During the early years of my priesthood, I had decided to invest my vacation time by touring the southern end of the diocese and getting to know the many "out of the way" parishes that make up the seven counties which our priests serve. Since I was raised in the country, I specifically wanted to experience the farm life of the diocese and the people who attend the local churches in Ford, Iroquois, Kankakee and Grundy counties. I have a strong belief that the country folk have a great need for priestly ministry and I personally feel the call to return back to my roots one day and offer them God's grace.

With this in mind, I took up an offer (about a decade ago) to cover for a priest in Gibson City, Illinois named Bill Smith. During the three weeks I spent down at his parish, I felt as if I were back in my hometown of Sandwich, Illinois, experiencing the farm lifestyle to which I was most accustomed during my formative years. Understanding the life of the farmer is a culture to itself; I had to recondition myself to think like a farmer, just like I would do the same if I were ministering to the Hispanic community, the faithful of DuPage County or some other group that goes about life in some unique type of way.

In the case of Gibson City, I entered a town with a population around 4000 folks and lived at the rectory of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church that supported about 200 families. Gibson City is about a half an hour north of Champaign, IL right down Route 47 and is the home of a "Rock 'n Roll" McDonalds, two drive-in movie theaters and the best German Restaurant south of I-80. In addition to spending time in this small farming community for those three weeks, I also had the opportunity to tour the rest of the parishes from down south, from Gilman to Paxton to Cabery to Wilton Center. I found out that our diocese supports a national shrine in St. Anne, Illinois and that in the city of Ashkum, the faithful still kneel at the communion rail to receive the Body of Christ.

I also had the chance to visit my favorite parish down south, St. Mary's Church in Beaverville, Illinois. If I had an actual aspiration left in life, I guess my would be to become a bishop of one city and one city only - I want to be known as "the Bishop of Beaverville," where I can sit in a Cathedral that holds some 1200 people in a parish community that only supports 100 or so families. I guess someone thought an airport or other place of commerce would be built in the area, so the faithful jumped the gun and built this huge church, which is now recognized as a national landmark. Sunday Masses are usually held in a wing of that that church, heated by space heaters during the winter (since the parish cannot afford to heat the entire church with such a small community).

During my stay in Gibson City, I spent my evenings in the rectory of Our Lady of Lourdes' Church. During those three weeks, I got to know a little bit about the pastor, Fr. Bill Smith. Today's gospel talks about those who live the life of love and obedience being the ones who actually realize the presence of the Holy Spirit within them. Fr. Bill Smith seemed to me to be one of those people. Unless you were once a parishioner at St. Walter's Parish in Roselle or one of the other parishes which Fr. Smith served as pastor, I am guessing that no one in this church has ever heard of Fr. Smith. Fr. Bill quietly served at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish for the last 20 years of his life, until he died at the parish in 2003. Every Sunday he would celebrate three Masses - one in Gibson City, one in the city of Melvin and one in Roberts, Illinois. Because he wanted to conserve parish finances, Fr. Smith celebrated daily Mass in his rectory basement with the fifteen or so faithful that came to worship. Unfortunately for me, the ceiling of the rectory basement was only six feet high and I am over six feet tall, so I had to celebrate Mass for three weeks hunched over so that my head would not hit the tiles of the basement.

While serving in Gibson City, Fr. Bill did not take much of a salary and chose not to spend much money on himself. In fact, the parishioners became concerned about Fr. Smith's notorious frugality and the beater car that he drove, realizing that Fr. Bill would not invest his money in buying a new car. Due to their concerns, a group of parishioners put their resources together and ended up buying him a car that was actually safe to drive on the road. These parishioners loved their pastor and would extend themselves to the limit for the sake of his welfare.

About a decade ago, a family from Gibson City realized that their pastor had not taken a vacation in some seven years and, for his anniversary, invited him on a pilgrimage to his home country of Ireland. What I have not mentioned up until this point was that Fr. Bill was fiercely Irish. His entire rectory was a testimony to his native land, with every Gaelic symbol hanging on the wall and Irish papers sprawled all over the house, unreadable to the rest of us unless you spoke the native tongue. I learned more about this particular culture in the three weeks I lived down south than I had my entire life, up until I came here to St. Patrick's in Joliet.

I also learned that as thick was his dedication to the Irish heritage, so thick was the smoke on the windows of his rectory from the pipe that he had blown in the rectory for those 20 years. During my time at the parish, I learned that no one had cleaned the windows of the parish for all the years he lived in the rectory! The first day I opened the dusty drapes to look outside the house, I realized that I could not see one thing on the outside from the inside. Thus, I dedicated some of my three weeks to a one-man rectory cleaning project at Our Lady of Lourdes only for the fact that I wanted to breathe!

As I read today's gospel, I connected the imagery that our Lord associated with the Holy Spirit with the type of life that Fr. Bill lived. I thought about the words that our Lord spoke in today's gospel and connected it to one of the commentaries attributed to this text (The Jerome Biblical Commentary). Here are the two passages in question:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him.

(In the context of today's gospel,) the conditions of love and obedience that apply to the prayer for the Spirit (v. 16) are also required for the efficacy of any prayer (as pointed out in v. 13).

When I connected those dirty windows to the life of the Spirit, I began to think about my soul. Outside of our Lord and our Blessed Mother, all of us have souls that are stained with sin. Like cleaning my glasses each day and cleaning my room each week, unless I constantly clean my soul from the stain of sin, there is no way I can see the Holy Spirit within my house unless I first clean the window of faith that rests in my soul. To receive communion with a stained soul is like trying to drive a vehicle with a dirty windshield - we become an accident waiting to happen.

Fr. Smith reminded me that a clean heart and a dedicated life allowed him to see this Holy Spirit within his heart and the reason why he became a priest for the Joliet Diocese. In this parish alone, over 40 women within the last hundred years dedicated their lives to a religious vocation as sisters in the Carmelite, Franciscan, Dominican and a myriad of other religious orders. In addition, over 30 men from this parish heard the call to serve as priests and religious brothers, two of which serving a bishops in the United States (one in Davenport, IA and one serving as Archbishop of Dubuque during World War I). Countless others have served as faithful parents, single people, and holy parishioners of St. Patrick's Church. The response to their respective vocations required a clean soul to make this decision. The response to our gospel must come from a clean soul as well.

And yet, as we have heard from the statistics recently published during our Holy Father's recent visit to the United States, many Catholics in our community do not recognize the presence of our Lord in the tabernacles of our churches. Many choose not to attend Mass on Sundays, even though the Third Commandment requires them to do so. Many do not go to reconciliation, even though this contradicts the second precept of the Church, especially when serious sin is involved. Many in our society choose to live their Catholic lives without cleaning their windshields before they drive. If we cannot see the God that is standing right in front of us, it is much more difficult to follow the example that God is setting in front of us as well.

Today's gospel sets the bar quite high for those in the faith - it requires us to be people committed to obedience and love. For those who follow this path, the presence of the Holy Spirit becomes very clear and the call of God becomes much more obvious to those who can see what God has in store for them. May we all follow the path that Fr. Bill Smith set for the people of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Gibson City, IL. May we all become the windows to the Holy Spirit in the way we follow our Lord's guidance and serve each other in love.

And this is our prayer.