And the winner is...

Almost every day, a battle rages inside me.  It is a desperate battle: two forces opposed to each other in a battle to the death.  They have been fighting since I was old enough to know who I was.  They will be fighting until the day I die.  At that point, one will win, one will be vanquished.  The question is: who will win?

The first force is very powerful.  It causes me to consider other people as my competitors, vying with me for material wealth, for earthly success, and for the love and esteem of others.  It causes me to be envious when others have more than me, jealously protective and greedy when I have more than others, condescending and arrogant when others appear less worthy than me, hateful and vengeful when others hurt me.  It fills me with fear that I may fail to get what I deserve or lose what I have earned.  It blinds me to God, makes me oblivious to His constant presence to me.  It’s ugly.  This force is pride.

Paul begs and exhorts the Thessalonians, as he begs and exhorts me, to act in ways that are pleasing to God, for Jesus will soon come again with all the holy ones.  Yet, when pride has the upper hand within me, I am clearly not acting as Paul suggests, not acting as Jesus asks me to act; I am simply acting as pride dictates.

However, the contending force within me is also very powerful.  It makes me compassionate towards others, generous and kind in sharing whatever I have.  It gives me courage to love even those who act with hate towards me.  It makes me humble, aware of God’s infinite and unconditional love for me, aware of His great gift of life, aware of His constant presence and help.  This force is gratitude.

It is fortuitous that our liturgical season of Advent – a season when we consider our readiness for Jesus’ second coming – usually begins in the same week that we celebrate Thanksgiving.  For the more I can be grateful for the gifts God has given me, most importantly, the gift of infinite, unconditional, self-emptying love He demonstrated for me on the cross of salvation, the more likely I am to act as He wishes, the more likely I am to see Him as my Lord, my Savior, my source of ultimate happiness and joy, the more likely that gratitude triumphs over pride.

I pray that during this Advent that God fills me – and he fills you – with the strength and awareness to turn every occasion of pride into one of gratitude, to create in me and to create in you an attitude of gratitude.

I pray that if and when my hard work is rewarded, I will remember that God gave me ability to work hard.  Thank you, God, for health and stamina.

I pray that when I do anything good, I will remember God’s goodness which inspired me, God’s grace which gave me the talent and opportunity.  Thank you, God, for your inspiration, for my talent, and for the opportunity to serve you. 

I pray that when I am loved by others, I will remember that I do not deserve their love, yet God loves others so much, they share that love with me, showing me the great love God has for me.  Thank you, God, for your infinite love.

I pray that when I am threatened, I will remember that it was God who saved me from sin, God who brought me safe thus far, God who will lead me home.  Thank you, God, for your mercy and your faithfulness.

And I pray that when the end comes, pride dies and gratitude wins; that I realize it was not about me or my efforts; that it was Christ who died, Christ who is risen, Christ who will come again. 

Stand erect with heads held high, for our salvation is near at hand.  Thank God.     

The Net of Gratitude

In one its declarations at Vatican II, Nostra Aetate, the Church insists that all humans form one community, for we are all from God and we are all destined for God.  Despite quite different teachings, we believe other religions often “reflect a ray of that truth that enlightens all men.” The Church encourages us “to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions.  Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians.”  (Nostra Aetate 1-2)

This teaching seems in sharp contrast to much I have seen on social media, particularly in the past week following the tragedy in Paris.  All Muslims are terrorists.  All Muslims are dedicated to the destruction of everything that is not Muslim.  The Koran demands the killing of all infidels.  The generalizations keep increasing in vehemence, frequency, and certainty.

Surely, we have witnessed some Muslims who are terrorists.  Surely, we have witnessed some Muslims who wish the infidel world much harm, and we have suffered grievously from their efforts.  Certainly, there are verses in the Koran which offer encouragement to those who follow this path.  And yet, this is not the whole story.

