Volume Three: Musings on Sunday Scriptures Year A
Sermons
I Wish I Had Preached
or
Better Still
"Teached"
Musings on the Sunday Scriptures
Year A
by
Catherine Berry Stidsen
Introduction
This is the third volume of these musings. I began the first in 1993, Year B of the liturgical cycle. The second volume was completed in Year C, November 26, 1995. I was about to write that these present musings have been completed on the now non-existent feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria. It's the word "completed" that I'm stuck on. Nothing of this sort is ever "completed". One writes and on reflection knows that there is more that one could have said, or much less. There is the realization, too, that the musings suffer from needing to be read rather than heard or worked with in a dialogic teaching/learning situation. Yet these particular musings have been discussed with colleagues and peers more than have the other two volumes and perhaps that shows.
In September of 1995, some women on the staff of St. Thomas More Secondary School in Hamilton , Ontario, asked me to be the facilitator of a small group that would meet weekly during a lunch hour. We had been reminded that we needed to upgrade our religious knowledge to meet the school board's renewal requirements, and they asked me if I might help to make that happen. I rejoiced at the prospect. I knew it would be my last year of formal teaching and I was happy to be used in this way by these special colleagues who became such special friends. I told them about this musings project of mine and we decided that we would use my thoughts as the spin-off for the adventure. Most weeks throughout the school year we did that. We became such intellectual intimates that I asked them to be my guests at the system-wide celebration of silver anniversaries and retirements at the end of the school year. That was the capstan of these wondrous times.
It was a bonus to hear from the English teachers in the group how "well" I write. It was a tremendous tribute to all of us when the tears came, and the laughter, and the pain was shared and the joys were celebrated. I would be remiss if I did not mention two special members of this group, Jeannine Giavedoni and Mary Mauro. Jeannine is a nurse who at mid-life opted to become a teacher. She went to St. Jerome's at the University of Waterloo and has been colleague and friend extraordinaire. She facilitated the discussions in my absences -- indeed eventually we all came to share the leadership of the group -- and she never hesitated to add her knowledge, especially of scripture, to my insights at our times together. Another member, Mary Mauro, former head of Family Studies at St. Thomas More, paid me the compliment of reading both previous volumes of the musings in manuscript form and then asked if she might pass on the work to others of her family and friends because so often I was "right on" in terms of things she had hoped could and should be the case in our church. Mary's and my times together were more than once a week and so often we two laughed together, wept together, and ultimately decided to do what we could despite what at times seems insupportable parameters to our personal and professional lives.
As I made my way through this special year when I brought my formal teaching career to its close, I returned to India again for a time of renewal and for work at the Nagpur Learning Centre. Our dream for it now is that it include a community computer assisted learning laboratory and an Internet hookup which will make of it truly, "a school were anybody can come to learn anything", its original vision in the mind of my mentor, friend and colleague in this and other projects, Archbishop Leobard D'Souza.
This last year of teaching was not so difficult as I had anticipated. I'm reminded of one of Chaim Potok's characters who when once asked how his day was, replied, "I've had better and I've had worse." I have had better teaching years and I have had worse. Some of the things that happened toward my career's close last June I have recorded in these musings. Others are left unsaid because if saying something does not advance the cause, then why say it. I did not know how tired I was until September 3rd when I did not have to return to teaching and awakened saying to myself, "What will it please me to do today?" That mode continues. I was so weary of the emotional and intellectual abuse and of the threats of physical abuse that I can hardly believe my relief. Of course, I am not good at taking personal abuse, nor allowing others in my care to be abused in any way, so I know that much of my pain came from fighting against these evils. But now someone else must do that in the school setting. I do pray every day for all of my colleagues and for teachers everywhere, that they may have the courage and wisdom to cope with what teaching well requires of them.
Apart from operating my home as a bed and breakfast, I have put other local involvements on hold. I feel the need to wind down from the past thirty years in particular and from fifty years of working at something or other, starting with part-time baby-sitting at the age of 10. One friend has suggested that I need to get to a stage where I am "really bored" and then I will know that I am physically healed. We'll see where that goes.
On the literary front, I have discovered Susan Howatch. Her five volume saga of the Anglo-Catholic Church from 1930 until the mid-1960s has been a special gift. We Romans have much to learn from what our Anglican brothers and sisters have discovered this past few centuries. At times I think how much I would like to write a Roman version of these same times, which are my own. Do I have the talent now that I have the time? Again, only time will tell. Was it Holden Caulfield who said, "How do I know what I am going to do until I have done it"?
I think I will miss these musings. They have given a special structure to my weeks these past three years. But a time comes to put down the pen -- or shut off the word processor -- and hope that some editor or other will see in them what special friends have. I am more than ever indebted to Peter Rogers, Paul Bolland, Dorothy Henderson, Patricia Nelson, Elizabeth Hughes Rufo, and Leonard Broughan, O.Carm., for their support of this and so many other projects in my life. Without their gifts of friendship, and those others whom I mention previously, my life would truly not be worth living.
At the end of my dissertation, I quoted the man about whom I wrote, at the end of his last major work. Perhaps I can do no better than that with these efforts.
Opus hic terminatum
sed non consumatum
dico.
Catherine Berry Stidsen
Oakwood, Cayuga, Ontario
November 25, 1996
THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR A
First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 2: 1-5
Romans 13: 11-14
Matthew 24: 37-44
A few days ago a colleague of mine said, "My students could never have been boy scouts or girl guides." She struck the typical scout/guide salute and said, "Be prepared. They just haven't learned to be prepared." I thought of her today when I pondered this musing. It is a message about being prepared.
There is a chance that today's gospel has nothing to do with the parousia, the anticipated second coming of Yeshua in glory. It might have been Yeshua's invitation to take him seriously while he was still alive. He was a bright man and he knew that he was heading for a conflict with the religious leaders of the Jews and with the Roman occupying powers. He knew enough about them, and about himself to know that he would likely die as a result of that conflict.
I have written elsewhere that some scripture scholars, although they are not many, tell us that a "second" coming is not what Yeshua's language is all about. He could be talking about the opportunities to be so united with God's Will that it becomes our own will. He could be inviting us to seize the Presence of the Good One in every person, place, and thing we encounter and in that to be united with that Presence and experience eternal life now. Be prepared for the interventions, almost the intrusions of that Presence in the most unlikely of persons, places, and things. Stay alert for possibilities. It is so hard to see God at work in my world at times. It is even harder at times to see God at play in my world, and I do believe God plays.
I am a week away from departing for India. I am going to spend Christmas there as I did last year in a village. I don't know which one yet but I am sure it will be an adventure. I will consult an ayurvedic medical specialist while I am there. I have been under his treatment for two years now to help with an arthritic condition. I will meet with the people working in the Learning Centre which I have helped to construct and am now helping to equip. I will pray in India with my friend and colleague in that learning project, and several others. I am expecting to conclude this journey in Goa, on its beaches and in its salt water, for the healing of body, mind, and spirit, which that experience usually provides me. I am feeling reasonably well prepared for this adventure, but in India one never knows.
I have been wondering this week if there is someone or something in my life that I should be listening to because they may not always be around. Is there some wisdom out there that I am missing out on because I have not ears to hear or eyes to see? Sometimes I look at my students and I wonder if there are messages that they are sending that I am missing. I will not always have them around. This group in particular will go on to other teachers on February 1st of the coming year.
This week I have watched my Grade 10 class in particular, "sharing all things". They give each other paper, pencils, rulers, and would give each other answers to their tests and exams if I would permit it, which sometimes I do in group testing. I ask them to be self-reliant and to come to class prepared with whatever it is they need for class. I don't ask them to come prepared to share incessantly with all others, but they do. I wonder if they are preparing for a future in which they will have to do more and more of this if what the futurists are telling us about the lack of resources of every sort for their generation is true. Maybe they are prepared but not for what I am? And maybe they don't need to be?
Cayuga, Ontario, December 3, 1995
Second Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 11: 1-10
Romans 15: 4-9
Matthew 3: 1-12
I am writing this on the plane from Amsterdam to Bombay. I got onto this plane exactly the minute it was due to take off. We were two and a half hours late leaving Toronto, and I was rushed here by electric cart. I had only thirty minutes to make the connection instead of the three hours I was to have had. I am wondering now if my luggage made it. The purser assures me that she has received notice that only the luggage from New York passengers didn't get on board. She has no notice of mine being left behind. We'll see. It seems light years ago that I was standing in front of my parish community yesterday proclaiming today's first reading and marvelling interiorly at the poetry of its promise of a secure and peaceful world when God's ways are its ethical core.
Yesterday's gospel tells me to repent. Whenever "repent" is used in this context it means to turn from one's own agenda to the ways of God. It might be better to say that it means that the ways of God must always and all ways be one's own agenda. What do I need to repent of? I must turn from every and any form of pessimism to hope, for if our God is not Hope, and Hope Incarnate, then I do not know what our God is. To hope is to believe that change is possible, and in particular, that change for the better is possible.
As I sit here scribbling away, awaiting the bar service and full course meal on the menu at what would be 5:00 a.m. at home, I am remembering that I usually begin the cycle of these musings with something about the community represented by the evangelist. I didn't do that last week so I should now. This year's cycle is from the gospel according to Matthew. I learned years ago that Matthew's community had many disappointed Jews in it. They were so convinced that Yeshua was the Jewish messiah that they could not believe that their countrymen and women did not think the same of him. The community set out to make clear that Yeshua is the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophecies.
There is unfortunately a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment in this gospel and Yeshua's calling Jews a "brood of vipers" is in that category. How could this son of God who was so clear so often that his role was to save his people from themselves and return them to God's agenda for them, expect to do that by hurling vicious words like this at them? It makes no sense. This kind of language tells us far more about Matthew and his community than Yeshua. Not that Yeshua did not call a spade a spade. He was not a Pollyanna, but he also did not crush people. His mission was anything but. Surely, he was a man of hope, and if I say I follow him in some way or another, I must be a woman of hope, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
A smiling, smiling, smiling KLM stewardess is heading in my direction with a hot towel. I shall begin my commitment to repent of all pessimism by savouring this towel and the meal to follow, enjoying this nine hour and five minute adventure to Bombay, including the movie "Nine Months", and hoping that my luggage will be there for me at the end of all of this. Amen.
Over Münster, Germany, December 10-11, 1995
Third Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 35: 1-6, 10
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11
I have just come back to my room after mass, a visit to the doctor, and breakfast. Archbishop D'Souza, my friend and colleague in Nagpur, arrived home from his ad limina visit to Rome three days earlier than expected, and we have been having mass together in his private chapel these past three mornings. It is a wondrously simple location, an Indian style chapel. We sit throughout the entire mass. We reflect simply after the readings.
Sometimes when people ask me why I go to India, I reply quickly, "To hear Leo read the scriptures." And this is very true. I have never heard anyone read the gospel more dramatically than he does. The story really sounds like a story when he reads and the humanity of the persons comes through in so special a way.
I have a friend who is a liturgist who keeps reminding me that a homilist should not regale an audience with their weekly autobiography but I tell myself that these are musings so there ought to be some leeway. My baggage did not make it. I was stuck in the Bombay Airport for an hour and a half filling out lost baggage certificates and my wheelchair was pulled out from under me in the process. I travel with one because of severe osteoarthritis in my right ankle and because of the muscular problem which worsens when I have to stand in lines. I stood to fill out the forms and the chair was taken away. I limped out of the airport with my hand luggage and found Leo's niece and nephew still waiting for me, thank God, thank them.
I had to go on to Nagpur the following day because the Parliament of Maharashtra is in its winter session here and if I delayed a day to get the luggage, I was sixtieth on the waiting list for the next flight. I authorized Leo's nephew to pick up the luggage, a several hour project, went on to Nagpur, and raided the archbishop's cupboard for clothes I could wear until my own arrived. The seminary faculty decided that most of the clothing had never looked that good! To my amazement and delight the chancellor arrived on December 13th to say that Leo and his auxiliary were enroute from Rome three days early and would be bringing my luggage with them.
I chatted with Leo in Bombay on the morning of the 14th. They were 32 and 33 on the waiting list but hopeful that they would be able to come that evening. The luggage was in their hands and they would bring it. At 8:30 p.m. that evening, both bishops and the chancellor arrived, with my luggage. An excited archbishop and I talked until 2:00 a.m. "It was my best visit to Rome in 31 years."
I was so happy to learn that the entire visit consisted of genuine dialogue. The Congregations wanted to know what was going on and how they could be of help to get done what the bishops and their people want done. "Instead of being told what to do as we have been in the past, we were asked what we were doing and how they could be of help." I marvelled. He marvelled. Can participative management have made it to the Vatican along with a home page on the Internet and a CD ROM of its operations, especially its library? Leo's hopefulness has been contagious these past days. I am almost feeling like I did when we met during the last session of Vatican Council II, thirty years ago. I am thinking, as I wrote last week, that where there is Hope, there is God.
I need to hope. The literacy training which I came to sit in on at the Learning Centre between medical treatments was cancelled the Sunday before I got here. That is a disappointment. I have spent a lot of time learning about interactive communicative ways of teaching English as a Second Language in Canada and the United States. I was hoping to experience how it is done in India by the National Language Institute from Hyderabad so that I can supplement the materials that I have already brought here. The training has been rescheduled for February 5th when I will be back in Hamilton teaching. But I am keeping busy doing secretarial type things for Leo and thanking Sr. Mary Augustine, I.H.M., for the excellent training she gave me in all of this in Grades 11 and 12. How often I have been able to use those skills especially efficient time management!
I have been having some wonderful discussions at table with the permanent and visiting seminary faculty and the guests who come to the seminary. Right now there are two sisters here who want to set up a school in the next diocese. The authorities are not giving them permission to do so probably because the upcoming election will likely bring in a rabid right-wing fundamentalist party which is currently preaching India for Hindus only. How Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims will fare is anybody's guess. Many years ago Leo said to me, "What Catholics need is a good persecution." He is an historian. I am just a little frightened that in India he may soon get his wish. I must ask him at some point if he still feels this way.
When Leo read this morning, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you," I thought to myself that Isaiah could as well have been writing of him as of John. I didn't say this to him but perhaps I should have. We talked a little about John's letting go, "He must increase. I must decrease." Both Leo and I are letting go. Leo has already let go of much of the administration of his archdiocese. He wants his auxiliary and vicars to learn what he has over the years of his episcopate and to be there for them as a resource during that learning. And I am letting go of my formal teaching situation. It has been the over-arching structure of the last thirty years of my life. Even though I have taken time away from it periodically, I have always had it to go back to. There are moments when I am relieved at the prospect and moments when I am terrified.
The doctor here is extremely happy with me. The medications are taking the toxins from my body, and he is pleased. I am feeling better already but wonder if that is the sun and the 29C. weather and Leo's friendship as much as anything the doctor can do for me! I am going to take my book and my knitting and go outside to savour this day. There will probably be visitors galore today welcoming Leo home and bringing sweets to him for Christmas. The word has gone out that he has came back early. In what will these visitors have to decrease in order that Yeshua will increase among them, I wonder?
Seminary Hill, Nagpur, December 17, 1995
Fourth Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 7: 10-14
Romans 1: 1-7
Matthew 1: 18-24
It's 9:30 p.m., Christmas Eve, and I am writing this by the light of a candle in my little room in the house of the Maids of the Poor in a village called Aherwardha. Archbishop D'Souza and the parish priest, Father Khurian, have just left after the evening meal which we all had together here. Some nearby residents originally from Kerala are here as well. The two seminarians who have been travelling with us on this trip are on the verandah of the house writing out with the visitors, by the light of a kerosene lamp, the words of the hymns they want to use at Midnight Mass. The children of these visitors have television at home and earlier they spent a half hour imitating their favourite music stars. I was amazed.
It has just began to teem rain and I excused myself to write this musing while waiting for mass. I am saddened by this rain because it will likely mean that fewer people will come this evening and also because I suspect it will mean the cancellation of a proposed trip tomorrow to a wildlife refuge called Kanha-Kisli. It is a world famous park and Leo said, "Let's spend Christmas Day with the animals." It sounds great to me.
We left Nagpur at 6:00 a.m. today and had a picnic breakfast enroute. We arrived at 11:30 to celebrate Eucharist at noon at Thala, a nearby village which I first visited in 1987-88. The Archbishop wanted me to see it because these people single-handedly had raised the equivalent of $1,500 Canadian to build their own well. They also fought off successfully the intention of the local landlord to flood their beautiful farmland in a dam project. It took these people 200 trips to the political establishment to effect this. The leader in all of this, a catechumen, was scorned by the villagers initially, and is now their sarpanch, the leader of their village.
We went first to Aherwardha to discover that the people there had just left. For some reason, Susan, the member of the secular institute who works here, thought we were arriving for breakfast and the people were here for two hours waiting to greet us! Susan insisted we have lunch before we left for Thala which took until 1:00 p.m. to get ready. I never feel more North American that when we experience a delay like this since the villagers were expecting us at noon. One of the seminarians who comes from a tribal village reminded me, "Madam, villagers don't wear watches." So I decided to relax and enjoy the lunch.
I remembered the drive to Thala as a slow and difficult one. On my first visit there, because of me, we took the car although the Archbishop and his driver would usually have walked. This time, to my amazement and delight, there was a paved road. The whole village was there to greet us and the first thing that stood out immediately was the number and health of the children. I remember them as so poor and so sickly. These were blooming. I remarked on this to another visitor who had once lived in the village. She said, "Yes, they are well, but the people are having too many, sometimes five or six in each family." These children are their wealth, I thought. How does one tell them not to have them?
We were greeted with garlands and my hands were washed. Archbishop D'Souza's feet were washed first with water, and then with coconut milk. The senior woman who did the latter actually massaged his feet and drank some of the milk in the process. I had met her earlier in Nagpur when Susan brought her and her grandchild to the Missionaries of Charity's creche across from the Cathedral. The child appears to be suffering from some kind of dwarfism and Susan thought it best to have it in Nagpur for five or six months to see if it is really that or malnutrition.
After suitable greetings, Archbishop D'Souza took his place on a covered part of the verandah of the sarpanch's home. An Indian style altar had been set up. Children sat closest to the altar and then women on one side and men on the other. I sat on a charpoy on the men's side! This seemed to have caused some amazement.
Seven of the families here are catechumens. They were that on my first visit and still are because they have decided that they will not be baptized unless all of the villagers approve. There have been so many divisions and such dissension in this community that they will not risk any further conflicts by their baptism. Archbishop D'Souza mentioned to me enroute here that he wanted to take some time with the sarpanch and see how things were going along this line.
I am always astounded in situations like this where I understand none of the language and yet I know what is going on. Today's gospel talks about "God with us" and that Reality is so palpable here. It could almost be the first century of the Common Era. At the offertory the people brought rice and other grain and some money and the candies that are given to others when Catholics receive the Eucharist. Babies nursed at their mothers' breasts and some howled at appropriate and inappropriate times. And the music! These are Gond tribals and they sing so beautifully that they appear ecstatic in the process. They sing even though they are not Christians. It is truly amazing.
After mass I took a walk through the village to see the new school. It has been built on a lovely spot. The children came with me and one pulled up my skirt and the rest laughed enormously. I had trouble figuring out what was going on until I asked the Archbishop. I was wearing red knee high stockings. He laughed and said, "They wanted to see if your legs were red." I relished the touch of empiricism.
A meal was served to the children first while I watched and the Archbishop went for a walk with the sarpanch. The children sat down in lovely rows and had a plate made from leaves put before them. They washed their little hands from a brass bowl and then relished the food. Some had seconds and even thirds to the delight of the adults. I admired the grace and dignity with which the children ate and their patience remembering how late we had been.
The adults ate afterwards, but for me. I had been warned against it and took a walk in the other direction marvelling at the beauty of this village and the gorgeous fields below it. The well is a good mile away down the hill and their next plan is to put pipes into place that will bring the water up the hill to the centre of the village. I returned to find Archbishop D'Souza squatting with the elders. He called me over. "Catherine, the people prayed for you during the mass, for your work here and at home. The elders have just asked me to thank you in their name for coming again. They remember your first visit and are happy that it was not your last."
I asked him to please tell them how deeply touched I was to be here again, and how noticeable the progress they have made is to me. I wished them well in all that they yet want to do especially the education of their children. I thanked them for their prayers and assured them that they would be in mine everyday. He told me that most of them planned on walking one hour through the forest to the Midnight Mass in Aherwardha. They will sleep overnight in the church which is really a multi-purpose hall. There is a Blessed Sacrament chapel beside it. This complex has been built since my first visit. He also told me to prepare for music until daybreak. That is the local way of celebrating.
Just as we were about to leave Thala a young man came to the Archbishop and said something and then began walking away across the field. When Leo got to the car he said, "They have made me a crozier. I asked them for one two years ago when some of them came to visit me. I wanted one like the walking sticks they use and to herd the cattle. The man who made it was too shy to tell me about it until just now. He has gone to get it." Within minutes the crozier arrived. It is magnificent, bamboo, oiled and naturally polished. I held it as we drove back to Aherwardha. Leo plans to use it tonight at the Midnight Mass. What a gift!
