Gazing at God: A Trinity Sunday Reflection

Dear Friends,

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only day in the liturgical calendar when we, as a faith community, gaze at our God in wonder. God: community of being. God, who has been misunderstood over the centuries, as uncaring, immune from our suffering, too hidden for us to know, who evokes fear and watches us from afar as an impartial observer. God who keeps a list of our sins. This God does not exist, says the American theologian, Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1991).

No. This is not the God we celebrate today, appreciate and hold close. Today’s feast leads us to honor and treasure “a personal God who is as close to us as a heartbeat, as near as the breath we breathe.” (LaCugna)

“God,” my friend, Father Gary Tyman, says “is a verb. God happens. When people who are adversaries come together in understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation, that is God happening. When someone suffering from alcohol or drug addiction decides to enter treatment, that is God happening.” I think further. When our relationships become more than just the two of us, God happens. Whenever profound things occur in human life, God happens.

The spiritual writer, Macrina Wiederckehr, speaks directly to this God who wraps us in a daily, unending embrace:

You are extravagant with your love.
You drown us with devotion and understanding.
You leave me breathless, thoughtless.
Master, Teacher, Friend, Lover, Parent,
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer…
I try to encompass all Your names, but they slip from my grasp.
When I hold nothing, I hold You.
When I hold You, I hold everything.                          Seven Sacred Pauses, 2008

This way of celebrating the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity makes it a feast of affection for our God who embraces us and welcomes us into the family of God. Once we were not. But once we came into being, we belonged—to our own families and to the very family of God.

Our life stories are interwoven with the very life of God. We are continually being drawn into the life of God. Today, together, we welcome this call.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

All in One Place Together

Dear Friends, 

We celebrate Pentecost this Sunday. The reading from Luke tells us that Jesus’ followers were all in one place together. Jesus had told them Go and make disciples of all nations. Now they gather and wonder just how to fulfill this mission. Now they wonder how safe they are in Jerusalem. They try to encourage each other. Now they draw on the memories of Easter and worry about what’s ahead.

The Spirit comes to them. Hopes are rekindled. The believers leave the house and mingle and pray and preach in the crowd of Jewish pilgrims. The Jesus people are becoming a gift to the world, starting from that Jerusalem home. The Spirit sends them out. 

Luke tells us that the disciples’ words could be heard by all, whatever the native language. Jesus’ words would be preached in every language. Jesus’ healing and mercy would unfold in many cultures and in all creation.  

This Pentecost I am feeling the challenge of being a member of a world church. The world overwhelms me with news of conflicts and scientific developments and diverse cultures and belief systems. There are stories of good and of evil. There are many preachers and leaders and heroes and saints. 

So, what is my own prayer this Pentecost? I pray to learn others’ languages of need or faith or love. May I hear each day the ones who call me by name. May I steadily pray and act on behalf of the poor who call my name. And may I wonder with other disciples how to respond to the voices of many nations.

In the Spirit,

Susan Schantz SSJ

Being an Active Listener Like Jesus

Dear Friends,  

The term “active listening” would not have appeared in the language of Jesus’ time, but he certainly did just that. If Jesus had not been an active listener, there would have been no miracles, no deepening of faith and community. The understory of the Gospel is that Jesus looked at the people who came his way and loved them into new life. He listened to how their lives unfolded, and he took up their healing. On this Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost, as we have just entered into the summer season, let’s pray that we will follow Jesus’ lead in this sensitive way of being with people this summer. 

But what are some of the qualities of the active listener? 

The true and active listener stops moving, stops reading and apparently listening while, in fact, their eyes are following something else. The active listener wants to know more about the person being engaged: his/her stories of change, growth, humor and sadness, tragedy and moments of rescue. Only small portions of a person’s story can be revealed in a brief conversation, but it may be enough to garner a sense of the person. There are gray areas, ambiguities in human experience. With an active listener, these may well come into focus.

