The Cross: One Symbol With Many Different Meanings

Dear Friends,

Do you have a cross in your house?   Is it somewhere prominent, for you and all to see? Do your children and grandchildren know the true meaning of the cross in the scheme of life? When you are miserable with pain or grief, do you ever hold the cross in your hands? Kiss it?

Next Sunday, our Church celebrates the Triumph of the Cross. The only other time during the year that the cross is highlighted is Good  Friday, when it is solemnly carried through the church during the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion and the cantor sings:

Behold! Behold! The wood of the cross, on which is hung our salvation.

And the congregation responds:

O, Come let us adore.

To be sure, the cross is one of the most universally recognized religious symbols. At the same time, the cross is one of the most widely misunderstood of all symbols. On the one hand, some groups in society have adopted the cross as part of the shock jewelry they wear. For others, the cross is an instrument of execution. Sometimes, it makes people squirm. It might make us squirm, too. Maybe we would rather skip Good Friday and the cross altogether.  

For Christians who try to deepen and embrace faith in Jesus the Word made flesh, the cross is more than a symbol of execution. It is a symbol of redemption. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of love over hate, the triumph of faith over cynicism, the triumph of life over death.

Christians do a risky thing when we see this death of Jesus on the cross as an act of liberation, of deliverance, of conquest over the forces of bondage and death. Christians believe against all evidence that death is not the final word. Yet the cross reminds us suffering  and  death  were necessary to Jesus if Christ’s resurrection and our faith are to have any meaning.

The cross reminds us that God’s love does not protect us from all suffering. Rather, God’s love is a shelter in all suffering. In Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine, the Ebola ridden countries of Africa, maybe in our own neighborhood – wherever there is darkness, futility and meaninglessness, the God of the lost reaches out from the cross, inviting suffering people to dare to hope.  These women and men, boys and girls, who have no apparent advocates, are, in fact, sustained by God.

 If the purpose of Jesus’ life is to demonstrate God’s unconditional love for us, is there a more dramatic way than the cross?

Refining and Redefining Our World

Dear Friends,

Last Saturday, Our Sister Anita Kurowski made her final profession, and what a glorious, joyful occasion it was. Thank God for moments of hope and conviction like this. We need it as we find the world around us vastly disturbed by events in Iraq, Syria, the self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate, Ferguson, the Ukraine, and with the immigration issues needing attention and resolution. We are disturbed, too. Where are human rights and respect for one another? Where is the recognition that our world is held in the loving embrace of God and that we are at our best when we live as though that embrace matters?

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief, instructs the central text of Rabbinic Judaism called the Talmud.

Do justice now.

Love mercy now.

Walk humbly now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

The writings that eventually became organized into the Talmud about 200CE were well known to Jesus and, indeed, to Hebrews long before Jesus. They were key parts of the oral tradition that the Hebrews put into practice as best they could. We find a similarly worded call in Micah 6.8. Justice, humility and mercy were woven into the actions, teachings and spirit of Jesus

Perhaps a practice for this new month might be to read the Gospel, looking at how these three specific characteristics are exemplified on every page: What does the Gospel tell us about justice, mercy and humility?  How are they manifest and unquestionable in Jesus? What do other Gospel figures tell us, pro or con, about these virtues?

What must you and I  be and do, in our time and place, so that justice, mercy and humility refine and  redefine our world today? Do not abandon the work!
~Sister Joan Sobala

PS. Fresh Wind in Our Sails, the spirituality program of the Sisters of Saint Joseph is starting a new season.  Here are upcoming programs for Sept at the SSJ Motherhouse:

Tuesday, Sept. 16    10 – 11.30 am    How to Deepen Your Gifts for Mission Sr. Mary Lou Heffernan

Wednesday, Sept. 24   7 – 8.30 pm   Encouraging the New Immigrants Among Us

                            With Isabel Miller of Saints’ Place and Kathy La Bue of Mary’s Place

Consciousness of Labor

Dear Friends,

If I wait until next week, Labor Day will be over and we will not have talked about it.

So let’s bring it up in our consciousness this week, not as the official end of the summer season in upstate  New York, but for what it was in its origin more that 110 years ago. It came out of the struggle of working people to be treated with respect and dignity. If we are at all aware of the stories that make up global news, the struggle of workers is a work in progress.

