Awakening the Faith of Men at Passionist Retreat Center

On Friday evening, February 9th, a flood of men from all parts of the Diocese of Pittsburgh flowed through the corridors of St. Paul of the Cross Passionist Center in the South Side of Pittsburgh. The chapel reverberated with the voices of 85 men singing traditional hymns and hymns of worship and praise.  It was the 2018 Men’s retreat, which continued a tradition that began more than 40 years ago. In front of me, I saw three generations of worshippers sharing a pew; they included a grandfather, his son, and his grandson. Their eyes were fixed on the Holy Eucharist exposed in a monstrance. The retreat continued until Sunday afternoon.

Catholic spirituality provided the foundation for the retreat. Between praying the Liturgy of the Hours each morning and evening the men participated in Eucharistic adoration, the Holy Rosary, walking reflectively along the path of an outdoor Stations of the Cross, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Although there were moments of reflective silence the weekend was not exclusively devoted to prayer; there was plenty of good food and laughter, which is characteristic of Christian fellowship. The library and reading room were stocked with inspiring books to deepen our spiritual lives, but I found that I wasn’t likely to get through more than a page or two before I was drawn into a lively conversation about the challenges and opportunities of living a life of faith in today’s world.

The camaraderie between the men illustrated the theme of the retreat: “In Christ, United in Mind and Heart.” Not only did the retreat strengthen our identity as members of the Body of Christ, it challenged us to reach beyond the parameters of the institutional church to become a vibrant presence in the surrounding community. There were workshops emphasizing the relationship between empathy (the ability to understand and share other people’s feelings) and compassion (the motivation and ability to act upon the feeling of empathy). Compassion draws one out of oneself and one’s comfortable and familiar surroundings to minister to the world.

Men shared their experiences during conferences, talking about what it means to remain in Christ and to allow Christ to dwell in us. They also identified the many gifts of the Holy Spirit; and discussed what it means to live with compassion and love. One of the Passionist priests created devotional audio-visual presentations to stoke our imagination during our prayers. These visual images helped to make our prayers more vivid and moving. There was also a documentary video by Bishop Robert Barron.

The day after the retreat one of the men reflected on his experience: “I went to Mass this morning and I was thinking -- I want to hold onto this feeling forever.” As the men carry the fellowship of the retreat into all areas of their lives they demonstrate the awakening of faith among our laity and the vibrancy of the New Evangelization in our churches.

Do "our thoughts and prayers" mean anything anymore?

