New Beginnings

          This past year has been like a 365 day long Good Friday.  It will be a year this June that I left a parish where I had served for seventeen years.  I was pastor there for fourteen.  I have derived great meaning and joy from all of my assignments as a priest, but being pastor of Holy Family was a great fit for me and for, I think, many of the parishioners.  Jackson Carroll, in his book God’s Potters, speaks of the importance of there being, what he calls, a good fit between a pastor and a congregation. 

        Several times last year, I went to Archdiocesan officials and asked for a little more time to finish a building project that we were in the midst of and, perhaps, to help break in the new pastor; but every person or people in authority that I went to were united in the mandate that I had to leave.  This was the case despite other men my age being allowed to stay on beyond their term limits.  I eventually had to accept the reality of the situation and I began to do anticipatory grief for months.  I would count off the weeks and the days that I had left.  I would look around the church at people I had grown to love and wondered what life would be like without them.  I would look at children, teens and young adults, many of whom were growing up and had grown up during my time at the parish. My heart would ache, for I knew the reality of the situation -  that many of these relationships would no longer continue.

            I was not approached by the Archdiocese to take another parish.  I began a conversation with the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago to consider work in healthcare at The Clare, a continuing care retirement community downtown.  I said yes to their offer because it gave me a safe place for service; and then I began a process of seeking a residence or a parish where I could help out.  I must have sent about thirty letters out, most of them to Archdiocesan pastors.  None of them responded positively.  One pastor in the Diocese of Joliet did; and that is where I have ended up helping out, St. Thomas the Apostle in Naperville. 

        As the time for my leaving the parish neared, things became very painful.  In some cases, I was leaving working relationships that I had for years, one that I had for over thirty years.  Though 74% of parishioners surveyed wanted me to stay on, at the end there was little fight on my behalf.  People that I considered friends began to distance themselves from me personally.  They became more advocates for the change and transition than concerned about me.  Among some, there were gossip and accusations about my poor style of leadership.  I got through the final mass, the party, the turbulent ordeal of cleaning out after seventeen years, and moving to two new locations for ministry.

         I had thought the ending or the departure was going to be the hard part, but as William Bridges says in his work on transition, the neutral zone or the moratorium period that follows an ending can be more painful than the ending.  I would sit during the summer of ’09 in a small office that I have at The Clare feeling lost and lonely.  I had been accustomed to working with a big staff.  I am a department of one.  I had worked with 3800 households.  Now I was ministering to less than 100 people.  Though I have an additional responsibility to also minister to the staff at The Clare, I could feel myself losing confidence.  I looked ahead at speaking and teaching engagements that were coming up in the future and I felt that I could not do them, that I had nothing to say.  Yet, for each of them, I diligently prepared and prayed for courage, and remarkably most of them were very effective and successful. 

        This has been the loneliest and most painful experience of my lifetime.  It has involved a lot of grieving.  I have lost almost everything that gave my life joy and fulfillment: my role as pastor of Holy Family; the faith home and the faith community that I had with the people there; the creative position that I had in leading adult evangelization and catechesis; acquaintances and friendships that gave me a sense of connection; friends whom I just do not see as frequently as I once did.  There were times when I felt that I did not think I would get through this; but through faith and prayer, I pulled through.

         They say that the experience of grief is resolved when you can “remember with less pain”; and I think that is where I am at this Easter.  I can remember this past year now and it does not hurt as much, but it still hurts.  A book I read a many years ago by the theologian Gregory Baum has greatly influenced me.  The title is Man Becoming. In this book, Gregory Baum speaks of the whole human family as in a process of evolution and development down through the ages, growing in consciousness and morality.  He speaks of each individual person in each of our lives as a process of becoming – becoming the self we are meant to become.  In a very intense way that is what this year has been for me.  I have been a man becoming, a person becoming.  And I can see now in hindsight, not only was I growing in the experience of remembering with less pain as I describe the resolution of grief, I have been becoming new.  I have been rising.  I have been being transformed.

       I can see in many ways that I had lost myself in my role as pastor and in the flurry of activity of that big parish.  I have begun to discover a lost self.  I have begun to dig out a buried self.  I have, through faith, discovered what Paul Tillich calls courage to be, or Baum and I might call the courage to become.  Tillich speaks of faith in Jesus Christ as the experience of Jesus as the New Being; and for all of us who believe, becoming new beings in Christ.  Tillich looks on the human family as, in many ways, being estranged from each other, from God, and the self each of us is meant to be.  Through faith in the risen Jesus, this estrangement, alienation, and division begin to be healed.  We grow in the experience of oneness and integrity with ourselves, others, and God.  That has been my experience this last year.  I am becoming.  I have been becoming and am becoming a new self.  I live each day with the words of Jesus on the cross, “Into Your hands I commend my spirit. Into Your hands, I hand over my life.”  It is this disposition of trust and surrender into God that is transforming me and making me new.

