Where am I?

We are in Staten Island right now. Drove from Boston on Sunday.
We generally stand up for the "serious" rehearsals, to reply to "seeking_something." The living room pic was just the alto group doing their own review of notes. Today we have our rehearsal (in the basement) of notes and of the gestures for each song. It is quite a challenge getting them all in sync: notes, gestures and, oh, words!

Practice

Practice

Suppertime

Suppertime

(Well deserved.)

Practice

Practice

Altos. (They need it more)

Advent

Advent

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will never end.

not over til it's over

Yep. The whole day pretty much followed along the lines it had begun with. Right down to the baggage claim part, when I remained like an orphan at the belt while all my fellow travelers had happily gone off with their many bags. Abandoned, I looked for some help, and saw an airport person unloading boxes from the conveyor. As I went toward him, lo and behold: my little suitcase and my box of books had been there all along--having arrived on an earlier flight. Sounds good, right? But my box of books had split open somewhere along the way. Thanks be to God, all the contents seem to have been preserved, including the donated box of Tootsie Rolls which I was bringing for Sr. Mary Caroline, to help speed her recovery from cancer surgery.
I kept trying to pray through all these mishaps, wondering how to redeem the day. But there was one aspect that I would have missed on the early bird flight: I would not have seen all the families, and all the tiny babies and toddlers on the later flights. It was a lesson for me: God is all about love and about the joy of loving. He doesn't even care about the $400 I may not succeed in getting back for my congregation. Because even the money, while necessary to our work, is intended for spreading the love of God. And if I can be more inspired by love after seeing those precious kids and the joy their parents had in them, God may think it was an investment well made.

The gates of Hell

Not really, it's only Gate B-12 at O'Hare, where I am living a traveler's nightmare. At least it's only severe ticketing woes and not a matter of security! But I sure hope ATA will refund (impossible dream) the 400 dollars I had to pay for a last-minute ticket to make up for their error!
There's no way they can make up for my having to get up at 4:00 a.m. to catch the flight I could not get on with my invalid code number...

out of town

I will be heading off to the East Coast horribly early tomorrow morning (God bless Sr. Phivan for bringing me to the airport at 5 a.m.!). I'll be out of town (with sporadic computer access--it's just too much to carry) for two weeks while we rehearse and perform our Christmas concerts. So if you are out East, I hope you will be able to make it for one of the events (listed a few posts back); I hope to give you a full report when I am able to return to regular blogging. Please pray we may get all our notes on pitch, and all our words in order.

I also have a final paper to draw up for the Theology of Prayer course I've been taking. Prayers are needed for that, too! Thanks and arrivederci!

Gabe and Katie

Prayers today for Gabe and Katie, who will make their marriage vows this afternoon. It's a marriage made, not in heaven, exactly, but in Pauline Books & Media. Gabriel is our shipper/receiver here, and Katie worked with our sisters in youth ministry while she taught at the same Catholic high school as Gabe's brother. Brother and sisters (ahem!) conspired to bring the two together (he a gentle, somewhat husky Mexican-American and she a perky redheaded Irish girl from the South side), and the rest is (or will be) history.

Please post your prayers for this young couple (well, Katie is young, anyway!) as they begin their wedded lives.

America's "Holy Day"

I really like Thanksgiving and July 4th. They are like "holy days" for the civic society, with special church services and so on. Especially Thanksgiving, of course. You don't have to go to church, but it is the most appropriate thing to do.

I think our parish church back home had two Masses on Thanksgiving; one was the big blow-out with singing and an elaborate procession with gifts. I remember when I was about nine or ten being called over by my parents, who were talking with the pastor before Mass. I was chosen to bring up one of the Thanksgiving gifts--a magnum of wine. I wasn't too crazy about that idea, but when you're nine or ten you don't have much choice.)

At the appointed time, I went to the back and the usher nested the big bottle in my arms. Up I went. The pastor (Father Mistretta--we always had priests of Italian descent in our parish) looked really nervous, as if he fully expected me to drop the bottle at the altar step. And I, the eldest of five, or by then it may have been six, kids, felt a bit miffed at his anxiety. If I could handle a squirming baby brother or sister, I could certainly handle this!  (You never know what's going on in a kid's mind, do you?)

Does anyone else have a Thanksgiving day memory to share?

By the way, today is my mom's birthday. It was Thanksgiving Day when she was born, too, the very day after yesterday's saint, Blessed Miguel Pro, was martyred in Mexico.

HAPPIEST OF HAPPY BIRTHDAYS, MOM.

"Wish I was celebrating with you!" ("Pass the salt....salt....salt....")

