Sunday, July 12, 2009AD
Fifteenth Sunday in Greentime
Neuralgic Nabi’s
About three hours from here, up I-95 North, our neighbors in Rhode Island are debating about changing the official name of their state. The smallest state, ironically, has the longest name, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The name goes back to the days of the settlement by the English following 1636. The founder of the “Providence Plantation” was Roger Williams, who has been called both an “irrepressible democrat” and/or a “kook”. He might be called a “nabi”, the Hebrew word for “prophet”, one through whom God speaks.
Prophets, then and now, can be neuralgic, offensive to pious ears. They frequently provoke indignation and fury. Roger Williams found that out. In our Scriptures today, so did Amos of Tekoa and Jesus of Nazareth. Amos was told to “hit the road” after he denounced Israelite idolatry linked to economic and social injustice. Yet, Israel kept his writings because they knew he was on to something. We all know what happened to Jesus of Nazareth, when He arrived in Jerusalem. In more modern times, we know what happened to Mohandas Gandhi, much of whose teaching was based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Mtt 5-7, read it sometime because it was written with you in mind!) and what happened to Martin Luther King and Archbishop Oscar Romero and countless others.
In the long run, Roger Williams got off easily. He came to Massachusetts, in 1635. Because of his religious background, (he studied at Cambridge in England), he became the minister of a Puritan Church in Salem. He had a problem with the idea of a “Zion on a Hill”, viz., the Puritans were going to build a theocracy, a commonwealth based on how God wanted it to be (They knew God’s Will; you didn’t.) Within a year, he was told to get out of Massachusetts for several reasons. 1) He felt that church and state should be separated. 2) He felt that a civil government could not enforce religious laws. (There had been a fine levied by the colony of people who did not attend the Puritan Church. 3) Going for the jugular, he said that the land belonged to the Indians, not King Charles I, who was divvying it up for his friends to make money. Pious ears were offended. As someone wrote recently, “in a community of religious fanatics, the outspoken Williams became the guy who all the other Puritans wished would lighten up on religion.”
Williams walked in the winter to what is now Providence, RI, 160 miles up I-95. He got the permission to live there from the Narragansett Indians and no money was exchanged in the process. Later on, when the whites and Indians were involved in Indian Wars, Indian women were acting as babysitters for the children of settlers in Providence.
However, Williams was no bleeding heart. He felt that anyone who disagreed with him would end up in hell. However, he felt that there should be such a thing as “soul-liberty”. He felt that one had the right to believe what he or she wanted. As a result, Providence tolerated Jews, Quakers, even Catholics! He felt that they would get theirs ultimately from God, but live and let live here and now. (It was a primitive expression of what became the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, 1791, 160 years later!) In 1965, at Vatican Council II, the Catholic Church officially endorsed “freedom of conscience”, based primarily on the thought of Rev John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit.
Roger Williams lived to a ripe,old age. Other nabi’s were not so lucky. As Archbishop Dolan, and others, put it, the job of the nabi is “To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Not always do people like to hear a critique based on God’s point of view. The etymology of the Hebrew word “nabi” seems to be “someone standing on a mountain, who sees reality from a different angle, viz., God’s slant or angle.
All Catholics, through baptism, become “cells” in the Body of Christ. His DNA, the Holy Spirit, lives in each of us. As a result, we share in the mission of Jesus Christ in this world. As St Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no hands but yours.” More recently, Teilhard de Chardin said, based on St Paul’s concept of the Body of Christ, that “Each of us is Christ in space and time.” As Blessed Teresa of Calcutta said, “Each of us is called to do something beautiful for God.” As Blessed John XXIII and Vatican II taught, “Each of us shares at baptism and throughout life in Christ, a universal call to holiness.”
USA Catholics have been challenged to live (w)holistic ,“catholic” lives. The word “catholic” is based on two Greek words, kata – according to and (w)holos -- entirety. “Catholic” means imbuing total human living in Gospel thinking, things affecting the group. Recently, we have been hearing more and more about some basic principles of Catholic thought that should permeate how we behave economically, socially, politically, globally with one another and with our environment. They include many familiar ideas such as “absolute value of human life, the consistent life ethic, the seamless garment theory”, as well as the preferential option for the poor (everyone counts with God, not just some), as well as the reality of the universal process of ascent, descent, transformation that nobody escapes.
Some actively reject the message as those who persecuted the prophets such as Amos, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Jesus of Nazareth. (Maybe, Roger Williams who lived to talk about it.)
Others offer passive aggressive responses. Many make excuses that prophets do not live in the real world, with the bottom line. (See where it got us, folks.) Others make excuses leading to an evaporation of faith. Examples include 1) Jesus cannot be for real. 2) I cannot do what Jesus expects of me, just little old me. That’s up to the religious. 3) That does not sound like the Jesus that I have created in my image and likeness. Sound familiar? 071209AD jfq