A Mother's Day Gift From A Grateful Son

Upon becoming a deacon candidate, my mother confided in me her dream to be married in the Catholic Church by her son, a deacon. Should that blessed day come with God's good graces, I created a homily for her.

It actually started as our homily assignment for this month's deacon formation weekend. We were asked to create a wedding homily. I could think of no better way to do it. Happy Mother's Day, mom.

-------------------------------------
Gospel Reading: John 2:1-11 (Wedding At Cana)

Miracles happen in all of our lives. Sometimes we have eyes to see. Faith helps open our eyes to see even better the miracles happening all around us.

The union we witness today is proof of God’s abundance of miracles. Christ is turning water into wine with this perfect union, this miracle of new life together in Christ.



When we prepare sacraments of bread and wine in a few moments I want you the pay close attention to when the gifts are being prepared at the altar.

There is a moment when a drop of water is placed into the wine cup. This drop of water signifies our humanity being placed into the divinity of Christ, signified by the wine in the chalice. It’s a blessed moment worthy of reflection.

The priest’s words are: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.”

Local Catholic author Dr. Tom Curran wrote about this in his book “The Mass: Four Encounters With Jesus That Will Change Your Life.”




He says, “the wine is the divinity of Christ, and we are the water. It is as if our spiritual self-offering (our “pouring out”) at Mass represented by tasteless, colorless water is immersed in the robust flavorful wine of Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. What happens to the water when it’s poured into the wine? It is totally dissolved into the wine and ‘becomes wine.’ That’s what will happen at Mass: our self-offering is going to be immersed into Christ’s.”

How appropriate that Christ’s first public miracle is turning water into wine. But not without a little reluctance to His Mother’s request. His “hour has not yet come.”

By turning water into wine, Christ demonstrates for us how He can turn our ordinary humanity into the divine.

And that’s what’s happening at this beautiful wedding of this woman and this man. Their self-offering is going to be immersed into Christ’s self-offering. In it will become a divine unity of woman and man for all eternity. Now, that’s a miracle, my dear friends. Watch. And we all get to witness this miracle.



Each and every one of us has placed in our hearts a desire for the divine. Sometime during our lives we awaken. Perhaps our awakening comes in the form of a desire to understand something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed with life that we need to hand it over to a higher power and ask for help. Sometimes we witness a beautiful sunrise over Mt. Rainier on a clear day and feel the presence of the divine. Sometimes just experiencing the wonder of the love we feel for another can make it happen. We awaken.

God leaves a calling card on all our hearts. He plants a divine drop of wine into each of our souls. This drop is the reverse of the drop of water going into the wine. It’s a drop of the divine wine going into the human waters of our souls.

The miracle is when Christ goes into action and turns our own water into wine.

Scientifically speaking, the average human being is comprised of nearly two thirds water. Babies and young children are made up of nearly three quarters water. That’s a lot of water in our human jug.

But just as Christ turned water into wine at the Wedding at Cana, Christ can perform a miracle in each of us. He can turn our water into wine. He can turn our humanity into divinity. He can perform a miracle in our lives.



The wedding at Cana miracle was witnessed by His mother. A mother’s love for a child is as close to perfect love as we see in our lifetimes. I am reminded of the power of that love every time I see the most moving scene in the movie “The Passion Of The Christ.”

When Jesus is carrying His cross to Calvary He trips and falls on the narrow streets of Jerusalem. His mother is struggling with what’s happening to her son. She is overwhelmed with grief. She cannot bear it anymore. In that moment, as she sees her son stumble, Mary is reminded of a time when Jesus as a little boy fell down and hurt Himself and remembers running to Him to pick Him up and hold Him. In that beautiful moment, Mary has the strength to overcome her grief and anguish and rush to her son. As she approaches, Mary says, “I’m here… I’m here…” the same words she said to her son when He fell as a little boy.

In His pain and His suffering, Jesus tenderly touches her face, looks her in the eyes and says the words that should awaken each of our souls, “See Mother, I make all things new.”



His hour is finally upon us.

His perfect sacrifice calls to mind the perfect sacrifice we are all asked to make to one another; the perfect sacrifice we witness today in the joining this woman and this man.



So, today, my dear mother, you give yourself to Joaquin as a sacrifice of love. Joaquin, you give yourself to Suzanne as a sacrifice of love. Your humanity and divinity are about to come into a perfect union. It’s a perfect sacrifice signifying the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

And Christ is present here. He’s blessing this marriage and turning the water of your humanity into divine wine here at this wedding. We may not be in Cana. We are in Seattle. But we are witnessing a living miracle. What an honor it is for this son to bear witness to this divine moment.

Looking Into God's Eyes

I am always humbled and in awe to see God's creation in abundance.

Remember how amazed you were when you first saw pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Seeing an up-close and personal view of our universe like that is almost like looking into God's eyes.

