Weekly Reflection 062710AD

Sunday, June 27, 2010AD

Thirteenth Sunday in Greentime

Jesus Has Seen It All!!!

Before the Reforms of Vatican II, candidates for Holy Orders were admitted into the clerical state by a ceremony known as tonsure. Five small clips of hair were cut off the candidate’s head in the form of a cross while the candidate said a verse from Psalm 16, our responsorial psalm today, “O Lord, my allotted portion and my cup, You it is Who hold fast my lot.”

The origin of the Psalm seems to have come from old Israel when the land of Israel was divided among 11 tribes. The twelfth tribe was the priestly tribe of Levi and their allotted portion and cup was the Lord’s ministry, not territory. The Psalm further states, “You will not abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption.”

From the first century of the Jesus Movement, the earliest Christians saw the fulfillment of Psalm 16 in Jesus Christ’s death and Resurrection. Since we are one and all cells in the Body of Christ, Crucified and Risen, the Psalm applies to each and all of us.

The Church still prays Psalm 16 in our Night Prayer, known as Compline, on Thursday. Now, the one who prays is no long the levitical priest but all of us in Christ Jesus.

In Baptism, we are all baptized into Christ Jesus and we share His destiny of death and Resurrection. The life of each person is a process of experiencing both the ecstasy and agony of human living. Through

Baptism, Catholics learn that while we are not immune to the negative aspects of life, with and through and in Christ Jesus, we are able to transcend them.

Every human person experiences both the right hand of God, viz., the blessings that God lavishes so generously as well as the left hand of God, the painful mystery of life as well. None of us is immune for the vicissitudes of human life.

In the Hebrew tradition, Job said as much. 1) “We accept good things from God. Should we not accept bad things as well?” 2) “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” 3) “Naked came I forth from my mother’s womb; naked I shall return again.” God never answers any of Job’s questions, but rather testily asks Job “ Where were you when I set the stars in the firmament?” As we hear many times in the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian, “Who knows the Mind of God?”

Nobody, least of all, a Catholic is exempt from what we call the Paschal Mystery. It can be in moments of desolation and loss when we realize that life is bigger than we are and that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe. There are those who say that in suffering, can a person be shaken out of the self-deception that we really run the show. We are not captains of our own ships!! Humans sense that we have a radical (basic) orientation outside ourselves, viz., that we find fulfillment in something or someone else, others or in the Other. Sadly in the middle class, materialistic environment into which we have been thrown, the drive for transcendence gets disguised in the unmanifest drive for security, esteem and control. As Cheryl Crowe put it so aptly several years ago, “It is not getting what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” Sadly, so many good people get caught up in the megilla. In an environment that pathologically demands security, esteem and control, we tend to get lost in the Big Picture. It is not about primarily, Who I am? Whoever I am, I am not the center of the universe. The Great I AM is present in all things and yet, beyond all things at the same time. The human mind, trained to think dualistically, viz., I judge all reality. In Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am”, notice that “I” (Ego) appears twice. A wise teacher said recently, “All you really need is your health, your success (as becoming an integrated human person), and satisfaction of our basic needs.” Everything else is extraneous. Something for all of us to think about!

In the Middle Ages, Blessed John Duns Scotus wrote, “Crux probat omnia”, “the Cross challenges everything.” In a contemplative practice, our Confirmation candidates pray slowly the words, “Life is 1,000 joys; Life is 1,000 tears.” Even in Armonk!! Do their parents and other adults get the message from the world in which we are immersed?

Buddhist traditions speak of what the Christian tradition points out, “God in in you; God is in me; God is in us; God is in all. Christians name it, “Transcendental Anthropological Reality, the Deep Incarnation, the Divine Indwelling, the Immanence and Transcendence of God. When speaking about the power of prayer, we recall that the Divine permeates all reality. Catholics say, with St Paul, “each of us is a (cell) in the Body of Christ.” The theory is that Christ Who lives in you lives in others as well. Therefore, prayer for others has to be of value because it is the same Christ Jesus involved with the pray-er and the recipient of the prayer!

