Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Amazed and afraid

Oftentimes, I like to commune with “nice Jesus.”  You know him.  He’s always friendly and approachable.   Not a mean bone in his body.  He practically glows with niceness.  But surely I have known many people like that.  Why would anyone feel compelled to kill this person?  Why would millions of people lay down their lives as martyrs for “nice Jesus?”

It is then that I realize I have domesticated Jesus.  I tamed the man who had appeared so subversive, radical, and dangerous Jesus to his contemporaries.  In doing so, I have removed any reason to have faith in or to follow such a person.  Mark reminds me of this today as he describes the disciples following Jesus to Jerusalem.  And as they followed, they were “amazed and afraid.”

Jesus was unlike anyone they had ever met.  Yeah, but that might not be such a big deal.  These were pretty simple folk, fisherman and country people, after all.  It wouldn’t take much to amaze such a simple crowd whose worldly experience had been so narrow.  Yet, they were right – Jesus was not like anyone who came before or anyone who will come after.

He taught and he acted with the authority of God!  He forgave sins, calmed the seas, and he – a carpenter, for Pete’s sake – claimed authority over God’s law.  He fed the five thousand with a mere handful of food, made the deaf hear, the blind see, the sick well.  The disciples were amazed since they rightly sensed – certainly without fully understanding – but still sensed in their souls as many of their more sophisticated and educated contemporaries failed to do, that God was present to them and to the world in a way he had never been present before.  That amazed and astonished them – quite appropriate responses to the presence of God incarnate.

But Jesus also made unusual demands.  He commanded his disciples to love him absolutely, that their love for him was to be greater than their love for mother, father, or children.  He claimed that nothing the earth could offer – family and country, possessions and pleasures, respect and honor, rank and privilege, power and glory – nothing could be greater than what he was offering to those who would love and follow him to the end…and that end was marked by service, rejection, suffering, and death on a cross.

Jesus demands that they – and we – throw away all of these earthly crutches that we have come to depend on, that we are very comfortable with, thank you very much, that we think we cannot live without.  In our minds, they are not crutches at all; they are our life and our salvation.

And that’s the radical and subversive nature of Jesus.  He reveals to us that all these things we have held most dear are, indeed, mere crutches.  While they may help us for a time, while they even may seem to solve all of our problems, they ultimately limit what we can do and constrain how far we can go.  We can only reach true and lasting peace and joy if we let go of the crutches and pick up his cross.

Jesus forces us to choose – to put aside all that we depend on and have faith in him.  There is no middle ground.  We cannot serve two masters.  We cannot carry both the crutch and the cross.  We must choose one or the other.  That’s the scary part.

The disciples were rightly amazed and they were rightly afraid, yet they made the right choice.  They chose to follow Jesus.


Amazed and afraid we also should be.  May we also have the courage of those first disciples to throw down our crutches, pick up our cross, and follow Jesus to an everlasting life of peace and joy.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Trinity

Imagine that you are a slave in the American South some two hundred years ago.  It’s morning, but still dark.  You rise from you lice-ridden straw mattress already in a sweat from the stifling heat.  A long day of back-breaking work in the cotton field awaits you.  You will not be back to the shack you call home until dark.  Like your fellow slaves, you live in a one-room shack with which keeps you neither warm in the winter nor cool in the summer.  You dress in threadbare clothes and survive on a subsistence diet.  This will be your life until the day you die.  You think to yourself, “Why do I keep doing this?”  Of course, you know the answer.  If you don’t, you will be punished severely.  The stripes on your back constantly remind you of this.  You are a slave to a master who considers you no more than a piece of property; who treats you no better – no, even worse – than he treats his horse or his ox.  You live each day in fear, but you cannot escape.

You would think that nobody in his right mind would actually choose to live such a life, and certainly no American slave chose this hellish life.  They were simply victims of greed, victims of racism, and victims of sin. 

Yet for much of my life, I chose to be a slave, not in the physical sense of 18th century American slavery, but a slave nonetheless.  Of course, I didn’t think of it that way.  I worked hard in school for good grades that got me to Notre Dame.  For me at that time, this was Catholic kid nirvana!  I’m guessing that for many here, it still is.  Good grades at ND led to a great job; that was what my parents and I expected and hoped for.  I earned many promotions and made lots of money.  All was good.  Even better, I was at Mass every Sunday and Holy Day, I donated to charities, I followed all the traditions.  Life seemed perfect.  But I had chosen to be a slave.  I had chosen to live in fear. 

For no matter how hard I worked, it seemed there was always something more that I could not have unless I worked harder.  And if I knew I couldn’t dream of working any less, for then what I already had would quickly collapse.  I feared I would not be able to work hard enough to get all I wanted and feared that if I stopped, I would lose what I already had.

At least if I kept going to church every Sunday, kept donating my time and money, doing good deeds whenever I could, I’d be ok with God, right?  But what if I missed Mass, what if I just didn’t have the time or the money to give, would I lose heaven, too?  Even in this aspect of my life, my motive was simply to stave off the fear of the consequences for not doing what my master – materialism, perfectionism, the American dream, whatever name it took – demanded that I do.

St. Paul understood my slavery very well.  He lived the same life as a slave to the law.  Like me, St. Paul lived under a harsh master – his master was the Jewish law.  The law was never satisfied with how much he had done – there was always more to do.  And if he slacked off at all from the law’s obligations, punishment was severe and certain.  But St. Paul realized that Jesus freed him – as he frees us – from all cruel masters.  Paul describes this new freedom as justification by faith.

When we have faith in the God who created us – out of boundless and unconditional love – in his own image and likeness; when we have faith in a God who saves us – out of his great mercy – by becoming one of us and dying an ugly and painful death on the cross for us; when we have faith in a God who remains with us – out of his divine providence – to guide us, to strengthen us, and to enlighten us, this faith unites us to the one God who created, saved and sustains us. We are no longer slaves of fear and anxiety.  We are no longer slaves of the law and of sin. 

So what changes?  On the surface, perhaps not much.  Yet, we are fundamentally transformed.

While we may do many of the same things we formerly did – we work hard, we go to Mass, we do good deeds – we act this way not out of fear, but for love and gratitude for the love we’ve already received.  We may still be accosted by evil and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but, as St. Paul tells us this morning, we live in peace and joy united with God through the mercy of Jesus Christ and the love of God poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

This is our Trinitarian life: a life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.  Not much of choice, the fruits of the Spirit or the dehumanizing slavery of sin.  Why did it take me so long to choose rightly?


In that light, I pray for you as Paul prayed once for his disciples in Corinth - may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. 

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Drawing circles


When I was a young boy, a family lived in the house on the street parallel to ours, such that our backyards shared a common border.  I didn’t really know this family, as my parents said there was a scandal in that house, so we were not to associate with them.  It was a “mixed marriage” between a Catholic and a Protestant!  Heaven forbid!

The line separating Christians was clear and bright in my childhood.  We dared not enter a non-Catholic church building, fearing the inevitable lightning that would strike us down if we did.  We assumed – and to a large part, rightly so – that the feeling was mutual.  All of us were very comfortable wearing John’s shoes in today’s passage, seeking to prevent one from professing Jesus because “he does not follow us.” (Mk 9:38)

Fast forward fifty-some years, the world is a much different place.  Today, thanks be to God, we are more focused on the greatness that joins us rather than that which separates us.  We have learned to work together to further Christian ideals in our society – to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, defend the unborn, and promote human dignity for all.  We have learned to pray together, consoling one another in times of tragedy and celebrating with each other in times of joy.  We have learned that when we unite in God’s love, we can transform the world.

While we are still “separated brethren,” we have made great strides closing the rifts that separate us.  There is still much more to be done.  However, we can see the road to unity – as far off as the end of that road may be.  This is amazing progress from a time when there did not seem to be any hope at all of crossing the chasm that divided us.

A poem by Edwin Markham captures the essence of what Jesus suggests this morning to his disciples:

He drew a circle that shut me out –
Rebel, heretic, thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win –
We drew a circle that took him in.

With the help of God and His universal love, may we continue striving to draw the world in.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Praying poorly


It’s a bit sad for me to say this, but I’m not very good at prayer.  And when I think about it, I have never really been very good at prayer.  As a boy, our house was not one of those prayer-centered places.   We surely went to Mass every Sunday, but I don’t think I prayed much there.  I always sang the songs.  And while St. Augustine tells us that the one who sings, prays twice, I didn’t think like that – I just liked to sing.  They could have been show tunes or Beatles songs for all I cared.

And when there wasn’t any singing, I was often using my St. Joseph missal to try and match up the Latin and English words.  I’d have these “aha” moments when I’d realize the Latin root of some English word.   Boy, was I a nerd!  I might have even been nerdier then than I am now, though my kids would say that's impossible.   Bottom line, I didn’t associate Mass with prayer very much.

