You are not wanted here

 

The music stopped; my chair was gone, and I was faced with having to leave a job and career to which I was totally committed and loved for over 30 years. A corporate reorganization resulted in my position and group being eliminated and “absorbed.” No, they said “I wasn’t being fired; your performance was exemplary; it’s just that your position would no longer exist.” “Well,” I asked, “if that’s the case how come I couldn’t do this or that and be reassigned?”

… Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.

To which the response was: “No, sorry, those options are not in the plans.” So, now I had to leave a place where I was no longer wanted (Luke 9:51-62.) How was that possible? I had to uproot my family and an established lifestyle; leave my friends behind and go to a place where I was wanted…but not here anymore. Hurt, anger and a futile urge to “strike back” were emotions that ruled my life for a long time.

Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?

Little did I know at the time that this pain and anguish would lead to new opportunities, personal growth and a transformation of sorts that would not have been possible had I remained anchored in that comfortable place. Little did I know that what seemed like an interminably difficult period of loss and “exile” protected me from the peril and upheaval awaiting those in that place I left behind. Little did I know then that in the long run, it was all for the best… and all part of His plan; not mine.

Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God

 

You are what you eat

 

 Jesus tells us 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 (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)

 Imagine hearing this for the first time. Imagine hearing this without any previous experience of the Eucharist's significance.  We know that some of Jesus followers were so offended and repulsed that they stopped following him.  Jesus makes no attempt to temper his words and make them palatable for the feint of heart. There’s not even a hint that he might be speaking poetically or metaphorically. He’s not quick to change the subject either. For us, these words may no longer make us uneasy. But, Jesus didn’t drop these rhetorical bombshells so that they’d be easily forgotten. It’s clear that He was stirring the pot on purpose. He wanted to say things that challenged the people. 

Imagine you are attending church for the first time as this passage is read! 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  told that although they are beautiful and comforting, reciting the prayers I was taught and had memorized is not the only way I can speak to you and that 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.

And yet 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 because it was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if you were present to me only in Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when 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 in the sacristy preparing the altar 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. Yet, 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. This idea 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. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home  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 16:12-15)

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

 

It's Our Birthday

 

Pentecost preserves the memory of Jesus through the Holy Spirit as our community’s faith is both restored and renewed in breadth and depth through our love for one another. God and Love cannot be contained and must be shared. God is love.  

David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper than Words that The Holy Spirit is the awe-inspiring power of life and love. We differ only by the degree to which we open ourselves to this power. If we patiently cultivate courage and openness, we will become more and more aware of the Spirit which allows us to know God within. 

In our Creed when we proclaim our belief in the Holy Spirit, we acknowledge the Trinitarian God as the ‘Father,’ the ultimate mystery from whom we come and to whom we are on our way; the ‘Son,’ in whom we find our true Self; the ‘Spirit,’ the divine aliveness within our innermost life, Here we touch upon the very core of faith. 

We are charged with remembering all that Jesus lived while he was with us. (John 20:19-23) The Spirit is the ultimate power of the Gospel through which the Word becomes flesh in us, and no longer just words on a page or our lips. We become those words and they define who and what we are, thereby setting our compass to live a God/Love centered life as Jesus taught. We remember not as if it were yesterday, but because it is today; we live the memory now and again and again. 

“When we remember, we leave the present for the past. To say it better, we bring the past into the present and give it life alongside the tangible realities we are compelled to consider. Not physical presence but love, leads us to live with this remembered person even in his/her absence. When love is strong, the memory of this may be even more dear and more real than the reality of those who are present. Our memory of another confers the present upon him, gives him further life in our life, and keeps a moment of the past from drifting away or fading into death. 

We are fed and nourished by communion of life in which our lives intersect in memory and merge into a common experience. No lover forgets. No beloved is forgotten. The memory of love is life; the memory of another becomes ourselves. So when the communion of believers remembers Jesus, Christ is present and is brought into the present with his grace by the power of the Spirit…The gift of the Spirit is fidelity to the memory of life’s mystery and confidence in the mystery of its future.”  (Anthony Padovano, Dawn without Darkness)

 

When you're awake, the things you think
Come from the dream you dream
Thought has wings, and lots of things
Are seldom what they seem

Sometimes you think you've lived before
All that you live to day
Things you do come back to you
As though they knew the way

 

 

 

 

 

...And We Shall Renew the Face of the Earth

 

We have come to learn over the years that John’s Gospels defy literal translation and find that we must suspend our literal inclination and allow the words to become flesh in us and take them to our hearts so that we might intuitively feel their presence and know the Spirit. Padovano tells us that Jesus will never be found by those who reduce faith to words or doctrines or who limit religious behavior to moral exercises or spiritual behavior. So, in our Gospel (John 14:23-29) Jesus says: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.”

