Pilgrim's Prologue

I have to admit that I am having a lot of feelings this weekend. Some are really happy feelings, and some, to be honest, are sad ones. Some are feelings of confusion or frustration, and some are feelings of intense gratitude and joy.

As obvious as it sounds, feelings are meant to be felt. Many times we shy away from feeling our feelings - which is really a matter of acknowledging what our experience is or has been and allowing that experience to change us, for better or worse. We tend to shy away from feelings because somewhere along the line we picked up the belief that certain feelings are “good” and certain feelings are “bad.” The words “good” and “bad” are about the most unhelpful words in the English language when it comes to describing the movements of our interiority.

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We learned to moralize - to “goodify” or to “badify” - often at a young age, from well meaning parents or teachers who said things like, “Aw don’t cry! Don’t be sad.” Or “you should be happier about this opportunity” or “You shouldn’t still be mad about this.” We were told this because it’s what that person was once told. This is one of the many ways in which generational emotional dysfunction in families takes root and continues.

Learning to feel feelings, to acknowledge how something that has happened either to us directly or within our lives has affected us, is never about good or bad. Feelings are not about “what” or “why”, they are about “how.” How does this experience affect me? How does this experience move me? how does this experience confuse or delight me? How does this experience make my heart or my life look different or take a different path? And what we glean from this “how” is not good or bad; but it serves simply as good information. I had a therapist once who would say, “that’s great data.”

Data for what? Information for what? Two things: knowing ourselves and for living our lives. Integrated and happy people are integrated and happy because they live their lives from a place of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-gift. I know myself, I accept myself simply as a fact (yes, I maybe have things I’d like to change or improve but at the basic level I can say “By the grace of God I am what I am”), and this knowledge plus the peace that comes with this simple acceptance allows me to be generous with the way I spend my time, the way I interact with others, and it changes my worldview from one of entitlement/self-centeredness to one of generosity, gratitude, and joy.

So I mentioned that this weekend I am having a lot of feelings. I just came home last night from Nashville, where someone very important to me - and whose family I’ve come to know in a way that only God could design - was ordained a priest. True joy. On the way home from Nashville, we learned that one of our ordination classmates in 2018, Fr Anthony Nyamai, passed away suddenly in his rectory in Crest Hill. True sadness and confusion. I’m filled with so much gratitude and pride for Fr. Sam Bergmann, who will celebrate Mass here today at 11:30, and as I watch him begin his priesthood with so much joy and hope, I am thinking of my impending departure from Visitation and beginning of Canon Law studies this August. So that’s bittersweet. At 9:30 today Bishop Siegel will be here to celebrate Mass and then dedicate our new Parish Administration building; I feel a lot of gratitude for the parishioners of Visitation who have made that possible, and a tinge of sadness that I’ll never really get to see it.

Are all these things good or bad? Is the data they’ve given me good or bad?

In the Gospel today, we heard that Jesus looked out at the crowds that had been following him, and we learn that as he looks his heart is “moved with pity for them.” If he’d been a person who didn’t like the way certain things made him feel, he’d have kept walking. Maybe he would have thought “that’s interesting” or “what a sorry looking group lol” and then bottled it up and kept living.

But he gets curious.

“What about this crowd is moving me to pity?” Perhaps he was thinking about the lines from the Book of Exodus that we heard today, the lines wherein God promises Israel that if they keep this covenant they will be “dearer” to him than all other peoples, that they are a holy nation. Maybe Jesus thought about the psalm from this morning: “We are his people the sheep of his flock” and felt pity because this nation had stopped singing that refrain long ago, and had themselves either fall away from the covenant or had become so obsessed with the letter of the law that they’d forgotten its spirit.

“What about this crowd is moving me to pity?” They were wandering around, looking for the totalizing, all-encompassing reality of God, but because in their day they had no “prince, prophet, or leader” to point him out, they were missing the fact that the “kingdom of heaven is at hand” for them. He thinks, “this crowd are like sheep without a shepherd.”

Another chance to feel something and move right along. “Sheep without a shepherd. Gee, I sure hope they find a shepherd soon! Bye bye now!”

But the information, the data he had from what he felt and noticed came into play both for knowing himself and also making the decision that came right after.

“This crowd is like sheep without a shepherd, but they are not sheep without a shepherd, because I am the Good Shepherd and I am standing right here.”

So he calls Twelve of those closest to him and appoints them as laborers for this abundant harvest. He fills them with his power and sends them out.

But what if he’d bottled up the pity?

Or acknowledged it but refused to let it move him?

Or let it move him but “didn’t wanna” do anything about it?

Or wanted to do something about it but would get to it later, or wait until the people who made him nervous had gone home, or maybe try again when the political climate was different?

And this, of course, is the value of paying attention to what’s going on around us and how it’s moving things within us, and then living a principled life based on what we know to be true and who we know ourselves to be.

To live any other way is to risk being ungrounded, one version of me with this group and another version of me with that group; a family version, a group-chat version, a school version, a significant other version, and a “by myself” version.

Jesus understood that his whole mission, the whole reason he was sent by the Father, would be constantly at risk of being lost if gave into many of the thousands of human pressures and temptations.

He understood very well that he was being asked to give absolutely every part of himself to this mission, he had to be “all in”, and make a total self-gift of himself.

Sometimes we look at the way of the Gospel as boring or restrictive. Maybe we won’t all take the formal vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, but deep down I think we all intuitively understand that to follow Jesus as faithfully and as closely as the first Apostles did requires from each of us some version of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

To imitate the Lord in these ways helps to imitate the pattern of his life, but also to become open and available to the path set before us. And that’s the word I’d like you to remember from this: availability. Paying attention to your insides, to the things you notice and the things you feel, paying attention to how certain experiences affect you, and being aware enough of your own deepest convictions that are able to respond to the things in your life in a measured, sane, and principled way even when you don’t want to or when the pressures around you are very great: this is all a way of saying that you have become available to God.

My sense is that each one of us knows what it’s like to be in a position like Jesus is in this Gospel. To be moved with some emotion, to see a concrete need, and unsure of what precisely we should do or what others might think or of how it might make x,y,z other thing better or harder, we choose to do an easier thing or a more comfortable thing or simply nothing at all….and then kick ourselves for it because we knew we were capable of much more.

So as we receive the Eucharist today, let’s ask for the grace to be aware and to be curious, so that we can be available when the Lord calls on us as laborers for his harvest.

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“To the Sacred Heart of Jesus” Written either June or October 1895

The Poetry of Saint Therese of Lisieux, tr. Donald Kinney, O.C.D. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996, pp. 117-120.

“Behold this heart which has so loved the men that it has spared nothing for their salvation.”

These are the words by which Jesus revealed his Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary through a series of apparitions to her in the chapel of the Visitation monastery in Paray-le-Monial, France, which began on December 27th, 1673. In the course of these apparitions, Jesus made twelve promises to St. Margaret Mary and to all who would devote themselves to this tender heart of mercy and peace. You can find the complete list here.

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Of these promises, three in particular have stood out over the centuries and have given way to one pious practice that has somewhat fallen away, namely the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Catholic homes. The first promise states that Jesus will give those who honor his heart “all the graces necessary in their state of life.” Where else do we live our state of life more completely than in the home? The second promises that Jesus will establish peace in these homes. And finally, the Lord promises that he will bless abundantly those places “in which an image of my heart is exposed and honored.”

This year, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus will be celebrated on June 12th. In honor of our nation’s 250th birthday, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is preparing to consecrate our nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the solemnity this year. I want to invite all Catholics and those who love the Lord to consider enthroning an image of the Sacred Heart in their homes on this day as well.

Images of the Sacred Heart are very easy to obtain. You can find something that suits your own needs and artistic style; there are some available in fancy frames for hundreds of dollars, and there is a $2 digital download available on Etsy. (I have one available on Etsy this year!) You might even consider drawing or painting your own, or asking your parents or grandparents if there is a family image stored away somewhere that a distant relative may have had.

