Random thoughts from Rome.

   

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..

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?????

Scenes from my first month in Italy.

So this is video from my first month in Italy. It is more a montage than anything else. In the future I plan to be more in depth with details about what you are looking at, here is just a nice little video showign you what I have been up to. Enjoy!

Peace,
Mike

A quick note on the new background.

So you may have noticed a pretty radical change in look, if this makes it harder to view this blog, or makes it unnecessarily slow, let me know via comment and I will try to fix it. I chose this background, however, because if you look in the bottom left hand corner, just below the Vittorio Emanuele monument, you can see the facade of a Church. That, dear readers, is the Gesu. That is where I now live, and where these posts will (mostly) be coming from. So I figured it was as good a reason as any to put it up there. Any comments on the new design are welcome!
In Christ,
Mike

From the Opera....

The First Video I will post up here is a simple one,  most will be far more edited and have far more information, I just don't have the bandwith to upload those from Verona. This is the aria Nessun Dorma from the Verona Opera Festival.  Every year the city of Verona hosts an Opera Festival in its famed Ancient Roman Arena. For the low price of 23 Euros you too can sit on solid granite for three hours where people have sat for thousands of years... 




This Aria is at the beginning of the third act of Puccini's final opera, Turandot. Far and away my favorite Aria, Marco Berti did a great job. This is the Encore, I just sat, listened, experienced, and welled up a little the first time he sang it. The shear beauty of this moment can only conjure gratitude to God. 


In this song, Calaf, the deposed prince of the Tartars is singing about his plan to win the love of Turandot, the princess of China. Turandot to this point has been the original ice princess, Calaf actually calls her as much in the previous act, but this bold young prince has a plan to win her heart. The words (in Italian and English) are below, this is really just the end of the encore though, there was no way I was going to ruin this moment by taping it the first time through. 

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che fremono d’amore
e di speranza.

Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun sapra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!

Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che ti fa mia!

(Il nome suo nessun sapra!…
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)

Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!
All’alba vincero!
vincero, vincero!

 English Version

None must sleep! None must sleep!
And you, too, Princess,
in your cold room,
gaze at the stars
which tremble with love
and hope!

But my mystery is locked within me,
no-one shall know my name!
No, no, I shall say it as my mouth
meets yours when the dawn is breaking!

And my kiss will break the silence
which makes you mine!

(No-one shall know his name,
and we, alas, shall die!)

Vanish, o night!
Fade, stars!
At dawn I shall win

(It's so much better in Italian...) 

More Random Thoughts From Verona.

A Disclaimer first. This will turn into more of a video blog as soon as I am back in Rome. The internet is simply too slow where I am to upload video in Verona.

Without further ado...

More Random Thoughts From Verona.

(The Winged Lion of Venice, a reference to St. Mark, or a Character from the Chronicles of Narnia? You be the judge....)

1)    I really value a language that puts such a heavy emphasis on the verb “to nap.”

2)    Washcloths could be America’s next great gift to the world, I anxiously await a shipment of them from the states thanks to my Mom.

3)    Venice has it right with all the canals, but the flooding of the streets at High tide has to be a constant reminder that the city is sinking.

4)    I am not sure how well a city can venerate the remains of a saint that were stolen from another city during the crusades (The remains of St. Mark were stolen by Venetians and brought back to Venice)

5)    The Lion with wings all around Venice looks like something out of Narnia.

6)    “How you like me now” by the heavy is a song that everyone should have in their I-Tunes Library, if only for it inherent ability to build self esteem, despite its poor grammar.

7)    The good people of the tourist industry will do everything they can to rip you off. For example, it was 104 degrees (40 Celsius) in the Dogge’s Palace in Venice on Sunday, we emerged looking for water in Piazza San Marco, and found a 2 liter bottle for 4 euro, which we though was a bargain until we saw it on sale for 50 Euro cents in the supermarket down the street.

8)    Once you know Italian, going to the Opera is like going to a broadway show, only the lyrics and music are better. The Turandot in the Arena di Verona makes Les Miserables (my favorite broadway show) look campy.

9)    That being said, it is easy to write poetry and lyrics in a langue where almost every word ends in a vowel.

10) Romeo and Juliet really loses its zip in Italian.

11) Itunes movie rentals are an important part of any expat’s sanity diet.

12)  A sanity diet are those little things that you do to feel a little bit more at home during a transition.

13) Everyone here seems to assume that: I play basketball well, I can throw a baseball well, I know George Bush/Barack Obama, and that all I really want is a cheeseburger simply because I am American.  Only one of these is really true, guess which one.

14) I responded to an email in Italian for the first time to an Italian Jesuit today. It was probably a hot mess, but I am still proud of myself.

I am glad that I got out of town before the Sox started to tank. 

Random Thoughts from Verona.

     1)    Dental floss cost me € 4.50, that is like $5.60. The same amount costs much less in the states.

2)    Not everything costs more, and it all depends on where you get it, going to the outskirts of town makes things much much cheaper.

3)    Nuns are pretty awesome and we don’t treat them nearly well enough, the sisters here are pretty spectacular.

4)    Verona is extremely beautiful, now that I know how to get in an out of the town center.

5)    When one is going into the town center, one should remember to put batteries into one’s camera.

6)    Its hard to believe I have been here a week, it seems much shorter.

7)    No matter how beastly hot it is, I can find Gatorade nowhere.

8)    I was sitting in class today learning how to say we are afraid of something, when asked what they were afraid of, my classmates said “Tigers” and “Lions” one even said “An Elephant stampede” Then I realized that they were all from Africa and India and had, in fact, encountered these things.

9)    I love Pasta, but wow people, just wow.

10) I played basketball today with a bunch of people from Africa and India. I was picked first because I am American. In about three minutes the team captain realized his mistake.

11) Juliet’s balcony is easily seen from the street, unless you are taking pictures I can’t imagine why you would pay to get into the courtyard. That said, how Romeo could have gotten himself in there past the gate and over the three story walls is beyond me. (and yes I know its just a scene from a play, and that that house likely has nothing to do with it.)

12) I like that Verona is both cooler and quieter than Rome, I also love the air conditioning in my room. I have it set at 20 Celsius, though the cleaning lady keeps turning it back up to 24 (which is like 75, and is reasonable enough)

13)  I ate dinner with some guys who were speaking a Slavic language last night (rather than the Italian that we are all supposed to be speaking) I asked an Oblate of Mary Immaculate that I was sitting with f they were Russian, he told me they were, I asked them where they were from in Russia (In Italian of course) they all stared me down and told me they were from Poland…. Oops..

