Monday, July 14, 2014

RELIGIOUS  PRACTICES




INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this 15 Monday in Ordinary Time is, “Religious Practices.”

Question: What are you religious practices?

One obvious practice for most of you is weekday Mass.

SOMETHING ALL RELIGIONS HAVE IN COMMON

Every religion has religious practices. 

So if one looks into any religion, one could line up various religious practices for that religion.

Catholicism has its list – and it’s a long, long, long list.

For example, the rosary, Stations of the Cross, making the sign of the cross with Holy Water coming into a church – and for some going out of church, making the sign of the cross when going by a church and for some also a cemetery, saying a prayer before turning the key of the car before going on a trip, morning prayers, night prayers, prayers before Meals, etc. etc. etc.

Religious practices vary by event, experience, culture, family, parish…

At a baptism, a woman told me she blessed her son on his forehead every night from his baptism onwards with a small sign of the cross made with her thumb. She was asked to do this at his baptism so she did this till he was 21.

Some religious practices drop out; some continue.

For example, there is no sign of the cross indicated in the big book to be made in the first part of the Mass with the penance rite at the beginning of Mass  – but many people still do it – priests included. Why not?

WHAT’S THE MESSAGE HERE

Now why this message today? Well, it’s a religious practice at Mass to give a short homily at weekday Masses.

Well, why bring up this particular message of addressing religious practices today?

Two reasons.

First of all, it’s a theme we’ve been hearing from the prophets these past few weeks in the first reading – Amos, Hosea and now again in today’s first reading from Isaiah 1: 10-15.

Isaiah has God asking rather bluntly: “What do I care about the number of your sacrifices? I’ve had enough of whole-burnt rams and fat of fatlings. In the blood of calves, lambs and goats, I find no pleasure.”

He also has God saying, “Enough with the incense. Enough with your festivals. Enough with your spread out hands. Enough with more prayers.”

Then Isaiah says what God really wants: Clean hands and a clean heart. Stop doing evil. Start doing good. Justice. “Make justice your aim; redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.”

I think we get this. We hear it over and over again from the prophets.

I suspect it’s a theme one would hear in every religion.

We hear it in Jesus all the time. He urges us not to do religious practices to be seen. Not to give lip service. Not to be faking it. Not doing only externals  - while one’s heart is far from God in what one is really doing.

Religion runs into the reality of show and phoniness all the time. The Pharisees weren't just in the Early Church.

I love the scene in a novel where a Boston politician always comes in late for Mass – walks down the main aisle – genuflects and drops his rosary.

I love the funniness of Ash Wednesday. The readings tell us to do religious practices that day and during Lent in the privacy of one’s heart – to wash our face - and then we put external ashes on foreheads.

The second reason I’m thinking about this today is because today is the feast of Saint Kateri Texakwitha.

She did some of the regular Catholic religious practices of saying the rosary and praying to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. 

One specific religious practice Kateri liked to do was make little crosses out of branches and plant them in the woods she would travel – and use them to remind her to pray.

I noticed in reading up on her life that the French missionaries brought to the Native American converts some religious practices – that were not healthy or helpful.

Kateri would also cut and burn her skin – in punishment for her sins. She and other women would beat their shoulders with sticks – till they drew blood. Some would – with clothes on – cut a hole in the ice and go into the freezing cold water and prayer for forgiveness of their sins. [1]

CONCLUSION

In this homily I’m highlighting the reality that we have religious practices.

The key ones to practice  are those that help us love the Lord our God with our whole heart, mind, soul and spirit – and to love our neighbor as ourselves.


Others – the unhealthy ones, "Enough already!"


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REFERENCE ARTICLE FOUND ON LINE


·        Masochism and Sainthood: Kateri Tekakwitha and Junípero Serra
·        Daniel Fogel
·        Presented at the symposium on “The Spanish Missions and California Indians,” held at D-Q University near Davis, California, March 2, 1990. Kateri Tekakwitha was canonized by pope Benedict 16 (formerly cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) on October 21, 2012, elevating her to sainthood.


Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) and Junípero Serra (1713-1784)are both candidates for sainthood. Pope John Paul, in beatifying Serra in September 1988, extolled him as “a shining example of Christian virtue and the missionary spirit. His great goal was to bring the Gospel to the native peoples of America, so that they too might be ‘consecrated in the truth’.”1 When he beatified Kateri Tekakwitha eight years earlier, the pope declared to a mostly Native American audience: “Blessed Kateri stands before us as a symbol of the best of the heritage that is yours as North American Indians.”2

Sainthood means raising a past Catholic's life as a model for living Catholics to emulate. Why would the pope view Junípero Serra on the one hand, and Kateri Tekakwitha on the other, as role models for Catholics today?

There seems to be a world of difference, culturally and historically, between the Spanish mission builder Serra and the Mohawk mission Indian woman Tekakwitha. One aspect that unites the two, however, is their single-minded devotion to Catholic dogma, their preference for a happy death over a happy life, and their practice of physical self-punishment to the point of excess. While harsh physical discipline and self-punishment were part of the secular and religious culture of both Serra and Tekakwitha, Serra was chided by his Franciscan colleagues, and Tekakwitha was chided by her Jesuit mission mentors, for carrying the practice far beyond the bounds of prudence.

Life of Tekakwitha

Tekakwitha was born around 1656, in the village of Ossernenon on the south bank of the Mohawk River, in what is now east-central New York State. Her father was a Turtle clan chief of the Kanien'kehaka, better known as the Mohawk people. Her mother was a Christian Algonquin woman, apparently captured in war, who had been educated and baptized at the French Jesuit mission of Three Rivers in Quebec.3

Mohawk society was being wrenched out of equilibrium by the stresses of European contact. The growing desire for European goods stimulated the Mohawk fur trade to the point that many men abandoned animal conservation practices and took to raiding the Algonquian peoples to the north, with the object of seizing beaver pelts. In the 1640s, the Mohawks obtained guns — first from the English, then from the Dutch — and became more aggressive and effective in fighting the French as well as the Algonquins and Hurons. Military leaders became more prominent and powerful than traditional chiefs. Rum sold by Dutch traders aggravated conflicts among village people. Smallpox and other European diseases devastated the population.4

When Tekakwitha was four years old, her mother, father, and younger brother all died of smallpox. She survived the disease, but was nearly blinded, and her face badly pitted. Since her eyes could no longer endure bright sunlight, “she was forced to take refuge in creeping about in the...shadows of the Long House. Whenever she emerged into the light of day, she had to hood her little head...to protect her eyes.”5

Tekakwitha's father's sister Karitha, along with her husband Iowerano, adopted her as their second daughter. Shortly afterwards, the survivors of plague-ravaged Ossernenon built a new village for themselves at the top of a hill, a mile or two up the Mohawk River along its southern bank. Celebrating for three days, they called their new village Kahnawake.6

In 1666, the French royal army systematically attacked the Iroquois nations. They amassed a force of over a thousand soldiers to subdue the Mohawks. After driving the people from their homes, the French burned all three Mohawk villages, one after the other, destroying the women's corn and squash fields in the process. The ten-year-old Tekakwitha and her new family fled into a cold October forest.7

Tekakwitha's family, along with other survivors, moved across the Mohawk River, rebuilding the village of Kahnawake on the north bank. By 1668, due to the drastic reduction in the Mohawk population from smallpox and French assault, two-thirds of the population of Kahnawake were said to be Algonquian and Huron captives.8

The Jesuits Arrive

The League of the Iroquois was compelled to make peace with the French in 1667. That same year, as part of the peace settlement, French Jesuits arrived in Mohawk country to set up a mission. Four priests (Jacques Frémin, Jean Pierron, Jacques Bruyas, and Jacques de Lamberville) visited Tekakwitha's family in Kahnawake, staying three days in their long house.9Previous efforts by French Jesuit missionaries to evangelize among the Mohawks and neighboring Iroquoian peoples had been frustrated by Mohawk hostility.10 Now, with the Mohawks pacified, Jesuit missionaries fanned out into all five Iroquois nations.

