One of the kids had brought $5 from home to buy Pokemon cards. But, because of bad behavior, that didn’t happen. Mom drove out of the Target parking lot and no one was happy. It was then they saw a man, with a woman and two children, holding a sign: “No job. Have kids. No food. Please help. God bless you.”
“Aren’t you going to stop Mom? We need to help,” came a voice from the back seat.
Hundreds of members of an international Catholic religious order dating back to the 11th century will soon be walking the streets of Anchorage. Alaska is host for the annual meeting of the northwest chapter of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre Sept. 18-21. While possessing an exotic name and a centuries-long history in the Catholic Church, the work of the order is right out of today’s headlines.
In announcing his presidential bid earlier this summer, Donald Trump made a speech in which he said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” This column is written in response to these statements.
People travel extensively nowadays. But a trip to a vacation spot, or a pricey tour, does not necessarily make a pilgrimage. Likewise, staying in our own environment does not mean we’re not pilgrims. A pilgrimage might take us to the local shelter or a refugee program across town or even a thoughtful walk to morning Mass. We can’t all hike out of Mexico, but we can journey out of our comfort zone.
Hayes first felt a call to the priesthood when, as a sixteen-year-old, he made a Confirmation retreat in Germany. “There, I had the confidence to ask the presider (who happened to be the archbishop of the military services at the time, now Cardinal Edwin O’Brien), what I had to do to become a priest,” Hayes recalled. “He told me to go to school, and to continue to pray about it.” Later, after the retreat was over, the base chaplain asked if anyone was discerning a call to priesthood.
A deacon with nearly 40 years of service to the Archdiocese of Anchorage retired from his position as director of the Office of Worship July 1. Deacon Ted Greene, a long-time homilist and catechist, said that health problems this year combined with a restructuring of the pastoral center offices means that at age 75 it’s time to slow down. Slowing down physically is tough for a man whose intellect and interest in all things Catholic have been running at high speed for years.
Learning to confidently speak English as a second language is challenging for many newcomers to the United States. This is especially so when attempting to communicate about deeply personal and emotional topics — like the state of one’s marriage. In such cases, many non-English speakers lean back on their more familiar mother tongue.
This winter, my faith-sharing group in Omaha took on the project of preparing an apartment for a refugee family who would be arriving in the spring. We worked with Nebraska’s largest resettlement agency, Lutheran Family Services, who gave us a detailed list of household items needed, and later, a list of food to stock the family’s home for the first few days.
If you were presented with a time travel machine, in which you could journey back and forth to moments in your life, would you travel back and change anything? It’s a preposterous but intriguing question, and it came up at a family birthday party. By the time the conversation ended I realized the discussion became less about science fiction and a little bit more about our spirituality and themes of guilt and regret.
If you were a religious sister in the 1960s, garbed in a long black serge habit, tucked away in a Catholic community which revered you, you were treated with deference. But when Sister Hogan marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, the crowds of screaming protestors on the street near the Edmund Pettus Bridge told a different story. And the folks at the airport as she headed home to Detroit glared at her with eyes livid with contempt.