Volume One: Musings on Sunday Scriptures Year B
Sermons
I Wish I Had Preached
or
Better Still
"Teached"
Musings on the Sunday Scriptures
Year B
by
Catherine Berry Stidsen
Introduction
I have been writing this book on and off for fifteen years. The writing has occurred usually after I have heard a particularly bad sermon. I have come home and pondered what I would have said, poured out my heart onto paper and then have usually ripped up what I have written within a week or two or the writing. Usually I have felt that my thoughts were too immediate or too topical to have any kind of universal value or impact. Perhaps I should tell you a bit about who this "I" is.
I am a fifty-nine year old woman, trained in English and the history and philosophy of religion. I am "sister" only to my brother. I have never been anything else but lay nor do I expect to be anything else but that. In my young adulthood I had a private vow of virginity for seven years when I was a very active member of the Jesuit Sodality of Our Lady. I hope I am a religious woman (albeit I am not a woman religious), whose "congregation" is the human race.
I was widowed suddenly in 1981 in the twelfth year of my married life. In that relationship I knew Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in loving and being loved as I did not before and have not since. I experienced that committed love, the decision to be each other's best friend for life, offers humanity the most accessible experience of the Love of the Good One that is possible this side of death. But then, I married my best friend.
Since the early 1960's I have been concerned with and committed to inter-religious dialogue. Vatican Council II confirmed my conviction of the worth of that endeavour. I also believe what the Council had to say about the laity in the Roman Catholic Community, or the "non-clerics" as I now prefer to call them. (I increasingly call clergy "non-laics" to remind them of what they are not.) I have been a secondary school teacher of religious studies since 1966. Before that I worked as a secretary for fifteen years for the Roman Catholic Church and then in the hospitality and hotel industry. I spent nine years at night getting my B.S., and four years part-time acquiring an M.A. in religious studies. It took seven years to complete my Ph.D. in religious studies. During that time, I was concerned with models for the reconception and revitalization of Christianity that require consociations for work and worship among the world religions to effect basic human community. I found the theory in the work of William Ernest Hocking. I experienced the practice in the Archdiocese of Nagpur, India.
I have taught and learned in the United States and Canada and most recently in Nagpur where I am now helping to build and equip a learning centre for persons on the margins of economic, political, and social life. I am winding down my secondary school career and hoping to move into adult learning enterprises. I am concerned that my church is still emphasizing youth and youth ministry and forgetting that Yeshua played with children and taught adults. I am ready to learn with adults and let someone else play with their children.
I owe readers an explanation of my poor English in the title of this book. I am inordinately concerned with words but then so was Yeshua. I am a teacher, not a preacher because I am an insatiable learner. Preaching usually sets my teeth on edge because there is no opportunity for corporate dialogue. I have been part of "dialogue" homilies in small settings, especially in India, and that has been powerful. I yearn for a Catholicism in which clergy and laity will mutually train and equip each other as a matter of policy not serendipity. I work for that time when Catholics understand that we exist primarily for those who are not members of our community. I hope for the time when we will give up our present preoccupation with our internal institutional self. My adult life has been given to effecting one Catholicism, to bridging the gap between its intellectuals and its "ordinary faithful" (who are increasingly not ordinary and no longer quite so faithful), and to consociations with its world religious neighbours and all persons of good will. In the process I have learned that bridges get walked over, driven over, and sometimes blown up.
I have been in dialogue over the years about these thoughts you will read. At the risk of offending some persons whom I do not mention I will cite a few who have contributed to my thinking. Leonard Broughan, O. Carm., my childhood friend, has shared with me repeatedly his special insights into the good news of and about Yeshua. Elizabeth Hughes Rufo, a friend from college days, has helped me to sharpen--and often to soften--my insights with her special educated good humour. Leobard D'Souza, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Nagpur, India, has been friend, colleague, and laugh-mate since we met in Rome during the last session of Vatican II. That His Grace calls me "friend," gives my life special meaning and purpose.
My husband, Bent Stidsen, was my best friend, colleague, lover, guru, laughmate, and constant constructive critic. I have learned to live without him in the flesh but I have not gotten over his loss. There is a difference. Of late, Paul Bolland, a liturgical architect and artist, has been in dialogue with me almost every Sunday morning about these musings. Last Trinity Sunday after an abyssmal canned homily from the pulpit, Paul came out of mass and said, "What should that have been about?" I explained that our God is a community of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating life and made in the image and likeness of God we are called to be mirrors of that Reality. Paul looked at me and said, "You have got to find a venue to reach adults. Write those books. Vow to me that you will stop tearing up those sermons. You are changing my life and my work in what you are saying to me, and opening up to me. Please, please write those books."
And so here I am with the first of the three books I propose, having begun in Year B, and hoping to finish in Year A. They are unfinished as any and all good teaching and good sermons must be. They are at times as vague as Yeshua was and at times as direct as he was. They may tell you more about me and my world than you and yours.
I believe that the Spirit of Life is "leading us to all truth" which is the fullness of our humanity. I hope that these musings provide some clues in the discernment of that leading.
Catherine Berry Stidsen
Oakwood, Cayuga, Ontario
November 26, 1995
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 3: 3-10, 19
1 Corinthians 6: 13-15, 17-20
John 1: 35-42
The scripture scholar A. M. Hunter thinks that we have a good example here of Yeshua's sense of humour. Peter was anything but a "rock" in the gospel stories. He was by and large a "wobbler" according to Hunter. I am almost tempted to say he was a "rolling stone." At least Peter seems to have waffled around a good bit up to and including the Council of Jerusalem when he finally conceded that converts to the Way did not first have to convert to Judaism and submit to circumcision, something repugnant to the Greeks who considered their bodies sacred and that ritual a violation of them. Tradition tells us that Peter didn't wobble or waffle when it came to his death though. He asked to be crucified upside down because he wasn't worthy to die as his Master had. It's a lovely insight into a man who appears to have grown in his office, not been diminished by it or intimidated by it.
Today's readings are all about being called. It's the word we hear a lot in our church now instead of the word "vocation". When I was growing up Catholic in Philadelphia we spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, to religious life, to marriage. We rarely if ever spoke about a vocation to be single, unless one had aged parents to be cared for or had a priest brother whose housekeeper one could be, at least in terms of single women, that is. Bachelors were usually looked on with suspicion because they could ask a woman to marry while the woman had to wait to be asked. It was a fairly limited sense of vocation but that was it.
Only once in my life did I feel "called" to do something which I felt involved myself to the point where if I did not do it, I would not be "saved" which means I would have no peace in my life. That vocation was to go to Temple University to get an M.A. in Religious Studies. I spent nine years at night working on a bachelor's degree in English while working mostly in the hotel and hospitality industry. In the summer of 1965 I went to Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Chicago and made a Retreat of the Christian Community. It changed my life. We came together as church, male, female, lay, cleric, vowed religious, assorted colours. We made a revised version of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and instead of keeping silence throughout the eight-day adventure we talked to each other for all but one day. At night we entertained each other. All my hopes about a church mutually training and equipping each other across vocations were there, real, palpable, although temporary. I was subsequently invited to learn how to give these retreats and in September of 1965 headed to Rome for a five-month course which was going to coincide with the last session of Vatican II.
While I was in Rome I had a taste of the universality of the Church. We were sixty people from thirteen "more or less" English-speaking nations as we used laughingly to describe ourselves. We had the chance to hear the peritii from the Council. I experienced anti-Americanism for the first time in my life. I came back to the United States knowing that I had to know more about the religions of my world neighbours, the backgrounds from which course members had come. When I finished my bachelor's degree I was offered a full scholarship at Fordham University in New York for an M.A. in religious education and I knew that I couldn't take it. I didn't just know this with my head, I knew it with every ounce of my being. A friend acquainted me with the program at Temple and I was accepted and went there to work on the Journal of Ecumenical Studies while working part-time on the M.A. I was thrown out of my Jesuit Sodality for opting for a "secular" rather than a Catholic university. The people who were my closest friends for seven years were told not to talk to me on pain of their being tossed from the Sodality as well. My mother couldn't understand why I just didn't "go to the convent." My father tried to understand. My favourite uncle told me he expected me soon to be the brightest corpse in the graveyard.
I have never before nor since had this kind of conviction about what I needed to do. I have wished over the years for that sense of security but it has not happened. Not even my decision to marry came with this kind of conviction. It was much more of a "guestimate" which fortunately worked very well. As a twelve-year-old I remember saying to the sister who was encouraging me to think of vowed religious life for my future that "I wish God sent us into this world with a tag attached to our big toe telling us what we should be and should do." There are times when I still wish that. As I near retirement which a friend likes to call an "open-ended sabbatical" I feel more "wobbly" about my future than I would prefer. But there it is.
I have always loved today's gospel, even though it's John slipped in again. What I like most about it is the calling of Yeshua "teacher" along with his own invitation to "Come and see." It reminds me of what good teachers do today and have always done. They invite. When I was studying these scriptures my professor said that it was a Sabbath that was involved. That meant that Yeshua and his new associates prayed together, had a meal together, relaxed in each other's company, shared their aspirations, began evolving friendships and cementing the ones already in place. It's a marvellous multi-media learning possibility, this coming and seeing before accepting a "call." I jumped in to that M.A. on faith.
I also like the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures. Samuel did not yet know Israel's Divinity, we are told, so he thought it was his teacher Eli calling him. Eli figured out what was happening and helped the boy to answer, "Here I am." Some of the most rewarding dimensions of my teaching have been playing Eli to my students. There are now fashion designers, a couple of religious studies educators, an animator and television specialist, and a few dozen others to whom I once had the courage to say that I saw something special in their gifts and talents and urged them to think about specific careers and professions. Because I have dabbled in so many things in my life I know goodness and greatness in several areas. It has been special to be able to compliment and complement their talent.
One of these special students keeps in touch with me regularly. She has finally worked up her courage to call me "Catherine" instead of "Miss." Not too long ago she said, "You know, in addition to being a born teacher, you are a born counsellor. What are you going to do about that?" I find myself wondering if she is now playing Eli to me. For the moment, all I can say is "Here I am, Good One, here I am. Help me to see and come."
Cayuga, Ontario, January 16, 1994
Mass for the Unity of Christians
Acts 4: 32-35
Philippians 2: 1-5
John 15: 9-12
I have been marking examination papers this week. It is usually a difficult time for me and this is no exception. I wonder what I have done with the past five months of my life and what my students have done with theirs. The marking is not without its lighter moments though. One student defined a covenant as "a place where nuns live." When asked to give the first and the last of Kohlberg's six stages of moral development another student wrote "Stage One and Stage Six." A Grade 11 student told me that the straw that broke the camel's back for Martin Luther -- I was looking for something about Tetzel and indulgences -- was "being asked to sit in the back of the bus with blacks." Without laughter where would religious studies educators be, where would any of us be.
The question of Christian unity is surely no laughing matter. Depending on what is happening in California right now, it is estimated that there are about 283 Christian sects and denominations. We surely need to get our act together and that is well worth praying for. Incidentally, when we heard the reading from Acts today, I remember being told in my studies this this disposition of goods was what Luke thought ought to be happening. It was not going on in the early church to the extent that it should have, this sharing of goods and talents. Perhaps if we could reach some consensus as Christians about what role poverty plays in our way of life, other things would come together. But this is not what I want to think about with you today. As important as Christian unity is, surely there is something more important.
I yearn for a mass for the unity of humanity. Without a global ethos, a world spirituality, some consensus on what human beings are for spiritually, I don't see how we can ever expect world peace or world justice. The United Nations is trying, there is no doubt about that. Its 1948 Declaration of the Charter of Human Rights is a move in the right direction. Do you know, by the way, that the Vatican has never signed that declaration? I have read and re-read it and cannot understand why representatives of Catholicism have not signed that charter. That charter provides us with a minimum of consensus about what people deserve and why.
I am happy to tell you that there is a Christian movement now to effect a world spirituality at the heart of world community. It is being called "World Wide Ecumenism." It is being promoted now especially by the World Council of Churches and Archbishop William Carey of the Anglican Communion. The term is a strange one because "ecumenism" means "of and pertaining to the whole known world." But the term got co-opted by Christians in the mid-60's and came to be understood as inter-Christian associations. All other kinds of terms also got spawned, "intra-Christian," "inter-faith," "inter-ideological," "inter-religious," "multi-faith," when a perfectly good word like "ecumenism" was available. Without boring you with the history of all of this, I rejoice that at last the idea of representatives of the the whole known world coming together to effect a spiritual ethos revives my drooping spirit.
Two Catholic persons who have been working for a long time hoping for a global ethos are Fr. Hans Küng and Dr. Leonard Swidler. Küng teaches at the University of Tübingen and Swidler is at Temple University in Philadelphia. Both have made a very serious suggestion that the Dalai Lama, the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a Muslim imam, and a Chief Rabbi, among others, ought to be sent up in a NASA spacecraft to see the Blue Planet from there and not be allowed down until they have produced a charter of spiritual rights to which all their constituents will adhere! Isn't that wonderful? One can only dream that their first moral statement would be an outlawing of any and all war.
In Canada, the United Church is surely in the forefront of promoting world wide ecumenism. In October of 1992 that Church, in a working paper entitled "Toward a Renewed Understanding of Ecumenism: Life and Work in the Wilderness of the World" had this to say about our present situation in the Christian churches and sects.
The mission of God is larger than the church, but the church has its part to play, it work to do. Our role is to bear witness to God's reign, to seek understanding of and the well-being of others who claim or claim not Jesus' Spirit. It is to gather allies in the Spirit of God to work at healing the Earth and its creatures. This healing work of God calls Christians to respect diversity and to recognize the rich gifts of the Spirit in people of different races, creeds and genders. At the same time, our unity in Christ calls us to move beyond the pain and hurt of our Christian divisions, to get on with the work of God in the world.
There is only one reason for us to get our Christian act together, or perhaps I should say, only one way for us to get our Christian act together and that is to understand that we Christians exist for the integral human development of all peoples. We exist to assure food, clothing, shelter, education, and sufficient leisure for reflection (religion/spirituality) for every man, woman, and child on Spaceship Earth. We exist to assure all persons love, fun, freedom from all oppression, and the potential for achievement. And we exist to secure the development of every living being and the preservation and enhancement of Mother Earth. Anything less than this commitment on our part means that we have sold our birthright. As I said earlier, my hope is for a mass for the unity of humanity, for the development of basic human community. May we live to see that happen! May we work to make that happen.
Cayuga, Ontario, January 23, 1994
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 18: 15-20
Corinthians 7: 17, 32-35
Mark 1: 21-28
I have visited the site of the synagogue in Capernaum which features in today's gospel. It is an interesting spot. While I was there a Franciscan priest from Italy who is an archeologist was working at the site and sweeping it out as well. I rather liked that. It is believed that the present remains are the third on the site so it would have been under all of the present remains that Yeshua read the scriptures.
How does one read anything with authority? I suggest that happens when one knows the content of the reading and is simply not reading words. I suggest that this happens, too, when people believe what it is that they are reading, have experienced its value, have made it their own. I have a friend who is an archbishop who reads scripture this way, but he not only reads it with authority, he reads it dramatically. Sometimes when people ask me why I try to get to India once a year and I tell them it is to hear this man read the scriptures, they laugh. But I really do mean that. I find it very difficult at times when lectors stumble over words and when they don't seem to know the content of their reading. But that's another story.
I have dealt elsewhere with the idea of evil in Mark's gospel. And I have explained that Mark's Yeshua is in charge, in control, and on top of everything so, of course, he is going to cast out demons, to control evil, to rid humanity of it. Jews will tell you that the story of Moses read today comes from a very primal time in their history and they really make that clear to people when they read these scriptures in their synagogues today. Jewish congregants themselves often squirm when they hear such readings and their rabbis assure them that they are right to do so. They have grown away from a Divinity that zaps people for not toeing the line.
It's the epistle that I want to reflect on. I honestly wonder why we keep reading it. Supposedly it was written at a time when a second coming of Yeshua was believed imminent . People were not supposed to change radically what they were doing except to change their minds and their hearts about things and do that with the conviction that Yeshua was the world's saviour. What does this offer today to the 99.5% of us in our church who are not vowed to celibacy or virginity? I have raised the issue before and I will probably raise it again. Paul's experience of his marriage was certainly not mine. I have been single, married, and am now widowed. And I tell you that I had more time at my disposal to be "concerned about the affairs of the Lord," when I was married than I have had before or after it. Let me tell you what I mean. I am not pretending that my experience is the universal one. I am not pretending that my marriage was not without its challenges to grow, to renegotiate. I am telling you that it gave me a freedom which I have not had before nor since.
I knew that I wanted to marry the man who became my husband because it was like two gears meshing. Nothing that I wanted for my own life, for my career, for my spiritual growth was diminished in the relationship. Nor was his. Our hopes and dreams were enriched, and we had one other with whom to enact them. We had "more" married than either of us.had invidually. We built that understanding of our marriage into our wedding ceremony, and even into the wedding rings which we had designed to symbolize the relationship.
My husband wore silver, the female metal, and I wore gold, the male metal, to signify the equality of the relationship. The rings are in three parts. The outer bands represent our individual lives. Our marriage relationship was built on that. In the center of the ring is a band which is wider and higher than the other bands and open to each of the bands representing our individual lives. The marriage gave us "more" than either of us had separately. That was my experience. It was like having six eyes, not four, six hands, not four, six feet, not four, three minds, not two, etc., etc. etc. I eventually became convinced that that more was really the More, the reality we have called "God" or Love.
A special friend who is the scripture scholar with whom I studied has translated that familiar "Where there is love there is God, " to "When we love, God is present." Isn't that a wonderful translation? When we love, God is present. That was my experience. He has put it into a nutshell.
I have said before and I will say again that I am not suggesting that the only kind of relationships that effect this "more" for us are married ones. But to have another human being say publically that he intends to be your best friend for life is a powerful gift. My experience is that the greatest miracle in the world is to say to someone "I love you" and hear their reply, "I love you, too." When we love, God is present.
Paul was wrong on this one. There are kind and generous people who are married, and kind and generous people who are vowed or temporarily single. There are miserable, penny-pinching people who are married and miserable and penny-pinching people who are vowed or temporarily single. With a synod on vowed religious life in the offing this coming September, we ought to be remembering that. Perhaps then we will have synods in the future that might even begin to deal with more than a preoccupation with internal institutional matters. We might even get around to addressing the integral human development of all peoples in the spirit with which Yeshua himself did.
Cayuga, Ontario, January 30, 1994
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Job 7: 1-4, 6-7
1 Corinthians 9: 16-19, 22-23
Mark 1: 29-39
There is a "miracle" hidden in today's gospel which goes untold unless someone knows a bit about widows at the time of Yeshua. Incidentally, I have just learned that in the early church, probably until about the fifth century, at least among Syrian Christians, there was an Order of Widows! Isn't that fascinating? They ranked with bishops and presbyters and one old Syrian book of blessings contains a prayer for the ordination of widows. The Syrian liturgy required that thirteen widows had to be present at every Eucharist and they were to sit behind the bishop and his presbyters on the left hand side. But I am getting away from the untold miracle story.
It was customary in Israel that after a woman was widowed she went to live with her oldest son. In many parts of the world today this is still the case. Those of you whose roots are in Italy will be familiar with this practice. Those of you whose roots are in India will know it well. Today we have a story of a widow living with her daughter, Peter's wife. This is no small thing. We can ponder what might have happened. Possibly the woman had had no sons and that would have been a great sadness for her because that was expected of the good wife. That the male contributed the chromosome that made the child male or female was unknown. Being barren or being without a male offspring was the fault of the woman. One can only imagine the pain of Peter's mother-in-law if that had been the case.
Then she must have suffered the loss of her husband for there is no account of him in the story that we have just heard read. She had to depend on the hospitality of her daughter and son-in-law during this time of her life. And the beauty of all this is that Peter apparently made this happen. He did not have to care for this widow. His own mother had the right to that care but not his wife's mother but we are told that Peter made a home for her.
There is a second miracle here. It is the story of Yeshua's touching the sick woman. Women in Israel stayed in their own part of the house. They did not associate with the men and usually did not eat with them. They stood and served them and when the men had finished eating they were allowed to eat themselves. Peter trusted Yeshua enough to take him into the inner sanctum of his home to his sick mother-in-law. I suggest that Peter cared enough for his wife and her mother to allow this to happen. And Yeshua touched the woman and healed her. This is the third miracle but it gets sloughed over in some ways. Jewish men simply did not touch women in this way. In public they were required to have their own wives walk behind them. They were not to speak to them and they certainly were not to touch them in any way or demonstrate any kind of familiarity in public. And here we have a Yeshua who goes into the woman's room and touches her and in that process heals her.
Forgive me if I bore you with saying more than perhaps you would like to hear that I have "stood in this spot" but I have stood in the place reputed to be Peter's home. I was astounded. It is huge by today's standards. It has areas mapped out as servants' quarters, dining and sleeping areas for the family, an office for Peter, and it is on the banks of a river. I stood there gasping intellectually and perhaps otherwise and the Israeli guide, a sabra or native -born Israeli, saw my consternation and said "What is the matter, teacher?" By then he knew that for the prior sixteen years I had been studying and teaching religious studies, thus the "teacher." I said, "Ben-Ami, whatever this place is, it is not the home of a poor fisherman. If it is the home of Peter then we have the wrong idea of his being poor and not having much to leave behind. He appears to have been anything but poor." Ben-Ami gave me a great smile because by then he had learned of my insatiable curiousity about things and he assured me that the Jews in the Galilee at the time of Yeshua had resources. He felt it was very likely that Peter was part of a fellowship of fishermen, perhaps its elected official, much like the later guilds that were to develop. The fellowships usually consisted of about twelve men, who cared for each other and worked with each other and most of all provided for the fellowships' widows and orphans and for suitable burials of all who belonged to this extended kind of family.
When I stood at that site reputed to be Peter's home I could see how the "whole city" could have gathered there as the scripture today tells us. And I could applaud Peter's hospitality and that of his wife and Yeshua's special welcome in all of this. Yeshua seems to have been very well received and very successful in terms of his healing here, just the opposite of what his experience was in Nazareth. Interestingly, we are told that he does not stay put.
The story tells us that he left the house early in the morning and went off to a "deserted place" where he prayed. Mornings are so special in this part of the world, perhaps in any part of the world, but then I am truly a "morning person" myself. Yeshua appears to be thinking about what has happened to him and Mark makes it the opposite of Nazareth. Interestingly, he appears to be doing what he tells his own disciples to do eventually, to do their thing and move on, despite their failure or their success. Yeshua does just that. He has been successful but he moves on as the scripture scholar C.F.D. Moule says, "refusing to be held down by his huge success and popularity in any one locality."
In many ways isn't this harder to do than to leave people with whom we feel we have failed, people who obviously don't want us around? To leave people who relish our company, with whom we can laugh, with whom we can share our most intimate thoughts, our aspirations, people who appreciate us, is a great sacrifice, sometimes I think it may be the greatest sacrifice that any of us can make.
A dear friend of mine often says, "Duty before beauty." I find that often I must make that choice in my own life as Yeshua made it in his. I think of the times when I so reluctantly left the breakfast table where my husband and I had some of our most wonderful exchanges and went to my work, refreshed but also saddened because I wanted more of the goodness that he was for me, of the success and popularity that I felt and enjoyed in his company.
I have been spending time this past month listening to some tapes by Edwina Gately. Edwina did precisely this. She left her work in England as President of a very successful group of lay missionaries and came to the United States because the "God of the belly button" as she likes to call the Holy Spirit called her to do that. She studied theology for a time in Chicago and decided that that was not what she had been called to North America for and so she bought an old R.V. and moved it to a camp site and waited there for nine months (interesting!) to discover what the God of the belly button wanted of her. Eventually, deep within herself she heard "Go to the prostitutes." She tells the story very humourously and I don't want to do her an injustice but she is for me a classic example of someone modern who is today following Yeshua by leaving behind huge success and popularity in one locality to work in another. You might enjoy her tapes.
Maybe this is a good day to think of this two-pronged invitation of Yeshua to move on. Maybe it is a reminder to do our thing as best as we know how to do it and leave the ultimate outcome in the hands of the Good One. Maybe it's a reminder not to get too overwhelmed by failure or by success. Maybe it's a reminder to get on with our living no matter what.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 6, 1994
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Leviticus 13: 1-2, 45-46
1 Corinthians 10: 23-11:1
Mark 1: 40-45
The gospel story that we heard read today may have involved a man with leprosy or Hansen's disease as we now call it. It is now curable and many persons who have it in our part of the world are treated on an out-patient basis. But the disease could also have been eczema or psoriasis. It sounds harsh to us to think about someone being asked to leave his or her community because of a disease. In our recent history we have missionaries who went to live among the lepers in Polynesia to care for them when they were forced to leave their families and to bring some order and beauty to their lives. I remember as a grade school student being overwhelmed with the work for lepers on behalf of Fr. Damien and the Sisters of Charity of Louisiana. It was a woman religious who isolated the leprosy bacillus and thus made its treatment possible.
The people with skin diseases who come to our mind today are surely those persons with AIDS. And before we cast stones mentally at our brothers and sisters of the Israelite nation we might remember those persons now who want people with AIDS quarantined in special camps. It does not appear at times that we have come a great distance from that stance so many thousands of years ago. It was one of the duties of the priests in Israel to determine when someone had to be expelled from the community for the well-being of all others and then received back again when they were well enough. This wasn't just a matter of physical hygiene but had as much to do with conditions that could make the whole community religiously impure. Our own processes of excommunications in the Catholic Church are a lot like these situations in ancient Israel. Priests and bishops are called upon to excommunicate those who might hurt the whole body. Our history is very interesting along these lines. Very often after their deaths these persons turn out to be our prophets and special witnesses.
Yeshua accepts the Jewish laws and then tells the man to carry out the prescription to go to the priests and offer the required gifts to rejoin the community. He also tells the man not to let anybody in on what has happened about the cure, and, of course, the man does precisely the opposite. This is another example of what is called the "messianic secret." But there are times when I wonder if humanly speaking Yeshua is simply wearying of the crowds and worrying that he was not able to provide the individual attention to persons which he would prefer. C.F.D. Moule, the Markan scripture scholar says that Yeshua wanted the man to keep silent because ". . . if the crowds became denser, Jesus would be unable to give effective help to any individuals; and partly because he wanted his message to carry its own weight, without the publicity of spectacular stories."
I am at the beginning of a new semester. I look around my classes at times and think of the miracles that I am expected to work within them, each child to be brought to the fullness of his or her potential, and there are as many different potentials as there are students in my classes. I look at the "lepers" in my classes and watch them being shunned by students and sometimes by teachers. More and more these classroom outcasts are not the developmentally challenged but the brightest and the best. It isn't "cool" to be involved, to work with teachers, to answer questions, to learn. Adults are the enemy. In crowded, tri-level classes, how do I reach all of them, how do I meet individual needs and corporate needs? How do I offer the one-on-one counselling that Yeshua seems to have wanted, too. This is, of course, what parents were once for. Those of us like teachers who stand in loco parentis seem not to be able to do too much better.
Perhaps this is a day to look around us for the outcast of every sort, for the non-obvious "lepers" and to make some time for them, to let them know we care. And perhaps it is a day too, for those of us who feel we are those "lepers" to reach out to another and look for healing.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 13, 1994
The First Sunday of Lent
Genesis 9: 8-15
1 Peter 3: 18-22
Mark 1: 12-15
I am always reminded at the beginning of Lent of the parish priest of my youth in a suburb of Philadelphia. He was curate and pastor in that parish for fifty-four years all told, fifty of them as pastor. I can see him yet on Ash Wednesday and on the first Sunday of Lent thundering, "Don't you dare come here and get ashes on Ash Wednesday and come back here to kiss the cross on Good Friday if you've done nothing in between!" The "doing" was no meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and only one full meal a day for adults. The other two meals together were not to equal the main meal.
Popular piety required that all of us "gave something up" during Lent. As a child it was usually candy or something of that sort. As a young and older adult it was usually alcoholic beverages. During school days the money we saved went to ransom pagan babies in foreign countries. A boy baby cost $10 and a girl baby $5 and we even got to name them. I always ransomed girl babies and named them "Catherine" and if the Holy Childhood Association kept its promise there ought to be about 100 middle-aged Catholic Catherines in South India now as a result of all that candy I did not eat and all those cocktails I did not drink. I can remember yet what it was like to break the fast after noon on Holy Saturday and have that first piece of candy or that first martini!
