Uniting as One Nation Under God

Dear Friends,

This is a week of coming face to face with life-altering choices for Americans: choosing leaders and recalling how many Americans choose to be sent into harm’s way for the sake of the common good.

I speak, of course of Election Day (Tuesday), and Veterans’ Day (Friday).

It’s well-known that we have been in a cycle of paralysis, which thwarts our desire to be all we can be as a people – our desire that everyone benefit from life in these United States. 

As we prepare to choose, political candidates at every level have tried to convince us of their positions. Are there other voices to listen to? I know one in particular that we heard speaking to a joint session of Congress last year: Pope Francis. Here are some excerpts from his speech on September 24, 2015, to mull over as we attempt to hear God’s voice in concert with our choices as we prepare to vote. I invite us to read over these thoughts (even out loud), pray over them and carry them in our minds and hearts to our polling places as a reminder of the good we have been as a nation and the good we are called to.

                “Legislative activity is always based on care for the people. To this, you have been invited, called and convened by those who elected you…you are asked to protect, by means of the law, the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human face…

                All of us are quite aware of, and deeply worried by the disturbing social and political situation of our world today…We know that to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. That is something which you as a people reject…

                I am happy that America continues to be, for many, a land of ‘dreams.’ Dreams which lead to action, to participation, to commitment. Dreams which awaken what is deepest and truest in the life of a people…

                A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to dream of full rights for all their sisters and brothers, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton….

                {Here is} some of the richness of your cultural heritage, of the spirit of the American people. It is my desire that this spirit continue to develop and grow, so that as many young people as possible can inherit and dwell in a land which has inspired so many people to dream. “

This week, I wish you the courage to vote with an openness to all our brothers and sisters who join together in a mutual desire for life in abundance. May you honor all who have served our nation’s vision of a world at peace. May the end of the week find us more deeply united as one nation under God.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Honoring Life Stories

Dear Friends,

As our calendar turns this week through Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, we are at least vaguely aware that this is the time to remember loved ones as well as strangers who have gone before us.

To highlight these days and these memories, I’m going to do two things this week, and I invite you to do so as well.

First, I’m going to take a walk in a cemetery – a slow, thoughtful walk, pausing to look at individual tombstones, and groups of tombstones that point to relationships among people deliberately buried together. A walk like this might take us to historic Mount Hope Cemetery, or to an old, apparently forgotten cemetery in the country or to a village cemetery. My immediate family members are buried in Lackawanna and Batavia. I doubt if I’ll get to either place this week, but walking through another cemetery will help me remember that my loved ones lived their lives as fully as possible, and now their remains are in a treasured place, like the one I’m walking through.

Ghost walks are popular around Halloween. This is not intended to be a ghost walk, but a tender walk of remembering people who lived as we do, with hopes and desires, frustrations and delights, sadness and joy.  If you see a small pile of stones at a particular gravesite, take a closer look. What this pile of stones may represent is a practice borrowed from our Jewish brothers and sisters, for whom a stone placed at a gravesite indicates honor, connectedness, reverence for the ideals that moved that person in life.

The second “to do” of the week is to go to one or both lectures offered this week at Nazareth College as part of the Annual Shannon Lecture Series. This week, the speaker is Robert Ellsberg, the publisher of Orbis Books, internationally recognized for his extensive publications about the saints of our world. He includes in his books, figures as widely separated in time and religious orientation as Sadhu Sundar Singh (Indian Mystic), Rahab (Faithful Prostitute of the Book of Joshua), Agneta Chang (Maryknoll Sister and Martyr),  St. Boniface (Missionary and Martyr) and Johann Sebastian Bach (Composer) to mention a few. Mr. Ellsberg will start with A Revolution of the Heart: From Dorothy Day to Pope Francis (Thursday, November 3 at 7 pm at the Schutts Center at Nazareth College) and will continue the next day with Saints and Prophets: Models for Today (Friday, November 4 at 1:30 pm in the Golisano Center.) To fill our minds with other people’s stories of faith is to give ourselves a new way of looking at our own lives. As Pope Francis told our Congress last September, “saints offer us a way of seeing and interpreting reality.”

Both of these “to do’s”  offer ways of looking outward at a time of year when the temptation is to hunker down and give up venturing “out there” – where people and situations which can expand our hearts, minds and souls.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Food in Our Life

Dear Friends,

Is not life more than food? Jesus asks this in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 6.25)

Of course it is, we would say, but we also have to admit that food is a great human preoccupation and a primary source of comfort as well as nourishment. Our mother’s milk was, after all, the first of our human comforts. Hot soup during this recent spate of rainy weather has also been a comfort.

Food is intimately bound up with our biblical origins and history as a people of faith

• Adam and Eve got into trouble because they chose to eat food that was forbidden.
• When the Israelites were in the desert, God gave them daily substantial food called manna.
• The remembered stories of and about Jesus often brought people together around food – parties, and dinners and ritual meals and pick up meals on the road. Then of course, there is the multiplication of the loaves and fishes – a story told by each of the evangelists, so profound was this experience for the followers of Jesus.

Jesus knew how important it was to share food and drink with people and He went beyond that to link food with His relationship with His Father. “I have food to eat that you do not know about,” Jesus told his followers (John 4.32) “My food is to do the will of the One who sent me (John 4.34).” “Do not work for food that cannot last, but work for food that endures to eternal life – the kind of food I was offering you (John 6.27). In the mystical transformation of food’s nurture of mind and body, Christ comes in Eucharist as bread and wine to nourish our daily lives.

Halloween marks the beginning of a long holiday season, where the centerpiece of our hospitality will be food that is shared. Looking ahead, how about making space in our lifestyles to find and savor spiritual food in times that could easily distract us from God’s presence and care? How about reexamining our own use of food as a humanizing agent for ourselves and our communities?

Generations of health experts have warned us that we are what we eat. The irrepressible Zorba the Greek in Nikos Kazantzakis’s great novel points us to the truth of being what we eat. “Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and some, I’m told, into God.”

Like Jesus, we, too, have food to eat which we do not know.

Food for bodily and spiritual strength.

Food for vision.

Food for re-valuing food, and sharing it at life’s many tables.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

What Being Catholic Means to You

Dear Friends,

My Aunt Teresa died at the age of 85 on September 13. She had not been a churchgoer since her teens. One day, several months before she died, I cautiously asked her what sorts of funeral instructions she would like to leave for her children to follow? Teresa was puzzled. What did I mean? Do you want to have a service at all? Something at the funeral home? At a local Protestant church in town? No! Teresa’s voice suddenly got stronger. I’m Catholic. I’ve always been Catholic. I want to be buried from the church where I was baptized. And so it was.

I was stunned at Teresa’s sense of herself, but in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been. Catholic roots run deep and a lack of weekly practice does not always imply that a person has abandoned her faith. It has taken another path.

While Christianity is still the largest religion in our country, individuals are moving from place to place along the spectrum. Others are simply getting off, that is to say, choosing to be unaffiliated with any faith tradition.

Some leave their church because they disagree with the teachings of their faith on certain points. Some have been alienated by a priest or a member of the pastoral staff. Others no longer feel welcome because of the life choices they have made. Some may come back. Many others might not.

But what goes on in the hearts of those who apparently don’t return?  Do their hearts ever burn with love for God? Does Jesus still mean anything to them? Where do they find meaning in life?

These are not questions easily resolved over a cup of coffee at a busy Starbucks. Both questions and the leaving are typically not quick for believers. I believe that, if the church has meant anything to them at all, the hurt must be personally deep for people to go, and the departures hurtful for family members and friends. The pews are more and more empty in Mainline Protestant Churches and in the Roman Catholic Church. But are the people who “left” really gone?

In fact, some are, notably Millennials (people born between 1982 and 1999) who have a wide range of faith choices to consider. Some were never baptized, their parents wanting them to make up their minds when they got older. The ones who were baptized haven’t always been encouraged to love the church, its rituals and seasons. Jesus is not well known to them. What would entice them to come back?

Yet Millennials admit to a “God Hunger.” They also strongly desire to experience community connections. They desperately want the world to be a better place, yet the options of ways and means are too many and too frustrating. Millennials sample practices from many faiths. Finding a spiritual home is a work in progress for them.

There are ways that God calls to people – older and younger—to draw close. Some of us only recognize traditional ways: prayer, sacraments, Mass, the authorized moral life. But God can act wherever and however the person needs to have the pain assuaged, the realizations about life become more clear, love more abundant in their life. God offers a sense of wonder at the cosmos, and human solidarity to lead us pilgrims along the way. These are not lost on Millennials and others called “Nones.”

As for the Church, to borrow from Pope Francis: Believers should wear church membership as a loose-fitting garment, not a straightjacket.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Privacy vs Solitude

Dear Friends,

There is privacy and there is solitude. We seek each of them for very different purposes.

Privacy is frequently sought as an end in itself, an escape from people, situations, anything that impinges on our self-controlled choices. Privacy was not something expected of life in earlier centuries. People lived together for survival, slept together for warmth, turned work together into community affairs and even play at times. People traveled together for security, listened to one another for news and knowledge. But progress and technology have made these ends achievable without others. Privacy is highly sought after and valued in our country, but is not a friendly word. Most frequently, privacy means ”Keep Out!” Even the fact that most houses built within the last 30 years have back patios and porches but no front porches suggests a great preoccupation with privacy.

Solitude, on the other hand, is time away from people to gather oneself together, to think and pray. Solitude is for the sake of renewal, for the sake of the future. Solitude sees oneself as related to society. The purpose of solitude is rest, reflection, perspective, a chance to listen to God in the stillness. People tell of healing or wisdom achieved when silence and solitude are embraced.

I think of Jesus in this context. He was a public figure who sought solitude to be with His God in prayer.

But Jesus always came back. He did not retreat from people, but accepted them, encouraged, healed, taught and questioned them. People were most often better because they had experienced Jesus.

People enlarged Jesus, too. The woman with the hemorrhage who touched Jesus enlarged Him (Luke 8. 40-48). Because of His interaction with her, He had to comprehend what it meant that the power went out from Him to strangers who were not His own fellow Jews.

Like Jesus, you and I are called to be public people – giving and receiving life in mutuality. The temptation is to dismiss this person, this group as having nothing to do with me. It’s much more human to say that this person, this group and I have a chance to create a better, loving world, because we are doing at it together, sometimes without knowing it. We need solitude to stoke our fires for the work of building society and life. “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers and sisters.” (Thomas Merton)

I can’t help thinking of those of you in our world who are homebound or who have limited energy to be out in public. You, too, like the rest of us, have to struggle against being totally private people. That means welcoming and calling the neighbor, sharing stories of the day. It means phone calls, letters, electronic reachout. To borrow from Henry David Thoreau, in each of our houses we need three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship and three for society.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Crying Out to God

Dear Friends,

The first reading from the prophet Habakkuk (1.2, 2.2-3) made us sit up straight this weekend if we happened to be in church for Mass.                   

                                               How long, O Lord? I cry for help, but you do not listen!

                                               I cry out to you “Violence!” But you do not intervene.

 

People of every age, from the beginning, have uttered that cry, right up to today’s migrants, refugees, and all who suffer from natural disasters. We don’t have to look to distant places to find cause to cry out to God, though. The violence and poverty are in our very streets. You and I are the brothers and sisters of everyone who suffers violence. Suffering – and in the midst of suffering – a cry to God for help. These are things we share in common.

 

Likewise, within us is a yearning for another day, when there will be no more racism, terrorism or sexism. We yearn for a day when our church heeds the call of Pope Francis in the name of Jesus to welcome all, all, all who call the church home and to welcome all others who come to our doors.

 

Yearning. Deep within us, we yearn for human realities that seem impossible.

 

Left to ourselves, we might well despair and smother the yearning in us before our hopes get too high. We fear the apparently impossible.

 

But God not only hears Habakkuk, God answers him – and us as well.

 

                                The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and will not disappoint.

                                If it delays, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not be late.

 

The vision of Jesus calls us to love without clutching, live without contention, serve without competition. These are not idle dreams. As yearnings within us, they are the voice of the Holy One speaking to us.

 

The problem is – we don’t easily believe that the vision is possible or that it is coming or that we will have what it takes to live by the vision.

 

But God knows us. God has not given us a cowardly spirit (2Timothy.7) but a spirit of power, love, and self-control as well as a faith that leads us to do things that are, at first, inexplicable. On the surface, we may judge that we are on a treadmill – doing the same thing day after day. We may fear that, as a society or a world, we are falling back into barbaric ways, or losing sight of life-giving values. We may conclude that we are a people without victory or without hope.

 

In one sense, there are no answers to some of the questions we ask of life and of God, but in another profound sense, the answer is within us in the form of an undeniable yearning for life, goodness, harmony, justice and peace.

 

This yearning is not born of naïve optimism, but rests on a bedrock of confidence in the God who invites us to…

                                …wait for the vision. It will surely come. It will not be late.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Celebrating Our Angels

Dear Friends,

Angie. Angelo. Los Angeles. Entertaining angels unawares. The Blue  Angels. Michelangelo. The Angel Moroni (Mormon). Satan. The Angel of Death (Jewish). Angel food cake.  Jibril (Muslim). Isn’t she an angel?

Part of our American lexicon includes words and phrases that have to do with angels. The cultural focus on angels was high during the 1990’s, when books about angels flew off the bookstore shelves, Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” was a big hit, and the Walters Art Gallery featured “Angels from the Vatican.” With all that is on our plate these days, we don’t hear much about angels.

Still, this week, in the Catholic liturgical calendar, we celebrate the feasts of the archangels Michael (who is like God), Gabriel (God is my strength) and Raphael (God has healed) on Sept. 29 and the feast of the Guardian Angels on October 2. The Hebrew Scriptures refer to the “messengers” of God, go-betweens between God and human beings. The word “angel” comes from the Egyptian word “aggelos” and isn’t used until a few centuries before Christ. But the messengers come to many, including Abraham, Mary, Joseph. The angel Raphael stays close to Tobit. Jesus, in Matthew 18.10 speaks of guardian angels for children: “Do not despise these little ones, for their angels in heaven are always beholding the face of my father.”

Some of the stories about Lucifer becoming Satan, the wars among the good and bad angels before and at the end of time are not biblical. They come from the Mesopotamian religions and were woven into post- biblical Christian beliefs. Because of the richness of religious imagination in the near east, we also find that Judaism and Islam honor angels in their literature and belief.

Medieval theologians helped make some sense of the place of angels in the order of creation by placing them in the ascending order from earthly matter to the transcendent God. Angels filled in the gap between the human and the divine. The poetry, art and stories of Milton, Dante, Fra Angelico and other artists included angels in their finest works.

Strictly speaking, according to the Dominican theologian Richard Woods, “the existence of angels is not a matter of divine revelation, but is presupposed by both biblical witness and church teaching. Angels are less the subject or content of revelation than its medium.” But humanly speaking, we are comforted by the sense that angels watch over us and that we are not alone in the cosmos.

Angels are not just for Christmas decorations. “Angels add color and richness to the spiritual life.” (Arthur Green) “The angels of all creeds are part of that mystery.” (Anne Underwood)

Celebrate your special angel today.  

~ Sister Joan Sobala