I want to do a little bit of reminiscing. That's always dangerous, particularly if you're Irish. Too many stories come up. But I want to go back in my own life, in my own experience, and it's probably kind of a developmental thing, of remembering some things of my earliest memories. I was born in Milwaukee. My sister and I were born in Milwaukee. The other older ones in the family, the four older ones in the family, were born in Minneapolis. Then my father got transferred to Milwaukee and they were there about from 1930 to 1942. But every year we would go up to Minnesota, which was kind of a home base as far as my folks were concerned. And we would visit relatives and friends.

[01:04]

But the thing that I think we always look forward to most was going down to Faribault, Minnesota from Minneapolis and visiting the relatives that we had on a farm. I grew up in the cities. I've lived in the cities all my life, pretty much so anyway. Going to the farm was a really very, very exciting thing for little kids. And the farm belonged to my father's aunt and uncle. Well, it was great to go down there. We would see the animals, the cattle, the horses, perhaps they had a few hogs and lots of chickens and all that sort of a thing, and we thought this was great. And we would go down there and we would

[02:06]

go into the barn, we go up to the hayloft and slide down the hay and all that sort of thing. It was good. It was really good. And then my great-aunts and uncles' children were all adults. In fact, they were probably closer in age to my father and mother than to anybody else. And they were wonderful to us kids. Well, one of the great things I can always remember about those visits was the meal that got put on later on in the daytime. And the women would be in the kitchen, they would be fixing this meal, and this thing would go on for hours and hours and hours in preparation. And we were getting so hungry, these wonderful smells and all the rest of it coming out, you know, of that kitchen. And of course, we were being very active, running around outdoors, and by the time the meal was all prepared, we were ready to just dig in, hands, feet, and everything else.

[03:20]

It was a wonderful way of getting to know the family. You know, this was the extended family, and we were living away from, basically from the extended family when we were in Milwaukee. But when we'd get back there, you know, this extended family was just very, very good for us. It was good for us to know what our identity was. We didn't talk about it in those terms, it's just that you got familiar with people that you didn't see very often. But they were so friendly, they were so welcoming, they were so much obviously of our blood, that it was nice to be with them. And it was a celebration. It was just a grand celebration with an awful lot of work attached to it. One of the things I think that it taught us as children was the idea that here you had a farm, you had crops, you had cattle, you had all of these different things, and somebody was putting an awful lot of work into putting this food on the table.

[04:38]

I don't think we didn't realize that immediately, but I think we realized it on reflection. That here was all this food on the table, but the work of getting it on that table was immense. You know, the whole growing season, the whole preparatory methods of preparing the land for planting and so on. I mean, these were things that had gone on for years. making all the preparations for this one meal. This one meal that we were sharing, it had so much to do with so many people, so much coming together. I think it made an impact on us because when we weren't visiting relatives and friends like that at home, We had a mother who liked to bake, and when Thanksgiving would come, or Christmas, or Easter, you know, the week or two prior to the big feast, the big celebration, she would be in the kitchen making bread, biscuits, what do you call it, suet pudding, all the rest of it.

[06:00]

And we would come home from school during those days, you know, one more thing was being prepared for this big feast that was coming up. And again, it brought the whole family together, and not only the whole family, but even friends from outside. My brothers would come home on a Sunday, for instance, and my mother would always prepare far more than our family needed. because she knew that my brothers were going to be hauling in a bunch of friends for Sunday dinner at the last minute. Do you mind if so-and-so stays for dinner? My mother said, come sit down, there's a place. And there was enough food, there always was. But reflecting on the firearm experience, reflecting on my mother's work on all of this stuff, a lot of work went into this, a lot of preparation went into it. It was really good. But it wasn't something that you opened up a package, heated it up, and put it on the table. That was it. It really did have an impact on bringing us together as a family.

