The Narrow Gate

Today’s gospel passage (Lk 13:22-30) occurs soon after Jesus proclaims the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast in which Jesus implies that the kingdom will grow to enormous proportions from its very small beginnings.  This must have sounded odd to the disciple who asks Jesus if only a few people will be saved.   Presumably, he thought of the kingdom more narrowly, possibly restricted just to the Chosen People or, even more limited, just to those who ate and drank with Jesus himself.  To the questioner's anticipated delight, he was already a member of this very exclusive group!

In a way, this jibes with our own experience and expectations.  We lock the doors at night once we are safely inside.  We close the membership to our clubs once we are safely admitted.  We build gated communities to assure that only those who belong can enter.  It wouldn’t make sense to do otherwise.  Similarly, in our spiritual lives, we often create boundaries or limits on God's mercy, but only when we are certain that we fall within those limits.  What sense would it be to exclude ourselves from God’s mercy?  On the other hand, those others, those evil-doers…

It is just this logic – this sense that we are right to belong, that we are insiders, protected and isolated from the undeserving – that keeps us outside the very door we feel we have entered.  Jesus states that the true way into the kingdom is a hard one, though it is open to anyone.  The Greek word we translate as "strive" in "Strive to enter through the narrow gate" is the root word of our English word "agony."  Jesus implies that entering the kingdom is an agonizing struggle. 

In ancient walled cities, the narrow gate was only one person wide, so that only one person could pass at a time.  This makes it a very apt analogy for our entry to paradise, for our narrow gate is exactly one person wide – Jesus. But where is the struggle, the striving?  Being with Jesus can actually be pleasant.  I look forward to being with Jesus at the Eucharist.  I enjoy the singing, the praying, and being with others of like mind.  And we even get graces and the real presence of Jesus!  I enjoy the peace of quiet of my weekly hour of adoration before the sacrament.  There’s not struggle here. 

But Jesus wants more.  Luke reminds us at the very beginning of today’s reading that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to the cross.  And if we are to struggle to enter paradise through Jesus, we must not only eat and drink and be in his presence, we must also carry the cross with him.

The particular cross each of us carries may vary, but a consistent feature of all of our crosses is constant and universal love: love of family, love of friends, love of neighbors, and most importantly, love of enemies.  For without loving our enemies, our love becomes simply what the pagans do.  Christian love is much more.  The cross we bear is that this Christian love is not always – in fact, is not usually – requited love.  It may even provoke division and animosity.  This should not matter, since, as fellow cross bearers with Christ, we are measured by how we love, not by how we are loved.

How can we show this love every day and to everyone?  That is where we struggle and strive.  Many times, it seems unfair to love others unconditionally.   Take our nation’s struggle with immigration reform and with undocumented immigrants.  How do we balance our right to private property with Jesus’ command to share with those who have less?  How do we balance Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger with our need to provide for ourselves?  How do we know when enough is enough?

For Jesus, of course, there is no balance.  Enough is never enough.  There is just more love – eternal, unconditional love, the same love that God shows us in the giving his only Son. 

So we keep struggling, we keep praying, we keep proclaiming God's love as best we can.  For if we stop struggling, if we stop loving, one of two things must be true.  Either we have ignored Jesus completely or we are certain of that which we cannot be certain – that we have done enough.  In either case, Jesus tells us, we will have placed ourselves outside the door, outside the kingdom, despite God's constant invitation for us to enter.

Struggle and strive, give thanks for our occasional successes, ask forgiveness for our more frequent failures, and pray for the strength to love others as God loves us.  Only by doing so can we hope to be counted among those from the east and the west and those from the north and the south, that take their place at the feast in the kingdom of God.

The Clarion Call

In our social interactions, we generally seek reciprocity.  When we exchange gifts with another, we tend to exchange gifts of similar value.  It becomes a simple matter for us to judge the status of our relationship with another person by the value – either financial or emotional – of the gifts we exchange.  

God had given an incredibly valuable gift to you and to me.  More amazingly, God offers this same gift to every single person now living, to every single person who has ever lived, and to every person who is yet to live.  It is the gift of salvation, the gift of forgiveness, the gift of oneness with the source of all good, the source of all peace, the source of all joy, and our source of all holiness.

