Uncategorized – Page 40 – Journeying Into Mystery

Back to where we belong – a reflection on the gospel for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

This past weekend, Ruthie and I, and our family were up in Two Harbors for a family get together. Ruthie and I went to the 4:30 pm Mass at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Two Harbors, having the wonderful pleasure of actually worshiping in the same pew together. Initially, when I read the gospel earlier in the week I remembered an Ollie and Lena joke that I won’t repeat here. As the priest was homilizing on the gospel this was the reflection that came to my mind.

When the comedian, Woody Allen, was doing stand-up, he had an observation about death that I still enjoy to this day. He remarked, “I am not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

As our gospel readings wind down to the end of the liturgical year, we begin to reflect on death and our life’s journey. Each liturgical year, we accompany the paschal mystery of Jesus, his life, his death and his resurrection. In doing so, however, we are not merely observers of some historical personage from a long time ago. The flow of the liturgical year and the scriptural readings that accompany that flow are meant to engage us in reflecting on our own life’s journey as we journey with that of Jesus. This merging of our life’s story with his began the moment we were baptized into his passion, death, and resurrection.

The gospel for this weekend calls us to confront our own mortal condition. We are going to die, whether we, like Woody Allen, want to be there or not. We generally avoid thinking about our own demise. Plain and simple it is just too depressing. However, the shortness of our human life is a reality we have to confront.

In Psalm 89, the psalmist writes, “To your (God) eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, no more than a watch in the night. You sweep us away like a dream, like the grass which springs up in the morning. In the morning it springs up and flowers: by evening it withers and fades.” A little later in the psalm, it is written, “Our life is over like a sigh. Our span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone. … Make us know the shortness of our life that we may gain wisdom of heart.”

Acknowledging that the time we have on this earth is so short, forces us to think about how we have lived our lives. How have we used the gifts we have been given? In what way has God’s Kingdom been advanced in the world by our presence? Is the world better off for us having lived, or would it have been better had we never had been born? Have we used the time we have had, wisely? Will the lives we have led been deemed worthy to attain to the coming age, where we will become like angels?

All of these questions, and many more, remind us that we are living in the end times, the “eschaton”, when Jesus will return in glory. If this makes us uncomfortable, well then, we should be uncomfortable. Perhaps, we should begin to rectify our lives, to reform our lives. Unlike so many others who run from death in fear, let us embrace death after having had a lifetime of preparation. Let us be good stewards of our short time on earth. Let us be good stewards of the gifts that God has given us, sharing those gifts with others in need. Let us be faithful servants of the God who loved us into creation, and will love us into recreation at our deaths.

Just a brief note …

I am never too sure as to how many folks look at this blog or not. While I hope that it gets read or listened to, as in the case of the music, were it followed only by a couple of folks that would be just fine.

I am having my right knee replaced tomorrow, which, along with recovery and therapy may either give me a lot of time to post things, or may not. If it is the latter, I ask you to be patient. If it is the former, well, I guess that unless I get really obnoxious there won’t be any problem.

Peace,

Bob Wagner

Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy: a homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/detail.cfm?ID=17236 The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version. Author: Doré, Gustave, 1832-1883 Image Title: Jesus at the House of Martha and Mary Scripture Reference: Luke 10 Description: Martha tells Jesus to have Mary help her, as Mary sits at Jesus' feet. — Jesus Visits Mary and Martha, a woodcut illustration by Gustave Dore

There is an old Simon and Garfunkel song from the 60’s that went, “Slow down, you move too fast. Gotta make the mornin’ last, just tripping down the cobble stones, lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy.”

I am reminded of that song whenever I read this gospel. We all know the Mary and Martha’s in our lives. Who are the Mary’s who emulate the lyrics of this song? Who are the Martha’s who are the antithesis of this song? Those who know my mother would recognize her as a Martha. Mom can be obsessively compulsive about cleaning. As my father once observed, we had the cleanest dirt in town. My mother takes great pride in keeping a clean and orderly house. Now on the other hand, Ruthie’s mom has had a different approach to housecleaning best expressed by her mother’s words, “If you don’t like the way my house looks, take off your glasses!”

As a rule, we as Americans are pretty obsessed about working. We are duped into thinking that our self-worth is linked only to our ability to work. We can be so obsessive about working that we cheat time with our families and we cheat vacation to work even more. There was a romantic comedy a number of years ago, in which an American woman is having lunch with an Italian man. At one point in their meal together, she looks at her watch and tells the man that the time she allotted for lunch was over and she needed to get back to work. The man looks at her and says wisely, “this is the difference between we Italians and you Americans. In Italy, we work so that we can live. In America, you live so that you can work.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus is emphasizing to Martha and to all of us to slow down and allow time for God in our very busy day. God does not impose his presence upon us. Having free will, it is only we who have the power to allow God, time in our day. How much time do we allow God during our busy day?

