The Connection between Halloween and The Church

Dear Friends,

A neighbor recently set out on the landing the cheerful pumpkin pictured above. The pumpkin glows in the darkness, shiny with some interior beauty. It's loveliness conveys itself to the viewer, offering memories of Halloweens gone by and the tenuous contemporary cultural connection of Halloween to the liturgical life of our church. Halloween stands as first in the trilogy "All Saints’ Eve/All Saints Day/the Day of the Dead.”  Let’s wander over these three days together in this blog.

Porches that welcome children who go tricks or treating often have a pumpkin prominently displayed, a funny, odd, sometimes scary face carved onto its bumpy surface. It’s a new interpretation for children when adults tell them that “Being a Christian is like being a pumpkin. God picks you from the patch, brings you in, and washes all of the dirt off of you. God opens you up and scoops out all the yucky stuff including the seeds of doubt, hate, greed etc. Then God carves you a new smiling face and puts his light inside you to shine for all the work to see.”

Ursula K. LeGuin, who died in 2018, wrote this in the last of her books of poetry, So Far So Good;

                                                                     All Saints All Souls

                                                         This is the day when the saints all go

           silently to church in France

                                                          And over the mountains of Mexico

    the bare bones dance.

                                                        Ghosts rise up from graveyard sleep

                                                          to follow the southward fleeting sun.

       It is the doomsday of the leaf

              and the feast day of the skeleton.

Personalize All Saints’ Day by making your own 10 saints to honor in the coming year: People whom you have known for many  years, or holy people you have only recently heard of. How will you recognize them? Here are some characteristics of Saints: 

• They live common lives and do common things with uncommon generosity
• Practice some restraint and courage
• Take God more seriously and themselves less so
• Care for others and treat them with dignity
• Take hope by the hand and never let go.

Your ten saints acknowledged by the Church for their holiness (All Saints Day) or the ones whose truth you have known in your lifetime (All Saints Day 2, commonly known as All Souls Day) will be your friends this year in a new and hopefully lasting way...

Celebrate these three days with all to whom we belong in the communion of saints.

-Sister Joan Sobala

A Lesson in Constancy

Dear Friends,

Today’s first and third liturgical reading go together like peanut butter and jelly.  It’s a no-brainer, but don’t let that make you think that their message is easy to live out.

Both Moses in the first reading and the woman who came to the judge over and over again about her claim are persistent. 

In modern terms, persistence means:

                                Hang in there!

                                Don’t let up seeking justice.

                                If you believe you know truth and right, live by that belief.

Let’s take a look at the key figures we meet today.

Consider Moses. Forget the fact that he is presiding over a battle and just concentrate on the man for a moment – this leader of a ragtag band of Hebrews making their way to the promised land. As their leader, Moses' part in the day’s events was to keep his arms raised in prayer over the battlefield. He couldn’t do it. We couldn’t do it.

Go into the kitchen and set the timer on the stove for five minutes. Extend your arms for that whole time. Is that hard to do? No! It’s impossible !  Moses, the leader, needed help. The future of Israel depended on it. Once Aaron and Hur figured out what they had to do, the leader got the help he needed.. Aaron and Hur stood on either side of Moses to hold his arms raised. Only then could victory be achieved.

And then there is the widow in the Gospel .She didn’t have an advocate, no power to bribe, cajole or force, but she didn’t fear the judge who kept denying her justice. She simply wore him down by her persistence. She was undaunted in her tenacity. She wanted what she needed enough to stay the course. She believed in her cause. The judge, on the other hand, depended on his authority. It was not enough. Justice has a way of making us determined in a way that enfeebles authority which is not based on justice.

What’s in these readings for us?

Perseverance needs to be relentless, but often needs assistance. Do you need help to persevere? Are you aware of others who need help in order to persevere?

No leader can lead alone. If we are the leader, reach out to the community for help. If we are in the community, work with the leader to achieve the desired goal.

As Paul counsels Timothy in the second reading ,be constant in season and out of season, when convenient or inconvenient.  Only this constancy will achieve the desired goal.

-Sister Joan Sobala

 

The Meaning of Happiness to a Catholic Christian

Dear Friends,

Someone suggested  recently  that I should do a blog on happiness and the meaning of  happiness in the life of a Catholic Christian. Just to see if people are interested in that topic, I googled “happiness” and found that the site had had 899,000,000 hits.  Are people interested or what? The web tells us that the pursuit of happiness has sped up in the last ten  years,  that it is global in scope, and that it is at the very top of human desires and needs.

Among the ancients, the Jewish mentality was that happiness and blessedness are equivalent  terms . People  were  happy or blessed  if they  had good health, many children and success in their economic lives. The danger then, as now, was that people’s attitude toward happiness could be completely self-centered: happiness is when things are going my way.

For Jesus, who stood tall among the ancients, happy and blessed also were interchangeable words with this difference:  The person blessed by God was happy. In both word and parable, Jesus also conveys that happiness is not what we expect.

Jesus engaged life on life’s terms. He reinforced, rubbed, disagreed, supplemented what he saw and hear. He engaged in prayer and in life’s incongruities. He became an expert in discovering the good in every person. With Jesus, no one was ever categorically excluded from happiness.

In the Gospel,   those who suffered had an opening to Jesus. Ironically, happiness came through suffering. Think of the woman with the hemorrhage in Mark 6 and Bartimaeus  in Mark 10. Happy were the people who sought for others, for then,  they  themselves  received. Remember the Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15 and the Father with the demonic son in Matthew 18.  They came to Jesus on behalf of their children, and they were rendered happy. Happy also were the people whose possessions did not possess them Contrast Zacchaeus, who gave away generously once he met Jesus, with the rich young man who went away saddened because he couldn’t let go of what he had.

Some translations of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 render them “Blessed are they”, while others say “Happy are they”. (The original Aramaic is “Mature are they” … but that’s for another time.) What Jesus is saying, in effect is Blessed are people who are good, whose hand does not strike, whose mouth does not betray. Blessed are the merciful, those who comfort others, help and tolerate each other. Blessed are those who do not give way to dominant powers, those who let go of power and those who, without restraint, speak and love everything that lives. The beatitudes contain and reveal such depths of happiness that we can see in them layer after layer of meaning.

The great Mohandas  Gandhi studied both Jesus and humanity. From these sources, he concluded that happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.

May harmony and happiness be yours today, and may you share it with others.

-Sister Joan Sobala

The Message of Easter

Dear Friends,

It is easy for us to forget that the message of Easter is for all seasons and not just springtime. Even now, as we glory in the fall season with the harshness of winter not far behind, we would do well to keep Easter at the heart of our being and doing. Easter is the culmination of a battle between life and death. In Jesus, we know that life wins out, but in our day to day lives, death challenges us mightily: the death of our hope, the death of aspirations  any time of the year. and  ideas that have not yet blossomed, the death of relationships that are tentative as buds. Easter flounders or flourishes in our hearts.

   

This battle between life and death, for which we claim victory through Christ is something that  other  cultures find true in their own way.

The desire to live is in us, no matter what part of the world we come from, no matter what we hold in faith, no matter where we have been transplanted. The Irish poet, John  O’Donohue  wrote  a poignant piece about being an exile and then coming to the Easter moment of  belonging in a new place. I offer excerpts of it here, that we may read it against the struggle between life and death, and find ourselves encouraging exiles from other places who have come to our land to Easter here with us:
                       

                “When you dream, it is always of home. You are there among your own,

                 The rhythm of their voices rising like song…Then you awake to find yourself listening

                To  the sounds of traffic in another land. For a  moment , your whole body recoils

                At the strange emptiness of where you are…Nothing of you has happened here.

                No one knows you. The language slows you.
                The thick accent smothers your presence. ..

                The things you brought  from  home  Look back at you  out of place here …

                Now is the time to hold faithful To you dream, to understand  That this is an interim
               time full of awkward  disconnection. Gradually you will come to find Your way to
               friends who will open  doors to a new belonging. Your heart will brighten with new                        discovery. Your presence will unclench  And find ease, Letting your promise and
               substance been seen.

                Slowly a new world will open for you. The eyes of your heart, refined

                by this desert time, will be free To see and celebrate the new life     

                For which you have sacrificed everything.”

Easter is today for the refugee, the exile, the asylum seeker, the stranger in our midst. Recognizing their pain of loss, the deaths they have died along the way, let us stretch out our hands to them in love and offer them new life. After all, have we not also known the death and resurrection of Jesus ourselves?

-Sister Joan Sobala

Dear Friends,

Today in our Gospel, we meet Dives and Lazarus, characters in Jesus’ parable which, on the surface is about the wealthy and the poor co-existing in the world. But the rich man, Dives, is not accused of specific injustices, but only of self-interest, self-indulgence and…indifference to Lazarus. In fact Dives does not even see Lazarus, so absorbed is he in his own world.

Dives is like the complacent people whom Amos chides in the first reading. They were so taken up in their own pleasure and success that they were not sickened by the moral collapse of their country.

What does it take to overcome indifference to the stranger?  Work, concentration and  commitment  are essentially needed to become more deeply human like Christ, who never neglects anyone who passed his way.

Praying for a change of heart is the  indispensable  way  to  begin  setting  aside indifference and becoming conscious of the stranger, anyone whom we typically pass by. Here’s a prayer that moves us in that direction.

                Tender God,

                                                In the presence of people whom You know and love,

                                                Teach me to be a good listener

                                                To hear what people unconnected to us  are really saying,

                                                And not ignore them with indifference.

                Attentive God,

                                                In the presence of people whom You know and love,

                                                Help me to speak words that build the other person up.

                                                Words  of comfort, encouragement and hope.

                God who sees beyond our own limited sight,

                                                In the presence of the people You know and love,

                                                Move me to see beyond what I want to see.

                                                Let me look past no one whom You have put before  me.

                Compassionate God,

                                                In the presence of the people You  know and love,

                                                Let my voice be an faithful echo of Your own,

                                                My hand to reach out to heal as  Yours  does.

                                                Let me not walk past those  whom  You love,

                                                For You love everyone who comes my way.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

At the Crossroads of Life

Dear Friends,


I don’t know about you, but I like the crooked steward in today’s gospel. It’s not his dishonesty or deviousness that’s appealing, but rather, his initiative.


Caught in his misdeed , the crooked steward  put into motion a plan to survive and be welcomed  into new places after his job collapsed. While the master didn’t keep the thief on as manager, he did admit that the steward acted shrewdly.


Sometimes it takes a threat to get us to change my ways. We go to the gym when our clothes get too tight. We spend more carefully when the bank account dwindles. In our spiritual life, we put off doing the right thing until we absolutely have to. We pray when  we are most in need. We are most generous with all we are and have when we feel guilty for being stingy. In short, we need initiative to get us where we want to be.


Jesus says to his followers: pursue the kingdom of God with as much enthusiasm as the crooked steward had for his own skin.


Even though the steward has initiative, he lacks integrity. That same quality is missing in the merchants whom  Amos  excoriates  in today’s first reading. The merchants were guilty of exploitation. They used two different sets of weights to measure goods – one for selling and one for buying.  Both sets  were calibrated to the merchant’s advantage. Amos tells people that one’s religious convictions should shape one’s efforts in the public sphere.

Jesus’ point in telling the story of the enterprising crook is that we should be shrewd about spiritual things as we are about gain and earthly advantage. He tells us to work at our spiritual lives with   enthusiasm and creativity.


Perhaps you know that old saying: Pray as though everything depends on God and work as though everything depends on us. Both parts of that statement are needed to make the axiom true. We need to be wholehearted , even as we expect God to be wholehearted.


So this week, today, as a matter of fact, you and I need to as enterprising as the unjust steward and land on our feet when adversity strikes and our plans and hopes are shattered. But more than landing our feet, we have to have in us that integrity that doesn’t seek to be greedy or self-serving. Jesus calls us to care for other people and our world, to have a sense of justice and generosity in what we do.


The Georgetown educator Kevin O’Brien, SJ, offers us this thought on the steward that comes from the fertile mind of Jesus: “In a world where plenty of people use cunning to undermine god’s reign, God needs inventive, practical and clever problem-solvers and risk-takers. God just might be asking us to exercise some holy boldness in our lives.” That’s the takeaway today: holy boldness.

-Sister Joan Sobala

Lost and Found

Dear Friends,

With very little thought and because of long experience, we can certainly relate to a strong theme running through today’s liturgical readings: they are about the lost and found.

The Israelites in the first reading are already on their way to the  promised  land when they become lost in their thinking and actions. They forgot God’s promise, lost their mental compass and acted in ways contrary to God’s call. It wasn’t easy to admit they were lost, but they did, and found their way again.

Paul, writing to Timothy, tells how before his conversion to Christ he was lost in the conviction that it was right to persecute Christians. But Christ found him.

And in the Gospel, Jesus tells stories about a shepherd, a woman and a father, all of whom lost someone, something precious to them. In each case, direction was found and people were found. There was celebration and life continued.

But celebrations do not always follow great loss, and the looked-for are not always found whole, if at all.

A few days ago, we commemorated 9/11. In those awful hours and days after the terrorist strikes, rescue workers and families searched for the lost. Sometimes, someone was found alive and the word went out in the news and there was great rejoicing. In many cases, the lost had to be commended to God’s love. They would not be found this side of eternity and we grieved.

As Americans, we can relate so well to Bahamians mourning after the devastation of Hurricane Dorian. People have disappeared. Homes were destroyed.  Lost. Hopefully, life will be new-found in the future.

The international and national stories that mirror our readings go on. So do the experiences of our own lives. Will we be like God, the shepherd, the woman, the father and seek the lost in our own lives? Will we seek the lost in ourselves – our integrity, the personal growth that we put on the back burner, our zeal for the things of God, the ideas and dreams that motivated us. In many instances, loss is an unfinished reality in us.

What then? Then, faith encourages us to turn to our God and ask: 

“Where are you, God? Are you with me or not?”

And the answer comes: 

“My dear One, don’t you know I want the lost? I search. I wait. I find. What seems lost to you is     never lost to me. I know that you cannot rejoice over what you have lost and not found again,  but  someday, when my kingdom is present in its fullness and the pieces of the story are in place, when the reunions with loved ones and real and true, then you will rejoice. For now, hope in me. I hold your treasured ones close. I hold you close, when confusion and misery threaten t swamp you. Try to be steadfast. I am with you.” 

~Sister Joan Sobala