Lots to talk about this time.

Looking at my notes from the Community’s annual meeting last week, I’d like start by saying a special word of thanks to the people who stood for election, but who did not receive enough votes to serve as at-large Council members. The voting was actually very close. These folks provided the Community with a genuine opportunity for discernment, rather than rubber-stamping a handful of volunteers. We hope those who were not elected will continue to serve on committees and will step forward again in future elections.

Here are the results: Elected to at-large positions were Eileen Garven, Paul Kunkel and Peter Toomey. Congratulations to them. I’ve had the privilege to work with all three on the newsletter. The following people were elected to chair committees: Barb Wingenfeld for Christian Formation, John Lucic for Communications, Sally Hayes and Alyce Schwarzwalder for Hospitality, K. Vine for Liturgy, Bill McLaughlin and John Gilmore for Membership and Lois Dingman for Social Concerns. Bruce Wacker was elected to the newly created post of Treasurer. During the meeting, Jane Smith volunteered to take over the Spiritual Development Committee.

Let’s pray for wisdom and an abundant sense of humor for all of them. Is there a patron saint for time management?

Over 100 people voted and about 75 stayed for the full meeting, which ran about an hour. A 13-page printed report on the activities of the various committees and ministries was circulated, and extra copies should be available at the Rectory. It includes a detailed chart by Bill Herceg on exactly how we are meeting the goals set out by the 1994-1995 Community Council. Chris Schenk’s report on FutureChurch is quite comprehensive.

Among some newsy tidbits from the meeting:

• Paul Kunkel reported that the second phase of Bishop Pilla’s Church and the City initiative is moving forward.
• K. Vine is our new representative to the Diocesan Pastoral Council.
• The Second Annual Pentecost lecture, featuring Fr. J-Glenn Murray, S.J., will take place on May 15. The evening will start with a 5:30 p.m. Liturgy followed by dinner, and then the presentation at around 7 p.m. Fr. Murray is a dynamic speaker and the event promises to be a good one.
• FutureChurch is seeking volunteers for its Pentecost Phone-A-Thon. During the fund-raising event, volunteers will follow up on the group’s annual Pentecost appeal, said Chris Schenk. Help is needed for May 14, 15, 16, 20 and 21, from 6-9 p.m., at the CSJ Mother House at 3430 Rocky River Drive. Call 631-6965 to sign up.
• May 19 is the next Council meeting, 6 p.m. at the Center. It is open to all Community members.

FINANCES: After the meeting, I had a conversation with Bruce Wacker about the Community’s financial situation, which is much improved from the last time I wrote about it here. There is now a budget surplus, but Bruce cautioned that this can be eaten up quickly during the summer months when liturgies are more lightly attended. Please keep up your generous level of support. If there are extra funds, the Community will have no trouble putting them to very good use.

RUMORS! Unreliable sources tell me that Mary Englert is getting ready to take over as Editor of the first page of the newsletter, which we have recently renamed "Malachi Notes." Mary refused to confirm or deny the rumor. More news on this as my unidentified sources report in to me. Uninformed observers observed that this is a high-visibility situation that bears watching.

FAMILY GROUP: The Small Christian Community Group of families met last weekend. It has become a very large group, too large for most homes. We are starting to discuss how it could be split up. A couple of us are talking about how we could use a spin-off group to involve/build community among our older kids who are disaffected from their church experience. We sure could use some ideas about how to approach that.

EL SALVADOR: This issue of Communio features another installment of Paul Kunkel’s report on his trip to El Salvador. Paul tells me that he has compiled his notes and reflections into a 52-page book thatwhich he had printed at his own expense. He is making it available to those who are truly interested. More excerpts will be forthcoming in Communio. Paul will be making a presentation on his trip on May 30 at 7:30 p.m. at Metro Hospital.

NEXT NEWSLETTER: As things start to wind down in May, we’ve decided to publish the next newsletter in three weeks, on May 26. Note well that the next deadline for Communio will be Sunday, May 19 —-- it’s sooner than you think!

Going over future publication dates with Communications Chair John Lucic, our tentative plan is to continue the every-third-week schedule through the summer. But as dedicated readers know, the Spirit may lead us to take a longer break from time to time during the summer months.

