Bagless For A Night

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

Airport-AirStream-Rolling-Camera-Bag-4It happens to someone else until it happens to you and then it takes on your life.  Due to flight circumstances my bag beat me to Milwaukee while I was still in Florida.  (Couldn’t I have traveled in the bag section?!)

An extra night added to my vacation would be the envy of anyone after making three phone calls to alert those tending to my duties back home.  “This will be fun,” I think to myself since the choice was not mine.  I now need to find a “room at the inn” stuck in my Milwaukee clothes in sunny, balmy Florida.  More that I paid before, I found a room that a New York couple would have loved including a living room (which is not necessary for my 20 hours and being single.)

“This will be fun,” as I remember my swim trunks are en route to cold Milwaukee and I’m on a lounger in Milwaukee’s warmests.  (I think I may start a new fashion of wearing pants at the pool.  “Next season they’ll all be doing it.”)  “I need to take my pill” after my shower which is not happening and I’m thinking that dying in Florida sounds better at my funeral than dying in Milwaukee’s February cold.  “I’ll grab my comb…oh, that’s right” as I remind myself of all the stuff that I stuffed in the suitcase.  The resort gave me a toothbrush with the paste already in between the bristles which I thought was ingenuous and invented by a bagless person whose experience was like mine.

After my shower, I wondered what I was to wear that night for supper until my wondering dwindled into the same Milwaukee stuff that I should be now wearing in there.  I smile and wonder how long it takes to smell to infected clothing.  “I’ll recharge my phone and be off,” until another smile appears realizing my phone charger and me are separated.  (Is there a worst scenario?)  The front desk comes to my rescue with my plug-in need.

The next morning arrives with me looking for my bag which I remember is where I am not but hope to return to soon.  (That’s an awkward sentence for anyone who hasn’t travel.)  It is just me in my sweaty Milwaukee clothes waiting to arrive in that cold climate prepared with the only clothes I have.

Checking out I thank the good folks for giving me one of their last rooms and remember Lent’s desert experience for Jesus, 40 days of it.  Granted Florida and loaded with credit cards does not make me a martyr but a slight taste of Lent in this contemporary day may be the best I can hope for.

Bag and me were reunited the next day.  I guess, at a stretch, that could be considered Easter?

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Modeling & Our Models

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

haxpv7kfA passing thought of mine with a particular cadence to it caused me to wonder where I got it.  I remembered Tommy Lee Jones saying it in a movie that I recently saw.  I used his inflection in a thought about something.

Wow.  That’s weird because you see I live in the United States where every person creates his/her own destiny and becomes the person that he/she personally designs without help or assistance from anyone.

We mimic and duplicate others whether we are conscious of it or not.  If it’s a John Wayne phrase for oldsters or a Bruce Willis comment for mid-oldsters or a guy I’ve never heard of for those under 30; we simply like to copy.  It may be their confidence that we’re after or the caution in their voice or someone’s behavioral mannerisms that stays with us at the end of the film and into some unknown tomorrow.

For priests of my generation it was Fr. Bing who solved personal problems in the person’s house and only if the person had a handy piano for Fr. Bing to sing the person’s problem away.  For even older priests it was Fr. Barry Fitzgerald who dotingly ran his parish church – safe and unchallenging and dying.

Young parents swear that they’ll never say something to their children that their parents said to them as they blurt it out one morning and then recall its origin.  “It was just so easy, it just came out,” the parent thinks, “I don’t know where it came from!”

Talk about modeling.  My mother was all enveloping and my father was a sealed envelope.  One couldn’t say enough and the other keep his postage due but their phrases and mannerisms creep up on me at different times.  My remembrance of them through words and gestures is heartening for me.  It’s the Fr. Bing’s lines that make me pause and wonder who I’ve become.

 

 

 

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My Funeral Music

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

oak_harp03I’d like a single harpist, preferably a woman wearing a white dress playing “Show Me The Way To Go Home” (Oldie) or “How Can I Be Sure” (The Young Rascals.)

I know she needs to lug that thing into the church but I could have asked a tuba player.  A diminutive friend of mine wanted the title song from “Rocky” played at his funeral as though eternal life can buff you up for that rousing song.

Something about a harp.  Soothing, mellow and alluring.  Why not have those things at my death when I did not exhibit them during my life?  Harpo Marx balanced his comedic antics by playing the harp and everyone watching sighed as the harp’s beauty melded with his comedy.

