Here is another chapter of Bread and Concrete: Connecting Sacraments and Service that was not published in Ministry and Liturgy Magazine last year. Today’s gospel (John 8:12-20) gives us again the words of Jesus, “I am the light of the world.” These reflections are from my time and experiences at Saint Andre Bessette Church in Portland, OR

Searching for Light

“While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” John 9

            Two large darkened-brass candlesticks stand together on the right side of the wooden altar for most of the liturgical year. Another candlestick balances the light on the left side of the ambo. These accessories were hand-me-downs from when the parish was in one of its previous five locations within the neighborhood. These become the holders for 19-inch beeswax candles that I purchase from a family owned religious goods store in Portland.

When I began at the parish, two sisters owned the shop, and the able-bodied sister died some years ago. The surviving sister who sells the candles is physically disabled and always seemed to be in the shadow of her business-savvy sibling. She is a great worrier about every detail having inherited the business responsibilities. She never expected to shine on the frontlines of her shop, now everything depends on her. Her gifts are being drawn out from the darkness of her shadowing her sister for her entire life. I drive to the southeast end of town a few times a year to pick up supplies from the business. I am always grateful that I order all of our liturgical supplies from a woman who so struggles to make ends meet. She has overcome so many issues to sell me a few cases of candles, a bag of ashes, a box of palms and the paschal candle for another liturgical year.

Our paschal candle usually stands at the baptismal font near the entrance of the church. However, in the past few years, I have stored the darkened-brass stand and candle in the closet in the chapel after the Easter season. Many times during these past few years people with mental illness have come into our chapel and immediately lit the paschal candle and played with the flame. The flame has been left overnight on several occasions. Even the flame of Christ can also be a hazard in our building.

Sometimes people will come into the chapel before Mass and play with the lit flames at the altar. People are drawn to the flames, especially when the lights are dim and the chapel is quiet just before Mass begins. We all watch carefully that no person gets hurt or that a fire does not erupt, but sometimes people act out quickly and the danger of fire is imminent. We never know when a person surviving the darkness of long-term mental illness or addiction will lash out, shout out or want to play with the flame on the candle or steal the large candlestick. I have seen this happen on several occasions and I am grateful no person has been hurt or that no fire has been set in our windowless chapel.

I admit I do not blame people for wanting to play with the flickering flame. People live in such darkness and dreariness every day. Even the clothing people wear is dark. Their only belongings are in dark colored backpacks and duffel bags. People also want life to change. Even people who have never been in a church before understand that there is something very meaningful, something very holy, and something that curses the darkness at the altar when the candles are lit. So many people are searching our neighborhood for such a light.

Our block is nestled in neon at night. Flames of artificial light draw music lovers from the suburbs. Prostitutes follow the lights of a car slowing down around the block. Some male prostitutes follow the lit cigarettes of guys hanging out at the bar on the other corner of our block. So many lights gather people into dimly lit spaces of the nightclubs and bars all along our neighborhood.

There are many promises that long to be made in the candlelight of a bar. People believe that the nighttime will bring relief from suffering. So many people obsessively believe that alcohol, sex and drugs will all be the light that everyone is looking for in life. Hook-ups made in the dark seldom work out. Binging in candlelight seldom relieves loneliness. Drug deals on dimly lit corners will not take the darkness away. Selling a body in stilettos does not curse the lonely, nighttime fear. It is no wonder that in daylight, people wander into our dark prayer space searching for promises that will set them free. The hangover seeks a new, healing light during the day. The shame-filled act needs a new light even in the dimly lit confessional. People are playing around with many kinds of light and many varieties of fire.

Our worship space is windowless. No natural sunlight enters our room for prayer. This is not because we want to keep the streetlight out of our prayer; it is simply the result of a cheap remodeling job when an old hotel building was renovated to become our parish church. I reflect on this darkness quite often. The dark chapel is quite the contrast to the other churches in which I have served through the years.

Some years ago, I designed nine large stained-glass windows in the parish church in which I was serving in Burbank, California. The windows were magnificent pastel-colored glass depicting our lived sacramental life of those years in California. The stories of relationships and faith were vivid and articulate in glass. I left the parish before all of the windows were installed. I then became the director of a retreat center where the only window in the chapel was a skylight. That chapel could hardly compare to the rich storytelling windows I left behind. Then I came to this parish community where our prayer space has no windows at all. I used to joke to friends that perhaps the next assignment for me was the grave, where it would be completely dark for all eternity.

So I have been searching for the Light in our chapel as many of our people still search for new life and relief from suffering. The light emanating from the altar candles is quite dim but focused and warm. Even the artificial lights that focus down from the ceiling do not fully light up the space. The real light that shines for me comes from the searching of people. The eyes of our street warriors, the expressions of the weary, the grins of the addicts show me a great light.

I hear Matthew’s gospel in a new way in our chapel. “You are the light of the world.” When I witness a woman stepping out of the darkness of addiction and coming to communion sober, alert and selfless, this great light overwhelms me. When I encounter someone striving to live a better life after a recent divorce, or in recovery from an accident or tragedy, this great light overwhelms me. When I hear that an elderly man has one day of sobriety and smiles with confidence, this great light overwhelms me. When I hear that people have decided to take their medications today for their mental illness, this is my light for the entire day. When I hear that a young veteran has a job interview today and that he is searching our dimly lit clothing closet for a suit, this is sunlight in the chapel for so many of us in prayer.

At the Easter Vigil, to prepare people to ultimately come to the Table of the Lord, we begin in complete darkness in our chapel. The new fire comes from a can of Sterno. I realize this is not the perfect liturgical source for the new fire. However, this is the best we can offer when dealing with fire codes in our building. After the smokeless fire and the paschal candle are blessed, the pastor raises up the new candle and chants, “Light of Christ!” After the third proclamation, the new fire is distributed to the assembly. The glow in the assembly is heartwarmingly beautiful. For just a moment, the darkness in life seems to melt away. The obstacles to people’s unbelief seem to fade into the distance. The stress and violence that shadows our streets seems cast in a new view of hope. The faces of people are shadowed in Christ’s love and new light and energy win out for the evening.

We are the Light of Christ. We believe that no darkness wins out. We believe that our baptismal light is stronger than death. We believe the light of our lives become the miracles of survival and service to one another. As people approach the altar on that most holy of nights, the paschal candle shines freshly blessed, the new altar candles seem to light up the night. The faces of people who once stood in darkness now see a great light from the candles purchased from a woman who struggles with her physical pain and her earthly business.

As I ponder our quest for light, I believe that we see the Light of Christ when our lives are most in darkness. I want in our prayer in our urban chapel for us to become instruments for people well beyond our dark walls that light, joy and peace are seen in what the world would consider dark times. Our Church cannot stand as irrelevant to people’s search for meaning and purpose. However, we are called even in our darkest moments to become light for people longing for direction and hope in life. Our windless chapel in Portland must be an example for every parish community, for every believer that even darkness seems to be the only way, new light can shine from the people we least expect.

“The Freed Sinner”

The Fifth Sunday of Lent 2016

Dear Believers,

Do we dare to stand before Jesus and bare our sinfulness? This is the gospel message today, (John 8:1-11). The adulterous woman is circled with blame and shame. The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman to Jesus carrying with them stones to through at her to kill her. Jesus quietly stoops to the ground and writes in the sand. He turns the blame on them. His authority compels them to stop. “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

The mercy of God is not written in the sand for us but in our hearts. We wait for God’s love and miraculous presence to set us free. Salvation is free. We do not earn our place in God’s love. Salvation is pure gift. We cannot put obstacles in the way of other people’s conversion or burden them with the stones of our blame. We do not shame people into accepting the healing presence of Jesus.

I suspect that if I asked all of you to name your sin, most of you would think that your sin is a sexual sin. The greater sins are those that shred the reputations of others or to blame them for problems we do not want to face. The greater sins, as we hear in Matthew 25, are those of resistance toward people who are hungry, naked and in prison. Our sexual sins are not the greatest sins even though we have been taught to live in shame about our bodies and our lives.

I wonder if this Year of Mercy has made a difference in your life? I wonder if you have the courage to face Jesus as the adulterous woman did? I wonder where you find yourself in this story? Are you standing in the way of Jesus’ love for you? Is it easier to condemn others than to face the beauty and redeeming love of Jesus’ face?

These are questions for you to consider in this Lenten season. I lay awake at night so often unsure that all of you have a personal relationship with Jesus. It is easier to follow the rules of the Church like the scribes and Pharisees than it is to fully believe that Jesus is in your heart and walks with you in your sin.

I also fret about how we label people who feel unworthy of mercy or who have been so abused and put down in life that they cannot rise to the wondrous love of Jesus’ presence. They would rather continue to put themselves down because that is what the Church does to sinners. I know so many people who cannot look Jesus in the eyes because of how other people continue to shame them.

I am sure many of you remember Pope Francis’ comment on the plane going back to Rome a couple of years ago when he was asked about homosexual people. He said, “Who am I to judge?” That question comes from this gospel text. As we stand in the circle to blame other people for their sin, Jesus still frees the sinner. He says to the woman and us to go and sin no more. I pray that in this Lenten season, we may all come to know and understand the freedom that Jesus offers us, the love that sets all hearts free. Our salvation rests on receiving this love and living blamelessly in our world.

Next Sunday March 20 we celebrate Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord. This begins Holy Week. I cannot emphasize enough of the importance of the liturgies of Holy Week. I realize it is also spring break for many schools. However, our faith is so much more important. These liturgies mark the highest holy days of our faith in the Church. They capture the meaning of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. Please mark your calendars for the Triduum, which means the three liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. I will write more about these liturgies in next week’s bulletin. The schedule is below.

Blessings in this Lenten journey,

Ron

On the Margins from Mater Dei Radio, Portland, OR

Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 13, 2016

LISTEN NOW: CLICK HERE

John 8:1-11  The woman caught in infidelity is brought to be stoned. Jesus bends down to write in the sand, to be re-created by the Father’s love. The powerless woman stands out to us to be an instrument of God’s mercy and love. We all search for the redeeming love of God. This is our Lenten journey.

“The Brokenhearted” Painting: Ronald Raab, CSC

When the just cry out, the Lord hears them, and from all their distress he rescues them. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; and those who are crushed in spirit he saves. (Psalm 34)

Jesus, lift up people who carry their unfortunate burdens.

Listen to our children who cry out alone on our streets.

Listen to our aged and ill family members curled up in dirty beds in nursing homes.

Listen to our hungry families searching for the basics of life

Receive the women battered in their homes in which they are frightened to leave.

Receive our children recently diagnosed with cancer.

Receive our clergy suffering now from Alzheimer’s disease unable to pray.

Hold our restless bodies and our searching hearts.

Hold our jobless fathers and our overworked mothers.

Hold those who will die this day.

Console the brokenhearted and offer us your mercy and peace.

Amen

Painting: Ronald Raab, CSC

Gospel Acclamation: I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord; whoever believes in me will never die. (John 11:25a-26)

I asked Ken and Sharon Krall from Sacred Heart Church to speak at our vespers series on Sunday February 28, 2016. They capture so well the art of mercy walking with their family members with special needs. 

On Loan From God  (By: Ken)

My childhood was a happy and safe one. My older brother Mickey and I lived with our parents in a pleasant but modest Cleveland neighborhood, within a short walk of our elementary public school, Catholic church, supermarket, and movie theater where for 25 cents we often enjoyed Saturday morning matinees of 20 cartoons and a serial episode of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

My 11^th birthday came two weeks before the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. Grownups were stunned and dismayed that America had been beaten in this first step into space, and felt that this changed everything. But I was experiencing my own personal life-changing event. We had just been told we were going to get a baby sister, and I was thrilled to begin planning all the fun things we would do. And I would love her and protect her from bullies, and teach her all the important things little kids needed to know.

Marianne was born a little on the light side according to our parents, but to me all newborns seemed a little on the light side. It wasn’t until several months later that my parents came home from the pediatrician’s office and shared with my brother and I that Marianne was profoundly retarded. I didn’t learn until much later that the term “profound” covered the 1-2% of the retardation population that never achieved IQs above 20-25. But at the time, even a dopey 11 year old knew that this sounded serious, although I didn’t know the extent to which this changed my plans. I’ll never know just how that day affected other members of the family, though it must have devastated our mother, who must have yearned for a girl companion in the household, and who may have had doubts about having provided a safe pregnancy for Marianne. And as a stay-at-home mother, she would be the one to accept most of the burden of Marianne’s day-in and day-out care. I was too immature to understand or to provide comfort to my mom during this time; rather I was too focused on my own pain, a pain that has lessened with time but still remains.

Although I had hoped Marianne and I could still develop a loving and meaningful relationship, I recall precious few joyful memories I can hold on to. Over the years Marianne was able to develop a vocabulary of several dozen words, but mastered only a couple of 2 or 3 word phrases. She often ignored my first attempts to communicate with her, looking off into space until a second or third attempt was made, and she had a habit of looking to a parent when responding with a word or a shake or a nod. Granted, I was occasionally able to buy her attention with french fries or frozen custard from the new hamburger stand she referred to as “Donnels”, or finding her favorite cartoons or children’s shows on TV. But it is difficult for me to picture her looking me in the eyes and responding TO ME during our encounters.

Because of the real and/or perceived insensitivity of many people toward those with retardation, our parents –and particularly our mother- turned inward, circling the wagons of the immediate family to protect Marianne, and in so doing, seldom again enjoyed their previous relationships with relatives and friends. It was to their credit that they remained loving, attentive and proud parents of their sons, carefully concealing their sorrows over lost dreams.

Marianne was 10 when I left home for graduate school and two years of active military service. While stationed in Germany, I had the opportunity to visit Lourdes, France, and sent Marianne a small bottle of spring water from the Lourdes Grotto. It must have been fifteen or twenty years later, while I made one of my two or three visits a year, that mom showed me a small empty bottle that I almost didn’t recognize. She had that same look as when we were out of milk and she hoped I could soon pick up more. She had carefully blessed Marianne every night of those many years from that little bottle. That was our mom.

Marianne had a special relationship with dad, spending hours in the yard while he gardened, often going down the driveway to visit with mostly friendly and understanding passer bys. In the winter, he would shovel snow and throw an occasional snowball in her direction, eliciting a hardy giggle. Her happiest time of day was going upstairs at bedtime. In her cozy bed, she would get a case of the giggles, and laugh back downstairs to dad, and back and forth they would laugh, over nothing in particular. There were times when outbursts of grabbing or pinching left mom with bruises on her arm. Dad was so hurt by these incidents, and Marianne would sense it. She would sit down next to him, put her arm around him, look him in the eye and let out a mournful groan.  That was their relationship.

Marianne continued to live at home, with our parents until the age of 40, being picked up daily by the bus that took her to workshop, freeing up mom – and dad once he retired – for several well deserved hours. During my visits, she did let me hug and kiss her at her bedtime, and she welcomed my bringing her “Jesus” in the form of Eucharist when dad’s health failed and he could no longer drive them to Mass. But there was never that closeness that I had hoped for, and she would always remind my parents that visitors were for saying “Bye Bye” to.

She moved into a group home when she was too much for my father to handle, and he died shortly thereafter. On a weekend visit to our mom’s, as they walked in the neighborhood, she lost her balance, fell, and although not suffering injury, never again walked on what had suddenly become rapidly deforming legs and feet. She survived another five years in a nursing home with the benefit of a G-tube and tracheotomy, once her swallowing muscles weakened. Marianne passed away, weighing less than 80 pounds, with a simple “failure to thrive” explanation on her death certificate.

We will never know of Marianne’s thoughts, her joys and fears, her dreams. Did she understand her place of importance in our family and in the world; did she understand that she often touched us all with moments of joy and sorrow? Or did she just live her life simply one moment at a time, experiencing community, appreciating simple pleasures as they came, loving when she could and struggling with challenges when she had to? She was, and always will be, a child of God.

Looking back, I marvel at my parents’ incredible love and sacrifice, and the awesome examples they set for me. As for myself, in some of my troubled moments of unproductive thinking, I would ask myself whether an act can be considered one of kindness and mercy if it appears to be unnoticed, unappreciated, or of no apparent benefit to another human being; there was a fear in my heart that such acts are in vain.

An answer to my questioning comes to me from Matt 25: verse 40:

“And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of my brothers, you have done it to me.” Curiously, most English translations read when “you have done it to one of the least of my brothers”, not when “you have done it for one of the least of my brothers”. This speaks to me that even if an act of kindness has no apparent benefit to or acceptance by the other person, the intention behind it is pleasing to God, and is therefore never in vain.

In First Corinthians, St Paul teaches that Love never Fails. I’ve come to believe also that Mercy never fails, and taking some strength in this belief, I’ve become more willing to risk rejection of my efforts, when choosing to treat others with kindness and mercy. Continue reading →

“The Prodigal” Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2016 

Fourth Sunday of Lent 2016: Luke 15:1-3,11-32

…”But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”