Jesse made me do it

Not a surprise that he was gone, really; more of a suspicion confirmed with a glance at the all-knowing machine.  Nonetheless there was surprise that I had heard nothing of it, five years later.  

The most ordinary of circumstances, Father Novajosky and I were talking over dinner at the kitchen island of books we had read long ago and reread later, authors we returned to after having been introduced to them in high school.  J. D. Salinger came up, somehow, as by some tortured route we went there from “Field of Dreams”, the movie, and its associated books and authors.  If a body meet a body coming through the rye…ah, Holden Caulfield.

We read Catcher in the Rye, of course, but also Franny and Zooey, I think, and maybe some stories too.  I still have the books.  We did other normal English-class things as well, like diagramming sentences; it was normal then, anyway.  I could always escape the test for that by diagramming correctly on the first try the paragraph-length sentence written on the board.  Writing on the chalkboard was normal then, too.  

‘Tis not deep as a well, nor wide as a church door, but – ‘twill serve.  I am worm’s meat!  He had me read Mercutio as we worked through Romeo and Juliet.  When we had to recite a poem from memory, I chose Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty: Glory be to God for dappled things…

Southern literature was an emphasis in that Alabama classroom.  Amarantha, Amarantha, how beautiful with shoes! I can still hear him declaim in his strong accent.  It was he who famously introduced us to Flannery O’Connor without mentioning (I swear!) that she was Catholic.  A Good Man is Hard to Find for ninth graders is hard enough, but Wise Blood in tenth grade?  Hair-raising and possibly unwise, as it turned me off Flannery for a long time – or what seemed like a long time, since it was all of seven years before I tiptoed back into her writings while exploring short fiction by modern Catholic authors.   

That started me reading her other stories, and her letters, then over time, urged on by new enthusiasm for her amongst culture-conscious Catholics, yet more stories, her prayer journal, her other short novels.  Admiration and amazement grew, but the hair-raising never went away.  Still, a deep aversion to Wise Blood kept me from going back to it until just last year, when I re-read it and then, one night with Father Santandreu, watched the John Huston film of the same name.  Oh my.  Nobody needs redemption who has a good car!  Now, I wear it rather like a badge of honor that I read it as a fifteen-year-old; perhaps it’s a red badge of courage, that left a scar. Thanks to him.

He was my high-school English teacher, four years’ worth.  Two summers, before junior and senior year, he offered the coming year’s course to a group of us who met one day each week at a local library, to free up a period for other pursuits during the academic year.  Senior year, that pursuit would be “English 13,” the only English course I had with any other teacher, as four of us met with the principal in her office to learn The Modern Novel at the rate of one book each week.  Thereby hangs a story, too, of course, but for another time.   

Last saw him almost twenty years after graduation, in 2001, at the funeral of a friend close to both me and him, who died young and in the worst way.  When I entered, a Catholic priest at an Alabama protestant funeral, a strange beast indeed, he greeted me from among a group of students from those high school days and had to say his name when I was slow to recognize him; perhaps the missing mustache threw me.  I was embarrassed to need the help, but truly delighted to see him.  That was a hard moment, however, and not a time to catch up.  We never did get a chance.  He wasn’t at our next reunion, in 2012.

He spent his youth in, and as an adult later returned to, Morris, Alabama, a place so rural, so remote and redneck that we kids couldn’t comprehend it then in the late years of the Carter administration, there in the blossoming suburbs of the big city of Birmingham.  I would say right confidently that nobody round these parts now days could picture or imagine.

But he could teach, and teach he did, all these and many things besides.  I am grateful; God rest ye, Jesse Booker.

Monsignor Smith

Cultural consistency

Whoa… time to rein in the horses of celebration!  Nine days of solemnities in a row, Easter and its Octave plus the Annunciation on Monday, more if you start with the Vigil on Holy Saturday, which of course we did around here.  Not only at Mass with Gloria and Sequence, and the Liturgy of the Hours too, but also throughout the tasks and respites of the day.  

My festive lunch with priest buddies on Easter Monday, and splicing the mainbrace with friends that evening, some glorious meals in the rectory and out as well, all with dessert and extra delights we might ordinarily eschew; all this, and the beginning of baseball.  I confess it’s been hard to slow the wagon, taking a funsize bar from the jar on Carol’s desk each time I pass, and pretty decent dinners here in the Holy House even on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Perhaps no dessert this time…or maybe just a little less.