14) I am beginning to really like it here. 



A Few new ones...

-       I realized that my family is essentially from the West Virginia of Italy while watching TV tonight. I will be much more careful about making redneck jokes in the future. (there you have it John Brown, Kevin Dyer, Carrie McGrath, Megan James, and anyone else I would consider to be from “the South outside of New Orleans”)

-       I still want to go down to Calabria to see where my great grandparents were born, and I am still proud of my heritage, particularly if it is as bad as northern Italians say it is my grand father and mother are proof that there really is an American dream.

-       Went to a pizzeria in the piazza of a little Italian village with a nun from Burma, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate from Texas, a white father from Nigeria, and a seminarian from Cameroon who recounted his tale of staving off a lion.

-       I was shocked by how similar an Itaian supermarket is to an American one, found Powerade, it didn’t taste the same.

-       Can’t find Old Spice in Italy, they do have Gillette though. Something nice about switching to a brand with it’s “World Shaving Headquarters’ in South Boston.

-       6 words. Turandot in an ancient Roman Arena. Nessun Dorma… Nessun Dorma.

           -      I plan to go read Romeo and Juliet at a sidewalk café outside of Juliet’s house, what are you doing with your Saturday afternoon?

A new look for an old blog.

For the past three years I have been teaching High School in Boston, MA, and this blog has been dormant. Now, however, I have moved to Rome and there may be need for a creative outlet again, so back to the Blog.

It is going to be different this time though, while I may still be posting some reflections, a bigger part of this blog will be dedicated to pictures and videos of my time here. I am going to try to focus on those things that the casual tourist might not see in Rome, and of course when interesting things happen over the course of my time in Rome, I may do some guerilla journalism as well to give you a sense of what the event was like on the ground. The first video will sum up the past three years, and the next will be a post from Verona, where I am studying Italian.

Ciao!

Mike

A Reflection on the Trinity

This is a reflection I offered at my College Reunion Last Year,
Enjoy!

Michael Rogers, S.J.
Reflection for Reunion Mass.
Trinity Sunday, 2007
Today, Trinity Sunday, at Churches throughout the world, those preaching will talk about how the Trinity. They will talk about how it is that there could be three distinct persons in one God and how it is a mystery. They’ll talk about how its beyond our ability to understand it, to grasp it, to put it into words, more than a few will reference St. Patrick and his famous shamrock, maybe a couple will talk about what St. Augustine had to say about how the way our minds work mirrors the trinity which made us, but most will say it’s a mystery and move on. Its true, the trinity is a mystery, and its one that has inspired debates and schisms from the time when Christ walked the earth until now. However, there is something about the trinity, about God being three persons in one God, which I think appeals to something more basic about how we understand God than the mystery of the metaphysics involved in such a reality. You see, the trinity, the thought that God constantly exists in loving relationship and that it is that love from which the Son and the Spirit, from which the world and each of us in it issues forth, ultimately points to the profound reality that in the end it is relationship, and more importantly love, that makes everything that exists make sense.
Applying the old Jesuit Maxim of finding God in all things, I think that what we discovered most profoundly, what we learned which was most important to us here at the Cross, was not learned in the Biology Labs or Philosophy Seminar rooms. We didn’t pick it up while cramming in Dinand or in some grand lecture. We learned the most profound lessons in the late night B.S. sessions, in the sometimes two hour stretches talking to friends in Kimball, in the countless road trips, some for Appalachia and some for less savory purposes. We learned it in being here, with each other, we learned it in learning how to be with, befriend, and hopefully love one another. The trinity makes sense to us, I think, because when we experience relationship with others, when we experience friendship, and ultimately come to understand that as love, we come to find God in each other, and in the midst of those relationships. It makes sense that if, as John says, God is love that God then exists in just the sort of relationship that love presupposes. When we love one another, when we care for one another, we experience what is often thought of as the most profound mystery of our faith because we participate in something which is at the very core of who God is. The trinity is all about love, its all about relationship. To the extent that we learned more and more how to love, in all of that various ways one does love, we learned our most profound lessons here on this Hill not in the classrooms, but in the care of those who sit around you now.
The readings today point to God existing in just that sort of love. The reading from Proverbs says that the wisdom of God, which we often think of in terms of the Holy Spirit, was God’s delight from the beginning of time. The Spirit was in loving relationship in the Trinity from the beginning. Jesus, in the Gospel, says that everything that the Father has is his also. The sharing of God’s self with Christ points to the love which exists between the Son and the father, just as what Christ has is also the Spirit’s to proclaim. Yet this love clearly spills over, it is too much to be contained, and as Paul tells us in the Letter to the Romans, it is this same love which exists between the Father, Son, and Spirit, which is poured into our hearts, which makes us capable of sharing in that divine mystery by loving one another.
Its nice to be back on campus after five years, a lot has changed, and its interesting to see the new buildings and the new construction. Its nice to walk past places and reminisce, but this is just a material place. Now for a second look around you, go ahead, look around you. Those faces you see, that’s Holy Cross. The buildings are just reminders. The institution itself rolls on without us. We are always a part of it, though, because we are a part of each other, we have indelibly shaped each other. We return to this place after five years a little older, hopefully a little wiser. Most of us have new responsibilities and roles, some of us are married and have children and many of us have interesting jobs in far flung places. We have learned and grown a lot since we left. We are different people than we were 5 years ago. Yet the bonds of friendship remain, and I hope that deep down that it is the people in this chapel right now that brought you back. It is in those faces that you just looked into that all of this begins to make sense, and it is in the context of their friendship, love, and care, that we came here originally to attempt a beginning at making sense of the world. The trinity tells us that God is love, and in the end it is the love which we had here for one another and continue to bear towards one another which makes this mystery not so mysterious.

A Man, A Thesis, A Mission

Hey everyone,

Welcome back! Sorry I haven't posted in forever. There were two reasons for this:

First, I had a Thesis to write. I am happy to say that it is done and I passed the Oral examination with distinction.

The Second Reason is more mission driven. The Society of Jesus issued new rules on publication, and included electronic media among the things which one needed permission to publish. This permission is pending with my new superior, so check back in the next few days for the first official post post-graduate school.


Peace,
Mike

Embracing Reality and the World Series...

