The Writings of Thomas Alan Russell

Proposed beatitudes

2011-02-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

I want to propose a couple of new beatitudes. Here’s the first:

Blessed are they who were born without will power, for they shall have to depend on God.

Spiritual power and will power are two different things. Some of us, myself included, have none of the latter, but all of us have the former in abundance – if only we choose to appropriate it.

The two really have nothing whatever to do with each other. I can certainly not bend God to my will any more than God needs me to accomplish His purposes. If, however, I abandon my will in favor of His, then I have the opportunity of being an instrument in His hands – if He chooses to use me. My faith confirms the certainty within me that He desires my instrumentality, albeit that we both know He has a poor workman on the staff. Puny as I am, I’m reminded of what Pope John Paul II once told the priests in Florida while visiting the U.S. We have a tendency to forget, the Pope said, that God can use not only our strength but also our weakness – that our weakness can be most effective in His service.

Along these same lines, I know that there is much about me that I am powerless to change. Even though I want to, I can’t, no matter how many resolutions I make. Left to my own devices, I’m beat, whipped, doomed – a hopeless case.

Go ahead, scoff. Say I could change if I wanted to. Browbeat me. Say I’m the master of my own ship. All the old chidings. They will do no good. I know that my only hope is not in will power, but in spiritual power. Not that I live, but that Christ lives in me. Not that I accomplish, but that God accomplishes in my behalf. I know that my victory will come in and through the beneficence and grace of Jesus Christ the Lord. He’s the real power.

My second beatitude says: Blessed are they who don’t make people their project, for they shall make some authentic friends.

It seems to me that there are so many religious programs around these days that some of them have begun to run their course for want of adherents. In the wake of this shortage of applicants, people have abandoned certain bounds of authenticity in an effort to lure others onto the roles of commencing experiences. I don’t think there’s malice in this: there’s just something cold about it. Recruitment activities seem to me to objectify “pigeons,” rather than spring from sincerity of wanting to offer a genuine friend a genuine opportunity to grow closer to God. Even as we are moved to share our faith with others, should we not begin by accepting them just as they are? In my own zeal to recruit, I have had ulterior motives in establishing relationships. I have found myself being less that honest. Better, I think, to have a sincere, unrecruited friend than a disillusioned acquaintance.

Maybe what it takes is more spiritual power and less will power. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 10th, 1988

Lent is a season, and not a deadline to be met

2010-03-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

So how is your Lent going?

You say you forgot to get ashes on Ash Wednesday?

You say you obeyed the rules for fasting, but you had two big small meals and one gigantic main meal?

You say you abstained from meat, and for your penance you had the smoked salmon filet, or was it the king crab?

Is that what’s troubling you, friend?

I have a tendency to focus on the wrong things. I feel disheartened because I have not made a good start for Lent. I feel discouraged, and I want to give up before I have even begun. I focus on the letter and not the spirit. I have had some faint glimmer that this Lent would be different, but even so soon it is a weakening ember of hope.

I need the Lord’s help to abandon my scrupulosity. I need His help to understand that Lent is not a rigid schedule of fixed dates, a make-it-or-break-it deadline to get going or bust. I need His help to see that Lent is a season, like springtime. The calendar says that spring has not yet come, but already I have felt the warmth of sun amid the cool days. I have been invigorated by air that makes life worth living.

Would that the Lord would let me see that it’s always now, and never any other time. Let this day be that springtime day that comes unannounced, off schedule like a child’s hilarity, like a crocus in the snow.

I would be free of the shackles of my own rigidity, the smokescreen of excuses for my unwillingness to change. I need the Lord to show me in my heart that Lent didn’t begin without me, that Lent awaits me like a kind friend rejoices as his tardy companion arrives.

It’s funny how desperately I cling to the old way, as if I refuse abundant life. I can’t understand how I let myself be strapped by the lamest reasons like: It’s too late! I didn’t start on time! Bosh. Have I forgotten that the Christians sang in the Colosseum? Did not all the saints speak always and everywhere of joy? St. Augustine cried out, “How late have I loved thee, Lord!” St. Augustine, intercede for this foot-dragger.

The Lord made this day just as He made all the others. I need Him to open my eyes to the great power that comes from Him to turn my heart away from habit and self-seeking.

I have bought into the ways of the world, and my justification system is elaborate. Rather than renounce it, I have found ways to incorporate its values into mine. Surely my ideals have become gilded and spread about with cushions and lots of articulate and wise rationale.

I have accepted the cravings of the flesh, preferred the darkness, the solitary prison of half-measures. Innuendo is okay. Off color is funny. I don’t want the jeering labels of radical, prude, straight-laced.

I have listened to the devil’s lies, though I know that God’s kingdom is not a democracy.

If you didn’t get ashes and your fast was more like a feast; if your abstinence has been a delicious change of pace, Lent was made for folks like you and me. This isn’t late. This is now. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 8th, 1987

We know what Lent is all about, if we admit it

2010-03-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

Back in my wild days of the barroom, we used to celebrate everything: anybody’s birthday, Tuesday, the full moon. You name it, we celebrated it.

Children were easy to love in those days in the warm glow of a couple or three whiskies after work. The feelings were all gushy and sentimental and fond, uncluttered by the realities of dirty diapers and having to feed them at ungodly times.

Come to find out, though, that celebration without accomplishment is so very empty, and fuzzy feelings don’t have anything to do with love. Love is something you do.

Lent starts this week, and like most Catholics, I find myself face to face with the great challenge of conversion, again. Somehow I think we Catholics have always known the real challenge of Lent; we can feel it in our bones, something very familiar and personal. Before the Great Council, there was a lot of hype about the rules and regulations and pious practices. Since the Council, there’s a lot of hype about there not being so many rules and regulations anymore and talk about pious practices is more loosely construed. Always, though, Lent was really something else: something inside and inexplicable and important, and we knew it. It has to do with little old me and God.

Here soon, Jesus will be going into the desert and beckoning me to follow Him. The desert, the vast, quiet, uneventful place devoid of the incessant messaging of the ear which has become our society. The desert, where there’s nobody to talk to but God, and I don’t want to go there.

It’s spooky out there, and hard and lonely and no good shows on. I stand at the edge and everything in me cries out forget it! No big deal! Who needs it! Bunch of nonsense! Why bother! Keep on keepin’ on, man!

Am I alone in this? We know the challenge of Lent, I’m sure. Fasting doesn’t have anything to do with some rule that says not to eat. That’s dumb. Fasting has to do with focusing our attention away from everything familiar and therefore distracting to us, even something as basic and ordinary as eating, so that we can satisfy our real craving, our hunger for God. Lenten practices, if you will, whether doing something or not doing something, whether required or self-imposed, are surely empty if they are so much stagecraft. We’ve always known that. The buzzing about the rules or lack of them is just one more delaying mechanism for coming to terms with what we know Lent is all about: seeing the truth about ourselves in relationship to God.

I’ve spent a lot of Lents letting things slide, and sure enough Easter was a zero. I did not rise with the Risen Christ because I had not died with Him. It was like those empty celebrations of yore. The new fire burned brightly and I was witness to it in my community, but the new fire did not burn in me. Oh, I wanted to celebrate and rejoice, all right; but I had eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear. I could not celebrate because I had not accomplished.

My friend Pete enjoys motocross, but he as little patience with people who want to talk about motocross who have not experienced motocross. They haven’t done it, he says, so they don’t know about it.

It’s one thing to feel all gooey and nice about my kids in the neighborhood tavern. It’s quite another to come home and have my kids give me a wide berth because of my ill humor and impatience and lack of interest in their affairs.

We’ve always known what Lent is about, and if you’re like me, you fight it tooth and nail. If you’re like me, you make small talk about the rigors and do whatever else you can to avoid confronting what your heart is screaming at you. It’s true I don’t know just what it’s screaming, what it’s saying, what the truth is. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to go into the desert where I can hear and see clearly.

I took one step into the desert one time, from the grass at the edge to the sand. Some journey, huh? Ah, you know what a journey it was. We Catholics, we’ve always known the challenge of Lent, known in our hearts. You don’t get to be an Easter people, with joy unsurpassed, with no sand in your shoes. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 1st, 1987

Owensboro Catholic High School Senior Yearbook Note

2010-01-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

written by Thomas A. Russell in 1965

Changes on the job

2009-08-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

Bob was a big guy and nobody liked him. He worked for a trucking company and all the workers in the place couldn’t stand him. He was a loudmouth. He intimidated everybody he came into contact with, and he especially intimidated Frank.

The think Frank had inside of himself about Bob was horrendous. Anger, outrage. Frank didn’t even want to be around Bob. Bob would come in from taking a load and Frank would go to the other side of the terminal to avoid making contact. Or Frank would hurry to get his work done and be out the door just to keep out of Bob’s way.

It wasn’t really just Frank, though. Bob was such a blowhard, there wasn’t a man driving a truck that wouldn’t just as soon Bob went out and never came back. With Frank, the case was more severe, because Frank knew in his heart that the reason he had so much anger toward Bob was because he was afraid of him. Frank was absolutely scared of the man, big, dumb bruiser that he was.

One day, Bob got sick and went to the hospital. The atmosphere at the terminal was decidedly different those days. Suffice it to say, unkind comments were made about Bob being in the hospital, things like good riddance, dressed up with other unsavory vocabulary words.

Frank was glad Bob was out, too; but he still had anger about the man, and he didn’t know what to do about it. The thing about Frank, he had come to a new place in his life, trying to make a few changes, trying to stop living the way he had been living, trying to make some kind of attempt to do what he knew was right in the eyes of God.

Driving home that night, Frank came to a T in the road, and sitting directly across was a card store. Something inside Frank said stop and go in, which he did, and there he found a card to send to Bob. Frank called back to work and got the room number and address of the hospital. He addressed the card right there in the store and bought a stamp from the guy behind the counter because he knew if he didn’t do it now, he wouldn’t do it. Frank signed the get-well card, “Your friend, Frank.”

Immediately outside the card store was a mailbox. The instant he let the card drop in the mailbox, Frank’s anger left him. Just like that.

Seven, eight weeks later, Bob came back to work. The first thing he did was walk up to Frank and stick out his hand. “Thanks,” Bob said. Frank’s was the only card Bob had received from work the whole time he was in the hospital.

Frank did a little investigating after that. He found out Bob had five kids and every one of them was accident-prone. It seemed like one always had something wrong: a broken arm, a broken leg. To top it off, Bob’s wife was a sickly person, along with having emotional problems. The point was that Bob was coming to work every day out of an atmosphere of pressure. He had no easy life.

It was several years later and Frank had a different job by that time, 60 miles away in a different state. He was a used car salesman now. It was a warm day and business at the car lot, which was on a busy highway, was slow. Frank was walking around the lot outside hoping for a customer to come in.

All of a sudden, Frank heard the gasping of air brakes behind him on the highway and the hollow bump, bump, bumping sound of the trailer end of an empty big rig skidding to a short stop. Frank turned and looked up and who should it be but Bob dodging between lanes of moving cars with a smile on his face, waving and hollering, “How ya doing, Frank! Good to see ya, Buddy!”

Bob had stopped his rig in traffic to say hello to his old pal. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on December 6th, 1987

Faith in the family room

2009-08-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

Jamie was a young man, just 15. He sat in the family room in the back of the house, alone this night as he was frequently in those times. Jamie lived with his Dad and his older brother. His Mom had died about a year before.

What had been a house full of kids and a Mom and Dad in the young fellow’s lifetime had become an empty place. Neighbors didn’t come. Meals were attempted but the effort mostly abandoned. It was empty and quiet.

Jamie had determined this night to be honest with himself once and for all. He would decide what he truly believed. It was a young man’s way of dealing with things. So much had happened so soon, but he could not say that then; he could not be wise and knowing about the meaning of his experiences.

Taking a pen and paper, Jamie wrote, “I believe in God.” He pondered the statement, questioning himself rigorously if he sincerely believed what he had written.

Dad had gone out, probably to the Elks. Dad was pretty lonely since Mom had died and Jamie didn’t begrudge his Dad’s need for companionship and relaxation. Jamie loved his Dad, but he couldn’t articulate the numbness in his own spirit. Did he believe anything anymore, anything at all?

Brother was out, too. It wasn’t long ago they had fought, Jamie and his brother. It was a real fight, one with wrestling and temper. Brother told Jamie he’d better start helping around the house, but Jamie wasn’t going to do that. He didn’t care about the damn house. You’re going to care, brother said, and whacked his sibling with the kitchen towel. Jamie grabbed the towel to wrest it away, but found it tight in his brother’s grip. They wrestled with it tensely to the floor.

Jamie’s eyes streamed with tears and anger and a hollowness he himself could not understand. From his center he cried: “I don’t care!” “You’ll start caring!” brother rejoined. And so it went until they both lost their energy, lying side by side, weeping, weeping, anguishing about a power guiding their lives to such an emptiness.

Jamie hated. He didn’t know why, he just hated. Jamie hated Dad, and loved him. Jamie hated God, and loved him. He could not see that his hate was anger, and that his anger covered up his hurt. Love was in him, but it seemed to him to be a painful contradiction.

The boy thought of the fight with his brother as he peered at the words, “I believe in God.” Quickly, there was a shuffling at the back door, and the quiet was broken by the sound of people entering. Immediately the air was pungent with a strange perfume. Jamie’s father, and a woman he had never met, entered the room. “Oh what a pretty boy!” the woman exclaimed.

After pleasantries and a short visit, Dad and his date left and quiet returned. The smell of perfume lingered in the air as Jamie resumed his thoughts, feeling the urgency of deciding what he truly believed, feeling deep longing for the basic, the absolute, the unequivocal. There was indeed something solid about “I believe in God.”

Against all expectation, Dad was home again soon, surprising Jamie in his exercise of discovering the substance of his faith.

Dad sat in the family room. “What you up to, son?” he asked.

Jamie said, “I’m trying to decide what I truly believe, Dad. I’ve begun by saying I believe in God,” feeling the urge to engage his father in discussing this pursuit.

His Dad nodded vacantly. He said, “Did you like that lady I brought by tonight?”

“She seemed like a nice lady.”

“Well, she might be your new momma.”

“Really? Gee, Dad, that’s great.”

Outside, the young man expressed happiness for his Dad. Inside, he retreated in fearful confusion. Barriers and walls went up that imprisoned the emptiness he could not understand. He stopped trying to decide what he truly believed. He began trying instead to repel the pain of the certainty of his doubt. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on December 6th, 1987

Hungry

2009-07-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

A special place is reserved in my heart for people whose own hearts are hardened and ugly and black with sin. The reason is quite simple: Takes one to know one.

I thank God for the profound blessings He has given me in my life. I thank Him especially for the opportunities I have had to love and show compassion for others like me: the bums and derelicts, the haughty, the selfish, the lustful, the greedy and indifferent, the addicted and desperate, the lazy and morose, the liars and thieves. I am not set apart from these. I long for their fellowship with me in our saving, loving, forgiving Lord. I want them to know about the victory that can be ours, not of ourselves, but in Him.

I can’t help it and I can’t explain it, but I feel drawn to those who have cut themselves off from God’s grace. Somehow there’s an urgency inside me for them to know that I understand, I’ve been there; I’m there now; I know the struggle; there’s hope.

I don’t boast of sin. St. Paul says, “What, then, are we to say? ‘Let us continue in sin that grace may abound?’ Certainly not! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” My boast is that God loves us sinners.

The sinners I find most difficult to love are the proud, the arrogant, the puffed up. The reason, again, is apparent. I find pride to be my most debilitating defect. Pride puts me at a distance from those most in need of my authentic concern. Pride blinds me to the beam in my own eye.

Once more, St. Paul: “…Every one of you who judges another is inexcusable. By your judgement you convict yourself, since you do the very same things. (People say) ‘We know that God’s judgement on men who do such things is just.’ Do you suppose, then, that you will escape His judgement, you who condemn these things in others yet do them yourself? Or do you presume kindness and forbearance? Do you not know that God’s kindness is an invitation to you to repent?”

I bring all this up today because I believe it’s important for me not to become smug or self-satisfied, to fail to recognize myself in the coal-blackest sinner. There, but for the grace of God, go I; and in my case – there I go.

As I bask in God’s favor in the Church and in the availability of the Sacraments, somehow hunger has become a growing part of that experience. A hunger for souls – not for the good guys, but for the bad guys.

God loves the poor and our hearts go out to those in need. But it strikes me that sometimes those in most need are the fat cats, the complacent, the stuffed. We sinners need more than a meal.

Whenever the subject of sin comes up these days, somebody always seems to fret about having a good self-concept. For my part, I have no trouble knowing that I am a person in love with God, longing to do His will, striving to follow Him, to obey Him, to love those He loves. I also know I fail in that. I’m aware that parts of me are revolting and embarrassing and dark. I deliberately choose evil. Al Capone had “My Jesus Mercy” chiseled on his tombstone. I wonder if people think, “Good thing Al prayed that prayer,” or if many don’t quietly pray it for themselves. I know I do.

Today, I don’t kneel and thank God that I’m not like the rest of men. On the contrary, it is my kinship with my brothers and sisters which stirs my soul to appreciation. This is why I am grateful: “It is precisely in this that God proves His love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Now that we have been justified by His blood, it is all the more certain that we shall be saved by Him from God’s wrath.” - T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 22nd, 1987

Two friends with a longing

2009-07-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite people in all the world is my friend Billy. We first met in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, 17 years ago.

Billy’s an unusual person as persons go. He certainly follows the beat of his own personal drummer. He’s at once eccentric and ordinary, spiritual and worldly. Only in the past few years have I made the acquaintance with his spiritual nature.

The Lord has his ways, and when Billy and I met we both were very much indifferent to matters of faith. One might say we had a scoffing attitude in those days. What mattered were good booze and good times. Now that we both sport decidedly balder pates, we find ourselves having been on a pilgrimage together. Somehow now the Lord matters a lot.

Billy and I have been great ones for pilgrimages. Hindsight helps me to identify the longing which was in both of us, longing for what we didn’t know, but thought we did. A couple of pseudo-artists-poets-vagabonds. We spoke amusedly and often of abandoning all vestiges of our former lives, of traveling to Denver. Denver! we’d say, and that would open great vague auras of significance, memories of reckless freedom and hopes for amusements and satisfactions as yet unexperienced in the human condition.

We had a longing all right, but not for Denver.

My friend Billy is not a Catholic, and I doubt he ever will be. (Who knows, maybe someday you’ll get that straightened out, William.)

Billy and I have both come to a new relationship with Jesus Christ, though, and surely that has given our friendship a whole new dimension.

I can’t describe the affection I have for my friend. My kids think he’s great and always enjoy his visits. My wife loves Billy, even though he can be awfully obnoxious. I’ve just never found it difficult to accept him the way he is, however that might be in a given year. Sometimes he is a flush high roller with a new artistic achievement under his belt.

Sometimes I worry he’s not going to make it, but he’s a survivor. He worked for a while with a Friends group in Chicago helping older people: driving them to town, doing their grocery shopping for them, cleaning their houses, tuning in to such wisdom as he could find among those he served.

No, I can’t describe this fellow to you. Whenever we meet we take up from there. Last Christmas morning he called and said he was coming in from Chicago if his car could make it. His car didn’t make it, so we got him on the Air Wisconsin. He had crafted gift packages for the children from pasteboard; one was a house, one was a pyramid, one was a book. The next day he went back home on the Amtrak. That was the last time I’ve seen him. He could show up tonight, though; and that would be wonderful.

Well, William, I would say. So good to see you. And he would laugh: a hearty, glad laugh that would send feelings of warmth to the very spirit. The kids would run to him and he would call them all by their middle names. And day would turn to night and night to morning with conversation and eating and fierce determined competition in a game.

I missed you, Tommy, he would say. I missed you, too, Billy, I would say.

Along the line I’d ask, how’s your spiritual life, Billy? And he would say, never mind about me, Tommy, how’s yours? And that would launch the writing of the latest chapter in our pilgrimage to Denver. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 15th, 1987

The real educators

2009-03-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

The great educators of American youth may not be the pastors or principals, not the parents or the teachers, but with all due respect to these important individuals – the real educators may just be the school janitors.

I remember the janitor from my elementary school, Ss. Joseph and Paul, although I honestly don’t remember his name. I’m not really sure I ever knew his real name. I always called him Yogi Bear and he always called me Booboo. All the other kids called him Yogi Bear, too; and all the other kids had the same name I did. However, I knew in my heart and in fact that Yogi knew me personally, and that my name meant something very different from all the other Booboos.

So what about the education I received from the school janitor? Volumes could not hold these treasures.

Yogi Bear had a watch, a beautiful gold pocket watch with delicately detailed black hands. It was more than a watch, however. It was a tool. The school ran on it. Mass began by it. Important people may have set the times when things would happen, but they nevertheless happened by Yogi’s watch. He set the classroom clocks and the one in the principal’s office, too. The principal’s important timepiece determined many grave events, but its importance depended on a higher source. Sister Dorothy Marie may have taught me to tell time (or was it my mother?), but Yogi Bear, the school janitor, taught me about time itself, and the sway it held in people’s lives. I learned about time from the timekeeper.

Many privileges and responsibilities came my way in my education; patrol boy, president of the C.S.M.C., student receptionist. There was no task I approached with more awe, however, than those reverent occasions when Yogi Bear handed me the rope (me! imagine!) to pull the Angelus bell. As we awaited the famous watch to tell us just the right moment, Yogi gave me my instructions: the right tension, not too hard, let the rope slide for the second ring before pulling again. Wait. Rhythm is important. I, Booboo, made mistakes, but Yogi Bear had confidence in me. I learned from him that I could have confidence in myself. It might be odd, but I grieve for the boys and girls of today whose churches’ electric chimes deny them the opportunity to learn the mystical lesson of ringing the church bell. Honestly, I still feel its weight and response.

Yogi was a quiet man. He had his own niche in the boiler room, and I suppose I envied him that spot. Niches in boiler rooms are fertile ground for the seeds of contemplation. Yogi moved at his own pace, but always seemed to be working. He was kind to me, always ready to share his knowledge, but perhaps more importantly, his experience. Yogi didn’t necessarily teach the lesson, he was the lesson. He was nobility of character; he was humility – humility in touch with his own intrinsic worth. He was patience and calm.

