We’re coming towards the end of the Church year, and so we hear words
that speak of end time events, as with Paul, “running the good race,
having the good fight.” One often hears this particular reading at
funerals. The gospel today continues to talk to us about our
relationship with God in prayer. I think it speaks more to our
attitude in prayer, that we bring our truth in prayer, that we
embrace our poverty, our whole reality, knowing that God’s grace and
love will sustain us and lift us up. In Sirach we hear that God will
hear those who cry out, the widow, the orphan. And I would like to
suggest to you that it’s in our own poverty, in our own truthfulness
that, when we approach God, God will hear our prayers.

I don’t know if any of you this week (How many of you watch
Oprah?).... A couple of weeks ago on Oprah there was this man, Randy
Pausch, who is a professor back East and he’s about forty years old.
He’s a professor and there is a lecture series at his university and
in the lecture series hypothetically you give the lecture if you have
only one year to live. What would you say in a lecture if you have
one year to live? What would you say to your students? The
difference between Randy Pausch and all of the other people that had
ever given the lecture was he HAS six weeks to live. Now, he didn’t
want a pity party. He wasn’t being morose. He was embracing this
moment in his life with all of the vigor that he could give it. And
so, when he got up to talk to those four hundred students, he had a
lot of wisdom and a lot of things to say. He didn’t want the pity
party because he just jumped out onto the floor and immediately he
gave push-ups. (I could do it for you but I’m not going to.) And he
starts off by saying, “You should follow your dreams.” God has a
dream for every single one of us, but we also engage in this dream
for ourselves, what we want to be. He wanted to be an imagineer at
Disneyland. He had gone there with his parents and wanted to be one
of the people who design the rides. And twice, in the early part of
his life, he applied and got turned down. He even kept the refusal
letters. But then when he got his chair at the university, he was
working on virtual reality science and so Disney needed that
particular ability and hired him, fifteen years later on, for this.
He says, “Even though you might not achieve your dreams you should
still go for it because you can achieve a lot just by trying to get
there.”

He asks the question, “Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore? Who’s a
Tigger? .... Oh, so the rest of you are Eeyores? C’mon, don’t sit on
the fence. Are you a Tigger? (Some yes responses are heard.) What are
you, Father Timoney? .... “I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” (from Father Timoney, followed by lots of laughter!) See, he
grew up in Ireland where there’s no TV. They didn’t get the Disney
Channel. Tigger is the one, the little striped tiger, who goes
bouncing around with vigor and life and decides to have fun, and
Eeyore is “wuh, life is a drudge...” Well, he is suggesting that you
should go out and you should have fun. He says, “I have six weeks to
live. These tumors are killing me, but I am going to live my life to
the fullest with my family and with my friends. Never underestimate
what choosing fun can do in your life, even despite what ‘s happening
to you.” He says you’ve got to live your life in truth and integrity.
If you don’t have your own truth, you don’t stop to take stock of
your own life and to live it in truth and integrity. what do you
have? He said “If you mess up, fess up. Apologize and then own it.
And when you’ve owned it, the mark of sincerity is that you say,
‘What can I do to make amends?’ ”

That’s why I think the twelve-step programs are one of the great
spiritualities of our day: to say it, to admit it to God, to admit it
to yourself and then stand before the community. It’s a very, very
powerful moment. And he says, “There’s not one person on this planet
who’s totally evil. If you wait long enough for the people around
you, the people that exhibit evil in their lives, if you wait
patiently, every person, there is good in them and it will come out.”
And lastly, he says (I love this and you will like this too, being a
pastor before. - This aside to Father Timoney) “We don’t like
complainers.” Somebody said to me last week, “Father, there are nine
mistakes in your letter.” I’m like, “OK. Well thank you for sharing.”
And when I walked over through the gym this morning, I said, “There
are not any in it today.” ... “Oh yes, there is. There’s one.” I
said, “OK.” Randy says, “Work hard.” And he was blessed to have
really wonderful parents that allowed him to be imaginative, allowed
him to express who he was as a kid. And so, he said, “Why am I doing
this lecture? It wasn’t for the four hundred people and it wasn’t to
be on national TV.” What he did was, and it ended up with a picture
of his three little girls, with them in his arms. The lecture was for
them. He owned his own truth and he wanted to communicate that truth
and that reality. Nowhere in all of it did you hear God mentioned, or
spirituality. But yet, from my listening ears with the God of love in
mind, Randy was communicating in faith. Randy was communicating what
we hear read from the Hebrew scriptures and the Gospel... own your
truth and live life to the very best you can. Live your dream in
truth, and that’s what he invited us to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HqdnjgkExY (YouTube has taken the
actual Oprah segment off due to copyright issues. This link is the
same “Last Lecture.”

You know each of us has his/her own truth and own poverty, and we are
called to own our own dark side and we have to own (What is it they
say in AA about secrets?).... (From the congregation) “You’re as sick
as your secrets.” .... Exactly! You know, a couple of weeks ago, I
asked one of the people in Christ Light (You know we are training to
put this retreat together. And one of the people makes me look like a
shy person. She is so extraverted. I’m serious. She came to Rome with
us last year, along with the group, and then she starts dancing on
the pole on the 62 bus, as we’re leaving the Vatican. I says, “We’re
on a Church tour. Stop that!” She’s kind of a fun person.) Anyway, I
said to her, “Could you do the talk on forgiveness?” And she said,
“Why me?” And I said, “Well, you’ve just gone through a really
painful divorce and I would say that you probably have a few people
to forgive in your life.” So she agreed to do it, and along with some
of the other people in the parish, she put her talk together and when
she came in to give us the talk, the forty of us critique these talks
so that they are better. You know a word here or a word there might
be different, or a thought or a feeling. But, as she got up, she was
shaking. And we are friends. We love her. And she got up and she
cried the whole ten minutes that she gave her talk. She cried for the
pain that was in her heart. She cried for the pain that her husband
had run off on her and her four children and she just was angry,
angry, angry. But you know what she realized? As I had asked her to
do this and as she had reflected on it, she realized that she had
some ownership in this divorce, that there were things that even
through her anger she realized there were things she had done over
the years that had actually pushed her husband away. And she hadn’t
really realized it before. And she was able to say it to us. And you
know what? The emotion in that room was incredible because all forty
of us stood up together and she said, “Let’s pray.” We always close
with a prayer and she said, “Why don’t each of us just say somebody
in our lives that we need to forgive.” And I would say that about
sixty-five percent of the people in the room, as that prayer went
around, including myself, had somebody that they needed to forgive.
So, she modeled for us, and we returned with that love because she
owned her own stuff, and she owned her shadow side.

Our kids go on retreat every year. I would suggest to you that the
kids of today have more difficulties, they have these role models,
these zero size models, and they have all of these different things,
technology and computers and they have this and that going on. And
yet there seems to be less ability to communicate. And this became
really clear at the last year’s retreat because, out of the eighty-
two kids that were there, there is an open microphone and I think
seventy-six of those kids got up and talked about things that were
going on in their lives, that they shared the dark side, the things
that are going on, the things that worried them, everything from
kids’ self-mutilation (I think there were about six or seven kids got
up and admitted to that.) to suicidal ideation, to everything. And
every time every kid got up, the kids around them just loved them and
embraced them. Isn’t that community in action? One kid got up and
said, “You know, I’ve been carrying this around for two years. Two
years ago, my family was going on a trip to Europe and I knew that
one of my best friends that had moved back East had cancer and he was
coming home to say Goodbye and I decided to go to Europe.” And he
said, “When I got home, my friend had died. And for this past two
years, I have just felt so bad about that.” And so, he was able to
communicate that to everybody and everybody was just like, “We still
love you. You made a mistake in your heart and he knows and he
understands.”

You know the saints that we are about to celebrate are simply revised
and edited human beings. They have embraced their shadow sides. They
have embraced their whole humanity. If you take Dorothy Day, for
example, what she went through in her search for God. You take Mother
Teresa. For forty years, that woman never felt God in her life. I
would suggest to you that’s more of a miracle, that she went through
every day of her life, doing all the good that she did and continued
to pray, and she never felt God. The dark night of the soul lasted a
long time for her. That’s a miracle. That’s why she should be made a
saint, and for all of the good things.

God hates the sin, not the sinner. And so we celebrate what we are,
becoming saints, each and every one of us. It’s kind of awful that
this word has become synonymous with perfection. They were not
perfect, but they embraced all of who they are. We all want to be
loved. You know, the last story in each of these stories, I talk to
these people, and I’m not just using stories without people’s
permission... When we were doing our “Eight Spiritual Heroes” the
other day and the topic was Dorothy Day and her challenges and where
she was, Dorothy Day was a woman, a single mother, who had terminated
a pregnancy in an earlier part of her life and felt terrible about
it. And so, as we talked about her journey, this one woman in our
group said to the group, “When I was a teenager, I had a pregnancy
terminated and I have gone to confession and I have felt like a piece
of excrement nearly all of my life because of that.” And in that
moment, all of us in the room that were talking just wanted to love
her. We just wanted to love her. My heart just went out to her, with
just sheer unadulterated love because this woman felt that she could
say it out to us and that we could love her.

God hates the sin and loves the sinner. We are called. We are called
in a special way to own our own truth. We are called to own our own
reality, our own poverty. And what can happen when we do own that?
What is the least that can happen? That God will love us, as sinners
and in our attempt to be saints, God will love us when we own our own
reality. And that’s the difference between the guy who was the tax
collector and the guy who was just up there praying for himself. The
little guy, the tax collector owned who he was, his need for God and
his need for his brothers and his sisters, as we attempt to do today.
God loves us.