A Reflection on God's TYM

As much as we have two months left as Cap Corps Volunteers, things are starting to wrap up for us at the Red House. We can count the number of retreats we have left on one hand, and are beginning to save all the talks we wrote this year for the edification of future CCVs. The process of wrapping things up and tying off loose ends has begun, and perhaps the saddest part of that process is saying goodbye to our God’s TYM groups.

There are a lot of pieces that go into that process. Of course it means getting things organized for the ever epic God’s TYM Olympics, planning the last meeting, and slowly learning to let go of a community you’ve come to love so much. It also means sitting down, reflecting on the year and typing out an evaluation of your time with God's TYM. So as I sit here filling out this form, writing notes to the future CCVs who will serve at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Mahopac, I can't help but think of all the amazing people I met and the great things I got to be a part of this year. And so I thought I’d share my top three moments of God’s TYM in this the year of Our Lord 2015.

#3 The Passion Play

Preparing for the Passion Play had its share of interesting moments. For instance, it was convenient that we could use Julie's iphone to play "New Again," but we found a glitch in the system when Julie's phone announced that she'd received seven text messages over the church's sound system. Then there was the issue of taking Jesus (played by Frangelico) down from the cross. True to his role, as soon as his hands were freed from the ropes on the cross, Jelly was dead weight and free falling from the cross. Unfortunately for him, there was some question as to whether the people designated to catch him actually wanted to and I think Mrs. Fabiano's heart skipped a few beats on more than one occasion. (For added security, I was appointed as one of the pall bearers.) The next lesson we had to learn is that when one is carrying a person, the natural instinct is to get them as quickly from point A to point B as possible. But four guys running down the center aisle of the church with a dead Jesus just didn't evoke the mournful effect we were going for. Fortunately, Jelly's not that big a guy and so carrying him out wasn't too hard. CYFM's Jesus at Living Stations later that day was a different story...(ahem, Mike.)

Even the costumes on the day of were a source of entertainment. We ran out of robes, so I threw on a black cassock instead. Then they handed me a head scarf; I wasn't sure exactly what to do with that so I tied it around my head like a bandanna. I was told I looked like a pirate priest, which I found funny until some guy in the narthax addressed me as "Father" and asked me a question about the parish...

The best part of all the prep work in March was that for once I wasn't running around trying to pull all the pieces together and was able to take time to get to know the youth group better. The people playing Jesus' followers had a lot of time to wait kneeling on the altar while Danny practiced nailing Jelly to the cross. So in the meantime, I got to find out where the seniors were going college, chatted about our favorite saints and told jokes which probably didn't match the solemnity that practicing for a Passion Play would usually merit.

When Palm Sunday came and it was time to present the play to the parish, everything went off beautifully. After Communion, Danny and Colleen dragged Jelly to the altar and nailed him to the cross. As Mary (played beautifully by Erin and Julie) knelt at the foot of the cross, we played a song in which Jesus comforts mother as he hung there dying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA20RW_VhSc It was a moving scene and I'll admit, even I shed a few tears (although they were manly tears.) We carried Jelly off the cross and into the narthax and even managed to do it without dropping him once. The youth group did a beautiful job and made Christ's passion more real for the parish. I think the parish and I hope the kids too, have a deeper appreciation for my how much Christ loved them to suffer so much. I have to admit, my chest swelled a bit when it was all said and done.

#2 Stump Joe

When I asked the group at the beginning of the year what sort of things they did before I got there, the first thing they mentioned was Stump Scotty. The idea of the game was to ask Scotty Biggs (last year’s CCV at St. John’s) questions until he couldn’t answer one. It sounded like fun so I decided to do it. I thought about changing the name to make the alliteration work with my name but “Mess with Moreshead’s Mind” just sounded weird, so we stuck with “Stump Joe.”

            

To make it more interesting, I instituted a point system. For every question I could answer, I got a point. For every question I couldn’t answer, they got a point. And because I was feeling cocky, I offered them an extra point if they could correctly answer the question themselves. The stakes: if they won, I would lobby before my fellow Cap Corps Volunteers for the Pie-a-CCV booth at Family Festiva.

            

To my credit, I was pretty proud of myself that I was able to get within a year of the date when Vatican City was founded. And I came within one book of guessing which was the 11^th book of the Bible. But I didn’t know where in the world St. Sophia was from, couldn’t list the ten commandments, and I although I could answer whether or not Jesus would eat at Wendy’s if He had the chance, I got schooled.

            

The game was fun, but the highlight came at the end, after I had already resigned myself to my fate and the questions were no longer for points. We had some extra time, so I opened the floor for whatever questions they wanted to ask, with the proviso that they be more "why" questions than "what" or "when." Having taught in a classroom, I know that that's a dangerous move. Half the time  when I did that, I wound up sitting listening to the crickets chirp while the kids stared at their desks and pretended to be invisible. But that's not what happened this day. The kids started asking questions, and good ones too. Although we spent more time talking about canonical impediments to marriage than I would have anticipated, their interest and engagement showed a level of investment in their faith that impressed me. I hope they never forget that for whatever question they think up, there's always an answer. It's just a question of finding it.

As fate would have it, my fellow Cap Corps Volunteers decided not to run the Pie-A-CCV booth at Family Festiva. Well, all except for one. Megan heard about the bet and made sure that there would be at least one pie reserved for my face…

#1 Adoration

Those who know me, know how much the Eucharist means to me. At the beginning of the year we were asked to answer the question, "This year will be successful if I..." and I answered, "Help one person to encounter Christ in the Eucharist." So I knew from the beginning of the year, I wanted to spend at least one night focused on the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Still, when I finally decided to do it, I wasn’t sure how it would go because I was venturing into unchartered territory. I decided if we were talking about the real presence, it only made sense that the group should have a chance to encounter His presence themselves. Recognizing Christ in the Eucharist requires abandoning your senses and looking with the eyes of faith; just being told He is there isn’t enough for that. 

I decided to model this Holy Half Hour after what I'd seen done at Catholic Underground. The plan was to write a meditation on the presence of Christ right before you, exposed in the Blessed Sacrament. Then I would intersperse it with praise and worship music so that hearts as well as minds might be moved and allow Him to enter. So I called a friend from Fordham and we started organizing praise and worship music.

Sitting behind the piano, things were interesting. John and I hadn’t rehearsed together, so there was a lot of whispering under our breath going on. “Go to the chorus!” “Slow down, you’re reading too fast!” “Do I take the repeat or not?!” It was an act of faith to trust that somehow Christ’s grace was working despite the Laurel and Hardy act that was going on behind the scenes. And yet when adoration finished and Fr. Patrick had placed Christ back in the tabernacle, no one moved to leave. For several minutes a pregnant silence hung about the chapel and they just knelt and prayed. It’s not that they weren’t invited to head back to the convent; I'm pretty sure I even mentioned that there was leftover food back there. For five minutes, everyone was still. I don’t know, but I suspect they did encounter Christ truly present before them and wanted to stay with Him. If that happened, my whole purpose for being a CCV was accomplished.

Those are my top three memories from St. John’s that I will take with me as I move on from CYFM. Of course there are many more I’m not listing here, like the Breakfast Run, the Christmas Party and the Rosary Procession we did in December. Of course the greatest gift I've been given has been the people I've been privileged to meet this year. This has been one of the finest groups of kids I've ever met. They're full of joy, hardworking and all in all willing to go deeper in their faith. The parents that support the group are truly amazing. From providing snacks for after the meeting to getting up at 4 AM to help with the Breakfast Run, they've been there every step of the way. Lastly the priests at St. John's have been a great blessing to have around. Particular thanks goes out to Fr. Patrick for support of the youth group and for bringing a sense of humor with him. God has blessed me deeply by allowing me to be part of such a community. Whichever CCV gets these notes I'm leaving them will soon find out just how privileged they are.

You Make Beautiful Things

One of the unique things about being a Cap Corps Volunteer is that we have a privileged place from which we can see the hand of God at work in many different people in many different ways. We see Him in the way kids open up and start to talk about their faith in small groups. We see Him in the lit up faces of retreatants leaving adoration. We see Him in the way CYFMers live out their faith in the activities they do and the way they choose to do them. Not surprisingly though, we probably see His hand most clearly at work in each other.

At the very beginning of the year, the Cap Corps Volunteers made a retreat on Lake Cayuga in Interlaken, New York. Coming from the world of five day silent retreats, this was more of a vacation for me than a retreat, but I certainly wasn’t complaining. Swimming, barbecues, evenings watching the sunset while reading a book on St. Lawrence of Brindisi, life didn’t get much better. But there was a spiritual purpose that dominated the retreat: it was time for us to reflect on where God had been at work in our lives and where He was taking us in the course of this next year; then we got to share it with our fellow Cap Corps Volunteers. Fr. Marvin explained that in the course of this year we would be asked to share our spiritual stories with retreatants and so it only made sense to first share it with each other. He wasn’t kidding.

Over the course of the year, we’ve given more retreats than we can count and at each of them, one of us is called on to give a witness talk. We know each others' stories by heart. We’ve heard over and over again what our quirky younger selves were like. We've heard about how Katie was more concerned with getting peach Snapple after church every Sunday than with the Mass itself. We've laughed regularly on hearing how Hollis gave bunny ears to the bishop in her Confirmation photo. And I admit, I never fail to wonder how Kelley managed to beg her way out of CCD in the 5^th grade.

But we also know the other side of it, about how at some point in our lives, God’s grace began to transform us. We’ve heard how Hollis came back to the Eucharist after months at a yoga ashram and was overwhelmed by God’s grace. We’ve heard how Megan on seeing a boy her age kiss the feet of Jesus on the Cross first felt a burning desire to pray. We've heard many times how on reading the lives of the saints in middle school, Kelley felt inspired to live like them. And my housemates have heard more times than I’m sure they can count how I first encountered Christ in the Eucharist on the Feast of Corpus Christi ten years ago.

A lot of the kids who come on our retreats are familiar with the former paragraph, with the ways in which God can be a secondary concern in our lives or something they’ll think about later. Some of our retreatants are beginning to understand the latter paragraph, are encountering God’s grace in their lives and taking the first steps to saying “yes” to Him unconditionally. What few of our retreatants fully realize is that latter paragraph is just the beginning. We give witness to these conversion moments because they help others bridge the gap between giving bunny ears to the bishop and abandoning all for Christ’s love and joy, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

In the course of this year alone, we as Cap Corps Volunteers have grown tremendously in our relationship with God. Just as many of our retreatants have had intense moments before Our Lord in adoration, so have we. We’ve had moments where we recognized God’s awesomeness in a way we never did before, until we just can’t help but say with Lindsay, “God is so cool, why doesn’t everyone believe in Him?!” 

Just as we challenge our retreatants to follow God more closely in their lives, so too we have been challenged by God in many ways this year. Some of us have been challenged to make prayer a more regular part of our life as we learned to pray the Divine Office and began attending Mass every day. For me, as many of you know, God challenged me to be more outgoing, to reach out to people when I’d really rather be sitting back and observing. All of us have been challenged by community life, learning to be forgiving of each others’ quirks and faults, and to always love the people we live with, eat with, travel with and work with. Through this year God has been grinding away at all that holds us back from loving Him and our neighbor with our whole hearts. However deep we thought our relationship was with Him before, in some ways it’s grown deeper for all of us.

We tell the conversion story a lot, but it’s only the first chapter of a longer and more beautiful narrative. As Cap Corps Volunteer we have the rare privilege of seeing the bigger picture in our fellow housemates’ lives. In the lives of those we serve, we only see the beginning. The end is up to you.

The Miracle of the Mildew

It was an ordinary Monday morning like any other. Hollis had been up since 4 AM and was eating oatmeal in her room, Lindsay’s slumber was impossible to disturb, and Megan and I sat sipping coffee at the kitchen table, discussing life’s most amusing problems.

But this particular Monday morning it was necessary to mix business with pleasure. Megan is the sacristan for the house; essentially, her job is to set up for Mass and then make sure Jesus doesn’t get flushed down the sewer afterwards. That sounds a little strange at first, (after all, who would ever want to throw Jesus in the sewer?) until you consider that every particle of the Eucharist is Jesus in the flesh and one has to be careful when purifying the sacred vessels. Some churches have sacrariums which are sinks that empty not into the sewer system but directly into the ground. Our chapel has no such thing. No, Megan’s sacrarium is an orange mixing bowl.

The ritual goes as follows: Mass at the Red House ends, we all file out of the chapel one by one (because there’s no room for anything else), and Megan stays back to purify the sacred vessels. The chalice is rinsed out and emptied into the orange bowl and the corporal and purificators are allowed to soak. They sit there for an indefinite period of time until all the particles from the Sacred Host are dissolved. At that point Megan removes the corporal from the mixing bowl, sets it on a towel to dry and dumps the rest of the water on the front lawn so any particles that are left return to the ground, not to the sewer…

This particular week, that indefinite period of time was a bit more indefinite than usual. It was cold out (it was February) and emptying the mixing bowl meant venturing out into the snow. And so the corporal incubated in that mixing bowl from Tuesday Mass, through Friday, through Saturday, well into Monday…On Monday Megan remembered that Jesus must have felt pretty cold too when He was dying naked for her on that cross, and so over coffee she started the process of removing the corporal from the holy orange mixing bowl.

As I sat sipping my coffee, musing on higher things like what I’d have for dinner, my thoughts were rudely interrupted: “JOE! What does this look like to you?!” Megan pushed the bowl over to me and pointed to the corporal. I looked. Blood red dots were scattered all over one side of the corporal. “I can’t be sure, but it looks like blood to me.” And it did. It looked like the particles from the sacred host had fallen on the corporal and turned to blood.

To be clear, we didn’t get this idea from nowhere. Eucharistic miracles, where the Eucharist not only is the body and blood of Christ but also looks like the body and blood of Christ, are not unheard of in the Catholic Church. Just a few years ago, a nun in Sokolka, Poland left a consecrated host which had fallen on the floor to dissolve in an ablution cup (a small cup of water.) When she returned later to empty it out, she found that a distinctive red spot had formed on the host. Scientists were later able to confirm that it was tissue from the heart muscle. It looked like we might be dealing with a similar phenomenon.

At this point Megan and I were running around excitedly thinking we had witnessed a miracle. “What do we do?! Can we take the corporal out of the bowl? Is that sacrilegious? How do we know it’s blood? What do we do?! What do we do?!” And so Megan set to looking up biological properties of blood while I went upstairs to the chapel to ask Jesus what He thought of this whole business.

An hour later we started to calm down and decided we needed an extra pair of eyes on this. So we took a picture and sent it to Fr. Marvin. “Hi…so I was soaking a corporal and this happened…What do you make of it? Joe and I were curious…” Of course this was the understatement of the century. We weren’t just curious; we were looking for ecclesiastical approbation to begin the veneration of the Holy Corporal of Beacon, New York. The two of us paced around the room wondering what our fearless leader would say. When Megan’s phone went off with a text message, I jumped a foot. The text read:

“Haha, it’s mildew. LOL.”

And so we learned our lesson well, that when one leaves a piece of cloth in a bowl of water for a week, mildew happens…

Admittedly, there was a period of time when I still held out hope that a miracle might have occurred in the Red House. As the corporal dried out, I kept an eye on the red spots to see what would happen. When they started disappearing as the corporal dried, I had to admit it probably was mildew. Nevertheless, a few spots still remain and to this day we hang the corporal proudly in our cubicles in memory of the ever famous, “Miracle of the Mildew.”

It's ON!!!

‘Tis narry a week ‘til the epic battle which is the annual CYFM God’s TYM Olympics will begin. Youth groups from around the Hudson River Valley will come together to compete for the coveted Golden Tau. Alliances will be made, frozen T-shirts will be broken, food will be eaten: only one will win.

To the St. John’s youth group (my youth group) I exhort you to follow St. Ignatius’ great advice: to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and to ask for no reward (because you’re not getting any, short of winning.) Be stout of heart, even when toes are stepped on, faces are planted in the mud, elbows are thrown, stomachs are too full to eat another doughnut, it is then when victory is within reach: you just have to choose to go for it.

Remember, when St. Lawrence was being roasted alive, he didn’t complain about the pain: he said “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.” When Mother Teresa was rolling in the muddy gutter, she didn’t complain about the filth: she just acknowledged that crap happens and went on serving Christ. When Lucifer was trying to take over Heaven, St. Michael didn’t just step aside and say, “Fine, you win.” No, he drove him out with the battle cry, “Who is like the Lord?!” (Which is essentially the original “Who’s your daddy?”)

So fight hard faithful disciples. The Golden Tau will soon be ours.

To the rest of the youth groups, you can ignore the above advice. Remember that all good things come from sitting back, relaxing, not getting too excited about these things. Take it from Hank the Hippie, it’s all about peace and love. No need to get overly competitive, man.

It’s only ten days away. Let the epic battle commence!