Over a year ago, before the sheltering made us all so tense, and before the eruption of protesting over the continued racial injustice in our country made everybody on edge, the administration of SUNY New Paltz was put upon by the student body to change the names of some of the buildings and streets on their campus. And one of the ones they wanted gone was Huguenot Street because, they said, the Huguenots owned slaves. That may or may not have been their intended purpose, but I suspect that at least why they wanted the name gone was because the kids couldn’t spell Huguenot anymore. However, you have to know this about the Huguenots to know how short-sighted that was.  

The Huguenots were a group of French Protestants who grew in numbers during the 16th and 17th centuries. They were so severely persecuted by the French Catholic hierarchy and the clergy who assisted them, that there were many bloody massacres of Huguenot people in France. They scattered to other countries in Europe, but couldn’t find a safe haven and finally came to colonial America while this area of the country was still in the possession of the Dutch. They settled in New Paltz and, ironically - just down the road here on Rt. 209, just outside of Port Jervis - in a little hamlet that is still named Huguenot. They were a group of, what we call generically, separatists. So were the Pilgrims.  

There’s an old chestnut from the teaching profession about a teacher who asked his or her class to write an essay about Abraham Lincoln. One kid handed in a paper that began “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he helped his father build.”

Now, the kid’s heart was in the right place, but he was so enamored with the myth of Abraham Lincoln that he kind of mixed things up and made it seem that Abe was so eager to help his Dad, that he helped him build the log cabin before he was born.

Sometimes, what happens after an event, or after a story is told overshadows the original information or the original story. It prevents us from seeing the story as it began. That’s why I read the long version of today’s Gospel. Because Matthew took a parable of Jesus’ and used it as a teaching tool thirty years after Jesus spoke the words. And the difference is the difference between a parable and an allegory.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” and the quote ends, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Most people know that those are the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Fewer people know that that’s the second stanza of a long poem called “The New Colossus.” And not too many people know who wrote it.

Her name was Emma Lazarus. Emma Lazarus was a Jewish woman who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. But unlike many other Jewish people of her time, she was not an immigrant. Her family was here for about fifty years before the Revolutionary War. They were not poor; they left Europe to avoid persecution both from Catholics and from Protestants. They came here and they did well for themselves. Her family was wealthy, she was homeschooled, she spoke several languages fluently, and she had a massive career as a writer of essays, criticism, poetry, and novels. And she hobnobbed with some of the other famous writers of her time – Thoreau, Emerson, Henry James – they all knew each other. Among her friends was a woman named Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. If you hear the Hawthorne in there that tells you that there’s a connection there to another famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This bag weighs a ton. Worst day ever. My parents will kill me. I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse. I’m drowning in tears.  

Those are common things we hear all the time, but they’re exaggerations. There’s a Greek word for them. It’s called hyperbole (two Greek words – hupér, meaning above and beyond, and bolus, the target or the goal), so it’s an overreaching.  

How ‘bout this? I’ve told you a thousand times to stop exaggerating.  That’s hyperbole about hyperbole.  

There’s also another Greek word that we need to know for today’s Gospel, and that’s anachronism (from two Greek words - ana and khronos - beyond or before the time). From khronos you get English words like chronicle. I tell you that because Jesus, very frequently in His conversations and His teaching, used both hyperbole and anachronism. And there’s an anachronism in today’s Gospel that you really need to notice.

Terror! Terror on every side. That pretty much sums up what we have seen over the last quarter of a year. The only thing that moved the Coronavirus story off the front pages of the newspapers and the lead story on the evening news was an equally important and frightful event – an eruption of demonstrations about racial justice the like of which we have not seen since the late 1960s. I’d like to tell you two stories - the first is kind of innocent, the second maybe not so much. When I was in grammar school, our neighborhood was made up of all Caucasian people. There were Italians, Irish, Polish, Germans, a smattering of French and English, but we all looked somewhat alike. We kids called each other in conversation by those ugly names that each of those ethnic groups has in street slang. But we didn’t mean anything by it. We all got along well together.

