Diaconate Ordination in Belleville IL

We left Saint Meinrad at seven in the morning for the three hour drive to Belleville IL. There were three of us in the car: Deacon Tom, Patrick, and I. We had planned this day trip to attend the Diaconate Ordination of our friend and classmate, Ben Stern of the Diocese of Belleville. Another classmate, Joe, had driven from his home in southern Missouri to the Ordination. We arrived an hour or so before the 11 AM Ordination at the Cathedral of St. Peter in downtown Belleville.

Ben was ordained there by his bishop, the Most Rev. Edward K. Braxton, DD, PhD, STD, along with his diocesan brother, Steven L. Beatty, who is studying at Mundelein Seminary. There were twelve of Steven’s classmates from Mundelein, transitional deacons all, who also had driven down for the Ordination. One of them, Deacon Ryan Larson of the Diocese of Joliet in Illinois (who knows my good friend, Fr. Sunny, from his diocese), vested Deacon Steven with the stole and dalmatic. I, on the other hand, vested Deacon Ben with the stole and dalmatic.

Above is a photo of Deacon Tom and I with our newly ordained brother-deacon.

Thanksgiving 2006

I wanted a hassle-free Thanksgiving Dinner this year. (Translation: I didn’t want to bother driving or flying; I just wanted to eat and, then, take a nap.) So, I decided to opt for what I did two years ago: stay here at Saint Meinrad and join the monks for their Thanksgiving festivities.

We all went to the Archabbey Church for Mass at 9:30 AM; after the Noon Office, we gathered at the Newman Dining Room for the Thanksgiving Dinner. For the Dinner, I joined two other seminarians, Deacon Tom Galarneault of the Diocese of Duluth and Matt Crane of the Diocese of St. Cloud, at the Prior’s table. There were ten of us at the table; with us and Fr. Prior Tobias were his mother, Mrs. Colgan (still pretty strong at the age of 90), Fr. Abbot Bonaventure, and Brothers Flavian, Mukasa, Cyril, and François. None of us at the table ever carved a turkey before. Br. Flavian tried his hand on it and did a pretty decent job. We shared a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner: turkey and stuffing, cranberries, sweet potatoes, and green beans, plus a pumpkin-carrot cake.

I had a good Thanksgiving this year. The best part, of course, was that it was hassle-free!

Love Stories

On this Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I preached the homily for the School Mass at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Chapel of the Saint Meinrad School of Theology. More than half of the community had already left for the Thanksgiving break, so it was a much slimmer crowd than usual. These were the readings for the day: Rev 3:1-6, 14-22; Ps 15:2-3a, 3bc-4ab, 5; Lk 19:1-10.

If chick flicks and romance novels are to be believed, all love stories basically fall into two categories: stories of love at first sight, and stories of love in hindsight.

Stories of love at first sight—we’re all familiar with how that plot goes. A man and a woman, strangers to one another, find themselves in the midst of a crowd. And then, there is that moment—when one sees the other across the crowded room, or she bumps into him, or he helps her pick up her books that have fallen on the floor—that one moment when their eyes meet, when one soul finally finds its mate, when both are bitten by the love bug and are overcome by a fever for which no doctor has a cure. Yup, that’s love at first sight.

Stories of love in hindsight, on the other hand, do not involve those sorts of fireworks. They are stories of the boy and the girl next door, of childhood friends and playmates that have always been there for each other. The story ends with both of them realizing that their one true love has always been their first love: one another. That’s love in hindsight for you.

Love stories: they’re either about love at first sight or love in hindsight. And experience tells us that our vocation stories are no different. Let’s face it: vocation stories are love stories; they tell of how we got to where we are now: deeply in love with Christ. And because vocation stories are love stories, they also fall into the same two categories: stories of love at first sight, and stories of love in hindsight.

