The Evolution of Our Faith

Dear Friends,

I seem to be absorbed these days in thinking about our Church, its life and future. The Church means a great deal to me, because it is our common way to be with our God in these uncommon times. I hope it means much to you, too.

Today’s first reading recounts how the fledgling Church handled its first major problem: What were they to do with the Gentiles who wished to become members of the community? Should they be required to observe the traditional Mosaic Law? Should males be circumcised? Should women and men observe the customary dietary regulations?

Hearing these questions probably makes us shrug our shoulders. They are non-questions for us. But they weren’t non-questions for the early Christians all of whom were practicing Jews. These were new questions, previously unasked. There were no models to which they could refer.

But the questions would not go away. Real people were standing across an apparent divide from them. They would not go away.

The Acts of the Apostles reports that people on both sides of the question met face-to-face. Their efforts led to a wonderfully succinct statement showing the confidence they had in the Holy Spirit with them:
            It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and ours too
            not to lay on you any burden
            beyond that which is strictly necessary.

Talk about bold and daring statements.

The first things this bold statement of the Council of Jerusalem reminds us in our day is that there are very few absolutes in life. Christ’s Spirit had shed new light on what they had inherited. Some of it was to be passed on. Some of it was not.

The second learning from this text is that each generation needs to ask: What is for now and what is forever? What is essential and what can change?

And finally, connected as we are through the Holy Spirt, nothing burdensome should be imposed unless it is strictly necessary.

Today, you and I are pioneers, not unlike the members of the Council of Jerusalem. There has never been a culture like ours. We can’t look at our history for the answer. There is no exact model – nothing out there – that is going to tell us how to live lives that are fully in harmony with God.

We are creating a new faith in 2022.

As the first Century Christians did, we are called upon to address life’s questions using the values of Christ: unity, not uniformity, compassion, devotion to God, refusing to call anyone a stranger or outcast. As a church with a very long history of struggle with the questions of the times, we got it wrong sometimes. It sometimes took us centuries to get it right and apologize…but we have tried and grown. Other people have joined us in the exploration into living truth.

It seems to me that our most important work of faith is to hold for ourselves and pass on to the next generation what is essential and crucial and to let all the rest blow away on the breath of God.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Shaping Our Church Identity

Dear Friends,

On Easter Sunday and the first few weeks following, the Sunday readings focused on the event of Jesus’ resurrection and the early Christians’ experience of Jesus. Beginning last week, though, and for these few weeks before the Ascension, the focus changes to the impact of Easter on the identity of the early Church.

To put it briefly, identity is not a static, once and for all thing. Psychologists tell us that, even though a person’s identity is somewhat shaped by heredity and inborn characteristics, to change and to grow is essential to life. We welcome some things and reject others. We sample, deepen, develop, refine our characteristics.

The identity and self-understanding of human groups is also a lifetime task. One such group is the Church.

Formed by the presence and promise of Jesus, the Christ, the church has existed for over 2000 years. From the days of Pentecost, through the missionary experiences described in today’s first reading until that time when the New Jerusalem of our second reading has overtaken our earth, our Church not only has existed, it has continually been becoming new and hopefully more faithful to its founding impulse.

The Church has unfinished business. The shape of our Church, how we embody and pass on the heart of our faith and practice will continue to change.

Recently, parish leaders in one local community have proposed changing the Mass schedule shared between two parishes. The shrinking number of clergy and the decline in weekend attendance by parish membership are practical reasons for this proposal. In our effort to be faithful to Christ in these difficult times, we will need to know and integrate our heritage and our history with our present circumstance without fear but with great love.

In today’s Gospel, we hear again Jesus’ tender words to his followers:
            Love one another. Such as my love been for you, so your love be for one another.
            So must your love for one another be. This is how all will know that you are my 

            disciples: by your love for one another.

We can quote those lines easily – they are as familiar to us as the air we breathe. But this love of which Christ speaks demands our attentiveness. It consists of sorting out what is necessary to maintain for the sake of life and growth and what is not. It chooses life for individuals and groups and discards what has become useless or has ceased to engender life. It values the way the Holy Spirit works for everyone.