However, it is all right. Our destiny is the destiny of Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. He asks us and enables us to try to surrender and to let go and to trust the God of Mystery in the journey of human life. If we trust, with God’s Help, in a Living and Loving God Who is our allotted portion and our cup, then it becomes easier for us to say in and through and with Christ Jesus, that ultimately, while we experience the shadows of life, the God of Life will not abandon our souls to the Nether World. Trust Jesus! He has seen it all!! 062710AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 062010AD

Sunday June 20, 2010AD

Twelfth Sunday in Greentime

This Hymn We (Still) Sing At Baptism

The first followers of Jesus called themselves several different names. Such names included the “Solidarity” (ha Echad).

One way that we self-identify is the Jesus Movement in Armonk. With God’s Help, this simple title re-inforces Who is the basis of our movement, Jesus the Lord. With God’s Help, we try to view reality in a different paradigm, with what we call “Jesus lenses”, a Christ consciousness viz., the Kingdom of God.

One religious sociologist suggested that there is a trajectory in which any movement needs to be aware. First, there is the Mentor (for us, God- man), who presents a new worldview, an alternate worldview to that of conventional wisdom (aka the System). Second, the Mentor establishes a movement that sharing and spreading the new worldview. Third, the movement develop into a machine, seeking efficient . Fourth, if the movement-machine forgets the vision of the Mentor who established it, then it becomes a monument or museum, a curiosity or an antique.

Today, we hear a very early baptismal hymn today as our second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He was writing, probably in the early 50’s of the first century, AD, and he was quoting a baptismal hymn that the Jesus movement in Galatia already knew well. “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is 1) neither Jew nor Greek, there is 2) neither slave nor free, there is 3) not make and female, for you are all one (cf. above ha echad) in Christ Jesus.

We know that in the first century, the pressing question was the first part of the baptismal triad. There was a clear pluralism of biblical responses on how the Jesus-movement fit into the mother religion of Judaism. This became particularly an acute question when non-Jews (Gentiles) started to outnumber the Jewish Christians who were the core of the Jesus-Movement. However, Christians, by and large, lived with little qualms of conscience about the second part of the triad. It was really not until after the French Revolution (not the Declaration of Independence nor the USA Constitution ) that Christians question the morality of slavery (spurred on by the Quakers. Most could not envision a world without slavery because it was so entrenched in the system. It boggles the minds of many Christians today that our ancestors thought nothing of slavery as a moral question.

It was only in the twentieth century that the third part of the triad has come under scrutiny. Church and state both ponder the question of the role of women in the world. The implications are still to be considered.

However, in a way that the people who sang the baptismal hymn in 55AD, even more is involved. In addition to the triad that there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, all are one in Christ Jesus, in the twenty first century, AD, more and more (though not all) see that the all who are one in Christ Jesus, share the same global homestead, the same village, the garden planet of the universe. Theologians speak now of the need to raise consciousness about the planet that we all share (and in many cases, have abused.) As early as 1982, the United Nations issued a Declaration of the Rights of Nature. Lest the one human family become guilty of specieism, viz., “everything exists for human consumption”, we need to become sensitive to the fact that all reality is related. Pope John Paul said in 1979, that the right to life extends also to the natural world as well.

150 years ago, Chief Seattle wrote a manifesto to the White settlers out west. He said among things, “1)Humankind did not weave the web of life. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. 2) We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us. 3) The Earth is precious to God and to harm the earth os to heap contempt upon its Creator. Even white men cannot be exempt from the earth’s common destiny. We just may be brothers (and sisters) after all. We shall see.” ( Att: BP et al., NB!!!)

Thomas Berry, a prominent (ecologian/theologian) raised three points 1) When did the automobile become an enemy of the planet? 2) Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the Divine in God’s Primal Revelation. 3) We need to establish a rapport among the divine, the natural and the human, in an epoch called, the Ecozoic Era. As we hear today, the baptismal hymn, already known and sung in Galatia (present day Turkey) a mere twenty years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus challenges the movement to focus on the Mentor, God-man Whose vision we share! Just as all are one in Christ Jesus, the one human family needs to realize, as well, in this consciousness that we inhabit one common homestead which most of us have taken for granted as existing only for me and us. 062010AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 061310AD

Sunday, June 13, 2010AD

Eleventh Sunday in Greentime

Joanna Who?

There is an opinion that Pope Benedict wrote his best selling book, Jesus of Nazareth, as a commentary of the media hype over the DaVinci Code, a few years ago. The Pope says that the book represents his personal search for the face of Jesus. Hopefully, just as many would read the Pope’s book as the many who mindlessly gobbled up Dan Brown’s book. (Do you ever feel that you might have been taken?)

The crucial figure of Mary Magdalene appears in our Gospel this weekend. Recall, please – THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. REPEAT THAT ONE MORE TIME!!! THE WOMAN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE GOSPEL READING TODAY IS NOT MARY MAGDALENE. Dan Brown probably knew that when he wrote the book, but what difference when you are laughing all the way to the bank! Do you feel as you’ve been had. You should!!

Sadly, the second part of the Gospel today is really charged with food for thought, but for which manipulated minds might not be capable. St Luke tells us that Jesus had cast out seven demons from the Magdalene. This is quaint, but bizarre language in the opinion of many post moderns. Yet, the use of demons in Scriptures also indicated in many cases, whatever obsesses us and keeps us from focusing on what is truly human. Who can deny that many individuals, families, groups and communities might be described as obsessed and not focused on what is truly human. The demonic today might mean addictions, compulsions and enmeshments that beset individuals and groups. How frequently, honest, yet obsessed people might say to themselves, “If only I (or we) could rise above this all.” Such might involve mindless concern for possessions, power, pleasure, prestige. (Some even are adding petroleum as addictive!) Jesus’ empowering Mary Magdalene to snap out of it, see reality as it really is, smell God’s coffee, and in the process, get a new life makes the statement about her neither quaint nor bizarre at all. With Jesus’ Help, individuals and cultures could do the same.

However, there is another lady mentioned today, viz., Joanna, the wife of King Herod’s steward, Chuza, who provided for them out of their resources. Whoever the lady was, she was not a marginalized figure. Her husband was on Kings Herod’s payroll. There were a few shekels in her change purse. Joanna could be described as a middle class wife of a management figure in her day. However, here, St Luke describes her as a part of the growing “Jesus Movement” who will soon be on their way up to Jerusalem for the great events to occur then. An unescorted wife following an itinerant preacher must have raised some eyebrows. Did Jesus eat his meals with any and everybody on the journey up to Jerusalem? In addition, she is picking up part of the tab! One might wonder what evil spirit or malady Jesus cast out from her that caused such life-altering behavior modification! Something more is clearly going on in this story than meets the eye.

In addition, the person of Joanna, the wife of Chuza, possibly recovering, because of Jesus, from an addictive pathology, slips under the radar screen for most folks. She represented the un-convention mores of Jesus and His Movement.

St Luke tells us that Joanna continued on the way up to Jerusalem. In fact, he names her (and Mary Magdalene) among the ladies who arrive at Jesus’ empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning and who announce the empty tomb to the rest of the Jesus Movement. (The group did not believe the women.) St Luke tells that several women who had come up to Jerusalem were there when the Spirit gave birth to the Church on Pentecost morning, c. 30 AD.

Pope Benedict writes of these ladies. “Yet Luke makes clear—and the other Gospels also show it in all sorts of ways -- that “many women” belonged to the more intimate community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.”

Apparently, in the very earliest days of the Jesus Movement within Judaism, most were captured by the Consciousness of Jesus (aka the Kingdom of God), they saw reality in a different light, in a alternative paradigm. Two thoughts from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians bring that New Consciousness to light. 1) The baptismal hymn quoted in Gal 3.28, “In Christ, there is no Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.” In addition as St Paul says today in today’s, “(We) have been crucified with Christ. The lives we live now are not our own. Christ is living within us (and we are living in Christ). We still live our human lives, but they are lives of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, Who loved us and gave Himself for us. The ladies might have played a bigger role in the earliest days of the Jesus Movement. What might have happened?

Sadly, a presumption that many Western thinkers make is that we are always in advance over the past. Some say that the West has made Progress a goddess!

However, the wisdom and teaching of the past might get lost with “advances forward.”

Obviously, we focused on Mary Magdalene because of her greater prominence in the Gospels. However, imagine what Dan Brown (or a committed Christian woman) might do with the figure of Joanna in reflecting on the role of women in the Jesus Movement then (and now, as well)? 061310AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 060610AD

Sun, June 6, 2010AD

Corpus Christi

What’s In a Meal?

