Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

Thursday, December 07, 2000 Coirmientsu'y The Southern Cross, Page 5 Everyday Graces Confessions of a I am a reluctant shopper. The older I get the less I enjoy it. I now understand why my grandmother, who lived to be 99, rarely shopped and never seemed to care about owning anything new. In the 1970s, the last full decade of her life, Granny wore the same dress to every family wedding. (We have the photos.) The only store she had any interest in was the grocery store, and eventually she stopped going there, choosing instead to provide my parents a list of what she needed. Granny was the only person I’ve ever met who used the word “trade” when referring to shopping. She’d say, “We used to trade at that hardware store.” That word evoked images in my mind of a trading post, Little House on the Prairie style, where you just go in and the proprietor takes your list, brings the items down from the shelf and wraps them in brown paper. What an appealing concept. Even from my own childhood I have memories of “modem” ver sions of such stores, Wilson’s Shoe Store, the Toy Parade, Albertson’s Dmg Store, all independently owned, all managed by people who actually knew their customers’ names and frequently knew their needs. Of course, in the years since my grandmother died, shopping has become more compli cated than ever. We’re supposed to be better off because we don’t have to visit a variety of stores to get what we want. We can do everything, get a manicure, deposit our paychecks, buy arti chokes, and eat nachos all under the same roof. Even so, I would not describe modem shopping as streamlined, more convenient. Yes, we have all the merchandise we could ever ask for, most of it packed on shelves in huge warehouses. The buildings are so full of stuff in the aisles, two carts can’t easily pass each other. In such places, I have a hard time finding what I need and an even harder time finding someone to help me find what I need. Of course, I’m not a 90-year-old widow like my grandmother, so I have to shop. My children fre quently remind me they need food and clothing. My 17-year-old daughter’s fanta sy mom is a mom who actually wakes her up one Saturday morn ing and chirps, “Let’s go shopping! Mary Hood Hart reluctant shopper Just for fun!” Katie dreams of hav ing a mom who doesn’t demand proof (“Your Honor, Exhibit A is the tattered pair of Nikes, please note the large rip near the toe.”), before she’ll agree to a shopping excursion. For the sake of my chil dren, I make myself shop—even this time of year, when for people like me shopping becomes even more frightening. About a week before Advent I went shopping. The trip was for Katie. After appearing before Her Honor the judge, Katie provided sufficient evidence of a winter clothing shortage and was granted a half-day shopping excursion. I was also searching for two items: an Advent Calendar and Advent candles for our wreath. In retro spect, I should’ve looked for those items earlier. I certainly would have been able to order them from a religious catalog. But since I had to take Katie to the mall, I figured one of the stores there would have the Advent items I was looking for. I was wrong. Every store I entered was packed full of Christmas items, ornaments, mugs, ribbons, garland, singing Santas, everything but an Advent calendar and tapered candles, violet and rose. When I asked one saleswom an if they carried Advent calendars, she pointed to a month of December calendar made of felt, decorated with a snowman and said, “Just that Christmas one.” It occurred to me finally that most stores don’t really want us to remember Advent, must less observe it. Waiting is not a part of the shopping experience—especial ly in the days leading up to Christmas. We’re made to feel as if we are crazy if we aren’t in a mad rush, foolish if we don’t start buy ing up the Christmas items shortly after Halloween. Even buying something on layaway is no longer a common practice, thanks to credit cards, I’m sure. Actually, the con cept of our waiting, prayerfully, expectantly, and, God forbid, tem perately is probably terrifying to retailers. No wonder Advent items are nowhere to be found. I finally found candles in a drug store...not with the Christmas stuff, just in the candle section. I ended up ordering the Advent calendar from a religious catalog. It will be arriving late, a few days after Advent has begun. I can wait. Mary Hood Hart Jives with her husband and four children in Sunset Beach, N.C. Catholics and Jews today Take care in presenting Christ’s Passion By Father Michael J. Kavanaugh void presenting the Passion in such a way as to bring the odium of the killing of Jesus upon all Jews or on Jews alone. It was only a section of the Jews in Jerusalem who demanded the death of Jesus, and the Christian message has always been that it was the sins of humankind which were exemplified by those Jews and the sins in which all share that brought Christ to the cross. In 1959, shortly after he was elected to the papacy, Pope John XXIII ordered that the prayer for the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy be changed. Until that time, the prayer had referred to the “perfidious,” meaning “faithless” or “treacherous,” Jews. In our Good Friday liturgy today we pray “for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God,” a far cry from the polemics of the older prayer. In 1960, when meeting with a delegation from the United Jewish Appeal, this pope greeted his visitors with the biblical phrase, “I am Joseph, your brother” (He was bom Angelo Giuseppe— Joseph—Roncalli). Pope John’s own words and actions signaled a dramatic change in the understanding our Church has of the Jews and their place in salva tion history, and toward our own Christian self understanding as heirs to the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes com mitted during his Passion... The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this fol lowed from holy Scripture” —Vatican II, Nostra Aetate 4. It is unjust to blame all Jewish people for the death of Jesus. As the text above notes, Jesus was crucified for our sins—the sins of the whole world. To assign blame for the crucifixion exclu sively or even primarily to the Jewish people is to forget what we learned in the creation stories of the book of Genesis; that is, that sin entered (and enters) the world as a result of human choice and that only God can bring about salvation. Through the centuries, Catholic writers, the ologians, preachers, and others have wrongly tried to place responsibility for the death of Christ on the Jews, rather than facing their own sinfulness as a cause for personal and social ills, as a means to justify anti-Semitic thought and action. This scapegoating has a long history. If we can just find some individual or group on which we can place blame for the evils of our society, and if we can destroy or drive out that person or those people, then our problems will be solved. Unfortunately, this never has the desired effect because it is a flawed and irresponsible way of thinking and acting. As comforting as such behavior may appear to be, blaming my/our sins on someone else is never going to bring about the conversion of heart we are invited to experi ence as believers in the salvation that Christ has won for us. Unless we humbly acknowledge that our sins are the cause for Christ’s crucifixion, and until we stop trying to place blame on some one else, we will always be looking for scape goats, rather than coming to know the healing power that comes through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Father Michael j. Kavanaugh is diocesan director of Ecumenism. This is the fifth in a series of articles on jewish-Christian relations.