+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Never doubt that a small group of committed
people can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever
has!!!!!!!!!
August 1, 2010AD
Eighteenth Sunday in
Greentime
Don’t Be So Sure!!
Mature Catholics realize that
adult life is divided
into two phases. In the first half of adulthood, our
goal is
to make our mark and take the world by storm. In the
Hindu tradition, this is known as “householding”. In
the
West, we can call it “building our tower”. It is how
we
are driven and it is good, provided that we remember
God’s Law. Remember when Pope John Paul taught us,
“There are no moral free zones” for individuals and/or
nations and groups. All stand under the judgment of
God.” Go for it, but behave as a Catholic in the process.
In the second half of life, we
can become wisemen
and wise-women, as we realize that life is more than
householding and/or building towers. We start to
experience
the painful mysteries of life and God teaches us
that
we have to make “leaps of faith”, we have to
surrender,
let go and trust the Holy Mystery. We can react to
God’s
pedagogy either peacefully, angrily or pathetically.
But,
react we must!!
Our first reading today is an
excerpt from the
Book of Qoheleth (aka Ecclesiasticus). It is definitely
an
inspired book, written by a person in the second
half of
his or her life who believes in YHWH. Seven times,
the
author asks the question, “What does my future hold?”
The answer thereto is “You can’t find out.” Another
question posed seven times asks “What can we know
about the future?” The sevenfold response is “You
don’t
want to know.”
The inspired author repeats the
words, “Vanity
of vanities, all things are vanities.” (The Hebrew
word for “vanity” is the same as the name of Adam
and
Eve’s second son, Cain’s brother, Abel, murdered by his
elder brother in jealousy.)
Qoheleth tells us several wise
truths. We are told
to enjoy the present, while one can, because all
things
change. We are told that God’s clock is not our
clock.
We are told that if one has a stretch of bad luck,
such a
rainy week’s vacation, may one have better luck next
year. We are told that it is wise to diversify one’s
portfolio.
We are told that life is full of surprises, pleasant
and
unpleasant, so, be prepared.
Jesus teaches us many things
with His parables
and his “zingers”, similar to folk wisdom, the “second
half of life wisdom” of Qoheleth. The parable of the
rich
fool is not so famous as the parables of the Good
Samaritan
or of the Prodigal Son. Yet, it continues to pack a
powerful wallop.
The rich fool had most things
figured out.
His favorite words were “I” and “my”. My grain,
my barns, etc. In fact, he used the words several
times. It seemed logical to expand.
He made one serious error. He
assumed that
his good fortune and his plans were self-fulfilling
prophecies. Things were only going to get better.
That was the way that he had calculated.
However, he died one night,
which was an
item not on his “Do-List”. To whom did all the piled
-wealth of his go? Who gets the I-PAD? Who gets the
plasma TV? Who gets the SUV’s?
We all know of sad and tragic
experiences
where people in our lives seemed to have it made and
then, it all went up in smoke. There is no rhyme nor
reason for us to calculate or to discern. Things do
not
always go as we assume.
So many things which assist us
in our search
for stability are fine and helpful, but they are not
absolutes.
Recently, someone described God as the
Central Point of Reference of our life. God expects
us to live on God’s terms and not on our own. In
addition,
this God is frequently a God of surprises.
To insure stability for oneself
and one’s family
is a noble thing. All of us are blessed with a variety
of things which bring peace and order to our lives.
Most of us here do not have to worry about whence
the next meal will come and do we thank God
adequately
for that? Most of us are reasonably secure
financially. Do we should thank God for that? Most
of us have blessings which many in the world can
only imagine. Do we thank God?
However, there are three
caveats. First, we
must never assume that possessions, power,
pleasure,
prestige, popularity, prosperity are
absolute
guarantees of security in our lives. They are good
things, but they are not absolutes. God is our
security.
Second, God expects us to live faithfully in
Christ Who enables us to behave in a Christian
fashion. God’s gifts to us make demands upon us.
The gifts of food, freedom, financial success
(morally
achieved) are not Good in itself. They should point
us to the One Who provides them to us lavishly.
Third, everything is a gift or the result of a
gift. (For example, family, aptitude, socio-economic
status, health, ethnicity are all given to us.) God
expects
us to show our confidence and thanksgiving
(Eucharistia, in Greek) by sharing with less fortunate.
Let us not try to find absolute
security in
things, rather than God. Jesus teaches us that the
God
of Life is full of surprises and enigmas. Let us
learn
to trust in God. Let us be like Qoheleth and Jesus.
Let
us not make the mistakes of the rich fool.
As an exercise in realizing
that God is our
Central Point of Reference, Fr James Martin suggests
four guidelines. 1) Get rid if what you don’t need.
2) Distinguish between “wants” and “needs”.
3)
Get rid of things that you think you need,
but can
actually live without. 4) Get to know the
poor by
volunteering to be of assistance. Many graduates of
Jesuit institutions give a year or two to the Jesuit
Volunteer
Corps. For most, their viewpoints and lives
are never the same. Share the idea with your kids.
080110AD jfq
Sunday, July 25, 2010AD
Seventeenth Sunday in Greentime
The Lord’s Prayer
As we reflected last weekend, Jesus wants
us to keep in close contact. He doesn’t just
want
you acquaintance, or your familiarity. Jesus
wants you to see that He is, indeed, more at
home
in you than you are. As the Little Flower,
St
Therese put, “God
is always at home in me; I’m
the one that is usually out to
lunch.”
Jesus tells a parable today, tongue in
cheek, when he tells us of the nagging
neighbor
who will not give up pressing his sleepy
friend
for a loaf of bread for guests who had arrived
unexpectedly. Naturally, the sleepy man gets
up.
However, there is something that the
immediate
group-oriented audience of Jesus’ parable
would
pick up immediately, viz., that the story
would
quickly get around to other folks on the
street if
the man did not get up.
Jesus hints that it is the same with God the
Father and Himself. God does not want it to
get
around that God is negligent of our needs.
(People might talk!) God wants to keep God’s
Name unsullied.
However, we all know of times when God
has apparently disappointed us and did not
give
us what we wanted. Someone describes 4 ways
in
which God responds to our prayers. 1) We get
a
quick response — just the way we wanted.
Everyone
is happy. 2) God takes a little longer in
God’s
response, but we do get what we asked for.
Not
too shabby either. 3) God hears our prayers
and
gives us the opposite of what we wanted and
we
discover that we are better off with God’s
Design,
rather than our own. Funny how things work
out.
4) God remains silent and no answer seems
forthcoming.
How could God let me down?
All of us experience moments of letdown
with type 4 prayers at times. Apparently, St
Luke
and/or his community of the Jesus Movement
experienced disappointment at times with
their
prayers. In St Matthew’s Gospel, the story
ends
with Jesus’ saying, “How
much more will Your
heavenly Father give you good things if
you ask
for them? In
St Luke’s Gospel, today, we hear
something different, “How
much more will Your
heavenly Father give you the Holy Spirit when
we pray?” The
prayer is not answered, but God
gives us the grace to cope, to deal with the
pain
and the disappointment that constitutes part
of
every human life.
We know that religion fits our lives
depending
on where we are in life. In the first half
of adult life, Jesus encourages us to make
our
mark and take the world by storm, but do so
mindful of God’s commandments and the needs
of people around us. After we enter the
second
half of adult life (and, after we experience
suffering,
troubles, failures, absurdities, rejections,
and
disappointments that are part of every human
life, we learn that Jesus teaches us “how to
bear
the pains of life”. Don’t fool yourself
thinking
that there aren’t any. Don’t look for them.
They
will find you.
In our reflection on prayer this weekend,
we recall someone’s asking St Teresa of
Avila, the
16th century mystic, What is the best way to
say
the Lord’s Prayer? Her response was, “Take
one
hour to say it!” Whatever did she mean. How
many have tried?
Take one of the petitions of the Lord’s
Prayer while we talk about disappointment in
prayer sometimes. “Give
us each day our daily
bread.” (Note that St Luke’s
version of the Lord’s
Prayer is probably closer to the actual
prayer that
Jesus teaches us; however, it is not so graceful
as
St Matthew’s versions, which we all know so
well.
Note also that the bread petition is a
little different
( St Matthew says “This day”; St Luke says,
“Each day”. Similar but not the same.
People think that St Luke talks more about
what we need, really need for today to
survive.
(People in poor spots of the world (about 5
billion
of them) mean something different than we in
the Affluent West speaking of “each day”.)
In a world in which 25,000 people die each
day of hunger and preventable diseases, the
petition
means something different. Here in the
West, where people speak of three economic
classes, viz., the rich, the poor and the
nervous,
we realize that what we consider “creature
comforts”
are basic life necessity for others. Water,
climate control in our homes and offices,
abundant
food (for most, though not all these days),
a
roof over our heads are things that we all
take for
granted. If someone were to ask someone in
the
underdeveloped world, what does daily bread
mean each day, their answers would be
different
than ours, were we to be asked the same
question.
God’s Honor is always at stake. God does
not want God’s good Name sullied. God knows
what we need before we open our mouths.
In taking account of the caveats of the two
Theresa’s today, Take an hour to say the
Lord’s
Prayer sometime. When you do, you might
discover
that God is, indeed, more at home in us,
and we are out to lunch.
Take time in silence and solitude and in
slowing down, to pray the petition for our daily
bread.
(Recall in Aramaic, the word for bread
means bread, food, sustenance, money.)
In silence and solitude and in slowing
down, ask God to help you figure out what
really
constitutes your bread each day. What do you
really need to survive? Share the prayer practice
with the children during the summer. They
may
surprise you. 072510AD jfq
Sunday, July 18, 2010AD
Sixteenth Sunday in Greentime
Get in Here, Martha (and
Bring the Rest of Us with You ) !!
This familiar Gospel story is
known to all of us.
However, we need to read
between the lines for some
food for thought.
Jesus broke several cultural
taboos with His
friendly visit. First, in that
culture, a single gentleman
would not visit 2 single
ladies. (Notice no mention of
Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel.) Second,
a single gentleman
would not have dined with 2
single ladies in their home.
(Recall that one only ate meals
with those with whom one
was most intimate, viz.,
relatives and/or close friends.)
Third, family members would
never ask an outsider to
settle a family quarrel.
Fourth, a woman would not have
sat at the feet of an itinerant
prophet. (Men were the students.)
Recall the Barbra Streisand
movie, Yentl, years
ago? Fifth, in a world in which
95% of the population
were tenant farmers, most would
not have had the room
(or the resources) to host
Jesus). As a result, this quaint
little story continues the
trajectory that we noticed a few
weeks ago, viz., that middle
class women (married or single)
were part of the retinue of the
emerging Jesus Movement.
Jesus was not bashful about
expecting dinner invitations.
In several places, people
invited Jesus to dinner
and it was never a dull
evening. (One student at Stepinac
asked, years ago, if Jesus had
a problem with his weight
because “the man was always eating!”)
Jesus’ strategy of table
fellowship was characteristic
behavior in His mission of
breaking down barriers
between people. (In Acts of the
Apostles and 1 Corinthians
and Romans, we know that table
fellowship was
pivotal in some of the earliest
Christian communities.)
(This is another reason for the
importance of our gathering
as a parish for a variety of
social events. Table fellowship
unites ideally and should not
be divisive.)
The 1st and 2nd taboos which
Jesus violated cultural
norms involved His even
accepting the dinner invitation
of Martha and Mary. However,
His job description,
like ours, is to proclaim that the Kingdom is
here, even now (though not yet.) Everyone is invited
to accept table fellowship in
the Kingdom. No one is excluded.
Marital status and cultural
norms are trumped
with the urgency of announcing
God’s intervention in
Christ Jesus. Things will never
be the same again.
The 3rd taboo which Jesus
violated was to place
Himself in the midst of a
quarrel between two sisters.
However, Jesus was a member of
every family, despite
cultural mores.
The 4th taboo which Jesus
violated had to do
with Mary’s sitting at the feet
of Rabbi Jesus. Again, Jesus
stressed the universality of
God’s invitation to listen
to Jesus teach about the Kingdom
of God (the way it
should be now and will be
someday, according to God’s
promise). Jesus invited women
as well as men to hear
Him. In fact, Jesus told Martha
to cook only one dish
ASAP and get into the living
room to listen as Mary listened
to the Word. Jesus invited her
to be a disciple with
her sister.
Jesus calls each of us,
including Martha and
Mary, and you and me and all Catholics to
discipleship,
“to hear the Word of God and
act upon it.” We are men and women, Type A’s
and Type B’s, Jews and
Gentiles, young and old, rich
and poor, well-educated and
not very, clergy and laypeople.
He calls us to listen to
His read on reality and try to
model our Worldview with
His. May we accept God’s forgiveness and forgive one
another. May we build
better (not perfect, only God
can do that and God
will). May our world be freer of
hunger, violence,
cruelty, injustice and inequality.
An interesting spinoff that,
with God’s Help,
someday we might live in a
world replicated last weekend
by the World Cup Finals . Imagine
a world, in which the
elder statesman of South
Africa, Nelson Mandela, after
experiencing 27 years
imprisonment for a call to end
apartheid, might have asked all
the world (at least, who
ever would want to do so!) to
stand and sing the anthem
of God’s World Order, the
Lord’s Prayer. (Imagine also
when Nelson Mandela led the
Lord’s Prayer that the
members of the Dutch and
Spanish teams would be standing
alongside him on either side.)
The English Catholic economist,
EF Schuhmacher, wrote many years ago that the world (whether it ever became
Christian or not) would eventually arrive at what he called the Great
Convergence, viz., sooner or later, people will come to see that the “System”
needs a basic overhaul.
If you were around that rainy
Sunday, July 20,
1969 in NY, do you recall where
you were when Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
landed on the moon? Our
planet became part of the
neighborhood that day. The
heavens declare the glory of
God and the firmament
proclaims God’s handiwork. (Psalm
19A). Please God, our
appreciation of the wonders of our
universe make us take better
care of the Blue Marble that
our earthly mother has been
called so aptly.
Such a scene we did not see
this past weekend.
However, Jesus assures us that
someday we will. The
Kingdom of God is among you.
Still, the Kingdom is yet
to come. Martha and Mary would
have heard a variation
of that message as Jesus made
His journey up to Jerusalem.
They must have become His
disciples because their
names are remembered in the
Christian Bible. (They reappear
in the story of the raising of
Lazarus in John 11,
with the same personality
traits that St Luke mentions
today.
May all those called to discipleship in Christ
hear the Teacher
and practice what He preaches.
“Now is the time; now is the
day of salvation,”
as St Paul teaches. Or, do we
have more important items
on the agenda? So many do,
unfortunately.
071810AD jfq
Fifteenth Sunday in Greentime
Sunday July 11, 2010AD
If Anyone Knows, It’s Jesus!!
Today, St Paul gives us the verses of a hymn that
was sung to Jesus c. 65AD. The opening verses of the
hymn
proclaim, “Christ Jesus is
the image of the
invisible God, the firstborn of all
creation”.
