Finding God and Our Calling in the Face of Suffering

 

Dear Friends,

                In today’s first reading, God tells Moses:

                                “I have seen the affliction of my people.

                                I have heard their cry.

                                I know their suffering

                                And I am coming to deliver them.”

               

                Our God is a God who is moved by human suffering, appalled by it. God stands over against human suffering and does not simply watch however sadly from the sidelines. God sides with those who suffer, whether it comes from a natural disaster or the sheer perversity of human beings. For more than two weeks, the world has watched the suffering of body, mind, heart and spirit that the Ukrainian people have experienced as the might of Russia bore down on their nation, unprovoked. Through the remarkable power of the camera and voices of reporters, we have watched as much of it as we could bear.

                All too often, when we are faced with suffering like this, we are tempted to think: There is no God. Or if we acknowledge God then we say  “This must be God’s will. We must be patient and not complain. We must accept the suffering God gives to others and to us as well.” But God does not call us to a tolerant acceptance of suffering, but to fight it, reject it, overcome it.  ”Suffering” Pope Francis reminds us “is a call to conversion: it reminds us of our frailty and vulnerability.”

                Look at how God meets suffering – with compassion and love. God sends whoever or whatever can stir our apathy and indifference, until we are compelled to share His divine compassion and love, to share in his works of healing and deliverance. This is our experience today.

                Watch carefully what we see happening in Ukraine. Ordinary women and men are overcome by divine impatience in the face of human cruelty and suffering and shaken from their apathy and passivity. God cares and asks us to care. God says to us” I am with you,” and in the same breath God says “I send you.”

                Truth be told, most of us are probably inclined to react as Moses did and say

                                “Send someone else, Lord. (I’m too ordinary, Moses implied.) ” I am not good enough.”

                In whatever way the message to help the suffering is framed, will we hear the call? Accept the mission? go where we are sent? In this time when we feel we can do so little to help the Ukrainian people, some of us will go there to help, maybe to fight the oppressor. Maybe we need to stay home and participate in events, rallies, fundraisers. Maybe we need to seek out our own enemies and make peace before we are all swept away by eruptions we cannot control.

                The fighting is there, but it is here as well. How can we undo hatred, division, and self-righteousness?  Where are we being sent? Will we go?

~Sister Joan Sobala
 

Making Our "Mountaintop" Experiences Meaningful

 

Dear Friends,

                Do you know what K-2 is? It’s the second tallest mountain in the world after Mt. Everest. Everest has been scaled numerous times over the last century, but K-2, had never been crested until January of this year, when ten Nepali, from Sherpa families, banded together to make the attempt. Despite frostbite and dramatic winds, the ten men linked arms and together ascended the pinnacle singing the National Anthem of Nepal. They were heroes whose lives would never be the same. They had been to the mountain, and the mountain had not conquered them !

                History is full of stories about people who look to the mountain as a place to find meaning and challenge.

                “I have been to the mountain!” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed. The biblical people also partook of faith experiences that happened on Mt. Sinai, where God gave the tablets of the Law to Moses, the Mount where Jesus gave the Beatitudes to his listeners and today, the Mount of the Transfiguration, that stopping off place on the way to the passion where Jesus’ radiance, His oneness with His Father flowed over Peter, James and John, rendering them awestruck.

                Mountaintop experiences such as those of MLK Jr. and Jesus allowed them to go forward to their own passions intertwined with the resurrection to come.

                You and I have been to the mountain. By that I mean we have had symbolic moments which have changed us forever, but which we might not be able to name and can’t cling to tenaciously.

                 We can only get to the mountain by walking up. No chair lifts. As with  Jesus, others have come to the mountain with us – people with whom we have shared the power of the moment, but whose experiences were so different from ours. We can get to the top only in the company of others. Never alone. Today’s Gospel shows us that mountaintop experiences may be exhilarating, but they are not destinations. Like Jesus and his disciples, we must descend from the mountain to pick up the work at hand, namely grappling with the demons that threaten to destroy the fragile children we have borne, bodily or otherwise.

                  The antithesis of transfiguration is disfiguration in body, mind  and spirit. World players, imbued with evil, do not care if their actions disfigure people, but most of us care. Nonetheless, we disfigure people by our words or lack of them, by our actions or lack of them, by our blindness to the participation of others in the radiance of Christ.