Ah, the lights have just gone on and there has been a knock at the door. A message has come from Father Khurian not to try to walk over to the church because it is too mucky. He will send the car just before 11:30 when the carols are due to begin. There are some candies here in the trunk with our foodstuffs. I am wondering now if I ought to take them for the prasad. This perhaps will be given to the non-Christians during the mass this evening.
The unseasonable rain continues unabated. The people from Thala are probably walking through the forest in it right now. Sister Susan has been coming in and out politely to see if I am being rained on. This house is so old and leaking it will soon be replaced, she has told me. It is impossible during the monsoons.
It is early afternoon in Canada. Are we really on the same planet? How can I ever explain to people there the joy that overtakes me in this rural Indian setting when I am here for this holiday? My previous experiences in India in the cathedral in Nagpur have been special but these past two Christmas holidays in the villages are so reminiscent of what Mary and Joseph must have dealt with that I am almost blown away. At the edge of Thala is a shed for cattle and goats and I stood there earlier today -- actually I crouched there -- thinking, "This was probably the kind of place that Mary gave birth." I ponder now what "births" these people have yet to give to each other and to all others. And what "birthing" am I being called upon to do? It's time to dress and make our way to the church.
Thala-Aherwardha, India, Christmas Eve, 1995
Feast of the Holy Family
Sirach 3: 2-6, 12-14
Colossians 3: 12-21
Matthew 2: 13-5, 19-23
I want to begin by warmly and sincerely welcoming all of you to the blessing of the marriage of Tejal and David. I welcome you not only as David's great uncle, but also in the name of Christ. One of the greatest gifts of the past thirty years of our Church has been the growing appreciation for and understanding of different religions. Tejal and David's commitment to explore together what they have in common in their religious outlooks is a witness to that positive growth and collaboration among all persons of good will
I welcome, too, the members of St. Theresa's parish community who are here today to celebrate our weekly Eucharistic religious gathering and to add your blessings to those of Tejal's and David's family and friends.
This weekend the Church celebrates the feast of the Holy Family. It is a special gift for Tejal and David to be making their marriage vows this Saturday. Perhaps we might take a moment and reflect on this feast for their benefit and ours.
The Holy Family is Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. We don't know a great deal about their daily life but we do know something. We know that Mary had become pregnant and that Joseph made "an honest woman" of her by marrying her. We know that Joseph worked with his hands in a carpenter's shop. We know that at about the age of three Jesus would have begun to memorize the scriptures of his Hebrew people and he was so precocious that by the age of twelve he was arguing and winning arguments with the adult teachers in his community. We know that he had an intense sense of God's presence and so intimate a relationship with God that he called God "Daddy" -- the word used is "Abba" which literally means "Daddy".
We know that Jesus eventually felt called to tell the Jewish people how far from God and God's plan for them they were. We know that Jesus abandoned all natural family ties to do that. At one point his mother and his extended family thought Jesus had gone crazy and they went to where he was preaching hoping to take him back home and keep him from being killed by the Roman and Jewish authorities. But Jesus would not budge from his calling.
We live in extended families in India as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus did. We know how what we do is reflected on and discussed and criticized or applauded in the family circle
Jesus was killed as a blasphemer by his Jewish religious establishment and as a political agitator by the Romans. This was no pious family. It was a real human family with more than its share of pain, joy, confusion, tension. What does the Holy Family offer for Tejal and David and for us?
I want to suggest that what this feast is all about is a reminder never to give up on those we love. It is a reminder to be with and for the members of our own family, our extended family, and the entire human family. It is a plea to persist in believing the best of ourselves, and of all others, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. It is a call to be women and men of hope.
It is a reminder for all of us that "sacrifice can be difficult and irksome and only perfect love can make it a joy." Sacrifice is a word that many shy away from today but actually it means to make sacred or to make holy which is to make for wholeness of body, mind, and spirit.
For Tejal and David, today's feast is a reminder that for and with each other, loving and being loved, they will have with them the Power of God Who is Love in their journey to wholeness.
For all of us, this feast is a reminder that being there for those whom we love and indeed for the whole human family, especially in times when we are confused, hurt, angry by what others are doing, is to love even as God loves. It is a reminder that that kind of loving eventually brings about resurrection, wholeness of bodies, minds, and spirits not only in the life to come but right here, right now.
This is my prayer for all of us today, that no matter what our present pains or sadness, the witness of loving commitment, willingly given, willingly received, will be our constant source of hope and joy. As Tejal and David publicly make that commitment today may we all re-commit ourselves to love unreservedly each other and all others so that soon our whole human family will resonate with the compassion and justice our one God desires for us.
et moi . . .
I have just finished my breakfast at the Sea Princess Hotel on Juhu Beach, Bombay. I am a little the worse for wear for some hammering that began at 4:00 a.m., and continued until 5:00 when I fell back to sleep. Yesterday I was awakened by the telephone at 5:00 a.m. and nobody was on the line. It's been a strange experience. We came here the evening of the 29th. We did not make it to Kanha-Kisli. Leo told me just before Midnight Mass that it was too risky because we could get stuck in the mud of the natural roads. It was a disappointment but I knew he was right. Later we learned that it had rained all over that part of India and that many out-of-door Christmas celebrations had been affected.
We had a wonderful Christmas celebration. Very few of the local people came but almost all the tribals who were enroute during the storm arrived. They seemed none the worse for wear and were joined by some professional musicians hired by the sarpanch for the event. The seminarians and their little choir didn't get to sing what they had prepared but they didn't seem to mind. I did give out some prasad, such a special experience for me. And I was amazed when Fr. Khurian stopped me from leaving after mass and presented me with a gift. I unwrapped it to find a book of the frescoes of San Clemente in Rome which contain the story of my patroness, St. Catherine of Alexandria. I was stunned. The Archbishop had seen them in Rome and brought the books to surprise me and was I ever! It has been a standing joke between us that Catherine of Alexandria is now supposed never to have existed and has been dropped from the calendar of saints. I have told him this is because the church is afraid of women who are philosophers and theologians, like myself. Like Sophia Loren who refuses to give up St. Christopher, I refuse to give up St. Catherine of Alexandria. The gift was so much fun it almost made up for the loss of the trip.
It was 3:30 a.m. before I got to bed and we were up again at 6:30. When Archbishop D'Souza, Fr. Khurian and the seminarians came, we had breakfast from our container of foodstuffs and made it back to Nagpur in time for the Christmas Dinner at the seminary at l:00 p.m. We made several stops enroute for Christmas visits. That is the custom among Christians here and with the Archbishop in particular. They visit him on the 25th when he's at home and then he returns as many visits as possible the following week. This year he treated people to special chocolates which he and the auxiliary bishop brought from Rome. I helped him to pack them prettily for the distribution along with some Indian sweets. There were forty plus packets. That's a lot of visiting.
He did his visiting beginning December 26th and I went back to the Learning Centre a few times trying to put together a grant proposal to a German funding agency for the computers I think are essential to this kind of learning resource. I have yet to convince my Indian colleagues of that completely but perhaps it will happen. Internet is becoming increasingly available in India and bodes well for the kind of distance education we could undertake at the Centre. The time passed pleasantly with walks in the sunshine, reading, knitting, some visiting of my own, helping with opening mail and other things of that sort.
Then on the 29th we came to Bombay for the wedding of Leo's great nephew. He married a Jain, a lovely girl named Tejal. This was my first Indian wedding and it has been special. It took place last evening at the regular Saturday evening mass of the parish so the wedding guests had very few places to sit because of arriving late. There turned out to be a second couple being married. The young woman was from Edmonton, Alberta. She and her husband had received permission to marry just three hours earlier and the parish priest told them to come along. "He told us there was an archbishop blessing another marriage this evening and we could be fit in," she told me when she was signing the marriage register and I went to say hello after Leo told me she was Canadian.
After the blessing of the marriage by the Archbishop -- the bride was fifteen minutes late -- we proceeded to the hotel for the reception. I was pondering how much fun it was to be doing all of this on the feast of the Holy Family. Indian extended families remind me very much of the Italian families in Canada with which I am more familiar. There is an interesting pecking order and rituals that are followed without too much reasoning about whether or not the traditions merit retention. How involved everyone in the family is in all of this! I'm reminded of one of the lines in Rohinton Mistry's, A Fine Balance, when one of the characters comments that weddings in India "make people crazy".
Jains are vegetarians but they do drink! That was lovely. The toast is a very important event and everything was held up while a local movie star arrived to do it. Finally, the dancing began on the part of the Catholics, and what dancing. I had to join in. Then almost as suddenly as it had begun at 9:30 p.m. it ended at 10:30 p.m. because Bombay requires this. It was sad in a way because the Christians were dancing their feet off. The Jains were amazed and delighted. I left at 12:30 p.m. Back in my hotel I pondered again the gospel for the day. Earlier in the day Leo and I had pondered together the feast itself.
I just do not see how a case can be made that Yeshua was a "family" man. It seems to me he was anything but. I think of things like his words about who his mother and father are, viz., "those who hear the word of God and keep it." I think about his telling people to leave the dead to bury the dead, unheard of in his and this kind of culture. Families here mourn for at least a year. The papers are filled with notices of death anniversaries of people who died twenty to thirty years ago.
Yeshua would have lived in this very kind of extended family which I experienced last night, on the part of both the bride and the groom. He took his male disciples away from their own families which could not have made him terribly popular with the women involved. What about the care of their children for which Jewish men are famous even today? Fr. John McKenzie, the biblical historian has written much about this in his books, Source, and The New Testament Without Illusion. He suggests that the blessing of the marriage bed and a crucifix over it are anachronisms for Catholics, to say the least. He writes with far more authority and much more humour than I ever could and maintains that Yeshua was certainly not a family man. He maintains also, that until and if laity write it, we will have no authentic theology of marriage.
There are so many good things about extended families especially in a country like India which does not have the social services networks that we do in Canada. When I see how people pulled together to make this wedding happen, it is astounding. And yet at the same time, I see what I can only think of as a kind of emotional blackmail. The memories about duties fulfilled and unfulfilled are so many. The expectations af a return on an investment are enormous. It reminds me of the extended family of my childhood through young adulthood which I left behind in my assorted career moves and after my marriage. In my own family it concerned me even as a child that whoever was not there was the subject of discussion. I often wondered what was said about my family when none of us were there. It concerned me that after twenty-five years my mother was still remembering that her mother-in-law had sent me $1 for one of my birthdays and my cousin Connie had received $5. What does it do to people to narrow their primary concerns to these kinds of things, I wonder?
There is a price to be paid within an extended family and a price to be paid without one. I have been told that in India to be an orphan or without extended family is very, very hard. I suspect it was the same with Yeshua. Yet he seems to have chosen to be without his and to have made his friends his "family". He seems, in that, to have invited all of us, married or on our own, to make of all humanity, our "family". I have been so warmly welcomed here by Leobard's family that I am almost ashamed to harbour these thoughts about this family thing -- but they are there.
Today there is to be a family picnic, a tradition in Leo's family. Tomorrow there is a high tea when Tejal leaves her family and joins David's, in theory. This will all happen at David's grandmother's apartment. She is standing in for his deceased mother. In practice Tejal and David are both taking off on David's merchant marine ship in mid-January. It's all kind of funny and sweet at the same time.
Amazingly, I have been writing for almost two hours. Now I want to take a long walk along Juhu Beach in the opposite direction to which I went yesterday. I think I am on the Indian Riviera from the looks of some of the houses. And then I must pack and check out and argue with the management about the incredible noise last night and the wakeup call the previous morning which I did not authorize. Then I travel next door to the picnic, part of which is supposed to be a smoked ham that was originally ordered for a treat to the seminary faculty in Nagpur but didn't make it there. The plan is to have some before the vegetarians arrive. The picnic place faces the beach. It will be a lovely adventure, I'm sure.
At 10:30 p.m. tonight we take a catamaran to Goa for a week of rest, relaxation, and massage and salt water treatments for me. Leo's youngest sister makes her home there and is so generous with her offer of hospitality. This will be my fifth visit. I am dreaming of champagne on the high seas to usher in 1996. I have been wanting to go to Goa by ship since a man recognized my Tilley hat in the airport in Bombay a few years ago and told me that he and his wife had just come from Goa via that means of transportation. Another special adventure!
Feast of the Holy Family, Juhu Beach, Bombay December 31, 1995
Mary, Mother of God
Numbers 6: 22-27
Galatians 4: 4-7
Luke 12: 16-21
It is early evening. We have just had Eucharist celebrated at the dining room table. Ida, Leo's sister, is cooking the evening meal. She insists the kitchen is too small for me to be of any help. Leo's nephew, William, has gone off to a wedding reception with his fiancée, Temla. Leo is checking out the evening news on a television now equipped with a satellite dish, an addition since last year. I am sitting on the front porch with a sundowner watching buffalo graze in a paddy field in front of me and hearing the noise from workers to the right of me putting up two new huge condominium complexes. The flats are to have a swimming pool and shops on the roadside and bachelor to three-bedroom accommodations. I am thinking that they will forever change the peace and quiet and beauty of this place. Is that real progress?
Ida, her husband John, and William are all convinced that the complex will enhance their property. They have purchased an office and a bachelor flat. And perhaps they are right. I have seen such changes here. On my first visit there was no one on the beach but us. Now there are shacks serving food, beach umbrellas and chairs, and hawkers galore. British and Northern European tourists have found the miles-long sandy beaches of Goa. Charters galore are coming here. There are new buildings going up everywhere to capture the tourist trade and to encourage non-resident Goans and other non-resident Indians to come here to live. Family homesteads are being restored. "The Heritage" in which we are is just that. There are strict rules to keep buildings well back from the beach and to keep the beaches public which is very good, I think. There are some five-star hotels but the smaller, homier ones are far more appealing with their wide verandahs and spacious ceilings.
The champagne on the high seas turned out to be two warmish cokes in the waiting room of the shipping line. In any event, it was lovely. We wished each other well in this year of my retirement and Leo's moving toward the second cycle of his teaching of church history and things pastoral at the seminary, and who knows what else for each of us. When we were ready to depart for the dock we got word that sailing had been delayed by "popular demand". It seems that the crew wanted to have the New Year in Bombay rather than on the high seas and given the paucity of persons travelling when we got to the dock we could understand why. We finally boarded at 2:00 a.m. and got underway about a half hour later. After a dry cheese sandwich and a dry piece of pound cake we cat-napped and then awakened to a magnificent sunrise just as we approached the north of Goa. The delay was worth this experience.
Leo used to travel to Goa by ship as a boy to have holidays with one or the other of his uncles who had summer places here but he had never seen the shoreline from this angle. He is thinking about touring this part of the state later in the week. The view was magnificent and one can understand why the Portuguese chose to come here and build their forts and carry out their commerce. We sailed right into the heart of Panjim and were met by a band as we docked. It was wonderful. "It's just like a banana republic," Leo said, grinning. He's travelled throughout Latin America which I have not. It reminded me of a milder version of every movie I have seen connected with an international voyage by ship. I did find it great fun to leave the ship to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." William was there to meet us and followed our cab on his scooter. The climate is lovely, the sun glorious, the company grand, and the prayer special.
Today's gospel has one of my all-time favourites in it, "Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart." I suppose I like this because I do much of the same thing. My husband was and Leo is amazed at times when I remind them of good things that they have said that have helped me to make my own decisions over the years, or at times have helped me simply to go on rather than give up. A few days ago after what seemed to me an endless telephone call about a prospective grant for a local project, Leo hung up and said, "We did far more work when we had less money." I know I am going to be pondering that "saying" for a long time to come in light of the fiscal restraints we are in for in Canada and Ontario.
For now I am treasuring and pondering the beauty of coconut palms, and of tropical plants with which I am surrounded, many of them in bloom, and many of which I can only grow indoors in Canada and never to the heights I see them in the garden here. My body is moving fluidly in ways it does not in the cold of a Canadian winter. The music coming from the huts of the itinerant workers building the condo is pleasant and the laughter of their children is contagious. Nellie and Rover, the dogs, have come to keep me company. The glory of this place and of this moment is so special that I am praying I may one day know the Whole of which all this is so beautiful a part.
Candolim, Goa, January 1, 1996
Epiphany of the Lord
Isaiah 60: 1-6
Ephesians 3: 2-3a, 5-6
Matthew 2: 1-12
We have just finished mass and breakfast. Archbishop D'Souza is sitting in the shade of a pipal tree reading Hans Küng's latest which I brought him as a Christmas gift. When we have mass at the dining room table here, I am reminded of what it must have been like in the early church to have sat together and remembered Yeshua, and to have talked and chatted about the needs of the local community, and its future direction. Here we have gotten into some discussions about the future of Goa and about the future of William and Temla in particular. Later today I am treating the family to lunch at a place called Martin's Beach Corner, recommended by the locals. My tongue is hanging out for crab. The family is very happy because one of John's clients has called and wants to build a five-star hotel in Goa. William has begun negotiating with the ministry of tourism to help that happen. It is a day for much rejoicing.
I am feeling enormously relaxed. Massage treatments, salt water baths, one day of sight-seeing in the north of the state, afternoon naps, and all kinds of discussion with Leo about all kinds of things have "revived my drooping spirit". It is hard to believe that early morning on the 9th, I head back to Canada. There have been epiphanies of many sorts in my previous trips to India. They have continued throughout this one.
I am reminding myself that if this story of the wise men happened at all, they were Zoroastrians, modern-day Parsees. In India, they constitute a rather wealthy class, known for their schools, and with major interests in newspapers and transportation. The shipping company that brought us to Goa is operated by Parsees. They are an adventurous and risk-taking lot and I can imagine that they would have followed a star actually or metaphorically, in the time of Yeshua, and now. The Parsees I know both here and in Canada are highly sophisticated and cultured.
It is interesting to be celebrating this feast in a country where astrology still figures so prominently. The date of Tejal and David's wedding was planned with a Jain astrologer. Astrological readings are available on street corners. I even found one Indian astrologer on the Internet before I made this trip. I haven't had the courage to consult one but I do read my horoscope every day. Religion and superstition! Are they inextricably intertwined as some would say? I learned something interesting from the Pelican Gospel Commentaries when I looked up this reading from Matthew. It seems that the word magoi, from which we get magi, can mean either a wise man, or a magician. The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh don't help us much in distinguishing who came to visit Yeshua because both wise men and magicians used these materials in their crafts. The Pelican commentary suggests that even if these men were magicians, the offering of the gifts to Yeshua meant that they were abandoning that life in favour of the life he offered. This is a big thing to ponder.
With all of my education and training, when I spill salt I still throw a bit of it over my left shoulder. When I am walking with a friend, I go out of my way so that nothing comes physically between us as a sign that I want nothing at all ever to threaten our friendship. I don't walk under ladders. I don't want black cats crossing my path. I drop a knife and pray not to have a fight. I drop a spoon and look out the window for the "company soon". It's amazing how thin a level of veneer there is in so many of us between genuine spirituality and rampant superstition. Is today a reminder perhaps to give up any and all attempts at manipulating Divinity, to give up all magic, black or white? Maybe.
But these are heavy thoughts for this glorious day. This afternoon after lunch I plan a trip to the beach for my last bath in the Arabian See. I want to watch the sunset and savour the gifts of this visit and of my previous six to this special country. Tomorrow I want to savour the sunrise before Eucharist and pray in a special way then for Archbishop D'Souza, his biological family, and his spiritual family who nurture me in so many ways when I am here. I want to remember, too, the African adage that , "Though we are far apart, our spirits share the same earth and the same sky." Ah, Leo has closed his book and I am finished this reflection. I am wondering what insights he has gleaned from Fr. Küng. Perhaps he has some epiphany of his own to share.
Candolim, Goa, January 7, 1996
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah: 49: 3, 5-6
1 Corinthians 1: 1-3
John 1: 29-34
What I really want to entitle this musing is "What a Difference a Week Makes", with apologies to the original author of "What a Difference a Day Makes." Am I back? Am I really back? Yes, as I sit here waiting for the Canadian Automobile Association to come and give my poor car a boost. It won't start after a week of freezing cold. Why would anybody who could live in India live in Canada? I know the answer to that, of course. It's all economics, but.... My friends here tell me that I went to India at the right time and that this cold is nothing compared to what went on two of the four weeks I was away. I went out to go to mass this morning and nothing on my poor little car worked so here I am awaiting the CAA.
The travelling here from India was difficult. We left Bombay four hours late but that is all exceedingly boring as most travel today has become. I was enroute 38 hours instead of 30 and that has been taking its toll. I'm due to go back to teaching tomorrow and I hope I make it through this last week. After that we're into exams. What has been hitting me like a ton of bricks is how all the fluidity of my body seems to have gone down the drain. I feel at times like I am encased in the ice that surrounds me. No wonder people with arthritic conditions want to go south for several months of a given Canadian year. I've spent the week answering the mail and the phone calls and catching up with friends, and hugging my cats who seem none the worse for wear although my plants do. I fear that some near the glass windows and patio door have been frozen by the excessive cold.