       In the last year, I have developed skills that I did not have before.  I have been able to do research that I did not have time for in the past.  I have been learning anew, facing new challenges, new responsibilities, developing new relationships while holding on to cherished ones.  I am much more God-dependent than I have been in a long time.  I am much more aware of my need for my fellow person.  I appreciate moments of friendship that I occasionally have with some people.  I appreciate prayer and the Eucharist more than I ever have before.  I trust the paschal process – that we constantly are moving from life through death to new life; and the process will continue through our actual physical deaths when we are blessed with eternal life. 

       Going to back to Bridges and his work on transitions, Bridges suggests that new beginnings often start in that neutral or moratorium zone when we are in the midst of transition.  Sometimes new beginnings cannot be seen or understood by the person or people in the transition.  I believe that.  I believe that in my life, and in all of our lives, the seeds of new beginnings are already at work.  The cross that hangs in Holy Family Parish is called the Cross of New Life.  It mysteriously presents Jesus as rising to Resurrection and eternal life in the midst of the experience of his cross.  The artist was trying to say that death and Resurrection are not two separate events, but are intermingled.  Resurrection flows from the experience of the cross.  That has been my experience.  Throughout my life and especially this year, I believe that I am rising with Jesus to new life.  I believe, through the mercy of God, I will rise with Jesus someday to eternal life.

         I do not mean to over-personalize this Easter message.  I am trying to give witness to my belief in the paschal process and in the Christ event.  I am trying to say that I find the Christ event, the Resurrection, believable because I sense the same kind of process going on in and through me.  But know that resurrection is much bigger than Pat Brennan.  St. Paul, in Corinthians and elsewhere, speaks of Jesus having engaged in the one perfect sacrifice.  Sacrifice was a ritual that Jewish people and other people engaged in to enter more fully into the realm of God, more fully into the presence of God.  Jesus has once and for all united the human family with each other and with God.  It just takes time for the human family to fully appreciate and understand the experience.  St. Irenaeus, one of the fathers of the Church, spoke of Jesus as the homo futurus.  He looked on the risen, glorified Jesus as the fulfillment of all human development and evolution.  He saw us not descending from apes, but all of us striving to ascend to the Risen Christ.  I have already mentioned Paul Tillich’s reference to Jesus as the New Being, in whom all of us become new beings alive in the Spirit, alive in the Reign of God. 

        Let us try to keep in mind some of the essentials of the death and Resurrection experience that the scriptures present to us.  The scriptures of these holy days tell us that in the paschal mystery there will be painful Good Friday endings.  There will also be fearful, lonely, lacking in hope, neutral zone/moratorium-like Holy Saturdays.  And then there will be Easter Sundays of new beginnings, beginnings of new life here on earth, the beginning of eternal life after death.  As with Jesus, as we pass through this paschal process, when we get to the new beginning, we are the same; our identity is intact; but we are changed.  We are transformed – growing and converting here on earth, and glorified with Jesus in eternal life after death.   Let Easter be a celebration of the profound hope and deep meaning for life that the good news of Resurrection brings to each of us and all of us.

The Seven Last Words of Jesus

           “Let us go on to the other towns so that I may proclaim the Reign of God there also,  for that is why I came.”  (Luke 4:43)

           In that short passage, Jesus describes his mission and why he came to the world.  He revealed in three years of teaching, preaching, and miracles the nature of the Reign of God.  But there was one final piece that he had to reveal; and that was the truth about life, death, and Resurrection.  And so, as we said on Palm Sunday, he resolutely moved toward Jerusalem.  There he was led to Calvary, nailed to a cross, and for three hours was crucified.  From that cross he said seven things.  He gave profound teachings.

