Holy Name of Jesus Pastoral Care Web Journal

It has been extensively documented that there is a real connection between our body and mind, between our emotional wellbeing and spiritual peace. I think we are coming to a much greater appreciation of the holistic understanding of the human body and its working parts. It is quite a miracle. Jesus often went about curing people’s mind, body and spirit. With that Gospel reality in mind, the Pastoral Care Ministry is inaugurating a new health initiative to promote good health, balanced living and an integrated spirituality.

I can’t tell you how much better I feel emotionally and even spiritually after a good work out at the gym. It’s like I have a new lease on life, a different perspective, a more cheerful disposition. Physical exercise and spiritual exercise are very closely related. Mind-Body-Spirit are pretty congruent to each other, more than we often notice or appreciate.

Pastoral Care will be promoting wellness over this next year by offering various resources, promoting good health information and putting on a variety of workshops or services to that end. (We have even requested a defibrillator and training for our staff as a part of that initiative. The hope is that we would never have to use it, but if the need arises, we will have trained personnel around to use it.) Perhaps you’ve noticed the mobile Wellness Center display in the parish building. You’ll find information on everything from mental health to disabilities, heart and lungs and hearing to caregivers, suicide and counseling, as well as good referral resources.

This effort is overseen by some of the health professionals in our parish in conjunction with the Pastoral Care Director. Any expertise you have in this area is invited and considered. Maybe we should promote a triathlon of healthy spirituality-exercise-family relationships sometime this year. I wonder what that would look like. You could do it right in your own family.

Healthy Connections,
Bill Rose
brose@hnoj.org
Pastoral Care Director

Heart Imagery is central to the readings after Easter and especially this month. In Acts, those who hear Peter are ‘cut to the heart’, and members of the churches of Asia Minor are called to ‘love one another deeply from the heart’. In Luke, Jesus calls the Emmaus pair ‘slow to heart’; they describe their hearts burning when he opened scriptures to them.

The Road to Emmaus is such a powerful instruction and invitation for me. Although the hearts of the pair ‘burn’, it is not in breaking open the word but in ‘breaking the bread with Jesus’ that Cleopas and the companion actually recognize Jesus: “He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35). This story is not about the head, but the heart—and also the belly.

Eating and drinking together, are essential to Jesus and the ‘kingdom movement’. The open-table practice that they shared breaks down barriers and reveals food justice issues in a way that soup kitchens, food banks, or holiday hampers handed across a counter cannot. This fact was driven home to me when our family bought, prepared, served and ate meals with the guests of St. Stephen’s Shelter back when all the kids where still living with us. What a huge eye-opening experience that was for us. Not just serving the food but actually sitting down and conversing and nourishing a relationship with those we fed were miraculous moments for all of us. It meant we cared not just about their belly-food but about their soul-food and the nourishing of relationship. I really think those we served and our kids were fed more by the ‘sitting down together’ than anything else.

Very few people suffer from malnutrition in North America, but food insecurity (not knowing where your next meal will come from) impacts more than 10 percent of households. Eating with others made this fact real to me. When you have only occasional access to a microwave, no can opener, one bowl, and a fridge shared with hungry neighbors, the only thing to do with an offered sandwich, pastry, or pancake is eat it, whether you’re hungry or not. Who knows when you will see another meal?

When our Senior Adults visit Feed My Starving Children to pack food for meals delivered to third world country populations, we are startled to know that many eat ‘dirt biscuits’ to fool their bellies and curb their starvation response. The belly brings us back to the heart. Poverty is the single best predictor of heart disease. In North America few are dying of hunger, but many die from the stress and food insecurity of poverty. Unless we have a heart of compassion, we will not meet the heart disease that affects us all. The couple on the road to Emmaus, like many of us on the giving side of the food bank counter, were headed away from Jerusalem, on the run from suffering, but their meal with Jesus (Eucharist) sends them straight back into the heart of the struggle.

I think that doing what we can to help feed the hungry will they bring us to a new ‘awakening’ of what Jesus’ Kingdom movement is all about.

Were not our hearts burning within us?
Bill Rose
brose@hnoj.org
Director of Pastoral Care

I remember the silence of the three hours of Good Friday vividly. It was a holy moment for me as a child and teen. It’s hard to practice silence. It was an inner journey. It was a time just for me and the Lord. It had the devotional tug of “old time religion”. It was the religion of my youth. I wondered at the time what it was like for Jesus in the tomb. Certainly, like on the cross, it must have been a ‘dark night of the soul’.

