Ashes…yucch!

By Debbie Shannon, Center Coordinator – St. Peter’s

I have never really enjoyed wearing ashes on Ash Wednesday, and so, it came as quite a surprise when a group of students began to beg Fr. Anthony to add an early morning Mass to the schedule for today.  Students DO NOT like early morning anything!  Why wouldn’t they prefer the 6pm Mass?  According to them, they like to get their ashes early so they can wear them all day.

I just didn’t get it.  Anyone who knows me, and plenty of the students will chuckle at this, knows that a dirty Debbie is almost an oxymoron.  Mrs. Debbie does not do dirty anything. The primary task I was given when I first arrived on the job at St. Peter’s was to ‘clean it up!’

Nonetheless, every year, I choose to begin my Lenten journey by receiving ashes at Mass on Ash Wednesday.  I know it is not a holy day of obligation and I could avoid the messy issue by not participating, but I get in line with everyone else and receive the mark. While some of our students may love touting their Catholic look on our primarily protestant Baylor campus as an opportunity to open dialogue, (Did you know you have something black all over your forehead?), I self-consciously endure the looks and comments as the opening to a season of sacrifice, self-denial and penance.

Over the years, as my faith has matured, I have learned to recognize it as a very good opportunity for some serious reflection.  Here are a few gems that Ash Wednesday has made me ponder in years past.  I am sure God will provide a wonderful new image for me this year as well.

• Can I wear ashes as a fraternal connection with my impoverished brothers around the world who have no option but to live in filth today.
• What if my sins “showed”?  What if each one created a visible stain on my skin?
• Why am I so self-conscious about looking funny, different or even “Catholic”?
• I have always envisioned that John the Baptist must have been a mess! And yet, people flocked to hear his message. Can I trust that God’s light shining through me will eclipse my own weak and shabby image?

St. Peter’s Catholic Student Center will indeed have an early morning Mass with distribution of ashes at 7am on Ash Wednesday this year.  We will also have one at 6pm.  (There will NOT be the usual 12:15pm Mass and lunch fellowship.)

The Great, Belated Intro Post

by Katherine

It might be a bit of an exaggeration to call myself the world’s worst procrastinator, so I’ll spare you the melodrama—I actually run a close second. When I was hired at St. Peter’s, I told Mama Debs that I’d do an introductory post about myself for the blog. But then I got the flu the first week of school. I spent the second week recovering, and the third scrambling to catch up on school work. By this time, of course, writing a blog post had officially Gotten Away From Me, and was therefore mentally categorized as Not a Priority. Eventually, the idea that I “should probably write some kind of intro post or something” drifted through my mind, but as a pro-procrastinator, thoughts like these are typically shot on sight.

So time passed, and a kind of guilt began to steal over me. I had to admit that I couldn’t put the blog off forever. I would write an intro post! I had to! And so I tried. And I deleted. And I tried again. It’s not like I was required to write the Great American Novel or something—I was just supposed to tell who I am and what I do for St. Peter’s. But, as I slowly came to realize, writing a blog post isn’t easy. I began to feel anxious. It had already been delayed so long; wouldn’t a post this late just be awkward? But eventually Mama D intervened. She insisted that I write an introductory post and gave me a deadline, which I promptly missed.

But here I go. Let me (finally) introduce myself.

Hi there. My name is Katherine, and I’m Ms. Debbie’s new student worker. I help with St. Peter’s website, Facebook page, blog (hahaha!), and other various projects that need an extra hand. I’m a “senior” at Baylor, meaning I won’t be graduating for two more years, and I’m studying studio art with a concentration in printmaking. (If you aren’t sure what printmaking is, ask me! I’ll try to explain it and you still won’t know what it is.)

