I Am Cain

Yesterday's Gospel was about the first act of murder. Cain killed his brother Abel. Although God knows everything, and Cain had to know He knew everything, when asked where Abel was, Cain uttered the second evasion.  (His mother and father had already uttered the first.after their act of disobedience at the devil's behest which thrust mankind into the knowledge of the evil and the capacity for evil. ).In saying, "Am I my brother's keeper?" he effectively and contemptuously denied to God what God already knew, and perhaps even hoped that somehow it was possible to fool his very Creator! In the world of human beings that followed, it has been possible for people to utter such lies and be believed by other people, and escape responsibility, or worse fool themselves that really, there was good reason. His Father in Heaven didn't love him as much as He loved Abel. And so, Abel should die that first death.

I have heard many sermons, homilies, talks on Cain, as no doubt any religious person has. But yesterday's homily somehow caught me with one phrase--that Cain had allowed his negative thoughts to overtake him to such a dramatic end. You could argue that it was a psychological rather than a theological homily. But on the other hand, that is what evil is, a flood of negativity spurred by a force, that we call the devil, that so overwhelms reason and the love of the good of others, that we act with cataclysmic impulsiveness.

Imagine it. A field where Abel is toiling. He is happy. His crops are bearing fruit. It is quiet in the field, with the sun shining, a pale reminder of the paradise out of which the family was thrown because Adam and Eve wanted to take Divinity from God. He would have given them anything, but they wanted it all, on their own terms. Abel, despite the consequence of the Fall, has managed still to trust and love God. But his brother, Cain, is an angry man, maybe because of what happened to his parents, and thus, to him. And there is that little brother, doesn't he know what happened? Why is he so happy? Why are his crops growing and Cain's are not? Why does Cain's God not favor him?

"The smug little bastard!" we can imagine Cain thinking to himself as he sees his brother tilling in the breeze. By the time he has reached his brother, who doesn't understand what it is he could have done to cause such ire, he is rage filled. Cain cannot see through the jealousy and hate. And he strikes his brother with the force of his fury.

God somehow promised to make good out of the evil his creatures had unleashed in an exercise of the free will that was intended as a gift. What would the gift of life have been without free will? He did not want automatons. He gave us the freedom to choose Him freely. And then our universal parents did not choose Him. They did what Lucifer did. "I will not submit."

So through generations there have been scourges, wars, religious misinterpretations, and one act after another that mirrors the first rage filled murder. Come on, haven't you felt it, that rage that someone approves of another more than you? That life is not fair? That some people suffer more than others, and from your point of view, your suffering is the worst? We see in what passes for news the violent blows of a husband against a wife, a father against a son, a mother against a daughter. And always, the lie about what happened, and the self-justification for an unjustified and heinous act.

We tell ourselves, no we are enlightened. And if we just got rid of religion, there wouldn't be all these beheadings and crucifixions by zealots.

God kept faith, and tomorrow, some of his creatures begin a season that remembers how He kept faith with us in the fullness of time. We each of us have essentially the choice of Paradise. Only this time, it's about the way back in, through the very suffering that we unleashed upon ourselves by disobedience.  And this time, if we decide against God, that He is not our Master, or even more, He doesn't even exist to make demands upon us, then it is an individual decision. But the sin of Adam and Eve, and of Cain, still dogs us, because the greatest deceiver can twist our weak minds and our weaker souls. If I forget about the evil of which I am capable, I will let my guard down. If I insist that I don't need something beyond myself, if I pretend that I am not Cain should the devil tempt me, then I will lose Paradise again.

I originally titled this entry, "I Am Cain, You Are Cain, We All Are Cain" but suddenly I thought I shouldn't speak for those people who would say, "I don't believe in this stuff".

But what if it is true? What if, by recognizing that God has the Grace in Abundance to keep us from being separated from Him for eternity--for that is the fire of hell, the fire of the absence of any hope of Love--we get back into Paradise.

Pretending that we are different from Cain doesn't make us different. It is the individual human heart that must change now. I need to pray that my heart changes, once for all.

As Father Robert Barron posits in his book, "The Strangest Way" which as you probably know from other entries, I love, the Cross is the center of Christian faith because God loved us so much, wanted us back with Him in Paradise, so much, that He became us and showed us the way through the suffering we had unleashed by our smirking covetousness and self-help that through us into torment.

When I am in doubt, I find Pascal's wager a nice safety net. If it were to turn out that there is o God, then it won't matter to me in oblivion, but if it does turn out that there is a God and that my effort to believe was correct, whew. (Well, that's my version of the wager.) But when I read, and consider and pray, however badly I do that, God's Presence does burst through in undeniable moments.

Maybe, with God's grace, in the moment of crisis, I won't be Cain. I will be a saint, which after all, is just really a good friend of God.

