The Meaning of Happiness to a Catholic Christian

Dear Friends,

Someone suggested  recently  that I should do a blog on happiness and the meaning of  happiness in the life of a Catholic Christian. Just to see if people are interested in that topic, I googled “happiness” and found that the site had had 899,000,000 hits.  Are people interested or what? The web tells us that the pursuit of happiness has sped up in the last ten  years,  that it is global in scope, and that it is at the very top of human desires and needs.

Among the ancients, the Jewish mentality was that happiness and blessedness are equivalent  terms . People  were  happy or blessed  if they  had good health, many children and success in their economic lives. The danger then, as now, was that people’s attitude toward happiness could be completely self-centered: happiness is when things are going my way.

For Jesus, who stood tall among the ancients, happy and blessed also were interchangeable words with this difference:  The person blessed by God was happy. In both word and parable, Jesus also conveys that happiness is not what we expect.

Jesus engaged life on life’s terms. He reinforced, rubbed, disagreed, supplemented what he saw and hear. He engaged in prayer and in life’s incongruities. He became an expert in discovering the good in every person. With Jesus, no one was ever categorically excluded from happiness.

In the Gospel,   those who suffered had an opening to Jesus. Ironically, happiness came through suffering. Think of the woman with the hemorrhage in Mark 6 and Bartimaeus  in Mark 10. Happy were the people who sought for others, for then,  they  themselves  received. Remember the Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15 and the Father with the demonic son in Matthew 18.  They came to Jesus on behalf of their children, and they were rendered happy. Happy also were the people whose possessions did not possess them Contrast Zacchaeus, who gave away generously once he met Jesus, with the rich young man who went away saddened because he couldn’t let go of what he had.

Some translations of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 render them “Blessed are they”, while others say “Happy are they”. (The original Aramaic is “Mature are they” … but that’s for another time.) What Jesus is saying, in effect is Blessed are people who are good, whose hand does not strike, whose mouth does not betray. Blessed are the merciful, those who comfort others, help and tolerate each other. Blessed are those who do not give way to dominant powers, those who let go of power and those who, without restraint, speak and love everything that lives. The beatitudes contain and reveal such depths of happiness that we can see in them layer after layer of meaning.

The great Mohandas  Gandhi studied both Jesus and humanity. From these sources, he concluded that happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.

May harmony and happiness be yours today, and may you share it with others.

-Sister Joan Sobala

The Message of Easter

Dear Friends,

It is easy for us to forget that the message of Easter is for all seasons and not just springtime. Even now, as we glory in the fall season with the harshness of winter not far behind, we would do well to keep Easter at the heart of our being and doing. Easter is the culmination of a battle between life and death. In Jesus, we know that life wins out, but in our day to day lives, death challenges us mightily: the death of our hope, the death of aspirations  any time of the year. and  ideas that have not yet blossomed, the death of relationships that are tentative as buds. Easter flounders or flourishes in our hearts.

   

This battle between life and death, for which we claim victory through Christ is something that  other  cultures find true in their own way.

The desire to live is in us, no matter what part of the world we come from, no matter what we hold in faith, no matter where we have been transplanted. The Irish poet, John  O’Donohue  wrote  a poignant piece about being an exile and then coming to the Easter moment of  belonging in a new place. I offer excerpts of it here, that we may read it against the struggle between life and death, and find ourselves encouraging exiles from other places who have come to our land to Easter here with us:
                       

                “When you dream, it is always of home. You are there among your own,

                 The rhythm of their voices rising like song…Then you awake to find yourself listening

                To  the sounds of traffic in another land. For a  moment , your whole body recoils

                At the strange emptiness of where you are…Nothing of you has happened here.

                No one knows you. The language slows you.
                The thick accent smothers your presence. ..

                The things you brought  from  home  Look back at you  out of place here …

                Now is the time to hold faithful To you dream, to understand  That this is an interim
               time full of awkward  disconnection. Gradually you will come to find Your way to
               friends who will open  doors to a new belonging. Your heart will brighten with new                        discovery. Your presence will unclench  And find ease, Letting your promise and
               substance been seen.

                Slowly a new world will open for you. The eyes of your heart, refined

                by this desert time, will be free To see and celebrate the new life     

                For which you have sacrificed everything.”

Easter is today for the refugee, the exile, the asylum seeker, the stranger in our midst. Recognizing their pain of loss, the deaths they have died along the way, let us stretch out our hands to them in love and offer them new life. After all, have we not also known the death and resurrection of Jesus ourselves?

-Sister Joan Sobala

Dear Friends,

Today in our Gospel, we meet Dives and Lazarus, characters in Jesus’ parable which, on the surface is about the wealthy and the poor co-existing in the world. But the rich man, Dives, is not accused of specific injustices, but only of self-interest, self-indulgence and…indifference to Lazarus. In fact Dives does not even see Lazarus, so absorbed is he in his own world.

Dives is like the complacent people whom Amos chides in the first reading. They were so taken up in their own pleasure and success that they were not sickened by the moral collapse of their country.

