There’s been a lot of discussion about building a wall to keep people out of our country. Some of the discussions have even been rational. It is a complex issue that will require a lot of rationality if we are to get it right. Europe, which faces even greater immigration demands, is struggling to come to an equitable solution.
 
When we talk of walls we think brick and mortar. But many walls are invisible but no less effective in excluding people. There is such a wall around the City of San Francisco. I don’t think it has been built intentionally, but it keeps people out of our city nonetheless. It has been built, perhaps unintentionally, by the very people who champion “inclusion.”
 
In fact, we have two walls, and outer and an inner defense against undesirables. The first wall is economic, firmly anchored by housing prices and the overall cost of living. Only the wealthy can afford to live in San Francisco. I have seen families move into our neighborhood (which is far from the most expensive) only to discover that they cannot really afford to live with us. They are pushed back out. We are sad to see these families leave.
 
The second wall is political, firmly anchored by ideological intolerance. Many single people, who can afford a small apartment here, discover that only the politically left-leaning are welcome in our city. Any talk of “religion” or “natural law” at work or school is not tolerated. At work they sooner or later get a termination notice with a significant severance package. At school they are bullied and harassed. They are pushed out, and we are sad to see them leave. They take their diversity with them. We are becoming a conformist monoculture.
 
If we are to be credible in the discussions about border walls, we who live in America’s wealthiest cities must face our own walls. As I say, the walls we build are largely unconscious and unintended. But we can be more inclusive, even in San Francisco and Boston and New York. We can begin by simply greeting each other. I’ve decided to say “good morning” or “how are you doing” to people I pass on the street. I can’t greet all of them, of course, but I want to connect with at least some of my fellow travelers. Three or four a day will do. And if I am seated in a restaurant close to others (in San Francisco’s crowded eateries you get stuffed almost on top of strangers’ laps) I want to greet them with a smile. We are, after all, fellow human beings. It’s not easy to keep this up, but I am delighted to see how most of the folks I greet return my smile.
 
The next step in taking down walls is to listen rather than react to someone with a divergent perspective. Listening with the heart, seeing the image of God in someone with whom we disagree, brings marvelous understanding. There’s a whole lot of judgment going on in my city right now, from contentions on the Board of Supervisors to rainbow banners with angry slogans to just plain old grumbling about “those others.” Listen first with the heart and then with the head. The head will understand if the heart first sees the goodness in my brother or sister.
 
So let’s start with greeting others with a smile. Let’s try to listen with heart and mind to others, and the walls will begin to open up.

Last week I spent some time with my earthly father during our annual family reunion in Pennsylvania. Dad served in the US Army during World War II, arriving at age 18 in Manila to work under General Douglas MacArthur’s command as a cartographer. Dad once gave me a piece of Japanese occupation currency, which I’ve put on my wall to remind me of the cost at which these men obtained the freedom and order we now enjoy. 70 years after my father fought in Manila, however, “the Americans” have lost a significant degree of that generation’s magnanimity. Might I suggest that the “Great Generation’s” greatness of soul was nurtured by the prevailing exercise of right religion. It was a culture born of the assumption that God exists and that we are created in His image, great-hearted and capable of the sacrifices necessary to restore peaceful order to a world at war.
 
But, lamentably, we have lost much of the faith of our fathers. And fatherhood itself has suffered loss from this loss of belief in a higher power. Twenty years ago David Blankenhorn pointed out in Fatherless America that never in American history have so many men abandoned their families. Without a father’s strong and loving hand, many children will simply not develop to their full potential. The infantile rage so embarrassingly obvious in public discussions, the adolescent violence increasingly manifest in our schools, the “failure to launch” so prevalent in adults are the sad consequences of fathers failing to form their children.
 
Do you ever wonder why Jesus describes God as a “father” and not as a mother? Perhaps it is because mothers rarely fail us, since motherhood is so naturally compelling. Fatherhood, on the other hand, is less “biologically obvious.” Men grapple more with fatherhood than women with motherhood. We thank our fathers, and we pray for them, both our earthly fathers and our spiritual fathers, the priests. Perhaps a major factor in the decline of fatherhood began with the confusion in so many priests in the 1960s. They began to dress, and to talk, and to behave like buddies rather than fathers. They said “call me Joe” and “I’m just a man like anyone else.” They lost faith in the divine authority with which God invested them at their Ordination Mass. Many priests lost a good deal of their identity when they became reluctant to receive the respect we all need to give our fathers. Without a firm conviction in their authority, it is quite difficult to spiritual fatherhood. Evil gets the upper hand when men, to whom God gives the authority to provide and protect, disbelieve in this authority. When earthly fatherhood falters, we must look to our Heavenly Father, and to pray: Our Father, who art in heaven … give us our bread … deliver us from evil!

Yesterday I rode my brother’s old bike over country roads to the farmhouse where I grew up near Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The rolling hills and Appalachian ridges were splendidly sunbathed in unusually dry and clear air. Over the years, Amish families have bought many of the farms along these roads. A tranquility has descended upon this part of the country because the Amish do not use gasoline-powered machinery. Amidst all the hand-wringing about climate change, this good folk consume the least natural resources and emit the fewest toxins into our air and water. They have never driven a car or flown in a jet-fueled aircraft. While the global warming experts officiously fly to and fro between important international conferences, luxuriate in carbon-consuming hotels, and pump position papers into the environment, the Amish quietly till the land with horse and human muscle. The Amish are, if you will permit me, the true “experts” in climate change. They know how to live with less and respect mother earth.