Vox media asked faith leaders whether or not our repeated invocation of “thoughts and prayers” in the face of tragedy has meaning anymore -- here are the diverse edited responses to their question for reflection:
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Pastor Kelly France, Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Minneapolis: Prayer can be a powerful grounding force. Prayer isn’t just a matter of wishing that things would have turned out differently, although that is part of it. When people pray, we assume a posture of listening.
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Prayer opens us to hear what God is calling us to do in a situation; it is a way to find clarity in the chaos around us by turning to God, who is greater than our pain and anxiety.
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Prayer grounds us in God’s mission and reminds us that God is active in the world ... Prayer helps us to remember God’s will for creation. Prayer moves us beyond ourselves toward God’s promise.
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Rabbi Jill Jacobs, T’ruah The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, New York: Prayer reminds us to reflect on others. Prayer frees us from our intellectualizing and rationalizing, breaks down the protective barrier around our hearts, and allows us to voice our pain and anguish. "Every night, I drench my bed; I melt my couch in tears" (Psalms 6:7). And prayer enables us to seek strength from a connection both to the divine (however we conceive of divinity) and to the community praying with us.
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Ultimately, prayer also forces us back into the world. We cannot praise God for divine acts of justice and mercy without hearing the call to imitate God through our own actions. As the prophet Isaiah warns, "Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood" (Isaiah 1:15). Prayer is necessary but never sufficient.
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Pastor Jim Kast-Keat, Riverside Church, New York: I often think the "thoughts and prayers" trope, especially in the immediate wake of a tragedy like this one, is utterly useless and only serves to alleviate the guilt that the "thinker" or "prayer" has for not being able to (or being willing to) do anything more ...
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As cheesy as it might sound, I want people to stop going to church and I want them to start being the church. I want them to stop praying with their thoughts and starting praying with their bodies...
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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: God doesn’t want your thoughts and prayers. God wants you to know that you are responsible to care for and protect other people. And to take action to do so.
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Patrick Hill, counselor at Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs, Colorado: Not only do our prayers move God's heart, but the direct communication with God strengthens our faith and provides comfort and peace — for the person praying and for those being prayed for. God’s desire for this world is peace. When we cry out to God, God pours out God's perfect peace.
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Pastor Dave Gass, Grace Family Fellowship, Pleasant Hill, Missouri:
“Thoughts and prayers” often get put together, when in actuality they are two very contra-distinct terms. Prayer is the idea of seeking help from outside of ourselves, while thoughts are internalized processing mechanisms ...
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We like to think of prayer as a way to get God to do what we want, but God is not a cosmic vending machine. We do not use prayer as a form of celestial manipulation. Instead, prayer is a means through which we communicate our hearts to God, and we surrender to God's perfect will. In other words, prayer is a means through which we remind ourselves ... that God is God and we are not.
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... I confess on behalf of many (perhaps most) Christians that prayer is often an excuse for inaction ...
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Prayer allows us to communicate our thoughts and feelings to God, knowing that God cares for us and is involved in our daily lives.
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... Prayer gives us space to grieve, to process, and to move toward actions of healing and growth from the pain we are experiencing both within ourselves and in the lives of others.
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In prayer we know that God is real, God is good, God is working, and God is calling us forward. Far from being inaction, prayer is a call to action.
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Rev. Elizabeth Rawlings, Lutheran Campus Ministry at University of Washington, Seattle: Prayer for my community and myself is time to be in relationship with God in an intimate, focused way.
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Through prayer, we are rooted in God. Sometimes we end up reflecting on hard truths about ourselves or the world; sometimes we are filled with love, strength, and grace. Sometimes we go to prayer to let out all of the pain and give it to God.
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Prayer for others allows us to focus on the needs of others and their suffering (or joy) and petition God for God's presence to be known in their lives.
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Prayer is being in relationship and communication with God. It breaks open our heart to the world and calls us to action.
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Simply stating that your thoughts and prayers are with someone is meaningless unless you are actively engaging in and with the pain and suffering in the world — and doing something about it.
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Father A.K.M. Adam, University of Oxford, Oxford, England: ... At this minute, in the face of such catastrophic evil, I can take an action that binds me closer in solidarity with many others around the globe, and that (in the faith by which I live) responds positively to a divine command and orients me toward a radically more benign state of affairs. So I pray.
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... prayer and activism are not zero-sum alternatives...
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Is tweeting, “Don't pray,” an improvement over tweeting, “I'm praying”?
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Imam Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Detroit: Acknowledging the suffering of others is important, even if the phrasing is trite. As there are those who may use the phrase “our thoughts and prayers are with victims and their families” as a cliché during tragic times, saying such is important nonetheless. Such statements reflect, at least in certain occasions, that there has been negative impact on fellow humans.
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The lack of acknowledging others’ suffering outside of one’s self or family is a sign of spiritual death. Spiritually dead people cannot bring healing and growth in any society.
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Father James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage, New York: Prayer is communication with God. So how can one not cry out to God when one is in need? It's part of an open and honest communication, as in any relationship.
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But how God responds is up to God. God may respond, for instance, by encouraging you to reach out or help someone who is suffering. That is, God may move your heart to help the victims of a tragedy in some way.
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What God does is up to God. All I know is that I frequently ask God for help, and I'm grateful when people pray for me.

Is Self-Giving Love Outdated?

People often say that the self-giving love expressed in the scriptures is impractical and outdated in today's world; yet the stories of Anthony Borges, the 15-year old who was shot 5 times as he shielded his classmates during a mass shooting on February 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and Aaron Fies, a coach at the school who gave his life shielding students, illustrate how ordinary people transcend themselves and do extraordinary things. And these are examples of the continuing relevance of the gospel of selfless love.

Eucharistic Meal and Eucharistic Heart

Breaking through barriers (between God and humanity and between human beings, ourselves) is at the core of the Eucharistic meal. The scandal of the Eucharist in the early church was that those who were once considered "outsiders" were now included at the banquet. To break bread together is the ultimate sign of communio. It breaks through the alienation that is caused by exclusion or being rendered invisible.

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This is why Denis Estimon's outreach, "We dine together," is so powerful in the Eucharistic sense. It emerged out of his own pain and loneliness when he was on the margins of his environment in elementary school.
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Following the typical Eucharistic pattern, it was out of his pain that he developed empathy, and out of that empathy that he developed the compassion and sense of solidarity to break through the isolation and loneliness of others. He knew how they felt and he responded.
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If we don't understand anything else about what it means to have "a heart formed after the Eucharist," we should at least understand this.

In Silence: The Apostolate of the Ear

In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others, and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested.” (Pope Benedict XVI, May 20, 2012)

Tupac Shakur: Soul of African American Conflict and Survival

I just got back, a few hours ago, from watching “All Eyez on Me,” a movie about the life and death of Tupac Shakur. In many ways, the movie traces the struggles, conflicts, contradictions, and decline of the African American community from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s.

Shakur, in this movie, was a tragic hero whose background, which was a quintessentially American hybrid of Afrocentric nationalism and Shakespearean city theater, gave him a vision of what he should aspire to while also sowing the seeds of his destruction.

The struggle against oppression and the attempt to adhere to principle comes at a heavy cost, as both Tupac and his mother learned over the arc of their lives. Tupac’s rise to stardom occurred within the tension of one who sees himself as being someone who has the power to spark the rise of a liberating form of self-awareness and to raise the consciousness of African American communities, and, on the other hand, one who sees himself as being merely an entertainer whose primary goal is to sell more records.

In the 1992 movie “Juice”, Tupac played the role of "Bishop," who was a chilling sociopath. The image worked for him and he may have internalized the persona. Still, this image was at odds with the values that his mother tried to instill in him since childhood.

Tupac's struggle with becoming something that he wasn't, while claiming he was expressing what was inside of him all along, became a recurring theme. On some level, the sociopath character, Bishop, channeled Tupac's childhood anger and gave it a creative outlet. The internal struggle that was emerging is foreshadowed in "All Eyez on Me" when Tupac's stepfather says to him, “Sometimes people need to step out of who they are to realize what they can be.”

In the film, Shakur tried to rationalize his misogynist outlaw popular image, which boosted him to stardom, with his grounding in the mixture of the Gospel and Islamic sensibilities of African American culture and spirituality: a spirituality of suffering, redemption, and resilience. It is a spirituality of survival.

Again, and again, however, he found himself making deals with the devil in order to rise to the top of his game, and in order to survive, when the authorities and his contemporaries were trying to destroy him.

The influence he had on several generations of young black males came at the cost of the corruption of his ideals. He reconciled the conflict between his image and his ideas by saying, “You’ve got to enter into somebody’s world in order to lead them out of it.”

When he was finally sitting on top of the kingdom of rap, at such great cost to his core values, it wouldn’t be a surprise to discover that he was thinking, like Shakespeare’s Henry IV, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

Tupac is depicted in the film as a man with a message, although, at 25, with all of the seductions of self-indulgence at his fingertips, the messenger often lost his way.

Nonetheless, the importance of the message remained. During one scene in the movie a record company executive told him that his lyrics were too raw and that people just wanted to be entertained, Tupac replied, “Some people just want to be entertained; other people want a chance to speak. I’m reporting from the streets. I’m educating and keeping it real.”

The sample of hip hop from the early 1990s, especially from Tupac’s long-forgotten Digital Underground days, had me dancing in my seat. Funny how all of that comes back to you with irresistible force when you haven’t heard the music for 25 years.

The film, like Tupac’s life, touched base with locations that were significant for very different reasons and in very different ways, for African American culture in the ‘70s through the ‘90s: Harlem, Baltimore, The San Francisco Bay Area, Brooklyn, and Compton.