Yogi shared important, lasting things. He knew about boys and pocket watches, boys and church bells. Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach; but he wasn’t the teacher. He was the school janitor. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 8, 1987

What happened to courtesy?

2009-03-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

Courtesy does not come to us naturally. It’s artificial, learned. It’s a lubricant in society that eases our relationships with one another. It’s artificial, but it isn’t phony. I believe it’s a necessity in an ever shorter supply.

Having been brought up in Kentucky, one might say I have been influenced by the southern traditions of high congeniality. Huck Finn’s “Yes, ma’ams” come to mind; and I do indeed still say yes, ma’am. The night they drove old Dixie down was a night no doubt duly accounted for in Divine Providence, but good manners began to die, too; and I’ll call that a shame.

Courtesy is right and important. St. Paul says in Philippians, “…Let all parties think humbly of others as superior to themselves, each of you looking to other’s interests rather than to his own.” If I push in ahead of you, grunt when you speak, in general fail in civility, much less pay deference to you dignity, I have done more than abrogate courtesy, I have harmed you. That makes it a moral matter.

I’m not talking about knowing which fork to pick out of a line of forks at a state dinner, but the common greeting, the consideration and respect we as individuals owe to one another.

Something grates against my bones when I hear a youngster respond to a teacher with “yeah.” Something goes to war inside me what a failure to hear is rejoined with “what?” Something wrinkles my brow when overfamiliarity occurs where unfamiliarity exists.

Words are, too, important. It does matter that people say please, that people say excuse me, that people beg people’s pardon. Addresses like Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. and Father and Sister and Brother and Bishop all matter. Children do need to learn to say thank you, and not just grab the candy and run. Courtesy is tightly linked with words – they are tools of respect; they erect it where it did not stand.

There are times of course, when words are obnoxious. Someone obstreperously butting into a conversation would do well to keep silence. There’s a time for reverent quiet; there’s a time to make noise.

It’s true, manners can be carried to ridiculous extremes. The French, in their précieux period, were loath to refer to teeth, for example, considering the word too earthy. They preferred “the furnishings of the mouth.” They disliked “feet,” preferring “les petites souffrantes,” the little sufferers. Sometimes discourtesy can be disguised in preciosity. A friend one filing through the college cafeteria line told one of the cooks: “Madame, this fare is a gastronomical felony!” To which she replied, “Why thank you!”

Courtesy, for all its sometimes culturally affected oddities, nevertheless has a certain core value, an intrinsic place in any time period. For all the funny distortions that can occur, we need cultural mechanisms for getting along. For sure, the gentility of the South is gone. Going, too, I’m afraid are the sentient good manners of the North, East and West.

Lord, thank you for giving us one another. Lord, please guide us in our ways. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 1st, 1987

On being a misfit

2009-03-19T05:17:00.000-07:00

One of the things I hear my Bishop say with regularity is that Catholicism is counter-cultural. He has spoken of the counter-cultural choice young men and women make when they enter religious life. He emphasizes the counter-cultural lessons taught in Catholic schools. He makes a point that our faith, the core message of our evangelization, is counter-cultural.

Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.

Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.

Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.

Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.

Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.

The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.

The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.

The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:

Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.

So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.

Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987

Too much, too soon

2009-02-26T06:20:00.000-08:00

Already they’ve started hawking Christmas wares. This is the first day of October! You’ll pardon my Grinch persona, but this early trading on the Spirit of Christmas does anything but inspire a festive mood. A TV ad on Oct. 4 with Bing Crosby wearing a wreath around his head singing the much-beloved White Christmas and all for only $12.98 plus shipping and handling does not give me a warm glow.

This early and offensive Christmas-theme commerce is linked intrinsically to the money god, not the Son of God. Christmas is a sacred celebration. The observance is gentle and quiet – full of the silence and serenity of awe. “He was known to be of humble estate,” the Scripture says. But where is the regard for the holiness of Christmas in this loud exploitation?

Celebration, of its very nature, implies waiting, anticipation, implies confining a particular focus to a particular time. Celebration also implies accomplishment. Things have to come to fulfillment before we celebrate them. Otherwise our celebration is empty, devoid of its reason for being.

My kids look forward to their birthdays, and rightly so. We do not, however, begin celebrating their birthdays three months in advance; nor do we emphasize the celebration until much closer to the date itself. We don’t want our children to be deprived of the celebration they deserve by causing it to be a vapid afterthought to a running hype.

I will grant that there is such a thing as the Christmas season. However, this ain’t it. We celebrate the harvest season during harvest season. We do not, however, celebrate bringing in sheaves in July! or June!

Frankly there is something decadent about beginning the Christmas celebration on the first of October. It’s an unfair assault on people’s sensibilities, and all this razzle-dazzle – particularly so soon – is a clear example of modern idolatry: the worship of money.

Sometimes I think that money has become the only real value in our society. If it has to do with money, people will take notice, act, be concerned. It’s the first good. Spiritual matters, affairs of conscience, issues of the heart and soul have become irrelevant, expendable – nice, but who cares? What matters is money. Money has become literally a god.

Merchants declare that if they don’t make it at Christmas, they don’t make it – and heads bow in sympathetic assent. Let the unbridled consumerism begin! No matter that people become numbed into indifference. No matter that the standard of right conscience is whether the right gift has been procured, indeed that the right number of gifts have been purchased. No matter that people become callous and frayed and pressured – Buy early! Buy here! Buy now! Buy more!

Does the Babe in Bethlehem desire that people incur unconscionable debt, panged by some materialistic guilt to give the very best somebody else’s money can buy? And what of gift receivers? Do we droop in disappointment if we don’t get enough, just what we wanted, just the right thing? I read the truth in my own heart. I feel the struggle. I’m not immune or above it all.

It is, of course, pointless to protest these proceedings. We have no defense save in the quiet place God gave each of us within. We know that retreat, but we forget about it sometimes – forget the sweetness and truth and light we have found there.

Giving is good, but a gush of extravagance is a distortion of that goodness. Receiving is a blessing, but tempered with anything but gratitude is an insult to that blessing. Celebration is natural, but unnatural if unrelenting and lacking fulfillment.

Pope John Paul II, in a message to the laity while in San Francisco, said that we will be a witness to Christ by the way we live and by the way we refuse to live. I refuse to allow Christmas to become an empty, giddy, hyperactive succession of weeks for me and my family. I opt to wait.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 18th, 1987

2008-06-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

This is a story about Father’s Day, but bear with me.

Sometimes, suddenly, I become full of fear about my job or my health or a relationship with someone. There will be no basis for this fear, but there I’ll be, worried something awful is going to happen, leaving me high and dry, terribly sick or dead, or lonely. Crazy, huh?

Fear will then become coupled with resentment. After I’ve gotten a good, irrational fear going, I’ll react by getting mad at my employer or my friend or God.

Before long I’m fighting a battle of the mind, defending myself against all charges when I realize there are no charges. Then I’m ashamed of myself and start feeling guilty for having been mad for no reason.

This, of course, leads to feelings of self-justification, some “legitimate” displeasure. I figure it’s not right that I have to be going through and emotional wringer all the time. God has it in for me. Then I realize I’m in an emotional wringer all right: the spin cycle.

Don’t laugh. People do go through all these ugly feelings, all for no reason. I know they do because I do. You may be perfectly at ease all the time, but I’m not.

My emotions become convoluted and I get mad and fly off the handle at my wife and/or my kids. I worry. I feel like a failure. I feel like what’s the use.

This is still about Father’s Day, so hang in there.

I have found that there’s nothing like a dose of honesty in the midst of emotional turmoil to cure what ails you. You’ve seen it on the silver screen. The soldier is hysterical and somebody slaps his face. In my own experience, I can become a knot of self-pitying gush born of irrational fear and somebody will call me a big baby. Nothing like a little humility (read: truth) to bring a person to his senses.

I was driving back to the old homeplace the other day. It takes a while to get there and usually I’m lost in thought by the time I arrive – no longer simply driving, but riding and emotional rollercoaster. A lot of nostalgia seeps into the cracks of my consciousness and I get excited-wan about the old days.

This trip, I made a pit stop at the Dairy Queen in Loogootee, my head full of visions and gushy feelings not about the past, but about illusions about the past. Inside the Dairy Queen john, a young father was helping his little boy with his britches. This proved to be my slap in the face, the truth that brought me back.

Back on the road, the sweetness of the child’s voice and the tenderness of the father’s rang in my ears, as I recalled the simplicity of the task that confronts every father and son at one time or another. It may not seem like much, but it’s quite something, really, for a dad and his boy to make happen and work out okay. It takes patience and cooperation. It takes the dad’s responsibility and the boy’s trust. It takes uncompromising, unconditional love.

In this case, their circumstances reminded me of mine: the truth that I’m a dad, too, and despite what was or what I thought I was, despite what crazy feelings invade my consciousness, despite my propensity for self-pity and getting mad at the world – I’ve got kids who depend on me. They look to me not only for food and shelter (they take that for granted), but also they expect, ahem, emotional maturity (they don’t know they expect that).

Yep, that does it for me. When I get on an emotional jag, all I have to do is remember I’m a dad, that straightens me right out. See, I told you this was about Father’s Day.

By the way, I thought about that father with his little boy. I remembered mine when they were that little. It made me cry. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 21st, 1987

A people of faith

2008-01-23T05:31:00.000-08:00

A parish is a living place. The bare twigs Marie Perry planted behind Sorrowful Mother Church now tower above the church. Father Raymond Weiber’s new shrine to St. Francis recollects those Franciscan Fathers who kept the Faith more than 100 years ago in the parish.

Mrs. Jean Kosik stopped by to paint the rectory office the other day. Paint brush in hand, she spoke of modern Catholic identity. She and I and Father Weiber and Sister Kathryn Kirk reflected on media coverage of the Holy Father’s visit, about how the ordinary lives of ordinary Catholics are not very newsworthy. I thought about the Holy Father’s theme, “Unity in the work of service,” as I observed Mrs. Kosik paint the doorjamb.

Joseph and Joyce Slawnikowski, the parish council president and his wife, had just left. Father Weiber said: “They’re here for Mass every day.” Faithful people.

Father spoke to a parishioner about a concrete walkway behind the rectory. They spoke in Polish, fluent Polish, flowing Polish, conversational Polish in the back yard of the rectory in Wheatfield, Indiana.

“We didn’t hear the word ‘ecumenical’ in those days,” said Margaret Grube, as she sat at the dining table, remembering her grandfather. “When you come down to the nitty-gritty,” she said, “good people are good people. The Methodist preacher used to come through here on horseback and he lived at my grandparents’ house when he was here. They fed him and gave him a bed so he could minister to the Methodists.”

Glimpses, a few memories. Who can say what reflections they bring, what significance they hold for those whose lives have been intertwined in this 100-year-old parish? We speak of buildings and windows and roofs and shrines. We tell stories of statues and who gave the ciborium and who made the altar linen. But a parish is a living place, ten thousand acts of charity, enduring faith, loyalty and service.

No monument recalls the work of the Victory Noll Sisters who labored to teach the faith at Sorrowful Mother parish. No marble slab marks the spot where Father Donald Hardebeck sat in his station wagon outside the public school in Fair Oaks, his motor running the heater in winter time, teaching religion, teaching the Catholic faith.

Only oral history recalls the courage of those Sorrowful Mother parishioners who were hated by the Ku Klux Klan. And what about the Protestants who resisted the threatening pressure to join in the bigotry?

The past becomes a part of the present in ways none of us understands. People will say that they love Sorrowful Mother Church. Buildings, though, are incapable of love. People know that. It’s just difficult to separate the brick and wood from the heart and soul of a parish. Objects become symbols of something deeper: the sign of faith which cannot be seen.

Time was, when the crickets sawed their songs in the marshy wilds of that once uninhabited country, a fearful, hopeful German family arrived at a clearing in northern Indiana. With a lump in their throat and a prayer to God, they stopped to stay, to live there, to call this green space home. There was no church, no parish hall, no house indeed for themselves unless they began to cut trees.

Weeks passed, months. A lone rider, hungry, weathered, spotted chimney smoke and stopped to pay a visit. He was a priest, he said, do you folks know of any Catholics in the area? Family members turned to one another and smiled. A tear formed in the mother’s eye, a tear of joy. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 27th, 1987

Living in today’s world

2008-01-22T19:01:00.001-08:00

While Jan. 22, the anniversary of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, is still fresh in our minds, my mind is unsettled and torn.

Recently I came upon a piece of writing by a group called American Life League asserting that five major U.S. companies are contributing to Planned Parenthood, the League calling for a boycott of their products.

I wrote to each of the companies and asked if it were true that they gave money to Planned Parenthood. Four responded to me. I have not heard from the other firm.

The four answered yes, they support Planned Parenthood, but only insofar as the nation’s No. 1 abortionist provides educational services, or said their money went for “family planning education for low-income people” or “ongoing heath care services.”

They thanked me for my comments. A couple said such comments were reviewed when it came time to give more money from the corporate coffer.

I guess I’m disturbed about these circumstances. One thing is for sure: There is no room for compromise on the question of abortion.

Suppose I buy a product from a company that provides support to Planned Parenthood. There is no question that I have thereby contributed to the support of the No. 1 abortionist in the nation. The companies make their money by the sale of their products to guys like me. They, in turn, direct some of their profits to outfits like Planned Parenthood. The question is, am I compromising on the question of abortion by buying these products?

The argument always goes that these Planned Parenthood activities are simply educational. Therefore, why is that not good? Let’s take this analogy: Suppose there was an excellent school with a first-class academic program. Part of the philosophy of the school, however was that abortion was OK. This was an assertion, now, not a moot subject. In fact, they taught an elective course which said that specifically. Would you send your child to that school?

Let’s take the analogy of a magazine that always has in its center spread one of the four Gospels. The rest of the magazine was devoted to essays on sexual mores with the underlying philosophy being that abortion on demand was OK. Would you recommend this magazine to your college-age son or daughter?

In both analogies, something good can certainly be said. The school was a good school; the magazine published one of the four Gospels. However, by association with the other elements, surely there is some inconsistency, some compromise one would be making in affirming either the school or the magazine.

There is no inconsistency in the various aspects of the Church. Somehow, things go together. There is nothing in the Gospel which contradicts another part of the Gospel. Planned Parenthood says it is at least two things: educational services and abortionist. It says you may not like the one, but you might find the other wholly good and worthwhile. I see a contradiction in that, an inconsistency, a compromise.

The argument exists that because Planned Parenthood has money for its other operations, it’s more at liberty to perform abortions. Like the family budget, you can do more with more.

Boycotts are certainly different from simple protests. If I write to my congressman, that’s one thing. If I don’t vote for my congressman the next time out, that’s another. I would not give money to Planned Parenthood for any reason, because I find their philosophy reprehensible. They think it’s OK to kill unborn babies, and even help do it. I’m now faced with giving money to Planned Parenthood indirectly, whether I want to or not, because American firms are giving them the cash. However miniscule my contribution would be when I purchased a small item, somehow it still doesn’t sit well with me.

It’s not an easy ethical dilemma. United Way of Greater Lafayette gave some money to Planned Parenthood a while back for one of its non-abortion programs, saying the money didn’t come from direct contributions. Cut me some slack! United Way does many valuable and worthwhile things, but that kind of talk is doubletalk. It represents inconsistency and compromise.

I suppose some company somewhere is always going to be doing something I don’t like: polluting the environment, treating its employees unfairly, having some connection with organized crime or pornography or some other vice. I’m sure I buy all kinds of things which bring about unsettling circumstances.

It just seems there is no clear answer. Sometimes my conscience aches living in this world. What about yours? – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in January, 1987

Scrooge and Thomas

2008-01-13T05:54:00.000-08:00

The wearing of white vestments concludes this Sunday, marking the end of another Christmas season and the resumption of another year of bad rap for my friend Ebenezer Scrooge.

The fictional Ebenezer and my very real patron saint, Thomas the Apostle, both have fallen heir to an outrageous and unkind legacy, their reputations sullied beyond any consistency with the facts.

Call someone a Scrooge and you should be calling him a kind fellow, generous, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough, in the good old world.” Trouble is, we still hold Scrooge to be miserly and sour, insensitive to the great chain of suffering to be found amongst his neighbors.

It’s also popular to think immediately of Thomas when encountering someone struggling with belief. “Doubting Thomases” they are called; but, of course, St. Thomas was a man of great faith. How many of us find ourselves repeating his words when we behold the host at the elevation: “My Lord and my God!”

It is true that Scrooge was a miser and Thomas refused to believe until he had seen the Lord himself. But the fact is and the point is that these men changed. Had Scrooge refused to turn around or Thomas perdured in his unbelief, what edification would we have had, what Gospel truth attained?

O, I’m a staunch defender of Scrooge and Thomas, all right; but I’m afraid I have trouble letting people off the hook, too. Would that I did not find it so easy to judge people, put them in a category, form an opinion. I can build a whole personality around a tiny bit of gossip. Obviously, the solution to it all is to allow people to have their faults, to observe the sturdy pile of timber in my eye, and to remember that God doesn’t have favorites.

The rub comes most keenly, I have observed, when the rub comes home. That is, I resist change because that means I will have to be different. I suspect the fictional neighbors of the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge were not a little suspicious of this now gregarious, now benevolent fellow. Doubtless he had to change a lot and for a long time before the townsfolk would hazard a fresh look at the old pinchpenny. Thomas has been dead these nineteen hundred-odd years, been canonized, but we still haven’t given him the benefit of the doubt.

So there is then this social aspect which militates against conversion, I think. I resolve to stop swearing, but in the company of the old crowd, will I find acceptance? I lay off the booze. What will my comrades say? Dare I show displeasure at some racial epithet? Do I laugh at the dirty joke?

I can’t believe it wasn’t humanly hard for Jesus when they sneered and scoffed. “We know you,” they said. “You can’t possibly be anything special. You’re the carpenter’s son. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” You can almost hear the round of laughter.

In a way, Scrooge had an easy conversion. He had a bunch of money to be generous with, which doubtless brought a degree of instant acceptance of his newfound state. The most Christ-like figure in the whole tale had to be Scrooge’s nephew Fred, who accepted and loved his uncle in his former state as well as his latter.

Thomas, to be sure, found himself without a leg to stand on, faced with the irrefutable contradiction of his lack of faith, and so fell to his knees. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Without doubt, he was forever changed – despite himself.

Sometimes I have seen the clear path to follow and have shied away. Given gobs of grave and unmistakable direction, I have stood firm in the old way. Fear of being no longer the hail good fellow, the wag, the center of attention, I have remained the un-Christ-like version of the Christian. Rather than stand by the Carpenter’s Son, the Nazarene, I have chosen the path of weakness and habit and pride. Jesus gave us a stand-in for us all to put his finger in the nail prints, his hand in the side. He gave us Thomas. He knew us. He wanted us to have not the slightest reason to doubt that He was alive.

I cannot understand my diffidence, my refusal to surrender. Faced with the same disarming clarity Thomas faced, I know what to do, but do not. Still, hope reigns in ordinary time, too.

Scrooge became a good man. Thomas came to believe.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 11th, 1987

What is a Catholic?

2008-01-02T03:35:00.001-08:00

You’ve heard the old joke, “Is the Pope a Catholic?” The question of the hour seems to be, “Is he the only one?”

The implication of the rhetorical question about the Pope, of course, is that there’s a commonplace understanding of just what being a Catholic is. Whatever it is, so the common understanding goes, at least the Pope must be one.

From there on, the common understanding seems to falter. Take the question, “Is Tom Russell a Catholic?” For those who’ve ever heard of Tom Russell, responses would vary. Some would say, “Certainly!” Others would say, “I always thought he was.” Still others, “He may be a Catholic, but I’m not so sure he’s a good Catholic.” Some would say, “He may say he’s a Catholic, but if you ask me, he’s a Catholic in name only.” You get my drift.

I was always taught in catechism class that in order to be a Catholic, a person had to believe everything the Church teaches. If you rejected anything, it was out you go.

Then along came the idea, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” That is, if you were “baptized a Catholic,” you were in for life. After that, you could become a “fallen away Catholic” or surely remain in “full communion.”

There were other gradations. We spoke of “good Catholics,” “marginal Catholics” and we had our share of “Saturday night sinners and Sunday morning saints.” I became acquainted with “C & Eers”: those who attended Mass only on Christmas and Easter. Another category was the “non-practicing” Catholic.

Anyone who wasn’t a Catholic was a “non-Catholic,” but it was only relatively recently that I heard about people who “used to be Catholic.” Used to be people were “raised Catholic” or “brought up Catholic,” but they couldn’t just quit. They “quit practicing their faith” or simply “stopped going to Church.” I’ve heard of people who were “supposed to be Catholic.”

People didn’t used to say of themselves: “I’m a member of the Catholic Church.” They said, “I’m a Catholic.” They were “members” of a parish.

It seems that there are all kinds of “modern Catholics” and today there are more kinds than ever before. We have “women Catholics,” “conservative Catholics,” “liberal Catholics,” “moderate Catholics,” “homosexual Catholics,” “charismatic Catholics.” A significantly distinct group has become known as “American Catholic.”

People of course used to “become Catholic,” but one could not simply “start going” to the Catholic Church and have that meet the sufficient “requirements of the faith.” Much more was involved, and that’s still true, at least I think it is.

Just how true, however, seems to have been called into question. I haven’t heard of any of the “requirements of the faith” being changed, but one thing I’ve noticed is that some people say they don’t have to believe certain things the Catholic Church teaches and can still be “a Catholic.” Another thing I’ve noticed is that the expression “fallen away Catholic” has fallen into disuse, along also with the general disfavor of the expression “non-Catholic.” The expression “former Catholic” has grown in popularity, and perhaps in this category reside those with selective disbelief in the teachings of the “Catholic Church.”