I cannot find anything in today's scriptures to bring me any comfort, to help me to deal with my re-entry problem from Mother India to Mother Canada. I feel devastated by the cold and dreariness around me. I keep thinking of that friend of so many years ago who said to me, "Christians and Jews are like people who drive by looking through a rear-view mirror." Why is it that we think there is something eternally of value in these ancient scriptures as though God does not continue to speak to us in our time and our place through our music and poetry and especially through our motion pictures which in many cases are our modern-day parables?
The Spirit of God was alive and well among us at Martin's Beach Corner a week ago, on the shores of the Arabian See. The view was breathtaking. We sat there, savouring it and each other's company, drinking Kingfisher beer. We ate our crab, squid, shark, and kingfish and we laughed and joked and we had to be asked to leave because the kitchen wanted to close. That's Life! How do we tell stories about It, preach sermons about It, make It part and parcel of all that it means to be authentically human and spiritual?
Cayuga, Ontario, January 14, 1996
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 9: 1-14
1 Corinthians 1: 10-13, 17-18
Matthew 4: 12-23
Last week it was the car. It needed a new battery which has now been installed. Despite the "new battery" installed in my being in India, this week it's a kind of stomach 'flu. When I get like this I remember a book I read years ago, the title of which escapes me at the moment. It's about a young woman whose father dies after years of her caring for him. She is handling the whole thing really well until she finds some broccoli in her refrigerator which has gone bad. It hasn't just gone bad. It is a slimy, glutinous mess, and she breaks down completely. Later a friend suggests to her that it's "the little things in life that get us the most." I suppose I'm dealing with something like that now. I had confirmed this week that I have a hole in my right eye which cannot be repaired. This I handled well. The stomach I want to weep over. Maybe it's more than that.
The young man who did the supply teaching for me when I was away was not able to finish the teaching I had asked of him. "They talk a lot, Catherine." I refuse to speak when anyone else is speaking. I warned my students that their incessant nattering would likely result in my not being able to finish teaching the course and certainly not being able to do a review. That is exactly what came to pass. In two of the classes this week I was shouted at by students who told me I was unfair for not doing a review. It is my job to "make" them learn and I have not done that. I stayed as calm as possible and said that I had explained what they were choosing to do several times throughout the course and they would now have to live with the consequences. I repeated again that those students who wanted what it was that I wanted to give them who did not help me to accomplish that were equally at fault. "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." I refused to rescue them from the consequences of their inaction. I suggested, too, that the more they continued to yell and abuse the time we had together the less they would learn during this final week. That was not appreciated. Logic is not popular among most of my students.
This week I do find some comfort and direction in the gospel. The Pelican Gospel Commentary says that the district into which Yeshua withdrew was "populated with Gentiles". It also says that when Matthew uses the expression "withdrew" he means that the rejection of God's word in one place leads to Yeshua's preaching of it in another. In Matthew's gospel it means the rejection by the Jews leads to the reception of the gospel by the Gentiles. What else am I dealing with day in and day out but the rejection of God's word no matter what the proponents of our Catholic schools in Ontario are trying to promote! I am being expected to work in a vacuum there. Where are the committed Catholic adults who believe in the Way, practice it, are willing to die for it, and in that give their children the example of a life well-lived, filled with meaning and purpose? Where are the parents who are refusing to allow their children to think of themselves as victimized by all others? Where are the adults who refuse to rescue children from the consequences of their poorly chosen behaviours?
From whence is my comfort coming? I know that it is right for me to leave secondary school teaching. I know it with my whole being in a way that I did not one year ago. I have been thinking for a long time that part of my open-ended sabbatical must be spent with those questing souls hungering for cosmic generating principles of life as I am. And today I know that it is right for me to "withdraw". I am going to go to the "Gentiles" of my geographical area and offer the learning there that I have been offering here. It will not be to the tribes of Zebulun and Napthali but to those of Haldimand and Norfolk. I know with all of my being that my future is in being catholic and remotely, if at all, Catholic.
Cayuga, Ontario, January 21, 1996
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Zephaniah 3: 12-13
1 Corinthians 1: 26-31
Matthew 5: 1-12a
Most scholars agree that Matthew has summarized in today's gospel sayings of Yeshua which took place over years. One very interesting thing is how much these sayings are like Luke's in what that evangelist calls the Sermon on the Plain. Matthew has it all occur on a mountain because, for him, Yeshua is the new, improved Moses. If Moses got the first revelation about right living on a mountain, where else would the new, improved Moses give his version of a better way of living but from a mountain?
We spend about six weeks in our Grade 10 religious studies course trying to help our students to understand the spirit of Yeshua which is in these Be-attitudes as we often call them to make the point that they are expected to mark all of our living. It is extremely difficult to get students to understand that "heaven" is one of the circumlocutions for the Divine Name and then when we have it in scriptures it means "with God" or "on God's side", not a place to which one "goes". The Be-attitudes bring rewards now, in this dimension of things, when they are well and truly lived.
I usually tell students that in these sayings Yeshua is giving us lessons in empathy. Then, of course, I have to explain empathy which is no easy task these days. It was a lot easier to do when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was on their Grade 10 English course. I explain that when we open ourselves up to hurt with others who are hurting, to stand in their place, as Atticus once advised his daughter to do, we can come alive to what needs to be changed in our world, and to why those changes need to come about. In other words we can become men and women of justice and charity. We commit ourselves to change the structures causing pain while helping those in pain because of those structures. Our work is rehabilitative and custodial. (I have to take a lot of time explaining these words, too!)
This all usually goes well enough until we come to the part about knowing that we're doing the right things in terms of justice and charity when we suffer because of what we do. Suffering is not an in thing these days. I still have enormous problems believing that it is a mark of my doing the right thing. I wonder again and again if this is more Matthew than Yeshua. Matthew was a hurt and hurting Jew. His community believed that Yeshua was the Jewish messiah and they were paying a high price for that, including having been excommunicated from their synagogues. I try to put this Yeshua of Matthew together with John's Yeshua who tells us that he came that we might have abundant life and I have trouble understanding suffering as abundant life. I'm much more comfortable with Leon Bloy's idea that joy is the infallible sign of God's presence. Can one simultaneously suffer and be joyful? Maybe, but I'm still working on it. At least my students and I have that much in common.
From their examination papers which I finished marking yesterday they seem to know the Be-attitudes now. Some of them chose to answer an essay question on the beatitudes and discipleship and I got some semblance in those answers of the need to be empathetic. They seem to have learned, too, that we must help people to help themselves and not create new kinds of dependencies when we would do good. A few quoted, "Give someone a fish and they will be hungry tomorrow. Teach someone to fish and you've solved their food problem for life." (This is my inclusive language version of the more traditional saying. I'm remembering, too, now, one young man who said when I taught this, "Yeah, unless there's mercury in the water, Miss.")
I wonder at times if what Matthew is trying to say in the recording of the beatitudes and his thoughts about suffering because of attempting to live them is M. Scott Peck's, "Life is difficult." These classic words open his The Road Less Travelled. We grow humanly when we meet crises and suffering, not flee from them, Peck posits. That I can understand. I think Yeshua could, too. But that suffering is a mark of successful living? That I have problems with and I think so would he.
Cayuga, Ontario, January 28, 1996
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 58: 6-10
1 Corinthians 2: 1-5
Matthew 5: 13-16
I'm having a nostalgia trip again, with enormous apologies to my dear liturgist friend who says that homilies may not be a weekly autobiography. A whole bunch of years ago at Cathedral Girls' High School in Hamilton, Ontario, for a Christmas assembly we did this thing on "light". It was wonderful! We told the story, first of all, of the Channukah lights and then we moved on to the Diwali lights in the Hindu tradition, and then we moved on to Jesus, Light of the World. I can still see Kathleen Feeney moving in the direction of the one Channukah light that had somehow not been lighted, making the whole menorah come together. Then, in the back of that auditorium where I was, I knew with all of my being that my life had not been lived in vain. The performance went on and we had the "salt of the earth" from another class, in another part of the auditorium, and it came from throughout the entire place, through the music of "Jesus Christ, Superstar", that we were the light of the world and the salt of the earth, or we were nowhere.
I am blessed to be teaching now with some of the people who were there at that Christmas assembly and who helped to make this experience happen, or who experienced it. We know now, as we knew then, that we make it happen or it won't be a reality. I could share with you all kinds of technical things about salt and light in the time of Yeshua and perhaps I should, but at the moment it doesn't seem worth it.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 4, 1996
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sirach 15: 15-20
1 Corinthians 2: 6-10
Matthew 5: 17-37
Martin Luther called his dog, "Blockhead". This is the literal translation of the expression "you fool" in today's scripture. Is it possible that Luther, knowing scripture as he did, decided that it was o.k. to give his dog that name, although it wasn't to call anyone else stupid? I like to think so. It's kind of fun.
Whenever I hear this gospel I ponder what it has done to people over the years to be told not to be angry with others. I think of a bout of severe depression I had as a young woman over a priest for whom I was working. Rather than tell him off, I turned the anger in on myself and wound up on anti-depressants until I realized what was going on. Interestingly, the psychiatrist who helped was a man who had left the Benedictines during his diaconate year and was by then happily married. I can see him yet saying, "Katie, I know whereof I speak. Priest or not, the man is an asshole. You don't have to take from him what he's dishing out to you. Tell him and quit." He was very directive for which I was very grateful. I did what he advised and the depression was gone. I found a new job the very next day
On Tuesday of this week I was seething. In my second period class, eight of the males decided to hum, then make cat calls, then do bird whistles, and finally to make that sound that Arab women do when they are grieving or celebrating. They also popped the sides of their mouths. I could not believe what was going on. They were rowdy the first three days of the new semester, obviously delighted to find themselves in each other's company, by some luck of the draw or other. By Tuesday, when we began rehearsing the verse speaking choir for the responsorial psalm for a mass on Thursday, they were off the wall. Fortunately, a second teacher with whose class I was also working, was there to experience the stupidity. She was even more angry than I was. Then the miracle happened.
I am not very good at asking people for help. I am always afraid of being a burden. People have enough on their own plates in my scheme of things to be asked to take on my burdens. But our women's group was meeting on Tuesday for the first time in the second semester. I went in, looked around and said, "I am angry and I am hurting and I need help." The next forty minutes were among the most beautiful of my life. Two of the members are in Guidance and they immediately took the names of the offenders and promised to do what they could to effect timetable changes. If that didn't work, four others came up with locations that I could send the boys to defuse the mob mentality. The youngest member of the group said, "None of us deserve this kind of thing but you certainly deserve better. This is your last semester of teaching. It ought to be something very, very special for you, not this kind of thing."
When I said that I was feeling guilty for not being able to get them under control, the teacher who had been with me during the episode said, "Guilt? What guilt? You haven't been with them long enough to be the problem. They came into the class with this attitude. Cut out the guilt stuff. They're bad news together and they've got to be broken up and that's that. We'll help you get that done." And that is exactly what they did. By the end of the day four of the students had different timetables and I had four other locations for the others if the need arose. The vice principal responsible for such changes backed me and told three parents who called that if their sons were that much a problem on the fourth day of the semester, he could only imagine what they would be like as it went on. He was not prepared to allow that to happen to me, or to them. On Wednesday, I taught a class. I really taught. I got almost the quality of performance I was looking for in that class. The week finished for me on a special high. What if I had not admitted that anger? What if I had suppressed it? What if I had turned it in on myself? Who would have been served? Myself? My students? The school community? I think not.
If we have a Yeshua who tells us to say what we mean, mean what we say, and do what we say we will do, would he tell us to lie in terms of our body language and our genuinely human responses to trying situations? I think he would expect us to use our anger constructively rather than destructively, but not to admit it, or deal with it, or use it to effect better relationships? I think not. I think there is probably a call in today's gospel to some kind of balance in all our living including our anger. Surely there is something wrong in being angry all of the time and equally wrong in never letting anything get to us.
The eight students involved are furious that we broke up their party. One of them informed me that they were only trying to "have fun" and we "ruined" that. I told him that I was all for that kind of ruination and hoped that one day soon, in a more mature phase, he would be, too.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 11, 1996
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Leviticus 19: 1-2, 17-18
1 Corinthians 3: 16-23
Matthew 5: 38-48
There's an interesting historical tidbit in today's gospel. It's about the right cheek. If you're right handed, think about hitting someone else with the back of your right hand. Yes, you'd hit their right cheek, not their left. To hit someone with the back of your hand in ancient Israel was the worst possible insult. (It's interesting to ponder that in terms of the Irish, "the back of me hand t'ya.") Given this dreadful insult we are to turn the other cheek and ask for more. That's a big one. But there's even more, and that is that our loving is supposed to be "indiscriminate". That's the translation of "perfect" offered in the Pelican Gospel Commentary.
When I first learned about this idea of being perfect it was that we were to be "disinterested" in our loving. That is not to be confused with being uninterested, which means uncaring. To be disinterested, my teacher said, was to love with the love of God, shining sun on the just and the unjust and raining rain on the just and the unjust. It's what I wrote about just a few weeks ago, viz., loving even when, especially when, we don't get the results we want and leaving the outcome in the hands of God.
There is no reference in the Hebrew Scriptures to hating one's enemies. There are references in the Dead Sea Scrolls to loving the elect of God and rejecting those who are not. If the Hebrews are considered the elect of God, then by logical extension one should not love any of those who are not Hebrews. But Yeshua seems to have seen beyond all this. He seems to have been tremendously aware of what it means to love only one's family or one's community to the exclusion of others. India, for example, is rife with this kind of communalism and it has the potential for destroying the country. What else is going on in Sri Lanka, and in Northern Ireland, and in the regionalism in Canada? To be indiscriminate in our loving is to be God for others, this gospel says. It is an enormous call.
When we were growing up Catholic in Philadelphia we fooled around a lot with this concept of loving. I can see the sisters yet telling us that "You have to love people. You don't have to like them." I always had trouble with this distinction and I still do. When I raised it as an adolescent in our weekly instruction by one of the priests in the parish who was the official school chaplain, I was told, "Loving someone means wanting the best for others, wanting for others at least the good things you want for yourself, and never deliberately harming others in any way. Liking others means you enjoy their company and approve of what they are. There are some people we can never like." Was Fr. McBride right?
Is it enough simply to refrain from doing evil to those who appall us? We are told that Yeshua went about "doing good". There seems to be an active dimension in his living, the difference between his "golden rule" and the "silver rule" of ancient Buddhism, viz., "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself."
In a discussion in one of my classes this week about this issue of turning the other cheek and loving our enemies, one of the girls said, "Listen, Doctor, there's no way you can turn the other cheek in this school or this world. Do that and you wind up dead." William Ernest Hocking, the philosopher of religion about whom I wrote my dissertation, used to say that turning the other cheek was a good idea if you had someone's attention. Other than that he suggested you first had to get their attention. If you are dealing with a person who is reasonable and who is out of control momentarily, and if you do not retaliate in kind, perhaps you give him or her a chance to rethink their behaviour. But if you are dealing with someone who is constantly out of control, does turning the other cheek and/or loving indiscriminately help them to change or simply encourage them to continue their asocial behaviour? Gandhi preached indiscriminate pacifism. I think my own is more limited. Today's first reading does remind us to "reprove" our neighbour if he or she is doing something wrong lest in not doing so we "incur the same guilt". And these are the scriptures that Yeshua said he came to fulfill, not to destroy.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 18, 1996
Ash Wednesday
His name is Dowling Knights. Apart from ever even seeing him, isn't that delicious? He is about 6' 4" and not just black and beautiful but black and gorgeous. I have been told that is wife is absolutely smashing and in the not too distant future, I hope to meet her.
Dowling and I arrived at our present high school in the same year. I know how I got there but am not sure how he did. I do know from another source other than him that if he had "played his cards right", Dowling would now be the Minister of Education in his native Trinidad/Tobago. I suspect that translates into, if Dowling had been corrupt enough and politician enough, he could have written his own bill of goods in his homeland. In the three years that I have been privileged to number Dowling among my colleagues, I cannot imagine his doing anything but the right, moral, and just thing. And in most political instances, unfortunately, that is not playing the cards right.
An amazing thing happened today. Through an almost miraculous set of circumstances -- and you know that miracles for me are time when things entirely possible happen at times when they need not -- Dowling and I wound up together in the chapel at the school where we teach for an Ash Wednesday service. It was a wonderful experience. I wept from joy at its ending. I don't want to diminish in any way, shape, or form, the gift of that experience. But at the time when we blessed each other with ashes, and were told to say, "Live the Gospel", Dowling got to bless me and he said, "Whatever -- remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." I could have hugged him. Sexist language aside, I have not heard that in years and I was well and truly touched.
I saw Dowling later and thanked him. I said something like, "Dowling, in this death-denying culture of ours, and I fear our church is moving into that same direction, I am so grateful for what you said to me in terms of those ashes. I am so grateful that you reminded me that I go this way only once. Thank you for that, and for many other things." And he said "I pray every day before each class and when I am faced with students who won't even join me by being attentive, and then we tell them to live the gospel...." He paused sadly. Amen, Dowling, Amen.
St. Thomas More High School, February 21, 1996d
First Sunday of Lent
Genesis 2: 7-9, etc.
Romans 5: 12-19
Matthew 4: 1-11
When I studied today's gospel years ago, I was told that Yeshua's temptations were those that come to all of us. The temptations are to "succeed" by bribes or largesse, through physical force, and through flattery. Or perhaps the greater temptations are to allow others to seduce us through bribes or largesse, by physical force, or through flattery.
We have had two Action Days in Hamilton this week protesting the cuts of the Harris government. I should perhaps be writing about this but closer to home was the experience of a young man who wants me to change his grade from mid-term. He failed the course with a 46. I have run the gamut of the temptations in terms of dealing with him. In a meeting with the vice principal he explained how excellent a teacher I could be but that when I got down he just couldn't function and those were the days when he did poorly. Previously he had told me that he would get off my case if I got off his. That meant allowing him to arrive late, out of uniform, and talk whenever he wanted to in class. I think that constitutes a bribe.
The physical force was the almost constant verbal abuse which I don't want to repeat here. It would serve no purpose. I watched the persona of this young man and I was amazed. I found myself thinking that he is either a consummate actor or incredibly devious or both. He never came to grips with the five missing assignments. There was not one iota of remorse in him in these post-term interviews nor had there been any remorse ever during the course of the semester. I read recently somewhere that remorse is a sign of a truly responsible person. Where there is no remorse there is no authentic responsibility. There is the decision to live one's life as a victim.
I am left with many questions today. Is my generosity really a form of bribing others so that I am a "success" in their eyes? Is my determination to compliment the good wherever a find it a kind of bribery wanting people to think better of me or return the compliments? Are the times when I send a student out of a room really physical force demanding that they and others conform to my standards and not genuine concern for their asocial behaviours? I don't know.
Somewhere or other in one of his books, M. Scott Peck suggests that there is no such thing as an unselfish life. He says that what we do always has some kind of hook in it but the mature thing is to learn to be involved in "smart selfishness" which means that we do not deliberately hurt ourselves or others in the process of what we want for ourselves. I suppose that would mean that if we do hurt others we would feel genuine remorse in having done so.
There were magicians galore at the time of Yeshua. There were bread and circuses by way of bribes from the Roman occupation forces. There were collusions galore among the political and religious establishments. I think today's gospel is a powerful reminder that all power must be power for others rather than power over them. Yeshua was a master of this way of living. Perhaps one day I will be, too.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 25, 1996
Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 12: 1-4
2 Timothy: 1.8b-10
Matthew 17: 1-9
Matthew is once again working to have Jews understand Yeshua as the new improved Moses. In Exodus we read that Moses' face also shone after he had conversed with God. Also, there was an ancient tradition that Moses had not died but was taken up into heaven. So, too, had been Elijah taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot. So Moses and Elijah come to be with Yeshua who will also ascend into heaven. But at one point these visitors vanish and so, too, the representatives of the law and the prophets of Israel "vanish" and Yeshua is left. That means, obviously, that Yeshua has superseded them, and his intimates, Peter, James, and John come to understand that as well.
I have written previously of what this displacement theory has done to Jewish-Christian relationships over the years. We can lay centuries of pogroms and other kinds of persecutions of the Jews at the feet of this gospel. We can probably even make a case for the Shoa (Holocaust) on the basis of the anti-Semitism of this gospel and in some cases the gospel of John. It is not a pretty scene. And I think it's fair to say that this was not the intention of the community that authored either of these gospels. They were hurt Jews who wanted their fellow Jews to buy into what they understood of Yeshua. They surely did not want any Jews wiped out in the process despite the animosity that arose between those who accepted Yeshua and those who did not. But what sense can we make of this transfiguration today?
