The explosion occurred at 12:07 p.m., on October 3, 1962 when about 100 employees of the New York Telephone Company’s uptown Manhattan building – most of them young women – were crowded in the basement lunchroom. Without warning, the boiler blew and erupted into the room with the force of a jet-propelled projectile. It smashed its way up through the ceiling to the first floor, bounced back into the lunchroom and finally roared through an opposite wall. It destroyed or killed or maimed everything in its path. (The Bridgeport Connecticut Post. 1962)
My mother was seven years old when she still remembers playing in the playground of Good Shepherd School, hearing the explosion, and seeing the priests running out of the rectory and toward the burning building on 213th Street in her native Inwood neighborhood. The New York Post reported that 213th Street and Broadway looked like a war torn battlefield, with priests giving last rites to those who needed them.
In this week’s second reading, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews offers us a beautiful and poignant dissertation on the role of the priest and the community. Though brief, it packs a punch! “He [the priest] is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring,” the writer tells us. (Ouch, but true, I know I have been a pretty ignorant and certainly erring parishioner.) The passage continues, “for he himself is beset by weakness.” Great priests understand that true servant leadership is about setting an example, admitting weakness and setting vision for the community, knowing they themselves are a part of the community, not separate from it. Great pastors understand that, like Christ himself, they don’t lead in front of the community, but from the center of it.
I’ve been beyond blessed to have an amazing lifelong relationship with my father, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say that this blessing didn’t include being spiritually raised by many other fathers. I’m reminded of the priests who, during the Día de Los Reyes Parade parties in Miami, would go around blessing tables and everyone’s fresh rosca de reyes (a traditional pastry) with cigars hanging out of their mouths. I remember the makeshift confessionals and altars built from waterlogged car hoods after Hurricane Andrew where priests would gather distraught victims for prayer. I was being spiritually raised and led and I didn’t even yet consider myself a Catholic!
Whether it was playing basketball with Fr. Ed Ward, O.Carm. as a teen at my youth meetings in Bogota or working on student Catholic programming with my mentor Msgr. Dick Liddy at Seton Hall University, I’ve been blessed to know many bricklayer priests. “That’s a good priest, that’s a bricklayer priest,” my dad likes to say. “Bricklayer priests,” he says, are those men who have built our Church, brick by brick, in a myriad of unpretentious, small and unsexy ways. Bricklayer priests are the “shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.” (Chrism Mass, March 28, 2015) as Pope Francis tells us.
Let us thank our priests and pray for the increase of vocations, both for the young men discerning and the parents to encourage their sons. To all you beautiful Catholic families, encourage your sons to consider the priesthood as they would consider a career as an artist, scientist or teacher. In fact, I’ve known priests who were all three! As young men who want to live authentic spiritual lives, I believe it is important to attend a vocational retreat for the priesthood as normally as you would attend your senior prom. Parents should know it is not something to fear, but to be encouraged. I have discerned and attended vocational retreats for the Carmelites, Benedictines and Franciscan Friars. My journey led me toward the vocation of marriage, but I look forward to nurturing my children’s vocational journey. So today, let us pray for more brave men, running towards the explosions of life. Have a blessed week.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot