Weekly Reflection 053109AD

Sunday, May 31, 2009AD

Pentecost Sunday

Pentecost 2009AD

We conclude the Lenten-Easter-Pentecost cycle today. The slogan for Ash Wednesday is “Remember that you are dust and unto dust, you shall return.” The slogan for Lent is “snap out of it and believe in the Gospel.” The slogan for Easter is “Jesus is Lord”. The slogan for Pentecost is “Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father sent Me, so I send you.”

Can we focus on the Spirit today? The word for spirit in Hebrew is ruach (and it is a feminine noun). The word for spirit in Greek is pneuma (and it is a neuter noun). This is important because Hebrew and Greek are the two biblical languages. The word for spirit in Latin (not a biblical language) is spiritus (and this can be a masculine or feminine noun)

Each year, we urge the Community to wear red clothing to Mass on Pentecost as a visual reminder that, like it or not, if we acclaim Jesus as Lord, we live with a different view of reality. Jesus and His Gospel is our absolute. Those filled with Holy Spirit are to live His Gospel as best we can in Christ Jesus. Sometimes, such living puts us “out of sync” with the System by which most people live. The goal of the System frequently is self-preservation of the Status Quo. This can involve violence, dishonesty, greed and arrogance.

In imitation of Christ, we recall that after His crucifixion, the Risen One opted not to get even with His institutional murderers. He offers the opportunity to follow in Christ His example. On the one hand, we can transmit violence, returning injury for injury in a downward spiral of violence that can cause the world some day to implode. However, in imitation of Christ, we can transform violence. We can remember that whether we care to admit or not, we are all brothers and sisters and that God is the Father of all, not some. A tough vocation, Jesus asks us, at least, to acknowledge that His way is the Way to go.

St Paul had a special strategy to implement the Gospel of Christ in the world. He established small communities over a two year period in pivotal cities in the Roman world. He believed in faith that a group of 20-30 or so people who tried to live authentic lives in Christ Jesus in large urban centers could change the world. While he writes, “Jesus is Lord”, he adds in another place, “Faith comes through hearing.” Today, he might add, “Sometimes actions in Christ Jesus speak louder than words.

It is clear from the development of the letters of St Paul within the Christian Bible that Christian living was quite distinctive and noteworthy. Christians had a different starting point and it showed in how they lived their lives.

St Paul saw a Christian vocation as a democratic call to all to live in Christ Jesus every moment of our lives. The Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962-1965, offered a new name to an old Catholic reality. The universal call to holiness, re-affirmed by Vatican II, is a reminder to us of what the Pentecost experience described in Acts and in John 20 (John’s original Easter chapter). We need to be reminded that, within our Catholic tradition, all, not some are called to live the Gospel and not just in Church. There are not meant to be super-Catholics.

All of us are called to live our lives in Christ’s Spirit, 60-60-24-7-365. All of us are called to be engaged seriously and responsibly in the dialogue with our culture. As an ancient Roman Christian writer said to Diognetus, “Christians are in the world what the soul is in the body.” Just as a human body needs an animating principle, we are called to be animators of society. Sadly, too often, we sit back and let others run the show.

Our red clothing today mirrors our baptism in the Holy Spirit. With God’s Help, may we answer the call! Not just in the church does Jesus need us, but He needs us engaged actively and intelligently in an outside arena that needs the insight of the Gospel of Life very much now more than ever. Followers of Jesus, a secular culture (even when they throw in a “God bless America” now and then to make themselves sound Christian) needs us just as the human body needs a soul. Just as the human body needs an animating principle each and every moment, so also does the world in which we live need the Animating Principle (aka the Holy Spirit) unleashed in all the Jesus Movement throughout our lives, not merely on a Sunday morning when we gather to renew our acquaintance with the Lord. It is an ongoing, never-ending process that the Holy Spirit has been in each of us and all of us everyday. Impress your kids. Keep in touch every Sunday; more importantly, keep in touch everyday!! 053109AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 052409AD

Sunday, May 24, 2009AD

Seventh Sunday of Easter

What If?

Today, three words dominate our second reading. 1 John tells us, “God is Love and the person who remains in love remains in God and God in that person”. The three words are God, Love and remain. How are they applicable to the everyday life of a Catholic?

What do we mean by the word “God”? What do we mean by “Love”? What do we “to remain in Love and in God” mean?

Blessed Juliana of Norwich wrote back in the thirteenth century that while most Catholics could handle the idea that God was almighty and that God was omniscient, most could not fathom that God is Love. She asked how differently we might behave if we believed St John’s words.

Certainly, Jesus wants us to be a community that celebrates God as Love as we deal with one another. Our community, however, is structured and sometimes, perhaps, structures become obstacles, if not ends, in themselves. Down through history, structured communities, church and state, have sometimes idolized the very structures meant to guarantee the communal life. In the process Catholics might obfuscat the Gospel that God is Love.

