PAROQUIA Nssa. Sra. do ROSÁRIO

Residência Nssa. Sra. de Fatima                                    7 August, 2013              XLIII:2

Trav. Carlos Pontes, 171                                    http://www.egfbenya.com                     

Cx. P. 101                                            

62.900-000 Russas, Ceará                                  e-mail:  [email protected]

BRASIL                                                

Dear Benefactors, Family Friends & Colleagues:

           Tradition and references of the past are crucial to the definition and perception of every human being. They help us recognize something of our origins, from where we come and from whom we spring.

           The recent World Youth Day and preceding MAGIS celebrations in Brazil provided a special reference to my family and personal past in quite unexpected ways. In Salvador, Bahia a group of 22 youth from Slovakia received me with profound patience and kindness as I used my ancestral language (Slovak) in its verbal form in prolonged usage for the first time in some 62 years. Stunning to me (although it should NOT have been) is the fact that the Slovak I speak is highly anachronistic, actually dating from some 100 or 120 years past (from the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries) when my grandparents and great-grandparents immigrated to the United States. In its family use it has changed little. However the national language of Slovakia has seen progressive change. Thus many of the youth of the group had difficulty understanding my words and structures.

           Crucial also is the fact that in my family, as a child, we used the two languages at home (Slovak and English), the latter dominated once I began school somewhere at the age of 4 or 5 years. Thus my Slovak, as one of the priests observed, remains that of a child [from 100 years past]. Essential also is the fact (as Dr. Carole-Ann Dunleavy observed) that the peasant stock from which I come used a verbal form of Slovak that was more colloquial than grammatically exact. This too has its influence.

Anachronism notwithstanding, I had the “crust” to accept an invitation and concelebrate the Catholic Mass in Slovak for the first time in my life. Results were quite agreeably surprising to me. The Slovak priests led. The young people supported, and I actually navigated a celebration where some 40 or 50 participants, representing 6 nationalities survived my “Chutzpah” (as the Yiddish would put it) and completed a truly “mysterious” adoration of Almighty God.

           I present this in gratitude to God rather than in pride. At best I am, along with other ministers, a messenger of God. At times I do not even reach that level. Messengers receive a command. It is their responsibility to present that command in an understandable manner; current, clear, referenced.  Anachronism may actually have some virtue, a distinct quality in itself serving as reference to what WAS, providing a measure of change of what presently IS and what may be in the process of BECOMING in a Faith and Church driven by Jesus Christ through a Vicar who is, for the first time in some 181 years a religious, and a Jesuit at that.

           All of this is most pertinent as I thank Almighty God for these 39 years of Religious Life and 29 years in oHHhhhhHoly Orders as HIS messenger. We are defined by God and each of us is unique before Him. Those unique identities are quite mysterious even to us personally, and that mystery is part of our Communion in The Holy Spirit.

                                                                        With humble gratitude in Jesus Christ

                                                                       Pe. Ed Benya, S.J.