Typically the enthronement service is led by the father of a household, but it may certainly be led by another or even divided so that everyone can participate more fully.

What is Enthronement?

“The Enthronement is the official and social recognition of the rule of the Sacred Heart of Jesus over the Christian family, a recognition affirmed, outwardly expressed and made permanent by the solemn installation of the image of that divine Heart in a conspicuous place in the home, and by the Act of Consecration.” (Jesus, King of Love, p. 125)

That language — official, social, permanent — is deliberate. The Enthronement is not merely a pious sentiment or a decorative gesture. It is a declaration. It says something about who governs this household, about whose law is honored here, about where this family’s ultimate loyalty resides. In an age when the home has become perhaps the last remaining space a family can actually shape according to its own convictions, the act carries a particular weight.

The devotion lives at the intersection of two great Christian instincts: the hunger for the real presence of Christ and the desire to let that presence reorganize everything else. It is the logic of the Incarnation applied to the domestic church — God does not stay in churches any more than He stayed in the manger. He moves into the places where people actually live.

“O God, what will you do to conquer the fearful hardness of our hearts? Lord, you must give us new hearts, tender hearts, sensitive hearts, to replace hearts that are made of marble and bronze.

You must give us your own heart, Jesus. Come, lovable heart of Jesus. Place your heart deep in the center of our hearts and enkindle in each heart a flame of love.

O Holy Heart of Jesus, dwell hidden in my heart, so that I may live only in you and only for you, so that, in the end, I may live with you forever. Amen.”

(Prayer of St. Claude la Colombiere)

For a printable version of these instructions and an enthronement certificate template, please click below.

Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Home

✦ ✦

“Behold this Heart which has so loved all that it has spared nothing for their salvation.”
- Jesus to St. Margaret Mary

I. Preparation for the Ceremony

Before the day of the enthronement, the family should attend to the following:

1. The head of household may preside at this ceremony, or you can ask your parish priest to do so.

2. Arrange for the entire family to receive Holy Communion at Mass on the day of the enthronement.

3. Obtain a beautiful image — a picture or statue — of the Sacred Heart, if you do not already possess one.

4. Prepare a “throne”: a table, mantelpiece, or shelf of honor. Cover it with a white cloth and decorate it with flowers and candles. Place the image upon it, and arrange photographs of departed or absent family members nearby.

5. Keep holy water handy for the blessing of the image.

6. Invite relatives and friends to take part in the ceremony.

7. Plan a family celebration afterward. Make the day as joyful and solemn as possible.

II. Guide to the Ceremony

The presider (priest or head of household) leads the family. Children gather nearest to the presider. The ceremony unfolds as follows:

1. All gather around the throne. Family members assemble, with children nearest the presider.

2. Blessing of the image. The presider (in surplice and stole if a priest) recites the blessing prayer and sprinkles the image with holy water.

3. Installation. The presider or head of household places the image in its honored position.

4. Apostles’ Creed. All stand and recite the Apostles’ Creed together: “I believe in God, the Father almighty...”

5. Words of exhortation. The presider offers a brief reflection or exhortation to those present.

6. Act of Consecration. All kneel. The presider leads the family in the official Act of Consecration (text below).

7. Prayers for the absent. The presider invites all to pray one Our Father and one Hail Mary for absent family members, both living and departed.

8. Prayer of thanksgiving. All recite together the prayer of thanksgiving (text below).

9. Hail Holy Queen. All stand and recite the Hail Holy Queen, in homage to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

10. Short prayers. The presider says, “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus”, and all respond: “Have mercy on us”(x3). “Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us”. “St. Joseph, pray for us”. “St. Margaret Mary, pray for us”. All: Glory to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.

11. Final blessing. The presider imparts the blessing: May the blessing of Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, descend upon you and remain forever. Amen.

Note: A certificate of enthronement, which should be signed by the presider and all family members at the close of the ceremony, may be framed and hung near the image of the Sacred Heart, or kept in the family’s archives as a permanent record.

Act of Consecration

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, who made known to St. Margaret Mary Your ardent desire to reign over Christian families, behold us assembled here today to proclaim Your absolute dominion and Lordship over our home. From this moment we resolve to lead a life like Yours, so that your virtues and peace may flourish among us.

You will reign over our understanding by the simplicity of our faith and You will reign over our hearts by an ardent love for You. May the flames of this love be kept burning in our hearts forever by the frequent and worthy reception of the Holy Eucharist.

O Divine Heart of Jesus, we invite you to preside over our gatherings, to bless our undertakings, both spiritual and temporal, to banish all worry and care, to sanctify our joys and soothe our sorrows. If any of us should ever have the misfortune to offend Your Sacred Heart, remind us of Your goodness and mercy toward the repentant sinner.

Lastly, when the hour of separation will sound and death will plunge our home into mourning, may we find consolation in Your eternal promises, and seek peace in the thought that we shall all one day be reunited in heaven, where we shall sing the praises and blessings of Your Sacred Heart together for all eternity.

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the glorious Patriarch St. Joseph offer You this our Consecration and remind us of the same all the days of our life. Glory to the Divine Heart of Jesus, our King and our Father!

Short Form — Renewal of Consecration

(To be prayed at night prayers and at renewals throughout the year)

Most Sweet Jesus, humbly kneeling at Your feet, we renew the consecration of our family to Your Divine Heart. Be our King forever! In You we have full and entire confidence. May Your spirit penetrate our thoughts, our desires, our words, and our works. Bless our undertakings, share in our joys, in our trials and our labors. Grant us to know You better, to love You more, to serve You without faltering.

By the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Queen of Peace, establish Your kingdom in our midst. Enter closely into the hearts of our families and make them Yours through the solemn enthronement of Your Sacred Heart, so that soon one cry may resound from home to home: “May the triumphant Heart of Jesus be everywhere loved, blessed, and glorified forever!”

Honor and glory to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary! Sacred Heart of Jesus, protect our family.

III. Suggested Devotional Practices

The enthronement is not a single event but the beginning of a living relationship. The following practices help the family honor the Sacred Heart throughout the year:

1. Frequent — and, if possible, daily — attendance at Mass by at least one member of the family, with Communion offered in reparation to the Sacred Heart.

2. Observance of the First Friday of each month: Holy Mass, Communion of Reparation, and renewal of the Act of Consecration before the enthroned image.

3. Daily family Rosary prayed before the enthroned image of the Sacred Heart, with the short-form renewal of consecration.

4. Celebration of the Feast of the Sacred Heart (Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi) by the entire family: Mass, Communion, a family gathering, renewal of the enthronement, and a special celebration for the children.

5. Observance of the month of June (dedicated to the Sacred Heart): keep fresh flowers before the throne; attend Mass and receive Communion as often as possible.

6. Assistance at Holy Hour in church.

7. Night Adoration in the home: at least once a month, one or all members of the family keep a holy hour between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.

8. Celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (the Saturday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost): Mass, Communion, and consecration of the family to the Immaculate Heart.

9. The Five First Saturdays of Reparation: Mass and Communion, five decades of the Rosary, and fifteen minutes of meditation on a mystery of the Rosary. A homily at Mass may satisfy the meditation.

10. 10.Devotion to the Holy Spirit, especially during the season of Pentecost.

IV. Special Occasions for Renewal of Consecration

On the following occasions the family should gather before the throne and renew the Act of Consecration in its long form, making of these moments fresh acts of trust in the Sacred Heart:

• The Feast of the Sacred Heart and the Feast of Christ the King.

• The anniversary of the enthronement.

• Wedding anniversaries and the birthdays of parents and children.

• At the birth of a child: after Baptism, consecrate the newborn to the Sacred Heart before the throne.

• At First Holy Communion: prepare the child before the image of the Sacred Heart in the home. Upon returning from church, let the child renew the act of consecration made for them by their parents at birth.

