Theological Reflections

2008-07-30T13:15:00.004-05:00

Continuing my use of past "Theological Thoughts," the doctrinal points addressed in this reflection follow a theme I have written about often, one that is probably quite familiar to you by now, namely that God desires our salvation and that through grace we respond to God’s call to us. These themes recur frequently in our Catholic theology. What connects these two points is the middle one, “God alone satisfies us (CCC 1718).” Part of the way that God calls all of us to eternal life and salvation is through the gift of our restlessness. It is what theologians and philosophers would call our human transcendence. In other words, the dynamism of our spirit eventually transcends or surpasses every finite thing in our life. Whatever we have or achieve is never enough. When we complete one task, we move on to another. Have you ever worked on a really big project at work or in school? Often when we have been putting a lot of our time and energy into something, there is an incredible relief when it is completed, but along with that relief comes a sense of restlessness. It is as if we don’t know what to do with ourselves all of the sudden. That feeling is an example of our transcendence. In theological terms, that restlessness is a gift from God. No finite thing or project or even person completely satisfies and fulfills us because only the infinite God can satisfy that longing. Only the One whom we can never transcend or surpass can fulfill that yearning. Oftentimes our relationships suffer because we place expectations on another human being that only God can realize. A spouse is someone who can be a companion and a partner on that mutual journey to fulfillment in God, but even a spouse cannot be God for us. We are finite beings, but we have been created with a capacity for the infinite, a capacity for God. Only the inexhaustible mystery of God can fill that capacity. God is a mystery that we cannot ever totally grasp or comprehend. If we could comprehend God, God would be a finite object like all of the others we are able to move beyond. We can never move beyond God. Furthermore when we let ourselves go and surrender into the abyss that is the infinite God, we discover that we have fallen into an abyss of love. Thus St. Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O Lord.”

The desire for God is placed in our hearts by the God who desires our salvation. By that gift of God’s grace, we are drawn relentlessly toward God. At the same time we must consent to God’s gift. Often human beings try to fill that restlessness with material things or power or other finite things that they make into false gods or idols. However, it is important to note here that I am not saying that the things of this world are bad. In fact, it is only through the things and people of this world that we experience God. It is only through the things and people in this world that we can accept God’s call to us. We do so by actualizing the gifts God has given us: freedom, a conscience, the ability to love. Every time one acts in love, freedom, or truth, every time one recognizes beauty and goodness, one affirms the presence of our God who is love, freedom, truth, beauty, goodness, etc. Our movement toward God is always a movement that is acted out in the midst of our world. In doing so, we do not make the things of this world into gods, but we see the presence of God being mediated through the people and events of our lives.

We see the perfect actualization of God’s call and the human response in Jesus Christ. Christ is God’s offer to us and our response to God. Christ has enabled us to respond, so that through the power of the Holy Spirit, we say ‘yes’ to God in and through the ‘yes’ of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a fully human life, a life of love, freedom and truth, and he calls us to imitate him. We see his ‘yes’ acted out in the events of his life, in his preaching, in his love for all people, and finally in his crucifixion. And in the resurrection, we see God’s ‘Amen’ to the life and death of Jesus, as well as God’s ‘Amen’ to our lives lived fully in freedom and love.

2008-07-16T09:09:00.002-05:00

I apologize for not being as good about staying on top of writing these entries as I had hoped! How is it that summer always ends up being such a busy time? I have also been working on preparing the courses I am teaching this fall, so I admit, I am going to take the easy way out! During my first years at St. Monica, I wrote reflections each week on the doctrinal points given in Celebrating the Lectionary, the program we were using in the Sunday School at that time, and sent them home to parents. Over the next few weeks I am simply going to share some of those reflections with you, so here is the first of them! The doctrinal points in this reflection dealt with the fact that God is creator, that creation is good, and that the Christian community has been tragically divided, so those are the points I address in what follows. I hope you are all having a good summer!

We believe that God is creator, and as such, all that God created is good. This is the message of the story in Genesis, in which God creates and then God proclaims that what has been created is good. Theologically, the Catholic Church teaches that creation proclaims the presence of God. Even without revelation, one would be able to come to a natural knowledge of God as creator through contemplating the beauty and the wonder of the created world. St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan friar who lived in the 13th century, wrote The Soul’s Journey Into God in which he reflected that creation is a book that has been written by God. The first movement of the soul toward God is the ladder of creation. For Bonaventure, in nature we see the footprints of God. To say that the world is sacramental is to say that it is a visible way in which God is present to us – if we know how to look at it.

When God creates the humans, he gives them dominion over creation. Dominion, when used in this way is not understood as domination, but rather as stewardship. God has given us the gift of creation, but has also entrusted it to our care. We are the stewards of the earth and its resources. Part of our job as stewards is to protect the earth and to make sure the resources are sustained. Part of our job as stewards is to make sure those resources are used justly and responsibly. To lose parts of the natural world through extinction or destruction is to lose part of God’s revelation to us.

In the creation account in Genesis, we also learn that God made human beings in the likeness and image of God. The fact that all human beings are created in God’s image means that all human life is sacred. All human life has dignity, not because of anything a human being does, but simply by the fact that he or she is created by God as an image of God, regardless of race, religion, gender or any other ways we categorize human beings. Such dignity is called inherent dignity in moral theology, because it is given to us as part of who we are, as opposed to ascribed dignity, which we grant to people on the basis of things they do or how they act. The inherent dignity and sacredness of human life means that as Christians we must protect all lives and make sure people live in conditions that are worthy of their dignity as images of God. We use the language of the seamless garment to talk about issues of life, which means that all of the issues around protecting and sustaining life are connected in such an integral way that you cannot stand for one and not the other. Many Catholics are familiar with the concept of pro-life in terms of being anti-abortion, but in Catholic teaching pro-life also means that one should stand against capital punishment, against war unless there is absolutely no other way to defend oneself, against assisted suicide. It also means that we must stand for life-giving and sustaining issues – making sure that people have proper food, clothing, and shelter, making sure children are being nourished and nurtured, making sure neighborhoods are places of safety instead of violence. As Christians, we must be scandalized that people still starve to death every day in our world. As stewards, especially stewards that live in the wealthiest nation in the world, we must work to see that the resources we have, resources that have been given to us by God, are distributed in a just manner.

It is especially important these days to remember that as Christians we also called to be peace-makers. We strive for peace both because war violates the sacredness of human life and because we have been given the peace of Christ and are compelled to share it with others. We believe that the reign of God is both already here, having broken through in Christ, and not yet fully here. Thus we work with God to give hope to the world that peace is possible, to keep alive the vision of Micah and Isaiah who looked to the day when the nations will “beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks;” a vision of a world in which “one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again (Is. 2:3-4, Micah 4:3).”

In a world seeking peace, we also must face the fact that the Christian community has been tragically divided. We have come a long way in our relations with our brothers and sisters of different Christian denominations. Unfortunately we also have a long way to go. How can we be true symbols of peace in the world when our own community stands divided? We look to the witness of those who are in mixed marriages, i.e., a Catholic Christian and a non-Catholic Christian (of course, marriages between Christians and those of other religious traditions also witness to us about dialogue between religious traditions!), and hold them up as examples of how love conquers the divisions between us. We stay in dialogue with one another, and we pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in continuing to heal past hurts and to move toward a future that celebrates all of our unity in the midst of our diversity.

2008-07-02T13:01:00.004-05:00

As we celebrate the birth of our nation on this upcoming 4th of July, we must think about what it means to be America - who we are as a country and who we want to be. This is a question we have faced since the founding of our country and is intimately connected to the issue of religion. Without a doubt our country was founded on Christian principles (along with principles from Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment). What is interesting is to look at the fact that those very Christian principles were used to to espouse freedom from and for religion, though not without controversy. I am currently reading Diana Eck's book, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. I highly recommend this book as a way to understand both where we have come from, what our country actually looks like today, and the choices we will have to make about who we are in the future. For a great overview of her research project, go to her website, The Pluralism Project.

In the book Eck talks about the history of the colonies and the different approaches they took to the issue of religious tolerance or exclusion, from colonies that had an established religion to those that did not, and that both sides argued their case on biblical grounds. In seventeenth century Boston, "an anti-Catholic law was enacted stating, 'that no Jesuit or ecclesiasticall person ordained by the authoritie of the pope shall henceforth come within our jurisdiction" (Eck, 36). Eck also points out that

while the Catholic founders of Maryland passed a Toleration Act in 1649, when Protestants came to power in the following decades, Jesuits were banished from the colony and Catholics were denied the right to hold office. Harsh anti-Catholic laws were passed, such as the 1704 law straightforwardly titled An Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery Within This Province. (Eck, 38)

We all know (I hope) that the issue of "establishment" and "toleration" was dealt with in the First Amendment to the Constitution that both prevented the establishment of a state religion and protected the freedom to exercise one's own religion. Of course, no problem is so easily settled.

Today we live in the most religiously diverse country in the world, and the challenge of diversity is always whether we will view it as a gift or an obstacle. Issues of religious diversity often intersect with issues of immigration. Eck cites the following example:

The vast alien immigration is, at the root, an attack upon Protestant religion with its freedom of conscience, and is therefore a menace to American liberties. . . . For forty years the alien, unassimilable masses have been de-Americanizing America. . . . A few more years of our present sentimental, irrational hospitality will reduce the American people to a hopeless minority. (Eck, 27)

That passage could be read today on many websites or heard on talk radio shows referring to Muslims or even to Spanish speaking Christians. It was not directed to either of those groups however. The statement was written in a publication of the Ku Klux Klan in 1924 and was referring to Catholics and Jews. In a post 911 world, unfortunately too many people react to people of other religious traditions with suspicion and hostility. Fortunately, for as many acts of hatred and violence that have been committed, there have also been efforts to reach out to other religious communities and learn more about one another. Just as the founders of our country had to make choices about how to deal with religious diversity and as Americans in the the 1920s and post-war Civil Rights period had to make choices about how to deal with religious diversity, today we are once again faced with this question of who we are, who we are referring to when we say "We the people." Eck points out that

America's response to this question is important, perhaps not only for America but also for the world. Building a multireligious society seems to be increasingly difficult in a world in which religious markers of identity are often presumed to be the most divisive of all differences. (Eck, 66)

Drawing on the sentiment of the American Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray that pluralism requires that we engage one another in dialogue, Eck proposes that such engagement

is vital also to the health of religious faith so that we appropriate our faith not by habit or heritage alone, but by making it our own within the context of dialogue with people of other faiths. Such dialogue is not aimed at achieving agreement, but at achieving relationship. (Eck, 71-72)

This Fourth of July, let us look around at "we the people," people of all different faiths - Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Christians, etc. (and if you doubt that this is the reality that exists today, use the The Pluralism Project directory to look up the communities of these different faiths that are active your own community) and choose to celebrate the gift and opportunity we have been given to engage others and come to mutual understanding through openness and friendship rather than reacting with hostility and fear.

2008-06-21T11:01:00.001-05:00

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am with you always, until the age.” This is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. Christ is always present to us, so what does it mean to say, where two or three are gathered in his name, he is in our midst? Why do we gather? Why do we come together on Sunday? Why do we gather in prayer groups? Why can it not just be about God and me? What does it mean to be Church?

Of course, Christ is always present to us, no matter what. We gather together because we believe in the sacramental presence of God, the presence of God made tangible and manifest through the created world. That presence is felt in the bread and wine that becomes the body and blood. That presence is felt in the oil that anoints or the words of the priest that assure us of forgiveness. That presence is felt in the vows of love that are exchanged between a man and a woman making a lifetime commitment to one another. And that presence is felt when two or three gather in his name.

Our relationship with God is like a relationship with another human being. Like any good marriage, there is a need to just spend time alone with God, to come to know God in a very intimate, personal way. But also like marriage, this relationship with God is not meant to turn you in on yourself, but should foster in you a desire and willingness to go out to others, to be more loving and active in the world. The love that you experience in that personal, intimate relationship, is meant to make you more compassionate, more aware of the needs of others. It is a love that is not selfish and self-absorbed, but one into which you bring others, it is a love of hospitality. And just as in a marriage there are times you struggle in your relationship, there are also times we struggle in our relationship with God. At those moments we need the support of friends who will encourage us and give us hope. We need those who will help us believe when we seem to have lost the ability to believe. We need the assurance that we are not alone, no matter what happens.

We gather together in his name because doing so holds an incredible power. In the actual passage from Matthew, the same Gospel in which Jesus assures us he is with us always, Jesus tells us:

Again, amen, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Mt. 18:19-20)

Maintaining belief, maintaining trust in God is not always easy. We gather together to support each other, to strengthen our belief, to share our joys and out sorrows, and to pray for and with one another. In doing so, Christ is in our midst. Sometimes we are the ones who need that tangible, sacramental presence of God that we experience in the love and concern of another. Sometimes that other person says exactly the words that we need to hear at that moment, and we know that God is present. But we can also not ever forget that sometimes we are gathered with others in prayer or at Church, because we are being called to be that sacramental presence of God to another, because someone else needs to hear something we will say or just needs someone to listen. Sometimes being with others is not about what we get, but what we will give, and the blessing of this is that in those graced moments, we too feel and know that God is present, that Christ is Emmanuel, God with us.

2008-06-12T11:20:00.003-05:00

I attended the annual meeting of CTSA (Catholic Theological Society of America) this past weekend, and I wanted to share a bit about one of the talks with you! Julie Hanlon Rubio, a professor at St. Louis University, gave a talk on "A Familial Vocation beyond the Home." In her talk Dr. Rubio reminded us that in Familiaris Consortio Pope John Paul II speaks of the family as being given a commission to serve society and to be a communion of love. Families are meant to build communion and solidarity, a place in which we form deeper relationships with others both within our family, but also outside of our family. Dr. Rubio challenged our parishes to really form families, to be more than just a place of spiritual comfort and friendliness. She said that parishes should help families live out their familial vocation outside of the home, to challenge a lot of the tendencies in our culture about the pace of our lives and how we resist that frantic pace in order to build communion within our families so that we can then enter into service to the greater community. She noted that the practice of service is crucial to a Christian life, and that in parishes families are too often either "excused" from service or directed to service in their own homogeneous communities of parish and school. Only when we include families in the call to service, she warned, can Catholic social teaching penetrate the Church.

Dr. Rubio was drawing on John Paul II's apsostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio. I want to share some of the passages in this text that highlight the point Dr. Rubio was making in her presentation. On the topic of service, John Paul II states:

The social role of the family certainly cannot stop short at procreation and education, even if this constitutes its primary and irreplaceable form of expression. Families therefore, either singly or in association, can and should devote themselves to manifold social service activities, especially in favor of the poor, or at any rate for the benefit of all people and situations that cannot be reached by the public authorities' welfare organization (44).

He goes on to state that:

The social role that belongs to every family pertains by a new and original right to the Christian family, which is based on the sacrament of marriage. By taking up the human reality of the love between husband and wife in all its implications, the sacrament gives to Christian couples and parents a power and a commitment to live their vocation as lay people and therefore to "seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God."(113) The social and political role is included in the kingly mission of service in which Christian couples share by virtue of the sacrament of marriage, and they receive both a command which they cannot ignore and a grace which sustains and stimulates them. The Christian family is thus called upon to offer everyone a witness of generous and disinterested dedication to social matters, through a "preferential option" for the poor and disadvantaged. Therefore, advancing in its following of the Lord by special love for all the poor, it must have special concern for the hungry, the poor, the old, the sick, drug victims and those who have no family (47).

And so I ask, with Dr. Julie Hanlon Rubio, how can we as Church help our families achieve their familial vocations beyond the home?

2008-06-04T12:53:00.002-05:00

I was involved with a Cursillo retreat this past weekend and it reminded of me of three (well, more than three, but only three I am going to talk about here) very important pieces of my spiritual life. The first is the power of prayer. My own personal prayer is the cornerstone of my life. It is what centers me on a daily basis, both my formal morning prayer and the numerous informal ways that I interact with God throughout the day. My favorite line from the movie Shadowlands is Anthony Hopkins, playing C.S. Lewis, stating to his friend, "I don't pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me. I pray because the need flows out of me constantly." I believe that prayer changes us and changes our relationships with one another. Those of you who know me well know that I am quite fascinated by quantum physics. I think that we will discover more and more about how truly interconnected we are through science, how truly interconnected we were created to be. I sometimes forget about this interconnectedness, about how much I also need the prayer of others, how much I am strengthened by knowing that others are praying for me and that I am not alone. The power of prayer is not simply my own prayer, but it is the prayer of those who pray with me and for me, which brings me to my second point.

I remembered this weekend (not that I had really forgotten, but had reinforced) the power of community. I have said many times that to be human is to be in relationship. There is an incredible amount of power in a group of people coming together in love and support and celebration. This piece of being human is why we worship as a community. My relationship with God is not just personal, it is also communal (or ecclesial in theological speak!). Part of the reason our relationship with God is also communal is that we are embodied. We experience the world in and through time and space. We also experience God in and through time and space, which means that our relationships with one another can mediate our experience of God. I can't even begin to describe how much I felt God present this past weekend in and through this group of women gathered on retreat. There is great power in community.

My third point is clearly the most obvious. I "remembered" the power of God. Again, not just the power of God in my own life, but hearing the stories of how God is present and acting in the lives of others (another reason why community is so important). My own faith is deepened and strengthened by that witness. I also believe that God was strongly acting in bringing this particular group of women together at this particular point in all of our lives. I find God works in that way quite often. We always say that in RCIA (the process of becoming Catholic) as well, that on any given year the group that is formed is the group that is meant to be together. In theology, this is what we call God working through secondary causes. I used to love to explain this to the teenage Confirmands at the parish, that God works in their lives through other events and people, so that yes, God can even work through their parents forcing them to attend Confirmation classes! Every woman on this retreat had different people and events that led her to be there. Some had planned to go on an earlier retreat, but life had interfered. Others were hesitant to go on this retreat but something pushed them. The result was what it was meant to be. Of course, I don't want to eliminate the role of freedom either. Maybe there were others we will never know about that were meant to be there as well, but were not open to the working of God in their lives at this moment. The great thing about the power of God is that a missed opportunity is rarely definitive; God simply works in our lives to offer us new opportunities. Wherever you are today and whatever you are doing, I hope you experience the power of prayer, community, and God in your life.

2008-05-29T13:19:00.002-05:00

I want to share with you part of a mediation I wrote on Martha for a retreat this weekend: As we think about how we encounter Christ, I want to turn to the Scriptures to look at an encounter between Christ and Martha of Bethany.

As they [Jesus and the disciples] continued their journey he entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary (who) sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me." The Lord said to her in reply, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her." Luke 10:38-42

Martha is a good and faithful woman, performing the duties that were expected of her. Jesus sees her efforts and loves her for them, but he invites her to set aside her concerns and enter into a deeper relationship. Like the rich young man who is too attached to his material possessions to surrender to God, Martha is too attached to duties and expectations to surrender. Maybe she is also attached to what others will think of her. We do not hear what she did after this – did she too let go of her concerns, her attachments and sit attentively at the feet of Jesus? Or did she maybe sit at his feet while still trying to cling to her attachments, half listening to his words, glancing anxiously back at the kitchen and wondering what they would do about a meal. Or looking nervously at the men around her, wondering if they were offended by her presumptuousness of sitting at the feet of the Master with the men, trying to be like one of the disciples. Would they tell the others in the village? What would the other women say? Imagine her unhappiness, wanting to be with Jesus and yet pulled away by the things that were distracting her, filling her mind. Imagine her sorrow once he was gone and she thought, if only I had taken more time to be with him.

OR did she freely give her heart over to the Lord, letting go of her attachments? Which story is yours? Do you find yourself free to give your whole heart to God or are you caught up in your attachments? What are your attachments? We all have them – for some they are material possessions, for others doubt. For some the attachment is a matter of letting their identities get caught up in their performance of certain roles – at work, as a parent, even as a member on a church committee! Are there areas where you lack the courage to trust God with all of the details of your life?

What would it take for you to let go of your concerns and spend some time sitting at the feet of the Lord? Surely Martha learned to do this over the course of her time with Jesus, because the Gospel of John tells us that when her brother Lazarus dies, she is able to profess her faith and belief, stating:

"Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world." John 11:27

2008-05-21T13:58:00.004-05:00

Last Sunday we celebrated Trinity Sunday, so I want to offer you a couple of ideas to reflect upon, neither of which are my own! The first is my current favorite Trinitarian description, and it comes from Elizabeth Johnson in a Catholic Update she wrote titled, "Who is the Holy Spirit?" Johnson talks about the Trinity as God beyond us, God with us, and God within us. God beyond us refers to the first person of the Trinity and emphasizes the transcendence of God, the God who is incomprehensible mystery. Were God not beyond us, were we able to comprehend God, God would not be God, because God would then be something finite and graspable. Instead our God is infinite, and as such always beyond our finite minds. Karl Rahner talks about God as the horizon - we move closer but never arrive. He also talks about our asymptotic relationship to God. If you think back to your geometry classes, an asymptote is a curved line on a graph where the line continously approaches the axis, but will never actually touch the axis because the amount of space between the two can always be divided (click here for an image). While we never reach God by our own efforts, the good news is that we don't have to because God has reached us, God has drawn near to us. God with us refers to the second person of the Trinity, God Emmanuel, incarnate in Jesus Christ. God has entered into unity with humanity in the incarnation. At the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus, Emmanuel, assures his followers,

"I am with you always, until the end of the age." Mt. 28:20

Finally God within us refers to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit that dwells within us uniting us to the Father through the Son. Paul refers tells us,

"the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us." Romans 5:5

The second idea I want to leave with you is a passage from St. Athanasius, one of the early theologians who had a profound impact on the Church's understanding of the Trinity. This passage is part of the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours and is taken from Athanasius' First Letter to Serapion.

[T]he Father makes all things through the Word and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as the Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit. . . . [W]hen the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.
This is also Paul's teaching in his second letter to the Corinthians: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. For grace and the gift of the Trinity are given by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Just as grace is given from the Father through the Son, so there could be no communication of the gift to us except in the Holy Spirit. But when we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son and the fellowship of the Spirit. (Italics indicate quotation of Scripture.)

2008-05-15T16:14:00.002-05:00

I wanted to share with you some comments about last week's blog that were sent to me in an email, because I think that they offer a lot to think about!

I just read your 5/7 Theological Reflections and was struck in particular by the specific phrase: "Chastity, while often understood as celibacy, actually means to remain true to one’s state in life." I was also impressed at how your thoughts seemed to somewhat parallel what I had read in Fr. Rolheiser's column: The Secret of a Monk’s Cell.

Since I can't really even paraphrase what Fr. Rolheiser said I will copy a few passages and underline [italicized here instead] to point out the similarities I see between your thoughts and his.
"This advice (to stay in one's cell) is being given to monks, to professional contemplatives, to persons living inside a monastic enclosure, to persons whose very vocation it is to live in solitude, to persons whose primary duty of state it is to pray in silence. In such a context, the word "cell" becomes a code-word that encapsulates the entire vocation and duties of state of a monk. Thus when Abba Moses says, "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything" he is, in effect, counselling due diligence and fidelity. Do what you came here to do! To remain in one’s cell is synonymous with fidelity.
And that’s sound spiritual advice for everyone, not just monks. Our "cell" is another word for our primary set of responsibilities, for our duties of state, for due diligence and fidelity inside of our vocations, relationships, marriages, families, churches, and communities. To "leave one’s cell" is to neglect our responsibilities or to be unfaithful. To let "our cell teach us everything" is to have faith that if we remain faithful inside of our moral values and our proper commitments then virtue and fidelity will themselves teach us what we need to know to come to maturity and sanctity."

First of all, let me say how profoundly I was struck by the insights offered here! I love the connection with being "in one's cell" and fidelity to our calling and the responsibilities those callings entail! I also think of the command to dwell in one's cell as the call to go within oneself, to spend time just being with oneself and God, again for those leading active lives as well as contemplatives. For me the line about "your cell will teach you everything" brings in that idea of self reflection as well. We come to know ourselves and our God through living our lives with faithfulness to our primary responsibilities and commitments. Likewise we find the energy to live that faithfulness through coming to know ourselves, taking some time to be in the "cell" of our own self, as well as in taking time to just be with and in God.

I highly recommend Ron Rolheiser as an author. I have frequently used his book, Against an Infinite Horizon, in one of the courses I taught.

2008-05-07T14:04:00.002-05:00

On Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, and in doing so, we each celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit in our own lives and our commission as disciples to go out and continue the work of Christ in the world. Jesus calls us into a special relationship with God through our baptism giving us the mission of continuing his work of being the presence of God’s love to all people. Part of that mission is to spread the gospel message of God’s love among all people and to call others to join us as disciples of Christ. The Catholic tradition tells us that human beings have a natural ability to know and love God, that is to say, that human reason can lead a person to God, even if he/she has never been exposed to Christian revelation. Being created with the ability to know and love God means that all people are called to know and love God, regardless of whether or not they are Christian. People can know and experience the existence of God just by looking at the world around them and reflecting on their own experiences of love, goodness, beauty and truth. A brief study of history and other cultures witnesses to that truth when we see the phenomenon of so many people across different places and times having a belief in some type of God. Hence when missionaries go into a non-Christian territory, they are taught to look for the ways that God is already working among the people that live there before they try to teach people about God.

Too often people do not experience the Church as a sign of God’s presence in the world, but rather see the humanness and failings of the people that make up the Church. One of the greatest scandals of the Christian Church is the divisions between the different denominations. Thankfully, we have made great strides toward unity in the Christian Church in recent decades. I have always thought one of the greatest gifts of the Catholic Church is its principle of maintaining unity in diversity and diversity in unity; that we have many gifts, but the same spirit. In other words, there is a great blessing in the fact that the Church is able to hold together in the one Body of Christ so many people who come from different perspectives and who have different experiences of God and of life. We can celebrate our differences, while holding onto the firm foundation of our faith in one Lord, one baptism and one Church.

Our Church is made up of people who live out their baptismal calls in many different ways. Those who live out their baptismal vocation through religious life take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (the evangelical counsels), but as disciples we are all called to be witnesses to the world through lives of poverty, chastity and obedience. We embrace poverty by not clinging to our possessions and by realizing that God has called us to be good stewards of our resources, making sure the goods of our world are fairly distributed. The first Christians actually held all of their good in common, dividing them “among all according to each one’s need (Acts 3:45).” Chastity, while often understood as celibacy, actually means to remain true to one’s state in life. Thus for single people, priests or religious, it means to be celibate; and for those who are married, it means to remain faithful to one’s spouse. Finally, all disciples are always called to be obedient to the will of God in their lives. As we celebrate this Pentecost, I pray that we will all feel renewed in the Spirit to recommit ourselves to living out our baptismal vocations, to being Church, to being the Body of Christ in the world.

2008-04-30T10:22:00.003-05:00

All of our language about God is metaphorical. We use finite human words and concepts to try to capture something of our experience of the infinite and incomprehensible mystery of God. Theology has different ways of talking about this process. Aquinas used the idea of analogy to deal with this issue, in which we say, God is 'a', but God is not 'a' in any way we experience or understand 'a', God surpasses all human comprehension of 'a'. In other words, we say, God is love, but God is not love in the way we experience human love because God far surpasses any human way of understanding love. Other theologians will talk about dialectical theology (Barth) or the coincidence of opposites (Bonaventure), in a way that recognizes contradictions in our experience of God that simply cannot be reconciled by our human minds. Christian theology has a long-standing tradition of what we call cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology is all of the things we affirm about God. Apophatic theology is the theology of silence and darkness, the theology that says ultimately before the mystery of God we can say nothing because any word we utter ends up being false in some way, because the most intimate experience of God is an experience that can never be put into words. Nonetheless, because we are human and we do have a need to communicate, we must struggle to put our experience of God into words, even while acknowledging that those words and concepts will always fall short.

We run into trouble when we start to take our words and concepts too literally. We run into trouble when we do not adequately understand the historical context of certain images. I want to use two examples of this issue. The first is the statement in our creed that Jesus "is seated at the right hand of the Father." For much of my life I had a mental image of two thrones in heaven with God the Father in one and Jesus in the other (probably with a dove flying overhead). The problem with this image is that it is di- or tritheistic - it is an image of two (three, if you count the bird) gods. We profess a belief in one God. So what is behind this image? Only when I started to study Scripture more in depth did this image become clear to me. As I became more familiar with the imagery used in the Hebrew Scriptures to talk about God, I learned that the right hand of God is a reference to the saving power of God. The psalms are filled with references to this image. Just yesterday the psalm for daily mass used it:

Though I walk in the midst of dangers, you guard my life when my enemies rage. You stretch out your hand; your right hand saves me. -Psalm 138:7

God's "right hand" saves us, delivers us, upholds us, sustains us. (For references to God's right hand, click here!) One of my favorite references to this concept is in the Book of Job. When Job is questioning God, God responds by questioning him. God basically asks Job, "Are you God?" Did you create the earth? Can you command the morning or bring the rain? God says, if so, if you are God,

"then will I too acknowledge that your own right hand can save you." Job 40:14

In other words, if you are not God, then you are dependent on God's right hand to save you. So what does all of this have to do with the Creed? To say that Jesus is seated "at the right hand of God" is simply a metaphorical way of professing that Jesus is the saving power of God. It is Jesus who saves us, delivers us, upholds us, and sustains us. Like Job, we cannot save ourselves, but are utterly dependent on the saving power of God in Christ to save us. By taking that line of the Creed literally, we not only fall into heresy by imagining Jesus to be separate from God, we also miss the very power the image is meant to convey!

The other example I want to use is the image of God that Jesus gives us, the image of God as Abba. We translate this image as father, a word that in our usage often conveys a very formal parent-child relationship. The tragedy of that translation is that the power of Jesus' calling God Abba was precisely in the fact that it shattered that formality in the relationship between us and God. Abba cries out to God with a child's familiarity, trust, and affection. To refer to God as a father would not have been shocking in Jesus' time as the Hebrew Scriptures use such imagery to talk about God. The informal and affectionate relationship with God is the legacy Jesus was giving to his disciples and to all of us. We also miss the point if we focus on the fact that Abba is a masculine term. God is not male or female. To try to categorize God as either becomes heresy and idolatry. We use personal pronouns (which in our language are gendered) to refer to God because our relationship with God is personal, not because we take literally the gender of the pronoun. Therefore it makes no sense to get upset when people use either male or female terms to refer to God, because neither one should be taken literally and Scripture uses both (for feminine imagery, see for example the beautiful passages in the book of Wisdom or Proverbs!)

Language is one of our greatest gifts and biggest frustrations as human beings. Just think about your human relationships to know the truth of this statement. How marvelous that we have been created with this gift of the ability to communicate, and yet, how often our words fail to capture our intention. So much human misunderstanding is based on the fact that we struggle to capture our feelings and experiences with language. Our relationship with God is not only no different, the disconnect between our language and concepts and the reality of God is that much greater because of God is ultimately infinite and beyond our comprehension. Nonetheless, because we are in relationship with God and do experience God, we continue to use our words and concepts, no matter how fallible they are, to try to articulate and communicate the relationship that makes us who we are.

2008-04-23T10:53:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago a friend emailed me the following question, so I thought I would use it, along with my response, in my blog this week:

Does our soul have a beginning? I know once created (at conception?) we have eternal life which I presume to mean our souls of course. But I have been having a conversation with someone that thinks "we have no beginning, we are eternal". That is not my understanding. Would you enlighten me or perhaps you could blog on this?

Souls are created and so do have a beginning. Only God is without beginning. When we use the phrase "eternal soul," what is meant is that our souls are everlasting, that they have a beginning, but not an end. Thus we also talk about eternal life, that is, life without end (not without beginning). In theology the soul is considered the principle of life, and so would be understood to be created by God at the moment of conception giving life to the baby. For Thomas Aquinas all living things had souls - so plants have vegetative souls that enable the plant to process nourishment, etc., animals have sensitive souls which include the elements of nourishment, etc., but also basic feelings (e.g., an animal can be afraid), and humans have intellectual or rational souls which include all of the above but also intellect and will. For Aquinas, however, only the human soul was immortal. (Interestingly enough, Aquinas thought the human soul was given at the moment of "quickening," which made sense from his perspective in an age before modern science. Quickening was the moment when the woman first physically felt the baby move, and thus at that point the baby must have life, hence a soul.)

The idea of a soul with no beginning is a very dualistic idea popular in the gnostic (from the Greek for knowledge) understanding in which the souls were thought to have pre-existed and that they "fell" into matter which was evil. Thus the goal of life was to find the proper knowledge (gnosis) that enabled the soul to be liberated from the body and return to the spirit world. Gnostic Christianity (combining Gnostic beliefs and Christian beliefs) was very popular in the first centuries of the Church. This way of thinking was condemned by the Church. Nonetheless, the dualistic tendency persists to this day and was especially exacerbated by the dualistic philosophy of Descartes in the 1600s.

Today we try to move away from a dualistic understanding of body and soul to understand the human person as embodied spirit or enspirited/ensouled body. The spiritual aspect of the human person is only lived out in and through our bodies. The unity rather than the distinction is primary. The role of the body is so central to what it means to be a human person that we profess our belief in the resurrection of the body, though we don't know what that looks like or precisely what that means after death.

This is a great question, and I think a lot of people don't understand this, as I have heard of people refer to it as if our souls are waiting around up in heaven until a point where they choose or are assigned to "enter" a person and "come down" to earth. I blame that somewhat on Hollywood as well as the persistance of an underlying gnosticism! On a related note, people often refer to humans who have died as angels, and theologically speaking, angels are a completely different creature from humans. When humans die they are saints, not angels (and in fact while living we are also part of the communion of saints)! Angels, by the way, are also created, and while immortal also have a beginning. Only God is without beginning.

2008-04-15T17:21:00.004-05:00

Not too long ago I watched the movie Freedom Writers and truly my eyes were opened. I consider myself to be pretty aware of many of the tragic circumstances in the world, but I was shocked at the words of teens who live in our very own country and describe themselves as living in an "undeclared warzone." Certainly I have read about and even talked about the problem of violence in the US, especially in our cities, in a concerned but rather detached way. The violence in our cities, for the most part, does not directly touch my life. Something about the direct honesty of the teens in this movie profoundly shook me up and made me aware of the the problem in a new way.

The movie is based on the true story of a teacher who inspires her students to write journals about their own experiences of violence and racism, which they ultimately end up publishing as a book, The Freedom Writers Diary. Needless to say, I bought the book after watching the movie. Erin Gruwell was a new teacher in a "rough" school who was shocked to learn that while most of her students had never heard of the holocaust, the majority of them had experienced being shot or having someone shoot at them. In an environment that was deeply divided between racial gangs, she set out to teach them the dangers of intolerance by helping them to understand the holocaust through the eyes of another teenager, Anne Frank. Inspired by Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic (Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo), the students realized that by telling their own stories, they could make an impact on the world. In one passage a student tells of getting jumped on the first day of school. She goes on to explain to the reader that the schools are just like the city:

All of them are divided into separate sections, depending on race. On the streets, you kick it in different 'hoods, depending on your race, or where you're from. And at school, we separate ourselves from people who are different from us. That's just the way it is, and we all respect that. So when the Asians started trying to claim parts of the 'hood, we had to set them straight. . . . Latinos killing Asians. Asians killing Latinos. They declared war on the wrong people. Now it all comes down to what you look like. If you look Asian or Latino, you're going to get blasted on or at least jumped. The war has been declared, now it's a fight for power, money, and territory; we are killing each other over race, pride, and respect (10).

In writing about the experience of losing a friend, another of the students says:

I've lost many friends, friends who have died in an undeclared war. A war that has been here for years, but has never been recognized. A war between color and race. A war that will never end. A war that has left family and friends crying for loved ones who have perished. To society, they're just another dead person on the street corner; just another statistic. But to the mothers of all those other statistics, they're more than simple numbers. They represent lives cut short, like more cut flowers. Like the ones placed on their graves (16).

The students write of their experiences of sexual and physical abuse, of being "jumped" into the gang, of buying a gun and shooting someone for the first time, of addiction to drugs, of being evicted from their homes, of being in prison, of not thinking about graduation because they do not know if they will even still be alive then. I realized that I listen to stories on NPR everyday about people living in Iraq in fear for their lives, afraid to walk down their streets, and I fail to have an awareness that people in my own country live in the same kind of pervasive violence and fear.

The story has a "resurrection" ending in that these students did survive. They did live and graduate and even went on to college because someone took the time and effort to believe in them, to invest in them, and to challenge them. Back in 1979 our bishops wrote Brothers and Sisters to Us, a pastoral letter on racism. In it they state:

In response to this mood, we wish to call attention to the persistent presence of racism and in particular to the relationship between racial and economic justice. Racism and economic oppression are distinct but interrelated forces which dehumanize our society. Movement toward authentic justice demands a simultaneous attack on both evils. . . . Major segments of the population are being pushed to the margins of society in our nation. As economic pressures tighten, those people who are often black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian -- and always poor -- slip further into the unending cycle of poverty, deprivation, ignorance, disease, and crime. Racial identity is for them an iron curtain barring the way to a decent life and livelihood.

The bishops call all of us to accountability:

Today in our country men, women, and children are being denied opportunities for full participation and advancement in our society because of their race. The educational, legal, and financial systems, along with other structures and sectors of our society, impede people's progress and narrow their access because they are black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian. The structures of our society are subtly racist, for these structures reflect the values which society upholds. They are geared to the success of the majority and the failure of the minority. Members of both groups give unwitting approval by accepting things as they are. Perhaps no single individual is to blame. The sinfulness is often anonymous but nonetheless real. The sin is social in nature in that each of us, in varying degrees, is responsible. All of us in some measure are accomplices. As our recent pastoral letter on moral values states: "The absence of personal fault for an evil does not absolve one of all responsibility. We must seek to resist and undo injustices we have not ceased, least we become bystanders who tacitly endorse evil and so share in guilt in it."(8)

It is sad to see that after almost 30 years we are still facing the same problems. This past September Catholic Charities published a report entitled, "Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good." The report concludes:

What motivates our concern about racism is our faith conviction that this is a “radical evil” which is not only absolutely incompatible with Christian faith and belief, but also a dire threat to our nation’s future. A new way of understanding what it means to be “American,” and who is included in that self-understanding, is urgently needed for both the integrity of our faith and our survival as a nation. Given the momentous shift occurring in our racial demographics, tolerating racial injustice and economic deprivation are realities we can no longer afford to indulge. We offer to both our church and society the following affirmations and convictions:
• Poverty and racial injustice are deeply intertwined and demand a simultaneous engagement if effective progress is to be made against either.
• Poverty and racial injustice are moral scandals that betray our national ideals of “liberty and justice for all.”
• Poverty and racial injustice are the results of human agency. They need not exist. This means that social reality can be other than the way it is. “Social life is created by human beings, by human choices and decisions. This means that human beings can change things. And therein lies the hope (Massingale, "About Katrina," 61).”

2008-04-08T13:20:00.002-05:00

What does it mean to be Church? The Church is the sacrament of salvation. Sacraments are tangible realities that mediate intangible realities. So when people encounter the Church, they should experience a concrete tangible encounter with the love and mercy of God. The Church, however, is not the buildings in which we worship nor is it the hierarchy, though those pieces are certainly part of the Church. First and foremost the Church is all of us, those gathered in the name of Jesus Christ, baptized into his death and resurrection. It is not up to the cardinals and bishops to be signs of God's love in the world (though hopefully they are), it is up to us! At Easter we renew our baptismal vows. We recall that we have been chosen by God to be Church, to mediate God's compassion and love to the world. As baptized members of the Church, we are the body of Christ. We have been chosen to be members of the body of Christ, the tangible ongoing presence of Christ to all those we encounter. As I frequently remind those who are being Confirmed, the sacrament of Confirmation is not about you confirming your faith, it is God who confirms you, confirms that you have been called and chosen to be a disciple of Christ. The question is do you accept? The acceptance proclaimed in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation must be lived out in our daily lives. The Amen we say to the Body of Christ each time we go to mass is our commitment to be that body of Christ for others.

What a tall order! I am frequently overwhelmed to think that ideally when people enounter me, they are supposed to be encountering a concrete expression of God's love for them. How often I fall incredibly short of that, or even give the opposite impression. The good news is that we are not called to fulfill this vocation through our own efforts. We are called to be open to God working within us. We are called to be open to the gift of grace that enables us to mediate God's love and forgiveness to others. So often we fall into the trap of thinking we have to do everything on our own, and yet when we depend on our own resources is usually the time we end up in the most trouble! I do not mean, however, that we are not meant to make use of the gifts and talents that God has given us. Of course we should be using those gifts, but always with a sense of humilty, acknowleding that just because we think we are doing right, just because we think we are on the right side, does not necessarily make it so. Luckily we do not simply mediate God's love and forgiveness, we experience it ourselves and in fact can only be sacraments of that love and forgiveness because we have already received it ourselves. We love because God first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19)!

We are also not called to this mission individually, but communally. Being Church emphasizes our interconnectedness with one another. We do not exist in isolation. In fact, we cannot exist in isolation. Humans are social creatures. We need one another. We depend on one another. We have been created to be in relation, in the image and likeness of our God who is Trinity, who is by definition relatedness. We come together because no one of us can possibly express the infinite love and mercy of God. We come together to experience the love and mercy of God in and through one another, to be community for one another and to accept the loving support of the community ourselves. Only in that way can we go out to the world and hope to share some glimmer of what we ourselves have been given.

2008-04-02T10:50:00.002-05:00

Doubt goes hand in hand with faith. Faith, in many respects, is believing in spite of one's doubt, not in a irrational way, but in a way that accepts the doubt as part of the faith. I am not talking about blind faith where you simply close your ears to any contrary opinions, but a faith that is strengthened by engaging your own doubts and fears, facing them and confronting them. All relationships involve risk, and our relationship with God is no different in that respect. All relationships at times involve doubt, questioning the reality and strength of that relationship, especially in difficult times. Will the relationship hold? Does the other person truly care? The same questions can arise with God, especially when the circumstances of life lead us to a place where we feel most alone.

Our Sunday gospels of last week and this week enfold us between two stories of disciples experiencing doubt. Last week we had Thomas who needed that concrete, physical reassurance that Jesus had not abandoned him. This week we hear the wonderful story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The disciples, Cleopas and most likely his wife Mary (cf. John 19:25), had given up and were going home. They were discouraged and beaten. They had lost. They thought Israel was going to be redeemed, but instead the one they believed was Messiah had been crucified. Both Thomas and Cleopas and Mary doubted that Jesus was really who they had thought him to be. When things did not turn out as they had hoped and expected, they gave up. In many ways doubt is often a failure of imagination, an inability to envision possibility.

One of my favorite things about both of these stories is that Jesus specifically reaches out to the ones who are doubting. He deliberately addresses Thomas' concerns and invites him to "not be unbelieving, but believe." Luke's gospel tells us that Jesus "drew near and walked with" Cleopas and Mary on their journey of doubt. The doubt in both of these stories becomes the catalyst for a much deeper faith and a deeper relationship. Thomas cries out, "My Lord and my God." Cleopas and Mary come to understand the Scriptures in a new way, their eyes are opened, their hearts are burning, and they immediately set out to share their experience with the others. Those who doubted now become the proclaimers of the gospel.

In our own lives doubt can also lead us to a stronger, deeper faith and relationship. Coming through the times of our lives that challenge our belief that God is with us, that sometimes challenge our very image and understanding of who God is, can lead us to a place of deeper, intuitive trust in the fidelity of God, an experiential knowing that God is always with us even in our moments of doubt and dispair, and a place of letting God be God in all the mystery that entails.

2008-03-27T15:39:00.002-05:00

Alleluia, Christ is risen! Happy Easter! I always love the fact that the church is SO crowded on Easter Sunday! How wonderful to see so many people attending, and I always hope we make it such a good experience people want to come back. A non-church going friend once complained that he hated to go into a church and see all of those people acting so pious who had committed so many sins. He could not stand the hypocrisy! I told him that that is why we go to church! We don't go to church because we are so holy, we go to church because we recognize that we desperately need God in our lives. The fact is, church should be a place where we welcome sinners with open arms, while at the same time acknowledging our own sinfulness and need for forgiveness. Jesus said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners (Lk. 2:17).” The Gospel is all about revealing God’s mercy and forgiveness. Jesus Christ is the love and mercy of God in the flesh.

As a community, it is our job to make everyone feel welcome, including those society has marginalized. In doing so, we reflect the Kingdom of God. The Jewish traditions and law of Jesus’ time held quite strict purity laws. There were certain types of people with whom contact would make you ritually ‘unclean’ and thus unable to participate in the religious practices of the community. There were also certain professions that were looked at as being contrary to a faithful Jewish life. One example is a tax collector, who not only worked for the Roman system that was oppressing the Jewish people, but also earned his living by what he collected from people above and beyond the amount required by Rome. Jesus breaks down all of these boundaries between people. He commands that we love God and our neighbor. When asked who is to be considered our neighbor, Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. Samaritans were not ‘neighbors’ to most Jewish people! The Jewish people and the Samaritan people had had centuries of conflicts. Jesus broadens the concept of neighbor to include, not just members of one’s own family and community, but even one’s enemies. As we reflect on the all-embracing love of God in our own time of uncertainty and conflict, it is good to ask ourselves today: Who is our neighbor?

The early Christian community worshipped in the temple and then gathered in one another's homes for the breaking of bread. We hear in this Sunday's reading from the Acts of the Apostles that the Christians held all things in common and that their resources were divided equally among them, to each according to his or her need. Of course we also know that problems quickly arose, given the story of the two disciples who sell their property, but try to hold back some of the proceeds of the sale for their own use. Likewise Paul admonishes the Corinthians because those who had plenty to eat were eating in front of those who did not have enough to eat and were not sharing what they had. Paul tells the Corinthians that if they cannot recognize the body of Christ in their brothers and sisters, then they are not going to be able to properly discern the body of Christ in the Eucharist. We may not always practice hospitality and community to the extent we are called, but it is important to always strive toward that ideal nonetheless. Who are those in need among us? Do we see them? Do we reach out to them? Do we as community incarnate Christ? All those who joined us for the liturgy last Sunday, will they be back this Sunday? If not, what could we have done to have made them want to come back?

2008-03-19T13:28:00.004-05:00

We stand between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, so I want to talk about the passion narratives that we hear this week. A few weeks ago, I went to an amazing talk by Donald Senior, C.P. (appropriately enough a priest of the Passionist community), a Scripture scholar and the president of Chicago Theological Union. While Senior talked about all four passion narratives, I want to share with you a little of what he said about Matthew, which we heard on Sunday, and John, which we will hear on Good Friday.

Matthew, following Mark, focuses on Jesus' humanness and solidarity with human suffering in the passion. Matthew focuses on Jesus as the obedient Son of God, paralleling the understanding of Israel as the Son of God in the Hebrew Scriptures (cf. Exodus 4:22). The idea of Jesus' sonship focus on his obedience and his trust. This relationship is shaken, but not broken, in Jesus' encounter with death. Senior points out that his death entails not only physical death, but the seeming loss of his mission, the shattering of his community and of his dreams for Israel. He prays in the garden that this cup might pass, but ultimately prays as he taught his disciples, "Your will be done."

On the cross, the religious leaders mock Jesus in the fashion of Psalm 22:

He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, 'I am the Son of God.' - Matthew 27:43

All who see me mock me; they curl their lips and jeer; they shake their heads at me: "You relied on the LORD--let him deliver you; if he loves you, let him rescue you." - Ps. 22:9

The crowds mock the very relationship with God that has grounded Jesus throughout his life and his ministry, and Jesus cries out in response with the words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" In a lament psalm the first half of the psalm pours out all of the psalmist's frustration and anger, but psalmist does not stay in the place of despair. Rather he moves in the second half of the psalm to a place once again of trust in God and praise of God.

For God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out. - Psalm 22:25

Jesus cries out, but does so trusting that God hears him. He cries out again at the moment of his death, and gives up his spirit, literally his breath. Senior pointed out that Matthew changes the verb from Mark's more raw "loud scream" (toned down in our translations as "a loud cry") to "cried out again" to bring to mind that reassurance of the Psalm that God hears those who cry out. Jesus does not "expire" or "breath out" as in Mark, but hands over his spirit in a final act of trusting obedience to God. Senior pointed out that for the Israelites, our breath was given to us by God and belongs to God. Jesus gives his breath back to God in a act of loving surrender, and the result is cataclysmic for the entire world - the veil in the sanctuary is torn in two, the earth quakes, rocks are split, tombs open, and the dead are raised. All that seemed hopeless is given new life - Jesus' trust in God is vindicated. Senior sums up: God is faithful even in the midst of our anger and doubt.

John's gospel tells a very different story of the passion. Jesus in John's gospel is the Word of God, the revelation of God to the world. And what does God say to the world? "For God so loved the world . . . " (Jn. 3:16) Senior points out that the most powerful sign/symbol/word of God's love is the death of Jesus.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. - John 15:13

In John's gospel love and life triumph over death. Jesus walks to his death in supreme confidence - the hour of his glory has come. The soldiers fall down before him. Senior points out that in John, Pilate brings Jesus out before the crowd's and seats him "on the judge's bench." Jesus is the true judge. Pilate fears Jesus.

Death in John is the completion of Jesus' mission. Jesus' crucifixion, his being "lifted up," is his exaltation, his ascension to the Father. He returns to the Father to prepare a place for those he loves. For John's gospel, death is communion with God. Senior sums up: death is the portal into communion with God, with the love of God.

As we stand between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, between the anguish of death and the confidence of God's love and faithfulness in the midst of our human turmoil, we also stand on the anniversary of the war in Iraq, a war that has now lasted five years. It seems somehow appropriate that a day that so aptly illustrates part of the sinful and anguished human condition falls between these two readings of the passion. So once again I ask you to pray for peace in Iraq and the world and wisdom for the leaders of our country and Iraq. Let us turn to God with all of our doubt and anger and somehow trust that God stands by us even in our darkest moments. Let us trust that all those who have tragically died in this ongoing cycle of violence have been taken up into the love of God. Let us move through Palm Sunday and Good Friday to celebrate the resurrection of Easter.

To read more of Donald Senior, see his books:
The Passion Series, 4 Volumes, Liturgical Press, 1985-1991.
You can also access some of his commentary on the passion narratives at:
http://www.cptryon.org/xpipassio/passio/index.html

2008-03-13T15:34:00.002-05:00

Last week I spoke of sin, so this week I want to talk about freedom! The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner had an axiom that can be summed as “God and humans don’t compete.” In other words, we do not lose our freedom when we surrender to the love of God, but rather we become fully free precisely in that surrender. Another way Rahner puts it is to say that dependence on God and human freedom are in direct proportion to one another, i.e. when one increases, the other also increases. They are not in a relationship of inverse proportion (in which if one increases, the other decreases).

From the time of St. Augustine, the Catholic tradition has made a distinction between freedom and freedom of choice. Freedom is our ability to love God above all things. It is our ability to be the people God created us to be. It is this freedom that we lost in the fall. To put it another way, not having this freedom is part of what we mean when we talk about having original sin. We are born incapable of actually loving God above all else. We can only love God in such a way because of God’s grace.

So if we have some understanding of freedom, what is freedom of choice? Freedom of choice is exactly what it sounds like, the ability to make choices, to decide or choose between this and that. Without God’s grace, human choice tends toward the things of this world. It is God’s grace that gives us the ability to love God, allowing good choices to flow from that love.

According to St. Augustine, who quotes St. Paul, grace is primarily “the love of God . . . poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom. 5:5).” Scripture tells us that “we love because God first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19).” God reaches out to us, but we must accept God’s offer. Of course, we are only capable of accepting the offer because of God’s grace; but nonetheless, as one of my teachers used to say, God won’t save us without our ‘yes’. God wants to share his love with all people, but at the same time, God allows us to choose whether or not to accept that love. God liberates us by giving us grace which frees us from sin and empowers us to do what is good. Yet even with God’s grace we are subject to the temptations of sin. We still have freedom of choice and can choose to do good or evil. However, in surrendering to God’s love and in choosing the good, our freedom, that is our ability to love God above all else, increases; and we continue to choose what is good because it is part of who we are and who we were created to be.

In each and every moment of our lives, we get to choose who we are, who we are going to be. Are we going to live up to all of the potential, all of the gifts with which God created us? Are we going to choose to close ourselves off from God, from love, from all that we could be? We don't always make the right choices, but we also have the incredible gift of God's mercy, love, and forgiveness that picks us up when we fall and empowers us to start again. Each day, each moment, can be a moment of new life, of better choices, of resurrection.

2008-03-06T17:33:00.004-06:00

Lent is a time when we reflect on our own sinfulness and shortcomings in preparation to renew our baptismal vows at Easter. We have all been created in the image and likeness of God; but we have also experienced the reality of original sin in our world. Original sin is the brokenness within us that is a part of being human and the fact that every single one of us is in need of the love, mercy, and forgiveness offered to us in and through Christ, i.e., salvation. Beyond the human condition, we have all experienced personal sin. If most of us are honest, we can probably acknowledge with St. Paul that there are times when,

“What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. (Rom. 7:15).”

He refers to those times when we do the things we know are wrong and then wonder why we did them in the first place. All of us are sinful at times; it is part of being human. The good news is that Christ has liberated us from sin and death. Christ is our physician who heals what is broken within us and restores our relationships with God, other people and ourselves. Our human reality is always a mixture of sin and grace. Despite the bad choices we make, God is always there loving us and forgiving us through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is that presence of God in our lives that stirs our hearts to do what is right and to overcome our weaknesses.

Sin is not just personal; it is also communal or social. All you have to do is turn on the TV or radio to experience the reality that we live in a sinful world. As we hear the stories of more deaths in Baghdad and Jerusalem, as we watch the tension unfolding in Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, it is clear that humanity has still not reached a point where we can solve conflict without violence. Each of us is indirectly responsible for the violence in the world. The Church calls this condition social sin. It involves sins that we do not directly commit, but are all implicated in by being members of the global human community. This social sin is often built right into the structures of our world.

In the midst of a world of social sin, when we look around and at times feel despair, it is important to remember that Christ has already won the victory over sin and death. In the midst of the darkness of war and violence, we must remember that Christ is the light that has come into the darkness, the light that the darkness cannot overcome. We must remember that after death comes resurrection. Maybe we can’t solve the problems of the world, but each of us can walk a path of continual conversion, allowing Christ to be our guide and allowing the Spirit into our hearts. We see God at work in the world when we as individuals, with the gift of freedom, allow God to work in and through us. Paul VI says, “If you want peace, work for justice.” Each of us can be peacemakers in our own lives, both in our actions and through our prayers.

I would like to ask all of you to continue praying for peace throughout the whole world, for all of the people who are serving our country in the military and their families, as well as for the people of Iraq who are also our brothers and sisters in Christ. I also ask that you pray for the leaders of our nation and the nations of the world, that they may be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As we move through these final weeks of Lent toward Easter, let us find hope in the resurrection and in our God who brings life from death.

2008-02-28T13:20:00.002-06:00

"I was blind and now I see." This is not only a line from the famous hymn, "Amazing Grace"; these words are spoken by the blind man in the passage from John's gospel that we will hear this Sunday. Blindness in the gospels is always a metaphor for coming to faith. The man in John's gospel is healed and becomes able to physically see, but much more important is the fact that he comes to believe in Jesus. Interestingly enough, this man does not come to Jesus and ask to be healed; Jesus takes the initiative in response to the disciples' question about whether the man or his parents had sinned. The man does respond to Jesus by doing what he is told - going to wash in the Pool of Siloam, but as a result, he does not see Jesus face to face. By the time he is healed and able to see, he is no longer in Jesus' presence. Consequently when he is questioned by the authorities about who Jesus is, he cannot tell them. He does maintain his belief that Jesus must be a man of God. Furthermore, when Jesus approaches him at the end of the story to ask him if he believes in the Son of Man, he does not seem to realize that Jesus is the one who healed him until he is told. When he asks who the Son of Man is that he might believe in him, Jesus responds, "You have seen him." In other words, the blind man recognized Jesus, who he was and that the source of his power was God, without ever having physically seen him. He has "seen" him without being able to see him. His response to Jesus' statement is to believe and to worship. The Pharisees are the foil to the blind man. They have no problem with their physical sight, but are unable to see Jesus, unable to recognize who he is and that the source of his power is God. It is precisely in their claim to have clear sight that Jesus faults them for being sinful.

Interestingly enough, I watched the movie Amazing Grace this past weekend, the true story about William Wilberforce, the man who fought tirelessly to end the slave trade in England, to get the people of his time to overcome their blindness to the evil that was being done in their midst and to see the truth. He was greatly influenced by his minister, John Newton, the former slave ship captain turned minister who wrote the hymn, "Amazing Grace," about his conversion experience. At the end of his movie, the minister has gone physically blind, but is finally willing to share his own story of being involved with the slave trade in order to open the eyes of others, to heal their spiritual and moral blindness.

Where are our own spiritual and moral blindspots? Individually and collectively? How are we participating in the healing ministry of Jesus, healing our own and others' blindness? Here at the parish on Tuesday night, we watched Dead Man Walking, and while no one is physically blind in the movie, Sr. Helen Prejean's eyes are certainly opened through her encounter with a man on death row. She in turn has done much to open other people's eyes on the issue of the death penalty in our country. Both movies also brought home the realization that individuals can change the world. We have each been created with great potential, and God's grace, each of us can see the world in a new way and help others to do so as well!

2008-02-21T12:44:00.002-06:00

Last Sunday we read about the transfiguration. The transfiguration is one of the most important stories in the gospels because it tells us who Jesus is and who we are called to be in Christ. In the transfiguration, Jesus' face shines like the sun and his clothes are as white as light. The language describing Jesus echoes the language describing Moses on Sinai in Exodus 33-34 indicating the manifestation of the divine, the appearance of God to Israel. Similar language is used of the tent of the tabernacle in Exod. 40, where the cloud covers the tent and the glory of the Lord enters the tabernacle, the dwelling place of God. For Christians, Jesus is the dwelling place of God, the temple of God, the very presence of God. Jesus manifests the glory of God.

Mark puts the transfiguration right at the center of his gospel, and connects it to two other moments, the baptism of the Lord and the crucifixion. Mark's gospel opens with the baptism of the Lord, in which God says to Jesus, "You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased." In the transfiguration we hear God say to the disciples, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." Finally, on the cross Jesus breathes his last, the veil of the sanctuary is torn in two, and the centurion (the Roman soldier) says, "Truly this man was the Son of God." The same one who is crucified is the transfigured one. God's glory is manifest not just in the transfigured Christ, but in the crucified Christ.

The transfiguration, however, is not just about Christ. It is also about us. The veil in the sanctuary of the temple is what separated the Jewish people from the tabernacle of God, the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and he only did so once a year. At Jesus' death, the veil is torn in two; that which separated God and humanity is rendered asunder. No more is there a barrier between us - we are united in the person of Christ crucified and risen. In and through our union to Christ, we too are transfigured. We become tabernacles, dwelling places, of the presence of God. We are to manifest the glory of God in the world. The same Spirit that transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ transforms/transfigures US into the body of Christ. We are divinized. Christ became human so that we might become divine. We do not become God, but we become more and more God-like, more and more the image and likeness of God we were created to be.

2008-02-14T11:47:00.002-06:00

Today is Valentine's Day, and appropriately I have been reading reflections on love from Thomas Merton's book, No Man is an Island, which I got as a gift from a friend this past Christmas. I have often thought it unfortunate that our concept of love on Valentine's Day tends to be a bit self-centered. Too often it is either about a couple in love focusing on their own relationship (not that that is in any way a bad thing) or a single person mourning the lack of a romantic relationship in his/her life. I would love to see a Valentine's Day when everyone focuses on loving as God loves - a day when we love those who are poor and most vulnerable in society, those who are downtrodden or the outcasts in our community, and yes, even our enemies. Of course, I guess that is supposed to be our focus every day!! Even the celebration of the love between a couple in a relationship should always be the celebration of a love that ultimately manifests itself in loving others. The concrete expression of this is when a couple has children, but it should not in anyway be limited to having children, but should extend out into the wider community. Love should ultimately make more of us, make us go outside of ourselves. A love that only turns us inward is a love that is lacking in maturity.

Thomas Merton reflects that

a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy. . . . True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit.

