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Ever been stuck between a rock and a hard place? Mary Magdalene was on Easter morning. Well, actually, it was Jesus’ body that was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and she seemingly had no way to get to him. This consumes her thoughts on the way to the tomb. How will I get that stone moved? Jesus needs to be anointed. If I ask the guards, what will they do to me? Can the disciples move it? They would be thrown in prison if they tried! And further, they don’t have a great track record of sticking around when things get tough…
What I think is most striking about this inner dialogue of Mary is that as she runs through the impossibilities in her head, she keeps moving toward the tomb. It seems like she has two options: to incur ridicule or worse from the guards at the tomb, or to fail to give Jesus a decent burial. Yet when she arrives, she finds something altogether different. Jesus has provided a spectacular third option she never could have dreamed of.
I have been reflecting lately how so many of our pressing social issues come down to a failure to see and embrace that third option. Our society forces people in difficult circumstances into a false dichotomy of horrible solutions. If you’re in a troubled marriage, you have two choices: the trauma of divorce or the long agony of staying together “for the sake of the kids”. Young, pregnant and unmarried? Your choices are abortion or a doomed future of poverty and underachievement. This is a brilliant tool of the devil. No one likes divorce or abortion, but if you juxtapose it with something equally devastating, it suddenly seems like a viable option. The “lesser of two evils”.
Now enter Mother Church, who is increasingly a lone voice against some of these “lesser evils”. Prohibit contraception? You want women to become helpless baby factories! Prohibit assisted suicide? You want Grandma to linger is meaningless pain! Prohibit IVF? You want to deprive people of the beauty of parenthood! What our culture fails to see in every one of these tough cases is the third option. The Church never just slaps on a legislative cuff. Instead she gently takes the struggling sinner by the hand and says, “this is extremely difficult, but you can do it”. In short, the third option is grace.
Grace is a poorly understood concept today, but simply it means God’s supernatural power which we have access to by our Baptism and by the other sacraments. What it means is that we never face our hardest times alone. We face them with the same power that moved the stone for Mary Magdalene. Grace opens doors where no doors should be able to open.
The third option is a transformed marriage where partners can learn to slowly rebuild trust and love again. It is adoption, where an infertile couple becomes parents, the young person is able to continue with their education and the baby gets to live. It is Natural Family Planning, through which couples learn to be generous in their love, open to God’s will for their families and through which they can either space their children or often conceive children despite low fertility.
I’m not naïve. I know that life is not a Hallmark movie. That’s the beauty of grace! I know that sometimes the third option is an ability to survive one of the first two horrible options. If Grandma is terminally ill, grace normally won’t provide a miraculous cure. But God will illuminate the meaning of Grandma’s suffering. Like all suffering endured with Christ, it can be a powerful avenue of grace for others. This is true of any suffering we let God into.
Finally, the best part about the third option is that it is available even after one of the “lesser evils” is chosen. There is hope for those who have divorced, whether that choice was made for safety, against one’s will or in the pursuit of a happier life. There is forgiveness and healing for those who have chosen abortion, or IVF or contraception. Here, too, the third option opens up floodgates of mercy and peace that never could have been imagined before. No matter what the situation, choosing the third option of grace leads to a surprisingly rich joy.
So this Easter season, let’s approach the tomb with our deepest anxieties. Let’s offer them up to the Lord and see what miracles await us.
Note: Grace is often channeled through practical avenues. For help in understanding the issues raised in this post or in getting practical help, please contact your pastor or the Respect Life or Family Life Offices.
Many, many movie plots have been based on the premise of the main character who acts strangely to others because of some hidden situation. I’m sure there are more recent examples, but the first that comes to mind is from the 80’s: ET. For those of you under 30, in ET a kid named Elliot discovers an alien in his yard that has been accidentally left behind by his friends. He takes him in, pet names him ET (for Extra Terrestrial), and befriends him while trying to hide him from his mom and from a mysterious group of scientists. Of course Elliot raises more than one eyebrow from his mom and neighbors as he seeks to clean up the effects of harboring a curious, wrinkly alien in his closet. It’s not until ET is finally discovered that Elliot’s mom puts all the pieces together as to why her kids were acting so oddly.
