), are in shambles. Professionals have fled in such proportion as to constitute a brain-drain. Baghdad is in ruin, with neighborhoods cordoned off from each other by road-block and razor wire. After the 1991 bombing, Saddam Hussein was able to get the electric grid up and running in six months. After eight years, the US leaves Baghdad with six hours electricity a day. Basra, Haditha, Fallujah will not soon forget the crimes committed against their civilian populations, nor quickly forgive. For them the war is not over.
It has been the Catholic Worker tradition to contrast the corporal works of mercy with the works of war: to feed the hungry as opposed to destroying farms and foodstuffs, to shelter the homeless as opposed to destroying cities, towns and villages, and so on. Consider the spiritual works of mercy as well, again opposed to the works of war. Instruct the ignorant? No! Lie, deceive them! The first casualty of war is always truth. Counsel the doubtful? No! Draft them, in the present instance through an “economic draft.” Comfort mourners? Only those on “our” side. Reproach sinners, the perpetrators? You might be fired, or even jailed if you put your body where your mouth is. Bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses? Hardly! Revenge! And pray for the living and the dead victims of “our brave fighting men and women”? Not to mention them! If you must, pray for them but quietly, not out loud, not in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass. The Church thus becomes complicit.
Imagine President Obama making a clean breast of it all and calling for reparations and national repentance! Imagine our bishops taking the Holy Father at his word and doing the same. Meanwhile, the Afghan war goes on and the warlords now take aim at Iran. Fast and pray!
Imagine President Obama addressing the troops at Fort Bragg as US combat forces withdraw from Iraq. Could he have told the truth: the invasion was the most grievous criminal act in international law, a crime against peace itself? Can he tell more than four thousand families that buried a son or daughter or spouse or parent it was all in vain, and worse, a criminal plot to control the natural resources of another country? Or the tens of thousands of families torn apart by PTSD suffering veterans? And what of the Iraqi victims? NPR and Reuters count the Iraqi dead in the tens of thousands. For shame! Multiply that by tens! Hundreds of thousands Iraqi dead, more than a million if excess morbidity is factored in. Between five and six million Iraqis have been driven into exile, many of them impoverished, unemployed in neighboring countries. For them the war is not over. The Christian community, Chaldean Catholics in the majority, a church that traces its origins back to St. Thomas, has been drastically reduced.
Iraqis were the best educated people in the Arab world. The education and the health care systems, once among the finest (and free), are in shambles. Professionals have fled in such proportion as to constitute a brain-drain. Baghdad is in ruin, with neighborhoods cordoned off from each other by road-block and razor wire. After the 1991 bombing, Saddam Hussein was able to get the electric grid up and running in six months. After eight years, the US leaves Baghdad with six hours electricity a day. Basra, Haditha, Fallujah will not soon forget the crimes committed against their civilian populations, nor quickly forgive. For them the war is not over.
It has been the Catholic Worker tradition to contrast the corporal works of mercy with the works of war: to feed the hungry as opposed to destroying farms and foodstuffs, to shelter the homeless as opposed to destroying cities, towns and villages, and so on. Consider the spiritual works of mercy as well, again opposed to the works of war. Instruct the ignorant? No! Lie, deceive them! The first casualty of war is always truth. Counsel the doubtful? No! Draft them, in the present instance through an “economic draft.” Comfort mourners? Only those on “our” side. Reproach sinners, the perpetrators? You might be fired, or even jailed if you put your body where your mouth is. Bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses? Hardly! Revenge! And pray for the living and the dead victims of “our brave fighting men and women”? Not to mention them! If you must, pray for them but quietly, not out loud, not in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass. The Church thus becomes complicit.
Imagine President Obama making a clean breast of it all and calling for reparations and national repentance! Imagine our bishops taking the Holy Father at his word and doing the same. Meanwhile, the Afghan war goes on and the warlords now take aim at Iran. Fast and pray!
