Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time8 July 2012

Icon of Christ the Teacher

Saint CeciliaP A R I S H

Ministers of the Liturgy

Saturday | 5:00 p.m.Rev. Peter Grover, OMV, celebrantCynthia Wanner, lector

Sunday | 8:00 a.m.Rev. Thomas Gariepy, CSC, celebrantTom Nicolini, lector

Sunday | 9:30 a.m.Rev. John Unni, celebrant Moira Macdonald, Bridget Spence, & Michele Maniscalco, lectors

Sunday | 11:15 a.m.Rev. John Unni, celebrantJoe Castellano, Erin Young, & Cole Young, lectors

today’s readings

Ezekiel 2:2–52 Corinthians 12:7–10Mark 6:1–6

next sunday’s Readings

Amos 7:12–15Ephesians 1:3–14Mark 6:7–13

special intentions

Saturday, July 7 | 5:00 p.m.Tundra Felker, Second Anniversary

Sunday, July 8 | 8:00 a.m.Kenny Boles, Memorial

Sunday, July 8 | 9:30 a.m.Winnie Dyer, Month’s Mind

Sunday, July 8 | 11:15 a.m.Liz Pino, Memorial

SAINT CECILIA PARISH

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our community news

Saint Rose School in Chelsea is looking for a part-time (2 days per week) music teacher for the 2012-2013 school year. Saint Rose is a thriving Pre-K—8 Catho-lic school serving a diverse community from Chelsea and its neighboring towns. For 140 years, the school has been striving to meet the ever-changing needs of its students and their families through works of love, mercy, and justice in the spirit of the Sisters of Prov-idence and Saint Mother Theodore Guerin. For this position, the ability to teach basic music skills and to ignite a passion for music in children who range in both age and experience is required. Massachusetts Teacher Licensure in music and experience with Pre-K through Grade 8 is preferred. Applicants for this po-sition should be able to play an instrument (prefer-ably piano), and be comfortable directing a choir and planning school-wide performances, as well as coordinating the music for monthly school liturgies. Please submit cover letter and resume to Caitlin Kee-ton, Principal (a parishioner here at Saint Cecilia), at ckeeton@strosechelsea.com.

are you a music teacher?

SAINT CECILIA PARISH

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Prayers & Occasions

Our SickPlease pray for all our sick and for those who are in need of our prayer, especially Josephine Parker, John Saulenas, K. Champoux, Patricia Hoggard, Jennifer Serpico, Christine St. Pierre, Jessica Coviello, Harold Williamson, Jessica Riviec-cio, Earl Chilcote, Colonel Robert C. Tashjian, Kim Murray, Heather LoRe, Rudy Kikel, Herbert Simmons, Peggy Furey, Janice Mascia, Pamela D’Ambra, Sue Lucas, Suki Coughlin, Roberta Keenan, Bridget Spence, Annette Kulas, Sam Gowan, Rhea Richard, Pil-Yun Son, Mary Yanez, Larry Buckley, M. Frances Driscoll, Ed Langlais, Bob McLaughlin, Steven Whitkens, Diana Sla-ton, Leo Garcia, Joe Ford, Danny Cotter, Natalia Chilcote, Amy Sweetland, Jim Keyes, Michael Zawikowski, Cheryl Proctor, Patricia Macdon-ald, Elvera Dowsky, Frank Ackley, Fred Haslee, Lorraine Haslee, Robert Menson, Paul Flaherty, William Louttit, Lucie Kelly, Bro. Adam Zielonka, O.C.S.O., Amy Duarte, Karen & Rick, Phyllis Por-ras, Jim Linderman, Mark Amerault, Sr. Nuala Cotter, R.A., Kristen DeFranco Martinez, Michele Crowley Tippens, Sara Lima Santos, Joseph Driscoll, Pete Huttlinger, Anthony Simboli, Lisa Caputo, Edward Gill, Darlene McLendon, Jeanne Tibbs, Debbie Pace, Deidre Sullivan, Roosevelt Brown, Mary O’Donnell, Ginny L’Abbe, Steve Chamberlain, Matt Penchuk, Carrie Penchuk, Christy Cosgrove, Jacques Romberger, John Scaife, Maureen Sullivan, Alyce Haley, Joe Capizzi, David Walsh, Joe Huenke, Kaylin Mar-cotte, Avito Pacifici, Charlotte Egan, James Noone, Keith Plaster, Frederick Flather, David & Paula Fillion, Fred Maglero, Sarah Sweeney, Susan Shea, Bill Croke, Ettore Bergamaschi, Ryan Delaney, Manuela Almeida, Ilda Almeida, Joe Farrell, Ethan D’Amato, Sophie Gagnon, Earl Meyers, Kathleen A. Meehan, James Ditomassi, Anne Frenette Handly, Jan Igras, Cheryl Sabin, Trish Mullen, Thomas Corrigan, Fernando Luis Riganti, Frank DeMare, & Carmela Franchi.

