A friend of mine in the Community of Sant’Egidio has asked me to reflect upon this past Holy Week and Easter Sunday in the parish and how the community accompanied the parish in its celebration.
“Accompanied,” I believe, is the proper word. Parishes by their very nature are living realities that are grounded in faith and their own particular history, tradition and makeup. St. Dominic Parish is no exception to this. Every parish has a living history that should be honored for what it has achieved yet also continually nourished into future growth. No movement within the Church should seek to replace or even replicate the living reality of the parish. That being said, we all help one another along in the journey of faith and it has been my experience that the Community of Sant’Egidio has many rich gifts to offer that a parish can benefit from both in the celebration of Holy Week and throughout the year. In order to be manageable though the focus of this reflection will be solely on Holy Week.
For full disclosure, I believe it important to also state that my own discipleship and priesthood has been effected by my encounter with and involvement in the Community of Sant’Egidio and, that as pastor of St. Dominic parish, I bring this influence with me into the parish. The pastor of a parish does have a unique role is helping to set the atmosphere of a parish. It is not the sole influence on a parish but it is one that should be acknowledged. For example, one of the things I find truly good and right about the Community of Sant’Egidio is a healthy relationship between priests and laity. These two groups are neither in competition nor are they set apart and, I believe, neither should they be viewed so. I bring this perspective with me into the parish. I am willing to work with the people of a parish as fellow disciples and I believe that people notice this and appreciate it. Yes, priests have specific roles and the pastor does have specific duties and responsibilities but these are best lived within the whole context of a community seeking discipleship together even as it may make things more laborious at times. Frankly, I believe that the priest needs to avoid the common temptation of playing the hero and the people need to avoid the temptation of seeking to make the priest the hero as a way of avoiding their own responsibility. We are disciples together.
As we began Holy Week 2016, I shared with the St. Dominic community the thought that our Lord greatly desires to spend these days with us. In the thirteenth chapter of John’s gospel, we find expressed a great longing and even tender love on our Lord’s part to be with his disciples and prepare them for what is to come even as his own hour approaches. This is a perspective firmly rooted in the gospels and an awareness that the Community of Sant’Egidio maintains. There is a deeper movement to Holy Week than that of us going about our rituals professing our belief, together yet isolated at the same time. Christ himself gathers us in and he gathers each one of us. Christ wants to spend these days with all of his disciples and with each disciple. We are not forgotten and we are not disposable. We are each remembered by Christ in Holy Week and we are each wanted by Christ. He greatly desires to spend these days with each of us.
Within the above mentioned deeper context of Holy Week there were three particular moments that the Community of Sant’Egidio accompanied St. Dominic Parish these days. The moments were not “Sant’Egidio only” but were a joint accompanying between the parish and the community. The three moments were Mercy Palms on Palm Sunday, the Prayer for the Martyrs and the ongoing relationship with our sister parish in Blantyre, Malawi. I would like to reflect a little on each aspect.
In a way to live the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Marco Impagliazzo (the president of the Community of Sant’Egidio) invited all the groupings of Sant’Egidio worldwide to live Palm Sunday as a demonstration of mercy. In the spirit of Pope Francis, we were invited to take the palms outside the walls of our church as a visible sign of God’s love and mercy for the poor and forgotten in our society. At St. Dominic’s we decided to do this by making close to 150 palm crosses and taking them as a gift to our friends at Holston Manor Nursing Home. We gathered on Palm Sunday afternoon with a few of our friends in the day room of Holston Manor. We had a simple ceremony with a reading of the gospel and blessing of the palm crosses. Those present had some social time together and then after a while our group divided up and we took the palm crosses throughout the nursing home, offering them to every resident we met as well as staff members. It was a simple gesture but a gesture that said “you are not forgotten”. The residents were truly grateful. In this simple act, St. Dominic Parish and Sant’ Egidio began Holy Week together by going out to the poor and forgotten in a gesture of mercy.
On Monday night of Holy Week, St. Dominic Parish with the Sant’Egidio Community offered the Prayer for the Martyrs. This prayer is an annual remembering of our Christian brothers and sisters who have offered their lives for the gospel within the past year and in the recent past. This was the second year that this prayer was offered at St. Dominic Church. This prayer is very meaningful and beautiful. The Prayer for the Martyrs fits quite well within the first few days of Holy Week and helps to bring a deeper awareness and connection with our fellow Christians who are experiencing persecution for their faith in Christ. Prayer is powerful and it is a good and important thing for the Church to gather in prayer and to remember that the names of our brothers and sisters are not forgotten and are precious to our Lord.
In the fall of 2015, St. Dominic Parish began a sister parish relationship with St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Blantyre, Malawi – a church staffed by priests of the Community of Sant’Egidio. St. Dominic’s is currently raising funds that will enable to parish and school in Malawi to build housing for teachers that will, in turn, allow the school to attract good teachers and make sure that classes do not have to be cancelled due to transportation difficulties during the rainy season. We believe that the best way we can help to have a long term impact is to strengthen education possibilities in the local community. Our parish youth coordinated a fund drive during the season of Lent for the school at our sister parish. The presence in friendship of our sister parish was expressed during Holy Week through photos from Malawi shared via social media as well as a note from Fr. Ernest, the pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Parish.
We do accompany one another along the journey of faith and this is especially true during Holy Week. I can only speak to my experience with Sant’Egidio and the parish, but I do believe that the movements within our Catholic Church have great gifts to share with our parish communities and vice versa. We all mutually benefit from this sharing and accompanying. We help one another along. Together, St. Dominic Parish and the Community of Sant’Egidio, celebrated a Holy Week where we were both gathered in by our Lord and sent forth to proclaim the truth of the resurrection and God’s love!
I wish this reflection to be a beginning of a dialogue so I encourage friends both within the parish structure and within Sant’Egidio to share your thoughts through comments. I would enjoy hearing from you. Here are a few question for reflection that might help begin the process:
What do you find life-giving about your parish? What do you find life-giving about your experience with a movement within the Church?
How was Holy Week celebrated in the context in which you found yourself? What was profound about the celebration and what might have been limited?
How might movements “accompany” parishes both during such times as Holy Week but also throughout the year? How might parishes benefit from this accompanying? How might movements benefit from this accompanying?
At the end of Luke’s gospel (Lk. 24:1-12), once the women had shared with the disciples what had occurred at the tomb, we are told that Peter runs to the tomb and upon arriving he bends down and sees “the burial cloths alone”. It seems an almost inconsequential thing. The main fact is the empty tomb, right? The burial cloths are just an after-thought one might think. John, in his gospel, is even more precise – the burial cloths are also noted but then John shares that the cloth used to cover the head of Christ was rolled up in a separate place.
So much of the Christian life seems to be about “going out”. We are called to go out to proclaim the good news. We go out to share Christ’s love. We go out to serve others. This is good and authentic to our faith and it is the mandate that Christ has given us as Church to proclaim the good news to the ends of the earth.
Jewish midrash is a way of interpreting Hebrew Scripture that seeks to fill in the gaps and therefore bring forth truths of faith. A midrash on the scene of God appearing to Moses in the burning bush that we heard in the first reading (Ex. 3:1-8a,13-15) holds that the bush had thorns. God witnessed the suffering of the Hebrew people in Egypt, their daily struggle and pain, and therefore God chose to reveal Himself to Moses in the midst of a thorn bush to show that He is a God who is present in the midst of the suffering of his people.
hrist comes to reveal the truth of who God is and to call us into relationship with Him because here and only here is where we will find true life. What choice will we make? We each have only so many days allotted us.
On January 31st, the Church will celebrate the Feast of St. John Bosco – a man who devoted his life to helping young people. One of the greatest blessings of our Christian faith is the witness of men and women throughout history who let go of their own needs and worked tirelessly for the good of youth and those generations who were to come after them. The witness of these men and women should call us, as the Church, into a reflection on how best to minister to youth and young adults, especially in a time and culture that is “youth obsessed”. We can readily see how this obsession plays itself out in all areas of society – the entertainment and news media industry, politics, sports, education, relationships – just to name a few. A fair question is how might this “obsession with youth” bleed into and perhaps even negatively influence the Church’s own ministry to youth and young adults just as they are seeking to claim their own Christian faith and discipleship and how might we best avoid the danger of this obsession?
