Righteous attitude

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving have always have been a holy troika of righteous deeds in Judaism, Islam, and other religions – and they remain so for us today as well.  We hear this passage from Matthew (Mt 6:1-6, 16-18) every year on Ash Wednesday as we emphasize these three practices during our Lenten journey.   Today, we hear Jesus’ teachings on them in the context of the Sermon of the Mount, from which we’ve drawn the daily Gospel reading for the past week and a half.

Throughout the Sermon, Jesus emphasizes that righteousness lies not in our deeds themselves, but rather in our attitudes and motives behind the deeds.  Our motivation for any work that we do should be to draw ourselves closer to God, the source of total happiness.  Thus, our attitudes must not be rooted in the finite, relativistic, and conditional world in which we live, but in the infinite, absolute, and unconditional love of the God with whom we aspire to live, the God who so loves and desires to live with us.

Oftentimes, I find that my behavior belies my faith in this infinite, unconditional, and absolute love of God.  My attitude and my motivations are askew.  My eyes are not on the prize.

I pray, fast, give alms and dutifully adhere to the commandments in the hope that perhaps God will love me more if I am more diligent in my righteous acts.  Yet, how can God love me more if his love for me is already infinite? 

I turn away from others who so obviously do not love God and obey God’s commands as well as I do.  I refuse to help them; refuse to love them; refuse to forgive them as God must love these ne’er-do-wells less than he loves me.  Yet, how can this be if God’s love is unconditional?

I work hard, yet I am still anxious that I can earn enough of earth’s treasures – wealth, power, respect and honor – that I will be happy forever, yet how can this be if I can only find the absolute and eternal in the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who will be, forever and ever, my God, my savior, my joy?

Today, Jesus reminds me to look behind my exterior acts, righteous though they may seem.  He insists that I set my interior disposition on the only thing that matters, the only thing that can save me, the only thing that can make me truly happy – being one with the infinite, unconditional, absolute and eternal love of God.

More than civil

I am eight years old and my mom’s birthday is coming up soon.  I have a dollar or two saved up from my allowance so I ask her what she wants for her birthday.  She says for me get along with my brothers, stop fighting and arguing with them and she will be happy.  Get along with my brothers!  This is way too much.  I’m thinking: why can’t I just do what everyone does and buy something or make something.  Isn’t that good enough?

And, of course, that is one of Jesus’ points today.  It is good to follow the law, for as Jesus says, not the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law and anyone who teaches against the law will be the least in heaven.  So the law is good, but it’s not good enough.

Without law, society as we know it would be impossible.  Laws are the basis of all civil societies.  Without laws, anarchy reigns.  Jesus knows that.  But Jesus wants more.  Jesus does not call us to be civil; he calls us to be holy.  Holy cannot be legislated, for holy is in our hearts.  Holy is in our souls.  Holy cannot come from Congress or the President or the Supreme Court.  Holy comes from God - the law fulfilled by the love of Jesus Christ, Son of God.

Following today’s passage (Mt 5:17-19), Jesus shows us how love fulfills the law.  Of course, we should not kill one another, it’s unlawful, and we are subject to judgment.  But anger, calling names, or thinking badly of one another is not against the law, yet it is unholy, for it disparages one whom God created out of love in his very image and likeness.  Anger subjects us to the judgment of God.

Of course, we should not exact undue retribution – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth seems fair.  But this “just” retribution is unholy, for it contradicts the unconditional love that God has for us, the infinite mercy God showers upon us, and the eternal life that God has prepared for us.  Thus we should “turn the other cheek,” “walk the extra mile,” and “give the cloak with the tunic.”

One of the most important and, it would seem, most holy parts of the Jewish law was laws regarding sacrifice, the bringing gifts to the altar of God.  Just so, we have laws which obligate us to participate in the Eucharist.  Yet Jesus insists that true holiness – reconciling with one another, loving each other as God loves us, forgiving one another as God forgives us – is a necessary prelude to bringing gifts to God.  It is this day-after-day holiness which is our best and truest gift to God.

