Archive for the ‘13th Sunday’ Category

An Altar Boy Comes Home 6-30-2024

Friday, June 14th, 2024

When he was eight years old, he wanted to be an altar boy—he
even harbored thoughts of becoming a priest. It was the summer of
1958; he just completed the third grade. He memorized all the Latin
responses; he practiced all the movements. Finally, the morning came
when he would serve Mass for the first time.
To his horror, the eighth-grader who was supposed to serve
with him didn’t show. One of the sisters in the parish sat behind the
flag in the sanctuary prompting instructions. But disaster struck. It
came time for him to pick up the heavy missal and bring it to the
other side of the altar. As he genuflected while trying to balance the
book on its stand, his foot got caught in the hem of his cassock, and
both he and the missal went sprawling to the floor. The priest stopped
the Mass and turned. His face was red, his forehead clenched like a
fist. “What’s going on?” he barked. “I want you to leave and never
serve Mass for me again?” The boy ran from the sanctuary. He
ripped off his cassock and surplice. And he never went back to
church again. Ever.
Thirty years later, he was traveling through the Midwest on
business. He passed a cathedral he and his family had driven by
many times when he was a boy. The cathedral’s design was inspired
by the silos of the farm belt. Both the church’s simple interior and
exterior were nothing like the Gothic churches he knew growing up.
He went inside where he struck up a conversation with a priest he
met. As they talked about the beautiful simplicity and symbolism of
the church, he told the priest the story of his literal “fall from grace” –
a story he had never told before.
The priest listened compassionately. Then he replied, “Priests
don’t always do everything right. Please…. forgive us!
Tears came to his eyes. The priest embraced him.
And so began a long and bumpy road home.
The “touch of Jesus’ cloak” can be experienced in a simple act of
generosity or a kind word offering forgiveness. The hurt and
humiliation suffered by this one-time altar boy, like the illness
suffered by the hemorrhaging woman, was “healed” by the simple
“touch” of a priest’s compassion; the “power” of Jesus mercy is

extended in the priest’s simple, heart-felt apology. May the despairing and needy experience the power of Jesus’ compassion and peace in the “cloak” of our compassion and care.




The 4 th of July 2023 7-2-2023

Friday, June 30th, 2023

As we prepare to celebrate the 4th of July. I began to reflect over
the last 4 or 5 months how many people I listen to who told me story
after story of being overwhelmed, overwhelmed by bombings and
vicious terrorist acts overseas and in this USA, by senseless school
shootings, cars being used as weapons of destruction, chemical attacks
on innocent babies.
I began to reflect on when I felt like this before. It was after
September 11, 2001. What I wrote then, needs to be spoken today.
When the first crews of firefighters and police raced to the World
Trade Center on that horrible day September 11, 2001, they had no idea
of the enormity of what they were about to see. In those first few hours,
not one rescue worker could find the words to describe the devastation.
When asked by news reporters what it was like, all anyone could say
was, “It was hell…I have seen hell…I have been to hell”.
And we wondered then and continue to wonder today: How could
God create such a hell? How could God allow such a hell to even exist?
The answer is perhaps too simple to grasp. The reality is that God
does not create these hells, then or today. Human beings do. Our
hatreds and self-centeredness form the foundation of hell’s walls; our
fears and angers are its gates. Hell can perhaps best be described as
where God is not: When we allow the worst of our human nature to
triumph, when we have torn down and dismantled the compassion and
justice of God, we have created a new hell.
And the breadth and width of the hells we create can be breathtaking.
So where do we go to escape these hells? Is God’s heaven out of our
grasp and beyond our vision?
In the wake of the September 11 bombings, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
was asked some questions. He was the author of the acclaimed When
Bad Things Happen to Good People. He responded:
“Where was God? I have to believe that God was at the side of the
victims, hurting and grieving with them so that they would not be facing
death alone. I have to believe that God was at the side of the firefighters
and rescue workers, inspiring them to risk their own lives in an effort to
save others. I don’t believe that God was on the side of the terrorists, no
matter how fervently they may have invoked God’s name as they set
their fiendish plan in motion.
Why didn’t God stop them? Because, at the very outset of the human
experiment, God gave us the free will to choose between good and evil.
Without that free will, humans could be obedient but could not be
good”.
We believe that God is not the God of the dead but the God of the
living. God is not placated by the destruction of sinners but rejoices in
the return of the prodigal. God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes
all of us to be saved. God will love us for all eternity, but there always
exists the possibility that we will refuse that love. That rejection and the
refusal to respond to such love are precisely the meaning of hell. Hell is
not a place where God puts us—it’s a place where we put ourselves.
Christ comes to show us how to dismantle the hells we create and set in
their places the justice, peace and forgiveness that are the building
stones of the kingdom of the Father.

Finding Joy in Sobriety 6-26-2012

Sunday, June 19th, 2022

How could anyone who has struggles with alcoholism stay sober
for a dozen years and suddenly go on a bender? Yet it happens again
and again. A recovering alcoholic, who has all but destroyed his or her
life once already, sets off again down the same path of self-destruction.
For a long time, the medical community could not understand how this
could happen. But after many years of study, psychiatrists discovered
how. Those who move from abstaining to the joy of sobriety seldom
return to drinking. But until they make the transition from struggling to
abstain to embracing sobriety, they are vulnerable.
We tend to think of faith as a series of passive “thou shalt not’s,” a
list of things we promise to avoid to stay on God’s good side. But true
discipleship is a matter of “thou SHALL,” actively and intentionally
embracing the justice, peace, compassion and forgiveness of the Gospel.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls those who would be his disciples not to
look back with regret or fear to what we leave undone but to look
forward to the possibilities we have to create and build the reign of God
in our own time and place.