Monthly Newspaper • DIOCESE OF BRIDGEPORT

The Second Vatican Council stressed the essential need in the Church for “stirring up a hunger for holiness” (cf. Lumen Gentium). What is the meaning of this “holiness” the Council calls for? One can wonder why God seeks a contact with human beings in the first place. What is He pursuing in us? We are told that God seeks something more from us than submission and reverence. We’re told that He wishes to be loved. Indeed, He desires to be loved above all things. Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (cf. Luke 10:27). I sometimes found myself asking, “Was God lonely? Is God lonely? Does God need humans?”

And then, on the other hand, Therese of Lisieux stated: “Oh, how little God is loved on this earth, even by priests and religious. No, God isn’t loved very much.” A writer nameaway J.H. Leuba pointed out that “God is not known; He is not understood; He is used.” For the average person it can seem that God is Someone the person never thinks of save in exceptional circumstances.

Still, we are told that we can have a personal relationship with one’s Creator. Is it possible for two beings so far apart to love one another? Can the Origin and Sustainer of the universe be the object of a relationship to be cultivated? Moses’ intensifying relationship with God is fascinating. Moses, the frightened shepherd, “slow of speech and slow of tongue (Ex.4:10) ends up speaking to God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex.33:11).

There was the God I grew up with. He had lots of rules and He was looking on approvingly or disapprovingly. He seemed prone to take offense. As I remember it, religion was occupied with saving one’s soul, avoiding hell, shortening purgatory. And there was a multitude of devotions (nine first Fridays, novenas, etc.). I made offerings to God of duties performed and devotions attended. It was a quid pro quo piety—I made deals with God. My view of God was essentially as Scorekeeper and as Spoilsport.

Eventually, a reshaping began to take place silently. The old things that used to satisfy began to lose their luster, their vitality. I could no longer see them as serving for a mature, adult spiritual life. My image of God began to change. So much of what was familiar began to fall away. That which was good for me yesterday was not right for me today. That which I had come to yesterday no longer helped me to mature, to grow and deepen.

I began to feel the need for something more in my spiritual life. For me, it was mainly Bible Study that led to a deeper and more mature spirituality. As Jeremiah 15:16 puts it: “When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart.”

There is the sheer poetry and beauty found in the Scriptures. Now many of my happiest times take place in the study of the Bible. The Bible never grows wearisome or stale. I even enjoy slogging my way through the scholarly commentaries. When one studies the Scriptures, what one leaves behind is much more than what one takes away. Christian spirituality needs to be rooted in the Scriptures for its nourishment and sustenance.

St. Augustine insisted that “soaking oneself in Scripture” is a part of holiness. The Second Vatican Council called for a return to the Scriptures as the primary source of Catholic spirituality. After the Reformation, Catholics were officially discouraged from reading the Scriptures owning to the emphasis given to Scripture by the Reformers. In 1692, a man named Pasquier Quesnel published a book in which he asserted that “the reading of Sacred Scripture is for everyone.” That comment became one of the propositions in the list of Quesnel’s “errors” condemned by Pope Clement XI in his constitution “Unigenitus Dei Filius.”

Today, many of us Catholics agree with the Scripture scholar Daniel Harrington, S.J., who said: “I find God largely in and through the Bible. Most of my spiritual life revolves around the Bible. It is for me the most important way to know, love and serve God.”

Bible Study needs to be accompanied by other kinds of reading. A spiritual life needs to be nourished by sustained reading. When we read, God can talk to us. Unfortunately, many modern people no longer read serious books.

There is a desperate need in our Church today for the recovery of spiritual depth. Spirituality is the hook back into the faith for many young people. They’re not turned off to spirituality. As we know, they talk of being “spiritual but not religious.” It is possible to be “religious but not spiritual.”

(to be continued)

My mother always said, “God will provide,” but I can’t say that I always believed her. She usually said it the day my father got laid off from his job as a carpenter because winter had set in and there wasn’t enough work to go around, so he had to sign up for unemployment and drive down to the union hall every morning to see if there was anything he could do.

