A Place of Welcome and Love

Dear Friends, 

There are plenty of Christmas pictures that depict Mary and the baby. There are not so many that feature all three members of the new family. In those scenes, Joseph usually stands in the background or to the side. He looks watchful and reliable. We can imagine him as a protector and provider. He can handle visitors and the curious animals. He looks like a respectable older man. He does not look like an excited new father.

The picture above is a still from the film The Nativity Story (2005). I love this scene. I sense deep warmth and energy among the three figures. Look at Jesus’ little hand in the air, lightly held by Mary. Look at the gaze of Mary and Joseph, two new parents overcome with love for their baby and each other. They’ve negotiated the difficult early days of pregnancy and marriage. Late in Mary’s pregnancy, they have left home and traveled rocky roads to Bethlehem. Their happiness is visible and tangible. Their loving touch links them and the child into a joyful trinity.

This year’s Christmas joy is threatened by the same forces that threatened the holy family. Wars and rumors of wars. Poverty. Frightening natural disasters. Violence born out of despair and hatred. Shifts in world leadership. Quarrels among former allies. Challenges to organized religion. 

When we enter the circle of the nativity scene we are welcomed to a place where love exists and love matters. Mother, father, and child reach out to us and we pray with them for a mending of this broken world.

Peace for you this Christmas.

Susan Schantz SSJ

The Joyful Coming of Our God

Dear Friends,

Christmas is a scant 10 days away. In today’s first reading from Zephaniah, we are reminded that God delights in coming to us. Our Mass translation is rather restrained: “He will sing joyfully for you,” it reads. But translations closer to the Hebrew assures us that God dances, twists, turns with shouts of joy for us.

God is like Gene Kelly in that famous dance sequence from “Singing in the Rain.” God is like King David, dancing in the streets because the Ark of the Covenant was being carried into Jerusalem. God is like the cripple in the Acts of the Apostles. Cured by Peter and John, Luke tells us the newly cured man took a tentative step and then another. Realizing what an astounding gift he had been given, the man began to leap into the air with shouts of joy.

Our God is not a reluctant God who comes because we need to be saved. In fact, Our God can’t wait to send His Son to our age, our time and place, our special moment in history. Sure, Christmas is our celebration of God’s coming, but it is also a celebration of God’s belief in human worth. We are not the only ones who dream of being loved and accepted. God dreams of being loved and accepted by us.

One of our great human weaknesses is to believe that we are not worth the coming of our God. We are bogged down not only by the very real weight of sin, but also by the suspicion that sin is winning out in us and in our world. Our secret wants and angers, the secret scorn or dislike we carry, the hidden scars we carry are so well known to us, so big in our eyes, that they override any good we feel about ourselves. We may not like ourselves for what we’ve said or done to others, the demands we’ve made, the pain we’ve inflicted. Secret shame can isolate us to the point that we say, “if they only knew what I am really like, they wouldn’t like me.”

We beat on ourselves.

But just as the father ran to meet his dejected prodigal son in Luke’s Gospel, so God runs to meet us.

Christmas, coming soon to your home and your heart, is the feast of God running to meet us, bearing Love Incarnate. Come as far as you can, God says to us. I will meet you the rest of the way.

That surprising insight, if we can grasp it, can stir up in us immeasurable joy. God wants us, loves us and holds us close.

Finally, be like God this week. Rejoice over someone, actively, tenderly. Say to the people closest to us:

Thank you.

I love the way you did that.

You are so good.

I appreciate you so much.

To speak words of appreciation to others, to let them see joy in us because of them is to echo God at Christmastime…God – who says to us – “I love you…You are special to me.”

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Clear the Roads

Dear Friends,

John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah:

A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The winding roads shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Isaiah 4

In this Gospel for the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist calls for roads to be cleared, rough ways smoothed and mountains levelled. This call touches me more deeply this year because of the Thanksgiving snow storms in New York State.

The media shared the storm with everyone, so that even if our road was clear, we watched plows push through drifted highways. We saw drivers skid and slide and creep along because of snow and ice. We watched residents dig their way out the front door and clear sidewalks for others. We looked on as Bills spectators and two teams cheerfully coped with snow and a slippery field.

John’s words are a call to individual believers. We are familiar with our individual crooked roads and blocked paths. Our way may be blocked by discouragement and addiction. Loss or illness may throw us off the road or make it difficult to care for ourselves and others. A betrayal by a loved one may leave us broken down by the side of the road, in need of help.

John’s call is also a call to communities. A family may need to refresh their ways of reaching each other. A parish may be stuck in practices that block membership or community. A nation may need to reconsider exclusionary regulations that block the path for new citizens.

This Advent, let’s ask ourselves: What closed roads need to be opened? What crooked ways need to be straightened?

~ Susan Schantz SSJ

Looking Up and Looking Around

Dear Friends,

The season of Advent begins today. We usually think of Advent as the entrance to Christmas, but Advent has a distinctive character of its own. One of its themes can be summarized in two phrases:

Look up and look around.

These are two seemingly simple but actually difficult ways of living that Advent calls us to remember and practice.

