"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" 2025 #4

 Last year, every Saturday I featured  a post called "Wisdom for 2024" This year, every Saturday, I will post a series of unusual personal experiences from the past under the title "You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up." Sometimes, names or locations will be changed or disguised to protect the guilty! Besides, I am retired! What can they do, fire me?

"LAZARUS" AND MY SECOND-CHANCE AT LIFE

Sometime around 1990, while I was pastor of the Cathedral of the Assumption, I was driving down Liberty Street to my house on Eastern Parkway. At a busy intersection, near St. Boniface Church, I noticed ahead of time that the light had just turned green as I approached the intersection. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a car speeding up as he attempted to "make it through the light." I realized, right away, that he was going to hit my driver's door head-on any second. I tried to brace myself for the impact! He hit my car door right beside the steering wheel! What felt like slow-motion, he turned my car completely upside down and spun it around a few times in the very center of the intersection. 

When the spinning stopped, I realized that I was hanging upside down in my seatbelt. Broken glass was everywhere. I seemed to be OK, but I was afraid to try to unbuckle my seatbelt for fear of falling into the broken glass that surrounded me. Hearing police and fire-truck sirens, I decided to hang upside down and wait  for the help to arrive.  When they got to the wreck site, they could not open the passenger side door beside me because it had been crushed in the over-turn. They broke the back glass out and one of the firemen climbed in, and seeing that I was not injured, cut my seatbelt and helped me exit through the back window. 

Standing on one of the street corners, I noticed that the book I was reading had come out of the car and its pages were blowing in the wind, right in front of me, in the middle of the intersection. It was like the book was waving at me for my attention! The book was entitled "Lazarus" by Morris West. I could not believe my eyes. Lazarus was the man that Jesus raised from the dead in the Scriptures! I asked one of the firemen to retrieve it for me as a souvenir! 

My car was completely "totaled," so after the police had completed their paperwork, I took a taxi to my house where Elaine Winebrenner and Julie Zoeller (Cathedral staff members) had been waiting for me to go to lunch. Puzzled when I got out of the taxi, they asked why I hadn't come in my car. Nonchalantly, I said "I'm sorry that I'm late, but I was just almost killed! My car is totaled. I had to take a taxi! Where do you want to go for lunch and which one of you can drive?" Again, I found that denial is a powerful pain reliever! 

A SECOND NEW BOOK IS DONE AND NOW AVAILABLE

 

Thank God for winter storms! This is my second new book this winter to be printed at Amazon Books. 

The first one, which is finished and for sale, is for bishops, priests and deacons. It is called BUILDING INTENTIONAL PRESBYTERATES: A Collection of Reflections. This second one, which is also finished and for sale, is for lay people as well as priests. It is entitled FOR YOUR GOOD AND FOR MINE: Preaching, Teaching & Writing. 

What I have done in these two books is to take some of my unpublished presentations, convocations, lectures, retreats, parish missions, blog posts and published articles and put them into books as well - one mainly for the clergy and one mainly for lay people. 

I realized recently that my days of traveling and doing priest convocations and parish missions is probably behind me. Instead of trashing all the material that took me years to develop, I decided to make it available to people who have never heard it, or might want to review it, in book form.

This effort frees me up to write new material and take on new projects going forward. I consider it much like tying a ribbon around an era of my past to preserve it, while freeing me up to pursue some new creative efforts in the near future.  

These books, along with all my previous books, can now be purchased from Amazon Books through a link to my bookstore at  ronknottbooks.com   

IS YOUR MIND OPEN ENOUGH TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

 

GIVEN YESTERDAY AT THE LITLE SISTERS OF THE POOR 

No one pours new wine into old wineskins. New wine is poured into fresh wineskins.

Mark 2:22

One of my very favorite books is entitled “The Art of Possibility” by Rosamund ad Benjamin Zander. The reason I find it so useful and intriguing is that I, too, believe that with an open mind more things are possible than we can ever imagine. The realization of the impossible begins with an open mind. When I have consciously and deliberately kept my mind open, I have seen “miracles” unfold more times than I can count. Negative thinking kills the possible. Here are a couple of examples from real life.

A shoe factory once sent two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding the shoe business. One sent back a telegram that said, “Situation hopeless. No one wears shoes.” The other sent back a telegram saying, “Great business opportunity. They have no shoes.”

Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, responded negatively to the idea of investing in computers in 1943 by saying, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” As late as 1977, Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation said, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in his home.”

As a child, if I had not decided to reject it, I would have been a victim of this kind of negative thinking. I heard it often enough to remember it, “Life is something that happens to you and all you can do is make the most of it!” Several significant adults in my life told me that I had no chance at all of making it through the seminary. Even my pastor told me as I was leaving for the seminary, “I’ll fill out these papers, but you won’t make it till Christmas.” I was even called a “hopeless case” by my minor seminary rector here in Louisville.

When I first arrived as pastor of our Cathedral downtown, the former pastor told me, “Father Knott, don’t get your hopes up! Nothing can be done downtown! There aren’t any Catholics living downtown anymore!” I rejected his warning and repeated over and over again to the congregation, “Who said we only get one golden age?” During the 14 years I served there, we grew from 110 parishioners to over 2,100 parishioners and completed a $22,000,000 renovation and restoration!

Because of these experiences, I stay in a mild state of irritation at our church because I believe that the biggest shortage in the Catholic Church is not money or priests, but plain old imagination and faith! No wonder we have a vocation crisis. No wonder we are closing parishes. We are hopelessly mired in downward spiraling talk about both issues. Where are the can-do people who can see an alternative to our hopeless resignation?

