The “End” of Us?

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

how-to-unlock-cell-phone-1How many “end times” have there been in your simple lifetime or the lifetimes of those before you?  (Notice I used “you” twice in one sentence because that seems to be the “end time” these days.)  Our society begins and ends with the most important and unique snowflake to fall from the sky and inhabit our universe: you.

Tweet “you” to all those eagerly waiting to know whether you’re about to do something or ask for advice whether you should to do this something or something else.  The news of your day is whether that blouse, that TV show, whether to drop that dead-end boyfriend or to take a nap awakens the attention of those who follow you.  “Follow you” is the Tweet expression and I love it.  “Follow you” where ever you go and whatever you think and more importantly why are these people following you?

The car people still text at stop signs and I can still hear the 35 year old husband ask his wife on the cell phone whether it’s the large or small ketchup bottle that she wants (his life is half over and he can’t pick a bottle on his own!) while I think he’s talking to me because he’s so loud and he gives me a dirty look like I’m intruding on a moment between he and his wife.  (The new bedroom appears to be the grocery store.)

Waiting for my connecting flight is a hoot with my cigarette-friends and their phones front and center and squarely in their faces as though they’re solving mathematical equations.  Is it ISIS that concerns them at the moment?  Is it their bank balance that’s low?  The lowest part of me believes it’s killing time without engaging with the live persons in front of them.

Community engagement decreases these days including church, civic groups and neighborhood gatherings but volunteerism seems steady which impresses me.  A six year old grows up with both parents texting each other or someone else at supper time (that is, if there is still a family dinner).  A 90 year old triggered this insight to me that I was already thinking about.  (Isn’t aging great?)  She called it our culture’s “Tower of Babel” with a cacophony (I’ll use that word any time I can) of voices that leads to no one else except the sender or the speaker.

She called it our Tower of Babel, idolatry while at the same time claiming God as our Creator in every survey sent to you when the essence of your creation is squarely squared around you.  The cell phone, for all it beauty and power, like other inventions ends up being used for the basest of purposes.

Instant, important information can be gained by a quick tweet to a friend and a Skype can reduce the distance between two continents.  She also told me that she’s glad that she’s old because it is so sad to witness this happening.

It should be sad for her because the times have changed and there is no reason she should change with them.  Her glorious, growth times and eras are in the past and those enduring memories are crystal clear to her as they should be.  For someone who’s in her 90’s and with technology changing every three to six months, I’ll be joining her soon.

Technology brings so many special advantages to our world – connecting us in ways unknown before.  There’s been numerous other “end times” that did not end the way the end was meant to be but technology’s vision of connecting us has downgraded us into a daily use of projecting and promoting the “me” which for some reason I’m unable to do promote within myself.

I wanted to tell the “ketchup guy” to hang up the phone (which you can no longer do, by the way) and buy the large bottle and then let his wife complain about it when he got home.  That’s the way it was meant to be.  Those are the days that I remember.

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“Father’s Day,” With a Silent Blessing

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

UT8IIWLXlheXXagOFbXuFather’s Day.  It’s an added date because Mom had her day so it was bound to happen for dads.  “Grandparent’s Day” was not far behind and “Cousin’s Day” waits in the wings.

Dad.  Daddy.  Pop.  Pa.  The name doesn’t matter but the character does.  TV’s Dad depiction is the guy who just doesn’t get it with the family gathered around the dinner table; sometimes goofy or silly and slightly out of touch.  It’s a humorous twist to a real truth about Fatherhood.

“Absent father” is used to describe him whether he lives in the home or not.  The irony is that he needs to be an “absent” because he represents the outside world where home bound mother does not venture.  (Don’t get caught up in contemporary understanding because these psychological principles do not change.  Think “masculine” and “feminine” instead of male/female.)

Mother’s world will always be encapsulated by the four-walled place we call home.  Dad’s world is that unknown outside world that is gradually unveiled to growing children.  “We know what mom does but what does dad do all day?” is the unspoken question of a young person.  Mine rarely travelled behind twelve miles of our home but still represented that awesome risk to leave the home every morning and return tired in time for supper.  Mother is the known and Father is the unknown.

If Mother is grace as we hope she will always be then Father is wisdom as we hope he will always be.  At five years old I imagined he held awesome powers.  He became somewhat lame when I was a high school sophomore but after graduating from college he regained the adjective “awesome.”  Did he change?  I doubt it.

“Let your mother take care of that,” was my dad’s response to a domestic situation.  His life was “out there” somewhere which provided for our means.  (Put Mother in the workplace and you’ll still have the same dichotomy.)  The parental combination works because it envelopes the two worlds that we often have difficulty enveloping: our personal world and our place within the world.  To say it another way, Motherhood is a gift and Fatherhood is a task.  Both roles are important and both find it difficult to replace the other while remaining true.

When I began I meant to write it was meant as a prayer for “Father’s Day” as I did for “Mother’s Day” but it’s harder to write.  He’s been gone from me for many years but his one sentence responses to my life’s questions and his lingering cigar scents with a hint of “Old Spice” remind me always that there is a bigger world out there than I can ever comprehend.  I want to go the thirteenth mile because he showed me the first twelve.

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It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

Posted on June 6, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

The-bread-becomes-the-body-of-christ-through-transubstantiation-where-consecration-changes-the-substance-of-the-bread-but-not-the-appearance-Microsoft-Clip-ArtColonel Potter on “M.A.S.H.” gave a classic line that I’ve never forgotten, “If you aren’t where you are then you are no where.”  With that, the conversation between Hawkeye and him ended

So much of religion is concerned with preparing ourselves for some place we know nothing about, heaven.  Oh yes, we can speculate and postulate until we’re blue (or purple) but at the end of the book or lecture we are still left with this inevitable end to our lives and this “some place” of a destination that follows.  (Actually, loosely used, heaven is only after the second coming of Christ.  In the meantime graves are visited by family and friends twice a year to change the flowers.)

Unfortunately the unknown and vague destination provides excellent fodder for anyone, anywhere to say anything about heaven’s pathway and then pass a collection basket to compliment the speaker on speculating better than others have on something the speaker has no personal knowledge of yet spoke eloquently about.  (Is religion great or what?)

Focusing on the journey rather than the destination tasks us with more immediate concerns because the journey focuses on today and the day after the next.  This is where I have a degree of control and influence.  It is here that my life is lived and presumably pathed toward hopefully the upper half of my eternal resting place.  If we could only cease with destination talk and focus on journey themes then something exciting and life-giving certainly occurs.

Terrorists are promised a special place in eternal life for their misguided “sacrifices.”  I’m always surprised more Catholics don’t commit suicide because of the next life’s bliss.  (I guess making suicide a mortal sin delays our eternal delight so we just need to keep solidering along.)

How we constantly miss the point of the person in front of us baffles me.

The person in front of us in this life wishes for a listening ear, a genuine smile and attentive eyes.  We spare a moment and we listen.  We smile or grimace depending on the nature of the story.  We wish the person well and promise a remembrance in our prayers.  There is no reward nor no merit.  It is this journey, not that destination that is lived and celebrated during that brief moment and, by the way, every time we gather for the Eucharist.

The new Mass prayers of the Catholic Church has the word “merit” pop up a lot; way too much, if you ask me.  It is heresy, as I remember which places our deeds, prayers or actions to somehow cause that “unknown” place to someday be ours.

Nothing can get us to our final destination – earned or rewarded.  Heaven is not granted on a point system or number of hosts eaten or rosaries said. The Psalms tell us that “sacrifice and burnt offerings” is not what God wants but a “contrite heart.”  I think Catholics have a more difficult time with this thinking than other Christian religions because we somehow were taught that heaven is a place that is worked toward.  You work to earn the rewards of eternal life.  The destination can never be achieved because of our accumulative actions and deeds.  That’s why the old joke about those who ate meat on Fridays are now in hell is a senseless belief because that’s not the salvation Jesus won for us.

What we all do know, what we all cherish and what we all appreciate is this life that we’ve been graced with this day and hopefully for several more tomorrows.  What comes after, “Who really cares?”  Can’t we give God at least something to do?  After all, He is God!

I began with the fictional character Colonel Potter so I close with another fictional character, Jiminy Cricket,  “Be good for goodness sake.”

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“Lefty” and loving it

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

I think “Lefty” should be my nickname because it fits my politics and handwriting. The grade school nuns didn’t break me and those on the right only convince me more that left field is the best place to hit the ball.

What I’m left with is my right-handed bowling which I never understood but it just felt, well, right. Which brings to the last word, right. “You were right” is an affirmation we all like to hear as though “You were left” meant being wrong.  Jesus enjoys the rights of sitting not left of God and owning the copyright to that position. “No Child Left Behind” was a hopeful use of that hand even if it was created from the right to right the course of education.