Many Mohawks were amazed that the French priests came with no military protection, and grew to respect the persistent “black robes,” as they called them. Moreover, the Algonquian and Huron Christians adopted into the Mohawk nation now felt free to express themselves as Christians. They eagerly flocked to mass at the mission church, and presented their children to the priests for baptism.11

Tekakwitha came into contact with children in Kahnawake who were being instructed by the missionaries and taught to sing charming church hymns. But her uncle Iowerano strongly opposed the Jesuits' evangelizing work. Her aunts Karitha and Arosen (Iowerano's sister) grew dismayed as Tekakwitha began to depart from traditional ways. They tried to arrange her marriage to a young Mohawk man.12  Tekakwitha fled the cabin after the young man had entered and sat down beside her. For this bold rebuff of their marriage scheme, Tekakwitha's aunts punished her with ridicule, threats, and harsh workloads. While obedient to their work demands, Tekakwitha remained firm in her resistance to marriage. Eventually, her aunts gave up their attempts to get her to marry.13

In 1669, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Feast of the Dead, held every ten years, was convened at Kahnawake. Some Oneidas came to the feast, along with several Onondagas led by their famous sachem Garakontié. Tekakwitha's mother and father, along with others who had died in the previous decade, were to be tenderly exhumed, so that their souls, contented, could be released to wander to the spirit land to the west.14

Showdown at the Feast of the Dead

Priest Jean Pierron had other plans. In a bold and rude speech, he attacked the beliefs and logic underpinning the Feast of the Dead. The assembled Iroquois, upset at Pierron's insult to their holy feast, commanded him to be silent. But Pierron continued, exhorting the Iroquois to give up their “superstitious” rites. Pierron's almost desperate sense of urgency no doubt stemmed from the Mohawks' revenge, earlier that year, against a group of Mohicans who had attacked Kahnawake: On that occasion the victorious Mohawks had tortured and burned to death eleven Mohican captives, including four women and one baby, scorning Pierron's attempts to instruct and baptize the captives even as they burned.

Pierron departed from the Feast of the Dead, but only to return accompanied by the Onondaga sachem Garakontié, to whose sense of justice he had appealed. Under Garakontié's protection Pierron concluded his speech, demanding that, as the price of continued friendship with the French, the Iroquois give up their Feasts of the Dead, their faith in dreams as a guide to action, and the worship of their war god.

Astonishingly, the assembled Iroquois relented. Exchanging gifts with priest Pierron, they promised to give up the customs and rituals he had denounced.15 In retrospect, Pierron had probably launched his bold psychological assault on the Feast of the Dead with the confidence that he and his fellow Jesuits had persuaded several valiant and respected Iroquois men and women far enough along the path to Christianity, that some would support him in his provocative speech. Garakontié himself later became a Christian.

Tekakwitha Becomes a Christian

In 1675, Tekakwitha met priest Jacques de Lamberville, who had taken charge of St. Peter's mission in Kahnawake the year before. She expressed her desire for baptism, and began religious training. Baptized on Easter Sunday in 1676, at the age of twenty, she took the Christian name Kateri. The new convert was considered exceptionally devout, having long since disdained and abstained from her people's traditional dancing, singing and feasting for the sake of a more humble and modest life, which now became more and more absorbed with Christian prayer.16

Kateri became the butt of scorn and insults from non-christian villagers. Men threw stones at her, compelling her to take roundabout paths to reach the mission chapel. Children ran after her down the streets, mocking and shouting, “Look at the Christian!”17

By now a new, Christian village of Kahnawake had developed 200 miles to the north, on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. The settlement, called St. François Xavier du Sault by the Jesuit priests, was first composed mainly of Oneidas, but soon attracted large numbers of Christians from other Iroquoian and Huron tribes, especially Mohawks. So many Mohawks settled in the new mission village that, by 1673, it was said that there were more Mohawks warriors living there than in their own country.18 The more zealous Mohawk converts made regular trips back to their home villages, with the aim of bringing fresh converts to new Kahnawake.

Flight to New Kahnawake

One of these Mohawk lay apostles, upon learning of the harsh harassment Kateri Tekakwitha was suffering in old Kahnawake, convinced her to flee to the new mission village up north. After securing the permission of priest de Lamberville, Kateri, fleeing with her Christian Indian companions, eluded her pursuing uncle and continued along the 200-mile trek through the Adirondack mountain region. She arrived at new Kahnawake in October 1677, and received her first holy communion on Christmas day.

