The Mother-Child Relationship

Dear Friends, 

Every day can’t be Mother’s Day, but every day we have a mother. 

If we have unanswered questions about our own mothers, if we doubt the word “Mother” applies to us in any way, we are in good company. 

Motherhood gives rise to a complicated set of relationships. 

Jesus had a mother, and we know that he didn’t always have an easy time with her. We have only to look in Chapter 3 of Mark or Chapter 12 of Matthew or Chapter 8 of Luke. In each of these accounts, Mary and his relatives came looking for Jesus, who was already becoming controversial. In Mark 3.21, the relatives of Jesus wanted to take charge of him, convinced he was out of his mind. But when Mary and other relatives tried to take him with them, Jesus replied: “Who are my mother and brothers? Here are my mother and brothers: anyone who does the will of God – that person is my brother and sister and mother.” 

That sounds like a rejection of Mary by Jesus – but it wasn’t. Mary knew about doing God’s will, after all, hadn’t she said “yes” to God before Jesus was conceived? Jesus knew about doing God’s will from his mother. So, in his moment, Jesus was telling everyone gathered around in what seemed to be a confrontation, that his mother fit the description of one who does God’s will.  

She stood by him as his disciple when other disciples did not. She stood beneath the cross and held his dead body in her arms. Later, on Pentecost, she would be the only one to have received the Holy Spirit in a second significant moment, the first being the annunciation. Mary, who had nudged Jesus into action at Cana, trusted he would be all who was meant to be, even when he seemed to be a failure, condemned and executed. 

When Jesus handed the disciple John and Mary to each other at the foot of the cross, he handed Mary another motherhood – the motherhood of all disciples, including you and me. 

I think we can draw courage from the way Jesus and Mary worked things out in their mother-son relationship, whether we are mothers, or we think of our mothers, living or dead. Neither mothering nor being someone’s child is easy. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to understand one another, if we even do then, but the mother-child relationship cannot be reversed or undone. 

Look at the painting pictured above. Done by a local artist, it is, at one and the same time, touching and humorous. Mama is kissing her child with ardor. The child doesn’t know what to make of it. 

In our own lives, what we do with our relationship with our mother, how we grow, given the mothers we have, is not just up to us, although it is in part up to us. 

On this day – Mother’s Day – let love have its way, whatever that means. Let the grace of God pour over us, so that we stand in the meaning of mother in the ways that best cause us to be amazed, to rejoice, to heal if need be, to accept and to let our mothers be who they are. Let us be who we are. Let Mary be our guide to a new depth of relationship with her Son, and our own mothers. 

~Sister Joan Sobala 

The Power of Being a Bystander

Dear Friends,

I have on my desk a photo cut out of the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper, 14 people standing curbside with the Cup Foods store in Minneapolis behind them.
            One couple held their child’s hands between them.

            Four had camera phones going.
            They were black and white – people who lived in the neighborhood as well as             

            passersby.

During the trial of George Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, lawyers referred to this group as “bystanders.” Bystanders are witnesses to deeds. Often “bystander” implies no willingness to intervene. They look. They see. They keep silent.

These bystanders outside Cup Foods did not keep silent. One of the women with a camera, Darnella Frazier, recorded the whole time that George Floyd was under Derek Chauvin’s knee. Her video was corroborated by video surveillance from across the street. These videos became pivotal elements in the trial. Moreover, several bystanders went on to be formal witnesses at the trial.

Bystanders are a repeating part of history. They watched the Armenian genocide 106 years ago, the Holocaust, the systematic forced marches of Native Americans, their relocation and massacres.

There were bystanders in Scripture. They are thus called only in Mark, Matthew and Luke. Bystanders watched Jesus’ followers untie the colt that Jesus was to ride into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. Two bystanders watched as a servant girl recognized Peter as a follower of Jesus, while he was keeping anonymous watch near the place where Jesus was taken. A bystander called out in Matthew and Mark that Jesus on the cross was crying out for Elijah. Singular voices. Who paid attention to them? The Gospel writers did.

No bystanders were at the tomb when Jesus was raised up. No bystanders were needed. This was a moment of faith beyond all imagining.

Christ lives, and He has not gone away. The Risen Christ has been with His people – all people – from that moment on.

Jesus was with the suffering Armenians, Native Americans, Jews and others who lost their lives in the Holocaust. He was with George Floyd. He is with us who have suffered at the hands of others. He is with us bystanders as we are caught in the presence of injustice.

When we come to the point of being bystanders, how can we take in and respect the truth of what we see and hear? These ways sound so simple, but they are arduous:
            Let’s keep Jesus in mind.
            Recognize those who are suffering as our brothers and sisters.
            Do what we can. Be ready to step forward, if possible.

            Pray that we may make a difference.

We can leave the George Floyd death behind us or we can understand that it is a part of our future – we who are bystanders who make an effort to see with Christ’s eyes.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Identifying As Children of God

Dear Friends,

Children and shepherds are two sets of unassuming people from an ancient Scripture with valuable lessons for us in today’s readings.

God’s love, John tells us in today’s second reading, enables us to be not just children but children of God. What do you suppose that means? Does John want us to think as children do? To learn as children learn? Or does it mean that, like children, we need to be or become at home with the great mysteries of life as children are so easily at home?

On the surface, we don’t deal with mystery in our everyday life. We work, play, make homes for ourselves and others, share ideals. We pray, cook, shop, spend endless hours on social media, make a living, show others we love them. In our everyday lives, we don’t feel like the children of God. We feel – well, adult, put upon, restless, satisfied, harried and energetic, but we don’t feel like children of God and we don’t pay attention to mystery. Then something happens which catches us up short.

COVID, for example? Why now? We also wonder why do people abuse or kill each other? Why does this person love me with all my warts and foibles? Why is the world divided into the rich and poor? The 99% and the 1%? Why do people feel they have the right to be supreme over others? Why you? Why me?

As we see our world reflected in the news, in our personal lives, maybe we dare to ask, “Is this all God’s plan?” If so, is God playing favorites? Or is this the result of being human, being free to choose?

In these pandemic times, we are encouraged to seek scientific ways to help bring COVID-19 down. But does science answer questions of the heart and soul about the meaning of life and death? If not, where do we look?

It’s when we begin to face and probe questions that defy clear and easy questions that we begin to face mystery: The mystery of life and the mystery of God.

In the face of mystery, being child-like means we are wrapped in the confidence that all will be well, that God is in charge, but truth be known, we are not easily convinced. Mystery befuddles us.

If we reduce mystery to a problem to be solved or a puzzle to piece together, we have done mystery an injustice for treating it like any other human concern. The fact is that every day and always, we walk in mystery. We take it in, but we can never take it in fully.

Sometimes, in the face of the mystery of God and the mystery of life, all we can do is listen attentively for the voice of God. Sometimes God's voice beckons us, assures us, stops us, lets us float in a sea of unknowing.

“I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel today. Do we listen to the voices of the shepherd? We hear the voice of God when we are as open as children to mystery. Adults prefer not to imagine much. Instead, we say that we deal in real time with real issues. We are leery of wasting time.

Today’s readings call us to be adult believers who are not afraid of being identified as children of God, adult believers who trust that mystery both enfolds us and unfolds in our lives, adult believers who listen for the voice of God accompanying us, leading us through the dramas and delights of life.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Healing What is Crippled

Dear Friends,  

In these weeks after Easter, we tend to be totally absorbed in the post-Resurrection stories about Jesus in the Gospels. That’s no surprise, for learning the meaning of His presence to us today is dependent on our grasp of this unique time in Jesus’ life. 