Recently, I came across a counterpoint to much of the screeds I have seen, a “ray of truth” that gives me confidence in the ultimate wisdom behind Nostra Aetate.  It is also quite timely, for it concerns gratitude, that virtue we honor in a particular way today on Thanksgiving.  It was a poem by a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi – in essence, a Muslim mystic – named Jamal al-Din Muhammad Rumi.  It goes like this:

Giving thanks for abundance

is sweeter than the abundance itself:

Should one who is absorbed with the Generous one

be distracted with the gift?

Thankfulness is the soul of beneficence;

Abundance is but the husk,

For thankfulness brings you to the place where

The beloved lives.

Abundance yields heedlessness;

Thankfulness brings alertness:

Hunt for bounty with the net of gratitude.

Given how long I tended to procrastinate as a child when writing thank you notes for my Christmas presents, it’s obvious that I didn’t really get the opening couplet.  How could giving thanks be more important than the gift?  But of course, the giver must be more important than the gift, for the giver cannot give anything greater than itself.

Rumi understood my problem, as he explains in the next couplet.  I let the pleasure of the gift distract me – and the more abundant the gift was, the more distracting its pleasure – I let it distract me from the giver.  I let it distract my heart from gratitude.

And without gratitude as the soul of all of my beneficence and the soul of all my good works, the abundance that I have received from God, the abundance I try to share with others, are simply the husks, or, as Jesus would describe it, the chaff that is thrown into the fire to be burned.

But when I am thankful, I am brought to the place where my beloved lives, the One who has provided me with the abundance that has been my life, the One who is so much sweeter than the abundance, the One who is the infinite and all-loving source of all abundance.

Rumi closes by reminding me not to be dulled by abundance, for without gratitude, mere abundance dulls our hunger for that which is so much greater.  In our perceived satiety, we become heedless of others’ needs, heedless of our own need to be with the One who truly fills us with all that is good.

By gratitude awakens us, alerts us to our source and to our destiny, the One who is all good, all loving and all provident.

Hunt for the One with the net of gratitude.   Thanks be to God.  Amen. 

Living in the Kingdom

Jesus said to the crowd: “They will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name.  It will lead to your giving testimony. Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.  You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.  You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.  By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” (Lk 21:12-19)

Clearly, this is not one of those warm, fuzzy, God-is-love gospel passages.  And the timing of the message adds fuel to the fire.  Here we are about to join with family and friends to give thanks for all of God’s blessings, and we hear that we will be seized and persecuted, turned against by those closest to us, even put to death in some cases. 

Uncomfortable though the message may be, we hear it more than once from Jesus.  For example, the final beatitude is “blessed are the persecuted.”  How can this be?  An easy out is to assume that Jesus is simply telling us a basic fact of life.  In a world of sin, meeting up with evil is inevitable, and everyone who lives in the world must endure at least some pain, suffering, and, yes, even death.  Our lesson, then, is to simply live in the hope of our final union with God, when all pain and suffering will vanish.  In the meantime, offer up our own suffering, help those who we see suffering, and all will eventually be well.

However, when I accept this interpretation, I have, in a very important way, missed Jesus’ point.  The key words in the passage – as they are in that final beatitude – are “because of my name.”  This persecution is not inevitable simply because we live in a world of sin and death; it is heaped upon us because while we live in this world, we are not of this world.  We are not simply to live in the hope that all will be well, but, in that very hope, we are also to live as if the kingdom has already come.  We are to live on earth as we will in heaven.

This is a very tall order!  Jesus tells us not to live as if the world around us is all we have. We are not to live as if our lives are bound by time and space.  We are not to live as if all resources are finite and all love is conditional.  We are not to live as if our happiness depends on our ability to live longer and healthier, our ability to possess more things, our ability to make more friends, or our ability to create more powerful weapons.

Rather, we are live in a world of infinite goodness, treating our limited time here on earth as a mere prelude to an eternity of life with our all-provident God.  We are live in a world of unconditional love, as God loved us by giving us his only Son, and as God continues to shower this unconditional love down on us and on all of his creation to this very day.   We are to live, as we were reminded this past Sunday, not bound by mere earthly government and authority – no matter how just and fair that authority may seem – but with Jesus as our King.

In very concrete terms, Jesus describes what this life looks like.  Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, forego violence, fight evil with good, be meek, merciful, mournful, be a slave to all, place complete trust in God for protection and sustenance, forgive seventy-seven times, and give without counting the cost.

The cost will be great, for living in the kingdom defies all common sense.  It contradicts the very obvious physical and temporal constraints of this world.  As a result, it makes many people – those who only think in terms of the world – very, very uncomfortable.  So uncomfortable, that it seems to threaten their very being. 

We see this dissonance quite clearly in the reactions to the Syrian refugee crisis.  While the Pope and the bishops insist that charity should drive us to assist in any way we can, many others insist that our primary duty is not love, but self-preservation.  And since it is almost impossible for us to sort out with certainty the dangerous from the benign, it makes sense – in a world in which God is not to be trusted – to simply keep the problem at arm’s length, or even better, at ocean’s length.  Those who would follow the Pope’s "ludicrous" thinking are, at best, idealistic fools; at worst, they are as dangerous as the terrorists themselves.

For me, the choice is clear – I either embrace the persecution that comes from living in Jesus’ name, living in Jesus’ kingdom, or I bind myself to a world of finite resources, limited time, and transitory pleasure – a world that doesn’t need God, a world of hell.

Choose the Kingdom, reject Hell.

Already but not yet

Last night, while we were out to dinner, Mary noticed that the lamp sconces were festooned with Christmas wreaths.  In other news, radio stations are playing Christmas carols 24/7, and Pumpkin Spice is out, Christmas blend is in.  We haven’t even celebrated Thanksgiving yet and Commercial Christmas has begun!  Oh well, 'tis the season.

Sometimes our readings at Mass seem just as out of kilter to us as Christmas before Thanksgiving.  Here we are, getting ready to thank God for all of the wonderful gifts he has given us, and we in this country have certainly been gifted with unimagined plenty.  Then we turn to the quiet preparations of Advent, and only then, with lights blazing, hearts filled with joy, and the air ringing with carols, we will celebrate the coming into the world of our salvation in the innocence of the baby Jesus in the stable.

But this morning, as prepare for a season of joy, we hear Daniel and Mark 13 at Mass…the “fire and brimstone” imagery of Jewish apocalyptic writing…a time unsurpassed in distress, the sun darkened, stars falling from the sky, Jesus coming as an almighty judge to gather the chosen and damn the wicked, etc., etc., etc.  Ouch.  Where’s that “Joy to the World” or “Silent Night” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” now?

In its wisdom, the Church forces our attention away from the comforting warmth of family gathered around the table laden with the turkey and trimmings of a Thanksgiving feast, the bright joy of remembrance of that first Christmas morning.  For it is easy for us to become complacent and think that Jesus saved the world some two thousand years ago, what more need we do but celebrate the coming of the kingdom?  In just a few short days, many of us will enjoy an abundance of gifts that are surely signs of God’s grace and his kingdom. 

In our complaisance, we can lose our sense of the kingdom to come where true, absolute, and eternal joy and peace reside.  This is the source of our Christian hope, that even though we know not when, we know not where, we know not how, Jesus will come again and all things wrong will be put right, not just for now, but for ever more.

This “already but not yet” tension has been with us since Jesus first came into the world. The kingdom is here, “at hand” as Jesus proclaims in the very first chapter of Mark, yet is “to come in glory” at the end of time.  Our readings today urge us to reflect on how we live in this “already but not yet” stage.

As we were horrified to hear just a few days ago, Satan seems intent to force us to dwell in and obsess in the “not-yet-ness” of our time.  In fact, he would rather we forget the “already” altogether, to write it off as pious foolishness.  He would rather we despair completely in the “not yet” and assume it will be nevermore. 

