Month: March 2022

I once had a Benedictine monk involved in the RCIA program, and he so enjoyed the learning, the formation, the community of new Church members that it overwhelmed him. I did not know how much until the final celebration gathering. The brother offered to bring dessert to our common meal. He arrived driving a station wagon and proceeded to deliver a full dessert for each RCIA member. We had sixteen people! Pies, cakes, cheesecakes, tortes, baked Alaska, and so on imprinted a caloric enthusiasm and memory! How sweet it was! Alas, it was a “leftovers event.” Like today.

At the conclusion of our Novena, Fr. Mike’s “wrap-up” thematic reflection arrives with this same enthusiastic fervor as my brother monk. He shares what our Novena team had as an addendum to our theme: God’s love never fails. Then he reiterates the eight presenters’ wonderful, insightful images of God’s slow work as experienced in their lives and their chosen form of sense-meaning. Listen to Fr. Mike evince the close relationship among trust, patience and hope. He quotes William Stafford’s (among other poetic desserts) poem The Way It Is and connects his words… “don’t ever let go of the thread” to our trust in God’s love. 

“No matter what, God will keep loving you.” His images from organic birth and regeneration, like seed and butterfly emergence, mirrored what his fellow presenters had given as oblation in slowly discovering how and where God was operative in their suffering. All of us in this Novena agree with what William Stafford said in another poem: “Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.”  

Note: For some unknown reason, our livestreaming capability was not operative today, but the Mass was recorded and can be viewed above. We are sorry for those who tried to attend with us online. We cannot see you, but in spirit, we are as Fr. Mike says, una voce in our prayer of praise and thanksgiving to our God. Breathe in kindness and our hope to see you in person as living bridges form to connect us.

In these last two years of Covid-19, the walls came tumbling down on what had formerly been a pretty placid family life for Emily Gumper. As most of us have experienced, crises usually come in bundles. And this was true also for Emily. “What parent would give their child a stone when bread is requested?” she asks.

Well, piles of rocks mounted higher as she religiously “asked, sought, and knocked” persistently on God’s prayer doors. In her honesty, Emily makes no excuses for God’s apparent failure to rectify, to sort, to heal all the maladies impacting her family. 

Listen to Emily reflect on the thin thread of trust and what transpired when hope was not hers to claim. (All along these eight days, we have been connected to human stories. Please do not miss this day to get closer to the heart of God by way of a human one.)

With biblical Jonah stories, his own biographical history, and his interactions with today’s kindergartners, Gerry O’Brien spoke about how we “have something greater than Jonah here.” He speaks from thankful remembrance and has a youthful heart that collapses at times in the awe of how his life has been impacted.

Gerry’s reflection centers on how he has slowly been formed by God’s own shaping through previous coaches, the Xaverian Brothers, a youth offender program mentor, and his ever-present kindergartners, who continue to teach him, like their sharing on how jellyfish regenerate! Our world amazes in kindness when we can form as people of God a “franchise” of “commitment, hard work, and friendship.”

Listen and be dazzled by Sarah Faux’s weaving of her personal story of being a part of worship but disengaged until a certain “Gloria,” a transcending moment one Mass — after 14 years! Certainly the “slow work of God” in her life story!  

Sarah’s reflection on prayer as a synergy of collaboration with God and using her musical background of chant to depict the breathing, pulsing, rhythmic culmination of prayer-song — many voices singing as one in praise — was written (should we say “composed”?) for you as one of her Novena gifts. After sharing her own interiorized understanding of the “Our Father,” Sarah ends with the Eastern Orthodox prayer of self before God: Pray You, Yourself, in Me.

Whenever someone takes a deep breath before speaking, you know the following words will usher from a depth of felt experiences that have been reflectively woven together for benefit. Matthew Pearl, a licensed social worker and counselor, shared however from a personal rather than a professional vantage point. He knitted scriptural wisdom with his own suffered perceptions of what keeps people from being and living in right relationship with each other. 

Matthew’s delineation of negative behaviors in our “me vs. we” society, our penchant for quick judgement especially on “otherness,” our slowness to allow God’s own unconditional love to be received — all are astutely shared in manifold layers of insight. Listen to Matthew’s words of how suffering equalizes us and binds us to shared yearnings for healing, transformed hearts.

Fr. Pat Couture was our homilist on this fourth day. He linked the gospel of Jesus’ own formative exposure with temptations to another gospel pericope of a young man who was very attracted to the mission of Jesus yet could not part with his many possessions and follow him. Yet Jesus expressed his felt affection for this man’s dedication. So Fr. Pat ponders the question he asked of his sophomore religion class at Jesuit High School: Do you think God admires you? 

Listen to his reflection on our Lenten call of “turning” (repentance), a quickening of faith and charity within us when we sense a trusting presence calling us to transformation. Fr. Pat asks if we are open to change, if we have the courage to face the one who admires us and embrace that trust!

On the third day of this Novena, with the gospel passage of Jesus not only calling upon the tax-collector, Levi, to follow him, Lizzie Petticrew attends to the apparent disjointing experiences of life: We are supposed to be righteous but Jesus likes to eat with those who aren’t; we trust in a God who is supposed to save us, but our God doesn’t come to our rescue in the ways we want. 

With the prophet Isaiah, Lizzie seeks to see how light rises out of darkness, how straight questions foster straight answers, how honesty and openness permit the slow work of God’s response to us. Levi provides the personal mirror of someone who could make a new life choice, face the negative powers, and convert from oppressive behaviors to just ones. This does not happen in the void of secrecy and suppression. Standing on honesty, it’s a personal encounter with the One who turns life around.

“We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.” 

Using the late author and University of Portland editor Brian Doyle as a touchstone, and speaking as a teacher, past soccer player and coach, mother, spouse and Christian, Lisa Chambers reflected on the gospel passage about living life in the present, not the future — not like kids who lament on the weekend because they imagine Monday coming all too soon. 

Her shared experiences, some traumatic, were told from the other side of having passed through it and what graces helped her through these transitions. As a mother juggling her teaching work, children attending virtual school, and her own anxieties during the Covid-19 pandemic, Lisa talked about learning how not to worry about “what isn’t,” but what IS. Accompany Lisa on her journey attending to the moments of life, the “shards of light.”

On the first day of the Novena of Grace, Fr. Gary Smith, SJ, shared the rich image of the living root bridges of northeast India, which can serve as a metaphor for the millions of moments in which we choose life. He also drew inspiration for his Novena reflection from the words of Dorothy Day, who said that upon her conversion to Catholicism, she “had a sense of being followed, of being desired; a sense of hope and expectation.”

Much like Day’s interior sense of God as a second heart, Fr. Gary’s words imbued an authentic spirit of trust and hope in our processes of choosing life — especially when living often throws challenges that reduce us to the cynical observation: “what’s the point.”