Early spring at the Willows in Radnor Township

I always like to think of the plaza in front of the Church of the Gesu as a gathering place and not, as we usually use it, a parking lot. Yesterday this basketball team gathered there on the church steps. They had just come from the Kelly Fieldhouse to the right of the church and I caught them as I walked by. Their heads are hanging and it appears that they lost their game. But they will recover and be as strong as the columns under which they review their play.

Holy Thursday-Good Friday April 2009

We have very limited knowledge of the kingdom of God to come. We have an image of that kingdom taken perhaps from imaginative pictures of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve. Or we craft an image taken from our favorite experiences. But Jesus provides us his leading image, with frequent mention in the gospels, the image of wedding feasts and other meals of celebration. And this evening we commemorate how Jesus put his own stamp on the meal above all others, the Passover meal that celebrates freedom, a memorial of the Exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt. For us who have not known slavery in any civil or political sense, the meal celebrates the power of God through Jesus’ death and resurrection to forgive our sins and free us for the works of love.

Adopting Jesus’ image of the meal as the experience of heaven might lead us to imagine ourselves sitting in luxury at an elaborately set table surrounded by our favorite foods and our best friends and family. And a gospel story or two confirm that God reserves some such places but for the poor Lazarus and for other poor and hungry. In our own images of God’s kingdom, however, it is useful for us to consider the whole picture. Maybe God would rather we wait on table or prepare the meal in the kitchen or be the rancher presenting the choicest meat or the farmer the choicest fruits or vegetables. Images of waiting on table or cooking can take the place of the usual ones we make up for ourselves: heaven’s champion tennis player or lead singer in the heavenly choir. What a pleasure to take some of these banquet positions without the danger of running out of joy and energy and with perfection of service and product always within reach.

In this evening’s ideal setting for a heavenly banquet, Jesus, as he celebrates Passover, provides us with the image of how he himself will always behave. It is so humbling to watch him. He takes the role of a trusted household servant and bathes the feet of his friends. This action appears at a moment in time but it is a gesture that informs all of human existence. It is the gesture that defines for Jesus his love for us and his deepest desire to be of service to us. It is the gesture that defines how we ourselves are to live.

My friends Maryann and Joe Farrell invited me to be part of the wedding party for their son Peter who married Stephanie Wong on April 4 in Newton, MA. Stephanie is pictured also here with her brother Michael after she had changed into her "goodluck red" dress, her one concession to Chinese wedding customs!

I enjoyed seeing the three other Farrell kids and their families, seven children in all. And I was able to tell Maryann that I meet graduates here at Saint Jospeh's Prep that fondly remember her brother, Bill Moody, SJ.

ANOTHER REASON TO ENJOY MY WORK AT SJP!



"At an orientation meeting for the parents and students of the class of 2013, I took some time before the presentations to greet personally some of those attending among the 240 eighth graders and their parents. I introduced myself to one boy who gave me his name. And I thought to myself that the name is familiar, the name of a famous writer or actor. So I asked the boy, "That's a famous name, isn't it?" And he said without skipping a beat, "It will be."

What can I say? Sometimes all the work is worth it!"

Picture in front of Prep on Snow Day, Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Homily for a gathering of Prep parents, February 1, 2009


Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“He taught them as one having authority and not like the scribes…. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.” Mark 1: 21-28

All of us who are parents, or teachers or speakers here at the Prep imagine how wonderful it would be if our sons and the students who heard our words could say the same thing about us that the crowds said about Jesus Christ: “he or she speaks with authority.”

Our students indeed might use the phrase “speak with authority” about those of us who speak backed by the power of jugs and suspensions.

But those who referred to Jesus “speaking with authority” did not mean that he was some kind of policeman or judge. Rather they meant that the power of his teachings did not depend on some oft-repeated traditional rabbinic thinking. True His teaching was rooted solidly in the scriptures and was faithful to the tradition; but his teaching was also new and it addressed the situation in which people found themselves. Jesus spoke to a people burdened by the minutiae of religious practice and suffering the indignity of a foreign occupation. To them Jesus spoke the good news about God’s love for them and about the response that this love should nourish in them.

He also taught them out of the nature of his personality and the passion that he himself possessed. His first followers listened to his words, yes, but more importantly they listened to him and found themselves moved to change the way they lived their lives. Yes, they heard the verbal message but they changed out of amazement at him and the love that he brought into the world.

For us to teach with authority, our teachings must be at the same time rooted in a tradition but also addressing the new situation in which our young people find themselves. In addition if God gives us any other personal gifts, we need to put them in the service of the message. But clearly the message is about the Lord and not about us.