Kateri was now free to express her Christian faith in all passion. She not only prayed ardently, performed all the Christian rituals she had been taught and humbly served the poor and infirm. She also deprived herself of physical sustenance, and punished her own body with unusual zeal. “She often went into the woods,” wrote her Jesuit confessor, “and chastised her shoulders with sticks. From there she would go to church and spend a long time deploring her sins... She confessed them, interrupting her words with sighs and sobs as if she were the greatest sinner in the whole world; yet she was of an angelically innocent disposition.”19

Survivor's Guilt

When a person suffers the death of her or his closest companions or nurturers, she or he naturally develops a strong desire to be re-united with those companions. To blunt the pain of her loss, she imagines her departed loved ones as happy together in some afterworld. But then, how does she reconcile the fact that she alone has survived to go on living? If she now finds pleasure in her life, she feels pangs of guilt, because her deceased loved ones cannot share in her pleasures. Both to rejoin her loved ones and to resolve her psychic tension, she may come to prefer an agonizing death to a happy life.

Tekakwitha suffered the death of her mother, father and brother at age four. At age ten, her village was burnt to the ground. At age thirteen, when she was expecting the happy release of her loved ones' souls from what remained of their dead bodies, the stunning turnabout at the Feast of the Dead ceremony instigated by priest Pierron may have compounded her psychic shock. If the Feast of the Dead was a wicked ceremony, and the Mohawk beliefs all wrong, then what would become of her loved ones' souls?

Guilt, it seems to me, was a driving psychological force of the Christian movement from its very beginnings. Jesus' closest disciples abandoned him during his hour of trial, condemnation, humiliation, torture and death. Their horror over their loss, and guilt over their own behavior, spurred them to sacrifice themselves spreading the gospel of their departed mentor. It also spurred them to rail against the pleasures of the flesh, and psychologically to invert Jesus' death agony into an object of adoration.

Catholic death obsession, and the dogma of original sin, may have provided Tekakwitha with a method to resolve her psychic conflict — a conflict provoked, ironically enough, by repeated European assaults against her people.

Masochism and Mohawk Culture

To be sure, physical self-punishment was not simply imposed on Tekakwitha from without; it had its roots in Mohawk culture. Besides hunting, war-making was among the men's major pursuits. The resulting military culture placed a premium on men's capacity to endure physical hardship, wounds, torture and execution. Condemned war captives were expected stoically to sing their death songs, and to endure their prolonged death agony without a moan or murmur. Women typically had the power of life or death over war captives, but women themselves were not always spared the cruel punishments of war.

Thus the Mohawks and other Iroquoian peoples, in contrast to the California Indians, took easily to the practice of physical self-punishment brought by Catholic missionaries. The Jesuit missionaries at new Kahnawake were amazed, and at times dismayed, by the self-punishing zeal of their neophytes. Priest Pierre Cholonec wrote that the Christian Indian women “outnumbered the men in repentance for their faults... Some rolled themselves in the deep snow...” Others chopped holes in the river ice with their hatchets, plunged into the water up to their necks, and boldly recited their prayers before clambering out, their clothing frozen to their bodies.20 Kateri Tekakwitha outdid most of her sister and fellow neophytes in self-punishment. One night, while her household slept, she spent several hours branding her own limbs with a burning wooden stick.21 She routinely fasted on Wednesdays and Saturdays and, when taking her single evening meal22 on other days, she often mixed ashes into her corn porridge. One day, to prepare for confession, Kateri and her Oneida friend Marie-Thérèse Tegaiaguenta voluntarily beat each other, in turn, with sticks, drawing blood from each other’s shoulders.23

Mourning Becomes Perpetual

In Iroquois religion, the Feast of the Dead provided periodic release from grief and mourning. With the shift to Christianity and the death cult of Jesus, mourning becomes perpetual. From an Iroquoian standpoint, Jesus Christ must have appeared as a kind and loving father whose soul could never find its resting place. For Kateri Tekakwitha, the figure of Jesus may have become a surrogate for her own departed father, who, by Mohawk belief, was a lost soul due to the aborted Feast of the Dead ceremony — and, by Christian belief, was a lost soul for never having been baptized.

The perpetual mourning mode of Christianity, with its attendant physical self-punishments, was bound to have a negative impact on the people. In Iroquoian societies (as in most cultures) women were the main providers, tending the cornfields and apple orchards, gathering wild fruits, nuts, roots and firewood, and manufacturing clothing. When women, the life-givers, become obsessed with self-torture and death, the people as a whole are in trouble.