But we can learn something about Jesus by exploring the incidents recounted in the Acts of the Apostles as well, for by then, the power, the healing presence of Jesus have been passed on to His followers. 

In His life before His passion, death and resurrection, Jesus, touched many people by his glance, his hands, his breath. Each of the four Gospels tell about Jesus interacting with paralytics – those who had to depend totally on others.  

Luke is the only evangelist who tells of Jesus healing a crippled person – and she was a woman. Her story is told in Luke 13.10-17. Remember her? She had been bent over for 18 years, crippled by a spirit that prevented her from standing erect. She did not see Jesus as he came by. She couldn’t. All she could see was the ground. But Jesus saw her, cured her, called her “daughter of Abraham.” Though the leader of the synagogue was indignant, the people rejoiced in her cure, indeed they rejoiced “at all the splendid deeds done by him.” (Luke 13.17) 

Fast forward to Acts 3.1 -10. This time the story is about a man crippled from birth. He had been brought by his faithful carriers to the temple gate to beg, when Peter and John came along. Peter looked intently at him, and the cripple expected alms. But he didn’t get money. Instead, he was cured by the power of Jesus. 

And then – pay attention to this – Peter took him by the hand, raised him up. The formerly crippled man “leaped up, stood, walked around, and went into the temple walking, and jumping and praising God” and the bystanders were filled with amazement and astonishment.” 

These two – the woman in Luke and the man in Acts, were freed from what crippled them and they gave witness – the man in Acts more exuberantly than the woman in Luke. Both let it be known what had happened to them through the power of Christ. There it was. Before and after the resurrection, Jesus cured cripples. 

Today, Jesus cures what is crippled in our world, in us – what reduces us to begging, what prevents us from seeing and doing all we can in life to make the world a better place.

 

What in us or in our loved ones, or in our neighborhood is crippled? Not necessarily physically crippled but internally. Do we invoke the power of Christ to heal? Do we participate in the healing of others as we are encouraged to do by belonging to Christ? 

This is an Easter message that causes us to look around ourselves to see who is in need and say as Peter did “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you…” 

And give it. 

~Sister Joan Sobala

Finding the Risen Christ

Dear Friends,

This year, Holy Week found the Jewish calendar coinciding with ours, with Muslim Ramadan not far behind. A significant convergence of the special holy days of the People of the Book. Yet, news outlets recently reported that, in the United States, less than 50% of the American public would be gathering to mark these important spiritual feasts.

Some will say COVID-19 has blown us off course. Others point out that there was a growing decline in religious observance long before that. Lack of interest? Lack of belief? Individualism? We can speculate all we want.

Let me ask the Catholic/Christian readership of this blog: Do you wish to keep Holy Week and Easter at the heart of your faith and practice? I’d love to have you write some comments at the end of this blog that I share in future blogs. If you need to prime the pump, here are a few thoughts to build on.

Before the Resurrection of Jesus, the operative word beneath the narrative of these holydays was “closed”: closed minds and closed hearts did not recognize Jesus for who He was, the closed door kept Him out, the closed tomb said all was over. Only with the Resurrection of Jesus did people open their minds and hearts, their arms and their future to the seemingly impossible. Christ, who was truly dead as Good Friday ended, was truly alive on the third day. How do we become open to this remarkable reality of God in our midst today?

Jesus was the same yet different, transformed through death to new life. How do we come to be open to His presence today? 

His presence today not in some distant future. As the farmer and New Testament Greek scholar, Clarence Jordan, told us “on the morning of the Resurrection, God put life in the present tense, not in the future. He gave us not a promise, but a presence, not so much an assurance that we shall live someday but that He is risen today.”

The Risen One is with us as we plow ahead, tired of the miseries, the isolation, the suffering of this last year. Do we feel the pull of it? To capture the meaning of this phrase “feel the pull of it,” go back to last week’s blog to grasp the meaning of Easter – not intellectually understood but held in our hearts as true and real.

Can we touch Him today, risen as He is? How do we touch Him? Mary Magdalen wanted to touch Him as He was before He died, but she couldn’t. Thomas was invited to touch His wounds but found that he didn’t need to in order to believe. Do we want to touch the Risen Christ? How do we do that?

On Good Friday, as they were dying, Jesus turned to Dismas, the good thief, to accept him. Jesus wanted Dismas. Jesus wanted then, and even now, excluded people. Today, in our land, they are Asian Americans, black, brown and red people, gay and transgendered people. We say we are one with the Risen Christ. Do we accept the excluded?

Easter is a threshold feast. We need to step into it and step over it to find the Risen Christ on our side of history. May I hold your hand as we step across to Christ and his people awaiting us?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Feeling the Pull of Easter

Dear Friends,

There’s a story about Easter I have been carrying in my heart for years. I used it only once in a blog. That was 2015, so I’m due to tell it again, so you can hear it and experience it’s meaning.

A German seminary professor of theology was fond of vacationing on the moors of England. On one such trip, he walked along a path still thick with morning mist. The professor came upon a group of cherry-cheeked boys and girls, gazing upward. One child was working the string of a kite.

“You can’t see it,” the professor said, announcing the obvious. “How do you know it’s there?”

With the exasperation that children have for clueless adults, a little voice piped up: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

Back in Germany, refreshed from his holiday, the professor took up the task of shaping the theological thought of the seminarians in his class. Seminarians, by their nature, loved to challenge their teachers. His class excelled in this way.

On one particular day, the topic under discussion was how to convey the deep abiding truths of Christianity in homilies for the great feasts.

“Take Easter,” one earnest student began. “What do we say? How do we make people know it’s real?”

Remembering the children with the kite on the moors, the professor replied very simply: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

On this “day which has no sunset,” as the 12th century abbot Guerric of Igny, describes it, do you feel the pull of Easter?

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Lingering in Faith this Holy Week

Dear Friends, 

All year long, we read about/study/drink in Jesus’ public life. 

Lent prepares us for the bleakness, the darkness of the passion, 

and yes, beyond that, a new day, glowing in the heart of Christ. 

 

We believe that the promise of life is stronger than death, 

but we linger in faith in the events of Holy Week. 

 

The day comes in Jesus’ public ministry that he sets his face toward Jerusalem, his destiny. 

He encounters believers and skeptics along the way. 

His disciples jockey for power. 

 

He finally enters Jerusalem, 

applauded and honored. 

 

The next day, Jesus spares the barren fig tree,  

but he himself will not be spared. 

 

Later in the week, on the night before he dies, 

Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples. 

He knows how God fed the Israelites as they fled from bondage to freedom.  

Jesus’ disciples, too, will pass with Him from bondage to freedom. 

 

In His passion, in the agony in the garden, Jesus yields control of His life.  

Disciples and friends will not/cannot watch with him. 

He is accused, mistreated, rejected, jeered at. 

 

Jesus is utterly vulnerable and on the way of the cross, reveals his physical weakness,  

a tenderness for others. 

 
Falling, falling, falling, He lean on another. 

 

He is lifted high,  

with no disciples at his side 

and he dies. 

 

Though it is day, night descends. Darkness covers the earth. 

He dies. 

 

“We shall never lose Christ. 

If we do not follow Him, He will follow us… 

Not too closely lest he take away our freedom… 

But near enough to wash our feet when we are ready… 

Close enough to give us bread and wine in our weariness.” (John Bell) 

 

May the God who holds Jesus close on the cross and in the grave  

hold us close as we strive to fathom and welcome the depth of Jesus’ gift to us all: 

Death, but not forever. 

Darkness, but not forever. 

Light and life with Christ, our Brother and Lord, forever. 

 

May the God of mercy,  

who is well acquainted with grief, bless us with faith that our God lives. 

And with God, we shall live. 

 

~Sister Joan Sobala