You Did Not Choose Me, No I Chose You - GUEST POST JOHN ANGOTTI

This week, I invited my friend, John Angotti, whom I have known for over fifteen years, to share his adoption story. John is a Catholic recording artist, speaker, and music missionary. He uses music to share the Gospel to people of all ages, nationally and internationally. He was instrumental in my own ministry, mentoring me, and helping me to grow in my own talents and confidence. I am blessed to call him friend over the years, and so very thankful that he was willing to share his story on this blog. 

This is National Adoption Month. Many of you know I have three adopted siblings. I rarely think of them as adopted, because we grew up very close and love each other deeply and have been through a lot together. At the same time, I don't know what it is like to be adopted, nor do I realize the pain of realizing that someone didn't want, couldn't care for, or was forced to give their child up. I don't know the wonders of what could have been or what should have been. 

But an adoption is a beautiful gift and witness of our faith because it is to be chosen. To be loved as not an obligation or simply familial tie, but as a free will choice. Yes, there are crummy adoption stories (and crummy non-adoption stories), but the point is that choosing to love is at the crux of our faith and what it means to be Christian. 

"You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you might go and bear fruit-- fruit that will last-- and so that whatever you ask in My Name, My Father will give you." -- John 15:16

Thank you, again, John for this message. 




ADOPTION IS THE OPTION – the story of an adopted child.

This story begins a long time ago in a small town called Lost Creek, West Virginia.  A young beautiful petite 16-year-old girl, who lived on a farm, fell for a handsome athletic 17-year boy who had lost his mother at an early age and lived basically in poverty with his father and brother.  The young girl ended up getting pregnant but tried to hide it from her father.  It would have been a disgrace to the family.  She continued to work on the farm but wear large clothes to hide her pregnancy.  She confided in her sister and some family and friends.  Then one hot day in August as she was helping on the farm, her water broke and the reality of her situation was made known to her father who was furious.  This was an embarrassment for him and the family so they rushed her off to a neighboring town to have the baby.  Nestled up on the mountain top in Phillipi, West Virginia was Alderson-Broadus Hospital where she gave birth to a baby boy.  It was a difficult delivery with a lot of blood and pain but both her and the baby survived.  A day or so later after she recovered, she silently went to the nursery, said goodbye to the life she had just brought into the world, and her life went on.  The baby didn’t have a name so the nurses named him Joseph.

Joseph was then put with an adoption agency and within a month he was placed in a family that had already had adopted two other children and even a couple years after they adopted him, they adopted another.  This family was a Catholic family of Italian decent where the mother was a musician.  As Joseph grew up he always knew he was adopted.  His parents always let the children know that they were chosen.  But he struggled.  He always felt he didn’t fit in.  His cousins all had dark hair and dark skin and they all looked alike.  His older brother had medical problems and his older sister was needy and required more attention than he.  So Joseph spent a lot of time alone.   He grew up being mandated to take piano lessons.  He hated those piano lessons, but his mother insisted.  She made sure the routine of practice occurred daily.  Going to church was something else that wasn’t an option for the family.  Faith was important to the parents.  The father grew up during the depression.  His family came from Italy for a better life but struggled through this era holding on to each other and God.  The mother was also a product of parents who came from Italy for a better life as they struggled.  The work ethic and Italian family values and traditions of the parents were instilled in Joseph.  He may not have had all Italian blood in him but he had the Italian heart.  

Joseph’s parents were very strict.  He wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things his friends were allowed to do, so while he was attending Catholic High School, he visited the Preparatory Seminary where he felt called for a couple of reasons.  One was that he felt free there.  Another one was that the living conditions seemed attractive. There was an indoor pool; sports that he loved; the mall was close; it seemed like he would have more fun and escape the rigid life at home.  But mainly it was the music at the Mass that pulled on his heart.  It was a calling that he couldn’t define but felt it.  So off he went to spend his last three years of high school.  His parents were so proud that he was in the seminary to discern priesthood.  But inside he felt freed and that he belonged.  

Because of those mandated piano lessons, Joseph excelled musically.  He became the lead musician of the all male choir and planned all the music for the school masses that occurred daily.  Music was a big deal at the high school seminary.  The choir toured every year and between his junior and senior year, the choir master, Father Magary, decided to record a cassette.  Joseph was the lead cantor on the recording at 16.  

Joseph went onto the college seminary for a year, met a girl, struggled with his grades and ended up at West Virginia University.  He graduated with a degree in marketing and finally couldn’t ignore the music that continued to call him from within.  He went on to musical school and was the lead singer in the US Navy Band.  He always felt something missing in his life and was always drawn to church not on his own but because his adopted mother would encourage him to go and participate with his musical gifts.

After his Naval journey and working in the business world, playing in bars and rock bands, and struggling through relationships he met Tracy.  They got married and the road was rocky from the beginning.  After a difficult time Joseph began to realize that something was wrong with him.  He didn’t want to live anymore and had thoughts of ending it all.  But he sought help to figure out what was going on inside of him.

Through counseling, tears, facing fears, and lots of prayer, Joseph found out that he suffered from something called “separation anxiety.”  Separation anxiety is what many adopted children have if they don’t feel loved enough from the adopted parents.  The wound of being left by the natural mother is so deep it is unconscious in the individual but shows itself through difficulties in relationships or even trusting that someone could love them.  The fear of being hurt is so deep that anytime someone gets close, they run the other way.  

Joseph actually had met his birth mother before he entered the Navy because of his longing to know who he was.  They developed a friendship but Joseph became aware that he was in a much better place with his adopted parents.  He called his birth mother after his marriage difficulty to ask her why she gave him up for adoption.   She told him with tears in her eyes, that she had every intention of keeping him.  That she had an option and she chose life for him even though it made her life hard for a little while.  But that day when she went to see him in the nursery, she said she looked at him and loved him so much that she knew she could never give him the life he deserved, so she allowed him to be adopted by another.

That’s when it all began to click.  Even though the wound remains, he began to see how God was present through all of it and he could now deal with his issues in a positive manner.  His life progressed and he wrote songs and gave his witness to many of how it was the love of God that saved him since birth.  He has been able to help many people with their faith journey by bringing the reality of God presence to all of us through word and song.  His story and music reveal how God has worked throughout history through the work of human hands: through our ancestors, through Mary, through Jesus, through his birth mother, adopted parents, and through his wife and family.  Therefore, all because a 16 year old choose life the baby who was named Joseph at birth by the nurses became John Angotti who now shares his adoption story with the world so that all will know that through Christ, with Christ and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all glory and honor belongs to God, forever and ever. Amen.

"No Religion Can Transform Evil into Good" (Guest Post by Fr. Terrance Klein)

This Homily was given by the Associate Pastor of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Dodge City, Kansas this weekend, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. I was very moved by the message and asked Fr. Terrance Klein to send it to me so that I could share with you all. I bolded the parts that hit home for me. It is important to remember you and I are being persecuted - we don't feel ill effects at the moment, but the mere fact that our brothers and sisters around the world are suffering and dying because they share our faith is a persecution we should feel keenly in our hearts. Please, take action. Pray and support Catholic Relief Services. See my previous blog for how you can help. 

Peace - Noelle

THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS

Fr. Terrance Klein

Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe

09.14.2014

Numbers 21: 4b-9   Philippians 2: 6-11   John 3: 13-17

About one third of the world’s population is Christian.  Each year, more than twenty-five million people are baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And each year, about one hundred thousand Christians are martyred, coming to share fully in the death of Christ.

There has never been a century since Christ in which Christians did not give their lives for the faith.  From the beginning they were acknowledged as martyrs, those whose witness to Christ was writ in blood.  But, whether one considers numbers or percentages, put bluntly, as John Allen does in his 2013 The Global War on Christians, we are “today indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the planet” 

Allen’s book easily marshals examples.  “The evangelical group Open Doors, devoted to monitoring anti-Christian persecution, estimates that one hundred million Christians worldwide presently face interrogation, arrest, torture, or even death because of their religious convictions.”  

