Weekly Reflection 112402AD

Jesus was Her Lord

We celebrate this weekend the Solemnity of Christ the King, as we anticipate, liturgically, our belief that God’s Kingdom will arrive, that God’s Will will be done. Yet, we believe that, even now, the Kingdom is already come, whenever people practice, with God’s Help, ethical monotheism as taught by Jesus.

One function which is very primitive in the human subconscious is the tendency to identify “in group” and “out group.” Who belongs to our family, our clan, our village, our nation? However, this tendency to identify “in groups or out groups” can get problematic in certain areas when imputation of guilt or responsibility for injuries, real or perceived, makes one feel a sense of self-righteousness over others.

Dorothy Day, a well-known Catholic, who died on Nov 29, 1980 AD in NYC, understood the tendency to “scapegoat the other” as the enemy as a dysfunctional way of exonerating one’s self of responsibility for one’s response to an injury, real or perceived.

However, she understood that all of us stand before God as people who have tried to be ‘gods” in our lives. She understood that the original sin described in Genesis 3 is really succumbing to the original lie, “You too can be like God.” You too can control reality. In one’s self-deception, we can easily blame others when we feel that we can and should control our reality and don’t.

She tried to live her life, with God’s Help, in conformity to the teachings of Jesus, particularly, the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew’s Gospel. (Maybe the Sermon on the Mount was the original “Straight Talk Express”?) Jesus reminds us in the Beatitudes that the person who, with God’s Help, acknowledges God (not the false god, EGO (Easing God Out) as the Center of Reality, is moving in the right direction. She understood that we have all been blessed with many gifts by God in our lives. However, she realized that one’s life was not about oneself, but rather about one’s place in God’s plan for reality. She knew that she had to use her gifts in service to others to acknowledge God as her Center.

Whether it was protesting air-raid drills (when she sat in Central Park), her marching with Cesar Chavez on the California migrant workers pickets, her care for homeless people at the many hospitality houses, beginning in NYC, that she established, she believed that she was doing God’s Will by trying to view reality from God’s perspective, not her own.

Her ministry in NYC and throughout the world was to show concern as a voice of the silent and helpless. She showed her concern for the “least of the sisters and brothers”. She understood that Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel which she treasured so much, that final judgment is based on our response to the hidden Christ in our midst, even in those we sometimes scapegoat. 112402 AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 111702AD

Sunday, November 17, 2002AD

33^rd Sunday in Greentime

A Sad Anniversary

Thirteen years ago, this weekend, many were shocked by the murder of 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper and daughter in the University of Central America in El Salvador. Their murderers, later established, were assassins associated with the military.

The massacre symbolized the 75,000+ people of El Salvador who died in the 1980’s in a nation with the size of and population of Massachusetts.

The civil war, waged in El Salvador for so many years, was called a “war of national security” against the communist menace. Sadly ironic but historically telling, the Berlin Wall, such a symbol of communism, was brought down a mere ten days earlier. China and Cuba notwithstanding, the communist monolith was cracking.

One of the Jesuit martyrs was Fr Ignacio Martin Baro, born in Spain on November 7, 1942. He became the only PhD in psychology in El Salvador. He studied the effects of violence upon war-torn people, especially children. (He spoke of one time of a meeting with a group of Indians who had witnessed a massacre in their town. His first reaction was the witnesses were all crazy. Then, it dawned on him that the violence had created dysfunction in the Indians. They were reacting normally to an abnormal situation.)

This insight changed his view of psychology. He felt that traditional psychological analysis was a form of individual self-help in which one tried to come to grips with problems. That was well and good. However, he saw that it was important for psychology not to be bourgeois only; rather, we should want to be “well for others” and to “make others well”. Psychologists should try to critique culture to highlight anything in the culture that is dysfunctional. The individual psyche and the cultural psyche had a symbiotic or parasitical relationship.

He re-interpreted St Irenaeus’ statement in the third century, “God’s greatest glory is the human person fully alive.” Baro saw this not as a call to personal self-help, but as a call to use psychology to eliminate whatever is dysfunctional (personally or culturally) in human development.

This weekend, we hear the familiar parable of the talents, in which the wealthy man gives various amounts of money to the three individuals. The last man was confronted by the donor for not using his gift.

Everything to us is a gift or predicated on a gift. Think about it for a while. However, God’s gifts make demands upon us to share with those who have not received the abundance of the gift that we received.

Ignacio Martin Baro has been called the “First Martyr of Psychology.” He tried to use his talent in psychology for the good of the people of El Salvador, not for personal self-aggrandizement. He understood Jesus and St Irenaeus very well.

To some in El Salvador, all this sounded subversive. His last words were, “You are unjust. You are rotten.” His murderers did not listen. 111702 AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 111002AD

Sunday, November 10, 2002AD

31^st Sunday in Greentime

(Not) Vanna

In several European monasteries, there are mosaics entitled “The Wheel of Fortune”. In some of these mosaics, the wheel is turned by a kindly old man with a white beard. In others, the wheel is turned by a young, beautiful woman.

The old man is a masculine image of God the Father; the young woman is a feminine image of Lady Wisdom. Why two images?

Anthropomorphism is the description of God in human images. It is of what humans are capable. God is transcendent and cannot be understood in human terms, so we have to use images that we can relate to God a little bit, at least, analogously.

Using the predominant (though not total) masculine image, reflecting the culture of the time, in one image, God is depicted as an old man. Using present (though not prevalent) feminine biblical imagery, the mosaics depict God as a young beautiful woman, Lady Wisdom.

In the latter books of the Hebrew Bible, the image of Wisdom personified becomes a way in which the Mystery of God becomes manifest to humans. The Hebrew word for “wisdom” is Hokmah , a feminine word; the Greek word for “wisdom” is Sophia, also a feminine word.

In our first reading today, Lady Wisdom, a feminine manifestation of God, “hastens to make Herself known”. “Taking thought of Lady Wisdom is the perfection of prudence.”

The Wheel of Fortune represents the vicissitudes of human living. In the image, at 12 o’clock, a man is depicted as happy and dressed like a king. At 3 o’clock, he has a worried look on his face and the clothing is a bit tattered. At 6 o’clock, he is in tears and in rags. At 9 o’clock, he looks slightly recovered and hopeful, on the road again. In all cases, the Wheel of Fortune is spun by the old man or the young woman; never the two at the same time.

The Wheel of Fortune teaches us that the Divine (not we) spins the Wheel of Fortune. While we would like to always find ourselves at 12 o’clock, such is not always the case. We go through good times and bad. God’s clock is not always our clock.

Theologian, Fr Richard Rohr, describes life as a combination of agony and ecstasy. We live in a culture that tries its hardest to control reality. Our culture wants it always to be 12 o’clock when we ride high. That is great if it were possible. However, the agony involved, at times, in human living preclude the possibility that we can always control reality and always live lives of ecstasy. It would be nice, but it doesn’t work like that.

The figure of Lady Wisdom, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, morphed into the image of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate, Who becomes for us the Face of God. He teaches the same lesson as the kindly old man and Lady Wisdom. Do we hear Him? 111002 AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 110302AD

Sunday, November 3, 2002AD

31^st Sunday in Greentime

Are You Talkin’ to Me?

We know from the Gospels that Jesus and some of the religious authorities of His time locked horns on several occasions. As we reach Jerusalem with Jesus and the 12 in Matthew’s Gospel, we recall the expulsion of the money changers from the temple which occurred shortly after the Palm Sunday procession into the city. Recall that during this event, Jesus was proclaimed as “David’s Son” and “Hosannas” were proclaimed to celebrate His arrival into the Holy City. The gospels which we have been hearing for the past several Sundays involved a challenge to what Jesus was doing from various segments of the religious elite.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus goes to work on the scribes and Pharisees, who tried to interpret the Law of Moses for the people in an overly-scrupulously effort (from their own viewpoint) to guarantee the stability of the Jewish religion. (It is important to know that whatever Jesus said in the confrontation reported in today’s Gospel was past down through several generations before the Author of the First Gospel composed Mtt 23, whence our Gospel today arises.) During that time, in 70 AD, the Roman armies had destroyed the city of Jerusalem, including the Jerusalem Temple. As a result, after the cataclysm of 70 AD, there were only two viable alternatives for Jews in a “temple-less” setting. 1) The Judaism of the scribes and Pharisees had now morphed into rabbinical Judaism. 2) The Jewish Messiah People (aka Christians) who followed Jesus of Nazareth were still a force within Judaism. (In addition, this group now had affiliations with Gentiles who were in other parts of the world accepting Jesus as Lord.

There was an obvious clash between these two remaining Jewish groups after 70 AD. The scribes and Pharisees did all in the power to purify and strengthen Judaism in the post-70 AD days. Since so many Gentiles had now become affiliated with Christianity and since so many Christians were taking Jesus’ Gospel of non-violence seriously, relations were strained between rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. This strain is reflected in today’s Gospel.

It is important for us to remember the perennial nature of Jesus’ denunciations of those who use religion in any way for self-aggrandizement. For the Jewish authorities then, the important thing was to maintain at all costs the Jewish traditions. In the contemporary world, all religious leaders are under a caution from this Gospel today. Whenever the religion becomes an idol in itself, Jesus’ denunciations start to kick in again. To paraphrase Jesus in another place, “Religion exists for the human person; the human person does not exist for religion.” In these traumatic days, it is important for religious leaders (Catholics, included) to heed Jesus warnings to the professional religionists of His time. 110302 AD jfq