Discovering Connectedness

 

Dear Friends,

It’s that season. The pruning of trees and vines is in process wherever the green grows.  Pruning is a necessary means to an end – to increase the yield – to bear more and better fruit. In the vineyards combing the Finger Lakes, this spring, workers with a professional eye, will go out to examine new shoots growing on the grapevines. The workers will decide which shoots hold the most  promise. The rest, they’ll snip away, so that the yield of grapes will be the best possible.

Pruning also helps people, although we don’t necessarily find the idea initially appealing. The story of Paul’s pruning is told in the  first reading for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (B Cycle). Paul has been pruned by his encounter with Jesus on  the road to Damascus, but the community is still suspicious of him. It takes  Barnabas – trustworthy Barnabas-to  introduce Paul to the community, and graft him onto the vine. The graft took.

One attribute people associate with pruning is a certain meekness – a diminishment of zest or feistiness. But Paul was never meek – before or after his conversion. Meekness is not the purpose of pruning.

The Gospel of the Fifth Sunday takes the pruning metaphor a step further, for it is also absolutely necessary to be connected to the vine. We are connected to Christ. We are connected to each other. Yet connectedness is an incredibly hard lesson for Americans, in particular, to internalize.

Robert  Bellah observes in his  classic, Habits of the Heart, that “Clearly the meaning of life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself." Much of this is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community and inherited ideas or as Frank Sinatra crooned and the public still quotes “I'll Have It My Way."

Yet,  if Christ’s life is to be grasped at all, if we are to understand  his message at all,  this Gospel passage is pivotal, for it says that everything and everyone is somehow connected with everything and everyone else and that isolation does not exist, although we would like to think so.

You and I do not create connectedness. We discover it. We discover that we belong to one another and that we belong to Christ, in whom we grow, and who sustains and nourishes us. Once we discover our connectedness, admit of its meaning and value in our lives, then self-centeredness has no part in us, nor violence or killing competition.

Being connected with one another through Christ does not mean we lose our individuality with all its grandeur and funny little quirks. On this particular vine, the branches do not all look alike or act alike. We are ourselves – always in the process of becoming more ourselves. At the same time, we do not fear pruning, and we draw courage, example, energy, nourishment from one another because we belong to Christ .

Just a side note, You are invited to join me for:

The Synod on the Family

The Perspective of Married Couples

Wednesday, May 6, 2015, 7 to 8:30 pm
SSJ Motherhouse
150 French Road

This is a follow- up to our March program,

when Bishop Clark gave a comprehensive  overview

of the Synod on the Family which is to resume in October.

You need not have been to hear Bishop Clark

to take part in this conversation.

Barbara and Jack Clarcq, Bob and Janet Fein and

Barbara and Bob Finsterwalder

were asked what positive points they would make

if they were invited to speak at the coming Synod.

Come, hear their thoughts, and add your own as

we hone our perspectives and our language  

and draw encouragement

from them and from each other.

Please let us know you are coming. Just call the Fresh Wind phone line

and let us know you’re coming.          585.641.8184

  ~Sister Joan Sobala

Transition

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago,  we talked about the disciples “learning to recognize the Risen One who did not look just as He did before His death.”   Another  theme found in these post –Easter season is transition: the followers of Christ were learning to live out their discipleship in new and untried ways, without his obvious presence. 

They had come to understand themselves as  disciples of Christ, but now what did it mean? Where would their direction come from? How would they work through next steps without Him? Of course, they were not without Him, but they had to come to that realization, as we do. He is with us through our life -movements.

Just as you and I need to learn to recognize the Risen One in our daily lives, we need to see Him in the transitions that fill our lives and challenge us.

A transition may be a passage to a new living place, a marriage, or reception into a religious order. The death of a parent, sibling, friend  marks a transition for us as well as for them. We transition to jobs, and way of thinking and acting. We accept new values and walk away from prior values.

I got kicked out of kindergarten less than a month after starting school and was sent “on probation “ to first grade. It was painful. I cried every day for weeks because I wanted to play and now I had to work. Later, I came to realize that I was in transition when the people around me were not. That’s hard, isn’t it?

Throughout our lives, change happens. In airplanes, shift happens in the overhead bins. With care, we open them to retrieve our luggage, but then that’s over. Not all changes are transitions, i.e.  life altering.

Transition may mean changing patterns. Sometimes, our transitions are sequential, sometimes they are simultaneous.  We move from orientation to disorientation to reorientation.  In this, we are not different from other people who don’t allow themselves to stand still.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus accepted moments  of transition. He found them at Cana, when He accepted His mother’s call  and turned water into wine,  with the Syro-Phoenician woman, when he ministered to a Gentile, and  in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed “Let this cup pass me by, but not as I will.” Our way to life-giving transition becomes enriched, ennobled, when we study Jesus, and when we drink deeply of his lessons:

Love God , know that I am loved, speak the truth in love, be faithful, be open, seek first  the reign of God, feed them yourselves, embrace the cross/the grave/new  life.

