John B. Kelly, Olympic Singles Champion, 1920, scans the frozen Schuykill, January 23, 2011

The Beatitudes Matthew 5

The Pennypack near Fox Chase.

The Altar at the Medical Missions Convent

Matthew 5 The Beatitudes Sunday, January 30, 2011

We find all we need to know about ethical behavior in the Ten Commandments. We find all we need to know about Christian prayer in the Our Father. In today’s reading we find all we need to know about the promises that God brings to us in Christ Jesus. The first point: the promises in the beatitudes, these promises of happiness and consolation, are made to the humanity of Jesus. Jesus suffers to bring about these promises but one can say that God so relates to Jesus’ human spirit as to fill it with promised consolations. It is this Jesus that attracted the disciples and the great crowds that followed him.

Blessed, or “happy” as some faithful translations read, are the poor, the meek, those who mourn and those who show mercy. Blessed, too, are the peacemakers, those who thirst for justice, those whose hearts are pure and those who take insults in the name of Jesus. These promises are not merely a poetic turn of speech, not merely rhetoric for an auspicious occasion but they pour out of Jesus own heart and signify both his constant demeanor and his consoled frame of mind.

Let me say something about the nature of God in relation to the beatitudes and then read and comment on a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.

First we step behind the reality of Jesus: The descriptors in the beatitudes tell us about the nature of God as well as any words in the scriptures. God, for example, is poor in the sense that there is no category of creation whose absence can make God poorer or whose presence can make God richer. God shows us the divine meekness and mercy, mourns with us when we test our freedom to our sorrow; God makes peace, desires justice, is pure of heart and is the first to hear the insults directed to the Person of Christ, the insults that deny Christ and that proclaim the death of God.

How is it possible for us to be like God and to live as Jesus lived in constant touch with the happiness of God? Dietrich Bonhoeffer confidently writes in The Cost of Discipleship the key to the nature of the beatitudes:

“[Jesus calls] the disciples blessed, not because of the privation or the renunciation they have made, for these are not blessed in themselves. Only the call and the promise, for the sake of which the disciples are made to suffer poverty and renunciation, can justify the beatitudes [can justify the state of happiness]. Sometimes Jesus speaks of privation [and the like] as if they implied particular virtues in his disciples, but that is neither here nor there. …Privation [and the like] all have the same ground—the call and the promise of Jesus.”

We value the comforts of the world: our health, our worldly reputation, our lives, our control over circumstance, an independence to make up our own minds about likes and dislikes. But to become disciples, to hear the call engages us in the common enterprise under the leadership of Jesus. We cling less to our worldly opinions; we worry less about our health; we care less about our worldly reputation; we ease our control. We place practical decisions in the hands of God.

Jesus himself experiences the happiness of this way of life and as the first born of all creation he offers it to us. We hear the call to discipleship and then experience the result of our call; it is the experience of Jesus: privation and renunciation. To the surprise of those who answer the call Jesus shares his consolation promising to us who have become his friends: “Blessed are you.”
God does not require most of us to live in such a crisis as the one that enveloped Bonhoeffer for the last decade of his life. God called him to be meek and a peacemaker, to thirst for justice and to mourn the collapse of Christianity under the Nazis.

He criticized publicly not only Hitler’s ideology and war machine but also his fellow Christians who denied themselves in their eagerness to cling to what little influence they retained in the era of Hitler. But Bonhoeffer prayed the Beatitudes finding that God would continue to console and be faithful to him. It is a testament to Bonhoeffer’s great character that even Hitler could not bring him to a legitimate trial and only in a gesture of vengeful weakness during the very last days of the war did Hitler order him executed. God uses the weak to shame the strong.

Our own crises pale in comparison to the crisis of Christianity in Hitler’s Germany but, have no doubt, the call and the promise of discipleship are for us in our own day-to-day lives. Many of us are restless in our search for the way of discipleship. God and the Lord Jesus are even more restless in their desire for our happiness. Blessed are those of us who have ears to hear.

Prep Senior reflects on service trip to the DR

Will Bankhead, Prep senior, made this presentation at the Senior Mother-Son Mass in December. He relates his experience as a member of a Prep service trip for the purpose of building houses in a rural area of the Dominican Republic.

Hello, my name is William Bankhead. I’m a senior here at the Prep and I’m here this morning to talk to you about one of the most important experiences of my life, my 10 days in the Dominican Republic this past summer.
When I was asked to speak here today, my first worry was at what point in my story I should begin. Well like many great movies and books, I’ll start at the end. What I read now is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent Ligia Bailand on June 21, four days after I returned from the DR, I wrote:
“It’s nice having all of those swell comforts of home back, but there IS something missing. If there is one lesson that I can take from this, it's that despite how much we all missed toilet seats and hot showers, nothing gave me the kind of satisfaction as my days in the DR. No food ever tasted as good as our meals after work; no sleep ever felt as good as our sleep after a hard day's work. I envy you and your current students because you still have those days ahead of you.”

With that in mind, let’s go back to the beginning. It all started when the wheels touched the tarmac at the Santo Domingo Airport. With me were close friends, kids I didn’t know, the head of the English Department and an old Jesuit. Most of us didn’t know what to expect, and minutes after landing, we piled into a large van and started out on a six hour drive to the retreat center. As we drove, the cities got poorer, the conditions rougher. Buildings went from large facilities to tenements to shanties, and eventually there were no buildings at all, and we all faced the beauty of the DR, the sprawling farms, the cascading mountains in the distance, and the endless horizon. It was like this for hours, and suddenly we arrived at the retreat center… where the electrical power promptly went out. Surprisingly enough none of us had a problem with this, we were all just so happy to be safe, with each other, and in close proximity to food and a bed. This was truly our calm before the storm.

The next day, it was out the frying pan, and into the fire, we awoke at sunrise and went down the mountain to begin our first day of work. There was no time for tutorials or learning curves; it was time to start pouring foundations and it was essential that all hands were on deck, willing and able. Work was back breaking, but satisfying. When things seemed bleak, or hands got tired, the realization that what we were doing made a difference was enough to help us push forward. At the end of the first day, the reality of our situation sank in. Chuck Palahniuk said in the preface of his book Fight Club, “Being tired isn’t the same as being rich, but often it’s just as nice.” On the way back at the end of each day, we’d look at ourselves and each other and see the dirt, concrete, and mud caked on our bodies. All we could do was smile and laugh. We were welcomed home by cold showers, and hot coffee. And to us, this was the lap of luxury. For the first four nights, we lacked electricity save that of flashlights. We went to bed when it got dark and woke up when the sun came up.

Around the fifth day, while laying cinder blocks, Ligia told us to drop our tools and follow her; she would take us on a tour of El Manguito. During this walk, the kids followed us, as they did everywhere during the entirety of our stay. At one stop, one nine-year-old boy following us at the time leaned against a motorcycle that had just pulled up. Little did he or any of us know, the exhaust pipe where he chose to rest his leg was still red-hot. When Ms. Bailand went to examine his leg, the burned skin was a sickly pink-white color, the smell haunting, the burn contrasting tragically against his brown skin. It was two days later that we found out this kid’s leg had gone unattended to in our absence; no one cared enough to take this kid to a hospital, or even wrap up the leg. The burn was becoming infected and had Ms. Bailand not given our driver $50 and told him to take the kid to the hospital, I doubt the child would still have that leg.

It was on the sixth day, Ligia took us to see a waterfall and the local beaches, to enjoy the paradise that is the DR. It’s this day however that rings as the most striking in my mind. From that day, the Dominican Republic was a terrible beauty. The entire country, beautiful enough to be a resort, but simultaneously stricken with poverty.

