USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #26

 

NOISE - THE WORST OF ALL POLLUTION?

WE ARE ALL CALLED, BUT OUR RESPONSES ARE DIFFERENT

 

A scribe approached and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go!”

Another disciple said, “Lord, I will follow you, but let me go first and bury my father.”

Matthew 8:18-22

My friends, each one of us is precious in God’s eyes. My one of us is special.  Each one of us is a unique expression of God’s love and creativity. In all the world there is no other person exactly like us. There never has been or never will be another person just like us!  Besides being special and unique, we are not here by accident. We were sent here for a purpose. We have a mission. We have something to do here that can be done by no one else. Our responsibility is to find out what our mission is and then carry it out with all our might.  Our purpose here is commonly called our “vocation” or “your call.”  Our most important task may have been in our younger years, but it may just be in the last days of our lives!

A few people enthusiastically “jump in head first” without counting the costs like the first would-be follower in today’s gospel and end up crashing and burning very quickly.  Some people hear God’s voice directly like Jeremiah, Peter and Andrew, James and John, seems to have done. More people hear their calls as “a hunch,” “a quiet knowing” or “a small still voice” that never seems to go away.  They just know in their guts. Other people hear God’s call through the invitation of others, those who say to them over and over again, “you’d make a good doctor,” “you’d be a great teacher,” “you’d make a good priest,” “you’ll make a great parent.” These voices just might be messengers from God himself!   

What if we listen for God’s call? What if we don’t?  God wants the best for us! If we do what he calls us to do, we will be ourselves, we will be what he created us to be. We will feel, and we will know, that we are in the right place. Our life’s work will fit who we are. When we follow our calls, we will be happy, not a “ha-ha” happy, but a deep-down satisfaction, in spite of challenges.

However, sometimes we know what we are supposed to do in life, but we don’t do it because we are scared of its demands, scared of what other people will think of us, scared of failure or scared of disappointing our parents, peers and friends and so we put it off “until our parents are dead” like the second of the would-be followers in today’s gospel.  We pay a price for not listening to God’s call.  We pay a price for pleasing others instead of becoming who we are. When people go against their call and do something else, their lives will seem to be out of sync, they will be frustrated, their hearts will not be in their jobs or professions. They will go through life with a low-grade depression, a restlessness that will follow them wherever they go and be filled with regret, anger and frustration that life somehow passed them by!

Everybody has a vocation, a call from God, to do something for him, to help him carry out some part of his work in the world. A call is not so much about what we want to do, but what God wants us to do! The famous Albert Schweitzer put it this way, “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” The famous Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?” 

Some of us are called to help God carry out his mission by being teachers, doctors, scientists and food producers. Others of us are called to be social workers, artists and scientists. Still others of us are called to help God carry out his mission by having children, by being a good husband or wife or by living the single life. Finally, some of us are called to be priests, sisters, brothers, deacons or full-time lay ministers.

Whatever our call, we are called to help God carry out his mission in the world in some way!  As St. Theresa put it, “Anyone who realizes that he or she is favored by God will have the courage necessary for doing great things!”  

 

 

TAKE NO BAGGAGE! DON'T GET DISTRACTED! STICK TO THE SCRIPT!

Jesus summoned the twelve and began to send them out, instructing them

to keep it simple and to land in one place without moving around.

He also told them that if they are not welcomed, shake it off, move on

and keep delivering the message! 

Mark 6:7-13

What we have here are the “marching orders” for the first apostles and those of us who carry on their work. That work includes each and every one of us!  We were all commissioned at our baptisms to be "ambassadors" for Christ! These “missionary” instructions are as valid today as they were then, and just as demanding, too. What I think Jesus is saying to us here, in plain English, is this: (1) keep it simple (2) bloom where you are planted (3) expect some rejection (4) stay focused on what's truly important.

These marching orders have serious implications for those who carry on the work of the apostles as priests, yes, but they have serious implications also for those of you who carry on their work as parents, those who work in the world and citizens of this country. We may not learn these four things in the sequence given, or all at once, but sooner or later they will have to be learned. After 54 years of priesthood, I can say I have experienced all of them, and some of them several times over.

The first thing I had to learn was to “bloom where you are planted.” Just as some of the missionaries that Jesus “sent out” shopped around for the bigger and better deals, priests today can be very rigid about what they will, or will not accept, in an assignment.  When I was first ordained, I had my heart set on being an associate in a comfortable suburban parish so that, after living mostly in the country, I could finally enjoy the benefits of the big city. What I got was an assignment to the “home missions” of our diocese, three and a half hours away from here.  This first crisis of my priesthood took place just two weeks into priesthood.  When I heard where I was being sent, I pleaded, begged and cried to no avail. I finally had to accept the fact that I had to go, one way or another, willingly or unwillingly. In the car, on the way down there, I made one of the most important decisions of my priesthood: since I didn’t get what I wanted, I consciously decided to want what I got. My heart and mind opened and I decided to do everything in my power to “bloom where I was being planted.”  In final analysis, it turned out to be an incredible 10 years. I used to teach what I had learned from this experience to priests-to-be when I worked at St. Meinrad Seminary. I used to tell them that when it comes to assignments from the bishop, if you don't get what you want, you can always turn and make up your mind to want what you got! I tried to tell them that it was possible to "bloom where you are planted!"

