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This morning, when I was putting this homily together, I thought, "You are going to get tired of this real quick!" The last time I preached at the Sunday Masses was October 6th, and I shared with you one of the principles I try to follow in preaching, and that is not a lot of personal stories about the preacher. You don't come to hear about his life, but something else about our faith. And then I went on to tell you about my father and his bar, about my sister and the milk bottle she stole from me. I was trying to make a point, that we have to take time on occasion to give thanks for the people who have formed and shaped our lives, and also look at our life where it still needs some shaping and forming, and also ask the question, "Whose life am I changing? Whose life am I touching?"

Well, here we go again.... Let me tell you what happened last night. Last evening, we had 82 seniors and juniors in high school here at Mass. They are preparing for the sacrament of Confirmation. And then, after Mass, they went over to the gym and had what we call a "lock-in," which sounds kind of punitive, but they were in the gym and hall all evening last night until early this morning. I went over and spent a couple of hours with them. The point of their preparation, part of it at least, for Confirmation is, since they are being confirmed in the Catholic faith and the Christian faith, to know what to hold onto, what is precious, what to treasure, what to pass on, and what to hold lightly, that is there and nice but not that important, and what to be able to let go of, or really hope will change.

The framework we gave the evening was "Looking at the Church Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." I was introduced as "Yesterday." It felt like the Christmas carol ....Christmas past, you know. And they asked me to share my story of the Faith as I grew up with it, and the Church that I bought into, and the kind of religion that I was formed with, and my journey of seeing a lot of it change and having to let some go, and what did I learn along the way. What wisdom did I learn?

And that is what today's gospel is about. The very first reading is about wisdom. And then, the gospel is about being wise. Jesus says, "Pay attention." So that is what this is all about. I began with the story of my eighth grade graduation. All of us were deciding where we were going to high school. I was twelve years old. Most of our class were going to Bishop O'Dowd in Oakland, (I was at St. Anthony's Parish in East Oakland.) or St. Mary's in Berkeley or St. Joseph's in Alameda. But I had met Father Bill Hughes, who was the young associate priest in our parish. Now, I knew the Mass was important, and he led us in that, even though his back was to us and it was in Latin. And I thought God was all right and Jesus was OK, and I said my prayers, although most of that I found pretty boring and did because I had to. But Father Hughes was always helping people and was an influence on people's lives. He was helping old people. In those days almost everybody was old and retired and elderly that I saw, from my point of view. And he was helping young people. He went with us to the state championship in basketball. He was always with us, and he was making such a difference in people's lives, that I said, "What a great life to live! That is the kind of person that I want to be."

I went to St. Joseph's College Seminary, at age twelve, out of the eighth grade. It was called a "seminary," but what it was was a private all-boys boarding school with high standards and very strict rules. The closest thing I could imagine to it today would be Harry Potter's Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I think it was patterned on my seminary, as far as I could tell. We came home just during the summer and for a couple of days at Christmas and Easter. Our parents could visit us for a half an afternoon once a month. The "muggles" came on the third Sunday of the month to see us. And we became a band of brothers together, with high ideals and strong education and a demanding lifestyle and lots of Latin.

Twelve years later, in 1963, I was ordained a priest, after a fairly rigid, unchanging preparation. And the very year I was ordained, the Council of Bishops met in Rome and reflected on what were the best direction and interest and most faithful values of the Church from the gospel. They put out one document that was on the priesthood. Since I had just been ordained a priest, I went to read it. And it said, in the first paragraph, "The human and pastoral situation of the priesthood has now been changed entirely, thoroughly, and completely. (I was thinking, "They should have told me before I got ordained.") And, secondly, the Council put out a document on the nature of the Church. And, where I had been raised in the system that said things were always the same and never change, that document said, "The Church must always be reforming itself and must always be changing."

What the kids last night asked me was, "What did you find difficult?" and "What do you find different? What do you find the same? What values did you have?"