These feasts are our culture, as much as our fasts, and both are rooted in our worship of the incarnate God, with the Church and in the Church.  Culture’s root is cultus, or cult, as in the worship that gives structure to our days.  Our feasting is not merely an extension of our liturgy but part of the same fabric.  It is not simply good to have a culture; it is essential, that is, life-giving; of our essence, to have the culture. To step away from the particular (and occasionally peculiar) givens of Catholic culture invites in an anti-culture that does not give life but rather deforms and disfigures it.

Culture warrior is a pejorative pasted primarily by ideologues of secularism on us who have the culture, the worship-based life and understanding of who we are and what we are for that the fullness of faith has given us.   We fight because we must fight, not against their silly constructions and poisonous destructions, but to embrace and live the mystery revealed to us and in us.  It is always a fight to live in the light of the living God, but as you might suspect, on the side “of the angels” there is help to be had in that fight.

One of the attributes of the Holy Spirit poured into us, good measure, shaken together, and overflowing into our laps is robur ad pugnam, that is, strength for the fight.  This help from God long predates the foolish and feckless assertions of the so-called science-based regime that is merely the modern manifestation of age-old materialistic hubris at the service of raw will-to-power.  The living God knows better than we the inclination we mortals have toward enslaving ourselves, and others along the way, to our aspirations of lordship over creation.  He drops sacramental worship into the world like a lifeline for us to grasp and wind around our flailing arms lest we drown in a sea of self-serving like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  

The sacramentality of our salvation is not limited to but rather begins with the Sacraments of which we have seven.  That is, God uses things we mortals can see and touch to make present realities we would otherwise miss.  Because of the beauty of Creation, and the beauties of our own creations, we know that life, human life, is beautiful even when that beauty is hard to discern.  The human body as we have received it is not some adjustable, external costume for us to don, disguise, and doff at will, but rather the place where grace and glory erupt and endure.  We know what wombs and wounds are for, and we rejoice to recognize that they are indispensable to God for our redemption.

We, like God, use tangible things, things we receive, treasure, and save; things we invent, create, and enjoy to show and share our love with one another.  God is good; Christ is risen in the flesh, and we have in our bodies a share in life eternal.  Maybe we should give the horses their head for a while longer on this road we travel.

Monsignor Smith

 

Making it happen

April showers are welcome for what they promise by way of future flowers, and those of us who rejoice in the fragrant fruit of the Paschal Mystery know well enough that we must first pass through the perfect storm, that is, all the work that makes Holy Week and Easter possible.  You can’t have one without the other, as a song used to remind us about some other intertwined mystery.  

The rectory staff hammered away with increasing enthusiasm as the Holy Days approached, providentially welcoming Carol Gangnath back after her hiatus.  Susan Sumner, who graciously stepped in to help during her absence, was here through Wednesday of Holy Week and there could not have been a better time to have both of them overlapping together.

The transformation of our sanctuary was almost as dramatic as the resurrection itself, though made possible by many hands rather than the digitus Dei.  Melissa Franklin, Sharon Haley, Liz Beegle, Julie Wilson, all the Daos, Margaret McDermott, and Jasmine Kuzner were our fern, frond, and flower wranglers for both gardens, round the altar of repose and in the main church.  The latter smelled awfully good when I entered at six this morning.

Preoccupied as I am about liturgical excellence, I confess I was positively relaxed much of the time this year, knowing I could count on John Henderson’s careful touch at the musical helm, with all of our singers and choirs (especially the youth choir – are they awesome or what?) providing beauty in abundance.  Likewise all our altar servers were prompt, attentive, enthusiastic, and skilled, with two veteran hands leading them: Daniel Dao and Isaac Daniel, both of whom know not only what to do, but how and why.  Cathedrals look upon our crew with envy.  Our lectors were superb.  Let me also acknowledge that Father Novajosky happily took up some of the trickier roles and rendered them flawlessly.

Fearlessly going where brave souls feared to tread, rookie Toni Henries-Ross took responsibility for organizing and supervising the splendid hospitality on the lawn, aided discreetly by the veteran organizer and queen of the egg hunt, Jasmine Kuzner.  It is a wonderful time to be together, and we need to offer folks a reason to slow down and enjoy it together with us.

