Month: August 2017

Wedding Homily from this past weekend.

This past weekend I had the honor of officiating at the wedding of Danny and Kylie. It had been a very long time since I have been to the chapel at the University of St. Thomas. It has changed much since my undergraduate days in the early 70’s, and my graduate school days in the 80’s. While I officiate at funerals quite frequently these days, it has been a couple of years since I last officiated at a wedding. Here is the homily I gave at the wedding this past weekend.

My wife Ruthie and I were married at 7 pm on December 27, 1974 at St. Bridget of Sweden, in Lindstrom Minnesota. It was a bitterly cold Friday night. The temperature was 24 below zero. As Ruthie was processed up the aisle alongside her father, she looked radiant. I was captivated by her beautiful face, framed by her long dark hair, and white hood. What I was not aware was as they were processing the aisle, her dad told her, “You can still get out of this if you want to. I won’t be mad.” Ruthie just smiled at her dad and kept walking up the aisle. That night was the beginning of an incredible life with someone who has utterly transformed and enriched my life.

The Gospel story of the wedding at Cana is not really about the wedding nor about water being miraculously transformed into wine. It was at this wedding that the world was introduced to a new creation, a new way of being human as Jesus ushers into human history the Messianic era. At the wedding of Cana Jesus began the process of transforming the world. Kylie and Danny, today through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus transforms your lives into a new creation. Christ transforms you into being a visible living sign of God’s love to our world. This is visible in the mutual love you have and express for one another. This reflects the mutual love that Christ has for the Church and that God has for our world.

Whenever we celebrate sacraments, we undergo a transformative change that the Church calls “the ontological change.” The transformation occurs very gradually, so much so, that the change that is occurring is barely noticeable. In the sacrament of marriage this ontological change is best described as two become one flesh, two hearts become one heart. Over time it is as if when one inhales, the other exhales. Another way to envision this change is a scene in an old Marx brother movie in which Groucho Marx is dancing with a pretty blonde woman. As they are dancing, she keeps whispering in his ear, “Hold me closer, hold me closer.” Groucho snuggles closer to her. She says again, “Hold me closer, hold me closer.” Again, Groucho snuggles closer to her. She whispers once more, “hold me closer,” at which he says to her, “If I held you any closer, I would be behind you.”

I hadn’t fully realized how close we had become until 2006 when we were separated from each as I was doing 3 weeks of Spanish immersion in San Antonio. The heartache I experienced over that 3 weeks was overwhelming. Even though I was busy learning vocabulary, practicing speaking, listening, and writing skills in Spanish 10 to 12 hours a day, my day pivoted around two significant events: 1) talking with Ruth by cell phone as she drove to work at the State Veterans Home at night (she works fulltime nights as a nurse there), and talking with her by cell phone when she returned home from work in the morning. By the time the last day of class was over, I could hardly wait to get back to the airport and get home to see her. My flight didn’t arrive till later in the evening, and Ruthie had to work that night, so I was fully expecting to be picked up at the airport by my daughter, Beth. My heart leapt for joy when I saw it was Ruth, not Beth, walking toward me at the airport. As we embraced I wept for joy. I was finally complete again.

In marriage we experience the presence of Christ in our spouse. The Jewish Theologian and rabbi, Martin Buber tells us that our relationships with one another are windows through which we look on the face of God. My greatest experience of God is in the person of Ruthie. From her lips I hear God saying to me, “I love you! I forgive you!” In her touch and in her arms I feel God embracing me. As I look into her brown eyes, I see the face of God.
Does all this happen overnight? Of course not, it is a gradual transformation into Divine love. Divine love is not a power over relationship. Divine love is a power with relationship in which both parties mutually and equally share their love with one another. It takes time to learn how to love at this deep a level. You must mutually invite the love of Christ that transforms all lives to be part of your new life together. This mutual love is the foundation of all for which you have been preparing these many long months. Mutually listening to one another in love. Mutually assisting each other through hardships and joys, triumphs and failures, always in love.

In the year 2011, I was on medical leave because of an infection I received when I got a hip replacement. 5 surgeries later, with Christmas approaching, still without a hip and because of my immobility unable to get Ruthie a Christmas present, I decided to start a book of poetry dedicated to her, recounting our courtship, our wedding, the birth of our children and the many joys and hardships we have experienced together. I called it “The Book of Ruth.” I sent it to my daughter-in-law, Olivia, to print out and put together so I could give it to Ruth on Christmas. I have since kept adding poems to this book. I would like to conclude with a portion of a poem I entitled, “Learning How to Walk.”

“To walk with you is
to learn how to love,
each measured step,
a grace-filled journey
to something greater,
far beyond and far better
than the stumbling steps
that I could have
made on my own.

To walk with you,
is to see the
world with different
eyes, colors bursting
through the grays,
warmth on the
coldest of days, your
voice floating, playing
delightfully in the air
alongside until the
sound settles gently,
gracefully in my ears.

We have walked many
steps together in life,
my gait now not as steady,
these days of uncertain
limbs, joints and cane,
reminiscent of my first steps.