I’m sure St. Joseph understood the situation because he was a carpenter, and there were probably times in Egypt when he didn’t have enough work to support the Holy Family.

Did my father believe “God will provide,” as he sat at the kitchen table, with a bottle of Budweiser and a jigsaw puzzle laid out before him, passing the time in anxious worry about what tomorrow would bring … or wouldn’t bring?

If you ever lost a job and knew the fear of not knowing what tomorrow would bring, it can be hard accepting that “God will provide.” Sometimes God waits a little too long for my tastes before providing.

But my mother understood his mysterious ways better than we did. Truth be told, we never went hungry although God cut it close some of the time. She kept a dime taped to the bottom of the statue of the Infant of Prague, which they got as a wedding gift, because she had been told that was an assurance you would never go without.

Both my parents knew what it meant to go without because they lived through the Great Depression and went to bed hungry a lot of nights. My mother had to leave her family in Bridgeport and go live with her aunt in Stamford because her parents didn’t have enough money to support everyone. And my father was one of nine children raised by a widowed immigrant from Italy back before there was a safety net for the needy. They knew hunger and they knew cold … but so did Jesus.

During the Great Depression, I’ve been told, when you were down to your last dollar, it was a common practice to give it away because it ensured God would provide. Over the years, I’ve met people who did just that and swear it worked.

Sometimes you have to let go and let God and step out into the unknown. You have to have faith and a hopeful attitude. But trusting is never easy. It’s a virtue that is acquired from experience and prayer.

In her book “God Will Provide,” author Patricia Treece recounts miraculous stories about saints like Mother Teresa, Solanus Casey, Frances Xavier Cabrini and Padre Pio, who turned to God in trust when the chips were down … and he provided beyond their wildest expectations.

Of course, our idea of what God should provide is probably different from God’s. As long as things are going well, we can have a strong faith but when things start to get a little shaky and the going gets rough, we worry.

I even start to suffer anxiety when I look at my 401(K) statement and the accounts are headed in the wrong direction. You see, sometimes I confuse the assurance “God will provide” with the fantasy “God will make you rich.”

The Sisters of Life have a wonderful prayer called the “Litany of Trust.” It says in part:

“From the fear that trusting You will leave me more destitute
Deliver me Jesus.

From the rebellion against childlike dependence on you,
Deliver me Jesus.

From anxiety about the future,
Deliver me Jesus…

That not knowing what tomorrow brings is an invitation to lean on you,
Jesus, I trust in you.

That You always hear me and in Your goodness always respond to me,
Jesus I trust in you.”

Sometimes God waits before he provides in order to strengthen our trust.

Worrying about the future is part of the human condition, but it can cripple us spiritually. Jesus knew that and talked about it often. He meant for us to take him seriously when he said, “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

God will provide.

If you know me, you know I love to be outside. I could walk for hours just taking in the beauty of nature. It is often in nature that I witness God’s presence most of all. Gazing on the beauty of His creation can bring a sense of peace, along with a sense of wonder and awe that makes me say, “God, I know you must be there.”

This love of nature has lent itself well to my enjoyment of photography. Capturing the beauty of God’s creation with the right combination of light at the perfect angle seems, in a way, to be a nod to Him. Almost as if each picture is a way of saying, “thank you, I appreciate the beauty of your creation.”

Over a year ago, I had the privilege of joining a group of young adults from around the diocese on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This was something I never thought I would be able to do and an experience I am forever grateful to have had.

I never really imagined what it would be like to travel to the Middle East. Any image I had ever seen of that area of the world seemed barren and even dangerous.

That being said, one of the things that surprised me most about being there was the sheer beauty of the land around us. Each place we went was more beautiful than the next. We were surrounded by palm trees, lush vegetation and sunsets over the sea. Even the desert, which most would expect to be dry and void of life, was absolutely breathtaking.

When I’m reading the Gospels, I often picture the places that we traveled to. I look back at the pictures I took as reminders. It makes a difference knowing they are real, tangible, beautiful places.