When I left for work this morning, I happily made more left turns than right ones just to prove my point. What’s left of my little tale is my grandmother called me Linkshänder because my left hand never quite made it on those stupid right-handed grade school desks.

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“Passing Time,” Airport’s Two Hour Wait

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

phx jpg.ashxYou find yourself waiting and then waiting again for that time that is far ahead of you.  There is no past because the waiting is before you and it lingers in a timeless fashion even though it has a specific time.

You think ahead to the time that is not yet now and imagine where you will be seemingly forgetting where you are now. You are already at that place that that time has not reached.

I say there is no past but while waiting for what has not reached its time settles now for that “life review” that you’ve done each time countless times when you find yourself waiting for a time that has not yet arrived.  All those regrets, those re-dos that cannot be redone and those forgotten people whose names you suddenly remember now (but normally could not) in the midst of this slowly passing time which has not yet occurred.
You know that the arrival time will arrive and that those quick gazes at your watch doesn’t bring the time closer although you’re sure that it will. “Looking at the time often must make time move faster!” you say to yourself since science is not your major.

I’ll distract myself to make time move faster knowing that I’ve just divulged my hidden plot to myself. (So much for clandestine operations.)

When you know that time is time and each minute contains only what the previous minute showed as the present passing minute exhibits.

How do you pass time?  Is it looking toward what is yet to be or a backwards towards (can you even do a “backwards towards?”) that looking back at the past somehow changes the past and hurries the future?

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Life Forming Models

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

Minister_PriestSince childhood we’re told we’re a snowflake, each one unique.  (But doesn’t it melt away when it hits the ground?)  America was built on the John Wayne model of individualism but would you trust him if his real name was “Marion” which it was, so who do you trust?)

“Trust no one” is an unspoken mantra of mine until his foot hits the petal.  (“Dr. House” taught me that.)  Unique or not we are all “copycats” during life’s journey picking up a piece from that person, another piece from another while remembering to never keep a piece from that one.  Conscious or not we are always looking for models and mentors to bolster ourselves or at least make our job a little easier to perform.

I think back on my 35 years as a priest and remember the slick and the sly, the serious and the silly and I’ve accumulated a bit of this or that from each of them.  Were these bits already living within me?  I’m sure they were but their unwitting modeling to me, validated it.

There’s the quick witted guy who could quick wit me better and with a straight face.  I loved the dueling.  The one who could spontaneously pray through the whole Mass without a book still amazes me.  The radio priest who wanted to be in radio and met me who had been in radio and created a wonderful fourteen year radio experience.  (“Who’s teaching whom,” I sometimes wondered.)  After a brother’s suicide the silence was crisp with this mourning family of surviving seven.  He puts on the CD, “Graceland” and the grade school age kids start dancing trying to pass from the senseless death to their own future.  (Brilliant.)  My grade school pastor would take off his watch and place it on the pulpit and give his sermon which I never understood but then would stop and replace the watch on his wrist.  Whether he made his point or not, I and the listening congregation will never know but he was done talking.  (He must have believed in, “Time will tell.”)  There’s the confident one who never showed his confidence, it just clothed him in his kind or admonishing words, his stories or his own personal problems.  (I’m able to hear his voice during all my awkward situations.)  No fact goes unquestioned from this one because facts are the source of life which made me wonder why he joined a church of folks who love to wonder.

The list only grows with the more years that I do this priestly thing.  I like to think that I’m John Wayne but the Marion in me keeps looking for silly and serious models to make me a non-melting snowflake.

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Eight Hours

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

gallery_6214_546_29691“There they go, off to their two jobs leaving me alone for at least eight hours.  Why both of them need to work I don’t know.  I heard talk about a bigger TV but I think the TV they have is plenty big, it takes me two swings to pass it by.

I tell myself each morning to pace the water.  It’s eight hours and if they stop for groceries or a parent visit, it can easily grow to nine or ten.  Do they think I have two bladders?  I only have one and I try to pace it but this cheaper dog food doesn’t help much, I think it makes me more thirsty.  Cheaper dog food?  I wonder if that’s a part of the new TV scheme.

I like the eight hours alone.  I know where everything is but still like to know if the smell’s changed.  It hasn’t.  I heard talk about kids but none in sight, just as well with both of them working.  There’s that darn water again but I pause as if I can think which I can’t so I quickly lap up what’s provided for me.  Mmmmmm, tastes good but it’s only 1 o’clock.  I can hold it.  Have you ever tried to nap with a filling bladder?  I wouldn’t suggest it and the back door key is too high and being stuck with paws doesn’t help either.