[07:06]

We knew we were family when we were welcomed at the table. And even the friends of my brothers coming in, or whoever it might be, we knew that we had something in common because we could share the table together. It was important. Then later on, I started hearing stories about my, not so much my grandparents as my great-grandparents, who had grown up in the southern part of Minnesota. And we heard stories about the church. In many places, in those rural areas, you didn't have a church building. You may have had a pastor who moved around quite a bit, but Mass on Sunday would be at somebody's farm. And it would be announced ahead of time whose farm it would be at and every week everybody would get together and they'd get the horse and buggy and they'd go from one farm to the other to wherever it was that Mass was.

[08:12]

And where you had a farm that was going to have Mass this following week, That week was in preparation for having the Mass. Now, what would preparation entail? It would entail not only setting up an altar or some kind of a table that would act as an altar and having enough chairs for people to sit in. It meant that you had to prepare a meal for that whole crowd of people that was going to be at your farm that day, because otherwise You know, I mean, that was their social gathering for the week. Not only having the Mass, but having this big meal that you had to feed everybody. If they're going to come, you had to offer them hospitality. One of the pastors they had was a man by the name of John Ireland, who eventually became Archbishop John Ireland. And if you know your church history at all, he was a rather outstanding figure in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. Was he the consecrated deserter of the North?

[09:17]

He was that one, and he was also a teetotaler, which was, you know, the Irish are extremists one way or the other, you know. He would, or they would come together with, one of the things they had to do as well, they had to prepare the altar breads. That was part of the thing that was in preparation. You didn't have the Dominican Sisters of Perpetual Adoration making the altar breads, so they had to do it themselves. So they would make the altar breads as well. But all of this coming together, all of this work, you know, you talk about participation in the liturgy and everything the liturgy means. This was participation par excellence. It reminds me of a story, it's kind of a side story here, but it happened when I was in the Bronx. We had about, on Wednesday release time, I think it was Wednesday release time, classes from the public schools.

[10:23]

We used to have about 700 or more public school students who would come every Wednesday afternoon for religious instructions at St. Anselm in the South Bronx. I had a class one time of probably ten-year-old boys and girls who had, and there were only maybe half a dozen of them, if that many, four or five maybe. They were too old to be in with the little kids in preparation for their First Communion, so I took them aside and gave them a class in preparation for their First Communion. If you didn't do that, if you didn't separate them from the little kids, they would just go home and they wouldn't make their First Communion at all. So, I was giving a talk to them one day about transubstantiation, believe it or not. And I was explaining, in the best of Thomistic terminology, transubstantiation, where the bread becomes the body of Christ and the wine becomes the blood of Christ, and both of them, of course, are body and blood anyway.

[11:33]

But I was going through this whole wonderful, you know, I solved the mystery of transubstantiation for them in ten minutes, you understand. I got all finished with his explanation and Jose is sitting there and Jose looks at me and he says, I can't believe that. I just can't believe it. So I went through this explanation all over again. I explained about the bread and the wine, body and blood of Christ and so on. It was a masterful explanation of transubstantiation, you understand. Jose sits there and he says, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. So I go through it a third time. I explain everything just perfectly. I mean, Thomas Aquinas would have been proud of me. I go through this whole explanation, I get all finished, and Jose sits there and he says, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it.

[12:35]

Well, finally I said, Jose, what exactly is it that you're having a problem believing? He said, I can't believe that's bread. He had no trouble with transubstantiation, he just couldn't believe that the little round white things were bread. All right. Here is the sign value of our sacraments, and you can't even believe this stuff is bread. Okay. He didn't recognize anything of this as meal, I'm afraid. He didn't recognize it as a meal. But the problem was, you know, that there are a lot of people in this world today who don't believe that the Mass is a meal either. Because, oh no, no, no, it's a sacrifice, it's a sacrifice, it's a sacrifice, it's not a meal, it's a sacrifice. Well, I'm sorry.