During the Fifty Days of Easter, we hear daily of our ancestors within the Jesus Movement who tried to live this Gospel in the Acts of the Apostles, our first reading at Mass. As we see, these folks were not perfect, but they lived with and in the insight that the Christ Quantum made a difference in their lives every moment. They gathered regularly to celebrate and to bolster one another in the Reality that God is Love.

Eventually, the Jesus Movement runs the risk of the mechanization of institutionalization. As long as the Vision remains focused on Jesus and His Gospel, there is little or no problem. However, when the Vision gets dimmed or blurred, troubles arise.

Hundreds of years ago, Blessed Juliana of Norwich said that in Western Christianity, people just did not always behave as if we really believed that God is Love.

We always need to remember that each person has deeply embedded in his or her brain the reptilian brain. There is the tendency, when provoked, to adopt a fight or flight kneejerk reaction to the provocation. In reptilian terms, if one opts to fight, it could be a fight to the kill.

In an effort to limit the extent to which redress for injury could be addressed, it was the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi that enacted the principle of Lex Talionis, the principle of “an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth” that later became part of the Mosaic Law. This was not to encourage getting even for injury, but limiting the amount of satisfaction that could be enacted.

With the development of honor-shame codes in the Meditterean world, the principle of code duello came into effect. What is one to do when one’s honor is attacked. (This Code Duello was in effect in Louisiana after it was admitted to the USA in the early 19^th century.)

Found in ancient religions, including the Mosaic Law of Israel was the Silver Rule, “Do not do to others what you would not want done to you.” A step further was the positive reversal into the Golden Rule in the Mosaic Law, “Do unto others as you would have done to you.” There are people today in this New Moment of Human History who say that the Golden Rule is the minimum of a global ethic that all people and cultures and nations can subscribe to if they are acting in good faith!!!)

Jesus goes one step further in the Sermon on the Mount when He tells us to practice non-violence in our dealings with one another. (Honest people know that He did, indeed, do so, despite the fact that Christendom said that He did not mean it the way it sounds.)

Building upon the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel that God is Love, Christians try to subscribe to a Third Way. This is an honest and constructive engagement with others with whom Christians disagree with the hope of a win-win situation for all sides. Jim Wallis speaks of this in the Great Awakening.

EF Schuhmacher also wrote that humanity was heading to a Great Convergence, a point of insight that whether people became believers or not in Jesus, that His Gospel, particularly the Sermon on the Mount and the Christian teaching that God is Love, is the only viable way in which the world can survive.

Around the same time, Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell articulated what they called their Manifesto in 1955, also endorsed by Pope Pius XII in Christmas of that year. “In the complex world of today, we must always remember our common humanity and forget everything else when facing conflicts.”

It was the unbaptized follower of Jesus, Mohandas Gandhi, who summed up much of what trajectory of the Gospel of Jesus in his teaching of ahimsa , never doing harm to another person (Actually, Gandhi attributed his learning that teaching to his wife!)

A member of St Patrick’s Jesus Movement adds the Armonk Corollary to this. A new Golden Rule, is “Alleviate any human suffering where we can through compassion.”

Through the Paraclete Spirit of Christ Jesus, we can come a long way from the feral reptilian brain. Do individuals and nations want to do so? 052409AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 051709AD

Sunday, May 17, 2009AD

Sixth Sunday of Easter

The Blindness of Mr Bumble

In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, there is an ironic and poignant scene in which Oliver dares to ask Mr Bumble at the Orphanage for more soup. Mr Bumble in his righteous indignation gets very upset. Behind his head are the words from 1 John, “God is Love”.

One of the last descriptions that conventional wisdom would offer as a trait of God is God is Love. Whoever God is, the One in Whom we (claim to) trust, most of us might demonstrate the fine art of “hedging our bets.” God may be love, but I will do my best to fend for myself. God might be Love, but God is unpredictable.

Jesus Who knows well that God is Love tells us to love one another as (God has) loved us. In fact, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus gives us a simple job description as His disciples, viz., “believe in the God of Life and the One Whom God sent” and “love one another”.

Bracketing his love commandment at the Last Supper, Jesus, as ever, practices what He preaches. He never asks us to do what He Himself has not done for us.

He had washed the feet of His disciples as a selfless act (pouring Himself out) for His own and of service of others. Recall His words in Mark 10.35, ”The Son of Man came to serve, not to be served, and to give His Life in ransom for the many”.

Next, He gave His Life in sacrifice for us, “Greater love than this no one has, that he would lay down His life for his friends.” While most of us are not called to lay down our lives literally for one another, we do so in lives of selflessness, sacrifice and service for our families, our communities.

