Put Guilt in Perspective

Dear Friends,

We say that Lent is a time of preparation for Easter. It is, above all, that. On the other hand, so much of Lenten literature talks about sin, the forgiveness of sin, and when possible reconciliation with people and most especially, reconciliation with God. How do these ideas work together?

The way we prepare for Easter is to clean up the internal mess of the year, or perhaps, the internal  mess we have been carrying along for a long time. Whichever we work at, the job is arduous and time-consuming, so be ready. The new clothes of Easter are part of our faith tradition. We put on the new when  we’ve done away with or diminished the sinful, the destructive in us and have welcomed Christ and His way.

One factor related to the internal mess which we don’t find discussed much is guilt. The late, great American humorist, Erma Bombeck, hit the nail on the head when she told her audience: “Guilt is the gift we keep giving ourselves.” That’s often the case. Many of us seem to have accepted guilt in our lives as we have accepted the shape of our hands or the color of our eyes.

The writer Michael E. Cavanaugh says that “Guilt is the feeling of discomfort or shame we experience when we have done something we consider wrong, bad or immoral. Guilt can be either a help or a hindrance to emotional and spiritual growth.” 

Deep down, we know that when we behave according to what our conscience says is right and good, we do not ordinarily experience guilt. Coming to grips with the many ways guilt can distort us is useful and hard. We don’t want to admit that friends, spouses, children and parents can feed the guilt that threatens to overwhelm us. It goes the other way, too. We can add strength to the guilt others experience.

At times, we want to suppress guilt. Other times we wallow in it. Will guilt rule us or not? Sometimes , we use God as a club.  “If you don’t do what I say, God will get you…” we say,  or something similar.
How can we handle guilt in a constructive way? Three things are important:

1.Acknowledge the feeling of guilt. “I feel guilty when… I feel guilty that…”
2.Determine whether the guilt is appropriate or not. (Get help to sort out whether it is or isn’t.)
3.If it is, make amends, so that you can feel at one with yourself and at one with others.

If it is not appropriate, let go of it. Send it away on the winds and be clean.
Our communities, other individuals, our God can help us in the process of dealing constructively with our guilt. But the first step in the process is ours.

During this Lenten season, put guilt into perspective.
God did not save us only for us to overwhelm ourselves.

~Joan Sobala, SSJ

The Homeless Jesus (Timothy Schmalz)

Dear Friends,

The Son of God opened last Friday at a theatre near you, the latest version of the life of Jesus Christ. I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t speak about it as one who has. I plan to, for the sake of talking with parishioners who will also see it. The film producer Mark Brunett  is quoted in last Friday’s Democrat and Chronicle ,pointing out that “people now more than ever feel ‘a big desire for Jesus‘ and the ‘need to reconnect.’”  Do you?

Then there is The Homeless Jesus, a life size bronze statue of a homeless man, lying on his side on a bench, apparently sound asleep. There’s room on the bench to sit next to him. The first time you notice the man is Jesus is when you see his uncovered feet which bear the holes of the nails. The sculpture is the work of artist Timothy Schamlz. Find him and his work on the net. Do you know this Jesus?

Which of these art forms draws you to God? Neither? Both?  Something  else? The liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil are worship , that’s true. But they also embody the artistic. Do they draw you to God?

My hope for your Lent and mine is that we use Lent as a time to draw near to God, become intimate with God, using whatever biblical, cultural, life tools are at our disposal.

Intimacy is a word we either like and use, or we don’t. If we don’t like it, it may be because the word “intimacy” has some negative connotation in our minds, e.g. illicit sexual relations or familiarity with a crime. But in its best meaning, intimacy is characterized by friendship or pronounced closeness, and it’s in this sense that we can talk about intimacy with God.

Intimacy with God is not something we have to create. It exists as soon as we exist. Our life’s work is to discover  or rediscover it.

“You are more inside me than my most intimate part,” Saint Augustine wrote. “You are the interior of my interior.”

Not me, you say.
I’m not good enough, valuable enough, important enough.

We want to run away, and sometimes we do.

But God says to us, over and over again:
   
I’m here.
I love you.
I want you.
Will you walk toward me even as I run toward you?

Why is it so hard to move toward God?

