Bishop Beckman celebrates the Presentation with St. John XXIII students
Bishop Mark Beckman met with University of Tennessee-Knoxville students at St. John XXIII Catholic Center on Feb. 2. (Photo Gabrielle Nolan)
By Gabrielle Nolan
The community at St. John XXIII Catholic Center came out in full force for a recent visit from Bishop Mark Beckman for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord on Feb. 2.
Both students and older parishioners filled the Paulus Room on Knoxville’s University of Tennessee campus for a 5:30 p.m. Mass, which was celebrated by the bishop and concelebrated by Paulist pastor Father Larry Rice.
The bishop commented that he felt like he had “gone back in time” to when he was at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa.
“There’s something wonderful about a community of young people who gather to celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist,” he said.
The feast of the Presentation of the Lord is also known as Candlemas, and in the Catholic Church candles for churches and homes are usually blessed on this day. Bishop Beckman blessed a variety of candles that were laid in front of the altar at St. John XXIII.
“Tonight, we celebrate a very special feast, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, that moment 40 days after His birth when Mary and Joseph take the child Jesus to the temple to present Him to the Father,” the bishop remarked.
At the beginning of his homily, Bishop Beckman said the temple of the Lord was “probably one of the most sacred places in human history.”
“In the Old Testament, there were times when the glory of God would fill the temple, so for the people of Israel, a place close to the heart of God,” he observed. “And today in that sacred place we see two people, Simeon and Anna, well advanced in years. They’ve been waiting for the Lord for a long time in their life.”
Bishop Beckman shared that as a young boy, his sacred place was his home parish of Sacred Heart in Lawrenceburg, Tenn. He said that the smell of incense and burning candles inside the church “always reminded me that God was close.”
Bishop Mark Beckman celebrated Mass at St. John XXIII Catholic Center on Feb. 2, the feast of the Presentation.
“One of the things that I’ll never forget is those older folks, who looked like they had been in that church forever when I was a little boy, quietly praying while I arrived,” the bishop commented. “Some of them were widows, or women who had never married. And I remember how they would sit quietly or kneel quietly for Mass, with their eyes ahead looking at the tabernacle, some of them with rosary beads in their hands quietly praying. There are faces and eyes of some of those people that I will never forget. I remember how they would look at me as a little boy with such love, that I realized that whatever they were doing there in prayer also had an effect on the way they saw me as a child.”
Bishop Beckman then shared a story of his first time visiting Jerusalem, where he was able to visit the temple area.
“I got the chance to go to the temple area, what’s left of it, the Western Wall. The stones are immense at the base of the old temple. It was destroyed by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, less than that. The Romans had invaded the Holy Land about 64 years before Jesus was born, so both Anna and Simeon probably remembered the Romans arriving. So, they were waiting for God there,” he said.
The bishop commented that while he was praying at the Western Wall, he noticed an older man and a younger man both touching the wall and weeping.
“I knew that they were weeping because it was a place that was sacred to them,” he said. “They, like Anna and Simeon, were waiting for the Lord. But something extraordinary happened the day that Simeon and Anna went to the temple that 40th day after the birth of Jesus. And the extraordinary thing was they encountered God, now in human flesh, in a baby, vulnerable just like all of us were when we were born. A tiny baby, God choosing to become human. And since that moment of the incarnation, God is somehow mysteriously connected to each one of us, and encountering the sacred mystery of God is no longer in the temple but now in each other, in the face of every human we meet in the street. … So, meeting God is meeting each other in a deeper spirit of love.”
Bishop Beckman explained that he understood that the women in his home parish who waited for God also “looked at me with such great love.”
The bishop then issued a challenge to all those in attendance at the Mass.
“I want to challenge you tonight as we pray on this feast day of the Presentation, to ask the Lord to give you the gift of recognizing more and more in every person that you meet the mysterious presence of God, and to give you the grace to respond with a deeper love,” he said. “Some people it’s easy to love because they love us, right? But there are other people who are more challenging to love, people who are not like us, people who are different—strangers, newcomers, people of other faith backgrounds, right? And the Lord is saying to us love them because I am in them in a mysterious way.”
Following the Mass, the bishop greeted students and attended his first Sunday Supper, a St. John XXIII parish tradition that occurs on Sundays during the school year.
