An Easy Yoke

"Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  

Yes , my yoke is easy and my burden light."

Matthew 11:29-30

The Pharisees referred to the Law as a yoke, literally a wooden frame placed over the necks of two oxen to draw a plow.  The quality of ease and lightness that Jesus offers does not consist of a lower level of ethical demand.  Obeying the Law is made easy by our relationship with Jesus and the sense of being grasped by the love of one who is gentle and humble of heart.  Jesus' interpretation of the Law also gives priority to engagement of the heart and promotion of relationships over purely ritual and external prescriptions. 

As we grow in our intimacy with Jesus he is able to share his goodness with us.

St. Paul and St. Peter

Today is the feast day of the two pillars of the Church.  Since Paul is my patron, let me concentrate on him.  One passage I like a lot and one of his most powerful, a terrific example of classic rhetoric, is in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. He has been criticized by some other Christian preachers for being too weak. Beginning in chapter 11, verse 21 he boasts of all that he has done, suffering, weakness, ecstatic visions,  "a thorn against his flesh." 
Of the last he says that he pleaded with Christ to take it away, but Christ told him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." (12:9)  Paul answers his critics, "That is why I am glad of weaknesses, insults, constraints, persecutions and distress for Christ's sake.  For it is when I am weak that I am strong."
As we realize and accept our weaknesses God's grace can work better in us.
The picture is my favorite corner in the house.  I just got up from there to write here what I was thinking about St. Paul.

Centering Prayer

When you pray, go into your inner room and close your door to pray to your Father who is in secret.  And your Father who sees in secret will pay you back.

Matthew 6:6

It looks like Covid-19 is with us for yet a while.  I mentioned centering prayer when we started isolating ourselves, but most of what I have done in this blog has been about meditating on the Bible (lectio divina.)  We begin that by using our head.  Centering prayer is a prayer of the heart.  Here are four recommended steps.

1. Choose a sacred word as a symbol of your consent to God's presence and action within you.

2. Sitting comfortably with eyes closed, settle yourself briefly, and silently start saying your chosen word as the symbol of your consent to God's presence and action within you.

3. When you become aware that you are thinking of something, return ever so gently to your sacred word.

4. At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a few minutes.

When I began centering prayer forty years ago I could do it for only 5 minutes, but within a month I could do it for 20 minutes.  I didn't want to go any longer than that, so I began setting an alarm.  Two books that were helpful were Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart and Basil Pennington's Centering Prayer.

Churches Opening

The Catholic Churches in Mountain Maryland (Allegany and Garrett Counties) are opening for Mass this weekend.  The pastors and staff had to do a lot of preparations.  Those taking part in Mass are asked to please follow whatever directions they are given to safeguard themselves and the others gathering for Mass.
We pray that everything goes well and that all will be safe.
We pray also for those who have died of Covid 19 and for their families.  We pray for those who are sick.  We pray for health care workers.  We pray for those who are having a hard, and even abusive,  time quarantining at home.
Because of my age and my health I will not be celebrating Mass for a good while yet. 

My Brother's Keeper

"Am I my brother's keeper?" a man quoted this Scripture passage to me recently to prove from the Bible that he didn't owe anybody anything.  Every once in a while when I would preach on social justice, someone would quote this to me. I awoke this morning with the quote going through my head, so I used Genesis 4:1-16 for meditation today.
Cain has just killed his brother Abel.  God comes looking for Abel and asks Cain where he is.  Cain's flippant reply is "Am I my brother's keeper?"  God doesn't honor the smart aleck remark with the  answer which is clearly "Yes." He kicks Cain out of Paradise.
This passage isn't aimed just at those rich people who think they deserve what they worked for.  So what is God saying to us.  In this time of the virus one message is that I must protect my brothers and sisters  by something as simple as wearing a mask and keeping my distance.  Being more generous by sharing what I have more than I might usually do.  Favoring programs that care for the poor and sick and exiled.

Who ya gonna love?

