"I hid my face from the saints and the angels . . ."

From one of my favorite artists and one of my favotite albums. Whenever I have "proved to live a dastardly day", I reach for this CD, this digital file and Jennifer's singing never fails to put me in touch with my Lord, Jesus Christ, who provides "A little more than I can give/A little more than I deserve".

Faith seeking understanding, or turning failure into success

It was a cloudy morning here along the Wasatch Front. The week before this week it seemed that fall was lurking. There is something about the slight northward drift of the sun in late summer that causes colors to change to brighter, crisper hues, a contrast to the kind of washed up and worn out colors of July and August, and morning begins to linger a bit. Then, this week, at least until today, it seemed summer again, with temperatures rising back up to and remaining in the 90s. It is my prayer that we receive some much needed rain today and over the holiday weekend.

I love the change of seasons. My two favorite times of the year are late spring and early fall. Of these two, I like early fall best. It really does remind me that to live is to change, no matter how much I resist. Our faith certainly changes as we move through the seasons of our lives. Like all change, these changes can be for the better or for the worse. I awoke this morning thinking of and praying for people who seem to be struggling both in life and with their faith. It dawned on me that most Christians, having had the need to be perfect, or to at least the need to appear to be perfect, both to others and to ourselves, taught to us from a very young age, often push God away when we are struggling and/or hurting. We seem to think that we have to get over this before we can return to God's good graces. This is not a Christian mode of living. It is no way to live; it is no way to love, or to allow ourselves to be loved.

God, to paraphrase St. Augustine, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is present to us always. I freely admit that discerning the divine presence in our lives usually requires us to look for it, to probe more deeply, to learn how God works, which is usually in quiet whispers and through other people. Very often we react to what happens to us; especially we are disturbed by sudden, unexpected disappointments. After our reaction, instead of owning it, we expend a lot of effort in seeking to justify, mostly to ourselves, that our course of action is what God would have us do, or, perhaps more often, by insisting, not without some justification, that we were incapable of any other response. In extreme cases our reactions can do a lot of damage to our relationships and, hence, to our ability to relate to others.

Solitude, by Marc Chagall

We must root ourselves in God by frequent reception of the Eucharist and the sacrament of reconciliation when needed, which, if we are honest, is probably more regularly than we now seek it. Prayer and scripture study, along with seeking counsel from wise people are also components of rooting our lives in God. Often the answers to our many queries are clear enough; it is just that we often do not like the answers. So, we go our own way, into great peril. However, even in such cases God does not abandon us. On the other hand, it is precisely because God loves us that we are not spared the pain and anguish of life.

Brain researchers have discovered that, paradoxically, or at least counter-intuitively (I have probably been trying to get too much mileage out of the word paradox lately), failure leads to success. Failure, which forces us to figure out what went wrong and to consider different courses of action, different responses, is a very good way for the brain to map new information. The ancient practice of examen, or, as I like to call it, praying backward through the day, the week, the month, the specific encounter, exists for this very reason. The sacrament of penance allows us to acknowledge our failures and shortcomings, receive forgiveness and the grace, which is our strength, to be better. After all in our Act of Contrition we say to God: "I firmly intend, with your help, to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin." Still, failure can be crushing and it is always disappointing. In God's eyes we may fail, but we are never failures. In life we never really fail until we give up, which is to lose hope, which is to fall into despair.

St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8,28). A better translation from the Greek is that all things "intermingle" for the good of those who love God. Note the qualification "for those who love God". This is not because God plays favorites in the mode of You love me. So, I will make sunshine out of rain for you. But for those who do not love me, watch out! What a petty, tin-pot, dime store God that would be!

Those who love God learn to look beyond the darkness of the present moment. Those who love God learn to find God in all people and in all events. Those who love God live in the hope, in the belief, which eventually becomes the knowledge, that God is never absent, even in the midst of great evil. Those who love God are humble enough to acknowledge their failures, to turn to God and to repent, which, in its original Greek is μετανοῖα (metanoia). Metanoia literally means a change of mind, or, even more precisely, a change of perception. It is useful to explore the Greek a bit more, with acknowledgement up-front that I am no scholar of koine Greek. μετανοῖα is a compound word consisting of the preposition, which transliterates into meta, meaning after, beyond, with, and the verb νοέω, which means to perceive, to think, or what results from perception and observation. In the context of our Christian faith, this change of mind/change of perception results in conversion. Conversion means to change from one state to another. In the English versions of the New Testament, μετανοῖα is normally translated as repent.

A look at The Gospel According to St. Mark is instructive:

"This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel."

καὶ λέγων ὅτι πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ: μετανοεῖτε καὶ πιστεύετε ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ.