​My older brother, whose old bike I borrowed, is not Amish. But he works quietly to feed his family, spending only what he needs of this old earth’s bounty. When he and his wife came out to visit me in California a few years ago, it was their first ride in a jet plane. It was in a jet plane that I watched part of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I gave up halfway through because, while Al Gore made some good points about our consumption of petrochemicals, he did so by using vast amounts of petrochemicals. In every other scene he was boarding a personal jet or riding a snow cat through Antarctica. The inconvenient truth, it seems to me, is that those who shout loudest about climate change are also offenders.
 
I think we can learn a lot from simple people. The Amish are a small community of Christians that few notice, but I think they, and people like them, will inherit the earth.

The Great Feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady

We have returned to the simple green of “ordinary time,” having just come off the liturgical highway of feasts which began last December. We traveled through Advent and Christmastide, then back into Lent and Eastertide with its grand finale of Pentecost followed by Trinity Sunday. The feasts of Corpus Christi (last Sunday) and the Sacred Heart (last Friday) followed by the Immaculate Heart (yesterday) cap this great liturgical sweep. We live the core mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection through the Two Hearts of Jesus and Mary, communicated to us at every Mass within the Body of Christ. Truly our own hearts are restless until they rest within the hearts of Jesus and Mary. The Church of the Eucharist is our earthly home while on pilgrimage to our eternal Home, the House of the Father.
 
The Day we became Homeless

The first reading today, from Genesis 3, tells the sad tale of the day humanity became homeless. Adam and Eve decided to leave their Father’s House by a fundamental act of distrust. “After the man had eaten of the tree”—that is, after he had lost his trust in God’s perfect will (we call this the Original Sin), God asks Adam … why? Why did you not trust me? Adam blames someone else: “She gave it to me—the woman you gave me.” It’s her fault, and really, it’s your fault! God then asks the woman: why did you give death to your husband? Eve blames someone else—“The serpent tricked me” and now implies, with Adam, that God himself is at fault: why did God put a snake in Paradise in the first place? With Adam and Eve, we say that God cannot lay all sorts of traps in our lives and expect us not to get hurt.
 
Isn’t it true that I’m messed up because someone else—probably in my childhood—messed me up. And they keep messing me up. My husband or my wife, my employer or my coworkers—someone right now is messing me up. I’ll always be messed up, so I’ll just have to self-medicate with food, or alcohol, or marijuana, or porn, or anger, or the internet. The temptation, when we mess up, is to think that we are helpless victims of this messed up world.
 
A New Adam and a New Eve

But God sent a rescue mission, a New Adam, born of a New Eve. The First Eve gave death to Adam. The Second Eve gives life to the entire human race by giving birth to a Savior, who trusts that God really is looking after him. In the Gospel this New Eve asks for Jesus from the edge of the crowd. Maybe she had a basket of food for him (she had heard, perhaps, that the crowds kept her Son so busy he had not even enough time to eat). Maybe she just wanted a word with him (she had heard, perhaps, that the leaders had decided to kill Him). The mother just wants to see her son for a moment. But Jesus says: “Anyone who does the will of my Father is my mother, and my brother, and my sister.” He directs our eyes to his own Mother, the perfect disciple, perfectly committed to the will of God. But Jesus also says that we all have a place in God’s house, if we do the will of the Father. Mary broke the chain reaction of rebellion begun by Eve, and now no one has to sin. Everyone can be a saint, and no one is excluded from the House of the Father.
 
Come Home

​The journey begins and continues with prayer. Only within prayer could Mary have responded to God’s Word through the Angel Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your will.” She trusted where Eve did not trust. Prayer is essentially silence, a stillness that can learn to trust the quiet voice of God. “In the Silence of the Heart God speaks” Mother Teresa would say. Today, in this parish, we begin the Forty Hours Devotion: 40 uninterrupted hours of silent adoration before the Eucharistic Face of Christ. It is only in this grace-filled emptiness that God can fill us with his perfect will. You are not OK, and I am not OK, but that’s OK because we have a heavenly Father who welcomes us into His home, the place where His Son awaits us in the most Blessed Sacrament. Give yourself an hour with Him over these next two days.

It is best to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Pentecost, because Thursday commemorates Holy Thursday, when the Eucharist was instituted. But while we processed the Sacrament inside the church before Pentecost, after Pentecost the Holy Spirit boldly inspires us to take the Eucharist into the streets. And so we did last Thursday.
 
Now, if you ask just about anyone in San Francisco what great thing happened last Thursday, they will say that our team, the amazing Warriors, won our first game against Cleveland for the NBA championship. But few know what I know, and what you are about to know.
 
We began our Corpus Christi procession at 8:15pm. Fr. Mark and I had torn ourselves away from the game with only five minutes remaining and the score just about even. We were worried. We were not concerned about the Warriors losing (how could they?), but that 50 Catholics would be processing past the sports bars on Clement Street just as the game was getting out. It could become awkward or even sacrilegious as fans in various stages of inebriation pushed their way through the narrow sidewalk.
 
But as we turned the corner onto Clement Street, we found it deserted. I’m pretty sure we were the only Eucharistic Procession winding through San Francisco at 8:30pm, which (we discovered later) was just when the Warriors drove the game into overtime. The game was in pitched contest as Fr. Fewel carried the heavy monstrance bearing the Eternal God. He was blessing the City at the very time the Warriors pulled ahead to a stunning victory. Little did Fr. Fewel know (he’s not even basketball-aware) that he bore the fate of the NBA Finals in his arms.
 
Facetious? Yes and no. The mystery of Corpus Christi is that God pitched his tent among us, and still walks with us, blessing every dimension of our lives. Jesus concerns himself even with the NBA finals, because he is the lover of mankind and everything human fascinates Him. I would say it is fortuitous that San Francisco’s first game was played on Corpus Christi Thursday, as the parishioners from Star of the Sea blessed the City with Christ’s loving presence.