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My son likes to play an Apostle Quiz Game on a Catholic kids website we frequent. It’s been great, since he now knows a lot about his Apostles. The one thing that bugs me, though, is that Peter’s “fun fact” is that he lost faith and started to sink when Jesus called him out of the boat and Thomas is identified by the fact that he doubted Jesus.
Recently, on the feast of St. Martha, I thought of that game as I listened to the Gospel of her rebuke by the Lord. Now, it’s not that we can’t learn a thing or two from that situation (Heaven knows I can!), but I personally would have chosen the other Gospel choice in which Martha professes, point blank, her belief in Jesus’ healing power and in the Resurrection. Well done, St. Martha! Your faith allowed Jesus to raise your brother!
Aren’t we tempted to remember some saints only by their former lives? Matthew: tax collector. Mary Magdalene: prostitute. St. Augustine: playboy and pear thief. These facts about their former lives are true, but when we stop there, we miss the whole deal!
As there are several places in my house that could use some updating, I love to watch home makeover shows. Regardless of what the particular focus of the show is, they always do a “before” shot review before the big reveal. The idea is to remember the sorry state things were in before the crew arrived. The worse it was in the beginning, the better the results look. But can you imagine a show of all “before’s”? Who would watch that? One dark-paneled old 70’s room after another? No way!
The same is true for our portrayal of the saints. We remember their former days in order to highlight the great work that God has done. We can’t get caught in “before”.
Of course, the same needs to be true in our own lives as well. We need to call to mind our sins, failings, and pre-conversion ways of life from time to time. We need the humility such memories bring back. We need to remember what we are capable of without God’s grace, and what we are able to do with his help. But we can’t stay there!
Sometimes we get so caught up in our own sins and faults that we come to believe that God can’t forgive us or do anything with us. That’s just plain bad theology. And really, it would be bad spiritual HGTV. Today, let’s all take an inventory of the ways that God has moved in our lives, the sins and vices he has saved us from and the marvelous ways he is using us to touch the lives of others.
For Father’s Day 2008, I made my husband a CD of contemporary Christian music I downloaded from iTunes. We dubbed it the Father’s Day Mix and it stayed in the CD player in our van for the next month. Of course, that particular month was spent driving to and from the hospital during our daughter Gianna’s illness and subsequent death in mid July. As often happens, those songs became the soundtrack to that time in our lives. When I hear them, I am drawn back to looping through the concrete levels of the U of M parking garage, with a sense of urgent mission that would not allow me to think further than the next blood draw, or scan or hospitalization.
Yesterday I was in the car and a song from that soundtrack came on. As I heard David Crowder sing, “You make everything glorious”, I reflected on whether I had really believed that when I heard it so often in the summer of 2008. Did I really believe back then that God would make the second death of one of my children glorious? Not just bearable, but glorious?? Yes and no. Yes in the fact that intellectually I knew it was true, and I needed to believe that far over the horizon it was going to bear great fruit for the Kingdom. But at the time, I was necessarily focused more on getting through each minute. In the weeks and months following Gianna’s death it was easier to heal when I thought of the fact that genetic mutations and dead babies were never part of God’s plan in the beginning. He grieved with me because he never intended it to be this way.
That’s true of course. But lately, I’ve been thinking about the other half of that equation. It would be enough if the God of the Universe just sat with us like a friend at a wake, offering a tissue and a hand on the shoulder; offering to be there for us and empathize and listen. Our God does that. But he does much, much more, too. He makes everything glorious. We only have to go back to the Cross to see that. On Good Friday, God took the worst possible human event (deicide- the killing of God), and used it to merit the salvation of those who committed the crime. Then, on Easter Sunday, he used that worst human act to conquer the hugest human fear of all time- death.
If that absolute low point in human history can be turned on its ear to be made into its absolute summit, then what can be said of our own daily sufferings? They, too, can be made glorious. Seeing that even the really bad stuff will result in glory (if we allow it to), can lead us to trust whatever comes. I was fortunate to take teens on back to back weeks of retreat this June. In one homily, the priest recounted a story of St. Therese when she was a novice mistress. One of her novices complained to Therese about a legitimate injustice that had been committed against her. Therese reportedly scolded her for being ungrateful for God’s providence in the young woman’s life. I’m not sure about the middle school campers, but I took that to heart!