Whatever the “Catholic Church” is seems to be in question, but there is general agreement that whatever it is, the Pope pretty well fits the mold of what a member of it is supposed to be. He says that to be “a Catholic,” you have to believe the whole shebang. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 20th, 1987

Msgr. Braun, r.i.p.

2008-01-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

The last time I saw him was Memorial Day 1985 at Resurrection Cemetery near Whitesville, Ky. A gang of priests was moving about the grounds praying for the dead. Msgr. Peter J. Braun was there but standing by himself in the parking lot: too old, too feeble, I figured, to join the others. He prayed the Rosary with them. He was the only one wearing a biretta.

Msgr. Braun was always Monsignor to his face, but he was Father Brown elsewhere in Ss. Joseph and Paul parish, where his was a name which brought quick change in tone to any querulous state in the life of faith. The Josephinum Newsletter tells me he died in November. Blessed be God in His angels and in His saints.

I did not greet Msgr. Braun that day in the cemetery. It would not have been proper to interrupt his Rosary. Woe betide me if I had. The feelings are familiar in the human condition: approach-avoidance. In the bustle of the aftermath, I thought no, he wouldn’t remember me.

Oh, but I remember him; indeed have kept up with the news of the whereabouts and well being of my former pastor during the years. Now, my inquiries are at an end.

I suppose I should be ashamed of myself for not making the effort to be personal in my attachment to Msgr. Braun. He was a human being with feelings. But there was no particular reason for him to have an interest in me. “I think you have a vocation,” he told me once. But he was wrong. I was just another kid in the parish.

It was a Sunday morning in the late 1950s. I was one of the servers for the Mass that morning. Father Brown was late and Father Brown was never even slightly late. I recall the news hitting the sacristy in the businesslike tension of the substitute priest. I looked out the sacristy door toward the rectory where no one stirred outside, but where inside I suspected Father Brown lay dying.

He had been overweight and a smoker. The post-heart-attack man emerged an exemplary model of health. If he had slowed, his pace belied it. He became a brisk walker and came to be joined later by a small pet dog.

I knew him to be a genial man but with bearing and reserve. That did not mean he did not speak his mind plainly. His self-discipline was the butt of jokes; but no joke could pierce his essential trait. Msgr. Braun had dignity.

His love for each one made each one know there were others to love, too. His love meant very specific, deep and uncompromising things – not things fuzzy, superficial and maudlin. His notion of repentance had to do with unequivocal effort to change.

Let’s face it, Monsignor. Some people thought you were mean. Word was you sent more than one away from the confessional with his sins retained until you could discern some semblance of sorrow. Tongues wagged about that, and even more tongues would wag today, I suppose. They say Padre Pio sent some away, too.

You were one of a kind, even though you did have a twin brother. I ached for your loneliness, but I know you were every fiber the man God called you to be. Being one of the kids in your crowd, I was never intimidated by you. I never misunderstood where you were coming from. My fear was respect for you, even reverence.

I think of the example of your life only with gratitude. I am still blessed by your blessings. They went past the sign to the mystery of the truth. You were a man of God. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 13th, 1987

On surrendering to God

2007-12-28T18:42:00.000-08:00

My son John has declared that he wants to be called Spike. That’s his nickname, he said, and he for sure does not want to be called Robert, which is his middle name.

I asked if it would be OK to call him Buzz. He said that it would not. John or Spike, but not Buzz and definitely not Robert.

I dearly love that boy and, of course, all my children. I would gladly lay down my life for them. There’s no courageous heroism or grandiosity in that. Their lives simply mean more to me than mine does. It’s something instinctive, I think, something in nature.

Stories about parents standing in harm’s way in defense of their children are myriad in human history. We’ve heard of mothers lifting enormous tree trunks to free a pinned son. Fathers have drowned saving their daughters.

Sure, an evil world spawns aberrations in parent-child relationships. But in the natural order, a parent’s love is not conditional. Even a bird will die defending an egg.

What then are we to make of God the Father giving up His only Son to death? Surely that relationship is fraught with more love than even a dad could have for a small boy named Spike. I cannot understand it, but my faith confirms the truth of it, just as I do not doubt that a mother can lift three times her weight to extricate a son.

The Son of God was in fact Love Incarnate. The Father so loved the world that He gave His only Son. No, my mind quits – trying to comprehend.

I know this: I could not bear to live knowing that I had avoided saving my son from death, even at the expense of my own life. I might have physical life, but my soul would be forever anguished, rendering the physical life also tormented.

Jesus said He came that we might have life, and He freely laid down His own life in His purpose. I know, though, that the life He meant for us to have was not physical life, but spiritual. I know that to obtain this spiritual life, I have to die, not physically – but to my own will.

There must come a time to surrender to God, in yielding my will to His, when what I give up is not only sin, but also even that which is most precious to me. If the truth be known, what is most precious to me is my will.

Abraham was a father. Surely Isaac’s life was more precious to him than his own. Gladly would he yield his own life, but Isaac’s? A father’s will for his son to have life is very strong. With Abraham’s surrender, he gave up the powerful life of his own will. Isaac was spared. Jesus, however, was not spared. He did die.

That’s a radical turnaround, a surprise to the sensibilities. It calls the Son Himself into the picture. The Father freely relinquishes His Son; the Son freely relinquishes His life because of His Father’s love, not only for Him, but also for all His children.

A lot of dying going on, giving up, surrendering. But what’s really dying is any consideration of self. Only by doing that kind of dying, as we are taught by the life and death of Jesus, can anyone obtain the kind of life worth having. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 6th, 1987

A Christmas Story

2007-12-24T04:09:00.001-08:00

Herbert was a Catholic gentleman; of that there was no doubt. He liked his drinks, but at 82, he was of age and no one questioned his moderation. He’d take a half turn on the barstool and all the whiskey in the shot glass; and then, like the whiskey didn’t faze him, he’d tell his stories.

“We lived down below the Sisters, went over to St. Mary’s to church. I was in the choir over there. I used to take the Sisters fresh cream so just so they’d have fresh cream to cream their coffee,” he said.

It was one Christmas morning, Herbert recalled. He got up before daylight that morning. Before he had gone to sleep, he’d prayed: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this night be at my side, to light and guard and rule and guide.” Waking was bland and painful. But this was Christmas morning and something about it, we, he was just automatically peaceful it seemed, and full of joy inside himself. Outside there spun a flock of black and gray chickens. Snow had fallen and was falling.

He had to feed the chickens before Mass; but, boy, it was down below cold outside, that morning it was. Herbert stiffened to the cold as he strewed feed on the frozen ground. He talked to those chickens just like they were somebody that day. He wanted the chickens to share his joy.

Five-thirty Mass on Christmas morning was a large, quiet, reverent, freshly cooled bunch of people. The servers lit the candles for the low Mass. Herbert heard the shuffle of the altar boy’s cassock as he put the book. The big crib off to one side had a single bulb shining down on the Baby Jesus. In the background was a painted, dawning scene extending to Bethlehem.

Herbert walked the long way back home as the snow came harder. His mother fixed him one of those only-on-Christmas warm kind of breakfasts, creamed coffee, all. It was good. “Herbert, you’re not going back to the 10:30 this morning, are you? That snow is really coming down. You stay home now. It’s Christmas,” his mother said. No, he said. He was going back. Father Sullivan was depending on him.

Father Sullivan paced the chancel, half reading his Breviary and half losing his place, mumbling to the congregation about Mass starting late. He stopped, though, and espied a bowed, bustling, snow-stomping Herbert in the vestibule.

“Ah, we have a choir,” he said, and he turned for the sacristy to vest for the High Mass.

Herbert climbed to the choir-loft to find not a soul. He looked down at the altar with the high candles lit. There were poinsettias. St. Joseph and Mary watched over the Christ Child as Father Sullivan followed the server out, genuflected and turned to face the congregation with aspergillum.

“Asperges me,” Father Sullivan sang, as Herbert’s glance lowered to meet the rising gaze of the priest. There was an awkward pause. “Domine hyssopo et mundabor,” Herbert sang, embarrassed, alone. He sang the Kyrie, St. Jerome’s Gloria, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. His embarrassment eased and left him. At the end of Mass, the congregation joined Herbert in a triumphant “Adeste Fideles.”

Father Sullivan genuflected, turned and looked up at Herbert in the choir-loft. A beaming smile crowded Father’s face. “Herbert,” he said, “may I see you a moment in the sacristy, please.” Herbert knelt and Father gave him his blessing. He then produced an array of sacramental objects, asking Herbert to choose something that he liked. “Herbert,” he said, “the way you sang the morning has made my Christmas for me.”

Herbert, staying on his knees, said; “Father Sullivan, instead of these, well, Father, I don’t want to sing in the choir. I want to be an altar boy. I’ve always heard, Father, that if you were ever an altar boy that you’d never die without the assistance of a priest.”

Father smiled gently. “You sing in the choir, Herbert. And when you die, for sure a priest will be there.”

“O thank you, Father,” Herbert said. “You have made my Christmas for me.”

Herbert Howard was a lean fellow with a weathered face. His means were humble, though he had a big house. His wife was gone and he lived alone, using only a few rooms in the place. He enjoyed the company of the neighborhood tavern. People knew him as a religious man. Herbert died Oct 25, 1978, just after a priest had given him the last rites of the Church. He was 85. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on December 21st, 1986

Doing what’s necessary

2007-12-21T04:10:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that Jesus didn’t do the things He could afford; He did what had to be done. He didn’t estimate His limitations and act accordingly. Rather, He acted according to the will of His Father.

When He had 5,000 to feed, Jesus didn’t feed only those for whom there were immediate provisions. He fed them all.

Jesus didn’t heal only during office hours, but as many as came to Him He made whole.

When He admonished, He did so with love – not to vent His spleen because somebody crossed Him, but because they needed correction to make straight the way for their own salvation.

So often the story of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the temple is cited as the text to justify justifiable anger. It’s hard for me to imagine Jesus doing anything out of anger and not love. Zeal is a very different thing from anger. He had zeal for His Father’s house and the moneychangers needed to have that, too. The moneychangers needed to be admonished. Surely moneychangers are people, heirs to the Kingdom, children of God. Surely Jesus loved them. He did what He had to do. It’s not easy to make a point in a raucous din.

For me, the challenge to live the Gospel message is a daily struggle. Always, it seems, I am beset on all sides because I count the cost rather than doing what needs to be done. I compromise, fear criticism, shrug because of weakness.

I’ve let banal, empty, vapid, inane television sap the vitality from the godly responsibilities and joys of fatherhood and being a husband. I use the old bromide that TV can be a good thing when I know that for every hour of decent programming there are a hundred hours of mindless crud. I compromise.

What Gospel imperative keeps me glued to the set? I know – the need for rest. Lo, on Judgement Day, the Lord said unto Tom, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You are among the best rested in My Kingdom!”

I spend time with, uh, unbelievers from time to time and God help me, I feel embarrassed identifying myself with Jesus Christ. I say it, but my heart and my mouth are in two different places. Among the faithful, faith is easy. Among those in sore need of Clear Light, I feel torn between wanting acceptance on the world’s terms and counting all as dung except the Cross of Christ.

However, if I continually focus on my weakness, my weakness becomes my focus. There is another way. That is to focus on what needs to be done, to keep my eye on the prize and on Him Who can accomplish what I cannot.

As I rise to a new day and feel the call to prayer, if my focus is no the ache of sleep, yesterday’s failure, today’s pressing business – I will not pray. If, however, I do not count the cost – the time, the mental energy, the foregone worldly strategizing – then comes the miracle, the blessing and the privilege of communion with God Himself, with Whom time does not exist, Whose mind is the engine of Life itself, Whose strategies long have been laid out. I will have done what had to be done. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on August 16th, 1987

Hot summer days

2007-12-18T06:16:00.000-08:00

Memories of summer days flash like heat lightning at twilight – showing vague outlines, gently brightening, quickly fading.

Charley Pfiester and I crouched in the fine dust at the corner of his house, in the shade of a giant maple, peering intently at the conical indentation the size of a dime in the light brown powdery soil.

“Doodlebug! Doodlebug! Your house is on fire! Doodlebug! Doodlebug! Your house is on fire!” we chanted in unison, first one, then the other – persistently, not giving up. Slowly, slowly the silt at the base of the cone began to shift, push up in the middle, A tiny mound in the tiny cone formed in starts, stops, starts – each push of the duped doodle bug escaping his burning house creating wonder for two bored lads on a summer day.

Charley and I did our share of doodlebug calling. Charley claims to have called one all the way out one time, but I was never that bored. There were apricots to beckon. They were big and fat.

They hung on the limbs of the forked tree in the side yard, the one Mrs. Pfiester was forever telling kids to stay out of until she gave up. It sat too good. God made that tree to sit in.

A pan of apricots went across the fence for an apricot cobbler. A bowl of apricots went down the hill for an apricot pie. For all the warnings: “Stop eatin’ those apricots!” and “Ya’ll are goin’ to get sick eatin’ all those apricots!” and “You’re goin’ to run into a worm!” – apricot eating continued on until the tree was bare those summer days.

Moms would send kids over to Mr. Winkler’s or down to Bess Hazel’s Blue Plate Grocery Store for a quart of Purex or a gallon of Ideal milk or a loaf of Bunny bread. (A rabbit rode a horse, played a guitar and sang a jingle: “That’s what I said, Bunny bread.” We sang it, too).

The drink box at Mr. Winkler’s was a pleasant trysting place for the weary traveler from home. Always plenty of Barq’s root beer, Nehi grapes and strawberries, RC’s and Chocolas. Sometimes a big orange would be just what you wanted and Mr. Winkler’s box would have one cold and waiting. Tony Payne won two dollars once under the cork on his Dr. Pepper cap.

Of course lots of Milky Ways and Hershey bars were available in the ice cream box with the Popsicles, the Push-ups and the Cho-chos; but you’d better get what you wanted and get out of it.

Miss Hazel had a spool of string rigged on a coat hanger wire with the end of the string dangling through a fashioned eyelet. She tied up purchases of side meat and baloney wrapped in brown paper.

A few in the crowd decided to see how deep a hole they could dig in the railroad field. It became a fair-sized neighborhood project before it was over. The talk predictably centered on digging to China before it turned to the great dangers inherent in a project of this magnitude, particularly after a ladder was needed to descend the great depth.

Certain advantages became apparent. Stifling and muggy vapors lifted from the thick weeds of the field, but it was cool in the hole. At an admirable depth there was much discussion of heading the excavations sideways. Main diggers could have their place to go be alone. They could put cardboard on the floor, take a candle down there, maybe mix vile poisons from milkweed and pokeberries and squeezings from unknown species.

But nah, that wasn’t any fun. Better to go watch Mr. Weber turn on the streetlight in the back alley. Let’s play hide and go seek, kick the can, wave out, or hum-bum runway. (“Ink, ink a bottle of ink, what color do you choose?” “One potato, two potato, three potato, four…”) Let’s hook our feet in Buck’s fence railing and lean back in the lawn chairs, pretend this is an airplane – not just any plane, but a big plane.

Then the calls came. “Tooonnnyyyyy!” “Toooommmmyyy!” “Charles Lewis, you git in the house! It’s dark as the dickens out here!”

True, nostalgia brings memories likely not as true as they seem. Carried to extremes, it can cause heartache. But a taste now and then has a sweetness, a goodness, a serenity. It can soothe a troubled soul on a hot summer day. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on August 2nd, 1987

Listening to God

2007-12-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Everybody talks about listening, but nobody does anything about it. What I need are not more pleas to listen, but more lessons on how. So often I cannot say what I want to be heard. So often I cannot hear what is being said so plainly.

On a purely physical level, my high-frequency hearing loss leaves me oblivious to some things in this life; and I’ll just have to live with that. My cat cornered a cicada the other night, for example, and my wife grimaced with empathy as she heard the piercing peals of the dying insect, succumbing as it was to the cold mauls of an unfeeling feline. I was not privy to the insect’s wails, they being out of range of my sensory receptors. Death would have its day on my doorstep and I would go blithely on.

The kind of listening I need, however, does not require much physical equipment. What I want most to hear is the voice of God.

I have little trouble believing that God hears me. Betty Maltz, writing about her after-life experiences, relates a striking image in this vein. She was in heaven, she said, and saw shafts of light entering the throne room of God, knowing within herself these shafts were prayers. God hears prayer. That’s easy. But what does God say back and in what way? How does one hear His response?

Some people I know seem to carry on with God like two old-timers on bench. I sometimes envy the Biblical folks who heard messages from God as plain as day, like me talking to you.

For my own part, sometimes I feel like that gargantuan radio dish the scientists have aimed at the cosmos, straining to hear with the most sophisticated gadgetry any faint trace of intelligent life out there. So far they’ve heard nothing intelligible, but have managed to an even more imponderable, and mute, void.

My faith tells me that God is working all around me, communicating His will to as many as will receive Him, to as many as long to be part of the action. However, I don’t believe the problem has so much to do with listening as with accepting the message. God is God. He can and does get my attention. I simply discount His messages in favor of ones with sometimes sweeter tones.

The thing I don’t want to accept is the startling and profound truth that God does speak to me personally. He speaks in a flash of lightning that makes the streetlights go of and sends a chill of awe through all that I am. He speaks in my soul and what He says is stillness, quietude, solitude. He makes a word among words in Scripture, glossed a hundred times before, burn in my heart, the word becoming a window on the page to a vastness of challenge. In the midst of my sin He pelts my conscience like a Chinese water torture, but with a softness that says love and hope and possibility for change.

What of the hard of heart, the jaded, the puffed up, the indifferent, the insensate? Having been all of these, I find the answer in my question: How is it, despite all of these, that still I long for the voice of God? God speaks an irresistible tongue. It is not for want of listening that I sometimes languish, but in hearing I do not hear. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on July 19th, 1987

A change in plans

2007-12-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve changed my funeral plans. It used to be that I wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery near Dermont, Kentucky.

Bishop Francis Cotton, the first Bishop of Owensboro (my hometown), was the first person buried in that cemetery. Both my parents are buried there along with several relatives.

Thank goodness I didn’t go ahead and buy a plot, though. I want to find another place.

The reason I’ve changed my mind about the Owensboro cemetery is because it’s one of those places where everybody has to have the same kind of tombstone.

These cemeteries came into vogue several years ago. They seemed to make sense. Everything was nice and even and Romanesque and easy to mow. Then I visited an old-fashioned, cluttered cemetery over Memorial Day weekend, and something snapped inside me.

This was the old kind of cemetery where there are a million different tombstones. No ugly, forbidding signs said: No artificial flowers allowed! There was no list of rules at the entrance telling all the things you couldn’t do. In fact, at this cemetery, you could do whatever you wanted. People had planted every kind of flower there, and marvelous trees of every description. Graves were adorned with shrubs.

The place was busy, owing to the holiday of course. But here were people expending tender loving care upon the final place for those they loved, instead of being forbidden to touch a thing.

As we visited, I became touched with the idea that graveyards are very much for the living. To visit a gravesite and to plant a rose bush, or trim a hedge or put in perennials – these things are purgative and helpful for those who so dearly miss the ones they have lost. These activities help the living spend time with the dead in a way somehow deeper than just putting down a bouquet.

I’ll not soon forget seeing one heavy-set man in his T-shirt as he stepped back from his gardening at the grave of his loved one. He had just stepped back and looked, his hands out from his sides and covered with dirt, like all people do when they have just planted something. The look on his face, however, went way beyond the flowers. His eyes were full of great love and great sorrow. He was an ordinary man, a simple man; but he was at a point of contact with all the meaning any life ever holds: the point at which one person loves another.

So give me one of those kinds of cemeteries, please, when I die – one construed for the benefit of the bereaved and not for the convenience of the caretakers.

Also, I’ve decided I don’t want the Dies Irae sung at my funeral. You remember that, don’t you? “O Day of Wrath, that dreadful day. The sins of man before the Maker lay – As David and the Sybil say.” I thought I wanted that, but now I’ve decided differently.

I don’t want to offend anybody, but now I want a funeral procession headed up by a New Orleans street band playing a little Dixieland jazz. I just pray I’ve made enough black friends by then to join the procession and help my stiff white friends let go a little and dance. Nothing puts me in a happier frame of mind than Dixieland, and I plan to be one happy dude the day I die.

What more glorious, happy, joyous, exciting thing could ever happen to a person than to go be with Jesus? –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 14th, 1987

Preaching with conviction

2007-12-10T17:06:00.000-08:00

My wife said she had never heard such preaching in a Catholic church. I agreed. Although I have been unsuccessful in identifying the priest by name, let it be said that he spoke with passion and conviction. He began his “homily” by saying, “Fasten your seat belts.”

My family and I visited relatives in Michigan during the Memorial Day weekend, and we went to Mass on Sunday at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Madison Heights, a suburb of Detroit. The sermon we heard that morning was some kind of sermon.

Father spoke about the unchanging law of God and about how it would be well if people realized that God’s law was still in effect. The preacher contrasted God’s unchanging law with laws of the Church which, obviously, change.

“Listen to me now,” he said, “This is important.” The Church can make a law and the Church can change a law, but neither the Church nor the Pope nor anybody else can change God’s law. God’s law is just as true today as it was in the time of Christ. God’s law was true when Moses came down from the mountain and it’s true to this day.

The message we heard that morning was a simple message – nothing heady or intellectual, but spoken with fire and feeling, out of obviously deep and heartfelt belief. Here was a man preaching a faith he lived.

People’s lives are empty today, he said, if they are not following the law of God. People are living together, having sexual relations outside of wedlock and looking for fulfillment but finding none. Because why? Because fornication is still a sin! he shouted. Adultery is still a sin! You can’t break God’s law and get away with it!

Father said he was tired of all the experts called “they” out there who are giving their expert opinion about how God’s law may or may not be applicable to a particular case, about how the Church’s authority has somehow become “relative.”

“You hear somebody say you don’t have to go to confession anymore, you ask that person on whose authority they speak!” the priest said with pointed and deliberate and emphatic diction. “They talk about ‘liberal’ Catholics and ‘conservative’ Catholics. What? Is the Church a political party now? They talk about the ‘non-churchgoing Catholic.’ What is that? Is that some special, new branch of the Church? Does that mean it’s okay for Catholics to not go to Mass anymore? It does not!” he said with power.

Father told his listeners to come off their complaining about changes in the Church and get back to practicing their faith and following the law of God spoken in their hearts by a true and informed conscience.

“I had a woman come to me and say her husband didn’t come to Mass anymore. ‘Is that so,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he just got to where he couldn’t take that guitar Mass anymore,’ she said.” Father made the Sign of the Cross. “I told her to tell him to go to one of the other Masses! Just because he doesn’t like the folk Mass doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to go to Mass! Get with it, people! You don’t like all these changes? Neither do I! That doesn’t mean you stop practicing your faith!”

Kind of does something to your heart to hear that kind of preaching, and I mean preaching. I felt some blood flowing in my veins that Sunday morning. Yes, Father what’s-his-name said a lot more things that morning: simple, uncomplicated, truthful things, things that make a person’s soul get stirred with the conviction that it is possible to walk in God’s way one more day. Thank you, Father.

It will be good to have something to cling to on Pentecost Sunday, something not half-baked and mealy-mouthed and soft in the middle, but something good and righteous and on fire.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 7th, 1987

Missed opportunities

2007-12-07T04:54:00.000-08:00

Being an opportunist is not necessarily a good thing. Seizing upon a situation for personal advantage, but at someone else’s expense, may be good worldly wisdom, but it’s surely not God’s way.

Circumstances and things do come along, however, which are genuine opportunities and truly are blessings from God. We can pursue these things with enthusiasm and dedication knowing that here is our chance to succeed, indeed to excel.

There have been times like these in my life; and times, too, when out of laziness and ignorance and pride, out of immaturity and weakness and stupidity, I’ve blown it. I’ve messed up. I’ve turned fabulous opportunity into empty failure.

These ghosts of the past rear their ugly heads from time to time. If you’ve had the experience, you know what I mean when I talk about the guilt, the remorse, the anger, the unrequited anxiety. These are the missed opportunities.

Sometimes these experiences are big. Real big. Life changing big. At least one skeleton in my closet represents a missed opportunity that could have made a vast difference in my life, both from the perspective of personal satisfaction and probably financially. Not me, though. No. I was more interested in partying than in making the necessary commitment to a career in law. I wanted to boogie!

Suffice it to say that my decision to drop out of law school has flooded my late night consciousness more than a few times in the intervening years. My sarcasm belies my anger at myself and even a sense of shame and embarrassment. Too late now. The feelings can be unlovely. If you’ve ever blown it big, you know what I mean.

At other times my missed opportunities are on a smaller scale. The other night one of my young ones came into the living room wanting to show me some school papers. I was in a sour mood. I had lost something and was mad because I couldn’t find it. When the school papers were presented I said tersely, I don’t want to look at these now. Get them out of my way. Put them on the table over there and leave me alone. Have you seen my …?

The next morning I saw the stack of papers where my child had left them. He was now in school. When I saw the papers I felt empty and sad. I had been hell-bent on being boorish and bearish and I had accomplished that handily, but I had missed the opportunity to share a peaceful and joyful and pleasant moment with a child. Such life-giving pauses can never be recovered. There’s never really any such thing as making up for it at another time.

Each of us has an emblem or two from the past that represents what would have been, what could have been. All of us have missed the opportunities, great and small. For me, it seems the distinction is beginning to blur.

I have trashed whole giant opportunities in my life. Somehow those big circumstances, however, leave me wanting to kick myself no more than the smaller things that come along: the blown opportunity to say a kind word; the lazy excuse for failing to visit a sickbed; the angry preoccupation preventing a session of patient listening.

The older I get, the more I have come to believe that there can be great power in a single moment. Sometimes, eternity may be hidden in waiting 30 seconds more.

One might say it was nothing that I didn’t take a minute and look at my son’s papers, especially compared to those great rewards I could have had in a legal profession. We’ll never know. That minute with my son could have changed his life, and mine. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 31st, 1987

Loving our neighbor

2007-12-05T04:53:00.000-08:00

My friend Robin described me as a cat chasing his tail. Some people are called to be monks and live in monasteries, he said, but you’re not one of them. You go around in circles with pietistic, philosophical, heady notions about spirituality, but I never hear you talking about loving your neighbor, he said.

This is a writing about the Gospel message to love our neighbor. Robin says our job is to do that. If we reject the message, then we reject the One who gave us the message.

I’ll be honest with you; it’s not a very exciting prospect. In fact, it’s boring. I would much rather spend time pondering the great verities of the cosmos than sit and listen to some dolt drone on about his problems. Neighbor loving can be very uninspiring.

One thing about neighbor loving that always has perplexed me is that I don’t really seem to get a chance. None of my neighbors are starving. They all have clothes to wear and a place to stay. I can and do give money for the poor, but that’s hardly a concrete, hands-on experience of actually loving. Giving money is important, but it also can be a way to detach one’s self from any real commitment to loving others. I suppose it’s a matter of attitude.

One thing I could do to love my neighbors, I suppose, would be to avoid gossiping about them. That would be very hard for me to do. There’s a compelling thrill about passing on some good dirt. It’s certainly no fun to sit on a juicy tidbit. Besides, I can always absolve myself by saying, “This may or may not be true, but…” That’s a lie and a cop-out, of course. Love dictates that I keep my trap shut.

As I think about it, another way to love my well-fed, well-clothed, well-sheltered neighbors is to tolerate their idiosyncrasies with patience and cheerfulness. That would be hard. Some people have a lot of gall in things they say and do. If I couldn’t scorn and resent their incredible stupidity or their brazen actions – I mean are we talking about blessing them when they curse me? Doing good things for them when they run wholesale over me? Standing by patiently while they keep rambling on?

Other ways to love neighbors, in a practical sense, come to mind. There are hundreds of letters I haven’t written, for example. Community agencies beg for volunteers. People in care centers and rest homes love companionship, even from people they don’t know at first. Blood donors love their neighbor.

When was the last time I found a kind word for the checkout person at the grocery store? How often have I thanked my letter carrier, and sympathized with her sometimes-grueling job? I could remember that courtesy is not dead.

Probably one of the keys to loving one’s neighbors is being open to loving them. It’s probably a safe bet that the Lord will give us plenty of chances to do it, even among the great middle class. I can chase around after my tail in my spiritual life, thinking the great thoughts and having the great visions – ultimately, though, finding myself pretty much where I started. Or, I can begin to go out of myself a little bit, begin to ignore the gooey feelings and go for the hard realities of love. The Lord said He didn’t want to hear “Lord, Lord.” What He wanted, He said, was someone who would do the will of the Father in heaven. God’s will is done in monasteries, but most of us live in the neighborhood. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 24th, 1987

The middle of the night

2007-12-03T04:24:00.000-08:00

My wife says God gets people up in the middle of the night so they will pray. I just read an article which says that prayer is an effort to find out what God is doing. So I guess my prayer is, what are you doing Lord, getting me up in the middle of the night?

I’ve been pretty sullen and irascible lately and I’m not proud of it. I probably deserve a little insomnia. I’m just in a place - you know what I mean? I don’t want to be melodramatic, but this image seems to fit: I feel like a prisoner in a cell with one high window through which he can see only the blue sky. The prisoner knows there’s something more and something good, but this ain’t it.

As I pray to discern what God is up to in my life, I find it hard just to listen and to wait. Prayer doesn’t seem like prayer unless I’m running my mouth. In my prayer, though, it’s helpful for me not to have to explain things too much. God, after all, is God. I don’t have to give Him all the fine points, for example, of a job I have waiting for me to do. God understands that I have to do this and do that, this call to make, that research to do. He understands my embarrassment for taking so long to finish and my anxiety about being able to do things right. God knows.

Usually what happens to me – in prayer in the middle of the night which God has awakened me for so He can tell me what He is doing – is that I begin to offload my troubles onto Him. I know He’s going to be up, and I’m trying to get some sleep. The circumstances and things of my life begin to flood my consciousness. As soon as something or someone comes to mind, I simply offer it or him or her to the Lord. It’s like: “Yeah, this situation, Lord. I can’t do anything about it.” Or I will think of someone I know and I will say, “Bless her, Lord. I don’t know what to do about her circumstances, but You do.” And on and on. I don’t spend too much time on any one person or thing, because so many people and things in my life compete for attention in this prayerful presence before God. I can’t concentrate, so I don’t bother to try. I simply try to fix my awareness on the Lord and ask Him to see and experience and be a part of all things that are on my mind. Usually this is a very satisfying kind of prayer.

I’m not a great issues person; I’m an ordinary person. God hasn’t called me to scale the peaks or to achieve much of anything spectacular in a worldly sense. That has bothered me in the past, but more lately it has been a comfort to me that God has finally realized that I’m not Mr. Big.

There is something good in the simplicity of having one’s half acre to plow. God has blessed my wife and me with three children, and I do have a tremendously loving wife. We have a small house and a car to get around in, and a cat. We have friends who love us and friends we love. We have old friends. We want for nothing. My job is, well, as I’ve tried to explain before: this is my job. My employers are good, decent, God-fearing, fair-minded, caring people. What further blessings could a person want?

Still I have the effrontery to sulk from time to time. You know what it is? Immaturity. Childishness. I have not put away former things and put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

God has given me so much raw material to work with. As I squint and strain to see what Christian maturity might look like, surely I see that God has called me to holiness in the place where I am. I might make a pilgrimage and I am indeed a kin of the world community. But this is the place where Jesus expects me to find Him – here, in these little digs. Here I am to be obedient, willing, surrendered. This is where the Lord expects to find me when He shakes me and wakes me up in the middle of the night and tells me what He’s going to do. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 17th, 1987

Things to pray about

2007-11-30T04:16:00.000-08:00

Whenever I’ve run out of things to pray about, I can take a look at this list:

- I can pray for all the people who have used me, manipulated me, walked all over me or taken me for granted. I can ask God to give these people every good thing that I would want for myself. In fact, I could ask God to give them good things instead of giving them to me.

- I can pray for people who have no sense of having harmed me, when they have.

- I can pray for forgiveness for all the mean, petty, selfish, inconsiderate things I have done lately.

- I can pray for freedom from deep-seated anger, my inability to let go with humility, and with surrender to God’s desire for my peace of mind.

- I can pray for the grace to speak plainly and honestly at all times with those in my environments.

- I can pray for the grace to bear with the trial of loving my neighbor when it’s particularly inconvenient.

- I can pray for those who are experiencing the same difficulties that I have, that God will find cause in my suffering to alleviate theirs.

- I can pray for my prejudices to become apparent to me, enabling me to see past them to the goodness, worth and dignity of all people, no matter who they are, what they have done, or what they believe.

- I can pray that God will show me my stinginess, which I paint prettier and justify and rationalize

- I can pray for deeper gratitude for the abundant blessings in my life, and for the grace to remember that my gratitude is cause to uplift others and God, and not occasion to think better of myself for being so grateful.

- I can pray for the people who right at this moment are dying with hardened and embittered hearts, that the light of Jesus Christ will so overwhelm their conscience that they can utter deep in their spirits a simple “I’m sorry.”

- I can pray that in every circumstance of my life I can see myself standing in God’s presence as I think, say and do.

- I can pray that my religion is more than some pious notion, more than a few half-hearted prayers, more than two dollars in the collection basket – but a commitment of head and hand and heart, of m life, all of it, turned over, turned inside out, sold out to Jesus Christ; a religion so radical that it just doesn’t go well with the world and its ways; a religion so radical that the world laughs and pokes fun. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 10th, 1987

Hanley

2007-11-28T03:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy I had a neighbor whose name was Hanley. I liked Hanley, and I still think of him often even though he’s been dead more than 25 years. He fell asleep with a cigarette and burnt up in bed. He was a good man, though many in the world may not have considered him such. He spoke in a deep, rich, sonorous voice. Sometimes he called me Tommy, but mostly he simply called me boy.

The reason the world may have looked askance at Hanley was because he was addicted to alcohol. We’d sleep out in the tent under the apple tree in the summer, and we’d wait for Hanley to come up the back alley from the First and Last Chance. We’d greet him, but at those times he often didn’t speak. He’d be drunk and staggering.

On many occasions I went to his house in the morning. He lived with his elderly mother who would pour Hanley his cups of strong coffee before he went to work at the light plant. His mother would smile broadly at me with her teeth out. Hanley would be unshaven and groggy, but it would be obvious that he was pleased that I had come in. Somehow I found their company warm and pleasant.

I know that alcoholism is a dreadful thing, and I don’t dismiss it in Hanley’s case. He died because he was an alcoholic. Being just a neighbor kid, I was spared the probable terrible ramifications of Hanley’s malady. As it was, I liked Hanley, and he liked me. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and I remember the tar stains on his fingertips. He was a raw-boned fellow and tall, with a weathered face and long hands.

My friendship with Hanley was by no means deep. There was enough distance between us that I took the news of his death with shock, but not with grief. I don’t want to sound cold, but the shock I felt was not disbelief, more the quality one experiences when stark reality sets in. Hanley’s end was not unexpected in our environs. Folks said well, they were shocked but not surprised, seeing how he was, seeing how he drank.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever had any kind of relationship with Hanley. Perhaps it was because I was a child. A child will go in where adults fear to tread. I never saw an adult neighbor at Hanley’s house at 7:30 in the morning, people who just stopped in early for no particular reason. Kids do that, but adults don’t. Trusting children take people as they come, without preconditions.

I read the 13th chapter of First Corinthians today, St. Paul’s great teaching about love; and I prayed that the Lord would teach me to love. After I read the Scripture, I was a bit apprehensive, wondering if I would ever understand love in my time. In my mind, I saw Jesus on the cross and I knew that was love, but I don’t pretend to fully comprehend it.

I ask myself if I loved Hanley, and I think maybe I did. I don’t know what else to call it. Now that I’m old and crotchety, I don’t have relationships with people like I had with him. I have a tendency to judge. I’m forever imputing motives, second-guessing, suspecting, finding fault, making sure I find a shortcoming or two. In Hanley’s case, I never did do those things. I didn’t condemn him, didn’t think to condemn him. Even when he staggered up the back alley, I actually looked forward to seeing him. In my child’s mind, I’m sure I chuckled and probably said, boy he’s really staggering tonight. But I didn’t think that was good or bad or what an awful man Hanley was for being so drunk. He was just Hanley. I accepted him with no reservations, no expectations that he should change. He did not, in fact, ever change.

For sure, love is more complicated than the love I had for Hanley. Jesus’ love for me and Hanley is indeed infinite compared to the simple, detached friendship a man and a neighbor kid shared so long ago. Nevertheless, there was something there, a beginning perhaps, a place for greater love to begin.

It would be easy for me to take my adult perceptions back to those mornings in Hanley’s kitchen and recast them with all kinds of judgments. Rather, I prefer to bring those mornings into now and again smell the strong coffee on the gas burner, hear Hanley’s gentle bass voice say how you doin’, boy. There is no ego in the air, no condemnation – just acceptance. Maybe it takes a child’s eyes to see the beauty and good and sweetness in a broken man. Love is more than the love I had for Hanley; but simple as it was, it was greater than prophecies and tongues and knowledge… and has endured. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 3rd, 1987

Then, now, and friendship

2007-11-26T03:45:00.000-08:00

My good friend, your letter arrived today, and soothed like an ointment an exposed and aching lack of hearing from you. I have missed you, these too many years.

You mentioned that we may be seeking the same thing in our lives now, if on a parallel, like two hunters going into the woods. You didn’t mention specifics. So often it is hard for two friends to share where they are, having come from what was, the way it was.

The old days were full of the wonder of boys in men’s bodies, of dreams and self-confident goals. Someday we would write the Great American Novel, visit the peak of Everest, tour the Balkans and the Lapland tundra, discover the Great Unknown. Money would be a given. We’d be freed to hear the Muse, to stalk the hart and the nuance of language.

I have tried, how I have tried to avoid orthodoxy. I grew my hair long and wore old clothes. When the “Hair” singers sang about long, beautiful hair just stopping by itself, I had no idea they meant it quite so literally.

Discovery still intrigues me, but somehow I can’t make one. I keep discovering what others already know. My dear good friend of so long an absence (Oh, grit my teeth. Can you bear hearing it? Can I bear telling it?) I, well… uh, you see, uh, what’s happened, uh, the thing is, uh, I didn’t mean to, but, well, I have changed.

I’ve put away Balzac and Voltaire and Ken Kesey and Unamuno and picked up Author Unknown and Duck and Bear and Jack and Donald. I’d mull the great verities of the cosmos with Vivaldi and Menuhin, now I sing Mr. Froggy Went a Courtin’, and he did ride, uhuh.

You are sitting down, aren’t you? I have become responsible. That’s right. I am so damn responsible I can’t stand it. I pay the bills and mow the grass and wash the car and take out the trash and watch out for what the kids watch on TV. You are sitting down, aren’t you? I go to church.

Now I know you knew I went to church before, but what you don’t know is that I have fallen in love with God. Some admission for a leftover, beer-drinking, 1960s-reject, pseudo-intellectual, hippy, stargazing, anti-establishment, rebellious, angry young man.

Before, the days were pointless, as if they were endless. Now they are precious, though ironically they pass in melancholy like a forgotten mist.

Old acquaintances have scoffed, saying sardonically, “I guess you’ve found the Lord.” Oddly, I love them for their honesty. They genuinely cannot see a happy life without boozing and hell-raising. My nemesis now is the arrogant, self-righteous, puffed-up, religious person, the modern Pharisee. They load up those around them with heavy burdens, but inside they are rot. They make me mad. Imagine. My embarrassment is that I know them too well.

No longer do I long for the vague, exquisite insights of intellectual trivia. My challenge now is to love the hard-core self-possessed without lapsing into my own pride and condescension. God loved me that way, in that condition.

Loving God is where it’s at, my old friend. Ain’t that a kick? He’s where’s it’s always been. He’s who we seek on our parallel, like two hunters going into the woods. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 26th, 1987

Looking at life through my son John’s eyes

2007-11-22T04:08:00.000-08:00

My father-in-law died not long ago, and one of the things we brought home with us from Detroit was a picture of my wife’s family when she and her sisters were little. Our children have been fascinated with it.

Our two youngest sit on the couch and stare at the picture in its frame and talk. I’ve never been able to pick up all their conversation. I gather what’s happening is that they’re internalizing that their mother came from a family, too. But there’s more that our children are aware of concerning this great mystery that is life.

When my wife was still a little girl, her mother died and she went to live with aunt and her uncle. Subsequently they adopted her. For our children, that has meant grandparents in Maine and grandpa in Detroit. Our children always have known that grandpa in Detroit was their mom’s “real” father, and that their Maine grandparents are the adoptive parents of their mother. I don’t suppose we see things, though, until we see them through a child’s eyes.

I passed by my youngest’s bedroom the other night after he had already been to bed for a while. I saw and heard that he was crying. I stepped in to see what was making John so sad.

Why are you crying John, I said, what’s the matter? Grandpa, he said, I miss grandpa. He was my favorite grandpa.

John is named after his grandpa. His middle name is Robert. We call him that a lot. We call him John Robert. He is six years old. I touched John’s hair and hugged him. I told him I understood that it was hard to lose his grandpa. Grandpa had died, I said, but he had gone to be with Jesus and that we would be with him again someday when we die and go to be with Jesus, too.

Grandpa was mom’s real dad, he said. That other grandpa and grandma in Maine are fakes. They’re fakes, he said, and you could tell he wasn’t happy about that at all. It made him mad that his other grandpa and grandma were fakes.

I said, they’re not fakes, John. They love your mother. They adopted her and took care of her. They provided her clothes and her food and gave her a home and sent her to school. They cared for her as one of their own and she really was, and still is, a member of their family.

No she’s not, John said. They’re fake. A lot of people say that, he said. If they’re not your real mom and dad, they’re fakes and that’s what they are.

People may say that, John, I said, but they are wrong. Your grandpa and grandma in Maine are your mom’s foster parents. Who was Jesus’ real father, John? He was God, wasn’t He?

John gave me one of those faraway, thoughtful looks through his moist eyes. Yes, he said.

Yet when Jesus came down to earth, He had to have a father to take care of Him, to love Him, to be His dad. That man was St. Joseph. St. Joseph was not Jesus’ real dad, but he wasn’t a fake. He was Jesus’ foster father. St. Joseph gave Jesus hugs, made sure He had food, taught Him how to do things.

People may say that grandpas and grandmas who are not real moms and dads are fakes, John. But that just isn’t true. They’re foster parents, just like St. Joseph was Jesus’ foster parent.

John Robert didn’t say anything. I love you, John, I said, and I grabbed him close to me. I know it’s hard to lose your grandpa, I said. I smoothed down his hair and he pulled the covers up around him. Very soon, he was asleep. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 5th, 1987

On finding the Truth

2007-11-21T02:43:00.000-08:00

Dishonesty is hard work. One of my more outlandish lies occurred one Saturday afternoon when I told my wife that I was on my way to confession. My real purpose was to idle about with the boys, but I knew my missus would have no part of that.

After my return from an absence of unseemly duration, the wife of course questioned me about the reason. I thought you said you were going to confession, she said. Indeed I had been to confession, I said. But my sins were of such a grievous nature that they could be forgiven only by the bishop. Owing to Father’s having to make arrangements and our having to wait upon his excellency, the hour grew very late, I said, against my best intentions.

So much for one of the redwoods in my forest of saplings.

By contrast, one of my favorite stories about honesty features Betsie ten Boom, Corrie’s sister. Betsie, it seems, so valued telling the truth that her very nature would not allow even slight equivocation. The ten Booms were hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. The family received word just before the arrival of the SS and hid their precious charges under floorboards, atop which they placed a table. When the Nazis burst in, Corrie said she feared the worst because she knew Betsie would tell the truth if they asked her any questions. Sure enough, a soldier asked Betsie if they were hiding any Jews and she said yes, they were under the table, which was in plain sight. The Nazi mistook Betsie’s truth for sarcasm.

Somehow I have a hard time figuring Jesus for telling a white lie or a fib or mixing fact with fiction to avoid bruising somebody’s ego. I doubt that He harbored any false humility or pride when He came before His Father in prayer. I doubt He had a complex system of denial about the shortcomings of human weakness. I think He was honest with His Father, others and Himself. Would that I could be.

Dishonesty will work you to death covering bases, backtracking, stirring in enough true-seeming deception to get you through the day. Through the grace of God, I’ve found a lot of peace in making a clean breast of things with God, myself and others. Still, though, I know I’ve got arthritis of the tongue, a few spurs and outgrowths in my efforts toward rigorous honesty.

When I come to the Lord in prayer, I want Him to see me just as I want to be or as I’m trying to be, rather than as I actually just plain am. Surely I have a better shot at the Lord’s love and forgiveness with a few qualifiers on my is-ness. You know what I mean. I’m lazy, Lord, but… I have lust in my heart, Lord, but… It’s easy for me to say I’m the most wretched of all creatures; just as easy for me to thank the Lord that I’m not like the rest of men. Why is it I can’t just come before God acknowledging my deliberate choices and my gratitude for all that He has given me? Too much theology, perhaps, and not enough honesty.

My neighbor will call inquiring about my interest in some service to the Church. Surely my hems and haws must sound almost comic. Say that sounds pretty good, I’ll say, but I’m pretty busy. What night? The boss has been pushing me pretty hard lately. I really need to get more involved. ‘Course the wife has been after me to finish wallpapering the bedroom. I’ve been called away on a journey to a faraway land. I’ve bought a yoke of oxen and I have to try them. I’ve taken a bride and I will be unable to attend.

One of the last great victims of my deceptions and dishonesty is me. I lie to myself all the time. I can lie to God and say I’m willing to change, but He knows the score. I can lie to others and say I’m willing to change and some will believe and report back to me how touched they’ve been by my courageous resolve. They, too, however, ultimately bear witness to the fruits of my actions. They’ve got eyes. They can see the same old so and so. Come we now at lengths to the heart of the man, telling himself with confidence and satisfaction that he’ll get going on that self-improvement campaign first thing in the morning. Never was there a lie repeated more often to such a naïve and spellbound believer. I’ll believe anything I tell me with the faith of the fathers.

Jesus said He was the truth. It seems ironic that a poor, broken sinner, in a grace-filled moment of honesty, will acknowledge that he is in fact unwilling to change, that in that moment he will meet Christ. I guess it’s true that if we can find the Truth, then we can find the Way: and if we can find the Way, we can find Life. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 29th, 1987

The beauty of forgiving and seeking forgiveness

2007-11-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

The second week of February was International Forgiveness Week, and doggone it, I missed it. I could have used the opportunity to forgive and seek forgiveness, but I let it pass.

I could have forgiven my mother for that time she punished me for something I didn’t do.

I could have forgiven my father for those times when I just couldn’t make him understand all my anger.

I could have asked my brother to forgive me for all that blind, immature selfishness I had that time he said, “You’re a punk, Tommy. A New York, Chicago punk.” I couldn’t see that he was right. I couldn’t see all the hurt I was causing my family. There has been a barrier between me and my brother for 20 years.

I could have forgiven the nun who was vindictive toward me. I could have asked her forgiveness for the mean acidic things I said about her behind her back.

I could have forgiven that person for being so empty-headed toward my children, thinking her kids could do no wrong, but scolding mine. The nerve!

I’ve never personally known Lyndon Johnson or William Westmoreland or Stanley Resor, but they are archetypes in my mind of the draftee Army. I gave myself over to full-blown, unrepentant hatred in the Army toward this government which had so much power over me, and these people represented this government. This same government did not send me to Vietnam in the heat of the Vietnam War. This same government has helped me buy two houses, and paid for advanced education. I know forgiveness would heal the hurt, but I let it pass.

What about that landlord that kept my rent deposit? I could have forgiven him, but I didn’t.

The crazy woman that drives me crazy could have been on my list. She never listens to what I have to say, but is ever expecting me to endure her great wisdom.

Ah, my dear mother-in-law. I’ve never known what to call my mother-in-law after all these years of being married to her daughter. Generally, I avoid the subject – talk around it, you know. Whatever name I choose to call her will be the wrong one, you can bet on that. It’ll be disrespectful or too familiar, and I refuse to call my own mother-in-law Mrs.

I think of the boss I need to forgive, stealing my ideas, earning credit for the work that I did.

The Church has made me mad, so blind to my needs, so irrelevant to my circumstances, so smug and rich and intellectually arrogant, answers changing from one priest to the next, one decade to the next. I could have forgiven my Church. I could have seen in Her leaders the same imperfect exercise I see in my own parenting.

I could have forgiven God for taking my mother and my father and my only dear grandparent. I know that God has no need of my forgiveness, that the change has to take place in me. But somehow I have preferred the bitterness, perversely enjoyed the resentment which feeds on itself, and grows – even though I am the only one who suffers. I know in my heart that forgiveness would bring peace and a whole new dimension to living, but I hang on.

Reliving these old circumstances in my life has helped me to appreciate anew the sheer beauty of forgiving and being forgiven. Knowing that I have in fact dealt with each of these relationships has changed the very quality and nature of my life. I do have peace.

Sometimes we sit between the ledge and the mountaintop, separated by a cloud. The peak is just a leap away. As the cloud passes, in the bright clarity, we have our chance. A little courage, a little action will bring us safely to the other side.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on February 15th, 1987

Self-centeredness has always been in vogue

2007-11-16T03:32:00.000-08:00

Pride is a difficult subject these days. So much is said about the importance of a good self-concept, and justifiable pride and the worthiness of pride in accomplishment. We say we’re proud of our Catholic faith, proud of our families, proud of our new car - not that all these things are equal, but we’re proud of them nevertheless. And rightly so.

Where, then, do we draw the line and cross into the Great Defect so ably exposited in the Story of the Fall? The sin in Eden, we know, was not so much disobedience as pride: man and woman thinking they could be equal with God.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t go around thinking I can be equal with God. I rather doubt, though, that that puts me in the clear with respect to pride. No, it seems to me that pride is not cut and dried, but insidious.

It seems to me that the very nature of pride would disable our ability to recognize it in ourselves. That is, if I’m swelled with pride, oozing with it – the worse the case I’ve got the less willing I am to acknowledge that I am indeed puffed up. How then to break the cycle of spiraling big-shotitis, sacrosanctity, gooey self-satisfaction and holy-and-worthy-of-praise-am-I?

Pride is no more noticeable than it is in someone else. I can spot pride coming up the road. I’ve noticed, however, that when my sensory-receptors become especially keen, I have to run and look in the mirror, there to see his excellency himself sitting in the judgment seat. In short, I’ve learned that one clue to recognizing this beast in myself is the recognition of it in others.

Once recognized, the pill is bitter. Seeing those pompous, egomaniacal, sick-with-self qualities in others, I become forced to admit that I myself must be schooled in these attributes, nay steeped in understanding.

Oh, society will come to my rescue with balms and ointments aplenty. I can round up confederates quickly - quickly stir the gossip mill against my boasting, pride-bloated target. It’s easy to find support to boo the overbearing fop, the woozy drunkard at the trough of self.

Being proud is chic. It’s in. Self-centeredness always has been in vogue, but it has taken on a certain religiosity. It’s true that God didn’t make any junk; but He also didn’t make any other gods. Recognition of self-worth can easily become the Cult of the Self. We may be worth it, but we also may be full of it. The Gospel message is still he who would gain his life must lose it; it’s still the last shall come first; it’s still never act out of rivalry or conceit; rather, let all parties think humbly of others as superior to themselves; it’s still looking to other’s interests rather than to our own.

It’s particularly difficult for me to think as superior to myself of someone who already thinks he’s superior to myself. I’d just as soon assign the jack-a-napes to you know where. I know I’m in a dead run ahead of him, though, if I do. It doesn’t seem right, but I guess it is.

The bottom line again, ever and always is prayer. I can’t get into the right understanding of who I am in relationship with God and my neighbor if I distance myself from the question. Once more, pride breeds a barrier to seeing its ugly face, so plain in others, but so hidden in the mirror. Praising God reminds me of Who indeed is worthy to be praised.

Pride comes in many forms inside this aging clay of mine: vanity (if you can believe that), an air of superiority, thinking little of others, smugness, being a gossip. It’s most insidious when it creeps into my self-confidence, my accomplishments, in the exercise of the gifts God has given me.

I know that there are those who need ego-reinforcement as therapy for crushing and painful circumstances. I know also that it can go too far, that it’s not a cure-all, cure-everything. Somehow in all the blessings afforded by counseling and the other helps we know in our world, a person’s relationship with God has to enter into the picture. Pleasing ourselves, feeling good about ourselves, satisfying ourselves is not a blessed objective without a deep understanding that we are who we are only because God made us that way. In and of ourselves, we are nothing. We gain our worth and dignity only in relationship – to God and to others.

God commanded us to love our neighbor in the same way as we love ourselves. I take that as a command to love ourselves, too. But love is patient, love is kind, is not puffed up, forgives all things and bears all things. To love means to die to self, and that brings the fullness of life.

My biggest hang-up with pride is recognition of good things I have done, thinking how I’ve helped and served and suffered long and patiently. There, too, Jesus taught me: “Why do you call me good?” Jesus said, “Only the Father in heaven is good.” That’s something for us moderns to ponder. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on February 8th, 1987

Making God my Pilot, instead of my Co-Pilot

2007-11-14T05:25:00.000-08:00

We’ve all seen the license plates which say “God is my Co-Pilot.” That’s a nice expression and expresses a faithful attitude, but one which, to my mind, doesn’t go far enough. The saying would be better expressed: “God is my Pilot.”

Now license plates saying that might be enough to strike fear into the hearts of motorists everywhere, having folks craning to see who was driving the car. My distinction, of course, is a spiritual one.

Having God as a co-pilot seems like a relationship with the Lord out of perspective. Either God would be taking over the controls when I let go; or even at best, He would be flying along with me. In the latter scenario, I would still be calling the shots.

I’m not saying that there’s necessarily any conflict between what I want and what God wants for me – but there could be, particularly because I have a strong inclination to sin. My point is that only insofar as God is in control am I in tune with the way things are supposed to be in my life.

So how does that work? I’ve never received any messages from God like Samuel received, or like Paul heard. I have been aware of the Lord working in my life in a lot of ways, but somehow I have perceived His Hand as I went along, or often I will see Him at work only after something has been accomplished. I will ask the Lord’s help to do some work, for example, or to help me talk to someone. During or afterward I will see how He helped me, guiding, giving insight, someway being a part. These understandings have helped me to build up my faith, to see as Thomas did that Jesus is alive.

My problem is common to most of us, I believe: It is in knowing what God wants me to do beforehand. I can think of plenty of things to do, things that are in the scheme of things wholly good and meet and proper. Which, though, should I do? I obviously can’t do everything.

How does a person decide, for example, to be a teacher, or a brick mason, or an engineer, or a janitor? Each of these things can be pleasing to God but one occupation is more suitable to one person, another to another. In our more common experience, among all the charities that beg for support, which one deserves my attention? Should I take the initiative to go to this neighbor or that with a kind word or a help, or should I keep my mouth shut and mind my own business?

I wish I could have a clear and unequivocal word from God about things out front, but alas it doesn’t work that way.

Like my friend Dick is wont to say: “God’s voice often sounds an awful lot like mine.”

The answer to the dilemma of making God my Pilot instead of my Co-Pilot I believe can be found in the very nature of the relationship I have with God. The more intimate and enduring the relationship I have with Him, the more I am going to “know” what He wants me to do. If my wife and I never talked, I would not – could not – be sensitive to all the things I “know” about her. Of course, many are the circumstances when I simply have to ask my wife what she thinks. So it is with God.

The more I come to Him in prayer, the sacraments and in reading His word in the Scripture, the more I will know Him, and understand how all that He has said and has to offer applies to me in the nitty-gritty circumstances of my life. If I never talk to Him, never receive Him into the home of my heart, never hear His word spoken eternally in the Bible, I just won’t know Him, that’s all.

If I keep the Lord on as Co-Pilot only, I may find myself high and dark and trying to find my way on instruments I can’t read. I need to become sensitive to His direction and guidance. If God Himself is just my Co-Pilot, there’s a poor pilot indeed at the controls. Maybe the motorists ought to be afraid of that. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on February 2nd, 1987

Marriage: living and loving together in Christ

2007-11-12T04:08:00.000-08:00

Just because my wife and I have been married for 16 years doesn’t make me an expert on marriage. I’m sure my wife will testify to that. It is true, however, that I have learned a thing or two. I don’t presume to suggest that I have a world view or that my views apply to anyone’s marriage other than my own.

One thing I’ve learned is that I shouldn’t be callous and domineering. I once suggested to a group of people there is only one thing in the world that I expect of my wife – that she keeps the bed made. A woman remarked from the group, “Why can’t you make the bed?” Gee, I said, I didn’t think it was too much to expect only one thing.

Of course, I was simply trying a little humor – that I was clinging to a last strand of chauvinism among the millions and billions of things involved in a marriage. It was a poor joke.

Even though I’m writing this from my perspective, I “feel” my wife’s attitudes and ideas and perspectives. For the record, my wife makes the bed if she feels like it. Far be it from me to tell her what to do. That becomes particularly significant in matters of faith.

I know that Lizzie needs to be free to be who she is in Jesus Christ, just as I do. He made us one and we are as one, but we are not one and the same. I’m what you might call lockstep wishy-washy, for example, and demand the freedom to be so. Elizabeth, however, has a tendency to regard matters with more conviction. I take a broader view, she a more detailed approach. She accepts people as they are, whereas I accept people as I think they ought to be.

Elizabeth needs freedom to go places and do things, particularly as she seeks the Lord, even if I believe she’s dead wrong. That does not mean that I cannot voice my opinion, that I cannot share deeply and intimately my own faith and feelings. However, I cannot tell her what kind of relationship to have with God. It is her relationship with Him. In the last analysis, we both worship the same God the Father, in Jesus Christ, together with the Holy Spirit.

If God wants my wife to make widgets or to associate with people who, uh, don’t always see things the way I do, then who am I to judge? I’m confident we are in agreement that God loves all His people.

Another thing I have learned is that I shouldn’t be selfish. I am decidedly selfish, but only in letting go of my laziness and preferences and pride do I find real peace.

One thing my wife won’t let me do is be patronizing or false. She has a highly developed awareness of the dishonest. I can’t say “It’s OK if you go there” if I don’t genuinely think that. She’ll catch it like a frog catching a bug. No, she wants the dignity of my honesty with her, not the indignity of my pseudo-complicity only to find out later I was really opposed.

Even if I am opposed to some of the things Elizabeth does, that doesn’t mean that I’m right and she’s wrong. Just the same, it is incumbent upon me to be honest about it and respectful of her freedom as a child of God. I ain’t saying I’m good at it, either. I just know it to be true, that’s all.

We Catholics share a common faith. That does not mean, however, that we do not have different talents, different gifts, different inclinations as we seek to know God and His will in our lives. Differences occur in our faith community and in marriages, too. God knows they do in mine. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 18th, 1987

It’s about time

2007-11-09T03:25:00.000-08:00

At a communal reconciliation service, Father Larry Zurek related a story he’d heard about the devil calling a brainstorming session, soliciting his underlings for good ideas for getting more souls into hell.

One devilish soul scratched his head and said, “Why don’t we tell them there is no God.” The devil said that wasn’t bad, but he figured that would not get too many. Another demon said: “I know. Let’s tell them there is no hell.” The devil liked that one, but still, it was short of the mark. Finally, a third fiend spoke up: “Let’s tell them they have plenty of time.” The devil threw his head back and laughed a scornful and hellish laugh. “That’s it, my boy,” he said. “That’s it.”

My mother had a sampler on the wall when I was growing up. It was called “God’s Minute.” Here’s how it went:

“I have only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, can’t refuse it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it
But it’s up to me to use.
I must suffer if I lose it,
Give account if I abuse it.
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.”

Time is very different from our other resources. We seem to be able to get a little more money, more food, more information. This, though, is the only right now we get. Ever.

We’re preoccupied with time. People are always taking time, or trying to find time, or losing all track of time. I suppose the most intriguing aspect of time for me is the enormous significance of single moments, little snippets of whatever time really is, that have such profound effect.

Take, for example, the moment the first light appeared in the first filament in the first light bulb. Or what about the moment it occurred to Albert Einstein that space and time are interdependent, that indeed time itself is relative.

What about the moment Jesus said: “It is finished.”

It seems to me that each of our lives could be filled with such moments, relative to our own circumstances, of course. If you’re anything like me, life is either something that was or something that’s going to be. Surely life, though, can be neither. Life is. This is our life, mine as I write this, yours as you read this. This is how we are spending our life now. We don’t accept that really. We have this intractable idea that life is something other than what life is right now.

St. Paul says in Ephesians 5: 15-17: “Keep careful watch over your conduct. Do not act like fools, but like thoughtful men. Make the most of the present opportunity, for these are evil days. Do not continue in ignorance, but try to discern the will of the Lord.”

The King James has verse 16 as “redeeming the time.” I like that a little better than the New American because it spells out what can be done with a moment. It can be redeemed. This is such a moment, isn’t it? Is this not a good one? When is a good one? Do we have plenty of time?

I find it a lot easier to look back in time and say, “My Jesus, have mercy on me,” than I do to look ahead and say, “My Jesus, change me.”

I know Scripture talks about everything having its season. Even Jesus spoke frequently about the coming of His hour. But Lot didn’t have much time to get out of town, and the Jews didn’t have much time to smear lamb’s blood on their doors. The tribes of Israel did not slow their march from Egypt as pharaoh’s army approached. Neither did Joshua hold back at Jericho, nor did Matthew tarry at the tax table. Jesus’ hour did come, though He sweat blood begging His Father to let it not be, not this way, not here, not now.

What if He backed down like I do all the time?

One thing I’m absolutely, positively sure of: This is the only moment I will ever have this moment. I can waste it or redeem it.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on January 4th, 1987

Perceptions and truth

2007-11-07T02:48:00.000-08:00

They say we remember things the way we perceived them to be the first time. I recall my oldest brother grabbing me from my bed one winter morning, taking me outside and setting me down in the new fallen snow. It was up to my waist! I had never seen so much snow!

Many snows have come and gone, but my memory shows the great snow of my childhood. The point is: It wasn’t that we had tall snow, but that I was a short boy.

I used to think that the home of my birth was very big, but it wasn’t so big. The overgrown hilly field behind our house was not a jungle but a thicket.

Many more perceptions come into play as we grow older, things a lot more complicated than big and small. Take marriage, for example. That can be a shocker.

I’m sure I went into marriage satisfied with the old ’60s adage: “You do your thing and I do mine; and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.” That seemed like a reasonable sentiment. Certainly I believed my wife and I had it together, each of us with something to keep and something to share.

Good golly Miss Molly how things change. Things just didn’t work out 50-50 in our wedlock. Come to find out that marriage can be ninety-nine to one or a hundred to nothing. Come to find out that marriage just won’t work any other way.

It seems that so much of maturity deals with coming to terms with disillusionment. It seems so unfair that big things are really small, that snow that once prompted awe now prompts dread, that love can be hard and thankless and painful.

I don’t mean to imply that I go around disillusioned all the time. Far from it. Actually, in a kind of ironic twist, disillusionment has been a great teacher, demonstrating to me that real beauty is found in truth itself rather than in a perception of it.

Who can know the peace, the deep satisfaction, of a couple married 50 years, a Sister celebrating her Silver Jubilee, a priest who has been a priest for 30 years or 40 years? You and I know that they didn’t make those milestones easily or alone. Indeed, they could not have made them without God.

My wife and I have discovered that Jesus Christ must be at the center of our marriage if we are to do the loving that’s called for. We have discovered that He was there all along, whether we chose to acknowledge Him or not. He has that kind of love.

One of the things I tell my kids is that Jesus loves them and that He never stops loving them. Even when they are doing wrong, even when it seems nobody loves them – when they are happy, when they are sad, Jesus loves them. I tell my children this over and over and over again. Sometimes they say, “I know, Dad.” Or they will say, “You always say that, Dad.” Sometimes, though, they don’t say anything – they just look off in one of those childlike stares, seeing what a child sees as he grapples with believing.

Having come through a few disillusionments in my time, I know that my children will face them, too. I cannot spare them that. Maybe, however, when the going gets rough, when life gets unfair and they are called upon to love someone who doesn’t love them back, they will recall with confidence that Someone does love them after all, and never stops.

The Hebrew scholar says that God did not tell us how to begin things. That is His secret. He did, however, reveal to us a precious secret: How to begin again.

That’s what I’ve had to do as I have recovered from my disillusionments. I’m surely thankful that God, Who is Truth, has pulled back the curtain, from which way to go.

As I have begun fitfully and timidly on these new journeys, I know that the snow may not be deep, but it can be serene and pure and awe-inspiring, and that I can appreciate it in a child-like way. I know that love out there will not be based on some preconceived idea, but will be beyond all understanding. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 23rd, 1986

Feelings and temptation

2007-11-05T04:24:00.000-08:00

The insight came to me with a freshness and a sense of peace and security. Surely this understanding about temptation was a gift. I do not know why I had not had this awareness before.

Certainly I could say the words – “Just because you’ve been tempted doesn’t mean that you have sinned.” People had explained this to me over and over. Just the same, I had grasped the idea only intellectually and not with faith. It was in the gift of faith that I was able, I suppose, to have an epiphany of understanding, a kind of manifestation of the truth underlying the concept. It’s like an “aha!” experience. We call dumbly poll-parrot that two plus two equals four. But when we understand what that means in a concrete situation, it makes more sense.

For example, if I have two dollars and you give me two more, two plus two equals four has much more meaning.

So it was when I came to understand about temptation.

You see, the thing I saw into was that the devil is a liar. Not only does he put a thought into my brain, he then follows that up with a subtle lie usually along the lines: “You sure are a bum for thinking such a thing. Look at you. You say you love God and you say you love neighbor. How can you love? Would a person who loves God be thinking what you’re thinking? You’re doomed, brother. God doesn’t want the likes of you around.”

It’s all a lie.

The plot thickens, of course, with feelings that come into play. A greedy thought sets up certain feelings. A lustful thought feels one way, a slothful thought feels another. Now I know that God gave us our feelings, and they do indeed make our lives very interesting. The thing I’ve discovered about feelings, though, is that they are unreliable. Feelings just exist. Just because feelings can be appropriate in a given situation doesn’t mean that they are. Feelings are not an unmistakable clue to the truth.

How often do we feel anger toward someone, for example, only to find out that we misunderstood? Or how can two people encounter the exact set of circumstances, one feeling serene and the other wired for sound? Feelings may add spice to life, but they certainly are no recipe for understanding.

In the case of temptation, the devil will put a lustful thought in my mind, and sure enough, I’ll start feeling, well, you know what those feelings are like. Then, though, the devil will begin his accusations, chiding his victims for not feeling disgust and revulsion, for after all, wouldn’t a truly faithful, believing, spiritual person feel horrified? The poor victim’s feelings are involuntary, but they do seem to confirm the devil’s lie.

And that’s the whole point, that’s what the big lie is: falseness represented as the truth. We can get tangled up in fiendish logic and lose sight of the fact that what has been happening is a plain old homespun run-of-the-mill temptation.

Let me lay it out simply. The devil puts a thought in our head. Quickly now, he lies, telling us we’re no good for thinking such a thought. Then, before we have too much time to think about that, he starts running on about our feelings. Then, so the devil’s plan goes, since we’re no good anyway for thinking such thoughts and feeling such feelings, we might as well act on or act out this initial thought, which was not our idea, but his.

To be sure, the devil knows exactly which thoughts to put in my mind because he knows my weaknesses, my stress points, my areas of confusion and doubt. But guess what, so does God.

God knows I have sinned, but Scripture and my faith confirm in my heart that, for those who will turn to Him, there is no condemnation. That does not mean there will be no battle. Spiritual warfare is very real, I should think. Just because I have gained some insight into the devil’s wiles is no guarantee that the father of lies won’t try again.

This gift of understanding, however, has been comforting to me, giving me strength for the struggle and encouragement toward the victory.

My nature is broken, inclined toward evil. Like St. Paul says, though, not that I live, but that Jesus lives in me. He is my hope, my strength, and my song. I have found that in the heat of temptation, in the pack of lies, in the confusion, in the tugging toward the wrong and the yearning for the good, if I simply say “Jesus” the devil can’t stand it, not for long. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 2nd, 1986

Life at the checkout

2007-11-03T04:03:00.000-07:00

I’m at the grocery checkout. The woman in front of me waits for her groceries to be tallied. When the job is done, she needs to stand there for a couple of minutes to let the full impact of her bill sink in. In about a month, after she has stared blankly at the numbers on the machine which proclaim the harsh reality of her circumstances, she begins a process known as opening her purse.

Somewhere in there is – no, not there, or here, or under that – ah, another purse. Extracting that in the modern day science of non-filmed slow motion, purse No. 1 needs to be snapped shut so as to rest purse No. 2 on the top of it. Opening purse No. 2 is a millennial event, accompanied by dabs to the nose, sniffs, and sundry other ceremonious trappings befitting the bittersweet occasion.

After my children have become mature adults with families of their own, we begin a surgical technique which is accomplished by holding a wad of bills safely inside the purse with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, while sliding a single note from the bundle with the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. That leaves for my middle and most productive years the counting out of change.

The change, of course, is taken out and put back in an elaborate scenario, each coin arrangement displayed on the flat of the hand until a mercifully accurate combination can be found. Meanwhile, wife dear wife is at the morticians attending to the necessary details.

As my family and friends return to the limousines and the scruffy gentlemen begin shoveling in the dirt on my aged and long-suffering remains, the woman is about to begin an evolutionary phenomenon called putting purse No. 2 back into purse No. 1.

Patience is a difficult thing to have to live with. To be honest, sometimes I think I’m going to die. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 19th, 1986

An unlikely partner to goings-on in Purgatory

2007-11-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

I sat in the city room at the daily newspaper doing what we call in the trade: “moving copy.” A routine obituary came to me for editing and typesetting; but my job, of course, was to look for errors and to see that they were corrected before the information was published in the paper.

In this particular case, I noted that the woman had been a member of a purgatorial society at our local cloistered monastery. Trying to resurrect from my memory the exact wording of those arcane old words has proved impossible. Nevertheless, from the context of the group’s name, it was apparent that the members promised to pray for one another promptly upon death.

Arcane then as now, I felt it necessary to call the monastery to verify the name of the group, the spelling of the words: routine procedure for a routine obit.

Somehow I was also reluctant to make the call. The usual press of deadline bore down, the hour of the night was not early; and the picture showed in my brain of a gruff, officious editor rushing to get the facts from a meek little nun. However, with the reluctance was also a sense of urgency. I dialed the number.

After identifying myself, I said, “Uh, we’ve received an obituary notice, Sister, on a Mrs. ______ I just want to check the name of a group. I note here she was associated with the monastery. From the context, Sister, it seems she was in a society, the members promise to pray for one another promptly at death…”

The meek Sister cut me short, “Oh,” she said, “has she died?”

At the time I made this call, I was not exactly your lockstep, practicing Catholic – more the gadfly exterior with the lukewarm interior. But the experience was surely mystical for me. I felt used, like the Lord wanted to get the word to the deceased’s comrades quickly, so he tapped this joker.

Now I don’t want to make more of this situation than was there, but what was there for me has held a special place in my recollection each November as we pray for the Poor Souls.

I know some people have trouble with the concept of Purgatory, an article of our Faith we accept on faith, the Scripture reference in 2 Maccabees notwithstanding. My faith, though, has been reinforced in a very practical way.

As with so many things about faith: logic, reason, documentation and argument don’t hold a candle to a personal peek in the door of something profound and holy.

The cigarette-smoking editor and the gentle nun became involved in the ongoing life of a woman who had died, two people at least one of whom was an unlikely partner to goings-on in Purgatory. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 16, 1986

Sainthood is not reserved for the few

2007-11-01T02:21:00.000-07:00

All Saints Day has always has been special to me. I am reminded of all the good and holy and God-fearing people I have known who are now with the Lord. I am reminded that sainthood is not reserved for the few who luck out, but for as many as will come to Him.

Now I’m not being presumptive. Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, but I have known saints. I am sure of it. None is on the Church calendar, but how would any of us know the Gospel – which is to say, really appreciate the Gospel – if we had not witnessed it in the lives of those around us.

I think of my friend Leo. He was a businessman who gave me a job, but my relationship with him went way beyond employer-employee. He was the most generous, selfless, giving man I have ever known. He accepted people just like they were, and that included me.

Leo’s fairness, right-thinking, patience and honesty have been an example to me throughout my life. There are times I made him mad with my shenanigans, but he always put up with me benignly. His evenness would make me see how cruddy I had been. By the example of his life I could come to see the shortcomings in my own.

He had an accident one time, and it was a freak accident. He was backing up and hit a lady with his car, severely injuring her arm. I’ve never seen Leo so distraught about something. Besides seeing to her financially, he went to visit that woman every day until she recovered.

Leo would honor a commitment uncompromisingly, fully and without fail. I know that in his business he had an arrangement with another business. Although his partner fell down completely on his end, Leo never flinched. He was a man of his word.

Long after I stopped working for Leo, I was always invited back to the company Christmas party, and of course went back to see him many times just to visit.

On his last Christmas on earth, I was living in Lafayette and could not make it back to the party. A former fellow employee told me that after the party that afternoon as they were leaving, Leo stopped, looked off and said, “I guess Tom’s not going to make it this year.” It made me very sad.

When I received word that Leo had died, I came back to his funeral. With the exception of two, every person who had ever worked for Leo was there.

I remembered seeing Leo at noon Mass during the weekdays in Lent. I remembered his laugh, a hearty chuckle, and his expression: “Good morning, glory.” Often he would talk about his World War II days in Italy.

The night before Leo’s funeral Mass, I went back to the place where I had worked for five years during high school and college and walked around the buildings. They had a spray of purple carnations on the door and I sniffed the fragrance of each one.

I loved him. I miss him.

Leo will never be canonized, but he’s a saint all right. He was a decent and good man, a caring father and husband. He loved his neighbor and he loved God. He was unassuming and gentle, but there was no doubt about his ethical convictions. He was surely conservative, but ask anyone who knew him about his magnanimity.

I pray for my friend all the time. But on All Saints Day, when I think of all the people God has called into His kingdom, all the simple souls who have passed unheralded into glory, I will think of Leo. – T.R.

written by Thomas Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 26th, 1986

My friend is always there when I need him

2007-10-31T03:18:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about my oldest and dearest friend. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t around.

That childhood day in the swing on the front porch was quite a time. I sat there holding my old cat, Rhubarb, feelings so sorry for myself. “Rubie,” I said, “you’re my only friend in the world.” It was truly a feast of childhood self pity. I didn’t recognize it as such, of course. I was steeped in my bittersweet emotions with abandon. Who should come along, though, but my old friend. It wasn’t long before dumb Rhubarb had lazed off under the foot-a-nights and I was swinging high with my friend singing made up songs.

We used to run for high pop flies together in a neighbor’s field. It’s funny. I wouldn’t be aware that he was running with me. I was a terrible baseball player, but my friend never let on like he minded. I tried out for Little League. That pitcher threw the ball so fast I didn’t even see it. My fellow Little League aspirants were impatient for their turn to try out at bat. They kept taunting me with “What do you want, pal?” All I wanted was a ball I could hit. I was a washout, but my friend made me feel better about it.

I went to St. Thomas Seminary in Louisville what I was 14 years old and I was really glad that my friend went with me. When I hit those terrazzo floors and sniffed those unfamiliar smells at St. Thomas, I was one frightened and homesick boy. I can’t tell you how intensely my friend and I talked that first night when we were supposed to be quiet.

My friend and I rode home together for Christmas that year – Glory be to God! Home! I recall that “Telstar” was playing on the car radio and my friend and I “dum dah dummed” to that instrumental song with happy gusto. What a joyful and sweet day that was.

When I left the seminary in February of my second year in high school, I couldn’t believe it, but my friend came with me. That was particularly comforting because my parents weren’t too happy about me leaving.

When my mother died, I honestly could not have taken the pain without my friend there with me.

There were some years after that when I lost much interest in my friend. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be with me. I guess I just didn’t want to be with him. He didn’t like beer bashes and I did. It’s hard to explain. I got all full of bitterness inside. My friend would get in touch with me, want to know if I wanted to talk. For some reason or other, I got mad at him. He just took it. I’ve never heard him say an unkind word to me.

I kept it up, kept it up. Here was a friend who had never hurt me, had been with me through thick and thin, called on me what I wouldn’t call on him; but I started blaming him for everything I found unpleasant in my life.

Somehow or other, we got back together. I’m reasonably confident it was his doing. I told him I was sorry for being such a jerk. He just shrugged and said forget it. He gave it to me straight, tough. He was as honest and true as you can get.

He said we weren’t kids anymore, and the time had come for me to decide if I wanted to be his friend or not. He’d always been my friend, he said, and he certainly wanted to go on being so. What was I going to do, though? Was I going to keep asking him to go places and do things I knew very well he didn’t like? Was I going to go on blaming him for every rough place in the road I came across? Was he going to be the only one to be the friend in this friendship?

He had a good point.

I know that there’s not another one like him. He’s bailed me out of more scrapes. I don’t understand myself sometimes. I forget about him, don’t call him. I can’t remember one time when he wasn’t there for me.

My friend told me one time that there wasn’t a single living, breathing human being in this world he didn’t love deeply. I said wait a minute, you know everybody I know, and even though you’ve been down the line with me, we’re acquainted with some pretty low types. He said, o yeah, who?

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 12th, 1986

The Rosary

2007-10-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

October is the month of the Rosary. My mind runs in a hundred directions about the Rosary in my life. How about you? Have you ever thought back to some of the Rosaries you’ve said?

My namesake is Blessed Alan de la Roche (d Sept. 8, 1475), a successor to St. Dominic in encouraging devotion to the prayer. But that certainly doesn’t make me a Blessed or a saint, particularly when it comes to the Rosary. The Rosary is a devotion to our Lord through the intercession of our Blessed Mother which has fallen on hard times. Used to be, everywhere you turned there was a queue of Catholics praying the Rosary. Today – how does it go – we’ve got one around the house somewhere. Now where did we put it?

Our tradition tells us with alarming simplicity that the Rosary has great power, power enough to effect world peace. We don’t have world peace, but of course we don’t say the Rosary either.

It’s not a little intriguing that one place where the Rosary still has widespread popularity is at wakes.

What a mysterious, inexplicable attraction this prayer holds! I’ve rushed through it empty-headed, persevered through it thoughtfully, begged it, pleaded it, wondered at it.

I’ve turned to it in desperation, interceded for others with it, cried through it.

I’ve been moved to imponderable peace during it, fought my way through it, been flooded with doubt about it. I’ve had deep confidence in its efficacy and let it go unsaid for long periods of time.

Real blessings have come my way in the wake of it. I’ve experienced profound temptations in the midst of it.

I’ve prayed Rosaries in airplanes, cars, hotel rooms, woods, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms. I’ve prayed it on my fingers, in my mind, out loud in groups and out loud alone.

So much can be said about this prayer. Indeed there are books. Our own second bishop, John Cardinal Carberry, has a volume called “The Book of the Rosary” (1983, OSV). It’s a nice enough work. It takes the reader through the Mysteries with Scripture and has a good introduction on the meaning and value of the prayer.

The enduring classic, however, is “The Secret of the Rosary” by St. Louis de Montfort (Montfort Publications). St. Louis knew the Rosary I know. Consider his words: “One must not be looking for sensible devotion and spiritual consolation in the recitation of the Rosary; nor should one give it up because his mind is flooded with countless involuntary distractions or one experiences a strange distaste in the soul and an almost continual and oppressive fatigue of the body.”

Now there’s a man who has said the Rosary.

I believe in this great prayer. I know in my heart that the devil hates it.

I will do this: I will pray the Rosary each day this month for the readers of the Visitor. If you have a need, a hurt, an ache for solace, a fear, a hope, claim this Rosary as your own.

Please don’t confuse the one praying with the prayer. I’m not puffed up about this. In fact, I have “a strange distaste in the soul and an almost continual and oppressive fatigue of the body” just thinking about it. I’m aware that someone may think I think I’m something special. I’m not. However, it often has helped me to know that somebody’s praying for me. It’s as simple as that.

Also, please don’t expect any assurance of particular fervency or the assiduous attention of my mind. I know from experience you'll have to rely on the great power of the Rosary to help you and not on me.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 5th of 1986

‘St. Joe and Paul’

2007-10-29T03:16:00.000-07:00

They’ve torn down my old school, Sts. Joseph and Paul Grade School in Owensboro, Kentucky. I’m reminded that our children have been growing up but don’t quite realize it. They don’t discern the memories they’re accumulating.

St. Joe and Paul we called it. It’s funny the things that come flooding back from this place that is no more.

I remember wonderful red apples in a book in the first grade. Sister Dorothy Marie’s face shown so pleasantly from her Ursuline bonnet.

I was Sister George Ann’s “little messenger boy” in the second grade. Sister George Ann became president of Brescia College in Owensboro where I also went to school. She died a while back of cancer.

Sister Angelica was indeed an angel, such a kind person. Sister Mary Mercy was very strict and disciplined, but I knew her gentleness, too. Sister Sylvia Mary kept us nailed in our desks and our desks nailed to the floor. But I also remember taking a keen interest in “Voyages in English” that year.

I got my comeuppance as Sister Mary Rose told me one day, “You think you’re pretty smart, Tommy Russell, but you’re just average, boy, just average.”

Sister Mary Rose gave me an “H” on my Kentucky scrapbook. My family had gone on a trip around the state and I included silly things in my scrapbook: bark from a tree at the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial and a rock from the entrance to Mammoth cave. Our grades were S-, S, S+, H, and E in those days, with the more familiar D and F on the other end. Sister Mary Ruth succeeded Sister George Ann as president of Brescia.

Sister Rosita, my eighth grade teacher, got bopped on the head with a ball on the playground, knocking her bonnet off. You can believe there were wide eyes on the playground at that noon recess.

School days, what days they were! I recall tracing an outline of the National Cathedral on a stencil for the school paper. Every class put on a play. I recall dancing a minuet in knickers. I was City Mouse one year and had to eat real crackers on stage!

I so well remember serving Mass. “Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutem meam.” That was pretty easy. The “Suscipiat” was another matter. I recall laying out vestments, making neat designs with the cincture.

Every year we’d be surprised with fried chicken at lunch and we’d ask Sister what was the special occasion. It was a golden opportunity to tell us about the Feast of Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

I remember the day I learned to spell “Immaculate Conception” and I ran to tell Sister Mary Rose. Sister Mary Mercy told us how important it was to have clean hands and fingernails, “It’s the first thing people notice about you.”

Sister Rosita said never begin a letter with the word “I.” Always think of a way to say something about your reader first, that way you’ll get their attention, she said. It’s also a good way to think about humility.

Sister Aloise, our principal, would play classical music during lunch, and a student would walk around with the name of the piece on a sign. Such odd words! I never entered the contest Sister Aloise conducted to see who could name the most classical melodies.

My school was all education, whether I was warming my hands on the chimney at back of church or having Sister Mary Rose show me how to put depth perspective in a picture of a lane. I learned the meaning of the word “uniform” by aligning all the slats in the Venetian blinds in the cafeteria. Sister Rosita taught me.

I value my Catholic education as one of the great treasures of my life. Those Ursuline nuns gave me gifts of love and friendship and knowledge and faith. My heart is full of fondness for them, and gratitude.

Our children are receiving their education now. It warms my heart to think of the richness of the thing that is happening. We’ll never know all about it. It will be something that belongs to them.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 28th, 1986

Afraid of the dark

2007-10-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m afraid of the dark. You’d think a grown man could shake it off, but when I turn off the light at the top of the stairs at night, something akin to low-grade panic sets in. It’s a good thing that there’s another light switch a few short steps away. Who knows what fearsome creatures could come out in the absence of light?

My case is relatively mild. I cope. While my circumstance is more rightly described as a phobia, there are some genuine fears, I believe, common to the lot of us in the human frame.

Take, for example, the fear associated with making a decision. I’m not talking about what to wear today. In my closet, that choice is somewhat limited anyway. Will I wear these blue pants or those blue pants?

But what about the decision to change some aspect of my behavior? Whenever I get my throat blessed on the feast of St. Blase and the priest asks me, “Will you turn away from sin and follow the Gospel?” my throat opens up right away for the gulp in it.

Sure, sure, I say yes; but what’s really going on is a qualified maybe. While part of my indecision is an awareness of fundamental incapacity, part of it is fear as well.

One of the most startlingly honest lines I’ve ever heard preached in a homily was: “Living the Christian life sometimes can be very boring.” As I struggle with the decision to live the Gospel, I fear boredom.

Sin, you know, can seem very exciting, indeed be very exciting, until dues day, remorse day, awareness of emptiness day, until the day when I realize I’ve been duped by the devil and feel weak and stupid.

Having sinned before, sometimes I am blessed with the recollection of payday before I do the deed again – so I back off. However, short of making any real commitment to fix the situation by a head-over-heels surrender to the Lord, I just kind of hang there afraid that becoming a down-home, broken-hearted Christian will be real boring.
I hang on to a few “pets.” Not that I actually plan to do this sinful thing again (Whew! Who needs the ag?), I do like tinkering with the exciting prospect once in a while.

I was told the story about a woman who had a problem with pornography. She’d go to the porno shop, then go to confession, then repeat the process over and over.
One day she was in a different town, New York City, and she popped in to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to go to confession. The priest asked her if she really wanted to do something about the thing she kept doing. She was in a bind, like me having my throat blessed. What could she say? She said yes.

“For your penance,” the priest told her, “fast and pray every day for a year.” Well, she did it. And from that day to this she hasn’t had the problem.

I’ve heard it said that the opposite of fear is not peace of mind, but love; because when we are in the presence of love there is no fear.

When a child gets afraid at night, he runs to his parents’ bed. Because why? Because there he will be in the presence of love. He may not be able to articulate that, but that’s what happens. With mom and dad, he is not afraid.

We often associate fear with big scary panics, but sometimes we are simply afraid we’ll be bored. However, if we run to our Father’s arms and become willing to do what He asks of us, like St. Paul says, eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it even occurred to us the reward which God has prepared for those who love Him.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 21st, 1986

Loving our enemies

2007-10-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

There are some people in this world I just don’t like. Of course, I’m reasonably confident that I fall into an unliked category or two myself.

So it goes.

The reigning philosophy is that you can’t like everybody – so don’t worry about it. The Christian modification to the reigning philosophy is hate the sin but love the sinner. Love your enemies. Yeah, right.

I’ve had a lot of trouble with that love your enemies business. It’s easier for me to understand things like “Cross me once, shame on you; cross me twice, shame on me” and “I don’t get mad, I just get even.” These concepts seem imminently more practical – you know what I mean?

Besides, Jesus had people He obviously didn’t like: like some Pharisees, for example. St. Peter had pretty much contempt for people who sidled up to new Christians and tried to take advantage of their newfound innocence and lead them back to the old way.

Thomas Merton tells the story in “Seven Storey Mountain” about the fat man who entered the Monastery of Gethsemani the same time he did. Merton said the fellow used to sleep during the night Office. It was obvious Merton didn’t like him, and he even kind of gloated when the guy washed out.

Then, though, there are the St. Theresa stories. The Little Flower was bothered by the nun in the choir whose teeth kept clacking. She offered that up, her biographers tell us. There was also a certain nun in the cloister Theresa simply couldn’t stand.

The nun of the saint’s displeasure apparently also had the distinction of not being well liked in her community in general. So it was, however, Theresa was assigned to work alone in the kitchen with guess who.

The story goes that St. Theresa found her kitchen companion a truly irritating individual. Nevertheless, after some time, Sister Irritation approached Theresa wanting to know why she alone, among all the nuns in the convent, was the only one who liked her.

There you have it, folks. All that’s required in dealing with people you don’t like is heroic sanctity.

Well, not possessing heroic sanctity, these patient endurance methods have left me in a pickle. I’ve had to search out other ways. I mean, not liking somebody hurts – if not them, then certainly me.

It seemed to me that there ought to be a Christian technique at least as practical as the vengeful, cold-shoulder, resentful scenarios that breathe up out of hell.

By golly, I’ve found one. Guaranteed, foolproof, works every time. Just follow these simple, easy-to-read instructions:

– Think of somebody you don’t like and pray for them.
– When I’ve got a good resentment going, I say this prayer every day:
“O Lord, give _______ every good thing I would want for myself and my family. Give them peace in their heart and health in their mind and body. Keep them free from harm and shelter them from all anxiety. Keep them healthy and happy. And yes, Lord, bring us together to eternal life with You.”

– I’ve found that if I pray this, even if I have to grit my teeth to do it, the hurtful feelings go away.

I’ve found that after a few weeks, the object of my prayer may still be a jackass, but my attitude toward them has changed. I may continue to dislike what a person does, but the person they are in Christ is more apparent to me. That must be hating the sin, but loving the sinner.

There are still people around who rub me the wrong way. I don’t like them, don’t want to be with them. But what I mean by that is different after praying for them. It’s what they do that bothers me. In and of themselves, I know that God loves them as much as He loves me.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 7th, 1986

What is faith?

2007-10-25T04:10:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy in the 1950s, I was not aware of the McCarthy hearings. Somehow it filtered down to me, though, that communism was a grave menace.

One of my childhood fears was that the Communists would come to our front door, come in with their guns and demand that everyone in the family deny God or die.

We were doomed, of course, because I just knew that they couldn’t torture us enough to make us deny God. I took solace about my slow, painful death knowing that I would quickly be given the inheritance of the saints.

Somewhere in that abstruse childhood vision was a germ of faith. Strip away all the fears and irrationality and conjecturing and you have a small boy with a simple statement upon his lips: I believe in God.

I laid turning in my bed the other night with this faith business. I say I believe, but what am I doing when I do that?

It occurred to me that I had said, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, an in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord…” so many times. Have I merely become conditioned by saying the words? Do I really believe what the words say, the reality that the words represent? What is faith, anyway?

St. Paul says in Hebrews: “Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see.”

Country and Western singer Tommy Hawk says everybody has a “knower” inside of them, and faith is knowing something in your knower.

I heard the story about a man who lost a child in a cruel accident. He became very bitter toward God and turned away from Him. Then the man lost another child in another cruel accident. The man then turned back to God and fell on his face in surrender to Him.

It seems to me that in both instances the man had faith. He believed in God. The only thing that changed was his relationship with Him.

I was always taught that faith is a gift. It therefore seems logical to me that it was conceivable that I didn’t get mine. Scripture says, however, that each person is given a measure of faith.

Father Joe Redinbo told the story in our church the other Sunday about a fellow listening to the Gospel about Jesus saying if a person had faith like a mustard seed, he could tell the mountain to hurl itself into the sea.

Father’s fellow thought he’d try that. Before he went to bed that night he told his wife that he was going to tell a tree in his garden to be gone. He got up the next morning and the tree hadn’t budged. He said to his wife, “I knew that tree would still be there.”

Of course, the man had no faith. Had he had faith, he would have been forced to conclude that what he saw in his garden was a very similar, different tree, come to take the other one’s place.

St. Paul goes on to say in Hebrews, “Anyone who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He rewards those who seek Him.”

I suppose if the Communists were to come to my house today and put a gun to my head, it’s altogether possible that I would tell them what they wanted to hear, I might scream a lot of things to save my hide.

I’d be ashamed not to have the courage to state openly my belief in God, even at the cost of my life. But whether I said it or not, I’d still believe it. It’s like it’s out of my hands.

Even if they put me feet first through a grinder, I don’t believe it’s possible to change the fact that I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord.

I guess that’s what faith is.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on August 31st, 1986

To change the world, begin with yourself

2007-10-24T04:03:00.000-07:00

People who go around smiling and happy all the time really get to me. The way I’ve got it figured, a little worry is healthy.

My friend Brenda gets after me for glooming and dooming about the mess the world’s in. I have got to make some suggestion for fixing things, she says. By golly, folks, I don’t know what to do, do you?

There’s a “be positive” ethic going around that troubles me. It’s like there’s some kind of holy responsibility to be positive about everything. I’ll be honest. I think being positive all the time is part of what’s wrong with the world.

We get so busy being positive we lose sight of the proper alarm we should feel about some of the horrors abounding about us. Oh, there’s always hope, but hope exists because there’s a need for it.

We’ve been told a lot lately by a variety of media means that the Western world is partying, mindless of our heinous and evil circumstances. We’re drunk on decadence, we’re told, thinking we’re invincible, that the day of reckoning is too far off to be bothered with.

One commentator on the social mores of Americans said we lack but one perversion which was rampant in the days of the fall of Rome. I’ll not mention this particularly disgusting thing. God forbid that I should give anybody any ideas.

I wonder if they smoked pot and jumped to acid rock.

Jesus warned us about complacency. Watch out! He said. You don’t know the hour when the Master will return.

Sometimes I sit on my front porch smoking a cigarette and I look up and see the billowing clouds in the sky. I think to myself, I could look up there a couple of minutes from now and see the Son of Man coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

I see myself quickly flicking away my cigarette and fanning the smoke. Gracious. Caught in the act. Doomed. Accountable. He’s not going to be concerned about whether I planned to do His will. He won’t be counting the times I said Lord, Lord. He’s interested in him who does the will of His Father.

Then I figure, though – nah, He’s not coming right now. So far, I’ve been right.

I’ve lived in this community for about eight years. However, not being a native, I don’t know a lot of people in the obituaries. Just the same, I skim them each day, looking at the ages. Do you do that?

Seems like a lot more people my age are in there than there used to be.

So the world’s in a mess and we’re complacent about it. But we really don’t know what to do about it anyway. There’s hope, but we’ve got these character defects we can’t seem to let go of. We’re hoping we have more time to get straightened out, but we keep seeing people our age in the obits.

All in all, there’s a yearning inside us that’s roughly akin to the old bluegrass song lyric: “Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Somebody said about the speed of light: “186,000 miles a second: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” So it is with the law governing this vapor of a life we live here: We may think it won’t end, but it will.

The problems I can fix are the ones inside me. At least I can try. I think being worried that I ought to be getting started is a good negative emotion.

God has given us a great gift. It’s called a conscience. It lets me know pretty clearly what to do. I may not be able to fix the world, but by changing me – being obedient to God’s law which He has written in my heart – at least one smidgen of a smidgen of the world will be a better place.

Lord, don’t let me be caught red-handed.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in August of 1986

Modesty: a virtue for all seasons

2007-10-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

Sacraments are outward signs of inward realities.

The signs, in and of themselves, are just pieces of business: A bishop’s touch on a young person’s cheek, a bit of oil applied, a quantity of water poured. In the context of sacrament, though, these acts take on great meaning for us. The meaning has such depth, however, that no one comprehends it fully.

In the context of sacrament, Jesus asks for faith, not mere understanding; trust, not half-heartedness.

This writing is about modesty, high on the list of misunderstood virtues these days. In our society, modesty is scoffed at. It is the subject of chuckles.

Have I been immodest? Yes. I say so plainly. Let there be no intimation that I come speaking from some sacrosanct perspective. Neither let there be any thought that I sit in the judgment seat. I sit beside you in the pew.

So straight to the heart of the matter: Modesty is not a sacrament; but it is an outward sign of an inward grace: the grace God gives us to love our neighbor.

Modesty occurs in thought, word and deed. But mostly we think of it in terms of the way we dress. No matter how much we are led to believe otherwise on TV, in magazines, newspapers, and elsewhere prevalent in our environments, dressing publicly to enhance, rather than to subdue, our sexuality is immodest.

The rationales for immodesty are legion, hammered at, reinforced, repeated constantly from all sides. Some common ones: “I’m not trying to turn anybody on, I’m just trying to keep cool.” “People distracted by scant clothing simply have dirty minds.” “Everyone knows how we’re built. It’s no secret anyway.” “Why should I dress like a nun?” “The prudes like to force their values on everyone else.” You know the litany.

I’m convinced that immodesty in dress has gotten to the point where people just don’t think about in anymore. People don’t realize they’re being immodest. More seriously, it has become deeply ingrained in some people that modesty is actually something ridiculous, a throwback, just dumb.

However, the truth is, that modesty, like a sacrament, says on the outside who we are on the inside. That doesn’t mean an immodest exterior bespeaks an evil interior. It does mean though, in the very least, that right-thinking is not happening within.

As with a sacrament, we cannot fully comprehend all that it means, we cannot fully appreciate all the effects of our modesty. Indeed, I suspect that most of our immodesty affects people we don’t know, people we don’t see who see us.

It’s also not their fault that they are affected. If I shoot you with a gun, is it your fault that you wretch in pain? If I call you a blockhead, is it your fault that you are offended? Yet by not shooting others, not insulting others, have I affected people I don’t know, people I haven’t seen? Of course. My restraint, my obedience to God’s law written in my heart, allows my neighbors to move about in peace.

In the same way, I am not free to assault the sensibilities of my neighbors, to attract them sexually, publicly.

In the last analysis, I may not understand all the ramifications of this virtue the Master asks me to practice. But in faith and in love for Him and my neighbor, His still, small voice is very clear about modesty. He has not modified His expectations to beat the heat.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in July of 1986

Who’s being taught?

2007-10-22T03:36:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember very many homilies, can you? Sister Mary Mercy used to make us fourth graders write a paragraph saying what Father said in his sermon on Sunday. (They called them sermons in those days). What torture! Next in severity would be bamboo shoots under the fingernails.

It was probably the most taxing task of my grade school career (besides, of course, anything having to do with geography). Knowing what I know now, Sister Mary Mercy herself, doubtless would have had difficulty doing her own assignment.

Psychologists tell us that we remember only about 10 percent of what we hear, so the expression “in one ear and out the other” must have some validity.

All of this brings me to my point: How and when and under what circumstances are Catholics being taught their faith? I submit that we are starving.

This is a strictly subjective opinion, of course. Opposing views are most welcome. But it seems to me that the only Church teaching most adult Catholics receive is that 10 or 15 minutes each week at Mass.

Sure, Father puts his very best into the preparation of his homilies. But can this be sufficient teaching for a living faith?

Of course, CCD is in place. Catholic schools are open. Many parishes have RCIA programs for new Catholics, which help some old ones in the bargain. But what about most Catholics between high school and the grave? There is no question that television has a greater place in many Catholics’ lives than learning about their faith does.

The Holy Fathers have written a bunch of encyclicals. Why do they do this? Honestly now, have you ever read one?

The U.S. bishops have taken to writing pastoral letters on a variety of life-touching subjects. Can you apply the content of these letters to your life?

The problem, of course, is to find a way for this teaching to reach the people it is intended to guide.

The call these days is to individual responsibility, ownership of our relationship with God and the Church, personal accountability. However, there are two flies in that ointment.

One: The concept of responsible leadership has not been abandoned.

Two: There are still plenty of Catholics out there who are like sheep without a shepherd, despite protestations to the contrary. People need to be led, inspired, guided, shown the way. A sheep won’t say, “Lead me.” A sheep will wander aimlessly – or watch TV.

I won’t offload to the priests the whole responsibility for communicating Church teaching, but I will give them their share. They certainly are leaders, and in a position to make a difference.

Laity with some gumption also are needed in this task. Laity with God-given leadership abilities should be rising to the God-given mandate to share this faith of ours.

Parents have a primary teaching role – ahead of the schools and CCD. That has to imply that they themselves bone up: either to put themselves in environments, or to create environments, wherein the faith is nurtured.

The Catholic press has been woefully underutilized. Catholic newspapers and magazines simply are not in the same league with the secular press, but can and should be a primary and effective tool in communicating Church teaching.

To the credit of many pastors and parishes, adult education classes are offered. But who goes? Nine or 10 show up, half of whom are qualified to teach the class themselves.

There’s plenty to be learned. Besides the steady outpouring of teaching by the Magisterium, it might be a good day for Sacred Scripture to make a comeback. We, Catholics, have lived in fear of private interpretation of Scripture for so long that we scarce crack the book unless we’re in the presence of a priest. That has got to stop.

Perhaps I have lapsed into a little testiness and cynicism. Forgive me. My point is that homilies – and I’ve heard some good ones – are not enough. For one thing, I’m going to be looking into some ways for this newspaper to be a more effective forum for communicating substantive Church teaching. Surely there are other ways to boost the resources we have.

The hour is late for creative leadership and greater personal responsibility, but not too late.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in July of 1986

Too much stuff!

2007-10-20T03:39:00.000-07:00

One of the paradoxes of the Information Age is the sheer volume of information we are expected to internalize and deal with. Being ethical, decent people, perhaps we run around with a load of guilt because we simply can’t find the time to care about all the things we’re supposed to care about.

Everywhere there’s a newspaper article, a TV spot, a radio segment, a flyer in the mail, a handbill at the supermarket, a knock at the door, a pre-recorded phone call, a letter sent home from school – all of them urging our undivided attention. Each one asks for money, prayers, or a letter to our congressman.

Phew! If you’re like me, you want to go live in the desert and send out appeals asking for undivided attention, prayers and a generous contribution in the postage-paid return envelope provided.

Here’s a sampling of the important things brought to my attention in recent days, stirring in me a sense that I ought to be doing something, or at least unsettled me in one way or another:

Altar girls, neo-paganism among feminists, abortion, denial of care to deformed infants, Satanism and promiscuous lyrics in rock music, welfare reform in Indiana, alcoholism and drug abuse among young people, Crack, the homeless, strident liberalism in the Church, strident conservatism in the Church, problems of the aged, rural poverty, unemployment, the lonely, the Third Secret of Fatima, intellectual arrogance, anti-intellectualism, world peace.

One that drives me crazy is John Huston saying “Give to prevent blindness.”

Believe me, folks, I don’t make light of any of these things. But you and I both know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. You could knock out a list longer than mine.

Among all the things that competed for my attention, here’s what I did something about:

- I made out a check to my parish church.
- I took my daughter to and picked her up from baton practice.
- Saturday I met with my Cursillo group and went to the Full Gospel Businessmen’s dinner meeting; Sunday I went to Mass; and Tuesday I prayed with my prayer group.
- I had a conversation with my wife, an argument with my wife and a de-argumentizing conversation with my wife.
- I hugged my kids.
- I hollered at my kids.
- I mowed the grass.
- I started reading a new book.
- I came to work every day at the best job in the world. (This is my job, you see).
- I prayed for a friend who wasn’t feeling so hot.

All of this is to say that these may not be the right things to do, but somehow they’re going to have to be for now.

God made us fearfully and wonderfully. He knows we can’t take on all of this stuff. That’s why, I suppose, we understand that we are but parts of His Mystical Body – each of us with a role to play, a job to do. We have to depend on Him to lead us into areas that we can do something about. He will teach us. He will guide us.

Perhaps by the very awareness we have of global concerns, we are given a better understanding of the awesomeness of God. I, however, am not awesome. I can’t do something about everything.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in July of 1986

Prayer is essential

2007-10-19T03:57:00.000-07:00

Every time I sit down to write one of these episodes, I pray – if I remember. Perhaps I should pray that I will remember to pray. However, I suppose I could forget to do that, too.

Of course, there is no guarantee that prayer will sharpen my dull wits. Certainly I will be unable to blame God for failing to do the work He has assigned me. Even so, prayer is a great companion to any endeavor.

It seems to me that my prayer life is very weak. How about you? From “Day One” we have been taught to say our prayers. Early on we are taught the Sign of the Cross, the Our Father, the Hail Mary. Later on in life we learn prayers like “Help!” and “God have mercy on me!”

A Passionist priest told me that if everyone would say “Jesus I love you” once a day, it would change the world.

O, I pray; but I don’t pray, you know what I mean?

Show me somebody who spends 45 minutes a day in personal prayer and I’ll show you somebody who’s accomplishing God’s will in their life.

Why can’t I spend 45 minutes a day in personal prayer? Why is it such a struggle? I bet I could find 45 minutes for a good installment of “Hill Street Blues,” or 45 minutes to linger over a good meal, or 45 minutes to dawdle. But pray? Infinitely postponable. It’s like there’s a numbing, rejection mechanism inside me that goes off similar to the feeling I have sometimes facing a ransacked kitchen after a hot meal, complete with pie, and it’s my turn to do the dishes.

Perhaps I am intimidated by not really having anything to pray about. Of course, that is no excuse.

Probably you have heard the story about the old man who would sit in church hour after hour until one day the pastor approached him. “What are you praying about?” the pastor asked. “Is something troubling you?” “No,” the old man said. “I just sit here and look at God and He looks at me.”

A teaching on intercessory prayer recently at St. Boniface in Lafayette by Stephanie Culhane gave me some delicious insights, even though I wasn’t there. Those who did attend told me about her point that distraction in prayer may not be a distraction at all. It might just be the Holy Spirit guiding us as to whom or what to pray about. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Jesus told us to go in to our room, close the door, and pray. Our heavenly Father would hear our prayer offered in secret would reward us in secret.

So there, I have no excuse. I should be praying even when I don’t have anything to pray about, and I become distracted. I should be praying because Jesus told me I should be praying.

Maybe I don’t have 45 minutes. But what about five? There’s a modest proposal, huh? Surely I have five minutes a day when I can go in my room, close the door, and pray. Five minutes. Surely I’ve got to be the last one left who isn’t offering at least five minutes a day in real prayer to my God.

O well, I’ve always said that I don’t care if I’m the last one in the Pearly Gates. Just please don’t close them without me, Lord.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in June of 1986

Close moments

2007-10-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

People who are involved with Cursillo speak of “close moments,” but you don’t have to be in Cursillo to have had a similar experience. Surely you have had one, for example.

Close moments refer to those times when an individual feels particularly close to Jesus Christ, those times shot through, as it were, with the awareness of God.

These moments can come at any time and can last but an instant or go on for a long time. Nothing I know of in my Christian experience compares with a close moment with Jesus.

It’s helpful to reflect on these times in our experience. They bolster our confidence in times of pain. They are a practical assist to a faith sometimes gone dry. They remind us that God is with us even when it doesn’t seem like it.

I have learned that there is nothing I can do to cause such an experience. Jesus is the Master of the encounter. Indeed, a person doesn’t necessarily have to be a believer. Paul, on the road to Damascus, certainly was no believer. Stories of conversion experiences abound, wherein a hardened sinner turns around owing to a close moment with God.

If Jesus Christ chooses to reveal himself to someone, there doesn’t seem to be much the individual can do about it.

As I grew up, I believed close moments (although I didn’t call them that) were reserved for saintly mystics.

I love the story of St. Francis of Assisi experiencing ecstasy. He cried out, “Enough, Lord, enough!” Apparently that close moment went on and on.

There’s the story of St. Catherine of Sienna being held in such rapture that her sisters believed she was dead. Her confessor had to come and call her back to the real world, so to speak. She cried, the story goes, because she became separated from her union with Christ. Another long one.

I’ve come to find out that Jesus does reveal himself to lowly and unworthy and ordinary persons like me – just plain folks who don’t have a mystical bone in their body.

Let me share with you a couple of close moments.

My son, John, is five. When he was three, my wife, Elizabeth, reported to me what John had told her one morning. She had written it in his baby book.

John said, “He made my sore better! He came into my room last night. He walked in and said, ‘I didn’t know you had a Mickey Mouse bed.’ And He made my sore come out! Jesus did! He called me my name! He called me John!”

Doubtless it was a close moment for John. But I cannot recall that little story without remembering the close moment I had with Jesus the first time I heard it.

Another time, I was returning from Holy Communion. I wasn’t feeling particularly joyful. In fact, I wasn’t feeling much at all. To be sure, I wasn’t running my mouth as I am wont to do. On this occasion, Jesus got a word in edgewise.

I was making my way between chairs toward my seat and everyone began to sing, “Yahweh, I know you are near.” It is not within my power to express to you the experience of what happened in that moment. It was as if my whole being was transformed, from that to this, from the old Tom to the new Tom. I could not stay the same.

Who can say? He touched me. Tears came into my eyes. The experience was physical, mental and spiritual – all encompassing. It was mighty and powerful, yet incredibly gentle and sweet. It was awesome yet peaceful, joyful and life-giving.

I shall always be grateful for the gift of that moment – an instant, really, of eternity.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 15th, 1986

Opposing abortion in our minds and hearts

2007-10-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

As the annual Right to Life March made its way from the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, I was taken by the notion that opposition to abortion is not a matter of carrying a sign, but a matter of mind and heart.

Most people don’t march in marches, and that’s fine. The really important activity occurs on the inside of individual persons.

Have you made up your mind about abortion?

I listened to National Public Radio the other day as a doctor described the experimental use of fetal liver tissue as a substitute for bone marrow in bone marrow transplants. “Now doctor,” the interviewer asked, “are these livers from aborted fetuses?” “Yes,” the doctor answered. He explained that the liver produces blood and that fetuses had not yet developed sufficient defense agents and therefore their liver tissue stood a better chance of not being rejected by the recipient.

How can anyone listen to that without being horrified? A fetus has a liver, you say? You mean it’s not just so much tissue, good for nothing? Surely if fetal liver can produce blood for a fully developed human being, it can produce blood for itself. Ah, but it hasn’t yet developed defenses. Indeed, a fetus is defenseless.

We don’t have to carry signs, but we can make up our minds. Have you made up your mind, or are you still on the fence?

The important work of opposing abortion doesn’t occur on the courthouse steps, but in the mind and heart convinced of its position. It occurs in coffee shops and work places and neighborhood queues. It occurs one-to-one, couple-to-couple, person-to-God in prayer.

