Crazy Spirit of Hope

Dear Friend,

Peace and all goodness of the Risen Lord be with you!

Our live stream Easter Mass from Serra Chapel proved to be an exciting adventure. With generous help from many hands and high tech tools, the liturgy was captured by cameras and mikes in the sunlit chapel, and instantly released into the ethersphere, where it rumbled with buffering and stutters onto about 250 screens. All in all, a learning experience, and, curiously, it triggered a memory….

It’s January 1973 and a group of restless high school students, of which I am one, are gathered at a certain household in Atlanta, Georgia. Two nights before, a massive ice storm had crippled the city, forcing citizens into a loose form of “sheltering in place.” Unholy antics ensue as a result of the fact that my friend John had received a super-8 movie camera for Christmas. With school cancelled we fully exploit our time off in a madcap romp of adolescent film making. I will spare you details, but suffice it to say that the result of it all was a cringe-worthy (to say the least) vampire spoof called “Binaca and the Red Dots” – the reference being to the newly marketed germ-killing breath freshener which the hero/vampire would tap into his mouth before each strike…yes, as I said, unholy antics…

Let’s be clear: this memory has little or nothing to do with liturgy or with this Sunday’s beautiful scripture readings. It’s about the crazy places our minds can go when our schedules are upset and we find ourselves trapped. Then again, there is a question: what got into those crazy high school students back in 1973? A storm had wreaked havoc in our city. Had a crazy spirit of hope penetrated the chill? Had we been touched by it? Just a thought…

And thank you for listening!

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor