These photographs
Monday, May 29, 2017
Father Manny Alvarez
On the wall in the northwest corner of my office, there is a framed photograph of every single eighth grade class I have seen graduate since I first entered a Catholic school classroom to teach some 17 years ago. Up there are six different schools, hundreds of kids, and countless memories.
I sometimes sit in my office and look at this collage of portraits, each one telling a hundred tales, and pray for those kids. Some haven’t been kids in a while. Some have kids of their own. Most, sadly, have wandered beyond the safety of the gates of Mother Church.
Since becoming a pastor, I’ve joked with eighth graders of not wanting to hand them their diplomas at graduation because I do not want them to leave. As if echoing the very words of Jesus in John 10:28, “No one will snatch them from my hand.”
But then I look at them and realize that they are not mine. They belong to the Lord. And as I’ve preached many a time during graduation homilies, we have to let them go.
It’s all so easy when they are children and you have them as a captive audience every Friday for Mass, or whenever I pop into a classroom. But after that, sadly, they are gone. And then we wait. We wait for them to come home. We wait like the father of the prodigal son to perhaps, one day, catch sight of them returning home.
Yes, there are some who still faithfully attend Mass every Sunday and who have done and continue to do some great things for the Church. Yet most of their classmates have wandered off.
Sure, many keep in touch. Many have become very successful in their chosen careers. And while most of the time I look up at that wall with pride and think of what those kids have accomplished, there are times when I wish I could reach into those pictures and — like the outstretched hand of our Lord in the Gospel story of the widow of Nain — touch the ones who have strayed and put them safely back in the arms of Holy Mother Church.
This is our calling.
All of us know people who for some reason or another have left the Church. Some reasons may be legitimate, but we must remind them of the compassion and mercy of Jesus Christ. Our hands must be the hands of Jesus who touched the coffin at Nain. We must touch the hearts of those who are “dead in sin” and have been carried off by the world beyond the safety of the gates of Holy Mother Church.
If you’re a parent who weeps because your children don’t come to Mass with you anymore, “do not weep” your Savior tells you. The Church, his bride, has been weeping with you, and waits for the day when all her children, especially those who were raised within the safety of her gates, rise up and return to the arms of their mother, who weeps every day for those who have wandered far.
As for all those kids in those photographs, for me it’s not so much tears that come to my eyes but a singular prayer that wells up in my heart: that the seeds of faith their parents and their teachers and their priests planted, may one day produce great fruit and ultimately lead them back home to their Church.
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