VIRIDITAS: SOUL GREENING
Interviewed by Sister Malia Dominica Wong, OP
Hawaii Catholic Herald
I have been a Jesuit for 31 years and a priest for 20. I was attracted to the Jesuits because of their — believe it or not — humility. Ignatius Loyola, our founder insisted that God was laboring in all things, for our good. That meant concretely in every event, circumstance, and in all peoples. Growing up in Hawaii where we knew that Catholicism was a foreign import, I was amazed how Jesuits learned from the peoples they served, in China becoming respected scholars, and in what is now Paraguay assisting indigenous Guarani inhabitants shape a culture that was at once deeply Christian and authentically Guarani.
Sometimes my dad would take me to early morning Mass at the old St. Francis Hospital chapel. In those early morning moments, night gone, but not yet day, I could feel God’s presence. I remember as well we would visit great aunts, Sister Mary Lucy and Sister Elizabeth Ah Fook, at the Sacred Hearts Convent in Kaimuki. What for me was an intermittent awareness and experience of God’s presence was for them a way of life.
After college and graduate school at Georgetown, I entered the Society of Jesus in 1988. After a long formation — which a Jesuit professor told us we had so that once we got ordained we wouldn’t get up in front of God’s people and say stupid things — I was ordained and have worked primarily with immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
I have been at my parish of Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia, since 2007. It is a wonderful parish, over 90% Spanish-speaking yet where everyone feels welcome and included. Working with this community we have learned much from the people themselves and “built church” with them. I would like to think that this is what my Jesuit forebearers did in places like Paraguay. Learning from them has taken me to many of their hometowns and villages to learn more about them.
Now I live in a COVID world, “huikau” — total chaos and confusion. I’ve learned, and it has been hard, that God is there, too, in the turbulence, unsettledness and confusion. With people sick, dying, out of work, hungry, and our weekly offertory a fraction of what it was, I have been exiled from the comfortable and familiar. “God, you must be here,” I brood.
Then I think of the song “Kanaka Waiwai,” based on Matthew 19:16-24 where Jesus tells the young man seeking eternal life to give away all he has. The song and the Scripture it is based on speak of riches. But often our riches are the things that we hold on to most tightly. Much has been wrenched from us, and it is now that Jesus becomes our one possession, giving life — perhaps more abundantly than we knew before.
There is a woman from our parish whose family is in a very rough spot including a daughter with cancer. Profoundly upset, she reflected, “I just wanted to give up. I felt I had nothing to hold on to anymore, and then I listened to one of the reflections on our parish YouTube channel. That brought me back to life and now I am more than ready to face any challenge, eagerly.”
God is everywhere and in everything. We just have to be humble enough to let things go and grasp his hand.
Father Shay Auerbach is a Jesuit priest who grew up in Hawaii. He is pictured with his mother Leona Auerbach.
