Mirroring God

Dear Friends,

One Easter Sunday, the parents of a parishioner where I served came from my home town of Lackawanna NY to Mass. They came bearing a wedding picture I had never seen before. “Did I know anyone in the photo?” they asked. My eyes passed over the bride and groom, others seated and standing around them, and there- at the end of the second row, I saw my grandfather, my Dziadzia, as I called him in Polish. I knew him immediately, even though Dziadzia was 55 years old and balding when I was born. I never knew this handsome young man with a dignified air, but I recognized him, just as each of us recognizes people who are not physically present to us – the voice on the phone, the distinctive laugh, the long lost cousin, the person in our dreams, the soul-mate we discovered in a letter or across the Internet or across the room.

Today is the feast of recognizing the God in whom we live and move and have our being. We celebrate the Trinity – the fullness of God whom we worship but who is beyond our grasp – God whom Jesus reveals to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel, the God who walks with Moses in the first reading – the truth of God, made evident by the Holy Spirit.

So often in our lives, we make a tidy package of what we know about God, or ourselves or other people for that matter. Satisfied, we put that tiny package on a shelf with a sense of finality. Plop! There it is to gather dust! And we go about our lives.

 “She’s always been like that,” we say.  “He can’t possibly change.” “You did what?” But the Spirit of Truth cautions us. Never say “never.”(never say “always”, for that matter.)  If there is life, there is  newness. Through all the welcomed, tolerated, unwanted events of life, through our delights and sufferings, endurance and hope, you and I are being drawn more deeply into the life of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. We are not being invited just to gaze on God. We are called into the very Heart of God – to be one with God. Throughout our lives, we are surrounded, sustained and encouraged by a God whose very nature is to share.

To put it another way, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity not only teaches us something about the nature of God, but it tells us who we are. Our lives are interwoven with the very life of God and when we are at our best, we mirror God’s life of interdependence and unconditional love.

Today, let us give ourselves up to the celebration of God who loves us so thoroughly and well.

-Sister Joan Sobala

Come Holy Spirit

Dear Friends,

Each year, in late May or early June, driving along the country roads and Thruway in Upstate New York, wild phlox can be seen tucked away at the edges of woods, in dainty clusters or occasionally in generous swaths. Pink and purple and white, the wild phlox seems to appear out of nowhere and then it’s gone.

I think of the Holy Spirit when I see these flowers, obscure, often missed by the unperceptive eye. So often we miss the Holy Spirit in our personal lives and our lives together.  The Holy Spirit: God -  given to us by Christ and His Father, and God received. The attentiveness and the allure of God which causes us to burn with the fire of God’s love.

The Irish theologian, Diarmuid O’Murchu composed a prayer to the Holy Spirit, which I offer here. In it, O’Murchu gives insight into the breadth and depth and scope of God the Spirit’s reach in human life. Pray it out loud, if you can. Let your ears hear it as well as your eyes see it:

          Come Holy Spirit, breathe down upon our troubled world,

                Shake the tired foundations of our crumbling institutions,

                Break the rules that  keep you out of all our sacred spaces.

                And from the dust and rubble, gather up the seedlings of a new creation.

          Come Holy Spirit , inflame once more the dying embers

                Of our weariness, shake us out of our complacency,

                Whisper our names once more, and scatter your gifts of grace with wild abandon.

                Break open the prisons of our inner being

                And let your raging justice be a sign of our liberty.

          Come Holy Spirit, and lead us to places we would rather not go;

                Expand the horizons of our limited imaginations.

                Awaken in our souls dangerous dreams for a new tomorrow,

                And rekindle in our hearts the fire of prophetic enthusiasm.

          Come Holy Spirit, whose justice outwits international conspiracy;

                Whose light outshines spiritual bigotry,

                Whose peace can overcome the destructive potential of warfare,

                Whose promise invigorates our every effort

                To create a new Heave and a new Earth,

                Now and forever.

                

         Amen.

-Sister Joan Sobala

Let God be God

Dear  Friends,

In a moment of candor, a precocious seven year old girl confided to me that she liked the world very much because it was sooooo interesting, but she wasn’t so sure about heaven. She thought that heaven  was very dull.” Why so?” I asked.  “Because God is dull,” she shot back. “God never changes, and the same old thing, day after day, is dull.”

