A symbol of the best in all of us

Mined from the notebooks, Easter Sunday morning, April 21, 2019. Posted the first Sunday of Easter, April 28.

[Editor's note: This is another attempt by me to catch up on my blogging by clearing out my notebooks.]

Happy Easter. Shh. We’re at mass. Father Bob’s leading us through a rousing recitation of the renewal of our baptismal vows.

“Do you reject Satan?” he asks at the top of his voice while smiling broadly, knowing we will.

“We do!” we shout back with great good cheer.

“And all his works?”

“We do!”

“And all his empty promises?”

“You betcha!”

Ok, that was me. And I said it under my breath. The rest of the congregation cried out lustily that they do.

Yes, I’m taking notes in church. It’s my form of meditation. You might be surprised that I’m in church and at mass. We’re here with Mom Mannion. We’re visiting the old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with her and my brothers Larry and Lyle and my sister Liz and their families. After mass we’re all going out to brunch. Right now there’s nothing for me to do but pretend I’m still a good Catholic or at least a dependable CAPE one. I have to say Father Bob gives good a good mass. He’s a big barrel-shaped, moon-faced, gray-haired cleric of about fifty-five. Mom Mannion thinks the world of him. Pop Mannion did too. I don’t trust him. But I don’t trust any priests these days. I enjoy his sermons though. I’ve sat through three in the last two months. That makes three masses more than I attended in the year before, and one of those was a funeral mass. Pop’s funeral. Father Bob said the mass and delivered the eulogy. He did Pop proud. He also did the benediction at the dedication naming the town hall after Pop. Last time we were up here Father Bob’s took for his text for his sermon the parable of the Prodigal Son. I got a real kick out of it. I should write a post on that. I took notes. Naturally.

Now he’s moved on to expanding on the baptismal vows.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

Of course we don’t.

He fires off the questions---too fast for me to keep up. I’m writing them down as I catch them, so I’m not putting them in order. I got the first two in order.

“Do you BELIEVE?”

“Do you believe in BELIEVING?”

Here are the ones I caught after that:

“Do you believe in Fairness?”

“Do you believe in Justice?”

“Do you believe in Mercy?”

“Do you believe in Peace?”

“Do you believe that this year our family is going to make a difference?”

Our family is the parish. The difference is that together we’re going the world a fairer, more just, merciful, and peaceful place for everybody.

Father Bob’s turned this part of the mass into a pep rally for Social Justice. This isn’t perfunctory or rote. Father Bob, without being preachy about it, preaches regularly that the point is social justice. Everybody means everybody. As in we’re all in this together. As in nobody gets left behind. It’s implicit in the parish’s mission statement, which is printed on the front page of the weekly bulletin:

We are an Evangelizing
Roman Catholic Community
of Christ’s Disciples that
Welcomes All
Prays Joyfully
Grows in Faith
Proclaims God’s Kingdom Acts
Justly:
This is our Mission

The parish has a Social Justice Ministry. Its members are busy organizing the parish’s participation in next weekend’s CROP Walk. Father Bob will be leading the parish contingent on the walk.

Today’s gospel was John 20:1-9. The painting up top, by Annabile Carracci, depicts a scene from Luke’s Easter story. I couldn’t find a painting I liked based on John’s. There’s a great painting Alexander Ivanov based on John’s story of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus outside the tomb while Peter and John are taking a look around inside, but it’s not as colorful or joyful as Carracci’s. I like John’s story better than Luke’s. I like what John has Jesus saying to Mary--- “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” ---but I imagine him smiling when he says it and then nearly laughing when she still doesn’t realize it’s him---she thinks he’s the gardner---and he snaps her into focus with an amused “Mary!” in the tone he’d use to say “Wake up and smell the coffee.” But he isn’t smiling in Ivanov’s painting and doesn’t look even mildly amused. He looks still mostly dead and as if he spent all day yesterday harrowing hell and it took more out of him than being crucified.

Father Bob gave his usual lively reading. It’s more accurate to say he performs the gospels rather than reads them. Today’s sermon started with the Easter story but he moved on to touch on other things. He told us about a couple of minor frustrations he’d experienced in the past week, Both his chalices broke. One was chipped on the lip, which he discovered when he went to drink from in during the Eucharist. The other sprang a leak. “A chalice is made to do one thing!” he said in mock dismay and irritation, as if he was saying “You had one job!” But he was leading into reminding us what a hard year we’ve been through, in which his frustrations were trivial in the grand scheme of things. Here’s something he said that made me sit up and take notice, which I think made a lot of people around me take notice too:

The Church, he said, had another hard year “mostly brought on by its own doing.”

We all knew what he was referring too. Even the Pope has trouble bringing himself to be that self-accusatory.

But Father Bob left that to sink in. He worked his way to his main subject.

Notre Dame.

“A symbol of the best in all of us.”

Symbol. That’s the key word. Symbol. Not totem. Not icon. And of all of us. The Church first, but only as the starting point. All of us.

Then he conjured up for us the image---the altar with its gold cross still standing, looking almost untouched by the fire amid the burnt wreckage and scorched ruins. Another symbol. Not a miracle. A piece of luck giving us something to focus on and think about: that no matter the trouble and the suffering and the difficulty we go through, some good can still be left standing inside us and from that and around that we can rebuild.

Mass is ending. We’re going in peace.

Comments

[sabretom]

Be careful; this Jesus fellow can use someone like Fr. Bob to draw you back to him, despite the shenanigans of Holy Mother Church; he's sneaky that way.

Was this the 10 am mass? I was there and, potentially, sorry to have missed you.

[Lance Mannion]

Sabretom, I think I'm inoculated against Father Bob. It's Pope Francis I'm worried about.

Sorry we missed you too. We went to the 11:30 at the RR campus. That's Mom Mannion's usual. We hope to make it up for Mother's Day. Luke Mannion might be there too.