(pace Dan Brown, (author of The DaVinci Code who
stated back in 2004 that Christ’s divinity was not declared
until 325 AD), Dan, please take note!)
The hymn rejoices in the unity of Creator and
creation in Christ Jesus. The Creator comes so close
that God assumes a created human nature in Christ Jesus.
However, the hymn further indicates that Jesus is
the “firstborn of all creation”, so to speak, the archetype
of creation. Just as humanity is the pinnacle of
creation, Jesus Christ is the archetype, the blueprint, the
pinnacle
of humanity. In, with and “through
Him, all
things were created.”
It stands to reason that Christ Jesus is the One to
Whom we must listen most carefully. He asks us to view
reality with Jesus’ lenses, with His Worldview, with His
Consciousness. (How this usually does not agree with the
System, conventional wisdom, the American Dream, call
the trance whatever You want.)
One thing that His great Apostle, St Paul, stresses
is
the solidarity between Christ
Jesus (the Head of
the Body of Christ) and the parts thereof. Christ Jesus
becomes for us the archetype, the paradigm and the
exemplar of what it means to be both truly divine and
truly human. Christ Jesus rubs off on us through the Jesus
Movement, through our gathering in His Name (He is
present when two or three gather
together in
His Name), the Word of God, the Sacraments, particularly
Baptism and the Eucharist, and in myriad other ways
known only to Him, as He meets us daily in the events of
our
lives. As several theologians have put it, “God comes
to
us disguised as our lives!”
Christ Jesus is the archetype of creation (St
Paul’s very word!!). We can say that Christ Jesus is out
deepest DNA and our deepest DNA is in Christ Jesus.
(As modern physics tells us, the Whole is greater than the
sum of all the parts, still each part (cell) contains the
Whole within it.)
As we know, St Paul says in several places that
we are the Body of Christ. Is it not to say that each of us
is a
part, a cell, a member, in
the Body of Christ?
Among other means, Jesus told great stories,
known as parables, short, pithy concrete stories that people
could imagine and picture mentally which had a trick
ending to teach people a new view of reality. Just as the
Storyteller is incarnate, so also are His stories, how
strange!)
In today’s Gospel, Jesus demonstrates how God
views the true nature of religion. A religious scholar tried
to test Him and posed a question to test Jesus. (Jesus,
however, betrays Irish ancestry of some sort on Mary’s
part by answering one question with another.)
The riposte leads into the Parable of the Good
Samaritan (To Jewish minds, then, the term was an contradiction.)
In the radical answer (Based on the Latin
word “radix” , (not a dirty word, despite the inflection
and spleen with which some talk show hosts use it,) the
word means “basis”, viz., what is at the heart of all
things) Jesus indicates the priest and Levite fulfilled a
ritual law by avoiding contact with what appeared to be a
dead man. However, the man was not dead. Ritual scrupulosity
would have resulted in the death of the mugging
victim. One not bound by religious ritual, viz., the rejected
“Samaritan was moved with
compassion.”
Commentators have listed 7 distinct actions that
the Samaritan performed as an expression of his compassion.
To the Semitic mind, the number, 7, is the number
for divinity. In essence, what Jesus says is that those who
were scrupulous for rituals failed to respond to the man in
need. The Samaritan, who did not observe the Law of
Moses,
fulfilled the call “to love
one’s neighbor as
oneself.” God worked through someone outside the
Law. Those who were expected to observe the Law of
compassion neglected to do so for fear of ritual contamination.
Basically, Jesus re-phrases the question. Your
neighbor is anyone who needs you when that person is in
trouble. One’s neighbor is open-ended!!
Jesus told several different types of parables.Today’s example would probably fall under the “role reversal”
category, where what one normally would expect
is turned “inside out”. The religious figures, the priest
and the Levite, passed the man who was mugged. The
religious outsider fulfilled God’s demand in giving help
to the one who needed his help.
In a culture that frequently brags about its foundations
on Judaeo-Christian principles, it is important to
remember that we always need to pray for justice, fairness,
solidarity, compassion and civility in planning for
our future. We need also to recall in a Judaeo-Christian
context, as well, the Judaeo-Christian triad of who are the
most vulnerable in our society, viz., the widows, the orphans
and the aliens.
St Augustine remarked 1500 years ago that sometimes,
the holiest people are outside the church while
sometimes, the least holy are within the church. It is only
God Who knows what is in our hearts.
The
Image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of all creation, challenges the “holy”
scholar
(and “us”) to go and do
likewise and
treat others with mercy. With
His Help, will we do so? 071110AD jfq
Sunday, July 4, 2010AD
Fourteenth Sunday in Greentime
Two by Two to Name Reality
Today, St Luke presents us with a story
that tells
us
a great deal about both the beginnings of the Jesus
Movement
as well as implications for 21st century Catholicism
as
well. He presents an interesting scenario.
In addition to the Twelve, Jesus sent out a
further
72
to proclaim that God has something new and important
to
share with whoever will listen. Jesus saw the task
as
so urgent that He stressed the necessity of traveling
light
and making the rounds to as many households as
possible.
The message is serious in its implications.
“The
Kingdom of God is at hand for you.”
In
modern parlance, Jesus might have put it this
way,
“Snap out of the trance that your System has
hypnotized
you to accept. Reality, as it exists, is not
what
God Has in mind for the world. Listen to Jesus
Who
proclaims that in Him, God’s System is active in
the
world. It is up to you. Snap out of your trance and
smell
God’s coffee!!”
However, some have wondered that if Jesus’
mission
were
so urgent, then why did He not send out these
missionaries
on their own? Why did He opt for 36 teams
of
two, not 72 individuals?
Several solutions have been offered. First,
since
the
message about the Kingdom of God needed verification,
the
Semitic mindset was that the testimony had to be
given
by at least two witnesses. Second, the teams of two
suggested
that the missionaries on such an all-important
and
stressful assignment needed the companionship of
one
another to de-compress from the pressures of the mission
effort.
Third, probably, the most salient solution
might
be that the Kingdom of God is not about a solitary
relationship
between an individual and God. Rather, the
proclamation
of the Kingdom involves a radical change in
one’s
relationships with God and with other people.
Gospel
living
is about God and others, not just God and self.
(Someone
calculated that over 2/3 of what Jesus said, for
example,
in the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew’s
Gospel,
which we just concluded in the daily lectio
continua
had to do with getting along with other people
along the patterns of behavior demanded by Jesus. A better
relationship
with God is bound to affect our dealings
with
other people.)
The format that Jesus used showed that,
even in
His
public life, word was starting to spread to others
through
the witness of teams of two. Most people back
then
tended to live very localized lives. Most never traveled
very
far from the place where they were born and
they
lived in very circumscribed environs in very structured
relationships
with very few people. Into this nexus
of
relationships, itinerant teams of two entered and
brought
news about the radical new order of things that
can
be affected by people snapping out of myopia to a
new
vision of reality.
Testifying to the Proclamation of Jesus of
Nazareth,
these
teams of two would back up the power of
their
testimony by healing infirmities of those who were
ill.
These healings were not meant to be showstoppers,
but
rather, audio-visual indications of the veracity of the
witnesses’
testimony.
Still, there is the fact that each person
is a psychosomatic
unity,
with a mind-body connection within
us,
operating for better or for worse of the person. If we
took
the reality of God’s new plan for us seriously, then,
we
would, in a sense, be different people. Our worldview
would
change.
There are many responses to all aspects of
the
proclamation of the approach of the Kingdom of
God
(aka Christ Consciousess, viz., if we saw life
differently,
as Christ sees it, our universe would be
alternated.
Pope John Paul in his Catechism taught
us
that we know speak of 4 types of sins. 1) Mortal
sin
definitively, by our choice, separates us from
God;
2) Structural sin, in which people are dehumanized
by
institutions in which we participate; 3)
Serious
sin, which is a major failure by which we
separate
ourselves from God; 4) venial sin, by
which
, in seemingly mundane things, we weaken
our
relationship with God and with one another.
Fr
Karl Rahner listed, as examples of venial
sins,
the following: impatience, coarseness, uncleanliness,
cheap
literature, talkativeness, laughing
at
the faults of others, petty egotism in everyday life,
petty
enmities, oversensitivity, wasting time, cowardice,
a
alack of respect for other people, disrespectful
talk
about men and women, harmful spike
portraying
itself as a clever joke, stubbornness and
obstinacy,
moodiness that other people have to put
up
with, disorder in work, postponement of the unpleasant,
gossip,
self-praise, unjust preference for
certain
people that we find pleasant, hastiness in
judging,
false self-satisfaction, laziness, the tendency
to
give up learning although still making believe you
know
it all, the tendency to refuse to listen to others.
Obviously,
not serious, but still venial sin makes life
unpleasant
for others and upset God’s Plan.
A science news item last week said that
people
who
tried not to nurse grudges or resentments tended to
have
a longer life span than those who let anger and hostility
smolder
in their minds and hearts. Jesus has been
telling
us for 2000 years that attempts at anger management
(with
God’s Help) are a grace and a good thing.
2000
years after the setting of this Gospel, while
times
and venues change, people remain the same. The
message
of the Kingdom brought to us by Catholic faith
can
continue to work miracles to convince us “The
Kingdom
is
at hand for you.” You might even see it in better
health
checkups. Trust Jesus. 070410AD
jfq
Sunday, June 27, 2010AD
Thirteenth Sunday in Greentime
Jesus Has Seen It All!!!
Before the Reforms of Vatican II,
candidates for
Holy Orders were admitted into the clerical
state by a
ceremony known as tonsure.
Five small clips of hair
were cut off the candidate’s head in the
form of a cross
while the candidate said a verse from Psalm
16, our responsorial
psalm today, “O
Lord, my allotted portion
and my cup, You it is Who hold fast my
lot.”
The origin of the Psalm seems to have come
from
old Israel when the land of Israel was
divided among 11
tribes. The twelfth tribe was the priestly
tribe of Levi and
their allotted portion and cup was the
Lord’s ministry, not
territory. The Psalm further states, “You
will not
abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor
will
you suffer your faithful one to undergo
corruption.”
From the first century of the Jesus
Movement, the
earliest Christians saw the fulfillment of
Psalm 16 in Jesus
Christ’s death and Resurrection. Since we
are one and
all cells in the Body of Christ, Crucified
and Risen, the
Psalm applies to each and all of us.
The Church still prays Psalm 16 in our
Night
Prayer, known as Compline, on Thursday.
Now, the one
who prays is no long the levitical priest
but all of us in
Christ Jesus.
In Baptism, we are all baptized
into Christ
Jesus and we share His
destiny of death and Resurrection.
The life of each person is a process of
experiencing
both the ecstasy and agony of human living.
Through
Baptism, Catholics learn that while we are
not immune to
the negative aspects of life, with and
through and in
Christ Jesus, we are able to transcend
them.
Every human person experiences both the
right
hand of God, viz., the blessings that God
lavishes so generously
as well as the left hand of God, the
painful mystery
of life as well. None of us is immune for
the vicissitudes
of human life.
In the Hebrew tradition, Job said as much. 1)
“We accept good things from God. Should we
not accept bad things as well?”2) “The
Lord
gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be
the
Name of the Lord.” 3) “Naked came I forth
from my mother’s womb; naked I shall
return
again.” God never answers
any of Job’s questions, but
rather testily asks Job “
Where were you when I
set the stars in the firmament?” As
we hear
many times in the Bible, both Hebrew and
Christian,
“Who knows the Mind of God?”
Nobody, least of all, a Catholic is exempt
from
what we call the Paschal Mystery. It can be
in moments
of desolation and loss when we realize that
life is bigger
than we are and that we are not, in fact,
the center of the
universe. There are those who say that in
suffering, can a
person be shaken out of the self-deception
that we really
run the show. We are not captains of our
own ships!!
Humans sense that we have a radical (basic)
orientation
outside ourselves, viz., that we find
fulfillment in
something or someone else, others or in the
Other. Sadly
in the middle class, materialistic
environment into which
we have been thrown, the drive for
transcendence gets
disguised in the unmanifest drive for
security, esteem and
control. As Cheryl Crowe put it so aptly
several years
ago, “It is
not getting what you want; it’s wanting
what you’ve got.” Sadly,
so many good people get
caught up in the megilla. In an environment
that pathologically
demands security, esteem and control, we
tend to
get lost in the Big Picture. It is not
about primarily, Who
I am? Whoever I am, I am not the center of
the universe.
The Great I AM is present in all things and
yet, beyond
all things at the same time. The human
mind, trained to
think dualistically, viz., I judge all
reality. In Descartes’
famous “I think, therefore I am”, notice
that “I” (Ego)
appears twice. A wise teacher said
recently, “All you
really need is your health, your
success (as becoming
an integrated human person), and
satisfaction of our
basic needs.” Everything
else is extraneous. Something
for all of us to think about!
In the Middle Ages, Blessed John Duns
Scotus
wrote, “Crux
probat omnia”, “the Cross challenges
everything.” In
a contemplative practice, our Confirmation
candidates pray slowly the words, “Life
is 1,000
joys; Life is 1,000 tears.” Even in
Armonk!! Do their
parents and other adults get the message
from the world
in which we are immersed?
Buddhist traditions speak of what the
Christian
tradition points out, “God in in you; God
is in me; God is
in us; God is in all. Christians name it,
“Transcendental
Anthropological Reality, the Deep
Incarnation, the Divine
Indwelling, the Immanence and Transcendence
of God.
When speaking about the power of prayer, we
recall that the Divine permeates all
reality. Catholics say,
with St Paul, “each
of us is a (cell) in the Body of
Christ.” The
theory is that Christ Who lives in you
lives in others as well. Therefore, prayer
for others has to
be of value because it is the same Christ
Jesus involved
with the pray-er and the recipient of the
prayer!
However, it is all right. Our destiny is
the destiny
of Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
He asks us
and enables us to try to surrender and to let
go and to trust
the God of Mystery in the journey of human
life.
If we trust, with God’s Help, in a Living
and
Loving God Who is our
allotted portion and our
cup, then it becomes
easier for us to say in and through
and with Christ Jesus, that ultimately,
while we experience
the shadows of life, the
God of Life will not
abandon our souls to the Nether World. Trust
Jesus! He has seen it all!! 062710AD
jfq
Sunday June 20, 2010AD
Twelfth Sunday in Greentime
This Hymn We (Still) Sing At Baptism
The first
followers of Jesus called themselves
several
different names. Such names included
the
“Solidarity” (ha Echad).
One way that we self-identify is the Jesus
Movement in
Armonk. With God’s Help, this simple
title
re-inforces Who is the basis of our movement,
Jesus
the Lord. With God’s Help, we try to
view reality
in a different paradigm, with what
we call
“Jesus lenses”, a Christ consciousness viz.,
the Kingdom
of God.
One religious sociologist suggested that
there is a trajectory
in which any movement
needs to be
aware. First, there is the Mentor (for
us, God-
man), who presents a new worldview, an
alternate
worldview to that of conventional wisdom
(aka the
System). Second, the Mentor establishes
a movement
that sharing and spreading the
new
worldview. Third, the movement develop
into a
machine, seeking efficient . Fourth, if the
movement-machine
forgets the vision of the Mentor
who
established it, then it becomes a monument
or musemn, a
curiosity or an antique.
Today, we hear a very early baptismal
hymn today
as our second reading from St Paul’s
letter to
the Galatians. He was writing, probably
in the early
50’s of the first century, AD, and he
was quoting
a baptismal hymn that the Jesus
movement in
Galatia already knew well. “For all
of
you who were baptized into Christ have
clothed
yourselves with Christ. There is
1) neither Jew nor
Greek, there is 2) neither
slave
nor free, there is 3)
not make and female,
for
you are all one (cf. above ha echad)
in
Christ Jesus.
We know that in the first century, the
pressing
question was the first part of the baptismal
triad. There
was a clear pluralism of biblical
responses on
how the Jesus-movement fit into the
mother
religion of Judaism. This became particularly
an acute question
when non-Jews (Gentiles)
started to
outnumber the Jewish Christians who
were the
core of the Jesus-Movement.
However,
Christians, by and large, lived
with little
qualms of conscience about the second
part of the
triad. It was really not until after the
French
Revolution (not the Declaration of Independence
nor the USA
Constitution ) that Christians
question the
morality of slavery (spurred on
by the
Quakers. Most could not envision a world
without
slavery because it was so entrenched in
the system.
It boggles the minds of many Christians
today that
our ancestors thought nothing of
slavery as a
moral question.
It was only in the twentieth century that
the third
part of the triad has come under scrutiny.
Church and
state both ponder the question
of the role
of women in the world. The implications
are still to
be considered.
However, in a way that the people who
sang the
baptismal hymn in 55AD, even more is
involved. In
addition to the triad that there is no
Jew
or Gentile, slave or free, male or female,
all
are one in Christ Jesus, in the twenty first
century, AD,
more and more (though not all) see
that the all
who are one in Christ Jesus, share
the same
global homestead, the same village, the
garden
planet of the universe. Theologians speak
now of the need
to raise consciousness about the
planet that
we all share (and in many cases, have
abused.) As
early as 1982, the United Nations issued
a
Declaration of the Rights of Nature. Lest
the one
human family become guilty of specieism,
viz.,
“everything exists for human consumption”,
we need to
become sensitive to the fact that all
reality is
related. Pope John Paul said in 1979,
that the
right to life extends also to the natural
world as
well.
150 years ago, Chief Seattle wrote a manifesto
to the White
settlers out west. He said
among
things, “1)Humankind did not weave the
web of life.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to
ourselves.
2) We are part of the earth and the
earth is
part of us. 3) The Earth is precious to God
and to harm
the earth os to heap contempt upon
its Creator.
Even white men cannot be exempt
from the
earth’s common destiny. We just may be
brothers
(and sisters) after all. We shall
see.” ( Att:
BP et al., NB!!!)
Thomas Berry, a prominent (ecologian/
theologian)
raised three points 1) When did the
automobile
become an enemy of the planet? 2) Not
to hear the
natural world is not to hear the Divine
in God’s
Primal Revelation. 3) We need to establish
a rapport
among the divine, the natural and
the human,
in an epoch called, the Ecozoic Era.
As we hear
today, the baptismal hymn,
already
known and sung in Galatia (present day
Turkey) a
mere twenty years after the death and
Resurrection
of Jesus challenges the movement to
focus on the
Mentor, God-man Whose vision we
share! Just
as all are one in Christ Jesus, the one
human family
needs to realize, as well, in this
consciousness
that we inhabit one common homestead
which most
of us have taken for granted as existing only for me and us. 062010AD
jfq
Sunday, June 13, 2010AD
Eleventh Sunday in Greentime
Joanna Who?
There is an opinion that Pope Benedict wrote his best selling book, Jesus of Nazareth, as a commentary of the media hype over the DaVinci Code, a few years ago. The Pope says that the book represents his personal search for the face of Jesus. Hopefully, just as many would read the Pope’s book as the many who mindlessly gobbled up Dan Brown’s book. (Do you ever feel that you might have been taken?)
The crucial figure of Mary Magdalene appears in our Gospel this weekend. Recall, please – THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. REPEAT THAT ONE MORE TIME!!! THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. Dan Brown probably knew that when he wrote the book, but what difference when you are laughing all the way to the bank! Do you feel as you’ve been had. You should!!
Sadly, the second part of the Gospel today is really charged with food for thought, but for which manipulated minds might not be capable. St Luke tells us that Jesus had cast out seven demons from the Magdalene. This is quaint, but bizarre language in the opinion of many post moderns. Yet, the use of demons in Scriptures also indicated in many cases, whatever obsesses us and keeps us from focusing on what is truly human. Who can deny that many individuals, families, groups and communities might be described as obsessed and not focused on what is truly human. The demonic today might mean addictions, compulsions and enmeshments that beset individuals and groups. How frequently, honest, yet obsessed people might say to themselves, “If only I (or we) could rise above this all.” Such might involve mindless concern for possessions, power, pleasure, prestige. (Some even are adding petroleum as addictive!) Jesus’ empowering Mary Magdalene to snap out of it, see reality as it really is, smell God’s coffee, and in the process, get a new life makes the statement about her neither quaint nor bizarre at all. With Jesus’ Help, individuals and cultures could do the same.
However, there is another lady mentioned today, viz., Joanna, the wife of King Herod’s steward, Chuza, who provided for them out of their resources. Whoever the lady was, she was not a marginalized figure. Her husband was on Kings Herod’s payroll. There were a few shekels in her change purse. Joanna could be described as a middle class wife of a management figure in her day. However, here, St Luke describes her as a part of the growing “Jesus Movement” who will soon be on their way up to Jerusalem for the great events to occur then. An unescorted wife following an itinerant preacher must have raised some eyebrows. Did Jesus eat his meals with any and everybody on the journey up to Jerusalem? In addition, she is picking up part of the tab! One might wonder what evil spirit or malady Jesus cast out from her that caused such life-altering behavior modification! Something more is clearly going on in this story than meets the eye.
In addition, the person of Joanna, the wife of Chuza, possibly recovering, because of Jesus, from an addictive pathology, slips under the radar screen for most folks. She represented the un-convention mores of Jesus and His Movement.
St Luke tells us that Joanna continued on the way up to Jerusalem. In fact, he names her (and Mary Magdalene) among the ladies who arrive at Jesus’ empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning and who announce the empty tomb to the rest of the Jesus Movement. (The group did not believe the women.) St Luke tells that several women who had come up to Jerusalem were there when the Spirit gave birth to the Church on Pentecost morning, c. 30 AD.
Pope
Benedict writes of these ladies. “Yet
Luke makes clear—and the other Gospels also show it in all sorts of ways -- that “many women” belonged to the more intimate
community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an
essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the
foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.”
Apparently, in the very earliest days of the Jesus Movement within Judaism, most were captured by the Consciousness of Jesus (aka the Kingdom of God), they saw reality in a different light, in a alternative paradigm. Two thoughts from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians bring that New Consciousness to light. 1) The baptismal hymn quoted in Gal 3.28, “In Christ, there is no Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.” In addition as St Paul says today in today’s, “(We) have been crucified with Christ. The lives we live now are not our own. Christ is living within us (and we are living in Christ). We still live our human lives, but they are lives of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, Who loved us and gave Himself for us. The ladies might have played a bigger role in the earliest days of the Jesus Movement. What might have happened?
Sadly, a presumption that many Western thinkers make is that we are always in advance over the past. Some say that the West has made Progress a goddess!
However, the wisdom and teaching of the past might get lost with “advances forward.”
Obviously, we focused on Mary Magdalene because of her greater prominence in the Gospels. However, imagine what Dan Brown (or a committed Christian woman) might do with the figure of Joanna in reflecting on the role of women in the Jesus Movement then (and now, as well)? 061310AD jfq
Sun, June 6, 2010AD
Corpus Christi
What’s
In a Meal?
A
student once asked if Jesus had a weight problem. The teacher wondered why the student would
ask the question. The student’s response
was, “He was always eating.”
One of the characteristics of Jesus’ public ministry was
his table-fellowship. As more than one biblical scholar said, if Jesus were
invited to dinner, the tabletalk would be very interesting. (In St Luke’s Gospel, one author cites 14
different meals. Jesus would dine by
whomover the invitation was sent.. His
rationale was “Well people do not need a doctor; the sick do.” We are all a
mass of contradictions, even the self-righteous.
Not all agreed with His modus operandi. It is hard for us to imagine the social
taboos that Jesus broke down with his table fellowship. 1) One only ate with
one’s intimates, viz., one’s family or one’s closest friends, usually on the
same social level. 2) One ate only with those who kept Kosher laws. In the world back then, most people could not
afford to practice Kosher. These were called
Ame Haaretz (the people of the land).
(It was not a complement.)
Jesus violated the social mores over and over again. It was one of the reasons why the “good
people” were suspicious of Him. He was
attacking the religious parameters of Israel by His open-mindedness.
(While many call Jesus a “Marginal Jew”, more and more speak
today of Jesus as a “Halakic Jew.” (The Halakah
was the guide book by which observant Jews were to respond to God’s covenant.)
Interestingly, there were two topics on which Jesus was tougher than the
consensus of most of His contemporaries.
1) He apparently was strict about His teaching on divorce. 2) He
apparently was tough on taking oaths, calling on God to bear witness to the
truth of what we say.
However, on other questions, Jesus apparently did not deviate from the
consensus of many of His contemporaries. (Biblical studies tell us that it was
after the destruction of Jerusalem and the construction of rabbinical Judaism
(without a Temple now!!) that Judaism became stricter. In stories about Jesus’ feeding the
multitudes, the guiding principle of Jesus and of much of Judaism is that human
need trumps the strict observance of the Torah.
Interestingly, human need trumped strict observance on
more than one occasion when it came to physical hunger. Today’s Gospel story
today tells us of an incident that is testified to in all four Gospels, the
multiplication of the loaves and fish.
The story reminds us of a picnic in which we meet different people. Such a concept would have been unthinkable
back then. In addition, such a large gathering of people threatens civic order
as well. Since the multiplication of
loaves and fish appears in all 4 Gospels (in Mark, two separate times), such a
gathering might not have been a one-time thing for Jesus, but that He might have
hosted these grass-roots meals more often.
As a result, Jesus threatened both temple and state by gathering people
of all walks of life together during which dietary and social restrictions as
well as crowd control were challenged.
As we celebrate Corpus Christi today, and next Sunday,
the 40th Anniversary of the Dedication of our Parish Church and the 6th
Anniversary Dedication of St Francis Hall, our parish center, and St Anthony’s
bread and the beginning of the summer, Jesus reminds us that venues don’t count
ultimately. People are together in
Christ in a variety of settings and we hope that barriers break down and
community in Christ becomes stronger. Don’t forget to top off Corpus Christi by
attending our Annual Parish BBQ, our local Jesus’ Movement version of today’s
Gospel story.
Jesus used communal meals as a means of gathering the
folks, sharing His View of the Kingdom of God, somehow and sharing the same
food with all. He teaches us many things
through His methodology.
He teaches us a “New
Consciousness”, where we take seriously that fact that God is the Father of all
and that Christ is Jesus is our Elder Brother. We are, indeed, one family. We
all share DNA with a female from East Africa 160,000 years ago — even Jesus
does!!
In 2010
AD, in Christ, we still gather in His Name (our Elder Brother), tell stories
about Him, share His favorite food (the Food by which we remember Him in a
special way), commit ourselves to the New Consciousness that He wants us to
have. Such a gathering can only
re-inforce the Force-Field that the Body of Christ is. The Power of that Force-Field travels with us
when we leave our communal gathering. Please God, the lives we touch feel its
effect. A nation that is in a sad
transition about basic civility with one another and about our environment needs
the reminder and call to snap out of it.
Our world needs to catch up to Jesus.
Our Elder Brother has more of a handle on reality than we have. Party with Jesus often and come to share His
Vision. 061310AD jfq
Sunday May 30, 2010AD
Trinity Sunday
Are We Surprised?
Many years ago, theologians said
that the principal creed of the Jesus Movement was Iesous Kurios (Jesus is Lord). As Christian thought
developed, we came to hear of a hierarchy of truths. Karl Rahner said, in an idea later adopted by
Vatican II, that the three cardinals truths of Christianity were 1) the
Trinity; 2) the Incarnation (cf. Jesus is Lord, above); 3)and Grace (the Offer
and Presence of God again and again in our lives) leading us to full life.
Nevertheless, he also said that the
Trinity as a doctrine to modern Christians had somehow become extraneous. If the doctrine were abolished, it probably
would not effect very much of our quests for meaning in our lives. Yet, the doctrine of the Trinity would never
go away. In the past, some Christians
were embarrassed when the accusation was made that our religion was
polytheistic, viz., that we worshipped three gods, rather than One God. That
was so yesterday!!!!
Because
of the relationship developing now between science and theology, we are
recovering what our medieval ancestors knew. If Truth is one, then, there
should be no insoluble conflicts between science and theology. In an interesting way, modern astronomy is
becoming a means of validating a central mystery of Christian faith.
The Hubble Telescope continues to
circle the earth after over 20 years. It
sends back consistently beautiful pictures of our universe. Indeed, there are those who say that Hubble
is able to photograph the very rim of the universe as the universe continues to
expand after 14 billion years.
Two things are immediately
noticeable. First, the cosmos is
incredibly beautiful. Most photos coming back are quite impressive in their colors,
etc. Second, we see patterns in the galaxies that are elliptical. Apparently,
everything in outer space exists in relationship to something else. We can note not a completely circular
pattern, but rather an elliptical pattern way out there. We speak of elliptical orbits.
However, there is something more in
the world of inner space, what is going on in the inner space of reality. Electron microscopes show us today the world
of inner space. We can see electrons spinning around nuclei pf protons and
neutrons. When the atom was first
discovered, it was thought that the electron circled the nucleus in a
consistent pattern. Now we are seeing
that the patterns are unpredictable, but orbital. In the world of inner space, nothing exists
autonomously. We speak again of
elliptical orbits.
We all learn as Catholics that we
are all created in the “image and likeness of God”. In fact, we read on
very the first page of the Bible! Somehow, there is a family resemblance
between God and us humans, the pinnacle of God’s creation .We don’t always take
that seriously about ourselves and hence, we do not always take it seriously
with others either. Still, the great Truth remains.
