Annual St. Christopher men’s conference to focus on prayer

By John Shaughnessy

As soon as he received the phone call, Tony Avellana feared the worst.

He had just arrived at work after driving through a snowstorm for two hours when his mother-in-law phoned him to come home immediately.

“She didn’t tell me what was going on,” he recalls. “She just said I needed to come home. She wanted me to be calm as I drove home. I just prayed that everything was OK. I hoped everything was OK with my wife, Julie, and our kids.

“I remember walking into the house. Julie took me to our bedroom. She told me my father had died of a massive heart attack.”

Avellana pauses for a moment.

“I wept so much and ached so deeply,” he continues. “I lost not only my father but my hero. He supported me through all my ups and downs of life. I still needed him in my life.”

In the next hours, he made arrangements to fly to the Philippines, where he was born and his father had lived.

“It was a 22-hour flight,” he recalls. “I did a lot of praying during that trip. I did a lot of wrestling with God as to why he took my father. Then I came to peace with it, knowing God does things for the greater good. He knows what’s better and what needs to be done. As they say in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy will be done.’ Sometimes, that’s hard amidst life and the crises we experience as human beings. But I know my father is in a better place. And one day, we’ll all be together as a family.”

Avellana shares that story from 1995 as he prepares to be a speaker at the Indianapolis Catholic Men’s Conference on Feb. 17 at St. Christopher Church in Indianapolis. The conference will focus on prayer: praying with silence, praying from the heart, praying the Beatitudes and learning to make prayer a personal connection with God.

“Prayer is a means of truly communicating with God, to ask him to walk by your side through the good times and the bad times, to help him spread the Gospel and lead others,” says Avellana, a Catholic musician who is a member of St. Maria Goretti Parish in Westfield, Ind., in the Lafayette Diocese. “One of the greatest tools we have to light the world is prayer.”

Life-changing and life-shattering moments often lead people to a different, deeper kind of prayer, says Father Keith Hosey, who will be the keynote speaker at the men’s conference.

“Most of the time our prayer patterns stay the same until something comes along to shake them up, usually in moments of pain,” says Father Hosey, a priest in the Lafayette Diocese. “The grace of God often comes in difficult times in life—the death of someone we love, the loss of a job or we have an addiction. That’s when we turn to God, our higher power.”

Yet the change can also come when people deliberately set aside time to focus on their faith—during retreats and faith conferences, Father Hosey says. It particularly helps when people separate themselves from the “noise” of the world and seek an atmosphere of silence to connect with God.

“We think prayer is talking to God, but prayer is listening to God,” Father Hosey says. “There’s a time when we really need to listen to God and that requires silence. It’s a skill that takes a lot of patience. Men who go fishing and hunting and climbing mountains are really looking for God. That’s where a lot of men find God, too.”

Bill Fike takes time to find God at 3 p.m. every day—the time he and his wife of nearly five years, Colette, always set aside to pray together.

“We find some time no matter where we are or what we’re doing at 3 o’clock to pray together,” says Fike, a member of St. Christopher Parish in Indianapolis, who will speak at the conference. “My cell phone will ring and it’s her. That’s been a wonderful tradition of prayer for us and our relationship.”

David Burkhard found a glimpse of God when he went walking in a park with his first child when she was about 3 years old.

“She was on my shoulders and the leaves were falling down around us,” says Burkhard, the coordinator of the men’s conference. “She was giggling and laughing at the falling leaves. It was new to her. Seeing her get caught up in the awesomeness of these new things awakened in me an awareness of the bigger presence of God in our midst.”

The personal awakening took longer for Daniel Sarell, another conference speaker.

Sarell remembers a time in his life when he believed “the poor were poor because they were lazy.”

“After all, I experienced firsthand how my mother worked hard and overcame many of the disadvantages of being a divorced, single parent,” Sarell recalls. “If we could do it, why couldn’t everyone else? I was proud and lacked compassion.”

His view began to change as he grew older, especially when he helped at a Catholic Worker kitchen in Denver.

“I encountered the poor as my brothers and sisters with whom I could have a person-to-person interaction,” says Sarell, who is now the director of Family Ministries for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. “As appalled as I was at the poverty I witnessed, I was inspired by the humanity of the people.”

At the conference, Sarell hopes to use the Beatitudes to help men make a difference in their daily lives. He believes that meditating on the Beatitudes can place people in a dialogue with God and move them closer to the destiny God has for them.

Father Hosey also believes prayer is the path toward that destiny.

“Finding God is what life is all about,” Father Hosey says. “God’s presence is the one thing you can count on. Yet we feel it’s too good to be true that God will be there for us, that he wants to be close to us. But it’s true.”

(The men’s conference will be from 8 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. on Feb. 17 at St., Christopher Church, 5301 W. 16th St., in Indianapolis. The registration fee, which includes lunch, is $35 before Feb. 14 and $40 after Feb. 14. For information, call David Burkhard at 317-241-6314, ext. 126, or send an e-mail to him at djb@saintchristopherparish.org) †