Busch Stadium right after the Cardinal's Victory
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

“How about those Cardinals Man? Were you down there last night?” These were the words of a random African American man to me on the street this morning. We didn’t even say hello, nothing, just a quick greeting of “How about those Cardinals?” The reason why I mention that he was African American is because of the simple fact that this can be very racist city, divided very clearly somewhere near Delmar as being White or Black. By in large to the north, people are black, and to the south, people are white. Often times it is a horribly divided city, and then there is the reality of living in the city verses the county, where often the division is between the rich and the poor.
Divisions, all around. Here we are too often, contrary to Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, Gentile and Jew, Slave and Free, Woman and Man. I think so often it is a component of our society, which transcends St. Louis, to put us all in a neat little box and to admonish us from birth not to go outside of it. It’s not even a race question primarily, though that is one way it manifest itself, it’s not a class issue primarily, though that is another way it manifests itself, it is the prevailing sense that this little box which is your identity is the context from which you are to relate to the world. This little box you are given is there to keep you safe, and increasingly for the purposes of your own comfort. This box can dull the heart and blind the mind too though, because being comfortable excludes us from large portions of reality, being safe demands a surrender to the mediocrity of out own myopic stances. The truth is that we come more face to face with the world, and with the wonderful reality of an incarnational faith, when we can see as brother and sister those who are outside our neat little boxes. Its when we transcend the plastic of our own little packages that we become able to really live, to experience joy, sorrow, love, passion, full rationality which is in touch with the world, and perhaps maybe, just maybe, the revelation of God’s undying love for the whole world. The incarnation is borne out of a love for the world both inside and outside of our little plastic boxes, but to love God means to love what God loves, which means everything beyond the little packages we are socialized into which keep us comfortable and safe.
“How about those Cardinals?” This man outside of the context of a World Series victory probably never would have said anything to me, and if I am honest with myself, I probably never would have gotten comfortably into a conversation with him outside of the context of my sense of duty as a Jesuit to do so. It’s strange how things like this help people to transcend the differences which make us feel uncomfortable. It is as if at that one moment something which is common to both of our realities provides the middle ground to, at least for a little while, encounter each other outside of our boxes as human beings. I was down at the Stadium last night after the game, walking around with some friends, and there was the normal celebration one would expect going on, but it seemed like, if only for a few hours, everyone could be joyful together. That common moment of joy provided the vehicle for a brief transcendence of that which divided us and made us stay content in our own comfortable little spaces.
As we were leaving, Ben Bocher, subject of a previous post on this blog, said “Man if only we could get people this excited about Jesus.” I think his intuition is dead on, but perhaps not for the reason he suspects. Something about these equalizing and uniting moments mirrors just a glimpse of the Kingdom of God for us strangely enough. In those moments if we pay attention and look beyond the particulars of the event (viz. the drunken revelry that was also going on) to the unified reality as a whole we can see what we are meant to be, people living out of a common love, which just is a to love and be loved by God. If we could get that reality out there, then we would love what God loves, each other. If only we could get people that excited about Jesus, about an incarnational God that comes from the ultimate space of comfort and safety, eternity, and becomes human, while still being God himself, a God who goes out into reality, to love it and bring it back to himself. The manifestation of that Love would be the kingdom of God. Simple Social Justice may not be enough, Social love may be the only answer.
Monday morning the parade will be done, the lights in Busch Stadium will be off for the winter, and North St. Louis, South St. Louis, the City, and the County will all probably fall back into their normal divisions, but for one moment there can be a brief glimpse into what should be, if only we look close enough……

Prophecy and Preparation.

The Prophet Jeremiah appearing to be in thought in the Sistine Chapel
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the definition of prophets as being the interpreters par excellance of the Law. As someone who has felt a certain amount of indignation as the injustices of our society as being contrary to God’s Law, as one who has felt called to and has taken prophetic action at the gates of military forts and the steps of the Capitol building in DC, as some one who feels called, genuinely called, to be who I am becoming, the thought intrigues me, because now I find myself in that place of preparation to become the person I was created in God’s image and likeness to be in a much fuller sense. The thought that the prophets were the interpreters of, and the truest experts about, the law implies that in order to make one’s calling fully present, if it is to prophecy, one must necessarily first know the Law.
I know many very good intentioned people who would like to think of themselves as living or acting prophetically. These can be very genuine people of very good will, but often times it seems that they have accepted various interpretations of the Law or various ideologies not their own, or perhaps they lack the discipline, drive, or desire to learn, for themselves, about the Law. It seems that they encounter God’s law only secondarily, or worse even in some tertiary light, and they never fully get it, their faith praxis becomes bound up with political positions rather than tenets of faith and pangs of conscience. For some, I have seen the actions they take as being prophetic to merely be salve on their white suburban guilt, something which makes them feel like one of the good guys in the light of all of the poverty and injustice that exists in the contexts of systems of which they, themselves, are the greatest beneficiaries. There is a real arrogance in their ignorance, because they don't realize the privilege that makes their choices easy. Often times for those people there is a real sense of belonging in a community of prophetic voices as well; and those who have no genuine vocation, or who would choose not to speak in the fullness of truth join a cause for the sake of their own comfort. There is simply something too comfortable, to blissfully ignorant, and falsely joyful, and while these are good people, they often do more harm than good, making genuine prophetic action trite and genuine concern meaningless. I know that if I am not careful, I can just as easily become one of these people, and perhaps have been tempted to be one at times.
The prophets, particularly Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, and Hosea, teach us that there is no salve for the fire that burns in the bones of the prophets; there can be no quelling of guilt, or easing of shame. They are, in fact, consumed with a zeal for God’s word. This is a sign of a true prophet. That they learn for themselves what the truth is, until like Ezekiel and Jeremiah they devour the very word itself, and it becomes a part of their being. Every word read, every thought produced in that tabernacle of the mind where man encounters God brings forth a moment ripe with the expectation of revelation. It is not about what the prophet wants the law to say, it is about what the law says, what the Lord says, even if it convicts the prophet’s way of life, and the way of life of those around him. It cannot be about one particular issue, but rather about the law taken holistically, as worship and justice, love of God and love of neighbor, so intimately bound up in one another that they simply cannot be put asunder. The role of the prophet is to speak the truth, but first he has to know the truth, first he had to have studied it, and have had in emblazoned on his heart.
So it is with me, I want to follow God’s call, but I want it for real. Each of us called to priesthood is called to share in the ministry of Christ, called to act someday in his very person. If we view Christ as prophet, priest, and king, then we too are called to share in those offices, to act with that authority. So I study, so I engage what some who are in the business of acting prophetically view to be the obsolete academic life. In the end, it is that loving relationship between God and man worked out in the mind that is the only thing that can really change the world, my prayers enforce my thoughts, my thoughts inform my actions, my actions always lead me back to prayer, and so it begins again. I want to know the law so that when I act in the person of Christ as a priest in the Catholic Church I can act with the fullness of the prophetic office of Christ. As the ordination rite commands I want to know what I am doing… and in doing that serve the people of God in the fullest, most genuine love and concern, so that in that I can serve the one who created me to someday act as a prophet.

Coming Attractions....

Coming Attractions....
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

Dreaming dreams can be a bit tricky sometimes, because we can dream for things which aren’t reality, or idealize things which just aren’t so ideal in reality. Such is the case with the discernment of my assignment to regency. As most people closer to me know by now, it looks like after I finish up here in St. Louis (hopefully) in May I will be heading to teach in a high school for the next three years, and I am actually really joyful about that possibility because it engenders a freedom I couldn’t have chosen for myself.

When the whole question of where my next assignment would be began to come up, there was some question that perhaps given my academic qualifications that I should go teach in a college. I went along with it, and was fairly puffed up and prideful about the opportunity, externally at least. Inside I was conflicted though, I felt a little bit of anxiety about not being ready, and about being a second class citizen at any higher education institution because of having only an MA. Now while an MA is good enough for a teaching assistantship at a big PhD granting university, most of the places I could have gone to work at pride themselves on being places where their faculty members all have terminal degrees. So I was nervous, at the very least, about that possibility. Meanwhile, I thought about going to a high school and felt calm and at peace at that opportunity. I felt like it was what I deep down wanted to do right now. Eventually maybe I would like to go back and work in Philosophy in higher education, but for now it just doesn’t seem to make sense. I couldn’t say that though, until my superiors said “let’s try high school” Which brings me to my point.

Sometimes we need help saying no to our pride to be really happy. There are things which we would try to do and commit the sin of presumption in attempting to do them in first place, simply because we’re not equipped to handle it at that point. I probably would have said yes to working in a college just to say “I teach at ___________ college” but been miserable for three years doing it. I wouldn’t have been happy simply because I am not sure I am ready to do that work yet. There was a strange and wonderful relief in the opportunity to work at a high school because I have done it, I have learned from my previous experience, and I know I can do it again. I think this is true for everyone too, sometimes we become so fixated on what we think the dream reality could be that we lose sight of the deeper realities. Sometimes, perhaps, we set up some sort of strange self image of what we think we should be, and we forget that what is most important is who we are, with all of our gifts, our talents, and even our shortcomings. We need, I need, to get away from that and just let ourselves be. When we can do that we become the gift God intended to give the world in bringing us into existence, with all of our abilities and shortcomings. To just be who we were created to be, to fulfill our vocation in the deepest sense, is to allow ourselves to experience radically that son or daughtership with God that Christ exeperiences in the Jordan “This is my beloved son on whom my favor rests…” That place of humility, that place where we can get past our own self aggrandizing deceit and get down to knowing ourselves more fully for who we are and in that we begin to experience ever deeper right relationship with a God who loves us.


So it looks like I will be coming to teach at a high school near you soon….. (that is of course if you live somewhere within the boundaries of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus)

The Dangers of Getting Greedy

The last one out has to turn out the lights at Fenway
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

So I have to admit, I now expect that my beloved Red Sox, and my much admired Patriots will now always win, they will always make the postseason, and that now the next title is just around the corner…. And then I realized, good lord, I am becoming what I hate…. A sports fan in the style of one from New York.

You see, we were spoiled in the afterglow of 2004, when the Sox won the Series, the Patriots won the Superbowl, the banners at Logan Airport welcomed people to title town, God was in his temple, and all was well with the world. That was 2004, this is 2006.

I think I forgot that for 8 teams to make the playoffs, 22 other teams had to have their seasons end on October first. I remember now. I forgot that for many, many, years of my life that neither team made the postseason, and I think I forgot how much I despised people who had expectations like I now do. Now those people have returned with their smug grins and intolerable consoling “Well there’s always next year for you guys..” Growing up in Connecticut and along the Rhode Island Shoreline I grew up on the border of Red Sox Nation and the Evil Empire. I grew up in a place where fights would break out on playgrounds about what ball cap you were wearing, and where even our Yankee fan Cub Scout masters would taunt us poor Red Sox Fans, just a little. I grew up hating what it seems that I have to be careful not to become, or if I have become it, to now be humbled and eschew it.

Sometimes success blinds us to our past failures, and makes us forget what it was like when we were on the bottom. Sometimes the pride that one can take in success can make us forget deep down who we are, and how it is that we hurt and were humbled when we weren’t always succeeding. It’s an addiction, this success thing, and it becomes something we feel like we need to feel validated all of the sudden, as if the honor made the man, and not the man himself, or better yet God, in whose image and likeness man is made. We can’t rely on our success, or in this case the success of others who we live surrogately through, to make ourselves feel more alive, to feel better about who we are. That has to derive from that inner place that says “you know what, I am a child of God, God made me, and God doesn’t make garbage, in fact God only makes things that are good.” So it has to be with anything we do, we can’t measure self worth by success, but by love. We can’t measure self worth by honors, but by that deep sense of our own worth. It is at that moment that we can recognize ourselves as children of God and really, truly be free.

So the Sox season is done, sadly, disappointingly. That minor disappointment means less in the long run, if we can just remember who we are, and maybe that should be a new Mantra for the Red Sox organization, we’re not the Yankees, let’s not try to be. The season is done, that means that its time to dig in and do some schoolwork, and time to cheer for my other favorite team, anyone who will BEAT THE YANKEES.

