This Week in Catholic News

Pro-Life News:

1)   In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher speaks of the rise of women sharing their stories about their abortions in a “guilt-free” way, and about how these stories are discomfiting even for those who consider themselves “pro-choice.”  Such tales of “guilt-free abortions” have made at least one reader wonder if pro-lifers are “right about the overall effect [of abortion] on our humanity.”

2)   The Atlantic observes that, despite the fact that abortions are at a historical low in this country, they are actually on the rise among African-Americans and Latinas.  Part of the reason may be the fear among these women of “the way society treats people who get pregnant young or unintended, especially if they’re of color" - which suggests that pro-life people may want to think of ways to combat the stigma such women face.
 
The Vatican:

1)   Pope Francis appoints five women to the International Theological Commission, which advises the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).  Women now comprise 16% of the Commission’s members.

2)    Pope Francis has also chosen a successor to Chicago’s Cardinal George, naming Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane to the position.  Some observers see this as a “clear signal that the church is changing under this pope,” as “George’s rigid approach to upholding church doctrine” is contrasted with Cupich’s “more conciliatory mode.”

Culture:

In The National Catholic Reporter, Eddie Siebert, S.J., examines the recent spate of films with religious and/or spiritual content, such as “Noah” and “Heaven is For Real.”  He argues that these films reflect an “evangelical Protestant” understanding of the Christian tradition, leaving little room for a Catholic viewpoint, which is “seen as too conservative by mainstream. . . companies” but “too liberal or Catholic by faith-based companies.”  However, he sees hope in the fact that many television shows are engaging deeper spiritual, theological, and religious questions that may bring a more thoughtful engagement with religion back into popular culture.

Miscellaneous:

1)  The Atlantic responds to Cal State's decision to de-recognize the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship as an official campus organization, saying that such a decision not only hurts students of faith and threatens their religious freedom, but also undermines the university's ability to "create space for competing ideas" in a pluralistic environment.

 
1)   Crux tells the story of Sr. Joan Dawber, who runs a safe house for survivors of human trafficking.

2)   Experiencing anxiety?  In The Catholic Exchange, Fr. Joseph Esper has lessons for us from the saints.

This Week in Catholic News

In Pro-Life Thought:

(1)  In First Things, Nora Calhoun writes about how her experiences as a midwife and as a caretaker for the elderly have shaped her convictions about the value of human life.  She speaks to the importance of human embodiment, writing that “there are things that can be learned – can be said – only in the language of bodies.”  The bodies of babies reveals that “it doesn’t matter how early the human heart beats. . .Being of human descent is enough,” and the bodies of women in labor teach that women “don’t need to be protected from the children conceived within their bodies.”  She urges pro-life Christians not to “confine [themselves] to ideas” and to engage in actual “corporal works of mercy” – acts of mercy based not on theoreticals but on the act of caring for physical bodies.  Otherwise, she says, we risk “los[ing] the riches vocabulary of human dignity, one better expressed in embraces and diaper changes than in words.”

(2)  It is a commonplace concept in modern Western culture to suppose that birth control is a necessary concomitant to economic development and environmental protection.  We are told that the world is “overpopulated” and that this is wreaking havoc on the economic growth of third-world countries and on the natural world.  This assumption has trickled down into our personal lives, as many couples forego having large families for the sake of “financial security.”  But in Ethika Politika, Artur Rosman writes of the dangers of this assumption, arguing that as a culture we have replaced a concept of fertility as the reproduction of children with a concept of fertility as “an endless multiplication of stuff."  Such a culture, he warns, “will not prove. . . to be kind to each other, the rest of the world, and the environment.”  He argues that Catholicism can be a sign of contradiction against this cultural trend, “reconfigur[ing] the parish as a site of fertile resistance to capitalist (in-)fertility.”

In Politics:

 Last week, a major conference met to discuss the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.  In attendance were many Christian leaders from around the region, as well as Senator Ted Cruz.  In First Things, Mark Movesian argues Cruz made a major – and offensive – faux pas by using the platform to speak not about Christians but about Israel, and then declaring to the disappointed crowd – many of whom had experienced persecution themselves – that if “you will not stand with Israel. . .then I will not stand with you.”  Mark Shea speaks of the Christian community's frustration that Cruz could not seem to transcend politics in order to support Christians facing persecution, and that his remarks took the focus off of Christians in distress.  

On the Liturgy:

The New York Times reports that “houses of worship” are becoming increasingly informal: “More and more Americans worship in congregations where drums are played, words or images are projected on screens, and praise is expressed via upstretched hands.”  On the one hand, some such as Fr. Thomas Reese argue that the Catholic Church should get on board with these changes, “revis[ing] liturgical practices to allow people to celebrate their Christian faith in ways that better fit contemporary culture.”  On the other, however, some like Rod Dreher in The American Conservative argue that liturgy is about transcendence of (not capitulation to) culture, and that liturgical reform should not be based on a desire to empower the community to express not its own culture but rather its conception of “the transcendent and eternal.” 