Of course, holiness is a much higher bar than mere civility and following the law.  I understood this even as an eight-year old boy who simply wanted to buy a present for his mom.  Instead of my easily purchased gift, she wanted what Jesus wanted – holiness.  Imagine that, my mom may not have known the Sermon on the Mount by heart, but she certainly knew it in her heart.

Holiness seems hard, that’s an understatement.  It is actually impossible for us to be holy simply by trying our best or by obeying the law.  But it is very possible to live holy lives with the grace of God, a grace that, as Pope Francis stated in one of his recent homilies, is offered to all – believers, atheists, and everyone in between.  

The only way to be holy is accept this universal grace.  This is faith.  This is the faith that saves us.  This is the faith that helps us realize the holiness and the godliness with which we were created.  This is faith that gives us the desire, courage and strength to obey the fulfilled law of love.

Only with this faith can we hope to meet the challenge that Jesus lays down for us at the end of Matthew 5 – be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

One flock, one shepherd

On the surface, it seems natural to celebrate the feast of a martyr like St. Boniface with Jesus describing himself as the Good Shepherd – the one who lays down his life for his sheep.  But for St. Boniface, the connection is even more apt.

As a young Anglo-Saxon boy in the late seventh century, St. Boniface entered a Benedictine monastery in what is now England.   He became very learned, eventually being ordained a priest in the monastery.  While a very successful teacher and on the “abbot track” at the monastery, he longed for more.  He felt called to be a missionary to his ancestors in what is now Germany.

When he arrived in Saxony, he discovered that the Christians there had slowly drifted back to paganism.  With the fall of the Roman Empire several centuries earlier, they had lost all connection to Rome and the pope.  Spiritually, they were rudderless.  Gradually, pagan practices and superstitions – even the worship of pagan gods – became common.  When Boniface traveled to Rome to report this, the Pope appointed him as bishop with the mandate to bring the people back to the Church.  After many, many years, Boniface was successful in this mission and today is regarded as the “Apostle to the Germans.”

But Boniface’s influence was far greater.  In reforming the German people, he also helped to reform the church in France, ruled by Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, and then by Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father.  In doing so, he facilitated the union of this important family with the Pope – a relationship that led to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800.  Boniface’s role fulfilled what Jesus tells us was his goal as the Good Shepherd – that there be one flock and one shepherd (Jn 10:16).

Ultimately, Boniface was martyred as he tried to draw more of the Germanic tribes – some of who had never been Christianized at all – into the one flock of Jesus Christ.  But long before he literally laid down his life, he had figuratively laid down his comfortable life in the monastery for the arduous work of a missionary to further this goal of unity.

Like Boniface, we are all called, in ways large and small, to promote unity among Jesus’ disciples and, ultimately, to draw others into the flock. 

But that’s always been a tough one for me.  I have been long conditioned to work independently, to earn my own keep, to look out for number one.  Surely, I’m willing to listen to and work with others, to be one with others, as long as they can help me maximize pleasure, possessions, power and protection for me and mine in this world. 

Boniface knew that this self-driven motive also drove the people to whom he preached.  He realized that this pattern could only be broken by creating unity with Rome and the vicar of Christ.  Without this intimate connection to the teachings and traditions that stretched back to the apostles and to Jesus himself, they would simply continue to drift their own way and Boniface would have no hope of rebuilding true faith among the German and Frankish tribes.

Thus, Boniface reminds me that my connection with the Church – the one flock led by the one shepherd – is vital.  He call me to consider how I have reconciled my personal feelings, interests and desires with the magisterium of the Church, with the teachings of the vicar of Christ, our holy father in Rome? 

Only by more building a deeper and more intimate connection with the Church, can I hope to figuratively lay down a life centered on self-gratification.  Only then can I even hope to do what Jesus calls me to do – place my complete trust in the God who loves me unconditionally and eternally, love my neighbor as myself, do unto others as I would have them do unto me, forgive seventy-seven times, and pray that I can offer my will that it becomes God’s will, but God’s will be done nonetheless. 

St. Boniface not only reminds us to be one with the shepherd, he also helps us to be one.  All we have to do is ask.

St. Boniface, pray for us.

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.

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 18^th 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. 

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.

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!