Weekly Reflection 062506AD

Sunday, June 25, 2006AD

12^th Sunday in Greentime

4^th Sunday after Pentecost

Don’t You Care?

We return to our regular cycle of Sunday readings from the Gospel of St Mark. We hear the familiar story of the storm at sea and Jesus’ dozing off in the midst of the tempest. We know when we first hear the story how it will turn out.

Many have commented on the primordial imagery of the scene. In ancient times, the sea was an ambivalent symbol. (It remains such today as we think of what the sea did in the Tsunami in 2004 and in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.) It is a symbol of life and death, blessing and horror. The storm at sea imagery plays into the archetype. All of us, at times, ask the question of the disciples of Jesus when our seas get stormy. “ Don’t You care that we are perishing?”

We ask for the grace to believe that Jesus cares that our lives are in distress. We need constant prayer for strength. When we pray His Prayer, we say “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

Our first reading is from the Book of Job, where the believer is pushed to the point of despair as Job wonders why all sorts of cataclysms have confronted him. YHWH seems to be bragging in the reading today that Job really doesn’t understand the big picture. Three famous quotes from Job appeared this week in our Morning Prayer. 1) We accept good things from God. Should we not be willing to accept the bad as well? 2) Naked came I forth from my mother’s womb; naked I shall go back again. 3) The YHWH gives; YHWH takes away. Blessed be the Name of YHWH. Only the person gifted with faith can pray these words. We pray for the gift.

A useful template for understanding contemporary life emerges from India. The Hindu tradition speaks of four stages of life. The first is “roots and wings”, comparable to our children in formation. Interestingly, we know now that the transcendent wiring in a young person’s brain is not developed until the youngster is about 18 years of age. The second stage is “householder”, when we build our tower”, viz., early adulthood. We take the world by storm and try to make our mark. This is what God wants, provided that we follow God’s moral principles in the process. The unpredictable third stage is known as “forest dwelling”. This occurs in the threshold moments of life, the liminal moments, the thin times in which we realize (at any age) that we are not in complete control of our lives, no matter how much we pretend to be. With the gift of faith in Christ Jesus, this time of “forest dwelling” jolts us from building our towers to learning to trust the Holy Mystery.

The final stage is “the holy old fool”, when we learn to bear the pains of life, to make our leaps of faith and to surrender, let go and trust the Holy Mystery permeating life 60-60-24-7-52.

Jesus wants to prepare us for the challenges of all stages of life. However, sometimes, even He finds it difficult to break through. That is why we need constant relationship with Him and with one another in Him as identifiable members of the Jesus Movement. In these moments of difficulty, we, like the disciples on the rough sea, ask the same question, “Don’t You care that we are perishing?” Jesus is constantly responding to our pleas, if we give Him the opportunity to break through our non-stop, noisy, cluttered airspace. That is why for 2000 years, the Jesus Movement convenes on the Lord’s Day. And, what about our children? More next week!! 062506AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 061806AD

SUNDAY, JUNE 18, 2006AD

CORPUS CHRISTI

The Family’s Gathering

We celebrate the anniversaries of the dedication of our parish church and our parish center this weekend. Often, this celebration coincides, as it does this year, with Corpus Christi, one of the most loved of Catholic feasts.

Our parish church building is recognized as one of the architectural gems in the Archdiocese of New York. (In fact, a picture of our church building sits over the secretary’s desk in the Chancery Office in NYC.)

However, it is important to remember that the People are the Church. It is actually incorrect to refer to the edifice at 29 Cox Ave as our Parish Church. We should correctly call the edifice, the domus ecclesiae, viz., the home of the church. Another correct biblical term would be that the domus ecclesiae is our paraoikia , viz., our other home, our second home.

Psychologists speak these days about our third place. Our first place is usually our home; our second place is either our place of business or our school, where we spend much time. Hopefully everyone has a third place, where he or she can let one’s hair down and feel comfortable. For the Community of St Patrick in Armonk, our third place is our “paroikia” our “other home”, “the home of the People of our Church,” our domus ecclesiae at 29 Cox Avenue.

Visitors to our domus have commented on its circular shape, which resembles the homes of people in other parts of the world. Not for nothing, the altar, the table of the Lord, is directly in the center of the edifice. Here we are nourished as the Body of Christ by our Community’s gathering, our Hearing of the Word and our sharing the Eucharist.

Others have commented upon our weekly gatherings as a church as a reminder of the ancient custom of a tribe gathering in memory of the founder of the tribe. In a real way, His genes exist in each member of the tribe so He is truly present. The tribe gathers regularly. The tribe talks about Founder and speaks of His heritage now when and where His descendents find themselves. Then, we eat His favorite food, the food by which His Memory is preserved and lived in a real way by the tribe. As we go home to our own dwellings, we are enriched by our gathering and our sharing our common heritage and stories and the Favorite Food of our Tribe’s Founder.

Recently, in his first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas (God is Love) as Successor of St Peter, Pope Benedict wrote, however, that our weekly gatherings have a final part about which every Catholic should think. What effect has our gathering on our behavior the other 167 hours in the week?

A special checkpoint is how does our gathering in Jesus’ Name affect our treatment of the poor and of our enemies? Does our sharing in our tribal gathering rub off by treating those less fortunate than we any differently? Does our sharing in our tribal gathering rub off on us by treating our enemies any differently. Do we try to live the basic kin-dom (sic) ethics of our Leader’s Message (aka Gospel), the call to glocalization (sic) or the need to practice xenophilia (sic), concern for those different than we? Do we even try to recognize the fact that God sees all people as members of Christ’s family, even those whom we cannot tolerate? Or do we go along with the “system”, the conventional wisdom of a media-driven, middle class, mass consciousness (aka the world)? Where are our children in all of this?

Do our weekly gatherings introduce us in any way to an alternate view of reality that our Tribal Founder calls the Kingdom of God? It is something to think about as we celebrate the anniversary of the dedications of our domus ecclesiae, our paroikia (other home) this weekend. 061806AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 061106AD

SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2006AD

TRINITY SUNDAY

A Triangle and/or A Circle

In the fifth century, St Augustine of Hippo realized that it would be easier to pour the Mediterrean Sea into a hole on the beach than to grasp the Mystery of God, One in Three, that we celebrate. Still, with God’s Help, we try to use metaphors and images a little better.

Frequently, in churches dedicated to St Augustine, the image of an equilateral triangle has been used to stress the three equal persons in one God that St Augustine tried to comprehend. However, another symbol has come into vogue in the last several years. Neither exhausts the mystery, but clarifies the Trinity a bit.

Many have used the triangle of St Augustine and/or the shamrock of St Patrick to, at least, make the densest of Mysteries a bit clearer. Both images stressed the equality of the three persons in one God.

In the Baltimore Catechism, the question of What is man (sic)? was answered with A man is a creature composed of body and soul, made in the image and likeness of God. The next answer specified that the likeness to God was principally in the soul.

Traditionally, the ability to think and to will and to love was seen by many, including St Augustine, as the point in which the human person reflects the image and likeness of God, about which we hear in Genesis 1, with creation story. However, now, people are looking at God’s likeness to a fully-“shalomed” (perfected or integrated or whole) person. Three characteristics of a human person are transferred back to God. 1) Each human person is equal to everyone else (or should be!). 2) Each thrives in relationship with one another. 3) Each is ultimately a Mystery, even to oneself.

Therefore, 1) there is an equality in the Trinity of the Three persons. 2) There is ongoing Relationship within the Trinity, that was called by the Greek Fathers of the Church, Perichoresis, literally that the Three Persons dance around One Another. Now, some use the image of the circle to express the Trinity. One theologian even said that the Trinity is not the three equal dancers, but the very Dance itself! 3) There is a Mystery about the nature of God that can never be cracked. We can never know God totally, just as we cannot know ourselves. We try, and that is all right.