My challenge to those who are in relationships this Valentine's Day would be to reflect on how your love enables you to go out toward others. How do you share your love with others? My challenge to those of us who are single is to reflect on what it truly means to love and be loved, and then let the love God has for us pour through us and touch all of the people we encounter in our lives.

2008-02-07T14:16:00.000-06:00

Lent is one of my favorite seasons of the Church year. I know that may sound strange, as Lent is often seen as a time of penance, but I have a different vision of Lent. For me, Lent is a time of conversion. In Greek the word for conversion is metanoia, literally a turning around. It is a time when we consciously focus on turning our hearts back to God. We try to spend a little more time with God in prayer. We make an extra effort to give to the poor and those in need, whether that need be physical, emotional or spiritual. We also fast, keeping ourselves in solidarity with those who do not have a ready supply of food as so many of us do.

Traditionally people ‘give something up’ in Lent. Such a practice can be a good way to be more mindful of all of the blessings we often take for granted on a day to day basis. I often add something to my life in Lent instead of or in addition to giving something up. Usually I add a way in which I will spend more time with God. It may be 10 minutes set aside to pray each day or it may be going to mass on a weekday each week. Whatever it is, adding something or giving something up, there is a certain discipline involved in our spiritual practices at Lent. We all maintain a measure of discipline around those things that are important in our lives. Most, if not all, of us are disciplined about getting up in the morning and going to work, because we know we would be fired if we didn’t have that discipline. Often we have a certain discipline to achieve a certain goal – we diet to lose weight, we practice to become a better pianist or basketball player, we study to get a certain degree. The word ‘discipline’ has such negative connotations because we think of it as punishment, something that happens to a child who misbehaves. That idea of discipline is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about the kind of discipline that we enjoy. It is a discipline that focuses our lives in the direction we want to go. It is the discipline that ‘turns us around’.

As good as such discipline is, it is not the goal of Lent. It is the means, not the end. The goal of Lent is to enter into a deeper relationship with God, the God who is the source of our salvation and who alone can fulfill all of our deepest longings and desires. The reading that we hear on Ash Wednesday is one of my favorites. In the reading, the prophet Joel tells the people what God desires. “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart (Joel 2:12).” God tells us to “rend our hearts, not our garments (Joel 2:13).” It is not so much our outward actions that are important as our inward dispositions.

Lent can be a special time of retreat that prepares one to enter into the joy of the resurrection at Easter. In this time of conflict in our world, when it is so easy to turn to despair, we are called to remember that we are an Easter people. As such, we believe that the victory over sin and death has already been won. As we watch new members come into our community at the Easter Vigil, each of us can renew our own membership in the Body of Christ. We take these weeks of Lent to prepare for that moment, so that we can once again affirm who we are and what we believe. We take these weeks of preparation to place our hopes and our dreams for the future of the world in the hands of the God who loved us into life.

2008-01-31T15:22:00.000-06:00

I was so inspired yesterday listening to a talk by Elizabeth Johnson (very well known contemporary theologian) on "Friends of God and Prophets: Toward an Inclusive Community" (click here to read the talk yourself!) that I wanted to share a couple of the points she made. (By the way, she also has a book titled Friends of God and Prophets.)

The first point that really struck me was the idea that the Church has been gifted with both office and charism. Office is what ensures right order within the Church, offering stability through the three-fold ministry of leading, teaching, and sanctifying, a participation in Christ's own ministry as priest, prophet, and king. While we talk about office in reference to those holding positions in the institutional Church, do not forget that each of us were also anointed priest, prophet, and king at our baptisms, marking our own vocation and participation in Christ's ministry. In terms of charism, Johnson explains that

the role of charism, freely given in unpredictable ways by the Spirit, is to break through routine, apathy, and even corruption with a renewed sense of the gospel for different times and places. This impulse has historically led to the rise of religious orders, new forms of spirituality, and movements for reform, among other events. To use Hildegard of Bingen's image, these help to keep the sap flowing strong and green in the branches, refreshing the institutional church grown gray with bureaucracy, meanness, or fear.

Johnson reminds us that both of these, office and charism, are gifts in the Church, but that they also exist in a certain tension with each other. I would like to suggest that this dynamic plays out not only on a global level in the Church, but also on a local level in our own parishes. Certain individuals in the parish are gifted with the ability to bring a sense of stability and continuity to the parish. Certainly the parish staff is typically focused more on the leading, teaching, and sanctyifying ministries within the parish in the day to day life of the parish. There is also a need and a place, however, for charism in the parish. Hopefully the staff is open to this gift as well as the gift of office, but ultimately I believe this gift must come from the community itself. We need individuals in the parish who are open to the Spirit and renew us in our sense of mission and inspire us as a community to breathe new life into our ministries. We need individuals who, in Johnson's words, break us out of our apathy and call us to read the gospel in a new way. Each of us has that potential, if we are open to the calling of the spirit.

The second point Johnson makes in her talk is her definition of what it means to be a friend of God and a prophet--in short, a saint! She reminds us that we are all saints (literally holy ones) and that the word was initially used in Christianity to describe the living community, not those who have died. She also reminds us that to be a saint is not a matter of being a good and moral person, but is simply a statment of the fact that we participate in God's holiness. She emphasizes this fact, stating

let me underscore a key point: this holiness is not primarily an ethical matter, being holy as being innocent of sin or morally perfect or engaged in pious practices or something earned by one's own merits. Rather, it is a consecration of the very being of this people due to God's free initiative. They participate in God's own holiness, a deep identity that flows out into responsibility to bear witness in the world, in accord with the loving kindness and faithfulness of God that now marks their own being.

The fact that we ARE holy hopefully leads us to be better people, to be a friend of God and a prophet through the grace of the Holy Spirit dwelling within each of us. Johnson explains that

to be a friend means to be freely joined in a mutual relationship marked by deep affection, joy, trust, and support in adversity; knowing and letting oneself be known in an intimacy that flows into common activities; as in Abraham, "friend of God"(Jas 2:23); as in Jesus' pledge, "No longer do I call you servants, but ... friends" (Jn 15:15).

What an incredible image of our relationship with God! She goes on to add that

to be a prophet means to be called to comfort and to criticize in God's name because, being a friend, your heart loves what God loves, namely this world, and you want it to flourish. When harm comes to what you love, prophets speak truth to power about injustice, thus creating possibilities of resistance and resurrection.

The line that actually caught my attention and my imagination was the idea that being a prophet means being called to comfort. I am very familiar with the idea of being a prophetic voice in the sense of speaking for those who have no voice or being called to challenge the systems of oppression in the world in which we live. I have never given any thought to the idea that to be a prophet is also to be called to comfort. Yet isn't one of the most famous lines (thanks to Handel) in Isaiah, "Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God" (Is. 40:1)? Certainly there is a tradition of the prophets railing against all that is wrong in the world and in their communities, but there is an equally strong tradition of the prophets offering the people reassurance of God's love, mercy, and faithfulness and reassurance that the community would survive and ultimately prevail against adversity. How do we fulfil our prophetic role in the world in terms of being a voice of hope?

The headlines on the webpage of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel once again delve into the issues of sexual abuse and lawsuits in the archdiocese. Immediately below that story is a story on the rather grim financial future of the archdiocese. We are in a time in our Church and our world where we need prophets who will criticize, but who will also comfort. We need the gift of charism, calling us to "break through routine, apathy, and even corruption with a renewed sense of the gospel" so that we can "help to keep the sap flowing strong and green in the branches, refreshing the institutional church grown gray with bureaucracy, meanness, or fear." More than ever it seems we are being called to be the community of saints right now, our hearts loving what God loves, fulfilling our vocation as friends of God and prophets.

2008-01-24T11:22:00.000-06:00

I met with one of our prayer groups recently because questions had arisen in their group about heaven, purgatory, and hell. Since this topic has come up many times in various conversations I have had with people, I decided it might be a good topic to address here!

One of the things that I love about being Catholic is our understanding of the communion of saints. In the very simplest terms, the communion of saints is our understanding that we are in relationship with all of those who have gone before us and all of those who will come after us. We believe that in death life is not ended, it is only changed. Likewise our relationships with those who have died do not end, they change. All of God's people are saints, those living and those dead. A canonized saint is simply someone the Catholic Church has definitively proclaimed to be with God in heaven. It is very important to note that the Church has never definitively proclaimed anyone to be in hell.

One of the immediate difficulties in talking about what happens after death (besides the obvious fact that we have not yet died) is that our existence after death is no longer one of time and space. Due to the fact that our existence here is in time and space, it is absolutely impossible for us to think without thinking in terms of time and space. Hence the end of my last paragraph talked about being "in heaven" or "in hell" as if they were places to which we go. They are not places so much as states of existence. Heaven implies an existence in union with God and hell implies a lack of union with God.

So much of what we say about heaven and hell is speculative. Some say hell is the absence of God. I have a hard time accepting that because I believe God is always present to us and loving us no matter what. I do believe that hell might be our own inability to recognize and accept God's presence and love. I have also speculated that if there is some need in death to recognize the ways in which we have hurt people (see the section on purgatory below), there are people for whom that process might last an eternity because the painful impact of their actions goes on for generations. Hitler comes to mind, as the Holocaust still causes us a great deal of pain to this day, and I believe that it always will. Of course with that speculation, I have fallen into the trap of conceiving of hell in terms of time. Hans Urs von Balthasar is one of my favorite theologians on this subject. In his book, Dare We Hope That All Men Are Saved?, he suggests that perhaps no one will ultimately end up in hell because of God's universal salvific will. If God wills the salvation of all people (1 Tim. 2:3-4), can God's will really be ultimately frustrated? Nonetheless von Balthasar accepts hell as a reality, but he very wisely cautions that it is a reality each of us must hold up before ourselves as we judge our own way of living and being in the world. It is not a reality for us to hold up before others, placing ourselves in the position of God to judge the possibility of another's eternal damnation (another trap I fell into with my speculation about Hitler!).

Many people ask me if we still believe in purgatory (a funny question, since I cannot actually tell you what you believe!). Yes, the Church does still teach the concept of purgatory. We do not (and technically the official teaching of the Church never did) teach the concept of limbo. Babies who die are with God. What kind of God would we believe in, if we did not credit God with having at least as much compassion and mercy as we ourselves have? God's compassion and mercy far outweighs our own abilities in that regard! Purgatory is part of our doctrine. It is not, however, a time and space concept as we so often have heard it talked about, as if we get 10 years in purgatory (which for some reason seems to be some sort of mini-hell with flames and torments in many people's imaginations), but might get out in 7 with good behavior and a lot of prayers from those still living. Purgatory simply refers to the process of purgation, the purifying that occurs in death that allows us to stand face to face with our God. The process that "burns away" all that still holds us back from complete and total union with God. In that regard, it still makes a lot of sense to pray for those in purgatory in that we are praying for those who are going through that process. In a conversation with our youth minister not to long ago, she told me that for her the concept of purgatory involved letting go of the things that were still holding us back from God, the attachments, desires, and addictions that we choose over God in our day to day lives. The continuity between the life we live now and the concept of purgatory is that we can do much of that "letting go" in this life, but that which we are unable to let go of in this life still must be released in order for us to be in union with God after death.

The theologian Karl Rahner talks about standing before God and having the love of God burn through us like fire (cf. TI 1:311-312). The analogy I always like to give is to think of a time when you did something you knew was very wrong and your parents found out, but instead of yelling at you or punishing you, they just reacted by loving you. The self-realization of both your own short-coming and the love that forgives that short-coming is very humbling and purifying, and it can burn like fire. I think that purgatory involves a coming to terms with and accepting God's absolutely unconditional love for us. The purification process is a recognizing and accepting who we were in our lives, with all of the failings and short-comings that life involved and all of the ways in which we hurt others, and then accepting that God sees all of that about us and still loves us beyond our wildest imaginings. To me the concept of purgatory is not a frightening concept, but a concept that embodies God's love and mercy.

2008-01-17T10:09:00.000-06:00

There is a buzz in the air about the new exhibit coming to the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Body Worlds Exhibit. I was initially surprised to hear the question asked on NPR of whether the museum expected there to be protesters, as apparently there have been when the exhibit has been in other places. It never occurred to me that such an exhibit would be controversial. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has put out a reflection paper that lays out some of the issues and concerns that have arisen, such as are the bodies being treated with respect, was proper consent given for the use of the bodies, etc. (Note that the Archdiocesan statement is not "pro" or "con" attending the exhibit; it seems to be meant in a more reflective manner.)

Having read the statement, I can understand why some people have concerns, but I also think it gives those of us not in medical fields an incredible opportunity to reflect on the wonder of the way we have been created. Our bodies are truly phenomenal, and learning more about them should only make us reflect more deeply upon and be more in awe of the God who created us. One of the stated intentions of the exhibit is to make people realize how important their bodies are and how important it is to treat them well. This theme fits in well with our understanding that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and part of the Body of Christ. Our bodies are holy and sacramental, and as such, we should be extraordinarily aware of them.

There was a time in Christianity when the body was somewhat denigrated and separated from the spiritual life. Today there has been a turn away from a dualistic worldview that separates the material and the spiritual toward a new understanding that we are embodied spirits. We experience what it means to be spiritual in and through these bodies that are our means of expressing who we are in the world and in relationship to one another. That is what it means for a body to be sacramental; your body is a sacrament of yourself, the tangible presence of you. We have been given an incredible gift in being embodied that is too often simply taken for granted. Having only read about the exhibit, I am already more aware of the complexity and beauty of every movement I make, being able to breathe or to eat, feeling my heart beat, the way our senses work together to allow us to experience the world around us, etc. Regardless of whether one attends the exhibit or not, it should be a powerful reminder to us to be very thankful for the fact that we are embodied.

2008-01-10T12:10:00.000-06:00

I want to draw your attention to one of the links I have put on this blog, and that is The Vicar's Corner. The Vicar's Corner is a blog where my friend Matt posts his homilies each week. Some of you may remember Matt from when he and Fr. Ed came and did a parish mission for us here. I would strongly encourage you all to click on that link and enjoy some of Matt's homilies.

I was profoundly struck by a passage in Matt's Christmas homily:

Love closes distances. It breaks down barriers and separations because the lover seeks the beloved and strives to make contact in any way possible. This is what we celebrate at Christmas. Our creating God, our divine lover is so intent on getting our attention, so focused on winning us over that he is willing to take on our humanity. Matthew T. Allman, C.Ss.R., The Vicar's Corner

Enough said - read the homily!

2008-01-03T10:22:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas and Happy Epiphany! This Sunday we will celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, a celebration of the revelation of God to the world in and through Jesus Christ. The Greek word epiphaneia literally means "to show forth." Sunday we celebrate God showing or manifesting Godself in and to the world. As the Body of Christ, we are called to continue to show forth God's presence in our world.

I have been reflecting a lot on what image of what it means to be Catholic Christians we project to the world, and I admit, I am a bit disturbed by what I see. The image I often see is too often one of harsh judgment and vitriolic outrage. Sometimes it is compounded by ignorance and a total lack of compassion for others who might think differently from us or come from circumstances with which we have never had to struggle. Too often I see people who seem to be very angry rather than loving and hospitable. Suddenly there is a mentality of "defending our faith" in the "culture wars" that is militant and seems to breed hostility, bitterness, and resentment. It seems to me that we live in a very angry culture. If you ever saw the movie Crash, it did an excellent job of portraying the way in which people seem to be so angry today, and it takes so little for that anger to brim over into the world. I fall into the trap myself where I find myself suddenly boiling mad about the littlest thing, until I stop and ask myself, exactly what am I so angry about? As Christians we should ideally be a counter witness to this anger and hostility. As St. Paul tells us,

Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good. Rom. 12:21

Whatever happened to witnessing to the love of Christ? Whatever happened to the focus on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless? Why is Christmas suddenly about whether or not a Nativity is set up in the town square instead of being about those of us who are Christian incarnating the love of God for ALL people? Whatever happened to the season of peace on earth and goodwill to all humankind, not just those who think like us and believe like us? The Epiphany is not the celebration of God's revelation to believers; the Epiphany is the celebration of the revelation of God's love to all of humanity. If only we could put as much energy into loving our neighbors (and remember in the story of the Good Samaritan, the neighbor is defined precisely as those we don't agree with) as we do into the so-called fight to defend Christianity, maybe we wouldn't have to work so hard at defense. Maybe we would engender an openness in people to the force in our lives that enables us to be loving and good and open to all people. I was listening to a song by Steve Camp this morning, and I think his refrain sums it up perfectly,

Don't tell them Jesus loves them till your ready to love them too;
Till your heart breaks from the sorrow and the pain they're going through.
With a life full of compassion, may we do what we must do;
Don't tell them Jesus loves them till your read to love them too.

2007-12-20T13:25:00.000-06:00

Christmas is the feast of the incarnation. In Christmas we do celebrate the nativity or birth of Christ, but what we are celebrating is not simply Jesus "birthday," the way we celebrate our own birthdays. We are celebrating the mystery of Emmanuel, God-with-us, God revealed in time and space. Each week in the creed we say "by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man," and the instructions say we are supposed to bow at those words, but on Christmas, the instructions say to genuflect. Why? Because those words proclaim the incarnation, that God became human. So what is the incarnation all about?

St. Athanasius, one of the great fathers and theologians of the Church, tells us:

The Son of God became human so that we might become God.

Obviously we do not become God in the way that God is God, but we become God-like, we are divinized. The eastern Christian tradition has done a much better job of reminding people of this fact than our western tradtion has done, as the west has tended to focus much more on the incarnation as a remedy for sin (it is both). The eastern tradition has a beautiful Greek word, theopoesis or theosis, literally to make divine, to describe this process. The word is usually translated as divinization or deification. We partake in the divine nature. St. Irenaeus puts it another way:

For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.

In the liturgy itself, when the priest pours a bit of water into the wine, he says:

By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbeled himself to share in our humanity.

We do not usually here him say this because he says it in a low voice to himself, but it proclaims the meaning of the incarnation - that God and humanity are united in and through the person of Christ.

Another axiom of our faith tells us that what Christ is by nature, we are by adoption. We cannot understand who Jesus is as Son of God without understanding our own identity and calling as children of God. "Son of God" does not appear in the Bible for the first time in reference to Jesus. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Israel is the Son of God (e.g., see Exodus 4:22-23). Likewise King David is referred to as a Son of God, as are other leaders and prophets. The phrase indicates both intimacy with God and the desire/need for obedience to God, a willingness to do God's will. Jesus is perfectly the Son of God in this way because he is both human and divine, and through our union with him and our sharing in his divinity, we are brought into that relationship with God as well. What he is by nature, we are by adoption. We become children of God, divinized and empowered to do the will of God by that intimate, loving relationship. Christmas is not simply a celebration of who Jesus is; it is a celebration of who we are.

2007-12-13T13:22:00.000-06:00

Hope is a lost virtue in our world. The world has become such a cynical place. All too often it seems people have very little hope that the world's biggest problems can actually be solved - war, poverty, illness, etc. A lack of hope then seems to translate itself into apathy and inaction. After all, if we don't really believe things will get better, why expend much effort trying to make things better? And yet, I can't imagine a world more in need of hope, and so I was delighted to see that Pope Benedict's second encyclical of his papacy, Spe Salvi, is on hope. His first encyclical, by the way, was on love (Deus Caritas Est). What better time of year to talk about hope then in Advent, a time of hopeful waiting for the coming of Christ? Pope Benedict notes that hope is supposed to be the mark of a Christian! We should be people of hope in such a way that actually makes people notice that fact about us!

Pope Benedict reminds us that our greatest hope, the hope which enables all others, is our hope of salvation. As Catholics we do not believe that our salvation is "simply a given," but rather

that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present.

We believe and hope in the promise of salvation that comes to us through our union with God in the incarnation, in the person of Jesus Christ. However, as Pope Benedict points out, the encounter with God that engenders our hope cannot simply be "informative" but must also be "performative," in other words, it must change our lives. As one of my professors was fond of saying, God will not save us without our yes. God values our freedom that much. Our yes is not simply a verbal or intellectual yes, but it is an embodied yes, a living out of our faith, and that yes is not complete until the moment of our death. At the same time, that yes is always empowered by God's grace, so we don't have to rely on ourselves, but rather, so long as we are open to God (even unconsciously as in those people who are open to Love, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc.), God can effect that yes within us. So while salvation is not a given, we have a hope in salvation that St. Paul assures us will not disappoint (Rom 5:5). The Psalms continuously repeat that our hope is in the Lord. The word hope appears in the Psalms 32 times. St. Paul uses the word 13 times in the Letter to the Romans alone! Pope Benedict points out that frequently in Scripture hope is used interchangeably with faith. In order to have hope, one must believe, one must have faith. Through our faith in God, we will find ourselves being signs of hope in our cynical world. And so in this Advent season:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 15:3).

2007-12-06T12:08:00.000-06:00

Very rarely do we see realistic painting or statue of Mary in which she is obviously pregnant. One of the few that I have seen in my life, a painting of Mary as a poor, young, pregnant Jewish woman moved me so profoundly that I began searching for a similar image. While I have found several now, my favorite is one that a good friend of mine, who knew of my search, painted for me. That image hangs in my bedroom and is my favorite image of Mary, especially during Advent. Advent is a time when we should focus on the image of Mary as a model for our own faith, and for me, that image is exemplified by her pregnancy.

If you have children, think back to what it was like to be waiting for your first child to be born, or if you do not have children, imagine what it would be like to wait for the birth of your child. I would like to highlight four elements of Mary's experience that give us a model of what it means to be faithful disciples during Advent, because like Mary we are all called to conceive and bear Christ in our lives and in the world.

1. Expectation, anticipation, impatience

Waiting for a child to be born involves expectation and anticipation. There is a certain excitement in the air about this miracle that is about to take place. Do we await Christmas with that same sense of expectation and excitement? Children can teach us a lot about this attitude towards Christmas as well! Having known many relatives and friends who have been pregnant, there is also a certain impatience in that last month of pregnancy. Do we experience that same sense of urgency, of desire for the coming of Christ in the world? We should be a little impatient for the coming of Christmas and for the coming of Christ in our lives and in the world. Children can also teach us a lot about this element of Advent!

2. Preparation – making a space

When a baby is expected, space must be prepared. The woman carrying the child literally makes space in her own body, but space is also made in the home. A nursery is usually prepared. Diapers, bottles, pacifiers, clothes, any number of safety devices, etc., are purchased and set up in preparation for the child's arrival. Advent is a time when we make a space for Christ in our lives, in our hearts, and in our homes.

3. Joy and hope

The birth of a child should bring joy and hope. Have you ever noticed that when people see a baby, they tend to smile? We tend to be filled with joy at seeing a baby. Joy should fill our hearts at the thought of God's love for us made incarnate in Christ. Are we a sign of that joy to others in our lives? When we encounter strangers during the Advent season, do we exude that joyfulness? A baby also represents hope in both the absolute innocence of an infant and the wide open possibilities for the future that lie before that child. Parents immediately have hopes and dreams for their children, often from the very moment they know they are expecting. Advent is a time to think about our hopes and dreams for the world, seeing all of the possibilities the future holds. Advent is a time when we hope and pray for peace on earth.

4. Awe

In addition to smiling at a baby, have you ever noticed how adults will just stand around and watch a baby, absolutely fascinated by this tiny child who is usually just lying there? Have you ever noticed how parents can spend countless minutes just gazing at their sleeping baby? Pregnancy and the birth of a baby are awe inspiring events. Babies inspire a sense of awe within us. The presence of the divine breaking into this world in a tiny baby should literally bring us to our knees. There is a song we sing every Christmas called, "Who Would Send a Baby?" by Mary Kay Beall that always brings tears to my eyes at the way in which God blessed us to give us this experience of Christ as a baby. The words of the song ask,

Who would send a baby to heal a world in pain?
Who would send a baby, a tiny child?
When the world is crying for the promised one, who would send his only son?

Who would send a baby to light the world with love?
Who would send a baby, a tiny child?
When the world is hoping for the promised one, who would send his only son?

Who would choose a manger to cradle a king?
Who would send angels to sing?
Who would make a star in the sky above to shine on the gift of his infinite love?

Who would send a baby to bless the world with peace?
Who would send a baby, a tiny child?
When the world is yearning for the promised one, who would send a baby, who would send his only begotten son?

Do we experience the same sense of expectation, preparation, joy, hope and awe in Advent? Do we carry Christ within in such a way that allows us to be moved and overwhelmed by the mystery of God’s love for us, a love that has us anticipating what happens next in our lives, a love that we make a space for in the busy-ness of our lives, a love that has us flooded by joy and hope, a love that brings us to our knees in awe?

2007-11-29T13:04:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote on the November Bishops' General Assembly and referred to the expected publication of the Faithful Citizenship document. I was deeply disappointed (though unfortunately not surprised) by the way this document was portrayed in the media and have heard people summarize it based on those reports as saying those who vote democrat are putting their salvation in jeopardy (i.e., are going to you know where!). I would strongly urge Catholics to read the statement itself rather than news reports about the statement! If you find that statement too long (43pp.), at least read the summary version, which is only ten pages long! Not only did the document not say any such thing, it actually says the opposite:

In this statement, we bishops do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote.

The statement does add that

as Catholics, we should be guided more by our moral convictions than by our attachment to a political party or interest group. When necessary, our participation should help transform the party to which we belong; we should not let the party transform us in such a way that we neglect or deny fundamental moral truths.

What the statement does do is raise concerns that all Catholics should be concerned about when they consider the candidates who are running. The statement reminds us that

responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation.

The bishops recognize that no candidate or party fully shares the Church's viewpoint, but emphasize that rather than being discouraged by that fact, we should be motivated to work within our parties, contact our elected officials, and even run for office ourselves! Nonetheless, the statement makes it clear that we must always oppose direct assaults on human life and dignity, including (but not limited to) abortion, euthanasia, genocide, torture, racism, cloning, etc. (all of which are examples the bishops give in the statement). The bishops maintain that as Catholics

we revere the lives of children in the womb, the lives of persons dying in war and from starvation, and indeed the lives of all human beings as children of God.

The bishops point out two temptations that distort the Church's teaching on the defense of life: first to make "no ethical distinction between the kinds of issues involving human life and dignity," and second "the misuse of these necessary moral distinctions as a way of dismissing or ignoring other serious threats to human life and dignity." The bishops clarify that while

a Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter's intent is to support that position. . . . There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate's unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.

They go on to add

as Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate's position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter's support. Yet a candidate's position on a single issue that involves an intrinsic evil, such as support for legal abortion or the promotion of racism, may legitimately lead a voter to disqualify a candidate from receiving support.

The statement concludes by looking specifically at the issues that are involved in the seven key themes of Catholic social teaching: the right to life and the dignity of the human person; the call to family, community, and participation; our rights and responsibilities; the option for the poor and vulnerable; the dignity of work and the rights of workers; solidarity; and care for God's creation. They state that

these themes from Catholic social teaching provide a moral framework that does not easily fit ideologies of "right" or "left," "liberal" or "conservative," or the platform of any political party. They are not partisan or sectarian, but reflect fundamental ethical principles that are common to all people.

The bishops recognize that voting in our culture presents us with some very complex dilemmas, and for that reason they offer this statement to help Catholics inform their conscience so that they can ultimately vote in accordance with that conscience. (By the way, just because I quoted extensively from the statement does NOT mean that you should not read the statement yourself!!)

2007-11-26T16:35:00.000-06:00

PRAY FOR PEACE!!! Tomorrow is the beginning of an international peace conference in Annapolis, MD to work towards peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Cardinal George, the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is asking all Catholics to pray for peace in the Holy Land. In his letter, the Cardinal eloquently states:

This call to prayer has a special timeliness this week, but the path to a just peace will be long and will stretch beyond the peace conference itself. In the weeks and months ahead may we persevere in prayer for a just peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the whole region.

2007-11-20T12:51:00.001-06:00

This past weekend, I watched the movie Schindler's List. Now I realize that I am about 14 years behind everyone else in seeing this movie, but that did not lessen the profound impact it made on me. I had not seen it because I knew that I would be deeply disturbed and saddened by watching it, and so everytime I was in the video store and considered renting it, I would put it off. Now in the days of renting online, I had it on my online list of movies so that it would eventually just be mailed to me, and I knew once it was that I would in fact watch it. Needless to say, I was deeply disturbed and saddened by watching the film. The weight of carrying around the renewed knowledge of the evil of which humanity is capable throughout the weekend was horrible. And yet I believe in the importance of being reminded of that fact from time to time. It is dangerous to forget what we are capable of perpetrating or simply ignoring when we do not want to face evil being done in our midst.

A couple of things struck me in the movie. One was the hatred of the general population for the Jewish people - yelling names at them, throwing dirt at them or spitting on them, things that are violent without necessarily doing actual physical harm. I was struck by the way that the general population cooperated in dehumanizing a group of people. Even those who did not actively persecute them simpley ignored their suffering and did not protest their treatment. Obviously there were exceptions who did protest, many at the cost of their own lives. But it made me wonder, who do we dehumanize and demonize in our society? The immigrants? The Muslims? The poor who live in our inner cities? To what extent do we ignore their suffering? To what extent are we culpable for the conditions in which we live?

Oskar Schindler was not an extraordinary person, which is actually what makes the movie so profound. He was a person like you and me, living his life, not wanting any strife or conflict, trying to get along and even enjoy life besides, trying to get ahead. He doesn't start out with the idea that he is going to save Jewish people from the concentration camps. He actually starts out using them as cheap labor so that he can make a bigger profit. He is almost forced to do the good thing, the right thing because he is more and more confronted with an evil that he cannot ignore. He cannot simply stand by and do nothing and be able to live with himself. One of the most moving scenes in the movie, with one of the most important insights for me, is the scene at the end when he realizes that he could have saved more, he could have done more. This scene speaks to all of us - we can always do more. Short of actually sacrificing our lives, we have never gotten to the point where we have done all we can do to fight injustice, violence, racism, poverty, and all of the other forms evil takes in our world. We can always do more. On the flip side of that sentiment is the fact that we have to begin by doing something. If all of the people living in the Nazi occupied countries had done something to help, to protest, how much of a difference might it have made? We can start with something small, but we must start. That is the moral imperative of our religious belief, of being disciples of Jesus Christ. I want to leave you with a quote from theologian Elizabeth Johnson in her book Consider Jesus:

There is a traditional axiom which claims that to live a good ethical life one must "do good and avoid evil." The emphasis shifts today, slightly but very dramatically, to make us realize that this is not enough. In fact, it can end up being a shirking of responsibility. For in the light of the compassion of God revealed in Jesus, we must "do good and resist evil." There is a call to the Christian conscience here not to hide our face from evil, not to walk around it, or pretend it is not there; but to face its massiveness in spite of our feelings of powerlessness or insignificance and to become involved in transforming it.