This seems especially heightened during Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Having been there makes it all the more real, even though it all occurred some two thousand years ago.

The forty days of Lent mirror the forty days that Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. We know it is a real place. We know because we’ve been there.

I can’t help but picture the Mount of Temptations in Jericho, surrounded by mountains of rock and sand. We hiked up to a monastery build high up in that rock. Although the monastery and the buildings below it would not have been there when Jesus was, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the land might have looked like at the time. It makes a difference knowing it was a real place.

It helps the Gospels come alive when we can picture an actual place in which they occurred. When the Pharisees tried to silence the crowd of disciples upon our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, Jesus responded, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40). I believe it. The earth reflects His glory. His creation can be a prayer, wherever you may be.

He has made all ground holy: Every time we watch a sunrise or a sunset. Every time we walk by the beach or hike up a mountain. Every time we witness the change of seasons; the fresh fallen snow, a tree of bright orange leaves or the first buds of spring.

As Thomas Merton wrote, “Let me seek, then, the gift of silence and poverty and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.”

We’re having some work done on the roof of the new house. The chimney is twisted and needs to be rebuilt. Friends gave us the number of a guy we could call to fix it.

McNulty is from Ireland. He told me he did “finishing work” for Guinness. I know what Guinness is. What finishing work is I have no idea. McNulty came one windy weekend to asses the chimney’s twist. We stood together in the driveway, eyes on the sky. We both saw the problem but McNulty saw what I couldn’t: How to fix it.

I only know how to fix sentences.

The meeting took five or ten minutes. “It’s no good Matchoo,” he said, pronouncing my name in what I took to be Dublinese. “You don’t want one of them bricks coming loose and falling down into the driveway while the kids are playing and all.” We agreed that was something I did not want. “I’ll talk to my brick man—Billy from Kildare—and we’ll get you sorted straight away.”

We shook hands on the sidewalk and parted ways. As I watched him leave I thought, “My goodness my hands are an embarrassment.”

McNulty is a slightly built man but his hands were like cinderblocks wrapped in sandpaper. Shaking my hand must have felt, to him, like meeting a man-size chinchilla with opposable thumbs. I am inadequate in the hands department.

Pinkish, uncalloused, and prone to cracking in winter, mine are the hands of man who has only ever worked indoors. My palms are like pillows; my fingers like sausage links. Ever see a tree that has grown around a chain-link fence? That’s what my wedding ring looks like.

Years ago I worked in bars. I sliced lemons with sharp knives. I tossed around kegs and dunked pint glasses in scalding hot water. The enemy then was small nicks and cuts, which were annoying and could let in bacteria that could get me sick and unable to work. No one wants a drink served by a bartender with a scabby hand or a runny nose. I used lotion and other manly emollients to care for my hands.

These days my hands do nothing more dangerous than hunting and pecking. My desk is ergonomic. My keyboard has a wrist rest. I still get little nicks and cuts, but mostly from the sharp corners of Post-it notes. I have one callous—on the tip of the finger that does my most aggressive deleting.

When I was a kid the joke was that plumbers made more than guys who worked in offices. Now I hear you can make a good living as a welder. My hope for my sons is that they have manlier hands than I do. Maybe I’ll send them to welder’s college.

Jesus was a carpenter’s son. Some scholars say the Greek word tekton, usually translated as “carpenter,” really means “builder.” It’s possible that Joseph was actually more of a stone mason. Either way, if Jesus worked alongside his father, his hands must have been rough. Like McNulty’s, not like mine.

Jesus swung a hammer. He knew his way around a workbench and a toolkit. He was fit for a job using chisels. So many familiar images of Our Lord convey a different vibe. Arms outstretched and surrounded by divine light, the Jesus of our time is a softie. We see him in hippy robes, cuddling a lamb. He hammers out justice, not stone blocks.

We see Jesus sad-eyed at the Last Supper. We see his thin, broken body on the cross, his hands bloodied by the nails, his lean torso twisted. But Jesus was a working man. Yes, the message of his public ministry was mercy, but his day job was building houses.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see an icon of Our Lord that makes him look like what he was? Some artist should render his misshapen fingernails and tough, calloused palms. If he needs a model, I can give him McNulty’s number.

Over the course of my life, there were days I wanted to salvage from the rush of time. I wished I could preserve a certain day from sliding away into the flow of time. I can picture myself clinging to a lovely, fulfilling day, repeating to myself “Don’t go—not yet—not yet—.” I wished I could stretch the day like a rubber band—pull it out and out and out. But time would not relent and the day slipped away as fast as any other.

I often wonder, where did they go, those used up days. John Donne wrote “tell me, where all past years are” (“Go Catch a Falling Star”). Do past years and days slip into nothingness? Or do they have some kind of eternal presence in God? Is there a gathering of all temporal times in an eternal present? Pavel Florensky, a Russian philosopher and priest, stated: “The past has not passed away, but is eternally preserved somewhere and continues to be real.” A modern Catholic philosopher, John Haught, also asks “do all things somehow remain in God?” He also asks “where does each moment come from in the first place?” (What Is God? p.25).

God is the giver of time. The sovereignty of God over the length of our lives is taught in Scripture. Our days are numbered, our term of life is fixed. Job 14:5: “Man’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and set limits he cannot exceed.”

Psalm 139:16: “In your book were written all the days that were ordained for me when none of them as yet existed.” We all have our earthly allotment of time. A number of psalms pray to God: “Do not take me away before my days are complete” (Psa.102).

The Scriptures frequently summon us to remember the past, e.g., Psalm 143:5: “I remember the days of long ago…I muse on the work of your hands.” When I look over my own life and ask myself which years of it I would particularly like to live over again, I think the happiest times were my boyhood times, the time when life was young. As W.B. Yeats put it, it was the time “when I was a boy with never a crack in my heart” (“The Meditation of the Old Fisherman”).

My boyhood years were kind years to me. There were those vanished summers of a simpler era, a time of splendor in the grass. I shopped at Kresge’s and took girls to ice cream parlors. It was a time of innocent and uncomplicated faith. Something I chiefly remember about those days is the absence of fear. Now fear seems to be a companion of us all. Job 29:1,4: “Oh, that I were as in years past…As I was in my flourishing days, when God sheltered my tent.” Or, as Shakespeare put it, “O! call back yesterday, bid time return” (Richard I, Act 3, Scene 2).

Time moves and all things come to an end. All things run their courses to their appointed ends. As Edmond Waller, the 17th century poet, put it in his beautiful poem “Go, Lovely Rose” there are so many lost and lovely things. Even that which is wondrous, sweet and fair doesn’t last. “The time of her sweetness and fairness, will be short lived.”

There is a Spanish proverb that says, “there are three tyrants—the weather, il Padre, and il Tempo.”

There are the dear, dead joys of those days long past—the brightness and beauty that could not last. So many people I loved from my boyhood days naturally have died. When you lose somebody who remembers who and what you were in the fifth grade, you bury a part of yourself, a part of your life. Nobody remembers me as the fifth grader who made that splendid catch on a baseball field long since plowed under for condominiums. There’s no one in whose eyes I can meet that fifth grader who sank the two foul shots that won that important game.

The dead are very close to me these days. I can see their faces. I long for them to be living and to have it all over again. There was a song from my boyhood days titled “Till We Meet Again”:

Smile the while you kiss me sad adieu.
When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you…
So wait and pray each night for me
Till we meet again.

I’m a student of pubs. Maybe it’s because my dad owned one. Maybe it’s because they smell so good, especially that front-door bouquet of stale beer, hamburger, air conditioning, and disinfectant. The flavor profile at my dad’s place included the unmistakable overlay of nicotine, but even without that, the pub smell is a sensory experience beloved of the truly cultured.

Many of the best pubs are decorated with framed Irish blessings. “May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back”—that kind of thing. Here’s a good one: “May those who love us, love us. For those who don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if He doesn’t turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so we will know them by their limping.”

