HORACE McKENNA, S.J.

[Down through  the  years I have heard about a wonderful Jesuit priest in Washington D.C.  with the name of Horace McKenna, S.J. Then when I was stationed in Annapolis - with lots of people who went to Jesuit schools in DC, I heard his name mentioned even more.  

I heard a relative once say, “If all priests were like Father Horace McKenna,  I’d go to church more often."  

In these times when priests are not being seen in the best light, I thought I’d do  a blog piece and a shout out about this great servant: Father Horace McKenna. 

Years ago  I did this for Father Alec Reid, a Redemptorist, who worked in Northern Ireland. Check my blog for September 8,  2014. Also check this blog piece about Father Horace McKenna, Jesuit. Thanks.]

OBITUARY FOR FATHER HORACE McKENNA, SJ

Horace B. McKenna S.J., founder of S.O.M.E. (So Others Might Eat) and advocate of the Sursum Corda Cooperative. He was born on January 2, 1899 and died on May 11, 1982.

The youngest of 6 children, Horace was born in 1899 New York City, the son of Dr.Charles F. McKenna, a respected chemist and first chemical engineering graduate of Columbia University School of Mines, and Laura O'Neill McKenna. Educated at Fordham Preparatory School, he entered the Society of Jesus at St. Andrew-on-the-Hudson on July 30, 1916. Between 1921 and 1923, he taught in a Jesuit school in Manila, Philippines. There, he discovered the desperate needs of the poor and oppressed. He was ordained June 23, 1929 and assigned to pastor parishes in southern Maryland amidst poverty and Church, St. James' Church, St. Ignatius' Church and St. Inigoes's where he was assigned in June of 1931. Here he worked for twenty-two years, and among his efforts helped create the Ridge Purchasing and Marketing Association. He was active in civil rights, Vietnam-era anti-war protests and the Poor People's Campaign.

From 1953 to 1958, he served at St. Aloysius Gonzaga parish, a Jesuit church a few blocks north of the U.S. Capitol and then as assistant pastor at the Church of the Gesu in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1958 to 1964. In 1964 he returned to St. Aloysius and remained there for the rest of his life, living at Gonzaga College High School and serving the poor. In his commitment to social  justice in Washington, D.C., Fr. McKenna founded So Others Might Eat, a soup kitchen, clinic and employment center; Martha's Table, a soup kitchen and child education center; and House of Ruth, a center for homeless women. He was also one of the leaders in establishing the Sursum Corda Cooperative, a housing development for the poor. Documentation of his life's work is maintained in the Georgetown University -Library Special Collections Division.

Fr. McKenna was named "Washingtonian of the Year" by Washingtonian Magazine in 1977. He received an honorary degree from the University of Scranton in 1998. The McKenna Center, a local shelter and soup kitchen for homeless men, located under the Great Church of St. Aloysius, was named after him in 1982. McKenna Walk NW, a short street within Sursum Corda, is also named after him.

The Father McKenna Center is still located in the basement of Saint Aloysius Catholic Church at 900 North Capitol Street NW in Washington, DC. The McKenna Center exists to meet the needs of the poor and homeless who reside in one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods despite being in the shadow of the US Capitol Building. McKenna Center serves the needs of the poor, men, women and children. Each day, the McKenna Center fulfills the Gospel instruction to “feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and clothe the naked”.

HORACE MCKENNA

APOSTLE OF THE POOR

Kevin O’Brien

America Magazine,

September 17, 2007

A line still forms outside the Father McKenna Center at St. Aloysius Church in Washington, D.C. People come to the cramped but homey church basement looking for food, clothing, housing and personal support. They still tell stories about Father McKenna, who died 25 years ago. To know the story of Father McKenna is to enter into the lives of the poor whom he loved as a father. “You can’t understand me if you don’t understand my people,” Horace liked to tell his friends as he brought them for a walk around the neighborhood.