The Hunting Season

The mission Indians of Kahnawake, who governed themselves under Jesuit supervision, would leave the village in groups during the harsh winter season, pursuing scant food supplies by hunting nomadically for three or four months. Kateri Tekakwitha, deeply attached to the mission church, did not want to join the hunting expedition, but was persuaded to do so by her adopted sister and brother, who wanted her help in making the long trip.24 Another woman in the hunting party accused Kateri of sleeping with her husband — a charge Kateri firmly denied, to the priests’ satisfaction. Kateri vowed never again to embark on a long hunting trip.

Upon visiting a sisterhood of French nuns with her friend Marie-Thérèse in Montreal, Kateri — who was still being pressured by her adoptive kin to marry — hit upon the idea of becoming a nun herself. The priests did not permit Kateri and Marie-Thérèse to establish an Indian sisterhood of nuns. Yet Kateri took a vow of perpetual chastity, with the priests' blessing, in 1679.

Tekakwitha's Death and Veneration

When the next hunting season came around, priest Cholonec, concerned over Kateri's failing health, urged her to join her kin in the hunting party, in the hope that access to meat might help her regain health. Kateri refused, insisting she would gladly suffer bodily hunger for the spiritual sustenance she received at the mission church. She remained in Kahnawake, continuing her harsh and sparse diet and her cruel self-punishments.25

The following April, after a long, drawn-out illness, after singing her Mohawk death song, and after receiving the final sacraments of the church, Kateri Tekakwitha died at the age of 24. The best spiritual explanation for her fatal illness is provided not by Catholic doctrine, but by Iroquois philosophy: Iroquois healers viewed some diseases as psychic, rooted in “the vindictiveness of the soul of the patient, when it is provoked to rebel against the body” out of despair over a lack of spiritual resources needed to sustain the body.26

Kateri's death and pious example left a deep impression on the Indians of Kahnawake. Their zeal for self-punishment increased. On the night of Good Friday, one day after Kateri's death, one woman spent hours rolling herself in thorns, as Kateri had done. “Many beat themselves till blood flowed. Married people separated, vowing to lead continent lives thereafter; widows renounced second marriage.”27 Young people took chastity vows, breaking sharply with Iroquois tradition. Kateri's burial ground soon became a shrine revered by Catholic pilgrims, both Indian and French, throughout the region. Many miraculous cures were credited to her intercession.


As candidates for sainthood, Junípero Serra and Kateri Tekakwitha form a perfect pair, by orthodox Catholic standards. Serra was a tireless European missionary who sacrificed himself to spread the gospel; Tekakwitha was a traumatized Indian woman who sacrificed herself to receive it. Serra worked with repressive imperial authorities to root out “pagan superstitions” among the people; Tekakwitha willingly gave up her people's “pagan” ways to embrace Catholic faith in its most repressive form.

If the Vatican canonizes Junípero Serra and Kateri Tekakwitha, the tragedy of the California Indians on the one side, and of Tekakwitha on the other, will be enshrined in the pantheon of saints.


Footnotes

(Click on any superscript number in the text to jump to the corresponding footnote)

1. “Serra Beatified at Last,” by Elizabeth Fernandez, San Francisco Chronicle, 26 September 1988.

2. Pope John Paul's address of 24 June 1980, as related in Kateri Tekakwitha: Joyful Lover by Mary Pelagia Litkowski, O.P. Growth Unlimited Inc., Battle Creek, Michigan, 1989, p. 51.

3. Edward Lecompte, S.J., Glory of the Mohawks: The Life of the Venerable Catherine Tekakwitha, translated by Florence Ralston Werum, FRSA, Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1944, p. 5 (translator's prologue).

4. William Fenton and Elisabeth Tooker, “Mohawk,” Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 1978, pp. 468-9.

5. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., p. 20.

6. Francis X. Weiser, S.J., Kateri Tekakwitha, Kateri Center, Caughnawaga, Canada, 1972, p. 34. Kahnawake (“at the rapids”) has several other possible spellings, the most common being Caughnawaga. The Mohawk village of Kahnawake, located in east-central New York, should not be confused with the (mostly) Iroquois mission Indian village by the same name, located 200 miles to the north near Montreal.

7. Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1936, p. 164.

