Seeing All SideS

Kansas Monks

“When my grandma was sick with cancer I visited her every day that she was in the nursing home.”

“I cleaned my grandparents’ garage for four hours and burned things,” one boy said, “and mowed their whole lawn, and trust me, it’s huge.”

For Abbot Barnabas the letters serve a practical purpose. People listen.

“I don’t preach that way on Sundays,” he says. “There is more enthusiasm than there is at a Sunday worship. The focus is on the young people who are there. Most of the people in the church are related to the kids.”

But the connection he seeks goes beyond preaching a good homily.

“I want to try to say something to each one of them, not just test their religious knowledge,” he says. The Abbot notes that the togetherness of the members of the class and the adults who support them should be reinforced. “People have given a lot of time and preparation to these kids. Not only the knowledge gained but also the level of commitment should be celebrated.”

Before returning to St. Benedict’s Abbey, the Abbot poses for pictures, munches on cookies and becomes a part of the community.

A few years later, a woman in a service station will smile and say, “You confirmed my daughter!”

Soon the church will stand empty. A few of the newly confirmed will certainly be glad it’s over. Families will gather for family dinners.

“It’s a prolonging of the ceremony,” Abbot Barnabas says.

As the Abbot leaves town in the late afternoon sun, traffic on highway 36 is light. A hawk is feeding on a rabbit along the highway. The fields are barren from the recent harvest.

New fruit is growing.

Every adult Catholic should read the holy book of Islam, the Holy Quran. Otherwise it will be impossible to have any meaningful dialogue between Catholics and Muslims.

It is important to remember that Islam started as a reform movement for Christians and Jews. Muslims had begun about 600 years after the start of Christianity, so they had a big chunk of time in which to evaluate Christian belief and behavior. Some might be surprised to learn that Muslims venerate Jesus, his mother, and many of the Jewish prophets. Muslims do not think of Jesus as God because they believe there can be only one God. Trinitarian formulations are completely foreign to Muslims.

The Holy Quran shows forceful concern for the impoverished, the orphaned, and the widowed. The book does not have much to say about violence to others except in cases of self-defense. The Holy Quran does, however, contain threatening language for those who ignore God’s commands. On the other hand, the Quran places heavy emphasis on God’s forgiveness and his loving attention to human beings.

Sura IX, Section 5, the Holy Quran, has statements that appear to be an avenue of discussion between Catholics and Muslims: “They take their priests and their anchorites to be their Lord’s derogation of God, and (they take as their Lord) Christ the Son of Mary; yet they were commanded

to worship but one God.”

Muslims are proud of the fact that the Holy Quran is written in Arabic, the language of the common people. This makes it easy for the average person to appreciate the lessons and the poetry of the book.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING FROM OTHER RELIGIONS

Father Michael Santa

a Grateful Response liturgy & the life of the church

Gift of the person

Parents see themselves anew through their children’s eyes, so I have been told and experienced from my own nieces and nephews and now from their children. With each succeeding generation the previous one sees itself afresh from the newborn’s eyes and so comes to know itself anew.

Every year when we celebrate the birth of the son of God, the son of Mary, we have occasion to see ourselves afresh through the eyes of the Christ child; thereby we come to know ourselves anew each year and at each stage of our lives.

Born on the Winter solstice, I was a Christmas child taking my place as the baby of now six siblings until that honor was assumed by another. The care shown to me before I could even understand I in turn was asked to show to my younger brother for whom I was in a new way responsible. I came to know myself and to respond as an older brother.

This gave me new understanding of the meaning of Christmas, because at first I had been the Christmas child, and following upon my birthday I understood Christmas as the birthday of baby Jesus. But once I could see the Christ child in my baby brother, I knew how to respond with gentleness as a big brother to baby Jesus.

When I said, “He is my brother”, I was saying, “He is my world”, as was my family, until I ventured out to to the world of other children in grammar school and through their eyes came to know myself as a distinct person. I was taught to share with others and to be fair to my classmates in our work and play together. A classmate who had greater awareness of self and others than I had in those years recently recalled how I was solemn and happy back then; so even now through her memories I am coming to more consciously integrate who I once was with who I have become.

When I was a child in the home, I saw the holy family like my family. As I came to know myself among classmates, I came to see the child Jesus in someone beyond my family. I came to understand that by sharing and being fair with others I was responding to the vulnerability of the child Jesus.

Throughout my teenage years I dedicated myself to a Boy Scout troop. I learned to discern personal values, for example, the difference between being trusted and being trustworthy. This experience helped me to develop a strong sense of duty to the larger society and prepared me to assume a leadership role in shaping that society. This formation helped me clarify and develop my social values in a positive way, but it did not prepare me for the inequalities and injustice in the larger society.

Celebrating Christmas as a teenager, I became aware of the

larger Gospel account and began to take note of the way in which the holy family responded to the injustices inflicted upon them by individual members of the larger society: the inn keeper, Herod. I began to appreciate the paradox of the Son of God lying in the manger of an ox and ass, and adored by shepherds and Father Daniel McCarthy the lowly and royalty only from afar. I responded to the injustices visited upon the holy family by my efforts to promote fairness in the scout troop and to encourage the weak and reticent. As a young monk and pastor, my seminary training had prepared me with a well integrated web of meaning that held together, because it was consistent. I was developing a degree of ritual competence by striving to preside in the liturgy in such a way as to foster other people in their liturgical ministries and the assembly as a whole in its participation. At Christmas time so many people return home to their roots in the small country communities, and these celebrations help them to know who they are when they return once again to their commitments in the larger world. Celebrating Christmas in the parish communities affirmed our response to the needs of the vulnerable often ignored in the injustices of the larger society. The parishes were able to contribute regularly to the local food pantry, to the home for abused women, to services that supported literacy and job training. I also came to see how parishioners often in humble and quiet ways served their neighbor in need. I came to realize that one of my tasks as pastor was to provide the opportunity for the quiet and unassuming parishioners to contribute to their parish community without fear of the dominant parishioners who tended to hold sway in rural parish and small-town life. When people live their whole lives in a small town they must negotiate long term relationships, and one of their greatest challenges can be Abbot Owen Purcell and Father Daniel in front of a mosaic of Joseph and Jesus at Sant’Anselmo in 2008, at the time of Father Daniel’s doctoral defense the difficulty of responding to Christ present in certain people. The paradoxes of one stage in life sometimes become the places from which we mature into the next. As a young man I was not yet prepared for the reality that each community dealt with conflict in its own way, and that as pastor I would be expected to exercise different roles appropriate to addressing the conflict in each. I came to realize that the polarization in American society and in the Church in America was felt at every level from the parish council to the national stage. So I went to Rome to study for a doctorate in Liturgy. Living according to the conditions of another country not my own, and pursuing studies according to another academic culture, was significantly challenging. The studies in Rome helped me to understand the changing patterns of Church history in tandem with the development of liturgy so that continued on next page 17