Shaken out of complacency

The Rose Garden at UCA
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

In short order Jon Sobrino, S.J. arrives in St. Louis. This is a theologian I idolize, I once almost said to him “Jon how do I be you when I grow up?” (and I still may) For those of you who don’t know, Jon is a Jesuit of the Central American Province, a theologian, and the director of the Romero Center at the UCA. Jon was also in the same community as the 6 Jesuits who were killed on the night of November 16, 1989 by members of one of the Salvadoran Army’s elite battalions. That night Jon was away at a conference in Thailand, and heard about the whole thing from another Jesuit who was there with him who had heard over the news.
Jon’s impending presence here is also kicking my butt, figuratively of course, because I find myself reminded of those men he lived with, and his testimony to their tireless work on behalf of the kingdom. These were men who were unafraid of a little work (or a lot of work) and always embraced doing that work as a part of the concrete manifestation of their love for Christ.
In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius says that love manifests itself more in deeds than in words. I find myself forced to ask the question of myself: What deeds have I done lately to manifest that love for Christ? Am I talking the talk more than I am walking the walk? In the exercises, in a meditation on sin, Ignatius also has us ask while contemplating the crucified Christ: “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?” Ignacio Ellacuría, one of of the men killed that night, shared Romero’s intuition that Christ is made manifest in the poor, as Matthew 25 is so clear about. This forced him to ask the question “What have I done for this crucified people? What am I doing for this crucified people? What will I do for this crucified people?” These are words which call us to account for ourselves.
So often we can be overcome by the malaise of day to day life, and forget to be intentional about what we are doing. So often we (I) can become lazy, and perhaps pay far too much attention to our (my) own personal tiredness, or the mundane tensions of day to day life, and simply fall back into a banal existence. The cure, as each Jesuit knows, is what Ignatius called the Magis, the more, always asking not just what is for God’s great glory, but for God’s greater glory. This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t attend to what one needs to do for personal health, but it does mean that sometimes we need to buck up and work through the tiredness, sometimes we need to work through the annoyances and sorrows of everyday life. We do this to make of our lives a complete oblation to God, living and dying for his greater glory, living so that others may be able to realize their own dignity. We do this because we were loved first, because we are called to love, and because love manifests itself more in deeds than in words.


P.S. Jon Sobrino’s Lecture is in the Anheuser Busch Auditorium in the Cook school of Business at SLU on Monday night, September 25th at 7pm. It is free and open to the public.

September 11, 2001

My Mom and Dad, who I now remember to always say "I love you" to.
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

..........I remember the morning like it was this morning. I awoke late that day. I was an RA at Holy Cross, it was my senior year, and I had been up late with some students who were friends of another student who had committed suicide the day before. I woke up, turned to my computer to check my email, and on a campus wide bulletin board site I read simply “TURN ON YOUR TV!!!” So I did, and there I saw it. I admit that at first I thought I was watching a movie, so many disaster movies had come out, like Armageddon, Independence Day, and others, that the reality of what was going on was initially a little skewed. Then I realized, no this is CNN, and no the caption on the bottom of the screen that said that one of the towers had just fallen was real….. Then immediately I realized that my Dad was supposed to be at a meeting in New York that morning, immediately I thought of the 2 or 3 friends I had who worked in those towers. I called my mom, and mass pandemonium ensued. We didn’t know where my father was; his cell phone, like every other cell phone in the city, wasn’t working. I remember hanging up the phone in a panic and running to the office of the Jesuit who was my spiritual director. At that point it was 11am. I then went down to the Chapel to pray. It was 11:30 and noon mass was starting in an hour, and prayer was my only recourse at that moment, I prayed for my Father, for my friends, I prayed for everyone in the buildings, I just prayed. My friend Rachel was the only other person in the Chapel at that point. She was from Queens, and she too had people she knew in those towers. By the time mass began St. Joseph’s Chapel was packed. And we sat there together, praying. I left mass turned on my cell phone and had one new message. It was my father. He was fine, he had gotten on the first metro north train out of Grand Central Station. There were people who were wounded on that train with him, but they made it out. He said in the message that he could see the smoke rising from Downtown Manhattan and he was on his way to New Haven to his car, and to home. There were many other cars which never returned to their homes that day. They sat in commuter lots for weeks after, waiting for drivers who would never return. My dad was lucky, one of my friends wasn’t. A friend from grade school worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, and died after the plane hit below where he was working.
So here is the thing. I didn’t post this yesterday, mainly because a lot of things I saw and heard made me angry yesterday. The way we view this anniversary now seems largely exploitive to me. While those of us who had friends or family die that day remember it solemnly, and hopefully prayerfully, it has become a polemic and political device in our society, and rather than learning from it, we have seemingly used the event to push us along at a more fevered pace down a path which we were already taking. So much glorification of the military industrial complex has occurred as a result of that day, and yesterday was no exception. We feed the military machine while the poor suffer and starve, and nothing makes barbaric extremists and terrorists like starvation and death. We call ourselves the city on the hill when we have forgotten the orphan and widow, the poor and immigrant at our gates, and nothing breeds hate like complete disregard. We call ourselves the bastion of civilization, when we sow the seeds of war and civil strife. The prophets in the bible spoke out strongly against it. We haven’t really learned. We could change the world, build the kingdom of peace, if only we built grain mills in stead of guns, baked bread instead of building bombs, treated disease rather than administering attacks on all of those who seem to be a threat.
I am not advocating not bringing those responsible to justice, but let’s not work other motives into that. I am not advocating a hatred of American and western cultures, in fact I love it so much I call it to task, call it into question. I am advocating Love in the face of hate, food in the face of starvation, medicine in the face of disease, education in the face of ignorance, and peace in the face of war. I am advocating participation with God’s grace in building the kingdom of God. I am advocating the most fitting memorial to those who died, that we live truly not in fear, but in the greatest of hopes, hope that this world can be saved, hope that a country which is largely Christian can live up to its hype, hope that no one will feel compelled to hate, hope that there will never be another September 11, 2001.

Jesuit Friendship Is Dangerous... A Reflection on the Feast of St. Peter Claver

Some of my most important friends on the back patio
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

A Reflection for September 9th, 2006. The Memorial of St. Peter Claver, S.J.

References to readings from the Jesuit Proper.
Isaiah 58:6-10
Psalm 147, 1-6
Luke 4:16-22


Jesuit friendship is a very dangerous thing….. It can plant the seed of support, shine forth light into the darkness that we ourselves are afraid of, or be the beginning of a long journey that begins with simply stepping out of one’s front door. Jesuit friendship as companionship with Christ can be a very dangerous thing because it challenges the status quo, forces us to proclaim light into darkness, justice into inequity, and love into a world all too often is filled with hate, objectification, and segregation. Jesuit friendship, as a result of the love of Christ for each man in this room and dare I say for each of the people that we encounter in the world, is a manifestation of the one thing that has ever really made a lasting impact on the world, love itself. Jesuits in friendship have throughout the years founded our Order, taken important roles in Church councils, and have supported each other in the far more mundane realities of day to day life.