Vegan Interlude

I shall never be a vegan. Not that anyone is asking for me to convert.

It's just that today's lunch experience reminds me.

After Church, I decided I needed a little "alone time" to take a little walk and maybe stop at one of the many restaurants along Sunset for a nibble. At the risk of enraging the inhabitants of most of these United States, I do have to add that this was another of several summer like winter days--the whole nine yards, warm breeze, blue sky and sparrows chirping with abandon in trees small and large.

I passed by the Griddle Café because the number of twenty and thirty somethings waiting was littering the sidewalk. And while I have been there once or twice before, I have to wonder what they are selling, because the food is fine but not extraordinary. Not chicken. I had a little wine and cheese and hors d'oeuvres thing last night for a few friends and one of the Gelson's catering items were large skewers of cashew encrusted chicken. Yummy indeed, but enough chicken for a few days.

How about The Pikey? It is a kind of English pub with eclectic, un-pub like food, but a little pricey. It's right next to the Samuel French Bookstore and I was afraid that I would spend more money than I should in there BEFORE going to The Pikey.

Onward. Cheebo?  Hate the name. And then I noticed Elderberries Café. I see it as I drive up and down Sunset. It has the look of a well used neighborhood eatery, and I have always had a hankering to stop in. And so I did. A mish mash of counter, mismatched tables, an old style piano, and a little stage in the window where a scruffy bearded man strummed "Blowin' in the Wind". I had stepped back into the 1960s amid a crowd that hadn't been born until at least 30 years after the decade ended.

I squeezed into a table with my back at the unused piano. I saw a Whole Earth magazine and realized that this was likely a health food place.  All right, that's fine, I can go healthy!

Then a slim slightly balding young man with a mustache and a sloganed T-shirt handed me a menu. And I realized. We are not talking just healthy, or even vegetarian. We are talking vegan. I have never eaten anything vegan. And I am not sure I want to.

But there is a man singing on the window stage and several customers right near me, and I just never have gotten this about myself, but I feel like I would be doing something vaguely disreputable if after sitting down I suddenly jump up and leave with an implicit "I don't like vegan" that was akin to an explicit shout.

What sounded vaguely like something I could tolerate?  A Mediterranean Panini. Olives. Tomato. Some green leafy thing and cheese. Ok. That's the order.  Except the cheese I would realize when the otherwise attractive sandwich appeared was not in anyway related to cows.  What it is made of I didn't ask, but it tasted nothing like any kind of cheese I have ever experienced.

I perused the Whole Life Magazine, Reiki, Mindfulness, Tantric sex. And I didn't hate the sandwich. I didn't like it a lot. But I didn't hate it. There was this strawberry lemonade thing that was pretty good, except for some odd pulp.

And I admitted to myself as I never have before. At least when it comes to food I am entirely mainstream. And when it comes to anything New Age, I just don't get it. But when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and I bade farewell to the man in the window, took a picture of Elderberries Café and chalked it up to an experience I won't repeat, but don't regret.

Exploded Out of Complacency and Thrust Into the Light

Mass, 12:15 at St. Victor Parish in West Hollywood on Super Bowl Sunday.  As usual, parishioners and visitors trickle in. There is never a huge crowd. St. Victor is heir to the same ills of many other parishes. As the usher hands a bulletin--to those who will take one, for not everyone will--a few greet with a smile, many stare blank faced as they walk automatonically through to their customary seats. At least a third of those who will attend won't come until around the Gospel, a good ten minutes into the service. A few of those will not even come inside, but rather stand out in the vestibule peering through the glass partition.

Even we who serve on the altar have developed a certain malaise, notwithstanding the Eucharistic Presence of God Himself mere feet away. Too often we move and speak through the liturgy, acting more out of rote than out of devotion. If we really apprehended the startling truth that God Himself feeds us week after week (and if you are able, day after day), we would be awestruck not unlike Paul on his way to Damascus. Thrown from our feet and asked each by name, "Why do you fail to adore Me who loves you relentlessly?"

Even our priests fall sometimes into a routine, uninspired celebration in persona Christi, fast mumbling the words from Collect to Consecration and seeking a quick escape from the exiting gathered.  A kind of folie a deux of religious boredom, a loss of the Center. Perhaps it is something endemic to a society of plenty where a big crisis is who got "snubbed" for a Oscar nomination, or whether Bruce Jenner is a transsexual in progress or whether the smoking age should be raised to 21. We forget about the people out there, all over the world, whose very day is consumed with survival. We forget about our respective missions in God's plan or we deny that there is a God with any plan at all. Smugly, we opine, since there is suffering, there must be no God.

And then, a single individual appears for a moment and explodes us out of our complacency. And reminds us that our lives are not about us (credit to Fr. Robert Barron for this line).