In Philosophy/Theology:

In The Week, Damon Linker takes on popular scientific atheist Sam Harris’ new book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion for rejecting the Western philosophical and theological tradition in his search for spirituality, turning instead to a modified form of Eastern spiritual practices.  Linker specifically questions Harris’ rejection of the concept of a soul, which Linker feels is a key component of Western philosophy’s attempts to answer questions about the meaning of life and “lasting fulfillment.” 

Opinion:
As evidenced by the news, as in any big family, Catholics disagree and even argue all the time.  Have you ever found yourself frustrated by fellow Catholics?  Fr. Dwight Longnecker has some advice.

The Bronze Serpent

Exaltation of the Cross

The readings today are challenging.  The Israelites complain against God for bringing them into the apparent "death" of the desert, where they are facing starvation and exposure.  God punishes them by sending snakes among them.

Are we not supposed to rail against suffering?  Cry out to God for its elimination?  Why does God plague the Israelites in their distress, instead of sending them relief?  Yet when the Israelites complain, God punishes them.

There is a deep irony in God's method of punishment, and in the mode of their relief from punishment.  The snakes that bit the Israelites must have recalled the snake in Eden, the source of human pride and rebellion against God.  Yet God chooses the snake - the very symbol of sin and death - to be the means of the Israelites' restoration to life: Whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.  

For Christians this irony foretells the irony of the cross.  The cross: a symbol of oppression and humiliation, of illegitimacy and death, becomes the source of our life and hope.  Jesus Himself made the parallel between Himself and the serpent clear.  

How does this irony help us understand why God punished the Israelites for crying out against their suffering?  Because the Israelites needed to learn the irony of God's justice: that it is through suffering that we are saved.  Sending the serpents to plague the Israelites was not just a punishment; it was a lesson.  God wanted to teach us that we cannot overcome suffering by running away from it.  We can only defeat suffering by facing it head-on.  Just as the Israelites could only be saved from the serpents by confronting the bronze serpent, so too are we saved from suffering only by confronting it.

This is the message of the Cross: to defeat death, Christ had to die.  The Israelites had lost sight of the meaning of suffering.  They had lost their hope, their faith that beyond the suffering lay their triumph.  God's discipline forced them to remember that, through and beyond their suffering in the desert, their salvation awaited them.

This is not a comfortable message.  But it is a hopeful one.  It means that we do not need to be afraid of suffering.  Our response to injustice and pain need not be one of fear, of running away, of avoidance.  Our response to suffering is based on our knowledge that we, in Christ, are stronger than suffering; that we can face it, confront it, endure it, and defeat it. 

The Israelites had lived a life of fear in Egypt.  They allowed their fear to condition their response to their trials in the desert.  God had to teach them that they, with Him on their side, were stronger than the serpents, were stronger than the hunger, were more powerful than all the forces of the desert arrayed against them.

We too live our lives in fear of suffering.  We are tempted to prefer comfort to freedom.  We give this "comfort" all kinds of fancy names: autonomy, mercy, even justice.  We dress up our fear to try to hide from ourselves the fact that we are afraid of pain.  We arm ourselves with our comfortable accoutrements - our technologies, our nationalities, our race, our political ideologies, our academic philosophies - and convince ourselves that we are strong.  But this kind of comfort is not strength.  It is cowardice.  We are afraid to face the world as the naked, suffering creatures that we are.

God asks us to set aside our weapons and let Him gird us.  He asks us to set aside our fear and let Him be our strength.  In all of His interactions with humans throughout our history He has tried to teach us this: that in Him, and Him alone, are we strong enough to face our real fears, to confront suffering and death and emerge victorious.

Are you suffering today?  God asks you to believe that you are stronger than your suffering, because He is at your side.  In Him you can endure all.  You are braver than you think, because it is not only your courage that lives in you - but the courage of God.

This week in Catholic news. . .

(1)   In The Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry debunks the idea that Christianity will change its ideas on same-sex marriage.  The usual argument is that Christianity's teachings have changed on many biblical proscriptions (such as the laws concerning the stoning of witches or the eating of pork) - so why is the teaching on homosexuality any different?  But sexuality, Gobry maintains, belongs in a different category of moral teaching, and the ethics governing it have remained “surprisingly consistent” over the last 2,000 years – to such an extent that the Christian understanding of sexuality is fundamentally connected to Christian identity.

(2)  The American Conservative reports on the decision of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City to allow gay groups to march in the 2015 parade, and on the decision of Cardinal Timothy Dolan to retain his position as grand marshal for the parade.  He raised the ire of some when he said of the decision to let gay groups march: “I have no trouble with the decision at all.  I think the decision is a wise one.”