With tongue in cheek, someone once paraphrased a line from the Gospel: Wherever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, there is … dissention. Maybe.

But for sure, whenever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, there is the potential to become more clearly who we say we are:
            The Body of Christ.
            The people of God.
            God’s love incarnate.

These weeks, as we hear how Christ’s Spirit guided the early followers of the Lord toward a new, unfolding identity, I hope we can find encouragement and determination to believe that we, too, will be guided by the Spirit in renewing our Church identity for our time.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Gift of Abundant Love

Dear Friends, 

Long before there was Mother’s Day, there were mothers…every day of the year…year in, year out.

Our society talks about birth mothers, natural mothers, foster mothers, stepmothers, single mothers and other mothers, e.g. women and men who have never given birth but who give life and nurture individuals and groups.

What we celebrate today is the motherhood of all nurturers: the motherhood of many including the motherhood of Mary and the motherhood of God.

There hasn’t been a time in Christian history that people have not been stirred to honor Mary. She is Theotokos, the Mother of God. On the cross, Jesus gave her to John and therefore to all of us as mother. (See last weekend’s blog.)

Mary is the first disciple of Jesus, our friend, companion, and model of how to say “yes” to God. She shows us how to be faithful to that Yes.

And then there is the motherhood of God. The medieval theologians Anselm and Hildegard of Bingen and Pope John I spoke and wrote of Jesus our Mother and God our Mother. Jesus refers to Himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood (Luke 13.34).

The mothering qualities we treasure in life are found first in God. If God is our Mother, then we imagine God when we activate the mothering qualities in our lives.

Mothering is arduous. Consider the Ukrainian crisis today. Amanda Taub, writing from Poland for The New York Times, reminds us that 90% of the refugees are women, children, and senior men. Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 had to stay behind to serve in the military. Life for these refugee mothers and their children is precarious. It’s exceedingly complicated to find affordable childcare and employers who allow flextime. How to provide?

The story of the Ukrainian women has its counterparts in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, to mention a few other countries. 

Most of the time, our minds and our culture picture mothers as honored, well provided for and happy. We hardly want to think about the pain that mothers suffer at various times in their life. They don’t talk about it, but it remains in their memories. It is part of what forms their character. Remember how Simeon told Mary in the temple after Jesus’ presentation “a sword will pierce your heart” (Luke 2.35)? Mothers join with Mary in that piercing and its memory. 

On this Mother's Day, when we think about the Risen Christ’s gift of abundant love and we remember all the mothers we have known, we commit ourselves to that same divine love – love that is active, strong, inclusive and unending.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Month of Mary

Dear Friends,

May is the month traditionally dedicated to Mary in our Church.

We know her and we don’t know her. Many of us whose roots are in ethnic groups have identified with Mary our patron. Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Poland…the list goes on. Mary belongs to us. But before that, she is the Mother of God, Jesus the Word Incarnate. Let’s pause today to look at who she was really. What do we know about her? What has history told us about who she was in her being, in the eyes of Jesus, in the eyes of others? Here are some nuggets.

Mary’s birth to Joachim and Anna is recorded only in the apocrypha. In all images of Mary with her mother, Mary is always pictured standing next to Anna, who holds an open book on her lap for Mary to read. Mary knew the prophecies of the Messiah who was to come. One way we know she knew the scriptures is that her Magnificat, spoken while with Elizabeth, is based on the Song of Hannah when she, barren woman that she was, knew she would bear a son (I Samuel 2: 1–10).

In the presence of the angel Gabriel, Mary did not hesitate. She turned to no consultant for advice before she said her yes. Not her father or mother, not Joseph.

Mary was the first of the disciples of Jesus. She believed in Him. “Do whatever He tells you,” she said to the steward at the wedding feast at Cana (John 2:5). When the woman in the crowd blessed her for bearing Jesus, He replied by honoring her discipleship (Mark 5.35). She heard His word and kept it in her heart.

Mary is the only person to be present at His birth and His death on the cross. Her arms embraced Him from lowly beginning to apparent end.

In the Orthodox tradition and the Eastern Catholic churches, the liturgical year begins with the celebration of Mary’s birth (traditionally Sept. 8) and ends with the Assumption of Mary (August 15). She is the one from whom salvation flows from beginning to end of the liturgical year.

