Enthusiasm for God and the Things of God

Dear Friends,

In the Gospel, Jesus draws our attention to a crooked manager who has a redeeming quality – namely his enthusiasm for his own life. In a moment of crisis, this man acts shrewdly, wisely, and prudently to save himself. Jesus applauds his initiative and ingenuity. The crooked manager in Jesus’ story wants not just to survive, but to succeed, even if it means to move to a new place.

Through this story, Jesus tells His disciples and us to have the same enthusiasm for the reign of God that the crooked manager has for his own skin.

The call to be enthusiastic about God makes sense. The very word “enthusiasm” means being inspired by God.

It takes a lifetime to learn and internalize what it means to be a committed follower of Christ – to be public in living our faith and personal on our love for the stranger.

In some people’s lives, the name of this action on behalf of others is called heroism. Some heroes give some. Some give all. Certainly, unremarkable people turned into heroes on 9/11/2001 as strangers helped other strangers without regard for their own safety. Often in the years since then, we have heard stories of rescue and courage in the case of one, two a handful, a hundred people in danger.

Where did this heroism come from? From somewhere deep within them – some hidden place not even known to their self-consciousness.

That hidden place was their life drawn from God, their life with God. Our God – yours and mine – is the God of everyone. Some resist or ignore God, others know God in their daily lives. As the renowned psychologist Karl Jung put it, “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”

News commentators in the aftermath of 9/11 had said that another possible target of the terrorists that day was the UN building. For some reason, that made me think of Dag Hammersjold, the UN Secretary General, whose plane crashed in Africa in 1961, when he was on a peace mission.

Then and often since, I have gone back to Hammersjold’s posthumous book called Markings, jottings written from the depths of his soul, for Dag Hammersjold wrestled with God all his life.

His words are apt for all heroes and for our own struggles with God:

  “I don’t know who – or what – put the question.

I don’t know when it was put.

I don’t even remember answering.

But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something –

and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and

my life in self-surrender had a goal.

I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to

a triumph which is a catastrophe and a catastrophe which is a triumph…

After that, the word ‘courage’ lost its meaning,

Since nothing could be taken from me.” 

This is the deep truth that Dag Hammersjold found in his being. This is the inspiration of heroes. This is the awareness that lives in me: God’s presence, bidden or unbidden, in me. 

~Sister Joan Sobala

We Do What We Can

Dear Friends,

Twenty-one years ago, the date 9/11 was seared into American memory as a day of violent attack, many deaths, courage and compassion. Stories about that day have continued to emerge – stories of not knowing what to do next, stories of love and friendship, stories that have rooted them in lands beyond the United States.

Michael Grady was a fairly junior Coast Guard officer in the area who took charge of a marine rescue operation as soon as he realized what had happened. Grady sent out the call: “Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of lower Manhattan Island report to Governors Island.” Five-hundred-thousand people were stranded there. The only ways they could get off the island were by walking or by water. One-hundred-and-fifty tugboats, ferries, pleasure boats, yachts responded making the trip over and over again to bring people to safety on Staten Island, New Jersey and elsewhere. Later in the day, the same boats brought supplies to use at the World Trade Center – everything from bottled water to acetylene torches. People did what they could.

The play Come From Away tells the story of over 6,500 people on 38 jumbo jets that were diverted from their various destinations on 9/11 to Gander, Newfoundland, a town of about 10,000 people. Passengers were hosted by the townspeople who gave what they had and did what they could.

Kathleen Murphy was a native of Kinsale, Ireland, who worked for 40 years as a nurse at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York. Firefighters, fallen on 9/11 were brought there, and she knew Father Michael Judge, chaplain of the NYC Firefighters. Kathleen came home to Kinsale to die of cancer, but the first responders lost on 9/11 were still on her mind. On some property she had on a hill above Kinsale Sound, Kathleen Murphy created a memorial to the 343 firefighters who perished in the World Trace Center Towers. Three-hundred-and-forty-three trees of various kinds were planted. Each bearing the name of a firefighter. Later, visitors who came, including many family members of the deceased, brought photos and mementos, medals won for valor, quotes and recollections. Kathleen Murphy and the people of Kinsale did what they could.

        In remembering life’s tragedies, in going forward with life, we, too, must do what we can.

        When disaster strikes or enemies attack, we do what we can.

        When the call comes to drop what we’re doing to respond, we do what we can.

        When we think we can’t, we do what we can.

        When it seems that all we can do is pray, we do what we can.

