THE GREAT WALL

Yankees, Elections and Lots of lectures

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead. – Voltaire

 

It has warmed up a bit since the snow last weekend.

 

Things have been very busy here as of late. All is going well, it just seems at times that there is more going on than I can keep up with!! It is all good stuff and it is the kind of situation most guys like me love to have.

 

I will be relatively free this weekend as there are no retreats scheduled for this weekend and next weekend. A very good friend, however, is sick in Changchun and Mingli is due to give birth any day now, so I will probably have a Changchun trip on either Saturday or Sunday.

 

 

The classes are all going really well. I am really happy with the way the oral and writing classes are going for the freshmen. They are working hard and it's paying off. The students are not and have not been able to freely leave the campus since the end of September (H1N1 precautions) and that makes for a whole lot of study time! I don't think I will recommend it as a policy change, but believe me I am not complaining about the closed campus policy.

 

Two of the Holy Family sisters competed in the Beijing Marathon a few weeks ago to raise money for the Tianji Social Service Center (the program to provide financial aid to keep poor kids in school) and here is an excellent little article about the sisters and their goal. Sr. Liu works closely with many of my students as she coordinates home visits and student tutoring. She led our trip to the countryside a few weeks back to harvest corn for a poor family.

 

The Yankees won their 27th World Series crown and they didn't seem to break a sweat in doing it. They put the Twins to sleep without a problem, the Angels went in similar fashion and the defending champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, just didn't have enough pitching to stop the Bronx Bombers. 

 

The 2009 elections are over. Not too many surprises as far as I am concerned. There was a big election that a few Maryknollers were watching, and that was the race for Executive of Westchester County (where Maryknoll is located) that pitted the long serving incumbent, Andrew Spano, against the nephew and namesake of one of our priests here in China, Robert Astorino. Astorino won and while I haven't seen or talked to his uncle, I am sure that Fr. Bob Astorino is  very proud of his nephew. Fr. Bob has been working for the past 20 years to establish the UCAN news agency here in Asia. He resigned from that position earlier this year to move on to new things in the area of social communications.

 

 

I will let the pictures do the talking for the rest of today’s blog.

 

 

 

Some photos from Michigan.

Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad on the boat

Mom and Dad with Mark and Matt

 

 

Today’s gospel and some comments:

 

 

Now large crowds were travelling with him; and he turned and said to them, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. Luke 14:25-33

 

Hate your father and your mother?  Hate life itself?  This is a deeply puzzling statement, and we have to look carefully at it.  A scholar writes, “The Semitic mind commonly associated opposing pairs of words, without distinguishing intermediate shades of meaning.  ‘To hate’ could signify ‘to love less.’“  (He gives examples of this usage: Genesis 29:31; Deuteronomy 21:15; Matthew 5:43; John 12:25.)  Many modern translations of these and similar passages substitute some other word for ‘hate’.  So the strange verse is not telling us to hate our fathers and mothers, but not to give them precedence over the Lord. 

  

Are Christians extremists, then?  Yes, if you mean that we are asked to take the most important thing in the world and put ourselves wholly behind it.  Moderation doesn't mean never going to any extreme; it means not going to false extremes.  There is no limit to the effort we are to put into living the Christian life.  You couldn’t imagine St Paul, who said, “Fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a good conscience,” saying instead, “Do take a little interest in what's going on in the Church, holding onto a bit of faith if you can!”  Other creatures put everything they have into what they do.  I remember having a close view of a bird singing.  What energy he put into it!  He was singing, body and soul; there was nothing in him that wasn’t singing.  He wasn’t singing because it was expected of him, nor because he wanted to be popular, nor because he was drunk…. He was singing, pure and simple.  I was made aware immediately of how I hang back in the very act of doing things, how I put only part of myself into what I do.  This is more or less what we call ‘normal’.  How hard it is to be pure and simple!  Every creature can be our teacher.

 

When we were very small children we lived fully!  We put everything we had into everything we did.  We didn’t think about ourselves.  If someone put a mirror in front of us we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves.  But soon the fatal limiting begins.  We begin to be self-conscious and to worry about ourselves; we begin to have a distinctive character.  It is a kind of armor around one; the more character you have, the more you are limited.  You sometimes meet an adult who is unable to be part of anything and whom nothing can please.  But there is a kind of infinity about a small child – everything is welcome, everything is possible. 

 

So when we meet Jesus, who is very like a child, we think he’s an extremist.  No, he’s just alive!  That's what makes him different from me! 

 

Being alive, he breathes!  He receives deeply and gives deeply. “The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands” (John 3:35).  And “I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).  It was this same Jesus who said to us, ‘Give up everything!’ 

