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Fr. Michael Juran |
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The Listener by Taylor Caldwell: Our pastors would listen—if we gave them the time to listen to us. But we have burdened them with tasks which should be our own. We have demanded not only that they be our shepherds but that they take our trivialities, our social aspirations, the “fun” of our children, on their weary backs. We have demanded that they be expert businessmen, politicians, accountants, playmates, community directors, “good fellows,” judges, lawyers, and settlers of local quarrels. We have given them little time for listening, and we do not listen to them, either. We must offer them concrete help and assume our own responsibilities. We forget that they are men, also, frequently very tired, always unappreciated, sometimes disheartened, quite often appalled, worried, anxious, lonely, grieved. They are not supermen, without human agony and human longing. Heedlessly, we neglect them—unless we wish them to serve us in material ways, when their ways should be exclusively God’s. We demand of them what we would not dare to demand of anyone else, even ourselves. We give them no time to listen, when to have someone listen, without hurry, without the click of a clock, is the direst need of our spirits. Until we free our shepherds from our insistence that they be our servants, let us remember that there is someone who listens. He is available to all of us, all of the time, all of our lives. The Listener. We have only to talk to him. Now. Today. Tonight. He understands our language, our semantics, our terrors, our secrets, our sins, our crimes, our sorrow. He will not consider you sentimental if you speak fondly of the past, if you are old. He will not turn you away if you are a liar, a thief, a murderer, a hypocrite, a betrayer. He will listen to you. He will not be impatient if you become maudlin, or cry in self-pity, or if you are a coward or a fool. He has listened to people like this all his life. He will continue to listen. While he listens, you will find your own problems solved. Will he speak to you, also? Who knows? Perhaps. Surely, if you ask him. If you listen, too.
Pam Record requested I print the prayer I used to say in the seminary as I do say as a priest even today. I used this prayer when I delivered my homily on the 4th Sunday of advent: “God has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission—I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I shall do good…Therefore, I will trust him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him..God does nothing in vain. He may prolong my life, he may shorten it; he knows what he is about…O my God, I will put myself without reserve into your hands.” This was a prayer first said by Cardinal John Newman, one of the founders and first priests of the Diocese of Buffalo.
A PARABLE FOR 2008: ON SATURDAY: he was lector at the evening Mass.
ON SATURDAY: she called her husband a no-good drunken bum for watching the baseball game and drinking a six-pack instead of painting the kitchen as he’d promised.
ON SUNDAY:they both went to Mass and communion and generally felt quite good about themselves. |
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Father Mike's Page Latest Update: April 3, 2008 |
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SUBJECT: EVEN GOD ENJOYS A GOOD LAUGH! There were three good arguments that Jesus was Black: 1. He called everyone brother. 2. He liked Gospel. 3. He couldn’t get a fair trial.
But then there were three equally good arguments that Jesus was Jewish: 1. He went into his Father’s business. 2. He lived at home until he was 33. 3. He was sure his Mother was a virgin and his Mother was sure He was God.
But then there were three equally good arguments that Jesus was Italian: 1. He talked with his hands. 2. He had wine with his meals. 3. He used olive oil.
But then there were three equally good arguments that Jesus was a Californian: 1. He never cut his hair. 2. He walked around barefoot all the time. 3. He started a new religion.
But then there were three equally good arguments that Jesus was an American Indian: 1. He was at peace with nature. 2. He ate a lot of fish. 3. He talked about the Great Spirit.
But then there were three equally good arguments that Jesus was Irish: 1. He never got married. He was always telling stories. 3. He loved green pastures.
But the most compelling evidence of all---three proofs that Jesus was a WOMAN: 1. He fed a crowd at a moment’s notice when there was no food. 2. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn’t get it. 3. And even when he was dead, he had to get up because there was work to do.
Amen!!!
Not too long ago, Fr. Bill and I attended a convocation of the priests of this diocese with Bishop Lynch to address the issue of “vocations”: the day long session was entitled “Fishers’ of Men”. Daydreaming during the conference, I recalled a satirical piece written by my classmate back in 1973 entitled: HOW TO MAKE A BREAKTHROUGH IN VOCATION RECRUITING THROUGH SELECTIVE ADVERTISING. I dug it out of one of my dusty, musty files and have printed it here for your humorous consumption: (Remember, it was written back in the radical and liberal ecclesiastical 70’s!) Prefect Congregation of the Priesthood Vatican City
Your Eminence:
At the more or less direct suggestion of my Superior General, I am writing to explain about the vocation advertisement which I ran in Playmate Magazine recently. He is of the opinion that you may already have encountered some of the resultant publicity.
I doubt that you have had occasion to become familiar with the magazine in question and I cannot include a copy for your inspection since it would be automatically destroyed by the Vatican Post Office. In my opinion it is a very fine periodical—for the most part—which contains articles and stories by some of the world’s most renowned and respected writers. Unfortunately it also contains photographs of scantily clad young ladies, some of whom are “topless,” as the idiom has it here, plus a regrettable few who are “bottomless,” and a quite brazen one or two who are both, simultaneously. There are also a number of suggestive cartoons and drawings. In all candor I will have to admit that looking at Playmate is a directly proximate occasion of sin.
