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Enough Words!

“There is nothing to eat. There is nothing worse than to see people in the streets looking for something to eat for their children. … There are so many people here that need operations and or specialist medical treatment but have to wait a long time, and are forced to go through immense suffering.” 

“As long as there is one person from our community left here, I will stay with them.” 

Fr Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest, who had spoken these words in January was shot dead this morning, April 7. A masked gunman opened fire on Fr van der Lugt, killing him instantly.

Having lived in Syria for almost 50 years, Fr van der Lugt had championed the plight of the ordinary people he had served. In February UN and Red Crescent workers evacuated more than 1,300 civilians from the Old City during a temporary truce. Fr. van der Lugt, along with Syrian Jesuit Fr Ziad Hilal, 40, had chosen not to escape to safety but to stay living alongside the 74 Christians and a few hundred Muslim civilians caught between government and opposition forces fighting for control of the area.

This is not the time for more words!

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Your Epitaph

When asked in September of 1941 about how he would like to be memorialized, President Roosevelt told his friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “If any memorial is erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this (putting his hand on his desk) and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives Building. I don’t care what it is made of, whether limestone or granite or whatnot, but I want it plain without any ornamentation, with the simple carving, ‘In Memory of ____’.” So, friends fulfilled his wishes on the 25th anniversary of the 32nd president’s death when a simple granite marker was unveiled on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the Archives lawn in 1960. [photo] 

We know that FDR eventually got something very different! The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial that is spread out over seven and a half acres on the southern side of The Tidal Basin is huge. It was opened in the late 1990s when I was living in Washington DC and quickly became my favorite site in the Capitol City. Today would be an especially gorgeous day to be there because it would be awash in cherry blossoms. No matter the season, be sure to visit the next time you are in DC.  Then, be sure to go to go to the Archives lawn on Pennsylvania Avenue to keep things in perspective!

Did you know that today, Sunday, April 6 is National Epitaph Day? Well, it is! Time to consider what you’d want said about you after it’s all said and done. FDR proves a couple things – what you get may be something very different that what you want, and “memorials” typically say a whole lot more about the people erecting them than about the person being remembered. So, all the more reason to give some thought to those few simple words that would capture your essence for all eternity!

Currently, I expect to be buried in a plot next to my parents in the small Nebraska town where I was conceived but from which we moved nearly 60 years ago. My paternal grandparents are buried nearby. All this is not far from the land homesteaded by my paternal great-grandparents in 1868. Therefore I have thought of engraving the following from the concluding stanzas of T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.

But, that might be construed as ostentatious bordering on the pretentious!

Friends already know that I actually want my epitaph to be He made good soup!  Some think I’m kidding!  Besides costing much less to engrave many few words, I cannot think of a finer compliment for someone to say about another than that!

What are the finest words you will want future generations to say about you?

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Happy Birthday, Mom!

My aunt thought the Easter bunny had brought her a baby sister! Today, April 5 was Holy Saturday when my mother was born in 1909.  I wonder how long it took my aunt to come to other conclusions!

Mom has always been a contradiction for me. Her childhood always seemed idyllic compared with the chaos that seemed to reign in our house. She recalled parents strolling hand-in-hand on leisurely summer evenings along the creek that ran through their farm or amid their orchard that was the envy of Cedar County. In addition to being beautiful with her raven hair and green eyes, my Mom was also really smart. I never had reason to doubt her claim that she earned the very highest score in the entire country on her 8th grade standardized exam.

Life was really hard for Mom as well. Her only sister who had welcomed her Easter arrival with such delight died at 28 giving birth to her third child. Mom’s favorite sibling, Uncle Rudy, died of cancer the year I was born. My parents married in 1931 and somehow survived farming during the Depression plus the birth of eight children before “moving to town” immediately after WWII. Mom could not have been ecstatic with the news that she would give birth to her tenth child – me – at the age of 41! Like me, my Dad could not have been the easiest man to live with – she did it for 62 years.

The contradiction that has always haunted me the most, however, relates to education. Despite my mother’s clear intellectual aptitude and academic success she was denied the opportunity to go to high school. Not even the protestation and appeals from her eight grade teacher dissuaded my grandparents from their belief that Mom was already very well prepared for her intended destiny as farm wife and mother.  Yet, she never begrudged Uncle Rudy, dashingly handsome from photos my mother prized, for the opportunity to graduate from college and medical school!   How that disparity must have hurt!  But, was she even quipped to name this as an injustice?

