MH Roanoke

Glimpses of the Harvest

                                                                 by Beth Holmes

    A little over twenty years ago Bishop Walter F. Sullivan of the diocese of Richmond, Virginia invited Madonna House to Roanoke to be “a visible prayer presence and to pray for the needs of the diocese”. Since then, living in the mystery we variously call `a prayer house’, `a listening house’, `a house of hospitality’, the staff assigned here have tried to carry out that mandate.

    Since we don’t have a `program’ such as teaching religion or feeding the poor, we are constantly asked, “Just what do you do there?”

    To answer that directly, we say we cook, we clean, we garden. We walk the dog; we feed the cat. We do all kinds of household work. We welcome whoever comes and whoever phones. We listen. We offer a shoulder to cry on, a heart to rest in, a chapel to pray in. We pray ourselves, together and individually.

    But overall, our life in this small house is pretty quiet, and not easily described in terms of what we do.

    Last May I was asked to give a talk about our house. That week at Mass, as I pondered what to say, the words of the Gospel from Mark jumped out at me: This is how it is with the kingdom of God. It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear (Mk 4:26-28).

    I identified with that man scattering the seed and not feeling part of its yield.

    But every once in a while God gives us glimpses of what is really happening in our houses and in our lives. I would like to share some that he recalled to mind as I prepared my talk.

    Our area of Virginia, which has few Catholics, has only one Catholic school called, fittingly enough, Roanoke Catholic. They have a monthly all-school Mass which we sometimes attend. We joined them this year as they celebrated the feast of the Epiphany.

    Imagine our delighted surprise when three `kings’ processed in with the priest and, at the end of Mass, passed out `gifts’—slips of paper with such words as `laughter’, `gentleness’, `service’, and `peace’—at each of the three doors.

    In Madonna House we have an Epiphany custom of sharing such gifts with our friends. All our houses do it, and sometimes someone dresses up as a king to give them out.

    We had been celebrating Epiphany in this way in Roanoke for the past twenty years. Though there was no mention at the Mass of the custom coming from MH, we felt that the seed of our sharing our custom had produced the fruit of this celebration among the children.

    Another glimpse came through a new friend, a local policeman, who likes to drop by for coffee and talk. We live in a kind of rough neighborhood and I chuckle to think of our neighbors watching him come up our steps in his uniform complete with walky-talky, night stick, gun, and bullet-proof vest. And they have no idea why he is coming!

    Ed had gone through a conversion experience through Cursillo, and someone suggested he get to know us. In his first visit, we spent two hours just talking about God. Ed would love to do great things for God like Mother Teresa did, but he knows that God’s will for him wears the face of his wife and children and all those people and situations he encounters through his work.

    On fire to know the Lord more deeply, he devours our books, asks his questions, and shares his faith with us.

    Most of the time, all we do here are the simple little jobs of every day, and yet this man is finding God in our home.

    The third glimpse is a story I call “The Angel with the Ten Dollar Bill”.

    When I was a child, I wanted a house with a huge front porch. Our house here has a beautiful veranda that stretches around three sides. Oh, dream come true! But what I hadn’t realized in childhood was that it would need painting every couple of years. And this past fall, it was that time again.

    Before painting, one section needed caulking. A friend told me how but, as I worked at it, I found out that it wasn’t as easy as it had sounded.

    The more I tried, the worse it seemed to get. This kind of situation—when I can’t do work with my hands—hits at a wound in me. It hooks into that place where I feel I’m not good enough and where I believe that anyone else could do it easily.

    My frustration and anger grew like wild fire. I was in the `country’ of self-hatred and, if any of you have been there, you know it’s not pretty. In my experience, it is also the place where I easily forget God, or just don’t want to let him in.

    As I got more and more frustrated, I started to cry, the kind of crying where you sniff heavily up through your nose. I didn’t care who was passing by or who heard me. And as I got angrier and angrier at who I was—a stupid, inept, worthless person—my interior monologue got uglier and uglier. I decided to go in for a drink of water.

    On my way back out, I passed the chapel. Now why hadn’t I thought to stop in there before! I went in and literally wailed to God, “I can’t do this; you have to help me!”

    Though feeling a little better, I was still sniffling when I returned to my caulking. I was just hoping that God would send someone to take me away from this!

    After a short time I heard a voice, “You gonna paint that porch today? I’ll do it for ten dollars.”

    Looking up, I saw the face of a young man who was obviously on this way to the soup kitchen behind us.

    I went into our spiel. “We live on donations. We don’t hire workers…”

    “Well,” he said. “Five dollars then.”

    “Why are you so interested in doing this?” I asked.