We don't do that kind of fasting any more although some persons still "give something up." We are urged now to do things that we might not do otherwise and that's surely good. But there was something special about the restraint we were urged to practice as children and in my younger adulthood. I think I can see it now as learning to delay gratification. The Christian psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says that the ability to delay gratification is a sign of genuine maturity. He also says that our North American culture today invites us to do anything but!
The story of Yeshua's temptation in the gospel we have just heard is surely an invitation from his culture to take traditional routes to power, to buy into gratification and not delay it in any way. In the other gospels we have more elaborate and detailled stories of this testing than we hear in Mark's and scholars tell us that the story of the temptations is about opting for three things, consumerism, flattery, and power. Yeshua turns his back on all of them. Yeshua refuses to buy into the mindset that we are what we have. He refuses to use flattery to get done what he is called to do. He refuses to use physical violence to establish the reign of the Good One among humankind. Persons who say they operate in Yeshua's name often have a track record far less admirable than his in this regard.
I have spent some time these past few days saying to myself "Do I really need this or do I simply want it?" I plan to do that in terms of any purchases I contemplate during these next six weeks, including books, which are my personal addiction, I fear. I am promising myself that for the next six weeks at least I will not put "Good" on a student's paper that is mediocre, nor will I pass work that is below par, no matter the supposed damage to the child's "self-esteem," a highly questionable concept to start with. What good will it be for my student to be a happy functional illiterate because I lacked the courage to be honest in his or her regard? And I am promising myself to negotiate more of my classroom management and to share it with my students so that they experience in me someone who is a power for good in their lives, not someone with power over them. I don't know how well I will succeed in any of this but I do know that I am not going to be able to kiss that cross on Good Friday with any integrity if I don't give it a try.
Cayuga, Ontario, February 20, 1994
Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 22: 1-2, 9-13, 15-18
Romans 8: 31-35, 37
Mark 9: 2-10
Rabbi Harold Kushner whose books regularly top the best seller list and who is probably best known for "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," says in his book "When Children Ask About God," that there is no part of the scriptures which he hates teaching more than this story of Abraham and Isaac. He hates teaching it to Jewish seminarians, he hates teaching it to adults, and most of all he hates teaching it to children. He writes "I would rather try to teach the most abstruse theological claim or the most involved story of sexual relationships than this particular story, with its themes of hostile parental designs on a young child."
Rabbi Kushner goes on to say that if dealing with the story can't be avoided we have to make very clear that it is a story of a father who loves his son very much. There is no one or nothing that Abraham loves more and that is how most fathers (and mothers) feel about their children. The other point is that God doesn't want Abraham to hurt Isaac. And there were religions at the time of the writing of this story that did hurt their children. Kushner is probably referring to the worship of the god Baal. Parents were required to throw their first-born son into the fiery mouth of this god and they had to do it before he was two years old. Their option was to enjoy their son for two years and then sacrifice him or do it anywhere along the way. To this day Jews in Israel spit at the site where tradition tells them the fire of the god Baal burned.
When I teach this story, I tell my students that the Good One does not want human sacrifice. I remind them that there were cultures that practiced it and that there are some still today that do so in secret. When I teach about the story of the Transfiguration of Yeshua as this gospel is usually called, I try to explain that it is a story of the realization of what following the Way will be all about, devoted toil, suffering, and death. This transfiguration story is a classic instance of how it helps us to understand Yeshua when we know something of Judaism.
Jewish tradition said that Elijah would come again before the end of time. You will remember that he went to heaven in a fiery chariot, a mysterious end to his earthly life. If Elijah is with Yeshua in this vision of Peter, James, and John, there is a confirmation that Yeshua is part of the final revelation, and that the end time is here. After the vision it seems as though Yeshua refers to John the Baptizer as Elijah incarnate. He has announced the end times and paid for it with his life.
Moses is the symbol of the law, the guiding of the Jewish people, Israel's greatest lawgiver. And in the vision Moses converses with Yeshua, probably a sign that Yeshua now ranks with Moses or even replaces Moses as the most important of the lawgivers. Then comes the Shekinah, the Cloud, the Divine Presence. All is complete. Yeshua is a realist. He brings this whole event down to earth. The reference to the Baptizer's death is a concrete reminder that there is a high price to be paid for following the Way, and a high price to be paid for not following it.
I have had a terrible time trying to put these two readings together. The Good One does not want human sacrifice, and Yeshua seems to be saying that sacrificing oneself to effect the reign of the Good One is the way to go. I think the key to both stories is that they are stories of self-sacrificing dedication. The Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures are filled with stories of these kinds of people, people who themselves choose to effect a free and humane world at great personal cost. Maybe, just maybe Yeshua is saying that that choice is our basic human freedom. It is a choice to be saints.
What does that say to us about our current pop psychology that tells people to "take it easy," that puts down "workaholics," that insists that people lower their expectations to avoid frustration, to fear "stress." What does it mean for the proponents of "good enough is good enough," or "the best is the enemy of the good"? What does it mean for those who refuse to believe that when Yeshua told us to be perfect he meant precisely that? What does it offer for those who think that the essence of Christianity is costless comfort?
Cayuga, Ontario, February 27, 1994
Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 20: 1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18, 22-25
John 2: 13-15
Has there ever been a winter like this in Canada? Talk about building up and tearing down houses, temples or whatever! Either I can't get water into my house because of frozen water lines or the sump pump can't get it out of the house when it starts to thaw because of ice in its line! I wake up to no water coming into the place or to water all over the basement. The plumber has been in and out of my home five times in the past month all concerned with the same problem. I know that so many others are dealing with the same thing but I don't find that that makes it any easier. I am ready for a new order to replace the old, for a new weather to replace the cold.
John's version of the gospel we hear read today differs from the other three in that he has the cleansing set at the beginning of Yeshua's ministry. The others have it at the beginning of Passion Week. Chronologically the others are probably right but remember that John's gospel is very theological. It's concerned with what the Good One has done in Yeshua and here John seems to be making the point that Yeshua knows what he is for and what he is about from the beginning of his ministry. Yeshua's job is that of a "refiner's fire." He is to get the pure gold out of every situation and will not settle for anything less. Neither may those who act in his name settle for anything less but pure gold, for being a refiner's fire.
There is an interesting reference toward the end of today's gospel about those who believed in Yeshua because of the signs he was working. Martin Luther used to call this kind of faith "milk-faith" or the kind of faith that feeds on miracles. Neither Yeshua nor Luther put much faith in people who believed in this way or were unduly impressed by those who had it. Faith -- what does it mean to believe? What is genuine faith in today's world? Maybe it's the unrelenting cold but I'm having a terrible time at the moment believing in and keeping the resolutions I made at the beginning of Lent. I resolved to meet real needs not just my wants, to avoid any and all flattery, and to avoid any kind of violence to get done what I believe I need to in my work life in particular.
I have decided to accept an invitation from my brother to use his condominium in Mexico for a week to escape from the cold and to rethink my teaching. I hope this is meeting a real need. This week Grade 9 students were up in arms with the return of their first major test. One young woman literally screamed at me. "Who the hell do you think you are? You're not an English teacher." I had corrected completely their mistakes in the three-paragraph essay that completed their tests. Out of forty-two papers I had seven that came close to standard English usage. Hers was not one of them. There were other reactions equally virulent and on a few occasions I could literally feel myself wanting to put my hands on them for their arrogance and stupidity. I had a serious flareup this week of a muscular disorder that I have which occurs when I try to contain my rage. Tomorrow the first set of Grade 11 papers go back. I spent a considerable portion of my marking yesterday with tears rolling down my cheeks. The bulk of the written work is garbage. But then, my subject area is "only religion."
Today I want to take out my whip and throw the educational defilers out of the temple of learning. The problem is that I just don't know who exactly to go after. Is it parents who don't read to their children, monitor their television, help them with homework, understand that we are not their children's tutors but teachers, and that they are the primary educators of their offspring? Is it harried elementary school teachers who are expected to be parents, and social workers, and child care specialists, and also teach reading, writing, and mathematics, and provide individualized programs while they are at it in classrooms with every kind of learning disability and challenge represented? Is it educational bureaucrats in their ivory towers who have decided that children don't have to be taught how to spell or write and that grammar is unimportant and that it will all somehow happen automatically when they are "ready" for it? Is it secondary school teachers who are in it for the money and whose best reason for teaching is often given as "July and August"?
I am weary and I am raging and like Yeshua I know that none of this has to be the way that it is. People in his time were choosing to defile the temple or at least look the other way while the defiling was going on. I fear that too many people in education are choosing to look the other way and by sins of omission are allowing a whole generation of young persons to leave our schools ill equipped for the world competition that is coming in this time of economic globalization. I wonder if Yeshua felt as alone in his rage as I do in mine. The young woman I mentioned earlier shouted out at me as she left the room, "You have no right to judge me. Jesus never judged anybody. You have no right to judge me." Tomorrow I am going to ask her if she heard today's gospel. Maybe that will help her, and maybe it will help me.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 6, 1994
Fourth Sunday of Lent
2 Chronicles 36: 14-17, 19-23
Ephesians 2: 4-10
John 3: 14-21
(a different kind of musing)
It's 4:30 p.m. and I am sitting on the balcony of my brother's condominium time-share facing the Pacific Ocean and soaking up the beauty of the universe. At noon today I was at mass in the Cathedral and after that we walked to a traditional Mexican restaurant and had one-half of their seafood dinner and couldn't finish it. My travelling companion has gone off to the pool to soak up sun. I wanted time here to think and to be. I will join her later.
We flew here on the cheapest charter flight we could get and parked in the cheapest parking lot at Pearson International Airport, we hope. I'm trying to keep my promise of being careful about needs and wants this Lenten season. My brother has made us a gift of the use of this facility, a belated present to me for my recently acquired Ph.D. We are eating most of our meals in and have nothing on our calendars. We are not taking any tours unless we do them spontaneously. Our lives at home are filled with all kinds of appointments and we want anything but. The only daily appointment we have is to watch the sunset. We have seen two so far and they have been gifts. "We love, O Divine One, the beauty of Your universe, the place where Your glory dwells."
When I was growing up Catholic in Philadelphia we called today Laetare Sunday. It comes from "Rejoice, Jerusalem," that opens today's liturgy. Earlier today I said, "Rejoice, Vincenza," and since she is my generation and well raised by the Ladies of Loretto, my friend grinned and said, "Rejoice, Catherine." We made our way to the Cathedral for mass at noon and got there twenty minutes ahead of time to find the church packed. I stood against a pillar and occasionally crunched down and squatted by it. My friend who taught modern languages in her salad days could follow the Spanish well enough to inform me that a little boy dressed like the pope that we saw on the steps of the Cathedral as we were entering it was, in fact, a first communicant, and he and his family were celebrating that event.
I found myself grateful that I could not understand the language. I took in the sights and sounds, the people from every nation who seemed to be there, the incredibly kitschy statues, and marvelled again at how the same bad art work stands in so many churches internationally. Here is the Caucasian St. Anthony, and the simpering Little Flower, and thank God, at least one black Martin de Porres. But it was the people, the children that intrigued me so much.
Most of the mothers and some fathers with them stood at the assorted church doors. Many were carrying plastic bags and I presumed they were food for a picnic after mass only to find that at the homily soccer balls came out of the plastic bags and children went sent off to play! A couple of the bags had popsicles in them, wrapped in newspaper, and at the homilies the mothers gave the littler children these sweets to suck on. I found myself thinking "Taste and see the goodness of our God." It took on a whole new meaning. The homily was more than twenty minutes and half way through it the other half of the popsicle got distributed. The babies roamed around and were welcomed wherever they went.
The people sang spontaneously and well without any accompaniment. They prayed with fervour. After the mass many went to their favourite saints to light candles and to pay special homage to them. There was much laughter and lots of good cheer as people left the church. Most were surprisingly well dressed and I remembered the days of "Sunday best" and found myself wishing that we still did this in North America instead of the so casual clothes that are almost de rigeur there Many headed to the food vendors in the plaza outside the Cathedral after the mass. Some were picking up food and then heading in the direction of the parish buildings. My friend said there was a marriage preparation course listed on the bulletin board for after the mid-day mass on Sundays. I pondered how good an idea it was to have this preparation at a time when the people were in the church and did not need to make a return trip some evening later in the week.
On our walk to the restaurant enroute home to our hotel we promised ourselves to go back to the plaza and savour the view of the city from there. During lunch my friend said that the mass reminded her of growing up Italian in Hamilton, Ontario. We talked a lot about the Catholicism of our youth during lunch and remembered especially the women religious on whose shoulders we know we stand. As Vincenza put it, "They taught us to put the common good before our own good. It's been a good way to live." I agreed.
There is much to rejoice about this Laetare Sunday. My work life seems very far away. I hope my present "running away" will help me to live and fight another day.
Puerta Vallerta, Mexico, March 13, 1994
The Fifth Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
Hebrews 5: 7-9
John 12: 20-33
I always find today's epistle comforting. It pleases me to think that like myself Yeshua of Nazareth cried and yelled over his plight as I often cry and yell over mine, usually not in public, but in the privacy of my home. Jews then and now are encouraged to tell it to the Good One "like it is." They are above all to be scrupulously honest in their prayer, as in their other relationships. It pleases me, too, to hear of a Yeshua whose "soul is troubled." I have always loved the words of Jeremiah, "I will be their God and they shall be my people." I can even forgive the maleness of God in this expression.
My soul was troubled this week when at 4 a.m. after getting off the plane from a week in Mexico we were not given the discount we thought we were entitled to in a budget parking lot because we were eight hours short of being away seven full days. My soul is troubled because I came home to find that as an individual I cannot get a matching grant from CIDA for a learning centre I am helping to build and equip in Central India. I have to be an organization to do that. So much for personal generosity. My heart is heavy because tomorrow is the thirteenth anniversary of my husband's change of life and although I have learned to live with the absence of his physical presence, I have not gotten over that loss. Losses are supposed to invite us to a new life, today's gospel says. Suffering is supposed to offer us opportunities to learn in a way that nothing else can or will. Sometimes I wonder. I know a great many persons embittered by suffering and not helped by it. I pray that I am not one of them. Do all seeds that die produce new life?
A woman friend and neighbour of mine who raises cattle once said to me in another context, "Your Jesus was a terrible farmer." When I looked somewhat shocked she said, "Seed put into the ground doesn't die. If it dies it doesn't produce anything. Seed put into the ground germinates if it's going to work. Think about that -- it germinates." She really got me wondering so I looked up what it means to "germinate." It comes from the Latin verb germino, germinare, to sprout or to put forth. A. M. Hunter whom I have mentioned to you before says that the purpose of this story is that "death is the necessary condition of fuller life, of a richer harvest." He says that it is a reminder of the "tragedy of self-love and the glory of self-sacrifice." I think it means what my friend reminded me of during my holiday, that we are for putting the common good before our own good. We are for "putting forth" for others It is Yeshua's plea, to the Creator when faced with his imminent death as a criminal, "Complete the revelation of Your holy love even at the cost of my agony," as Hunter paraphrases it. The older I get the harder I am finding that to do. Somehow I thought it would get easier. It hasn't. These are the moments when I wish that Yeshua had lived to be an old man and not died in the prime of his life. That's the kind of role model I need now, an old, wise, mature Yeshua. Yet in a sense, role models like that are in my tradition if I take the time to look.
In the Catholic papers this week there is the story of the moral theologian Fr. Bernard Häring asking the Holy Father to reconsider the church's ban on artificial birth control. Fr. Häring was chair of the 1968 commission that recommended that the Christian couple make the decisions about how to plan their family Paul VI ignored the recommendation of the majority of that commission and repeated the traditional ban on artificial means of birth control Fr. Häring also went on record recently that he had been interviewed by both the Gestapo and the Vatican about his philosophy and found the Gestapo interview to have been the kinder experience! This man who is close to 90 years of age is still "putting forth" that others might live. An aged gentle Franciscan monk, a Capuchin priest, named Fr. Walbert Bühlmann, is saying out loud and writing about Catholic missions in the developing nations what many in Rome do not want to hear. He is saying that the younger churches must be put in charge of their own destinies, must evolve their own theology, and their own rituals, and must not be forced into Eurocentric molds or kept financially dependent on Rome. He is calling for Catholicism to become a cosmic religion to meet the needs of its modern persons, a religion of both/and not either/or principles.
Fr. Hans Küng has just produced one more monumental work, this time on the need for a global ethos if we are ever going to have world community. He talks about the absolute need to understand and appreciate the religions and ideologies of our world neighbours. He has been denied the right to teach in Catholic colleges and seminaries.
Maybe I have more models than I have realized. The universality of Yeshua's message to buy out of the tragedy of self-love and into the glory of self-sacrifice is still there in this church for those of us who take time to see. Today on Solidarity Sunday when we Canadians are asked to remember our brothers and sisters in the third, fourth, and now some say the fifth world, perhaps it is also a day to be in solidarity with those in our own community experiencing the psychological pain of being "seeds" for a more truly catholic church.
Yeshua the Jew would have been very familiar with the Jewish "prayer of asking." One part of that prayer is for what we need for a given day, and another is for successes enough to keep us going. There is a psalm that has that refrain as well. "Give success, Creator, to the work of our hands. Give success to the work of our hands." Maybe that would be a good prayer for all of us to pray this week, no matter how we have to pray it, weeping, wailing, gnashing our teeth in the process, or with much joy. "Creative Love, may I buy out of the tragedy of self-love, and into the glory of self-sacrifice, May I do this in my time and place as your son Yeshua did in his. Give me what I have to have today, some pleasant surprises along the way, and successes enough to keep me going. Amen."
Cayuga, Ontario, March 20, 1994
Passion Sunday
Isaiah 50: 4-7
Philippians 2: 6-11
Mark 14: 1 - 15: 47
It is blistering hot in Central India today, so hot that the people in the cathedral parish will wait until early evening to celebrate Eucharist. There are about 6,000 Catholics in the parish and people will form in their neighbourhoods and walk in procession to the huge tent erected for this week's liturgies. Their archbishop will walk with them. He chooses a different neighbourhood each year as do the priests of the cathedral parish and the archdiocesan offices. Many of their non-Catholic neighbours will walk with them because in India it has become a custom for people to celebrate each other's holydays and holidays. There will probably be 3500 to 4000 persons who gather eventually and remember the passion of Yeshua.
Many of these people in India are on the margins of their country's economic, political, and social life. Perhaps that is why a day like today means so much for them. Today's is a gospel about outcasts, a leper, a woman who was considered profligate in her affections, a man doing a woman's job of carrying a water jar, a rabbi who dies the death of a criminal between two criminals.
Perhaps this is a moment to be grateful for any and all people on the margins, the "anawim" who gravitated toward Yeshua in his lifetime and who gravitate toward him in ours, and to hope and to pray that we will always have them with us.
Cayuga, Ontario, March 27, 1994
Easter Monday
(again, a different kind of musing)
I am sitting in the sterile area of Miami International Airport. I have just tried to purchase a stamp and have been advised that there aren't any in this area. I can purchase post cards but no stamps. "Lotsa folks take 'em home wif 'em," the smiling salesperson assured me. I decided against the postcards without the stamps since the inconsistency didn't seem to be getting through.
I have just spent Easter with friends whom I have not seen in eight years, since their wedding in fact. He had been widowed for four years by then, with three teen-age children. She was a never-married forty-seven year old when they committed themselves to be each other's best friend for life. It was special to be with them this first Easter without my father in the flesh. For years we spent this holiday in each other's company, even moreso than Christmas. When my husband was alive we often drove to Philadelphia on Good Friday and back on Easter Monday. It was lovely because the spring flowers there are ahead of us in Canada. Usually the cherry blossoms and other spring flowers along the Parkway and near the Philadelphia Art Museum were blooming and we often went to Easter Sunday brunch at a restaurant that meant a great deal to us when my husband was teaching and studying at the University of Pennsylvania. I decided it was a good time to go away and to get some more warmth on these fatigued muscles of mine.
Easter is surely the more important feast in the Christian calendar and yet somehow it doesn't hold a candle to Christmas. I wonder why that is. Perhaps it is because we need Christmas more, at least where I live. We need to light our houses, light our fires, make for warmth in that cold, cold land of Canada, so bitterly cold this year that we are still recovering from it. We went to the Holy Week services in a stable. It literally is that, a stable converted to a gathering place, with all kinds of sound and light equipment, and in-house television where we watched 21 adults and one infant son of one of the adults being baptized during the Easter Vigil. There was an enactment of the passion play in full costume, and even a Latin Litany of the Saints to which I responded with vigour, surprising myself and my friends with what I remembered from my youth in St. Mary of the Assumption choir in Manayunk, Philadelphia, Pennsyvania. My friends introduced me to charming people. The stable welcomes all kinds of people and I was told that for many Christians it is a church of last resort because they are so unhappy with their home churches. The Blessed Sacrament Chapel is a completely separate building, beautifully appointed albeit in a medieval not a modern motif. There is a huge deck and serving area outside the stable and people stay and enjoy each other's company. There were some wonderful lambs in that area waiting to be petted after the Easter Vigil. It was lovely, truly lovely to be with my friends, to greet Easter Day at the beach in Fort Lauderdale, to enjoy lamb cooked by the husband of the house according to a James Beard recipe and served with Carlo Rossi light red wine, and to finish the Easter meal with a New York cheesecake that was to die for. And yet, there is something missing in how I feel. It could, of course, be that I stood in line for an hour trying to get into this "sterile" area because Air Canada has changed some part or other of its system. It could be my father's death, my husband's death, my mother's death, too much death to contend with in a season that is supposed to be about life, about Life.
And maybe it is a touch of the green-eyed monster. Yeshua is so real for my friend. She speaks to him, prays to him, reflects on him the way she does on her family, her friends, her stepchildren, her husband. It is as if he sits at table with her, reads with her, walks beside her constantly. At one point when I was sharing concerns about some of my students she said to me "Kate, have you socked it to Jesus about this?" I replied that as a matter of fact I hadn't and she replied that she thought it was about time that I did. I told her that I have been socking it regularly to God about all of this and I hope that will get a similar hearing.
I think I envy my friend that familiarity and that sense of presence of the Word. But my flight has just been called, and a slushy Toronto awaits me and five friendly felines in Cayuga will want huggles as soon as I get there. Maybe a crocus or two will be coming up in the snow and maybe fifteen minutes after I'm dead this hole in my heart will be filled.
Miami International Airport, April 4, 1994
Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 4: 32-35
1 John 5: 1-6
John 20: 19-31
If Yeshua were observing in my classrooms this past week I think he would be saying to me today, "Catherine, blessed are those who have seen and who yet believe." My principal told me this week that I have the "Grade 11 class from hell." I thanked her for confirming my suspicion. I still don't know what to do about them. I lost it with them this week, completely, totally, and entirely. We are studying the Reformation and I wanted them to have an experience of Protestantism today so I showed them a wonderful film called "Protestant Spirit, U.S.A." One scene is in a poor black church in a Chicago ghetto. These people work and save all year to provide Thanksgiving Dinner for anyone who needs one. The year the film was made they served 2,500 meals all over the city of Chicago. These are poor people financially but so rich spiritually! I have seen this film so many times that I have lost count of it but I never see this scene without weeping. When I showed it to my Grade 11 class this past week those who didn't put their heads down on their desks and go to sleep laughed at these people praying and singing and distributing these meals. There is a powerful scene just before the cooking of the dinners when their minister talks to them about the churches needing to take out their garbage. The people respond with typical Afro-American enthusiasm and concern, out loud, obviously moved by the preaching and teaching.
My students not only laughed, they began to call out obscenities. I could not believe it. I went to the front of the room turned off the videotape and raged at them. I lost it in every way. I wound up wishing them children just like themselves and double the number in their own families and one young man on his way out of the door said, "That's what my mother says to me all the time, she wishes me children just like myself. I wonder why."
The principal was in my room the next day. I won't bore you with the details of why but on Tuesday there was a problem in the class and in the school and a group of students yelled out "Get Mazza [the principal], get her here now." I explained that that isn't the way it is done. If a group of them wanted to go to Ms. Mazza and invite her to the class they were welcome to do so and I would adjust my teaching accordingly. Two young women went and Theresa came to class on Friday. She is a professional to her fingertips. Several times during the class she said, "You are entitled to disagree with me but not in that way." Over and over again I saw them violating the basic good manners and courtesies that have regulated our relationships in the West. I was so naive I thought it was just with me that this was happening. It was after this that she told me about their being the "class from hell." She explained about the computer time-tabling that makes this happen. I understand all that and I still don't know what to do about it. I see the arrogance. I see the violence. I see them being seduced into thinking that these are "cool" ways to act by every sitcom they watch. I know that this kind of behaviour is learned. I believe that it can be changed. "Blessed are they who have seen and yet still believe."
Pray today, please, for parents and teachers, for all those in any way in charge of children, adolescents, and young adults. Pray that we not give up on ourselves, or on them. Pray that we continue to believe in our charges no matter what they appear to be.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 10, 1994
Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 3: 13-15, 17-19
1 John 2: 1-5
Luke 24: 35-48
One of the interpretations of this gospel is that it is in the Eucharist that we come to understand the meaning of Yeshua for us here and now. Just as the disciplies on the road to Emmaus were confused about what had happened in their lives and what their future was for, and in the breaking of the bread they came to "know" Yeshua, so, too, do we come in the breaking of the bread to know what it means to live the life of Yeshua in our own time and own place. I like that idea. It gives our coming together a purpose and a meaning. And its fits Luke's determination to make a church happen. I wish Eucharist were that for me. So often it is anything but. I find it so difficult to be told what to do rather than be able to talk together about what we might do as Christian people to make the resurrection a reality among us.
There is a man named James B. Sauer, from Gloucester, Ontario, who writes regularly for the Living in Christ Sunday Missal. I don't know who he is or what he does for a living but I usually like what he has to write very much. About this Sunday he says, "We need to be reminded that Christ's resurrrection is an exclamation mark, not a period, in God's project of redemption!" Isn't that wonderful? The resurrection of Yeshua is a "wow" sign! It's a beginning, not an end.
I have felt resurrected now and then. I felt resurrected when I landed my first full-time job and got my first paycheck. I felt resurrected when I published my first article. I felt resurrected when I began my first teaching job. I felt resurrected most of all when my husband asked me to marry him. I felt resurrected when a friend and I met again after an eighteen year separation. I felt resurrected when an outside reader gave me "Excellent" in all five review categories for my doctoral dissertation. They were all exclamation points in my life.
I really felt "resurrected" this week when after asking for prayers last week I saw a notice on our staffroom bulletin board about a course on discipline for parents and teachers that is being offered this summer. The course promises to help participants deal with 108 discipline problems. I must admit I got a little bit upset when I saw that because I didn't know there were that many, but I'm ready for that kind of help. It will help participants to sleep better at night. I'm ready. It will help us once again to enjoy our teaching. I'm ready. It will help us to heal ourselves and to heal our students. I'm ready. I think that something like this is what James Sauer means about exclamation marks. Is it pure coincidence that I called friends and colleagues this week and had a few conversations with them in which I admitted that I had come to my wit's end in terms of my teaching, asked their prayerful support, and then found the notice of this course? Is it pure coincidence that after waking up five nights in a row at 2:30 a.m. I "socked it" to God and said "I need help. I'm going to lose my mind if I don't get some insights about what to do in my classes. Where are You in all of this?" Is Eucharist supposed to be something like this, meeting each other's needs, supporting each other, being able to sock it to each other? I think so.
I have pondered what it would be like if we had a real gathering as part of the Liturgy of the Word, if we could come in and talk with each other, and laugh with each other, and share the good things that have happened that past week, and deal with questions that we have, and hopes and dreams, and then search the gospels for the spirit of the answers, and after that, break bread. I did something like this once in a village in India.
Instead of the traditional morning mass the days I was there, we gathered before the evening meal which is usually 8 p.m. We began by sharing the good news of our day and the concerns that we were left with as a result of our work. We brought these gifts and concerns to the altar, literally, celebrated Eucharist, and continued our time together during the meal. Some of us went on after that in one-on-one reflections. These are among the most memorable Eucharists of my life.