What does it take to overcome indifference to the stranger?  Work, concentration and  commitment  are essentially needed to become more deeply human like Christ, who never neglects anyone who passed his way.

Praying for a change of heart is the  indispensable  way  to  begin  setting  aside indifference and becoming conscious of the stranger, anyone whom we typically pass by. Here’s a prayer that moves us in that direction.

                Tender God,

                                                In the presence of people whom You know and love,

                                                Teach me to be a good listener

                                                To hear what people unconnected to us  are really saying,

                                                And not ignore them with indifference.

                Attentive God,

                                                In the presence of people whom You know and love,

                                                Help me to speak words that build the other person up.

                                                Words  of comfort, encouragement and hope.

                God who sees beyond our own limited sight,

                                                In the presence of the people You know and love,

                                                Move me to see beyond what I want to see.

                                                Let me look past no one whom You have put before  me.

                Compassionate God,

                                                In the presence of the people You  know and love,

                                                Let my voice be an faithful echo of Your own,

                                                My hand to reach out to heal as  Yours  does.

                                                Let me not walk past those  whom  You love,

                                                For You love everyone who comes my way.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

At the Crossroads of Life

Dear Friends,


I don’t know about you, but I like the crooked steward in today’s gospel. It’s not his dishonesty or deviousness that’s appealing, but rather, his initiative.


Caught in his misdeed , the crooked steward  put into motion a plan to survive and be welcomed  into new places after his job collapsed. While the master didn’t keep the thief on as manager, he did admit that the steward acted shrewdly.


Sometimes it takes a threat to get us to change my ways. We go to the gym when our clothes get too tight. We spend more carefully when the bank account dwindles. In our spiritual life, we put off doing the right thing until we absolutely have to. We pray when  we are most in need. We are most generous with all we are and have when we feel guilty for being stingy. In short, we need initiative to get us where we want to be.


Jesus says to his followers: pursue the kingdom of God with as much enthusiasm as the crooked steward had for his own skin.


Even though the steward has initiative, he lacks integrity. That same quality is missing in the merchants whom  Amos  excoriates  in today’s first reading. The merchants were guilty of exploitation. They used two different sets of weights to measure goods – one for selling and one for buying.  Both sets  were calibrated to the merchant’s advantage. Amos tells people that one’s religious convictions should shape one’s efforts in the public sphere.

Jesus’ point in telling the story of the enterprising crook is that we should be shrewd about spiritual things as we are about gain and earthly advantage. He tells us to work at our spiritual lives with   enthusiasm and creativity.


Perhaps you know that old saying: Pray as though everything depends on God and work as though everything depends on us. Both parts of that statement are needed to make the axiom true. We need to be wholehearted , even as we expect God to be wholehearted.


So this week, today, as a matter of fact, you and I need to as enterprising as the unjust steward and land on our feet when adversity strikes and our plans and hopes are shattered. But more than landing our feet, we have to have in us that integrity that doesn’t seek to be greedy or self-serving. Jesus calls us to care for other people and our world, to have a sense of justice and generosity in what we do.


The Georgetown educator Kevin O’Brien, SJ, offers us this thought on the steward that comes from the fertile mind of Jesus: “In a world where plenty of people use cunning to undermine god’s reign, God needs inventive, practical and clever problem-solvers and risk-takers. God just might be asking us to exercise some holy boldness in our lives.” That’s the takeaway today: holy boldness.

-Sister Joan Sobala

Lost and Found

Dear Friends,

With very little thought and because of long experience, we can certainly relate to a strong theme running through today’s liturgical readings: they are about the lost and found.

The Israelites in the first reading are already on their way to the  promised  land when they become lost in their thinking and actions. They forgot God’s promise, lost their mental compass and acted in ways contrary to God’s call. It wasn’t easy to admit they were lost, but they did, and found their way again.

Paul, writing to Timothy, tells how before his conversion to Christ he was lost in the conviction that it was right to persecute Christians. But Christ found him.

And in the Gospel, Jesus tells stories about a shepherd, a woman and a father, all of whom lost someone, something precious to them. In each case, direction was found and people were found. There was celebration and life continued.

But celebrations do not always follow great loss, and the looked-for are not always found whole, if at all.

A few days ago, we commemorated 9/11. In those awful hours and days after the terrorist strikes, rescue workers and families searched for the lost. Sometimes, someone was found alive and the word went out in the news and there was great rejoicing. In many cases, the lost had to be commended to God’s love. They would not be found this side of eternity and we grieved.

As Americans, we can relate so well to Bahamians mourning after the devastation of Hurricane Dorian. People have disappeared. Homes were destroyed.  Lost. Hopefully, life will be new-found in the future.

The international and national stories that mirror our readings go on. So do the experiences of our own lives. Will we be like God, the shepherd, the woman, the father and seek the lost in our own lives? Will we seek the lost in ourselves – our integrity, the personal growth that we put on the back burner, our zeal for the things of God, the ideas and dreams that motivated us. In many instances, loss is an unfinished reality in us.

What then? Then, faith encourages us to turn to our God and ask: 

“Where are you, God? Are you with me or not?”

And the answer comes: 

“My dear One, don’t you know I want the lost? I search. I wait. I find. What seems lost to you is     never lost to me. I know that you cannot rejoice over what you have lost and not found again,  but  someday, when my kingdom is present in its fullness and the pieces of the story are in place, when the reunions with loved ones and real and true, then you will rejoice. For now, hope in me. I hold your treasured ones close. I hold you close, when confusion and misery threaten t swamp you. Try to be steadfast. I am with you.” 

~Sister Joan Sobala

Keeping Your Choice Fresh

Dear Friends, 

In today’s second reading – the briefest of all New Testament letters - Paul offers Philemon, a well-to-do Christian from Colossae, a simple, direct challenge: Think again. Make a fresh choice.

Philemon had a slave named Onesimus – the name itself means “useful” or “profitable.” Onesimus escaped or ran away and eventually, found himself in the company of Paul in a Roman prison. Paul then writes this very personal letter to Philemon, asking him to take Onesimus back, no longer as a slave but as a brother. In modern terms, Paul asked Philemon to think again, to think and act in a revolutionary way – not just to acquiesce to the values of the existing social system, but to create a new order of life in Christ, where there would be neither slave nor free. What Paul asks has implications for both Philemon, Onesimus and their world. Their actions would bring others to think again, choose again.

The Gospel today continues this amazing challenge of Christ that, like Philemon, we think again and make new choices. In the instructions and stories he tells today, Jesus invites his hearers to make choices that are:

                                                God-centered.

                                                Arise out of a sense of discipleship.

                                                Are personally costly,

                                                and are incongruous to a skeptical world.

Here’s a well-known example of a costly choice. When a couple gets married, their wedding both announces and celebrates a choice. The couple says to each other: “I am for you. I will be for you in good times and bad.”  But we know that the starry-eyed loveliness of the wedding gives way to daily struggles to keep love fresh, to care for children and to cope with illness and economic ups and downs. Think again. Choose one another again. It is never enough to say “I made that choice once.” We can all do that and do it with relative ease. It is much harder to choose our commitments day by day. Or if one day, the marriage is no longer viable, the partners need to think again. Choices still need to be made to support children, be faithful to life-giving values, to the people close to them and to oneself.

That is precisely where we carry our daily cross - when we are seemingly alone, when what we do is unpopular, misunderstood or deemed foolhardy. How things look at the outset is important, or else we could never begin. What is crucial, however, is to meet the situations that test our resolve, the critical moments, the hard times.

However stable or changing our daily commitments may be, choosing to be faithful to God anew or over again does not mean our lives end up on a cross and stay there. As with Christ, there is  resolution, victory, sadness and misery overcome. The resurrection is made real. Think of that again and often and choose life with and in Christ.

Making room for new consciousness

Dear Friends,

Labor Day was never a pat on the back for the wage earner. It was about unions and how unions responded to mistreatment by absent owners and work-line bosses. The Knights of Labor marched through the streets of New Your City in 1882, agitating for a day to honor the sacrifice and courage of workers to stand together in solidarity and to organize for the common good of the workers who shared inhumane treatment. A few states like Oregon, Colorado, New York and New Jersey began celebrating Labor Day before 1894, when Congress made it a national holiday.  

While respecting the origin of Labor Day, labor, that is to say work, has many significant meanings. People work in diverse ways, sometimes for pay, sometimes to accomplish something new, to improve society and sometimes for the sheer joy of producing, contributing, or being in harmony with God’s call to share work, as we read in Genesis. 

Today’s Gospel give us a thought about the work of moving over - making room for someone/something else than what arises in us despite our own limited vision or desire. 

As the post Labor Day season begins, let’s make room for people who can teach us unexpected lessons. I think of missionaries who expect to teach the people about faith, only to find faith into the places they go. My friend, Bob, set aside his own personal reluctance to have a conversation with his New York Pakistani cab driver. Bob learned about common things they shared in life and values insights from this encounter to this day.

There’s a certain security in believing that we have the answers to life’s questions sewn up or to believe that how we are and what we think is exactly right and that we don’t have to change one iota. Making room for new consciousness can be as simple as eliminating or minimizing the use of throw -away  plastic  items, thereby not contributing to junk in our oceans. To welcome a new consciousness means letting go of absolutes about ourselves and our world and welcoming life-giving change of mind and heart and action.

And here’s one last thing, to keep it short on this holiday weekend, let’s make room for the child in us. As we grow up and older, we tend to leave behind the inquisitiveness and dependence of childhood, our need to belong, our sense of wonder. When we rediscover the child within, that child can lead us to see anew the face of God. 

So many aspects of life and of ourselves to work at! As this new season begins, honor whatever life-enriching call is attractive to you. Honor it. Do what you can to become ennobled and a more loving person in your family and our world. 

-Sister Joan Sobala