The implications of this are huge in our own lives, since not every bad thing that happens to us is as simple as a baby getting sick and dying. By simple I mean that it was clearly nobody’s fault. Nothing anyone did could have saved her. In fact, most of the bad things that befall us are a jumbled mix of our own faults and sins, societal ills, bad communication or others’ shortcomings. In some cases, we can even be victims of someone else’s pure malice. Yet, even as we wade through the putrid muck of such situations, we can take comfort in the fact that even these can be made glorious by God.
The saints saw every trial coming directly from the hand of Jesus. This image has been very helpful for me in dealing with mucky situations. While it might be hard to receive a trial from the hand of one who misunderstands me or judges me or even wishes me ill, it is not as bitter to receive it from the sweet hand of Jesus. This is because Jesus understands me completely. He knows my intentions, my faults and my sins, and he accepts the whole package. He allows others to act whatever way they do to somehow refine me; to root out sin that separates me from Him, to make me stronger or in real cases of injustice, to give me the gift of merit- a heart larger and more filled with love. Jesus never has anything but my greatest good in mind- and unlike anyone else in my life, he actually knows how to bring that greatest good to life.
The end of the chorus in that song says, “You make everything glorious….and I am Yours. What does that make me?” In the end, that is why Jesus allows every trial that we face. If we want the glory of the Resurrection, we need to conform ourselves also the shame of the Cross, knowing that Jesus blazed the trail ahead of us and now walks it again with us. We are invited to never fear anything, since even if our worst fears are realized, God will bring them to great splendor. Glorious, indeed.
Contrary to what the TV commercials would have us believe, Memorial Day is actually about honoring those who have laid down their lives to protect our freedom. Of course, we are referring in this case to our brave men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate price for us in war. However, I had an experience this weekend which led me to reflect on another type of often overlooked hero.
 The newly ordained kneel before their brother priests. I watched as 8 men became Catholic priests. Today, in our pragmatic society, we often boil a priest down to his functions, making him a cross between a social worker, a teacher/entertainer and a master of ceremonies. While of course priests perform some of these types of duties (caring for people, giving homilies, presiding at Mass), it is not essentially what a priest IS, any more than you could boil me down to making dinner, driving people around and collecting permission slips. The priest is another Christ, and as such, he is called to imitate Jesus in laying down his life for his bride, the Church. I can’t count how many times during the ordination ceremony the newly ordained are reminded that their priesthood is the path of the Cross… of suffering with joy for the sanctification of God’s people. Case in point: this prayer (slightly paraphrased) that the bishop says as he hands the new priest the chalice and paten which will hold the Body and Blood of Christ:
 A new priest presented with the chalice and paten. Receive the oblation of the people of God. Understand what you do, remember what you celebrate, and conform your life to the mystery of the Cross. That is what priesthood is all about.
So we know that all priests are called to lay down their lives spiritually to free us from sin and death. That’s what celibacy is all about. And obedience. But let’s not be naive and think that this is just symbolic. There are priests today that are giving their physical lives for their vocations. The priest who I came to see ordained is a refugee from China. In order to follow his vocation, he had to flee his country and everyone he loved, and settle into a whole new language and culture. If he hadn’t left, he very likely could have been killed for his faith. Another priest I know is about to be deployed to Afganistan. He is a military chaplain who is passionate about ministering to the spiritual needs of our soldiers. As a former soldier himself, he understands that his choice to follow what he believes to be God’s call could cost him his life. This has been one of bloodiest centuries of the Church’s history, with many, many martyrs. Many priests have been murdered simply because of their collars.
So, let us reflect today with gratitude and admiration for our soldiers who have given their lives for our country. But as this Year for Priests winds down, let us not forget to appreciate the priests in our lives.
In the parish the size of ours, it is not uncommon for our large gathering space to be full of groups selling stuff or seeking to recruit folks for a program. This is never more true than at Advent, when one year groups had to be shuffled into the parish hall (less than prime real estate to say the least) because in the plaza we had Knights selling books, teens selling cookies, Scouts selling wreaths, Fair Trade people selling coffee… you get the picture. If not managed fairly, the intersection of all these groups competing for fundrasing dollars can get ugly. For the most part, our fabulous facilities coordinator handles it all with grace and heads off the greatest points of conflict at the pass. Once in a while, though, on a heavy fundraising weekend, I hear a comment from a parishioner that invokes the Gospel account of Jesus cleansing the Temple. The argument goes like this: since Jesus drove out the money changers from the Temple, he would be most unpleased with us for having stuff for sale in our plaza after Mass.