        God is ever present, so with God we do what we can.

        It’s never too late to do what we can.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

The Dignity of Work

Dear Friends,

All of our lives we work. From our infancy to our death, we learn to take in and become all we possibly can about being human. This is major work for which we receive no money, but rather, we receive the human qualities that will inform our lives. For the work of our becoming, we praise You, O God.

On this Sunday of Labor Day weekend, let’s pause to think about the challenge to honor all work, beyond our becoming, and not to resist work as something not worthy of us. For the openness to work you inspire in us, we praise You, O God.

Let’s look upon work with the eyes of God. God is the first among workers, as we read in Genesis. God worked for seven days, and then rested. We are God like when we work, when we produce, create, imagine, enlarge and rest from our work. For making our work an imitation of yours, we praise You, O God.

All work is not of equal value, but all work is valuable. Not because of what we earn, although that is necessary, but all work is valuable because it is how we build, nourish, educate, make music and fun with one another. It’s how we sustain the human community. For the work of our minds, hearts and hands, we praise You, O God.

We have a habit of thinking some work is more important than other work. We tend to believe that, if I make more money, my work is more valuable. But consider the truth that the value of work is within us. As a dishwasher in a restaurant, I contribute to the health and safety of customers. As a beach lifeguard, I watch over the play of children, so that they don’t hurt others, deliberately or not. As a member of the military, my work is to serve the peace and not make war. How I think about the work I do contributes to my being more human. For our work which helps, serves, inspires, empowers other, we praise You, O God.

Some work is dangerous: military service, rescue missions, journeys into the unknown. Bravery is given to us when we need it. For our work which builds peace out of hostility and newness out of darkness. We praise You, O God.

The life work of some people is to organize the men and women who labor at essential jobs so they are not taken advantage of. For them, we praise you, O God.

In this world of brutal climate conditions, and brutal regimes which cause people to flee as refugees, there are women and men who answer the call to be first responders. For them, we praise You, O God.

Gracious, God, First Worker of the Universe and Lover of all You have created, as I study and learn from my life of work, help me to ask not, “Why does he/she have more than I do?” but rather to ask, “What can I be and do with what I have and am?” For the wonder of me, I praise You, O God.          

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Growing in Our Humility

Dear Friends,

Among the best insights into human life in our times is that self-esteem is essential to living fully. You and I need to know, accept and, yes, be glad about ourselves. False modesty and self-deprecation are unhealthy as well as untrue.

To recognize ourselves for who we are and what we are, to value ourselves, are all part of humility, a theme in today’s readings.

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was on the stand as a witness in a lawsuit. The dialogue went like this:

“What is your name?”
“Frank Lloyd Wright.”
“What is your occupation?”
“World’s greatest architect.”
“You’re not very humble, are you?”
“Sir, I am under oath.”

While self-confidence is a part of humility, self-promotion at someone else’s expense is not.

That’s the rub. That’s what the guest in Jesus’ story is doing – advancing himself at the expense of others.

Preoccupation with one’s status or position in relationship to others is not just a modern phenomenon. In Jesus’ day, the question of where to sit at a table was no idle matter. One’s honor, social significance and worth were at stake. But Jesus places no value on jockeying for position. Instead, He says to take a lower place. Let the master of the house be the one who invites his guest to a higher place if he so chooses.

How do we grow in humility? For one thing, we can make room in our lives for people who can teach us unexpected lessons. Missionaries who have gone off to foreign lands, fully expecting to bring great insight and value to the poor, often realize how much these people who welcomed them also taught them about life and God. But we don’t have to go off to a foreign land to gain insight from people of other nations. I remember a friend telling me about his own personal reluctance to engage a Pakistani cab driver in a long stop-and-go drive in New Your City. Reluctantly but truly, my friend learned much for his own life in that hour they were stuck together in traffic. Make room for people who can teach us unexpected lessons.

We grow in humility when we make room for new consciousness. It feels so secure to believe that we have the answers to life’s deepest questions sewn up. Or to believe that how we are and what we think is exactly right and we don’t have to change one iota. Humility means letting go of our absolutes about ourselves and our world.

Finally, we grow in humility when we make room for the child in us. As we grow up, we tend to leave behind in inquisitiveness of childhood, our need to belong, our sense of wonder. When we rediscover the child within, that child can lead us to see a new face of God and experience a new connectedness with all people, all creation.

Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, we are not under legal oath to name the truth. Like him, we stand before God, before one another and before ourselves and are asked to name the truth of our lives.

What do we need to make room for?

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Journey of Our Shoes

Dear Friends,

In late July Pope Francis spent a fruitful week in Canada on a “pilgrimage of forgiveness,” as he called it. Earlier in the year, a delegation of First Nation people, Metis and Inuit, came to Rome to deliver a personal invitation to Pope Francis. They brought with them a small pair of moccasins, a treasured relic from the times when their children were forcibly taken from them to go to government endorsed religious schools to become civilized and made “strangers to their own people.” “Bring the moccasins back when you come,” his visitors told Pope Francis. How could he not come? He had two missions – to utter on behalf of the whole church heartfelt words of apology and to bring back the moccasins.

That got me thinking about other times when shoes of various kinds figured into people’s spiritual journeys.

When Margaret Clitherow was about to be hanged in post-Reformation England for being faithful to Christ in the Roman Catholic Church, she made only one bequest: her shoes were to go to her daughter. “Walk in my shoes, daughter,” was the message.

One of the historic displays on Ellis Island is a steamer trunk overflowing with shoes: singles, pairs, worn out shoes, new shoes, children’s shoes, women’s fashion shoes, work shoes. One wonders: Were they left or taken away? Did their owners have other shoes? Where did the owners settle? Or were they sent back? Or died? The United States is a land of the shoeless and the shoe-d.

On the shore of the Danube at Budapest is a plaza with a variety of bronze statues. Touchingly, one is a pair of a child’s shoes. The plaque next to the shoes says the Nazis took prisoners from this place during their occupation. These shoes were found on the dock after one such raid.

Bridget O’Grady was a senior Irish-born woman who came to daily Mass at St. Mary’s Church in the 1980’s. We all had a hard time understanding her form of English, but we could all see that she wore tattered, sneakers, with rips here and there. Some parishioners wanted to know if they could get her new sneakers? Yes. A few days after the shopping expedition with Bridget, she arrived at church in her new sneakers…rips in all the same places as before. The dawn finally came. Bridget needed a podiatrist. That was (if I can put it this way) the next step.

The Scriptures have a dozen or so references to sandals, but only a few references to shoes, like this one in Ephesians 6.15: “Stand with your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.”

There’s a lot to think about in that brief line in Ephesians. Are we to be ready to welcome the Gospel of peace or deliver it elsewhere? When we put our shoes on, what are we ready to do? Where are we willing to go? In whose name? For what reason? Is there something of Margaret Clitherow in us? Do we stand firm in the shoes we are wearing? Do we go to help where people suffer at the hands of others?

Today, look at the shoes in your closet. Many? A few? More than you need? Look at your feet now and think, “What shoes do I really need?” After all, yours are the only shoes made to walk your journey. (Charles F. Glassman)  

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Assumption of Mary

Dear Friends,

Monday is the feast of the Assumption of Mary. If you Google images of the Assumption, what comes up are images of a beautiful Mary, most often by herself, being taken up gracefully into heaven.

What follows is a spiritual, meditative, imaginative look at what might have happened and what Mary’s Assumption might mean for us.

One day,
Mary, the Mother of God, died.
        Her friends and
        the disciples of Jesus
        had seen it coming.
        Her heart, which had suffered so much
        during the life of Jesus,
        was slowing down.
        Her energy no longer prevailed.
        Maybe her memory became fuzzy, and
        her hands were marked by arthritis.
        We don’t know.

What we know is this:
one day, Mary, the Mother of God,
did not get up to meet the day.
        Her friends and the disciples of Jesus
        prepared her tomb,
        her body for burial,
        applying precious spices
        and unguents that would enhance
        the fragrance of her body.
        They gathered around her still body,
        and looked upon her face one last time
        before covering it.
        They finished their ministrations.
        They prayed,
        and all withdrew.

But God the Father who chose her to be
Mother of the Word Incarnate, did not withdraw,
nor the Spirit
who had overshadowed Mary,
two other times in her life,
nor did her Son, the Word made flesh, withdraw.
He was there.
Jesus reached out His hands,
marked by the wounds of His Passion,
and scooped up
the fragrant body of
His fragile, aged mother in His arms.
Holding her close as she had held Him
so often in life,
        Jesus bore her
        into eternal life.