I really don't know. I find it tremendously hard to identify with the story. I suppose the closest I have ever come to something like this is the Retreat of the Christian Community which I made the summer of 1965 at Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Chicago. I had the kind of experience in Chicago which the Methodists call "the mountaintop". Every dream I had about the potential of lived Christianity was realized in those eight days. I really didn't want to leave. I could have set up my tent on that campus and yet I knew I had to go. I knew I had to help make happen for others what was so real for me.
The only greater sense of community I experienced after Chicago (and in some subsequent training in Rome) was my marriage. I knew then, and still know, that when a man and a woman are each other's best friend, and together worship a common divinity, that is a mountaintop experience. Perhaps it is the mountaintop experience open to humanity. It is an experience of unsurpassed Joy. It is an experience of one's unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable worth. It is an experience of the worth of all that is good, and true, and beautiful and a commitment to keep making this goodness, truth, and beauty evident in one's life. It is an experience of God alive and well among us.
In the midst of a provincial strike on the part of public service workers, cutbacks in hospital services, the awaiting of cutbacks in education, perhaps today's gospel is an invitation to ask ourselves what mountaintop experiences we might be effecting for others. Perhaps it's a reminder to be sure that we aren't missing the forest for the trees in terms of those around us, friends, families, colleagues, who are providing those adventures for us.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 3, 1996
Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 17: 3-7
Romans 5: 1-2, 5-8
John 4: 5-42
I have written previously of how when I read this story I am in spirit back at the wells of India, whose waters I have tried unsuccessfully to carry to the places where I have been residing. I am once again in awe of Sr. Magdalen and other women religious who could carry water with the best of the village women. It was Magdalen who explained to me how many are the "teachable" moments which occur at the well when the women gather, far from their men's eyes and ears. Men are never welcome there. Women who are out of favour in the community come to the well on their own, as this Samaritan woman apparently did. On the rarest of occasions men are permitted to come to the well. I saw that at Thala this past Christmas when the men filled an old oil drum with water and hauled it up the hill to the village where the festive dinner was to take place. It sat there in solitary splendour. Still, it was the women who took the water from the drum and used it.
In John's gospel water serves many symbolic functions. John uses it to speak of purification. He also uses it to address issues connected with initiation into the Christian life and the Christian community. Now he seems to be using it to suggest the need for ongoing renewal of life in this community, or he may be using the imagery to suggest the replacement of the Torah, the Jewish law, by the law of the Way. Jews today still refer to the Torah as the "living water", and expect those who study it to add to the insights it offers. But there is something else in today's story that merits special reflection. And I want to dwell on it for a bit. It has to do with false gods and with mission.
Instead of the traditional understanding that Yeshua is dealing with a woman with five husbands it is possible, some scholars say, that what is going on here is that Yeshua is asking the woman to tell him who her "gods" are. It is very possible that Yeshua is pointing out to her the impoverishment of her Samaritan tradition, not just her personal life. (You will remember how often the relationship with God and God's people in the Hebrew Scriptures is described in terms of brides and bridegrooms, marital fidelity and infidelities.) To outsiders, the Samaritans looked like Jews. To Jews they looked anything but. In other words, in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, Yeshua is using marriage imagery to make clear that the Samaritans have the externals of Judaism, but not its core reality. John's Yeshua has made the points previously that the Jewish ritual, the temple, and its way of salvation are insufficient. So now is the Samaritan way. Since many Jews would have seen the Samaritans as little more than a pagan cult, it is possible that John's Yeshua is pointing out their inadequacies as well.
After his interrogation of her about her "gods", Yeshua goes on to say to the woman, "the hour is coming and now is." (Emphasis mine.) In other words, the invitation is there again that living the Way brings happiness and its own rewards this side of death. Eternal life is not something after life but something that begins right here and right now. There is no need to wait eons for some future fulfillment of every good thing that life has to offer. It is at hand. It is what many concerned with modern Christian mission call the "already and not yet" of the promises of Yeshua. There are joys of this way of living to be harvested now. Eventually we are told that it is not only the woman but the townspeople who come to see the Way as what they have been dreaming about and waiting for. The sacred meeting place with God is not Jerusalem or Gerizim, the Samaritan sacred place, but whenever and wherever the Way of Yeshua, the Truth of God, the Human Face of God, is embraced.
There is a universalism in this story. We will pick it up again in the story of Yeshua's encounter with Nicodemus and the healing of the supposedly Gentile servant in Galilee. Yeshua is not simply Israel's saviour, nor the Samaritan saviour, but the universal saviour. In the history of Christian mission, I think it is fair to say that the universalism has been mismanaged. It came to be seen as converting everyone to Christianity by displacing their own religious ways. Is this what Yeshua did? Yeshua knew the Samaritan way. He had done his homework. There is genuine dialogue between Yeshua and the woman and subsequently between him and the other townspeople. There is no force here. There is calm, quiet, honest, intelligent sharing. I think Yeshua might have learned something first-hand from this encounter with the Samaritans, perhaps at least as much as he was able to teach them.
That word "universalism" touches me deeply. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I renewed my interest in and knowledge of the categories of faith development described by James Fowler and his associates. Begun at Harvard and now continuing at Emory University, Fowler says that one-third of all persons past middle age, across all cultures, are at post-conventional stages of their religious development. He says that they are yearning for "cosmic generating principles of life" and he calls them Universalists. I truly believe I am one of them. There is nothing I yearn for more.
How do we find each other? How do we enter into the genuine, loving, dialogue which marked Yeshua and the Samaritans? How do those of us weary with the preoccupations with their internal selves of so many of our churches, synagogues, mosques, and other traditional religious establishments, get into this genuine fruitful dialogue? I sometimes wonder if the new Jerusalem and the new Gerizim is the Internet.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 10, 1996
Fourth Sunday in Lent
1 Samuel 16: 1bm 6-7, 10-13
Ephesians 5: 8-14
John 9: 1-41
"Are all your sons here?" The people of Dunblane, Scotland, know today that all of their sons and their daughters are no longer here. The parents of Michael Fyke of Belleville, Ontario, know that one of their sons is not here today. And God knows, while I do not put my loss in the same category, one of my cats who was here last Sunday is not here on this. A mass murderer took the lives of the children in Dunblane and then his. A teen-aged robber took Michael's life. Euthanasia was the only humane way to deal with a thrombo-embolism that paralyzed my cat's hind quarters in a matter of minutes. There has been too much death and dying this week. It is almost too much to bear on a day when we are told that today's gospel is supposed to be making points about sight and insight. And it makes at least one point about "undeserved" suffering, that is, the suffering of innocents.
There are so many things going on in this gospel today that I could be faulted for focussing on just one point but surely the question about who has sinned, the blind man, or his parents, raises a question that must be in the heart of any person concerned about justice and charity. Why is there suffering like this? Why Dunblane, why Michael Fyke, and why is a one year old baby boy from Hamilton, Ontario, fighting for his life in a Florida hospital with three brain tumors? Yeshua doesn't try to answer this question about undeserved suffering but he does say that what God is all about can become manifest in such events. Perhaps what Yeshua means is that there is no one more ready to work toward ending suffering in others than one who has suffered and has coped, especially if by every stretch of the imagination that suffering is undeserved. The man born blind not only has his physical sight restored but his spiritual insight is recreated. He knows who Yeshua is and he knows who he is and no one will shake him from that.
I think of what Priscilla de Villiers has done with the death of Nina. I think of the countless cancer survivors who are there for others stricken with this disease. I think of the outpouring of money and gifts to the people of Dunblane and of the thousands of dollars raised already for hospital costs for the baby from Hamilton. I look at Michael Fyke's classmates and think that perhaps some of them know now in a way that they have not previously, that their "omnipotentiality syndrome", as some psychologists are calling it, is the ultimate fraud that some of their peers are perpetrating against them, as are some other parts of their society. I pray that my tears over the departure of my feisty, furry friend will keep me working for a better world rather than give up on it.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 17, 1996
Fifth Sunday in Lent
Ezekial 37: 12-14
Romans 8: 8-11
John 11: 1-45
I sat down last evening to watch the news. I turned to a station I usually do not watch to be greeted with the story of nine traffic fatalities this weekend and the mention that one was a local young man. Then in horror and disbelief I saw the graduation photograph from St. Mary's High School of Frank Nicolazzo. The camera shifted to his home in Ancaster and his uncle, whom I have taught with, who talked about Frank and his smile. "Yes, yes, yes," I thought, "I don't remember Frank ever without a smile." I have been weeping intermittently since. I can imagine Martha and Mary's sending for Yeshua when their brother died. I can identify with their tears and with Yeshua's and with those of Frank's family. And a part of me that knows better is saying, "Why him, O God? Why him? I could give you a whole list of scuz bags that the world would be the better without. But not Frank."
I know it is irrational. I know it is arrogant on my part to think this way. And perhaps I am angry because unknowingly and unwittingly I was once able to help Frank to feel really good about himself. He was my student in Grades 11 and 12. On Parents' Night in Grade 11 his mother, a teacher in our system, came by to say hello. I looked at her and said, "You look familiar." She smiled and replied, "I'm Nat and Anna Gallo's sister." I was amazed. Frank had never mentioned this to me. Nat and his wife have house-sat for me. Anna and I travelled together to Greece. His mother showed his report card. Mine was the first 80 he had ever received. I was surprised at that and then she went on to say, "Frank has trouble in his other classes, especially English. When he saw this mark in your class he decided that if he could get that here, he can do anything he wants to." I smiled and was gratified by her remark.
Later I learned from his aunt, with whom I now teach, that Frank -- the family called him Frankie -- went every day after school to visit his invalided grandmother. I have eaten at her table. She is a great lady albeit in dreadfully failing health of late. Frank and his grandmother were great friends. He subsequently joined the military on a reserve basis and used that money for university tuition. He was preparing for a peace-keeping mission. The family was nervous about it but Frank saw it as a special opportunity. I can understand how he would have.
Frank's friends and family will gather this week to bury him much as Lazarus' family and friends, including Yeshua, once did. Scholars tell us that whether or not there was an "actual" raising of the dead in this story, the sign that it involves is that Lazarus "died" to Judaism, and was "raised" to new and eternal life through belief in the Way, not only his own belief, but that of his sisters and his friends. I don't like the anti-Semitism here because God does not go back on promises. "I will be your God and you will be My people," means just that or nothing means anything. But I do believe that Frank's love for us and ours for him is the essence of eternal life. Frank's goodness -- Godness? -- will live on in everyone of us touched by him, especially by that radiant, loving smile. May you savour life after life, Frank, and keep working for us there as you did for us here. Amen.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 24, 1996
Passion Sunday (Palm Sunday)
Isaiah 50: 4-7
Phillipians 2: 6-11
Matthew 26: 14 - 27: 66
Earlier today I was one of the readers of the passion story. I have not done this in years. I relish dramatic readings of scripture and so I read my part that way and the more dramatic I got, the more the other readers loosened up and began to act. They were all men. I was the only woman reading. As I said my part I was overwhelmed at the pathos of this story. A good man goes to his death rather than back down on what he believes God wants of humanity. He walks his talk which is always irresistible. He could have gone back to the Galilee and lived there with the rest of the religious radicals and people on the fringe. Instead he decides to confront those whom he believes are selling out Israel for the mess of pottage which was co-existence with the Romans.
I did some confronting of my own this week, mostly connected with students whose asocial behaviours cannot be overlooked for the mess of pottage which would be their "liking" me. At one point a colleague said to me, "Catherine, you have only three months to go in this job. Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself through such pain?" And I found myself responding, "Precisely because I have only three months left in this job." I don't think she understood.
Loving others is hard work, really loving them, I mean. When we see others, individuals, groups, nations, selling themselves short, can we do anything less than Yeshua did and be true to him and ourselves, no matter the personal cost?
Cayuga, Ontario, March 31, 1996
Easter Monday Evening
The triduum is a blur. I would be less than honest with you if I wrote anything else. I awakened on Spy Wednesday with one of those colds in which every bodily orifice is evacuating something, or about to evacuate something. It was one of those "Oh, death, where is thy sting?" moments. I dragged myself into school on Wednesday and again on Thursday for reasons I need not go into. I was in bed after school on Thursday and slept in until 8 a.m. on Good Friday when I had to drive to Windsor to help pack books for a container I am shipping to India. The black humour of that adventure I will leave for another telling. I did make it to church on Easter Sunday for a rather lacklustre service which included a sermon about loneliness. Why that happened on an Easter Sunday I have still to fathom. I drove home to Cayuga in a physical fog, through snow showers, and whiteouts at times. I slept in again today and am planning to head to school tomorrow.
I have just had a vicarious hour-long celebration of the feast via a phone call to my friend in India who spent it in a rural parish eight hours drive from the Nagpur Cathedral. It was 38C throughout the week. While he shared some other delicious anecdotes -- like the half-hour it took to get the new fire lighted -- the highlight of the triduum for him was washing the feet on Holy Thursday of twelve sisters who belong to a small religious community which had excommunicated itself from the rest of the diocese for twenty years. Their reconciliation took place just about a year ago.
I have been pondering the power of that symbol of self-sacrificing love for the sisters and for the archbishop himself. In a country where foot washing is still practiced, but it is usually done by senior women to men of some importance, what must this gesture of the archbishop's have said? How can anyone despair of a church and a world where this kind of thing can happen?
Cayuga, Ontario, April 8, 1996
Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2: 42-47
1 Peter 1: 3-9
John 20: 19-31
Thomas is the original "seeing is not believing" proponent -- then again, maybe not the original because surely Zen Buddhists have been trying to remind us of this for centuries longer than Christianity has been around, viz., that seeing is not necessarily believing. Have you pondered that when Yeshua does come back for a second time and Thomas is there on that occasion, Yeshua offers Thomas the chance to do what Thomas has said he needs in order to believe, i.e., to feel the wounds, and put his hands into the siade that has been pierced by a spear. And, amazingly, Thomas does not do that. Thomas refuses the physical evidence and says instead, "My Lord and my God."
In my elementary school days I was taught to say "My Lord and my God", at the consecration of the mass and bow profoundly in the process. As Johannine scholars tell us "my Lord" is a natural enough term because it simply means master or teacher or guru, and what else has Yeshua been for Thomas but that. But when Thomas adds "my God", he affirms what John has been trying to make clear throughout the signs of his gospel. Yeshua is the human face of God, the truth of God, and in accepting that and believing that, his mission now becomes ours and ours becomes his.
What is that mission? As far as I can grasp it, it seems to me that it is to work to bring to an end anything and everything that oppresses the human spirit, whether that oppression is physical, mental, or spiritual. It is to do what Yeshua is reported to have done during the end of this visit to the apostles and to Thomas in particular, viz., to "inspirit". The expression Yeshua uses is the same one used about the Spirit that hovers over the waters before creation is completed. It is the same Spirit that breathes life into the nostrils of the first couple. It is a Life-Giving Spirit. The mission then, it seems to me, is that we be life-giving persons day in and day out, and whether or not we see the results of our efforts, believe that this is what God wants of us. I relish this theory. I find its practice very difficult.
It has been a week of more promises to me broken than kept. I am finding it so hard to give these people who have broken their promises. the benefit of the doubt, to believe in them in the face of this evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Is the modern Thomas called to believe in the goodness of God and the goodness of persons even though we do not see it? How can I be a life-giver to my students who see no relevance in the religions of their world neighbours which I want to share with them? How am I a life-giver for those students who think that my concern with their appearance and comportment is an infringement of their "rights"? How am I a life-giver for a friend who is currently feeling so sorry for herself that I don't think she needs anyone else to feel sorry for her? How do I keep believing in a colleague who has mucked up the container project to the learning centre I have helped to build and am now equipping in India? Is it "keeping on keeping on" that I am called to on these gray, wet April days? Would Thomas understand? I think so.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 14, 1996
Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2: 14, 22b-28
1 Peter 1: 17-21
Luke 24: 13-25
There is an ancient tradition that one of the persons on the way to Emmaus was a woman. Why else would Yeshua have been invited to have a meal in a world when it is only women who cook? The first time I heard this possibility was from Sr. Mary Hadwig Munz, c.s.p. We were in her studio in Shillington, Pennsylvania, at the U.S. motherhouse of her community. She was debating whether or not to make a wall hanging on Emmaus, for which she had just been commissioned, with three male figures or two males and one female. She gave me the exegesis of this scripture and it almost blew me away. But then that was all in 1967 and I was a long way away from my own studies and deeper and broader insights into scripture than I had then.
Hadwig is very much on my mind today, not just because of this scripture passage, but because I learned this week that she died in November of 1994, and her religious community has just gotten around to telling me that this past week. I am finding it very difficult to use "religious" about that community at the moment but perhaps that will change. Shortly before Easter this year I sent Sr. Hadwig an Easter greeting. I had done the same at Christmas of 1994, Easter and Christmas of 1995, and then this latest greeting. How in the midst of all of this could that community have missed telling me that she had died in November of 1994? The new provincial assures me that they looked through her things and found nothing with my address on it. But there were sisters other than Hadwig who knew me. Are they all dead, too?
Should I tell you her story, our story? Why? Why not? I came back from Rome in 1965-66 aglow with the possibilities of community as I had learned them during the last session of Vatican II and study with the Movement for a Better World. I knew Sr. Hadwig's community from a home for toddlers they had adjacent to a home for unmarried mothers where I was teaching typing and shorthand to the women who were there to have their babies. The superior of the toddler operation invited me to their motherhouse to give a day of recollection to the community about my Roman experience. I leapt at the chance. During one of the conferences, one of the sisters, extremely sober and dour looking, asked a brilliant question and I was pleased with the possibilites of the encounter. The sisters were a community founded to work in Africa but many had not yet had that opportunity nor were they likely to do so. They had come to North America to get money for the African adventures and for their Dutch-German motherhouse almost wiped out by the war. The sister who asked the perceptive question was Sr. Hadwig.
Later in the day of the conferences I was asked if I wanted to meet the sister-artist in the community. I almost refused picturing cherubs and kitch and finally said yes and who was the artist but Sr. Hadwig. I could not believe my eyes. I saw artwork that would have made the Louvre envious. I was to learn later that she had been shipped out of Holland to the backwater of Shillington, Pa., for her too-advanced views on mission. She was standing with Karl Rahner, S.J., and others like him in terms of "anonymous Christianity" and what would that mean for a community committed to saving African souls, despite what might be happening to their minds and bodies.
Oh, there is more, so much more. I took her to New York and managed to get her work into the liturgical circles there. I helped with her first-ever exhibit at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia which truly lauched her career. She held a degree in monumental art from the University of Cologne. She was there for me through the turmoil of all kinds of sadnesses and eventually the joy of my marriage. She and my husband had a guarded respect for each other. She earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for her community over the years and when I went to visit her after I had gone to Philadelphia to bury my husband's ashes. she said, "Ah, Katie, when people ask me how all of this got started, I say it was you." And she wept for the first and last time I ever saw her cry.
She visited me once at my Cayuga home and dubbed the place "my Canadian art gallery" as it indeed was and is. I saw her only once after that. It was after her golden jubilee of her religious profession which I had been unable to attend. By then she was on home dialysis for a kidney ailment which had been misdiagnosed for years as arthritis. At that last visit she said, "We must promise each other to see in the millennium." I agreed. We talked on the phone now and then but it was never the same. Eventually she had to go into the community's home for the aged. The motherhouse decided it could no longer care for her. It must have been shortly before her death when I called her at Holy Family Manor and realized she did not know me. She began to speak to me in German which I barely understood. I mourned her then. She died physically about a month after that.
I do not feel angry about her community's not letting me know of her death. I am saddened by it, but not angry. As much as I could be, I was there for Sr. Hadwig for twenty-seven years, during her dark days and during the successes, and she was there for me. We laughed together, and once, we cried together. We had great fun packing her art work into my little Volkswagen beetle which I named "Genevieve". I remember visiting her once when an entire set of her stations of the cross had been evicted by her superior from a new chapel that their mother general decided to erect. The replacements were garbage. I remember Hadwig's unconcern. I thought, "This is the attached detachment and detached attachment for which I long," May you keep working for us who loved you, Ida Munz, alias Sr. Mary Hadwig. If there were a woman at Emmaus, she would have been like you.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 21, 1996
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 2: 14a, 36b-41
1 Peter 2: 20b-25
John 10: 1-10
I have written elsewhere about my problem of perpetuating the image of shepherds and sheep as a suitable one for Yeshua's relationship with us so I am not going to go into that again. I do admit that I get all goose-bumpy as I watch the newborn lambs on the hillsides near my country home. I also feel that way about the wee calves that I am seeing more and more these days. My thoughts this week, however, have not been on sheep but have on the devastation in Tasmania, thirty-two people killed out of racist motives, if one can believe the papers. I have been reading Thomas Harpur's latest book in the midst of all this. It's called How to Believe in God Without Losing Your Mind. It's a great title. In it Harpur is honest enough to admit how much the words that John puts into Yeshua's mouth have made of Christianity an "only way" religion with its subsequent intolerances. Harpur is right on! What else is racism but an "only way" mentality, with all of those terrible implications including killing people who don't fit the "only way".
