Face Time

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

Originally published by Celebrate! Magazine, July 2008
– PDF version –

Our parish community marks time differently than most. We flip on the same light switches whether we celebrate the Sundays of Lent or the day of Christmas in our windowless urban chapel. The simple swags of liturgical color in the sanctuary are lost among the dark rain-soaked clothing worn by the homeless waiting in line outside our chapel doors. Changes of seasons pass us by since we have no gardens of white spring tulips or walkways of yellow autumn chrysanthemums.

We mark our seasons with people’s personalities. Autumn is the time fresh-faced nursing students arrive in our daily hospitality center to wash the dirty feet of our neighbors. Christmas is the time we look out for serious depression even among our daily volunteers. Summer excites us because new student interns now move beyond book learning and interact with real people living in poverty, and this dry season keeps our homeless friends from bone-cold nights.

Even members of our parish staff mark their time of employment and ministry by the number of years of Sam’s sobriety or when Joe finally got housing. The senior members remember the days when John showered weekly. He has not showered now in nearly five years. Marking the liturgical years reminds all of us of God’s investment among his marginalized people.

We also release from the pages of the Lectionary the faces that give our community hope. These summer stories of Scripture speak well across the generations to offer us both challenge and consolation. There is nothing run-of-the-mill about how the characters from the Gospels help us keep track of time, celebrating our lives of faith.

The furrow-browed Canaanite woman unleashes her worry about her daughter in her verbal battle with Jesus. Her brash and strong stance advocates to Jesus about her daughter’s health and life. Like any caring mother, she jumps over cultural barriers that even Jesus was reluctant to cross. He draws a line in the sand that reminds her that his love is out of her reach. She storms his conscience and she changes his opinion. Her daughter is healed. The cultural and spiritual walls tumble down around them.

Our parish community depends on this prophet’s gumption. Her honesty empowers us to advocate not only on behalf of those we know and love, but also those who line the outside walls of our church building waiting to be noticed. Her marginalized status empowers her voice which continues among us who serve people who are down and out. Her integrity invigorates our days when we tire of thinking life could be different.

Her love for her daughter and her love for Jesus scream out across the centuries and well beyond my proclamation of the Gospel or my preaching. I find her fire in serving those who need the essentials of life. I mark my days among strangers whose pain is transparent and lives are inconsolable. Her story empowers me to believe that those who need Jesus the most will find among us some morsels of compassion and love. I must not tire, but if I do, even leftovers of Jesus’ presence will still feed me.

Peter’s unselfconscious act of stepping out of a storm-thrown boat also speaks to our community in summer days. Jesus invites him to trust beyond the scope of common sense. His logic and his faith lock together in a single moment and he starts to sink into the raging water. Jesus is there to simply catch Peter and to ask him why he doubted.

Most of us in our parish community reach out daily from our fear to the hand of Christ. We sink into depths of uncertainty when we realize we cannot change the systems that keep people poor. We drown in their sorrow and in our own when people refuse to take their medications for schizophrenia when we know they could walk on steady ground. We lose ourselves in the storms of people’s old age, recent strokes and relapsing on drugs.

Our parish knows also from Peter’s example that we must continue to leave our safety and walk toward Christ. People need us to not only provide toothpaste and clean socks but to be with them through storms of loneliness and self-loathing. Real people need us to accept them when they smell, and pray with them when they are soaked in grief. Peter motivates us to get out of our boats of safety so to find the real purpose of our ministry and the joy of the Lord’s presence.

The real goal of worship, no matter the time of year, is to see the face of Jesus for ourselves. These Gospels also open to us and to every parish community Jesus’ invitation to rest our weary bodies exhausted by his mission. He reminds every community that the work of faith and the church is not ultimately our worry. He confronts our controlling attitudes that we can satisfy other’s pain or doubt. The face of Jesus unveils itself when finally all Christians yield to his call to rest our exhausted spirits in his meekness, in his humble heart.

I never pray in summer without counting myself among those who search for the face of Christ. There is no vacation from our seed-throwing work among the poor and invisible. I gain strength for the journey, no matter walking among thorns or rocky places, when at last I entrust people into the net of God’s Kingdom. The personalities of the summer Gospels form us all into the Body of Christ, the face of love for all seasons.

Oven-Baked Fears and Homemade Dreams

Posted on June 1, 2008 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

Originally published by CHURCH Magazine, Summer 2008
– PDF version – Online version –

At the 25-year mark, the author is finding profound meaning in priestly ministry.

I dreaded taking time to dine with the bishop. I scurried around with last-minute details of lost luggage at the airport, calming elderly relatives, and handling requests for different hotel arrangements just four days before my priesthood ordination. The bishop’s invitation to the four of us who were to be ordained that weekend raised in me much anxiety about why we were summoned to his simple, former-convent apartment to discuss the ceremony that had been planned for months. My classmates and I carpooled across town to meet the Ordinary of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, William McManus.

He was better known to us as “Billy Mac” for his approachable style and his vision of a servant church. I felt anxious about this meeting on his soil because I feared a last-minute oral exam, which always induces dry mouth and a baked brain on my part. We pulled up to a parking space just outside his apartment and I tried to persuade my brothers that it was not too late to change our minds about this evening’s plans.

Bishop McManus quickly opened his outside door wearing a kindly, gentle smile. He held a small glass of scotch above his head and said, “Welcome guys, I am so glad you joined me. Come in.”

He explained to us that he was recuperating from heart surgery, witnessed by his weight loss, and which explained the simple menu of oven-baked chicken, a plate of white rice, and steamed broccoli. He invited us to his kitchen table like a proud parent, and prayed reverently in thanksgiving for the food and for our decisions to become servants of God’s table.

Bill quickly spurted out commands for ordination day, details and items he needed to ordain us presbyters. Then he shifted gears. He put his fork and knife on his Melmac plate, leaned back into his chair, looked us in the eyes, and said, “I have two questions for you. What are your fears? And what are your dreams?”

I felt both the chicken and the fears lodge in my throat. My brain started to bake. Nearly twenty-five years later, I have no idea what I said that night and I have no memory of how my three brothers replied to his startling, acid-producing questions. After going around the table, each of us sputtering out answers, Bishop McManus then spoke. He started to cry. His words, perhaps lubricated by the scotch, sounded a note of disbelief as he reminisced that forty-four years had passed since his ordination day. He admitted that his dreams of an inclusive church never came to life as he imagined. The bishop told stories of his faltering dreams of working toward peace, providing comfort for young women carrying their children to full term, feeding the growing numbers of hungry people, and of his grief over the fact that Vatican II had never really been tried. He encouraged us to live the real dreams of the church. He invited us to take over where he left off; to go to bed tired; to live selflessly, because others starve for food, shelter, and a sense of belonging in the world and in the church. The tired, elderly man reminded us our commitments would produce great costs. Bill whispered to us how lonely he was being a bishop. In his first year in South Bend, Indiana, no one had invited him to dinner. He advised us to care for each other, to honor our religious community, and to be not afraid.

For twenty-five years I have held the memory of that meal in my heart. It is only now in my jubilee year that I understand the wisdom of his words and the passing on of his dreams. I reflect on the iconic meal with Bill McManus because in these past six and a half years I have finally found a home in the church. I hopscotched around the country, tried out various careers, interests, parishes, and leadership positions. None of those careers in ministry opened me up or healed me, gave me my real voice, or evoked courage within me. None of that happened until I found myself living and working among our society’s marginalized.

I work among so many of the people Billy Mac told us not to forget. In a small urban parish in Old Town in Portland, Oregon, I minister among the fragile, those living outside, and people suffering from unimaginable mental illness. Every day I pray among the fraught who simply need clean underwear, a warm blanket, or a place where they feel they belong.

I landed here not on my own power, but with a thud from the Spirit. I arrived broken and discouraged from years of trying to sort out my place in the larger institution. I showed up at this place because the successor to Bishop McManus stripped me of my priestly faculties in that same diocese because I had hired a massage therapist to work in the retreat center where I was director. That was the most fear-producing moment of my priesthood. Praying through all the issues of that trauma, I created some new decisions about my life and my relationship with the church. Finally, after all those years of fear-clenching, I pried open my priesthood and offered back my entire life to God. It is in this setting where I finally let go of so much of my personal fear, my insecure feelings that I am the outcast of the church. At last, I am not in control of what God wants of me or where he leads.

I arrived at the Downtown Chapel after driving cross-country with few physical possessions. I carried with me my spiritual emptiness, tangible anger, and questions about whether I would survive everyday work among the poor. Walking in the building that first afternoon, the odor overwhelmed me. The stench of men not showered, lingering foul alcohol-breath, stale cigarettes, and wet garments packed in small backpacks stopped my breathing, yet welcomed me to my new home.

Along with my luggage, I unpacked my intense defensiveness about living in a place where I was not sure I wanted to be. As I slowly sorted out the contents of my suitcase, the stench of my sense of entitlement and the vile odors of my own resentments overwhelmed me. I stashed away in time the obnoxious fear that my circumstances were somehow more alienating and hurtful than anyone else’s. I made the decision to finally move beyond my own hurt. I chose to learn this time from the real suffering of other people.

