Complete the Circle
By By George Evans
I remember the summer of 1964 and plan to participate in some of the 50th anniversary events of Mississippi Freedom Summer at Tougaloo College on June 25-29. I was a native of Vicksburg, had finished college a year before and had just completed one year of law school and had started seminary studies at a Benedictine Monastery in Conception, Missouri. Mississippi was in an absolute turmoil.  I’m not sure we knew it at the time but a social revolution was in progress. Students, both black and white, were pouring into the state from colleges all over the country with the sole intent of registering new voters.

The summer before the freedom riders had come. That effort had been directed at integrating accommodations and bus stations. Progress in that area was on the way. This was different. These students, and those in charge, were staying here for weeks or months, not passing through or being sent to Parchman.

They were working to organize people who had never before voted and who, for the most part, had not been taught how to register to vote nor encouraged to do so. Tension ran high. A major black vote could threaten the way of life of segregation and white supremacy which prevailed.  The threat of school integration had lingered for 10 years since Brown vs. Board of Education and deep down whites knew the delay couldn’t last forever (it ended six years later in 1970).  A black vote along with the federal action being taken could mean a power shift.

The tension that built with incident after incident during the early days of June, erupted with the killing of three civil rights workers, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner on June 21-22 in Neshoba County. They were missing for weeks after being released from jail at night. National media and the best the FBI had to offer descended upon Mississippi and Neshoba County. National news reported daily.
The bodies of the three workers were found in an earthen dam in Neshoba County 44 days later, Aug. 5, 1964. The outrage over their deaths, assisted in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mississippi had shot itself in its foot.

Freedom Summer 1964 brought forth some leadership from churches and synagogues, particularly the Catholic and Episcopal bishops, some other church leaders and the Jewish rabbis pleading for restraint and tolerance in the name of Judeo-Christian principles. In truth, as I saw it at the time, this effort was welcomed, took courage and made me proud. But it was limited and unsupported by the vast majority of the churches and people who remained silent.
The accommodation that the churches had made for years with segregation was taking its toll. Change is never easy and for most whites, this was CHANGE IN CAPITAL LETTERS. I think we were all (even those who embraced the changes) a little afraid of what the future held because of the uncertainty that a social and cultural revolution brings. This was a change in a way of life. This was a true social/cultural revolution.

Looking back after 50 years we see great progress. Black elected officials are found all over Mississippi in great numbers. More and more black Mississippians graduate from college and professional schools and take their place in meaningful and well-paying jobs in business, education, the arts and professions. Restaurants and theaters and recreational venues of all kinds reverberate with  black patrons and couples and perhaps even more significantly with mixed race patrons and couples.  Schools and universities are well integrated.
Despite the progress enormous work still remains. The African American poverty rate in Mississippi is awful and disproportionate to that of Caucasians and Asians. The same is true for those in prisons and those born out of wedlock. The tensions of 50 years ago have abated but new fears and anxieties between races still endure and God’s command to love your neighbor as yourself still goes wanting.

Churches have made progress but until secular materialism is confronted and overcome the self absorption and narcissism it leads to will continue the need for a new social/cultural revolution as did segregation. Until we buckle down on that enormous undertaking we will not achieve that which many hoped to achieve 50 years ago – justice, peace, prosperity. There will be no further progress in race relations and no further social/cultural revolutions until we reach out and touch and embrace our neighbor, actually love our neighbor as ourself.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Reflections On Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
“There’s a 911 going off all around the Catholic Church, especially in the black part of the Church. But few people seem to be listening to the 911. It is noted that one in three Catholics is no longer practicing. Former altar boys or altar girls, former Eucharistic ministers and lectors are now part of some megachurch, Pentecostal church or no church. Amazingly, the number of former Catholics is sufficient to form the third-largest U.S. denomination.
“Most distressing of all, late-teenage and young adult Catholics are those most conspicuous for their absence. We are losing them at an alarming rate because we are not breaking the Word open to them. Our prayers, worship and life are not filled with the driving power of the Holy Ghost, so that people leave church in the same sad shape they entered it.
“Before walking out of church on Sunday, all of us need an attitude adjustment and a greater quickening of the Holy Ghost. But some of us need a transfusion, minor surgery or varying degrees of medical care, while others need open-heart surgery or, in some cases, a heart transplant. Serious head adjustment, nerve and/or emotional treatment is in order for many before they casually walk out the door as if everything were all right with them and the world.”
These words came pouring out of the mouth of evangelist/revivalist Msgr. Ray East, pastor of St. Teresa of Avila Church in Washington, D.C. He was busy bringing the fire of the Holy Ghost to St. Anthony Parish, housed in a smallish church in Dallas. Six of us from Our Mother of Mercy Church in Fort Worth had motored there to join in the revival. He observed that few churches are catching the fire of the Holy Spirit, and, without that fire, they will be lifeless, purposeless failures.
With an almost continuous smile, his eyes, ivories and his striking demeanor showed clearly that he was enjoying, savoring each greeting, every word, each prayer, every reading of the liturgy, rocking, gesturing and clapping to the beat and lyrics of each song rendered by the dynamic, powerful blended choir of St. Anthony and Holy Cross Churches.
Wearing Texas boots, Monsignor Ray removed them ostentatiously in the midst of his homily and placed them standing next to the pulpit. He did not put them on again until shortly before the Consecration. Wandering over much of the church like a peripatetic preacher, he made certain that he engaged as many individuals as he could.
Later, he explained that removing ones shoes before entering a house is common in the East, but especially when entering an area that is considered a holy place, much as when Moses approached the burning bush.
And, not surprisingly, I had that familiar feeling during the progression of the liturgy, music and homily that we were indeed standing on holy ground. As he spoke, the words of the song came to mind, “We are standing on holy ground, and I know that there are angels all around. Let us praise Jesus now.”
Yes, and the Holy Spirit was indeed moving and hard at work. In their now smiling, now pensive, now troubled, now joyful, now explosive demeanor, the sisters and brothers throughout the church resonated Msgr. East’s infectious presence and spirited proclamation of the Word, his on-fire sharing of the Word in his homily, and his highly personal rendition of each segment of the liturgy. It was an obvious reenactment of the legendary Last Supper.
“In order to reach our St. Teresa of Avila Church in D.C., many of our church members have to pass by megachurches and a number of Catholic parishes. They have to WANT to come to our church service! And that is what all of us must do. We must so conduct our lives and our church service that people will WANT to come to us and be a part of our Faith Family.”
The afterglow, of course, and the follow-up by the folks attending a church service are the proof whether the action and interaction of the service have been faith-driven, Spirit-filled and live to the point where minds and hearts are changed for the better, negative stress is relieved or removed, pain and sorrow are more bearable and our lives become more livable.
That afterglow and follow-up were evident as we repaired to the hall for a light repast. The happy, buzzing beehive atmosphere was that of the Agape gatherings of the early Christians.
“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
The lusts of the flesh reveal the loneliness of the soul. Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote those words and they highlight part of the deeper intentionality of sexual desire. And this insight was more than just a theoretical one for Hammarskjold. He knew loneliness and unfulfilled desire.
As more and more of his journals are published in English, we are becoming more aware that Dag Hammarskjold was both a man of extraordinary moral integrity and extraordinary spiritual depth. And he came by it legitimately. His father, at one time the Prime Minister of Sweden, had been a great statesman of uncompromising integrity and his mother had been a woman of great warmth and spiritual depth. Hammarskjold inherited the best of both, and it made him both a rare statesman and a great spiritual writer. However not everything was whole in his life.
While in his professional life he dealt with issues of world importance and was taxed for every ounce of his energies, the rest of his life was not nearly so complete. As a young man, he had lost a woman he deeply loved to another man, and this was a wound that never left him. He never dated or pursued marriage again. He longed to be married, but, for all kinds of reasons, as is the case for millions of people, it just never happened. He was, in the words of his biographer, Walter Lipsey, “checkmated rather than mated.”
Hammarskjold, in his journals, often reflects on this “checkmate” and upon the lacuna it left in his life. There’s a searing honesty about its pain and about how he tries to grapple with it. On the one hand, he is clear that this is a pain that cannot be denied and which never goes away; on the other hand, he is able to redirect it somewhat, sublimating it into a wider embrace, into a different kind of marriage bed:
“I feel pain, a longing to share in this embrace [of a husband and wife], to be absorbed, to share in this encounter. A longing like carnal desire, but directed toward earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light.”  Was this satisfying? Not quite, but it brought a certain peace: “Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested, while waiting.”
In this, both in how he experienced the pain of his inconsummation and in how he tried to redirect those longings, his feelings parallel those of Thomas Merton. Merton was once asked by a journalist how he felt about celibacy. Merton replied that “celibacy was hell”, that it condemned one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned (“It is not good for the man to be alone”), and that it was in fact a dangerous way to live since it was an abnormal way of living. But Merton then went on to say that, just because it was anomalous and dangerous, didn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully generative and life-giving, both for the one living it as well as for those around him or her. And that was no doubt true in Merton’s own case, just as it was true for Hammarskjold. Both infused more oxygen into the planet.
Moreover, Merton tried to sublimate his desire for a marriage bed in much the same way as Hammarskjold did: “I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.”
Both Hammarskjold and Merton longed for that deep, highly individualized, intimate and sexual, one-to-one embrace which was denied them by their place in life and which is denied to millions of us by every sort of circumstance and conscription. Merton chose to forego sexual consummation deliberately, to embrace religious vows; Hammarskjold had it chosen for him, by circumstance. At the end of the day the effect was the same. Both then tried to sublimate that need and desire for congenital intimacy by, in their own words, somehow marrying the world and making love in a less-particularized way.
Many married persons who enjoy that unique depth of one-to-one intimacy that Hammarskjold and Merton longed for, must, I suspect, inchoately also long to find within their sexual intimacy that wider embrace of which Hammarskjold and Merton speak, knowing that they want that too in their sexual embrace.
Thinkers have forever mulled-over the problem of the one and the many, the interrelationship between the particular and the universal, because this isn’t just a theoretical issue in metaphysics, something to entertain philosophers, it’s also something that lies inextricably entangled within the powerful pressure of sexuality in lovers in their beds all over the world.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Forming our future
By Joni House
Deciding on the best educational environment for a child is one of the most important choices a parent has to make. In our quick-paced, technology-centered culture, finding the right technological tool for one’s child can seem like the most challenging part of the process. In truth, this is only half of the challenge.
It is not until one begins to use available technology that one discovers its value as a resource in education and appreciates that having the right tool is only the first step in the success of student learning. For teachers to be truly successful at using technology in education they must have more than just the availability of technology, they must also be educated in how to use it effectively.

