Crazy Catholic Question #111 - Forgiveness

Some thoughts on Forgiveness…

Henri Nouwen once wrote: “To forgive another person from the heart is an act of liberation. We set that person free from the negative bonds that exist between us. We say, ‘I no longer hold your offense against you’ But there is more. We also free ourselves from the burden of being the ‘offended one.’ As long as we do not forgive those who have wounded us, we carry them with us or, worse, pull them as a heavy load. 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. It is the way to the freedom of the children of God.”

Pope Francis says the very essence of God is Mercy. Period. End of discussion. He says the Mercy of God is the most beautiful truth of our faith. God’s love for us is so great, so deep; it is an unfailing love, one that always takes us by the hand and supports us, lifts us up, and leads us on.

Fr. Greg Boyle S.J. says “Jesus never modeled the One-False-Move-God, but rather was always proclaiming the No-Matter-Whatness of God.”

Bishop Untener once pointed out that Jesus didn't go from town to town saying, "Bring me your best and brightest." Rather, he sought out the “hot-messes” among us. He taught us that God doesn’t shun or abandon us in our darkness until we clean up and get our act together. Rather he said God loves and accepts us as we are, not as we should be.

God doesn’t love us despite our faults and failings, but rather works in and through them to bring about His kingdom. Jesus preached a God who knows that we're not perfect, that there's a dark side to our lives, that we've got some shameful memories, and that God wants to be with us in those parts of our lives where we don't feel so good about ourselves. Jesus came to say not simply "I love you," but to say, "I love you THERE, in the part of your life no one else sees.”

I long to believe in the image of God that Jesus paints for us. I want to believe in the utter foolishness of God’s mercy. That like the Good Shepherd, God would do the pastorally unthinkable, and completely outrageous thing and leave the 99 to find that one lost renegade sheep. I want to believe that I’m that precious and treasured by God; that each of us is that precious.

Today, together, we profess our belief in the power of God’s love to change and heal each of us, and for us to then change the world. No small dream. May this love seep deep into our souls this sacred day.

Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org. Read past columns at: www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com.

Crazy Catholic Question #110 - Atrium Training

CCQ #110: Is there special training for someone who is interested in becoming a catechist in our faith formation program in the atrium (Catechesis of the Good Shepherd style)?

Yes there is! First off, if you haven’t visited our new Level 2 atrium, let me invite you to a little open house and guided tour after our homecoming “Mass in the Grass.” Look for the signs or ask around for Lisa Brown (big nose, big smile at the door, that would be me) and I’ll be eager and delighted to bend your ear for a few minutes about this brilliant, Montessori style of faith formation that we began instituting here at CTR in 2015 (visit www.cgsusa.org for details or read a wonderful article on the CGS method in America magazine at this link: www.americamagazine.org/issue/667/article/faith-child).

AND secondly, lest our K-8 Coordinators come with pitchforks to permanently remove me from my position as DRE, you DON’T need the “official” 90 hours of formal Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training to serve as a catechist in our program. All we need is your dedication and interest. We have a short catechist orientation coming up Tuesday, Sept. 19th at 6PM OR Wednesday, Sept. 20th at 11AM. Short, sweet and we give you every single thing you need to be an effective catechist for our children; an immeasurably valuable role in appropriating our faith to the next generation. Need not have children to volunteer! All that is needed is a welcoming way and a willingness to be present and kind to our little ones and you are in! That being said….

If our program is to continue to grow, we really DO need at least 15-20 of our CTR members to seriously consider taking the formal training (which is recognized by our Archdiocese for official, resume worthy certification). If you can dedicate one Saturday a month from now until June to this beautiful, retreat-like catechist formation course, the training begins Saturday, Sept. 16th at 9AM with Sr. Nancy Ayotte, IHM (who is absolutely mesmerizing). We are especially looking for members of our community who have a calling to work with 3-6 year olds because we are praying and dreaming about expanding our atrium offerings to this age group. Developmentally, around age six, children begin to imagine God as a judge, so it’s important to have the central parable of the Good Shepherd firmly in place before our children hit that milestone.

If you feel God tugging on your sleeve (or your heart), Sr. Nancy usually allows people to attend the first class for free (I guarantee you will fall in love with CGS within the first 2 hours) and Lisa Brown (that would be me) is always available for a chat over coffee (please, give me a reason to visit Starbucks!). Blessings to you and yours as we begin this new year of spiritual knowing and growing!

Visit www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com to review past articles or send your question/comment to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org

Crazy Catholic Question #109: Motivation

CCQ #109: What motivates you to get to church on the weekend?

Many thanks to the parents who gifted us with the presence of their children during our summer program that just wrapped up last week. We hope the kids had two-weeks filled with joy, grace and love...and lots of learning about our faith!

My daughter Vivienne, age 7, made a new best friend, Drea, during our summer program and on the commute in on the last day she said “I’m so said I won’t see Drea anymore.” I don’t’ know about you, but sometimes the only thing that gets me motivated to go to church on the weekends is the friends I see here. Sometimes I just need to be around people who share my values and my desire to understand better and draw nearer to God. People who help me, through their friendship, to stay close to God and to hold tight to the hope found there. Friends who encourage me when I’m feeling down or lost and remind me to just keep “showing up” and be still before God and believe, like me, that only good can come from this spiritual practice. These friendships are a well from which I drink on Sundays, often arriving quite parched; refreshment is found both at Mass and after Mass chatting with my friends. So, why would it be any different for our kids? They like seeing their friends and sometimes that is the only thing that makes them want to come to church (and the donuts...never forget the power of the donut). There are worse motivations. Friendship is just God with skin on; the incarnation giving us a hug when we need one.

Mass and/or Playdate in the Atrium
So, an invitation, particularly for our summer families to help keep our children, and ourselves, in touch over the school year - consider making our weekly weekend Masses Sat at 5PM and Sun at 9 and 11AM a priority on your stacked calendar and/or setting up a playdate in the Atrium. There is a binder in each atrium with all our lessons (so far), written out word for word, so basically its reading a lesson to your child as she/he shows you how to work with the materials (or the “works” as they are called). Just call our office to let us know the day and time of your playdate so we can be sure the atrium is cooled/heated to a comfortable temperature for your playdate. And yes, the children are allowed to water and care for our plants in our atria….

Church PTA
I’m looking for a few interested individuals to work with me on establishing a Parent Association, like the PTA, for our families here at CTR. This team would plan mid-year gatherings for our summer families, perhaps bring in a speaker and host one or two parent “topic” nights, or maybe even collectively write an editorial for the paper pushing back just a little bit towards sports teams/competitive dance, etc. who are encroaching a bit on our family life—not in a hostile manner but rather just to start the conversation on the importance of protecting family time. Just some possible ideas. Contact me, Lisa Brown, at dre@ctredeemer.org if you are interested. Wishing your family peace and lots of down-time during these last few weeks of summer!

Here is a little poem that touched me, especially as a parent, during these lush days of summer:

“The Peace Of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Crazy Catholic Question #108: Laborers are few...

What do you think Jesus meant when he said the laborers are few?
I was kicking around on-line the other night and landed on a website that had a spin off of the humor of Jeff Foxworthy with a few lines of “You might be a Methodist if you….” Of course, I didn’t get the joke since, I’m not a Methodist, but I thought it was a fun idea and I mused over what our “You might be a Roman Catholic if…” statements might be. Here are a few I came up with.

If you have an irrational fear of the front pew, more than 5 siblings or if you've ever spit out a bite of a hamburger when you realize it is a Friday during Lent…you might be a Roman Catholic

If you have ever wondered what the “legal” maneuver is to remove the communion wafer, or more properly the body of Christ, stuck to the roof of your mouth…You might be a Roman Catholic.

And, if you heard Jesus say “The harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few” and your first thought was of the “shortage” of priests and vowed religious in our church today, you might be a Roman Catholic.

Some thoughts on this last one. Our self-understanding as members of the body of Christ demands at the most basic level that there be some real sharing of life among us. We pray together, celebrate our rites of passage together, we have some common sharing of finances in support of our parish ministry. In short, we are in relationship with one another. Our relationships are the bricks and mortar of “the kingdom” we proclaim and the love we share in these relationships is the very essence of the God we believe in.

That being said, anyone who has every truly loved another, knows very well that the business of relationship is not for the faint-hearted. At best, our relationships are as close to heaven as we will get this side of the grave, at their worst they are heavy, hard labor.

Once the honeymoon is over, so to speak; the butterflies ceases, excitement wanes, whether it be a new romantic squeeze, a new-found friend, a new church or even your dream job – eventually the inevitable happens. Disillusionment sets in. Conflicts begin. We begin to see all the flaws and failings. We are misunderstood by our spouse, our parents say painful things, we are over-looked at work, every friend we have will at one time or another hurt our feelings. Even our church family is not free of gossip, injustice and other painful realities.

At this point, we are tempted to cut and run. We’ve been duped! This isn’t the person I fell in love with! The people in this church are the body of Christ? Yeah. Right. We feel justified in saying God couldn’t possibly be calling me to love under these conditions.

But perhaps that is precisely what we are being called to. Loving each other through thick and thin is heavy labor that we are ALL called to do by virtue of our baptism. Of course, Jesus never calls us to be doormats, or to stay in relationships where we are taken advantage of or are victims of abuse. But what if we resisted isolating? Barreled through our disillusionment and tried our best to love, in word and deed, those people that God has placed in our path?

I suspect we might reap a great harvest for God. We are the laborers, appointed by God to love people into life, heal wounds with our acceptance, drive out demons with our kind affirmations, cure the sick with our time, touch and care. To love those who are not perfect, including ourselves.

Crazy Catholic Question #107: Loaves & Fishes

Fr. Joe mentioned that the feeding of the 5000 directly precedes the gospel reading for the Feast of Corpus Christi that we celebrated last weekend. Do you believe in that miracle?

Your questions reminds me of a man who once said to me he was no longer a Christian because if Jesus could produce food for hungry people and only did it once or twice, he did not want anything to do with him. He felt Jesus should have done it many times and left the recipe for his followers. But I suspect that focusing on the physical miracle is like reading the story of Jonah and debating and researching whether a man can live in the belly of a whale for three days or not…it misses the deeper truth that the story is trying to impart.

We can imagine the scene: a blistering hot afternoon in a far off deserted and dusty plain. Jesus has just finished preaching about the dream he has for our world; about a kingdom where no one is in need, where everyone’s hunger is met, a joyful time when God’s goodness will reign, when there is no hostility, no war, a kingdom of compassion, sharing and deep communion with God and with each other. A time and place where love is the law of the land.

Minutes after he finishes, the disciples, say to Jesus, “We have to send these people away so they can find some food for themselves before nightfall or we are going to have a hungry mob on our hands.” The disciples immediately snap back into survival mode, concentrating on what they lack; panicking over a need they do not have the resources to meet. They prescribe having the people “go and buy” what they need from some outside resource before its too late.

Jesus redirects the attention of the disciples to what they DO have. He tells them they should feed the people. But they are locked into the magnitude of the need before them and the scarcity of resources. They say “But we have nothing here - nothing but 5 loaves and 2 fish…”

Theologian John Shea says that it is at THIS point that Jesus has brought about a “crucial shift” in their thinking. They have moved from the preoccupation with lack to the awareness of assets. They are no longer looking outside themselves for an answer. They have turned their gaze within. "Going and buying may work in the physical world, but what works in the spiritual world is standing still and becoming aware. Knowing what we HAVE is the first step of spiritual transformation.”

So, a possible spin on this miracle is that just maybe Jesus knew that these people were not so dim as to hike out to a deserted place for most of the day in the scorching heat without some provisions. Maybe when Jesus gave thanks and shared so generously the little he had, he inspired everyone there to slowly begin to dig into their pockets and purses to share the food they were hiding and saving for the long walk home. Maybe he managed to shift the focus of over 5000 people from seeing what they have as too little and hoarding it - to seeing it as a gift, becoming grateful and giving it away as a gift to the people around them, who in turn give it away to others.

No one 'takes and holds"; everyone 'receives and gives.' and all went home that night with a full belly. The people that day didn’t just hear the good news, but they participated in an amazing experience of divine abundance, an experience that was completely satisfying because it was a taste of the kingdom, a glimpse of the potential of people, of the collective fulfillment for which we were designed. And really, even today, what could be a greater miracle than that?