There is much worthy of reflecting upon in today’s gospel (Jn. 2:1-11) which gives the account of our Lord’s first public miracle – the turning of water into wine and the wedding in Cana. We can see in the image of the couple running out of wine on their wedding day a symbol of the ending of the Old Covenant and the freshness of the New Covenant beginning with our Lord turning water into wine. We can see in Mary’s noticing of the wine running short a concern for the young (and probably poor) couple who will soon be greatly embarrassed by not being able to provide for their guests. The first step of true mercy is noticing needs and not being indifferent toward others in their plight. This is a good witness Mary gives us during this Year of Mercy.
My father was brought up in a Presbyterian household although how staunch it was is open for debate. A story I once heard was of an exchange which occurred sometime after my father’s conversion when my two great aunts from Mississippi made a visit to my grandfather and grandmother. Noticing a little dust on the family Bible one aunt is said to have remarked, “Maybe if that Bible was not dusty, Jack would never have converted.” A number of years later my own aunt (my father’s sister) would tell these same two great-aunts, “Michael has decided to enter Catholic seminary and we are very proud.” The southern equivalent of drawing a line in the sand!
My mother did not grow up in affluence as my father did. Her childhood was spent in a small town in North Carolina. Nominally, I believe that she was raised Baptist but it seems that church was not a major factor in her younger years. She did once tell me that for a while she worked at a local Methodist retreat center frequented by the young (and then single) Billy Graham. “All the young ladies would swoon over him,” my mom once confided. She never said if she was one of the ones swooning. Right out of high school my mother left Brevard to work in book-keeping for a man who owned a number of hotels scattered around the southeast. Mr. Faw was a good man. He looked like Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and for the fun of it would sometimes dress like the fast food icon just to see people’s reaction. Mrs. Faw was of Eastern European descent and she once gave my mother an eighteenth century lithograph of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. My mother treasured this gift and today it hangs on my wall.
At one point (prior to marrying my father) my mother was sent to a hotel owned by Mr. Faw in Oak Ridge, TN. At that time it was the only hotel in the city and therefore the temporary residence of visiting scientists from all over the world who came to do work and research in the government-run laboratories. My mother met a wide variety of people those years and at one point was approached by the FBI to help keep tabs on a visiting couple that the government thought had Russian connections. For this effort my mother received a signed letter from J. Edgar Hoover thanking her for her service to her country. One scientist my mother met and became a good friend of was a Franciscan nun from the Northeast. She taught at a university and had come to Oak Ridge to do some research. She and my mother remained friends for many years and I do believe that her friendship and that of Mr. and Mrs. Faw were what helped my mother in recognizing the beauty of the Catholic faith which, in turn, enabled her to make the choice to become Catholic.
My father and mother each walked their own journey of life and of faith (like we all do) but through their journeys and their own reflecting on experiences (i.e. use of the illative sense) they both came to belief in God and in the Church. I do not know all the experiences that added up to their each making their choice for faith. I never will and that is probably for the best. There are some things rightly left between the soul and God alone. These are and will remain the missing jigsaw pieces of their own journeys but I must admit that I do take great delight when I hear a story or memory shared that sheds a little more light on the journey each one had. These insights bring me joy and, I believe, are gifts given to help us who remain to continue our own journeys of life and faith.
Some of the best advice I ever came across regarding homily preparation was in an essay written by Annie Dillard. In the essay Dillard made use of the imagery of following bees as a way of exploring the adventure of writing. If you want to find a bee hive (and honey) then follow a bee. If you lose sight of the first bee then wait and when you catch sight of another bee follow it. By so doing you will eventually be led to the bee hive. The same is true for writing. When an idea or thought, no matter how strange or non-sensical it seems at the outset, pops in your head then follow it. Let the thought lead you even if you do not know exactly where it is going. It may take you to where you want to go. If it takes you only so far then stay there and wait for the next thought.
Two things struck me as I prayed over the gospel this past week. The first is when Luke tells us that Mary entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. I found myself returning again and again to that scene in my imagination. How joy-filled it must have been! Mary stepping into this house which for too long had been barren of the sound of new life, the sound of children. Elizabeth said that the child in her womb leapt for joy at the sound of Mary’s greeting – a confirmation of what the angel had promised Zechariah. What was thought barren will now bring forth life and it will be a life that, in turn, will proclaim the coming of the Messiah! For nothing is impossible to God.
The Alternate Path 