Stories of love at first sight are those stories of conversion, stories of former sinners who reformed their ways when they finally encountered Christ in their lives. Stories like that of Zacchaeus, Jericho’s own corrupt tax-collector. He was a short gawker who climbed up a sycamore tree to get a better view of the celebrity passing by. Yet, Jesus looked up at that gawker and looked him in the eye. For Zacchaeus, it was love at first sight; it was love for Love Himself at first sight. Zacchaeus was not bitten by any love bug yet he caught a feverish zeal for the Lord, turned his back on his life of sin, and followed Jesus. And so it is for some of us here today: there was that one moment when God touched us and we followed Him and we never looked back. And it’s all because we fell in love with Christ at first sight.

For the rest of us, it was love in hindsight. It’s about a lifetime of being in Church, going to Church, doing Churchy things. God always has been there for us, waiting for us to keep saying yes at every turn. It’s a story not unlike that of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose life was dedicated to the service of the Lord from the very beginning. Today, we celebrate the memorial of her Presentation in the Temple. She was then but a girl of three. Little did she know that as she climbed up those 15 steps to the Temple, she was already taking the first steps of a journey that would find her climbing up a hill called Calvary. Hers was a lifetime of saying fiat at every turn, not just at the Annunciation. It’s no different from the stories of some of us who kept on saying yes to God at every turn, culminating in entering seminary or a religious order or perhaps deciding to raise a family. Ours is a story of God’s immense love that only makes perfect sense in hindsight.

And now we find ourselves here in this chapel, gathered around the table of the Lord: those who loved Him at first sight and those who loved Him in hindsight. Here we are at the banquet of His love to receive His Body and Blood, the gift of His love and the sustenance of our lives. Yet, even as He calls us to this table, so also He sends us forth from this table to be His instruments in the world, so that others out there might also fall in love with Him. He sends us forth to witness by our words and works, by our very lives, so that those who have yet to meet Him might come to know Him and be touched by Him and fall in love with Him at first sight. He sends us forth to nurture those who already know Him and serve Him so that when they are called to say yes again and again to His call, they will realize also His constant love in hindsight.

So shall it be until the end of days when finally all our love stories will find their one happy ending, when all of us, lovers of the God who first loved us, will delight in the blessed sight of Life eternal, of Joy eternal, of Love eternal.

Requiem

On this Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, I read these last lines in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

I had heard these words earlier in the day, in the homily preached by Fr. Denis, OSB, at the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel. They echoed in my ear as I remembered the names of those family members and friends who have died since the last Feast of All Souls: Gregorio Antonio Soriano and Ofelia Suing-Soriano (my great uncle and great aunt), Virginia Torres viuda de Dizon (my paternal grandfather’s first cousin), Genoveva S. Tinio viuda de Galang (my cousin-in-law’s mother), Eduardo Torres Nunag (another cousin-in-law’s father), Jesus Lacson Simbillo (my Mom’s third cousin and also my Dad’s fourth cousin) and his firstborn son Manolito Simbillo, Nancy H. Fister (widow of Deacon Louis Fister of the Diocese of Lexington; Nancy and Spanky had always sent me a card at Christmas since I came into the Diocese), and Eugene Rodney Hutchinson (from my home parish of St. Martha’s in Prestonsburg; a retired officer of the Kentucky State Police, he had taught me how to parallel park when I first arrived in the United States).

I owe a lot of who I am now from the unhistoric acts of these men and women of happy memory. I have learned much from Ingcung Goyu’s piety, Apung Peleng’s humility, Apung Viring’s industry, Apung Beba’s devotion, Apung Eddie’s joie de vivre, Bapang Situk’s confidence, Cong Lito’s forgiveness, Nancy’s thoughtfulness, and Rodney’s patience. Indeed, things are not so ill with me partly because I have met and known these unhistoric men and women, but most of all because they have allowed me to know how it is like to be loved on this earth. Today, even when I am unable to visit their tombs, I name them in my prayers and implore our everloving God to keep them in His eternal embrace.