Resurrecting Chicago

I can’t be sure how old was I when I began to understand that the resurrection of Jesus is about me, too.   When did I begin to believe that if it were not for the quick embrace of evil in my life Jesus would not have had to suffer? I know: this is a strange way to put it. Maybe that notion was more subtle than that but the deceiver was at work in me. Somehow, though, the Resurrection has become a great hope in my life.

Those who will hear the Gospel of the Resurrection will hear it I suppose in their own way.  How will it become real to ordinary people? It makes me think about the middle-aged, good-hearted man who wonders if he has broken any religious rules lately.  He’s “got to work on” his foul language,” as if it’s a matter of willing properly and controlling one’s self. He is not hearing the news that our efforts are not what counts but grace does. When we fall we get up because Christ Jesus did.

Then, there is the fifteen-year-old girl who informs me that she is reading the bible from front to back.  She does not tell me why.   Is she looking for the secret of life? Is she simply interested in the history of religion and likes the strange and fascinating stories of the Old Testament? What young person picks up a bible and wants to read the whole thing? She must have gotten this idea in defense of her name: “Catholic.” Because Christians of other traditions, especially those who believe that the bible holds all truth want to know why we baptize infants. And, why they can’t receive the Eucharist in our Church? She and others are looking for answers and missing the Gospel. Salvation is about you.

There are those others, too, who are wading through life. Somehow the death and resurrection of the Redeemer hasn’t hit home.  They are walking in fear that the waters that pull at their feet when they move forward might cause them to sink into the deeper murky, watery quicksand. They know, too, that lurking silently among the stumps and old trees there could be a moving log with eyes in sockets skimming the water and an overbite guarding a gaping maw filled with razor-sharp teeth. Deadly spiders hang from silent webs and if disturbed could inject poison, too. And, it’s a shadowy swamp and the waters are rank with sweet decaying life. It’s an exhausting desperate struggle to maintain life.  And where is the glorious Resurrected Christ in all of this?  Speak to me of God’s love in Christ.

Everyone now knows which country Charles III represents. He is king of the U.K. and regent of all the countries in the British Commonwealth.  Millions identify with him as their image of what their nationhood means. The king represents stability and endurance. For over seventy years Queen Elizabeth II maintained that role for her people.

When she died two statements reassured the commonwealth: ” The Queen is dead. Long live the king! No uncertainty here. The people endure while queens and kings come and go but the nationhood maintains stability.

Contrast Charles III with Pope Francis. Francis is the regent of Vatican City, the smallest of all nations but he also represents over 1.3 billion Roman Catholics as their leader. When he dies, cardinal electors will gather in Rome and elect a new pope. While the cardinals deliberate there is an interregnum, the Chair of Peter is unoccupied. “Sede Vacante.”

The difference between the two rites of passage is that those who are represented by the regent have no say in selecting who their next leader will be.  For good or evil and for everything in between, it is the next in line for the throne who is proclaimed regent.

In Vatican City, at the death of a pope, it is not at all clear who the new pope will be. Locked into the Sistine Chapel a hundred or so bishops will choose the man who will lead the Church. The electors pray for direction and wisdom.  They entreat the Holy Spirit to lead them to the one who will step into the “shoes of the fisherman” and represent the face of the Church to the whole world.

I’m having a solo lunch at Chili’s on Monday, my day off.   My server is an attractive z-gen female who wants to talk. Her bright eyes easily engage mine.

Me? I am a grandfatherly figure with my cane hung behind me on my chair and my suspenders unfashionably holding up my black pants. She tells me she’s a college student finishing her third year in computer programming. She’s excited about it. Only one year to go!

She lingers after I place my order. “What did you do before you retired?” she asks.

“Well, I’m a Catholic priest and I’m still able to help out on Sundays when I am needed so I am not fully retired, I guess.”

“A priest? You don’t look like a priest.” I wondered what she thought a priest looked like. She pauses and says:

“Why did you become a priest?”

I thought: “O.K. I’ll give her my elevator speech.”* My life wrapped up in thirty seconds.

“My family went to church every Sunday. I was about fourteen and was in church with my family listening to the pastor give a sermon. He was quoting Jesus  Who said, “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” At that moment, I was ready for the road of perfection even though I did not know what to be perfect meant.  I simply heard in my heart Jesus calling me to holiness and to helping people. So after high school, I entered a seminary where I thought I could become holy and also help people. I still want to.”

From the first to the eighteenth floor in about thirty-five seconds.

She gathered the soiled breakfast plates, thanked me, and placed the bill on the table. I noticed she’d written something at the bottom of it: a smiley face and the words “Go for it!” Sandy.

*Elevator speech: You enter an elevator.  You strike up a conversation with the person next to you who for some reason asks you what you do for a living. After he/she leaves, you’ll probably never see that person again. So, you make your answer short and sweet.