(3)  The National Catholic Register reports that the cause for the canonization of Fulton J. Sheen has been suspended indefinitely, to the chagrin of Sheen’s most ardent devotees. 

(4)   Reuters News Service reports that the ruling Socialist Party of Venezuela has changed the words of the Lord’s Prayer into an “ode to its beloved late leader Hugo Chavez.”  The change has been condemned as idolatrous by Venezuelan Catholic leaders.

(5)  The Atlantic reports that The Boston Globe is launching a new website specifically devoted to coverage of the Catholic Church.

(6)  Richard Dawkins caused a firestorm last week when he suggested in a Tweet to a pregnant woman that it would be immoral not to abort a baby if the mother knew it had Down’s Syndrome.  Many people with Down’s Syndrome and their parents condemned his remarks, but Dawkins dismissed their criticisms by calling their viewpoint “an emotional one, not a logical one.”

(7)  For the historically and theologically inclined, this piece from the York Aquinas Reading Group in the U.K. provides a nice explanation of Thomas Aquinas’ method in his writing of the Summa Theologica.  Of particular interest is the observation that the medieval scholastics displayed a high level of “intellectual honesty” in that they were “obliged to justify [their arguments]  in the light of the strongest possible objections.”  In other words, they were required to make the best possible case against their own position, and then argue against it – forcing them to treat their intellectual opponents with a great deal of respect.  Perhaps in today’s contentious political and cultural climate we could learn from their example!

This Week in Catholic News: Women in the Church

Last month, in the wake of increasing Vatican scrutiny, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, for its annual assembly.  During her keynote address, Sr. Nancy Schreck, in responding to Vatican criticism, stated that “we have been so changed that we are no longer at home in the culture and church in which we find ourselves.”  Sr. Elizabeth Johnson (a Fordham theologian whose books have been sharply critiqued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but who was honored at the assembly with an Outstanding Leadership Award) urged her sisters to continue to resist the “patriarchal structure” of the church’s institutions, arguing that the Vatican’s criticisms of her work and the work of the LCWR are “careless” and “vague.”  Many observers in the media have taken up the LCWR’s line, claiming that the nuns are being “abused” by the male hierarchy, which is apparently engaged in a “Nunquisition.” 

On the flip side, however, those who defend the Vatican and the CDF accuse the sisters of a “defiance against ecclesiastical authority” that may justify revoking the LCWR’s status as a Catholic organization.  Others, such as Ann Carey of the Catholic World Report, point to the fact at the LCWR does not represent all women religious in the U.S., and that even the leadership of the LCWR does not reflect the viewpoints of its own members.  Some argue that the LCWR’s increasing irrelevance is demonstrated by the decreasing number of young women who are joining their orders.   The decrease in numbers among LCWR congregations is, reportedly, in contrast to the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), which split with the LCWR in the 1992 and whose congregations are supposedly more youthful and vibrant than those in the LCWR. (CMSWR communities include, among others, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who recently butted heads with the Obama administration over the requirement to provide birth control to their employees.)

The arguments on both sides are very emotionally wrought.  A sociological study on women religious conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate attempted to bring some objective balance to the debate – although, of course, statistics are tricky things.  The study found, among other things, that, in terms of pure numbers, vocations to LCWR and CMSWR congregations are about the same (and both regrettably low), and that one reason for the apparent “youthfulness” of CMSWR congregations is that LCWR accepts older members.  Even more interestingly, however, the study also examined reasons why Catholic women do not choose religious life.  Among the top eighteen reasons Catholic women give for not considering religious life, only a few (such as “disagreement with some Church teachings,” “vow of obedience,” or “stigma of clergy sex abuse”) relate directly to issues of patriarchy within the Church.  The top reasons are the desire to marry and become a mother, the desire to choose one’s own lifestyle and career, and the sense that God is “not calling.”  Perhaps if women religious congregations are seeking to increase their numbers, they would do well to examine these issues, and explore how they themselves might better respond to the deepest desires of young women in the modern world.   

Despite all this mudslinging and number crunching, however, what I find missing in the various arguments is any meaningful discussion of precisely what the CDF has criticized about the LCWR.  Smokescreen words like “patriarchy” and “feminism” make the struggle between the Vatican and the LCWR seem like a battle for power, rather than a dialogue aimed at theological and ecclesiological truth.  (Indeed, Eugene Cullen Kennedy in the National Catholic Reporter has explicitly argued that the Vatican’s complaints against the LCWR are based on “trivialities” and that the main issue concerns not theology but authority.)  But if any critique of the LCWR is going to be written off as “patriarchy,” and if any response on the part of the LCWR is going to be condemned as “defiance,” any serious theological inquiry is automatically forestalled.

