Farewell, Monsignor Nelson

After seven years at my church, our pastor, Msgr. Glenn Nelson, is moving on. He's been asked to resume a position he previously held in our diocese, which is as an assistant to the bishop -- this time the newly installed Most Reverend David J. Malloy. As far as I know, he will continue to be the Diocese's point man for the deaf ministry as well. And he's the first and only priest I've ever seen use sign language as he delivered his homily. He also sometimes signed the mass when another priest was celebrating it.

While I never got to know Monsignor terribly well, he's a good priest with a good heart and his homilies were always excellent. I belong to a Newman Center parish (Christ the Teacher University Parish just off the campus of Northern IL University in Dekalb, IL.) Newman Centers, named for Blessed John Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), serve university parishes all over the country.

Monsignor's connection to our parish began when he was a student at NIU in the 80s. So being sent to Newman by then-Bishop Thomas Doran was a sort of homecoming for him. He served us well as pastor and had to hold back tears as he gave his farewell homily at mass this evening.

I'm a lector at Newman (one of the people who delivers the readings at a Catholic mass, for the uninitiated) and I had the peculiar honor of lectoring at his first mass there as well as doing so tonight – the first mass of his final weekend. (I'm a lector for the Saturday night “vigil mass”; he'll celebrate at least one other Sunday mass tomorrow) It was gratifying to me that I got to serve as sort of bookends to his Newman experience and told him so at a farewell reception for him after mass this evening.

Our previous pastor, Fr. Michael Black, was good enough to return to Newman to sponsor my son, Eric, at his confirmation mass some years ago. That mass was concelebrated by him, Monsignor Nelson and another of our associate pastors at the time, Fr. Godwin Osukwo. Each of those three men is a twin and I wonder if any other mass has ever been concelebrated by three twin priests. Monsignor, the principal celebrant that evening, got a good laugh at the end of mass when he told us that while they were all twins, they weren't identical. (Fr. Osukwo is a black Nigerian; the other two men are white.)

While all of us at Newman will miss Monsignor, we can be heartened by the fact that he will continue to serve our diocese well in his new position. Many well-wishes and blessings to him as he begins the next stage of his wonderful career.

Hey, There's a Point to All of This, People!

In the men's group I'm a part of, we're reading a commentary called The Gospel of Mark by Mary Healy. (Hey, how did that woman get in the room?) The chapter we just covered reflects on Jesus' interactions/arguments w/the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees.

When one of the scribes asks which of the 613 commandments of the Torah is most important, Jesus responds with the primacy of the two great ones. “The first is this: '. . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Healy says that the Jews – in a religious world of polytheism – was the first people to say that there is only one God. She further states that “Jesus is the first one known to have explicitly combined these two commandments. But they are the foundations underlying the first three and last seven commandments of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) respectively. His implication is that they are inseparable: our love for God is concretized and expressed in our love for (our) fellow human beings. To love others 'as yourself' means to make their well-being as high a priority as your own – a very demanding standard. Although in its original context 'neighbor' meant one's fellow Israelite, elsewhere Jesus makes clear that our love must extend to every person without limit, since the one God is God of all.”

She goes on to say “Jesus concludes there is no other commandment greater than these. The rest of the law merely spells out how to love God and neighbor. To fulfill this twofold commandment perfectly would be to fulfill the entire law”

Now, I don't know the Torah and I'm painfully aware that I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight here, but shouldn't this have been a no-brainer? What else could possibly be more important? And to some degree, in spite of the enormous benefits of our Christian faith, doesn't loving God and neighbor trump even that? It seems to me that one could be the most fervent and pious Christian, yet lacking love for God AND neighbor defeats the purpose of that religious belief. Of course, from the Christian perspective, better to have both. In fact, having Christian faith, it would seem to me, puts and even greater onus on us to love both God and neighbor. Why is it that in the Christian world we see so much evidence that the great twofold commandment is so largely ignored?

Mrs. Messiah?

It seems that every few years we get another religious controversy – some archaeological discovery that threatens to upend everything we know about religion: the debunking of the Shroud of Turin – then the new school that says it's legitimate after all; the ossuary that allegedly contained the bones of James, a brother of Jesus, which would put to rest the notion of Mary's perpetual virginity; the Gospels of James, Judas and Mary; and now a scrap of papyrus containing an incomplete phrase, in the voice of Jesus, in which he refers to “my wife.” While all these controversies pertain to Christianity, I'd suppose other religions have their own controversies as well.

In regards to the newest kerfluffle, first of all, even the Harvard scholar who announced the find doesn't yet attest to its authenticity. It's an incomplete phrase on a fragment of papyrus smaller than a credit card and there's no wider document yet known; therefore we have no context for it. It's written in Coptic and presumably dates to the fourth century, but that has yet to be authoritatively established.

I'm not denying its validity outright, but there are compelling reasons to doubt that validity so we shouldn't get our shorts in a twist over it just yet. And while I firmly believe the conventional wisdom that says Jesus was a celibate man, it would be rash to have the reactionist opinion that it's all so much hogwash.

If Jesus had been a married man after all, that wouldn't refute my belief that he is Lord and Messiah. Neither would the revelation that Mary had mothered other children after him. But it would also be rash to jump to the conclusion that this discovery discredits the Christian religion. That would be the other unfounded extreme that this discovery might represent, and which I'm sure some unbelievers will seize upon. I attach the article here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/jesus-wife-papyrus-authen_n_1897169.html?&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

The Passion of Mary

In the Catholic church – to which I belong – today is The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. In my own terminology, I often refer to what I call “the Passion of Mary.” Any Christian is well acquainted with the “Passion of the Christ,” which gives Mel Gibson's famous film its name. All believers know about the crucifixion and its attendant redemptive suffering – the central event of Christian life and experience.

Jesus suffered agonies incomprehensible to us leading up to and including his crucifixion and death. Everyone knows about the horrible details – even non-believers get the gist of it; there's no need for me to scourge a dead horse here, as it were.

We usually – and rightly – see it in the context of the horrors that Jesus personally endured for our sake. But think for a moment what Mary endured through all of this. Any parent, if they think of their own kids, can imagine the anguish of another parent who experiences the loss of a child. Some, tragically, have lived it, God bless them.

The worst thing I can imagine as a Dad would be my child having been abducted and dying some ghastly death at the hands of, for instance, a sexual predator. We hear all the time of this unspeakable sort of thing. Any parent worthy of the name would eagerly wish such a fate happen to themselves rather than to their child if that were possible.

For all the fear and pain Jesus endured, Mary had to witness it happening to her own son. Don't you suppose that, if she could have effected it, Mary would have gladly switched places with him? She saw the unsurpassingly strong, self-assured, adult Jesus go through this. But how far removed from her heart could have been the little boy been whom she had held, nursed, laughed and played with all those years before -- with the love that any mother knows?

But for all of that, bolstered by God's presence and promises, Mary suffered through it unflinchingly. She accepted and took on board her heart being “pierced by a sword,” as the prophet Simeon had put it at the time of the infant Jesus' presentation at the temple. In my mind, this adds yet another layer to the complex economy of redemption that lies at the heart of our faith. And to add one more layer to that complexity, Jesus – being the earthly manifestation of God himself – knew and understood, not only his own suffering, but that of his mother. This was among the infinite human sufferings by which his own redemptive suffering led to “all things being reconciled to himself.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Atheist

      (Cue Jack Paar's re-entry. Focus holographic image. Hold and sustain . . . NOW!!!) :

      Sorry, that's just me being an idiot. Anyway . . . to the matter at hand . . .

      There's a daily devotional I've been reading called, Praying With St. Mark's Gospel. Yesterday's entry talked about the Sadducees' unbelief in a resurrection. Its author, Fr. George William Rutler, made what I thought to be an insightful point about their questioning of Jesus on the matter. To wit:

While they would have been reasonable in saying that they saw no evidence of life after death, they were unreasonable in denying resurrection simply because they had no evidence. They exalted their opinion to the rank of a truth. By so doing they assumed that truth is only opinion. Faith roots us in something more, not less, substantial than opinion . . . The Sadducees thought they “knew it all” because they did not know how small what they “knew” was, and how vast “all” is. That was simply because they had a limited definition of “it.”

      This is perfectly analogous to and can be applied to atheism. I've long maintained that atheism is an intellectually unsustainable concept. Like the Sadducees in Fr. Rutler's observation, atheists are perfectly reasonable is saying that they see no evidence for God. Merely holding that opinion makes one an agnostic. But to claim that there is NO God is to make a negative claim that, by definition, can't be proven.

     Many of us have heard of the “dark matter” that scientists in recent years have theorized makes up something like ninety percent of all matter in the universe. It can't be seen or observed in any manner yet known to science. But a lot of very smart thinkers in the world of cosmology have stated – by methods that are well beyond your humble narrator's capacity to fathom – that the existence of dark matter has been established (as far as theories go.) And I, for one, tend to trust scientists and their claims.

     How do the skeptical establish that dark matter doesn't exist? People may have reasons not to trust science (and frankly I don't trust those people); they may well believe in science but say that the whole dark matter thing is balderdash and I'm content to let them think what they want to about it. But how can one empirically prove that dark matter doesn't exist? They can't. They may not like the idea, it may make them uncomfortable because of various prejudices associated with their religious beliefs, etc., but like the atheist's denial of the existence of God, it's an unprovable negative statement.

     One can summon nearly infinite reasons for thinking that there's no God – wars, human misery, the worldly domination of the violent and prejudiced, and so on. But none of that establishes empirically the nonexistence of God. (And to be fair – outside of some demonstrable existence of the miraculous, neither can believers empirically prove that God does exist. The atheist, of course, will deny the possibility of that demonstrable existence.)

     So regardless of any intellectual muscle that atheists like Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, the late, great Christopher Hitchens, et al, bring to the table, the essential thing that they can't bring is empirical proof. Like the Sadducees of Jesus' day, they have no intellectual leg to stand on.

     As for the belief in God that I hold, I can't prove to the unbeliever that God does exist. But when it comes time to breathe my last (something everyone knows will also occur for them one day) at least I'll have a lifeboat to reach for. Unless there's a God who'll rescue him despite his unbelief, the atheist is just plain screwed. I'm content to take my chances and am grateful that that chance – however fleeting or illusory some may say it is – exists.