"Bloom where you are planted" can apply to the rest of you as well - whether your life is focused mostly in the professional world, mostly in the work world or mostly in the home world. There are opportunities everywhere to "preach the gospel" by your actions, "using words if you have to" as St. Francis supposedly said.  You don't have to stand on street corners and preach, all you need to do is to just focus on being the best marriage partner you can be, the best parent you can be and the best professional or laborer you can be!   Yes, if you just "bloom right where you are planted" that will be enough! 

The second thing I had to learn was to “keep it simple.” In 1975, I was assigned two rural counties where I was expected to start two mission parishes where the Catholic Church had never been before. In all of history, I became the first resident Catholic priest to live in Wayne County, Kentucky. When I moved into the basement apartment of St. Peter Mission Church, all I had was an old bed, a bedside table, a tacky old yard-sale lamp, a warped green kitchen table with two matching chairs, a total of 6 parishioners and $70.00 in the parish bank account.  I remember lying in bed that first night recalling the words of today's gospel: “Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals” I kept asking myself that night: “What in the hell has just happened to me?” That night the challenge to “keep it simple” became a very stark reality for me! 

Since I could not do grand things in a situation like that, I was forced to look for simple ways to make an impression in the community. I remember deciding to pray for the other churches, one by one every week, until I had covered every church in Wayne County.  Each week, I would write a letter to the church pastors telling them we were praying for them and for the success of their ministry at the coming weekend Masses. One year, when I was able to get a semi-truck load of educational toys from PLAYSKOOL TOY COMPANY in Chicago through one of my seminary classmates, I divided them among the Sunday School classrooms in all the churches of Wayne County who would accept them. 

Because I had to "keep it simple," I came to believe that one of the most effective ways of making a difference in the world is to simply lead by example.  Practicing simple random acts of kindness is a simple and effective way to set a good example on how to behave in the world. People today are often surprised by simple acts of kindness. Benjamin Franklin once said, "The best sermon is a good example." Whether you are a priest or a parent, I believe that "setting an example" can be a much more effective way to "preach the gospel" than reading from a Bible on street corners, no matter how loud one gets! I like to think that my own personal "acts of kindness" have been just as effective as any of the words I might have used in a pulpit. 

As an "ambassador of Christ" in the world, the third thing I had to learn was to “expect rejection.”  One of the reasons I did not respond positively to the news of my first assignment to the "home missions" in the southern part of the state, where Catholics made up only one-tenth of one percent of the population, was the fact that anti-Catholicism was very much a reality down there at that time. I grew up very much fearing rejection.

The first day I went into a local “ministerial association” meeting, the host minister saw me, left the room abruptly and sent a note back to us by his secretary, which read, “I can no longer be part of this group, now that it has a Catholic in it. Please leave my church!” Thank God all the other ministers stood up with me and walked out. We went across the street to another church to finish our meeting! I was regularly preached about, by name, on the radio. One minister told his radio audience, “If you people had prayed harder, those Catholics would not have come!"  Even when I got my own radio program, I was thrown off the air while I was on vacation, because some local ministers showed up at the radio station to complain. I didn’t “shake off the dust” in the sense of leaving town, but I decided not to let those comments affect me. I simply refused to take them personally. I simply turned the other cheek and decided that I would "kill them with kindness" until I was accepted.  It worked! 

Many of you parents, who do the heroic work of raising children, have had to endure rejection from your own children, especially as they go through puberty! As Shakespeare said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" During that transition to adulthood, there may be times when your children call you every name in the book and quite speaking to you for weeks, but you remain steadfast, parenting as best you can as they work their way through the trials of growing up!  

The last thing I had to learn as an "ambassador for Christ" was “not to forget what is truly important.” Some priests think their main mission in ministry is to be the “town scold,” always looking for evil to condemn - "mousing for vermin" as one writer called it! Well, I have always believed differently. I believe that we actually see what we look for, so one day I decided to start writing a weekly column in The Record called "An Encouraging Word." Rather than always looking for evil to condemn, I tried to look for goodness to affirm in the ordinary people moving around me. I wrote that column every week for fifteen years. I wrote a total of 750 weekly columns in all! I always found some goodness to affirm because I was training myself to look for it!

I believe that the last thing our people need from us, when we go into their parishes, is always telling them what’s wrong with them. What they need from us is encouragement. In many cases, it is obvious to me that they already have more faith than I do. What they need, I believe, is God's encouragement, the encouragement of the “good news,” the good news of God’s universal and unconditional love for all people. If announcing the “good news" is not our passion, but instead being one of those who is always wallowing in that small world of nit-picking liturgical issues, always delivering complicated tedious theological lectures from the pulpit that nobody is interested in, then we are guilty of overlooking the great treasure in favor of focusing on the humble crock that holds it. In the priesthood and in family life, there is always so much to do that it is very easy to forget what is truly important. People today still crave hearing the “good news” and still respond to it enthusiastically when they hear it. When we remember the "good news" ourselves, and help others remember it, we will always be remembering what is truly important. 

My friends, all of us are "evangelists." All of us are "preachers of the good news." All of us are "ambassadors for Christ." We just carry that "good news" out to the world in a variety of ways. Some of us do it mainly with our words. Some of us do it mainly with our actions. Either way, we are all called "to keep it simple, to bloom where we are planted, to expect rejection and to remember what is truly important!