The role of women religious in the Church is an important piece of a broader issue – namely, the role of women in the Church as a whole.  Where and how should women be allowed to utilize their intellectual and spiritual gifts in the life of the Church?  One particularly contentious issue is the sacramental role of women.  As several Catholic news services have reported, the new bishop of Rochester, NY, is in the process of ending his predecessor’s custom of allowing lay people (among them lay women) to preach at Mass.  Sr. Christine Schenk, former director of the reform group FutureChurch, opines that the move towards “silencing” lay (women) preachers is not justified by canon law, since their preaching was “in dialogue” with the priest and provided “reflections” rather than “homilies.”  A strict interpretation of canon law, however, such as that provided by Redemptionis Sacramentum, seems to preclude lay preaching at any point in the Mass (para. 65-66).    

Though women are canonically prohibited from preaching at Mass and from being invested with the sacramental authority that can only come with priesthood, the question does remain: how can the Church best include and utilize its increasingly well-educated and empowered female population?  The sense among Catholic women that they have more gifts to offer the Church than they are being permitted to share is an important issue for Church leaders to address, and we should not expect solutions to present themselves quickly.  Yet in spite of claims that the Church’s hierarchy is intent on silencing women, the prefect for the CDF, Cardinal Muller (the same person who criticized the LCWR’s decision to honor Sr.Johnson), has just announced that he will increase the number of women represented on the international theological commission that advises the Vatican.  Currently, two women serve on the 30-person commission; the CDF wants to see that number increased to “five or six.”  This is, admittedly, a small step towards greater inclusion of women in the theological life of the Church, but one that we should welcome as the Church strives to achieve its divine mission in a fallen, contentious world.

We Are Not Worthy

But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.  (Matthew 15:23)

The Canaanite woman was lucky: Jesus eventually did give her an answer, the same day that she asked.  But for so many people, God's silence seems to go on indefinitely - for years, for a lifetime.  Yet she persists in her faith, and insists on continuing to do him homage (15:25).

When Jesus does speak to the Canaanite woman, his first words to her are harsh and humiliating.  "I have not come for your kind," He says first.  Then He compares her to a dog!  But she is not to be deterred, or deferred.  Her faith is marked by her persistence, her insistence, her willingness to argue and even "talk back" to God.  She does not give up on God!  

Yet her insistence that God will and must act on her behalf does not come from a place of entitlement.  She accepts His judgment of her.  She is not worthy.  She even accepts His characterization of her as no more worthy than a "dog."  Her appeal to God rests not on her worthiness, but on God's generosity.  She comes to God in a stance of humility - but her humility will not be rebuffed.

It is to these people that God comes.  Not the people who feel entitled to special treatment, not the people who insist on their own worth, not the people who point to themselves in their appeal to God.  God comes for the people who recognize, deeply, their own unworthiness, but point rather to the worthiness and goodness and generosity and abundance of God.  It is these people who are able to be lifted out of their own narcissism and self-centeredness and who can recognize God as the source of all that is good.

God's silence at times is a way to bring us to this place of humility.  The truly humble person knows that God cannot and will not remain silent forever - not because she deserves an answer, but because God's goodness will prevail.

We do not live in a culture that values humility.  Certainly the virtue of humility has been warped in the past, to justify keeping certain groups of people silent, or to encourage people to endure injustice without fighting back.  Certainly it is good to fight back against this wrong notion of humility.  

But the Canaanite woman's example teaches us how humility actually is a call to speak out against suffering and injustice, and is the only starting point for seeking true righteousness.  There is an irony in this that many advocates of social justice seem - at least in their public proclamations - seem to miss.  It is only by a deep awareness of our own unworthiness that we can claim our true worth as sons and daughters of God.  It is only through humility that we can claim dignity.

The Shut Door

Alphonsus Liguori

When I was growing up my parents were fond of the saying, There are no atheists in foxholes, but even at a young age I sensed the illogic of such a statement.  It's far easier to believe in God when life is going well than it is when life challenges you.

In fact as a believer I think that's why God challenges you.  He wants you to have a mature faith, one that can withstand tests and difficulties.  One that causes us to raise our voices with the Psalmist: My courage fails me. . . [but] though I am afflicted and poor, my Lord keeps me in mind (Psalm 40).  

I have always found myself closer to God in good times than in bad.  But I know that this sense of distance is my own doing.  I have voluntarily chosen to shut myself off from God.  I am angry with Him.  I do not want Him near.  I don't want to accept the consolation - perhaps even the apology! - He wants to offer me.  

I don't want to trust Him.

I thank God for giving me the space to sit quietly and lick my wounds.  I know that even if I've locked the door on Him, He's still waiting patiently outside.  Sometimes I can even sense myself opening the door a crack, and in those moments I can hear Him whispering to me the words I know are true but that I don't want to believe, because it's easier not to believe.  So I slam the door shut again.  It's easier to whine and moan, Why me? than it is to accept that God will give me the courage to face whatever it is I have been called to face.  Because I don't want to face it.

