Choosing Hope Over Fear

Dear Friends,  

The way preachers talk about a particular Gospel passage often depends on the translation from which it is taken. In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say to the people: Do not fear. Only believe. 

Another, older translation of the same verse has Jesus saying to the crowds: Fear is useless. What is needed is trust. 

Jesus was speaking to a distraught crowd gathered outside Jairus’ home. Inside, Jairus’ daughter has died. But Jesus was undaunted. Fear is useless, he said. What is needed is trust. 

Fearmongering is big business in our time. Fear runs through the pulse of America. Doom is impending – the end of democracy. No matter the candidate, the opposition will attempt to sow fear into the electorate. How well we see this in these times. The exhaustive reporting of disasters often lasts beyond the human capacity to absorb these accounts. Even the weather gets reported in ways that play on people’s fears. 

Fear is big business because fear sells in a way that trust doesn’t. Drama needs fear, but Jesus says, ”Fear is useless.” 

If fear is indeed useless, what is useful? The answer to this question is at one and the same time easy and hard. The answer? Hope and trust. If we pay enough attention, we see that we are surrounded by people whose actions symbolize hope not fear. 

COVID has complicated life for the poor. Hope has come through the various acts passed by Congress to help, allowing people to purchase food, housing, medical care, other needs. The recent acceptance of Juneteenth as a significant moment in our history has stirred hope in our Black brothers and sisters and in the rest of us as well. The heroes of COVID in hospitals, ambulances and nursing homes have shown to Americans again and again that fear is useless. What is needed is hope. 

Hope requites that we believe that the future can be different from the present and that we can help make the future new. This hope which urges us on is based on faith in God and faith in one another. The recent rash of violence in our land notwithstanding, there is more love and support available than we seem to see.  

And then there are the refugees streaming to our shores, especially across our southern border. We are not altogether welcoming of uninvited newcomers to our land. We fear they will take away from us what we are and want and need. Can we be bearers of hope for new immigrants? Can we say to them the words of Jesus to the crowd faced with the death of Jairus’ daughter: Fear is useless. What is needed is trust. I hope we can say this and live its truth. I hope we can hear Paul’s words in today’s second reading and take them to heart. Paul says: This is not relief for others and pressure for you. Rather, Paul says, “Let there be a fair balance between your abundance and their need.” 

Hope is the offspring of faith that inspires good. Hope is alive and well where people develop life-giving, life-sustaining relationships and solve life’s problems together. Will our vision be big enough to live and act this way? 

~Sister Joan Sobala 

Celebrating Fatherhood

Dear Friends,

While Father’s Day is not a liturgical feast, it is a time to bring together the fathers of our world with the Father of the Universe, the Creator Father, whom Jesus called “Abba”…Daddy. There is no life without fathers. Of course, there is no life without mothers, but that’s for another time and place to reflect on. Let’s focus on fathers and fatherhood.

Fathers, like mothers, are either revered because of their abiding love or cause pain because of their absence of mind, body or spirit. The best of fathers are good men, for whom fathering is a privilege and a daily pledge.

Relatives of one of our Sisters live in the Midwest. I’m told that this is how the family handled education at the height of the pandemic. As a family, they decided that they would set school time aside as special every day. Dad was to be the teacher. He would wear business clothes, including a tie. The children would wear their school uniforms. And mom, they decided with delight, would be the cafeteria lady. Such fun! Such working together! The dad of this family had probably never envisioned the daily pledge of fathering as including a stint as their classroom teacher. But dads do what they have to.

Family life is the cornerstone of society, the testing ground of the muscles of our minds, the place where our hearts can be broken or they can soar. Blown by the varied winds of the Holy Spirit or destroyed by destructive human hurricanes, family life is central to all life.

On Father’s Day, we salute family life as the hearth of God, ours for the making with God in the shaping. Worth the effort because the effort is not ours alone.

Before Jesus, no one in Scripture dared to call God Father. But Jesus named the God of his relationship Father/Abba/Daddy. Jesus not only used this enduring and endearing name for God, He passed on to us the invitation to do the same. Live with this thought about the Father that Jesus offers us in John 14.23, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

Today, why don’t we pray for all fathers – 

            that they may not grow weary,

            that their hearts and minds be absorbed by the wonder of fatherhood

            that they may turn to the Father of Jesus, our Father, for courage, sustenance                              and delight in their life with their children.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Gazing at Others

Dear Friends,  

Today’s blog is something of a ramble...It’s about an action we perform which often goes nameless and has hidden implications for others. I’m talking about “gazing at others.” To gaze at someone is to look steadily, intently and earnestly at someone, something. It is to look with eagerness and curiosity (New Webster’s Dictionary). 

Whose gaze matters to us? Whose gaze do we emulate as we look upon others? Whose gaze do we feel upon us? What is in our hearts and minds as we gaze at others? Or maybe we are like Dives, in the Gospel, who does not even see Lazarus at his doorstep, much less gaze on him. 

Ibrah X Kendi, the author who recently won the National Book Award, asks us to look at the “white gaze,” a phrase he took from Toni Morrison who says it is as if “our lives have no meaning, no depth without the white gaze.” Kendi goes on to enlarge that phrase “white gaze.” “When internalized by Black people, the white gaze functions as a pair of glasses binding our eyes and thereby our very being...The white gaze positions white people as the perpetual main character of Black life and thought.”  

There is the white gaze, the male gaze that pins a woman as being in a particular place, the gaze of the monied 1% whose demands accept no counterproposal, the gaze of arrogance or self-centeredness. 

In Mark 10.17-22, a wealthy young man ran up and knelt before Jesus and asked him, “Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” You can read the ensuing conversation for yourself, but pause at verse 21. “Jesus gazed upon him with love.” The young man went away, but the loving gaze of Jesus followed him, it did not abandon him. 

With everything we ask as we approach Jesus, He gazes on us with love. If we bring nothing, He nonetheless gazes on us with love. Each of us is the rich young man. 

In our day, do we focus our gaze on anyone long enough to know them and love them as they are? God gives us the call to do so in Psalm 11.4, “God’s eye gazes watchfully.” And then there is the example of Stephen, dying from being stoned in Acts 7, “But he, filled with the Holy Spirit, gazed intently to heaven.” Stephen, in the midst of his worst trial, gazed up to where he could find God and he was not disappointed...Stephen had the courage to die faithful because he saw the gaze of God upon him. 

In these early summer days, here are some questions to consider while sitting outdoors or walking on city streets: 

    Does my gaze maximize or minimize the worth of the person(s) upon whom I gaze?  

    Do I even see the stranger in the store, in the library, in the church, much less gaze upon him/her?  

    Is the gaze I rest upon others limited by my classist, sexist, racist biases?   

    Upon whom, like Jesus, do I gaze with love? 

~Sister Joan Sobala

Returning to the Pews

Dear Friends, 

Today, the feast of Corpus Christi – the Body and Blood of Christ – is like no other our Church has celebrated since this feast began in the 13th century. What makes this year so different is that, for over a year, we have been told to stay away or come only in qualified circumstances (distancing, masks, reservations). 

We stayed away lest the coronavirus come home to us from worship. Churchgoers searched for and found themselves celebrating Mass virtually in favored places across the country and across the world. Make a spiritual communion with Christ, we were told. That’s all that is possible – a spiritual communion with Jesus whose Body and Blood we have become over the years our being Catholic. 

But during this last week, many places in our country have opened up: beaches, the Indy 500, stores, all sorts of events and venues. Church, too.  

It’s time to come home to who we are in the depths of our being. Will we come home? In some ways, it’s more convenient to turn to our electronic devices while in our pajamas and pray at a distance, instead of dressing up and driving a distance to be with coughing strangers and friends in a church building that has nonetheless held many important memories for us. 

If we can, we need to return to the church building to pray shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath with others, to meet again people who, like us, value the Eucharist and our mutual immersion in Christ through baptism. We are invited to rediscover the community of which we were a part before the pandemic, and now, with whom we can share new, life-shaping experiences. God is among us. Fully present. 

Come. Come back. Come back each week to be with others who are also the Body and Blood of Christ. 

