Weekly Reflection 032810AD

Sunday, March 28, 2010AD

Palm Sunday

Life is Bigger than We Are

The disciples of Jesus (that’s us, folks!!) enter Holy Week this weekend as we celebrate our participation in the Paschal Mystery of the Lord. We share in the cruciform process. Life is one of ascent, descent and transformation. Our sharing is happening constantly, but we usually do not perceive it. From Thursday evening through Sunday evening, in the Easter Triduum (3 days), we proclaim liturgically. We remember, in gratitude and thanksgiving, that we participate in the Death and the Resurrection of the Lord, 24-7-365 .

We live in a culture that has been described as a “therapeutic, individualistic” culture. The axiom is “I am who I am”. People feel a malaise at times. More and more, many seek a panacea in therapy. Wise people rejoice in the gifts of healing provided by psychotherapy. However, we must remember that we are individuals created in community. Most Catholic psychotherapists themselves urge us to remember that they do not offer cure- alls. In a society stressing the individual at the cost of community, we need to remember that individual therapy is an answer, not the Answer.

We are part of a community as well, with which we should identify in a healthy fashion. Here the operative axiom is “We are who we are”. We rejoice in our membership in the Catholic community, in our American citizenship, our ethnic and racial backgrounds, etc. Yet, when such identities become security blankets if we find them as the absolutes of life (as opposed to YHWH, the Father of Jesus, the God of Life, the God of Mystery), we will someday become disappointed and disillusioned.

The Paschal Mystery focuses our attention to our belief that the operative axiom for all is found in the Transcendent, viz., the Mystery of God, in which we all live. Now the operative, all inclusive axiom is God’s self-identification, “I am Who am.” This transcendent axiom of YHWH, for followers of Jesus, and for everyone else, (although Christians are the ones called to spread the Word,) subsumes and relativizes other axioms.

Our God is revealed in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His salvific sharing in our life and death. We all experience disillusionment, disappointment, betrayal, accident, sickness and suffering in our lives. The Cross takes a variety of shapes and sizes. Such crosses can become opportunities for growth in faith and strength when we accept them as part of our participation in them as part of the Mystery revealed in the death and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, into Whom we are all baptized.

As we hear Jesus’ dying words this week twice, they reflect in a human dichotomy what Catholics feel in our lives. In Luke on Palm Sunday, Jesus dies with the words of Psalm 31 on His lips, “God, into Your Hands, I commend My Spirit!!” Jesus died the way that He lived; through His Holy Spirit given to us in Baptism and throughout our lives, He energizes us to do the same in with and through Him.

Entering into Holy Week as we prepare for the Easter Triduum, we ask Jesus for the grace to see the axioms, “I am who I am” and “we are who we are” relativized by the Transcendent Axiom of YHWH, I am Who am, Who is self-revealed in the salvific death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 032810AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 032110AD

Sunday, March 21, 2010AD

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Who Are Those Two over There?

Many say that one of the most memorable scenes in their religious imagination is the scene depicted in our Gospel today, viz., Jesus and the Women Taken in Adultery. Even St Augustine, 1,500 years ago, said the scene is an archetypal depiction of “the person in need of mercy in the Presence of Mercy Incarnate.”

However, others point out that the story is memorable because it comes close to home for everyone of us. However, the crowd, then, might differ in ways from the crowd now. Then, everyone in the crowd disappears. Then, everyone in the crowd cannot claim to be without sin. Then, everyone in that crowd, at least, when Jesus set the ground rules for the event was honest and left the premises.

Is it so now? One wonders whether such would happen now . Someone made the remark once that shook a lot of “good churchgoers”, “The Church was meant to be a hospital for sinners; not a hotel for the saints.”

There is a theory that this Gospel passage is located in the wrong Gospel. Nobody has ever disputed the divine inspiration of the Gospel today. However, biblical commentators feel that it would more appropriately be at home in the Gospel of St Luke. (Luke’s Gospel is the one that we are hearing on most Sundays during this Church year. Hence, even those in Rome who devised the three year Sunday cycle of liturgical readings accept this theory by its being placed in a “Year of St Luke”. In St Luke’s Gospel during the last week of Jesus’ life, He was embroiled in controversies with various groups within institutional religion at the time and certainly, this Gospel fills the bill for that motif, big time!) Its insertion in John’s Gospel which is not testified to until the eighth century places it in a context of controversy, but strikingly out of place where it is. Some have conjectured that this story of the tremendous Mercy of Jesus was intolerable for some of the pious ones who were committed to the “hotel for the saints” motif.