This is the key point about the commandment of keeping holy the Sabbath. Coming to synagogue or church on the Sabbath is not about God needing our prayers and worship to feel good. As Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees, the Sabbath was made for us. The Sabbath is to be OUR day of rest.

Rabbi Harold Kushner in a book on Psalm 23, relates a story from the 19^th century, when a British group of men hired African porters to carry their supplies into the jungle on a Safari. The group walked for 6 days in the jungle, and on the 7^th day the porters refused to move. When one of the British men asked why, the leader of the porters replied that they had been traveling for 6 days, and needed 1 day for their souls to catch up with them.

This poses a question for us. How often throughout the week do we allow our souls to catch up with us?

Are we so obsessively busy with all the activities in our lives that we ignore or completely forget about the God who created us? Do we only allot one hour a week to the God who created us, who loved us into existence, and sent his Son to teach us and then die and rise from the dead for us? In the 168 hours we have in each week, for some people is even this one hour in all of those hours too much time to spend with God?

Jesus urges us to put the important areas of our lives into perspective and then order our lives accordingly. Our relationship with God must always be first, immediately followed by our relationship with our families and friends. When we do this, everything else, including our work will fall into its proper place. It does not have to be an either/or choice, but think of it as a choice of “with.” In other words, we can be very busy but at the same time be very much aware of God’s presence in the moment. However, we must make sure that we set aside time every day to be exclusively alone with God.

In all of her busyness, my mother never neglected her time with those of us in my family, and she always set aside time daily to be exclusively with God. Mom has always known how to order that which is most important in her life. However, if we find our lives so compulsively busy that we can’t fit God into our daily living, then let us take my mother-in-law’s words about housework to heart and apply them to our busy lives. There are times when we must simply “take off our glasses” and drop the busyness of our lives, so that we can spend time with God, making God first in our lives.

Upon hearing about the death of Dave Waite

My expectations in blogging are not harboring some delusion of affecting a change in the earth’s rotation or saving the universe. I approach this blog as a way of relating my particular passage through life. As the psalmists note poetically, time goes by quickly and all life quickly blooms and then, as quickly, fades. The blog is a way of letting the world see one’s blooms before they droop and then drop to the earth. In a less poetic and more cynical analogy, it is a bit akin to a dog marking territory, letting the rest of the animal kingdom know who has passed by.

We all have stories and those stories are important. As I recall from a theology class from the distant past, the understanding of eternal life from the theology of orthodox Judaism, is to so fully live life and achieve much in life so that the stories about your life will continue to circulate far into the future. While not the original intention behind the composing of the Psalm Offerings, in a way, posting those music compositions and noting for whom they are dedicated is a way of noting the important story of those lives who have passed into the fullness of God’s Reign, and the importance of those whose lives are still in the being of becoming.

It was with a mixture of both excitement and then sadness to hear about my friend Dave Waite from his widow, Gerda. Gerda, in great kindness, commented on the music dedicated to Dave (Psalm Offering 4, Opus 4), and informed me that Dave passed away in 2004. Dave, as I had noted in the comment about him on that blog, was larger than life, gregarious with a capital G, and living the gift God gave him fully and fearlessly. Dave, as all of us do, had his Achilles heel, but what a remarkable man he was.

I remember the very first autobiographical story that Dave related to me as we were rehearsing the opera, The Elixir of Love. We were sitting in a room on the lower level of O’Shaughnessy Music Building on the campus of the College of St. Catherine’s. The room was a very small lounge with a couple of stuffed chairs and some classroom chairs and a coca-cola vending machine, the only room, I must add, on that level that did not have a practice piano in it.

Dave talked about his mom, who had died when he was in junior high. Upon his mother’s death, his dad, a Presbyterian minister, thought it best that Dave spend some time on his Uncle’s farm, while his dad tended to those things that needed to be settled when a love one dies. It was the winter, and Dave’s uncle had a prized stud bull which had a rather sour disposition toward most homo sapiens. Dave and his cousin liked to rile the bull up by throwing frozen cow turds at the bull. One day, while his uncle was in town, they riled the bull so greatly that the bull chased them across the field. They sought to escape the bull and possibly great harm by running across a frozen pond. When the bull’s hooves hit the frozen surface he legs went in all four directions, belly flopping on the surface of the pond. Unable to get up, the bull got even angrier. Knowing that the bull was the prize stud for the farm, and fearing the wrath of his uncle, the two boys decided it would be a far better fate to be mauled by the bull then mauled by the uncle. They tried and tried to get the bull up on his feet, but to no avail. Then finally backed a tractor up to the pond, hooked an old rusty chain around the back of the tractor to the hind quarters of the bull and pulled the bull off the pond. In doing so, they damaged the bull’s most prized and valuable private parts. His uncle upon looking at the bull thought the wounds were due to getting hung up on some barb wire. The boys never told the uncle exactly what happened. All Dave related that was in the Spring, when his uncle sent the bull out to mate with cows who were in heat, the bull could not perform his primary function. Dave said the memory that lingered in his mind was the sight of the unperforming bull being chased across the pasture by very single-minded cows in heat. Alas, the bull ended up being hamburger on somebody’s plate.

