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Last night, when I did this reading, I read the long version. So I have spared you another five minutes listening to the other one. But it is kind of interesting. I have a really firm belief that the Spirit of God works through the ordinariness of life, the little moments, not the big stuff, the little stuff, because God is present in every single fiber of the universe. And so the Spirit of God moves. And last night he moved me (Well, it could be “she” as well.) but I was moved because, at the end of it, I come from northern Ireland with the tiny little small “n. ” For those people here who know anything about Ireland, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, from St. Patrick arriving to this moment in time, has never recognized that border. And neither do I. So, if I come from northern Ireland, I come with a small “n.” The Holy Father Pastor here put northern Ireland with a big “n” last week, and coming from an Irishman, that’s bad! So, he went “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” .... Does he do that often? .... You’re not saying.

Anyway, I come from that end of the world, and there is a fundamentalist Protestant minister who hates Catholics, hates anything to do with Roman Popery. And I grew up as a second class citizen in that little British statelet in the north where Catholics didn’t get any of the benefits of the state. That’s why the war happened, to get equal rights. But anyway, he stands up in his First Presbyterian Church that he owns, silent collection, Fundamentalist minister, and this is the thought that came to me.... He said, he was preaching on this particular Gospel reading, “And there shall be a gnawing and a gnashing of teeth.” (It says in the long version.) And there is a wee woman from Belfast sitting in the front row who said, “But, Dr. Paisley, I don’t have any teeth.” ....”On the last day, teeth will be provided for gnawing and gnashing!” So, the Holy Spirit moves us in all sorts of ways.

But I think the core of what the readings are telling us today, in the first reading, we are hearing about an all-powerful, all-loving God that is always and everywhere loving and caring and holds us up and is forgiving right up until the very moment that we make that decision to ask for forgiveness. No matter what the sin, no matter what the wheat. Scott Peck was a very famous writer in the 90’s. He wrote a book called “The Road Less Traveled.” It’s a book about one’s spiritual journey and talking about psychology and how you grow and develop. His second book was “The People of the Lie.” In that book, he talks about evil and evil in the world. So, equate evil with weeds, if you can for a second. Evil, weeds. He says there is not any really truly evil person. He said, in his travels of the thousands of people that he met, he only met a few really evil people. But the reality is, if that’s true and there’s only a few, then what about all of the rest of us? The truth of the matter is we have the weeds and the wheat. We are saints and sinners all in the one experience of life, and that’s just the way it is. Our Church recognizes that. That’s what we are based upon. That’s why Christ came, his death, his burial, his resurrection come to call us to wheat, to be saints. Our Church reflects that in the sacraments and we come here every Sunday to be united to that experience in this place and at this time. So it is not my responsibility to judge anyone. It is not your responsibility. It’s not our responsibility to judge anybody for any reason at all. Let that happen on the last moment of that person’s life. I find you just don’t judge. Now we do that, we kind of unconsciously do it. Somebody looks different. Somebody acts different. You can think of all the different concoctions in your mind of how that happens and how you have to turn it off. You have to be conscious to the Spirit of God and sort of turn that around through prayer and seeing the presence of God in your life.

You’ll have to indulge me a few moments because I need to get to know you and you need to get to know me. So I need to tell you a little bit about my story of who I am in order for me to be minister with you over the next three or four or five years or ever how long Father Brian lets me be here. I was eight years old when I first realized that I wanted to be a priest. Don’t ask me how that came about. I was an altar boy in holy Catholic Ireland, the north with a small “n.” Very traditional, very Catholic. Catholicism was under attack. The wagons were circled and we had our own little Catholic parish. We did everything in that parish. Our whole world. I have eighteen aunts and uncles, fifty-five cousins. That’s why I moved six thousand miles. I said to Bishop Cummings when we were sitting, three hundred fifty people at my ordination. It was like a big wedding almost. It got a little bit out of control. But anyway, once you start inviting one relative, you have to invite everybody. It was a little crazy. So I said to Bishop Cummings, as they handed him a little glass of Paddy’s, “Wait til you see this.” So I stood up and I said, “Everybody who is a cousin in here, stand up.” And there were like sixty people stood up in the room. And I said, “They’re all relatives of mine.” But that world is the world in which I wanted to be a priest. And you would think, with a mother called “Mary” and a father called “Joseph” and my dad’s a carpenter, that that would all work out kind of quickly, and, well, it didn’t work out like that.