Many saints and sinners have had those ‘nights’. Pondering the absolute silence of God in the face of evil. There seams so many more of them in our time. The horrific moments we have seen lately in Africa. The catastrophic failures of moral decay in supposedly developed countries including our own. The ‘silence of God’ for our heroes like Mother Teresa. You all remember the news release on her published diary of writing about God’s silence—more particularly God’s absence. “In a letter to her archbishop, Teresa begs,”Please pray especially for me that I may not spoil {Jesus) work and that Our Lord may show Himself, for there is such a terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.” This great emptiness started when she began her ministry with the destitute and dying in Calcutta.

I have experienced that same ‘silence and absence’ of God in companioning people who are dying, who are suffering terrible afflictions of cancer or divorce. Where are you God? The early Christians described this experience of God’s absence or silence as the via negative. It is difficult to describe this experience with words because it is beyond them. One relates to God as the vast emptiness, the Dark Night, the ‘Absent One’ as Mother Teresa put it. Where is God in the senseless bombing, the drive by shootings, the terrible hunger and starvation in a land of plenty? To feel all alone, as if no one cares is a terrible desolation of the soul. So what does one do in this deep silence?

Many people have turned to cynicism, others turn to one form of addiction or another, still others to despair or depression. What is your response to the senseless evil and absence of God? What does your pondering bring you to? How do you walk in the silence of Good Friday? Mother Teresa took on a discipline of “smiling at God” in the emptiness. And later, she was able to write, “I have come to love the darkness”. My hope for you is that you become aware of the preciousness of life, the fragileness of love, the deepest longing for being “beloved of God’.

Lead kindly light,
Bill Rose
brose@hnoj.org
Directory of Pastoral Care

As we are coming into the final stretch of Lent, I hope you have been true to your Lenten resolutions to give something up and take something on for your spiritual renewal. Fasting, prayer and almsgiving are the traditional Catholic practices that we have been invited to accept in our Lenten discipline. The other day my attention was drawn to that challenging parental task of helping our kids grow up not to be self- centered. Most people are in agreement that are kids have a lot. They have a lot of stuff, a lot of opportunities, a lot of travel and vacations and just a lot of freedom.

I thought that whole effort at almsgiving that is a part of our Catholic Lenten discipline really relates to how we are doing with our kids when it comes to money. It is suggested that helping our kids realize they should take some of their money to share, some of their money to save and some of their money to spend would be a wonderful parental stewardship effort. I believe it would be a huge connection to make that a part of not only the Lenten discipline of almsgiving but throughout the year in helping kids deal with money responsibly.

Money is one of those huge sacred idols in our materialistic culture. Helping children become aware of the connection between money and work is important. Helping children to learn how to save is critical. Children who learn how to postpone gratification have higher academic scores. Have more successful career opportunities and success. And I believe they have a more balanced lifestyle from my personal observation as a counselor and parent. The spiritual connection is there also. Helping children learn how to not spend everything on themselves and share with others is contagious to them not becoming so egocentric and self-centered. That is at the heart of stewardship. So how to share our money is at the heart of stewardship, the common good, and the ground of our spirituality as Christians.

Then there is that focus on saving that our culture has failed to take seriously. I believe that the latest reports are that the American populace is at a zero savings rate and even some would suggest that we are spending more than we are making. We are digging a huge hole in our financial future, as individuals and as a country. To learn how to save takes discipline. To not spend everything that you earn and set something aside for a “rainy day” was a lesson I learned from my parents while growing up. I hope you are teaching your kids the same.

Lasting the effort in parenting is helping kids spend wisely. Do we really need that gadget? We are finding out that if kids spend their own money they think twice about whether they need that latest electronic game, cell phone, CD, or toy. They become wise consumers. Of course, we know kids follow footsteps better than advice, so we need to practice what we preach. How are we as Adults doing with the Share, Save, Spend mantra? There is still time this Lent. There is nothing wrong with doing it all year round as well.

Share, Save, Spend,
Bill Rose
brose@hnoj.org
Director of Pastoral Care