A lifetime of study has taught me that roughly 72 percent of the Irish pubs in New York feature a toast ending thusly: “May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

We talk a lot about the devil, even if we don’t usually think much about what we mean by the word. Sometimes we use it as a kind of synonym for temptation, or a catch-all excuse for our own bad behavior. “The devil made me do it the first time,” sang Waylon Jennings in 1973, before adding, “the second time I done it on my own.”

The idea of the devil is a bit of a cartoon to us now. If you’re my age, you remember that great line delivered by Kevin Spacey in “The Usual Suspects”: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

The devil most certainly exists. From the grand jury report exposing the shocking sexual abuse of 1,000 victims in Pennsylvania over seven decades to the New York Archdiocese review board’s finding that the allegations of sexual abuse against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick were “credible and substantiated,” this summer has reminded every Catholic that the enemy always has the one true Church in his sights.

My wife and I, like all parents, have always wondered how to approach the problem of evil with our children. When to tell them about the worst things in the world? How to keep innocence from descending into ignorance? No one wants to place vile ideas in clean hearts. No one wants to sully what’s pure. Our love for our children makes us, naturally, protective.

Then again, no one wants a child to end up in a vulnerable position because they’ve been kept in the dark about the filth in the world. We love our children, and we are compelled to keep them safe, but there comes a point when you have to lay it on the line: The devil exists, and he’s working hard to defile everything that’s good, true, free, and holy.

Watch your back. The devil has nothing better to do than try to keep you out of Heaven. And he’s got more than 30 minutes to do it.

My wife and I homeschool our children. This has afforded us the ability to regulate more aggressively than is typical our children’s exposure to the funkier stuff. But we know that it also makes it more likely that they will find out later than their peers that the world can be a terrible place. We worry this will place them at a disadvantage. We know the devil lurks in wait.

The priests of the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford solved our problem. They kept alive a tradition that had lately gone lax—recitation of the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel at the end of Mass.

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

When we first started attending Mass at St. John’s, this prayer was a mystery to us. It had fallen out of favor during the last few decades in the life of the church—probably because of its unrelenting insistence on the presence of true evil in the world and its clear reference to the existence of the devil.

We learned that prayer. Our children learned that prayer. Now they pray it every night before bed on the principle that it’s better to be safe than sorry. In his wisdom, Bishop Frank J. Caggiano has decreed that in response to the abuse scandal all parishes shall recite this prayer after Mass. I hope it catches on in other dioceses.

Evil spirits seeking the ruin of the souls? Yes, kids, and if St. Michael does his job, you will know them by their limping.

My mother hated the house on Speedwell Avenue. She may have had her reasons. The kitchen was small, the sink was too far from the stove, there was one bathroom for six people, and the whole place drooped slightly so the bedroom doors wouldn’t close. Then again, it was home.

We moved there in 1979. I was six. Before that we’d lived in the house where my dad grew up. It was built in 1886 by my great-grandfather John T. Murphy. My dad told us that John T.’s ghost still lived in the attic. I don’t think my mom liked that house much either.

I didn’t hate those houses. I loved them, especially the Speedwell house, which was quirky in the best way. I loved the sounds it made; the creaks in the floorboards; the squeaks; the little bell my mother hung on the doorknob so she’d know when some late-night sneaker let himself in.

I loved the staircase landing where the laundry baskets piled up; the bathroom with the light switch on the outside; the living-room window that gave the whole neighborhood a view of our Christmas tree; the ancient and faded wallpaper; the decorative Tuscan columns in the living room.

I loved all of it in the way of a child. That’s the way that doesn’t see your parents struggling to pay the electric bill. That’s the way that doesn’t know how annoying it is to have a lawn with grass that just won’t grow or a white picket fence that’s missing a few pickets.

When I drive by that house now I’m shocked at how small the property looks. As a kid I thought it was plenty big—practically an estate. We played every sport imaginable in its friendly confines, with eccentric grounds rules covering Wiffle balls hit over the porch roof or off the side of the house.

