THE HEAT WAVE continues its relentless assault.

I have spent the day in prayer, answering mail, doing laundry.

Friends downloaded a list of every country on the face of the earth so I can pray for each nation by name.

What a joy to be a member of the human family!

It is not the seemingly obvious wars between nations, as destructive as they are in their own right, which in reality have the greatest number of casualties.

It is that other war, raging in each soul,  in the spirit of each nation, which takes the greater toll.

On the battlefields of mud, soaked with human blood, the physical end comes with physical death.

The casualties of spiritual warfare, unless crying out for His mercy, risk facing an eternal fate.

St. Paul encourages the Corinthians, and all of us, that while we are engaged in the true battle against visible and invisible evil we are well armed {cf. 2 Cor.10:3,4} and speaking to the Ephesians advises us on how to be protected as well {cf.Ep.6:16,17} – simply put, not to rely on our own strength!

Of course this means we strive to live in reality, to live the Beatitudes, to live with and for Christ, to be filled with life, with love – to love!

ONE DAY Father Lot went to Father Joseph and told him, ‘ As far as I can, I keep my rule. I eat little, I pray and am silent. I work with my hands and share my bread with the poor. As best I can, I strive to purify my heart. What else should I do? ‘ Then Father Joseph stood up and stretched out his arms, and from his fingers shot tongues of fire. ‘ If you want, ‘ he said, ‘ you can become a living flame. ‘

To become a living flame: that is the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus the Master……There is no secret about the nature of that fire. It is simply love. Love is the fire the Son of God came to cast on the earth…the burning passion for His Father and for us that bore Him to the Cross and through it to His Resurrection. Love is the fire the risen Lord pours into the hearts of all those who follow Him, those who hear His voice today as well as His first friends.

This love is more than a human word or metaphor. It is the living Spirit of the living God, alive in us. It is the Holy Spirit who pours God’s love into us and makes us living flames. If we want, then, we can become living flames of love because, as Jesus has promised, we shall receive abundantly.

……we are not on fire. Why not?….we are uncertain that such extravagance is either possible or desirable…we are honestly not sure how to ask for the Spirit, even if we do sometimes see clearly that we can have no real joy outside the fire of His love. [i]

Preparing for Holy Mass this evening my heart was moved to celebrate the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit, so as to become open to that very fire.It came to my heart during thanksgiving after Mass that part of the reality of Divine Fire is its purifying aspect. Who wants to be purified, to be burned?The Sacrament of Confession is the purifying fire of His Divine Mercy, so we know the burning is tender, effective, and the fire of His Love more intense, enduring, than His purifying action, because His Mercy is His Love!A purifying and humbling experience of all this for a priest, notwithstanding the personal aspect when he himself is penitent, is in the celebration for the disciples of Christ of the Sacrament of Confession. { True nowadays many say ‘ of Reconciliation’, but that sounds so ‘negotiating’, whereas there is nothing ambiguous about confession!}What is so deeply moving is to be there, fully experiencing the beating, tender, listening Heart of Christ.The Heart of Christ Priest.Listening with love, to the plea of His little ones, the poor, the humble, the trusting of His Mercy.Men, women, children of all backgrounds and with their sins from the seemingly venial to the most grotesque of human depravity and yet, when they come, their trust in Him is exquisite.There is perhaps nothing we understand less about the God who permits evil to exist than His mercy towards those who co-operate with, or initiate, evil.How often am I pleased when people remain behind the grill rather than sit in front of me, for I do not wish any to see me weep.I weep not because of the weight of their sins, but from being touched in the depths of my heart by their humility.Protestants who have lost, and Catholics who have abandoned this Sacrament will argue they can confess their sins to God directly.Mostly that is an illusion.It is true the ever present God hears all prayer, answers all prayer IF it is directed to Him.

Perhaps one of the most scary yet consoling teachings of Christ [cf. Lk. 18:11]  touches directly on this point – scary because the one man prays “to himself” – consoling because the one who most resembles the majority of people simply trusts his plea for mercy will be heard.

It is but one of the teachings from Jesus about how God our Father judges the human heart.To whom am I confessing once I have taken up my solitary position?No, at least for an ego like mine, the danger is too great I would be rationalistically confessing to myself.With Sacramental Confession even though I know the priest is in the person of Christ, and it is Christ I confess to, the veil of the human being Christ places before me adds the necessary touch of purification which offers to me and all penitents the opportunity to, in truth, embrace the humility of the Publican.The Nuns prepared us wonderfully for First Confession at school and the parish priests stressed the mercy of God, as well as the seriousness of sin.I recall they did their job so well confession was something more anticipated than feared.There was some fear within me, but it had more to do with the newness of the experience than any doubts about the immensity of His Mercy.Such fears would come later, when deliberate sinning of the truly serious kind was my constant addiction.The emphasis was on mercy because, unlike today when the clear teaching of the Church is so often ignored and the sequence of first confession and first communion too frequently is reversed, confession was presented as proper, humble prelude to communion.The importance of the proper sequence has been brought home to me as a priest on more than one occasion when children, making their first confession, will tell me how long they have waited to confess thus and so because it burdened them.Their joy once absolution is given radiates on their faces.That’s what I mean about the blessing and the humbling grace of being a confessor, you are drawn not to the sins but to the marvellous reality of a soul restored to right relationship with the Blessed Trinity.Sometimes penitents weep during confession as they experience the grace of true contrition and the flood of Divine Mercy pouring into their beings.

Those who go to God have a great struggle, first exhaustion and THEN ineffable joy. Those who wish to light a fire get smoke in their eyes and shed tears; then they obtain the desired result. We too must light the divine fire with tears and hardship. The more one aspires to the love of God, the more will one value this work……If anyone does not destroy the passions of the soul with the fire of such tears, he will never be able to acquire charity…..in real life charity is a living thing which begins with conversion, then is purified and grows towards unattainable perfection, always drawing nourishment from the same sap: the grace of God and humble human sincerity.
[j]

My first confession left me just so exhausted but unburdened in a way I had never experienced in my short life.This was how confession was for me for a few years, until I entered the period of prolonged addiction when it became a terrible thing, for I knew I was being less than truthful and shame seemed to render me almost mute.The problem was not within the sacrament, nor with any of the priests who were, with one unfortunate temperamental exception, compassionate and understanding.The problem was with my increasingly neurotic self. But I would still come out of the confessional as determined as I could be to keep the promise to avoid the ‘ near occasions of sin ‘ and ‘ to amend my life ‘ and, at least for a day or two, such would be the case.

WRITING THIS I am reminded of one of my favourite stories from the Desert Fathers, a teaching of the great Abba Anthony, for today I took some time to cull more of my possessions and was caught up in the struggle, to risk not having, to risk having to trust Him to provide what is needed:

A BROTHER renounced the world and gave his goods to the poor, but he kept back a little for his personal expenses. He went to see Abba Anthony. When he told him this, the old man said to him, ‘ If you want to be a monk, go into the village, buy some meat, cover your naked body with it and come here like that.’ The brother did so, and the dogs and the birds tore at his flesh. When he came back the old man asked him whether he had followed his advice. He showed him his wounded body, and Saint Anthony said, ‘ Those who renounce the world but want to keep something for themselves are torn in this way by the demons who make war on them.
[k]

  

{ Here I am moved to insert my favourite of all Abba Anthony’s sayings, because it has always struck me as a vision of our own era and what the world tells Christians, is this:

 

ABBA ANTHONY SAID, ‘ A TIME IS COMING WHEN MEN WILL GO MAD, AND WHEN THEY SEE SOMEONE WHO IS NOT MAD, THEY WILL ATTACK HIM SAYING, ‘ YOU ARE MAD, YOU ARE NOT LIKE US.’
[l]  }

  The great day arrived!After Baptism there is no greater experience than to receive Jesus Christ Risen, Glorified in the Most Holy Eucharist where He is Real, Present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity!In the whole realm of human belief systems, be they religious or philosophical, even in the whole area of the sciences where there remain aspects of the material universe which are still beyond empirical certainty, yes, in many respects even beyond the most audacious capacity of human imagination — and yet as tangible, accessible, consumable as a morsel of bread and sip of wine — there is the mysterious reality of the Holy Eucharist.Theologians, philosophers, scientists, and to a certain extent artists, have struggled from time immemorial to make sense of matter.Matter, anti-matter, visible to the naked eye matter such as rocks, invisible matter such as certain forms of energy, invisible to the naked eye, detectable by our capacity to invent instruments that can ‘see’ for us; the origins of matter, the transformation of matter from a type of static, or potential energy state such as coal or oil in the ground, to fuel for cars or heat for cooking, warmth for comfort; even the vegetable matter from the garden which becomes fuel for the human body, energy for the inquisitive, reflective mind.For the authentic theologian matter becomes an aspect of contemplating the Divine, especially within the mysteries of Incarnation, Resurrection, Sacrament; for the philosopher matter is material for debate, speculation; for the scientist matter is to be discovered, studied, re-shaped, used, searched for clues about origins and destinies — hence the tension between science and philosophy — between physics and metaphysics; for the artist matter is a resource for use in creative expression:

What is the difference between ‘creator’ and ‘craftsman’? The ONE WHO CREATES bestows being itself, He brings something out of nothing — ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it — and this, in the strict sensem is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The CRAFTSMAN, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God. In fact, after saying that God created man and woman ‘ in His image ‘ (cf.Gn.1:27), the Bible adds that he entrusted to them the task of dominating the earth (cf.Gn.1:28)……….God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman’s task………With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of His own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in His creative power…..
[m]

Why the reference to artistry when contemplating the Holy Eucharist?Once the Father had created matter, breathed Himself into the matter of human flesh, thus transforming what to that moment was only material matter into matter with a spiritual immortal soul, the mystery of the human person, where it is the soul which gives form to the body, the spiritual is determinate of the material, became, and, for a time all was well and beautiful, upon the earth, within and around the created, living, human beings, Adam and Eve.Then, through the sin of Adam, evil, darkness, ugliness entered creation, and the pinnacle of creation, man, became in absolute need of redemption.Only God Himself could redeem what was now lost, indeed recreate what had been desecrated. To bring this about the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity took created matter upon Himself through the power of the Holy Spirit and the co-operation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and:ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST…..[Jn.1:14]Not only did He become a man, a living human being but He lived among us at a particular time in history and in the Most Holy Eucharist and the Ordained Priesthood STILL lives among us and with us!The Incarnation, mystery of the two natures — the created nature of matter, the human nature — and — the un-created nature, the divinity, in the One Person Jesus Christ.How can this be?Wonderfully it is a mystery!The night before He died for us, Jesus took other created matter, some bread and some wine, and in virtue of His forthcoming death and resurrection declared of the bread: THIS IS MY BODY………of the wine: THIS….. IS…….. MY BLOOD……... [Lk.22:19,20]At each Holy Mass, each Divine Liturgy, celebrated by the authentically ordained priest in apostolic succession through the laying on of hands by the Bishop, which is the calling down of the power of the Holy Spirit, in an unbroken line reaching across the millennia directly to that moment in the Upper Room with the Apostles being commissioned/ordained by Christ, the same event takes place, the same reality becomes!How can this be?Wonderfully it is a mystery!Both mysteries, the Incarnation and the Holy Mass wherein the bread and wine BECOME the Real Person Jesus, for no longer is there bread, no longer wine, but the Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity of Christ Himself, are the work of the Holy Spirit.All creation, all redemption, all sanctification is, ultimately, Trinitarian!Matter becomes not merely transformed, that is reshaped beautifully by a craftsman but in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar matter is transubstantiated— that is matter becomes in its very substance, its essence, its being, that which it was not.True the accidental, the external, the texture of the original matter remains as what is visible to the eye, tangible to the taste — but it is a type of illusion because the externals do not directly reveal the truth — though the shape of what still appears as bread and what still appears as wine, seem to indicate this is bread and wine, it is the truth that the reality is they are NOT what they appear to be!Since the actual real is always invisible only the eyes of faith can see the Real Presence.Holy Eucharist must be experienced. It cannot ever be adequately explained because love cannot be explained. Eucharist IS LOVE HIMSELF!I found an old photo of me taken right after my First Communion.In those days, with the total fast from all food and liquids from the midnight hour until communion time, it would have occurred probably at the six or seven o’clock morning Mass.I am dressed in a white shirt, white tie, white shorts, white socks, my brown shoes painted white for the occasion and a white bow is around my left arm.I am standing ridged; my hands clasped in the manner the Nuns taught us.What I had never noticed before is that I am bathed in light and it is the only photo of my childhood wherein I appear happy….no, not happy for that is a mere human emotion….I am clearly filled with that which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, joy! Imagine swallowing the sun, whole, and all that light then pours out of you, all that fire permeates your entire being.Imagine and then you will have a slight inkling of one’s First Holy Communion.    

