Father Faucher's Third Sunday of Easter, 2008, Homily

As those who are familiar with my preaching know, I rarely stay here at the ambo when giving the homily, and rarely use a written text. But as I did at the 8:30 Mass on Easter, I am going to do both of those things today.

The first reading and the great and wonderful Gospel today are about events in which the participants in those events found Christ. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the finally courageous Peter preaching to the people of Jerusalem and how the people were changed and found Jesus Christ through the experience of his message. The Gospel tells us the story of two disciples walking to Emmaus and in meeting a stranger found him to be Jesus Christ.

These stories of how people meet Jesus Christ, encounter Jesus Christ, come to find Jesus Christ are repeated over and over again in our lives. I am often asked to speak about my own story of faith, how I came to believe what I believe, and what are some of the major events in my own spiritual journey. Since I am in many ways a private person and yet am known as someone who often speaks in stories, I know I find it easier to speak about the stories of others than about my own. But today I want to tell the story of one of the most important events of my own growth in spiritual understanding.

That event was the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King which happened 40 years ago this past week and what happened to me in the weeks following his assassination.

In April of 1968 I was in my first year of grad school at the Theological College of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. There were about 140 seminary students from all over the United States at TC, and we joined hundreds of other seminary students from religious orders in attending the School of Sacred Theology at Catholic University.

It was early evening on a warm April day when word spread through the house that Dr. King had been shot and killed in Memphis. Racial tensions were already high in the District of Columbia and everyone immediately knew that this was not only a terrible tragedy but also could mean terrible things might happen.

I think it was my best friend Brian O’Shaughnessy from Albany, New York, who came in and said that a couple of cars would going to go down to Sts. Paul and Augustine Church in the northwest section of Washington where there was going to be a special Mass for Dr. King. Sts. Paul and Augustine is a famous black church in a poor part of town, now called simply St. Augustine. I said I would come along.

For a 22 year old white man from very white Boise, Idaho, I had slowly gotten used to living in a black city, but I realistically knew almost nothing about the lives of African Americans. I did know enough to realize that going to Sts. Paul and Augustine was both important and dangerous.

While driving to the church we could begin to see fires beginning to rage in various parts of the city. There were crowds of people on corners, talking, crying, yelling. The church is on 18^th street, and as we crossed 14^th street we could already see fires starting further south on 14th. When we arrived at the church we hurried in. Father Ray Kemp, the beloved and very effective white pastor, was just starting Mass.

I was the last into the pew and sat on the end seat. A man came in behind me and took the seat across the aisle. He sort of collapsed on his knees, made the sign of the cross, and was sobbing. I recognized him as Senator Ted Kennedy.

The readings were hard to hear because of the increased noise from outside -- yelling, screaming, some gunfire and the sound of sirens. Father Kemp had just began his homily when a man ran into the church, hurried up to Father in the pulpit and spoke to him. They huddled for a moment and then Father Kemp said, “I am afraid I have to ask all of you who are white to leave and go home. It is getting much too dangerous outside for you to say here any longer. To the extent that they can, members of the parish will try to help you get to your cars. Thank you for coming and please pray.”

We got up, made it to the cars and drove back to TC, with fires and destruction all around us. When we got home we went up on the fifth story roof and could see fires all across the city to the south.

The next day was the ordination of the third year students at Theological College to become deacons. It was a big event for the seminary, one of the biggest of the year. Most of the families who had come were staying out in Maryland and could get into the seminary safely.

My fellow seminarian Carey Landry, who later became a major religious composer, had written a special song for the ordination and I cannot remember which of his songs it was. I don’t think it was Peace is Flowing Like a River but I have asked Bob to play that song of Carey’s today for the preparation of the gifts.

I can remember during the ordination sitting in the pew, which in seminary style faced each other, and looking out over the other side through the open windows and suddenly seeing tanks and personnel carriers coming down Michigan Ave. Martial Law had been declared in the District of Columbia, and the soldiers from Fort Meade were coming into the city. The image, of looking out the chapel windows at tanks with the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the background is something I will never forget.

At the end of the Mass the rector announced that the reception had been canceled and asked all visitors to please leave Washington as soon as possible. It was also announced that the University had been closed and all the students were encouraged to leave as soon as possible.

Almost everyone did leave, but about 15 or 20 of us lived too far away or had no place to go, and we chose to stay. I was one of those as was my friend Brian.

The next day and in the days to come we were asked to come down to Sts. Paul and Augustine and help in the distribution of food. Even though most of the people in the area were not Catholics, the parish knew this was something it had to do. All of the small grocery stores which served the community had been destroyed and the people, who often had no or little refrigeration had nothing to eat. We donned our best Roman collars and went back into an area of town I normally would never have gone to.