Some of my friends and I do this now informally after mass especially on days when the weather permits. This is, in fact, how this book has come to be written, one friend who asked me please to put my "musings" in writings for other adults. But why does this have to be a matter of serendipity? Why not have Blessed Sacrament chapels as I experienced in Florida and have these times with each other as part of our coming together. Why not have a time to say hello, to mill around, to greet each other normally and naturally rather than in this stylized sign of peace? Why not have a place in Catholic churches where we can take off our coats as our Protestant brothers and sisters do? Why not occasionally at least have this all spill over into a Sunday brunch?
The precedent is there in our history. In the early church, Eucharist simply could not proceed until every member of the community was reconciled with each other, and with the bishop, and until all needs were met. Those were the days, of course, when a diocese was the size of the village of Cayuga, and the bishop was much more like a parish priest, both of which may also not be such bad ideas inour present moment. If we're going to be exclamation points maybe we laity need to have more of a say to each other and to our religious professionals how and when to provide the punctuation marks.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 17, 1994
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 4: 7-12
1 John 3: 1-2
John 10: 11-18
At my first and last country fair in Denmark, my husband's native place, my husband said, "Sheep are the dumbest animals in the world," as we watched a group of them make their way into the centre ring to be judged. Since his family were dairy farmers, I took his comment with a grain of salt, perhaps because of all the westerns I have seen and the battles in them between cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers. I suppose that's why I feel a little ill at ease with sheep and shepherds as a modern analogy of the priest, bishop, and Christian people. With the best educated laity in the history of our Church, maybe we need a different image.
From many pulpits this Sunday there are probably homilies being preached about the need to encourage persons to take up vocations to the professional religious life. Those "other sheep" need to know the good news. And that's true, of course. So do many of the people who are baptized Christians need to know the good news because there is so much sociological Christianity among us in the West. For thirty years the World Council of Churches has been saying that we need mission to all six continents, not just to developing nations. And they're right.
Some wiser persons will be talking about the fact that there is only one Christian vocation, lived differently, and that vocation is to holiness or wholeness and it is for all peoples, not just for Christian persons. We Christians are for the integral human development of all peoples, for their dignity and freedom, for their peace and prosperity, for basic human community. This is not an easy concept for many of us to grasp especially those who are in this church from pre-Vatican II days. The "real" Christians were our priests and our religious men and women. The rest of us were basically also-rans. There is still a great deal of that around today. It is hair-raising the number of times one of my students will say to me about something I have raised with them, "That's not what my parish priest says." The fact that his parish priest has refused any kind of renewal of thinking and in many cases prides himself on not having opened a book since he left the seminary gets ignored. But I don't want this to be an anti-clerical diatribe. There is more than enough of that going around.
One time I asked my husband what people are for. It was probably at breakfast where we often had these kinds of philosophical discussions. Without hesitation he said, "We are for giving people their humanity. We are for forming the world that forms us. We are for continually seeking different ways to better purposes, which is the only one right way of being human." I am blessed with the gift of being able to remember things like this from people who mean a great deal to me. I also found these ideas subsequently in a paper that he wrote about his philosophy of marketing action. Over the years these words have come to be a major part of my own philosophy of life, my own vocation, my own way of living out what I hope is a life of creative, loving, power for others, rather than power over them. I don't always succeed at it but I certainly try. This seems to be a truly noble way to live, a calling out to the best that is in us. I doubt that our truly divine and truly human Yeshua could have framed it any better in our contemporary idiom.
Cayuga, Ontario, April 24, 1994
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 9: 26-31
1 John 3: 18-24
John 15: 1-8
There is a place just outside of Jerusalem which, I believe, is called the Holy Land Motel. In its garden it has a scale model of Jerusalem at the time of Yeshua, and up until the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. It is a marvellous thing. And since all Israeli guides must be licensed by the State of Israel, and usually have studied history, archeology, Hellenistic Judaism, etc., to stand at that model and have it explained is a powerful experience.
There was a great golden vine carved over the temple gate and Yeshua may have seen it enroute to Gethsemane and thus spoke about the vine and the branches. Maybe it was the wine on the dinner table of which there are traditionally at least four glasses at the Passover meal. Passages from the Hebrew scriptures, especially Psalm 80, picture Israel as the vine of the Good One. John is convinced that despite all the divine efforts the vine of Israel has become degenerate and has Yeshua present himself as the new vine.
I thought about all of this when I went on a wine-tasting expedition in Israel. I had no idea they produced wines. They were good, very, very good. I learned subsequently that in the early days of Zionism, the Rothschilds brought Dutch Jews in to clear the marshes that the Arabs had sold to the settlers, and they brought French Jews in to plant vineyards on the slopes of this country with its exciting, varied geography.
I have wild grapes at my country home. I rip them out every year because they want to take over everything around them. And every year they come back. I use them for making wreaths. My city friends love to have the dried vines. A neighbour came by last year and asked me for all of them that I could give her because she wanted to make drapes out of them for her family room! I told her to rip away. She filled the back of a pickup truck with them.
Not too far from me there is a little vineyard owned by a woman named Martha, so, of course, the place is called Martha's Vineyard! I have thought at times that I would like to work with her for a season to have the experience of growing grapes and tending them. Perhaps I will put that on the agenda during my open-ended sabbatical which most people call retirement. I relish driving through the Niagara region on Blossom Sunday. I enjoy watching the vintners and gardeners of every sort at all times of the year. I enjoy stopping by wayside fruit stands and savouring the work of these people's hands. I know that pruning has to be done and I also know that passages like the ones we have heard today have been used to deal with the internal life of the Christian church, and sometimes not very kindly. People who have been deemed withered branches by church leadership have often been cut down, heaped together, and thrown on fires, literally, like the Anabaptists, and the supposed "witches" including St. Joan of Arc. And these passages from John have been understood as permitting that. I want to suggest that this is not what they are about.
It is so important to remember that John is a Jew speaking through the Jewish Yeshua to other Jews, and to any and all religiously-minded persons. He knows that Israel needs pruning and refinement and sees Yeshua as the one who makes that possible. He knows that other religious traditions of his time need that as well. There were "God-fearers" from these traditions, gentiles, who regularly worshipped with the Jews and followed their religious laws without converting to the tradition. A renewed Judaism through Yeshua's Way is what John is after. A Judaism convinced that "all nations shall see the glory of our God" is John's hope. It is Yeshua that makes this possible.
The New English Bible translates "abide in me" as "dwell in my love." I like that so much better. To dwell in the presence of a beloved is eternal life. One who dwells in love will be very careful with pruning shears and with lighting fires intended to burn things up.
Cayuga, Ontario, May 1, 1994
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
1 John 4: 7-10
John 15: 9-17
"You are my friends if you do what I command you." Sometime before I die I would like to have the chance to talk this one over with Fr. John Powell, S.J., the proponent of God's "unconditional" love for humankind, and of our unconditional love for others. "If you do what I command you," sounds very much to me like a condition! I was happy to hear in one of M. Scott Peck's tapes that he thinks that unconditional love possibly exists for 48-72 hours after a child is born. After that parents begin to set "conditions" and establish parameters for relationships, child to child, parent to child, etc.
Servants are supposed to do their employer's bidding no questions asked. They need not be given reasons why. A friend is let in on secrets. I tell my friend why I am doing what I am doing, what I am for, what my dreams are, my hopes. Yeshua has let his friends in on his secrets and the secrets of his God so that his joy and their joy "may be complete." It is probably this idea that made that somewhat eccentric lay French Catholic poet Leon Bloy declare that "Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God." We are commanded to love which means to "set one's affections in order," William Ernest Hocking says. And M. Scott Peck says that to love is "to commit oneself to nurture the spiritual growth of oneself and/or others."
I thought of Fr. John Powell and of Yeshua and of John and of Hocking and of Peck this week when a young man whom I caught cheating said to me, "Get off my case, Miss. I'm a cheater. That's just the way I am and God loves me just the way I am." When I suggested to him after class that that love is intended to help him be and become his best possible self which I cannot believe includes a life of cheating, he told me to "Chill out! Nobody takes this Jesus stuff serious." And I walked away from him thinking of G. K. Chesterton's reminder that "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has not been tried."
What would our world be like if one billion Christians decided to really love, to applaud what is good, and to confront and eradicate what is evil?
Cayuga, Ontario, May 8, 1994
Ascension
Acts 1: 1-11
Ephesians 4: 1-13
Mark 6: 15-20
"Theophilus," means "lover of God," in its masculine form. When I was growing up Catholic in Philadelphia my classmates used to practice writing their proposed married name, "Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Sharton", and I used to sit there in the rare moments when I daydreamed, writing "Sr. Mary Charita, Sr. Charita Mary, Sr. Mary Theophilia, Sr. Theophilia Mary, Sr. Mary Philothea, Sr. Philothea Mary", and pondering what initials would go after the proposed names, "O.S.F., M.M., I.H.M.", etc., etc., etc. I liked Theophilia a lot but it sounded too much like the blood problems of hemophiliacs. My mother, whom I rarely credited with knowing me at all, cut most of this short one day when she said, "Girl, you might go to the convent one day but the only way you'd stay would be if they made you Mother General the first day you walked through that door." She was right about that one.
I wish that I had an overhead projector with me today and the overhead of the shape of the world that I use to explain the ancient wordview of the universe when I teach the Hebrew Scriptures. The best that I can do is ask you to imagine an overturned soup bowl. Above the roof of the world which had holes in it that the Divine One opened to let rain through, there was the realm of the Divine. It is to this realm that Yeshua is reported as having ascended today. Mark's story is saying the best that could have been said about anyone at his time. Instead of going to Sheol which was the place under the surface of the earth where even the best went to wait for the Messiah, Yeshua goes immediately into the realm of divinity working for us and with us as does the Divine One. And what is the work? It is what we in Christian churches have come today to call the evangelization of the nations, to proclaim the good news to the "whole creation." I would add that it is to be the good news to the whole creation. .
Every once in a while we read about people who take this passage literally and pick up snakes and drink deadly things and one of them dies. It is sad that people like this forget that snakes were a symbol for the fertility rites connected with the Canaanite god Baal. It is also sad that many don't know that this reading is probably an addition to the original story of Mark and written years after the original which very likely ended with the story of the frightened women. Again, this isn't cause for concern but testimony to what people were experiencing who were following the Yeshua Way. They had their sexuality in control, they were feeling healed and helping to effect healing of other bodies, minds, and spirits, they had new insights into their lives and their meaning and purpose. My bet is they had brought to an end any and all fatalism in their lives, a lived experience that with God and with each other, all things are possible.
Just about a year ago today I completed a seven year study of modern Christian mission. No, it would be better to say that I ended the study, but the work is still not finished. One of the really exciting things that emerged for me is that there is research that confirms that there are persons in all cultures, in the major religions, and in the New Age movements seeking cosmic generating principles for their lives. They are not satisfied with either/or principles, but want both/and principles, ways of being authentically human and deeply spiritual that transcend the partial truth of their own present ways of being. The good news is that as many as one-third of the adults in our world right now are, or are moving toward being universalists in outlook and commitment. I find this really exciting. These people want to learn from and with their world neighbours. They want to work with their world neighbours to effect world community. It appears as though literacy, human rights especially peace, and issues relating to poverty are the rallying points for these universalists. The sad news is that many of these universalists in the West report that their churches, mosques, and synagogues do not encourage them to this kind of universalism of thinking, feeling, and doing. In fact, the bulk of western religious institutions still promote anything but. They are right. Others outside of their assemblies are wrong. My book on this topic and my recommendations about how this kind of spiritual incest might be brought to an end is being released in India on Tuesday of this week, at a gathering of forty Catholic women committed to renewing themselves and their tradition. My work is not new but has the more modest purpose of unpacking a model to accomplish Christian revitalization that has been around for sixty years.
Perhaps this is a week to commit ourselves to being open to truth and goodness no matter when and where we find them, in our own religious assemblies and outside of them, and in the spirit of Vatican II to work with women and men of good will lovers of God, everywhere.
Cayuga, Ontario, May 15, 1994
Pentecost
Acts 2: 1-11
Galatians 5: 16-25
John 15: 26-27; 16: 12-15
It pleases me no end that young people today are rediscovering Gregorian Chant although some of the horror tales connected with former monks suing for the monies made from when they were in the choir is ludicrous! I am thinking of all of this today because I am remembering how in my youth almost all of our congregation, led by the assorted choirs of children and adults, sang together in Latin, the thirteenth century Veni, Sancte Spiritus which is the sequence of today's mass. There is a beauty in this music which nothing surpasses for me. Nostalgia trip behind me, here again today we have an excellent example of how it helps to understand Yeshua when we know something about Judaism.
Remember from your Bible History days the Burning Bush and the Pillar of Fire that were part of the stories of the ancient Hebrews? Remember the wind, fierce and powerful, sweet and soothing? They are signs of the Divine Presence conspiring for humanity. Can you understand now why the apostles have tongues of fires on their heads in today's readings? Right. In Yeshua and his successors there is a renewed conspiring of the Divine Presence available to humanity. Remember the Tower of Babel, the people who tried to build a ziggurat so high that they would reach the realm of divinity? The story was interpreted for us as the beginning of world-wide dissension because people were trying to live their lives on their own resources without divine assistance. What happens today? This is a story of the end of the reign of dissension and the beginning of a new universal understanding, again effected by and through Yeshua and his Way.
The feast on which all of this occurs is important. Pentecost was not only a harvest festival but a rejoicing in the giving of the Torah, the guidelines for fulfilling human life. Here is the new guideline for effective, fulfilling human life, today's evangelist is saying, the Way of Yeshua. Here is the reminder that the Spirit of Life "will lead you into all truth." Here in Yeshua and his Way is the new reason for rejoicing because he is, so to speak, the walking, breathing, enlightening Torah in his very person. He is the Word made flesh.
William Ernest Hocking, whose model for the revitalization of Christianity I have mentioned to you previously, used this idea of the Spirit's leading us into all truth as the basis for his work. Hocking maintains that Yeshua's guidelines are deliberately vague because he wants us to use our brains to deal with the challenges of our time and our place even as he did in his. Hocking was wont to say often, "Deficit of mind has no place in authentic religion." He also used this "leading" as a reminder that the modern era offers an opportunity to find truth outside of western religious and philosophical thought, and indeed for the East to find truth outside of its religious and philosophical thought. There is an ancient tradition that Yeshua himself did just that and we would do well to emulate that approach to Ultimate Reality. Let me take just a minute and tell you about that.
Some fairly reputable work suggests that Joseph of Arimathea became Yeshua's mentor after their encounter in the Temple when Yeshua was twelve years old. As would have been the practice, Yeshua travelled with him. It is believed that Joseph was a tinsmith and that ancient trade route can be traced. It went to India and to Glastonbury in England where for centuries there has been a tomb of Joseph. Now we know what people did when a caravan came to a halt. They talked to each other and they often talked about what we would today call religion and philosophy. Even today in India a traveller will ask you "What is your way?" (I once replied on my first trip there, "I'm enroute to Nagpur." The inquirers laughed and then I realized they were asking me about my religious affiliation!) What would an intellectually precocious child like Yeshua have done in such a situation? Probably he would have questioned, debated, taken it all in. If you doubt me, rent the movie The Chosen with Robbie Benson and savour the learning model of devout Jews in it. This is a centuries old way of learning among Jews.
We know that the Emperor Ashoka of India sent Buddhist missionaries to the Middle East and they were there at the time of Yeshua. Surely he would have known of them. He could not have been so religiously attuned as he was without learning about what they were offering. He lived with the Roman religion day in and day out when he was at home. He appears to have known much of the teaching of the Essenes, a Jewish group that had left the mainstream of Pharisaic Judaism and retired to the desert in Qumran. I suspect that it is very likely that in such encounters Yeshua saw the strengths and weaknesses of his own tradition and set out to confirm the former and dissipate the latter. Some believe that we don't hear of him and his ministry until we do because he was giving the Jewish religious leaders a last chance to do a redistribution of land in a jubilee year which would have helped the people who through no fault of their own were indigent. When it didn't happen, he had to do something about it and began his teaching. It makes sense to me.
Since my salad days I have been studying and teaching the sacred texts and ethics of my own religious tradition and those of my world neighbours. I hope that like Yeshua I am open to Beauty, Truth, and Goodness no matter where I find it. That's why the documents of Vatican II and the Council itself were and are such a gift to me. It didn't just call on us to nurture, it called on us to be nurtured by the goodness around us, to seek it out, to celebrate the action of the Good One in all peoples. Fr. Karl Rahner has called Vatican Council II and our present age a new Pentecost. He did much to help us understand that not only can we, but we must effect world community, at the heart of which is world faith. Nothing, and no one lasts without faith and hope, the conviction that we don't have to do anything but die.
Today many of our Jewish brothers and sisters are praying at their Pentecost celebrations, "Spirit of Life, leading us to the fullness of our humanity, help us to follow Your lead." What else is "all truth" but the fullness of our humanity?
Cayuga, Ontario, May 22, 1994
Trinity Sunday
Deuterononmy 4: 32-34, 39-40
Romans 8:14-17
Matthew 28: 16-20
I hope that you have seen the movie Monsignor Quixote. It is based on a Graham Greene novel, one of the last things he wrote. I have lost track of the number of times that I have read the book. I have seen the movie three times something which I rarely do.
There is a wonderful episode in the movie when the aged monsignor is running away from his bishop who wants to retire him. He is with his friend the Communist mayor of the town. He is trying to explain the Trinity to his friend and takes three wine bottles. Alec Guinness plays the monsignor and explains that each of those bottles is filled with the same wine but each of them is distinct. Each Person of the Trinity is filled with the same Life but is distinct, the monsignor explains. And then horrified he apologizes to the Holy Sprit because he has used a half litre for that image and litre bottles for the other two! The description beats the shamrock image of my growing up, and probably yours. Perhaps that one worked better if you're Irish!
Many years ago when I was studying the Trinity, and cracking my skull over what I was being taught, the professor said, "It doesn't really make that much of a difference. No one has ever left the church over the doctrine of the Trinity." I must admit I thought then, "O.K., if that's the case why are you bothering us with all of this?" But since then I have come to wonder if perhaps more people give up on the church because of this doctrine of the Trinity than we realize.
The "persons" that we talk about in the doctrine of the Trinity are not persons like us. The word comes from the Latin word persona which was the mask that actors used to get their roles across to their audiences. The masks made it possible for their voices to carry in special ways and for them to be seen and identifiable from any point of view in the theatres. So, too, these "faces" of Divinity can be heard and identified as acting for us in this Trinitarian motif as it was intended to be understood. This Reality is Creating, Re-Deeming, Inspiring. In other words, the Trinity is, as it were, three ways for God to be God. No offense intended but it might even be better to say that it is three ways for God to be God-ding. We are being invited to believe in a Dynamic Reality, deeply concerned about what happens to us personally and corporately. We are relating to an Eternal Source, Word, Spirit.
An Italian Jesuit with whom I studied how to give retreats used to say this. "Our God is a community of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating life." I remember the first time I heard him say that in his heavily accented English. I went off to the chapel and thought that if I had learned nothing else in that five months this would have made the whole trip to Rome and study there worth it. And this is why I think that more people probably do leave this church of ours over the Trinity that we think possible. Doctrines and dogmas are not just abstract truths that have no relevance to our everyday lives. They are intended to be the principles by which we live our lives, the guidelines for that living, a contemporary interpretation of Yeshua, who built his Way on Moses and the prophets and sages of the Jewish people.
Are we Catholics "communities of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating life"? We tell each other that we individually and corporately are made in the image and likeness of God. That means that I must be, we must be creating, re-deeming, and inspiring. We must be source, word, spirit. As I said at the beginning, I think more people do leave this church over the Trinity than many of us admit.
What would it mean for us, right here, right now, to be communities of persons, knowing and known, loving and loved, together generating life, a life which, without each other, we simply would not have!
Cayuga, Ontario, May 29, 1994
Corpus Christi
Exodus 24: 3-8
Hebrews 9: 11-15
Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26
In 1960 I planned the whole of my first trip to Europe around this feast. I had saved for seven years to make the trip. It took place on the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday. I grew up in a parish church in Philadelphia that served the needs of German-speaking immigrants. The priests and sisters who were our teachers were determined to make us American Catholics and to demonstrate to the society at large that it was very possible to be a good American and a good Catholic. I know now that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
One of our associate pastors had spent time studying in Cologne. And every Corpus Christi during the homily he would talk about the procession in Cologne where every child who had made his or her first communion that year was on the steps of the cathedral for the final blessing. He spoke, too, of how the Cardinal Archbishop of the city would intone "Te Deum Laudamus," and the assembly would sing the popular verion of the Latin, "Grosser Gott." In my own parish we used to alternate between singing this response in German and in English.
Corpus Christi was a major feast in French Canada, too. I have seen movies of the processions that were the highlight of the feast in every parish in Quebec, especially in its major cities. There are throngs of priests, seminarians, women religious, lay associations, children of every age, in procession before the Blessed Sacrament held aloft by the archbishop or highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the place. Traditionally there were three stops in the procession, and three concommitant blessings with the monstrance. We did the same in our parish church in suburban Philadelphia. I remember my first procession as if it were yesterday.
I was in Grade One and my grandmother made me a wreath of flowers for my hair from her garden. She would not part with flowers from that garden except for the altar of the parish church and an occasional sick neighbour. All three altars had her flowers on them and I had some of those flowers in my hair! My grandmother and aunts walked with the Ladies Aid Society. Younger mothers including my mother stood on the sidelines watching the procession with squirming children in tow, my baby brother among them. My cousin Betty walked with the Sodality. My father and uncles walked with the Holy Name Society. My grandfather was one of the four men chosen to hold the baldachino over the pastor with the monstrance. There is a story in this but that is for another time.
We walked according to class except for the Grade Two class, the First Communicants, who walked just in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Boys came first, and then girls, and I was the tallest girl in Grade One so I was last. I remember yet that it dawned on me then that if I stayed tall for at least one more year I would be closest to the Blessed Sacrament in the procession when I was in Grade Two. There would only be some seminarians and the altar boy walking backwards incensing the Blessed Sacrament between me and God! For once in my life I prayed to stay tall and that prayer was answered.
The morning of Corpus Christi in Cologne dawned gray and wet. The procession would be postponed a week if the weather didn't improve, and my travelling companions and I would be gone. I was sad but hopeful and about 11:00 a.m. the sun began to shine. We followed the procession at a distance and then went to the steps of the cathedral for the final benediction. As the associate pastor had described it in my childhood, the whole of his image was before me. The steps of the cathedral were white with First Communicants. The cardinal intoned "Te Deum Laudamus," and it seemed to me as if the whole world thundered in response, "Grosser Gott." Great God, we loveYou! Holy God, we praise Thy Name!
On this same trip I was in a small audience with Pope John XXIII, saw the Passion Play, and walked in the candlelight procession at Lourdes, each pilgrim singing that hymn in our own language, but nothing, absolutely nothing moved me so deeply as that experience in Cologne. It was an experience of being part of the Body of Christ.
I know that there were abuses in the church of my youth, in Germany, the United States, and Canada. We are confronted with those abuses daily in our papers. Our native peoples in Canada are distressed with the alleged abuses of their culture in residential schools operated by Roman and Anglo-Catholics. Only one German bishop opposed Hitler Sunday in and Sunday out from his southern German pulpit. The machinations of Cardinal Spellman are of legendary proportions but there was still something so good in all of this that helped me to feel part of something special, vital, and sustaining, and that must not be forgotten. Too often we judge things by their abuse rather than their use.
Pilgrimages and processions are not in vogue among us in North America any more except for various kinds of walkathons. I think it's good that we have them rather than nothing at all of this sort. In other parts of the world pilgrimages are still important. Doctoral dissertations are being written in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, by North Americans who are going to live with these pilgrims not just to write of them but to learn from them. I have one more story to relate about pilgrimages and processions in this already long musing and then I am done.
Because of an aircraft that was delayed for a full day leaving Sri Lanka, an Indian colleague and I once spent a full day travelling by two other planes and nine hours in a car to get back to his archdiocese for the centennary of its Lourdes Grotto. We made it and he presided after three hours of rest. I sat in a chair offered by the seminary rector where the grotto is, too exhausted to move. I barely understood a word of what was going on because most of the procession and celebration was in Hindi. But I knew what was going on. I watched the people around me, not just Christian people, but Hindu, Parsee, and Muslim, too! There were Chinese and Sudanese and Nigerians as well, students at the local Catholic college, some Christian, some not. And, I was once again five going on six, twenty-five going on twenty-six, and now fifty-five going on fifty-six and the Body of Christ truly in that moment became for me in fact not theory, part of the People of God, and at its service. Amen.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 5, 1994
Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 17: 22-24
2 Corinthians 5: 6-10
Mark 4: 26-34
There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth going on in my classrooms these days. It isn't that the seed of knowledge hasn't grown or been harvested. It is that it hasn't been sown in the first place! We are five days away from the end of the semester and I have five to seven students in each class who have sown the seeds and who are now harvesting. But the bulk of each class has not and panic has set in. I, the adult, am supposed to kiss it and make it all better. I am supposed to rescue them from their irresponsibility. I refuse to do that.
I am being inundated with requests for "extra credit" and for makeup. I tell the students to do as well as they can in the final and hope that that 20% will help with their grade. And when they ask me what else they can do I say, "Repeat the course next year." The parting shot is usually something like, "Some religion teacher you are!" Religion has come to mean costless comfort for many of my students. I cannot prostitute my discipline or myself by allowing them to continue to think that.
I have planted "real" seeds myself. I have watched them being planted at home and abroad. I have prepared the earth, planted, watered, all as directed and have had excellent results and disastrous results. I have planted, practically ignored the seeds, and had excellent and disastrous results. For seven years my husband planted a kitchen garden in a 60 x 70 foot plot on our land. Most of it he started from seed and nurtured the seedlings. I remember one day when he sat on the deck looking at the garden and said, "An atheist is someone who plants a seed and expects it to grow."
It was not until I travelled to lands that do not use mechanized labor for farming that I saw how seed that is sown could fall in places not intended to receive it. Here, in Canada, unless birds pick up and move the seeds or excrete them in unusual places they pretty much stay put. Still, if there is to be a harvest, the seeds must first be sown. Most of my students have not yet learned that. There are moments when I am terrified that they never will.
For me the most important lines in today's readings are the ones at the end of the gospel. The disciples have everything explained to them. It seemed to me for years that Yeshua was deliberately confounding and confusing average persons and only really teaching his favourites. It helped me enormously to understand when I read the explanation of these words by C.F.D. Moule, the Markan scholar whom I have mentioned to you previously. I want to quote him directly because his interpretation is so vital. Moule writes that God's reign is revealed to those who have "listened enough to come for more." So many of my students do not listen to begin with. It is the listening in learning that is for me the planting of the seeds. If they do not listen in the first place, how can they ever come for more? Sometimes in my classes when the side conversations continue beyond anything mannerly and courteous, I am reminded of a novel of Chaim Potok's, in which there is a Jewish widow who talks incessantly. A young Jewish man who is in her company says something like, "It took me years to figure out that she was terrified of dying and as long as she talked, she knew she wasn't dead." Are my students so terrified of dying that they talk incessantly to be sure that they aren't dead?
Moule continues that, "You can hear without making your own what you hear--without responding or acting on it; if so, you remain 'outside': you get no further than simply hearing the parable; you have not begun to crack it open and get its kernel." Some of my students who have heard what I have offered, what our texts and experiences have invited them to, have not responded or have not acted on it. They have not made it their own for as many reasons as there are students who have not done so.
Moule also comments that he believes that Yeshua and the early followers of the Way were trying to make clear that, "You cannot teach people by spoon-feeding: you must set them a puzzle to think out for themselves; those who start to crack it are getting somewhere. There is no short-cut to understanding." In addition to instant gratification, and what else is talking when one should be listening but instant gratification, so many of my students want instant understanding. I fear that there is not much wisdom along the information highway.
There is a wonderful Doonesbury cartoon that appeared recently. Two university professors are talking about how things have deteriorated in academe, from parental expectations to student rights' movements with no concommitant student responsibilities. The last two panels show a young boy giving his report card to his father who says, "Son, I am very, very disappointed in your teacher." The boy responds, "So am I, Dad, so am I."
Pray this week for teachers who, like Yeshua, refuse to spoon-feed. Please.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 12, 1994
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Job 38: 1-4, 8-11
2 Corinthians 5: 14-17
Mark 4: 35-41
This is the first Father's Day of my life without my father in it in the flesh. It has been so strange not to get ready for it, to mail him some Laura Secord chocolates with soft centers, salted cashew nuts, and tiny German milk chocolate balls, and, of course, a check to help him celebrate. I used to do the same at Christmas. Dad used to put the gifts in tins and dole them out to special friends. When my brother and I were closing his apartment we found a little crown. He had kept it from the first Father's Day after he remarried when one of the daughters of his new wife presented him with a special cake that told him he was "king" for that day. I remember the photograph he sent of the cake, and the children, and grandchildren.
Job was a father, too, and the story tells us that he lost all of his first group of children in God's attempt to prove Job's loyalty. I cannot imagine anything worse than the death of a child before its parent. The most profound treatment of the Book of Job that I have ever encountered is by a father, one of whose children pre-deceased him. It appears in Rabbi Harold Kushner's book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I was a fan of Rabbi Kushner's long before this book appeared. For years I had used his When Children Ask About God which I first read in 1971. I still teach from it today. When Bad Things Happen arrived in the mail for me on December 24, 1981, my first Christmas as a widow. I remember sitting and reading it cover to cover with tears of relief running down my cheeks, especially when I came to the lines that said, " Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God's goodness." For months I had been saying to friends, "God cannot have wanted the premature death of a man as good as Bent anymore than I do." Kushner goes on to say that our anger at life's unfairness, our compassion for those who are suffering, and "our indignation is God's anger at unfairness working through us." I urge you to read the book if you have not done so yet. Rabbi Kushner has been Job, living through the life and death of his son Aaron, who at age three was diagnosed with progeria, a disease of premature aging which took the boy's life at thirteen. Kushner knows whirlwinds and storms which we are back to in today's readings.
Ruah, Wind, is an ancient name for Divinity. It is the wind that blows where it will, and how it will. And again we encounter water, the symbol of life. Maybe this story happened just the way it is reported. I once sat early in the morning on the balcony of my hotel room on the shores of Lake Tiberias and watched a storm roll in and just as suddenly move on. When Yeshua walks on water, stills storms, turns water into wine, symbolically he has his life under control. He has Life on his side. In a very real sense this is the same point as Rabbi Kushner is trying to make about the Book of Job. In any situation, no matter how turbulent, with God, it is possible for us to get our lives together, to calm the storms.
Kushner suggests that our prayer in stormy moments, in times of chaos and evil, ought to be "God see what is happening to me. Can You help me?" That word "can" is interesting. Ponder it. In another place Kushner suggests that in difficult times we pray for the courage and wisdom to cope with whatever life is asking of us. To cope, incidentally, means to struggle with and to win. In the NEB edition of this reading from the gospel today, Yeshua says "Don't be such cowards!" That's what I mean about Mark's Yeshua shooting from the hip!
Much of my own prayer this week has been, "Creative Loving Power, give me the courage and wisdom to cope with whatever this day asks of me," as irate parents egged on by irresponsible offspring continue to abuse me verbally over my high standards for my courses which are "only religion." Have you seen the bumper sticker that reads WHAT KIND OF A WORLD IS IT WHEN CHILDREN ROAM FREE AND DOGS GO TO OBEDIENCE SCHOOL. When I saw it on Friday of this week I had the distinct feeling that it was the Good One's special gift and answer to my prayer and an invitation to keep hoping.
I have prayed that prayer too when I learned this week of the death of a special woman, after a horrendous illness, who presently loved a man I once previously loved enough to want to marry. She deserved better and so does he. I pray now for his courage and wisdom to cope.
I am praying, too, for Steven Spielberg to have the courage and wisdom to cope. I don't know if you have heard that Spielberg considers Schindler's List his best movie ever, and that he has made prints of it available for all the school systems in California to use when they teach about the Holocaust. At the first showing to an adolescent California audience, Speilberg, who was present, could not believe that the students laughed their way through the film. He was aghast. He has determined to use all that he has at his disposal to help end this kind of insensitivity among the young. May he succeed where I feel I am failing so badly!
May we all have the courage and wisdom to cope with whatever this day asks of us, especially fathers in the flesh, and fathers in spirit.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 19, 1994
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 1: 13-15; 2: 23-24
2 Corinthians 8: 7, 9, 13-15
Mark 5: 21-43
I have been marking exam papers this week. One of the most interesting adventures has been the assorted definitions I received of a "tell". We did a simulated archeological dig in my Grade Nine classes and the students learned, I thought, how investigators slice up mounds and discover things about ancient civilizations from them. These mounds are called tells. The most interesting definition I got was "A tell is a story which is sometimes a mith and sometimes true." So much for another emphasis of mine that myths contain truths.
I like this gospel today, perhaps because it deals with women so much. The NEB says that Jairus was president of the synagogue which means that he was responsible for organizing worship and keeping order. I have known a president of a synagogue, a friend from my salad days, who had two daughers, not one, who were his great delight, as was his beautiful and talented wife. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday he came home from watching a Phillies game, sat down in a chair in his den, and died. His wife and daughters found him early the next morning. His obituary gave one an idea of the incredible good he had done in his lifetime. My friend to whom he had once been engaged who was at the service said that students came forward to say that Charles had paid their tuition. There were other kinds of loans extended. This was a man who once packed up and went to Israel during the Six Days War. One of his beautiful daughters was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She has recovered more or less successfully. But whenever I hear the story of this sick girl child, it is Charles, his family and his goodness that come to mind. No Jewish father loved sons more than Charles loved his daughters.
Women in Israel at the time of Yeshua were their father's or husband's chattels. They were treated well enough but they were their property. One can only imagine the courage of the woman "with the issue of blood" exhausted with doctors who broke with tradition and sought on her own for a cure. Her father or husband or brother should have done that for her even as Jairus asked for his daughter. But she does not. She breaks with tradition and "energy" flows out of Yeshua to her.
I wonder, too, if there was a beloved sitting at the bedside of the dead girl. She was old enough to have been betrothed. Many girls were, as soon as they reached puberty. C.F.D. Moule is convinced that the girl was dead not merely in a coma as some have suggested. He explains that comas were well known and this was a real death. Unlike Yeshua, he maintains that the girl died again, as did Lazarus, and others in the Christian scriptures reported raised from the dead. The important thing to remember is "Do not be afraid. Believe."
I would like to take every person in my life by the hand and say, "Do not be afraid. Believe." I want to say it to parents who are not only afraid for their children but of them. I want to say it to some adult friends who have lost jobs completely, or are being demoted. I want to say it to the brightest and best of my students who are being pressured to be anything but. I want to say it to young women who don't want to walk down the corridors of their schools and have their bodies "graded" by macho slime. I have said it to my colleague who teaches one of the best Ontario Academic Courses I have ever seen, truly a university preparatory course, who is being hounded by irate parents of four irresponsible students in her class. I want to say it to the Doctors Without Borders and the other people trying to help the Rwandan refugees especially the babies. I want to say it to the refugees themselves. And yet I know that the words are not enough, nor are tears, as the song goes that was at the heart of relief to Ethiopia so many years ago. I pray for all of their resurrections from their present deaths and dyings, for their courage and wisdom to cope. Most of all I want to remind myself not to be afraid, and to believe.
The school year will end on June 30th. I cannot be sure of the "good that I have done and the good that I have failed to do" this year in terms of my students. I am thinking of the day I arrived in a class to find "Dr. Stidsen is to old to teach" on the blackboard. I circled the "to" and changed it to "too" and then wrote, "Not so long as there are illiterates like this around." I signed it with a happy face, while feeling anything but. I am trying not to be afraid and to believe. I am trying to be faithful and courageous.
Cayuga, Ontario, June 26, 1994
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 2: 25
2 Corinthians 12: 7-10
Mark 6:1-6
Unlike Paul, I have never "gloried in my infirmities," as the previous language of scriptures used to read. I have wanted and do want to bring my infirmities to an end, for my own sake, and the sake of all who associate with me in any way. In cynical moments, when I have heard this epistle, I have wondered if Paul's associates -- his wife in particular -- found Paul's infirmities as endearing as Paul himself seems to!
Some commentators think that Paul had eczema or psoriasis. He must have been relatively short because he once sequeezed into a basket and was lowered over a wall in that basket. Scholars say you had to be five feet or under for that to have been possible. He must have been a little man with a skin disease which in his time was seen as a mark of sinfulness. I feel sorry for him and he may be a saint but that does not guarantee that everything he thought and did was right. A good case could be made, but not here, that the seeds of a heresy called Quietism, condemned in the 17th century and rampant again today as I read contemporary Christianity, are to be found in Paul It was reading Paul that launched Martin Luther on his campaign that faith alone saves us. It is almost as if what we do does not matter. Catholics were reminded at the Council of Trent that we must be men and women of faith and of moral effort, that is we must work to bring evil to an end, to believe that with divine aid, we can make this a better world.
It is interesting that Paul gets coupled with Ezekiel in today's readings. There seems little doubt that Ezekiel was a psychic of some sort. He knew the House of Israel was in big trouble and headed for disaster. He had visions and dreams about Israel's future. He railed at his people for their bloodshed, adultery, extortion, dishonouring of parents and religious authorities. He particularly condemned their violating the rights of widows and orphans. Ezekiel did not glory in anybody's infirmities. He would not allow his generation to shift blame for its own situation to anybody or anything. In Ezekiel's understanding each person is responsible for his or her own destiny. No one is the puppet of heredity, environment, or historical causation. In other words, Ezekiel's message was, get off the "fatalism" kick. Suffering is a time to rethink one's life and to renew trust in One Who is conspiring for us, not against us.
I find it very hard to do that when I am hurting physically but especially when I am hurting mentally or spiritually. I want suffering to end, I pray for it to end, whether the suffering is my own or another's. Every bone and sinew in my North American body wants to make a frontal attack on any and every kind of pain of body, mind, and spirit. My sentiments are much more with Ezekiel than Paul. Perhaps that is also because I am a woman and I have had enough experiences of brokenness and loneliness and pain in my life, in this church, and often because of this church, to last me for three lifetimes. I need more power, not less.
In many churches today men in positions of power will be lecturing congregations on how dangerous power is. Not many will preach about the difference between power over and power for, and there is a major difference. I suggest that today's third reading is an invitation to use Yeshua to help us understand some important things about fatalism, weakness, responsibility, and achievement, issues which Ezekiel wrestled with before Yeshua, and Paul wrestled with after him. They are issues with which we still wrestle today. Yeshua is about power for others, not power over them.
I have been to Nazareth. I stood there one day with an ulpan beside me and the Ford plant for all of Israel behind me. An ulpan is a place where Jews immigrating from other countries to Israel go for their introduction to the country. The ulpans are usuallly set up according to the work lives of the immigrants. This ulpan was for professionals. As I stood there savouring an unbelieveable view, this was at a high place with a valley below it, I thought of the wisdom of having this study for professionals take place in the hometown of Yeshua bar Yussef, one of Israel's brightest and best thinkers and doers. I don't think the government planned it that way exactly but here this ulpan was in the home of Yeshua who knew the difference between power for and power over. He wanted to make available to all what he himself had, viz., intimacy with Divinity, fecundity through Divinity, purpose and mission from Divinity. He could not do it in Nazareth we are told because of the jealousy, antagonism, and cynical scepticism of his family and the townspeople. That's sad. I wished more for the professionals studying in the ulpan no matter where they eventually settled.
Is there anyone here who has not shared the pain of Yeshua in like circumstances? The employee whose boss chooses to be intimated by her competencies rather than use them? The parent whose adolescent chld rejects the widom he offers? The teacher who meets daily with scorn and contempt from students, and even sometime from colleagues, who do not know the difference between arrogance and authentic self-esteem? Yeshua is offering mutual interdependence. No healing of any kind can take place unless the one to be healed wants it, unless the healer wants it. No learning can take place unless the teacher and student both want it. No quality work can take place unless the employer and employee want it. Wisdom cannot survive and grow unless parents and their children want it. Yeshua wanted both/and, not either/or relationships. That is what power for is all about, both/and relationships. Yeshua leaves Nazareth almost completely unappreciated. He turns then to his friends, not his family to help him get done what he believes the Good One is asking of him. How often families think they know us. So often they know what we were not what we are.
Today's readings leave us with many things to ponder. What fatalistic stances must we abandan to enhance our humanity? To whom or to what might we be shifting blame instead of taking responsibility for our own growth? Are there ways in which we are wallowing in our weaknesses and abandoning moral effort to be rid of them? Are we staying when we ought to be walking or walking when we ought to be staying? Do we know the difference between friends and cronies? Do we understand that families are intended to sustain the individuals within them not subvert their potential? Do we know the difference between authentic loyalty to one's family and the emotional blackmail that often passes for that loyalty? Are there any whom we underestimate? Is it perhaps time to start honouring the prophet or prophets in our midsts instead of despising them?
Cayuga, Ontario, July 3, 1994
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Amos 7: 12-15
Ephesians 1: 3-14
Mark 6: 7-13
Today's readings are about going out to others and telling them what the Good One wants of humanity. I think it's enough to say of Amos that he was a reluctant missionary. He was a farmer being sent to the north of his country known for its well-educated, well-heeled way of life. He told the Good One that he didn't feel he had much to offer his brothers and sisters to the North but he went anyway. It reminds me a bit of Dom Helder Camaro, Signorina Rigoberta Menchu, Archbishop Oscar Romero, reluctant prophets from our South coming to us in today's North, inviting well-heeled, well-educated us to rethink some things about our way of life.
Paul to the Ephesians I would really rather not touch. These are among the passages that gave John Calvin his position on predestination, i.e., that some of us are "saved" and some aren't and salvation has all been decided in advance. It isn't quiet that simple but that's how Calving has generally been understood. Paul is trying to make the case about why his generation ought to go out to others in the name of Yeshua. He is familiar with the Jewish concept of chosenness and is probably trying to use it. We are still living today with some of the sad interpretations of Paul's message, I should say misinterpretations, made in l6th century Geneva.
Let's take a look at Yeshua's missionary model in today's gospel. Go in pairs, travel light, accept local hospitality, do your thing. If your'e heard, good. If you aren't heard, move on. This is what I meant at the beginning of the reading of Mark when I told you Mark's Yeshua "shoots from the hip." He is direct, unsentimental, in charge. There is nothing here about endless repetitions, multiple chances, continuing to hope in the face of failures. Yeshua simply says "If they don't want what you want to give them, move on." Yeshua gives freely, freely to be received, or rejected. He wants that mode for his disciples.
Not all the world's religions are missionary in their approach. In fact, there are only three that are, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. People of other paths have usually felt that if they had something to offer, people would come to them, a bit like building that better mousetrap. That is changing a bit today, of course, as Hindu gurus come to the West and some Hasidic Jews become overt proselytizers especially of other Jews who do not live their ultraconservative lifestyle. Still, generally speaking, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have been committed since their inception to taking their good news to others. Buddhist missionaries were always sent out on their own by Siddartha Guatama, the Buddha. He loathed the Hindu priestly caste of his day and feared that a professional priestly caste might reoccur in his reform of Hinduism which today is called Buddhism. Gautama wanted his monks to understand that they were for the people to whom they were going, not for each other's personal or professional maintenance.
Buddhism has been around since 600 B.C.E. There is no record in that tradition of any attempt on the part of missionaries to radically displace what they found by way of religious paths. They were always urged to look for what was good in the people they encountered and build on that goodness through the practice of the "Middle Way," Buddha's Eightfold Path. Christian and Muslim missionaries don't have that clean a track record in terms of non-violent mission. If you saw the movie "Mission" you will know what I mean. If you watch the news about contemporary Muslim fundamentalists putting out contracts on persons who oppose them, you will understand what I mean. Historically there are other atrocities committed in the name of the Christian and Muslim Divinity which need not be mentioned here. But to return to today's gospel. Yeshua did send his disciples out in pairs, we are told, and that's interesting.
Feminist scholars today are saying that these pairs were men and women, in other words they were couples, at least some of them were. The Twelve were married, and it is very likely that some of their wives were travelling with them. This was the custom in the ancient world. We have scriptures that tell us about the women travelling with Yeshua who ministered to him and his disciples. These feminist scholars know the original languages of the scriptures, the male and female forms, which I do not so I depend on their interpretations. One suggests that the couple on the road to Emmaus were a man and a woman and the invitation to come and eat with them wouldn't have happened otherwise. Men did not cook for themselves in that ancient time. There are many parts of the world where they still don't. It would have fit Yeshua's Jewishness to send out couples on these missions. Judaism then and now holds that the fullness of humanity occurs in the marriage relationship. That is why Israel is called the Bride of YHWH. That is why Jewish scriptures are replete with images of married love as experiences of the Divine.
The Buddha had been married and left his wife and infant son to find enlightenment. Tradition says that his son ultimately joined his father and became his most fervent disciple. The Buddha's wife and stepmother became the first Buddhist nuns. In Indian religions, after being a father and householder, the man is encouraged to leave his family in two stages and become a celibate solitary. Not so in Judaism. Faithfulness to one's marriage partner to and even beyond death is the call.
Bishop Stephen Neill in his assorted histories of Christianity makes clear that it is men and women who were the earliest messengers of the good news, that "God isn't mad at us," as one precocious eight-year-old recently put it to me. Some of these women were wealthy, like Lydia and Phoebe named in the scriptures by Paul. I think Yeshua sent his people out in pairs because he knew how hard it is to go it alone especially in terms of one's philosophy of life. I think he knew out of his Jewishness the strength that comes from having even one other person in the world with us. It gives a freedom, a security, a home base. The friendship makes possible a going out to others from that base. It does not make for exclusion, but for inclusion, at least it did in my experience of loving and being loved in that best friendship which is usually called marriage. I think somehow that is behind Yeshua's sending people out in pairs, the psychological support that comes from authentic friendship. I want to believe that these disciples were not cronies but were real friends.
I don't want to imply that the only truly fruitful friendships are married ones. Once when I was tremendously concerned about a woman friend who was deeply involved with a priest, my husband said to me, "Catherine, there are many kinds of loving relationships, as many as there are loving people in them." It was a good reminder of my stereotypes. He once also reminded me that "There are as many happy marriages as there are happy people married." Maybe, just maybe, Yeshua sent The Twelve out in pairs that together they could make the decision about when to stay and when to go. Maybe he sent them out in pairs so that they could be the persons for each other that would make endurable the inevitable losses they would experience in their mission. Maybe in his own life he had come to know what it means to lose that one person who makes all other losses endurable and wanted more for his close friends. (Incidentally, if you want to follow up on the probable significant others in Yeshua's own life you might want to read "The Women Around Jesus." It's written by a French Dominican priest, a scripture scholar.)
Maybe today is a day to celebrate friendships, married friendships, celibate friendships, friendships that double our joy and divide our grief, that help us to know when to go and when to stay, friendships that are models of joy and that invite others, through example, to their own health of body, mind and spirit.
Cayuga, Ontario, July 10, 1994
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 23: 1-6
Ephesians 2: 13-18
Mark 6: 30-34
I relish those lines from today's scripture about the missionaries who "gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught." Is there anyone here who hasn't had that kind of joyous experience? Something special is going on and you think about the person at home to whom you are going to tell it to. Or you think about someone special to whom you are going to write about the episode. Or perhaps there is someone whom you will call to share the fun. Maybe it isn't fun. Maybe it's a difficulty and you think about someone special in whom you can confide and who will perhaps help you to see things differently. There is an old German proverb about friendship, that it "doubles our joy and divides our grief." I think that this is what was going on in today's gospel, Yeshua's friends were telling him and each other of the successes and failures of their first missionary ventures, doubling their joy, dividing their grief.
How often during a day when my husband was alive would I think of what fun it would be to tell him something when I got home or what a relief it would be to get his insight on some problem. Marshall McLuhan once said that North Americans go home to be alone and Europeans go home to be together. I don't quite know what that made of us because my husband's origin was Denmark. I was born in Philadelphia. But it was a wondrous thing to have his presence in our home. Not having it there after his death in this special way was, and in many ways still is, the most difficult part of being on my own. It is almost as if it is in our human nature to be with others. Yeshua and his friends are no exception.
But then the inevitable happens. People start crowding in. I wonder again if there is anyone here who hasn't had the experience of trying to put aside just a bit of special time with some important person and having that time interrupted. Yeshua seems wiser than many of us are in such circumstances. He decides that he and his friends should take off to a deserted place, which, of course, as the story continues, isn't deserted for long once word gets out that he and his friends are nearby. This isn't the first time that we hear of a Yeshua who invites his friends to "come apart and rest awhile" and who himself goes apart and rests awhile especially with three adult friends at Bethany. It's a good reminder for us during this holiday time in North America. Do we rest? Do we re-create ourselves on our holidays or does the taking of them become one more job? It's something to ponder. Shepherds are good at taking time out, enjoying their own company. I introduced you to shepherds in Israel at the time of Jesus last Christmas. They were loners, thugs, isolated persons, but they knew the "sheep from the goats," not an easy task because they look so very much alike in Israel especially in the dark. Yeshua "shepherded" his friends to a quiet place because good leader that he was he knew that that was what they needed. It didn't last for long as we will read next week, but he surely appears to have been sensitive to their whole persons.
Since the shepherd David slew Goliah and eventually became a king of the Jewish people, the image of a leader as shepherd has been around. Shepherds are clever, they know more than their sheep do, their job is to care for their sheep and risk their own lives in the process. They help the ewes to give birth and nurture the baby lambs. In one story of Yeshua we have him saying "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep." It is poignant.
There are sheep in some of the farms in my area. Most of the farmers raise cattle but there are increasingly sheep farmers in the area. I never see shepherds, though. Fences seem to have replaced them. I don't see the sheep dogs of other places. I do see fuzzy, furry, white, brownish, and once in a while black sheep as I travel to and from the city where I work from the country where I live. A point comes when they are less furry and I know that the shearing has taken place. I have a neighbour who raises sheep, cards their wool, spins the yarn, and dies it with natural materials like onion peels and beet skins, and then knits wondrous sweaters from the wool. These sheep without shepherds or at least very limited contact with them seem to be doing well.
In Catholicism we have spoken of our religious leaders as shepherds for many years. I have seen a bishop's crozier that is in fact a shepherd's crook. It is used by the Benedictine abbot of the Monastery of the Genessee in New York State. Our bishops and priests are supposed to know the "sheep from the goats" and be willing to die for us. They opt in the Latin tradition for celibacy which solitude they are supposed to come to cherish for the freedom to be of service it provides. It is also supposed to end all possibility of a hereditary priestly caste among us so that our leaders are chosen because of their wisdom and holiness. There is a bit of a return to that election to ordination in the revised liturgy of presbyteral orders when the congregation is asked to give some sign of their approval of the candidate. In North American churches there is now frequently applause as that sign. But it really is a pro forma gesture because it has all been decided in advance by seminary rectors, staff, and bishops.
What can we take from today? Certainly one of the messages is about the need to go apart periodically and really rest and what is rest no one can decide for another. Another reminder could be not to fear solitude as part of that resting, even as shepherds in Yeshua's time and in same places today, come to cherish their solitude. Perhaps another is to ponder that last line in today's gospel about Yeshua's being moved with compassion. He must have been visibly moved for the Gospel writer or his sources to have noted it. Rest, re-create, and "feel with" might be the message. Or maybe it's rest, re-create, go apart that you might unabashedly and unashamedly "feel with" yourself and all others?
Cayuga, Ontario, July 17, 1994
Seventeenth Suday in Ordinary Time
2 Kings 4: 42-44
Ephesians 4: 1-6
John 6: 1-15
Many people who believe that Yeshua is the incarnation of Divinity have no problem with accepting literally the story in today's gospel. There are others who believe that Yeshua is fully human and fully divine who still find it hard to handle. Some persons have suggested that what happened was that Yeshua and his disciples shared what they had with each other and this inspired other people who had food to do the same. But often this is not seen as anything special. There is supposedly no special gift in this. There is nothing miraculous about that kind of sharing.
As I have been watching the situation in Rwanda this past week, especially the thousands dying from cholera, I have thought that it would indeed be miraculous if the people shared what they have. If they shared the clean water instead of fighting each other for it. If they helped with gathering the rice instead of trying to take it from each other. I think it would be miraculous if they shared something other than dying.
My roots are in the United States and I must admit I wept with joy at hearing President Clinton's announcement on Friday that in excess of $l00 million is going into relief, that 20 million anti-cholera kits are enroute to Zaire, that advance teams of engineers and other persons needed to provide landing places and roads to get supplies to the refugees have already gone into the area of Goma by Lear jet. As scorned as they are by so many and so often, the citizens of the United States cannot be faulted for their initiative good will in coming to the relief of persons in situations like these. It is good to know that someone cares.
A.M. Hunter, an expert on the gospel of John whom I have mentioned previously, says that this story of the loaves and fishes is "superior" to the one that we would have heard from Mark. So perhaps that is why the liturgists chose this reading from John. He appreciates it because it is Yeshua who is sensitive to the needs of the people, not the apostles as the other stories report. One of the reasons Hunter finds the story superior is because there is a command in here about the bounty of the Good One which is not found anywhere else in the stories of these loaves and fishes. Yeshua tells his people to collect anything that is left over and in this Hunter sees the command that "God's bounty is not to be wasted." God's bounty is not to be wasted.
Sometime ago I almost lost it completely over this wasting of God's bounty. I was walking down the corridor of the school where I was then teaching and found some boys using an orange for a soccer ball. It was dangerous among other things because of the floor tile and the possibility of slipping on the juice and pulp from the fruit, but it was the wasting of food that I could not believe and could not bear. I yelled like a shrew. I had to put my hands behind my back to keep from hitting the smirking fool who yelled back at me that I didn't have any sense of humour. I knew who he was so I took him with me into the principal's office and I was raging. The principal felt that I was over-reacting and that I had missed a teaching opportunity. I told him and the young man who was the ringleader of the group that maybe if they had ever travelled on a train in India and watched people risk their lives along the rails for scraps that travellers might have thrown onto them, perhaps they would be "over-reacting," too.
In those days we had a basket in the school cafeteria in which we asked people to put the foods they were not eating. We used to collect at least a basketful, sometimes it was overflowing, and we donated the food to a local food bank. We thought we were teaching our students something about not wasting God's and their parents' bounty. But the food bank decided it was inconvenient for them to pick up the food and we could find no one who would take it to them. A woman who worked in the cafeteria decided to take it for her local church that had a soup kitchen. Eventually, as the recession hit harder and harder there was less and less food in the hamper. I was transferred from that school so I do not know what happened eventually. I do know that until the day I die I will never get over seeing that orange being kicked around that hallway and having those young men think it was strange that I reacted as I did.
Hunter says that what Yeshua saw was "a leaderless mob, a danger to themselves and to everyone else." John wants to make clear that Yeshua ends every and any kind of hunger. He also wants to make clear that those hungers can not be dealt with violently. One interpretation of the messiah was that he would be a military leader and use physical force to get what Israel needed. Incidentally, every time in the gospel of John that we hear contempt for the "world" we should remember that the contempt is for using physical violence to get what one wants rather than to be involved in the war of persuasion to change hearts and minds. Physical violence was the way of the "world" which approach Yeshua condemned. It was not the beauty, truth, and goodness of creation that were to have no place in our value system but this violence. Yeshua would not allow people to turn him into a political messiah. I am not happy with myself that I would have battered those young men if the law had not prevented me from doing it at the risk of losing my job. Maybe I did lose a teachable moment. I still have so much to learn myself.
On the news this week also we were treated to the opening of the new Covenant House in Toronto, a hostel for street "kids". Seventy-five of them are now going to be able to be housed there and to have a "second chance" as one of the staff explained in the television interview. Millions of dollars of federal, provincial, municipal, and private monies have gone into this building. I am grateful that there are people around who want to fill the hungers of these young people. Maybe these young people are today's "leaderless mob"? Maybe their parents and their teachers are the modern "leaderless mob"? I find myself hoping and praying with all of my being that whatever else happens there at Covenant House, at any place committed to helping people help themselves, in all of our social institutions, is a realization and a lived experience that God's bounty is not to be wasted.
Cayuga, Ontario, July 24, 1994
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 16: 2-4, 12-15, 31
Ephesians 4: 17, 20-24
John 6: 24-35
My heart is too heavy today to deal with these scriptures readings as assigned. I want to share with you my pain and concern. I subscribe to a homily service called Celebrate!. It is published by Novalis and the editor is a personal friend of mine. She is a lay person and has a master's degree in liturgy from the Institut Catholique in Paris. She is one of the few lay persons, much less lay women to accomplish that. In an editorial which she has just written she informs readers that there is now a movement in the United States to bring to an end all inclusive language in our liturgy. Despite the work being done by the International Commission for English in the Liturgy, and their valiant efforts to use inclusive language and to return poetry to our worship, this movement is petitioning the U.S. representatives to ICEL to restore masculine language.