Sitting and staring can kill a lot of time while I’m intently and diligently staring at nothing.  Maybe humans could learn from me, who knows.  I hear a car but it could be the neighbor’s car, they sound alike to me.  I consider one more lap of water but the release feels too risky.  My first week with them proved troublesome between their wish for me to wait and my wanting.  Of course they won and here we are; I mean here I am with these eight hours to kill before I get to yellow the green grass.

It was their car.  ‘Make sure your tail is pointed up,’ I remind myself as though greeting them is more important than relieving my number one.  (They’re fooled every time, by the way.)  We exchange seconds of pleasantries and I’m out and running and smelling and running and smelling until, yes – all those eight hours of holding finds a suitable place.  Number two is saved for special places that they’ve already found.  They scoop up my number twos for sanitary reasons.  Why number ones are ignored is beyond me.  There must be something toxic in the ones as well as the twos but scooping seems a problem for the ones.

Even though they’ve taken care of my reproductive rights (yea, rights?) my number one release I consider superior to the joy of the joys I will never know.   They went back inside but I don’t mind.  ‘Frolicking’ is now my time in their small back yard.  I run and run always avoiding my numbers one and two.  Ahhhh, that was wonderful.  I hurry to my door for reentry and sit in a waiting posture for what seems a long time but there is no response.  ‘Ummm, that’s weird,’ I think to myself.  They’ve missed me for eight hours and now I’m out here with them in there when only a few minutes ago those roles were reversed.

I think of putting on my adoring face but don’t have a mirror to check it. My tail is perky and the relief was unbelievable.  A quick bark will alert them that I’m still around but it seems to alert no one.  Are they assembling the new TV and forgot about me?  Three more barks to tell them that I’m empty, ready and anxious to begin another eight hours in their home.  Nothing.  If it’s not the TV then perhaps they’re creating the kid I was promised?   Now it is time for random and loud barks for any neighbor to hear who wishes to own a lovable, small blonde, cuddly dog who know the length of eight hours.  Nothing.  Then a swift opening and the mom holds the door for me in spite of my spirited tail and adoring face.

I made it back inside to the familiar people and smells that I’ve grown to love.  But, alas, there’s that darn bowl of water.  Oh well, what the heck.  I indulge.”

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“Surprise, Surprise!” Gomer Pyle and the Holy Spirit

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

Baptism-of-the-Holy-SpiritYou have been looking for that lost object for two weeks now.  You know that it’s around here somewhere.  You thought you left it over there but you’ve already checked “there” three times.

It’s got to be here somewhere.  Yet, while searching for that lost object (which is not really lost at all) you happen upon that thing that you’ve been also searching for but had forgotten about.  It’s that important thing that you needed sometime back then and now here it is in front of you when you were looking for this other important thing that you misplaced.  That’s called “serendipity.”  Serendipity is the unexpected resulting in something that is beneficial and good.

Welcome to the world of “serendipity.”  It’s a wonderful place because it’s full of wonder.  If nothing serendipitous has happened in your life then I’d say that you are wrong, you just missed it.  Try again.

If no mystery has surrounded and buried you in what looks like death but instead is new life then you just missed it.  Try to retrieve it.  Serendipity equals the Holy Spirit.

Our diocese had ordinations and the bishop wrote that the moment of ordination is in the imposition of the bishop’s and fellow priest’s hands on the candidate.  Isn’t it interesting that we can narrow and limit a divinely inspired sacrament?  That a sacrament can be reduced to a “moment,” as though it’s not really your birthday until the first “Happy Birthday” is sung?  That’s not the work of the Holy Spirit.

I think that you’re ordained when you stop giving cute and pious statements during Confession and truly “be” with the penitent as one’s heart is opened up to God’s mercy and forgiveness.  Or you are finally ordained when a parishioner stops you after Mass and tells you, “Father, I’m sorry but I have no idea what your sermon was about today.”  Now you are ordained.  The Eucharistic moment?  It is not my grandstanding of the elements but it is when you get out of bed on a Sunday morning to link yourself with a community of believers that form the Body of Christ.  Marriage?  I would suspect that its sacramental moment is better placed after the first argument when a couple realizes that another, separate and individual person in standing in front of them.  That moment is not found in the wedding rings.

