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 a