The men and women of the parish and community had done an incredible job of quickly organizing how the food would be given away. Our job, supposedly protected by wearing Roman collars, was to go down the alleys with shopping carts of food and try to get people to come out of their houses and accept our gifts. We could see people through the windows but no one came to our call of “Free food” until someone added “Free food from Sts. Paul and Augustine.” In moments we were surrounded by people accepting our help.

We went back time and again and filled our shopping carts and each time the effect of the trusted name of Paul and Augustine was what made the difference. I have never seen fear on the faces of people as I saw it those days, nor saw trust in the name of a church of which almost none of them were members. But they trusted the parish, they trusted the church, they trusted us because we used that name.

At one point we got back to the Sts. Paul and Augustine parking lot just as a big truck with Virginia license plates pulled in. Someone said it was from the Mormon stake of Northern Virginia. As the driver got out of the truck I said to him that I was from Idaho and I had never heard of the Mormons opening their food storage facilities to help others. He said that he was from Utah and he had never heard of it either, but when his bishop told him what he wanted to do, the driver had volunteered to drive the dangerous route into Washington from Arlington into Washington because it was the right thing to do. But the bishop had also told the driver to ask Sts. Paul and Augustine not to tell people that the food was from the Mormons but let the Catholics take all the credit.

One day going down to the church I was in a car driven by my classmate Tom Farley, who, while white, had grown up in a black neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. We were somewhere on Florida Ave. at a red light when four of five hundred people suddenly appeared down a side street. There were three young soldiers trying to guard the intersection, all white, who were obviously as scared as I was. Tom, who always thought of me as maybe book smart but incredibly naive and innocent, said we would be fine and told me to just sit back and watch. One of the crowd threw a rock at the window of the Safeway on the corner, and in less than five minutes the entire contents of the store were gone. The poor soldiers just stood there and watched.

Tom looked at me and said, “When you finally understand why they did that, you will begin to understand what it is like to be poor and hopeless in our country.” When we talked about it later, Tom said that Dr. King was all about hope, and his murder was the end of hope. Unless I could understand all of what was happening in terms of hope I would never understand the events happening around me.

On the way home we drove past the White House and down by the US Capitol where tanks and troops guarded our national buildings. It was a chilling sight.

There were many other things that we did in those days but I must share one more. As things at Sts. Paul and Augustine calmed down the students at TC were asked by the District of Columbia Police Department to help them with a problem. A woman had called from deep in Anacostia, the all black area in southeast Washington asking them to help her. Her teenage son was a diabetic who needed medicine and all the drug stores were destroyed. But he and a group of friends had also looted a liquor store and had four boxes of booze stored in her house. Would we both go down to Anacostia and get the prescription, get it filled and take it back, and remove the booze from her house. She knew her son would be gone for about two hours and could we do it then? The officer from the Police Department added that we could keep all the booze we collected.

Everyone decided I would be the driver. We made it to the address. I could feel hundreds of eyes on us as we pulled up to the house and a couple of Roman collared young white men quickly entered the house and then ran back to the car. We filled the prescription and got back to the address. I opened the trunk as they carried four boxes of bottles out. We quickly made it back to the safety of TC, talking about an evening of enjoying good scotch and gin.

We drove into the parking lot and opened the trunk, only to find four boxes of cheap Thunderbird wine.

As school resumed and things got back to normal I tried to think of what all of this had meant to me. I came back time and time again to the reality that my life, my wonderful Idaho life, my family and church and all that made me who I was, was so different from these people I had been involved with. I knew if I wanted to be a priest I could be one, and if I wanted to be something else I could do that. I had education and promise and a future. “Hope” was never a missing reality. Sure the war in Vietnam was a reality I would have to face if I left the seminary, but even that was not hopeless.

For many of these people the death of Dr. King was the death of hope. I thought of it in terms of the apostles and the death of Jesus, which was for them the death of hope. But then the Resurrection of Jesus changed everything.

I also saw Jesus in the people I was with. I saw him in the people crying that first night at the Mass we had to leave. I saw him the people who organized the food distribution, and in the people who only came for food when they could hear that it was from Sts. Paul and Augustine. And I saw Jesus in the woman trying to keep her diabetic son from harming himself even though she told my friends that when he got home and found out she had given away the booze he would beat her.

It took me a long, long time to finally put into words what was for a naive and innocent boy from Boise the greatest lesson I learned from these days. If I really wanted to be a priest my own background and upbringing was too idyllic, too good, too narrow. I needed to feel, not just understand intellectually, but find a way to feel, the pain and suffering that so much of the human race endures.

If I was going to be a priest then I had to decide to be a priest unlike many of those I knew. I had to be a priest who was open to hearing, seeing, and feeling new things and new ways of finding Jesus Christ. I had to become like the people hearing the sermon from Peter, or the disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus. I had to be open to God on God’s terms, not my own.