All generations shall call her blessed

Come on out!  Our Fall Festival is this weekend, and you and your friends need to be there.

One of the most important parts of the Festival is the attendance of kids, ideally lots and lots of kids, including kids with families who aren’t usually here, or even have never been here before.   Neighbors, coworkers, family members who live a few suburbs away, and even a few strangers should all be invited and encouraged to come; most people are on the lookout for something different and delightful to do with the family. 

It takes more than a bouncey house (though there will be one) to make kids excited and their parents comfortable, though.  What you will have heard about as we have asked and asked for more is the volunteers.  Here at Saint Bernadette we are blessed with an enormous number of people who are gifted at and dedicated to providing all that children needs be happy, healthy, and safe.  I marvel at the moms, the dads, the teachers, and the coaches who demonstrate an elevated awareness of and care for kids, whether their own, their friends’, or even ones they’ve never seen before.

One recent Friday evening on the back field, during CYO Intramurals (what I call Munchkinball) I marveled at the swarms of young people who moved about in something resembling elaborate choreography.  There were the little ones in uniforms on the field, discovering the joy of soccer through a particularly coach-intensive tutorial.  But besides these who were registered for this structured activity, there were others.   Their older siblings moved about in small packs delineated by age and (usually) boys or girls.  Several un-structured and un-supervised games of basketball were pursued enthusiastically.  Younger siblings, too, ran, shrieked, giggled, played with one another, and alternately tried to elude or find their parents.  The swings and the other playground equipment attracted these kids and engaged them one with another. In the midst it all, the parents (not engaged in coaching) seem blithely to be enjoying one another’s company.

But making possible what looks like chaos, albeit joyful, is a constant, conscious, and careful level of attention and care and communal responsibility that makes the joy possible, and safe.  The moms, the dads, the teachers, and the coaches are united not only in helping a lost little one find his mom, or soothing the anguish of a fall, but also in vigilance against anyone who would take advantage of these happy, trusting children.

Undergirding it all, we have structures, programs, evaluations, and criteria such as VIRTUS and background checks in which our coaches, teachers, volunteers, and many moms and dads willingly cooperate.  But what makes that work, and what conveys the confidence to make such fun possible, is the adults’ elevated awareness of and care for kids, whether their own, their friends’, or even ones they’ve never seen before.  No government organization can arrange for that; one cannot train or pay a staff to provide it; nor can you ask it of an ordinary group or community.  That is why having it here is a marvel, and why it is a necessity. 

Not only do I admire all of you whose generosity and vigilance make our events open, inviting, and safe for families and their children, but I invite you to renew and intensify the conscious and careful responsibility that you so freely share.  It is you who make possible so many of the best things we do around here.  

The more I hear people comment on the weather, the more convinced I am that it’s NEVER what it’s “supposed to be” in late summer and early autumn.  But you know what?  We like it anyway, and maybe even partly because of that.  Let’s move forward with confidence.  It will be great to welcome visitors and friends to our Fall Festival, knowing it will feature something that they cannot find many other places:  kids, ideally lots and lots of kids, including kids with families who aren’t usually here, or even have never been here before, and all of them safe.    

Monsignor Smith 

What we can do for one another

This weekend at Mass, I want you to do something different.  I want you to offer your prayers, your participation in the Holy Sacrifice, and your intentions, at least in part, for somebody for whom you did not plan to pray.  Please pray for a person near you in church who is not part of your family or group.

Let the inscrutable purpose of Providence choose the person for you.  And do not simply note their presence and toss off a prayer; no, pay attention to the person, the identity, the appearance and other clues to life and needs.  Take good note of this person, who is close to you in the sight of the Lord.

One aspect of being a priest is being privy to people’s secrets, good news and bad.  Secret sickness or sorrow, secret fears and faults, but also secret joys and anticipation.  It is a great privilege and a constant call to prayer for me when people share their secrets with me, and opens my mind to those who do not share them with me yet surely have them.  It is this bearing of burdens both revealed and concealed that I want you to consider.  

