Summertime, and the Learning is Easy...

Dear Friends,

Here are some online sites that help me connect with other believers. If you visit these sites, you will find news, scripture reflections, interviews, and prayer resources. Enjoy!

God’s Word, Many Voices (godswordmanyvoices.org)

• weekly Sunday scripture homilies
• gifted and educated lay Catholic writers
• home grown in Rochester diocese

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (usccb.org)

• scripture for weekdays and feasts, with daily e-mail and podcast
• news and official statements by our bishops
• resource for questions about liturgy and Church teaching

Pope Leo and the Vatican (vatican.va)

• pictures and daily news bulletins
• texts of Pope’s homilies and statements
• written and visual resources for church history, practice, doctrine

America Magazine Podcasts (americamagazine.org)
There are several, the latest one being The spiritual life with Fr. James Martin, SJ

• Interviews on life with God
• Guests include Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, OP; Mary Karr; Stephen Colbert; Whoopie Goldberg; Pete Buttigieg

Daily TV Mass (dailytvmass.com)

• well produced 30-minute Canadian broadcast
• excellent homilies and some music
• our SSJ Motherhouse community has been praying with this community five times a week since COVID

Hoping for your summer refreshment,

Susan Schantz SSJ

Peter, Paul, and the Path of Compassion

Dear Friends,

Each time June 29 falls on Sunday, the liturgical calendar sets aside the readings of Ordinary Time and invites us to celebrate two giants of Christianity, Peter and Paul.

Peter and Paul were both Jews by birth. Peter was a fisherman by trade, Paul, a tentmaker. Peter fed people and lived under the sky. Paul created shelters for people to take refuge from the elements and the creatures that inhabited it. 

Jesus came upon Peter at his boat and called Peter right then and there. Peter followed Jesus immediately. Paul did not walk the roads of the Galilee and Judea with Jesus and Peter. Paul only came to know Jesus after the resurrection, but nonetheless as intimately.

Paul and Peter received new names from Jesus. Simon became Peter, the Rock. Saul became Paul, the missionary. With them, as with us, new names meant a new call, a new future.

Paul, the fiery, fearless preacher, and Peter, the acknowledged leader of the early Church, were not without faults. Paul hunted down the early Christians and sent them to prison. Some of those who stoned Stephen left their cloaks at Saul’s feet. Peter ran away as Jesus was arrested. A short time later, Peter denied that he knew Jesus. Peter and Paul were leaders who knew what it meant to be human, fragile.

It’s good to keep this fragility in mind in our times since the sexual abuse scandal broke in 2002. Then, the weaknesses of our current Church leaders came to the fore. The pain and humiliation touched us all.

I suspect that, even today, the anger, bitterness, and cynicism about the church lingers in many of us. It makes us lose our taste for Church and all it offers. Some of us leave.

But let’s stay the course. Let’s suffer with the abused. Compassion means precisely that, “to suffer with,” and let’s hold them in prayer, that they might experience a healing of memories and restored hope, dignity and joy in their lives. That is compassion to which we are called.

But we are also called to be with the perpetrators, the abusers, and the bishops as well. This is hard to hear. This is the real test of our compassion. Can we stand with another when it doesn’t feel good or look good?

From the example of Jesus, we find the courage to attempt this way of being. Jesus was crucified between two thieves. There wasn’t one cross, but three. To bystanders, Jesus was painted with the same brush as the other two: tainted and guilty. Jesus carried everything without protesting his innocence, though he was.

Can we help carry one of the darker sides of our Church’s history without protesting its unfairness or distancing ourselves from it?

This is the challenge of living compassionately in this community of God’s people.

May Peter and Paul, who knew fully what it meant to be human, be with us on the way.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Body and Blood

Dear Friends,

As we move toward the end of June, the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, also known as Corpus Christi. The stark words "body and blood" evoke images of our June 2025 news reports. No one reading this blog post is ignorant of the news of broken bodies and spilled blood.

Ukraine. Gaza. Israel. Sudan.

Minnesota. Texas. New York. California.

These deaths spring from violence and conflict. They are born of division and prejudice, racism and intolerance. What place do these harsh images have in the celebration of Eucharist? Our sacred meal commemorates the death and rising of Jesus and celebrates our baptismal unity with him in this mystery. In this feast day mass, a portion of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians recalls Jesus’ words and action,

"This is my body that is for you….

This cup is the new covenant in my blood."

The early Christians knew these words by heart, as do we. The words articulate our faith and remind us that we are one in Christ. However, when we read the verses ahead of this passage, we recognize a divided community. Paul points out separate food and seating for rich and poor, slave and free. He writes of neglect of some members’ needs. Was not the first Jesus community free of such separation? Were they not one in mind and heart in their prayer and their ministry?

Our own Eucharistic celebrations contain the same contrasts, the same light and shadow, the same love and indifference. When we hear Jesus’ words repeated at Mass, let us also hold space for the words of Paul. He and other preachers and prophets through the ages call us to share Jesus’ body and blood that we might attend to the suffering of his beloved community.

In hope,
Susan Schantz SSJ

Gazing at God: A Trinity Sunday Reflection

Dear Friends,

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only day in the liturgical calendar when we, as a faith community, gaze at our God in wonder. God: community of being. God, who has been misunderstood over the centuries, as uncaring, immune from our suffering, too hidden for us to know, who evokes fear and watches us from afar as an impartial observer. God who keeps a list of our sins. This God does not exist, says the American theologian, Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1991).

