Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time - June 17, 2018

Fathers Day brings many memories to my mind. Here’s one that, I hope, will lead into another point. My father worked for Westinghouse, and in 1964 they asked him to learn to learn the COBOL programming language. Computers were not typically accessible to us ordinary folk, so even into college, I thought of my father’s work as something beyond me. Then in college I took a class in Fortran. I did well in the class, but I did have one program that absolutely would not run, so I asked my father for help. He came up to Duquesne one Saturday afternoon, and the two of us poured over the printout of my program. Finally, he spotted the bug. There was a print command with certain parameters. The line I wanted to print had to be in quotation marks, and the parameters had to be separated from the quotation by a comma. Like a good English student, I had put the comma inside the quotation marks. What was right English was absolutely wrong in Fortran.

Although I was 21 at the time of that Fortran class, I felt like a five-year-old who thinks that his father knows everything. How strange it felt to me years later when Dad would call me to help him with problems he was having in DOS or Windows.

It helps to have someone you can turn to for guidance when things are not going quite right. The surprising thing with a simple solution for computers is simply to reboot, to turn them off and on again. Turning it off clears the memory and gives it a fresh start. And that is the analogy I hope to use now that we are getting into summer. Life gets so hectic that it is nice to have a time when things move a little more slowly. One of the fringe benefits of my involvement with the school is that it makes summer a little more of a break. For me, summer is a time for two specific periods of “rebooting.” Next month I will be going on vacation, and I will write more about that trip in the columns to be published while I am away. Meanwhile, every priest is required to make a retreat once each year, and mine will be this coming week at my alma mater, Mount St. Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. It is important to take a vacation and have some fun, but it also is important to have a time to focus primarily on the spiritual. On a retreat such as I will be attending, there is one priest who serves as “retreat director,” giving spiritual talks and meeting with any of the priests attending who want to talk about anything connected with ministry. In addition, we get to talk with one another and offer support and friendship. There is a nice group of priests who attend this particular retreat every year, and we have become our own little once-a-year community. (Fr. Michael is part of this retreat and will be riding down to Emmitsburg with me.)  Similarly, it is helpful for any of us to find someone we can turn to for support and guidance, particularly someone who can help us from the perspective of our Catholic faith.
For anyone who still has a father to turn to, that can support both parts of this message – Fathers Day and my spiritual retreat. So please pray for my while I am away from the parish this week. And to all fathers, thank you for all you do. Happy Fathers Day.
                                                                                           Father H