God's Secret Agent

When we were little, we used to get books in our Christmas stockings and Easter baskets. Catholic books. Pauline books, for the most part. And one of those books was about today's Blessed, the Mexican martyr Miguel Pro (SJ). The book, "God's Secret Agent," was in the Pauline "Encounter Series," which has undergone several incarnations since then and is now a series of about twenty small paperbacks (still very appealingly written and illustrated). But so far, we haven't released a new edition of "God's Secret Agent." I hope we do.

Father Pro, in case you don't know, performed his priestly ministry clandestinely. He must have been an extraordinarily gifted actor! He used a variety of guises and disguises to get around while avoiding the authorities during brutal persecution. It worked for a time, and then he was betrayed (I think) and delivered over to a firing squad. His last words were "Viva Cristo Rey!"

The beatification cause took a long time because the political situation was so involved. When being a Catholic priest is against the law, any efforts to carry out ministry have political overtones. Plus, Father Pro was "set up" by the government, to make it look as though he were part of a coup attempt. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only martyr of that age. While I was in Rome, a whole crowd of Mexican martyrs from that era was canonized. I keep wondering what kind of witness we are called to give, in our time and culture.

My inner mechanic

Well, today I got in touch, as the title says, with my inner mechanic. News flash: she's not very mechanical. Now, I did manage to get the little folding machine (thank you, local lawfirm who donated the used folder) to make the folds I wanted, after much experimentation and scrap paper. But I couldn't get our community newsletter to "feed" properly. They went in crooked; they went in triplicate or even more (jamming the machine so I would have to pull it apart to yank wads of newsletter away from the rollers); they went in straight and came out torn and wrinkled. So if any of you are on our community newsletter list, you will know what happened. If you are not on the list and would like to be... You already know all the news because I tell you about it here.

When the sheets did feed and fold properly, they got nested into one another, so that now (having made a batch of pumpkin muffins which indicate that my inner chef isn't doing so well either) I am un-nesting them and setting them in a postal tray for the sisters and Blanca (our volunteer, God bless her) to stuff with our Christmas cards. I will be out of town (singing!) when that gets done, and so I am trying to get the mailing ready for them before I leave.

I may have to print a few hundred extra copies just to be safe. But that means I would have to fold them....

Christ the King

Today's second reading struck me like never before. The line about how at the end of time, when all things have been subjected completely to Christ, he will subject himself to the Father so that God may be all in all. "All things have been delivered over to me by my Father," Jesus said (I think it's Matthew 11 or a parallel of that text). But Jesus is never "unto" himself: he is always "to the Father." So of course, in the Trinitarian life, all is gift, to be unceasingly given and received. And we are destined to be "in" the gift of the Son, fully and completely.

Today one of our sisters entered into that realm of gift. Sr. M. Aparecida, born in Brazil, completed her earthly life on the Feast of Christ the King. Sister was a precious little rascal all her life. "Enter into the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world!"

Community Prayer

Well, it was my turn on Thursday to lead the community Hour of Adoration. (We make our Hour of Adoration in common on Thursday, our community day as well as our day of prayer for vocations, and on the first Sunday of the month, which our Founder devoted especially to honoring the Holy Trinity through Christ, Way, Truth and Life.) Anyway, I always find it difficult to combine the two aspects of leading the community prayer while actually praying myself. I find myself wondering, "Is it time to incorporate a hymn? Is this theme actually consistent? Can anyone even follow this?"

I thought I had hit on something very helpful. I took my cue from the liturgy of the day, which was one of the more doom-and-gloom sets of readings, to tell you the truth, with Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and predicting its destruction for "failing to recognize the time of your visitation." It sounds like just the most awful impending judgment, and yet the whole point of the "visitation" is that God is in your midst. So the sin involved here wasn't just a matter of deeds done, but of a deeper kind of resistance against God; turning from his presence; refusing him hospitality. Sin and salvation are just a razor's edge apart, if you think about it.

Anyway, I used the Gospel and some passages from Robert Barron's "And Now I See" as the framework for our prayer time, which included praying Psalm 139 (Lord, you have probed me and you know me).

Oops.

I guess the "salvation" dimension wasn't as obvious and inviting as I had thought.

 

Katrina: Books of Comfort Program

Here's a summary of the "Books of Comfort" program so far (thanks to Sr. Sharon for drawing it up!):

 

BOOKS OF COMFORT PROJECT 
Mrs. James Hunt, a nurse and the mother of one of our sisters, was the initiator of the project Books of Comfort. She called us to suggest we do something to provide comfort to the survivors of  hurricane Katrina with Pauline editions. At the same time, we Daughters of St Paul were praying and looking over our inventory to find something appropriate to distribute to the victims. As people were rescued from the Superdome in flooded New Orleans and transferred to Texas, we heard requests over and over again from the survivors: “Now that we have food and other essentials, the most important thing we need right now is a Bible.” We immediately sent out an appeal for generous people to sponsor our “Bibles and Books of Comfort” project on the Internet, in press releases and radio spots.
 