• Before the departure of any family member — to enter the military, a convent, a seminary, or marriage.

• Upon the return of an absent member of the family.

• On days of great family joy, and in times of sorrow, sickness, and death.

May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be Praised, Adored, and Loved
at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world,
even to the end of time. Amen!

✦ ✦ ✦

Source: Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Your Home, Oblates of the Virgin Mary — St. Francis Chapel, Boston.

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You can find Pope Leo’s encyclical letter here.

This past Monday, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical letter — a papal teaching document that takes its name from the Latin encyclica, meaning it cycles the globe, addressed to all members of the Church and to all people of goodwill everywhere. This one was about artificial intelligence.

A lot of people assumed the Pope would simply condemn AI and be done with it. He does not do that. What he does instead is something more interesting: he uses the occasion of this encyclical to offer a sweeping restatement of Catholic social teaching: its foundations, its pillars, and why those pillars matter for how we build technology, structure economies, and treat each other in daily life.

When a papal encyclical comes out, it’s easy to learn about it from the news, from podcasters, from commentators and influencers of various kinds. But the letter isn’t written to them. It’s written to you and to me. And so it’s worth knowing, at least in brief, what it actually says.

Catholic social teaching is sometimes dismissed as political, as the province of one ideological camp or another, depending on which parts make you uncomfortable. Remember, it belongs to no party. It answers to no faction. Catholic Social Teaching simply asks what society could look like if it took the Gospel seriously.

When I was teaching high school moral theology, I used a handout called “The Catholic Social Teaching Hut”. Look below!

The Pope walks us through each of these pillars.

First: the dignity of the human person. This is the umbrella under which everything else falls. It includes, yes, the rights to life from conception to natural death. But human dignity extends far beyond the debates we’re accustomed to associating with it. Leo XIII, writing at the end of the nineteenth century amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, was already applying it to the dignity of workers. It applies to reputation and how we speak about people. It applies to the interior life of the home, where dignity can be violated through silence, passive aggression, or the slow erosion of trust.

Human dignity is not simply a matter of the great bioethical questions, as important as those are. It is a question that arises every time I am in the presence of another person: if this person is a living image of the living God, how does that change how I speak to them, how I speak about them, what I do with them, and what I expect from them?

Second: subsidiarity. It’s a large word for a simple idea: that problems should be handled as close to the people involved as possible, at the most local level capable of addressing them.

You’ve probably experienced what a violation of this principle feels like. Imagine you have a cubicle neighbor whose music is a bit too loud. The right move — the human move — is to walk over, introduce yourself, and say something about it. Maybe they had no idea. Maybe it gets resolved in thirty seconds. But now imagine you said nothing, and one day your phone rings and it’s someone from HR informing you that a complaint has been filed, that it’s now in your permanent record, and asking you to come down and sign a performance improvement plan.

That feeling — that strange violation — is subsidiarity being ignored. It’s what happens when a problem that belonged between two people gets escalated past them, above them, around them. The same principle applies when a neighbor calls the police over your Christmas lights rather than knocking on the door. The same principle applies whenever the machinery of large institutions gets invoked to solve problems that two people and a conversation could have handled.

Third: solidarity. We are in this together. Not as a sentiment, but as a fact. Your grandmother’s version of this was probably something like: everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time. The most powerful person in the room and the person with the least advantage in the room are, before God, exactly the same. We make life harder for each other than we need to.

Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist, was often asked why she did the work she did with the poor and with workers. Her answer was simple: I believe we have made things harder than God intended them to be. We need to make it easier for people to be good. That was it. Not a policy platform. Not an ideological program. Just: we should arrange things so that it is easier, not harder, for people to be good to each other and to themselves.

Which brings us to Day’s other great line, perhaps her most famous: Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

Fourth: the common good. On May 29th, the Church celebrated the feast of Pope St. Paul VI, who gave us one of the great one-liners of modern Catholic social thought: If you want peace, work for justice. Justice, in its strictest sense, simply means giving the other what they are owed. To render to God what belongs to God, to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to render to my mother-in-law what is owed to my mother-in-law. To render to my parents the respect and openness that their role deserves. To render to my child the freedom they need to grow — while also, yes, holding the line on a 10 p.m. curfew, because a relationship of trust is also something owed.

The common good is not a transaction. The goal is not a world of perfectly balanced ledgers. But it does require asking, honestly, what do I owe other people, and what do they owe me…and then actually doing the dishes when it’s time to do the dishes.

There is a practical application.

I am a human being — possibly you had noticed — and I too have people in my life who occasionally drive me to the brink. I will sometimes find myself composing a text message to a priest friend about some situation in the parish or in my personal life. And the text is genuinely good. It has everything going for it: it’s funny, it’s well-crafted, it makes its point with precision and verve. It might win a Pulitzer Prize.

It is also, if I’m being honest, completely disparaging of another person, and it could live perfectly well between me and God and never need to involve anyone else. So then rethink, bounce this action off of what I believe to be true about interacting with others in a way informed by the Gospel, and I backspace. Bye bye Pulitzer, but hello peace.

That is what I mean by a filter. I’m suggesting that every day contains moments… in the home, at work, in traffic, in the kitchen… where human dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good are genuinely at stake. When you feel those things being violated against you, the same pillars give you language and courage to advocate for yourself and for others. When you’re the one doing the violating, they ask you to stop.

Mend your ways, Paul says in today’s second reading. Encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace. It’s not as simple as just deciding to agree. But it is as practical as putting down your phone, going over to the person, and having the conversation that needed to happen three weeks ago.

The icon here on the ambo this week is an image of the Holy Trinity, depicted as three divine figures seated together at a table, a meal before them. It’s based on the famous icon by Rublev, and it is my favorite image of the Trinity, partly because it’s one of the few that doesn’t immediately make you a heretic to contemplate. (Trinity Sunday is, for the record, the single hardest Sunday on which to preach, because the easiest thing you can do is accidentally say something that was condemned at a Council in the fourth century.)

In this image, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united at a banquet, each fully present, each fully themselves, completely transparent and open to one another, and yet maintaining the total individuality of who they are. They are not merged. They are not in competition. They are in communion.

Remember in Genesis, God says Let US make man in OUR image (Gen 1:26) that us in Genesis is the whole Trinity, creating together, with this image in mind. Not division, but communion. Not rigidity or selective generosity, but the kind of love that gives freely and expects that it will be received and returned.

If you want peace in the world, work for justice. If you want peace in your home, work for justice — which means, yes, getting off the couch sometimes; yes, being ready to leave when you said you would; yes, letting him go out on Friday because he’s seventeen and you cannot follow him with water bottles and sunscreen for the rest of his life; yes, being willing to set aside what you want to keep for yourself if keeping it prevents the full flourishing of the person in front of you.

Not because you’re required to. But because that’s what love does.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the Pope chose to spend almost half of an encyclical on artificial intelligence on Catholic social teaching? Half the document — devoted to these pillars, to human dignity and subsidiarity and solidarity and the common good.

He’s trying to say something. The question of how we build and deploy new technology is not, at its core, a technical question. It’s a human one. And if we can learn to run our decisions — all of our decisions, not just the ones about AI — through the filter of these pillars, we might find, not automatically but organically, something that looks a little more like the communion the Trinity imagined for us at the very beginning.

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I started kindergarten in 1997, and I went to school every single year until I finished graduate school in 2020. That’s twenty-two consecutive years of formal education. 22nd grade.

I went to public school my entire life until the seminary, and public school taught me many things. What to do, how to be a decent citizen. But I cannot say, with any honesty, that it taught me to love school, to be curious about study. In high school in Oswego, we had block schedule: four periods a day, each ninety minutes long. My second semester of senior year looked like this. First period: I worked in the school office, answering phones, running notes between classrooms, and eating candy. Second period: bowling. We drove to the bowling alley every day…an endeavor that was not without its fruit: for my final exam that year I bowled a 290. Third period: band, or choir, depending on the day. Fourth period: an actual class. History, maybe? English?