Why then, you may be asking—as did the Superior General upon learning that I had placed the ad—would one seek candidates for the celibate priesthood from such a readership? It’s a fair question but irrelevant. For you must understand, Eminence, that statistics show Playmate to be the magazine most widely read by young men of all religious persuasions or lack thereof. Shocking as it may seem, it is as avidly perused on Catholic campuses as on seculiar ones. Thus I reasoned that if we were to rule out all young men who risked the proximate occasion of carnal sin by reading Playmate we would be cutting ourselves off from virtually all candidates.
Our own traditional campaigns in the Catholic press would seem to bear out this reasoning. Our standard advertisements in Lily and Thorn, Boys of St. Bernard, The Chastity Crier, Offer It Up!, and Custody of the Eyes have brought in but four applications in the past seven years—one from an elderly gentlemen in prison, two which were discarded because they came in scented envelopes, and one from a nine-year-old Congolese youth.
Our high school visitation program has fared no better. In many cases, the assembled students have laughed derisively at our veteran man in the field, Friar Ethelbert Mary, who always begins his talks with a prayer to our founder, Blessed Humperdink the Persistent. They make slingshots out of the elasticized wrist scapulars he distributes and airplanes out of our three-color folder “Twenty-four Ejaculations for Personal Piety” (which don’t come cheap, I can tell you). We’ve tried direct mailings to Catholic lads on their birthdays and sent Papal Blessings to their parents; we’ve offered free bus trips from the metropolitan areas to our novitiate in Bismark, North Dakota (with free Cokes and potato chips en route); we’ve even promised plastic statuettes and Catholic art calendars to anyone who would write for one of our brochures—all to no avail.
Meanwhile, as I’m sure you must be aware, our order faces a personnel problem of crisis proportions. Aside from Brother Paul who suffers from chronic hiccups, I am the youngest member of the community—and I am forty-nine. Our median age has crept up to sixty-eight and more than two-thirds of our order now reside in the Humperdink Haven for the Bedridden. Bismark has three novices but doubts that two of them will last the winter. The Retreat Houses which have been our special mission are all in need of modernization—it seems that the soft, spineless retreatants we get today insist on central heating and indoor toilet facilities (cutting out tea and coffee at supper didn’t work.)
But it was when I phoned our major seminary in Dubuque and got no answer—the number had been disconnected—that I knew we were in real trouble. Radical action was demanded and I launched “Operation Breakthrough,” as I like to think of it, forthwith.
The Playmate ad is only one step. I can’t give you all the details and won’t, because other recruitment directors who are in as much trouble as I am will copy them shamelessly. But I can say that you can look for some pretty unconventional and imaginative breakthroughs in the near future. Our stunning new “Swing with the Big J” posters are going up in selective singles bars across the country; the National Football League is considering my bid to sponsor the “Jesus Christ Super Bowl” on the Feast of the Circumcision; we’re thinking of entering a Holy Ghost Turbine in the Indianapolis 500; Ara Parseghian has agreed to endorse our “Punt, Pass and Pray” competition; Jerry Lewis will host our television series “The Vocation game” starting next fall; and Mae West has done a series of color spots for us wearing a black mantilla and saying: “If I had it to do over again—and I do—I’d only confess to a Humperdinkian Friar.”
I’m not at liberty to tell you exactly how many responses we’ve had from the Playmate ad. Suffice it to say that I’m already taking bids on the construction of a new wing for the Novitiate (with indoor pool, piano bar and sauna). And I can tell you something else—none of these new applicants used scented envelopes!
Yours respectfully in the all-new vineyard, Chuck
Rev. Charles “Studs” Winkler, Recruitment Director Friars Regular of the Order of Blessed Humperdink the Persistent
Pentecost...The Easter season lasts for fifty days, ending with "Pentecost" (from the Greek "pentekoste," "fiftieth"). Ranking second only to Easter, the feast of Pentecost must be understood in the context of the Jewish feast by the same name. Its other name in Jewish tradition is Feast of Weeks, a full season of seven weeks of thanksgiving beginning with Passover Sabbath (see Tobias 2:1; 2Macabees 12:32). This prolonged festival celebrated the theme of harvest and thanksgiving. It evolved before the time of Christ into a memorial of the covenant and, by 300 c.e., a memorial of the giving of the Law. By the end of the 2nd century, Christians were observing a similar fifty day festival of rejoicing after the annual Pascha. It seems that originally the followers of Jesus continued to observe the Jewish festival, a time of "first fruits" (see 1 Corinthians 16:8 and 15:20, 23) rather than a distinctly new theme. During these weeks, fasting and kneeling were forbidden because of the joyful experience of resurrection. By the late 4th century, the feast of the Ascension was celebrated in some parts of the church on the fortieth day after Easter (see Acts 1:3, 9-11). Originally, this mystery of the ending of Jesus' visible presence among his followers seems to have been observed as part of the outpouring of the Spirit on the 50th day, or Pentecost. For the first time, the original 50-day festival was broken. The weekdays between the Ascension and Pentecost are a preparation period for the outpouring of the Spirit. It is popularly called the Pentecost Novena (see Acts 1:14). Pentecost itself closes out the Easter season. It celebrates the overwhelming experience of God pouring out the Spirit upon the first community of those who believed Jesus was the Lord and Christ (see Acts 2:1-4). Pentecost is called, therefore, the birth of the church or the birth of the church's mission. The color of vestments and decorations for Pentecost is red. It symbolizes the intense love and fire of the Holy Spirit. Other symbols of the Pentecost event are the dove (see Luke 3:21-220, the tongues of flame (see Acts 2:1-4), and wind (see Acts 2:2). |
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