A student once asked if Jesus had a weight problem. The teacher wondered why the student would ask the question. The student’s response was, “He was always eating.”

One of the characteristics of Jesus’ public ministry was his table-fellowship. As more than one biblical scholar said, if Jesus were invited to dinner, the tabletalk would be very interesting. (In St Luke’s Gospel, one author cites 14 different meals. Jesus would dine by whomover the invitation was sent.. His rationale was “Well people do not need a doctor; the sick do.” We are all a mass of contradictions, even the self-righteous.

Not all agreed with His modus operandi. It is hard for us to imagine the social taboos that Jesus broke down with his table fellowship. 1) One only ate with one’s intimates, viz., one’s family or one’s closest friends, usually on the same social level. 2) One ate only with those who kept Kosher laws. In the world back then, most people could not afford to practice Kosher. These were called Ame Haaretz (the people of the land). (It was not a complement.)

Jesus violated the social mores over and over again. It was one of the reasons why the “good people” were suspicious of Him. He was attacking the religious parameters of Israel by His open-mindedness.

(While many call Jesus a “Marginal Jew”, more and more speak today of Jesus as a “Halakic Jew.” (The Halakah was the guide book by which observant Jews were to respond to God’s covenant.) Interestingly, there were two topics on which Jesus was tougher than the consensus of most of His contemporaries. 1) He apparently was strict about His teaching on divorce. 2) He apparently was tough on taking oaths, calling on God to bear witness to the truth of what we say.

However, on other questions, Jesus apparently did not deviate from the consensus of many of His contemporaries. (Biblical studies tell us that it was after the destruction of Jerusalem and the construction of rabbinical Judaism (without a Temple now!!) that Judaism became stricter. In stories about Jesus’ feeding the multitudes, the guiding principle of Jesus and of much of Judaism is that human need trumps the strict observance of the Torah.

Interestingly, human need trumped strict observance on more than one occasion when it came to physical hunger. Today’s Gospel story today tells us of an incident that is testified to in all four Gospels, the multiplication of the loaves and fish. The story reminds us of a picnic in which we meet different people. Such a concept would have been unthinkable back then. In addition, such a large gathering of people threatens civic order as well. Since the multiplication of loaves and fish appears in all 4 Gospels (in Mark, two separate times), such a gathering might not have been a one-time thing for Jesus, but that He might have hosted these grass-roots meals more often. As a result, Jesus threatened both temple and state by gathering people of all walks of life together during which dietary and social restrictions as well as crowd control were challenged.

As we celebrate Corpus Christi today, and next Sunday, the 40th Anniversary of the Dedication of our Parish Church and the 6th Anniversary Dedication of St Francis Hall, our parish center, and St Anthony’s bread and the beginning of the summer, Jesus reminds us that venues don’t count ultimately. People are together in Christ in a variety of settings and we hope that barriers break down and community in Christ becomes stronger. Don’t forget to top off Corpus Christi by attending our Annual Parish BBQ, our local Jesus’ Movement version of today’s Gospel story.

Jesus used communal meals as a means of gathering the folks, sharing His View of the Kingdom of God, somehow and sharing the same food with all. He teaches us many things through His methodology.

He teaches us a “New Consciousness”, where we take seriously that fact that God is the Father of all and that Christ is Jesus is our Elder Brother. We are, indeed, one family. We all share DNA with a female from East Africa 160,000 years ago — even Jesus does!!

In 2010 AD, in Christ, we still gather in His Name (our Elder Brother), tell stories about Him, share His favorite food (the Food by which we remember Him in a special way), commit ourselves to the New Consciousness that He wants us to have. Such a gathering can only re-inforce the Force-Field that the Body of Christ is. The Power of that Force-Field travels with us when we leave our communal gathering. Please God, the lives we touch feel its effect. A nation that is in a sad transition about basic civility with one another and about our environment needs the reminder and call to snap out of it. Our world needs to catch up to Jesus. Our Elder Brother has more of a handle on reality than we have. Party with Jesus often and come to share His Vision. 061310AD jfq