Luís

Luís Alberto Rodriguez

We said a final goodbye this Sunday to Luis Alberto Rodriguez, a dear friend, amazing father & husband, and absolute exemplar of Christian fidelity. A former Roman Catholic priest from Argentina, he transitioned to teaching pastoral theology at an Italian university and found the Episcopal Church and it’s Latin American Community after moving to Rome. When I first met him, Luis and his wife & daughter were the principal music ministers for the Spanish-speaking congregation and some of the strongest pillars of that tight-knit parish family. He was the sort of layman that every congregation wishes it could emulate a thousand fold.

Despite undergoing rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, he continued to serve in the church until he no longer could, even being gleefully elected to vestry and posing for the cover photo on our church magazine. He wrote two absolutely compelling narratives about his cancer battle for the church magazine here and the parish newsletter here which Sadly two months later, his cancer returned strongly, and he soon knew that the end was coming soon. As his death approached, he faced the end with stunning grace and deeply inspiring fidelity. I last spoke with him in his final Sunday at St. Paul’s, on April 3^rd, already looking markedly diminished as his body quickly grew frail. In the following weeks, as clergy and friends visited him in the hospital, his demeanor was always warm, being thankful for the life he had lived and ready for what was to come. On April 24^th, the battle was ended.

 

Perhaps it was most fitting that we would memorialize this beloved child of God on the feast of the Trinity. After all, he lived what it means to love the Triune God not only from afar but deeply and up close. He dedicated every day of his life not only to serving and obeying God but to an unshakable intimacy in the love of the undivided Trinity.

If Rublev’s famous icon reminds us that we are forever invited to take our seats at the table, eternally loving and being loved by the Holy Godhead, Luis Alberto Rodriguez showed us how to do it. May we all have the steadfast courage to do the same.

Does God Listen

On the Other Side of the Net?

by Luis Alberto Rodríguez

It is a few days after the operation to remove a malignant tumor from my colon, and everything hurts, but recovery is proceeding well. Today my doctor has told me I can eat some dry toast and tea. I am delighted, because I have not eaten for many days, since before the operation in fact.

Sitting in the bed at 7 am, I am waiting for my wonderful breakfast today. There is half an hour left to go. It's cold outside, and from my window I see a precious green, typical of the Roman countryside. Then I think of God, in his silence, and his mysterious presence.

I remember a priest friend of mine told me one day that when he was little he started playing football in the neighborhood club. His father never told him that he would go to see him play, but when he went out from his home alone with football boots hanging from his neck, he still knew that his father would be there. He had a special way of communicating. His father's presence on the other side of the net gave him security and strength, even more so when he saw him yelling, excited and happy.

This is how I understand God, there on the other side of the net, not intervening in our "football match" of life. However, God encourages us and gives us strength in a mysterious way. Of course, God is not only outside the net or even in as well, because nothing could remain in existence without His support. He is the "subsistent being" to use a difficult phrase. In this way we can say that God is "on that side of the net" and that He is transcending, but also that he is "on this side" and therefore is indwelling.

At some point in the history of Christianity, we thought that God intervened if we allowed him to act through the saints, who were seen as powerful intermediaries. Today we talk a lot about the mystery that surrounds God and we do not seek to give an answer to everything, but rather accept that we are incapable of fully understanding the holy mystery of God.

We will never be able to explain God fully, and there will always be many questions: Why doesn’t God prevent the evil of the world?  Why doesn’t God intervene to punish the corrupt officials that cause death in the world? In the end, many questions will be left with the same answer: “We do not know, but He is there, He guides us, gives us strength, and He encourages us as a Father-Mother does, proud of each one of us.”

They bring me breakfast, and I savor the dry toast dunked in tea as though it were the greatest delight that I have ever eaten. I cry, emotional because my stomach can cope with solid food at last. I call my wife by phone and we cry together about this first breakfast after surgery. The intense cold continues, the wind shakes the trees, God is still, silent, and mysteriously present. I feel my Father’s care. Today I play another day and I believe I can feel his eagerness that the game will go well.

Fortunately I know I have many games left to play - in front of a full stadium! And all with God's mysterious presence.

Luis Alberto Rodriguez

The last time I saw Luís. April 3, 2016

Trinity: Two Guys and a Bird

The three-fold depiction of God in St. Paul's famous apse

In my first year of Seminary, my German-born liturgy professor Teresa Berger keenly observed “The Trinity is not two guys and a bird”! Her point, terribly well illustrated, is that as much as we visually imagine the Triune God as an old man with a beard, a younger man with a beard, and a dove with a halo, that image is a terribly misleading and often dangerous mischaracterization. That the almighty and everlasting God – the One who alone transcends every possible boundary and definition – could somehow be confined to these three ridiculously overused images would be preposterous. But somehow, in this tradition that so often depicts our holiest figures in art & architecture everywhere, we’ve become artistically and even theologically dependent on picturing the Divine as two white guys and their avian companion.