(Mk. 1,15)

Seeing how all things intermingle for the good of those who love God results from two things: God's love for us ("In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins" 1 Jn 4,10) and from our love for God. This perception, which leads to a dramatic change in the way we perceive the world, our lives in this world, and other people, allows us to grow and to change. One sure way to get off on the wrong track with this insight is to merely believe that seeing the world through the eyes of faith is a mental trick, at the root of which is a refusal to grasp or deal with reality.

Let's face it, even for a Christian, life sucks at times. We are not required to give a phony smile and insist to others, to God, or to ourselves, that everything is great. Avoid this dangerous, dysfunctional trap! Our faith, this change in our perception that converts us, results in our seeing things as they really are and our grappling with reality in the confidence of knowing God loves us and that we love God. Our change in perception results from the shift in our perspective. This shift occurs when we acknowledge, not only the transitory nature of this life, but also our eternal destiny, which is the cause of our longing. Our longing, in turn, is the cause of our sense of incompleteness. It is to perceive things from this perspective that allows us to be the ones who point others toward the light of the world, Jesus Christ. This is what it means to be an apostolic Church. Nonetheless, this is no guarantee that we will not make a mess of things, or act in ways that are sinful, or even to fail to act at times. This brings us back to failure leads to success.

St. Paul draws these strands together beautifully a bit further on in his letter to the Christian community of Rome:

"Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. For by the grace given to me I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than one ought to think, but to think soberly, each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned. For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another" (Rom. 12,2-5)- emboldening and underlining mine

On this Friday, a day of abstinence and penance, our little Good Friday, which is followed by our little Easter, Sunday, let us each take some time and reflect on our lives before God and seek God especially in those parts of our lives and in those relationships from which He seems most absent. Then, let us reflect on how we might make God more present to these people and situations. Let us also ask ourselves two questions:

Is there someone I need to forgive?
Is there someone from whom I need to humbly seek forgiveness?
In light of those people for whom I awoke praying this morning, I urge married couples to ask these questions to themselves with their spouse in mind.

Trusting in God's infinite love for us

Writing about Psalm 91, which the devil quotes in a distorted manner to Jesus in tempting him to hurl himself off the parapet of the Temple, His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, observes: "If you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge. You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One who loves you."

He also reminds us that putting our trust in God "is something quite different from the reckless defiance of God that would make God our servant" (pg. 38). So, we must surrender our will to God's will, not as an act of self-abasement or resignation to fatalism, but out of genuine trust, born of love, like the trust we put in our parents as young children. We do so in the knowledge that God loves us and will never abandon us, no matter what. It is not too pie-eyed or superficial to trust, as Julian of Norwich trusted: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Neither should we seek, like pagans, to propitiate God in a cheap attempt to gain His favor so that nothing bad will ever happen to us. We do not need to do this because we live in the confidence of knowing that God already loves us, is always already on our side. While we do not need to propitiate God, we do recognize that, just as parents long to be loved by their children, to receive physical affection, such as hugs, and verbal affirmations of love, from them, "God thirsts to be thirsted after."

The Memorial of the Marytrdom of St. John the Baptist

Beheading of John the Baptist by Caravaggio, 1608

"Herod was the one who had John the Baptist arrested and bound in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, whom he had married. John had said to Herod, 'It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.' Herodias harbored a grudge against him and wanted to kill him but was unable to do so. Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man, and kept him in custody. When he heard him speak he was very much perplexed, yet he liked to listen -to him" (Mk. 6,17-20). Note Herod's strange fascination with this holy man. We also seem to have a strange fascination with holy people, like Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Abbé Pierre, et. al.

Perhaps, we have convinced ourselves, that we can never be like them. The good news is, we are not called be exactly like them, we are called to be ourselves, called by our baptism to holiness. So, while we may glean some good things from such people, the form of holiness we are called to pursue is unique. If there is one thing the lives of the saints show us is unity in diversity. This itself is an icon of the Blessed Trinity. The call to holiness is the call to love perfectly. We do this by striving to become who we already are, by the grace of God. To become our true selves, so to speak. Of course, one revered sign of Christian holiness is matryrdom, willingly laying down one's life for God and others as a witness to faith in Christ Jesus. On the liturgial calendar, we mark the memorial of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

Today also marks the second annivesary of Hurricane Katrina's striking of the Gulf coast and the devastation of the city of New Orleans, which showed us the huge and ever widening gap between rich and poor in this country. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while visting New Orleans, Franciscan Fr. Raniero Cantalmessa, preacher of the papal household, speaking to victims of this devastating storm, said: "A disaster like this is not a punishment but a warning for everybody that we should be vigilant and should not put all our trust in what can be taken away in one day, if not by the flood of water, then by the flood of time. Time passes and will take everything." These words link today's memorial with our lives in a sobering, yet joyful manner.

Eucharist and prayer on the Memorial of St. Augustine

"I thought I heard your voice from on high," writes St. Augustine, the great doctor of the Church, whose memorial is today, in his Confessions. What did Augustine hear this voice say? He thought he heard the words: "I am the food of grown men; grow then, and you will feed on me. Nor will you change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me." Indeed, being changed into Christ, becoming alter Christus, other Christs, and together constituting the totus Christus, the total, or complete Christ, with Jesus as our head, animated by the Holy Spirit, is what God calls us to. When pouring the water into the wine during Mass the priest or deacon says, sotto voce: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share our humanity." Augustine understood and articulated all of this beautifully, logically, and clearly.

Prayer and Eucharist are indispensable to this becoming to which God calls us through the waters of Baptism. To pray, we must open a space for God in our lives. This is nothing more than setting aside a regular time and a place to be with God. For God, Richard Foster assures us, "rushes at us at the first hint of openness. He places within us such an insatiable God hunger that absolutely nothing satisfies us except the genuine whole-wheat Bread of Life" (Foster Prayer 70). In this he seems to be paraphrasing Augustine's great words, which get a bit overused at times: "You inspire us, O Lord, to delight in praising you, because you made us for yourself; our hearts are restless until they rest in you." One of my favorite contemporary Christian groups, Jars of Clay, also express this in their song Sing: "I walk through flame, I touch the fire you know that I still burn for you/flood water rain crash down soak the ground still I thirst for you."

Once we have determined how we can fit regular times of prayer into our lives, into our busy schedules, "we must firmly discipline ourselves to a regular pattern of prayer" (Foster 4). The sad truth of the matter is that time for prayer will not magically turn up - "we must make time". (Foster 74). In order to do this we must "be ruthless with our rationalizations" (Foster 74). One pseudo pious trap we can all too easily fall into is the "always living prayerfully" trap. This rationalization simply seeks to convince us that our whole life is a prayer. Such an approach creates many complications, like how muttering obscenties under our breath, or, worse yet, shouting them out loud, as we are driving can possibly count as prayer! We may well, by the grace of God, reach the point at which we always live prayerfully, but we cannot use it as an excuse not to pray now. On this score Foster quotes John Dalrymple: "The truth is that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere" (Foster 74). To use an analogy, we can insist that every word we speak or write is poetry, even though we have never studied poetry, or sought to master its various forms. The truth of the matter is that we are not reciting poetry, we are just talking, or just writing. In order to write free verse well, one has to have mastered the forms. I think this is what Dalrymple is seeking to communicate.

St. Augustine writes prayerful poetry with these words: "I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace."

Year C, Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isa. 66,18-21; Ps 117,1-2; Heb. 12,5-7.11-13; Lk 13,22-30

Contextually, the subject of all three of today’s readings is the nation of Israel. In our first reading Isaiah prophesies of the time when the LORD will "come to gather nations of every language" (Isa. 66, 18). From among these nations the LORD will take some "as priests and Levites" (Isa. 66,20). Isaiah is seeking to communicate that it is through Israel that God enters into covenant with people of all races, languages, and nationalities. Put simply, the covenant is not given to Israel for its own sake, but for the sake of all humanity. It is to Jewish Christians that the entire letter to the Hebrews is addressed. Finally, in today’s Gospel when Jesus speaks of the first being last and the last being first, he is speaking of Israel and "the nations."

In our Gospel readings over these past several weeks, taken from St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has had some pretty uncomfortable words for us, just as Isaiah had for ancient Israel. In Luke’s narrative these passages are linked as part of Jesus’ only journey to Jerusalem, which ends with his passion and death. In these passages, as he begins the final days of his earthly ministry, our Lord speaks very directly. He is concerned that his message not be missed. His message is best summed up as "the reign of God is at hand" (Mk. 1,15). Jesus’ ushering in of God’s reign is the beginning of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

There is always a lot of speculation about who will be saved and who will not. Such speculation is usually pointless, unless it is self-directed. When asked the question, "Lord, will only a few people be saved," Jesus responds with the answer, "Strive to enter through the narrow gate" (Lk 13,23-24). This answer remains the answer to any inquiry about salvation. Of course, it prompts the question, how do we enter the narrow gate? The direct answer to this question is quite straightforward. We enter the narrow gate by loving God and loving our neighbor. In these two commandments, Jesus tells us, are contained the whole Law and all the prophets. However, it does not take much experience on our part to learn that, like many actions, loving perfectly is easier said than done.