Imagine you have just purchased a beautiful new car. It is sleek, shiny, and includes all of the latest upgrades. You are thrilled at the possibilities available to you now that you own it. You open the door, place yourself inside, and close the door in preparation for your very first drive to the most amazing place you can imagine. Can you feel the excitement?

Now imagine that excitement dissipating as you realize that you have no idea how to start it or which pedal to push to make it go. This is the frustration teachers struggle with when faced with using modern technology in the classroom. It is a gift, but without the knowledge of how to “drive” it, the value is lost.

One of the determining factors for parents when choosing a school for their child is knowing and understanding the technology resources that a school can provide. The catch for true integration is that the technology must not only be present, but utilized to its fullest capability. For technology to be successfully integrated in school, it must be used in the classroom, but also done in such a manner that facilitates hands-on learning for students. What does this mean? Let’s take a look at the use of interactive white boards.

If not properly trained on the capabilities of an interactive white board, teachers can fall into the trap of using them as a glorified overhead projector. Although still an important use, there are countless additional interactive possibilities in interactive white board software that can assist teachers in facilitating hands-on learning for students.
Students should be out of their seats, at the board with the mouse device in hand, applying what they are learning to the lesson. They should be at the plate swinging, not sitting on the bench watching the play. Kinesthetic learning is technology’s biggest asset, but it is not as simple as handing the technology to the teacher and patting him/her on the back with a silent “good luck.”

The proper use of technology in the classroom necessitates continual professional development. Teachers must be provided ample opportunities to master the use of technology in building classroom curriculum and facilitating modern day hands-on learning.

Having the resources and utilizing them to enhance the teaching/learning process is crucial. An educational environment can have all the latest resources, but if those resources are not utilized, how is the material being taught enhanced?
In order for resources such as interactive white boards, tablets, digital cameras, document cameras, wikis, blogs, student response systems, Skype, laptops and notebooks to impact student learning, educators must be provided professional development opportunities which demonstrate how teachers can integrate technologies into classrooms.

Educators must then be given the opportunity to utilize the newly learned strategies that integrate technology into the curriculum. If technology is truly integrated into the curriculum the school community will have to learn from their challenges, celebrate their successes, and share their resources.
In many instances educators learn best from their and colleagues’ trials and errors. We are all learning, and what a great lesson to teach our students – learning never stops.
(Joni House has been the principal of Columbus Annunication School for three years.)