The tragedy in France compounded for us the horror we felt most personally here in Newtown not three years ago, and the horror the world felt some fifteen years ago on 9/11.  How are we to appreciate the “already” when we seem to be buried in and blinded by the “not yet?”

Fred Rogers gives us a clue.  Fred McFeely Rogers was the creator and host of what is perhaps the greatest children’s television show ever produced – Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.  He also happened to be a Presbyterian minister, and part of the appeal of his show was the richness of Christian spirituality which pervaded each episode.

He gave us a pearl of wisdom that helps us see the “already” especially in times where we are blinded by and lose hope in the “not yet.”  As he tells it, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things on the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.’”

And doesn’t that resonate with us here in Newtown.  Take a moment – or, as Fred Rogers would say – “close your eyes for ten seconds and think” – think of the reverence in which we hold the first responders at 9/11, many of whom gave their lives that day and many of whom are still dying today from their efforts during the recovery.  Think of the gratitude we felt – and still feel today – for the thousands upon thousands of people throughout the world who offered us material and spiritual support after 12/14.  Imagine the doctors and nurses in trauma centers in and around Paris these past few days.  Imagine the people rushing to the aid of friends and strangers as bedlam descended on Paris.

Where you find the helpers, there you will find faith in the “already.”  

There you will find hope in the “not yet.”

There you will find the light which darkness cannot overcome.

There you will find God.

Easter People

We all know from song that there are twelve days of Christmas, but Easter is a much bigger deal.  There are fifty days of Easter!  We can be wishing each other happy Easter and shouting out our alleluias until May 24^th this year, when the Easter season ends at Pentecost.

This is a logic to this.  While the Incarnation of Jesus is certainly worthy of celebration and praise, we are not really changed by it.  God becomes man, but we’re still the same.  But when Jesus allows the world to hit him with its worst, then conquers death by rising from the grave on Easter morning, we are transformed.  We become Easter people.  So, how exactly does that work?  Our readings today – the Emmaus story in Luke 24 and Peter and John at the Temple in Acts 3 – give us a clue to our new lives as Easter people.

Easter people are people who see the world – past, present and future – with new eyes, with Easter eyes.  The two disciples on the way to Emmaus were quite confused.  They knew their history and the prophets.  They knew that God had promised his people a Messiah, a king from David’s house who would conquer Israel’s enemies and reign with justice for ever and ever.  They had hoped Jesus would be this king, but their hopes were dashed when Jesus was crucified.  They couldn’t see where they could have gone so wrong.

Then, after the stranger explains the Scriptures to them, joins them for dinner, and breaks and blesses the bread, their Easter eyes are opened to see in a new way.  They see the Messiah not as an earthly king, a mighty general who conquers Israel’s enemies, but as a divine savior who conquers humankind’s greatest enemy, death itself.  They see Jesus and the past few, fateful days with eyes of faith.

Peter and John come to the Temple to pray and see a man who had been crippled since birth.  Both of them “look intently” at the man.  What do they see?  Do they see as they did when Jesus came upon a man blind from birth in John 9?  Do they simply see this man as one being punished for his sins, or perhaps punished for the sins of his parents?  No, they see the man in a new way, with Easter eyes.  They see the man as a child of God, as one for whom Jesus died.  They see him as Jesus saw each person he came across, with eyes of love.

Peter then says something very odd.  Peter asks the man to look at John and him.  The man does so, “expecting to receive something from them.”  The man doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to become part of the Easter people.  Peter has primed him to see as all Easter people see, with eyes of hope.

Like Cleopas and his companion, like all Easter people, we see the past with eyes of faith.   We see the historical Jesus not simply as a good man who lived, taught and died as all men do, but as the Christ of faith.  We see in the crucifix not an instrument of torture and death, but a sign of God’s infinite and unconditional love for each of us.