    He had been sent out on a job that morning, he answered, and didn’t find out until he got there that he needed boots, which he didn’t have. So he had hitchhiked back to town and was heading up to the soup kitchen for lunch. He wouldn’t be making any money today.

    I paused, and something inside nudged me. Was this my rescuer? We certainly had ten dollars, and who was I to determine how the Lord will answer prayer?

    I had to leave for Mass just then, so I told him I’d meet him afterward. “But please don’t tell anyone up there we’re paying you!” I begged pointing to the soup kitchen. He put his finger on his lips and, with a smile, shook his head in promise.

    Sure enough, when I returned from Mass, he was sitting on the porch waiting for me. We shook hands on the ten dollars, and then we both went to work. As we did so, he talked about his life: his father’s abandonment of the family, his own dishonorable discharge from the Navy, his broken marriage, his struggles with alcohol, his wanderings. And he looked so young to have already had such a hard life!

    We finished the section in a couple of hours, and then went inside for a break. I gave him his money and some food. After that he left, and I never saw him again.

    I wondered: Was that an angel? And, if so, what would he do with a ten dollar bill?

    Not long ago the Lord gave us still another lovely glimpse through a friend. Though she had known us for some time, only recently has she come to share her pain with us on a deep level. “I never knew what you were doing here,” she said one day. “Now I know.”

    We scatter the seed, we sleep and rise, and night and day, the seed sprouts and grows. The man in Mark’s Gospel knew not how, but we do. It is the Lord. And every once in a while he reminds us of that.

 

What Is My Vocation?

                                                               by Diane Lefebvre

    It took me years to find my vocation. So I know what it’s like to be wondering, wandering, trying out different things, and getting rejected.

    I had always wanted to be a missionary, and at age fifteen I began actively searching for where to go. At 21, I entered an order of Sisters which had missions in 83 countries. “I can’t miss,” I said to myself, “I’m going to be sent somewhere.” 83 countries! The world was my oyster.

    Well, after I was there for fifteen months, I was told it was not my vocation and was sent home. That was one way of finding out where God didn’t want me.

    After that, I went back to my old job. Then one day about six months later, when I went to confession, the priest gave me as a penance to “pray to know God’s will.”

    That really struck me, and because it had happened within the sacrament of Penance, I took it very seriously. So I said a quick prayer to know God’s will.

    Two weeks later I quit my job and volunteered at Labré House, a Catholic soup kitchen and second-hand clothing center in Montreal. There I met all kinds of people, including someone who talked about Madonna House. Three months later I came to MH and never left. That was in 1963.

    How do we find out where God wants us? I have four simple words: prayer, silence, word, and action.

    First we have to ask God, and that means that we have to pray.

    And then we have to `listen’ for his answer. That’s where the silence comes in. We have to get rid of the noises that interfere with our search.

    We can’t be sitting in front of a TV or a computer or listening to a Walkman 24 hours a day. If we do, we won’t be able to hear God’s gentle voice.          Unless we are quiet enough, we won’t learn about ourselves, who we are, what our talents are, and how God has equipped us to do a particular work within his family.

    The third word is `word’. That means talking with someone—a trusted friend, a parent, a priest, a spiritual guide, someone to whom we can open our hearts and share. Someone to whom I can say “I’m thinking of this,” or “I’m thinking of that…” We shouldn’t talk to everybody, just those whom we trust and whom God puts in our path.

    The last word is `action’. And that means trying things out. Am I interested in nursing? Do I have an aptitude for carpentry? Try it out.

    When I was eight years old, God gave me a desire to be a missionary. So my action was to go to a missionary convent. Then God’s action was to say, “Not here, baby.” I don’t call my going there a mistake. I did what I thought I had to do.

    I see the time of looking for a vocation as courtship time. God is courting me and I am courting him.

    It is he who puts into us the desire to find our vocation. And, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, I am quite certain that the one who began this good work in you will see that it is finished when the day of Christ Jesus comes (Phil 1:6).

    He may not tell us right away. Before he tells us our vocation, perhaps he’ll say, “Take a year to go to a Bible school,” or “Take a few months to go to Madonna House.” But sooner or later, if we are seeking his will, he will reveal our vocation to us.

 

Watershed Birthday

                                                           by Kieran Kilcommons

    I turned forty this year. But so what? A magazine article informed me that 4.5 million other people in North America also turned 40. In fact, 1960 was the last big year of the baby boom, and more people turned or will turn forty this year than in any previous year ever.

    According to the `reams’ of literature that has come my way since my birthday, 40 is a watershed age. Most of the literature was unsolicited, but all of it was very informative.