God is being patient with me.  I thank Him for that.  Even as I know I've put this distance between us - even as I know I'm being as immature and quarrelsome as an adolescent who feels deprived unjustly of some unearned privilege - I know He still loves me, and will wait for me to open the door to Him once more.

I do want to open the door.  Underneath my anger, I still love Him.  And I can only cast myself on my reliance that He will continue to bestow upon me His loving kindness.

Reflections on Pentecost

We speak of Pentecost as God's dramatic reversal of the Babel event.

At Babel, those building the tower thought that they could reach heaven through their own efforts.  They thought they could enter heaven without the help of God.  But their pride, which inspired them to build their tower, ironically was the root of their downfall.  Prideful men refuse to listen, refuse to hear.  Prideful men cannot communicate with one another.  Prideful men seek power over other men, insisting that they are "better" than others even within their own group.  A prideful people cannot remain united for long.

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit achieved something remarkable: He used the very vices that drove the people of Babel apart - their differences of opinion, their inability to listen to one another - and transformed them into a means of forging a new unity.  Difference, instead of being divisive, is chastened and sanctified by the Holy Spirit and becomes a path to reconciliation.  Diversity is graced, and brings people together.

It is because of the Holy Spirit that we can celebrate diversity as a positive good, that we can find unity among the differences that bind us.  Of course, we must choose whether or not we will respond to the Spirit's graced transformation of difference.  Difference now has the potential to unite us, but unless we open our hearts to the Spirit's workings our differences will continue to divide us.  It is up to us to make the potential of unity-through-difference a concrete reality in the world.

The Second Reading from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians contains an image of the many diverse gifts given by the Spirit, reflecting the Spirit's opening the doors to unity through diversity.  Paul addresses a community whose pride threatened to divide, much like the pride that threatened the people of Babel.  The Corinthians were arguing over whose spiritual gifts were the "best," like servants in God's household jockeying for position and squabbling over who was most important.  Paul tries to impress upon them the unity that comes from being children of the same Spirit - children as we all are, since Pentecost.  We are all different, and we are all essential.  Accept humbly the gifts you've been given, and rejoice humbly at the gifts given to others.

This is so very hard to do.  It is so easy to be jealous when others seem to have things you want.  It's easy to accuse God of injustice when someone else's life is going better than your own.  But we know how these prideful jealousies can rip relationships apart.  Accepting God's Spirit means accepting each day, for good or bad, as God's gift to you.  It means accepting the things that happen to you, good or bad, as an opportunity to grow in grace.  It means accepting the path God has given you for your salvation - rather than coveting someone else's path, or trying to create a path of your own.

Pentecost teaches us that by the grace of the Spirit God can transform an ostensibly evil situation into something good.  It can be hard to believe that God can do this in our own lives. but this is precisely what Pentecost asks us to believe.  When things don't go "your way," when life seems unfair - even and especially when you feel you are trying your best to be "good" and serve God! - you must trust God to bring grace out of change of course that has been thrown before you.  Remember that you can serve God in life no matter what path He has given you to follow.  After all, serving God the way He asks us to serve Him - which isn't always the way we wish to serve Him - is the goal of our Christian lives.

This is essential not just for our own happiness; it is also essential for the unity of our families, our communities, and our Church.  Resentment, jealousy, covetousness, and pride have no place in the Church.  Insisting on doing things "our way" instead of truly listening to each other - and to God - will lead only to ruin.  We are all different.  We have different lives, different opinions, different viewpoints, different experiences, different perspectives.   That is not something God has changed or wishes to change.  But it is up to us to use our differences wisely, for the good of all.  Accept the way in which you are different and celebrate it, without insisting that your way of being different is better or holier than anyone else's, and without being envious of others' gifts.  Accept the challenges that you encounter as a result of your differences as part of your journey to God.  This is how we can truly live the spirit of Pentecost.  

Day 48: Spiritual and Religious

I have little patience with confessors who try to convince penitents not to feel bad because what they’ve done isn’t really a sin.  In making such comments they think they are offering comfort, but truly I feel that they are denying their penitents the experience of God’s forgiveness and mercy, which is far greater comfort than any false sense of our own innocence can give.

I do not understand the distinction between spiritual and religious.  For me religion has always been the mode of accessing the spiritual – that is what religion is about.  But without the support of religion, spirituality becomes paralyzed, like an engine with no car to run. 

I think when people try to access the spiritual without the structure of religion, the spiritual simply becomes therapeutic, serving only our need to feel good about ourselves, even if this “good feeling” does happen to include a sense of communion with and love for others. 