After meeting with Dean Brackley, S.J., who showed us a photos of the slayings of the six Jesuits and the workers, we walk behind the administration building at the UCA to the Memorial Garden. In the afternoon sun, we see the six beautiful rose bushes, in full bloom, which had been planted on the spots where Ignacio Ellacuría, Armando Lopez, Joaquin Lopez, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, and Juan Ramon Moreno had lain, before they were executed. A stone monument stands at the back of the garden, which is neatly manicured and cared for by Obdulio, whose wife Elba and daughter and Celina also died at the hands of the military assassins on November 16, 1989. The red roses symbolize for us the martyrs'martyrs blood, as we stand here quietly in prayer, contemplating these brave peoplemen and women whose lives were snuffed out for taking a stand.

We walk a few hundred feet from the garden to Elba and Celina’s quarters. A tombstone stands in front of their door, in a little garden plot:

Upon entering the room, we see a couple of single beds on each side of the small room. The ceiling still has bloodstains on the acoustic tile from where they were gunned down.

Next to the Memorial Garden, wWe spend a few minutes in the museum next to the Memorial Garden, wherethat displays some of the degrees, academic papers and possessions of the martyred priests, were displayed along with some bones and artifacts from the war. Some of the items were charred. The military had attempted to burn all their possessions.

Quietly, we walk around front to the Romero Chapel, to view the artwork commemorating the death of the eight martyrs. We sit and ponder once again, on this beautiful afternoon, the deaths of these slain churchmen and the two women. T, trying to understand what kind of a system drives humansmen to killing anyone who wants peace and justice. These eight deaths in which the Jesuits mixed their blood with the two women and in turn with the thousands of nameless Salvadorans prompts Dean Brackley to tell us:

"They died for the truth, for the poor, for the glory of God, and so they have inspired us all to go on living and living better. For if there is something worth dying for, then there is something worth living for." (p. 17, The Christian University and Liberation, by Dean Brackley, S.J., 1992.)

After driving through the small village of San Pedro Nonualco not too far from the airport in the district of La Paz, we turn off the paved road onto a dusty farm road toward the Memorial Chapel. Driving very slowly, we pass the Hacienda San Francisco, whose residents heard the gunshots on December 2, 1980. A short distance from the Hacienda, we enter the Memorial Chapel grounds, on which Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, Ita Ford and Maura Clark were brutalized and slain. A stone wall had been erected on the side of the property adjoining the road. The rest of the property had been fenced in to keep the farm animals from grazing on the hallowed ground. The beautiful brick chapel is a few paces from the grave site. Fr. Denis St. Marie, founder of the Cleveland Mission in El Salvador, had been instrumental in having this chapel built.

It struck me that in this land of contrasts, the churchwomen were slain in La Paz (Peace) not far from San Pedro (Saint Peter,) who was himself a martyr) and the Hacienda San Francisco (Saint Francis,) who cared for the poor and, of course, the environment).

It is a very warm, sunny afternoon. Walking past the stone monument, some of us kneel in prayer at the small garden, with white-washed stones circling the area that had been the shallow grave of the slain women. There is a small cross made from some branches in the center of the flowers. As I kneel, I remember that Donna Rego, a Pastoral Associate at St. Malachi’s, had asked me to say a special prayer for her cousin, Jean Donovan, lay missioner from Cleveland. Judy Head, one of the Cleveland delegates, kneels and cries, with her husband comforting her as she remembers her friend and teacher, Sr. Dorothy Kazel.

The engraving on the stone monument reads as follows:

Fr. Mike Williamson and Srs. Roberta Goebel and Lisa Belz had arrived and were preparing for the liturgy. An older campesina woman with two small children joins us. Lisa brought some old "Glory and Praise" hymnals with her and accompanied us on the guitar during the liturgy. Father Mike in his homily speaks of the deaths and also of the state of the country today. A, a country that is getting better. A, a country in transformation, which he tied in with Matthew’s gospel account (16:1-9) of the transfiguration. He chooses the readings from the following Sunday, asking us to remember them, next Sunday, when we get back home. As I sit at St. Malachi’s the next Sunday, I do in fact remember Mike’s words and tell my wife about the memorial liturgy.

On our way back to town from La Paz, we pass a funeral procession on the highway. The black, wooden casket rests in the back of a small pick-up truck, while the mourners, all on foot, walk silently in the heat of the afternoon to bury their loved one. It is a quiet drive, as we reflect on the day’s happenings. We are jarred out of our thoughts as we come upon a burning dump. We roll up the windows very quickly as we pass through the burning garbage. Stopping for refreshments a little later at a roadside cafe, we ponder the reality of afternoon’s experience.

May they rest in peace!