It was great to confer the Sacraments of Initiation upon seven souls at our Vigil, Jorge Gaston León; Fitz, Kiernan, & Maura Bader; Kyle Curley; and Addison & Penelope Kerdock.  Thoughtfully prepared with their families by DRE Jasmine Kuzner, the six young folks clearly delighted in the grace of the Communion.  Jorge, whose road was a smidge longer, was no less delighted.  Let’s not forget that the Vigil began with the excellent fire-work of a new crew of Scouts, led this year by the Barclays.  

Let me point out that I am under no delusion that I labored alone.   My fellow priests put their shoulder to the wheel of shriving, and spent hours in the confessional caring for penitents making first confessions, first-in-a-long-time confessions, and confessions of every sort in between.  

Rejoicing now in the Octave and making time for tasks I had put aside during the preceding weeks, and maybe a bit of baseball, it is time to look to the Things of Spring – First Holy Communion, Munchkinball, Gala and Graduation.  Before you know it, we will be processing through the neighborhood with the Blessed Sacrament.  But before we get into all that, let’s be glad for the April showers, and rest a spell, joyfully, in the knowledge that, still today, Christ is risen.

Monsignor Smith

Let this holy building shake with joy

Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,

exult, let Angel ministers of God exult,

let the trumpet of salvation

sound aloud our mighty King’s triumph!

Did you ever wonder what the moment of Christ’s resurrection sounded like?  Partly because no person besides Jesus witnessed its happening, we have trouble picturing what the Resurrection looked like, though many artists have attempted to depict it.  The soundtrack, however, is readily available: the Easter Proclamation.

Better known as the Exsultet, the first word in its Latin form, a single voice, often a deacon or priest, sings the Proclamation at the beginning of the Great Vigil of Easter.  The New Fire has been kindled and brought into the pitch-dark church as a single flame atop the Paschal Candle, the light of the Risen Christ piercing the darkness of the tomb.  After this living flame has spread to the candles in the hands of the worshippers, the great candle is placed in its candelabrum in the sanctuary, and in the flickering glow begins the song of praise.

The first time I heard the Exsultet I was a freshman in college.  I was at the dinky parish church near our campus for my first Easter Vigil, trying to make it to the whole Triduum despite my semester exams.  That church had precious few resources, liturgical or otherwise, but that year one of the French professors sang the Exsultet, and beautifully.  

Unfamiliar with the text and knowing little Latin, I was nonetheless unquestionably moved and even changed by the sung Proclamation.  It communicates radical joy and transformation like no other work of human genius or art.  The great composer W. A. Mozart was so moved by it that he is known to have said that if he had composed the Exultet, he would have no need to compose anything more. 

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her, 

ablaze with light from her eternal King, 

let all corners of the earth be glad, 

knowing an end to gloom and darkness.

All the earth is affected. Not only is Christ transformed in glory by this event, but moreover all creation is changed in both substance and experience.  Death was universal, but for mankind, now it is different.  No longer the end, it has been given the possibility of beginning something new and glorious. 

Our birth would have been no gain

had we not been redeemed.

The Exsultet rejoices in the most basic truths of our salvation, reminding us that without salvation by Christ we would be born into a prison without hope of escaping: the prison of Sin, Original and Actual, inescapable and fatal.  We can decorate it and make it comfortable, but for us mortal men and what power we have, there is no way out.

In what is perhaps its most famous assertion, it celebrates even Adam’s sin, which brought about our sad situation, but thus makes possible our joy.  

O truly necessary sin of Adam,

destroyed completely by the death of Christ!

O happy fault,

that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!

Easter answers the oft-recurring questions, How could God have allowed such a simple, solitary act to expel all of us from His presence in Paradise?  Is He so eager to punish?  This puts a very fine point on the mystery in which we rejoice, which the Church often cites throughout the year:  O God, who wondrously created human nature, and still more wonderfully redeemed it!  

Lest we get lost in the cosmic significance of it all, it is clear that this great act of God our Father is deeply personal, both to Him, in what it cost, and to you and me, for whom He paid such a great price:

O wonder of your humble care for us!

O love, O charity beyond all telling,

to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!

Not surprisingly, the Easter Proclamation is yet another part of our liturgical patrimony whose promise was restored in the much-improved translation of the Missal, introduced back in December 2011.  One feature that pleases many is that the bees are back.  Yes, bees: remember, this is a hymn for the dedication of a great candle:

On this, your night of grace, O holy Father

accept this candle, a solemn offering

the work of bees and of your servants’ hands…

This is particularly welcome news around here at St. B’s, since the mascots of our school and all our athletic teams are the Bees.

Like the Resurrection itself, the Exsultet happens only once, and at night – each year in the Sacred Liturgy, at least.  But thanks be to God and His holy Church for this single song of praise, which for a millennium and a half has let us know precisely what the Resurrection sounds like.  Uncountable voices unite to proclaim what God has done for us, rocking the very foundations of the world, shaking this very church each Sunday.

Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,

arrayed with the lightning of his glory

let this holy building shake with joy,

filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.

Amen!  Alleluia!  May this Divinely-given joy fill your homes and your lives throughout the year.  Joined by Father Brillis and Father Novajosky, and all who work here at the heart of your parish to keep the song going, I wish you Blessed Easter.  Exult!  

Monsignor Smith

How much is enough?

Enough!   It seems such a simple word, but it can be powerful.  Used in self-defense, it can stop us from over-indulging, as when we find ourselves drawn back to a heavy-laden buffet; or being over-served, as by an indulgent grandma, aunt, or barkeep.  Used for governance, it can announce that the threshold has been reached beyond which penalties will be imposed, such as to a carload of rowdy children.  But also, and often, it is the word of condemnation.

Some people use it to condemn themselves.  I do not pray enough, they say in confession.  I do not love my children enough, or I am not patient enough with my kids, they say.  They grieve their shortfall.

I ask you, though, what I often will ask them: Who does pray enough?  How much prayer is enough?  Only Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Who does love enough?   Who is patient enough?  Again, only God and His sinless mother manage that; this is why we are so attached to them.  With quantity impossible to set, as for prayer, or love, or patience, the accusation of not enough is guaranteed to condemn.   

If this is how we accuse ourselves, then we damn ourselves to continual misery, since we are in fact constitutionally incapable of loving God, our neighbor, or even our spouses or children enough.  We are all wounded by Original Sin, which leaves as its scar a large streak of selfishness and limitation.  Nonetheless, we can be aware of our insufficiency, and grieve. 

It is different when we fail in a specific, discrete act that CAN be counted.  In such cases, to use the word is a deception, for example to say, I don’t go to Mass enough.  Our obligation is clear to attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, unless impeded by specific circumstances like sickness.  More accurate, and more honest, would be to confess: I missed Mass last week for no good reason; or, I forgot about the Holy Day last month; or, I haven’t been to Mass for seven years, except when my mom came to visit.   The hidden benefit of such quantitative honesty is that having named our specific shortfall, we can identify and achieve the necessary and specific remedy. 

The obverse type of obfuscation would be, I lied too much.  How much is the right amount (enough, but not too much) of lying?  Zero!  So, I lied several times, is a more honest self-analysis, and an error we can amend, with the help of God.  

Our culture has lost sight of the reality of Original Sin, and thus the universal insufficiency that characterizes the human race.  The scientific and technological models of predictability and tolerances has been thrust onto human beings, and our laws and our society frequently and freely pronounce judgment on whether someone did enough.  This ambient attitude can hobble us in our mission to grow in grace and virtue.

It can also damage or destroy the very fabric of our community and society.  If of ourselves no human being can ever do enough, then we are always vulnerable to accusations of insufficiency.  If someone is injured on your property, then you obviously failed to do enough to prevent it.  According to our legal system, that makes you liable.  If terrorists fly an airplane into the World Trade Center, clearly someone failed to do enough to prevent it.  But who failed?  The government?  The airlines?  The architects?   According to our norms, we must find out, so liability can be assessed, penalty imposed, and money flow.  

Remembering in honesty our creaturely weakness, we know we never can or will do enough.  I cannot do enough to prevent an elderly Mass-goer from falling and being injured approaching our church, though I pray that no one be injured that way.  Any time you read an article declaring that someone did not do enough – to prevent an injury, or death; to solve a problem, or make something fair; to avoid injustice, or thwart evil – say a prayer for that person as you recognize, there but for the grace of God go I!   For from this analysis there is neither defense nor reprieve.

All power lies with those who publish and accuse people’s insufficiencies.  Whoever admits to having not done enough is already condemned.  In our persistent insufficiency, all that remains for us to hope is that we not be found out.  Yet before God, we know that hope is vain.  

