Since we are travellers and pilgrims in the world, let us ever ponder on the end of the road, that is of our life, for the end of our roadway is our home (St Columban, 8th sermon).
I first wrote this post in October 2008 and used it again in 2011 under the title Lala and Queen Elizabeth II. I have re-posted it a number of times, with variations, because Lala's story is one that should be told over and over again. This year I am re-posting what I posted three years ago, with a couple of updates on ages. Today Lala is celebrating another birthday. No doubt, the occasion is being marked at Punla, Ang Arko, where Lala lives, the only L'Arche community in the Philippines, in Cainta, Rizal, part of the metropolitan sprawl of Manila.
The Pope's Universal Prayer Intention for September 2014 was:That the mentally disabled may receive the love and help they need for a dignified life. The truth is that persons with mental or learning disabilities can teach the rest of us about the dignity of life, as the photo above of Lala helping Jordan with his meal shows.
Let us show our service to the poor, then, with renewed ardour in our hearts, seeking out above all any abandoned people, since they are given to us as lords and patrons. (St Vincent de Paul, used in the Office of Readings for his feast day, today.)
St Vincent de Paul,(24 April 1581 - 27 September 1660)
Both Lala and Queen Elizabeth II have have two birthdays, the real one and the official one. Lala’s official birthday is 27 September, the feast day of St Vincent de Paul, and she turns 45 today. Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday is celebrated in 53 Commonwealth countries, but not on the same date. Only the Falkland Islands observes her official birthday on her real one, 21 April. In the United Kingdom the Queen’s official birthday can be on the first, second or third Saturday in June. She turned 95 on her most recent birthday.
While there’s no confusion about the date of birth of Queen Elizabeth, there is about that of Lala. The young Princess Elizabeth was born in a palace in London. Lala was found shortly after birth in a trashcan in Cebu City in the central Philippines. Those who found her took her to the Asilo De La Milagrosa, the orphanage of the Daughters of Charity there. The Sisters noticed that the little girl had Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) and took her in and raised her. Since they didn’t know who her parents were they had to choose a name for her.
The Sisters chose 'Vicente' as her family name, in honour of St Vincent de Paul, and 'Louella' as her Christian name, in honour of St Louise de Marillac. The two saints founded the Daughters of Charity in France in 1633. Lala, as all her friends know her, probably has something else in common with St Louise. She was almost certainly born out of wedlock, as the saint was, and, like St Louise, never knew her mother. I suspect that Lala’s mother, probably very young and unmarried, panicked – her panic possibly added to when she saw that her daughter wasn’t 'normal' - and left her baby where someone could find her and take care of her.
And the Sisters made the feast of St Vincent de Paul, 27 September, Lala's official birthday.
St Louise de Marillac (15 August 1591 - 15 March 1660) [Wikipedia]
I first met Lala in Cebu in 1992 at a Faith and Light celebration. We had just begun a community there, after a retreat given by the co-founder of the movement, Jean Vanier, a Canadian layman, in Holy Family Retreat House, Cebu City, in October 1991. During the retreat he gave a public talk in the auditorium of St Theresa’s College, as I recall, and a group of interested people got together after that. The gathering at which Lala was present included members of Faith and Light from Manila who had come to tell us more about the movement.
I could see immediately that Lala had a special gift: she’s a natural 'ice-breaker'. Though she seldom says anything, she lights up any group into which she comes, unless she’s in a bad mood, which happens from time to time.
Lala became a member of our Faith and Light community in Cebu but I lost contact with her when I went to Lianga, Surigao del Sur, in 1993 as parish priest and to Manila the following year to become vocation director of the Columbans. But one day when I visited the L’Arche community in Cainta, Rizal, known as 'Ang Arko', I was surprised to see Lala there. L’Arche, the French for 'The Ark' as in Noah’s Ark, was founded by Jean Vanier, in 1964 when he invited two men with learning disabilities, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, who had been living in an institution, to join him in a small cottage he had bought and was renovating in the town of Trosly-Breuil, France. Jean had no intention of founding anything, but he realized very quickly that he had made a commitment to these two men. One of them, I forget which, chose to live independently some years later, something he could never have done had he stayed in the institution and not met Jean. Out of these small beginnings has grown an international movement of about 130 residential communities where those with learning disabilities are enabled to live in a family-type situation and to develop their abilities to the greatest extent possible.
Jordan and Raymon, another young man, were welcomed by Ang Arko when they were very young. Both have physical as well as learning disabilities. Others have also been welcomed down the years. The original house was in Manila but the community moved later to Cainta.
Lala and Hachiko, each looking more content than the other!
Sadly, this beautiful dog died not long afterwards, choking on a chicken bone.
In Holy Week 2001 I attended the international pilgrimage of Faith and Light to Lourdes as chaplain to the group from the Philippines. Lala was one of the twelve or so Filipinos.
The Easter Vigil was celebrated in the underground basilica. Some of the Old Testament Vigil readings were dramatized. During the account of creation when the words God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him were read, a spotlight shone on a young man in a wheelchair. But what moved me most was when Lala was part of a group dramatizing the reading of the Exodus.
I simply marveled at the fact that a young woman who should never have been born, according to the 'wisdom' of so many, left after birth among garbage, was on the other side of the world helping to proclaim the Word of God to thousands of people, many like herself, and doing so with the joy that permeates her soul.
Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Canada, in Toronto in 2010[Wikipedia]
Ever since I was a small child I've just loved the scarlet jackets of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the 'Mounties'. I used to draw Mounties with crayons but never developed into an El Greco or a Van Gogh!
Queen Elizabeth has been blessed by God with a long and healthy life, in which she continues to serve her people with dignity. Though Queen Elizabeth is among the richest people in the world, Lala, also with her two birthdays, enjoys even greater riches, because the words of Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, have been revealed in her life: 'God has lifted up the lowly'.
Behold, the
wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are
crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the
ears of the Lord of hosts (James 5:4; Second Reading).
Readings(Jerusalem Bible: Australia,
England & Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland)
GospelMark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48(English Standard Version
Anglicised: India)
John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in
your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not
following us.”But Jesus said, “Do not stop
him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterwards
to speak evil of me.For the one who is not against us is for us.For truly, I say to you, whoever gives
you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose
his reward.
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in
me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round
his neck and he were thrown into the sea.And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it
off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go
to hell, to the unquenchable fire.
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in
me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round
his neck and he were thrown into the sea.And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it
off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go
to hell, to the unquenchable fire.
“And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better
for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be
thrown into hell,‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not
quenched.’”
In August
1982, after a year’s study in Toronto and before three months of Clinical
Pastoral Education in Minneapolis, I supplied in a number of parishes for short
periods in the Diocese of Boise, which covers the whole of the state of Idaho
in the western USA. One of my purposes for this was to visit the Abbey of Our Lady of the
Holy Trinity, Huntsville, Utah, where I had spent ten days or so in
August 1970. There I had met some of the monks who were to be part of the community that would open the first Trappist foundation in the Philippines, in Guimaras
island, now Our Lady of the Philippines Trappist Monastery.
I spent a
week in one parish where the parish priest was from India, there were
reservations of two different Indigenous American tribes, many
Spanish-speaking immigrants working on farms in the area. The majority of the
people in the town proper were Mormons. The local newspaper carried
photos of young Mormons from the area going on mission to other countries.
Just after lunch one day the doorbell rang. A young
woman asked me to go to the hospital where an old woman, a Catholic and a
relative of hers, had been in a coma for a long time, and was dying. I
immediately went to the hospital and, to my surprise, the patient was fully
awake and participated joyfully in the Last Sacraments, including Holy Communion, as
I had brought the Blessed Sacrament with me. I learned later that she died
about twenty minutes after I left.