Religion, however, reminds us that the spiritual also entails real, concrete, and often difficult obligations to others and to God: obligations to be at a certain place at a certain time, obligations to behave in a certain way towards others, even an obligation to ourselves – to go to church even when we don’t feel like it, to feed our souls even when we don’t feel like eating. 

Spirituality turns us inward and lifts our souls to heaven; religion grounds the spiritual and reminds us of our responsibilities here on earth.  Religion without spirituality is dead, but spirituality without religion is impotent.

Day 47: A Sacrament of Poverty

The Eucharist is the sacrament of poverty.  Mother Teresa writes: The Eucharist and the poor are nothing more than the same love of God.  The Eucharist is God impoverished, stripped of the trappings of divinity and made into a piece of bread.  A piece of bread!  The cheapest, simplest, most basic, most common, and yet most insignificant type of food.  Not content to divest Himself of His power and become merely human, Christ humbled Himself even more and became a piece of bread to nourish humans.  Can we truly understand what it means that Christ became bread?  

If we can see Christ in a piece of bread, then why can we not see Him in the poor - who, after all, are at least human beings created in God's image!  If we see that Christ humbled Himself to give Himself as nourishment to others, then why do we not follow His example and give our whole lives in nourishing other people?

When we receive the Eucharist we are receiving poverty.  Even if we do not understand it, we are, in the act of eating Christ impoverished as a piece of bread, expressing solidarity with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely, the elderly - all the poor who live their lives unrecognized as Christ among us, just as to faithless eyes the Eucharist appears only as a piece of bread.

Seeing with the eyes of faith means more than seeing Christ in a piece of bread.  It also means seeing Christ in the most debased, the most filthy, the most impoverished, the ugliest of human conditions.  

That is why Christ coupled the Last Supper with the washing of feet, something only the lowest of servants would do.  Christ is calling us both to see Him in those who serve us, and He is calling us to imitate Him in His poverty.  He is calling us to recognize that the poor are our servants and that we must let them serve us by serving them.  Mother Teresa also writes that the poor have given her far more than she gives them.  But she could only receive what they had to give by first giving herself to them.

What is beautiful about Mother Teresa is her recognition that spiritual poverty is worse than material poverty.  By spiritual poverty she means: loneliness, a sense of worthlessness, a sense that you no longer have anything to offer the world.  The great crime of material poverty is that it so often leads to spiritual poverty, especially when we live in a society that tells us the poor are mere "leeches," the mentally ill are to be feared and shunned, the homeless and unemployed are simply "lazy," and so on.  We do not see the poor as people who have things to offer us.  And so we ignore them, and we plunge them into spiritual poverty.

When Mother Teresa offered rice to a poor woman with eight children, the woman took half the rice and went to share it with another poor family who was hungry.  Mother Teresa says: "I did not bring them more rice that night because I wanted them to experience the joy of loving and sharing."  Mother Teresa recognized that it was vitally important to that poor woman to experience herself as someone who had something to offer someone else.

It is not your money that will save the poor.  It is your love.

Mother Teresa is clear that love was not given to us to make us "feel good."  Love, if it is true, is supposed to hurt.  We are called to turn each act of love into an act of suffering service, and we are called to turn each act of suffering into an act of love.

Days 38-46: Wisdom through Suffering

Augustine says that a philosopher is not a man who is wise but a man who loves wisdom. 

Ambrose says that we believe fishermen, not dialecticians.

The fishermen whom we believe are philosophers in the truest sense of the word, because they loved wisdom, and they recognized it when they saw it, or rather when they saw Him.

The problem with so many philosophers today is that they become dialecticians, in love with their own arguments and ideas.  They no longer have the humility to love wisdom itself, because love of wisdom entails the acknowledgement that there are things you will never understand.

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What is the value of fasting?  I think of the female medieval mystics, who were known both for their great charity, and for their great fasts.  How do they fit together?

Our Church teaches that we are all “in this” together.  We rejoice when others rejoice; we mourn when others mourn.  As part of one Body, if one member suffers we all suffer. 

Members of our body are hungry now.   They are poor, naked, homeless, sick, cold.  When we fast – whether from food or from other material comforts – we manifest in our own lives the truth that the hunger and the suffering of the poor are also our hunger and our suffering.  This is the meaning of solidarity. 

When I suffer the hunger and deprivation of the fast that I have chosen, I should be remembering the ones who have no choice but to suffer hunger and deprivation.  The pang in my flesh should make present to me the obligations I have to those who suffer out of necessity. 

As long as other members of Christ’s body are suffering, so too am I suffering, whether I realize it or not.  The choice to fast is my choice to realize it and to live out this realization.

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When we confront suffering, we have a choice.  We can choose to turn inward, towards selfishness, towards hopelessness, towards hatred.  Or we can choose to confront it with an attitude of love, hope, faith.  We can choose to make it into something that transforms us into a gift given up for others. 

God has made this choice possible by offering Himself on the Cross.  But He does not excuse us from the responsibility of choosing.

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I read this recently: “We are always receiving God’s mercies.  Many of them we don’t understand – some are painful, some are unbearable – but they are all God’s mercies.  We just ask that He please give us a few more of the tender ones.”

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Cardinal Carlos Maria Martini, S.J., writes that Peter’s problem was that he wanted to be the Lord’s savior.  How much insight does that give into Peter’s personality throughout the Gospels!  He was a man of action, and he wanted very much to be doing something for the Lord.  Build a tent, wash feet, fight, die.  We find Christ throughout gently rebuking him.  It is my job to serve you, Christ says.  It is my job to save you.  Let me save you, for you cannot save yourself, and you certainly cannot save me.  Peter becomes wise only when he acknowledges that his ability to serve the Lord comes not from himself, but in fact from the Lord he wishes to serve.

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Thus the fisherman attains wisdom through suffering.  First, suffering the wounds to his pride: realizing he cannot save Christ, realizing that all the ways he had thought to fight for what was right had failed, and realizing that he could not even trust himself to be loyal to his dearest friend.  Then, suffering on account of love: enduring hardship for the sake of the One who saved him.  The first kind of suffering brings grief; the second brings joy.

I think Christ acknowledges the grief that accompanies death to self, and I think He understands our need to mourn this death.  When Peter heard the cock crow, he wept.  There is no escaping the wounding of our ego, the recognition of our dependence on others, the acknowledgment that we cannot control our circumstances or even wholly understand ourselves.  

But then Christ calls us to transform this death to self into self-gift of love.  Don't languish in the mourning of your own incompetency.  Christ has taken your inadequacy and transformed it into Himself.  He has saved you, and if you give your wounded pride to Him He can restore you.  Die to self, and Christ can live in you, and in Christ's life in you you will find joy.

Day 37: Neither Do I Condemn

All sin is akin to adultery, because it all involves taking what rightfully belongs to God and giving it to other 'gods.'  All sin is breaking covenant with God.

Thus when Jesus forgives the adulteress in John 8, He is really forgiving all of us.  We stand with that adulteress, who has given herself to men who are not her covenanted spouse.

Of course He is also telling the scribes and Pharisees that they are adulterers, like the woman they are prepared to stone.  But He is also offering them forgiveness, just as He offers the adulteress forgiveness.  In forgiving the adulteress, He forgives us all.

He is the only one who has the right to throw a stone, for He is the sinless one.  He, after all, is the cuckold.  Hear God's cry of rage against His faithless spouse in Ezekiel 15.  But in Christ this rage has gone: all that is left is compassion and mercy.  The cuckold does not abandon His adulterous wife.  Neither do I condemn you. . . It is a moment of reconciliation.  Christ is fulfilling God's promise to "remember the covenant He has made" and to "make atonement" for all His faithless wife has done.  It is in accordance with this remembrance of His mercy that Christ declares the woman innocent of her crime.  He is not simply declaring this woman innocent; He is declaring His people innocent.

This Gospel is paired with the story of Susanna in the Book of Daniel.  Susanna is innocent, unlike the woman in John's Gospel. But remember: in John's Gospel Jesus' words pronounce the adulteress innocent despite her guilt.  In both tales, innocent blood is spared.  Susanna is innocent of wrongdoing according to the Law, but the adulteress is innocent because of Christ's gracious action on her behalf.  

The fact that the elders in Susanna's story are the ones who are truly guilty - the true adulterers - underscores Jesus' implication about the scribes' and Pharisees' unfaithfulness.  The desire of the scribes and Pharisees to find a trumped-up charge to bring against Jesus also parallels the perjury of the elders in Susanna's case.  The point is clear: when we pass judgment on and condemn others, we perjure ourselves.  Because in the act of judging others, we imply that we are innocent - that we are "sinless" - when we are not.  We are all complicit in each other's crimes.

When we judge others, we second-guess the God who has refused to condemn them.  We put our judgments before God's.  One of the worst sins is smug self-righteousness.  Such self-righteousness can be found both in those who moralize and impose their codes of behavior on others, and in those who take refuge in God's promise of forgiveness as an excuse to persist in sinfulness.  The devil is at work in this, again using things that are good - moral judgment, trust in God's mercy - and turning them to his evil purposes.  The only cure is in humility: an awareness of ourselves as we truly are before God.  Only when we are humble will we have the clearness of vision to condemn the sin (both in ourselves and others) out of love for the sinner (both ourselves and others).  

Day 36: And Jesus Wept

The Mass is a re-presentation of salvation history.  The story of redemption encapsulated for our participation in it.