Bibles, the books, "Surviving Depression" and "God is Here When Bad Things Happen," small prayer books for courage and strength in times of anxiety and difficulty, coloring books for the kids, were prepared in sets to match different dollar amounts of donations from compassionate people across the country who knew “It is important to rebuild homes but it is also important to rebuild lives.”
 
The first donations came in a matter of a few days and we were able to start to send Bibles and comfort books to our sisters in San Antonio to distribute to the thousands of  New Orleans evacuees in a large shelter nearby. The people were just thirsting for something to help them cope with the tragedy and suffering they'd experienced. Many books of comfort were distributed with the help of sisters and priests throughout the Gulf Coast. In rapid succession, 71 large packages with a total of 5,280 individual items were sent to the dioceses of Biloxi, Lake Charles for the students in 24 schools, and the New Orleans evacuees. In addition to the 174 initial donors, the Daughters of St. Paul’s communities also responded with the sisters sending their personal treasures of books and bibles and rosaries. Other sisters from Louisiana were beginning to use the Comfort Books in Bible studies with groups of evacuees they were counseling.  “Thank you so much for thinking of us and helping us. We will always remember you,” were the responses from the recipients. Some donors thanked the Daughters of St Paul for giving them an opportunity to reach out by giving encouragement, comfort, and inspiration through the Books of Comfort to their brothers and sisters who were suffering so much. Also, through this apostolic project, the lives of several heroic rescue workers themselves were comforted who felt the need for inspiration and strength.
 
Each donor is thanked with a personal note, the name of the destination of the books and a listing of titles that their specific donation helped to send.*
 
We are not done yet! Donations are still coming in. We will be contacting our Sisters in New Orleans to see what are the spiritual needs of the people who have returned to the city and how we can collaborate with the diocese in its pastoral ministry to its scattered flock.

 

*From Sr. Anne: I'm not sure that all donors were able to be thanked in this way; we received many cash donations here in Chicago. So if you didn't get a personal thank-you and all the accompanying information, the good was still done, so THANK YOU!
 

On My Top Ten (Chicago)

Chocolate pollution.

Ah, yes, the sweet but heady scent of chocolate wafting across the El tracks, streaming down the streets, eastward, when the wind is just right. I enjoyed this distinctive Chicago experience again just today on my way home from Mass and an errand. It almost made the bitter cold (it warmed up to 24 by noon) tolerable, just being able to smell that satisfying aroma. And I was reminded of an article in last week's Tribune about some disgruntled soul (clearly not a woman!) complaining to the EPA about the particulate matter issuing from the Blommer (you know, chocolate Easter bunny) factory just, what, eight blocks west and north of here.

A city could have a lot worse pollution.

Just one word

Snow.

Beginning to Look Like X-mas

And I do mean "X" mas. As in "Winter Holiday" or the "Holiday Shopping Season." The lights are in the trees along the Mag Mile, but not yet spread out into the branches. Instead, little bundles of Italian lights are hanging down like grapes. Next week (maybe the weekend after Thanksgiving) there will be the Disney parade, which a half-million or more people will come downtown to see, and Mickey will turn on the lights block by block. See what I mean by X-mas?

Marshall Fields has its "great tree" up, with the Swarovski crystal topper, and along State Street, 10 or 12 foot long trumpets shoot out from the facade. Sorry the picture is not too great, but you get the idea.

At least the Kristkindlmarkt (spelling????) in Daley Plaza is still "Christ Child," but I think that is because it really is a German Christmas market, with maybe 30% of the merchants coming in from Germany to exhibit traditional wares. There are elaborate embroidered tablecloths, hand-carved nutcrackers, and zillions of delicate glass ornaments: lots of fruit, onion-shaped ornaments, glass Santas. The booths are being set up around the enormous tree, which is really many trees set up on a kind of scaffolding.