In his lifetime, as they do today, people freely called Father McKenna a “saint.” His father, Charles, had a sense of things to come. In his insightful biography, Horace: Priest for the Poor, John S. Monagan recounts how Charles insisted that his son be baptized with the name Horace. The priest protested: There is no St. Horace. “He’ll be the first,” Charles replied. Thus was Horace McKenna baptized in a New York City church in the winter of 1899.

Horace met the Jesuits at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. As war raged in Europe, Horace entered the tranquil confines of the Jesuit novitiate overlooking the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, north of New York City. There he immersed himself in Jesuit ways of praying and benefited from a learning that was, by his own account, “deep, broad and accurate.” After professing his first vows, he studied humanities and philosophy, growing in “confidence in thought, truth and love.”

Horace was then assigned to teach at a high school for affluent boys in Manila, Philippines. Far removed from his comfortable upbringing and the insular world of studies, Horace felt his mind and heart stretched. He remembered particularly how an elderly Filipino Jesuit would regularly canvass the school playground for scraps of food left over by the privileged students. The brother would then bring the food over to the school wall, where hungry children anxiously waited for the delivery. According to Monagan, the Jesuit brother’s kindness and the children’s desperation made a lasting impression on Horace.

When he returned to the United States to study theology at the Jesuit seminary in Woodstock, Md., not far from Baltimore, Horace taught Sunday school to African-American children who were not permitted to attend the segregated parochial school. Like his experience with the poor in Manila, his contact with those children transformed his understanding of his priesthood. After Horace was ordained in 1929, he asked his superiors to send him to work with African-American families suffering under segregation laws.

With the blessing of his superiors, Father McKenna made his way to southern Maryland, where for over 20 years he served as a pastor. Horace thrived in his sacramental and pastoral duties, traveling around southern Maryland in his old car. Walter Burghardt, S.J., then a young priest, recalls driving with Horace and stopping frequently so that Horace could say hello to people along the way, usually addressing them by their last name as a sign of respect. During the Great Depression, Horace set up a food distribution system and over the years provided assistance to struggling farmers. Inspired by other Jesuit trailblazers like John LaFarge and Richard McSorley, who worked in southern Maryland at one time or another, Horace vigorously advocated for racial integration in churches and schools.

Horace could become impatient (a “passionate impatience,” Horace admitted) with a too-cautious approach to racial integration. His zeal won him many friends and a fair number of adversaries, even among his fellow Jesuits and priests who argued for a more gradual approach to racial equality. With a blend of friendliness and righteous persistence, Father McKenna always spoke his mind. After one tense, emotionally raw town meeting, Horace approached a man in the hostile audience, extended his hand and said, “I hope there are no hard feelings.” The man responded by looking up at the rafters and saying, “There’s where you should be hanging from.”

As racial tensions continued to flare, Father McKenna was transferred in 1953 from his beloved southern Maryland to St. Aloysius Church in the District of Columbia. Except for a six-year stint at a parish in Philadelphia, Horace would spend the rest of his life ministering just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. “It’s the same work,” he said, “chasing sheep; except that the ground is harder.” The St. Vincent de Paul Society office in the basement of the church became a center for Horace’s charitable work.

Just as he had driven around the counties of southern Maryland, Horace walked the streets around the church, getting to know his neighbors by name. By the mid-1960s, St. Al’s, once mostly white, had twice as many black parishioners as white. The once residential neighborhood was changing. White families were moving to the suburbs and office buildings were rising. The redevelopment around North Capitol Street caused a shortage of affordable housing for the urban poor. Responding to this need, Horace and his friends established a new housing complex. They named it Sursum Corda, a Latin expression from the Mass that means, “Lift up your hearts.”

Horace’s work was ecumenical at its core: he partnered with other churches and served anyone in need, regardless of their religion. In 1970, with the help of friends at Georgetown and other religious leaders, Horace founded S.O.M.E. (So Others Might Eat), an organization that provided hot meals to the hungry not far from St. Al’s.