Over the last four or so years, my annual tradition (along with many other enthusiasts of nerdy church humor) has been to watch this famously funny yet pointedly biting video every Trinity Sunday. In it, the hilariously animatronic St. Patrick is repeatedly flummoxed by two Leprachaun friends pointing out wryly that every analogy he tries to use for the Trinity is incomplete and even accidentally heretical! Witty as it is, the comedic sketch makes a poignant message – our images and analogies, no matter how clever, will always fail to capture even a fragment of the indefinable and ineffable Deity.

One image, however, that comes much closer than most is the stunningly powerful Holy Trinity by Andrei Rublev. By far the most famous Russian icon in Christian history, the 15^th Century work powerfully portrays the Divine Persons as three notoriously winged, haloed and markedly androgynous figures, seated at a table around what one might identify as the Blessed Sacrament. Most remarkable of all, the table leaves an open space right at the front directly at the point where the gazes of the three holy figures meet. That open space, as theologians and art scholars have often suggested, is the place for each of us, as the beloved children of God, to experience the all-consuming welcome of the Holy One. It is not that the believer comes to the table to be a member of the Trinity, or even to approach it as if on an equal footing with the Divine. But it is to receive the invitation to be reconciled, re-membered, into the full family of God. That open space at the table is the place where we come to love God not distantly but up close, as dearest kin and greatest friend and beloved parent.

In his Trinity Sunday sermon this week, Fr. Austin said wisely that we are called to “enter into the space where we can both trust and question the way we are supposed to as human beings created in the image of God.” It is a difficult balance to both obey trustingly and question faithfully the movements of the Divine in our daily lives. 

Fortunately, all of us here at St. Paul’s had the honor to know and love a man whose very life was a model of this powerful grace and faith. In my next post, you can read about our beloved friend & parishioner Luis, whose dedicated service to the Triune Lord continues to inspire all of us in the St. Paul's community.

The Season OF Pentecost

Celebrating the Feast of Pentecost with Fr. Austin, Aja Paola and our favorite shoes :)

We find ourselves now in what we call “ordinary time” – a moniker that frankly grates at me like sandpaper on the skin. The language we use is critical. As a practice, we in the ecclesiastical world have taken to labeling our holy days in various seasons “The second Sunday OF Christmas”, or “the second Sunday OF Easter” etc, because we’re talking about not just the day, but the season as a whole. But Pentecost, for whatever reason, does not garner the same honor. Instead, we’ve taken to say “the __^th Sunday AFTER Pentecost. But why? The seemingly never-ending season of green, when we focus broadly on the teachings of Jesus and the “regular” life of the Church, is not “ordinary” at all. It’s the season of the Holy Spirit. It’s the season when we not only remember the lessons Jesus taught us but we carry them into the world and live them every day through the power of the Heavenly Dove. And It’s the season in which we take Christ’s words  - the language that brought our faith into being – and live them out in all of the words and all of the languages of the earth.

Pentecost, as I’ve found myself saying often this past week, is by far my favorite feast day of the church year. Yes, even beyond the joy of Christmastide and the Paschal awakening on Easter day. Perhaps it’s because unlike its more celebrated counterparts, Pentecost has never taken on the secular & commercialized atmosphere that pollutes the celebration of the sacred mysteries. Instead, there remains such an unencumbered purity to it, like a gem hidden in the open and yet preserved providentially throughout the centuries.

But above all, my favorite part of this mystical day – amidst the decorative tongues of fire and bright crimson streamers, the birthday celebrations for the Church and the beckoning call of the Veni Sanctus Spiritus – is the absolute grandiosity of the gift of language. Something has always captured my imagination about that particular wonder.

Until eight months ago, the great miracle of this favorite feast was something of a theoretical treat to tickle the imagination – a cartoon without the benefit of animation. I mean think of it – flame-headed disciples speaking incoherently in tongues and people from all over the world (the Scripture mentions groups with at least 16 native languages and several different alphabets) all impossibly understanding each other all at once without need of translation! No matter they all thought they were drunk – I might’ve assumed the same thing!