This third person of the Trinity cannot be restricted to a “moment” but rather is a process with often a surprising end.  It is a process where our all of our senses are keenly tuned to what’s occurring within our hearts and the hearts of our community.  As best we can respond to those senses, we can begin to get a flavor of where the Spirit or something beneficial resides or is leading us.

The Catholic Church in its early wisdom recognized and acknowledged the Holy Spirit as closely united to God’s unfolding Kingdom.  The institutional Catholic Church, to its dismay, must also recognize and respond to this wonderful, wily and uncreated Person in its life and the lives of its believers; as this moment and in all moments.

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B.O.A.D.

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

question-markWe live in a world full of acronyms, clever little ditty’s intended to entice us by their singular bold letters that mean something and we need to guess what it is.  Just like meeting someone for the first time and our radar is in full motion.  I see D.A.R.E. on license plates every day and there’s M.A.D.D. which expresses both the name and the sentiment.  A.A.R.P. keeps asking me to join but once they became politically conservative the circular file found their materials. (Since I’m aging I can still think for myself!) D.O.A. we all know from TV and R.S.V.P. is for weddings but don’t ask anyone to spell it out.  (We’re still not sure about the French since they were the smart ones who stayed out of Iraq.)  Healthcare has A.D.L. which means you are no longer able to perform simple tasks when left alone.

I bored you with the first paragraph to introduce a new one and it even makes a pronounceable word which is helpful for its repetition.  It’s “Benefit Of A Doubt.”  We often surprise ourselves by the behavior of someone but is the surprise not in the person but in our judgment?  We seemed to have this person weighed and measured and, viola (another French word), we are surprised.  Surprise should actually be replaced with our narrowed definition of that person, “I thought that she was…” “He seemed to me to be…”  So there’s no surprise but only more insight that our sight failed to capture the first or second time.

It’s milliseconds in our appraisal of someone.  The way the hands shook, the lost eye contact, the low-cut dress, the wrinkled shirt or loose tie are all surveyed, stored and retrieved for the next time we meet.  It’s such a handy tool for us to keep people in this camp or that category.  Our simple minds become the proverbial filing cabinet which flips to our remembrance of someone and their now fixed personality.

That lazy single mother with two small kids turns out to have a second job with helpful neighbors to watch her toddlers.  That mean-spirited grouch from accounting suddenly dies and leaves a sizable gift to the charity that helped his son before his son died.  That little brat who stuttered and blinked too much in grade school became a priest (I couldn’t resist).

“Just when I had you figured out,” is the familiar line before the surprise is revealed when it was no surprise at all.  Whatever it was, it was there all the time.

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The “Mothers” Of All Inventions

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

the-word-mother-index2_01She was late. An important day for me and the Church. You’re only ordained once in a lifetime and she decides to take a walk around the block with a priest friend. They must have walked slowly. The choir was ready, everyone sat silently waiting for the 5 o’clock bells. She’s not in sight or standing next to my dad for the entrance procession. The retired bishop whispers,”Where’s the mother?” and priests shrugged their shoulders. Long minutes pass and she arrives telling me that they “got talking.” The opening song begins, they all stand, the ceremony begins and the task is accomplished, complete with prostration and oiled hands. It all worked out.

Mother. Doesn’t it always work out? Hardly, when you multiple biological mom with life’s other “moms” you’ve either created or learned. There’s the mom of the earth whose nature appears to have destined you toward a fixed purpose. There’s the mother of entitlement to take advantage of whatever society offers or is available to you. There’s life’s mother lode when all appears to others to fall together for you which only creates envy and jealous. There’s the self-nourishing mother you’ve earned only through many years of practice. There’s the mother you attempt to substitute for the biological one which now gives you someone to blame when you don’t get what you want.

Mothers surround our lives daily. Being able to recognize and name her each time may help and assist us in our journey of self-discovery.

She wasn’t late that day. Mother was present all the time. I just didn’t know which mother it was.

Books by Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS. All available on Amazon.com

“Soulful Muse,” inspirational reflections on the Catholic Church and U.S. culture
“Living Faith’s Mysteries,” inspirational reflections on the Christian seasons
of Advent/Christmas & Lent/Easter
“Spiritual Wonderings and Wanderings,”
inspirational reflections on the Catholic Church and U.S. culture

Newest books include:
“Letters From My Cats,”
a collection of letters written by my cats over twenty years
“Bowling Through Life’s Stages with a Christian perspective,”
Bowling as a metaphor for religion and growing up

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