"Save yourselves from this corrupt generation", from today's first reading has struck me like a ton of bricks this week. I am to save myself from this racism in Tasmania and from every other approach to living that would make of itself an "only way", if I understand the scriptures and Thomas Harpur and others like him. I am to save myself from a corrupt generation that chooses to make a career out of exculpating itself by inculpating others. Oh, yes, above all else, I want to save myself from that. I suppose the big question is how to do that.
I am reeling a bit at the moment from an eighteen month adventure that has not gone the way I anticipated. Is this part of the "corruption" of this generation? Readers know that I am helping to build and equip a learning centre in Nagpur in central India. Some two years ago, not one, not two, but three different persons offered me libraries for the Centre. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. There were so many books involved that I decided to investigate shipping a container to India with these contributions rather than using Canada Post which is currently about $80.00 for 20 kilos. It took me an enormous amount of time to get container quotes and in fact, it was only on March 11th of this year that it all became feasible cost wise and I contracted for the container.
You're ahead of me already, right? I contracted for the container and, not one, not two, but three of the persons involved cancelled their commitments or did not follow through on them. So here I was with an 8 x 8 x 20 container and $3,500 of my own money and gifts from others tied up in the project thinking I was going to lose my mind. And then other persons who had made little or no previous commitment offered to help and on this past Thursday the container was sent. (The container itself is a contribution from Dominion and says on its side "It's mainly because of the meat." I think it's a howl shipping this to vegetarian India.)
So the container has been shipped. The quality of the books is not what I had hoped for. They are good but not great. More people than I care to think about, including the original three, have said, "The next time...." and I have said, "There is no next time unless you plan to ship a container because I am not planning to do so." There were some surprised grunts at this news. Why am I so angry about all of this? Why am I seeing this as part of the corruption of this generation? Why can't I give these people the benefit of the doubt? And what about the people who came through, those who had made no promises in the first place and who salvaged the project? Shouldn't I be more grateful rather than so angry?
All I have ever asked for or needed of people, especially those who say they are my friends, is that they say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they will do. Am I asking too much? Am I hopelessly naive? If I am, then so was Yeshua.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 28, 1996
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 6:1-7
1 Peter 2: 4-9
John 14: 1-12
Earlier today I was at the First Communion celebration at St. Stephen's Church in Cayuga. I know two of the children and their families, Jessica Vallentin and Andrew Campana. Jessica's father is dead. He was a dear friend. We used sometimes to weep together after the death of my husband and his first wife. He was remarried very happily to Jessica's mother for six years before his untimely death from cancer. Andrew's parents are divorcing. His mother was my student in Grade 9. Both his parents love their sons enormously, but.... I felt really privileged to be part of the celebrations and relieved that it was not a tacky church celebration. I find that so many of them are these days.
Andrew's great-uncle, Fr. Tiziano Sofia, S.D.B., a missionary in Argentina, was at the mass. He helped with the distribution of the Eucharist and it delighted all of us who know Andrew and who know him. Later we went to a lunch at nearby Lake Erie for Andrew and I was the photographer. In the midst of it all, I felt like Solomon making decisions about who to pose with whom. I had done this same thing for Jean-Paul, Andrew's older brother, two years before, when the family was still together, and I felt in my camera the tension of this separating. It was not the happiest photographic experience of my life. And yet, I admired his mother who had announced to her family, "It's Andrew's day and he wants his father here. I don't have any problem with that and if you do, then don't come." Now that's gutsy!
At the homily time, the pastor ignored the gospel for the day. As I have pondered the reading this past week, I wonder if he found that a bit of a relief. As usual, there are so many things going on in John's thinking that one wonders what to choose. I suppose of it all, what hit me in the commentary on this gospel is that we will do "quantitatively" more than Yeshua has, "greater things" than he has accomplished. We will go to the gentiles, not just the house of Israel, so says John. And indeed, we have. Fr. Sofia has gone to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Argentina. In my own case, I have gone periodically to India. And this morning it hit me like a ton of bricks that now the "gentiles" are coming to us. In the First Communion class, in this tiny village of Cayuga, there was a United Nations assembled in the persons of those children and of their family and friends. As they stood before us three times to sing with enormous gusto, I felt like it was a spiritual "I'd like to teach the world to sing". The nations are gathering, not at the temple in Jerusa- lem but at St. Stephen's Church in Cayuga. I wonder if it is possible that Canada is the most culturally diverse country in the world at the present moment. And if it is, what are the implications of the "only way" philosophy of John, as I pointed out last week? I am reminded of the "one Jesus, many Christs" theology which is emerging but currently so suspect. Yet, what else will make any kind of sense for Jean-Paul, Andrew, and Jessica?
Cayuga, Ontario, May 5, 1996
Sixth Sunday of Easter
I am at home today with a gripey stomach. I was to have read at mass today but I have decided not to go. It's a kind of better safe than sorry, thing. It's Mothers' Day and, as usual, I am pondering how much we need something like a Nurturers' Day. I have spent a portion of the day thinking of the persons who have nurtured me over the course of the years and the persons it has been and is my privilege to nurture. I wish I knew enough Greek to know if a "paraclete" could quality as a nurturer.
A special friend who is a family studies educator came by yesterday. We were going to swap some perennials but it was raining too hard to do that. She is single, never married, and as she shares with me what she teaches in her parenting course, I think how blessed her students are. What nurturing! Could she be doing more for humanity than she is through biologically reproducing herself? She said yesterday, "We have to help people to understand that parenting isn't popping out a baby. That's only the beginning."
There's such a fine line between being a nurturer and being a sap. This week in one of my readings I found, "A sin accepted is a sin permitted." How do we hate the sin and love the sinner, which would be nurturing, I suppose. I have been thinking a lot about that this week in terms of a young man whom I put on probation for not having done some work he should have. He is a star of the school soccer team and the coaches have been all over me for this. I need not bore readers with the emotional harassement I have been subjected to. On Thursday it was discovered because of my putting him on probation that the student has missed ninety classes since the beginning of the semester and should have been on probation by his three other teachers as welll. He's been forging notes from his parents about his absences. He's failed all four of his courses at mid-term. Is there a chance that we're talking collusion? The other three teachers are men and all sports fans of one sort of another.
As I left school on Thursday, I was advised that the student has been expelled, and his parents are ready to throw him out of the house. Apparently he has been intercepting the calls home to them from the school about his absences and they haven't seen his report card. They are first generation new Canadians, working fourteen hours each day to make ends meet. They are beside themselves with pain.
Will the boy come to understand eventually that I cared enough for him to hold him accountable, that there are consequences for non-performance, in this life and the next? Will he understand one day that authentic nurturing can involve a lot of tough living and loving? I hope so.
Mothers' Day, Cayuga, Ontario, May 12, 1996
The Ascension
Acts 1: 1-11
Epehsians 1: 17-23
Matthew 28: 16-20
I usually breathe a sigh of relief when the readings from John end. I did this time, too, until I found that the reading from Matthew today is about going to all nations and baptizing them in the trinitarian formula. When I think of all the pain and havoc this has meant, and the accomplishments, it is a gift to know that "it is improbable that Jesus ever said this" according to J.C. Fenton in the Pelican Gospel Commentaries. He refers to the hesitation of the first apostles and disciples to teach gentiles as recorded in Acts, and wonders why that would be the case if Yeshua had actually said this at the time of his Ascension. Fenton makes sense o me. Matthew is obviously identifying a need and putting the words into Yeshua's mouth that he thinks ought to have been there, if the words are not a later interpolation which may be the case.
I am currently teaching about the Acts of the Apostles in my religious studies classes. Interestingly, the topic is coming up in all of them at the same time. In Grade 11 we staged the Council of Jerusalem and it is fascinating to see who is there and how much every side was listened to and how a consensus was reached because everyone seems to have gone away happy. We know that gentile converts no longer had to be circumcised, i.e., become Jews before they could become members of the Way. Above all else the precedent at Jerusalem is that aggrieved parties have the right to be heard. There is a win-win model of relating in place. We lost this when the Roman model of organization began to dominate with leadership like that of Ignatius of Antioch. His was hierarchical.
I was told recently that one theologian in India has had his wrists slapped by Rome because he has dared to suggest that while paying lip service to the model presented at the Council of Jerusalem as part of the apostolic era, our church councils since then have been anything but. He is calling for a Jerusalem II and is going so far as to suggest that any council that does not meet the criteria of Jerusalem I need not be taken seriously. I like that. It's good stuff.
Perhaps I'm feeling this way because our staff had its wrists slapped this week by our administration. I sat there wondering when we would ever be asked how to resolve the problems of our school community rather than be told how to do that. We are supposed to be teaching critical thinking skills to our students. How can we do that if we are not permitted to be constructively critical thinkers in our own right?
Meanwhile our papers are filled with news of a bishop in Nebraska who is excommunicating anyone in his diocese who belongs to an association of persons named "Call to Action". These people, as I understand them, are trying desperately to bring the concerns of modern "gentiles" to the church's attention and offering resolutions of difficulties that are alienating persons from becoming members, to say nothing of the actual members that are being alienated. A few years ago when I saw photographs of one of their meetings I marvelled at how many were my age, with hair as gray as mine, and how many were women. These are, from the looks of them, persons who are unwilling to "stand around idle" and who want to make of the church the vibrant community they believe it was intended to be. I wish them well. Perhaps I will even join them soon.
Cayuga, Ontario, May 19, 1996
Pentecost
Acts 2: 1-11
1 Corinthians 12: 3b-7, 12-13
John 20: 19-23
It was two years ago on Pentecost that my dear friend Paul Bolland extracted from me a promise not to tear up these homilies I had been writing for fifteen years prior to that talk. There have been times when I wished that I had not made that promise and today is one of them. I am supposed to be musing about the spirit of God being breathed onto the disciples who are to do in their time and place what Yeshua did in his. I teach my students that this mission is ours as well, viz., to do with our lives and our time what Yeshua did with his. We are to be healing and hopeful presences to and for each other and all others. We are to make of Spaceship Earth a place where no individual is insignificant, where all that oppresses the human spirit is ended, where all of creation is nurtured.
I have written previously that in John the "spirit" is that same power hovering over the waters before creation, and breathing into the nostrils of the first humans to make living beings. In today's gospel, Yeshua is breathing onto the disciples to remake them into creative, living souls. We say the same thing happens to us in our Baptism, is reaffirmed at our Confirmation, and at every Eucharist. It is interesting that the word "receive" in John is the same word used for "take" in the stories of the institution of the Eucharist in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I believe that this is our task, to live in our time and our place as Yeshua did in his. I wonder how good a job we are doing of it. Our papers this week are full of the story of a fourteen-year-old boy killed by his same age chum. Two weeks ago we heard about three boys, all under fifteen who raped a thirteen-year-old girl. The eleven-year-old told the police he knew he couldn't be held accountable because he wasn't yet twelve. What can I offer today that can be hopeful, life-giving, creative, restorative, in the spirit of what Pentecost is supposed to be all about?
All that is coming to my mind today is one of the last Pogo comic strips I ever saw. Pogo was talking to one of his swampland buddies and for three panels his buddy was lamenting the foibles of the young of Okefenokee Swamp. They're lazy. They don't keep their promises. All they want to do is have fun. They have no sense of responsibility. They have no get up and go. What can one do? Pogo replies simply, "Keep movin' personally." In the modern idiom, I can't think of any better insight than this in today's feast. If it doesn't commission us to "keep movin' personally", I don't know what it does.
Cayuga, Ontario, May 26, 1996
Trinity Sunday
Exodus 34: 4b-6, 8-9
2 Corinthians 13: 11-13
John 3: 16-18
The man to whom Yeshua said the words in today's gospel was a ruler of the Jews. He was probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the group which would eventually secure Yeshua's death. It is to him that Yeshua works to make clear that God's love is for all of humanity, not only the Jewish people. By extension it is probably accurate to say that the love of the Jewish people must therefore be for all of humanity, not only for each other. By further extension, anyone who operates in the Yeshua way is supposed to do that same thing, love all of humanity.
I ponder what this could have meant to a Jewish ruler whose country was occupied by Romans and who felt under seige from them as well as from various kinds of Jewish interpretations of the law that were abroad at this time. He must have been genuinely confused at being told to love those who appeared to want to do in his way of life. So am I.
I have not yet seen "Dead Men Walking", the story of the woman religious who works with men in death row in a U.S. prison. Friends tell me it is a hard movie to watch. The older I get the harder I am finding it to hate the sin and love the sinner. And yet, if I don't, the big question is what that does to me. To harbour grudges, to live with that kind of hatred for another, will eat me up. Still, I think of the parents of a child who has been molested, of children who have been savagely killed, of the French, Mahaffy, de Villiers families, and wonder how they can hate the sin and love the sinner. It would take superhuman strength.
That is what the eternal life in today's gospel is all about, a life, here and now, which is unassailed by corruption or decay. How much I want to believe the best of people, especially my students! I want that attitude to be unassailable by corruption and decay. How hard I am finding it to do that! People are asking me at school why I care. After all, I have only ten days left to teach. I have been hearing this all semester from a few of the people on staff, "With only a year [semester, month, etc.] left to go, why do you care?" To one I said recently, "When I no longer care, I will no longer be me." I don't think he got it but then if he did he would likely not have questioned my behaviour in the first place.
It was thirty-one years ago this September that I first heard Fr. Riccardo Lombardi's understanding of Trinity. He said, in his heavily accented English, "Our God is a Community of Persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating Life which without each other, they would not have. Made in the image and likeness of God, we, too, are called to be communities of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, and together generating life which without each other we simply do not have." I knew that kind of community in my marriage. I know it in one of my special friendships. I want it in all of my relationships and I want it without corruption or decay. Isn't that what the promise is all about?
It has been a hard, hard week. Students who have chosen to goof off for most of the semester are now resorting to all kinds of tactics to avoid the consequences of their actions. The ploy is usually something like the damage to their self-esteem in the classroom which made it impossible for them to learn. Why they wouldn't have brought that to the attention of the administration the first two weeks of the semester, rather than the last two goes unanswered. The connivings going on in my classes makes those of the Sanhedrin against Yeshua look almost benevolent! How, in God's name literally, do I continue to love these young people, look for the best in them, and encourage them?
I know that another way of looking at the Trinity is that it is three ways for God to be God, i.e., creating, redeeming, sustaining. My prayer today for myself and for all others, especially adults, is that we may "keep movin' personally" in creating, re-deeming, sustaining ourselves and all others no matter what, and maybe, just maybe if we refuse to allow that attitude to be corrupted all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, we will help effect that community which is eternal life.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 2, 1996
Corpus Christi
Deuteronomy 8: 2-3, 14-16
1 Corinthians 10: 16-17
John 6: 51-59
In Hebrew thought, "flesh and blood" are paired to refer to the sacrificial giving and taking of life. So it is likely that Yeshua is saying, or John is saying through him, that if one would ever have some kind of peace, joy, hope, [eternal life] then to give as Yeshua did is the way to go. That's a lot to ponder in a world where a multi-billion dollar industry is involved in killing any and every kind of pain around, where pain is not seen as a kind of friend, but an enemy to be defeated at every turn. What does that do to the idea of sacrificial love and the pain of body, mind, and spirit which that usually means? The arguments about whether or not Yeshua is truly present in the Eucharistic species or if the breaking of the bread is a memorial of him, pale in comparison for me in these days of pain-ridding.
How often in these pages I have shared with readers my pain of the last eight years in trying to live and to teach the Way to the adolescents with whom I have been working. I have awakened in the middle of many nights in cold sweats over what the young people tell me they are and are not doing with their lives. In 1990 I had to take time away from teaching to re-think my strategies and my own vision and mission in my work. Things have been better since then but I still fear for what I see as the costless comfort which my students believe is the essence of the good life. I see very little in them of the sacrificial living which today's gospel calls for. They will lie through their teeth to support a student who is, right or wrong, their friend. How to take that loyalty and turn it to the Yeshua Way? My own solution has been to "keep goin' personally" and I have wondered if that has made any difference at all in their lives. This past Thursday I learned that it just may have.
It was the school's farewell to those of us who are leaving. One teacher is being transferred and two of us are retiring. I was dreading the event, literally expecting to be booed off the stage. To my amazement I was given a standing ovation. I need not bore you with the details of the event but I am still finding it hard to believe, much less process it. A friend suggests that they know I care, and indeed, I do care, and that is what came out in the applause. The stories of students who came to me throughout the rest of the day, some of whom were my worst problems, who told me how sad they are that I am leaving are too many to recount. The day was for me a major taste of "eternal life".
The training of my youth and early adulthood are very much in my mind today. I learned to "give without counting the cost, toil without seeking for rest" and an amazing number of other ideas which is the essence of sacrificial loving and living. I was taught that the common good came before my own. Over the years I have been told that this is unwise and mentally unhealthy, among other things. Self-love has been given the priority, not the love of neighbour as the love of self. As a woman who has lived what the men in my religious community have preached, I know that a balance needs to come into my life and all of our lives. I need to be nurtured as well as nurture, to be loved as well as love. I need at least some of the bread I cast upon the water to come back other than moldy. And this Thursday was such a day.
I recommend retirement to everyone. It's almost like being at one's own funeral and hearing all sorts of good things about oneself without actually being dead. Maybe our contemporary breakings of the bread need more of this kind of "eulogizing" and then we might even be what we say we are, Christ's flesh and blood truly alive.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 9, 1996
Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 19: 1-6a
Romans 5: 6-11
Matthew 9: 36-10: 8
When the other verses around today's gospel are read there are some very serious injunctions about what the apostles may and may not take with them on their journeys. They are to take very little. They are to be supported by those to whom they go. They are to travel light, very, very light by today's standards even for the most conservation conscious of trekkers. When I read this gospel I always remember the wondrous scene in "Becket" when Thomas becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury and gives away his possessions. Played brilliantly by Richard Burton, the scene begins to be set for the conflict between Thomas and his great friend Henry II. Henry had thought that giving Thomas episcopal office would solve his difficulties with the church. In fact, the conflicts will be heightened and Thomas will die a martyr's death when a drunken Henry says he wants to be rid of him and some of his court take him seriously. Thomas' decision to travel light in the spirit of Yeshua results in a high price, as Yeshua himself predicted it would.
I often use this gospel when I try to make clear to my students how essential it is that we understand Judaism if we are going to understand Yeshua and our own Christian community. It is so clear here that Matthew, a Jew disappointed in his own community who has not seen in Yeshua what he has, reports that Yeshua has come for Israel. He wants the Jews to clean up their own act. The "harvest" that Yeshua is talking about is the reign of God which he believes is imminent. He wants people to be ready for it and to make it their own vital concern. Later Matthew will extend that concern to all the nations because he is writing well after the Council of Jerusalem. At that Council, in 50 C.E., it was decided that converts to the Yeshua Way did not first have to become Jews. Paul convinces the Council that Yeshua is a universal saviour and all humanity must be made aware of him. Matthew knows of that decision and eventually makes of Yeshua a universal saviour as well.
And what of us? In his book, Yeshua: a Model for Moderns, Leonard Swidler offers us many suggestions about how we might do in our time and place that which Yeshua "thought, taught, and wrought." I don't want to do a disservice to his excellent book by trying to summarize it. It deserves to be read in its entirety. It is not, however, for the faint-hearted. One must be prepared to have misinformation about the Yeshua Way replaced with solid scholarship. It is an effort to move us from childish and adolescent Christian thought patterns to truly adult ones.
The point of the book is to make clear to us that we must use our brain power in our time and place as Yeshua did in his. We must insert ourselves into our society, know what it is for, and resist anything that does not offer eternal life. We must be prepared to abandon anything that would hold us back from the peace and joy that is ours in God's plan, and we must be willing to die for what we believe in. That may mean losing jobs if not lives but in this time what else is it to lose a job but to lose one's livelihood and to risk the lives of those dependent on us.
I am about to halve my income to do something that I believe needs to be done before I am much older. I want to go to the adults in my community and help them to think through the implications of the Yeshua Way in our time and our place. I want to learn from them and with them. I have halved my salary twice before in my life. My very first job was working for the Catholic Church. I took $45 a week instead of the $90 the U.S. federal civil service offered me. In 1996 I left a secretarial job in the pharmaceutical industry to teach. That was the era when priests and sisters were leaving Catholic schools in droves, and were just plain leaving. I got exactly half my salary again. And now I am once more about to do the same. As I did in the previous times, I feel an enormous sense of relief rather than anxiety. Maybe that's the real travelling companion for the "harvest", peace and not anxiety?
Cayuga, Ontario, June 16, 1996
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 20: 7-10-13
Romans 5: 12-15
Matthew: 10: 26-33
How can anyone tell anyone else not to be afraid? Oh, I suppose it's possible to tell someone that, but to really mean it? I am thinking of special friends of mine right now who are dealing with terrible situations, a mastectomy, the probable death of an adult son from a pernicious kind of leukemia, "clusters" of cells in a mammogram. How can one tell them not to be afraid?
Perhaps there is an answer in a recent article in Time Magazine. Much of the edition is devoted to healing and the power of prayer in relationship to healing. There is increasing "scientific" evidence that persons who are church goers, persons who pray, persons who have some kind of reliance on an Ultimate Absolute do a lot better in beating life threatening diseases than those who don't. Scientists are even now conducting double-blind studies of persons with diseases who are prayed for and persons who aren't. In some cases the persons praying don't even know personally those for whom they are praying. The results are definitely on the side of the religious persons and those who are prayed for. Maybe if one is religious, if one has a sense of the imminence of God, as Yeshua surely had, then one can say, "Be not afraid." I'm nowhere near that but how much I would like to be. It's delicious to think that pefect love, or should I write Perfect Love, can indeed not only cast out fear but make of any sacrifice a joy.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 23, 1996
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 Kings: 4.8-12a, 14-17
Romans 6: 3-4, 8-11
Matthew 10: 37-42
A few hours from now I am expecting 103 guests to help me celebrate the beginning of my open-ended sabbatical which most people call a retirement. It was interesting to read this gospel last evening and be reminded that if I want to find my life I must lose it. I suppose in my case it means if I want to find happiness in the next phase of my life I must "lose" my identity as "teacher". One friend said to me yesterday, "It's going to be interesting to see what you're like without the school." I suppose it will be.
Four guests are here already, three from Philadelphia and one from New Liskgeard. We had fun last evening at a local fish fry, which gave my friends a lot of country colour. They were happy to be with me. I was happy to have had them. Today's party will be the fifth celebration and the last, at least of some size. A few friends went to provide me with special treats because they can't be here today. I'm always ready for that kind of joy. Today is an open house, a champagne brunch, and I have asked people in lieu of gifts to make contributions to the Nagpur Learning Centre. It will be fun to see what happens in all of this, especially since the weather forecast is for 30C andit is going to be very humid.
At the moment I'm not feeling anything but relief. I awakened this morning and thought, "No more verbal abuse, no more emotional abuse, no more threats of physical abuse from these unhappy young persons. I'm ready for that kind of peace." What will I be losing in this case but fear? There is little or no prestige left in teaching, not that I became a teacher for that reason, but there was some in 1966 when I entered my first classroom. I thought of that on Thursday of this past week when I left my last classroom after giving out report cards and going over examination papers with interested students. I remember sitting down at my first official desk in 1966 with bare bulletin boards in front of me and the principal's telling me to see the art teacher to get help with putting something up. I was leaving a room filled with artifacts from the study of world religions and decorated with gorgeous collages of Fr. Avery Dulles' models of the church. The fullness of those bulletin boards reminded me of all that I had hoped to do with my teaching life some thirty years ago, viz., give my students a mature vision of their own church, and invite their intelligent respect for the religions and ideologies of their world neighbours. I have done that. That does not mean that what I have given has been received, nor been understood, much less applauded.
The conclusion to George Eliot's Middlemarch is very much on my mind today. I recently saw the PBS version of it. At the end Eliot comments about the main characters, especially Dorothea who married an aged cleric and after his death gave up her inheritance to marry a man whom she came to love. Throughout the movie Dorothea is true to her principles and demonstrates enormous integrity. Eliot says that Dorothea is the kind of woman whose life makes the world a better place. She is one of the millions of good people who go to their graves without any fame but with much greatness. Eliot seems saddened that "no one will worship at her unmarked tomb". Maybe doing good in secret is the modern version of losing one's life in order to find it?
Cayuga, Ontario, June 30, 1996
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Zechariah 9: 9-10
Romas 8: 9, 11-13
Matthew 11: 25-30
I wept my way through most of mass today. I am absolutely exhausted. How much I feel in need of the rest promised in today's readings. It usually takes me seven to ten days to wind down after a teaching year and I am in the midst of that, but I am also winding down from the 117 guests last weekend, more than anticipated. Much as I relished entertaining them, and my wonderful house guests, I am tired. More than that I think I am worn out from the keeping on keeping on that has marked so much of the last few years of my life. The fatigue is almost overwhelming me and I am finding it interesting to be contemplating "rest" in the midst of all this lack of energy.
Most scholars are agreed that today's gospel is the Matthean community's putting words into Yeshua's mouth, an acceptable enough custom. Jews are not accepting Yeshua, as Israel's messiah apart from those on the margins of Jewish life as are Matthew and his group of associates. They are the "little ones" who understand who Yeshua is. It is likely that in today's readings those who are burdened and "heavy-laden" are those who find the Pharisees' interpretation of the Law burdensome. The more flexible vision of the law as proposed by Yeshua will provide the joy of the messianic age here and now and not just in the time to come in the evangelist's version of things.
As the Matthean community felt the loosening of the burdensome version of the law falling from their shoulders, I think I am beginning to feel the burdensome weight of the laws concerning education falling from my shoulders. Perhaps my tears are as much from joy as from fatigue. Ought learning to be as circumscribed by federal laws, provincial laws, board rules and regulations, school guidelines, federation rules of conduct, as is ours in Ontario? Laws that cannot be enforced, and most of these cannot, are bad laws. Is it something like I am feeling that those in the presence of Yeshua felt, tremendous relief because authentic living has much more to do with loving than anything else? Love your neighbour as your self. Love God with your whole mind, and you whole soul, and your whole strength. Love God and do what you will. It's all there in the tradition. Can we command others to love any more than we can command them to learn? Yet that seems precisely what we are being commanded to do, to love.
I have been pondering today how much learning and loving are connected. I'm thinking of the bullock carts which I have seen in India, and sometimes walked behind and sometimes driven behind. There are usually two oxen yoked together and they make their way at a gentle, steady pace, and they can carry enormous amounts of materials in their wake. Maybe loving and learning are something like that, and when they are "yoked" together we are at peace.
If I love you I want to learn all that there is to know about you. When I open myself to any learning I am opening myself to greater loving because I am admitting that I do not know all that there is to know and that I am in need of in-formation. I cannot imagine a happy, peaceful world without learning any more than I can without loving. I want to look, listen, learn, love, laugh, and live a lot this next week, and all the rest of my life. That yoke will be very sweet.
Cayuga, Ontario, July 7, 1996
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55: 10-11
Romans 8: 18-23
Matthew 13: 1-23
Did you know that Jewish farmers sowed their seeds before they plowed? I didn't until I researched this reading from J. C. Fenton's discussion of it in the Pelican Gospel Commentaries. That meant that the farmer wouldn't know the exact depth of top soil, or if the land were new to him, how rocky it might be beneath the surface. I find this mind boggling. It means at least that the farmer sowed all of his land with the same diligence and concern, then turned it over, and allowed it to do its thing. I like this. It reminds me of authentic loving. One loves and gives the beloved the freedom to respond or reject the loving and in that much becomes vulnerable. Love is freely given, freely to be received, just as this seed is freely given, freely to be received. And if God is the Sower it means that there is an equal, universal distribution of knowledge about Ultimate Reality. It is not reserved to a select group or groups as we have been invited to think for so long.
When I used to raise my concern with learned men (there were very few learned woman of this sort in my salad days) about believing, faith and what seemed to me tremendous unfairness on the part of God, I would be told that this was simply something called the "scandal of particularity" and it was God's way of doing things and not something I ought to be questioning. I ought simply to be grateful that I was a member of that community which had been given the knowledge. I found that overwhelming because if any human parent gave to one child and held back from another or others what they needed we would jail the person. How could God get away with this "scandal of particularity" and be God? I would usually get a patronizing smile and something about my being too tender-hearted, long before some cardinal in Rome used the same language about why women canon lawyers aren't such great shakes.
I remember feeling much more comforted when in my studies of Judaism I learned that people are not entitled to blame God for anything that a good person would not do. God's morality is surely at least as humane as the best among us. I have found that reassuring over the years.
Fenton puts another twist onto this gospel which merits some reflection. He suggests that Yeshua's parables were perfectly intelligible to the people who heard them. Many of them did not like what they heard, but they certainly understood them. Parables were the medium of instruction in Yeshua's day. Like any good teacher, Yeshua didn't seek to keep knowledge from others, but to help them to discover it, understand it, and apply it. But no matter how brilliant the teaching, anyone who has ever stood in front of a class knows that some students want what it is that one has to offer, and others don't. Fenton posits that it is the members of the early church who are having trouble understanding the parables and so they come up with the idea that some people receive a gift from God to understand and to believe and from others God witholds that gift. If gentile Christians and Jewish Christians had stayed in touch with each other, instead of writing each other off there would have been a mutual training and equipping of each other, not mutual ex-communications. The allegorical, detailed interpretation of a parable which we find in today's gospel is not Yeshua's method.
Fenton suggests, too, that this parable is really about soil not about seeds. The community around Matthew is experiencing misunderstanding on the part of religious and political leaders and Jews in general are not accepting Jeshua. Apostasy is happening among some of those who have accepted Yeshua. The rich are wanting to become members of the community and are acceptable providing they use their riches in the service of others not hoard what they have. And there are persons doing amazing things with their lives. Thus we have the four kinds of "soil".
What to do with all of this? I'm not sure. I know that area farmers are hard, hard hit with unseasonable cold and rain. The corn which should be "knee-high by the Fourth of July" is about ankle height ten days later. My farmer neighbour says, "You have to be a gambler to be a farmer, Ma'am." I wonder, is there any possibility that Yeshua was suggesting that the Sower is a Gambler and that we have to be gamblers, risk takers, if we are to be faithful to the Sower?
Cayuga, Ontario, July 14, 1996
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 12: 13, 1-19
Romans 8: 26-27
Matthew 13: 24-43
Three parables are presented for our reflection in today's gospel, the weeds in the corn, the mustard seed, and the leaven in the dough. I have just walked over to my neighbour's fields to see if in the barley and the red clover planted in them I could see any weeds. From the path along the side of the house I don't see any. But then I know that he carefully plows his land and then sprays it probably to rid it of any kind of weed before he sows his crops. From what I have been reading about farming at the time of Yeshua, it was usual to broadcast the seed and then go over it with a plow which kind of scratched the surface of the land rather than digging deeply into it. It sounds something like the directions one gets now for wildflower seeds.
It would have been possible then for someone to come and put these tares into the area for the corn. Apparently when both plants are small they cannot be told apart. It is only when they are grown that they can be distinguished. The harvesting of these plants were done with sickles, not scythes. People stooped low to the ground and cut down the two sets of plants, tares and corn, keeping them carefully apart because if the tares got into the corn, the persons who ate the corn could become ill.
Supposedly this is a parable about the fact that the church and the synagogue, the corn and the tares, will be left to grow side by side until the end of time and then the decision about which is harmful and which is helpful will be made. Surely again, we have the thinking of the early church at work, not Yeshua's own thought. How can the man who came to fulfill the law not jettison it use such an image. Maybe, just maybe Yeshua in the original version was asking for people to be less quick to judge who is good and who is evil? Maybe we're back to "by their fruits you will know them". Perhaps what looks identical exteriorly is anything but interiorly.
The mustard seed image is beautiful. I have stood looking at fields of wild mustard almost blown away by their beauty. I have not seen in Israel these supposedly glorious trees at Tiberias. Although in this dry land anything that grows eight to ten feet in height is considered special. Maybe the trees were there at the lake the Israelis call Kennesareth and I missed them. I was caught up with watching fishermen at work in it much the same way they would have done in Yeshua's time. Is there something to be learned from a tree which gives shelter to birds and is also the source of a spicey condiment?
It is the image of the leaven in the dough which truly excites me however. Measuring dough and kneading it to make bread is women's work. The farming and the harvesting of mustard seeds were usually done by men although women helped in the gleaning of the fields as we know from the wondrous story of Ruth, and they likely would have crushed the seeds for mustard as women in many nations today still do with herbs and spices. There are two images here of the value of men's work and now comes this one of the value of women's work. Is there something especially symbolic in that this three measures of flour was exactly the amount that Sara is reported to have mixed up for her heavenly visitors? I like to think so.
On the wall of the entrance to my home I have a fabric print of a painting originally done in India. It is of women from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures who made a difference in the lives of their people. Miriam dances for joy. Ruth gleans, a very, very pregnant Ruth as a matter of fact. Elizabeth in brilliant blue saree dances when Miriam of Nazareth announces her pregnancy to her. Mary of Magdala in brilliant red saree announces Yeshua's resurrection to the apostles. In the centre, sitting in the midst of what appears to be a grain of wheat, there is a woman in a white saree, traditionally the sign of widowhood in India. She is kneading a small piece of dough and has a large bowl of it in front of her. There is a rolling pin beside her. I think she is making Indian style bread which is unleavened. I have never seen Indian men make this bread. Even in the seminary which I visit in Nagpur in Central India, there is a woman who comes in daily to make this bread. Everyone else in that kitchen is male, apart from the woman religious who is in charge of it. I wonder what the artist is trying to say. Possibly it is something about the bread of life, or the Bread of Life, and the role of a woman in it. Or is she trying to say that the women of India like their Jewish and Christian counterparts have something special to offer humanity and dare not be stereotyped if that gift is to be understood?
It is interesting to ponder corn and tares, mustard seed, and leaven at a moment when the centennial of the Olympics is blaring at us from every source of media. Is small really beautiful? Is the hidden and secret really important? Does slow and steady win?
Cayuga, Ontario, July 21, 1996
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 3: 5-12
Romans 8: 28-30
Matthew 13: 44-52
During an interview with a Canadian athlete at the Olympics last evening, one could see the pipe bomb blast that rocked the central part of the Olympic village. Coming in the wake of the downing of a TWA jet about ten days ago with the death of all on board from a suspected bomb, it was a dreadful moment. I have been pondering what the athletes have "sold" for their pearl of great price, to be in the Olympics. I have been pondering the bake sales, the car washes, and the other fund raisers for the sixteen high school French Club students and their five chaperones from a small town in Pennsylvania, who died in the crash of TWA 800. Imagine what they "sold" to make that trip possible. Imagine the pearls of great price, their children, lost to grieving families and friends.
In ancient times people buried their treasures especially in times of invasion. Just a few short years ago a man in Great Britain found an ancient Roman treasure in his garden when he decided to extend the flower beds in it and began turning over an area that was previously grass. Scholars tell us that we probably have the Dead Sea Scrolls because they were hidden from marauders at the time of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and of other things Jewish about 70 C.E.. In these cases, like the poor man of the first parable today, the Roman treasure and the scrolls were found by chance. In the case of the second find, it happened in the midst of the man's work. What pearls if any do people find in the course of their work these days, I wonder?
The parable about the fish is less clear. It could be that it is about fish which is kosher and fish which is not. It could once again be Matthew's point that the good and the bad grow together and it's the job of the disciple to make some judgements about what is moral and what isn't. We have seen previously how convinced Matthew is that Jews who accept the Way are true to what God has been asking of them in the past and now in the present. Theirs is the renewed covenant and the direction that all Jews ought to be going if they would open up their hard hearts.
At the end of these parables, Yeshua asks his disciples if they have understood and they say they have. They have understood the "old" and the "new", again, probably the original covenant and what Matthew understands as the new or renewed one. They are true to what God wants of them and what the new Moses, Yeshua, is calling them to be. If there is ever a case for modern Christians to know the insights of their Jewish neighbours, past and present, it is probably in this message about the old and the new.
My heart is heavy today thinking about the dead of TWA 800 and their survivors. It is heavy thinking about the two persons killed by the pipe bomb in Atlanta and the hundred or more injured. What does violence ever solve? And yet how much we take it for granted. Three times this week I could not get workmen to take me seriously until I lost my temper with them. I hung up on a furniture refinisher that I have been waiting one month to come. I ranted at people who have put up eavestroughs for me which are not properly installed. I almost screamed at the service personnel where I have been taking my cars for twenty-one years. In each instance, I was not taken seriously until I lost it. I regret that I did it in each case but if I had not I would still be waiting for service which I am paying for, and to which I am entitled as their customer. I have been asking for nothing but for what they say they are for and willing to pay the price for their services. Why did I have to get violent to get taken seriously?
If this musing today is incoherent, it is because I have found much of this week and last to be that. The older I get the less I seem to understand. We are not called to lead lives of costless comfort, of that I am sure, and I think the parables we have had read to us these past few Sundays make that very clear. But what are intelligent risks on behalf of the realm of God and what are stupid ones, I have yet to decide.
Cayuga, Ontario, July 28, 1996
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55: 1-3
Romans 8: 35, 37-39
Matthew 14: 13-21
Today's gospel is another classic instance of how well the gospel writers knew the Hebrew Scriptures and how constantly they plugged Yeshua into them. Matthew, in particular, convinced that Yeshua was the long-awaited messiah, the new Moses, does this again and again in his stories of him. In Exodus there is the famous story of the manna in the wilderness which sustains the Jews during their wanderings. In Kings Elisha feeds a hundred men. In Isaiah bread is used as a symbol of life and of truth as it is elsewhere in these scriptures. In Baruch there is a kind of prophecy that there will be a manna-like feeding again when the realm of God is ushered in by the messiah.
So Matthew again is working at making clear to his co-religionists, the Jews, who Yeshua is, and why it would make sense to accept him as their messiah. It is very, very hard, given all this symbolism to know what actually happened in terms of the bread and fish, but the symbolic value of Yeshua is abundantly clear. And Yeshua's advantages over Moses are, too. It isn't just manna but bread and fish that is provided. It isn't to just 100 but to 5,000 that the meal is given. In Elisha's miracle there was food left over, too, but these leftovers in the case of Yeshua are copious. Once again, we have the new improved Moses at hand.
Bread is a symbol of life and truth in the Hebrew Scriptures. Is Yeshua life and truth for us today, this Civic Holiday weekend, or Simcoe Day as some say we should be calling it? I fear not. Should he be? If we Christians say that Yeshua is the human face of God or the truth of God which is what it means to call him "son" of God, then he surely ought to be. But in reality?
In my research for my doctoral dissertation, the man about whom I wrote, William Ernest Hocking, said in 1930 that ultimately there would have to be Christian missions to all six continents. And he said the most difficult of all these missions would be to those nations that think they are Christian. I think it's fair to say that in North America, and Northern Europe most of us think we are living out the Jewish-Christian ethic. But are we when a mother in England plans to abort one of twins she is carrying because she "can't afford" to raise two children? Are we when people argue that a mother who is pregnant, addicted to sniffing solvent, and has already produced three children, two of whom are brain-damaged, must be "free" to choose rehabilitation or not? As a special friend of mine said to me about all of this, "The minute she opened up her legs, she lost that freedom. She was free to keep her legs closed and she chose not to. This is not the point to be talking about her freedom. Law or not, that foetus has the right to be protected from her stupidity." And this woman is a feminist.
It is a wondrous summer day and again I am faced with far more questions than answers. Who among us can make the case for Yeshua today that Matthew made for him in his time and his place? But, of course, it didn't really work in Matthew's milieu, except for a comparatively few, did it?
Cayuga, Ontario, August 4, 1996
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 19: 9, 11-13
Romans 9: 1-5
Matthew 14: 22-23
I wonder if when we hear today's gospel we concentrate too much on the water and too little on the fact that Yeshua was separated from his apostles and disciples when all of this happened. Water in the Hebrew Scriptures stands for life, as I have written elsewhere, so when Yeshua walks on water the evangelist is saying that he has it together, he understands what life is all about, and if we do the same, with faith, Yeshua's final vindication will be our own. But there is that story of the separation. He goes off to pray in a private place and then the storm comes up.
Is it just possible that it is the separation that is the main point of the gospel? Yeshua has been crucified. True, the good news is that he has been resurrected by the Creator and that he has ascended to the Creator but it is now about 85 C.E. All of this happened more than fifty years ago and the people who are living the Yeshua Way are finding things harder than they could have imagined possible. Apostasy is happening and these Matthean Jews who have come to see Yeshua as the renewed covenant of God with them are wondering what difference if any faith in him makes. Who better to use as a model of this doubt than Peter who is one of the most important leaders of the community. If he can doubt, anybody can. And doubt he does, but, ultimately faith pulls him through and he, too, gets his act together. The point? The physical separation of Yeshua from us does not mean that he does not go on working for those he loves.
In the past few weeks, three people who are special in my life have lost loved ones. One lost a brother, one a father, one a spouse. In each instance I have said to them, and meant with all of my heart, that the end of physical existence does not mean the end of loving. I know that with my own being. And it need not end our loving of them, indeed, if anything I would say that not to continue to love them would be the ultimate betrayal of what they have been to us.
Fifteen years after his change of life, I still have a sense of my husband's presence to me and love for me. It is not so intense as in the early days of my loss, but it is there. At times I cry out to him in my pain and I share with him my joys as I did when he was "in the flesh". He was and is and will yet be, a Christ of God for me, an incarnation of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Maybe the point today is that nothing can separate us from the love of God and Christ does come again and again and again when we have eyes to see.