“Ah,” we may say, “I get nothing out of it.” Maybe. But being with God in worship and with our brothers and sisters in Christ means that we are becoming something more than a feeling of success or accomplishment or satisfaction. 

As a church, we believe that Christ is really and truly present in the Eucharist. His is not merely a symbolic presence nor is it a physical presence. It is the Lord, truly. 

One author suggests that Jesus might say to us today, “In the years ahead, I want you to know that the one who loved you still loves you. The bread you break and the cup you drink is your communion with me…the link that binds us together and makes us one. You share my life and love when you do these things in memory of me.” 

So come. Begin today and continue every Sunday if possible. Be nourished and take that nourishment out to others all week long to those places where we pour out our life’s energies, like Jesus, for the life of the world. Can we be less generous than Jesus, our Risen Lord, whom we receive in Eucharist? 

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Kiss of God

Dear Friends,

When I was a child, a couple named Fran and Mike lived upstairs from my parents and me. Fran was a heavy smoker from her teens. Mike worked in one of those loosely regulated chemical plants north of Buffalo. The best medical wisdom of that time offered them no hope of ever having children of their own.

When a girl down the street became pregnant with no husband in sight, Fran and Mike approached her. They would take, adopt, and love her child. So Johnny came to live upstairs when he was a few days old. He grew up much loved, doted upon, but Fran and Mike made one mistake. They never told Johnny he was adopted. For whatever reason, they held that information as a closely guarded secret. One day, when he was 25 or so, someone told him.

Johnny’s reaction wasn’t pleasant. He could not accept that this largely uneducated couple chose him in love. He felt betrayed, alone, without roots. Johnny raged at his adoptive parents and finally cut off ties with them. Mike died without ever seeing Johnny again. Eventually, Johnny became reconciled with Fran, but the scars remained.

Mike and Fran had no enlightened guides in their life process with Johnny. They simply chose him, not knowing his personality, talents, or potential. They simply embraced him.

This story is a fit for today’s feast, as our Church worldwide celebrates Trinity Sunday. Today, we celebrate no abstract, distant unfeeling God, no solitary monolith in the sky ready to roll down judgment to crush us.

No, Paul tells us in today’s second reading (Romans 8.15) that we are children of God. God chooses us and in baptism, gifts us with the spirit of adoption. We are adopted into the family of God.

Unlike Fran and Mike, who kept Johnny’s adoption a secret, our faith tradition from the earliest New Testament writings on proclaims we are adopted. We belong to the family of God.

We walk with God and in God. God is the Source of our being. We belong to our Creator God, our Father/Mother. We also belong to Jesus, our brother, the one who put himself in harm’s way so that we might live. We belong to God, the Spirit, our sustainer and comforter. God is the only one who most profoundly satisfies our hungers and brings us to completion. Today, we celebrate God, our kin.

The Norwegians tell a Viking legend to their children. The story is short but touching.

Before their souls became one with their bodies in the womb, God kissed their souls. All of life, the Norwegians say, is living the memory of that kiss.

Our own Christian tradition does not believe that there are unembodied souls waiting to be joined to bodies and be born. We believe that the whole person, body, soul, and spirit begins in the womb. But whether we are Viking or Christian, before the womb or in the womb, let’s think of the kiss of God being upon us.

Be still for a moment now and let’s bring up from our deep unconscious, the tender kiss of God. Savor it on this Trinity Sunday.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Accepting All of God's Languages

Dear Friends, 

Most often, when we think of Pentecost, we focus on the scene in the upper room. There, in the midst of their prayers, Mary and the disciples of Jesus experienced a mighty wind blowing, tongues of fire and the ability to speak unknown languages. All signaled the coming of the Holy Spirit. 

Instead, let’s go out into the street. There, in Jerusalem for the feast of shavuot (The Jewish feast of Pentecost) were Jews from all over the world, from faraway places with strange sounding names. They could have been from Wilkes-Barre, PA; Skagway, Alaska; South Sudan, Lichtenstein, Azerbaijan, and Mongolia. There they all were, caught up in the sound they heard. What they heard was the voice of the disciples speaking in their own tongue of the mighty deeds of God. Their tongue, which was common, ordinary, neither lofty nor honored in history and cultures. Here’s the thing about Pentecost. It said that people’s languages are important and that God is borderless. 

God is borderless, not confined to one language, nor one expression of God’s call, nor the covenant to be one with God. 

Powerful countries tend to use language as a weapon. You must speak this language if you want to be heard. You must understand this language if you want to move upward in life.  

In the United States, the official language is English, even though there are well over 100 languages spoken in our country. If you don’t speak the official language, you could be understood as subversive. A threat.  

*“On Pentecost, God gave the divine voice to a bunch of nobodies and a crowd of commoners. It was an act of liberation both for humankind and for God.” Those in authority have not paid heed. They have restricted God to certain languages to be used in prayer. God, on Pentecost, said, “Not so!” 

God remarkably does not silence the speech of the oppressed, brutalized and marginalized. We heard that in the trial of George Floyd. His words, uttered 28 times or more in less than 10 minutes were heard by God and bystanders that day. “I can’t breathe.” God, who gave and gives all humanity breath, cannot bear to have the breath of George Floyd taken away. Without breath, there are no words. Without words, people cannot share, cannot bear witness to God and to the meaning of life. *“When someone suppresses the language of nobodies, they suppress God’s word.” 

*“Pentecost was a rebellion against those who would restrict God to a single powerful language of a single righteous people or a single systematic way of looking at reality.  

“Instead on Pentecost, God spoke and the people in the streets understood. 

“They began to speak, too, in the tongues of angels and in the divine voice.” 

Nothing could have been more subversive, then or today.  

~Sister Joan Sobala 

*The quotes in this blog are from an anonymous, brilliant, God-centered source. Regrettably, it was not I.  

Walking in Christ’s Footsteps

Dear Friends,

Even though the feast of the Ascension was last Thursday, it’s not too late to mull over and celebrate the meaning of this event as believers in Christ, our risen Lord. In the early Church, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost were celebrated as three aspects of one event – the raising up of Jesus, his being welcomed home by His Father, and the giving of the Holy Spirit to his followers. Over time, Christians began to celebrate the importance of the Ascension 40 days after Easter as a moment of gladness over Christ’s victory and their own willingness to accept the work that Jesus handed on to them.

Two true stories show how people internalized this “handing over” of the mission of Jesus.

In her autobiography, Catherine DeHueck Doherty tells of visiting Jerusalem with her father, the Russian ambassador to Egypt. One day, her parents took her to the Rock of the Ascension, a place near Jerusalem from which Christ was taken up into heaven.

“I loved to look at that rock,” she wrote, “because it showed the imprints of a person who was standing on his toes on one foot, while the other was flat. I had one ambition: to put my feet into these imprints of the feet of Christ. But that was a bit difficult because they had this area cordoned off. But what’s a rope to a little girl? One day, I just slid underneath while everyone else was praying, and put my little feet into those imprints, one up the other down. People began screaming, ‘Look what she is doing! Get that child out of there! Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ A Russian priest came forward and said, ‘Let the children come to me, have you forgotten that?’ He helped me put my feet into the imprints, as they escorted me out.”

Isn’t that what we are all called to do? To walk in Christ’s footsteps.

In 16^th century England, to be Catholic was to put your life in danger. To provide support of any kind to this outlaw religion was considered treason and punishable by death. Some did accept that fate, to keep that faith alive.

One such martyr was Margaret Clethrow of Yorkshire. For the crime of having Mass celebrated secretly in her home, Margaret was executed in 1586, at the age of 33.

On the night before she died, Margaret made one final request. She asked that her shoes be given to her oldest daughter, Anne, who was at that time 12. In those shoes, Margaret passed on to Anne the message of the Ascension.

Catherine and Margaret both caught the meaning of the Ascension. They embraced it. Jesus leaves us His sandals. We walk in his footsteps, and carry on His works of compassion, healing, justice and reconciliation.

Each time we act in that spirit, no matter how great, simple or unnoticed our words and actions might be, we do the work of the Risen Jesus – the Risen Jesus who puts the world into our hands and His sandals on our feet.

~Sister Joan Sobala