                  I hope that, as we look on the faces of the people who come our way this Lent - indeed all year long - that we really see the transfiguration God makes real in them, and help those in need in supportive ways even as Jesus did when He came down from the mountain.

~Sister Joan Sobala

God’s Word Many Voices

           

  Who is this Satan, anyway?

                In today’s Gospel, Jesus recognizes Satan for who he is, but in our daily lives, we don’t … or at least we don’t easily recognize Satan for who he is.

                The Evil One (a.k.a. Satan,  the Adversary) is present wherever people and cultures distance themselves from God.  Terms like “sin” and “taking responsibility for our actions” are receding from our vocabulary. Yet the popularity of films from Faust in 1925 to The Witch in 2015 and the Netflix series Evil tell us that Satan is still on our minds.

                The contemporary evangelical author, Max Lucado, reminds us that Satan presents himself as attractive, beautiful, engaging, willing to share the good things of life with us. He presents himself , indeed, as  God-like. If Satan, the Evil One, the fallen angel who challenges God, were to present himself as ugly, mean and possessive, he would have no allure, and we would have no sin.

                It’s this alluring Satan who presents himself to Jesus in the desert.

                Jesus’ first temptation - and ours – is possessiveness, the need to have more and better, to satisfy our hungers at any price. Yet our hungers for food, money, sex and power represent only one part of our life - and a limited part at that. To pursue any one of these with singlemindedness is to live distorted lives… to have a warped identity.

                The second temptation is to make a god of something that is not God, in the hope that this alternate God will provide what we desperately crave: importance, attention, influence, connection. The alternate god may be a person, a group, an ideology, something addictive.  When loyalty in given to this alternate god,  when things, people, situations other than God are placed at the center of our lives, all morality is subordinated to this false center. Who we truly are becomes lost.

                The third temptation is perhaps the most subtle of all, but the most potent. It is the sense that a person does not have to participate in the safety of his/her life. God will save us despite us. Succumbing to this temptation, we taunt God with our recklessness.

                “Throw yourself down from here” – Satan says to Jesus in the third temptation – “lest you dash your foot against a stone. (Luke 4.11)” God becomes a “perfect fit” to meet Jesus’ own specific needs. As for me,  I don’t need to help myself. God will provide.

                Jesus , in each temptation, rebuffs Satan. Lent reminds us that we need Jesus to recognize the evil, in us and around us, for what it is.

                But we can ‘t do this alone.

                In  our day, with its taste for individualism, people, in increasing numbers, remove themselves from being active members of the Christian community. When we live in our own bubble, we more easily resist  being challenged by the community’s vision and work toward a world where the war against Ukraine could never happen again. For now, we join with Pope Francis is using our Lenten practices of prayer and fasting to stand with the Ukrainian people, to disarm Satan, disarm Putin and all who say no to compassion, justice, and peace in our violent world.

                Lent, lived out attentively within the faith community, can help us develop and deepen a spiritual pattern in our life by which we look at Jesus for inspiration and insight and act on what we believe.

                Luke is the only Gospel writer who tells us that, at the end of this encounter between Jesus and Satan, Satan goes away, searching for another time when he can tempt Jesus. Satan finds the right moment in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus prays over, broods over the suffering and death that awaits Him.  But there, Satan fails for a fourth time. The power of Satan is not infinite. It cannot annul the power of God.

                Jesus goes on to his passion and death and to His Easter Rising. Satan will never tempt Him again.

                After Easter, 2022, our own personal work will not be over. Satan will want to continue to get at us, to hold us in his grasp and destroy us as we journey, however unsurely, toward God.

                On this First Sunday of Lent, let’s begin this Lenten journey with eagerness – with willing hearts that recognize that, though we dash our foot against the stone, as we strive to be faithful to God, we will not be broken forever.

~Sister Joan Sobala                                                                           

Special Lenten Mission

 

Dear Friends,

                In last week’s blog, I talked about the sign of the cross as an apt symbol for us in the Lenten season. This week, I want to do a second brief blog about Lent as a whole – Lent as the way we prepare for the Great Feast of Easter, for Lent is not meant to be a season of penitence in which we are the center.  Christ is the center. The whole Church is invested in preparing for Easter and we, as individuals, are called to do the same.

