One of my friends, an ex-Roman Catholic now Orthodox priest, complained to me about the devotion to the Sacred Heart. He saw it on the corkboard in my Real Estate office-where I had pinned it after my conversion. He called it"gross" - - that is -the heart of a man -Jesus- outside of His body and on fire.
One day the now Orthodox priest gave me all of his holy cards from his ordination as a Jesuit Catholic Priest. All were pictures of "The Sacred Heart". On them were his name and the date that he was ordained. As a Catholic priest he lived and worked in Japan in the sixties. He called the Holy Cards a gift to me but perhaps more of a purgation of this "gross" devotion from his past Priestly life.
I had never considered the devotion as "gross". It had always been a part of my life as a child. Even after I left the Church on a long hiatus...I would find a picture of Sacred Heart of Jesus at an Estate Sale and would buy it because it would remind me of the spooky figure over the bed in my grandparents house. Jesus with His heart aflame and His index finger pointing at it as if to draw attention to the Fiery Heart. This was familiar. It was a part of my roots. It reminded me of the devotion that my grandparents had to the Church, and I wondered why I just didn't have that same draw to the Church that they had.
In the summer of that same year, my husband and I took our kids on a train trip to Colorado.
One of our side trips was to Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, Colorado. My grandmother (maternal) was always invoking Mother Cabrini when she needed a parking place in the front of wherever she was going. (She was always late.) This time I was an adult...meaning this pilgrimage was mine, and it was more curiosity than devotion that led me to the steps of the hill. When I looked up from the bottom I felt a magnetic draw to climb the steps...so we did. We read each sign not realizing that we were praying the Stations of the Cross, as we climbed to the top of the hill I struggled to breathe in the thin mountain air.
At the very top was a gigantic statue of the Sacred Heart and no sooner had we set foot at the plateau than fierce lightening began to break and hiss and snap at us above the head of the statue of Jesus.
At my paternal grandfather's funeral...a sunny cloudless day quickly ended when the sky began to snarl with lightning bolts just the same way it did when I went to the top of that Hill.
We had decided as a family that the gates of heaven had open and shut long enough to allow my grandfather entrance, who always wore a Scapuler. Twenty five years later, I see both incidents as a moment in time that the heart aflame was calling me to come home...a hard fought battle with a soul nearly dead. In my own arrogance, I had failed to understand the condition of my soul, thinking after all I was such a "good" spiritual person.
Beneath the statue of the Sacred Heart at Cabrini Shrine was a pile of rocks shaped into the Sacred Heart that had been arranged lovingly by Mother Cabrini herself.
Rushing back down to the bottom of the hill and very thirsty, I ran for the water that was dripping plentifully from the well that Mother Cabrini had located shortly after she was given this shrine/orphanage's worthless piece of ground. (It was considered worthless because there was NO water to be found anywhere).
Nearby was a plaque which explained the devotion to the Sacred Heart and Mother Cabrini's prayer for "priests"- even after reading it, I still did not understand.
Upon our return home, I began to attend Mass again in the wee morning hours. The Parish Priest was just a "silly little man". His presence annoyed me causing me to hope each morning that the cooler priest would be saying Mass but the "silly little man" and his "silly little homilies" would lie in wait for me "interfering" in my spiritual journey.
Believing myself to be far more clever than the priest, I decided that I would go to confession to him for the first time in ten years, and tell him what an idiot I thought he was. So I made an appointment and showed up at his office and began my confession by saying,"Bless me Father I have sinned I can't STAND you."
Silence.
Suddenly like uncontrolled vomit I began to confess ten years of the worst kinds of sins...and ending with the words, "Can you forgive me for how I feel about you?"
After he gave me absolution he said, "If I couldn't I would be a fake."
It was at that point I had found myself speechless with nothing clever or retaliatory to say. I thanked him, and promptly left.
I continued to go to Mass, soon my heart began to soften toward him, (The "not a fake comment" wormed its way into my heart...)
Soon, at the same priest's prompting, my son Will, was baptised. This boy really didn't "get" Church. Despite my efforts to iron a nice suit and tie for the young lad, I often found his clothes on the floor and his Batman cape and cowl over his head for the rest of Mass. My son used to call it "transforming" at Mass.
Every morning until he was seven years old he went to morning Mass with me, "transforming" every morning no matter how certain I was that he had no time to sneak anything underneath his clothes that resembled a superhero costume.
My son is twenty years old now. He has transformed into a superhero (at least in our eyes). He is now Lance Corporal Will Moebest and will be soon deployed to some far away place with 1st Marine Division.
He didn't ask if I thought it was okay for him to sign up. Its seems his inspiration came just a few weeks before our Parish Priest stopped him and said, "Will, I am getting old now, I can barely walk. I want you to become a priest so that I can retire." From that moment on, Will avoided going to that Parish and shortly after that...joined the Marines.
His Marine Division is known for doing humanitarian work (he says all Marine work is humanitarian) but specifically, they cared for the Vietnamese Refugees in the 70's at Camp Pendleton...opened the food distribution lines in the 90's in Somalia, but it is with paralyzing fear I know that they are the first boots on the ground, and are the last to leave.
A Catholic parent has one concern for a son in battle that is,that there is a priest who can give absolution because "if you die in battle the only solace I will have is knowing that your soul will be lifted to heaven".
There is a long legacy of priests who have died on the battlefield. One who is honored was a Marine named Father Vincent Capadanno. There are more memorials to him than anyone else in the Marine Corp and with good reason. But that is another story. This one is about the "Year of the Priest"- (believe it or not.)
http://www.caringbridge.org/mn/timvakoc/history.htm
"A man of peace, he chose to endure the horror of war in order to bring the peace of Christ to America's fighting men and women," Archbishop John Nienstedt said in a statement. "He has been an inspiration to us all and we will miss him. We ask everyone to remember him in prayer."
Yesterday the 20th of June Father Tim Vakoc died. ( The feast takes place 19 days after the Feast of Pentecost.) The Lord took him home on the day after His Own Feast Day, and I imagine it was so that he could celebrate the Feast Day here with his family and grateful friends and then yesterday with the Lord himself. He had just finished his 17th anniversary of his ordination.
This priest modeled the burning Heart of Christ full of love for mankind in the most supernatural way. The last five years of his life were the most Super-natural that a priest could live. He had to literally "pick up his cross" every single day for five years. Father's burning heart full of love for his fellow soldiers called him to serve them on the battlefield selflessly in Iraq, until he was almost killed there by a roadside bomb. That same "Love" was crucified for 5 years as he longed to say the Mass, lift the Host, and swallow the consecrated blood, but he could not do so.
As a Military mom, I cannot express how grateful I am to Father Vakoc. I am grateful to his parents who raised a priest to the altar of God. His entire life was a sacrifice for young men like my son. I can only pray that there will be a priest near my son to hear his confession and feed his soul as he travails the world and is placed in harms way.
Father Vakoc is the "model" for the "Year of the Priest", and an imitation of the mystery of the Sacred Heart. I finally think I "get it"- Thanks Father Vakoc -May Perpetual Light Shine Upon You.
1 comment:
Amazing - thanks for sharing this reflection!! My prayers are going up now for the soul of Father Vakoc and for Will, his fellow heroes of the Marines, and his mom!!
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