I became a youth minister in the parish. I was very involved. I was dating someone between sixteen and nineteen. I ran that youth group. I eventually joined the Redemptorists in Ireland on my nineteenth birthday. And over the next six years, as I realized the dream of becoming a priest, the dream started to fade because I realized I was on this path and I kind of felt like I couldn’t step off. There were twenty-one of us who joined and unfortunately today, there is only one left, ....and me now. So, there is a little vocations crisis in the Church you may recognize. But anyway, I can only do what I can do in my space.

In that time, as I got to theology and trying to understand what the Church teaches, I remember working in a parish in north Dublin in these projects. We don’t use that term in Ireland but you understand what “projects” means. And I have worked in them for fifteen years in San Francisco. And you can build wonderful, good projects for families and build good communities. But they were not. So, on the seventh floor of McDonough Tower, seven towers with fifteen stories, where Dublin Corporation, the Council, put all of the problem people of Dublin, I am going to visit this woman. I rapped the door. I am in a Roman collar and jeans. (All these Americanisms are over in holy Catholic Ireland. They want to make us all into fundamentalist Protestants. They want to make us into Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, all that.) But the people will open the door when they see a Roman collar. I came in and I sat down to a really dirty, rank-y apartment, a woman with three kids, young, very young. She said, “Father, I do not go to Mass on Sundays anymore, but I do pray, and I especially pray to the Blessed Mother.” And then she broke into tears. I felt uncomfortable, had never met her before but my instinct was to put my arm around her. And she was really upset. I said, “What could be the matter?” She said, “ Father, a while back, my husband who has never worked, came home drunk from the pub. We got into a fight. He kicked me in the stomach. I was four months pregnant and I instantly lost the baby.” Well, I have to tell you, I thought I came from a regular family, a mom and a dad and five kids and I thought we were functional. My world seemed functional. And to hear this, I couldn’t really deal with it.

Over here, I was doing church law with marriage and it said, “You’ve got to stick to this marriage, no matter what, not factoring in anything. You’ve got to stick in this marriage.” Over here, I had this woman who, if she didn’t get out of that relationship, she was going to die or the kids were going to get hurt. Those kids needed that mother more than she needed to be with that man. She wanted to stay. That’s not an unusual thing for a woman who has been abused, to want to stay with this person who has his weeds. I am sure he has his good points too, but I helped her get out of the situation. But I couldn’t reconcile my traditional Irish Catholicism, couldn’t reconcile with the Church’s teaching and this. For me, it was very black and white. And, at that moment, I realized in my own experience of life, I really didn’t know who I was. At twenty-four years old, a lot of guys are ordained priests. At twenty-four, you kind of think you know it all, you know, like a teenager, you kind of think nobody needs to tell you anything. Well, nobody needed to tell me anything because I knew it all. But I knew one thing, that I couldn’t be a good priest. I never really loved. I never experienced love of another person, an intimacy, in my life. I didn’t experience what it is to have a mortgage, to have a bank account, to hold down a good job, to do all of the things that people do in life and a whole lot more. I hadn’t done those things. I was living in this pollyanna world of religious life where everything was taken care of. And so the short version of that story is I up and left, met a friend from my hometown who was living with his girlfriend in San Francisco. He said, “Come out to the States.”