COMPLETE THE CIRCLE
By George Evans
I can’t seem to avoid Pope Francis when I sit down to write this column. That may not be bad. In fact it may be very good because he continues to have so much to say that we all need to hear.  This time his Easter sermon to 150,000 gathered in St. Peter’s Square emphasized that evangelization, the topic it seems everyone is currently talking or writing books about, “is about leaving ourselves behind and encountering others, being close to those crushed by life’s trouble, sharing with the needy, standing at the side of the sick, elderly and the outcast.”

He is not telling us to sell the catechism or to teach the creed as such.  He’s telling us to take the risen Lord with us to those who need him and will meet him in us. That’s scary, but who else is going to do it.  We are his hands and feet. Peter and all the heroes of the early church are dead.
Saints Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius, Dominic and are dead and while their religious orders are doing their part, they can’t do it alone either. He’s telling us to do what we are told at the end of each Mass, “Go and glorify the Lord by your life.” Embrace the world and its people in mercy and love and the catechism and creed will follow and will be embraced in turn.

Pope Francis prayed in his Easter message that the risen Lord would “help us to overcome the scourge of hunger, aggravated by conflict and by the immense wastefulness for which we are often responsible” and that Christians “would be given the strength to protect the vulnerable, especially children, women and the elderly, who are at times exploited and abandoned.”
He’s telling us to get out of our churches and get our hands dirty – to visit the sick and suffering, to feed the hungry and go into their homes, to teach about Jesus by letting those vulnerable see him in us.

Francis is telling us to nourish and strengthen ourselves with prayer, adoration, Eucharist and other sacraments but then to do something with it for others as Jesus did,  not to just keep it for our own sole benefit.  The tough things like affecting legislation that is desperately needed at both the state and federal level, working with  one or more of the myriad groups attempting to make Jackson and every other city in Mississippi a better and more just and caring place to live.

Giving some of our time to those in prison or just out of prison, to those struggling with mental illness or the financial disaster which so often accompanies it. Reach out and touch a family member who has been excluded or a co-worker who’s difficult or a foreign worker who doesn’t speak good English.

Pope Francis has given us all kinds of examples of what to do in his actions and in his preaching and writings. He has stripped away much of the unnecessary pomp and circumstance of the papacy that made it more difficult to see the humility and care of Jesus by living a lifestyle much more in keeping with the carpenter from Nazareth and the incarnate son of the Father and risen Lord. He has worked tirelessly to reform the Vatican and has announced two synods on the family for the fall of 2014 and 2015.  He has embraced the poor and vulnerable in almost every public outing.

He needs our help as we need his. We cannot be content with trying to shape up our own lives and stopping there. This world needs Jesus desperately and can only get Him from us.

Jesus has saved us and we have celebrated the Paschal Mystery yet again and are not only saved but strengthened by it. It is now time to do something with it and to take the risen Lord with us to the world in all its nitty-gritty reality.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Nature, desire, and soul – we rarely integrate these well. Yet they are so inextricably linked that how we relate to one deeply colors the others; and indeed, spirituality itself might be defined as what we each do in terms of integrating these three in our lives.
More recently notable spiritual authors such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Bill Plotkin and Belden Lane have argued persuasively that physical nature profoundly affects the soul, just as how we manage our private desires deeply influences how we treat nature. Spirituality is naïve when it is divorced from nature and desire. In a book just released, “The Road Knows How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul,” Canadian writer Trevor Herriot joins these voices in calling for a better integration between nature, desire, and soul.

The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul as he does this prairie Camino. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book.

As a naturalist, Herriot is involved in various conservation projects from saving grassland birds to preserving the historic grass upon which the buffalo once roamed. Thus it’s no surprise that one of his central themes is the connection he intuits between nature and spirit. “I worry about what happens when we separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place,” he writes.

And we should worry too: “These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges.

The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.”
From there it’s a short step to his reflections on sex and desire. Herriot submits that “there is a sadness that comes of misappropriating sexual energy, a kind of functional despair that hums away in the background for most men if they stop long enough to listen to it.” In brief, for him, how we treat our bodies, our spouses and the other gender greatly helps determine how we treat nature.

And the reverse is just as true; how we treat nature will help determine how we treat our own bodies, our spouses, our lovers and the other gender: “In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?

We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge and be fruitful.
Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.” This is not a language that’s easily digested by either the right or the left.