Life brings such joy, beauty and delight. It is also confoundingly unfair, unjust and tragic. Cynics say, “Life is short, then we die.” During Lent Christians deliberately enter the passion, death, resurrection cycle. From this vantage I am beginning to appreciate that Mom enforced Lenten disciplines of fast and abstinence in our home and trucked us off to church long before we even knew the words “Triduum” or “Paschal Mystery” because she knew them to be the truth of our lives. 

Mom died just shy of her 98th birthday. We chose 1 Corinthians 13 and the Beatitudes as the perfect Scripture for her funeral liturgy. “Love is patient, love is kind, love is…” encapsulated her life! Proclaiming the Scripture from the lectern of Holy Trinity Church, the church where she had brought me to be baptized but from which the family had moved 52 years earlier, I was totally unprepared for the punch the Letter to the Corinthians delivered. It was as if I had never before heard the conclusion to the passage:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became [mature], I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 

Yes! Amen! Thanks be to God! Because of a mother’s love I am alive. Because of her mature, time-tested and tempered faith I am able to get a glimpse of what genuine faith looks like.

None of this mitigates the fact that life remains confoundingly unfair, unjust and tragic – especially for the poor and those in any way dismissed as having little value by our culture. Yet amid this culture that worships individual autonomy, personal fulfillment and material acquisition my mother’s story proclaims a contradictory truth: self-realization comes from self-giving, perhaps even to the point of dying to self. Human freedom, our fulfillment, is not so much the power of autonomous choice as it is the ability to orient what choices we have toward love.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Aunt Dora was right… your life was the gift of Easter!

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Death, Be Not Proud

Today, March 31 is the anniversary of the death of John Donne, Anglican priest and poet in 1631. I am familiar with only a small portion of his writing but everything I have read has left me stunned with its sublime beauty and profound spiritual insight. Perhaps you know this selection from MEDITATION XVII in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: 

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

The following is not only my favorite of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, it is among my all-time favorite prayer-poems, ever…

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

Another Donne sonnet grows in significance with each passing year and loss that I have grieved…

 

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

 

What are we to say about someone whose words still nourish, inspire and console nearly 400 years after his death?

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In Grateful Memory

Dom Christian de Chergé and his fellow Trappist monks rank among my all-time heroes. The movie “Of Gods and Men” recounted their faith-filled commitment to inter-faith dialogue and their tragic fate. On the night of March 26-27, 1996, seven monks from the monastery Notre-Dame de l’Atlas of Tibhirine in Algeria were kidnapped.  They were held for two months and then found dead in late May 1996.

Aware of the reality in which they chose to live, Dom Christian, the superior, wrote a testament in 1993 to be opened and read if he died by violence. The text was opened on the feast of Pentecost, May 26 shortly after the monks were killed.  In prayerful respect for these martyrs I recommend Dom Christian’s testament for your reflection on this anniversary:

If someday -and it may be today- I happen to be a victim of the terrorism which now seems to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country. 

May they accept that the Sole Master of every life cannot be indifferent to this brutal form of departure. 

May they associate this death with so many others, just as violent, left in the indifference of anonymity.

My life is not worth more than any other.

Nor is it worth less.

In any case, it lacks the innocence of childhood.

I have lived long enough to know my complicity with the evil which, unfortunately, seems to prevail in the world, and even with the evil which might suddenly strike me. I would like, when the time comes, to have this moment of lucidity which would enable me to ask for God’s pardon and that of my brothers in humanity, and at the same time to pardon with all my heart the one who strikes me down. I cannot wish such a death. It seems important to testify to this. I do not see how I could be happy to see this people whom I love to be indiscriminately accused of my death. It is too high a price to be paid for what is perhaps called the “grace of martyrdom” by an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes Islam to be. I know the contempt in which Algerians are held. 

I also know the caricatures of Islam, encouraged by a certain idealism. It is too easy to think that one is acting in good conscience by identifying this religious path with the fundamentalisms of its extremists. Algeria, Islam is something else for me; it is a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough. I believe this, as far as I know and have seen, so often finding in this place this leitmotiv of the Gospel learned at my mother’s knees, my first Church, specifically in Algeria and already respecting Moslem believers. Clearly, my death will appear to justify those who would quickly dismiss me as naive, or as an idealist, “let him tell us what he thinks of it now”! But they should know that this will finally liberate my most burning curiosity. For, God willing, I will be able to plunge my vision into the Father’s in order to contemplate with Him His Islamic children just as He sees them, all illuminated with Christ’s glory, fruits of His Passion, clothed by the gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and re-establish resemblance while enjoying the differences. I give thanks to God who seems to have wanted this lost life, completely mine and completely theirs, for heavenly JOY, for everything and despite everything. 