Moved by this awareness, we must admit: I do not do enough.  I stand condemned.  And yet.  This day the Son of God handed Himself over to be crucified, in fulfillment of His Father’s will.  He handed over His spirit, and said, It is finished.  It is consummated.  It is accomplished.  This, and this alone, is sufficient.  

I am redeemed; it is enough.

Monsignor Smith

I bind unto myself this day the strong name of the Trinity

Saint Patrick's idea of a good place to spend Lent

Would Saint Patrick be encouraged, or rather find it strange that his name annually is on the lips of every retailer, restauranteur, and party planner in this faraway nation?  Unlike “Christmas”, “Saint Patrick” is a name and a concept that the most secular around us seem to invoke readily and often.   Add that the reality that this evangelizing saint's strict regime of fasting and penance could not be more distant from the spirit that expects “dispensation” to eat meat on a Lenten Friday when his day falls there, and he may as well be the patron of ironic twists.   

Always falling in the middle of Lent, his feast generates much celebration and precious little consideration of what the saint himself said or did.  There’s no green glitter here, nor corned beef, nor beer, but your observance of your heritage – as a Catholic – should include reading his own words.  Slainte!

Monsignor Smith

My name is Patrick.  I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many.  My father was Calpornius.  He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburnia.  His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner.  I was about sixteen at the time.  At that time, I did not know the true God.  I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.  We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments.  We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved.  The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth.  It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.

It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith.  Even though it came about late, I recognized my failings.  So, I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance.  He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil.  He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.

That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity.  This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven.

This is because there is no other God, nor will there ever be, nor was there ever, except God the Father.  He is the one who was not begotten, the one without a beginning, the one from whom all beginnings come, the one who holds all things in being – this is our teaching.  And his son, Jesus Christ, whom we testify has always been, since before the beginning of this age, with the father in a spiritual way.  He was begotten in an indescribable way before every beginning.  Everything we can see, and everything beyond our sight, was made through him.  He became man; and, having overcome death, was welcomed to the heavens to the Father.  The Father gave him all power over every being, both heavenly and earthly and beneath the earth.  Let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ, in whom we believe and whom we await to come back to us in the near future, is Lord and God.  He is judge of the living and of the dead; he rewards every person according to their deeds.  He has generously poured on us the Holy Spirit, the gift and promise of immortality, who makes believers and those who listen to be children of God and co-heirs with Christ.  This is the one we acknowledge and adore – one God in a Trinity of the sacred name.

He said through the prophet: ‘Call on me in the day of your distress, and I will set you free, and you will glorify me.’  Again he said: ‘It is a matter of honor to reveal and tell forth the works of God.’

Although I am imperfect in many ways, I want my brothers and relations to know what I’m really like, so that they can see what it is that inspires my life.

… I pray for those who believe in and have reverence for God.  Some of them may happen to inspect or come upon this writing which Patrick, a sinner without learning, wrote in Ireland.  May none of them ever say that whatever little I did or made known to please God was done through ignorance.  Instead, you can judge and believe in all truth that it was a gift of God. This is my confession before I die.

Saint Patrick

born in Roman Britain in 387; died at Saul, Ireland, on March 17, 461

 

Revealed in voices, places, and faces

Why, it must be Thursday!**

Christ used stories because we have stories; the Church gives us Christ’s life and all Scripture broken down into stories because stories fit into our lives.  Not only are we able to recognize and understand the story of salvation, and the parables of Jesus, because they have reflections in our own stories, but also so that the holy stories become part of our own stories.

Lent lays out the story for us in one long, familiar pattern, where each day and its stories come on a schedule that help us recognize how far along we are on the path, the Great Fast of Forty Days.  Ash Wednesday reminds us to beware of doing religious acts for other people to see, right before we smirch our faces.  The first Sunday, Christ is in the desert; and the second, He is transfigured.  The three-year cycle scrambles the next several Sundays from year to year until we find our feet firmly in the Passion, and while clutching our palms, we know again where we are, and where Christ is.  We hope there’s less distance between us than when first we started.

