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