In this THANK YOU which says everything from now on about my life, I of course want to include you, friends of today and tomorrow, and you, friends here, beside my mother and father, my sisters and my brothers and their families, repaid a hundredfold as promised! And also to you, friend of the final hour, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, I also desire this THANK YOU for you, and this A-DIEU (TO-GOD) foreseen for you. May we be allowed to meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it pleases God, Father to both of us. AMEN!
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I highly recommend the compelling history, The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria by John W. Kiser (St. Martin’s Griffin 2002).

Christian de Cherge: A Theology of Hope by Christian Salenson (Cistercian Studies, 2009., trans. 2011) is perhaps the most compelling and inspiring theology I have read in ten years.

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Contours of Capacity

I landed in Phoenix seven days ago with a quote from Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings framing my arrival: “Each day a life. Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back.  It must be held out empty – for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.”  Enduring gifts of family, companionship, place, years and memory invited me to trust my emptiness as the markings of capacity.

For decades my brother Jerry made sure my sister-in-law had a fresh long-stem red rose on the coffee table. This was my first visit since his funeral in July so there was a boatload of apprehension about his absence. I arrived at Marilyn’s house on the first morning with a fresh red rose from the same Safeway that was Jerry’s source. We shared a tearful embrace in the family room within eye-shot of Jerry’s recliner, his mantra fresh in my ears: “Life on life’s terms.”

How proud he would be, and I am, of his sons! On Sunday evening, in the side yard of the home where the boys grew into men, 39 y/o Matt leapt with sweeping command of airspace tossing a football to a jumble of Jerry’s grandkids – unknown to Matt I recognized his father’s athleticism and good-looks flashing across his face. We had just returned from the zoo where the kids were strategically preoccupied with all-things exotic allowing this godfather to savor with approval stories of a godson’s incessant juggling of parenting, profession and priorities. What is “success”? How is its definition different at different times in our lives? Quantification, calculation are so inadequate, deficient. Marilyn had previously presented Jerry’s walking stick to me. I was grateful to lean upon its sturdy base while we made our way through the elephants, camels, flamingos, jaguars and macaws!

Before dinner Chris garnered an uncle’s unspoken praise and admiring attention when he dismissed his choice of ice water as a matter of Lenten abstinence. His eldest would later share her frustration with “giving up candy” but failing to “make it through Ash Wednesday.” She quickly shifted to excitement at the prospect of her fourth grade class being able to enact the Stations of the Cross at church on April 12. With an inward smile I commiserated with Ella’s frustration and delight – of course we fall short with even our best intentions. Perhaps the point is not our success or endurance but our need for God and enduring providence.  Enacting the Stations of the Cross will serve her well – hopefully a far distant time from now – when life inevitably presents them to her in a myriad of forms. But that avuncular wisdom should surely wait another time. We had a multiplicity of blessings before dinner as numerous children vied for the prestige of leading our family prayer. What goes through a grandparent’s heart at a moment like that?

My mind remains awash with the prospect of Ella’s class enacting the Stations of the Cross. I was reminded all too well throughout the week. Staying with a dear sister is a precious gift but provides yet another lesson in letting-go and moving-on. Claudia and her husband share a love strengthened by having grieved the loss of their first loves. Dean is an absolutely marvelous man! Thankfully, love is not a zero-sum game and he and Claudia have no need to disguise an enduring love for Carol and John. News on Saturday of a sister-in-law’s uterine cancer weighs heavy as another cross to bear with a tenacity only hope can inspire. The prospect of a favorite nephew’s move to Boston comes with the sobering reality of seeing much less of him, and his objectively adorable pre-school daughters. A weekend retreat at the Franciscan Renewal Center imprinted a resonant image of Moses – a man of privilege as a member of Pharaoh’s household whose fidelity to his core identity transformed him into a poor desert nomad with leadership and authority of a very different sort.

Lenten wisdom even sprang from the utter devastation ten and twelve-year-old grandnephews expressed after Creighton’s collapse in the NCAA basketball tournament. Their dad, another godson, used the occasion to introduce them to one of life’s hardest lessons: Very, very few people ever win their last game! Do the math… 68 teams, single elimination, only one team wins the championship, on that team perhaps only four or five are seniors for whom this is their final game.  So many compete, so very few finish with a victory. Perhaps the greatest lesson parents can teach children is the fine art of losing and that life is ultimately about loss, letting go… Lenten themes, Stations of the Cross, paschal mystery, emptiness marking the contour of our capacity.

I never shared Jerry’s athleticism and actually hated football. Perhaps now I can finally catch the wisdom he wanted to pass on to grandchildren. I leave PHX today with Jerry’s walking stick firmly in hand, grateful to lean on its steady base, with his mantra echoing still… Life on life’s terms!

Even more, as he never tired of saying… Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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Gracias, San Romero!

Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was shot while celebrating Mass in the chapel of La Divina Providencia Hospital on this day in 1980.  It was one day after a sermon in which he appealed to Salvadoran soldiers – as Christians – to obey God’s higher order and to stop carrying out the government sponsored repression of the poor and denial of their fundamental human rights.  An estimated 250,000 people participated in his funeral six days later in the Cathedral of San Salvador.  I have had the privilege of visiting the chapel, Romero’s modest residence on the hospital grounds and to pray at his tomb three times over the years.

We do well to hear his words again today:

“There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”

One day before he died: “When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”

And seconds before he was shot: “I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.”

Today Romero is popularly referred to as San Romero among Salvadorans.  He is one of the ten 20th-century martyrs who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, a testament to the wide respect for him even beyond the Catholic Church.   In 2008, he was chosen as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy by the Europe-based magazine A Different View.  In 1982 Pope John Paul II prayed at Romero’s tomb on his first visit to El Salvador and officially recognized him as a “Servant of God” in 1997.  It is widely presumed that Archbishop Romero will be beatified during 2017, the centennial year of his birth.

What would Archbishop Romero say about all the fanfare and adulation?  I’m pretty sure he’d challenge us to ask what is it about us that needs to place others on pedestals, declaring another’s faith “saintly” as if it were rare… and rarefied!!!  He would likely explain he was simply doing what needed doing in service of the Gospel… that we should expect our shepherds to smell like their sheep.   Would that we had many more pastors and bishops who cared for the vulnerable and poor with such evangelical clarity and passion!  I suspect he’d tell us to be careful about pointing fingers, questioning whether anyone should be on a pedestal.  With genuine pastoral humility he would say, “What about you?  Tell me more about you.”

What about us?  You?  Me!  How am I going to live the Gospel – today, here, now?

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A Sign of Hope

We have ground for hope, genuine signs of vitality and reason to risk optimism! Regular readers will recall that I recently expressed blunt criticism and serious disappointment in Pope Francis [link] accusing him of being insensitive and out of touch regarding clergy sex abuse.  I bemoaned the fact that he seemed to defend a perverted “clericalism” that underlies a corrupt power-structure in the Catholic church.  I had largely concurred with canon lawyer and priest Thomas P. Doyle: The survivors of abuse and countless others from the church and from society in general have been waiting for three decades for evidence that the institutional church “gets it.” There not only is no real evidence that it has, but from all appearances the hierarchy will remain on the defensive, hoping the problem will go away.  Fair is fair so I am here today to suggest — to express genuine hope — that I was premature in my harsh criticism and profoundly wrong.

Over the past 24 hours media have favorably reported on the new Pontifical Commission on the Protection of Minors.  It has to be significant that the first to break this story [link] in the U.S. was John L. Allen, Jr. for the Boston Globe.  You may recall it was the Globe who tenaciously pursued and really broke open the American clergy sex abuse scandal in 2002.  In a journalistic coup and demonstration of its resolve to provide ongoing and incisive coverage, the Globe recently recruited Allen from the equally tenacious, progressive and independent National Catholic Reporter. My purpose is not to repeat what is already well reported but to express welcome surprise and highlight reasons to be hopeful.

Of the eight commission members, four are women.  I have long argued that had women held meaningful leadership in the Catholic church – or the male hierarchy of college sports a la Penn State — the scandal of sex-abuse would have been addressed and resolved much more swiftly and with immediate reforms.  Five of the eight commission members are laypersons.  That in itself is a refreshing change.  Significantly, one member is an outspoken survivor of rape by a priest when she was 13 years old. Corroborating this non-clerical, non-hierarchical composition is that Pope Francis explicitly left it to the eight commission members to choose their own leadership and selection of additional members.

It also has to be sobering for bishops and national conferences of bishops to recognize that their only representation comes with Cardinal Sean O’Malley, OFM — of Boston! Having only one bishop on a pontifical commission of such import sends a pointed message.  Equally significant, and something I have not seen adequately appreciated, is that the other two ordained members are Jesuits.  The fact that all three “clerics” are members of religious orders is a message that cannot be lost on church hierarchs!  As religious, these three have had very different formation than their diocesan brothers and are much more insulated – and one would hope inoculated – from the careerism that is endemic to ecclesial bureaucracies.

