My Saint--Maybe

I am in the Church office as I write. There are two levels of intensity in this role in which I volunteer, on Wednesdays only--relentlessly quiet or relentlessly busy.  Perhaps it is that it is just a few days after Easter and Christians are still on some spring break. It has been the quiet so far today as the early afternoon becomes middling. The birds are chirping outside the window on a day that was supposed to be cloudy, but is sun and breeze. The Pacific Hills kids are playing leisurely basketball on the other side of the trees, and I have tired of reading bits of the Early Church Fathers, and other on line treatises.

I am mulling some of what I have read about various individuals, a few already pronounced saints, those about to be saints, like John XXIII and John Paul II, and those not quite as far along the line, though they have been dead far longer, like Servants of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Father Patrick Peyton and Elizabeth Leseur,



and Blessed John Henry Newman.

There is no rule that says I have to pick one intercessor. And more than one could guide me in my spiritual journey. Yet instead of integrating them all, so far, I jump from one to the other.

Part of the reason for my jumping should be a reason for my loyalty--the reality of each person's, for a saint was just as much born in original sin and engaged in personal sin, particular frailty which sometimes, and likely unfairly, turns me "off". An example. From and after his funeral in 2005 I was wildly emotional about John Paul II and delighted about his upcoming canonization. 

As the wind turned the pages on the Roman Missal on his wooden casket, I felt something of his connection to the Transcendent. Then I heard from someone who was present at a large audience at which he became testy at the crowd and shouted, "The Pope is Speaking!". I have been around priests who suffer from a rather demeaning clericalism in which no lay person ,male or female, regardless of education and vocation is more than an errant child.. This is a failure to me of the consecration to service. Then I have read more about his iron clad resistances to any challenge on his operational and daily authority (not the Dogma of Infallibility). I understand PR. We cannot help but cover over the chinks in the armor of family, friends and the famous after they have left the earth. But in the designation of saints one wonders whether the stories of martyrdom and heroic virtue are more fiction than fact.  I have become suspicious.  He is John Paul the Great for all time, but is that perhaps unfair both to him and to us? He probably was John Paul the Sometimes Great. Maybe that sometimes is more than enough. He still compels me, as do all those saints who were complex in the expressions of their sanctity.

I cannot get out of my head, for another example, what my late pastor told me about his ever so brief encounter with Archbishop Sheen. My former pastor was a young priest when he happened to be in a location where the Archbishop was giving one of his lectures or homilies to a gathered group of Catholics. Although Sheen was renowned for his exegesis, as the once young priest recounted, it wasn't all that spectacular, and then he added that asked to bring something to the famous cleric in his hotel room, the reception was as cold as it was short. So, what am I expecting? Sheen was by this time fairly old, and probably wildly tired.   



And Newman.  

I have read many of his homilies given both before and after his reception into the Catholic Church. Anglicans and Catholics alike criticized him for his sincerity. What I read seems a torturous sincere search for truth. (Read, for example, "Passion for Truth" by Fr. Juan Velez). At Littlemore, alone in his chapel, I felt certain he was my intercessor for life. But then he is co-opted by progressive thinkers on his appeal to "conscience" mistaken to be private conscience when his context was underlying objective and Divine Truth, not human relativism or uncontrolled feeling as foundation. But what did he do to make his case so easily twisted? And what do I not know about the real Newman, the day to day Newman. I began to read a book that was critical of him, but I became afraid of finding another hero or heroine with clay feet.

Stop. Stop, Djinn. What are you doing? Are you looking for a saint, which we are all called to be, with all the warts and incompetency of spirit? They sought to follow Christ; they weren't Christ, without sin. I keep forgetting. I want the pure. And the pure exists only in Paradise. These people, just people, point to the pure. They remind me to persevere--to avoid the temptation of something else I have been reading about, acedia, an "I don't care" form of despair, a detached "contemptus mundi".

The men and women who are considered for public sainthood (there are many who will never be knownas the saints they were). They are just models of people who loved God who were doing their imperfect best to be with Him after performing their mission--which Newman famously said none of us may ever know when we live. And telling us to do the same now that they have left us and are in a position to give us an ear and have God's ear and cheer us on.

So maybe they are all my saints. Each has something to teach me as I stumble along the road.

Sister Goldenhair and the Memories She Evokes

I was taking the short drive home from my Wednesday "job" as volunteer secretary at my parish. As I approached my block the soft rock station sequed into a favorite 1970s oldie of mine, "Sister Goldenhair" by America. Ahh, anything by America probably would have evoked the same wonderful sudden feeling I haven't had that much over the last years--a feeling of endless possibility. I felt as the 20 something I had been when I first spun an LP (gosh that seems positively antediluvian) at WFUV back in the Bronx from which I have long been an émigré.

 California Djinn

 

I never tended toward being particularly happy or optimistic as a child or late teen life--but that particular part of my life, the year or so of my college life, I felt for the first time free-ish of soul.
It had been a hard early part of the decade losing a mother with whom I had a rather difficult relationship--until she became ill and all the self-protecting walls finally came down. She was gone. I missed her but there had been a resolution by implication in how much she softened before she died.
It was as if she gave me permission finally to enjoy myself, something that had seemed unpermitted in earlier days.

It was at college and in college radio that I became so much less shy that people who know me today think it was never possible I ever had been quiet and afraid to show myself. I seriously considered diving into the low pay arena of trying to be an on air performer--even if it meant going to some low watt station in the middle of nowhere. I loved the experience of being in that low lit little room surrounded by equipment and turntables and cassettes. There were people who heard me in whatever show I was privileged to do who called me, and wrote to me, and sent me the odd book or album in appreciation of what they thought was my verbal and tonal skill. And then I got to meet so many of the people who became a cadre of friends till this day. And I began to talk of moving to this sun kissed state.

The possibility of coming here to California probably got me through the entirety of law school, which I did not enjoy, but which gave me an intellectual foundation which has stood me in good stead for over 30 years. And then the adventure began when for the very first time in my life I did not overanalyze the bad things that could happen if I did not succeed in my move--the California Bar and job seeking. 

I was 27 then, and more than half that time has passed since the adventure began.

I know, intellectually, that possibilities have narrowed, simply by virtue of those statistical realities of aging. BUT, in the moment, with the music playing from days long gone by, there was nothing that couldn't be achieved. And it was the best fleeting moment.

 The Wednesday parish secretary at rest on the church steps