Reflections

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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

7^th 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

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

6^th 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 62^nd 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