However, God’s gift is so far beyond what we can possibly imagine, we cannot easily discern its value.  It is not delivered to us in the mail, gaily wrapped with a card announcing the giver’s good wishes.  We cannot look up its price on the internet.  Yet God constantly seeks to make us aware of the gift and its value.  He has planted in each of us a seed of faith, to be nurtured and grown that we may know the magnitude of his love for us.

In the beginning, we know almost nothing of the gift, never mind its value.  We live as if we can have nothing other than what we can provide for ourselves.  We live in the self-centered world of ego, with no response at all to God’s gift.  We may not even be aware that God has gifted us all.

Graced by God in baptism and the sacraments, we begin to gain some understanding.  We sense, consciously or subconsciously, that is not our ego that supports us and sustains us, but rather something much greater.  In response, we offer our obedience, much as servants obey their master.

But as we mature in our understanding of this gift, our response becomes much deeper and richer than mere obedience.  We come to understand that God not only loves us with an unimaginable love, not only cares for us with an unimaginable providence, and not only forgives with an unimaginable mercy, he desires us to love and care for and forgive others as He has done for us.

In essence, God has entrusted us with even more than his great and mighty gift of salvation.  As church, we realize that we are like the stewards who not only obey the master, but also love and care for all of that is His.  Our self-centered lives of ego become other-centered lives of love.  Without this love, our obedience becomes a horribly insufficient reply to God’s great gift.

Jesus tells us this when he cites the greatest command – love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:37-39).  As our exemplar, Jesus gives us a new command – “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn15:12).  Paul echoes this command by telling us that even with the faith to move mountains, without love, he is nothing.  Love is the obedience of the heart (1 Cor 13:2).  Love makes us slaves not of ego and sin and death, but of righteousness and life.

Since the very moment of his selection as Pope, Francis has consistently proclaimed this mission of love.  As church, he reminds us that we are the ones who have been entrusted with “still more” (Lk 12:48).  We are the stewards whom God has entrusted with the knowledge, the understanding, and the experience of His infinite, providential, and merciful gift of love.  Pope Francis urges us to respond in kind – care for the poor, bind up the wounds, and have mercy on all.

It is a clarion call.  It is a call to love.

Praying always

In the 1960s, someone at IBM coined the word "multi-tasking” to describe what their newest computers could do.  Pretty soon, it became a buzzword for efficiency.  Everyone was encouraged to multitask so they would be more effective and efficient.  The problem is that psychologists have confirmed in test after test that none of us can truly multi-task with any proficiency at all.  When we try to do two things at once, it takes longer and we make more mistakes than if we just did one thing, finished it, and did the second thing. 

Early on, I realized that I was not really very good at this multi-tasking thing.  I could do lots of things and I could them very quickly, but if I wanted to do it right, or get anything done at all, I had to focus on just one thing at a time.  So when Jesus tells me to pray always, I get confused.  If I prayed always, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else!  I can’t do two things at once!

My problem is that I often think of prayer as something to do.  When I get up in the morning, I “do” morning prayer.  It’s on my list of things to do.  But prayer is not something that would be on a list of to-dos. 

St. Jerome said that for the saints, even their sleeping is prayer.  St. Augustine wrote that when we practice faith, hope, and charity with continual desire, we pray always.  In essence, what the saints teach me is that prayer is not just something I do; it is something I am. 

When I am fully aware of the God who is with me until the end of name, who wishes to dwell within me at all times, in whose name is my help and my strength, my life becomes prayer.  I am praying always, since the other things that I am doing are being done for the glory of God, led by the Spirit to fulfill God’s will.

To use Jesus’ metaphor, praying always is as simple as leaving the light on – “Let you light shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Mt 5:16)

So the key to praying always is simply to have a constant awareness of God in my life.  Thus, what keeps me from praying always is not a lack of time to do other things, or not an inability to multi-task, but simply forgetting that which I should always know – that God is always present to me and simply wants me to be present to him. 

The readings today give me some clues as to how I can remind myself of God’s presence, and thus transform my life into constant prayer.

Paul points out to Timothy, as he points out to us, the critical role of Scripture.  In the second-most famous 3:16 in the Bible, we hear “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tm 3:16).  Note to self – read and reflect on scripture daily.