We always said a prayer before dinner.  It was the standard “Bless us, O Lord” prayer, though we appended a short prayer after it that always confused my friends whenever they stayed for dinner.  But that prayer became so rote that I’m not sure I even listened to it very much.  It became meaningless prayer, like throwing salt over your shoulder.

We never did the family rosary thing.  The rosary is what you did at a wake.  And I was always amazed as my Irish uncles – who I’m sure rarely graced the inside of a church with their presence – could kneel there for the entire rosary, those Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s reverently rolling from their lips.  We didn’t pray it, but I always had a rosary on my bedstead.  Whenever I complained to my mom that I couldn’t get to sleep – I was usually trying to wheedle some more reading time – she’d tell me to say the rosary.  I generally didn’t get through a decade before I fell asleep.  I was like Peter, James and John in the garden.  Jesus asks them to stay and pray with him and they fall asleep.  I was sleeping with them.

Whenever I did pray as a kid, it seems it was always a begging prayer.  God, give me this.  God make somebody better.  God, keep so-and-so away from me.  It’s not that prayers of petition and intercession are not good prayers, but they were my only prayers.  God was super-Santa Claus and my prayers were simply the good deeds that would earn me the presents I wanted.

As I reached adulthood, I had more than a bit of perfectionist in me.  My motto was that anything worth doing was worth doing well.  As those of you cursed with this affliction know, I’d beat myself up if I didn’t do something well.  The only recourse was to avoid things I didn’t do well.  If I didn’t pray very well, then there were other things that I could do better.  Why waste my time and beat myself up doing something that I didn’t do very well?

In a lot of ways, I haven’t changed all that much.  My mind still can wander off during prayer, I can mechanically recite prayers without even listening to them, and sometimes my busy-ness can bump prayer down to the bottom of my to-do list.

But I have learned at little, and it makes all the difference.  It may be true that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.  But it is also true that if something is really worth doing, it’s even worth doing poorly.  Prayer is one of those things that is really worth doing. 

It is really worth doing because it is simply good in its own right.  We don’t pray to get something out of it – we may, and probably will, be changed by it, but that’s just a bonus.  We don’t pray because God needs it – he needs nothing.  We pray because it is the right thing.  We state our faith in this at every Mass.  The priest asks us to raise our hearts; we say “We have lifted them up to the Lord.”  The priest asks us to give thanks to the Lord our God, and we say, “It is right and just.”  It is right to pray.  When we pray, we act justly.

And as Jesus promises us the Spirit to help us, St. Paul reminds us that even if we “do not pray as we ought” – he’s obviously talking to me there – the Spirit will intercede for us.  (Rom 8:26)  He will perfect my prayer as he will perfect your prayer before God.   

This assures me that no matter if my prayer is as dry as toast, no matter if my prayer seems like mere babbling, no matter how insipid my prayer may be, the Spirit make it a perfect prayer.  Now I know that prayer is not just something I do, it is something I am.

Pray well if you can, pray poorly if you have to, but pray, pray, and pray some more.  The Spirit guarantees that any prayer beats no prayer, every time.  Amen!  

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

In, but not of


This morning, we hear Jesus praying for his disciples – that would be us.  He makes what seems to be a rather strange claim.  He states that we "do not belong to the world," that we are not "of the world," any more than Jesus belongs to or is of the world.  How can this be?  Unlike Jesus, we not have a divine nature.   We are not God.  We certainly live in the world.  How can we not be of this world?

The answer is clear in John’s gospel.  We have been redeemed from this world through the gracious, merciful, infinite love of God.  Out of God’s love, we receive his only Son, so that those who believe may not die, but may have eternal life.  As the Father loves Jesus, Jesus loves us, and we are to love one another.  And this love unites us with each other as Jesus is one with the Father.  In this love, God dwells in us, and we in him.

Filled with the infinite love of God, we are free of the need to slavishly seek love and approval from others; free of the need for status; free of the need to put others down to raise ourselves up.

Filled with the infinite love of God, we are free of the need to possess material goods; free of the envy of others' possessions; free of the rivalries which can lead to hatred of our fellow children of God.

Thus freed by the infinite love of God, earthly goods and earthly desires – this is, the world – cannot possess us.  And if the world does not possess us, we do not belong to the world.  We are not of this world.  Yet, Jesus asks the Father to keep us in the world.  Jesus sends us out into the world to continue his mission.