Here at the Prep and in our households, we want to teach with authority, we long to enkindle in the hearts of our young men some great desire that will focus the immense potential they have for true charity, for faith, for the building of a more just society. I imagine most often that my best efforts at this are not equal to the task at hand.

I do have stories about Prep boys who hear the word and then go out and practice it in a selfless way. But let me tell about a more remote teenager who turns into a leader: John Lewis, the present Georgia congressman who was one of the early champions with Doctor King in the civil rights movement. He grew up in rural segregated Alabama. He worked as a sharecropper with his parents. They made a happy home for him and, as long of they worked hard, they had no needs surviving without indoor plumbing and electricity. He realized when he was 8 years old in 1948 that there was something wrong with the fact that he could not go into the town library like the white kids because of his race. He realized when he started in high school that the segregated school system was clearly unequal, the black school physically inferior, the books hand-me downs from the white school, etc.

On Sundays it was the family custom to listen to the sermon on the radio preached by some Alabama preacher. One Sunday in 1955, Lewis reports in his autobiography, they heard for the first time Doctor Martin Luther King, a new pastor in Montgomery. This was the first time that the young Lewis had ever heard about the gospel having an important relationship to the social conditions in which people lived. Doctor King’s sermon was rooted solidly in the Bible but it also said something new to this son of a sharecropper who had experienced the indignities of his racial status. Dr. King spoke with authority. His words changed John Lewis’s life. Not many years later John as a college student became one of Dr. King’s young protégées. Now 55 years after he heard that sermon, he still serves in the Congress of the United States.

Perhaps some parent among us with some word or action will powerfully influence a son or a teacher our students with a message like that of Jesus or that of Dr. King, a message that has the power to inflame the imagination and create lasting contributions to the common good. More likely the environments that we have created at home and at school will be the deciding influence. Rare it is that a single sermon or a single experience has such power to change people’s lives.

We would like to have this power to encourage a sullen teenager, to heal a lovelorn kid, to free kids from whatever bondage holds them back from using their talents. And we know that the gospel offers a hope that we can do such things. Jesus tells us that we heal the toughest situations only with prayer and fasting.

But whatever we say or do here at the Prep to be a positive influence on our students, we need to remind ourselves of a wonderful line spoken in a Flannery O’Connor short story. The story is about a young preacher in rural Georgia who has miraculous powers and speaks with authority. People flock to the river where he preaches on Sundays. They have hopes of being healed of all their troubles. But the young preacher admonishes them with this line: “If you ain’t come for Jesus, you ain’t come for me.” (repeat) It will be well if we remind ourselves and in some way our students that there is little point in choosing the Prep over any other school if they ain’t coming to learn more about Jesus and to hear an invitation to follow him in the healing of this troubled world.

The house on Jericho Road, Abington

(My parents owned this, our family house, for about sixty years. Then the house lacked the extension on the rear and, when I was young, the other houses in the picture had not yet been built.)

Visiting my grand-nephew’s bedroom at Christmastime reminded me of the room that I shared with my brother while growing up in the house on Jericho Road in Abington. Over the years the house and neighborhood appear in my dreams as the most desirable geography in this world. But, of course, the dreams also identify it as a place to which it is not possible to return, a place that has long ago disappeared. How can I describe entering the house on a cold winter’s evening when the sun light is setting over the snow and dinner beckons? We stomp our way into the basement through the side door and plaster a snow ball against the iron-walled coal furnace just for the pleasure of hearing the hissing and watching the steam.

Those who now live in the house purchased it from my father’s estate in 1993. The new owners transformed the house and even put a large addition at the back, an extension easy to see in the photograph. What my father and mother purchased as a simple house for $6,500 in the middle of the depression is now transformed into a home worth several hundred thousand dollars.

My Prep-student grand-nephew has a small study desk in his room where he tackles his algebra and Latin homework. His desk reminded me of my dad’s renovations in the bedroom that my brother and I shared, the room on the third-floor front. (Our window can be seen in the picture and a story can be told about the window, too!) When we were small the room had no electrical outlets, no desks and no closet. But my dad remedied all of these things with his own hands. He built two small desks in along the north wall opposite our twin beds. As my brother and I sat at the desks, we could turn on lamps plugged into convenient outlets installed at eye level. My brother and I often studied side by side, he working on college math that I found mysterious and I handwriting some clumsy essay that we Prep students were required to grind out every weekend.

My father loved the house and spent many a weekend on maintenance, repairs and renovations. What would he think of seeing it now, the silver maple he planted on the front lawn towering above the house, the brick and stone patio we built together at the back of the house destroyed with the extension? Whatever he thinks of Jericho Road, I know he prays for his thirteen great grandchildren with the hope that they all continue to grow in nurturing households like the one he and my mother created for their five children.