Two weeks ago I had not planned to do a funeral. As I pulled up to the Missionaries of Charity Gift of Love convent (established for poor who are dying of AIDS), the sister waved me over to the hospice. “One of our men just died and so we will do a funeral in their chapel.” As I vested in the sacristy, the sisters brought out his pale body and laid in a simple cot before the altar. Before Mass started, I sprinkled holy water on his pale head with the usual words: “In the waters of baptism Hugo died and rose with Christ….” On a shelf above his cot was his wedding picture: he stood sheepishly beside a radiant bride, herself full of styled hair, himself slightly balding. His shorn pate now rested on a thin pillow in front of me, in front of the simplest of altars.
 
I don’t usually cry at funerals—cannot remember the last time I did—but I couldn’t make it through the homily without weeping. I hadn’t planned on a funeral that day. But death had found us, cutting down this poor man who hadn’t had much a life, by my reckoning. We inevitably think of our own lives when we stand before death, and how it’s poor significance will end bitterly one day. This man, a life so briefly lived, dying mostly unknown and unloved. “He won’t get a funeral unless we give him one now,” Sr. John Marie had said. They were just going to take him away and cremate him at some state facility.
 
But here he was with the sisters, who loved him with the immaculate heart of God’s own Mother. “I have lived like an animal,” a dying destitute once told Mother Teresa, “but now I die like an angel.” Indeed, I was the only one crying at Hugo’s makeshift funeral. The sisters were themselves peaceful, even radiant, to be at the bedside of one who was “one his way to God,” as Mother Teresa had painted in the morgue at her Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta. The sting of death, the sorrow of an “insignificant” life, has all been done away with today, Good Friday, by God’s own death. No life is meaningless now, and no death unknown. His eye is on the sparrow who falls to the ground, and on Hugo, and on you and on me as well. 

We’ve all been doing the Stations of the Cross for five weeks now, and only one Friday remains. I’ve not been brave enough this year to seriously fast on Fridays—may God grant me the courage to suffer for Him! But when I have entered into the Stations after a day of work and fasting, I have been able to “feel as He has felt”, as in the beginning verses of the Stabat Mater (“Grant me Lord to feel as He has felt...”). Not as He felt, but as He has felt, for Christ continues to feel the weariness of each man’s difficult way through life. We are one body in Christ.
 
This year, I have not entered Friday night Stations with the fatigue of a man who had spent a night in prison and a public trial in Pilate’s court. But I am amazed to feel, even without hunger pains, a kind of psychological weariness as we begin the Stations. “The First Station: Jesus is condemned to death. We adore you O Christ and we praise you….” There we stand, looking down a line of fourteen stations that end only in death and burial.
 
There we all stand, at the First Station, and we wonder how we will make it to the end. We might even wonder how Jesus—true God but also true man—how He felt as he looked down the long road to Calvary. Whether we realize that we are feeling as He has felt or not, we keep our heads down and we keep going. We stop counting the genuflections, the prayers, the Stabat Mater verses, and we enter into the Way of the Cross. It usually overtakes me by the Fourth or Fifth Station, and then without realizing it, I am walking side by side with Him. And a joy overcomes me, around the Seventh or Eighth Station, that I am not alone. I am walking this Way with Him, and with all these people around me. None of us walks alone, and nothing can defeat a people who walk together with the Lord. This is the irreplaceable fruit of any pilgrimage, and in particular of that brief pilgrimage we call the Way of the Cross.

Receiving Mercy 

Today’s Gospel is very difficult to hear, if we listen carefully, because some men of God try to kill a woman. Some Pharisees, who would have been respected as we respect pastors and theologians, drag a woman caught in adultery to Jesus. Apparently they had followed a woman—probably a poor prostitute—and watched her hooking up with a customer. Not accusing the man, they jumped out to force this woman before Jesus; they used her to trap Jesus. They were using the law as a sledgehammer to bash this unfortunate sinful woman, and to bash sinless Lord Jesus. These two are thrown together, and unbelievably, they understand each other. Jesus wants to give the mercy she needs, and she gratefully receives the mercy he thirsts to give. The accusers, however, do not ask and so do not receive mercy. The woman, abased, humbly awaits Jesus’ decision, whereas the Pharisees grudgingly drop their stones, but keep their hatred, only now transferring it to Jesus. They have come for blood, and they will get it. Jesus will die in that woman’s place. In absolving her, Jesus makes her capable of receiving the real love she had never known from a man.
 
Sacramental Confession 

This drama plays out several times a day in our parish. Every time someone goes to confession, he or she kneels before the Lord humbling awaiting Christ’s sentence. And Our Lord does indeed judge the sinner, but only as worthy of mercy. He has come for our sins, and weeps that we will not give them to him (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew…”). The one thing Christ needs, however, is our presence in that confessional. God does uphold the law, for without right order we sink into demonic chaos. He does not condemn her, but he does tell her to sin no more. He doesn’t abrogate the law but makes us capable of keeping the law.
 