                In one of her writings, Teresa of Avila prayed about making Lent meaningful for her.

                                “What do you want of me?” She prayed.

                                            “Yours, you made me,

                                                Yours, you saved me,

                                                Yours, you endured me,

                                                Yours, you called me,

                                                Yours, you awaited me,

                                                What do you want of me?

                                                Yours I am, for you I was born:

                                                What do you want of me?”

               

                In our Lenten experiences, God wants us to pay close attention to others. Pope Francis in one of his Lenten reflections tells us “We need effective gestures that will alleviate the pain of so many of our brothers and sisters who walk alongside us.” We see them only on the nightly news, in the homeless shelters, in the children who have almost nothing to live on. But what are effective gestures for us to participate in alleviating the pain of others? That’s for you to determine with your own insights and skills, your own response to God’s call: “What do you want of me?

                  Here’s another thing that’s reasonably simple. Let’s try to live with the Gospel for each Sunday before we celebrate Eucharist. If we have a computer, there is no reason not to know what text is coming, for the Gospel texts can be easily found there. In this year’s C cycle readings, we encounter Jesus tempted, the radiant Jesus transfigured, Jesus’ parable of the barren fig tree, which the gardener begs to be allowed to live, the prodigal father and Jesus’  encounter with the woman caught in adultery. As you find yourself in these readings, ask “What do you want of me, God?”             

                Here’s an at home thing to do -  let’s be bold with our closets, drawers and shelves and throw out/give away each day one (just one) item to help diminish our attachments to things. Things: do they possess us or do we possess them?” What do you want of me, God?”

                 God has a special Lenten mission for each of us: to seek… to become…to do…to hand over…to open ourselves to…to practice…to unfold…to soften…to enter into radical trust…YOU finish the phrase. All you need to live Lent in love will not be revealed to you at the beginning of the season, but it will become known, so be alert.  Trust God as the companion of your Lenten journey. Ask God over and over again: ”What  do you want of me?”

~Sister Joan Sobala

               

Preparing for Lent

 

Dear Friends,

                Looking ahead, our church celebrates Ash Wednesday  -- the beginning of Lent – on March 2, this year. What is notable about that day is the public display of penitence writ large on our foreheads  - the sign of the cross made with ashes, sifted down from the palm used the prior year on Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion.

                Catholics who can, go to Mass on Ash Wednesday, at which time they come forward and have the sign of the cross traced on their foreheads with ashes. Catholic Christians, and some other Christians as well, relish the thought of this public proclamation of faith. TV personalities can be seen with ashes on their foreheads. So also people on busses or in hospitals or businesses and children in schools. I remember when I was in parish work and distributing ashes at Mass one year, being moved by young mothers presenting their very small children for ashes. Sometimes, priests wait in the church parking lots to offer ashes to passersby whose schedules don’t permit them to get to Mass. In other cases, a dish of ashes is left before the altar in the quiet church during the day for people who come by. But however we receive ashes, they are always administered in the sign of the cross.

                The sign of the cross is an ancient prayer/practice. It was introduced in the second century. Cyril of Jerusalem in the 4^th century wrote: “Be the Cross our seal made with boldness by our finger on our brow, on everything… over bread , over  our coming and going.” The sign of the cross is a way of blessing ourselves.

                It is used in liturgies by the priest/presider to bless us as we begin the liturgy of Eucharist, as well as at the end of Mass. People are baptized and confirmed with the sign of the cross, and always with the words “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

                One of the shifts in practice we have made over the centuries is to leave making of the sign of the cross to our priests and deacons. It’s true that they are the ones to bless us liturgically, but if we go back to Cyril of Jerusalem and other writers, we see that blessing ourselves and others is a way believers express faith for ourselves and encouragement in faith for others.

                As Lent comes, how about making it a daily practice to bless yourself as you get up in the morning or as you get into the car or bus to leave for your workday? Tell your spouse or children what you are doing, but then bless them as you part in the morning and trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads. Bless them at night as well. Such a simple practice, but one which highlights the centrality of the cross for the believer.

                One of the things I have started doing is making the sign of the cross with the cursor/mouse on someone’s forehead on the computer screen at the end of a particularly deep and touching zoom conversation. I tell them I am blessing them and most often, they sit still, poised to treasure the moment.