All Eyez on me captures the best and worst of the struggle for survival in African American communities. It also captured the hyper-materialist popular culture of the 1990s. Tupac grew up believing, with good reason, that the biggest threat to his survival came from forces beyond African American communities; by the end of the film, he realized that the community is often complicit in its own destruction.

This is not to say that the external threats weren't real. When Tupac’s mother realized that powerful people saw what an influence he had over young people, and perceived him as a threat, she pleaded with him to be careful: “They are going come after you with everything that you love. They are going to give you the tools that you need to destroy yourself.”

The movie presents an all-too-human story of the contradiction between the best and the worst that is inside of us.

Out of the Cave (a poem)

Out of the Cave
By C. Matthew Hawkins
Spring, 2017
Baltimore

Image Credit: WBaltTV

After what seemed like more than a lifetime
in dimly-lit rooms where the musty smell of unwashed clothes
and stale cigarette smoke still lingered in the air
something drew you to the door.

You stumbled through narrow hallways cluttered with empty soda bottles,
greasy boxes of half-eaten pizza, and large plastic bags filled with trash,
waiting to be emptied.

You bumped against smudged walls as you made your way to the door.
You reached for the knob and turned up your nose when you smelled the rotten wood.
The door gave a painful whine when you opened it.

***

Although the air outside was fresh you tensed, 

flexing the muscles in your arms, 

and tightening your fists into knots,

and scowling as you stared down the street, 

nursing fear concealed as anger.

You thought anger would protect you,

but it suddenly dropped away like an unreliable bodyguard.

All that was left was your fear. 

In that brief moment, you were exposed.

Light passed through the summer mist, which rose from the sidewalk after the rain.

The air was sweet.

All things were new again.

***

Sunlight cut across your eyes; 

You squinted with a pout, trying to turn away

but you could swear you caught a glimpse of the very figures of love, truth and freedom 

strolling through the haze.

You snapped your head back to where the figures were, but they are gone.

***

You shook your head to clear it of thoughts and feelings that could not be trusted.

The feeling was strange and new, yet it had shadowed you for years. 

Comfortably familiar, yet disturbingly unexpected, you searched for traces of the elusive figures

and you knew this search was reckless.

***

As reckless as kids on dirt bikes in city streets dodging in and out of traffic,
cutting across alleys strewn with broken glass and across vacant lots overgrown with weeds.

They scraped their knees and blood rose to the surface of wounds too fresh to form scabs.
If you had hung on for the ride no telling where you would have ended up.

You could not trust the feelings that drew you out of the cave.
You tried to retreat into the safety of darkness but stubborn fascination insisted on more than just a glimpse.

You heard the roar of an approaching dirt bike, almost inviting you to hop aboard,
but you wouldn’t even think of riding along because you could not afford to lose control.

Image Credit: 12 O' Clock Boys Film

You could not see the face of the rider, whose ragged, blood-stained bandanna covered everything below the eyes.

How could you trust that which was partially concealed?

Yet above the tattered bloody cloth that flapped in the breeze as he zipped past,
the rider’s piercing eyes looked you dead in the face, and in an instant, he was gone.

Burning, soul-piercing, youthful eyes older than all the centuries
peered beneath a scar across his sweat-soaked brown forehead
and he disappeared as suddenly as he came.

Image Credit: 12 O' Clock Boys Film

It didn’t matter where the feeling came from that drew you into the sunlight,
your impulse was to turn away.

The feeling that drew you out refused to explain itself or to give you answers to all of your questions.

It was a moment of encounter that refused to be confined by your logic.

Your tongue felt like sand against the roof of your mouth and it reminded you that you thirst.

Gradually it dawned on you:

Mystery is not your inability to know; it is your inability to exhaust your thirst for what had been revealed.

Even as you tried to turn away revelation tightened its grip, cutting through layer upon layer of encrusted belief that you had woven over the years to hide you from yourself.

Image Credit: Baltimore Police Department

A Reading of the Poem during a practice session: