Be Thankful for the Goodness of God

Dear Friends,

In the sweeping song of praise  that Christians call the Magnificat, Mary  proclaims for all the world to hear that “God has done great things for me.(Luke 1.49)”  As Thanksgiving approaches, I hope that each of us has awareness enough to say the same thing, with the same conviction. It’s true, God has done great things for us. But what? What great things? Listing them is a laudable thing to do, alone or with others on Thanksgiving Day. Here are  some ideas to prime the pump:

Surely we thank God for personal gifts: health and energy to meet the day, new ideas, meaningful memories, the blessings of family and friends. We thank God for whatever good people did for us in a year that might have been hard, and if we have had a good year, we thank God for that, too.

But there is more to Thanksgiving than acknowledging what we have received as gift personally and directly, for God’s action and gifts to the world are very much gifts to me as well.

As Mary is aware that God turns people’s expectations upside down, breaks the bonds that enslave them, free them to use their talents to better the life of all, so too do we need to be aware of the breadth of God’s gifts in this fragile world as touching us directly.

Helping hands in the turmoil of Paris last week, blood donated so that another person might live, ethical public servants ready to act, consensus-builders and peace negotiators, all who help us understand this rollercoaster ride called life, people who practice the art of healing  are God’s gift to you and me. Forgiveness given, justice insured, compassion offered and violence rejected across the world are God’s gift to you and me. Harvest of crops, harvests of unity and courage are God’s gifts to us.

But giving thanks for worldwide or personal gifts given to us is not enough. Consider focusing our attention instead on the giver of all the gifts we acknowledge. Theologian Karl Rahner,SJ,  told  an interviewer shortly before he died in 1984: “If God is interesting to me as a stopgap and the guarantor of my needs, then I am not speaking of the true God. The true God is the God who must be worshipped and loved for the sake of God.” 

This week is a perfect opportunity to turn to our generous, loving God to say: Thank you for being you. Thank you for loving the world and all its people despite the awful things some of us perpetrate. Thank you for being a God who holds us firmly but lightly and for encouraging us to act on our freedom. Thank you for loving us when we are grumpy and foul-mouthed, insecure or discouraged as well as when we are happy and satisfied with life. Thank you for letting us  recognize you in the love of another.

Soon, it will be on to family gatherings, meals, football, card games, long walks and talks together. May we carry into all of these traditional celebrations the whispered prayer: Thank you, God, for being you.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Courage in the Face of Paris Attacks

Dear Friends,

Friday the 13^th was one of France’s worst days in recent memory. Lives of ordinary people were brutally snuffed out as chaos overtook the streets of Paris.  Once again, terrorists killed their fellow human beings in the name of a misguided ideal. The people who survived the hostility of that night could have only experienced numbness, shock, emptiness, helplessness. We live in calamitous times.

The misery of World War II caused  the French to wonder where  God was in the midst of all the senseless killing of the war, if they thought  of God at all. That led French philosophers to eventually pose the question “Is God Dead?” Was God dead? Is God dead, now?

The short answer, of course, is “No.” The long answer requires that the French and all of us tap the deepest understandings available to us when our lives collapse in some way, when we are confronted with  violence in our physical and political worlds, and experience  hostility among cultures and races.

People like us from other times and places who also came to the limits of their resources, teach us how to face our crises as individuals and as a people. The Book of Daniel speaks to the Jewish people fighting for their very survival. The Gospel of Mark comes out of another time of crisis, some 30 years after Christ’s Resurrection. Jerusalem was then under foreign domination and the familiar was being swept away.

Today, two thoughts gleaned from Daniel and Mark help us take courage as a world in the face of ISIS:

·        

      In the throes of crisis, things are not always as they appear.

God is not dead. We are not abandoned. God has not lost control. In fact, God goes before us, surrounds us, offers us the freedom to shape life even as others misuse their freedom to destroy life. Disaster is immediately recognized for what it is. It is harder to frame that disaster in the hope God offers us.

·         It is only as a community that we come through the disasters of life.

Day-to-day, we may think of ourselves as independent, self-sustaining and capable

of working out the dimensions of our lives by ourselves. But we aren’t and we can’t be.

Watching the news from these days after the Paris massacres, we see people coming together, offering tokens of solidarity, not only on the streets of Paris but across the world.  Vigils intertwine people’s grief and the prayer that arises within them. Buildings, lighted with the French colors, illuminate the nighttime skies. These  symbols  are more than comforting.  They bespeak the determination of people to choose life.                                                                  

Disaster is not the mother of despair, unless we let it be so. Deep down, the French know this. We know this. Hope sustains us in the most arduous times. . As the French  poet, Charles Peguy, wrote in God Speaks. “If it weren’t for hope, all would be nothing more than a cemetery .”

~Sister Joan Sobala

An Additional Reason to Offer Veteran's Our Thanks

Dear Friends,

Jesus often tells us a great deal in the space of a few lines. In Mark 3, he says "No one can make his way into a strong man’s house and steal from him unless he has bound the strong man first.”  Who are the strong man and the thief? One commentator suggests that the strong man is any oppressive institution, civic or religious, that prevents individuals or communities from living with dignity – their human rights respected. The thief is the group or individual or movement that says no to the strong man, and finds ways to bind the strong man so that the people can go free.

When our service personnel go to far distant lands to bind the strong man, the intent is that that the people held in ideological bondage can be free. It is not easy and it doesn’t always work. The true gift is in the effort that our military make, sometimes even sacrificing their own lives.

This week, Americans honor with respect and thanks, the men and women who have served in the military. We call them veterans, a word that means experienced in service. Honor flights have become symbolic of the thanks of a nation, and a model for young children to learn and grow into in their civic lives. Early in their service,  today’s veterans had bound themselves to protect and defend our nation.

The generous binding of veterans makes me think about all the ways we bind ourselves or are bound to someone, something, some cause, some value.  Here’s the stretch from Veterans’ Day  into our own lives, for veterans remind us to be faithful to those realities to which we are bound: wives and husbands,  priests and  members of religious orders, professionals in  the face of the duties of their office, members of reform groups and resistance groups. Other groups, making their way to a goal bind themselves to each other, for example, mountain climbers are tethered to people above and below them. Pre-school children, shepherded by  vigilant  teachers,  are bound together as they walk down the street.

Being bound is often but not always a good thing. Being bound to a destructive idea or practice can lead to our diminishment. Sometimes, we bind others by not forgiving them the wrongs – real or imagined- they have done. We freeze them into a moment of time when they did something mean or stupid or compromising and we’ve never let them forget it or grow beyond it. Sometimes we bind ourselves by not forgiving ourselves. 

Binding and loosening from bonds are part of the stuff of human life . In themselves, veterans are to be honored. Thinking of their service leads us to think of the many bindings and loosenings of our own lives. An additional cause for offering veterans thanks this week!

~Sister Joan Sobala

November Brings a Burst of Remembrance

Dear Friends,

With a burst of remembrance, you and I, our whole church, in the first two days of November, embrace the dead: the holy and historic saints who have gone before us, the holy ones in our families and among our friends, who have no saintly titles but whose lives were rich with human vitality, courage and love.  We remember also people we don’t know, but mourn their tragic and untimely passing, most recently, the passengers and crew of the Russian plane that went down over the Sinai Peninsula  just last weekend. On these days, we remember all who live in the great beyond. We honor them all. We bless them and ask their blessing.

In many places around the world, family members go to the burial places of their dead, clean and decorate them, honor their beloved by their presence and actions, call to mind the lessons of these remembered  lives, talk with their dead.

Christian burial practices have ancient origins. In those early centuries, after a procession to the grave, the Eucharist was celebrated, and a eulogy was given- words of praise for the life of the deceased interwoven with the consolation that the Christian faith offers at the time of loss. Relatives would give a final kiss to the body of the deceased. This kiss witnessed to the affection of people for the deceased and the belief that this body was indeed holy, sacred. That kiss appalled non-Christians, who thought that any contact with the corpse defiled them. At first, families buried their dead in the catacombs outside the city. Later, when churches were allowed to be built,  cemeteries  were planted  around them. It was a deeply held   belief that both the church and the people whose bodies were buried in these cemeteries, made the church grounds holy.

Vatican II opened up the possibility for Catholics to be buried in non-Catholic cemeteries, where their plots were blessed and named holy. Cremation also came to be accepted as well, with reverence for the human body still at the core of the practice.

All of this is to say that “the body is the human place of meeting between God and humanity. The body is  the possibility and the reality of communication with God” according to theologian and Cardinal Walter Kasper.

Have you someone buried in a local cemetery? This month, go there to honor them, listen to them speaking to us from beyond. Or  if you have no one buried nearby, go to a cemetery anyway, to honor the lives of the strangers buried there. They are related to us as well.

Harder than doing either of these, talk with a loved one about his/her burial wishes. They may be nowhere near dying, but there is a value in doing this while death seems to be a distant reality. Sharing this conversation gives you both the chance to raise up both questions and beliefs about honoring the body,  about death as  a passage and  about life beyond the grave.

~ Sister Joan Sobala 

PS.  Join me for two upcoming Fresh Wind In Our Sails Programs:(Send me an email if you'd like to go at jsobala@ssjrochester.org)

Finding Faith: A Couples Story

Wednesday, November 4, 2015, 7 – 8.30 pm at the SSJ Motherhouse, 150 French Rd, 14618

Marlene Bessette was a non-practicing Catholic and Eric Bessette was an avowed agnostic when they met. They pushed and pulled each other along to spiritual places neither would have imagined.Come listen and take part (if you wish) in their discussion!

Retreat Day at SSJ Motherhouse

Theme: Becoming More Deeply Who We Are

Saturday, November 7, 10 am to 3 pm

Location: SSJ Motherhouseat , 150 French Rd, 14618

Presenter: Sister Joan Sobala

Cost: $35.00