Like Peter and John, like all Easter people, we see the world and the people around us with eyes of love.  We see times of great tragedy and evil not as unmitigated darkness, but as opportunities to shine the light of God’s love. We see those who hate and despise us not as enemies, but as fellow sons and daughters of God, fellow creatures in the image and likeness of God, and though they may not know what they are doing, we see them as fellow objects of God’s love.

Like the man at the Beautiful Gate, like all Easter people, we see our future with eyes of hope.   We look to the future not with anxiety over what we are to eat or wear, but with confidence in God’s benevolent providence.  We see death not as an end, but as a transition to an eternity with the source of all joy, peace and love.

We are an Easter people, for we see the past with Easter eyes of faith; we see the present with Easter eyes of love; and we see the future with Easter eyes of hope.  

Happy Easter!  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Morality through Relationship

If you’ve ever been to Outback Steakhouse, you would notice several menu items listed as “no rules.”  I’m not really sure what it means – perhaps you can have it however you want it; or perhaps it is so decadent that you must not rules about healthy eating if you order it.

Some people think of Jesus as an “Outback Steakhouse” kind of guy – “no rules” is his motto.  Why worry about all those pesky rules that the Pharisees followed – just love Jesus, believe he is the Son of God, and you are saved!  After all, if we could save ourselves by following rules, why would God find it necessary to send His only Son to take on our mortal nature and suffer and die like the rest of us?

Yet, this morning we hear Jesus tells us that we should not break “the smallest part of the smallest letter of the law” or, heaven forbid, teach others to break the law. (Mt 5:18-19) In other places, he implies that at least part of the law is a gift from God, created solely for our benefit – “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mk 2:27).  As a devout Jew, it seems certain that Jesus was also a good follower of the law.  Otherwise, the Pharisees would not have invited him to dine with them, as they were scrupulous about not eating with those whom they considered unclean.

So, how do we reconcile salvation through God’s mercy and the need to follow the law and to encourage others to keep the law?  One clue is to look back at the Ten Commandments, which we just heard at Mass this past Sunday.

Before listing the fundamental moral and ethical rules – rules which guide our behavior and attitudes towards others, we are given the first three commandments that lay out our relationship with God. 

First, God is to be the most important thing in our lives.  Nothing can be more important to us than God, for that thing – which must have been created by God and is therefore inferior to God – must be a false god.  Second, God must not only be number one in our hearts, but he is also number one in our speech.  We should not use his name – for the ancients, the name was the essence of a person – frivolously, for our relationship is too serious and important.  Finally, He should be number one in our actions – so much so that we should be willing to dedicate one day of seven completely to him, putting aside our worldly concerns and duties to spend “quality time” with him.

Locked into this intense relationship with God, the rest of the law – how we are to interact with the all of God’s creation – flows as naturally water under the bridge.

The Ten Commandments – and Jesus – teach us that our morality is not based on a rule book, but on a relationship.  The rules that we follow are simply a consequence of our relationship with the One who created us, the One who loves us without limit or condition, and the one who desires nothing from us by our complete and utter love.  If we live in this relationship, the rules become part of our lives.  We enter a virtuous cycle.  Our love of God encourages and strengthens us to follow Jesus’ rule of love.  This, in turn, deepens our relationship with Jesus, and we are then emboldened to love his creation even more richly.

In contrast, if we ignore the relationship with God, if we separate ourselves from the love inherent to that relationship, the rule of love becomes a heavy burden, and we easily put it aside whenever the going gets too tough.  This is a vicious cycle.  As we deny or ignore the love of God, our love of his creation wanes.  This turns us into ourselves, and we become even less sensitive to the love of God, our only source of strength and courage, further weakening and discouraging our desire to love his creation.

Lent calls us to double down, or perhaps triple down, on our relationship with God – enriching it with our prayer, realizing the emptiness of false gods with our fasting, and remembering his great love and providence through our almsgiving.   Let the virtuous cycle begin.

