Brennan Family Reunion July 24-25

Dear Brennan Family members,

Mom, Grandma, Great Grandma, Aunt, Sis, Peggy Phillips asked me to send this email to invite you down to her place in beautiful Crawford County, MO for a Brennan Family Gathering on Saturday July 24 and/or Sunday July 25, as your schedule may permit. We apologize for the short notice. She plans to call Uncle Tom to be sure that he can attend. Peggy asked that, if you think you can make it, to let her know. You can respond to me via email at
dgp0422@sbcglobal.net, or if you have a few minutes, I know she would be delighted to hear from you if you wish to call her at 573-885-2276. I know I do not have everyone's email address, so please be sure to share this invitation with your immediate family members.

Thanks,

Nephew, Cousin, Brother Dan.

P.S. Peggy Kuehner's son Mark was admitted to St John's Mercy Hospital yesterday. He is taking IV and oral antibiotics for a staph infection in his elbow. As you may know, staph can become very serious. So far, Mark feels fine except for the tenderness in his elbow. He has no fever and his blood work is good. Hopefully, he will be out in a couple of days. Peggy welcomes your prayers for Mark's speedy recovery. Mark asks that you pray for the doctors who have to
attend to him (and nurses too, I suspect)!

Sheila in Ireland

Hi Everyone. I'm a virgin blogger so bear with me as we set out on another adventure. If this works, you'll be able to watch Sheila walk across the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge on the Antrim Coast in Northern Ireland. The rope bridge is 65 feet across and 90 feet above the crashing Atlantic. Sheila's the one wearing a pink jacket. Isn't she brave?!!

Merry Christmas!!

Back Home

I'm back in St. Louis, everyone, after a wonderful sabbatical. I left Rome on Thanksgiving Day for a long weekend in Cambridge, where I got to see one of the famous Lessons and Carols services. I returned to St. Louis on December 1st. What a blessing these last four months have been: Lourdes, Meuse-Argonne, Switzerland, Italy, the Holy Land, England. I am so grateful to God for the opportunity.

I ask your prayers for two intentions. Dad will be having surgery on January 4th, to repair a fracture in his neck that is not healing quickly enough. The surgeon is very optimistic---says there is a 70 to 90% success rate for the procedure---but still it is serious surgery. Second intention: I will be leaving for Colorado on December 28th to begin my new assignment, also on January 4th. I will be living in a parish I have been visiting for years, and I will be working at the Catholic Center in Colorado Springs as director of permanent deacon formation, as director of continuing formation for priests and deacons, and as theological consultant for the diocese. I am very excited about all of this but it is a big change and I would appreciate your prayers.

Finally let me offer Christmas greetings to everyone. The image I would like to use is copyright, so let me provide a Christmas link in place of a Christmas card:

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/sandro-botticelli-mystic-nativity

I pray that your celebrations are prayerful and joyful. This is the central mystery of our faith. The invisible God made himself visible to save us, and we need that salvation. May we all enjoy it together. Merry Christmas.

The Holy Land

I haven’t posted in a while, but hello everyone. I am back in Rome for the last month of my sabbatical, after a one-week pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The schedule was a little too ambitious and I got sick the second-last night we were there, but I am feeling better now. All that said, the pilgrimage was a memorable experience. We spent four days in Galilee and four days in Jerusalem. I have a much better sense of the geography of the Bible now, especially of the Jerusalem area.

Highlights of the visit would be: Nazareth, Capernaum, Tabor, Qumran, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, and the Old City of Jerusalem. Most of the Jerusalem sites were overcrowded, especially the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is the strangest church building I have ever seen. I got away from my group to visit the Western Wall (the only remainder of the ancient Temple) in the Jewish Quarter, and I found that a touching experience. What was most touching, though, was the Via Dolorosa, the street from Pilate’s Palace to Golgotha that is the basis for the Stations of the Cross in Catholic Churches today. We stopped at each of the outdoor stations (one through nine) on the way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the Via itself is basically a shopping bazaar like something straight out of Indiana Jones.

Picture this: I am climbing up the Via Dolorosa trying to imagine Jesus and his Cross and remembering each of you again by name; I am looking out for dog poop and loose paving stones and ducking under racks of hanging scarves, souvenir shirts, and carpets; a private Jewish property owner has placed an enormous one-storey menorah at the top of the street; a muezzin is calling the Muslims to prayer over loudspeakers in a long, minor-keyed and haunting chant; the shopkeepers are pushing to ask if we want to come in; several of the other priests are trying to bargain from shop to shop on a kiddush cup that they see as a chalice; from time to time, we file into one of the tiny chapels dedicated to the station and say our prayers; one time we have to say our prayers out in the middle of the street; and suddenly we are on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, where there is a whole community of Ethiopian monks.

We clamber down a staircase to get to the only entrance to the Church, and once inside, we climb up again on a narrow spiral starcase to get to Golgotha. Everywhere there is simply a crush of humanity, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of incense and rose oil. The building is dark. Candles hang in decorated holders at every key shrine in the Church. Different sections of the building are controlled by different ancient Christian traditions, and they do not get along---although today they are on their good behavior. The eleventh station is in a Franciscan chapel and the twelfth is in a Greek Orthodox chapel, side by side. We finish the stations, and after wading through the crowd, we get to venerate the place where the Cross stood---the rock is covered in a massive glass case with an altar on top of it. (It is actually very likely that this is the exact place, since the Emperor Hadrian built a temple over it in an attempt to obliterate the Christian cult. The Emperor Constantine later tore the temple down to build the antecedent of the present Church.)

We go back down the narrow spiral staircase, and find ourselves at the Stone of the Anointing. We are not far from the nearby rotunda and the Chapel of the Anastasis (Resurrection), but there is such a long line to get into the shrine over the tomb that we are not able to get in. Finally we pass back outside into daylight and fresh air, and I try unsuccessfully to get a photo of this strange Church.

The whole time I was in the Holy Land, I kept thinking of Ogden Nash's smart-aleck couplet, "How odd of God / To choose the Jews." The whole place was odd. I am still thinking this through. God chose a desert to be the Promised Land? He chose a People and then dispossessed them for two-thirds of their history? In the unforgettable words of the Psalmist, “It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

The Masses at Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre were prayerful, but on the whole this was not exactly an inspiring experience. My predominant memory is how crowded everything is. If I have taken one thing away from the experience, it is a deeper appreciation of what Jesus meant when he said, "It is better for you that I go" (Jn 16:7). What we have in the Church and the sacraments is much more intimate than what we could have if he were still preaching and attracting crowds in the Holy Land. It is so much more accessible and personal.

Uncle Rod's Funeral

I received the following email from Aunt Ellen:


Here is the info, Denny...........and a couple others..........send it to anyone who may be able to attend. There will be no Wake, he has been cremated. His remains will be transported with Mike Snider and Mimi on Wednesday. of this week........Mimi will return home the following Tuesday.

Friday, October 2, 10:00 AM

St. Walter Catholic Church
130 W. Pine St
Roselle Illionois 60172

Interment at Mount Emblem Cemetery
Elmhurst Il


Love and prayers, Ellen