Can’t argue with that

…those kids have been doing the Friday dance for  a while…

(-Dorian)

Yeah, so blessed O Antiphons, Happy Christmas, Ecstatic Octave of Christmas, Happy New Year and a light-filled Epiphany to you all.

Our house has been invaded by illness. I was the only one who escaped unscathed.  My oldest son, who has ended up sick three out of the last five Christmas visits to us and who this time actually had to take sick days for it, basically yelled “I am never coming to see you at Christmas again!”  He was so adamant, I don’t think  the phone was even necessary for the message to reach over here. His voice would have carried from Atlanta just fine unaided. My poor father even had to be hospitalized after returning to K-Town  from our Sick House. He asked me incredulously, “How did you escape it?”

I have no idea, but I did.

Don’t ask questions, is what I say.

We went to Florida for a few days.

Self-portrait after visiting husband's grave

I went to Mass many times, of course.  My Mass-going over the past two months has been rather intriguingly framed.   It began in the beginning of November with a Mass in another city and another state.  A Mass in a huge, wealthy parish celebrated by a priest who – for whatever reason – ego, training, habit – placed himself firmly in the center of the action, drawing attention to himself by way of meaningful, soulful pauses, ad-libbing fairly continually and a homily featuring his adolescent self.

It was interesting to me because this was just a few days after the massacre at Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, and the Gospel concerned persecution.   The homily, though was a very strange message to the hundreds of us gathered there – to not beat ourselves up for not being martyrs.  It was intermixed with challenges to be more forward in our faith in public, but those moments were overshadowed by an assurance that whatever we could do was okay. Or something.  And in the homily, no mention of the Iraqi Christians (although they did come up in the Prayers of the Faithful).

In the weeks following were varied encounters on Sundays and Holy Days.  On December 8, being surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) by Bishop Baker celebrating the noon Mass at the Cathedral, and being gratified, as we say down here, by the number of people whom I knew at Mass – people from all different parts of my small little life down here – school parents catching that noon Mass during lunch hour, folks from the local crisis pregnancy center..and so on.

Joseph served Christmas morning Mass. He had volunteered to do so, and I was nervous about it because for several weeks he – a new server – was the only name on the list.  I couldn’t see how that would end well.  But thankfully, another server did sign up a few days before, so he ended up in good hands.  It was really just what I needed, that Mass – no music at all, our Indian priest preaching his carefully structured, deeply sincere homily with an odd absence of articles, my little boy up there serving buoyed by (I think) my urgent missives to his father (Help him….!) and (I believe) the resultant pushes and nudges at the right places in the liturgy.

Then this past week, an interesting end-frame to the first Mass I spoke of up there.  We went to Casa Maria and aside from the usual satisfaction of dignified, simple chant and singing led by the Sisters, there was a quite bracing Epiphany homily from the celebrating priest. It was brilliant – beginning with Aristotle’s statement about all human beings desire for truth – working its way through the story of the Magi, the relationship between faith and reason and ending up with the stunning, loveIy, compelling irony of all of this embodied in a helpless child (very Benedict-ine, I couldn’t help but think) – but I had no idea who he was.  Because the convent is a retreat house, Sunday morning Mass celebrants are often the priest retreat-masters of that particular weekend – which makes it an interesting place to go to Mass since your chances of hearing an excellent homily are very good indeed – but there were no retreats that weekend.

After Mass, I asked one of the sisters who the priest was and she said it was Fr. Brian Mullady OP (a Dominican – of course!) who has had programs on EWTN and visits regularly.

Isn’t interesting how this business about “gifts and talents” works.  This Mass-going season that I’m writing about began with a fellow who self-consciously placed himself, his drama past and present,  in the center of our consciousnesses.  He had probably been taught at one point in his formation that it is necessary for a priest to be open and vulnerable and share himself with the community in order for them to powerfully encounter the wounded Christ in his witness. Or something.  But the result is solipsism. Not to speak of vague, persistent embarrassment.

But it ended with this tremendously gifted preacher and teacher whose gifts are uniquely his, the fruit of his own intelligence and faith.  Those gifts – individual and unique – were poured out the other morning and pointed me in a compelling way, not back to him, but to that astonishing love of God lying in a manger. A light.

It is a tricky, challenging line to walk.  Anyone trying to do so, it has always seemed to me, would do well to study Paul and take him to heart, for he embodies the challenge – so adamant was he to be taken seriously as an apostle, for his gifts, but also so firm was he in the knowledge that it was not him, but Christ who lived in him, to whom all glory should be given.

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