It's been a month

A month ago I left for a twelve day visit to the United States. I’ve been back here in Honduras a little more than two weeks.

Yesterday I realized that I have not written about either experience, except for a Mass for the victim of a killing.

I won’t belabor you with details of my trip to the United States. It was largely to visit cousins and friends on the East Coast – most of whom I had not seen for at least two years. I had a few special surprises – seeing two guys who were undergraduate together with me and whom I hadn’t seen for 45 years! I also spoke at the University of Scranton, my undergraduate school, sharing a bit about my experience here in Honduras. A highlight was a get together of cousins on my mother’s side as well as a great visit with a cousin on my dad’s side. There were a good number of other joys.

I spent a few days in the New York City area and did take advantage of my time to visit a few museums, see friends, and even run into someone who had graduated in 1991 from Iowa State. I got to the Thomas Merton at Columbia University and saw his letter asking for conscientious objector status.

One of the most enjoyable experiences was spending a few hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with five adults and four kids (between one and half and eight years old).

While waiting for a friend near Columbia I visited a sculpture park just south of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This image of a dove captivated my imagination.

When I got back to Plan Grande on April 21 I had a lot of work waiting for me.

First I had to facilitate a workshop on liturgy for one of the parish. I had done the workshop before, but a number of circumstances led me to do it almost singlehandedly.

Then I had a two day workshop on Transformation of Conflicts for Caritas staff. I had asked Sister Pat Farrell to help me and so we spent a full day preparing. We both had read and appreciate Crucial Conversations which we used for part of the workshop. This first attempt to work together went well; maybe we have a road show!

The day after the workshop I visited a contact at Beneficio Santa Rosa to try to arrange processing and shipping of coffee from the coop in formation which I wrote about in April here. It looks as if they will be able to help; I’m waiting to hear from them – hopefully soon.

Friday was May Day, a national holiday – to celebrate workers. I spent it working on materials for the catechists workshops.

Saturday I accompanied Padre German to Mar Azul for the funeral of a church leader who had been killed there. I briefly wrote about that here.

This week I had two catechists workshops – 23 arrived on Tuesday, 17 today. I’ll have two more next week.

One of the more interesting, though troubling, part of one workshop was the response of one small group who was working on identifying sins of specific age groups and how to work with them on these issues.

The group working on kids between 10 and 13 at first identified “curiosity” as a sin. I controlled myself and just asked them what they meant. They were concerned that kids had curiosity about things like animals copulating. I asked enough questions to help them see that curiosity is not the real issue and it is hardly a sin. I even got them to ask if the problem is that there are not many good resources for young people to satisfy their curiosity in a way that will help them mature in healthy and moral ways. I suggested that the problem is not curiosity but the failure of church people to really speak to young people about sexuality in a healthy positive way – not just saying “Don’t fornicate.”

Now sexuality may be a major issue to consider this year!

I’ve brought it up at both catechists’ training sessions and will do it again this coming week. We’ll see if I’m run out of town for bringing these issues up!

Tomorrow I have a meeting of the leaders of base communities in one of the parish zones. It’s the first time I’ve done it alone and I’m still not sure what I’ll do.

What’s coming up?

On May 16 Padre German will be officially installed by the bishop as pastor of the Dulce Nombre parish; he’s been the pastoral administrator for more than two years. God willing, I will also be admitted as a candidate to the diaconate at the same Mass.

May 23 is the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero. God willing, I will go for the beatification – but taking a few more days in El Salvador to visit with friends.

It’s busy – but I still have time for reading, writing, praying, and quiet – even though I have a sinsonte that accompanies me when I pray in the morning. (Supposedly the  sinsonte is a mockingbird; but my visitor is black, and so is, possibly, Melanoptila glabrirostris).

Thank God for everything – even the sinsonte. At least the chiquirines - cicadas - have moved away. For the first few days back, they were my alarm clock – loudly proclaiming the dawn at almost exactly 5:12 am, three days in a row!

Service at the altar and the table of the poor

...service of the poor is the logical consequence 

of service of the altar. 

Basic Norms for the Formation of Permanent Deacons,  73

For several decades ago, I have connected worship with service to the poor and the pursuit of justice. Perhaps it was in the early 1960s when I attended a meeting of the Liturgical Conference. Several speakers connected the liturgy with care for the poor.