[13:39]

When I was down on that farm and seeing all the work that went into putting this meal together, when I saw my mother putting this meal together over a period of days for Thanksgiving or for Christmas or for Easter, whatever it might be, by God, I knew that making a meal was a sacrifice. There's no contradiction between a meal and a sacrifice. And the meal is far more than a sacrifice, just as the Mass is more than a sacrifice. It's a totality of God's love being expressed to us in the form of a meal. Sacrifice, yes, but more than sacrifice. It's a coming together of people who discover their identity in their family because they're able to share this together. Work that they've put into it, you know, over a period of years even, putting all this this human energy into the preparation of a meal that sustains the life of people. It's a marvelous sign of what it means to be the body of Christ.

[14:42]

Not only that this is the body of Christ on this table, but that we are the body of Christ. We are sustained by this meal. We are the ones who become what we eat. And that's what we are. The whole idea of coming to know your identity and to see that the Eucharist is not me and God. Oh, I am going to receive communion. Don't bother me now. Don't bother me with a sign of peace. Don't bother me with singing together. Don't bother me with anything that has anything to do with us coming together. This is me and God. I've got to have my time, my solitude with God. at the Mass, friends and countrymen, please, you know? I mean, this isn't what the Eucharist is. The Eucharist is the coming together of the body of Christ to receive the body of Christ to become a stronger body of Christ.

[15:45]

That's what it's all about. My oldest brother's family lives mostly in the Twin City area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. And every year after Thanksgiving, it's usually the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the Saturday after Christmas or some day nearby, the whole family gets together in one place. They have their own Christmas celebration at home, but they all get together in one place. And I always get invited to come. So I go to one of my nieces' homes, I guess it was, and everybody else was there. Well, I had a grandniece, I don't know how old she was at the time, maybe six. And she comes over, she climbs up onto my lap, and she looks at me and she said, why are you here? You're not part of the family.

[16:46]

I said, I am too. She said, you are not. I said, I am too. I said, I am your grandfather's brother. I officiated at your mother and father's wedding because I am your father's uncle. And I said, I baptize you. She said, you did not. I did too. Yes, oh, you didn't. I did. I told you didn't. Finally, her mother is sitting over here someplace. She says, everything he says is true. That settled it for her. It must be all right. So I'm part of the family now. A few weeks later, I was down visiting a brother in Wisconsin. And one of my nephews came over with his five-year-old. And the five-year-old climbs up to my lap, sits on my lap, kind of squiggles around. He's looking up at me. And he says, why do you have hair in your nose? I said, because I swallowed a rabbit.

[17:48]

He said, you did not. I said, I did too. No, you didn't. I just said I did. No, you didn't. You didn't. Finally, his father is sitting over there. His father says, yeah, he swallowed a rabbit. He said, he did not, you know, which was a clear indication to me that women have a tendency to have more of the gift of infallibility than men have. You understand? The mother would be believed. The father would not be believed. You understand? Coming together, getting to know each other as a family is really important for your identity. Where do you come from? What are your roots? Where have you learned to be a human being? This is what the church is also. Where do we learn that we belong to God? Where do we learn that we are the children of God? Where do we learn that we are fed by God? Where do we learn that we are brothers and sisters? Where do we learn all of these things? Where do we come together in thanksgiving? Because of who we are. Because of our parents.

[18:50]

Because of our relatives and friends. Because of the providence of God who provides food for the table. Who provides an earth and an environment. You know, finally the Eucharist is going to bring us to an understanding that we are not in this world alone. that we are in this world with everybody else who's in this world, and that we have an obligation to take care of this world for the sake of feeding other people, for the sake of other people's lives. We come to an understanding far better when we reflect on our own experiences of life, that these are important teachings about who we are in our unity as a humanity. Now, go back to what we started out with. What is the image and likeness of God in us? It's exactly this. It's exactly this.

[19:52]

The image of God in us, the image and likeness of God in us, is that we are for the other. We're able to love the other. Love not being this warm, fuzzy emotion, but love being this service to one another. It's a very, very important thing to see ourselves as the image and likeness of God providing for others, but also receiving from others. We're not only givers, we're receivers from one another. But we're also, as God is, free from anything that would stand in the way of our love for one another. That I am not going to discriminate among people, I'm not going to serve some because I like them, and not serve others because I don't like them. This is the image and likeness of God in us. It takes all sorts of people to make this meal, to bring this unity. So we have all of these preparations that speak of sacrifice, yes.