Then college, where I studied English because I wanted to be a high school English teacher, and this was difficult because I discovered that I hated to read and write. And then, as a college sophomore, I transferred to my first Catholic school, the seminary. Graduate school after that. Ordination in 2018. And then, of my own free will, more graduate school.

Why would I do that? Why would I cross the finish line and then voluntarily go back?

Because when I finally started studying theology, something clicked that had never clicked before. A whole new world opened up, filled with wonder. Every answer I found opened up fifty more questions. I loved reading about it, writing about it, thinking about it, preaching about it. For the first time in twenty-two years of school, I had found something that made my heart and mind come alive at the same time.

That’s what learning is supposed to do. That’s what it’s for.

You might look back on eighth grade someday and find that you don’t remember very much about it, or that what you remember has nothing to do with school. That’s okay! That’s probably right, actually. The years of formation are years to be coped with as much as cherished. Take out the trash. Do your homework. Come home on time. We all went through it.

But our prayer for you is that your life will not merely be coped with. That somewhere ahead of you, you will find whatever it is that makes your heart and your mind connect. For some of you it will be theology. For some it will be law or medicine. For some it will be the particular and underrated joy of family life. For some it will be a craft, a sport, a challenge you haven’t yet encountered.

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Deacon Sam and I got a real kick out of reading your twenty-year plans in the yearbook. A few things stood out. First, how many of you looked forward to finding love and building families. The fact that you desire that is not nothing, and it says something good about your own families and experiences of life thus far. Second, how many of you said you wanted to move back to Elmhurst and even Visitation, which says something equally good about the way your parents have raised you. Third, way too many of you are counting on a Butterfield membership. I hope you’re able to achieve that! And finally, so many of you wrote about leaving room in your homes for other people, about maintaining the friendships sitting in this room right now, about building lives with space in them for the people you love.

Whether all of that comes to pass exactly as written or not, it is a real testament to what you have learned during your time here. The fact that you can imagine your life that way at all means something.

I am leaving in August, which means that you and I are both graduating from Visitation this year. I’m headed to 23rd grade: Canon Law at The Catholic University of America, six semesters straight through, summers included. I’ve never studied it before, so we’ll see how it goes!

But here is what I have learned, looking back across twenty-two years of school:

In finite mathematics at North Central College, I received a C-minus. That is Math 100, for the record. And that C-minus was after a semester of make-up tests, meeting with the professor, crying over calculators, and stressing out. Do you know how many times someone has asked me about that grade in the years since? Not once. Nobody has ever asked. As we used to say in the seminary: what do you call a priest who got a C in math? Father.

It was never about the grades. It was never about which study groups clicked or which relationships lasted or which tests I aced and which ones I failed. All of that shaped me, and I’m not dismissing it. But it was not the point.

Your Christian faith is not ultimately a what. The question of your life is not what you will do, because that will change, probably many times, in ways you cannot predict from where you’re sitting right now. I could have been a priest or a lawyer or a doctor or a farmer or a plumber or a trombone player. Many things were possible. The what is not the point.

The question is how. How you do it. How you live it.

Can you be the same person in a pew as you are at your desk? The same person on the street as you are at home, in a restaurant, in a difficult meeting, in a moment when no one is watching? That integration — that consistency of character across every context — is what the Christian life is actually asking of you. It is, in the end, what sets people apart. It is what makes someone worth working alongside, worth building a life with, worth trusting when things get hard.

Do not let your academic study get in the way of your education. Your real education — in virtue, in humility, in kindness — your growth into a person filled with goodness and truth, who goes looking for what is just and loving in every person and every situation: that is what will matter. Not the transcript.

I remember my own eighth grade graduation as a tremendously joyful day. I received the American Legion School Award — Traughber Junior High, Class of 2006 thank you very much— and I remember being proud of that. I don’t remember much else.

And I hope that someday you look back on today and find that it has become, in memory, a little soft around the edges. Not because it isn’t significant, because it sure is, but because that softening is a sign that even greater things have come after it.

Today, you are as old as you have ever been. And today, you are as young as you will ever be again.

And that is something you can say every day of your life, and it will always be true. It means: it is okay that you know what you know and don’t know what you don’t know, because you have never done this before. And it means: don’t waste the moment you’re in, because this particular moment — this age, this version of yourself, this exact configuration of people and possibilities — will not come again.

So celebrate today. Be present to it. And then step forward with confidence, not because you have everything figured out, but because you are loved — by God, by the people in this room, by people you haven’t met yet — and that love does not depend on your having everything figured out.

Over all the years of my priesthood, across four assignments, too many semesters of graduate school, and in every unexpected turn the road has taken: God has never let me down. There have been moments where I’ve said, what exactly are you doing!?, and could we perhaps discuss this more collaboratively!? But he has never led me astray.

The Lord has been my light. He is yours as well.

I know I speak for your parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends who are here when I say that our prayer for you tonight is simple. It’s a prayer we pray with everything that we have, because we have come to know you and love you and believe in you:

May God bring to fruitful completion what today is so wondrously begun in you.

Amen.

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A priest’s life is first and foremost a life of repetition. Secondarily, but just as importantly, it is also a life of interruption. There’s a stretch of every priest’s life where the days begin to feel like they’re being lived by someone else. He says Mass, he visits the sick, he sits through meetings, he writes the homily, he eats dinner alone or with a brother priest, and somewhere in the middle of all of it he realizes that he’s gone a long time without being particularly present to any of it. Not necessarily unhappy. Not in crisis. Just a little to one side of his own life.

I don’t know of any novel that describes this condition with more honesty or tenderness than The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor.

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O’Connor’s 1961 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, went the way of many great Catholic novels and has essentially disappeared from the conversation. I hadn’t even heard of it until a friend recommended it last winter.

The story is narrated by Fr. Hugh Kennedy, a fifty-five-year-old priest in an unnamed New England city. (A priest named “Kennedy” in a book written by “O’Connor” in a major New England Archdiocese? It’s Boston, of course) Fr. Hugh is the pastor of Old St. Paul’s, a once-grand parish now reduced to a handful of old-timers and transients in a neighborhood the diocese has more or less forgotten. He has been sent there, the reader gradually understands, as a kind of soft landing after a long bout with alcoholism and an all-but-imposed period of treatment, a “rest cure” that has become permanent, and that suits him just fine. He is, by his own reckoning, neither happy nor unhappy. He and his newly ordained vicar are keeping the doors open. He is, as he puts it himself, living near the edge of sadness.

The novel begins when Fr. Hugh receives a phone call from Charlie Carmody, the cunning, gregarious, slightly insufferable patriarch of a family Fr. Hugh has known since boyhood. Charlie is turning eighty-two and, despite years of no contact, wants Fr. Hugh at his birthday party. From that small social hook the entire novel unfolds: an old friendship resumed, a family reentered, a past confronted, and a man slowly waking up to the life he hadn’t realized he’d half-abandoned.

In the early part of the book, Fr. Hugh describes a new nightly ritual he’s fallen into, one that’s new to him; a disconcerting ritual that was absent even in the lowest moments after the loss of his father or the rock bottom of alcoholism.

He comes into the rectory at night, slightly tired but slightly numb. He finds that he sits for an hour or more in his room before getting into bed, and finds that he is doing nothing at all: thinking of nothing in particular, waiting for nothing in particular. He’s quick to say these moments were not filled with unpleasant thoughts or feelings, because they seemed to lack any thoughts or feelings at all. This, he realizes, is precisely what’s wrong with these moments. A priest is not meant to feel nothing. A priest is meant to be, perhaps, a man more available to feeling than others, first to his own feelings so he can be open to the feelings of his people.

Fr. Hugh admits that without trying he’d been arranging his days, his relationships, so that very little could reach him. A lot of us do this: what can’t reach us, can’t hurt us. A major arch of this book is watching this priest, this person, realize the other side of that arrangement: what can’t reach us can’t help us, either.

That realization represents the entire novel in miniature. And it is the diagnosis of a particular kind of spiritual condition that I suspect a great many of us, no matter what calling or path, will recognize right away if we’re honest.

What O’Connor does so well, and what makes The Edge of Sadness so different from the more famous Catholic novels of its era, is that he refuses to subject the priesthood and the Christian life to the merely melodramatic. He humanizes the monotony that Bernanos makes so unbearable in Diary of a Country Priest, and he avoids altogether the scandal and shattering conversion in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Fr. Hugh’s alcoholism is in the past by the time the novel begins; he is not tempted to relapse, and O’Connor does not manufacture some new crisis for him. The drama is interior, gradual, and almost imperceptible: a man being drawn back slowly into the business of caring about other people, largely against his will, by the sheer accumulated weight of those people’s needs, affections, and aggravations.

Charlie Carmody is the great comic creation of the book, and I would say one of the great comic creations of mid-century American fiction. He is a self-made Irish immigrant turned slumlord. He’s vain, manipulative, miserly, hilariously self-pitying, and also, somehow, lovable. His grown children loathe him, yet they can’t stop orbiting him. His friendships are transactional and yet, in their way, sincere. He is, as the kids say, “performative.” He’s spent eighty-two years constructing an elaborate performance of himself, and O’Connor gives him to us as a meditation on what such a life costs and what might lie beneath it. Charlie is the dark mirror of Fr. Hugh: the man who feels everything too acutely and manages it by turning his whole life into a long, charming lie.

This book is filled with quiet scenes…scenes, I must admit, I was sometimes tempted to skip on account of their winding verbosity. What I eventually realized, though, is that the all-too-detailed accounts of the humdrum parts of priestly life in the book were shining a light of deeper meaning on the more humdrum parts of my own ministry. (If you saw the most recent “Knives Out” movie, the phone call scene that starts as professional and becomes “Father listening to a woman who just desperately needs to talk” is not exaggerated even one bit; it really happens, and it happens a lot. A blessing and sometimes a hardship.)

Fr. Hugh hearing the same handful of confessions from the same handful of regulars at Old St. Paul’s; Fr. Hugh’s long, rambling conversations with his old seminary classmate John Carmody, Charlie’s son, who became a priest in part to get away from his father and whose burnout/disenchantment has been slower but has become far more cynical and toxic than Hugh; Fr. Hugh totally disassociating at the rectory dinner table as his newly ordained vicar pontificates the promising future of this dying parish; Fr. Hugh remembering his own father as a sincere and practical man, and in every way the antithesis of Charlie Carmody.

What continues to strike me is how unsentimental O’Connor portrays the priesthood itself. He does not romanticize it as many writers do, or emphasize its heroic aspects as our vocation directors did. He does not exempt his priests from the ordinary human capacity for self-deception, exhaustion, or despair. But neither does he reduce the priesthood to these things. Fr. Hugh’s vocation is real. His ministry at Old St. Paul’s, threadbare as it is, is real. The Mass he says for six old women on a Tuesday morning is real. O’Connor trusts the reader to see that something is happening in those small, unobserved corners of Fr. Hugh’s life even while Fr. Hugh himself cannot see it, and that what is happening there is, in the end, what saves him.

A priest who cannot come to terms with the fact that the heroism of his life is found in a heroic imitation of the Lord’s virtue of endurance and in his tolerance of monotony is a priest headed for somewhere sad. But this isn’t a life sentence to dour gloom; the whole Christian “thing” comes to life when each of us realizes for ourselves that it’s in the monotonous, daily grind that real life is lived and abundant life is found.

I appreciate The Edge of Sadness as a priest because it has given me permission to settle in a bit more completely to the “long middle” of this vocation. The days of the seminarian poster are over, and here I’m in the years that wouldn’t make much of a highlight reel, the years in which the early enthusiasms have burned down and the late consolations have not yet arrived. It is a novel, in other words, for the great majority of my life. And it is, in the most unobtrusive way, a deeply hopeful book. I wouldn’t call it “optimistic”, but hopeful, in an older and harder sense: it teaches that grace can reach a man to his depths even when his life is arranged in such a way that very little else can.

For those with eyes to see, the edge of sadness in any vocation turns out not to be a scary cliff but a promising threshold.

—

The Edge of Sadness Edwin O’Connor. 1961. Loyola Classics edition, 2005, paperback. 640 pages. Loyola Press.

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Man’s Search For Meaning
Victor E. Frankl
First published 1956, current printing by Beacon Press. 165 pages.
—

Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, does what many great books wold like to do but have trouble doing, and that is: speaking to the lived or perceived experience of as wide a gathering of people as possible. Having sold over 18 million copies since its first printing in 1956, this book finds itself in the center of a very interesting Venn diagram: the current publisher, Beacon Press, publishes under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations1, and yet this is a text used in undergraduate psychology classes, sociology dissertations, atheistic/humanist reflections, Catholic Great Books programs, and this priest’s nighttime reading.

The reason for this is not hard to pinpoint: the search for meaning unites every person, everywhere. This books touches the basic, nagging question that wells up in the heart and mind of anyone who is awake enough to notice the weirdness of their life: “there’s surely more to life than…this, right?” This question, Frankl suggests, is heavy and unshakeable whether it’s born from dissatisfaction with the circumstances, distress about the conditions, or boredom from the vacuum of life.

The search for meaning is pitted against Marx and Nietzsche’s search for power and with Freud’s search for pleasure. All of life, according to these thinkers, is summarized in either the search for domination and control or the selfishness of endless pleasure.

The ability to ask this question and take seriously the various answers one comes up with are crucial parts of being alive, and the ability to face one’s circumstances with an openness to a deeper meaning2 is what saves a person from the monotony of trough-to-trough hedonism, and from the temptation to think she has become the ruler of her own world; both of these end up in the same place: living in such a way so as to ensure that everyone else is as miserable as you.

For more than half the book, Frankl applies the lens of meaning to his time spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz and Dachau, what he admits must seem to most readers as the most meaningless place in all the world. He writes that many of those who survived the initial sorting but later died did so because they had simply given up; their circumstances had become too much…a completely understandable reaction to the depravity and horror in which they were living.

But those who survived these unimaginable conditions did so because they were able to find freedom and meaning within themselves, freedom and meaning that no exterior circumstance could take away from them.

Near the end of his reflections on the concentration camps, and by way of a parentheses, Frankl summarizes the heart of his claim:

The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it? (63)

My brother’s apartment in Warsaw is situated in the heart of what was once the Jewish Ghetto. Today, there are plaques and historical markers spread throughout modern apartment buildings and shops; how interesting it is to see these buildings, which were 80 years ago the scene of unimaginable horror and difficulty, now standing in the shadow of modern skyscrapers the hustle of what is, by all accounts, a normal rhythm of life. These Ghetto buildings sit dark and abandoned, like ghosts, stark reminders of the sheer evil of which humanity is capable.

I spent a lot of that trip Googling these buildings, and reading about life in the ghetto. Hidden within the tales of woe and depravity, a different story began to stand out: hope and life. Many of the residents of the Warsaw ghetto did what they could to continue life as normal; they formed relationships, created art, discussed books, cooked together, and even managed to organize a small symphony orchestra. There was a sense that although more and more external liberty was being taken away, there was something more fundamental and human that the Nazis couldn’t take: an interior freedom strengthened by the emergence of humanity and meaning. Not only could this freedom not be taken, it could not touched; on the contrary, it was somehow able to grow.

And here is the crux of Frankl’s proposal: human despair plummets a person downward into an abyss of darkness, but it is not infinite; eventually, once hope is exhausted and despair takes a strong enough hold, there becomes only one way out.