Friendship…. In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI writes of friendship that Christ’s friend is our friend, that is to say that we love each other in friendship in God and with God and that our friendship itself is a manifestation of God’s presence working within each of us, impelling us to mission and making of us the corporate body which the original companions referred to simply as “friends in the lord.”

Such is the case with the man we celebrate today. Peter Claver, in no small part because of his friendship with Alphonsus Rodriguez became a saint. This young man, from a poor but distinguished family, went to Majorca to study philosophy, and it was the friendship that developed with the door keeper there, a brother who was years his elder, that would lead to the exhortations from Alphonsus that Claver should go to the Americas, and subsequently it was this friendship which lead to Claver going to Cartegena to spend the rest of his life ministering among the African Slaves brought into the Columbian port town. In many ways, it is out of the friendship that Claver had with Alphonsus that the reality that Christ, being in the midst of these two men gathered in his name, sent Claver, as apostle, to share in the proclamation of today’s Gospel. To boldly proclaim that: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 9 because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” The fulfillment which Jesus speaks of takes place because of the depths of a friendship, which as friendship in the Lord, allowed for the indwelling of the Spirit in the mutual love between friends.


Jesuit Friendship is a dangerous thing because when we are truly friends in the Lord, when we are open to the kinds of spiritual conversation that these two friends shared, God can and will move and act, exhort and inspire. These men in their friendship provide an example for us, especially now in studies of just what this time can be. Their friendship developed at a philosophate, and it was their spiritual conversations that lead to the mission Claver undertook to Columbia. Our mission here is studies, but in that mission we live in the already but not yet of the kingdom of God. We must be careful and tend the seeds of preparation we receive here well, for what flowers from those seeds may be an important part of the realization of God’s will being done on earth, as it is in heaven, Just as it was for Claver.

In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict also points out that the love from which each friendship is born has a character which orients us ultimately out of ourselves, towards the other. It orients us beyond our close personal relationships, destroys any chains of selfishness, and carries us forward to something more, towards the magis. It is this outward turn which is precisely what Isaiah talks about in our first reading which is the natural result of friendship. Friendship with Alphonsus not only helped Claver to discern the call that was his to boldly minister to African slaves brought to the new world to work in the mines but gave Claver the proper outward orientation to be able to begin to even conceive of “releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thong of the yoke, sharing his bread with the hungry, and sheltering the oppresses and homeless.” Peter’s life was a life animated by friendship. It is recorded in some of his papers that Peter knew what so many of us have come to recognize in the exercises, that love should manifest itself more in deeds than words. Peter’s mission of evangelizing and baptizing slaves was then not simply about giving instruction, but also about making manifest that love of friendship to them by caring for their temporal needs and defending their human dignity when their slave masters wanted to resist even their being baptized on the grounds that they were less than human. Peter cared for so much more than the simple tasks which are seen often to be the proper provenance of a priest, he could have simply baptized immediately, he could have simply fed the slaves, but he ate with each, had conversations as best he could with each, and defended them before the authorities of the time. Love turned out from oneself is love that participates in God bringing his kingdom to bear on earth just as it is in heaven.

Jesuit friendship is a dangerous thing… because it can challenge the status quo, shake us from complacency, and impel us forward. Jesuit friendship is a dangerous thing because it can give us the support to do things we once thought ourselves incapable of. Jesuit friendship is a dangerous thing because it is participation in the awesome work of God in shaping and molding a world of justice, love, and peace. These men serve as example, we can learn today about just how it is that we get the strength, joy, and peace to share in God’s kingdom. Pedro and Alfonso, just two men having spiritual conversation. Pedro and Alfonso, just two Jesuit brothers praying for each other. Pedro and Alfonso, the great saints, friends, and companions even on the day they were canonized together. Pedro and Alfonso, pray for us.

Surrounded by so great a cloud of Witnesses……

Fr. Suwalsky Opens the Gate to the New House
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

So I am back in St. Louis. I have returned for my third and final year as a Philosophy Grad Student to write my thesis, spend one more year in formation here in the Midwest, and to have one more year with the many great friends which I have been blessed to make out here, the people which truly make this place a home for me.
I have also moved into our new house at 3900 Westminster Blvd. This is a beautiful old house, well over a hundred years old, and having much of the Victorian charm about it that one would expect from a turn of the century house in a city which was entranced by the World Fair’s arrival in 1904. The house itself served as a radio station for over 60 years, producing the old Sacred Heart radio program broadcasts which were used as public service announcements for many radio stations. Changes in broadcasting regulations, however, made their little radio snippets less and less popular, and the station closed in November of last year. Now we live here.
Almost immediately after the demise of the station, the house underwent renovations, some things were removed, (like massive steam heaters) others were restored, (like the mural of angels on the parlor ceiling) and then others were added. (like the slew of antique furniture which came out of storage from the old novitiate in Florissant, Mo) Now we live in a massive, beautiful house a block from the University filled with beautiful 150 year old antique furniture which you couldn’t buy if you wanted to. One recent alum from the university has taken to calling this place the “Bellarmansion.” (a clever play on the fact that this house is a part of the Bellarmine House community) While it could be cited as a testimony against our vow of poverty, I think it actually testifies to it, and that some of the stuff holds a deep and rich history which can humble the people that live here and remind us that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
My room, which is arguably the largest in the house, has a big beautiful old secretary’s desk in it which is over one hundred and fifty years old as well as a smaller curio cabinet of probably about the same age. I don’t think I realized the significance of these two pieces of furniture, however, until I looked in the desk across in the room across the hall from me though. That desk bears a card which gives a little history of the desk it says:

“For about 100 years this secretary-bookcase stood in the room of the pastor of St. Francis Xavier Church. It was identified as such by brother Vowels in 1944. When the limestone rectory was about to be torn down in late 1965, Father Louis Hanlon, S.J., the pastor, gave me this case because he knew it would be too high for the ceilings of the new (cream brick) rectory” ---Claude Heithaus, S.J.