It’s always a little intimidating to start a new job and get involved with a new community, but St. Peter’s has been so great. You guys are incredibly welcoming and sweet and encouraging. I have always wanted to get more involved with the St. Peter’s community, but I wasn’t sure where to begin. Around Christmastime I saw that the center was looking for an assistant, and after praying about it, I submitted my application, thinking, “If I don’t get it, it’s not where God wants me to be.” But here I am, and I can only hope that by being here I can learn something from all of you, and be at least somewhat useful in the meantime. I look forward to meeting all of you, and I hope you’ll be patient with me as I get the hang of things. I promise that one day, I’ll even stop being a procrastinator.

Just not today.

Week of February 19-25

St. Peter’s Weekly Schedule
Feb. 19 -  25, 2012

Visit www.baylorcatholic.org for more information

Monday, Feb. 20

• 5:30 p.m. Communion Service
• 7:00 p.m. Theology of the Body

Tuesday, Feb. 21

• 7:00 a.m. 30 minutes with Jesus
• 7:30 a.m. Morning Prayer
• 3:15 p.m. Chaplet of Divine Mercy
• 6:00 p.m. “Heaven’s Song” Study Group
• 5:30 p.m. Daily Mass
• 7:00 p.m. RCIA

Wednesday, Feb. 22

• 7:00 a.m. Ash Wednesday Mass
• 6:00 p.m. Ash Wednesday Mass
• 7:00 p.m. “Credo” Apologetics Class

Thursday, Feb. 23

• 7:00 a.m. 30 Minutes With Jesus
• 7:30 a.m. Morning Prayer
• 5:30 p.m. Mass
• 6:30 p.m. “Women at the Well” Faith-Sharing Group
• 7:00 p.m. Bible Study

Friday, Feb. 24

• 12:15 p.m. Mass

Thoughts from BaylorCatholic Alum, Elizabeth George on Austin Catholic New Media regarding the scandalous performance of Nicki Minaj at the Grammys.  Good points, Elizabeth.  Write on!

http://www.austincnm.com/index.php/2012/02/nicki-minaj-a-grammy-performance-sacrilege/

I Love You – I Affirm that You are Good

By Fr. Anthony Odiong

The closest the Christian Scriptures come to defining God is in the first Letter of St. John, (1 John 4:8) when it states that “God is love.”  This same passage recommends that we “… love one another, since love is from God.” (1 John 4:7)

We love to love and to be loved.  We were created to love, and out of love.  It is the ability to love that perhaps best expresses the ‘imago dei’ in us.  Our ability to go out of ourselves to delight in a thing or a person for their own sake brings us very close to God.

Ask a child what love is and that child will blow you a kiss – an innocent, sacramental definition of love – way different from the confusion between love and sex in our erotic and ‘feel good’ age today.

According to Josef Pieper, love is the affirmation of the goodness in being.  It is a way of turning to a person or thing and saying, “It is good that you exist; it is good that you are in this world.” It is in this sense that Caritas (Agape) has called many saints to devote themselves to working for the wretched of the earth because they are also good.  Did Love itself not come down to earth in Christ to affirm that we were so good and worth dying for?

It is always a surprise when someone responds to you in a profound way, or when you find yourself drawn to a thing.  However, the love of a person and a thing are quite different.  The abuse of love is when we do not distinguish between the love one has for a glass of sweet tea, for instance, and the love one has for a person.

When we love anything, we want to unite with it, to appropriate the good in the other.  If it is a thing, an object I delight in, there will not be much of an issue.  When it is a person, a thinking subject, it introduces a whole new set of questions.

When a person is good for me, it suggests that I have a superabundant response to that person – a response in mind and heart that will ultimately lead to or imply a union of bodies.  This is what a Christian marriage is all about. Only in this context is the superabundant response of a man to a woman consecrated.

Love, properly so called in the Christian sense, is selflessly seeking after the well-being of another.  True love has to be essentially selfless.  It is this selfless seeking after the other’s well-being that results in happiness.  Much of the unhappiness today is as a result of wanting always for me.

As Christians we are called in Christ to love all persons because we hope to share a common bliss.  The call to love is mandatory because in the evening of our lives “we will be judged on the law of love.”

Podcast: 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

To download click here.

Sunday’s homily was given by visiting priest Fr. Andrew Gawrych on the topic of vocations. Read on for a short bio of Fr. Drew.

Fr. Andrew Gawrych, C.S.C., joined the Office of Vocations staff [of Holy Cross, a religious community in Notre Dame, IN] in 2010 after serving as deacon and then parochial vicar at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Goodyear, Ariz. Born in Michigan and raised in Kansas, Fr. Drew earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government and International Relations from the University of Notre Dame in 2002. Following graduation, he joined the Congregation of Holy Cross, and in 2007 was awarded a Master of Divinity degree from the University prior to his ordination to the priesthood in 2008. In addition to his vocation ministry, Fr. Andrew has written several books on Holy Cross spirituality. He currently lives in residence at Moreau Seminary.

[Bio. and photograph taken from: http://vocation.nd.edu/contact/meet-the-vocation-team/]

Week of February 13-17

St. Peter’s Weekly Schedule
Feb. 13 -  17, 2012

Visit www.baylorcatholic.org for more information

Monday, Feb. 13

• 5:30 p.m. Communion Service
• 7:00 p.m. Theology of the Body

Tuesday, Feb. 14

• 7:00 a.m. 30 minutes with Jesus
• 7:30 a.m. Morning Prayer
• 5:30 p.m. Daily Mass
• 7:00 p.m. RCIA

Wednesday, Feb. 15

• 12:15 p.m. Mass, followed by Lunch & Fellowship
• 7:00 p.m. The Rock – Dina Dwyer Owens

Thursday, Feb. 16

• 7:00 a.m. 30 Minutes With Jesus
• 7:30 a.m. Morning Prayer
• 5:30 p.m. Mass
• 6:30 p.m. “Women at the Well”
• 7:00 p.m. Bible Study

Friday, Feb. 17

• 12:15 p.m. Mass

Podcast: 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

To download click here.

 

A Good Day

Have a very good day, Friends!

The Old and the New

Written by Fr. Anthony Odiong

I visit with young people on a day to day basis.  Many of them struggle with questions about faith.  They wonder why they must believe in anything, let alone a God.  Faith in God, for them, is that which belongs in antiquity and is no longer necessary.  My take on this is that they desire that which is truly true, if I may put it that way.  That which is novel appeals to them, much more than that which seems to be antiquated.

To one young man recently, I responded in the following fashion:

There is an old truth, or let’s call it, the “Old Myth” in the words of Thomas Howard.  The myth states that men, women, the stars, acorns and angels were all operating in their different modes under the sovereignty of the whole pattern, called The Dance; as though we were all moving solemnly and joyously in a measure, finding our true freedom in the steps appointed to us. The Old Myth defined everything as belonging together and giving meaning to each other.

However, the “New Myth” is the root of a lot of discontent today, resulting in a cosmic disharmony, a disruption of the Dance – the symphony of existence. The New Myth reduces justice, truth and transcendence to common idea, and common place invention, and religion to a fancy club.  In this new dispensation, there is no sense of sacramentality; man is alienated from reality, he is alone and very unhappy.  There is no totally other – no concept of a loving God.  The New Myth has resulted in a hermeneutic of suspicion.  Everything is questioned and human life is at the level of base matter.

To all my young friends, the issue here is not the Old or the New, the issue here in contention is truth – the kind that brings peace and a feeling of home. The Old Myth is what St. Augustine once called “Beauty ever ancient and ever new.”  What you desire is the beauty that saves.  We find it in the eyes of love, sometimes in the elegance of poetry, but always in the transcendent faith that tells us that we were meant to be here.

I encourage you to pay attention to the Old Myth, to listen to the symphony that plays eternally.  Find your steps in the dance.  Believe in yourself.  Believe in the God who lovingly willed you into existence.  Make sense of everything.