Biography
Fr. Dominic Grassi is Pastor of St. Josaphat Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. Fr. Grassi is a natural-born storyteller and the author of a recent book of tales called Bumping Into God, gathered from his experiences as a lifelong Chicagoan. Fr. Grassi has been an educator, an athletic coach, and a retreat leader, and is a frequent contributor to magazines and journals. But his greatest love is the people he serves at St. Josaphat's, a place he calls "A Church to Come Home To." [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Bumping into God:  Finding Grace in Unexpected Places" 
In the 18th Chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, there is a wonderful encounter that occurs between Jesus and Peter. Peter, as you know, is the one that would always answer Jesus' questions and sometimes his answers were brilliant and sometimes they left a lot to be desired. Well, Peter came with a question for Jesus, but he also came with a prepared answer, what he thought would be a good answer. Peter asked Jesus, "Lord, how many times should I forgive someone who has hurt me? Seven times?" Now, seven was a good answer. Seven meant a lot of times and so you can imagine that Peter and the Disciples and all those who had gathered around them to hear this exchange were quite shocked with Jesus' answer.

Jesus looked at Peter. He looked at the crowd. He looked at them with love because he had a message he wanted them to hear. Jesus said, "Not seven times, Peter, but seventy-seven times. Not a lot of times, Peter, but an infinite number of times we should forgive others who have hurt us." He saw the look on Peter's face and he saw the look on the crowds face. Jesus knew what he had to do to explain his message to them. He told them a story. That's how he tried to make his point with them, and the story was a simple story about a master and a slave who owed him a lot of money and how the master forgave the slave the debt. That same slave went to another person who owed him just a little bit and because that person could not pay him back, he punished him. When the master heard this, he was angry at the slave, not because he hadn't paid back his debt, but because he hadn't heard the message of forgiveness. He hadn't felt the forgiveness so deeply in his heart that that because his message to share with the other slave.

This is a story that had a message for Peter, for all the people and the disciples that heard it, but also for us. Our lives are filled with stories, one story after another strung together beautiful pearls on a necklace. In the stories of our lives, we have the opportunity to bump into God, to find God's presence, as Peter and the disciples found that presence when they heard that radical message of forgiveness told to them. When we look at our own stories, we realize we have stories we can share with others, to help one another find God's presence in our lives, God's love in our lives, bumping into God together.

Let me share one of those stories with you. My mother recently reached her ninetieth birthday. Thank God, she is in good health and wonderful spirits, but because of some changes in her health insurance, she had to leave the doctor she had been going to for twenty years, her primary physician. That is not easy for anyone to do and certainly was not easy for my mother to do, but she seemed more than usually nervous as she went to meet her new doctor. She went in for her appointment and the doctor noticed how nervous my mother was. She took my mother's blood pressure and it was far beyond what it should have been, given her history and her record. The doctor very wisely stopped the exam, looked at my mother, and asked her what was wrong. What was bothering her so very much that she seemed almost afraid of sharing anything with this doctor? My mother, who is an honest woman, said, "Well if you want to know doctor, I'm going to tell you why it is so difficult for me to be sitting across this desk from you."

My mother began to tell her story. It was a story that goes back more than fifty-three years, back when she was a young mother of four children, the oldest being a beautiful daughter just approaching her seventh birthday, and three sons who followed after that daughter. One day her beautiful daughter complained of a stiff neck and then of a headache and then had a very high fever. Well, fifty-three years ago parents knew what they had to do when that happened. The doctor was called, he immediately came to the house, and the worst diagnosis that could possibly be made was made: infantile paralysis, polio. My sister was rushed in an ambulance to a special ward in Cook County Hospital where there were children with the same disease lying suffering in their beds. The parents could not comfort their children because of the infectious nature of the disease. The parents were put behind a glass wall. Now imagine, if you can, being a parent, seeing your child suffering and in pain and unable to comfort your child, to hold your child, to wipe your child's brow, to speak comforting words to your child. Instead, behind glass you watched your child breathe with more difficulty as the paralysis continued to spread and you watched other parents in their grief as their child breathed a last breath. It was a difficult vigil my parents faced. They spent the night in the hospital and a woman doctor came up to them who had been in the ward. She looked at my mother and said, "You realize that you're still here. I thought that your daughter would be gone by now."

How much that must have hurt my mother to hear those words. The next morning, still there, that doctor walked through and said, "I'm surprised you're still here. She is still alive." The tremendous pain my mother felt! My sister died after only two days in that hospital ward and even at the wake, my mother and father could not come close to her. It was behind a glass wall. So my mother carried that pain for fifty-three years in her heart, that pain of the words that doctor spoke to her.

Now we don't pass judgment on that doctor. Who knows what demons she had to deal with because she was dealing with dying children that she wanted to heal and couldn't. But those words made a wound in my mother that would not heal, and so for fifty-three years she maneuvered around ever going to a woman doctor until this moment in her life when she found herself sitting across a desk from a woman doctor who heard the story with tears in her eyes and decided to be a true healer. This wise doctor, this true healer, walked from around her desk to where my mother was seated, gently lifted her up from her chair and embraced her. She invited my mother to please forgive that doctor the pain that was caused her some fifty-three years earlier, and if my mother could find it in her heart to do it, she promised that she would be the best, most caring doctor my mother could possibly have. It was a moment of healing. My mother said, "Yes." And I am convinced at that moment my mother was healed not only emotionally but also physically, and even more importantly spiritually. That was a very special moment in their relationship and a very special moment that my mother had needed to have happen for close to fifty-three years. It was a wonderful encounter of God's grace in her life, coming to her at a very unexpected moment when she was nervous and concerned about being with a new doctor. All of a sudden she bumped into God and was healed because of this woman.

Forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that is important, certainly for the one who is being forgiven, but even more important, I believe, for the one who does the forgiving. It is what brings healing not only to the forgiven, but to the forgiver. Remember, Jesus said, "Seventy-seven times we should forgive," an infinite number of times we should forgive, not just once or twice. We shouldn't harbor the hurt and the pain and let it fester until it takes away the joy and the happiness and the peace that should be in our hearts, but we need to forgive over and over and over again as Jesus did. Why? Because we are called to be the presence of Jesus to others. If we dare to call ourselves Christian, we bring Jesus to other people, not only when it's easy, not only when it's convenient, but when it is most difficult for us to do that as well. So I invite us to look at the stories of our lives and look at the times in our lives when we have been hurt. We need to ask ourselves the question, "Who do we need to forgive?"

I invite each one of us to take the time to look that person in the eye if we can, or to call that person if that's all we can do, or even to write them a note. If we can't find them, or they have gone to their eternal judgment, at least say a prayer for them and all we have to do is say three simple words and those words are, "I forgive you." No explanation needed. It will bring peace and closure to them, hopefully, but more importantly for us, it will help us to find in our hearts the love of God that we are now so freely sharing with that other person. It will fill our hearts. It will heal us. It will bring us the peace and the joy that we need as children of God so that we can go on with our story, our life, continuing to find God in unexpected places and to share that God with others. Let us be the healers that Christ calls us to be.

Interview with Dominic Grassi
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Father, I enjoyed your message so much. There are a great number of people watching us now looking for inspiration who are perhaps in hospitals now, know someone who is ill, or has a real problem in their lifes. Do you have a story in your book, Bumping into God, that you could relate that would help them at this moment?

Dominic Grassi: I think people who are in some kind of pain or need other people shouldn't be afraid to ask for the help and to accept it. And we shouldn't be afraid to reach out and offer that help and support to one another.

In the book there is a story about a woman named Mrs. LaFrance. It goes back to my childhood. My mother met this woman on the steps of the church and brought her to our house. Every Wednesday, Mrs. LaFrance would come over. Just the name was kind of an exotic name; she wore exotic clothing; had a kind of, for lack of a better word, continental accent. We didn't know what it was, and my brothers and I would sit there as my mother fed her with pasta and all the good Italian food. She would eat with gusto, this tiny little woman. She would give us advice on everything, from which end to start eating a celery stalk to how to tie our shoes better and everything. She was a delightful woman and my mom was somebody that befriended her. She told us of her world travels and we listened with awe.

One Wednesday she didn't show up and then she didn't show up the next Wednesday, so my mother sent my older brother, Phil, to her house with a container of chicken soup in case she wasn't feeling well. Well, their house was just one simple little room in a rooming house in the back of an alleyway in the neighborhood and I think she was probably embarrassed for us to see this was where she was living. She got angry that my brother came over and invaded her space. She took the soup, but she was very angry and never came by the house again.

About two months later I saw my mother putting on her Sunday coat. It was the middle of the week. She had circled an obituary in the paper. It was Mrs. LaFrance who had died and mom went to the wake. She came back and said that she was the only one in the funeral home at the time. How sad it was.

I couldn't help but think that if Mrs. LaFrance had just reached out and said, "I need a little help. I need a little company. Things are not going well for me," I know my mother and my father, my brothers and I would have been there for her, but she, for whatever reason, couldn't do that.

All of us need help sometimes. All of us need to lean on somebody else. We should do that for one another and realize that's what we're called to do as Christians.

Brown: It's a marvelous story. Your entire ministry has been in the Chicago area. You've taught in the schools. In our earlier conversations you've said there are real advantages here because you get to know people. Our area is being consumed with problems from gangs. Have you been able to do anything to address that situation? What do we need to do?

Grassi: What we need to do is realize that gangs are a symptom of a larger problem that exists in all of our communities. It's a problem of isolation. People move into a neighborhood now and build a fence. They build a wall. They build a gate and lock themselves in and they think they are locking the rest of the world out, but they're really unable to do that. What is happening out there affects all of us and so we need to look at the broader picture: the picture of education, the picture of family and family values, the picture of employment, the picture of opportunity and realize all these things are tied together and that we need to somehow come together and bring our efforts together in all these areas, and churches can be a focal point that brings people together in all of these areas so that we can deal with these larger issues, and the issues like gangs where young people find an identity, even if it is a negative identity, where people find money even though it's gotten in the wrong ways, where violence is applauded rather than coming together. That can all be dealt with if we deal with the larger issues. But we have to be called together to do that.

Brown: You know you've had a consistent message here with all the stories: reach out.

Grassi: Exactly.

Brown: Reach out. We don't have a great deal of time left but I am going to expand our borders just a little bit. What should we as Christians, or caring people in the world, do at this time for the people of Turkey and other parts of the world who are in such misery?

Grassi: Well, the simplest thing we can do, and it's powerful, is to pray for them because when we pray for them we become aware of their needs and concerns and we can find the outlets and the ways that we can respond. We can respond financially with services, with all the blessings that God has given to us. We can also realize, because we have these blessings, we need to use them in a proper way for ourselves, not to hoard them and not to use them in a flagrant way, but in a way where we realize that God has blessed us with so much. We want to do right by those blessings.

Brown: Father, your experiences have been so wonderful and for you to give us the opportunity to share them with you is a blessing for us. Thank you very, very much. I have got to say that Bumping Into God is filled with stories just like this.

Grassi: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you, Floyd.