She was a (this girl, Mary Kay) was a freshman, in high school. And it was the first couple of weeks of school and at the end of the day, their announcements are made in the homeroom, on the P.A. And freshmen are just getting adjusted, and Mary Kay, as the announcements came on, would say, "Lis-s-s-sten, will ya? It might be important." I can see her now. "Lis-s-s-sten, will ya?" to the other kids, you know? "It might be important."

Today the Gospel is about so many things, of course. But I think it's a lot about "Lis-s-s-sten, will ya?" It's also about anger. I think Martha is mad, and few of us would blame her. In a sense, she (Martha) is saying, "Lis-s-s-sten to me... the two of you having this colloquy!"

Remember last Sunday, Our Lord told that perfect parable. Flaubert, the great French writer, said that if he could have given up all his books, he wished he could have written that one story of the Good Samaritan. It's perfect. But, remember "Good Sam," as I call him, sees the man bleeding and sick, and Good Sam, the Samaritan, takes care of the man. He takes some action. Now, today, the Gospel is about Our Lord saying, "Now and then you've got to stop and Lis-s-s-sten.....to Me." That's what's wonderful about our Christian Catholicism. We have both sides of the spiritual person. First, good action, and then, listening Him, to His Word, both sides.

Now, when I was on the East Coast, I used to teach an adult ed course, called the Seven Capitol (Major) Sins. And I had a little batch of index cards for each, over the years, questions and answers and stuff. But, when we got to anger the index card batch was this (indicating a thickness of an inch or two) thick, about anger... questions and answers. Martha is angry, I think, naturally. And I think, from what I did in that review course on the Bible back in '92, evidently a lot of Our Lord's enemies, the Scribes and Pharisees, would have been OUTRAGED at what went on. Jesus, who was considered amateur status, a teacher or rabbi, is teaching a woman... alone, with the other woman serving food? You teach, as a rabbi, the men up front and the women in the balcony, not in HER house, just a woman in her....You know that patriarchal society Our Lord lived in. It's easy to forget that. They would have been outraged! Teaching a woman in her own home? So, Our Lord had a whole lot of people ANGRY at Him because they did not want to lis-s-s-sten to Him.

And over the years, as usual, as I told some of you as I see you every Sunday, I try to remember stuff by means of an acronym, a little word that checks in all kinds of different ideas. The acronym for the angry Martha today and a lot of our anger, for me, will be S.O.R.E. That's what we used to say on the upper west side in New York when I was a kid. "I'm sore at you.... That makes me sore....S.O.R.E."

The "S" of S.O.R.E., with regard to anger and listening is "STICK TO THE SUBJECT" when you are angry. Stick to the subject. And I got that from an elderly gentleman, who I realize now was younger than I am now. But when I was a young priest and I had just arrived as a teacher in this high school, and I had to give a talk at a Mass the next day, and I was working in my office on a Friday night. And this janitor came in with his mop. And he was elderly and he would come to work (He worked from six at night until two ot three in the morning.)... He'd come to work every night with his wife, holding hands. It was kind of nice. And he'd call her at midnight to see if she was OK. So, I thought I'd ask Jasper, the janitor. So I said, "Jasper, what would you say to a couple getting married tomorrow, if you were me?" And he thought a long time. He leaned on his mop and he meditated. He said, "Well, if they love each other, they're going to fight. Tell them, when they fight, stick to the subject. That's forty-one years ago, and I think it's Nobel prize-winning wisdom. Stick to the subject. Of course you're gonna fight if you live together and love each other. Friends fight. Married couples fight. But, stick to the subject. It's not easy, but it helps a lot.