8. William Fenton and Elisabeth Tooker, op. cit., p. 467.

9. Mary Pelagia Litkowski, O.P., Kateri Tekakwitha: Joyful Lover, op. cit., p. 53.

10. William Fenton and Elisabeth Tooker, op. cit., p. 469.

11. Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, op. cit., p. 164.

12. Among Iroquoian peoples, marriage was traditionally arranged by the mothers of the prospective couple, with the youngsters having no voice in selecting their marriage partners. Also, Iroquois families were generally matrilocal, with the husband moving out of his clan and/or village residence to live with his bride in her family home. This meant that arranging the marriage of a young female relative would bring a new man, and eventually children, into the woman-centered family home. See Judith K. Brown, “Iroquois Women: An Ethnohistorical Note,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975, p. 241. Also George P. Murdock, “The Iroquois of Northern New York,” in Our Primitive Contemporaries, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1934, p. 312.

13. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., p. 28.

14. Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, op. cit., p. 167. Also, J.N.B. Hewitt, “The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 8, Boston, 1895, p. 109.

15. Daniel Sargent, Catherine Tekakwitha, op. cit., pp. 167-8.

16. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., p. 41.

17. Ibid., p. 44.

18. William Fenton and Elisabeth Tooker, op. cit., p. 470.

19. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., p. 72.

20. Ibid., p. 97.

21. Ibid., p. 99.

22. The normal Iroquois custom was to have the main meal at the beginning of the day. (Judith K. Brown, op. cit., p. 249).

23. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., pp. 99-100.

24. Ibid., p. 75.

25. Ibid., p. 95.

26. J.N.B. Hewitt, op. cit., p. 114.

27. Edward Lecompte, op. cit., p. 121.

Bibliography

Beauchamp, W.M. “Mohawk Notes,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 8, Boston, 1895, pp. 217-221.

————————. “Iroquois Women,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 13, Boston, 1900, pp. 81-91.

Béchard, Henri, S.J. The Original Caughnawaga Indians, International Publishers, Montreal, 1976.

Brown, Judith K. “Iroquois Women: An Ethnohistorical Note,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter. Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975, pp. 235-251.

Chamberlain, A.F. “A Mohawk Legend of Adam and Eve,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 2, Boston, pp. 228, 311.

Fenton, William and Elisabeth Tooker. “Mohawk,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 1978.

Hewitt, J.N.B. “The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 8, Boston, 1895, pp. 107-116.

Lecompte, Edward, S.J. Glory of the Mohawks: The Life of the Venerable Catherine Tekakwitha, translated by Florence Ralston Werum, FRSA. Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1944.

Litkowski, Mary Pelagia, O.P. Kateri Tekakwitha: Joyful Lover, Growth Unlimited Inc., Battle Creek, Michigan, 1989.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society, edited with an introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock. World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1963.

Murdock, George P. “The Iroquois of Northern New York,” in Our Primitive Contemporaries, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1934, pp. 291-323.

Sargent, Daniel. Catherine Tekakwitha, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1936.

Sheehan, Thomas. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, Random House, New York, 1986.

Weiser, Francis X., S.J. Kateri Tekakwitha, Kateri Center, Caughnawaga, Canada, 1972.

Acknowledgments

Genevieve Cuny, OSF, director of religious education at the Tekakwitha Conference in Montana, generously explained to me her perspective on Tekakwitha's life and the sainthood campaign, and supplied me with popular literature on Tekakwitha's life. Gilbert Hemauer, OFM Capuchin, former executive director of the Tekakwitha Conference, gave me valuable background on Tekakwitha and the current Native American Catholic movement.

The late Henri Béchard, S.J., vice-postulator at the St. Francis Xavier mission in Kahnawake, helped me pursue a difficult historical question by tracing out his own extensive research into that question, and supplied me with two informative books he wrote on Tekakwitha and the early mission Indian community at Kahnawake. Thomas F. Egan, S.J., at the Akwesasne parish church in upstate New York, brought me up to date on Tekakwitha's sainthood campaign and told me of the recent history of the Mohawk community he serves.

Shirley Scott, librarian at the Kanien'kehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center at Kahnawake, helped me sort out European-imposed names from the true names Native groups have given themselves, and told me of the wonderful work her community's elders have done to keep the Kanien'kehaka (Mohawk) language alive among the young generations.