She could play other songs to justify her carrying that thing and her stipend but as an Opening Song for me, I’m all for it.

Funerals are unusual times for the all the years I’ve had them.  Too many flowers means it’s too late to show affection.  Long-winded eulogies tend to shut down listeners because that spaghetti story from 1957 is only enjoyed by eight of the sixty folks present.  (40 minutes is my eulogy record; she showed me her single-spaced 10 pages and I thought an intermission was in order for a quick smoke.)

Grandchildren crying at your funeral is real plus.  It will always amaze me that two generations down are so moved by this person’s passing.  I guess that is until they realize what her exaggerated worth was truly worth.  I joke here but it is heartening to hear a grandchild talk about what a witness her grandmother was to her in strength, perseverance and affection.  Even when a 58 year old son can’t get through his dad’s eulogy make my eyes water up.

Sometimes we wait too long to express our deep feelings for another person.  I’m told  often that women do it better than their opposites.  The opposites feel it but show it more often in their eyes, humor or a tender smile.

Sons about their dads is the most moving when I hear them.  Daughters about their strong moms is ditto but even stronger considering the multiple cultures their moms had to live through.

The quiet children are of course the most difficult to read.  Their mom is 93 with Alzheimer’s disease and the shock of her death surprises them.  So, I’m surprised by their surprised.  If they’re Catholic their input for readings from The Book meant to influence all of our lives is nil.  (The Catholic Church taught them subtly not to read the Bible and it’s probably one of the few rules they’ve faithfully followed, “I’ll choose the reading for you,” I chime in to their saved-looking smiles.)

A funeral is cultural and it’s mimicking – “Why don’t we have a DVD of our dad?”  “I was at a funeral where they….” (fill in the blank).  A polka Mass funeral was the most fun.  Why not?  He loved polka music and the Mass was filled with 3/4 tunes that lifted us all up.  “You Are My Sunshine” was sung a copula at the beginning of one funeral and it set the tone for the entire service.  I was told that she just loved that song.

One harp.  Let someone help her carry it to the church to play one of the two suggested songs for my funeral.  I can only hope that I’ve carried someone through something toward something new in my priestly service.

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“A Spatula for Jesus”

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

thIt was kept in her kitchen drawer so I could easily grab my wooden prop when visiting my grandmother on the many days my mother would say to me, “Go do something!”

She’d begin her nap and hoping not to be nabbed, my pretend quiz show would begin in her back bedroom.  I wonder now if she wondered while falling to sleep if psychiatric help was available for me in our small town.

This was my time facing her two empty walls but my imaginary full audience.  Holding the spatula firmly in my 11 year old hand I was all those I tried to imitate – Don Pardo, Jack Kennedy, Gene Rayburn, Johnny Olsen how many others a young mind absorbs.  It was my glorious sixty minutes while snoring was faintly heard down the hall and a promised braunschweiger sandwich when she awoke.

My stuttering stopped, my poise increased, my delivery was clear and clever as I delivered a message of hope and joy in front of the congregation surrounded by stained glass windows where my grandmother’s one window once was.  I think she’s still napping down the hall while I’m still holding a wooden spatula provided to me by my grandmother.

Often after Mass I still wait for the braunschweiger sandwich.  It was pretending to be all those people in my grandmother’s home and now it’s providential pretending to be who I’m called to be in front of you.

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First Sunday of Lent

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

thAn older adult will never, ever begin a sentence with, “if memory serves me correctly.”  Just don’t hear it.  Because they know better.

What I hear is, “It happened in 1946 or was it 1947?  It was either 1:00 a.m. or 1:00 p.m.”  And then in the middle of this unfolding story, I’ll hear, “Wait!  It was 1946 because that was the year that…” and a completely new story is told while the first story dangles waiting for a conclusion.  We finally reach the end of the second story and there’s silence looking at me as though I’m the problem until I say, “But what about the first story?”  “Oh, yeah,” you’ll say, “it was 1946.”

And so it goes.  “If memory serves me correctly…”

God has a memory we learn today.  He’s decided to destroy the world and start all over again.  He’s decided to flood those living and replace them with new blood.  His memory has reached its limit and it was time to create a new memory.

God REacted.  God did not act.  God overreacts and destroys the world much like the United States REacted after September 11 with our invasion of Iraq.  We REacted instead of acting.  Both us and God were impulsive and we’ve both paid the price.