Friday night, I was compiling all the different ways we fight, and I came up with twenty-four! But, don't be alarmed! I'm just going to take one. And that was the way that was very popular among us when we were in the seminary, and it's still popular among priests, the anger that's what's called "passive aggressive," smiling, friendly, teasing, and the stiletto goes in before you even know there is blood. And there was a classmate of mine, (The names are made up, but the incident is true.) whose name was "Don" and we had been in high school seminary together, freshman high school seminary.... Now we're in the big seminary (Seven years we had known each other!) and we're going down the main aisle of the seminary to go to the chapel for fifteen minutes of private prayer. And we were having a ferocious argument about something, something about politics or religion or whatever. Just as we get to the chapel door, Don turns to me and says, "Michael, I think I will continue speaking to you when you're completely sane, and when you're not (He was studying psychology.) operating under an Oedipal complex, the transference of the erotic principle and some kind of narcissistic lunacy." And then he dipped his finger in the holy water! And I had to spend fifteen minutes in that chapel, in silence, NOT meditating. Passive aggressive, and he threw in all that psychological jargon. Now, he'd known me for seven years, but he wasn't sticking to the subject! If he'd picked one aspect of my lunacy, we would have stayed on the subject.

Especially when you love somebody and are close to somebody, what exactly are we mad about? And, in the Bible (I'll try to end all of this with a quote, from four thousand years of Jewish / Christian wisdom.) about arguing and listening, in the Bible, Our Lord says, (Remember, so many times, especially when confronted by enemies) "Let your yeah be yeah and your nay be nay." Let your yes be yes and your no be no. In a way, Our Lord is simply saying, when we're arguing and debating, keep it simple. Keep it focused. Don't go off on all sorts of tangents. Let's keep it simple. What exactly are we talking about? It does help if you stick to the subject.

And the "O" of S.O.R.E. is OPEN your ears to the subtext. So many times, when we fight, especially when we fight with people we care about, it's not so much the words or the particular thing we're exploding about, there's often a subtext, a feeling underneath, that's finally exploding, using this particular thing to explode about.

Example. Again it's from me. In this classroom in Poughkeepsie, New York, that I was in for twenty-eight years.... (And I loved it. I had the biggest classroom, out of longevity, and I had a lot of windows and a lot of venetian blinds.) And I would get to that classroom.... For twenty-eight years, I would be there by 6:30 a.m. That's not virtue. That's a statistic of neurosis. And I tried to adjust the venetian blinds. They had to be absolutely and perfectly symmetrical, venetian blinds and six windows, and when they weren't I would explode, you know, at 6:40. By then Jasper had gone home. I had the place to myself. I would explode. Now I was cussing in Shakespearian stuff. I would say, "The devil damn thee now, thou cream-faced loon." and other Shakespearean curses. But I was really mad! How come I can't.....

You know, I didn't find out until 1989 (I can remember the day and the hour.) when suddenly I realized why I get so mad at silly things like whether or not the venetian blinds are evenly spaced, because I wanted to control, not just the blinds, everything and everybody! I guess it's human nature, but in some of us it's carried to a really bad extreme. And some of you I hope will learn, younger than I did, that you can say, "Oh, thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you for teaching me the spiritual principle that there's very little I can control, except me, and even that's hard some times. I certainly can't control another adult human being. I can't control the direction I think the Church is going. I can't control Washington or scandals. So help me to keep my ears open to the subtext of why I'm so mad. And if it's because I can't control.... Oh, thank you, Lord. You take over... except for me, help me to control me."

Martha is very jealous, I think. I think she is. And I asked a lady, Wednesday night, (I read her today's gospel. She's not a Catholic. She's very interested in coming into the Church, and I said.... She'd never heard that gospel.) I said, "Why do you think Martha says that to Our Lord?" And she said, "She's jealous." And then she said,"And I don't blame her. She's jealous." The subtext is "Why aren't you talking to me?" At the outside is, "Well, help me serve the Maneschevitz and the matzo."

The Scripture, again we heard Our Lord say this so often since we were kids, listening to the Gospel.... (And the gospels get richer as you get older. They really do.) And Our Lord, so many times, talking to enemies, says out loud, "Let him who's got ears to hear, hear!" Hear what I'm saying. Stop rooting around with all your jealousies and your arguments. Open your ears to the subtext which is, "I love you. I can help you. And the only one, really, you can control on this planet is you."