THIS RELENTLESS heat wave continues.

The news is full of drought stories, heat related deaths, forest fires, all of that here and abroad. But lest the news channels leave us frightened as we bake they counter balance fire with flood, show other stories about our own and various countries where the deluge is upon us!

I am a winter person.

I cherish ice and snow.

Cold is my elixir.

Normally today would be my day off, a day away from the phones and doorbells of the rectory…but not away from being priest.

I am here where my little bedroom air-conditioner is. A doctor ordered concession because of the effect of heat upon me. As I came up the stairs late this afternoon, after a necessary trip to the Capital, I could hear the young assistant was in and I knocked on his door to offer him a share in my treat for myself, some chocolate pastries.

He’s a wise young man who works out at the gym and he declined the offer graciously. When I mentioned I’d given up on taking my day away due to the heat he smiled and said he was sticking close to his air-conditioner as well!

So I sit here in my study on the edge of the cool air and peruse more of those original notes for this book and came across a memory of an incident that, at the time, had a great impact upon me, whose import was made clear by my Spiritual Father. (The original reflection was triggered while I was looking out a car window the winter I was being driven back and forth from The Community to the hospital for tests to see if I had a brain tumour.)

ON THE DRIVE into the doctor’s this morning my brother priest pointed to the frozen river and noted how it seemed this winter’s extreme cold and thick ice appeared to have increased the usual number of ice-shacks for fishing.

Immediately I recalled an incident from some years ago when I was first a pastor in a rural parish.

One of the women came to me after morning Mass asking me to go with her into the nearby city, to the slum area, to comfort her friend, a single mother of several children.

The mother’s oldest, a lad of barely fourteen, had gone missing.

 I agreed and we went immediately.

As we arrived the street was filled with squad cars, fire trucks, an ambulance, people milling around, some sobbing.

Instantly my heart knew to call upon Our Lady and to pray for the God’s mercy upon the soul of the boy.

The woman ran into the house while I asked the nearest fireman to tell me what had happened.

The boy, as boys of that age are wont to do, on an errand to the store for his mother, apparently took a dangerous shortcut on his way home across the frozen river which separated the housing project from the ‘ better’ homes.

He was near the middle of the river when the ice gave way.

Someone saw him fall in and called 911.

Crawling on their bellies, roped together in case more ice would give way, the firemen were within a few feet of him when the boy, perhaps exhausted, sapped of strength by the cold, had slipped beneath the ice.

With the fast current they were unable to retrieve the body.

In the spring, when the ice was gone and high water abated, they would come back and look for the body.

I headed into the house where the woman, the mother, the children were all sobbing. I closed the door behind me to shelter them from the curious. The police and firemen took off their hats and helmets and stood in silent prayer while I held the sobbing mother and prayed for her.

One of the children, about eleven, the younger brother of the dead boy, tugged on my sleeve after awhile and asked me where his brother was and I told him simply in the heart of God.

      “ And where’s God? “

I thought for a moment, saying in my heart: Mother Mary help me.

An idea came suddenly and I asked the boy’s mother permission to take him outside.

Night had fallen, the police and firemen with their equipment were gone, neighbours had either gone home because of the cold or where already by now in the house with food and comfort. So the boy and I stood in the street, alone.

Thankfully any near streetlights were either burnt out or broken, so you could look up and see the night sky which seemed exceptionally brilliant with stars that night.

I told the boy that God lives beyond where all light comes from because He is light.

“ So, pick a star you like and behind the light, in the heart of God, is your brother.”

Though not exactly theologically precise it clearly comforted the child’s heart.

Spring eventually came, the ice broke, the waters rose, subsided, the firemen returned for the search and eventually found the boy’s body.

The same woman came to me and asked if I would perform a funeral service even though the little family was not Catholic and could the boy be buried in the parish cemetery, she would raise the money for the plot.

I agreed, but there was one problem, for though the ice on the river was gone the ground was still frozen below a foot from the surface and out in the country burials were never done between freeze-up in late fall until the ground naturally thawed in late spring.

She agreed and wondered aloud how to tell the poor mother there could be a delay of weeks?

We both fell silent. Then it was like we had the same inspiration and agreed we’d call around to the nearby farmers and beg them to open the grave.

As word spread about the situation..the boy’s death, the mother’s plight, dozens of men showed up. They worked all day, through the night, back-breaking labour with pick and shovel.

They fought the ice’s grip on the earth and they won!

 

In the morning the little family was driven from the city.

When they arrived at the grave side they were not alone, for the farmers and their wives and children came to keep them company.

They answered the prayers, sang the hymns and then, to my surprise, for they had not told me of their plans, when the grave had been filled in they ushered the mother and her children to the parish hall for the traditional funeral lunch.

In reply to my telling him about this incident my Spiritual Father said:

      It was the drowning boy within you, you were seeking to retrieve from the icy water.

DEATH has already appeared frequently in this writing.

 I find myself this evening wondering why?

Am I an unwitting Hamlet?

For forty-five minutes, though it does not appear visibly on this page, I experienced a death of sorts in that my finger slipped and I hit some key that caused the entire tool bar on this machine to disappear. The young assistant here, the moment I knocked on his door said: ‘ Now what happened with your computer? ‘

I explained.

He came to my study and after a few minutes of clicking this and that all was well.

So why this series of opening chapters where death appears so frequently?

It is not something I planned.

No more than I plan any of my actions which cause me to be so computer-inept!

My heart suddenly understands I am asking the wrong question because it is ego-centric.

I should ask the Christ-centered question:

“ What are You showing me?”

The reality is that each time we choose sin we choose death over life, curse over blessing.

This is what God who is Love, God who respects the gift of freedom He places within us at our creation, persistently offers us: life or death, blessing or curse [cf. Dt. 30:19].

The choice is ours.

When recalling then, as I must, His tender mercy and proclaiming the truth His mercy is greater than our capacity to sin, I cannot hide the fact many of my choices before true conversion were death choices.

So death appears in many forms in this telling.

Physical death.

Sin death.

Christ has conquered death of both kinds.

 

However here too we are free to choose, for love us though  as unconditionally as He does, He neither forces eternal life nor mercy upon us.

In those ancient days of awaiting the long yearned for promised Redeemer already the Psalmist in laudatory and prophetic prayer recited the pardon of sins, healing of ills, deliverance from death and lavishness of love and compassion which is offered us. [Ps.103:1-5]

Dom Columba Marmion puts it this way:

 … We are destined to proclaim eternally in the heavenly city the triumph of grace over our weakness and over sin. We can sum up the whole mission of Jesus in this world in a few words: ‘ Jesus is the herald of infinite mercy to human misery.’

If, then, there is one divine perfection which we should extol above all others, it certainly is mercy. All the ways of the Lord in regard to us are simply the condescension of love. In the economy of the Redemption in which we live, God has compassionated our distress to raise us to the power of participating in His life……

 … By acknowledging his many miseries, man admits that he has no right in justice to become the object of the divine bounty: his sole title to grace is the constant admission of his unworthiness united to his desire to glorify the eternal mercy which has given him all things in Jesus Christ…..

It is when, in full knowledge of our wretchedness, we persist in hoping in His love that we really give glory to God. [g]

 

That’s what I am still lacking.

Not just the full knowledge of my wretchedness, but rather the admission not only of my need of His mercy but that He IS merciful.

The writing of this alone will not suffice, for that would be egocentric and everything about us, all that we are, all that we do, must be Christ-centered.

To be Christ-centered means to be centered on Him in loving response to the needs of my brothers and sisters, to be servant as He Himself who repeatedly teaches He came upon us as servant [Mt.20:28 & Lk.22:27] and on the very night He instituted the perpetual Self-Gift of Love in Holy Eucharist and the Priesthood at the same time showed us how to lovingly and humbly serve as He took towel and basin, knelt and washed feet [Jn.13 esp. V.15].

This reveals a dimension to the coming sabbatical more critical than any writing I may do.

Since I have been granted time away from active, per se, priestly work in a parish, then the fulfillment of the reality of ora et labora, work and prayer, means a willingness to enter deeply into the mystery of the desert, in particular the desert of the heart.

The ancient Fathers of the Desert, the followers of Abba Anthony, those men and women through the centuries known as hermits, recluses, the inhabitants of contemplative monasteries, some like the followers of Charles de Foucauld and Catherine Doherty living the desert life in the heart of great urban centers, these have known and know that when evil spirits tire of their destructive work among the souls in the cities the same demons seek out the desolate places.

To enter the desert is to be willing to engage in combat, against the devils, yes, but also to overcome the false self which is unknown to God.

More it is also to, in a sense, draw those same spirits away from attacking our brothers and sisters, in a sense to make of ourselves the target so our brothers and sisters might, if not escape entirely the wiles and hatred of the evil ones for them, at least will have some period of respite.

This is spiritual warfare in which Christ alone is Victor, but in which we must participate.

It is the war spoken of in Revelations when the evil one, having failed to destroy the Child and His Mother, goes and mounts warfare against those who are faithful to Christ [cf. Rev.12:17].

I have come to understand such is where the Holy Spirit is leading me through the instruction from my Spiritual Father that it is time for me to go and ‘ write, pray, paint ‘….this is the writing, the painting, with the help of grace will be iconography, the prayer, will be spending time alone, fasting, in the desert of my heart, yes, and in a little room somewhere He shall show me.

Somehow this is the place I have been seeking all my life, not so much a physical, geographical place, but the ‘ thin place ‘:

 ..a ‘ thin place ‘ where the membrane between this world and the other world, between the material and the spiritual, {is} very permeable.[h]

Not merely because of the need for personal atonement, as great as that is it would be sinfully self-serving, if that is all I shall do.

No!

There is a hunger to allow the Spirit to plunge me into the immensity of the sacred kenosis, to be face to the ground beside He who Himself in the Garden was face to the ground for us.

To adore.

I don’t think we simply adore Him enough — can it ever be enough — anymore.

I don’t.

Do you?

To adore, intercede, to become by the action of the Holy Spirit, little by little, less me and more of Him.

 

One with the poor who cry alone, in the night, without hope.

To cry with them even if they know not anyone cries with them, for them.

This will not happen in any neat or comfortable way or in any way at all that I can possibly imagine or comprehend in this moment.

I must grow in trust.

Therefore I must become abandoned to Him moment by uncertain moment.

It will probably be most untidy.

Often seemingly incomprehensible to me as it already is to my brother priests in this rectory where I write in the dead of night while they sleep and this city, still broiling in the heat wave, is filled with crying poor.

Foolishness!

Yeah in some ways it is utterly nuts to walk away from career possibilities, but priesthood has never been a career for me; sheer stupidity to think whatever effort is put into this writing will someday be read by others and a real fool’s errand to go to war – but then St. Paul himself called for such foolishness [ 1 cor.4:10] so long as Christ is the reason for it.