God apologizes to us.  (Did you ever think you’d hear a sentence like that?  God apologizing?)

Instead of telephoning us or sending us a $2.25 Hallmark card to make amends, God paints us a rainbow in the sky; a clear, visible sign to show us that hope is worth hoping for, that trust is earned and then utilized and that strength comes from our inner beings – not through any outside REactive force.  A rainbow.  A simple rainbow to illustrate the binding covenant provided to us by God.

He tells us, “When I bring clouds over the earth, and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will recall the covenant I have made between me and you and all living beings, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all moral beings.”

It seems that even God’s memory has played tricks on him.  Were those living beings as bad as God thought or did God exaggerate their misdeeds and misplaced values.  God gives us a rainbow so that He doesn’t forget and He gives us a rainbow so that we and He will always remember.

God REacts in the flood but then ACTS in the birth of His Son.  God paused for quite a long period of time by remembering the past and then thinking of the future by sending His only Son.

God’s covenant is now the bedrock of our Christian faith, the cornerstone from which all religious beliefs flow.  It is a rainbow of trust, an apology with an eye toward a future filled with hope, joy and peace.

Can we do any less?  Lent is a wonderful time for forgetting the misdeeds of the past and looking forward to God’s promised Kingdom.  In Confession, after offering up their sins, many people say that old phrase that concludes a confession, “and forgiveness for all the sins of my past life.”  It is said as though those sins were never forgiven, those sins are not forgotten, those sins continuing to live and breath within you.

It’s over.  Your past sins are forgiven, the beauty of the sacrament propels to today and to tomorrow. We are forgiven people.

God’s given us a covenant of love, His Son.  God’s given us a commitment to be with us through all times of life.  God may have forgotten about the flood episode but he still remembers it and possibly even regrets it.

What can we forget about but still remember?  What covenant can we hold onto in a faithful trust represented by a simple rainbow after a rain?  There is only one covenant that I know of.

I can remember it as best I can…because “if memory serves me correctly…”

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“How To Tie A Bow Tie”

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

thI found a cheap bow tie online and thought it’d be cool to wear one.  They seem to be coming back into style so why should I be left behind wearing those hanging things.

I remember bow tie wearers from the past including John Daly, host of “What’s My Line,” and Bud Collier, host of “The Price is Right,” also but not trying to imitate Louis Farrakhan and Pee Wee Herman.

The long piece arrived and I thought I’d arrived.  “Distinctive, elegant, the talk of the town” was my destiny until that long thing just laid on the kitchen counter.  “Can’t be that difficult,” I say to myself remembering Louis and Pee Wee.  My neck size is shown on the back with a hook presumably to tighten it into place.  Wrong.

Being savvy in my search to retrieve the olden days I go to the new avenue for all solutions including the meaning of life: YouTube.

You cannot imagine how many videos are available for those who wish to create something pretty from a long string.  I watched several, including how to make a bow tie but since I’m already a proud owner I ignored them.  I find one where the guy exhibits slowly and clearly how this is done which I appreciated from my older age and attempts to redeem a past treasure.  “It’s easy,” he begins which makes me weary since I couldn’t even tighten up my neck size.

This calls for a bathroom visit to fully appreciate and absorb this lost craft.  I’m standing in my bathroom with my iPad showing the YouTube’s “easy bow tie making” video and duplicating his moves in my mirror realizing all the time that the mirror is the opposite of what I’m feeling around my neck.

“This is the hard part,” he says four steps further than I am watching myself in the mirror and thankful that I have a cocktail nearby.

It was a very attractive piece of string that I hoped to wear tomorrow.  It lays back now on the kitchen counter wondering to myself if a Goodwill recipient will have better luck at assembly.

I resign my bow-less tie-tieing to the resignation that I am able to write a beautiful funeral sermon for someone I’ve never met in 20 minutes, a Sunday sermon that leaves folks thinking about in 25 minutes.  (One extra cigarette for the Sunday sermons.)  I can listen and enjoy a story from an 80 year old that I’ve heard before and sincerely welcome a new employee wondering if this job is right for her or not.  I am able to small talk and banter about sports which I care nothing about and feel the joy when someone decides that it’s time for a change or celebrate a long time employee who enjoys his work.

My string will hang again tomorrow because I just can’t get the mystery of the string with multiple winds around a neck size that does not tighten.  John and Bud got it and I remember them for that.

