Monday, March 24, 2014

Third Sunday of Lent

            Every year during Lent the story of the woman at the well is told. The third Sunday of Lent is also the Sunday on which parishes with candidates in the RCIA program conduct what we call the first scrutiny before baptism or profession of faith at the Easter Vigil. These candidates are about to enter the Church. It is a season that, while we emphasize repentance on the one hand, we also emphasize the anticipation of new life in the Church.

            We listen to the parable and are apt to get caught up in the woman's past of five husbands. The woman is astonished at the master's awareness and knowledge. But just as we may be caught up in the spirit of Lenten repentance, we may forget to keep looking ahead and thus, the most important thing about the woman at the well may be overlooked. She is also the first evangelizer. It's not too difficult to explain. Three brief sentences are all we need to know about this woman. Jesus speaks to the woman. She hears the word of Jesus. She runs off to tell her fellow townspeople. What Jesus speaks to her makes such an impression that she wants to share it with others.

            I have often told the story of a young man I knew from my home parish. I was active in my parish's Catholic Youth Organization in the late 1950s. One of our members was a fellow named Jerry who was not Catholic. We always wondered why he joined the CYO and he wasn't even Catholic. He attended the nearby public school. Though we liked him and he became a part of us, we didn't understand why he hung out with Catholics.

            One Saturday morning we showed up at the parish to gather for a field trip when this young non-Catholic man burst out of the church. He saw us gathering and came running up to us yelling out, "I've been baptized! I've been baptized!" Remember that at that time, preparation for entering the Church was always a matter of regular meetings with a priest that ended with a private baptismal ceremony. What I and my CYO friends did not know was that Jerry had been working with our pastor for some months preparing for baptism. He not only was not Catholic. He had not been previously baptized. He was the most excited human being I have seen. The joy of his baptism spilled out everywhere.

             How did I and my friends react? Well, some were visibly embarrassed by his actions and some just shrugged it off. So you've been baptized. So what? But the radiance of the moment didn't wear off Jerry. About two years ago I met Jerry again for the first time when I accidentally met him at a local parish when I happened to run into him while assisting at a weekend Mass. The strength of that baptism had not left him and he remained an active member of his own parish.

            Most of us here are probably cradle Catholics and I suspect most of us take our faith for granted. There are probably things about our faith that we enjoy but I have rarely seen excitement in myself or other cradle Catholics about too many things in our faith like I saw in Jerry that morning in the late 1950s. Jerry knew that his baptism made a difference in his life.

            The woman at the well knew that something changed when she met Jesus. It was a most astonishing thing in her life. Something so profound occurred that she ran into the nearby town to let the townspeople know of it. She had to share it with others. They came out to see this man who had told her everything she had ever done. He wasn't a fortune teller. He didn't read cards or palms. He didn't perform magic tricks. He simply told the woman who she was. And that simple encounter meant that she wouldn't be able to live her life in the same way.

            Each week we meet Jesus in precisely the same way the woman did. We do so in this liturgy through the reception of holy communion. But what is the result? Are we as excited as she was? Are we ready to go into our neighborhoods and tell others about Jesus? Are we excited enough to want to share Jesus with others? Do we bring our neighbors to meet Jesus?

             The Archdiocese of Indianapolis is involved in a process of consolidating parishes due to declining numbers of priests and changing demographics. Many of us are trying to hold on to a Church and to a parish within a Church that reflects time past. We want things to stay as they were. But they can't because things aren't the way they were. We are inclined to be inhospitable. We aren't always welcoming of others who don't believe as we do, who don't think as we do, who don't look as we do. We often don't want to bring new people into the Church. We are inclined to ignore the profound yet simple event that happened at the well.

            Perhaps you and I have not heard Jesus tell us all about ourselves. Perhaps we are not listening closely.

 


Sunday, March 16, 2014

Elsye Cantwell (1922-2013)

Elsye Mahern died December 22, 2013. She was 91 and had been in declining health for more than a year. One of her daughters let me know of her death. Elsye was my third cousin and the last time I heard from her was 10 years ago when she sent me a note inviting me to call her for tea. I never got back to her.

The first time I met Elsye was about 1960. I was a freshman at Marian College and Elsye was a mother of 10 children going back to school to begin a master's in education which she eventually accomplished with a degree through Butler University. She introduced herself to me by saying, "I'm Elsye Mahern and I know we're not supposed to talk to each other but I don't see why we can't be friends."

Elsye was a writer and she produced a weekly column for the Indiana Catholic and Record on family matters that were helpful, humorous, serious, but always down to earth.

Her grandfather was Edward Cantwell and Edward had a brother named Thomas who was my great-grandfather. Thomas's daughter Mary Alice (or Mae) was my grandmother and Grandma Mae once told me that there was a branch of our family that we never spoke to but that they were really very nice people. The Cantwells were Irish and in some mysterious way that is all that needs explaining.