Number three. We're half done. REMEDY! If there were a remedy that I could come up with, or Father or anybody, for anger, we'd be canonized by supper time. Remedy for anger.... Why don't I have an index card packed this thick? There is no remedy for anger. But there are a couple of things that we learn as the years go on, and especially from the Bible. And one of them is this: When you know you're wrong... (And none of us is always completely wrong, I don't think.) But, when you can kind of sit back and you've had a fight or argument with somebody you care about, or a co-worker, but especially someone you care about, and you think to yourself, "I was wrong. Yeah. What I said, what I did was way out of hand." Apologize fast! Don't wait too long. Apologize fast! And a woman taught me this years ago, married woman, and had a lot of kids. She was a single mother. She said, "You know, when it comes to anger, it is something like taking off a bandage. There are two ways to take off a bandage." And she was just as dramatic as I am. She pulled up her sleeve, and she said, "You can take off a bandage slowly, or quickly. If you take it off slowly, it goes like this: 'ah - ah, ouch, o-oh, ouch, hair's caught, oh, ouch, aaugh....' If you take it off fast, it's 'tzh-h, ouch!'" And then she added, "I learned to apologize quick, and I teach my kids to apologize quick if you think you are either wrong or half wrong. Don't wait. Don't wait!" And that's many places in the Bible.

When it comes to letters, and I've learned this again from grown-ups. You want to send a letter to someone who's hurt you. You've had a fight. It's going to sound awfully simplistic, but I know it works. Let's make it a kid who's in college and won't darken the door of a church ever again, and "I hate the Pope and I hate the Church and I'm not going there...." OK. You write a letter and, so many kids have come back and have shown me the letters, you know, out of college.

The first paragraph is love and affection and happy memories of when they were younger. (There have got to be some happy memories when they were younger.) The middle paragraph, NOT "You meant when you said that over the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.... You will break your mother's heart.... You were a selfish brat to take off on a ski trip when we look forward to your being home from school!..."

"I" (Say "I")... "I felt hurt.... I was feeling sorry for your mom that she.... I was puzzled.... I was really mad... Not YOU meant, YOU intended... YOU... " Don't.... Don't. If you just say "I" you're not ducking the issue, but you say it's from you.

And the third paragraph that ends the letter is more affection and love. Kids have shown me such letters that they've held onto for years. One boy in Yale was so mad at his Poppa that he tossed the letter in the wastepaper basket, and two days later, he went rooting around in the rubbish of Yale to find the letter. And he did. It's not a waste. And in a letter you can say things the way you want to say it. No one will interrupt you. And it's a sandwich: affection, "I felt hurt because...," and affection.

I was in Safeway, speaking of remedies for anger. I live in my own little place. I'm the guest of a doctor and his wife, in my own little place at last. My own bathroom, my own little kitchen. And I go to Safeway shopping. I don't know how you do it, how you pay for milk and bread. I'm learning about prices and stuff.

At any event, you know in Safeway they have the lanes: "9 Item Limit,....15 Item Limit?" They're express lanes. So I wheel my big cart into the Express Lane. But it was really crowded. 9 Item Limit. And I said, "Well... lot more than nine, but they probably mean 9 CATEGORIES." I actually swallowed that rationalization. And I'm standing on line with this big barrel of food, and there was this very tired-looking woman on line behind me. She did look so tired. And I glanced. There she was, and I felt kind of guilty and embarrassed, and I guess my eyes were wild. And she said, "Yeah. There are more than nine. And then she said....Then she said, as a remedy to her anger and certainly as a good lesson to me, she said "...but I'm not in a hurry." Now, I would never pull that stunt again because of her reaction. She said, "I'm not in a hurry." In New York, if that had happened, the legitimacy of my parentage would have been questioned....loudly.

The line from the Bible again is from Our Lord's own lips, and you've heard it so often since you were kids, about anger. Remember Our Lord says, "If you come to the altar and bring your gifts to the altar and there you remember that your brother" (which in Our Lord's language means somebody fairly close to you, man or woman) ..."has something against you," (There's some kind of tension.) "Go and be reconciled with your brother and then come back and leave your gift." That's from Our Lord's lips, great wisdom, and eventually, great serenity, as a remedy.