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Learn to Read the Bible, Learn to Pray
4 Advent B #11
2 Sam 7, 1-5. 8b-12. 14a-16
Ps 89
Rom 16, 25-27
Lk 1, 26-38
December 18, 2011
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
Tom Cornell
This wonderful story, the Angel Gabriel and the young Virgin Mary calls to mind so many beautiful paintings of the Annunciation. What really happened that day in Nazareth? If there had been a movie camera in Mary’s room at the time recording the scene, what would it have captured? Mary was deep in prayer, so deep that she had this Annunciation experience in her innermost soul. It was real. She understood and she said yes to God’s will for her, and for all of us. Even if a shining guy with wings doesn’t show up on the film, we have to picture it, and so we do. ¬
How rich we are, we Catholics. The most beautiful music ever written, the most beautiful statues and paintings, the most glorious buildings are ours, poetry and accumulated wisdom; and yet there’s more to the spiritual treasure each one of us has within, the very image of God. I know about poverty, probably better than anyone in this congregation. I’ll spare you the details. Our family was the poorest we knew. But we were happy. We had an Italian mother and family and the Christian faith and St. Peter’s Church down the block with stained glass windows and Christmas carols, even in public school! We were rich! Cold, but never hungry, and rich beyond measure. Some people say that religion is an opiate. It’s not just an opiate, to ease our pain, this faith. Survey after survey shows that people who pray are happier, healthier and better educated than those who don’t, and live longer.
I was trained as a high school teacher, so I think of the young. Most of them know more about science and accounting and any number of things than they know about our Catholic faith. Too often, when challenges to faith confront them they are ill prepared. You can’t get what you need, my dear young people, you older ones too, you can’t get what you need to bolster and deepen your faith from Sunday sermons alone, as excellent as they are in this parish. You have to read, you have to study, and you have to pray. You have to learn how to read the Bible or you’ll be subject to ridicule. And you have to learn how to pray, I mean how to pray deeply.
Let me tell you a story. A young woman friend of mine was living with a jazz musician in Harlem. He was quite well-known, and one of his jazz albums was dedicated to her. One night the two of them drank more than was good for them. The next morning, Mona woke up with a hangover. She went to a nearby drug store for Alka Seltzer. It was Saturday; she had the day off so she thought she’d just settle back in bed with a book. On the paperback rack she spotted something that looked interesting, a book with dancing girls on the cover, and champagne bottles and bubbly glasses, and a file of hooded monks in the background approaching a church of some sort. So she picked up The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s story of his life in the fast lane, his conversion and his becoming a Trappist monk. By the end of that book, Mona was converted herself, joined the Catholic parish at New York University and quit her job at Esquire magazine to come to work with the Catholic peace movement for much less pay. That was a generation ago. We are still in touch. Read anything by Thomas Merton. Or any good spiritual writer, Martin Laird, Basil Pennington, John Main. But read! You have to learn to pray and to experience the Mystery in silence. Then you will be prepared for anything.
Another story: the late Professor A. J. Ayer at Oxford University in England did his best to undermine his students’ religious faith, if they had any. Two of them were friends of mine. Professor Ayer argued that propositions like “God exists” and “God does not exist” are equally meaningless. The only statements of facts that are in fact, fact, are those which reflect concrete experience. We have no concrete experience of God so anything we say about God is nonsense in the literal sense of the word. One of my best friends fell for that line. Leon’s faith was destroyed. He went on to a successful academic career but he was really impoverished, poor in the deepest sense of the word. My other friend, Wilfred, let Professor Ayer’s argument roll off his back. He had an advantage in life though: his father and mother were Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. You may have heard of them. They owned a Catholic publishing house. Wilfred grew up with some of the best minds of his time around the kitchen table. He was on first name terms with Hilaire Belloc and Ronny Knox. G.K. Chesterton was his godfather. He knew that there are more ways of experiencing reality than putting it in a test tube, weighing it on a scale and fixing it in time and space. He had experienced God in the only way possible, by God’s own gift and by receiving it in nature and Scripture, in music and art and poetry and story and especially in the people he met, in a lecture hall or a soup kitchen or on a city bus.
In the end, by the way, Professor Ayer had an unexpected experience, a “near death” experience, as they call it. He wrote a little essay about it, “What I Saw When I Was Dead.” He claimed he saw a tunnel, and a light at the end, and that he felt a sense of welcoming, and in one account, the presence of “a divine being.” From then on, the professor said that he could no longer, with absolute certainty, say that there is no such thing as life after death. Good for him! But bad for all the many students whose faith he had destroyed.
God is good and merciful. God may see Professor Ayer as a man who intended to do good but was mistaken, tragically wrong, but in good conscience nevertheless. Wherever he is, I wonder, does Mr. Ayer regret, does he feel sorrow that he has impoverished so many by undermining their belief in God? We take with us into the next life what we have made of ourselves here in this one. Will all that loss weigh on him for all eternity, a never ending sorrow? Or will Christ at the last wipe away those tears too? Let us hope.
I know that God has care of us, from experience. I can have no doubt: too many blessings, it can’t be chance. I have to thank him. To do otherwise would be to throw back in his face so much beauty, so much love. At every step of my life he has been there, at every turning point, at every step where faith might have faltered or failed, there he was, even in darkest days of grief and bewilderment when he seemed to be hiding. He was there, not surprisingly in Monica, or a saintly pastor, or a teacher, even on a soup line and in a prison cell and on a city bus.
The Quakers say there is that of God in every one. We say the image of God is in every one. We adore God in prayer and in the Blessed Sacrament. What if we saw clearly the image of God in the beggar? Might we not fall down on our knees and worship right there in the street?
2 Sam 7, 1-5. 8b-12. 14a-16
Ps 89
Rom 16, 25-27
Lk 1, 26-38
December 18, 2011
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
Tom Cornell
This wonderful story, the Angel Gabriel and the young Virgin Mary calls to mind so many beautiful paintings of the Annunciation. What really happened that day in Nazareth? If there had been a movie camera in Mary’s room at the time recording the scene, what would it have captured? Mary was deep in prayer, so deep that she had this Annunciation experience in her innermost soul. It was real. She understood and she said yes to God’s will for her, and for all of us. Even if a shining guy with wings doesn’t show up on the film, we have to picture it, and so we do. ¬
How rich we are, we Catholics. The most beautiful music ever written, the most beautiful statues and paintings, the most glorious buildings are ours, poetry and accumulated wisdom; and yet there’s more to the spiritual treasure each one of us has within, the very image of God. I know about poverty, probably better than anyone in this congregation. I’ll spare you the details. Our family was the poorest we knew. But we were happy. We had an Italian mother and family and the Christian faith and St. Peter’s Church down the block with stained glass windows and Christmas carols, even in public school! We were rich! Cold, but never hungry, and rich beyond measure. Some people say that religion is an opiate. It’s not just an opiate, to ease our pain, this faith. Survey after survey shows that people who pray are happier, healthier and better educated than those who don’t, and live longer.
I was trained as a high school teacher, so I think of the young. Most of them know more about science and accounting and any number of things than they know about our Catholic faith. Too often, when challenges to faith confront them they are ill prepared. You can’t get what you need, my dear young people, you older ones too, you can’t get what you need to bolster and deepen your faith from Sunday sermons alone, as excellent as they are in this parish. You have to read, you have to study, and you have to pray. You have to learn how to read the Bible or you’ll be subject to ridicule. And you have to learn how to pray, I mean how to pray deeply.
Let me tell you a story. A young woman friend of mine was living with a jazz musician in Harlem. He was quite well-known, and one of his jazz albums was dedicated to her. One night the two of them drank more than was good for them. The next morning, Mona woke up with a hangover. She went to a nearby drug store for Alka Seltzer. It was Saturday; she had the day off so she thought she’d just settle back in bed with a book. On the paperback rack she spotted something that looked interesting, a book with dancing girls on the cover, and champagne bottles and bubbly glasses, and a file of hooded monks in the background approaching a church of some sort. So she picked up The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s story of his life in the fast lane, his conversion and his becoming a Trappist monk. By the end of that book, Mona was converted herself, joined the Catholic parish at New York University and quit her job at Esquire magazine to come to work with the Catholic peace movement for much less pay. That was a generation ago. We are still in touch. Read anything by Thomas Merton. Or any good spiritual writer, Martin Laird, Basil Pennington, John Main. But read! You have to learn to pray and to experience the Mystery in silence. Then you will be prepared for anything.