I remember as a child, watching as my father participated in one particularly significant strike. Dad was a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna. He and his coworkers plugged along through World War II in less than satisfactory conditions. That was part of the American sacrifice that was made during those profoundly cohesive years. But after the war, they would take no more. The struggle for justice that took up most of the winter of 1945-46 was long-remembered in Lackawanna, but it paid off in the health, safety and security benefits won by the workers. The labor union had been at its best in those years.

Since then, labor has struggled all over our country and world so that people might live  with adequate wages and benefits. : farm workers, mine-workers, teachers in our land, the shipyard workers of Poland, the sweatshops of Asia.

Today, hold these people close:

·         Workers who face dangerous conditions or hazards without sufficient protection

·         All who face the conflicts of working and caring for children without adequate support

·         Workers who cannot find work and for whom unemployment assistance is unavailable

·         Women and children caught up in the sex trade

·         Workers displaced by technical change or global pressure to relocate jobs

·         Children whose childhood is cut short because they are forced to work

·         All who face discrimination in getting work or in the workplace itself because of  race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical disabilities

·         Workers whose work is taken for granted, is unappreciated or lacks meaning.

Hold them close and pray to the son of the Carpenter of Nazareth to remind all workers

( those named above, you and me, nameless others) that God  values human labor as sacred – a reflection of the very work that God does.  Through work, we bring light, beauty and renewal to our world.

Respect the Waters.

Dear Friends ,

How seldom we think about water, much less bless it.

Humanity can’t live without it, nor can animals or plants. Water is needed before food. The Yezidi driven to escape to the Sinjar Mountains in northern Iraq gave eloquent testimony to that fact. Think of the drought in Southern California. And don’t forget ”My water broke!”

In 1998, he mayor of Bethlehem told a group of travelers of whom I was part that if there were to be World War III, it would be fought over water. Precious  water.

Recently, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, couldn’t rely on their ordinary source of water from Lake Erie. It had been contaminated with algae blooms.

At the same time, water can destroy property. Consider Hurricane Sandy.
Every now and again, brilliant engineers try to reroute rivers. Silly  people. Eventually, rivers go back to where they were and need to be.

For years, the great Columbia River was smoothed of its rapids to the detriment of fish and animals that depended on them.. Reversal is happening. In parts of the Netherlands, the sea is being allowed to reclaim land that had been taken from it though people’s need and desire.

At a personal level, I can tell you that when I swim in Canandaigua Lake, instinctively I see it as my being held up in the waves of life by God. God is the lake.

On the second day of creation, God made the waters. After that, there are some 870 references to water in the Scriptures – positive references, such as “I will pour our water on the thirsty” (Is.44.3), and “the river of God is full of water” (Ps.65.9) and negative references, such as to the waters that devastated the land at the time of Noah (Gen.7.6 ff.) and  when as a guest at table, Jesus told his host “You gave me no water to wash my feet.” (Mark 9.41)

Today in our minds and daily usage, let us respect the waters. Respect water.

Let us bless the humility of water,                      Water: vehicle and idiom

Always willing to take the shape                         Of all the inner voyaging

Of whatever otherness holds it…                         That keeps us alive.

Water : voice of grief,
Cry of love,                                                           Blessed be water,

In the flowering tear.                                           Our first mother.

                                                                                                            excerpt from To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donohue

The Assumption of Mary

Dear Friends,

On August 15th, our Church celebrates the Assumption of  Mary .

The date, the feast, the meaning of it can escape us very easily. What does that have to do with my life in this world or my life of faith, for that matter?

More than we think. Here are some pieces of information and affirmation to use in making the feast one to celebrate and treasure.

Fact: The Assumption of Mary was declared a dogma of the Church in 1950. Something new in the Church’s teaching? Not really. From the earliest centuries, believers held that Mary’s body was not to be found buried in the earth, but that her body and soul had been taken up. Just as Jesus is the first fruit of the Resurrection, Mary is the first human person to be in that tradition.  A church was dedicated to the Assumption of Mary in Jerusalem in the 4^th century. The feast was observed in Rome by the end of the 7^th century . The post-Resurrection home of Mary in in Ephesus is still a place of pilgrimage today.

People have played with the meaning of Mary’s Assumption in all sorts of ways – playing to release its profound  meaning  for us in ways that can penetrate our obtuse limits.

For example, among our in-words today is “closure”. We put closure on our conversations, conferences, business dealings, and sometimes on our relationships. The opposite of closure is “without end.” Few things in life are without end. We say “I will love you forever (beyond death.) We pray to one God, world without end. It is the belief of the faith community that Mary is the first example of a human being who goes on without end… not in human memory alone but her very life, her very body, her spirit. There is no closure in the life of Mary.