When I came into the sacristy today a visiting priest was in the sanctuary praying.  Fr. Thomas Cahill, MJ, a priest of Miles Jesus, a not terribly well known group that runs schools and parishes in places like India, was to be the celebrant, the day before his return to Mumbai (Bombay) and his work for 10 months out of every year. I understand he has been doing this for many years. He left a life in Beverly Hills to be formed a priest and a missionary.





I found this photograph of Fr. Cahill being ordained by Saint John Paul the II.  This is an old photograph. He appears now to be roughly my age, and so, his hair is gray and he wasn't wearing glasses. That this photograph represents the young Fr. Cahill is not only because the photograph said so (and there could easily be other Thomas Cahill's) but because there was a little article with it that described his history which I recognized after speaking with him and others about him today.

His stance was particularly reverent and his pace from the moment of the Greeting was unhurried. Lovely. But God was to provide more. Fr. Cahill's homily began unassumingly. Today, he reminded us, was Super Bowl Sunday (it occurred to me that this missionary priest probably pays little attention to that which has nearly become a national holiday in the United States) but there was another Super Bowl Sunday, the one every week, the one which pits the forces of light against the forces of darkness. It is a contest which we all fight, but he told us a story of a woman who was brought out of utter darkness, not of her own making, into the Light. The place where Father works has lately found that a number of those known as "untouchables" are coming to spend the nights, or as often as they can. If you remember your sixth grade world history class if you are a person of my generation, you might also remember that in the caste system of India, these people are considered less than dirt by the four castes, beginning with the Brahmin, the most rich and noble and ending with the shudra, the semi or unskilled laborers. The untouchables don't rate a caste. This is not the stuff of the past. It is a legacy to today. A dark legacy. They are surrounded by Hindu gods of great darkness as well. And cursed as far as the people of the land believe.

Father talked of one such woman. She was married at 13 and immediately had children, five of them, all girls. As girls are not wanted, her husband and her family believed her irrevocably cursed and she would be "hammered".  This is not a figurative word in this context. Her husband would take a hammer to her, as would others in her family, in more than one case opening large wounds, one on her face that required over 20 stitches. At some point, she managed to have a boy.  Because she couldn't support the family, three of the girls died. From the time she had these children, a child herself, to her 60th year, she lived this life. But somehow, somehow, she found the oasis of the place in which Fr. Cahill works and lives, in Mumbai.

She was drawn there by a vision of Christ. He did not say how this woman, Akkuabai, came to have a vision that brought her there and there she has come regularly. Something in her, interiorly, changed also. It was so evident even to her abusive (although in that world such a man would not be considered abusive) husband that something dramatic had happened to her in coming to this Christian place, that his curiosity was piqued and he also began to come.

They are two of about 20 untouchables who attend Mass, although they are not officially Christian. On at least one occasion, when Father said Mass, he noticed that the entire group stood as if transfixed. He could not imagine what their expressions meant. When he asked, they told him that they felt as if they were struck by lightning; they could not move. The experience of this place, this Mass, this Christian God had altered them in some essential way. In the battle of dark against light, of the devil against the Creator of the Universe, Akkubai and these others had been brought out of the darkness.

That was the homily. One of my fellow parishioners told me that two people in front of him who had taken the bulletin had begun to read it as Fr. began his homily. This is not unusual. People often do not listen to the priest preaching. Partly that is a disrespect. Partly, although happily in my parish this is not usually the case, it is the result of poor homilists. But as Fr. Cahill spoke, quietly, a little haltingly in the beginning as he found his place in his notes, they looked up and found themselves unable to do anything other than to listen.

As Fr. returned to the presider's chair, he read the announcements. He said that he wanted to read them now so that, when we recited the creed and as the liturgy of the Eucharist was celebrated, we would not be distracted, that we would be focused fully on Our Lord.

I would doubt that there were many, if any, not giving their full attention to the celebration of the Mass by this time. Somehow, this single priest had restored us to our attention to the Transcendent becoming Present in the room. When he raised the Host to consecration he did so with a selfless slow motion that drew our eyes to the Bread of Life. Today was the first Sunday and at our parish, the Eucharist is exposed. This means, if one believes, that God is fully and truly Present to those that pray before Him as much as any material item we can feel or taste or see. Before he place Our Lord into the Monstrance (the holder of the Consecrated Host) Fr. reminded us of the joyful gravity of what we had and what it requires of us.

I talked to at least two individuals who had been in tears. God is always there in exactly the same Powerful and Loving way, but so often we miss him, worse, ignore Him.

This American priest, these days a visitor to his own country, was quite the mediator today--putting our eyes on Christ the Lord, reminding us that we have a place in the contest between dark and light, and that we cannot fall into a cozy sleep as if it has nothing to do with us. And oddly, he had given us hope that there was still some fervor within us. Or that there ought to be.