It's beginning to feel like X-mas weather, too. Snow flurries and maybe a light sprinkle of snow is expected this week. And at the same time, the one boon to Chicagoans in the winter is being taken away to allow for construction. I'm talking about the underground sidewalk that connects key buildings in the Loop. When the weather is ugly, I am so grateful to be able to pop down the slick stairs and find refuge from the wet and cold. I can go from our corner all the way to a half-block from St. Peter's, toasty and dry. But not any more, and not for another 26 months to come. The long-vacant "block 37" right across from Marshall Fields is going to be turned into shops, condos and an underground rail connector station (to include a rapid train to O'Hare and another to Midway, direct from the Loop). But meanwhile, why did they have to start construction in November? The odd thing is, a different part of the Pedway was closed for the first two years I was here, and the whole thing has only been open for about two years. And now it will be closed again for two years (if the project is on schedule). Oh, well!

When I saw the signs announcing the closing (to begin tomorrow), my first thought was "Why November?" My second thought was, "What's going to happen to the keyboard man?" He is a blind person who almost every day taps his way to the Pedway with his white cane in one hand and his arm around a large electronic keyboard. He sets the keyboard on a crate, sits on another crate, and puts a bucket in front, and all day long plays and sings for the passers-by. Ray Charles he's not, but he is a good entertainer. Sometimes the police have made him leave, but I think they do that unwillingly. Now he's going to have to find another safe spot for his music and his instrument. A place where he can keep warm and dry, and keep singing.

Vatican offers On-Line Course

I've just learned about an on-line course being prepared for a new Vatican website. It is, from what I gather, a type of correspondence course, but designed for group participation; you have to sign up as a group, from what I understand. This coincides with the way the Church understands media: as instruments of "social" communication, not isolated one-way transmission. The topic for the course is "The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering." This was supposed to be launched in the fall--but it may be running on an Italian schedule! If anyone knows the website address for this, please post it!

Today's liturgy

First a reflection, and then an experience!

The reflection comes from the interesting way the liturgy itself interprets the Scriptures for us. The Gospel was the parable of the talents: the master entrusting enormous sums of money to his stewards, according to each one's ability, with two of the servants taking initiative and earning income on the investment, and a third who simple restored the original sum intact. This last is judged unfaithful, and serves as a warning.

The first reading illustrates the kind of behavior the Gospel demonstrates as what God is looking for, only in the first reading (Proverbs on a "worthy wife"), it is a woman running a household who is the model. Now the actual text of Proverbs is definitely from a male point of view, and the Gospel, too, depicts a man's world. It is the Church who adds the feminine angle, not by giving the reading from Proverbs alone, but by setting it alongside that specific Gospel text, giving those verses of Proverbs a meaning they do not otherwise have. This is one of the marvelous things about the Church and biblical interpretation, using the Bible to interpret the Bible.

Now the experience. Tell me: has this ever happened to you?

As we entered the Church and went to our "choir" pews, there was a young man standing in the front pew. He kept standing through the entire liturgy (no small feat), but shortly before Communion, he adjusted his suit (a kind of fitted style) and his scarf (red, rolled at the neck) and picked up a book ("Left Behind"). He held the book flat against his chest and turned toward the center aisle and just stood in that position throughout the Communion procession. Then he turned to the front again as the Mass concluded, but before the dismissal, he opened a lollipop and put it in his mouth, took his book to his chest again, and walked quickly toward the back.

Obviously, a man with a mission. And a very well-planned mission, too. By standing throughout the Mass, he guaranteed that all eyes would be on him. My own eyes, frankly, were on him, because I was so afraid that in my habit I would be a target for some extreme behavior. Anyway, have other congregations been subjected to similar activity? I am just wondering if it was a Lone Ranger on Crusade, or if there is some kind of activist group doing this.

Flu vaccine concerns

Today's Tribune features a column by their medical writer, Julie Deardoff, which touched on the recommendations for flu vaccines for small children. The flu vaccine is still being made with thimerosal, which is a mercury-based preservative. Mercury is a neurotoxin. Parents of autistic kids have a reason for suspecting that childhood vaccines, which up until recently almost all contained thimerosal, caused brain damage in their children. (There are way more vaccinations for kids now than when I was a kid, so the mercury exposure was magnified.) Anyway, I'm just giving a heads-up to any interested parties out there that even though thimerosal has been eliminated from most single-dose vaccines (not the multi-dose ones that we have been sending to places like China, where the first diagnoses of autism coincided with the arrival of those vaccines), the flu vaccine being administered this year does contain it.

Illinois just passed the "Mercury Free Vaccine Act," but it doesn't go into effect until January. When it does, it will be illegal for a vaccine to contain more than 1.25 micrograms per dose. Meanwhile, you might want to keep an eye open.

Katrina update

I haven't given you any Katrina updates recently, and just this weekend I got a handful of them myself, between talking to my mom and to friends who have been in Louisiana lately. The news is hopefully going to make you pray with greater intensity.