In the early centuries of the Church, it was debated: Was Mary to be called the Mother of Christ (christotokos) or the Mother of God (theotokos)? The decision was made at the Council or Ephesus in 431 and has stood ever since. Mary is theotokos, the first lady of all creation.

Praying with touching religious imagination over the real woman that Mary was, the Episcopal priest Alla Renee Bozarth wrote in 1994:

Before Jesus was his mother.

Before supper in the upper room, breakfast in the barn.

Before the Passover feasts, a feeding in the trough.

And here, the altar of Earth, fair linens of hay and seed.

Before his cry, her cry.

Before his sweat of blood, her bleeding and tears.

Before his offering, hers.

Before the breaking of his body and death, the breaking of her body in birth.

Before the offering of the cup, the offering of her breast.

Before his blood, her blood.

And by her body and blood alone, his body and blood and whole human being.

The wise ones knelt to hear the woman’s words in wonder.

Holding up the sacred child, her God in the form of a babe, she said

“Receive and let your hearts be healed and your lives be filled with Love,

For

This is my body.

This is my blood.

Happy month when we honor you, Mary, theotokos, our mother, our sister, our friend.

~Sister Joan Sobala

We All Are the Beloved of God

Dear Friends,

The picture above this blog was taken in my office at Blessed Sacrament. The cross and figures beneath it are on a shelf above the desk where I can look at them often as a reminder of the work we all need to do for racial justice, myself included.

The cross is a memento from the life of the late Fr. John Lynch, whom I got to know well when he lived at St. Anne Parish, Rochester, in his later years. The figures beneath the cross are from the home of my late Aunt Teresa. A little white girl and a picaninny, close to the foot of the cross, even as Mary and the other women and the disciple John stood beneath the foot of the cross in witness to Jesus’ dying for us.

While picaninny, in its original loving sense was a term West Indian people used for their little children, the term developed an offensive cast in the southern United States, most notably between 1830 and 1880. One would think it would be gone today, but it remains as a caricature used in a derogatory and racist sense, in conversation, films and TV shows.

Why my aunt had both, never separated from one another in her home for more than 25 years, I don’t know. That’s a question I am saving for a conversation with her in eternity.

But even in this Easter season, bright with the brilliance of the Risen One, replete with the glory of springtime, the reality of racism is undeniable in our county, in our country. Despite the applause that Ketanji Brown Jackson received last week as our newest Supreme Court Justice, racism not only endures but is stronger than ever. We see it in the violent deaths of Black men and women, in the ways voting rights are being undermined in many states, and in racial profiling.

“Just nine years ago, most adults in Monroe County did not believe racial and ethnic discrimination was a problem. In 2021, nearly three in four believe it is.” (D&C, April 10, 2022)

Pope Francis calls racism “a virus that quickly mutates, goes into hiding and lurks in waiting. Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our so-called social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.” (Fratelli Tutti)

In their Pastoral Letter Against Racism “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call To Love” (2018), the US Bishops, basing their message on the call of the Risen Christ, living among us, to enlarge our hearts, “love compels us to resist racism courageously, reach out to victims of this evil, to assist in the conversion of those still holding on to racism and to begin to change policies and structures that allow racism to persist.”

An immense agenda, and one in which we may well think that we have no significant contribution to make. But we do. We can become more conscious of possible changes in our society, speak as equals to people of other races when we meet them in the public, take part in life-giving conversations with others about racism.

Most of all, we can hold each other close, no matter ones color or race. Hold each other close, for we all are the beloved of God.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Promise of Christ to Be with Us Always

Dear Friends,

These are bleak times. Think Ukraine, economic instability, COVID-19 and its variations, mental stress for everyone, including children and youth. All of these and more absorb and distract us from being attentive to God as Passiontide ends and Easter dawns.

Given all of this, is there any cause for Easter Joy? Absolutely! But let’s remember that Easter joy is not a giddy, silly celebration of peeps, chocolate bunnies, jellybeans, and Easter egg hunts.

Easter is a deep-down realization that Jesus lives.

