The Road From LaStorta.

NEWS FROM ROME... after a Hiatus

2012-01-07T10:21:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone, I took a bit of a Hiatus during the fall to get back into the books, but with the news that broke today from Rome, I decided to get back to a bit of reporting from the ground up, so here, with the help of my trusty iPod Camera, is the news direct from his Holiness, Benedict XVI himself... 22 new Cardinals.

Here are the names:
1. Msgr. Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples;

2. Msgr. Manuel Monteiro de Castro, Major Penitentiary;

3. Msgr. Santos Abril Y Castellò, Archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major;

4. Msgr Antonio Maria Veglio, President of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People;

5. Msgr. Giuseppe Bertelli, President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and President of the Governorate of the same State;

6. Msgr Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts;

7. Msgr JOÃO Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life;

8. Msgr Edwin O'Brien, Pro Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem;

9. Msgr. Domenico Calcagno, President of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See;

10. Msgr Giuseppe Versaldi, President of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs of the Holy See;

11. His Beatitude GEORGE Alencherry, Major Archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamaly of the Syro Malabar (India);

12. Msgr Thomas Christopher Collins, Archbishop of Toronto (Canada);

13. Msgr Dominik Duka, Archbishop of Prague (Czech Republic);

14. Msgr Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht (Netherlands);

15. Msgr. Giuseppe Betori, Archbishop of Florence (Italy);

16. Msgr Timothy Michael Dolan, Archbishop of New York (United States);

17. Msgr. Rainer Maria Woelk, Archbishop of Berlin (Federal Republic of Germany);

18. Msgr John Tong Hon, Bishop of Hong Kong (China);

The Holy Father has also decided to raise to the dignity of cardinal a revered prelate, who carries out his ministry as Pastor and Father of the Church, and three worthy clergymen, who are distinguished for their commitment to serving the Church.

They are:

1. His Beatitude Lucian Muresan, Major Archbishop of Fagaras and Alba Julia of the Romanians (Romania);

2. Rev. Julien Ries, priest of the Diocese of Namur and professor emeritus of history of religions at the Catholic University of Louvain;

3. Fr. Prospero Grech, OSA, Professor Emeritus of various Roman universities and Consultant to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith;

4. Fr. Karl Becker, SJ, Professor Emeritus of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Consultant for many years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Two days following St. Ignatius.

2011-09-04T23:28:00.003+02:00

Truth be told, I am too tired to write right now after two long days of tourism at Montserrat and then Manresa, following in the footsteps of St. Ignatius in northern Spain. Here, however, are some photos to share of our visit to these places.

I hope that you enjoy them!

Monserrat, The Shrine of our Lady, where St. Ignatius laid down the sword of a knight:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/set=a.765379955604.2237740.33302598&l=6d188c2bdc&type=1

Manresa, where he wrote the Spiritual Exercises:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/set=a.765593926804.2237808.33302598&l=f44cf407ca&type=1

(Disclaimer, I only friend people that I actually have met in person on Facebook for a measure of security and privacy. I am glad to share these two albums from Facebook with everyone, but please don't be offended if I don't respond to friend requests if we haven't met in person. )

The Road in Reverse.

2011-09-01T22:28:00.001+02:00

The road from LaStorta was a journey that began for Ignatius in the foothills of northern Spain, near the town of Azpetia. Eventually, after journeys through Spain, the Holy Land, and France, Ignatius ended up at LaStorta praying in a small chapel by the side of the road in sight of the walls of he eternal city. Today I have arrived in Spain, along with the rest of my classmates at the Gesù to being to trace the Spanish part of that journey in reverse. We landed in Barcelona, are staying in Manresa, and eventually will make our way towards Loyola for our retreat and a mass with Fr. General. In these days we are retracing our steps, to find where the road began. Even as we, like Ignatius, approach the final moments leading up to the end of one journey, the journey towards ordination. This seems to be a constant theme of my summer, going back to the foundations of my family, going back to the foundations of my Order, and going back to the foundations of my vocation. That's a picture of me with Barcelona behind me, I have come to Spain for the "Arrupe Month," amidst the Jesuit pilgrimage sites. This time in Spain isn't just a pilgrimage, it is a time which the Society of Jesus sets apart to think and pray about what it is to be a priest. Heading towards ordination, it seems to be a blessed time to get back to basics.

I was talking to my spiritual director the other day and his advice was that we find God at the foundation of ourselves, and when we can genuinely appropriate God's presence there, when we can admit to the wonderful and fearful fact that God dwells and operates in each of us, we can finally come to the fullest realization of ourselves. To do that, though, we sometimes need to retrace our steps.

For St. Ignatius, just like for so many of us, there were wrong turns. I write this from the house built over the cave where it is said that he was in such despair that he contemplated suicide. He was also, even after his conversion, thrown into prison and because of stubbornness, threatened with excommunication. Somehow, he is a saint. I would suspect that his sanctity is born out of precisely this sort of moment, a moment of going back to the roots of who he was, and where his journey began. Once in his life he even went home after he had resolved to leave the world behind to set things right in Azpetia. I am sure that the incredible work that he did on the Spiritual Exercises, which he began in the house I am typing this from and finished in the house that I normally live in, were a recounting of those experience of God's trust and care in his life. As it is, he always reminds us to go back to earlier graces received when he writes about prayer.

So often things get confusing. There can be a million and one desires which flood our hearts, a billion worries and little cares. That's precisely when we need to follow the breadcrumbs back and take the road in reverse. That is when we need to get back to basics, and to the most basic thing, which is of course our relationship with God. This is not to get back to it in the hustle and bustle of daily life, sometimes we just need to get back to where it all began, drink it in, and be grateful for it. When we can do that, we can loudly proclaim with Mary that "The almighty has done great things for me, from this day forth, all generations will call me blessed," because then we can be bold enough to proclaim that God is actually working through us, and all of the other things, no matter how lost we may have been, in light of God's forgiveness and love, don't seem to matter much. So here I am on the road in reverse, and I have been going backwards all summer, to find my family, my order, my vocation, and hopefully along with Mary be able to really understands what it means to have my soul magnify the Lord.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

2011-08-28T20:41:00.001+02:00

Dear Ireland,

Thank you.

Thank you for taking me in in a moment when I had gotten lost in the immensity of all that has happened in the past year and helping me get back to basics. Thank you for that reminder in your devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the need in that novena to rename what I want most, namely, to be a priest. Thank you for that moment in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Cork when in the middle of the novena when I could listen to the deepest desire of my own heart in the most profound of ways and say simply that I wanted to be a priest and asking the Lord to make that the case, so well aware of how much of God's grace would have to make that possible.

Thank you for your soft days, for the rain so gentle that you often wouldn't think of using a hood or an umbrella against it and ending up drenched as a result. Thank you for giving me a reminder of what God's grace is often like.

Thank you for helping me to see beyond Rome, and the small devout and pious circles that I run in. Thank you for reminding me that there is so much work to do and the answers which seem so easy sometimes need more work in a world which wants to believe but finds it so hard to sometimes.

Thank you for showing me that I am not really meant to live outside of Jesuit community, and making me grateful for it by my absence from it. In those two months living in Cork, faithful to my vocation while living apart from a regular community, reminding me why I need to be among the blessing of brothers who both support me and challenge me to become the person that God created me to be.

Thank you for my family, for the O'Connors, Rynns, McCarthys, Rogers, and most of all Hanleys. Thank you for reminding me through them that my vocation is no accident, that our family has for years had men and women who have dedicated their lives to God and his people. Thank you for reminding me that I am blessed to embody some of the best qualities of those people, and that I also share in some of their struggles in my own path. Thank you for overwhelming me with the generosity of Mary, Kathleen, Francis, and P.J. Glennon, who welcomed me, a stranger in all but name, into their homes. Thank you for these cousins who showed me the home of my family, and allowed me to rediscover Kilteevan, county Roscommon, as home. Thank you for their helping me to experience the deep faith of our family at Knock and Clonmanoise. Thank you for helping me to remember, through their example, the truth of the old saying "Hospes Venit, Christus Venit" (and thank you for helping me to learn how to read that in Latin.)

Thank you for that insane tour, for seeing things I had only dreamed of seeing since I was a kid. The Giant's causeway that I once saw in picture books, or the Cliffs of Moher from the Princess Bride movie. Thank you for a few quiet moments along the coast of the Dingle peninsula, and the moments of prayer on the North Coast. Thanks for letting me randomly meet one of my favorite Rock Bands and allowing me to hang out with them and talk about the things that matter most with them, like openess to God, poverty, and the search for meaning. Ireland. Thank You.
Slán go fóill.

The Five Pound Note and the Long Way Home

2011-08-22T03:36:00.001+02:00

Many of us Americans wonder just exactly made our families come to the United States. For those of us who are just a couple of generations removed from the realities of immigration we might even be able to find out, and thanks to the immense generosity of my cousins in Ireland, I know now too. The answer is 5 pounds.

In Ireland in the 1800's the landlord, if they were going to evict you, might offer you 5 pounds to leave before they had to pay the sheriff to do it for them. It was a way for them to save money. This is what happened in the village of Kilteevan to my great great grandmother, Sara Hanley, and her family. Her dad took the 5 pounds, and they left for Providence, Rhode Island. Within a generation, that same family,who before would have had little more than a grade school education had college grads and doctors and college professors among them. They took the 5 pounds, went to Cobh, boarded a boat for the U.S, and never looked back. They didn't ever abandon their friends or family back in county Roscommon, they just kept moving forward. So often in our lives we look at desperate situations and think that there is no way out, but we are almost always wrong to think so. The truth is that forward through what seems to be a storm is often the way in which God's dreams for us are realized. Losing everything and having to move to another continent didn't seem like a joyful thing, but the truth was that my 4th great grandfather, John Hanley, accepted that 5 pound note and left, and in doing so accepted a new life that lead to mine. There was much to fear, I am sure, but the gift of courage that we receive from the Holy Spirit is the assurance that in God's love and providence, all will be well. So many of us sons and daughters of immigrant families are proof of that.

When I arrived in Roscommon, and to the town of Oran where some of the Glennons, my cousins in Ireland, live now they said "welcome home!" and that is, in the end, the truth of it. It we can just rely on God enough for courage we can know that even when we take that 5 pound note and leave the past behind, it doesn't mean the end of the things that matter most. The Hanley home is still there, as are the Hanleys, as is the promise. We would do well to mind the most common admonition in the Gospels, and not to be afraid.

Our Home is the Road....

2011-08-18T21:43:00.001+02:00

One of the original companions of St. Ignatius once said that the home of the Jesuit is properly not the houses we live in, not the high gates of a benedictine monastery, or the secluded fields of a trappist abbey, but in the streets, mobile, and ready to go serve the Church and Gospel wherever we're needed.

While I will confess that most of my upcoming travel, of which there will be a great deal over the next month and a half or so, is focused around attending to myself and those closest to me, there is something soothing about getting back on the road for me. Cork, Roscommon, Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Dingle, Kerry, Dublin, Rome, Barcelona, Manresa, Pamplona, Javier, Loyola, Bilbao, Boston, Worcester, Rome... all of this between now and October 10. One of the people who knows me best once told me that I am so content never really settling down for good that I must have Gypsy soul, and this was before the recent Zac Brown Band song which uses that line.

The truth is, though, that I do have roots, and a home. It's not a place though, its the people in my life. I am blessed to have those people, both Jesuits and non-Jesuits, all over the world. More and more though, I think its just time to admit that I find that I am undeniably become more and more a Jesuit, more and more a man who is at home on the road.

I leave Cork tomorrow for a crazy amount of traveling, and I will be posting through the marvels of an iPad and free WiFi, but its time to get back on the Road. I am more than a little excited. Tomorrow, onto Roscommon...

Until then... Take it away Allman Brothers:

This Our Exile.

2011-08-15T23:42:00.001+02:00

Our Lady of Coomatloukane, in Co. Kerry, Ireland.

Today in the Church we celebrate Mary going home. The Assumption is something which I think we all understand deep down, particularly in this day and age, because it is about that longing for home. No matter who you are or what your beliefs are, I think we all understand that longing for home.

So much of my decision to come to Ireland this summer, beyond the course in Latin that I am taking, was a decision to come home. To trace my family’s roots and hope to understand not just history, but who I am a little bit better. I have had a year in Italy to understand that part of my history and I think I understand myself more in light of that wonderful whirring existence. Here in Ireland too, the more time I spend the more I get why I react to different things in different ways. I have stood in the graveyard where generations of my mom’s family are buried, and I walked the streets that other O’Connors have before me in Abbeyfeale. This weekend I will go to Roscommon and there meet my cousins on my Dad’s side. There was something in this journey about a longing for home, and Ireland, and my family here, have been so incredibly gracious in providing that for me.

There is a strange feeling though, being in these places which have defined my family, I still feel oddly not at home. This is not to say that I am ungrateful for these experiences, or that I am not content with my life. I very much am content, there have been so many blessings, so many new friends, so much life. Still though, I feel that exile. It definitely has something to do with not being in the United States in 1 year, 1 month, and 2 weeks. Truth be told, though, there was an itchiness to leave the US there to find something more that set me on this path in the first place. If I didn’t already feel the desire to learn something more in this way, I may have never asked to move to Europe.

Which brings me to my point. In our world today, regardless of how much the internet, the media, and all of that other stuff connects us there are still so many of us that feel disconnected, so many of us looking for home. Today is our feast day.

Today is our feast day because we can have a belief that there is a home to which we are headed, and that Christ has already opened it to us, because another human being like us is already there.

Today is our feast because, for as much as the thought of home or talking to someone there is nice we know that it is never replaced by physically being there, as Mary is.

Today is our feast because we know one of us who went before us, and still advocates for us.

St. Augustine of Hippo once famously said in his confessions that “Our Hearts are restless until they rest in you oh God.” That’s home, the place where our hearts find rest and our exile is at an end. It would be wrong to make the Assumption a day where we make Mary seem kind-of-almost-like Jesus, but not quite. The fact that Mary is a human being like any of us gives us all hope. The fact that she is assumed to heaven body and soul affirms the goodness of our earthly body, and illustrates what we already know about going home and being physically present. That Mary is conceived without sin and plays such an pivotal role in the history of salvation is why she goes before us, but in going before us, she is a sign of hope, that someday this exile will end for us too, because it already has for her.

In 45 days, 22 hours, and 30 minutes I will touch down on an AirIberia flight from Madrid and be home in the US for the first time in well over a year. That exile will end, if only for 10 days. The truth is though that for those ten nights, like every night, I will pray “and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus,” because even in the city I once waxed romantic over, as the video I am reposting below displays, I still felt enough of that same exile there to keep searching.

Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, pray for those of us who here in exile hope to follow you home someday.

(A true story about this video. I had intended to make something like this anyway, but I definitely made it when I was at my most homesick last summer. I repost it here because I think, despite its overt cheesiness, that it gets at the sense of longing that I am talking about in the post above.)

Relearning one of the beatitudes...

2011-08-12T01:16:00.000+02:00

Why am I doing this? Why am I spending my summer struggling over Latin? Why do I need to learn another language?

There are just certain things that you need to do. You don’t particularly want to, they may not seem incredibly useful, but you just need to do them. Every academic subject has its thing. For pre-med i remember my Holy Cross friends fretting over organic chem. In philosophy it was logic, we philosophers have never had much use for logic anyway. In theology studies a good number point to Canon Law as the beast to get past, and I may well discover that to be true in the coming year in Rome. Right now, however, it is Latin.

University College, Cork. Where I am plugging away at
Latin.

It is not that I don’t have a facility for languages, I speak or read 6 at least in part, and have some conversational ability in 3 of those, but Latin just seems so peripheral to everything that I want to do or accomplish. Especially now, reading the Satyricon, which makes trashy reality TV like the Jersey Shore look like Sesame Street, I feel so far removed from anything useful. Even still, when I think about it I realize that the ways in which I will use Latin, even if I go onto study more in Theology after ordination, will not require excessive knowledge of the obscure 1st century idioms I am learning right now.

Somewhere on the Ring of Kerry, in one of my thankfully
less studious moments.

At this point, the study seems useless, except for one thing. The truth is that all too often it is easy today to see something that looks too difficult, too intense, and turn away. Sometimes the discipline of getting through it is unto itself its own reward, however. Sometimes when we can force ourselves pass the peripheral, less important, desires that we have it helps us to focus on what we really want. Many saints have called it the practice of mortification, and they had many sundry and often medieval ways of doing this. (Many of which I don’t recommend.) The truth is though, that sometimes sticking with something which is unpleasant is precisely the sort of thing that makes us better able to understand just what we desire most.

Case in point. I am here, in Ireland, for the summer. I would much rather go find a pub and listen to good traditional music just about every night rather than study Latin. I would much rather go out hurling (the traditional Irish sport that I have taken up in the past couple of months, not the gastronomic feat) every afternoon than translate from Petronious. Truth is, I would much rather do just about anything, including writing on this blog, than study Latin. It has been a struggle not to write, or hurl, or go to the pub as often as I would like. Latin is sometimes, as it was tonight, a sheer endurance test. The truth is, though, that sometimes having to suppress those momentary desires for a much more profound one helps us to remember who we are. I find myself here in Ireland much more focused on the reality of what will happen in my life over the course of the next two years, and realizing just how deep that desire flows in me. With the peripherals stripped away, or forced to the background, the most true thing comes to the fore, which for me is the desire to be priest. I am doing this because I wan to fulfill the University’s requirements, which will help me to become a priest. So I can’t go to the pub when I have class the next day, which is 6 days a week here. I can’t go hurling every afternoon. I have to do this and stick it out, even if it is a struggle to. Being forced to sit and struggle, or endure something unpleasant, for the sake of a greater desire can often make it clear to us just how much we want something. For St. Ignatius, when we can get in touch with that deepest desire we can also be sure we have been in touch with what God wants for us, who else would have placed such a desire on our hearts?

So sure, I am convinced that God smiles at my feeble attempts a picking up a new sport at 30, and he likely delights in the songs at the pub and a pint shared among friends. More importantly, putting these legitimate little joys aside, having to say no to them more often than I would like, and realizing the struggle that can be, has helped me, and I think can help all of us, get closer to what we want most, and understand how much we want it. In rediscovering it we find a kind of joy that the pure of heart have always known for so long, they can put aside the other desires in their heart for the most profound of all, and that is likely why they see God.

Happy Feast Day!

2011-07-31T07:22:00.001+02:00

Today, July 31st, is the feast of St. Ignatius. To Celebrate, I thought I would repost an oldy, but a goody. A tour of the Rooms of St. Ignatius in Rome, inside my house, that I made last year. I post it with a promise that there will be a new one of the family home of St. Ignatius at the end of September. Anyhow, enjoy!

And Happy Feast!

From the Emerald of the Sea.

2011-07-29T02:37:00.001+02:00

At Blarney Castle... The famous stone is
behind the arch right above and behind me.

The Road from LaStorta is a two way street. Just as easily as it can take one into Rome, as it bore St. Ignatius and the early companions, It can lead us out to the world beyond Rome. The truth is that for me Rome is a wonderful place, full of beauty, love, and joy. There for the last year I have prayed by the tombs of saints and sat at the feet of scholars. For the last year I have listened to the Pope in St. Peter's and talked with the poor on the Ponte Sisto. I love Rome, and I miss it, and I will be back to it for a new year soon enough. My life there, in no small part due to the friends that I have, is nothing short of blessing.

Rome isn't the whole of the world though, sometimes its grandest illusion is that because it is so large and so metropolitan that the entire world comes there to you. The truth is that it can be a much smaller world, particularly in Church circles, than one would think. So when the summer plans came up, I knew that I had to get out. There was a chance to learn Latin, of all things, here in Cork, Ireland, so I took up the chance to come to this town, where my paternal Grandmother's family was from, to learn the ancient language of the city that I normally live in on the other side of the continent. It seems a little strange that one who lives in sight of the Forum would come to Ireland to learn how to translate the speeches Cicero delivered 200 yards from his house, but the course is excellent and taught in English, so here I am.

There were, of course, other reasons for wanting to come to Ireland. I am proudly Italian American, but I am also Irish American. For the past year I have learned Italy's language, been through its towns, learned its history, and of course eaten its food. Now in Ireland, I am seeing where the rest of my family came from, meeting distant cousins, taking up Hurling (a bit), and learning its history. It seems clear to me, though, that somehow my soul, my being, is Irish, Italian, and American. Somehow I am the result of so much more than randomness, and that's true for each of us. If this great great grandparent had more money and never had to leave home, if someone missed a boat, if someone died in a war, or from famine, somehow I don't exist.

