Remembering Rhythms

I posted this on Amy Welborn's blog today after reading about her own struggle with her husband's recent unexpected death, but thought I'd re-post it.

Amy spoke of the following:

It is surreal and odd. Here one minute, gone the next, without a chance to say goodbye. Sunday’s experience did not really help in that regard for as fearful as I was, anticipating, when the moment came, without getting too specific, the line from the gospel flashed through my soul, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” I could not connect that experience with the smiling face in the pictures surrounding us and the voice still echoing in my ears and memory. And the fear was gone. But the dissonance remained. And does.

To use the old phrase: It does not compute.

There is a mystery, as I was telling Dorothy, and what I feel driven to do is not “understand” it, really. It is not even to “accept” it. It is something different, and I don’t get what that is - where that space is and what it looks like.

I am opening comments on this post, but with a specific purpose. If you have had similar experiences, or any experiences with loss and grieving that you would like to share, please do. It will be helpful to me and to others.

I have had three of these, as you say, strange deaths in my own life. They never get easy:

As a young man 2 fellow altar boy friends of mine died much to young. The first died at a summer camp. Friends had received a call from him just days before telling them how awful his camp experience was. Days later reports came back that he vomited in his sleep and choked to death. All kinds of stories followed and all of them speculative at best. Was he drunk, was he high, or just sick? His brother was devastated, his mother even worse.

It wasn't until a year later when a simple weekday mass was said in his memory that I began to feel any comfort. Mass was the rhythm in which I came to know James. We served mass reverently and easily knowing cold what we were supposed to do and our motions moved without much thought around them until the odd thing would happen. A friend tripped and fell into the aisle once. A large candle fell and hit a priest nearly burning him another time. We would react and then move back into reverence once the issue died down and probably we would laugh about it later over dinner. It was all about presence. Being present to one another without thought, with ease, with the rhythm of the mass parts--sometimes mundane, but mostly joyful.

I think much of our lives are indeed like that. And even when those lives are taken unexpectedly, disrupting that rhythm, it is the rhythms in which we knew them that keeps them in relationship to us, praying with us, living with us. It is a different experience for us Eucharistic people who need the tangible and visible sometimes to make sense of the mystical. But the mystical is no less present even without those "accidents". These rhythms to me are indeed communion, and they are always revealing God to us in some way--the God who always lurks where we least expect to find Him.

The last of these strange deaths was my college roommate, who was always a sick young man and who many of us expected that he would die young. He had a heart condition and even had a defibrillator attached to his heart our senior year. That machine gave him and extra 3 years or so. He had been doing so well and so, when he told us that he was simply having his defibrillator replaced we all relaxed and thought it was rather routine.

Surgery is often tough to recover from and in this one, Dave, my friend, just didn't have the fight. Without any warning one of our other roommates called and gave me the news straight. Dave was dead. I beat up a studio pretty good that day at the radio station--angry wasn't the word for the emotion that poured out of me--it was more like frustration. I hadn't had the chance to say goodbye. I didn't feel like it was his time yet--although I knew it probably wasn't far off. His parents lost their only child and had given their very lives over to his care for over 25 years and now he was just...gone. Unfair. Even the dog was upset at it.

But what happened next reminded me a lot of this friend, who was possibly the most unselfish person I had ever met. Everyone rallied around each other that week. We made sure people stuck together, got the things done that needed to be done. We shopped for Dave's family and made sure people had rides to all the week's events. We laughed a lot (he was a stand up comic), cried a lot and prayed together. In short, we lived very full days noticing all the small stuff. It was how Dave, full of illness and pain for most of his life, lived each day and taught us how to live. Dave often healed broken relationships between people by simply making fun of how ridiculous arguments could be--so even now, one of us often plays that role when others are fighting or simply acting stupid.

Timing, rhythm, the adding up of time shared, it is often is like a dance and that all gets lost when the music abruptly stops. But the best dancers don't even need to hear the music. They know the rhythm intimately --and for me it has been remembering the rhythms of the shared experiences where I find that we all almost always find comfort and where we will always dance with joy.

RIP Michael Dubriel

Please keep Amy Welborn in your prayers. Her husband and Catholic author Michael Dubriel collapsed this morning at the gym and died needless to say quite suddenly.

Our Sunday Visitor adds more about Michael:

Mike had left Our Sunday Visitor last April to go to work for his long-time friend, Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, Alabama. In my encounters with Mike after he left, he seemed enthusiastic about the work in the diocese. He was responsible for several areas of concern, and the challenges appeared to energize him.
Mike was always a hard worker. He was also a prolific and gifted author.
Among his titles for Our Sunday Visitor were
· The Church’s Most Powerful Novenas
· The How-To Book of the Mass, Expanded
· How to Get More out of the Mass
· How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist
· A Pocket Guide to Confession
· A Pocket Guide to the Mass
· Praying in the Presence of Our Lord with Fulton J. Sheen
· Praying the Rosary

The titles reveal his deep concern for the fundamental practices of the faith by Catholics. He sensed a great pastoral need in this area, and he had a gift for deepening the appreciation of ordinary Catholics for the encounters with Christ that occurred in Mass, during the Eucharist, in Confession.

I didn't know Mike Dubriel personally, only by reputation. Amy and I have shared the occasional email but have never met in person. I know of their deep love for one another, for the church, and for their children most of all. He was clearly a great dad who was revered by his family.

Eternal Rest Grant Unto him O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the soul of Michael Dubriel and all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.