Maybe this is the work of Lent this year, to move toward  God . In order to do that work, we need to remember a couple of things:

•We don’t have to find God. God is always in touch with us,
even when  we don’t want to be in  touch with God.
•We don’t need to be wordy with God.  Think about the times when you and a loved one are in the car together,not talking but aware of each other. “Being  with” is all that’s needed.

This Lent, pray, fast, give alms, as you have, perhaps, done for many years already.
But this year, let these important practices come from a heart deeply in touch with God, a heart deeply attuned to God, a heart  intimate with God.

This year, sit with the homeless Jesus on the bench. Touch His foot. Make your commitment to Christ then and there.
~Joan Sobala, SSJ

Get Ready for a Season of Grace

Dear Friends,

Since the seventh century, Ash Wednesday has been the beginning of the season of preparation for Easter which we call Lent, but the imposition of ashes (made from last year’s palms) didn’t become common until the tenth century. Start your observance of Lent on Ash Wednesday, if you can.

A woman with a poetic bent, named Elizabeth Anne Vanek  made these Ash Wednesday connections:

You thumbed grit

Into my furrowed brow,

marking me

with the sign of mortality,

the dust of last year’s palms.

The cross you traced

seared, smudged skin,

and I recalled

other ashes

etched

Into my heart

by those who loved too little

or not at all.

For forty days beyond Ash Wednesday, early Christians fasted. They could only eat fish, fruit, vegetables and bread made only of flour and water. To add a measure of interest to their meals, early believers created  a bread they called “bracellae” which they shaped in the form of arms crossed in prayer. This helped remind them that Lent was a time of prayer and penance. The bakers sprinkled the tops of this pastry with salt.

When  monks introduced these breads to the Northern countries of Europe in subsequent centuries, the Germanic people coined the word “pretzel” from “bracellae” (which means little arms.) 

Here’s a twist for Lent this year:
   
Buy a bag of pretzels, and have one a day (like vitamins) as a sign of your willingness to take in and live out the practices of Lent.

When you have guests for dinner, let the first course be a pretzel each, with some conversation about why you are serving it.

If you are part of a committee, take pretzels with you to the committee meeting to enjoy and to be a conversation starter.

Think of other novel times to serve pretzels. After all, we are not called to give up humor and creativity for Lent.

Let us pray:
Make us new, gracious God, and hear our prayer,
for You are good and loving. Bless our work and prayer this Lent,
That our lives may show forth Your cross and Your glory.   
Amen.


Get ready for a season of grace,

~Joan Sobala, SSJ

Restore a Weary Heart

Dear Friends,

Winter can overpower us with its relentlessness, especially this year. Even in other years that are not as bitterly cold or snowy, by the middle of February, let’s say, we get weary.

We can have a weary body, but not a weary heart. Weary bodies are restored with sleep, food, rest, relaxation. Bodies seem to get weary faster than hearts do, but when hearts grow weary, restoration takes longer. When I am weary of heart, for whatever reason:

• I cannot think clearly
• I cannot muster hope
• I want to quit
• I miss important signs
• I putter, eat more, cry more, coast
• I congratulate myself on a just weariness

In the worst of heart weary times,

• I want to close down, walk away.
• I say to God: You do it. I can’t. I don’t want to. I won’t.

       
Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men and women shall fall
exhausted; but they who wait for God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up    
with wings of eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
    (Isaiah 40.30-32)

Renewed strength doesn’t come unless I reach out to

• notice when someone picks up a piece of what I am supposed to do
• let the word of comfort someone offers me really touch me
• remember how often in Scripture we hear “Do not be afraid”
• tell others I am heartweary  and accept their ministrations

I don’t need to tell God about the times when I am heartweary, as if God doesn’t know it, but I may need to admit it to God and remember

The steadfast love of God never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “God is my portion," says my soul, “therefore I will hope in God.” (Lamentations 3.22-24)

I can be overcome by my heartweariness. I can wallow in self-pity, grow breath-deprived in the stagnant air of a barricaded heart, or I can

• put some blinking lights on a lilac bush, so God can see me
• watch a homely, spiny cactus bud in March
• taste the Eucharistic bread and cup as real food and drink to revive me

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden light. (Matthew 11.28-30)

Lent is coming. Set aside weariness. Indeed, fast from weariness. Feast on the strength the Holy One gives without cost.