Another story: the late Professor A. J. Ayer at Oxford University in England did his best to undermine his students’ religious faith, if they had any. Two of them were friends of mine. Professor Ayer argued that propositions like “God exists” and “God does not exist” are equally meaningless. The only statements of facts that are in fact, fact, are those which reflect concrete experience. We have no concrete experience of God so anything we say about God is nonsense in the literal sense of the word. One of my best friends fell for that line. Leon’s faith was destroyed. He went on to a successful academic career but he was really impoverished, poor in the deepest sense of the word. My other friend, Wilfred, let Professor Ayer’s argument roll off his back. He had an advantage in life though: his father and mother were Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. You may have heard of them. They owned a Catholic publishing house. Wilfred grew up with some of the best minds of his time around the kitchen table. He was on first name terms with Hilaire Belloc and Ronny Knox. G.K. Chesterton was his godfather. He knew that there are more ways of experiencing reality than putting it in a test tube, weighing it on a scale and fixing it in time and space. He had experienced God in the only way possible, by God’s own gift and by receiving it in nature and Scripture, in music and art and poetry and story and especially in the people he met, in a lecture hall or a soup kitchen or on a city bus.
In the end, by the way, Professor Ayer had an unexpected experience, a “near death” experience, as they call it. He wrote a little essay about it, “What I Saw When I Was Dead.” He claimed he saw a tunnel, and a light at the end, and that he felt a sense of welcoming, and in one account, the presence of “a divine being.” From then on, the professor said that he could no longer, with absolute certainty, say that there is no such thing as life after death. Good for him! But bad for all the many students whose faith he had destroyed.
God is good and merciful. God may see Professor Ayer as a man who intended to do good but was mistaken, tragically wrong, but in good conscience nevertheless. Wherever he is, I wonder, does Mr. Ayer regret, does he feel sorrow that he has impoverished so many by undermining their belief in God? We take with us into the next life what we have made of ourselves here in this one. Will all that loss weigh on him for all eternity, a never ending sorrow? Or will Christ at the last wipe away those tears too? Let us hope.
I know that God has care of us, from experience. I can have no doubt: too many blessings, it can’t be chance. I have to thank him. To do otherwise would be to throw back in his face so much beauty, so much love. At every step of my life he has been there, at every turning point, at every step where faith might have faltered or failed, there he was, even in darkest days of grief and bewilderment when he seemed to be hiding. He was there, not surprisingly in Monica, or a saintly pastor, or a teacher, even on a soup line and in a prison cell and on a city bus.
The Quakers say there is that of God in every one. We say the image of God is in every one. We adore God in prayer and in the Blessed Sacrament. What if we saw clearly the image of God in the beggar? Might we not fall down on our knees and worship right there in the street?
Sunday, November 20, 2011
It's a Beautiful Church
CHRIST THE KING 2011
Ez 34, 11-12. 15-17
Ps 23
1 Cor 15, 20-26. 28
Mt 25, 31-46
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 20, 2011
Deacon Tom Cornell
When is the high point of the Church year? It’s Easter, Holy Week and Easter. That’s when the New Testament story, the story of Jesus, comes to its fulfillment. Everything that comes before leads up to Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and everything after helps to explain what it all means. The Church year ends this week and begins again next Sunday, recalling the events of the Gospel story. And interspersed are the celebrations of the saints.
