Do you know what you want?

It’s easy to relate to Jesus’ reaction to the crowd in Matthew 11:16-30

 as he compares his followers to of children who cannot make up their minds:  John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, `He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they said, `Look, at Jesus, a glutton, a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!  

In today’s vernacular, Jesus might have asked “do you really know what you want? What else will it take for me to help you understand how much God loves you?” His beautifully human feelings to which we identify helps us know that the one whose Word we follow and live by can experience these emotions that are so much a part of our lives.

We all view the world through our own prism or lenses that are largely influenced by our experiences and the world around us. Two people can hear an identical message yet, the same two people may have a completely different interpretation. We attribute this to our human nature. Sometimes we consciously create our own reality that serve our desired expectations and “wishes” based on what we want to hear. In most cases, our perception is unconscious and consistent with our view of reality. This might be called “unintentional bias.”

It’s when we allow the ego to “re-write” or “re-create” our own “script” for what we know to be reality, that we work at cross-purposes with God’s will. These become fanciful dreams, not based in reality. On the other hand, “hope” is based on realistic expectations that come into play as new creative possibilities. Scientific studies are rooted in premises that have reasonable potential for a desired outcome. When all parties are blinded any possible unintentional bias is removed.

“What do you want? Jesus seems to ask the crowd. Except he knows they won’t answer. They can’t because what they want is to grow, to evolve, to improve and more. And yet, they want to be left alone, untouched and unchanged, safely ensconced in their comfort zones. Transformative change is risky as it almost always requires that we let go of those attachments that paralyze us; in many ways change may feel a little like dying. How many of us have considered our experiences during Covid19 as transformative? Do we recognize ongoing changes that are desirable and maybe not so desirable? How many of us have been challenged by the need to change, a this time during which holding on to the old way is not even an option?

Paradoxically, we as people who follow Jesus – want to grow but do we really want to change. Why can’t it just happen without our involvement is the fanciful wish? Let it happen in the bliss of ignorance. Change, you see, brings the unknown. Change is not certain. Change implies risk and even potential loss.

In Matthew we see the love of God manifest in Jesus’ ability to embrace our human diversity with his divinely inspired nature. Reaction to the different ministries of John and Jesus provide a model to help us understand that whatever we do can never meet the needs of everyone. We will not be able to reach those whose lenses are distorted by ego and they will forever remain deaf to us. Instead, surrendering our voice to God who through the Holy Spirit will provide the voice that will reach the different ears and different needs, we vainly believe that what we say should be sufficient for all.

Thomas Keating tells us “that there are all kinds of ways in which God speaks to us—through our thoughts and/or anyone of our faculties. But keep in mind that God’s first language is silence. We must listen. We must be willing to listen. The Spirit speaks to our conscience through scripture and through the events of daily life. Reflection on those two sources of personal encounter and the dismantling of the emotional programming of the past prepare the psyche to listen at a more refined level of attention.”

As John and Jesus show us, there is more than one means to the great end… God.

The Family Tree...Living for God in Jesus

In years that from now on will always be designated as before/after Covid19, we had the good fortune to celebrate Father’s Day with my son and his family.  The day was always made more special because it coincided with 2 birthdays. Of course this year those milestones will be celebrated in person at some unknown time in the future. 

Last Father’s Day still reminds me of how much fun it was to be surrounded with  the young ones of all ages and listen to their respective conversations and interests. I especially enjoyed listening to the various pleas and individualized approaches that each of the children used in asking permission for this or that. I recognized many of these scenes from the past; they had been acted out when I was a parent and when I was a child myself.  Of course in time the youngsters drifted from our gathering, as I did when I was one of the younger ones, having spent the requisite amount of time with adults. They understandably grew restless and were eager to pursue their own interests.

As the proverbial “fly on the wall,” I listened to the repartee and marveled as to how well this all turned out. I realized that I became a better parent when I became a grandfather. As a grandparent I am more a spectator than an active participant and have the luxury of being able to sit back and observe how these scenes all play out. Sure, I know some of the challenges my son and daughter-in-law face in rearing children are the same as the ones we and our parents faced, but the world and our culture are more complex today and the pressures on parents to manage these challenges are greater than the ones we faced.

Our parents never faced Covid19 and the challenges that this dreaded virus has heaped on young families. The book has yet to be written but somehow it seems that it is all working out. Whatever changes that had to be made were made on the fly based on insight and intuition, with the default position always being whatever is best for all. There were no manuals to help with what was best for the health and safety of the family and while there were CDC guidelines and Government mandates, their implementation was very specific and personal to the family unit.

As a “spectator” I am in awe as to how our son and daughter-in-law work through the endless requests and issues that pop up on a daily, if not hourly basis, and I ask myself, “when did he learn to do all that; where did he pick up all the skills to handle this? I don’t think I would have done it as well.” I have learned so much about parenting in watching them and while it makes me feel good to think that there’s probably some imprinting going on, they are far ahead of where I was then. 

Along those lines few years ago I remember a Jay Leno interview with actor Michael Douglas. He spoke of his relationship with his father, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas; I’ll paraphrase the story he told:

Dad called me the other night. He said, "Michael, I was watching myself in an old movie earlier tonight and I didn't remember making it."

"Well, Dad, you made over 70 movies and you are 94. Don't be so rough on yourself."

"No, Michael, you didn't let me finish. I realized halfway through that I was watching one of your movies."

Sometimes we see ourselves in our children almost as if we were watching an old  8 mm family movie. Wouldn't it be great if we could see certain aspects of our lives and how ways of relating to others play out in the life of Jesus? Every day we strive to be Jesus’ surrogates in all that we do. We don’t always succeed because we are not Jesus although being aware of when we slip is part of the journey.

Our task (Matthew 10: 3742) is to consciously attend to the Christ in everyone. Christ in the stranger. Christ in the enemy. Christ in the friend. Christ in the spouse. Christ in our siblings. Christ in the politician who makes our blood boil. Christ in the disenfranchised. Christ in the “others” and Christ in us.

What's Going On?

Sarah Dylan Breuer, an Episcopal priest from Cambridge MA, conducts workshops called "Speaking the Truth in Love: Practical Skills for Reconcilers." These workshops are primarily intended to address divisive elements within religious congregations. She proposes that there are essential skills that are foundational and vital to the process of reconciliation.

The first skill requires that we keep an open mind, listen and be as fully “present” to the process of sincerely trying to understand one another while resisting the urge to comment. The second skill is to be as mindful as possible that we are called to love one another. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in the throes of contentious polarity. Matthew’s (Matthew 10:26-33) Gospel selected for this Sunday calls to mind those skills

While it would be decades before Matthew’s followers would be called Christians, they built pockets of communities within the larger overarching community that eventually became known as the Christian community. Since they represented a radical new order which threatened to undermine the order of the Empire, they experienced serious persecution from local authorities because they deferred to Jesus’ teachings and not to the ruling powers of the time.

This “new world order” began to threaten friends and neighbors as well as the ruling class. And so their neighbors, their friends, and sometimes their own family, fearful of reprisal, reported them to the local authorities as agitators. Being betrayed by those so close is reminiscent of how Jesus felt by Judas’ betrayal and his disciples’ silence.

We don’t have to look far to see history continue to s repeat itself. As we prepared to carefully manage our exit from months of Covid19 quarantine, the country was beset with racial strife, intolerance and violence not seen since the late ‘60s. Words alone did not mitigate the discord. People, well intentioned, good people were at wits end to seek an immediate cessation to the violence and long-term solution going forward to “systemic racism.” This time it seemed different or was it. Were we really trying to just make it go away or were we really trying to change race relations?  Municipal and state police were under fire and while their actions were at its root cause, they were trying to restore order and reconcile themselves within their own ranks and among the disparaged communities, largely but not solely black. “What’s going on” we kept repeating.

While the racial turmoil of the 60’s was a separate and distinct entity, it was compounded by the raging discord in the country with the Vietnam war. Communities were divided and took up sides as polarized opposites within were talking at one another, not listening or willing to listen. People were wounded and many felt disenfranchised.

We know that all wounded creatures are likely to respond to any overture with a variety of emotions out of pain, confusion, and anger. A person who retorts with “equal and opposite” acrimony will likely accelerate the spiral of violence, with disastrous results. Breuer says that the only way to disrupt that spiral of violence is to listen and be present and loving. That's very hard to do when someone is either threatening violence or inciting a "fight or flight" response.