When the Assumption of Mary was proclaimed a tenet of faith, the psychiatrist Carl Jung was delighted. Jung saw in this feast the Church’s belief that our bodies are part of our redeemed whole. Once in a while, it is good to remind ourselves that are human bodies are good and are redeemed even as our souls and spirits are redeemed : the bodies of our family members, babies, loved ones, wrinkled bodies that are given character through length of days, women’s bodies, men’s bodies, bodies that don’t seem to work very well, young and energetic bodies. They are all good and worthy of honor.

Contrast this way of thinking and living with the dishonor  we see in our contemporary world: carnage, pornography, sex slavery , the abuse of women and children. All of these and more tell us that human bodies are throwaways- worthless, “collateral damage,” for my use and abuse, a sales come-on. People the world over could turn this feast into an affirmation of the body’s goodness and to try making that a lasting, absorbing worldview.  

We Can Be The Light... The Hope, That Someone Needs.

Dear Friends,

Today, I want to think about the Transfiguration of Jesus with you. The liturgical feast of the Transfiguration is this Wednesday, August 6^th  (Matthew 17.1-9). Certain words come to mind when thinking of this significant event told in the Synoptic Gospels: radiance, awe in the apostles, the connectedness with Elijah and Moses, towering figures in the Hebrew tradition.. Jesus and his disciples were headed for Jerusalem, when they paused  at Mt Tabor. There Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. In Jerusalem, dire experiences would happen, including the passion and death of Jesus. Before the Resurrection, Jesus and his followers would need the strength of the Transfiguration to steady  themselves.

The experience of transfiguration is not just for Jesus, it is for us. We are called upon to witness to the transfiguration of Jesus, but also to witness to transfiguration in human life  and to help it happen, however we can.:

to be the radiance of Christ for others

            to be the voice of the Father of Jesus for others, saying to them “You are  my

                                               beloved.”

The antithesis of transfiguration is disfiguration, and so we come to August 6^th, 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped from the belly of the US airplane, Enola Gay, over the city of Hiroshima.

On that day, transfiguration gave way to disfiguration: devastation, death, horror,

disbelief. The face of God was scarred beyond imagination.  God’s beloved, the innocent ones were unrecognizable in the aftermath .  Its horror was underscored with death- dealing emphasis on August 9, when Nagasaki was bombed with an even stronger atomic bomb.

Today, we see the disfigurement caused in newborns whose mothers were on drugs, the distended bloated bodies of the starving in impoverished parts of the world, the wounded in war-zones, our own veterans.

People of good will do not inflict diabolical evil on others. But unless we are alert and God-centered, we can and do disfigure others  by our blindness to the radiance of Christ in them. On the other hand, we can use the power for good that we have. We can encourage people whose faces are disfigured by boredom, horrendous life experiences or masked with indifference. We can bring a glow of dignity to those who have been humiliated. We can speak words of hope and bring a realization of true worth to those whose faces reflect a belief in their own unimportance.

Transfiguration is a human venture today as well as the divine experience of Jesus in distant  Galilee over two thousand years ago. “Be attentive to it as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” (2 Peter 1.19)

Create Your Creed

Dear Friends,

Each weekend at Mass, Roman Catholics recite the Creed – either the more ancient Apostles’ Creed or the fourth century Nicene Creed. These are among the proclamations Christians hold dear, because they contain the basic elements of our faith.

In the years that I was teaching, or when groups have gotten together for a retreat, I have  asked  participants to write their own creed, not to supplant but to supplement the historic creeds. I’ve done this myself, producing a half dozen versions of a creed, as I’ve grown in consciousness of who God is, who we are and how human consciousness is expanding. Here’s one example. Take some time to write your own this summer. It need not contain every aspect of faith, but only those which are stirring in you at the moment. If you want to be even more daring, share it with someone.

                                    I believe God, Imaginative  Creator .

I believe Jesus, our Brother and Saviour.

                                    I believe the Spirit, moving over the chaos.

           

                                    They are the One that, with us, makes life here

congruent with life hereafter.

                                    I believe that a tool of this congruence is the church,           

                                                called to welcome the stranger,

                                                offer the sacraments.

                                                practice compassion

                                                and do justice,

                                    While on its way to becoming obsolete,

                                    Overtaken by the Kindom of God,

                                                replete with harmony,

                                                with every shadow gone

                                    And life lived in mutual embrace with a tender God.

                                    Amen.