Father Javier Hernandez' visit and homily

Padre Javier visited our parish from Guatemala this weekend.  We welcomed him and his two parishioners, Zulma and Libio, with the joy that comes from greeting friends.  Here is the homily that Fr. Javier shared with us:

Good evening! (Good morning!)  My name is Javier Hernandez.  I am happy to visit your parish.  I am a Claretian missionary, and my parish is San Antonio de Padua in Semaje Guatemala.  My parish has about ten thousand parishioners.  They are mostly Mayan Indian.  I myself am from Costa Rica.  I am blessed to be serving indigenous Mayans.  I am also blessed to be with you today.  I want to say thank you for your generosity, to tell you about my parish, and to share with you the good news of Jesus Christ.

Today’s gospel reading is from Mark. (Mark 10:17-30) The ideas of journey and of following Jesus are basic themes in the gospel of Mark.  Jesus' words in this reading were said as Jesus was "setting out on a journey." Most of Jesus' words were spoken as Jesus was traveling or about to travel.  Likewise, all of us are traveling on a journey in our lives on this earth.  Jesus came to earth in order to walk with us on our journey. Jesus offers true life to those who agree to walk with Him.  Not only life in our earthly sojourn, but eternal life.  

Today’s reading says that we cannot walk with Jesus merely by keeping the commands of the Old Testament.   The Old Testament commands are mostly negative:  Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal. . .    Today Jesus says we must also act positively in order to be with Him, in order to be a true Christian.  That means, we must do good to others, not just avoid evil.

The rich young man was a good man because he did no evil.  But he was not a good disciple of Jesus because he did not act in a positive way to do good to others.  Jesus’ invited him to correct this – to sell his possessions, give them to the poor, and follow Him.  The rich young man’s face fell.  He went away sad, because  he had many possessions.

When Jesus speaks to the rich young man He speaks to each of us. Each of us is that "rich young man" in so many ways.  I grew up in middle class Costa Rica.  You live in a wealthy Chicago suburb.  We are all much richer materially than the Mayans in central Guatemala.

Jesus invites us to share our material wealth and all of our "resources" with the poor so we can be richer in a different way.  What he offers is life.  Life means the joy that comes from having friends and companions, the compadres we make when we use our resources to help one another.  These blessings are the only "riches" that matter.  

Even so, Jesus’ invitation is hard to accept, for many of us have financial difficulties or fear them, and we tend to look for security in material wealth.  The gospel reading shows that the situation was no different in Jesus’ time.  Jesus’ disciples were “astonished” at Jesus words, and asked, “Then, who can be saved?”  We ask the same question today.     

It is true that living a Christian life is not easy.  But Jesus promises that our material and self-sacrifices will be rewarded with the life that flows from the loving relationships that are created when we care for and give to those who need us.  And, by the way, the needy include all of us one way or another.  We are all are in need of loving and caring and forgiving.  Our universal church exists in order that we can share these riches with one another, all of which are facets of the love that originates in the sacred heart of Jesus Christ.  This is truly good news!

On the other hand, our secular culture offers a fake “truth.”  It is the temptation to see happiness as pleasure -- the pleasure of consuming and of using things.  This is an “ego” culture.  In it the human person is so often lost from view.  Jesus asks us to reject this temptation.  He asks us not to consume but to give, to give to the poor in order to help create a more just and fraternal society, in which just relationships are restored among peoples.  The good news is that our self-sacrifice will bring us the blessings and joy of friendship, which are worth more than all the pleasures material riches can provide.  

This gospel reading is very appropriate for my visit.  I come to thank your parish for helping bring life and health to our parish.  Life and health that comes from regular medical care, and basics, like water. 

Your parish and school helped us to almost complete a medical clinic in the mountains in our parish.  The clinic is being built in Semachaca, a center for 36 nearby villages.  The clinic enables us to give regular medical care for the first time to several thousand villagers.  Thank you for sharing with us, so that our people can live a better and healthier life.

You are also helping a community in our parish – Tierra y Libertad, or “Land and Liberty.”  This community left Guatemala during our civil war in the 80’s and returned five years ago to my parish.  They discovered that from April to June there is little water in the village.  Your parish is helping us solve that problem.  Thank you!

We have 83 villages in our parish and over 10,000 parishioners.  50 villages I must walk to.  I spend half the nights every month in travel to our villages.  I have brought two parishioners with me – Libio Cante and Zulma Chew.  Please stand up if you will.  Libio helps with programs to improve agriculture and protection of land.  Zulma works in health care.  She operates rural pharmacies and helps train medical personnel like midwives and providers of first aid.  Libio and Zulma also want to thank you for working with our parish.

I won’t take up any more of your time.  I invite you to continue the warm relationship we have started between our parishes.  Come visit us in Guatemala!  We enjoyed your visit last March. I understand another visit is planned for next March.  I promise that if you visit you will be inspired by working with the Mayan people, as I have been.

Jesus promises us true life if we follow His way, a way of charity and friendship.  To use words in Spanish, “La caridad de Christo nos une!”, which means, "the charity of Christ unites us!"  It is from within the spirit of this caritas of Jesus Christ that I address you today.

Thank you and God Bless you!

 

 

The "Spirit"ual Life

I joke that I envision a friend as Bridget Bardot when I should imagine her as Therese of Lisieux.  It's actually no joke.  The images I make and install in my mind are are the "demons" I live with. They either minister to my passions (and thus enslave me) or free me to lead a nobler life..  How do I elevate those images so that I am free of the temptation of reduce another (and myself)?

Yesterday's gospel (Luke 11: 15-26) bears on this subject, as explained by our homilist (Fr. Dan Hoehn).  In it Jesus warns that just sweeping out one demon (temptation) doesn't end the story.  If I leave the house empty the demon, still prowling around for a place to live, may come back with a host of his friends!  Then all hell breaks loose!

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone,
it roams through arid regions searching for rest
but, finding none, it says,
'I shall return to my home from which I came.'
But upon returning, it finds it swept clean and put in order.
Then it goes and brings back seven other spirits
more wicked than itself who move in and dwell there,
and the last condition of that man is worse than the first.

The lesson is fairly evident: Replace the exorcized image/temptation/demon with something more elevated or risk being invaded again.  Our nature abhors a vacuum.  The mind must be filled with something.  Its our job to make sure it's Godly ghosts.

How to accomplish this?  Fr. Hoehn advises: With the temptation/ bad image dispatched to the dustbin, actively replace it with something Godly, good demons, good imaginings.  Elevate your mind. Cf. Rom. 12:1-2 ("Be not conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.")  Then keep the house spic and span: hire effective cleaners  - mass, the sacraments, prayers, lofty readings and thoughts - to keep the house and furniture clean and polished.  This way the good demons will hang around.

Spooky stuff . . . for October!

The Travelin' Road

Life as journey; pilgrimage, quest, sojourn, discovery; release.  The metaphor of life as movement, as travel, as quest, is universal.  (Exodus; Odyssey; Crusade; Pilgrimage - Canterbury Tales; Don Quioxte; Dante - to name a few).
 
Travel has always been a way to confront and conquer fear, and to seek one's true identity.  The Camino to Compostella in Spain and so many other journeys are really about spiritual transformation and discovery, spiritual change that takes place as the traveler walks in the physical world.

I happened to see an interview with Andrew McCarthy discussing his travel book, The Longest Way Home.  His story too is about his traveling cure for childhood terrors that tormented him in a home that was not always loving.

I'm reading the Divine Comedy, Dante the poet's travelog about the pilgrim's journey to self-transformation and life.  This is the only journey worth taking.  Dante recommends we take it too, and the good news is that only we can take it.  Yet the end is the same for true travelers of the spirit:  a beatific vision of Christ who is love. 

And so the true way is the "way" (of truth and life) into which Jesus invites us, which travels more or less a via dolorosa.  The cross is the Christian image par excellence of divine love, sacrificial but efficacious to redeem: to raise us from death to life. 

Love to Live Freely

In how many relationships are we truly free?  Most relationships are superficial, constrained by manners and convention.  But that's a good thing because freedom in action for most of us leads to gaffes and embarrassment.  Formalities, at the cost of superficiality, keep us from "coloring outside the lines."  A little child, on the other hand, cares little for conforming, and seems free and spontaneous as a result.  We view the actions of a child as refreshingly "cute."  Jesus himself advises us to "become as little children."

Can we resolve the seeming conflict between conforming and being free?  According to Jean Vanier, relationships of love allow true freedom because in those relationships we are better able to "conform" to who we really are, which is what freedom really is.  Here is how Vanier, in Becoming Human (p.89), describes "communion":

When we are in communion with another, we become open and vulnerable to them.  We reveal our needs and our weaknesses to each other.  Power and cleverness call forth admiration but also a certain separation, a sense of distance; we are reminded of who we are not, of what we cannot do.  On the other hand, sharing weaknesses and needs calls us together into 'oneness.'  We welcome those who love us into our heart.  In this communion, we discover the deepest part of our being; the need to be loved and to have someone who trusts and appreciates us and who cares least of all about our capacity to work or to be clever and interesting.  When we discover we are loved in this way, the masks or barriers behind which we hide are dropped; new life flows.  We no longer have to prove our worth; we are free to be ourselves.  We find a new wholeness, a new inner unity.