In the Eucharist we witness the Incarnation: Christ born again in a piece of bread.  He offers Himself - the Word of God - in Scripture and in the sacred meal we share.  He dies again when we receive Him - descends into the bowels of our own sinfulness, dies like the seed that must give its life so that we may live.  And He rises again in us, when we, now part of His Body, go forth to be His hands and feet and eyes and ears in the world.

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Today's readings are astonishing.  The Gospel contains that famous verse: And Jesus wept.  Et lacrimatus est Iesus, says the Vulgate.  The passive form in the Latin emphasizing the helplessness of Jesus in the face of His sorrow.  Jesus was made to have wept.  

Yet Jesus was not helpless in the face of this despair.  Why should Jesus weep?  He knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead.  He says to His Apostles: This illness is not to end in death.  Yet Lazarus does die.  The point is that, though the illness will not end in death, the illness must bring Lazarus through death: Lazarus must die before He can be raised.  And this death is still something that causes Christ sorrow.  Christ does not offer the grieving sisters any blithe platitudes.  Christ is perturbed at their grief.  Christ weeps with them.

The faith and loyalty of Martha and Mary are put here to an awful test.  Already they have been tempted, perhaps, to anger that Jesus did not do more to save their brother.  They bring Him their reproach: if you had been here, our brother would not have died.  Yet they also never lose faith in Him.  Despite His apparent neglect of them, they still offer Him their love and faith.  Their interaction with Jesus is a model for us.  God welcomes us to share our sorrows with Him, to ask our questions.  Why did this have to happen?  Where were you, God, in the midst of this tragedy?  But the sisters invite us to share their faith: they trust that, somehow, the will of God will take place.  They do not ask Jesus to raise their brother: they simply say, Whatever you ask of God, God will give You.  They put their sorrows and their questions and their fears into Christ's hands, and entrust their fates to Him.

Jesus' prayer at Lazarus' tomb is a model for us as well.  I thank You for hearing Me.  I know You always hear Me.  Can we make this prayer our own?  Can we know that God hears us, even when He seems to be silent?

The faith of the disciples, too, plays a role in this tale.  The story is bracketed by the disciples' fear for Jesus' life: if He goes to Bethany, so near to Jerusalem, He risks being stoned to death.  They try to talk themselves and Jesus out of going to Bethany.  Fear of the death makes them afraid to seek God's glory.  But Thomas utters the words: Let us also go to die with him.  Thomas' words follow Jesus' Let us go to him, meaning Lazarus.  Thomas demonstrates his willingness to follow Jesus on His life-giving mission, even if it means his own death.  When Jesus asks us to go sacrifice our lives for the Lazaruses of this world, can we say with Thomas: Let us also go?

Make Jesus' tears our own: weep at the injustice of death, weep with compassion for those who mourn.  Make the words of Martha and Mary our own: If you had been here. . . but whatever you ask of God, God will give you.  Make the words of Jesus our own: I thank You for hearing Me.  I know You always hear Me.  Make the words of Thomas our own: Let us also go to die with You.  Know that God hears our sorrow and our pain, and follow Jesus into the depths of that sorrow, trusting that He will bring out of it life and joy.

Day 34: Guilt Like Love

The problem with excessive guilt over sin is that it holds us back from the only thing that can work to conquer sin: loving and joyful action.

It is a trick of the devil to use something so laudable – a sense of contrition about sin – for evil purposes – to prevent us from doing good in the world.  We must not let a sense of guilt for what we’ve done wrong keep us so mired in self-centered despair that we do not do the good we can do.

Make no mistake: guilt in and of itself is not bad.  The Church has been accused of fostering guilt in people, and so the Church should.  Without guilt, we are content to continue sinning.  Indeed we lose all sense of sin and responsibility for our sins.  But healthy guilt is an impetus to good action.  It impels us to act in ways to combat sin.  It strengthens our resolve to do what is right.  It helps us to see our distance from God and urges us to move closer to Him.

But guilt that is not tempered by a sense of God’s mercy, guilt that is focused inward – on our evil – and not on God’s goodness, is unhealthy.  This kind of guilt makes us so afraid of our sins that we are afraid to act.  It makes us fear ourselves so much that we feel any step we take will lead to a fall. 

Unhealthy guilt is born of hatred – self-hatred.  Healthy guilt is born of love – love of God.

Every day I pray for God to reveal my sins to me.  Because I know that they are there, whether I have the insight to acknowledge them or not.  But I pray for this not because I long to feel despairing and despondent about myself.  I pray for this because I know that my sins are keeping me from God, and I do not want to be kept from God.  I love Him and I want to be as near to Him as I can.  I want Him to reveal to me anything that is keeping me from Him, especially my own sinfulness, so that I can work with Him to remove them from my heart.

If you pray like this, pray too to have the courage to face yourself as you really are.