2007-11-08T13:27:00.000-06:00

I have a special prayer request this week, that all of you prayer for the United States bishops as they hold annual Fall General Assembly from Nov. 12th-15th. The bishops' agenda this year is varied discussing everything from the curriculum for high school students to the Faithful Citizenship document that is published every presidential election year, from the most recent reports on the abuse scandal in the Church to the revision of the guidelines for music at mass.

One of the unique items on the agenda is that the bishops will vote on a stewardship brochure directed toward teens. This brochure invites the teens to share their time, talent, and treasure with the Church. How wonderful it is to see the Church specifically reaching out to our incredibly talented teenagers and working to incorporate their gifts into the life of the community. It is also important for teens to understand that being Christian involves more than just showing up on Sundays (a point all of us can probably be reminded of from time to time). In their press release, the USCCB states that

The text encourages teens to pray, especially with Scripture, to make an inventory of their gifts and to rejoice in the ways they are already using their talents, adding that “even the smallest act of kindness can bring joy and relief to another.” It also thanks them for the gifts of energy, idealism and zeal that they already share with the Church, and tells them to not be afraid of asking the Church to “do more.” “Stewardship” the document says, “is the call for all of us to do more, to be more and to love more!”

I especially like the call for teens not to just do for the Church, but to challenge the Church to do more!

A difficult topic under discussion this year is the draft for the Faithful Citizenship document this election year. The bishops consider this topic so important that for the first time they are bringing the document for a discussion and vote by the entire assembly, whereas in the past the document has been written and approved by a committee. The specific focus of the document this year will be the formation of conscience, a factor that will be included in the title itself, "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility." The document will again emphasize that our political responsibility goes beyond casting our votes on election day. The document has to walk the fine line between political partisanship in a day and age where none of the candidates represent a consistently "Catholic" position. While upholding the preeminence of issues that involve the direct ending of human life, such as abortion, active euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research, the bishops also emphasize that those issues do not excuse us from being concerned about issues such as war, torture, and economic justice. The press release from the USCCB on the draft document states that

the draft affirms the importance of participation in political life. It explains the necessity of opposing actions that are intrinsically wrong, such as abortion and euthanasia, and affirms the obligation to promote the common good by combating such threats to human life and dignity as hunger, poverty, racism, unjust immigration policies, and unjust war.

As "faithful citizens" who are democrats, republicans, and independents, it is our job to call the candidates in these upcoming elections to a higher standard and challenge some of the presuppositions of our respective parties. Only in this way will we stand a chance of really having an impact on the political landscape of our country.

2007-11-01T12:17:00.001-05:00

Today is the Feast of All Saints! The word "saint" simply means holy or holy one and comes from the Latin sanctus (holy), the root of which is sancire (to make sacred). In biblical times a saint was simply a Christian, one who is holy, who is called to be holy. The New American Bible usually translates this word, (h)agios as "holy ones" but other translations use the word "saints" following the Latin translation which was sanctum or sancti. When the term is used in the Bible, it more frequently refers to those living than those who have died. All of us are saints.

One of the true gifts of our Catholic faith is the teaching on the communion of saints, a belief that we express each week in the creed. The communion of saints simply expresses the fact that as Christian community, we are in relationship with all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us. Our relationships transcend time and space. Hopefully we experience this intuitively when someone we love dies. Our relationship with that loved one does not end at death. The relationship is transformed, but does not end. When I am explaining the communion of saints to those who are becoming Catholic, I start with our relationships to the living. If I am struggling with something, I might ask my friends and family to pray for me. Because our relationships do not end at death, when a loved one dies, I can continue to ask him/her to pray for me. Taking it a step further, I have a grandma who died before I was born. While I have never met her, I feel as if I know her because of the stories that have been told about her over the years. I ask her to pray for me in the same way I ask the grandparents I knew to pray for me. The canonized saints are like that. They are Christians who have gone before us as models of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. While we have never met them, we come to know them through the stories that our family, the Church, passes down about them. We form relationships to them through those stories and traditions. We ask them to pray for us in the same way we ask our family and friends to pray for us. We do not technically "pray to them," we ask them to pray to God with us. Also implied in that statement is that we do not ask them to pray to God instead of us praying to God ourselves, but rather we ask them to join their prayers to God to our prayers to God. The fact that a saint is canonized simply means that the Church has definitively declared the person to be in heaven with God. It is important to note that the Church has never definitively declared anyone to be in hell.

All Saints Day is a great day to reflect on those in our lives who have been examples of what it means to be a Christian and to thank God for the gift of those people in our lives. It is also a great day to reflect on what it means to each of us to be a saint. Do we make the world a holier place through our words and deeds? Do people experience something of God's love when they encounter us? Do we image Christ for others? Ultimately that is what a saint, canonized or not, is and is called to be, an image of Christ in the world. Have a blessed All Saints!

2007-10-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

I was deeply disturbed and distressed recently by an email I received. Many times people forward emails with jokes or prayers. The forwarded email I received was an attempt to foster hatred and prejudice. The email protested a stamp reissued (it was first issued in 2001) by the US Postal Service that honors the Islamic holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The USPS created this stamp as part of their holiday series, which also includes stamps for Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanza. In the press release, the USPS states that "On these days, Muslims wish each other 'eid mubarak', the phrase featured in calligraphy on the stamp, which translates as 'blessed festival' or 'may your religious holiday be blessed'."

Eid al-Fitr is the celebration at the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting to commemorate the revelation of the Qu'ran to Mohammad. During this month, from dawn to dusk each day Muslims fast from food, drink, medicine, smoking, and sensual pleasure. They "break their fast" in the evening after sundown, often with family and friends. More than just external observances, the month is meant to be a time of reflection and a time when the differences of wealth and status between people are minimized. Eid al-Fitr, or the feast of fast breaking, is the close of Ramadan and is a joyful time when people travel to be with families and send cards to one another. The celebration begins with a special prayer service.

Eid al-Adha, or the Great Feast, commemorates Abraham's obedience and his willingness to sacrifice his son to God (note that in the Islamic tradition, it is Ishmael that Abraham is going to sacrifice rather than Isaac as in our own tradition). This feast is celebrated each year during the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca that most Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetime, but all Muslims, even those not on pilgrimage in Mecca, celebrate this feast. Families purchase an animal, such as a goat to be sacrificed and butchered in a ritual manner (similar to the way in which the Jewish people butcher meat in a kosher manner). The meat is then divided up and a portion is given to the needy, a portion is shared with one's neighbors, and a portion is kept for the family's feast.

Both of the feasts are remarkable celebrations, and all of us (including/especially those of us who are Christians) would do well to learn from the discipline and the charity of the Muslim people. To protest the fact that the post office issued a stamp commemorating these Islamic holidays (which in the email is incorrectly listed as a Christmas stamp) is petty and ignorant. It also ignores the fact that according to the US State Department there are 1209 mosques in the US and 2 million Muslims who are associated with mosques. The Second Vatican Council stated that

The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God's plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting. - Nostra Aetate 3

What made the email even worse was that it listed a litany of offenses the "Muslims" have supposedly committed, including various bombings culminating with Sept. 11th. The Muslims did not commit any of those bombings; terrorists did. That the terrorists claim to be Muslim is similar to the way in which the Ku Klux Klan claims to be Christian and justifies their acts of terror and violence with quotes from the Bible. Any religion can be corrupted to be used for violent purposes; that does not make the religion itself responsible for those violent acts. Muslims are not terrorists. The fact that there are terrorists who are Muslim is no different than the fact that there have been people who claim to be "Christian" and "pro-life" and have then bombed abortion clinics. The actions of the terrorists are not condoned or supported by mainstream US Muslims, and to suggest that all Muslims are responsible for those atrocious acts is prejudice and the antithesis of what it means to be Christian.

2007-10-18T12:38:00.000-05:00

This Sunday's second reading from 2 Timothy tells us:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (3:16-17)

The Catholic Church teaches that Scripture is the Word of God. The many words in Scripture are seen to be a revelation of the one Word of God who was fully revealed in Jesus Christ. For that reason, “the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body (CCC, 103).” In liturgy we understand Christ to be present in four ways: in the Eucharist, in the assembly gathered, in the person of the priest, and in the Word of God proclaimed.

Without in anyway detracting from the prominence of Scripture and its status as the inspired Word of God, the Catholic Church also acknowledges that Scripture was written by human beings. Scripture is inspired, but not in the sense that God dictated the exact words to the human author. Rather God worked through the human authors, using their own experiences, their imaginations and the literary forms common in their time. When we wrestle with Scripture, it is important to know something about the author and the time period within which that piece of Scripture was written. An understanding of the author’s perspective helps us discern what is revealed Truth in the Scriptures, e.g. God created the world, and what is historically conditioned, e.g., women must cover their heads in the assembly.

It is also important to understand the way Scripture developed over time, from an oral tradition to a collection of writings to a conscious choice about what was to be included and excluded in what we call the canon of Scripture. People often do not realize that the Old Testament in the Bible used by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches includes 46 books and the one used by Protestants and the Jewish people has 39 books. The reason for the difference is that the early Christian church chose to use the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which is called the Septuagint. When the Jewish people determined their canon (the list of official books in their Scripture), they limited their list to those books that were originally written in Hebrew and excluded the books that were originally written in Greek. After the Reformation, the Protestant churches chose to use the same canon as the Jewish people for their Old Testament. The books that are in the Orthodox and Catholic Bible, but not in the others are: 1 & 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Judith, Tobit, The Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, as well as additions to the books Esther and Daniel. As Catholics we believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the development of Scripture so that God is revealed in the stories initially told, in what was recorded and in what was selected to be in the canon to make up what we call the Bible.

The final thought I want to share on Scripture is that as Catholics we understand Scripture to have many layers and levels of meaning. It has such depth because it is the inspired Word of God. Thus, one may read the same passage from Scripture at two different points in one’s life and get two different meanings out of it. Scripture has the ability to speak to all people in all ages. It is good to have a practice of reading a little bit out of Scripture on a regular basis. One can explore the readings we hear at church more deeply or one can explore some of the treasures within Scripture that are not included in the lectionary, and thus less well known. Pick something that interests you initially (I don’t recommend that you start with Leviticus!). If you find yourself getting lost or losing interest, try another part of the Bible or seek help with the section you are trying to understand, but don’t give up on reading the Bible altogether. There is, in fact, a world of wisdom to be found within God’s Word.

2007-10-11T11:38:00.000-05:00

I wrote on immigration for the bulletin this Sunday, but I decided to write on the subject for my blog too, because I just read one of the best articles yet on the subject. The article is by Tim Padgett, the bureau chief for Time magazine, but appears in America (the Catholic news magazine published by the Jesuits. The article is "Rethinking Immigration Reform: It Starts in Mexico" (unfortunately, if you don't subscribe to America, this link will only give you access to the first paragraph of the article!). Padgett was in Mexico on assignment and got into a conversation with some Mexican journalists who, in an unusual turnabout, stated that the US should build a wall because it would force the Mexican government to address the issue of immigration and the huge gap between the very few very wealthy and the multitudes of poor in Mexico. While I do not agree with building the wall (and suspect the Mexican reporters were somewhat speaking tongue in cheek), the U.S. government should be taking some action to pressure the government of Mexico to address the needs of their own people that cause them to seek better lives in the U.S. Padgett points out that while home to the telecom billionaire who is the world's richest man, almost half of the country's 106 million people live in poverty with a quarter of those living on about $1 a day. In one of my favorite lines in the article, Padgett states:

My Mexican colleagues were simply acknowledging what most Americans still fail to grasp: immigration reform is not domestic policy; it's foreign policy.

Padgett points out that we will have a problem with illegal immigration as long as so many people in Mexico live in desperate situations. He then says:

But if we could work with countries like Mexico to steer more of their wealth and ours to the impoverished by means of better jobs, education and entrepreneurial opportunities--if we were to steer billions to those efforts instead of fences--we might not need fences.

One of the issues that cripples Mexico's economy, according to Padgett, is their banking system, a system that has "exorbitant interest rates and maddening red tape," making it all but impossible for small enterprises and those living in rural areas to get loans. Padgett then states:

Many of those immigrants have now decided to do what Mexico's banks won't. Mexicans in the United States send home as much as $25 billion in remittances each year; and while much of it used to be wasted on flashy pickup trucks, wide-screen televisions and (apologies to my fellow Catholics) ostentatious churches, more is now being used to start local microcredit banks. The hope, of course, is that fostering new, job-creating businesses at home will eventually keep Mexican workers at home.

Padgett visited a city where it is working, Santa Cruz Mixtepec. He says that 2/3 of the 3000 residents of this town lived undocumented in the U.S., but after several of the wives started a microcredit bank a few years ago, some have returned home from the States to start businesses and others are deciding not to leave. So far 95% of the loans have been paid on time. The woman Padgett interviewed, who is one of the bank's founders, said that this is because

locals want to make this program work "in order to bring our families back together."

All of this gels with my experience of visiting Mexico and meeting families whose sons or husbands were living in the U.S. sending money home. They would have loved to have these types of opportunities enabling them to keep their families together. Padgett, however, notes that the residents of Santa Cruz Mixtepec realize that microcredit will not solve all of their problems though because of the deplorable state of education in Mexico. In addition to recommending that the U.S. invest its money in these types of venture, Padgett ends his article recommending our government push the government of Mexico on what he calls "the most urgent reform" needed in Mexico:

dismantling the power of its ravenous monopolies and oligopolies, which control everything from television to cement to sliced bread. They are the main reason that credit and capital get choked off from Mexican society, but Mexico can get away with it simply by exporting its desperate workers to the United States.

2007-10-04T12:26:00.000-05:00

Today is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, one of my personal heros. While many people associate St. Francis with bird baths and the blessing of animals, his actual life deeply exemplifies what it means to be Christian. Francis came from a wealthy family, and his father had many hopes and expectations that Francis would follow in his footsteps in taking up the family business. Instead, after experiences of war, imprisonment, and illness, Francis decided to follow in the footsteps of Christ, much to his father's dismay. The story tells us that when his father dragged him before the bishop, irate at the way Francis was living and by the fact that Francis kept giving money away to the poor, Francis stripped off all of his clothes and laid them at his father's feet. The bishop then embraced Francis and covered him with his own robe. Thus began Francis' life of total poverty, literally living according to the gospel mandate to the disciples to possess neither silver nor gold, neither shoes, nor staff, nor extra coat. Francis lived his life serving the poor and working amid the lepers. He also connected the idea of poverty to non-violence, claiming that those who own nothing have no need for a sword.

We also recently celebrated the feast of St. Michael and the Archangels (Sept. 29) and the memorial of the Guardian Angels. These celebrations made me think about angels and the fact that many people speak of those who have died as "becoming angels." An angel is a completely separate type of being, understood as a being that is pure spirit, unlike humans that are spirit and matter or inspirited matter/bodies. Humans don't become angels when they die; they are saints. So the next time we think of our loved ones who have died, think of them as part of the communion of saints, worshipping God with all of the angels. And that is your Catholic trivia for the day!!

2007-09-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be Catholic and why I am Catholic (beyond the fact that my parents baptized me into the Catholic faith!). These thoughts have come up for a couple of reasons. First, being in my mid-thirties, I am noticing that more and more of my friends are either looking for another church or just not going to church at all anymore. Most of these are people that were once part of our young adult group at my Catholic church when we were all in our late twenties. They are also all people I like and respect. Their reasons are varied and not unreasonable: dissatisfaction with the community itself, which unfortunately is proving to be not very kid-friendly as they are all having kids, dissatisfaction with a certain priest, a bad experience at a certain parish, etc. Then there are also issues with the greater church: the abuse scandal, the position on women or birth control or homosexuality, the issue of not allowing the use of condoms in HIV situations, the lack of involvement of the laity in the decision making process, etc. I understand their reasons, and honestly, I also struggle with some of the same issues in the Church, so why do I stay? What is it that keeps me from walking away, finding another church or another way to worship God?

Honestly, I don't know that I can even put it into words. Being Catholic is just part of who I am, not simply because I was raised that way, but because it is part of the core of my being and identity. Which brings me to the second occasion that caused me to reflect on this question, a conversation with colleagues about Catholic identity and what it means to be Catholic. For me, being Catholic is not about simply accepting everything the Catholic Church teaches and says, though it does involve staying in dialogue with the Church on all it teaches and says, struggling to understand why it takes the positions it does and what values it is trying to protect. For me (and really for Catholic ecclesiology) the Church is also bigger than the hierarchy. It is not simply what "the Church" thinks versus what I think, because I am part of the Church (recognizing of course that the hierarchy is the teaching office of the Church, and so my opinion does not hold as much institutional weight as that of the bishops). The Church is not some entity over and against me, I am part of it and it is part of me. So yes, I believe that you can be Catholic, be a FAITHFUL Catholic, and disagree with the Church. That is part of why I am Catholic, because I love the principle of "unity in diversity" that is a bedrock principle of how the Catholic Church understands what it means to be Church. I believe that one of the great gifts of Catholicism is its ability to hold together people of very diverse viewpoints.

On a deeper theological level, for me being Catholic is about believing in the goodness and love of God our Creator, and thus the goodness of humanity and all creation. This core theological precept is what grounds the sacramental mentality of Catholicism, the idea that all of created reality has the ability to mediate God because it has been created by God. Our sacraments are based on a relationship with God that is tangible, a God who has chosen to enter into our finiteness so that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the presence of God in bread and wine, in oil and water, in candles and incense, in song and symbol. I am Catholic because I experience that presence of God each Sunday in the community, the Word, and the Eucharist. Sure I experience God when I kayak down the Root River amid the breathtaking wonder of the autumn leaves, but that is not enough for me. I need the ritual, the beauty of the words and gestures, the reminder of who I am and the union that I experience in the Eucharist.

I am Catholic because I believe that God loves all people, has graced all people, and is present to and in all people through the Spirit; and so I believe that the goodness of humankind will ultimately triumph. I am Catholic because on my worst days and on the days when things seem to be so wrong in the world, I can look at a crucifix and see an image of the God that loves us despite all of our sinfulness and brokenness, a God in whom the victory over sin, evil, and death has ultimately already been won by a love that is bigger than our worst failings and with us in our darkest moments. That is why I am Catholic. That is why I stay. In the words of the grandmother of one of my professors, "You cannot leave your heart."

2007-09-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

Amos chides the people in this Sunday's reading for selling "even the refuse of the wheat." But what does that mean? Social justice is beautifully inscribed into the very heart of the Hebrew covenant law. They had their very own "welfare" system, decreed by God. The law states:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not be so thorough that you reap the field to its very edge, nor shall you glean the stray ears of your grain. Likewise, you shall not pick your vineyard bare, nor gather up the grapes that have fallen. These things you shall leave for the poor and the alien. I, the LORD, am your God. (Lev. 19:9-10; see also Lev. 23:22)

And again:

When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf there, you shall not go back and get it; let it be for the alien, the orphan or the widow, that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you knock down the fruit of your olive trees, you shall not go over the branches a second time; let what remains be for the alien, the orphan and the widow. When you pick your grapes, you shall not go over the vineyard a second time; let what remains be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. For remember that you were once slaves in Egypt; that is why I command you to observe this rule. (Dt. 24:19-22)

There is a great example of this in the Book of Ruth, the story of a widow who is living in Bethlehem with her mother-in-law. Ruth goes to the fields to glean ears of grain after the harvesters have gone through, and the field she enters happens to belong to Boaz. Boaz tells her not to glean in anyone else's field, but to stay with his female servants following the harvesters. He tells her he has instructed his men not to harm her, and she may drink from the water they provide. (The story eventually ends with the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, who are the parents of Jesse and the grandparents of King David.) The Hebrew law included what we would call today distributive justice - an allocation, and at times reallocation, of material goods to meet the needs of all (see the sections on the jubilee and Sabbath laws in Lev. 25 and Dt. 15!)

Amos, our prophet for this Sunday, is a shepherd from the southern kingdom of Judah, but he is preaching in the city of Bethel in the northern kingdom of Israel (c. 700s BC). Amos is appalled by the great prosperity of the city combined with a complete disregard for the poor. Furthermore, the people are not just falling down in their obligation to care for the poor, they are taking advantage of them and actively cheating them. Amos warns the people that God will destroy their winter house, their summer house, their ivory apartments. He paints a picture of the women of Bethel, the "cows of Bashan," as he calls them, lying on their "beds of ivory" eating choice food, listening to music, and drinking wine, while oppressing the weak and abusing the needy. (Bashan is a region of rich pasture land where the herds were well fattened - even in the 700s BC, calling the women "cows" was NOT a compliment!)

Amos tells the people that God detests their worship, that worship has no substance if the people are not upholding the covenant to care for the poor and needy among them. Amos tells them, thus says the LORD your God,

I hate, I spurn your feasts, I take no pleasure in your solemnities; Your cereal offerings I will not accept, nor consider your stall-fed peace offerings. Away with your noisy songs! I will not listen to the melodies of your harps.
But if you would offer me holocausts, then let justice surge like water, and goodness like an unfailing stream. (Amos 5:21-24)

By not acting with justice toward the poor and the needy, by not leaving anything of the harvest behind for the poor and selling "even the refuse of the wheat," the wealthy folks of Bethel are breaking their covenant with God. Amos tells them that if they keep on this way, their kingdom will be destroyed. Indeed the northern Kingdom falls to the Assyrians in 721 BC. When I read Amos I can't help but wonder, what would he say to us today?

(P.S. As a follow up to my last post, America Magazine had a great article on Mother Teresa this week!)

2007-09-13T12:36:00.000-05:00

Mother Teresa was on the cover of Time magazine a couple of weeks ago (I am always behind in reading my magazines!) with the headline, "The Secret Life of Mother Teresa: Newly published letters reveal a beloved Icon's 50 yr. crisis of faith." When I first heard of this "shocking" revelation that Mother Teresa had experienced doubt and darkness in her prayer life, my reaction was, "Well, of course she did!" How could anyone see the misery and human suffering that she did day in and day out and never have any questions or doubt about God? Having read the article now, I realize that her suffering the "dark night of the soul," as it is traditionally called in spirituality (from St. John of the Cross), was much darker and more profound than I first supposed. She had very mystical and intense experiences of Jesus when she was young that literally compelled her to start out on her mission, and then just as she was getting started, the visions and even the closeness she felt to Christ simply ceased.

I have several thoughts on this revelation, starting with the question of whether her personal letters and most private writings should have been published at all, when she specifically requested that they be destroyed upon her death. While I recognize that these writings will hopefully offer a lot of support and comfort to all of us as we struggle with the daily difficulties of staying faithful to God, I can't help but feel that our reading them is a violation of her privacy. She was writing to her confessors, her spiritual directors, and in her private journals. How many of us would want the world reading those sorts of letters? Even famous people should have a right and the freedom to be able to write their innermost thoughts and feelings without fearing that their writings will one day be fodder for conversation over coffee (or material for someone's blog!). I find it a bit ironic that while she requested that her personal writings be destroyed, she was "overruled by her Church," but Pope John Paul II (who was Pope at the time of her death) similarly asked that his personal writings be destroyed upon his death. His wishes were respected. Thus while one can argue that Mother Teresa was a public figure that most people figured would one day be a saint, the same thing could be said about John Paul II.

Nonetheless, Mother Teresa's writings have been preserved and now published, so I suppose it is a moot point now! Given that fact, the letters do tell a spectacular story of her faith journey. The article in Time speculates and interviews people about their opinions on why her visions stopped, why she suddenly experienced such suffering in her spiritual life. My personal reflections were very different from all of the opinions ventured there, while of course realizing that the bottom line is that in this life we will never know the answers to those questions. I thought about the fact that most of us never experience the kind of visions and union with Christ she experienced, and how it had been that mystical experience that compelled her to begin her work with the poor. It seems to me that once she began her work, the purpose of the visions was accomplished and so she no longer needed to have extraordinary visions. The force of her own strong personality and will were enough to keep her moving forward in her work once she had begun. The thing about visions is that they are extraordinary, not ordinary. Most people never experience them. When they are given, they are given for a reason. The article says that there was one time she had relief from her spiritual suffering. After Pius XII died, she asked by virtue of his intercession for a sign that God was pleased with the Society. She received the sign she asked for and her suffering disappeared, but only temporarily. She eventually had to find a way to come to terms with "the absence" of Christ in her life. I can only imagine, though, how excruciating it must be to lose that sense of presence once you have experienced it. The prayers, Scripture, sacraments, etc., that bring such joy to us must pale in comparison to the immediate vision and voice of Christ. The amazing thing to me about Mother Teresa is her perseverance - in prayer, in belief, and in the incredible work she was doing - in the face of her inner turmoil. I expect she would have continued her work, even if she had come to lose her faith, because I think she believed in what she was doing. She did not lose her faith though, but rather understood her own suffering as a part of her solidarity with Christ on the cross. Her "crisis of faith" reveals not a closet atheist (as Christopher Hitchins would have one believe), but the very definition of true faith - belief in the face of doubt - echoing those words from Mark I quoted a few weeks ago that we all need to say to God at times, "I do believe, help my unbelief!" (9:24)

2007-09-06T11:46:00.000-05:00

Monday was labor day, and as is their tradition, the US bishops issued their Labor Day Statement, A Time to Remember; A Time to Recommit. The statement starts off by recalling the Church's longstanding tradition of supporting the worker and the dignity of work and by commending workers for the progress that has been made in working for decent wages, working conditions, and benefits such as vacation and healthcare. The statement also reminds us that there are still many who have none of these things, including 40 million people in our country without health care coverage. The statement draws on key principles of the Church's teaching to reflect upon on Labor Day:

The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy.
A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring.
All people have a right to life and to secure the basic necessities of life (e.g. food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, economic security).
All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefit, to decent working conditions, as well as to organize and join union or other associations.

Mostly, however, the statement reflects on the issue of immigration reform as an issue about workers. No holds were barred in the assessment of our lack of progress on this issue as a nation:

This vital national immigration discussion polarized our people, paralyzed the Congress, and failed our nation. . . [S]ometimes anger trumped wisdom, myths overwhelmed facts, and slogans replaced solutions. After this debate, we are a society more divided, a people more confused, and a nation unable to move forward on one of the most serious and complicated issues we face as a nation.

The reaction of the bishops is simple: "We have to do better." The statement suggest four new starting points for the discussion to move forward: reality, civility, morality and consistency. Under reality, they list some "inescapable facts":

The immigration status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable. The ‘system’ is broken. We need far-reaching and comprehensive reform.
Immigrants come to our nation because they find work here that allows them to offer some hope and dignity to their families. The work they do is a contribution to our society.
There are some 12 million undocumented people among us, most of whom are workers. Our economy and communities depend on them. They bus our dishes, pick our vegetables, clean our offices and homes, and care for our children among other jobs. We cannot wish them away or simply send them away. For practical, economic, and moral reasons, we have to find ways to bring these people out of the shadows, to protect them from exploitation, and to regularize their status for their sake and ours.
Like the rest of society, immigrant populations include a small number of people who do damage to our communities and engage in dangerous behavior. These people, like others who harm our society, must be caught and punished, but their reprehensible acts cannot be used to demonize millions who contribute to our economy and society.
One-dimensional ‘solutions’ may be simple, but they are often illusions and can make things worse. There is no fence long enough or high enough that can wall out the human and economic forces that drive immigration.
Immigration reform cannot start or stop at our borders. U.S. policy must help overcome the pervasive poverty and deprivation, the violence and oppression that push people to leave their own lands. Policies on debt and development, foreign aid and global trade are essential elements of any effective immigration reform.

In terms of civility, the statement notes that both sides fell short in this debate. They take to task those who would use this issue politically "for partisan advantage, a ratings boost, or a fundraising tactic." They note that issues such as "legitimate concerns about protecting our borders, curbing the flow of unlawful immigration, the potential displacement of native workers, and the possibility of exploitation within guest worker programs . . . are not to be ignored exaggerated, dismissed, or used as political weapons."

The statement also addresses morality from the perspective that all people, regardless of where they were born, where they come from, or what documents they do or do not possess, have fundamental rights that must be protected. Our policy should be shaped by values such as the common good, family unity, and the protection of children. Finally the statement raises the issue of consistency, in that this issue must be addressed on a federal level. As a result of the failure to make any progress on immigration reform on a national level, many states and communities have begun to pass their own laws. The statement notes that "a patchwork of conflicting policies, punitive measures, and local disputes cannot fix a broken federal system, but they can further enflame the divisions that make real progress more difficult."

Many of us can be very grateful that we were born in this country, that we have had opportunities for education and advancement, and that we have decent jobs. It is important each year on Labor Day to be mindful of those who do not have all of the advantages we do and to pray for the wisdom to discern concrete ways in which we can use our advantages to help others. As the Bishops' statement reminds us, "after all, this is about what kind of people we are, what kind of country we are becoming."

2007-08-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

I have often said that prayer is relationship with God. It can take many forms - talking to God, being silent with God, using traditional forms such as the rosary, etc. Sometimes we ask God for something, sometimes we thank God for something, and sometimes we do not know what to pray. Sometimes we pray for faith. One of my favorite lines in Scripture is the father of a little boy, who says in response to Jesus' proclamation that everything is possible for one who has faith, "I do believe, help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

There have been very few times in my prayer when I have felt some sort of concrete response, and even those times, there was no booming voice from heaven telling me what to do or what I needed to hear. It was more subtle than that. Most of the time, I suspect God answers our prayers in ways we never even realize or recognize. We are reading the book Eat, Love, Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert for our book club right now, and her description of a prayer experience really resonated with me. Gilbert was raised Christian, but had not really practiced her faith as an adult. At a low point in her life, in the middle of the night on her bathroom floor struggling with her misery in an unhappy marriage, she says she begins to pray. She begins, amusingly enough, by introducing herself to God - literally. She says,

"That's right--I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we'd just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship." (pg. 15)

As she cries, she begs God over and over to tell her what to do, and she says that she hears a voice. But the voice is not that, in her words, "Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice," but rather:

"It was merely my own voice speaking from within myself. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I'd only ever experience love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?" (pg. 16)

I like to think that this is how God speaks to us. That there is this inner voice within us, if we really and truly listen to it, that is God's voice speaking in us and through us. So what did the voice say to her? Here is the real brilliance of it - the voice told her to go back to bed. That is it. She reflects:

"It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have trusted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that's not true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at three o'clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed, because I love you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need for now is to get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight. Therefore: Go back to bed, Liz."

