Moving Homily Reflects on Spirituality, Humanity of Fr. Rother

EDITOR’S NOTE — Father Don Wolf delivered this homily, in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the death of Father Stanley Francis Rother, July 19 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Okarche. The pastor of Assumption Catholic Church in Duncan, Father Wolf is a cousin to the slain Father Rother. The 46-year-old Okarche-born priest was shot to death by a government-backed death squad on July 28, 1981 at the Catholic mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. Oklahoma Catholics are praying the Church will one day officially declare the martyred Father Rother a saint.

                                                                             Father Stanley Rother Anniversary Mass
July 19, 2006
Okarche, OK
Father Don Wolf

In 1935 a young couple stood at this very baptismal font with their newborn child. The fact that it was the deepest hard times, the depth of the Depression, could not dampen the joy that comes from the gift of a child. Franz and Gertrude Rother were here, in this church at this spot, to baptize their baby.

All went well, until the baptism actually began and their pastor, Msgr. Steber, asked them what name they had cho-   Archbishop Eusebius Beltran offers prayers during a July 19 Mass at Holy Trinity sen for their newborn.  “Stanley    Church in Okarche. The Mass was a celebration of the life and death of Fr. Stanley Francis” they said. “Stanley            Rother whose photo was placed near the altar.
isn’t a saint’s name” the Monsignor said. “We will baptize him ‘Francis’”.

This was back in the days when pastors spoke for the whole church and, more importantly, it was a time when people listened. Stanley wasn’t saintly enough and so he would be called “Francis”. That was that.

Who knows how many other daring names died at this baptismal font. Imagine it; Okarche could have been home to whole sections lines full of boys named Peregrin, Winthrop, Beverly or Wolfgang. Instead we have Josephs, Leos, Lawrences, Gregorys and, of course, Francises. In those day, when pastors spoke, people listened.

But if you knew Franz you had to know how this would turn out. He was German, after all. When he and Gertrude got back home they called their baby what they always intended to call him; Stanley. I guess that even in the old days the pastors of the Church are not always to be regarded as infallible. Or maybe you have already found that out.

And yet, Monsignor Steber’s concern that Stanley just wasn’t saintly enough might be remedied. Perhaps the objection might prove to have within it the beginning of a deeper truth. Maybe the name Stanley wasn’t saintly enough, then.

Jesus claimed that unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it remains but a single grain. It must fall to the ground and die, and then it bears much fruit. At twenty centuries distance from his words we pause at Jesus’ poetry. For if there is one thing that does not happen to a grain of wheat when it falls to the ground, it’s that it dies.

Anyone who has crested the overpass south of Okarche as they come up Highway 81 during the winter and spring can testify against a grain dying. Every part of this town is insulated with a belt of blue-green wheat ten miles thick growing up on every side. Or if you come by on Memorial Day and hear the golden rattle of the ripened heads as they wobble in the wind, you know that Jesus’ words might exaggerate. You drop a grain of wheat into the ground and the chemical processes that are set off are the same as when dynamite is set off, only in slow motion. It hard to find a more living thing than the ten thousand acres of wheat sprouting here in September. A grain that falls to the earth     Tom Rother and Sister Marita Rother carry the photo of their     does anything but die.
departed brother at the July 19 Mass at Holy Trinity Parish
in Okarche. Sooner Catholic Photos/Cara Koenig.                                                                                    

And yet, the poetry remains. We can forgive the images of 1st Century Palestinian agriculture. There is something to Jesus’ words. There is a deeper truth that sprouts alongside the wheat. Because Stanley Rother’s death has prompted life in ways we could not have imagined; and life abundantly in ways we could never have predicted.

It happened in Santiago, Atitlan. The projects that Stanley began there during his life began to bear fruit only upon his death. Ministries planted by Stanley’s thirteen years there began to truly grow when he died. The power of the gospel message sprouted and took root during his time of the brutality of occupation and the savagery of score-settling. But it was after his death that it ripened to harvest. I once met a Guatemalan tourist who stood outside the chapel doors at Cerro de Oro. “I have found my faith again” she said. All I could think of to say was, “You’ve come to the right place.” The fruit of Stanley’s life began to bear after he was gone.

It happened here too. Central American policies became household concerns. Our eyes were turned to Guatemala during the years following his death. We, who could hardly find Mexico on a map became familiar with the Mayan Highlands and their beauty and tragedy. We discovered a whole world that had suffered and rejoiced and lived and died in obscurity. Suddenly they were brought into the spotlight of our curiosity. As we were paying attention in the 80’s-politics shed its juvenile skin of Cold War talk about Communist subversion and brave American resistance. Naïve patriotism morphed into the realism of bravery and into the inevitable truth that political decisions can get people killed, even in their own bedrooms.

But even more closely. Stan’s life brought life to flower in the Church here. In a five year span beginning in the middle ‘80s a whole new crop of young men entered the seminary to study for the priesthood here and in Tulsa. So many put their roots down that we harvested a crop of ordinations in the early ‘90s like we had not seen since the late ‘50s. It may have been just a demographic blip. None of the guys who went into the seminary mentioned that they were inspired by examples of heroic priesthood. Maybe it was just chance. But somehow, it seems not. A man gives his life and thirty come to take his place.

And those are only a few of the grains that we can see. Like any plant, the action under ground in the darkness of the soil is more spectacular and more complicated than what we can see above ground. There is also a crowd of people here in this parish who can give their own testimony about Stan’s life and the power of his death in their lives.

A grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, Jesus says, and it grows up to bring a great harvest.

And now there is talk about sainthood. The news is everywhere; maybe Stan Rother will become the first saint from Oklahoma. We marvel, and are proud, at the speculation that a humble man from a small town who flunked Latin could go to Central America in the ‘60s, become a pastor in the ‘70s, be martyred in the ‘80s and become a saint for the new Millennium. Maybe it could happen here.

After all, sainthood fits Stanley and Okarche. His example is not just talk. It is truth. Stanley witnessed the truth of Christ in his living and his dying. Jesus’ words, even as poetry, come to life in Stanley’s life. His example is the tremor of bliss we all look to find in the saints. St. Stanley Rother of Okarche, St. A’Plas of Guatemala-it has a certain ring to it. Sanctity seems to fit.

But we should rejoice carefully. Our celebrations should celebrate truth, the truth of the gospel. It is easy to imagine that Stanley Rother’s life has become something that it was not, even as the word ‘saint’ becomes something it was not, before we thought of using it to describe him.

The triumph of sanctity is the blessedness of life. We celebrate holiness as Christians because it is life come to fullness. But it is a holy life, not a holy fiction, it is not a revised and edited version of living. The triumph of sanctity is the blessedness of life that takes place in the hard edges and dark accumulations of living that trouble every man.

The famous social activist, Dorothy Day, the founder of The Catholic Worker’s Houses, was often called a living saint. When she heard this her response was always the same. She said “You can’t dismiss me that easily.”

We must not dismiss Stanley so easily. As a priest his life was an intense version of every Christian’s life. As a missionary and a martyr he lived an intense version of every priests’ life. Stan died a Christian, a Catholic and a priest and his dying is a model of dying for us all. But let us not forget his living. He was the man who lived a whole lifetime amidst the troubled truths of his own life in Okarche, the man who wondered and questioned how God could use a life as simple as his. We must not elevate his sanctity too quickly lest we forget his humanity.

There is a certain shame we share in the living of our lives. As we stare into the mirror of our lives we see reflected back a shadowed image of ourselves. The face that stares back at us is never as true or as whole as we want it to be. It is always accompanied by a shadow that falls across us, a dimness of life and being. We know it everywhere and in all that we do. The more religious we are the more certain we are of it, but it is as true as our own fingerprints and it is true for everyone of us.

When we hear sanctity we celebrate a life and a death that has transfigured the struggles that shadow us. Holiness and saintliness is the sunny side of life we’re missing, so we move toward it. We hear Saint Stanley and we’re inspired, inspired enough to move toward it. But it only takes a moment before we start to think that it is a life that wasn’t like ours at all. It was holy and pious and certain and meaningful. It was a saintly life. Not like our lives.

So we imagine a whole life that Stan Rother never had. We imagine that he could effortlessly change the direction of his settled future as a farmer and go to the seminary. He could slog through the obstacle course of academics with his heart firm set with no questions. The young priest from Okarche could endure without flinching the whispers of the real meaning of five assignments in five years. He could go to Guatemala and stand up to the tidal wave of violence because he was a saint. We imagine his life was not like ours. His eyes, his soul, they were elsewhere, not like ours at all. We canonize his life and we keep our lives in the shadows.

But sanctity is life, real life. Stanley Rother’s life is a gift to the people of Guatemala and Oklahoma because it was a true life, not an escape from it. Stanley’s life was a life like ours.

So, to you young men who have inhaled the notion that priesthood might be for you but who are terrified by the sacrifice it requires. Remember, Stanley knew no more than you when he was a young man.

For you priests who are desperate for meaning in the wilderness of your service. As you wonder through the desert of your life without encouragement and without a single light on the horizon, Stanley Rother’s ministry was an endless sea of sameness. He served just as you serve.

For the Christian who wonders how to live an authentic life among the compromises that suffocate the Church and the failures that drown society, Stanley lived his prayers hemmed in the by volcanoes of history. They erupted regularly to cover both church and society. And he walked carefully there, wobbling first one way and then another, just as you do.

Sanctity is lived, not given. For Stanley his holiness was born out of his proximity to Christ, not his distance from his humanity. It grows among the soil of the everyday and it flourishes wherever its roots take hold. Whether it is yesterday in Okarche, today in Guatemala, tomorrow in Oklahoma City, the grain that falls to the ground and dies produces much fruit. He who loses his life gains it. Holiness is living, living a real life.

Stanley came home in 1981. He fled the pall of violence that had been thrown over Lago Atitlan by the death squads that roamed over the countryside. It was back to the farm west of Okarche where he ended up.

Franz told me he would look out of the west door and stare, silently, at the field stretching out to the horizon behind the house. Franz said, “I knew he was going to go back.”

He did go back and the priests and people of Oklahoma, members of his family, wondered why he did it. Why would he have chose to jump back into the maelstrom of politics and bullets that now marked his ministry?

People noticed his affection for the downtrodden Tzutuhils he served. Priests admired his determination among the dust and discouragement of Guatemalan life. But Stanley, in all his sanctity, went to Guatemala to live. To stay in Oklahoma was to die. He left home to go home and when he got home he was bound for home. He went to Guatemala to live.

And in the months between April, 1981 when he went back to Guatemala and July when he was murdered he lived a lifetime of grace.

William Stafford has a poem in which he describes the journey of life. He says that we wander our journeys and find our way amidst the darkness of life. But when we come to door that is our way forward we put our hands on the knob to open and, he says, “the road straightens behind us.” Every part of our journey is a direct path to this doorway.

When the moment came for Stanley, in the night of July 28th, his life became a grain of wheat plunged into the earth. And his life was flooded with light, a light that began at that moment to light up every dark corner, every shadowed decision from that moment backward.

The words of Christ are not just poetry; they are the poetry of truth. The truth is, unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. If it dies it produces much fruit.

Stanley Rother, may his soul, and the souls of all of the martyrs of Guatemala and of all the faithfully departed in death, may they rest in peace.