I have no doubt that some of us are like that seven year old when it comes to God, unsure of God as being lovable and absorbing.

God, in classical theological language, is often portrayed in bigger than life terms” all-knowing, all-seeing, without  beginning  or end.  Many of us know the biblical phrase “yesterday, today and tomorrow are all the same with God”(Heb. 3.8) or “a thousand days with the Lord are as one.”(Ps.90.4)

We can’t wrap our arms around these concepts like we wrap our arms around a person. These words overwhelm us who travel through life an inch at a time, sometimes with our horizon only as far as the end of our nose.

Yet, in today’s Gospel.  Jesus prays: “Father, I have revealed your name to them and I will continue to reveal it…”(John 17.26)

So what are some of the names of God and what are the characteristics of God that can appeal to us, make us excited, warm and eager over God? What are some of the embraceable qualities of God?

Our  God is a learning God… God in Jesus, who came to teach us the ways of truth, justice and integrity, first had to learn what these meant in human terms.

Our God is a laughing God… the 14^th Century mystic Meister Eckhart in a poetic moment says “The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.” God’s sense of humor is rich and deep. Take a look at creation!

Our God is the Great Attractor…like fragrant flowers attract bees and hummingbirds, God attracts us if we allow it. Do we allow ourselves to be attracted by God?

Our God treasures the useless…Our age and place in the world are enamored of the useful, the practical and the productive. Our judgments of value are wrapped up in utility. Sometimes people say they hate that part of themselves they consider useless. Sometimes, old people describe themselves as useless- as if that’s bad. But our God values the very being of all that is. It is enough to be.

We cannot exhaust God, because God’s originality and freshness keep surprising us. As the playwright Christopher Fry noted: in our time and place “The enterprise is exploration into God.”

In this week before Pentecost, as we pray a welcome for God’s Spirit in our world, our church, our lives, let us also pray a welcome for God as God is, beyond our well-defined categories. Let us let God be God.

-Sister Joan Sobala

Welcome a Summer Rich in Playfulness

Dear Friends, 

On this Memorial Day weekend, we remember with deep gratitude all who served our nation to prevent the destruction of democracy in our country and beyond. We remember them and we thank God for their generosity which exceeded even their strength and their lives.

At the same time, this weekend inaugurates the summer season, and I wish each of us, adults and children, could renew our sense of play.

As Americans, modern, liberated, technologically savvy and living in a fast-evolving culture, we have a hard time with play unless it’s on a computer or with a video game. Play, we say is for children – and I agree. Children who are 3, 10, 20, 40 and 72!  All too early in our lives, we begin to take the business of life too seriously. Beginning at 4 or so, we are taught read, write, how to study, how to get along in society, but very little is done to promote and encourage us to play. I don’t mean organized sports or summer study/enrichment camps. I mean that no one encourages us to develop a life-long attitude and practice of playfulness, that is doing the unnecessary and delightful with enthusiasm.

So we end up feeling strange or guilty or even silly  when we feel the urge to play, to dance, to sing. In  2 Samuel  6.14, we hear how David danced “with abandon” before the Ark of the Covenant, giddy with delight because the Ark of the Covenant was being carried in procession, while his wife Michal turned away in disgust at such a display. Maybe we are too antiseptic to play in our new slacks or with our carefully arranged hair. Maybe we’ll get sweaty.

What is there about play anyway that makes me want to add to the beatitudes “Blessed are those who play…”

For one thing, play requires faith in people. We need to believe that the world will not fall apart if we take time to play. We need to believe that people want to play with us. We need to trust in the people we love to temporarily abdicate out sense of adulthood in order to play, and that the give and take of play is pleasurable.

It’s also true that the truly, deeply human person is playful. The laughter that bubbles up within us when we are playing, the sense of being well-glued, the perspective that monumental things may just not be as monumental as we like to believe are indications that play, in its own way, is life-giving and meaningful.

Finally, a playful person is a sign of God’s presence. When we stop to think about it, the creation of the universe was a playful act on God’s part. God was engaged in doing the unnecessary, and God was certainly enthusiastic and dare I say imaginative and silly? (Think zebra, giraffe, porcupine, whale, saguaro cacti…) We do not change the course of life when we play, but our course through life, with its playful diversions, can lead us to shout out to the world: “The Lord has done great things for us. We are glad indeed.” May you have a summer rich in playfulness.

-Sister Joan Sobala 

The Journey of Missionaries

Dear Friends,

 

Each year during May, a second collection is taken up in our diocese for Diocesan Missions abroad. May is a fitting time to do that, for May is Easter time. When Jesus left his disciples after the Resurrection, He said to them, “Go and make disciple of all nations.” That call was further conveyed to the whole church by the Second Vatican Council. Our diocese was particularly mission-minded, with wide-ranging programs which educated both adults and children that everyone, by virtue of baptism was to be mission-minded. In addition, while Religious Orders of women and men had been sending missionaries out for the whole of the twentieth century and before, this was a new moment. Sisters and priests, used to ministering in our diocese, were asked to consider being missionaries.

In our diocese, the Sisters of Saint Joseph were the first to respond, sending five Sisters to the Diocese of Jatai, Brazil, in August of 1964. Initially, we worked in education, nursing and parish ministry. Our sisters are still in Brazil, but spread from north to south, in the interior and in cities, engaged in new works as needs emerged. The Sisters of Mercy went to Santiago, Chile in August 1965 and worked in ministries to families. Eventually they too moved into rural places to do pastoral work among the very poor. The Sisters of Mercy remain in in Chile today.  

Our auxiliary bishop, Lawrence B. Casey, met the archbishop of La Paz, Bolivia, in Rome during the Council. A plan was developed to invite our priests to go to La Paz for service. Fr. Peter Deckman and Father Tom O’Brien went in 1966 to work at San Jose Obrero, a parish in the northern part of the city.  Priests from other dioceses in the USA also ministered in LaPaz parishes. (The Archbishop was resourceful in getting the help he needed!) Between 1966 and 1974, when the mission ended, five priests and a layman from our diocese worked hard to prepare the people to take over the functioning of the parish, which they do to his day. The original plan was not that our clergy remain there, but that they be interim – in the service of the people at a time of specific need.

I had the privilege of traveling some five thousand miles through Brazil visiting our Sister’s missions. Three brief anecdotes put a human face on their activities. In Goiania, a city of over a million, recent arrivals from the interior were given a small plot of land and some money to build a house. They were relegated to the red clay hills on the edges of the city. All they could afford to build initially were “half houses”. (Think of a house that had a central roof line. Now cut that house in half.) When the people had saved enough money to build a church in their midst, the Benedictines were commissioned to create a tabernacle. As the artists listened to the people, the shape of the tabernacle became clear. The tabernacle was created in the shape of a half house. On it were the words, “God lives here.”

Two of us traveled by bus for 18 hours to get to our Sisters who lived and worked in the Amazon region. The bus was no Trailways! Two drivers were on board. So were people, their chickens and bundles of what not. I held a sleeping girl on my lap fir six hours. When we needed to cross a river, one driver got out and guided the other over two beams that spanned the river.

Later in the trip, near the equator, one of our Sisters took us on a long jeep trip to an area where indigenous people lived. We were going to the funeral of chief who had been assassinated by thugs, who, people believed, were hired by greedy landowners who wanted the indigenous people’s land. At the funeral, the wife of the slain chief stood in the midst of the people. In a strong voice, she proclaimed. “Today, we are not here to bury my husband. No. We plant him, and from his life and death, we draw strength to go forward to be strong and firm in our quest for justice.”

It is mistaken to believe that as missionaries our Sisters and priests went to Latin America to bring faith to the people. The faith was already there. We were, instead, to accompany them on their journey as they discerned their hopes, needs and desires for life.

It was and is a journey worth our taking.

The Motherhood of All Nurturers

Dear Friends,

Long before there was Mother’s Day, there were mothers, every day of the year, year in and year out.

Every now and again, newspapers feature a photo of four generations of women. The handing over of life one to another in love.

The now deceased Fr. Emmett Halloran’s mother died birthing him. Eventually, Emmett’s dad gave him a new mother when he married a second time. I wonder, though, if the memory of his mother dying in birthing him was a seed of Emmett’s priestly vocation – a different way of handing over life one to another.

Our society talks about birth mothers, natural mothers, foster and stepmothers, single mothers, the women and men who have never given birth but who nurture individual life and groups of people. Jean Vanier died earlier this month. He is the founder of the L’Arche community movement, where ordinary people live with the disabled in community. The motherhood of Jean Vanier and his life-sustaining network. .

What we celebrate today is the motherhood of all nurturers: the motherhood of many, including the motherhood of Mary and the motherhood of God. There hasn’t been a time in Christian history that people have not been stirred to honor Mary, Theotokos, as she is called in Greek, the Mother of God. And when, on the cross, Jesus gave Mary to John, Jesus gave Mary to all of us as mother.

Some groups in Christian history have made her equal to God, but she is not. Mary is, however, the first disciple of Jesus, our friend, companion and the model of how to say yes to God and be faithful to that yes.

And then there is the motherhood of God. The medieval theologians St. Anselm and St. Hildegard of Bingen, and the too-short-lived Pope John Paul I wrote and spoke of Jesus our Mother and God our Mother.

In the Gospel, Jesus refers to Himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood (Mt. 23.37, Lk. 13.34). And in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21.4) God is a comforting Mother, wiping away the tears from every eye, as we recall our own mothers doing.

The mothering qualities we treasure – steadfast love, generosity, openheartedness – are first of all found in God.

So on this Mother’s Day, when we think of Christ’s message of abundant love, as we speak the names of all the mothers we have known, let’s commit ourselves to that same kind of love – love that is active, strong, inclusive and unending.

To borrow from Pope Francis, “A world without mothers would be inhuman, because mothers always know how to give witness, even in the worst of times to tenderness, dedication and moral strength.”

~Sister Joan Sobala

Denying Hatred a Place in Our World

Dear Friends,

For the Catholics of Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday became Good Friday again, as suicide bombing attacks on churches during Mass killed many. Add in the bombings at nearby hotels, and more than 250 died. The motive for these  attacks  is said to be retaliation for the bombing of mosques in New Zealand. 

But other places in the world have not escaped hatred- inspired violence this year either:  the synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh, Christian churches in the US south. Religious hatred begets religious hatred. Is there no end to the violence based on hatred among religious groups?

Each of us needs to work long and hard at denying hatred a place in our world. The opposite of hatred is not love. It’s indifference. “I don’t care what happens to people beyond those I love. I don’t need to be involved with sowing love and spreading it. I’ll pick and choose the ones I will care about.” Love requires a personal investment: of mind, heart, body, soul and strength as Jesus puts it in Matthew 22.37. These qualities are not self-generated. They arise from union with God. Fully embraced union with God begins small: with prayer for openness to God and others, with the cultivation of respect for others, with kind words in our public spaces toward all we meet.

Impossible?  No. All that is needed is  just  hard work and worship together.

Going to church or a synagogue or mosque is not like going to a filling station to get what we want or need   and then going away until our next want or need, We worship together so that we can have dedicated time during the day to face God who faces us with great desire. We worship together so that we can breathe the same air as other worshippers, to take in the smell of their humanity, to experience in them fear and hope and courage, to breathe with them.

Do you love me? Jesus asks Peter on this Third Sunday of Easter. Three times Jesus asks Peter that question. Three times Peter says yes. Yes, yes and yes.

For Peter, saying I love you to Jesus meant that Peter was willing to take a risk and that there would be consequences.  For us, too. It costs to be part of a family, a neighborhood, a country, a world. No one will do it for us. We have to stretch out more than we ever thought we could. Social media is an acknowledged place where animosity is fostered and where it festers. If you are devoted to social media, sow grace, rekindle mercy. Don’t demean or denigrate. Risk embracing others with your words.

Refuse to be part of the invisible army of assailants who dishonor people’s lives of faith.

‘Well,’’ you might say, “my small part won’t do away with hatred and violence. “ Don’t be too sure.

The call of God to us is new each day.

~Sister Joan Sobala