Obedience

I’ve never had much problem following the Ten Commandments.  Well, I can’t say that I’ve always obeyed each and every one, for if I said that, I’d be breaking one of them right then and there.  But I’ve always known that I should follow them as best I can.  I’ve always felt guilty if I broke one of them and knew that when I did break them, I needed God to forgive me.  What I didn’t know, or knew wrongly, was why this was so.  Why should I obey them at all?

I suppose my first thought was that I was an oldest child.  Many psychologists have theorized that first-born children are compliant, seeking to be seen as upright, responsible mini-adults, someone like their parents who were the only ones in their lives at the most formative stage.  The theory may or not be true, but I was certainly like that.  My mom and dad were good people who obeyed the commandments. I wanted to see to be like them, so I obeyed, too.   So I internalized that my purpose in obeying the commandments was so that people would think I was good; that I was a grown-up.  But this couldn’t be the real purpose.  I’m grown-up now.  Do I still have to obey the commandments?  Isn’t it possible to be grown-up without obeying these ancient rules?

Of course, I soon learned that the Ten Commandments weren’t just my parents’ rules, they were God’s rules.  And Sr. Thecla assured my classmates and me that if we didn’t follow God’s rules, really, really, bad things would happen.  And of course, that’s true.  If I willfully and habitually ignore the commandments, I build walls between me and God.  If those walls get thick enough, I may never even know or believe that God is on the other side.  I may have walled myself into hell.  As I recall, Sr. Thecla had a much more graphic description of that process.

And while this is certainly a good reason to not break the laws, I then made a deadly mistake, though it seemed to make perfect sense.  If by breaking the laws, I damned myself to hell, then my purpose in following the laws was to gain my place in heaven.  The closer I followed the laws, the better I would be and then, the God would reward my obedience with more love and with heaven itself.   Not only would the laws save me from hell, they would save me for heaven.  For most of my life, I used this to justify following the Commandments.  But I was wrong again.  Even more importantly, my mistaken view of the Law’s purpose led me into dangerous spiritual ground.

I became quite proud of my obedience.  I found that I was much better at following the law than many of the people I knew.   That’s what a lifetime of practice would do for you.  Being better at following the law, I believed, made me a better person than many of the other people I knew.  I could even assume that because of my scrupulous obedience, God would love me more than he loved those who ignored his law.  After all, they were going to hell, right?  I was headed in the other direction.

Then came Jesus.  Jesus teaches us throughout the Gospel that salvation comes not through the law, but through relationship with Him, who is in intimate relationship with the Father.  It is only when we love and live in this intimate relationship, that we see the law as God’s gift, given to us to allow us to praise God, to thank God, and to love God as he loves us.  Certainly Jesus insists that we should obey the law, but our obedience does not lead to our salvation.  Rather, our salvation leads to our obedience.

We do not obey out of fear, as a slave obeys his master to avoid a lashing, but rather we obey out of love and gratitude, as a loved child obeys a loving parent, as a husband obeys his wife, and as a wife obeys her husband.

Furthermore, this proper ordering and interplay of grace and works then changes our view of the rest of God’s creation.   As we live in relationship with God and his infinite, unconditional and eternal mercy, we are impelled to go beyond the law – to live the fulfillment of the law which is Jesus himself, the one who laid down his life for me, for you, and for all of creation.  We see those who do not follow the law not as the damned and the lost, those less loved by God and by us, but as those who have not yet realized the grace of their salvation, have not yet experienced or recognized the great bounty of God’s love.

Why should I obey the Ten Commandments?  It is the right and just response to the good news that Jesus, out of God’s great love and mercy, has died to save me from the fires of hell, and desires me to enter into relationship with the one who is all love; the one who is all joy; the one who is all peace.

I obey the Ten Commandments not for my own gain, but as witness to the world of the infinite and unconditional love I have already received as pure gift; a gift offered to one and to all, forever and ever, amen.