For example, in 2008, in northeastern India “a series of riots ended with as many as five hundred Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals, thousands more were injured; and at least fifty thousand were left homeless.”  

In Nigeria the militant Islamic group Boko Haram “is held responsible for almost three thousand deaths.”  Like its counterpart in Egypt, Christians and their churches are targeted.  

In North Korea “roughly a quarter of the country’s two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Christians are believed to be living in forced labor camps because of their refusal to join the national cult around founder Kim Il Sung…Some three hundred thousand Christians in North Korea have simply disappeared and are presumed to be dead.”

Before the first Gulf War, more than a million and a half Iraqis were Christians, whose origins dated to the age of the apostles.  A year ago, after relentless bombings and unrestrained persecution, the number of them in Iraq was close to one hundred thousand.  That was before the rise of ISIS and its declaration that there is nothing to give Christians “but the sword.”  This summer, in Mosul, Christians, including children, have been beheaded, even crucified. 

When unprecedented numbers of Christians are being murdered, what does it mean to celebrate—this year during our Sunday liturgies—the Exaltation of the Cross?  The Church Father Tertullian said that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” but this seed should never be blithely scattered. Even as the Church celebrates her most faithful witnesses, she must also mourn their deaths.  

The Church exists to midwife the Kingdom of God, which is one of peace and justice.  She cannot ignore the injustice, the violence, perpetrated against her own people.  The meaning of this feast cannot be that it is good for men and women to die violently for the faith because, in doing so, they imitate Christ.  To exult the cross is not to celebrate violence, neither that inflicted upon Jesus nor upon his followers.

One cannot suggest that what happened on Calvary, two millennia ago, cancels the contemporary evil perpetrated against Christians, or anyone else.  The meaning of the cross is not that violence has been transformed into something that we proclaim—paradoxically, with an eye toward the world to come—as good.  That would make the cross of Christ an enemy of men and women, because what is evil—and his crucifixion surely was—cannot be baptized by blather into something good.

If the cross were simply a human horror, made inspirational by centuries of whitewashing piety, then to exult Calvary would be to perpetrate the very evil cited by many critics of religion.  It would be akin to that perversion of authentic Islam, which tells the fanatically violent that Paradise awaits them.  

The cross cancels our calculations. From the earth, looking up at its beams, at his bloodied, outstretched arms, it defies sense.  Those who stood beneath the cross saw it as the death of all their hopes, the terrible judgment of God upon the wickedness of earth.  

Only God can comprehend the cross, which is to say that no human dares to assign its meaning.  To call the cross the great mystery of God is to rebuke every human effort to domesticate the divine.  The death of Jesus upon the cross is not a past event that makes the present palatable for the persecuted.  

No, we must see the cross as the eternal, the standing-outside-of-time, the ever ancient and ever new decision of God, which is to enter into the abasement of sin and its consequent suffering.  Christians don’t go to their violent deaths because Christ went to Calvary.  Christ embraces the wood of the cross because the innocent died before him, died after him, continue to die.  

The cross draws all of human history—past, present, and future—into those outstretched arms.  The will of God—Father, Son, and Spirit—is revealed there.  The meaning of history is curiously carved into its wood.  

He emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross (Phil 2: 7-8).

No religion can transform evil into good.  Evil is absolute inanity, the complete absence of the good.  You cannot directly choose to do evil to accomplish the good.  Those who try only diminish the good, in themselves and the world.  

You can suffer evil, like the martyrs, or resist it, like those who fight to restrain it.  Martyrs are not passive, and soldiers are not evil.  They are righteous in resisting.  But there is a reason that the cross of Christ belongs on ambulances and not at the head of armies.  Christ chooses to suffer the cross.  Note the present tense of the verb.  Christ chooses.  It will never enter the past tense until the world, its sin and suffering, is gathered to him.

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