Sadly and correctly, in the last century, German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, said that for most Catholics, the Trinity is irrelevant and embarrassing. Skeptics have made jest of it throughout the years.

However, now the Trinity is proclaimed as an invitation to all creation mediated by the Incarnation of Christ Jesus (the icon of the Father and the pattern of creation) to join in the very Life of God. Christ Jesus of Whom we become a cell through baptism into Him now incorporates us into the Trinitarian Life.

In these days, in Catholic quantum theology, we remember that the cosmos, the macro-universe itself appears to be in orbital relationship. We remember that the atom, the micro-universe, is in orbital relationship as well.

To refuse healthy relationships

with one another is a source of disengagement from others in the universe, which we can call sin. One theologian said recently, that one cannot explain God and/or Love completely. One can only experience God and/or Love. Both paradoxes, viz of the triangle and the circle prompt us to live the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity in our daily lives, not to explain it. 061106AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 060406AD

Sunday June 4, 2006AD

Pentecost Sunday – The 50^th Day of Easter

The Feast of the Holy Spirit

The Red Blends into Green

We celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit, the Fiftieth Day of Easter this weekend. Our red clothing this morning reminds us that the Spirit of God comes upon us in Baptism and then, again and again and again throughout our lives.

We celebrate today the most egalitarian of Christian festivals. We recall that we are in the Solidarity of the Holy Spirit with the Primitive Christian Community. Last week, St Luke told us that the group consisted of the 12 (with the election of Matthias), Jesus’ relatives and friends, the women (including Mary Magdalen) who made the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem with Jesus and picked part of the tab, and Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The beginnings of the Jesus Movement consisted of about 120 people. We are that Christian Community in the Spirit in New York in 2006AD. What a lofty vocation it is that God has called all of us to fulfill, with God’s Help, each day!

Sadly, everyone gets caught up in routine. Sadly, everyone conforms to mass consciousness of a system that prefers to guarantee its own security and to deny the reality of poverty in spirit, viz., that everyone of us stands before God with empty, soiled hands.

Pentecost sends us a powerful reminder that God has great hopes that of each of us and all of us and that God empowers us to fulfill those hopes in Christ. Energizing us with the Holy Spirit, the God-given power for ordinary folks to do extraordinary things, God wants each of us to fulfill his or her specific vocation in the mundane, the routine and the ordinary moments of life.

The American Catholic theologian, Thomas Merton, wrote often that Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) had succumbed to a Promethean notion of Christianity. He said that we stressed the heroic rather than the usual and banal.

In the early days of Christianity, we developed the cult of the martyrs, red martyrdom. A person, not matter what he or she had done with 99.9% of life, automatically became a saint if he or she shed blood for Christ.

Later, when the heroic age of the martyrdoms became the Age of Christendom (when it was expected that you had to be a Christian), a new form of witness evolved, that of white martyrdom, when one became a missionary or entered a strict monastic setting to live a difficult life.

However, now we see that, all along, there was a third type of martyrdom, witness to Christian faith. We call it green martyrdom. This means that each of us does his or her daily task with the realization that, indeed, the Spirit of God always energizes us to do in the ordinary whatever our specific task might be. We try to be faithful spouses and parents; we try to be honorable and trustworthy employees; we try to be faithful to friends and neighbors; we try, with God’s Help, to do unto others consistently what we would done unto us. It is not easy, but nothing is impossible with God. Doing the ordinary tasks of our lives is the Spirit-filled way in which Catholics have lived the Life of the Spirit for 2000 years.

St Matthew relates in Jesus’ genealogy that God brought about the birth of the Messiah through people who were unlikely, unworthy and unknown. Recently, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta said repeatedly, “God does not call us to be successful; God calls us to be faithful.” God enables us to be faithful. The red of Pentecost blends into Green Martyrdom as we celebrate the constant outpouring of the Spirit. What began in the Upper Room, the Cenacle, at 9AM, on Pentecost morning, 30AD, is the outpouring of the Spirit that never stops. 060406AD jfq