Go with Our Lady

So go to confession at least once before Easter. The woman in today’s gospel, after all, made her confession, albeit not under optimal circumstances. But the effect was the same—she received pardon and the grace to “avoid this sin.” Let’s not wait until someone accuses us, drags us under the public eye, before confessing our sins. The Church gives us the confessional to make it relatively painless. Ask Our Lady to go with you into the confessional, as crying children sometimes ask their mothers to go with them. You will not be condemned by Jesus, and you will escape the condemnation of men.

I haven’t posted for 10 days and it’s about this time I start getting emails from a few customers asking when I will next report in. I’ve actually jotted notes for a few posts but haven’t gotten the time to write them out. My current problem is that I’m the only man left standing in our parish and sinking slowly in a morass of emails, correspondence, and unfinished business.
 
Some young adults have asked me to accompany them on a pilgrimage this summer to Santiago de Compostela with optional extension to Rome for Mother Teresa’s canonization. Some are asking me for details, so here they are. Assuming the canonization will be September 4 (we will not know for sure until after the Pope’s consistory on March 15), I propose these dates:
 
Dates:
August 15: depart California (after Mass for the Solemnity of course)
August 16-31: walk the pilgrimage either on the Camino Primitivo (mountains) or Portugesa (coast) from, covering around 15 miles a day.
Sept 2: fly or train to Rome
Sept 4: Mother Teresa’s canonization
Sept 5 or 6: depart for California
 
Cost:
If we purchase tickets now, plane fares should be around $1400 for both flights (California to Spain and Spain to Rome). Most people on Camino forums say you don’t have to spend more than $40 to $50 per day for food and lodging. We’ll be sleeping in refugios and pilgrims hostels, so bring plenty of earplugs.
 
Requirements
Pilgrims should be between the ages of 18 and 35 and able to walk 15-20 miles a day with a light backpack. We will be sleeping in rustic environments and eating plain food. Read Fr. Markey’s book for a better idea of what the pilgrimage entails. I expect all of us to treat this as a pilgrimage—that is, a prayerful and penitential journey—not a tourist trip. Of course we will have Mass and communal rosary every day, plus anyone wishing to join me for the breviary and/or daily holy hour is welcome. Confessions are extra (just kidding). Hopefully no one will need an anointing (bring plenty of moleskin for those blisters). The group will be around 15, men and women.
 
Further Reference
I recommend seeing The Way starring Martin Sheen. There are probably thousands of books on the Camino, but I can recommend Fr. Greg Marque’s Discovering the Camino de Santiago.
 
More information
Contact either Martin Ford at Star of the Sea parish ([email protected]) or April Shonnard at Thomas Aquinas College ([email protected]). Don’t contact me! I am drowning in emails as it is!

I am proud that one of my parishioners (Ron Konopaski) is the City Coordinator for the Forty Days for Life apostolate, which schedules people to pray in front of abortion centers every hour throughout Lent. Unlike the photo posted here from Illinois, our San Francisco is a bit light on participants, so Ron spends most of Lent camped out at the local Planned Parenthood. He does so with great good cheer, he cheered me during my hour this morning. “I used to be angry with the people who are doing this,” he told me, “but I realized how much God loves them, so I figured I’d better love them too.”
 
It was hard to love some of them today. Two young American women let irrational tirades at us praying in front of the clinic. “I’m a lawyer,” one spat out, “and what you are doing is probably illegal and certainly hateful.” The other accused us, with barely contained fury, of “abusing children.” But then a shiny new Mercedes pulled up. A father and two children, with their mother, got out. They were Chinese, and the mother entered the abortuary while Dad took care of the kids. Unlike the American women, the Chinese woman was polite, calm, and as unconcerned as if she were making a hair appointment.
 
I’ve heard that the Japanese make cemeteries for their aborted children, at which they leave flowers and cry quietly. They leave signs like “My little one, I wish we could’ve kept you.” They don’t pretend the unborn child is not human, but neither are they deeply conflicted about killing him. They were not raised in a Christian or even post-Christian culture. The Romans, before Christ, practiced abortion and infanticide, burying the bones of their small children under the floors of their homes. Killing unwanted children was just part of life, because the novel idea of “human rights” had not been revealed yet.
 
The vituperation of our two American women today seemed an expression of fear to me. They were terrified of their own consciences, which were formed in a Christian culture. The effects of that culture are still present, though waning rapidly (the very young in America have significantly less sense of human dignity and the inviolability of the human person than their parents). The Chinese woman, by contrast, was probably raised in a non-Christian culture, and so does not have to fight her inbred sense of the human person. Notice that America and Europe wrestle with abortion while in non-Christian cultures it is not much of an issue.
 
It helps, I think, to understand this: that the irrational reactions to prolife advocacy are vestiges of a Christian conscience. It is not impossible to reawaken these consciences, such as has happened with, for example, Bernard Nathanson and Norma McCorvey. We cannot rationalize on this issue with most post-Christians, but there must be a way to appeal to their dormant consciences in some way.