Transition

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago,  we talked about the disciples “learning to recognize the Risen One who did not look just as He did before His death.”   Another  theme found in these post –Easter season is transition: the followers of Christ were learning to live out their discipleship in new and untried ways, without his obvious presence. 

They had come to understand themselves as  disciples of Christ, but now what did it mean? Where would their direction come from? How would they work through next steps without Him? Of course, they were not without Him, but they had to come to that realization, as we do. He is with us through our life -movements.

Just as you and I need to learn to recognize the Risen One in our daily lives, we need to see Him in the transitions that fill our lives and challenge us.

A transition may be a passage to a new living place, a marriage, or reception into a religious order. The death of a parent, sibling, friend  marks a transition for us as well as for them. We transition to jobs, and way of thinking and acting. We accept new values and walk away from prior values.

I got kicked out of kindergarten less than a month after starting school and was sent “on probation “ to first grade. It was painful. I cried every day for weeks because I wanted to play and now I had to work. Later, I came to realize that I was in transition when the people around me were not. That’s hard, isn’t it?

Throughout our lives, change happens. In airplanes, shift happens in the overhead bins. With care, we open them to retrieve our luggage, but then that’s over. Not all changes are transitions, i.e.  life altering.

Transition may mean changing patterns. Sometimes, our transitions are sequential, sometimes they are simultaneous.  We move from orientation to disorientation to reorientation.  In this, we are not different from other people who don’t allow themselves to stand still.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus accepted moments  of transition. He found them at Cana, when He accepted His mother’s call  and turned water into wine,  with the Syro-Phoenician woman, when he ministered to a Gentile, and  in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed “Let this cup pass me by, but not as I will.” Our way to life-giving transition becomes enriched, ennobled, when we study Jesus, and when we drink deeply of his lessons:

Love God , know that I am loved, speak the truth in love, be faithful, be open, seek first  the reign of God, feed them yourselves, embrace the cross/the grave/new  life.

And let’s not forget to study the transitions of His followers after the Resurrection. They spent time deepening who they had become, they remained in prayer before  Pentecost, and then they went into the whole world to set it on fire with God’s love.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Celebrating Earth Day ~ A Spiritual Guide

Dear Friends,

              “We are not separate from the earth, nor anything in it or on it. We  need to uplift everyone and everything… uplift from meaninglessness.”   I wish I had said that. A man named  Louis  Savary did, expanding on the thought of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin, Savary, Pope Francis along with convinced pioneers from many nations and academic disciplines urge people to renew the face of the Earth. We must do all we can to promote sustainable development, human ecology and a slowing of climate change.  Pope Francis, speaking to an audience earlier this year, made an important connection for believers in our creative God: "A Christian who does not protect creation, who does not let it grow, is a Christian who does not care about the work of God.” It is not enough to buy environmentally friendly products and recycle, although these help. We need to dig deep, as it were, into the profound aspects of change and collective human discipline and harness our collective efforts so as hand over to future generations a  treasured  earth.

                2015 will be a year of information, affirmation and action by many individuals and groups spurring  on  a common effort on behalf of our earth. Pope Francis’ encyclical  on the environment is due out this summer. He will also address the UN in September on this compelling issue in its multiple dimensions. The Milan Expo on Sustainability will focus world attention on the work before us. A Vatican Summit of the World’s Religions will add weight to the discussion, because, as the Earth Day Network holds, “faith leaders have been a driving force behind the most important and successful social movements.” Google The Earth Charter and see the work that has been I progress since the 1992 Rio Summit to develop a cohesive, clear set of goals to undergird efforts to treasure the earth. Here is a sampling of it’s core elements.  Use them to guide your own thinking as we celebrate  the 45^th annual EARTH DAY on April 22^nd:

1.        Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.

2.       Care for the community with understanding compassion and love.

3.       Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.

4.       Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well –being.

5.       Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.

6.       Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.

7.       Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.

8.       Promote a culture of tolerance, non-violence and peace.

   There are eight more points of this breadth and scope. Each sets forth objectives to make these goals reachable.

  Gasp! You can’t. I can’t.  But together we can move in this direction which is, if we think about it an outline of what the Kingdom of God will be like in its completion.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Recognizing the Risen Lord in Your Life

Dear Friends,

As April in the north is awash with drenching spring rains, the Easter season Gospel narratives are awash with the revelation of the God of Surprises. An experience threaded through many of these accounts is that the disciples did not initially recognize the Risen Jesus. They had to learn to recognize Him in His new, risen way of being.

On Easter Sunday morning in John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalen encountered Jesus in the garden outside the empty tomb. She thinks he is the gardener. “Woman,” He says to her,” for whom are you looking?” (John 20.15) But when He says her name, she does recognize Him. We recognize Him when he says our name. The voice may be that of another person, but the one who calls us by name is the Risen One.