From the home front, one of my aunts came back to the city this week to find that her home had been looted. Since she is only a half-mile or so from my parents, this does very little to enhance my own peace of mind. (I don't know if the looting took place shortly after the floods or more recently.)

My Dad's doctor lost a friend (another doctor, age 49) to suicide. Two kids. There is anecdotal evidence of a higher than normal rate of suicide and of deaths due to cardiac incidents. I guess as people come home and try to salvage what they can, or (like my parents) live on site while work is being done, there is no way to limit the stress you are under. Mom is finding it very hard to deal with the dust penetrating everywhere in the house. She has air purifiers going all over the place; two in the bedroom, which is the only clean zone in the building.

And a friend who was on a singing tour and stayed with a Baton Rouge family reports that there are significant increases in crime, with break-ins and robberies in that city which absorbed so many of the evacuees. This really makes me mad. I know that such things are perpetrated by a relative few, and that those few probably didn't have much of a home life and probably brought themselves up, so it's not totally their fault they turned into sociopaths, but clearly the only thing they can do in society is prey upon its members. By the very nature of the problem, these persons are not actually members of a society, but stand outside of it. My inner redneck wants to just lock them all up some place, because it is so doubtful that persons whose very brain synapses were wired by neglect and abuse even have the capacity for rehabilitation. "Rehabilitate" means to bring people back to a former, adjusted situation. How can you do that with persons who were never habilitated to society in the first place? The only thing worse would be to allow these persons, now relocated to Baton Rouge, to establish a new non-society, where another generation would be similarly abused and neglected.

Convinced you to double your prayers yet?

New in Chicago

Yesterday I just happened by as this new riverfront parklet was dedicated (21-gun salute, aircraft salute and everything). It is located on lower Wacker Drive, between Wabash and State. The weather being unseasonably warm (fine by me), the park can be used a bit before the cold renders it effectively off-limits until June.
Speaking of warm and cold, there is an article on global warming in the latest issue of Rolling Stones. (Sr. Helena is an ardent subscriber.) Their journalism seems really first-rate, to be honest, and the article carefully points out the many and varied scientific tests, all of which are not only confirming the reality of global warming, but emphasizing that it is happening at an unexpectedly rapid, and even accelerating, pace. Even the growing season has extended by 12 days since 1980--and that's not totally good news, because the growing plants are emiting more carbon, and that is being joined with the carbon being released by plant matter previously embedded in permafrost, which is now in a defrost cycle. There are some who steadfastly refuse to accept the conclusions that are being drawn, even though the same conclusions are pointed to from something like a dozen different scientific disciplines. Among the deniers are persons who seem to have a lot riding on maintaining the status quo, whether for economic or political reasons. Others just don't think it's that big a deal, since the heavy impact (extinctions and the like) won't affect them personally, and probably won't be measurable for another century. And other people seem just plain apathetic. I can't understand that. Even if there's only a "good chance" that "some" of the predictions will come to pass, don't we have a moral obligation to act in view of the greater good, instead of give preference to immediate advantage? It is impossible to deny that decreasing our dependence on things like fossil fuels and diminishing excessive consumption and unfiltered waste (and I mean on a corporate and multi-national level, not merely on the household level) would be beneficial to the overall environment. I suspect that so much of our economy depends on not just maintaining but increasing consumption, that the common good is totally lost.
Some people seem to think the planet is indestructable. Yes, it has been through mass extinctions before and recovered, though with enormously different flora and fauna. There is no doubt that if our behavior destroys the ecosystem for the kinds of life it now supports, in tens or hundreds of millennia new forms of life could arise. But we would have closed the curtains not just on the beautiful handiwork of God we see now, but the very handiwork that God Incarnate saw and delighted in. We will have even succeeded in inadvertently hastening the Second Coming by obliterating from the face of the earth the species which God himself chose to unite with in the person of Jesus.
So there you have it: the Incarnation as a motive for greater environmental awareness.

Reaching out to alienated Catholics

One of our regular visitors here in Chicago is starting a podcast outreach to people who have been alienated from the Church and find themselves thinking about making a comeback. The podcast is being done in English and Spanish, and can be subscribed to at: www.taketwopodcast.us.

 

Veterans Day

Kind of neat, isn't it, that Veterans Day is on the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, the famous Hungarian (oh, all right: Pananonian, if you want to be precise) soldier-turned-bishop?

St. Leo

I'm still waiting for St. Patrick to be recognized, as Leo was, as a Father and Doctor of the Church.