[20:59]

We have planting, harvesting, preparing. And I think that today, sometimes in our fast food mentality, here you take part in preparing the meals. That's a wonderful thing to be able to do. But I think in so many places, we don't. You go to the freezer in the store and pull out a package and you put it in the microwave and you sit down and you eat it. And a lot of times people just simply eat alone nowadays. They don't bother having a group of people that come together. So how can we understand the Eucharist if we don't ever experience you know, what it means to have even a normal ordinary everyday meal with each other. But finally, what it does is that it brings us together to recognize the one common need, a common need, it's not the only one, but the common need that all of humanity shares.

[22:07]

We must have food, we must have drink. We're equal on that. We are the body of humanity, but we're also the body of Christ. We have been transformed. Bread, wine, are two very good things when they become the body and blood of Christ, but they're good before that because they're able to become the body and blood of Christ. So the Eucharist means that all bread is holy. The wine means all drink is holy. Water for baptism means all water is holy. The oil for anointing means all oil is holy. The laying on of hands for orders or for the part of confirmation. The laying on of hands, touch is holy. You know, all these things are holy.

[23:12]

What is God saying? God is saying to us, embrace the entire earth. Embrace everything that people are doing. Embrace all of this that is there for the sake of humanity. Embrace marriage. Because here, this union in marriage of man and woman is the sign of their unity between Christ and the Church. That's a holy thing. Sex is holy. It's very holy. All of these things are holy. And that they can be used as symbols and signs of bringing us to God, of revealing God to us. Revealing God to us in the nitty-gritty, down-to-earth things of life means that we're living in an environment of holiness. It is this that we bring to the Eucharist, and it is this that we take from the Eucharist, because we are the body of Christ. We are one.

[24:13]

There's a unity here that we cannot forego. There's a unity here that we can't ignore. Because it's a unity that finally is created, not by us, but by God. Because it's in that unity that we are the image and likeness of God. Comments you want to make? I've been reading an article by Harris Carling, an American, and I saw a connection with what you presented here at the conference. It's about identity. He essentially was saying that identity is held, recognized by others. trying to make a transition of life, weighing things, and I looked at his films, in my own person, meaningful.

[25:35]

But I wrote this quote up from his article, it's about actually the healing of shame and the rules that bound it. And at the end of it he says, but what if our true identity is not independence but radical rootedness in the other, whose knowledge of us is the only thing that really sustains us? The corollary is our connection with other persons. If we really cannot exist without the other, neither can we exist without them. Yeah. Was that a recent article? Yeah, San Francisco. San Francisco. Good. Thank you. You know, another thing is, the food and drink thing is a real bent on a real sign of hope. It's an unsolvable problem.

[26:37]

You know, I can never get enough to eat. So, I'm never going to solve the problem. Yeah. But the magnificent way we've dealt with it, some of the meals you can get, That would be fantastic, you know? And you're glad that it doesn't... that it isn't complete. But we don't look at other problems the same way, but they seem to be unsolvable. A little imagination, and some good luck, and a little bit of help. It's kind of fun to have certain problems, unsolvable problems. Unless you can't solve those problems, you know, like the starving people. Yeah, we can, yes. I do that when I come here sometimes. I'm always conscious of it. I tried to hold myself back.

[27:39]

I would just enjoy it. It was a good way to take care of myself. I welcome that, I'm looking forward to that. You don't take care of yourself. I would be bothering of course, but just try not to get so pressed by, well, I should pull back. But I do, it's a way to care for them, not compulsively. So I just sort of try. It may go big this coming year. Yeah, too much. I think one of the things that a lot of us grew up on in monastic life was that you're not really supposed to enjoy food, which I think is quite nonsensical.