Sadly, in colloquial American English, the word “love” has collapsed in usage as have the words “nice” or “interesting”. In the biblical language, Greek, there were at least 4 different words used for “love”. “When I “love” Italian food,” the word is “sorge.” When I “love “my neighbor, the word is “philia” When I love significant others, the word is “eros”. When I love without counting the cost, the word is “agape”.

The word used by the Fourth Evangelist is the word “agape”. It is the love based on the longing for relationship, but the willingness to live for the other within the relationship. It is a mode of life in which the relationship (and the people therein) become primary. Simply put, it is not what can this relationship do for me; rather, it is what I can do for this relationship.

In the past, some have characterized the three major religions, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, as three variations of dressing up the American Dream with religious language. Religion becomes, for some, something we do for an hour on a weekend because it is what Americans do.

What incarnational Catholicism aims for is the realization that the drive to philia and eros and agape built into the human psyche is the saturation of all life with the attitude that God is always with us and we are always with God. Whenever we live our lives with and for others, God is present and active. (Recall the mantra mentioned in the past, “God is a verb”.)

American culture has been described as superficial. (Recall that the theory that the entire culture might have Attention Deficit Dysorder.) Our culture has been described as hedonistic. (The good life is the name of the game for many.) As a group, we have a propensity to showiness. (For many, success is having more than most people.)

Sadly, with our built-in Holy Longing, when we have an abundance, we feel a sense of entitlement. When we don’t get what we want, we feel cheated and revert to our abundance to get even more. Where is the sacrifice, selflessness, service associated with Jesus’ call to love (agape) one another as I have loved you? Life in Christ Jesus is not co-terminus with the American Dream.

Mr Bumble must have heard the words, “God is Love” many times. He certainly heard them every Easter when he went to church. Still, did he understand the words? He knew the words, but did he know the words? (In the biblical sense, “to know” is to be intimately united with the known.)

The school of the Fourth Evangelist tells us that God is Love, that Jesus Christ Whom the God of Love has sent into the world has given us the great commandment to love one another as He loved us. He shows how, with the help of the Paraclete-Spirit, to live with faith in the God of Love and Life in selflessness, service, and sacrifice for others.

Did Mr Bumble get the Message? Does the system today get the Message? Do we all get the Message? Do we try, with God’s Help, try to live the Message? 051709AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 051009AD

Sunday May 10, 2009AD

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Cling to the Vine

St Paul wrote of the Church as the Body of Christ, a privileged term for Catholics throughout two millennia. In addition to St Paul’s imagery, Avery Cardinal Dulles commented that many American Catholics identify, as well, St John’s image of the “Vine and Branches” as a powerful one in understanding our relationship with Jesus and with one another. Indeed, three principal ways of understanding American Catholics should see ourselves as the “Body of Christ”, “the Little Flock of the Good Shepherd” (last Sunday!!) and “the Vine and the Branches.” (The three images are vivid ways for our self-understanding as an individual in the Christian community. You are a cell in which the DNA of Christ Jesus dwells since Baptism into the Body of Christ; you are a sheep in the Little Flock; you are a branch on the Vine of the Body of Christ.)

If we were asked how the branches cling to the vine, most would say immediately that it was a twofold response. First, we are to try with the aid of the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit) to obey the great love commandment of John’s Gospel, “Love one another as I have loved you” And how has Jesus loved us? He did so through service and sacrifice and selflessness for others.

Second, we cling to the Vine through prayer, community, the Scriptures and the sacraments, particularly Baptism and the Eucharist. There are, also, myriad other ways in which Jesus helps us to cling to Him.

Let us focus on the image of pruning that Jesus speaks to us today. Some would take the term “pruning” and understand it as the de-stabilizing, disorienting suffering that we all have to endure at one point or another in our lives. Suffering strips away the false concept that we are ultimately in control of our lives. Whether it is through disappointment, job loss, family problems, sickness, accidents, impending old age in a youth-oriented society, as well as death of loved ones, periodically, we get shaken up to realize that our grasp of security is tenuous and illusory.

It is at such times that we realize that we have no place to turn but to Jesus. He assures us that as we cling to the Vine, Which He is, that He and God the Father are in control, more intimately involved in our lives than we are. He asks each of us to make a leap of faith as we bear our pain, that, in the Spirit, He asks us to surrender, let go and trust the Paschal Mystery.

Traditional cultures teach young people that life is more than they are. Life does not revolve around the young. Living in extended, multi-generational families made that reality easier to understand. We are a part of a greater scenario in which we play a significant, but not central part. It is a humbling and a humanizing experience to realize that the universe does not revolve around oneself. We all have to learn the lesson. However, we all do not learn it at the same age.

