USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #38

"Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere."

"KEEPING THEIR MEMORIES ALIVE" UPDATE

I know I have said in this blog that I have sworn off any more "projects," but I have already failed to stick to my guns! The St. Theresa Parish Council has approved my idea of a "new project" in our "old cemetery." It consists of gathering many of the old broken headstones from the woods around the edges and scattered around the cemetery and piecing them together in the exact shape of the second log church that stood where the wooden cross now stands (see photo below) before they are lost or misplaced forever. This will preserve the pieces, remind the congregation of how small the second church was and make sure the memory of those is unmarked graves are kept alive - even partially.   

This is similar to one of my last projects when I was pastor (1980-1983) of Holy Name of Mary Church in Calvary, Kentucky,  (founded in 1797) before I was called to Louisville to be pastor of our Cathedral. They, too, had broken stones from the early and mid 1800s scattered around their old cemetery. Some had even been thrown into a nearby creek. The photo below shows what the preservation project looks like after 41 years.  

Below is a sketch of what we hope to do in the "old cemetery" of St. Theresa in Rhodelia. Once the broken headstone pieces are gathered and cleaned, they will be laid out in a 20' X 30' pattern, the exact size of the second log cabin St. Theresa Church that stood where the wooden cross stands today. 

This project will not only help preserve the memory of those who are now buried in unknown graves, preserve important pieces of our history, show those living today the very spot where their predecessors used to worship, but also give us a "holy spot" to honor them by having outdoor Masses, Prayer Services and historic lectures. 

The Parish Council of St. Theresa Church also approved my idea of having an outdoor Dedication Mass for all those in the old cemetery, especially those in unmarked graves, as well as the poor man who hanged himself in the old log cabin church on that very spot which caused them to move out of it early because they considered it "desecrated." We look at suicide today differently from how they did in the mid 1800s. I am pretty sure the poor man did not receive a decent Catholic funeral or even a "private Mass." No one even knows where he was buried, but certainly not in the "consecrated ground" of the old cemetery.   

This historic monument will be next to another historic monument (the white sign on the left in the photo above) a sign over the grave of Matilda Hurd Chisley, the enslaved parishioner and grandmother of Father Augustus Tolton (son of Martha Jane Chisley Tolton, also an enslaved parishioner of St. Theresa Parish, who was sent away to Missouri at age 17) who became the first black priest ordained for the United States and who is in line for sainthood. Below are two photos of some of the group of 30 Catholic Bishops who visited her grave and laid a wreath back in June while they met in Louisville for their annual meeting.  Auxiliary Bishop Perry of Chicago, in the black suit with the gold chain in the very center of the photo looking down, is in charge of promoting the the canonization of Matilda's grandson Father Augustus Tolton. 

Below is a photo of the reception in the new St. Theresa Family Life Center for the visiting Bishops to St. Theresa after their visit to the old cemetery.   

I have already raised most of the money for this particular project, but if you are moved to send a donation to help finish this project and help make additional improvements to this historic parish cemetery, where the Catholic faith was passed on to the family of the Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, which could likely become a religious attraction once he is canonized, you can send it to:

St. Theresa of Avila Church

Old Cemetery Restoration Project

4245 Rhodelia Road

Payneville, Kentucky 40157 

A Friend, Sister Bernard, A Local Little Sister of the Poor

Sister Bernard was a sweet-heart of a person! She spent most of her life as a Little Sister of the Poor serving in St. Joseph Home for the Elderly right here in Louisville. As a "chief beggar" for the elderly poor for many years, she made contact with so many businesses here in our city. She knew so many of the owners and they would never turn her down! 

As a volunteer priest at St. Joseph Home, celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation monthly and the Eucharist mostly on Mondays, I got to know her several years ago. 

In the time I knew her, she would have a health crisis every now and then, but managed to keep springing back. Just when I thought the end was coming, I would meet her in her motorized cart coming to Mass or navigating the doors of the room where I heard confessions! I would ask her "Sister Bernard! You have sprung back! On a scale of 1-10, how good do you feel today?" "Oh, about a 7," she would say smiling through her pain! She always rated herself higher than she actually felt in order to project a positive attitude! I lost count of how many times she "recovered" from this health problem or that!