Cayuga, Ontario, August 11, 1996
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 56: 1, 6-7
Romans 11: 13-15, 29-32
Matthew 15: 21-28
It's important to remember that about thirty-five years before this gospel was written a council had taken place in Jerusalem. It was presided over by the apostle James and both Peter and Paul were there. As a matter of fact, anyone who was concerned about whether or not people of The Way had to become Jews (be circumcised) before they could be baptized were invited to come and to discuss this issue. A lot of listening went on and eventually it was decided that the "Gentile dogs" could immediately enter the community without becoming Jews first. This was an amazing decision with long-term implications which we are only beginning to grasp today.
Just before today's gospel there is an episode about what defiles people and Yeshua says that it is what comes out of the mouths of people that is defilement. It's amazing to read that and then have him shoot off at the women in today's gospel the way he does. Supposedly this translation is a bad one. Yeshua is supposed to be talking tongue in cheek, some say, and a better translation would be, "You want me to take the food from my baby's mouth and give it to the puppy licking my cheek?" I am hoping with all of my heart that Yeshua never said this kind of thing at all. I hate, loathe, and despise these kinds of smart-assed remarks. So many men think they are so great when they use these kinds of one liners to put people off. They are usually men terrified of any kind of intimacy, but with women in particular. Intimacy, especially intellectual, makes us vulnerable. I don't want to believe that Yeshua was terrified of intimacy of any sort, but I am enormously gratified that the woman gave Yeshua as good as he is supposed to have given.
If this episode did happen, and again I hope that it didn't, I imagine this competent, cultured woman drawing herself up tall, and speaking her piece. She will not be put off. I find myself hoping that if she did it she spoke kindly, and if Yeshua did what he is reported to have done, I hope her reply embarrassed him because he would have deserved that.
I identify with this woman. I have done this in my own day, given back to men as good as they have given to me. But only a few men in my life, two to be exact, have responded to me the way Yeshua is reported to have responded to her, grateful for her persistence, her honesty and integrity, grateful for her faith in his honesty and integrity. Most men have seen my interventions as those of an "uppity-broad" and become even angrier at the truth I have felt compelled to speak. I have paid a high price for that. I can see one administrator yet telling me to "at least go along for fellowship" and warning me that my career would never take off if I didn't. Verbal and emotional harassment did not begin with Generation X, much as many of them believe that to be the case.
There's one other interesting point here that deserves mention. In the original version of this story in Mark, the crumbs fall from the "children's table" and here it is from the "master's table". Matthew changes it to make a point about the superiority of Judaism. Have he and his community really gotten the message of the Jerusalem Council?. Part of the woman's faith in Matthew's story is supposedly that she sees the Jews as superior to the gentiles. Mark doesn't need that one-ups-manship. I want to say, "Come on, Matthew. Enough already. Be open to honesty and integrity wherever you find it. Rejoice in it, celebrate it, applaud it. Get the superiority thing off your shoulder and you'll be a lot happier, and more human..
I feel this way, too, when I am treated now and again to sermons about the "fullness" of Roman Catholicism, and that while other religions and ideologies have much to offer, Catholics have the "real" truth. Once again I want to say that Christians may have an edge on truth because we have had to deal with some things in the West that our brothers and sisters in the East have coming their way only now, but if our earliest Jewish-Christian brothers and sisters were able to say that Judaism didn't have the entire revelation of God at its disposal, can we be prepared to say anything less of ourselves in our time and our place? Like the Canaanite woman, I hope persons of other religious traditions and none hold their own -- kindly -- against any and all Catholic dogmatism.
Cayuga, Ontario, August 18, 1996
Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 22: 15, 19-23
Romans 11: 33-36
Matthew 16: 13-20
After years of using the wonderful liturgical materials developed by Novalis, this past December my parish priest decided to use the "new" St. Joseph Sunday Missal. I looked at the book and remembered hating it as a child and young adult. The art work was and still is kitschy. On Trinity Sunday we have an aged, white bearded Creator, and a gallant dark Son, and the ubiquitous Dove. The artwork for today is especially offensive. A really Anglo-looking Yeshua talks to a fierce-looking bearded Peter and there is a rock behind them surmounted with a cross with three circles. Just how it would all have happened, right?
There is no doubt that Peter played a leadership role among the earliest followers of The Way. His Jewish name was Simeon but he is usually called Simon. He is mentioned first in most lists of the apostles and eventually gets called by the nickname, "Rock". In the Hebrew Scriptures there are numbers of times when a person gets a new name indicative of a change of life, e.g., Abram becomes Abraham. It is possible, too, that following up on his Yeshua as the new, improved Moses, Matthew has him establishing the new Israel from a "rock" even as Isaiah once described ancient Israel as "hewn" from the rock of Sarah and Abraham.
Things get even more interesting when we read what scholars have to say about the word which gets translated as "church" in today's gospel. It can mean "the people", "the assembly", "the congregation", the whole group of believers, or the local group of believers. Presuming he said it, which then is the "church" which Peter is being told by Yeshua to lead, the apostles and disciples, or the universal church as Roman Catholics have come to believe this commission to mean?
Earlier in Matthew we read that if one wants a secure foundation for a house it needs to be built on a rock. We even do that today, cement block or poured concrete, or in Florida where the water level is so high, we build on concrete slabs. That rock in terms of this "church" is to be Peter, Matthew tells us. Remember all of this is being written some fifty years after the actual events and Peter's original sympathies at Jerusalem rested with the Jews who wanted conversion to Judaism before acceptance into The Way. Is there just a bit of a chance that Matthew wishes Peter had "won"? But then comes this very Markan-like command not to tell anybody who or what Yeshua is and perhaps who or what the Rock is supposed to be in all of this. This gospel is not easy.
One thing is clear. It is not only to Peter that Yeshua gives commissions to make decisions about matters of discipline and authority. He gives it to all the apostles throughout Matthew's story and toward the end of the story it's fair to say that he gives that same mission to every follower of The Way. Is there just a possibility that this portion of Matthew today has far less to do with papal supremacy than with taking responsibility for making life-giving choices in one's own time and place no matter when and where that is?
Cayuga, Ontario, August 25, 1996
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 20: 7-9
Romans 12: 1-2
Matthew 16: 21-27
There is considerable agreement among scholars that Yeshua did predict his death. He knew that he was on a collision course with the Jewish religious leaders and with the political establishment with which they were in collusion. He knew that he could have gone off to the Galilee with the other "kooks" and have had a reasonably comfortable life and probably lived to an older age. If he kept up doing what he was doing and if he proceeded to Jerusalem he was setting himself up for a confrontation which he was bound to lose. Whether he used the words about his death that we are presented with here today or in the Gospel of Mark which are slightly different, is very hard to know. Whether or not Peter responded as we are told today that he did is also very hard to know. But surely what Peter might have said is not unfamiliar to many of us.
How many of us who at some point or another have felt the need to effect change have not had all sorts of persons tell us to back off, that we are too serious, that we owe it to them and to ourselves to forget the mission to which we feel we are called? Words like "it's only a job", and "what difference will it make a hundred years from now", or "you can't fight city hall", are all too familiar for many of us. How very, very difficult it is when these words come to us from people we love! How sad it can be when someone we feel understands us, what we are for, and why, urges us to back down on what we believe in our heart of hearts we are for. It's all a very far cry from the Spartan women who, we are told, sent their husbands and sons to war with the injunction to, "Come back with your shield, or on it."
Maybe what Yeshua was aching for in his adulthood was what most of us ache for in ours, credit for knowing what we need and want to do and help in getting it done. We do not need roadblocks that are attempts to manage us, or persons who seek to manipulate us. We especially do not need any of this supposedly concerned behaviour when it is done in the name of "love".
Cayuga, Ontario, September 1, 1996
Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 33: 7-9
Romans 13: 8-10
Matthew 18: 15-20
Once again in today's gospel there are more things here than one would first suppose. The "brother or sister" referred to means a member of the new Israel, the Christian synagogue. There certainly was disagreement among these persons about what it meant to live the Yeshua Way, but there was considerable agreement, too, about what was in-volved. In Matthew's community, it meant, among other things, thinking of the Jews who had not joined it or those who had joined and were not living up to its precepts as "gentiles". These persons were to be excommunicated from the Christian gathering. How was that excommunication to be decided? Never by just one person but by the "church". Granted the musing I engaged in previously about just who and what this church is, it is clear that a consensus was needed for the excommunication. Would that that were still the case in our institution today!
It's true that formal excommunications today are few and far between but why is it left to clerics to make the final decision about who is in good standing in this community? What kind of consultation did the Dominicans have with the lay persons for whom Matthew Fox made such a difference before he was ousted from that community? None so far as I can gather. The precedent at the Council of Jerusalem and also of the Matthean community is that the whole community has a say in this asking of a person or persons to leave. True, ministerial priesthood and the episcopacy as we know it today simply did not exist then. We owe our present format very much to Constantine and to Charlemagne. There appears to have been much more discussion in the early church than we have now. I know that pastoral councils are supposed to be helping with that today but most members of councils that I know tell me they are expected to be rubber stamps of the pastor and not much gets done that he doesn't want done. The process in Matthew sounds a lot more involved than this. And for those who would counter with, "The church is not a democracy," I might just want to suggest to them that perhaps it's time it became one.
I know the limitations of democracies. What thinking person doesn't? But what do we have that's any better? What invites us to buy into something more than a share in how it operates and some input into its policies? Does a community that does not invite that of its membership have any chance of succeeding in the present world? I think not. I also think there's nothing worse than to be asked one's opinion and then to have that opinion ignored especially when one has put some time and effort into thinking about the opinion before giving it.
So often when I was teaching I wished that we had a student government instead of a student council. I grew up with the former and it was an amazing experience. We had a president, vice-president, chief judge, two assistant judges, treasurer, and classroom representatives. We also had a faculty moderator. Three detentions and the student went to court. She had the right to plead her own case or invite others to speak in her behalf. The entire student government was required to be at every session of the court. The final decision had to be consensual in that if we felt the judges were mistaken in their verdicts, we were required to say so. What training!
I have been told that students today simply wouldn't stand for this. They want their peers' approval too much to stand in any kind of judgment of them, and yet one day some of them will have to.
A friend of mine who is about to join one, tells me that this is what modern support groups are all about, helping people to help themselves, and to decide how to live their lives more effectively. They are often organized around professional concerns, or health issues, and rarely around spiritual ones from what she had seen so far. She thinks that what are loosely called prayer groups are attempts to help people to grow spiritually but these are usually composed of people firmly, perhaps too firmly, rooted in their church, mosque, or synagogue. Marginal persons would find little welcome there.
I knew this kind of loving concern in my marriage. On a few occasions during my eleven years in that relationship, my husband kindly pointed out to me things that he thought would enhance my living. He did it kindly and gently always suggesting and usually advising me to ask someone else close to the situation for their opinion as well. How much I grew from those exchanges and how much I still miss that creative caring. Because I knew he loved me, I could hear all sorts of things about myself from him, good and sometimes bad. Have the clerics who ousted persons in our church truly loved them? Was Martin Luther loved? Was Matthew Fox? Was anyone who has ever been silenced by our church for any reason at all truly loved by those persons who did that formal or informal excommunication? I doubt it. Historically it doesn't look that way. Maybe ours is an era that needs much more in-communication than "ex".
Cayuga, Ontario, September 8, l996
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sirach 27:30-28:7
Romans 14: 7-9
Matthew 18: 21-35
Last week's deals with the need for the whole church to chuck unrepentant sinners. Now Peter asks what the individual ought to do with persons who offend him or her. Here again is where it helps to know something about the Judaism with which Peter, Matthew, and Yeshua were formed. In Genesis 4: 24, written about eight hundred years before Yeshua lived, there is a lamentation that blood feuds may (I am almost inclined to write "must" but that's too strong) be carried on without mercy, even to seventy times seven. The results of these feuds were so horrible that sometimes whole familes, clans, and tribes would be wiped out. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," was in fact a please for mercy and justice rather than wholesale slaughter in the name of retribution. Once again, in today's gospel, the new renewed Moses, Yeshua, is instructing the new Israel that these days are gone. Even as hatred and vengeance once existed without limit for ancient Israel, for the new Israel, mercy and compassion must exist without limit.
What doesn't get mentioned here by Yeshua is what constituted forgiveness in Judaism, and still does. (If anyone listens to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio talk show host, you will hear her repeat this approach again and again and again.) In Judaism, the guilty party has to repent, apologize, make restitution, and then has to be forgiven by the person who has been offended. In its Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Roman Catholic Church continues this format when it requires sorrow for sin, a firm pupose of amendment, and a penance or some sort which is designed to make restitution for the evil done. Then only does absolution come. Maybe Yeshua didn't raise the issue about what was needed for forgiveness because he figured Peter knew about this method and maybe Matthew didn't raise it because he was writing to persons following The Way who had begun their religious lives as Jews.
I have written elsewhere but I think it bears repeating of how much it upset me when I was teaching to have students expect to be forgiven for any and every transgression when they said, "I'm sorry." The tone of voice with which they said it was almost as jarring sometimes as their expection of being forgiven without doing anything about changing their behaviours or making any kind of restitution for the evil they had done. Time and time again I was reminded, often by the worst of them, that God loved them unconditionally and so should I. They may not listen to much of what sermons are about but they surely have the words "unconditional love" in their vocabularies. I remember one day shouting at one young man, during his reminder to me that I was required to forgive him the way God does, "Yeah, well I'm not God."
I worried over the years and I continue to worry when people think they are entitled to do whatever they want to do and then demand forgiveness in the name of love without any intention of changing their unacceptable behaviours. What does it do to a person to have their behaviours accepted in this way except to reinforce for them that what they do is of no consequence and therefore they are of no conse-quence? What happens to accountability and responsibility? A friend of mine who was an excellent vice-principal used to have a sign over her desk that read, "I trust you until you give me reason not to. I will not trust you again until you give me reason to do so." Now that strikes me as a super-intelligent approach to forgiveness. Another friend told me that when she was growing up her mother used to say, "Don't tell me you're sorry. Show me that you are by never doing that dreadful thing again."
So much of what I see passing for unconditional love or forgiveness today strikes me as being preached by and involving persons who are willing to be cheated or abused or allow any number of injustices to be perpetrated against them. Most of them are terrified by conflict of any sort, and terrified is not too strong a word to use in these instances. What they call unconditional love for the "sinner" is really lethargy, refusal to take time, or the lack of courage to make issues of things which are wrong. They refuse to engage in the hard work of persuading the person or persons involved to more loving ways of living. They look in the other direction and hope the evil will somehow disappear automatically. It is a flight from responsible provocation and unworthy of the Yeshua Way.
Many years ago, William Ernest Hocking, philosopher of religion at Yale and Harvard, said it all much better then I am. He wrote, "When seeking forgiveness and getting it becomes routine, it ceases to minister to moral progress." I doubt that there is anyone no matter how they interpret Yeshua who would not concede that he was indeed interested in moral progress, to the point of dying for it. Amen.
Cayuga, Ontario, September 15, 1996
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55: 6-9
Philippians 1: 20-24, 27
Matthew 20: 1-16
I heard a most unusual interpretation of this gospel earlier today. It was given by a Holy Cross father who was visiting St. Stephen's Parish in Cayuga. He has spent twenty-two years in Chiappas in Southeast-ern Mexico and after a home visit was planning on returning there. In early September the Mexican gov-ernment decided to refuse him permission to do so. His name is Father Alan Mahoney. Formerly from New Brunswick, I listened to his good humour and his stories and wondered if I had been forced to abandon a people I loved and cared for -- in his case Mayan In-dians -- I wondered if I would have been as cheerful and hopeful as he is.
Father Mahoney's interpretation of this scripture is that while the Jews were the earliest "workers" in the vineyard, the point of the story is that the same gifts and blessings are there for all those who come to do God's will. Historically it was the Jewish Christians after the Hebrews, and then the Greeks. And other nations and peoples since then have come to serve God through God's son. The reward will be the same for all of these peoples.
I don't know how scripturally sound this is and I find myself not really caring much. It was lovely not to be treated to the usual "God's ways are not our ways", and so although black may look white to you and white black, just don't question the Almighty. Take whatever is dished out and know that it's for your good. No self-respecting Jew ever dealt with God in that way then or now. One has only to watch Fiddler on the Roof to get that cleared up. I found myself wondering if in his scripture studies with his Mayan people, Fr. Mahoney had heard this idea from them. I wonder if the Mayans numbered themselves among the "latter-day" saints once someone like Fr. Mahoney went to work among them. I rejoiced to hear that although there are no priests left working in the area where Father served there are 8,000 lay preachers who are encouraging the Mayans to secure for themselves their basic human rights, as, of course is their bishop whose life is at stake because of his inter-ventions on behalf of the Indians.
Some scripture scholars think that this parable is Matthew's attempt to make clear that no matter when one in the Christian community comes to Yeshua, the rewards are the same, eternal life. Others say this is a story about Yeshua's arguments with the Pharisees over the persons with whom he chooses to associate, namely those on the margins of Jewish life. The point again is to make clear that no matter who it is who comes to The Way or when they come, eternal life is theirs.
I am grateful for Fr. Mahoney's inspiration this wet and rainy day on which I feel so uninspired. I am exhausted at the sordidness of my world at this moment. It is one of those moments when I am overwhelmed at the apparent lack of a desire for any kind of excellence on the part of so many. It is so increasingly rare to find persons who take pride in doing things well, persons for whom good enough is not good enough. I know that if I lose faith I become part of this sordid mess. Is there anyone else out there who believes that when Yeshua told us to be perfect that's just what he meant?
Cayuga, Ontario, September 22, 1996
Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 18: 25-28
Philippians 2: 1-11
Matthew 21: 28-32
There are no fewer than three different versions of this parable in three different highly respected ancient manuscripts. The replies are different in each and it's hard to know what the point of the story is. To some scholars the first son is the Jews who say they will do what God wants of them but ultimately don't accept the Messiah Yeshua. The second group are the Johnny-come-lately members of The Way who don't appear to be good, faithful Jews but who, in accepting, Yeshua, do what God wants of them.
Other scholars say it is an example of Yeshua's concerns about saying and doing. It's one thing to say that you will do something and another to follow through and get the thing done. Also, it's something in one's favour to say you won't do something and then have second thoughts about your lack of gener-osity and do it.
I can empathize with Yeshua's wanting people to say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they will do. Some of the unhappiest moments of my childhood, adolesence, and beyond, have been connected with people making promises to me which they did not keep. It's so hard to be anticipating with such joy the arrival of a friend and then have the meeting aborted for any one of a variety of reasons, often very good ones. It's so diffi-cult to have planned and prepared a special meal and then to have guests turn up late or not at all, or to call at the last minute even with a valid excuse. It's hard to put faith in someone and have that faith dashed.
I ponder at times Yeshua's disappointments. They ranged from a family who thought he was bonkers to dying almost friendless. If he had lived longer would he have changed? We'll never know.
Friday of this past week was my sixty-first birthday. My horoscope that day mentioned that I am bright, energetic, fun to be with, and above all loyal to my friends. It mentioned that I don't have many of them, but those that I do value me for my honesty and it is that which makes me such a good friend. I like to think that's right. I think today's gospel is about something like this, viz., that one needs to be honest, one needs to walk one's talk. Is there anything more irresistible in anyone than that?
Cayuga, Ontario, September 29, 1996
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 5: 1-7
Philippians 4: 6-9
Matthew 21: 33-43
By now you know the clues to understanding this gospel as well as I do, right? The vineyard is Israel. The landowner is God. The slaves are the Jewish prophets. Yeshua is the son. Israel has missed the boat. The followers of The Way have got it right. It is interesting that in one version of this gospel, the son is seized, killed, and then thrown out of the vineyard. That would have meant that the body was not buried but thrown into a common grave. Matthew corrects the version to its form in this gospel, seized, thrown out, and then killed which means the common grave was not the ultimate destination for the body.
I try to think of what it would have been like to have been a Jew at this time and to be told constantly by members of The Way how unenlightened I was. By this time the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed and someone wanting to make clear the wrath of God against the Jewish people could cite it as a warning to embrace The Way. It would have been a difficult time to remain faithful to the Torah, at least as difficult as it has been throughout most of Jewish history. Remember the Maccabees whose mother watched all of them die rather than deny their God? Sometimes I think Matthew was saving the saved, writing to converts to The Way to shore up their conviction that they had The Truth the way many fundamentalists today, Christian and otherwise, see themselves as having the only way to God.
This past week I was at the University of Windsor discussing classroom management with some teacher candidates in the Faculty of Education and the state of religious studies in Ontario with some members of the now defunct Faculty of Religious Studies. The question of a voucher system arose in the latter discussion and someone wondered if that would give rise to religious schools which would fragment our society more than it now is. I mentioned that I don't know a religious organization worth its salt which is not requiring some study of the major religions of the world along with its own tenets. Then I mentioned that even if that were not the case, I was a product of that bigoted way of thinking that identified Catholicism as the "true" religion. I had prayed for the "perfidious" Jews every Good Friday until I met one and she was so sweet and kind and generous that I decided I had better look up the word "perfidious" again to see if I had misunderstood it. Given the way we must rub shoulders with each other in a society like Canada, is it conceiveable that we can be what we are by putting others down? We can try but it can't last.
I remember once discussing Judaism with a Christian scripture scholar. His words were very simple. "God does not go back on promises." If God said once to the Jewish people, and scripture tells us that God did so, "I will be your God and you will be My people," then that is a promise and it is still intact. In light of books like Hitler's Willing Executioners, there are moments when I wonder why we continue to read these virulent anti-Semitic scriptures in our churches. I wonder what it does to hear them again and again even though our official documents tell us that we must abandon the replacement theory that Christains are now God's Chosen People. The documents may say that but scriptures like these don't help us to live this way.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 6, 1996
Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 25: 6-10a
Philippians 4: 10-14, 19-20
Matthew 22: 1-14
Probably what this gospel is all about, before Matthew and members of his community decided to make an allegory of it, is Yeshua's defense of his friendships with tax collectors and others considered sinners by mainline Jews. The Pharisees had refused his invitation to repent and be with him at the messianic feast, anticipatory of the reign of God among all humanity. These outcasts had not.
It is interesting to be pondering a feast on this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. I will be having eight for dinner tomorrow. It will be turkey with all the trimmings. I remember with joy the years in Philadelphia when I had twenty to twenty-five visitors for that November holiday which inaugurated the Christmas season. Anyone I knew, once I had my own apartment, and anyone my husband and I knew after I married, who were away from their homes and families, and some who were not, were invited to attend. We had some wonderful parties. We did the same each Christmas Eve. The gatherings were real happenings. People were so happy to be welcomed into a home for those days that it took very little effort on our parts to make the occasions incredibly joyous.
There's something so wonderful about a dinner party that works! It's more than the food, although surely that's important. It's the good conversation, the right mix of persons, the funny stories, sufficient diversity among the guests, the right number of them, in a pleasant setting, and something beyond all this, perhaps Something beyond all this. As I set my table tomorrow, there will be a moment when I think of getting an altar ready for Eucharist. For years that has happened at some point when I put the last touches on a beautiful arrangement. That is the moment when I know why meals were and still are so important for Jewish persons, inclusing Yeshua. There is such a possibility for communion at a meal, for forgiveness, for growth.
To eat in the Hebrew Scriptures is a symbol for intimacy, usually genital intimacy, but it can be extended to that complete, total knowledge of each other which a marriage promotes. I don't think anyone of us can know any other totally but there is a special kind of intimacy that dining together encourages, an intellectual and emotional intimacy, a desire to be at one with those at table, an openness to being vulnerable in terms of them. To this day, if two Jews are at odds with each other, they need only to be invited to a meal to know that they are forgiven and to say that they forgive. "I'm sorry" is not needed.
There will be no one at my table tomorrow with whom I am "at odds" in any way. In a sense I wish that there were. If I had time I would put an ad in the paper and invite the person or persons who have trashed my mail box for the fifth time in seven months to come to my table. I heard the noise on Friday night and sure enough on Saturday morning I found my new mail box demolished. I think it was ripped off the post and then run over with a car. On Tuesday I will take the remnants to the local police office.
No other boxes have been damaged. Who could I have offended in such a way that they want to wreak this kind of havoc constantly rather than deal with me personally? I can only think they are former students, some of whom live in the area, who will not forgive me for having believed that they were capable of better behaviours than they were exhibiting. I am not so frightened by their actions as I am saddened by them. If they continue to function in this way in terms of others with whom they disagree, what will that mean for their future, and ours?
But it is a nearly perfect day weather-wise and I shall spend it thanking God for those persons who make my life so worth living by being men and women of faith, and hope, and love, who continue to believe in human beings and their potential, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 13, 1996
Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 45: 1, 4-
1 Thessalonians 1: 1-5
Matthew 22: 15-21
I have written previously that the twisto in today's gospel is that no self-respecting Jew carried on himself or herself any "graven image", and if a coin with the emperor's image on it didn't rank among "graven" in those circumstances, what did? Yeshua is catching the questioners in their own hypocritical behaviour.
I have been listening this week and last to the various interviews with the persons who are organizing labour's "Days of Action" in Toronto from October 22-27. Two of them are women and on one occasion I literally wept for the hypocrisy of their thinking. They say they are organizing these days to protect the poor and the homeless and the innocent whom the provincial government is supposedly ignoring. I listen to this and I wonder if I were the only person in Ontario who read what Mr. Harris promised to do, won in a landslide, and is now doing. Am I having a memory lapse of some sort?
The Toronto Transport is to be closed down. That doesn't sound to me like a day of action but of inaction. I sit here and ponder who takes public transport. Is it the rich? I would doubt it. I sit here and ponder the one million persons daily who move in and out of Pearson Airport. What of those who are trying to reach the bedsides of dying family and friends? What of those who are immigrating to the country and will enter it amidst untold confusion if the unions have their way? What of those who have saved for years for the trip of a lifetime who may land in Toronto without any public transportation to assist them or relatives to meet them because there will be no public transporation? What of persons with heart conditions who may have to lug around their own baggage? How in God's Name, literally, is any of this going to help the cause of labour? What else is this all but a group of anarchist hypocrites determined to hurt the innocent to make some obscure point? Time and time again I have pondered that if an individual really wants to make clear how indispensable his or her services are, then the trick is to do them perfectly. Do them so well that no one can fault anyone who wants to keep those services intact. Do them so well that no one will refuse the monies to continue to make those services happen.
I have been waiting three years for a friend and colleague from India to visit me to work on our literacy project in that country. Right, you guessed it. He's due to arrive on October 25th. Because of other commitments his visit has been shortened by two weeks already and the airline involved is fully booked on both October 24th and 26th. He will have been travelling for more than one month in various causes by October 25th. What kind of welcome will he find in "Toronto the Good"?
Yeshua only dealt with his stiff-necked people for thirty-three years. Sixty-one years of this kind of irrationality is almost more than I can bear at the moment. It is always the innocent who suffer in every and any kind of terrorism. And what else is this action but a special kind of terrorism? I find it so hard to believe that the women involved in this organization don't recognize the hypocrisy connected with it. Is unionism the new "graven image"?
Cayuga, Ontario, October 20, 1996
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 22: 21-27
1 Thessalonians 1: 5c-10
Matthew 22: 24-40
There is a tradition that the Jewish formulation of this great commandments in today's gospel was "What you hate having persons do to you, don't do to others." Yeshua is supposed to have turned this into a creative effort on behalf of persons by saying that the good we want for ourselves we must do unsolicited for others. But that tradition probably existed before he did. The Jews themselves were beginning to take a more positive approach to doing good for all others, not just other Jews. Yeshua himself seems to have been part of this transition because sometimes in the stories of him we have him saying that he has come only for Jews. In practice, he extends himself to be of service to gentiles as well.
Perhaps a word needs to be said about the Sadducees who are reported to have been silenced at the beginning of today's gospel. They were the biblical fundamentalists of their day. If something was not in the scriptures, or could not be proven directly from the scriptures, then it was not binding. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead and perhaps they are "silenced" by Matthew because resurrection is so important in his story of Yeshua.
I had my own feeling of resurrection this week. I awakened on Thursday morning thinking that both my colleague from India and I are bright people. We have handled ourselves well in some very difficult situations and no matter what the days of action had to hold for us, we'd make something good come out of it. To my amazement and delight I had the easiest drive to Pearson Airport I have had in twenty-one years of living in Canada. I was there four hours sooner than I needed to be. The lot was so empty I parked directly across from the arrivals area in Terminal 3. I carried five yellow ballons with white stars all over them, to the delight of every child coming to meet someone in the international area. They were designed for easy identification of me by my friend. The place was so deserted I really didn't need them. The plane was not only on time but early. My colleague cleared customs and immigration in twenty minutes. The usual traffic jams enroute home were minimal. By 6:30 p.m. he was unpacked and we were savouring a hearty home-made soup, crusty bread, and red wine.
My friend said that from the air Toronto looked like a city on hold. He has been at that airport four times previously. I had faxed him about the potential difficulty, but he said he had never seen anything like it. It was almost like some kind of virus had closed everything down. It was his easiest arrival ever. True, the Terminal 3 authorities had managed to get an injunction against stopping picketing at the air traffic controllers entrance and the R.C.M.P. were on hand to make that happen. Picketing did occur at a construction site but nowhere else. Transporation in Toronto was another thing. Despite a court order to allow a corridor for workers to enter the TTC who wanted to, pickets refused to allow that to happen and even defied their leadership on this. The TTC intends to take them to court.
Yesterday there was a mass rally at the provincial parliament buildings. Today both sides are claiming victory. The union organizers are saying they brought the city to a halt as they promised. The government is saying it was business as usual despite periodic protests at some offices. Who is right?
Have the unions refrained from doing to others what they do not want done to themselves? Have the unions done the good to others they want done to themselves? Has the government refrained from doing to others what they do not want done to themselves? Has the government done the good to others they want done to themselves? What good was not done or was done for the single mother of three who with tears in her eyes reported that she has lost a day's wages because her children's day care centre did not operate on Friday and she had to stay home to care for them?
If today's gospel speaks to any of this it is surely that there is a spirit in the Yeshua Way, something beyond the letter of the law, and something creative involved in making social justice a reality. I can't see that it encourages hurting anyone for any reason.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 27, 1996
Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Malachi 1: 14-2.2, 8-10
1 Thessalonians 2: 7-9, 13
Matthew 23: 1-12
There is a consensus among scholars that the invectives against the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Scribes in Matthew's gospel are caricatures of these persons, especially of the Pharisees. There were many good and loving persons who were Pharisees and Yeshua himself very likely was one. He appears to have believed in the resurrection of the dead, which the Sadducees did not. He was an artisan and not trained as a scribe, it would seem, which may be why we have nothing from him in writing. It may also be that his peripatetic life style prohibited his writing. We do know that Jewish men and some women were taught to read because they were required to proclaim the scriptures and this was not always able to be done from memory.
It is interesting to ponder a caricature. I have one of my husband which was done by a very clever cartoonist. When he asked Bent what he was, Bent replied, "I think of myself as an intellectual." The cartoon has him with a huge head, a lovely smile, and carrying a bunch of books in one arm. One of the books is Oliver Twist. We laughed over that subsequently because Bent grew up in Denmark during the war and there were times in his life when he would have asked his mother for "some more gruel, please". Often, of course, there wasn't any.
One scholar says that today's gospel is really about practical atheism. Practical atheism is putting on a pious face but actually functioning as if there were no God or no accountability for one's actions other than expediency. When a friend and I talked about this recently she suggested that a practical atheist "is a supposedly religious person who can be bought". The stories about Yeshua are very clear on this point. He couldn't be bought. He was not a practical atheist. He died rather than sell out on his convictions of what God wanted for and of humanity.
It's interesting to ponder what as individuals, members of families, workers, and as members of religious congregations we are selling out for today. Practical atheism was not only a first century problem. It's alive and well among too many of us right here, right now.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 3, 1996
Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 6: 13-17
1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18
Matthew 25: 1-13
This weekend is the Hindu feast of Divali. It is a time of great rejoicing and fun, and a national holiday in India. It goes on for two weeks actually but this weekend is a special time. It's kind of the Indian Christmas. Schools close. People travel to see relatives and it is a time of fun and games. This afternon my Indian colleague and I are having a bit of a Divali party for about sixteen people. Most of them have helped us in one way or another with our Learning Centre. Yesterday and this morning we got ready for the party, especially for the "lucky dip". It's a kind of grab bag game and the gifts he brought from India will be used for the game. It has been fun to think about today's gospel in the light of preparing for this party.
The story of the wise and foolish virgins (as we used to call them before we got the translations of bridesmaids and maidens) is an interesting one. The story is supposedly about the good and the bad in the early church, some scholars say. Others see it as those who have faith and those who don't, then and now. My friend suggested to me earlier today that there's no better modern interpretation of this story than the one provided by M. Scott Peck. Dr. Peck was at a retreat and asked to give the homily at the Eucharist which was concluding it. (It must have been some enlighted presider who asked this of him.) Peck had never, ever done this before and when he saw that the gospel was today's, he reports being at his wit's end about saying something intelligent about it.
He decided to sleep on the issue and awoke the next day with the insight that this was a story of preparation. He told his hearers in his sermon that the one thing that no one can do for anyone else is to do their preparation for them. Each of us must do our own preparation for living and loving.
It's interesting to ponder what preparation means. Webster's dictionary suggests that preparation consists of creating a state of readiness. It is to acquire resources to meet that which is required of us and that which is unexpected. And Peck says that no one can do that for us but us. It's the "aloneness" of the human condition, not to be confused with loneliness. This acquisition of wisdom, for what else is this preparedness but wisdom, is what today's gospel is all about and it is what a liberal arts education was and still is all about.
It's sad to read this gospel in the light of the cuts which universities in Ontario, and elsewhere, are making in their supposed restructuring processes. De-partments of religious studies are being hard hit as are departments of philosophy and other subjects in the humanities. Much emphasis is being placed on information but the traditional vehicles for acquiring wisdom are being eroded.
We need new kinds of institutions for this wisdom to be available to us. Perhaps eventually our spiritual centres of every shade and variety will become these kinds of places of preparation where seekers after wisdom will find it, "radiant and unfading". Perhaps Dr. Peck's works and others like his will pick up the pieces after so much of the abandonment of wisdom of our main line institutions. And perhaps he won't.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 10, 1996
Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proverbs 31: 10-13 et al
1 Thessalonians 5: 1-6
Matthew 24: 36 et al
Library shelves are filled with learned analyses of whether or not Yeshua actually believed that his return to earthly existence was imminent. It seems likely that Matthew and his community believed that he would return and that their job was to live a life of charity in the interim. Luke and especially John would eventually make clear that with or without an immediate return of Yeshua in the flesh so to speak, the life of charity was requisite of all followers of The Way.
By the time Matthew was writing the Temple had been destroyed, there had been famines, and there was at least one earthquake. Does Matthew put into Yeshua's mouth Jewish predictions about the coming of the end times? It's possible. Does he want people who are following Yeshua to stop what they are doing and concentrate on those end times? I think not. He is absolutely clear that the requirement of the follower is a life of charity lived in a permanent state of readiness to be of service. Then no matter when the end time comes, the follower will be prepared for it.
What is a life of charity, a life lived with mercy for the oppressed, for us today? Many would likely point to Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her Missionaries of Charity. Mother has been much in the news these days refusing to have a heart operation which many of those she serves could not afford. She is reported to have told her doctors to allow her to die as would many of the people in her homes for the destitute and dying. Mother Theresa make no bones about the fact that her sisters are committed to custodial, charitable work. The justice issues must be left to others. In this instance she would want others to work to secure adequate health care for every member of the human family. I think one thing our era has come to understand is that charity and justice are two sides of one coin. We need people who pick up the pieces after injustices. We need people to change the unjust structures.
I have just spent three weeks in the company of my friend and colleague, Archbishop Leobard D'Souza of Nagpur, India. He came here for some rest and relaxation and to investigate new possibilities for our programs at the Nagpur Learning Centre. The highlight of this investigation was a morning at the Community Computer Assisted Learning Laboratory established in nearby Stoney Creek by the Wentworth School Board. We saw and worked on a program that takes a student from pre-literacy through Grade 12. We met a couple from Yugoslavia who arrived in Canada five months ago without a word of English, who carried out a conversation with us. So, too, we met a young Vietnamese woman here only three months who spoke with us about her experience with the program.
There were two young men working with mathematics programs to get back into regular schools once they have those credits. Their truancy was their major handicap. The lab manager told us that now she has to ask them to leave when the place is closing. Perhaps the highlight of the adventure was meeting a young man who is two credits away from entering Mohawk College. The lab manager met him in a local bar where she went to introduce herself. He had just come back from a correctional institution and she urged him and his buddies to avoid a future of such incarcerations by taking advantage of the learning program. They did but he is the star. And so, of course is everyone at that lab, from the principal who spent seven years finding the right program to put into place and convincing the board that their delivery of education had to change from traditional classroom formats.
Throughout the whole experience I felt charity, justice, and readiness alive and well, and so did Arch-bishop D'Souza. There was a desire on the part of all concerned with managing the lab to end the injustices and oppressions experienced by any of the persons coming to it. There was a determination to change the traditional structure which was inaccessible to some and wearing to others. There was in all the facilitators we met a determination to meet people where they are educationally and socially and move them into better places. There were no crucifixes on the walls nor prayers said publically before classes begin. But all that human peace and development is about was palpable in that store front operation.
Later we were to learn from the person who is marketing the program locally that five city blocks in Detroit are now given over to this kind of education by a group called Focus Hope. In London, Ontario, it is being used at a women's centre, and abused women in safe houses can now access it by modem and lap top computers from their shelters. The English as a Second Language Portion of it is being used by Hyundai to help the three hundred Koreans they have just brought into their local plant. And what is most important in all of this, is that the program operates on the lowest level of computers, those which many schools and companies no longer use. We felt like we were in the midst of a modern-day miracle of charity, justice, and readiness.
We want this program in Nagpur. We want it operating at our Centre all the waking hours of the day and perhaps into the night. We want it available for women who have some time in the afternoons after their meals are cooked. We want it for the poorest of the poor who cannot attend formal schooling. We want it for the school drop-outs, for the Tibetan refugees, for the street children. We want it for the education which undergirds their humanity.
We hope, we pray, that our efforts of this sort are a modern version of living lives of charity and justice, and of mercy toward the oppressed. We hope that Yeshua would approve.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 17, 1996
Thirty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 34: 11-12, 15-17
1 Corinthians 15: 20-26, 28
Matthew 25: 31-46
Today, the last Sunday of the liturgical year, is also the feast of Christ the King. I have written previously of how difficult it is for modern persons, I believe, to take kings seriously. This week I read the thesis that Wallis Simpson was really a drag queen and that gave the Duke of Windsor his opportunity to indulge in homosexuality. Oh, my, the good king or queen, putting people's interests before their own to the point of dying for the people is lost for most of us.
I have also written of how difficult it was and still is to tell Israeli goats from sheep. They look so much alike only the practised eye can distinguish which need the warmth of the fire at night to survive and which can be put on the outskirts of it and make it. The evangelist seems to be saying that the "good" and the "bad" are perhaps far less easy to identify than we would like to believe to be the case.
This Sunday always is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me. I remember in my growing up Catholic in Philadelphia the fire and brimstone gospels and sermons of this day. The word was going to come to an end, our relationships were going to come to an end, we were going to come to an end and the preparation for Christmas had to keep all of that in mind. The warnings were not quite so dire as those of Lent but they were there. It was a time to take stock, serious stock of what we were and weren't doing in light of our eventual deaths.
I don't remember being frightened by all of this. I do remember that it made of me a far more sober than frivolous child and probably a far more serious than frivolous adult. I'm not sure that's all bad. I wonder at times if the mitigration of reminders of our end is at heart a cave-in of the church to our death-denying culture. At funerals I wonder at times if the liturgists have consulted with women who have lost babies, or persons who have lost spouses to horrific diseases, or with parents whose teenage children have died prematurely, to say nothing of children who lose their parents prematurely. It's all so upbeat one feels almost afraid to cry. Apart from the time when a close family member speaks of the dead person, usually after communion, one wonders if there really has been a death. (The bishop of my diocese is now prohibiting these kinds of eulogies. Is this one more attempt to avoid the pain of loss?)
I am currently re-reading A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. It is his notebook on which the movie Shadowlands is based. The book is more poignant. I cannot begin to do justice to it in this short musing but it ought to be read by all who have suffered any loss especially the death of a beloved spouse. The bereaved lover writes much differently than the un-married Christian academic. There is no glossing over of the pain. There is an eventual new life this side of death which is both earned and gift. The books makes for special Advent reading.
Three years ago I began to write these musings which were many, many years in the making. My thinking about the scriptures will not end with this effort. I have ignored in most cases to comment on the Hebrew Scriptures and the epistles. I felt they would have made the reflections too long. I fear some are already. I know I have broken many of the rules of good preaching especially that a sermon is not supposed to be exegesis. But the historian in me questions how we can understand the spirit of something if we do not know the context in which it was said. The Germans call this sitz im leben. And the teacher in me -- and what else was Rabbi Yeshua -- is committed to discovering anew with others what this spirit is. Any real teacher knows we offer, we facilitate, we hope, we pray, but we can't do it for others, only with them, especially when we are in the business of giving people their humanity, of helping them to form the world that forms them, of continually seeking different ways to better purposes.
If Yeshua was about anything, it seems to me that he offered people a new kind of wealth, viz., the power of control to create a better future for ourselves and for all others. I hope my musings are in that Spirit.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 24, 1996
SERMONS I WISH I HAD PREACHED OR BETTER STILL "TEACHED": YEAR C. Copyright © 1995 Catherine Berry Stidsen, Ph.D., R.T.C. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations. For information or permission for longer citations address the author, 535 Irish Line, R. R. #3, Cayuga, Ontario, Canada, NOA lEO, Phone/Fax: 01-905-772-3790, E-mail: ad930@freenet.hamilton.on.ca.