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still living and celebrating fortieth
19 MarIn May each year there is an anniversary dinner that gathers all the priests of the Archdiocese, at which priests of 25, 40 and 50 years are recognized. A booklet is printed with photos, facts and memories of the jubilarians. I was asked to submit a photo and some words of remembering. I am anxious to see if what I sent will be printed or edited. With my thoughts I sent my ordination picture.
Fifty years ago 54 of us 16 year old kids, most of us studying for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, entered St. Gregory Seminary High School as juniors. Forty-two of us graduated from the high school in 1967. Of these, six of us were ordained priests in 1975 for Cincinnati. Only Bob Schmitz (currently the pastor of Good Shepherd parish) and I are still living and celebrating our fortieth anniversary of ordination and fiftieth year of entrance into seminary.
Some of the pastors with whom we lived in those first days, the “old” guys, were puzzled that we priests ordained in the 70s insisted on being called by our first names, didn’t wear cassocks and brought with us a different style of vestments for Mass. As much as I called my first pastor by his first name, he always called me “Father,” except for two times in the fourteen months in his house when he called me by my first name, once getting it wrong. Some of us “young” guys were pretty convinced upon ordination that we knew what was best for the Church, and that, as soon as the “old” guys got out of the way, we could make it happen. Some of the “old” guys were wondering what “they” were doing in the seminary to create this new breed of priests, and were miffed over what these new fellows were doing to “our” Church.
Well, forty years later, I am one of the old guys, and see in the young guys a lot of myself.
It is sobering, and calming actually, for me to remember that the Church does not belong to any of us. We are simply the tenant farmers in Christ’s vineyard and stewards of Christ’s harvest, trying our best, each of us, not to get in His way and not to mess up what He is trying to do, admitting that each of us has gotten (and will get) in His way and has messed up (and will mess up) some things. His Church will go on with us, without us, because of us and in spite of us.
Christ gave us the assurance long ago that He would be with His Church always, through 1975 and still in 2015 until the end of time.
Francis gives us the courage and the inspiration now to get out of the sacristy and into the streets, not to be self-referential or narcissistic, but to take on the smell of the sheep, His sheep.
Ad multos annos!
Along with these words and that ordination photo, I sent another photo. This one has less chance of getting printed in the banquet program. It would be more fun, but it is less likely.
واحد, إثنان, ثلاثة , waaHid, ithnayn, talaata (left to right read)
24 DecSitting in my den at 8:21 a.m. on what my mother called “Christmas Eve day,” my mind and my heart, my thoughts and my prayers wander to the Middle East, and more specifically to Palestine, and more specifically to Bethlehem, and more specifically to Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem.
It is Beit Jala that warms my Christian heart and sustains, what others have called, my Palestinian soul. I have fallen hopelessly in love with Beit Jala with a love full of hope which longs for peace for my friends, no, my family, in Beit Jala.
On Facebook I found a post by my (our) friend Waseim. From Arabic his name translates as “Handsome,” which has given the two of us many smiles since I first teased him, “Something certainly gets lost in translation!” I asked him to post it on YouTube, so that I could copy it and embed it here. Within hours of his waking in Beit Jala on Christmas Eve, he honored me and my request, as he always does, and so it appears below.
The countdown is obvious to our ears, however different the sound of the numbers. The feel of Jingle Bells is the same, no matter the language. And we join in singing the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” like we (and they) will sing those words in our hometown churches, here in the little town of Milford and there in the little town of Bethlehem.
Fireworks, of different kinds, are a common occurrence in the area surrounding Beit Jala, some set off in celebration and some set off in conflict. On this occasion, however, as during the celebrations of weddings, graduations and baptisms, the fireworks are explosively joyous. At the end of the video the noise of the fireworks overtakes the singing of “Glory to God in the highest.” We all live in hope that one day soon the song of the angels will overcome all military firing, and Beit Jala and Palestine and all the region will live in peace with justice with all her neighbors who deserve and long for the same freedoms and rights.
May Beit Jala know the peace the angels sang about during that mid-night on which Christ was born.
Twice Waseim turned the camera toward his parish church, Annunciation Catholic Church in Beit Jala, where I first met “my five (grand) children” – Issa, Mary, Ranim, Tamara and Tamer – back in 2003, and where Waseim worships every Sunday with Father Faysal, the parish priest, with the families of Beit Jala, with Suhail, the principal, with the teachers and students of the Latin Patriarchate School, and with the seminarians of the attached Latin Patriarchate Seminary. To all of them my heart will turn, as I turn my prayers to God at Midnight Mass for them.
Agatha and Melithon
16 NovWhenever I meet a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati, I tell her that I am a “charity case,” meaning that I was taught by the Sisters of Charity when I was in grade school at St. Jude. The Sisters of Charity, those sisters who taught me in grade school, are partly responsible for me being a priest today, especially Sister Mary Agatha and Sister Melithon. The other day I went to the Motherhouse cemetery in Delhi to find the graves of the two of them. 
As I stood over each, I simply said, “You were the one who said that I might make a good priest. So, help me to be one now.”
Sister Agatha was my seventh grade teacher. When it came time to bid farewell to the eighth graders a year ahead of us, someone decided that we would do a “funeral” for the soon to be graduates, complete with casket, mourners, dark candles and dirges. Sister Agatha decided that I would be the minister, apparently doing some sort of subtle type casting. I remember that I wore the tux of the father of one of the girls in the class. Years later I was doing a chaplain internship at Good Samaritan Hospital. On the list of my visits one day was Sister Mary Agatha. I went into her room, with Roman collar and white hospital jacket, to find out from her that she had cancer. However many times I told her that I was not yet a priest, she kept insisting on calling me, “Father.” We kids remembered her as very strict. We would have said “mean,” remembering a tale, whether or not true I have no idea, that she gave a kid a bloody nose. All we knew for sure was that he left classroom with her in a hurry and came back in with a bloodied tissue held to his nose. Certainly, she had clobbered him, we knew.
