The Time is Now

Fr. Terry Kristofak, C.P.

This week, I have been reading Eckhart Tolle’s STILLNESS SPEAKS--few books have so captured my attention. He writes about the importance of the present moment. This moment must get our best energy for it is all that we have to deal with. The past is just that and our future is yet to be. Now is the time and it deserves our best energy. In my own life I have a great sense of tradition and I do not spend much time in thinking about the future. I am very visual in my learning but today and its events and energies have great interest for me.

In the Advent Season, I experience the same call to live in the now. This is Advent 2007. The themes of the season offer such great life. Sometimes they are just what the doctor orders. Often in our culture, however, it is difficult to get away or even get a few moments of peace and quiet. This is a felt need by most of us and worthy of our attention. Time with our family or with a friend who listens is a most cherished gift. The spirit of this season is often about shopping malls and getting everything done. Often the opposite of what we really want. We long for a night at home with nothing to do. We look forward to our vacations when we can focus on what really gives us joy and peace. May this season of Advent be one of peace and joy and quiet time. It’s all good for the body and soul. The time is now.

God Believes in You

by Bill Walsh

A friend recently told me about a company that produces short videos exploring the Christian faith. I work with teenagers preparing to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation, so I’m always looking for interesting ways to get students to talk. The first video I watched was impressive. It was narrated by a Christian minister named Rob Bell. His message was that discipleship is for everyone and that God believes in each one of us.

He began by explaining the Jewish understanding of discipleship during the time of Jesus. To be chosen as a rabbi’s disciple was a rare and very challenging honor. It would begin with early childhood study. At around six years of age, boys would go to school to learn about the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew testament. By about ten years of age, most of the boys would have dropped out and would have begun working for their fathers, but the most accomplished of the boys would have been able to memorize all of the Torah. The best of that group would be invited to continue pursuing their studies. By age 15 or 16 the most accomplished of the boys at this level would have been able to memorize all of the Hebrew Testament, from Genesis to Malachi, which is 39 books. Again, many of the boys would have dropped out along the way, but the very best of the best would seek out a rabbi and apply to become his disciples.

Only after a very arduous examination of the candidates would the rabbi select just a few who he considered to be the absolute best to be his disciples. It was such an honor to be a disciple that you didn’t just want to know what your rabbi knew, you wanted to be just like your rabbi, you wanted to do everything he did. There was a saying in that time, a blessing for disciples, “May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi,” because after long journeys following closely behind their rabbi, the disciples would be covered in the dust he kicked up.

And then Jesus came along. He didn’t wait for candidates to come to him. He sought out his followers, and he chose men who were working as fishermen, so they had already dropped out of the pursuit to become a rabbi’s disciple. They weren’t the best of the best. They weren’t even the best. They were the rejects who didn’t make the cut. But by saying, “Come follow me,” Jesus was telling them that they could do what he was doing, that they could be like him. And by choosing these common followers Jesus was saying that his movement was for everyone; men, women, rich, poor, influential, and powerless.

There’s the story of the disciples out on a boat at sea and Jesus came towards them walking on the water. I never understood what would compel Peter to get out of the boat and walk towards Jesus, but in the context of Ron Bell’s story of discipleship, Peter’s actions make a little more sense. If Jesus kept encouraging his disciples that they could be like him and live like him, then Peter would want to do what Jesus was doing, and walk out to him on the water. But then Peter started to sink and called for Jesus to save him. As Jesus grabbed Peter he said, “You of little of faith, why did you doubt?” I always thought that Peter was doubting Jesus. Ron Bell interprets the scene differently. It’s not that Peter doubted Jesus. After all, Jesus wasn’t sinking and Jesus saved Peter. Jesus chided Peter for doubting himself. Peter began to sink, not because he didn’t want to do what Jesus was doing, but because he didn’t believe he could do what Jesus was doing.