Our churches were suddenly shut down in the middle of Lent, and all of a sudden, instead of the things we planned to give up for Lent, we gave up the way we were used to living, both in our private lives and in our life as a parish. It became a true Lent of tremendous drastic abstinence. Many of us entered into our own Gethsemane, where we cried out to a seemingly absent God, “If it is your will, let this cup pass me by.” But it didn't. So many of us then found ourselves - like Jesus on the night before he died - alone, seemingly abandoned or forced to abandon, those who we loved and things that we loved. And so it was a kind of crucifixion. And there were those, sadly, who like the women watching the crucifixion from afar, were only able to wave up at windows to loved ones in a nursing home or hospital, unable to touch, unable to speak. And we were entombed, all of us, in our own homes. 

Holy Trinity: One God, Three Persons. Easy to say; hard to comprehend; still harder to embrace.   Do you like to dance? Do you dance well? One of my favorite memories of growing up in the 1950s is that of me and two of my friends, on the cusp of being teenagers, gathered at someone’s house, trying to teach one another how to lindy. Two years after the “birth” of rock ’n roll, OUR music was everywhere. And meant a lot to us. Someone had “borrowed” his older sister’s records and we played them over and over for over. I couldn’t lead; I couldn’t follow. I never got it.   But dancing is magical. In 1952, my aunts took me to see “Singin’ in the Rain.” I was mesmerized by the famous dance scene. To this day, whenever I watch the movie again, I’m still enthralled. Gene Kelly, even drenched with rain, makes it seem so effortless, so enjoyable. I get the same reaction from those old Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals - corny plots, great music, wonderful dance routines.

From 1984, Animal Farm and Peter Pan to “You Are My Sunshine,” “Poison Ivy,” “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Hotel California,” pop culture revels in allegory. No one has any trouble “getting” the hidden messages. In high school lit class, we may have struggled with the differences between a metaphor, a simile, an extended metaphor and an allegory, but they are among the most commonplace - as well as the most complex - ways we express ourselves. “Like” is, like, the most-over-used word, like, Ever!    It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the inspired words of Scripture often take the form of metaphor and allegory. The Vigil and daytime Masses for the Solemn Feast of Pentecost offer us a “feast” of them. In fact, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit as told by Saint Luke in the Acts of the Apostles is an allegory made up of allegories. He uses a bunch of old stories to tell a new one. In Hebrew, this literary trick is called “midrash,” and the Bible fairly bristles with them.

            “We’re “on pause.” You’re probably thinking: “If I hear that one more time, I’m gonna scream!!”               But we are. And people are experiencing this unplanned hiatus in differing, often contradictory, ways. On the one hand, lots of folks are saying they’re getting “stuff” done around the house or at the office - deep cleaning, reorganizing, sorting, filing, discarding, reminiscing. On the other hand, lethargy is setting in. There’s lots to do but we don’t do nuthin’ at all. The days go by like a rat race at a snail’s pace.               We are eager, chafing at the bit, to get going again. At the same time, many of us are also anxious, fretful about the restart. Will my job still be there? What if it isn’t? What if it is and now it’s too hard!! Have I lost my edge? Have my skills been blunted? Now that I haven’t tackled these tasks in almost three months, do I still want to invest my time and energy in them?

While in college, I worked summers for the adoption agency of the Archdiocese, microfilming and shredding closed case files. Back then, of course, everything surrounding an adoption was confidential and children were never allowed to know the names of their birth parents. One day while shredding, I came across an adoption involving acquaintances of our family. Bound by secrecy, I hung on to the information, which hung onto me like an albatross around my neck. Finally, unable to bear the tension, I told my parents. Their response was, Oh, Peter! Everybody knows that!!”   Orphans tug at our heart strings. Charles Dickens made them staples in his cast of characters: David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, Sydney Carlton in “A Tale of Two Cities,” Nell in the “Old Curiosity Shop,” Esther Summerson of “Bleak House,” Pip in “Great Expectations” and, most famously, Oliver. (Please, Sir Dickens, could we not have some more!) Dickens had an axe to grind against the cruelty and hypocrisy of British labor and poverty laws in his own day. But orphans have also dominated children’s - and even adult - fiction. Cosette in “Les Miserables” served the same consciousness-raising purpose for Victor Hugo as Dickens’ kids did for him. The same is true for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. More romanticized were Jane Eyre, Heidi, Mogli, Peter Pan, Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella and even Clark Kent/Superboy. The comics gave us “Dondi” and, of course, “Little Orphan Annie.”

Happy Mothers’ Day. Although’ this homily will not be about the holiday, in the end it is - in its own way - about nurturing.   The Depression Era give birth to two staples of Hollywood movies - the “zany comedy” and the “stage door/boy meets girl romance.” They both feature “spunky gals” and “’can-do’ guys.” The films were at the same time ironic and hypocritical. Their producers made capital out of compassion. The cynicism is best summed up by the remark of the snarky primadonna in “Singin’ in the Rain,” that movies “bring some joy into your humdrum lives.” Even Bing Crosby had a hit record about the ruin of others: “They used to tell me I was building a dream / with peace and glory ahead. // Why should I be standing in line / just waiting for bread? // Once I built a railroad, I made it run / made it race against time. // Once I built a railroad, now it's done. / Brother, can you spare a dime?”

One of my family’s dogs was a Shetland sheep dog and Border collie mix. “Collie” speaks for itself; but unlike Lassie, they are smaller, more agile and less “hyper.”  The “border” is the mountainous meadows forming the boundary between Scotland and England. The “Shetland” refers to a group of islands between Scotland and Norway.  Even in these days of ubiquitous synthetic fabrics, the wool of Shetland sheep still is prized for being warm, soft, strong and durable. The sheep dogs of the Shetland Islands, like their cousins the Border Collies, are vital to wool industries. Trained to herd sheep as skillfully as any human being; they are determined, resourceful and courageous.

Not too long ago, I was visiting a parishioner in rehab. As I passed by the exercise room, I saw an elderly man doing some light weight lifting. I kept going, then did an about-face as I suddenly realized that the “old man” was my own kidney specialist. He’d had a mild cardiac event and was briefly hospitalized. Without his white coat, stethoscope and air of kindly efficiency, I hadn’t “seen” him. Has the same sort of thing ever happened to you? You were out somewhere, perhaps the supermarket or the mall, or even on vacation in a distant area, and you bump into someone with whom you deal regularly ... but they are out of context. Because they “don’t belong” in the setting where you meet them, for a moment you do not recognize them.

It’s interesting that just a little while ago, today was called Low Sunday. It received such a name because, after all the liturgies and devotionals of the Sacred Triduum, the church seemed to take on a nomenclature that reflected the tiredness of both priests and people. The past week - were we able to gather - would have been typically spiritually intense, emotionally draining, logistically busy, and sometimes either a circus or a zoo in organizing choirs, ushers and greeters, altar servers, lectors, and everyone else. After such a whirlwind, it seems everyone is ready for a Low Sunday! Except it’s not called Low Sunday anymore. Now, we have Divine Mercy Sunday and that brings along with it another whole set of expectations and devotionals. What happened? Where’s our break? Why a Divine Mercy Sunday? The answer isn’t too complicated. It only involves two world wars, rampant nihilism, a Polish religious, a pope ...

Boy! If ever we needed some divine mercy, it’s now! Bombarded with one dire situation after another, I duck for cover whenever CNN comes on. The only way I get through the days is by compartmentalizing stuff.  

I’ve been trying all week to figure out how to turn today’s Scriptures into a comforting and strengthening message. The power of the Holy Spirit resides in the words of Scripture but we access that power by faith. And faith is the very thing being tested these long weeks of confinement. So here goes.

Suppose, God forbid, someone you loved had just died. You attended the funeral Mass, went to the cemetery, left with assurance that “proper care of the grave will be taken after your leave-taking.” It often is one of the hardest things a person ever has to do. But we do it - out of respect for our loved one; in the hope that, for us, it will begin the long process of healing.

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Priests. Some are holy, some are worldly; some are kindly, some are mean; some are affable, some are withdrawn; some are articulate, some are confusing; some are brilliant, some are dull; some are compassionate, some are harsh...

Beginning with Palm Sunday, Christians observe the most sacred time in our year of faith. The liturgies celebrated in Catholic Churches are mirrored in Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches everywhere.  Depending on their own calendar, members of the Orthodox churches often celebrate Holy Week the same time we do. But, because neither Holy Thursday nor Good Friday are holy days of obligation, many Catholics do not make a habit of observing those days. Palm Sunday and Easter, like bookends, anchor our worship and center our faith.

Here’s a puzzle for you. If we remember the Lord’s Passion and Death on Good Friday, why do we ALSO read it on Palm Sunday? When I was growing up - before the changes in Liturgy brought about by the Vatican II - the Fifth Sunday of Lent was called “Passion Sunday” and  that’s when  this Passion Gospel was read. The Sunday beginning Holy Week was called “Palm Sunday,” and the Gospel of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem was featured...