A week on Nassau

With the Easter holiday behind us, and this being a school vacation week (and thus a CCD vacation as well), Ginni headed off to Massachusetts to deal with our son Mike's move to Sag Harbor NY to be with his brother. Mike's departure will be good for him since he'd had his fill of working in public access television, and his brother needed his help - so new horizons and new opportunities for Mike.

Meanwhile we still own our home in Massachusetts and now we need a renter for the apartment Mike had been renting. So my saintly wife hit the road to help with the final clean up, move out, renovate, and clean up yet again effort - all the while advertizing, interviewing, and running credit checks on potential renters. Time will tell how this plays out.

While all this is going on in the States, I am still here plugging away. With the Easter school vacation I have no CCD to prepare for, making life much, much easier. An added plus, however, is that the following week was the annual Archdiocese of Nassau Clergy Retreat. Consequently, I cancelled CCD for two weeks and for this second week I flew to Nassau for the retreat.

Once more I flew GlenAir, and once again I was in the co-pilot seat of the 5 seater. We arrived safely, despite the white knuckles on this tiny plane, and headed out to the Emmaus Center for the retreat. Now I must tell you that, since I had worked at running a retreat house for 7 years in Wareham, whenever I visit another retreat center I am pretty observant. Suffice it to say this was very nice. The food was fantastic, and there was always more than we could eat (although we tried to eat it all).

The retreat director was Fr. John O'Grady, a diocesan priest from Albany. He is also a world-class scholar on St. Paul and, with this being the year of St. Paul, our retreat had a Pauline-focus. Fr. O'Grady has taught all throughout Europe, studied with guys like Karl Rahner, just to name one. I have come to realize that one of the benefits of being in this Archdiocese is that our Archbishop was sent to the very best theological schools in the world and is very well connected.

With that said, the retreat had more of a bible study format than a retreat - but I did come away with a few gems. Fr. O'Grady, as a bible scholar, loves words. Words are important in scripture study since, to truly understand the text, you need to understand the meaning of what was intended in the original Greek or Hebrew. So, the word I came to appreciate much more on this retreat was PEACE.

Lets start with PEACE. In each of the resurrection appearances we are reading during Easter Jesus begins by saying PEACE to the disciples. In Hebrew peace is Shalom - now I knew that, but Fr. O'Grady explained that a more accurate translation would be 'may you have the very best of everything'. So if I were to say Shalom to a farmer, I would be saying 'May you have the best of everything, may your cows all have triplets, may your harvest fill 2 barns, may you have the very best of everything'. So Fr. O'Grady explains it like this, and I get it, but then it occured to me that each of us is a multi-faceted individual, I am Deacon, Father, Husband, . . .

When someone says Shalom to me, they are wishing me the very best of everything - they are wishing the very best of every aspect of me - the very best of everything as Husband, as Father, as Deacon, and the list goes on until every facet of my-self is covered. Whew!

But it doesn't end there, when we pray, when we hear at Mass the words, 'May the peace of the Lord be with you' - what we should hear is 'May the Shalom of God be with you' - think about it in the context I just described - May the SHALOM OF GOD be with you. May the very best of God be with you - isn't that incredible! Peace. Shalom.

Good stuff, huh.

I returned on Saturday, just in time for the 6PM liturgy at the Navy Base. Having had very little time to prepare a homily I was a bit concerned until I read the Gospel and realized the first thing Jesus says in this Gospel, when appearing to the disciples once again is - Peace. I had a homily ready to go without having to write down a single word. God is good.