Today’s gospel is part of Jesus’ long discourse at the last supper from John, where John the gospel writer develops many of his theological ideas. An important theme today is Jesus’ relationship with the God whom he called "Father." When Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus reply is "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." In other words, the author is trying to make the point that Jesus is the full revelation of God. Through Jesus we glimpse what God is like. Jesus’ characteristics are God’s characteristics; Jesus’ actions are God’s actions. If we want to know what God is like, we have only to look at Jesus. This realization of Jesus as the full revelation of God, present after the resurrection everywhere through the Spirit, eventually developed by the fourth century into the doctrine of the trinity.

How ought we understand the meaning of Jesus as the full revelation of the Father? This is a question for women because of the male imagery. If Jesus, (a male), is the full revelation of God who is called Father, does this mean that God is male? And, consequently, that women are not able to be images of God, or only partial ones at best? Christian teaching gives a resounding "no" to these questions, having always understood our language for God not literally, but metaphorically, analogously. God, as pure spirit, transcends gender and sexuality. God is neither male nor female. When we call God "Father" we are using an image, a metaphor, an analogy. What we mean is that our experience of God is something like our experience of our fathers. But God is not our father in exactly the same way as our human fathers are. Human fathers are imperfect; God as Father is the perfection of fatherhood. We also mean, because of God’s transcendence of our images, that it is just as accurate to call God "Mother" as "Father.," aAnd beyond parental images, to use many images based upon our relationships with other people and the natural world to express our multifaceted experience of God.

Yet the Judeo-Christian tradition has used male images for God almost to the complete exclusion of any other images. WAnd, while Christian theology has very carefully and accurately has maintained God’s transcendence, in the minds of many Christians, God is literally male. Even those who know this is not the case sometimes defend the exclusive use of male images for God because Jesus told us to call God "Father." It is certainly true that in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus told us to address God as Father. But was "Father" Jesus’ only way of referring to God? In her recent book, She Who Is (New York: Crossroad, 1992), Elizabeth Johnson discusses this issue in light of recent scripture scholarship. What follows here is a summary of her discussion.

It seems that Jesus used other images for God besides "Father." FirstIn the first place, as a devout Jew he would have prayed the psalms, which portray God in a plethora of images taken from the human and natural world. In his own imaginative parables, as recalled by the believing community, he pictures God as a woman searching for her lost coin, a shepherd looking for his lost sheep, a bakerwoman kneading dough, a sower sowing seed, a woman bringing people to new birth, and the wind that blows where it wills, to name a few. Not "Father" exclusively, nor male images exclusively.

Beyond the question of exclusivity, we might ask how frequently Jesus used "Father" as God’s name. If we examine the gospels, we find that God is referred to as "Father" four times in Mark, 15 times in Luke, 49 times in Matthew and 109 times in John. Of these, we find Jesus calling God "Father" only once in Mark, once in Q (the early sayings source found in Matthew and Luke), once more in Matthew, twice more in Luke and 73 times in John. What do these statistics tell us? It seems that the name "Father" for God is used infrequently in the earliest traditions (Q and Mark), those closest in proximity to the historical Jesus, suggesting an infrequent use on Jesus’ own part. But this data also implies that in the early church there was a gradually developing tradition thatwhich eventually settled upon "Father" as the best way to present Jesus’ sense of God. This view , something that became popular in the last decades of the first century, especially in Johannine theology. This became further solidified through the development of trinitarian doctrine in the second through the fourth centuriesy.

More important than the name "Father" is the question "What did Jesus mean by using this term for God?" It is generally accepted today that Jesus meant to indicate the intimate relationship that existed between himself and God, a relationship he wanted us to have as well. He wanted to say that God is not some harsh judge or patriarchal ruler, looking down from a distant throne, far removed from concern for earthly creatures. Rather, God is someone who wants to be in intimate relationship with us, an approachable God, one ready to have compassion on us and forgive us, even before we ask for forgiveness. Suchsuch a view of God could as adequately be imaged as "Mother," "Lover," "Friend" as "Father."

Do we see this kind, intimate, loving God through Jesus? To be sure. Jesus is the full revelation of God, not because he is male, but because he is generous, compassionate, forgiving, just and merciful. To the extent that all of us can develop these characteristics within us, under the power of Jesus’ befriending Spirit, to that extent all of us, male and female, are called to be the Risen Christ’s liberating presence in our world. We are all called to fulfill the promise Jesus makes to his disciples in today’s gospel: "The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these." This promise belongs to men and women alike.

THE COMMUNITY OF ST. MALACHI is a lay-directed, non-territorial personal parish of the Diocese of Cleveland. Although separate from the Parish of St. Malachi, we join together for many worthwhile activities. All are welcome to worship at the 11:00 a.m. Community liturgy on Sunday. Community members are expected to actively contribute of their time, talent and treasure.