You know a lot of the people around you at Mass.  You talk after Mass, maybe even hang out around the parish, field, or school, and possibly even have been to one another’s homes.  Some you know only by sight and a friendly greeting.  There is a familiarity, even an intimacy because of where you are together.  

If today’s prayer assignment for you falls to these people, think first about all you know about them – maybe their busy lives, maybe just who they attend Mass with, how they present themselves, and how they look today.  Look for clues to what they are placing before the Lord today:  sorrows or joys, hopes or fears.  Then allow for what you do not see, what they might be keeping secret.  Then bring it all into your prayer and offer it to the Lord for them.

Alternatively, you may find your new “prayer partner of proximity” to be somebody you know only barely or not at all.  This, too, is a gift of Divine Providence and reveals the mystery of the Church and corporate worship.  Beyond our family or church-going group with whom we assemble in our pew, we have no control over and no prior knowledge of who will be near us in our worship of God.  Sometimes it can be quite striking.

It has become quite clear to me that even here in our supposedly self-selecting suburban society, Catholic Mass is the place of greatest diversity and greatest unity of any experience available in the metropolitan area.  You have a broader range of people than you would find together on any city bus or Metro car, in any dive bar or concert venue.  And unlike those places, by and large we are all glad we are all there.

So you may find your prayer-gaze settling on somebody truly alien to you – unknown, unfamiliar, and unlike you, and therefore inscrutable in ways that others are not.  Maybe a generation or two older than you; maybe much younger, even a child.  A child’s fears and anticipations are childlike not childish, and real.  Whoever it is, pause to search: good day or bad day – can you guess?  Secrets heavy or joyful – what clue is there?  Comfortable or cautious – what can you discern?

Now you have your mission, your assignment: pray for this person, friend or stranger, as if his concerns were your own, as if her joy depended on you.  Because they are, and it does; in Christ, we are one body, and you will walk out of church today different: with that much more life in you.  

Monsignor Smith

Open to Encounter

Odilon Redon's Christ

You don’t miss a trick.  So I know you have noticed new faces around the parish, especially in the sanctuary at Mass on Sunday.   Of course, that’s where you are looking for somebody else entirely – Our Eucharistic Lord – and so it would not be inappropriate if your attention did not linger on them.  But let me take a moment to let you know to whom those faces belong.

First, and most likely for you to have encountered already because he has been here since the end of August, is our new student priest in residence, Father Alek Schrenk.  He is a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, ordained in 2017, and here in Washington to get a degree in Canon Law from the Catholic University of America.   We may be something of a “destination” residence for Canon Law students after Frs. Santandreu and Novajosky did so well on the degrees they completed this summer.  Fr. Schrenk, like all of us, will benefit from the continued presence here of Fr. Novajosky, who is continuing study to begin the doctorate.  Doubtless he has insights to share.  And no, it was not one of the criteria I had for choosing our next resident priest, but if you have seen Fr. Schrenk, I am sure you have noticed that now you can tell him apart from Fr. Novajosky!

More recently begun to be among us is David Tines, a seminarian for the Diocese of Lincoln (that’s in Nebraska) in his third year of theological studies at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg.  By the way, that’s pronounced “tea-ness,” not like the business end of a fork.  His wardrobe makes him look like clergy, but he isn’t quite yet there, though we have every confidence he will be soon.  He will be working principally with Jasmine Kuzner, assisting with our religious education community.  I say “community” because we want to make available his ability to teach the Faith not only to the kids K-8, but to the parents and families, too.  He is a resource for everybody who has questions, because he has been studying for six years already and his head is full of learning that he is only too eager to turn around and present for your benefit. 

You’ll see David at Masses and around the campus often on Sunday.  Take the time to talk to him, because in addition to having knowledge to share, he is also eager to meet you.  In “seminarian-speak”, you are what is known as “regular people” or even “real people.”   Mainly, you are not another seminarian, which is a big win for him after six years in a box full of seminarians.  He wants to know you, too.

In that regard, David is like a lot of other people around here.  Every week, but especially at the end of a summer of transitions and at the beginning of a semester and schoolyear, there are lots of new faces around that are not in the sanctuary.  You’ve probably heard me call out to them, “Do I know you yet?” – I admit I do that to some people more than once.  But the newcomers among us want not only to meet me, but to get to know you.  You are worth knowing!

So over the coming weeks, if you see a face you to which cannot put a name, or a face you’ve seen many times but never had the chance to talk to, or even one of our new faces in the sanctuary whose name you have read but who hasn’t yet met you, please, stop.  Say hello!   Reveal something about yourself, and learn something about the other.  Noticing a new face is only the beginning; showing yours is the next and necessary part of the work of building communion.  There is no “trick.”

Monsignor Smith

And they shall be shiftless

Since the devil gave us the internet several years back, the one thing it could be counted on to provide was bad news. Bad news in the morning on the desktop, bad news over lunch on the phone.  Bad news while you’re waiting before dinner, and bad news when you check before bed.   Today is no different; what is unexpected is the source.  No, not the White House or the Hill, nor the Vatican or even Nats Park.  The bad news came from Volkswagen.

The word is out that after the 2024 model year, VW will no longer offer a manual, six-speed transmission on the Golf GTI.  I will pause now for the stunned silence.

One by one, vehicle manufacturers have stopped offering shifters in their cars, at least the ones they sell in the United States.  Unlike Europeans, who prefer to exercise some control over their cars’ transmissions, Americans are more diffident and the minority of those who chose to shift their own has long hovered around ten percent.  The requirement that every vehicle configuration, including transmission, complete the full battery of testing for such things as emissions and crash safety, makes such variety exorbitantly expensive to bring to the U.S. market.  Model by model, then make by make, the possibility evaporated.

I thought I could count on Volkswagen.  I should have known when Audi caved almost a decade ago.  Performance cars?  Nah: luxury is what sells here.  Ease.  Comfort.  The latest thing is cars that pay attention for you, so you don’t have to – if you ever did.

My first acquaintance with a clutch was not a happy one.  After I washed his Fiat roadster, my dad let me try to drive it.  After bouncing the length of the driveway in frightful spasms, we both decided to postpone the first drive.  But I was only fourteen.

I was still fourteen when I finally showed the clutch who is boss, but it was on the little Yamaha street motorcycle I got for my paper route.  Kids, ask your mom and dad what a “paper route” is.   For that matter, ask them what a “newspaper” is.  There were some spasms in the first days, but being stuck for half an hour at the bottom of the steep driveway of a home that doesn’t belong to you or anybody you even know will learn you right up on how to apply power while easing out the clutch.  

From the Yamaha to the Dodge Colt (by Mitsubishi) with its 52 horsepower and four forward speeds was a natural progression.  In that little beige weeniemobile I learned what an advantage a manual was in snow and even ice, in the blizzard of January 1982.   Look it up if you don’t recall; it was a monster around here, and yes, it hit Alabama too. 

My job those last summers of high school put my skill to work as the pickup truck we used there had a three-on-the-tree (I think a lot of you will need to look that up).  I could drive the dump truck, the stake-bed we used as a garbage truck, and the 1962 Mack open-cab firetruck, all because I could work a clutch.   

There followed a second-generation Honda Accord with a five-speed but no a/c, if you can believe, then my first GTI, a 1987 model that taught me, for diverse reasons, not ever again to own a two door, nor a red car.  I sold it when I went to Rome for seminary, but once over there I was always the driver if while traveling with other seminarians we rented a car, a rare indulgence, because, you know, Europe drives stick.  

My friend George lent me his car for the two whole weeks I was in DC from Rome for priestly ordination after ascertaining that I could shift for myself.  After ordination, my dad gave me his car (his final shift-your-own, as it turned out), and after that, I have enjoyed three VW-group manuals to get me up to this day.  Even as I watched other manual cars fall out of production, like the proverbial little Indians, I thought that for me and VW, it would never end.

The manual transmission is a marvelous security feature, since so few people can drive it anymore, including would-be thieves.  The surge in carjackings in our area is frightening, but my car is not the one they want.  

I rented a nice, zippy little performance sedan last March while I was in Florida for spring training.  I liked everything about it except for the dumb transmission.  I was never sure what gear it was actually in, or how to put it in the gear that was wanted, so I tended to go faster than I intended because I had to use the accelerator to shift gears.   Imprecise plus uncertain equals bad.

The other day while driving in classic Washington traffic, I changed lanes, but because I was in the wrong gear, fourth I think, I did not accelerate smartly enough and burdened the chap behind me.  I felt badly about that.  But because I shift, that almost never happens.   I know what gear I am in, what gear I need to be in, and with a flick of wrist and foot, I find that gear.  

That is all desperately out of fashion these days.  My niece – my own flesh and blood! – insisted on a car with an automatic this summer despite the protestations and maybe even weeping of her mother, my similarly-inclined sister.  We have passed from the machine age into the electronic age, and it has come for our cars.  Already many have no transmission at all.

Machines burden us with the obligation of control; the operator must observe, adjust, engage.  Electronics, on the other hand, offer the illusion of control.  More often than not, it is the so-called “operator” who is being controlled.  Even more than bad news, that is the principal product of the internet, which was the devil’s goal all along.

Monsignor Smith

You wanna start something?

Things start in September.  That doesn’t make much sense at first glance, since the name of the month reveals it was seventh in the Roman calendar until two Roman Caesars, Julius and Augustus, inserted their namesake months just ahead of it.  Why start in the seventh month?  Seven is regarded as lucky in many cultures, but whether that contributed any impetus, I do not know.  Things surely start in September.

Of course, because modern Americans can’t wait for anything anymore (see: Christmas etc.), September starts in August.  Eating a chunk out of The Most Wonderful Month of the Year, the campus lit up like Cape Canaveral around an Apollo moon rocket this past week as parents brought their kids for the beginning of school, our enrollment up and expectations even more so.  There had been anticipatory activity the week before as teachers and staff prepared.  But breaking our stride for the long Labor Day weekend, we know things really start in September.

Summer has many activities associated with it, but starting is not one of them.  “Indolence” may be only a summertime ideal, rarely if ever achieved or indulged in our always-on culture, but until the season passes, we still abstain from starting, along with other burdensome or too-serious things.

The first week of September back in 1986, I moved to Washington to seek my career and my “fortune”.  I had finished crisscrossing the country to vacation and visit friends in what I called my “summer of dissolute living.”  Freshly granted B.A. and frightfully brief C.V. in hand, I had a car, an interview suit, and a place to live; a frequent collaborator of my father, who lived just down the street from Blessed Sacrament Church in Chevy Chase, offered her basement.  Thirty-seven years and several vocational twists and turns ago, it all started in September.

Looking back even further, sixty years in fact, the whole undertaking, vocations and all, began in September.  Steve Smith, my dad, and Bernie Eichenlaub, my mom, were married in Sacred Heart Church in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh on September 7, 1963.  To try to grasp the change and happening that has unfolded in the intervening time simply boggles the mind – well, it boggles MY mind, anyway.  And to look for a moment at that one thing that has stayed the same – that Steve and Bernie Smith are married – is to find that words of measure or description fail.

As human beings fashioned in the image and likeness of God, you and I and every person on earth now and ever are capable of amazing things.   We are capable of and engage in innumerable things; projects, activities, and undertakings, many of them mundane, some of them selfish, none of them irrelevant.  Every time we do, we can and in fact should echo and incarnate the creating and life-giving love of God, faithful and self-sacrificing.  Alas, we do not achieve that every time.  But we can, and occasionally do; and none of us should fear to try.

Be not afraid, our Lord says, in words among His most often quoted.  Anybody who seeks to instill fear in you or me or our young people desires the opposite of our good.  It is in this context -- of living, of giving, of starting – that the deep meaning of Christ’s exhortation to us is revealed in fulness and in truth.

If it is good, you can do it.  If it is hard, you should do it.  If it is long, you must begin.   Who knows what manner of things will start this September?

Monsignor Smith