You’ve had a situation in your life when abortion was discussed, haven’t you? It was a conversation at work, or in a restaurant with your group, or in your living room with your neighbors. What did you say then? Did you make your position known? Or have you cowered, like I have, with my mouth shut, not wanting to offend anybody, not wanting my friends to think I’m a crackpot, not wanting people to think I don’t have an open mind.

I was lukewarm, cowardly, afraid to take a stand. Abortion is an issue out there, somebody else’s problem. I can’t change it so why should I have to be embarrassed, be scoffed at, ridiculed, scorned? I’ve read the papers. I know what people think about those pro-lifers, how they laugh and jeer and say, “Go to hell!” I don’t want to put up with that. Leave me alone.

But my conscience won’t leave me alone. I’ve had to make up my mind. I don’t have to carry a sign, but I do have to speak up when the opportunity arises. I have to face my friends and co-workers and acquaintances, and that’s a lot harder than carrying a sign.

The effects of abortion are complex. Circumstances surrounding it are complex. We must have compassion for women, millions of women, who already have had abortions. I don’t have all the answers for all the sticky moral dilemmas. But of this much I am sure: that babe in a mother’s womb is a person, with a liver and eyes and a nose, just like me. I cannot deny that. I cannot skirt that issue anymore.

The Catholic Church is known for its staunch opposition to abortion. But the official Church teaching means nothing if it is not embraced in the heart and soul and mind of individual Catholics.

Carrying a sign is easy. Looking your neighbor in the eye and speaking from conviction is hard. But that’s the important work in the fabric of society. You know you’ll have the opportunity, and so will I.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in May of 1986

Lucy Alice

2007-10-16T03:06:00.001-07:00

My mother died when I was 15 years old, almost 25 years ago. She was a friendly woman, hard working, deeply faithful.

Mothers are always special. It takes a long time into adulthood sometimes to believe they have any faults – any at all.

My mother was born near a place called Dermont, Kentucky. Actually, where she was born doesn’t have a name. It’s just the country. We had a blue plate in our home when I was growing up that testified about where my mother’s family used to trade. On the underneath side it said: “Sog Hinton’s Grocery Store, Dermont, Kentucky.”

Her name was Lucy Alice. I came in from playing one day and she was standing at the kitchen sink with her friend, Snooks Kluck. I said, “You’re name is Lucy? Maybe we ought to get a screwdriver and tighten you up!” She roared with laughter. I remember her laugh more than a lot of other things about her. It was so full and so ready and so uninhibited.

She was a strict disciplinarian. There was none of this sitting in the corner business. We got what she called a “thrashin’.” It came swiftly and without hesitation, with a belt or a hairbrush or a willow branch, whatever was handy. I loved her so awfully much.

She’d clean house every day, but Friday was housecleaning day in a big way. She’d dust the baseboards and the tops of pictures and wipe the bottoms of the kitchen chair legs. Lunch was most often leftovers, except on Saturday when there’d be Spanish bar cake and lunch meat from the A&P.

During the week, she lie on the couch at the noon hour in the T.V. room and watch “As the World Turns” on the Lowboy. She’d put her feet in my lap and I would rub them, and her legs. They hurt her from being on them so much.

Every night at 9 o’clock, we’d kneel down in the living room and say the Rosary. Dad would give and we would answer. My mother had a special devotion to Mary. Mother would have coffee many a late morning with her friend Madge who lived up the way. As often as not, it was a faith sharing.

We had a cloister of Passionist nuns near where we used to live. Madge would say, “Now, Lucy, how in the world can them women live in there like that? Seems like they’d go crazy. I would, I know.” And they’d both laugh, and my mother would explain. My mother would talk about Mary. She knew her as a protectress, an intercessor, a friend. To this day, Madge has a statue of our Blessed Mother in her living room. “She’ll keep me safe,” Madge says. She is a Baptist.

When the Rosary was ended, Mother would stand up and I would hold her because she was dizzy. I would hold my arms around her waist and look into her face. Her eyes would be closed and her head would sway gently to the right and left. Then she’d open her eyes and smile, and I would kiss her good night, as would my brothers and my sister.

My mother’s first two babies were miscarried. The doctors told her she would never have any more children. I was her ninth and last pregnancy. She died of cancer when she was 54.

When I was born, my mother named me “Alan,” after Blessed Alan, a Dominican who spent his days encouraging devotion to the Rosary. On my birth certificate, they put “Allen,” and that made my mother mad. She sent it back and made them change it. My birth certificate has “Allen” scratched through and “Alan” handprinted on it. A lot of people called me “Tom” or “Tommy.” My mother was wont to call me “T. Alan.”

My mother knew a lot of pain in her life. She wore a back brace for a long time because of surgery for a slipped disc in her back. I’ve never witnessed anyone have such pain for such a long time as she had with that.

But she also had joy. I remember her dressing up for a party in our home as a Chinese woman, just acting silly. There was so much happiness that night. Her friends were good friends, and many, and life-long. We were a home of extremes, I guess. Our pain was intense. Our laughter was abundant.

On Mother’s Day, all of us think of our mothers. It’s a simple observance, really. We remember that they gave us life. We reflect on how much we love them. For those of us whose mother’s are gone, the day is no less meaningful.

Sometimes in my mind’s eye, when I’ve done things I’ve had no business doing, I became aware that my mother knows everything about me now. I have no secrets from her.

Sometimes, too, I see myself coming into heaven and Momma’s there to greet me. She runs up to me and hugs me hard and says to me, “Honey, come look!”

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in May of 1986

Humility

2007-10-15T03:24:00.000-07:00

Humility: The word is almost anathema anymore.

Bring up humility in your next polite conversation and see what reaction you get.

It’s amusing to reflect on the irony of the reaction one might get from writing a column about humility. “Who do you think you are, Bud: The world’s most humble person?”

There’s no way to defend my capacity to discuss humility. I don’t mind putting my cards on the table. I acknowledge that I’m selfish, overindulgent, lazy; and I’m not particularly fond of having people notice these things about me.

I have a difficult time speaking my convictions in public. Rather, I prefer saying what I think you might like to hear. Better you agree with my half-baked platitudes, than have you mad at me because my deeply-felt, but unlived, ideals make you uncomfortable.

But saying these things doesn’t make me humble. A person might indeed be proud of his character defects.

Can we talk about it?

It seems to me that our society is wallowing in humanistic absolution. The “Yeah, but” syndrome has taken over.

Some examples:

“You’re not spending much time with your family, are you Charlie?” “ Yeah, but a man’s gotta make a buck.”

“You’re not spending any time at all in prayer, are you Charlie?” “Yeah, but nobody’s perfect.”

“What was that you put in the collection basket, Charlie, a nickel or a bottle cap?” “Yeah, I put a nickel in, but I couldn’t pay my bills if I put it all in the collection.”

You get my drift. It’s easy to find agreement for our short-comings and in it absolve ourselves and get lost in the great complexus of the human condition.

What is humility? There’s probably a classic definition out there somewhere that would give us erudite insights. But humility is nothing if it’s not real to us. It is perhaps best defined as lived in the life of someone we know.

If we have been privileged to know one or two humble people in our lives, surely we have been favored with a special grace from God. Then we have been favored not only with knowing about humility, but of coming somehow closer to understanding.

Bishop Fulton Sheen was wont to distribute crosses in his travels for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. It was one day in Africa that he presented a cross to the outstretched hand of a leper.

He tells the story in Treasure in Clay, his autobiography, that the hand “was the most foul, noisome mass of corruption I ever saw.” He held the cross over the man’s hand and dropped it.

“I had taken that symbol of God’s identification with man and refused to identify myself with someone who was a thousand times better on the inside than I,” he said. “Then it came over me the awful thing I had done. I dug my fingers into his leprosy, took out the crucifix and pressed it into his hand.”

Yes, we have value before God. Yes, we are special. Yes, God loves us beyond all understanding. Yes, we are all imperfect.

Humility is not groveling, or false self-derision or even a poor self-concept. But it is the awareness of the truth of ourselves. It is the willingness to acknowledge and honor the worth of another, without reference to self.

Humility is a most valuable, nay precious, virtue; and I vote for its resurrection in our society. It can exert such power over so much of our behavior. Humility awakens the awareness of truth. The awareness of truth brings us into the presence of God.

What flareup of anger could not be soothed with humility?

What arrogant, intellectual confrontation could not be assuaged with humility?

What strides could be made toward Christian unity with humility?

What sickness of headlong greed could not be healed with humility?

We just can’t seem to do it. We know about humility. We even understand it. We just can’t accept its challenge.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 20th, 1986

His name is Eugene

2007-10-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

His name is Eugene. He’s out there somewhere today – maybe Cincinnati, maybe Logansport or Lafayette. You might miss him, though, for all the angels crowded around.

Eugene came very quickly into my life and just as quickly was gone. But he was the closest I have come in a long, long time to Easter Sunday morning coming down.

The great miracle of Easter leaves me saying with the words of the old hymn, “I scarce can take it in.”

But the small miracle that came to me one Saturday afternoon helps me to understand that God loves us, that He sent His only Son that we might have eternal life.

I sat pouring out my troubles to the priest. My job had me down. I didn’t know what God wanted me to do with my life. I couldn’t see a way out. I hurt and couldn’t stop hurting. I was miserable, confused, frustrated, angry, broken.

Father was very kind to me. He showed me that he understood my dilemma and offered me patient and caring possibilities. We talked of prayer and soliciting the prayer of others.

As kind as Father was, and as insightful was his council, still I didn’t have much faith that things would change. I felt hopeless and detached, as if there was nothing anyone could do, really. I had prayed. It just didn’t seem like God was listening.

There came a ring on the rectory bell. Father left the room and I could hear him conversing with someone at the door. Before long, he returned asking if I could give a man a ride to the nearest truck stop. That’s what he wanted, Father said.

We talked a minute longer before I came into the hall and met Eugene.

He was looking for work, he said, and he couldn’t find any in Lafayette. He’d be willing to do any kind of job, he said. He wasn’t looking for a handout.

I told Eugene that I didn’t know which was worse, having a job or not having one. He said he’d be grateful if I could take him to a truck stop so he could catch a ride with a trucker to Cincinnati. He’d left Logansport not finding work. Lafayette didn’t have any jobs. Maybe Cincinnati would be the right town. I told him I’d be glad to give him a ride.

Eugene was in every respect a gentleman of the road. But unlike other fellows I have met along the way, his eyes were clear and his manner cheerful.

“I don’t have no education,” he said, “but I’m a good worker. I’ll find a job soon enough.”

I told him he seemed pretty confident of that. He said indeed he was. “God takes care of me,” he said. “I walk along the road, but I don’t worry about anything. I’m happy because I know God’s not going to let anything happen to me. I haven’t got nothing and I don’t have no good education or anything, but I haven’t gone hungry yet.

“I believe in God,” Eugene said. “I don’t drink, but I do smoke.” His clothes were not much, but they were obviously clean. His hair was combed neatly. He smiled often, and spoke animatedly and with conviction. I offered him one of my cigarettes.

“What’s your name?” he asked me. “Tom,” he said, “you know what I do when I’m walking down the highway? I pray. I don’t have anything else to do so I just talk to God. I pray for everybody. I’m not one of these that just prays for the poor people. I know everybody’s got troubles. I pray for them that’s not got money, and I pray for them that’s got money, too. I know God loves everybody.

“Sometimes I get scared when I’m walking along. These big trucks come by and I’m afraid I’ll get hit or something. But you know, Tom, God sends His angels down to protect me. He absolutely does. Before you know it I’m walking down the road with a bunch of angels.”

Not once at the rectory nor once along the way to the truck stop did Eugene ask me for anything but a ride, nor even indicate that he wanted anything more.

When we arrived at the restaurant, I told Eugene that I sure was glad to have met him, that he helped me a lot more than I helped him.

In my heart, I felt redeemed. I was reminded through this man that the quality of our earthly stay has more to do with confidence in God than in our circumstances.

He said he would never forget me. He said that when he was walking along, he would pray for me. He said that when we got to heaven we’d see each other again, and he was really looking forward to that.

Happy Easter, Eugene, wherever you are. I’m looking forward to seeing you again, too.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 13th, 1986

Catholic Identity

2007-10-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

Father Thomas Savage, S.J. said, “Catholics are struggling with what it means to be Catholic. They’re saying it is important to me, but I’m not quite sure what that means.”

It’s an intriguing question, this identity business. We Catholics these days are a veritable litany of souls looking for commonality that somehow exceeds our grasp. That is not to say that each of us is not brimming with certitude about exactly what is Catholicity.

For a few examples:

-The lady sidles up to an acquaintance in her parish church ready to go aghast in commiseration about the pastor’s dog (Saint’s preserve us!) being a part of the joyful celebration of the pastor’s anniversary last Sunday. A dog brought in to church on Sunday morning, mind you! Whereupon the lady learns that her acquaintance had no inkling that anyone might be offended, she is doubly indignant. Surely her acquaintance must be one of those “liberal” Catholics.

-The fellow who always sits in the fourth row back just happens to comment about his belief in the power of the Rosary and the comfort he has found so often in reciting the “Memorare.” Two in the group roll their eyes at one another about the poor fellow who hasn’t gotten with it and is not likely to. And what in the world, one says to the other after the meeting, is the “Memorare?”

-Two in the Charismatic prayer group talk about Sunday Mass being one dry, routine, somber service. Two in the pew across the aisle share a chuckle about the “Holy Roller” Mass the Charismatics have.

-One parish priest wants to hake the high, ornate altar out of the church, saying it’s a distraction to the central act of worship occurring on the Table of Sacrifice. A band of his parishioners is prepared to post an armed guard around the ornate altar to see anybody just try to take it away.

-One man eschews bombing vacant abortion clinics. His friend asks, “Would it have been okay to bomb the ovens at Dachau?”

-One woman devoutly receives the consecrated host in her hand. Another woman asks, “If we really believe this is the Real Body of Christ, why are we not on our knees in reverence as we receive Him?”

-One priest wears a Roman collar. Another wears a necktie. One Sister wears a veil saying she wishes to express her identity. Another Sister wears a modern, attractive suit, saying she wishes to express her identity.

We Catholics, we love our Church, and love is the right word. We look askance at, criticize, chuckle at one another. But we love one another because we are the Church.

We may disagree about what constitutes decorum, but we rejoice in the celebration of our faith.

We have different ideas about piety and prayer. But we, all of us, seek God in prayer.

We discern the liturgy in this mode or that, but we come to worship as the People of God.

Our views of symbolism go from stark to gothic, from multiple to precious few, but we value symbolism as a part of our heritage.

Not one of us questions the dignity of human life. Not one of us denies the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

We bristle on both sides of the clerical garb issue. But we do not question priesthood. We continue to honor the Sisters who dedicate their lives to the service of the Church.

How does the song go? “At that first Eucharist before You died, O Lord you prayed that all be one in You. At this our Eucharist You now preside, and in our hearts Your law of love renew.”

This little piece of writing does not presume to resolve the question of Catholic identity. But one thing is for sure and Psalm 100 says it: “He made us. His we are, His people, the flock He tends.”

written by Thomas A. Russell on April 6th, 1986

A vocation view

2007-10-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

What do you think Jesus meant when He said, “Take up your cross and follow Me?”

Could it be that this is the question we skirt as we wrestle with the dilemma of our shortage of priests?

To be sure, we have to look elsewhere for the cause of this difficulty.

- We blame celibacy

- We figure there are plenty of fellows being called, but they’re too selfish to answer, or the world has them dazzled, or we commiserate with their rejection saying nobody could be expected to live such a life.

- We suspect the staid influences are gone. Home life isn’t supportive or sufficiently faithful. Our schools are full of lay teachers. Can any good come out of such a place?

- We boo the strident right-wingers and hiss the screaming liberals.

- We quietly harbor the notion that there’s something wrong with the Church.

Our focus has been on him and them and it and that and See! Here is the problem, or No! There it is. Perhaps we don’t want to look in the mirror and say, “What do I think Jesus meant when He said ‘take up your cross and follow Me?’”

No one can fathom the mystery of the Cross. But surely it meant for Jesus what it means for us. It means obedience.

Can we look out across our Church today and see a wide-spread hunger to do, not what I will, but the will of my Father, Who is in heaven?

Do I find myself saying to my children, “What do you think God wants you to be when you grow up?”

In these New Testament times, the people gather around the center of the Holy of Holies. The priest celebrates the Sacrifice made once and for all, and lifts up the Living God, giving Him into the very body and soul of the people He loves.

That is the cross of the New Testament priest. It begins by his taking it up the way Jesus did: with a simple yes, Thy will be done.

If I’m a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, that is my cross. It is if my life is a showcase of the road not taken: not because I’m a dreamer or a vagabond, but because I have obeyed God.

Those He sends, He empowers. They will be nothing more, nor nothing less than what He would have them be. If I have been obedient, my meats will feed His people, my cakes will delight His people, my candlesticks will bear light to His people.

Brother Raphael, the story goes, was the gatekeeper at the monastery. Visitors always met him first and found in him a warm greeting, a ready listener and a sage counselor.

So valued and inspiring became Brother Raphael’s word, that the monks of the monastery began to seek him out, and his fame spread from the visitors to the area roundabout.

Raphael began leaving his gat and giving sermons and retreats. He published books and treatises and went abroad for lectures.

One day in the monastery chapter, Brother Raphael sat pondering the homilies he was to deliver a week from Sunday, when an old monk entered and knelt behind him.

The old monk, a denizen of his cell for 30 years, leaned forward and whispered a word in Raphael’s ear. “Phony,” he said.

Tears streamed down Raphael’s cheeks. He ran to the Abbot and fell to his knees before him and begged for the privilege to again be the gatekeeper.

It must be that if doing God’s will, of taking up my cross, came into vogue, then surely that would have an effect in many ways.

I suspect that when I turn away from the self will in my life, when I surrender my life completely and say not my will but Thine be done – then I will be doing what those who are called to the priesthood are asked to do. Then it may be that somewhere a bishop will place his hands on the head of a weak, surrendered deacon and empower him to lift up the Living God.

written by Thomas A. Russell in March of 1986

"Bless me, Father..."

2007-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. I can’t really remember how long it’s been since my last confession – six years, eight years? It’s been a long time. Probably some of those confessions when I did go weren’t ‘good’ confessions. I know I didn’t tell about some things I should have. I know that today I can’t possibly remember all the things I’ve done. Some of the things I have to say are so embarrassing and petty, I’m going to need God’s special grace just to say them. For all of that, here I am. I want to be reconciled with God.”

So began, roughly, the confession several years ago of someone with whom I’m well acquainted: me. I share this with you today to try to put an experience with the Sacrament of Reconciliation on a one-to-one level. We human beings are like this, I think: We can understand the personal experience of another person sometimes better than all the intellectual, educational, social – even scriptural and ecclesiastical reasons – that abound for going to confession. These latter things sometimes even enable us to keep our distance, keep us “thinking about it.” Here’s a guy going into the box.

Sorry. You won’t get to hear what I said after that. The only sin I’m going to tell you about is the one that kept me away a long time. You guessed it: Pride.

Suffice it to say that the Hound of Heaven was after me. It was He who overcame my pride. My spiritual life was pretty empty. I really didn’t know what I was looking for.

There’s a saying, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’ve got.” I kept living the way I was living: and I kept being hungry, or uneasy, or guilty. Whatever it was, I kept being that way. I didn’t want to live that way anymore. You can laugh at this if you want to, but I wanted “fullness.” I don’t know how else to say it.

I wanted to be honest. I wanted to be able to be honest, but I guess I had gotten so far away from God I couldn’t even imagine what being reconciled with Him would be like. At best I’d feel okay for a while and then I’d get real bored, real fast. At worst I’d face a bunch of impossible demands for perfection, demands I’d never be able to meet.

When I was just a lad, I had been in the confessional one day and had just said my contrition. Then, Father asked me what I had just said. I said I had said I was sorry. Yes, but what else did I say? I couldn’t think, I was I was truly sorry, Father. Well, don’t you know that I also made a firm purpose of amendment. I said I was going to change. Father made it clear that amendment was part of contrition. It was that same firm purpose of amendment that stuck in my craw those years later. It was both a stumbling block and what I wanted to do.

Enter now that pride I mentioned. Please don’t get me wrong in this. I’m not quite sure what it was all about. I am trying to be honest with you and this is, after all, a personal story. But it wasn’t the big wrong things I had done which were keeping me away from confession: you know, like the banks I robbed and so on. It was the petty, embarrassing, sniveling, mean things I had done which were the hardest for me to face. Does this make sense to you?

So there I was, spiritually empty, afraid to change, afraid what change might bring, knowing I couldn’t meet the demands out there, nagged with the idea that I’d been away too long.

Then one day I hear this little bit of wisdom. The story goes that a man died and met St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Fully expecting a thorough interrogation, the fellow was ready with a long list for when St. Peter would ask him, “What have you done?” Much to his surprise, however, that wasn’t the question. Instead St. Peter asked him, “Who are you?”

It occurred to me that sin was not so much what I had done, but who I was. I am a sinner. That’s before, during, and after the confessional. Sin was a condition in my life, and sin meant those actions which lacked love. It wasn’t so much that I committed this sin of pride, or that one – although certainly I did. But it was that I reacted pridefully to situations in my life, including the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Because I had not been loving, I was consequently very empty. I needed to come and let Jesus fill me with His forgiveness and His love.

I’m no authority on the Sacraments. But Christ gave His Church the power to forgive people, and the Church vests that power in her bishops and priests. I fit somewhere in the “People of God.”

No doubt there were many more dynamics in my coming to Reconciliation than what I have detailed here. I did go, though, with all my imperfections, all my embarrassment, all my memory loss, all my uncertainty, all my emptiness.

There was no magic in there, just a lot of honesty, gentleness and love. I’m still as imperfect as they come. I don’t hold myself up as better than you.

I came away from that confession reconciled with my God, knowing He loved me beyond my wildest imagination. He wanted to say to me, “I absolve you of your sins.” He wanted me to hear those words. He knew I had been responding to situations in my life without love, had known it all along. He just wanted me to acknowledge it, too, so that I could understand firsthand a little better the depth of His love.

written by Thomas A. Russell in February of 1986