Now the history of this desk is important. It stood in the room of the man who performed the famed St. Louis exorcism (which would later become a book and movie known in popular culture as The Exorcist.) Aside from that infamous chapter in its history, however, and the thing which pops out most to anyone who knows a little bit of Jesuit history in the Missouri Province is that this desk also belonged to the man who wrote this card, Claude Heithaus, who, in a time when many Jesuits and many at the university were timid at best about speaking out about segregation in the City, spoke publicly one Sunday from the College Church pulpit, denouncing racism, segregation, and all of the horrible effects it had, and still has in many ways to this day, on the city of St. Louis. Fr. Heithaus was a prophetic voice who was misunderstood in his time, but today is idolized among all of the Jesuits who know his story.
It’s a cool thing that that desk is here. It’s amazing to be able to live in this house, but this isn’t a newly acquired property, and it was given to us as a bequest many years ago. The upkeep of this house, like the furniture that now sits in it, is a testament to the gratitude of the men who have faithfully maintained it down to this day. It is a testament to men who have lived out their vows of poverty in gratitude to God and their benefactors, and displaying that gratitude by not being wasteful of those gifts. In this house, this “bellarmansion,” the eight of us who live here stand on the shoulders of giants. We are caught up in a living monument to the history of this place and the Jesuits who have lived here, worked here, or used (or in many cases made) the things which fill it. In the letter to the Hebrews (12:1-2) the writer says: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” The example of these men is what leads us and spurs us on. So as I sit here at my desk, in these days of reading Aristotle and Plato, preparing for comprehensive exams, I think back to those men who came before me in the society, and who are now hopefully with God. And I ask their intercession. All Saints of the Society, pray for us.

This just in.....

Fenway through the alleys
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

This just in....

The Boston Globe
August 21, 2006

Roxbury MA (AP) - A seven-year-old boy was at the center of a Boston
courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with child custody law and regulations requiring that family unity be maintained to the degree possible.

The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried out that they also beat him.

After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who should have custody of him. After two recesses to check legal references and confer with child welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Boston Red Sox, whom the boy firmly believes is not capable of beating anyone.



Ok so I didn't write that, it came in a forward from my dad, but unfortunately it seems to be true. The Sox are tanking, and there is nothing we can do about it. No postseason this year, no World Series, I won’t be wearing my once lucky jersey until late October, and I will be watching football far sooner than I normally care to. All this because the Sox are tanking. When Yankee fans, and I know a few, get into it with me over the sad state of affairs at Fenway park, I simply give a gracious smile if I can, even though deep down I want to tell them precisely what they can do with their $200,000,000 payroll. At some point, though, you just have to laugh, and be able to laugh at yourself and your own situation. When I get upset about the Sox I am obviously taking myself and the game WAY too seriously….. and perhaps losing streaks are most in order for my own spiritual well being at that moment.
I think that we all have things in our lives which, if we are honest, we have to admit that we take way too seriously. In general they are things which are far more important than the Boston Red Sox. They are things which drive us often enough, things which we are passionate about, things which can motivate us, and drive us forward. All of that stuff is straw, as Thomas Aquinas once said, in comparison to knowing and loving God. In the end its not that I shouldn’t enjoy the Red Sox, with their ups and downs, but its that moments like this remind me how insignificant something like being a baseball fan is in the long run. Its fun, but will I remember who played second base for the ’06 Sox in 20 years? Probably not. I am a passionate baseball fan, no doubt, but this applies to other things, be it what I enjoy studying in philosophy, or the kind of apostolic work I do, in the end, its all one small, broken gift which we offer up to God, to be made whole in the glory of his Love for us. That is the same love which flows through each of us in the person of the spirit, and the very thing which impels us on to the one thing which is not straw in the end, God himself.

Chilling by the ocean

Cohasset
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

Ahhh Cohasset, that enduring finish line of every year right before a new one begins, this is where I take my vacation drinking strange beers and smoking dry cigars, and more importantly it is here that I catch up with Jesuit brothers who I see only once in a blue moon. That picture to the right is where I am on vacation right now. Vacation is, for me, more than just a time to rest and lay out by the pool. (Which, in fact, would have disastrous results given my all too Irish skin.) Vacation is a time to gain fresh fruits even in the last moments of summer, to be refreshed, renewed, and to spend some time in gratitude, basking in the warm glow of God’s love and our benefactor’s generosity.
Benedict XVI said in his angelus address for this week that: “Vacation also makes for a precious opportunity to spend more time with family, to reunite with relatives and friends, in a word to give more space to the human contact which the rhythms of everyday tasks keep from being cultivated as we would like.” Those relationships are at the very core of my and any vocation, not just to religious life and priesthood, but in general. It is those relationships which support us, which help us to grow and become increasingly the person we were created to be, it is those relationships which are at the very heart of how it is that we experience Christ himself. Genuine companionship with others is at the heart of the Christian mystery, because Christ consistently creates community, among the apostles, disciples, and among the whole Church. In the end the mystical act of giving His body and blood to us in the Eucharist is enjoined by the prayer that they all may be one as He is one with the Father. Augustine says that by the Eucharist we become what we consume, that is the Body of Christ which Paul identifies as being the Church, community itself.
Often times it is the rhythm of mundane life which breaks those bonds, and can leave us with a feeling of loneliness, of isolation, and alienation. The desert fathers warned against just such a thing when they warned against sloth in the spiritual life, and I think it applies here. Sometimes the day to day wears us down, and makes us slothful around community life. Such is a reality for us all, when work, study, or other circumstances make us less intentional about tending to the people that we care about, especially those not immediately present to us, we lose something. We lose a sense of our deeper connectedness, we lose a sense of just how much we are genuinely loved by those friends and family who care for us, and that is a dangerous thing.
So here I am at Cohasset, on vacation, resting, recouping, and perhaps most importantly reconnecting with many of the people who make this life worthwhile, enjoyable, and living in gratitude for it.

What my time in Georgetown has meant.

The Back Side of Healy Hall.
Originally uploaded by mikerogerssj.

I read my final evaluation of my time at Georgetown working in the hospital today and I have been, as I finish up my self- evaluation, figuring out what my time here has meant…..

Strangely enough given that my job is pretty much talking to whoever will listen or whoever will talk back with their own spiritual needs, I think that for me in a lot of ways it has been a time to embrace silence. It’s a different silence though, not one of total quiet, not one in which I have been jealously guarding my solitude, but rather a silence which has allowed me to allow God to bring me back to life in a lot of ways.