This passage made me cry. It just speaks to me of God's presence with us in our darkest moments. Prayer, relationship with God, is not about God "fixing" things or solving our problems for us. Prayer is about letting God be with us and love us during the good times and the times when life seems so very hard.

2007-08-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

Death has a way of bringing life into very sharp focus, especially when that death is unexpected and tragic. We generally cannot listen to the news these days without hearing about death: the soldiers and civilians in Iraq, the miners in Utah, the victims of the floods in the midwest, the victims of the earthquake in Peru. The list could go on and on. At the same time I am very fortunate in my circumstances in life that death is usually not a part of my day to day existence, therefore when it does touch my life, it is unexpected and tragic. This past week the wife of one of my relatives unexpectedly died from a blood clot that went to her heart. She injured her foot a couple of weeks ago, the blood clot formed without anyone's knowledge, and now suddenly she has died. She leaves behind her husband and 3 year old son. In the midst our sorrow, I am forced to recognize that life is a very precious and fragile gift. I take it for granted. For the most part my family members have lived long and happy lives, dying in their 80s or 90s. That is my paradigm and my expectation: that I and those I love will live, that life is somehow a given. But it is not, and it can be lost suddenly and unexpectedly. People who live in war stricken countries or even in the more violent neighborhoods of our own country realize this much more vividly than I usually do. In having that sort of lived ignorance, I am very fortunate. That potential loss of life, for me who can see this instance as somewhat the exception to the norm, makes me appreciate how grateful I should be for each moment of life, for each relationship with a loved one, for the beauty of nature that constantly surrounds me, for the very breath that I breathe, and for the fact that all of the cells and organs in my body operate day in and day out the way they are supposed to.

In Deuteronomy, God says to the people,

I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendents may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you. 30:19-20

Death can cause us to despair or it can cause us to choose life, forcing us to recognize that what we have here does not last forever. It is an extraordinarily precious gift that we are given to cherish and to make the most of each and every day.

2007-08-09T12:41:00.000-05:00

I have been reading Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton over the last couple of weeks as part of my daily spiritual reading. I want to begin by quoting a lengthy passage from this work that was written in the 1960s and continues to be so very relevant today:

It is no exaggeration to say that democratic society is founded on a kind of faith: on the conviction that each citizen is capable of, and assumes, complete political responsibility. Each one not only broadly understands the problems of government but is willing and ready to take part in their solution. In a word, democracy assumes that the citizen knows what is going on, understands the difficulties of the situation, and has worked out for himself an answer that can help him to contribute, intelligently and constructively, to the common work (or "liturgy") of running his society.
For this to be true, there must be a considerable amount of solid educational preparation. A real training of the mind. A genuine formation in those intellectual and spiritual disciplines without which freedom is impossible.
There must be a completely free exchange of ideas. Minority opinions, even opinions which may appear to be dangerous, must be given a hearing, clearly understood and seriously evaluated on their own merits, not merely suppressed. Religious beliefs and disciplines must be respected. The rights of individual conscience must be protected against every kind of open or occult encroachment.
Democracy cannot exist when men prefer ideas and opinions that are fabricated for them. The actions and statements of the citizen must not be mere automatic "reactions"--mere mechanical salutes, gesticulations signifying passive conformity with those in power.
To be truthful, we will have to admit that one cannot expect this to be realized in all the citizens of a democracy. But if it is not realized in a significant proportion to them, democracy ceases to be an objective fact and becomes nothing but an emotionally loaded word.
What is the situation in the United States today? (100-101)

The question with which Merton ends his reflection is one we must ask ourselves today. We finished two different series at the parish recently, one on Vatican II and the other on immigration. In the series on Vatican II, we ended by discussing Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). If you have not read this document, you should click on the link above and begin. The Council calls all of us to take responsibility as citizens, not only of our country, but of the world, and be an active part of working toward solving the problems of the world such as the economic disparity between the rich and the poor and issues of peace and justice.

Too often politics in our country is all about rhetoric instead of education, sound bytes rather than constructive reflection. The politicians define themselves in opposition to one another instead of entering into dialogue to find common ground and ways to move forward and make progress. Too often we as citizens don't bother to inform ourselves but simply swallow the party line, preferring ideas and opinions that are fabricated for us, as Merton says, rather than doing the hard work of thinking through the issue for ourselves.

The recent discussion series we had on immigration was a shining example of the exact opposite of this type of complacency. Here a group of intelligent, committed Christian Americans came together to struggle with a very complex problem, to understand better the different viewpoints, and to try to figure out how they could individually make a difference. In a time when our politicians have somewhat given up on this issue, it was invigorating to see a group of people willing to stay with the issue and the struggle to figure out what the right course of action might be. There was no consensus in the group of what the solution might be, but everyone agreed that we could not give up. These people were doing exactly what Merton maintains the citizens of a democracy must do if democracy is to work: they were struggling to understand the situation and its difficulties and trying to figure out their own answers in a way that would allow them to contribute "intelligently and constructively" to solving the problem. This is the challenge and the beauty of democracy.

2007-08-03T08:58:00.000-05:00

I was sitting on our deck up north with my eight year old niece watching the sunset, and she commented on the peace and quiet. She lives in a house with 2 parents, 4 kids, a dog, a talking bird (Macaw), doves, and rabbits (her dad is a magician). Sitting on the deck, she said to me, "Sometimes at mass Fr. Tom closes his eyes, and we all take a moment. That is about the only peace and quiet I ever get!" Out of the mouths of babes! We do not live in a culture that values silence. With all of our cell phones, ipods, entertainment systems, etc., not to mention just the chaotic households many live in, how often do we get to truly experience silence? And yet we have a deep need for silence and contemplation. Even an eight year old can recognize that fact!

In the Vatican II series we are currently having at the parish, we just discussed the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. While the main point of the document is the importance of the "full, conscious, and active participation of the laity" in prayer and song (which, by the way, is prayer - in fact Augustine says singing is praying twice!), there is also a line in the Constitution that notes the importance of times of reverent silence during the liturgy. I have been at parishes where the pastors have tried to incorporate such times of silence, and the tangible uncomfortableness of many people is almost amusing, if it weren't so sad. We don't know how to be silent. Sitting and being silent is often regarded as a waste of time in our very efficient society. At my parents' church up north, the priest would sit down after the homily and close his eyes for a good amount of time. Since the church was usually full of tourists, who were unaware that this was his normal mode of operation, eventually you would hear the whispers, "Is he alright? (he was in his late 70s or early 80s) "Did he fall asleep?" Silence often seems to indicate to us that something has gone wrong. Silence is often referred to as "awkward". In theatre, silence often means that someone has forgotten an entrance or a line, so the after that silent pause, the other actors quickly jump in and improv to fill that silence until everything is on track again. Hence the other assumption that is sometimes made when a priest is silent: "Did he forget what comes next?"

And yet most of us do also know peaceful silence. Many of us have experienced that beautiful silence of holding a sleeping child. Loved ones know what it means to walk or sit in companionable silence. There is a song that came out not too long ago by the Dixie Chicks called "Easy Silence." The refrain is:

The easy silence that you make for me. It's okay when there's nothing more to say to me. And the peaceful quiet you create for me, and the way you keep the world at bay for me.

The song immediately captivated me because it just invokes that sense of loving silence. In our spiritual lives, we need that kind of silence as well. We need to simply be with God. In Centering prayer they say,

"God's first language is silence."

One does not necessarily need to spend 20 minutes in silence as we do in centering prayer; even just taking a few moments during the day to be quiet is important, as Scripture advises us, to

Be still and know that I am God.
-Psalm 46:11

Last night I saw the movie, Into Great Silence. Not only is the movie filmed at the Grande Chartreuse Carthusian monastery where the monks spend most of their time in silence, but the film itself is basically silent. There is no narration or music, other than the occasional scene in which the monks are chanting or very rarely speaking. Most of the movie is simply silent, allowing you to hear the natural sounds from the fall of footsteps on the stairs to the sound of the wind or the water. While I will admit, the movie is quite long, and I did get rather restless during the middle section, it is also unbelievably beautiful. You enter into the monks' silence, and the filming directs your attention to the simple beauty we often miss in the chaos of our lives, from a drop of water to the way the sunlight shines on the wooden floor. The natural beauty, from the majestic French Alps to the minute intricacy of a seed pod, is heightened through the calm quiet of the movie. Reiterated through the movie is the written line from the prophet Jeremiah (20:7) that would appear on the screen,

"You seduced me, O Lord, and I was seduced."

A more accurate translation (which did come through in French and German, also written on the screen) is, "You seduced me, O Lord, and I let myself be seduced." Actually, our English translations often uses the word "duped" instead of "seduced" (Jeremiah is rather upset with God in this passage), and I like both translations, depending on my mood, but my challenge to all of us this week is to take a moment to let ourselves be seduced by the silence of God.

2007-07-26T12:03:00.000-05:00

Prayer is the subject of this Sunday’s gospel, and in it, we are told to be persistent and ask for what we need in prayer. Why do we pray? We do not pray to change God; we pray to be in relationship with God. In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) says,

“I do not pray because it changes God. I pray because it changes me. I pray because the need flows out of me constantly.”

In other words, it is not as if God has determined a certain event will or will not happen (the Packers will lose to the Bears), but we pray, so God’s mind is changed and the outcome is altered (the Packers beat the Bears). Granted, this is a somewhat trivial example, but there can be a tendency to ‘use’ prayer this way with major issues as well – illness, getting a certain job, safety in traveling, etc. The danger with such prayer is that when one’s wish does not come true, one’s faith can be shaken. At the same time, we do need to pray for all of those major issues in our lives (though maybe not for the Packers to win) as well as minor ones. Why? Because prayer is about being in relationship with God. We share our deepest thoughts and the desires of our heart with the one who created us, loves us, and knows us better than we know ourselves. We do so through prayers of intercession, but also through prayers of praise, thanksgiving, and even lament. The difference is not whether or not we pray for things we want and need, but how we understand that prayer. Prayer is not a way to control or manipulate God.

When we pray, we are responding to God’s universal call to us. There is something in the way in which we are created that gives us a desire for relationship with God. Theologian Karl Rahner says that each of us has been created to be a ‘hearer of God’s Word’. St. Augustine says,

“You created us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

In other words, we are already hard-wired for God. God’s call to each and every person is built in, and prayer is one of the ways in which we respond to that call, thus entering into a covenant relationship with the one who calls us. At the same time that we offer our response in prayer, we remember that our ability to respond is in itself a gift from God.

We also believe that God hears and answers our prayers. In saying this I do not mean to contradict what I said earlier about not controlling God. It may be difficult at times to recognize the answer to a prayer. While God is calling us into relationship, a relationship must be freely entered into by both parties. We are called to put some effort into the relationship and persevere even when we do not see or understand the response to our prayer. One’s relationship with God will have the same ups and downs that any human relationship encounters. In my own prayer life there are times when I feel very connected to God and other times when I feel like God is totally absent. It is at those times that I must call on all of my resources of perseverance and the help of the Holy Spirit to trust that God never abandons us, even when life seems the darkest or prayer seems the most empty. Sometimes that is when God is actually the closest. The mystic, saint, and doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila, went through three years of a ‘dry period’ in her prayer, a dark night where she felt entirely abandoned by God. Her advice to us was whatever you do in those moments, do not stop praying because to do so is to take yourself out of relationship with God.

2007-07-19T11:05:00.000-05:00

As reports started trickling in last week about Pope Benedict XVI proclaiming the Catholic Church the "one true Church," I must admit that I was loathe to even delve into the story. Yet, when I did, my overall reaction was that the media was making a much bigger deal of this than was necessary. This is front page material for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel? Really? The reaction of most Protestant leaders was something to the effect of "yeah, we know they think that." So what is this story all about?

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (not Pope Benedict XVI, by the way, though he did approve the statement and gave basically the same interpretation in Dominus Iesus in 2000 when he was Prefect of the CDF) released a document entitled, "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church." The CDF is responding to the work of some unnamed theologians that may involve "erroneous interpretation which in turn may give rise to confusion and doubt" and so are "clarifying the authentic meaning of some ecclesiological expressions used by the magisterium which are open to misunderstanding in theological debate." When the Protestant leaders responded that these statements are not saying anything that has not already been said, they are absolutely right. The Commentary itself states that to respond to this issue the CDF has "chosen to use the literary genre of Responsa ad quaestiones, which of its nature does not attempt to advance arguments to prove a particular doctrine but rather, by limiting itself to previous teachings of the Magisterium, sets out only to give a sure and certain response to specific questions." The main issue is how one is to interpret the line from Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church that the universal Church or the Church of Christ, which is referred to in the Creed as one, holy, catholic (which means universal, by the way, not Roman Catholic), and apostolic, "subsists in the Catholic Church." The controversial word is "subsists." Some (including some of those present at the Council) argue that the "subsists in" was used instead of "is" to indicate that the universal Church is not limited to the Catholic Church, that in fact, the concept of the universal Church is a larger or wider concept than the Catholic Church, while nonetheless acknowledging the union of the Catholic Church with the universal Church. The clarification in the current document, which simply repeats what had already been said in Dominus Iesus, states that the phrase "subsists in" means "the full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church. The important factor that was revolutionary in the Constitution on the Church at Vatican II was the teaching that there are "numerous elements of sanctification and truth" in the non-Catholic Christian churches (or ecclesial communions, if you prefer) and that "the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation." If you remove the double negative from that statement, it says that the Spirit has/does use them as instruments of salvation. This development was truly ground breaking in an era with Catholics and Protestants did not even enter one another's churches! As for the interpretation of the phrase "subsists in", it is not a teaching that could not possibly be reinterpreted at a later date, but to clarify the interpretation at this point (even if some disagree with that interpretation) is part of the teaching office of the magisterium of the Church. Because of the media spin, I think it is more important than ever for us to reach out to our Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ in ecumenical dialogue and prayer personally witnessing to our respect for their deep faith witnessed in their communities, their prayer, and the way they live their lives.

2007-07-12T12:07:00.000-05:00

With the recent headline about Pope Benedict's (or really the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's) teaching on the Church, I thought about writing on that, but I wanted to talk about an experience I had while on vacation in Mexico last week (hence why there was no blog entry last week) while it was still fresh in my mind. I promise I will address the recent statement about the Church next week, which will also give me time to do a bit more research! This story comes with pictures though as an added bonus!

The friend with whom I was traveling knows a young man, who I am going to call "Abraham" (not his real name, of course, but I will call him after thefounding father of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition who was himself a migrant) in his early 30s who is among the undocumented here from Mexico. "Abraham" works for a hotel in the laundry service in the States. We decided to go and visit his family in Mexico. One of the consequences of the fact that "Abraham" is undocumented is that he has not seen his family in seven years, since he obviously can't return to Mexico to visit on holidays and family occasions. He is from a small "rancho" that we reached by driving on very hilly dirt roads for a good 20-30 minutes (with the help of a local from the nearest city whom we hired to come along with us and give directions; it turned out that the rancho we were looking at is basically made up of one extended family, and he knew of the family and where they lived).

We arrived at a collection of maybe 20 houses (though I use that term rather loosely by our standards), stopping every so often to ask the way to "Abraham's" mother's house. When we arrived, she was a bit leery of who these strangers were, but when we explained who we were and the connection with her son, tears immediately filled her eyes. She was completely overwhelmed to meet someone who had seen the son she had not seen in seven years only days before. She introduced us to "Abraham's" sister-in-law and proudly showed us pictures of his brother's wedding that had taken place last April, but which "Abraham" of course could not attend. She also introduced us to "Abraham's" grandmother who lived across the road. We went to visit the chapel, which was nicer than any of the homes we saw. She was extremely proud of that chapel, though they only celebrate mass there once every one to two months when the priest is able to get out to their rancho.

We then met "Abraham's" aunts, uncle, and cousins. His sister-in-law went to fetch "Abraham's" brother and bring him home from work so that he too could meet us. They brought out wooden benches, and we all sat in the cool shadow of the church while we talked. His cousin told us that her husband, and the father of her four year old daughter, was in Alabama. She had not seen him in two years. They told us they had all been wondering who we were as we drove into the village, asking one another about the car driving through with the "white girl" in it (that was me!). We were the first Americans that had ever been to their village. They went to get a bottle of Coke, which they apparently bought to serve us (though I am not sure where they bought it, as there did not seem to be any type of store anywhere - perhaps from a neighbor?). We speculated later on about their incredible hospitality in desiring to serve us when they clearly had so little themselves. They wanted us to stay for lunch as well, but we refused, saying we needed to be moving on before that.

They took us around the village, including up to the top of a hill that held a brick and cement cistern to gather water, which was then piped down to spigots in the yards (no running water in the houses) of the individual homes. They proudly explained that that cistern contained the water that served the entire village. They showed us the one room school where "Abraham" had been educated until he was old enough to work, after which time he worked during the week and attended school in town on Saturdays. We then returned to "Abraham's" home, where they explained that they had built their new home with money that "Abraham" had sent them from the U.S. This is the house in which "Abraham" grew up:

This is the picture of the house they have since built with the money "Abraham" has sent:

Still not much by our standards, with two rooms, and no glass on the windows, but clearly a vast improvement to their previous home. Furthermore, "Abraham's" brother introduced us to "Abraham's" animals, the animals that have been bought with the money he has sent home: goats, pigs, and cows.

They also showed us a full grown mango tree that "Abraham" had planted before he left. We took pictures of all of them and the village and "Abraham's" home to take back to him. They said he would not even know the children under seven, but they would explain to him who was who when they spoke with him on the phone. He does call home periodically, but since they have no phone in their village, he calls someone in the neighboring village. His mother then has to be sent for so that she can come and talk to him on the phone. While we did not meet his father, my friend told me that "Abraham" has been sending money home recently so that his father can buy a truck - his first ever, having only ever had a donkey previously. They were a wonderful family who all gave us hugs as we said goodbye. The little girls picked some of the orange flowers I had admired off a tree and gave them too me. The hardest part of the morning for me was the emotion that filled the face of a mother who had not seen her son in seven years and her incredible gratitude (and his whole family's joy) at having been able to have some contact with some small portion of his life in the States. When we consider the issue of immigration in our country and ponder the teachings of our Church, it helps to have a human face on the issue and to see first hand both the struggles involved for the families of the undocumented, but also the reason they take the risks they take. I share this story and these pictures with you so that we can all ask ourselves, if we were in their situation, what would we do? "Abraham's" family has been able to vastly improve their lives by the mere fact of his making minimum wage at a hotel laundry in the United States. For many of these families immigration (legal or otherwise) isn't a choice, it is a matter of survival.

2007-06-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

"I praise you for I am wonderfully made" was the response we sang for the Psalm last Sunday. A friend of mine who is a cantor remarked that she found it a bit funny to be singing those words from Psalm 139. We are taught to be so humble, and here it seems as if we are bragging about ourselves! We are wonders though, and we should be aware of and grateful for that fact! Psalm 139 is a well known favorite. This section of it states:

You formed me in my inmost being;
you knit me in my mother's womb.
I praise you, so wonderfully you made me;
wonderful are your works!
My very self you knew;
my bones were not hidden from you,
When I was being made in secret,
fashioned as in the depths of the earth.
-Psalm 139:13-15

Psalm 139 has been set to music in such well-known hymns as "You Are Near" by Dan Schutte and "O God, You Search Me" by Bernadette Farrell. While both songs emphasize the fact that God created us and knew us in the womb, Farrell picks up this specific line, "For the wonder of who I am, I praise you." I have always loved that line in her song and wonder how often we do stop and thank God for the wonder of who we are. Do we really look at ourselves and marvel at the creation we are? Do we marvel at our role as co-creators with God in choosing the person we become, realizing what an awesome gift and responsibility that is? In many translations of the Bible, this line is translated as "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." There is another song that I have always loved by a Christian singer Rich Mullins that picks up this theme. In his song, "We Are Not as Strong as We Think We Are," he sings:

We are frail; we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Forged in the fires of human passion,
choking on the fumes of selfish rage.
And with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart,
we must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are.

This is one of the things that amazes me about human creation; we seem to be so incredibly strong and so very frail at the same time. We have an unending ability to hurt one another. There is a great vulnerability in being human, and it seems the more human we become, the more vulnerable we are. And yet we have this incredible strength to endure. The song always reminds me that that strength to endure comes from God; that in realizing our dependence on God, we find our strength and our freedom. It is when we try to shoulder the world on our own that we run into trouble. It also reminds me of our need for one another. The irony of life is that we depend on the very people to whom we become the most vulnerable and who have the greatest power to hurt us.

For me, it all comes back to this incredible gift of human life we are given, and how we choose to use it. Are we living the lives that allow us to actualize our full potential as human beings? Are we enabling others to do the same? In moral theology the basic criterion for judging issues is whether or not a certain action or course of action leads to human flourishing. Do our lives enable others to flourish? Are we ourselves flourishing, and if not, is there something we can do to change that fact? We praise God for the wonder of who we are by living our lives in a way that allows us to be the creation God intended us to be! We are only given one life, are we truly appreciating it? There is a great line that I have been reflecting upon lately and will leave you with:

"I gave my life to become the person I am today.
Was it worth it?"
- One, Richard Bach

2007-06-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

As someone who spends a good hour and a half to two hours on the road going to and from work, I was intrigued to hear that the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People had published a document entitled, "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road." The document made headlines for giving the "Driver's Ten Commandments":

I. You shall not kill.
II. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
III. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
IV. Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims of accidents.
V. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
VI. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
VII. Support the families of accident victims.
VIII. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
IX. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
X. Feel responsible towards others.

While there have been some amusing jokes made in the media about the Church speaking out on this issue, I actually think there is much wisdom in these guidelines. I will be the first to confess that I am an impatient driver, and I have a tendency to speed. While these "commandments" are a good reminder to all of us that when we take to the roads we have a responsibility for our own lives and the lives of those around us, the document actually goes far beyond simply stating these basic rules of the road.

While the document acknowledges the benefits of increased mobility in our world, it also uses our role as drivers as a metaphor for our approach to life. Are we aggressive, self-centered, and domineering as drivers? Do we manifest an attitude that respects the life, needs, and rights of others? What is it about driving that can bring out the worst aspects of ourselves? Being responsible drivers is not simply about "being nice," but can be a matter of life and death:

During the 20th century approximately 35 million people lost their lives in road accidents, whilst around one and a half billion were injured. In 2000 alone, deaths amounted to 1,260,000, and it is also noteworthy that around 90% of accidents were due to human error.

We literally hold one another's lives in our hands when we drive; and the tragedy of an accident is not only for the victims and the families of the victims, but for the driver who never intended anyone harm, but must now live with the consequences of the accident.

While the section on driving got the most (only?) press, it is important to note that that section is only one of four in the document. The remaining sections are on the liberation of prostitutes, the care for street children, and care for the homeless. The document speaks of the slavery of prostitution as human trafficking and exploitation. It recognizes that not just women, but also men and children are victims of this form of exploitation. The document notes that many prostitutes experienced violence and sexual abuse as children and that prostitution is often the effect of an unjust society where people are looking for a means to support themselves and their families or a way out of an impoverished country. The document states that:

The victims of prostitution are human beings, who in many cases cry out for help, to be freed from slavery, because selling one's own body on the street is usually not what they would voluntarily choose to do. Of course, each person has a different story to tell, but a common thread of violence, abuse, mistrust and low self-esteem, as well as fear and lack of opportunities, runs through them. They all bear deep wounds that need healing, whilst they seek relationships, love, security, affection, self-assertion and a better future for themselves and their families.

The "deeply rooted problems" of the "customers" are also acknowledged. A call is issued for churches to offer solidarity and compassion, engaging in an active involvement to bring about the end of this form of exploitation and to foster opportunities for the rehabilitation of its victims, both prostitutes and customers.

The section on street children, defined as "those with no ties to their families, which means that they have made the street their place of abode," notes that there are around 100 million children living on the streets, and the numbers are increasing. Added to this number are those who have a home and a bed they return to at night, but who spend most of their waking hours on the streets. The document notes the primary causes for this phenomenon as:

Increasing family breakdown; tensions between parents; aggressive, violent and sometimes perverse behaviour towards children; emigration, which entails uprooting from everyday life and consequent disorientation; conditions of poverty and hardship that destroy dignity and deprive people of the wherewithal to survive; the spread of drug addiction and alcoholism; and prostitution and the sex industry, which continue to take an extraordinary toll of victims, often driven by terrible violence to the most brutal kind of slavery. Other factors are wars and social disorder that upset normal life, including for minors, and the spread, primarily in Europe, of a "culture characterised by pleasure and transgression" -- which should not be underestimated -- in environments marked by a lack of reference values, in which young people in general suffer from loneliness and an ever deeper sense of the emptiness of existence.

Again we, the Church, are called upon to address these very serious issues in our society and our world.

The final section is on the homeless in general. It calls on us as Church "to accompany and serve these people whatever their moral or personal situation might be." Furthermore, we are called to recognize that:

People who live on the street are looked on with wariness and suspicion, and being homeless is the start of gradually losing one's rights. It is more difficult to obtain welfare, almost impossible to find work, and no longer possible to obtain identity papers. These poor people become a nameless and voiceless crowd, unable to defend themselves and find the necessary resources for a better future. The Word of God censures any form of irritation or indifference towards poor people (poverty fatigue), reminding us that the Lord will judge our lives by assessing how and how much we have loved the poor (cf. Matthew 25:31-46). According to Saint Augustine, we are requested to help any poor person so as not to run the risk of denying someone who might be Christ himself.

We are reminded that the homeless are in need, not only of food and shelter, but also of "kindness, respect, and human warmth." There is so much in this document to think about, pray about, and act upon! I am struck by how unfortunate it is that most of the time we hear very little about the wisdom that the Church offers in the documents it publishes and that when the media does pick up a story like this because of its "curiousity" element, it leaves out the most important parts. (Note: If you would like to read the document yourself, you can access it by clicking here!)

2007-06-14T12:16:00.000-05:00

Water is the source of life. This concept struck me profoundly as I flew to the west coast for the first time in my life this past weekend. I sat with my nose pretty much glued to the window for the last hour of the trip as we flew over Utah, Nevada, and California. What I saw was miles and miles and miles of completely uninhabited land in an overpopulated world and in a country that is currently debating the problem of immigration. So why is this land unpopulated? Granted, some of it is preserved as national parks, but mostly it is unpopulated because there is no water. What I saw from the plane was beautiful, but it mostly was rock and dirt with very little evidence of vegetation. I saw shades of russet and white and black, but no green, no trees that I could make out. Interestingly enough, during my morning commute this week I listened to a series on NPR about the struggle over water in the west, primarily focusing on the conflicting needs of rural and urban areas, especially the massive amounts of water used in Las Vegas. The main source of water for the region is the Colorado River, with its reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. What I learned in listening to that series is that there is also water in that area in deep underground aquifers. Where that water springs up to the surface, life blooms in the desert. Little pocket communities develop around these sources of water.

Water is the source of life. We use it in baptism to symbolize our new life in Christ. We use it at funerals symbolize our being born into eternal life. We go through the desert of lent for forty days, only to renew our baptismal vows and be sprinkled with the water of life for the next fifty days. We use water to bless ourselves and our lives. Deserts also play a role in our spiritual life. We experience desert times, times where we wander as the Israelites did, unable to recognize God working in our lives. We experience the parched desert times when we thirst for God as did the psalmists:

Like a deer yearns for living streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. (Ps. 42:2)

At the same time, the desert is a place we voluntarily go, as did Jesus, to pray. In the early church there was a strong tradition of desert fathers and mothers who went out into the desert to live, to pray, and to be with God. The desert is a place where we can be alone with God, and in that solitude, come to recognize our thirst for God, our absolute dependence on God, and come to know more intimately the One who is the source of our life. Jesus offers us "a spring of water welling up to eternal life," (Jn. 4:14) so that we will no longer thirst. Water is sacramental. The next time we get a drink of water or wash our hands or dip our hands into the baptismal water fonts as we enter a church, the next time we turn a faucet and water comes pouring out, let us be thankful that we have water, that we have life, and most of all that we have a relationship with the one who is the source of all life.

2007-06-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

On Sunday several of the area churches sponsored an ecumenical program in which Dr. Calvin DeWitt, a professor at the UW-Madison Nelson Institute of Environmental Science, spoke on "Science and Religion: Partners in Environmental Understanding and Action." DeWitt has been instrumental in getting top scientists and religious leaders together to discuss how leaders from both areas can work together to protect the environment. DeWitt said that at one of these meetings, it was actually the top evolutionary biologist who suggested that they use the term "the creation" instead of "the environment." The reason was twofold, first to offer an olive branch, so to speak, to the religious community, but also because "the creation" includes humankind, not separating humans out from the environment in which we live. DeWitt explained that changing the terminology does away with the false dichotomy that raises the question of which we should value more, humans or the environment. You cannot choose between humans and the creation because humans are part of the creation.

Another important point that DeWitt made was about the translation of Genesis 2:15:

"The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it."

The Hebrew word that is translated "cultivate" in this passage (from the New American Bible) actually means "serve." It is the same word that is used in the conclusion of the book of Joshua, in which Joshua says to the people:

"Decide today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." Joshua 24:15

The same word that is used to refer to our relationship with God is used to refer to our relationship to the world God has created. We are to serve both. We are stewards of the earth. DeWitt also spoke of the Endangered Species Act as today's Noah's Ark, saving the very animals that God created. When Genesis 1:28 speaks of humankind having "dominion" over the creatures of the world, it must be read in the context of what dominion means in a religious context. As DeWitt points out, our model for what it means to have dominion is Jesus Christ, who has dominion over us and all creation. We are to care for the creation as Christ's stewards, taking the same care as Christ takes with us. We have been given a divine mandate and responsibility; I would hate to think of standing face to face with a God who asks, "What have you done to my creation?"

