Out of Darkness

Student assembly address:

Did you know there’s now a web site called www.blackfridaydeathcount.com?

It features a giant “ticker” that tracks the number of people who’ve been killed or injured as the result of Black Friday, and underneath, there’s a link to particular news stories about these injuries. 

Here are a few stories from Black Friday from four days ago:

• An 11 year old girl was sent to the hospital after being stampeded during an early morning opening of a Walmart store in Boston
• A person was stabbed when two men got into an argument over a parking space outside another Walmart in Virginia.
• Two men got into a fight inside Walmart in Rialto, California, and when a policeman tried to break it up, he was hurt and had to be rushed to the hospital.
• An employee was injured in an Arkansas Walmart when customers got out of hand competing with each other to get the last few sales items.

(Apparently Walmarts are dangerous places to be on Black Friday.)

According to the ticker, there’ve been 7 people killed and 90 people injured on Black Friday since they started keeping statistics in 2006.

There’s something obviously perverse here. The very season we celebrate—the coming of the Prince of Peace--has become  cause for a “dog eat dog” competitiveness to see who can get the best prices on the most stuff, even to the point we hurt each other to get these things.

This week we begin the season of Advent, a period of four weeks when the Church asks us to prepare for the birth of Jesus at Christmas.  St. Paul, writing in his letter to the Romans, tells us bluntly:

Brothers and sisters:
You know the time; it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.

For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;
the night is advanced, the day is at hand.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light.  (Romans 13:11-13)

As we go about our lives these next four weeks—four very busy weeks of tests, papers, studying, exams, buying presents, playing sports, preparing for concerts, practicing---let us take St. Paul’s admonition seriously, to wake up from our spiritual slumber, to throw off the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light.

How do we do that this Advent? We look to serve each other, to place others' needs before ourselves. We go out of our way to build other people up, rather than tear them down, by finding ways to genuinely compliment them. We carve out of our day some time for prayer. We find ways to appreciate the people who are our friends and family, and forgive those who have hurt us. We ask God to help us. 

If we do these things, then Christmas for us will become something far more meaningful than the accumulation of presents. It will become an opportunity for us to draw closer to our families, closer to our friends, and closer to God.

O Come,  O Come, Emmanuel! 

Losing Our Moral Judgment

Student assembly address:

Nationally, marijuana use among teenagers is trending upward, with 22.9% of seniors in this country reporting they’ve smoked marijuana in the last month, according to 2012 data released by National Institute on Drug Abuse. That’s up from 18.5% five years earlier. It also means seniors are likelier to smoke marijuana than smoke a cigarette, as only 17.1 % of seniors say they’ve had a cigarette in the past month.  Alcohol usage nationally has declined slightly, with 28.1% of seniors reporting they’ve been drunk in the last month, down from 30.6% five years earlier.

Our sense here at JPII is that those national trends are reversed—that alcohol usage is on the rise, whereas marijuana usage, while still present, has declined.  Mr. McLaren reports he’s been informed of a rising number of events that occur in our families’ homes where drinking is a prominent feature.

So let’s talk about that for a moment.

When people drink heavily, otherwise sane and normal people do stupid, bad things. I’ve told this story before to a number of you, but my roommates in college at Notre Dame were good, smart and decent guys. One Thursday night in January, with the temperature near 10 degrees, a group of them went to the bars and got drunk. I was in the study hall on the ninth floor of my dorm, and I heard them when they came back, laughing loudly about something. About 5 minutes later, one of my roommates came in, looking sick, and said to me “You have to stop them.” “Stop them from what?” I said. “They have…. a cat. I can’t stomach it. “

So I walked out to the commons area, and what I witnessed almost made me throw up. They’d found a cat that was frozen to the sidewalk on the way back from the bars, took it back to the dorm, pinned it up on a bulletin board and were throwing darts at it.  Just as I walked in, one of my roommates jammed a pencil up one of the cat’s orifices, as everyone laughed, drunkenly. I took the cat down; they swore at me; one of them even tried to take a swing at me—a drunken swing, he missed—and I yelled at them to go to bed.  The next morning, after he sobered up, the roommate with the pencil came to find me and ask me what he had done, because it was fuzzy, and when I told him, he was absolutely disgusted with himself.  As I said, these were good guys. But they lost their sense of decency because they were drunk.

Being disgusted with oneself the morning after is a common theme of individuals who get drunk the night before.  Girls who are otherwise moral, good persons often lose their virginity—or even worse, become objects for multiple partners.  Men mistreat women in ways that they’d never do if they were sober, and because they’re decent guys, are eaten up with guilt about what they’ve done the next day.  It isn’t just an issue of not driving while drunk; it’s about losing all of our moral judgment, which opens us up to doing all sorts of horrible things to each other. Gang rapes in dorms are all too common in universities, even local ones, and drinking is usually part of the reason they occur.

Your character, your reputation, your good name—these are far more important than your GPA, your athletic or artistic accomplishments. All those things are fleeting and temporary, but who you are and what you’ve done stay with you.

One of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time is the Las Vegas commercial: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. “ It’s as if we can do whatever we want there, and then magically forget about it when we come back home to our regular lives. Except we can’t compartmentalize like that.  Location doesn’t matter, because we’re still the same person, whether we’re in Vegas, or in Nashville, or at home, or whether we’re drunk or sober. We carry that guilt, that burden with us.

Even so, God forgives. And when God forgives, he forgets—as if he takes a video of our lives and simply deletes forever those parts we ask him to forgive us for. If you’re carrying around some guilt, seek out Fr. McGowan for the sacrament of reconciliation, and unload that burden and seek God’s forgiveness. If you’re not Catholic, though Father can’t administer the sacrament to you, he is happy to listen to you.

God wants us to be happy, and to be free of emotional burdens. He wants to forgive us, but he respects our freedom. We have to ask for it. We have to seek him out. In the interim, let's do our best not to put ourselves in a position where we do harm to other people and harm to ourselves. 

The Supreme Sacrifice

May we honor all those men and women who have given their lives in service to our country. 

My uncle, Sam Coursen, was killed in the Korean War and awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously. His wife, my Aunt Evie, accepted the award in his stead, with my cousin, Sam Coursen Jr. in her arms (see below). 

Here is his citation:

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress  March 3, 1863 has awarded in the name of The Congress the Medal of Honor, posthumously, to

First Lieutenant Samuel S. Coursen, USA

for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy:

Lieutenant Coursen, Infantry, United States Army, Company C, 5th Calvary Regiment, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity  above and beyond the call of duty in action on 12 October 1950 near Kaesong,  Korea. While Company C was attacking Hill 174 under heavy enemy small arms  fire, his platoon received enemy fire from close range. The platoon returned  the fire and continued to advance. During this phase, one of his men moved  into a well-camouflaged emplacement, which was thought to be unoccupied, and  was wounded by enemy who were hidden within the emplacement. Seeing the  soldier in difficulty he rushed to the man's aid and, without regard for his  own personal safety, engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat in an effort to  protect his wounded comrade until he himself was killed. When his body was  recovered after the battle, seven enemy dead were found in the emplacement.  Several of the enemies' heads had been crushed as the result of Lieutenant  Coursen's violent struggle with his rifle. His aggressive and intrepid  actions saved the life of the wounded man, eliminated the main position of  the enemy roadblock and greatly inspired the men in his command. Lieutenant  Coursen's extraordinary heroism and intrepidity reflect the highest credit on himself and are in keeping with the honored traditions of the military service.

(signed) Harry Truman

For more information on Sam Coursen's life, go here.