My teachers presented themselves quickly, quiet reminders of what it means to be most human, honest, and sincere in their suffering. Patrick, a year older than I, immediately started calling me “Ronnie the Kid.” Even with his unstable mental illness, Patrick reads people and understands when others are hurting. I watched him in prayer. I listened to his public prayers for the plumber to fix his toilet, for doing his laundry and grocery shopping. He asked us to pray for him because he feared his inability to unscrew the cap off the shampoo bottle during his weekly shower. I realized in all my years of life and of priesthood, I was never that honest in my relationship with God. I wanted what he had. What he has is the faith to make his real life his prayer, without pretense and without lying. I began to feel a new sacrament inside of me, a real presence where fear started to loosen. We became friends. Patrick teases out of me the crippling effects of my own insecurity every day with his presence at the Eucharist.

I woke up one night with a most unexpected teacher, gunfire under my bedroom window. I heard five shots. After running downstairs, I spoke up to the police as if I had some vital information to share. An officer told me that I had slept through the first four shots. Nine bullets killed eighteen-year-old Daniel outside our church door. I had been sleeping—in so many ways. That night I was confronted with real violence and my own blindness. I could not control the suffering around me, nor could I contain answers to all of these questions in the tidy confines of a church building. I started to connect our work of prayer within our sanctuary to the terror of our streets. We now expose our common prayer on street corners when violence hits us again and again. We process into the streets after celebrating Sunday Eucharist to pray for peace on all corners, for families experiencing loss, and for the church to become an instrument of justice. Between the gunshots that night I started to find my home here. I care for these people and I do not have answers to solve their problems. I am a caretaker of our reliance on grace and I must offer myself to God in ways that this community needs to be healed.

Bruce cornered me one day in our lobby after Mass. His eyes pierced the awkward silence, his tobacco-stained fingers confessed his struggles. He whispered his longing to be baptized, to join in our search to discover the truth of the church. This community had already marked his impression with acceptance. Bruce admitted his years of heroin addiction and his newfound recovery of almost two months. I felt fear tighten around my body. I was not sure what I could offer him, unsteady as I was about my own ability to trust this community.

Trying Each Day

His fierce fight to find God still leads me to heartache as well as great joy. Bruce battles demons beyond my imagining. He prays, some days he wants to pray, other moments he wants to want to pray, anything to shield himself from gut-wrenching desires to use drugs. Just a week before his baptism he relapsed. He tries to find God’s love, but his addictions tell him he can live without God and our community. Today, he tries again.

Bruce’s zealous search for God mirrors many stories in our community and in some ways my own story as well. I listen to him with an ear that hears my own fears. His blind spots and hardness remain so obvious to me. He stands behind a wall of fear that may never be bulldozed by any community’s love or anything human at all.

So he keeps coming back in search of what only God can do, heal him. I stand with him, with others like him, and they all teach me to come to God as I am, with self-stripping honesty. Bruce teaches me there is no other place to go.

Christine started to join us for daily Eucharist with shy hesitation. She tested the waters of her belonging in our parish each day. Months passed before she revealed to me that she suffers from multiple personality disorder. She never felt loved growing up with unspeakable family abuse. She never felt a sense of belonging because she dissociated her childhood from reality. Today she teaches me to sort out my own life, to trust its broken pieces and to see the whole picture. I listen to her shed the protective shells of her fear, the clinging rage, and her overwhelming reluctance to trust people.

During a parish retreat I shared with Christine a few frustrations about my own life. The following day she stopped me and said, “Thank you for sharing your life with us. We do not want a priest in a box.” Those words opened me up. They gave me permission to creep out of my own shyness, a place toward being myself. She invited me deeper into my own fear, where I find a home in my honesty.

My friends here teach me every day that faith is about people. I learn to create community by naming real suffering, exposing the harmful labels of mental illness, addictions, and homelessness. People connect through admitting these differences because we need everyone to survive. I discover integrity about my own priesthood, my leadership, and my very life in this new frankness. I never learned this kind of honesty in the seminary or in my graduate studies or in any catechism. I study it here because I have no cure for people’s doubt, no solution to cumulative years of their depression, no antidotes to keep people from using drugs or alcohol. Here I discover how to reach out beyond my fear, to rely on the person of Jesus.

Our parish staff grapples every day with how to serve beyond our expertise. We find our answers not in cut-and-dried solutions, nor perfect rubrics, nor in assumed authority, but in gathering the fragments of people lost along the margins of society. We build up people by touching their inconsolable suffering. We admit we do not have answers, we listen, we console, and we hold on to mystery itself. People do not always get what they want; most of life for the poor does not work out. We try to expose the healing power of Christ so we celebrate the anointing of the sick weekly at a daily Mass. We gather people living with depression for retreats every other month. We open our doors to prostitutes on Saturday evenings and offer a “School of Prayer” after Mass on Sunday. Every volunteer in our daily hospitality center reflects on the Sunday gospel so as to realize our reliance on strength beyond our own. I speak weekly now on a local radio station to connect the Sunday gospel to the human stories that continue to convert me, people who show me that I must rely on God in order to live.

Now I relish the experiences of my past fears, at least most days. I live today grateful that finally my own scars allow a new openness in me to accept the pain, grief, and incompleteness of others. I would have fallen on my face had I come here hiding behind my previous life of self-protecting power, dark denial, and inauthentic behavior. This parish community remains simple, unencumbered, and remarkably full of lessons I still need to learn. This place compels me to discover each one that comes my way. I experience here how facing my personal fears forces open the process to really dream about what is most important—people’s lives.

I celebrate now twenty-five years of public ministry, growing into the fears and dreams Bishop McManus initiated us into with oven-baked chicken and his warm hospitality. I make plenty of hurtful mistakes, and many dreams pass me by. Finally after all these years, I learn I can offer nothing without being intimate with God. Now, I see for myself that no amount of money can hide suffering or build authentic dreams. I cannot fix people’s misery, solve their questions, or control their opinions.

At last I get it: we all need God on earth to survive, and this need turns our hearts toward desire. I desire Jesus. I celebrate this jubilee year lovingly with people arriving from around the country, rearranging flight schedules, retrieving lost luggage, and changing last-minute hotel reservations. This time I stand comfortably at the feast of Eucharist, tears in my eyes, age spots and thinning hair, grateful for the oven-baked fears of my life and the homemade dreams for all of us gathered here.

Trinity Blest

Posted on May 1, 2008 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

Originally published by Celebrate! Magazine, May 2008
– PDF version –

I usually cringe when an engaged couple asks my advice on planning a wedding. Discussions of turquoise dresses, unity candles, and thousand dollar floral arrangements send me fleeing the church. The expectations of parents, the search for the longest church aisle, and the guest musicians often make me feel like my presence is another accessory, another “check” on the list of wedding preparations from the latest bridal magazine.

Kim and Charlie gave me a new perspective about wedding preparations. Kim explained to me that she spent a year after college graduation working among the poor. Charlie also shared his desire to live out his faith in a more challenging way. They wanted their wedding to express their deep conversion into God who changed everything about their lives. The engaged couple desired to profess their vows in our small urban chapel which welcomes people who struggle for the essentials of life. This decision drew a line in the sand about how they wanted people to view not only their wedding but their marriage. She stepped out of her family’s expectations that their ceremony be held in their home parish.

Preparing for their marriage became an act of God’s faithfulness. God so often becomes a cultural accessory at a wedding. God’s action is invited as a stamp of approval, or an inconvenient guest, hidden among the fake flowers and candelabras. Kim and Charlie’s plans stepped out of the cultural norm and into an authentic expression of faith and service.

The couple also wanted to make sure that the people present at the wedding did not feel like observers or well-dressed adornments. They asked people to bring to the ceremony white socks, bags of new underwear and clean blankets for people who come daily to our hospitality center. Their friends and family received the message that this wedding was a call to action, and that action of service comes from the covenant of God’s faithfulness.

The Eucharist remained the centerpiece of the couple’s commitment.
The crystal clarity of hospitality, the simple music, the contemplative pace, all revealed to the congregation that God is the one who brought them together, and God’s initiative would lead them beyond the church doors and into a life of fidelity and purpose.

This wedding unmasked a deeper understanding of God. It was not a ceremony that talked about God, but explored God’s real activity in Three Persons. We moved beyond the quirky images of how people often think about the Trinity, as shamrock or triangle, into a deep, profound action in people’s lives. No one left our simple worship space unaffected by deep grace or an ache for justice. The frivolous, cultural wedding accessories were replaced with breathtaking awareness of love and compassion for the poor and suffering.

Now is the time in your parish community to unveil people’s relationship with the fidelity of God. The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity summarizes the liturgical journey from Lent through the gift of Pentecost. It reminds us that the marriage of heaven and earth in Christ is truly our path to change, commitment and reliance on the Three Persons of God.

The liturgical Gospels after the Solemnity of the Trinity now open for us the profound call to base our lives in the continuing action of God’s faithfulness. The marriage covenant of the Trinity in our earthly ways shows us the path to building our commitments on rock. We first must have the courage to listen to the echoes of God in the course of real life. Kim and Charlie revealed to me that the storms of wind and rain are nothing compared to the shelter of truth and honesty.

We often think our faith comes from our own decisions. God’s initiative calls us beyond ourselves. The courage to follow Christ beyond our selfishness is also God’s gift. This marriage bond of God and His people continues to show me that love is real even in the midst of my doubt and insecurity. My fragile earthy ways can become a new identity in God’s love for me.

