Americanbible.com is supporting the World Meeting of Families and the Papal visit with these posters mounted in the Locust-Walnut Subway Station.   There are two more versions;  one announcing that every family has someone who wants to come home and the other proclaiming that every family has prayed for the impossible.

This kind of "outside" support astonished me with its elegance.

These eight Jesuits form the present community at Arrupe House, 1226 18th St. across from St. Joseph's Prep and Gesu Church.   I am seated on the far right and will be leaving the other seven next week to take up my new mission at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, PA.   All seven of these men have been doing great work for the Society and I will miss living with them.

seated:  Richard McCouch (superior and Provincial Assistant for Secondary and Pre-secondary Education),  Jeff Puttoff (founding director of Hopeworks and now student at U of Penn), Chijioke Azuawusiete (from Nigeria and a student at U of Penn)

standing:  John Swope (president of St. Joseph's Prep),  Adam Rosinski (Prep faculty member and on staff of Mission and Ministry), Steve Surovick (Prep faculty member and on staff of Mission and Ministry), Neil Ver'Schneider (Gesu School administrator and counselor)

"Will you come and follow me, if I but call your name?"

The Medical Mission Sisters of Fox Chase tastefully prepare the Sunday Eucharistic table.   I celebrated the Mass with them on Sunday August 9.   The scripture readings spoke of Jesus' reactions to his followers who wanted at least another miracle of loaves and fish.    He instructed them: "Eat my Flesh; Drink my Blood."

Nineteenth Sunday of the Year   John 6 on The Bread of Life

Food and all of the rituals surrounding food play a big part in our lives.   For some of us, granted, food is a pedestrian matter and meals are simply a necessary fueling station as we go about our busy lives.   But for most of us the rituals of food all the way from shopping to relaxing with friends after a meal are part of a program to sustain a meaningful life.   This even despite our anxiety about so many local and international food needs,

To signal that religion is not something outside human life, then, it should come as no surprise that the inspired authors of the Bible give food and our eating a key role in the Bible, all the way from the forbidden apple in Genesis to the scorn that Paul in First Corinthians heaps on those who exclude the less fortunate from the Christian table.  In between such symbolic frames to Scripture, Yahweh is busy rescuing his people in times of famine and Christ is proving our Father’s generosity of spirit in events like the miraculous catch of fish and the miraculous multiplication of  loaves and fish.

The Eucharist itself that we celebrate at this table gives us a simple mnemonic key to understanding all of our interactions with food: bless, break, take, eat.  Bless, break, take, eat.  It will be well for us to integrate these four simple words not only into our eating together and even into snack time but also into every daily routine.  These four simple directions imitate the simple directions of a recipe book, words like shop, chop, boil, savor in their various forms.   But “bless, break, take, eat” are written in the recipe book for our lives.  These four words are not only about food; they are about every resource God gives us to carry out our mission in life.   

We read today in the Book of Kings about the prophet Elijah suffering from a bout of depression, meditating on his failure to bring about any sustained change to the paganism of Israel.   He has tried to change the culture of paganism, even by arranging the deaths of false prophets and now he is running for his life from the regime.   He has no appetite; would prefer even to die.  But God has not finished with him and insists that he eat for the journey and the work ahead.    His journey will take him to Horeb, that is, Mount Sinai, to meet God in his prayers and hear instructions that will sustain the prophetic mission in Israel.  

In this instance God summons Elijah from his depression with a blessing of food.  Elijah must break from his own desire for death and take and eat.   The food that he finds as a blessing before him has no source but in the God who has been miraculously accompanying him all of his prophetic life.   Without an understanding of this food as blessing, Elijah would have ignored what was set before him and remained confirmed in his desire for death.   But he is obedient to God’s call: Bless, break from your self-pity, take and eat.   Whether we recognize it or not, God is always putting resources in front of us for our mission.  Bless, break, take and eat.

This message is underlined in the gospel reading from John.   You are following me, Jesus says to the crowd, because you ate at the multiplication of the loaves and fish.   As if that was not enough of a sign, you want more from me.   You want more of the food that will sate your physical appetites.   But now I ask you to bless, break, take and eat of my very life and its gifts.    Eat my flesh; drink my blood.   

This invitation is as startling to us as it was to the disciples, some of whom were always trying to define Jesus in their own terms.  I think of this invitation as stunning material imagery but one with literal meaning.   It is an invitation to grasp all of the Incarnation as a gift for our own wholeness of body and spirit.  Like the best of hosts, Jesus conscious of his mission from his father, sets a full table for us in the Eucharistic celebration and offers for our sustenance everything that he is and has. 

When it comes to meals in the gospel stories, Jesus is more often a guest of someone else than the host.   But, nevertheless, even as guest he brings gifts to the table: for example, forgiveness to the host Zacchaeus and to that unusual guest, the woman who bathes his feet with her tears, healing to Peter’s wife, miraculous wine to the wedding feast, a powerful revelation at the Inn in Emmaus.   He never comes to a meal empty handed.     But he most startles us with the meals in which he is host: the Last Supper, the enduring Eucharist, in which he offers himself to us, and, in today’s gospel, the feeding of the five thousand. 