So, let’s jaunt six thousand miles over to San Francisco, and I got a job in Concord through a priest friend, worked landscaping and stayed the summer because I was on a J-1 Visa. OK, Everybody! For all those who might be Republican, you might want to just throw me out of the country but I was illegal for five years. And people have told me that to my face when I have told my vocation story. “I would just have you thrown out!” Well, OK, but you didn’t. And, back then, it wasn’t as difficult as it is now, after September 11th. But anyway, I found myself in this situation for five years. I worked in San Francisco. I volunteered with Shanti Project because I had heard, the first person who came home from the States who had AIDS, and I remember listening to this phone call as a Samaritan, which is the suicide hotline in Dublin, and I remember feeling the loneliness and pain of this guy’s life. You do not communicate to anybody what this was. I didn’t know what AIDS was. This is 1986. So, in ‘87, I applied to become the first administrator of Catholic Charities AIDS Hospice. Catholic Charities responded to the AIDS crisis. They built this AIDS Hospice for thirty-two people. They pulled together all these resources. I showed up in a suit and I got the job. I guess I was Catholic and probably looked a lot better than I do now. And I got the job and I was frightened out of my life. There was a computer sitting on the desk, a 286, and I didn’t even know how to turn it on. But I told them a little white lie and said I knew about computers, but I didn’t. But that really wasn’t why I was hired because they knew I had a compassionate heart and I wanted to serve these people, dually and tripley diagnosed with AIDS, alcohol dependency or abuse, drug abuse, all of that stuff. And for five years, I worked and ministered in that context, all the time going to church, all the time loving the job, dealing with being here, dealing with the loneliness of feeling like I belonged back home, dealing with the fact that my mom wasn’t doing too good and I couldn’t go home because of my illegal status. And that was always sort of haunting me. I’ll tell you how I got a green card after that. It’s all very legal. (But I’m not going to tell you now.)

At the end of that period, over the next year, I got promoted. Catholic Charities built this eighteen million dollar complex for families in the Tenderloin, beautiful building. It was the best job I think I ever had to that moment. Eighteen of us staff, we had the most beautiful building and brought all these families into this beautiful housing and created a really wonderful sense of community. The next year after that, the Sisters of Mercy took over that and we built other places in the Tenderloin for homeless people and I was supervising four. Then, the next five years, I got promoted to working in the State of California, looking after the homeless places for Mercy Housing, ten facilities. In that time, all of those things that I had wanted to experience when I was leaving the Redemptorists, I experienced. I had my home in the Oakland Hills which I was remodeling. I had my job. I had my experience of life. And I had a job ($70,000 a year). I had the experience of working, doing all those things. Be careful what you pray for. So, here I was. I had this experience, and I came to Church on Sunday. I was getting better at my job. (...She’s smiling. Why are you smiling? Because you were at the same church, Our Lady of Lourdes!) And I found that’s where my soul really sang. That’s where I was happy. I knew that all of this other stuff, my plasma tv, my other boy-toys that I loved, the surround-sound system and the this and the that, it really didn’t mean anything because at the end of the day, what really made me very happy was working with the people of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Enter Jerry Murphy. You remember him, good friend of mine, good guy, and I wish him well on his life journey. But we were walking around the lake in Oakland and I found myself talking to Jerry about really missing the fact that I was not a Redemptorist anymore, and really wanting priesthood, knowing that God was calling me. But I didn’t want to leave all the stuff. I didn’t want to leave my nice little house that I had renovated. I didn’t want to leave my dog, Orlando. I didn’t want to leave the relationships of my life. But that’s what God was calling me to. And so Jerry said, “Aidan, You know I’m sick of listening to you talk like this. Why don’t you just pee or get off the pot?!” I said, “OK, Jerry. That’s like telling me how it is. So I went off to the vocations director. And my journey took on a whole different experience.

I got accepted back to the seminary. I said, “This is my experience in the totality. I was very honest with the seminary. I had gone out and party-ed when I came here. I thought I was missing something. So I decided to experience the “missing something.” So, I was honest with them. I said, “My soul, as I’m standing here before you, I’ve been to confession. So I’m OK. I’m good with God. So I think he wants me to be a priest.” They accepted that, and so, over the next period of time, in the next couple of weeks, I lost my father to suicide before I went into the seminary. When I went for the interviews, I think I just sat and cried through every one of the four people that interviewed me. But that was OK because that was how I felt and I think you’ve got to be real with your feelings. And I was.