Several pertinent ideas emanate from today’s Gospel. First is the very simple fact that Jesus could write!! Most people back then were probably illiterate, which is why the spoken tradition and the memorization of prayers and religious poetry were so crucial. Jesus was writing something on the ground. St Jerome conjectured that it was the sins of the crowd there that Jesus was listing. Other theories refer to biblical passages in which “God write the names of sinners in the dirt”, according to Jeremiah 17.13.

Finally, when the crowd begins to dissipate, the Gospel writer (Luke or John) states that the dispersal begins with the eldest first. Some think that those around the longest have the longest list of sins which is why they flee the scene first. If the truth were ever to be known, what would people say?

Around here, we try to call to mind our sins as we begin our liturgies. This is not to lay a deliberate guilt trip on anyone. It is an honest admission that somehow, all of us – no exceptions – have missed the mark. (Within Buddhist tradition, there is a threefold admission of guilt before group meditation commences.) We need to be reminded that all of us are family; all of us are favored by God; all of us are flawed in some way; all of us have fallen at one time or another; all of us are forgiven; all of us flounder when we forget these basic realities of human living. (USA theologian Joan Chittister says there are two types of sinners, viz., those who admit they are and those who don’t admit it.) We need to hear this Gospel story today with the realization that we can be characterized as sinful converts or converted sinners. We are all cases of a work in progress. Jesus has spoken to us all once or twice during life.” Let the one without sin cast the first stone” “Go and sin no more.) We all live lives three steps forward and two steps backward. we all are a mass of contradictions -- no exceptions. This Gospel’s popularity speaks to the depths of honest Christians. 032110AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 031410AD

Sunday, March 14, 2010AD

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Laetare Sunday

The Parable of the Lone Bro?????

Jesus is the Master story teller. After twenty centuries, many consider today’s parable (zinger of a story) His Magnum Opus in Creativity. It continues to escape a definitive name. About whom is the parable?

Since we are told that Jesus directed 3 parables to those who resented the fact that Jesus had outreach to sinners, etc., who had been written off by the respectable church people, more feel that the true subject of the parable is the unforgiving brother. When one thinks about it, this elder brother was a “sad dude”.

Each of the three parables (the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son) represents the theme that God is crazy by human standards. What shepherd would leave 99 sheep to find one? What domestic technologist would sweep the house for a lost coin? What self-respecting father would welcome a wayward son home after the son had dyssed and deserted him? God does and then, throws a party. (Read Eucharist!)

In the shocking beginning of the parable, the two sons both got half of the father’s stuff (that is the word that appears in the original Greek). The older son got his inheritance, just as the younger brother did, even before the father died. Toward the end of the story, when we start to hear his whining (which he probably had done all along), he is filled with complaints and criticism and carping.

His complaint sounds almost immature and childish. Still, when you think of it, the older son had enough of his own money to buy his own goat if he wanted to have a party with his friends. (One might wonder if he had any friends because he is such an angry person.)

He criticizes both his father and younger brother when he tells the father that the younger brother had squandered the father’s wealth with prostitutes. (We did not hear this fact anywhere else in the story.) Did the father (or we) have to have that sad item thrown into the mix? We get the story without painting all the details.

He carps when he berates the jubilant father about the unseemly (which it was!) behavior on the part of the father. The father brought out the fatted calf and put the best attire on his returning son.

The older brother has serious problems. He has been alienated from his father. He seems to refer to the father as his employer, not his father. With the stuff that he had already received, he has been rewarded already, still the father is seen by the older brother as a boss.

He has alienated himself from the younger brother (Whose gall got both sons their inheritance prematurely). He refers to the younger son as this son of yours, not as my brother.

Finally, he has alienated himself from the entire village. When the father ordered the slaughter of the fatted calf, it was before the days of putting leftovers in the fridge for meals in the days ahead. Therefore, the father had to invite the village because the fatted calf would feed an entire village. In addition, many in the village were probably related to the dysfunctional family. Now, the resentment has alienated as well from his extended family and village, who are inside dancing and eating the fatted calf.