In John’s account of the empty tomb, Simon Peter found “the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head rolled up in a separate place” (John 6 - 7). Simon Peter knew what the separated, folded headcloth meant. In Jewish households, if the master of the house was called away from dinner, he left a signal for his servants. A crumpled napkin meant “Don’t wait for me. I won’t be back to the table.” A folded napkin meant “I will return.” 

Jesus’ folded headcloth meant he would be back. He was back, and He is here today, accompanying us through bleak times. He doesn’t spare us from the miseries that beset us. That would deny our freedom to be human, but He walks with us.

We know this because we feel the pull of Easter, we feel Easter hope stirring in us.

At the U.S. southern border, in Ukraine, and everywhere people suffer, religious groups, humanitarian groups, individuals of conviction, all bolster everyone they can. Each helpmate and peace-seeker are an Easter sign that the Risen Christ is among us.

In our families, among our friends burdened by illness or distress are generous women and men who help. They, too, are Easter signs that the Risen Christ is among us.

Pope Francis reminds us of what we already know: “Easter is a time when God turns the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life” (March 9, 2022). Ultimately, death has no victory, no sting.

Today we can believe this, because it is true:

The premise of bleak times has given way to

the promise of Christ to be with us always.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Generosity of Holy Week

Dear Friends,

This week, from Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion to the Easter Vigil next Saturday evening, is, without doubt, a week of profound generosity or lack of it.

Above all, Jesus, Word of God made flesh, gives Himself for the life of the world – its salvation and fulfillment. Jesus gives His all. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Satan hovers in the background once more and Satan doesn’t stand a chance. He is gone and Jesus places himself, without distraction, into the arms of His Father. “Yes!” he echoes the words of his mother, Mary. “Yes. I will.” Jesus gives himself over to these next hours with exceptional generosity. He withholds nothing.

All along the way to the cross, He meets people who are challenged to be generous as He is generous. Simon of Cyrene felt the flat of the soldier’s sword on his shoulder. Everyone under Roman rule knew that gesture meant that the person under the blade was to serve in some way. Simon did as he was told. But the demand on him grew into a generosity that made him act lovingly and wholeheartedly in carrying Jesus’ cross. Simon’s sons were later named as remarkable members of the early Church (Mark 15.21). They could only get that love, that fire, through following their own father’s generosity. Dismas, the good thief hanging to one side of Jesus, is generous with his words to Jesus. They are like balm for his wounds. Generosity does this. It makes tenderness blossom where there has been no awareness or caring. The other thief has not a generous bone in his body. His words are harsh. I wonder if anyone had ever been generous to him.

After his denial of Jesus three times, Peter wept. He did what he did not ever believe he would do. Yet, Jesus was generous to Peter in return. Never rejected by Jesus, Peter’s holiness was watered by his tears, generously flowing to wash him clean. It could also have been so with Judas. Whatever motivated Judas to betray Jesus, it could have been overcome. Judas needed to be generous in accepting Jesus’ forgiveness in the aftermath of his betrayal, but he couldn’t.

Mary, Jesus’ mother, stood beneath the cross. She may well have wondered if she had anything left to give. But her Son found something both surprising and hope-filled. With the generosity of a God-Son, Jesus gave Mary and John to each other to love and support in the years ahead. Now Jesus had given almost all away. He had only a few words left and he flung them out into the universe. “It is finished,” Jesus cried out (John 19.30). He shared his victory in that moment with all of us.

After Jesus’ death, Joseph of Arimathea stepped out of the shadows. He had been a secret believer in Jesus, but he had judged that too much was at stake for him to speak up sooner. Now he had the courage to be generous with his presence before the Romans, generous with his own tomb. He claimed the body of Jesus and took it for burial (Luke 23.50-53). The women bought costly spices and oils to prepare Jesus’ body for entombment. From what possible sources had they found money to spend so generously so that Jesus might be ready to enter the beyond?

For Jesus, it is finished. For us, not yet. What will we be and do this Holy Week? Will we be generous with our time to be with Jesus in prayer? Will we carry the cross of others? Wipe their faces? Say tender words to them? Weep with them? Wonder with them?

~Sister Joan Sobala