All Souls Day in China

Ad Eorum Memoriam Quos Valde Amo - In Memory of Those I Love.

 

I had a great weekend. The Halloween parties went really well as the students and I had a great time. Friday night's party was pretty good, but nothing compared to what the freshmen did on Saturday night.

If you were lucky enough to get an invite to the Freshman Nursing Halloween Party (I was) then you were part of something very special on Saturday night.

 
This blog has a number of pictures from those parties. You can also find a few more pictures in the photo albums on the side of this blog.

There was more to the weekend than just the parties, but the parties were certainly the highlight.

The party started with a little Masquerade Ball.

Some modern dance, followed!

Then Brian told a story. A scary story!!!

 

Some students at the apartment for lunch.

 

We got the CET-4 Review classes going this week. The second year students who didn't pass the exam the first time are getting a little extra help each Saturday from now until the exam in late December. Zhang Lei comes over and gives me a hand with this program.

 

Li Tong finished her discernment retreat yesterday and she seemed quite happy with it. She left for home today. She plans to come back for another short retreat just before Christmas.

 

The Holy Family Sisters (many of them) are on retreat this week, so Li Na has a little vacation. Li Na along with Wang Wei teach two of the sisters English in the office each day to help them prepare for some overseas studies at the end of next year. Jacqui is also working with the sisters each day.They are making good progress and by this time next year they should be ready for the challenge of studying overseas.

 

O.C.Lin of the Hong Kong AIDS Foundation is in town to do some training with the Tianji volunteers. She will be here for a few days and hopefully the two of us will be able to get together while she is here. Xu Feng (Theresa) left the Tianji Social Service Center at the end of October to enter the convent and religious life. Her leaving will be a real challenge for Tianji, as she was a very important part of the Center. I plan to spend more time with the volunteers during this time of transition. I have already been doing that the past few weeks.

 

Fr. Joe Loftus C.M. will also be here to work with the leaders of Tianji later this month.

Jiajia as you can see, is doing quite well.

 

 

Today’s gospel and some comments:

 

 

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’ When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. Mark 15:33-39, 16:1-6 

 

 

A religion teacher told me many years ago that based on her experience there are two kinds of children: those who have no trouble in believing that Jesus is divine, but scarcely see him as human; and those who see him as human but are very iffy about his divinity.  Many older people, I think, would lean towards the first.  For instance I once heard a preacher say that the most wonderful thing about Jesus was that he never doubted. He ought to have read St Ambrose (333 – 397), who wrote, “As human Jesus doubted. He experienced amazement. It is not his divinity that doubted, but his human soul. He had no difficulty being amazed because he had taken humanity fully to himself. In taking upon himself a human soul, he also took upon himself the feelings of a soul. As God he was not distressed, but as human he was capable of being distressed. It was not as God he died, but as man. It was in human voice that he cried: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  As human, therefore, he spoke on the cross, bearing with him our terrors. In the face of danger it is a very human response to think ourselves abandoned. As human, therefore, he was distressed, wept, and was crucified.” 

 

 

If Jesus was not fully human, “like us in all things but sin,” there is no hope for us.  It is very much in our interest to see that his death was a real death.  If he had joined us in life but not in death, he would remain partly a stranger to us.  If his death was not a real and complete death, then his resurrection was not real; and “if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17).  His death and resurrection make sense of ours. 

 

 

“Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.  He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and became as human beings are... And being found in human form he became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8)).  They are among the most moving words ever written. Our God’s way with us is the way of powerlessness. His passion pure loneliness…… When you are going through something you can say: At least my friends are with me.  But the disciples were nowhere in sight; they were gone, and they came back only when he was dead.

 

 

Death is our final poverty.  It is our powerlessness, our emptiness.  We too are found in human form and have to be obedient unto death.  We die every day: many small deaths before the big one.  We die a little when our loved ones die; we die when we are parted from anything or anyone who has been part of our life; we die when we experience rejection of any sort.  The Lord is with us in all our deaths.  He himself died many times.  St Augustine wrote, “He was crucified at the third hour by the tongues of the populace and at the sixth hour by the hands of the soldiers.” 

The First Snow and The Solemnity of All Saints

The whole happiness of man and even his sanity depend on his moral condition. And since society does not exist by itself in a void, but is made up of the individuals who compose it, the problems of society cannot ultimately be solved except in terms of the moral life of individuals. If the citizens are sane, the city will be sane. If the citizens are wild animals, the city will be a jungle.   Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth

 

We had our first snowfall of the year yesterday. The first year kids from the south sort of enjoyed it, the rest of us said, “Here we go again!!” 