That’s not my read of the scripture. Yes, we need to manage pleas for cash so that people don’t get weary and so that we don’t lose our focus on Christ. But, truth be told, at our church, the sellers are not in the church at all, but outside it. And some kids selling pastries to try and get to World Youth Day, or some vendors selling olive wood carvings to support persecuted Christians in the Holy Land are a far cry from usurers and cheats.
So, if Jesus is not commenting on my parish’s fundraising pursuits, what’s with the whips and overturned tables? Is Jesus just having a bad day or what? On my latest reading of this passage, in John, I was caught by Jesus’ admonishment: “Stop making my Father’s house a place of business” (2:16). It made me think. Regardless of what is being sold outside of Mass, how many times have I made Mass itself a kind of exchange of goods and services?
Isn’t that what we are doing when we go there looking to “get something out of Mass”? Or when we subtly sit in the pew as if we are somehow doing God a favor? How about the times when we demand answers to our prayers like a three year old in the toy aisle at Target? I state these so bluntly not to try and shame anyone, but to wake myself from these attitudes that sometimes creep into my own piety. As Americans, we are used to being customers, consumers who give our buck to get a good or service. I think we have to work hard to not allow that to taint how we see God and how we see the means by which that God becomes present to us: the Mass.
What is Mass after all, but a sacrifice? All religions in the world before the modern era involved some sort of sacrifice for the expiation of sin. People understood that in the face of the Guy who made the earth and who decides if the mix of sunshine and rain will be right to grow enough food so they didn’t die, they didn’t quite measure up. Sacrifice of some kind was needed to try and bridge that gap between us and Him. And that is what the Mass is… with a very major twist. In Mass, that God of the Universe himself is the sacrifice, offered so that we could not just approach him but consume him as bread.
So, it follows that Jesus, after turning over the tables, shifts the conversation to the temple of his body (Jn 2:21). The Temple of the Jews, 46 years in the making, was a magnificent splendor in which to behold God’s presence and to worship him. But it was not the last word. Now, we worship at the altar where God himself is the sacrifice. Jesus’ Body and Blood is offered to the Father, and to us as food. Which, frankly, makes “what do I get out of it” question suddenly seem kind of shallow. What I “get” is a participation in the life of God. Salvation. And what I am asked to give in return is not my butt on a pew for 50 minutes once a week, but my whole life. My whole self.
So, the next time your peaceful exit from Mass is interrupted by some well meaning parish group trying to get you to support their cause, let it remind you that inside the Church, the transaction involves stakes that are infinitely higher.
The winter was not kind to the main road that leads to my house. Once we had the first mid-winter thaw, it became full of so many potholes that I began hoping my neighbor’s Smart car would fall into one to level things out.
Then, it got worse. They tried to fix it. Presumably, in an attempt to remedy the situation, the road crews left mounds on top of where the holes had been. Now instead of 100 or so holes there were 100 or so mini speed bumps.
So, when I left to take my son to school today, I was very please to meet up with a man in a flourescent vest who was stopping my lane of traffic. They were in the process of scraping the whole thing up! This means that in a few days, I should be able to say with my favorite Italian animated car, “Thisa road! It’sa like it wasa paved by angels!”* I can’t wait!
It made me reflect on this past Sunday’s Gospel, where Jesus tells us through St. John, “Behold, I make all things new.” It made me think of how bad things can get when I often try to “fix” my own problems, weaknesses and faults. It is all too common that I take pot holes and make them into speed bumps.
So, what a gift that Jesus doesn’t just try and patch up and salvage our old selves. He makes us new. How sparkly, how un-stained and un-faded, how springy and undaunted by use are new things. They capture our attention and make us feel a little bit giddy. Any wonder the saints attracted people with such irresistable magnetism? It’s because they were always new. This is what Jesus does in each of us, if only we are willing to give up the salvage job and let him scrape up the old us.
I have been taking a Christology course this semester, which means we’ve been studying the person of Jesus Christ. In each paper, after using weird Greek words to describe Jesus’ nature and essence or to comment on the types of knowledge he had in his human intellect, I found it necessary to ground myself again in why we pursue such questions. The answer (unlike the metaphysics in involved in the arguments) is simple. If we don’t understand who Jesus is, we will get salvation wrong. Our faith is not primarily a list of rules or doctrine, but a person. This person just happens to be the eternal, living God, who took on our flesh so that we would not be lost.
