September 25, 2011

Picking up from last week’s blog, maybe I should begin by saying my Creole was better this Sunday during the two Masses. My teacher, Anacréon, thought about last Sunday and decided I needed help with pronunciation. So our lessons this week were reading random texts from the New Testament. Of course it would help if I know what I was reading and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t. I have a general idea but not an exact word for word understanding in my head. So it’s learning vocabulary which will help and of course I have the same old choice, “word recognition or phonics?” This whole process is interesting when it’s not discouraging and driving me crazy. I sort of watch myself as I’m going through it. Part of me understands the overall picture and part of me is hung up on individual words and their pronunciation. Now to all of you who are reading this, if you get what I’ve just said, you get an “A” in Mind Reading.

Last week I got back up on the horse, as they say, after my discouragement with last Sunday’s Creole’s performance. I had Mass at the Sisters and it was Monday so the Mass was in Creole not English. For Monday’s Mass the Sisters bring in some of the Haitian orphans they are caring for. Usually they are between 2 and four years old. They are so cute and can they sing! They seem to learn everything by rote and they really go to it. Everything went well even the little homily I wrote in Creole. Anacréon came along to listen to me. He was pleased with the Mass and how I did. Learning a language is such a long and usually painful process. I hope the day comes when I can just get along as I do in French. But meantime it's step by step.

We still have no word from the Brazilian embassy about the visas the men need to head off to Brazil. We went there Monday and they said the man who was working with them went on vacation and that was the reason for the delay. He said we’d hear the next day – Tuesday, but by the end of the week we still had no word.

Thursday I went to see the Vicar General of the Archdiocese. We needed a letter stating that the Oblates of St Francis de Sales were officially established in the Archdiocese. Msgr. St Hubert is the Vicar General. He is a very nice man. I went with what I thought was a model letter that he could give to his secretary to type on official stationary and stamp with the official seal. He was happy with that and he gave it to his secretary who had it done in no time. Another little task completed. That’s what life here seems to be for me.

Tom Hagan is upset with the overall lack of initiative concerning the presence of the Catholic Church in Cité Soleil so he’s taking the bull by the horns. He’s hired some of the people from Ste Anne’s Chapel to be an evangelization team. Exactly what they will do I’m not sure but he asked me if I’d give them some initial conferences helping them to get started. He doesn’t want them to take this on as just a job that pays some money but rather as a “call” or a “vocation”. So tomorrow at nine o’clock I have the first get together. Among other things Tom thinks it would be good to have them review their own faith life. Where are they with their Catholic faith? Where have been the ups and downs? Do they have a personal relationship with Jesus and can they talk about that? He really feels that they need to be convinced of God’s love for us, each of us, personally. So that’s the beginning agenda. I thought for starters I’d share with them Isaiah 43: 1-4 especially the last line: “You are precious in my eyes, and I love you.” That’s pretty direct.

At the same time I've just begun reading “Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy” by Eric Metaxas. Tom just lent it to me. In the Forward I read this: “By the time of Hitler’s ascension, much of the German church understood grace only as abstract acceptance –‘God forgives; that’s his job.’ But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life. That’s the gospel, not salvation by law or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.” This I think is one of Bonhoeffer’s phrases, “cheap grace”. I think it means “feel good” religion. “God loves us and God forgives us so let’s not get too worried about our sins, etc. Let’s just be nice, etc.” Well that hit me. I preach and I believe deeply in God’s love for us personally and God's forgiveness but you can go down that road too far to the point of taking the life (not to say the teeth) out of our Christian commitment. I think the author of the Forward of the book, Timothy J. Keller has it right, or better, Bonhoeffer has it right. God’s love and forgiveness became flesh and blood in Jesus and we can easily forget what Jesus said: “If you want to be my disciple you have to pick up your cross everyday and follow me.”

Well all this to say I want to work with this evangelization team and to help them renew their baptismal commitment to follow Jesus but to remind them that there is a “Cost of Discipleship” (the name of Bonhoeffer’s famous book) and it’s not cheap. So I’m off to the races with this new task and I look forward to working with these good people. It will get me more involved with the real world of Haiti and Cité Soleil. So pray for me that I can do this well.

Blessings to all as we finish September and begin October. Tom