                This year if you can, begin your Lenten experience with Eucharist and the reception of ashes. Begin even now to reclaim the tracing of the sin of the cross with your thumb on your forehead or the foreheads of others.

~Sister Joan Sobala

 

Valentine's Day...A State of Heart

 

Dear Friends,

                Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, when we honor the people we love in some way. But is what we do tomorrow a true symbol of what we do all year long?

                For love is not momentary, not limited to a greeting on a certain day, no matter how profound the verse on the card may be.

                What we give on Valentine’s Day depends on the state of our heart, and the state of our heart is what we would do well to think about before Valentine’s Day dawns so that we can judge whether what we say tomorrow is rooted in our lives.

                Here are some questions to address to your heart:

                All year long, do I have a courageous heart – one that does not fear loving deeply and                             broadly?

                Do I love the stranger, immigrants and the poor and find ways to engage with them and not                    just people I love most dearly.

                Do I have a heart imbued with joy or a heavy heart that makes life gloomy?

                Over my lifetime, have I had a forgiving heart that sets other people free and myself as well?

                Do I have an empathetic heart that recognizes the misery of others and tries to be                                     compassionate with them?                                         

                Do I have it in my heart to encourage and awaken the spirit of possibility in others?

                Do I believe that God lives in the sanctuary of my heart? If so, what does that mean for my                    life?

                Do I continue to love the people who have weathered life with me and do I tell them so?                                                                                                                                                                              As I think about these questions, and perhaps some things that have only recently come to light in my heart, what lurks or lurches in my heart? What do I feel when I come face to face with God’s Image in others in my daily living?

 O God, Mother and Father of us all, I pray to you with deep reverence:

                May your love become like a furnace burning in my heart. (Jer. 20.9)

                May Your Son’s peace reign in my heart. (Col.3.15)

                May Your Spirit stand guard over my heart and mind. (Phil.4.7)

 From this side of the computer to you…May you have a happy heart this Valentine’s Day.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Here I am! Send Me!

Dear Friends,

                Isaiah, Paul and Peter.

                These three figures are prominent in today’s readings. They were people totally caught up in their own day to day lives. They did not wish to be different or to relate to God in another way. But each was surprised by God and ended up in a new place spiritually and even physically.

                Isaiah was from Jerusalem, an aristocrat, married with children, a bright man, totally absorbed in his life and times, a faithful believer who worshipped regularly in the temple. He was also a reluctant prophet.

                Today, we hear how Isaiah had a vision, i.e.  he came to a new and compelling consciousness of God calling him to speak God’s word to the people. By the end of the passage, when God says “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”, Isaiah steps up.  “Here I am. Send me!” Isaiah had moved  from no apparent consciousness of a new mission to an ardent commitment to speak God’s word.

                Paul was a whole-hearted Jew, who made tents for a living and a man who was hostile to Christ and his followers. “I persecuted the church of God” he confesses in today’s second reading. Yet Paul, in a moment of conversion, moved from hostility to being one who claimed Jesus as his Lord.

                Peter was from a small town in Galilee, far from the places of power, married, satisfied to be a skilled fisherman, self-reliant. Prone to put his foot in his mouth.

                On this morning in the Gospel, he and his dejected partners washed empty nets. They had fished all night and had caught nothing.

                Jesus, the non-fisherman, stood on the shore nearby and told Peter to go out again.” Cast out into the deep.”

                Peter was called back to the same place he had failed and was asked to try again. Daring to go back, Peter knew great success and realized it was not of his own doing – an important step in coming to a new commitment to follow Christ.

                In much the same way as these three, you and I are absorbed in our everyday lives. In our homes, families, work-world, we are sometimes reluctant to follow God’s call, or hostile or so self- reliant that we don’t need God to tell us how to fish. Yet each of us is called by God, touched by God, invited by God in a unique way to be the embodiment of God and the bearer of Good News to our world. “Why me?” we might ask. “Why not me?” Each of us called by God at some point to go beyond where we are.

                It might be to a new place like Isaiah. We may have to give up long- held convictions like Paul. We may have to return to a place we’ve been, like Peter, only to be surprised by what God offers us there.

                This is real. This is true. 

                What will it take for us to cast out into the deep, or to say “Here I am! Send me!”?

~Sister Joan Sobala