The second story that Dave related to me had a similar agricultural bent to it. Dave for a semester or two studied voice at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. His voice professor, whose name I cannot remember, sang in the Metropolitan Opera. His voice professor also ran a dairy farm when he was not engaged singing for the Met. Dave was at his voice professor’s farm for voice lessons when two men from the Met came to negotiate a contract for the professor to sing with the opera for another season. Upon arriving at the farm, the professor’s wife directed them to the barn where the professor was engaged in milking cows. These two business men, in expensive $700 suits (remember this was back in 1970 or so) went down to the barn where they found the professor in his overalls busily milking his cows. As they talked, the professor told them not to stand behind this one particular cow, because the cow had the scours (a rather explosive diarrhea condition). The two men ignored the warning of the professor. When the cow started to fidget as the professor was milking her, he slapped her on the rear end to which the cow responded by literally showering the two men in their expensive business suits in liquid cow manure. The shower was so profuse that Dave said you could see where they had stood by the outline on the wall behind them. Dave said, covered in cow crap, they ran up to the house clean up but the professor’s wife stopped them at the door, made them undress on the porch, put their clothes in a plastic bag, and gave them coveralls to wear back into the city. Apparently, this did not have a negative affect on his professor’s singing for the Met that season.

Dave was a very gifted storyteller, and we heard many a great story from Dave during the production of that opera. I had the joy of hearing many more for some years afterward. I do miss him and wish him the blessings of the greatest story that can be related, the fullness of his life with God today.

Psalm Offering 3 Opus 2 for piano

This Psalm Offering was composed in 1985 to commemorate the baptism of my godson, Jordan.

Musically, this Psalm Offering is a neo-Romantic period piece. The chromatic passages very Chopinesque. The structure of the music is in two part form, specifically, AB, bridge, a development of the A melody, and two variations on the B melody before the ending.

A little about me …

I am Bob Wagner. How best to describe who I am? I was born in Chicago. I moved quite a bit as a kid, my dad, a mechanical engineer, was transferred between Chicago, IL and St. Paul, MN several times. At the beginning of my junior year, we finally settled in St. Paul. I went to St. Bernard’s High School on Rice Street and the most significant thing that happened to me on that first day of school was meeting Ruth Ahmann. As I sat next to her in band that day, she smiled at me and welcomed me. She has a most extraordinarily beautiful smile. From that first brief encounter began a relationship that would later grow to dating, becoming engaged, and being married now close to 41 years.

I went on to major in music, piano my major instrument, voice my minor instrument earning my music degree from the University (then, College) of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN. I taught vocal/general music in schools from 1975 to 1988. During that time, I also was the director of liturgical music in two Catholic parishes, St. Wenceslaus, New Prague and St. Hubert, Chanhassen. Ruth’s studies led her to a degree as a Registered Nurse. She has been a nurse in a big metropolitan hospital, a small rural hospital, and since the birth of our youngest child, Beth, has worked as a nursing home nurse, the past 15 years at the Minnesota State Veterans Home in Minneapolis.

I am in my 39th year of church ministry. Along with teaching music in Catholic Schools, and being a director of liturgy and music, I have also worked as a director of pastoral ministry and pastoral administration. I earned a Master Degree in Pastoral Studies from the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity, University of St. Thomas in 1989. I was ordained to the Permanent Diaconate for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis on September 24, 1994 by Archbishop John Roach. I have ministered as a deacon in large suburban parishes, urban parishes, small town parishes and rural parishes. I go to where the Archbishop assigns me.

My first intent in majoring in music was to be a composer of music. Of course, composing music is an invitation to destitution and starvation. However, I have a body of piano compositions I have entitled “Psalm Offerings,” and a rather large body of vocal/choral/instrumental music.

I have a large collection of poems, mostly about the relationship I have had with Ruth, entitled, “The Book of Ruth.” It has grown from about 25 poems to over 175 poems. Is it good poetry? Probably not, but the poems are reflections in many ways of how I have experienced the presence of God in my relationship with Ruth all these years. As such, the poems are a measurement of my relationship with God through Ruth.

I am a certified spiritual director, doing my studies through the Franciscan Spirituality Center in Lacrosse, WI.

Lastly, the greatest legacy I will leave on this earth are my children: Andy, Luke, Meg and Beth.

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