Although one man, one Wall Street man, just before I left New York, told me he was always fighting with a colleague, (And we're almost to "E" but I don't want to forget this because it helped me for two years.)... He said, "A colleague, not a boss, a co-worker, but this guy was always yelling, arguing," and finally this man who was a Catholic, great devotion to Our Lady, just said, "I say in my skull, 'Mother, shut my mouth.'" Five syllables. He'd say it in his head. When he was getting in a conversation, nothing he was going to say was going to change this person's attitude. He couldn't control another adult. But many times he had to stand there and... "Mother, shut my mouth....Mother, shut my mouth." It helped him. And my last two years in New York, I had a colleague I wanted frequently to... and I would say... IT DOES WORK! It does. It works .... like a prayer.

Back to "E," EXORCISM. And I chose "Ecorcism" because anger in a spiritual setting can be the most shocking in a way. A kid once told me, a junior in high school, he said, "The nastiest place all week long is the parking lot after Mass." That's not true here. I really don't think it is true. But it was in Poughkeepsie. Mass, and being angry, angry at God, and wanting to exorcise it. I don't know if you have to exorcise anger at God. We don't get mad at Mary Poppins, Harry Potter or Peter Rabbit. We don't say, "Peter Rabbit dammit!" because we are so intensely aware of God. You wouldn't be sitting here listening to me babbling away on a glorious sunny afternoon unless some dogged faith makes you believe in God. And if you get mad at him, at least you're talking to Him. It breaks your heart, doesn't it, when you hear people, let's say a married couple, and the man says, "I haven't talked to her in years, not really." And people who have shut down talking to God. Yell at Him! It's communication, and He does lis-s-s-sten, as long as we keep talking. Last week, in the Gospel, two of Our Lord's apostles, James and John, lost their temper. Remember the Samaritan town won't let Jesus go through it. It's like East Berlin, West Berlin. And John and James come up to Our Lord and they say (hot-headed, loving, affectionate, but crazy, angry) "Lord, shall we call down lightning and burn them all up?" Our Lord says no, it would be a waste of spiritual energy, in effect. He says, "Let's go to another town." And they lis-s-s-stened to Him.

And the last thing is I called this priest last night and I said, "Can I tell this story?" And he said, "Yes. I'm on the East Coast. What harm can it do me?" He's a classmate of mine, and he arrived in the Wall Street parish ten months before I did. It's very rare you have two classmates in the same parish, but we were. In any event, in this Wall Street parish, after the last Mass on the weekday, around two o'clock in the afternoon, the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on the altar. And this was during the summer. It was very hot, but air-conditioned in the lower chapel, and the Blessed Sacrament exposed. You know that lower chapel was packed on weekdays from two in the afternoon until close-up time. Wall Street people coming in to pray. And I don't mean just big-shot executives. I mean people who mop floors and stuff. Lots of people praying quietly.

And my classmate is very punctilious about neatness. And he was going up and down the aisles, cleaning the pews and straightening out the missalettes. And there was this lady, sitting in about the third or fourth row, beautifully dressed, and eating a big bowl of ice cream. And, as my friend said, "Noisily!" So he leaned in the pew, just so she could hear him, and he said, "Excuse me. I don't think you should be eating ice cream with the Blessed Sacrament right up there on the altar." (Remember. He is new, like me.) And she looked at him and she said, "Do you know who I am?" He said, "No. I just arrived in this parish, but I don't think you should be eating ice cream." She said, "Well, it's clear you are new, because if you knew how much I gave to this collection day after day, you'd watch your step!" That was exactly what she said. And then he moved on. You cannot control another human being.

Several days later, the same scene. He's going down the aisle, straightening it out, cleaning up pieces of paper and stuff. This time, she has a frozen yogurt sundae with whipped cream and the cherry. And he had learned his lesson, my age, 66 then. He just glided by, can't control this woman. And she looked at him, and she barked at him, "When I look at you," she said, "I cannot pray!" He walked back to the pew and he leaned forward very gently, and he said, "And when I look at you, I've GOT TO pray!" Isn't that a great way to deal with...

Anyway, I'm positive the next time you have an argument with somebody you care about you'll whip out your little S.O.R.E. acronym. Maybe you'll just do what that man on Wall Street told me. Just as I was leaving New York, he said, "When I get mad and I can't accomplish anything..." he said, "Mother, shut my mouth," praying to Our Lady. "Mother, shut my mouth." And, obviously, because it has worked for me my last two years in New York, the Lord is lis-s-s-stening.