And Jesus' mission is a one of service, as he demonstrated earlier in the Last Supper with the washing of the feet.  Jesus' mission is one of unity, as he prays that we be one as he is one with the Father.  Jesus' mission is one of universal love and charity, reaching all nations, Jew and Greek, slave and free, woman and man.    

Jesus' mission is hard!  In fact, if we decide to remain of this world, it is impossible for us to follow Jesus.  We must have absolute faith in God's love, and thus abide in God and God in us, if we are to have any hope of living our Christian mission.

Jesus knows that we do not share his divine nature.  He knows that we often have difficulty with this gift of love.  For example, when I receive an unexpected gift, I sometimes wonder if there are any strings attached.  I’m thinking, what does this person want from me?  Or, I may look at what I’ve received and wonder if it is as good as what somebody else received.  Why did I receive less?  What do I have to do to get more?
This finite world in which I live, a world of reciprocity, a world of haves and have-nots, becomes part of me ultimately taking possession of me completely.  I reject the gracious and infinite love of God who transcends all worlds, who gave his only Son that we may be one with Him who is all love. 

Thus Jesus finishes his prayer this morning – as we join with him in prayer – for the Father to protect us with his name, to guard us from the evil one, to consecrate us with truth, with his word and with his Spirit.

Come, Holy Spirit, enkindle in us the fire of your love.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

The Dignity of Work


A teacher at a noted prep school had a troublesome student.  This student handed in slap-dash assignments when he bothered to do them at all.  He paid no attention in class, often distracting the other students with side-talk or irrelevant questions.  One day, the teacher’s patience simply wears out.  He calls out the student in class and said, “Mr. Smith, there are four words that describe your future in this world.”  Responding to the student’s inquisitive look, the teacher says, “Want fries with that?”  Everyone in class chuckles, for certainly this was not what they had in mind for themselves.  They would do so much better.

As someone who enjoys clever repartee, I was amused when a fellow teacher related this story to me.  However, on reflection, I realized that it denigrated an entire class of honest work; work which our Church teaches us has great dignity.  It is by our work that we participate in the creative nature of God. It is though our work, at least in part, that we live out our nature as God’s children.  Our catechism states, “Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to prolong the work of creation by subduing the earth, both with and for one another.” (CCC 2427)

Our celebration today, lauding St. Joseph the Worker, is a relatively recent addition to the liturgical calendar, for it was only in 1955 that Pope Pius XII instituted this celebration.  Yet, the concept of celebrating work has roots deep in our faith’s past.  St. Joseph was a carpenter, a creative job for sure, but also a job that required long hours and its share of drudgery.  Yet this is the work that St. Joseph taught our Lord to perform.  This is the work that Jesus did to help support his family and to serve the village of Nazareth.

As the teacher denigrates the work of serving fast food burgers, the townspeople of Nazareth denigrate the lowly carpenter’s trade.  Jesus can’t be the prophet he claims to be, he is the son of a carpenter! (Mt 13:54-58)

And yet God has lifted up the lowly carpenter from Nazareth to be the savior of the world.  Our faith insists that each human being shares a great dignity – created in the image and likeness of God, loved and cherished by our infinite and eternal God, and entrusted by God to steward and care for all of God’s creation through the dint of honest work.

But I often fall into the same trap as the teacher in our story and the people in Nazareth.  I impute greater dignity to certain types of work, implying less dignity in other work.  I may deem intellectual work more dignified than manual labor.  Alternatively, I often equate the dignity of the work with the money that it earns.  Worse, it then becomes easy for me to assume that the people doing this less-dignified work must be, ipso facto, less-dignified human beings.  I cannot be following Jesus at that point, as Jesus never goes there.

Jesus calls each one of us, the CEO and the McDonald’s clerk, the lawyer and the garbage collector, the scientist and the homemaker, to follow him.  He calls us to be loving, kind, generous, joy-filled, and merciful harbingers of the kingdom of God, recognizing the dignity of every person, each created in God’s image and likeness.  Whatever what we do for a living, Jesus calls us to work for life.

Jesus knows that this will not be easy.  He tells us that it will entail suffering and drudgery, for it is being a slave to all.  It will seem fruitless at times, as it may inspire hatred from the very ones whom we love, who are the objects of our service.  Yet it is part of our nature, a nature that Jesus took on and a nature that Jesus redeems by his work, by his suffering, and by his death on the cross.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us.