 

In walking with you,
new discoveries never end,

new beginnings
abound, and that
with you, the first
and the finest of
all teachers, learning
to walk is never
fully learned.”

Kylie and Danny, as you process down this aisle as a married couple, you begin your walk today as a couple transformed in Christ’s love. You will walk many steps together, through good times and bad times, through challenges, through triumphs, through heartaches, and through joys. May the love of Christ transform your lives today. And may that Divine love through you transform the lives of all you meet from this day forward. May God bless you with many years of walking together, always learning to be the presence of God in our world.

 

The DNA of God among us – a homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

In the Fall of 1980, I had the great opportunity of taking an independent study on scriptural exegesis with Fr. Mike Joncas. Scriptural exegesis is a very involved and exact process of studying scripture to better understand what a scripture passage is saying. When he wasn’t composing hymns like “On Eagles Wings”, Mike is a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas.

Mike had given me today’s Gospel as an assignment. After doing all the exegetical work on this Gospel, I handed Mike my paper on it. After reading the paper, he asked me two questions. Did Jesus initially refuse to heal the woman’s daughter because in being raised Jewish he had learned from his culture not to associate with people who were not Jewish? Or, did Jesus initially refuse to heal the woman’s daughter to test the woman’s faith? I told Mike, that Jesus was probably testing the woman’s faith.

Mike replied that many scripture scholars believe that because Jesus was raised in the Jewish culture of his time, and as a good practicing Jew, he was following the teachings of his religion to avoid people who were not Jewish. This is evident in the behavior of the apostles advising Jesus not to engage with this pagan woman. And, initially, Jesus ignores the pleas of the woman. The pagan woman’s faith challenged this bias that Jesus had learned from his religion. As he listened to her and discovered her deep faith, he realized that what he was taught by his religion was wrong and he cured the woman’s daughter. Jesus had to unlearn the cultural bias taught to him by his Jewish culture. From that moment onward Jesus began to widen his mission to include both Jewish and non-Jewish people.

In reflecting on what I heard from Mike Joncas that day, I began to examine my own prejudices and biases. I remembered a time when, as a college student riding the Snelling Bus to St. Thomas College, how uncomfortable and uneasy I became when at the intersection of University Ave and Snelling Ave the color of the bus changed from primarily white to primarily black. Where I had I learned this prejudice against people of color?

I was not taught this prejudice from my parents. My parents would not tolerate any religious or racial prejudice at home because they themselves had experienced religious prejudice as Catholics. My father was a mechanical engineer, but many United States businesses would not offer him a job precisely because he was Polish and Catholic. My grandfather told my dad to change his last name to something more Protestant sounding. So, my dad legally changed his last name from the Polish Catholic Wojnar to the more Protestant German sounding Wagner, and, was subsequently hired by Westinghouse Air Brake Company as a mechanical engineer. My mother, a highly degreed home economics teacher lost her job teaching poor children in the inner city Pittsburgh public schools for the reason of being Catholic.

Where I had learned to be racially prejudice? It was from my culture. In high school, it was made very clear that when a person drove in the Selby-Dale area of St. Paul, you rolled up your windows and locked the doors. Why? because that neighborhood was populated only by black people and was considered dangerous. It was a load of hogwash. It was just as dangerous to ride through German neighborhood on Rice Street in St. Paul, where Ruthie lived, as it was to drive through Selby-Dale. It took that uneasiness I experienced riding the Snelling bus for me to become self-aware of my own racism and to begin to “unlearn” the lies I had been taught at school.

Today’s Gospel forces us to examine the racial and religious prejudices we have been taught and have accepted. It forces us to engage, as Jesus did, with those we have been taught to fear and to hate by our culture and perhaps by our family. This Gospel forces us to acknowledge that to God there is no such thing as different races or cultures. God’s mercy and God’s love is extended to all people. Whether we are black, white, Asian, Native American, Latino; whether our names are Ole and Lena, George and Gracie, Emil and Ludmilla, Ezechial and Sophie, Maria y Jose, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. We all have God’s DNA in us. We belong to only one race and that is the human race.

To overcome our prejudices and biases we must, as Jesus did, listen and talk with one another. We will find that we all possess the same heartache, the same love, the same joys and the same sorrows. There was a time when Germans from Union Hill or Heidelberg would never marry a Czechs from New Prague. There was a time when the Irish from St. Patrick, St. Catherine or St. Thomas would never consider marrying a German or a Czech. Somewhere along time our grandparents discovered that national prejudices were false and ridiculous.

Unlike the movies, and many television mini-series that portray Jesus as a Northern European man with long brown hair, blue eyes, and a British accent, Jesus was a brown skinned, dark haired, brown eyed Palestinian Jewish man who spoke Aramaic. Jesus mission as St. Paul vividly points out in the second reading was not just to the Jewish people but to all people. Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation to not just a select few, but to all people of the world, who are sons and daughters of God. May we, who possess the DNA of God, who are the Body of Christ made flesh in our world, continue his salvific mission by serving the image and the likeness of God in all people.