Namaste: I Greet the Holy Within You

Dear Friends,

The Fifth Week of Lent begins today. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant that God will write on our hearts. God says, “I will be (your) God and (You) shall be my people…All from the greatest to the least shall know me.” What a tender sentiment for God to have toward Israel and us. We have known the misery of the pandemic, even the loss of our daily bread. One young person told her companion a fact about her decimated home life: “It is not my day to eat.” In a country of over 300 million people, we do not always see that some of our fellow Americans have lost so much: food, heat in their homes, their very homes. Their Jobs. Survival is not apparent. Other sicknesses beyond COVID-19 are not attended to. Is there a future? Is Easter real? Yes, God says. I will be your God and you shall be my people.

This awful year has also seen the rise of violence – domestic, racial and political. Why don’t we agree to set aside violence, hatred of the other who is brown, black, yellow, red and do what Jesus did? He shows us the way.

The author of Hebrews says to us today in the second reading that Jesus was heard because of his reverence. Jesus’ reverence for God, his Abba, was displayed primarily through his reverence, his respect for other people. That’s what made Jesus so attractive to people. Jesus did not pity others. There’s a difference between pity and reverence. Jesus rather saw the goodness, the uniqueness, the dignity of the individual. He embodied a way of treating others that the is summed up in the word Namaste. Namaste: I greet the holy within you. I greet the goodness within you. I greet God within you. This reverence for you, the other, is of the very nature of God. The word Namaste itself is of Hindu origin, but its meaning is for all of us.

One reason to continue wearing masks and to maintain social distance is out of reverence for others. It all comes down to seeing ourselves, without exception, as belonging to God.

The least valuable way we can think of Lent is as a time of temporary change of insignificant aspects of our lives. The most significant way to think of Lenten change is as transformation – becoming lastingly new in ways that make our world and ourselves a better place. As individuals, as families, as institutions of all kinds, can we take the risk of acknowledging God in that other person? Can we take responsibility for creating an atmosphere, an environment in which this Namaste – this awareness of God in the other – is acknowledged?

As a nation during this last year, we have suffered a great deal. Storms and fires, tornados and floods have contributed to a sense close to despair in people. But that sense need not be part of our future. Let’s stop looking on the other as a threat to ourselves and instead treat the other as our neighbor, our sister and brother.

Bow your head, ever so slightly toward the person coming toward you: Namaste! We say in our minds and hearts if not out loud. I greet the holy within you.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Unexpectedness of God

Dear Friends,

Let’s admit it. We like to control our lives and the way they unfold. We plan our days. Interruptions frustrate us. So, if we are unable to make a connection for a vaccination, or our computer goes haywire, we fume and we mutter and our household knows about it.

We’d also like to control God, and the Scriptures today illustrate that our efforts don’t succeed.

In the year 587, after years of complacency and disregard for God, the inhabitants of Jerusalem awoke one day to see the armies of Babylon at their gates. Today’s first reading tells us that Jerusalem was leveled, the temple destroyed and the people taken a thousand miles away into captivity.

But God, faithful and unconditional in love, sent the people a savior – one who would set them free so that they could return to their homeland. Remarkably, unexpectedly, it was Cyrus, the King of Persia –Cyrus, the outsider, the pagan was God’s anointed.

The Israelites were overjoyed but befuddled. God had stepped outside of Israel to save Israel. That wasn’t in their game plan.

In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Nicodemus needed the darkness, lest he be seen, lest he be wrong about Jesus. But in their long conversation, Nicodemus began to understand Jesus as the one sent by God – as the way to eternal life. A whole new world was opening up for Nicodemus – a world he never anticipated or expected a world he could not control.

Cyrus was the unexpected savior of Israel. Jesus was the unexpected one for the people of his time. Who is the unexpected one for us? Jesus? Yes and no.

In one sense we expect Jesus to be our savior. After more than 2000 years of Christian history, the expectation is in our heart and soul. We expect Him in the Eucharist, in the Scriptures, in prayer. In these ways, our mind controls and limits the way Jesus comes to us.

It’s the unexpected Jesus who is harder to recognize. Thomas Merton, the unconventional Trappist spiritual writer, offers us an intriguing insight into why Jesus is hard to recognize in our world today. It’s especially appropriate now, during our second Lent in COVID restrictions. “We are carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, too many demands…The frenzy of life kills the roots of inner wisdom…” The attempt to keep going with maximum output through this pandemic neutralizes our ability to see God, the unexpected one, in the midst of this set of unique experiences. There are far more important and lasting treasures in life to discover – joy, hope, companionship, gentleness, humor and the dignity of the human spirit.

Like the Israelites who had to accept that God could work outside Israel, like Nicodemus, who had to adjust his thinking about who the Messiah might be, we need to enlarge our thinking, look at daily things with new eyes, to rest in the Lord more deeply, to change our hearts, so that in the unexpected and perhaps unwanted people, events and moments that crowd our life this year, our unexpected God is made visible and touchable.