St. Paul describes the radical followers of Christ.

Having been in my life radically opposed to Christ there is justice at work here.

Tender- love- justice, as grace from Him.

My brothers are worried I am ruining my ecclesiastical career, that after the sabbatical I’ll not be recalled to active duty, so to speak.

If I had a secure tenure to come back to where would the foolishness be?

My desert does not/will not even give me the luxury of sand and rocks, not even the security of a cave or the penny-potential of reeds with which to weave baskets!

My demons are unlikely to scream and screech so as to disturb the neighbours or trash my little place as if I were a latter-day Cure d’Ars….God knows I am neither that holy nor humble.

 

Mine shall most likely continue to be the slimy scratching kind as befits one as poor and weak as I am.

They are no less dangerous for all of that.

My desert is first within the inner struggle to overcome the shame of a sinful and neurotic life, to repent for time wasted and stolen from Him; it is a wasteland which must be traversed through the inner mystery of physical and emotional illness, of weakness in faith and trust in Him.

My Spiritual Father was right about which boy had slipped through the ice, which one needed retrieving.

IN THE city where I grew up most of the school year was marked by the frosts of fall and snows of winter.

By day my routine was centered around school, though after my First Communion this often included serving the six or seven a:m Mass before school, and after school helping my mother with my increasing number of brothers and sisters.

The evening was ‘ my time’, especially if I could get out of the house and especially if it was dark out.

I came therefore to prefer winter to summer.

The dark fell sooner in winter.

Deeper.

 Closer.

In the dark when I was very young I mainly played street hockey or maybe with some boys I hung with we’d shoplift or hustle smokes or just be obnoxious.

In the dark I felt — cloaked — not in some imaginary Green Hornet sort of fashion but rather in that the ‘real’ me was protected.

I was less terrified interiorly because the dark itself was fearful and facing that fear took most of my attention and energy.

More and more in those years there was forming around my heart a hardness, greater even than the hardness of ice. I was beginning to become used to leading a double and secretive life, even before there were any real secrets to keep — it was almost like I was practicing for what was to come.

 

The tension of that double-life was increasing my anxiety, so much so that by the time I was starting to act out sexually with my peers I had no memory left of what it felt like to be either a child or unafraid.

Cigarettes, danger, pleasure, these became the ever more addictive antidotes to that constant state of fear but guilt would swamp me ever so constantly and so I’d, once I made my First Confession, flee to the confessional and for a while things would abate.

Mysteriously, though obviously by grace, at the same time my hunger for God, for holiness, grew.

Looking back from the vantage point of sixty years it seems in some ways unbelievable any child could have chosen to live like that, but I did.

True, family circumstances, neighbourhood, influence of others, etc., ancestry, there are all kinds of contributing factors that can, legitimately, be pointed at, but even with all of that being seriously considered, the truth remains I made the choices I made.

One night in the winter I remember we’d built a snow house in a vacant lot and I was inside it when it collapsed upon me. I could hear muffled laughter from the boys I was with who’d assisted in the collapse.

For a moment I wasn’t afraid, rather I felt incredibly safe in that cold darkness and wanted to slide even deeper into its embrace.

I recall my Father digging me out.

He must have been nearby or maybe my kid brother went and got him.

Just before he freed me there was a moment when light came through the thinned snow and ice and it was in that moment I became frightened because I could tell I was trapped in the dark.

I never played in a snow house again.

SUNDAY!

A 100 degree heat and humidity Sunday!

It is mid-afternoon, the Masses have been celebrated, confessions heard, the remnants of yesterday’s parish youth group car wash put away, the collection counted, the debris from last night’s severe thunderstorms cleaned up, with no one killed or injured thanks be to God.

A brother priest calls from another city far away where, through a circuitous route, a letter has come to him from a lifer, seeking help to break the bondage of his ancestry. He’d approached the prison chaplain who proved unwilling to even consider a connection between ancestry and evil in the present generation.

Praying for that prisoner I was struck by the mystery of the Divine willingness to wait, as it were, for us who, sometimes perhaps because of the chaos of our lives unawares, wait for Him.

This mutual awaiting/seeking is articulated profoundly through Sacred Scripture, such as in Lamentations 3: 25-27!

My brother priest asked if I would be willing to help through letters to and from the lifer.

I said I would.

Part of this afternoon has been spent culling files in preparation for the sabbatical. This is actually a graced moment in my life to unload some of the burden of stuff!

Our culture, looked at dispassionately, has developed an entire cradle to grave system whereby we are formed to compulsively want stuff and become educated in a manner which will enhance our earning ability to acquire stuff.

 Stuff ,which we cling to in a way of such profound self-investment that it becomes a constant idolatrous state.

Only God and the things of God should so occupy a culture, an individual.

Priests appear not immune to this cultural quagmire, in spite of the clear teaching of the Second Vatican Council:

….PRIESTS ARE INVITED TO EMBRACE VOLUNTARY POVERTY.

 

By it they become more clearly conformed to Christ and more ready to devote themselves to their sacred ministry. For Christ being rich became poor for our sakes, that through His poverty we might be rich. The apostles by their example gave testimony that the free gift of God was to be given freely. They knew both how to abound and to suffer need. Even some kind of use of property in common, like the community of goods which is extolled in the history of the primitive Church, provides an excellent opening for pastoral charity. By this way of life priests can laudably reduce to practice the spirit of poverty commended by Christ.

Guided then by the Spirit of the Lord, who anointed the Saviour and sent Him to preach the Gospel to the poor, priests and bishops alike are to avoid everything that might in any way antagonize the poor. More than the rest of Christ’s disciples they are to put aside all appearance of vanity in their surroundings. They are to arrange their house in such a way that it never appears unapproachable to anyone and that nobody, even the humblest, is ever afraid to visit. [d]

 

This was dramatically brought home to me last night when I was called to the hospital for an emergency. After I had anointed the dying person, and comforted the family, one of the men followed me out into the dimly lit corridor.

With gentle humility, yet also with an assumptive air from wherever the little family originates, he asked: “What do I owe you Father?”

I was stunned like I’d been slapped.

Not by him.

He was, as mentioned, humble and gentle.

I’ve had such things happen before.

They always shock me.

It is a burden to have to have stuff, books, computer, etc. in order to be able…at least so I must convince myself because I am too cowardly to be truly impoverished…to fulfill my vocation of loving, truth-speaking servant.

But to ask, much less expect, payment for serving as a priest my dying brother or sister…..

I must confess my own origins in a lower working class strata of the social order where most lived a mere pay check away from destitution, or the orphanage for the kids, makes it even more difficult for me not to seek security in the material world and so it is true what most irritates us in others is what is the greatest hidden, or so we hope, flaw in ourselves.

{ The clunking sound you hear is my beam banging into the doorway! {cf. Mt. 7:3ff.}

Yes, it can be dangerous to write reflectively!

Before I dare write anymore I must go and pray for forgiveness at being so bold to even think I can detect splinters.

 

A FREIGHT train rumbles across the street halfway down the block, rattling the louder as it crosses the old bridge which spans the canal. At the other end of the neighbourhood workers swelter away in the huge cereal factory.

The evening sun is red, still broiling the city this end of July summer’s evening.

IN THE QUIET of this evening, after praying Vespers, I thumb through the original notes and have time to write once more the mystery of how a human being, a man-person of the twentieth century can, even when he knew not, or knowing struggled against, be guided bythe Holy Spirit to the ineffable reality of being priest, In Persona Christi.

There is, of course, the necessary editing which any writer must engage in. It is basically the same process as a sculpture who, having done the gross chipping away of stone or wood, must then more patiently, with more delicate tools and indeed a type of tenderness, finely shape what was rough into sheer beauty.

There are two dangers in editing.

The first is to edit out what might be a cause of shame, whereas it would be better for one’s soul to edit out what might be a cause of pride.

The second is to edit with an eye towards sales, to be blunt, which, of course, is another form of pride.

An artist in wood, stone, cloth, music- scale, word, must craft not for sale nor for admiration but for beauty and in the case of a baptized artist for the glory of God.

Sometimes the best way an artist, especially one crafting through autobiography, can give glory to God is to embrace the bold courage of both Zaccheus [Lk.19:1-10] and Bartimaeus [Mk.10:46-52] and the truth-speaking confidence of the Publican at the back of the Temple [Lk.18:9-15] so that not only for the one writing, but for those who read, what ultimately transpires is a willingness to open the doors of our being to the encounter with Jesus such as the Samaritan Woman had, for in the end it must be always Jesus, and none other, not even ourselves, who will tell us, indeed is the only One who can speak to us the truth of our lives [Jn.4:29]. Then at the end of this telling we can then go and give witness, testify about the All-Loving and Merciful One, and once we have been heard those who have listened will go to meet Him and once more the encounter and belief become intimate [Jn. 4:42]!

If that little child, later the youth and adult, so screwed up, bent, wounded, head­-living, angry, struggling against life and God, would one day be converted it is because throughout the Catholic world ordinary people, children and the elderly, the sick and the suffering in particular, are faithful to their prayers, especially the Rosary and with generosity pray as the Angel taught the children at Fatima: “O my Jesus forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Your Mercy.”

For St. Monica, mother of the great St. Augustine, it took thirty years of prayer for her son’s conversion…being no Augustine in my case it would take over forty years of prayer and still I would not claim to be fully converted!

Eventually for myself and my peers the world which seemed to end at the edge of the curb, or at least at the end of the neighbourhood, was suddenly to expand and in what lay beyond the limited horizon of factories and childhood imaginations there was to begin a process of expansion, a relentlessness of change none of us could have suspected the first fall of school.

School meant parochial school for me, while for some of my friends it meant public school.

 That alone was an indication of change.

Except for Sundays we could mostly ignore the differences in denomination or even religion.

Now each morning as we headed off to school the whole harsh reality of difference would be reinforced day after day.

Difference would be something I would come to hate, become ever more filled with rage over, for I seemed powerless to do anything about it, yet I could see all around me, and more intently the older I got, the horrific sufferings of those considered different because they were, Black or Asian or Jewish or Protestant…of course sometimes I, we, suffered because we were Catholic.

All I remember about my first day at school besides the compassion of the good Nuns towards rather upset children was how terrified I was in a place which seemed immense. Surrounded by strangers, I was determined to escape as soon as possible!

Surrounded by all those people, my peers and the adult teachers, the Nuns, and the lay women, I was utterly filled with loneliness.

I had become more fully conscious than, had I been offered a choice, I would have wished.

Within my inner being I could almost feel myself split apart.

Paradoxically with starting school, and thus formal catechism classes, I had begun the journey towards my First Confession, prelude to the real goal, First Communion, but at the same time I was becoming split off from or, more accurately, splitting myself off from God.

Little by little losing awareness of my true self the disconnect was occurring.

I was more and more engaged in the elaborate development of a false self which necessarily entailed the establishment of ever more complex self -defences and their concomitant self-survival skills.

Because we are gifted with free-will God Himself will not arbitrarily possess us, enter into us, unless we invite Him.

He can, does as long as the soul remains in the body, call to us, as He did of old [ 1 Sam. 3: 4,6,7] and persistently knocks upon the door of our being, asking….imagine God asking of His creature!!!…..leave to enter [ Rev, 3: 20].

      However He will not force us either to answer, I am here, nor to open.

Contrary to current mythology the evil one, satan, the devil, cannot enter by force either: in some fashion he also must be given leave to enter.

How then does it come to pass that seemingly so many of us choose death over life, the death of our intimate relationship with the Father, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, for the chaotic existence of non-relationship with self and the illusion of a relationship with the evil one?

Mostly, I believe, we begin by being aware we are lonely, which we confuse as meaning we are alone.