I’m not standing in front of you this morning to tell you that all the money in your wallet will solve all of our problems; all of their problems; it won’t plug up the wounds, cover the scars, or erase their history. But each dollar more we have is another vat full of concrete; another truck load of wood; more sheets of roofing; another entire house or two, or three; another DR trip all together. On July 11, the last day of the final DR trip, 10 more houses stood than at the beginning of the summer.

On the wall in my English class reads a quote, “At the end of my life, I’d like to think that I won’t be remembered for the size of my house, or the car I drove, or the number of toys I had. But by the things I left behind. The people I touched, and the difference I made.” Thank you.

The "north rose window" at St. John the Evangelist in Morrisville.

A dynamic and explosive universe!

The north rose window at the Cathedral in Chartres.

An ordered, contained universe!

Feast of the Immaculate Conception December 2010

Five hundred years ago when Ignatius of Loyola was a teenager (if they had teenagers then!), the Blessed Mother held a position of great honor in the popular European imagination. In tribute and devotion to her, cities all over Europe had constructed and were still at work on the great cathedrals. These public works projects in every major city created community energy and developed the talents and skills of all kinds of people from stone masons to architects to glass makers to those who worked in tapestry.

The great spaces of the cathedrals embodied the very place where the virgin gave birth to Jesus and provided the security, the peace and the promise that sustained and comforted the faithful.

This effort at creating these beautiful tributes was in reaction to the anxieties that beset these communities often visited by devastating plagues, by wars that resulted in pillage and mayhem and by the usual uncertainties about crops and livestock. Our Lady was accessible both in the community effort to create the Cathedral and in her presence as symbolized by its central place in the community. Our Lady provided her personal guarantee of stability and confidence.

Here in Philadelphia we are no longer subject to plagues that we do not understand, though for a short time HIV wore that mantel. We do not have wars, though we do have a living memory of civil unrest. We are not worried about what we will eat today or in the years ahead. We have lingering anxieties, of course, about the safety of family and friends just as people did five hundred years ago.

But we do have a new anxiety, unimagined by Ignatius and his peers. They imagined the universe, then, as contained and ordered. Today our science tells us that the universe is dynamic and explosive. The number of stars is unimaginable and the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in this universe that we struggle to measure is almost certain. Our anxiety today is about our place on this tiny, fragile speck of earth sustained by a sun that will one day die.

In this contemporary context we need Our Lady just as much if not more than the Europeans of five hundred years ago. She comforts us in the vastness of creation by her witness. Willingly she bears the first born of all creation, Jesus. God in the Lord Jesus, with some power inaccessible to us, rules with divine love over all that we know and do not know in our physical world. But Our Lady remains as accessible to us as our own mothers and gives us confidence by her presence. Just as she did among the disciples in the anxious time after the calamity of the crucifixion, she now offers a posture of comfort. She can see us through our calamities as well.

In approaching Mary it helps us to be humble like the young Mexican couples in Mexico City who bring their newborns, sometimes so young that their skin is still wrinkled and red, to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to present them to her for her blessing and protection. In any joy or sorrow, but especially to ward off useless anxieties, we go to Our Lady and let her love of her son help us to be in love with his changing world with all its uncertainties.

After forty years and literally hundreds of soccor victories as head coach of Prep soccer, Jim Murray '59 (my classmate) this year coached a team to the Catholic League Soccer Championship for the first time. Senior Pat Kardish scored the two goals in a 2-1 victory over Archbishop Wood. Pat told the press that he and his classmates made a promise as freshmen three years ago to one day win the title for Coach Murray.

Just yesterday a slight-built boy is walking along the corridor nearly dragging his school bag with one arm. His other arm is in a cotton sling. I assume his collar bone is damaged.

"How did you do that?" I inquired.

Rugby

Will you go back to playing rugby as soon as you heal?

My mother has other ideas!

Well, you need to stay on good terms with your mother.

Mmm.

I am sure that you have many other talents.

I like to think so!

Every now and then one takes a picture that needs no caption and can stand entirely on its own!