Love Transforms: Remembering Deacon Bill Waldmann

Pastor's Points: Love Transforms
Remembering Deacon Bill Waldmann

On November 28, our beloved Deacon Bill Waldmann died following complications from heart surgery. Deacon Bill served for 42 years as a permanent deacon. He was one of the first men ordained following the restoration of the permanent diaconate. Deacon Bill was ordained  for the service of the Archdiocese of Detroit and then served in both Detroit and the Diocese of Raleigh in his retirement years. He served our parish well for many years as he attended to the sick, the dying and the bereaved. He preached the Gospel with fidelity and was a man of compassion and empathy. I still expect to see Deacon Bill walking into the vesting room to get ready for Mass. I greatly miss him, as I know all of us do.

On November 3, Deacon Bill preached his final homily. I wanted to share that with you. He spoke about how love transforms. Is that not the truth? That sums up a lot of the message of Christ. Love transforms. Please take some time to read his homily. It is very poignant for this time of year as we think about how the incarnation of Christ transformed the world, and how divine love was showered upon us.

Deacon Bill began with a story that went something like this:

A man sat down in his seat at the Super Bowl. A woman sat down next to him and there was an empty seat next to hers. The two people got to talking and the woman said that her husband had bought these two tickets to the Super Bowl and he passed away recently. She still wanted to come and honor him. The man asked the woman why she did not invite someone from her family or friends to use the other ticket. She said that they were all at the funeral!

HOMILY:
This is not the kind of commitment or love Jesus is teaching in the Gospel reading today.  Love is one of the most important attributes that is emphasized in the scriptures. “Faith, hope and love are the three things that last,” as Paul writes in his first letter to Corinthians 13:13.  This theme of love is pervasive in the New Testament from start to finish.  This may sound like the hippy movement of the sixties, but then maybe they got the message.

We all know the Ten Commandments and that the first three concern our relationship with God. But there are seven more that show us how to manifest our love for God, and they have to do with our relationship to one another. Jesus makes it easy to understand, but teaches us that in order to love God we must have a healthy loving relationship with all others. This will require that we die before we die. That is, we may have to die to the idea about how we see ourselves so that we can be transformed, yes, transformed to what God intends us to be. Fr. Richard Rohr in his book “Things Hidden, Scripture as Spirituality” states: “How we relate to God always reveals how we relate to people, and how we relate to people is an almost infallible indicator of how we relate to God and let God relate to us.” A statement to think about and contemplate.

I would like us to now take a moment to look at those around us, alongside us, behind us and in front of us.  Let’s take a minute now and do that. Now imagine that you have just looked at the image of God. As it is, we are all, yes all of us, big or small, dark or light skinned, good or bad in our eyes, made in the image and likeness of God.  Now when you go home, I want you to go and look in a mirror at yourself. You, too, are now looking at the image and likeness of God. Everyone that you see is loved by God, and God commands that we love each other in the same way. 

I suspect that the reason some people find it difficult to love others is because they don’t think God loves them, or that there is something about themselves that they don’t love.

Loving and being loved is fulfilling what Jesus teaches us in this commandment; it transforms others and us.  If we think about it, we may realize that those that are most in need of our love are the ones that we think the least of. 

In the wake of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh this last week, I read that the Islamic Community in this country raised over $270,000 to aid the victims of that Jewish tragedy.  Yes, the Islamic community that has been at odds with the Jews. This is something for us to think about. A lesson that should remind us that we have a responsibility for others. Yes, to pray and love one another, no matter what we may think.

We may all remember the musical “Man of La Mancha,” the story of the ridiculed Don Quixote who lived with the illusion of being a knight of old; battling windmills he imagined were dragons. Near the end of the musical, Don Quixote is dying and at his side is Aldonza, a worthless lady of ill repute he had idealized by calling her Dulcinea—sweetie or sweet one.  This adoration of Aldonza by Quixote caused howling laughter and ridicule of him among the townsfolk.  But Don Quixote had loved her in a way unlike anything she had ever experienced.

When Quixote breathed his last, Aldonza begins to sing “The Impossible Dream.”  As the last echo of the song dies away, someone shouts to her “Aldonza!” But she pulls herself up proudly and responds, “My name is Dulcinea.”  The crazy knight’s love had transformed her.

What does this have to say to us?  Loving has a healing, transforming effect.  Let’s go away from here knowing what our love for another can do.  Loving takes effort, and a commitment on our part. Let’s see if this next week – month — year or even our lifetime of love for another can transform them to see in themselves and us the goodness we were created with, the image and likeness of God.