Honoring Our Faith Traditions

Dear Friends,

Three ancient feasts appear on our calendar this week: All Saints’ Eve (Halloween), All Saint’s Day, and All Souls Day. In today’s culture, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day could very well not exist at all. Halloween, the first celebration of the Saints, has been transformed into the second biggest commercial holiday of the year, with huge amounts of money spent on costumes, parties, and candy. Playfulness on Halloween is a good thing. Still, it’s valuable to get in touch with our Catholic roots as these special days approach.

In our own faith tradition, these three feasts are a foretaste of the fullness of time, when God will bring all creation home to heaven. In November, in the northern hemisphere, just as the harvest is finished, Christians keep our own harvest feast – God’s harvest – the harvest of the Saints and all our beloved dead. In November, the earth itself seems to fall asleep. The world around us mirrors our interior mood of gratitude and awareness of our predecessors in faith and life.

In another sense, November gives us a much needed opportunity to focus our attention on the tenacity of life. Life simply does not let go. We have only to think of perennials that we cut back to the ground in the fall, only to have them return with energy, beauty and profusion the following year.

So on these three days, let’s incarnate in ourselves what others who have gone before us in faith have done. Let’s try to live common lives and do common things with uncommon generosity and practice a little restraint and a little courage. Let’s take God more seriously and ourselves less so, take hope by the hand and never let go. Let’s care for others and treat them with dignity. And laugh at truly funny things.

During November, in your household: 

• Make a list of your favorite saints: the ones who have inspired you with their unrelenting clinging to God, even in the face of disdain or threat. 
• Put this list in a place where you’ll see it every day. Perhaps you’ll want to put it on a table, along with photos and mementos of your own beloved dead. 
• Light a candle and reminisce. Tell stories. Ask the older generation for their recollections. 
• Begin a winter’s worth of care for the lonely, the troubled, the homebound for whom November ushers in a season of bleakness without people at the door or on the phone.

On All Souls Day:

• Visit a cemetery – one nearby or one in which your deceased loved ones are buried. 
• Make grave rubbings.
• Sit on a bench there and let your eyes linger over the tombstones which represent so many people who tried their best in life, or maybe not. 
• Think about the words found on a very old tombstone in Leeds, England: "Those who love God never see each other for the last time."

November, more than any other, is a month of remembrance and gratitude for life around us and before us.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Exercising Our Civic Duty

Dear Friends,

My friends, Giuseppe and Mark delayed returning to Milan, Italy until they could vote early in New York State. They wouldn’t miss voting for anything! Giuseppe became a citizen of the United States in 2008, in time to vote in the presidential election that year. At the same time I experience his enthusiasm for the American process, I recall people who didn’t vote in 2016, because they didn’t like either presidential candidate. Their vote was lost.

This blog comes with a couple of weeks left before Election Day to encourage you to encourage others to vote on November 6. Among other things, it’s the Catholic thing to do!

Catholic Social Teaching directs Catholics to participate in public life and to exercise our civic duty. In a moment of truthful humor, Pope Francis remarked that, “A good Catholic meddles in politics.” He calls us to put aside exclusion, and embrace the common good.

Here are a few questions about our national election that arise out of our faith with its focus on social justice:

• With respect to Racism: Will the candidate work to reverse the disenfranchisement of people of color by supporting the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act?

• With respect to the Economy: Does the candidate have a plan to undo the damage of the tax law that widens wealth inequality?

• With respect to Immigration and Refugees: What has the candidate said about a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants or about the separation of families at our border?

• With respect to Healthcare: Does the candidate reject efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even while addressing its limitations?

• With respect to Gun Violence Prevention: Does the candidate support legislation to ban assault weapons and strengthen background checks?

• With respect to Global Peacemaking: Does the candidate support the increase of funding for diplomacy, peace-building and development, while cutting Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons?

• With respect to the Environment: Does the candidate support the Paris Climate Agreement and a shift to green energy?

• Respect for the First Amendment: Freedom of Religion and Conscience: Does the candidate have a thoughtful position that upholds both religious liberty and our responsibility to others?

These are the major areas roiling our political waters, but these are not the only questions. The Gospel is not our private domain, calling us to holiness without regard for others. In fact and in truth, the Gospel calls each of us to the public square – to dialogue with others who may agree or disagree with us so that we may understand and embrace the common good – the good of all without exception.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Putting Our Possessions in Perspective

Dear Friends,

Money. We earn it. We need it. We want more of it. We share it, or maybe not. Money helps or hinders us in our search for life’s value and meaning.

Take the rich young man that Jesus meets in today’s Gospel. A good man. Still, the rich young man believed that something was missing in his life. He turned to Jesus for insight, and got more than he bargained for, because Jesus pushed him to consider the unthinkable. “Go. Sell what you have and give it to the poor. Then, come follow me.”

The rich young man couldn’t do it. He went away saddened, the Gospel says, but he couldn’t let go of his possessions. All he could do was walk away.

The Word of God is a two-edged sword, we read in Hebrews – today’s second reading. The Word of God was dangerous to the rich young man’s clinging to what he had – a quality he didn’t know was in him until Jesus challenged him.

Having money or even great wealth is not contrary to the Gospel. We have to be very clear about that. It’s the preoccupation with, the clinging to whatever money or possessions we have that is contrary to the Gospel. How hard it is to follow a light, to hear a voice along life’s journey if we are so preoccupied. But it is not impossible. Jesus says that with His God and ours: nothing is impossible.

Avarice, possessiveness, the acquisition of more and better toys are not the prerogative of the wealthy.

No matter what’s in our pocket, its value is defined by the heart.

As the 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart, pointed out: “where clinging to things ends, there God begins to be.”

These readings invite us to sort out what is really important in our lives and what is not, what we value beyond all else as individuals and as a nation.

We don’t have Jesus before us to challenge us in the same tangible way that he challenged the rich young man, but we do have Jesus and the Spirit of Wisdom described in today’s first reading – the Spirit who enlightens our choices and helps us treat all good things without possessiveness.

“I prayed,” Solomon says, “and prudence was given to me. I pleaded – and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.”

Would that you and I would be like Solomon. Would that we would pray and plead and be open-handed before God.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Aftermath of Divorce

Dear Friends,

Like you, I have family members and friends who have been through a divorce.

No one enters a marriage planning on divorce. No one enjoys the divorce process. It is a devastating experience. It tears at our lives.

All of us know people who, because of divorce and remarriage, no longer feel welcome at Catholic worship. They feel awkward, uncomfortable and maybe angry at what looks like a rejection of them. In the spirit of the compassionate and merciful Lord, about whom Pope Francis speaks so frequently, I hope they will come home to a God and a community who will welcome them and not judge them. In every way possible, I pray that people experience the Church in the aftermath of divorce as a place where hurts are healed, and hearts find the courage to rebuild life. All of this takes work, both on the part of the Church and the hurting or alienated.

It’s true that there are pockets of judgment in the Church, but the Church is bigger than that. This conviction about a big church goes back to Jesus. It is based on the promise of our faithful, gracious God to be with us on our life’s journeys, who will celebrate with us our victories and hold us in our defeats, who will laugh with us in times of joy and cry with us in moments of sorrow and sadness. God does not desert us.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of divorce. He tells His listeners that that is not God’s intention, but the result of choices that men made over the centuries leading up to his day. Only men could initiate the divorce procedure. Grounds for divorce varied among the various rabbinic schools of thought, ranging from flimsy reasons, like poor cooking, to more serious reasons, like adultery.

Specifically, in Mark’s Gospel, as we hear it today, Jesus speaks of the implications of divorce as it pertains to women. For a woman, divorce meant total disgrace in the community, as well as loss of home and children. It was a catch 22: it was socially unacceptable for her to be on her own, yet no respectable man would marry her. In short, in Mark, Jesus is addressing divorce, not as we know it today, but as a situation in which a woman is treated as an unwanted possession.

The longer version of the Gospel today includes the next few verses, in which Jesus draws a child to himself and says, “Let the children come to me…for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Mark 10 . 14). Both children and women were considered the property of men in Jesus day. Jesus, in these two passages, calls for the full dignity of women and children to be recognized and upheld. The promises of God belong to them as well as to men. This way of thinking and acting has come down to us, but with resistance, as we see in the major issues of sexual exploitation raised in our society today.

The bottom line in today’s Gospel is to honor people for who they are, to shape our thinking and actions so that people may know we honor them, respect them, love them.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Fabric of Community Life

Dear Friends,

In the moral language of the centuries, “virtues and vices” are umbrella names for a whole set of characteristics – habits – which people unleash in their interactions with others. There’s not one set for the people of antiquity and another set for us and our contemporaries. The same virtues and vices keep reinventing themselves, perhaps with a slightly different look or feel. People who manifest these attitudes either help or hinder the life and growth of the community.

Two vices appear in today’s scripture readings, while Moses and Jesus call their followers to be otherwise. They are jealousy and apathy.

Joshua, in the first reading, wants to keep the community tidy and clearly ordered. He is worried about anyone who shows initiative independent of Moses, especially these two men, Eldad and Medad. In the Gospel, John, the beloved disciple, doesn’t like it at all when he sees a complete stranger expelling demons in Jesus’ name.

The first of these vices or attitudes is jealousy. When someone invades our turf, does something that we think is our exclusive responsibility, we resent them. Like Joshua in the first reading and John in the Gospel, we try to stop them dead in their tracks. Let them know that we have the inside track. We are the ones authorized to take this action. Jealousy is the sin of those who say: “You can’t do that! Your help, your talent, your skill and expertise are not needed. Keep out!”

A second, more pervasive, more harmful attitude which these readings remind us of is apathy or passivity – the sin of those who say, “I can’t do that. I have nothing to contribute – no talent, no skill, no experience. I’m no help. I’ll just mind my own business. Besides, I don’t want to.”

These two ways of thinking and being are not only intolerant, self-centered and controlling, they are also destructive of ourselves and the faith community. Jealousy and apathy eat at the fabric of community life. When we leave the work to others (because they are insiders – they always do it), we deprive the community of our talents, our humor, our zeal for God. When we insist on doing it all ourselves (because we know how things work, we’ve got the history and know the people), we deny both the community and ourselves the gifts of others. Would that there were more Eldads and Medads in the church and in the world to say something, do something, get involved!

Moses cries out: “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets! Would that He would bestow his spirit on them all!” And later in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul would say unequivocally: “To each one of you, the manifestation of the Spirit if given for the common good.”

We all have something the community needs. Our task, as Christians, is to make real, to demonstrate that Moses’ prayer has come true: The Lord has indeed bestowed His spirit on us all.

~Sister Joan Sobala

At Home in God

Dear Friends,

Sonja, the wife of Ove in the book called “A Man Named Ove,” was a wise woman. After she died, and Ove was so empty that he contemplated suicide, Sonja’s words kept him going, even as other events evolved to make life livable for him again.

Late in the book, Ove recalled hearing Sonja say, “Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years, the walls became weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”

These are the little secrets that make it your home. That’s what Sonja told Ove. That’s what Jesus says to his followers. “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we shall come to them and make our home with them” (John 14.23). Jesus doesn’t say so directly, but the home will grow in its imperfections. The floors will creak, the flaws in ourselves and the people who live in it with us will become more apparent and perhaps bigger, but the home is ours.

The name of the house where we live with God is called the Church, where we are welcome because it’s home. We know its nooks and crannies. It is where we celebrate the supper of the Lord and a hundred other meals during the course of a year. We baptize and bless, we are reconciled, we welcome newcomers, we marry and send our loved ones off to eternal life with God. The Church has splinters, because some of our leaders and some of our members are flawed. We get most distressed when some of our leaders reveal themselves as flawed. But it is home.

Last week, on successive mornings, two women talked with me about our Church. The first one, well into her 80s, was brimming with anger over the sexual abuse by clergy and the bishops who shielded them. She said: “I’m madder than hell, but you know, Sister, it hasn’t shaken my faith. This is my home in God.” The other, a younger woman, and I were waiting to tee off at a benefit golf tournament. Once she knew I was a Sister, she took off on the Church. “I don’t go anymore. How dare the clergy tell me how to live my life when they prey on the people in their care.”

The questions won’t go away: Do I stay or do I go? How big is my understanding of Church? Do I judge and condemn the whole because some parts are corrupt? What part am I called to as a believer to help the People of God reshape our home for a future closer to the heart of God?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Making Room for God

Dear Friends,

We are never finished working and reworking the relationships of our lives. The ones that endure for a good part of our lifetimes are great treasures. In other relationships, one or the other party, or perhaps both recognize that they might go on together for a while and eventually, each person will go on without the other.

And then there is our relationship with God. Before we came to be, God knew us when we were being made in secret (Psalm 139). After that the ball is in our court. The primary task of our life is to “do the work” so that we abide in God and God in us. Wait a minute, you might say, God always abides in us and we in God. True. But what human life requires for growth toward being our most complete selves is that we work to raise to the conscious level what is unconscious, assumed, taken for granted, expected but not named. It is hard work to grow in God and to recognize that God grows in us, since our minds are spilling over with contemporary information and our feet take us 10,000 steps a day in a multitude of responsibilities, wants and needs.

How do we enlarge ourselves so that the God who is with us and in us is not a stranger, a shadow, a backdrop for our life? How can God become our acknowledged awesome other, companion and friend?

Here are a few hints:

1. Become as empty of clutter as possible. A daunting task, I agree, but essential. Paul calls this work self-emptying. Jesus did it (Philippians 3). We may like our clutter, but then there’s no room for The Other. Something has to go. Maybe for two or three or five minutes a day, at first, but then in longer periods. Two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We know this from our high school physics. Mindfulness or meditation can help achieve this emptiness – an emptiness which prepares us to receive God.

2. Become as open as possible to God’s embrace. Not just presence, embrace. God holds us all the time, and we can honor the embrace of our abiding God as it becomes more clear to us. The spiritual writer, Richard Rohr, writing in The Divine Dance, says: “…by yourself: you do not know how to desire God, you don’t know where to look, you don’t know what to look for, you don’t know what God’s name is, you don’t know God’s shape, you originally don’t know God’s energy. You will almost always look in the wrong places. Just beautiful sunsets and not the cracks in the sidewalk. Just weddings and funerals and not the laundry room.” This leads to a third point.

3. Ask God to enlighten you. God’s Spirit knows how, and in our world are people who can help us “read” and interpret God’s movements within us. Who are these people? Spiritual directors and professional religious, for sure, but also some of our neighbors, coworkers and friends once we drop them a word that connects us at this deep level. God leads us to those who can help. Be ready to engage them.

4. Start now. The God who abides with us and in us has the gift of closeness to give us in abundance. We can be sure of it!

~Sister Joan Sobala