2007-05-24T12:10:00.000-05:00

The US Bishops have declared "A Million Prayers Initiative" for the week of May 20-26, asking Catholics this week for two things regarding the immigration situation in this country: prayer and action. As the Congress debates immigration reform, the Bishops ask us to take the time to pray the Justice Prayer:

Come, O Holy Spirit!
Come, open us to the wonder, beauty, and dignity of the
diversity found in each culture,
in each face, and in each experience we
have of the other among us.
Come, fill us with generosity as we are
challenged to let go and allow others to share with us
the goods and beauty of earth.
Come, heal the divisions
that keep us from seeing the face of
Christ in all men, women, and children.
Come, free us to stand with and for those
who must leave their own lands in order to find work, security, and welcome in a new land, one that has enough to share.
Come, bring us
understanding, inspiration, wisdom, and
the courage needed to embrace change
and stay on the journey.
Come, O Holy Spirit,
show us the way.

In addition to praying this prayer, the bishops have asked us to take action by contacting our senators and representatives. Ask them to support immigration reform that does the following:

• To make family a priority in immigration law
• To insist the worker programs contain protection for U.S. and migrant workers
• To allow for an earned legalization program for the undocumented in the country
• To restore due process protections
• To respond to the economic, political, and social root causes of migration.

The Senate recently introduced S. 1348, the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, but the Bishops have serious concerns with the bill and would like to see the following improvements made to the bill:

Title IV – Temporary Worker Program
Legislation: S. 1348 fails to provide a path to citizenship for
temporary workers and their families. It also limits to two years the time temporary workers can bring their family members with them to the United States. A worker is eligible for up to 6 years. It also requires that a worker return home for a year after working for two years (two working, one at home, etc.), which could lead to visa overstays and an increase in the undocumented population.

Title V --- Family Reunification
Legislation: Title V of S. 1348 eliminates several categories of family immigration (1,2b, 3, and 4) and reduces the number of green cards available to parents of U.S. citizens to 40,000 a year. It clears up backlogs in the family preference system for anyone who applied prior to May 2005, but penalizes those who filed after that date. It replaces the family preference system with a “point” system skewed to highly educated and highly skilled workers.

Title VI --- Legalization Program
Legislation: Title VI of S. 1348 would provide a “Z” visa for undocumented persons and allow them to apply for permanent residency within 8 years. Unfortunately, it would not allow immediate family members to join the eligible worker until a green card application is approved, a minimum of eight years. It also requires the visa holder to return to his/her country of origin to apply for a green card.

For more information on the Bishops' position, see their website, Justice for Immigrants. For a fast and easy way to take action, visit Catholic Relief Services' Action Center.

2007-05-17T14:45:00.000-05:00

This Sunday we will celebrate the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, traditionally referred to as "Ascension Thursday," as Acts tells us that Jesus appeared to the disciples during the forty days after Easter before ascending into heaven. The feast has been moved to Sunday to enable more people to take part in the celebration (in other words, even though it was a holy day of opportunity, as my professor liked to call them, very few people were actually attending mass when it was on Thursday). The result of this move, however, is that we do not hear the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

I was struck by the fact that the first reading for the Seventh Sunday of Easter tells of the stoning of Stephen, because one of the headline videos on CNN today is a video of a 17 yr. old girl being stoned to death. (To see the video, click here, but be aware that the content is graphic.) Watching the video gave a whole new level of awareness to my reading the story of Stephen and other Christian martyrs who have been stoned, making me wonder how willing I would be to stand up and publically proclaim my faith under such terrifying circumstances. During the Easter season, during which the second reading is taken from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear the stoning or threat of stoning the early followers of Christ faced. In addition to Stephen's death, a death that Paul watched, Paul himself is stoned in Lystra and left for dead, but he didn't die, so his disciples are able to help him leave the city. Jesus was threatened with being stoned more than once, and of course, he prevents the stoning of a young woman in the Gospel of John. Stoning is horrific both in the suffering of the victim and in the mob mentality it emerges from and engenders.

More importantly, the video made me mindful that people, frequently women, are still suffering this fate today. The 17 yr. old girl in question was a Kurdish girl of the Yezidi faith (a pre-Islamic religion). She was stoned for being involved with a Sunni Muslim Iraqi boy. Yezidi girls are not allowed to date or marry outside of their religion. The stoning was an "honor killing." In retaliation, Sunni Iraqis attacked and killed 23 Yezidi men. And so the cycle of violence continues. Stoning is an issue in terms of such "honor killing" and as a form of execution in many parts of the world. Before we cast the first stone, so to speak, we must look at our own record. In our own Scripture, people were to be stoned for sacrificing their children to the god Molech, for blaspheming the name of the Lord, for being "spiritists" or mediums, for not keeping the Sabbath, for trying to convince another to serve other gods, for being a stubborn or unruly son who will not listen to or obey his father or mother, for having sex with a betrothed girl or being that betrothed girl, even if she is raped (in a city; if it takes place in a field, she is not guilty since she may have yelled for help and not been heard). As a country we also must not be quick to cast the first stone. We might not stone people, but remember that stoning is first and foremost (both now and in the days of the early Christians) a form of execution, a sentence handed down in a court of law after a trial; and as a country, we do execute people. It is difficult to take the moral high ground on issues such as this when our country is listed by organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Roman Catholic Church, next to countries like China, Saudia Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, in terms of human rights abuses in this regard. I won't continue on this line, as I have written on it previously, but the Church's teaching on this subject is very clear! For more information, see the USCCB website! When we read the stories of Christians being stoned, let us pray for all those who are being executed, both in our own country and around the world, and let us pray for all those who suffer religious persecution.

2007-05-10T13:01:00.000-05:00

The news stories this week read something like, "Six Islamist Jihadists. . . " or "Six foreign born Muslims. . . " or "Six Islamic Militants. . . " These were followed by stories of "Muslim community fears backlash. . ." Now the men arrested in the planned attack on Fort Dix are self-proclaimed Muslims and pronounced that their plan was, in their minds, "jihad" in defense of their religion, so one cannot fault the media for proclaiming them as such. I continue to be concerned, however, about how little many people seem to know about Islam, and the contradictory perspectives and at times caricatures people in this country encounter. Obviously the Muslim community in the US has similar concerns, hence their legitimate worry about a backlash.

One of the difficulties Americans face is that like any world religion, Islam is not a cookie-cutter religion. Not only are there different sects of Islam, Islam is practiced differently in different parts of the world. Muslims themselves have very different viewpoints regarding Islam depending on their own upbringing in the religion. On the extreme level, it is the same as Catholics and members of the Ku Klux Klan both calling themselves Christian. Even within mainstream Islam though, there are differences similar to those among "conservative" and "liberal" Christians. How many of us have at one point in time met an ex-Catholic who had a VERY negative experience in the Catholic Church? Asking that person to tell you about Catholicism and a person who has found their life rejuvenated by practicing the Catholic faith is going to yield two very different pictures of what "Catholicism" looks like.

One can quote seemingly violent passages of the Qu'ran. One can also quote excessively violent passages from the Bible

"Slay, therefore, every male child and every woman who has had intercourse with a man. But you may spare and keep for yourselves all girls who had no intercourse with a man." - Numbers 31:17

Oh, but that is the Old Testament, some of you may protest!"

"If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." - Lk 14:26

Or again:

"He [Jesus] said to them, "But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one." Lk. 22:36

But these passages are taken out of literary and historical context, you may protest. Exactly! But they are there to be misinterpreted by those who might choose to do so. In the Christian world of the Middle Ages, during the Crusades, in colonial times, during the Salem witch trials, etc., passages in the Bible were often used as a divine mandate for violence.

Even before the stories in the media this week, I was struck when two friends were talking about reading the writings of two different Muslim women with two completely different viewpoints about women in Islam. One was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote Infidel, a book that tells her story of experiencing a very oppressive Islamic culture first in Somalia, then in Saudi Arabia, and finally in Holland, where she left the Islamic faith and began speaking out publically on the dangers to women in Islam. The other is Ingrid Mattson, a former Catholic, who is the first woman and the first convert to be the President of the Islamic Society of North America (I have to point out here, that no woman has ever been the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). Her experience is that the religion of Islam is very liberating for women. Both stories are important, because they bring home the very different ways in which the religion of Islam is practiced in the world. Neither woman is "wrong". Islam can't be judged in theory; it can only be judged in practice. The same is true for Christianity.

2007-05-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine told me about a fascinating article on Slate.com, "God is in the Dendrites: Can Neurotheology Bridge the Gap Between Science and Religion?" As neuroscientists have started to study various types of religious experience, we end up with the chicken and the egg question - which came first, brains predisposed to religious experience or religious experience that developed certain areas of the brain? Further questions are asked about the meaning of brains that have the mechanics for religious experience, such as were the brains created by God to facilitate such experiences or are such experiences simply physical occurences that create an illusion of a God? The answer to this question is one that cannot be scientifically proven one way or another. It simply comes down to faith and/or opinion.

As for which comes first, the chicken or the egg, I suspect it is like most of our other traits, that there are differences physiologically that make a person more prone to religious/meditative feelings or experiences, and then that part of the brain is developed and enhanced through actual religious/meditative practice. Our intellectual frameworks, belief systems, etc., also affect the experiences we have. The Newburg study (Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newburg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience) shows that Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, when meditating, initially display similar MRI patterns , but if you read further in the study, there is a point in the meditative experience where those patterns diverge, and they describe their experiences differently. The Franciscan nuns speak of a oneness with God, whereas the Buddhist monks speak of an impersonal void (D’Aquili and Newburg, “Religious and Mystical States,” Zygon 23:178). The scientists tell us that the divergence of areas in the brain that are stimulated in the experience (as shown in the MRI patterns) corresponds to the nuns experiencing a positive feeling and the monks experiencing a neutral feeling, hence my argument that the fact that they come to the experience of meditation with different intellectual frameworks actually affects the experience itself. The physiological activity in their brains is different because they are operating under different belief systems. Does this mean that religious experience is a product of our brains? Yes and no. Yes, in the very physiological way that I just described, but no in that the physiological basis of the experience does not negate the religious nature of the experience.

From a religious perspective (note that I am going beyond what science can prove or disprove at this point), we are embodied spirits. We do not have spiritual experiences that do not involve our bodies. Of course religious experience is physiological! The embodiedness of the experience does not make it any less of God. In Catholic theology there is a principle that God works through secondary causes. It is this principle that allows Catholic theology to see very little conflict between most areas of science and religion. Scientific explanations do not discredit theological explanations. Ultimately they should enhance theological explanations by filling us with a wonder and awe of the God whose creation is so intricate and beautiful, from the expanse of the universe to the tiniest details of every atom. That human brains should be created in such a way as to be able to have an experience that gives them a sense that there is something "more" than our own existence doesn't "prove" the existence of God, but for those of us that do believe, it sure does make sense. That those same brains are able to reflect upon theological concepts and that the different concepts in turn affect the experience one has, says something even greater to me both about free will and the infinitely, incomprehensible mystery that we call God.

2007-04-26T16:13:00.000-05:00

This weekend we are celebrating the sacrament of Confirmation in the parish. So many people have a misconception about the sacrament of Confirmation, understanding it to be the moment when the individual "confirms" his/her faith. Confirmation is not about something the individual does; it is about something that God does. In Confirmation, God confirms you. You have been chosen by God to be a disciple, to be a witness, to be a sacrament of God's love in the world. There is also a role for the individual, which is to accept that mission (picture Mission Impossible - "your mission, should you decide to accept it . . .") and to use the gifts that God has given you to live out that mission.

The Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar taught that it is in our mission that we receive our identity, our personhood. He taught that God creates each of us with a telos (Greek for end or purpose). It is in and through prayer, through our relationship with God, that we discover the mission or purpose that is "specifically designed for and tailored to each individual" (Theo-Drama III, 249). One only becomes conscious of one's mission through encounter with God. Confirmation can be one such encounter, where we realize we have been specifically called by God to accomplish something of God's plan for the world. It is then through living out that mission that we truly discover who we are, who we have been created to be. Each person's mission is also a participation in the mission of Christ, so that as we live out our mission, we become more holy, more Christlike, and ultimately find our fulfilment as a human person.

So often in this world we tend to search for meaning, looking for that which is going to fulfill us and make us happy. The Christian message is so simple - that our fulfillment is not found in ourselves, but in living lives of love and service. It is in giving of ourselves that we truly find ourselves. We spend our entire lives living out our mission, and in doing so, discovering ever more deeply who we truly are. Doing so takes a life of continual prayer and discernment, for rarely is the path we should take crystal clear (life would be much easier if it were, but probably not nearly as interesting). Most of the time I would guess there is no single right path, but rather many different paths we can take, all of which provide opportunities for living out our life of discipleship and mission. And so I leave you, and our Confirmands, with the words of Psalm 143:

In the morning let me know your love, for I put my trust in you. Make me know the ways I should walk; to you I lift up my soul. Rescue me, Lord, from my enemies; I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you, O Lord, are my God. Let your good Spirit guide me in ways that are level and smooth.

2007-04-19T11:14:00.000-05:00

Like many others, I was stunned and deeply saddened by the tragedy at Virginia Tech on Monday. My heart goes out to the loved ones of those who died. My heart also goes out to the parents and sister of Seung-Hui Cho. I have not heard a lot about his family, one article simply said his parents were not at home when the reporter knocked on their door, and for this I am grateful. I can't even imagine what it must be like to experience not only the death of your child, but the knowledge that your child did such a horrific thing. With all that the media has reported about this young man, from his own writings to the way he is described by teachers and classmates, it is clearly evident to me that he was seriously mentally ill. He was living in some kind of personal hell, and while many around him saw that, no one knew precisely what to do about it. This fact in no way excuses or lessens the horrific things he did, but it does make me wonder what brings a person to that point, and so I pray for him and his family as well as for all of the others who have suffered in this incident.

The tragic death of 33 people and the nations' focus on the event also makes me reflect on how fortunate I am to live a life in which I am stunned by this event. My presupposition is that when students attend classes at universities, they will be safe. My presupposition is that when I go to the grocery store or stop to fill my car up with gas, I will be safe. Yesterday at least 197 people were killed in attacks across Baghdad. 140 of them were at a market and many of those killed were women and children. I don't know what it is like to live in a world where I could be killed driving home from work or buying my food for the week. I don't know what it is like to live in the inner city in the US and worry about the safety of my children when they play outside or wait for the bus in the morning. I don't know what it is like to live in a refugee camp in Chad or Darfur and fear being raped or killed when I go to get water or firewood to keep my family alive. And so when 32 people are tragically killed at a US University, I am stunned.

2007-04-12T13:24:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday we heard of Mary Magdelene discovering the tomb empty, and this Sunday we will hear of the appearance of the risen Lord to the disciples and then to Thomas. Here we have the beginning and the end of chapter 20 of the Gospel of John. What we miss, unless we were able to attend daily mass on Tuesday, is the middle of this chapter, which is the encounter of Mary Magdelene with the risen Lord. A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to hear a talk on this chapter by Sandra Schneiders, and I hear the chapter in an entirely different way now.

This chapter is about coming to belief. The themes of presence and absence, seeing and touching, all play a role in this account of the transition from a belief in Jesus based on his physical presence among the disciples to our belief today in the continued presence of Christ in our midst, but in a new way. As Schneiders laid it out, the story begins with the physical absence of the Jesus and a problem - where is the Lord? Note that the empty tomb does not engender belief, but confusion, concern, fear. The immediate assumption is that the body has been taken. What brings the disciples to faith is the encounter with the risen Lord.

Sandra Schneiders points out the interesting paradox in John's gospel. In the encounter with Mary Magdelene, Jesus tells Mary not to touch him, but in the encounter with Thomas, Jesus commands Thomas to touch him. Schneiders explains the difference by associating Mary, on the one hand, with the transition from the pre-Easter Jesus to the Easter Jesus. Jesus is present now in a new and different way; he is present now in the community of believers. The prohibition against touching him exemplifies that difference. Thomas, on the other hand, represents that transition from the Easter Jesus to the post-Easter Jesus. The disciples believe because they have seen the Lord. Thomas has not seen the Lord, and refuses to believe. He does not accept the testimony and witness of the others, of "the church". When Jesus appears again, he says to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. . . . do not be unbelieving, but believe" (v. 27). To see in John's gospel is to come to faith, which Thomas does in his exclamation, "My Lord and my God!" The new generations of believers will have to come to faith through the testimony and witness of others; by spiritual sight, not physical sight. That spiritual sight will then allow them to encounter the risen Christ.

2007-04-05T16:21:00.000-05:00

Tonight we begin the Triduum (Latin for "three day") with our Holy Thursday service, The Mass of the Lord's Supper. The Triduum is one service that begins tonight, includes the Good Friday liturgy, and culminates in the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, the highest, holiest celebration in our Church year. In these three days we enter into the paschal mystery, the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. Tonight we will hear the earliest account of the Last Supper, the reading from Paul's Letter to the Corinthians (written a good 15-30 yrs. before any of the gospel accounts). Paul is writing in response to the disreputable behavior of the Corinthian community at their celebrations of the Lord's Supper. I once heard a priest in a talk on the Eucharist say, "Thank God for the drunks at Corinth!" Those drunks are the reason Paul recounts the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. Paul's insight in this 11th chapter of this letter is that when the Corinthians mistreat their fellow Christians, when they let some in their community go hungry and suffer while they indulge themselves, they do not recognize Christ, and thus eat and drink judgment upon themselves. They do not discern the body. In other words, they do not recognize that they are the body of Christ, and when they do not recognize Christ's presence in one another, they do not recognize Christ in the body.

The gospel we hear from John gives a similar message. In the Gospel of John, there is no account of the sharing of the bread and wine. Instead we hear about the washing of the feet. Jesus washes his disciples feet, a gesture of love, concern, humbleness, service, and tells them that as he has done for them, so they are to do for one another. In this passage is one of the most profound lines in John's gospel for me:

I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do. (John 13:15)

If we could live by this one line in the Gospel, we would have understood Jesus' entire life and message; we would have understood what it means to be a Christian. We literally wash one another's feet at the Holy Thursday service. If you have ever had your feet washed, you may know that it is not always a comfortable feeling. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable to have your feet washed. You have to recognize another's vulnerability and trust when you wash her feet. In many places 12 are picked to have their feet washed. I have also attended at places where everyone washes someone's feet and has her own feet washed. The theme of Holy Thursday is what it means to be a member of the body of Christ, the continuing sacrament of God's love in the world.

On Good Friday we venerate the cross. We do not worship the object, but rather express our devotion to what the object stands for - the crucifixion of Christ. The cross represents Christ's sacrifice for us and his solidarity with us in our moments of worst suffering. The cross should tell us that we are never alone, even when we feel abandoned by all including God. The cross is the symbol of God's love for us poured out. The cross tells us that God's reaction to our sinfulness is to love us without any conditions. Nothing we could ever do can "separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:39)

Easter, like all of our feast days, begins at sundown Saturday night. At the Easter Vigil, we begin in darkness as the Paschal candle is lit. The light of Christ's resurrection is spread through the entire church, as each of us receives the light and then gives what we have received, the pattern of our Christian lives. We hear the story of salvation history - the way God has worked in our history from the moment of creation. We welcome new members into the Church and renew our own baptismal vows, seeing in the waters of baptism that we have become new creations, we have put on Christ, we are transfigured. We again receive what we are and become what we receive in the Eucharist, and we are sent out into the world to take the Easter light into all the darkest places in our lives and our world.

2007-03-29T15:33:00.000-05:00

This week we will hear two different accounts of the passion narrative during Holy Week, the one from the lectionary cycle (this year Luke) on Palm Sunday and the one from the Gospel of John on Good Friday. These readings and the veneration of the cross on Good Friday call to mind for us the meaning of the crucifixion in our salvation. I have often reflected on what we mean when we say that we are saved through Christ's death on the cross, that in this act is the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of humankind. After Pope John Paul II died, I read Crossing the Threshold of Hope, responses John Paul II wrote to interview questions he had been given. One of the passages profoundly impacted the way I thought about the cross and salvation. In the context of a discussion about suffering, Pope John Paul II says:

In a certain sense one could say that confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make himself "impotent." And one could say that God is paying for the great gift bestowed upon a being He created "in his image, after his likeness" (cf. Gn 1:26). Before this gift, He remains consistent, and places Himself before the judgment of man, before an illegitimate tribunal which asks Him provocative questions: "Then you are a king?" (cf. Jn 18:37); "Is it true that all which happens in the world, in the history of Israel, in the history of all nations, depends on you?"

We know Christ's response to this question before Pilate's tribunal: "For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth" (Jn 18:37). But then: "What is truth?" (Jn 18:38), and here ended the judicial proceeding, that tragic proceeding in which man accused God before the tribunal of his own history, and in which the sentence handed down did not conform to the truth. Pilate says: "I find no guilt in him" (Jn 18:38), and a second later he orders: "Take him yourselves and crucify him!" (Jn 19:6). In this way he washes his hands of the issue and returns the responsibility to the violent crowd.

Therefore, the condemnation of God by man is not based on truth, but on arrogance, on an underhanded conspiracy. Isn't this the truth about the history of humanity, the truth about our century? In our time the same condemnation has been repeated in many courts of totalitarian regimes (p. 65, italics in original).

Reflecting on this passage, I thought, everytime we fail to see what is sacred and give reverence and respect to what is sacred, we are guilty of the very sinfulness that led the people of Jesus' time to crucify him. Everytime in our own lives we fail to recognize God in our midst, we crucify Christ. We crucify Christ in our blindness or apathy toward the suffering of the innocent. The cross is not about God substituting punishment of Jesus for punishment of us; it is our false judgment of God - a judgment not based on truth, but on our arrogance and underhanded conspiracy, our attempts to protect the status quo, to maintain our power and control -- in a word, what we call original sin. Pilate asks, "What is truth?" In the passion narrative, Pilate does not recognize truth when it is right in front of him. Peter denies the truth. Judas betrays the truth.

God's reaction to our sinfulness is not wrathful punishment, but rather is to embrace it in a willing acceptance of the cross and to redeem it through an outpouring of love for us. God brings resurrection out of our crucifixions of God. In that is the forgiveness of our sins - that God looks at us, sees us for who we truly are (sees the truth) and all that we have done and failed to do, and loves us unconditionally. God enters into solidarity with us, into union with us, and draws us into the divine embrace of the Trinity. Through our baptism we are always, already forgiven all that we do, because by the Spirit we are united to Christ on the cross and our sinfullness is redeemed and transfigured in the resurrection. In our baptisms, we are plunged into the death and resurrection of Christ. At reconciliation we experience and celebrate that unconditional love and forgiveness that calls us to be and reminds us that we always can be more. At Eucharist we renew and rejoice in our unity with God and one another through receiving and being the Body of Christ; and in accepting the cup, we accept God's mercy and forgivenenss, renewing the covenant, surrendering to God, and joining our "Amen" to God to the Amen of Christ on the cross. As we renew our baptismal vows this Easter, may all of our sinfulness be transformed and transfigured by the love God has poured out for us on the cross.

2007-03-22T11:07:00.000-05:00

It always seems odd to me to use the word "anniversary" to refer to a sorrowful event. I am so used to hearing the word to refer to the celebration of marriages or ordinations or birthdays, events that are joyful. This week marks two sorrowful anniversaries of which we should be mindful. The first would be hard to miss with all of the discussion in the media of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 19th. The second is the 27th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero on March 24th. Both should remind us to continually pray for peace.

The Catholic Church was adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq four years ago. We cannot, however, turn back the hands of time and undo what has been done. In his statement "Towards a Responsible Transition in Iraq," written over a year ago for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Wenski stated:

Our nation cannot afford a shrill and shallow debate that distorts reality and reduces the options to “cut and run” versus “stay the course.” Instead we need a forthright discussion that begins with an honest assessment of the situation in Iraq and acknowledges both the mistakes that have been made and the signs of hope that have appeared. Most importantly, an honest assessment of our moral responsibilities toward Iraq should commit our nation to a policy of responsible transition.

In January of this year, in the statement "Evaluating Plans for a Responsible Transition in Iraq," Bishop Skyland wrote:

Each course of action, including current policies, ought to be evaluated in light of our nation’s moral responsibility to help Iraqis to live with security and dignity in the aftermath of U.S. military action. Our nation’s military forces should remain in Iraq only as long as their presence actually contributes to a responsible transition. Our nation should seek effective ways to end their deployment at the earliest opportunity consistent with this goal. The Holy See and our bishops’ Conference expressed grave moral concerns about military intervention in Iraq and the unpredictable and uncontrollable negative consequences of invasion and occupation. In light of current realities, the Holy See and our Conference support broader regional and international engagement to increase security, stability and reconstruction in Iraq. . . . At this critical juncture as our nation seeks a new way forward in Iraq, our leaders have a moral obligation to examine where things genuinely stand in pursuing justice and peace in Iraq, to assess what is actually achievable there, and to evaluate the moral and human consequences of alternative courses of action and whether they truly contribute to a responsible transition. At this difficult moment, let us pray for our nation, for the people of Iraq and for all those who bear the responsibility and burden of these difficult choices. We ask God for courage, humility and wisdom as we seek a path to a responsible transition in Iraq.

There is no easy solution to the problem of Iraq. For more information on the bishops concerns and suggestions, see the "Questions and Answers on the War in Iraq," they published in February.

The second sorrowful anniversary is the assassination of Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador. When Romero was selected to be Archbishop, nobody thought his impact would be very great. He was labeled a "conservative" and was predicted to be a person who would maintain the status quo. The two previous years he had spent as bishop of a poor rural district in El Salvador had made an impact on him, however, as he encountered the desperate poverty of his people and the unjust wages and working conditions that were a part of their daily lives (see James Brockman's article in Spirituality Today). Archbishop Romero was further affected by the assassination of a Jesuit priest weeks after he became Archbishop. Over the next three years five more priests and numerous catechists and church leaders were assassinated. Romero went to the Pope John Paul II with seven dossiers documenting the violence that was being perpetrated on his people, he went to Pres. Carter to ask the US to stop funding the El Salvadoran military that was behind the slaughter of his people, but in the end, he was not able to get anyone to listen and even his fellow El Salvadoran bishops turned their backs on him.

Romero was undeterred. He encouraged his people by preaching the Word of God each week, his homilies being broadcast across the nation by the archdiocesan radio station. His homilies would last more than an hour, and he

began to incorporate a report and commentary on the past week's events into his homily on the scripture readings of the mass. "We can not segregate God's word from the historical reality in which it is proclaimed," he said. "That would not be God's word . . . .It is God's word because it enlightens, contrasts with, repudiates, or praises what is going on today in this society." The people themselves, he told them, must learn from his example to apply God's word to their own lives, just as he was trying to apply it to the life of the nation and of their church. (Brockman)

He preached that if they kill all of the priests, each of the people must become God's microphone, must become a prophet. He said, "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people." Days before he was killed, he said,

You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish.

He challenged the army to stop the repression, to stop killing their fellow citizens, stating, "No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God." The next day he was killed. On March 24th, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the heart while celebrating the mass. In his final homily, moments before he was killed, Archbishop Romero challenged all of us, saying:

One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives.

To read more of Archbishop Romero's words, see the collection of his homilies, The Violence of Love.

2007-03-15T12:09:00.000-05:00

I have a hard time believing that I feel the need to once again address this topic, and I can't even tell you the sense of hopelessness I feel settle in my soul with that thought. If I, with my comfortable home, safe life, food, water, etc., feel such hopelessness, how must the people of Darfur feel, living with death, rape, torture, and starvation on a daily basis? How is it that after more than four years of saying this cannot continue, the genocide goes on? Despite the Darfur Peace Agreement brokered in May of 2006, the United Nations reports that "violence has increased since late 2005 and has continued unabated into 2007." Estimates of deaths from the conflict itself and from lack of food, water, and health care among the refugees is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000. Over 2.5 million people have been displaced. Villages have been bombed and burned. Wells and livestock are deliberately destroyed. In the words of the United States Bishops, "this new wave of violence points to a collective failure on the part of the international community to stem what can only be described as a catastrophe." The people in the refugee camps cannot survive without water and firewood, and so they must leave the supposedly safe refugee camps to collect these essentials. If the men go for water and firewood, they risk being castrated and killed; if the the women and children to, they risk being gang raped and abducted. The choices these families have to make are not choices any human being should ever have to face. At the same time, because of the increased violence, humanitarian workers are increasingly less able to get supplies to those who need them most, both because of the extreme danger involved, and because they are frequently being denied access to the country by the Sudanese government. The UN report concluded:

The situation is characterized by gross and systematic violations of human rights and grave breaches of international humanitarian law. War crimes and crimes against humanity continue across the region. . . . While important steps have been taken by the international community, including the African Union and the United Nations, these have been largely resisted and obstructed, and have proven inadequate and ineffective. . . . The Mission further concludes that the Government of the Sudan has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes. As such, the solemn obligation of the international community to exercise its responsibility to protect has become evident and urgent.

I am sure that many of you, like me, have worried and prayed over the situation in Darfur. Maybe you have contacted Congress and the President to express your concerns or signed a petition. I know that there is extreme frustration with the feeling of futility this situation engenders. The US has pledged financial support, and President Bush did appoint a special envoy, Ambassador Andrew Natsios, to work on the situation with Sudan. Part of the problem is that the Africa Union troops on the ground do not have a mandate to protect civilians, but only a mandate to monitor the ceasefire. They have neither the numbers (7,000 troops) nor the equipment to do either. Many of the soldiers go months without being paid, they are demoralised, and the African countries involved are starting to talk about pulling their troops out. The Sudanese government is resisting efforts to deploy a combined UN - AU force of 20,000 troops.

The USCCB is calling for the following:

1. Ask the U.S. to pressure both the government and the rebels to respect a ceasefire and to intensify the search for a just and durable peace, while urging both Sudan and Chad to refrain from supporting each other’s rebel movements.
2. Urge the U.S. to use its voice in the UN Security Council to continue and strengthen the mandate of the African Union in Darfur to monitor the ceasefire, protect innocent civilians and assist international humanitarian relief organizations, while urging NATO to provide AMIS with all possible logistical support, until its transition to a more robust, well funded force with a strong mandate.
3. Encourage the U.S. Administration to hold the signatories to the peace agreement accountable and to honor its promise to provide substantial financial and political support to the government of national unity to undertake the reconstruction of the country and its civil society.
4. Urge the UN Security Council to continue its support for the peacekeeping mission that is working with all parties to the national-unity government to implement the peace accord. The United States should provide adequate funding and logistical support so that peace and security might be achieved.