Dorothy Day is perhaps the greatest example of a person who tried to live this in her life. The Catholic Worker houses included feeding the poor and worshipping the Lord. I saw here several times – once at Mass in Rosary parish in the Lower East side and once at a Friday night clarification of thought at the Catholic Worker around the corner. She was at home in both places.

Some of her inspiration came from the Benedictine monk Father Virgil Michel, a pioneer of the liturgical movement in the US, who saw the relation of the altar and the world. In the February 1940 issue of Orate Fratres, he wrote:

What the early Christians thus did at the altar of God, in the central act of Christian worship, they also lived out in their daily lives. They understood fully that the common action of worship was to be the inspiration of all their actions. They knew well that their common giving of themselves to God and to the brethren of Christ was in fact a solemn promise made to God that they would live their lives in this same love of God and of God‘s children, their brethren in Christ, throughout all the day. Unless they did that, their action before God would be at best lip-service, a lie before God.

The deacon is meant to show sacramentally the connection. As Pope John Paul II said to deacons in the US in 1987:

...the word of God inevitably leads us to the Eucharistic worship of God at the altar; in turn, this worship leads us to a new way of living which expresses itself in acts of charity.  

Rev. Paul McPartlan makes this clear with a beautiful image:

The deacon stands at the altar and prepares the gifts with clean hands, but he stands also where the practical need is greatest, getting his hands very dirty. 

There should exist no gap between the altar and the world. Indeed, we bring ourselves and all the world to the table of the Lord – so that the bread and wine may be transformed in the Body and Blood of Christ and so that we may be transformed into the Body of Christ in a world that will be transformed by Christ.

As Bishop (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper said in a 1977 speech:

Through his ministry in liturgy, preaching and diaconia, [the deacon] has the chance make people aware of the link between faith and life. In his service at the altar he sets the needs of man on the table of the Eucharist; and of course he includes them in his preaching. He has to make the parishes sensitive to all situations, where need exists and to motivate them to work with each other and for each other.

As my friend Fr. Tim Shugrue has said and written, the deacon ought to make the needs of the poor made known in his homilies.

Some writers have suggested that the deacon ought to have the ear of the bishop so that he can share with him the needs of the poor and marginalized in the diocese. A bishop at the Council of Trent wrote that all the needs of the people are mediated to the bishop by deacons.

I don’t know if I have the courage to do this. But I do feel that God may be calling me to another step to serve those most in need by being a sign of the real connection between life and the table of the Lord. And then may the Lord give me the grace to listen to the poor and share their concerns with the People of God – including the bishop.

Maybe in this way, I can begin to help our parish live out the vision of the Entrance Hymn of the Salvadoran People’s Mass:

Vamos todos al banquete
a la mesa de la Creación,Cada cual con su taburetetiene un puesto y una misión. We are all going to the banquet
to the table of Creation.
All of us with our stools
have a place and a mission.

Timothy Shugrue, in an article in the collection Forming Deacons: Ministers of Soul and Leaven:

It would be a real contribution to the life of the community if, every time we heard a deacon, we came away with an insight into possibilities for responding to a need that his natural sensitivity, strengthened by the grace of orders, has helped us to recognize or feel with greater intensity and with the idea that some practical remedy is within our reach. 

Deacon as servant

On May 16, God willing, Bishop Darwin Andino of the diocese of Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, will receive me as a candidate for the diaconate.

As I noted in a previous post, this is not something that I had sought. But after urging from Padre German and Bishop Andino, and much discernment, accompanied by prayer, reading, and conversations with friends and advisors, I felt called to accept the call to begin the journey toward the diaconate.

There is no assurance that I will be ordained to the permanent order of the diaconate, but I leave all that in God’s hands.

In the next days leading up to day of my admission as a candidate, I will try to write something about the diaconate and my sense of what this would mean for me.

CALLED TO SERVE

When I was discerning if I was being called to come to Honduras, my spiritual director, as well as two good friends, asked me why.

My immediate response was “to serve those most in need.”

That has been central to my pastoral ministry here, even though I have not always lived it.

But these questions guide my presence here in western Honduras:

• How can I serve God’s people in need? 
• How can I help them make a difference in their lives in all its aspects? 
• How can I accompany them as they week to become people who live lives of dignity and reflect the vision of the Reign of God that is central to Jesus’ teaching?

When I began reading about the diaconate, I was struck at the centrality of service to the life and mission of a deacon.

In Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the bishops call for the restoration of the diaconate as a permanent order. Deacons “serve the People of God in the ministry of the liturgy, of the word, and of charity.”

In later documents it is noted that the deacons is called to be an “animator” or “driving force” for service.

Speaking to deacons in the US in 1987, Pope John Paul II noted:

By your ordination you are configured to Christ in his servant role. You are also meant to be living signs of the servanthood of his Church.

I must admit that this surprised me a bit. My impression of the diaconate, based on my very limited experience in the United States, was of men on the altar who assisted the priest and occasionally preached. I did not see the centrality of service, especially of the poor, in the deacons I encountered.

But an article by Deacon William Ditewig in U.S. Catholic helped open my eyes to the centrality of service.

Praying over this, I saw how the diaconate might be, for me, a confirmation, a sacramentalizing, of what I am already trying to do.

And so my heart was opened a little to a possible call to the diaconate.

Four dead in Ohio, two in Mississippi

On April 30, 1970, US president Richard Nixon announced that the US would launch a military operation in Cambodia, together with South Vietnamese forces, supposedly against North Vietnamese camps there. “This is not an invasion of Cambodia,” Nixon said.

But for many of us this was an invasion. In fact, though, it was not an invasion but the first open admission of US intervention in Cambodia. The US and South Vietnamese had already been undertaking military actions in Cambodia.

Many of us responded – including many university students. I was in my last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Scranton. We demonstrated, sat in the streets, called a student strike, and more.

I'm the guy with hair at the front left.

Ours was a peaceful resistance to an expanding war.

In other places the protests turned violent, in some cases with bottle-throwing and lighting of bonfires.

But what I remember was the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970 – 45 years ago today.

But what many don’t remember was the killing of protestors at Jackson State University on May 15, 1970. Jackson State was a largely African-American University.

Why are these two deaths not often recalled?

Could it be our failure to see those who are not white?

Could this be related to our inability to see the other, those unlike us, who are victims of violence and injustice?

What I think we need is an openness to see all victims of war, injustice, and poverty – not just those like us, not just those who agree with us, not just those who support us or our positions.

Could it be that we need to learn how to “love” one another and, even, the enemy?

Four dead in Ohio, two in Mississippi, 

and thousands in Viet Nam and Cambodia.

Present in the midst of pain and death

Saturday afternoon I accompanied Padre German to a funeral Mass in a village I had never visited. Yesterday a leader in the church community had been killed, leaving a wife and seven children.

The village has no church building, though the man who had been killed had donated a parcel of land to build a church. So the Mass was in the porch of the home.

Padre German chose the Genesis story of Cain and Abel and the Gospel of Jesus on the cross.

He spoke strongly about the horror of the death and the need to forego vengeance. He noted that there was a huge crowd for the deceased – but the killer or killers would probably be experiencing loneliness and a fear that someone would come up and kill them.

This village has experienced a number of deaths recently – and this is at least the sixteenth death in the municipality since January 2014.

I don’t know the details but the real concern is that this will unleash more deaths. In a nation where less that 6% of murders are brought to justice, all too many people take the law into their own hands. And in a country where witnesses cannot count on protection, intimidation and death are often the means to prevent someone from testifying.

But what struck me was the pain. People are hurting. During the Prayer of the Faithful, Padre German invited people to state the names of people in the village and a nearby village who had been killed. There were six or so.

And so, for me, I feel more and more that what I am called to do, at the very least, is be present, in the midst of the suffering.

One of the passages of St. Paul that has moved me for many years are the first verses of his second letter to the Corinthians 1: 3-4:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercy and God of all consolation, who consoles us in our every affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.

I have been blessed with much consolation in the face of difficulties, and I am now beginning to see that God has given this to me so that I can be a sign of consolation to others in affliction.

And there are many who need that consolation – that comfort – that encouragement.