In Luke, Cleophas  and his companion, are walking dejectedly back to Emmaus, when a stranger joins them.  With him they had a revelatory conversation, but they were still clueless. It was only at the supper table that the God of Surprises “took bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them “(Luke 24.30) did they recognize Him. We recognize Him in the breaking of the bread at Eucharist and wherever/ however the Eucharist is experienced in our daily lives.

Finally, once again in John, the disciples went fishing. They had had enough of being cooped up in the city, so they went back to Galilee to fish. “All night long, they caught nothing” (John 21.3). At dawn, they saw a man on the beach, but they didn’t know it was Jesus. He prompted them to cast their nets over the other side once more, and they caught an abundance of fish. One of them realized who the man was. We need to trust when one of us recognizes Him.

All of these same encounters with the God of Surprises are given to us in our day. The Risen Jesus walks with us in our hearts, our mindfulness, in our loved ones and in the stranger. New realizations are given to us as we celebrate Eucharist and hear His word in the mouth of a stranger or loved one. The God of Surprises “easters” in us.

As part of today’s blog, I offer you three images of the Gospel texts we spoke of above. They form a triptych  in the sanctuary of Our Lady Of Lourdes Church, in Brighton (Rochester) New York, the work of well known Rochester artist Dick Kane. The artist caught the delight, the joy in these moments of recognition. Look only at the smiling faces of everyone depicted, including Jesus.

May your face image their joy when you meet the Risen Lord in your everyday world. 

~Sister Joan Sobala

Do Your Feel the Pull of Easter?

Dear Friends,

                                Our Sisters join me in wishing you delight and insight as we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus from now until Pentecost. May you find the Risen One around every corner!

                                Here is a story, the origin of which I don’t know. I used it one Easter and launched into my own thoughts after telling it. On the way out after Mass, one appreciative parishioner said I could have stopped at the end of the story. I tell it here, so you can share it with others.

                                A German seminary professor of theology was fond of vacationing on the moors of England. On one such trip, he walked along a path with the mist still thick. The professor came upon a small group of cherry- cheeked  boys and girls, gazing up into the mist. One child was working the string of a kite.

                                “You can’t see it,” the professor said, announcing the obvious.

                                “How do you know it’s there?”

                                With the exasperation that children have for clueless adults,

                                 a little voice piped:

                                “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

                                Back in Germany, refreshed by his holiday, the professor took up the task of shaping the theological thought of the seminarians in his class. Seminarians, by their nature, love to challenge their teachers. His class excelled in this way.

                                On one particular day, the topic was  how to convey  the deep, abiding truths of Christianity in  homilies for the great feasts.

                                “Take Easter,” one earnest student began.

                                “What do we say? How do we make people know it’s real?”

                                Remembering the children with the kite on the moors, the professor replied:

                                “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

Do you feel the pull of Easter?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Experience Holy Week as Jesus Did

“Truly this was the Son of God”

One would have thought that these words affirming 

Jesus would have come from His family and friends,

or perhaps from some one of the faithful Jews in Jerusalem for the Passover –

someone who knew the Scriptures well and who recognized their fulfillment in Jesus.

No. The one who recognized the meaning of Jesus’ death was a foreigner:

ironically, the centurion who supervised  Jesus’ execution.

True, others kept watch with Him those last hours –

His Mother and the women who had walked with Him.

As for His other close followers, they had abandoned Him.

Here He was, put to death as a common criminal.

What good news is there in this?
The good news is, despite his abandonment, Jesus was faithful.

He trusted that His Father would be with Him to the end, and so, broke the power of sin and betrayal.

Jesus loved those who abandoned Him. “Peace,” he would say to them from beyond death.

No accusation or condemnation. Just  “Peace.”

You and I experience the anguish of Jesus’ last days through the lens of Christ’s Resurrection.

Thank God we do, for otherwise, we might not bear it , as Peter and Judas could not.

We know God raised Him up, as we hear Paul in the letter to the Philippians (2.9)

“and gave Him a name above all other names.”
He is Christ the Lord, the Risen One, and next Sunday, the bright light of Easter will overtake darkness, and we believers will mark new believers with the holy oils and call them by our own name - Christian.

We look backwards on the experience of Jesus. We see its completeness, but we live forward.

In our everyday lives, we share the Holy Week experiences of Jesus,

but maybe we don’t feel the life of His resurrection yet.

We know the fickle plaudits of the crowd.

You and I have been abandoned and betrayed by our friends

 or we have abandoned or betrayed others ourselves.

We are Pilate, Nicodemus, the women along the way.

We are Jesus.

We have been condemned and condemned others. We have helped others to carry their cross

and have been the recipients of the help of others.

We have died big deaths and little deaths.

Will we believe, as Jesus did, that God is faithful?

Somewhere in our past is an old theology which encourages us to heap upon ourselves

guilt for our part in Jesus’ death.

Surely He has taken on Himself, as a humble servant, the sins of us all.

But, more especially, these days, let us think of ourselves as standing in Jesus’ place.

His experience is the experience of all humanity.

 Even as He came through unadorned tragedy to new life, so do we.

~Sister Joan Sobala