~Joan Sobala, SSJ

HappyValentine's Day

Dear Friends,

Happy Valentine’s Day to each of you and to all the people who make your heart happy. Here are some thoughts about this cultural winter celebration which reveals the Holy One, too.

Valentine was a real person who lived in Rome in the third century. He was a priest and a physician who was beheaded in a religious persecution. The date was February 14. Valentine caught the attention of people in medieval times. Myths grew up around him and the belief was common that birds began to mate on February 14, the date of his martyrdom. This gave rise to the custom of sending Valentines on this day.

In its historical context, Valentine’s Day was meant for lovers: someone would send a Valentine in the hopes of enticing the recipient to think of the sender in a new way. Valentines celebrated a budding love, a faithful love, a new love.

But Valentine’s Day has also become a time when friendship, too, is celebrated. In friendship, when two hearts beat in time, words are superfluous, secrets are kept and comfort given. Friendship arises between people unbidden, sees us through turbulent times and makes us secure.

Friendship is an unlikely thing to find in an inconstant, inconsistent world. The wonder of  friendship is that it is God’s gift to a broken world, a truly “amazing grace” that defies the laws of likelihood and challenges changes that are thought impossible. It is remarkable how friends can create something where there was once nothing. 

The Gospel can be read as a story of great friendship. Jesus did not wish to work alone. At the very beginning, Jesus chose others to walk with him – first Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John. Later Mary Magdalen joined him as well as Joanna and Susanna. There were others, too. Friendship brought together a most unlikely collection of people – with Jesus at the center. 

Jesus taught them that they could have a new relationship with God. He taught them to love people and to put things in their proper place. Jesus taught them by his example: compassion not pity, inclusion rather than rejection. It was in their daily living with Jesus that they grew to love him and one another. It is only in the daily living with the people of our world that we grow to love others as Jesus did.

Occasionally, we run across a person who is without friendship. Friendship for this person may be judged unnecessary, or dangerous or beyond control. Unpredictable. This person is like a splendid house filled with treasures – a house that is locked against everyone who might want to come in. 

But friendship is available, not just to the perfect, but to every person who is willing to be open to it, work at it and not be afraid of the spills and hurts that are part of working out friendships.

In the warmth of someone’s friendship, we discover our hidden capacities and unsuspected values. Friends are like salt: they bring out the flavor in us. But please – don’t hold a friend too close, lest the fragile bud of friendship be squashed.

Friends like to think they choose each other. Perhaps.  More likely, however, is that friends are given to us as reminders of God’s abiding love.

The columnist Colman McCarthy one Valentine’s Day wrote in The Washington Post: “It’s either an Irish mystic or poet who said that a friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and plays back the words when you forget how they go.” All week long, red hearts will appear everywhere we go, reminding us to love and offering some tokens of that love. If you have a few someones in your life who can’t remember the words of their song, sing it for them. It’s better than chocolates. And while you’re at it, sing a new song to the Lord, too.

~Joan Sobala, SSJ

Faithful Diversity

Dear Friends,

Our church  is a big church. I know you’ve heard that before. Big, in the sense of being worldwide, but big, also, in the sense of embracing people with great love of God, or a tiny struggling love of God. Big, because the points of view of our members is diverse, and we have a wealth of insight, experience, attitudes and practices.

Beyond our mutual acceptance of the Creed, beyond our immersion in Word and Sacrament, diversity has always been part of our church – from Peter and Paul to Benedict and Francis, from the faithful of South Sudan to the Catholics of Seattle.

One such group of stand-outs was the Corinthians, with whom Paul interacted with vigor. The people of Corinth were religiously diverse, but as Paul reminded them when they embraced the Lord, they were “consecrated in Christ and called to be a holy people.”

Diversity marks us, yet we are one holy people.
Recently I came across a book title and I thought Yes! This applies to us as a church. The phrase is faithful diversity. We are a church of (I hope) faithfully diverse people.

Some of us say: prayer is all. Others claim: No, prayer happens when we are in the service of others. Some of us put great energy into pro-life issues. Others say: We do need to do that, but shouldn’t we also work at eliminating poverty and other evils in the world. Some want everyone to follow the letter of the law. Others hold that the spirit of the law is more important.