Yes, eat my flesh, drink my blood is a crude expression.  But I believe Jesus uses it to stun us into the knowledge that, whether we are a guest at his table or he comes as a guest at our table, he will share himself with us and give us every gift we need to bring about a wholeness of body and spirit, and this even when one or another part of us, as in the case of Elijah, seems to be failing us.

He calls the knowledge, the trust that he will give us himself in the Eucharist and whatever sustenance we need by the simple word “belief.” 

 

May we remember the words of the Eucharist, bless, break, take and eat. Like Elijah may we have the willingness to take what God offers us.   Like Peter and the disciples may we come to know that there are no other tables that will truly sustain us.  And may we recall the words “bless, break, take and eat three, four, five times a day.

  

On a walk near Conowingo I saw this bird posing for me.   I assume it to be a Great Blue Heron.  I would have liked a selfie with this bird.

Malcolm Hollett

An inaugural message as I return to my blog after stepping down from my work at St. Joseph's Prep

August, 2015    The young man in the center of the photo is Malcolm Hollett, student of St. Bonaventure's High School, a Jesuit school in St. John's, Newfoundland.  Malcolm came to the Shriners Hospital in Philadelphia in March to learn how to walk again after a serious skiing accident.  After five months of rehab he is walking on crutches and his hard work has restored feeling to most of his lower body.   He, his parents (Phil and Elizabeth) and his sisters (Camilla and Cecilia)  recently returned to Newfoundland where Malcolm will continue his rehab.  We look forward to seeing him in Philadelphia in February when he returns for a refresher course at Shriner's.   The staff there and the hospitality of the Ronald McDonald House made all this possible.

When I first met Malcolm and prayed with him, I asked him what we should pray for and he paraphrased a line from the New Testament: "I want to walk."    His desire and God's love for him through family and caregivers has made his desire come true.   This is a young man with great grit and a great future.

November 2018:  After more than three years of hard work and consultation with rehab specialists, Malcolm now walks with one cane and can go miles if needed.    He still wears a simple brace on one foot and the next goal is the training of those bones and muscles.

Refer to Saint Joseph's Prep Main Page for President's Blog

Those of you looking for more entries, please check the President's Message site on the web page for Saint Joseph's Prep in Philadelphia.

It's more appropriate for me to use that site for entries that reference the school. Some personal items are posted there as well.

Thank you

George W. Bur, S.J.

Gesu Spirit Medal

Words of Gratitude on the occasion of the Gesu Spirit Medal,
May 2, 2011 at the Constitution Center

Thank you, Byron! My gratitude first to those at Gesu who invited me to share this honor not only with Chris Beck but also with Mark Solomon, Ralph Saul, Al and Aline Martinelli, Sue and Bill Shea, John DiIulio and Jay Sherrerd. Thank you, Chris. You made the work of the first ten years of the Gesu independent school a prelude, a kind of seed that fully blossomed in the amazing physical and programmatic additions of the last eight.

I thank the people of what was the Gesu parish whom I first met 26 years ago and who encouraged me and the Jesuits and the Sisters to keep Gesu School alive as a pillar of strength for neighborhood children regardless of what might happen to the parish. Many of those men and women, including Byron McCook are here tonight. They bore the heat of the day, and because of their vision and strength, for a long time into the future children from the Gesu neighborhood can walk happily to Gesu School.

I thank my siblings Eileen, Jeanne, Tony and Mary, and my in-laws Peggy and Frank, for their constant support not only for the children of Gesu but for me personally over a far longer period of time. And my nieces and nephews who took time away from their own children and their other obligations to enjoy tonight’s program.

I thank the Jesuits and the Sisters who went before us at Gesu. Without 125 years of the Gesu Church and the School before 1993 there would be no independent Gesu Catholic School.
I thank a Gesu graduate who joined Byron McCook and me when we first started a development program for the school in 1988: Jim Higgins from the Gesu class of 1945. Thank you, Jim, for your marathon run with us.

I thank my brother Jesuits, present housemates on 18th St., Father Neil especially with whom I served at Gesu for 14 years. He knew my weaknesses from day one and stepped up to fill in for me when necessary.

I thank Sister Ellen and Sister Pat and all of the IHM Sisters who have an uncanny understanding of children and their needs. They and the Gesu faculty and staff are amazing. How many years, Shirley Bright? How many years, Dolores John? They are the chief reason why young boys and girls from Gesu are able to take on confidently the challenges of high school.

In his absence, (I miss him but regretfully he had an unavoidable obligation this evening), I thank my schoolmate and good friend, Win Churchill, for his personal support and for his cheerfully persistent efforts over the past 21 years to place the success of the children of Gesu School before a steadily increasing group of friends. Without him and his many friends the Gesu School would be, if anything at all, a weak image of itself.

I thank Frank and Keith Pension and Bill and Elise Rouse. I thank all of you gathered this evening around a vision of a world where all children have an opportunity to be healthy and to grow and succeed so that their gifts, too, can make a better world.

Finally I thank the children of Gesu and their parents and caregivers who are striving to be the best that they can be and who teach us, friends, parents, teachers, board members, all to believe in our best selves. There is no better world than one in which we show our best selves to one another.

And if I have saved the thanks for God to last, it is because the living God is not only Other but also present in all of us in this room. We give thanks for that divine presence and we count on it as we continue to gather around this wonderful school and its children.