Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

This weekend we are challenged to widen the circle of our identity to go beyond ourselves, to consider the Church as a much broader obligation and opportunity to realize our calling as the Body of Christ. As we traveled through Israel-Palestine and Jordan the past couple of weeks I was haunted by an awareness of our Church that seemed always broader. Not only is there a universal Church with whom we have real solidarity in the life, the breaking of the bread and the prayers, and we experienced the love of brothers and sisters everywhere we went, regardless of language or nationality. But there is also a rising tide of awareness that we who have so much have a profound obligation to share what we have with these brothers and sisters who still wait for us to share the knowledge of the faith as well as the many blessings and security which we have received so undeservingly.

One of the things pilgrimage does is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you have to go far away in order to recognize the truth that lies close to home.

To those who have suggested, in response to the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal, that our obligation lies really with the needs of our local community, I would recommend a pilgrimage of heart that causes one to travel outside of himself and discover somebody else’s life and circumstance.

Each Mass as we prayed in the Eucharistic Prayers for our Holy Father Francis and our Patriarch Archbishop Fouad, I realized that we belong to a remarkable flock, one that spans all time and geography. We are not really the Church of Fredericksburg, or even the Church of Arlington, though that is truly our local Church represented by the person of our successor to the Apostles, Bishop Paul.

To deny this is the foundation of the kind of divisions that so characterize post-modern Christianity, a literal parrochialism that allows us to think only of ourselves. We can justify our isolation because we are unique and special, and don’t have to answer, then, to the needs of others in their own sphere. A cult of opinion can stop listening to God—or anyone else, for that matter.

Our love and support has to be for our community on all these levels; our local Church of Arlington is not merely our guide, it is also our link to the universal Church in seeking response to our obligation as the larger Body of Christ.

We can’t be separate. We have to remain a branch on the vine or we dry up.

The BLA provides a lot of wonderful services and growth for ourselves in Fredericksburg — you can see Bishop’s mailing for a long list of things we ourselves benefit from. It also gives expression to the kind of outreach that only a diocese can do, as well as connectedness to world-level charity, peace and justice to which we would otherwise have no access. Please, let’s get the Appeal started and finished quickly–not because it is something we have to do, but because it is who we are.

As last year, there are matching funds for every dollar you increase your commitment from last year, a great benefit for the Church of Arlington.

I challenge each and every family in the parish to give something, no matter the amount. Not because it is a task, but because it is who you are, as a member of this Body who sees need and responds with love.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Greetings from the Holy Land. We have prayed for you everywhere we go, all this weekend we are in the city of Jerusalem and include you in our pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane, House of Caiafas, the Way of the Cross, Calvary and Jesus’ empty tomb.

As I write this letter it is Tuesday evening, my room looks out at the Sea of Galilee. This afternoon we took local minibuses to the top of Mount Tabor where Jesus is transfigured appearing with Elijah and Moses, in front of Peter, James and John. On the mountaintop is a beautiful last-century basilica with perfectly maintained architecture, art and glass by the Holy Land Franciscans. The altar in the sanctuary at the heart of the church is built directly above the crown of rock where the event took place. We 30 gathered around the main altar and the space came to life.

I noticed a remarkable acoustical quality that seemed to magnify our sounds as we sang and proclaimed the Word of God and prayed the acclamations. The sound in the lower sanctuary seemed to multiply and fill the upper church above us with a kind of infinite brightness that seemed to emanate, radiate from that altar to the entire church.

I began to imagine on that day the brightness of Christ “like the sun” and that full, fecund sound of the Father’s voice the moment it happened, first and always. I considered the nature of light and sound as it crosses space and never ends, I prayed that our light and our sound might join with that ancient glory showing in the sacred humanity of Christ and that creation-causing sound of God that still shows and echoes today in his universes– both in original form and first-time, new in us. That blast of glory still echoing came back around again on Mount Tabor today, as at every exalted altar, and in every heart who climbs to witness it, in all places known to us, and even in the silent reaches where no one has gone or been able to go to experience it. The glory of God surrounds us and permeates us. Once spoken, it exists forever that it might be heard. If not today, then tomorrow.

The event of Mount Tabor is sometimes compared to those peak moments in people’s lives when the real light finally comes on, God is encountered, we are changed, converted, transfigured; we can never go back to whom we were once before after we have experienced the heights of these thin places near to God.

But it doesn’t have to be the encounter of vastness. I have included here a photo of the view from the top of Mount Tabor. The Jezreel Valley (“Armageddon”) unfolds in front of us. We can see the mountains of Samaria to the south, Haifa to the west, Nazareth just to the north and Lebanon beyond. It seems like a forever vision. But consider how that equal infinity, the limitlessness of the infinite in the plan of God, is also found within. Take an inch, divide it by two, again by two… You can divide endlessly though the parts are endlessly, impossibly small. In the same way that light and sound of God broke forth from the mountaintop, it enters and permeates us infinitely within. I imagine we are more perfectly transfigured in this way, not merely in awe of the sheer expanse.

One thing for sure: he still shines and he still speaks. May we see, and hear.

God bless you.