How will it happen for any of us is unclear, but it happened to the Israelites and Nicodemus, why not us? The first step is to stop, look and listen. Jesus, the unexpected one is here.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Deepening Our Intimacy with God

Dear Friends,

The season of Lent is still pretty fresh, so we have lots of time to draw near to God, to allow ourselves to do our part to deepen our intimacy with God.

Intimacy is a word we either like or we don’t. If we don’t like it, it may be because the word has some negative connotation in our minds. But in its best meaning, intimacy is characterized by pronounced closeness, friendship, and association. It’s in this last sense that we can talk in a helpful way about intimacy with God.

Intimacy is not something we have to create. It exists in us as soon as we exist, and our life’s work is to discover it or recover it: the rooted connection we have with God and one another that sustains our life.

Speaking of God, St. Augustine wrote, “You are more inside of me than my most intimate part. You are the interior of my interior.”

“Not me,” you say. “I am not good enough, smart enough, important enough.” We want to run away, and sometimes we do. But God says to us over and over again…“I am here. I love you. I want you. Will you walk toward me even as I run toward you?”

Why are we so afraid to move toward God? 

Maybe the work of Lent for us this year is to explore that question: “Why are we so afraid to move toward God?” Is it because we think that in moving toward God, we will lose our freedom to become what we want to be? In fact, we become more free, but don’t recognize that we do so.

The Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe writes that “God’s ways are very much simpler than ours. He does not have any complications. He is just simply in love with us…He loves us intimately and personally – more intimately and personally than we can love ourselves.” There it is. The wholeheartedness of God toward us. Another way of looking at the work of Lent is to embrace God’s love for us as real, immediate, true and tender.

God is always in touch with us, even when we are not in touch with God. You and I are always in the right setting to make intimacy with God possible, because everywhere we are is where God is.

God before me.
God behind me.
God within me.
God in my mind and heart and body.
God in the other person’s mind and heart and body.

We don’t need to be wordy with God. Have you ever watched a loving, seasoned couple together? They don’t talk to each other incessantly. They are simply in each other’s presence.

Whatever our Lenten practice, let it come from a heart in touch with God, a heart deeply attuned to God, a heart intimate with God.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Torn Between Two Ways of Thinking

Dear Friends,

Among the characteristics people share is to be torn between two ways of thinking.

The Apostle Paul had it right: “I find myself doing the things I don’t want to do and not doing the things I want to do.” (Romans 7.15)

Peter and the early Christian community were pulled in two directions with regard to Gentile converts: to have them become Jewish before they became Christian…or not?

And Jesus, too, had his moments of being torn. Should he heal the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter or not? And remember how he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by, yet not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22.42)

You and I are torn between what we want and what we need. We want these COVID times to end, but we need to live through them and hopefully, come out whole, faithful to God and our loved ones, faithful to our country, our church.

Just as we are torn between what we want and what we need, we are torn between what we want now and what we committed ourselves to some time ago. This is a tough one. Each of us change and grow in life. Tastes change, experiences change us. It is difficult or tempting not to honor the commitments we made in our personal past. Hopefully, what we want and what we are committed to are the same, but it takes work to repeat our determination to live out these commitments.

And then there are people who are torn by a love/hate relationship with the Church. Before he died, a good friend said to me, “I haven’t left the Church. The Church has left me.” It hurt him to say it, but he believed it. He meant that, in his understanding, the church had not welcomed the new questions and insights about life that our times were experiencing. He no longer felt at home in the church which had not embraced him in his personal newness and the newness of these times.

My friend had not found a lasting home in the church in his last days, but he continued to seek and welcome truth. He continued to find a home in Christ, whom he recognized as the Way, the truth and the Life. Christ is greater than the Church, he said. Truth, he found, is somewhere between ambiguity and paradox.

Being torn between two ways of thinking is for some of us the only way we have to go forward.

Let’s not judge each other too harshly.

Instead, as we are torn between two ways of thinking in life, let’s turn to God, the Gentle Disturber of the satisfied and the Relentless Comforter of the distressed. “Hold me close,” let’s pray, “in your embrace of mercy and healing.”

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Burning and Sifting

Dear Friends,

Someone in the church where
we celebrated Ash Wednesday
performed several indispensable steps to prepare for the ritual celebration of that day.

Someone burned piles of palm (saved from last year’s Palm Sunday service)
and sifted the residue.
Burn and sift.

Sometimes we find our hearts burning within us.
Sometimes anger or at least annoyance burns within us.
In fact, we all burn energy.
Burn and sift.

If you do not burn,
if I do not burn,
if we do not burn,
how will the darkness become light?

Burn.
Burn and sift.
Sift together.
Sift with purpose,
continuity, and conviction.

Come to new realizations:
we cannot be who we are or become new
without burning and sifting.

Over the heads of the disciples (Mary, the Apostles and many more) on Pentecost,
the fire of the Holy Spirit burned,
calling each of them to proclaim and shape the emerging Body of Christ.
Burn and sift.
Respond and relate.
Come and become
holy and whole.

These are indispensables of
becoming one in Christ, of
sharing Life in Christ.

