The following story, too, is told by many. A certain seer warned Caesar to be on his guard against a great peril on the day of the month of March which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had come and Caesar was on his way to the senate-house, he greeted the seer with a jest and said: “Well, the Ides of March are come,” and the seer said to him softly: “Ay, they are come, but they are not gone.” Moreover, on the day before, when Marcus Lepidus was entertaining him at supper, Caesar chanced to be signing letters, as his custom was, while reclining at table, and the discourse turned suddenly upon the question what sort of death was the best; before any one could answer Caesar cried out: “That which is unexpected.” After this, while he was sleeping as usual by the side of his wife, all the windows and doors of the chamber flew open at once, and Caesar, confounded by the noise and the light of the moon shining down upon him, noticed that Calpurnia was in a deep slumber, but was uttering indistinct words and inarticulate groans in her sleep; for she dreamed, as it proved, that she was holding her murdered husband in her arms and bewailing him. — Plutarch, The Life of Julius Caesar, Chapter 63, verses 6-9.
First reading: Genesis 2:7-9 and Genesis 3:1-7
Psalm: Ps 51:3-6,12-13,17
Epistle: Romans 5:12-19
Gospel: Matthew 4:1-11
how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace
and of the gift of justification
come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.
Distance
I want you to picture that day, John, Mary, the other women standing under the cross. Jesus has died, His blood and water flow out and onto the ground. Now walk with me. We travel through time, and what happened to that moment under the cross? It is farther and farther away. It seems to be distant, history, something from long ago.
Birth of the Church
From the moment of Jesus’ death, from the moment the first drop of His blood hit the ground, the Church was born. But what is the Church? What was born at that moment? And, is what was born that moment only history?
What we are not
First we must consider what the Church is not:
The Church is not an opportunity for fellowship. The Church is not a club or exclusive group. The Church is not an earthly institution. The Church was not established only for our well-being or to teach us moral rules for life. The Church is not solely what it does, the sacraments, the synods, meetings and bishops, priests, deacons, councils.
In fact, Jesus Christ died that the Church might be born. As we stand under the cross we stand at the very moment the Church was born, and that moment defines us forever.
Time doesn’t matter
Father and I both like science fiction. Those familiar with sci-fi know that on occasion authors play on time travel. What some consider science fiction, we live – for this is what the Church is.
That little journey we took, we must see as a falsehood. The cross isn’t back there in time, a moment long ago and lost to books and history. We are not here, at a distance, removed from the foot of the cross.
At that moment of Christ’s death, at the moment the Holy Church was born, the cross extended through time and space. It became an eternally present reality and the very center and focus of our lives.
God gave us the Church from that moment, and forever, so that we might be saved. He gave us the Church so that His life would be ours and our lives would be His.
We know that God is love, and He gave the Holy Church that we might become the very love of God found in the cross.
Becoming
In the Church, in the Holy Cross, we do more than evolve. We don’t just become better people. We come to exist as we should, as we were designed to exist.
The Church is the reality of God’s life with us, and our life with Him. It is where the love of each member for each member, and the love of each member for all, is our truth.
The Church is the place where forgiveness is not a moral act, or something we are obligated to do -– but rather an act that is at the core of our existence, something we do because it is who we are. Goodness, humility, kindness, generosity, truth, evangelism, charity are who we are, not things we do just because someone else, long ago and far away, said we should. The Church is the reality where we find who we really are, not the place we fight against who we are.
If God were cruel, He would have designed us as evil or ignorant beings, and then would have given us rules, so that we lived in constant conflict against our nature. No! God created us in His image, with true humanity and love at our core. He gave us the Church to be the place we connect to our nature, to our life in Him, to our life as it is meant to be.
If we fail to see the Church as the mystical center and ark of salvation we fail to understand the thing most fundamental to our Christian faith. The Church is the ark in which we meet God, stand under the cross, and where we weather the storms of what we are not with God. It is the place that takes us from the flood of sin and death — the things against ourselves, and carries us to eternal life with God.
Standing in
So today we stand in the Church. We stand in the mystical place that meets the cross extending through all of history and time. In it we experience the body and blood of Jesus, the very body on the cross, the very blood that flowed from it. In the Church we touch that very moment. We stand under the cross and in the cross. We stand with God, and in Him. We connect to who we were always meant to be, with more than that, with who we really are. We find God in us and God in each other. That, my friends, is the Church.
Today we encounter the crucified Christ, in His full reality. In this encounter, in this very moment, our encounter with Him is an encounter with His eternal love and forgiveness.
In the Church we extend God’s love and forgiveness to all. We encounter Christ not because we have purged the Church or the world of every sinner, or have corrected everything we think wrong, but because we embrace the weakness of love, the cross, which saves all. Our love, our unity with God’s love, is stronger even than death. In the fulfillment of the love shown in the cross, present today, present in our lives, we find our resurrection. Our union with the Crucified Christ, and the love He gave of the cross, marks the heart of our Christian vocation and life.
More than heritage
Today we give special thanks for our organizer, Bishop Francis Hodur, and those brave souls who reconnected themselves with the reality of the Holy Cross, who understood the Christian vocation as the fellowship of believers who live in unity of love, who are true to the cross of love. It exists as much today as it did in 1897, as it did 2,000 years ago.