But human freedom is quite a different story. When the innate human desire for meaning is allowed to flourish, a person becomes limitlessly free. Freedom only grows, increasing exponentially, until the human sees even captivity, sickness, danger, and tribulations of every sort as (somehow!) a profound and limitless gift.

I want to finish this book report with quite a lengthy quote from Frankl himself, with my added emphases.

In attempting this psychological presentation…of the typical characteristics of a concentration camp inmate, I may give the impression that the human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings. But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings?…

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions…

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoyevsky said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.

It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 65-67.

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“We don’t know if there is a God, or if there is, which one it might be; but just in case, we worship.”

Which is not the same as “everything happens for a reason :) :) :)”

When you start a new job, there’s usually a period of adjustment before you’re trusted to operate on your own. A probationary period. A training period. If you’ve ever worked as a server, you know the specific humiliation of following someone around for a week, watching them take orders, pretending that writing things down on paper is, in fact, a learnable skill. If you come from a family of tradespeople, maybe someone went through an apprenticeship before they were allowed to pick up the tools unsupervised. In religious life, monks and sisters go through a novitiate — sometimes a year, sometimes many — before they’re professed.

In life, there’s always a learning curve. That’s just true. We are never as good at things immediately as we want to be.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from a sign on the wall at Jimmy John’s: If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.

Put in the work and you’ll see the results.

What I find interesting is how rarely we apply this kind of common sense to the life of faith. We get discouraged when we’re not immediately good at prayer. We get down on ourselves when we can’t easily hear the voice of God, or figure out his will, or treat the people around us with the patience and generosity we know we’re capable of showing. It can feel like evidence of some fundamental failure.

But the Catechism of the Catholic Church uses this exact word — apprenticeship — to describe the growth of the Christian life. An apprenticeship of self-mastery, of integration over time. The project of Christian living is a slow, ongoing reconciliation of all the different parts of a life: what you’ve done, what has been done to you, the facts of the world as you’ve found them, and the proposal of the Gospel. It takes time. That’s not a bug in the system, requiring a downloadable patch. That’s the design.

Today’s gospel — I am the way, the truth, and the life — is one of the most famous lines in all of Scripture. We know it so well that we might not actually be hearing it.

The Greek word John uses for way is hodos. You don’t need to remember that. But it’s worth knowing that hodos doesn’t just mean a road. It’s a “means of access, an approach, an entrance” — a way of getting into something. It’s also used not just for the beginning of a journey but for the journey itself: a systematic pursuit, a course of action, a way of conducting oneself that belongs to something larger.

This is why, in the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest Christians weren’t called Christians. They were called followers of the Way. The word Christian only comes later, coined first in Antioch. Before that, the identifying mark of this movement was simply: these are the people who follow the Way — meaning this person, Jesus, who is himself the road you walk and the gate you enter and the destination you’re headed for, all at once.

We’ve become very attached in modern Christian life to the language of personal relationship with Jesus, which is obviously not wrong; Jesus himself says in John’s gospel: I have called you friends. A genuine friendship with Christ, a personal attachment to him, is not optional. Something real is missing without it.

But here’s the danger: if your entire Christian life is just you and Jesus, with no Church, no community, no teaching, no accountability, you might ask yourself an honest question: is this actually a relationship with someone outside you, or have you quietly made God in your own image?

If your God lets you do whatever you want, your God is probably you. And then what you have is, essentially, the anti-Trinity: you, talking to you, about you, and calling it prayer.

A personal relationship with Jesus is a real thing. But it’s a personal relationship that is ordered toward conversion, for the sake of a kingdom, with lots of other inhabitants and concerns. Jesus didn’t come to make us feel validated. He came to establish something. And we are invited to participate in that, which means being changed by it.

One of the marks of a genuinely Christian way of seeing the world is this: nothing is censured.

What I mean is this. A huge amount of human suffering comes not from circumstances themselves but from the story we tell about those circumstances: this shouldn’t be this way. He shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have turned out like this. The world shouldn’t be so broken.

Well — who said?

Perhaps the hardest thing Christianity asks of us is to look at the world and our lives exactly as they is, take them seriously as real, and stop fighting reality as though, if we push back hard enough, we can make it into something it isn’t. When we spend our energy resisting what’s actually true about our lives, we turn to other things to cope: wealth, pleasure, power, the endless distractions of a world that will always eventually disappoint us.

I want to offer you an image, and I will warn you in advance that it is extremely cheesy. But since it’s cheesy, it means you’ll remember it.

You and I are terrible bowlers. We’ve decided to hire a coach, and his name is Jesus.

He is very gentle about the whole thing. He says, have you tried putting your fingers in the holes? Because the holes are there for that. Have you considered your stance? Let’s work on your follow-through. I know it’s uncomfortable — it’ll require a change, maybe just a small one, one millimeter this way, one centimeter that way. Let’s try throwing it underhand and see if that helps. We’ll figure this out together.

And then, to our slight embarrassment, he also goes ahead and puts up the bumpers.

On the bumpers of the lane, if you look closely, you’ll find words written there. The sacraments. The Church’s teaching. Christian fellowship and community. Catholic social teaching. Your family history and the people who have prayed for you. The saints. Grace. The power of the Holy Spirit. It’s a very long lane, and there are a lot of bumpers.

But this is the point: as you roll your little ball through life, you have all of these things to bounce off of, to keep you on the narrow way — the hodos — rather than careening into the gutter. Wide is the way that leads to destruction, as Jesus says elsewhere. Narrow is the way that leads to life. And he is the way, and he is also the coach, and he is also the one who built the lane.

You have to want the help. You have to ask for it. And you have to accept that it will take, like everything else worth having, a very long time.

A Dominican theologian from the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart, puts it simply: Do you want to be holy? Then start by doing the next thing you do in a holy way. Say the next thing you say in a holy way. Think the next thought. Take the next step.

This is also, essentially, Aristotle’s whole theory of virtue: if you want to have a virtue, act as if you already have it, and eventually you will. It sounds like “fake it till you make it.” That’s because it is. Aristotle got there first.

The practical version is this: before you send that text, before you say that thing, before you react the way you’re about to react — pause and ask: Would a person who genuinely loves God do this? Is this what freedom looks like?

Not: am I allowed to do this? But: is this consistent with who I am trying to become?

And if the answer is no — backspace. Walk away. Take a breath. One decision at a time. One throw at a time.

You’re going to get it wrong. I’m going to get it wrong. But we have a coach who shows up to these lessons without fail, ready to look at the tape and say: last week had some bright spots, and also some areas for growth. Let’s start there. It’s usually the area you least want to start in. But that’s where the work is.

The saints are not people who came out of the womb bowling strikes. They’re the people who stayed in the bowling alley. Who kept showing up to the lesson. Who, over years and decades, learned to do the things they needed to do, until someday they could do the things they wanted to do.

There are joys along the way. There are Bosco sticks and questionable bowling alley fries. It is not a joyless road. But it is a road, and it runs in a particular direction, and it asks something of us.

If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you wanna do when you wanna do them.

It's pretty much as simple as that.

Here’s something I’ve realized: there comes a point where nobody asks you about your vocation story anymore.

When you’re in seminary, you have to have this polished elevator pitch ready to go at any moment — every retreat, every high school visit, every kitchen table conversation. Tell us your story. And you do. But somewhere along the way, after you’ve been ordained a while, people just stop asking. Maybe they assume they already know. Maybe they think it’s rude. Maybe they’re worried you’ll actually tell them.

But I think it’s important that people know where their priests have come from. Pope Francis, in one of his funnier lines, once said that priests do not sprout up out of the floor of the cathedral like mushrooms. We come from a place, a family, a life. And I think that matters. So here’s mine.