 

The first Halloween party was lots of fun. I have a number of things to take care of today and then we have the big Halloween party this evening with the freshmen class. 

 

Yi Xin Pond

 

It is beautiful!!

But, watch your step, its slippery out there!!

 

 

The Gospel for the Solemnity of All Saints and some comments: 

 

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain,
and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.
He began to teach them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad,
for your reward will be great in heaven.”  Matthew 5:1-12

 

Why is it necessary to celebrate the feast of all saints? All year round we are celebrating feasts of saints: Thomas Aquinas, January 28; Augustine of Hippo, August 28; Theresa of Lisieux, October 1, etc. Why then is it necessary to set apart a day to celebrate the feast of all saints? I can think of two important reasons.

 

 

First, besides the handful of saints whose feast days we celebrate on specific days in the year, there are countless other saints and martyrs, men, women and children united with God in the heavenly glory who we do not celebrate. Many of these would be our own parents and grand-parents who were heroic women and men of faith. Today we keep their honorable memory. In many ways, therefore, today's feast can be called the feast of the Unknown Saint, in line with the tradition of the Unknown Soldier. We celebrate what the first reading calls "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands" (Rev 7:9).

 

 

Another reason is this celebration gives us a peek into our eternal destiny. The saints we celebrate were men and women like us. Where we are now they used to be, and where they are now we hope to be someday. As Christians we know that a person's life story is not limited to what happens to them between the day they are born and the day they die. Our story starts before we are born, at our conception, and goes beyond the day we die, to all eternity. That is why we do not simply forget people after they die. Didn't St Theresa of Lisieux say that she would spend eternity doing good on earth? In our mortal eyes she is dead and gone. But in the eyes of faith we know that she is alive now more than ever, because she is now fully alive in God. She is now more alive than we are because the life she now enjoys can no longer be diminished by suffering, disease and sin, or death.

 

Unfortunately, our reaching the fullness of life with the saints does not happen automatically. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven" (Matthew 7:21). How do we live a life of doing the will of our heavenly Father? The answer is given us in today's gospel, the Beatitudes, where Jesus gives his followers a road map to a happy eternity. All the saints we celebrate today walked the hard and narrow path of the Beatitudes to arrive at heavenly bliss. On the feast of All Saints the church invites us and challenges us to walk the walk, not just to talk the talk, of the saints.

 

 

The Beatitudes propose to us a way of life, inviting us to identify with the poor, those who mourn, the meek, and those who hunger and thirst after justice. They challenge us to be compassionate people, to be men and women who are pure in heart, and to become the peacemakers in our dealings with one another, in our families and in the society at large, even when this approach to things exposes us to ridicule and persecution. None of the saints we celebrate today had it as their aim in life to amass wealth, to acquire power or to gain popularity. Rather they looked forward to the eternal reward which God gives to his faithful ones at the end of this short earthly life of illusion. 

 

 

Today we are invited to walk the path of the saints, the way of the Beatitudes. The way is narrow and hard. We need faith and courage to walk it. The example of the saints and their prayers encourage us and help us on. St Augustine found it hard to live the Beatitudes, but when he read the lives of the saints he said, "What these ordinary women and men have done, why not me?" Why not? Faith assures us all who heed the call of Jesus and live the life of the Beatitudes that at the end of life we shall, together with all the saints, hear the consoling words of the Lord, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joys of your master" (Matthew 25:21).

Halloween Preps, A Retreat and More Visitors

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. - G. K. Chesterton

 

 

I started the day with my morning walk, followed by mass in the chapel, before heading over to the office for breakfast with a group of freshmen. The breakfast conversation is rarely the same as the students always have something new to talk about. I really enjoy that. I guess the exception would be Wednesday mornings. Every Wednesday morning all the students in the nursing college are up early for a mandatory morning run. I won’t say much about how unpopular this weekly run is; I’ll just say it is one of the topics of discussion every Wednesday morning. ^_^

 

Milk tea stop after lunch.

 

I have had a very busy week so far. I have a full load of lectures each week from now until the end of the semester and the extracurricular stuff seems to increase by the week. I have also spent a good chunk of time visiting a patient in the hospital and a few of the old sisters who are under the weather at the retirement home.

 

I made it over this week’s ‘hump’ and we are now sort of heading (cruising) towards the weekend. And it is going to be a fun weekend for sure! Halloween parties on Friday and Saturday night will be a good start for a great weekend, but the real treat is that the students’ journals will be in their hands this weekend, as I just finished correcting the latest batch this evening! So, it is shaping up as a weekend heavy on parties and light on work!