Like Allan Bloom’s book a generation ago, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Herriot’s book is poised to have equally strong critics on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. Religious conservatives will be upset about some of his views on sexuality, but I fear that many secular liberals will be just as upset by those views as their right-wing counterparts. The same holds true for some of Herriot’s views on soul, church, historical Christianity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, homosexuality and global warming.

Conservative Christians will find themselves stretched in ways that they would prefer to not think about and strident secularists will find themselves constantly incredulous that someone like Herriot, whom they consider an ally, will speak of soul, spirituality, lust and chastity in ways that they have long-considered naïve; but holding very complex truths often creates precisely this kind of tension.

James Hillman used to quip: “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.” “The Road Knows How” tells us where many, many of our symptoms belong.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Millennial Reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
Recently I got a request from someone in Bangladesh urging people to sign a petition seeking full and fair compensation from two national clothing retailers for the survivors of a horrific fire that killed more than 1,100 people in a clothing factory a year ago.
The individual, Aklima Khanam, was a 20-year-old survivor. Some of you may remember the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York around the turn of the last century where almost 200 immigrant women died. They were locked in to keep them working. This galvanized the new movement for worker rights. The rest is history.

The event last year in Bangladesh dwarfs what happened 100 years ago in the United States. Here, too, survivors say they were locked in to keep them working and the cost in human life and injury was staggering.
Looking at the way workers are treated in these international sweat shops unencumbered by American labor law begins another chapter in human oppression and exploitation. It is always the most vulnerable poorest classes of people affected, especially women and children.

This came to me right after we celebrated total destruction. Jesus faced a rigged trial and was tortured and executed in the most grizzly way possible. His followers were dispersed. The Scriptures told how this was the plan of God, and Jesus did what he promised, he rose from the dead. His resurrection was the final statement that injustice of every kind would come to an end.

There will always be a push back from the kind of exploitation I just outlined, and, despite the lack of material resources, such movements will not stop. We always preach the death and resurrection of Jesus as a unit. One explains the other. It also says that no matter how much evil we encounter, people will keep getting back up to resist it.
These next two years we will celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the two major civil rights laws in our country. The struggle for civil rights and worker justice did not begin in the 1960s or 1860s, but from the first time one group exploited another.

The theological inspiration for every movement for social justice can be found in the Scriptures we read on Easter, in the Easter season and throughout Lent. The prophets are quite explicit about justice and fairness. Those who have been exploited can look to the trial and execution of Jesus. The followers of Jesus came from the exploited and marginalized.

Things we rely on as basic: food and clothes are produced all over the world by young, poor, invisible people. When we buy brand named clothes at high prices, we have no idea where they were made. Labels tell very little. Think for a moment about an $800 suit going at clearance for less than a $100, then try and figure out the real cost of its manufacture. Then think about the wages the workers get who make the clothes. No, the answer is not to react and make your own clothes. The answer is to change the system that is built on exploitation.

We can turn to food and those who grow and harvest the crops. That leads us to the broken immigration system. We just saw pictures of Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson  reaching through the border fence trying to give someone communion during the Mass for unity the bishops had at the Mexico-Arizona border.

The point is the endless push back for justice. They can build fences. They can build sweat shops, but people will always fight for justice. This is the power of resurrection over death. Real Christians know that our religion is built on optimism. Easter is the great feast that anything resembling despair, weakness, misery, etc. will be overcome by the power of justice, the joy of freedom and the peace that comes out of the empty tomb.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson)

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech all who attended will never forget. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question.
“When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?”
The audience was stilled by the query. The father continued. “I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled, comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.” Then he told the following story.

“Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, ‘Do you think they’ll let me play?’ I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.
“I approached one of the boys on the field and asked – not expecting much – if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, ‘We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.’

“Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.
“In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

“However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground.
“The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head.

“Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, ‘Shay, run to first! Run to first!’ Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base.  Everyone yelled, ‘Run to second, run to second!’ Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.

“By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions. So he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

“All were screaming, ‘Shay, Shay, Shay, all the way, Shay!’ Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, ’Shay, run to third!’ As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, ‘Shay, run home! Run home!’ Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.”

“That day,” the father said softly with tears now rolling down his face, “the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world.
“Shay didn’t make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!”

If you are anything like me, this curious little episode did to you what it did to me, causing mist in my eyes, a tightness in my throat, and stiffness in the hairs of my skin. Deep down, we want everyone to be a winner in this life and in our glorious life to come.
“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)