The young woman who had asked me to go to the
hospital was a Mormon. I was able to thank her later.
When I was a child we lived in a street of terraced
houses in Dublin where no one had a telephone. One time one of our neighbours,
Jem Norris, got gravely ill in the middle of the night. Charlie Brooks who
lived across the street went for the priest, whose house was about a kilometre
away. (The Norris house is the one on the far left above. Ours was the one on the right.)
Charlie was a Protestant.
I have posted in Sunday Reflections before
about a Mass in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany, shortly after it was
liberated in 1945. The account, published in 2004 in The Daily Telegraph (London) but no longer online, is by James Molyneaux (1920 -2015), then a young officer in the Royal Air Force and later
leader of the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. He wrote:
The most
moving experience came on the second morning as I was walking from what had
been the luxury SS barracks which our troops had transformed into a hospital.
My attention was drawn to two packing cases covered by a worn red curtain. A
young Polish priest was clinging to this makeshift altar with one hand, while
celebrating Mass. Between his feet lay the body of another priest who probably
died during the night. No one had had the energy to move the body.
I had no difficulty in following the old Latin
Mass, having been educated at St James's Roman Catholic School in County
Antrim, and, although an Anglican, I had gained a working knowledge of all the
rituals. Still supporting himself against the altar, the young priest did his
best to distribute the consecrated elements [Holy Communion]. Some recipients were able to stumble over
the rough, scrubby heathland. Others crawled forward to receive the tokens [Sacred
Hosts, the Body of Christ] and then crawled back to share them with
others unable to move. Some almost certainly passed on to another - probably
better - world before sunset. Whatever one's race or religion one can only be uplifted
and impressed by that truly remarkable proof of the ultimate triumph of good
over evil.
When I first
read this article I was deeply moved in a number of ways. I was surprised to
discover that the author had gone to a Catholic school in a community where, at
least since the latter 1800s, there has been a deep divide between Catholics
and Protestants, for historical reasons that are not entirely theological. But
here was an Anglican from that background giving a powerful testimony to the
Mass as the Holy Sacrifice. And he noticed how those who were barely able to
crawl shared the Body of Christ with those who couldn't move at all.
I find in the three stories above an illustration
of the response of Jesus to the complaint of St John, Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we
tried to stop him, because he was not following us.Jesus says,For the one who is not against us is for us.For truly, I say to you, whoever gives
you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose
his reward.
St John's complaint reflects that of Joshua to Moses in the First Reading. the response of Jesus reflects that of
Moses: Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29).
Memorial Stone, Bergen
Near the ramps where prisoners for Belsen were unloaded from goods [freight] trains. [Wikimedia]
James Molyneaux's article also illustrates the reality of hell that Jesus
speaks about today. He writes:
On arrival at Tactical Headquarters,
we had been briefed on the discovery of the Belsen prison camp nearby. In
company with our RAF medical unit and the two 2nd Army Field hospitals, we wasted
no time. Briefed though we were, the shock excelled all the horrors of the
battles of the 12 months since Normandy.
As we passed through the camp gates,
the Royal Military Police requested us to drive very slowly to avoid the
numerous disoriented prisoners. We were handed adhesive tape to put over the
vehicle horns in order to prevent them going off accidentally, lest the shock
would cause still more deaths. [This
little detail is surely telling.]
The British liberators were staggered
and shocked by the inhuman behaviour of some of the former guards, who
continued to abuse and torment prisoners nearing death when they assumed we
were looking the other way. I confess that on such occasions I may have
breached the Geneva Convention to prevent further ill treatment of helpless
victims. Their behaviour after we had arrived contradicted the excuse that the
SS had forced them to carry out orders. Our new orders to them were ‘Stop
acting like savages’.
The 'Thousand Year Reich' of Hitler
was in ruins after twelve years, and millions dead all over the world. These
deaths, like countless deaths since, were caused by persons who chose evil over
good. Each choice we make for sin is not at the level of choosing the evil of
Belsen but it moves us towards that. Other dictators have tried their hand at
their own version of Hitler's distorted vision and people have gone along with
them.
Each of us likes to have power. We
may not be conscious of this and in many instances there's no sin at all. I
remember once seeing in a Catholic magazine a
cartoon of people assembled for Mass where you were asked to
'spot the errors'. One was the proverbial 'little old lady' kneeling in the
middle of a pew instead of blocking it at one end. There are times, especially
as I grow older, when I can see the 'little old lady' in myself, trying to
subtly ensure that things are done my way. Indeed, in the parish in Idaho where
that kind young Mormon woman asked me to go to the dying elderly woman, the
housekeeper asked me what time I'd like to have dinner at each day. I told her
- but she always served it thirty minutes earlier.
But if I am a spouse, a parent, a
teacher, a boss, a priest who doesn't listen to the other, who rules my little
domain with a heavy hand, the words of Jesus are directed at me.
What is the 'hand', the 'foot', the
'eye' that causes me to sin, especially in the use of power?
Antiphona ad Communionem
Communion antiphon Cf Pas 118[119]:49-50
Memento etiam verbi tui servo tuo, Domine,
Remember your word to your servant, O Lord,
in quo mihi spem dedisti,
in which you have given me hope.
haec me consolata est in humilitate mea,
This is my comfort when I am brought low.
Choir of St Benedict's Monastery, São Paulo, Brazil
Traditional LaCtin Mass (TLM)
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The Complete Mass in Latin and English is here. (Adjust the date at the top of that page to 9-26-2021 if necessary).
Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.
September
Song
Singer:
Ella Fitzgerald; pianist: Paul Smith
Lyrics
by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill
Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are
strong (Psalm 90 [89]:10, Grail translation).
Abortion is more than
a problem, abortion is a murder. Abortion... without mincing words:
whoever has an abortion, kills. Take any book on embryology, from those
who study students at Faculties of Medicine and see that, in the third week of
pregnancy – in the third week, and often before the mother is aware of it – the
fetus already has all the organs; all, even the DNA. And wouldn't it
be a person? It's a human life… period! And this human life must be
respected. This principle is so clear… To those who cannot understand it, I would ask two questions: Is it
fair to kill a human life to solve a problem? Scientifically, it's a human
life. Second question: Is it fair to hire a hit man to solve a problem?
The first sentence above in the original Italian
reads:
Il problema
dell’aborto. L’aborto è più di un problema, l’aborto è un omicidio.
The Italian word omicidio means both ‘murder’ and ‘homicide’, the latter a legal
term used in some English-using jurisdictions.
120. Since everything is interrelated, concern
for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of
abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other
vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail
to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates
difficulties? ‘If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the
new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society
also wither away’.
2271 Since the first century the Church has affirmed the
moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and
remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either
as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.
The Catechism deals with the question of abortion from No 2270 to No 2275.
Healing for persons affected by abortion
Rachel's Vineyard
Rachel’s Vineyard is a healing
ministry to persons affected by abortion, women and men. It offers healing weekend
retreats in many places. It is a Catholic initiative but open to persons of all
faiths or of none who are seeking healing in this area.
I have been involved in some of the retreats in Ireland and know how powerful they are.
These
weekends offer a supportive, confidential, and emotionally safe environment
where women and men can express, release and reconcile painful post-abortion
emotions and begin the process of restoration, renewal and healing.
Married
couples, mothers, fathers, grand-parents, and anyone affected by abortion have
come to Rachel’s Vineyard in search of peace and inner healing.
The
weekend is a lot of work, but those who are willing to journey through their
grief, will experience the power of resurrection in their own lives. They will
find meaning in what has happened, and allow God to transform the experience
into something that gives hope, liberation and peace.
Rachel's
Vineyard retreats are held at private locations.