According to a recent poll, 69% of Catholics say Jesus is only symbolically present in the Eucharist.  About a third of those polled believe in His actual presence: real food, bread and wine, become the flesh and blood of Our Savior.

The Eucharistic Bread and Wine.

I’m in the second group but I don’t understand His presence as meat. If that reference sounds crude to you — it is.  I remember discouraging a parishioner from showing a film in our parish hall that purported to show at Holy Mass a cracked and bleeding host.

But! what about the story in John’s Gospel (Jn 6:55-63) where Jesus faces this issue head-on. He says “My flesh is real food and my blood real drink.”   And, His hearers say in disgust, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat? We then read that many walked away after hearing this. What sane man asks that his flesh be eaten?

Why is it so easy for us to materialize this message that we hold by Faith?  It seems to me that His presence in the Eucharist goes way beyond descriptive or scientific terms.  Yes, you might argue, but doesn’t transubstantiation define the physicality of this greatest mystery of our Faith? St. Thomas Aquinas, using the philosophical concepts of Aristotle describes the substance of the bread and wine being recreated as the substance of Christ.

Although, the bread and wine after consecration look and taste like what they appear to be, St. Thomas describes what we see and touch as only the “accidents” of bread and wine. The substance of these elements is Christ himself. And, that miracle of  Faith is beyond our reasoning.

I have respect for but less belief in consubstantiation where using a similar Aristotelian analysis, the bread is present with the Body of Christ and the wine is present with His Blood, both substances present in each instance.  I have little respect for trans-signification, where the purpose of the bread and wine changes from being mere food to the elements of the sacrifice of Jesus. Bread and wine placed on the altar and offered to the Father changes its significance and become the Body and Blood of Christ. Nothing physical happens.

Jesus means what He says, not what we think He means. I believe He is truly present, though what I eat seems bread, and what I drink appears to be wine. It’s as if love itself becomes for me a real thing in both the bread and the wine. This I believe by Faith. I understand that Jesus used the words “body” and “blood” but it means that when I receive Him in the Eucharist, He in all his human and divine reality unites himself to me in a mystery of love.  For God is love. It is what I have been searching for my whole life. What about you?

Most mornings at about 5:30 AM, you’ll find me in my yard sitting on a metal bistro chair watching God’s creation wake up. The sun hasn’t risen yet but it’s already light.

I am trying to blend into the scene with a dark-green lawn in front of me and a crabapple tree at my left. That tree is about twenty feet high, its branches are leafed with everything that gives cover for sparrows, robins, house finches, mourning doves, and other occasional species that visit with me as the day begins.

I am praying when I am watching and listening to what’s happening around me. Maybe God is speaking a message today that only I should hear.

Morning birds, sure! But I also hear the muted roar of a train a half-mile from me going somewhere on purpose plus the hum of cars and trucks motoring up and down the highway which courses through the center of my little town. Everyone going or coming from work. Everything sounding busy.

All this motion stirs the air and comes to me like a kind of music. Each morning the composition is different. Robins add their reedy woodwind effect every now and then. House sparrows chirp because that’s all they can do. A mourning dove laments about something as it coos. A cardinal lifts its clarinet and plays songs other cardinals from down the streets hear and join in on. Street traffic adds percussion and bass. There’s a kind of jazz this morning.

The redbird is the loudest. Some fifty feet away from me, a bobbing rush of red perched in a leafy-green oak in my neighbor’s yard sings again. Give me a cardinal singing anytime to lift my spirits!

These are voices through which the Creator speaks and this chorus has me listening closely. What I hear is the Creator asking me to join in with whatever voice I can find within me this morning. So, I clear my throat… and sing!

For the life of me, right now I can’t get the image of Benito Mussolini out of my head. Trump is up there, preening, gesturing,  haranguing the crowd and I see the great fascist Benito, lifting up his chin at the end of his speech, arrogant and defiant. But, it’s not 1942 and  Mussolini is not strutting up there. It’s Donald Trump.

His eyes flash with anger. His mouth gapes oddly as his voice strains louder. The strange flop of yellow hair contrasts with his tangerine-tinted face. He repeatedly gestures like a ringmaster exhibiting the next act of dancing ponies.

His voice is loud, determined to hook you. It is sing-song  as he lists one after another the complaints he has against those who want to ruin this country. Many. many people, good people, know that the election was stolen, he rants. Our country is going down in the cesspool of what the Democrats want,  Elites are jamming down our throats stuff that the the socialists are feeding them. We are loosing our country.  That America that you and I grew up with.  It’s no more.  We’ve allowed our country to  lose it’s prominence among the nations. Nobody respects America anymore.

Were going to change all that. No more sending off money–your money– to countries that take, take, take! And, what do we get back? Nothing! Well, all that is going to change. Our military is the greatest power on earth but it is weakened by timid leadership.  All that is going to change.   We are going to be respected as the greatest country on earth again.

This is a man of stump speeches. Last week, Illinois. Before that, Ohio. He stirs up crowds wherever and whenever he can. Give him a platform — even a stump — anything to elevate him, and he is up there on another harangue. The rant is always the same. The enemies of America are the Democrats. The white race is discounted by massive, uncontrolled invasion at our border with Mexico. But were here today to change all that! We’re here to Make America Great Again!

Benito stirred up the crowds in just about the same way to Italians eighty years ago. Only he said it as Make Italy Roman Again!

They eventually hung him.

Where are the young Catholics? All I see most Sundays are “Boomers” and their X-generation progeny.  Could it be that the Boomers come with good hearts and ready familiarity because after all, church is part of life, a good part.? Meanwhile the Millennial and   Z-generation stay home with the used, abused, confused and refused of every generation..

There are no young people at Mass this morning.  Well, just a few children. Fewer babies. The core of our church communities used to be families. Husband and wife and kids and sometimes grandma and grandpa came to church together. Our church appears now to be dying of lack of family.

Father Casey Cole, OFM, a young bright Franciscan priest has a website where  he tackles dwindling church attendance. He says we first have to admit this is happening.  We can’t be satisfied with a church that isn’t maintaining itself much less growing as church.  But few priests and bishops seem to be worried about it much.  By the way, what  happened to the new evangelization?

He thinks lack of attendance. is due to the following:

—The revelation of the scandal of sex abuse by priests and the cover-ups by bishops.

— the dueling liberal versus conservatism of church liturgies. Vatican II liberals whose liturgies are casual events hosted by the pastor and his crew. Conservatives ringing bells once more during liturgies, Reading their sermons.  Collections restored to ushers and baskets. Tridentine liturgies. (See St. John Cantius Church, Chicago. vs Novus Ordo in Latin and English) People are tired of the liturgical battlefields.

—Priests debating and cheerleading for their side of the Vatican II reforms.  Priests who critize and condemn from the pulpit and rail against other priests, their own bishop and the entire church they feel is slipping into the pit of hell. (So they put us through purgatory about it.)

— The church has become irrelevant.  I think this is the chief reason for the decay of the Church community. One man told me that it didn’t seem to make a difference if  he went or not. “I didn’t miss it nor did the church let me know that they missed me and my family.”

–People in our western culture do not see the need to believe in a God.  Also, we have not learned how to teach doctrine in a way that people understand, appreciate and can live with.

Our culture has two idols: the cult of self and the worship of money. The cult of self symbolized by selfies and endless concern with one’s image.  My brand becomes my idol.  Christian love in the midst of suffering is impossible. Everything is funneled thru my understanding and my grasping for image worship.  How I look, how I sound, how many followers I have, whether I am an influencer or not. I must be iconic.

Then there is the worship of money.  I have more than you.  My idea is so valuable that I am an entrepreneur. It’s not important what I invent but how much I can sell it for. Then, I’ll move on to another invention and another sale. The name of the name is greed and addiction to more and more of what feeds my importance. Elon Musk is the idol here. Right now he is sitting on top of the world counting his marbles and twittering..

Our idols are silver and gold.  The glittering ego that I want the world to see and the gold I display.  This corruption of society is deeply affecting the community of the church. I know one preacher who was encouraged to develop his own brand where he could sell himself as a great retreat master.  We extract huge sums to maintain our cathedrals and ethnic monuments to worship while the people sit in beautiful but sparsely populated churches.

— The church can’t seem to concern itself with the poor. We don’t know who they are and what they need so we contribute money so that the natives in Africa have WIFI so that we can sell them stuff.  Commercialization of radio, TV and social media extracts money and attention so that it can produce more programing to sell more stuff.

FATHER CASEY says that adults are not teaching their children the relevance of the Church because it is honestly not relevant.

WE NEED TO FIX IT

—by serious catechesis of our children. Catholic schools today are often run by educators who hold faith in a secondary position. Religion is taught like a secular subject and often without heart.  Often not energized by the Gospel. Our Catholic school system was a reaction to a great need of education in an immigrant church. We here in the U.S. are no longer an immigrant church.

—by authentic worship.  Liturgy focused on Him and not us. It should be a Thanksgiving Service. It should be a shouldering service where we are encouraged to take up our cross as Jesus taught us to do and to lay down the burdens of sefl and greed.

—By restoration of the cross as in “Take up your cross and follow Me.” That cross is absent in much of our preaching.

— Evangelization.  We need to learn how to do it if it means kneeling down before our protestant brothers and sisters in ministry and asking them how we do that.

— by ceasing to use the sacrament of reconciliation as the sole path to conversion.  Are we never clean until we “go to Confession every day and scrutinize for every sin? Let’s somehow give respectful time for people to get counselling and direction and a BLESSING and prayer for healing now.