    Not narrowly confined to the fortieth year, it shed much light on the next ten, telling me what to expect, what to watch out for, what to prepare for, and what to worry about. Forewarned is forearmed!

    It seems that fairly shortly, if it hasn’t happened already, I and my fellow forty-year-olds—men and women both—will begin to grow restless in our marriages and nervous about our jobs. Mortality will begin to show itself dramatically in receding hair lines and  farsightedness.

    Raised in a culture which idolizes youth, many of us, in our search for the fountain of youth, will look elsewhere for life. Young women with that look our wife once had will appear to offer that lost vitality. And, for women, young or `exciting’ men will hold out that promise of devotion that their husband lost somewhere between the house and the workplace. And, of course, mortgages, job insecurity, and worry about the future of our children will compound all of this.

    I must admit that, as I read and contemplated the bad news, I began to get a little depressed. Is there an answer to the middle age crisis? What is God saying to us all?

    I believe God is saying: as you see your mortality and insecurity, don’t be afraid. Don’t compensate with more of the same. Don’t try to run away. Don’t give up on the life and adventures you’ve begun. That life is worth every tear shed, every diaper changed, and every miscommunicated word and action.

    At the start of this jubilee year, an elder in our MH community counselled us all—members of MH of whatever age—to `return to our first love’. I guess that means we need to fall in love again. Yes, we forty year olds too need to fall in love again with our wives, our husbands, our vocations, and our children. And especially, with all the passion he has to offer us, let us fall in love again with our God.

    And the beauty of this new love is that—since we are falling in love with one whose faults we know so well, or with a vocation whose ups and downs are so visible to us—our love is much more real, more alive, more eyes-wide-open, more sacrificial and more life-giving than it was the first time.

    Let’s not think as the world does. God is opening the door for us to fall in love again in a new and deeper way. Through the Holy Spirit, the Lord is giving us the nobility and grace to begin a new life right where we are.

    Falling in love again has opened up a whole new life for me. In consequence, I’m looking forward to the next ten years.

 

My Story

Pursued by God

                                                                by Peter Gravelle

    Although I was raised Catholic, my first personal encounter with God was on a retreat in my freshman year at college. And with that encounter came a deep sense of calling.

    On that retreat we were told that once you open yourself up to God, he will never leave you alone. He will keep at you until you fulfill your vocation.

    That first year at art school was very important for me. I had barely graduated from high school (I had a 51% average), but at college, I discovered I could do crafts well. People liked what I made, and I enjoyed doing it. I had found purpose in living.

    Then the second year, I discovered silversmithing, something at which I am gifted. The teacher was amazed at how fast I learned, and I became almost his assistant, helping everyone else in the class with what he had just taught us. And because I enjoyed it so much, I felt a conflict between silversmithing and the call I felt from God. I chose silversmithing, and as a result, ended up leaving the Church.

    In my third year, I was able to major in silversmithing and went at it full steam ahead.

    That third year two incidents happened which struck  me. One was when I was commissioned to make a cross for someone. One of my classmates came up to me and said, “I didn’t know you were religious.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Well, I’m here and not in the seminary, aren’t I?” That startled me, and I wondered where it came from.

    Then at our end-of-the-year  critique, the instructors didn’t even look at my work, which was probably the best in the class.

    One of them just looked at me and said, “You’re running. What are you running from?” They then spent a half an hour talking about it.

    Needless to say, that started me thinking, and by the end of that summer, after vacillating from one thing to the other almost daily, I decided to enter the seminary.

    There I discovered that I also enjoyed the seminary and found out that, much to my surprise, I could do studies. I even got a B in English Literature, a subject I had had a lot of trouble with in high school.

    One of the things that came to me there was a deep desire for poverty. Another was to live that poverty in community. Since that is not the calling of a diocesan priest, I left the seminary to look for a community.

    I checked out several, but none of them satisfied my desire for poverty. I was told by my spiritual director to look at Madonna House, but thinking only in terms of traditional religious orders, I said, “But I want a real community!

    Being a man of extremes, if I can’t have it all, I want nothing. So, once again, I left the Church.

    I was working in Toronto at the time, and every day I walked past a place called Madonna House. Was this where I was told to go? I constantly felt drawn to look into it, but I ignored the feeling.

    I was working as a silversmith and loved it. I was enjoying life, living high on the hog as they say, and was getting involved very quickly in a disastrous relationship.

    The relationship was getting serious, and that led me to look towards the future. What did I want to do with my life? Did I want to go back to school? Did I want to get married?

    This looking towards the future brought back my sense of vocation. It was the only future I could see for myself. Within two days I made a 180 degree turn, and I started going to church.

    At the back of the church, my first day there, I ran into two people from Madonna House Toronto. Within a week, I went to volunteer, and soon I was spending Monday evenings and my weekly day off over there. When they showed me a video, Man Alive, about Madonna House Combermere, I said to myself, “I have to go there. I have to go there!”

    At the end of two weeks in Combermere, I asked if I could return in December for a longer visit as that was when my work commitment was over. I didn’t know anything about applicancy (the period of formation equivalent to a novitiate). But since I said `December’, Albert, the director general of men, assumed I was asking to be an applicant. So he sent me the forms that are sent to those who have asked to join Madonna House!

    But God seemed to be saying something through this miscommunication. When I returned in December, it was clear to me. I was home.

     The desire for poverty, the sense of calling that was so deep in me that I felt I couldn’t remain in the Church if I chose not to follow it, was drawing me to MH. For the first time in my life, I was at peace.

    But there was one problem. I had substantial student loans to pay off, and working as a silversmith you don’t make much. But I figured that, if I worked for a year and saved every cent I had, by the end of that time, I could be back.

    So I went to my former employer and asked him for a job. “And I need a 10% raise,” I told him, “because I have to pay off my student loan.”

    He looked at me and said, “I don’t want you to starve. I’ll give you 20%.”

    God was paving the way. He was saying, “This is it!” I was back in Combermere in ten months.

    At one point in my applicancy, I was ready to leave and return to the seminary. But my spiritual director said,  “Peter, you need community. As soon as you walk out of here, your faith will crumble.” And he was right.

    When I made promises as a staff worker in 1990, I thought the pursuit of my soul was over. But it wasn’t. I discovered that you can run away within a vocation as well as outside it.

    Over and over the Lord has caught me running from his call to go deeper and running from pain. And so the pursuit continues. God is always with me, pursuing me, pursuing me.

    Like the psalm says, If I climb the heavens, you are there…. If I take the wings of the dawn and dwell at the sea’s furthest end, even there your hand would lead me (Ps  138:8-10).

 

Word Made Flesh

Anything Can Happen

                                                               by Fr. Pat McNulty

    The following is a reflection on the readings (Mk 12:28-34 and Deut 6:2-6) for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (November 5th). 

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    It’s somewhat of a shock for me, at age 69, to suddenly realize that I have not really understood the only new commandment given by God to the world since Sinai. Oh, I have always believed what Jesus said about loving as he loves us. But…

    One of the advantages or disadvantages of living in community is that sooner or later you will be asked (!) to take on a job for which you have little knowledge or skill. Very often this happens simply because there is nobody else available to do it. The job can be anything from gardens or laundry to giving a course on Sacred Scripture.

    The latter fell to me a few short years ago, and once something falls on you at MH, you might as well plan on it for many years to come.

    So now every other year I teach the Old Testament to a small group of people in the process of joining Madonna House. (It `fell on’ someone else to teach the New Testament. Whew!)

    Of course we’re not talking about their getting a Ph.D. but rather about their getting a prayerful somewhat educated exposure.

    As a result I have begun, perhaps for the first time, to read the Old Testament as it is instead of reading it only with the New Testament in mind.  And reading it in this way has taught me something about love that I never quite understood before.

    First of all I had never realized how much the people of the Old Testament loved God. I knew they believed in him, obeyed him and hoped in him. But the depth of their love of God was a new realization.

    Secondly, I had never realized how much they loved one another. One could, of course, show the many and sometimes terrible ways they did not love either God or one another. But this was a very extraordinary people with a very extraordinary relationship with God which they expressed in a love for one another that was unique at that time in human history.

    And then one day, somewhere back in the more active part of my brain where it gets its messages from the heart, the penny dropped. I got the message of what this `love thing’ is all about.

    Love is not something we strive for in order to be whole or fulfilled or to prove something to ourselves or to God. Love makes it possible for God to live on earth. In fact love is the only human environment in which God can be fully God in human history.  And that is why we love!

    We are made whole when we learn to love as God loves—even if it changes nothing visible.

    What I saw revealed about love in both the Old and New Testament is how God intensely desires to dwell with us, and I saw what kind of love makes that possible: You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words…be written on your heart (Deut 6:5-6).

    And I discovered in the New Testament just how complete that love by God is.

    No, this `love thing’ is not about us. It is about God. And that is what I am only beginning to understand.

    If we look carefully at the life of the Hebrews as it unfolds in the Old Testament, we can see that when they loved, God could do anything. And when the community fell short, individual giants of love—from Noah to Malachi—prevailed upon God’s heart.

    I’m sure most Scripture scholars would not call this phenomenon in the Old Testament `love’ or at least not what we in New Testament times mean by love. They would probably call it `faith’ or `reverence’ or whatever. But since I’m not a scholar, I can call it that.

    The Old Testament Hebrews did not have a New Testament to explain all the future hidden purposes of God in history. I call that heroic witness to God `love’ in capital letters.

    And what does that tell me about New Testament love? Christians are not baptized Don Juans or Venus di Milos, people who have become magnanimous lovers `by faith.’ Christians are people who, against all odds, personal and historical, believe that where there is love there is God. And where there is God, even if all is disaster and despair, anything can happen.

    What the Old Testament teaches me about love is how powerful God can be in human history when he finds a whole community that will love the Lord their God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their strength (Deut 6:5). What the New Testament continues to teach me is what God can do in human history when he finds even one individual who will love as I have loved you (Jn 13:34).

    For me now, the `two testaments of love’ fit together but in a rather strange way—like a bush and a fire.

    The bush provides a place for the fire to come to earth. But the fire doesn’t need to consume the bush in order to come. It took a long time for the bush to mature out in the desert, but without it there would have been no fire.

    The bush? Listen, Israel: the Lord our God is the one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength  (Deut 6:4-5).

    The fire? I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you (Jn 13:34).

    I pray to God that I don’t have to live another 69 years before I fully live what I fully believe.

 

Marriage 

Heroism by the Bucketful

                                                            by Mary Beth Mitchell 

    I have prayed and meditated for some time now about the holy sacrament of Matrimony. A few months ago I was asked to give on talk on marriage to an RCIA group, which led me to research the teachings of the Church about this magnificent vocation.

    What struck me most profoundly was that the initial concern of a husband or wife is to be the welfare—emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual—of their spouse. The welfare of their children comes second. That gave me quite a jolt.

    The purpose of marriage is that the two become one (Matt 19:5), resulting in the sanctification of each. They are then called, together, to be open to life, to the precious souls God desires to entrust to their care.

    It is only in a union where the husband’s and wife’s primary focus is one another that the children will become mentally, spiritually, and emotionally secure. If either spouse’s full attention becomes `the children’, it is unhealthy for the marriage and the family.

    Your children learn about life from observing and dwelling in the love you have for one another. No amount of `teaching’ can substitute for that. You can teach them everything you think they need to know, but if you aren’t both there for one another, your children are deprived of security and miss the lessons they most need to give them a healthy outlook on life.

    Now, every couple, in the course of their married life, alternate between being beloved friends of each other and beloved enemies! The Lord has joined you together because you are the perfect mates for each other—which means you are also the perfect grindstones for each other, wearing away the rough edges and polishing one another into magnificent jewels, the completed masterpiece you are each meant to be.

    This action of the Holy Spirit in your lives through one another can be a painful thing—the surgeon’s knife that cuts away the infected parts. (It happens in community life too, believe me). It is so easy for married couples to avoid true intimacy with one another due to missed understandings and missed communications that need to be worked out, and then get caught up in the lives of their children in an unhealthy way.

    It takes heroism by the bucketful to remain vulnerable to one another—or even to become vulnerable in the first place.

                                                                    Alien Nation 

    Every marriage is a union of differing cultures (even if you have the same ethnic background) because you each bring to it that `other world’ of your personal family history—an alien nation for your spouse, an untravelled road for him or her.

    Oftentimes, after the honeymoon is over, the spouses re-enter their old family culture and begin seeing each other in the light of their parents or siblings. When communication breaks down (if it ever truly began) they begin to hear `mother scolding or nagging’ or `father being heavy or absent’ or some similar idea.

    The need we all have for affection, understanding, intimacy or fulfillment then gets focussed on the children (the poor kids!) or on the job (again, poor kids, because now they’re abandoned).

    Do you know that if a husband or wife makes a unilateral decision for the family it won’t work? However, if you make decisions together, they will be blessed (even if you screw up royally!) because you will have the grace of your sacred union as their basis.

    I am praying especially for you husbands. Yours is an extremely difficult role, and you need more than ever the full support of your help-mate, your chosen one.

    Return to the thrill of your first love for her and let it pound in your being. Add to that all the wisdom and understanding you have gained. Be assured that the more you open your heart to her, share with her your hopes and aspirations, doubts and fears, the more she will be able to meet you where you are.

    Contrary to popular belief, sharing with her your anxieties and frustrations will strengthen her and give her courage. One of the greatest causes of her fear and anxiety is not knowing what’s in your heart.

    Wives, respect your husbands. Know that they have the grace of their state in life from God the Father. Encourage them to use it. Don’t usurp their part of the decision making because of your fears. Pray to St. Joseph for them. Speak the truth in love, and then let it go. Give your menfolk time to assimilate your thoughts and make the constructive decisions that are theirs to make, or to bring back to mutual discussion whatever needs further clarification.

    Husbands, many times when your wives come to you with things that are on their hearts, they’re not asking you to `fix it’ for them. What they need is an understanding heart to commiserate with them—a simple bit of tenderness. You don’t have to `do’ anything. Rest. Offer her your loving heart and peaceful strength. Often that’s all that’s needed. If she knows you really hear her, peace will return and bless you.

    We are living in delicate times. You, dear ones, are paying the price of the cross for your spouses and children. The enemy is furious with you for standing between him and them, and he will try to overthrow you so he can get at them.

    Stay on the cross. Give 100% to each other, asking nothing in return. Pray like never before, and at the same time be filled with joyful hope!

    We may have to suffer yet awhile, but Jesus has conquered sin and death, and we know the end of the story: the fulfillment of all our dreams—joy and peace eternally.

 

The Pope Speaks

To Whom Shall We Go

                                                             by Pope John Paul II 

    The following is an excerpt from the homily of the concluding Mass of World Youth Day held in Rome on August 20, 2000. 

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    Will you also go away? (Jn 6:67) Christ’s question cuts across the centuries and comes down to us. It challenges us personally and calls for a decision. What is our answer?

    Dear young people, if we are here today, it is because we identify with the Apostle Peter’s reply: Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life(Jn 6:68).

    Around you, you hear all kinds of words. But only Christ speaks words that stand the test of time and remain for all eternity. The time of life that you are living calls for decisive choices on your part: decisions about the direction about your studies, about work, about your role in society and in the Church.

    It is important to realize that among the many questions surfacing in your minds, the decisive ones are not about `what’. The basic question is `who’: `Who’ am I to go to? `Who’ am I to follow. `To whom’ should I entrust my life?

    You are thinking about love and the choices it entails, and I imagine that you agree: what is really important in life is the choice of the person who will share it with you. But be careful!

    Every human person has inevitable limits. Even in the most successful of marriages, there is always a certain amount of disappointment.

    So then, dear friends, does this not confirm what we heard the Apostle Peter say?        Every human being finds himself or herself sooner or later saying what he said, To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life?

    Only Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and of Mary, the eternal Word of the loving

Father born 2000 years ago at Bethlehem in Judea, is capable of satisfying the deepest aspirations of the human heart.

    To Peter’s question—to whom shall we go?—the answer regarding the path to follow is already given. It is the path that leads to Christ. And it is possible to meet the divine Master personally. He is in fact truly present on the altar in the reality of his Body and Blood.

    In the Eucharistic sacrifice, we can enter into contact with the person of Jesus in a way that is mysterious but real, drinking at the inexhaustible fountain that is his life as the risen Lord.

    This is the stupendous truth, dear friends: the Word who took flesh 2000 years ago, is present today in the Eucharist….

    Our society desperately needs this sign, and young people need it even more so, tempted as they often are by the illusion of an easy and comfortable life, by drugs and pleasure-seeking, only to find themselves in a spiral of despair, meaninglessness, and violence.

    It is urgent to change direction and to turn to Christ. This is the way of justice, solidarity, and commitment to building a society and a future worthy of the human person.

    This is our Eucharist; this is the answer that Christ wants from us… Jesus is no lover of half measures, and he does not hesitate to pursue us with the question: “Will you also go away?” In the presence of Christ the Bread of Life, we too want to say today with Peter: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life (Jn 6:68).

 

Grace Through Sickness

God With Me in My Loss

by Helen Porthouse

    About this thing, I have pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave me, but He has said, `My grace is enough for you. My power is at it’s best in weakness.’

    So I shall be very happy to make my weakness my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me, and that is why I am quite content with my weaknesses…. For it is when I am weak that I am strong (2 Cor 12:8-10).

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    I was born in the north of England and came to know MH through our house there. In 1989 I visited Combermere and became an applicant.

    I had grown up feeling that I had to be strong and do everything myself and that I was never to ask for help or for anything else. And the fact that I was physically quite strong had reinforced this.

            When I became a member of MH, I was assigned to our house in England. There in 1991 when I was thirty years old, something happened which radically changed my life.

    I caught a really bad flu, and when it was over, I could only look straight ahead; my right eye was paralyzed. Shortly after that, my hands and feet became numb, and I began to get spasm jerks. I knew that something was seriously wrong; and when the doctor came to see me, he put me right into hospital for a week of tests.