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Being Fired: “The Car Crash”

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

You wake up in the morning as you have every morning for the past 24 months and prepare for another day at the job you’ve grown to appreciate and love.  Your fellow employees are easy to get to know and you found your way around the company’s unique language and managerial styles.  (I never heard of “dashboards” or “parking lot” until one meeting and I still don’t know what they’re talking about but it seems very serious.)

Well, how about company’s acronyms like ADC, SNF and ADL’s?

Driving to work you take your time because traffic on this road has a reputation.  Swerve here and pause there is your daily mantra during this 12 mile drive.  Five things roam around your mind that need to be accomplished today while driving.  You smile to yourself because four of them are a cinch and the fifth will take a simple phone call.  You’ve been charged to lead the meetings of seasoned employees who look at you with a doubt in their eyes but you’ve prepared for them and get to the business of those dashboards and parking lots on your large screen TV Excel sheet.  (So many colors and listed items, I wish I was in one of those parking lots right about now.)

You pull into the parking lot (it’s an actual parking lot) and proceed to remove your coat and grab a cup of coffee that you were told in orientation is free for employees.  “It’s a nice perk,” you’ve said to yourself every day for the past two years.

“That meeting’s been cancelled,” your co-worker tells you passing by, “but the director wants to see you.”  “Great,” you reply wondering which dashboard is no longer to be a dashboard.

Smiling, you enter his office and exchange the pleasantries of the day and the pending weather changes.  You’re not married so there are no children to include in this introductory conversation.  He tells you, “It’s just business and that nothing personal should be taken away from this conversation.”  You wonder if that statement was meant for him or for you.  Your car’s just been crashed so you withhold an opinion until the evening and a somber glass of wine.

Blaming questions about yourself follow, all of them dismissed by him.  His eyes look down which in a murder trial would be a deadly sign of guilt but now it’s just the three of you; yourself, your director and your free cup of coffee.  On reflection you remember there’s a fourth presence – those five items that need to be accomplished today.  You recall the company’s philosophy of “excellence and accomplishments” from the slick video and those four energetic speakers during your orientation day.

The driver side of your car has just been hit by some guy.  The airbag wants to expand but that would mean tears which you refuse to release in front of him.  The news on the car radio continues to play as if life continues which, indeed, it has not.  The time of shock of the car’s impact doesn’t match the time on your ticking watch.  His words caused your driver’s door dent which may have totaled your car but you will not know until an estimate is made.

He says it’s effective “right now” and you find it amusing holding half a cup of coffee and wondering who will do those five things that drove you out of bed and into your car and safely to the parking lot (the real one) that morning and will this final half cup of coffee be deducted from your final paycheck?  He extends his hand to you and you wonder if this suave is sincere or if he can quickly end this and receive his next appointment.  You lift yourself out of your damaged driver’s seat wondering where you found the strength.

You smile back to him with the one taught to you in kindergarten that thanked the teacher for showing you that “a” stands for apple but today “a” stands for another word you will say to yourself often walking to your damaged car in the parking lot (the real one).

24 months did not accumulate too much so the box you carry is light but your mind is heavy with the “What if….” questions that contain no answers.  You drive from the parking lot (the real one) and carefully proceed back home, 7 1/2 hours subtracted from the expected day.  A small part of you is eternally happy that he did not say, “This hurts me more than it does you.”  (Thankfully, guns are not allowed in the building.)  The impact of your driver door dent increases and the pain of separating yourself from the other car slowly increases.   Before the imaginary police arrive you think to yourself, “Who will do those five things that I needed to do today and have them done in “excellence and accomplishment?”

There’s got to be a better way… in “excellence and accomplishment.”

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Lent: Season of Grace

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

The 40 days of Lent begin this Sunday.  For 40 long days we are not allowed to say the “a” word.  I wish I could tell you what the “a” word is but then I would tell you what I’m not supposed to say for 40 days.  (Whispering, But I can tell you that it begins with the letter “a.”)

God has partly abandoned us by denying our use of the “a” word before the reading of the gospel.  So, we sing a filler refrain that we’d rather not use but have no choice in the matter.

While denying the singing of the “a” word, God has bolstered the use of another beautiful word, the “g” word.  Grace.

Lent is a season of grace.  If Advent prepares us for grace then Lent delivers the goods – wholly and completely.  For me, the “g” word is more beautiful and powerful than the “a” word.  “A” word just announces but “g” is a commodity, the real stuff.

