{"id":1026,"date":"2009-01-27T14:31:33","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T14:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2009\/01\/relevant-1.html"},"modified":"2009-01-27T14:31:33","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T14:31:33","slug":"relevant-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2009\/01\/relevant-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Relevant"},"content":{"rendered":"

The priest is old.
\nBeyond retirement age, but still energetic, it appears.
\nAnd every time he preaches – every time I have heard him, at least, it always comes around to death.
\nIt doesn’t matter what the Gospel or the feast is. Death – its reality, its inevitability, and what Jesus gives us in the face of death – works itself into the conversation.\u00a0 Stories are told about dying and dead people, about funerals.
\nI don’t mind. And I think about the drive, in contemporary American Christianity of all types, to emerge into relevance, to reach out by interacting with the newest of pop culture, to make it loud and driving and get the place rocking.
\nWhat place is there in all of that for a priest with white hair, wrinkles, a slight stoop and a tremulous voice, to talk about death?
\nOh, how we do need to reach out, to evangelize, to reach people where they are, to bring in the young, the searching, to be alive to the whispers of the Spirit in the culture.
\nIt clearly opens hearts to Christ.
\nBut in the midst of the relevance, with the like-minded from my own demographic cohort, with those with extroverted and affective personalities, worshipping with someone who looks like us – or looks like who we would like to be – up front –
\n…what are we missing?
\nThe homily begins and it sounds familiar. I smile a bit and we share a “here he goes again” moment in our pew.
\nSo yes, an old priest muses about death again. A word suggests itself to me as I take a glimpse around me as he takes us down that road again,\u00a0 seeing all ages, from all places, squeezed into the pews, some restless, some bored, some content.
\nRelevant.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The priest is old. Beyond retirement age, but still energetic, it appears. And every time he preaches – every time I have heard him, at least, it always comes around to death. It doesn’t matter what the Gospel or the feast is. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}