Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Last weekend I was in Salt Lake City for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Let me tell you, it was interesting. I made some good friends, saw a lot of people whom I hadn’t seen in a while, some I saw last week… but it was very interesting. I am convinced in today’s world you can sew a crazy hat and show up, call it a religion and they will give you a seminar. But  generally speaking there were 80 countries and 50 religions represented, 9,500 in attendance. Our Catholic network, CADEIO (cadeio.org), for the first time sponsored a conference- long schedule of seminars and workshops, and provided an authentic Catholic presence where we hadn’t been represented much before. You may have seen in the news that there were “Catholics” there who confused people about our church, some ordained a woman, others tried to let people think that our Church has made changes that she hasn’t made. All the more reason to be there! No longer can we flee from the world because we think we will not be accepted or we will be misrepresented, or even belittled. We must give an authentic witness of who we are. So we did.

I was invited by the World Sikh Council to present the Catholic viewpoint with regard to two tenets of Sikhism that we share in common. The first was with regard to the Langar meal, a  custom began by the first Sikh Guru, Nanak, in the 1400s that has continued to be a hallmark of Sikh life even today. The Langar is an open kitchen, where anyone can come and  receive a home-cooked meal. Anyone. As a sign of the radical equality of Sikh society, all people sit on the floor in rows and members of the community serve them, wave after wave of people who come hungry. I was happy to explain the beautiful custom we now have in Fredericksburg, supported by the many volunteers of Saint Mary and all the downtown churches, of our Community Dinners. You see, you don’t have to be poor to be hungry, and you don’t have to be homeless to be lonely. Our compassion reaches out to all people, us, in the name of Jesus Christ who calls us to do this for the least of our brothers and sisters.

The other topic the Sikhs asked me to present was, as a panel member along with a native American and a Baha’i, the theology of the unity of humanity as created by God. I started with the reflection of Thomas Merton (you can find it in one of my homilies from a few weeks ago at the parish website), then traced the thoughts from Laudato sí (Pope Francis’ new encyclical on human responsibility and the environment), to a beautiful document of the International Theological Commission called “Communion and Stewardship,” to the theology of Henri de Lubac and theologians leading up to Vatican II, with the roots of their thoughts extending back to the first century Fathers of the Church.

I used as part of my presentation a beautiful account I learned this week about the unlikely meeting between Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement of the Church, and  American Muslim Imam W. D. Muhammed of New York in Harlem, 1996. She said, “It seems that the Lord has placed him beside us, and the Lord has placed us beside him. Let’s go deep into our hearts where God is present and tell him we want to do this: We want good faith. We want to serve. We want to be brothers and sisters.”

He wrote, ” Once the oneness of God is impressed upon the heart, our nature transcends race, it transcends beliefs. It resides in the heart and makes us one, as God is one.”

When we approach our brothers and sisters in the human family of God our Father, if our encounter is honest and open to real encounter, it is something beyond a press photo or an annual meeting. I used in my presentation a new idea. In another Vatican document, “Dialogue and Proclamation,” dialogue is described in four ways: the dialogue of life, of (spiritual)experience, of theological exchange and of social action. When we approach one another on an interreligious level, that is, the level of completely different world religions, we begin  with the dialogue between God and his creation, when by his Word he created all things and declared them good. This “Dialogue of Creation” is a new idea and, as I suggested in my paper, must be the ideal upon which all other dialogues between peoples must be based.

God has created no one who is deaf to his Word.

We have been prepared from the beginning by God for the moment of meeting, sensitive hearts ready to meet.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

There have been several meetings referred to as a Parliament of the World’s Religions, the first being the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893, which was an attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths. The event was celebrated by another conference on its centenary in 1993, again in Chicago. This led to a new series of conferences under the official title of the  Parliament of the World’s Religions which have taken place since every few years in Kyoto, Cape Town, Barcelona, Monterrey, Melbourne, and this year in Salt Lake City.

In 1893, the city of Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition, an early world’s fair. So many people were coming to Chicago from all over the world that many smaller  conferences, called Congresses and Parliaments, were scheduled to take advantage of this unprecedented gathering. A number of congresses were held in conjunction with the exposition, including those dealing with anthropology (one of the major themes of Exposition exhibits), labor, medicine, temperance, commerce and finance, literature, history, art, philosophy, and science. One of these was the World’s Parliament of Religions.

The 1893 Parliament, which ran from 11 to 27 September, marked the first organized gathering of representatives of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Today it is recognized as the occasion of the birth of formal interreligious dialogue worldwide.

I’m not with you this weekend because, as president of CADEIO (in my last year until April), I’m participating in the Catholic program that our Association has prepared for the 2015 Parliament. We have prepared seminars based on the newest developments in interreligious dialogue, especially the fresh approach that Pope Francis has encouraged based on  relationship. I will be working mostly as a speaker in a seminar and a panel with the Sikhs, a dialogue between Catholics and leaders of the Sikh religion which I attended for the first  five or six years that I came to Saint Mary.

It is a time that people of all religions are going to gather—about 10,000 people in all—to pray for peace, for harmony in our environment, for growth in understanding and  conversation and renewed efforts to help alleviate hunger, suffering and violence through collaboration in what Pope Francis has called the “Dialogue of Action.” It is good to talk about it, it is even better to do something about it! Our goal is to start working on these social reforms together.

I will be the homilist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine at the Saturday Vigil Mass this weekend, and I will remember all of you and our parish’s hopes and needs in all these areas.  My daily prayer for Saint Mary is that we will awaken to the presence of God who is so present to us though we don’t necessarily think of him, or remember his goodness toward us too often. We need to learn how to see him in our most difficult situations, in the most forgotten people, in serving those who need to know Jesus through us the most.

For those of you who have subscribed on the parish website for periodic announcements and reflections, I won’t be recording a homily this week, but will resume the weekend after.

This trip to Salt Lake City will be the final significant obligation I will have for CADEIO until after Easter! I’m so looking forward to things slowing down a little and just enjoying being a pastor. Also the several trips I have taken to Kansas have accomplished our family’s goal. We have prepared the farm for sale and now the remaining contents of the house will go in  in auction later in November. I will still try to go home when I can for a couple days at a time to visit Mom.

Sunday the 25th we will begin a three-class series on Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato sí. If you would like to participate, you can download a copy free of charge in pdf format—please let’s start reading it so that our discussions will be meaningful. We will discuss the document the first two Sundays and plan a parish response in action to the document on the third. By the way, the words Laudato sí are the beginning of the prayer that Saint Francis really wrote—the Canticle of Creation:

Be praised, my Lord, for all your creation and especially for our Brother Sun, who brings us the day and the light; he is strong and shines magnificently…

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

You might not believe this, but as I was cleaning out our basement in Kansas there were a lot of things that my mom and dad just never threw out. A lot of things from our youth were still there as reminders of a long-distant past. Sometimes you realize how different things are today revealed in the simplest things.

I found my old electric typewriter that my parents gave me when I went away to college. It had its own plastic case that looked like a lumpy briefcase. My older brother John, who was  ne year earlier in technology, had a manual return (this means you had to raise your hand and hit the return arm on the carriage to return the position of the drum to the left margin and advance one line lower on the typing paper in order to start typing another line on the page). My electric typewriter, one year more advanced, had a modern and sleek electric return button.

It still turned on, I thought I would give it a try. I made a lot of mistakes. My typing fingers have grown weaker. Confronted with my mistakes, I used a correction cartridge that was still inside the case, but it was dry with age. I remembered how difficult it was to type before these cartridges were invented and you had to line up the striker with the typed letter on the page. It got a whole lot more complicated if you were typing carbon copies (you see, we didn’t have copiers or liquid white-out yet in those days).

I realized how much harder we used to try not to make mistakes, because they weren’t easy to fix. I studied typing in high school, and was pretty proud of my 110 words per minute with a minimum of typos. I loved those IBM Selectrics.

Typing on a computer today you can be a whole lot more careless, fixes are just a delete or backspace button away. I have allowed my skills to get sloppy. We get to make a lot of  mistakes today and it is so easy to hide all of them, still giving a good impression with our work.

Our lives have gone this way, too. Most people today don’t even know how much discipline might be required to achieve excellence, we settle for “good enough” all too often. We don’t even have to learn how to spell anymore, or write by hand, the machine even takes care of matching subjects and verbs for us. There is a great deal of typing being done today, people writing about how machines are replacing our skills, our excellence, our relationships. Isn’t a conference call as good as a meeting, anyway? I knew a young man who attended ecumenical meetings who told me one time that his best friends were actually Facebook friends. I asked him if he ever met them face-to-face, in person. “No,” he said, “don’t need to.”