And so I entered the seminary, what happened then? January 2001 that sex scandal stuff unleashed. That was really painful to be in that world at that time, trying to be a priest and all of this media furor going on around it. And did I do any of that? No, I didn’t, but I had to endure some of the stuff that came from it. A lot of it is legitimate, but what about the 95% if priests that are OK? And all of the guys that are there with this new training that doesn’t really allow that sort of a person to get through? But what I wanted to say to you is that the death of my father, the negative experiences and the positive experiences, the wheat and the weeds of life, allowed me to go out to St. Augustine’s and Father Poraig Green said to me, “Aidan, what do you want to do here?” I said, “Well, I would like to do your divorce and grief ministry.” And he said, “Well, how have you dealt with grief in your life?” And I said, “Well, my dad died last year. I did this AIDS work for five years. I think I have a really positive attitude. I pray for those people. I pray for my dad every day. I’m with him.” He said, “OK. You’re in.” So, we worked in this ministry, very powerful, giving people, mostly women who were divorced, just lifting them up, letting them be real, and letting them come and be in this support group, not a traditional sort of support group, but one where you get to express your feelings and emotion. Then when I went to St. Bonaventure in my pastoral year, it was there that I realized I was there to give my all. I gave my all. I realized what it is to be a priest and love people and for them to love me, and I told them that on my last day, leaving. I was confirmed in every way possible.

And so, after that, I decided that I wanted to get ordained in Ireland, in the church where I had my Baptism, my First Holy Communion and my Confirmation. Now, if our lovely pastor, was a really wonderful, good hi-tech pastor, you would be able to look at a powerpoint presentation up on those two walls. But you are not going to be able to do that until I get my hands on that particular issue in another couple of months. But anyway, when I went to Ireland, I had seven priests from our diocese, Bishop John Cummings, three hundred fifty guests, twenty-five people from St. Bonaventure, and at that moment with taking all of that history, when I had planned this, my mom was alive and my brother was alive. And within six months, this last year, I lost both of them, very suddenly. And I wanted them more than anything, all three of them, to be at my ordination, to be with me on my journey. That wasn’t to be. And, at the end of the ceremony for ordination, my two brothers and my sister were sitting right here and the priests had all filed past, and the photographer captures this. And I’ll leave it up (a picture of that moment) at the back later. At that moment, my brother Martin and Dominic and Maureen, they just jumped up spontaneously and hugged me. And at the moment, I felt my mom and my dad and my brother too. It was so powerful. It was such a wonderful, beautiful experience. And I carry them with me always, and I carry them into my ministry. And all of the experiences, all of the joy, all of the gift of God, all of the beauty, you have to carry the wheat and you have to carry the weeds. And eventually, as Paul says in the letter that we just heard,”The spirit of God is with you always.” The Spirit of God, on those three occasions that I took that horrible flight to London to go back with my sister to Ireland and deal with those three situations, each time my family, huge and all as it is, no matter what crap was going on or who wasn’t talking to who or whatever else was going on in big families, they put our arms around us and held us up in the most powerful way. Our faith and our church lifted us up. And our Irish tradition, of all the traditions that we do around that issue of death, lifted us up. And so, it was a wonderful moment to go back to Ireland and celebrate with these three hundred fifty people, and you know what? Most of the Americans were surprised. We have a bar in our social services ministry center! Oh, when they put the shutters of the bar up, everybody cheered including the Americans! And we had a good time because we all got to celebrate life. It wasn’t at a wedding or a funeral. We celebrated this moment in a very powerful and wonderful way.

So, I look forward to celebrating the gift of my experience of life, the totality. I am, as you are, a product of everybody who has ever loved you and everybody who has ever hurt you. Let us celebrate the love to help us in the times of hurt. God bless you all, and I look forward to serving you over the next couple of years. God bless.....