More than just being the result of those moments which I call providential, but which someone else could dismiss as luck, we are the product of love. Leaving Ireland and leaving Italy wasn't a choice against home. I feel so at home here and so alive in Italy because, in so many ways, the old ways of being survived from the old countries. The food in my mother's kitchen is Italian, the ways in which we communicate on my father's side of the family are clearly Irish. As kids we marched in the St. Patrick's day parade in March and heard about La Befana at Christmas. My brother and I know both as many Italian Opera Arias as we do Irish Folk Songs (though admittedly he knows more on both counts.)

Leaving home was, in many respects love for lives that didn't exist, leaving home was for the promise of something better not just for them, but for their children and their children's children, down to those of us in the present generation. So here I am in Ireland, after a year in Italy, and the thing that is most apparent to me is simply this, we are loved into being long before we are ever born by people that we will never meet in this life, and that existence is one of the greatest gifts of all.

We hold their traditions and keep the memories of their pasts out of gratitude, respect, and even love, but more, being here now and living in Italy, we can love them and be more grateful knowing what beauty they left behind...

Take it away Mr. Cash:

Remembering a legend.

2011-07-04T17:17:00.003+02:00

“So, do you know Fr. Sheehan?” I once asked of my students from South Boston when I was a teacher at Boston College High School. “Yes,” he replied, “whenever my mom makes me go to confession I hope that I always get him.” Living in Boston for the three years before I moved to Rome, I was blessed to live close to my cousin, Fr. Dan Sheehan. The man was something of a legend in Southie, everyone seemed to know him and love him. If, however, I ever mentioned that to him he would almost always use some colorful language to tell me to shut up.

Fr. Dan, Ready for St. Patrick's day.
Picture taken by my brother, Fran
Rogers.

Meanwhile, among a good number of the priests in the Archdiocese of Boston, I would mention that he and I were cousins and I would almost invariably get a somewhat different reaction. “Really, you’re related to HIM??” they would ask. The exception to this rule was usually the men that he lived with at St. Brigid’s rectory and among his friends. When his name came up, particularly among those who were, or at least thought they were, important in the Archdiocese there would be a slight roll of the eyes, or maybe a little bit of a sigh. They would never say a bad word about him, mind you, but it was always a the same reaction.

The truth is that this all made sense. Fr. Dan was more at home with a Hot Dog at Sully’s Restaurant on Castle Island than at an important dinner table in the Chancery. He would have much rather preferred a walk down the Sugar Bowl causeway at Castle Island to a walk down the aisle at the cathedral. He much preferred a good joke to some lofty theological discourse. The truth is that I always had the sense that to him that the other stuff didn’t matter much. The high and lofty could be cast down from their thrones, for all he cared, he was just there with the people. There wasn’t ideology or some sort of statement behind it, it was just who he was. This way of being had become so fully a part of him that when he preached it often seemed that it could have just as easily been anyone else from South Boston preaching. He knew and loved the people and became, even in his retirement, one of them.

One of the things that made him most beloved was the sense that he didn’t care much about judging people, and he loved people where they were and for who they were. He knew enough about those people who surrounded him, first in the missions of Peru, and then among his working class parish in Peabody and eventually in retirement in Southie, that he knew not to judge them for the things that they had done or situations that they found themselves in. You knew that he had listened to them well when he could preach and mirror back to them the Gospel in their own context, and show them a God who was full of love, mercy, and compassion who often times in Fr Dan’s preaching seemed to have their face and walk with them on East Broadway or Day Boulevard. He knew enough not to demand that anyone change as a precondition of his caring for you, and he was wise enough to know when certain individuals were incorrigible. He just loved them anyway, and as best he could he rejoiced in their joys and shared in their sorrows. He didn’t have time to judge, he was too busy loving people in the genuine and deep way that made him one of them.

I can think of only one group of people that he didn’t have much time for, those who loved all but themselves too little. He didn’t have time for those who would put themselves in a place of superiority, and he didn’t have much time for you if that was who you were. It was the place where the genuine nature of his love was actually most manifest. When the abuse crisis broke in the US he was one of the ones brave enough in his own Archdiocese to say publicly that there was a crisis of leadership and that those responsible needed to hold themselves accountable. When he knew people who seemed to be campaigning for positions of authority in the Church rather than being pastors to the people of God, he wasn’t afraid to call them on it. When he felt that the institutional Church wasn’t meeting some need of the people of God, he wasn’t afraid to write what I have heard both from him and others were numerous letters. He didn’t care that it made him unpopular sometimes, or that it could have led to some sort of sanction, he just followed his conscience and didn’t let pride get in the way of doing what was right.

When I was young, I remember calling Fr. Dan “Fr. Clown,” because he was always making us laugh, even as kids. He lived with a joy that was contagious, and he didn’t care if it was at times even bordering on the mildly goofy. On St. Patrick’s Day in South Boston, he would wear a green clerical shirt, green pants, and a green fleece. Where he got that color of a green clerical shirt, I will never know. There he would be though, outside the parish with the rest of the city watching the parade pass by. He was the first priest I knew and and I never knew him to be somber, downcast, or overly serious. We never felt distant from him and we never felt like he was set apart from us, even as kids. I suppose now, looking back that that image of priesthood helped me to begin to form my own attitudes towards it, and made me think first and foremost about the possibility that this could be a life filled with joy.

Fr. Dan passed away this past Saturday, and I was awoken to a call via skype at 5:00 in the morning here in Ireland with the news. Of all the places I could be to get this news its seems somehow strangely right to be here in Ireland. His last words addressed to me were to go to find the places where our family came from. So I will go to Abbeyfeale this weekend, and I will pray for him and for all of the Sheehans, and Rynns, and O’Connors. More than anything else, I will remember that far more than the great and grand holy sites of Rome, or even Knock here in Ireland, this place where we came from would be a pilgrimage for him. To him it would be ground holier than St. Peter’s because it is the ground where we came from, because it is the ground of the real world, and that is after all where he found life, joy, and God.

A Peak Into Where I Live

2011-05-20T00:36:00.002+02:00

I am consistently impressed by the talent of the guys that I live with. Pawel Kowalski, a Polish Jesuit in my year here at the College, put together a great website for us. I thought I would share that link with you! The International College of the Gesu'

NJN Exclusive: Jesuit Shares his Experience of Pope John Paul II’s Beatification

2011-05-18T14:17:00.000+02:00

NJN Exclusive: Jesuit Shares his Experience of Pope John Paul II’s Beatification

So this is likely the last thing that I will write on the beatification, but here is a little reflection after the fact on the whole event on the National Jesuit News Blog.

A week later and...

2011-05-09T00:19:00.001+02:00

A video to give you some idea of how the basilica feels in the aftermath of the beatification.

The tomb itself, with some flowers left by it.

The area immediately surrounding the tomb of Bl. John Paul II is still brimming with people, such that at St. Peter's they have actually set up a special set of barriers to channel people through and not block people wanting to go up the other aisles. It is interesting to me that when you enter the basilica there are now very few people in front of Michelangelo's pieta, which had until now been the principle attraction upon immediately entering the basilica, and huge crowds in front of the altar of St. Sebastian. The word that I hear from some friends who have tried is also that booking a morning mass in the chapel of St. Sebastian has now become more difficult than booking a morning mass in the Clementine Chapel, the closest to the tomb of St. Peter himself.

The crowd gathered around the tomb..

The placement itself is also interesting in that the tomb is in the chapel between the Pieta and the Blessed Sacrament chapel, and the closest chapel that one could be buried in to the holy door where the new Blessed inaugurated the Jubilee of 2000, which he held to be a high point of his pontificate. From there, as well, you can look across the nave of the basilica to the tomb of St. Pius X and up the side aisle to the tomb of Bl. John XIII. It's interesting too that Bl. Innocent XI was moved from this altar to the altar of the Transfiguration, much closer to the main altar. I noticed there today that Innocent seemed to have more people stopping by his tomb.

JPII's grade school report card. (click on picture to expand.. the grades
are legible.)

On the left of the main Basilica, in a space usually occupied by a bookstore, is the exhibit commissioned by Pope Benedict to mark the event of the beatification. I saw a fair number of things which made me think, but as the semester here in Rome begins to press down on me in the final weeks before exams one thing struck me in particular. One of the most interesting things that I saw Bl. JPII's grade school report card, and I thought it might bring some solace to those approaching the end of an academic semester or those preparing for exams that even JPII didn't get straight A's, though he was obviously no slouch. So, corraggio to all of my fellow students out there, we don't need to be perfect to be blessed...

Bl. JPII and the Lesson of the Mammertine Prison.

2011-05-04T22:35:00.002+02:00

Not too far from my house there is an ancient Roman spring which bubbles up in a cave underneath the Capitoline Hill, which I can see across Piazza Venezia from my bedroom windows as I write this. That cave became the Mamertine prison, in which Rome held all of its most notorious prisoners and enemies of the state before their often grisly and always public executions. Vercingetorix, chief of the Gauls, Jugurtha, the King of Numidia, and the Catilinarian conspirators, who tried to overthrow the Republic, were held there. This was where the Romans held captured enemies of the state before paraded them through the streets and strangled them publicly.

One of the Cells of the Prison.

The spectacle likely made people feel better, or made them feel safer, or made them feel like Roma was in charge, and that no one dare defy or run from its might. The truth is, though, that for every enemy leader they killed and every conspirator that was executed, the barbarians were still at the gate and the people of Rome were still afraid. They had forged the peace of Rome by the sword. The problem is that the sword always demanded the use of the sword again and again, until the wars were too costly to fight and the land to large to govern. Of course the empire collapsed and today from my bedroom window I can see its ruins.

For a day the spectacle of victory over a sworn enemy made the Romans feel good, because their fears were relieved. The question has to be asked, though; Why did they feel the need to be afraid in the first place?

The Entrance to the maximum security cell.

One of the constant themes of this weekend here in Rome was a phrase continually echoed by Bl. John Paul II, "Do not be afraid." In light of the events of the past week, both the beatification and the death of Osama Bin Laden, maybe we need to keep asking ourselves, why are we afraid, and what do we have to fear? Maybe we've lost the imagination that the world could be other than it is, that it could be better than it is. Maybe we've lost our sense that an educated person is much less likely to fall for the ideology of a mad man. Maybe we've forgotten that the ability to provide for one's family brings a dignity that stops someone from following the perversion of a religion. Maybe we've forgotten that fortitude is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and that if we really lived in the light of God's love, we'd have nothing to be afraid of.

If the billions that were spent on war were spent building schools, ideologies would become almost irrelevant. If the millions that we spent on a bomber went to irrigating fields or teaching people how to grow crops in a way that would allow them to provide sustenance for their families, maybe fewer people would feel the need to produce drugs. Maybe if we built bulldozers instead of tanks to help build levees, the poorest parts of our own cities in the US wouldn't flood.
I am not suggesting that we stop fighting the reign of terror and fear. I am suggesting that we beat it in the one way that it can never return, by making it irrelevant. The good feelings that so many felt on Monday at the death of our own Vercingetorix were reported almost immediately with a sense of foreboding, we asked the question.. who's next?

The irony of the Mamertine Prison is that it is said that eventually the man to whom Jesus once said "those who live by the sword die by it," spent his last days there. This is where St. Peter, first pope and bishop of Rome was held prisoner. His successor, some 2000 years later, constantly reminded us not to be afraid. He was a man who used the power of faith in Christ, of love and brotherhood, not bombs, guns, or special forces, to help to take down not just one man, but an entire oppressive ideology in Eastern Europe. Today, and in the days ahead, maybe we can ask the intercession of Bl. JPII that we too can have that kind of courage.

The Aftermath of a Glorious Day.

2011-05-01T19:38:00.001+02:00

Off to the beatification.

The day began early, too early, 5:00am early. Now for those hundreds of thousands who slept on the Lungotevere Vaticano or in a piazza or a church I know that my waking up in a warm and comfortable bed at 5:00 doesn't seem like much of a stretch but it was still a moment of mortification for me. In any event, we all grabbed whatever we could find in a kitchen where it was too early for breakfast and put on cassocks and headed for the area surrounding St. Peter's Square. At a little before 6:30, we saw the crowds already forming and were able to use a pass that we had been given to slip past a security checkpoint and onto the Borgia Santo Spirito.

Me on the quick walk up to the Piazza.

We waited outside the Jesuit Curia and across the Street from Santo Spirito for instructions, some of us wandered up to the Piazza to see the scene there and take in the crowd as they began to file into the piazza. The things that struck me most was the way in which millions of people gathered in one place could be so full of a genuine joy and celebration. As someone who went to the Inauguration of President Obama, I have often commented on how well everyone treated everyone else, how genuinely nice people were, but there was a different and even better spirit hovering over this moment. It was a moment of real jubilation, a moment of real joy, so much so that I saw more than a few tears on the via and walking into the square. There was a sense in pride in the great and rich diversity of people that were there from all over the world, each feeling joy in celebrating who they were and where they were from without doing it to the detriment of others. I remember that at the inauguration there was a sense of hope, but also a lingering sense of that this could all go wrong hanging over the whole thing. Today, at the beatification it was a time to celebrate instead the "well done, good and faithful servant.."

Vocation Poster?? Jesuits at the
Beatification

We went to the Church of Santa Maria in Transpontina to have a mass to consecrate most of the hosts that were distributed to the pilgrims on the Via Conciliazione. This is a church of the Carmelites, and sitting there, right next to the statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel during the beatification mass for JPII, I couldn't help but think of a good friend and mentor back at home who was, himself, just diagnosed with Parkinson's. I couldn't help but take the confluence of the moment of the beatification and the place in front of the statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, to whom my hometown of Westerly, RI has a great devotion, as sign of providence and assurance.

That is what 60,000 hosts look like.

At the moment of the consecration in the main mass we were each given a Ciborium and led into the via to bring communion to the masses. I can't described the feeling of the intense presence of Christ in that moment, holding the bread which I believe had become his body, and being ready to bring him literally to people from all the ends of the earth. I was overwhelmed and silenced. We proceeded into the via, and as I looked to my right I saw the great dome of St. Peters, I could hear the swell of the music, and I almost caught myself welling up a little. This image is one which will be forever ingrained on my mind. It is perhaps a moment only paralleled in my life in its intensity by the experience of being at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, now so many years ago. A deep and abiding sense that I was where I was always supposed to be at the moment came over me. I walked up and down a small center aisle that they had made in the midst of the crowd and gave out communion to as many people as I could get to.

In the midst of this moment of extreme consolation, though, I also encountered something interesting. First, as Pope Benedict XVI said in our most recent general congregation, we Jesuits are called to go to the frontiers of the Church, and here we were, 10 Jesuit seminarians from the Gesu on the frontiers of this mass. Not among the wealthy and elite up front, but among so many who had given so much of what they had to come. The people I was giving communion to were not up close. Many weren't young and strong enough to fight the crowds or to wait on line from 3 in the morning. Many didn't speak Italian or English well enough to know how to navigate this city and get there early enough for good seats. There we were, on the frontiers. Right where we were supposed to be.

A friend took this from about where I was distributing
communion.

The other realization was this: The truth is that there is no way that we could have communicated 1.5 million people. We maybe only got to 60,000 or so along the Via. Many people were too far from us, and we couldn't get into the crowds. There also simply wasn't enough time. I think that this is where there is a lesson for everyone. Even when we are both personally and corporately right where we are supposed to be, there is no chance that we'll ever be able to do all of God's work that is out there to do. What we can do is try to do what we can, and what we are supposed to, in the best way possible knowing that God blesses those efforts and doesn't ask the impossible from us. Even the work of Bl. John Paul II remains to be completed. In the media there has been a great deal of talk trying to detract from JPII, and it would be unfair to him to try to defend him as if he was perfect. He wasn't Christ, he pointed us to Christ. Like any worker, the job wasn't always perfect and there was still work to be done. Being a saint doesn't mean that one is perfect it means just that, relying on the mercy of God, one is in heaven. That is all that we can hope for ourselves, knowing that our work will remain undone. There is liberty and joy in that, because the horizon of the great work of God, which seems to always retreat from us in this life, is none other than the destination that we can be sure that the man whom we beatified today found, eternal life.

Live from the Vigil

2011-05-01T00:27:00.000+02:00

Fr. Matt Monnig, S.J., and I on the Circus Maximus for the Vigil

Tonight I went with my good friend, Fr. Matt Monnig, S.J. and 6 students from Loyola University Chicago's John Felice Rome center to the Vigil for the beatification of JPII. About 200,000 people filled the Ancient Circus Maximus to overflowing in front of an Icon of Mary, help of the Roman People. People were genuinely happy to be there, singing, dancing, and celebrating. Not just from Poland either, but from Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Lebanon, Mexico, The US, Angola, and from many other places whose flags I didn't recognize. We prayed the rosary with 5 other marian shrines from around the world, including the Shrines at Fatima and Guadalupe. I am really to wiped out to write much more now, and I need to be up early, but I will just add one thing. The spirit of joy is palpable in this town right now, and that is a sure sign of sanctity.

4:30 am wake up call for communion! To bed with me

Tweeting from the Beatification...

2011-04-30T17:11:00.001+02:00

So here goes nothing. In the next couple of days I will be at the beatification of JPII. I have added a twitter feed to the right because I know that I won't have time to write much, but some people asked that I send updates, as possible from the vatican during this time... here goes.

Happy Easter!!!

2011-04-24T09:21:00.000+02:00

St. Ignatius of Loyola says in the Spiritual Exercises that Jesus appeared to Mary his mother first on the morning of Easter... Here is what I imagine he said.

Happy Easter everyone!

After a Post-30 day 30ish posts hiatus, I will be back to publishing more in the days ahead.

The Gates: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 25 out of 30

2011-03-22T19:00:00.000+01:00

Lambert Airport, desolate in the early morning.

It was early in the morning, and the runways of Lambert Field were still dark and a song about going home was blaring on my iPod headphones. I was sitting there by the gate, wearing my Red Sox jersey. I had a cup of Starbucks in my hand as the coffee caused the acid in my stomach to swell up into my esophagus. My heart was in my throat. I was exhausted, broken hearted, and just wanted to get to Boston, and the Red Sox game on the other side of this flight.

It was early in the morning, the sun was rising over Boston Harbor. I sat by the gates wearing the collared shirt that they had given me as a tennis coach at BC High. I was exhausted from a long night of grading, but I was excited. Louis Armstrong was blaring in my IPod headphones singing the St. Louis blues, the school year had just ended, and I was going to St. Louis for the wedding of two good friends. The Dunkin' Donuts coffee in my hand was waking me up, and the Boston cream donut was giving me a sugar high. I couldn't wait to get to the golf course in forest park.

Fenway Park, my destination that day.

I landed in Boston, after having been kicked repeatedly by the child in the seat behind me I was even more tired from lack of sleep. There, on the way up the jetway, I could smell the salt air coming off the water. As I cross the gate I saw the sign that said "Welcome to Boston," and I was back where I began. I made my way down to baggage claim, and my father and brother were waiting there. We grabbed my overstuffed suitcase, loaded it into my Dad's car, and took off for Fenway Park.

Dan and Matt on the Triple A course.

The plane landed in St. Louis, and not a moment too soon. I had slept the whole way, but began looking nervously at my watch. I had a half an hour to make it to the golf course for the round of golf the morning before my friends Dan and Sarah's wedding. I called Dan, grabbed a cab to Forest Park's "Triple A" course, and urged the cabby on to take shortcuts. The cabby understood that I knew where I was going, and rather than taking me for a ride he took me right there, I got out of the cab a few minutes before tee time and was excited to go.

Dan and Sarah get married.

It was Monday afternoon. The wedding was amazing. After the wedding a trolley took the entire wedding party and ushers, and the acolyte (me) around the city. We went to the ballpark, Ted Drews, Tower Grove park, and Dan and Sarah's house. I saw alot of good friends, and I was ready, at last, to go home. As I crossed through the gates and onto the plane, I was careful not to hake the dust from my feet. One last time I had walked on holy ground with friends, and I was finally ready to move on.

Boston from the Charlestown side.

The plane landed in Boston, my brother picked me up at the airport, and finally, a year after moving back, I was home.

One of the greatest struggles in Jesuit life, particularly early on, can be the need to move on. Just at about the point that you feel like setting down roots somewhere, every three years or so, it is time to move on. It can be heartbreaking leaving people and places behind to move on into the future, even if you know that it is a future full of promise and hope. It is hard letting go and saying goodbye, and can be even harder learning how to land too. Sometimes the places that we go don't really become home, even when they really are home, for some time after.