Edward Cantwell and Thomas Cantwell, who worked together as Western Union telegraphers had a falling out in 1894 after their mother died. Her will stipulated that she was carrying out the wishes of her dead husband (he died in 1885) by assigning most of his estate to one brother and leaving only a nominal sum to the other.

This all came to light sometime in the late 1970s when Elsye's sister Katheleen Cantwell paid a visit to my family to provide us with a copy of the genealogical research she and Elsye had been working on. Kit, as she was known, had worked diligently and thoroughly on the research. Edward's family and Thomas' family had grown since 1894 with the understanding that one did not speak to the other side. And, for the most part, no one had.

In high school I was approached by a classmate in my first year of school who introduced herself as Stephanie Cantwell. She was also the great-grand daughter of Edward. All she said was that her mother knew that she and I were related somehow.

A few years ago I came into contact with one of Elsye's sons Louis, jr., who was active in Democratic politics in Indianapolis. Some years after that I got to know a daughter Kate who is a law professor. It was Kate who let me know of Elsye's death.

After I first met Elsye, she invited me to her home for dinner. That is all a vague memory now except that I remember a household of very well-behaved children, and a very nice dinner and sociable evening. By the end of the 1960s the marriage had ended, Elsye moved, I heard, to Chicago and later to California where she remarried many years later. 

When we reconnected in 2004, Elsye sent me a copy of a book she had written in recent years. I also had obtained a copy of another book of hers written in the 1950s following the death of a son. She and her first husband were very active in their parish and in the Catholic Interracial Council and in the burgeoning family movements of the 1950s that became popular in the Church. Reform in the Church affected us in different ways, however.  Elsye was a woman of integrity and as her obituary stated of life, she never stopped living. She affected in a positive way the life of the local Church and she deserves recognition for it.

I regret that I never visited her for tea





Second Sunday of Lent 2014

There is understatement in the reading from the Book of Genesis for the Second Sunday of Lent. God tells Abraham to pack up and leave home and settle in a new land over 1,000 miles away by the best traders' route. By our reckoning nowadays, that distance isn't all that far. We could travel by air in a couple of hours or so. But there were no airplanes for Abraham to take, no paved roads to drive on, only dusty traders' routes. Barely roads.

Abraham willingly accepts the direction of God in the first reading and leaves everything to go to "a land that I will show you." How frightening that must have been. But Abraham lived a long time ago and it is not easy reconciling Abraham's travels with our own. To what can we compare it?

What was it like when you left home to go away to school or to move into your own place? Or what was it like when you perhaps got your first job and maybe moved away from home? Or went away to college? Or what did you feel when suddenly your parents said you had to find your own place to live?  What was it like when you discovered you were on your own? Not all of us experience that, of course. Perhaps your transition was smooth and you found yourself on full scholarship to Harvard! But probably most of us felt some kind of fear as part of our first streak of independence.

Imagine Abraham leaving the only world he had known and striking out for some distant land to begin a new life. He might as well have been crossing an ocean for the first time. It was not likely he would ever see or hear from any of his relatives or neighbors again. The only consolation here is that in the ancient world of the Middle East in which these people lived, one traveled with one's entire family. So Abraham didn't merely strike out on his own. He had brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and who knows who else going with him.

Perhaps the fear is not unlike that of our own ancestors who left foreign lands to take opportunity in this country. What was it like to leave and to begin anew?

In today's Gospel of Matthew, Jesus takes three of his disciples to a mountaintop and he is transfigured before them. We might not think of this event in the same way as Abraham's problem, but for our faith this was a life changing event. For Peter, James, and John, this event abruptly changed their relationship with Jesus. It was an event which caused them to be afraid. What did it mean?

They see Jesus in all his glory. In reading Matthew from the beginning, this passage seems to have been misplaced here. Peter has just declared that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus predicts his passion and death and suddenly he is taking his disciples to the top of a mountain to be glorified. Afterward he goes on to heal a boy possessed by a demon. And then Jesus once again predicts his passion and death. The Gospel writer seems to have gotten the chronology wrong. It is as if he got all the facts misplaced. If I were Peter and James and John, I would feel lost, as if I had gotten into the wrong movie script. If I were Abraham I might feel as if life had played me a terribly unfunny joke. Yet Jesus reassures his disciples not to be afraid.

When we come to the season of Lent, we are always caught up in the practice of giving things up. Well, so be it. Is it possible we could think about giving up our fears? Is Lent a time for me to overcome my fear of change in my own life? Growing older? Living with life threatening illnesses? Children moving on?

Those are tall orders, of course, and giving up being afraid isn't accomplished easily. The answer for the Christian, obviously, is that we are invited to put our reliance on Jesus. It is not really even possible to give up our fear unless we can attach ourselves to Christ. But the more we try to do so, the more we may continue to fear. If we find that happening, the challenge is not to try so hard. The challenge is to let Jesus invite us out of our fear which is what he does for Peter, James, and John. The words of Jesus to "be not afraid" are as much an invitation as a command. Perhaps we can make one our Lenten practices the repetition of that prayer of Jesus.