Holding People Close Despite Their Sins

Dear Friends,

Summertime is traditionally a time to dip into novels. Beach reading. Backyard, hammock reading.

I admit it. I do. One of the historical crime novelists I have been reading for years is Anne Perry. Many more years will pass before I locate and read currently unavailable selections from the more than one hundred books she wrote before her death in April of this year. Anne Perry created finely drawn characters in her crime solving stories set in Victorian Britain and during World War I. She dealt compassionately with ethical issues, the social, intellectual upheavals of the times in which her books are set. “Many of my fictional crimes are committed by characters who find themselves caught in a situation beyond their comprehension or control,” said Perry as quoted in Time magazine, April 24, 2023. “I know only too well how that can happen.”

The reason she knows the pathos of life’s critical involvements is because, as a teenager growing up in New Zealand, she was involved in the death of a friend’s mother. Anne Perry spent time in prison for her part in the death of Pauline Parker’s mother. By her thirties, Anne Perry was living in Scotland and had begun to write.

What do we do when we hear about this awful part of Anne Perry’s life? Do we figuratively burn her books? Do we condemn her whole life because she had done evil as a youth?

What would Jesus have us do? In His travels, Jesus met people who had done wrong or alienated those close to them. Yet, He had a way of holding people close despite what they had done. He looked into their hearts, saw their sorrow and forgave them. He invited them to build their lives anew. Jesus told stories about people who did wrong and showed how they were reconciled with those whom they hurt. Jesus’ one outstanding failure in His ministry of reconciliation was Judas, who refused to believe that God’s love was greater than his sin.

Reflecting on her own life as it evolved after her release from prison, Anne Perry says, “I hope I have profited from the whole experience…to seek redemption, to devote the rest of one’s life to becoming a more compassionate, more just, less judgmental person. To atone.” (Time magazine, April 24, 2023)

Those wounded by their own sin cannot come to be able to speak this way about their life without help.

I think of the solace shown in the prophet Ezekiel:
            I will take you away from among the nations…
            And bring you back to your own land.
            I will sprinkle clean water upon you…
            I will give you a new heart
            And place a new spirit within you…
            I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36.24-28 selected)

Did anyone read this passage for Anne Perry? She doesn’t say. But her works speak for her.

When you and I meet someone after they have “paid their dues,” do we gentle them into new life and encourage them to release their talent as a gift for the world?

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Putting God in the Center of Life

Dear Friends,

Since Advent, I have concentrated almost exclusively on the meaning of the liturgical feasts and seasons in this weekly blog. These cover the soul-touching times in Jesus’ life, and we are the better for immersing ourselves in their richness.    

But now that summer is officially here, let’s shift our focus to the legacy of Jesus, as perceived in the writings and contemporary experiences of his followers.

Here are some elements to build into our summer lives or to improve upon.

Have more family meals this summer than you do during the fall/winter/spring seasons. Agree in your household to leave cell phones or other electronic devices elsewhere in the house. Say grace that invites everyone around the table to participate. Talk with one another about the day, new learnings, special moments. Initially, these meals may be a challenge, but they are worth it for the family’s sake and for our faith. Family meals are a prelude to/are practice for Eucharist when the whole community comes together to share the presence of God in Word and Sacrament.

Learn to look around you when you are out and about. Who is walking by? What is growing in the garden you pass? What sounds are in the air? Whom have we talked with today or whom have we ignored and why? Pope Francis clusters these ideas for consciousness under the heading of “culture of encounter.” When we really develop this culture in our lives, “no one is discarded or pigeonholed, but all are sought out because all are needed to reveal God’s face…The Holy Spirit impels us to go out from ourselves, from all that hems us in, from all the things we cling to…Blessed are they who believe and have the courage to foster encounter and communion.” (Pope Francis, Homily, May 31, 2019)

Weave into your day a dollop of prayer. Believers erroneously think we need always to pray in paragraphs or designated formal prayers. Trying brief, one-liners directed frequently to God-around-us and God-within-us also work. When we are walking toward our golf ball in the rough on the golf course, when there is a lull in conversation on the beach, when we are waiting in line at the ice cream shop, slip in a word to God.

Thank you, God, for this moment.

Awaken me to Your presence, O Lord.

Teach me Your ways, O God.

Bless everyone in this line, Lord.

And more. Make up your own prayer or repeat and savor all week-long a phrase you heard at Mass last weekend.

Finally, in this simple but profound to-do list, allow yourself daily summer silence when God can cradle you close and speak to your heart. Quiet your senses for a few moments early in the day or at night before sleep descends. Let go of the thoughts that scurry around your mind like so many mice. “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46.10)

Like a summer tan, work at putting God in the center of life in your own unique way.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Nourishment of God’s People

Dear Friends,

Today, the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, I can’t help praying that this feast will touch each of us deeply with Jesus’ very own depth of generous loving and self-giving. But the story of generous nourishment of God’s people began many centuries before Jesus.

Our readings prompt us to meet and value God’s presence in three such holy meals:

• God who in Deuteronomy, fed the Israelites in the desert with manna and water from the rock,

• the oneness of the loaf and the sharing in the cup at the First Eucharist, as told in First Corinthians,

• and the undeniable truth of Jesus giving us His very self as food and drink in John 6.