In today’s responsorial Psalm we pray:

Make me know your ways, O Lord,

And teach me your paths. (Psalm 25.4a)

How will we know God’s ways and paths, if we don’t look up and look around? As a culture, it seems we have lost our daily breadth of vision. The ever-present in-our-hands cell phone makes us look downwards. People, old and young, walk down the street or in stores with eyes fixed on their phones. They sit at tables having a meal with others, while casting frequent glances at their phones, all the while missing the drama, joy and maybe even the goodness of life around them.

Arriving a little early for Mass, we tend to fold inward. We don’t see the stranger from another country who has recently arrived and is seated next to us. We don’t even say hello to friends seated nearby. In defense of our not paying attention to them, we say that we are in church to focus on God. True. But when we have a larger vision, we also embrace God within our neighbor.

Listening to people talk about the way they came to the voting booth in November, pocketbook issues were primary. I understand that. But was there room in our concern and our thinking for the big picture? Seeing more than our own needs can happen only when we look up or look around.

Next week, the prophet Baruch will alert the people to look up: “See your children gathered from the west and east.” (Baruch 5.5) In the Gospel, John the Baptist will appear, his preaching offering people a future beyond their imagining.

In the third week of Advent, we will again see John, this time looking up to see Jesus, coming to be baptized. Afterwards, Jesus looks around him, sees a desert and makes his way there, in order to keep his vision big enough to embrace everyone.

And finally on the fourth Sunday of Advent, we will see Mary and Elizabeth, meeting in joy because of the children they carried. Each could have been self-absorbed in her own joy, but as they looked at each other’s face, they knew, felt, intuited a bigness that was beyond them.

There we have it: each Sunday of Advent offering us a pathway to follow if only we look up and look around.

How about lifting our eyes, hearts and vision throughout this last month of the year to see the world in a deeply spiritual way, while a secular, end-of-the-year cultural celebration of Christmas would have us too distracted to do so.

Then, Christmas Day, when it finally comes, will become what it truly is, namely the beginning of realizing the many ways God-with-us surrounds us daily with love.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Come to the Table

Dear Friends, 

We think about tables around Thanksgiving time. This year, whether we eat at a crowded table or at work or alone, let us name our past meal companions. Reach back to the tables of your past. Remember that everything happens at the table.  

Here is a poem by Joy Harjo, our first Native American poet laureate.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

~ Susan Schantz, SSJ

https://www.poetrycenter.org/at-table-poems-inspired-by-us-poet-laureate-joy-harjo/

Being Saved Together

Dear Friends,

Is there anything important in life that we have not received from someone else?

As much as we like to think so, the totally independent person does not exist. True, we make individual choices, perform independent actions and create newness in science, culture, business and more, but at the core of our lives, we are interdependent. In other words, I do not exist without a we. Today’s readings assume that interdependent people will be saved together.

Popularizations of Christianity focus on “Jesus and me.” The teachers of this way of thinking propose that our personal relationship with Jesus is all that really matters. Individuals as well as groups fight against the notion of being saved together. Some would rather be lonely than to be bound to others. Others of us fear being so lost in a community that our own personal efforts go unnoticed, unvalued. Still others fear that, in carrying others, we might get swept away ourselves. But we know differently.

So much of the history of our church has emphasized personal sin and personal salvation. In many ways, our church continues to foster these viewpoints. But there is communal sin as well as personal sin – the subtle or increasingly overt ways that society has of demeaning, denying, dehumanizing and destroying people. Sexism, classism, racism, spun out to the edges of life!

Communal sin is a reality. It thwarts compassionate thinking and action. It denies others the good we claim as our own. Only when individuals reject communal sin and move toward true reconciliation with others that salvation becomes possible for all of us in our time.

Today’s readings from Daniel and Mark tell us that as interdependent people, we will be saved together, not without suffering and misery, but ultimately, we will be saved together. It’s easy to recognize disaster. It is more important to frame that disaster in the hope God offers us is only together that God and we will overcome the threatening darkness.

The Letter to the Hebrews encourages us to

hold fast to the confession of our hope
without wavering,
for the One who has made us
a promise of life is faithful. (Hebrews 10.11-14,18)

As we make our way in life, we have a God upon whom we can depend.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Widow's Offering

Dear Friends,

Let us consider the gospel reading from Mark 12 that is assigned for Sunday November 10, 2024.

In the course of his teaching Jesus said to the crowds,
"Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes
and accept greetings in the marketplaces,
seats of honor in synagogues,
and places of honor at banquets.
They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext,
recite lengthy prayers.
They will receive very severe condemnation."

He sat down opposite the treasury
and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury.
Many rich people put in large sums.
A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents.
Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them,
"Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more
than all the other contributors to the treasury.
For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth,
but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had,
her whole livelihood."

The story of the widow’s gift is familiar to us. Often our preachers focus on her generosity. They remind us to live and give in the same manner. When this story is read at the time of a giving campaign, it may be used to encourage donations. Some homilists overlook the story’s setting, audience and larger context. A much deeper reading is possible.

In this section of Mark, Jesus berates those in religious and political authority who place unjust burdens on the poor. Jesus condemns predatory and exploitative laws and systems. This is not a speech about personal generosity. Here, Jesus is concerned with morality of systems and organizations.

When we reflect on Sunday’s reading, let’s widen our focus. With the widow and the disciples, let’s take in the surroundings. With them let’s ask ourselves some questions. What are the unjust systems we see? Where are we called to generous service? Where are we called to courageous change?

~ Susan Schantz, SSJ