Horace could not turn away anyone needing help, including a man who gave his legal address as “the back seat of Father McKenna’s car.” On one occasion, his car was stolen. The thief was caught in West Virginia. When Horace arrived there to retrieve the car, he refused to press charges and even gave the thief a ride home to D.C. If asked, he gave away whatever money he had in his pocket. Father McKenna did not hesitate to eat or sleep overnight in the city’s homeless shelters, because he “wanted to see how my brothers in Christ are treated.”

On most days, Horace amiably greeted people in the line that formed outside the church basement. As Horace’s reputation for generosity grew, so did the line. Gonzaga High School students, many of whom came from Washington’s affluent suburbs, would walk by the line every day. One of those students was Martin O’Malley, now governor of Maryland. He recently told The Washington Post: “So you’d come in from the lily-white suburbs and you’d see the nation’s Capitol looming in front of you and then...you’d walk by the morning line of homeless and poor and jobless men who were waiting in line at Father Horace McKenna’s. That was not lost to many of us walking into school by that line every day: how lucky we were, how much we had.”

Horace was an avid fundraiser and communicated news of his work to well-connected friends along the East Coast. He tried to educate the privileged about the plight of the poor. Accolades and honorary degrees came his way. He courted politicians in the name of the poor. With his charming personality, simplicity of lifestyle and selfless zeal, Horace easily won over benefactors.

In the late 1960s and 70s, marches and protests were common in the District of Columbia. Horace walked down to the mall and befriended the protesters. He marched against the Vietnam War. By the end of his life, as the nuclear arms race continued unabated, Father McKenna described himself as a pacifist.

Amid all his social work, Horace remained faithful to his ministry as a parish priest. His prayer and preaching grounded his activism.

Celebrating Mass was the center of his day. He earned a reputation as a succinct, engaging homilist and as a wise, compassionate confessor. He called the confessional the “peace box,” because people found peace there. A fellow priest commented, “He was so close to the Lord that he could speak with authority and we could reasonably believe that this was the divine word.”

Horace’s most difficult time as a priest came in 1968, after Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae. He publicly dissented from the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal O’Boyle, who had issued guidelines for priests to apply the teaching prohibiting the use of artificial birth control. Horace, who had great personal affection for the cardinal, joined a group of priests in protesting a literal application of the encyclical. Relying on more than 40 years experience hearing confessions, Horace argued for some pastoral accommodation for married couples who as a matter of conscience found the teaching unduly burdensome. Because of this dissent, Cardinal O’Boyle, who had equal esteem for Horace, restricted him from hearing confessions. Being kept from the “peace box” pained Horace deeply. After two-and-a-half years of canonical appeals and personal pleas, Horace and other dissenting priests expressed assent to a series of statements of doctrine, after which O’Boyle restored their faculties to hear confessions.

As he approached his 80th birthday, Horace encountered physical limits to his once boundless activity. Though his mind remained sharp, he started to lose his sight and needed help getting around. Talk of his saintly character grew. When Washingtonian magazine named Horace a “Washingtonian of the year,” the editors commented, “He is said to be the closest thing we have to a saint.” Mayor Barry of Washington, D.C., declared July 15, 1979, “Horace McKenna Day” and named him “Apostle of the Poor.” Governor Hughes of Maryland awarded Horace a special citation for his service in southern Maryland. He was given his fourth honorary degree, this time by Fordham University. Of his many honors, Horace treasured most of all the celebration of his 50th anniversary as a priest, hosted by his Jesuit brothers.

On May 11, 1982, Horace suffered a massive heart attack and died. Years earlier, Horace had imagined what would happen after his death:

When God lets me into heaven, I think I’ll ask to go off in a corner somewhere for half an hour and sit down and cry because the strain is off, the work is done, and I haven’t been unfaithful or disloyal, all these needs that I have known are in the hands of Providence and I don’t have to worry any longer who’s at the door, whose breadbox is empty, whose baby is sick, whose house is shaken and discouraged, and whose children can’t read.

The Church of St. Aloysius was packed for Horace’s funeral: rich and poor, black and white, men and women from all walks of life. He was laid to rest in the Jesuit cemetery on the Georgetown University campus, buried in a simple coffin, befitting both his lifelong vow of poverty and his faithful accompaniment of the poor.

Kevin Gillespie, S.J., recalls an encounter with Horace one cold winter night just months before he died. Kevin was a young Jesuit teaching at Gonzaga High School. Father McKenna, partially blind and using a cane, asked Kevin to drive him to a homeless shelter. “I want to be where Jesus is tonight,” Horace explained. Arriving at the shelter, a group of men came out to greet them. Kevin helped Horace get out of the car and entrusted him to the arms of the men of the street who loved him as a father. They carefully led Horace into the shelter, the door shutting behind them. Their saint had come home to them one last time.

One testament to a saintly life is the vigor with which the holy person’s work is carried on. On the first anniversary of Horace’s death, Archbishop James Hickey of Washington, D.C., dedicated the newly renovated basement of St. Al’s in honor of Horace. The Father McKenna Center has since expanded to include a small shelter for men. S.O.M.E. now offers food, clothing, health care, job training and housing to thousands of people each year. Sursum Corda continues to operate, but its future as publicly supported housing is precarious. 

Horace’s old neighborhood is changing rapidly. The gentrification of the area and development of more office buildings have further squeezed poorer families out of the neighborhood.

To those facing present-day challenges and opportunities, Horace would undoubtedly offer his encouragement. During his lifetime, he would often interject at meetings a question pertinent to those carrying on his mission today: “And what about the poor?”

A single-minded focus characterizes those special people we call “saints.” For Horace, the focus was always the poor and powerless. In them, he glimpsed the face of Christ; in them, he always found a home.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Horace McKenna, Apostle of the Poor," in the September 17, 2007 issue.

WORDS OF WISDOM

FROM FATHER HORACE  MCKENNA

"I really believe that every person is a revelation of God - the joy of God, the love of God. I feel that the human person on the street is the appearance of Jesus Christ consumed with human needs. Christ is in the wretched person, as well as the young person, the young woman or the young child. Their smile is so fresh, like a bud or an open flower that speaks of the wealth of the plant beneath the surface. And that wealth is God. "

"You can't talk to a person about his or her soul if that person has no food."

"In the old days, we would go out in pairs and take care of the Widow Jones who had no bread or the Widow Smith whose rent was due. But now, the poor are a swarm all around us. We can't go out to them. How could you go to sixty homes? How could you go everywhere at once? We have to be ready when they come to us."

"The greatest undeveloped resource of our nation and of our world is the poor."

"The poor can't lift themselves up by their bootstraps because they have no boots."

“When  God lets me into heaven, I think I’ll ask to go off in a corner somewhere for half an hour and sit down and cry because the strain is off, the work is done, and I haven’t been unfaithful or disloyal, all these needs that I have known are in the hands of Providence and I don’t have to worry any longer who’s at the door, whose breadbox is empty, whose baby is sick, whose house is shaken and discouraged, and whose children can’t read."

September 12, 2018 

Thought for today: 

“I always prefer  to  believe the best of everybody; it saves so much trouble.” 

Rudyard Kipling [1865-1936]

WHERE  WERE  YOU?

Where were you …?

That’s one of those questions 

we’re asked in a lifetime?

There’s probably 3 to 5

of these such questions?

Where were you when

JFK was shot and killed?

Where were you when

September 11, 2001 happened?

Were you there when

they crucified my Lord?

Where were you when….?

© Andy Costello, Reflections 2018

GOD SNEAKS IN EVERY TIME

The title of my homily is, “God Sneaks In Every Time.”

That was the title of a homily I gave  at St. Mary’s on September 11, 2002 or 2003 at a Mass for our High School Kids - out on our lawn in the Carrol Gardens.