There are few people who have the courage to risk everything to hear God’s call. To be a laborer in the harvest means we let go of the stifling images we have of God, ourselves and people in need. God is in relationship with us. We in turn keep the heavenly marriage vows alive by entering into profound relationship with the marginalized, the anxious and the doubtful right here on earth. God calls us each by name, beyond the labels of our sickness, past our notions of sin and our own self-reliance.

God’s initiative in our lives is not a pious accessory but takes place deep within our human fear. This marriage promise from God gives light to our human ways. When fear keeps our hearts concealed and in the dark, authentic faith counts us more valuable than the sparrows.

Kim and Charlie’s vows expressed their desire to build their marriage on rock. They replied to the question of Jesus, “Who do you say I am?” They showed the rest of us that God’s call does not come in one occasion. The call of God satisfies us in all stages of life, in all sorrows, in good times and in bad.

I received the vows of Charlie and Kim in the midst of people they loved. My heart was glad as I heard their words of commitment to follow God forever. Words which I now understand bind their earthly desires to heaven’s promises. These words were more than fancy frills from a ritual book but the deep passionate response of a couple who understood their love flows from God.
I believe we must dig deeper into our human experience to sift out the love of God from our fear. Kim and Charlie’s lifetime commitment teaches me that the Trinity is still surprising us, continuing to teach us that love from heaven changes everything on earth. Blest be God, forever.

Personal Poverty Retreat

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

Originally published by Ministry & Liturgy Magazine, February 2008
– PDF version –

Our parish church, on Burnside Street in Old Town, downtown Portland, Ore., sits on the border of a great divide. On one side corporate executives scurry one by one to tall, marble buildings, but on our side people dressed in drab colors line the sidewalk in front of our building waiting to enter our red doors for coffee or clean underwear. One day I noticed a woman executive who crossed the forbidden line. She stood on our sidewalk pointing her finger at a man, mentally ill and homeless, who was playing with his grey kitten. Dressed in grey flannel and stiletto heels, she screamed at him not to endanger the cat. After her encounter, she stormed into our lobby, where I was sweeping the floor, and yelled at me, “you have to do something about that man who is hurting that cat!” I assured her I would take care of the situation. After she left the lobby I turned to one member of our parish staff and said, “1 wait for the day when someone comes into our lobby and says, ‘We, together, should do something about that young man who suffers from mental illness and is without housing, employment and friends’.”

This encounter teaches me that we all face different forms of poverty. Dozens of times every day in ministry, I realize poverty is not an abstract reality but reveals itself through our own histories, relationships, and education. We carry poverty in our prejudices or our backpacks, in our cultural expectations or in a shopping cart. We express issues of poverty by the labels we attach to one another, no matter which side of the street we live on.

This interaction between two people dressed in grey also shows me the black and white divide between the rich and poor that continues an ancient tradition. This chasm reminds me every day of Lazarus in the doorway who longed to eat the scraps from the rich man’s table. The segregation calls to mind the journey of Jesus to a Samaritan town to reach out to a woman under the noonday sun. It underlines Jesus’s command to welcome ill strangers, people with handicaps, the former prisoner, and the newly widowed to the feast where all people fit around his open table. This ancient way of dividing the poor and rich teaches me that we have yet to understand the basics of gospel life, in which our lifestyles of fear can be replaced by reaching out to those who need the staples of love and understanding.

Our parish staff searched for ways to educate people living beyond our corner. We wracked our brains to develop a method to move believers beyond their black and white interpretations of life. The staff realized that our ministry among the poor on our side of the street could become a vehicle for real catechesis among those who already have jobs, security, and satisfying relationships. We began to realize that the poor themselves would become the teachers, the authentic catechists. The antidote to unhealthy interactions with poor people begins by learning from those who are suffering, lonely, and drug addicted. Building authentic relationships remains the answer to recognizing the dignity of all life. But the people would first have to be willing to cross the street.

And I needed to examine my own life, priorities, and actions to discover which side of the street I really live on. I needed to grapple with my own need and desire for God, my own personal poverty. I needed to authenticate God’s work in me by stepping out of my fear and comfort in order to serve people suffering physical and emotional poverty.

I found the way to bridge the chasm between faith and service right under my nose. Our daily hospitality center has changed my approach to God more than anything in my years of priesthood. When I spend two hours handing out hygiene products or laundry vouchers and listening to people’s stories, our interactions strip away all the pretense of my human ego and priestly identity. I am the one emotionally naked most days as I realize all the masks, education, and power I stand behind. Mingling in our hospitality center strips away any notion I have that people should be different than they are or that I could possibly have answers for their questions of survival or sobriety. So I invited those who live on the opposite side of the street and beyond to enter into this place of self-stripping.

The parish staff developed from our basic daily ministry an opportunity for others to join us in learning more about prayer and service. Every Friday we work a 13-hour day. We now open up this time once a month so others may join us in an unconventional retreat. We call this day of work and reflection “The Personal Poverty Retreat.” People in small groups muster the courage to cross the dividing line and participate in this day of ministry and sharing.