           The first word from the cross: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”  (Luke 23:34)  He hung on a cross as a condemned criminal. He was without his clothes.  Thorns pierced his head.  Blood was running over his eyes, down his arms, and from his feet.  At the foot of the cross were skeptics and guards, religious leaders, the soldiers mocking and jeering.  There were the heat, the insects, and the sensation of suffocation.  His first word, in the midst of this sea of pain, is to ask the Father to forgive the people who are crucifying him.  In his teaching from the cross, Jesus offers us important wisdom.  We are not to allow anger and resentment over hurt to grow within us.  We are to try to understand people who hurt us, give forgiveness as a free gift, and ask God to forgive such people.  Whom should we be forgiving from our hearts? 

        We hear from the criminals hanging with Jesus.  One reviled Jesus saying, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us.”  The other said, “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?  We have been condemned justly; for the sentence corresponds to our crimes. This man has done nothing wrong.”  Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Jesus spoke his second word from the cross.  (Luke 23:43) “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”  At the end of both of their lives, Jesus promises heaven to a criminal.  Dying, Jesus gives witness to his conviction and belief that there is a new dimension of being awaiting us on the other side of death and it is heaven.  God wants to grant heaven to those who seek it and want it.  As we are aware of the pain of being human, let us be of hope in this teaching from the cross that suffering and death are not dead ends, and that eternal life is offered to all of us.

           The third from the cross:  “Woman, behold your son; Son behold your mother.”  (John 19:26-27)  He had lost everything: his clothing and his supportive relationships.  Only his mother and a few disciples remained with him.  In an act of love, Jesus gives away a precious gift.  He gives his mother to the beloved disciple.  He gives his mother to the beloved disciple so that he might watch over her, and so that she might watch over him.  In fact, Jesus gives his mother, shares his mother, with all disciples in the future.  The mother of God has become the mother of us all.  There is a special bond between sons and mothers.  How hard it must have been for Mary to see her son’s life ebb away.  Although Jesus believed in Paradise, how difficult it must have been to say goodbye to her.  We have all had painful goodbyes through death.  Let us be conscious of some of the people we have lost, who are paradoxically still with us in the communion of saints.

           The fourth word from the cross:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  (Matthew 27:46)  As death nears, Jesus feels depths of despair.  Have any one of us ever felt so low that we felt that God had abandoned us?  At least for a short while, that was the felt experience of Jesus.  The physical, emotional, and spiritual pain must have been crushing.  Jesus is a faithful man.  In expressing despair, he is praying Psalm 22, a psalm of lament.  Psalms of lament usually end with an affirmation of faith.  Jesus knew the end of Psalm 22 also:  “I will proclaim your name to the assembly; in community I will praise you.  I will live for the Lord.  Each generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance that you have brought.”  Let us be conscious of people who suffer from depression.  Let us pray that they can rediscover hope. 

           The fifth word:  “I thirst.”  (John 19:28)  Jesus is still praying Psalm 22, making reference to his thirst.  The psalm speaks of dried parched lips and a scorched throat.  That must have been the experience of Jesus since he probably had nothing to eat or drink since the Last Supper with his apostles.  Jesus’s thirst, however, is a sign and symbol of a deeper thirst that he had – a thirst that he had all of his life.  He was hungry and thirsty for the Reign of God.  He was hungry and thirsty for more and more people to abandon lives of power, aggression, materialism and hedonism to pursue a life of connection and communion with God and with each other.  That is the Reign of God.  In teaching us about the Reign of God, even from the cross, Jesus reminds us about our deepest hungers and thirsts.  We hunger and thirst for the God-centeredness and the connection and the meaning that is found in the vision and the lifestyle of life in God’s Reign.  Often these hungers and thirsts that we have go unattended or we try to fill the void in our lives with that which cannot satisfy.  As we experience thirst with Jesus, let us be prayerfully conscious of the many people around the world who are dying of hunger and thirst, poverty, and homelessness.  Let us make distributive and social justice more and more a part of our spirituality so that the resources of this world will be shared more generously and equitably with all people. 

          The sixth word from the cross:  “Into Your hands I commend my Spirit.”  (Luke 23:46)  Jesus approached his whole crucifixion with faith and he continues to pray, this time Psalm 31.  He is ending his life with perhaps the most beautiful articulation of what life in God’s Reign is about:  total trust in and total surrender to the unconditional and providential love that God has for each of us and all of us.  I know from first hand experience that living the attitude behind the words, Into Your hands I commend my Spirit, can help so much with the anxiety, stress, and depression that so many of us deal with in our lifestyles. Let us live each day, “Father Into Your hands……”

           The seventh word from the cross:  “It is finished.”  (John 19:30) At times perhaps, not morbidly, but realistically, we fear what the final passage will be like.  Did Jesus feel what many others who are approaching death experience?  Did he sense or experience the spirit of his father Joseph or other beloved people who preceded him in death?  Jesus went closer and surrendered into the final passage.  His work was finished.  The mission, His quest to usher in the Reign of God was finished; but He was not finished.  He went on to Resurrection and to glory; and He has sent his Spirit among us so that people of all ages might live as His disciples, the Body of Christ in the world.  Let us be conscious of all who are imminently facing death.  Let us be one with them and the people who love them who are being called, as Mary and others were called, to let the loved one go. 