Jesus tells us that God needs an open mind, a “new wineskin,” to do his work of making all things new. Mary understood this when she said “yes” to God. She knew that when an open mind cooperates with God, then “all things are possible.”

I pray for this kind of mind and heart. My prayer for this kind of mind and heart can be summed up in the words of Soren Kierkegaard when he said, “If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”  C.S. Lewis said this, “God gives His gifts where he finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.”

Yes, the power of an open mind filled with belief can move mountains!

 

 

 

PLENTY OF GOD'S LOVE TO GO AROUND

       

It was at Cana in Galilee that Jesus
began the signs that revealed his glory and his
disciples began to believe in him.
John 2:11

Jesus came to this world to teach us, by performing a series of "signs" or "messages" about what heaven is going to be like!  There will be many as we follow his life this liturgical year, but today, we read about the first of those "signs" or "messages."    

Now, you would think the first "sign" or "message" he would want to deliver, right out of the gate, would be something practical like healing the physically, emotionally or spiritually sick. There were certainly plenty of them to go around! You would think that his first "sign" would be some practical like feeding those who were hungry. There were certainly plenty of them to go around!  Instead of multiplying loaves of bread to feed the hungry first or curing a few hundred lepers first or even healing a bunch of mentally disturbed people first, he went to a party and delivered a truck load of wine - somewhere between 120-180 gallons, in fact! What kind of "sign" or "message" was that?

If you line up the details of this reading, surely Jesus wanted to male a statement about abundance.  His first "sign" or "message" seems to say that, in the kingdom of heaven, there will be plenty.  In a culture where people routinely lived on the edge of starvation and want, for Jesus to make this wedding reception his first "sign" or "message" was quite powerful.  A wedding is about fertility, new life, continuation, happiness and possibility.

Every detail symbolizes plenty and abundance.  Not only were the bride and groom's family there, along with their relatives and neighbors, but also Jesus, his disciples and even his mother!  Not only were the water jars now full of wine, we are told they were full to the brim!  This was not a single day affair. Jewish weddings went on for a week, so this 120 -180 gallon infusion of extra wine toward the end of the week, didn't even count what the family had purchased in the first place and had already been drunk up!  Not only was this new wine added to what was already supplied, this new wine was actually much better than what was served first, unlike most weddings when they pulled out the cheap stuff after people were pretty well two-sheets to the wind and wouldn't know better! 

This multiplication of wine was the first "sign" or "message" that Jesus performed to teach us about the kingdom that God has in store for us. The rabbis at the time of Jesus had a saying, "Without wine, there is no joy." So this "sign" or "message" wasn't as much about a wedding or wine as it was a "sign" or "message" about the joy that awaits us in the kingdom of God. As Jesus said, "I have come to bring you life - life to the full - life to the brim - a joy that is not stingily divvied out in thimbles, but "pressed down. shaken together and poured into our laps."  Saint Paul talked about it this way, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it even dawned on human beings the great things God has in store for those who love him." 

Jesus did not teach, as some assume, that this kingdom awaits us in the afterlife. Jesus taught us that we are already in his kingdom. He wants us to start tasting it now, even though it will not come to its fullness until we enter heaven.  Think about it! We are partially in heaven already! All we have to do is have the eyes to see it!  Jesus said as much before he performed this first "sign" or "message."  In fact, these were the first words out of his mouth when he began his public ministry! "Metanoiete! Change the way you see so that you see that the kingdom of God is at  hand, right there in front of you!! Indeed, it is within you!

The kingdom is already here? To that Jesus said, "Yes it is! If you have the right eyes you can see it has begun! It is subtle, like yeast working in a batch of dough, but it is here. The "signs" that I perform - healing the sick, feeding the hungry and releasing those who are bound up - are "signs" that the kingdom is building. The "signs" that my followers, as they spread around the world in the years to come, will perform will be "even greater" because there will be millions of my followers "healing the sick, feeding the hungry and releasing those bound up."  Then someday, in the great by-and-by, there will be no sickness, no hunger and no imprisonment of any kind!

One of the "signs" of the kingdom today is the work of Catholic Relief Services and our local Supplies Over Seas organization, carrying on the ministry of Jesus, delivering medicine, food and equipment to desperate places around the world. It should make us all proud that one of the most respected, most efficient and most trusted relief agency is Catholic Relief Services. Our local Supplies Over Seas organization collects and distributes tons of surplus medical supplies, from our hospitals and nursing homes, around the world that would otherwise be sent to landfills.  Another smaller “sign” was my own little charity fund and my personal volunteering down in the poor, small Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We renovated their Pastoral Centre, bought a car for the Bishop, vans for an orphanage and a parish, medical supplies for hospitals, school supplies, Christmas toys for poor children and church furnishings for several of their parishes.  I had to quit when their volcano erupted and COVID hit. However, I was able to sponsor their diocesan Christmas party this past December because of a diocesan financial crisis. This year, I am committed to sponsoring a seminarian in Tanzania and building a simple church in Kenya - two countries in east Africa.

Relax! There will be no second collection today, but I want you to know that through the donations and volunteering of disciples like us, the kingdom of God is shown forth, and will be shown forth, until there is no need for it when the kingdom comes to perfection in the life to come!  Then on that day, there will be no volcano eruptions or earthquakes, no diseases like COVID, no hunger, no thirst and no crying! On that day, when our lives will be "filled to the brim," there will be plenty for everybody!