I gain great courage as I hear people reveal insights and stories during the debriefing sessions following morning hospitality. They understand that the trip across the street was worth the effort as they slowly unravel all their misconceptions about people who are poor, addicted, or lonely. Facing the mentally ill rouses palpable fear in people who are used to having all the answers in life, those who spend their days telling others how to live or what to do. Teachers, bankers, and retired executives often sit confused about how the experience challenges them. I watch in silence as I hear a retired grandfather express guilt over his well-earned possessions. I listen with gratitude as a businessman reveals that he must reinterpret his basic notions of a lifetime of cultural norms, his perceived masculine role in society, and the threats he feels to the American dream. Encountering people who live in poverty becomes real catechesis to the rest of us who think relying on our own power, education, and social status will bring us to God.

After we celebrate the Eucharist at noon, we take the call of the dismissal seriously. We let go of the safety of the sanctuary and enter the streets of the neighborhood where we visit Catholic agencies serving the needs of people living on the streets or in single-room occupancy hotels. I try to resist the notion in myself that this is a poverty safari, a tour of gazing at drug dealers selling their stuff or glaring at the mentally ill person who asks for a handout along the way. This walking tour opens up all our senses, especially for those who are used to passing through this same area in the safety of their car. I see a couple having sex in a doorway, a family creating a cardboard hut near a fence, and a man telling jokes to himself. It is on this tour that people experience the issues of our city trying to eliminate housing for the poor, closing agencies that provide services, and avoiding the needs of the mentally ill people. Amidst the piercing sounds of jackhammers, ambulance sirens, and buses rushing by, we always pray in front of each service agency. This is not a tour about how the church serves the poor but an exploration of people’s consciences to find new ways to learn the needs of others and a new dependency on God who calls us out of ourselves.

The foot-tour raises challenges and exposes consequences about people in poverty, but the two-hour reflection session afterward is where the rubber meets the road. Here we try to ask the startling questions raised by shattered notions of who poor people are and about the God who calls us to do something with our lives. I introduce the session by reading aloud about one of my mentors in Scripture. The Canaanite woman perks us all up after the walk outside, challenging us to shake our fists at Jesus to change his mind about the needs of her daughter. She teaches us to advocate not only for those we love but also for those we just met along the way. This holy woman in Matthew’s Gospel reveals that what we must do to change people’s lives is to storm heaven with our prayer to make sure Jesus is paying attention to his lonely and forgotten.

l am profoundly changed by the challenges people face while sharing in this group setting. One by one people share their real poverty. Suddenly people are making the connections that a recent divorce isa path to God or that the powerlessness they experience with a tormented teenager is the way to a new life of compassion and change. I witness the Spirit softening the anger of a middle-class parent realizing that his years of anger and hatred toward his homeless son need to change. He now understands through the course of the day that he cannot fix his son’s addictions and ‘that he simply needs to love him and offer support. I am amazed at how people let go of so much control and regret, old patterns of life, church, and family. The people on retreat realize that their answers to questions of family, society, and church do not always work for every person, no matter how hard they try to convince people of their correctness. This kind of catechesis does not come from a religious education manual or a tidy parish program but is found in real and honest relationships with those who find themselves on the margins of society and church.

Our evening ends by sharing a meal with other volunteers and then working in our soup line, The Brother Andre Cafe. In our church lobby we encounter people from the neighborhood coming to us not only for food but for an affirmation that their lives count. They come because this is about community, even as broken and tenuous as it is. I try to make the connection with our folks on retreat that this line is an extension of the sanctuary where people feel cared for and welcomed. It is the human and complicated table where people learn that profound hunger brings honest community. This safety of community sometimes is shattered by a man who acts out his mental illness violently or by people just wanting to stir up a fist fight.

I am deeply inspired when people realize Christians are not U do-gooders. People begin to learn that serving under our own power only gets us to burnout and anger. They make the connection that discipleship comes from realizing that we are all loved by God and then we are called into loving others. We do for others what only God can first do for us – that is simply to love. This is the real grace I witness when people come to the conclusion that they do not possess all the answers in life, that finally they need God to do the work only God can accomplish.

I learn from people encountering the needs of the poor that admitting suffering is the road to true community. This admission and conversion is a struggle in every parish community. This is the key to building bridges between people on both sides of the street. This model of retreat convinces me that parishes only need to look to those who are suffering in their midst to begin to understand that people need to be loved as they are and not made over according to our prejudice or ambivalence. Once we admit our own poverty, our own need and desire for God, we can learn to walk together, no matter which side of the street we may live on.