I was seven years old, growing up in Oswego, Illinois — a small town back then, maybe 2,500 people. No Catholic school, so I went to public school all twelve years, which is why I’m so gritty and tough. (I had to be. The mean streets of Oswego.) I was halfway through second grade, getting ready for my First Communion, and at that point still fairly convinced I’d be the first American pope. I’ve since made my peace with that.

My mom woke my brother and me up that Monday morning and said: Come on, look out the window. Do you see that smoke?

Sure enough, rising high over the houses and trees across town — billowing black smoke. It was our church. St. Anne’s in Oswego was on fire.

The fire started in a supply closet behind the cry room at the back of church. (Which is, for what it’s worth, a contributing reason why I remain philosophically opposed to cry rooms.) Whether it was an electrical malfunction or a cleaning rag too close to a heater, no one ever knew for certain. What they did know was that the fire spread through a heating duct that ran straight down the center of the building, and the entire church was made of wood — walls, ceiling, everything — with no windows. It was, as the Chicago Tribune reported that day, essentially a bonfire waiting to be lit.

The roof was so thick and the building so impossible to ventilate that the only alarm was raised by a runner out on an early morning workout, pounding on the rectory door at six a.m. The pastor, Father Dan Stempora, almost didn’t answer. He thought it was a joke — until he stepped outside and saw the smoke billowing out of the top of the building.

The church was a total loss.

Even as second graders in a public school, there was a lot of talk about the fire that day. By the next morning, our class had decided we would hold a bake sale to raise money to rebuild. We raised about $250. If you visit St. Anne’s today and look at the donor wall — the little bronze plaque thing in the lobby — you’ll find it: The Second Graders of East View Elementary School.

My mom picked us up early from school that afternoon and took us to the site. This would never be allowed today, but somehow they let people inside what remained of the building. We had all just been there the Sunday before, singing, the church beautiful and still dressed for Christmas. Now there were puddles on the floor, broken glass everywhere, charred timber, melted chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, organ pipes fused together.

But the thing I remember most — the thing I keep coming back to, even now — wasn’t the ruins. It was Father Dan.

He was supposed to retire that year. He’d been at St. Anne’s for twelve years, and the fire had rather derailed his plans. But when we arrived that afternoon, there he was in the middle of the crowd, stocking cap on, gloves on, greeting people. Hugging them. Consoling them. Letting them console him.

He showed up. He stayed.

He assured us it would be rebuilt. And over the next three years, we watched a beautiful new church take shape — what we have since taken to calling, with more than a touch of pride, the Cathedral of Kendall County.

That image has never left me. A priest standing in the cold with his people, in the wreckage of something beloved, pointing toward what would be. I’ve come to think that’s about 90% of the job. Ninety percent of priesthood is just showing up. Ninety percent of life is just showing up. Ninety percent of prayer is just showing up. Literally all we have to do is be there, and the work of the gospel can begin.

It was the work of the gospel to transform our parish hall into a temporary church. And in that little temporary church is where I made my First Communion. Where others in our parish were confirmed and baptized. And where, eighteen years later, I would have my reception as a newly ordained priest.

Father Dan himself vested me at my ordination in 2018. He remains one of my closest mentors to this day.

Of course, it’s not exactly cool in public school to announce that you want to be a priest. The other kids want to be astronauts, firefighters, doctors. And then there’s me. If you’ve seen Despicable Me — when Gru is depicted as a child — that was basically me, except shorter, announcing my intention to be celibate forever. People were confused.

I also had a Presbyterian girlfriend in high school who did not understand the concept of the priesthood or why anyone would voluntarily choose it. Fair enough.

So I arrived at high school having mostly buried the idea. I decided I either wanted to be an English teacher or a high school band director — I play trombone and was the drum major of the marching band, and anything involving a large stick and a hat with a feather in it has always appealed to me. I followed my brother to North Central College in Naperville for one year.

While I was there, I kept going to Mass — partly because my mom would drive down on Sunday nights to take me, and then buy me Starbucks afterward, which is a highly effective evangelical strategy that I recommend. At Sts. Peter and Paul in Naperville, I got to know younger priests in a way I hadn’t before. And something shifted. Priesthood was presented to me not just as a spiritually rewarding vocation, but as an ordinary way of life — priests who were tired, who were hungry, who played video games or walked their dogs. Not a locked-away existence of rectory kumbaya, but real human life, with this one extraordinary difference: as a priest, you are conformed so closely to Christ that through you, Christ himself lives out his mysteries again in the world.

That takes some getting used to. But it was enough.

I left North Central after one year and transferred to St. John Vianney Seminary at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota — the first Catholic school I had ever attended. I was ordained in 2018 with six other men. Of the seven of us, only one had gone to a Catholic high school. Make of that what you will.

After seminary came my first assignment at the Cathedral of St. Raymond in Joliet, where we also served Sacred Heart Parish on the east side of the city — a self-described Black Catholic parish that completely recalibrated my understanding of the Church and of Catholic social teaching. I had preached about Dorothy Day and social justice in the abstract. Sacred Heart made it concrete, personal, and urgent. I left a different priest than I arrived.

From Joliet, I went back to Naperville — to Sts. Peter and Paul, this time as a priest. My room in the rectory faced the building at North Central where I had once decided, mid-semester, to abandon English literature forever and go to seminary. A neat little full circle. I also served as chaplain and theology teacher at Chesterton Academy in Lisle during those years.

And then I came here, to Visitation, where it’s been two wonderful, stretching, formative years.

Which brings me to the news.

In August, I’ll be heading to Washington, D.C., to study canon law at The Catholic University of America.

Canon law is something most Catholics only hear about when they really need to hear about it — usually not under the happiest of circumstances. But it’s actually one of the most fascinating corners of Church life. Think of it as the Church’s internal legal and organizational structure: the rules that govern 1.5 billion members across every continent. It’s the best history book of the Church, because almost all of it is jurisprudence — meaning something happened, and now there’s a rule.

Canon law asks questions like: Who actually owns this church building? What’s the relationship between a pastor and his bishop — who has authority over what? How does the Church regulate ordination? Why must the Eucharistic bread contain at least a trace of gluten? Why must Mass wine meet specific requirements? (The Franzia boxed wine question has a canonical answer, and also a common sense one.)

There’s a wonderful story — I say wonderful; the parties involved may disagree — in which a group of California nuns attempted to sell their convent to Katy Perry. It became a major news event. The canon lawyers swooped in and pointed out that the nuns didn’t actually own the property. The archdiocese did. The deal collapsed. This is the kind of thing canon lawyers do. They also handle marriage cases, disciplinary proceedings, and serve as legal advisors to bishops.

Three of us are going together to study. I’m genuinely excited.

One of the first things Father John said when I told him was that he’d like me to keep my room here at Visitation. I cannot tell you what that means to me — practically speaking, I don’t have to pack up my books, which is enormous — but more than that, it means that on breaks from school over the next two years, I’ll be back with you. Think of it this way: I’m your older brother, going off to college. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving. It’ll be great.

A new priest will be joining Visitation — more information about him in next week’s bulletin — and you are going to love him.

I also want to mention: Deacon Sam will be ordained to the priesthood on June 6th of this year, and while he’ll be leaving Visitation, he’ll be just up the street at Immaculate Conception in Elmhurst. Still very much in the neighborhood.

I wanted to tell you parts of my story, and you’ll have noticed that isn’t particularly dramatic. No jail time, no rock bottom, no lightning strike on the road to Damascus. Just a seven-year-old kid watching a priest in a stocking cap stand with his people in the ruins of their church and somehow make it feel like a beginning rather than an end.

That image became a method. Or maybe it revealed one that was already there in the gospels: Jesus comes to a group of people, and over years — not in a single sermon, not in a viral moment, but over years — he teaches them, lives among them, lets them know him as someone extraordinary and yet utterly ordinary. Brilliant enough to outwit the Pharisees. Humble enough to wash feet. Powerful enough to calm storms. Compassionate enough to stop for a grieving widow, for a hungry crowd, for one lost sheep.

They had never seen authority married with compassion before. They’d never seen genius and integrity allied with humility. He was, in the truest sense, too good to be true — and yet there he was.

Priests are not good at this all the time. Early in my first assignment, a woman called me a “feudal lord”. (I have tried to grow since then).

But this is the job description. These are the marching orders. And they begin, every single time, with showing up.

Please pray for more priests. Pray especially for vocations from Elmhurst, which is full of young people, and which has not ordained a priest since 1988. That’s not because God hasn’t been calling. It’s because the world is loud, and parents get scared, and the attractions of an ordinary life are real and understandable.

But if God has made you for something, if he has written a particular way life into the very fibers of your heart, you will not be fully yourself until you live it. Not because he’ll punish you if you don’t. But because your life will simply never be as full, as whole, as naturally joyful as it will be if you follow the thing he made you for.

I’ll close with a poem by Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, a nineteenth-century Dominican priest:

To live in the midst of the world without wishing its pleasures; to be a member of each family, yet belonging to none; to share all suffering, to penetrate all secrets, to heal all wounds; to go from men to God and offer him their prayers, to return from God to men, to bring pardon and hope; to have a heart of fire for charity and a heart of bronze for chastity; to teach and to pardon, to console and bless always —

My God, what a life! And it is yours, O priest of Jesus Christ.

This is my “Jesus year.”

Indeed, last May I turned 33, the age our tradition says is the age of Christ when he died.

To mark the day last May, Fr John and Deacon Sam greeted me by saying, “Crucify him!”

But really, because celibacy adds 70 years, in priest years I am actually 103.

And as I settle into my venerable old age, there are fewer and fewer hills I am willing to die on. One hill that I will die on until the bitter end is the following: The West Wing starring Martin Sheen, which aired on NBC from 1999-2006, is the greatest television show ever made.
Full stop.

Near the end of the first season, it’s revealed that Leo McGarry, the president’s loyal chief of staff, had been in recovery for a substance addiction. He is raked through the coals by the press, but stands by his character and affirms the progress he’d made in his life. Many episodes later, when Josh Lyman, an advisor to the president, goes through his own PR crisis, Leo McGarry sits him down and tells him this story:

A man was walking down the street when he suddenly falls through an open manhole. He sees a priest walking by and yells, “Father, can you help me out?” And the priest scribbles out a prayer and throws it down. He sees a doctor walking by and yells, “Hey Doc, can you help me out?” And the doctor writes out a prescription and throws it down. Suddenly the man sees a friend walking by and yells, “Hey pal, can you help me out?” To his shock and horror, the friend jumps into the hole. “What’d ya do that for? Now we’re both down here!” “Yeah,” his friend replies, “but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

—

As we come to the conclusion of this Sacred Paschal Triduum, these three days of walking with Jesus as he moves from dinner with his friends in the Upper Room to the Garden and to prison, to Calvary and the Cross to the silence of the tomb, and now as we - with all the celebration and splendor the Church can muster - mark the night on which “he rose victorious from the underworld”, we recall the basic shape of this divine drama in which we are invited to participate.

One day, long ago, by his own volition and in total freedom, God sent his spirit to hover over the formless waters of chaos and darkness; into that chaos he spoke his Eternal Word, and brought light, order, life, and peace. At the top of that creation he ordained that two should be made in his image and in his likeness, and live with him in harmony in his garden. To know goodness, one must be capable of evil, and into that garden lurked a serpent, the most cunning, deceptive creature ever made. His words were smoother than oil, but his tongue was an unsheathed sword, and in his wickedness that creature lied to Eve and likewise to Adam, and convinced them that disobedience was a way to fullness of life. Instead, just as God had warned them, disobedience was the pathway to shame, violence, and death.

God did not abandon humanity, but sent them forth from the garden to toil and live; to be fruitful and multiply. Through the ages “God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets,” making covenants with his people, leading them from slavery, feeding them with manna and honey from a rock; yet in every age, in each generation, they preferred the lure of disobedience to the promise of life in abundance.

In every age, in each generation, the Father of all creation stayed faithful to his promise, and through his prophets foretold a savior, one mightier than any who had been sent before. He taught the chosen people to look for signs of this savior, so that they would recognize him when he came.

“The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world…The world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

“But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God.” The Word, present at the beginning, the Word spoken by the Father over the formless void, the Word spoken by the Father into the darkness and chaos, and the Word who spoke into being all of creation, “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth…From his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace.”

This Word of God was named Jesus, which means “salvation of God”. From the very beginning he remained obedient to his mission: to live our life and experience it in all things but without sin; to die our death in payment of the wages of sin, and to rise from the dead as the first fruits of the resurrection of all creation.

“This is the night, when Christ broke the prison bars of death…
Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of his humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave, he gave away his son.

O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the death of Christ.”

In the Gospel tonight, we encounter Mary Magdalene, the one who was chosen by the Lord to be the “apostle to the Apostles”, the first to witness and then proclaim the resurrection. They go to the tomb “very early in the morning.” As the women approached, the earth shook as an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and rolled back the stone for them.

The resurrection of Jesus is the definitive turning point of all of human history. The one thing that every person and every culture had been trying to avoid, delay, mitigate, or at least explain - death! - has just been conquered, and the new age had come. The re-creation of the whole cosmos has begun, the recalibration of all creation under the banner of life and grace is underway; the old order has passed away and the new self, living by a new order, in a new age has come.

What are the first words spoken in this new age?

“Do not be afraid.” “Peace be with you.”

The message of the angel to Mary Magdalene at the tomb early that first morning is likewise the message to each of us, and must be the content of all of our preaching, teaching, and service: “Do not be afraid. I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, just as he said….He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

Galilee? We can’t see him any closer than that? From the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem to the gate of Capernaum is 162 kilometers, exactly 100 miles, and according to Google Maps is a 37 hour walk.

Did it have to be Galilee? Yes, it had to be Galilee. Why?

If you want to be reborn, if you want the life of the new age, then you have to go back to the beginning. You cannot be only half reborn, one foot in the new age and one foot in the old; this part for Jesus and this part for me; if you want the hundredfold, then you must go all in.

For the disciples, back to the beginning meant back to the shoreline of Galilee. Back to the place where he first met them, first called them, first spoke their names, first called them up out of the boat onto the water, first taught them, first rebuked them, first saved them from winds and seas, and first called them himself that they might come and follow him.

We’ve quoted Dorothy Day on this topic so many times, and when we think about our lives, our world, our hearts…these words hardly need repeating: we have made things here below much harder than God intended them.

And we can think to ourselves that if we could only show the world what Jesus could do, that this place would be bursting at the seams. We’d need more than three churches in Elmhurst; if people knew what grace could do, it would be impossible to ignore.

But it isn’t “somebody else” that the Lord is calling back to the beginning, back to the basics; it’s you, and it’s me.

Jack, Mihael, Natan, Stefan, Kayla, Michael, Russ, and Scott: as you are received into and embrace the fullness of faith tonight, you are witnesses to us of the power of going to the beginning. In these months of preparation, you have learned that the words spoken by the angel at the tomb that resurrection morning are true: indeed the Lord has gone before you, has met you at the beginning, and has walked with you and led you here; not just here to Visitation’s Easter Vigil, but here to this precise moment in the long journey of your lives, here to a definitive and beautiful new beginning.

So this is the promise and joy of Easter:
that as we look around at whichever manhole in the street we happened to have fallen into, and as all of the usual people, places, and things leave us feeling unseen, unheard, or out of luck,
We look around and see this friend, this great and powerful and cosmic friend
who made himself small for my sake and yours,
this Jesus, this risen Jesus, with gaping holes still present in his hands and feet,
Who has gone down into this mess ahead of us, to meet us, to tell us:

“Peace be with you, do not be afraid. I’ve been down here before,
and I know the way out.”

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