Back home, teaching, and finally happy

What I found that weekend, a year after I moved back to Boston, was gratitude. There were some loose ends when I left the St. Louis. There were people and places that I just hadn't really said goodbye to yet, or that I hoped would still be a part of my life in the same way that they had been when that part of my life came to an end. When my life in St. Louis was stripped away, I spent a great deal of time focused on all of the things that I had lost rather than all of the things that I had returned to in Boston. Going back to St. Louis was saying goodbye. I had been back once in the interim, but I think that I still had hope that the somehow I could live both in my past in St. Louis and in my present in Boston. Rather than being grateful for the past and hopeful for the future, I was envious of what was behind and fearful of what was ahead. The fear was so great, in fact, that it threw a lot of things in doubt and question in my life and made me just want to be done with all of the moving around, and to settle down.

BC High.

That weekend in St. Louis changed a lot of things though, the truth is that when I went back I realized that even in the past year so much had moved on and changed without me, and that moreover, I had changed. St. Louis was a place where I had been richly blessed, but that time had come and gone, and the present that I was living in in Boston and was finally full of just the sort of joy that God desires for each of us.

Some of the friends that made those three years
so blessed.

In each of our lives there are times that we pass through those gates, those things that mark the end of one time and the beginning of another. Like the people of Israel in the desert we may even want to return to Egypt. Familiar is comfortable, even if it is ultimately untenable. The future, devoid of trust in God, can be nothing short of terrifying to the point of paralysis. In other words, we can settle for the present and be afraid to have hope of something more. The good news is that God is better to us than to give up on us. If we can see the joy in our lives, if we can see God in the present, then that is reason enough to be grateful for the past and hopeful for the future. That is precisely what my friends in Boston, my life of prayer, and my joy in my new work gave me. I could return to St. Louis grateful for what it had meant, and hopeful finally for my future.

"For I know what I have planned for you,' says the LORD. 'I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope." In the book of Jeremiah (29:11) God tells this to the people of Israel, even as they go off into exile. If even in that moment God wants to give them hope, then in each joyful moment we can have hope too. Now, just hours from 30, I know that I need to remember that. God knows the plans he has for us.. go ahead, go through that gate.

The Flight: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 24 out of 30

2011-03-22T00:34:00.000+01:00

(Disclaimer: I am not accusing anyone in any of the pictures below of what I say of myself in this post, those are good people and great friends, I am clearly only speaking for me.)

When I lived in St. Louis I inevitably found myself back and forth between Boston and the midwest on a regular basis. At the end of one summer in particular, after some time at the Jesuit vaction house in Cohassett, MA, I boarded a plane to take off and begin the academic year in St. Louis.

I was in Logan Airport when I looked down at my boarding pass… middle seat. I hate middle seats. I am not a small person, so middle seats are extra uncomfortable. I looked around me, it seemed like almost everyone at the gate was wearing camouflage. I was getting on a plane with members of the Army heading out to training in Missouri. Well, I thought, this should be interesting.

A collage of a protest at Ft. Benning, GA

Just the summer before I had been in El Salvador and had seen what US military involvement in the world (and we were involved there) can do. I spent the better part of the next year protesting war, hanging out with like minded people, protesting at the gates of military installations, and feeling pretty good about myself in the process. At least, I thought, I was now on the right side of history.

This all, of course, bred a certain arrogance in me, a certain self righteousness. I became, in many ways, the angry young man that Billy Joel imagined in the eponymous song. I was now on a plane with members of a military I had protested all year and that I was sure to protest when I got back to Missouri, particularly when I was among my like minded friends. On one side of me on the plane, a soldier from New Hampshire, on another side, a private who grew up in Roxbury, one of the poorer neighborhoods in Boston. I offered to switch seats with either of them so that they could sit next to each other and they declined. I put on my head phones and sunk, as best I could, into the seat.

As take off neared I noticed something. That soldier from Roxbury, who was sitting next to the window, looked just as excited about take off as one of the little kids in the row ahead of us. I asked him “Is this your first flight?” “Yeah,” he replied “we don’t fly many places in my neighborhood.” We got to talking about his life, where he had gone to high school in Boston, what he wanted to do after he got out of the army. All of the sudden my judgments started to fall down, and I ended up really enjoying talking to this Army Private witting next to me. When he became a person, and not just a concept of militarism that I despised, things changed.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and sometimes peace activist, once wrote: "So, instead of loving what you think is peace, love others and love God above all. And, instead of hating the people You think are warmongers, hate the appetite and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed ~ But hate these things in yourself, not in another." How blind was I when I professed faith in a Jesus who said that those who live by the sword die by the sword, forgetting that at the same time he forgave even the soldiers who crucified him? The truth was, in my own way, I was making war on those who make war, just in a different way. I wasn’t making peace, I was substituting hate for hate, and that never really solves anything.

A group of SLU Students protesting the Death Penalty.

In our world today there are so many voices, each seemingly louder than the next. Whether you scream on behalf of the Tea Party, or yell on behalf of Move On, whether your major insult is to call someone a facist, like they do here in Italy, or to call someone a Communist, like back home in the US, it doesn't matter. The truth is that Christ’s only enemy was that which keeps us away from God. Its even clear that he doesn’t even really view the Roman official who orders his death as a real enemy because Jesus seems clear that Pilate isn’t even close to his equal.

Me, with some students, at the Gates of the School of the
Americas.

I know now that I had the same appetite for disorder in my own soul that produces war, and that my pride was a twisting of the good desire to help participate with God’s grace in building the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, as we pray in the Our Father. The truth is that that Soldier from Boston wasn't the enemy. He was just an 18 year old kid, right out of high school, caught up in a lot of the structures of sin and poverty that I wanted to fight against. As someone who was privileged enough to have the advantages of an education and the means to survive without joining the Army, who was I to judge him? I quickly found out that I was no one.

At a protest in Georgia.

I still hate war, militarism, poverty, and oppression. I still want to build a culture of life in the fullest sense of the word, but that needs to start in knowing that I don’t know and approaching others in humility more and more. I still want peace, but first it has to start in my own heart. I can't be the angry young man. Lord make me an instrument of your peace.

Amen.

The Shoes: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 23 out of 30

2011-03-21T00:54:00.005+01:00

The Shoes.

Matt in the Village of Arcatao, just on the way to Los Posos

Somewhere on the road from San Salvador past Chilatenango, San Jose Flores, and the Rio Sumpul, right up against the edge of the border of Honduras, just off the road to Arcatao, is the village of Los Posos. There in El Salvador, in a place that you can’t find on google maps, is a small village. In the village in the midst of the conjunction of three small streams is a rock. This seems to be an ordinary rock, but it is revered by the people of the village because it was there that Padre Pinderas, a missionary from the village, preached. Every year on the anniversary of his death the 50 or so people in the village celebrate. There is a play the night before re-enacting his life and a mass using the rock as an altar. They tie brightly colored tissue papers in the lush green trees surrounding the village, there is music and dancing, tamales filled with a little chicken to eat, and at the moment of the consecration of the Eucharist they light off fireworks to alert everyone around. There amidst the simple adobe houses, a people who have so little celebrate so much.

Carlos, another Jesuit, driving down to his home village
of Los Posos.

In the summer of 2005 I went to live in El Salvador to learn Spanish, and to begin to maybe do some research for my graduate thesis. It was early one Wednesday morning when the Rector of the house where I was living told me at breakfast that I would be going out to the campo for the weekend. I was told not to take extra clothes, just a small book bag maybe with an extra t-shirt and underwear, and be ready to leave on Friday afternoon. I talked with one of the other Jesuits, Carlos, who invited me along to his family’s house for the feast and so I went. When we arrived I discovered that I would be staying in the town’s small health clinic, really it was a first aid shack, and I found that people were bringing things there to wrap as prizes for the fiesta.
One young woman, not much older than me, had taken the rickety, old, beat up school bus to the market down what could barely be called a road to Chilatenango. There she bought the nicest pair of shoes that she could afford and carried them back with her. As the man organizing the shoes wrapped them up for the feast he said: “Shoes for the migrants…” and handed them to a small boy who put them with the rest of the door prizes to be taken down to the chapel.

That night, after the play, names were drawn, and sure enough her fiancée won the shoes. These were the shoes meant for the migrants. A look of fear and sadness swelled on her face, as her eyes puffed and spilled tears even as her strength and will held them back. The shoes for the migrants… was the man she loved now going to become one? This one gift brought so much freedom and joy to him, but at the same time anxiety and uncertainly for all around. Would they lose him? These shoes were too nice to work in the fields around Los Posos. They would not serve to pick pineapple, they would not work to tending to animals, and they would only crush beans. Would he use the shoes for what they were intended for?

Me, somewhere in El Salvador.

The shoes for the migrants are a gift that so many of us get in our lives, things that are so wonderful and attractive and freeing, but at the same time confusing, and even terrifying. A world full of possibility can just as easily be a world full of doubt. All doors being open means that one could just as easily choose the wrong path. During that time in my vocation, I was beginning to come into my own as a Jesuit. I began to really feel like I could be a good Jesuit, and that was terrifying. My vocation was like those shoes, it offered me more freedom than I had ever imagined, and unto itself it gave me the challenge to do something with it. In Deuteronomy the people of Israel, freed from slavery in Egypt, felt the same thing and God was clear with them: “Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom…I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.”

The question becomes one of what we do with the awful possibility of our own freedom. How do we live with new-found freedom and in the darkness of the future? The truth is that we don’t. No one lives in the future, and Deuteronomy tells us how to get through, simply by holding fast to the Lord in the present. In the times since that date, when I have held fast to God and lived in the present, when I have been able to trust in God the freedom of that moment has given me hope. When I have been fearful is when my freedom didn’t represent a choice for God, but for my own willfulness and cunning (of which I have little that is useful) to get me through. Our shoes can take us many places, the question is who directs our steps. We have no need for directions if we can let the one who loves us direct us.

The thing I find hard to believe about God: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 22 out of 30

2011-03-20T03:29:00.004+01:00

Today two good friends arrived in Rome. I have to say that when I moved to Rome one of the things that gave me pause was the thought of celebrating my 30th birthday away from everyone that I love. Given that Lisa and Matt are here, that will prove not to be true. Instead, Lisa and Matt, one whom I have known since that bus trip, the other since even before, will be here to celebrate. Not just that though, the new friends that I am blessed with, Christian, Jay, Laurie, Janelle, Steven, Al, and Ted, among others, will be there too...

Sometimes the only thing that I find hard to believe about God is how good he is.

Today I spent the day walking through Rome with Lisa and Matt. They brought a batch of my Mom's amazing cookies from home, and I savored a couple and saved a bunch. After an amazing cup of coffee at San Eucsatchio here in the streets of Rome we ran into the Father General of the Jesuits, who recognized me after our dinner together last night, and he was incredibly gracious to my friends. We ate a wonderful dinner at a place where a bunch of other Jesuits randomly showed up. I finished the day having a pint of Guinness with my friend Laurie and being able to convince my friend Steven's boss that he should have the night off on Wednesday to be able to come to celebrate with us. After that a couple of friends of mine in the Swiss guard wanted to make sure that I was all set with tickets for the Papal Audience that I am going to on Wednesday morning to receive the apostolic blessing to begin this new decade.

I know that there is suffering in Japan, I know that there is great poverty, and I know that people are dying of horrid diseases. I also know that I don't deserve the life that I lead, but somehow, joyfully, I just can't wrap my head around how good God is to me. My only hope is that knowing that makes me more attentive to those who genuinely suffer, and that in gratitude to God for God's love that such a knowledge helps me find a way to genuinely serve them in love,so that through God working in me they might also find it hard to believe just that one thing.

A Night off.

2011-03-16T20:17:00.000+01:00

So... after writing about 1000 words for 21 days straight, I am taking the night off to take in Italian Flag Day (which is a bigger deal than American Flag day, I assure you.)

So happy Flag day... and just in case I decide to take tomorrow off too... Happy St. Patricks!

The Series: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 21 out of 30

2011-03-16T00:24:00.001+01:00

In October of 2004, the baseball playoffs felt like déjà vu. The Sox had lost to the Yankees the year before. Now the Boston Red Sox were once again playing their rivals, and the New York Yankees were about to once again claim the American league title. The Sox were down 3-0, and I told myself that I couldn't watch game 4, I couldn't deal with the heart break. At the very end of game 4, though, I went to watch some baseball, to see the very bitter end of the season. Of course all Red Sox fans remember the end of that game. Kevin Millar walks, Dave Roberts steals and scores, David Ortiz hits a walk off in extra innings, and the Sox win, and they went on to win the AL in 7 games, completing the greatest comeback in the history of baseball and one of the best, if not the best, comeback in the history of sports. The Red Sox showed up in St. Louis a week later, bound and determined to brush off the St. Louis Cardinals and win the World Series for the first time in 86 years. Anyone who follows baseball knows the outcome of that World Series, the Sox swept and were world champs for the first time in my life, my dad's life, and even my grandfather's life. In the last moments before they won, I muttered under my breath: "They'll screw it up, they are going to find a way to screw it up," because they always had. Then it happened, Keith Foulke throws,Edgar Renteria hits a dribbler back to the mound, Foulke fields it, underhand tosses it gently to Doug Mientkiewicz at first. The Sox WIN. I remember watching the last out of the series jumping around madly, and then calling my Dad. On the other end of the phone I heard: "WOOOOO HOOOOO!!!!!!" I yelled into the phone, "DAD I don't know what to do!!!!" That night at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, as I stood there just beyond the dugout with my friend Ben, I basked in the glow of a moment that the entire region of New England (maybe not southwest Connecticut) had waited for for 86 years. The Patriots had won recently, and the Celtics are still the most storied team in Basketball history, but the Red Sox, that was truly the stuff of passion. We stood there until they kicked us out of the Stadium though, the good people of St. Louis being who they are, they gave us a good long time to celebrate before that happened. When I left the stadium a St. Louis fan, seeing me in my Red Sox hat, shooted off an expletive at me, but then quickly turned around and said "But Congratulations, you guys deserve it."

We went around to where the players were getting on their bus to go back to the airport, we saw Manny leave (Carrying a Louis Vutton Purse of his own no less) and get into his own ride. We also saw the rest of the team walk out of the stadium, and Mike Meyers, a little known reliever, carrying out the trophy. Terry Francona was signing autographs, Johnny Damon was a little drunk, Curt Schilling walked out on crutches, and as the bus pulled away I knew that I had seen something that only about 40 other people (the others who found the exit) could ever claim to have seen. The Sox went on to win again in 2007, and the ballpark was full all of the time. The truth is, it just wasn't the same, until this year. The truth is that this year the team started to lose, and I think that we were all a little better for it. The pink hats and the people who couldn't tell you the name of our shortstop disappeared, and we were better for it. The truth is that we became more than a little arrogant, and we always expected success. The other problem, of course, is that when we did succeed we didn't really feel the joy in it. I was there with my brother for game seven of the ALCS championship in 2007, and it was a great night, and I loved being with my brother, but was it as special? They asked the owner of the Red Sox that question and he gave some trite answer like "They are all special in their own right..." The truth is what any Red Sox fan who was there the night they won it in 2004 will tell you... No it wasn't. Truth be told because I had lived my whole life as a fan in the shadow of the curse of the bambino, 2004 was incomparably special, and when things are good all the time, we lose our sense of what that being good really is. St. John of the Cross described the realty behind this well in The Dark Night of the Soul. The truth is that sometimes our lives we need to go through dry spells to understand what how good something, be it a baseball team, a relationship, even our prayer life, actually is. Sometimes we need the dry spells, and we can't run from them because in them we can find a truer meaning of what those more fecund times mean. I would, sometime just after that, go into a pretty long dry spell in my prayer life. Although I was faithful to my practice of prayer, I would have only occasional showers to wet the soil of my soul and remind me who God was, and who I was in relationship to God. Fortunately, the spring rains came in just enough time in my prayer life.

That Series, that wonderful experience of joy, was amazing on so many levels. The truth is, however, that I know that I understood it better because of the many years in my life prior where we didn't even dare to dream that it would be the year.. we just hoped. Last year, a minor dry spell gave us reason to hope again at Fenway park, just as the dry spell that was coming in my life made me realize how good God had been to me, and also gave me new eyes to look for the rain when it came again.

The Dump: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 20 out of 30

2011-03-14T21:01:00.002+01:00

The Gateway Arch

It was July of 2004, when sitting in the living room at the Novitiate another novice turned to me and said “Good God, they are sending us to hell!” We were watching baseball with the novicemaster, and the team that we were watching was the St. Louis Cardinals. Now, this was to say nothing of the Cardinals, old Busch Stadium, or St. Louis in general. All that my fellow novice was commenting on was the reported temperature in St. Louis, 101 degrees (40 for you Celsius people out there) with 90% humidity. This is where he and I were being sent to study for the next three years, and initially, it didn’t have much to recommend itself. The day after vows we loaded up a minivan with all of our stuff and the two of us drove to St. Louis from Syracuse, NY.

It would be hard not to remember the first time I saw the famous Gateway Arch, it was rising over a landfill on the eastern side of the river. When we came over the bridge into St. Louis, we exited and took a wrong turn into a warehouse district near the train tracks… Was I really going to live here for three years? We had taken the fourteen hour drive with a stop to sleep in the middle at the Jesuit parish in Columbus, Ohio and arrived the next day in St. Louis, and what an arrival it was. It was also in the mid 90’s and the humidity was high at the end of August. In fact, I remember it being so hot that it was actually painful to be outside. I got up to my room and looked out of my third floor window, over the back fence of our back yard to the vacant lot and the abandoned houses beyond and, although our house was very nice, I thought to myself. “What a dump!”

The next day I walked over to the philosophy department to have a sit down with the dean for Jesuits in studies. As I walked into what had been an old office building that IBM had moved out of years before because the neighborhood was too dangerous, I though very little of the architectural choices that were made when someone decided that a honeycomb pattern in concrete on the outside of the building was an attractive choice. All of this was not to mention, of course, the lack of windows in the building in anything that wasn’t an office. Being used to the Victorian elegance of Holy Cross, SLU was falling short of my aesthetic expectations of a university, then I took a walk up the middle of campus and saw strange statuary everywhere I looked. What the heck was I doing here?

The next night, one of the guys in the house took some of us out to a bar that he liked for a few beers to celebrate his birthday. He told us it was a good place for pizza and beer. I walked in, and there were dollar bills stuck to the ceiling with God knows what, writing all over the walls, and an incomparable sense of complete and utter dive bar. I was used to fake upscale Irish pubs and drinks at sunset at the Top of the Hub in Boston. Was I really to be reduced to this in philosophy studies??

Where the heck was I? Only two words adequately describe this reality. St. Louis.

There was a reason that the blues thrived as a musical form in this city. There was a reason why, during my third and final year there, it was the violent crime capital of the country. There was a reason why a Jesuit who had just arrived from LA said “Compton has nothing on the northside.” There was also a reason why the day that I left to return home to New England three years later that I didn’t want to leave.

My first few days in St. Louis were rough, not because St. Louis was a bad place, I came to love it, but because the truth was that I spent those first few days and weeks comparing it to everything back home. Ted Drew’s Frozen Custard was ok, but it wasn’t St. Clair’s Annex Ice Cream. The Cardinals were fun to watch, but they weren’t the Red Sox. SLU was an OK school, but it wasn’t Holy Cross. The Blues were fine to listen to, but it wasn’t the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Oh, and the Mississippi River was definitely NOT the Atlantic Ocean.

Dan and I on a scavenger hunt one night.. not even sure
what we were supposed to be getting a picture of.

What changed me? The people around me were the ones that did it. I made friends among the Jesuits, like Chris and Brian, who were from St. Louis and could fill me in on the peculiarities of the Jesuits from St. Louis, but also who were able to share with me why they loved being a Jesuit in that city, even if it wasn’t always easy. They introduced me to some of their friends, who in turn became good friends of mine. One in particular, Dan, loves St. Louis so much that it is to him an objective truth that all things holy and good come, in some way, from the city. That enthusiasm helped me to generally get excited about things that were going on. I made friends among the Jesuit Volunteer and Catholic Worker Communities there, who didn’t take those vacant lots and high crime and poverty rates as things which were signs of crushing hopelessness in North St. Louis, but rather as the potential for urban farms and the formation of new communities and a new civilization, literally in the shells of the old one that had failed so many in those neighborhoods years before.