I find that chance conversations sometimes loosen people’s memories or desires to talk about something. It is a blessing for both speaker and listener. People are wary of personal storytelling. Maybe, in times past, they shared a piece of themselves, only to be shouted at, disrespected, judged, rendered joyless. 

The active listener puts aside his/her own need to tell and draws out the threads of the other person’s story and abides in that story, however briefly. 

John ends his Gospel with these words: “There are many other things that Jesus did, but if there were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” (John 21.25) 

I hope we can believe that many of these things that Jesus did involved listening to people.  

How Jesus was with people is how we, as his followers, are called to be with people this summer.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Ascension Missioning

From Christ Episcopal Church Glen Ridge New Jersey

Dear Friends,

What does the ascension of Jesus mean to us? This feast will be celebrated in my diocese on Thursday May 29. It commemorates Jesus’ leaving the disciples after commissioning them to continue the loving ministry and witness they had developed among them.

Reflect on the disciples’ feelings about Jesus’ leaving them. They’ve been consoled by his words and touch in the days since Easter. The recovery of presence and purpose during the weeks after Easter is threatened by the cessation of Jesus’ visits to the upper room and the lake shore. When these visits cease, the disciples are left behind, yearning for the spirit to take up ministry, to journey and preach, to tend the poor among them, to work out their relationship with Jewish and Gentile believers.

Do we recognize ourselves in this disorganization, in this grief, in this longing for direction? Where in our lives as believers are we confused, worried, or feeling abandoned? What turning points or transitions shake our faith in these days of 2025? What hopes have been abandoned? Are there any hopes being gradually rekindled? Where are we called to journey in the months ahead?

In this time after Easter and before Pentecost take some time with the disciples as they share sadness and hope, grief and faith. Take time to kindle hope as we wait for the fire of the Spirit. Here is a prayer for these days.

On the Death of the Beloved

by John O’Donohue

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or night or pain can reach you

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

Peace,
Susan Schantz SSJ

Continuing Jesus' Work

Dear Friends,  

On Easter Sunday and for the first few weeks following, the Sunday readings focused on the event of the Resurrection and the early believers’ experience of the Risen and Glorified Jesus.   

Beginning last week though, and for the weeks before the Ascension, the focus changes to the impact of Easter on shaping the early Church. 

Christ entrusted to His followers the work He began. We see this in the story of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles and in the letters of the New Testament. 

That work is summed up in today’s Gospel, where Jesus gives His disciples one comprehensive, all-encompassing charge: 

Love one another as I have loved you.   

It takes a person a lifetime to sample, deepen, develop, and do what Jesus calls us to do in living out the one indispensable aspect of discipleship. 

We are on our way. 

Sometimes analogies help us grasp what the Risen Jesus has entrusted to us. (I found this somewhere but give it to you without quoting the unknown reference.) 

Giacomo Puccini, the great composer, wrote the memorable Madame Butterfly, Tosca and La Boheme. In 1922, Puccini was diagnosed with cancer. Undaunted, he announced: “I want to write one more opera.” So he began to write Turandot. “But what if you die?”, his students asked him. "Then my students will finish it." In 1924, Puccini died, Turandot was unfinished and his student took up the task. 

Turandot’s premier performance was in Milan’s La Scala Opera House under the direction of Puccini’s best student, Arturo Toscanini. The gala performance went on until it came to the point where the composer laid down his pen. Tears streaming down his face, Toscanini put down his baton and turned to the audience. “Thus far the master wrote, and then he died.” 

Toscanini picked up his baton again. His tear-stained face was wreathed in smiles. Toscanini shouted to the audience "But his disciples finished the music!” And they had. 

That’s love and dedication – generous and willing to pick up the unfinished work of the master – and for us, disciples of the Risen Lord, we continue the unfinished work of Christ. 