Copyright © 1990 by Daniel Fogel

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Poem for Today July 14, 2014





FOR AN ADDICT

 On its way through the innocent night,
The moth is ambushed by the light,

Becomes glued to a window
Where a candle burns; its whole self,
It dreams of light and all desire,
Trapped in one glazed gaze;
Now nothing else can satisfy
But the deadly beauty of flame.

When you lose the feel
For all other belonging
And what is truly near
Becomes distant and ghostly;
And you are visited
And claimed by a simplicity
Sinister in its singularity,

No longer yourself, your mind
And will owned and steered
From elsewhere now,
You would sacrifice anything
To dance once more to the haunted
Music with your fatal beloved
Who owns the eyes of your heart.

These words of blessing cannot
Reach, even as echoes,
To the shore of where you are,
Yet may they work without you

To soften some slight line through
To the white cave where
Your soul is captive,

May some glimmer
Of outside light reach your eyes
To help you recognize how
You have fallen for a vampire.

May you crash hard and soon
Onto real ground again
Where this fundamentalist
Shell might start to crack
For you to hear
Again your own echo.

That your lost, lonesome heart
Might learn to cry out
For the true intimacy
Of love that waits
To take you home

To where you are known
And seen and where
Your life is treasured
Beyond every frontier
Of despair you have crossed.





© John O’Donohue
page 128-129
 in Benedictus,
A Book of Blessings,
Bantam Press, 2007

Sunday, July 13, 2014

I AM A PART  OF  ALL 
THAT  I  HAVE  MET  


INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time is, “I Am A Part of All That I Have Met.”

That’s a line from a poem, Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I heard that line in that poem in high school and for some reason I have never forgotten it and have said it to myself many times.

“I Am A Part of All That I Have Met.”

TODAY’S READINGS

Those words by Tennyson came back to me last night as I sat down to work on this homily for this morning.

I say that because the first reading and the gospel talk about words as seeds planted in the field of our memory or our brains.

The first reading from Isaiah 55:10 -11 begins with the image of God watering the earth with rain and snow to make it fertile and fruitful. In doing this the earth gives seed to the one who sows and then bread to the one who eats.

Then Isaiah says that God also sends down words from his mouth and that word will be fruitful. It will not be void – or empty. It will do God’s will. He has God saying, “I will achieve the end for which I sent it.”

Those words are very clear. Get it? Got it?  Good!

If you’ve ever been to Israel and Palestine – or if you look at the TV background on many a story about fighting going on over there – you know that the earth can be dry desert like.

Today's gospel -  Matthew 13: 1-23 - presents his wording of the Parable of the Sower which is also very clear – even if one is not a gardener or a farmer.

Jesus pictures himself as a farmer sowing parables and wisdom and stories like seed on our world. Then he says there are 4 kinds of people who are the recipients – just as the seeds the sower is tossing land on all kinds of soil and earth.

Some people are rock deaf and dumb and dense. Some people are shallow. Some people are good listeners – get and love the message – but they have too many other things in their minds. Some people get the message, grow, and become fruitful – 100, 60, 30fold.

Jesus understood what every preacher and teacher and parent knows.

Best of luck – keep trying – keep nagging – keep advertising: “Please! I don’t want to be the only one around here who empties the dish washer every time.”

Some people don’t hear. They just don’t get it. It’s like talking to the sidewalk. 


Some people listen lightly and nothing really hits home.


Some people have depth, but they have too many other things going on in their lives. They promise, promise, but we are only 1 of their 100 promises.


Some folks get it and go with it and grow with it.

THIS HOMILY: 3 RAMIFICATIONS OF THIS REALITY

There are many ramifications to today’s two readings – including today’s second reading as well. Let me give just 3.

ONE: TRUST THE PROCESS

I was taught years ago the slogan: “Trust the Process.”

When I first heard it, I might have said, “Great!”  But I really didn’t get it.

At 49 - my brother gets cancer, Melanoma – Irish Skin -  and is told from Day 1 – “You have 18 months to live." And that’s what he got. I asked him Day 1, “How are you going to deal with this?” He said, “I’ll let you know.”

Just before he died he said, “I’m glad I didn’t wait till now to smell the roses.” Then he said, “Thank God, mom and dad gave us the gift of faith. Without faith in God, I don’t know what I would do.”

