Dear friends,
25 years
ago June 4, one lone man stood down the tanks that had rolled into Tieneman Square.
This man could have lost his life because of his unwillingness to move. Many
men did lose their lives on June 6, 1944. D-Day. It is written that, after he
gave the signal to commence the operation, General Eisenhower turned away and
wept. Volumes have been written about
this bloody, courageous day when evil was confronted – a day that was judged to
be the turning point of history. Many words have been used to describe the
remarkable gifts of those marines, airmen, sailors and soldiers. Today, I
choose one word. Generous. They were generous.
The
generous sharing of who we are and what we have is no simple matter. It is a
complex thing to know how much to share, how, when and why share life’s
treasures at all. Our own generosity affects and sometimes changes drastically
the lives of others, including our loved ones.
Take the
lone man in Tieneman Square.
We don’t remember what happened to him. We do know what happened to a
significant number of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy. They stayed, tucked away under
white crosses, forever to be a sign to visitors of their remarkable generosity
that others might live.
Watching
the sundrenched ceremonies from Normandy
last Friday, I wondered what these D-Day
heroes thought as they went off to confront tanks or howitzers. Did they wonder
whether what they shared would be wasted, misused to build religious or
political empires rather than the lives of people?
Similar
questions tug at our lives when we creatively try to hold seriously the
relationship between achievement and responsibility, between pleasure and
loyalty, between having and sharing. For those who try to hear the word of God
and keep it, Jesus gives examples of generosity – his own as well as the
generosity of others, like the poor
woman who put in the temple coffers all she possibly could, without knowing how her gift would be used. Her
attitude mirrored his.
For
followers of the Risen Lord, generosity is a way of life. Some of us are called
to give up our very lives for others. Many more of us are called to live our
lives so that others may live graciously. Sometimes, generosity calls us “to
live in the world, to sanctify the world, to not be afraid of living in the
world by our presence in it.” (Pope Francis)
In the face
of life, in the face of death, I invite us all to reconsider and re-appropriate
the generosity of Jesus and His followers of all time as a way of life.
~Joan Sobala, SSJ