Young Neighbors in ActionScott MacDonald, Letitia Howland, Erin Newhall, Dominic Collamati and sixteen of our high school students are departing for Washington, DC next Saturday. Father John will join them on Sunday.Please pray for their safe travel and for a great week of service and learning.

Memorial of Saint BenedictWednesday, July 11, is the Memorial of Saint Benedict of Nursia. Benedict (c. 480–547) is the sixth–century father of Western monasticism. We remember in prayer the Benedictine monks, nuns, and sisters who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Pray for PeacePray that God will turn hearts from violence, particularly in the Middle East, and guide all toward the establishment of safety, justice, and peace.

For ProphetsPray for those who are called to speak prophetically: that they will listen attentively to the voice of Christ and faithfully

announce God’s message so that all may have life.

Weekday MassMass is celebrated each week on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings at eight o’clock.

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drivers needed

Each month parishioners have the opportunity to pick up donated meat, dairy products, and produce from a South Shore supermarket and baked goods from Whole Foods and deliver this food to Catholic Charities’ Haitian Multi-Service Center in Dorchester along with the packaged food items donated at Saint Cecilia. This vital ministry takes place on Sunday mornings at seven-thirty and can be completed in time to attend the nine-thirty parish Mass. We need four cars each time we deliver to Catholic Charities. Here are our upcoming dates:

July 15•July 29•

If you have a car and are interested in volunteer-ing, please contact Mark Lippolt at mlippolt@ham-mondre.com.

done time?

Please join us for our Monday Night Gatherings. Men and women who have been incarcerated are invited to join this group which is designed to provide participants with a sense of welcome and support. The meetings are held from six to eight o’clock in the Parish Pastoral Center (Saint Cecilia Street entrance) and begin with a group that pro-vides an opportunity for individuals to talk about their personal experiences, insights, and issues in a safe environment. A simple meal is shared after thegroup.It’sfinetojustcome,butifyouwouldlike additional information (or if you are interested in helping to host this group), please contact Peg Newman (peg_newman@msn.com; 508-587-4254) or Tom Ash (whatevertp@gmail.com; 617-642-9351).

a request from catholic charities

Sunset Point Camp, located in Hull, serves as a dream “vacation” for 300 children each summer. The camp was a donation to Catholic Charities in 1918 by the Knights of Columbus.”

The goal of the camp has always been to provide a free vacation for at-risk, low-income children from the Greater Boston area, without regard for their race,nationality,orreligiousaffiliation.Thepro-grams at Sunset Point Camp are designed around building life skills, including teamwork, leadership, self-discipline, self-esteem, sportsmanship, and good health. Many of the children live with the harsh realities of poverty, violence, and homeless-ness, and a host of other challenges, but for one week in the summer, these children are given the opportunity just to be children, enjoy the fresh sea air, and simply have fun.

Sunset Point Camp is supervised by our friends at Catholic Charities’ Yawkey Center in Dorchester. They have mentioned to us that they always need donations of sunscreen for the kids at the camp. So the next time you’re at CVS or Walgreen’s or your local supermarket, please consider picking up an extra tube of sunscreen and dropping it in theplasticbinidentifiedforthispurposeinthenarthex. We have been told the higher the SPF number, the better. Thank you for your help!

foreign student looking to stay with parish family

We have received a request that a seventeen year old high school student from Madrid is look-ing for a family to host him during July and August (or a portion of this time). He does not have much money but can help contribute toward food and other costs. If you are a family who is interested in more information about this, please contact Scott MacDonald (smacdonald@stceciliaboston.org).

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being present to god and life

“So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there. He was amazed at their lack of faith.” — Today’s Gospel

By RON ROLHEISER, OMI

Shortly after his conver-sion, St. Augustine penned these immortal words: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unlovliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

Augustine, sincere, but pathologically restless, had been searching for love and God. Eventu-ally he found them in the most unexpected of all places, inside of himself. God and love had been inside of him all along, but he had hadn’t been inside of himself.