For Holy Week the past few years, our family has watched the whole Jesus of Nazareth miniseries. It’s a great way to focus on Christ, and for young children it’s a great way to visualize the life and death of Jesus. Tonight we saw the part where John the Baptist is preaching . As I watched tonight I thought of how odd John was, and how normally I stop at that. The guy wore camel hair and ate bugs. He ranted like one of those street preachers we dignified people snicker at. “Repent! Repent!” He’s a real get-in-your-face kind of guy, and frankly he makes me a little uncomfortable. As I said, I normally stop there, but tonight I had a little grace to see past the dirt and screaming and think, holy cow… John gets it.
Then I read tonight’s reading about Mary pouring ointment on Jesus’ head. Really expensive oil. 10 months worth of pay’s oil. She dumped it on his feet and wiped it with her hair. Weird, right? Wasteful? Nope, because Mary gets it, too.
What do they get? And what does this have to do with an 80’s family film? It’s not a perfect analogy, but here goes. In all three situations, the protagonists have more information than their peers. They are working with a deeper understanding of things. That’s why they seem strange to those around them. Elliot’s erratic behavior is because a visitor from outer space landed in his yard to befriend him. In a manner of speaking, so are John’s and Mary’s.
Let’s not forget who Jesus is. We can be lulled by our culture into believing that Jesus is just a cool guy, a good teacher, a community activist or a wise sage. If that’s where we are at, then John is a fundamentalist whacko and Mary is a wasteful hater of the poor. But if we get it, if we understand that he is really the Creator of the whole universe come down to the earth made by his own hands to save his creatures from certain doom, then all the crazy behavior makes sense. John knew that only if people understood they were sinners would they be open to receiving a Savior. He knew if they didn’t get their spiritual houses in order then they would miss out on the defining point of all of human history. So he went to the extremes of fasting and prayer that others might be ready to meet their God in the flesh. After all, it was the task he was born to do. How could he have done less?
And Mary… she also knew firsthand who this Jesus was. She had sat at his feet, contemplating him. She saw him weep at the tomb of her days-dead brother and then call him out. And now she was having dinner with both of them. What she didn’t understand due to her deep spiritual connection with Jesus she could have figured out from the mounting tension surrounding Jesus: God-made-flesh would not be around much longer. Have you ever had the agonizing privilege of sitting with someone you love as they are on their deathbed? As you realize your time together is short, you pour out your love lavishly. The world stops for a short while as bills and chores and sometimes even bodily necessities take a back seat to cherishing each moment with that loved one. This is what Mary did in anointing Jesus, and Jesus acknowledged her correct ordering of priorities.
Most of us are not like Elliot, trying to hide Jesus in our closets. We go to church and wear our crosses and celebrate our Christian holidays. But are we like John and Mary? Do we really get it? Do we understand that this same Jesus sits in our tabernacles and Adoration chapels waiting for a visit from us? Do we understand that he offers his very self to us in the appearance of bread and wine at Mass? Do we know that he is literally dying to forgive our sins if we just jump in our cars and drive a mile or two to church on a Saturday afternoon?
I would submit that most of us (myself included) love God, but we’re afraid to stand out. But frankly, we live in a world that doesn’t get it. And if we are loving Jesus with the devotion he deserves we are likely going to get some strange looks.
“You’re not letting your kid go to the whole-weekend long playoffs just because he’ll miss Mass? Lighten up.”
“You’re in a Bible study? Are you a fundamentalist?”
“You have how many children? Don’t you know what causes that?”
“How can you belong to a Church that doesn’t support women’s reproductive health?”