If any of you are worried about your kids - if they dropped out of church and the faith, be at  peace, “God Sneaks in Every Time.”

If your kids or family members don’t go to church for any reason - relax. Simply say, “God sneaks in every time.”

I told the following story that September 11^th: I had gone to a wedding of a relative in New York City a year before September 11^th, 2001.  It was a cousin’s daughter.  She didn’t want any religion or anything Irish at her wedding - so too the man she was marrying - who was Jewish. He didn’t want any religion or mention of God or what have you at their wedding either.

So I was just going to the wedding - as family. I was doing no priestly stuff.

The wedding was at the National Arts Club - 15 Gramercy Park South  in Manhattan, New York City.  We went because it was family.  We sat in the middle of the room.  My two sisters and my brother-in-law - and some other family members had filled up a row. So I went into the row - in front of them.

I sit down. Surprise!  Next to me is a priest. We shook hands - but I didn’t really get his name - and probably vice versa.

He knew my cousin - the father of the bride.  The wedding was short. A justice of the peace or someone officiated. They had a few readings - nothing officially from the Bible. One reading was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 43 Sonnet, “How Do I Love You, let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of being and ideal grace. / I love thee to the level of every day's / Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. / I love thee freely, as men strive for right.”

Surprise they picked from an anthology the reading we hear at every other church wedding. It’s from 1^st Corinthians. “Love is patient, love is kind, etc. etc. etc.” Now,  there is no mention of God in that section of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians - but in this excerpt from an anthology of love poems  God was mentioned. 

I didn’t notice this, but the priest next to me did. He elbows me and says, “God sneaks in every time.”

I found out after the wedding from my cousin that the priest next to me were good friends. My cousin had talked to the priest that he was upset there would be no God - and no religion as part of his daughter’s wedding.

End of that story…. Life goes on….

After the 4 plane hijackings on September 11, 2001, my sister Mary  calls me and says that the priest in front of them and next to me at that wedding was Father Mychal Judge.

God snook into the horror of that day big time with all the stories of acts of bravery by fire fighters and so many first responders.  People prayed big time that weekend.

Father Mychal Judge’s life was written up and spoken about. The newspaper stories and TV accounts told about all the work he did with the poor - with folks who had AIDS - with gays - with alcoholics - and on and on and on.

Those who heard all this heard about a man of God who was very human and who put every other person first.  Mychal  Judge was not the first person who died that day, but he was the first one checked out by the coroner and listed as Victim 0001.

So I was happy to know a priest who did great priestly work that day.

We also lost a cousin September 11, 2001. He was my God-father’s grandson, Shawn Bowman. I found out later that a fireman, the husband of a cousin of mine, whose marriage I had done, was one of the fireman who carried Father Mychal  Judge’s body across the street to St. Peter’s Church and they laid his body on the main altar.

Father Mychal Judge had said, "God is not an obligation or burden. God is the joy of my life!" 

Lucky for me he, God and life slid into my life that day in a new way.

I went to a non-descript wedding and I experienced God in that moment and the scary September 11 moment in New York City.

God sneaks in every time.

SHAWN BOWMAN, 28, FATHER, 

CANTOR FITZGERALD EMPLOYEE

Posted Sep 11, 2010

By Staten Island Advance

Date of Death 9/11/2001

By Frank Donnelly
Advance staff writer
Friday, 09/28/2001

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Shawn Edward Bowman Jr. wasn't an early riser by nature, but each morning he got up before dawn to shower and dress his 16-month-old son, Liam Edward.

The 5 a.m. wake-up call gave the Sunnyside resident precious time with Liam before work and let his wife, Jennifer, sleep a few more minutes. Mrs. Bowman is pregnant with the couple's second child.

Mr. Bowman, 28, a human resources information specialist for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of Tower 1, is among the missing in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

"He was a very devoted father and husband," said his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Davitt. "And as a mother-in-law I could not have asked for anyone to be nicer to my daughter."

A lifelong Staten Islander, Mr. Bowman was a model employee who reported to work an hour early each day. Among his duties, he trained colleagues in the use of special software.

"He wanted to make sure everything he did, he did well," Mrs. Davitt said. As dedicated as he was to his job, which required frequent travel to Europe, Mr. Bowman was even more devoted to his family.

He was little Liam's special playmate. He devoted Saturdays to treks to McDonald's for pancakes and walks in Clove Lakes Park. Weeknights were reserved for romps on the floor.

"His son was everything," Mrs. Davitt said.

The day before the attack, Mr. Bowman left work early to bring Liam to the doctor's office. He and his wife were planning a trip to the Bronx Zoo with Liam to celebrate Mr. Bowman's 29th birthday on Sept. 16.

"He will live through my daughter, but it's a shame his children will never know how wonderful their father was," said Mrs. Davitt. "He will be sorely missed and our lives will never be the same."

Mrs. Bowman is due to give birth in January. The child will be named Jack, after a character in Tom Clancy novels that Mr. Bowman enjoyed reading.

Mr. Bowman was especially fond of mysteries and political accounts and devoured every copy of the New York Times and Barron's newspapers.

He also enjoyed cooking and was an Eagle Scout. He was active with Pouch Camp, Sea View, and with Troop 43 of St. John's Episcopal Church, Rosebank.

Born in New Dorp, Mr. Bowman moved to Arden Heights in 1999. In April, he and his wife moved into his mother-in-law's Sunnyside residence while they awaited construction of a new home in Columbus, N.J.

He was a graduate of Monsignor Farrell High School and the State University of New York at Albany, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in business administration.

Following graduation, Mr. Bowman worked as a human resources information specialist for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Manhattan. He often traveled to the company's overseas offices to train colleagues in special software use. Mr. Bowman was a parishioner of Our Lady of Good Counsel R.C. Church, Tompkinsville, where he was married on April 17, 1999.

Surviving in addition to his wife, the former Jennifer Davitt, and his son, Liam Edward, are his parents, Carol and Shawn E. Sr.; a brother, James, and his maternal grandmother, Anne Barbieri.

There will be a memorial mass tomorrow at noon in Our Lady of Good Counsel Church. The Rev. Joseph Mostardi, the former pastor, will officiate, wearing vestments Mr. Bowman's family purchased for him.

The Harmon Home for Funerals, West Brighton, is handling the arrangements.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SHAWN EDWARD BOWMAN JR.

A BOY SCOUT AT HEART

Even as a grown man of 28, Shawn E. Bowman Jr. was still a Boy Scout. Just about every Friday night, he came to Staten Island's Troop 43 meeting in his khaki pants and beige shirt festooned with patches and medals. When the boys' energy flagged, he would break out into his favorite skit, "Bananas," shouting, "Bananas of the world, unite!"

"He almost lived and breathed it," said Gil Schweiger, the ranger at Pouch Camp, a camp for Boy Scouts in Staten Island, who had known Mr. Bowman ever since he was a 7-year-old signing up to earn his first patch.

The boy became an Eagle Scout, then an assistant scoutmaster, passing along what he had learned — everything from how to tie a knot to how to tell the truth.

His day job, human resources information specialist at Cantor Fitzgerald, was a source of pride, but his real joy was scouting; he relished the prospect of passing it along to his son, Liam, now 2, and a second son, Jack, who had not yet been born on Sept. 11. "He tried to pass what he learned from scouting," Mr. Schweiger said. "They looked up to him. The boys still do."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on September 1, 2002.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Shawn Bowman was a relative and my god-father's grandson - so I wanted to honor him today: September 11th.

September 11, 2018 - 

Thought for today: 

“The moment to spend  with a husband who loves me, or a sick friend, or a delicious new grandchild is here and now. Not some time later .... The nation learned this lesson all at once that horrible day in September 2001. The pictures stay with us -- the fires and falling debris, and, most hauntingly, the faces. Look how young so many of them were, people who thought there would be much more time, a lot of 'later' when they could do all the things they really wanted to do. I grieve for their families -- especially for those, like me, who haven't found any trace of the people they loved. But I grieve even more for the people who died that day. They couldn't know what we know now about the precious gift of time.” 

Cokie Roberts -  

contributing senior news 

analyst for NPR News

I’M  ALL  MIXED  UP

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily is, “I’m All Mixed Up!”

There used to be a song by Elvis Presley - 1969. Billy Joel and others sang it as well. It was called, “I’m All Shook Up.”

At times we’re all mixed up.  At times we’re all shook up. We can’t slow things down to figure out what to do.  Things are happening too fast.  We’re in the mix and we can’t stop the music.

Sometimes we can.

HOW TO DEAL WITH MIX UPS - AND SHOOK UPS

If we can, the first step  is to step back. Turn off the music. Stop the spin that’s going all around - that’s mixing us up - that’s shaking us up.

We can do this if we can get away from it all. Having the ability to pause is a good skill to have.  Being able to become silent and walk away nicely - is a good skill? Knowing how to fake it and say, “Excuse me. Is there a bathroom nearby?”

Then in the privacy of  our mind - we might have time and place to sort out what’s going on around us and inside us.

Sometimes it’s smart to admit it - to say  out loud to the other or to others - but  especially to myself, “I’m all mixed up. I’m all shook up. I need space.”

It could be family stuff, church stuff, self-stuff, money stuff, politics stuff, children who are long gone stuff, what have you stuff.

Next time you have some time, take a good look at your remote. Is it a good sign that the letters on the mute button are worn off? Is it a good sign if we can mute ourselves - bite our tongue and learn now to say, “Mute!”?

That’s the first step - stepping back.

The second step is to ask what’s in the mix of the moment? Jot down one liners that are short hand for what and who’s in the mix - that’s mixing us up.

TODAY’S FIRST READING

Today’s First Reading from 1^st Corinthians 5:1-8 talks about a shook up - a mixed up - early Christian Community.

Read the letter with the question: What’s going on here?

In today’s reading we find out:

·       A man is living with his father’s wife.

·       People are being expelled out of the community.

·       People are being prideful.

·       Paul pronounces judgment on someone.

·       People are boasting about inappropriate things.

Paul uses the image of baking bread. Here’s where the image of mixing hit me. He says get rid of the old yeast and become a fresh batch of dough. He says too many times we have mixed into our being the yeast of malice and wickedness - instead of sincerity and truth.      

We all have baggage.  I like that word: baggage.

Another word I like is,  triggers. What’s triggering our mess?

Another word I like in this mix is projection.

We walk through life with baggage - boxes and backpacks, memories and moments that are triggered by present events and experiences - and they are all part of our mix.

We mix experiences from our childhood and school and work into what’s happening now.

Warning: we might be unfair doing that to ourselves or another, because what’s happening now is different from what happened back then. That’s why it’s important to look at the mix and the mess we’re in.

TODAY’S GOSPEL     

As a result our mind can become like a hard fist or like the withered hand the man in today’s gospel has.

Jesus says to the man:  Stretch our your hand” and the withered hand is restored.

Here we are in church - a gathering place. If we were Jewish, this would be a synagogue.

Hear Jesus say.  “Stretch our your mind - your twisted or over laden or even withered mind and let Jesus heal us.”

Another warning: In today’s gospel those present don’t like what Jesus did.

Jesus was crucified many times before the got to Calvary.

Well, Jesus might cause in our mind and heart a resentment - because he’s naming what we do at times. Once we’re healed we can’t blame others for our own mixed up motives and patterns.

CONCLUSION

The title of my homily is, “I’m All Mixed Up!”

Hope this homily had at least one message or one image that shows some clarity or light in any thing you’re mixed up about. Amen.