Feast of the Assumption of Mary

Dear Friends,

On August 15 each year, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Because the 15 falls on a Saturday this year, according to national Church norms, it is “not of obligation.” But don’t miss it, for this feast  is Mary’s “finale”, so to speak.  This feast offers us the treasured belief that Mary was so in tune with God  that her whole being was taken up into heaven . Just as Christ is the first Fruit of the Resurrection, Mary is the first human person to follow in that tradition. The Church has held this belief from ancient times to today.   The writer, Reginald Fuller, applauds Mary’s Assumption as part of the poetry of the Christian tradition.

Here’s the crux of it  for us to relish. 

                                        

                                                Life lived under the impulse of God is eternal.

                                                Mary’s life was lived under the impulse of God:

                                                                                God’s light,

                                                                                God’s breath,

                                                                                God’s shadow,

                                                                                God’s energy.

                                                Mary is without end.

                                                If we do the same , that is, if we live life under the impulse of God,

                                                                                God’s light,

                                                                                God’s breath,

                                                                                God’s shadow,

                                                                                God’s energy,

                                               

                                                we have with Mary a kinship and a destiny.

                                               

                                                This feast bids us take heart.

                                                Our lives are not destined for termination.

This year we celebrate that which is not “of obligation.” It is anticipation of the richness of forever.

                                               

~Sister Joan Sobala

Summertime Reflection

Dear Friends,

There isn’t a day of the year that the obituary page of our newspapers is omitted. Every day people die. Yet, many of us begin thinking about death only as the signs of death, our own or others’, become imminent. We label earlier thoughts about death as premature, morbid,  depressing.  After all, people are living longer and longer. I can put off these thoughts for now.

A summertime reflection on death, in the midst of the lush and varied growth of field, vine, trees and children is good for the soul. I mean reflection on death’s place in the whole of a human life, not its complicated medical aspects.  Death  is a moment of completion, a cherished moment in which we can say “I did my best ”-  in which we can say, with  Jesus in John’s gospel  “It is finished.” (John 19.30) The Greek word for this cry of Jesus on the cross is tetekestai, which is not a cry of defeat, but rather the shout of the victor when  (s)he achieves the goal.

Death is not evil. It is not failure. It does not mean that the dying person has done something wrong to incur the punishment of God.  Death is a common experience for  every human being. As we approach death, what matters most is how we have lived. Throughout our life, what response to the many deaths that come our way do we exhibit, cultivate, pray over?  We experience the death of a dream, of one particular moment in one’s life, the death of a relationship, the death of playfulness or the death of an idea.

True, the death of a loved one or our own impending death saddens us. After all, we love life as we experience it and we love many people who die before we do.  We say death is unfair. The news of it crushes us, angers us, makes guilt arise in us and sometimes, if we are honest,  relieves us. Death will come in its own good time. Some current conversations in society promote hastening death or  prolonging life even if it has no retrievable human qualities. Sometimes we find no words to express what we think of death. Like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, all we can do is weep.

Let’s put aside the legal and medical issues that at another critical point in life can’t be put aside. Let’s linger over the meaning of death as the threshold into the unknown, a journey toward a new horizon. Consider again Jesus as he heard about and then experienced the death of his beloved Lazarus (John 11.1 – 44. )”this illness is not to end in death,”  Jesus said. (John 11.4) Death, as in the case of Lazarus, may be  immediate result of illness, bit it is not the ultimate result. There is more.

So ask “What is the fate of those who seek a life-long relationship with Jesus?”

Life. Not life without sadness or pain, but life in all its fullness, today and tomorrow and forever.

All of this is worth thinking about here and now.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Spiritual Food to Peak Our Appetite

Dear Friends,

Remember how, in the musical Oliver, the orphans sing “Food, Glorious Food!”

Food. Junk food and health food.

Food that we consume as couch potatoes.

People – you and I -  use food to control uncontrollable factors in our lives: We might not have a good relationship, but we can have a good steak!

Sometimes, probably rarely, we dine with power. Sometimes we stuff ourselves.

We eat to forget, to remember, to feel comforted, to be sociable.

Sometimes we eat because we are truly hungry.

Sometimes we eat to gain strength for the journey – real soul food.

Sometimes we eat to survive.

Food is something we never tire of having, reading about or talking about.

Beginning on July 26 and for four more weeks, the Sunday Gospels are from John 6 - that portion of  the Gospel in which Jesus feeds the many and then is challenged because he says  “I am the true bread that comes down from heaven.”

We can concentrate on  John 6 or we  can read it with other passages that remind us how pervasive bread  is In  various parts of the Scripture. The Bible is full of reminders, easy to memorize, valuable to underscore the place and power of spiritual food in our lives. Here are a few such sentences, culled and rephrased, that are  packed with wisdom for us to help us grow this summer:

My will is to do the will of my Father. Jesus was clear about that. He recognized that His Father’s will is that the world be safe and healthy for all people, that justice be done and that mercy and compassion be the way  we address and embrace the suffering we encounter along the way.

We must become food for others: given and consumed. Sometimes we are consumed for a short time. Sometimes we are totally consumed.

We do not live on bread alone. Each day, each of us receives manna, in many ways – a word of peace which calms us, a newspaper headline, a stirring within, a phone call from a stranger asking us to serve in a new way, an experience which refines our hearts or lends clarity to our vision.

And finally: The Lord will give us the bread we need.  Study your own lives and see how you have been fed with the bread you needed when you needed it.

Be ready this summer for tasty spiritual food to peak our appetite for God.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Be Merciful

Dear Friends,

First and foremost, it is God who offers the world mercy. God does so, because it is in the very nature of God to be merciful. God can do nothing else but be merciful. You and I, in imitation of God, are called to develop mercy as a way of being, thinking and acting in our everyday lives.

It takes effort and courage to follow God’s example offering  mercy, not judgement, not condemnation,  to others, who have fallen in some way, or whom the Law says have fallen or whom we think have fallen. Mercy is not what comes to mind when faced with people who are not law-abiding, or who don’t belong. We figuratively cross the street like the priest and the Levite, leaving the injured man by the wayside. But the Good Samaritan was merciful to the injured man, and the world continues to find his generosity of spirit worthy of imitation, though very hard to do. Mercy leaves no one behind.

German-born Cardinal Walter Kasper, one of the more vocal members of the Extraordinary Council on the Family, spoke at Catholic University of America last year. He included these thoughts on mercy:

“Correctly understood, mercy is not a yielding pastoral weakness nor is it a softening agent eroding God’s dogmas and commandments. Mercy is itself a revealed truth and can for that reason alone not be played out against the truth. It does not abolish justice, but outdoes justice. Justice is the minimum of mercy we owe to one another; mercy is the maximum of justice of what I as a Christian can do for another human being who needs me. It is more than pity; it becomes concrete in active engagement for others… With mercy as the key word of the pontificate [of Pope Francis,] the question of the Church too is redefined. When Jesus says we are to be merciful like our father in heaven (Luke 6.36) that applies not only to the individual faithful but also to the Church as the communion of believers.”

As the Synod on the Family moves through various stages of preparation for the October 2015 meeting, watch for the ways in which hierarchy, theologians and the People of God struggle to be merciful with the alienated, the hurting, the distant, the left out. It isn’t easy. Of the 62 issues discussed during the Extraordinary  Synod last year, only three did not have two-thirds support: divorce and remarriage, cohabitation and homosexuality. These are all against Church Law - thorny issues that defy easy solutions. Yet Pope Francis, during a Lenten  Penance Service at St. Peter’s  last March, reminds everyone that ”No one can be excluded for God’s mercy.”

It’s frankly around these three issues that families can be divided, and family members judged. Both Church and families need to be pastoral in their approach to people whose lives and goodwill have taken them in directions traditionally unsupported by these institutions (family and church) upon which they have depended.

I recently studied a letter from the Hindu father of a man who wishes to marry a Christian woman. The letter of the father was full of anguish and disbelief. He cannot forgive his son for his choice of a wife, for the father’s hurt is soul-deep. This issue of mercy is not just Christian. It pervades the human family. We must be soul mates with all people in our expression of compassion and mercy.

Pope Francis has designated 2016 as “The Jubilee Holy Year of Mercy.”  No one is excused from the work of becoming merciful. Be merciful, as your father in heaven is merciful.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Pamper Your Spiritual Self

Dear Friends,

The summertime lectionary readings offer us deep insights into Jesus’ interaction with people and a compelling set of characteristics of the true disciple of Christ. Pamper your spiritual self. See how this is true in the Gospel passages for the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th Sundays of  Ordinary Time (B Cycle, where we are right now.)

Together, these three readings give us a primer in discipleship, for if we, as Christians, are anything at all, we are disciples of Christ, who follow His generous, tender example. Baptism was our initiating moment into discipleship, but we choose, all our life, the discipleship to which we have been called.

Just as Jesus sent his disciples out (15^th Sunday), so, too, we can expect to be sent to our back door neighbor or to a new colleague at work, to a fellow parishioner or to someone who is sick, to people near and far, going with others or alone. Disciples are, by definition, on mission.

We can also expect to live without a great preoccupation for the world’s goods. Jesus tells his disciples to travel light. We are tempted not only to accumulate, but also to support by our purchases goods made by international companies that uphold racism and poverty.

The disciples in the Gospel took Jesus seriously as they went out to minister. When they came home (16^th Sunday) they were weary, full of stories, anxious to debrief with Jesus, and most of all, to rest.

For his part, Jesus knew that in the tempo of life and service, his followers needed to be restored. Neither the biblical disciples, nor we ourselves can go on endlessly.

Disciples who take God seriously can expect to rest.

Mark paints a chaotic picture of the scene as the disciples returned. “People were coming and going in great numbers, and the disciples had no opportunity even to eat.”(Mark 6.31) So Jesus and his followers went off in a boat to a private place. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But guess what? It didn’t last. The fourth thing a disciple can expect is to be pursued into the wilderness.

We’ve been to the wilderness. Not necessarily places that are physically forbidding, but the world around us, fraught with social and political destructiveness. Sometimes the wilderness is in ourselves- the places to which our inner journeys take us where we feel desolate, lonely, unloved or frightened.

There, in the wilderness, the disciples thought they could do no more. They were used up. But Jesus took over. He simply couldn’t resist acting in love. And so, Jesus did what His disciples could not (17^th Sunday). He fed the hungry in the wilderness until they had their fill and there were abundant leftovers. The fifth thing that disciples can expect is to participate in the imaginative generosity of God .

Here’s our checklist for discipleship: sent without pretention or hoarding, rested,  pursued into the wilderness, caught up in something more than we could ever imagine or be or do on our own. Dare it all.

~Sister Joan Sobala