The more we delve into the mystery of what it actually meant for Jesus to be both God and man, the more our awe increases. For instance, Jesus had both acquired, or regular experiential knowledge and infused knowledge. This means that we have a God who knows exactly what it is like to learn to walk and speak. Think of the humility of the God who created the universe to give himself a body that would limit him to baby steps! On the other hand, we need to remember that he also had infused, or directly God-given knowledge. This means that when he went to the Cross, he understood every lash he would receive, every spiteful comment and every drop of blood poured out in the streets of Jerusalem. And yet he chose it. His death must be freely chosen if it is to be a sacrificial offering for our salvation. Again, at the thought I am moved to deeper love!
With all this in the back of my mind, I listened to yesterday’s readings on Good Shepherd Sunday and put together two titles for Jesus that I use interchangeably but never put together before. Jesus is both the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God. Only God could use such a beautifully simple way to describe the hypostatic union! He is a shepherd who loved his sheep enough to become one of them. To lead them, not only from above, but from alongside them at pasture. With this gentle Shepherd to guide us, indeed, “there is nothing I shall want” (Ps. 23).
I like houseplants, but don’t have much of a green thumb. I am amazed by people who seem to know things about plants. Things like the fact that plants “eat” their dirt (use up the nutrients) and need to be replanted every so often, or how people know which plants need which kind of sunlight to prosper.
Once we were having dinner with a friend of ours at our home and he noticed a scraggly plant I had on my porch. I told him that when I had gotten it, it had lots of blooms, but the flowers had all but disappeared in the last year. He told me to cut it all the way down to the base and it would flourish. That seemed ridiculous to me, but I figured what did I have to lose? Besides, my friend does know a lot more about plants than I do. So I cut the heck out of the poor thing and waited. After a few weeks, some green appeared. Now it has come back to life, with lots of healthy leaves abounding.
In the spiritual life, Lent is a time of pruning, of cutting off the dead branches, and even some that may appear to be doing okay. We do this not for its own sake, but so that we might become more fruitful. Easter, then, is a time of that new life and growth- the first appearance of the healthy green sprouts. It is a season of new life.
I have been reflecting on this since the Easter season began, since for me the temptation of Easter Sunday is to say, “Whew! Glad that Lent stuff is over! Pass the jelly beans!” In the past I have viewed Lent as the period of deprivation and Easter as a time to pig out and make up for lost time. I don’t think this is what God intended for this holiest of seasons. How, then, should we understand it?
To try and think through it, let’s go back to the first Easter season. The Apostles are gathered in the upper room, filled with fear for their lives, shame for their abandonment of Jesus, confusion over what they expected Jesus’ mission to be. For John and the women who stood at the foot of the Cross, the image of Jesus’ last agonizing hours is seared into their memories.
Then in bursts Mary Magdalene with a message too amazing to be true: Jesus is alive. Then Jesus appears to his Apostles in the upper room, to his disciples on the road to Emmaus, to a few on the beach after a night of fishing, and according to St. Luke, Jesus continued to show up and teach the Apostles about the Kingdom of God for the next 40 days (Acts 1:3).
For the first followers of Jesus, the period following Easter Sunday was a time of new growth. The expectations the disciples had of what Jesus would do were cut down to the ground on Good Friday and now Jesus was reminding them of what they had learned before, but nowon in light of the Resurrection. During this graced time of Easter, the apostles were little green sprouts. This growth was not instantaneous by any means. There is a good indication that even as Jesus is about to ascend to the Father that they still don’t quite get it: “Lord, is it now that you will return the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Here I have to imagine Jesus shaking his head thinking, “Really? Okay, never mind. Just wait for the Holy Spirit!”.
What is the implication for us? First, it does us great good to remember that new growth is extremely fragile and needs to be cared for accordingly. Do you allow your dog to trample through your newly sprouting grass? Of course not. What about a new baby: do you toss him up in the air like you would a 2 year old? No way! Likewise, we need to allow Jesus to do for us during this season what he did for the Apostles: remind us of what we had heard before in light of the Resurrection.