We then, from an extraordinarily early age in most cases, begin to discover and devise ways and means of what we presume will be a filling up of that aloneness but which in fact merely aggravates the loneliness.

What is often dismissed as, for example, promiscuity as sexual indulgence, in point of fact is a desperate attempt to experience existence, that is, if I can compel you to pay attention to me, perhaps even to in some fashion utter my name, then I exist.

It is to seek from another mere human being what only God can give: BEING!

It is within that gap between the true self and the false self that satan enters and is given entry because we begin to choose things that come from the place of darkness rather than from the Kingdom of Light…..our failure to say in openness of our being here I am, to Christ, becomes silent ascent to evil.

One incident from my early life as a school-child illustrates the point.

Given that the parish school was some distance from the neighbourhood and that certainly for the beginning weeks I could easily become lost, not to mention the normal hazards of city streets, my Mother arranged for one of the teenage girls from the tenement next door to walk me to school.

My Mother had at that time my sickly Grandfather and my two younger sisters to care for and my Father, of course, was off with the navy in some war or other for months at a time.

I recall the girl was kind, pretty, and I trusted her.

What I most remember is she had a boyfriend from further up the street, a tough kid who didn’t seem to spend much time in school and who was always fixing various cars in front of his place near the bottling plant up the street.

This adolescent male, to my eyes tall, strong, handsome, the missing father and non-existent older brother I yearned for, captivated my being.

When he was around, when he carried me on his shoulders, let me hand him greasy tools as he tore apart another engine, paid attention to me, then I was some- one.

Was I already at that age confusing various emotions, even sexual drives, with the transference of being a son and brother, a person, onto this young man?

Did he know what a godlike being he was to me?

Certainly he never acted towards me in any way but that of an older brother.

He never lost his temper, never struck me, in fact other than picking me up to carry on his shoulders when walking with the girl and myself to or from school I have no memory of his touch, though I used to dream he was my father and played street-hockey with me and all the rest of father-son stuff.

Of course it was all an illusion within my own being.

He was neither my father nor my brother and undoubtedly had his girlfriend not been taking me to school that adolescent and I would never have met and, of course, no one outside of my own imagination knew of how much of my sense of being had come to depend on that boy being in my life.

He was my idol.

One day, it may have been a Saturday when there was no school, I was walking towards him.

I was some distance away but could see he was bent over under the hood of yet another car hard at work.

Suddenly a prowl car stopped beside where he was working.

A couple of cops got out.

There was a brief struggle.

He was billy-whipped, cuffed, shoved into the car.

I began to run towards that scene utterly terrified.

The prowl car pulled away quickly and rounded the corner.

By the time I got to the corner the car was starting to turn the next corner.

 All I saw was the sad and scared face of the young man staring at me from the back window.

Monday I walked to school by myself.

I was never to see him again.

Once again God had let me be robbed of someone I loved.

Once again the person I cared about had abandoned me.

Once again, more deeply, I withdrew into self.

What was wrong with me that no one would stick with me?

Anger, grief I would not weep out, darkness, seeped into my being and I became more and more fearful.

For in spite of all the witness of creation and of the salvific economy inherent in it, the spirit of darkness is capable of showing God AS AN ENEMY of His own creature, and in the first place as an enemy of man, AS A SOURCE OF DANGER AND A THREAT TO MAN. In this way SATAN manages to sow in man’s soul the seed of opposition to the One who “ from the beginning “ would be considered as man’s enemy — and not as Father. Man is challenged to become the adversary of God!

The analysis of sin in its original dimension indicates that, through the influence of the “ father of lies “, THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY THERE WILL BE A CONSTANT PRESSURE ON MAN TO REJECT GOD, even to the point of hating Him: “ LOVE OF SELF TO THE POINT OF CONTEMPT FOR GOD, “ as St. Augustine puts it. Man will be inclined to see in God primarily a limitation of himself, and not the source of his own freedom and the fullness of good. [f]

Of course while I suppose I knew that young man was my idol in the sense of hero only now do I understand that he was my idol in the more accurate sense of false­ god, because I was drawing my sense of being from him and NOT from the One and only God who alone is our True Father.

 

Even less so did I have any possible understanding that by permitting me to lose my idol the Father was offering me the same gift-promise spoken in His Name by the prophet Ezekiel, [Ez.36:25], though by grace I sure understand and give thanks today for such mercy.

“Father, I need your help!”, called the Pastor to me as I emerged from the church after this morning’s Mass.

The heat wave continues.

The church was stifling, the air heavy, the two dozen or so faithful listless in their responses.

I was not much better, sweating under the vestments, unusually distracted about what to do on my day off, which would start after Mass.

When I stepped out into the morning sun after Mass the added heat brought on another wave of sweat.

Father is younger than I in years and in years of ordination. A good priest, kind, dedicated and always respectful of myself and the other assistant, who is even younger.

 

 

We never address each other by our first names in public but show the respect for our sacred office we expect the people to show.

“ Father I need your help because as you know I have the next Mass in a couple of minutes and a call has just come from the hospital.”

He told me who was dying in ER and I immediately went into the rectory to get my hospital ID….[gone are the days when being dressed as a priest and known on sight suffice for entry]…and the Holy Oils.

It took about ten minutes to get to the hospital. The dying man was hooked up to the usual equipment.

Wife, children, in-laws, grandchildren, all were there, all entering into grief.

His wife took me aside and said she’d been advised to permit him to be taken off the machines and even a casual glance at the man showed the effects of the massive stroke and that the most charitable thing to do was to allow him to die in God’s time.

I assured her the decision was proper, loving and, addressed her concerns about the moral issues.

I’ve attended enough deathbeds to know when it is the ethical cessation of extraordinary intervention and when some doctor or family member has chosen expediency, if not outright killing, over God’s chosen time for the soul to return to Him.

 

After the Apostolic Pardon, the Anointing, other prayers for the dying, sometime to comfort the family, it was time for me to leave.

By then I was totally soaked with sweat, our old hospital not being air-conditioned.

On the drive back I remembered back to when they were checking me out for a brain tumour and how I came to hate those constant tests and trips to the hospital, never imagining in those days I’d one day be, as I was until a couple of years ago, for several years a hospital chaplain.

When I got back here I changed out of my wet blacks, showered, and while showering thought I’d dig through the original notes for this work written in those days of such uncertainty:

THERE was something surreal about the fifteen minute walk from the parking lot, up and down stairwells, through tunnels, in and out of elevators, down corridors, to that tile and too many bright lights room, filled with the smell of antiseptic and fear of a death notice tension from people laying on various types of stretchers, beds, many looking frightened, some with tubes hanging from arms and other places, all waiting to be scanned.

Above all the other sounds in that place the most daunting and persistent was that of the Cat-scan machine which seemed to be in near continuous operation.

Everything moved with factory efficiency. Forms were thrust into our hands while staccato orders and warnings were given by overworked nurses about the possible deadly effects of the dyes which would be used.

Suddenly a needle was pushed into the vein in my arm.

 Fluid coursed unusually hot into my body.

 I was fed into the machine which began to use its noise and some kind of rays to slice-picture my brain.

Suddenly it was over and the priest who was my Guardian Angel for this trip was told to stay with me near the hospital “ For twenty-four hours just in case there is a severe reaction to the dye in which case rush him back here.”

To this day the memory of that test is vivid, not because a tumour was found, it was not. What they actually found was arthritis pushing the vertebrae against something or other causing severe vertigo and other symptoms which triggered a type of mimic of a tumour.

The memory is vivid because I was astonished by how fast blood courses through our bodies, something I had never experienced until that warm dye entered my vein and I could instantly feel it through my whole body.

Recalling that event on the way back from the hospital today caused me to reflect on the mystery of the Holy Eucharist…for in that Most Sacred Sacrament we receive Him, Body, BLOOD, Soul and Divinity not just as something ‘spiritual’ but physical and Real.

His Precious Blood courses through our physical being, more certainly and effectively than that dye ever did.

      The Sacred Writer of the Letter to the Hebrews stresses the power of the word of God penetrating, permeating the deepest regions and aspects of our being, revealing all to Him, yes – but there is more for this activity, this Divine Gaze, is ultimately one of love, of mercy, of healing, of truth – so that even in a moment as ordinary as a medical test we can be enlightened! [ Heb. 4: 12,13 ]

It is through the sacraments, in particular Confession/Reconciliation and most especially through the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Spirit does the effective work of “ the Word of God”, of God’s word!

Blood and water flowed from the side of Christ on the Cross, the blood which came from His Mother Mary, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of the Incarnation.

Our God becoming so humble and tiny as we all begin, like all of us being fed by His mother’s blood, and thereby growing, developing an arterial system and heart of His own.

This Sacred Person, this Sacred Heart gives to us His own very Self, His Sacred Body and Precious Blood, as our real food and drink.

How many Holy Communions have I received since my First Holy Communion and therefore how many times has He communicated His very Self to me? 

What have I done with and in this body, in my very person, into which the All Holy One Himself has communicated Himself, in His Risen Glory, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity?

It is a question of remembering, a type of memory and emotional blood-letting like that ancient cure-all when doctors would bleed the sick person in hopes of draining away whatever invisible source of sickness.

I suppose in a metaphoric way this keyboard is the lancet and the computer screen the basin into which the blood lands.

The flowing of the blood, however, is not something easy, smooth.

It is difficult.

It is confession.

Not in the purulent sense of contemporary talk-shows where mere titillation is the purpose.

This, please God, and with the blessing of my Spiritual Father, is an exercise in purgation of my heart, an exemplum.

 Memory, of course, is not a tangible record of past experience but is more an interpretive record of how certain events impacted themselves upon our minds, perhaps even our souls.

 Autobiography, more perhaps than any other form of literary effort, then is virtually a   natural form of roman-`a-clef.

What is remembered is not a dispassionate account of particular events in one’s life but an interpretive telling of why, of all possible other events in the given year the writer of autobiography writes about, this one stands out so sharply it demands to be remembered.

Usually that demand is because of all possible memories this one concerns something or someone whose impact was impressive, that is, made an impression that has marked us, effected us, in some way which still endures, either as enhancement of ourselves, our lives, or as a continuous hindrance.

In the first instance it is cause for rejoicing, gratitude to God for the evident blessing. In the latter it is cause for contrition if the impediment has been self-inflicted, for a forgiving heart if we are the victim of another’s sin.

Jesus promise-teaches we will come to know the truth and in this truth-knowing we will become, or rather be set, free.[ Jn.8:32 ]

 However this is not a process of self-discovery by our own efforts, rather it is an openness to the work of the Holy Spirit, as mentioned in Hebrews, where the Spirit of Truth Himself comes to prevail to make of us a real person, THE real person created by Love Himself.

The truth being sought here is how I came…frankly how we come…to distance ourselves from reality, that is, from being in relationship with God our Father, from choosing death over life, sin over virtue.

The truth being sought is to rediscover the Father’s supreme gift to us, His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Saviour and to bow face to the ground before Jesus and cry out: Have mercy on me!

The truth being sought is to discover the true self, the one in whom the Lord and Giver of Life, the Sanctifier Himself dwells.

As Thomas Merton wrote:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.{c}

 

For far too much of my life I have lived in and from, indeed for, that false self. For a time, as a child, it was a means of survival, but as an adult what worked in a strange way for the child, works against the adult.

I want to be KNOWN by God!

True but even more do I want to KNOW that I am known by God!

What is striking about the creation accounts in Genesis is the repetition of God speaking into being, God seeing what exists, confirming the goodness and existence of what has been created until a “who” is created.

This free-will being, and the one other who is like him, brutalize the integrity of the Love Himself created person and suddenly it is clear God cannot recognize what He has not created, this distorted image of Himself, and there is a heart-wrenching simplicity to God seeking, calling out, like many a mother for their lost child! [Gn. 3:9]

The all-knowing, all-seeing God having to call out because He cannot find the man He created!