Moses wants to pray for the people as they defend themselves against Amalek.  But he can’t do it alone.  Aaron and Hur find him a seat and help hold his hands up in prayer.  (Ex 17:8-13)  Just like Moses, I need the help of others, too.  There are people out there who have successfully transformed their lives into constant prayer, who now enjoy the most intimate presence of God.  Note to self – study the lives and the writings of the saints.  Become friends with the saints.

Well, that’s a good start, but it’s only a start.  I need more.  To make the constant spiritual presence of God uppermost in my mind, what could be more natural than spending time in the physical presence of God?  Note to self – participate in the Mass and practice adoration regularly.

But even with all this, I still find myself forgetting God, acting selfishly, working for my own glory instead of God’s.  What’s a body to do?  Like all mistakes in life, we can best avoid them by finding out why we made them in the first place.  At IBM, we’d call this root cause analysis – or the “five why’s” in six-sigma lingo.  St. Ignatius calls it the examen.  Note to self – nightly examination of conscience.

Final note – praying always is, by definition, never done.  It can only be lived.  Pray always and when the Son of Man comes, he will certainly find faith in you.

The Pure Motive

This book, “Between Heaven and Mirth,” James Martin emphasizes the role of joy and humor in our faith.  He demonstrates that there is even humor in the Bible, though the writers, understandably, tended to be very serious about their writing.

For me, today’s gospel scene (Lk 11:42-46) has always been one of those moments of humor.  I see the crowds gathered around Jesus as he excoriates the Pharisees, in no uncertain terms, on how misguided they have been; how their actions are leading them to eternal perdition.  You can imagine the discomfort on the part of the Pharisees, and perhaps the amusement of the rest of the crowd at seeing this discomfort.  One of the scribes  – I imagine him with a self-satisfied smile on his face  – tries to point out that Jesus has perhaps stepped too far, and mistakenly included him and his fellow scribes in his prophetic denunciation.

Jesus turns and says, in effect, oh, yeah – you, too, wipe that smile off your face, woe to you who are equally shamed, equally damned, for your actions betray you.  Whenever I read this passage, I can hear the laughter of those who have watched the tables suddenly turn on the pompous scribe.

Yet, behind the humor is a very serious point.  Jesus points out that our actions betray us, though not always as we may intend.  Jesus knows that our actions are simply the result of our motivations.  If our motivations are not pure, then our actions or works, no matter how righteous they may appear – after all, the Pharisees were scrupulously obeying what they understood to be the law of God – must be equally impure.

For Jesus, there was only one pure motivation – love.  This love starts with gratitude at what God has done for us, a gratitude that grows into trust that God will continue to do good for us, a trust that grows into a desire to be constantly close to God, and then to grow in likeness to this God who is love, who is good, who is merciful.  One may call this virtuous cycle of gratitude, trust, love, and mercy “faith.”  We could debate which comes first, the gratitude, the trust, the desire for oneness with God, the mercy, the love, the faith, but they all grow out of and reinforce each other.  This is the pure motive which drives the works by which we will be judged.

And yet, I have often assumed that motives didn’t matter much at all.  The only thing that mattered was my obedience.  I followed the law, asked for forgiveness whenever I broke the law, and that was it.  Is this not the proof of the pudding?  Who cares about motivation if the end result is my obedience?

Jesus insists that this attitude is the road to woe and damnation.  Without pure motives, without faith, works can only amount to hypocrisy.  I may think I am one with God and I may even claim that God is number one in my life, yet without love, I am only being one with myself.   I have placed myself on a pedestal.  I have set myself up for a fall.  It is just a matter of time.

For when my motive is not grounded in love and mercy, in faith and in gratitude, I become judgmental.  I see others who are not following the law as scrupulously as me and judge them to be my inferiors, those who have not won God’s love as I have so clearly done.  Since they have not earned God’s love – as if God’s love needs to be earned – they are not worthy of my respect or my love.  I’m smug, therefore I judge.

This morning, Paul reminds us that as we judge, so we will be judged. (Rom 2:1)  Though Paul was never present when Jesus preached, and though he was writing many years before the Gospels were written, we can hear in his words the words of Jesus:  “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.  For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” (Mt 7:1-2)

Indeed, woe to me when I judge, for affliction and distress, the wrath and the fury are mine.  