The driveway was only wide enough for a single car, and bounded on one side by a hedge, so we played quarter-court basketball. There was room for a layup on the right, but you could only launch jumpers from the left. The hedge led the league in rebounds.

My mother eventually achieved her dream of leaving that house, but before she did 234 Speedwell served as the setting for many great moments in the life of the family. Graduations, birthdays, homecomings, and holidays, of course, but also the unpleasant stuff—the hard Christmas when I dropped out of college, the frightening day my mother fainted and was taken away in an ambulance, my father’s heart attack.

One day I was coming home from high school and found Onyx, my sister Mary Ann’s cat, dead on the side of the road. She’d been hit by a car.

I buried Onyx using a garden spade near my mother’s rose bushes. Mom called Mary Ann to deliver the bad news.

“Mare,” she said. “Onyx bit it.” My mother wasn’t sentimental about pets.

The surprise party for my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary was a famous hooley. A platoon of friends and relatives who’d gathered up the block were led in by a bagpiper. Mary Ann’s 21st birthday party featured a keg of beer that she and her friends couldn’t quite drain. Me and my teenage friends tried to finish the job the following afternoon.

I did the lion’s share of my growing up on Speedwell Avenue.

I tell you all this because we moved recently, leaving behind a house—and a community—that we had grown to love. My son Patrick got emotional when I told him we’d be moving. He’s about to be 10, and probably thinks of Millport Avenue the same way I think of Speedwell Avenue.

Patrick didn’t know the house was too small for us. He didn’t know the long commute was poisoning Daddy’s soul. He didn’t know how badly his parents wanted a house of their own. Millport Avenue was just his home, the setting for his family memories, and he didn’t want to leave.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” he told me, his eyes brimming with tears. “I’m gonna miss all my friends.” I promised he’d make new ones. He didn’t care. All that mattered was that we were going and we weren’t coming back.

How much would I love to walk through that old house again—to hear the bell ring as I come through the door and the stairs creak as I take them two at a time, to flip that hallway switch on my way into the bathroom, to sink a jumper from the left side of the driveway? I’d give anything to look up from the kitchen table and see my mom again, or to hear her sigh because the sink’s too far away from the stove.

I put my arm on Patrick’s shoulder and, pulling him to my side, said, “I know, bud. I know.”

​My friend’s 5-year-old son came home from school and started to share the day’s events with his mother over a glass of milk and cookies. He told her about the show-and-tell that featured a daddy who worked in the hospital emergency department. He told her about the scuffle on the playground between a bully-in-training and a soft-spoken kid. And then he told her about a discussion that left him so confused he had to ask a compelling question: “Mommy, who is God?”

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When our parish’s Mothers’ Group asked me to be a guest speaker, I jumped at the chance. I love to share my faith. And I love being a mother. I was thrilled for the opportunity. But at the same time, I was scared.
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My younger sister, who has MD after her name, regularly sends family members and friends advice on how to live healthy and happy lives so our bodies make it to the average life expectancy of 78.6 years—if not Abraham’s 175 years or Noah’s 950.
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“What is truth?” (Pontius Pilate, John 18:38)

Truth is a serious matter. Truth is the pathway to happiness and freedom. The Book of Sirach tells us that all our human misery comes from mistaking where our true satisfaction lies (cf. Sirach 15:16-17), and there are Jesus’ words “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

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The thing about spring is you forget how great it’s going to be. Life can be a drag. Winters can overstay. But spring is about hope, and hope is the thing that pokes its way out of a robin’s egg.

We take family walks. By the pond in the cemetery we happen upon a pair of turtles that are, um, trying to start their own family. I turn it into a teaching moment, but biology isn’t my best subject. The best I can do is sing.

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Years ago when I was teaching religion in junior high school, the topic turned to God’s will, which can be a pretty daunting subject even for adults like Augustine and Aquinas, never mind adolescents.
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Again it is stern November— “no butterflies, no bees, no fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—November!” (Thomas Hood). The aged year is near its end; proud Winter is close at hand.
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