For years, Catholics have rejoiced
that there are three principal ways in which the family resemblance are
apparent. First, ultimately, the Trinity is a Mystery
(a truth infinitely knowable and unknowable at the same time.) Aren’t we all
mysteries, even to ourselves (a truth infinitely knowable and unknowable at the
same time)? Second, just as the three
Persons of the Trinity are Equal, which early ecumenical councils
stressed, all human persons are equal. (We make a big fuss about that on July
4, but we do not always live the reality in our dealings with one another. Third, God in the Trinity is Relational. The Father relates to the Son; the Son
relates to the Father; the Relationship is the Holy Spirit. We become who
we are, not just the matter and energy that we occupy in space and time, but in
the relationships which help us to thrive as children of God (and of the
universe.)
People
are starting to refer to the universe as a relational matrix and as a cosmic
web. Nothing or nobody is excluded. You
cannot know much about yourself without knowing something about the mystery of
the “others” in our lives.
There is even more. The ancient and medieval taught us many times
that God is in all things. Today, their doctrine is called the Doctrine
of the Deep Incarnation. Either God is all things, or God is in no
things. In a more Catholic perspective,
Franciscan theologians proclaimed, “Crux probat omnia, The Cross determines everything.”
The Trinitarian God is universal;
the Trinitarian God is everywhere; the Trinitarian God has to be in all things.
Therefore, the Trinitarian God exists relationally throughout space
(both outer and inner).
But wait a minute. You and I exist
in God’s universe now. Therefore, the Trinitarian God exists in us now; we
exist in the Trinitarian God now.
In a world now dominated by “Myspace”,
we need to recall God exists in us and we exist in God. It is a useful reminder to beige Catholics
that “Myspace” is relativized with the realization that God is at the
center of my space, not me. It certainly should make a difference to a serious
Catholic. We need Silence; we need
Solitude; we need to Slow down and Seek to God’s Silent Voice!!!!!!!!
During the wonderful summer ahead,
don’t forget Who gave us the gift of the summer as well as the Presence of God
in all that happens. Think about coming
to daily Mass once a week (and bring the kids and then, take them out for
breakfast). Bring yourself and your kids
for a twenty minute sit in the church. Don’t forget that God comes first
(particularly on summer Sundays.
053010AD
jfq
Sunday, May 23, 2010AD
Pentecost Sunday
The Feast of the Holy Spirit
Giver of Life
Every week for over 1600 years, our Catholic ancestors and ourselves have prayed the Nicene Creed as our response to the Liturgy of the Word on Sunday mornings. Every week for over 1600 years, we have professed our faith in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. Inadvertently, familiarity breeds mindlessness. On this Pentecost Sunday, the day in which we celebrate the Gift of the Holy Spirit, we might reflect on the implication of these words in our Creed.
More and
more, these days, contemporary Catholics are experience two paradoxes. First, when photos come back from outer space
through the Hubble Telescope, savvy observers notice two things, viz.,the
patterns of elliptical orbits present even in the outer rims of the cosmos
and the beauty of the universe.
Localizing our thoughts on Earth, our global village, we can meditate on the beauty and wonder of it all. Imagine the most beautiful place that you have ever experienced personally. Frequently, three venues are commonplace for many. We wonder and are in awe on our ancestral homes, whence our families came. Italians say “La tierra chiama” .(The earth calls.) We are told that there is such a thing as “genetic memory”. Even if you have never been to your ancestral home, when you arrive there, you feel that you are at home. The place is already in your genes. Second, we are in awe of scenic mountain scenes or rugged landscape. Flying over the Rockies and/or the Alps (especially if they are snow-covered) can be a moment of wonder and awe for many. Third, scenes involving water capture the wonder or awe of many. Scientists think that the sea reminds us in a very primitive, primordial way that all life on earth somehow came from the sea. We say also, “La mar chiama”. (The sea calls.)
Catholic theologians speak these days of the Deep Incarnation, viz., if God is anywhere, the omnipresent God has to be everywhere. While we focus on the human person alone as created in the divine image and likeness, God is present throughout creation if God is God. The implications of this are mind-boggling, yet they are logical. That is why the Holy Spirit is the Dominum et Vivificantem, the Lord and the Giver of Life. Somehow, the Presence of God’s Spirit permeates all reality, not just some reality, as the life-giving Divine Breath. As St Paul said, “In God we live and move and have our being.”
However, there is a shadow reality that offsets the sense of wonder. It is the sad reality of wasting resources. (Did anyone ever wonder what would happen if an off-shore oilwell in the Gulf of Mexico were ever to spring a leak?) People speak of the fact that humans might be guilty of the sin of specieism. We forget the fact that we share the planet with thousand, if not millions, of other species. Decisions that we make (or think we make) have implications for other species in the planet as well. There is a new word, ecocide, that we add to our list of structural sins. In 1990, Pope John Paul II made the startling statement, “Respect for life and for the dignity of the human person extends also to the rest of creation.” While the human person alone is created in the image and likeness of God, Pope John Paul inferred that the living Earth is God’s beloved creation, deserving of care.
Catholics
believe that God is both immanent (present in all reality) and transcendent
(beyond reality) at the same time. One theologian asked recently what does “the
command to love one’s neighbor” as oneself mean in all this. His response was
the Samaritan, the outcast, the enemy? Yes, of course. (Not that we obey
this command so well with our human family.) Yes, yes, of course, these are
our neighbors. But it is also the whale, the dolphin, the rainforest. These
days, we might add the Gulf of Mexico. Our neighbor is the entire community
of life.”
Usually, on Pentecost Sunday, we reflect on the Gift of the Holy Spirit on the Jesus Movement, then and now. We have become recipients of the Spirit again and again and again, whenever we say yes to God in faith. As we remember liturgically the Coming of the Spirit, we recall that somehow, God ‘s Spirit is omnipresent.
The Spirit lives in Christians to let other humans know that somehow known only to God, that the Spirit dwells in them as well. All our sisters and brothers need to remember the Deep Incarnation in all creation. As Rabbi Joseph Heschell said many years ago, “Humans are the cantors of the universe, acknowledging and praising the Divine Presence in all things.”
Lest Catholics be guilty of the structural sin of specieism, in which humans exploit the Earth for our own self-aggrandizement now, we try, with God’s Help, to alert others to Pope John Paul’s words “Respect for life extends to the rest of creation.” If more heeded his prophetic words, we would not be confronting now the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not about the Gulf of Mexico also, now, next it will be the Atlantic and so on.
We remind one another that God’s Spirit is in all of us. This Pentecost, we recall that the Lord and Giver of Life permeates all reality. Let us behave more appropriately to what that means in 2010AD. 052310AD jfq
Sunday, May 16, 2010AD
7th Sunday of Easter
The
Baptist or the Deacon?
In
our Gospel reading, today, Jesus prays for you and me and all of us at the
conclusion of the Last Supper. The
prayer that Jesus offered before the beginning of His passion, death and
Resurrection is called by many, now, “the Prayer of the Good Shepherd,” It
speaks of how the Lord Jesus brings together God the Father, Himself and in His
Paraclete-Spirit, “His own”, viz., those at the Last Supper and all who become
believers because of the witness of “His own” together into the Trinitarian
orbit. (There is where we are mentioned.)
The
Fourth evangelist is aware that the Jesus Movement is going to last a long time
in which every generation is included. Through the Christ Quantum, the
Trinitarian God is present and available to all.
We
see an early example of this dynamic in the account of the death of St Stephen
(the Proto-Martyr) in our first reading.
Though he was a younger contemporary in the Jesus Movement, he did not
experience the physical Presence of Jesus before Jesus’ death and
Resurrection. Rather, he appears on the
scene early on, perhaps within 3 or 4 years after the crucifixion. His murder was probably, c.35.
However,
St Stephen spoke Greek, not Aramaic, and he was probably part of a group of
Jewish people who returned to the Holy City from overseas. (There is evidence, indeed, that many Greek
speaking Jews came home to Jerusalem as an act of religious commitment to the
Holy Land, if not the Temple.)
St Stephen was caught in the
crossfire that represented the challenge that the Jesus Movement posed to the
Jewish authorities. (Recall the heavies
in the Gospel of St Luke were the Jewish authorities, not the Jewish
people.) The authorities represent
archetypal entrenched religion that will always defend itself. (One might
wonder what would happen if Jesus were to come today to Rome as He did to
Jerusalem 2000 years ago.)
At first, the religious leaders
harass and challenge the Jesus movement; next they imprisoned members of the
Movement; finally, the authorities
threaten with death (and carry it out on) outspoken members of the Jesus
Movement, viz., St Stephen.
St Luke describes the deaths of
three prophet-martyrs. First, as someone said recently, John the Baptist did
not go down without a fight. The Baptist
was engaged in a “verbal food fight” with King Herod and ended up having his
head handed to him, literally.
Second, we heard the account of the
death of the innocent Prophet-Martyr par excellence, Jesus of Nazareth on Palm
Sunday. Recall that Jesus died forgiving His executioners and surrendering,
letting go and trusting the God of Mystery.
Third, we hear today of the death of St
Stephen, who, indeed, names the reality of leaders who care more about
self-perpetuation than innocence, similar to the Baptist. However, the death of
the young deacon resembles more clearly the death of Jesus. St Stephen dies forgiving his murderers,
after he (like Jesus) is dragged out of the city for execution. Next, his dying breath involves commending
himself to God, just as Jesus did (“Lord, receive my spirit.”)
The difference between John the
Baptist and Stephen is what we call today the “Christ Quantum”, the vibrational
field, known as the Body of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus made the
difference.
You and I and all of us share in the
same Spirit. Our mission is the same as
St Stephen’s. In the Easter Season, we
hear frequently the proclamation that faith comes through hearing. Today, our
modern culture might make the statement differently. Humans have always been
mimetic beings, We tend to be imitators, rather than innovators. A significant statement on television is
about the father confronting the son with illicit drugs. When the father asks
the son, “Why did you start this? ” The child’s response is “I learned it from
you”. Today, we might say, “Values are caught, not taught”. Another way of putting it is “Actions
speak louder than words” Even a third way of understanding obvious paradox,
“Don’t do as I do, rather do as I say.”
St Stephen learned how to behave
from Jesus, even though he had not met Jesus face to face. The witness of others intervened in Stephen’s
case. In this season when we honor both
mothers and fathers, we recall the words of the baptismal liturgy. The
father (and his wife) will be the first teachers of their child in the ways of
faith and love. May they always be the
best of teachers, bearing witness to their faith by what they say and do in
Christ Jesus. St Stephen says to
us, “Pass that by us again and think about very carefully.” Keep in touch
weekly, as we recall that God always comes first, even on summer Sundays . 051610AD jfq
May 9, 2010AD
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Put Us in, Coach!!
On the
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Jesus
re-assures
us (viz., His Own) of the Presence of the
Paraclete-Spirit.. Now
that He is not physically
present
with us as He was then, He remains in the
Holy
Spirit Whom He sends as the Father’s Gift.
All
language about God and our relationship
with God
is inadequate. Therefore, religious language
has to b
e metaphoric. Ergo, God is like a……
The two
biblical words for Spirit are ruach
( in
Hebrew) and pneuma (in Greek). Both words
have
multivalent meanings. First, ruach describes
the
wind, the unseen force that is life-giving, yet unpredictable
in its
effects. Second, ruach , pneuma
describe
one’s life-breath, when we stop breathing,
we are
“out of here”. Third, ruach describes the
energy
for ordinary folks to do extraordinary things.
The
Shack, a
very popular novel, appeared
recently
that sold literally millions of copies. For
those
who read the book, the “parable” or story presented
a very
different view of the Holy Trinity.
While
Jesus is rather easy to recognize, God the Father
is hard
to grasp at first. Yet, most Catholics
(who
read the book) catch on.
However,
it is view of the Holy Spirit that
confused
many, with even Name changes of the
Character
as (S)He(?) is depicted. The Third Person
of the
Trinity becomes an non-descript but constant
Presence
in a variety of ways.
This view
of the Third Person of the Trinity
reflects
the ambivalent way in which the Holy Spirit
is
perceived by Christians. Like the wind, one’s
breath,
or energy, the Spirit is hard to describe. In
addition,
other images, such as the Dove, the Fire
and the
Water imagery which the Evangelists used
represent
Reality hard to pin down.
For
example, the Holy Spirit is like the wind,
one’s
life-breath and an energy to do what God
wants of
us. Other theologians have adopted what St
Paul, a
Greek speaking Jew, who believed in Jesus,
meant by
the word. The Holy Spirit is a troublemaker,
a
taskmaster, a taunter Who prompts us to
believe
in Christ and to act what we believe.
Christ
Jesus lives in me (and I live in Christ
Jesus.
The
Spirit energizes us to behave as such.
The
Fourth Evangelist describes the Holy
Spirit
as the Paraclete. The surprising word has a
variety
of meanings as well. A paraclete has been
described
traditionally as a consoler, a counselor, a
defense
attorney, an advocate.
However,
the understanding has recently expanded
into
other metaphorical ways to understand
the role
that the Paraclete-Spirit fulfills in, with
and
through us. Now, we see the Holy Spirit as a
mentor
in authentic human living, a significant
Presence
in our lives, guiding us how to live as
God
wants. In
most traditional cultures, it was the
mother’s
brother, the boy’s uncle, who taught the
young
boy what it was to be a young man. In contemporary
American
Catholicism, we use the image
of a teacher,
a guidance counselor or a coach to telling
us “to
get the lead out and do better than we care
to do in
our lassitude and complacency”.
The
Coach Spirit teaches us to do in the
Spirit
an honest self-evaluation to discover what my
sins are
(and
they are there), rather than focusing
on other
peoples sin. It is less fun, but more honest
to see
oneself as the Spirit. I might not be the person
as I
masquerade (even fooling myself sometimes),
others
might not be so bad as I judge. “Get rid of
the
plank in your eye before you remove
the
splinter in your neighbor’s eye.”
Jesus
tries to transform us from ritual religion
to
relational religion. Rituals are what we do; relationships
are what
make us who we are. Now,
Catholics
celebrate the Mystery of the Trinity, one
God in
three persons. We have stress that God is relational.
What
Jesus says is that, through the Holy
Spirit,
God brings us into the Trinitarian Life.
In this
way, can we see the Paraclete-
Spirit as the
Christ Quantum, the Presence and ongoing
effect
of the Incarnate God. As a result, we
are
brought into the very Life of the Trinity because
we are
living, here and now, in the vibrational or
force
field, the energy of Christ Jesus.
Next
Sunday, Jesus prays the Prayer of the
Good Shepherd,
in John 17, as our Gospel. He prays
that God
binds all Jesus’ Own into relationship
with God
the Father and Christ Jesus in the Holy
Spirit.
The following Sunday, we celebrate Pentecost
(the
Feast of the Holy Spirit) as we complete
Easter
with the outpouring of the Spirit. (Don’t forget
to wear
red to celebrate our belief that we are all
clothed
with the Holy Spirit!!) The following Sunday,
we
celebrate Trinity Sunday as we reflect on
the
Divine Indwelling in us and our dwelling in God.
Again,
religious language has to be metaphoric. The
Holy
Spirit is like our Coach challenging and empowering
us to
live God’s life here and now. Put us
in,
Coach!! 050910AD jfq
Sunday, May 2, 2010AD
Easter Sunday V
Listen to
Your Mama:
Many years ago, there was an ad on television
for a new brand of margarine. Mother Nature
was asked to sample the new product and she liked
it. However, when Mother Nature was told that it
was
oleo, not butter, she got quite upset and said, “It
is not nice to fool Mother Nature” as claps of thunder
and lightning appeared around her. Her words
were sadly prophetic.
This weekend, we remember the publication
by the American Catholic Bishops of their masterful
letter, “The Challenge of Peace — God’s Gift and
Our Response” Three terms became part of Catholic
parlance
after that landmark event, viz., consistent
life
ethic, disarmament of the human heart and
a
new moment in Earth’s history.
The USA bishops wrote in 1983 that the human
race had a new phase in creation. Their primary
reference was the rise of nuclear weapons, in which
they said that were they to be used, the process of
creation that God is following would be able to be
challenged by humans and human institutions. Since
1965, the development of MAD (mutually assured
destruction) by the USA and the former USSR could
destroy
life on this planet as God intended. (“We
could
un-do God’s creation.”)
Now, while the super-powers have seen, generally,
the menace of nuclear war, other threats have
emerged. Now we face serious moral problems for
the development of new weaponry, such as “smart
bombs” and non-nuclear conventional weaponry that
can inflict “collateral damage” on innocent civilians.
We are becoming immune to the reality that scores
or hundreds of people and their children die and all
most can say in response is “Sorry about that”. (As
early as 1950, Pope Pius XII said that our human
family must remember the threat (minimal then)
from ABC warfare, viz., “atomic, biological and
chemical”. 60 years later, those words were prophetic.
In addition, we face serious moral problems
with human cloning and human stem cell research.
Catholics
forget that just because we can do
something
does not necessarily give the moral
right
to do so.
However, an idea that has come into its own
recently is the moral problems we face with the resources
of Mother Nature. As herself said many
years, “It is not nice to fool with Mother Nature”.
Be careful, be very careful.
Some geo-theologians have suggested that
much of the problems that our human community
faces might be due to Western Civilization’s acceptance
of the thought of Rene Descartes (of “I think,
therefore, I am” fame). The traditional notion of Immanent
Transcendence (God both within and yet
greater than Reality) went awry when humans made
their own minds the arbiter and definer of reality.
There are those who said that our adoption of
Descartes’ paradigm create a “dualistic mindset” in
people. My mind interprets reality and therefore, my
mind is apart from reality, creating a “mind vs matter
mentality.” Even transcendence itself (the Mystery
of God) is subject to the scrutiny of my mind. The
universe and all its components, therefore, come to
be seen as a machine paradigm that runs basically
efficiently even if my mind has not figured it all out
— yet. (Much of this was the mindset of the Deists
in the 18th century Enlightenment, including some
of our “Founding Fathers’. Reality is like a watch
that runs well according to the way that it has been
made (by the Divine Watchmaker). Since it runs efficiently,
the Divine Watchmaker leaves it alone.
Therefore, the Divine Watchmaker exists someplace,
but by and large, is not necessary around or operative
anymore, basically not needed. (Sound familiar??)
A Creator apart from creation no longer
makes sense (to me!)
Many have become aware that the resources
of our planet are limited, not unlimited. We have
already fought wars over petroleum to drive our cars.
In 1914,, there were 1 million cars in the world; in
2010, there were over 1 billion cars in the world. As
one geo-theologian wrote, “When did the car become
an enemy to the planet?”
In addition, we are hearing (and it makes
sense) that wars in the 21st century will be fought
over potable water as well. Something as bizarre as a
turf conflict between North and South Carolina over
which state owns a like have already happened. In
arid areas (due to global warming or not) where
populations are growing, then wars over potable water
are not that far-fetched.
Much has transpired since 1983 when the
Bishops published their landmark statement (of
which New York’s Cardinal O’Connor was a key
player) Still as we recall that we live in a “New Moment
in Human History”, we recall that even the circulstances
under which the term was coined has expanded
in ways unimaginable even in 1983. Be
careful. Be very careful!! 050210AD jfq
Sunday, April 25,
2010AD
Easter Sunday, IV
Jesus
Has Some Little Lambs
Every year, on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we worship
Jesus under one of His most appealing titles, the Good Shepherd. Even
though we do not live in a pastoral setting around here, the imagery is
enticing and people respond.
However, as people in a pastoral setting
know, apparently sheep are not the most lovable of animals. They can be very cantankerous and smelly and
willful. It could only be a good shepherd that would really love them.
The image of God as the Shepherd goes
back into the Hebrew Scriptures.
Usually, Psalm 23, the most beloved of all the psalms, comes immediately
to our minds. “YHWH is my Shepherd.” In today’s responsorial psalm, which
apparently was an entrance hymn to liturgy in King Solomon’s Temple. Although
the citizens of Jerusalem were now urban, they still referred to themselves as
the “sheep of YHWH.”
In
our Gospel today, from John 10, viz., the Good Shepherd chapter, Jesus
Self-identifies with His Father’s nickname.
Jesus speaks of how His sheep hear His Voice. There is room for
reflection here as well for us. First of
all, each individual sheep hears the Voice of the Good Shepherd. Second, the flock as a flock responds in
unison to the Voice of the Good Shepherd.
Third, the individual sheep of the flock have a relationship with one
another.
It is for this reason that Avery Cardinal
Dulles, SJ, who resided at Fordham University, down in the Bronx, has referred
to the Little Flock of the Good Shepherd as one of the ways in which Catholics
identify their relationship to God and to Christ and to one another. Writing thirty years ago, Cardinal Dulles
said that because of the development of various lay movements with USA
Catholicism, such as Marriage Encounter, the Cursillo Movement, the Charismatic
Renewal and other lay ministries, it was a unique gift of the American church
to world Catholicism.
The Catholic scene was much different
thirty years than it is now, sad to say.
For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the post-modern
phase that so many traditional institutions encounter after the pivotal year,
1968. Most traditional institutions have undergone what has been called
“de-construction”. New views of church and
family have come into conventional wisdom with the result that many do
not take traditional values.
Sadly,
the growth of Catholic Communities as Little Flocks of the Good Shepherd has
waned sadly in the recent past. With
two of the basic traditional institutions undergoing scrutiny, the church and
the family, the traditional symbiotic relationship between family and church
has weakened. We have generations now of good-hearted Catholics, who do not
know very much about what their faith is all about. In addition, certainly, in
the past months, with the sad revelations about cover-ups of clergy accused of
abuse, our leadership has brought difficult times upon the total Church
community. Their public relations staff
needs to get a little more real.
Sadly, too, many are so hard pressed for time
that it is seen as a burden to require people to do anything more than the
attendance at Sunday Mass (and keep it under an hour, please!!)
Every
sheep in the flock, at one time or another, has to walk through the dark
valley. We call it the Paschal
Mystery, when we experience the painful realities of life, (one’s mid-life
crisis is only one predictable event!).
If there has not been sufficient grounding in faith by both church and
family when the going is good (as it is for so many of us in our setting around
here), then when the shadow side of life confronts us, then, it might be too
late to look for the answers that one should have been gathering earlier.
The
image of the Good Shepherd is always appropriate. However, these days, Cardinal Dulles probably
would not use it as readily since so much has changed in our Catholic social
setting. Still, it is a reminder to us
that when we do walk through the dark valley, the Good Shepherd has been
there all along. On good days as
well as bad, many each of Jesus’ sheep and the entire flock listen in
unison to His Voice and respond accordingly.
It is then that He will, indeed, lead us to the verdant pasture. He is doing it all along, but most of us are
too busy to realize it. 042510AD
jfq
Sunday, April 18, 2010AD
Third Sunday of Easter
er and Us -- Young and
Old
Our Gospel reading this weekend appears as an epilogue to the original concluding chapter of the Fourth Gospel, viz., Jn 20. (You will recall that last weekend, we celebrated Fearless Thomas, who had the courage to be out of the place where the Jesus Movement was in hiding, as were the ladies led by St Mary Magdalene who had the courage to go to the tomb!!) Last week, we heard what were meant to be Jesus’ last words in the original Gospel of John, “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.” (That’s us, folks, if we accept God’s Grace.)
This weekend, we hear of another appearance of the Risen One to a group of seven of “His own.” Now, they go fishing.
After the miraculous catch of 153 fish (who bothered to count?), when the disciples come ashore, Jesus is preparing a breakfast for them. Imagine that. After all that Jesus had been through, He bothers to be both the Chef and the Host for a bread-fish gathering, reminiscent of the loaves and fishes.
Jesus had already greeted His own with “Peace be with you (Shalom aleichem)” in the Gospel last Sunday three times. Now, St Peter was confronted by three questions from Jesus, ‘Do you love me more than these?” When Jesus raises the question a third time, Peter knew where Jesus was heading. This was his triple rehabilitation for his triple denial. (Incidentally, part of the scene provokes another hint at the story, the charcoal fire that was last mentioned on the cold night of Peter’s denial.)
Next, Jesus, Who has just commissioned Peter to feed the lambs warns Peter that his pastoral future resembles Jesus’ Ministry in another way. Peter will experience flaws, failures, falls and forgiveness, (just as we all do!!) Jesus tells Peter that Peter will lay down his life for the sheep in his martyrdom.
In many ways, St Peter is an archetypal Christian. He can be a big talker; he can be a failure; he can be forgiven and rehabilitated, just like all of us. He is always a part of God’s plan.
However, like every human person, St Peter experienced the vicissitudes of life. He had good days; he had bad days. He met disappointment, rejection, absurdity, trouble and sorrows, just as did Jesus and just as we do.
St Peter also went through the stages of life. When he was a young person, he wore what he wanted and went where he wanted. When he was older, he went where he preferred not to go (to martyrdom on Vatican Hill)
Hindu thought tells us that each adult goes through three stages of life. When we are young, we build our tower, we make our mark, we take the world by storm. That is fine and good (but for a Catholic, we always must follow Jesus’ Gospel in our dealings with others.) Then, at one point or another, we experience the onset of discomfort and disillusionment. We come to realize that life is bigger than we are. Our lives are not about us. Jesus in the 40 days in the desert at the start of His public life tells us to trust Him and God the Father. (Hindus call this “forest dwelling”.) When we transcend with God’s Help the shock that we are not the center of the universe, we become “happy, wise folks”, we realize that God’s plan has always been kicking in for us. It is that we have not seen it.
St Peter
can remind us of ourselves. Once he was
a young man and did what he wanted.
Then, when he became older, he realized with God’s Help that he was not
the hotshot that he thought he was. He learned that he was not the captain of
his own ship. Rather, he was part of God’s family. He was flawed. He fell at
times into sin. He was forgiven in Christ Jesus and restored. He did his job
and laid down his life for Christ. With
God’s Help, we can do the same. Life in Christ is beautiful!!!! 041810AD jfq
Sunday, April 11, 2010AD
Second Sunday of Easter
Three Who Didn’t See,
but Believed
The patron saint of Missouri, the “Show Me State” makes his annual appearance in our traditional Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter. Thomas represents those who demand empirical verification that belief in Jesus is legitimate. When Jesus meets his demand, Thomas’ response is “My Lord and my God.” (This is the highest title attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.
He
is well-known from the Fourth Gospel in which he appears at the time of Jesus’
Last Supper, death and Resurrection. He asserted that he would do to die with
Jesus. He asked Jesus “Lord, we don’t know where You are going,
so how can we know the Way? Jesus said that He, Jesus, was the medium and
the message, “I
am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
Finally,
he became Doubting Thomas when he
challenged the others, “unless I put my
fingers in the nailprints and my hand into His side, I will not believe.”
(You know the rest.)
Many think
that the incident of Doubting (Skeptical) Thomas probably represented the last
account in the original Gospel of John. If such is the case, Jesus’ words to
Thomas at the conclusion of the Gospel today would have originally been the
last words of the Risen One in the Fourth Gospel. “You believed, Thomas, because you have
seen. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Is Jesus talking about us? With the Help of the Holy Spirit, indeed, He is. However, it is not that easy. We all experience, at times, the Left Hand of God. In our lives, there is an assortment of experiences that challenge our faith in the God revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. Catholics and all Christians should be very circumspect in talking about the depth of our faith. We all want to be strong believers. Still, sometimes the vicissitudes of life can challenge an easy faith and make our “credo’s” a little shakier.
During April each year, Catholics salute some twentieth century figures, who, with God’s Help, tried to believe amid adversity, even though they had not seen. We recall Lutheran theologian, Dietrich von Bonhoeffer, Jesuit scientist-theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the California farm worker, Cesar Chavez.
Bonhoeffer was a young Lutheran professor who was scandalized by how easily so many of the mainline German churches gave into the demands of Adolf Hitler. Germany was almost half Lutheran and half Roman Catholic. The tacit agreement made with many leaders by Hitler was simply to stick with prayers and rituals and don’t say anything about what is going on in Germany now. Bonhoeffer, in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, coined the expression, “cheap grace”, when one waves a baptismal certificate and claims membership and all its privileges when convenient. He also coined the expression “costly grace”, when one’s baptismal commitment to Christ Jesus makes demands upon us, such as speaking out and acting against the injustices of the Third
Reich. He spoke of the role of the
Church in the world of Nazi Germany, “The Church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the midst of the village.” He came to see, as he wrote, “We have learned to see the great events of world history from below, viz., from the perspective of those who suffer.” A moral rule of thumb for Bonhoeffer (more appropriate now than ever) was, “The ultimate question for a responsible person to ask is how is the coming generation to live.” Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945, shortly before V-E Day.
Jesuit anthropologist- theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, saw the unity of creation, as did “the man of the twentieth century”, physicist, Albert Einstein. Teilhard’s simple little book, The Divine Milieu, identified the church, and, through the church in Christ Jesus, the entire world, as the place where God dwells in all things and all things dwell in God. Because he was so ahead of his time, Teilhard was treated with suspicion by church leaders in Rome. Still, much of his synthesis came to be celebrated after his death. Teilhard saw the Incarnation of God as the Omega Point, toward which unity, all things were moving. In his systemization of religion and science, he had expressed a hope that he would die on Easter Sunday, the day of God’s definitive breakthrough in Christ Jesus. He died in NYC on Easter, April 10, 1955.
Thirdly, we remember Mexican American Catholic union organizer, Cesar Chavez, who died on April 23, 1999. Born in the USA, he struggled for the rights of migrant workers (both USA and Mexican- born) in a fashion distinctly shaped by Catholic social teaching. He was motivated by the Gospel to organize non-violently the migrant workers who were exploited in many ways in the Southwest United States in the mid-century. Each union member was expected to pay dues each month as a commitment to the union. (Dues were $3.50 a month. This was a small amount, but it gave a sense of vested interest and dignity to the migrant workers in their efforts.) Even though at times, some growers and rival unions resorted to violence against the Catholic non-violent social effort, the union was committed to work through Gospel non-violence to point out, challenge and correct injustices against farmworkers. Venerable Dorothy Day and Robert Kennedy and others found further inspiration to work for justice through his efforts.
All three did not see, but they believed. With God’s Help, may we who have not seen believe, on good days and bad, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God.
Thomas saw; Thomas believed. With
God’s Spirit, may we all who do not see also believe!! 041110 AD jfq
Sunday April 4, 2010AD
Easter Sunday
Fifty Days Are Not
Enough !!!
This is the day that the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad! Christians believe that words are incapable of expressing what the Paschal Mystery is all about. It is more than just the vindication and victory of Christ Jesus after His horrific death on Good Friday. Easter is all about each of us and all of us because of Christ Jesus. Each day is Easter when you believe that Christ died and rose and lives.
Quantum theologians tell us that every person in our lives rubs off upon us. We rub off on every person with whom we have contact. Christ Jesus is like us in all things but sin. He still rubs off on us! Why should it be any different with Him?
In the
Hebrew tradition, “son of man” meant
“everyone”, a generic name for “humanity”. (In Hebrew, the words are ben adam;
in Aramaic, the words are bar
nasha.)
Lately, it has even been translated as the “human one”. However, in the later
Hebrew Bible book of Daniel, the term starts to refer “One like a Son of Man
(a human one) coming on the clouds of heaven to whom dominion has been handed”.
St Paul teaches us “Christ Jesus is both the image of the invisible God and the archetype of creation”. Our Creed celebrates Him truly divine, truly human.
Christ Jesus, therefore, becomes for us the archetype, the paradigm and the exemplar of what it means to be both truly divine and truly human. He rubs off on us through the Jesus Movement, through the Word of God, through the Sacraments, particularlyBaptism and the Eucharist, and in myriad other ways that only He knows.
Christ Jesus is the archetype of creation (St Paul’s very words!!). We can say in faith that Christ Jesus is in our deepest DNA and our deepest DNA is in Christ Jesus. As St Paul says in other places, we are the Body of Christ. Is it not apt to say that each of us is a cell in the Body of Christ?
Still, as we live our lives in Christ Jesus, we experience the reality of human living. We experience God’s many blessings, the right hand of God. Still, all of us, no matter how long we kid ourselves, experience the painful mysteries of life, the left hand of God. Christ Jesus in us teaches us that all humanity, as part of creation, needs at some point to surrender, let go and trust the Holy Mystery at work within us and within the universe.
In St Luke’s account of the arrival of the ladies at the tomb, the women hear that it was necessary for the son of man to die and rise again. The announcement clearly refers to the Crucified One. However, might the announcement also refer to the necessity of the Paschal Mystery in all human experience. In Christ Jesus, we die and rise and live again, again and again. True, we experience both the right and left hand of God during our earthly life. Still, we live in a New Reality, a New World Order, a New Universe, when we grasp the Paschal Mystery. We rub off on each other!
Our
vocations as New York Catholics is to proclaim both in actions and words and
attitudes our belief in the Paschal Mystery of Christ Jesus. Through Him, with Him and in Him, Jesus
wants us to live the Paschal Mystery as best we can.
Four hundred years ago, St Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no hands but ours; no feet but ours, no lips but ours.” The Crucified and Risen One expects us, New York Catholics, to be “change agents”, “critical mass”, “core groups”, catalysts, channels, instruments of God’s Peace”.
Sadly, our world seems to continue to implode through violence against people and nature. Several say that our nation has lost our sense of justice, fairness, compassion and civility. Today, the Human One asks us to be human by living His Paschal Mystery with all its implications every day of our life through, with and in Christ Jesus. God knows each of us (know, in the biblical sense); loves (love in the biblical sense); forgives us (forgives, in the biblical sense, like the prodigal son and the woman taken in adultery recently and His executioners (Palm Sunday’s Gospel)). Let us ask for the Spirit of a New Vision of our place in the world as we recommit ourselves today as we renew our baptismal commitment to His and our (in Him) Paschal Mystery. Christ crucified and risen lives in me; I live in Christ crucified and risen. 040410AD jfq
Sunday, March 28, 2010AD
Palm Sunday
Life
is Bigger than We Are
The disciples of Jesus (that’s us, folks!!) enter Holy Week this weekend as we celebrate our participation in the Paschal Mystery of the Lord. We share in the cruciform process. Life is one of ascent, descent and transformation. Our sharing is happening constantly, but we usually do not perceive it. From Thursday evening through Sunday evening, in the Easter Triduum (3 days), we proclaim liturgically. We remember, in gratitude and thanksgiving, that we participate in the Death and the Resurrection of the Lord, 24-7-365 .
We live in a culture that has been described as a “therapeutic, individualistic” culture. The axiom is “I am who I am”. People feel a malaise at times. More and more, many seek a panacea in therapy. Wise people rejoice in the gifts of healing provided by psychotherapy. However, we must remember that we are individuals created in community. Most Catholic psychotherapists themselves urge us to remember that they do not offer cure- alls. In a society stressing the individual at the cost of community, we need to remember that individual therapy is an answer, not the Answer.
We are part of a community as well, with which we should identify in a healthy fashion. Here the operative axiom is “We are who we are”. We rejoice in our membership in the Catholic community, in our American citizenship, our ethnic and racial backgrounds, etc. Yet, when such identities become security blankets if we find them as the absolutes of life (as opposed to YHWH, the Father of Jesus, the God of Life, the God of Mystery), we will someday become disappointed and disillusioned.
The Paschal Mystery focuses our attention to our belief that the operative axiom for all is found in the Transcendent, viz., the Mystery of God, in which we all live. Now the operative, all inclusive axiom is God’s self-identification, “I am Who am.” This transcendent axiom of YHWH, for followers of Jesus, and for everyone else, (although Christians are the ones called to spread the Word,) subsumes and relativizes other axioms.
Our God is
revealed in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His salvific sharing in
our life and death. We all experience
disillusionment, disappointment, betrayal, accident, sickness and suffering in
our lives. The Cross takes a variety of
shapes and sizes. Such crosses can
become opportunities for growth in faith and strength when we accept them as
part of our participation in them as part of the Mystery revealed in the death
and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, into Whom we are all baptized.
As we hear
Jesus’ dying words this week twice, they reflect in a human dichotomy what
Catholics feel in our lives. In Luke on
Palm Sunday, Jesus dies with the words of Psalm 31 on His lips, “God,
into Your Hands, I commend My Spirit!!” Jesus
died the way that He lived; through His Holy Spirit given to us in Baptism and
throughout our lives, He energizes us to do the same in with and through Him.
Entering into Holy Week as we prepare
for the Easter Triduum, we ask Jesus for the grace to see the axioms, “I am who
I am” and “we are who we are” relativized by the Transcendent Axiom of YHWH, I am
Who am, Who is
self-revealed in the salvific death and
Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 032810AD jfq
Sunday, March 21, 2010AD
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Who Are Those Two over There?
Many say that one of the most
memorable scenes in their religious imagination is the scene depicted in our
Gospel today, viz., Jesus and the Women
Taken in Adultery. Even St
Augustine, 1,500 years ago, said the scene is an archetypal depiction of “the person in need of mercy in the
Presence of Mercy Incarnate.”
However, others point out that the story is memorable because it comes close to home for everyone of us. However, the crowd, then, might differ in ways from the crowd now. Then, everyone in the crowd disappears. Then, everyone in the crowd cannot claim to be without sin. Then, everyone in that crowd, at least, when Jesus set the ground rules for the event was honest and left the premises.
Is it so now? One wonders whether such would happen now . Someone made the remark once that shook a lot of “good churchgoers”, “The Church was meant to be a hospital for sinners; not a hotel for the saints.”
There is a theory that this Gospel passage is located in the wrong Gospel. Nobody has ever disputed the divine inspiration of the Gospel today. However, biblical commentators feel that it would more appropriately be at home in the Gospel of St Luke. (Luke’s Gospel is the one that we are hearing on most Sundays during this Church year. Hence, even those in Rome who devised the three year Sunday cycle of liturgical readings accept this theory by its being placed in a “Year of St Luke”. In St Luke’s Gospel during the last week of Jesus’ life, He was embroiled in controversies with various groups within institutional religion at the time and certainly, this Gospel fills the bill for that motif, big time!) Its insertion in John’s Gospel which is not testified to until the eighth century places it in a context of controversy, but strikingly out of place where it is. Some have conjectured that this story of the tremendous Mercy of Jesus was intolerable for some of the pious ones who were committed to the “hotel for the saints” motif.
Several pertinent ideas emanate from today’s Gospel. First is the very simple fact that Jesus could write!! Most people back then were probably illiterate, which is why the spoken tradition and the memorization of prayers and religious poetry were so crucial. Jesus was writing something on the ground. St Jerome conjectured that it was the sins of the crowd there that Jesus was listing. Other theories refer to biblical passages in which “God write the names of sinners in the dirt”, according to Jeremiah 17.13.
Finally, when the crowd begins to dissipate, the Gospel writer (Luke or John) states that the dispersal begins with the eldest first. Some think that those around the longest have the longest list of sins which is why they flee the scene first. If the truth were ever to be known, what would people say?
Around
here, we try to call to mind our sins as we begin our liturgies. This is not to lay a deliberate guilt trip on
anyone. It is an honest admission that somehow, all of us – no exceptions –
have missed the mark. (Within Buddhist
tradition, there is a threefold admission of guilt before group meditation
commences.) We need to be reminded that all of us are family; all of us are
favored by God; all of us are flawed in some way; all of us have fallen at one
time or another; all of us are forgiven; all of us flounder when we forget
these basic realities of human living. (USA
theologian Joan Chittister says there are two types of sinners, viz., those who
admit they are and those who don’t admit it.) We need to hear this Gospel story today with the realization
that we can be characterized as sinful converts or converted sinners. We are
all cases of a work in progress. Jesus
has spoken to us all once or twice during life.” Let the one without
sin cast the first stone” “Go and sin no more.) We all live lives three steps forward and two
steps backward. we all are a mass of
contradictions -- no exceptions. This
Gospel’s popularity speaks to the depths of
honest Christians. 032110AD jfq
Sunday, March 14, 2010AD
Fourth Sunday of Lent
Laetare Sunday
The Parable of the Lone
Bro?????
Jesus is the Master story teller. After twenty centuries, many consider today’s parable (zinger of a story) His Magnum Opus in Creativity. It continues to escape a definitive name. About whom is the parable?
Since we are told that Jesus directed 3 parables to those who resented the fact that Jesus had outreach to sinners, etc., who had been written off by the respectable church people, more feel that the true subject of the parable is the unforgiving brother. When one thinks about it, this elder brother was a “sad dude”.
Each of the three parables (the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son) represents the theme that God is crazy by human standards. What shepherd would leave 99 sheep to find one? What domestic technologist would sweep the house for a lost coin? What self-respecting father would welcome a wayward son home after the son had dyssed and deserted him? God does and then, throws a party. (Read Eucharist!)
In the shocking beginning of the parable, the two sons both got half of the father’s stuff (that is the word that appears in the original Greek). The older son got his inheritance, just as the younger brother did, even before the father died. Toward the end of the story, when we start to hear his whining (which he probably had done all along), he is filled with complaints and criticism and carping.
His complaint sounds almost immature and childish. Still, when you think of it, the older son had enough of his own money to buy his own goat if he wanted to have a party with his friends. (One might wonder if he had any friends because he is such an angry person.)
He criticizes both his father and younger brother when he tells the father that the younger brother had squandered the father’s wealth with prostitutes. (We did not hear this fact anywhere else in the story.) Did the father (or we) have to have that sad item thrown into the mix? We get the story without painting all the details.
He carps when he berates the jubilant father about the unseemly (which it was!) behavior on the part of the father. The father brought out the fatted calf and put the best attire on his returning son.
The older brother has serious problems. He has been alienated from his father. He seems to refer to the father as his employer, not his father. With the stuff that he had already received, he has been rewarded already, still the father is seen by the older brother as a boss.
He has alienated himself from the younger brother (Whose gall got both sons their inheritance prematurely). He refers to the younger son as this son of yours, not as my brother.
Finally, he has alienated himself from the entire village. When the father ordered the slaughter of the fatted calf, it was before the days of putting leftovers in the fridge for meals in the days ahead. Therefore, the father had to invite the village because the fatted calf would feed an entire village. In addition, many in the village were probably related to the dysfunctional family. Now, the resentment has alienated as well from his extended family and village, who are inside dancing and eating the fatted calf.
The older brother is a sorry case. Did he ever go in? Only you can answer the question. Sadly, the personality of the older brother was replicated by the arrogant attitude of those who feel that they are the good ones, the self-assured ones certain of their own moral superiority, while those others, well you know! Sadly, the older brother has many replicates in our own church and world. Fifteen hundred years ago, St Augustine of Hippo said that the church had many that God did not have and God had many that the church did not have. Whatever did St Augustine mean?
Did the older brother go in? Again,
each of us has to answer the question. 031410AD
jfq
Sunday, March 7, 2010AD
Third Sunday of Lent
God beyond …
Few
scenes in the Hebrew Bible have been imagined more than God’s call to Moses to
climb Mount Sinai and to experience God’s Presence as well as God’s challenge
to Moses to liberate the Hebrew slaves
from oppression in Egypt. Somehow, Moses experienced the Divine Presence and
Challenge and all human life was radically affected. Even today. Even Now!
One of the groups who caught the innuendo of the story was the Southern slaveholders in the nineteenth century. It was a felony to teach a Black slave to read in the Old South. The fear was that the slaves would read (and understand, between the lines) what God was saying, viz., nobody should enslave or oppress others. The slaveholders were loathe to quote St Paul (who had written that in Christ there is no slave or free) but eager to quote the Apostle to the Gentiles with the realistic admonition in the ancient world (that Paul thought was about to end anyhow) that slaves should obey their masters. That line was quoted frequently.
However, the story has many aspects to it. The big question for St Thomas Aquinas and countless others was the Self-Naming of God, in Exodus 3.14, “I AM WHO AM”. What’s up with that?
The two possibilities that grab many people are simply “God of Life” or else, “I am who am I and I cannot be named, so don’t bother.” One speaks of God somehow logically; the other speaks of God somehow mythically. These are two of countless others. Even a change in tense from present to future is permissible in ancient Hebrew that did not have written vowels.
More and more, people are recovering the sense of Mystery, viz., something that is infinitely knowable and unknowable at the same time. God can be known, but always remains unknown. Within our Catholic tradition, it is apophatic knowledge. It is described by King David in Psalm 46, ‘Be still and know that I am God now.”
A
meditation on the Sacred Name might go as follows. God, greater;
God, nearer; God beyond me; God within me; God beyond words; God beyond God;
Let go, let God; Let God be God; God beyond me; God within me.” Then try to
practice silence and try to think not a thought. You will think thoughts
because every human has what is called by Eastern religions “the Monkey mind”. Try to return to the
word “God”. Our children are mastering this in religious
education. There is no reason to
think that adults cannot receive the gift of apophatic prayer. Great Catholic thinkers, like St Thomas
Aquinas, the Little Flower, and Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta were familiar with
this type of prayer and felt that it was available to every human person. This availability is known as “grace”.
As part of your Lenten regimen, now only 26 days left, try to slow down, sit in solitude and silence, either here in church or anyplace and remind yourself that you are always in the Divine Presence of the God of Life, Who cannot be named.
Practicing apophatic prayer is like children practicing for sport or a music instrument or a play. We recall the other adage, “Practice makes better”, not perfect, only God is perfect.
Prayer would necessarily ease all our aches and pains. The Galileans mowed down by Pilate in today’s Gospel as well as the workmen in Jerusalem killed in the mishap, the victims of the earthquakes in Haiti or Chile, all need to recall basic mythic language. We remember that in every human life, there is sadness, trouble, failures, absurdities, rejection and disappointment. These things are all bad thing. However, we recall that bad things happen and they are part of life. Then, we remember that life is the greatest subsuming God. Then we remember that our God is always Present and always beyond our thoughts. God remains always faithful.
Slaves on
the Underground Railroad during the years before the War Between the States
would not have risked all if they did not trust in God’s Promise and Vision at
the time of the call of Moses. They
remembered God’s Words in Psalm 117, the shortest chapter in the entire
Bible. ‘Praise God, all you
nations, glorify God all you people; steadfast is God’s kindness to us and
God’s fidelity endures forever.” Allow God to speak in the Silence about
it. 030710AD jfq
Sunday, February 28, 2010AD
Second Sunday of Lent
The Mystery beyond the Mystery
When Catholics use the word
“mystery”, it does not mean the same thing that “mystery” means to others.
People think “whodunit” or copout with inability to respond without mystifying language. Catholics understand “Mystery” to mean
something that is ultimately knowable and unknowable at the same time. Mystery is paradox. Life is full of
paradoxes. Indeed, life itself is a mystery, as Madonna sang back in 1989. Ergo, God is a Mystery. Ultimately, you are a Mystery too, especially
to youself. As Hermann Hesse wrote in
many years ago. “The greatest mystery
each of us has to transcend or fathom is oneself.”
Always, on the Second Sunday of
Lent, we hear the account of the Transfiguration, wherein Peter, James and John
get a glimpse of Christ Jesus in His resurrected state. Whatever happened that day, Jesus had gone up
to the mountaintop to pray. St Luke is known
as the “Evangelist of Prayer”. Before
anything monumental in the life of Christ Jesus is about to happen, Jesus goes
to pray in solitude in advance. He does this before He begins His public life,
before He elected the 12 and gave His great Sermon in Luke 6, in the Garden
before Good Friday and finally on the Cross.
Jesus was into prayer bigtime.
Perhaps, He wants us to be as well.
When Jesus went to pray, in some
cases, spending the entire night in prayer to God, what type of prayer did He
say? We know that Jesus could read, yet
it doesn’t say that He brought any biblical scrolls with Him, nor the Jewish
version of Rosary beads.
In all probability, like many Jews
of His time, Jesus would have memorized many prayers. We imitate Him this Lent as we try to get
Psalm 23 down this Lent as a community.
However, chances are that Jesus was
big into contemplative prayer, viz., prayer without words. Prayer in which we remain as silent as
possible and let God speak to us in the Silence.
Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta said, “God speaks to us in the silence of my minds and
hearts. Our job is to slow down and
listen to the silence. Then, we translate what we heard by the way we treat
others, especially the poor.” One hundred years earlier, the Little Flower, now
a Doctor of the Church said, “God is always at home in me; I am usually the one
who is out to lunch.”
All the major religions of the
world, both East and West, have a contemplative tradition. Some call it the highest form of prayer when
one slows down and shuts down and let God speak to us in the Great Silence.
However, Americans frequently find
silence as something pathological. We
owe this to our Puritan ancestors who taught us that the idle mind was the
devil’s workshop.” As a result, “it was
early to bed, early to rise” …. and you know the rest.
Priest-psychiatrist wrote about this
as early as 1992, “There is a reason
that more people do not find the silence and listen to the Inner Voice. They
are afraid to do so. The truth is that, in our culture, we fear the Silence
precisely because something from within might speak to us. Therefore, we prefer the noise and fear
Silence because in that silence, the unconscious might make its presence
felt. This consciousness might contain
all that we have been repressing and denying about ourselves. It is impossible
to listen to the small, still voice within without coming to terms with the
unconscious.” It is not for nothing that children have an easier time with
contemplation than most adults. Are adults afraid of what the Silence might say
to us?
The greatest Catholic theologian, Fr
Karl Rahner, whose birthday and anniversary we celebrate this month spoke of
Gratia non Creata, Uncreated Grace. He
said that this was the immanent and permeating Divine Presence in all. Fr Rahner understood Gratia non Creata as
another name for the immanent and premeating Presnce that Christians call the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit lives in all;
all live in the Spirit. While God is
ultimately a Mystery, both knowable and unknowable simultaneously, transcending
all Reality, God is also immanent, present in all. Maybe that was what Jesus was tapping into
when He went up to pray before big events in His life. Maybe, He wants up to do the same. Recall the
distinction made several weeks ago. If
you listen to Jesus, you become a disciple.
If you don’t, then you remain in the crowd. Which is it going to
be?
How do we respond? As mentioned last
weekend, treat youself to a twenty minute sit in God’s Presence in our church
or any church. Plan to learn Psalm 23
and use it as the handy prayer tool that your ancestors have done for the past
3000 years. There is a reason why the
Psalm has perdured. Find out the reason.
Join Jesus on the mountaintop (or in
our parish church or anywhere). Let God
speak to you in the silence. Peter, James and John heard God say to them, “This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.
Listen to Him.” We probably will
hear a reasonable facsimile thereof. What
do we do next? 022810AD jfq
Sunday February 21, 2010AD
First Sunday of Lent
He Knows How It Gets
Each Lent, we recall that Jesus was like us in all things but sin, as we hear the account of Jesus’ temptation at the start of His public life.
This year, we hear St Luke’s account of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Ergo, Jesus was baptized by John and proclaimed as God’s Son. He then went off to the wilderness to figure out the implications of what He has to do.
The number “40” is a number
that is “charged” biblically. It usually
refers to a period of testing and/or teaching in the Scriptures. Obviously, in this case, St. Luke speaks of
the test of Jesus at the start of His public life. Next, after this section of Luke’s Gospel,
Jesus begins in the synagogue in Nazareth announcing “the Spirit has anointed (christened)
Him to preach Good News to the poor.”
The triple temptation which Jesus experienced had to do with the nature of the ministry which He was undertaking. What the devil confronted Jesus with was the temptation to prove Himself in other ways besides the way which God the Father had pre-ordained. The God of Life willed that “it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to die and then, to rise again” to save us.
The devil tries to dissuade the Messiah from this course of action. First, the tempter suggests that Jesus proves that He is the Messiah through magic tricks. “Turn these stones into bread.” Next, the devil suggests that Jesus tries to establish Himself as a political Messiah. In return, the devil will give Him all the power and the glory of kingdoms if Jesus worships Him. An interesting insight is that the nations of the world are, indeed, Satan’s to give! St. Augustine of Hippo had a field day with that idea in the De Civitate Dei.) Finally, the devil suggests to Jesus that Jesus test God by jumping off the parapet of the Jerusalem Temple.
To each of the temptations hurled at Him, Jesus responds with quotations from the Book of Deuteronomy. This fifth book of the Torah stresses the love and gratitude of the individual Israelite for the Presence of Yahweh with the Chosen People. Yahweh is with the individual and with the community, but always on God’s terms and never on ours. There is a divine necessity (which Christians call “the Cross”) within every human experience and a Divine Presence as well. Quoting Deuteronomy, Jesus is within His Jewish religious tradition in resisting temptation to go another route.
Interestingly, the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, was succumbing to the serpent’s temptation to go another route and to “be like God.” They were not content with God’s plan for them and they preferred the tempter’s alternative. Chaos, dysfunction and sin set in our world, as a result. Our modern world still suffers the effects of that decision.
Psychologists say that there are three basic childhood needs that we carry with us through life. We are drawn to security, esteem and control. As we mature, we still strive for these things. All is fine if we obey God’s rules!
However, many go off the deep end. We rely in “golden calves” which we believe will provide us for the absolute security, esteem and control beginning to obsess us. The god that we worship is EGO, viz., Easing God Out.
Psychologist Erich Fromm commented “evil deeds to harden hearts, good deeds tends to soften it, to make it more alive. The more a person’s heart hardens, the less freedom does that person have to change, the more is that person is determined by previous action.” Jewish thought speaks of the Yetzer rasa (the evil urge) existing in the human heart.
The evil urge goes all the back to our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the temptation scene in Genesis. Therein, the temptation was “You too can be like God”. You can, in essence, control and name reality, even in changing basic rules. The Tempter approaches them and all their children (that’s us, folks) in subtle ways, sly and suggestive ways that challenge God’s plan for us. We are called to live religious lives (basically linked up with the Transcendent that permeates all reality). This means our relationships with God, others, particularly the poor among us, and the ecology in which we live. (The word “religion” is based etymologically on the Latin, ligere – to bind together and re – again.),
It is curious to notice as well that just as Jesus began His public life with the triple temptation in the Gospel, so also, in Luke’s Gospel, the “last temptation of Christ” is also three-fold. As Jesus was dying, He is tempted three times to “save Yourself”. The leaders, the soldiers and the criminal on the other cross who did the Devil’s work by tempting Jesus to short-circuit Yahweh’s Divine Plan.
Jesus’ final response to the Devil’s temptation were the words of Psalm 31 on His lips. “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit.” He died, God’s obedient, humble Son, the elder brother of our human family, a person of faith and hope who said “Yes” to the Divine Necessity of the Cross.
We can only
ask Jesus to give us a Share in His Spirit so that each of us in obedience and
humility and solidarity with others say “Yes” to God’s Plan for each of
us. Jesus does not require the
impossible of His disciples. He asks us
to live and die as He did. As Gabriel
told our Blessed Mother, “Nothing is impossible with God.” We always ask God to give us the strength to
resist temptation and always offer our “Yes” to God. 022110 AD jfq
Sunday, February 14, 2010AD
6th Sunday in Greentime
Where Are You Listening
Now?
On this last Sunday before we enter the Lenten Season, we hear this weekend the beginning of the commissioning address of Jesus to His newly form group of 12 as well as other disciples who listen to His words. In addition, St Luke tells that Jesus was also addressing the crowd NOW as well. From what vantage point are you listening NOW?
Catholics are familiar with much of what Jesus says today because it is similar to what Jesus says in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. (There are more Beatitudes in St Matthew; St Luke adds a series of Woes to balance the Beatitudes.) Familiar, but different.
Recall that the language which St Luke uses today, viz., the poor, is language that is used throughout the Scriptures. In today’s reading, Jesus is clearly referring the material poor, downcast and mournful because of their condition. It is not that Jesus is glorifying their poverty. Rather, he is stating that God is conscious of it, that time is on the side of the poor and that the poor have a headstart to God.
Recall also that Anawim YHWH were a group within Judaism (as well as the earliest Jesus Movement) of men and women who understood and lived that no matter things seemed to appear God was running the show. They, with God’s Help, bore the pains of life (although they tried alleviating them as much as they could). They made leaps of faith into God by surrendering, letting go and trusting the Holy Mystery Who permeated them.
The rich young man, notwithstanding, (wealth was his particular problem apparently) there is no evidence that the Jesus Movement, from the days of earliest Christian house-churches, expected that all the members of the movement were to surrender their goods to the community. The story that St Luke himself presents later on in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles presents the Jerusalem community living that way, not as a demand, but as a choice. (This opinion was cogently presented several years by NY Catholic theologian, Fr Raymond Brown.) Later on, when the Jerusalem Community experienced hard times, we are told several times that the outlying communities provided for their needs. (Modern examples of the same are your recent generosity to our sisters and brothers in Swaziland and in Haiti as well as your regular food contributions to the Food Pantry in P-ville as well as others area pantries).
Recently, one theologian suggested that the composition of the hearers of Jesus’ Word could change. If one accepted the Centrality of God, as proclaimed by Christ Jesus, then that person would be a disciple. If one were to reject the Centrality of God (and make power, prestige, possessions their security), then that person was part of the crowd. The thing to remember is all of us (depending on circumstances and our response to the Gift of Faith) can move back and forth between the two groups. When we trust God, we are the disciples; when we trust other things, then we are the crowd.
The basic question becomes “What (or Who) is your ultimate security?” Recently, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke to a crowd of business leaders on Wall Street at the Stock Exchange. He said to them that somehow, the System (with its profit and loss categories) had taken over much of Western civilization. He said that frequently, the morality of business decisions depended how profitable the bottom line would be. He was not shown the door because so many agreed that he was naming reality.
Rather than impose his own interpretation on the System, Archbp Williams highlighted the idea that structures have a moral life of their own. He basically agreed with Jeremiah, Popes John Paul II and Benedict, and Jesus that “socio-economic structures effect people and come under the scrutiny of the Gospel.” As Pope John Paul put it, “There are no moral free zones!”
Jim Wallis
suggests that men and women of good
faith need to develop a “new normal” in response to the Recession of
2008. The “system”, the “market”
“conventional wisdom” (call it what you want!) did not take the Paschal Mystery
into account in economic foresight. Even
in elementary school, Catholic students learned, early on, that everything is
the process we know as “the Paschal
Mystery”. All life goes through the
process of ascent, descent and transformation.
All things do pass, even economies. One thing that people realize that
we cannot and will not go back to the way we were. New message emerge, “We
are still confronted with the fact that three billion people (virtually half of
God’s children on the planet) still live in less than two dollars a day. That
service to your neighbor and the common good is more rewarding and fulfilling
than the endless pursuit of individual gain. New questions emerge, “Do we want our children’s values shaped by the market and its
advertising?” New spins on old
Gospels emerge, “One factor that had a
significant impact upon the behavior (of the cast in the Good Samaritan parable
) was whether or not they were in a hurry.”
As
Archbishop Rowan stated on Wall Street recently, Jesus did not suggest any
specific socio-economic system. Jesus challenges His audience (then and now)
with where we hear Jesus’ Beatitudes and Woes.
If you hear God’s Word now and act upon it, you
are a disciple. If you hear Jesus and still rely ultimately on other things
(Golden Calves), you remain in the crowds.
Where do you stand now? 021410AD
jfq
Sunday, Feb 7, 2010AD
Fifth Sunday in Green
God Ever Greater, yet
Nearer
Catholics try to stress that God is always living in us and we are all living in God. (If God is omnipotent, it’s logical, isn’t it?) Still, there are times when we feel the Divine Presence in powerful, haunting ways. They can be both joyful and/or stressful. Divine Presence resonates in our lives. Many years ago, sociologist, Rev Andrew Greeley wrote that most people had 5 or 6 powerful religious experiences in their lives, and that is all that most people need to nourish a lifetime of faith.