But blessed am I when I love, for the peace and the joy, the glory and the honor are mine, now and forever.  Amen.

It is enough

At some point, every parent faces a certain challenge – teaching their children to say the “magic words.”  Please and thank you.  “Please” isn’t too hard.  After all, there is immediate positive reinforcement; you say please, you get what you want.  Thank you is another story.  Kids don’t see that thank you’s get them much of anything. 

My brother had a strategy for the dreaded thank you notes.  His birthday was at the end of June, almost exactly six months from Christmas.  He would say that he was waiting until Christmas and would thank everyone once for both gifts.  Of course, when Christmas rolled around, it was only six months until his birthday.  No sense with thank you notes then, he’d just wait and kill two – or was that three? – birds with one stone.

Grandparents make the challenge even more difficult.  My mother-in-law, Pat, would send things to the kids all year long!  We’d say, “send a thank you to Grandma or she’ll stop sending you these goodies.”  Of course the thanks were few and far between but did that stop Pat?  No, the presents kept coming!  What’s a parent to do?

Of course, Pat and other grandparents aren’t the only ones whose generosity is unstopped by lack of thanks.  They are on God’s side.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus offers a gift beyond our wildest imaginings.  As lepers in the ancient world, the ten supplicants weren’t simply sick; they were cast out from any contact with society.  So Jesus doesn’t simply cure their disease, he reunites them with the community, makes them one with humanity.  And yet only one comes back to thank Jesus for this great gift.  Jesus praises this man, but, as the kids might be quick to point out, despite their ingratitude, the other nine lepers are not “uncured.” 

What’s the deal?  Why should I have to thank God for his grace if, as its very name implies, God freely and unconditionally gives it to me?  Why does Jesus make a connection between gratitude and salvation if the other lepers are still cured despite their ingratitude?

Perhaps my model of God is wrong.  I imply to my children that in giving thanks, they will continue to receive gifts.  After all, that’s the way I look the world.  I expect thanks when I give a gift.  If I give a wedding gift and don’t receive the obligatory note of thanks, I feel slighted.  I may look at that couple in a different light.  Far be it for me to remember their anniversary.  

I presume that God acts like I do.  If I remember to thank God, then He will continue to remember me in my need.  Unfortunately, I have now reduced God to a vending machine – put in the right coins and hit the right buttons and I receive grace.  Most fortunately for all of us, God is much greater than a heavenly vending machine.

God loves us and graces us not for what we do, but for who we are.  He created us out of love, he created us in his very image and likeness, and he created us to be with him in love for all eternity.  We are for God.  Yet sometimes I live as if I don’t believe this at all.

Instead, I take life and all that God has given me for granted.  My goal then becomes to work hard to make life as good as it can be for my family and me.  And yet this hard work never completely satisfies.  We never seem to have enough.  There is always something that seems just beyond our reach, but if I work just a little bit harder, it can be ours.  Of course, if we get that, there is something else just beyond that, and the cycle continues.  We can never work hard enough, we can never satisfy ourselves, and on our worse days, we feel that we are simply not good enough.

In fact, this constant level of dissatisfaction drives our economy.  Without our constant yearning for the newer car, the bigger house, the latest fashions, etc., we spend less, the economy falters, jobs are lost, and our material wealth and our self-worth shrinks.  We live not for God, but for ourselves. 

Jesus praises the grateful leper for he has broken this cycle of dissatisfaction.  The man has recognized the source of his life, the source of all that he is, and it is enough.  When we come together here to celebrate the Eucharist – the root word for Eucharist is the same word that Luke uses to describe the man’s thanks and praise to God – we recognize that God has given us our very lives as a gift, that God loves us with a love that knows no bounds, that He gave us his only Son to die for us that we might have eternal life with Him.  This attitude of gratitude does not change God, it changes us.  For with gratitude as the center of our lives, our eyes open to see that whoever we are, whatever we have, it is enough, for it is the fruit of God’s infinite and everlasting love.

It is enough.  Thank God.

Let us pray

Why do I pray?  In some sense, it seems so unnecessary.

If God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, and God is all-loving, then he knows everything I need, has the power to give me everything I need, and loves me enough to want to give me everything I need.  Why are my prayers of petition necessary?

If God is secure in his being - and who could be more secure - then why are my prayers of praise necessary?