Harry and Chris protesting the Death Penalty

I made friends among the staff at the University, my friend Harry, in particular. Harry was also a Holy Cross alum at SLU, and got it when I spoke wistfully of Mt. St. James. I made friends among the grad students at the University, who kindled in me a desire to walk into that ugly humanities building, because the conversations that I might have in there made it worth it. I made friends among the undergrads, who in their passion rekindled in me a desire to help build up the best, most just, world possible. I even had a professor who, because of his insistence that the third single on Muddy Waters’ chess album was the closest thing to a perfect instantiation of the platonic form of the beautiful, got me listening to the blues.

A group of us in the dive bar in question.

I even went back to that dive bar, the one that I thought was a complete dump. I got talking one night with one of the bar tenders named Antonio, and it turned out that he was from Boston, and Sox fan. As anyone who knew me during that time is aware that dive bar, the Blackthorn Pub, became the hang out for my friends and I for the next three years.

Sarah Holtz Stout and I in front of the mighty Mississip.

The truth is that, as my novicemaster once told me, comparisons are odious. All that they really do, in situations like the one I described above, is inspire ingratitude for the opportunities we are afforded. Even here, in a place as marvelous as Rome, one can easily make comparisons about why home is so much better. When we let a place, or a thing, or even a person speak to us on its own terms, then we can grow in gratitude for those things in ways that we might not even be able to understand.

Laura, Murph, and I tailgating before a Cardinal's game.

My earlier assertions were all correct. St. Louis was not Boston, Ted Drew’s was not St. Clair’s, the Cardinals weren’t the Sox, and SLU wasn’t Holy Cross, and thank God for that. Those nights in Busch Stadium with my friend Dan and his wife Sarah are things that I wouldn’t trade for anything. The mid snow-storm trip to Ted Drewe’s with my friend Laura is something I will never forget. The Grad program at SLU and the great faculty there helped me go deeper wit my love of philosophy. Thank God St. Louis wasn’t Boston. I grew because St. Louis wasn’t familiar or comfortable, God can work in our vulnerability. I discovered things about myself that I couldn’t at home, because I was just unsettled enough to pay attention to the spirit moving around me. I found some of the people who make up some of the most important stories of my life, some of which I take to be too sacred to ever post here, because removed by distance from my friends back home, whom I love dearly, I found a group of people who encountered me not in the past, or the future, but in the only moment that we shared, the present. I found life, and joy, and love, even amidst some hard days and tough lessons, and there is nothing that one can feel for that but gratitude.

The truth is that St. Louis obviously wasn’t hell. I came to grow to love it, not because it became home, which it did, not because it was better then my hometown, no need to judge that, but because of what it was on its own terms, and the people I was blessed to share it with. So much for that first view of the arch beyond the dump.

The High Road: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 19 out of 30

2011-03-13T17:47:00.006+01:00

Mt. Evans rising above Echo Lake, (photo by E.J. Pieker, www.ejphoto.com)

We’ve all heard the expression, that sometimes we just need to take the High Road, well in the summer of 2003 I took it, literally. The highest paved road in North America climbs Mt. Evans in the Rockies just outside of Denver, Colorado. With the summit reaching 14,240 ft, you can drive from the entrance of the road in Idaho Springs, Colorado all the way to the top. The drive to the summit climbs through forests, up above the tree-line to an alpine pasture, and then to the rocky mountain peak beyond. As you ascend, the car travels past ancient trees, some dating to times before Christ, mountain goats, and meadows filled with brilliantly bright yellow small flowers. Somewhere near the top, in full view of the peak, there is a small mountain lake made by the melting snow each year. Its silver surface echoes the sky and peak above, its water is always cool and crystalline.

When you reach the small parking lot just below the peak you still have a little bit of climbing to do reach the summit, but it is well worth it. There, above the surrounding peaks, you can see for miles in every direction and the horizon disappears beyond the foothills in the east and the mountain range to the west. Sitting there one day in the summer of 2003 with a few other novices atop the mountain, it became apparent that sometimes taking the high road, while lots of work and sometimes even dangerous, was definitely the way to go.

One of those Ancient Trees,
(photo by the talented Ej Peiker, www.ejphoto.com)

The truth is that in order for the car to make the climb we had to stop a couple of times to let it cool down to stop it from overheating. The car was a fine, normal car, but the amount of work and the change in pressure of the atmosphere meant that we sometimes just needed to stop to let things cool down so that it wouldn't blow up. It was a good thing that we did, too, because at one of the places we stopped we saw trees that had been twisted and turned by the wind over the course of several thousand years. At another place, we sat down by that small mountain lake and ate the lunch that we had brought with us. Stopping to cool off gave us time to witness things that we might not have otherwise, and that was a real blessing.

In front of the No Summer Moutain Range,
Somewhere in The Rockies.

It is also a little dangerous to take the high road, and sometimes it can be a real balancing act. On the way up the mountain that day I remember driving the car and looking out the window to my left to see a sheer drop of several thousand feet almost immediately outside my window. Other times being on that road, which is narrow in parts, meant swerving a little to avoid oncoming traffic all the while trying to avoid falling off the mountain. In other words, driving up this peak required a lot of attention to actually staying on the road and sometimes avoiding oncoming traffic just to stay safe.

In the end, though the high road is rewarding. From the top you can see everything for miles around, and there is a real sense both of accomplishment and gratitude in that. That month that we were in Denver in 2003 it was for a course on the history of the Society, and after a few weeks of studying together and living together all 90 or so novices in the USA were starting to get on each other's nerves a little. That is normal, human, and understandable, the question became one of which road to take.

In these sorts of situations in our lives it is all too easy to take the low road, the road of gossip, pettiness, name calling. I know that I have all too often taken that road in my own life. Sure it seems to be safe, controllable, and somewhat easy. Sure, on that road there is the possibility of danger, but the road is wide, and there are nice guard rails, and we don't have to exert much effort to use it so we take it. The truth is really that it can be just as dangerous, just in different ways, and can just as easily lead to a wreck.

A Group of intrepid Jesuit Novices straddle the great
continental divide.

The flip side can be taking the high road, the straight and narrow, which on the surface seems much more tricky and dangerous, but which we know from the outset can be much more rewarding. It is hard to do your best to love people sometimes, or even to be charitable with them. Sure there will be times when you might overheat and want to blow up it is then that we just need to stop, calm down, and take sometime to see what is around us, and try to find the beauty in the situations and people we are dealing with. Sure there might be times when avoiding a head-on collision with someone that we find difficult it tough, but on the high road sometimes a quick swerve to avoid a difficult situation is all that you can do. Yes, the kind of intentionality in the context of our relationships that it takes to drive that road can be exhausting too. In the end, though, if we can keep taking that high road, even in rough circumstances, we come to the peak where everything can come into focus and our journey there makes more sense.

On the road toward the mountains. (You can kind of make
them out in the distance)

That day on Mount Evans I think we learned something important, sometimes the high road can be long and arduous, but if you don't try you never get to the place where things can be in the purest perspective. If you don't take that high road, you never reach the peak.

The Cowboy: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 18 out of 30

2011-03-12T11:21:00.001+01:00

The prairie in the spring, the way the grass moves in the wind is beautiful, and pictures alone don't capture it:

In the spring of 2003, just after I finished the Spiritual Exercises, I was missioned to work on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in south central South Dakota. From February until May, I lived at the St. Francis Mission, taught Catechism, helped prepare families and children for baptism, and did what I could to help out at the mission’s museum. The truth of the museum work was really just that Ray, a Jesuit anthropologist, and Mike, the curator of the museum, were gracious enough to give me something to do when I wasn’t teaching the kids.

Spring on the Prairie.

When spring hits the reservation the undulating sea of white made by the snow capped hills of the prairie turns into a heaving ocean of green and grass. The Prairie comes back to life for a few months, and all around from the high points all that you can see is a vivid green filling the horizon if you look close enough, though, you can see small spots of white, brown, and black filling the horizon alongside slightly larger spots of the same colors. When the green returns to the grass, life returns to the prairie, new calves are born, and it is time for branding season.

One day, while eating lunch with Buzz, a fellow novice, we were asked by one of the mission’s employees if we would help at the branding on her father’s ranch. We asked what it would entail, and when we were told that we would get to ride horses we were in. We were also told, though, that we would be helping to round up and brand the new cattle. Now before any assumptions are made about the cruelty of the process of branding, in South Dakota, west of the Missouri River, it is the law that every newborn calf has to be branded. This is actually to protect the Ranchers, many of whom have very little to begin with, from those who would steal those cattle that they rely upon for survival. It is also the moment in which these new calves are immunized and, for those male calves that aren’t going to be used for breeding, neutered. It’s a full service veterinary operation, and in fact when people can afford it there is often a vet present.

Like most boys growing up in America, the cowboy is an archetypal dream. When you are young you might play cowboys and bank robbers. I know that I had a small cowboy hat, a plastic holster with a plastic gun and a sheriff’s badge that my dad had brought back from a trip to Arizona for me. I also had a pair of spurs that I never figured out how to attach to my shoes, and rope that I wanted to be lasso. All of this, and my mother’s old 1970’s (ironically suede) hippie flower child vest to boot, which somehow made the whole thing feel authentic. We had a small stream that was ran by my house and the area around it was often enough perfect to pretend to be a cowboy along with my next door neighbor, who was only about a year older. The truth is that I had had the dream of being a cowboy from a young age, from the day that my Dad took me to see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans make an appearance at a local Roy Rogers fried chicken restaurant. I was about to find out, however, just how different my childhood dream was from reality.

Me on "Buck" a trusty steed.

We arrived at the ranch early in the morning ready for work, wearing older clothes that we weren’t afraid to see get beaten up a bit. Almost immediately, Buzz and I were shown the horse we’d be using during the day, its name was Buck. Now here is the question, why on God’s green earth would someone give a horse named “Buck,” which is the last thing that you’d want to see a horse do when you were just learning to ride, to someone new to riding? Anyhow, as we headed out to the corral to get a couple of minutes of practice in before riding out to the pasture to drive the cattle in I realized that the ground wasn’t so much ground as it was deep mud mixed with animal excrement, my first unpleasant surprise of the day. I mounted the horse, though, and rode out for the roundup.

Riding out to round them up.

Cows are incredibly dumb animals. Why they would move just because someone like me, who is much smaller than a cow, would come riding towards them on a horse, which is slightly larger but not so much larger when one considers that there are in a typical drive more than 20 head of steer to one cowboy, is beyond me. Yet all one really has to do to get steer to move is ride hard at them on a horse and cut around them a little bit to force them in the direction that you want them to go. That’s what we did. We drove the cows in from a pasture, which was about a mile out, and separated the calves from their mothers. We rounded the calves up into a barn, and then one by one pulled them out, wrestled them to the ground, and then one of us sat on their upper body while another sat on their lower body and held them while one more person branded and immunized them.

The calves await their branding.

At first, wrestling a calf to the ground was not an easy prospect, these things are already pretty big, and they can kick too. I got a lot of scrapes and bruises that day. Then, when you hold them down while someone else is branding, you can feel the moment of shock run through them when the branding iron hits, and smell the hair and flesh as it is burning under the iron. In the meantime, the mother cows, which had been separated from their babies, are mooing bloody murder from the other side of the corral’s fence. None of this is to forget that the ground on which you are sitting to hold them down is that unpleasant mix of mud and the other stuff that I mentioned above.

Still want to be a cowboy?

Buzz, with the bandana on, helping to take a calf down.

By the end of the day I was bruised from the kick of cattle hooves, and even though I had learned how to sneak up behind the calves and flip them over easily, it was still a risky business. I also realized that riding a horse is no joke, saddle sores are real, and your back can kill you by the end of a day of jostling up and down. All of this is not to mention that, unlike a car or a motorcycle, the horse has a mind of its own and sometimes goes in directions and does things that I, particularly as a novice rider, didn’t want it to do.

Did I still want to be a cowboy? Heck. No.

The truth is that very few of us who want to be cowboys, or astronauts, or ballerinas (to be gender inclusive) hold onto those dreams after a young age. There are obviously many admirable qualities among those occupations, or the million and one other things that we dream of being as kids, but as we grow into who we are we most of us come to realize that we were made for something different. It was years before that I had given up the dream of being a cowboy, as is obvious since I was there as a Jesuit. The interesting thing was to see just how much the dream didn’t match the reality, being a cowboy isn’t about independence, it is about needing people around you to do the things that need to get done, like branding. Being a cowboy isn’t glamorous, it’s hard, dirty, work.

The truth about my short-lived life as a cowboy is that looking back on it, it helps me to remember something. Even as kids, our deepest desire isn’t really to be a cowboy, astronaut, or ballerina (to be gender inclusive) it is ultimately about dreaming about something that will make us happy. That is, of course, what God wants for each of us, happiness. The truth is that we are often surprised by the things that bring us real joy in our lives when we finally do grow up, and I think that this is precisely the kind of thing that should continue to feed our hope, particularly in times of disappointment. It may be that I don’t get the job I want, or end up doing the same sorts of things that I always dreamed that I would, but heck I didn’t end up being a cowboy either, and that’s worked out just fine. What we really want, deep down, is not any given job, but what that job will ultimately bring, which is hopefully fulfillment and happiness. I know that now, sitting at my desk over looking the Capitoline Hill here in Rome, just weeks from the beginning of branding season in South Dakota I am pretty happy not to be a Cowboy. That gives me some small measure of hope that even if the other dreams that I have for myself in life, even now staring down 30, don’t end up happening then everything will still be ok. So put my spurs away, I think I will stay right here.

Sunset on the Prairie. (also one of my better pictures ever.)

The Armpit: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 17 out of 30

2011-03-12T00:18:00.001+01:00

During my first month after the Spiritual Exercises I went to go live and work in South Dakota. One day the rector of the Jesuit mission asked if I wanted to go see Mt. Rushmore, and of course I responded “YES!”

Rusmore... underwhelming.

I remember being disappointed by Mt. Rushmore. As a kid you hear about these monumental faces carved into the side of a mountain, and you can only imagine how grand that might be. The reality is that it is not very big and it is carved into the side of one of the Black hills which the Lakota, among other Native American peoples, hold to be the sacred place where life began.

What Crazy Horse will look like when its done.

Just down the road from Rushmore another, albeit less famous, sculpture is being hewn out of a mountain. Rather than just being in the side of a mountain, however, they are using the whole thing as if it were one gigantic chunk of marble. This statue will eventually be Crazy Horse, riding his horse and pointing forward across the hills. When it is finished, and they have been working on it for over 50 years already, it will be much larger than Rushmore.

When I returned to the Rosebud Reservation later that early March afternoon one of the Lakota men who worked for the St. Francis Mission pointed out something very interesting to me. “You know,” he said, “Rushmore would fit in Crazy Horse’s armpit.” I laughed and went home and thought about it some more that night. Not only was it an interesting fact, but also it spoke of a people who were reclaiming, at least a little, a measure of pride through this sculpture. This was sacred land that had been promised to them by treaty and taken away. For us Christians, it would be hard to imagine if someone forcibly took the Garden of Eden from us and then planted the symbol of their own civil leaders right in the middle of it, and yet that is what Rushmore actually is. That quick little statement equating Rushmore with the armpit of the Crazy Horse sculpture makes sense.

The progress so far... it is so huge that it will take a while.

Sometimes in our lives we can be all to quick to trample of things that are sacred to others, and I don’t just mean the Garden of Eden of another religion, it can be something so simple and so unseen. Sometimes, as it was with General Custer and his gold hunting expeditions taking the Black Hills, it is out of greed. Other times it is just because we fail to be intentional or mindful enough to respect the mystery of God present in another. When we take time to listen to the stories, though, we can see the beauty in what others find sacred, from the things that pertain to religious faith, to friends, family, home, or parts of their culture, and find in it that deep longing for deeper meaning that each of us experience.

At the same time, when people trample on the things that we hold sacred it is always good to help someone else try to understand the dignity that they have offended so that there can be genuine reconciliation. Jesus’s turning the other cheek wasn’t meant to allow people to beat us down, it was meant to cause the person who had just slapped you to have look you in the eye and to have to recognize you as a human with dignity. Sometimes to help people come to a clearer understanding we too need to turn the other cheek, or really want to make our point, you can put those moments in a place that shows how truly odiferous they are, like in the armpit.

The Breakwater: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 16 out of 30

2011-03-10T23:02:00.001+01:00

A hollywood clip of where this next post happened:

At the edge of Eastern Point in Gloucester, MA there is a lighthouse that guides the fishing boats back into the harbor. It was once in the movie The Perfect Storm. From the edge of that lighthouse there is a breakwater made of massive slabs of cubed grey granite that extends a hundred yards or more out into the middle of the mouth of the bay. In the evening, if you walk carefully out to the edge of the breakwater, you can see the sun setting over the faint skyline of Boston in the distance. There you can smell the salt air invading your nostrils, and watch as the gulls dart through the sky in the interplay between the gold, scarlet, and orange of the sunset and the deep blue of the North Atlantic. If you turn back towards the light house you might see the gentle sweep of the light over the water as the sun sinks further beyond the horizon, and in that moment the world can almost seem to have been completely transformed as everything stills and all that remains is the sound of the gulls and the water below colliding with the granite.

The lighthouse, taken from the breakwater.
(During the Summer)

It was there that I stopped running from God and wrestling with God just long enough to actually start following God. It was a January afternoon, and snow had just fallen freshly on the ground all around leaving everything coated in a white that was in that moment still unspoiled except for my footprints. I was on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a thirty-day retreat that all Jesuits make twice in our lives, and as a novice I was trying to get a hold of the fact that God loved me, and to learn to trust in that. There, in a moment of frustration, I decided to run out to the end of the breakwater. “This afternoon walk will be about exercise,” I thought, and so I made the stupid choice to run. The rocks of the breakwater were slippery with the snow, and the ocean that constantly churned around them had left some ice underneath the coat of snow on the top. The wind was whipping frantically and almost immediately I had to stop running. Slowly, however, I was bound and determined to make it to the end of the breakwater anyway.

The Breakwater.

As the sun set over the horizon I could barely see the faint outline of Boston in the distance. Sitting there as the edge of this breakwater felt like sitting at the edge of the world. It was bitterly cold, and the wind stung every last bit of exposed skin. There on the edge of the world, I started to laugh. I laughed at the fact that I had tried to run on ice covered in snow. I laughed at the fact that I was sitting on the edge of this breakwater with the temperature in the 20’s. I laughed at myself. I drew the hood of my winter coat down tighter to my face, and there huddled against the cold. I laughed, and said aloud to the God who was still trying to communicate to me through the beauty of everything around me, even if I wouldn’t listen to the still small voice within, “Well you’ve picked a real bright one in me Lord!”

No matter how blessed our lives have been, and perhaps sometimes precisely because our lives have been blessed, it can be hard to really have a grasp on not only that God could love us as much as God does, but also how it is that we, with all of our faults, should be loved. As the retreat progressed I found myself becoming clearer on God calling me to this life, and I also found myself, like St. Peter, saying, “Go away from me Lord, I am a sinful man.” In fact, I still find myself saying that sometimes.

A Jesuit friend of mine once described a similar conversation that he had with God in prayer where he said to the Lord; “Well Lord, you know who you chose.” Usually those of us called to this life, when we realize just who calls us, and the immensity of love with which he calls us, feel completely unequal to the task. We know that we are sinners, and we know that we are loved, but to get to the place where one can bring those two things together, where we can say “I am a sinner loved by God,” that is not always easy. This of course, doesn’t just apply to those of us called to ministry, but to anyone who follows Christ.

The truth is that it is right to say that none of us are worthy of the love and blessings in our lives, or the people in our lives, or our vocations, or the beauty we’ve seen, the love we’ve shared, the celebrations we’ve been blessed with. The truth is also that God doesn’t really care much about worthy. My need to run out to the edge of that breakwater was about doing something dramatic, doing something to feel worthy of the beauty of the moment into which I was entering. I couldn’t, and God didn’t care. The truth that I have come to find is that in the end is that when you can come to see all of it as gift, even just living everyday in whatever life God has called you to, even when you know there are a thousand reasons why it shouldn’t be the case, you come to understand the truth and the depth of God’s love. Once you get there you know that all that you can be led to is love in return.

Sunset over Gloucester Bay.

