C h r i s’ J o u r n a l 

A couple days after the end of Christpower I was sitting in my office, very, very tired.  Christpower is our in-town mission trip where along with some incredible adult volunteers, 7 other parishes, 47 teenagers from HNOJ and 96 teens total, I lived and worked in North Minneapolis June 22^nd-28^th.  This is probably the best thing we do all year.  Seriously.  But it is a very hard thing and by the end, I was very, very tired.  It wasn’t the kind of tired that comes from not sleeping enough (I actually got plenty of sleep) or from working hard (though we did work hard – tree stumps), but the kind of tired that comes from trying to give everything to a community that really, really needs it.

During the week we had the opportunity to write little notes of affirmation to each other, telling one another the ways that we saw each other being the Body of Christ (the theme this year).  I hadn’t opened by bag, and figured it was as good a time as any.  The thing that people write were very nice and I felt affirmed by what they said, but more than that I was struck by what they had written their notes on.  About half way through the week we ran out of the little sheets people were supposed to use to write notes on.  This, of course, was a testament to how much each member of this community cared about each other: they ran out of paper to write affirmations to each other.

Being inventive and creative, people started to use any odd piece of paper they could find.  The effect was that my bag, at first glace, appeared to be full of trash: wrinkled pieces of paper bag, candy wrappers, toilette paper, and some pieces of folded lined paper not big enough to stick your used gum within.  Yes the contents of my bag appeared to be full of the same kind of pieces of paper we had picked up cleaning up people’s yards, working around Ascension or even walking through the other work site at St. Bernard’s Parish in St. Paul.  The reality was that this bag of “trash” was full of some tremendously God filled words.  Some words thanked me for my time and effort, others complimented me, still others reminded me that all the work the adult leaders were doing was worth it.  Literally written all these pieces of trash were the words of God.

A lot of people look at the Northside of Minneapolis and see trash.  They think the streets are trashy and dangerous.  All they see when they look around are trashy people, spending their days doing trashy things.  But most people and for most of you reading this article, I am talking to you, that is all most people take time to do.  They see the drugs and violence and the Northside gets dumped onto the trash pile.  If you haven’t heard it before, let me be the first to tell you that on all that “trash,” the very word of God is written.  In the very short 3 weeks I have spent on the Northside over the past 3 summers, I have gotten to know spirit led, God inspired holy people.  I am not just talking about our teens (though they are spirit led and God inspired), but the people who live and work there everyday.  I have seen beauty flowering up between the cracks in the concrete of this difficult neighborhood.  I have heard the commitment in the voices of those who live there to make their home a safe and holy place.  I spoke with small business owners committed to changing the face of the Northside.  I heard an aldermen speak about his vision for how to change the world.  None of these people have any delusion about the state of things in the blocks surrounding the Church of the Ascension.  It is not like our neighborhoods, but it isn’t without God and the people there aren’t any less loved by God than we are.  It’s about time that we, good people, take the time to really reach into what we think is a bag of trash and give God the opportunity to surprise us, to change us and the world, and make a real difference in the lives of other good people.  If we won’t do it, who will?  Thanks for reading.  Keep it real.  God Bless.

If you want to find out how you can help, please contact me at Holy Name of Jesus.

Liz and I were lost. We generally knew where we were, but still didn’t know how to get from where we were to where we were supposed to be. And thus the first moment that I felt ultra-cool whipping out my new cell phone and looking up directions. I plugged in the cross streets to the Google Maps application and before too long had a route to where we were supposed to be. Full key board, unlimited texting and internet, and we reworked our plan to pay pretty much the same as we had the month before, but with all kinds of new stuff.

The new phone is sweet and I am pretty excited about. Its screen is huge. It has a full keyboard. It can even get my baseball scores. And best yet, when Liz and I go shopping to “just one store,” but end up spending hours at the mall or in Maple Grove, I can read the paper or check out ESPN, all on my phone. Not to mention that, but I can also call people and talk to them. I know. It’s insane.

My mom also just got a new phone. I got a text from her the other day that just said this, “This is my second text ever!” That was it. And then she called me which defeats the purpose of the text, but nonetheless I was proud of her. When we were comparing the new phones and talking about all their features, my dad said he thinks they might have more memory and applications than the first computer I took to college, which might not be that far off. My mom followed that up with a, “Oh yeah, and like I will ever use all of these applications.” I think I might agree with her. There is so much that these phones can do. Games (which will be used), internet, phone, text, email, voice recognition, all kinds of ways to sync it to my computer, blue tooth, and more and more, are all available on this little piece of metal and plastic. I questioned whether I would really be getting full use out of my phone if I didn’t use most of these applications.

I got thinking about this idea of not using all the applications available in my phone. I started thinking about all the different gifts and “applications” I have been given. I thought about how there are so many gifts and talents I have been given in varying degrees. I wondered how well or poorly I had been using these gifts. Are there applications in my life I have overlooked or ignored? And what gifts have I used only partially? I also wondered when I have relied too heavily on one ability because I failed to recognize my giftedness in other areas.

I think that failing to use our gifts to the best of our ability is probably that we are lazy or prideful or scared that if we try to develop a talent we haven’t ever worked on that we will fail. Either we think we know who we are and are too prideful to keep searching or we are just too lazy to do the work to develop those talents and gifts God has given us to work with. Imagine in the movie Spiderman if Peter Parker decided that learning how to shoot webbing and flying through the buildings of Manhattan was just too much work. Or imagine if Superman thought, “I am a journalist, not some fancy hero. I am too busy to learn how to stop bullets with my chest or prevent major catastrophes.” Of even if Bruce Wayne decided not to built his bat suit because he was frightened of failing as a superhero. It sounds silly or ridiculous, yet I now that we do these things everyday. We say, “I am too busy to learn how to be a better listener or to work on my relationships with my family or to hit a curve ball.” What we mean by busy is that we are lazy or too sure of who we are to grow. Often we get stuck in a vision of who we are which falls short of who we could be.