And let’s not forget to study the transitions of His followers after the Resurrection. They spent time deepening who they had become, they remained in prayer before  Pentecost, and then they went into the whole world to set it on fire with God’s love.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Celebrating Earth Day ~ A Spiritual Guide

Dear Friends,

              “We are not separate from the earth, nor anything in it or on it. We  need to uplift everyone and everything… uplift from meaninglessness.”   I wish I had said that. A man named  Louis  Savary did, expanding on the thought of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin, Savary, Pope Francis along with convinced pioneers from many nations and academic disciplines urge people to renew the face of the Earth. We must do all we can to promote sustainable development, human ecology and a slowing of climate change.  Pope Francis, speaking to an audience earlier this year, made an important connection for believers in our creative God: "A Christian who does not protect creation, who does not let it grow, is a Christian who does not care about the work of God.” It is not enough to buy environmentally friendly products and recycle, although these help. We need to dig deep, as it were, into the profound aspects of change and collective human discipline and harness our collective efforts so as hand over to future generations a  treasured  earth.

                2015 will be a year of information, affirmation and action by many individuals and groups spurring  on  a common effort on behalf of our earth. Pope Francis’ encyclical  on the environment is due out this summer. He will also address the UN in September on this compelling issue in its multiple dimensions. The Milan Expo on Sustainability will focus world attention on the work before us. A Vatican Summit of the World’s Religions will add weight to the discussion, because, as the Earth Day Network holds, “faith leaders have been a driving force behind the most important and successful social movements.” Google The Earth Charter and see the work that has been I progress since the 1992 Rio Summit to develop a cohesive, clear set of goals to undergird efforts to treasure the earth. Here is a sampling of it’s core elements.  Use them to guide your own thinking as we celebrate  the 45^th annual EARTH DAY on April 22^nd:

1.        Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.

2.       Care for the community with understanding compassion and love.

3.       Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.

4.       Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well –being.

5.       Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.

6.       Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.

7.       Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.

8.       Promote a culture of tolerance, non-violence and peace.

   There are eight more points of this breadth and scope. Each sets forth objectives to make these goals reachable.

  Gasp! You can’t. I can’t.  But together we can move in this direction which is, if we think about it an outline of what the Kingdom of God will be like in its completion.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Recognizing the Risen Lord in Your Life

Dear Friends,

As April in the north is awash with drenching spring rains, the Easter season Gospel narratives are awash with the revelation of the God of Surprises. An experience threaded through many of these accounts is that the disciples did not initially recognize the Risen Jesus. They had to learn to recognize Him in His new, risen way of being.

On Easter Sunday morning in John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalen encountered Jesus in the garden outside the empty tomb. She thinks he is the gardener. “Woman,” He says to her,” for whom are you looking?” (John 20.15) But when He says her name, she does recognize Him. We recognize Him when he says our name. The voice may be that of another person, but the one who calls us by name is the Risen One.

In Luke, Cleophas  and his companion, are walking dejectedly back to Emmaus, when a stranger joins them.  With him they had a revelatory conversation, but they were still clueless. It was only at the supper table that the God of Surprises “took bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them “(Luke 24.30) did they recognize Him. We recognize Him in the breaking of the bread at Eucharist and wherever/ however the Eucharist is experienced in our daily lives.

Finally, once again in John, the disciples went fishing. They had had enough of being cooped up in the city, so they went back to Galilee to fish. “All night long, they caught nothing” (John 21.3). At dawn, they saw a man on the beach, but they didn’t know it was Jesus. He prompted them to cast their nets over the other side once more, and they caught an abundance of fish. One of them realized who the man was. We need to trust when one of us recognizes Him.

All of these same encounters with the God of Surprises are given to us in our day. The Risen Jesus walks with us in our hearts, our mindfulness, in our loved ones and in the stranger. New realizations are given to us as we celebrate Eucharist and hear His word in the mouth of a stranger or loved one. The God of Surprises “easters” in us.

As part of today’s blog, I offer you three images of the Gospel texts we spoke of above. They form a triptych  in the sanctuary of Our Lady Of Lourdes Church, in Brighton (Rochester) New York, the work of well known Rochester artist Dick Kane. The artist caught the delight, the joy in these moments of recognition. Look only at the smiling faces of everyone depicted, including Jesus.

May your face image their joy when you meet the Risen Lord in your everyday world. 

~Sister Joan Sobala