[28:43]

I mean, it's there. It doesn't, you know, you don't have to be eating, you know, T-bone steaks for breakfast every day, you know, once in a while maybe. I'm thinking of my own family. As you were talking, none of us had a car. We used to go to Chicago in my Aunt May. would be like that for an hour. My mother too spent hours and hours. My sister too carried on that tradition when my parents passed away. But with our family, the dinner is always very important. And we always had Sunday dinner together. And people were getting away from that, even back in the 40s and 50s. was starting to get wiped out, but not with our family.

[29:48]

It is important. Those are the best memories. I was told by the senator, he would be the one that's picked out to do the preparations for the people's social meal on the New Year's Eve. What I remember in Minnesota. Kind of widespread. in a way that all I can think of is she couldn't have done it by herself and also had either sons and daughters and wife, or hopefully you had some neighbors that could have helped her. Oh, absolutely. In other words, it wasn't an individual thing. I would suspect. Although I'd like to see if I was a thing of the ideal life. All this poverty and all.

[30:52]

Yeah, I think that was very true. I think the Amish still do that. Do they? Yeah. [...] I just, I mean, out there in the secular world, you know, at work, and time is of the essence, I can inhale food. Obviously I look. But, all the books I've been reading about monastic life, up late, the last several months, there's been a couple, I can't remember which ones, that refer to taking extreme time and pleasure in eating, when you are eating your meal, and thinking about all the preparation went into it, what you were talking about, where this food started, where it came from, the people, the preparedness, and the love, and everything that went into this, and the really same reach and everybody taking time.

[32:02]

So I've been really trying to do that. But the last one's done every time. Which is great, am I wrong? You guys got me confused. Slow down, guys. Jesus is looking at me with the phallic wall of that thing. I bet you're doing it on Thanksgiving. But you know, if you look at the rule of Benedict, one of the things that Benedict is very clear about, that you have to eat your meals together. You have to be together for your meals. Now, there's a very practical reason for that. If you're not together for your meals, there's not going to be any food left. Not because everybody is eating so much, but you're not going to have any food left because there's no refrigeration. You simply have got to have the preparation done in such a way that when everybody can be together, that's when you eat.

[33:16]

If you don't have that, When he says, you know, if you're going to do penance, if postponing a meal is a penance, you know, if somebody eats at such and such an hour, you eat at, you know, three hours later, whatever it is. That's a real penance, because the food is going to be cold, and it's not going to be as fresh as it was for everyone, and mostly, You're eating alone. You're kind of excommunicated. You're not with other people in this meal. For Benedict, that was a very, very important thing. You know, at my place, I know very well that I'm able to, if I, well, when I have to go someplace, and I don't want to have to eat out, you know, when I'm gone someplace, I will go down to the, we have a little snack room, And I can get enough there to eat ahead of time, but I really miss, I really do, I miss, I don't want to have to eat just for the sake of eating, but I want to eat also for the sake of the people.

[34:28]

who are there sharing a meal with me. So I mean, eating is a communal thing. Of its nature, it is communal. And I think in our culture today, we've kind of made it exclusive. It's unfortunate. I remember being up on the border of Canada and Minnesota, and the people I was with arranged to have one of the Indians in a little quarter horse park on board, on a canoe, through the rivers and things like that. Anyway, as we were getting started, he said, now, if we see someone along the shore and they wave to us, we're going to go in and eat with them because these people are all alone and they really can't eat alone and it'd be too much for them to have somebody to eat with them. We've had a couple of people come here who said, you know, that just eating alone finally got to them.

[35:31]

Yeah, oh yeah. That's amazing. Again, when I was in New York, you'd go to visit a Hispanic family. And if you're just stopping in for five minutes, you better have a cup of coffee with them. Because if you don't, you're insulting them. You've got to share something to eat. It's very, very important for part of the culture. The Vietnamese Venerable Phra Pham talks about that everything is in inter-being, he calls it, to inter-being. And he uses illustrations, I don't know, of foods that are planted by a farmer, and fields that take time to grow, but nurtured by a cow's brain, and picked by a farmer's students, that grow to market, and then shared with people together.

