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About The Georgia bulletin (Atlanta) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 14, 1989)
PAGE 5 — The Georgia Bulletin, September 14, 1989 Father Richard J. Lopez The Rosary - Beads Of Hope All of us have from time to time found ourselves in that sickening and depressing point when hope seems to be lost. In Dante’s classic The Divine Comedy, the entrance to the Inferno is marked “Abandon all hope you who enter here!”, and indeed to live without hope is to know a kind of “hell on earth." If we look twice at the reasons for our pain it would appear that a root cause is the frustration of our plans. Things did not turn out the way we hoped, our most cherished dreams became nightmares.'Our family life, our personal life, our pro fessional life have become something so much less than we expected. Perhaps at the risk of being too simplistic, we have to lobk twice again and see that it is at the moment when we seem most hopeless that the virtue of hope is most clear as a gift and a grace. Perhaps to live and know Christian hope means to abandon our fondest dreams, give up our most cherished expecta tions, and expect from God something even greater! Is hope possibly the very risky gesture of saying to God in the ruins of our dreams, “You must have something better in mind than I did!” It is in this possibility that I would suggest Mary serves as a good example. If we tried to image ourselves in her place would we have had a matching set of dreams to a set of what life brought her? Would the dreams at the Annunciation be matched by birth in a stable, the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt? Would the joyful expectation of the Visitation be matched by Joseph’s confusion and anger, and untimely death? Would the excitement of Jesus’ first miracle at Cana be matched by the reality of His people’s rejection, and the horror of the crucifixion? Would the spectacular joy of the resurrection and Pentecost be matched by Mary’s exile and her witness of the Church's persecution? Her life must have been a series of high expectations and shattered dreams. Her silence in Scripture makes her very few words all the more important, and might we presume to say that at every broken dream she may have cherished per sonally there were the words “Be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), in other words “You know what you are doing.” Our Lady’s example is that she did not hang on to her dreams for the future, but on God’s plans and God’s will, no matter how crazy and at times cruel the results may have ap peared. Reflection For myself as a priest, and it would appear for many others, at times when hope seems so strained, as dreams seem shat tered, one way of “hanging on to God’s plans” is the rosary. We think and pray with Mary, we retrace the “trail of tears” of the sorrowful mysteries, the "path of hope” in the joyful mysteries, and “road of victory” in the glorious mysteries, and say to ourselves, “We have been this way before,” and gain strength and hope, as we realize that Mary is keeping us company and giving us power. If it has been awhile since you have prayed the rosary, try it as a way of “hanging on”...not to your own plans and dreams, but your hope in God, the God in whom Mary trusted even when her expectations were shattered. Gerard Huyghe, the Bishop of Arras, wrote “Hope is a vir tue which is renewed every day. It cannot grow except by asserting itself in the face of impossible situations. Mary lived it in her life until the day when Jesus, dying on the cross, seemed to be definitely deprived of the throne of David. She knew how to hope without ever seeing the pro mises made to her realized." May our praying of the rosary give us a share in her hope. The Rosary Rally will be Sun., Oct. 8 at 3 p. m. at St. John The Evangelist in Hapeville. Ivan J. Kauffman Being A Good Catholic Making Peace The other morning I was driving to Mass. Because I’d tried to do too many things before leaving we were running late and I was trying to make up for lost time by driving fast. For our house at least, a fairly common state of affairs — nothing out of the ordinary. But then about halfway to church the thought suddenly struck me, “You could kill somebody driving like this,” and I started thinking about what I was doing. From a strictly religious viewpoint it all made sense. Good Catholics go to Mass regularly, and they try to arrive on time. We attend Mass because it gives us something we need, and we come on time both so that we can prepare ourselves spiritually and so we won’t disturb the people who are already there. So from a strictly religious perspective you could say the reason I was driving fast was that I wanted to be a good Catholic. Of course it doesn’t make any sense. If a police officer had stopped me, he or she probably wouldn’t have been impress ed with either my driving habits or my religion — and if I’d hit a pedestrian, or another car, the other person involved would have been even less impressed. They'd have had every reason to say, “If that’s what being a good Catholic amounts to I don't want anything to do with it.” Fortunately I didn’t hit anybody that morning. But the whole incident set me to thinking about what it means to be a good Catholic. What struck me was how often we measure the depth of a person’s Catholic faith by the number of specifically religious things we do. If we attend Mass regularly, pray, go to confession, contribute to our parish generously and are respectful to Church leaders we're likely to be considered “good Catholics.” But what about the rest of our lives? We sometimes seem to take the attitude that so long as we perform our religious duties what we do the rest of the time doesn't really matter. It’s always tempting to divide our lives up into separate, air tight compartments — one of them being religion. The rest of our lives we put into other compartments labelled work, fami ly, finances, recreation, etc. As soon as we yield to that temp tation we start equating being a Catholic with doing certain religious things — which leaves us free to do whatever we want with the rest of our lives. Of course everyone knows it’s not that simple. The Church won’t consider you a good Catholic if you’re selling drugs or performing abortions or robbing houses. The same is true if you abuse your children or cheat on your spouse. Being a good Catholic has always had a strong moral component. But somehow the simple everyday moral aspects of being a good Catholic keep getting pushed into the background. We all realize that how we treat other people is an essential part of our faith, but still we keep finding ourselves dividing our lives up into the sacred and the secular. We identify being a Catholic only with the sacred, and assign our relations with other people to the realm of the secular. That doesn't mean the religious things we do such as go ing to Mass and praying don’t matter. Exactly the opposite. They matter because only the personal transformation which takes place through the sacraments and prayer make it possi ble for us to incorporate our morals into every aspect of our lives. But unless our religious practices lead to actions which make the world a better place in some way we can hardly claim to be good Catholics. To be religious in the Christian sense is to follow Christ — and what that means, as the Gospels make clear Sunday after Sunday, is to be good to other people, especially those in need. Surely that’s also what it means to be a good Catholic. ARCHBISHOP'S SCHEDULE FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, SEPT. 15-16 Deacons’ retreat at Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Con yers. SUNDAY, SEPT. 17 - 1 p.m. Confirmation for members of Korean Apostolate at St. Thomas More Church, Decatur. - 4 p.m. Benefit concert, Friends of the Shrine, Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Atlanta. TUESDAY, SEPT. 19 - 7 p.m. Groundbreaking for new church, St. Joseph’s, Marietta. WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 20 -10 a.m. Meeting of Priests’ Council at Catholic Center. - 4 p.m. Board meeting at St. Joseph’s Village, 2969 Butner Road, Atlanta. THURSDAY, SEPT. 21 - 11 a.m. College Unified Assembly at Morehouse College, Atlanta. SUNDAY, SEPT. 24 - 10:30 a.m. Mass, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Cathedral of Christ the King. - 2 p.m. Opening of Hunger Walk, Bed ford Pine Park, Atlanta. - 4 p.m. Reception for Atlanta Con ference of Sisters, archbishop’s residence. Antoinette Bosco Someone To Love A few months ago, Ed, an acquaintance of mine who had recently turned 77, died. His son brought me a statement he had writ ten about his father. It was a glowing piece about what a fine man he was, and it fit what I knew about him. But I was rather suddenly taken aback when I reached a paragraph explaining that this man had always said he would know when to end his life, and that time had come. His son smiled and said, yes, his father, suffering from terminal cancer and too long a lonely widower, had found a way to end his life. On the one hand I could understand how terrible it must have been for him to be suf fering and alone, without hope of a cure, and yearning for his deceased wife. But, I felt much more saddened over his death when I found out it was by his own hand. From all the statistics I have been reading lately, he is not alone in being an old man who chose this way out of pain. The New York Times recently carried a front page story on the alarming rise in suicide among the elderly. The rate among those 65 and older is higher than any other age group, with more than 20 per 100,000 older people having committed suicide in 1986. Also, be tween the ages of 65 and 69, four times as many men die by suicide as women. Somehow, even in this age group, women come out as being more durable. The Times article prompted many letters to the editor. Of the fine and compassionate letters, the one that-really touched my heart was by a man from Tucson, Ariz. He spoke of the loneliness of his mother, a widow, who 10 years ago, at the age of 79, was about to give up on life. The family found a young, pregnant Mexican woman to stay with her. As the baby began to grow into a little boy and the woman had another child, “a miracle seemed to occur,” he said. The children, who gave his mother loving atten tion, moved her to change from an “in troverted, undemonstrative” person to a lov ing “grandmother.” In his letter the man said the combination of children and the elderly is something that “works better than anything I know,” and he advocated putting orphanages next to old- age homes. I do not have answers for individuals, like my friend Ed. But I do believe that love and faith in God contain the power to keep peo ple of all ages safe from the despair of depression. And I do believe that if old peo ple have someone to love, as the Times’ let ters indicate, they will not choose to die. Copyright (c) 1989 by Catholic News Ser vice