Sometimes in our lives, when we are at the edges of our own breakwaters, fighting furiously to prove something that we can’t, that somehow we’re worthy of all of the good we’ve been given, all that we can do is listen along with St. Peter. Sometimes all the can do is put ourselves in the place of one who told Jesus to go away because of his sinfulness and listen to the words of Jesus. Sometimes out on the edge of the breakwater, all that we can do is listen to hear “Follow me.”

The Ashes: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 15 out of 30

2011-03-09T23:53:00.001+01:00

The Chapel at Campion Center

It seems only appropriate that this should be short today. In those first months working at the retirement home I found myself around many good, holy, men who were close to their time to meet the Lord. Over the course of those first few months there were a good number of funerals in the cavernous expanse of the Chapel at Campion Center. Sometimes the Chapel would be filled with people, others it seemed empty but for a few family members and as a novice, it got me thinking.

There was a part of me that found those small funerals sad, and it seemed like the family and the Jesuits of that community who were present were bracing themselves against the crushing enormity of the empty space that they occupied. As I reflected on it more later though, I realized something... “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The measure of our lives is not by what we have accomplished, or by how many people are gathered about our grave, its measured by our relationship with God. I knew some of those men with small funerals, and it wasn’t because they weren’t loved, it was just because they had lived longer than most people that they knew in life. Slowly the people, places, jobs, and things that they had had in their lives all turned to ash or dust. This is not, however, as sad as it seems to be. One of those Jesuits told me that he had seen so much of his life turn back into dust that he felt like he too was slowly going back to the one who had made him. He said “In the end all that I have ever really wanted was for there to be nothing left of me.” By this he didn’t mean that he wanted to drift into some sort of oblivion, but be finally consumed by the mystery of the God he had loved for all of those years. For him, ashes and dust weren’t just a sign of conversion, but of hope that he too would some day share in the resurrection. Maybe that’s how all of us should be thinking as we start this Lent.

The Jesuit Cemetery in Weston, MA.

The Frying Pan: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 14 out of 30

2011-03-08T23:57:00.012+01:00

When I was young I never had a reason to cook for myself. My mother, being proud of her Italian heritage, loved to cook and she did it very well. When she couldn’t cook my dad had a repertoire of a few things that he did very well, among them was Chicken Parmesan. We NEVER ever starved in my house and, as any friend of mine who has ever visited my family’s house can attest, there was rarely an occasion where there weren’t ample left-overs. It is not hard to imagine then, that when I got to the novitiate and they told me that I had to cook about once a week for the community I was a little frightened at the prospect. The afternoon before I had to cook the first time I went to the grocery store, and there I made my choice, Chicken Parm it was… I walked down the aisles in the Jackson Square Stop and Shop… Chicken, check. Bread Crumbs, check, Tomato Sauce, check, Mozarella and Parmesean shredded cheese, check, pasta, check. Bread, check. Ingredients for a Salad, Check.

The Desired Result

The next morning we went out to the work that we did two days a week during novitiate. I went to the Jesuit infirmary at Campion Center in Weston, MA. One of the older Jesuit Fathers named Leo asked me: “So Michael, I hear that you are going to cook tonight, and what are we attempting to prepare?” “Chicken Parmesan, Father.” I replied, sitting there in the room that was used both as the recreation room and for activities. He asked, “And why did you choose that?” “Well Father I have seen my Dad prepare it a thousand times, so I figured I could do it too.” One of the other Fathers, who rarely spoke, sat in his wheelchair. This priest had been in Jamaica for years working as a missionary in one of our high schools there, he nodded and grunted in approval of my choice.

That night we started out after work towards the novitiate. I figured that if I had an hour and half before dinner I should be able to get things done. We got into the car and exited off of route 128 (Interstate 95 for those of you not in the know) and on to route 9 to return to the novitiate. What one needs to understand about route 9 is that it is a 4-lane road. In parts it is 50 miles per hour, in other parts there are stoplights and major intersections. It was the most direct route home. It was, however, Boston, at rush hour, and we got stuck. I finally pulled into the driveway of the Novitiate at 4:30pm, a half an hour before Mass, not sure that I had enough time to cook.

As I walked into the house I apologized profusely to the novice master, “If I had known I would have left work earlier,” and “I am so sorry, it won't happen again,” came forth from my mouth. Paul, my novicemaster, being a wise, relatively patient, and gentle person said, genuinely: “Michael, don’t worry, we’ll just order pizza.”

This should be the end of the story because now, 8 years later, I would take it as a relief and get on the phone to the pizza place down the street, but not then. “No,” I said “I can still get it done.” “Are you sure?” he asked. “Yep.” Immediately I sprung into action. Chicken out, bread crumbs out, bread the chicken. Frying pan on the burner, Olive oil in, heat up. Fry Chicken (I burnt it because the heat was too high) Put Chicken in Baking Dish, Pour Sauce, scatter cheese. Throw in oven… whew, done with 10 minutes to spare.

As I turned back to the counter away from the oven I began to prepare the salad when my classmate Matt, who was setting the table, walked through the door. “Umm Michael,” he said, in a remarkably calm voice, “I think there is a fire behind you.” I turned around, flames were gushing out of the frying pan and into the industrial hood that was over the stove. I was about to turn the novitiate into an inferno, and all that I could say in that moment was: “We should do something about that.” Thankfully, both Matt and I, who were not only novices to religious life but also to cooking, knew enough not to throw water on it. We searched frantically for what felt like an hour, but was no more than a couple of minutes, for the fire extinguisher. When we found it we unleashed hell on the grease fire, and in the process covered what seemed like half the kitchen in extinguisher foam.

When I went upstairs to the chapel for mass, which was about to start just as the fire was going out, the first words out of my mouth to the novice master were “Now just so you know, the fire is out.” Immediately my novicemaster, who had survived the worst fire in the history of our province when he was a novice, tensed up. “We may have lost the brand new frying pan for good, but no more fire.”

The unfortunate victim.

That night we all sat after mass and ate what remains to this day to be the worst meal that I have ever prepared. Everyone were gracious about it, however, and we all had a good laugh when the novicemaster said, during the cleanup of the kitchen after dinner, “Oh no, not the frying pan given to the novitiate by his Holiness the Pope.”

A couple of days later I went back to the Health center, and I was sitting there with the same Fathers as before. Fr. Leo asked how it went, and I told him the story of chicken burnt and frying pan lost. As I concluded the other father, who was named Ted, looked up from his wheelchair and rare words issued from his mouth. “That’s ok, when I was in novitiate I killed a horse!” The entire room erupted in laughter.

The Old Shadowbrook Novitiate, sight of the unfortunate
equicide.

Apparently as novices at the old novitiate they had to work the farm that was there. He was told not to take a specific older horse out into the pasture one day, but he did it anyway. The horse had a heart attack, keeled over, and died on the spot. Obviously this is not an example of animal cruelty. As his words later in life attest, his intention was never to kill the horse. There he was, though, consoling a young novice by reminding him that the loss of a frying pan and a little burnt chicken really wasn’t that big of a deal.

It strikes me that stories like this are what Lent, which begins in a half an hour here in Rome, is all about. The truth is that in Lent we need to first admit something that is universally uncomfortable to admit. We need to admit that we are not perfect, and be humble enough to accept it, laugh at ourselves and move on with God’s grace. That night in the kitchen I didn’t cook because I had to, I cooked because I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t. I cooked because I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t perfect and a frying pan went up in flames in the process. (Thankfully that was all that went up in flames.) The classic call of Lent, which is already posted on some churches here in Rome, is to repent and believe in the Gospel. Before we can do that though, we have to be humble enough to know that there are things to repent of, and free enough to be honest with those faults. It’s wrong to assume that we need to be perfect too. Sometimes, when we can be honest with who we are our imperfection can be just the thing that helps others become more comfortable with who they are. Even if it means admitting that you once, unintentionally, killed a horse.

Note: An apology to anyone who read this post earlier. Unfortunately, I copied a draft version onto the webpage this version should be better.

The Novitiate: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 13 out of 30

2011-03-07T22:41:00.000+01:00

Paul, our novice master, in the novitiate Kitchen.

On August 25, 2002, I woke up at my parent's house in Westerly, RI. I followed my normal Sunday morning routine. I put on some Church ready khakis and a nice button down shirt. I was doing the readings at mass, so I threw on a tie and went down to the car and off to St. Pius for mass. Something was different that day though. When I got in the car the back of my Dad's SUV was loaded down with bags, more precisely my bags. Right after mass, we were heading to Boston, to the novitiate, and I was becoming a Jesuit. That morning at the end of Mass, the parish prayed for me, and the next Sunday, and for every Sunday since, I have been prayed for by name at all of masses. (That is the kind of support that has sustained this vocation, even in its darkest moments.) After that mass we piled into the car and trekked an hour and a half up interstate 95 to Boston.

When we arrived in Jamaica Plain, and in the church parking lot of Blessed Sacrament Parish, I stepped out of the car and across the threshold of the notivitate, and with one simple step I had entered religious life. I was greeted at the door by Paul, my novice master, and David, the director for formation. I was then escorted into the living room with the rest of my family where some of the men who entered with me were already present. My classmate Matt has since declared that those first moments in the novitiate were something akin to a wake in terms of their general tone and unsure awkwardness. I remember looking at my sister, who was 5 at the time, sitting there perfectly still, and seemingly the most uncomfortable of all of us.

For those of us entering, we weren't quite sure what we were getting ourselves into, for those of us who came with us, they weren't quite sure that we were sure of what we were getting ourselves into. Since the novice master, his assistant, the formation director, and the other novices were busy attending to the things that needed to be done, like waiting for the others, setting up mass up stairs in the chapel and cooking dinner, we were left to our own devices and it was nothing if not awkward, and I found myself feeling the weight of it.

The door to my cell in the novitiate.

The truth is that when I left the Holy Cross at dusk that bright May evening, every step was pointed solidly in one direction from that point until the end of that summer of 2002, towards Arrupe House, on Creighton St., in Jamaica Plain. I was very nervous for most of that summer. Was I doing the right thing? How could I know? That summer was filled with hanging out with friends, cruising around Rhode Island in the Volvo, and just a little bit of work to keep me flush with cash until the end of summer. I was fortunate that my friends Brian and Jill had moved just up the coast to Newport for that summer, without being able to hang out with them I may have had just a little too much time to think about what I was about to do. I stopped working on July 31st, because the feast of St. Ignatius just seemed like a good time, and spent the rest of the summer somewhere close to the beach. That day in late August, though, sitting there in the living room on Creighton St., it was all real all of the sudden.

The Arrupe House Chapel at Christmas.

When the time came, we went up-stairs for mass in the novitiate chapel, my second mass that day, and after we went downstairs for drinks an hors devours before dinner. I remember the family of one of my classmates (though I won't say who for fear of reprisal) hitting the bar immediately as soon as we got down stairs. As we went into the dining room for dinner, we all sat with our families, and ate dinner before it would be time for them to depart. My little sister, who had been nervous all day, and very well behaved for a 5 year old, eyed the chocolate cake out of the corner of her eye, and that was the moment that I knew that everything would be alright.

In that moment David, the formation director, had seen her looking at that cake, and in his usual larger than life and graceful way, got up, walked over to her, grabbed her by the hand and brought her over to the cake which was sitting atop the novitiate piano. He lifted her up so that she could grab a strawberry off of the top, and a big smile came over her face as she shoved the chocolate and frosting covered strawberry into her mouth. I know my mother still remembers that moment, and I suspect that it is a good part of the reason why she felt at least a little better about my entering that day. The truth is that that was David, there was nothing contrived or disingenuine about it, and I think that he may have delighted in it just as much as my sister did. His gentleness and joy with her that day would be echoed with me over the course of the next couple of years that he was my formation director. It was the same sort of gentleness which could support you in the middle in the middle of a tough conversation about where you saw yourself going in Jesuit life, while at the same time having a gigantic bowl of Jelly-beans ready to share just a little joy.

The view from the novitiate roof deck. The Prudential
Center hovering over Mission hill.

In that moment I discovered that, even with all of the new rules that were about to govern the way I lived my life, there was still room for me to be me in the society. There was still space to love my family, to joy in simple little things. I wasn't supposed to be aloof, or become separate from the people and places that had meant so much to me. The truth is that being a Jesuit has made me closer to my best self, and more present to those little joys and attentive to little blessings. Moreover, if the Provincial's assistant for formation could be that attentive to the cake that a 5 year old was eyeing from across the room, I knew that the way of life that I was entering was something warm, human, and life-giving.

The sad part of this story is that David died far earlier than he should have, and unexpectedly, though in his maudlin Irish manner, I suspect that that was precisely what he wanted, though certainly none of us did. On that Sunday evening though, that look of joy in his eye told me that just maybe I could survive this place called Arrupe House, and the novitiate.

The Graduation: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 12 out of 30

2011-03-06T22:45:00.001+01:00

My friend Rachel graduating...

Just a few short hours after our last trip to the Boulevard, we graduated from College. That morning, since “R” is pretty far back in the alphabet, I got to watch most of my friends graduate before me. I took pictures and could see the looks on their faces as they walked across the stage. Finally it was my turn.

Jill, Frank, and Brian... College Graduates.. (almost 10 years ago)

There are moments in our lives where everything slows down, where we experience the moment in slow motion because we want to remember every little detail. I have had other moments like this since, when I took my vows, when I said goodbye to friends in St. Louis and Boston, and when I served mass for the Pope. There are moments where things just slow down, and we remember them clearly years after. This was one such moment, and I am not sure that I can make sense of it in any other way than to say that when those moments do come along, God is good enough to let us experience them just a little bit more slowly.

My family in the stands.

The actual process of graduating from Holy Cross seems simple enough, climb stairs on to stage, accept diploma with left hand shake hands with the president with the right, continue along the stage, go down the stairs, exit. The things is, I remember the faces on the stage that morning. I remember Kim McElaney with a huge smile, a big hug, and I remember her saying: “I am so proud of you.” I remember walking on to the stage and, having heard the president say “Congratulations” to the 4 or 5 students before me and I remember having been prepared to say “Thank you” I remember looking up towards the crowd, and having picked out where my family was sitting earlier, looking up at my parents and my mom’s mom, and my dad’s dad. I remember the sky being bright blue, and the sun bleaching out everyone at Fitton field. I remember the green astro-turf carpet on the stage, the white tent that surrounded it, and the line of rolled up diplomas neatly tied with purple ribbons in the special boxes that Holy Cross had made for the occasion.

I remember the name being called ahead of mine and having to will my feet to move, just a little, to proceed to the spot where Fr. MacFarland was standing, I got up to the stage and expected to hear “Congratulations,” but instead I heard “So I guess we’ll be seeing you around…” The man threw me a curve, I was ready to say “Thank you” and instead I said “um yeah, around, yeah,” and walked off the stage, and I could see my friend Joe, who was seated in the front row, chuckling as I walked off, and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself a little too.

It can be all too rare a thing in our lives when we have moments where things just slow down, and we realize that we are right where we are supposed to be at that moment. I can’t say that it was always an easy ride for me at Holy Cross, in fact the record will show that there was a point during freshmen year where I thought of leaving to go to the diocesan seminary, but somehow felt like I would just be running away if I did. I had a deep sense that I had to see it through. Had I not made those decisions in darker moments this moment of graduation, and a thousand others like it that occurred over those four years never would have come. Sometimes, when we are right where we are supposed to be things slow down, and I think that maybe in those minute God is giving us just a minute glimpse of what eternity is really like.

At the beginning of the book of Acts, the disciples go up with Jesus to the mountaintop as he ascends into heaven, and it could be that for them this was just one of those sorts of moments. I say that because as Jesus ascends into heaven, messengers from heaven appear to ask them why they are staring into the sky. Heaven comes down to meet them in that moment, not because it wants them to stay, but to impel them forward. Just as the two messengers ask why they are standing there looking to heaven, it is good for us to always ask in these moments just where it is that we are going, because those glimpses are always a preparation for something else. For the Apostles it was the moment when they returned to Jerusalem to await the Holy Spirit. In my moment it was about returning home to prepare to enter the novitiate. These moments that we remember so vividly I think often point us to the future precisely by allowing ourselves to live in the present. Those moments can give us the times that we recall in later days to push us through into the future.

Matt, Joe (with all the academic bling) and I at the end of
the day.. (Thank God I found an exercise bike a few months
later...)

At the end of that day, I stood up on the quad at Holy Cross with my two closest friends that year and had lunch, after I had handed in the cap and gown and I packed up the old Volvo and headed out. As the car drove down Mt. St. James I have to admit it was a weird feeling, and I may have welled up a little, but it was time to leave the mountaintop, and get ready for a new mission.

The Boulevard: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 11 out of 30

2011-03-05T23:24:00.000+01:00

There is a diner on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester that is, almost single-handedly, responsible for my need to drop a bunch of weight during the novitiate. The Boulevard is an old train car turned into a diner that is open 24 hours a day, you can get breakfast anytime, or in my case, a hamburger, fries, and a coke. It got to the point during my senior year that when my friends and I walked in, the burger would go on the grill without my having to say a word. It should come as no shock then that on our last morning at Holy Cross, after the sun had risen over Mt. St. James, that we piled into my friend Matt's car and drove down to the diner for breakfast. The windows were rolled down as we peeled down College St. for one last time. We were all incredibly sleep deprived after two weeks of celebrating our impending graduation, and everything seemed funny at the time. It was the beginning of a brilliant May morning, and we were off to the diner one last time.

I remember the glow of the early morning light reflecting off of the metal top of old quonset hut turned field house, and the bleary eyes of a few of my friends as they walked back from the field where we have all just watched the sun-rise, since most of them hadn’t slept. Of course, when we arrived at the diner we weren’t the only ones with this idea, and so we sat down at the counter, instead of our regular table, and settled in for breakfast. The thing that I remember most about that morning was not what I ate, not what was said, the thing I remember the most about that morning was the sense that it was full of the possibility of something new. We were all on the edge of a big change in life, but it seemed most important to honor our friendship by having one last meal together before everyone arrived later in the day.

One last trip down to the Diner before the real events of the day began. Having gone now through the normal 3 changes of mission that every Jesuit goes through by this time in formation I have become pretty aware of what it takes to transition well, and what some of the pitfalls of moving on can be. There is a sense in which you do have to grieve a little, and a bigger sense in which you have to have the courage to move on. I love that stereotypical way to encourage someone in Italian is to say “corragio,” courage, because in these moments that is exactly what is needed. Moving on from a place isn’t easy, and in the moments before it, it is always important to spend time with the people that have meant the most in the places that have meant the most. That morning it wasn’t that the food was so exceptionally good at the dinner, though it was good, it was that one last time we were there together in a space that meant something to us, because we had spent so many nights there hashing out all of the world’s problems, but more importantly, relishing the friendship that we shared.

I have been back to the Boulevard since, and it should be no shock that it just doesn’t feel the same. Everything changes and our experiences, when they are our best experiences, are never really about the burgers or fries, or the old tin train car, they are about the people that we have been blessed to share them with.

The Shoreline: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 10 out of 30

2011-03-04T17:47:00.000+01:00

It was just about a month away from my graduation from Holy Cross, and I was driving a minivan with 7 other undergrads down towards the southern shore of Virginia. Our destination was the peacock motor-inn, where we would meet the community organizers from District 10, where we would be doing service for the week.

That week we helped clean up a house that had burnt down, we tore down a porch that had rotted away from an older woman’s house, and tutored the children at the local Baptist church. That time tutoring would be the one and only time I have ever attempted to teach math. During the course of that week, though, one of the members of the community who was most welcoming to us was a man named John, who had organized a good number of the projects, and showed us around the southern shore. Then there was the one night that we went down to the beach with John at sunset. There on the western shore of the bay, looking out over Chesapeake bay, we stood and watched the sun set into the water. At one point John you could just tell how proud John was of his home. Here we had come into this community that we as college kids thought was poor and in need of help, and we stood there with john on this beach at sunset and something occurred to me.

John, looking out over the bay.

The truth is that whenever one goes on one of these trips, especially when we are young, we go expecting to help someone out. We go expecting to march in and in youthful exuberance make a real difference in the work that we do there, but the only thing that ever really changes in the end is ourselves. On that beach that night I watched as John taught us something, not just about how beautiful the beach was, but about not taking things for granted. The surroundings around us can become so common place. Even living in Rome, there is something that has become commonplace about walking past the rooms that St. Ignatius used to live in, because they are here in the house. I walk past them a few times everyday to go to the dining room. Today I went for a walk with a friend and we just sort of ended up strolling down to St. Peter’s. When I lived in Boston I knew that, in its own way, even Dorcester Bay was beautiful. The question is, when faced with the extraordinary beauty that surrounds us, do we find the time to be still and be grateful in front of it?