[36:34]

I think it's very poignant, what Martin wrote up, I guess that's where, you know, when we can write, or we can be dispossessed, or lost, or broken, to our meal, literally. But, you know, our attentiveness to that. I guess that's a salvation clue as well. It is. After I was an administrator at Bellarmine Abbey, North Carolina, for three years, in early 1992, I went out to Big Sur, California, to the Kamali Monastery out there and spent four months in a hermitage.

[37:38]

They have a common prayer at whatever time it is in the morning, and then they have Eucharist together about quarter of twelve, I guess it is, or whatever it is. And they have evening prayer at six o'clock, Vespers at six o'clock at night. But I always had to look forward to the Eucharist at noontime, because right after that was the one common meal of the day. And just to be able to get together with everybody in the community for that one common meal was a very, very important thing to sustain whatever else you were doing during that time. At night, You know, each hermitage had a little refrigerator, and you had a hot pot, and you could fix a cup of soup, or you could... I used to fix an artichoke.

[38:47]

That's artichoke country, and somebody would always donate crates of artichokes to them, and I would always bring one up, you know, for my evening meal, put it in that much water, turned on low, and by the time Vespers was over, I could get back there and eat an artichoke, which was always very good. But I mean, still, you were eating alone. And breakfast the same way. I mean, it just wasn't—getting together for that noon meal was just such a wonderful thing. Just such a wonderful thing. And maybe sometimes eating alone is the best teacher for us to appreciate what it means to eat with other people, as well. One of my spiritual directors was, in the course of our friendship, he saw that it was about to be happening, it's going to happen in the community, it's not going to happen by itself.

[39:50]

Yeah. [...] reading them and being present with each other. Sometimes they become very acute, but this is what they mean to me. And I didn't want to leave the table, so they continued to share in solitude. And in all the ways it happens, which remains to be found out, I guess. Part of the thing is that we're all social beings.

[40:59]

I was born in 61, I came in 61, 63. I used to have meetings that had the command to work the meal. They'd be packed, and all of a sudden they didn't do it anymore. And they didn't always get rest. You get six people. These are the nine years they ask. Why is this guy very popular? I always couldn't believe. That's not the Eucharist. The Eucharist ain't in your house. Still it shows you. and take their progress and be independent of God. You know, from gravity to a meal.

[42:06]

Well, it takes us back to the agape meal Paul talks about in Corinthians, of people coming together and sharing a meal. Eucharist is going to be part of that. But he says, what he's talking about, he says, you know, you bring your food, some eat too much, some don't have enough to eat, you don't share. He says, am I supposed to praise you for that? So, I mean, the agape meal was something that was just as expressive of the unity of the community, practically speaking, it was as expressive of their unity as was the Eucharist. And, you know, they're different, but they're joined. You know, you can't separate meal from meal on this stuff. When I was a kid, we used to spend nearly every Sunday with one of my father's relatives, his mother and my grandparents, his mother and father, or his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles. Almost routinely, the whole month, one together with my grandparents, my grandparents in Carolina, and Joe's the next Sunday.

[43:14]

And the thing was, it lasted all day. We got there around 8 or 9 in the evening. big dinner, cross from house to house, and be without us to our family. Manja, manja, you get sick if you don't eat. Come on, eat. That's right. I think meals in those situations do somehow become the encounter that you're experiencing and you learn how to serve and how to let people serve you. Our second parish in the Bronx was in the East Bronx, and it was basically an Italian neighborhood. And I loved to go up there on a Sunday afternoon and walk through the neighborhood and hope to get invited into the backyard feast.

[44:20]

And it did. Those things lasted all day long. They were marvelous. It's a shame to know you have a great family in Los Angeles. It seems to be more important. It's not a regular, every Sunday was now. Well, you know, the time of our, I think our Sunday dinner was always somewhere between two and four in the afternoon. It varied, depending. But, you know, during the week you wouldn't dare do that at all. You wouldn't even think of doing that. But Sunday was the day the family gets together.

[45:10]

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