So moms and dads, trust the process. You’re here. Maybe your kids ain’t – but trust the process. If they saw you here, if you prayed at meals and an Our Father or whatever at home with them - or you said a prayer in your car whenever you went on a trip, you planted that in the field of your kids.

It’s in them. Trust the process. Time has a wonderful way of coming home to us.

TWO: WHO SAID ELEPHANTS HAVE THE BEST MEMORIES?

We humans have great memories. 

Someone mentions South Korea or the Southside of Chicago and a memory something that went south years and years ago bops up from out of our depths.

I was taking a 5 hour car trip once. Since I would be with myself, I grabbed  some old cassette tapes – from 25 years ago. My car now had a CD player – so I grabbed a cassette player – put new batteries in it – and off I drove.

I’m listening to this tape – and I say, “Woo!” The speaker, a Jesuit, gave this great example. And I say out loud in my car to myself, “Oh that’s where I got that from – and I thought I was so original.”

Is our brain a tape recorder? Nope. But I do remember all these years a book I read by Doctor Wilder Penfield – a Montreal Canada neurosurgeon.

In treating epilepsy and doing brain surgery – to avoid doing big time damage – he did brain mapping – keeping the patient somewhat conscious – so as to know what parts of the brain triggered stuff in other parts of the body. This was in the 70’s – and his brain mapping is still used. Accidentally he discovered that in some patients – touching a specific part of the brain, triggered memories. Other brain surgeons have not been able to replicate this – and it was only in 5% of his patients.

However, when news of this got out, it became the stuff of imagination. Who needs waterboarding, just open a person’s brain and tap, tap?

That book by Dr. Wilder Penfield told me that we have a lot in our brain – amazing. It told me what one reads from time to time, that we have only just got to edge of the exploration of the human brain. Talk about Mars and outer space. What about the inner space of the brain and the soul and spirit of us people?

Stick around to 2492. Some Doctor Christopher or Krista Columbus of will discover whole new worlds in the human brain.

So no wonder when Jack says Blue – Jill thinks of seeing the Blue Angels in Annapolis in 2014.

THREE – GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT, SO TOO BEETHOVEN AND BACH

If all this is somewhat true, if we are like soil, earth, and seeds are planted and they grow – especially if they are watered, then the obvious message is: Plant the good stuff; avoid the weeds.

Work a garden. Listen to good music. Watch good movies. Read good books. Walk in beautiful places. Sit and pray in quiet afternoon churches. Try listening prayer.

We all remember the saying from years ago, “Garbage in; garbage out.”

You reap what you sow.

In this homily, I'm throwing out seed  ideas. I'm hoping some will take root, but I heard what Jesus said about different kinds of listeners.


If you're listening, then know that you don't have dementia yet. 

But if anyone is still listening – I failed, because I see preaching as triggering stuff folks can go off on – to listen to your own stuff that you need to tend to and stop listening to the preacher.

However, if anyone is still listening, you should have some questions - about memories.


Here are a few possible ones - with comments.

What do I do with my past sins? I confessed them – I regretted them – but they are still bothering me from time to time.

Response. Welcome to the club.

Response – the good news is that you don’t have dementia – but a good long term memory.

Response – our sins can keep us humble.

Response – our sins can help us to understand others. I  never forget Hawthorne’s story where in a New England town there is this lady who spends her time, “Tch, tch, tch", other people.  So this other lady says, “Why don’t you go out and commit a really good sin and maybe then you’ll understand the rest of us.”

That story was worth the price and the reading of the whole story.

Response – all this should get us thinking - how we were formed - where we got our ideas from - and also get us thinking about not drinking poison.

Perhaps we should also reflect upon next Sunday's gospel - Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds - the one in which the farmer says let both grow till harvest time. Pull them out now, you might do damage to the good stuff growing in your field. [Cf. Matthew 13:24-30]

So the following gets me thinking.  I love shoot-em-up movies. I loved the Bourne Movies and Kill Bill I and 2 – and they are rated R for violence.  I still have no desire to kill any of the priests I live with. How about you? If you feel that way, maybe you shouldn’t be looking at those movies.

CONCLUSION

When you come up for communion this morning – say, pray, “Jesus, I am a part of all that I have met. Thanks for the good. Help me to learn from the bad.”


Then pray, “Jesus come into me today in communion and help me to bring you out into our world today and tomorrow – so those who meet me, meet you. Amen.”