       Little Sister of the Poor Bernard Hopkins                                           Obituary

With profound sadness, we say goodbye to LSP Bernard Hopkins of Louisville, Kentucky, whose vibrant spirit touched the lives of many. LSP left this world on October 3, 2024 at the age of 96, leaving a void in the lives of so many people. You can send your sympathy in the guestbook provided and share it with the family.

In the quiet moments of reflection, let us honor LSP's memory by embracing the beauty of each fleeting moment, knowing that her spirit resides in the eternal tapestry of existence, forever woven into the fabric of our hearts.

Visitation was held on Sunday, October 6th 2024 from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM and on Monday, October 7th 2024 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM. A funeral Mass was held on Monday, October 7th 2024 at 12:00 PM at the Holy Family Catholic Church (3938 Poplar Level Rd, Louisville, KY 40213).

Expressions of Sympathy donations may be made to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

MAKING THE MOST OF FAMILY LIFE IN A CONFUSED WORLD

 

It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him!”

Genesis 2

What God has joined together, no human being must separate!

Let the children come to me! Do not prevent them!

Mark 10

Christmas is a special time to reconnect and recommit as a family. Three Saturdays before Christmas, all five of my brothers and sisters got together for lunch instead of dinner last year. As we have aged, driving after dark has become problematic for some of us. Happily, we stopped the stressful gift-giving years ago. We have been getting together like that for many years. As a single person with no family of my own, it is one of my ways of connecting to a sense of family. Like always, we have a great time laughing and talking and telling the same old stories from growing up years. We do have one very strict rule - absolutely no mention of politics! That would be like striking a match over a gas tank! 

Several of my siblings pointed out how lucky we are just to be able to get together. Some families we know cannot even gather together because of divorces, hard feelings and old grudges. If they do get together, the getting together atmosphere is tense, strained and uncomfortable. 

As a person who is still a member of a family of five siblings, I pay attention to families. I take notice. The thing that I see most is that having a family brings both joy and pain. Those who attempt it have my deepest admiration. Not having a family of my own, I realize that I miss out on both its joys and its pains.

A couple of times, as I have flipped though the channels, I have been compelled to stop and watch one of those live birth experiences that you see once in a while. I am not ashamed to admit that I usually get choked up and watery-eyed when I watch new parents at the moment of birth of their children. While I am proud that it can move me so much, I am very aware that what those new parents are experiencing is a thousand times more intense. It is a joy that I will never experience. 

Not all families are "happy" families! A few years ago, about 10:00 at night I realized that I had not eaten supper. The closest fast-food restaurant to my house was a White Castle about five or six blocks away. What can I say? I was desperate! I ordered three cheeseburgers and a diet coke and sat down to watch a fascinating show that only happens late at night in a White Castle.  No sooner than I sat down than a distressed young mother with a toddler came in and asked the women behind the counter to call the police. Her “boyfriend” had locked them out of the car and was threatening them in the parking lot. She paced back and forth, one minute trying to appease her whining child who needed to go to bed and the other minute peeking out the window to see if her boyfriend was still out there. Sadly, like many abused women are wont to do, she went back to him before the police got there. A few minutes later, a wild-looking young woman, probably bi-polar, came in and ordered some cheese fries and ate them standing in the middle of the floor, spilling some of them and stepping on them, while muttering to herself. Before she finished, an older woman, her distressed mother, came in telling her that she had been combing the neighborhood looking for her to take her home. Her mother apologized to all of us and finally coaxed her daughter into the car and left. As I left that night, I realized once again how many things some families have to deal with. Anyone who is trying to hold a family together these days has my deepest admiration.

Today’s readings are about “family life:” the creation and union of man and woman, the tragedy of divorce and welcoming children! Preaching about those topics today are not the easiest things to preach about.  In a world where family life is a painful experience for so many, I have always shied away from those romanticized and idealized sermons that I grew up with. They certainly did not describe my experience. Because my family was not at all like the “Holy Family” our nuns and priest talked about, I always left church feeling defective as a family. My religion teachers of the past were so driven to hold up the “holy family” as a model for all families that they may have read about in the bible. They were obviously reading those stories about the “holy family” with rose colored glasses because they ended up with a religious version of a 1950s TV family. Because their reading of the stories was so idealized, by the 1960’s, people began to reject that brand of piety, and even laugh at it, as totally unrealistic and impossible.

A few years ago, I came to realize that maybe the real “holy family” is more like today’s families than we have traditionally become accustomed to think.  The facts show that the “holy family” was not that sugary little family that we use to hear about growing up!

We only have a few stories about Jesus’ childhood and the family from Nazareth, and none of them would be what you would call "nice and sweet."

(1) The family started out with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.  Mary and Joseph were engaged, but not yet married when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph came within a hair of divorcing Mary, but backed off because of a message from God in a dream. (2) When it came time for Jesus to be born, Mary and Joseph were called out of town for a census. Away from home, Mary and Joseph end up having to deliver their baby in a barn, right there in a donkey stall. (3) No sooner that their baby was born, a maniac king tried his best to kill all the Jewish children he could get his hands on. To protect Jesus from that fate, Mary and Joseph crossed the border, becoming refugees in a foreign country, until the coast was clear to come back home. (4) When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple for his circumcision, they were so poor that they had to make an offering to the temple of two common pigeons, instead of the traditional, more expensive, doves. (5) When Jesus was twelve years old, he got lost on a trip to the big city, Jerusalem. His panic-stricken parents spent a few hellish days till they finally found him. (6) On one occasion, hearing some of the things he was preaching, his family came to do an intervention on him because they really thought he had lost his mind. (7) A symbol of all sorrowing mothers, Mary finally had to witness her son, stripped and beaten, being executed as a common criminal.

No, this holy family was no “goody-two shoes” family that I had idealized for me as a child. This family had problems, big problems, but they managed to remain faithful to each other and to God through it all. I think this family has a better chance of being a model if we simply accept the fact that they were like us in so many ways. 

Today’s readings offer an opportunity to say a few words about family life. The problems are easy to list, the solutions are not so easy to come by. The most obvious fact facing us is that families have changed. There is no use pretending they haven’t or wishing they hadn’t. They have! Instead of pretending or wishing, we need to develop new ways to help and support modern families, including single parent families, blended families, adoptive families and the many other new varieties of families that exist today.

Families and couples cannot take anything for granted. The forces against family life are hard at work. Families must be intentional about being a family if they have any hope at all to work against the forces that are trying to pull them apart.  To let things slide in marriages or families is to invite disaster. Families need all the support the community and church can give, not judgment and condemnation. You certainly have my support! I don’t know how you do it!  

The Scriptures give us an impressive list of “family values,” values that can guide and strengthen even our modern families in all of their marvelous varieties: honoring your father and mother, taking care of them in their old age, offering heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, obedience, patience, forgiveness, peace, thankfulness and love, just to name a few of the “family values” listed in Scripture. Family is not something that we can take for granted these days. It is something that must be wanted and worked for. Whatever family you have been given or whatever substitute family you have pieced together, may the Holy Family bless you abundantly today! I am here to support you where I can!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #37

ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ME OR YOU?

Understand Today's Complicated Medical World

I WAS LOST! NOW I AM FOUND!

I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that

they need no longer fear and tremble; and none shall be missing.

Jeremiah 23:1-6

One of my earliest childhood memories was seeing Father Johnson, our pastor at St. Theresa in Rhodelia for many, many years, dressed in his overalls and rubber boots, with feed-buckets in each hand, surrounded by hungry sheep, walking through the cemetery as we drove by. The parish did not have a lot of money, especially back then, so he raised sheep both to keep the cemetery mowed and to provide mutton for the parish picnic each summer.