These words ring true in my life, and I am sure in many others'.  How vulnerable and needy we are.  Only in loving communion can the vision of who we are be released and lived.  Loving friends see who we really are, who we can be (why God had to create me, in the words of Robert Spaemann), and those friends can guide, persuade and forgive us, as we stumble into that vision.  Conformance with that vision makes it possible for us to be, and be free.  And the source of the love (mercy, compassion, forgiveness, exhortation, encouragement, caring) in a communion of persons is divine: Christ, who is love, and the love that radiates from the Trinity of Persons, into whose embrace we are invited.

Welcome!

My wife and I attended an open house yesterday celebrating the purchase of a new home by one of our parish Burmese families.  We took our shoes off outside the front door.  We delivered a "house-warming" present (a set of pliers and wrenches for the new Harry homeowners), then sat down on the carpeted floor (no furniture yet).  We listened to several speakers (in Burmese).  The language barrier made me appreciate how these new-comers must feel in our world of English-speakers.  In their own community, I observed them listening with understanding, keeping their little children quieted, with smells of cooking emanating from the kitchen.  Ellen and I were the strangers now! (the only -- save one -- native Americans then present).

After a couple of speakers finished, I asked if I could say a few words.  A translator was found, I stood up, and thanked everyone for the invitation to visit their new home.  I told them I appreciated how important a home is, and that I well remembered our own first home that we purchased for $35K, now less the price of many new cars!

I reminded them that all of us in the US are immigrants, or children of immigrants. Even the American indians came from somewhere else!  I told them that my mom and dad hailed from Colorado and our ancestors emigrated from Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and French Canada.  Everyone, it seems to me, had (and have) very similar dreams and aspirations: a job, a home, a family.

I told the group that, speaking for myself, and for my parish and community, I was very happy that they had come here to be our new fellow-Americans.   I said that their presence was inspiring and invigorating in several ways.  They are hard working.  They show courage and perseverence in struggling with their new language, new jobs, and new culture.  And they continue to live their own cultural heritage, which helps me see its richness and value. I said I felt blessed to be included in their community celebration, that I wanted them to know they were welcome in our community, and that we wanted to help them transition to their new homes.

It's easy to see that the path of emigration/immigration is an uphill climb.  Emotions are mixed toward home country and new homeland.  The challenge is not only to move geographically, but to transition from a sense of exclusion to one of inclusion, from rejection to welcome. 

I want to help that transition by being hospitable, welcoming.  "Welcome" is more than a word.  It means to extend a hand to our new neighbors.  And that hand becomes a handshake, blessing us with friendship in our nation of immigrants.

Blessed are the Poor

Jesus calls the poor blessed.  Why?  Essentially because in poverty Truth finds a home. Poverty has no other claim than Truth, so Truth emerges in the poor.  Cardinal Ratzinger wrotes: "The Platonic Socrates underscores the connection between truth and defenselessness, truth and poverty, especially in the Apology and the Crito. Socrates is credible because in taking the part of 'the god' he gets neither rank nor possession, but, on the contrary, is thrust into poverty and, finally, into the role of the accused.  Poverty is the truly divine form in which truth appears: in its poverty it can demand obedience without alienation."  From, "Interreligious Dialogue" in Communio (Spring 1998).

Looking Up

Leonard Cohen's "The Tower of Song" imagines the world of songwriting (and life) in its vertical dimension: among others, Hank Williams is "100 floors above me" in that tower.  Value sorts itself out in a hierarchy.  Aspiration seeks and sees the "greater good."  Jesus says, "Be perfect as my Father is perfect."  I scan that as meaning, aspire to the highest good; which in practice for us means stumbling and imperfection.  In another song, Cohen sings: "I fought against the bottle, but had to do it drunk.  Took my diamond to the pawnshop, but that don't make it junk."

Theresa of Avila's Way of Perfection counsels her nuns in prayer to "try to think and realize Whom you are about to address and continue to do so while you are addressing Him.  If we had a thousand lives, we should never fully understand how this Lord merits that we behave [correctly] toward him, before Whom even the angels tremble." p. 160 (Image edition).

To see the good, to value it, to experience it, to make it one's own, is the practice of love. Its dimensions include charity and forgiveness, caring and self-sacrifice.  Cohen sings, "Well my friends are gone, my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play, and I'm crazy for love, but I'm not comin' on. I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song."

I know the sentiment.  My life's business is imperfection and loss intermixed with joy, and my way of perfection a plodding, myopic staring at the saints floors above me whom I want to beg to love me and draw me to them.  "Crazy for love, but not comin' on."  Dante also saw ascent as life's possibility, even though he too realized, in Cohen's words, that "fighting against the bottle, we usually do it drunk."  The via purgativa walks the way of loss, but its sweet fruit is a "Beatific" vision of our Christ, smiling with love.  Comin'?