Crazy Catholic Question #106: Building Atrium II

What is going on in rooms Luke 1 & 2?
We aren’t building walls….rather, we tore one down! We literally tore down the wall between rooms Luke 1 & 2 in order to make more elbow room as we begin building our second Atrium, designed for our older children. A hearty and sincere thanks to our awesome maintenance staff under Derek Ikeler’s leadership who took that wall down in record time!



Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is a what’s called a “spiral” method of faith formation, meaning that the same areas of focus that we have in the First Atrium, such as Baptism, Geography, Liturgy, Kingdom Parables, etc. will also be present in the Second Atrium but just a little more advanced and complex for the children who have already mastered the lessons found in Atrium One. So, for example, on our Atrium One Geography map we only instruct the little ones on three important cities to remember: Bethlehem, Jerusalem & Nazareth but in Atrium Two that Geography lesson now includes 15 cities that we hear about in our scriptures, as well as 4 Regions, 4 Waterways & 8 Mountains. So when our older children listen to the readings at Mass and hear “This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing….” or when they read the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Jesus says “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers….”the children can actually visualize where those cities are in relation to one another and the whole region in which Jesus lived his earthly life.

Also part of the CGS method is that all our hands-on “works” (the materials that accompany each lesson) for the children are to be handmade. So, we need all you crafty folks (glue gun in hand), and/or those who can paint, sew or do some woodworking to help us out. We have several project that are needing care…

So, if you are willing to offer your time and talent to our efforts in building our new sacred space for our children, please contact me, Lisa Brown, at dre@ctredeemer.org so we can set up a meeting and I can go over all the projects to choose from. Thank you for your time and consideration! Keep us in your prayers – much has to get down before our summer program begins in July.

Crazy Catholic Question #105: Graduation

A poignant commencement speech…
Fr. Greg “G-Dog” Boyle, S.J. recently addressed the graduates of Notre Dame. Part of his talk is quoted below, but his full 11-minute speech is well worth the listen at this link: http://news.nd.edu/news/rev-gregory-j-boyle-sj-2017-laetare-address/

After his ordination in 1984, Fr. Greg was assigned to serve the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, located between two large public housing projects with the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. In response to witnessing the devastating impact of gang violence, he led the community to launch their first social enterprise business in an abandoned bakery and called it Homeboy Bakery. Today, Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world.

Fr. Boyle is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (A profoundly inspirational graduation gift!) and is the subject of the 2012 documentary, G-Dog.

Fr. Boyle says “What Martin Luther King says about church could well be said about your time here at Notre Dame: “It’s not the place you’ve come to, it’s the place you go from,” and you go from here to create a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it. You imagine with God a circle of compassion and then you imagine nobody standing outside that circle. You go from here to dismantle the barriers that exclude.

And there’s only one way to do that: and that is to go where the joy is, which is at the margins, for if you stand at the margins, that’s the only way they’ll get erased...when you stand with the poor, and the powerless and the voiceless…with those whose dignity has been denied, whose burdens are more than they can bear…you will go from here and have this exquisite privilege to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop…with the disposable, so the day will come when we stop throwing people away….

He goes on to share the witness of a “gentle, kind soul,” 25-year-old José, a former gang member who in his short life had spent time homeless, in prison, and as a heroin addict and is now a valued member of the substance abuse team.

José said “I was six years old, and I guess you could say my mom and I, we didn’t get along so good. She said to me once, ‘I wish you would just kill yourself. You’re such a burden to me.’” I was nine when my mom took me to an orphanage and said, ‘I found this kid’’ and she left me there for 90 days until my grandmother could come rescue me from where she had dumped me.

My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years with things you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn’t. Every day my back was bloodied and scarred. I had to wear three t-shirts to school each day: first t-shirt because the blood would seep through; second t-shirt you could still see it; finally the third t-shirt you couldn’t see any blood. Kids at school, they’d make fun of me, ‘Hey, fool, it’s 100 degrees, why you wearing three t-shirts?’”

And then he stopped speaking, so overwhelmed with emotion, and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see. When he could regain his speech, he said through his tears, “I wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t want anybody to see them. But now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help heal the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”

May we all go from this place to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it...