To some degree or another, we’re all afraid of looking weird. But our faith is not a set of abstract doctrines. It’s a relationship with a God who loves us to the point of dying for us and to whom we owe our very lives. This holiest week of the year is overflowing with graces. Let’s allow Jesus to move our hearts with the devotion of John and Mary. Let’s ask him to help us get it.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says we should deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow him. Denying ourselves is fairly straightforward, especially in the context of Day 2 of no soda or candy or whatever we gave up. But what does it mean to take up our cross? Here’s my take on it:
Many, if not most of us expend an awful lot of energy gingerly tiptoeing around our crosses. Let’s say there is a mess on the floor of your house (it has to be your house because mine is spotless!), such as a 1,000 piece puzzle someone dumped out on the floor. The members of your family spend the day walking around or over the mess, shaking their heads thinking, “someone should really clean this up!” They may even complain about the mess and when it is suggested that they pick it up, there is a good round of finger pointing about who dropped it or whose responsibility it is to clean up. Usually, it doesn’t get attended to until someone (Mom or Dad?) gets mad and either picks it up themselves or threatens the children with some terrible consequence in order to get them to pick it up.
This is what we often do with our own suffering, whether it is something forced upon us from outside or as is often the case, our own sin. We exert so much energy stepping around the suffering, drowning it in food or drink, crowding it out with activity or stifling it out with noise. When it does confront us, we can spend time blaming others for why it is there, or getting defensive about why it’s not really our fault, or crying out about how unfair it is that we have been given this cross. Now, it may be very true that our suffering is someone else’s sin, or someone else’s fault, or that it is a completely unfair cross that we have to bear. After all, these things were all true of Jesus’ cross, weren’t they?
I think what it means to “take up” our crosses is to face them head on. Like the puzzle, it means we are honest about them, we accept them as ours and we set about the work of picking up the pieces. For different crosses, this is a different kind of work. For sin or bad habits that are totally ours? We need to get to confession and look at practical ways to change. For other’s sins and bad habits that effect us? We need to look at our own reaction to them. For example, if someone always tries to lure us into a fight, we can recognize it coming and calmly say, “I’d be happy to talk about this when you calm down”. Finally, for things that are beyond our control, like grief, we allow ourselves to feel all the horrible things that we are feeling, realizing that the only way through grief is through it. We offer our broken hearts to Jesus for healing.
Our penances during Lent should be a practice and a support to taking up our crosses. For instance, I can be kind of scattered and distracted, and being home most days now with my kids, it’s hard to focus on them and what I need to get done. That’s one of my little crosses. So, I’m giving up things that contribute to my scattered-ness in hopes of being able to face my weakness head-on. Even if your fasting is not directly related to your cross (maybe you gave up soda and you need to stop losing your temper), the fasting does help, since your ability to say no to soda will help your ability to say no to angry outbursts.
Who says God doesn’t like a good BOGO sale? Happy Lent, friends!
Overall, my 7 year old son has adjusted well to life in Kansas City after our move from up north in September. There are times, however, when he is almost brought to tears in thinking about all that we left in Minnesota. What I find fascinating is the specific things he laments losing. For instance, he talks a lot about his “best friend”, whom I will call Cole. Cole is a kid who is a grade ahead of my son and with whom he had maybe a total of 5 play dates the whole time we lived there. When he talks about Cole and how much he misses him, I am sympathetic, but I can’t help but picturing what things would have been like if we had stayed. Cole, now a 2nd grader, would be so wrapped up in school and activities that my son and he would rarely, if ever have time to play. I marvel at the other friends he left that I know he misses, but that he forgets to mention.
Likewise, I know that when my son talks of moving back to Minnesota, he is picturing life there just as it was last year when he was in Kindergarten. Yet I know that even in the few short months since we left, our friends there have changed, and so have we. He doesn’t realize that if we moved back tomorrow that he would miss the new group of friends he has met here. He doesn’t take into account that we made a commitment to our job here and have no jobs in Minnesota anymore. He doesn’t get the fact that other people are living in our house and that we have signed a contract to rent our Kansas City house until the end of the summer. He definitely does not understand that moving an entire house full of things so soon after moving them the first time would certainly turn his mother’s head prematurely grey! What he understands when he suggests we move back is an expression of his feelings at the moment, an expression of affection for all that he loved about living up north. A good parent empathizes, but also sees that granting the request will not make him as happy as he thinks. As parents, we have a greater perspective.
Lack of perspective is not a 7-year-old’s problem. It’s a fallen humanity problem. Look at the Israelites in the desert. God had freed them from slavery, promised them a land of their own, made them his own people and provided for their every need. Yet, at every turn they found reason to panic and complain. They went even so far as to reminisce about how great the food had been in Egypt! Never mind the backbreaking slave labor, darn it! In Egypt they had onions!
This situation with my son has been an opportunity for me to reflect on my own perspective on things. Often I get frustrated at God for not following what I thought the plan should be. I grumbled each time I made a double house payment while we waited for a renter for our Minnesota home. Heck, I grumble when I hit three red lights in a row when I am in a hurry. We are very wrapped up in our day to day struggles and so it can be very difficult to understand why God is holding back on granting us what we believe to be a perfectly reasonable prayer request. We can even become despondent and angry with God.
If it’s true with relatively small things like house payments and red lights, it is much more profound when the stakes are higher. I understand this, too. We prayed for the miraculous recovery of two of our children, and both times God said no. While our obvious preference would have been the miracle, my husband and I were forced to gain a new perspective from our losses. We were forced to look beyond our pain and see the truth: our job as parents is to get our children to heaven, and two of ours have already arrived! We were also reminded that our suffering, offered in union with Jesus on the Cross, could be used for the conversion of those who needed some extra grace to make it to heaven themselves. This perspective didn’t remove the grief, but it did help us to turn toward God instead of becoming bitter.
The Church has always recommended fasting, and this is the reason: fasting helps us gain perspective. When we fast, we give up an earthly good in order to gain a spiritual good. We are reminding ourselves that the spiritual goods are more important. Lent is coming up, and Lent is a season of fine tuning our perspective. This is a good time to look at what in our lives is giving us myopia. What kind of perspective does my family need to grow in? Are we getting kind of spoiled by material goods? Maybe we need to sacrificially give stuff away and meet people who are happy with much less. Are we bored all the time? Maybe we need to ditch our ipads and TV for 6 weeks and rediscover each other’s company. Do we feel far from God? Maybe we should get to confession, get Mass attendance in check and/or begin some simple family prayer.
In big and in small things, we do well to acknowledge that God has a much fuller picture of the situation. If we believe that he does love us, we can trust that even when we don’t understand things completely, they are being done for our good. Here’s to a Lent full of perspective!
 Recently I met with a group of other moms, the topic of Tebow Mania came up. A few of the moms had teenaged sons and they expressed how pleased they were that there was at least one NFL player that they felt their kids could look up to. Almost in the same breath however was the fear that like so many other figures who seemed promising, Tim would also disappoint. One mom noted a magazine cover broadcasting Tebow’s new girlfriend, as if the editors were salivating over the next issue when they could either report a nasty breakup or an unplanned pregnancy.
The conversation then turned to all the role models who crashed and burned in the last few years. Too many sports, entertainment and political figures have hit the papers with a sexual indiscretion, a nasty divorce or a brush with the law. It is common enough that it has become the bread and butter of certain types of magazines. It’s no wonder that the moms I was meeting with were a little hesitant to let their sons dive into Tebow Mania!
Worse is when the fall is one who was supposed to be leading others to God. How many church communities have lost their faith because a pastor has been caught doing something bad? We Catholics, whose dirty laundry seems magnetically attracted to headlines, are by no means alone in these rare but hurtful instances, but we can feel it more intensely than others.
So, famous people and even our local leaders can seem just poised and ready to disappoint us. What do we do? Well, I suppose we could choose to live in fear of the next headline, but what kind of life would that be? The fact of the matter is that due to a pesky thing called human freedom, we are all capable of terrible things. This is what I choose to think of when I these stories break. It is important that we not get too comfortable in our own piety that we begin to believe that those people over there are big sinners, but I (with all my rosaries and daily Masses and devotionals) am immune. This is a dangerous frame of mind that I think we can all fall into from time to time. The fall of others should lead us not to judge a person’s intentions or character (obviously, we can judge the actions as wrong) but to reflect on what we are doing to keep ourselves far away from a similar slippery slope.
I think this is a good lesson for our kids, too. When our children start looking up to public or even local mentors, it’s an opportunity for us to be involved. We can ask why they like the person, what their lifestyle is like and whether that is how Jesus asks us to live. Especially in the case of entertainers who tend to thrive on disposable relationships, we can probe into whether it seems like this person is really happy. When people we know fall, we can help our kids understand the difference between excusing and forgiving. We can help them to find healing in Christ for our own wounds and to trust that he can heal others when we wrong them as well. Before a fall, we can talk to our kids about temptation and pray for those we know may be special targets for temptation because of their fame or position.
Finally, we can take great hope in the lives of those who persevered to the end: the saints! How amazing for us as Catholics that there are scores of people who cannot let us down because they have already achieved the glory God intended for them! It is so good to read about the saints with our children as there are as many saint stories as there are humans. The saints were rich, poor, smart, slow, young, old, from every country and color and pre-conversion moral background. Their lives can speak volumes to our kids about facing up to everyday temptations and hardships. The best part is… they don’t just speak through books! It is good to help our kids to develop living relationships and devotions to saints, by celebrating their feast days, praying novenas and keeping reminders of them around the house.
So, I will pray that Tim Tebow can hold steadily to his Christian faith in through the difficult temptations of playing professional football. But whether he succeeds or fails, the God we both believe in will not disappoint. Surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, he stands beside me, giving me the grace I need to achieve greatness in the game of life.
Well, it’s finally over. While the world took their Christmas stuff down at midnight on the 25th, we held strong, our tree blazing straight through New Year’s and the whole week after. But now it’s officially over. Bye, bye Christmas, hello Ordinary Time. Though the color for Ordinary Time is green, what we see a lot of here in the absence of snow is muddy brown. It’s time to hunker down into winter, with nothing but Valentine’s Day to tide us over into Lent.
As we enter this season from Christmas, my thoughts have turned to the Holy Family’s long stretch of ordinary time. They had some absolutely amazing experiences that first Christmas, didn’t they? Visits from angels, a few long road trips, a huge star, visits from shepherds and Magi, prophesies from Simeon and Anna, royal gifts and stern warnings in dreams. Later, there would be more amazing things: healings and walking on water, huge crowds of followers, the conversion of sinners, controversy with authorities and of course a humiliating death and triumphant resurrection. But in between these two brief spans of years where God manifested himself very plainly were 30 years where he settled into life as any ordinary carpenter’s son.
Isn’t this how our lives are? We have very profound events in our lives: marriage, births, deaths, illnesses, graduations, milestone birthdays. We have profound religious experiences too: initial conversions or reversions, intense retreat experiences, spiritual epiphanies, etc. But the majority of our lives are much more mundane. We settle into a routine of commuting, house cleaning, nose wiping, errands and carpool. Our spiritual lives take on a pattern too of daily prayer, grace before meals, Sunday Mass, monthly confession and whatever other practices we make part of our family’s religious life. There can be a temptation to become a little ho-hum about everything, or to live distractedly, always latching on to the next thrill, whether it be the next night out or the next retreat.
This is a serious thing, since the mundane makes us such a huge majority of our lives! It is also why I think God decided to make it such a big part of his own earthly life. He could easily have come as a conquering king, swishing down from heaven in grown-up form to save the day. He could have started his ministry that day in the Temple, when at 12 years old he was already blowing away the Rabbis. But he didn’t. Taking on our humanity meant taking on the vast expanse of years in simple, poverty-line family life. Everything Jesus touches turns to gold. That is why he chose to live a quiet, hidden life in Nazareth for those 30 years. It’s where his sanctifying work began. Not only did he begin suffering for us then through hard work, obedience to his parents and the humility of not being recognized as the creator of the universe, but he transformed those daily things so that they could sanctify us, too.
What will you do today? I will attempt to teach my son to add, read and know more about Jamestown and mountain habitats. We will probably go to the library and the grocery store. I will likely change 2 or 3 poopy diapers, check work email and fret about getting a babysitter. I will make three meals and two snacks, give out several reminders, text back and forth with my husband and my mom. While I hope that these things are done with a smile, I will not be surprised if they are accompanied by whining and grumbling: by either me or my family. Therefore, the day will also likely contain several apologies. With my list or with yours, there is hidden grace. The grace of doing our duty with love.