I have been concerned for thirty years that we use inclusive language in our liturgy and among the reasons for that is where God is male, the male is god, and that is not fair to God, to the male, or to the female. Let me explain. The language which Yeshua used did not have a neuter gender. It had only male and female forms. The biology which Yeshua used, the biology which St. Thomas Aquinas used for that matter, did not know of the existence of the ova. It was believed that the male sperm contained all of life and the woman was simply the passive receptacle of life and the bearer of it. Of course, if we are talking then about a Life-Giver, that entity gets identified as Male and/or as Father and eventually as Abba because we are told that Yeshua's will was so aligned to that of the Good One that this kind of intimacy was reflected in the name "Daddy." But surely we know better now.
What need is there to continue to use "Father," "Lord," "King," any one of a number of terms like that when we know that Goodness, Truth, Beauty is not male nor female and that any terms like those of "Father" or "King" are anthropomorphic. We are taking terms and using analogies to make the Goodness, the Truth, the Beauty personal. But my question is why use them at all? We know that women are co-creators of life, and not just of biological life. We have psychological evidence that we must wed the masculine and feminine parts of our own natures if we are to be whole people, the parts that Jung calls the anima and the animus. Why are there people who want to denigrate not only one-half of humanity but one-half of what they need to be whole persons? Let me share a little story with you.
A friend of mine called me recently. She said, "Catherine, I have wondered for a long time about your concern for inclusive language. You know that I have thought that you were over-reacting to something not that significant. Now I know what you mean." This woman has a delightful six-year old daughter who is a tremendously spiritual person. She and her mother often get into discussions about spiritual things and the other day she came home from school with this insight. Her mother said Jessica said, "Mum, now I know for sure that God is a boy." When her mother questioned why she said, "Well, we call Him God not Goddess, don't we?" The mother called to say that now she understood my concern. She wonders what it will mean for the spirituality of her daughter now and in her future to be "certain" that God is male. What saddens me so much is that we have other names that we could use.
The scholar Leslie Dewart has researched this question for many years and suggests that we adopt the ancient appellation "Light." Richard McBrien in his revision of Catholicism says that Catholics believe in a creative loving power conspiring for them. I find great consolation in praying to the Creative Loving Power Which I believe is concerned with "power for" us not power over us. The Carmelite Sisters in Indianapolis, Indiana, in their inclusive language breviary have adopted "Eternal Source, Word, Spirit," as their trinitarian nomenclature for Divinity. I usually begin my classes with "In the name of the Good One, who Creates, Re-deems, Inspires." What is the matter with us? What are we waiting for?
In the same edition of this magazine, this same woman editor reviews the liturgy portion of the Universal Catechism. She is perfectly fluent in both French and English and Latin and she points out how inclusive the French version is. Les hommes does not mean men. It means people. In English is appears as "men". There are other errors too many to mention but why this document of all of them could not be in inclusive language boggles the mind.
I do not want to believe that we have a male hierarchy so insensitive to the verbal abuse of women that goes on in churches every Sunday that they want to continue to do that or to lose the few gains that we have made. But there are times when I think that the only hope for us is if the bishops were to trade places for three weeks like the kind of thing that happens in Disney movies, with theologically and philosophically trained women, or any women for that matter. Perhaps they would have to experience the pain of feeling so left out, so unnamed, to have them take seriously those of us who ache for inclusive language.
While we're on this question of naming divinity, there is one name that I hope with all of my heart we will soon stop using in our church. It is putting vowels into the sacred tetragram YHWH and pronouncing the unpronounceable name of the Divine One. In Judaism to name is to be responsible for. That is why Adam names the animals in the Genesis story. When a devout Jew comes across YHWH in their scriptures, they say "Adonai" which is like "sir" or preferably "The Name." This is because they believe they are responsible to divinity, not for it. Let me make my point by one more story and then I'm done. A Jewsih friend came with me recently to her first Eucharist. I saw her face grow pale when she saw that "YHWH is the God of my salvation" was the opening hymn. I reached over and took her hand and sang "Adonai is the Light of my salvation." She relaxed visibly. After mass she said to me, "Catherine, you know not to pronounce the Name but why don't the rest of your people?" I suggested that she ask our parish priest that question so after an introduction to him she did. He replied, "Nobody in the seminary told me that." But then this is the same priest who told me that the study of the religions of our world neighbours also had no part in his seminary preparation, a strange thing for Christians who are supposed to be committed to the integral human development of all peoples.
We need work on these issues and lots of it and maybe we could start with being sure that the Canadian bishops' workshops on inclusive language are held in every parish and institution in our country. Then maybe we can do something about ending the maleness of God and the godliness of males.
(or in less of a spirit of pique)
Scripture scholars are generally agreed that we have in the words of Yeshua in the gospel we heard read today, the words of John and of the community that the gospel according to John represents. Now before we get all excited about this it is important to remember that it was the custom until the 18th century to produce historical positions in this way. Words were put into the mouths of important persons so that they would be given special attention. There was no intention on the part of the authors to defraud the hearers or readers. So what we have here is a community convinced that Yeshua is meat and drink for the human journey. Now this is very important.
There were at least 24 kinds of Judaism abroad when this commitment to the Way of Yeshua was being made. There were other ways of being religious, the Gnostic, the mystery religions, and the worship of Baal among them. It isn't important for us to go into detail about any of these options, but to realize that people made choices. It was a religious era. People were concerned about what they were or were not doing with their lives, and here we have a group of people so convinced of the way of life proposed by Yeshua that they present him as the human face of God. They do this in an interesting way. You will remember that the story is told that when Moses asked of the burning bush Who it was that was sending him, the bush replied, "Say that I Am Who I Am has sent you." Today we are told that a better translation would be "I Will Be Who I Will Be" has sent Moses. The latter is a much more dynamic concept of divinity and far less static than the former translation.
Yeshua makes these and other "I am" statements in these scriptures because the hearers would have connected the episode with Moses and the "I am" of Yeshua. They would have realized that there was an equating of Yeshua with the Divine One, not exactly, but very, very close. Yeshua is an incarnation of divinity. And this incarnation is for the world, not just for the Jews but for the world. Usually when John uses the "world" he means people who opt for physical violence to get what they want. Here it probably means that Yeshua is food and drink for all of humanity, not just the Jewish people. He is the saviour of all, not just the Jewish Messiah.
Have you ever thought about that delightful word companion? It comes from the Latin "cum panis" which means "with bread". Companions are people who break bread together, who eat from the same table, and who because of that, believe that they have the same life coursing through them. Eat at the table of Yeshua and you have that same life coursing through you, John is saying. It is a powerful message. I want you to engrave in your minds and hearts what the Johannine scholar, A. M. Hunter, has to say about all of this, viz., "the life of faith does not earn eternal life; it is it." Please think about this this week. The life of faith does not earn eternal life; it is it. This is what this gospel is all about, believing in ourselves, in each other, in the Yeshua Way, in the Good One conspiring for us. When we meet men and women of faith, of real faith, don't we have the feeling that we are in the presence of Life? Their verve, optimism, hopefulness, encourage us to that kind of joy. They are truly a taste (bread) of Life. John and his community experienced Yeshua as like that. May we, too.
Cayuga, Ontario, July 31, 1994
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 19: 4-8
Ephesians 4:3 - 5:2
John 6: 41-51
I have suggested to you previously that the words that John puts into Yeshua's mouth appear to tell us more about John than about Yeshua. And this is significant. John and his community are making a positive choice for the Yeshua Way apart from all the other options around them. They believe that this Way is the best bread for the journey. But I think we really have to give the supposed hearers the benefit of the doubt today. If somebody came up to you and said, "I am the bread of life," I think you might at least give your neighbour a nudge in the ribs with your elbows, especially if you knew the speaker well. Why would we have expected it to be any different in the time of Yeshua, presuming he himself said any of this?
John works hard to make it clear that belief is a gift of God and therefore God decides who and who will not have faith in Yeshua as the human face of God, the truth of God. This has always bothered me. The whole idea of "grace" has always bothered me. Karl Rahner, S.J., once said that grace is "God's offer of friendship." Now that I can understand because people can offer to be a friend, and someone can refuse that offer. I can understand this kind of offering, too, in the gift of human love. I have loved others who simply will not or can not return my love and that is hard to deal with, really, really hard. A man whom I loved deeply before I married and for whom I still have a special spot in my heart once said to me, "All love is freely given, freely to be received." I thought at the time it was his cop out for not returning my love but I have come to believe that he is right about that. Love simply cannot be compelled.
I suppose what bothers me most about the typical descriptions of grace, faith, belief and the role of the Creator in them is that somehow the Creator comes off at times worse than parents whom we charge for neglect of their children. For example, if a human parent had five children and fed only four of them and starved the fifth, he or she would be charged. But is it all right if a Divine Parent does that? Four are given faith in Yeshua as the Bread of Life but the fifth isn't and that's o.k. because somehow this is in the realm of mystery and God will be God the way boys will be boys? Doesn't that really make the morality of the Creator lower than the morality of those created? Of course it does, and that doesn't make sense. Sometimes I think too much of our theology is devoted to trying to save the honour of the Creator. Maybe we should forget about that and work harder on acquiring and saving the honour of humanity.
Having vented my spleen on all of this I want to tell you about the times when this whole bread of life thing has made the most sense to me. I have a friend who also happens to be a priest. The man is on duty twenty-four hours a day except for a few hours each afternoon when he closes his door and tries to rest. I have also seen that door banged on until it is opened despite the man's fatigue. He has damaged his health irreparably with this giving of himself. He will very likely continue to do so until he dies of a stroke or massive heart attack, perhaps both. I doubt that he will ever "rust out." When we celebrate Eucharist this whole bread of life makes sense.
I remember one time about five years ago after I had travelled with him on his missionary rounds for almost a month, when he said as usual at consecration, "This is my Body which will be given up for you. This is my Blood which will be given up for you." And in that instant I thought that what he was really saying was "This is my body which is being given up for you, this is my blood which is being given up for you." The "other Christ" which I learned in my salad days was what a priest is all about became real for me. To my friend's dismay I wept through most of our breakfast together after that mass and finally I worked up my courage to tell him what I had experienced during it. He is a kind and gentle man and so he smiled, hugged me, and then left me to begin his day's work. To this day I never am at Eucharist with him without that sense of its being his body, his life's blood that he offers every day. I am convinced that it was something like that that people experienced in Yeshua. It was the reality not the words, or at least the reality more than the words that made the difference.
Long ago a man with whom I studied how to give retreats suggested that most of us fill out mental index cards on people. We put their name at the top and what is significant for us about them on the rest of the lines and then when we run out of space we stop. He suggested that we do this especially with the people we think we know. He thought it would be great if now and again we would rip up the old index cards in our heads and make new ones. I think that is the mistake that the people in today's gospel were making. I don't know what it does or doesn't have to do with grace or faith but I think they would have been a lot better off if they had ripped up their old index cards on Yeshua and made some new ones.
Cayuga, Ontario, August 7, 1994
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proverbs 9: 1-6
Ephesians 5: 15-20
John 6: 51-58
To "eat" and to "drink" in Ancient Israel was to "know". It meant that one assimilated into one's very being the knowledge, the insights available. The words involved were also used for sexual intercourse or for "carnal knowledge" that is to know something as intimately as is possible, to become one with the knowledge, to relate totally to the knowledge. You will remember that Eve "ate" of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. At least this means that she came to an intimate knowledge of that which is good and that which is evil. It probably meant more but I will save that for another musing. I wish with all of my being that I could "know" good and evil in this way, that I could know Yeshua in this way, the Divine Being in this way. Meanwhile I stumble along.
This has been a very difficult week for me. I spent the bulk of it at the workshop on discipline that I was so looking forward to. It was the most undisciplined learning experience of my life, but for one other. By the end of the first day I was feeling intellectually assaulted by what I was hearing, and what I was not hearing, by what I was being asked to do, and what I was not being allowed to do. And at one point I asked the facilitator who was really an autocrat, "What ever happened to sin? What ever happened to our Catholic guidelines for human behaviour?" "Well, it's a mixed group," he replied, "and we have non-Catholics here so I can't get into that." The few attempts he made to layer something moral on to what he was promoting were abyssmal. At the end of the course I turned my answering machine on for twenty-four hours and went incommunicado to consolidate my energy. If this is what is being touted as discipline, if this is what our teachers and students are "eating up" (what the promoters of the course said about it in their advertisements) no wonder our schools and my students are in the mess they are in.
Part of consolidating my energy was to look again at a favourite book of mine, Catholic Morality Revisited by Fr. Gerard Sloyan. I studied the Christian Scriptures with Fr. Sloyan when I was an M.A. student at Temple University. (But any faults you find in these musings are mine, not his, I assure you.) Because Gerard Sloyan is an astute man he has worked to help Catholic educators and parents to provide moral direction for themselves and their children in his book. He makes very clear in this book that the teaching of Moses and the prophets and sages of Israel as interpreted by Yeshua and his followers is the core of Catholic morality. I would suggest that any Catholic discipline programs must take this into account.
I wish that you would read this book. It would be of enormous help. I cannot give it to you in detail today but let me quote just one sentence. "[Catholics] must make a commitment to have no part or lot in lying, thieving, revenge, greed, sexual deviance, cruelty, or violence." The book is a highly readable explanation of why this is the case. So I may not lie, steal, seek revenge, have excessive material possessions. I must be chaste, fair, and non-violent. I must be this for myself, my students, my world neighbours. I must "eat up" this way of life, we must eat it up, or we die as a people and as a power. Amen.
Cayuga, Ontario, August 14, 1994
Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Joshua 24: 1-2, 15-17, 18
Ephesians 4: 32-5:2, 21-32
John 6: 53, 60-69
Fr. Gerard Sloyan, the U.S. scripture scholar calls St. Paul an "incurable widower or bachelor" who did not hesitate to share his prejudices in favour of the single state. Fr. Sloyan is convinced that Paul's position did little to "add to the number of celibates in the early church." It was later that that would happen. If Paul were preaching today I would suggest to him that there are indeed men and women who hate their bodies and invite him to do some re-thinking. But that isn't what I really want to muse about today on this twenty-third anniversary of my arrival in Canada. I want to think about the contemporary "spirit that gives life." I want to share with you the first time I really came to grips with the potential of Eucharist.
When I first met my husband he was finishing his Ph.D. and teaching a course in the philosophy of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He had introduced the course the previous year and it was so successful that a group of the graduate students who had taken it wanted to go on meeting. They called their assemblies the "Tuesday Platform," and it was held in an upper room of a small French restaurant at the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus. Each Tuesday of that academic year, members of the class and their "significant others" came together to be with each other, to continue to grow, to continue to learn. As Bent's significant other, I was invited, too.
There was good food and good wine at reasonable prices, much laughter, and a small enough group to relate to each other. Sometimes there was a guest facilitator, like Loren Eiseley. The president of Haverford University who spent his sabbatical as a garbage man was outstanding. The Chairman of the Board of Scott Paper Company turned out to be a classmate of Huston Smith, one of my all time heroes in the field of Religious Studies. But it is my very first dinner that comes to mind today, my taste of the bread of life.
To say that people in business were not knights on white chargers for me was to put it mildly. I almost did not go out with my husband when I learned that he was a member of the faculty of business at Wharton. But when I told him that my field was religious studies and he didn't hang up but said, "How interesting! I think of myself as a bit of a philosopher as well," I decided that I had to know him. We were married in August and it was late September near my birthday that I went to my first Tuesday Platform. It was the last that I went to for six weeks.
There were about two dozen of us in the restaurant. The internationality of the setting was overwhelming. The heir to the largest chain of department stores in Latin America was there. Young men and women from Iran, Australia, Great Britain, Quebec, Pakistan, Ireland, the prairies, west and east coasts of the United States, my husband with Danish roots, and Philadelphia me were gathered in that upper room to learn how to live better together in the coming era of global economic interdependence. I don't remember exactly what happened but I do remember that it happened. We were "eating up" each other's knowledge, convictions, and morality. These were good people, unintimidated by each other, and each in their own way committed to make this global interdependence work for the well being of all of humanity. And they seemed to know how to do it.
I remember that I cried all the way home and I remember saying to my amazed husband, "Bent, this is what Eucharist is supposed to be. I know with every ounce of my being that Jesus had something like this in mind, a community of friends, working for and with each other and for all others. My church is supposed to be this and here I have found it in the upper room of a French restaurant in West Philadelphia in a way that I have never experienced it in my church. There was no jockeying for position, no put-downs, nobody patronizing anybody else. The women there tonight are as bright, gifted, and talented as the men and their opinions were equally appreciated. I am so jealous. I can't go back there until I deal with this. I am so jealous." It took me six weeks to come to grips with that jealousy. All I could think of during that time was "Others I have who are not of this fold." I had met those others, Jews, Muslims, disenchanted Christians, and they appeared to me to be doing the work of the Name better than my Christian community was.
This all happened in 1969 and some members of the Tuesday Platform are still in touch me with today. They remain men and women of vision and of hope. As I know them they continue to be of help and use to each other whenever and wherever they can. And they continue to be of help and of use to me.
I thought of all of this recently at the wedding of some special friends. You are probably familiar with the custom of lighting three candles at weddings these days. The mothers of the bride and of the groom usually light two small candles, and then the bride and groom take lights from those candles and light together the one that symbolizes their marriage. Usually the other two candles are put out which has always bothered me. It is, for me, not that people who are married are no longer two, but that they are more together than each of them have separately. I was so happy that my young friends continued to have all three candles burning. It said to me that they knew that their marriage was being built on mutual interdependence. I did not have the words for it then but I am sure that that was what I experienced in 1969, the commitment to mutual interdependence of those people gathered in that upper room. It was real. I could taste it. My bet is that this was at the heart of the Way as well, this sense of mutual interdependence, the lived experience that the Whole of the Way was greater than the sum of its individual parts.
There was something else in that 1969 experience. Each of those persons had some capabilities in their own right. They had something individually to offer the whole group. They would have been missed if they had not been there, as many were in subsequent meetings which they were not able to attend.
I know that taking in the body and blood of Yeshua, eating it, is to assimilate the virtue of his living and dying. It is to be committed to self-regarding love of oneself and of one's neighbour. And I now know that that was what I experienced in that upper room in Philadelphia. Not just at the time of Yeshua but for centuries people have turned away from the challenge of self-regarding love of themselves and of all others. Isn't it so poignant when Yeshua says to Peter, "Do you also want to leave me?" The loneliness of the man is almost overwhelming even after all these centuries. Are we leaving him or staying with him?
Cayuga, Ontario, August 21, 1994
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-8
James 1: 17-18; 21-22, 27
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23
The evidence is pretty clear that Yeshua was himself a Pharisee. The first time I heard that I almost came unglued. I had grown up thinking that Yeshua (I called him Jesus in those days), wore a white hat and the Pharisees, or the "Jews" wore black hats and that was that. After all, in my growing up we always prayed for the "perfidious Jews" every good Friday until John XXIII helped us to do better. Now that we Christians and Jews are not throwing things at each other, but talking to each other, other realities are emerging. Mind you, not that Jews ever had very much to throw at Christians except for brain power. Christians, in our history, made sure of that.
It is important to remember that historically the Jews at the time of Yeshua were a conquered people. The Romans were the occupying power. How do you keep your identity when others than your own manage your country? I would suggest that you develop ghettos, geographical ghettos, emotional ghettos, psychological ghettos. I grew up in that kind of Catholic ghetto in Philadelphia. Supposedly the United States was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but actually, it helped a lot if you were WASP, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. The reality of a free, brave homeland was much more for the WASP than the Roman Catholic. In our ghettos we became more "American" than anything the framers of the U.S. Constitution had ever imagined possible. It was very like this with the Pharisees. They were concerned with saving their nation, and not just any nation, but the people chosen, they believed, by Divinity, to lead all others to the fullness of their humanity, and because so much was closed to them they developed rituals, some of them absurd by our standards, but the rituals helped people to remember who they were, to know who they were, the chosen of Divinity.
We Catholics in Philadelphia abstained from meat every Friday. We fasted on the prescribed days and we attended mass on all the prescribed days. We married only among ourselves and mourned those who married other kinds of Christians, or married, God forbid, "outside the Church." We knew that we were saved because the rules we kept were saving us and we were "saving" the rules. We grew up, not just in seminaries and convents, but in our schools and our homes learning "You keep the rule, and the rule will keep you." Those rules were by and large, the rules of the Church, in particular its Canon Law, to which the Ten Commandments and the Eight Beatitudes played second fiddle. The Pharisees were up against the same thing. They were battling the Roman occupiers. We U.S. Catholics were battling the WASPS.
And then in ancient Israel along came Yeshua. There are Pharisees around today, many of whom live in Jerusalem. They have survived these thousands of years and many of them are today increasingly intrigued with their brother Yeshua. Some of them, when they read the Christian scriptures, are wont to say, "Jesus was a Pharisee, but not a very good one." Or they will say, "Jesus was a Jew, but not a very good one." That can be translated into, "He was rather flexible, more elastic than many of us were and are comfortable with." And that's probably fair. In all that he did, Yeshua was concerned with the human person. He was frightened of and distraught at anything that used people as a means to an end. Rules were made for human beings. Human beings were not made for rules, and when the rules got in the way of charity, of genuine loving relationships, they had to be abandoned for love and what it alone can accomplish.
As I mentioned earlier, when I first heard that Yeshua bar Yussef was very likely a Pharisee, I almost lost it. The friend who was helping me to understand this said, "Catherine, why do you get so angry so often with your Church?" I answered immediately, without any thought, "I get angry because I know what it should be and because I know that it isn't that. I know that it pays lip service. . ." And then I stopped dead in my tracks. My friend said, "You have studied it. You have lived its rules and live them. You have given your life to make its ethos a reality in your own life and in the lives of others and that is how you see the gaps, the holes in the wall, the loose bricks. What makes you think that Jesus would have done anything but what you are now doing?" It was a sober moment for me. It continues to be a sober reminder for me of the potential of my tradition, and of the reality of my tradition.
I suggest that we have the same thing in Yeshua today. We have a man who knows and who loves the potential of his tradition and who is overwhelmed at the pettiness it has substituted for the ideal. Yeshua is one hurting lover!
I am hoping and praying with all of my heart that there are some hurting lovers among our Canadian bishops this week as they gather in Ottawa for their annual meeting. I hope that there are some among them who abhor the pettiness and the posturing as much as their brother Yeshua once did for his own people in his own time.
Cayuga, Ontario, August 28, 1994
Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 35: 4-7
James 2: 1-5
Mark 7: 31-37
"And they brought to her class a young woman who was hearing impaired and who had a speech defect." On Tuesday of this week in many schools in Ontario, teachers will meet students with all kinds of learning abilities and with all kinds learning disabilities. They will be asked to work with students who are mentally and physically challenged -- we used to say handicapped -- and they will meet spiritually bereft young persons, the hardest of all to identify and serve.
I have mentioned before that these miracle stories may have happened just the way they are recorded. I have also mentioned that they can stand for powerful changes of heart and therefore of conversion because the Jews believed that all actions came from the heart. I never hear of this story of a tongue being "loosed" without thinking of Bea. She came to my Grade 9 class many years ago from Northern Ontario where she had been in an institution for severely handicapped young persons. In those days the last month of the Grade 9 Religious Studies course invited students to understand five world needs and how they might help to resolve them. There was a major unit on handicapped persons.
By the time Bea got to this class students had been identified as at basic, general, or advanced levels of instruction. Bea was basic modified, which meant well "below average." But since I refused to teach students in that way, she was with her peers in work groups -- now we call it cooperative learning. By luck of the draw her group was to research the challenges of mentally handicapped persons and how we could be assistance to them without handicapping them further by creating dependencies. I gulped when I realized what had happened but the whole group agreed that they wanted to work on the topic, Bea included, who by this time had a special hearing aid.
I should explain that for the prior four months, Bea had been truly welcomed into the class. We listened to her until we could understand what she was saying through her impediment. Students and myself spoke slowly so that she could read lips. She was getting special speech therapy to help her and some of the senior students in my Grade 12 class volunteered to put her through her speech exercises. Her involvement in the class and in class discussions increased notably over the months but I was not prepared for the final "loosening" of her tongue. When it was time for her group to present the results of its research and recommendations for how we should be relating to mentally handicapped persons, I invited the special education teacher to come into the class. I'm not sure why except that I thought I might need him to pick up the pieces. The leader had to give me prior to the presentation a description of how they were going to spend the hour they had for it. A very competent young women was the group leader and the outline looked good. They had omitted the names of who was doing what and when I questioned the leader she said, "Miss, we want to surprise you." I thanked her and hoped that I was going to be surprised, not destroyed. The day came and I got into the classroom to find it decorated with all kinds of posters from the local Mental Health Association. There was a lectern in the front of the room and my desk had six chairs around it. The rest of the room was U-shaped. There were chairs for the special education teacher and myself in the back of the room.
I can see that moment yet when the time came to start. The leader of the work group went to the lectern and introduced the topic and the members of her group and then to my amazement Bea walked to the lectern! My colleague and I looked at each other, as Bea began speaking slowly, the impediment obvious but not overwhelming. "Good morning, Mrs. Stidsen, Mr. Hunting, and Class. I am a mentally handicapped person and I want to tell you about my life in a school for people like me where I used to live. And I want to tell you how much better it is to be in a school like this one and why."
I had thought that Bea's contribution to the assignment might have been to put the posters in place in the room and here she was making the initial presentation! My colleague and I looked at each other and both of us were blinking back tears. For ten minutes Bea told us about her life before she came to our school. You could have heard a pin drop. It was not just a loosening of her tongue but a loosening of our minds and hearts that was going on. I found out later that the group members had worked with Bea at school and in their homes and hers and had helped her with her diction. So had the Grade 12 girls. And they had managed to keep all of this a secret from my colleague and myself. I remember that the balance of the seminar was brilliant but what exactly the girls did I do not remember except that it was of a quality which today I might not even get in Grade 12.
Today Bea works as an education assistant in an elementary school caring lovingly for severely multi-handicapped young persons. Her speech is much improved but it is her smile that makes all the difference, that radiant smile that I saw for the first time when she was given a standing ovation at the end of her speech in Grade 9 so long ago.
I have often pondered my own role in this miracle of Bea. My contribution was an atmosphere of trust and hope. I refused to label my students in my mind and in my heart. I offered them all the same learning opportunities and encouraged them to find ways to help each other to understand what was going on and to succeed in the course. I worked to help them understand that the success of others was an enhancement of and not a diminishment of their own accomplishments. I still try to do that.
Please think today about someone whose tongue might be loosened in your company if they experienced in you more hope and trust than they do at the moment. And think of someone in whose company you might feel freer to speak your heart if they were more hopeful and trusting in your regard. You might even ask them to provide that atmosphere for you so that both of you will be enhanced by the loosenings of the tongue and of the mind and heart that that atmosphere will provide.
I have one more thought for those of you who are parents. Please remember that your child's teacher is just that, a teacher, not a tutor. You are your child's tutor, and primary educator. Yours are the real life experiences. Ours are simulations of life. The brightest and the best of us work with groups, sometimes very large ones. We do our best to meet your child's needs but no one can meet those needs as you can. Perhaps today is a good time to think about making sure that your home is a place of truth and hope, that there are in it no hearing or listening impairments, so that all your tongues may be loosed.
Cayuga, Ontario, September 4, 1994
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 50: 5-9
James 2: 14-18
Mark 8: 27-35
"Keep your knees together and the word no on your lips," my former student who is now my colleague said to me this week. "That's what you'd be saying if you were in Cairo talking about population issues right now, eh, Catherine?" I was delighted that she remembered this from the days when we talked about responsible reproduction when I was teaching at Cathedral Girls' High School. She went on to say, "I remember how you smiled and told us that the name for that posture was abstinence." And so I had. I was especially concerned with pre-marital sex and the fact that many of my female students were feeling pressured into it. She also remembered that when one of the girls in her class had talked about her boyfriend's "needs," I had suggested that he take up jogging and cold showers. And so I had. I was then and continue now to be furious with persons who invite people to feel that they are controlled by their gonads rather than that human beings are gifted with the ability to control their gonads unlike our animal friends who mate seasonally and instinctually.