Sister Mary Agatha, “You were the one who said that I might make a good priest. So, help me to be one now.”
Sister Melithon was the principal when I was in the fifth grade. After school one day all the boys who wanted to be servers were in the same classroom. Sister Melithon looked over the group and told the nun in the room with her, “Sister, everyone is okay, except those two boys back in the corner by the window.” She pointed to me and the kid behind me. Somehow she had decided that I would not be a server. Even though no one questioned Sister Melithon, I have assumed that it had something to do with my liking to tease the girls. Sister Melithon has a lasting place in my vocation tale, as I boast that I thought at that moment, “I’ll show that nun! I’ll invite her to my first Mass.” In three years she changed her tune a bit. I was one of the eight grade boys that she waned to visit the seminary for a tour and a lunch of hot dogs and baked beans. As a seminarian, we used to refer to those days of visits of little kids, “zoo days.” I am cluless as to why she shifted from thinking that I could not serve the priest at the altar to thinking that I could be the priest at the altar.
Sister Melithon, “You were the one who said that I might make a good priest. So, help me to be one now.”
things I will miss (1 of …)
28 AugKnowing that in ten months I will be leaving my beloved St. Andrew parish, this place and these people, I am more and more noticing things that I will miss. Last night as I was closing the blinds of my bedroom windows, preparing to prepare myself for bed, I looked out my back window. “There is something I will miss.”
I took three photos on my iPad, and deleted two: one with a stray cat roaming into the bottom right corner heading toward a drink of water from the fountain, and one that cut off the top of the statue and the top of the cross on top of the grotto. This one was the best of the three:
I tried to enjoy the scene fully, hoping to engrave it in my memory.
Then I prayed a Hail Mary …
… and closed the blinds.
papal selfies
16 AugTwo phenomena come together, when young people use opportunities to take selfies with Francis: the popularity and playfulness of the selfie itself, the playfulness and the popularity of Pope Francis.
The Holy Father seems delighted in this video. I know that it delights me when young people make a point of saying hello to me in public, unabashedly calling out to me as “Father,” and introducing their friends to me and me to their friends, “This is my priest.” Many of them I do not recognize from being in Mass on Sundays, BUT the fact that they feel comfortable and even proud to approach the local Catholic priest is a blessing to them and to me. It is a holy connection and a holy communion.
hoping we never have to use it
30 JulYesterday we received something new at the parish which we hope that we will never use.
Over the years we have had, as every parish has had, funerals for babies, infants, toddlers and young children, not many, thankfully, but more than we would have liked. Each time we bring a small casket to church we have not had a funeral pall that would gracefully cover the casket, once it was sprinkled with baptismal waters. So, we had one made.
There are buttercups (yellow), bluebells (dark blue), roses (pink), and, get ready, baby’s breath (white), and, here is the hardest, forget-me-nots (blue).
The flowers are bunched like a bouquet a child picked to give to her/his mother, and which the mother grouped together, tying a ribbon around it. The purple ribbon is a “mourning” ribbon.
The butterfly helps parents and mourners to focus on new life, being reminded of the metamorphosis that takes place as the butterfly leaves its caccoon to be free in its beauty and flight.
This pall was almost two years in the making. It is one of kind. There is no other like it.
Alice is the love and the skill that gave birth to this work of art. It was designed, she tells us, “by a non-Catholic young lady in Massachusetts.” Alice has made other regular size palls for other priests and other churches in our area, but this is the only one that she has made in this smaller size for children. It was her goal, hope and dream to be able to finish it for us and for the parents who would need to bury children before her eyes went bad and before her arthritis got worse.
Now that you have finished this good work that God began in you, Alice, may your eyes and hands continue to serve you as well as you have served others with your eyes and hands.
And may we never have to use this child-size funeral pall.
hear our cry for mercy, O Lord
24 Julas we pray …
- for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas
- for the resumption of humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza through Catholic Relief Services
- for the Israeli innocents who live in fear of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian areas
- for the Palestinian innocents who live in fear for their lives from air and ground attacks or suffer the humiliations of occupation
- for the avoidance of excessive actions of hostility and indiscriminate punishment which can breed a whole new generation of terrorists
- for the emergence of a viable and independent Palestinian state living alongside a recognized and secure Israel which will bring the peace for which majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians yearn
her three children
20 JulIt seemed that, while on pilgrimage, Michelle was always remembering her three children, and was always missing them. She often reminded the rest of us that she had three children, and was constantly reminding God, too.
Whenever she was standing quiet, we figured she was thinking of her three children, missing them, and praying for them.
While at the Sea of Galilee, I handed her three stones, of three different sizes, one for each of her children: small, medium and large; youngest, middle and oldest. I suggested that she hold the stones, one by one, as he held her children in her heart, one by one. Start with the smallest stone, I suggested, while praying for your youngest child. Hold the smallest in your hand, tell God what your prayer is for your youngest, then toss the stone into the sea. Then take up the medium sized stone and your medium sized child; make the prayer and toss the stone. And finally, the largest and the oldest.
The four photos below capture the stages: the stone, the wind up, the toss and the ripple.
It made me wonder if the four photos capture the stages of our prayer. Do they represent four parts of prayer, or four movements in prayer, or four things that are necessary for prayer, or four things that make a prayer a prayer and not just a thought? What do you think?
I have given each photo a caption, from the point of view of the stone. What caption would you give them, if the photos were not about the stone, but about the prayer?
Part 1: the stone (notice the white bird flying near the water)
Part 2: the wind up
Part 3: the toss
Part 4: the ripple
With Open Doors 