I have been writing this book on and off for fifteen years. The writing has occurred usually after I have heard a particularly bad sermon. I have come home and pondered what I would have said, poured out my heart onto paper and then have usually ripped up what I have written within a week or two or the writing. Usually I have felt that my thoughts were too immediate or too topical to have any kind of universal value or impact. Perhaps I should tell you a bit about who this "I" is.

I am a fifty-nine year old woman, trained in English and the history and philosophy of religion. I am "sister" only to my brother. I have never been anything else but lay nor do I expect to be anything else but that. In my young adulthood I had a private vow of virginity for seven years when I was a very active member of the Jesuit Sodality of Our Lady. I hope I am a religious woman (albeit I am not a woman religious), whose "congregation" is the human race.

I was widowed suddenly in 1981 in the twelfth year of my married life. In that relationship I knew Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in loving and being loved as I did not before and have not since. I experienced that committed love, the decision to be each other's best friend for life, offers humanity the most accessible experience of the Love of the Good One that is possible this side of death. But then, I married my best friend.

Since the early 1960's I have been concerned with and committed to inter-religious dialogue. Vatican Council II confirmed my conviction of the worth of that endeavour. I also believe what the Council had to say about the laity in the Roman Catholic Community, or the "non-clerics" as I now prefer to call them. (I increasingly call clergy "non-laics" to remind them of what they are not.) I have been a secondary school teacher of religious studies since 1966. Before that I worked as a secretary for fifteen years for the Roman Catholic Church and then in the hospitality and hotel industry. I spent nine years at night getting my B.S., and four years part-time acquiring an M.A. in religious studies. It took seven years to complete my Ph.D. in religious studies. During that time, I was concerned with models for the reconception and revitalization of Christianity that require consociations for work and worship among the world religions to effect basic human community. I found the theory in the work of William Ernest Hocking. I experienced the practice in the Archdiocese of Nagpur, India.

I have taught and learned in the United States and Canada and most recently in Nagpur where I am now helping to build and equip a learning centre for persons on the margins of economic, political, and social life. I am winding down my secondary school career and hoping to move into adult learning enterprises. I am concerned that my church is still emphasizing youth and youth ministry and forgetting that Yeshua played with children and taught adults. I am ready to learn with adults and let someone else play with their children.

I owe readers an explanation of my poor English in the title of this book. I am inordinately concerned with words but then so was Yeshua. I am a teacher, not a preacher because I am an insatiable learner. Preaching usually sets my teeth on edge because there is no opportunity for corporate dialogue. I have been part of "dialogue" homilies in small settings, especially in India, and that has been powerful. I yearn for a Catholicism in which clergy and laity will mutually train and equip each other as a matter of policy not serendipity. I work for that time when Catholics understand that we exist primarily for those who are not members of our community. I hope for the time when we will give up our present preoccupation with our internal institutional self. My adult life has been given to effecting one Catholicism, to bridging the gap between its intellectuals and its "ordinary faithful" (who are increasingly not ordinary and no longer quite so faithful), and to consociations with its world religious neighbours and all persons of good will. In the process I have learned that bridges get walked over, driven over, and sometimes blown up.

I have been in dialogue over the years about these thoughts you will read. At the risk of offending some persons whom I do not mention I will cite a few who have contributed to my thinking. Leonard Broughan, O. Carm., my childhood friend, has shared with me repeatedly his special insights into the good news of and about Yeshua. Elizabeth Hughes Rufo, a friend from college days, has helped me to sharpen--and often to soften--my insights with her special educated good humour. Leobard D'Souza, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Nagpur, India, has been friend, colleague, and laugh-mate since we met in Rome during the last session of Vatican II. That His Grace calls me "friend," gives my life special meaning and purpose.

My husband, Bent Stidsen, was my best friend, colleague, lover, guru, laughmate, and constant constructive critic. I have learned to live without him in the flesh but I have not gotten over his loss. There is a difference. Of late, Paul Bolland, a liturgical architect and artist, has been in dialogue with me almost every Sunday morning about these musings. Last Trinity Sunday after an abyssmal canned homily from the pulpit, Paul came out of mass and said, "What should that have been about?" I explained that our God is a community of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating life and made in the image and likeness of God we are called to be mirrors of that Reality. Paul looked at me and said, "You have got to find a venue to reach adults. Write those books. Vow to me that you will stop tearing up those sermons. You are changing my life and my work in what you are saying to me, and opening up to me. Please, please write those books."

And so here I am with the first of the three books I propose, having begun in Year B, and hoping to finish in Year A. They are unfinished as any and all good teaching and good sermons must be. They are at times as vague as Yeshua was and at times as direct as he was. They may tell you more about me and my world than you and yours.

I believe that the Spirit of Life is "leading us to all truth" which is the fullness of our humanity. I hope that these musings provide some clues in the discernment of that leading.

Catherine Berry Stidsen
Oakwood, Cayuga, Ontario
November 26, 1995

| year B | year C | year A |

SERMONS I WISH I HAD PREACHED OR BETTER STILL "TEACHED": YEAR C. Copyright © 1995 Catherine Berry Stidsen, Ph.D., R.T.C. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations. For information or permission for longer citations address the author, 535 Irish Line, R. R. #3, Cayuga, Ontario, Canada, NOA lEO, Phone/Fax: 01-905-772-3790, E-mail: ad930@freenet.hamilton.on.ca.