I was challenged one day after saying, as part of a talk, that not all ideas that are held by believers are of equal weight. The voice from the audience passed the judgment: “You’re a cafeteria Catholic!” No. There’s a breadth to the scope of Catholicism. It is important that we respect the spectrum – respect faithful diversity.

Jesus did not melt his disciples down into one mold. If anything, he called his followers to a fruitful diversity. They were to bear fruit in God’s name, put their lamps on a lampstand, be salt, leaven and encouragement for others to follow the Spirit.

Diversity we will always have with us.
Divisiveness happens when we believe that my way is God’s way, and that we do not allow others the freedom to follow the Epiphany star by a different route.

This is the work of ordinary time, indeed, the work of every season of the liturgical year, to develop ways of being and doing that allow and encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to grow as individual believers, and for our whole church to grow strong.

Saint Augustine dealt with analogous issues in the 4th and 5th centuries. His words are a rich formula to shape our own attitudes toward others who belong to our church but who differ from us:

In essentials, unity.
In non-essentials, freedom, and
in all things, charity.

~Joan Sobala, SSJ

Where Does Everybody Know Your Name?

Dear Friends,

We almost always ignore the geographic references in reading the Scriptures. Just as we didn’t know Kabul
and Khandahar until our troops were there, Scriptural geography means nothing to us until we relate to these places. Today, let’s do just that. For the Third Sunday readings (this last weekend,) Jesus moved from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee to the rest of Galilee, called Zabulon and Nephtali, and beyond.

Nazareth is Jesus’ home town – the place where he experienced the love of his family, where he grew, made mistakes, learned to earn a living. It was the place where he first became a people-watcher and learned how to live from observing children and adults alike.

Where is your Nazareth? Where did you learn to give and receive love? Where did you get your image of what it means to be a spiritual man or woman or to be a believer in the Holy One?

There’s a one act play about Blessed John XXIII in which the Pope muses about himself:
One of my earliest memories- my father hoisted me up on his shoulders to see a parade. It was one of my best memories of him. He must have cared more than I realized. Would a father hold his son on his shoulder, if he didn’t care? How many people in my life have carried me on their shoulders? On whose shoulders have you climbed?  Take time later today to think of your own Nazareth…and the people who held you up so you could see.

Jesus also spent time at the Sea of Galilee. To this day, it is a welcoming place where fishermen work the waters. It was here that Jesus called Simon and Andrew, James and John. They followed Jesus, immediately, Matthew says.

The seashore is a place of friendship made firm, a place of care and concern. Capharnaum, on the Sea of Galilee, became Jesus’ adopted home.  Where is the place where people love you so much that they stop what they are doing when you arrive, just to spend time with you? Where is the place you feel most at  home. Where does the world feel tender to you? And where is it that others feel this way with you?

Remember this line from Cheers : “Everyone needs a place where everyone knows your name.” Is that place where everyone knows our names in our distant past, or do we still go there, if only in our dreams?

Not all the places we visit in life are places of nurturing, love and friendship. We have our own faraway places with strange sounding names, like Zebulon and Naphthali, where people have been living in darkness and are in dire need of healing. How did we get there? And why?

Where are the dark places of your life? The places that make you feel tense? The places where people need healing? It’s not easy to go there or to be with these people. It wasn’t easy for Jesus to leave his comfort zone. It’s even more difficult to take the warmth and good feelings of the Nazareths and seashores of our life to live these out in an unwelcomed environment. Heartfelt sharing happens easily in a friendly place, but when I enter the dark regions of my life, do I give any of me away? Do I bring light into these dark places or do I hoard the light, save my light for places already well lit?

Eventually, Jesus traveled to other foreign places: Samaria, Decapolis across the Jordan, Judea, Jericho and Jerusalem, itself. In some of these places, he found kindred spirits. In other places, he was rejected. Some people wanted everything he could give, as if it were their due. Some tried to trip him. Others believed in him.

Wherever he went, Jesus was faithful to his father, to who he was, to all that he was at Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. As his followers, we are called to be no less faithful, wherever the journey of life takes us.

Will we?
~Joan Sobala, SSJ