If God loves me unconditionally, then what do my prayers of thanksgiving or even contrition mean?  God still loves me.

Yet Jesus insists that I pray.  And he leads by example.  The Gospels are filled with instances of Jesus at prayer.  The disciples see this and ask Jesus to teach them how to pray.

And in teaching them how to pray, Jesus gives us insight into why we pray.

Jesus begins the prayer with “Abba”, an Aramaic term of endearment for a father.  In English, it would be more properly translated as “Daddy.”  Of course, since every person is created by God, every person, whether Christian or not, is a child of God.  But by using the intimate term “abba,” Jesus teaches us that, as his followers, his brothers and his sisters, our relationship to God, our status as children of God, is much deeper and more intimate than that of creator and creature.  Instead, it is the relationship of a loving parent and a loved child. Our anxiety is replaced by comfort and peace. 

Jesus then teaches that “when we pray,” we begin with praising God, for hallowed is his name.  In ancient thinking, a reference to one’s “name” implied the entire essence of the person.  God is the holy one, the source of all that is holy and all that is good.  Our pride is replaced by humility.

As Christians, Jesus has us pray for the entire world, for God’s kingdom to come – a kingdom of peace, a kingdom of justice, a kingdom of love.  In Matthew’s more familiar version, Jesus connects the coming of the kingdom with the doing of God’s will, on earth as it is in heaven.  Jesus places prayer for God’s will and prayer for the world ahead of our own desires.  Our greed is turned to generosity.

Jesus has us pray for “daily” bread, that which sustains us, that which is necessary for our survival.  He reminds us that our sustenance is an every day affair.  Even at the very end, we still depend on God to protect us from temptation, the final test.   Our self-righteousness is turned to gratitude.

We pray for forgiveness, for we forgive all who do wrong to us.  We are reminded of our call to emulate Christ who demonstrated forgiveness to the point of forgiving even those tortured and killed him.  Our vengeance is transformed to mercy.

C. S. Lewis had it right.  When a skeptic once asked him why he thought his meager prayers could change the almighty and immutable God whom he professed, his answer was simple.  He said that his prayers did not change God, they changed him.

Whether in praise, petition, thanksgiving, contrition, or contemplation, the essence of prayer is placing us in the transforming presence of God, making us the peaceful, humble, generous, grateful, merciful servants whom God created us to be, whom Jesus calls us to be, whom the Spirit gives us the strength and courage to be.

With confidence, let us pray.

Guardian Angels

A few years ago, I read a survey about what people fear most.  You would think that perhaps pain and death or terrorism might top the list, but they do not.  At least here in the United States, the number one fear was getting old and becoming dependent on others for the simplest acts of life – feeding oneself, going to the bathroom, cleaning ourselves.  We live in a society that takes pride in self-reliance, founded on the principles of independence and self-determination.  We teach our children to study hard at school to get a good education; get a good job and work hard; then you can be whatever you want to be and do whatever you want to do.  You will not have to depend on anyone or be a burden on anyone.  Independence is the goal, dependence is failure.  So it makes sense that the fear of helplessness and dependence is our greatest fear.

Jesus reminds us this morning that we must embrace this great fear and become as dependent as a little child or we shut ourselves out of the kingdom.  (Mt 18:1-5)  His mention of the angels and our celebration today of our guardian angels reminds us of our utter dependence on God’s providence and on his protection.  (Mt 18:10).

Yet I resist.  I seek more tangible support.  I look to money and other possessions to assure my independence such that I need not rely on anyone else for sustenance and support.  As a society, we build walls and guns and bombs and other instruments of violence to protect us from the wickedness of those who would harm us or make us dependent on them. 

Yet while these tangibles cannot be evil in their own right – they are only things, after all – our love of them, which we profess whenever we assert our vaunted independence through them, is truly the root of all evil, for our love of them precludes our absolute love of God, who loves us absolutely, without condition and without end.  Our love of them refutes our dependence on God, in whose name is our true help and salvation.  (Ps 124:8)

Today, as we celebrate the feast of the guardian angels, listen closely as the angels whisper Jesus’ message to me and to you:  accept and embrace the dependence of a little child and you accept and embrace Jesus.  Put aside your love of the finite and the fallible and become a dependent child of God, and you will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.