There’s a lesson here: We don’t pray to make God present to us. God is already present, always pres-ent everywhere. We pray to make ourselves pres-ent to God. God, as Sheila Cassidy colorfully puts it, is no more present in church than in a drinking bar, but we generally are more present to God in church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us.

Sadly, this is also true for our presence to the rich-ness of our own lives. Too often we are not present to the beauty, love, and grace that brims within the ordinary moments of our lives. Bounty is there,

but we aren’t. Because of restlessness, tired-ness, distraction, anger, obsession, wound, haste, whatever, too often we are not enough inside of our ourselves to appreci-ate what the moments of our own lives hold. We think of our lives as im-poverished, dull, small-time, not worth putting our full hearts into, but, as with prayer, the fault of non-presence is on our side. Our lives come laden with richness, but wearen’tsufficientlypresent to what is there. A curious statement; unfortunately true.

The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, at the height of his fame, was once contacted by a young man from a small, provincial town. The young man expressed his admiration for Rilke’s poetry and told him that he envied him, envied his life in a big city, and en-vied a life so full of insight and richness. He went on to describe how his own life was uninteresting, provincial, small-town, too dull to inspire insight and poetry. Rilke’s answer was not sympathetic. He told the young man something to this effect: “If your life seems poor to you, then tell yourself that you are not poet enough to see and call forth its riches. There are no uninteresting places, no lives that aren’t full of the stuff for poetry. What makes for a rich life is not so much what is contained within each moment, since all moments contain

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what’s timeless, but sensitive insight and presence tothatmoment.”Poetryisaboutbeingsufficientlyalert to what’s in the ordinary.

Augustine was lucky, the clock never ran out on him. He realized this before it was too late: “Late have I loved you!” Sometimes we aren’t as lucky, our health and our lives must be radically threat-ened or taken from us before we realize how rich these in fact already are, if only we made ourselves more present to them. If everything were taken away from us and then given back, our perspective would change drastically. Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, like Augustine, also was lucky. He had been clini-cally dead for a few minutes and then revived by doctors. When he returned to his ordinary life after this, everything suddenly became very rich: “One very important aspect of post-mortem life is that everything gets precious, gets piercingly im-portant.Yougetstabbedbythings,byflowersandby babies and by beautiful things-just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets themuch-intensifiedsenseofmiracles.”

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God. Thesecrettofindingbeautyandloveinlifeisbasi-cally the same. Like God, they are already present. The trick is to make ourselves present to them. Rarely are we enough inside of our own skins, pres-ent enough to the moment, and sensitive enough to the richness that is already present in our lives. Our experience comes brimming with riches, but too often we are not enough inside of it. Like the young Augustine, we are away from ourselves, strangers to our own experience, seeking outside of ourselves something that is already inside of us. The trick is to come home. God and the moment don’t have to be searched out and found. They’re already here. We need to be here. Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles. His answer: “I don’t believe in them, I rely on them to get through each day!” Indeed, miracles are always present within our lives. Are we?

A PROPHETIC RACEBy GERALD DARRING

Thefirstreadingdealswiththewitnessoftheprophet Ezekiel. The Gospel deals with the witness of the prophet Jesus. Both accounts leave no doubt that the prophet is in for trouble: the people, “rebelswhohaverebelledagainstGod,”findtheprophet “too much for them.” Paul describes what awaits the prophet: mistreatment, distress, perse-cutionsanddifficulties.

Our age has had its prophets: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, Pope John XXIII. Theirs were not easy lives, and many of them were killed by “rebels who have rebelled against God.” Because of their lives, which bore witness to “the power of Christ,” the rest of us have been able to grow in faith.

“Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites.” That message to Ezekiel echoes in God’s sending of today’s prophets. It would be a mistake to think that only Romero and Gandhi and those like them had a calling to be prophets.

We believe that we are a prophetic race, called to be prophets in the midst of “a rebellious house.” Our task is “to bring Good News to the poor,” to speak God’s word in such a way that “they shall know that a prophet has been among them.”

The consequence of such prophecy will inevitably betrialanddifficulty,butalsothevictoryoftheGodwhose“righthandisfilledwithjustice.”

“We urge (everyone), again and again, to spareno laborsand letnodifficulties con-quer them, but rather to become day by day more courageous and more valiant. Ar-duous indeed is the task which We propose to them, for We know well that … there are many obstacles and barriers to be overcome. Let them not, however, lose heart; to face bitter combats is a mark of Christians, and to endure grave labors to the end is a mark of them who, as good soldiers of Christ, fol-low him closely.”

Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931) 138