But the weekdays of Lent suffer no variety of programming, bringing the same Scripture to the same day year after year.   On Thursday of the first week of Lent, as I read the Gospel of the Rich Man and Lazarus on his doorstep, I was transported to a moment in the late 1980’s, when I heard Fr. Brainerd (remember him?) proclaim and preach it.  Jesus’ story that day begins, There was a rich man who dressed in purple and linen; which is exactly how Fr. Brainerd, as the priest must necessarily be, was dressed for that Mass.  Yes, I remember; Thursday was the day that after work I went by metro to the Cathedral for Mass. 

As I may have told you before, each day of Lent has a place attached too, a church in Rome where the Stational Mass is offered, according to ancient tradition.  From my seminary days through my later assignment there, I would trek each Lenten day to the appointed church for the dawn Mass (in English) organized by the North American College seminarians.  That’s nine Lents, and some of the churches are inseparable in my mind from the days and their scriptures.  

Tuesday of the second week of Lent brings Christ’s Gospel admonition to call no man on earth your Father, a loaded moment for a church full of current and future priests.  The church that day is Santa Balbina, one of the least popular, least attractive churches on the rotation.  It’s a simple, ancient, heavy church built into the back slope of the Caelian hill, which has risen over the intervening millennium or so, that the interior of the church is more like a basement, and a damp one at that in the Roman winter morning chill.  The cracked walls are lit by bare bulbs hanging on wires from the undecorated ceiling; its one glory is a magnificent if anomalous inlaid marble throne against the wall behind the altar.  That Gospel reading takes me straight there every year, bringing a chill to the back of my neck, but sparing me the long walk along the Tiber and Circus Maximus.

Monday of the fifth week of Lent is at San Crisogono, one of the original churches in the stational lineup, which means it goes back to the fifth century.  You should visit the excavations beneath the current, medieval church when next you are in Rome, but you won’t -- because this isn’t even the most important or beautiful church in its own neighborhood of Trastevere, much less in the city.  Anyway, the Old Testament reading that day, the longest first reading in the whole lectionary, is the story from Daniel of Susanna and the two dirty old men.   My first year there, my classmate (now-Msgr.) Tom Cook of Winona, Minnesota, declaimed it with such relish and emphasis that every year, it is his voice I hear say: Your fine lie has cost you your HEAD!

Finally, finally, in my last year as a pilgrim in these Lents, I was called as a substitute for a priest who became ill, and was able to be principal celebrant and homilist at Mass for Wednesday in the fifth week of Lent, at the church of San Marcello.  One of that church’s most striking features is an enormous fresco of the crucifixion which is on the back wall above the entry doors, which means I got to appreciate it from the ambo and altar.  The Gospel for that day is from John 8, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.  That very excerpt is carved into marble over the main entrance of Central Intelligence Agency headquarters.  Coincidence?  You make the call.

Unrehearsed, unresearched, these moments come to me clear as light.  Such is the power of liturgy and God’s Holy Word to break through the prison of our present moment and transport us into the Communion that is outside of time yet unabating in our lives. 

The story of our salvation, the stories that Jesus told to His disciples and that they have told to us, become entwined with our own stories when we encounter them in moments of grief or joy, in our need or in our distraction, recalling us to the awesome truth that no matter where our feet stand on this earth, our eyes and ears behold the very mysteries of heaven. 

Monsignor Smith

**The church interior pictured is that of San Giorgio in Velabro, the Station Church for the second day  of Lent, the day after Ash Wednesday.  The connections, of course, are more complicated than that.   

Just a few weeks before my seminary class arrived in Rome at the end of August, 1993, in a "warning" to Pope John Paul II after his strong condemnation of "the Mafia" (for lack of a better word for Italian organized crime), two powerful bombs were detonated, one of which blew to bits the ancient carved stone portico of this church.  San Giorgio was closed for years thereafter as the portico and church were restored, and the Stational Mass was moved to a nearby church, usually the bizarre, octagonal San Teodoro, whose vinyl, high-backed benches resembled nothing so much as school-bus seats.  But I digress.  At some point the Lenten pilgrims got into San Giorgio again, I THINK before I finished seminary, maybe my fourth year.   

No less significantly, this is the church in which Father Ben Petty, son of this parish, delivered his first homily to family and friends on the day after he was ordained deacon in 2018 at St. Peter's in the Vatican, so by his gracious invitation I have also celebrated Mass at this altar. 

Notice that the church is off-square, and the walls of the nave not parallel.  You can see it clearly using the grid on the church ceiling for comparison.