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 o