~ Sister Joan Sobala

A Book Full of Names

This Sunday is Mother’s Day in the US and I will leaf through my mom’s prayer book. It holds much more than its worn pages of prayers. I will see a few faded family photos and a yellowed Erma Bombeck newspaper column, entitled If I Had My Life to Live Over. A fragile bookmark is signed Love, Lila. That’s from my mom’s aunt, Sister of Saint Joseph Loyola Guider who died in 1948. There is an index card in mom’s writing, A Prayer for Husbands and Wives. There is a clipping of a letter to the editor written by my brother Stephen. There are death notices for my sister and my father. 

Mom’s prayer book still breathes relationships and connections. Her prayer, like her life, was full of names. She told me once that when she prayed at night, she would simply name each of her loved ones and ask God to take care of us. 

For many North American churches, it is also Good Shepherd Sunday. Like God, our Good Shepherd, mothers know us and call us by name. And, this Sunday, there is another shepherd on believers’ minds. By the time you read this reflection, we will know the name of the next Bishop of Rome. Let’s add his name to our own prayer. May he be a shepherd like Jesus, like Francis. May he be a shepherd like Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga who wrote four days before his death:

At the end of the road, they will say to me:

Have you lived? Have you loved?

And I, without saying anything, will open my heart full of names.

Peace,

Susan Schantz SSJ

A Sign of New Life

Dear Friends,  

Sometimes my calendar is such that I need to write a blog a week or two before it is due. I wrote my blog for May 4 during Holy Week. Pope Francis died Easter Monday. I debated what to do. The blog I wrote is about Carlo Acutis, the millennial who was scheduled to be canonized on April 27th. The ceremony has been postponed until the new Holy Father sets a date. But I chose to present the blog about Carlo. He is still a sign of new life in the Church. 

Once in a while, I read two articles back-to-back, which seemingly have no connection, only to find out that they do. Your experience too?  

The Notre Dame Magazine (Spring issue) carried a conversation between the sociologist Christian Smith and the noted religion writer Ken Woodward. They talked about Christian Smith’s new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Smith points to the fact that availability to a larger world through the internet has come to mean that the younger generations do not need organized religion to understand the world or their place in it. Religion used to provide these insights. Smith’s research says religion is deemed obsolete to achieve these goals. Today’s young people live in a world where religion is culturally unnecessary. 

Then there is the story of Carlo Acutis, told in the “Last Word” section of THE WEEK (February 14, 2025). Carlo, born May 3, 1991, died of leukemia on October 12, 2006. Fifteen years old. Carlo was known for his devotion to the Eucharist. From the time he was 11, he posted on his website stories of Eucharistic miracles he collected from around the world. He called his postings a "virtual museum” of miraculous events. Carlo believed he would not reach adulthood. The onset of his illness and subsequent death were rapid.  

If the Church is anything, it is thorough in its investigation of those who are presented for sainthood. This was certainly the case of Carlo. But the pieces quickly fell into place. “By 2019, Carlo’s body was moved to a glass-paneled tomb inside the Church of Saint Maria Maggiore….Assisi…A silicone mask of his face was made to cover up signs of decay… Acutis was attired in his favorite clothing: navy blue Nikes, blue jeans, and a North Sails zip-up sweater. He was the first prospective saint to be buried in branded clothing.” (THE WEEK cited above)  

Carlo Acutis will be called on as the patron of youth, computer programmers and influencers. 

One could argue that the Church is astute to present to the world as one of its own in the most dazzling sort of way a beautiful looking, contemporary youth who can attract others of his generation. True. But there is more. Carlo Acutis did not find faith, the Eucharist, belonging to God obsolete. He lived by these realities. 

Truth be told, many others of us also feel pulled, stirred, called by the power of God to be open about our lives of faith. For us, faith is not obsolete.  

In this Easter season, as we celebrate the Risen One among us today, as we remember with love, Pope Francis, we have a young friend who has completed his journey and stands with the living God.  

~ Sister Joan Sobala