The older brother is a sorry case. Did he ever go in? Only you can answer the question. Sadly, the personality of the older brother was replicated by the arrogant attitude of those who feel that they are the good ones, the self-assured ones certain of their own moral superiority, while those others, well you know! Sadly, the older brother has many replicates in our own church and world. Fifteen hundred years ago, St Augustine of Hippo said that the church had many that God did not have and God had many that the church did not have. Whatever did St Augustine mean?

Did the older brother go in? Again, each of us has to answer the question. 031410AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 030710AD

Sunday, March 7, 2010AD

Third Sunday of Lent

God beyond …

Few scenes in the Hebrew Bible have been imagined more than God’s call to Moses to climb Mount Sinai and to experience God’s Presence as well as God’s challenge to Moses to liberate the Hebrew slaves from oppression in Egypt. Somehow, Moses experienced the Divine Presence and Challenge and all human life was radically affected. Even today. Even Now!

One of the groups who caught the innuendo of the story was the Southern slaveholders in the nineteenth century. It was a felony to teach a Black slave to read in the Old South. The fear was that the slaves would read (and understand, between the lines) what God was saying, viz., nobody should enslave or oppress others. The slaveholders were loathe to quote St Paul (who had written that in Christ there is no slave or free) but eager to quote the Apostle to the Gentiles with the realistic admonition in the ancient world (that Paul thought was about to end anyhow) that slaves should obey their masters. That line was quoted frequently.

However, the story has many aspects to it. The big question for St Thomas Aquinas and countless others was the Self-Naming of God, in Exodus 3.14, “I AM WHO AM”. What’s up with that?

The two possibilities that grab many people are simply “God of Life” or else, “I am who am I and I cannot be named, so don’t bother.” One speaks of God somehow logically; the other speaks of God somehow mythically. These are two of countless others. Even a change in tense from present to future is permissible in ancient Hebrew that did not have written vowels.

More and more, people are recovering the sense of Mystery, viz., something that is infinitely knowable and unknowable at the same time. God can be known, but always remains unknown. Within our Catholic tradition, it is apophatic knowledge. It is described by King David in Psalm 46, ‘Be still and know that I am God now.”

A meditation on the Sacred Name might go as follows. God, greater; God, nearer; God beyond me; God within me; God beyond words; God beyond God; Let go, let God; Let God be God; God beyond me; God within me.” Then try to practice silence and try to think not a thought. You will think thoughts because every human has what is called by Eastern religions “the Monkey mind”. Try to return to the word “God”. Our children are mastering this in religious education. There is no reason to think that adults cannot receive the gift of apophatic prayer. Great Catholic thinkers, like St Thomas Aquinas, the Little Flower, and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta were familiar with this type of prayer and felt that it was available to every human person. This availability is known as “grace”.

As part of your Lenten regimen, now only 26 days left, try to slow down, sit in solitude and silence, either here in church or anyplace and remind yourself that you are always in the Divine Presence of the God of Life, Who cannot be named.

Practicing apophatic prayer is like children practicing for sport or a music instrument or a play. We recall the other adage, “Practice makes better”, not perfect, only God is perfect.

Prayer would necessarily ease all our aches and pains. The Galileans mowed down by Pilate in today’s Gospel as well as the workmen in Jerusalem killed in the mishap, the victims of the earthquakes in Haiti or Chile, all need to recall basic mythic language. We remember that in every human life, there is sadness, trouble, failures, absurdities, rejection and disappointment. These things are all bad thing. However, we recall that bad things happen and they are part of life. Then, we remember that life is the greatest subsuming God. Then we remember that our God is always Present and always beyond our thoughts. God remains always faithful.

Slaves on the Underground Railroad during the years before the War Between the States would not have risked all if they did not trust in God’s Promise and Vision at the time of the call of Moses. They remembered God’s Words in Psalm 117, the shortest chapter in the entire Bible. ‘Praise God, all you nations, glorify God all you people; steadfast is God’s kindness to us and God’s fidelity endures forever.” Allow God to speak in the Silence about it. 030710AD jfq