    I was terrified of what could be wrong with me, and I was in a ward with other people who were all going through the same fear. But somehow or other the pain that I experienced there, including my own, was holy. I felt Christ’s presence there. Maybe I’d never been open enough before to see him in the poor and in myself in my own poverty.

    And then a lady, probably in her sixties, who was so disabled by MS (multiple sclerosis) that she could hardly move, was carried in and put in the bed opposite mine. Such a light came into the room with this woman whose whole focus was on others.

    Whenever I get sick or go down physically, I remember Dorothy. I think God sent her to me as an image of what weakness can become when it is embraced.

    When the tests were over and I returned home, the doctors still hadn’t found out what was wrong with me; and imagining the worst, I thought I was going to die within the next couple of years. It was only six months later that I found out I had MS.

    I wasn’t able to do too much and lay in bed most of the time. I felt like I had nothing to give to God or to  anybody else.

    While I was in that place of darkness, a wonderful priest came to hear my confession. “Father, I don’t know what’s happening,” I said to him. “I don’t believe God can let this happen to me. I don’t believe he loves me. I think I’m losing my faith.”

    “You have a choice,” he told me. “Either God is love, and this has been allowed by his love for you, or he isn’t. It’s that simple.”

            And because I loved and trusted this priest, I said “Okay.” I didn’t understand, but I took it on faith and held on to it. And believing that changed everything.

    I was given a sense that the Father was present in everything I was going through and that he was holding me. During that time, I also received an image of the Father weeping uncontrollably over Christ on the cross but allowing the crucifixion to happen for our salvation. And he was weeping uncontrollably over my pain, too, and was holding me with a great tenderness.

    I came to know that there is no pain that I can go through that Christ hasn’t gone through before me, and in which he isn’t there with me.

    That year, when our house went with our diocese on its annual pilgrimage to Lourdes, I had to go in a wheelchair.

    While we were there, Helen, the director of our house, told us that we had been asked to lead a prayer meeting. I had a reaction. I did not want to lead a prayer meeting from a wheelchair. My poverty would be right out there. No thank you!

    But under obedience, I went. And every single person there was in a wheelchair! It was because I was in a wheel- chair, too, that I could speak to their hearts. It was quite beautiful.

    Then another day, we went to the baths. The water, which comes from the mountains, is ice cold. Since it was 90 degrees outside, there was a great contrast in temperature, something that is very bad for people with MS.

    We also received the Sacrament of Anointing, but the next day I was so sick I could hardly move. So I had to stay in my hotel room while everybody else went out to whatever was happening.

    As I lay there, I felt as if my life was of no value, and I was very, very depressed. I had read a book, Prison to Praise, which says that when you’re depressed, praise God.

    So in the midst of that pain, I began. There were some beautiful flowers in the room, and I started by praising God for the flowers, and then I continued to praise him for other things.

    Then suddenly I had an experience of God’s presence. I had always known that Christ had died for all people, but suddenly, there in that hotel room, I knew that he had died for me. And overwhelmed with a sense of love coursing through my body and pouring over me, I started to cry.

    Though I hadn’t been able to walk that day, I felt that I could leave the hotel room and go for a walk. So I put on my shoes, went out, and started walking up the hill that I had been looking at from the window.

    That’s when I knew that, through the bath, through the sacrament, through whatever had been happening at Lourdes, God had healed me. And as I walked, I just kept crying.

    The healing was partial; I still have MS. Before Lourdes, I had approximately 30% of normal energy, and now I have approximately 70%. Though I occasionally need to use a cane, I no longer need a wheel chair. I can work, but I still need to rest every day.

    In my MS God asked me to face the thing I was most frightened of—that I would lose my physical capacity. And because he did, I learned that he was with me even in this loss. And I learned that this loss would not destroy me.

  

Marian Center Regina

 Part 2

A Gift From the Poor

                                                           by Anne Marie Murphy

    Joe was a regular at the soup kitchen. He came every day and sat beside the coffee urn. Most of the guys we only knew by their first name, and because there were so many Joes and Bobs and Gerrys, we sometimes added a second name to distinguish them. Joe had a British accent, and so he was known as English Joe.

    I never knew much about Joe until he died. He lived above a tavern a block or so from Marian Centre, our mission house in Regina in western Canada. His landlady took the rent out of his pension check and he probably drank the rest of it.

    One day I was left in charge of the soup kitchen. At about 12:05, just as the first fifty seats had been taken and another hundred or so men were lined up waiting their turn, one of the volunteers came over and told me that English Joe was in some difficulty. Joe was holding his arm which was stiff, and he couldn’t talk.

    I called 911 and the paramedics arrived in five minutes, just as Joe went into a massive seizure. I had been holding him up until then and, not being a medic, I thought he was having a stroke.