Meanwhile, a reflection on the prayer for today's saint--and the Gospel for this Thursday in Ordinary Time. The opening prayer affirms that God "will never allow the gates of hell to triumph" over the Church. Hearing this, I reflected, well, no, because the Church is the Body of Christ, and Jesus has already won the victory. And we, too, insofar as we are (to use St. Paul's phrase) "in Christ and in the Church" are similarly victorious. Today's Gospel was the rather enigmatic "You cannot tell when or where the Kingdom of God is coming; the Kingdom of God is in your midst."

For my class at CTU, we had to read a chapter from von Balthasar on contemplation, and I found his comments dovetailing precisely with this reflection. For Balthasar, the hastening of the victorious coming of Christ happens not though our "building the Kingdom" or establishing a just society on earth: it comes through and because of contemplative prayer. The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, is in your midst. But only contemplatives have eyes to see.

There was something else but I forgot. (Figures!)

just stuff

Choir practice today. We will be doing some contemporary stuff for Christ the King, and I have figured it out: I only like contemporary "classical" liturgical music when the composer is adopting some ancient style. When they do their contemporary thing (with angular intervals and dissonant chord progressions), I end up straining my voice and wondering why on earth they are putting me through such agonies to sing something I don't even like. As it is, I am going to miss choir for several weeks while I am doing our Christmas concerts in New York and Boston, and I wish those were the weeks we were doing the modern composers. Reminds me of a Lenten Sunday a few years back when we did a Mass by Benjamin Britten. After Mass, someone in the assembly commented that the music (it did have a rather dark, even eerie quality to it) sounded as if it had been written by Vincent Price. (I guess only readers of a certain age would even know what that meant.) Give me da Vittoria any day!

Last week we had our celebration for the Pauline feast of Jesus, Way, Truth and Life. A good many people joined us here, since it was also the "official" closing of our 25th anniversary in Chicago. I made a big pot of jambalaya, and many of the guests brought treats, too.

We had the extra joy of welcoming members of the Holy Family Institute, the institute of consecrated life founded in the Pauline Family for married persons. There is an active group in the Chicago area (see picture). Having other Paulines around really enhanced the feast day, which was so much in our Founder's heart. (Speaking of the Founder, his feast day is November 26.)

liturgy as language

This is a little reflection that has been percolating in my mind a while, and now that I am preparing a short talk on the Liturgy of the Hours, it is back on the front burner: the concept of "rubrics" as a liturgical language, a form of speech.

Language is about communication. Rubrics are not a kind of decoration, there for their own sakes or as a sort of embellishment. They are at the service of some other, higher good. I get kind of creeped out when participants (or celebrants!) in the Liturgy adopt stiff, formal postures, or speak with unnatural cadences. Sometimes you see priests with their hands held at an awkward angle, fingers ramrod straight and close together (or, heaven help us! the really young ones with their thumbs and index fingers touching after the Consecration, as if they weren't later going to give the Eucharist to the faithful, as the Church Fathers did, in their hands)... I wonder if it is just that they are still acquiring the liturgical language of posture, gesture and expression--and so making, as it were, a careful effort to spell the words correctly, or if (an unsettling thought when it is a matter of someone who has been around the liturgical track a few times) all the focus really were on orthography and not on the message!

Liturgy is life, communication, communion. Rubrics are like the letters and punctuation. But the point is worship. If our attention is so fixed on doing things with precision, what have we done with the presence of God? It would be quite a feat for the devil to get people worked up about rubrics to the point that they turned from the worship of God to a cult of rubrics.

 

parking miracles

Years ago, while on a mission trip in Iowa, I heard a priest (a very devout man) say that he did not believe that Jesus found him parking places. I let it go with a shrug. Jesus finds me parking places all the time. Today, for example. I was heading off to school, but found that the community mini-van was already out of the house. That left me (hopefully) with the heavy-duty cargo van, which is parked in a public lot nearby. That means waiting until the attendents can bring the car down, and usually involves a good ten or fifteen minutes of downtime. Today it was more like a half hour. (Thanks be to God, I had gotten an extra early start this morning!) So as I approached Hyde Park and then made my exit from Lakeshore Drive, I reminded Jesus, "Don't forget my parking miracle." (Even when I'm early, it is a challenge to find a parking spot--and a week or two ago, when there was street cleaning and so the west and north sides of all the streets were off-limits, one of the students simply couldn't come to class for lack of a parking spot. I had a miracle that day, too. Bona fide.) Anyway, I finished my little prayer and turned the corner to see a car backing out of a coveted spot. It was my very own parking miracle. On a Monday morning.

And when the other students got to class, what was one of them talking about? Parking miracles.

Do you believe in parking miracles?

Missed You!