Sad Time for Legionaries of Christ

The Legionaries of Christ are having themselves a week they'd soon like to forget. It has long been rumored that their founder Marcial Maciel was in fact accused of several accusations including the following with a hat tip to the Life after Regnum Christi blog:

* Maciel fathered a child who is now in her early 20's;

* Maciel offered some money illicitly to his own family;

* The current head, Alvaro Corcuera, entertaining his own suspicions, demanded that the case be reopened several years ago;

* Maciel had numerous accusations against him for paedophilia, beginning with his earliest recruits (none of whome were ever ordained);

* Early companions of Maciel recount several affairs with women with details reaching back to the 1950's;

* Maciel has been accused of extensive drug problems;


* The rank and file were recruited for their connexions, money, and sincere zeal for souls.

In short, oh brother. Amy Welborn who is always fair in her judgments of such matters has an excellent take on most of the proceedings.

Serious problems have surfaced in relationship to the group, both present and past. Financial questions. Questions of formation. There is much, much to be concerned about, concerns voiced by many observers and several bishops, most notably Archbishop O’Brien of Baltimore, who stepped in and requested complete transparency from LC and RC regarding their apostolates in his see last year.

We should note, in retelling this story, that the charges against Maciel apparently had no traction at the Vatican, for whatever reason, until Benedict XVI became Pope. In May, 2006, Maciel was ordered to retire to a life of prayer and penance. Here is the text of the communique, which was intermidably parsed here and other places, but whose meaning is hard to escape.

There are, indeed, good people associated with LC and RC - many of us reading this blog know them. They need our prayers and great strength - the strength that any and all of us need when we have been deceived in the name of God.

That said, the book on this affair will be long and complex. Torturous, in fact. There will undoubtedly need to be several volumes.

The news coming out now is sketchy and incomplete. The word is that the leadership is admitting that Maciel fathered at least one child, perhaps two. Some sources are saying that the leadership is admitting the veracity of the previous accusations, as well, but that is fuzzy to me at this point. Over the past few days, various parties and groups have been informed of this. After the question of the accusations against Maciel himself, the huge question waiting to be unraveled, but extraordinarily difficult to do because of the group’s obsession with secrecy, is the awareness of the LC leadership of all of this over the years.

The third question is that if the leadership is admitting the truth of the bulk of the many accusations against Maciel…will the victims, long vilified by the movement and its defenders…receive an apology?

Indeed that is my question as well. If the founder is guilty --and it looks like he obviously is--then what does that mean not only to his legacy but to the future of the order? As Welborn also notes above this is a blight on the Papacy of John Paul II as well as it seems that he or at the very least, his senior aides, didn't believe that the accusations could be true.

Much was made of the Legion's "secrecy pledge" that they required of faculty at Atlanta's Donnellan School which led to many staff firings and resignations. Coercion and outright hostility towards perceived enemies seemingly has followed the Legion wherever it goes.

However, Welborn makes a good point when she says:

What is the appeal of Regnum Christi and its apostolates in the United States? The appeal may be negative in some ways, but those I have met who have been drawn to it are thirsting for solid faith content. They know that their children live in a challenging world and have no confidence in what passes for catechesis in the parish or even in many Catholic schools to equip them for that world. They do not see these programs or liturgies seriously oriented toward bringing those participating into a deep, committed relationship with Christ.

So something substantive appears…it appeals.

But this problem is also systemic in its very nature. We leave religious education in most parishes in the hands of willing volunteeers, without much (or any) proper training or assurance that they know even the basic tenets of the faith at all. (My 5th grade CCD teacher didn't know how to look up a bible verse!). We also give parents little training in passing along the faith and with Generation X parents we need to give them a remedial Catechetical course so that they have some sense of a tradition to pass on because in many cases nothing was transmitted to them in terms of faith information at all.

But what of the more traditional orders who teach the basics well but perhaps act somewhat judgmental towards others, cover up their own sins to make them seem above the fray and often simply seem to be unstable or unhealthy? And what of the other extreme? Where almost nothing in tradition is transmitted, everyone's sins are often minimized and while care for the poor is often espoused as a central element of the faith not much connection to Jesus, much less Catholicism is often coupled to it?

It strikes me that a more centrist view is needed. Community AND contemplation, a vertical relationship between us and God needs to be joined with a horizontal relationship with the community. Traditional devotions like the rosary and eucharistic adoration need to be coupled with discernment so as to ask greater questions:

What do these devotions empower you to do? What does your knowledge of Catholic tradition mean for you in your everyday life? How will you live now knowing Jesus more intimately?

It seems to me that this is what the good men and women who have dedicated their lives in religious profession do well. They come from all walks of life. There are great members of the Legion but also great Jesuits, Paulists and Redemptorists. Great women exist in Opus Dei who bring others to Christ and great women in the Sisters of St. Joseph. Diocesan officials who have healed marriages and educated children well and other officials who have let marriages fail and children go uneducated too. All have different approaches to be sure, but in all these various "faith journeys" individuals have cared for souls in great ways.

Unfortunately, we have the best and worst in all our traditions--just like everywhere else. It is up to our own judgments to seek the best of our tradition and to associate ourselves with what seems healthy, true and Christ-like.

We've all had good and bad math teachers, co-workers and Presidents. Why should our religion be any different.

Prayers today for all good religious educators, The Legion and the victims of abuse who have suffered for so long. And for all of us who try to bring people closer to God.