St. Dominic men’s conference draws record 157

Bishop Beckman joins a roster of speakers focused on the theme of ‘Weathering the Storm’

By Dan McWilliams

The fifth annual Appalachian Highlands Men’s Conference at St. Dominic Church in Kingsport on Feb. 28 drew a record 157 attendees, with Bishop Mark Beckman on hand to give his advice on how the participants could cope in “Weathering the Storm,” the event’s theme taken from Psalm 130:1.

The conference is open to men from Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, and while it draws many parishioners of St. Dominic and St. Mary in Johnson City in upper East Tennessee, this year’s event attracted men from as far away as Knoxville, Chattanooga, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Bishop Beckman said he enjoyed seeing a group of men assembled for one purpose.

“It’s fantastic. It’s great to see a roomful of men who have set aside an entire day just to be with each other and with God,” he said, adding that the conference “is a spiritual shot in the arm. ‘Weathering the storms of life’ was the topic, and everyone has storms to weather, and giving men an opportunity to reflect and have tools to weather the storms in life is very helpful.”

The printed program for the conference states that the gathering “is an opportunity for men to make new friends, learn more about their faith, and build the spiritual muscle needed to survive the challenges they face in the modern world.”

Bishop Beckman spoke to attendees in the parish life center after lunch and later celebrated Mass in the church with host pastor Father Michael Cummins and St. Dominic associate pastors Father Bede Aboh and Father Anselm Edu. Deacon Bob Lange of St. Dominic was deacon of the altar, and Deacon Vic Landa of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Harriman was deacon of the Word. Deacon Frank Fischer of the host parish served as master of ceremonies.

Conference facilitator Kevin Musser, Grand Knight of Knights of Columbus Council 6992 at St. Dominic, proclaimed the first reading at Mass. Parishioner Steve Hrivnak provided the music for the liturgy.

Knights State Deputy Eric Pelton of St. Jude Parish in Chattanooga attended the conference, which was emceed by Paul Vachon of St. Dominic.

Keynote speakers were Father John Orr, pastor of Holy Ghost Parish in Knoxville, and Steve Hemler. Breakout sessions were led by Father Orr, Mr. Hemler, Father Cummins, Deacon Landa, Jonathan Cardinal, Paul Simoneau, Jimmy Dee, and Father Tom Lawrence of St. Anne Parish in Bristol, Va.

Beloved sons of God

Bishop Beckman spoke on several points in his talk in the downstairs meeting room of the parish life center at St. Dominic.

“I started off with a reflection on who we are. First and foremost, we are beloved sons of God, called to the Father by our baptism,” he said. “Then I reflected on being priests, prophet, and king. As priests, the sacrifice we offer is ourselves, just the way we are, to God every day asking His help to live well each day. Prophet, that we listen to God’s Word daily, and we speak that Word in truth in the world that so desperately needs it. And then as kings, we’re all entrusted with a sphere of influence, the authority God has given us, to use that to bring the light of Christ to the world.”

The bishop in his talk encouraged the conference men to begin their day with the Lord.

“You wake up in the morning and some part of us is resisting God. That’s why at the beginning of the day we say, ‘God, today I bring myself to you just as I am, good and bad. I want to give it all to you. Please free me, remove from me the things that hold me back from being the son that you created me to be so I can bring your light to people today,’” Bishop Beckman said. “So, that’s being a priest.”

He then asked “what a prophet is.”

“The prophet is the one who first and foremost listens to the Word of God spoken and secondly speaks that Word and tells the truth to the world today that the world needs to hear,” he said. “By the way, most often prophets are not well-received, right? You suffer for telling the truth. But the first part of it is listening to the Word of God. I have become convinced that if we really want to be good human beings, if we want to be good men, then we’ve got to start our day alone with the Lord.”

Bishop Beckman said he learned following seminary that there is no one but himself to bear the responsibility for starting each day in prayer.

“I had no community of support around me. I was like, ‘God, I need you.’ Nobody else is going to make me do this,” he said. “I’m not in a community surrounded by like-minded individuals. If I don’t take this time for myself, no one will take it for me. I’m responsible. I’ve gotten to this ritual now (since his priestly ordination): I get my mug of coffee in the morning, and I have my place of prayer, and I start with God.”

The bishop said he led a class once and asked those attending, “If you’re not praying every day, what’s your No. 1 reason why not?”

“You know what the No. 1 answer was? ‘Not enough time—I’m too busy.’ I’ve said to people since then: if we have time to get up in the morning and shower and shave and get ourselves dressed and do all the other physical things to get ready for the day, we have time to be with God, right? It’s more important to be spiritually ready every morning than it is to be physically ready,” he said.

Bishop Beckman asked the men at St. Dominic to “imagine what would happen, just as an imaginary exercise for a moment, if every single human being on planet earth would get up in the morning and take 15 or 20 minutes even, that short a time, to try to listen for what God is telling them. Do you think this world would be different than it is today? I believe it would.”

“I tell you what’s going to happen, though,” he added. “If you’re not used to doing that, 15-20 minutes or 30 with God in the morning, the first thing that’s going to happen is you’re not going to like it. Your body’s not used to it; your brain’s not used to it. You’re going to be thinking of all the things you could be doing instead of sitting there with God, so all these things are going to start going through your brain: worries about what’s coming up, unresolved anger or fear about what happened yesterday or last week or last month. If the past and the future all start intruding, it is hard to stay focused on the here and now and simply listen.”

The bishop said there are apps such as Hallow that men can use to focus on God’s Word, “but I’m a bit old-fashioned, and my phone does too many things with dings and messages and all that stuff coming in. I like a book. I like to have a prayer book in my hand, some prayer of devotion. I listen to God in the morning, and I ask God to help me speak His truth throughout the day. There are times when I don’t want to speak God’s truth, and I pause and I tell God that: ‘God, I’m afraid to say this, and if you want me to speak this truth, God, then I pray that you will remove the fear and help me to say exactly what you want to say the way you would want me to say it and because you want me to say it.’

“God always speaks His truth, by the way, with the greatest tenderness, gentleness, and kindness toward the most vulnerable and to those who are the most self-righteous and the bullies—that truth often happens like an arrow or a sword that penetrates into the person. It’s important to learn how God wants us to speak as much as what God wants us to speak.”

Following being priests and prophets, “the kingship of Christ,” Bishop Beckman said, means “all of us as men have some level of power and authority and influence that we receive from God. We all have what I call a sphere of influence: the ability to make an impact in this world in a positive way that God has given us. Some have a huge ability to make an influence on the world. Pope Leo, right? Pope Leo speaks and acts—his influence ripples around planet earth. My influence is smaller than Pope Leo’s,” he added to laughter.

“All of us, by what we say and do every single day, can either have a positive ripple in this universe, in this world God has given us, or a negative ripple. Lose my temper, become impatient—what happened to that ripple? Where did that go? See a person who is suffering and reach out and say, ‘How are you today?’ and listen. What kind of a ripple effect can that have?”

The bishop concluded his talk by saying what the men should know if they wonder “who you’re called to be.”

“You are called to be the light of Christ in the world today. You’re called to bring Him to the world,” he said. “If you want to figure out how to do that, if you want to listen to God’s Word, a great place to start are those eight beatitudes found in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew.”

Bishop Beckman then stated the beatitudes and explained each one.

“All of those beatitudes—they are the shape of what it means to be a man in the world today. They always have been because they reflect who Christ is,” he said.

The bishop told the men: “Never forget who you are. You’re a beloved son of God. You matter to God. You belong to Him. He’s given you His light. We get up in the morning—we do it imperfectly but we say, ‘God, I want to give myself back to you. Please take away the things that stop that.’ We listen to God’s Word. He’s telling the truth, and then we use the God-given authority, the power and influence God has given us, to bring His light to the world. May God who has begun this great work in each one of you—or you wouldn’t be here today—bring it to fulfillment through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

‘We are here for Christian men’

After the bishop’s talk, Mr. Musser presented him with a $1,000 check from the men’s conference for the Bishop’s Appeal and gave him a Knights shirt.

“Thank you, brothers. We will definitely put this to great use,” Bishop Beckman said of the check. “We’re doing a lot of things like promoting vocations, especially to the priesthood, so needed in our diocese. This will definitely help with that. Thank you.”

In his homily at Mass, Bishop Beckman spoke of a time many years ago when he was driving his car and a loose baseball or softball in the seat fell into the floorboards. Being distracted by the ball, his car ended up in a ditch. He joked with the Mass-goers that a car is not made for driving in a ditch.

“Just so, we are created to live in a certain way, and when we live that way, there’s something inside of us—despite the difficulties of life—that is remarkably well-constructed,” he said.

The bishop referred to the Gospel reading from Matthew 5, where Jesus tells His disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.

“I’ve discovered in life that when I practice that law in my day-to-day activities, I do experience joy and peace and gratitude—closeness to God,” Bishop Beckman said. “When I don’t, I create a barrier between God and myself. When I stop loving, no matter who it is, I inflict harm upon my own soul, more so even perhaps than the one I am holding that darkness toward.

“All of this is wrapped up in the words at the end (of the Gospel reading): ‘you must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ Perhaps the word ‘perfected’—you must be perfected because we’re all in this process of getting back on the road, aren’t we? We all know what the ditch is like in human life, so we pray today, ‘God, help us to live the law that you have implanted and inscribed in our hearts,’ which is the law of love because God is love.”

Deacon Landa led the intercessory prayers, stating that the Mass intention was for the men attending the conference.

Mr. Musser spoke at the end of Mass and led a round of applause for Father Cummins for his support of the conference. A reception concluded the event after Mass.

Breakout sessions at the conference were led by Mr. Hemler on “the science and significance of eucharistic miracles—what are they and how does mother Church verify true miracles with science”; Deacon Landa on “Holy Spirit not holy leftovers—why honoring and worshiping the Holy Spirit is not only important but necessary”; Jonathan Cardinal on “What now? How to continue fellowship after one has accepted Christ”; Paul Simoneau, director of the diocesan Office of Justice and Peace, on “demonology—how and why demons manifest and influence our secular world”; and Jimmy Dee on “formal vs. informal prayers—which situations call for either type and helpful hints to further your prayer life.”

A second session of breakouts featured Father Orr on “the importance of fasting”; Father Cummins on “the call of the wild—getting closer to God through the beauty of His creation”; Father Lawrence on “presenting the Mass through the early Church fathers (walking from Apostolic times up to the time of Justin Martyr)”; Mr. Cardinal on “Mariology 101—why Mary is so venerated in our Catholic tradition with a focus on Scripture”; and Mr. Hemler on “why would a loving God allow evil, pain, and suffering?”

Mr. Musser said at the reception that the conference “has developed a team, a very, very good team, who have helped expand our reach, our knowledge, and our skill out there in the countryside. A lot of people have taken notice of that. It’s a delight to have the bishop here. We’re thankful for that. We’ve had men from more parishes than ever before and in great numbers from each of those parishes. Every year our numbers have increased.”

Mr. Musser said some 15-18 parishes were represented at this year’s conference, and he thanked priests and diocesan offices for their support.

Mark Pendley of the Knights council at St. Dominic served on the conference committee team for the fourth year.

“I love it. We’ve gone above and beyond this year. We’re grateful for Bishop Beckman being here and all the speakers seem to be very well-received this year,” he said.

Attendance at the conference “has ticked up each year, but this year it shot up dramatically, so we’re really pleased to see that,” Mr. Pendley added. “Having the bishop here is a huge draw, but also we paid attention to what feedback was from prior conferences, what the men were wanting to hear and see, and which speakers (they wanted to have)—we invited some back this year.”

Father Orr spoke to the full group of men on “the seven penitential psalms and the examination of conscience during Lent as part of everybody’s ‘Weathering the Storm,’” he said. “I went through the Ten Commandments as presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, briefly.”

Father Orr was one of those returning speakers at the Appalachian Highlands Men’s Conference.

“There are guys here from West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky—they’re coming from all over so they can grow in their faith and have fellowship and be challenged,” he said.

David Austin, financial secretary of Knights Council 6992, is the treasurer for the men’s conference, which he says is an interdenominational event.

“We are here for Christian men of the East Tennessee and southwest Virginia area. This is our fifth year, and fortunately this year we had 157 men come to the conference. We had people from as far away as Pennsylvania, and we had at least a dozen from Knoxville. We had people from Chattanooga, Rogersville, and Greeneville, and Morristown was represented here,” he said. “It’s grown every year, and at the end we always say, ‘If you enjoyed yourself, bring somebody with you next year.’ We’ll be very friendly.”

Mr. Pelton, the State Deputy, attended the conference for the first time.

“The Knights of Columbus have organized a fantastic conference. I was just proud to be able to come up here and spend the time with them today,” he said. “This was very well-organized and well-attended and very well-executed. They’ve got a lot of participation.”

One of the men attending the conference—for the second time—was Stephen Wang of St. Mary Parish in Johnson City.

“I thought it was really well put together. It was beautiful the way the Church in Virginia, Tennessee, and the Highlands really came together,” he said.

Mr. Wang said “it’s always great to have the bishop join us and lead us in prayer,” before adding that “there were a few good breakout speakers like Deacon Vic, and Father Orr spoke very well. I thought they were very knowledgeable and were faithful men who could lead well through their talks.”

Jared Yates attends Sunday Mass at St. Mary in Johnson City, even though he travels from Beckley, W.Va., some 2 1/2 hours away.

“This is my first time” at the conference,” he said. “I was invited by Stephen. It was excellent. It was very well-organized. I attended two of the breakout sessions, one on prayer and one on the organization of the Mass. I thought they were both excellent.”

Mr. Yates said the event “was definitely full” with its high attendance. “The atmosphere was like a very good community.”

Having Bishop Beckman present “was excellent. I didn’t know he would be here. It was good to be able to talk to him. I think he’s a very good bishop, which is shown by him being here with his people at the conference.”