           The final word of Jesus is found in Matthew 28:  “Go out into the world, make disciples, teach them everything I taught you, and know I am with you until the end of time.”  His mission is now our mission.  Part of that mission is to always share with the people in our lives the truth and the good news of life, death, and resurrection.  In the movie, The Passion of the Christ  by Mel Gibson, when Jesus is given the cross He is portrayed as taking the cross; and before He carries it, He kisses it.  He reverences it.  He reverences the wood of the cross, which is a sign and symbol of the mystery He is experiencing, a mystery that frightens Him, terrifies Him; but which He, nonetheless, totally embraced.  I invite us to come forward to venerate the cross of Jesus Christ.  True veneration is to express our love and gratitude toward Him, our Savior, and to express also our trust in the paschal, passage process, and mystery.

       I received my doctorate from the Adler School of Professional Psychology.  Alfred Adler and his followers stressed the importance of retrieving memories and early recollections in the course of doing psychotherapy.  Adlerians believed that people remember things for a reason and that events we can remember, especially from early childhood, can be indicators of the status of personality and emotional pain and conflict in the present.  Thus, retrieving and reflecting on some early memories help a client to discover who he or she really is. 

           We hear in the scriptures today that the ancient Jews were given a mandate to eat a Passover meal yearly; and when they ate that meal, they were to remember Moses leading the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt through the Red Sea to freedom.  They were to remember the angel of death, who passing over the Jewish people, brought death to the Egyptians.  The Jewish people of ancient times also valued the importance of memory.  They used memory every time they ate the Passover meal and for every other ritual meal that was similar to the Passover. They believed that when we recalled God’s past saving events, the past events became present again.  Through the sharing of the food at the Passover or Seder Meal, they became one again with these saving, liberating activities of God. 

        Jesus shared a Passover meal with his apostles the night before he died.  Jesus was aware of the power of memory at meals like the one he offered on the first Holy Thursday night.  Jesus told his followers to repeat, to offer, this first Holy Thursday meal in his memory.  The implication was that when the followers of Jesus remember Him at the Eucharist, He is present again.  Jesus felt a connection with the meal and what would happen on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  We remember Jesus we remember Him in the saving, liberating activity of His death and Resurrection.  When we take communion into ourselves, we are becoming one with Jesus in the mystery of His and our living, dying, and rising.  We not only receive Holy Communion, we become holy communion with Him and with each other.  The gift that Jesus gave us on Holy Thursday night, the gift of the Eucharist, is an intense experience of what Jesus meant when he taught about the Reign of God.  Let us be grateful this Holy Thursday for the great gift of the Eucharist.

           The news has been carrying a story these past days of a teenage girl who committed suicide as a result of other girls bullying her and abusing her and actually telling her to kill herself.  School bullying is much more prevalent than many of us realize.  It actually has taken on a new term – mobbing.  Mobbing is the group abuse of a student on a school setting.  Mobbing has expanded to the workforce. There is research that sometimes employees are psychologically mobbed by fellow employees to the point of having to leave work, or in adult situations, the mobbed person experiencing psychological breakdown or committing suicide.  In other countries besides the United States, mobbing has become a crime.

        Jesus, on Holy Thursday night and Good Friday, was mobbed.  A group of mass minded people decided that He had to gotten rid of; He had to be executed.  He was a threat to the domination system of the religion of the time and the political status quo.  Before he was mobbed, Jesus engaged in an important, prophetic, symbolic act.  He who would come to be known as Lord and Savior knelt down and washed the feet of his followers.  He gave us an example, at that Last Supper, of how we are to be with each other: not aggressive; not violent; not overpowering.  We are to be servant leaders.  We are to be leaders in our world by serving one another.  As we share this Eucharist in His memory and experience His real presence again today, we engage in a ritual that is reflective of His foot washing.  We will wash each other’s hands as a sign and symbol that we embrace Jesus’s teaching that we are to be servants.  We are to lead by serving.