Those brave Christians saw the truth: not the organization, not the structures, not the cathedrals or palaces. They saw the cross and the call to live within the Church of Christ as brothers and sisters. That is not just our 114 year old heritage, it is our reality today. We are not distant. We stand in the same place, under the same cross of love, where weakness is strength, where life is eternal, where we meet God and each other, true to our Christian vocation, one in love.
As St. Paul said: We have received the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification in the present eternal reality of the Church. Because of that, we will come to reign in life eternal through Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Begone, Satan! for it is written, `You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'” — Matthew 4:8-10
From Maria, A Ukrainian Tale, by Antoni Malczewski
From The Plain Dealer: Jerzy J. Maciuszko promoted libraries and Polish culture
Berea — Jerzy Janusz “George” Maciuszko was a leading librarian and Polish scholar.
Maciuszko died March 3 at the Renaissance in Olmsted Township. He was 97.
He headed Baldwin-Wallace College’s Ritter Library and the Cleveland Public Library’s prestigious special collections department. He also chaired Slavic and modern languages at the former Alliance College in Cambridge Springs, Pa., where he started a pioneering academic exchange with Poland.
Among dozens of honors, Maciuszko won an Officers’ Cross of the Order of Merit from Polish President Lech Walesa, an Eagle Trophy from the American Nationalities Movement and a “Man of the Year” award from the American Biographical Institute, for which he wrote.
Congratulating him for a Polish Heritage Award from the Cleveland Society of Poles, President Clinton wrote, “As a scholar, writer, and educator, you have made your own outstanding contributions to the heritage and to the intellectual life of our nation. Your efforts and achievements have helped to reaffirm the ties of family and friendship between the people of Poland and the United States.”
Eugene Bak, head of the local Polish American Cultural Center, said, “Polonia has lost its most distinguished citizen. He was always so considerate, so gentle.” Maciuszko donated many books to the center, which named its library for him.
John Grabowski, vice president of the Western Reserve Historical Society, said, “He was an absolute gentleman of the old school.” Introduced to Grabowski’s wife, Maciuszko kissed her hand.
The librarian helped to start Western Reserve’s ethnic collection. Now Grabowski will seek a publisher for a manuscript Maciuszko finished a few days before his death: “Poles Apart: The Tragic Fate of Poles During World War II.”
In 1983, Maciuszko told The Plain Dealer that literature had kept Poland alive. “When Poland was wiped off the map of Europe in 1795, literature assumed the role of guardian of the Polish identity.”
He felt that heritage mattered more to succeeding generations of Polish-Americans. “Often the first-generation immigrants put aside their ethnic background in a rush to become Americans, the second generation grapples with identity and the third returns to the beginnings.”
Jerzy Maciuszko (pronounced YUR-zhi ma-CHEWS-coe) was born in Warsaw. He graduated from the University of Warsaw with a bachelor’s degree in English. He taught English at a high school in Warsaw.In 1939, the Germans invaded, and Maciuszko was captured at the border. He spent nearly six years in a prisoners’ camp. Besides hard labor, he played violin in a camp orchestra and wrote a short story, “Concerto in F-minor,” which passed the censors and shared top honors in a contest staged by the International YMCA.
Late in the war, Maciuszko escaped and became a liaison officer for the U.S. Army, helping fellow Poles find other homes than their newly Communist homeland. He moved to England in 1946 and inspected Polish secondary schools for the British Ministry of Education.
In 1951, he taught at Alliance. Soon he moved to Cleveland and joined its library’s foreign language department.In 1963, Maciuszko began to direct the library’s John G. White Collection, which features folklore, orientalia and the world’s most comprehensive set of chess publications. He rose to head all of the library’s special collections, including books going back to the 1400’s. He also earned a library doctorate at Western Reserve University and taught there.
Maciuszko returned to Alliance in 1969 and chaired Slavic and modern languages there. He worked out an exchange program between his school and Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
In 1974, he moved to Berea and started four years of leading Ritter Library. At age 65, he had a child, Christina, with his wife, the former Kathleen Mart Post, another librarian. Retiring in 1978, he became a professor emeritus and continued to write and speak prolifically.
Among his many works were “The Polish Short Story in English: A Guide and Critical Bibliography,” published in 1969 by Wayne State University Press. A Columbia University reviewer called the book “a monumental work indispensable to all American teachers and students of Polish literature.”
He also wrote a monograph on the Polish Institute of America and chapters for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. He chaired the Slavic division of the Association of College and Research Libraries and co-founded the association’s journal, Choice.
Maciuszko swam steadily and served on the board of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute at Ritter Library.
Jerzy Janusz “George” Maciuszko, 1913-2011
Survivors: wife, the former Kathleen Mart Post, and daughter, Christina of Cleveland Heights.
Memorial service: 3 p.m. on May 15 at the Polish American Cultural Center.
Contributions: Jerzy J. Maciuszko Memorial Fund, Polish American Cultural Center, 6501 Lansing Ave., Cleveland, OH 44105.
Eternal rest grant onto him O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul, and he souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. Amen.
Wieczne odpoczynek racz mu dać Panie, a światłość wiekuista niechaj mu świeci.
Niech odpoczywa w pokoju, Amen.