Karl Rahner, probably the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20^th century, wrote that the Paschal Mystery (the process of ascent, descent and transformation that all creation experiences in Christ Jesus) should teach all of us a sense of “pessimistic realism”. Tough things happen in life; tough things are a part of life; life is the greatest gift of all.

Teilhard de Chardin, last century, spoke of the negative diminishments of life, what Catholics call today as the “cross”. The Fourth Evangelist hints that Jesus’ reference to the “pruning of the branches” means how the Word of Jesus helps us to endure the “cross” as the coming of age of a mature person within a Catholic framework.

Traditional Catholic theology teaches that every human person is offered actual grace, viz., the call of the Infinite within his or her individual life, to Which the person responds (or not!!!) However, God offers actual grace to each of us, even if it is within the “ego-destabilization process” of pruning, viz., the call to surrender, let go and trust the Holy Mystery at work in your life and in the universe.

American Catholics grasp easily the threefold images of the “Body of Christ”, “Little Flock of the Good Shepherd” and “the Vine and the Branches”. However, the Paraclete does it, may we always cling to the Vine of Jesus Christ. Teach your kids. It is even more important than playing baseball. 051009AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 050309AD

Sunday, May 3, 2009AD

4^th Sunday of Easter

Good Shepherd Sunday

Whose Voice Do We Hear?

This Sunday, Catholics hear the voice of the Good Shepherd who tells us that “(His) sheep hear his voice”. How well do we hear His voice these days when people of various ideologies are frequently citing their religiosity as a sign of their deep faith?

Today, May 3, we commemorate the 26^st anniversary of the US Catholic Bishops’ letter, The Challenge of Peace, authored in part by John Cardinal O’Connor (whose 9^th anniversary we commemorate on the same day). Three new terms become part of Catholic vocabulary with this bishops’ letter.

1) We are asked to be consistent in our human life opinions as we are pro-life on every human life issue. As we were reminded at Cardinal O’Connor’s funeral, “He taught us to be pro-life on all issues and not some issues.” He taught us to follow the seamless garment theory of the sanctity of all human life.

2) We were asked to practice an on-going conversion, known as disarmament of the human heart, a new name for an old Catholic axiom. With God’s Help, we try to live the Sermon on the Mount, the forgotten call to non-violence that Jesus makes in His summary sermon. We recognize that, with God’s Help, that we try to adapt the practice of non-violent behavior in the hope to become non-violent.

3) We are asked to realize that we live in a new moment in human history. We have the capacity to undo what the God of Life has been doing since the beginning. We can literally alter God’s plan for creation through manipulation of weaponry, nuclear energy, stem cell research and eugenic reproduction. The world has changed since Hiroshima. We need to snap out of illusions. We need to evaluate the present time with the new reality with an entirely new attitude. (Cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, # 80.)

No doubt, there were always be weirdoes (of the right and the left) who feel their way is the only way. Some of the weirdoes even operate out of a “God wills it” attitude, viz., (usually God agrees with them and disagrees with everyone who disagrees with them. Smart God!!

However, on the contrary, not so long ago, a English Catholic economist, EF Schuhmacher, spoke of the need and the eventual arrival of the Great Convergence. This will happen when men and women of good will become a critical mass, change agents, channels, catalysts for serious change in the way that world looks at itself. He opined that whether or not people ever become baptized followers of Jesus, even those who claim that they only respect Him (while not accepting Him as the Absolute Savior) will see that His programmatic is the viable to human survival in the new moment of human history. As the Crucified and Risen One still teaches us things that now make more sense than ever. 1) We are children of God; we are all children of Eve; we are all family. 2) We share a common home (which we have abused and now which is talking back to us!!) 3) We need new ways to settle conflicts now peacefully that we have developed weapons of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) 4) We need to remember our common humanity and forget all the rest when trying to settle such disputes. 5) We need never to stop asking the question about the lives of others less fortunate than we, “Is all that fair?” 6) We need to impress our kids by taking seriously the call of Jesus the Good Shepherd (echoed by John Cardinal O’Connor in the Challenge of Peace) and EF Schuhmacher in the Great Convergence and Jim Wallis in the Great Awakening to hear the Voice of the Good Shepherd and practice what we preach. Actions speak louder than words.

We are hearing these days about the flu cases throughout the world. We are now aware of the negative effects of globalization on the world economy, although the poor throughout the world learned that lesson a long time ago. When Catholics go to the movies, listen to speeches, watch the news, do we participate passively or do we use our moral principles as a criterion? One thing that we learn from quantum physics is that all reality is a relational matrix, a cosmic web, an all inclusive universal. Attitudes and actions today, on your part, even in small things, have ramifications for your children and their children. Choices today will have important ramifications for your children and grandchildren in the future as we remember that we can never hear the Creation story of Genesis with the same ears ever again. One thing that every mature American Catholic must remember. We live in a new moment. 050309AD jfq