So today as I run through my to-do list, I will try to steal away a moment to think about Mary making bread for the evening meal, going to the well for water, mending and washing clothes. I will think of Joseph who scraped by a living for his family by the sweat of his brow, and little Jesus, wisdom incarnate, doing his chores and memorizing his lessons. I will think of the inconceivable miracle living in that tiny Nazarene household and ask that family to help me see the miracle in mine, as well.
Around our house we try to keep Advent as its own season, which means we are constantly fighting the slow seeping of the penitent season of waiting into full blown jingle bells. With kids, this isn’t always easy. One thing we do is we put up our Christmas tree first Sunday of Advent, but dress it with purple, and use it to hang our Jesse Tree ornaments on. The first year I thought of this, we didn’t switch from Jesse Tree to Christmas Tree until Christmas Eve. That proved to be one too many things for Mom to do on Christmas Eve. Plus with our Christmas season always including travel, we only got to enjoy our fully-decked-out tree for a few days. The compromise I’ve now adopted is that on Gaudete Sunday, we can start putting ornaments on. My 6 year old son was super excited, and we enjoyed looking at our “special ornaments”, which are a trip through time for all of us. (I still have one I made in preschool– my class picture with a lacy edging and glitter!).
Gaudete means rejoice, and it’s the theme of the third Sunday of Advent. My son rejoices in the fun things of Advent/Christmas and gets more excited the closer we get to Christmas. But as I reflected on the readings last night, the first reading from Isaiah caught my ear. He says that he rejoices in the Lord for He has wrapped me in the garment of salvation and the robe of justice. It struck me: yes, we are rejoicing this week. But over what?
One of my professors in grad school, when he did spiritual direction, would ask his directees to tell him their biggest sorrows and joys from the past year. There, he said, you find out what they love. What do I rejoice in? A day that is open where I can get lots done? An unexpected check in the mail? Time with my family? These are all good. But do I REJOICE in my prayer time? In sitting before the Lord in adoration? Receiving him at Mass? When it comes to Christmas, do I rejoice in the Giver or the gifts he has given me?
The result when we rejoice in the Lord himself is that when other things are absent, we are still joyful. When I heard the reading from Philippians the Advent after my Peter died, I thought, “rejoice in the Lord ALWAYS?! Oh, like EVEN NOW?” and came to a deeper understanding of joy. It is not a feeling, but an assurance in God’s provision, a look to eternity, a deep trust in His plan for us all.
Further, if we focus on the Gift himself, we can suffer the little things (or big things) with joy. I know of two babies born yesterday. What a great day to be born! But imagine these two little ones’ parents rejoicing in the baby gifts and the free meals from friends more than the babies themselves! When the rejoice in the baby, it is not as hard to endure the first few days of nursing or the sleepless nights. If they were in it for the gifts and photo ops? Not so much!
Of course, Christmas should be a fun time for kids. Of course we don’t expect them, (or us!) to be able to strip away all the candy canes and elves and such to just be serious and stare at the manger scene all day. But as I prepare during these last two weeks of Advent, I am going to try hard to be rejoicing in that little baby and all he has done for me.
My 3 month old son Peter died on the Feast of Christ the King, 2006. That year, it was the Sunday following Thanksgiving. As we buried him right before the start of Advent that year, many people commented to us on how the impending holidays must have compounded our grief. I won’t pretend that it was fun to pass by the “baby’s first Christmas” sleepers, or to see TV commercials where rosy-faced children are snuggling up to the hearth with homemade sugar cookies and cocoa. Our secular culture has labeled December “the most wonderful time of the year”. Needless to say, grieving the sudden death of a baby is in stark contrast to these images and can make grief seem a little fresher.
All that being said, that year I entered into Advent in a deeper and richer way that year than I think I ever had before. For four Sundays, we could leave the jingle bells of the outside world and enter into a sanctuary where all was quiet, and expectant and still. Our souls were mirrored in the hauntingly beautiful liturgies. We heard Isaiah speak of the longing of God’s people to be brought back from the land of exile. We heard them pour out their sufferings and their fears. And God’s reply? I have not forgotten you. A day is coming when every tear will be wiped away, when “no longer will there be an infant who lives but a few days” (Isaiah 65:19-20).
Advent is a time of waiting, a time of penance, which I think is uniquely suited for those who suffer. By definition suffering is a lack of something good that should be there. We suffer because we should be healthy, but we are not. We should have peaceful family relationships, but instead they are a mess. We should have our loved ones with us, but instead we are separated by death. In the beginning, we were created in a state of perfection where sickness and death had no place. It was original sin that screwed things up. And the baby we celebrate at Christmas is Jesus– the Child of promise, the One that God promised would right the wrongs of the Fall. It is this Child that the Israelites hoped for down through the generations. Advent is a time of joining in their waiting. We remember the long dark years before he came. We wait for him to come with a unique gift of grace to our own hearts now to help to heal and strengthen us, and of course we wait in joyful hope for his coming again in glory.
Even Christmas does not need to be a foreign time for those who grieve. Of course, it is hard to be suffering during a time that makes joyful memories sting, or while it seems everyone else is wrapped in tinsel and gingerbread and laughter. But again, we need to go deeper into what Christmas really is. Did the baby Jesus get to drink egg nog and go caroling and open presents? No. He was rejected by those he came to save and was born in a barn filled with animals. Yes, he was given gifts, but two of the three reminded his parents that he was to suffer and die. On the day of his presentation, Mary was told a sword would pierce her heart. And to top it all off, the newborn had to flee the swords of soldiers out to mortally wound him.
This isn’t intended to make Christmas a downer. It remains a time of great joy. Why? Because Jesus intentionally entered into our suffering. He chose to come and be with us while we wait for the days of glory. Christmas teaches us that God is with us in our sorrows, that he brings great good from them (if we let him) so that one day we can celebrate with him in the joy of heaven.
So, this Advent, like every one we have celebrated in the past five years, will have its moments of sadness. We will put ornaments on the tree that remind us of our little saints Peter and Gianna. We will have a moment when we see our two children and wonder what our two missing kids would be doing. But our loss also helps us deeply and sincerely pray with the whole communion of saints, “Come, Lord Jesus!” My hope for all who grieve this Advent is that they do not allow themselves to feel like outsiders but rather find true comfort and joy in the coming of the Christ Child.
Gotta love the Book of Daniel. In today’s reading, King Belshazzar gives a feast and after a few glasses of wine decides it will be really funny to use the vessels pilfered from the Temple in Jerusalem to drink out of. His guests drink wine out of them, praising their gods of “gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone”. God does not think this is very funny. He expresses his displeasure by sending a disembodied hand to write a note on the plaster wall, which Daniel interprets: you offended my God and he is going to take your kingdom away.
While today, we’re not so tempted to grab the chalice and paton from the local parish and put them out for guests, we are prone to profanation. First, a definition: profane means to use what is sacred for everyday purposes. Like wearing your wedding dress to run errands. We should kind of cringe at the thought. But the king in the story, whose gods were “gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone”, fails to see a differentiation between the sacred and the everyday.
Today there are some outrageous examples of profanation or even sacrilige, but most of us aren’t guilty of that. Our profanation tends to be more subtle. We put priority on our own “gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone”. In other words, we put all our energies into the tangible, everyday things without remembering God. We use Sunday, a sacred day, as just another day off to run our errands. We use God’s name as an explative. In a more subtle way still, we try to bring God down to our level, shrink him to fit our own understandings or our own personal theologies.
God is way, way, above us. Sometimes, because he is so generous as to draw so close to us, we can get a little too comfortable with him. Granted, he desperately wants us to be near to him, as a loving Father. However, we do well to remember how great he is. This is what sacred things remind us of. And like I always say, better to remember this on our own then to get a visit from a creepy ghost hand.