And yet I’m pretty sure they said the same thing about the printing presses and calculators, we need them all. All good gifts come from God, but always require that we still engage our brains when incorporating such tools in our lives. Gifts are intended to enhance, strengthen, expand our human abilities, not replace them.

The keynote speaker at my college graduation commencement was a university president from California, I believe. He commented about the advances and new trends of thought that  were transforming our society—this was 30 years ago before the personal computer was even invented. Some were good, some were bad, he said. It is important to keep an open  mind…as long as you don’t open it so far that your brains fall out.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

It’s time again for one of those periodic columns when we catch up with a lot of housekeeping items, things that need to be mentioned for the good order of our community. Please give careful attention, and help one another in kindness to make our life together more fruitful and effective.

Volunteers. Please plan to join us on October 22 for our annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner. If you have volunteered in any capacity at Saint Mary or Holy Cross Academy, I invite you for an evening of dinner and dancing at Holy Cross Academy, prepared and served by your parish staff! We gather together for a home-cooked
dinner and dancing to a great local band, Blue Tips Rhythm Revue, to thank you for your service to our parish family. It is always a lot of fun and I have the honor of giving out Volunteer of the Year Awards to those whose nominations again them the distinction of being some of our most treasured volunteers.

Hope. Some of us from Saint Mary gathered together and represented our parish family at the Hope Over Heroin event last weekend Friday and Saturday nights. People who were trying to beat drug addiction, parents who were looking for answers for their children with addictions, and volunteers from all over Fredericksburg came and ate a lot of cookies, and spoke with us. Especially as we had been listening to Pope Francis all week, I was filled with the truth that there was no other place that we should be at that moment, no other people we were placed here to serve than these people who needed to know the support of their community. It was good to be there to let them know that we were there for them. So many parents, since we have announced we were involved in this program, ave communicated their relief knowing that their Church truly cared. All I can say is that I am sorry that we haven’t been more involved in such real community issues up until now. We are here for you, and we care.

Thanks, Bishop Loverde. I understand that most of you have received a mailing from the Diocese asking you to fill out a spiritual bouquet card. All of them will be given to Bishop Loverde at the celebration of his 50th anniversary of priesthood (December 18) in early November. All of us know how important it is to be recognized for our goodness; even though we wouldn’t actively seek it for ourselves, it brings great satisfaction. Probably you know that Bishop Loverde reached his 75th birthday on September 3, the day on which all bishops submit a letter of resignation and retirement to the Holy Father. It is up to Pope Francis to decide when he accepts that resignation and his new assignments have come anywhere between nine and 15 months. Bishop Loverde’s anniversary is an opportunity for all of us in the Diocese to let him know how much he has done for us. He has been a true father, a good teacher and an especially good friend for us at Saint Mary, always supporting our initiatives and growth, as well as often looking to our parish to pioneer many of his programs. We have a great debt of thanks to him, so it is appropriate that everyone respond to this request. A spiritual bouquet is a gift we give to another consisting of prayers, sacrifices, good deeds  which we offer in his intention. The benefit of our good deeds is given to him, for his needs and the intentions he has in his own heart. Please respond generously with your gifts of sincere thanks.

Church kids. Parents, please consider the needs of people around you if your children are fussy at Mass. They can’t help it, but you can help us. When children seem to be more than momentarily upset, please know that we share  our frustration but hope that you will enable us to hear and better join in Mass participation. Please do not feel embarrassed if you need to step out of the church for a moment. Again, if  you don’t have children who are upset, you should not be in the cry room at all, it is reserved for noise and those who are looking for refuge with noisy children. It is NOT a play room alternative during Mass. Parents, also please keep your children from damaging our new pews. They are already in bad condition in some places. Also, I’m told, children have been gathering unsupervised by parents in the restrooms and playing, and running us out of paper products. Please keep an eye out for us. Thanks. Nobody likes to stop in and suddenly realize there is no paper, as happened often last weekend.

You are Called and Gifted. Last call: this weekend we begin the Called and Gifted Workshop. October 9 and 10. Please don’t miss it. We don’t know how often we will be able to repeat this blessing to our parish.

God bless you,