That day, along the coastline of the eastern shore, John taught me something that I am still learning to this day, to not lose our gratitude just because the extraordinary becomes something that we normally witness, but to find ways to still be in awe and still be grateful.

The Proof: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 9 out of 30

2011-03-03T15:34:00.000+01:00

Holy Cross on one winter day, the bell tower of O'Kane Hall.

The email popped up on my Holy Cross Groupwise account one overcast winter day in Worcester. “To all philosophy majors:” it read, “This year’s Markham Prize philosophy contest topic is the existence of God.” The Markham prize was given out every year for the best essay on a chosen topic, it carried with it a nifty medal, and a cash prize.

Convinced of my own magnificence in the field of philosophy I began to sketch out my argument. I remember sitting in the old philosophy seminar room on the upper floors of O’Kane Hall sketching out my argument during a particularly boring seminar, and in one moment I found what I wanted to say. There on top of a large oak table I sat scribbling on a legal pad as the pale light of an overcast day spilled in through the gabled window. I got home to my room in Lehigh Hall and began to type, and type, and type. I spent all night on it, and I remember sitting at my desk, which faced the window and from which you could see the chapel, as the sun rose over the other side of the hill and lit up the cross on top of the chapel, turning it a bright gold.

I had done it. I was convinced that I had proven, in a new way, the existence of God. I sat there and soaked it all in. I thought to myself… I am just that good. I followed the contest rules, put a fake name on the cover (I think I even had the audacity to take the pseudonym Neo-Thomas, as in the new Thomas Aquinas) and submitted the essay. Then I waited, and waited, and waited.

The group in Mexico on the day off that we had, we were all
so young.. (I am third from the left standing)
Photo Courtesy of Laura Peynado's facebook page.

At the same time, I was applying for the Mexico program that Holy Cross had for that following summer. I t was two weeks in the south of Mexico going from one little village to another, spending time among the poor and listening to their stories. I was all set to go, but the problem was that it cost $1400, and I had fundraised nothing. The truth was that I found it hard to approach people to ask for money. We had always been raised to be self-reliant in my family, you do our best to make your way and only if you absolutely have to, you turn to immediate family, and only to immediate family. There is value in having that sort of work ethic, it has been the source of a great deal of good in my life, but it can also be a temptation. That kind of thinking can also sometimes lead us to a place of arrogance, to a place where one feels that they can always make their own way on their own. I was definitely there. I would make my own way, I would find my own way to go on this trip, I didn’t even want to ask my parents for money. It very well could have meant that in the end I wouldn’t have been able to go on the trip, but then grace intervened.

With three days to go before the deadline to get money in for the trip to Mexico, I went to my mailbox in the student center. I went down the small back hallway where my mailbox was, put in the code, and saw a letter sitting there that had come through campus post. It was from the Dean. I had never received a letter from the dean before. In truth I had never had reason to hear from the Dean. I had always done all of my work, passed all of my exams, maintained a good GPA, why now? With some fear, I opened the letter. “Dear Michael,” it read, “Congratulations, I am pleased to inform you that…” I had almost forgotten about the contest, I was so nervous about not being able to pay for the Mexico trip. The letter continued to tell me that I had won, and that there would be an awards ceremony in a week’s time. The first words out of my mouth were the first words of the Benedictus. I am not being super sappy here, that is true. I had been using the office for prayer for a long time at that point and “Blessed be the Lord” was the first thing to come out of my mouth. I ran down to the philosophy department, where the secretary told me, “You know that you just won $2000 right?” Relief flooded over me, I had the money to pay to go to Mexico on our immersion trip, and everything was going to be ok.

Almost as quickly a new pride swept over me, I was all too quick to say publicly that I had proven God’s existence, which in fact I didn’t. My proof wasn’t that great, it was just better than the other ones that the committee read. After I put it down and read it years later I have actually become ashamed of it a little, and looking at it I am humbled by the folly of my own pride. What happened? I went to Mexico.

Fording a river in Mexico...while in the back of a truck.

The irony of that essay was that the prize that I won for writing it provided me with the money to go to a place and be among a people who, in ways both joyful and sorrowful, rendered my answers useless. One of the great joys of finding faith, of finding God, is that we feel like we have found the pearl of great price. When we arrive in that new place we feel like we have gained no small measure of wisdom for having done that, and that is true. The problem becomes when we use that pride, knowledge, and wisdom the way that the Pharisees did. Our words become weapons rather than invitations; our words become judgments rather than proclamations. Mine certainly did for a long time. The question always has to be one of whether we find ourselves humbled enough by our knowledge of the scriptures and traditions of the Church to let them be things which help people experience the love of God or whether we are made foolishly proud by what is a only really ever a miniscule knowledge of the divine.

The truth is that my pride became its own undoing, and that is something that can only be attributed to grace. I thought I knew the answers, I thought that I could give reasons to an unbelieving world. That is why I wrote that essay, but in the prize I received I found questions which I struggle with to this very day. In front of the face of the poor and suffering the pride of my own answers faded, and the fidelity and love of God that I encountered in so many who had so little made me begin to want to know who this person was more and more, not in the context of a book, but in the context of relationship. As the Benedictus says, in that moment I was set free.

By the way, to further illustrate the point above, here is a link to that essay.

The Airport Run: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 8 out of 30

2011-03-02T22:53:00.001+01:00

Logan airport.

It was the break from our Ignatian Spirituality class senior year. Joe P, Brian, Matt, and I were talking in the kitchen of Fr. William Reiser, S.J.’s house down in the middle of Worcester, when Fr. Reiser came up to me to ask a favor. A Jesuit from France was going to be arriving at Logan airport for a talk at Holy Cross the following week, would I mind driving to the airport to pick him up? Bill didn’t give me much other than a name, Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J., and the time that his flight would be arriving, 2:30pm. I agreed to do it, and asked my friend Matt and then Jesuit novice (now Fr.) Charlie Gallagher if they would like to join me. We made the hour-long trip to the airport and sat in the Sam Adam’s Pub for lunch while we waited. We looked out over the tarmac, and when the Airfrance flight came in we quickly paid for the fried clams that we had been eating and ran down to arrivals.

I had made a sign on Microsoft word that said “Fr. Calvez” on it, and a small man in a big coat turned the corner, looked up at us, and the sign and waved. Introductions were made, Fr. Calvez told us that Fr. Reiser had told him that a young man applying to the Society was going to pick him up. Matt grabbed his small suitcase and he and Charlie began talking about all of the Jesuits that they knew in common as we walked towards the car.

This is the same model and color as my old car. Sadly I couldn't
find an actual picture of it though.

My car was a navy blue 1993 Volvo 850 GLT (that’s right, the sports model) It had been my father’s for 8 years before he more or less gave it to me at the beginning of my senior year of college. At this point in the spring of 2002, this car wasn’t particularly elegant, but the seats were still leather and it was still comfortable for the ride back to Worcester. We put Fr. Calvez’s suitcase in the trunk and got into the car. As we made our way out of the airport traffic began to pick up. This was back in the days before the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston, and getting back and forth through the Sumner and Callahan Tunnels could be something of a chore. As we sat there, under the harbor, in the tunnel, Fr. Calvez asked me a simple question: “So Michael, what theology classes are you taking this semester?” I answered: “Well Father, I am taking Jesuit Spirituality and Vatican II Theology.” Fr. Calvez quickly responded: “Very interesting, I was at the council you know.” “No Fr. Calvez, I didn’t know that, what did you do at the council?”

This turned out to be the first dumb question that I asked, I expected an answer like “I got coffee,” or “I was a page.” With all gentility and humor, Fr. Calvez responded: “I worked on a document.” My second dumb question: “Really Father, which document?” I expected to hear one of the more minor documents and that he had just advised in the writing of it. He responded: “I wonder if you have heard of it, it is called Gaudium et Spes, my friend Karol and I wrote most of it.”

STOP for a minute; let’s just break down that statement. 1) Gaudium et Spes, arguably the most important, revolutionary, beautifully written, document of the council. Inarguably in the top four in all categories because it is one of the four Constitutions, the four most authoritative documents, of the council. (2) His friend Karol. You likely know this polish friend of Jean by a different name, John Paul II.

Fr. Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J.

OK, so to recap, at this point I realized that this diminutive French Jesuit riding around Boston in the back seat of a college kid’s second hand Volvo is none other than one of the more important figures of the Church in the 20^th century and a personal friend of the Vicar of Christ. Now, to be fair, Bill Reiser’s sense of humor calls for such a thing. He knew that I would be gracious to our honored guest and that the conveyance would be comfortable enough, but he also knew that as the car ride progressed eventually it would be revealed who this man was, and none of us, including Charlie who was a Jesuit Novice and Church Historian, would have guessed it.

The rest of that ride Fr. Calvez glad regaled us with interesting stories of the council and of his “friend,” andwe hung off of every word. He spoke in a generous and gracious manner that was not at all patronizing, but in fact very interested in what the three of us thought. Here is a man who, in part, wrote one of the most important documents of the history of the Church, and yet his name appears nowhere on it. He was a friend of the pope, and yet two college kids and a novice picked him up at the airport. He was obviously known as a great scholar among scholars, but the three of us had no clue as to who was about to sit in that back seat when we arrived at Logan Airport that morning.

I think I learned two lessons that day. The first is the old, trite lesson, that one should never guess a book by its cover. To look at the man you would have never known that he was who he was, and while I certainly didn’t think poorly of him before I met him, it only became apparent that rather than my doing Fr. Reiser a favor by picking Fr. Calvez up, Fr. Reiser was actually doing me a favor by giving me time to pick the brain of this intellectual giant of the Church. The second lesson is much more profound, and one which I carry with me more and more. In this life we often want to leave a legacy behind, but the question is to what end? There is a church here in Rome that has over the tomb of a cardinal the inscription “Here lies dust, ashes, and nothing.” That might be a little extreme, but what might be more important in this context is just this; we can live for our glory and leave our name behind, or we can choose to live for God’s glory and do some remarkable things in the service of the Kingdom of God.

Fr. Calvez counted his greatest achievement as something that he isn’t given credit for, but that has changed the way that we think about the Church in the world, particularly in its relation to the poor. His telling us wasn’t to publicize it, but to start one of the most amazing discussions about it that I have ever had, for obvious reasons. In our lives we can be famous for doing nothing, as many Hollywood non-actresses and heiresses prove. Fame means nothing and fades. Eventually all that is left is dust, ashes, and nothing. Sometimes the greatest works of our lives are the ones done in anonymity, those things that we do not seeking reward for ourselves but the betterment of all, or more importantly the greater glory of God. Besides, how often do you get to change the world just by sitting, writing, sometimes arguing, and learning with your old friend Karol?

The Nap: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 7 out of 30

2011-03-01T23:43:00.003+01:00

Where this nap took place.

I shouldn't have been able to fall asleep. The seat that I was sitting on was really nothing more than a short stool with a back on it. It was very uncomfortable. There were 5000 people all around me. Bright fluorescent lights filled the room with a light that assaulted the senses. Thee space itself resembled something of a cross between a boat and a spaceship, and there were guards around that woke up people that they saw snoozing.

Somehow, I fell asleep. There with 5000 people mulling around, I managed to fall asleep. With a group of my college friends around, I slipped into unconsciousness. As much as I fought the urge to do so, I kept feeling my eyes get heavy, and my head began to nod.

The Audience Hall, from the front.

This wasn't just any place to fall asleep in either, this was the Pope Paul VI audience hall, and now soon to be Blessed John Paul II was praying the Rosary. In fairness, I was 17, and I had just gotten off of a plane from the US hours before. Although my body should have thought that it was somewhere around one in the afternoon at the 7pm Rosary that John Paul II used to hold, the truth is that the red-eye out of Logan Airport and the night spent trying to sleep on a plane had taken its toll. I clutched in my hands the rosary that I had bought outside and tried to keep up, even as my eyes began to close under the irresistible weight. I looked up at the stage at the front of the hall and saw the man that many have already acclaimed a saint kneeling in front of the statue of Christ emerging from the tree of life, and I fell asleep.

I think it was my friend Joe who woke me up, I had fallen asleep during the first decade, and the Pope was now just saying the Salve Regina, it was over. Joe whispered in my ear, "Mikey, I would have let you sleep, but when you started snoring.. well." "Thanks Joe," I muttered, my eyes still half shut. I sat up in the chair disappointed, I had just missed praying the rosary with the Pope, and I was more than a little ashamed.

The truth is, of course, that in retrospect there was little to be ashamed about. What had happened was perfectly normal, and human, and understandable. I am sure that I am not the only one in our group who nodded off, and the likes of Joe, Erin, Dave, and Mary Clare who were all there and might read this, can let me know if I am right. St. Theresa of Avila famously once said something like falling asleep in prayer is the surest sign of surrender to God. If that is true, then that night the surrender was unconditional.

(almost) Bl. John Paul II... yep he was
praying the rosary during this nap....

The truth is that sometimes in the moment we make too much of something simple, or we can demand too much of ourselves. To have stayed awake obviously would have been preferable, but at the same time, that night I sadly didn't have it in me. I remember, as a 17 year old, being disappointed that I had missed out on that night, but also feeling somehow guilty about not being able to stay up for that rosary. The truth is that in that strange way that only a college kid can think of themselves as the center of the universe, I honestly thought I had been disrespectful to the Pope.

12 years ago this week, I feel asleep in the audience hall at the Vatican. So what? The next time I was in that hall was 6 months ago, when I went in the hall this time in a freshly pressed suit and clerical collar and sat right up front, because I was now a Jesuit. The truth is that in life (and I do this even still now) we can make too big of a deal out of something that is really nothing.

We need to remember that we are always in front of the God who made us, who knows our resting and rising, who knows us well enough to know where our hearts are and to know what fills our desires. We are going to be subject to our own frailties, and sometimes we'll even make bad choices. We need to be patient enough with ourselves and trusting enough in God to know that in those moments where we nod off God delights in our being just as he created us. We need to remember that we are not nearly so powerful, or even important in some sense, to think that in those moments where we really do fall down, that we would be able to make God stop being loving and forgiving. It took a long time for me to realize that, as St. Paul tells us, nothing can separate me from the love of God. In no small part because of confession, not even the things that we do can really separate us from the love of God, a lesson that I have learned all too well over and over again. Sometimes we just need to relax. God didn't make us to be perfect, he made us to be in relationship with him. The God who knows us better than we know ourselves delights in who we are, and always welcomes us home. This is the same God that I am pretty sure was fine with my falling asleep that night. For my own sake, though, the next time you see me sleeping in Paul VI hall, wake me up!

The Bus Trip: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 6 out of 30

2011-02-28T21:26:00.002+01:00

This wasn't our actual bus... but it didn't look too different.

There was a moment when I was 15 that began to unfold some 20 years, or more, earlier. It was a beautiful summer day, and my mother told me to pack my bag because the family was going to the house that she shared with her sisters down in Rhode Island for the weekend. That much was true, the family was going to the house in Rhode Island for the weekend, and I would go to the house in Westerly for a couple of minutes and then get back into the car to go to the Church. When we arrived at the parking lot of St. Pius X parish I saw a large coach bus. The lot was also filled with a bunch of high school kids, some looked excited, others reluctant, and there was one with a surprised look on his face.

That surprised look on my face came from the fact that I really knew very little about what was going on. I knew that the parish that we used to go to during the summers in my mom’s hometown had an active youth group. I knew that they went on a trip to Ohio every year; I had heard that it was 15 hours, one way, on a bus. I also knew that at that time that I wasn’t sure that I wanted much to do with it. My mother shoved into my hands a small box that had my well under-used rosary in it and a bible that had been bought a week before (which still sits on my desk to this day) and I was off.

15 hours there, on a bus. Connecticut seemed endless, Pennsylvania, infinite. Initially out of boredom, I began talking with a few of the other kids on the bus. It turned out that one, who subsequently became one of my better friends in High School, was someone I had played with as a child and that his family lived across the street from my grandparents. Two others whom I befriended had my opinions about the weekend, if we were on a bus at least there were cute girls along for the ride too. (A thought shared by many 15 year old boys on that bus I am sure.) Very quickly I started noticing that the last names were names that I had heard growing up, it turns out that these were all the children of my Mom’s friends… and we were all being shipped off together to Ohio.

Somewhere about 11 hours into the trip we stopped as a Shoney’s outside of Pittsburgh for Breakfast. Among the deliriously tired was my friend Mike, who when asked whether he wanted chocolate or white milk could only respond “White is nice!” My friend Colin laughed so hard that I thought the milk that they had just brought him would end up shooting out of his nose. My friend Frank was too asleep to even notice. So we sat and ate what was the greasiest, least nutritious, meal of my life and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. "Well," I thought, "at least I got some new friends out of this."

About four hours later the bus crossed the river from West Virginia into Ohio. I looked down at the brown, muddy expanse of the river, and up at the hills on the other side, and as the bus pulled in I saw a giant Red and White Circus tent, and a couple of thousand of other teenagers mulling about. Most were surrounding a Domino’s pizza trailer that we were told had free pizza for everyone. It was then that I thought that this actually could be ok.

We got off the bus, unrolled sleeping bags on a racquetball court and took showers after our long bus ride. Then we all went down under the main circus tent, and people were singing about, of all things, Jesus. Almost immediately I began to be afraid, I called my mother later that night to tell her that I had walked into some kind of cult… I asked what I was doing there, and more importantly told her that I needed to come home, quickly.

I suppose that at this point this story warrants some explanation. Yes, I was still an altar boy in the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of High School. Yes I did always do well in theology class, and yes I would have comfortably described myself as Catholic. However, there was something comfortable about my Catholicism. Being an altar boy meant $20 every other Saturday for serving weddings. Getting good grades in theology was just what was expected in my house growing up. Sure my Dad prayed with us before we went to bed, but as a high school kid this was quickly replaced with the new ritual of watching TV before bed. I was Catholic, sure, but it was comfortable. It was just easier to be Catholic than not and more than likely, at the pace I was going, once college rolled around Sunday mornings would become a time to sleep in rather than go to church. My parents could sense this and they turned to an old friend to help.

The Padre himself.

When my parents were both attending Providence College they had a friend named Ray Suriani, and while they were planning on getting married, he was beginning to think about entering the seminary. As fate, or rather providence, would have it he ended up as the associate pastor of my mom’s home parish years later, and they reconnected instantly. Fr. Ray came to a parish that had had two very holy, but very old, priests. Instantly he was able to connect with the young adults and teenagers of the parish, and began taking groups on pilgrimages. When one of those pilgrimages fell through they started taking this bus out to Steubenville, Ohio every year for the youth conference. My mother turned to an old friend that she had met years before for help, and he invited me along.

Given this, it is not surprise that my mother told me to stick with it when I told her over the phone that I was at a cult meeting. I thought she was the worst mother in the world when she told me that I couldn’t come home immediately. In truth, I am not sure how exactly I would have made it home anyway; 15 year olds don’t think this stuff through. So I stayed, and the next morning I sat next to Colin, Frank, and Mike under the big tent, and started dancing to the music at first to impress some random girls who were nearby, and then I found myself actually letting go and beginning to enjoy it. Later in the day I listened to some talks about living a Catholic life as a teenager and went to confession. Still hedging my bets, I thought to myself: "Sure I will go to confession I haven’t gone in a couple of years and this priest will never see me again so why not?" Then Saturday night came.

One of my Christology professors at the Gregorian says that all faith begins in an encounter, and he is right of course. If faith begins with an encounter, then in a real sense, my faith began that night. I am not sure if I can explain or describe what happened that night under that tent. There is a famous story that one day St. Augustine was walking along the shore taking a break from writing a book on the Trinity and saw a young boy using a shell to pour water from the Mediterranean into a little hole that he had dug in the sand. When Augustine asked the young boy what he was doing, the boy responded, “Trying to empty the sea into this hole.” Augustine smiled and told the boy gently that that was impossible. The boy responded, “so is trying to understand the Trinity.” That Saturday night is much like what the story describes, it would be impossible to really say what happened, other than that for the first time in my life I had an encounter with God. There was Eucharistic adoration and singing, but somehow I just became aware that God was alive, real, and wanted to love me, if I would let him. That moment was a turning point in my life without which I would not be here. I knew in my heart who the living God was, and at 15 I wanted to follow Him, whatever the cost.

