The Stranger on the Road

Dear Friends,

Once again today we hear the much-loved story of Jesus encountering his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Cleophas and an unnamed partner were fleeing Jerusalem, disappointed and miserable. Their world had collapsed. We don’t know who was with Cleophas, but it could have well been his wife, Mary, who had stood beneath the cross of Jesus. Let’s call Cleophas’ travelling companion by that name.

As darkness began to encroach, Mary and Cleophas were approached by a solitary stranger. They could have cut him out of their journey. Passed him by. Perhaps it was pure mid-Eastern courtesy that prevented them from doing so – more likely some deep tugging of grace. The stranger seemed to be ignorant of the things that had transpired over Passover and the Sabbath. He listened to their interpretation of what had happened. The stranger – Jesus unrecognized – was attentive to them, and then it was his turn to unfold the Scriptures for them – to offer them meaning and hope. And as they listened, something happened to them. Much later, they would reveal to each other how their hearts burned within them as He spoke.

At this moment in 2020, we are all together as a people beginning to emerge from the coronavirus. Like Cleophas and Mary, we want to run away from the place of our miseries; our hopes dashed. We might even want to run away from a God who doesn’t seen risen or present in our world, shattered as it is by this invisible enemy. Like Mary and Cleophas, we try to name the things that have happened – to us individually, to our church, our relationships, our world. What we fear is that things won’t go back to how they have been. It’s likely they will change. Maybe evolve. Maybe change radically. The stranger on the road – Christ unrecognized – will be our travelling companion. Let’s listen to Him. And when we invite Him in as a guest for supper, He will feed us with himself instead.

In the days ahead, when Eucharist will be available to us again, will we go? Maybe before all this, the meaning of Eucharist was escaping us, but how about now – in this new time. Pay attention to what is happening within you. Does your heart burn within you? Will you recognize the Risen Lord? Looking at the wounds this virus has brought us, will you see Jesus’ wounds in others? Will you come to know that we need one another in dawning new ways? Will you? Will I? Will we?

This beloved story of the disciples and Jesus on the road to Emmaus, tells us to take courage, for Christ will meet us on the way to a new tomorrow. It tells us: the stranger who walks with us and helps us understand what had happened is no stranger at all.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Wounds of Christ

Dear Friends,

For Him, it didn’t have to be this way,
Risen Christ that He was.

He could have left His wounds
in the tomb,
staining the stone,
untreasured.

But Jesus’ wounds were the embodiment of
the compassion he bore for everyone.

Jesus’ breath,
halted in death,
was fresh, deep and sweet
on this new Day.

Beyond this day, Jesus wanted His holy wounds
to touch the wounds of people where they suffered
in every time and place, as with the silent virus eroding our world.

Yes, His wounds stir life
in us who are so wounded today.
His wounds,
hands and feet and side, make us,
wounded as we are,
cleary, undeniably
one with Him.

How faultlessly wise of Jesus not to reject His wounds
for they throb with the truth of all
we can trust about Him
in this fearsome time.

Come to think of it: We might not recognize the Risen Christ without them.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Feeling the Power of Easter

Dear Friends,

This year, Easter – Sunday and Season – are inextricable bound together with the coronavirus. Some people say that the Sunday after our nation is free to move about again will be the real Easter this year. We can certainly celebrate it then, but we would miss the power of Easter if we don’t “celebrate” Easter when our nation faces death as it does right now.

Easter tells us that death is not our destiny. God gave no permission for death to hold Jesus as its permanent victim. Rather, death, like an old snake skin, lies discarded at the garden gate.

“Jesus, You live and we live because You live.
Our minds cannot grasp it, so we leave it to our hearts to embrace new life in You.”

Easter is not naive. We don’t close our eyes to the realities around us. The cross always stands in our sanctuary, even though this day, this season, it is draped with the mantle of victory.

Today, though our hearts are heavy with the anguish of many, “we celebrate Easter because we believe there are no God-forsaken places, no God-forgotten promises. Easter is the ultimate intrusion of God into places and situations we deem to be God-forsaken. Jesus lives and we live because of him.” (Lutheran Bishop Mark Harmon)

Clarence Johnson, New Testament scholar and co-founder of Habitat for Humanity writes of Easter: “On the morning of the resurrection, God put life in the present tense, not in the future. Not a hope for the future but a power for the present. Not so much that we shall live someday but that He is risen today. Jesus’ resurrection is not to convince the incredulous nor to reassure the fearful, but to enkindle believers…”

So today, let yourself be enkindled. Go outside and at least in your heart and in your imagination, meet Jesus in the garden. Like Mary Magdalen, you may not recognize Him at first, but He will call you by name. Then, like Mary, you will see Him Risen and Glorious, and your heart will be glad.

Today – outside – feel the pull of the resurrection and let courage stir in you to meet the days ahead.

May God Easter in You Today.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Mind of Christ

Ah, God.

Today begins Your week.

Oh, I know that every week is yours,

but this week is yours

in a more distilled way.

You’ll be more on my mind this week

than in an average week.

Help me to drink deeply of Your passion,

let the alleluia stir in my depths,

so that next week

it will rise in me

like the dawn.

Dear Friends,

To learn how to suffer this pandemic time, we must learn how to stand in Jesus’ place – to bear pain, abandonment, cruelty, distance, condemnation. Through all of it, Jesus was faithful and true. May it be so with us.

He trusted and obeyed his Father and broke the power of sin and betrayal. In the great and little tragedies of life, let this mind of Christ be ours as well. May it be so with us.

Love led Jesus through to death to life. His love. His Father’s love. May it be so with us.

That is our last word.

Next week, Jesus has the first word as He Easters over the world.

All week long, let us live into His New Day. Alleluia.

~Sister Joan Sobala

To Whom Do We Belong

Dear Friends,

Since the unfolding pandemic began, I have been home – like you, grateful to have a place of safety with people to whom I belong.

But then, events as seen on various media outlets started me thinking about the question, “To whom do I belong?” The answers to that question seem simple, but they are not, for over the centuries of human life, belonging has happened unbidden, been cultivated, limited, enlarged, denied and sometimes forgotten about.

With you, I wonder to whom do we belong, for how long and how? Are we ever finished belonging or belonging anew? As I write this at the end of March 2020, with the pandemic touching more and more lives, insightful leaders have encouraged us to act on the belief that we belong to everyone. We are in some measure, responsible for one another’s well-being, life or death. Belonging is not earned. It is freely given or it is withheld.

Belonging requires perseverance on our part. We could say: “this belonging that I experience today is not what I thought it would be, so I am going to move on and care only for those whom I choose.”

Belonging sometimes comes as a surprise. We would not initially have thought we belonged to this one or that. Mid-20th century, our Sister Rosalma Hayes was studying in Europe. One day, she came around the corner of a public building in Paris. Toward her came a Sister of Saint Joseph in a similar habit. They did not know each other’s language, but they recognized each other, kissed each other’s brass bound crucifixes worn with the habit, and kept going. France was a homier place to be because of that encounter. It takes courage to belong to anyone, however fleetingly.

Sister Rosalma Hayes

Before this pandemic struck, our Congregation was preparing to celebrate 80 years of serving in Alabama. Eighty years of working with, loving and encouraging the black community to be all they could be. We came to belong to the black community, and they to us. Belonging meant that we came to be part of something greater than ourselves as we lived life beyond the greater Rochester area. That belonging in Selma was put to the test when in 1965, the civil rights march made its way across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. We were prevented from marching by the dictate of the archbishop of Mobile. Instead, with desire, we watched the marchers pass by our convent. They were ultimately attacked on the far side of the bridge. At Good Samaritan Hospital, which we ran on behalf for the black community, our Sisters tended to the great John Lewis and his confreres immediately after the attack. Our belonging to the black community of Selma was sealed in those days.

Sister Barbara Lum at the Good Samaritan Hospital Nursing Home in Selma, AL

Sister Kathleen Navarra and Sister Patricia Flass (not pictured) continue to mission in AL

Whether moved by a humanitarian perspective or by the sheer love of God, you and I – every person – belong to a far greater community than we realize.

Writing in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic, David Brooks reminds his reader that “for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting not just of people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with" (p64). That same unity of cooperation was unique to Jesus and His followers long before our day. Paul expressed it as all of us being members of the Body of Christ. “There are many parts but all one body” (1Cor.12.20).

That’s where we are today: “members of one another” (Marshall Sahlins). We are called to experience the “inner solidarity of souls” (J Pretz – Johansen). The maturity that such connectedness requires comes only with suffering together through destructive times, and not allowing our spirits to be crushed.

That moment is now. This pandemic will either make rise in us a new sense of universal belonging or it will make us fall back into ways that are not of God. In our age, many of our contemporaries and maybe we ourselves have trouble with the reality of God. We may want to deny the truth of God, the faithfulness of God in these devastating times. But pause, drink in God’s Spirit.

Perhaps this is our time’s new admission that we do belong to God. Not a God who commands servitude but a God who honors our capability to embrace one another. It takes courage to belong to anyone, much less God.

So we come to it. Belonging to people. Belonging to God. Work the phones, send e-mails, use social media as a tool for engaging the other. Pray with someone else’s prayer or our own. These days are too precious to waste marking time.

~Sister Joan Sobala

We Are Made for Life, Not for Death

Dear Friends,

Do you remember the comedian Danny Thomas? After his father’s death, he wrote about that robust, energetic man who had emigrated from Lebanon with his wife. The Thomas family prospered and raised a large family. When his father was dying, he called his wife and all his children around him. He raised himself up in bed, looked at them all lovingly and said, “Damn death!” Those were his last words.

Somehow I think those words sum up the rage, the grief, the helplessness that we have all felt when we have lost someone close to us, or when we realize our own time is limited on this earth…or in this rare moment when a pandemic threatens to invade our lives in an invisible way.

Death is cruel. It is terrifying. It goes counter to everything we cherish.

It is too bad that our churches are now closed for public worship, for today, we are gifted with the story of Jesus and his friend Lazarus. Today we understand that Jesus knows only too well the pain of losing someone close to him. Troubled in spirit, moved by deeper emotions, Jesus wept.

Some Scripture scholars believe that the words “He was deeply troubled in spirit” would be better translated “he was angry.” Jesus was angry as we have been angry when life is disrupted and we are helpless. For all intents and purposes Jesus would have agreed with Danny Thomas’ father; “Damn Death!” Jesus was not philosophical about death, nor does God expect us to be stoical, unmoved in the face of death – anyone’s death.

So why do we read this lengthy gospel two weeks before Easter? Because followers of Christ like us believe that, in Jesus, God has indeed damned death.

In his Passion, Jesus did not bypass the terrors of death. He met death head on. Jesus was not willing to give death the last word. We hear that conviction in today’s gospel when Jesus says to Martha “I am the resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even though he dies will live” (John 11.25). In other words, we are made for life, not for death. We are made for God, the living God, the God of life. Death is the antithesis of everything Jesus represents, of everything He is. He is life.

This is why Easter is the critical, central feast of our Faith. This is why we prepare ourselves for it during Lent – any Lent – but this one, with its remarkable face-to-face encounter with death. This is why we read this gospel today.

It helps us focus on our belief that one day, Jesus will say to all of us as he said standing before the tomb in Bethany so long ago:

                “Lazarus! Martha! Mary! And all of you, my beloved friends: Come out! Into the Light!

                 Untie them and let them go free.”

~Sister Joan Sobala

Calling Upon Faith To Help Us Through the Darkness

Dear Friends,

One of the things Jesus says about Himself , quoting Isaiah in Luke’s gospel, is that “he was sent to bring new sight to the blind.” It’s no wonder then that all four Gospels tell stories of how Jesus cured blindness. John’s story of the man born blind and his encounter with Jesus is much more detailed. It is a rich source of illumination about life for it deals not only with spiritual insight and the triumph of light over darkness, but also the struggle in life against the power of human darkness.

Caught up as we are in the Coronavirus  pandemic, we may become distracted from other important aspects of life and be  inclined to shed the daily food that sustains us spiritually – the Gospel, prayer, the recognition of God’s abiding and tender presence, our  concern for and service of others.  We might find ourselves stuck in the darkness. Plato, centuries before Christ, reminded us that “we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy in life is when adults are afraid of the light.”

In this time of potential panic, let us not be afraid of the light. Instead, let us call upon faith to help sustain us through the threatening darkness of world-wide illness.

Three thoughts about the journey out of darkness seem important for  us to consider:

It’s a very long journey from blindness to sight to insight. Most often, we carry our blindness alone, accommodate to it until Jesus stands before us, touches us and urges us to take the next steps if we want to see. Left alone, we stay blind. Sharing what we experience may be very helpful.

We come to insight only when others challenge what our sight means. In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees jeer and deride, threaten the man born blind with rejection. They try to make him back down from the truth of his experience. But his truth, his determination is greater than their pressure.

Holding fast to the truth of his experience, the man born blind prefigures Jesus – who from his capture in the Garden of Gethsemane to His death on the cross is challenged by the powerful who also jeer and deride Him .They try to derail Jesus from embracing the deep meaning of what he is doing.

Just as the man born blind was instructed to wash his eyes, we too have been washed at the instruction of Jesus. We call our washing  Baptism – a once- in-a- lifetime event which we draw upon all our lives. In Baptism, we receive the promise, the invitation and the grace to be one with the Risen Christ. But there is no automatic guarantee that we will live in the light. Living out the promise, the invitation and the grace is our work. That’s one reason to keep Lent carefully, especially in this stressful year.

Are we afraid of the light? If not, then we are not afraid to experience  Christ  coming  through self-giving,  suffering and death to radiant light to walk with us at this fearful time.  It is in His light that we will see where we are, and how to make our way through the days ahead.

~Sister Joan Sobala