Have we ever seen the Holy Spirit? This is not a trick question. Let’s think for a moment. The best description we get in the Bible of the Holy Spirit are tongues of flame or a freely blowing breeze. However, in this week's reading we get two helpful hints that offer a pretty good picture of just what the Holy Spirit looks like. 

The Holy Spirit looks like an Advocate --the one who stands up for you when you need it; the one who speaks on your behalf; the one who lends you a helping hand, takes your side, and won't leave you while you're down. 

The Holy Spirit looks like Jesus. The Spirit is "another advocate" because Jesus is the first. The Spirit, Jesus goes on to say, will abide with us and is sent in Jesus' name to remind us of what he taught. In a very real way, the Spirit affirms Jesus presence in us and through us, and helps to keep his promise that he will not leave us orphaned. You know him, because he abides with you, and lives with us 

An advocate is defined as one who upholds and defends a cause or person, and intercedes on the part of another. Yes, we've seen the Spirit many times in those who share the love of Christ, and stand up for one another. 

John’s Gospel is as relevant today as it was when it was written two thousand years ago. There are advocates for the love of God in our midst…and there are adversaries. 

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.  

Love One Another as I have Loved You

“….By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” is so familiar to us in John13:31-35 that we are inclined to wonder what else we can say about this passage that has not already been said. Yet, this simple phrase which sums up Jesus’ earthly ministry is at the very core of who we are as Christians. Jesus wants us to live the love in everything we do. Make it become the essence of who we are and how we are defined. It is a part of the human condition to love and want to be loved. Sure, it’s easy to love those with whom we agree or have a close relationship. Loving those who do not share our values or frankly dislike is a much harder proposition. 

The love that Jesus speaks of is hard because it requires that we put the welfare of others before our own, even when it “hurts.” We see this love in action when we are able to overlook the slight of a friend or able to set aside our goals to help someone achieve his or hers. Even small “gestures,” requiring the need to sublimate our ego to benefit another, not out of any sense of obligation or desire to incur favor or reward, counts. Sometimes that love requires putting aside a hurt or moving beyond disappointment caused by a friend or family member, even when it is difficult. 

Today, we are faced with the stark reality of the war in the Ukraine in which the Russians have committed horrible crimes against humanity. How do we make room in our hearts for those who cause so much pain? How can  we, in the context of these inhumane atrocities, find it in our hearts to love as Christ ask us? 

God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us change our attitude toward them…this is what holiness really is. (Keating, The Human Condition)

My Sheep Hear My Voice

I grew up in New York City in the ‘50s. We lived in a two–family house in Brooklyn. I recall it as a carefree time of life. It was a time during which doors marked certain boundaries, but we were not so afraid of others inappropriately crossing them. It was not always necessary to lock our doors. And when we finally did, my father kept a key in the milk box on the porch or left one with our upstairs neighbor. Our ability to come and go was safe. However, in later years when both my parents worked I as the oldest of my siblings, was entrusted with that key. In time concerns for safety appeared to be heightened and more attention was paid to locking doors and security. I know I was older and more aware of the news of the day but times were changing and I guess we were a little less carefree as the world was not as safe as it was before.

While gates and doors provide protection and security, they are the means for entering and leaving a  place. In today’s Gospel (John 10:27-30)  Our frame of reference for a shepherd does not likely fit with the image of the shepherd in the time of Jesus.  Is there any more powerful artistic depiction of Jesus the Good Shepherd in our Christian heritage?  For me it is the famous painting of Jesus with the lamb draped over his shoulder that was hung on the wall in one of my grade school classrooms, and was one of the stained glass windows in the church.  Yet, when Jesus lived and John writes his Gospel, shepherds were among the most disreputable and mistrusted outcasts of society. We might consider replacing the image of the loving guardian strolling peacefully in the sunshine among his flock, with the marauding motorcycle gangs of our century or cowboy outlaws of the 19th century. Shepherds were drifters with no fixed address and as a result of their unwholesome occupation, they were perpetually unclean and, in violation of Jewish law. These outcasts are the very people John’s gospel is talking about. 

Needless to say John shocks his audience by comparing Jesus to a shepherd and then later calling this very shepherd “good.”  He challenges his listeners to look past their assumptions of where God is located and who God belongs to and who can belong to God.  We and the people of John’s time are asked to see God in those who are outsiders, who exist on the fringe of the community, who are despised and even a little feared.  The readers of John’s story are told to look for God among the despised.

When Jesus proclaims that “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me” he characterizes his role as a loving protector. We are told that there was no actual gate in sheep-folds and that the shepherd would stand, sit or lie down in the opening which allowed entry and exit. In this way the shepherd could serve as protector of his sheep.  He knew his sheep and they knew him. John purposely contrasted Jesus, the Good Shepherd, with disreputable religious rulers of his time who exploited their congregations.esus clearly spells out his role as the Good Shepherd and his Father’s steward when he says I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one