I haven't had internet service since Sunday morning.  My phone also was unreliable.  Turns out some towers were down in our area, but I don't know why that would affect both internet and phone.
Well, Monday I meditated on Matthew 10:37-42 which is this coming Sunday's Gospel. Of the warnings and advice that Matthew collects here, the verse I found most poignant was, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.  And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." When I was little I couldn't imagine loving God better than my mother and father.  As I grew older I was able to make some sense of the warning, but I also grew convinced that if someone didn't love their parents and relatives, they couldn't possibly love God.  Someone once told me that I love God only as much as the person I love the least.  I hope that's not true, but if we don't love people, we won't call attention to the Good News as Jesus wants us to.
This coming weekend the Catholic churches in Mountain Maryland are opening for Mass.  We are seeing an upswing in Covid 19 cases in some places where churches have opened.  Use you head.  Be cautious.  I will not be celebrating Mass for the foreseeable future.

Happy Fathers' Day

Parents, never drive your children to resentment 

but bring them up with correction and advice inspired by the Lord. 

Ephesians 6:4

Our image of God in heavily influenced by the way our fathers and mothers treated us.  When they have loved us and cherished us, we are comfortable with God who loves us and cherishes us.  We feel sure of God, we know that we can trust God with our life.  

If one or the other or both punished us severely we grow up afraid of God as someone who cannot be trusted.  We also may are very judgmental of others.  Some may even turn away from God entirely. 

A book I just finished reading named Good Goats: Healing Our Image of God, can help us to  understand how we come to our image of God and to find ways to heal it.

Summer Solstice

I got up this morning at six so I could get a picture of the rising sun on the summer solstice.  The fog was so thick I couldn't see beyond the shore line.  Then I read that the earliest sunrise is often a few days earlier than the solstice.  Maybe the sunrise that I posted Wednesday.  So here's a somewhat different picture of that.

Psalm 19 is one of my favorites.  I used it for meditation today.  C.S. Lewis thought it was the most beautiful of all the psalms.  The name used for God is El, an ancient Near-Eastern name for the high god.  The Hebrew word for sun has the same root as the name of the Babylonian sun god.  It may be that the psalmist has taken poetic elements about the Babylonian god to show that the Hebrew God is the creator of the sun.  In other words, "Our God made your god!"  Here are verses 4-6:

There at the rim of  the world

God has pitched a tent

for the sun to rest and  rise renewed

like a bridegroom rising from bed,

an athlete eager to run the race.

It springs from the edge of the earth,

runs its course across the sky

to win the race at heaven's end.

Nothing on earth escapes its heat.

Heart for Love

Today is the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  When I was little I was fascinated by a picture on my grandmother's living room wall of just two hearts, that of Jesus and Mary.  They were shaped like real hearts, not like the one in the picture above.  One had a crown of thorns around it and the smaller, I think had a sword through it.  My family told me that was to show me how much Jesus and Mary loved me.
The second reading for today's Mass is 1 John 4: 7-16, a passage I refer to frequently.  The author says that if we are loving people that's a clear sign that we are children of God because "God is love."  God's very nature is love.  If we love one another it shows that God lives in us. "Those who remain in love remain in God, and God remains in them."  These verses have become a touchstone for the centrality of Christian love for all persons.
So it isn't that God tells us that we have to love all those who are different from us.  It's simply that love flows from God through us to everyone, no matter what their color or race or nationality.

New Adam

The blossoms on the rhododendron have come and already gone
In Romans 5:12-15 St. Paul begins an analogy between Jesus and Adam.  Jesus brings new life to the world the way Adam brought death.  Since we no longer regard Adam as an historical figure,  scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson uses him as a symbol, "Everyone has sinned the way Adam did, so that the effect of Adam's sin continues, and continues to be symbolized by the death experienced by all humans."  The Risen Christ, like a new Adam, stands at the beginning of the new creation and brings obedience, new life and grace. He has redeemed believers not from one single sin but from the power of sin and death.

Speaking Out

5:30 AM, June 17, 2020

Now there's some good news: beautiful, beautiful way to be awakened.

The prophet Jeremiah (20:10-13) had lots of bad news that God expected him to announce to the people.  Even though it was true, he was hated and persecuted for it.  Jesus tells us  three times not to be afraid to tell people what God expects of them (Matthew 10:26-33.)   Most of us are reluctant to speak out.  When I read about Hitler's time or see movies about it, I wonder how the priests and bishops who did speak out decided that "now is the time."  

More Than Many Sparrows

A book I got a lot of comfort from in my later years in the seminary was called More Than Many Sparrows.  The quote comes from this coming Sunday's Gospel reading, Matthew 10:26-35.  The author of the book, if I remember correctly, took the verse out of the context of this Gospel and used it simply to stress how precious we are in God's sight.  Not even a sparrow dies without God knowing it and we are worth more than many sparrows.  Luke and Mark each use it in different contexts also.  Elizabeth Johnson, in a passage I just read this morning, uses it to point out God's intimate care of all creation.  I will never hear it without simply being comforted that God is constantly looking out for me.
The little fellow in the picture is a song sparrow who has an absolutely beautiful song.  In the picture he is eating the supper I fed him after he sang for it.

Life-changing

On our retreat last week one of the questions for reflection was: "When have you had an experience of coming to know Jesus in a different way?  What effect did it have on you?"  For me it was discovering unearned love in a book I read in the early 1970's by James Burtchell named Philemon's Problem.  I am sure that I had heard of God's gracious love in Catholic school and in seminary and had probably even preached on it during the ten years that I had by then been a priest.  But it had never sunk in until I read this book.  One paragraph got to my heart (forgive all the male references:)
"Unlike ourselves, the Father loves men, not for what he finds in them, but for what lies within himself.  It is not because men are good that he loves them, nor only good men that he loves.  It is because he is so unutterably good  that he loves all men, good and evil. He loves sinners, He loves the loveless, the unloving, the (for unaided us) unlovable.  He does not  detect what is congenial, appealing, attractive, and respond to it with his favor.  Indeed, he does not respond at all.  The Father is a source.  He does not react; he initiates love.  His is motiveless love, radiating forth eternally.  And because it is creative, it originates good rather than rewarding it  Augustine had this divine priority in mind in his aphorism, 'In loving me, you made me lovable.'"
That passage changed my spiritual life from effortful to effortless.  From then on I felt like I was floating through life.  Forty-five years later I am still unpacking all that it means to have a God who loves us not matter what.

Eating and Drinking

My flesh is true food

and my blood is true drink.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood

remains in me and I in them.

John 6:55-56

Going further than St. Paul's writing about a "meal," John is very vivid in the language he uses.  Most of us have not eaten Christ's flesh and drunk his blood for three months.  That eating and drinking is much missed, but we still "remain" in Jesus in Jesus "remains" in us.  

Eucharistic Meal

Because the loaf of bread is one, 

we, though many, are one body, 

for we all partake of the one loaf.

 1 Cor 10:17

What I miss most during this time of the virus is gathering around the altar table with the community of believers.  St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that the purpose of the Eucharist is to build up the community of the Church.

Because of my age and my health, I have made the decision to wait a lot longer before I gather with the community either in church or in the yard.  

The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

Love Who love us, please heal our world.
May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, come down upon us and remain with us forever.
Monday through Friday this week I am making my annual retreat with seven other priests, my support group.  I probably won't have time to work on this blog.
We are still not having Mass in the yard on Saturday.

Relationships

I have a good copy of the above icon that I use to start my centering prayer in the morning.  Starting on the right, I address, "Holy Spirit, Jesus, Father, Love, in You I live and move and have my being.  Each day You show me that You are gracious Love."  A few short prayers and then, "You are Love with Whom I love You."
Trinity is a name that points to God as an eternal communion of self-giving love.  God is relationships.  Love relates to me as Energy that is always powering evolution and as Beauty that astonishes me everyday.  Love became a human being like me and carries my humanity and all humanity into the Divine.  Love within me relates me to every other person and creates unity in the Church and among all human beings.
For the last several years this way of looking at the Trinity has helped me grow in my relationship with God.  In past years other images and metaphors helped me.  In the years to come I don't doubt that other ways of looking at God may help me grow.  It is important to our spiritual growth that we leave ourselves open to the way that at this time in our lives makes the most sense to us. 

A Shamrock?

God is not a shamrock.  Nor is God two men and a bird.  God is not a father in any literal sense, nor a son, nor a spirit in any literal sense.  God is neither male nor female.  God is not even "god" in any literal sense.  Our word "god" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word meaning "day."
St. Thomas Aquinas said the only way we can talk about God is by analogy.  St. Augustine said, "When you have understood, then what you have understood is not God."  Words about God can only point rather than enclose.
We are sometimes afraid to talk about the Holy Trinity lest we end up in heresy.  Once we realize, however, that no ideas are adequate, that frees us up  to find images and metaphors and analogies that help us to get some glimmer of understanding that is essential for growing in our relationship with God.
This year's first reading for Trinity Sunday from Exodus 34:4-9 is a powerful reminder that the feast is about one God.  The earliest Christians began to talk about their experience of this one and only God in a three-fold way as beyond them, with them, and within them, that is, as utterly transcendent, as present historically in the person of Jesus, and as present in the Spirit within their community.  These were all encounters with only one God. 

A Holy Kiss

My favorite place in Greece was Delphi.  Many people came here to consult the Oracle.  What made it my favorite was the altitude.  I chose a hotel clinging to the mountain with a great view of the Gulf of Corinth.  The picture includes the city of Corinth and an enormous orchard of olive trees.  I have never had such delicious olives; they were almost sweet.
In the time of St. Paul it was a large and bustling city, apparently famous for its immorality.  At the very end of Paul's 2nd letter to the Corinthians (13:11-13,) we get only a hint of the difficulties Paul ran into with the converts there, fighting among themselves.  It is kind of reassuring that the kind of split that we find in the Church today was already happening in the late 50's of the first century.  Paul begs the Corinthians to let the kiss of peace be an expression of the loving concern for one another.
This is the only passage in this year's Trinity Sunday readings that refers to "three."  This early on the Christians did not have a developed doctrine of the Holy Trinity, but Paul expresses an awareness of relating to God in three ways.  Through Jesus the community has come to know the love of God that they may live in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, the source of their unity in Christ.  Just a glimpse!

Second Chance God

Since the three year set of readings for Mass was published in 1970, I have never paid this Trinity Sunday's reading any attention.  Even as recently as this past Sunday I din't intend to give it a second thought.  Then today I decided to use it for meditation. What a striking revelation!
From Exodus 34 we select only verses 4-9 for the Sunday reading, but it helps to know that when Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the Law which God had given him and found the Hebrews worshiping the golden calf, Moses was so angry that he threw the tablets on the ground and broke them.  So Moses gets two fresh tablets which God writes on and heads back up the mountain.  This fact alone signals a new relationship with God.
Elizabeth Nagel in her brief commentary points out that God's willingness to give the Hebrews a second chance indicates that the future of the divine-human relationship "would always depend not on human fidelity but on God's intense desire to live with humankind."
I understand that, out of respect for Jewish sensitivities, we no longer use the Divine Name, but it is sorely missed in this passage which captures all the awe the name inspires.  God passes before Moses and cries out, "Yahweh! Yahweh! a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and faithfulness."  Translating the Name as "I AM," as God does in chapter 3, we have God calling out a description of God's very Self.
Nothing here about "Three Persons," but a powerful statement about the One God. 
(Nagel's commentary is in the Workbook for Lectors.)

Mini-Gospel

God so loved the world 

that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him might not perish

but might have eternal life.

For God sent his Son into the world,

not to condemn the world,

but that the world might be saved through him.

(John 3:16-17)

"The world" usually has a negative meaning in John's Gospel; I've seen it translated as "the system."  Not so much in these verses.  God loves the world so much that God wants to be part of it.  The Son is the way God does this.  Incarnation (enfleshment) saves us.  Divine and human are united.  The other world and this world are knitted together.  The Son enables us to surrender in love to the Divine in us and around us.

The picture is last Tuesday's sunrise sky from my bed when I awoke.

Mother of the Church

This statue was on the site of the church of my childhood.
Today is the feast  of "The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church."  February 11, 2018, Pope Francis announced that this new feast could be celebrated the Monday after Pentecost.  This morning was the first I saw the prayers and readings.
The Gospel is a good one John 19:22-34, Mary at the Cross as Jesus says to the disciple whom Jesus loved, "Behold, your mother."  In John's Gospel Mary is a symbol of the New Eve, "the mother of all the living" (Genesis 3:20.)  The crucified Christ gives her to us the disciples whom Jesus loves as our Mother, the Mother of the Church.
Just like our country, the Church is seriously split.  We might ask Mary today to pray that we all will be united in her family, the Church.