Actually if I had been in Cairo this week I would have been saying one more thing. I would have been inviting people to read Partha Dasgupta's 1993 book An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. If I had organized the conference I would not have allowed anyone to come to it unless they had read the book in which the University of Cambridge economist argues that there is no one formula to reduce fertility. In some populations it happens through women's education, in some it has to do with child survival, and in others it is related to income growth. Dasgupta says, however, that the one universal factor is social norms. People cross-culturally are interested in "keeping up with the Joneses" even in terms of the number of their children. I don't like all of Mr. Dasgupta's conclusions but he does suggest that what is needed in many areas of life are "tradition-breakers" -- people who think through the social norms of their culture and break from them if the mores are not truly life-giving. And that I surely agree with.
I abhor abortion. I think there is no greater irresponsibility than using it as a means of birth control. I also abhor the idea that women exist to fill men's biological "needs", an idea that comes from "it is better to marry than to burn [with lust]", making of marriage little more than legalized rape. I read Mother Theresa's plea for no abortion and that unwanted children be given into her care. I was left with many questions, though. On my next trip to India I want to find out from her Missionaries of Charity what kind of long term care these babies receive. How many of them are adopted? For those who are not what sort of schooling do they get, what kinds of jobs do they get, what sort of marriages do they make? What happens to orphan children in a society like India's where extended family is everything? Are the Missionaries of Charity providing that surrogate extended family? Is one allowed to ask these kinds of questions of a religious community founded by a "saint"? My intuition tells me these questions must be asked. Have the Missionaries provided their orphans with quality as well as quantity of life these past forty years since they haver been established? Are they and others like them real "tradition-breakers" or are they subtly fostering irresponsibility in terms of reproduction? We need to ask these questions of persons closer to home as well. It remains to be seen whether our child care agencies picking up the pieces after babies who are having babies will break the cycle of teen-age pregnancies or will reinforce irresponsible reproduction. If we can believe the statistics that 25% of all births in North America today are to unmarried mothers, and that the major portion of these births are to desperately poor women, we surely need some tradition-breaking here as well as in developing nations.
In mixed classes today I still teach that abstinence is the only sure-fire method of avoiding pregnancy. My colleagues think I am hopelessly naive and that I owe it to my students to teach means of family planning. What I do tell them is that I cannot believe that being genitally intimate at this point in their lives is to their emotional, spiritual, or financial advantage, but if they are, they need to get to a physician with their partner and work out with him or her what they need for responsible reproduction. When I speak this way I can hear almost audible sighs of relief from my students who are living chaste lives. So much of the information they get presumes that it is natural for teenagers to be sexually active and sends them a subtle message that if they are not there is something the matter with them. This is criminal.
I hope that what I am doing is "breaking" with the present tradition that only the physical orgasm makes life ecstatic. I personally value intellectual orgasms much more. I suspect the same was the case with the tradition-breaking Yeshua who today tells Peter to stop looking to him to use physical clout of any sort to bring about the reign of God. Yeshua's way is the war of persuasion for change of hearts. So is mine.
Cayuga, Ontario, September 11, 1994
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 2: 12, 17-20
James 3: 16-4: 3
Mark 9: 30-37
The Markan scholar C.F.D. Moule on whose commentary I depend so much for my musings suggests that Christians today are invited to remember that the modern state did not invent child welfare. Yeshua and those closest to him took little children seriously. I suppose that's true enough but I'm not sure that that's what today's gospel is all about. I was in the 47th year of my life and in Tel Aviv before I came close to understanding what I think Yeshua meant today and on some other occasions when he invited people to become as little children. My conviction was that he was telling us to be lifetime learners, to be insatiably curious, to never think that we have it all together and that there is nothing left to know. Just as he rebuked his closest friends for arguing about who was the greatest among them, as if they even knew what greatness was, he would rebuke anyone who thinks they have nothing left to learn.
In 1982 on the last three days of a tour which I made to the State of Israel, I went to the home of Dr. Chaim Weisman, who was so instrumental in helping the State of Israel to become a reality. Along with David ben Gurion, often called the father of modern Israel, Dr. Weisman brought the hopes and dreams of modern Jews to the world. He was an academic and a statesman. I went to his home, a museum of his own successes and of the early days of Israel and saw a brief film and then prepared to view the exhibits. To my amazement and near despair, busloads of Grade 6 students, with study sheets in hand, descended on the museum just as I did. I was standing and reading Weisman's correspondence with John F. Kennedy when I got pushed out of the way, literally, by these young people determined to get their study sheets filled in, and not allowing anyone or anything to stand in their way.
I saw this elsewhere among children in Israel and I have certainly seen it in the precociousness of the children of Jewish friends. Their parents answer their questions, taking them seriously, never talking baby talk, never talking down to them, and never refusing to make time to listen and to help them to learn. I remember walking outside into the Weisman garden and sitting there quietly and suddenly thinking, "I wonder if this is what Yeshua meant when he told people to become as little children. Can these present sons and daughters of the People Israel be so very different from those at the time of Yeshua?"
When I got home I looked up "children" in Henri Daniel-Rops' book, Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. To my amazement and my delight there was the confirmation I was hoping for. The role of the child in ancient Israel was to learn. Girls were expected to learn from their mothers how to make a good home happen and how to assure the religious lives of the men in the household. That in fact was the religious duty of the woman. Fathers were required to teach their sons their own trade as soon as the boy was capable of learning. Furthermore, boys at the age of five had a drop of honey placed on the Torah by their father or grandfather, and after eating it to remind themselves of the sweetness of the Law and the sweetness of studying the Law, began their memorization of that Law. By the age of ten they were learning the interpretation of the Law, and by thirteen they were responsible for their own religious life which means all of their life because Jews did not separate religion from secular life. One's whole life had to be lived with Divinity in mind. What would it be like if we Christians did that for all our children at the age of five, presented them with a Bible, and gave them something lovely and sweet to remind them of the gift of our scriptures and the sweetness of studying them contextually, if they are Catholic Christians? What if by the age of ten we had them studying interpretations of scripture, and by thirteen told them that they are indeed responsible for their learning and maturation? In Israel today among even the least religious Jews thirteen-year-olds are taken to a Jewish frontier and stand guard for a night, or give blood for a transfusion. They belong. They exist not only for themselves but for their whole community. Confirmation is supposed to be that for Christians, a realization that what they do matters, effects not only themselves but their whole church, their world. But is Confirmation really anything more than a pre-graduation party for our Catholic children? Day in and day out I meet confirmed young people who do not understand that they exist to make their lives happen, and to make the world the better for their having being in it.
Perhaps the bigger question and the one that today's gospel really raises is how much are we adults in this community committed to continually learning about ourselves, our community, our nation, our world? How much do we believe that we exist to make our lives happen, to make our world the better for our having been in it? C.F.D. Moule to the contrary notwithstanding, I think an insatiable love for learning is what Yeshua is getting at today.
Cayuga, Ontario, September 18, 1994
Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Numbers 11: 16-17, 25-29
James 5: 1-6
Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48
Over the years I have had considerable difficulty with what constitutes excessive material possessions for someone like myself. Whenever I hear today's epistle I remember how my husband helped me to bring that difficulty to an end. We skimped and saved and finally managed to buy property in the country and then with more skimping and saving had our home built. We had the contractor do only the basics and we finished it ourselves. It took us almost three years of additional work, saving, and scraping. We limited ourselves to $5.00 a week spending money all those five years. In many ways it was the happiest time of our marriage.
Shortly after we finished decorating the house we left it for a New Year's visit with my family in Philadelphia. On our return from the visit as we turned the corner to the road on which the house is I felt tremendously apprehensive, and I said to Bent, "I wonder if the house is still there." He replied immediately, "Catherine, if you can't live without it, you can't live well with it." It is the most succinct statement of being poor in spirit that I have ever heard.
Vatican II reminded Catholics to applaud the good wherever we find it, whether it is of our own doing or of others. So does Yeshua in today's gospel. I suggest that today is a subtle reminder from him to be willing to live without the applause so that when, if it does come we will be able to live well with it.
Cayuga, Ontario, September 25, 1994
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Genesis 2: 7-8, 18-24
Hebrews 2: 9-11
Mark 10: 2-1
In ancient Israel the woman was her father's possession and then her husband's. There was no question of her initiating a divorce under Jewish law. In Orthodox Judaism this was and is the prerogative of the male. A good case can be made that Yeshua is addressing men today because the right to divorce was theirs. Sometimes men were allowed to divorce their wives because they had become physically unattractive, had not borne male children, or cooked bad meals. Some rabbis thought that if a woman talked too much that was grounds for divorce. We know biologically today that the male determines the sex of the child but ancient peoples did not. Roman wives were allowed to initiate divorce but Jewish wives were not. They were at the disposition of the men whose lives they were supposed to make happen. Yeshua is clearly warning his male listeners today not to treat people as things, especially the women in their lives.
The New English Bible translation of "hard of heart" is "unteachable". The Jews believed that all their thoughts and actions originated in the sentiments of their hearts which is why they prayed and pray to be "clean of heart". To be "hard of heart" was to refuse to learn, refuse to be open, refuse to rethink. It is almost as if Moses got weary of trying to explain the wisdom of unbroken, lifelong, exclusive faithfulness in marriage, which was a symbol of unbroken, lifelong, exclusive faithfulness to YHWH, and said, "Forget it." I can identify with that. I am weary of trying to explain to thirty-four Grade 11 students why they are not entitled to call out whenever they want to, to get up and walk around the room at will, to sharpen pencils in the middle of a mini-lecture or videotape, to arrive late and expect me to re-teach what I have already done with the rest of the class, etc., etc., etc. When they do that they are treating me and others as things not persons. So often recently I have wanted to say "Forget it," and teach those who want what I have to offer. Has my heart grown hard? Am I unteachable? When I was a child I was told that I had to earn the respect of the adults in my life. Now I am being told that I must earn the respect of my students. Have I missed something somewhere along the way? Is there never supposed to be a moment when someone respects me, looks at me again, gives me a second hearing, which is what respect is all about, from the Latin "respicere", to look at again. I am a person, not a thing.
In a CBC interview this week, educators at a convention on technology in the classroom were being told that they must begin to see the world through their students' eyes or they never will be able to teach them. I think this is the death knell for my teaching career. Periodically I watch music videos on television and I want to vomit when I do not want to cry. I go into the computer room at school now and then to watch the hackers play games and I am at a loss to understand why this is so much fun for them. I would rather read a good book. I supervise in the school during a lunch hour and cannot understand why a food fight is considered fun. On days when students are not required to wear uniforms my aesthetic sense is so assaulted that I usually drive home in tears. The out and out ugliness of their attire frightens me. Who is selling them on this? Who is making them believe that ugly is beautiful? Some of the brightest and the best of my female students arrive in body suits that leave nothing to the imagination especially the size and location of their nipples. Have I become hard of heart and unteachable? I think often these days of that mother who said to me last year, "Now that I have met you, Doctor, I can see how my daughter would interpret your intelligence and poise as inflexibility and rigidity." Am I supposed to play dumb and lose my dignity to reach her daughter and others? I cannot believe that unbroken, lifelong, exclusive faithfulness to the Yeshua way of life asks that.
Plague in India, food riots in Haiti, Cuban refugees still drowning at sea in attempts to reach Miami, some students in our school and another Catholic school going after each other with crowbars, and my fifty-ninth birthday this week on the day of our monthly staff meeting! Talk about a mixed bag. A large part of that meeting was given over to a discussion of the violence in our school, a forthcoming assembly on Crimestoppers and TIPS, and the need for our personal efforts to end the violence. Our superb principal said, "This school is going to be a safe place if it kills me!" Only a few of us caught the humour.
I have been praying for insight into what it means for me personally to continue to learn, to keep an open mind and heart and to my amazement and delight an answer came in a birthday card. I want to quote it in full. It is surely as applicable to men as to women but it struck me as an updated version of Yeshua's invitation to think. It's from a Hallmark Ambassador card but no author is mentioned.
Here's to the woman who knows where she's going and will keep on until she gets there; who knows not only what she wants from life, but what she has to offer in return.
Here's to the woman who is loyal to family and friends, who expects no more from others than she is willing to give; the woman who is confident in her beliefs and yet is willing to listen to what others have to say.
Here's to the woman who guides and inspires not by quoting others' philosophies but by living her own good example; who accepts both victories and disappointments with the same grace; and who can rise above life's challenges and move on.
Here's to the woman who gives the gifts of her thoughtfulness, who shows her caring with a word of support, her understanding with a smile; a woman who brings joy to others just by being herself.
The friends who sent me this birthday card told me that they experience in me this kind of woman. I hope with all of my heart they are right. I have known and do know these kinds of persons and many of them are men as well as women. They never confuse persons with things and vice versa. Pray that myself and other adults in education will never say "forget it" in terms of trying to get these values in place in our students' lives by living them in our own.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 2, 1994
Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 7: 7-11
Hebrews 4: 12-13
Mark 10: 17-30
I am almost overwhelmed at the number of possibilities for today's musings. It is Thanksgiving Weekend. The reading from the Original Testament offers us an example of a feminine name for the Good One, viz., Wisdom. Wisdom is "Sophia," through which as today's first reading tells us, all things come to us, all things are possible to us. How much information we have today, and, I fear, how little wisdom. I want to come back to that in a bit.
And there's that wonderful reading about the two-edged sword. Fr. John McKenzie, the recently deceased biblical historian, whose dictionary of the Bible is a classic and a must for Catholics who wish to be contextual readers of scripture, once wrote a book called "The Two-Edged Sword." As I remember it, he was trying to make clear to us that every event of our lives offers us the possibility for salvation or for condemnation. Nothing that we do is neutral in his understanding. We choose life or we choose death. What we do matters.
And then there is today's gospel which makes me feel fifteen years old again, sitting in the pew in St. Mary of the Assumption Church, Manayunk, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and being told that the highest vocation in Yeshua's own words was the priesthood, followed by what is now being called consecrated life at the present synod in Rome. I felt guilty for years because I was being told by the sisters in my elementary school and in my secondary school that God was calling me to vowed religious life and if I did not accept that call I would never be happy. It took me years to figure out that Yeshua was not talking to people about the gift of being perpetual virgins in priesthood or vowed religious life. He was talking to married men and women, and he was talking to the poor, rarely to the rich. I was in my early thirties before I came to understand this scripture. The apostles were distressed and surprised at what Yeshua said because in that time there were so many rules and regulations for the Jewish people to keep their identity intact in a nation that was occupied by another power, that only the rich had the time to fulfill these obligations! The poor envied the rich their religious opportunities as they were commonly understood and here was Yeshua undermining everything that people had come to value, the money and the time to do holy things. It's a lot like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, asking God, "Would it ruin some immortal plan if I were a wealthy man?"
Tevye talks about what he would do if he were wealthy. He would go to schul and he would pray and he would study and he would learn and his wife would be deliciously fat and happy and his daughters would be well provided for in terms of their dowries. His life would be complete. Riches in the understanding of the Jews at Yeshua's time was that it opened to them participation in the fullness of God's Life. And Yeshua appeared to be contradicting that. It's almost like he's saying "You don't need pots of money to be happy, or to serve God, or to serve each other. You need the right attitude." But I want to take the apostles side for just a bit. I think they were on to something important.
We are being told today that basic human needs are not just food, clothing, and shelter, but education, and sufficient leisure time for reflection. Anything less than this is inhuman. Some financial security make education and leisure for reflection possible. Maybe, just maybe, some of the apostles and disciples were a bit more practical about these needs than Yeshua was? After all, they were the married men and the fathers, and from what we commonly understand of him, Yeshua was not. It reminds me a bit of an Italian friend of mine who after the issuance of the encyclical Humanae Vitae and its opposition to any form of family planning but "natural" methods, said of the pope who issued it, "He no playa da game, he no maka da rule."
We need leisure for reflection to be truly human. I need leisure for reflection to be truly human. Yesterday I turned off the computer, got my coffee, and sat in my living room looking at the trees. The beauty of their colours so overwhelmed me that I wept with gratitude. I could take that time because I have some financial comfort in my life. All I could think of during that reflection was "How beautiful is your dwelling place, O Good One, how magnificent the work of your fingers." (Jewish friends tell me that "fingers" is better than the more traditional "hands".) Will giving away material possessions make me more reflective? Then I ought to give them away. Will using material possessions to make reflection possible for others be the better thing? Then I keep them.
I think that today's readings are attempting to remind us that without reflection there is no true wisdom, and without wisdom there is no chance of determining effectively how to wield that two-edged sword that makes for salvation (authentic human existence) or condemnation (inauthentic human existence). And that discernment is our mission, cleric, laic, or vowed religious in this church.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 9, 1994
Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 53: 4, 10-11
Hebrews 4: 14-16
Mark 10: 35-45
The Nobel Prize for Peace was announced this week, to be shared by Itzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat. It was announced while Rabin was working for the release of a nineteen-year-old Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas, a group opposed to peace as Arafat and Rabin are trying to negotiate it. Rabin's effort failed. The solider was killed by his captors as an elite group of Israelis stormed the Hamas hideout. Others died and were injured in the raid. How bittersweet this must be for all the prize winners! Their dream of peace has a dark cloud hovering over it. It must be very, very hard for Rabin to see a silver lining at the moment.
Fr. Aristide went home to Haiti this week after three years of exile. His welcome was jubilant. He is the elected president of the country. One wishes him well as he works toward the integral human development of his people and remembers those who died while fostering his return. Some of his closest priest friends are among those who died. They died for his dream and theirs, a dream of a democratic Haiti.
Closer to home, after being sworn at by an almost completely inarticulate young man who refuses to get for himself the help offered by our special needs personnel, I gave a seminar at McMaster University for persons supposedly interested in making the world's religions available to the world's peoples, especially its children. Through much of the afternoon all I could think of was my husband arriving home one evening from such a meeting around another topic and saying, "Catherine, the most difficult thing I am ever called upon to do is listen to people mentally masturbate themselves out of greatness." What a world it would be if we helped each other to make our dreams happen rather than putting down those dreams before they get off the drawing board.
Today's gospel has James and John dreaming. They are dreaming about "sitting in state" with Yeshua, as the NEB translates their hope. C. F. D. Moule, the Markan scholar says that if the other apostles were not harbouring the same kind of hope they would not have gotten angry with James and John! That makes sense. But I want to explore the apostles' side of things for just a minute. Maybe there is more here than meets the eye.
I grew up learning to "give without counting the cost, toil without seeking for rest, etc., etc., etc." I was in my early twenties before I realized that this was the way of life proposed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. And I was in my early thirties, having made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius three times by then, and recently moved into my own apartment, when I began to wonder who cooked Ignatius' meals, who washed his clothes, who cleaned his house? Brothers? He himself and his Company of Jesus? Women servants? I began to wonder if Ignatius could write this way to his priest companions because he had the example of so many others providing him with unstinting service, helping him to make his dream happen. Maybe what he saw in their service was something that he wished he and his priestly companions would practice for themselves.
I can understand Yeshua's friends and other disciples of the Way and contributors of any sort, wanting to know that they are making some difference with their lives. It is incredibly hard to go on when there is little or no recognition of one's efforts or when the "giving without counting the cost" comes to be taken for granted, and there are no "peace" prizes, including a good night's sleep. I am watching the best teachers around me, and periodically also myself, burning out not from hard work, but from the feeling of futility about what we are doing. What does it do for those who are being "given to" not to be invited to "count the cost" of the giver? Is it too much to look for some kind of gratitude, some kind of recognition, on the part of those who are being served? Remember Yeshua's plaintive "Where are the other nine?" I can go miles on a "Thank you, Miss." I am left with wondering what it will mean ultimately for people who think that because they exist, they are entitled to be cared for. And this is happening in an age when we are being told that the future of the West is in service industries. How will those who have only been served learn to serve?
My husband once told me, "Catherine, you constantly confuse greatness with fame." I remember snapping back at him at the time, "That's easy for you to say since you have both." He was then president of his professional association, a tenured faculty member, and serving on two provincial and two federal committees concerned with enhancing Canada's economy. Once I calmed down I apologized for my rudeness but being taken for granted is tough. And I increasingly think it is wrong, especially where it is the service of women that is involved.
I was comforted in all of this recently when I read the psalm that pleads, "Give success, O Good One, to the work of our hands." My prayer increasingly is for successes enough to keep me going.
Oakville, Ontario, October 16, 1994
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 31: 7-9
Hebrews 5: 1-6
2 Timothy 1: 10
All week long I have been juxtaposing the requests of last week's gospel story and this. Last week the request began "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." This week the request is, "My teacher, help me to see again." I keep wondering if it were not so much what the apostles asked for last week as how they asked for it that really ticked Yeshua off. And this week, there is a plaintiveness about the request that really touches me. Maybe it was a literal healing of blind eyes that was going on in today's gospel. There's no good reason for not believing that. But maybe it was a renewal of vision that Bartimeus was seeking. And I can only begin to imagine what that request did by way of heart-warming for Yeshua. I know what it does for me when a student comes to me and asks me for a renewed vision and what it does when a student expects me to do the work for them that they should be doing for themselves.
It's been a rough week for teachers in Ontario. Two were shot by a disgruntled adult student on welfare. He had been told that if his attendance did not improve, a requisite for his continuing to receive welfare, his absences would have to be reported to the funding agency. He chose instead, at least so the papers are telling us, to "kill the messengers", or perhaps more accurately, to try to do so. I have had my own bout of attempts to "kill the messenger" this week. And a lot of it has been, "Teacher, we want you to do whatever it is we ask of you." One of the "want tos" went something like this.
"What's the word 'herald' mean?"
"Get our your dictionary and look it up, please."
"Why should I? You're the teacher. Teachers are supposed to tell us things like that."
"Teachers are supposed to teach you how to learn, how to teach yourself and help yourself, and that's what I am doing."
And then he treated me to one of the most rotten slang expressions now in vogue, and I treated him to a visit to the vice principal's office. Driving home later that day I thought of how interesting it was that this thing about "herald" had come up in class. We were studying Fr. Avery Dulles' models of the church. He maintains that there are five: mystical communion, sacrament, institution, herald, and servant. The service is not intended to be obsequious. "Herald" refers to the church's missionary dimension. This Sunday is, of course, Mission Sunday, when we remind ourselves of this heralding of the good news. It is also the time when we increasingly need to remind ourselves that Christian mission now is to all six continents, not just to those places in Asia and Africa or remote places in Northern Canada traditionally thought of as missionary areas.
What is our mission? Since Vatican Council II we have been talking about mission as the integral human development of all peoples. That means that we must be committed to securing food, clothing, shelter, education, and sufficient leisure for reflection (prayer) for every human being on spaceship Earth. Increasingly, too, we are understanding that Mother Earth must be part of our effort and that only sustainable development may be engaged in. Surely of all of these needs it is education that makes for the long-term fulfillment of the other needs. A friend of mine from India, Archbishop Leobard D'Souza, who eight years ago preached here at St. Stephen's on Mission Sunday, has this to say about education:
. . . it is education which undergirds human dignity, makes human relationships fruitful, and provides the moorings for democracy. In this era of global interdependence authentic education demands that the accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and information systems of any and of all societies, be accessible to every member of the human community.
This is the mission of which I want to be a part. I want to help my students, to help every human being to help themselves through a renewed vision of themselves and their world. "My teacher, help me to see again." I do not want to be expected to do it for them. "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." I don't think Yeshua did either.
It's the same kind of thing I mused about last week when I wondered what it does to a person who is always being given to never to take the cost to the giver into account. I mentioned this last week in the presence of a person who is a great fan of Mother Theresa. The person said to me, "But Mother Theresa tells her sisters, 'Let the people eat you up.'" I found myself replying, "What does that make of the people who do the eating? Cannibals of other bodies, minds, and spirits?" Whatever else modern mission is, especially educational mission, it cannot be this.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 23, 1994
Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 6: 2-6
Hebrews 7: 23-28
Mark 12: 28-34
This is the Sunday when we usually are reminded that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. When I was growing up this was referred to as "Nemo dat quod non habet." Some wag or other used to translate this, "Nemo dat quod non got." You can't give to others what you don't have yourself. I suspect that this or something like it is at the heart of the current "self-esteem" craze. I have wondered previously in these musing what this means in a world that seems to have forgotten sin. And I know now that others like Rollo May and M. Scott Peck have wondered and do wonder about the same thing.
My experience has been that I have often done my very best living in the darkest moments of my life. I have helped others to help themselves in the midst of my truly hating my life. I can even chalk up a few mighty successes in terms of others when I was suicidal about six months after my husband's death. These were moments when I did not have anything to give others, or at least that was how I felt. And yet somehow in the midst of this pain, I was able to help make some very good things happen. I suppose someone could tell me that underneath all of this I really do like and love myself and perhaps that is true but that was certainly not how I was feeling at the time. I was filled with loathing and contempt and near despair for the hand that Life had given me to play.
You can perhaps imagine then that it was with considerable relief that I read a few years ago that Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Jewish scholar most noted for his contributions to contemporary religious studies and education, once pointed out to a group of Christian scholars that they were misinterpreting this Jewish text. He is reported to have done it with great smiles and with much patience but he pointed out that the words are not "Love your neighbour as you love yourself," but "Love your neighbour as yourself." Now ponder that for one minute. The rabbi went on to say that the scripture means to love one's neighbour as a person like unto oneself. It has nothing to do with self-love, he said. It does not call for us to love ourselves before we think we can do good things for others. I must confess to having felt enormously relieved when I read this.
I must confess that these are the moments when I wish that I knew the original languages of both these Hebrew and Christian scriptures. I wish I did not have to depend on others for their interpretations but I did call a friend whose scholarship in these things I respect deeply and he consulted both scriptures and confirmed that Rabbi Heschel has a point. I leave it to others who are into the "self-esteem" culture more than I am to do with this insight what they want. I want to take a minute to ponder what it might mean to deal with another as my alter ego. To do this I am going to go to another modern Jew, William Glasser, M.D.
You may know that Dr. Glasser is the man who was recently given an award by the National Education Association in the United States for "returning discipline to the classroom." Dr. Glasser says that it is "learning" that he has returned to the classroom. In his private psychiatric practice Dr. Glasser was seeing so many burned out teachers and administrators that he closed it and began work to produce quality schools. He has moved now into urging quality management on any person in any position of responsibility for others. He operates out of a model he calls Reality Therapy/Control Theory. I don't want to get into it in detail except to describe what he says constitutes basic human needs, what I might read as my "yourself" and the "yourself" of my neighbour.
Glasser maintains that we all have five basic needs which are genetic; survival, freedom, fun, belonging (love), and achievement (power). The extent of these needs is unique in each of us and what makes us us. But unless these needs are met in some way or another, we will never achieve wholeness. He also has a theory about behaviour which again I will not go into in detail except to say that we have most control over our actions and thinking, and less over our feelings. We can act well despite how we feel, not because of how we feel.
Now what if, no matter how I feel, I approach every other human being whom I encounter with the mentality that he or she needs to survive, to achieve, to have fun, to experience freedom, and to belong. Is it possible that in helping my neighbour to help himself or herself to meet these basic human needs, accepting them as alter egos of myself, I do love myself truly and well? There are no priorities here. This kind of loving is two sides of one coin. It is a both/and proposition, not an either/or. I don't have to wait until I feel good about myself and my world to be effective for and with others. And more than this, probably in the process of this self-giving no matter how I feel, ultimately I will achieve that sense of well-being and purpose and meaning which is for me the fullness of life, and of Life. My prayer today is that all of us will love our neighbours as persons like unto us.
Cayuga, Ontario, October 30, 1994
Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 17: 10-1
Hebrews 9: 24-28
Mark 12: 38-44
A woman who was widowed in the ancient world was very vulnerable. Even as I put down this musing I wonder if there is any time or any place when a woman who is widowed is not vulnerable. In orthodox Hinduism today she is considered "inauspicious" and expected to keep away from brides and from pregnant women in particular. I found to my amazement that after I was widowed some of the couples who were our special friends seemed to see in me a kind of death's head, a reminder of what one or the other or them would have to deal with eventually. In ancient Israel without a man to protect her a widow was extremely vulnerable. It is interesting that the early Christians made the care of widows and orphans a priority among them and even got to arguing among themselves about who was better taken care of, the widows and orphans of Hellenistic Jews or of Jerusalem Jews!
I really don't have much more to contribute this week beyond my musing last week. The widow whom Yeshua applauds gives all that she has, not out of her abundance, but whatever it is that she has, she gives. I think that's the key message, and Yeshua, good teacher that he is, knows that "repetition is the mother of learning." This widow surely did not give "without counting the cost." She counted the cost and she still gave.
Perhaps this is a week to ponder about the cost of our own giving and the cost to those who give to us.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 6, 1994
Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Daniel 12: 1-3
Hebrews 10: 11-14, 18
Mark 13: 24-32
Libraries are filled with learned arguments about today's gospel. Some scholars say that this passage is clear evidence that Yeshua was not divine because what he predicted about the end time did not come to pass. Others say that it is proof of his keen intuition about human affairs. Still others say that the words are those of a generation or even two later than Yeshua's lifetime, a generation convinced that he is the universal saviour of humanity and frustrated at those who will not accept him as such.
My own conviction is that we dare not take these words of today's gospel literally. Yeshua is straining to make clear that there is more to life than what we humans do with it. Our choices are important. What we do or do not do makes an enormous difference in terms of a better world. But Yeshua was a Jew and his Jewish experience was that YHWH was intimately and personally involved with creation and conspiring for its well being. The language attributed to Yeshua today is poetic language intended to startle. The will of Yeshua was spiritually so united to the will of his God that people came to believe that to see him at work was to see Goodness, Truth, and Beauty at work. With all that he did in his own right, there were times when Yeshua went apart to pray, to call on the More that he alludes to today, Impenetrable Mystery, within him and beyond him.
When I try to make clear to my students this reality of the difficulty of expressing the Inexpressible I often begin by asking for a student volunteer to enter into a dialogue with me. I say something like, "Lisa, your lips are red, your eyes are blue, your teeth are white." There's usually considerable astonishment in the class and one or the other of the students will say, "Are you o.k., Doctor?" And then I say, "Lisa, if there were a young man in your life who said to you, 'Your lips are like rubies, your eyes are like sapphires, you teeth are like pearls,' what would you think"? I get an answer like, "I'd probably collapse first of all and then I'd feel really good. It means I'm special, and maybe even that he loves me." I continue to explain that this is the kind of language we have at work here, a language of love, a language trying desperately to help us understand that what we do matters, and that God works with us and works above and beyond us.
Contrary to what the current cult of self-esteem would have us believe, the language of love is not always pleasant and it is not always easy to hear. In my experience, people who truly love me are willing to tell me what is good about me and they are also willing to tell me the hard things that I occasionally need to hear to be a better person than I am. I suggest that in the spirit of love, today's gospel is saying hard things to people who are finding the Way of Yeshua much more difficult then they had imagined it to be. Don't give up hope, they are being told. Stay alert. It's a lot like the motto "Semper Fidelis" of the U.S. Marine Corps, stay ready, be faithful always, all ways.
I have sat at this spot on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple area where Yeshua is reported to have sat and warned of the end time. It is also the spot where he is reported to have wept for the hard-heartedness of his people. He would have looked at the Temple. Now one sees the Dome of the Rock, a mosque over the place from which it is believed by many Muslims that Muhammed ascended into heaven. It is a place of incredible beauty. As I sat there and pondered that view, I thought about how often beauty (Beauty) can lead us to feel the pain of that which is not beautiful, that which is not a way of living filled with Wisdom. Is it possible that the same thing happened to Yeshua and his disciples?
He knew the violence of the Zealots who were eventually to bring down the wrath of Rome on the Jews even to the destruction of their Temple. He knew the nit-picking of many of the groups of his own Pharisees. He knew the collusion of the Jewish religious establishment with the Roman occupiers. He knew the limits of the Sadducees for whom the here and now was the only basic reality. With the hindsights of history we can see these limitations, too, and their ultimate consequences. Yeshua's wisdom was the wisdom of the great who see so clearly the outcomes of actions that the present, in a very real sense, becomes its future. Their vision is foreshortened. Attempts to share the reality they see are often in the language of that which is above and beyond the human, the language of poetry, the language of love. I suggest that that is what we are hearing today.
It's something like someone saying, "Continue to do that and unless a miracle happens, you'll find yourself in lots of trouble!" The truly important words here are "unless a miracle happens", that is, unless the Good One intervenes in some special way. It is obvious that Yeshua believed in that kind of intervention. Leslie Dewart once put it this way. "God is the Power for Good at the heart of the world that makes anything in nature possible." Today's gospel is a reminder of that Power for Good. The Good One has not left us orphans.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 13, 1994
Feast of Christ the King
Daniel 7: 13-14
Revelation 1: 5-8
John 18: 33-37
I find it very hard to teach about sheep and shepherds. But that comes across like a piece of cake when I am confronted with talking about kings. As a friend of mine said recently, "The only king that North Americans can relate to is Burger King!" In Canada we do have some connection with royalty despite what is going on with the British representatives at the moment. But kings are tough to deal with, especially for someone like myself whose roots are in the United States and the last king who made any difference at all in our lives there was George III.
I cannot confirm this fact, but if memory serves me correctly this feast came to be when the nation states of Europe were becoming a reality and when one of the Popes Pius was really ticked off with that fact. The papacy had literally dominated Europe and much of the rest of the world until that time and it was a demise of Christendom that was imminent with the nation states. And so it was decided that Christ was the only real and authentic king and the feast got launched. Now, of course, if Christ is the authentic king then the vicar of Christ -- read the pope -- continues to have the supreme authority. And that was what this feast was supposed to be all about, a reminder of the spiritual authority of the Pope of Rome.
But there is another ancient tradition about kings and it is from here that we get the "Lord, have mercy" from our present Eucharist. Kings used to walk among their people. At least periodically they were accessible to them and did the kind of walk abouts that some of our present day personalities also do. As the king moved among his subjects, they would shout out in his direction to get his attention, "Lord, King, look here. Hear me. Grant me what I ask for." Scholars tell us that this is a reminder that kings existed to make their people's lives happen, not the reverse. People did not exists to make the king's life happen, but the king, the good king existed to make his people's lives happen.
There is a story in ancient India that makes this point very well, although from a very different culture. It is called the Ramayana. The king's wife, Sita, is captured by a truly evil character and is carried off by him for years. All this while Sita remains faithful to her husband, Rama. Eventually, Rama rescues Sita, and believes in her fidelity to him, but some of his people are skeptical. She's been away a long time and the flesh being what it is. For the sake of his people, Rama exiles Sita. At least that's how the story goes, and Sita, because of her love for Rama, and for the good of their people, accepts the exile. Indian feminists today read the story differently, but that need not concern us at the moment. The point of the original story is that no matter the pain to himself of losing his beloved wife, Rama does this for the sake of the people whose king he is to be and whose trust he must have to be their king. It's powerful.
Do we see our Christ Jesus in this way? Is he a king of this sort, one who gives up everything that we might have life, know life, be life to each other? The stories about him make him out to be that kind of person. And if he is that kind of person, and if we are supposed to be committed to being like him in our own time and our own place, then we must ask ourselves what we are willing to be for others that will help them to know life, have life, be life for each other.
It was a year ago today that I committed myself not to trash these musings of mine which have been fifteen years in the making. It was a year ago on November 18th that my father went into God's arms, went home. My first non-trashed musing was about him, about the extraordinary ordinary man that he was. To the end of his days my father had a bearing that I cannot think of but as regal. His back never bent under the weight of his many pains and losses, and they were many. Maybe today's feast is about something like that, too, something like the dignity of which human beings are capable in any and every circumstance. Perhaps this is part of what it means for all of us to be king, priest, and prophet. With Creative Loving Power, with Light, with the human face of God, with the Truth of God, with the Breath of Life, alive in each of us, we can love what God loves, and do what God would do. Amen.
Cayuga, Ontario, November 20, 1994
THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR B
First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 63: 16-17; 64: 1-3-8
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:31-37
I should be reflecting on the new church year today. But I want to tell you instead about a week ago today, the last Sunday of this church year. It was not just the year that came to an end but a special part of my life. A week ago today I was at St. John the Baptist Church in Philadelphia at the 1100 a.m. mass. Three days before that my brother and I received word that our father had died of a heart attack on the bus on his way home from a senior citizen's meeting. My father's wake was on Monday night. His funeral was Tuesday. Wednesday we took Dad's clothes to the Salvation Army, arranged for the disposition of his furniture, packed my car with some things of his. On Thursday, the U.S. Thanksgiving Day, I drove my brother to the airport so that he could get back to Sacramento for dinner with his family. Although friends had asked me to stay for dinner I decided to drive back to Cayuga. Last Sunday I somehow missed that it was the end of the liturgical year. There was an installation of ministers of the altar during the mass, young men who elected to stay on as altar servers during high school years. I found the installation rather bizarre as the boys laughed and waved and made power signs to their family and friends. But this was my father's Sunday tradition, this particular Eucharist, and I determined to keep it this one time for him and with him.
It was a strange experience. The pastor is a man whom I knew as an adolescent, five years younger than I am. None of my father's friends recognized me although he had my pictures in several places in his apartment. I saw a few older women weeping and consoling each other after the mass but I wasn't sure any of them knew Dad so I slipped quietly away after having introduced myself to the pastor and reminding him that a mutual friend of ours was coming to preside at the vigil service and funeral. It was all rather strange. I treated myself to breakfast at my father's favorite haunt, an old-fashioned diner. And then I went to Dad's apartment to make some phone calls, finish the funeral arrangements, and await my brother's arrival.
Yesterday, as I pondered today's gospel about staying alert, being prepared, it was my father who came to mind. He was an extraordinary ordinary man. Sometimes we thought he was too alert and too awake. People like my father can sometimes drive others crazy with their efficiency and competence. Sometimes my father did that. Sometimes I do that because I am in many ways my father's daughter. But then there is a precedent. Yeshua wasn't killed because he was an non-alert, unaware, insensitive wimp.
My father left everything in order in his apartment. He was alert to the end. He had told us where the keys to his strongbox were. The bank account for the funeral costs was there. The directions for a funeral like that he had arranged for my mother were there. I had only to pick out clothes for him so I buried him in his Bill Blass suit, his St. Patrick's Day green tie, and his Holy Name lapel pin. I could have put his Roxborough Hospital Volunteer's pin in his lapel (and one visitor who worked with him there was not happy with me because I hadn't.). There really was not much to do. His competence and efficiency extended beyond his death.
My father worked for most of his life at Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton. They made diesel locomotives and Dad had the number for every part of those engines memorized. In what we now call "downsizing" he was bumped from his job as foreman back to the bench where he had started and finally let go after 45 years of service with no pension but his social security. Time and time again throughout the course of his life I watched my father do what he could and leave the outcome in the hands of the Good One. He did that with his forced retirement. He did it when he learned that my mother had cancer. That news coincided with the retirement. He nursed her at home through three years of her dying as efficiently as he had once constructed those locomotives.
One thing he was not content with was the infrequency of visits to my mother on the part of the parish priest who had no intention of allowing lay persons to help him with that duty. If he got to our home once in three months that was supposed to be fortunate. My father and mother attended daily mass for years. This lack of attention from the parish irked my father. I used to call them at least weekly and one Sunday just as I began to say hello I could hear my father sobbing. Through the weeping he said, "Cass, I did a terrible thing today. I took the host out of my mouth (this was 1978) and brought it home to Mom. Maybe it will help her. I don't know what else to do for her. Will God punish me for this? Did I commit a really terrible sin? Is it a sacrilege?"
I gulped back my own tears and told him about auxiliary ministers of the Eucharist and that he had just jumped the gun in his own parish and that God loved him for what he had done and for the care he was taking of my mother. After I got off the phone my rage soared over that supposed religious professional in my church who seemed to me to be being anything but. My father forgave so much more easily than I ever have or probably ever will.
My father re-married two years after my mother's death. After ten years his second wife abandoned him. This coincided with a depletion of a sizeable bank account, pure coincidence, of course. Dad picked up the pieces of his life and went on for another three years. He never once spoke disparagingly of his second wife. During the funeral we learned that his second wife had physically abused him during the marriage. His neighbour told of what she had heard through the thin walls of the apartment building. "With his size, your father could have knocked her over with one blow. One time I heard him say to her 'If it helps you hit me.' More than once I thought I ought to intervene," she said. "Your father was such a gentleman." He was alert, aware, and a gentleman.
C. F. D. Moule, an expert on Mark's gospel says that alert and aware people give us a "peep into the beyond." He suggests that Yeshua had the influence he did because his alertness and awareness made of him a visionary, a person who gives us a "peep into the future." I like to think my father did that, too, gave people a "peep into the beyond," to relationships in which violence of any sort plays no part. "We'll miss him so much," one of his "lady friends," as he called them, said at the wake. "He laughed so much and he loved to dance and to sing. He was one of the best dancers we had. We'll never get over not having him around, telling his jokes, making us laugh. Why did it have to be him?" I think my father's alertness, awareness, and determination never to make work for others (because that was what he believed a gentleman was all about) give us a special peep into possibilities, to laugh, to sing, to dance, to celebrate eternal life beginning right here and right now.
I have broken almost every rule of worshipful preaching in these musings. We are supposed to be experts at detachment and be careful of personal disclosures. We are supposed to prepare with the bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Maybe I have erred but I hope it is on the side of the justice of celebrating the extraordinary ordinary, not just my father, but the legion of men and women in this church, and in this world who go unapplauded and unappreciated. My father was alert, awake, and prepared. That deserves mention
Cayuga, Ontario, November 28, 199
Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40: 1-5, 9-11
2 Peter 3: 8-15
Mark 1: 1-8
Homilies are not supposed to be exegetical liturgists tell us. That means I am not supposed to dissect the readings line by line or emphasize the how and why these stories got written. Catholics are supposed to be contextual readers of scriptures and not literal readers of them and I have asked liturgists how that is supposed to happen if we don't do some exegesis in our preaching? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. A Carmelite priest friend from my youth told me the following. "What's the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?" Answer, "You can negotiate with a terrorist."
I want to tell you something about this good news according to Mark which we read this liturgical year. He is the primary author although others get tossed in here and there. It's hard to know why this particular order has been chosen. I would prefer that like our Jewish brothers and sisters we read our scriptures in one go from beginning to end in their historical sequence. But we don't.
This gospel is probably written thirty to thirty-five years after Yeshua's death. It's probably written a few years or a few months after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, that symbol of Judaism's identity and purpose. It is written very likely just after the death of the last apostolic eyewitness to Yeshua. It's brief and to the point. It takes an hour and a half to read from beginning to end.
This gospel is more concerned with Yeshua's passion and death than anything else about him. It was probably produced for a second generation of Christian teachers now bereft of apostolic leadership. There is confusion about much of it especially its "messianic secret" which is Yeshua's telling people to keep quiet about his being the Messiah and at other times seeming to encourage the telling. Many scholars think that this is simply reminiscent of Yeshua's own growth in self-understanding of his mission and purpose. Apart from some letters of Paul, Mark is probably the earliest scripture. It is a narrative reflection on a group of sayings of Yeshua that were around at the time of the writing. Mark had to create a whole new form of literature. He did it.
The Yeshua of Mark is dramatic. At times he is tender and sympathetic. At other times he is vigorous and unsentimental. In all instances, Yeshua is in charge. Some think that Mark was Peter's secretary and that the sometimes brash, almost rash Yeshua has been filtered through Peter's biases and temperament. That may be the case. In any event, Mark's Yeshua is a no-nonsense type.
In the reading today Mark sets the scene for his good news story. Isaiah is mentioned because he was the Jewish prophet who foretold the intervention of the Good One on behalf of the House of Israel. The wilderness mentioned is probably the Jewish monastic community of Essenes, a group that had left mainstream Judaism and retreated to Qumran awaiting the arrival of Israel's messiah. Tomes have been written about John's baptism and its significance. Much has been and is being written about baptism with the Holy Spirit, especially by contemporary Christian charismatics. Mark's story is probably an attempt to say that while John's call to repentance was vital and an excellent beginning, Yeshua is the fulfillment of what the Spirit of Life promises for a complete purging and refining of one's life.
What is very important to keep in mind is that it is the counter-cultural John the Baptizer who recognizes Yeshua. Mark sets a pattern for counter-cultural persons of all times. It is John, on the margins of his time and place, who recognizes Yeshua, sees the signs of the activity of the Spirit of Life in and through him. Maybe Mark is suggesting that it is only people on the fringes, not those caught up in the hell of successful existence, who are able to see the Spirit of Life conspiring for us?
In a book called "The Antiquities of the Jews" written about 93 C. E., the Jewish historian Josephus records that John the Baptizer was killed by Herod as a potential revolutionary. That means at the very least that John was seen as concerned with Israel's nationalist hopes. In today's reading John sees Yeshua as the fulfillment of those hopes. Yeshua will eventually be seen as a political revolutionary, an even more deadly enemy of political and religious oppression of his own people, and of all people, than was John the Baptizer.
Perhaps today is a good day to think about counter-cultural persons. I want to suggest that not all of them are alive to the Spirit of Life. Many I fear are more committed to the Spirit of Death. Sometimes I ponder my gum-chewing, out-of-uniform, baseball-cap-wearing, inarticulate students and wonder if they are today's counter-cultural prophets? I wonder if well-groomed, well-educated, and well-fed me is the counter-cultural visionary. Years ago I would find among my students, many young persons who had someone or something worth dying for, and therefore someone or something worth living for in their lives. Today these are the exception to the rule. I fear it is also the exception to the rule in the lives of most adults.
I have never, like Isaiah, wanted a world where all the mountains are levelled and all the roads straight. But then I don't have to get everywhere on foot as he did. I do want more responsibility on the part of all of us, young, middle-aged, old, black, brown, red, white, yellow for a just society. In the presence of Mark's Yeshua there was growth, and that growth is the symbol of the Spirt of Life conspiring for humanity. Perhaps Mark's Yeshua in the liturgical year ahead will help us to make that growth happen.
Cayuga, Ontario, December 5, 1993
Third Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 61: 1-2, 10-11
1 Thessalonians 5: 16-24
John 1: 6-8, 19-28
I am happy to be back in India and visiting this Centre for the third time. I am overwhelmed with your generosity in inviting me to participate in your deliberations about revising your Indian catechetical program. You will probably hear me say ad nauseam that Jesus played with children and taught adults and that as soon as our church does the same thing, we will be a lot better off. But that is for later.
In my youth, and some of yours, too, we called this day "Gaudete Sunday." The name comes from the first word of the entrance antiphon which was not read today, viz., "Gaudete, Rejoice." I remember the thrill as a child of being reminded that Christmas was almost here. Advent.was almost over. Today it does not have the same significance. No weddings were blessed during Advent in my youth unless it were a special emergency. We prayed devoutly the prayer, "Hail and blessed be the hour and the moment, etc." with superstitious fervor for special Christmas petitions. The Grail Movement was promoting the use of Advent wreaths accompanied by suitable blessings each Sunday of the season. It was a far more somber time but not so somber as Lent. It was a reminder to be spiritually prepared for Christmas above all other kinds of preparations we might be involved in. I'm even old enough to remember when there was a Last Gospel, a reading from John, to whose good news we turn today, leaving Mark behind, temporarily. They are words that thrill me even to this day. "In the beginning was the Logos." But more of that in a minute.
In North America this is a bleak and dismal time. The weather where I live is usually cold and damp and we have had our first snows. The sky is as permanently gray during this time at home as your sky seems to me to be permanently blue. I feel much more like rejoicing here than I did in Canada. The flowers everywhere, the spectrum of saffron vestments, the fact that I am in lighter clothing, all lift my spirits. I am happy to be beginning my fifth visit to Mother India here in your company. I feel the need for the comfort of your fabled Indian hospitality to refresh my health of body, mind, and spirit.
We are in good scriptural company today in terms of comfort. Isaiah knew the need for comforting and for being comforted. He sums up in the first reading what the intervention of the Good One on behalf of the House of Israel will be like. The intervention will be so wonderful that Israel will dance and sing like guests do at a wedding. I thought I knew what that was all about until my fourth visit to India. I have sung and danced and celebrated at North American weddings of many different nationalities. But the Indian marriage which came as a revelation which I saw in Bombay.from an apartment on Jehu Beach.
I had just taken a bath preparatory to an evening meal at the hotel restaurant next door where I was taking the Indian friends who had given me the hospitality of their flat during my Bombay visit. I heard fire-crackers and singing and looked out of the bedroom window to see a bridegroom arriving on a white horse, dressed like a maharajah, with garlands on him and on his guests, and women in stunning sarees dancing before him. His groomsmen were with him. I was in awe. The wedding and reception turned out to be just outside the hotel dining room and one of my guests who is Hindu, but of a very liberal variety, explained to me what had happened and would happen. By then the bride and groom were seated before the priest. I could see her red silk saree which was itself full of jewels. The "aunties" as my Hindu guide called them, the senior women, sat in splendor in the centre of things, receiving guests during the long ceremony. All were exquisitely garbed and there were flowers everywhere. I remember thinking at the time that this had to be the kind of partying at a wedding that the Jewish and Christian scriptures talk about. It was Hindus partying but it was Jewish in context. I had seen the Indian Muslim wedding in the movie the City of Joy and was tremendously moved by it but this three dimensional experience of an actual Hindu wedding even from the sidelines was something else.
I find that Indians and Jews have a great deal in common. Both love to talk. Both love good food. Both love to laugh and relish jokes. Both countries are filled with warm and vibrant people. They are that today. They must have been that at Yeshua's time. They both have grave problems which are inter-religious and inter-ideological. They both value the spiritual. I was fascinated to read recently that there is a Jewish synagogue in Cochin that probably pre-dates Yeshua. It was on the Jewish trade route. I remember wondering if Yeshua had travelled with Joseph of Arimathea as some believe, if he might have visited India. It could explain many things about him if he did. Maybe he even attended an Indian wedding. Jews and Indians know how to party.
The responsorial canticle in English today was the words of Miriam of Nazareth's rejoicing over the conception of Yeshua. She borrowed them from her ancestress Hannah. Miriam knew Judaism well. Yeshua probably had his first insights into his tradition from her. When I heard the bhajan being sung here, although I did not know what you were singing, I found myself thinking that Miriam probably sang her praise in the same repetitive way, and she may have danced as well. Jews often did and beat a tambourine in the process just as you accompany your signing with such joyful musical instruments.
The reading from Paul today always reminds me of that wonderful line from the Fiddler on the Roof, "God would like us to be joyful even when our hearts lie panting on the floor. How much then should we be joyful when there's really something to be joyful for. To life!" Teyve sings it at his daughter's betrothal.
If we had continued reading Mark today instead of shifting to the gospel of John, we would have read of the death of John the Baptizer. Maybe the organizers of the lectionary want us to be more concerned with life than death and therefore they make the shift. Today we hear of John the Baptizer's witness to Yeshua, his conviction that Yeshua is the very presence and power of the Good One among us. John the Evangelist has Yeshua "pitch his tent" among us. Pitching a tent sounds like a temporary thing but in the original language John uses a shhh sound in the Greek word for the pitching of the tent which is like the Hebrew Shekinah, the word the rabbis used for the Divine Presence among the people of the House of Israel. John the Evangelist is a superb stylist. John the Baptizer comes in out of the wilderness, probably the monastic Essenes at Qumran, and tells everybody within earshot, those who want to hear and those who don't, to get with it because Israel's messiah, Yeshua, is there, at hand, among them. The Good One has intervened, kept promises, and it's party time. Incidentally, I have stood at the spot in the Jordan River where all this is supposed to have taken place. I was surprised at how shallow, narrow, and muddy the river was when I was there. I remember thinking that just to get into it, much less be baptized with the water, required a major act of faith.
There were at least twenty-four other people claiming to be Israel's messiah, or making the claim for someone else to be the messiah when John the Baptizer was making his for Yeshua. We have to forgive the Jewish people if some of them thought "Not again!" The messiahs ran the whole gamut from the Zealots to magical types like Simon Magus. Jews then and now like to be shown. Yeshua was one of several contenders as far as most of them were concerned. It's important that we never forget that.
I want to admit to you that I have always found it difficult to be joyful on command. The older I get the harder I find it to do that. I almost want to say, the harder I find it to be joyful period. I am physically fatigued at the moment from a muscular disorder, and suffering from what sociologists are now calling compassion fatigue, and donor fatigue. I don't want to hear about one more evil thing in my world. I don't want to be asked to give to one more cause no matter how noble, except for the Salvation Army Christmas Drive because they were there for my family during the Depression when nobody else was, including the Catholic Church. I am wiped. I am exhausted by a younger generation thinking that I exist to make their lives happen, and an older generation rarely if ever satisfied with what I am expected to do on their behalf, or do spontaneously on their behalf. I am tired of being brave.
What is it that I am supposed to be so joyful about? I wrote to a dear friend recently and asked him to tell me the Good News in real language, not tinselly, sugary, otherworldly stuff, in twenty-five words or less, something that a twelve-year old Hindu could understand, perhaps not accept, but understand. I don't have his reply yet. Apart from a precocious eight-year-old who once said that the "Good News is that God isn't mad at us," I don't feel I have much else to go on. Sometimes when I get like this I think about that scene in O God when John Denver asks George Burns to do something about the evil in the world and "God" George replies, "I did. I made you." Maybe that's the good news? The Good One made us, not just Yeshua, but us, to be the human face of the Good One in our time and our place as Yeshua was in his?
An early Christian philosopher named Justin Martyr who was trained in Greek thought began to speak about the logos spermatikos when he tried to help Greeks, non-Jews, understand Yeshua and his Way and to rejoice in that message. In Justin's thinking each of us is a spark of the Divine One, each of us is the Divine One's thought spoken, each of us is the seedbed of possibilities for fulfilling every human hope. Yeshua is the "sparkiest" of sparks and the most fertile of seeds if you will forgive my interpretation of the eminent Justin. When I read your poet and holy man Rabindranath Tagore, I feel like I am reading a modern Justin Martyr but one who expresses himself much better than Justin ever did about the Godhead in each of us, all of us. My gut tells me that it is from a place like India and persons like Tagore that we will get our revised language about the Good News, in twenty-five words or less, preferably less, because you Indians are closer to poetry which is the lifeblood of spirituality. We have become so literal-minded in the West that it is frightening.
I know I will leave here comforted and challenged by the thinking that will go on, the friendships that will be renewed, the praying that we will do, the discussions over meals, the entertainment we will provide for each other. I also know that we do not need a new catechism so much as we need a new catechesis, one that will speak to the hearts of adult modern men and women, North and South, East and West, one that will give us real reason for rejoicing. The catechism coming from Rome will not do that. I believe that it will come from Christian India and from Indian Christians and pray that it will not be long in coming.
National Biblical, Liturgical, Catechetical Centre
Bangalore, India, December 12, 1993
Fourth Sunday in Advent
2 Samuel 7: 1-5, 8-12, 14, 16
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38
We have a twisto here again. In this year in which we are supposed to be reading Mark we move today to Luke. That's probably because Mark is not at all concerned with Yeshua's birth. It is his passion and death that Mark emphasizes. On the contrary, Luke is very much concerned with Yeshua's origins and from him we get the Infancy Narratives. When I was growing up I learned that Luke got the stories right from Miriam of Nazareth. It was fanciful but it is highly unlikely.
There was a tradition in Israel that the messiah would come from the House of David so there is a great effort made by Luke and by Matthew to connect Yeshua with David. Today we hear the story of the "real" house that the Good One wanted David to build, not the temple that David wanted to build but the line of the messiah. Paul is happy about that line's being fulfilled. He invites rejoicing over it.
About six months ago I heard this gospel read at a mass of thanksgiving. The priest then launched into what Miriam would have had to endure as an illegitimate mother, etc., etc., etc. And I wanted to scream. Afterwards I went to him and asked him if he knew that engaged couples at the time of Yeshua had the right to sexual intercourse after their solemn betrothal? Very few engaged in it and that is why we have the story of a so very much perplexed Joseph because he was the only one who would have known for sure that he had not had intercourse with Miriam if the story really went that actual way. I lost the poor man at this point. He lashed out if I were questioning the church's teaching on the perpetual virginity of Miriam and I tried hopelessly to explain that that was not the purpose of this story at all. He said he didn't have time to hear more and walked away.