One of the youth group meetings, I am not in this picture,
though I recognize the miscreants who are. :)

Of course the truth of life in faith is that it is not sustained by one simple moment, and as much as faith is a response of commitment to the one who we know loves us, that commitment is not without struggle. I needed to find some support. I began going to the youth group meetings, and made some friends that helped me to sustain me through high school and college. Beyond Colin, Mike, and Greg, there I would meet my friends Adam, Stephanie, Kara, Greg, Kristin, Melissa, Jaimie, Maria, Kendra, Lisa, and Beth. The truth is that for most of my teenage and college years, my mother’s friend, Fr. Ray, was there to help me sort it all out. Even now, having been a Jesuit for 8 years, his support and prayers have helped to sustain my vocation. I am also certainly not the only person to come from St. Pius X Parish, where he has been Pastor for a while now, with that story.

At the beginning of the book of the Prophet Jeremiah, God says to Jeremiah. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” It is amazing to think that before my parents were even married their simple decision and Fr. Ray’s decision to go to Providence College shaped this crucial point in my life. This was one of the most important moments of my life, without which I very much doubt that I would be who I am today. In each of our lives there are those people and those moments. There behind it all is providence, the divine hand of God, leading us in love to those moments even long before we exist, where we can choose to find him, to know him, and to love him. From that knowledge and love comes a service, and like Fr. Ray couldn’t have known that saying yes to taking this non-chalant kid from outside of his parish along on a retreat for the weekend would have meant that that kid would become a Jesuit, none of us can never know the immeasurable good that God wants to work through us.

The Famous Foosball Table (Version 2, now with video evidence) : 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 5 out of 30

2011-02-27T19:36:00.003+01:00

I can’t remember when it occurred to us that putting a foosball table in a college dorm room would be a good idea. What I do remember is that we found one on eBay, and then had to pay a courier company to lug it up Mt. St. James to our dorm room in Lehigh Hall. The day that the table arrived a large green 16 wheeler somehow made its way through the windy streets of campus and to the street behind the dorms known as Easy St., because it was one of the few flat streets on campus, to drop off the foosball table. Once it was dropped in the middle of my bedroom, the assembly happened rather quickly, and the ball dropped for the first game of foosball. My roommate John had a table as a kid, and was already very good. I played my first game on crutches; I was just recovering from a broken ankle the story of which I will tell later on. From then on, however, the foosball table played a central roll in my life for the next couple of years.

Yes, for Junior and Senior year of college, I had a foosball table in my room with all of the immeasurable joy that it brought with it. Thursday nights during senior year, the guys would assemble in my room, drink beer, and play foosball. Rather than hitting the bars or partying, we stayed in my dorm room, and enjoyed each other’s company. Quickly these nights became known as foos and booze (though the sheer amount of booze wasn’t really all that much) and we would often times invite special guests. The games really became a medium for something much more important though, it was an excuse to get together, to talk, to share what was going on in our lives. As the real world began to encroach upon our idyllic existence at college students at Holy Cross, it gave us a few hours every week to stop thinking about the future and just live in the present.

For my friend Brian and his roommate Tim, who would become a Naval officers at the end of the year, it meant that they didn’t have to think about the possibility that they could be deploying to war after the summer was over. For my friend Joe P, it afforded some time off of thinking about his Senior thesis. For my friends Pat and Tom, it was a time when they didn't have to worry about their applications to PhD. programs (Both of them, being super-geniuses, have long since become Drs. Pat and Tom) For my roommate Joe H, it was a time just to enjoy college, and for my friend Matt, it was a time when he just didn’t have to think about the next step. For me, this was a time when I didn’t have to be “the kid becoming a priest” and just be with my friends.

We were often cautious about who we invited, in fact some friends of ours once told us that they were bothered by the fact that they were never invited, but the truth is that this wasn’t ever about exclusion. What these Thursday nights were about a time to be together, and just be. There was a sense that among us, in our own group, we could just be ourselves, and be real and honest with each other, and more importantly just have fun. What made the whole thing so enjoyable, though ,was that in a period of time in someone’s life where their every thought is supposed to be in the future, we were living in the present, if only for a few hours every Thursday night.

There can be something very dangerous about living in the future. Certainly it is irresponsible not to make plans and it is equally irresponsible to not live up the commitments that we have made today tomorrow, but if one lives one’s whole life in the future, one risks missing the most important moment, right now. St. Therese of Lisuex once wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Story of a Soul, that: “When we yield to discouragement it is usually because we give too much thought to the past and to the future.” The truth its that the past is over, and sometimes when it has been, like it has been for most of us, an imperfect one we can give ourselves over to worrying about it too much. Given where I was heading back then, if I had thought too much of the past and all of the things I had messed up in my life, I am not sure that I would have had the courage to go forward. At the same time, if I had put too much thought into the future, I could have had the doubts that even St. Ignatius had at the beginning, and would have asked myself how I intended to live this kind of life for the next 70 years.

The irony is, that if we can just focus on the present, then we can see our past as grace history, not because it was perfect or that everything went perfectly, but because of the people and experiences that have made it precious. In that moment we can be grateful to God for having brought us this far, even if we are in the middle of a tough moment, because we have made it this far. The other irony about focusing on the present is that we can live in hope, and not in fear, because if we can see how good God is in the present, even in the most mundane of realities, we can trust that that will hold true no matter where we go, who we meet, or what we are to become.

On those Thursday nights, I could be grateful for having met Joe P on a service trip to Narrows, VA. I could remember with joy meeting Brian at the incoming students reception for students from near Hartford. I could put faith in the fact that God could put people in my life who would have been unlikely friends because of the different social circles that we had been in the first three years of college in Matt. I could be grateful for a great roommate like Joe H. This was a graced history. It was also because of those little moments of the present that when that foosball dropped onto the table for the first time every Thursday, the years ahead became all the more hopeful.

The Purple Birthday Cake: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 4 out of 30

2011-02-26T17:01:00.001+01:00

What most Americans can remember of their 21^st birthday, if in fact they can remember it, does not include a particular emphasis on their birthday cake. I remember mine well, however. It was purple, and had a bible on it. It was specially made for the occasion and ordered by Dean Joe Maguire, a man who was legendary in his own right.

Dean Joe Maguire

Joe had been a Dean at Holy Cross for years, and lived in one of the residence halls. He wore purple, the school’s color, everyday. He had his own table at the local Chuck’s Steak House that they had painted a purple Holy Cross banner above, and was such a fixture at Holy Cross that alums from years before would stop in to visit with him all the time. He counted the local bishop and most of the local clergy among his friends. In so many wonderful ways Joe was larger than life, and it was his work that would establish an education department at Holy Cross, and guide many young people through the years to be excellent teachers.

The morning of my birthday, my phone rang, it was Dean Joe on the other end “Young Man.” the voice bellowed, “there is something here for you.” The night before my friend Kelly had taken me out for my first legal beer at midnight at Mahoney’s in Worcester, so I was still a little groggy when I picked up the phone. “Umm ok Joe, can I get it when we go out for dinner??” A loud laugh came over the other end of the phone “Enjoying our 21^st last night… were we??”

Later that night my family drove up to Holy Cross from Connecticut and we went, along with Joe and my two friends Matt and another Joe, to O’Connors Restaurant in nearby west Boylston. I had the fish and chips and the beer sampler, which conveniently put 4 beers on one shamrock shaped tray for you to sample the various kinds that they had. Before, though, we picked up Joe from the house he was living in nearby in Auburn, and there on his coffee table was a large cake box.

My 21st Birthday Cake.

Joe was famous for his ordering of cakes. A friend of his was very talented at making them, so whenever one of us had a milestone coming up, Joe would order a cake that had some sort of significance for us, but they almost always were purple. The cake itself was chocolate, and melted in my mouth as soon as I took a bite. This was the sort of thing that Joe was famous for, unwarranted generosity and love and a desire to celebrate the very best things in life. When Joe died the following October, the Old Testament reading at his funeral was the vision of the Kingdom of God from Isaiah that included “choice wines and juicy meats,” and it was all too appropriate.

Sometimes we assume that the image of the saints is supposed to be of austere people, the ones who fast, who always look just a little discontented because they are here on earth and not in heaven. That does the saints a disservice. Sure there is time to fast, and certainly, as St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God,” but we need to pay attention to the moments in our lives where if we were just conscious enough of the world around us, we just might be able to rest in God in the here and now.

What we always knew about Joe was that, for no particular reason, he loved us. He would say it all the time, and it was so apparent that he was that way with the students who chose to befriend him that it often was uncomfortable to a world that didn’t want to believe that love could be genuine and without condition. These moments of joy that we shared with Joe proved the opposite to be true. All of this was rooted in Joe’s deep faith, and the simple truth is that is was his relationship with God that gave him the strength to love and that also gave him a joy to be able to celebrate.

That purple birthday cake is the one detail that stands out from my 21^st birthday, not because of its unique color, the bible painted on it, or even the amazing taste. What stands out most in my memory is the lesson that a great teacher taught me through it, that when we can love without condition, there is always something to celebrate.

30 Days, 30 Years, 30 Stories... Day 3 out of 30.

2011-02-25T18:38:00.001+01:00

Catcus, Pizza, and Listening for God. Day 3/30

The Cypress Forest on Monte Pellegrino

I stopped for just a second to take a picture. The sun was setting beyond the horizon of the small mountain that was maybe a quarter of a mile away. The wind was sweeping up the hillside from the Mediterranean below, whispering through the cypress trees. The last rays of light caught a small cactus by the side of the road and turned its needles to gold. It was quiet, and when I looked up I saw that the group that I was with had moved on and were already 200 yards ahead. There in the quiet, on Monte Pellegrino, high above the noise and confusion of Palermo, I found a moment of peace, and it was like a salve to my soul. There in the whispers of the cypress and the golden needles of the cactus I sensed the presence of God, and it was all because I stopped for a second to take a picture.

The Cactus by the side of the road.

Often enough in each of our lives we have invitations to these moments, and it doesn’t need to be in an exotic location. Sometimes in my house I walk by one of our small side chapels and feel drawn in. Other times I could be walking to school and stumble across a quiet, empty, beautiful little piazza in Rome. When I lived in Boston, it would often enough be the in the sun rising in the morning over Dorchester Bay, lighting up Umass Boston across the street and turning what I thought was otherwise an architecturally ugly building a bright rose color. At my parent’s house it can be something as simple as looking up at the stars as a fire is burning in the fire pit. Sometimes we just have moments where we’re invited into the quiet, and we need to relish them, particularly in our noisy world.

I often brag to people back home about being able to see the Campodoglio out of my bedroom window, or that I live right in the middle of Rome. The truth is, though, that despite the ideal location, it is very noisy. When I was in high school and college I would fill every spare moment with noise. When Napster came on line, and before I was self reflective enough to know it was stealing, I was one of the first to have filled their computer’s hard drive with music, which would be playing all the time. (All of it has long since been deleted.) When I went out around campus, I would almost always have headphones on, or want to be talking to someone. Now, in many ways I have discovered that I can be jealous of those moments like the one I had on top of Monte Pellegrino, spaces of quiet, where I can just listen. St. Rosalia left Palermo, found a cave on the mountain, and lived and died there as a hermit, in the silence with God, and I understand why she might.

This is actually a picture that I took in that moment with my
old camera by Lake Casenovia.

Rewind to a moment in the summer of 2003, in Casenovia, NY. After having just made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, having just spent 30 days praying in silence along the Atlantic Ocean in Gloucester, MA, I was just learning how to appreciate these quiet moments. Sitting by a beautiful lake at sunset, I was soaking in the silence and listening for the voice of God when I heard: “ROGERS!!!!! PIZZA’S HERE!!!!!” Rather than hearing the voice of God I heard the voice of another novice yelling down to me to come up and get dinner. I have to admit that in that moment I was annoyed with my brother in the Society, but later that night I realize something important. The dinner that I ate with those guys that night was wonderful. We laughed; we talked for hours, and all of this over a few slices of pizza that could have been eaten quickly. The truth is, I enjoyed that night more than I might have otherwise. Communion with God draws us into communion with others. If we can take those moments to enter into the silence and listen to God, we can find the way to embrace that same silence with others so that we can genuinely hear them and listen.

Back to the present. Ignatius prayed on the roof of this house, in the dead center of Rome even back then, every night. Even with the bustle below, he heard the voice of God when he would go out of the door from his room on to the small balcony that was over the roof to pray. Now I often go to a spot nearby to do that same thing, and when my phone rings and it is a friend inviting me to go watch a movie or sit and talk for a while, I can do so knowing that I am being drawn into much the same reality I had just been enjoying.

Little Chocolate Donuts: Day 2 of 30.

2011-02-24T18:18:00.003+01:00

Little Chocolate Donuts

30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories.

Day 2/30

Little Chocolate Donuts, the Breakfast of Champions.

When I was in high school, I would be woken up every morning at a quarter 'till six by my father. During the baseball season, invariably there were two things that were options for that day to wake me up. Either "Sox Win, Sox Win!" or "Sox Lose, Sox Lose." Immediately every morning, I knew the result of the baseball game that had been on too late for me to possibly consider staying up for it. On rare occasions, when my favorite team had lost in a particularly horrendous manner, as they had the tendency to do when I was younger, I would hear simply.... "Poor Red Sox." That was just how my day would begin.

My Breakfast in High School.

   After this greeting I would shuffle into the shower, attempt to gain consciousness, get dressed and head downstairs. On a daily basis there, wrapped up and on the counter for me already, would be one and a half little chocolate donuts, a glass of Orange Juice, and to make up for the donuts, a vitamin. I would always chug the juice and vitamin, grab the donuts wrapped up in silver tin foil, and head out the door to the already waiting car. Every morning on his way to work, whether it was warm or cold, dry or raining, my dad would drive me to the bus stop, so that I could get 20 minutes more of sleep, and then stay there with me for another 10 minutes or so until the bus came, in the warm heated car so that I would never have to be cold. Every morning we would listen to the local morning radio show from 96.5 WTIC FM, and then when the bus came rolling down the street, I would hop out of the car and on to the bus. Not, however, before consuming that little chocolate donut, which Jon Belushi had declared years before to be the breakfast of champions.
   When you are in high school it is hard to realize what someone is doing for you, and even heading into college it is very easy to forget that you're really not entitled to much of anything yet in life. None of us have really earned anything when we are young, everything in our life is gift, and I suspect that God is trying to communicate something about the world and about his love for us through that. It is pretty easy to focus on the big things in our lives, the dramatic moments, and the grand gestures. I wouldn't dare not thank my parents for paying for college, and it's not hard to be grateful to the friends who organize birthday parties, or be grateful when someone gratuitously takes on a burden for you. It is harder to be grateful in those small moments though. It is harder to be grateful when it is something routine, something that we come to expect. In fact, I am not sure if I have ever, before now, really expressed my gratitude to my father for all of those mornings waiting for the bus to Northwest Catholic High School.
   So, thank you Dad. Thank you for getting up earlier than you had to to get me up. Thank you for going downstairs and wrapping those little chocolate donuts in tin foil for me so that I could take them to the car. Thank you for convincing Mom to buy little chocolate donuts because, despite Jim Belushi's wonderful claim, they weren't exactly full of the kind of sensible nutrition that caution would call for, but boy were they tasty. Thank you, most of all, for not making me hike up that big hill or stand in the cold every morning before school, and more importantly for enjoying that time in the car with me early on weekday mornings.
   It is unfortunately all too often the case that we aren't really grateful for the little things that we take to be routine. I wasn't as grateful for those mornings as a kid as I should have been. Yet, what I took to be routine I know now was really anything but. Waking up earlier than me, being ready when he woke me up so that he could move me along, putting out breakfast, sitting in the car rather than getting to work. I now realize that this was no small feat. St. Therese of Liseux, in her autobiography, points out that what she really wanted to do was what Bl. Mother Theresa would later paraphrase as "little things with great love." In fact, every one of those mornings was a little thing done with great love, which in and of itself made it a great thing.
   It strikes me that this is precisely how God deals with us, a million little things with great love at every moment of our lives. From the air I breathe as I write this, to the room I sit in to write this, (which happens to be the room where St. Ignatius lived and died) to the food that I will eat later, right down to the light which will fill my window tomorrow morning to wake me up so that I can head over to the university for classes. God constantly bombards us with a million little acts of great love. The key insight of St. Ignatius here is that we have to take time each day to step back and see exactly where it has happened.
   Maybe that is the point, maybe we have to learn first in our lives how to accept grace by having everything given to us, the question then becomes one of how it is that we respond. Maybe, just maybe, if we can learn how to be grateful for those gifts we will be able to see even more where God is present in our lives. Maybe even more we can be so aware of that love that we participate in it, and that could mean something as simple as taking tin foil out of a drawer and wrapping up a little chocolate donut, which is, after all, the breakfast of champions.

30 years, 30 days, 30 stories, Day 1.

2011-02-23T21:51:00.002+01:00

30 years, 30 days, 30 stories.

On March 23rd, I will cross a big threshold, 30 years old. It has occurred to me lately that all of our stories are ultimately, if we pay enough attention, stories that are ultimately stories of grace. Over the course of the next thirty days, I want to share 30 of those stories with you.

Our Lady of the Way, Who has Always Watched My Way. Day 1 of 30.

In the beginning, for me, there were six simple words which have ever since shaped my life: "Let her bring it with her," but in fact those word were more something like "let it be." These are words the power of which I am not sure that I would ever fully realize the significance of for me until just now, "Let her bring it with her." The reality is that these thirty years that I am grateful for almost didn't happen.

The Madonna Della Strada

When my mother became pregnant with me it was dangerous to her health. The doctors cautioned bed-rest, and many doctors likely would have told her that for the purposes of her own health that she should have had an abortion. My mother never would have even considered it for a millisecond, and so it was bed rest for her, for months. The truth is that my mother's doctor likely never even mentioned the possibility that she should abort me, he was an alum of Holy Cross, where I would later go to college, and a man who had at least a sense of faith. My mother went on bed rest so that we both could live.

My Father, one day during his lunch break from work, went to the Catholic bookstore in downtown Hartford and bought a small plastic resin statue of Mary holding Jesus and put it by my mother's bed. This is a beige statue, no more than 6 inches tall that still stands in my parent's bedroom. Mary's veil is smooth, and she cradles Jesus in her arms. So when my mother was on bed rest, she would pray in front of this simple statue of Mary which stood on her night stand, and when she went to Hartford Hospital for the last days of her pregnancy, the statue came with her.

Some time early on the morning of March 23rd, 1981, my mother had a stroke. There was a code blue in the maternity ward, and rather than being taken to the delivery room, my mother was taken to the operating room. As they were taking her out of her hospital room she reached out with her good hand to grab the statue, which stood there by her bed. The nurses said "no you can't take it" but my mother clung fast to it. She had prayed. She was convinced that the Blessed Mother would hear her. Even now when her life was in danger, when she could have lost her first child, and when everything seemed at its darkest, she clung to fast to her faith, and the belief that with Mary's intercession, God couldn't refuse her what she had asked for.

It was at that moment, above the nurses objections, Dr. Stavola, her doctor, said "Let her bring it with her." Let it be... at 8:03 that morning I was born. Thirty years later my mother is still alive, still doing well, and much to the chagrin of some, she still has the gift of fortitude that allows her to stick with things through tough times, and the grace to not give up. If the story ended here, it would be a great story, but later in life, that day came to have even more meaning.

When I was young I asked my mother about that statue, because from a young age I knew how important it was to her. She told me "That is Our Lady of the Way." Whether I knew it or not, from the very beginning of my life Our Lady of the Way has been interceding for me, pushing me along, and now I live in the same building in which the ancient Icon of Our Lady of the Way is housed.

When St. Ignatius came to Rome in 1540 Pope Paul III gave him the chapel of Our Lady of the Way and from that point on, the Society of Jesus has held her as our patroness. My mother had no idea about this, she didn't really know the devotion all that well in fact. All that she did know was that she had a statue that she was told was Our Lady of the Way. That statue was always around in my house growing up, and at two other key moments in my life, it was the intercession of Mary that guided me.

The Church of the Gesù. Where the Icon is housed
and where I live.

When I was at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City after my junior year of college, praying in front of the tilma of Juan Diego, I had a deep interior sense that all of the things in my life were leading me to this life, and a little under a year later I was accepted into the novitiate. There was a moment as well when I thought of packing it in and giving up on being a Jesuit, and then it was listening patiently to the words of Mary in the gospel of Luke having the courage to say "fiat," Let it be done to me according to your will, Let it be, that I knew I couldn't do anything other than be who I am today. Years later, finally reaching the near end of this path of formation to priesthood I have come here, finally, to the Church of the Gesù to the Altar of the Madonna Della Strada, and finally with peace I can say back to the Lord along with Mary, let it be done to me according to your will.

Our histories are graced histories, if we pay enough attention to see where God has been moving. From my first moment there is a sense in which Our Lady of the Way has been watching out for me. I like to tell my mother that she has only herself to blame for me being a Jesuit, though in fact she is proud of me. The truth is, though, that reflecting on stories like these make me realize that from my first moments, providence has conspired for me, and not against me. Our Lady has watched me and prayed for me, and somehow I have been given just enough grace to realize it and be grateful.

From the Altar of Incarnation to the Altar of the Chair.

2011-02-16T03:25:00.002+01:00

When I was in 5th grade Fr. Johnson the parochial vicar at the Church of the Incarnation, our parish in Wethersfield, CT, asked if any of the boys in 5th grade and up would like to join his training sessions to become an altar server. It was a group of 10-15 of us who committed to learning the different exotic names for things like "Chalice," "Ciborium," or the ever outlandish "Monstrance," and memorizing the confiteor, and I have to say that in those afternoons in the parish I probably learned more about the liturgy than I have in the almost 20 years that I have been studying and participating in it since.
I remember that I wasn't supposed to serve the first time that I did serve the mass. I was supposed to have one more week of training, but Fr. Johnson saw a bunch of us there in the church that Sunday with our families and pulled us back into the sacristy to get ready. I also remember being terrified, because Fr. Johnson wasn't saying mass, it was Fr. Crawford. I now know that Fr. Crawford was a great man and an excellent priest, but when I was 10, all that I knew was that he was the pastor... and I didn't want to screw it up. So I stood there, on the altar, biting my lower lip, trying to remember all of the prayers. I made it through well enough, and after to celebrate my family went out for brunch. I remembered that nervousness again this past November, though.

Processing in to the Mass. I am without my customary facial
hair here, because we weren't sure whether or not it was ok at
St. Peters, and we knew that JPII wasn't a fan.

   The call came on a Monday night, one of the Jesuit Cardinals in town had died. St. Peter's Basilica had called the college looking for acolytes. (altar servers) Could we do it? It really wasn't out of any sort of merit or seniority, but really just dumb luck that meant that I got to serve on that morning. The main criteria for my selection to go to St. Peter's? I was one of only a few guys who fit into one of the collection of cassocks that we have in the house for just such an occasion. So on Wednesday morning, I put that cassock on and met up with the other guys who were serving. We got on the 64 Bus, and went over to St. Peter's.
   After a VERY brief rehearsal, we went into the sacristy of St. Peter's and waited for the mass to begin. Watching the Cardinals assemble is something to behold. Despite the large "SILENCE" sign posted in the sacristy, the moments before a mass in St. Peter's is something of a social hour for many of them, and rightly so, particularly when they are mourning one of their own. There is obviously a time for the prayer and reflection that that sign is asking for, but there are also times when it is ok to abrogate that silence for the time being. In the spirit of that, I went up to greet and congratulate one of the new Cardinals who had just been made a Cardinal the weekend before. As the immediate preparations for mass began, though, I was handed the thurible, the thing in which the incense is burned. The coals were already lit, and I was told to take the incense to the Dean of the College of Cardinals for him to fill the thurible... All of the sudden the 10 year old boy was back, my heart was racing, and I was biting my lower lip.
   I will not pretend that this mass was my finest hour liturgically. I didn't screw anything up too badly, but I wasn't in the sort of sync that I would have wanted to be. If you watch the video, you can even see a place where I almost fell down while holding the chalice. One little nudge led to another, and another, and another, and I could almost hear the old tennis coach inside my head saying "don't snowball because of a dumb mistake, just focus and get back to it." Then something remarkable happened.
   At the end of communion, the Holy Father arrived to give a homily and the final benediction, and everything just became calm. There I was three feet from the Pope, holding the thurible that he was going to use to incense the casket, and everything just calmed down. In that moment I realized something, that so many moments in my life had led to this one. While this wasn't an end point, or the climax of a story, or even necessarily one of the top ten most important moments of my life, I realized something very important. God calls me as I am.

Serving Mass in St. Peters, I am third from the left, right next to
my friend Gvidas, who is holding the Pope's Mitre.

Maybe it is because I am approaching 30, or maybe it is because I am (God-willing) getting closer to ordination, but lately I have been thinking about how so much of our lives lead us to bigger moments. The nervousness I felt that day serving mass for the first time came back on the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, when I was serving Cardinal Navarette's funeral, and getting ready to hand a flaming hot thurible to Pope Benedict XVI. I think it is good to remember sometimes that no matter where we go, or what we end up doing, that God calls us as we are precisely for who we are. There is no reason to doubt that from the first moment of altar server training at Incarnation that God was planting the seeds of the moment on the Altar of the Chair, and more importantly of my vocation to the priesthood. It is also important to know that I am still that same person that God began calling all those years ago. I am that same person with the same ability to be nervous, and even some of the same nervous ticks, and I think God rejoices in that. No matter how much I learn, how I grow, or how this formation for priesthood takes hold in me I am discovering that I am still that same person He called, with all of my weakness, nervousness, all of my fears and frustrations.
Nothing in following God's call in our lives says that we become someone different, whether it is to married life, single life, religious life, or priesthood, what God is calling us to is to become more and more who we are. (A great insight of my friend, Jim Martin, S.J.) The psalmist reminds us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and Jeremiah reminds us that God knew us before He formed us in our mother's wombs. Of course we are free not to follow that call, but trying to follow it at the very least helps us to become more fully alive, because we are more fully ourselves. As I was standing there in the midst of that mass at the Altar of the Chair nervously biting my lip I couldn't help but ultimately rejoice just a little, because I realized that I was perhaps in that moment, and in others like it, more than ever myself.

Teddy Ballgame, The Science of Hitting, and an exam on the Gospels.

2011-02-14T21:45:00.000+01:00

Spring training, surviving the first semester, and realizing that I haven't written in a long time have all gotten me thinking..

Ted "The Splendid Splinter" Williams in his first at bat as a
member of the Boston Red Sox at Fitton Field at the College
of the Holy Cross.. He hit a homerun.

When I was about 12 years old I tried out for little league baseball. I have to say that the simple truth is that I wasn't very good, and I was almost immediately placed in the minor league division. In any event, a big part of the reason why I wasn't very good was that I discovered that I could hit the ball pretty far when I really got a hold of it. Now, for those of you who are baseball fans, this may seem to make absolutely no sense, but the simple truth is that once I got a mere taste of hitting the ball hard, I never again saw a pitch that I didn't like. It could be high, low, fast, slow, I was going to swing at it, and I wasn't just going to swing at, I was going to crush it. This lead to a batting average that was well south of the feared mendoza line, and a baseball career that ended very abruptly as soon as my parents decided to put a Tennis racket in my hand.

I was still a huge fan of the game though, and this week the wisdom of one of the greats hit me hard. Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting, and the most basic, and best advice that the Splendid Splinter had in that book was that you should wait for your pitch. At the foundation of this is a basic humble admission, you can't hit every pitch, so you wait for the one you can and go with it.

So often in my life I know that I can still be that 12 year old kid out on the Highcrest School Little League field, wanting to destroy every pitch that comes my way. The difference between now and then is, of course, that I have learned to hold up on swinging at a pitch that I can't hit (and now of course I am speaking in metaphor) and wait for what I can. The clearest example came only a couple of days ago in my Synoptic Gospels final. I walked in, and as with all other exams here, I had 10 minutes to prove to the Professor what I had learned over the course of a semester, the professor gave me two questions that I could answer. Question 1: Talk about a question about hermeneutics according to the pontifical biblical commission. I hadn't anticipated this one. This was a pitch that was low and at my knees, nearly unhittable. I held back, strike one. Question 2: Do exegesis (explain) of the passage on the primitive Christian community. This pitch was a little high, I could hit it, but it was risky, no swing. Strike 2. I asked for a third pitch, and it was graciously given. Question 3: Exegesis on the Parable of the Lost sheep in Luke. Fastball, 90 miles and hour, right down the middle of the plate... swing, contact, over the fence... Homerun!

You see the simple truth is that somewhere, deep down, I didn't want to wait for that last pitch. I wanted to try and answer one of those first two questions to impress the professor, but I held back, I was humbled by the fact that I didn't know the responses to the questions well enough to try to answer and do well, I would have had to fake it, and in the name of protecting my own pride, I may have lost out in the end. So often it is the case in our lives, we hesitate to do anything that might demonstrate that we are weak, and in doing so we can find ourselves undone. I had to ask for that third question, I knew I couldn't do the other two justice, and when I did, when I admitted my weakness, I was able to wait for a question that I could. Jesus once said that the truth sets us free. The truth here was simply this, sometimes we need to be honest about who we are and where we are at to have any hope of success, even if that truth is that we can't hit a given pitch.

On Retreat....

2010-09-17T09:44:00.000+02:00

In my room I have an icon of St. Ignatius that was painted by William McNichols. In the Icon St. Ignatius has one finger up to his lips, and the other near his heart. The finger up to his lips is in the typical gesture to remind us to be quiet, and boy do I need that reminder right now.

Rome is noisy. I live over Piazza Venezia, and not a moment goes by without a motorino passing under my window. My life is noisy. I have two soundtracks, one in English, one in Italian, running in my head at all times. My heart right now… a little noisy. So I am headed north, and east, into the mountains for a week to be quiet and pray.

Those of us who are Jesuits have the privilege of doing this every year, of renewing our life in the spirit by just being quiet and being with the One who makes our vocations both possible and meaningful. It’s the time to listen to that still small voice, and the time focus all of our thoughts and all of our intentions one the one who loves us.

Augustine once said that prayer is like breathing for the soul. Imagine your first breath after coming up from a prolonged stretch under water… that is what retreat can be like for your soul. This is why I am so excited to come up for air.

Ignatius lived in this house, and I can picture him being here at the cross roads of Rome knowing just what I am talking about, that he needed to be quiet and pray. So do I.

So I am off to the mountains to pray, and this blog will lay dormant for a week or so. Pray for me and know that I will be praying for you.

Descending into St. Peter's Prison Cell.

2010-09-17T02:30:00.000+02:00

Sometimes the simplest places are the ones that can fill us with awe. Today I visited a cave that was turned into a prison in about 500 B.C. It was in that prison that St. Peter was held before his death. Below is the video, enjoy.

A Visit to the rooms of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

2010-09-14T09:21:00.001+02:00

I am fortunate to live in the same house that a couple of Saints lived in, most notably among them St. Ignatius of Loyola. Here is a visit to where he lived.

Enjoy!

The Capella Clementina and the Communion of Saints.

2010-09-03T19:26:00.003+02:00

5:00am. I know that for many religious this is midmorning, but for this nocturnal son of St. Ignatius, 5:00am is an ungodly hour. Why did I get up at 5am today? The answer is in a conversation that I had with a fellow Jesuit last month in Florence, when a good friend of mine invited me to a mass that he was celebrating in the Capella Clementina, at 7 am this morning.

St. Peter's Basilica at 6:45 in the morning.. just barely after sunrise.

For those of you who don’t know, the Capella Clementina is the Chapel closest to the tomb of St. Peter. It is the oldest part of St. Peter’s Basilica, and it is here that, under the altar you can see the remains of the “Old” St. Peter’s, namely the basilica of Constantine. If you go up to the altar and look down through the grate you can, in fact, see the actual tomb of Peter, where it was rediscovered during the archeological digs under St. Peter’s. People have worshiped in this space since the martyrdom of Peter in about 64 AD. The chapel was rebuilt by Pope Clement VIII in about 1592, and adorned with marble and gold. Clement left his mark, literally, on the chapel and all around it you can see the 8 pointed stars that are a part of his coat of arms. (You can also see these stars worked into the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica around the papal altar)

The interior of the Capella Clementina, it is only able to hold about 6 people.

So today we went to pray literally at the tomb of St. Peter, two other Jesuits and I woke up very early and took the bus across town and were actually the first people to pass through security at St. Peter’s Basilica this morning. At the tomb of Peter this morning I prayed for everyone in the path of the Hurricane back in the states. I figured the tomb that we were praying at was the tomb of a man who had seen the Lord rebuke a storm, and who had asked the Lord to rebuke a storm in scripture, so why not. After mass we went by the tomb of John Paul II, and I prayed there for a relative that was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s because it just seemed to make sense. A few weeks back, when I first got to Rome I stumbled upon the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, which is literally a block away. The body of St. Catherine of Siena is buried there, and so I prayed for a friend of mine who, like St. Catherine, is a woman who both loves her faith and Church, but who also passionately works for justice in it. In Venice I prayed for my friends who teach scripture at the tomb of St. Mark. In Assisi I prayed for a Jesuit friend of mine who keeps finding himself on TV at the tomb of St. Claire, since she is the patroness of TV. Then there are the rooms of St. Ignatius, where I go to pray each day. In those rooms I have prayed for BC High, where I just completed three happy years, and I have prayed for many Jesuit friends of mine there as well.

A great cloud of witnesses indeed, as the writer of Hebrews says, surrounds us. These great saints not only serve to inspire us and intercede for us, but they also serve to connect us to those around us, because the communion of saints doesn’t just include them, but all of us who are living and still on pilgrimage. These saints have served, all too often, to connect me with the people that I care about most back home, even as the journeys to these places have served to bring me closer to the people I live with here in Rome. This morning in the Capella Clementinum, as I prayed for everyone in the path of the hurricane which now seems to be weakening, I didn’t feel quite so far from home. Maybe that is really in the end what the communion of Saints is all about.

Gearing Down to Understand Gearing Up.

2010-08-29T01:54:00.001+02:00

In Jesuit communities in the U.S. there is almost always some dessert option after dinner. If you are as lucky as I have been in the past three years, you are blessed to live in a community where the cook is particularly talented with cakes and desserts. So when I came to Rome, I was sad to hear that we wouldn't have that everyday here. Now don't get me wrong, I certainly don't need dessert. In fact, truth be told, I am better off without it, but it seemed like it just might be one more annoying cultural adjustment that I would have to make, then I strangely realized that I kind of liked it.

The view from my desk as I write this.

In addition to losing a little weight, this arrangement is made all the more enjoyable by the fact that we have a fairly simple way to mark special days here in Rome. For example, today was the feast of St. Augustine, and so after lunch we had cake. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and Gelato will be served. On regular days though, its just fruit, and that's increasingly becoming something that I kind of strangely enjoy. For example, this past week, on the feast of St. Bernard I sat down with a piece of cake, and jokingly said: "Thank you St. Bernard for your life of austerity and poverty, for this we will enjoy cake." Now irony aside, I didn't know it was a feast day before I walked into the dining room, in fact I quickly pulled out my Ipod to see which feast it was, and read a little about St. Bernard. The thing is, in the US I am not sure that I would have looked up which feast it was had we not been celebrating, and the fact that we even do something so simple to mark those days is a very cool thing.

St. John of the Cross in his famous Dark Night of the Soul points more eloquently to the reality that I am getting at. He says that sometimes in our spiritual lives God allows us to go through dark, dry, dessert periods so that we can really appreciate what it is to feel God's presence. I like that thought, and I think that those of us who live in the US could stand to learn something from it.

The simple reality is that when we become too contented, when everyday is a feast day, we lose sight of what it is to celebrate. When everything is too pleasant, we become dulled to life around us. I think there is a way in which an American lifestyle sometimes can lull us into a spiritual coma, if only by simple always giving us access to everything that we want. Maybe the best thing that we can do is save some of those pleasurable everyday things for special occasions, and to do some critical self reflection about what we can really do without, so that when we do enjoy those little things in life they are really a cause for celebration.

There's No Place Like Rome.

2010-08-15T21:02:00.001+02:00

Here it is: a very quick view of where I live. The video is sped up to get you through what is a 10 minute walk in 3 minutes or so, but you can catch glimpses of the important stuff. More detailed videos of different things in the house to follow.

Enjoy!

Random thoughts from Rome.

2010-08-10T16:24:00.000+02:00

Rome unfolding from the top of St. Peter's

1. Apparently the bar across the street is where the Swiss Guard go to hang out… this should be interesting.

2. I went to a Wal-Mart like store named Panaramo in the suburbs today via the Metro. I had to walk back with a laundry basket full of stuff through the Forum. Tourists were still annoying.

3. Tourists in the forum have this habit of randomly stopping in front of you to the point where a single walk through the forum yields an average of 3.2 collisions.

4. I can see a tower designed by Michelangelo from my bed as I fall asleep. What can you see?

5. I went to La Storta this weekend for the first time. After we prayed in the chapel of the vision for an hour I went to get an espresso, when I emerged everyone was gone. (So I just went to the train station…)

6. Went to watch the Sox Game tonight at the ex-pat bar nearby, they were playing trivia, I could have won on my own. (Come on, seriously, which Muppet lived in a trash can, as a question????)

7. I bought a bottle of Coke today. The label, which was from before the world cup, advertised over a thousand free vuvuzelas in a give away…. Strange that Coke knew what a big deal they would be this time around in advance of the cup….

8. I am actually beginning to have conversations with Italians fairly confidently, and they seem to be tolerating my horrible Italian. I am told that Ignatius spoke horrible Italian too, so much so that little kids would correct him. I take consolation in this.

9. I have learned that 30 Celsius is the upper threshold of gross sweatiness.

10. The walls were paper thin at the little hotel that we were studying at in Verona, not a huge fan of not being able to talk to anyone after 10:30pm Verona time. This isn’t be such a huge deal in Rome (where our walls are 400 years old and about a foot thick.)

11. I realized today that horsemeat is a Veronese specialty, and that without knowing it I have probably eaten it. I have my suspicions about which mystery meat it was, but don’t ask how I liked it.

12. I have begun to be recognized by the barista at the café across the street from my language school. This morning he had my espresso ready for me before I even asked.

13. It cracks me up when Americans are clearly lost in my neighborhood, particularly trying to find the Pantheon, and I ask if they need help and I get something like “nope got it,” and then they wander off in the wrong direction anyway.

14. I have learned that if you just stare down taxi cabs while you are in a crosswalk they will stop, the same cannot be said for moto-scooters.

15. Taking a walk like most Romans do at night for a little exercise is a good thing, the positive effects of which are negated when you merely walk to the Trevi Fountain for Gelato.

A Letter which echoes back..

2010-08-07T01:30:00.001+02:00

If Christ is for us.. who can be against us???

I had this thought tonight as I was standing atop a newly discovered terrace in our house here in Rome. If Christ is for us then who can be against us? If you look to the west, you see the Capitoline hill. Here they crowned new emperors; behind it lay the ruins in stone and brick of what was once the most powerful place on earth. If you look east, you see a hill on what was once the outskirts of that powerful city where the executed a man who was old and likely illiterate from a backwater town in a backwater country.

If Christ is for us…. Who can be against us???

On that hill today stands the most prominent point in the eternal city, the dome of St. Peter’s. The empire is in ruins, and yet the place where an impotent (in the classical sense of the word) fisherman was executed upside down is revered.

If Christ is for us…. Who can be against us???

If you look to the north you can see the space where nine college friends lived for a few years while they waited to figure out what they should do since their original plans were going to be delayed by war in the middle east. If you look immediately down, you can see where one of them died years later as one of the more influential men in Europe and in the Church. If you look down you can see where the letters that captured the imagination of an entire continent arrived from one of those men who went to India. If you walk down the stairs you can walk where their followers walked, like the son of the most notoriously violent family in Spain, and you can stand in the spaces where one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time decided to turn in his wealth for a life of poverty….

If Christ is for us…. Who can be against us???

I am not saying that St. Peter or St. Ignatius would be thrilled with the churches built in their names, in fact I suspect that they might be perplexed by them, but faith has overcome empire, and the indecision of the quarter-life crisis shared by Ignatius, Faber, and Xavier was transformed into the Society of Jesus.

So I ask, looking at Rome, boldy and bravely…

If Christ is for us… who can be against us.

I daresay that there is still even more to it than this, and that these symbols of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God are only half measures. We need to be as bold as St. Peter, and embrace what the world sees as futility in coming to Rome, a place where they were executing Christians.

We need to be as bold as Ignatius, Xavier, and Faber, to look with hope to the future even if/when our plans fall apart.

Now is not a time to be practical, but to embrace a holy boldness. We need to look at the world as it is and continue to pray that God’s kingdom come ON EARTH as it is in heaven, and believe it can happen….

If Christ is for us… who can be against us?????