Once Adam had sinned he was no longer tabula rasa as person, the untainted one created by the Father.

 He had allowed himself to become a tablet on which any might scratch and scrawl graffiti.

Merton again:

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life itself. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion…………

A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. {op.cit.}

Permit then this memory-blood-letting as exemplum for you ( and I do pray for you in this, and from this moment on ) and a purgation for me, much needed, so that in the end all that will remain in/of me, and this is my prayer for you, is CHRIST!

 

THE HOURS of this day off pass quickly.

The writing does seem to flow.

The Pastor is away and the other assistant is also gone, and the phones have remained quiet, the doorbell still.

Out on the distant waters the nation’s valiant announced today that deep under the liquid dance-floor of this July’s sun they have found the body of Camelot’s Prince and now the nation, the world in some respects, can grieve.

Those who speak to me about this latest familial tragedy use terms like: “ It’s not fair he should die before his time. “

I try and control my Italian temper at such an affront to the Lord of History and Dispenser of Mercy.

But now is not the time to write about time!

Now is the time to take advantage of the quiet, to be still!

IT IS late afternoon now.

The weather has cooled somewhat.

Driving on a back road yesterday I was struck by the golden fields of grain, the season because of the extreme heat running a couple of weeks early. Then I noticed large flocks of birds and wondered if they know something about this summer and the not too distant autumn. Maybe it shall be early as well.

Countless are the verses in many Psalms which glorify again and again the wonders not only of the created universe itself but the providential Love who created all this beauty and sustenance for us!

I particularly treasure Psalm 104 in this regard.

 

Memory of a lovely, elderly, woman, kind, strong, at the top of the stairs leading to the dank stone basement with its huge coal bin and furnace, its rows of jars filled with mustard pickles, plum jam and little bins of potatoes nestled near mysterious trunks covered with ancestral dust.

She was my Grandmother, mother to my own, a woman whose words I remember none of, whose tender expression I remember all of.

She was the one who when the city was devastated by the explosion in the First War and the shattered glass embedded itself in her face took care of the wounds herself and then took care of her children and neighbours.

It is originally from her and her own artistic talents that I come honestly to write.

My memory of her is that particular beauty as she stood at the top of those stairs, light coming from behind her, yet without placing her completely in silhouette.

She was, as I recall, bidding me to come to supper.

This is among my earliest experiential memories.

My earliest reflective or thought memory, dream memory too, is of always having wanted to be a priest.

My next memory is also of my Grandmother.

Perhaps of the same day or maybe it is that whatever intervened has been displaced by the powerful impact of the second memory.

We are at table, the whole family of Grandparents, parents, me, my two sisters next in line of birth, maybe some cousins, an aunt, uncle, or two.

Suddenly there is a great commotion.

 Clearly something is wrong with Grandmother.

 I am whisked away by one of the adults and taken upstairs to the small bedroom I share with my two sisters.

I lay there in the dark and from their crib they ask me what’s happening in scared voices and I don’t know and it is the not knowing which scares me.

Later in the darkness of that same room one of the Aunts comes in and tries to explain to my child’s understanding that Grandmother is dead.

Once the aunt leaves the older of my sisters asks what it means and I say: “ The eggs killed Grandma.”

The next evening the whole house was hushed, women in black dresses, dark suits for the men, with a wide armband of black cloth on their left arm.

Caravaggio could have painted the contrast sharpness of the hues as in the front room bright candle light bounced of muted wallpaper, the white of the priest’s surplice edging the black cassock, rosary beads, made of crystal, dancing with little rainbows like dozens of prisms aimed at the corpse.

A wreath was hung on the outside front door to announce to the whole neighbourhood they were invited to join in the ritual of grief, pay respect.

 Women came, sometimes with nervous children clutching at their dresses or felt coats. The women came to the kitchen door with gifts of food and tears and those in-decipherable, but to another woman, words that convey all manner of true understanding of the particular capacity of woman to comprehend, and endure, the vagaries of life.

Later the men would come by the front door, for a woman had died, a woman who had done their families much kindness…but a woman, that is, not someone they would have gone to war with or worked in the factory with or pounded a beat with or downed beer with when the week’s labour was done and the pay packet swollen with the hard currency of their sweat.

So the men came in the front door, showed respect, joined silently in the rosary led by the priest, made offers of help but looked upon my widower Grandfather as a living totem of the clan to which no male ever expected, much less would want, to belong.

At some point in the brief mourning period my father came and got me, it seems from that same dark bedroom, and took me in his arms to the open casket in the living room and I looked down at that soft face and would not allow myself to feel since I harboured within me a notion that my anger at her for disturbing my secret world in the cellar had caused her death…not the eggs we’d had for supper killed Grandma, I did.

The next day the living room was empty.

Sometime later the Great Uncle, the wounded warrior from the first war, died.

The mother of the milkman’s kids from just a couple of doors down died too.

Then another uncle and my grandfather and death became this always expected but only appearing when unexpected intruder whose coming meant someone you cared about disappeared.

I began to notice it wasn’t just people who died, other things died too because they too disappeared.

There used to be these wagons with horses that brought milk, ice, and even the junk man had one….but they disappeared and trucks started to come by, but no truck ever wanted a carrot or a sugar cube.

The old man with the bell which he clanged as he hollered his trade as sharpener of knives and scissors and the treadmill with its stone that spewed wonderful sparks as he sharpened scissors; the other man with his pushcart and buckets and ladders, the washer of windows and teller of stories to children; the iceman who in the summer with one fluid motion would severe a chunk of cold relief that was hard as rock but melted fast as you would laugh with your friends.

All were gone.

I came to hate death and change with equal vigour and to allow myself to grieve over neither and should the grief strain against my grit I’d use anger or pleasure to quell its determination but I would not allow it for to grieve meant to confess it was true…the death or the change.

I don’t know precisely how or when I figured out a simpler way to deal with grief was never to become attached to anything, or anyone, at the outset, then their loss or disappearance while unfortunate could be if not ignored at least accepted as the inevitability of the ruthlessness of existence.

Pretty heady stuff for a boy who’d not yet made his First Communion.

But that was the key: to think and think and think until the thing either made sense or had been gutted of all its sensation.

Indeed it seemed to me that if I became attached to anything, even worse to anyone, my attachment was for it, them, harbinger of their inevitable disappearance, their death.

Often I suspected…or was given to suspect by the father of lies, something I could not understand as a child but do now as an adult…God was doing this, being mean because there was something about me which He disliked intensely.

Given the Jansenistic spirituality prevailing in parishes in those days such thoughts were also connected to that influence.

A gradual disconnect was occurring at this early stage in my being between reality as an objective sequence of events and reality as my subjective internalizing of the import of those same events.

I became more secretive, not only about my thoughts and feelings but about my activities when out of eyesight of any authoritative adult, parent, priest, teacher.

Sometimes this would inevitably lead to disputes between me and them about factual matters.

 

For example this memory is burned into my psychic memory as fact but from the moment I told my mother and ever since she maintains it never occurred…perhaps because as a mother the outrage of the gesture was too much for her to bear or perhaps she was seeking to protect a child who already before this incident regarded life as a dangerous labyrinth:

{The phone just rang.

One of those ‘interruptions’ that is my work!

A woman in the parish concerned about a friend in another city who is dying of cancer, and has been away from the faith for decades, needs a priest but does not know where to turn.

I gave her the number of The Community’s house in that same city and assured her all would be well.}

 

ONE day, it had to have been late fall because I recall the ground was frozen but there was no snow, I was playing alone along the fence that ran between our place and the tenement building at the back.

I heard sounds of people yelling in that manner which has crossed-over from mere frustrated anger to utter rage.

These yells were hard.

Cold.

Determined in a manner which frightened me.

Someone had either lost, or forgone, control.

Suddenly there was a new sound.

One, less familiar.

Shattering glass, but not like when you dropped your glass of milk and it shattered.

 This sound was less explosive, more tearing.

There was another sound along with the shattering, a softer sound, like it was straining after the first and as all this sound was racing at me I was looking up and following the shards of glass cascading towards earth, glistening in the sunlight.

 A bundle, whose cloth seemed to unfurl slowly, was falling to earth as well and behind that, but not falling, just leaning part way out the shattered window, a young woman, face from that distance not so much a face with features as a flesh coloured oval, but one which implied hate nonetheless.

From the unfurling cloth stuck out a little arm and my brain fought against what my eyes were telling for how could a baby shatter a window and fall to the earth?

Part of my being was frozen in horror and part of my being wanted to rush through the fence and get between the glass and the baby and catch the baby and save the baby, but the baby outpaced some of the glass and hit the coal chute with a muffled thud of weighted cloth.

Little shards of glass landed upon the sudden stillness.

Soon, sirens.

I fled into the house and told my mother what I had seen and she went out, having forbidden me to follow her, returned, ashen faced some minutes later and told me I should not tell lies.

It was just a laundry bundle.

No more was said that day.

I tried a few times, even some years later, to get her to admit what I had seen but the same admonishment was given to curb my over active mind.

It would not be until many decades later when I was working in Child Protective Services and rescued a baby whose PCP’d parents were playing a dangerous game of catch with the child that I would suddenly understand which baby I was still trying to save.

Which child.

AS I BEGIN to write this late evening I listen to Bach’s Zion hort die Wachter sigen.

In all his music you can hear, indeed have vibrate within your being, the cultural reality of a time in human history, at least in Western Civilization, of the permeation of faith into all of life.

True the artists of the day, the intellectuals, scientists, and no doubt some of the ordinary people as well, may not have been what would be termed today ‘ true believers ‘, but the culture itself retained this Christian ethos and it is there in all its yearning in his music.

It is through music that the ineffable most easily I believe, outside of sacramental reality, becomes tangible.

Now flowing through the headphones is Albinoni’s haunting Adagio, music that invites the soul to dance!

I continue to go through those original notes and in them this chapter had a title taken from Sacred Scripture and I had forgotten why until I read the notes…..

Writing itself is both composition and brush stroke, it has its own melody and colour and as sculpture, painting, photography invite the eye to observe contemplatively, and music invites the heart to imagine, and feel, the composer of words must attempt to move the whole person without access to melodic variations or depths of colour, shadings of light.

I suddenly have come to suspect that to read is participatory whereas the other forms can more easily be merely observed in an almost passive state.

No doubt this is why St. John took the Greek LOGOS and used it so accurately to open up the reality of who Christ is: WORD.

 

For the Holy Gospel cannot be merely observed passively as a montage about a life but must be participated in as an encounter with Some One: the One who plaintively calls out, seeking the man in the Garden, who awaits the woman at the well, Whom we would, to borrow from St. Augustine, never go in search of if He had not first found us – indeed were He not constantly at the door of our being seeking leave to enter! {Rev. 3:20}

The great Ezekiel with the poetry of a prophet and the prophecy of poetry captures this intimacy lavished upon us by the Divine Seeker! {Ez. 16:8}

 

THAT IS the passage used as a chapter title at the time I was writing those notes. The passage had been in my heart all day long.

I have come, finally, in my life to understand something which years ago when I was reflecting on that passage I had not yet truly grasped: Sacred Scripture, the Bible, both Old and New Testaments — though for the Christian we must begin with and always see all Scripture in light of the Holy Gospels — is not just the revelation of God, in point of fact His Self-revelation, nor is it, in the Old Testament just the story of the Chosen People, or in the Gospels just what Jesus did for the people of that time — Sacred Scripture is personal: the reality of the relationship between Christ, the Father and the Holy Spirit, with each and every person — if we will open to that relationship.

Thus that passage from Ezekiel is very personal indeed!

Already by the time I was old enough to go to school I had turned inward upon myself, was well and truly developing that ‘ false self ‘ Merton so accurately describes.

