MAKING ALL THINGS NEW

So, I know I’m a bit late with this post, but if you haven’t gotten your veggie plants/seeds yet, it’s not too late!  In my area of the country, Mother’s Day is the usual weekend when it’s safe to start planting things outside.  Wouldn’t you know that two days after I got my plants into the ground and several containers, we had a frost warning.  In mid May!

If you want to get healthy, eating fresh vegetables is one sure way to achieve your goal.  Many centuries ago, Hippocrates said, “let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food.” Doesn’t that make perfect sense?  Sometimes we think raising fresh food is hard, too time consuming, or not worth the effort.  Wrong on all points.  Start small and find things that can easily be grown, especially in containers. Although they are harder to find today, seek out an independent garden center and ask for some guidance.  Those folks love to share their knowledge, and like the people you meet at farmer’s markets, they need our financial support.

I have a wonderful garden center not too far from my house, and I make several trips there during this time of year.  They have dozens of varieties of tomatoes and peppers, many of them heirlooms.  In each of the two Earthboxes my brother gave me several years ago, I plant two tomatoes, two peppers, and two dwarf eggplants.  I’ve been planting the same mix in each box for the last few years, and I’m amazed at the results.

What a joy it is to eat something that you’ve grown, and even better, to share the fruit of your labor with those you care about!

St. Ignatius  still seemed a bit unreal to me when we left Montserrat and headed down the mountain to Manresa, where he would live for nearly a year, living as a hermit, having mystical experiences, writing in his notebook, and, in a moment of despair, even contemplated suicide.  God revealed himself to Ignatius in this little town, and even though he planned to stay there just a few days, it would be nearly a year before he left.  His experiences in Manresa were profound and shaped the rest of his life.

There is now a  church built over the cave where Ignatius lived, and the cave is now a chapel.  My fellow pilgrims and I had the blessing of celebrating Mass there, and as rich as that experience was, I wasn’t feeling the real Ignatius.  Then, someone pointed to two small crosses carved into the stone.  Fr. Paul told us that, so the legend goes, Ignatius himself was the carver.  Now, I could imagine Ignatius doing that.  I closed my eyes and in my mind, I saw him holding a stone and making the marks.  Simple signs to keep him going through the dark days he experienced right here, on this spot.

Our time in Manresa was short, and I wished we could have spent the whole day there.  It seemed like a place that called for reflection, for imagining, for discernment.  Like Robert Frost pondered in his poem The Road Not Taken, I doubted if I should ever come back. Somehow though, I think I just might make it to Manresa again, and I can’t wait.

It’s almost 400 miles from the castle of Loyola to the Benedictine Monastery high up the mountains of Montserrat.  When you are riding in a coach bus, the miles pass slowly, but painlessly.  No so for St. Ignatius.  After months of recuperation from his battle injury and subsequent surgeries, he was ready to head out of the family castle and visit the famous Shrine of our Lady of Montserrat.  His conversion underway, he went to the Shrine to reconcile with God.

It must have been an incredibly painful trip, sometimes limping along, sometimes riding a donkey. When I first saw the mountains, I simply couldn’t imagine how Ignatius made it to the Monastery, which sits high up, nearly to the top,  on March 21, 1522.  Those who study Ignatius know that, after his conversion, he was a very determined man, and he knew getting right with God was essential to his mission.  His sacramental conversation with one of the monks there, a Frenchmen named Jean Chanon, took three days.  When Ignatius headed down the mountain to Manresa, he had removed all trappings of his former life of a nobleman.  Now, dressed as a pilgrim, he thought he would spend the rest of his life in the Holy Land.  God had other plans for Ignatius, plans which would he could never have imagined.

Have you ever been to a place where you could just feel the holiness?  Up until my own pilgrimage to Montserrat, the little Umbrian town of Assisi in Italy was it for me.  The presence of St. Francis is everywhere.  In Montserrat, you have the sense that many, many saints have climbed the mountain and made their home here.  It’s no wonder that Montserrat is the number one spiritual destination in Spain.

I was blessed to visit for two days.  I wish it had been two weeks.  Maybe next time…

A year ago today, my fellow pilgrims and I were in Loyola, the ancestral home of St. Ignatius.  Amongst the baroque grandeur of the  17th century Basilica built in his honor, it was a bit hard for me to find a glimpse of the real Ignatius, who probably wouldn’t have been thrilled with the huge and fancy church.

In an unexpected way, I found what I was looking for in what’s now known as the Room of the Conversion, located in the Loyola family castle, right next to the Basilica.  Ignatius spent months in that room, unable to get out of bed, recovering from the surgeries he had after being seriously wounded in the battle of Pamplona.  As he read from two books, one on the Life of Christ and the other on the lives of the saints, Ignatius said in his autobiography that, in this room, “his eyes were opened a little,” and he began to perceive things with spiritual vision.

He came to realize that when he thought about his former way of life, one which was quite sinful and worldly, he felt sad.  When he thought of Christ and the Saints, he felt happy.  He slowly came to realize that he wanted to leave his past and move forward, aligned with God and desiring to serve Him.

We celebrated Mass in this room, now a place of prayer and reflection.  It was good to be with my fellow pilgrims in this space, each of us contemplating the beginnings of Ignatius’ conversion, which took place right here.  Maybe some of us had our eyes opened to perceive what God is calling us to.  Maybe just a little.

This past week, I marked anniversaries of two important events in my life, and both involved pilgrimages. The first pilgrimage began the last week of April of 2009.  Easter was late that year, and I held off getting a routine medical checkup until after all the events of Holy Week were over.  As I recall, I went to get some blood work done on Monday or Tuesday, in anticipation of my check up the following week.  I wasn’t expecting a call from my doctor that Friday, but when his name came up on caller id, I figured something was up.  And it was.  The lab results showed that I had Type II diabetes.  I can still recall leaning my kitchen counter as he gave me the details of what this would mean for the rest of my life.

That phone call ushered in a series of changes in my life that I’m still working on every day.  It became a type of spiritual pilgrimage for me, and pilgrimages usually involve several things, including prayer and movement.  This particular pilgrimage involved a lot of both, and to be honest, I’ve very grateful for the experience, since it helped me encounter the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which has made a huge and positive impact on my life.

A year ago today, I had the blessing to make another pilgrimage, this one to Spain and Italy, where I was to visit many of the sites connected to St. Ignatius.  After an very long overnight flight from Chicago, my fellow pilgrims and I landed in Madrid.  Colleagues from Loyola Press joyfully met us at the gate, and before making our way to the bus, we stopped at the terminal’s coffee shop for one of the best cups of coffee I think I’ve ever had (and needed).  From there, we stopped first at Toledo, then on to Avila.  We were blessed to be in Avila during year-long celebration of the 500th anniversary marking the death of their town’s greatest saint,Teresa of Avila.

As we approached her home town, I was struck by the very high walls which completely surrounded the city.  I learned later that they are Romanesque in style and date from medieval times.  Seeing those amazingly strong walls and knowing that St. Teresa was not the only saint to be born behind them, I understood how Avila has been known for centuries as the “town of stones and saints.”

This morning, as I sit typing these words, I thought about the connection between those walls and illness.  For many people, especially those with chronic illnesses like Type II diabetes, working to improve one’s health might seem as daunting as scaling the fortified walls of Avila. With the right tools, prayer, perseverance, and support, health improvement can be achieved.  I know because it happened to me.

It didn’t happen quickly.  Pilgrimages take time and effort.  Sometimes, you want to give up.  More to come…

Happy Easter!  At the Easter Vigil last night at my parish, thirty-two people became Catholic.  It was an amazing liturgy, lasting longer than the Vigil at St. Peter’s in Rome, but it was so filled with grace that it took my breath away and left my heart filled with joy.  Like many Catholic parishes in the United States, the makeup of the congregation is changing.  The majority of our new Catholics last night were Hispanic, and our liturgy was bilingual.

Having grown up in Southern California, I’m used to liturgies where more than one language is used.  When the Vietnamese boat people arrived, our important Masses at St. Finbar became trilingual: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.  It would probably surprise some in my present church in Maryland to know that those trilingual Masses have been occurring for over forty years.  The make up of Catholic congregations has been changing for decades, and so it should be.

Today, as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, let us rejoice in the new life this singular event made available to us, and that means everyone, regardless of their past, their ethnic background, their age, or anything else.  James Joyce said it well in Finnigan’s Wake:  “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.'”  How true, and I’m grateful to have witnessed a validation of that quote last night in my own church.

Blessings to you and yours this Easter Season.