In our second reading today, taken from the letter to the Hebrews, we read about enduring trials as discipline from the Lord. Whoever God loves, the author tells us, "he disciplines; he scourges every [child] he acknowledges" (Heb. 12,6). This is true of Israel, it is true for the Church, and it is true for each disciple. In recent days we have read much about Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s sense of being cut-off from God for many years of her life. So acute was her sense of abandonment that at one point she wrote to her spiritual director: "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear" (Time magazine Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith, by David Van Biema).


Nonetheless, while she was denied the comfort and consolation she so desired from the One to whom she had pledged herself with such great fidelity, she still found him in a thousand places, or, rather, in a thousand faces. For this great missionary of God’s love, as for any true disciple of Christ, it was impossible to say, "I love God, but I do not love my neighbor." According to Mother Teresa, it was in his dying on the Cross that God made "himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she continues, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. Jesus, her beloved, was not completely absent from her, a prayer she wrote proves this: "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive" Time magazine Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith,, by David Van Biema). My dear friends, Teresa recognized that Christ almost always comes to us as a fellow human being in a distressing disguise. "Our poor people," she said, "do not need sympathy; they do not need pity from us, they really need love and compassion" (Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center ). Today is the ninety-seventh anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth. Through her life she showed us that Jesus not only invites us to lay down our lives, but to them lay them down for him. Christian songwriter Michael Card sings about this beautifully:

“Every time a faithful servant serves a [another] that's in need/
What happens at that moment is a miracle indeed/As they look to
one another in an instant it is clear/Only Jesus is visible for they've
both disappeared” (Distressing Disguise).

In the novel Absolute Truths, by Susan Howatch, Martin Darrow, who has recently gone through a self-induced personal catastrophe, tells Bishop Charles Ashworth, who is himself in the midst of a personal crisis after his wife’s death, how good it is, when going through a difficult time, to have a frank conversation with "someone who's gone through hell lately." This leads Martin to comment: "It makes all the difference to know there's someone else screaming alongside you - and that's the point of the Incarnation, I can see that so clearly now. God came into the world and screamed alongside us."

Indeed, God did come into the world to scream alongside us. In his agony on the cross Jesus shouted these words from the twenty-second Psalm: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15,34). It is from this agony that we gain hope. Our hope resides in this God who brings life from death, but the journey from death to life is not painless.

So, how will Christ recognize us at our Judgment? One way will be by how we responded to the challenges we faced in this life. Another, perhaps more important criterion of recognition, will be the way we treated and cared for others, even in the midst of our own pain. Let us not forget what we read at the end of the same chapter of Hebrews from which today’s second reading is taken: "our God is a consuming fire" (Heb, 12,29). May we also keep in mind that God’s reign was not put on hold at Christ’s Ascension. Rather, ushering in the reign of God, preparing the wedding feast of the Lamb, of which this Eucharist is but a foretaste, has been entrusted to us until that day, when the last having been made first and the first last, we "recline at table in the kingdom of God" (Lk 13,29).

Abandonment, surrender, letting be

Recent revelations that Blessed Teresa of Calcutta endured a long period, lasting most of her life after her summons to serve the poor, of seeming divine abandonment that caused her to doubt at times, are nothing new. This became public knowledge shortly after her death. Besides, anybody who has read St. Thérèse of Lisieux's autobiography, The Story of a Soul, will have at least a general understanding, a framework within which to make some sense of what Blessed Teresa experienced and endured. Nonetheless, the media and various commentators are having a heyday with these revelations now that they have been published in a forthcoming book: Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

It is not my purpose here to address or even comment on the deepest, most intimate recesses of the soul of this incredibly holy woman, except to write that knowing this makes her all the more holy in my eyes because it allows me to identify to some very small degree with this very Christ-like person. For Blessed Teresa it was never about her, but always about the other, especially the most neglected and despised. She poured our her entire life, her very self, for those who the world literally kicked to the curb like so much trash. Being like Christ means just this: dying to one's self and living for God by living for others. To think otherwise is fall prey to a horrible and spirtually debilitating deception.

It bears mentioning that sometimes abandonment to Divine Providence means, well, (at least seeming) abandonment by God. With due acknowledgement to Joseph A. Komonchak, who posted this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins over on dotCommonweal, here is a poem on the matter. Hopkins, writes Komonchak, "suffered from dark nights, too, and wrote at least four poems while he was in the midst of them; they’re often called 'the Terrible Sonnets.' This is one of them, written, it seems, he was starting to come out of the dark":

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormenting mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping around my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather–as skies

Betweenpie mountains–lights a lovely mile.