In 1967, my father, Harold “Harry” Louis Birzer, was a 33-year old insurance sales man, former fourth-string college football player for Kansas State University as well as a deeply Conservative and Roman Catholic man; he had a passion for arguing politics, and he loved Barry Goldwater.  By all accounts, Harry was a remarkable man—dedicated, intelligent, passionate, and gregarious beyond my abilities at written description.  Much to my mother’s chagrin, he helped everyone who needed it—with his time, his money, and his various mechanical skills—and everybody loved “Harry Birzer.”  While few people willingly speak ill of the dead in even the best of circumstances, enough people have told me about everyone loving Harry, that I would have to set aside every ounce of my historical training to doubt the full truth of this.  From what I’ve been told repeatedly throughout my life he sounds as though in all conversations and in all social situations, he served as the life and the soul of that moment.  He and my mother met at college in the mid 1950s, and they were married toward the end of the decade.  Somewhat of a scandal in German Kansas, my mother was fully of Volga German (what was called a “Roosian” in Kansas in the 1950s) stock, while my father’s family was mostly of southern German (Cologne and eastern Bavaria) origin.  Each family, however, had remained fully committed to the Roman Catholic faith.  Still, many considered this a “mixed marriage.”  After a honeymoon in Las Vegas, my mom became pregnant with my oldest brother, Harold Kevin Birzer.  Three years later came my older brother, Todd Allen Birzer.  Certainly, from every recollection of my mother and my brothers, Harry was a loving and dedicated husband and father.  Harry and my mom had a strong marriage.  Though my mom admits to being rather spoiled and selfish in their early years together, she remembers the years of their marriage as “golden ones.”  Indeed, when she speaks of those years, her voice and her eyes take on a different tone and cast.  Some of the stories about him have been told many times, and I certainly grew up with strong image of this wonderful man, absent from my own life.

As noted above, Harry was also deeply conservative and libertarian in his politics.  He frequently debated my mom’s father, an Ellis County Democrat and politician.  From the recollections I’ve heard, they sound like two great men heatedly arguing in only the way those who respect each other can.  As mentioned earlier, I was born that first week of September, 1967, and baptized later in the month.  A few weeks later, my dad and my grandfather saw Goldwater speak at Fort Hays State University, a highlight in the life of my father.

God’s ways can be strange and unpredictable, at least from any viewpoint this side of heaven, and He decided to take my dad for His own into eternity, two months after I was born.  In some darkly ironic way, my father died inside of one of his own creations.  His hobby, aside from politics and political debate, was rebuilding and selling older cars.  On November 17, 1967, Harry collided with a drunk driver in the middle of the night, just west of Dodge City, Kansas, somewhere in K56.  Thirty-three years on this earth seems too short of a time for anyone, but it was good enough for Jesus, so it must be good enough for my dad.  Somehow, this strange coincidence of age has always given me a bit of hope about my father’s death.

I’ve often wondered what my mom and brothers must have gone through losing my dad.  Each of them talks frequently about his greatness and his magnanimity, but neither of my brothers willingly talks about hearing the news of his death or the months that followed it.  Indeed, the first three years of my life, from 1967 to 1970, when my brothers and I were fatherless, seem to be a void in family history.  Admittedly, though, I’ve asked them about this time period only very infrequently, not wanting to trample on the good memories they carry with them regarding his life and how alive he had always seemed to be.  Every memory recounted to me indicates that Harry lived life to the fullest extent possible.  My oldest brother Kevin remembers how loving he was, how social he was, and how he hated snakes (a hatred Kevin carries with him to this day).  Kevin especially remembers a day when he and Harry walked out of Harry’s parent’s farm house, only to confront a rattlesnake resting on the sidewalk leading to the driveway.  My dad immediately placed Kevin, then a little boy, on a car roof and proceeded to whack the snake.  The snake didn’t have a chance.  Amen.  Too bad Eve hadn’t responded in the same manner.  Todd remembers my dad’s love of cars, and buying him Hot Wheel toy cars down at the local drugstore (very much against my mother’s wishes).

When on the rare occasion that courage overcomes prudence and I push either of my brothers about his death, they only remember how sad mom was throughout the following winter.  I’m sure they remember more than this, but they don’t willingly share their memories of him.  I understand; death is a hard thing, especially, I’m sure, when a boy loses his father.  Somehow, the loss of a parent for a child seems to violate the natural order of things.  I would guess the memories they keep, they keep as closely guarded treasures, brought out and caressed only in certain very private moments, moments during which the glow of a missing father returns and gives comfort to a restless soul.

I, of course, have no memory of my father, and I think this has always been a small barrier between my two brothers and me, though we are very close one with another.  Still, they share something—memories of him that I don’t and can’t have—and I assume they think my questions regarding him as though from an uncouth stranger.  I don’t have the same precious treasures to pull out in times of great sorrow or great joy.  I’m sure my lack of having a father has affected me in ways I’ll never understand.

But, I certainly know him to have existed.  I don’t think I have his personality, his athletic ability, or his looks, but I do have his love of intensity and finding the most important things, to be, well, important.  I also know that despite being a fierce conservative, he would fight for the weak and the poor wherever and whenever he found them.  From what I know of him, he carried a profound sense of Justice.  And, of course, I see each one of these traits—the ones I carry and the ones I don’t—in my brothers, two of the closest friends a person could ever want.

In them, especially, filled with loving memory, the legacy of my father, Harold Louis Birzer continues.

May God bless His servant, Harry, and embrace him today and all days, November 17, 2011, forty-four years after he departed this City of Man.  And, may God bless my mother, Rita, and my brothers, Kevin and Todd, who endured so much the following fall, winter, and spring and all the seasons of their lives.

Hey, I’m a poet and didn’t even know it! Making Thanksgiving a way of living isn’t as hard as you might think. I understand that there is much to grumble about but, I want to write more on being grateful.

God has a way of entering into our needs in a most generous and beautiful way when we first approach Him with praise and thanksgiving.  It is not hard to imagine how our God must feel, when we our selves do not always feel appreciated.  We all have stories of times when we were not appreciated.  Needless to say, it is way worse to have a story when we were not appreciative.

I remember when I was in eighth grade, our teacher Sister Dominic, helped us with making  angels for the top of our Christmas trees to give as a gift to our parents.  She spent the better part of a whole night finishing them with gold spray paint, so that we could give them to our parents the next night at the Christmas program.  She lovingly had them placed on our desks the next morning.  None of us seemed to even notice.  I remember, to my shame, not finding any joy in making the angels and making fun of the project.  Before she started lessons for the day, she stood before the class and waited for an awkward  moment.  She then asked us if there was anything we wanted to say to her.  After a long pause of silence, I will never forget the look on her face, her eyes welled up and her lip started to quiver.  Finally one of the boys in class, Joe, said, “Thank you Sister!”  She turned to him and said, “God BLESS you Joe!”.   He was the only one to receive that blessing, he was the one who noticed what she had done and he was grateful.  Joe’s heart was formed in gratefulness.  Luke 6:45 “…for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks”.

First we need to take notice of what God has done for us.  Having life and a body is a good place to start.  Starting within the center of ourselves and then move out ward.  Thank Him for our hearts, it’s beating, our lungs, that they are breathing, our stomachs, that they are digesting, our blood supplied by our bones, that it nourishes our brains and bodies with oxygen and nutrients … You get the idea.  From ourselves, we thank Him for others, nature, objects like, key boards and the fingers to use them… Most of the time when we do this we forget why we wanted to grumble in the first place.  Of course there are problems in our lives that only God can fix.  In thanking Him for that fact, He finds a good place to start in fixing them.

I  distinctly remember a time when God entered into my life very profoundly.  While driving my regular daily route and spending this time giving God my daily grumblings of all the things I wanted Him to fix about my husband, God very rudely interrupted me, and I felt Him say, “I want you to thank Me for him”.  My response was not a generous one.  I said, “You want me to thank You for him?”.  He didn’t respond.  I then said “Fine, thank You God for Bobby!”  I said it over and over that day,  crying in between. I had waisted so much time focused on faults and not truly appreciating who he was and the gift that God had given me in our marriage.  When he got home from work, I tearfully let him have it.  I let Bobby know just how much I appreciated him and thanked him for being a good husband and dad.  He smiled with a puzzled look, put his arm around my shoulder and asked what smelled so good.  People gravitate toward appreciation and so does our Lord.  Being thankful to our Creator and each other is the polite thing to do.  He loves us so much, how can we not thank Him.

What plagues our families, communities, nation and world is ingratitude.  I believe with all my heart that the beginning of moral law starts with a grateful heart.  Gratefulness sets moral law in motion.  It’s the beginning of humility.  There is a definite correlation between success and a grateful heart.  People with grateful hearts have a gravitational pull to them.  They appreciate opportunity, hard work, gifts, freedom, life…(Speaking of life, how can we not appreciate the miracle of it?  I would like to take this moment to thank God for fertility.  The world is teeming with it.)  They appreciate success and strive for it on a daily basis.  They see life in real time, right as it is happening in front them.  With gratitude our perspective changes, we lift each other up, we congratulate our successes and over come our faults.  With gratitude we whistle more, we sing more, we skip more, we love more.  With gratitude we move mountains and change the world.  Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land”.  And maybe even a blessing from a little nun.

Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
759 “The eternal Father, in accordance with the utterly gratuitousand mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness, created the whole universe and chose to raise up men to share in his own divine life,” to which he calls all men in his Son. “The Father . . . determined to call together in a holy Church those who should believe in Christ.” This “family of God” is gradually formed and takes shape during the stages of human history, in keeping with the Father’s plan. In fact, “already present in figure at the beginning of the world, this Church was prepared in marvelous fashion in the history of the people of Israel and the old Alliance. Established in this last age of the world and made manifest in the outpouring of the Spirit, it will be brought to glorious completion at the end of time.”

The fundamental truth of the Christian faith that the modern world must destroy. God is a family. God is a community of committed, mutual, radical, self-giving, life-creating love. God is love. God is self-gift. And all that is flows from that radical loving self-gift. Without that radical loving self-gift nothing is or can be.

And in the radical plan of God He created all that is to share mutual, reciprocal, self-gift, in love, and thereby new life would come about. This experience finds its quintessential expression in the human family: mother, father, children, the most basic unit of society, which brings about and animates all other human societies.

This Trinitarian testimony of the Christian faith continuously and fundamentally challenges the modern secular ideologies that hold up individual wants-fulfillment at the expense of radical self-gift. To our own ends we may use others to fulfill our wants—not needs—without commitment. Modern ideologies call for corporate, usually governmental, or at least academic-approved structures that supplant the nuclear family in bringing about new life and in raising children. But love and self-gift are not involved, only theory and scientific approaches to child rearing. Oh, brave new world.

I don’t believe the un-Christian modern ideologies are malicious, because the Trinity is not intuitive. Some individuals who hold to them may be, but not all, and the ideologies themselves do not necessarily arise in malicious minds. We who know the Trinity know it because God has revealed the Trinity to us through Judeo-Christian salvation history. Without the revelation of the Trinity, movements toward personal wants-fulfillment make some sense. If we had not been shown that our Creator is a community of love, that we are most alive when we emulate the amazing committed self-giving love of the Trinity, then we would not know to act accordingly. Those who do not know our Christian faith, or who have rejected it for whatever reason (even if they remain within a nominally “Christian” ecclesial communion), are simply following what their best intuition, even if selfish, dictates is right. There are those who know their judgment to be clouded by pride but who forge ahead with their unGodly designs anyhow. Those people are to be pitied, prayed for, and opposed.

But this Solemnity of the Trinity stands as a reminder of who we are, because it reminds us who our God is. And our trinitarian God challenges us to model His intense, mutual, radical, committed, self-giving, life-creating love for the world to see, that the world might be redeemed, in part by our own witness to what true love is about. In that way we shall make good on the verse in Colossians, and make up for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.