I know that in this church no Gospel text has been preached on more often than today’s on the Last Judgment and “the least of these my brethren.” So I’m going to skip it. Archbishop Dolan has asked us preachers to stress love of Jesus and love of the Church in these days. I did Jesus last month. It’s all about Jesus, first and last. Now, why love the Church? There’s plenty to love and plenty to cause us wonder. The Catholic Church is the largest voluntary association of people on earth, in all of history, and the oldest ongoing institution in the world, along with the Orthodox Churches of the East. In two thousand years’ time, over so vast an area with so many people, we’ve had the opportunity to make just about every mistake conceivable. It’s no wonder there have been scandals. There was a time, in the mid-15th century, when the Vatican was a scandal, and the term “whore of Babylon” was not inappropriate. So why love this corrupt institution?
First of all, the Church is not corrupt, not in itself. Some of its representatives have been, yes! But the Church remains the Mystical Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit has never, will never desert us. “The gates of hell will not prevail.” Members might fall, some very badly, but the Church remains what it is, bringing Jesus in word and sacrament to us. If it were not for the Church not many people would have ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, Lord and Savior, King of the Universe. How many of you recognize the name Gilgamesh, the hero demi-god of the Babylonian creation myth? Not many because there was no organization to carry on his memory, no Church of Gilgamesh, as it were. Jesus would be lost to history too were it not that his followers kept together and developed, from New Testament times, the basic hierarchical structure of the Church, with bishops, priests and deacons, the same structure throughout the far-flung ancient world and the same today.
So here we have the Bible stories every Sunday revealing God’s plan of salvation. Then there are the saints. If we have villains, we have the most marvelous heroes too, the saints. Their memories, their stories, their feasts, are strategically placed throughout the year. Their lives tell us what authentic discipleship is all about. Their stories are often sanitized for mass consumption and dumbed down. The details of their lives are censored to suit certain constituencies. Take Saints Francis and Anthony, for instance. Francis was very controversial in his time. He rocked the Church and the state. We don’t hear much about that. He not only excoriated wealth and privilege but the political life of his day. His rule for the Third Order forbade lay members from bearing arms. Hundreds, then thousands then tens of thousands of men joined the Third Order in Italy to avoid military service. The princes, the powerful people of the day, didn’t like that at all. They pressured the Pope and that rule was dropped. They had their way. Money talks!
St. Anthony was a hell-raiser too; he wasn’t just the sweet guy walking around in a brown robe with the Baby Jesus in his arms and a big white lily. He excoriated the bankers of his day. They called him, "Il Martello, "The Hammer." If he were here today he’d be down at Zuccotti Park in New York City, with Occupy Wall Street! He had the Gospel on his side so the bishops had to take him seriously. At his insistence they condemned usury at a Church synod, usury – that’s banks ripping people off. Did you know that the Church today has taken the same stand, essentially in line with Occupy Wall Street? We can be proud. These guys weren’t saps! Our church is truly a champion of the poor and oppressed and of peace.
We just celebrated the feast of Saint Martin of Tours. As the son of a pagan Roman army officer, Martin was forced into the army. The persecution of the Church was already over by his time, and Christianity was now the state religion. But when Martin was baptized he refused further military service and sat out the next war in a prison cell. He was later released. Then he cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar. He became a monk and later a bishop. St. Martin is counted patron of soldiers and patron of conscientious objectors as well. The patron and model for parish priests is the Cure of Ars, Saint Jean Batiste Vianney. He was an army deserter. So was Lieutenant Joseph Ratzinger.
Don’t misunderstand me. Those who protect the freedom and security of their fellow citizens honorably in uniform deserve our respect and support. But when their patriotism and bravery are abused , when they are sent to unjust and useless slaughter, we must protest in the name of God. Patriotic rhetoric will not make up for the abuse of our soldiers or comfort them when they can not resign after four and five and six deployments because there are no jobs for them back home, and no health insurance for their children if they leave the military.
We should think of the saints as members of our family and ask their intercession with God for our needs. The Archdiocese of New York has petitioned the Vatican to open the Cause of Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint, and the Vatican has agreed. It’s in the works. Cardinal O’Connor, then Cardinal Cooke and now Archbishop Dolan have been eager to advance her Cause. The Dorothy Day Guild met last Tuesday at the Chancery Office to plan our next step. For Dorothy to be beatified she needs a miracle. It looks as if we have one, in Texas, a cure of a brain cancer. She needs at least one more for canonization. Pray for a miracle, one miracle in particular.