If we are called to be agents of healing, we must remain grounded in the knowledge of God's unconditional love and rely on the power of love to heal. Martin Luther King called the result of nonviolent resistance "beloved community." It is the community of those who personify the Good News and know that love is powerful, and inevitable. We have seen the Word made flesh in Jesus, and we see it embodied in and among us. It can't be stopped by violence. Bringing violence to bear against God's love only creates more opportunities for God's love to disrupt the spiral of violence and build a beloved community. Could it be, as one black minister said that “George Floyd may well be the sacrificial lamb that redeems us from the original sin of racism?” Please God!

(Adapted from SarahLaughed.net, by Sarah Dylan Breuer, 2009.)

Mother, mother

There's too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There's far too many of you dying

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today, eh eh 

Father, father

We don't need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer

For only love can conquer hate

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today, oh oh oh 

(Marvin Gaye, 1971) 

You Are What You Eat

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…John 6: 51-58

Whoa!!! Imagine hearing these words for the first time without any previous knowledge of the Eucharist.  We know that some of those gathered in the crowd were startled by what Jesus was saying, to the point that they stopped following him. Jesus doesn’t tone down his rhetoric or even hint that he might be speaking metaphorically. No, he said what he did in the way he did so that his words would not be easily forgotten. He wanted to challenge his followers to process his words so that they would resonate in a place beyond the intellect. I wonder if after years of listening to so many Gospel readings and sermons on the Eucharist, have we become jaded to the true essence of their meaning?

Imagine you are attending church for the first time as this passage is read!

Imagine hearing Jesus say these words. How would you react???

Once again John relies on mystical words to speak to each of us in that place in which the personal images of reality and life itself reside. John invites us to close our eyes and picture what being in a relationship with God really means. Note, I use the word “picture,” not “understand,” in an effort to prompt our imagination and senses to feel the words as a palpable, sensory experience, and know what being in a relationship with God actually feels like, tastes like, and smells like. This is at the essence of our being and what we mean when we say “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God fully shared our humanity through Jesus as we through Jesus, fully share in God’s divinity. Anything less than that relationship with God would be reduced to mere acquaintance.

St. Augustine used the phrase “visible words” to help explain the connection between the sacraments and our daily lives. Baptism and Communion are visible, physical manifestations of our faith. In other words, the sacraments are the embodiment of the gospel in the material form of water, bread, and wine. They serve as the physical presence of what we have heard and believe because we are physical creatures. And so the gospel is proclaimed so that we may hear it, and this very same gospel comes alive to us in the Eucharist as we taste, touch and feel it with our hands, our mouths and our bodies.

My Prayer to the Holy Trinity

Dear God, I don’t want to pass the buck but your being within me hasn’t been discussed too often or too clearly. I hate to sound critical but this doctrine on the Indwelling has been passed over rather superficially in my early religious training. I never heard this from the nuns in grade school or the brothers in high school.

Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love and the reassurance of your love as I always tried to earn it. So you can see why your Indwelling presence strikes me as strange and foreign.  Now I’m being told that while they are beautiful and comforting, it’s not necessary to say the prayers I was taught and had memorized whenever I want to speak with you. No, rather I should converse naturally, in a familiar and relaxed way as if you’re “one of the family” because you Eternal Three, have made your home within me.

Of course I hesitate. My religious training emphasized that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as a youngster I remember confessing it. It was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if your presence was only in my Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time after Sister Janice discovered Ralph and me playing the theme from “Dragnet” on the organ in the choir loft one Saturday afternoon. Who knew she was preparing the sacristy for Sunday Mass! I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to face her wrath on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now, I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be comfortable with you. I feel as though I should hold my breath.

Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit within me.  And that you are closer to me than I am to myself and that you want to be for no other reason except that you love me. That is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling forever.

I’m trying to understand that the more aware, conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things. Dear God, I really do want this.

Frankly, I must admit that in the past I hadn’t given much thought to your presence, your intimacy, you activity within me. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home love within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices anymore, can I?

Thank you Lord.

In the Name of the Father, from whom we came and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life. Amen   (John 3:16-18)                                                                                 

(adapted from  Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You, Mysticism for the 21^st Century, pp. 150-151)