So, although we should heartily rejoice and celebrate the new life of Christ during Easter, we should not do so by simply returning to all our old patterns of life. Hopefully, if we fasted from vices, the opposite virtue has taken root. If we fasted from a good thing, maybe more order has started to grow in our desires. If we gave of our time and money, our hearts have grown bigger and more generous. Whatever our Lenten observances, if they were done with a sincere heart, they have produced spiritual fruit. Our job now during the Easter season is to allow Jesus to water and fertilize that new growth. Easter should not be the end of spiritual vigilance, but the beginning!
So, as we continue through this Easter season, let’s ask Jesus what new thing he has planted in our hearts, and ask him for the grace to cooperate with him in caring for that new growth, that it might grow to be a tree strong and full of fruit for the Kingdom.
… for one who is alive? (Luke 24:5)
This is the question that the angels at the tomb asked Mary and the other women who came to anoint Jesus’ body on Easter morning. More than just a clever way of announcing the Resurrection to these beloved disciples, though, I think it is a question for all of us.
How many people today believe Jesus is just another “good teacher” who came to tell us all to be good to one another? How many believe that his historical persona is completely divorced from the myth that his crazy followers made up about him? For such a one, Jesus is among the dead. He has taken his place in history as a more dramatic version of Ghandi, Caesar or Plato.
But Jesus is not dead. He is alive. Even today, 2,000 years later. He lives. Which is why Christianity is different than any other religion. It is not a collection of doctrines or rules. It is a dynamic relationship with a real person: Jesus Christ. We will never understand or appreciate the joy that is the Easter season until we are participating in that relationship. Until we experience active participation in our lives, allowing him to truly continue to live in us and through us.
This is what many women tell the director of our adoption agency when she offers adoption to them as an alternative to abortion. I won’t go into the irony of that statement right now. It is also what people often tell me and others like me who have experienced a great loss and continue to live life. The connecting thread is this: we don’t know what we are capable of until it is asked of us. I think of this a lot in regard to Peter’s death, which was so sudden. I attribute the way we were able to respond almost entirely to grace, as there is no human way to look at it and credit us for how we were able to get through it. From many others who experience great saddness, I hear the same thing: once it happens, you just do it. You just have to, so you do.
Today we commemorate the opposite phenomenon. At the Last Supper, Jesus says to his disciples that they will all abandon him in his darkest hour. Their response? Not us, Lord! With the saddest irony, it is Peter who is most insistent: even if he has to die with Jesus, he will never deny him. We all know how that turned out.
So, how will we respond when the worst happens? St. Alphonsus in his short gem, “Uniformity with God’s Will” would answer, “I will respond how God allows me to respond”, thus avoiding the extremes of denial of the work of grace and presumption of one’s own spiritual might. I think he’s on to something. We simply have no idea how we would react is such and such were to happen to us.
This doesn’t mean we need to just throw our hands up in despair or unconcern, however. We should instead take Jesus’ advice that his apostles neglected to follow: Stay awake. Keep watch and pray. Pray that you not be put to the test. Our best defense against tragedy is to do what we should be doing anyway: pray, frequent the sacraments, study, grow in virtue. I said “almost entirely” earlier when I referred to my part in reacting to Peter’s death. That’s because, even though I wasn’t in tip top spiritual shape (never sleeping will do that to you), I was open to the grace that saved me. So, perhaps it was 99% God and 1% Libby. But that 1% allows for the other 99%.
Tonight after Holy Thursday liturgy, we will have a chance to keep Jesus company in his agony. Let’s take that opportunity. For in strengthening the Savior, we strengthen ourselves as well.
Today is the solemnity of the Annunciation, aka the day Jesus was conceived. We get so used to hearing things like, “the word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1) that I think it’s easy to forget how gigantic those words are in their logical consequences.
God became a one-celled human being in the womb of a peasant girl. The One whom the universe cannot contain was a zygote. An embryo. A fetus. Eventually a baby. All because a young girl said yes to God.
There’s way more here than I could say in ten years, much less five minutes. But the implications of the Incarnation for our defense of the unborn cannot be ignored. God’s answer to the problems of the world, the seemingly insurmountable problem of human sin? A conception. A person.
We may be tempted to point out that Jesus was an exceptionally special little zygote, being God and all. But, really, this has always been God’s remedy for crisis: another saint. And every human, no matter how brilliant and strapping or dependant and incapacitated, has the capacity for bringing grace into this world, through the power of God.
As we marvel at the Incarnation today, let’s also marvel at the beauty of each human life, and strive to make the one we’ve been given live up to its best potential: sanctity.
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