To see how our senators and representatives have voted on various Darfur legislative methods, go to the Darfur Scorecard website. I encourage all of you to continue urging those in Congress and our administration to keep the issue of Darfur as a top priority for our country and for all humankind. I am glad that the Catholic Church has been proactive, not only in lobbying for the international community to step in and do something about Darfur, but also in directly helping those most in need through Catholic Relief Services. CRS provides an easy way for us to contact our government with our concerns as well as a way to support the direct aid that is being given to those living in the midst of this nightmare. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also is part of the executive committee of Save Darfur, a coalition of many different organizations all working together to help the people of Darfur. The one small light in the darkness of this situation for me was reading the list of member organizations in this coalition. The list contains various Islamic, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and Unitarian organizations, as well as different charitable, ethnic, regional, etc., groups who have put aside any and all differences to recognize that our common humanity is greater than any of the differences between us, and to say with one voice that what has happened and continues to happen in Darfur is an affront to that humanity.

2007-03-08T15:55:00.000-06:00

Lent is a time when Catholics traditionally do an examination of conscience. This spiritual exercise comes in many forms and formats, but basically it is taking a look at oneself and evaluating to what extent I am being the person I want to be, the person I am called to be. Many examinations of conscience focus on the ten commandments. The Ten Commandments can be broken down into the two great commandments of Jesus, to love God and to love your neighbor. The first three commandments have to do with loving God: “You shall have no other God before Me,” “You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain,” and “You shall keep holy the Sabbath.”

The rest of the commandments are ways in which we love our neighbors. They call us us to affirm life (“You shall not kill”), honor families (“You shall honor your mother and father), and honor the covenant of marriage (“You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”). We hear a lot about the importance of family values today. Ideally the family is the place for one’s primary relationships and the place one receives love and support. The concept of ‘family’ includes a lot of diversity, for example single parent families, intergenerational families, or families that include a diversity of race or religion. To be a family is to be held together by commitment and love. As such we use the term ‘family’ as an analogy for communities that mirror that commitment and love as in ‘our parish family’. Our faith upholds the ideal that families are sacred. As some of you may have heard me say many times, the family is the first and foremost place a child learns about faith. The Church has a role in supporting families and marriages and upholding both as ideals. We also recognize that life is often not ideal, and our family relationships sometimes fall short of what we hoped and dreamed they would be. Thus the Church also has a role in helping people grieve when they experience loss or brokenness in their families through death, divorce, or the other hardships we encounter in life. Please know that those of us who work in parishes consider it part of our ministry to support you and your children during those difficult times, and hope you feel free to seek us out in that capacity.

Other commandments deal with possessions. They entreat us to respect the property of others (“You shall not steal”) and avoid coveting what is not ours (“You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods”). Most of us are probably not going to hold up a bank at any time in the near future, but these commandments do encourage us to look more closely at ways in which we might be less honest about possessions than we should be. Such an examination of conscience might include examining one’s investments to see if the companies in which one invests operate out of sound ethics, including such matters as how they treat their workers. It might mean examining how often we give in to the materialist expectations of our culture – how aware are we of what we need versus what we want? It is also not always goods or possessions that we covet, sometimes it can be someone else’s position or power or even his/her happiness. These commandments encourage us to examine our lives to see if we have made any false idols in our lives, i.e., that which we seek with the ardor with which we should seek God.

The final commandment left entreats us to be honest (“You shall not bear false witness”) and appreciate the dignity of the human person (an obviously recurring theme among our doctrines that is included in all of these commandments). Honesty has to do with our basic integrity and authenticity as human beings. It includes a prohibition against lying, but it also includes a prescription to have a congruity between the person you are on the inside and the person you present to the world, between your beliefs and your actions. The theological foundation for this commandment is the belief that our God “is truth and wills the truth (CCC 2464).” Part of our dignity as human beings is to be the image and likeness of our God who is truth. To be that image and likeness demands that we are always striving toward a deeper integrity and authenticity as a human being.

2007-03-01T09:10:00.000-06:00

"Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This phrase is one of the options given to be said when we receive ashes on Ash Wednesday. It is not used as often anymore. More frequently one of the other options, such as, "Repent, and believe the Good News!" is used. I used to be rather disturbed by the "dust to dust" phrase; it seemed so morbid. Now I rather like it and wish it was used more often. Thinking about it this past Ash Wednesday, I realized it is not meant to be morbid, so much as to make us reflect on the fact that this life and the things of this life are not ultimate. That does not mean that they are bad, it just means we need to keep things in perspective. All that we encounter in this life is finite and impermanent. We are beings that are created for the infinite, that are created for God. We are enjoined to enjoy this life and to make the most of the time we are given, but also to recognize that nothing in this life can ultimately fulfill us. I have frequently quoted Augustine and will do so again,

"You created us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Augustine's quote should be our guiding image through Lent.

Lent, for me, is a time of retreat. We hear the call from God on Ash Wednesday in the words from Joel 2:12, "Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart." I always look forward to Lent as a time of spiritual renewal in my life. It is a time for me to reflect on the fact that I too often try to find fulfillment in the things of this world instead of in surrendering to God. In my head I know that it is only in surrendering to God that I find that peace and freedom I so desperately need, but being that I tend to be a control freak, I just forget to let go! That reminds me of a family story we always tell when teaching someone to water ski. When I was young, we were teaching a friend to water ski, and it did not even occur to us to tell her that if she fell, she should let go of the rope. She did fall, held on and was dragged underwater for several feet before she finally let go. We were all in the boat yelling for her to let go, but she was underwater and could not hear us. Sometimes our spiritual lives are like that. We have fallen and are being dragged underwater so that we cannot even breathe, and all we need to do to recover is let go. Sometimes we hang on until the force of being sucked under finally forces us to let go.

In addition to re-learning the need to surrender to God in Lent, to look for that ultimate fulfillment of our lives in God, Lent is a reminder of how short this life can be. That is another reason I like the phrase, "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." I tend to take my life, with all of the people and experiences that entails, for granted. I have frequently told others that we should live our lives more as if each day were the last, appreciating the giftedness of each moment. Doing so puts life in perspective so that we mend broken relationships in a timely matter, and we remember to appreciate the people in our lives and tell them how much they mean to us. Of course, it is much easier to tell others to do this than to do it myself! Lent is a time to ask myself, what would I do if today were my last day on earth? What would I say to the people I love? Who would I make a point to talk to? Do the people who are important to me and who have impacted my life know how they have affected me?

I hope that you will find this Lent a time of spiritual renewal, a time to come to a new appreciation of God and the gift of life. The traditional practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving will hopefully help all of us be mindful of what is ultimate in life, what we have been given, and how we appreciate what we have been given. "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

2007-02-08T15:10:00.000-06:00

I'm going to use this week's blog to expand on a comment on last week's blog. If you didn't read Sara's comment last week, which raised some excellent points, she stated:

Was it Rahner who asserted that all language about God has to be comparative and relational? I just read that section in She Who Is, but I can't remember the exact wording used. I think our divisions by sex, or imaging of God by gender is such a limited (and limiting!) understanding. After all, the Bible says "male AND female, He created them," not "male OR female."

Her comment caused me to pull out She Who Is by Elizabeth Johnson, and I found several points in there I wanted to share this week. Karl Rahner does assert that God is first and foremost incomprehensible mystery, and therefore all of our language about God falls short of the reality it is trying to express. God is beyond our cognitive grasp. We can "know" God, but when we do, we "know" God as mystery. The word "God" actually works because it is empty of all content. Unlike other words we use for God, such as "Father" or "Lord", the word God is not metaphorical; it is not a word that is taken from our prior human experience and applied to God. We create images and concepts of God, but those images and concepts can never fully capture God. Rahner also points out, in an article titled, "When God is Far From Us," that at times the images we have been using for God no longer work, and the consequence is the feeling that God is absent. It is not that God is truly absent, it is that God is not fitting our image or idea of what God is supposed to be, and we have to let go of that image in order to reconnect with God. Elizabeth Johnson quotes C.S. Lewis on this point. In his work A Grief Observed, Lewis says:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that his shattering is one of the marks of His presence? (p. 52; cited in Johnson, p. 39.)

Lewis' idea of God was shattered by the death of his wife. He had very explicit ideas about the purpose of pain and suffering in our lives, but when his wife died, his previous understanding of God no longer worked. Our images of God change and grow as we go through various experiences of life, and sometimes that growth can be painful.

The idea that our concepts fall short of God is as ancient as the prohibition on images of God in the ten commandments, but has been profoundly restated by theologians over time. St. Augustine simply states, "If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God." In its more expanded form quoted by Johnson, Augustine says:

If you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand even partially, then you have decieved yourself with your own thoughts. (Sermo 52, c.6, n.16; cited in Johnson, p. 109.)

Thomas Aquinas follows Augustine on this line of thought. Johnson quotes the following passage from Aquinas:

Since our mind is not proportionate to the divine substance, that which is the substance of God remains beyond our intellect and so is unknown to us. Hence the supreme knowledge we have of God is to know that we do not know God, insofar as we know that what God is surpasses all that we can understand of [God]. (De Potentia q.7, a.5; cited in Johnson, p. 45.)

Nonetheless, we do need to be able to talk about God and put our experience of God into human concepts. For this reason, Aquinas develops the doctrine of analogy which says whenever we affirm something of God, we must also negate it, and then negate the negation. In other words, we can say God is good, but God is not good as humans are good, God is good beyond what we can even understand goodness to be because God is the source of all goodness (see Johnson, p. 113). We use our human concepts to talk and think about God, but we also recognize the limits of those concepts.

This point brings us back to the topic of gender and metaphor for God. Speaking of God in language that is masculine or feminine is always using language that is metaphorical. The problem is not using such language; the problem is taking such language literally. Many feminist theologians, including Elizabeth Johnson, would argue for the necessity of using feminine images and pronouns to break through the exclusive hold masculine images and pronouns have held through the years. Read some of the Psalms, for example, and replace "he" and "him" with "she" and "her". Does it make you uncomfortable? Why? That reaction is something to examine within yourself. Has a masculine image of God become an idol in your thinking about God? Many raise the objection that Jesus was male, but Jesus' "maleness" was part of his humanity, as was his height, weight, hair color, etc. Some also protest that Jesus spoke of God as male when he called God "Abba". He did, but we also have to understand the historical context in which he was preaching. He also did use feminine images for speaking about God and God's reign (a mother hen gathering her chicks, a woman searching for a coin), albeit not as frequently. The most prevalent use of feminine language for God is Scripture are the passages about Wisdom/Sophia, for example in Wisdom 7:22-27

For in her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique,
Manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain,
Not baneful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly,
Firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing,
And pervading all spirits,
though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.
For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion,
and she penetrates and pervades all things
by reason of her purity.
For she is an aura of the might of God
and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nought that is sullied enters into her.
For she is the refulgence of eternal light,
the spotless mirror of the power of God,
the image of his goodness.
And she, who is one, can do all things,
and renews everything while herself perduring;
And passing into holy souls from age to age,
she produces friends of God and prophets.

In closing, I just want to highlight the an important point Sara made in her comment, that we are made in God's image "male and female" not "male or female". Thanks Sara, for that profound insight!

2007-02-01T16:30:00.001-06:00

A friend showed me a CNN video clip the other day about a 12 year old child prodigy artist named Akiane Kramarik. At the age of four Akiane had an experience of God, even more extraordinary given that she was raised in a home where faith was not practiced or discussed. Her mother had been raised atheist, and her father was a former Catholic. (See article in Christianity Today.) In the CNN interview, speaking of when Akiane first started describing the visions, Akiane's mother tells the reporter, "I knew it was real to her, the things she had seen and the places she had visited." Through their daughter's experience of God, Akiane's parents have found/renewed their own faith in God. While Akiane enjoys painting portraits and animals, she also started to paint her visions. Through the visions Akiane felt called to help others, not only through her artwork, but also actively working to relieve suffering in the world. She gives a portion of the proceeds of her artwork to charity and is hoping to start building hospitals in Lithuania (her mother's home country) and will soon begin a tour to raise money to alleviate suffering from AIDS in Africa.

In addition to the paintings themselves, Akiane would pray, reflect, and write poetry about the paintings. Akiane explains that her poetry writes about the suffering and the hardship of humankind; her art shows the hope. About a painting titled, "Divine Knowledge," Akiane writes:

"This painting was particularly hard for me, because I have changed it so many times and ended up using two models and two completely different backgrounds. It took me a few months to paint its full meaning and another five months of prayer to fully understand it. This is the painting about search for divine knowledge.The young sculptor represents our civilization mostly ruled by the male. His youth shows that our civilization is still immature. The sculptor is chiseling a huge heap of coal in order to find the diamond representing divine knowledge. The sculptor ignores the pain, strain, hardship and temptation of everything surrounding him. All he focuses on is on finding this particular diamond, and he knows that if he chisels long enough through the black coal layers, representing human knowledge, he will finally see the diamond of divine knowledge. In the background of a cave"

The poem she writes with the painting states:

“…Only from the deep coal tunnels
White diamonds come.
But only by the light
They are recognized…”

Akiane tells CNN that her vision of heaven is vivid and full of color, more colors than we can even imagine. God she describes as "bold light, pure, really masculine, really strong and big." I write about Akiane both because her story and her work touched me deeply, but also because it gives me an opportunity to talk about visions and images of God. If you or I were to have a vision of God, there is a good chance that God would not look to us as God looks to Akiane. God is imageless, and so when a person has a vision, God works through the person's imagination, which is not to say the vision is "made up". God works through the person's own consciousness and the concepts or experiences the person has at her disposal as well as through the subconscious. Many mystics have visions of God, but rarely do two mystics describe God in the same way. Often times words fall short of describing the experience.

Julian of Norwich had many visions of "showings" of God. In her writing about on of her visions, she states:

"As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother, and he revealed that in everything, and especially in these sweet words where he says: I am he; that is to say: I am he, the power and goodness of fatherhood; I am he, the wisdom and lovingness of motherhood; I am he, the light and the grace which is all blessed love; I am he, the Trinity; I am he, the unity; I am he, the great supreme goodness of every kind of thing; I am he who makes you to love: I am he who makes you to long; I am he, the endless fulfilling of all true desires."

Our images of God tell us about our relationship to God, and they also tell us a lot about ourselves. When I taught theology, I would ask my students to describe God for me. I would write the characteristics they said on the board: powerful, loving, just, compassionate, strong, etc. Then I would ask, for each trait, whether it was masculine or feminine. The results were never entirely surprising: powerful - masculine, loving - feminine, just - masc., compassionate - fem., strong - masc., etc. Eventually someone would sort of catch on and start replying "both". I would have them look at the board and tell me what this says about God. God is not male or female - God does not have a body. Then I would ask what it says about us. What does it mean to men that we say being loving and compassionate is feminine? What does it mean to women that we say being powerful, strong, and just is masculine? I recently heard that there is a new movement afoot called the "menaissance" (like Renaissance) encouraging men to be more manly and less "in touch with their feelings". Similarly much of the language about complementarity between the sexes has the danger of stereotyping men and women and limiting both groups in terms of what it means to be human. I recently heard a homily (not at St. Monica's) about husbands needing to love their wives, and wives needing to respect their husbands. Not once did the priest say that wives should also love their husbands, and husbands also need to respect their wives.

Many people are uncomfortable with feminist theology and feminine images of God, but as theologian Elizabeth Johnson points out, the symbol of God functions. The way we image God has an impact on the way we understand the human persons created in God's image. What does it say about all of the traits listed above when we exclusively image God as male? Not that it is wrong to image God as male, but it is also not wrong to use female metaphors for God, because all of our language about God is metaphor. Images help us relate to God, but they do not capture God. Johnson also points out that to use one image exclusively for God is actually idolatry.

So what does this have to do with Akiane's paintings? I invite you to hear her story and look at the images she has created, and I hope that they will inspire you as they do me. But I also offer them to you with the caveat to take them as real and true, for Akiane and maybe for you, but not literal. They are beautiful symbols and representations of an extraordinary relationship this little girl has with God that, as she herself points out, will always go beyond what we can capture with the limited means at our disposal in this life.

2007-01-26T09:38:00.000-06:00

My reflections this week come from the confluence of three sources: I have been reading Henri Nouwen's book, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, we read and discussed Elie Wiesel's book, Night, in our book club, and I prepared a talk on C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Nouwen's work is a collection of reflections he wrote as he was recovering from a spiritual/emotional breakdown. Wiesel's book is the account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps. Most of us are probably familiar with Lewis' series, at least from seeing commercials for the movie, if not having read the books themselves.

Nouwen reflects a lot on God's unconditional love for us, and the way in which we need to find that place within ourselves where we connect to that love in order to not look for that fulfillment from other human beings. He recognizes that when other people touch us in that place which is most vulnerable, it can awaken a tremendous need within us, but that if we do not see that need as the need for God, if we try to have that person who touched us so deeply fulfill that need within us, we will inevitably be hurt. He also reflects that once we do find our security in that experience of trusting the most vulnerable part of ourselves to God, we are free to love others without expecting to receive love from them in return. He does maintain that we have a need for human love as well as for God's love and that God intends to bring people into our lives to fulfill that need, but those people may not be the same people to whom we give our love. The only problem I have with Nouwen's reflections is that sometimes it seems that when we trust that most vulnerable piece of ourselves to God, we experience being hurt or let down by God. Regardless if that is not really the case in the grand scheme of things, that is our experience. We don't understand why things turn out the way that they do.

Reading Wiesel's account of the concentration camps, one cannot help but ask with him, "Where was God?" How could God have let such a thing happen? Granted there was tremendous evil at work, and humans were ultimately culpable both for directly perpetrating the evil that took place as well as for being complacent with its occurrence even when they were not directly involved. I also do believe that God was working in those who risked their lives to save others during that time, but that still doesn't answer why God did not intervene in some direct way to stop what was occurring. It raises many theological questions for us about whether and how God intervenes, to which there are very few satisfactory answers.

That brings me to Narnia. In Narnia the children ask if Aslan (the Lion who is the God/Christ figure in the story) is safe. Mr. Beaver responds, "Of course he isn't safe. But he is good." One of the articles I was reading related this statement to Lewis' own experience of God. Lewis' mother died when he was a child. His father was unable to overcome his own grief enough to be any source of comfort and love to his grieving children. The children were sent to boarding schools where the experience was abusive to the extent that Lewis calls that chapter in his autobiography, "Concentration Camp." The author of the article I read reflected that Lewis' own experience of God led him to the conclusion that God is not safe. God does not protect us from bad things happening to us. God is also not tame for Lewis. As the children cannot control Aslan, we cannot control God. We can pray for help; we do pray for help, but we cannot make God do what we want. In the movie Shadowlands, which is about C.S. Lewis losing his wife to cancer, Lewis' character states, "I do not pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me. I pray because the need flows out of me constantly."

This is the paradox of our faith. Bad things do happen to us. We do not understand. We do not know why God does not intervene to stop these things from happening. We may even feel betrayed and hurt by God, finding it hard to trust God again. But ultimately we also experience God as the only one we can turn to at such times, the one who is there with us, crucified on the cross of suffering. The one who is with us in our cry, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" And in that experience we pray that we can come again to the place where we feel God's unconditional love for us, the place where God, who "is not safe" paradoxically becomes our place of safety, our home.

2007-01-18T09:08:00.000-06:00

I wanted to post these pictures from northern Wisconsin along with my “Merry Christmas” wishes on December 25th, but due to my impatience and dial-up internet service, I was not able to get them posted. Being in northern Wisconsin always makes me mindful of the presence of God because of the awesome beauty of God’s creation. We believe that God is creator, and as such, all that God created is good. This is the message of the story in Genesis, in which God creates and then God proclaims that what has been created is good. Theologically, the Catholic Church teaches that creation proclaims the presence of God. Even without revelation, one would be able to come to a natural knowledge of God as creator through contemplating the beauty and the wonder of the created world. St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan friar who lived in the 13th century, wrote The Soul’s Journey Into God in which he reflected that creation is a book that has been written by God. The first movement of the soul toward God is the ladder of creation. For Bonaventure, in nature we see the footprints of God. To say that the world is sacramental is to say that it is a visible way in which God is present to us – if we know how to look at it.

When God creates the humans, he gives them dominion over creation. Dominion, when used in this way is not understood as domination, but rather as stewardship. God has given us the gift of creation, but has also entrusted it to our care. We are the stewards of the earth and its resources. Part of our job as stewards is to protect the earth and to make sure the resources are sustained. Part of our job as stewards is to make sure those resources are used justly and responsibly. To lose parts of the natural world through extinction or destruction is to lose part of God’s revelation to us.

In the creation account in Genesis, we also learn that God made human beings in the image and likeness of God. The fact that all human beings are created in God’s image means that all human life is sacred. All human life has dignity, not because of anything a human being does, but simply by the fact that he or she is created by God as an image of God, regardless of race, religion, gender or any of the other ways we categorize human beings. Such dignity is called inherent dignity in moral theology, because it is given to us as part of who we are, as opposed to ascribed dignity, which we grant to people on the basis of things they do or how they act. The inherent dignity and sacredness of human life means that as Christians we must protect all lives and make sure people live in conditions that are worthy of their dignity as images of God. We use the language of the seamless garment to talk about issues of life, which means that all of the issues around protecting and sustaining life are connected in such an integral way that you cannot stand for one and not the other. Many Catholics are familiar with the concept of pro-life in terms of being anti-abortion, but in Catholic teaching pro-life also means that one should stand against capital punishment, against war unless there is absolutely no other way to defend oneself, against assisted suicide. It also means that we must stand for life-giving and sustaining issues – making sure that people have proper food, clothing, and shelter, making sure children are being nourished and nurtured, making sure neighborhoods are places of safety instead of violence. As Christians, we must be scandalized that people still starve to death every day in our world. As stewards, especially stewards that live in the wealthiest nation in the world, we must work to see that the resources we have, resources that have been given to us by God, are distributed in a just manner.

It is especially important these days to remember that as Christians we also called to be peace-makers. We strive for peace both because war violates the sacredness of human life and because we have been given the peace of Christ and are compelled to share it with others. We believe that the reign of God is both already here, having broken through in Christ, and not yet fully here. Thus we work with God to give hope to the world that peace is possible, to keep alive the vision of Micah and Isaiah who looked to the day when the nations will “beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks;” a vision of a world in which “one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again (Is. 2:3-4, Micah 4:3).”

2007-01-11T10:59:00.000-06:00

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.'

Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?'

And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.'

Then they will answer and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?'

He will answer them, 'Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.' And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Matthew 25:31-46

As I mentioned last week, January is Poverty in America Awareness Month. (All information in the blog is taken from the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops website. They take most of their information from the U.S. Census Bureau.) 37 million Americans, or 1 in 8 are living below the poverty line; 34.9% of those are children. Of the 37 million, 16.2 million are non-Hispanic white Americans, 9.4 million are Hispanic Americans, 9.2 million are African Americans, and 1.4 are Asian Americans. The city of Milwaukee is number nine in the ten cities with the highest poverty rate in the United States and number four in the ten cities with the highest child poverty rate. These are "top ten" lists those of us who live in the Milwaukee metro area should be ashamed to find ourselves on.

The poverty line refers to the minimum amount of money set by the U.S. government as to what is required to meet the basic needs of a family. It is $19,971 for a family of four and $15,577 for a family of three. What is it like for a family to live on that amount of money? Using the average costs a family of four entails, once they pay for housing, utilities, transportation, food, health care, and child care, including all government benefit and assistance programs, that family would be $1601 short at the end of the year (see the breakdown or text-only). And yet a single parent with two children earning minimum wage only makes $10,712 before taxes working full-time. How are these families supposed to make ends meet? If you were trying to raise your children on $11,000 a year, what would you have to cut out in order to make sure they had food, shelter, clothing, etc.?

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well," but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Indeed someone might say, "You have faith and I have works." Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.
James 2:14-18

So how can those of us who are more fortunate get involved? First of all, we need to educate ourselves on the issues. The Bishops' website is a good place to start. Another way to get involved is to advocate for systemic change by talking to our elected officials. Organizations like Catholic Charities USA or Network: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby can help you do so. Local food pantries, meal programs, etc. also offer opportunities to make a difference. In the Milwaukee area, we have St. Vincent de Paul and St. Ben's, two phenomenal programs that are always looking for volunteers and donations. There are numerous other organizations to get involved with that are doing incredibly good things in our communities. If you are looking for ways to get involved, ask at your parish or arch/diocesan offices. The archdiocese of Milwaukee includes volunteer opportunities in the job listing section of their website. For other ideas, click here! We should also pray: for wisdom for those who set policy, for resources for those who care for the poor in our midst, and above all, for those who suffer in poverty, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.

This concludes our Catholic guilt/soapbox portion of the program (for now)! Thank you for all that you are already doing to make the world a little bit better each day!

2007-01-04T11:38:00.000-06:00

January 7-13 is the 26th annual observance of National Migration Week for the US Catholic Church which culminates with the 93rd World Day of Migrants and Refugees in the Catholic Church. In his address for the occassion, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us of the plight of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt, and notes that

in this misfortune experienced by the Family of Nazareth, obliged to take refuge in Egypt, we can catch a glimpse of the painful condition in which all migrants live, especially, refugees, exiles, evacuees, internally displaced persons, those who are persecuted. We can take a quick look at the difficulties that every migrant family lives through, the hardships and humiliations, the deprivation and fragility of millions and millions of migrants, refugees and internally displaced people. The Family of Nazareth reflects the image of God safeguarded in the heart of every human family, even if disfigured and weakened by emigration.

The theme for National Migration Week in the US Church is "Welcoming Christ in the Migrant." Bishop Gerald Barnes, the chairperson of the USCCB Committee on Migration, writes:

The theme for 2007 is Welcoming Christ in the Migrant, which is at once an invitation and a challenge to provide welcome for the migrants, immigrants, refugees, human trafficking victims, and other people on the move who come to our land seeking justice and peace. Our theme reminds us of Jesus' scriptural admonition to us: 'Lord, when did we see you a stranger ... and not minister to your needs?' He will answer them, 'Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.' (Mt. 25: 44-45) This reminder is particularly timely as our citizens and leaders grapple with the complexities and many dimensions of the migration experience. Our nation's legitimate security concerns have been distorted by some who would foment anxiety, fear, and a distrust of migrants. The present immigration reform debate has lost much of its reason and is often being fueled by raw emotions. Scriptures and Catholic Social Teaching call upon all of us to examine the issues and respond to the strangers among us as we would to Jesus Himself. The Holy Family found safety and new lives in Egypt during their time of great need. Many migrants today follow similar paths as they embark on their journey of hope. . . . Additionally, we encourage you to become informed and active in the Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope campaign. More information about this Catholic immigration reform initiative can be found at www.justiceforimmigrants.org.
When we reach out to aid and comfort the newcomers to our land we are indeed offering ourselves and our gifts in service to the Lord. This is not only our Christian duty but a privilege, knowing that we too have been adopted into God's family. May you be richly blessed by your faithful acts of hospitality in Christ's name.

The Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People explains that the Church recognizes people's right to migrate but does not encourage the practice due to the fact that the migrant often suffers in this process. At the same time, the Council notes that the suffering involved in migration is often the lesser evil for many people in desparate situations, and when people do migrate, the receiving country should recognize and welcome these "strangers" as the children of God that they are. The Council goes on to explain that

Migration today is practically an expression of the violation of the primary human right to live in one's own country. The origin of such a violation is found in wars, internal conflicts, the system of government, unequal distribution of economic resources, incoherent agricultural policy, irrational industrialization, widespread corruption. These situations are to be corrected through the promotion of balanced economic development, progrssively overcoming social inequalities, scrupulous respect for the human person and the proper functioning of democratic structures.It is necessary to carry out urgent corrective measures to the present economic and financial system, dominated and manipulated by the industrialized countries. These very same countries are presently threatening to annul even the right to emigrate, which has always been considered an alternative to the impossibility of living in one's own country.

The Council addresses the fact that we cannot deny people the right to immigrate without addressing the reasons they are leaving their own countries, stating that

the most evident consequence of such logic is an increase in the rate of illegal migration. This causes anxiety in destination countries, jeopardizing the context for integration. It is a dangerous involution, before which it is not improper to challenge the policy of the exclusion of immigrants, right at a time when the living conditions in developing countries are becoming more and more dramatic. Closing the doors to immigration without a commitment to remove its causes is a double injustice. Besides it is not ethically acceptable to reject the migrant worker as well as the product on which he invests his labor in his country of origin through exorbitant tariffs.Poverty, which is the generator of migration, requires an urgent solution. Progress is such only when it is transformed into development for all persons. This means sharing of goods and a more sober lifestyle on the part of rich countries.

As we attempt to deal with immigration issues in our own country, we must look to solutions that deal not simply with protecting our borders but rather address the root causes of why people are leaving their own countries in the first place. For more information on the positions and actions taken by the US Catholic Church on immigration issues, go to the USCCB website. For those who live in the Milwaukee area, there will be a "Justice for Immigrants Educational Forum" held at Gesu Parish on Tuesday, Feb. 6th. For more information on this forum, click here.

On a related note, January is also Poverty in America Awareness Month, but so as not to wear out your good nature, I will talk more about that next week!

2006-12-25T21:58:00.000-06:00

Have a Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year!

2006-12-13T15:00:00.000-06:00

Advent is a time of hopeful waiting. We wait with patience and expectation but also with joy and excitement. Children are great models of faith for Advent because of the exuberance with which they wait for Christmas. If you are with children on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day, really watch the way they wait for Santa to come. When was the last time in your life you were that excited about something? Children at Christmas are generally excited about the gifts they are or will be receiving. How excited are we about the numerous gifts we have been given?