 Another modern author, Leanne Payne, who has had a great influence in my life also, uses the term of practicing the ‘ presence of self ‘, as opposed to the practice of the Presence of God.

Though I did not understand it at the time I was also, with this becoming inwardly bent, moving towards an inextricable, for decades to come, interior disconnect with self and a move towards an equally inextricable influence in my life of the forces of darkness.

Were I not to be completely overwhelmed at such an early stage in life Christ Himself would, somehow, have to intervene.

The more was an appreciation, though certainly not an understanding because I was more knowledgeable of the experience of absence, of Real Presence.

Looking back now it seems inconceivable I would deliberately choose atheism as a young adult.

What was happening when that little boy that I was would stop into church on his way home from school or play?

What was he thinking, saying, praying?

How did he know that here there was some-One, unseen, unheard, unknown in any but the most transcendent and ineffable of ways?

There is no answer I can give to those questions that would be a set of traceable facts leading from the broken child, so overwhelmed with his little life, to the truth of the words of the prophet Ezekiel spoken as the voice of the Father, but this I do know: He was doing exactly what He says each time I entered the church, or rather more accurately, stepped into His Real Presence.

Even in this moment as I write these lines, in the moment you are reading them, He is again loving and moving and seeing.

So powerful are the exact words in Ezekiel about what He does when He finds us I urge you to go, discover, listen: Ez. 16:6,7!

 When my Spiritual Father wrote to me so many years ago about what he had seen upon my face when I recalled the memory of being spat upon he ended his letter with these words:

…underneath everything, even the loneliness, beyond the hurt and the anger and the confusion, I sensed something else, and perhaps that is what enabled the Lord to make your face shine. You think that you are a survivor, making it on guts and street-smarts but what I saw was someone — maybe weak and broken and beat-up — who had too much LIFE in him to die or to let himself be killed or to go crazy or even to stop hoping that love was possible. I don’t know how Jesus put that life in you, but I praise Him for it.

One time when I was praying in the sacristy, contemplating through the open sacristy door Jesus in His Real Presence in the tabernacle, I heard the heavy wooden doors of the church bang shut indicating, obviously, someone had come into the church.

It being the middle of the afternoon in that factory neighbourhood it was unusual to have someone come in at that hour.

I could hear the shuffle of winter boots up the aisle, one set heavy, the other the scuff-scuff of a small child.

When they came into view the father appeared to me as if he were barely out of his teens, if that, and the boy about three.

They did not notice me, so I was about to go and greet then when something made me stay still.

The father approached the stand of votive lights before the statue of Our Blessed Mother and dropped in a coin, lit a candle, then gave his boy a coin, helped the lad to put the coin in the box and then lifted the lad and helped him with the taper so he too could light a candle.

After a moment’s silence, still holding his son, the father said: “ Know why we do this? “

I heard no reply from the child.

“ Mommy’s sick and we can’t be here all the time to pray for her so the candles remind Jesus’ Mom to pray for…..”

From the sacristy I blessed the sobbing father and his son and watched them leave.

 As I recall that scene this summer’s evening writing these lines it remains for me a icon of His Will that we live!

Mail has been answered, the sick in hospital visited, appointments kept.

 Now it is late afternoon.

Unlike most of the year these, dog days of summer, phone and doorbell stay rather quiet.

 There is extra time to pray, to read, and yes, to write.

It rained a bit this afternoon.

One of those, warm, lazy rains, of mid-summer.

Water!

It makes up much of our bodies, even from the very beginning, in the womb.

In some form or other water is an essential element of physical life.

From the opening of Genesis to the flood and the ark, from the parting of the sea to water from the rock, from the battle between the true and the false, to the Lamb at the Jordan, from the miracle of Cana to the broken open Heart, water has its irreplaceable part as the living, flowing, river of His providence. { cf. Gn. 1;Gn.6-9;Ex.14:10-31;Ex.17:1-7;1Kg.18:21-40;Jn.1:29-43;Jn.2:1-11;Jn.19:31-37 }

Did I not just write that the phone has been quiet today?

It has taken near fifteen minutes to write these few lines, however, as a holy priest-writer once said when asked how he coped with all the interruptions: Interruptions? They are my life!

CHRIST casts His eyes upon us even before we are created in our mother’s womb.

When do we first cast eyes upon Him?

It is at the moment of our Baptism.

      The moment when water becomes sacrament of He who has first gazed upon us!

So many questions pose themselves here for the non-believer: about God, man, sacrament, about Baptism itself.

The temptation is to answer them in a way which frankly would drown you dear reader in ponderous theological paragraphs.

I am, be grateful to her, reminded of words from the Servant of God Catherine Doherty who pleaded with we priests to give people God and not theological punditry.

 So I pray here the answers sought will be found in the telling of a life created by God, sustained by Him, redeemed by Him, and how He does all that!

Given the fact I was baptized within a few days of my birth I naturally do not retain a normal conscious memory of the event, though undoubtedly my soul, being indelibly marked by the sacrament, sealed as one of Christ’s own by the Holy Spirit, has somewhere a memory of the event more vivid than I can possibly imagine.

In those days before the Second Vatican Council ritual was something cherished, not seen as some impediment to personal creativity.

Having been at the baptisms of my various brothers and sisters, and reviewing pre-Vatican II ritual books, I can piece together what would have occurred at my own baptism and touch on this importance of water become sacrament in the life of a human being.

The Baptism would have taken place over a marble font in the sacristy of the parish church, where I would have been carried in the arms of my Godfather. Often in those days the mother was not present as Baptism occurred within hours, certainly no more than a couple of days of birth.

The ritual would have unfolded mainly in Latin, the sacred language of over a millennia of the believing Church.

QUO NOMINE VOCARIS?, the priest would have asked: By what name are you called?

Naturally I could not answer being a mere baby and so the Godparents would have answered: MY name!

Sacred Scripture is filled with consoling words about the sacredness of name, the promise of redemption, the blessing of water { cf. Is.43:1,2; Jn.10:3 } and the Church Herself teaches clearly: “God calls each one by name. Everyone’s name is sacred. The name is the icon of           the person. It demands respect as a sign of the dignity of the one who bears it. The name one receives is a name for eternity. In the kingdom, the mysterious and unique character of each person marked with God’s name will shine forth in splendour. “ To him who conquers….I will give a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it. “ [b]

QUID PETIS AB ECCLESIA DEI?

What do you beg of the Church of God?

The solemn answer would be given in one word: FIDEM! FAITH!

FIDES, QUID TIBI PRAESTAT? Faith, what does that offer you?

The answer given this time was both a declaration of truth and a statement of hope: VITAM AETERNAM!

ETERNAL LIFE!

Having called me to live the Gospel and enter life by keeping the commandments of loving God with my whole heart, soul, mind and my neighbour as myself, the priest then leaned over my tiny body and breathed the sacred breeze of his Spirit filled breath, three times, over my face intoning: EXI AB EO IMMUNDE SPIRITUS, ET DA LOCUM SPIRITUI SANCTO PARACLITO!

DEPART FROM HIM UNCLEAN SPIRIT AND GIVE OVER THIS DWELLING PLACE TO THE HOLY SPIRIT!

Then the priest would have signed me on the forehead and over my heart with the Sign of the Cross that I might embrace all Divine teaching and live as God’s temple and blessed salt would have been placed upon my tongue to seal within my being the declaration of Christ Himself  that we His disciples are, and are to be, salt of the earth{ Mt.5:13 }.After other blessings, anointing, came the actual pouring of the baptismal water over my being and the declaration by name of my baptism in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In that instant I was transformed from a creature of God to a child of God, from another object in the created universe to a subject also, a true person!

At that precise moment there was no darkness within my being, I was filled with His light, with all that was needed to live a full, holy life, the life St. Paul so eloquently describes as an actual, a real re-birth, not to some mundane existence, but fullness of life in Christ and therefore no longer should be we looking to ‘the world’ for the meaning of life, the purpose of the very gift of existence, but beyond ourselves, indeed into the very heart of the Trinity until that extraordinary moment comes when the very truth of the ‘am’ of ‘I’ will be revealed in Him and with Him [Col.3:1-4}.

From the moment of my Baptism, until I was old enough to start school, that ideal of the Christian way of life pretty much remained in my being untainted by any of my own deliberate doing, for I was after all a mere toddler.

However, as is simply the reality of living life in the company of other human beings, as the years went by the events of family life, life lived in this world, affected me to varying degrees.

From very early on, certainly it was already a personal practice by the time I started school, internalizing things as a battle between what I knew to be true, and true as a matter of faith, and what I felt to be true, as a matter of experience, became ever more intense, ever more something I began to keep locked inside of myself, speaking about it to no one.

Possessed of an almost ferocious self-will when it came to being stubborn at the same time when it came to giving into fear or gratification it was as if I had no self-will at all.

What began as a battle within myself over the years would develop into a great struggle with, and eventually against, the very God whose sacramental child I had become.

St. John stresses the reality of belonging to the Holy Trinity within the starkness of life in a world which is darkened by another {1Jn.5:19}.

Decades ago when I was working in the financial heart of the country, immersed in the cult of greed, returning home on the subway late one night I was accosted by a ‘bible-thumper’ with the usual assumptive challenge: Have you been saved? Do you know Jesus brother?

Instantly my ego was engaged.

 I stupidly plunged right into the insane trap and frankly proved how little I knew Jesus by assaulting the young man’s religious innocence, assuring him that, as a Roman Catholic, not only was I saved big-time but that thanks to confession I could sin and sin and be saved and saved!

This horrified him no end.

He was literally, utterly horrified that anyone who has been saved could ever consent to sinning again. To him it was incomprehensible.

He, of course, was/is right.

It should not only be incomprehensible but unheard of that a Christian, once baptized, would ever willingly cast off Christ and choose sin.

But I was really terrible that night on the subway and would not leave it alone.

I pressed him, hassled him, about the current state of the world, our so-called Christian culture, the TV evangelists, the Catholic priests, the public Christians who committed terrible sins stressing it sure seemed to me rather common for the ‘saved’ to sin and sin and sin.

He fled the subway at the next stop.

I sat there in a puddle of my egotistical waste, though at the time I was too much of a casual Christian to grasp the meaning of the entire encounter.

Only now these decades later do I understand what a missed opportunity of grace that was and I thank-God for that young and enthusiastic Christian man.

I often ask our Heavenly Father to grant me forgiveness for my lack of openness and charity.

Indeed, this is the constant prayer of my heart.

So there I was in that cold sacristy in the middle of a World War reborn in living water.

I would grow up on the shores of the great water over which the Spirit had hovered at the beginning and in the years to come, in the silence of the night, as a great war waged relentlessly within me, soak my being with the water of tears….not of contrition but of being overwhelmed by it all.

“ THEY look like they’re just coming out of some Siberian forest! “, exclaimed one of the women.

I glanced out of the kitchen window.

There, framed between the outside wall of the kitchen, and the wall of the woodshed, in that little narrow space where no buildings block the forest from view, came the great procession!

In the lead: the thurifer, his white server’s alb visible near his feet, the rest of his body bundled in a parka, head swathed in toque and scarf, his warm breath pushing puffs of steam from his mouth, in competition with the clouds of incense rising from the gold thurible, he rhythmically swung back and forth.

Behind him came the men and women of The Community, all dressed against the cold, holding lit tapers, singing…but from the distance of the enclosed kitchen the words were indecipherable.

Then the priests, the bottom edges of their coloured vestments, worn under heavy winter coats, visible above their various shaped and coloured winter boots.

Last in the procession came the Archbishop.

Coatless he was layered in golden thread vestments, his face beaming, equal to the brocade in which he was awash, carrying high for all to see, a crucifix.

Once the procession had passed by the small area from view, I moved, with all the others, to the far side of the kitchen facing the river where large windows framed the unfolding liturgy.