After all, the one thing in this world that’s always given me envy as green as the Amazon, it’s seeing people with the facility to speak several languages easily & skillfully. Should I ever meet a genie in a bottle or stumble upon a sack of magic beans with superpower-granting ability, I’ll pass on extreme wealth or the ability to fly or teleport or have amazing athletic ability (although that might help my beloved Cincinnati Reds have a winning season this year)! Nope – All I want to be is a polyglot someday…

After horribly failed attempts at studying Spanish & Russian & Latin & German & Greek  over the last 15 years or so, I had more or less resolved that the Pentecostal gift just wasn’t meant for me. Then I arrived in Rome.

In my very first blog post after arriving in Rome, just two weeks after making landfall in this weird and wonderful city, I marveled out loud “At St. Paul’s everyday is Pentecost”.  The last eight months have taught me just how true that was – even more than I imagined. Every single day I am absolutely dumbfounded by the linguistic diversity of this world and the remarkable microcosm here at the corner of Via Napoli & Via Nazionale. As I’ve mentioned here before, on any Sunday morning our pews are filled with speakers of at least a dozen native tongues, from Spanish and Italian to Igbo and Swahili to Tagalog and Japanese. And a brief venture downstairs to the refugee center acquaints you with probably two dozen more including Bambara (from central Africa), Eritrean, Hausa, Ewe, Urdu, Pashto/Persian, Uzbek & Arabic. And just for good measure, we are blessed daily with tourists and visitors who greet us happily in Mandarin, French, German, Portugese, Russian and countless other tongues. Last week I came across an American volunteer and an Afghan refugee speaking fluently with each other in Turkish – a language I had no idea that either of them knew! Even still nobody, no matter how talented, could be useful at all in all, or even half of those myriad voices. Heck, I’m awkward at least once a day in English alone!

Refugees & volunteers link hands, hearts and languages at the JNRC

But that – That right there is where the Holy Spirit shows up every single time. Every week I get to welcome visiting groups of students, normally from the United States, to our refugee centre to meet, learn about and share moments of bonding with “the guys” as we’ve been known to fondly say. Every time, I have the honor to hear them revel about for the first time meeting new friends with whom they don’t share even close to a common language. Sometimes knowing nothing more of Italian than “Ciao” and “Grazie”, they track down someone to translate, maybe even through two or three telephone-like connections (ex. English to French to Italian to Persian). but more often than not, the far more powerful intermediary of smiles and handshakes, games of checkers (with chess pieces, oddly enough), enthusiastic foosball matches, drawing artistic works together, eating together and just plain presence that makes all the difference.

Upstairs in the church, the Holy Spirit is still always doing her thing. It’s not unusual to have conversations where one person knows only English & Spanish, another knows Spanish & Italian, another knows English & Italian but nobody knows all three. Even each of our three office computers is set to a different language! So there’s always an odd sort of relay going on, and somehow or another we all manage to figure one another out. Sure, there are mistakes and miscommunications all the time. I manage to embarrass myself in at least one foreign language every day! But every single time, that Heavenly Dove manages to arrive right in the nick of time.

Our multi-lingual Pentecost bulletin cover!

Although I’ve always wished to be fluent in a range of languages, never have I come closer or been more motivated to actually accomplish it. As I’ve been heard to say, I can get along in Italian (good enough to impress those who don’t speak the language but sometimes poor enough to make real Italians cringe). And I can actually read quite well in Spanish – from time to time I’ll read whole newspaper articles with very little trouble, but still some days when I open my mouth to speak it, nothing but a jumbled mumble falls out! But amazingly enough, for someone who loathed and occasionally even failed foreign language classes for more than a dozen years, I’ve actually fallen in live with the quest to grasp a foreign tongue. In fact, I find myself scheming every day on how to achieve greater levels of immersion & dedication in the coming months & years.

I want to carry this Pentecost spirit from this year in Rome to every life & ministry in the Church. And I pray that the Holy Spirit, who gives us the words and the languages to carry on the disciples’ ministry in preaching & living the Gospel throughout the world, will remain at the center of this sacred season. So rather than saying “Ordinary time” or “the Sundays After Pentecost”, I will call it “the Season OF Pentecost” and I hope the Church someday will too.

Youth Across Europe!

Last Week, St. Paul's had the great pleasure to welcome more than twenty teenagers from fellow parishes across the Convocation of Episcopal Churches In Europe. The occasion was Youth Across Europe 2016, the annual conference of young people 13-19 years old from across our sister parishes in Europe. I had the pleasure of being the planning coordinator & lead the host committee for the event, and to spend time with these amazing kids & adult chaperones along the way! Here's a little bit of what we did during these five extraordinary days.

 

 

It was an incredible event, and we are so thankful to the dozens of youth, adults and volunteers who made it all happen!