I think that the most challenging aspect of discipleship is believing that I can live like Jesus lived. I accept that God loves me unconditionally, despite my many faults. I believe that I don’t have to win God’s love, and I’m thankful, because I know my weaknesses. But to believe that I can live like Jesus lived, that’s both inspiring and scary. But this has been my prayer in recent weeks; to believe that I can live like Jesus lived. It must be true. After all Jesus left his movement in the hands his disciples and they transformed the world. And I’m part of that; we all are. To strengthen my acceptance of God’s faith in me, I have been using Rob Bell’s final words from his video entitled, “Dust” as a prayer. “May you believe in God. But may you come to see that God believes in you. May you have faith in Jesus. But may you come to see that Jesus has faith that you can be like him. A person of love and compassion and truth. A person of forgiveness, and peace, and grace, and joy, and hope. And may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi, Jesus.”

If you are interested in learning more about this video, and the many other selections offered at NOOMA, go to: http://www.nooma.com/, or call (877) 776-7755.

Three Virtues

Theresa Wiss

The year I applied to divinity school the application required a response to the following question: Why and how have you come to consider a theological education at this juncture in your life? I wrote that I had known since childhood that my vocation in the world was to express my passion for God. I explained that at thirty-five years old, I found myself unencumbered by marriage, mortgage or any other long-term commitment. I finally possessed the courage and the freedom to formally pursue a deeper understanding of God.

Quite a few years have passed since I wrote that response. I now have a husband, a mortgage and a young daughter to care for. So much has changed in my life – from where I live to what I do for a living. Yet, my longing for greater insights into the mystery of God remains.

In our Christian life, sometimes we can be slow learners. We don’t always catch on to where and how God is working in our lives. I recognize that I have not always responded to God’s presence right away or even in the right way. I am constantly striving to live out the qualities that will help me be responsive to God’s presence. From the long list of virtuous qualities I struggle to embrace, three stand out: Trust, honesty and forgiveness.

Trust

When I rely on my capabilities to discern what is valuable, I am led astray by my vain imaginings. Once I shift my trust away from my personal capabilities and look to God for strength, it becomes difficult to trust my petty strength again. I depend on God to guide me in sorting out the valuable from the valueless in my life.

Father, I have been entrusted with Your Gifts. I trust Your Guidance will show me where and when to share Your Gifts. May I forever place my trust in You as the One who provides all that I ever need. Amen.

Honesty

Once I have placed my trust in God I can afford to be honest. Trust in God removes any fear I might experience around living out the truth of who I am. When I see myself as a child of God, I acknowledge my true identity and the value of speaking honestly of it. “Honesty” means more than just speaking the truth. Honesty is consistency. What I say should not contradict what I think or what I do.

Creator, Your Love created me and made me forever a part of You. Be my eyes and ears so that I may experience peace and harmony in thought, word, and action. My goal is to follow in the way that leads to You. May all that I say and all that I do reflect my goal. Amen.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness allows me to transcend my grievances and experience peace with others and myself. Forgiveness affirms my trust in the goodness of God and in the goodness of God’s creation. We are all interdependent beings – dependent on each other for our moral growth and maturity. I am bound to injure another and even myself along the way. Forgiveness lets me look to the benefits of reconciliation. I hold peace and harmony as a more natural state of my being than conflict and separation.

Father, forgiveness is the means by which my mind and heart return to You at last. May I look to everyone as my brothers and sisters in creation. Allow me to accept others as they truly are – made in the image of God. Amen.

Trust, honesty and forgiveness. Three of the many virtues I could name to help me respond appropriately to God’s presence. What virtues or qualities are you striving toward? What behaviors and dispositions give you the wisdom to discern what God wants for you?

Theresa Wiss is Holy Family’s Director of Youth Ministry. She comes to the retreat center with a background in parish youth ministry. Theresa Wiss also has wide experience in facilitating groups and has been a workshop presenter at Holy Family for several years. She holds an M.Div from Yale Divinity School and presently resides in Simsbury, CT with her husband and daughter.