You may remember I told you four years ago, in 2007, of a trip I made to Rome to present a young man to Pope Benedict, Joshua Casteel. Joshua had been a West Point cadet, then a US Army Arabic language interrogator at the infamous Abu Graib prison in Iraq. And there he read Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and converted to Catholicism. He was released as a conscientious objector to war and to military service, with an honorable discharge and full veterans’ benefits. He has been admitted to the Veterans’ Hospital in Chicago with cancer, 31 years old, cancer of the lung, 4th stage, metastasized! Pray for a cure through the intercession of Dorothy Day. It will take a miracle. Joshua’s faith is strong. His parents followed him into the Church. I saw him last spring, at the Riversides Church in the City. He told he had taken the previous year off to nurse his father through his last year, a cancer victim. He is strong, strong in faith.
This is a beautiful faith, and a beautiful church, a beautiful family, and like any other family, with a rascal or worse here and there, but a Mother Theresa, a Damian the Leper, an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier, a Therese of Lisieux, a Dorothy Day, a Francis, a Clare and an Anthony. They are our examples. They give us heart.
The world we know today is faced with more grave threats than ever before in history, threats to our very existence. If we are to deal with climate change, global warming, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with endemic poverty and the just revolutionary claims of the world’s disinherited, know that the Catholic Church is a voice of sanity in the chaos. We have all we need. We have the Book and the table and we have examples to show the way, Dorothy Day not the least among them. We can take heart.
Ez 34, 11-12. 15-17
Ps 23
1 Cor 15, 20-26. 28
Mt 25, 31-46
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 20, 2011
Deacon Tom Cornell
When is the high point of the Church year? It’s Easter, Holy Week and Easter. That’s when the New Testament story, the story of Jesus, comes to its fulfillment. Everything that comes before leads up to Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and everything after helps to explain what it all means. The Church year ends this week and begins again next Sunday, recalling the events of the Gospel story. And interspersed are the celebrations of the saints.
I know that in this church no Gospel text has been preached on more often than today’s on the Last Judgment and “the least of these my brethren.” So I’m going to skip it. Archbishop Dolan has asked us preachers to stress love of Jesus and love of the Church in these days. I did Jesus last month. It’s all about Jesus, first and last. Now, why love the Church? There’s plenty to love and plenty to cause us wonder. The Catholic Church is the largest voluntary association of people on earth, in all of history, and the oldest ongoing institution in the world, along with the Orthodox Churches of the East. In two thousand years’ time, over so vast an area with so many people, we’ve had the opportunity to make just about every mistake conceivable. It’s no wonder there have been scandals. There was a time, in the mid-15th century, when the Vatican was a scandal, and the term “whore of Babylon” was not inappropriate. So why love this corrupt institution?
First of all, the Church is not corrupt, not in itself. Some of its representatives have been, yes! But the Church remains the Mystical Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit has never, will never desert us. “The gates of hell will not prevail.” Members might fall, some very badly, but the Church remains what it is, bringing Jesus in word and sacrament to us. If it were not for the Church not many people would have ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, Lord and Savior, King of the Universe. How many of you recognize the name Gilgamesh, the hero demi-god of the Babylonian creation myth? Not many because there was no organization to carry on his memory, no Church of Gilgamesh, as it were. Jesus would be lost to history too were it not that his followers kept together and developed, from New Testament times, the basic hierarchical structure of the Church, with bishops, priests and deacons, the same structure throughout the far-flung ancient world and the same today.