The frozen artery is buried under more than a foot of snow.

Deep below the cold water moves, flowing from far north, deep in the great northern forest, past our little Community, and on for hundreds of miles until it flows into The Great River and onto the sea.

Today it had a piece of itself torn open, before dawn, by axe and pick, so that into the open hole this crucifix, being carried by the Archbishop, might find leave to enter the water, sanctify it and the rivers and oceans, into which it should flow, until the heat of the sun, one tiny blessed water droplet at a time across time, will draw each into the embrace of invisible, to the earth-bound eye, particles of dust and the gathering will begin. Clouds will be woven, wind will stir, and then rain shall fall upon the fields nestled against the hills of this valley. Deep in the great forest rivulets will form, streams will be replenished and dance through the glens until they stumble into this river which will flow across the summer, through the fall harvest, until winter’s ice-rest returns.

Then, on time’s new morning like this, another procession will emerge from the forest, another crucifix will be placed into the water and the sanctification will be renewed.

That continual reality of the constant renewal throughout the liturgical year of the sacramental life of grace, our own being drawn by the Spirit to the Father through the Son is the grace of every moment in God being the moment of beginning again.

The central witness of my life is not just our constant need of Him, but more importantly His constant lavishing of grace, of mercy, of new beginning upon us!

I am a priest.

Whether it is preaching, teaching, hearing confessions, or, yes, writing an autobiography, ultimately the only One I seek to proclaim is Christ. So my real name is of no import.

The witnessing to His mercy, to His Holy Name, is.

As St. John the Baptist, with passionate urgency beholding the Lamb of God, Jesus, approaching him,  realized and proclaimed that henceforth he, John, must be less of a presence, less visible, that Christ might be the everything everyone seeks { Jn. 3:30 & Col. 3:11}, so must each priest live the gift and mystery of priesthood.

When people, for example, are more aware of Father X or Y celebrating Holy Mass than they are of Christ Himself we priests are failing to be what we are: in persona Christi – Christ for you!

As a priest, who has some small gift as a writer, my heart wants to stir your heart dear reader to open wide the doors of your being to Christ, showing through this telling of my own prodigal’s passions and pilgrimage, His mercy is greater than our capacity for sin, that our Father in every moment rushes towards the returning prodigal.

My prayer is you will open wide the doors of your being to the Holy Spirit, the Life-Giver, Teacher of Truth, the Sanctifier, confident He is tirelessly answering every human prayer.

Indeed in his own telling of what the Holy Spirit accomplishes, if we are willing within us, St. Paul boldly proclaims there is nothing the Sanctifier cannot restore to Christ, no one who cannot be sanctified, if we are willing to risk loving God who Himself is love {Rm.8:28}!

      ANCESTRY, roots, heritage, ethnic-origin, the old-country, family-tree, tribe, clan.

We all have a history.

We all come from somewhere…from some at least momentary encounter in passion between a man and a woman.

Some people can trace their family history back through countless generations with exact records. Some families use these traces to assure power over others, or at least some particular status in their own minds; others have no, or few, written records, but their colour, use of language, mannerisms, and, especially, oral history, assure them an identity; still others in our modern era have the record of photographs, and now video images of generations at play, at Baptisms, weddings, birthdays, perhaps even funerals.

However it is looked at the orphan, that is even the person with no apparent tangible official record of their original family seeks to have some kind of connection with a family history…be it a military unit, street gang, cult, or religion. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church even an orphan can join a religious order like the Benedictines and become part of a specific family within the greater Catholic family of the Church, a family which traces itself across the millennia.

The Church is also that family which, par excellence, always, passionately, welcomes home the prodigal, again and again and again, following the example of her Divine Spouse.

Of my own origins I am woefully ignorant, at least going back any further than some vague notions about my Grandparents, and even those notions are coloured by family legend and the passage of years.

Certainly they all originally came from various parts of Europe. Italy mostly is what I cling to, though none of those traditions was passed on.

The times of coming over were marked by the later wars of the 19^th century and the First World War in the 20^th century.

They clearly brought with them the typical immigrant determination to survive, with its good, and less so, aspects.

They certainly passed onto me a fierce determination as a survivor.

They were soldiers, sailors, hard-working men and women with true survivor skills.

All of them tough as nails.

When, during the First World War, the city in which I grew up was almost totally destroyed by the collision and explosion of a medical and a munitions ship, and a glass window shattered into the face of my maternal Grandmother, she simply took the glass out, sutured up her own face and proceeded to care for her children, clean up the house, help wounded neighbours.

That was the same war in which many of the men died in the mud and blood of the Europe their ancestors had thought they’d left behind to its own relentless cycles of horror.

Some ancestors also brought over with them the faith of the Reformation, but the men kept falling in love with the daughters of other ancestors who brought over with them the faith of Rome. There is an almost constant back and forth among the family branches between one side or the other, depending it seems, on who was marrying whom!

By the time the men who had survived the first war managed to survive the Great Depression and raise sons, those sons were available for the European branches of the family to slaughter each other and plunge the world into yet another blood bath, since the war to end all wars clearly had not been bloody or far reaching enough.

The original Reformation side, my mother’s, were now Catholic and my father’s side had lost the faith of Rome, so my father became Catholic to marry my mother and I became another generation of sons to begin life during a war.

Increasingly many astute Protestant and Catholic clergy have come to understand the Scriptural basis for looking at family history when considering the personal struggles of the modern Christian.

In a culture where the sons have gone to war not once or twice but many times in one century, the 20^th, where women have first because of war and then because of the societal need to consume stuff, or just to put food on the table, have been taken out of the home, especially in the critical early years of their children’s lives, where the whole social order has been in upheaval and where technology, science, medicine, communication, philosophy, art, and most other human endeavours have been in a constant state of upheaval, not to mention things like the spread of artificial contraception, abortion, homosexuality and the attendant variations on the theme of human sexuality etc., etc., we see all around us loneliness, depression, a type of lostness unheard of in human history, which pulverizes the human person as we constantly ask why?

“ … we are strange in some way, yet we are Christ’s body on earth.  Cardinal Ratzinger calls this an example Of the ‘ divine law of disguise’  — God’s Divine ability to be present in what is the weakest and least  likely, so that holiness can shine forth for what it is, His own. As we are healed and our family is healed, our living members are integrated more in charity; deceased members in our family attain a closer union with us in Christ, because they become closer to the God-Presence,  and more fulfilled through this prayer. In this corporate familial healing God’s glory is Manifest abundantly, often dramatically……” [a]

In other words, no matter how crazy the twists and bends in the branches of our family tree, God will make it all come out beautiful in the end….if we let Him!

So how much detail do I need to write about?

I am well past the half-century mark in my own life. I begin to write on the threshold of the new millennium and question how much of the past before my birth is important for me to discover Him at work.

As I write this hot summer’s evening, when it feels like at any moment the whole city could spontaneously combust, the might of the state is at work.

Helicopters, planes, ships, men and women, desperately seeking over, and in, the ocean for the man the nation still sees as the little boy peering out from the desk of the young father who just happened to be President of the United States.

When the ‘father’ of the nation was slaughtered the boy became the nation’s son.

In the intervening years the culture has decided it can do without fathers.

Now this fatherless nation must cope with the tragic death of its son.

I believe the sixties are finally over.

=================================================

I WAS BORN when hundreds of thousands of men, including my father, uncles, cousins, were spilling their blood into the sand and gravel of Normandy, Sicily, Holland, or drowning in a mixture of blood, bunker oil and seawater, as the final years of the Second World War ground on.

My childhood would be marked by other wars in Asia, the Middle East, and the constant anxiety among most North Americans caused by the ebb and flow of the Cold War. Then there would be the so-called local wars between India and Pakistan, Israel and just about everybody in the area, Biafra…who remembers that sad, little, temporary nation?

Viet-Nam would scar a whole generation…both those who fought in it and those who fought it; the civil rights battles, the struggles, often of sad incomprehension, between fifties’ parents and sixties’ flower-children…those were the years in which my adolescence would wander into young adulthood.

Early memories are of fear…war-fear, absent father-fear, polio-epidemic-fear, atomic-war-fear; grainy newsreel footage of the camps of the holocaust, the scenes from a devastated and hungry Europe, the Berlin airlift,….playing down at the docks as ship after ship arrived with war-brides and refugees…cousins, young, frightened, determined to survive, as yet another generation from the relentless killing fields of Europe sought to begin again.

How little did we know in the late forties that within less than a generation this would all repeat itself ….the scenes of bombed cities, tortured women and children, piles of bodies, defeat, flight…in Viet-Nam, Cambodia, Latin America.

Apparently however those oceans of blood in which we were drowning were not, are not, deep enough for we are approaching the new millennium at war with the future.

Not satisfied with imitating Cain on a massive scale against the brother we see, now we out Cain-Cain and slaughter our brothers and sisters in the millions before they are even born!

What a century of blood.

No wonder as a child I became obsessed with books, imaginary places of peace, beauty, with being alone for hours on end along the docks and the great breakwater of the harbour….dreaming, dreaming, always dreaming of a place of safety, of a family where fathers were not always going away.

I’d lean against the window at night, even in the winter when the thin glass would be frosted over and my cheekbone would ache with the cold, and gaze at the stars and the moon, yearn to float with the clouds…..street lamps in those days being weak of light and usually only one to a block, so even a kid in the city could see the night sky!

I’d wonder who I was, why I was, where I came from, what was life all about, why was life so fearful, sad, so relentless in its ever changing demands?

Eventually the cold, biting into my cheek, would be too much, or, if I was down by the ocean, the fog would roll in and the dampness would seep through my clothes into my bones…strange but I came to love the cold like my one reliable companion in an ever deepening aloneness….but in either case it would be time to head to bed, or home, to ponder some other time.

SOME YEARS BACK when I first started making notes for this book such old questions about who am I, why, where, had stirred within me once again one winter’s day when I was living with The Community and staying in the priests’ house.

I’d gone out to stand for a time and ponder. I stood in the companionship of that winter’s cold and snow, with pen and notepad in hand:

While standing out on the porch, watching today’s slight snowfall Stephen Hawking came into my heart.I enjoy his work very much.Were his theories uttered from a perspective of sheer adoring faith, I would be more willing to simply thank God for him.As it is I must pray constantly for him to open wide the doors of his being to Christ.Once he does then he shall know the true splendour and origin of all.

I still enjoy Hawking and still pray for him.

That admission scientists like himself make about not knowing what was before the elapse of the first one billion-or portion thereof-of a second into the big bang….Aquinas would say that is what some call God!

I wonder if, really, it is the universal — just moment of beginning of everything — that scientists are anxious about or is it not that they, being persons like the rest of us, REALLY want to know that mysterious moment of their own beginning of existence, as a way of refuting the reality of God as Father, as Creator?

In truth all the ‘ where has it come from’ questions about the universe are essentially ‘ where have I come from?’, and, ‘ why am I here?’

In my own case it is tinged with the immense inner awareness that when I ask that question I am compelled to ask how I came to be at a time when, as best we can figure, fifty million of my brothers and sisters, in a real sense my immediate family, had died, or were dying, in the ovens and camps, the saturation bombings, tank battles, sea-battles, on beaches, in the frozen horror of Stalingrad and the suddenness of an atomic flash, so far above their heads they probably never even heard the plane fly over them with its belly full of instant death.

WHILE pondering such questions the sudden melting of a snowflake on my tongue causes my being to shudder as if those melting crystals carried within the immediacy of ancient history and my heart heard the plaintive cry of God Himself calling out to Cain {Gn.4:10} 

All my pondering about the origins of life, my own included, the marvels of the created universe, being deeply affected by the course of the century of blood: perhaps only when I am truly a very old man, past pondering with curiosity and only able…please God willing….to marvel with quiet gratitude to Him, will the effort to understand surrender to, finally be melted into, the great truth, or rather to become one with the truth no-thing, more critically no-one exists but through Christ – and – of course if we neither know Christ nor that we are known by Him then our very existence, the existence of everything, everyone, most particularly our very selves – well all remains incomprehensible {Jn.1:3}!