We hear about two powerful religious experiences today in our first reading and in our Gospel, viz., the experience of Isaiah (at his initial call to prophecy) and or St Peter (after the great catch of fish). Neither Isaiah nor St Peter was ever the same again.
The experience of Transcendence goes back as our ancestors lived in this world. At least, 100,000 years ago, our ancestors demonstrated their intuition that the human person was different. Archaeologists still discover evidence of religion in burial procedures, tools left behind, the use of fire early on, and the development of human communication. All indicate that humans are different in our awareness. Archaeologists and anthropologists tell us today about 10,000 years ago, around 8,000BC, occurred the Agricultural Revolution, with its implications to the present day. As later theologians said, humans always intuited that we were the poets of the universe.
About 100 years ago, a German theologian, Rudolf Otto, described this orientation to Something Greater, yet Nearer, in human experience. Using Latin, Otto described that Something as Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (the Mystery Tremendous and Fascinating).
Again, we need the clarification of terms. Mysterium, in this sense, means “something knowable, yet unknowable, at the very same time”, something that cannot be experienced totally. Tremendum means awesome, something beyond our control. Fascinans means alluring, something overwhelmingly appealing.
Now more than ever, that Something challenges and invites us. The desire for this Something goes on and on. There are at aleast three reasons for this. 1) The call to Transcendence is in infinite. 2) The human quest for knowledge, love and freedom is insatiable. We can never know, love and be loved, or be free enough. 3) We continue to change as people. Our cultures hopefully evolve (or sadly, sometimes, devolve).
There is much discussion these days about theism, atheism, agnosticism, deism, etc. Usually, most of these discussions are strawmen, because they dissect people’s ideas, not the Something generating these ideas.
The term “theism” is a general term which basically means, “God, as you (personally or culturally) understand God.”
There is always a proviso that we avoid “idolization” of the term “God”. What might work for you might not work for someone else. Don’t blame them, if they don’t agree with you.
With this is mind, it is important for Catholics (and others as well) to remember that while the human mind and heart are oriented to Transcendence, God is bigger than human comprehension. As a result, we try to remember that no expression for God can be taken absolutely literally. For these reasons, humble believers say, “God has many Names”. (Our Islamic brothers and sisters speak of the 1,000 Names of Allah.)
Catholics believe that God has planted this Holy Longing for Transcendence in our minds and hearts. St Thomas Aquinas called “obediential potency”, the potential to hear God’s call and respond in humble obedience.
In the twentieth century, Fr Karl Rahner speaks of the “supernatural existential”, viz., the call to transcendence in which we live and move and have our being, both within and beyond us.
In our Scriptures today, there is no doubt that both Isaiah and St Peter had profound experiences of the Mysterium . Note that the reaction of both to their awareness of the Divine Presence and Divine Calling is their unworthiness to respond. Isaiah calls himself, “a man of unclean lips” and St Peter tells Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Both realize that they are “out of their league”, yet both respond to the alluring call that is made to them.
The Divine Presence can be felt in a variety of settings. It is always on God’s initative; we don’t trigger it ourselves. Isaiah was in the temple in Jerusalem praying when had his experience. St Peter was at work, fishing.
There is no reason to think that God changes God’s modus operandi in dealing with us, the unlikely, the unworthys and the unknowns of this world. In different days, people spoke of “Red Martyrdom”, when, in a Promethean show of strength, we do one great thing for God. In other days, people spoke of “White Martyrdom”, we stoically sacrifice ourselves for a noble mission. In our own time, people speak of “Green Martyrdom”, when, in humility and obedience to God’s constant call to us (sometimes, though not always, powerfully felt), we say yes to God in our doing what seems so trivial and mundane and unimportant.
God is ever
greater, ever nearer, even in the everyday routine of my life. Slow down, in solitude and silence frequently
and let God be God. Isaiah did. Jesus
did, St Peter did. We will be in good
company. 020710AD jfq
Sunday,
January 31, 2010AD
Fourth
Sunday in Green
Jeremiah, Jesus and
Friends
This weekend, we hear the conclusion of Jesus’ opening address in the synagogue of His hometown of Nazareth. Last weekend, He got off to a good start because He spoke of God’s compassion for all people. He did all right until He pushed the envelope by making the statement that God cared about everyone, even those whom the Nazareth folks had written off.
All of a sudden, the mood changed. The crowd turned on Jesus and planned to hurl Him off the cliff. God spared Him.
Several key themes make their appearance here. First, as we said last week, Catholics believe that God is always with us. Still, there are special times in which we become conscious of God’s Presence in our lives. St Luke stresses these moments through the words, today (semeron) and now (nuun). For example, Jesus said “Today, this Scripture reading is fulfilled in your hearing.” Do you believe Me or not?
St Luke describes Jesus as the consummate Jewish prophet-martyr. Jesus speaks, then and now, what God wants to be said. On Good Friday, it brought the prophet-martyr to the Cross. We hear a hint of what is to come today when Jesus’ townfolks try to hurl Him over the cliff. What Jesus said that turned the audience off was that the God of the Jews loved everyone desiring their salvation, even those outside Jewish parameters. Sometimes, prophets become martyrs when their audience don’t like what they hear.
Jeremiah survived his career, just barely, but not all others have been as lucky. Jeremiah challenged his audience 1) YHWH’s tender love is infinite; 2) YHWH expected to have that tender love reciprocated by right relationships; 3) YHWH would have to somehow practice tough love to straighten out the situation. 4) YHWH had a version of what the Catholic Catechism today calls “structural sin”, viz., the evil that human institution can perpetrate against innocent victims. Just as individuals bear “the law of built-in punishment” for their actions, a similar kind of “karma must govern institutions”. Therefore, Jeremiah made his famous statement, that people should not feel false confidence by saying “This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord.” Behave as God wants you to behave. Not all his hearers agreed with him.
This
weekend, we commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the assassination of
Mohandas Gandhi, who tried to bring non-violent change to India. So many of his one liners still speak
poignantly 60 years later. 1) “As
humans, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world --
that is the false myth of the atomic age – as in the ability to remake ourselves.” 2) Cooperation, not competition, is the law
of the human species ultimately”.
3) “Be the change you want in the
world.”
Please God, the line of prophetic figures might continue today when people like Jim Wallis come along. His new book, Rediscovering Values – on Wall Street, on Main Street and Your Street, ( NY: Howard Books, 2010) has something about prophecy about it. It might deserve a read. It is in the tradition of God’s Politics and The Great Awakening. The book contains many insights about a Judaeo-Christian response to the Great Recession which began in the Fall, 2008.
In a prophetic fashion, he stresses three moral lessons that men and women of good will from whatever religious background might observe. 1) Relationships matter (on a big and a small scale). Einstein’s theory is applicable universally. Nothing can be understood in its entirety unless it is understood in relationship to everything else. The notion of autonomy is a fallacy of Western intellectual hubris. 2) Social sins also matter. (Here Wallis speaks in the train of thought that began as early as Jeremiah, whence our first reading this weekend through to Popes John Paul and Benedict. 3) Our own immediate good is ultimately tied up with the common good.
He speaks of
a “seventh generation mindset”, making decisions today with a view that they
will effect our children seven generations hence. Our parish community has discussed this very
concept on several occasions.
An
interesting feature of the book is the use of sidebars which stress salient
points in the text that deserve special emphasis. One may not agree with them all, but they are
certainly conversation starters for with civil people. Several examples bring
points home more easily. “The God of the Bible seems not to mind
prosperity -- if it is shared.” (p. 82) “Ultimately, the common good is our own good, and the best thing for
all of us is the right thing for the least of us.” (p. 94) “What is good for our neighbor is not just the
right thing but is usually a good thing for us as well. (p. 131) “A calendar is a moral document.” (p.171)
Finally, he concludes with 20 moral
exercises that individuals, families, groups, communities can reflect upon
together in a clarification of values. For example, (# 16 Watch and Pray): Exercise the regular habit (and teach your
children to do it too) of communicating with political representatives.
We conclude this month of new beginnings, as we reflect on prophets, then and now, Jeremiah, Gandhi, John Paul, Benedict, Jim Wallis, and Jesus Himself. Maybe, pick up a copy of Rediscovering Values as another way to make New Year’s resolutions. 013110AD jfq
Sunday, January 24, 2010AD
Third Sunday in Green
Now,
Hear This, Theophilus
For most of this upcoming liturgical year on Sundays, we hear excerpts from the Third Gospel, attributed to St Luke. (During the 50 days of Easter, we hear excerpts as well from the Acts of the Apostles, composed as Volume 2 of a two work opus, known today as Luke-Acts. The 52 chapters of Luke-Acts sweep from the Annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah in Luke 1 to the arrival of the Good News, the Gospel, by St Paul in the Eternal City of Roma, at the ends of the earth. Acts 28. Much ground is covered by the brilliant, inspired trained, yet anonymous, Greek speaker, known to us as St Luke.
Both Volume
One, viz., the Gospel of St Luke, as well as Volume Two, the Acts of the
Apostles, were addressed to an individual known as Theophilus. Who was this individual? In all probability, he was a Greek speaking
Gentile who attended Jewish synagogues, but did not become Jewish himself. (We know from a variety of sources that there
were sizable numbers of Gentiles who did worship in the synagogue without
becoming Jewish themselves. Jewish
worshippers referred to their Gentile visitors weekly as the
“God-fearers”. These were men and women attracted to Judaism’s coherent ethics and
worldview in which the human person was created in the image and likeness of
God. In addition, many of these
God-fearers were scandalized by the potpourri of the various pagan religions of
the time. These non Jews sensed
something special about Judaism.
However, they did not become Jews because of the obligation to observe
so much of the Jewish rituals, such as circumcision and Kosher observance. They could (and did) worship from afar.
Scripture scholars tell us that many of the first Gentile Christians came
exactly from this group.
The consensus is that Theophilus was an affluent Greek speaker who was interested in becoming a member of the Jesus Movement (also known as ha Derek, the Way.) He might very well have been the patron who financed the two-fold literary efforts of St Luke. As a result, in accordance with literary custom, the author dedicated the opus to his literary patron.
There might have been several questions about the Jesus Movement that St Luke was trying to answer for the prospective new Christian. 1) Why did not more of Jesus’ Jewish kinsfolk not become Christian themselves? 2) How could the Jewish Messiah be the universal Savior of all the human family? 3) Why should anyone follow the Way of a crucified Roman criminal? Did that make followers of the Jesus Movement suspect as well? 4) What connection was there anymore between the Jewish Temple (destroyed by the time that the Gospel was written) and the Way of God, professed by the Jesus Movement in the house churches and Jewish synagogues around the Mediterrean?
5) What were the basic premises of the Jesus Movement that needed to be clarified for Theophilus and others like him?
However, there is a meditation that
anybody, then or now, could make as a result of the name of the putative
literary patron. The name Theophilus is
a Greek derivative of two Greek words, 1) Theos – God; 2) philus – lover
of. The name Theophilus means simply
“one who loves God.”
Questions abound. Was this the literary patron’s actual name? Was it a new name that he assumed if and when he became a baptized member of the Jesus Movement, similar to a Confirmation name today?
Was it simply a nickname for any member of the Jesus Movement, then and now? Could it possibly be a nickname for everyone of us who claims to be a follower of the Way of Jesus Christ in the Jesus Movement?
If, indeed, it is a nickname for all of us, how does the inspired Gospel writer encourage us to show God our love (and commitment)? Is it simply to say, as many do, “I believe in God and in Jesus Christ”? As Pope Benedict wrote in Jesus of Nazareth a few years back, is it the same as saying more radically or basically, “I believe God and Jesus Christ.”
One of the
most salient characteristics of the message that Luke is sending to Theophilus
is the usage of the words “today” (semeron) and “now”
(nuun). It is that Luke is
telling Theophilus
(then and now) that whenever we are challenged by God’s message in Jesus
Christ, we face a moment of decision. We
show our assent in faith through living
the Way
of the Jesus Movement. Some
of the difficult adjustments that obviously Luke feels that Theophilus,
then and now, have to accept include our
realization that God is constantly part of our lives. Still, there are special times when we
experience God’s Presence in a “Now” or a “Today” that is unique. This critical moment becomes a time of
decision whether we believe God and Jesus Christ in the everyday realities of
our lives. God is the Presence in which
we live every “Now”. Special situations whenever bring the
Divine Indwelling home to us in every “today” and every “now”. 102410AD jfq
Sunday, January 17,
2010AD
Second Sunday in Green
Coffee Brewing in the
Attic
Several years ago, there were a variety of motion pictures about wedding preparations. Steve Martin and Diane Keaton played the parents of the bride in one release about twenty years ago. Bride’s fathers were told to buy (NOT RENT) the video and watch it and study it. They could save thousands.
One sad subtle point was that the actual wedding liturgy itself took about 30 seconds in the movie, featuring the de rigeux doddering, old “out of it” minister. Or was he a Catholic priest?
However, who or what was “out of it?” Sadly, it becomes apparent that many (although not all) couples usually do not have the time or energy to think about the significance of marriage in Christ Jesus. The unspoken drive is “Don’t talk to me about the rest of my married life; I am too busy planning for my wedding.”
The Gospel of the Wedding Feast of Cana comes up as part of a triad from the early days of Christianity. When our Christian ancestors spoke of the Epiphany of the Lord, they referred to three manifestations or appearances of the Lord Jesus: 1) the epiphany to the Visitors from our Gentile ancestors; 2) the baptism of Jesus by John; 3) the first of Jesus’ signs, the wedding feast of Cana.
The Lord Jesus manifests Himself to us in a variety of ways. (Some of them are known only to Him because we miss them.) Our relationship with Christ Jesus can take a variety of levels. 1) We can maintain an acquaintance with Him as we tip our hats to Him as we gather on the Lord’s Day. 2) We can maintain a familiarity with Him through a variety of built-in techniques into the course of each day. Than Christ Jesus for the gift of each new day. (It is only when you get older that you realize that each day is God’s “Present”. Say a prayer the first and last thing in each day; thank God for the gift of food at each meal. (Not everyone is so fortunate as we. Think of those in Haiti this morning after the earthquake.) Don’t forget attendance weekly at the Sunday Eucharist. Everyone finds out that no matter what they tell you, religion is not a luxury item. The “System” has a way to ease Transcendence, Infinity and the Presence of God in your daily life. Yet, the Lord Jesus is Present in every moment, or He is Present in no moments. The choice is yours.
Finally, and most important, in silence and solitude and in slowing down and in simplicity, we let God speaks in our minds and hearts in the intimacy of silent prayer. Do yourself the favor and find the time each day, no matter what.
This week, the world heard of the death of Miep Gee