The commission is bound to face strong head-winds of resistance, centuries of entrenched power interests and decades of denial – such is the nature of all abuse of power as with this distinctively “Catholic” manifestation. We owe them gratitude and uncompromising support. 

Commonweal magazine provides a little known reason to inspire additional hope [link].  In the current issue editors cite sources suggesting Jorge Bergoglio possesses the finest-honed political instincts of any Argentine since Juan and Eva Perón.  Let’s all pray the editors are right — we need such gifts right now!

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Bread for the Journey

This weekend I am participating in a LOGOS Lenten retreat at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, popularly known as the Casa.  My family has been associated with the Casa since 1974 when our parents moved to the Valley.  My sister, with whom I’m staying while in AZ, was married there. We celebrated my brother Jerry’s funeral there last July.  Many memories ground me in this space — deeply consoling.

Our retreat theme is “the Patriarchs” (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc). Our leaders bring a rich perspective — one earned his doctorate from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, another is an Arab Christian from Egypt and the other is a rabbi from Massachusetts.  We began Friday evening and continue through Sunday until 1 p.m.

With these memories and focus for my weekend, I leave you with two favorite quotes from Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey:

  • The great temptation is to cling in anger to our enemies and then define ourselves as being offended and wounded by them. Forgiveness, therefore, liberates not only the other but also ourselves.
  • Being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing with a friend times of confusion and uncertainty…such experiences can bring us deep joy. Not happiness, not excitement, not great satisfaction, but the quiet joy of being there for someone else and living in deep solidarity with our brothers and sisters in this human family.

Both messages appeal to me for very different reasons.  Each provides good fodder for my Lenten reflection.  Perhaps they will challenge and enrich your day as well.

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From the Playground

Riley, my nephew’s senior Golden Retriever stood at the fence with tail wagging.  On the other side were young children on the playground of Villa Montessori.  Shouts of freedom, tromp of running feet and rhythmic squeaks of swing sets offered a consoling din to our conversation.   Lunch on the patio with a favorite sister-in-law marked another consoling ritual renewed.  Among memories recounted and updates feverishly made, Marilyn reminisced, “Remember how Mom used to love being out here when the kids were on the playground?  She loved their running, yelling and screaming!  She’d never tire of their energy and joy… reminded her of her own childhood, the kind she always wanted for kids.”

Nearly the age she was then, we affirmed her truth as gospel.  Perhaps a little wizened by age, it felt refreshing to cut through the flurry and noise of our lives – years – to cherish memories, reclaim life’s gift, reaffirm what matters.  Unknown to Marilyn I was distracted by another flash of memory.  A few weeks ago at a formal dinner preceding a panel discussion at a university, Rabbi David Wirtschafter grounded us with a quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: “Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.”   My overly primed intellect had resonated with the truth of Niebuhr’s insight and envied the rabbi’s brilliance.   Nussled with  sounds from the playground, recalling a mother’s joy, they were reconfirmed now by maternal wisdom.

With all this rippling through my day, I became intrigued with a story spotted during a routine iPad survey of favorite sites.  What really drew my attention were remarks by Jesuit Superior General Fr. Adolfo Nicolás marking the 100th anniversary of a Sophia University in Japan. Likening religious experience to a person who can appreciate the intricacies and variations of classical music, Nicolás explained that “religion is first of all very much more like this musical sense than a rational system of teachings and explanations.”  In this Jesuit’s teaching I heard the wisdom of Rabbi Wirtschafter and Pastor Niebuhr affirmed.  Even more, I heard music that charmed my mother’s ears. 

Here to escape the harshness of winter and soak up the warmth of Arizona family, I resonate with Nicolás’ lamenting how many people have lost our attentiveness to music because of the many other distractions of the modern technological age: “Just as this musical sense is being eroded and weakened by the noise, the pace, the self-images of the modern and postmodern world, so is religious sensitivity… [We] must first of all work toward helping people discover or rediscover this musical sense, this religious sensibility… This awareness and appreciation of dimensions of reality that are deeper than instrumental reason or materialist conceptions of life allow us.”  AMEN!

Being reminded of how Mom used to love hearing children at play – their running, yelling and screaming being music to her ears, renewed by their boundless energy and joy – I am again grateful for the way she taught me to pray.
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Joshua J. McElwee’s report on Fr. Adolfo Nicolás’ remarks may be found [here].
The quote by Reinhold Niebuhr is from Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.