And it doesn't have anything to do with Miriam's physical virginity. All unmarried women were virgins in Israel before they were married unless they were widows. The scripture scholar John Macquarrie has gone to great lengths to help us to understand that Luke is trying to make clear that there is in the birth of Yeshua a creative act of the Good One, as important and vital and necessary as was the act of creation itself. What we have here is a new Genesis. Remember, Luke has a church to get together. He is the ecclessiologist, the one who sees that the Second Coming is not right around the corner and sees the need to establish a community to carry on the way of life of Yeshua for a lot longer than had been anticipated. Just as the House of Israel was the virgin bride of the Good One, concerned only for the mission and purpose of its Beloved as a good wife was supposed to be, Miriam of Nazareth is the virgin mother of the new creative act of the Good One, Yeshua. Miriam is the first disciple, totally committed, pure of mind and heart, totally caught up in the new creative act of the Good One, fulfilling her Beloved's purpose through conceiving Yeshua. She is an image of what every member of the community is intended to be, one who gives spiritual birth to Yeshua, to the human face of the Good One, to the truth of the Good One.
Luke puts the song of Hannah in Miriam's mouth to make another point. Yeshua embodies in himself the mission and purpose of the old Israel. Miriam is the new Hannah. As Hannah was one of the model mothers of the old Israel, Miriam is the true mother of the new Israel. And in Miriam's image each of us is to be a nurturer of the new Israel.
It is very hard at times for me as a once very happily married woman, now a widow, to hear this gospel read. Much of the thinking of virginity as superior to the married state comes from here. Early on Christians began to misinterpret the Hebrew scriptures and identified the sin of Genesis 3 as sexual. Jews will tell you the first sin was that of Cain despairing of forgiveness for his sin. Probably to make clear Yeshua's sinlessness this whole decision that he could not have gotten here like the rest of us was carried on. But what a price the 99.5% of us in this church who are not vowed to virginity or celibacy have had to pay for this mistaken interpretation.
Luke's story is a powerful one. It is a reminder that authentic discipleship means letting nothing or no one get in the way of our being vessels of truth, justice, and compassion. It is a reminder that the Good One needs our "yes" for good things to happen as much today in our time and our place as Miriam's yes was once needed.
Archbishop's House, Nagpur, India
December 19, 1993
Christmas, The Mass at Night
Isaiah 9: 2-4, 6-7
Titus 2: 11-14
Luke 2: 1-16
This is my fifth Christmas in India. In some ways I will never forget my first. I remember being in my room in Archbishop's House waiting to come to the Cathedral for Midnight Mass when suddenly the sounds of "Frosty the Snowman" wafted into my room! Eventually there were some traditional Christmas carols but "Jingle Bells," and "White Christmas," and other western favourites were also played in that time before we assembled for Eucharist. I had read of what some are calling "global tribalization," that the western way of living is becoming the norm for all, but had not really understood it until that music. We in the West are exporting to you all kinds of things and I fear, they are not necessarily the best of what it is that our way of life offers. But that is for another discussion, not for tonight.
I mentioned that Luke sees Yeshua as a new Genesis. The Good One is acting on behalf of all humanity, not just the people Israel. The fact that we are here tonight is a reminder of how many people have taken that message of a universal mission seriously. Tradition says missions in India began with Thomas the Apostle. Some say that St. Bartholomew came here as well. We know that Roberto de Nobili and Francis Xavier are among the heroes of missions. The Portuguese, the Danes, the French, how many more came to India and other parts of Asia with the Good News by and about Yeshua. Tonight is a reminder of its beginnings.
Isaiah posits that it was in the mind of the Good One to send one who would make clear what the House of Israel was for. This Anointed One will lift every burden and end every oppression. Perhaps no one has ever proclaimed this event like Handel does in his "Messiah." One would not even need to know English to feel the power of that music, the fulfillment of promises, the strength in the fulfillment.
Titus reminds us that the purpose of all of this coming of Yeshua is to make of us men and women who are "zealous to do good deeds." Imagine what the world would be like if we took that seriously, 800 million Catholics who now go about "doing good" and Yeshua once went about "doing good." And then, of course, in the gospel we have Luke's version of Yeshua's birth. Although Yeshua is known as "of Nazareth" it is Bethlehem where he is born.
Bethlehem means "house of bread." When you are there and see how close it is to the desert, and the fact that Bethlehem is an oasis, it is impossible to think that it is only because David came from Bethlehem that Luke sets the birth there. I think a case could be made that just as one comes in from the desert needing food and drink, Luke is inviting people to remember that Yeshua is their food and drink, their house of bread, after the long waiting for him that the House of Israel experienced. Bethlehem is now a dry and dustier place than it probably was in the first century of the common era and it is filled with more Arabs and Christian Arabs than Jews. I went to the grotto of the Nativity but avoided its other Christian holy places. I find it difficult to even mention to you what they are. I find the house of bread symbolism more than enough.
There are other powerful symbols in tonight's gospel. Shepherds in Israel were often thugs. They were usually loners, too. Sometimes they were shepherds because it was the only occupation open to them. They were fiercely protective of their sheep and they could tell the sheep and the goats from each other. In Israel they both have very similar coats and it is sometimes really difficult to tell them apart. Shepherds need to do that when evening comes because the sheep need more warmth than the goats and it's important to get the right ones closer to the fire. It is these thugs that get the message about the arrival of Israel's messiah. Again, there is another powerful symbol here. It is the people on the margins of life that are often open to new ways of life, new channels of life. Persons in the establishment, caught up in the hell of their successful existences, often don't even bother to look for different ways to better purposes. Perhaps Luke is trying to remind us too, that it is often in the midst of doing our ordinary work that the Presence is revealed and experienced. The angels, symbols of divine interventions, divine messages, divine insights, announce peace. This is the news for the shepherds. Peace is now enfleshed, in this order of existence in a new and creative way in Yeshua.
Peace is a tame word in English. In Hebrew, Shalom means something more than the absence of strife. It means something like "getting it all together." It means a life of harmony and of fulfillment, and yes, of perfection, something which we often attribute to Divinity alone. But Luke seems to be saying that the message about Yeshua and the message of Yeshua is that the Good One intends all of humanity to have lives of freedom and satisfaction just as the Good One's own Life is freedom and satisfaction. And Yeshua is the message about how to get to that good life. Marshall McLuhan, the communication scholar, was fond of saying, "The medium is the message." Long before him Luke was saying "Yeshua is the medium and the medium is the message."
Yeshua tonight comes to us as a newborn. I wonder at times if there is anything in the world more beautiful than a newborn baby. The youngest infant I have ever seen was just twenty-four hours old and he had come from his mother's womb with fingernails so long that they had to be cut! On my last visit to India I saw a baby at Isha Bhavan just about the same age. Is there anything more beautiful than the eyes of Indian babies and toddlers? Yeshua would have looked like that, those sweet brown eyes and dark hair, and skin that was coffee-coloured or darker. He was a Semite. (That's why I wish someone would repaint your Caucasian Yeshua in the Christmas creche.) He was defenceless, he needed care, he needed nurturing. He was a threat to no one or nothing at this point in his life although Herod is reported to have felt otherwise. He was literally, adorable. But that didn't last. He grew up and began to challenge oppression of every sort. And he was killed for that.
As we celebrate this season, the unique gift that Yeshua is for each of us and for all of us, perhaps we might take a moment and think about the new life, the birth, the freedom and satisfaction that we might be being called on to give this night, and tomorrow especially. Are there family differences that need to be resolved? Are there hungry people whose bodies, minds, and spirits need to be fed for whom we can bring hope? Are our families and friends confusing needs and wants and can we help them to discern the difference? To whom and to what, individually and together, are we called on to give birth tonight? To whom and to what, individually and together, are we called on to give birth all the days of our lives, albeit we might die in the process?
Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales
Nagpur, India, December 24-25, 1993
Feast of the Holy Family
Genesis 15: l-6; 17: 3-5, 15-16; 21: 1-7
Hebrews 11: 8, 11-12, 17-19
Luke 2: 22-40
Have you ever pondered the impossibility of the typical model of family life that we are offered today in that of Miriam, Yeshua, and Yussef of Nazareth? For years, until I went to Israel, I had the vision of some quiet, gentle maiden, caring unstintingly for her beloved husband and son and they smiled at her like all the kitschy artistic representations that run rampant in Europe and in some cases here as well. When you are in Israel, the family looks anything but kitschy.
All one needs to do is to head to the Arab market which is part now of the Way of the Cross and watch the women from the villages bargain. Women in this part of the world bloom early and they fade early. As lithe and lovely as they are young, they become fat and frowsy early on. The men are lean and strong and now usually sit around and drink lots of coffee and tea while their wives work. The children are a helter-skelter lot. I would not want to mess with any one of these women. I feel very sure they would kill for what is theirs. When you see the photographs of Arab women lamenting the loss of their children in Gaza or of Jewish settlers there fighting their own Israeli police you get a semblance of the powers at work in those societies. They were at work at the time of Yeshua and they are at work now. His was no pious operation but a healthy, happy, fighting threesome if they were at all like the people of their times.
Family life was important and sons were important as we have heard from today's readings. The Hebrews did not know that women contributed anything to conception. They thought they were the vessels of male seed and for that reason men were essential to carry on the tradition. Girls were never killed as was practiced in some ancient cultures but fathers preferred sons to daughters as is often still the case in India today.
Sociologists tell us that people often turn to their families to make up all that is wanting in their lives when they do not trust the state to which they belong. Where there are no pension plans, good health plans, good education provided by the civil authorities, families turn to each other, in extended relationships to make their lives happen. And often it becomes a case of "my family right or wrong, my family." I think that there is fairly good evidence that Yeshua and his extended family did not get along very well. There seems to be some evidence that even his mother thought that he had gone over the edge and came to rescue him and take him home. We have some scathing comments from him about who is his family when a woman praises his mother. Yeshua leaves no question that those who align themselves with him and with his God whom he calls "Abba" to effect a world that is compassionate and just are his family and his mother and father, sisters and brothers. Those are strong words in a culture for which family was at least as important as it is today in India. Yeshua turns his back on blood relationships for spiritual ties.
I have just finished a major study of the thought of a man named William Ernest Hocking. He was a philosopher of religion at Berkeley, Yale, and Harvard Universities. He formed a theory about how Christianity had to be revitalized and reconceived and, incidentally, he thought that Indian Christians are those most likely to effect this revitalization. When he came to talking about Yeshua and his family and married and family life in general, he concluded that what Yeshua did was astounding. He took the Jewish idea about the need for the family, the gifts of the family, the potential of the family, the love that should exist among family members and extended it not just to other Jews, but to the whole world. Jews were never taught to hate their non-Jewish neighbours, just to be very careful of them. There are Jews today who feel that way and not without reason after the six million of their brothers and sisters killed by Hitler simply because they were Jews. But Yeshua moved beyond that. He wanted the kind of love that marks the relationships in good families to be extended by those who follow his Way to all of humanity. That's powerful.
Having said that, I have a confession to make. I have never loved a member of my family as much as I have loved my friends, especially my male friends, especially the male friend whom I married. I would have died for him. When I ponder my friendships, I think I understand the kind of love that Yeshua wanted us to extend to the whole of humanity. I remember, too, the time that he was in the synagogue in Nazareth and could work no healing there because of the lack of faith on the part of his family and the townspeople and we are told that he turned to his friends to help him fulfill his mission. I understand that so well. It is my friends who have shared my vision and enlarged and enhanced it. My family did not do that. I wish they had.
I understand my family better now than I did before. I remember that story about Bertrand Russell that at 21 he was amazed at how stupid his parents were and at 25 he was amazed at how much they had learned in four years! If I had been my mother and had had me for a daughter I don't know if I would have responded differently than she did. In my mother's day good girls lived at home until they went to the convent, preferably, or got married and had lots of children who became priests and sisters. Her daughter moved away from home, didn't go to the convent, and didn't marry until she was a month away from her 34th birthday. My father handled things better although he was certainly torn at times between his love for my mother and for me. My brother is five years younger than I am and far more conservative but we have become special friends these past few years. But I must be honest and say that it is my friends that make all the difference in my life. My mother and father thought they knew who I was. In many ways they never knew what I had become. And there is a difference.
I wish that families were each others' friends. But friendships involve a free choice that families do not. There is so much truth in that old adage about being able to choose our friends albeit not our families.
Friends choose each other. They strengthen and support and help each other to get done with their lives what they want to. Friends walk beside each other and only sometimes does one walk before the other. Usually there is a catching up with each other at some point. Friends don't nag each other. Friends don't hold grudges. Friends forgive and very often forget. Friends give each other the benefit of the doubt and believe the best about the other. Friends are honest with each other and sometimes must say hard things to each other, but that is rare. Friends laugh a lot when they are together. Friends give their lives, and therefore their time, for each other.
I think that if Yeshua were around today he would be talking about genuine friendships as the norm for universal relationships, for peace at all levels, for the fulfillment of the human family. The family, whatever else it is, does not exist for itself, nor for its members. In many ways, like an effective church, it exists for those who are not members of it, or at least it ought to exist for those who are not members of it. India has that sense of welcome in it in the families I know. They are not many but I have been so hospitably received that I wonder how I might ever repay those kindnesses. Families are for the world, nothing more and nothing less. But it is good families, families of friends, biological families of friends, humanitarian families of friends, religious families of friends, that will effect the universal compassion and justice that Yeshua was all about. Yeshua seemed unable to accept "my family right or wrong my family." I think we should, too.
St. Joseph's Convent, Nagpur, India
December 26, 1994 [sic]
Feast of Mary, Mother of God
Numbers 6: 22-27
Galatians 4: 4-7
Luke 2: 16-21
People have died, been condemned, and been applauded for the feast we celebrate today. It all revolved around the title "Theotokos," Mary, Mother of God. There was a great hue and cry in the early Church that Miriam certainly was the mother of Yeshua, but how could she be "Mother" of That Which was older than herself, God's Thought Spoken, Yeshua. It does not seem necessary to me that we go into these discussions in any detail except to say that the institutional church by this time was using the genius of Yeshua to replace the genius of the Roman emperor and they wanted doctrinal accord so that they would have civil accord. I am not condemning this but simply mentioning it. All of this is a mighty reminder that our doctrines are intended to affect and effect our lives. We might ponder today how often they do or do not.
In our own time it was the Jesuit Karl Rahner who reminded us that any doctrine or dogma is an end and a beginning. It settles something in its own time and place, or at least attempts to, and it is vital, and because it is vital it must be reinterpreted again and again in every era in the idiom of a people to whom it is expected to make some difference about what they do with their lives. Protestant Christian thinkers were saying the same thing as Rahner. Years from now I believe that people will look on this time of ours as important as that period in 600 B.C.E. when so much of things religious in so many places reached a special kind of high water mark. It is now called the "axial period." I believe that our time is that kind of time, too.
What can we do today with a feast like this which also coincides with the New Year? Last night the normal drive from the Bombay domestic airport to Bandra took us three times the length of time it usually does because of the people out to see the lights in Bombay and to celebrate the New Year. I do not remember this celebration being of much importance in the other parts of India where I have been on New Year's Eve on previous visits. In fact, I remember one time asking for a prayer service in the village of Garratola and seeing Indian liturgical dance there for the first time. It was special. But no one but myself had thought to celebrate that end and beginning. I want to suggest that this feast reminds us to be nurturers, to be life givers, to be vessels of Creative Loving Power, to give birth to the godly in our time and our place.
I was in Rome during the last session of Vatican Council II. It was then that I met your friend and mine, Archbishop Leobard D'Souza, who has made my visits to India possible, and with whom you have worked on your many projects connected with printing and disseminating the Good News in the contemporary idiom. I had the opportunity to read the Council documents of that last session, hot off the Gestetner mimeograph machine, in unofficial English translations. I had the opportunity to hear some of the men, and one woman, who had helped to frame those documents. I remember sitting one morning on the balcony of the centre in Rocca di Papa where I was studying, reading some document or another, and I began to weep for sheer joy. I kept thinking to myself over and over, "This is a woman's council. This is a woman's council." I don't mean to stereotype but this was 1965 and I kept reading in the documents about the need for compassion and empathy and joy in our relationships with each other and with all others, including our world religious neighbours. I was so relieved because for seven years previously I had been warned time and time again by my Jesuit spiritual director about my "feelings" and my "tender-heart" and the need to "control my emotions." I sat there in that November sunshine weeping my relief that there was room for my feelings in this church that was being reborn. It was a nurturing, encompassing love that was to be our hallmark. We were being recalled to the spirit of apostolic times, in what today we might call "win-win" management of our relationships, rather than the more typical "win-lose" styles that had marked us especially since the Council of Trent.
It is no secret that there are those in power in the institutional church who would revise that call for compassion, who fear tenderness. Just a few weeks ago a highly placed cardinal suggested that women have no place on marriage tribunals because of that tenderness. Interestingly, he seems to have had less of a problem with women religious on the tribunals than with persons like myself. Does that mean he thinks that you are less compassionate and tender-hearted than your married and single sisters? Does he think that your superiors can control you and force you to "toe the line" in a way that cannot be done to me? It would be interesting to follow up on that one.
Those of us who are sensitive, male or female, pay a high price for it. I remember the first time that my husband who was then my husband-to-be wept in my company. He broke down completely, totally and entirely and sobbed like a tiny child. With the force of a revelation I knew how much he trusted the relationship. He trusted it enough to share his tears with me. He was a sensitive and compassionate man which does not mean he was a doormat. Being sensitive and being a doormat are not co-terminous.
Without sensitivity what hope is there? Who has made the difference in our world but those who have felt the pain of others, felt sorrow along with them, walked in their shoes, as much as it is possible for us to do that for and with another? Remember that poignant scene in the scriptures when Yeshua weeps over Jerusalem? I was doing some photographing at Archbishop's House, Nagpur, recently, and I watched the hen in the servants' courtyard gather her chicks away from my intrusive presence. She clucked and clucked until she felt her brood were safe. She would have attacked me if I had not kept my distance. At my home in Canada, I once watched with my field glasses, a mother robin spread her wings over her babies during a severe thunder storm. She did not move. She would have given her life to protect those young. Would any of us who care really do anything less?
I understand that it is a custom in your country for young women who feel they have a vocation to vowed religious life to approach their bishops with their hope and to discuss the community to which they wish to go. I have also been told that your society along with two others are rarely if ever recommended by the bulk of the Indian episcopate with notable exceptions. I found myself thinking you must be doing something very right. With all of my heart I believe that today's feast is a reminder about giving birth to new hope, new visions, new dreams, new ways of being Christs of God in our time and our place, no matter the labour pains. Amen.
Daughters of St. Paul Provincialate
Bandra, India, January 1, 1994
Epiphany
Isaiah 60: 1-6
Ephesians 3: 2-3, 5-6
Matthew 2: 1-12
"The wealth of the nations shall come to you." I feel reasonably sure that Isaiah did not have the Chapel at Frankfurt International Airport in mind when he spoke those words. And yet here we are, perhaps not the wealth of the nations, but certainly from many nations going to many nations gathered here for Eucharist enroute.
Today's gospel touches me deeply since I have just come from the East where these holy men are supposed to have come from. If they did exist they were probably Zoroastrians, modern day Parsees, who are a wealthy and powerful group in the world although small in number. In India they have established outstanding schools and are known for their good minds and their benevolence.
In 1960 during my first visit to Europe I made a point of going to Cologne for the Corpus Christi procession which I had heard about in my childhood in Philadelphia from a priest who served our German-speaking parish. I had also gone there to visit the tomb of the Three Wise Men in the Cologne Cathedral. Again, true story of not, it was a powerful experience of my young womanhood. It took me some time to ponder how the Magi were going to get back to Persia via Germany. Talk about fooling Herod! Still, to be here today and to be hearing these scriptures and praying in German, Latin, and English, is a powerful experience of the universality of this church. Perhaps it would be more honest to say, of the potential universality.
We are still so western in so much of our church structures and we still impose so much of that westernization on our younger churches. There are moments when I think that those governing the church forget that there are "wise men" and women in the East today, who can inculturate Christianity into their time and places without losing anything of its essence in the process. Let me give you one example. In the eastern part of the world, the left hand is used for toiletting. The right is used for eating. That is why it is such an incredible punishment in an Islamic country to cut off a thief's left hand. It not only marks him or her as a thief but it bans them from all polite society from then on because that means that the hand used for toiletting is also the same hand used for eating.
When it was decided that we Catholics would have the option of taking Eucharist into our hand instead of directly into our mouths, it was decreed in Rome that the Eucharist is to be put into the left hand and then picked up with the right. (Incidentally, the "feeding" of a woman with Eucharist by a man (a priest) in the Indian context was rife with sexual innuendo. Insightful liturgists in India asked for a change for years.) Can you imagine what this Roman decree means in an Indian context? I was about to make that mistake on my first visit to India when I caught myself, watched the people around me in Nagpur, and saw the Eucharistic minister hold the host until the recipient took it in the fingers of her right hand and then communicated herself. I learned later about the need for intinction in that culture because it is unacceptable for people to drink from the same cup. Yet in another major Indian city I watched Indian persons use the western format. I wondered what our Hindu brothers and sisters thought about all this since many now come to our churches to celebrate with us, especially on holidays like Christmas. We are taking Divinity into the hand which we use for toiletting? It boggles the mind. This is what I mean by westernization gone mad.
Perhaps this is a day to pray for new and many visits to the West from the wise men and women from the Christian East. Perhaps it is a day to pray, too, for many visits to the East by the wise men and women from the Christian West. Perhaps in openness to each other we can counteract in the Christian West the tendency to equate Eurocentrism and Latin rite liturgy with authentic Catholicism. Perhaps such visits will help the Christian East to end any and all slavish implementation of our culture into theirs. Perhaps with a Christianity that is then both East and West we can truly begin to welcome the real wealth of nations, all its peoples, into our catholic midst. We can learn of and honour and reverence their alternative routes to Divinity so that we might revitalize our own.
The Chapel
Frankfurt International Airport, Germany
January 2, 1994
The Baptism of the Lord
Isaiah 55: 1-11
1 John 5: 1-9
Mark 1: 7-11
In ancient Israel water was a symbol for life. When you wanted to indicate a change of pace or direction, you bathed. There were ritual lustrations. Even today devout Jews shower before the Sabbath. It is a change of pace. John's baptism of Yeshua and of others was a sign of a change of pace, of a turning to the effecting of the reign of justice and peace, of repentance. It is hard to imagine what Yeshua would have had to repent of or turn from. But the symbol was powerful. And perhaps it was as much a gesture for John the Baptizer as it was for Yeshua. Perhaps Mark is trying to make clear to John's apostles who were still around that John was moving in the right direction. But it is Yeshua who fulfills the direction that Israel is to take. It is at this baptism that Yeshua is identified as the beloved of the Good One. The dove may be a sign of Yeshua's self-awareness of who he is and what he is to become. His spirit comes alive and accepts the vocation to lead Israel to true peace and justice. I want to move on to the story that immediately follows the one we have just heard read.
Immediately after the baptism of Yeshua we are told that the "devil" leads Yeshua into the wilderness to be tempted. Forty days means that the trial goes on for a long time. There are interesting polarities in the story, Yeshua is the beloved and Satan is the "opposition". The word "Satan" in Hebrew means "Opposition." Eventually it came to be a proper name for the Chief Enemy of the Good One, the Devil. Yeshua is the beloved of the Good One. Satan is the opposition of the Good One. In the Greek New Testament the word for being opposed to the Good One means one who slanders, one who misrepresents.
Matthew and Luke go into much more detail about this time of testing of Yeshua than does Mark. They present the time in the desert as a time when Yeshua doubts his vocation, or when he is tempted to misuse his possibilities. In all three gospels, however, Yeshua does not cave in to the opposition. He does not cave in to slander, or to misinterpreting, or misrepresenting what he is for, to flattery, or to abusing power to bring about the reign of freedom and justice which he believes the Good One wants for humanity, and which he is to have some part in effecting to the point of giving his life for what he believes.
I have at times pondered what it must be like to be the beloved of Divinity, to experience oneself as loved by the Good One. I know what being loved humanly did for me in my marriage. It saved me from meaninglessness, from purposelessness, from feeling that the world was a hostile, unfriendly place to be. It ended in me feeling alone, and feeling uncared for. Being loved still does that for me. I can only begin to imagine what feeling the beloved of God can do for an individual.
In his classic book "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the great psychologist of religion William James, quotes pages and pages of examples of those who have felt beloved of God, called by God, favoured by God. The passages are powerful. Most people with the experience say that it is inexpressible and then, of course, rush to put it into print! It is something that they want to share, some possibility that they want to hold out to others because of the gift it has been to them. I still remember one bright young man at the Divinity College of McMaster University when I was studying there asking me if I had ever experienced Jesus Christ as my personal lord and saviour. I had to admit that I had not, at least not yet. The look of joy that came over his face when it was clear to me that he had had this gift is something I can yet see. I hope he still feels that way. One young friend of mine who also told me once of a similar experience said not too long along, "I've been high on drugs and I've been high on Jesus. Neither lasts." There are moments when I wonder if it lasted for Yeshua, that sense of being beloved. There is that cry from the cross about feeling forsaken.
I suppose the closest I have come to feeling beloved of God apart from human love is when something I really believe is good, not just for myself, but for all of humanity, comes to pass. When I have had some part in effecting goodness I feel beloved of the Good One. Not a great deal of that has been happening for me recently. I feel much more the absence of the Good One than the Presence. Perhaps I should explain.
I have taken much of my identity, my sense of worth for myself and to my community, from my success as a teacher. Before my marriage, during it, and for several years after I was widowed, my teaching was how I contributed generatively to my world. I helped secondary school students, and sometimes adult learners, know something about the spirituality of their own religious tradition, and of their world religious neighbours. I believed that I was helping to effect world spiritual unity without which I do not see how we can have world community or world peace. Now, not only is that sense of my contribution gone, my efforts are being sabotaged by those for whom I want it to happen.
What Christianity offers is "dumb," "stupid," "sick," according to the bulk of my students, especially the males. The only way to make it is violence, being tough and with big bucks. The ways of life of their world religious neighbours? Also, weird, dumb, stupid, and why don't they stay where they're coming from. Who needs them in Canada? We have Muslim and Buddhist students in the Catholic school where I now work. My heart goes out to them. My students are modelling themselves on "Married With Children," "Roseanne," and "Beverly Hills 90210." I can barely watch these shows and do so only to keep abreast of their models. The experiences for me are so painful I usually cannot watch them to the end. My students think they are funny. They think that physically abusing people is funny. They think that verbally abusing people is especially funny. They have bought into ageism and many are buying into neo-Nazism.
Two young women who are doing very well in a very difficult class came to me this week. One was weeping. She had been put into her locker by a group of boys in the same class when she defended me and my methods. She told the boys that she wanted to know what it was that I was trying to teach them. She is Greek Orthodox. She was in the locker until her locker partner came along and helped her out. Her locker partner is a beautiful young Indian woman whose parents came to Canada from Goa. She appreciates the attempts I am making to help my students understand and appreciate the Religions of India. She was physically pushed around by a group of boys from this same class when she told them to grow up. I asked the girls to report what they had told me to the principal and to bring their parents with them. They said that the locker experience had been bad enough. They were too frightened to do anything more because of repercussions that could be much worse.
It has been a semester like this. My car has been damaged. I have had obscene phone calls to my home. I have been cursed and sworn at this semester more than in my entire previous career. I don't feel beloved of anybody at the moment, much less the beloved of God.
Am I so hated because I refuse to flatter students who are doing work that is lacking in any kind of quality? Am I hated because I will not condone their violence toward me or toward each other, especially their verbal abuse? Am I to be punished because I refuse to entertain them constantly, and refuse to allow them to think that I exist to make their lives happen? Am I to be scorned because I am refusing to allow them to make an art out of exculpating themselves by inculpating others? I fear that is the case. I am at a loss about what to do. I am tired of hurting. And I am tired of trying to deal with this loss of my professional self-esteem. And I have lost that one person who made all other losses endurable.
After Yeshua's temptations, after the loneliness and the terror, after the sense of urgency to do something about the difficulties, we are told that angels came to minister to him which is the biblical way of saying that the Good One had not forgotten him. I believe with all of my being that the Good One is conspiring for us not against us, for me not against me. I hope I will not be too long in feeling that way, too, and that whatever your terror and loneliness, you will soon, too, feel beloved of God.
Cayuga, Ontario, January 9, 1994
SERMONS I WISH I HAD PREACHED OR BETTER STILL "TEACHED": YEAR C. Copyright © 1995 Catherine Berry Stidsen, Ph.D., R.T.C. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations. For information or permission for longer citations address the author, 535 Irish Line, R. R. #3, Cayuga, Ontario, Canada, NOA lEO, Phone/Fax: 01-905-772-3790, E-mail: ad930@freenet.hamilton.on.ca.