Outside St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Huntington Park on Sunday afternoon, if you saw five men standing and praying in a circle on the sidewalk, that was the vicar, the Rev. Santos Flores, his son, Jose, two of his lay leaders, and I.
He had just shown me the mission church’s new foundation sign. I had enough Spanish to be able to read it out in English: “Our teenagers and young people aren’t bad. They just need love, acceptance, and support. If they don’t find what they need at home, they look for it in the streets.”
Fr. Santos has a ministry to young people, some as young as 13, who hang out near the church. It’s been more complicated since an incident several months ago. A church member named Berta tried to protect a 17-year-old guest at a neighborhood party at church. She and he were injured. Now the police and some church leaders worry a little more about Fr. Santos’ ministry. Our sidewalk prayer was that the spirit will continue to lift up him and the young people he serves.
Since I didn’t have a visitation on Sunday, I dropped by St. Clement’s to check on Fr. Santos and Berta and her spouse, Francisco. All are recovering well. The young man who was injured is also out of the hospital, but no one has much news about him or the police investigation.
Usually I’m at St. Clement’s on confirmation Sundays or Mothers Day, with hundreds in attendance. A solid 60 were present for this mid–summer mass, and that with many women of the church away at Cursillo. With his usual flare, Fr. Santos reviewed the music with everyone before we began. He and I took turns with the prayers. During the sermon time, he unpacked Jeremiah and Hebrews. I asked his permission to reflect on the gospel reading, from Luke, when Jesus talks about turning members of families against one another. I said I thought Jesus was talking about division in families then, now, and always.
In his time, and a generation later, when the gospel was being written down, faithful families were divided about whether he was the Messiah. In our time, the Christian family is divided by socio-economics and a resulting deficient understanding of the lives their siblings are leading elsewhere, for instance in a diocese such as ours. Outside observers and journalists have a way of describing what happened to Berta, for instance, in language that Fr. Santos does not use, because it makes overlooked or lost young people sound bad. And remember, he proclaims that they are not, just as they do at Homeboy Industries.
And to all our times, Jesus is saying that families are divided when people don’t understand the urgency of his invitation to love, forgiveness, graciousness, and humility — the urgency of his proclamation of the love that never insists on its own way. It isn’t something to be done later, when it’s convenient, but instantaneously, every single moment, for God’s glory and the sake of God’s people.
After church, I was a guest for a delicious lunch and conversation with second-generation English speaking members of immigrant families about the challenges they’re facing, in life, school, and church. I promised to return once more before I retire next year, to check on Berta and Fr. Santos and the young people in the neighborhood, for whom both of them have demonstrated in their particular way that they are willing to give their lives.