I look forward to the day when we all stand on the same side of the street believing in something more than our fear. We can work together to change these initial instincts into actions of acceptance and service. Participants on our retreat show me that attitudes change when we cross the barriers that separate us from other people’s suffering. Barriers fall through the simple encounters of people as they strip away their black and white differences and share a cup of coffee and a warm bagel.

Jesus of the Streets, Remember Me

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

Originally published by GIA Quarterly, Fall 2007
– PDF version –

Our parish community prays the taize chant “Jesus, Remember Me” as an antidote to loneliness and fear in our neighborhood. In the past five years, two young men were murdered in separate incidents at the entrance of our church. The forces of violence and isolation killed Wallace and Daniel, and the two crimes may never be solved. ‘As a faith community on this corner of Sixth and Burnside in Portland, Oregon, the violence that surrounds us compels us to take our voices from the safety of the sanctuary into the chaos and uncertainty of our streets.

Two weeks after Daniel’s murder, I took the risk of asking Daniel’s family and our parish community to pray together on the street at 3:00 A.M., the exact time of his murder. I woke up myself to the reality of the neighborhood and the call for the parish to stand amidst the violence. I wrote a prayer service and composed a sung litany for the occasion, but it was the song “Jesus, Remember Me” that I relied on to move the mourners from our warm lobby into the cold and unforgiving street that night.

We gathered in our small lobby and were led outside under the banner of a processional cross. Slowly our voices merged into the simple chant of “Jesus, Remember Me,” and I could feel our souls clinging to the music and to the message. We did not want Daniel to be forgotten, and we did not want death to win out. The song flooded our hearts and began to wash away our fear on the bloodstained streets.

Our community of the Downtown Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul Parish now responds to murder beyond our red doors. When a homicide occurs within our neighborhood, we carry our faith and our song deeper into our fearful community. After celebrating Sunday Eucharist, we process out of the chapel and into the streets singing “Jesus, Remember Me.” We stand firmly on the place of death and pray for peace. Our voices merge into support and encouragement so the families and neighborhood can move beyond hatred. Our singing bears witness to our own community that power comes from faith even though we live in the midst of mental illness and homelessness. For just a few minutes our collective praise of God erases the loneliness that makes a home in our addictions and poverty.

“Jesus, Remember Me,” from the French monastery of Taize, especially voices the ache of the human condition within the love and passion of God. Jacques Berthier’s melodic chant opens every community to the longing of the repentant thief from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 23:39–43). The combination of text and musical accessibility makes this song one of the most profound liturgical and ritual pieces of music available in any pastoral setting.

The healing balm of “Jesus, Remember Me” continues to guide my human and sacramental response to people in need. I bear this song in my heart well after the choir rehearsals are over, the altar candles are snuffed out, and the church doors locked. This mystical chant carries my priestly ministry into the darkness where fear, loneliness, and despair overwhelm people. Berthier’s music companions me when I am helpless in the center of desperate moments and worried that words will not satisfy in circumstances of chaos and violence.

I carried this mantra again one rainy night from the warmth of my bedroom to the deathbed of a newborn baby. Walking into the small hospital quarters, I was confronted with nurses, aides, and doctors huddled around the premature infant. Sounds of life-sustaining machines filled the silence of the room. The exhausted mother sat nearby, suffocating in her grief. She desperately wanted someone from the church to be present for the decision to turn off the respirators, and to end the life of ner firstborn boy. I quietly, fearfully, leaned against the doorway, waiting to speak with her.

The doctors decided to turn off the respirator and let the infant breathe on his own power. The hospital staff and the baby’s mother all looked to me for assurance and approval. I felt so inadequate, so naked, and so unable to speak any words of consolation. So, I sang, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” The nurses and their aides joined in praying with soft voices of support. The baby’s breathing lasted just a few minutes.

The mother carried her dead child to an oversized rocking chair in a darkened corner of the room. She asked me if I would sit with her for a while. I squeezed into the chair and put my arm over her shoulders as she held the body. We rocked and sang. We rocked away the cold night and sang the song we could hold on to, the only prayer that could comfort us. We rocked on the margins of this world and the Kingdom.

My pastoral experience teaches me that we are all afraid. Fear crushes us when the fragility of our existence takes over our daily lives. This is simply being human. However, a faithful and pastoral response to life cannot be based on denial, sugarcoating painful circumstances or avoiding the truth. Music brings us closer to the release of fear, to the understanding that Jesus’ passion-death-and-resurrection is also for our own lives as well. Ritual song does not take suffering away, but it bonds us in faith with those in sorrow and those who cling to the new life only Christ can bring.

Berthier’s music gets to the heart of faith. This simple chant, sung together in congregations, or anywhere two or three are gathered, demonstrates our earthly desire for God’s assistance and remembrance. The hypnotic melody helps us rest in the assurance of Christ’s passion to bring everyone into the love and forgiveness of the Kingdom. His music helps us to leave our self-sufficiency and cling to God.