 

Rosa Li (Li Tong) is here through the weekend making a discernment retreat with me. She is thinking about joining a community of sisters and is using this time to get away from both her work and her studies to do some reflecting. Rosa worked at the Tianji Social Service Center for over a year when Tianji was just getting going.

 

Keep one of our students in your prayers. Sunny had a biopsy earlier this week for a lump on her breast. The results should be in today or tomorrow and we all hope Sunny is going to be OK. I had some good chats with her, her classmates, and hospital roommates during my visits to see her this week. Sunny is a fourth year medical student who discovered a lump on her breast when they were studying that examination procedure in her clinical medicine class. Sunny has been very active in college wide English Corners over the past few years and I really enjoy being with her. There is never a dull moment when Sunny is around. As I mentioned above, do keep Sunny and her health in your prayers!!

 

Cletus' Philadelphia Phillies took the first game of the 2009 World Series last night with a huge win over the NY Yankees in the Bronx.

 

 

A reading from the letter to the Hebrews and some comments:

 

Brothers and sisters: Every high priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people. No one takes this honor upon himself but only when called by God, just as Aaron was. In the same way, it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest, but rather the one who said to him: You are my son: this day I have begotten you; just as he says in another place: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. Hebrews 5:1-6

 

 

There is a story of a kid who won four goldfish at the annual school carnival. The following day, his dad went out shopping for an aquarium. The prices ranged from $70 to $100. Finally he spotted a discarded tank, complete with gravel and filter, for only $10. He bought it at once, took it home and spent hours washing and cleaning it up until it looked like new. By evening, the four little fish were swimming in their new home. The following day, they found that one of the fish was dead. Too bad, but three remained. A day later, a second one was dead. By nightfall the third died. The man called in an expert. It didn't take long to discover the problem: He had washed the tank with soap, something one must never do. In spite of his good intentions, his unenlightened efforts had destroyed the very lives he sought to protect.

 

 

 

Sometimes, we Christians, are like this man. In our zeal to clean up the lives of others, we use "killer soaps" -- criticism and condemnation, anger and exclusion. We think we are teaching them a lesson, but our harsh, self-righteous treatment demoralizes rather than encourages the weak brother or sister. In today's second reading from Hebrews, we are reminded that, as sharers in the universal priesthood of believers, we should minister God to one another, and that we should do so in gentleness, as Jesus did.

 

 

 

The teaching of the New Testament, and particularly the Letter to the Hebrews, on priesthood is quite intricate. Traditional theology has formulated it in one paradoxical saying, "All are priests, some are priests, only one is a priest." Together with the doctrine that Christ is the sole and unique priest of the new covenant (Hebrews 5:5-6), there is also the belief that some of the faithful are chosen to be priests ministering to the people of God (Hebrews 5:1-4), and indeed that all believers share in the priestly ministry. The doctrine of the universal priesthood of all believers is spelt out in the well-known passage from the First Letter of Peter.

 

 

 

But you are a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people to be a personal possession to sing the praises of God who called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. (1 Peter 2:9)

 

 

 

Many people do not understand what it means that we are all priests or how to go about fulfilling their role in the common priesthood of all believers. That we are priests means that we are called to lead people to God and to bring God to people. A priest is someone chosen to represent other human beings in their dealings with God (Hebrews 5:1). A priest is a go-between, an intermediary, between God and human beings. Ministerial priests fulfill this role by offering sacrifices for sins. That is clear. But how do believers in general fulfill their roles as sharers in the common priesthood of all the faithful? It is by interceding for people before God's throne of mercy and by ministering God to people.

 

 

One person who lived the common priesthood of all believers to the full is St Francis of Assisi. The Peace Prayer attributed to him shows us what it means for every believer to be a priest.

 

 

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love; / when there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith; / where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light; / and where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek / to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand, / to be loved as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive, / it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

 

 

How do we go about living out this priestly lifestyle? Hebrews tells us one essential disposition of character that we must possess. It is gentleness. A priest "is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness" (Hebrews 5:2). Recent events in the church in many parts of the world have left us in no doubt that priests are subject to weakness. This disgrace can be turned into grace if we learn from this to deal more gently with the ignorant and wayward. As priests, we should be holding up to sinners an invitation to God's mercy and not a threat of God's impending judgment.

 

 

 

Today, there are many believers who are on a crusade to cleanse the church. They are bent on removing the weeds from the wheat. When we do that, we are playing God (Matthew 13:30). Our work as priests of God is essentially to reconcile people with God and the best and most effective way we can do that is not by being harsh but by being gentle to sinners. Le this be our prayer today, "Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine."