Courage in the Face of Paris Attacks

Dear Friends,

Friday the 13^th was one of France’s worst days in recent memory. Lives of ordinary people were brutally snuffed out as chaos overtook the streets of Paris.  Once again, terrorists killed their fellow human beings in the name of a misguided ideal. The people who survived the hostility of that night could have only experienced numbness, shock, emptiness, helplessness. We live in calamitous times.

The misery of World War II caused  the French to wonder where  God was in the midst of all the senseless killing of the war, if they thought  of God at all. That led French philosophers to eventually pose the question “Is God Dead?” Was God dead? Is God dead, now?

The short answer, of course, is “No.” The long answer requires that the French and all of us tap the deepest understandings available to us when our lives collapse in some way, when we are confronted with  violence in our physical and political worlds, and experience  hostility among cultures and races.

People like us from other times and places who also came to the limits of their resources, teach us how to face our crises as individuals and as a people. The Book of Daniel speaks to the Jewish people fighting for their very survival. The Gospel of Mark comes out of another time of crisis, some 30 years after Christ’s Resurrection. Jerusalem was then under foreign domination and the familiar was being swept away.

Today, two thoughts gleaned from Daniel and Mark help us take courage as a world in the face of ISIS:

·        

      In the throes of crisis, things are not always as they appear.

God is not dead. We are not abandoned. God has not lost control. In fact, God goes before us, surrounds us, offers us the freedom to shape life even as others misuse their freedom to destroy life. Disaster is immediately recognized for what it is. It is harder to frame that disaster in the hope God offers us.

·         It is only as a community that we come through the disasters of life.

Day-to-day, we may think of ourselves as independent, self-sustaining and capable

of working out the dimensions of our lives by ourselves. But we aren’t and we can’t be.

Watching the news from these days after the Paris massacres, we see people coming together, offering tokens of solidarity, not only on the streets of Paris but across the world.  Vigils intertwine people’s grief and the prayer that arises within them. Buildings, lighted with the French colors, illuminate the nighttime skies. These  symbols  are more than comforting.  They bespeak the determination of people to choose life.                                                                  

Disaster is not the mother of despair, unless we let it be so. Deep down, the French know this. We know this. Hope sustains us in the most arduous times. . As the French  poet, Charles Peguy, wrote in God Speaks. “If it weren’t for hope, all would be nothing more than a cemetery .”

~Sister Joan Sobala

An Additional Reason to Offer Veteran's Our Thanks

Dear Friends,

Jesus often tells us a great deal in the space of a few lines. In Mark 3, he says "No one can make his way into a strong man’s house and steal from him unless he has bound the strong man first.”  Who are the strong man and the thief? One commentator suggests that the strong man is any oppressive institution, civic or religious, that prevents individuals or communities from living with dignity – their human rights respected. The thief is the group or individual or movement that says no to the strong man, and finds ways to bind the strong man so that the people can go free.

When our service personnel go to far distant lands to bind the strong man, the intent is that that the people held in ideological bondage can be free. It is not easy and it doesn’t always work. The true gift is in the effort that our military make, sometimes even sacrificing their own lives.

This week, Americans honor with respect and thanks, the men and women who have served in the military. We call them veterans, a word that means experienced in service. Honor flights have become symbolic of the thanks of a nation, and a model for young children to learn and grow into in their civic lives. Early in their service,  today’s veterans had bound themselves to protect and defend our nation.

The generous binding of veterans makes me think about all the ways we bind ourselves or are bound to someone, something, some cause, some value.  Here’s the stretch from Veterans’ Day  into our own lives, for veterans remind us to be faithful to those realities to which we are bound: wives and husbands,  priests and  members of religious orders, professionals in  the face of the duties of their office, members of reform groups and resistance groups. Other groups, making their way to a goal bind themselves to each other, for example, mountain climbers are tethered to people above and below them. Pre-school children, shepherded by  vigilant  teachers,  are bound together as they walk down the street.

Being bound is often but not always a good thing. Being bound to a destructive idea or practice can lead to our diminishment. Sometimes, we bind others by not forgiving them the wrongs – real or imagined- they have done. We freeze them into a moment of time when they did something mean or stupid or compromising and we’ve never let them forget it or grow beyond it. Sometimes we bind ourselves by not forgiving ourselves. 

Binding and loosening from bonds are part of the stuff of human life . In themselves, veterans are to be honored. Thinking of their service leads us to think of the many bindings and loosenings of our own lives. An additional cause for offering veterans thanks this week!

~Sister Joan Sobala

November Brings a Burst of Remembrance

Dear Friends,

With a burst of remembrance, you and I, our whole church, in the first two days of November, embrace the dead: the holy and historic saints who have gone before us, the holy ones in our families and among our friends, who have no saintly titles but whose lives were rich with human vitality, courage and love.  We remember also people we don’t know, but mourn their tragic and untimely passing, most recently, the passengers and crew of the Russian plane that went down over the Sinai Peninsula  just last weekend. On these days, we remember all who live in the great beyond. We honor them all. We bless them and ask their blessing.

In many places around the world, family members go to the burial places of their dead, clean and decorate them, honor their beloved by their presence and actions, call to mind the lessons of these remembered  lives, talk with their dead.

Christian burial practices have ancient origins. In those early centuries, after a procession to the grave, the Eucharist was celebrated, and a eulogy was given- words of praise for the life of the deceased interwoven with the consolation that the Christian faith offers at the time of loss. Relatives would give a final kiss to the body of the deceased. This kiss witnessed to the affection of people for the deceased and the belief that this body was indeed holy, sacred. That kiss appalled non-Christians, who thought that any contact with the corpse defiled them. At first, families buried their dead in the catacombs outside the city. Later, when churches were allowed to be built,  cemeteries  were planted  around them. It was a deeply held   belief that both the church and the people whose bodies were buried in these cemeteries, made the church grounds holy.

Vatican II opened up the possibility for Catholics to be buried in non-Catholic cemeteries, where their plots were blessed and named holy. Cremation also came to be accepted as well, with reverence for the human body still at the core of the practice.

All of this is to say that “the body is the human place of meeting between God and humanity. The body is  the possibility and the reality of communication with God” according to theologian and Cardinal Walter Kasper.

Have you someone buried in a local cemetery? This month, go there to honor them, listen to them speaking to us from beyond. Or  if you have no one buried nearby, go to a cemetery anyway, to honor the lives of the strangers buried there. They are related to us as well.

Harder than doing either of these, talk with a loved one about his/her burial wishes. They may be nowhere near dying, but there is a value in doing this while death seems to be a distant reality. Sharing this conversation gives you both the chance to raise up both questions and beliefs about honoring the body,  about death as  a passage and  about life beyond the grave.

~ Sister Joan Sobala 

PS.  Join me for two upcoming Fresh Wind In Our Sails Programs:(Send me an email if you'd like to go at jsobala@ssjrochester.org)

Finding Faith: A Couples Story

Wednesday, November 4, 2015, 7 – 8.30 pm at the SSJ Motherhouse, 150 French Rd, 14618

Marlene Bessette was a non-practicing Catholic and Eric Bessette was an avowed agnostic when they met. They pushed and pulled each other along to spiritual places neither would have imagined.Come listen and take part (if you wish) in their discussion!

Retreat Day at SSJ Motherhouse

Theme: Becoming More Deeply Who We Are

Saturday, November 7, 10 am to 3 pm

Location: SSJ Motherhouseat , 150 French Rd, 14618

Presenter: Sister Joan Sobala

Cost: $35.00

A Halloween Reflection

 

Dear Friends,

Whether you go out to a Halloween party this year or remember Halloween celebrations from times past, “going as someone else” is part of the ritual involved. We wear clothes that transform us into someone else we have chosen to become and we wear masks. We are temporarily other than who we are.

Beginning with ancient times and cultures, people, taking part in rituals native to their clan, wore masks. The mask allowed them to become the fire god, the demon, the holy one, the alpha ancestor. Those who wore masks found  themselves  thinking  and acting like the figure they personified. Wearing masks temporarily takes us off the hook for answering for ourselves and our actions. One Halloween, when I was dressed as a pumpkin, with padding that enlarged and changed my look, several  masked  people pushed me deliberately and rudely. They would have been chagrined to know who they were really pushing around. I didn’t expect that, but am not surprised. Masks allow us to be intemperate, to do things which we would think twice about doing in our ordinary lives. But masks do not necessarily bring out the worst in us.

The Lone Ranger, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Avengers are among the many masked figures of our culture.  They worked for good in their own way. Masks do not always diminish us.

I think of the Scriptures, where some characters wore disguises. That’s how Jacob, instead of Esau, won his blessing from his father. Levi (Matthew) and Zacchaeus wore the mask of the tax collector. There must have been some core of goodness and openness to God that Jesus perceived in them that caused him to welcome them despite their public image. Names can be considered masks of  sorts.   

At the time of deep interior change, being given a new name is a way of announcing to the world that the mask is off.  Saul to Paul, Simon to Peter.

In our families, we sometimes wear masks. Do they hide or reveal who we are – who we are striving to be?

With our public face, do we reveal  who we really are?  Think of the microphones, hidden backstage, which revealed the political figures true thoughts not said onstage.

Jesus wore no masks. He was who he was. Before God, we can wear no masks. We can try, of course, to wear one, but that only shows how little we know of the God who knows us through and through. (Psalm 138. Read it all.)  

~Sister Joan Sobala 

PS. Don't miss these upcoming Fresh Wind In Our Sails Programs.

Wednesday, November 4, 7 – 8:30 pm

Finding Faith: A Couples Story

Location: SSJ Motherhouse

Marlene Bessette was a non-practicing Catholic and Eric Bessette was an avowed agnostic when they met. They pushed and pulled each other along to spiritual places neither would have imagined.

Saturday, November 7, 10 am to 3 pm

Retreat Day at SSJ Motherhouse

Theme: Becoming More Deeply Who We Are

Presenter: Sister Joan Sobala

Cost: $35.00