A MEMORY has sprung into my heart from my early childhood after the war and illustrates the fundamental type of experience and my reaction to such which formed the person I have become….or rather in many ways formed the wounds within me, the healing of which has allowed me to become the person He created and redeems!

I was about six.

One day in the fall, for my birthday, I was given a new sweater.

New clothes were something special, they were yours, smelled new and henceforth would only smell like you, they’d take in your warmth, assume your shape.

Living in the city of the great harbour on the north Atlantic meant the air is never merely cold, it is so damp it soaks the cold into your bones.

A sweater was no luxury, it was necessary.

 A truly warm sweater was a treasure.

I remember that day with vividness as if the images in my mind have been painted there by Cezanne… a memory of sharp colour yet muted light, people moving about, yet still.

 I remember parts of people, but no faces, events but no time frame.

Mostly I remember I survived.

We lived on a street which went from the war veterans hospital at the top of the hill, past a few houses with little ground floor shops, tenements, the construction company yard, the lot leading to the arena, more shops and tenements, the neighbourhood chop-shop, stores, boarding houses, fire-hall, bottling plant, huge factory size bakery.

On and on it was a world of wonderful places, constant activity, sounds, smells and a boy on a tricycle could be a motorcycle cop, drive a bus, a huge dump truck, cowboy on a horse, tank commander…anything.

Riding my new tricycle and wearing the treasured new sweater off I went!

Down the block, past my best friend’s house whose bachelor uncle was a ham radio operator and, as the need would arise in our anti-commie games, became for us from time to time a spy!

Past the dark mauve painted house, always shuttered behind huge lilac bushes, which defied the cement sidewalk encroachment around their roots. That house was where a spinster lived with a string of handsome young men, her boarders. In the summer, it seemed each year, one by one the young men would leave that house early in the morning, dressed in morning suits, flower in the lapel, sometimes accompanied by one of the regulars from the boarding house, a little drunk for so early in the day.

He might return, but none of the men in the morning suits ever did!

Many of the houses in those days had old men and unmarried daughters…war­-widows. Some of the houses were homes with young widowed women who had children to care for, so the front rooms had been turned into little shops or lunch counters.

Past all those, past the tenements, the bottling plant, round past the fire hall and down the far side of the block…technically out of my neighbourhood…I recall riding in the joy of my new sweater and the fire-crispness of that fall day.

Past the big grocery store where the oldest of my younger sisters got lost one day when my Grandfather took us in there and she screamed and hated us both for losing her so I’d bopped her one as I declared I hadn’t lost her!

 Then I was midway down that side of the block, passing the little stationary store which smelled inside of paper, pencils, rubber erasers, glues, paint, ink….a world of images and ideas….a place where a dedicated spinster-sister cared for a battle wounded in body and spirit young man, her brother, who would beckon from his wheel-chair for the ‘little boy’ to come and visit.

My Mother would always agree to tea when she took me there in early fall for the year’s school supplies for me and my increasing number of brothers and sisters.

 I never liked the wounded guy, so while the women had tea would avoid him and would  stroll among the little narrow rows of paper, pens, books, cards, yearning for the world of my dreams, that place where there was neither uncertainty nor fear.

Suddenly I was surrounded.

There were five of them.

Local tough boys, older than me by far and too big for a tricycle.

I was on their turf.

They wanted my tricycle.

Worse.

They wanted my sweater.

I knew if I got off the bike I was done for.

I held on so hard my knuckles whitened and pained.

I was punched and shoved, rocked back and forth both by the blows and them trying to haul me off but I had the extreme strength of a survivor.

I was not letting go.

They cursed, swore, mocked, threatened.

I could not afford to say a word for that risked taking strength away from my grip which was now locked in place.

Adults were passing by, saying nothing, doing nothing.

 I, not expecting help, did not bother to ask for the help I did not expect.

Suddenly the rocking and pounding blows stopped.

For a second I began to form the idea they had given up.

The first glob landed on my swollen closed right eye.

Somewhere deep inside of my being that warm spittle hurt more than all the punches, even more than the fear which was so great it itself was sickly sweet in its ever increasing waves through my pounding heart and throbbing knuckles.

They spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit.

My face and hair were covered.

They spit and spit and the sound of the great intake of throat swill and gasp of air, as they prepared to hurl more spit upon me, became the only sound I could hear.

It smelled.

I smelled their smell.

Every instinct in my being urged me to let go, surrender, cry.

I would not.

From a surreal distance an adult male voice uttered some command.

The sound of fleeing boy-feet replaced the guttural grasping to fill a throat and mouth with another salvo of spittle.

The male voice attempted to convince the knuckle tight, spittle-covered boy he was safe and a handkerchief in the rough hand of a working man attempted to clean my eyes and face.

 Though I must have stared at the kind man I do not recall his face.

Escape occupied my being now.

 I pedaled home as fast as I could, put the tricycle were the other kids could take it to play with, for I would not, slipped into the house unseen, went to the room I shared with the oldest of my younger brothers, wiped myself off, took off the sweater.

 I don’t remember where I put it.

I know I never wore it again.

I also know now that I made an inner-vow that day that I would survive anything and that I could not rely on anyone to come to my aid. Not anyone.

The smell of spit was never to leave me.

 Especially would it be there, in its entire stench, whenever I was afraid, for over thirty years.

======================================

IT IS mid July and the city has become a broiler within which we human beings struggle to go about daily life, confronting something way beyond the illusion of our power over the created order!

Sure, we can air-condition our cars and buildings….that is we the non poor of this world…but the poor in dense tenement after tenement block of inner city chaos…what cool breeze ever caresses their foreheads?

People think I am strange, frankly for various reasons, but never more so than in my opposition to air-conditioning the rectory until all the poor have the same luxury in their little apartments.

In the heat, on this city afternoon, a funeral. One attended by people who have not darkened the door of a church since they were children, people sobbing in un­-availed grief, who dutifully came to pay their last respects and who then endured the heat in the middle of a vast city cemetery, devoid of trees to make room for more graves.

The sun tore through my black jacket over my black shirt like an unstoppable laser beam seeking its target!

I am easily one enamoured of all that has to do with the origins of the material universe, of man himself, and all that has to do with the ultimate outer reaches of the galaxies, the human imagination, mind, and heart.

More am I fascinated by what lies beyond the second experience of womb…the grave.

Yet in this generation it seems we have forgotten sheer wonder and become addicted to mere information.

Perhaps that is why since I was a little child with his first Brownie camera the art and wonder of photography has so fascinated me.

When I walk about this world, camera at the ready, my physical eyes tend to gaze more attentively.

Most respectfully.

More in wonder at human beings, animals, street lights and other things we have constructed, at trees and plants, an old abandoned running shoe in the gutter, a gutted car in a vacant lot.

My heart draws stories about what I see from the fertility of my imagination .

Sometimes I will stop and take a picture knowing full well that when it is developed it will not be exactly what I saw with my physical eye but it will refract itself in the eye of my heart.

 Once again I shall stand in wonder at the inexhaustible beauty that is life!

That’s why I usually only photograph in black and white.

How wonderful it would be to know more about the ancestral beauty from which I have come, and the ancestral ugliness as well…for it is as we all know, but often do not want to admit, the stark reality of opposites and paradox which heighten the experience of living……….the broiler sidewalks where the air assaults the lungs enhances the sweetly sick smelling coolness of an old movie theatre..the doddering wrinkledness of a passing wino reassures the overly expensively dressed young entrepreneur of their youthful superiority…….the darkness abyss of the loneliness just before dawn can ease because even the most pedestrian of mornings is a beginning again and may appear as a horizon of hope.

But now duty calls this 102 degree afternoon and, for a priest, the need of any soul is always more important than any personal project!

STRANGE this ebb and flow of daily life between the immediate nitty-gritty of service as a priest and these snatched moments in the evening late hours to write about events in my life more than five decades ago.

As yet I do not clearly see the whole connection, though of course in ways at times self-evident, more often mysterious, grace is the connection.

Grace is part of His Self-Gift to us.

Perhaps – no – definitely there will come a point in this telling where I shall write about grace.

Now is the time to exemplify how His grace is Himself at work!

As mentioned the smell of spittle, the horror of that assault, the inner-vow never again to trust anyone [ only late in life would I admit that anyone included any-One ] would not leave me for over thirty years and would return with vengeance at times of great fear.

One Sunday in the winter of 1979 my Spiritual Father was attempting to bring healing into my being through a process called ‘ the healing of memories ‘ where I would allow painful memories to surface, allow myself to ‘ feel ‘ those experiences and hand everything over to Christ.

It was a difficult process with which in those early days…he had only been my spiritual director for a few months and I was most tentative about a return to the True Faith – or any faith life at all for that matter – I was not always truly co-operative.

The healing event of that Sunday afternoon is best described from his perspective as recorded in a letter he wrote me the day after:

IT WAS good to see you face to face and to have a chance to listen to you and pray with you.

One moment will always remain with me.

I’m not sure when it was, but I think you were telling me about that terrible incident when the kids hit you and spat on you and your sweater; suddenly when I looked at you, your face was radiant. You looked so young, beautiful, the way people do when they know they are loved.

It startled me because you were telling me this heart-breaking story, and I could only think that Jesus was somehow showing His love to you in the depth of your heart, revealing His Presence to you, taking away the smell of spit, making you realize that He had never abandoned you even if the abandonment of everyone else made you think that He had.

It is true any rational person rightly wonders where God was or is when we are being abused, are grief-stricken, suffer in anyway.The greater truth is God who is Love, Christ Himself is right there, more intimate to us than we are to our very selves for the worst of every drop of spit, of every slap, of all torture, abuse, of every lie, insult, rejection, of death itself, He has taken not just on { Mt.26:67-8 & Heb.4:15-16} but into Himself so that we might never, ever, no matter what, be even for a moment unloved or truly alone. 

THAT is the why of this!

MY BISHOP has just granted a sabbatical.

My Spiritual Father has said to use the time to “ write, pray, paint “.

Yesterday I traveled far to visit a friend, coping with a sudden death in the family. The return trip took place in the dark.

Age has dimmed my eyes.

I usually take easy routes when driving at night.

On those twisting back roads the slower pace allowed for reflections about the directive to spend these sabbatical months writing, praying, painting.

My heart was moved for silence, so I turned off the radio and tried to still my mind.

What came to my heart, over and over again was the line from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans where the Apostle stresses the apparent paradox that where the more there is sin, even more so there is grace [ Rm. 5: 20 ]!

The Apostle is stating that every moment of our lives is offered as a moment of beginning again.

It IS in God, the Trinity, specifically in Christ who through His Holy Incarnation in His Holy Ascension has taken time into the Trinity, that each moment is the moment of beginning, again, again, again, so long as there is breath in us.

This book is  a witness to this truth :  HIS MERCY is greater than our sin IF we but, with every breath, cry out to Him for His mercy.

The tragedy is how long it takes us to realize this and turn to Him.

The joy is, once we truly turn to Him, sin loses its allure and the Holy Spirit is free to glorify Christ within us, thus making real the truth that the glory of God is the human person fully alive, for, we are fully alive when we no longer live, Christ lives in us.

I do not claim that is accomplished within me, rather I do witness to the truth the Spirit is at work, tirelessly, to complete what was begun at my Baptism, this configuration to Christ.

Placed in the hands of Our Blessed Mother,this book is dedicated to mySpiritual Fatherwho continues to teach me that inCHRISTevery moment is the moment of beginning again!