Well, one of you readers came by yesterday and I didn't hear the page when our diminutive, marathon-running superior called me over the intercom. Oh, well! I didn't even find out about it until supper. Please try again sometime!

Advent Retreat

Put this on your calendar (and help us get the word out!):

 

Advent Women’s Retreat, Saturday Dec. 3 (9:00-3:00). Director: M. Jean Frisk, STL, author of Joyous Expectation: Journeying through Advent with Mary and The Rosary of Jesus and Mary. $15 fee (students and religious, $5) includes lunch. Validated parking available. Pauline Books & Media, 172 N. Michigan Ave. (between Lake and Randolph), downtown Chicago. 312-346-4228.

 

A pdf file that can be printed and posted (or distributed!) is also available; please e-mail me at romans8v29@yahoo.com for one.

Spanish TV

Sr. Maria Ruth, the writer/producer/voice talent for our Spanish radio programs, is going to be interviewed by a Boston cable station on Nov. 8th. The broadcast will also be live on the Internet. My guess is that it will all be in Spanish. So to learn about the Pauline life, mission and spirituality--and brush up on your Spanish at the same time--go to www.lasemanacuencavision.com at 9 p.m. (Eastern time) on Nov. 8!

yesterday's gospel

I wanted to post this yesterday, but by the time I remembered, the day was over. Today has been equally full--and (God be praised) I am catching up a tad on some of the little grinding tasks that have been hanging over my head. It almost looks as though I will be able to ... catch up! (Not really; there is that 500 page translation project that I've basically shelved for months, and then our "Christmas rush" starts.)

Anyway, yesterday's Gospel began with the scene of Jesus being criticized for welcoming sinners and eating with them. And he responded with the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. And I remembered a day, over twenty years ago, when this Gospel entered very concretely into my life.

I was stationed in Alexandria, VA, and assigned to door-to-door book visitations. Cold calls, in sales language. We would each carry about thirty pounds of books in our leather satchels, attempting to bring a selection that would be appropriate for the people in that area. Two of us that day were visiting the area around Andrews Air Force Base. We visited mainly the businesses in the zone, since even then people just weren't home during the week. At one shop, the proprietor was not interested in anything, but he directed us to an out-of-the way stair, telling us that there were people there who might want to see our books. We thanked him for letting us know about those others, and made our way up the steps. There was a door at the top of the staircase, and the sign indicated that it was a health club. One of us knocked, and before long the door was opened by a woman--she seemed "older" to me, but since I was 28 at the time, she may have been all of forty--in a kind of corset-style apparel. The man downstairs was probably laughing his head off at having directed us to a brothel. Put on the spot, I used my "quick getaway" line: "We have Catholic books for sale. Would you like to see some?" The woman (herself clearly taken aback at finding two young nuns at the door) answered thoughtfully, "Not for me, but let me see if the others are interested." And off she went. My companion was so scandalized she wanted to leave then and there, but that struck me as dereliction of duty. If Jesus could spend time with prostitutes and tax collectors, so could we. And sure enough, within a minute or so, a younger woman (likewise in her professional attire) came to see what books we had. And she chose a small book of psalms.

I don't know if we were able to distribute any other books that day. I think it was one of those days when we brought home 29 pounds of books. But the one little book that mattered most found a person who needed it.

I have often prayed for that woman, probably my own age, wondering how she used that little prayerbook. Did she still have it? Did she manage to find a better life for herself, one in keeping with her human dignity? (Because that creep in the downstairs shop was demeaning her as much as we in sending us up those stairs.) What happened to him? Has he ever repented? And what of the men of Andrews Air Force Base--the primary source of clientele for that zone?

There's still a lot to pray over, after twenty years.

 

 

The Lord's Prayer (conclusion)

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

 

The usual interpretations of “temptation” can be individualistic, short-sighted and superficial, referring simply to the urge to violate a precept. But the word can be translated “trial” or “test.”  The same set of circumstances could be a temptation leading to evil or an occasion of purifying, strengthening trial. Whether we are faced with a “temptation” or a “trial” can be known only by the outcome and not in its midst. Contrary to the consumer culture with its emphasis on “having arrived,” this petition of the Lord’s prayer places us squarely “en route” in a “status viatoris.”

