Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 20 July 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

Some clergy of the Burke-Springfield area meet monthly just to check in and learn what is going on the community. We met this week to plan our upcoming interfaith Thanksgiving prayer service (which we will host here Tuesday, November 25!) and another program in which our congregations hopefully will participate called Faith250, coming together to discuss secular texts (“The New Colossus,” the Declaration of Independence, “America the Beautiful,” “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”) to rediscover and nourish core values that make us America. It starts with the clergy group, then expands to our respective congregations, finishing with a large gathering/potluck of area churches, synagogues, mosques and temples to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation. Watch for details as they come.

With this planning came a rich discussion and I thought I might float some of these ideas for your reflection about where we are as a people today.

The framers of the Constitution never intended the Constitution to take place in a vacuum, something just to be litigated. It happened alongside the human and moral formation (granted, largely Christian) that happened in houses of faith.

Today with each successive generation becoming more and more “unchurched” across the wide range of houses of worship and faiths, “community” has changed. Society is red or blue, divided right down the middle, and the divide sadly has also entered religion, in many ways that are either “red” or “blue.”

Surveys have shown across the board that people simply are less and less likely to trust anyone or anything – churches, leadership, or institutions. I think this is because the human and moral formation which had been rooted in faith communities is no longer central. The Constitution is not a religious document, but it has become the focus of bitter fighting, as if over words of a contract.

We might even claim to be tethered to faith by some particular religious affiliation, but how many of us actually know why? To have a rule is good, and it is good to follow a rule, but faith in my own life didn’t come to life until I began studies in the seminary. There I found out it was actually okay to question everything – healthy, even. I found that the remarkable thing about Catholicism is that there is a reason why we believe and do everything we believe and do. If you don’t search, you won’t find; if you don’t ask, you won’t learn. Who I am is so much more than simply words on a page that I recite. It is the Spirit behind our limited human attempts to express the Good, the True and the Beautiful which we need to touch, and to touch us. Of course, in faith language, this is God.

Confronted with the question who am I? or who are you?, it is easier to deflect the question by engaging judgment on another. Who really is an American? a Catholic? We have introduced division.

Do you believe it is possible to live in a community which follows a rule of life revealed by God and suspends judgment on each other, rather focusing on how I can grow in goodness, and how we can grow together in goodness? A community where there is no exclusion, no minority. I do. I have to become my brother’s keeper, a good Samaritan, an offering to God that is pleasing to him.

Next weekend I will be giving a short talk at a conference of Pure Land Buddhists in Tainan City, Taiwan. It is called the “Ceremony for the Third Year of Venerable Master Chin Kung’s Nirvana.” Master Chin Kung was a great international leader in interreligious dialogue and, like Pope Francis, found his emphasis in the one human family. Pure Land Buddhism has at its center the figure Amitabha, infinite light, who created a heavenly realm where ordinary people can strive for enlightenment.

My short talk is on what I call “The American Experiment” and the Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue. Hopefully I will print it in next week’s bulletin in case you are interested in what I will be saying.

The Lord be with you.