Advent is a time of joy and excitement, but also patience (this part is a bit harder for adults as well as children). In a passage telling the reader to be patient, the letter of James says to "steady your hearts" (5:8). What a great image of patience - to steady one's heart. Our culture tends to be one of instant gratification, which seems to make patience even more difficult. I am a very impatient person, whether waiting in line at the store Christmas shopping or driving behind someone going slower than I would like to be driving. Naturally then in my prayer life, I tend to be impatient. I want things to happen now. God doesn't work that way (at least in my experience and occasionally to my frustration). Ideally, we would model our own patience after God's patience. The second letter of Peter tells us that God's patience is for our sake. When the early Christians were concerned that the second coming had not yet occurred, the letter reassures them:

In the Lord's eyes, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as a day. The Lord does not delay in keeping his promise--though some consider it "delay". Rather, he shows you generous patience, since he wants none to perish but all to come to repentance. (2 Pt. 3:8-9)

While we wait for God, God is waiting for us.

We wait in hope. I have often thought that hope is a forgotten virtue. We talk about faith and love quite a bit, but we don't talk about hope very often. Today's world often seems so cynical and tired. Sometimes when facing just one more scandal in the Church or in the government, it is hard to find that glimmer of hope or even know exactly what it is we are hoping for. It is precisely for these reasons that I think hope is so needed today. We hope for a new day and a better world. The color of Advent is a blue purple, the color of the sky at dawn right before our world is lit up by sunlight. In our part of the world the days are at their shortest this time of the year, so many of you, like me, may begin your day in darkness and witness that purple blue sky while you wait for the light. We hear at this time of year the proclamation of Isaiah, that "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." (Is. 9:2) We read the prologue to the Gospel of John,

What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (Jn. 1:3-5)

When we live in darkness, our eyes become accustomed to the darkness. We accept evil and sin in our world because we have become blind to the alternatives. When the Gospel of Matthew talks about the end-times, Jesus warns that "because of the increase in evil, the love of many will become cold." (Mt. 24:12) We lack the imagination and love needed to come up with new and creative ways of addressing the problems in our world and our lives. Poverty and violence seem inevitable. When somebody suddenly turns on a bright light, the natural reaction is to flinch, cover your eyes, and turn away. And yet light is the only thing that dispels darkness. Darkness is the absence of light - it is overcome by light but cannot overcome light. Choosing light is not always the easier choice, but in the end it is the only choice. Advent is the time to face the darkness. We bring light to the world through our acts of love and kindness, through cultivating patience, joy, and excitement. Advent is a time when we choose hope over despair. In choosing to be an Advent people, a people of hope, we must heed the words of the first letter of Peter:

Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope. (1 Pt. 3:15)

Do people see you as a hope-filled person? If someone today asked you the reason for your hope, what would you say?

2006-12-07T10:39:00.000-06:00

Christmas is the season where we pray for peace on earth and wish goodwill to all humankind, and so I have found myself increasing distressed at the divisive tone I heard in conversations about Christmas and our culture lately. I understand that many Christians are a bit mystified by the fact that people who do not believe in Christ celebrate Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation. Rather than seeing this fact as a negative one however, as if Christmas has somehow been hijacked from Christians, I believe it is a sign of all that Christmas is supposed to be - the celebration of God's presence in the world. What do non-Christians celebrate at Christmas? In my experience, most of them celebrate family and love. Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of God's love on earth, and so wherever people gather together to celebrate love, they are celebrating Christmas. It does not detract from Christmas to have those who are not of the Christian faith celebrate the season with those of us who are; it simply affirms and witnesses to the miracle of God's love active and present in the world today. It celebrates Emmanuel, God with us.

We hear a lot about the commercialization and materialism of the Christmas season, and I do think there is a valid critique there about how we sometimes let the details distract us from what is really important, but I don't think we give people enough credit for truly appreciating the spirit of Christmas. I have always been struck by the magical spirit of Christmas. I like the fact that people smile at perfect strangers at this time of year because of a feeling of human fellowship. I like the fact that the city streets are decorated and lit up. If the lights are snowflakes and snowmen, or the trees are called holiday trees instead of Christmas trees, does it really make it any less special or beautiful? I think "Happy Holidays" is a beautiful greeting because it can encompass Christmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and any other religious or cultural celebration found at this time of year. What a wonderful expression to foster peace on earth! The word "holiday" comes from "holy day", so I don't think there is any reason to take the word as some sort of slight to Christianity. If people send holiday cards with pictures of snowmen on them instead of a manger scene, I would hope that the recipients can just appreciate the beautiful, loving gesture someone made in sending a card instead judging the person as somehow selling out to secular culture.

I do think those of us who are Christians benefit from the reminder to "Keep Christ in Christmas." It is so easy to get stressed out at this time of year because of all that needs to get done that we forget to take time for our own spiritual lives. I do believe that those busy Christmas preparations, decorating the house, baking cookies, shopping for gifts, wrapping gifts, etc., can be part of our Advent preparation for Christmas, but I also think it is good to step back from all of that at times and think about what it is we prepare for - the coming of Christ into the world. I was reading a passage from St. Charles Borromeo earlier this week that spoke of Advent as a time of preparation for three comings of Christ: the historical coming of Christ, the second coming at the end of time, and the coming of Christ into each of our hearts. How do we prepare for that coming of Christ into our hearts? St. Charles says that we put obstacles in the way to Christ's coming into our hearts, and so the preparation of Advent is examine our hearts and remove any obstacles we find to Christ's dwelling there. When we think of keeping Christ in Christmas, we need to recall that Christ is not some theoretical idea or word. Keeping Christ in Christmas means being Christlike in our thoughts, words, and actions. We are the Body of Christ. Like Mary we are called to bear Christ in the world. When others encounter us, do they experience of God's incarnate love? My prayer this Christmas is that Christians around the world do keep Christ in Christmas by the way they touch the lives of others. My prayer this Christmas is for peace on earth and good will among ALL humankind!

2006-11-28T12:31:00.000-06:00

Restorative Justice, Part II
The second pair of speakers I heard at the Restorative Justice Conference was Linda Biehl and Ntobeko Peni from South Africa. In the wake of apartheid, South Africa instituted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a place where one could apply to receive amnesty for any act, omission, or offense with a political objective. Decisions were made on a case by case basis and amnesty was given when the objective of the crime was in fact political in nature and when the whole truth was given by the perpetrator. The victims also had a chance to tell their story to the Amnesty Committee. In addition to the Amnesty Committee, the Commission had a Human Rights Violations Committee that investigated human rights abuses and a Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee to restore victims' dignity and assist with rehabilitation and healing for survivors, their families, and the community as a whole. 22,000 victims told their stories. Over 7,000 perpetrators came seeking amnesty; around 850 received amnesty.

Ntobeko Peni, having spent about two years in prison for killing Amy Biehl (along with three others), applied for and received amnesty from the committee. Linda and Peter Biehl, Amy's parents, also attended and spoke at the hearings, saying that they did not oppose amnesty and that they had forgiven the men who killed their daughter. In a clip from Long Night's Journey into Day, a documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Amy's father (who has since died) talked about the work Amy had done to end apartheid, how proud they were that she had been willing to risk her life for that work, and how they would do everything in their power to honor her work and her memory. They spoke of the ironic fact that Amy had told them on the phone of the countless African men who were killed and listed in the papers simply by the number killed as opposed to the killing of a white person which would be headline news, not knowing that her name would be the name in the headlines. The mother of one of the other men involved in Amy's killing sent the Biehls an apology via a video tape. In the tape she spoke of their sorrow gathering around the table for the holidays, facing the sorrow of Amy's absence at the table. The Biehls personally went to meet her and tell her they would not oppose her son's plea for amnesty. The Biehls subsequently founded the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust to work against violence in South Africa. Linda Biehl, Amy's mother, speaks of her work as that of a grandmother working with young men who are looking for parenting, for guidance; men who lost their own childhood on the streets of South Africa during a war.

Ntobeko spoke of growing up watching his comrades be shot and killed daily, but that the environment did not scare him but motivated him. He said he was ready to die for the cause, and eventually was ready to kill for it. He said it was realizing who Amy was that broke him as an individual, and he stopped being a militant. At the hearings, Amy's parents told him that they had already forgiven him, and now it was up to South Africa to forgive him. Their statement had a profound effect on him, as he realized that he had killed someone fighting for the same cause and as he realized that he could have done things differently. He spoke of the current situation in South Africa, where things have not improved a great deal and the youth are involved in substance abuse and criminal activity. He started working with the Amy Biehl Foundation, but still was not at peace with himself. It was only in working with Amy's parents that he eventually realized he still needed to forgive himself, and he said that he found the strength to do so in their forgiveness of him. He said he would not have been able to do it without them.

Linda spoke of the youth in South Africa today who have been taught the skills of violence, but no longer have the resistance into which to put that violent energy, so they are turning to crime. She realized through the experience the importance of mothering, and that it is out of her identity as a mother that she is able to mother those who did not have the kind of childhood her own daughter had. She said that when you can face pain, you can take it to another level. Reconciliation is energizing; it is being proactive.

The third pair of speakers at the Restorative Justice Conference was Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad. Robi and Ali's story can be seen in the documentary Encounter Point, which was recently released and was shown at the Milwaukee International Film Festival a few weeks ago. Robi's son had been killed by a Palestinian sniper while he was serving in the Israeli military and stationed in the West Bank. Robi pleaded with those listening not to take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that you cannot be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine without becoming bitter. She said, "It does not help if you are pro-this or pro-that; help us find reconciliation." There is no black or white, she told us, only a vast amount of gray. In a letter to the mother of the sniper that killed her son David, Robi told the mother that her son would not have killed David had he known him, had he heard David play a Mozart Concerto on the piano. She understands that as a young child the sniper saw his uncle killed and that he had lost two of his family members in the First Intifada. She said that we must work to understand the consequences of the Israeli occupation on the Israeli people and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Robi said that her son went to serve in the West Bank in the hopes that he could be one Israeli soldier who treated the Palestinian people with dignity, and so that those under his command would do the same. After she spoke in once, a Palestinian man came up to her and told her he had been through her son's checkpoint the day before he was shot. He said the soldier apologized for having to make them go through the checkpoint. He said it was the first time an Israeli soldier had ever treated him with such respect. Robi said that images are seen in the media, and judging is so easy, but do you know what is in the heart of the young man who is standing there?

Ali Abu Awwad, whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, feels that the biggest enemy to peace is the media. He believes that both sides want peace, but no one is giving them any hope. After his brother was killed, Ali said that he was broken into a million pieces, but he couldn't do anything. He couldn't kill anyone because it would not make it better. He met with a group called Bereaved Israeli Families, and for the first time, he saw the pain of the other side. He said that it is easy to be right, but it is very difficult to be honest. You have to decide to be human, and then allow the other side to be human. You have to understand each other's heaviness, and allow the other side to understand why you are angry. He joined the group of bereaved families, but said that it is not easier; it is harder, but he can live now. He compared it to lighting a small candle in the darkness. You do not light up the whole darkness, but it gives you enough light to take a step to get out of the darkness.

2006-11-16T12:06:00.000-06:00

(For those of you who read my bulletin column, I apologize that some of this entry will be repetitive, but I have expanded my comments beyond what I put in Sunday's bulletin!) This past Monday, I attended at the International Restorative Justice Conference on Healing after Political Violence. Restorative justice is a process that focuses not simply on the criminal or perpetrator of a violent act, but also includes the victim and the community. The approach views crime as a wound that needs to be healed, and thus focuses on healing instead of retaliation and revenge. As Janine Geske said in her introductory remarks, if we choose revenge and retaliation, the violence will never end. Mark Umbreit, a professor and Founding Director of the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, noted that peace requires a heart open to understanding the context of the other. He quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who states

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Peace and healing can only be found in getting to know and understand the other as a fellow human being. Dr. Umbreit also made the point that political means can achieve disarmament, but communities have to build peace.

The conference focused specifically on healing and reconciliation after occasions of political violence using three pairs of speakers. The first pair of speakers was Jo Berry, a woman whose father was killed in the 1984 bombing of the Brighton Hotel in England by the IRA, and Patrick Magee, a former IRA activist who served time in prison for bombing the Brighton Hotel. The second pair was Linda Biehl, whose daughter Amy was beaten and stabbed to death while living in South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar, and Ntobeko Peni, one of the men convicted in Amy’s murder. The third pair was Robi Damelin, whose son was killed by a Palestinian sniper while serving in the Israeli army in the occupied territories, and Ali Abu Awwad, whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers and who himself has been shot by Israeli soldiers and spent four years in prison (this was the one pair where neither individual was directly responsible for the act of violence against the other). Listening to these individuals speak was an experience of seeing God’s grace at work in the world. What they were doing, opening up their personal pain to a crowd of strangers, was certainly not easy for them, but each of them felt it was necessary. I learned so much from them and would like to share some of that with you. I realize it is not the same as listening to them in person, but what they had to say was too important not to pass along. I apologize if my notes do not do justice to the words they actually said!

Jo Berry commented that she would not call the experience of forgiveness a Christian experience, but a human experience, a spiritual experience. She said that her forgiveness of Patrick was not motivated by religion per se, but rather that many things motivated it. Pat added that he felt that the churches of Ireland have been a part of the problem rather than the solution, and that any good that came from them came from individuals rather than the institutions. I found that to be very sad. I think that we need to ask ourselves in what ways the Church is fostering healing and reconciliation in the world as opposed to division. There seems to be a lot of division between Catholics right now without much attempt (that I have seen) to understand the feelings, perspective, and context of the person with whom one disagrees. How are we/are we modeling healing and reconciliation within our own worshiping communities?

The overwhelming message of these individuals was the need to see others as human beings, not as the enemy. Patrick Magee stated that he realized he was guilty of something he had always attributed to the enemy – dehumanizing and demonizing those he was fighting against. Jo Berry said that if she had lived Pat’s life, she might have made the same decisions. Jo commented that a friend of hers, after seeing a documentary on her and Pat, remarked, “Pat doesn’t seem like a terrorist at all!” Jo said the problem is that we demonize the terrorist and fail to see him/her as a human being. Pat ironically commented that he is not a violent person, and yet he has caused a lot of violent actions. He began as a pacifist, but eventually was able to see no alternative to violence. He said that what he did goes against his inner grain. Jo commented on how it had affected Pat to choose violence and how seldom that aspect, the damage done to the perpetrator of the violent act, is addressed.

The other sentiment that all of these individuals commented on was that peace will never work if any party is excluded from the talks. Pat commented that no inclusive settlement can be built by excluding the margins. The party excluded will simply grow more angry, resentful, and bitter, and the violence will continue, if not get worse. Jo added that our greatest hope for peace is in listening to those who are not heard, to those who are choosing violence to get their needs met. Victims become the next victimizers.

To read more about Jo and Pat's story, as well as reflections Jo has written herself about the experience, see this article about documentary that the BBC has produced, Facing the Enemy: Everyman. Due to the length of this entry, I will stop here for now, and share some of the reflections from Linda Biehl, Ntobeko Peni, Robi Damelin, and Ali Abu Awaad next week.

2006-11-02T11:43:00.000-06:00

Happy All Souls Day! I was initially going to write on the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, but given that it is almost Election Day, I decided to write on politics and the Catholic Church instead! Many questions have arisen lately about the Church's role in the political world. Often times people are very upset when the Church speaks out on or gets involved with political issues, whether it is criticism of the invasion of Iraq, refusing communion to politicians who vote in ways that support abortion, or urging people to vote against the referendum on the death penalty and for the amendment regarding marriage. I can understand people's concern, as I myself disagree with some of the stands on political issues the Church has taken, but I understand and agree with the reasons the Church gets involved in the first place. We live in a country that upholds the separation of Church and State. In fact, the Catholic Church also supports the separation of Church and State on a governmental level. As Christians, however, our religious beliefs should affect our political opinions. Likewise, the Church has an obligation to address its members and society as a whole on justice issues. What the Church cannot do is take a partisan position. In other words, the Church cannot endorse any specific candidate or political party. The Church is not even allowed to state that a certain candidate is the "pro-life" candidate nor can it pass out any literature that endorses one candidate over another. The Church can urge you to vote one way or another on referendums because they address issues not candidates or parties.

For more information on the Church's stance on various political issues and the guidelines given for parish involvement in political issues, check out the website for the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the public policy and lobbying organization of the Wisconsin bishops. On the years of presidential elections (so last written in 2004), the United States Bishops also write a document titled, "Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility." When looking at the Church's stance on various political issues, it should quickly become clear that there is no party or candidate that upholds all of the positions of the Catholic Church. The Church maintains that all Catholics have an obligation and a responsibility to participate in the political process, and therefore should vote. They will not (or should not) tell you for whom you should vote. "Faithful Citizenship" speaks of the fact that a Catholic's political responsibility does not end with casting a ballot, but in fact truly begins the day after the election in terms of lobbying your local, state and federal officials on important public policy issues. One of the bedrock tenets of Catholic social teaching is that we must all have a concern for the common good and that the role of the government is to protect the common good. We live in solidarity with the entire human family, and therefore must be concerned not only about issues that affect our lives and those we care about, but also issues that impact the community and the entire global society.

All of the above raises the question of what one is to do when one finds oneself in the position of disagreeing with the Church's position on a specific issue. The first thing to do is to be responsibly informed about what the Church teaches and why it teaches what it does. As one of my professors used to put it, you need to discover the value behind the teaching. Even if you disagree with the position the Church takes, you may find you agree with the value the Church is trying to protect. The second thing to do is think about why you take the position you do. Examine where your own ideas come from and discuss the issue with others you respect, both those who agree and disagree with you. What values are behind your own position? Sometimes what is at stake is the conflict between two values, both of which are good in and of themselves. Ultimately, if you find you cannot accept the Church's position, you may dissent from the Church's stance, but in doing so are asked to keep an open mind about the teaching. The Second Vatican Council, the document Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) addresses the dignity of moral conscience. It states that

deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man's most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. By conscience, in a wonderful way, that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one's neighbor. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined to other men in the search for truth and for the right solution to so many moral problems which arise both in the life of individuals and from social relationships. (GS 16)

The document recognizes the primacy of human conscience in decision-making, but it goes on to state that a conscience can go astray through ignorance or the blindness of sin. Following one's conscience is not simply a matter of doing whatever one wants. A conscience has to be informed and examined. The presumption of correctness is given to Church teaching. The Church does not take positions on issues lightly, but rather studies the matter at length, consulting with experts on the issue before forming their positions and teaching. However, when one finds oneself unable to agree with that teaching in the depths of one's (informed and examined) conscience, one has a right to follow one's convictions and can withhold personal assent from the teaching.

2006-10-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

Theologian Karl Rahner has an axiom that states, dependence on God and human freedom are in a relationship of direct proportion, not inverse proportion. In other words, freedom does not decrease, but rather increases when we surrender to God. This statement is contrary to what one might normally presume, that the more you surrender to God's will, the less freedom you have. For Rahner freedom is the freedom to be what we were created to be, the freedom to be in love with God. If you think about the analogy of a healthy marriage relationship, your relationship with the person you love, while inevitably involving some compromise, should ultimately bring out the best in you and foster your growth and development as a human being. Remember the famous line from the movie, As Good as it Gets? Jack Nicholson's character says to Helen Hunt's character, "You make me want to be a better person." (This line is, in my opinion, a much healthier concept for a relationship than the famous Jerry Maguire line, "You complete me," which smacks of co-dependence!) Another example is the line from a wedding homily in Gail Godwin's novel Evensong, in which the priest says of the couple, "May their having each other make more of them both." Our relationship with God should be this way - it should make us want to be better people. In loving surrender to God, we discover that God is the one that enables our freedom, the freedom that lets us become who we want to be.

The difficulty is balancing this tremendous freedom and dependence on God. Surrendering to God's will does not necessarily mean accepting things as they are, surrendering to the status quo. We use our freedom to co-create (with God) the reality in which we live. There is a joke about a pastor who prayed day after day to win the lottery to help the poor of his parish, and when he died he was expressing his anger at God for not answering his prayer. God says to the man, "Give me a break, you could have at least bought a ticket!" With freedom and faith there comes a responsibility to see the opportunities we are given and to act on them. At the same time, one must be careful not to use the "God helps those who help themselves" mentality to blame the victim.

The relationship between freedom and surrender means using freedom to try to act in accordance with God's will, but how do we know God's will? While there are many different ways and traditions of discernment in Christianity, the bottom line is we never know with absolute certainty that our actions are in accordance with the will of God. Presuming to know God's will is a dangerous business. The uncertainty with which we live is part of that to which we surrender. I have always taken comfort in the humble words of a prayer by Thomas Merton:

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Amen.

2006-10-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

Last week I addressed the spiral of violence that I see in our society. This week I want to mention the shining example (an example I was remiss not to mention last week) that exemplifies the very Scripture passages I referenced in that entry. There have been many stories and reflections in the news about the Amish community's loving forgiveness in word and deed of the man, Charles Roberts, who murdered their children. I am adding my own reflections because I don't think enough can be said about their extraordinary reaction. In addition to expressing their forgiveness of the shooter, the Amish community reached out to Roberts' wife and children in the midst of their grief. The Amish community responded to violence with love and goodness by visiting the Roberts' family to bring food and express their condolences, inviting the Roberts' wife and family to attend the funerals of the children killed, and attending Roberts' funeral themselves. They have set up a fund for Roberts' children and have expressed the hope that the family will stay in the area as opposed to moving away, assuring them that if they stay, they will have friendship and support. I must add my disappointment in reading the news report that vandals had disturbed Roberts' grave, an act that can only add to the grief of Roberts' innocent family and can only be seen in stark contrast to the loving and forgiving reaction of the families of the victims themselves.

I stand in awe of a community that practices what they believe with a sincerity that I doubt I could match in similar circumstances. While I would not wish ill on the family members who are certainly not to blame for the tragedy and are undoubtedly suffering themselves, I would probably not wish to see or interact with those who would be such a vivid reminder of my own suffering were something similar to happen in my community. The Amish community took the exact opposite approach, reaching out to them in a way that expresses profound graciousness. They say that they forgive because they believe they are forgiven. They grieve, but also believe that their children are in a better place, and so are able to respond with love instead of bitterness. The Amish that live among us have always been a strong counter-cultural witness to what it means to live simply and with humility. At the time of their most public and mournful moment, they have also been a witness to what it means to live the principles of non-violence.

One of the reasons I love working in a parish is because I learn so much from the people with whom I work. A woman at our parish spoke the other night about how it can be difficult to see Jesus as an example for our own behavior and reactions, because while we believe he was fully human, we can also use his divinity as an excuse not to do as he did (well of course he could forgive, he was divine!). She said that when you look at a human person who does live as Jesus lived, it takes away the excuse. If the Amish community can imitate Jesus' own love and forgiveness in such a vivid way, the rest of us have no excuse not to do the same.

2006-10-12T10:25:00.000-05:00

Hearing all of the reports of school shootings this past week, I have been reflecting on the prevalence of violence in our society. It seems to me that we are teaching our children to deal with conflict through violence. Popular sentiment all too often seems to favor responding to violence with violence, from war to the death penalty. Why are we then surprised when our children respond to conflict in their own lives with violence? Yet for those of us who are supposed to be witnesses for the Christian tradition in this world, this is not what our tradition teaches us. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says

But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. . . . You have heard it said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. (Cf. Mt. 5:38-48 and Lk. 6: 27-36)

Paul also says in the Letter to the Romans, "Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good." (Cf. Romans 12: 9-21; Paul is drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures in this passage, cf. Proverbs 25:21-22) How can we, as Christians, witness to this ideal of non-violence in our society? Could we stop the cycle of violence by responding with goodness and love?

I saw the movie Crash last year, a movie that is explicitly about racism, but I really thought the underlying theme of the movie was anger. It made me reflect on how angry people seem to be in our society. That anger seems to bubble to the surface at the slightest provocation, such as someone cutting someone off in traffic. Where is this anger coming from? The tagline from the movie website is "Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide with each other." Is it the speed of life, the stress we are feeling from being stretched too thin too much of the time that is a source of this anger? While I don't think that is the entire answer, I think it might be part of the answer. I think many people fall into a pattern of living life on the edge of their breaking point.

Going back to where this reflection started, a recent study by the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that our children do not have enough down time or unstructured playtime in their lives. As a result, more of our children are going to the doctor with medical problems related to stress. Rather than us being more childlike (as Jesus suggests we need to be to enter the kingdom of heaven), it seems we are making our children more adultlike. Perhaps we all need a little more down time. Maybe then, we can do as Paul tells us in the Letter to the Ephesians,

And do not grieve the holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. (And) be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. (Eph. 4:30-32)

Imagine what the world would look like if even just those of us who profess a Christian belief managed to live in this way!

2006-10-05T11:16:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking a lot about the concept of prayer lately, partially because in my own life I have run up against the realization that God is not The Great Wish Granter in the sky. I knew this, of course, on an intellectual level, but to sincerely pray for things and not have them come to pass makes it necessary for me to re-examine my understanding of prayer and my image of God. I am reminded of the line from the movie Shadowlands, where C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) says to his friend, "I do not pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me. I pray because the need flows out of me constantly." And so I have to ask myself in what ways my prayer changes me.

If I was asked what prayer is, I would respond that prayer is my relationship with God. Prayer is my way of being with God, sometimes spilling out what is in my heart, sometimes listening, sometimes just sitting in silence. Like any relationship, there are times when I feel very connected to God and in sync with God, and there are times when I feel a disconnect between God and myself. Teresa of Avila, a great mystic who tells of experiencing three years of dryness or disconnectedness in her relationship with God, says that in the midst of that dryness one should never stop praying, never cut off the relationship altogether. I have tried to hold true to that advice, praying even when I feel lost and alone, even when I wonder if God is really listening.

Prayer is also about my relationships with other people, about our interconnectedness with one another. Prayer is my solidarity with others in their joys and sufferings, sharing that solidarity with God who is in solidarity with us. As I imagine is true for many people, I generally do want God to "fix things" for me and for those I care about. That doesn't always happen. Returning to prayer as a way of "being with" God and others, I place those I care for in the presence of God. I pray that they feel the love and support and peace of God's presence in their lives. Sometimes I pray for those who cannot pray for themselves, either because they don't believe in God or because they are too angry with God, etc., placing them in the presence of God so that they may somehow experience God's presence through my experience of God's presence. They may not call what they experience "God," but I do believe that they may experience the love, peace, joy, etc., that is what I understand to be God.

In his book of prayers, Encounters with Silence, Karl Rahner writes about experiencing God's silence in prayer. He says,

Isn't Your Silence a sure sign that You're not listening? Or do You really
listen quite attentively, do You perhaps listen my whole life long, until I have
told You everything, until I have spoken out my entire self to You? Do You
remain so silent precisely because You are waiting until I am really finished,
so that You can then speak Your word to me, the word of Your eternity?

Rahner says prayer is giving oneself to God. He says that running from prayer is often running from oneself, from one's own superficiality. And still God patiently waits. Ultimately he says that it is God who opens that deepest part of ourselves to us, the place within us where we encounter God, and so all of our daily prayer is a preparation and a waiting for that moment when we find God at the center of our hearts. Prayer does not change God; it changes me.

2006-09-27T14:47:00.000-05:00

The second reading for this coming Sunday is from chapter five of the letter of James, v. 1-6. I am particularly struck by this reading, which begins, "Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries," given the recent sentencing of Enron's Andrew Fastow. You see, the letter of James is not simply decrying wealth, but is chastizing those who gain wealth by witholding wages from their workers. The letter states, "the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your field are crying aloud; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts (v. 4)." Fastow's sentencing was lenient (6 yrs. instead of the possible 10 yrs. Fastow agreed to in the original 2004 plea bargain), because Fastow, according to those present at his sentencing including his prosecutors, has changed. NPR reports that,

When it was Fastow's turn to speak, he wept as he apologized to Enron's employees, its investors and his family.
"I'm ashamed of what I did, I wish I could undo what I did at Enron but I can't," Fastow said. He said he would accept whatever sentence was imposed without bitterness. Judge Hoyt told Fastow that he'd been drunk on the wine of greed. NPR Story

What a refreshing change to hear about someone admitting he made a mistake and saying he is sorry for his actions. The warning seems to come in Judge Hoyt's statement about being drunk on greed. Too often it seems, when people get so focused on gaining wealth and getting ahead, they are blind to the ways in which their actions hurt others. Wealth can too easily become the controlling force in our individual lives as well as in our world. In this election year, just look at the extent to which wealth currently controls our political landscape.

Scripture warns in many places of the dangers of wealth. The Hebrew Scriptures try to build justice and care for the poor and vulnerable into their lawcode, because their covenant with God obligates them to try and act as God would act. The prophets, however, demonstrate how difficult it was for the people to live in this way. In the gospels Jesus also warns against the dangers of wealth, from saying to his disciples, "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:24)," to his parable about the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16: 19-31). The temptation today is to soft-peddle these passages or to "spiritualize" them. Many of us, myself included, live very comfortable lives and really have no intention of selling all we have and giving everything to the poor. Nevertheless, I think we have to continue to hold these passages in front of ourselves and let them challenge us.

I was very disturbed to see the headline on the cover of Time on Sept. 18th, which stated, "Does God Want You to be Rich?" (See Time.) The article talked about the revival of a movement called Prosperity Theology that builds on the idea that God promises to be generous with us in this life. While proponents and skeptics of Prosperity Theology can both quote Scripture to support their opposing positions, I think ultimately it has to come down to a deeper reflection on the place of wealth in our lives and the challenge of what it means to be Christian in a world where there is a vast gap between the haves and the have nots. Rather than spending our theological energy justifying our somewhat extravagant lifestyles, it would seem a time for an examination of conscience. In what ways am I benefiting from the oppression of others, and are there ways I can change those situations? What do I value most in my life, and what do I sacrifice in the name of that value (e.g., do I sacrifice career advancement to spend more time with my family, or do I sacrifice my relationships with my family for the sake of my career?)? Am I happy and at peace? Inner restlessness can be a key indicator that what I am valuing most in my life is not fulfilling for me. Am I making the world a better place? This question is a big one for me, because I believe that having more resources gives you a greater responsibility to use those resources (and the power that often comes along with them) to make a difference in the world. If the second reading on Sunday makes us a bit uncomfortable, gives us cause to squirm a bit in our seats, that is not a bad thing. As the saying goes, the Scriptures should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!" (A quick google search showed that this quote is from Finley Peter Dunne and really is in reference to the newspaper, but the sentiment still holds!)