I would say, the Church and my world changed totally in my first years of priesthood. First of all, it was a Church that, in my experience, had underlined silence and separation. And now it underlined, more faithful to the gospel, participation of everybody. Secondly, it was a Church that really kept its distance, it seemed, from the world. In our seminary, in our high school years, we were not allowed to read a newspaper and we never saw a television. And the Council in the Church said, "The Church must be engaged in the world. When you preach or when you live as Christian believers you have to have the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other hand." It was a Church that now said, "Instead of no-change, (This will always be the same so memorize it!) rather, we must always be adapting." And in the church that I grew up in, there seemed to be uniformity and agreement and unanimous consent to everything. And, today, it is a Church of tension and disagreement and dissent, all over the place.

The kids asked me, "What did you find hard?"

I guess the first thing I found very hard was that band of brothers that I had grown up with began to shrink and disappear. Actually, one hundred three of us entered the seminary in the ninth grade. Thirteen were ordained twelve years later. But, since my ordination, and there is no connection here, since 1963 about one hundred thousand priests have left the ministry. Many of them left to marry. Some few left because it wasn't the Church they had grown up in and had bought into. A large number left because the Church was changing, but nowhere fast enough. And our band of brothers seemed to disappear. I found that hard.

What I found different was, when I looked back to Father Bill Hughes, he was doing wonderful things by himself. Today, in the Church, we do nothing by ourselves. We don't make decisions by ourselves. We don't minister by ourselves. Everyone is involved in service and ministry and in the life of the Church.

What I found satisfying was the celebration of the liturgy, not in silence and in Latin, but people coming together and connecting and celebrating their faith and talking about life. What I found exactly the same from my eight grade at St. Anthony's and today was that caring and compassion and consoling people, and helping people, and justice are at the heart of what being Church is all about.

So what did I learn? Where is the wisdom in all this? Well, I suppose I found it is wise to hold onto the core things in the life of the Church, and hold the others lightly. And, even thought the form changes, to hold onto the core things. For example, the Eucharist was central forty years ago, is central today, but the form is very different. And, secondly, not only to hold onto the core things, but to read the signs of the times, that we might embody the gospel in the real world, and not in nostalgia or a make-believe world. And the other is to respect the core values of other people, because we don't always agree. And, finally, to keep learning.

Now, you notice, I used the word "core" a lot. And what the teenagers said to me was, "Well, which are the core values? What are they?" What I said to them was, "You have to work that out and find that out for yourselves, but this is what I suggest, just three.

Number one is Jesus Christ and the God that Jesus uncovers and reveals, and the stories and the lessons and the wisdom and the values of Jesus, and some kind of a personal relationship with this Jesus Whom we believe has risen. That is number one.

But we are not isolationists or fundamentalists. So the second core value is community, the community of the Church with its celebrations, its life, its traditions, so important because some times we run ahead too fast and the community slows us down. Most of the time, we don't move at all and it is the community that pushes us. And always it is the community that sustains us and our faith, when it is hard, and helps us to sustain it longer. That is the second core.... Jesus, the community.

And the last is the obvious one, caring. The gospel calls it compassion. The scripture calls it justice. I like to call it making a difference in the world, that we are called to make a difference for the better. Those are the core values. That is the wisdom.

And then, Jesus, in today's gospel, says, "Pay attention. Pay attention." Now you may not know this but there is another preacher in our congregation and he regularly uses an acronym. Who am I talking about? And he takes the letters of a word to spell out the outline of his homily.... You've noticed! Well, there is another thing you can do besides acronyms. You could look at a word and see what's buried in it. Jesus says, "Pay attention." I look at the words, "pay attention," and I see first, "to attend." We are called to notice, to see with fresh eyes people different from ourselves, or looking at problems in the world, instead of looking away, or attending and looking for God Who will always surprise us in the most amazing ways.

So, first of all, when Jesus says, "Pay attention," it means "to attend." Another word I see there is just what you do in your garden, to "tend" things. To tend something, to tend a plant, means to help it grow. We have to be people who nourish one another and who are life-giving, instead of putting people down, being hostile, negative, naysayers. One more word I see in attention, "tender." We are called to be gentle, to have respect for others, to be caring to our world, tender and caring to our world, its creatures, and to one another. That's the wisdom. That's the attention we need. May we all be more attentive and more wise. Amen.