Singing “Jesus, Remember Me” along the margins of the church and culture brings me to a deeper faith. Carrying this gift of song into people’s suffering helps me realize that worship is built upon people who need God through daily human turmoil and struggles, Opening people up in song when they are most closed down in sorrow invigorates my faith when I rerum to the worshiping assembly. This chant goes far to unite individual suffering to the prayer of the entire congregation.

Musicians and pastoral leaders can only witness to faith if we believe what we are singing. Singing along the margins of life means we also leave behind comfortable aspects of our ministry and images of ourselves. Singing among those who suffer the most means we leave behind the mandatory rehearsals, our performance egos, and professional liturgical correctness. Believing what we sing is a gift of faith.

We are called to bring this gift of faith into the lives of wounded veterans and the uncertainty of their families. We carry this faith with us as we listen to people crying out in despair over losing homes and security in floods and storms. We offer the song of faith to those suffering from debilitating depression and the shunning of those with mental illness. We sing in unity when people are torn apart by job loss, the end of a marriage, or the death of a parent. It is into all these situations we bring a song of presence, remembrance, and hope.

I sing in the midst of sorrow so I will nor forget people. Music keeps my memory alive and my life prayerful. I will never forget the widow’s grieving, the mentally ill parent, or the child with cancer. I still pray for the mother of a son dying of AIDS who taught me to overcome my fear of touching her son. My memory prays for the family walking to the gravesite on a cold windy day to bury their grandfather. I cannot forget the ache of those who cry out for help and assurance.

I also learn from all these fragile circumstances that people cannot be manipulated or controlled. Reaching out beyond our safe sanctuaries does not guarantee that tragic situations will change or that people will be comforted. I cannot bring with me pat answers, stale rubric, or a fixed pattern of responding to people’s needs. I still learn about my temptation to judge people and my desire to control conversations when I am afraid and lonely.

Not everyone is ready to move out of fear. When life is raw and hurting, some people cannot immediately receive the invitation for God’s remembrance and love. Fear is an incredible beast to tame even with music and prayer. I learned this again one night when I responded to a phone call requesting a priest for a twelve-year-old boy dying in an emergency room.

I proceeded slowly into the corner of the hospital room where the boy was hooked up to multiple monitors. The clicks, sighs, and rings of the life-giving equipment overwhelmed me. I was prepared with the sacramental oils in hand, but I was not ready for the anguish of the boy’s mom. The loudest sound in the room was her voice as she leaned over her son and screamed into his face. “Don’t you die!” she yelled. “If you die I will be so angry!” she shouted above all the screeching monitors. As she yelled I noticed the graphs and lights on all of the machines attached to the boy’s body popping up and down. The more she screamed at him, the louder the buzzers and alarms sounded around the boy’s bed.

I watched the boy’s body become rigid and resistant. The sound of her yelling made me nervous and anxious about how to respond to both of them. She finally invited me close to her son’s bed. I approached him from the opposite side where the mother sat on the bed. I could hardly speak. His fear filled me with tears. I slowly began to sing, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” When the boy heard my voice, he started to relax. His face lost its frown and his shoulders let loose. All the graphs and lights on the monitors began to even out.

The mother’s face became red and tight. Her mothering instincts became another kind of monitor. She stared at the machines and became unraveled. She verbally threw me out of the room and told me never to come back. I still pray for her years later because recovering from a child’s death is in God’s hands alone.

“Jesus Remember Me” continues to echo throughout my sacramental ministry, in my memory of those who felt forgotten by illness, aging, or fear. I have sung this refrain in every possible ministry setting. Many times it connects people’s longing to God’s love, and sometimes people are not yet ready to receive that invitation. No matter how people respond I am always changed by people’s courage to face life as it is. I am always brought to profound prayer even when pain divides people from their loved ones. Even when people cannot relate to this song at the time, I always come back to our parish assembly confident that the words of the man who hung next to Jesus still spoke of hope and consolation.

Leaving the safe confines of our communities of worship and taking prayer and music into daily life is never easy. Ourcommon worship depends, however, on people feeling connected to faith and the support of the church in times of profound fear and uncertainty. This is where real music ministry opens us all to reliance on God and the love of people who remember others in good times and in bad. The sung Scripture verse from Taize, “Jesus Remember Me,” helps us all pray through our sorrow and leads us to rely on and praise God. No matter how far into the inconsolable suffering of people this chant may take us, Jesus will no doubt remember us all.

Blessing for the People of God

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Ronald Patrick Raab, C.S.C.

In remembrance of Blessed Basil Moreau
Sunday September 16, 2007
Downtown Chapel
Portland, Oregon