So here we have the Bible stories every Sunday revealing God’s plan of salvation. Then there are the saints. If we have villains, we have the most marvelous heroes too, the saints. Their memories, their stories, their feasts, are strategically placed throughout the year. Their lives tell us what authentic discipleship is all about. Their stories are often sanitized for mass consumption and dumbed down. The details of their lives are censored to suit certain constituencies. Take Saints Francis and Anthony, for instance. Francis was very controversial in his time. He rocked the Church and the state. We don’t hear much about that. He not only excoriated wealth and privilege but the political life of his day. His rule for the Third Order forbade lay members from bearing arms. Hundreds, then thousands then tens of thousands of men joined the Third Order in Italy to avoid military service. The princes, the powerful people of the day, didn’t like that at all. They pressured the Pope and that rule was dropped. They had their way. Money talks!
St. Anthony was a hell-raiser too; he wasn’t just the sweet guy walking around in a brown robe with the Baby Jesus in his arms and a big white lily. He excoriated the bankers of his day. They called him, "Il Martello, "The Hammer." If he were here today he’d be down at Zuccotti Park in New York City, with Occupy Wall Street! He had the Gospel on his side so the bishops had to take him seriously. At his insistence they condemned usury at a Church synod, usury – that’s banks ripping people off. Did you know that the Church today has taken the same stand, essentially in line with Occupy Wall Street? We can be proud. These guys weren’t saps! Our church is truly a champion of the poor and oppressed and of peace.
We just celebrated the feast of Saint Martin of Tours. As the son of a pagan Roman army officer, Martin was forced into the army. The persecution of the Church was already over by his time, and Christianity was now the state religion. But when Martin was baptized he refused further military service and sat out the next war in a prison cell. He was later released. Then he cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar. He became a monk and later a bishop. St. Martin is counted patron of soldiers and patron of conscientious objectors as well. The patron and model for parish priests is the Cure of Ars, Saint Jean Batiste Vianney. He was an army deserter. So was Lieutenant Joseph Ratzinger.
Don’t misunderstand me. Those who protect the freedom and security of their fellow citizens honorably in uniform deserve our respect and support. But when their patriotism and bravery are abused , when they are sent to unjust and useless slaughter, we must protest in the name of God. Patriotic rhetoric will not make up for the abuse of our soldiers or comfort them when they can not resign after four and five and six deployments because there are no jobs for them back home, and no health insurance for their children if they leave the military.
We should think of the saints as members of our family and ask their intercession with God for our needs. The Archdiocese of New York has petitioned the Vatican to open the Cause of Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint, and the Vatican has agreed. It’s in the works. Cardinal O’Connor, then Cardinal Cooke and now Archbishop Dolan have been eager to advance her Cause. The Dorothy Day Guild met last Tuesday at the Chancery Office to plan our next step. For Dorothy to be beatified she needs a miracle. It looks as if we have one, in Texas, a cure of a brain cancer. She needs at least one more for canonization. Pray for a miracle, one miracle in particular.
You may remember I told you four years ago, in 2007, of a trip I made to Rome to present a young man to Pope Benedict, Joshua Casteel. Joshua had been a West Point cadet, then a US Army Arabic language interrogator at the infamous Abu Graib prison in Iraq. And there he read Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and converted to Catholicism. He was released as a conscientious objector to war and to military service, with an honorable discharge and full veterans’ benefits. He has been admitted to the Veterans’ Hospital in Chicago with cancer, 31 years old, cancer of the lung, 4th stage, metastasized! Pray for a cure through the intercession of Dorothy Day. It will take a miracle. Joshua’s faith is strong. His parents followed him into the Church. I saw him last spring, at the Riversides Church in the City. He told he had taken the previous year off to nurse his father through his last year, a cancer victim. He is strong, strong in faith.
This is a beautiful faith, and a beautiful church, a beautiful family, and like any other family, with a rascal or worse here and there, but a Mother Theresa, a Damian the Leper, an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier, a Therese of Lisieux, a Dorothy Day, a Francis, a Clare and an Anthony. They are our examples. They give us heart.
The world we know today is faced with more grave threats than ever before in history, threats to our very existence. If we are to deal with climate change, global warming, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with endemic poverty and the just revolutionary claims of the world’s disinherited, know that the Catholic Church is a voice of sanity in the chaos. We have all we need. We have the Book and the table and we have examples to show the way, Dorothy Day not the least among them. We can take heart.
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