Lent urges us to prepare thoroughly
for Easter this year.
Easter, ever the same, always new,
glowing on the horizon
toward which we hurry.

Will you?
Will I?
Will we
awaken the stilled alleluia
on that Day of days?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Welcoming the Leper in Ourselves and Others

Dear Friends,

Today’s Scriptural readings are about lepers. In Leviticus, the leper was quarantined not for the individual’s sake but that the purity of the community be preserved at all costs, even at the cost of excluding the leper from the love and support of family and friends. We can contrast the legalism of Leviticus with the human drama of the Gospel. Jesus, whose reputation must have been far reaching and great, inspired the unclean person to come to him and say:

                                            If you will to do so, you can make me clean.

The leper knew what he himself could do and what he was not permitted to do. Yet he stepped out of his required role to approach Jesus. Jesus, we read, was touched – not superficially – but in his innermost parts. Jesus touched this man whom society declared untouchable. He offered inclusion and healing in contrast to the community that offered only exclusion and condemnation.

The importance of what Jesus did becomes clear to us at the end of the story, where Jesus, in effect, trades places with the leper. Jesus, because of his compassion, was not able to show himself in any town He was ostracized – unwelcome as any leper would be.

As in the Book of Leviticus, people in our times also divide the world into the clean and unclean, the pure and the impure, the included and the excluded. That’s the stuff of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6; the stuff of family break-ups; of class struggles. Today’s lepers are any and all people who experience discrimination, alienation, prejudice and rejection.

Is there a leper in you and in me? Is there a part of ourselves we consider untouchable, unclean? A part of me that the rest of me avoids? Is there something in my heart that I don’t want to look at – fear, shame, humiliation, an unwillingness to forgive myself, painful or scarring memories?

How easy it is to slump down in some private dump and feel the situation is hopeless. We can brood over our inadequacies and failings, allow ourselves to fall before the demons of discouragement or we can allow Jesus to get close enough to the leper in me to say:

                                            Of course, I want to heal you.

The significant thing about the leper in the Gospel is that he dared to hope. Because of that hope, he got up and did something in pursuit of the seemingly impossible.

Wednesday, we begin Lent, and each of us has a decision to make. Will it be a season ignored or half-attended to or will it be a time to face the leper in us as individuals, group or nation?

If we try, Lent can be for us a time of courage – a time to come before Jesus and say:

                                            If you will to do so, you can make me clean.

Let him be our guide this Lent as we try to welcome the leper and others in ourselves. Then Easter can be unlike any other we have known.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Remembering God is With Us

Dear Friends,

The first reading today is from the Book of Job. Job must have been composed in January or February when our world is bleak! His words find an echo in our own lives…depression, hopelessness, helplessness.

For a person who has lost a loved one or who has experienced the breakup of a relationship or who is out of work or has felt the pressure of being cooped up – anyone in these circumstances can understand Job when he says, “The long night drags on, I am filled with restlessness.”

Job has lost all. His lament was not so much that his possessions and children were gone, as that their passing made no sense. He had done nothing to warrant this suffering. He was a good person, yet he was suffering apparently unjustly and unfairly.

In the Gospel so much is said in so few words that it is tempting to think that Jesus has a simple answer for everything. He touches people, they are cured. Their problems are solved. Did Jesus have the instant cure for everything? No. Jesus was, at times, almost overwhelmed at the pain and suffering he saw.

The question won’t leave us alone. Why? Why pain and suffering, especially when it happens to good people like Job, who are innocent and faithful. It almost seems as though God is powerless. Why? Why? Maybe the closest we can come to an answer is a story I’ve heard several times.

There is a place where people still bring the sick to Jesus. I’ve never been there, perhaps you have. The people I’ve talked with tell a similar if not an identical story. I am speaking of Lourdes in France. It’s like a biblical scene. The sick, sometimes thousands of them, arrive by every possible means of conveyance, with hundreds of volunteers to care for them. Most of them do not receive a cure, but the answer to their prayers, and it is not a trivial one, is a healing in soul and spirit. They are renewed in faith, but the faith is not that they continue to expect physical healing. It is rather a conviction that God is with them. They do not bear the cross alone.

This is the good news, God is with us. It is a truth that is hard for us to take in, and perhaps even harder for us to explain.

For us, when all ties to the future seem to be cut off, when our pain and suffering seem overwhelming, it is in these moments when we are faced with Job’s choice: We can say, as Job’s wife suggested, “curse God and die” or we can come to God with open hands and heart. Tired, confused, angry as we may be, we can abandon hopelessness and bind ourselves to a hope that will sustain us even beyond death.

God promises in the Psalm today:

The Lord heals the brokenhearted. He binds up their wounds. He sustains the lowly.

We are talking about the One who stands against the dark forces of life that threaten to overcome us. We do not have to search for Him. He is among us. He is here. He holds us in his hands. He is our God.

To suffer is to write with our lives what we believe with our hearts. Our belief is that, though the setbacks in life are many, the victory, given to Jesus, will ultimately be ours.

~Sister Joan Sobala