No. This is not the God we celebrate today, appreciate and hold close. Today’s feast leads us to honor and treasure “a personal God who is as close to us as a heartbeat, as near as the breath we breathe.” (LaCugna)

“God,” my friend, Father Gary Tyman, says “is a verb. God happens. When people who are adversaries come together in understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation, that is God happening. When someone suffering from alcohol or drug addiction decides to enter treatment, that is God happening.” I think further. When our relationships become more than just the two of us, God happens. Whenever profound things occur in human life, God happens.

The spiritual writer, Macrina Wiederckehr, speaks directly to this God who wraps us in a daily, unending embrace:

You are extravagant with your love.
You drown us with devotion and understanding.
You leave me breathless, thoughtless.
Master, Teacher, Friend, Lover, Parent,
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer…
I try to encompass all Your names, but they slip from my grasp.
When I hold nothing, I hold You.
When I hold You, I hold everything.                          Seven Sacred Pauses, 2008

This way of celebrating the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity makes it a feast of affection for our God who embraces us and welcomes us into the family of God. Once we were not. But once we came into being, we belonged—to our own families and to the very family of God.

Our life stories are interwoven with the very life of God. We are continually being drawn into the life of God. Today, together, we welcome this call.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

All in One Place Together

Dear Friends, 

We celebrate Pentecost this Sunday. The reading from Luke tells us that Jesus’ followers were all in one place together. Jesus had told them Go and make disciples of all nations. Now they gather and wonder just how to fulfill this mission. Now they wonder how safe they are in Jerusalem. They try to encourage each other. Now they draw on the memories of Easter and worry about what’s ahead.

The Spirit comes to them. Hopes are rekindled. The believers leave the house and mingle and pray and preach in the crowd of Jewish pilgrims. The Jesus people are becoming a gift to the world, starting from that Jerusalem home. The Spirit sends them out. 

Luke tells us that the disciples’ words could be heard by all, whatever the native language. Jesus’ words would be preached in every language. Jesus’ healing and mercy would unfold in many cultures and in all creation.  

This Pentecost I am feeling the challenge of being a member of a world church. The world overwhelms me with news of conflicts and scientific developments and diverse cultures and belief systems. There are stories of good and of evil. There are many preachers and leaders and heroes and saints. 

So, what is my own prayer this Pentecost? I pray to learn others’ languages of need or faith or love. May I hear each day the ones who call me by name. May I steadily pray and act on behalf of the poor who call my name. And may I wonder with other disciples how to respond to the voices of many nations.

In the Spirit,

Susan Schantz SSJ

Being an Active Listener Like Jesus

Dear Friends,  

The term “active listening” would not have appeared in the language of Jesus’ time, but he certainly did just that. If Jesus had not been an active listener, there would have been no miracles, no deepening of faith and community. The understory of the Gospel is that Jesus looked at the people who came his way and loved them into new life. He listened to how their lives unfolded, and he took up their healing. On this Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost, as we have just entered into the summer season, let’s pray that we will follow Jesus’ lead in this sensitive way of being with people this summer. 

But what are some of the qualities of the active listener? 

The true and active listener stops moving, stops reading and apparently listening while, in fact, their eyes are following something else. The active listener wants to know more about the person being engaged: his/her stories of change, growth, humor and sadness, tragedy and moments of rescue. Only small portions of a person’s story can be revealed in a brief conversation, but it may be enough to garner a sense of the person. There are gray areas, ambiguities in human experience. With an active listener, these may well come into focus.

I find that chance conversations sometimes loosen people’s memories or desires to talk about something. It is a blessing for both speaker and listener. People are wary of personal storytelling. Maybe, in times past, they shared a piece of themselves, only to be shouted at, disrespected, judged, rendered joyless. 

The active listener puts aside his/her own need to tell and draws out the threads of the other person’s story and abides in that story, however briefly. 

John ends his Gospel with these words: “There are many other things that Jesus did, but if there were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” (John 21.25) 

I hope we can believe that many of these things that Jesus did involved listening to people.  

How Jesus was with people is how we, as his followers, are called to be with people this summer.

~ Sister Joan Sobala

Ascension Missioning

From Christ Episcopal Church Glen Ridge New Jersey

Dear Friends,

What does the ascension of Jesus mean to us? This feast will be celebrated in my diocese on Thursday May 29. It commemorates Jesus’ leaving the disciples after commissioning them to continue the loving ministry and witness they had developed among them.

Reflect on the disciples’ feelings about Jesus’ leaving them. They’ve been consoled by his words and touch in the days since Easter. The recovery of presence and purpose during the weeks after Easter is threatened by the cessation of Jesus’ visits to the upper room and the lake shore. When these visits cease, the disciples are left behind, yearning for the spirit to take up ministry, to journey and preach, to tend the poor among them, to work out their relationship with Jewish and Gentile believers.

Do we recognize ourselves in this disorganization, in this grief, in this longing for direction? Where in our lives as believers are we confused, worried, or feeling abandoned? What turning points or transitions shake our faith in these days of 2025? What hopes have been abandoned? Are there any hopes being gradually rekindled? Where are we called to journey in the months ahead?

In this time after Easter and before Pentecost take some time with the disciples as they share sadness and hope, grief and faith. Take time to kindle hope as we wait for the fire of the Spirit. Here is a prayer for these days.

On the Death of the Beloved

by John O’Donohue

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or night or pain can reach you

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

Peace,
Susan Schantz SSJ