 

Even more than the plea for daily bread, this petition asserts our utter dependence on God “We are God’s children now” (cf. 1 Jn. 3:2), but even that is still a work in progress.  Do we accept this state of things? The challenge is “not to run or attempt to run from the inescapable fact of the contingency of our being” (Ulanov, Primary Speech, p. 62). Face to face with fear, even ultimate fear, we may try to short-circuit it in many ways. What if “temptation” refers to our attempts to circumvent life’s incompleteness—our refusal of the greatness of our filial condition in the vain attempt to make ourselves complete, self-enclosed, secure in intransitiveness, rather than to live in the incompleteness of an ongoing gift of self that is the creaturely form of Trinitarian life? We are tempted to take an off-ramp from the via humanitatis, which is a way of pilgrims. As Teresa of Jesus noted, concerning the security of one “who fears the Lord,” “I say ‘security,’ but that is the wrong word, for there is no security in this life” (Interior Castle, Third Mansion, Chapter 1). Earlier, she had written, “We here, so far as outward things are concerned are free; may it please the Lord to make us free as regards inward things as well and to deliver us from evil” (First Mansion).

 

It is here that the Lord’s Prayer completes itself, having begun with the invocation of God’s transcendent and holy name and the plea for the fullness of God’s kingdom. Before all that would substitute that kingdom and in which we could seek to ensconce ourselves, secure and unmovable, we pray: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

 

Amen.

 

Amen is the genuine, filial expression of security: not in ourselves, not in our accomplishments, but standing confidently on the “one in whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). And the Lord, the “Amen, the faithful and true witness” (cf. Rev. 3:14) responds, “I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord” (cf. Ez. 36:36).

 

All Souls, part 2

Such a delightful assembly at the 5:00 Mass. I find it so heartening that people remember these special days. I'm sure the Holy Souls found it very heartening as well! Today's observance raises all kinds of interesting questions about time and eternity. In general, Catholic thought is "placing" Purgatory squarely within the timeframe of death and the particular judgment, the idea being that the white-hot revelation of lingering sin and its effects in us is the purging of those very sins and consequences. But since "all time belongs to Him," our prayer for the departed, even if chronologically "after the fact" of their purgation, is still effective.

 

St. Catherine of Genoa is probably our prime source for the spirituality of Purgatory, and she says that the chief dispositions of the Holy Souls is one of love and praise. They are more than relieved to be able to be purified of anything that prevents God's glory from being fully reflected in them and to them. They'd NEVER want to take a step back into life in the body: far too risky. And even though there is a suffering involved, it revolves precisely around the sadness and horror of finding out, with no possibility of avoidance, just how much one has, basically, said "no thanks" to infinite love. 

All Souls

One of the tricky things about All Souls' Day is that there are so many choices for the readings, you never know which ones will be used at Mass! Since in general I coordinate my meditation with the Liturgy of the Word, it's a bit of a toss-up today. Still, a beautiful day to remember and pray for the departed. I am especially thinking today of those who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. When my godmother called me for my birthday, one of the things she mentioned is that she knew so many of the elderly who had died. (My godmother, who would not consider herself "elderly" at all, has many, many friends, and was a regular visitor and volunteer at the Chateau Notre Dame, which was severely damaged by flooding.) I am praying for Shirley Richard, our "Miss Shirley," who died about ten days after being evacuated. It was "transfer trauma" that hastened her move from these shore to the eternal ones.

 

I had class this morning, and after lunch I finished baking a second batch of "purgatory cookies," this time putting an extra egg in the dough. It came a little closer to the "dolci dei morti" that I had in Italy, but it still resembles an almond Christmas cookie a bit more. Oh, well! The choir members will have to be satisfied with a remote approximation. The flavor is right, at any rate!

Holy Days

I've been a big fan of "Holy Days of Obligation" ever since grade school, when we had a holiday for things like, well, the day after my birthday! No, seriously, even as a kid, I appreciated that Catholics would stop everything in the middle of the week to acknowledge a facet of faith as especially important. Since I grew up in a pretty Catholic environment, I did not know that other religions did that. (When I lived in New York, of course, the city's stillness on Yom Kippur and Passover was very educational for me.) At any rate, I still think Holy Days are glorious.

I had a lot to celebrate in that regard when I went to St. Peter's today for the 1:15 Mass. The noon Mass was close to finishing, and the vestibule was crowded with people waiting to go into Church. It was such a testimony! All these people who even remembered that it was a Holy Day! (I'm delighted when people show that their catechesis left some residue.)

The Mass itself was pretty simple, but again, the assembly came through with power. The Gloria was recited, and with so many people there (probably standing room only in the back, but there were a good many places in the front pews; this was a Catholic assembly, after all!), the prayer sounded in a powerful unison. I prayed that God would give all of us a sense of how good and true and beautiful were the words we were proclaiming: We praise you, we bless you, we glorify you, we give you thanks!

And at Communion, to hear the priest at the side aisle repeating, "The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ..." on this feast of All Saints: the truth of the Eucharist, if we live it. The Body of Christ.