I sat next to a child at Mass today who had a very irritating, hacking cough. About every 45 seconds, he would let out a string of very loud coughs. In between, he would slump down in his chair, looking miserable. I questioned whether this child should have been out at all- not only for his own health, but for the health of everyone else in that gathering space/cry room area where we all were. After all, he was giving the old “cough into your arm” thing his best shot, but let’s face it, he didn’t have the best aim. I tried to read other people… are they noticing this kid? Were they wondering what kind of mother would drag their sick child to church on a cold Sunday morning—risking his health and that of the whole parish?!
If you haven’t guessed, the child was mine, and though I am not proud to admit it, I was slightly more preoccupied with whether I was being judged than by my son’s health (I know he’s fine… he just gets coughs and they hang around for a long time!). Do you do that? I think as parents we are very prone to this, because no matter what we do with our kids, we can get judged for it. Let’s say your two year old is whining for candy at the grocery store. If you give in, people may judge you for spoiling your kid. If you don’t, your child may end up in full tantrum mode and you may be judged for having that loud, ranting kid at the grocery store. There may even be some people there who judge you for your child whining in the first place, and if you have more than two children with you, you will most likely be judged for overpopulating the world. (If you have only one, you may be judged as selfish for only having one—who knows?!)
Childless people, I’m sure experience the same thing. We all do. Generally, we experience it because we know how often we make judgments about others. How many times in a day do we critique a stranger’s driving or clothing or diet? We text and tweet about these folks and even put them in our Facebook statuses. We laugh and snarl about others’ habits to each other.
Judgment is an ugly thing, so we try to rid our world of it by “tolerance” and “diversity” and all kinds of “let’s get along”- type stuff. We quote the plank-in-your eye verse from scripture. We throw out the concept of sin and explain guilt away as a remnant of oppressive religious structures. We have created a world in which every person is allowed to decide for himself or herself what is right.
It’s a noble idea. After all, we all hate to be judged! The problem is that we know in our hearts that there are still things that are wrong. If we throw out all moral codes, if it’s fine for everyone to just do their own thing, then what exactly are you supposed to tell a child whose dad just gambled away the family home? What do you tell the rape victim or the spouse who has been betrayed or the elderly man whose nest egg was stolen by an identity thief? Obviously these things are wrong. But how can we say they are wrong if there is no such thing?
This situation has led to a state where (someone wiser than myself said), “everything is permissible, but nothing is forgiven”. We have the most tolerant society in history, but we are perhaps the angriest people ever. And depressed. In my own scientific opinion, we’re a mess.
Judgment is an ugly thing, but we need it. The trick is, we can’t each be our own sheriff. When there is no overarching system of morality, we have to each judge for ourselves, and generally, we aren’t the most objective when it comes to that which has wronged us personally. We need a judge. A good one. And luckily, we’ve got one.
Today is the feast of Christ the King and in today’s gospel we see the final judgment—that time when Jesus will judge all the world, and all of history. We may be uncomfortable with this, but we really need it because our hearts crave justice. We know deep down that it isn’t fair that some people are born into poverty while some squander riches and get richer off the backs of the poor. We know it’s an outrage when a murderer goes free on a technicality and claims another victim as a result. These are big things. But we also know how much each unkind word has hurt us, or how we were only trying to help a situation but instead had it blow up in our faces. At these times, we can take comfort in knowing that one day all things will be put right.
The final judgment can be terrifying, too, since we know that we never quite measure up. We know the things that we have gotten away with. In this sense, we can take comfort in the character of the judge. Jesus, the King, is just, not spiteful. As CS Lewis would say, he is not a tame Lion. But he is a merciful one. Christ reigns from the wood of the Cross. He conquered his kingdom by dying to save her. If we can admit where we have failed, we never need to fear to approach him. For Jesus, not everything is permissible, but EVERYTHING is forgivable.
This feast has a special place in my heart because it was on this feast five years ago that my son Peter died. This brings me to the last reason why the final judgment is a good thing. Sometimes things happen that aren’t anybody’s fault, but they are still unfair- like a baby only living to be three months and two days old. Sickness and death were never meant to be part of the plan. We were created to live forever and to use those long lives to build one another up in love and respect. In the final judgment we will see how things were meant to be, and provided we have done our best on earth to live in love, it will be the beginning of an eternity of perfect peace and justice.
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