Mary, the Mother of God,
hadn’t even known
she was on her way.
Death was already a memory.
Now, she was there.
Now, Mary’s body seemed young and vigorous once more.
Now, she was transformed,
restored to her original beauty.
        “Yes. Let it be so, “
        she had said once.
        “Yes,” she repeated throughout her life.
        And now,
        beyond death,
        her life-song had not changed,
        “Yes. Let it be so.”

Those of us left behind,
Mary’s friends and
the disciples of Jesus,
are wordless in the face of this moment.

And when words are finally restored,
we dare to say:
        Mary, our Mother, our friend
        and disciple of Jesus,
        we honor all you became in life,
        without spending your energy on
        your own becoming.
        You became, through sheer belief, love
        and generosity,
        the Mother of Jesus, the Son of God, and
        our mother, our friend, our companion.

        All that was in you expanded/flowed/flowered into
        forever – an endless day.

It is irrepressible joy to us
that you, Mary, are whole and forever
with God.
We ask that
with you,
as we look ahead
to our own forever,
we may likewise say
on this side of eternity:
        “Yes. Let it be so.”

~Sister Joan Sobala

Moving Toward the Horizon

Dear Friends,

Abraham, we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews today, travelled to a horizon beyond which he could not see. “Abraham…went out, not knowing where he was to go.” (Heb.11.8) All he could do was to have faith and trust in the God who told him to go forth.

What began with Abraham reached its high point in Jesus, who taught his followers to be daring in faith. In today’s Gospel, the servants had a limited horizon. They thought they knew what was required of them.

To their surprise, the master in today’s Gospel story was so delighted to see his servants awaiting him in the night that he kicked off his sandals, put on an apron and served them a meal – frankly eccentric behavior from an employer and certainly not what the servant expected.

In this story, Jesus tells us that over the horizon of the servants’ waiting to serve was the friendship of God – not promotion, not praise, but friendship with God, which is unseen from the vantage point of the long night of waiting.

            So much of life which is beyond our horizon
                    Is the unexpected gift of God.

Every one of us gathered around the Word today has a horizon, the limit of our thinking, interest, experience, or outlook. Consider your own personal God-story about first jobs, college, successes and disappointments, and relationships that worked or didn’t work. In every moment and movement, God is at the horizon.

We move toward a horizon both personally and as communities.

The community we call Church, for example, is always present, always moving toward the horizon. Some of us remember how the Second Vatican Council opened for us new horizons…
    … a new sense of belonging
    … a valuing of each other’s gifts of the spirit
    … new ways of celebrating the sacraments
    … understandable liturgical language
    … the companionship of our ecumenical and interfaith sisters and brothers.

Not everyone ran toward this horizon, but many of us did.

Fifty-five years later, we find our American Church…
    … 22% of the US population (the same in 2022 as in 2014)
    … full of people and bishops some of whom treasure the mission and words of Pope Francis, while others cling to the teachings of Popes Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II
    … divided by the June overturn of Roe vs. Wade
    … led by fewer clergy and experiencing emptying pews.

What can we say about the church horizon before us?

There will always be a horizon of Christian identity.

As a church, we will always be striving, growing, becoming. It’s not over. Even in our weakened state, we can confidently say, not only is God our horizon, but God is also here to accompany us to our horizon. Will we find God here? There?

Sometimes, we get closer to the horizon of our Christian identity by our own choice.

This happens when we, as the servants in the Gospel who waited into the night, stay the course, probe the Scriptures and the Church’s living tradition, and find them life – giving, transformative. This happens when we shape ourselves and our communities as disciples of Jesus, the Holy One.

Yet, we know that the future is not solely of our own making.

The horizon holds unexpected and sometimes even unwanted developments. Think about being downsized at work. Think about the school you didn’t get into. These are not personal choices, yet some of the unexpected developments are serendipitous. So too with our Church: we meet new companions, shape new ministries, find new insights into faith, and deep value in the sacraments when we dare to go where we go where we do not want to go.

The poet Stephen Vincent Benet gives us these thoughts to spur us on our way toward the horizon:

God pity us indeed, for we are human

And do not always see

The vision when it come, the shining change,

Or if we see it, do not follow it.

Because it is too hard,

Too strange, too new,

Too unbelievable, too difficult,

Warring too much with common, easy ways…

Always, and always, life can be

lost without vision, but not lost by death.

Lost by not daring, willing, going beyond

Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude

To something more, something yet unseen.

Rather than stand still/mark time, let’s move together toward the horizon. God will accompany us and paradoxically, meet us there.

~Sister Joan Sobala