Labor Day and Faith

Dear Friends,

Enjoy this last full week before Labor Day. The first Monday of September, in our national calendar, marks the unofficial end of summer, with a flurry of picnics, reunions and other celebrations. The main purpose of Labor Day, since its inception in 1887, however, is to honor, applaud and encourage American workers. While Labor Day was originally intended to recognize union laborers, we realize today that we are all workers and we all have cause to recognize and draw satisfaction from what we do. While most adults and many youth work for pay, some adults volunteer or are retired, but still work. 

That’s because work is part of what it means to be human. Occasionally we hear someone complain that work is a punishment for sin, but remember how before the fall, God settled Adam in the garden of Eden “to cultivate and care for it. (Gen.2.15)" Adam was given work to do.

In Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, our Holy Father reminds us that “We are created with a vocation to work… part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment.  (n. 128)”

Locally, the iconic social activist, Hattie Harris, who died in August 1998 at the age of 101, told the public not long before she died: “Be ashamed to die until you have done something life- giving for the human community.”

From the Philippines comes a story of an initiative that came out of a threat and utilized the very source of that threat in surprising new ways. This story of creativity was featured in a publication of the non-profit, Unbound.

           

In an area near Manila, the waterways fished by local men became overwhelmed by water       hyacinths, fast growing pest which clog waterways, kill fish and deprive native aquatic plants             of sunlight. Fishermen had lost the key source of income to support their families. Charito, wife of a local fisherman, contacted Unbound with a potentially life-giving question “Was there any way to generate income from these water hyacinths/pests?” In fact, the Philippine government was offering training in how to turn the plant stalks into large sheets that could be used as a leather substitute. Currently, about 50 couples work together in harvesting and processing the  water hyacinths, creating backpacks, shoes, wallets, purses and other products. A bonus added  to their efforts is that, with less hyacinths in the lake, fish have come back and fishermen are at   work again, doing what they do best. Everyone who can, works. It all started with formulating the right question, knowing someone to ask and then following up.

While all stories of communities facing hardship don’t always end with such apparent ease and success, the following prayer is nonetheless worth repetition, as God accompanies us through the labors of the day:  "Prosper the work of our hands, O Lord. Prosper the work of our hands. (Psalm 90.17)”

~Sister Joan Sobala

Life is Precious

Dear Friends,

What’s precious to you?   Precious means beyond price.  Precious time, precious thought, precious gift. The word has been in common use since 1595, although Isaiah used it in the 8^th century BC to tell us what people mean to God. “You are precious in my sight and I love you. (Isaiah 43.4)”

All of life can be described as inestimably precious, anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance:
at birth or at the end of a gun. Life is precious. The three Americans who confronted a would be terrorist on the train from Brussels to Paris last week understood that life is precious.

That thought flits in and out of our consciousness, but is not our first thought in an argument, in depression, or in frustration when our talents are rejected. We develop the love of life as precious.

For example, life is vastly enriched when it is shared with others, or explored with a telescope or a wide angle-lens. Life is even more precious when what we value and what we dream finds an echo in other human hearts. Human life is precious when we give ourselves up to play, when we dance and laugh and do horrendously funny things. It is enriched  when we share our daily bread with others in the market places of life.

Human life alone is precious, but when we are salt, leaven and light for one another, when we call forth one another’s gifts, when we ask God-questions of one another and acknowledge with our lives that Jesus is Lord that  precious life grows deeper, richer, warmer.

I hope we believe this, or at least suspect that this is so, because what follows is that we need to say so by our lives. We need to expend and expand ourselves, invest and divest ourselves and dare to be and do what is needed, individually and as a community.

We know so much and yet so little about ourselves and what the Gospel means or doesn’t mean for our lives. Collected and focused, our own individual ideas, talents, sense of the timely and appropriate have  the power to move the community to a new sense of humanity with the Gospel as our sourcebook.

We are also people of varied taste and uneven growth, so we need options in life as well as convinced, committed relationships. Life is universally precious but not all life is precious in the same way.

With new or renewed conviction, now, at the end of summer, let’s try anew to root ourselves in our church community and let that community help us re-image and live the truth that life is precious.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Feast of the Assumption of Mary

Dear Friends,

On August 15 each year, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Because the 15 falls on a Saturday this year, according to national Church norms, it is “not of obligation.” But don’t miss it, for this feast  is Mary’s “finale”, so to speak.  This feast offers us the treasured belief that Mary was so in tune with God  that her whole being was taken up into heaven . Just as Christ is the first Fruit of the Resurrection, Mary is the first human person to follow in that tradition. The Church has held this belief from ancient times to today.   The writer, Reginald Fuller, applauds Mary’s Assumption as part of the poetry of the Christian tradition.

Here’s the crux of it  for us to relish. 

                                        

                                                Life lived under the impulse of God is eternal.

                                                Mary’s life was lived under the impulse of God:

                                                                                God’s light,

                                                                                God’s breath,

                                                                                God’s shadow,

                                                                                God’s energy.

                                                Mary is without end.

                                                If we do the same , that is, if we live life under the impulse of God,

                                                                                God’s light,

                                                                                God’s breath,

                                                                                God’s shadow,

                                                                                God’s energy,

                                               

                                                we have with Mary a kinship and a destiny.

                                               

                                                This feast bids us take heart.

                                                Our lives are not destined for termination.

This year we celebrate that which is not “of obligation.” It is anticipation of the richness of forever.

                                               

~Sister Joan Sobala

Summertime Reflection

Dear Friends,

There isn’t a day of the year that the obituary page of our newspapers is omitted. Every day people die. Yet, many of us begin thinking about death only as the signs of death, our own or others’, become imminent. We label earlier thoughts about death as premature, morbid,  depressing.  After all, people are living longer and longer. I can put off these thoughts for now.

A summertime reflection on death, in the midst of the lush and varied growth of field, vine, trees and children is good for the soul. I mean reflection on death’s place in the whole of a human life, not its complicated medical aspects.  Death  is a moment of completion, a cherished moment in which we can say “I did my best ”-  in which we can say, with  Jesus in John’s gospel  “It is finished.” (John 19.30) The Greek word for this cry of Jesus on the cross is tetekestai, which is not a cry of defeat, but rather the shout of the victor when  (s)he achieves the goal.

Death is not evil. It is not failure. It does not mean that the dying person has done something wrong to incur the punishment of God.  Death is a common experience for  every human being. As we approach death, what matters most is how we have lived. Throughout our life, what response to the many deaths that come our way do we exhibit, cultivate, pray over?  We experience the death of a dream, of one particular moment in one’s life, the death of a relationship, the death of playfulness or the death of an idea.

True, the death of a loved one or our own impending death saddens us. After all, we love life as we experience it and we love many people who die before we do.  We say death is unfair. The news of it crushes us, angers us, makes guilt arise in us and sometimes, if we are honest,  relieves us. Death will come in its own good time. Some current conversations in society promote hastening death or  prolonging life even if it has no retrievable human qualities. Sometimes we find no words to express what we think of death. Like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, all we can do is weep.

Let’s put aside the legal and medical issues that at another critical point in life can’t be put aside. Let’s linger over the meaning of death as the threshold into the unknown, a journey toward a new horizon. Consider again Jesus as he heard about and then experienced the death of his beloved Lazarus (John 11.1 – 44. )”this illness is not to end in death,”  Jesus said. (John 11.4) Death, as in the case of Lazarus, may be  immediate result of illness, bit it is not the ultimate result. There is more.

So ask “What is the fate of those who seek a life-long relationship with Jesus?”

Life. Not life without sadness or pain, but life in all its fullness, today and tomorrow and forever.

All of this is worth thinking about here and now.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Spiritual Food to Peak Our Appetite

Dear Friends,

Remember how, in the musical Oliver, the orphans sing “Food, Glorious Food!”

Food. Junk food and health food.

Food that we consume as couch potatoes.

People – you and I -  use food to control uncontrollable factors in our lives: We might not have a good relationship, but we can have a good steak!

Sometimes, probably rarely, we dine with power. Sometimes we stuff ourselves.

We eat to forget, to remember, to feel comforted, to be sociable.

Sometimes we eat because we are truly hungry.

Sometimes we eat to gain strength for the journey – real soul food.

Sometimes we eat to survive.

Food is something we never tire of having, reading about or talking about.

Beginning on July 26 and for four more weeks, the Sunday Gospels are from John 6 - that portion of  the Gospel in which Jesus feeds the many and then is challenged because he says  “I am the true bread that comes down from heaven.”

We can concentrate on  John 6 or we  can read it with other passages that remind us how pervasive bread  is In  various parts of the Scripture. The Bible is full of reminders, easy to memorize, valuable to underscore the place and power of spiritual food in our lives. Here are a few such sentences, culled and rephrased, that are  packed with wisdom for us to help us grow this summer:

My will is to do the will of my Father. Jesus was clear about that. He recognized that His Father’s will is that the world be safe and healthy for all people, that justice be done and that mercy and compassion be the way  we address and embrace the suffering we encounter along the way.

We must become food for others: given and consumed. Sometimes we are consumed for a short time. Sometimes we are totally consumed.

We do not live on bread alone. Each day, each of us receives manna, in many ways – a word of peace which calms us, a newspaper headline, a stirring within, a phone call from a stranger asking us to serve in a new way, an experience which refines our hearts or lends clarity to our vision.

And finally: The Lord will give us the bread we need.  Study your own lives and see how you have been fed with the bread you needed when you needed it.

Be ready this summer for tasty spiritual food to peak our appetite for God.

~Sister Joan Sobala