    The paramedics had to work on him for about twenty minutes before they could move him, and as they did so, the people watched the drama unfold.  Some, having lost their appetite, dumped their food in the garbage bin and left.

    There was only about a foot of space around Joe and the medics gave me the IV bag to hold while they were trying to get him to breathe again.

    All I could think of was “I’m going to give a faith testimony at a banquet tonight and, Joe, please don’t die at my feet. I’m already stressed out enough.”

    Joe was taken to the hospital and later that afternoon I went to visit him and bring him some clothes. They had cut open his shirt and sweater to work on his heart.

    The seizure had passed and they were ready to release him from the hospital. As I drove him back to his room, he asked if we could drop into Marian Centre and get something to eat as he had missed lunch. (Imagine being released from the hospital and not having anything at home to eat!)

 As we drove, he talked a bit about how he had started drinking when he was in the Merchant Marines. When he started having seizures, the doctors had told him that if he didn’t give up drinking, it would kill him, but he’d never been able to stop. “But,” he added, “I’m still alive.”

    About two weeks after this incident, at the end of the month when the pension checks were out, Joe called me over to the coffee urn where he was sitting.  Very quietly so that no one could see him doing it, he slipped a twenty dollar bill into my hand. “Thanks for saving my life,” he said.

    I was so overcome that there were tears in my eyes. As bad as his addiction was, he gave me his drinking money as a gesture of gratitude!

    I knew I had to accept it, but I also knew that in our life of begging a gift from the poor has to be used in a special way. I wanted to perpetuate this sign of love from Joe and somehow to multiply it, as God multiplies our little offerings to him.

    I was just learning to carve wood and had been borrowing a carving knife from the instructor during the class. I thought, “What if God wants me to use Joe’s gift for perpetuating beauty, all the while remembering Joe and others like him?”

    So I used the money to buy my first knife. The knife is often a weapon of the poor in their violence toward one another, and I hoped that, with God’s help and Joe’s approval, I could use it as a means of spreading beauty and love.

    Joe died shortly after that, but because of that last gesture he made to me and because of the knife I still have, I will always remember him.

    After his death I found a brother and sister-in-law of his who lived in the city but hadn’t seen him in ten years. I filled them in on those years and told them the story of the twenty dollars and the knife. I like to think that it helped ease their burden of his tragic life. They told me he had been a Catholic and showed me his First Communion picture.

    By the world’s standard’s Joe’s life was a failure, but one day his distressing disguise slipped, and I saw the mark of Christ in him, the mark put there on his baptismal day. And he changed part of my life.

    It’s the task of us Christians to protect this life of Christ in the poor, in the people some people want to euthanize. These people are part of our faith journey. They have powerful lessons to teach us. We won’t get warm mushy feelings for loving and serving the poor, but if we persevere in faith, we will be recognized by Christ at the Last Judgment. Insomuch as you have done this to the least of my brethren, you have done it to me. (Mt 25:40)                                                                           

                                                                           

Questions & Answers 

                                                               by Fr. Paul Burchat 

Question: What are the requirements for Catholics in order to receive the Eucharist?  Answer: Under ordinary circumstances (i.e. when no grave reason for an exception exists), Catholics may receive Holy Communion provided they are free from mortal sin (CCC #1385). If they are in a state of mortal sin, they must receive the sacrament of Penance first.

    In addition they must have abstained from all food and drink (with the exception of water and medicine) for at least one hour prior to receiving the Eucharist (Code of Canon Law #919-1).

    The Church also strongly recommends (not a requirement) that, “Bodily demeanor (gestures, clothing) ought to convey the respect, solemnity and joy of this moment when Christ becomes our guest” (CCC #1387).

    All of this of course presupposes that the person believes what the Church teaches about the Eucharist, namely that it is in fact the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ.

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Question: Why are non-Catholics not permitted to receive the Eucharist?

Answer: In answering this question, I am not going to go into the exceptional circumstances under which Protestants may be allowed to receive the sacrament.

    The primary reason that non-Catholics are not permitted to receive the Eucharist is that they do not share our belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist or in some other aspects of our faith. Sharing in Eucharistic communion is the sign which more that any other expresses our full unity in faith and worship.

This unity must precede reception of the Eucharist. It is not created by its reception.

“Celebration of the sacraments is an action of the celebrating community, carried out within the community, signifying the oneness in faith, worship and life of the community. Where this unity of sacramental faith is deficient, the participation of the separated brethren with Catholics, especially in the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and anointing of the sick, is forbidden” (Directory Concerning Ecumenical Matters: Part One, May 14, 1967, #55).