My challenge to you (and back unto my self as well), is to take another look at our gifts and talents. Not just what we have been able to do in the past but how we can apply our gifts in new ways. God has blessed us abundantly, but it is up to us to apply that abundance. I want to leave you all with a poem that always give me jump start regarding using my gifts.

Our Greatest Fear

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other

people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
—Marianne Williamson

I was flipping through the ol’ cable while I was at the gym a couple days ago and came upon a show on the History Channel all about crucifixion.  Not exactly light entertainment, but being a church kid I was generally interested in the topic.  Plus it took my mind off the cardio machine that was trying to slowly kill me.  The program went through the physical steps of crucifixion in gruesome detail.  It outlined how the Romans used this form of execution to make a public statement to enforce their rule.  The narrator turned to the rest of history and looked at all the different cultures that have used crucifixion or some form of it.  It was a brutal summary of this terrible way to die.

At the very end of the show one of the historians said something that surprised me and made me think differently about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  He said that what is remarkable about the crucifixion of Jesus isn’t that it was so gruesome, though it was gruesome and horrible, but that it was so common.  Jesus died in the same way has hundreds of thousands of others.  Yes it was a horrific, painful, and torturous death, but it was death that Jesus shared with so many others.  For me this doesn’t make it any less remarkable, instead it only deepens the meaning.

For me the crucifixion, the death of Jesus, is remarkable not because Jesus suffered so greatly, though he did, it is remarkable because he suffered at all.  God chose to become one of us, to become a human, a creature, one of his creations and because of that choice to be with us in all things, he suffered all the pains that we suffer.  God didn’t have to, he chose to.  Paul writes in Philippians 2:6-8, “Who, though he (Jesus) was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

Jesus lived a human life and died a human death and in no way does his divinity mitigate that experience.  No, we have a God who knows what it is to be human.  When you wake up tired because you stayed up late doing homework, he knows what it was like to be tired.  When you hurt because someone you loved has left, he knows what it is like to be hurt like that.  When people ridicule and make fun of you, Jesus Christ knows full well what that is like.

Jesus’ death on the cross and the widespread use of crucifixion reinforces this idea that our God loves us enough to share our experience in every way.  For me that means that I can turn to God with every trial and tribulation, every shortcoming and suffering because he knows what I am going through.  When times are tough, I know I can turn to my God because he knows what it is like to live this human life.  Who do you turn to when you suffer?  Thanks for reading.  Keep it real.  God bless.

In 1938, Clement Frischauf OSB, a monk of St. John’s Abbey, painted the apse of the Great Hall in a renovation of the Abbey’s worship space (picture).  It wasn’t until 1961 that the monks moved over to the Abbey Church with dominates post cards of St. John’s with its impressive bell town and honeycomb stained glass.  If you have never visited St. John’s I recommend spending time in the Abbey Church, but it wasn’t this powerfully simple worship space that alerted me to God’s presence on Thursday night, it was Clement’s painting in the Great Hall.

The Great Hall is now used as a banquet hall and general meeting area at SJU.  There is an information desk and a door that leads to the admissions office.  Thursday night I was at a banquet for friends who were graduating form the School of Theology at St. Johns.  We were seated at round tables, and the podium for various speeches, back patting and presentations was placed at the top of what used to be the sanctuary steps facing out to the crowd, which meant we were facing this tremendous image of Christ raising a hand in a Triune Blessing holding a book inscribed with the Latin for, “I am the way the truth and the life.”  Angles with 6 wings as described in the book of Revelation were painted above Christ, as well as white shrouded, faceless angels were painted below.  Lamps were placed between these faceless angels giving the whole painting a mystical feel.

All of these images were fascinating, but it was the smallest creature on the wall that my eye kept returning to.  In the center, under the large figure of Christ, stood a small lamb.  Out of the lamb rivers of blue water flowed out to the edges of the apse.  While a flock of other sheep bowed in respect to the central lamb.  Why was this lamb calling my attention?  I didn’t know the answer, but this morning when I went to Mass, I found out.

After the consecration we say or sing the words, “Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.  Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.  Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”  We say it each week, most of us without thinking too much about it.  We just know it is time to kneel after we are done.  But thinking about the lamb of God represented on this wall at St. John’s, I was struck by the presence of God in this small barnyard animal.  Sometimes it is easy to describe God as being BIG.  God is big, and with that sometimes we think God is too big to think or care about us.  He has more important things to do.  Right?  It is also easy to think about God as human.  I have been told that all my life.  God was a pretty amazing human, but human.  Got it.  But our faith holds that God is lamb.  Jesus is the sacrificial lamb whose death has won us life.  That God could be so small and gentle and close makes me uncomfortable.  But it’s true.

God wants to be close to you.  God wants to show you and me mercy and grant us peace.  And whether we mean it or not, we pray it each time we go to Mass.  This next Sunday (or whenever), you attend Mass with the rest of us, and it comes time to say or sing the “Lamb of God,”  let’s pray it.  I mean really pray that God comes close, becoming small and gentle and most of all near to each and everyone of us.  Let’s pray this simple prayer because we need God’s mercy, our world needs God’s peace.  Thanks for reading.  Keep it real.  God Bless.