He was a good man – a holy man no doubt. He was especially good at building. He personally laid the bricks and blocks on the convent, rectory, school and parish hall. He was, however, not very good with people – especially with women in general and nuns in particular, and not very good at preaching.  You might say he was better at pasturing sheep than pasturing people, but we loved him anyway. Even though he told me, when I first told him I wanted to go to the seminary, that I would never make it, he did send me a message from his deathbed, after I finished my second year, that he had changed his mind and thought I might make it after all. I, too, loved him anyway – loved him enough to still remember the date of his death – January 3, 1960.   He was such a big part of my childhood that I cannot read about Jesus, the Good Shepherd, without thinking about him and his sheep. It broke his heart to give up his sheep when he got too old to fend off the roaming dogs that slaughtered and destroyed them.

One day, I was watching a program from Australia about sheep and shepherds. I was shocked by what I saw. It did not remind me either of Father Johnson or the Good Shepherd we read about in the New Testament with the sheep eagerly following the gentle calls of their trusted shepherd leading them to food and water and making sure they were protected. In Australia, they have another way to heard sheep and it is done with barking and snapping dogs who force the sheep from behind to go where they would rather not go. Rather than inviting from the front to follow, they threaten them from behind if they dare try to run away!  

As I sat there watching this version of shepherding, I was reminded that we have had two kinds of "pastors" in our church in my life-time: those who the sheep trust, gladly following his convincing voice, and those who bark and snap at the flock, leaving them in fear and trembling and trying to escape from such shepherds! 

It is interesting to me that of the two words for “good” in the original Greek text are agathos and kalos. The first means “good” as in “a good person,” while the second means “good” as in “good at something.”  The word for “good” in the gospel "Good Shepherd" scripture is the word for “good at.” Of course Jesus is a “good person,” but what it wants to say there is that Jesus is “good at” shepherding. 

The Latin words for the “good shepherd” are “bonus pastor,” from which we get the word “pastor.” This passage is most often applied to priests and ministers who are called to be like the Good Shepherd, “pastoring” in his name.  We priests and ministers are also called, like Jesus to be “good” and “good a what we do.”  When we fail, we are often compared to the “hireling” shepherds who are only interested in “threatening, using and abusing” the sheep for their own benefit! 

But, today, I want to apply this story to you, the spouses and parents and future spouses and parents, sitting here in front of me. You, too, are called, or will be called, to be “good shepherds” of your families. You, too, will need to be “good” and “good at” what you do. You will need to be a “good person” and “good at” being a spouse and parent.

The late Pope John Paul II’s new Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Two sacraments are directed toward the salvation of others and, if they contribute to personal salvation, it is through service to others that they do so.” In other words, those of you called to marriage and those of us called to ordained ministry, become “good” through “being good at” what we do, you as spouses and parents, and me as an ordained minister.

We live in a world of slick temptation and bad examples. It is easy to get off track and be seduced into adopting atrociously bad behaviors simply  “because everybody else is doing it.”  If we are going to be “good” and good at” what we do, we must draw strength from something else than the culture around us. I have also liked the image of the “tree planted near running waters, whose leaves never fade” from Psalm 1 and the prophet Jeremiah.

“A tree planted near running water” never has to worry about hot weather and drought: its leaves stay green. No matter what is happening above ground, because its roots go down deep and taps into the water. Another psalm says “He who practices virtue and speaks honestly, he who brushes his hands free of bribes, stopping his ears and closing his eyes to evil, shall dwell on the heights and have a steady supply of food and drink.”

Jesus is that life-giving water which we should be tapped into. If our roots go down deep and tap into Him, we can stand tall and healthy. Tapping into his life-giving water is what will make us “good” and “good at what we do.”  A connection to Jesus only on Sunday is like trying to fight off drought by carrying water. If you are planted near that stream and your roots tap into him, you never have to worry, you will always have a “steady supply of food and drink,” it will be possible to be a “good person,” a “good spouse,” a “good parent,” or a “good priest/minister” no matter who else crashed and burned in today’s culture.