Here is a picture of our ENTIRE universe from Planet Earth's perspective. It is not the creation of Hubble, but a Seattle photographer.



Pretty cool, huh?

Now here's a story behind the creation of this incredible photograph:
(from komonews.com - Click on above title "Looking Into God's Eyes" to see the video story)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEATTLE -- It's been the dream of a Seattle-area man to put the entire universe into one photo.

"And show them what's really hidden out there that we can't see, especially in Seattle," said Nick Risinger. "Maybe on a good night, we see 20 or 30 stars. At full size, you see 20 or 30 million."

Risinger spent a year toting his huge camera with six lenses across the world.

"All throughout the Southwest U.S. and twice to South Africa, so there was 60,000 miles total," Risinger said.

The lenses sit on a special robotic mount.

"The Earth spins, the stars don't stay, so you have to track with them," Risinger said.

To capture billions of stars, it takes some pretty impressive numbers. The photo isn't just one click -- it's made up of 37 ,000 photos and has a resolution of 5000 megapixels.

To get the rich colors, his shutters had to stay open for seven minutes.

"As anybody has shot with their point-and-shoot would know, stars are almost impossible to capture," he said. "It was a lot of, you know, sitting out in the cold out under the stars waiting."

After that, it took months to piece together the thousands of pictures into the largest true-color sky survey. He hopes his breathtaking image will get more young people looking up.

"If I was a kid and I saw this, I would go 'Wow, it's really inspirational,' " Risinger said.

You can see the photo and even interact and zoom in on particular stars at his website, www.skysurvey.org.

A Boy, An Injury, A Recovery, A Miracle?

From National Public Radio at NPR.org
(Click on title link to hear the NPR story)

---

An Accident On The Court

Jake Finkbonner sits on a couch flanked by his mother, Elsa, and father, Donny. Jake, who just turned 11, is a little shy. He doesn't quite look you in the eye, and you wonder if it's because of the scars on his face.

He describes the terrible day that changed everything: Feb. 18, 2006.

"It was the last game of the season, and it was the last minute of the game," his mother begins.

"I was driving for a lay-in," Jake says, picking up the thread, "and then I got pushed from behind the back, and I hit my lip on the base of the basketball hoop."

"The game ended, and I told him to get some ice cream, you know, 'Get something on that lip,' " Donny recalls. "And I was thinking to myself: 'It's his first big fat lip.' "

But overnight, Jake developed a raging fever. His entire face swelled, and a day later, he was in the hospital.

"I walked in the room, and my heart sank when I saw his face," Donny says. "And he said, 'Hi Daddy!' But he couldn't see me because his eyes were swollen shut."



Dr. Richard Hopper, chief of plastic surgery at Seattle Children's Hospital, says Jake's infection had a life of its own.

At the trauma unit at Seattle Children's Hospital, Craig Rubens, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, instantly suspected a flesh-eating bacterium called strep A. It was consuming Jake's face with terrifying speed.

"It's like lighting one end of a parchment paper," he says, "and you just watch it spread from that corner very fast, and you're stamping it on one side, and it's flaming up on another."

Dr. Richard Hopper, chief of plastic surgery at Seattle Children's, had never seen a case so dire.

"It's almost as if you could watch it moving in front of your eyes," he says. "The redness and the swelling — we would mark it and within the hour it would have spread another half-inch."

Praying For A Miracle

In his office, Hopper turns his computer and displays gruesome photos charting the bacteria's steady march from Jake's lip to his cheeks to his scalp to his forehead. Each day surgeons removed more of his skin to get ahead of the infection.

"The infection was like it had a life of its own," he says.

The doctors told Jake's parents several times that their son would probably die. Elsa Finkbonner called a Catholic priest, who gave the boy his last rites.

"Donny and I went off to the chapel and just surrendered Jake back to God," she recalls. "We just said, 'God, he is yours. Thy will be done, and if it is your will to take him home, then so be it.' "

They also prayed desperately for a miracle, and soon others — many others — were doing the same.

"Things were looking so grim for Jake that we needed all the prayers we could get," recalls their priest, the Rev. Tim Sauer. And because Jake is half Lummi Indian, Sauer urged parishioners at St. Joseph's Catholic Church to appeal to a woman who lived 350 years ago.

"I encouraged people to ask for the intercession of Blessed Kateri," he says.

Kateri Tekakwitha was a Mohawk who converted to Catholicism. Her face was scarred by smallpox. Legend has it, when she died, her scars vanished. She was beatified in 1980, the step before sainthood. Sauer says Kateri was the perfect intercessor for Jake.

"No. 1, we're talking about two young people," Sauer says. "No. 2, we're talking about two people who come from Native American ancestry. And No. 3, we're talking about a person who herself suffered from a disease that disfigured her face."

Annette Bagley, the mother of Jake's best friend, recalls how the church and Jake's school began praying to Kateri. She says the prayers went viral.

"The kindergarten class that Jake was in started hearing back from relatives: 'Tell them we're praying for him in Denver! Tell them we're praying for them in London! Tell them we're praying for them in Israel!' " she says, laughing. "I mean, just all over the world, so we got a big map and we had the kindergartners put pins on the map everywhere in the world where someone was praying for Jake."

Jake Recovers

As Jake hovered between life and death in the hospital, a representative of the Society of Blessed Kateri visited him. She gave his mother a pendant with Kateri's image on it. Elsa Finkbonner placed it on her son's pillow.

"That was the last day that his disease progressed," Elsa says. "And the next morning when they had taken him in for surgery, that was when they told us the news that it had finally stopped."

Surgeon Richard Hopper says after two weeks and a dozen surgeries, the team of doctors had little hope they could get ahead of the bacteria. And when they realized they did, he says, it was breathtaking.

"All of a sudden, to have this infection stop is almost like a geyser coming out of the earth with this great roar — and all of a sudden it just stops. And there's silence. And everybody's just a little bit stunned by it being over," he says.

Jake went home after two months. Now, five years later, doctors are rebuilding his face, little by little. Rubens at Seattle Children's Hospital says it's one of the most amazing recoveries he has seen. Elsa Finkbonner goes further.

"There's no question in my mind that it was in fact a miracle," she says.

But does the Roman Catholic Church believe it is? To qualify as an authentic miracle, the Vatican has to determine that Jake's recovery was unexplainable and that it occurred because people prayed to Kateri to intercede with God on Jake's behalf.



The Rev. Paul Pluth, who is coordinating an investigation into Jake's recovery, says that would suggest Kateri has special access to God.

"That means we have received assurances that this person now stands in heaven before the throne of God," he says. And historically, "one of the evidences of that has been miracles of healing."

These days, the bar is pretty high, says the Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit priest in Rome who has investigated more than 100 potential miracles for the Vatican.

"The Catholic Church has many hundreds — even thousands — of saints," he says, "and the idea is not to get more."

Under Pope John Paul II, it was relatively easy to attain sainthood. In 1983, the late pope made the process quicker, easier — the number of miracles required dropped from two to one — and less adversarial because he eliminated the office of the "Devil's Advocate" at the Vatican. Thus John Paul produced more saints than all the popes in the previous 500 years.

The process is more rigorous under Pope Benedict. Gumpel says that the Vatican does not want to approve miracles lightly, thus misleading people or looking foolish if the "miracle" turns out to have a logical explanation. The church dismisses about 95 percent of the miracle petitions it receives, he says, adding that there are a number of hoops to jump through, from interrogating witnesses to examining medical records to calling on medical specialists and theologians before finally — often years later — presenting the evidence to the pope.

"It has to be rigorous," he says, "because we do not want to submit to the pope a statement unless we are absolutely, morally certain that this case merits to be approved by him a miracle by God."

Now investigators in Seattle are putting Jake Finkbonner's extraordinary recovery on trial. For more than three years, a team of priests has collected documents and interviewed witnesses. There are a lawyer, a priest with medical training and a skeptic who goes by the title of "promoter of justice," the role once called the devil's advocate.



That skeptic is Eusebio Elizondo, the auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Seattle. He tried to find holes in the case.

"In old times it used to be called the devil's advocate," says Elizondo. "I'm trying to really push every single witness [and asking], 'Really, are you sure? Are you positive that there's no other way to explain this, a logical explanation or a scientific explanation or it was a pure coincidence?' "

'I Can't Explain Why'

The panel interviewed each doctor for more than an hour, asking details about Jake's condition, his recovery after each surgery, fatality rates. They asked nothing about miracles. Rubens says they were the consummate professionals.

"They took a very hard look at whether this really was something beyond what they described as the wonders of modern medicine," Rubens says.

The doctor says he didn't get the feeling at all that they were stacking the deck. But Joe Nickell, a paranormal investigator, says there is "no evidence that a miracle took place."

Nickell, who writes for Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine put out by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, says the whole investigation is a joke. Jake received the best medical care, and therefore it's hardly surprising that he recovered.

Nickell says when the Catholic Church confirms miracles, it's using what is called an argument from ignorance.

"They're starting with a mystery, and they're saying, 'We don't know why this person's illness went away.' And then they say, 'Therefore, we do know! It's a miracle!'"

Still, Jake's doctors believe the family's faith was crucial.

"What Jake survived was truly remarkable," Rubens says, "and I can't explain why he would survive over someone else."

Whether or not Jake's recovery was due to the intercession of Kateri Tekakwitha will be a matter for the pope to decide, perhaps years from now.

As for Elsa Finkbonner, she thinks Kateri does deserve to have Catholicism's highest honor.

"It would be disappointing if she didn't get to be a saint," she says. But in the end, that's not really the salient issue. Her son is. "I'm just happy to celebrate Jake's 11th birthday."