This past year was a tough one for me. Many things happened in the context of my life at SLU. Friendships were made and broken, people came and went from my life. I have had to come into better contact with what these vows I have taken mean concretely. The honeymoon of vows ended; there was no more novice master to guide me as closely as they do. I was left to be a Jesuit on my own accord. I didn’t do that perfectly by any stretch, and by the end of the year I found myself asking in my retreat that whatever small, humble offering I was making to God would be a sufficient enough manifestation of my love for him who loved me first. In the midst of whatever struggles I was having two of my closest Jesuit friends left, and I was left to mourn the loss of friendships which were for me a constant support and continual joy. I had a bit of a premonition that last year would be tough, that it would involve some suffering, and it did. Maybe such a premonition was a self fulfilling prophecy, but the reality is that it doesn’t matter if ti was or wasn’t. What matters most is the reality itself, that last year was hard, and I learned deeply the meaning of “take up your cross and follow me”..

So why am I writing all of this? Well it’s because of the silence. Sometimes after death and suffering we all need to enter into the only appropriate response, silence. When I was a novice in the Society during the full boat Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius we spent a whole day meditating on Christ dead in the tomb. For some of the novices this meant staying in their room all day and emerging as little as possible. I didn’t do that, but I did spend that day in the silence, anticipating Easter. Some of that silence is sitting face to face with the cold hard reality of death itself and the ways in which it causes us to come up against our own mortality, which is the ultimate limitation of ourselves. We come to realize just how finite we are, and there is a great sense of liberation in the humility that that can bring. This is a lesson though that I have learned over and over again this summer, and it’s been a summer of that silence which can do nothing but simply be with itself, simply face the reality that there are many forms death takes even while we are alive.

I have faced this all with the poverty of spirit I prayed for earlier this summer; the sense of my radical dependence on God, and that has been healing. The hospital forces your hand on that, being with people, walking with them on their journey, makes you embrace those quiet moments when all you can do is keep silence, those moments when healing can only come in a complete lack of words. The time in the tomb here at Georgetown, that is, this time in the silence away from many of the realities which were at the center of that suffering, this time to rethink and reclaim, this time to remember my own deeper poverty, this time to come to terms with the possibility of resurrection..

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

"If they Kill me, I will Arise in the Salvadoran People"

-Oscar Romero (from outside the U.C.A. Chapel)
Photo by Laura Hershberger

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own: A Reflection Given at Georgetown University Hospital Chapel. August 4, 2006.

Scripture:
Deuteronomy 34
Psalm 30
John 21

Prayer/Poem "Prophets of a Future Not Our Own" attr. to Archbishop Oscar Romero



There is a sense of liberation in knowing we cannot do everything. We are ministers, not messiahs, workers, not master builders. At some point for each of us there is a moment where we have to leave behind a project, a job, a way of life, in order to carry on to whatever the next stage may be. For some of us, very practically here, this means that at the end of these next few weeks we will leave our jobs as chaplains here in the hospital and move to carry on our ministry elsewhere. For some watching or listening, this may mean very practically that what has happened in the context of your being here in the hospital, whether it is illness, surgery, birth, or death has changed your lives to such an extent that you will not, cannot go back from where you came.
We can mourn this part of our lives just as much as anything else, and we should though we may also look ahead and see the work that will be done, but will not be for us to do. In our reading from Deuteronomy, Moses looks into the holy land, the fulfillment of his prophetic longings, but does not, cannot, enter in. Of course scripture points to this being punishment for having doubted God, but there is more at stake here. The kingdom of God, the story of our salvation, both supersedes any one man and is at the same time fully realized in one man, who was also God. We are not God though. Moses, the greatest of the prophets, was not God. In truth we carry nothing to completion, but each event finds its fruition in the community of believers that we gather around us as the people of God. For Moses the realization of his dream was a realization through his progeny, which was a free community of God’s chosen people now coming into the inheritance God had promised them. For many of us it may be the same, and often it is the case with the greatest who walk among us, those men and women like Moses, Martin Luther King Jr., and the author of the poem which is at the center of this reflection, Oscar Romero, we too might just be able to walk to the Jordan, but not cross over. The future we prophesy is so often not our own, and often the world which we try to create is one which is just a little better, a little more loving, a little more humane for our children, and their children, entrusting to them what was once entrusted to us, the gift to participate with God’s grace in the shaping of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
The Psalmist comes to us with a perspective which says that we can sometimes think that we shall never be shaken. But we know better, for people who are sick and in the hospital very often it seems as if God seems to be hidden, and that the best of our efforts in life, because of illness or injury will ultimately come to nothing, that with the psalmist we might ask “will my life blood come to nothing?” We have hope in God though, and it can be in just that recognition of our relationship with God which is made manifest in crying out for mercy for whatever humble, broken, offering we make of our lives in which we can allow God to show us his mercy, his love, and that we can know that our incomplete offering is merely a step along the way, and an opportunity for God’s grace to enter in and do the rest in our lives.
We sometimes need to step back and look at the broader picture, because in context what little we accomplish in our lifetimes often makes a significant contribution to the building of the kingdom of God, and the seed we sow, though we may never reap it, bears fruit far beyond our imagination. There is a commitment in this to participate in the building of that kingdom for each of us; a commitment to participate in the sowing of the seed; a commitment to participate in the watering of that which is already planted. That commitment is the command of Christ to Peter that we hear in our Gospel reading, to love Christ is to feed his sheep and tend his flock. This is perhaps the only pastoral visit in recorded history which one could argue brings wholeness, Christ visiting Peter after the resurrection, the Messiah himself, brings forgiveness and a chance to amend his life to Peter to counter act the Peter’s denial of the kingdom in the face of the fear of the crucifixion that all Christ had said and done would be for naught. The resurrection stands as the surest hope, that life never really ends, it changes. The resurrection is the surest hope that in our weeping we will find joy. The resurrection is the surest hope that the seed which falls to the earth and dies lays dormant only for a while, only to see bountiful grain arise after the shoot which produced that seed is long gone. Yet there is, even in this, a sense that no life is completely filled, no life given its fullest meaning on its own merits. Jesus warns Peter: “Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Even Peter, seemingly made whole by the work of Christ himself is left with a moment to ponder, that his work may never be full, may never be complete, and that in that moment of recognizing his limitation, there is the liberative moment of Christ’s words to him: “Follow Me.”
So it is for us, we may never see end results, and what we do may in the end be very incomplete. Still we minister; still we love, hoping for the kingdom which is beyond our vision. Still we plant and water the seeds which may not be our own, but in truth belong to future generations. Still we find meaning in our lives as incomplete as they may actually be, because we participate in something much larger than ourselves, and in this hope we prophesy of the kingdom of God, we prophesy of a future that is not our own.