Three memorable meals, spanning the centuries, from Moses to Jesus. They are ours today to relish.

We pass on to one another “a taste for this meal” which we call Eucharist. We cultivate that taste. We hunger to be fed by the bread of life and to drink from the cup of salvation.

To stay the course of faith and life, each of us – all of us – need nourishment of many kinds, all of which ultimately come from God, but proximately, that nourishment comes from others, strangers as well as family, friends, coworkers in the vineyard of the Lord.

I am speaking of food for our minds and hearts – that’s what the Word of God is. Food we eat so that we can be strong and determined enough to serve the poor, the outcast, the whole community.

We need the food of incongruity to make us laugh; the food of wonder as we behold a child learning life’s quirks; the wonder of people’s stories of survival; the giants that swim in the depths of the ocean; the longed for, fragrant, springtime-blossoming of fruit trees.

Sometimes we need the food of fasting so that we can be disciplined enough to hear the Word of God and keep it.

Even as Jesus poured out His blood for all people on the cross, we pour out our own blood, so that others may live, Transfusions we call them. Blood that once was ours becomes the blood of life for others. We become blood relatives of one another and in this way, are called to be faithful to all people, for we do not necessarily know who got our blood.

We are nourished and we nourish, endlessly reaching out in tangible or symbolic ways to those who journey with us.

To preside at the Table of the Lord is the honor and responsibility of the priestly minister. It has been said that there is a dearth of vocations to the priestly ministry. Not true. Women and married men experience the call to priestly service, but the official, institutional Church does not recognize these callings. Such vocations have been found wanting without being tested. It’s hard to believe that the God who fed the people in the three mystical readings today would starve future generations.

As we move toward the beginning of the Synod in October, we remember Ludmila Javorova, ordained in the underground church of Brno, Slovakia, in 1970, to minister to imprisoned women, including nuns, who were denied priestly support or the sacraments in the official Church. Ludmila, in a visit to the United States in 1998, told a group of us gathered in Washington, DC how she would go into women’s prisons, bearing a roll of bread, and ask for a glass of water into which she would drop a raisin, thus making wine for the Eucharist. She would console, anoint, absolve. After the dissolution of Communist rule, Ludmila was not allowed by Rome to continue her priestly ministry.

The coming Synod, 2023-2024, will consider the life of our Church and its essential mission of pastoral care. We find ourselves in a new period of history. Assumptions about the way the Church has deployed priestly ministers in service of the reign of God, the way the Church has fed the People of God, are giving way to new realizations about human life and what we can be and do, male and female. We desire to see our Church responding to the call of Jesus to serve in new unexplored ways. It is time.

As Jesus fed the multitude, no one ever went away hungry. Each of the six accounts of the feeding of the many said there were leftovers. More than enough. Enough for the next people who came with their hunger. Thank God for Jesus foresight. Can we do anything less?

~ Sister Joan Sobala

God is Not Beyond Us

Dear Friends,

The meaning of the feast of the Holy Trinity eludes us. In this age that demands to know immediately the usefulness or relevance of any thought, we get impatient with the word “Trinity” – which seems beyond us.

But God is not beyond us.

God is not some impartial observer who watches from afar, but a lover of all things human and created.

When we fall down into the sewer basin as the ducklings in Buffalo did last week, God, like Mama Duck, stands guard until help comes.

God is never, ever absent from us.

God’s Word offers us truth, even when we don’t want to hear it.

God’s Spirit opens us up to the new, the unpredictable and holy.

God cannot be defined by our need.

God does not fulfill our personal or political agenda.

God simply is.

The boundaries of our language give us no once-and-for-all way of giving a clear, unequivocal expression to who God is. But God, who embraces us minute by minute, says to us: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” No conditions.

When we switch to the categories of love, ah! That’s different from trying to understand God with our minds. We can grasp God as simply loving us.

Think of people you love and who love you. God’s love is their love exponentially multiplied.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Inspiration of the Holy Spirit

Dear Friends,

Happy Pentecost – the feast of the hovering of the Spirit over all of our lives without exception!

Because the Holy Spirit is freely given, we are tempted to believe and to act as though no work on our part is necessary. Wrong! The Spirit can act within us only if we are open to meet and accept the Awakener along the way.

Susan, a cleaner I know at the YMCA, has some handicaps which she could spend her days bemoaning. No bitterness in her. No self-pity. She says her ministry is hugs and encouragement for people she meets. She says she is moved by the Nudge. Just a daily welcome of the people who come her way. I see it in her each time I am at the Y.

I visited Barbara at the hospital last week. She is vastly incapacitated by a stroke, and unable to speak. In 1986, Barbara, who was volunteering at St. Mary’s Church, made me a multi-colored filing system for my homilies and talks. In our recent hospital visit, I told her that I was still using her system to my everlasting gratitude. Her face lit up with an angelic smile. The Spirit led me to her, to say words of gratitude that have been crowded in my heart for all these years. It’s never too late to speak of the gratitude that wells up in us.

How about you? When were you in the right place at the right time? When did you ask the perceptive question and didn’t know it was the right question? When did you act courageously and didn’t know why? When did you speak and have no idea you thought what you voiced? When did you see a person become strong in outlook and action when they had been timid or uninvolved before? Whom have you seen – a public figure or someone you know personally speak and act under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?

The Mexican poet Armando Nervo (1870-1919) gives us a picturesque sample of the vast and endless ways the Holy Spirit draws us in if we are willing:

            Alone we are only a spark, but in the Spirit, we are a fire.
            Alone we are only a string, but in the Spirit, we are a lyre.
            Alone we are only an anthill, but in the Spirit, we are a mountain.
            Alone, we are only a drop, but in the Spirit, we are a fountain.
            Alone, we are only a feather, but in the Spirit, we are a wing.
            Alone we are only a fraction, but in the Spirit, we are one with everything.

Without the Holy Spirit, God seems far away, Christ is relegated to the past and there is no message of love to be heard, no compassion to be felt in our day. With the Spirit, the universe is fresh and vital, and all creation is involved in giving birth to the new, the holy. Together, today, let us greet and celebrate the Holy Spirit who rejoices to be one with all creation.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Awaiting the Holy Spirit

Dear Friends,

This is the Sunday between the Ascension and Pentecost. A time of waiting.

Jesus had left them. They would no longer look upon that much loved face or hear that authoritative voice that could be laced with kindness or steel.

Jesus was gone. Taken up.

But this time, they were not desolate as they were when he died. Now, they were primed, ready for…Well, they were not sure what they were ready for. Jesus had a way of surprising them.

Together, they went back to Jerusalem to wait and pray for the promised Spirit. In Acts 1.15, we are told there were 120 gathered for Pentecost. These included Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the Twelve with Matthias in place of Judas Iscariot, and I wonder who else? Perhaps Mary Magdalen and the other Marys, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, Simon of Cyrene and his sons, the soon to be deacons Stephen and Philip. Maybe the son of the widow of Naim, and the little girl whom Jesus cured and the cripple from the pool of Bethsaida and the blind men Jesus cured. It is delicious to wonder who was included and why. They were diverse, many with little savvy and very little discipline as a group. Yet these were among the ones that Jesus called His own, and as they awaited the Spirit, their prayer blended where their lives did not.

What allowed them to not fall apart were two things: Jesus’ prayer for them and His message.

The intimacy, the uncompromising gift that Jesus gave is His prayer for His disciples, is in today’s Gospel. Reread it in John 17 1-11. Read it out loud. Read it to someone else. It confirms that the ones for whom he prays in this passage are loved by Him. Jesus recognizes these disciples belong to His Father. Jesus holds them close.

His message to them of peace, unity and courage was to be spoken and lived by the whole company of believers. It was about the reign of God – already in their midst but not fulfilled. Each of them would not receive the same message in the same way. There are as many nuances to the message as there were people receiving it. When the time came, the Holy Spirit would warm and encourage them to deepen their commitment and move into action. Then they would know what to say and do.

You and I cannot be in the upper room with the other early disciples of Christ for the next week, but we can join with one another all week in praying and waiting, repeating over and over, Come, Holy Spirit!

~Sister Joan Sobala

A Mother's Impact

Dear Friends,

Recently, Ron Klain was interviewed on the Jan Psaki show (MSNBC). Ron, you may recall, has just left his post as chief of staff for President Joe Biden. A man of distinction who served in other administrations, Ron’s interview was clear, strong, thoughtful. Who would have thought how the interview would end. In these weeks running up to Mother’s Day, Jan asked Ron about his mother, who had been a major influence in his life. At 61, Ron Klain burst into tears.

Mothers, whether living or dead, have a way of doing that to us.

That got me thinking about Jesus on the cross, peering down through pain-blurred eyes at His mother who came to see Him through these last hours. I wonder if, like Ron Klain, the very sight of His mother brought tears to His eyes, too. She couldn’t touch Jesus, but He remembered her loving touch. Somehow, Jesus found the strength to give her and John the beloved disciple to each other. She would be safe in John’s care and he in hers. It always went both ways. Jesus was mindful of others to the very end.

Jesus, Ron Klain, you and I all have remembered mother-stories – how we felt with them at significant moments or in ordinary daily living. Their hair brushing our faces, their hands red from kitchen work, their disappointment in something we said or did. Mothers are memorable. Our mothers taught us about all sorts of things, including stamina – “You’ll sit there until you finish your spinach!”

Maybe we didn’t particularly like our mothers. We just rubbed each other the wrong way. On the other hand, maybe we remember the glow of approval in their eyes when we did or said something notable in public.

Mother’s Day may stress us out. We don’t know what to do with our memories, good, sad or unexpressed. What we can do is pray in thanks to our Mother God for our mothers. They carried us. Some died in the process. Without them, we would not be here, not be the selves we are.

If your mother is alive, hold her hand. Let your eyes speak for you. Words sometimes get in the way. Entrust her to Jesus.

~Sister Joan Sobala