Grace is a product, invisible agreed but still a real product.  Picture a card game where faithful people wager a bet with “raising you three graces to your two.”  I’d say to myself, “That guy’s got a good hand to risk those graces.”  (If only the Church could sell grace then we’d be all set.  Oh, wait.  The Church did try but called it “indulgences” and it back fired because you can’t sell what someone already possess.)

You don’t think that grace is a product?  Just listen to two of our prayers.  I tell you each morning that the “grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you” and you all dutifully respond to me in the urban slang, “And back to you, bro!”  We say that Mary is “full of grace” when that it is not even true.  Mary was not “full of grace,” she was grace – from her pregnancy to holding her dead son.

The Trinity is grace and from our baptism has blessed us with all the grace that we need to get through this journey of life.  That’s right!  We already have all the grace we need.  We just tend to forget, ignore or deny this grace filled product we call grace.  Lent is the opportunity to renew and return to the grace filled people that God created us to be.

That’s my other problem with how we use grace.  We keep adding letters to an already perfect word.  We add the letters “filled” and “full” as if to make more important what is already of utmost importance.  It is simply and powerfully “grace.”  You don’t need to make it “graceful.”  That’s like saying “most unique” which drives my fingernails down the chalkboard or “awesome movie” when an Israeli and Palestinian union would be a more fitting time to use that word.

We are already full of it, this beautiful word that we can say everyday, year round.  It is the word and product and power given to us at baptism that is never totally spent or exhausted.  It is grace.  Remember, it’s the “a” word that’s on hold for 40 days.

God’s grace to us and our grace to each other and to ourselves knows no season.  The season of Lent is reserved to renew and return us to who God wants us to be.

May you have a grace filled, no, I mean a graced Lent.

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The Lost Belly Button

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Rev. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.

A&EIn a outpatient medical procedure my friend will lose the most physical connection to his mother.  (Where’s Freud when he’s needed?)

It’s aptly named because we know exactly where it resides above our belts and on our bellies.  “Femur” doesn’t provide a clue about its location.  The belly button is the necessary nourishment that brought us into life and after birth it represents the first of many cuts throughout life – like leaving home after college, that second mortgage request, the short (2 years) return home after the divorce, babysitting the kids while he starts dating again and the yearly “Mother’s Day” cards which could have been the same card each year, “You’re the One, Mom!”

How many cuts can a mother have with her child?  Depends on the mother and depends on the child.  (Just watch the movie “Terms of Endearment” or “Mother Dearest” and you’ll understand.)

Truly a relationship second to none is the one between mother and child.  She is gravity (Mother Earth) and every other occupation she assumes for the benefit of her child.  Psychologists say that a mother can never leave her child, it is the child who needs to leave the mother in order to become an individual, an adult.

The belly button served its purpose at birth and its present purpose of collecting lint.  What is left now is motherly memories.  Isn’t that what lint is, bits and pieces of life gathered together in the most intimate and united of ways.  The belly button.  We all have one.  Adam didn’t have one and on Thursday my friend will lose his.

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Life Is Not That Difficult

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

WSProdLG_ZENITH AM-FM RADIOCirca 1969, AM radio: my first real job spinning records on a Saturday night as a high school junior like I’m home but instead entertaining Manitowoc, Wisconsin.  Dream job, mistakes and all.

Sometimes there would be callers with comments like, “I don’t like the music you’re playing.”  I would then need to guide them through this carefully constructed, sequential process that I share with you now.

“I’m sorry to hear you say that.  Are you in front of the radio right now?  Good.  Do you see two dials in front of the radio.  There should be one on the right and there should be one on the left.  Do you see them?  Very good.  We’re on a roll here, you’re doing very well.  Now…I want you to look at the dial on the left, only the left.  Please do not look at the dial on the right.  Are you with me on this?  Good, very good.  We can take a break whenever you’d like, if you need one.  You’re okay?  Okay, good.  Now I want you to carefully move your hand to the left dial and place it firmly on it.  Would you do that for me please?  Great.  You’re doing great.  Now…slowly turn the left dial toward the left – yes, left and left – funny how that works.  Slowly turn the left dial toward the left, which is away from you.  Keep doing this until you hear a click.  Take your time, there’s no hurry.  You’re doing fine.  Did you hear the click?  That’s great.  Wonderful.  I think our problem is solved and thanks for calling WOMT radio.”

I resumed playing the 1969 hits which I still hear today and wonder if he’s okay.

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