Over the last month or so, I've been reflecting on the events that occurred forty years ago that were the beginning of the New Jerusalem Community. On a high school retreat, a group of boys attending a retreat led by a young Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, were touched deeply and powerfully. In their desire to continue with what they had experienced, they asked to continue meeting because they didn't want what had happened with them to end. So began regular Friday night gatherings for prayer and liturgy, growing ultimately into New Jerusalem.
As I shared with a group that gathered last month to commemorate the 40th anniversary of that retreat and the community's long history, I almost attended that weekend. My dad had told me to cancel whatever I had scheduled because I was going on this retreat. Following an argument with him (not uncommon for me back then), I was not going. For that, I've always been thankful since the great majority of those high school boys were from another local high school and I very possibly wouldn't have entered into those prayer meetings that followed.
I spent some of my high school years searching. Beginning at the very end of those turbulent 60's and the early 70's, I had several things that I'd experienced that led me on that search. In my freshman year, I'd been caught for the second year in a row drinking and was grounded for forty days (both years, my trouble occurred right before Lent, and logically, I'd get an extra ten days tacked on to fit the season!). To kill time, I'd walk home instead of taking the bus (a bit more than two miles). One of the days, crossing over Montgomery Road onto Miami Avenue, I asked myself what sort of person I wanted to be – one who needed to drink to be accepted or someone who wanted to make people laugh, to make them happy. I have no idea why the question came to me in that manner, but it did and I decided I wanted to be a different person.
A couple of other things came to me, really just coincidentally, but which impacted my life considerably. First, I routinely would have conversations with a man from our parish in Madeira, someone my parents' age, discussing the war in Vietnam. He at some point gave me a speech by then Fr. Phillip Berrigan speaking out against the war, along with another article by a Catholic pacifist named Gordon Zahn. They really struck me powerfully. Second, just by happen-chance, I turned on the TV one afternoon and caught the very end of a movie on Mahatma Gandhi depicting his assassination. In this movie, he says to the man who shot him, “I forgive you.” I was utterly blown away! As the credits rolled, they said the movie was based on “The Autobiography of Gandhi, My Search for Meaning.” The next day I went to the Madeira library and amazingly that branch actually had a copy of it. One thing that struck me was Gandhi recounting how moved he was by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which I decided to read. Of course, the only bible Catholic families had back then was the large “family bible” and then it was a mystery where to find anything, but I finally found it in the Gospel of Matthew (for those of you following along at home, it's Matthew 5:1-12). I read it and knew this was a formula for how to live my life.
Of course, as with all human endeavors, it's more easily said than done. As all of us do, I found quickly that I wasn't living the Beatitudes well at all. After the fight I had with my dad about the November retreat, I came to a Sunday when I just blew off Mass, hardly a radical thing at the time, but intent on trying to live this life of a peacemaker, it made me wonder how I could do that if I couldn't even give God one hour a week. I really thought about it during that entire week. My mom mentioned to me later in the week that another of the retreats was coming up, this one starting on a Sunday night and going through Tuesday. And even better, it turned out I had an assignment due on Monday and this would buy me more time, so I readily agreed to go this time. My best friend Gary came along as well, making it all the better.
On December 12th, 1971, the day after my 17th birthday, Gary & I walked into the TEC Center (“Teens Encounter Christ) in Mt. Airy and was greeted by an older priest (by older I mean probably someone ten years younger than I am today!) and a younger man who I assumed was a seminarian helping out the priest. In fact, he was the retreat director who introduced himself as “Fr. Rick.”
Late in the second day of the retreat, we had a penance service. Richard asked us to write our faults and sins on a piece of paper, which I did, although I was less than candid, concerned that we'd have to share them later. Richard read the gospel story of the prodigal son. As he preached on it, he talked about at the end, it was the father who went running to greet his wayward son, so elated that he had returned. In a basin, he lit a fire and then encouraged us to come forward with those scraps of paper and to put them into that fire and to watch how God's love consumed our sinfulness, our weakness, our brokenness. Needless to say, I added a thing or two to the list to be burned too.
Afterward Richard and some other priests would hear individual confessions. As it happened, a priest who taught at the girls high school near my own school where many of my friends attended) was one of them, so I sat down to talk with him. I remember just saying over and over, “it can't be that easy.” He assured me, it was. At the conclusion of the retreat, other folks who had made earlier retreats came back for the closing mass. They mentioned to Gary and me that these Friday night prayer meetings had begun and invited us to come. Gary and I hemmed and hawed for a month with the typical teenage “what do you want to do tonight?” sessions. “I don't know, what do you want to do,” but never got around to deciding to head down to check them out. In January, we both attended the closing mass for the next retreat. Talking with one of the guys who had been on our retreat, he mentioned the Friday night gatherings and said we ought to come down, sealing the deal; he mentioned that there were lots of girls that came to them. The following Friday, in subfreezing temperatures, Gary & I hitchhiked down to Northside and came to a prayer meeting at Rosie Kremm's house on a little side street of this working class neighborhood. Not sure what house it was, we were pleased that the house was well lit making it easy for us to find. Years later I mentioned this to Rosie, saying it was convenient for us that her house had a streetlight outside of it. She asked me what I was talking about because her house wasn't by the streetlight at all. To this day, I can still picture the brightness that shone on her house that cold winter night. It just absolutely glowed.
In 1999, I wrote an article for Radical Grace magazine prior to a handful of us traveling to Albuquerque to do a conference with Richard on community. I wrote about that night saying
That night, we prayed, sang and concluded with liturgy. Little did I know that I had begun a journey which would change my life. What I learned over time was that my faith wasn't a personal matter, it was something lived with other people. That ragtag group of teenagers, the “Friday Night Prayer Meeting,” became the New Jerusalem Community.”
I came to learn (and am still learning) what community could be for me. From a group of teenagers who “wasted time together,” I have come to know members of this community as well as my own family members.
Coming from seeing that I often fell short of trying to live as a follower of Jesus, of being a peacemaker in a world that desperately needed such, that in my brokenness, my failings, I could trust in a love that was absolutely unconditional, that runs across a field on my return embracing me, welcoming me home. Recounting this isn't to pine for “the best time of my life,” but rather to remember these great moments of grace which have propelled me through my life with this knowledge. With that has come a great journey with a tremendous group of folks all striving to live out this same grace, even in all of our similar brokenness. From this has come lifetime friendships of people who still are present in my life. Carol & I, having just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary this past October, marvel at how many of the same, good folks who joined with us then to witness our commitment to each other, have continued to love and support us throughout all of this. This life together, not just mine and Carol's, but all of our lives, gave us the ability to raise a family in this same milieu and to see others doing the same - these journeys of faith struggling to be God's presence for a world greatly in need. I don't know that I've improved much in being faithful to that vision, but I very much want to continue on this lifelong journey trying.
And so, on this morning, I continue to be grateful.
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