Remembering Whose We Are

by Sr. Mary Ann Strain, C.P

A few weeks ago I was asked by our Provincial, Sister Theresina Scully, C.P. to speak at the funeral of our sisters, Maureen Nixon, C.P. She was 85 years old when she died, a Passionist for over 60 years.

The scripture readings we chose for the funeral helped us think about Sister Maureen’s life journey. The first reading from the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians was an exhortation to remain faithful, to remember that our true home is with God. Paul says in this letter, “we are fashioned for heaven and we groan while we are here.” The gospel repeated that theme. Jesus promises that if we follow him we will live forever in his love.

On the day Sister Maureen professed her vows as a Passionist Sister she wanted to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, to become like him, to know him in his life of service, to share in his Passion and death and finally to rise with him alive and whole in the dwelling place of heaven.

And she did.

Maureen served for many years as a teacher, in Rhode Island at the Assumption, at St. Francis in Wakefield, at St. Bernard’s in Wickford, and here in Connecticut at Corpus Christi in Wethersfield. Later in life, she served as a pastoral minister in parishes in both Rhode Island and Connecticut. Maureen was devoted to her family. She spent 12 years caring for her mother in Ireland.

Maureen shared in the Passion of Jesus in a profoundly literal way through her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Jesus suffered crucifixion and so in a way did Maureen. Crucifixion was one of the cruelest and most humiliating forms of punishment in the ancient world. Crucifixion was intended by the Romans to be utterly dehumanizing. It stripped away a person’s dignity, their identity in life and finally their humanity.

There is a book called Forgetting Whose We Are, Alzheimer’s and the Love of God by David Keck. He is the son of Leander Keck, one of the greatest scripture scholars in the United States, former Dean of Humanities and now Professor of Biblical Theology Emeritus at Yale. His wife contracted Alzheimer’s at 57. David Keck, a Methodist minister wrote this book drawing on the experiences of his family.

Keck writes that Alzheimer’s is a theological disease because it strikes at some of the assumptions we have about what makes us human; intentionality, self-consciousness and self-direction and takes all of them away. Alzheimer’s snatches away the core of a person’s being.

When someone has Alzheimer’s not only do they forget who they are, but people around them begin to forget too.

But, Keck writes that when someone in a devoted family is ill and cannot remember who they are or to whom they belong, the family remembers. Those who really love the person never forget. Even though others forget that the sick person is a human being, the family continues to lavish care and kindness on the person.

Our community and Maureen’s family didn’t forget her. They visited her and spent time with her even when Maureen became so ill that her only response was to turn her head toward a hand that gently caressed her face.

I wonder if most of the people who passed by the cross of Jesus on Good Friday remembered him, remembered that he was the one they had given a rapturous welcome into the city of Jerusalem less than a week before. Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Beloved Disciple, and the holy women who stood by the foot of the cross remembered. Their presence, their standing with Jesus not only comforted him, but also prevented the Romans from completely dehumanizing him. Their presence said, “Here is a person who is valuable and precious and loved.

Our presence, our standing with brothers and sisters who are unjustly treated, abused and forgotten not only provides help and services, but stands against those who would oppress and dehumanize the most vulnerable among us. We state by our presence that no human life is without value. This prophetic witness is at the heart of our Passionist vocation.

In the Bible, God is the one who ultimately never forgets. God remembers when everyone else forgets who he or she is. God doesn’t forget. In the Book of Isaiah, at a moment of desolation when the chosen people feel alone and forsaken after their exile, they cry out that God has abandoned them. God responds through the prophet in these words. “Can a mother forget her child? Can a woman forget the fruit of her womb? Even if these forget, I will never forget you. See, upon the palms of my hands I have written your name.”

God kept Jesus safe on the cross. God kept Maureen safe.

Today Maureen is at home with the God who never forgets.

Not So Ordinary Time

by Fr. John Baptist Pesce, C.P.

The cycle of the church’s calendar which we are now in goes under the title of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time, though, is no ordinary time. Never mind the name. It is a season of grace. While, for the most part, major feasts of the church are not celebrated at this time, it may be a salutary time to reflect upon what grace means for us and what it does to us.

Grace, the gift of God, sets up a relationship. Grace puts us in the current of the stream of life that has its source in God. Grace gives a share in the life of God. Grace makes us that “new creation” Paul wrote about in his second letter to the Corinthians. The Eastern Church has better maintained the understanding of grace as “divinization” or a sharing in the divine life. Too many of us fail to appreciate the marvel of grace when we limit it to salvation from sin, a sort of passport to heaven. To be graced is to be rendered godlike. Again, Eastern Church uses the term rendered “deification.”

During the Christmas season, the prayers of the liturgy speak of the “marvelous exchange” that has taken place in that the Word has taken our flesh and become a human being and in exchange we have become partakers of the divine. What Jesus is by nature, we become by grace.

What a sublime dignity is ours! When we try to speak about this, we can only babble like babies. It may seem like an exaggeration but the Church says so in one of her official prayers that the Father sees and loves in us who have been graced what he sees and loves in Christ. A transformation has taken place. An initial conformity to God’s Son has been traced on our spirit by the Holy Spirit who becomes the guest of our soul as we become the daughters and sons of God, the sisters and brothers of Jesus and of one another, not in name but in reality. This is all undeserved and unexpected on our part. Truly it can be said, “This is glorious and marvelous in our eyes!”

This comes about through our baptism which gives us our identity as Christians, as the disciples of Jesus. Every baptism marks the birth of another Christ. Washed in the baptismal waters, we are raised up and inserted into the body of the risen Lord to become members of the body of Christ, the Church. The Son of God takes flesh and blood all over again to come forth from the baptismal font another incarnation of himself, a daughter of God, a son of God. From our baptism each of us can make our own the words of St Paul, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me. I still live a human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” (Gal 2:20). In the baptized, Christ lives his life, now theirs, but more radically his. When they grow up in him, he waxes strong in them.

The graciousness of God orders us to God as our final destiny. The expression commonly used is “to see God face to face.” But one of the marvels of grace is that God accompanies us all the way, that God is “with” us and, even more, “in” us and “in” is the superlative degree of “with”! In virtue of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, God is our constant companion, our unchanging friend. Paul writes about our life being hidden with God in Christ and Christ in you, the hope of glory. The apostle may have offended the purists among the Greeks in that he had to introduce neologisms to suggest our union with Christ. These are often rendered in translation by the preposition “with.” Thus, we live with Christ, we suffer with him, are raised up with him, glorified with him.

Without giving us anything near the final word on this subject, St John Eudes who lived in the seventeenth century gave wonderful expression to what it means to be so graced. “It can truly be said that the true Christian who is a member of Jesus Christ and is united to him by grace, continues and accomplishes by every action he performs in the spirit of Jesus Christ, the actions which the same Jesus Christ performed during the time of his life on earth. Christian life is but the continuation and the completion of the life of Jesus in each of us.”

We are privileged. We are gifted. But privilege brings responsibility. Gift suggests task.
The grace that has been given to us is not to be clutched to ourselves to experience a warm inside feeling as though it were a private possession. Rather, God has, in a sense, made himself dependent upon us for the accomplishment of his design for the reign of God. God requires us to bring to fruition his eternal plan for the redemption of the world.

We have to de-privatize our understanding of Christian discipleship. Our understanding of the life of Christ in us may have to undergo a massive alteration. One of our brothers in Christ made the claim, “The whole world is my parish.” This is all of a piece with Jesus understood as a “man for others.” Each of us is to be for the other. Especially the poor, the underprivileged, the marginalized and shunted members of our society. We remember, as well, that there are none so poor as those who are not loved. Those who may be regarded or, even tragically, may regard themselves, as not-a-people with no awareness of their dignity, with no claim upon humanity so bereft are they of the basic necessities of life – all of these, and they are all around us, are as much the people of God as we are! God loves them as much as he loves us. But God summons, invites, charges, empowers us with the mission of communicating the divine gifts of love, caring, compassion to them. And since Jesus came to save human beings, creatures of body and soul, with material needs as well as emotional and spiritual needs, we have the responsibility to exert ourselves in these areas. Gandhi has been quoted as saying, “God comes to the hungry in the form of bread.” To serve such a hungry person is to minister to that individual more than food for the body. And, making the required modifications, the same can be said for other material, bodily, concrete, tangible needs which we satisfy in the lives of our brothers and sisters in the human family, the family of God.

These are but a smidgen of the implications of what Jesus meant when the scripture tells us that before leaving us in his own historical dimension he said, “You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the earth.” You and I with our fellow believers are to be those witnesses wherever we reside by living out the grace that has been granted to us. Simone Weil, who had an appreciation of what it meant to be a Christian although she never was baptized, expresses well, making allowances for a certain rhetoric to make a point, how we who are baptized should live our graced lives in service. “A victim of misfortune is lying in the road, half-dead with hunger. God pities him but cannot send him bread. But I am here and luckily I am not God. I can give him a piece of bread. It is my one point of superiority over God.”

The mystery of a divinely willed indigence, indeed!

Surprised by Joy

by Brandon Nappi

Our society puts incredible pressure on us to be happy. Shelves at bookstores are spilling over with self-help books. In our culture, happiness is a billion dollar industry which peddles everything from wrinkle-free skin, to slim waist lines, to the perfect sex life. I don’t know about you, but this pressure to be happy is making me unhappy. Think of the messages that we invite into our homes by way of television: you’re fat, ugly, too old, too wrinkled, too stupid, too busy, too tired. Billions of dollars a year are spent to entice us to measure our happiness by externals.

Yet true Christian joy is like the current deep below the river where I bring my young daughters to play. Depending upon which point of the river we come to, we can see calm pools of peace, crashing whitewater, or places where the water almost seems to be running backwards as it encounters giant boulders and tree trunks. The surface of the river knows the great variety of activity, but deep beneath the surface, the water knows only one direction. Your sorrow, anger, frustration, and worry along with your happiness, gratitude, and elation are all wonderful parts of what it means to be human. If those emotions make up the chaotic surface of the river of our humanity, then joy is the current deep beneath. So you can have joy even in your sorrow. You can have joy deep beneath your anger.

In an age when we are pressured to be happy from the outside, we easily forget that joy comes from deep within. I remember my very first year at the retreat center, a retreatant came into my office. “How are you?” I asked. “AWEFUL!” she declared. She had been homeless, beaten by her husband, and abandoned by her family. She struggled with addiction and depression while living alone in chronic pain. She said that her life had not been easy. Still, she declared, “Joy is not the absence of suffering. Joy is the presence of God.” This constant availability of God is the true foundation of Christian joy.

So how do you become a joyful person? Being joyful is not about becoming something you’re not; it’s not about getting something you don’t have. Being joyful is about accessing something you already have. You become joyful by opening your eyes and discovering that God’s presence is with you in every place and every moment.

The great surprise of Christian joy is that it is always available. It’s nothing of consequence. It’s provoked by the thing you walk past everyday. You step on it as you walk out your front door. It lies just through your kitchen window. What is remarkable about joy is precisely that it is not remarkable. It’s a joy that God has generously scattered all over the earth like sprinkles on my daughters’ cupcakes. We’ve missed this in our churches. For too long, we’ve made the Christian life a rather gloomy and somber existence in which holiness has been defined by how aloof, disconnected, and how other-worldly we become. Joyless Christianity is not Christianity. Let’s remember the wise words from Julian of Norwich, the 15th mystic who said, “The greatest honor that you can give Almighty God, greater than all your penances and sacrifices and mortifications, is to live joyfully because of the knowledge of his love.”