Maybe It's You

It is almost always the case that we live in uncertain times, but the truth of that statement seems more acute today than it has been in a long while. Our economy is in tatters. After years of reckless and unscrupulous business practices seemed to continue without consequence, we appear to be caught up in a perfect storm of economic events: rising debt, skittish lenders, failing businesses, and growing unemployment lines.

In this storm, it seems that everybody is reeling, looking for shelter. As we look into the face of the uncertainty which these times seem to hold, I am reminded of a passage in Matthew’s Gospel.

You cannot serve God and wealth. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? . . . strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.

In many ways, this scripture passage and the promise that it offers should give us great comfort. But there is something about it which seems almost illusory. And not surprisingly, while we certainly understand this promise, and we understand the importance of putting our faith in this promise, it appears to be one article of our faith that many have a hard time believing. Who really trusts in God so much that they put aside their worries?

In fact, the opposite seems true. For obvious reasons, concerns about money are almost invariably the source of our greatest stress. Though God has promised to care for us and even warned us about being consumed with wealth, we seem chronically unable to heed this warning and to accept this promise on its face. Why is that? I think that the answer is two-fold. First, I think we run a basic cost-benefit analysis and make our choice accordingly. If we put our faith in God to provide for all our needs and we end up being wrong, the consequences are pretty severe. We have no food on our plates, no clothes on our backs and no roof over our heads. So, with respect to our very tangible every day needs, we need the comfort of a tangible way to fulfill those needs. Something that we can trust and rely on coming every pay day.

The other reason that we have such a hard time accepting this promise is that it just seems too good to be true. And there are plenty of examples to back this up, examples of people who seem to have been abandoned. How many have lost their homes in the current financial crisis? How many were displaced by Ike and Katrina? So, I think, it becomes very easy not to place our faith in this promise, or to at least have a reliable back up plan.

So, are those who get up every day and go to work somehow demonstrating a lack of faith in this promise? I don't think so. God gives us many gifts and, I think, expects us to put them to good use. Well, what then do we make of his promise?
Let me offer this. What if we are misunderstanding the promise? Matthew's Gospel tells us, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” I don’t think that God promises to cut our steak when it is tough or to shovel the driveway when the snow is wet and heavy. He promises that when we strive for Him, we will have what we need. Well how is that going to happen?

Well, maybe it’s you. Maybe, when we strive for the Kingdom, we get each others’ backs, we live in communities where people know each other and make soup for each other when we are sick, pick each other up when we are down, stand up for each other when someone needs some help.

God has already told us that he has no hands and feet here on this earth. Your hands are His, your eyes and ears and mouth, His. When we strive for the kingdom, we strive for each other. When we look to find Christ in this world that we might serve Him, we find Him in each other. We see Him naked and we clothe Him, we seem him with no roof and we provide one, we see Him hungry and we prepare a meal to share. We see Him on a rooftop in the Lower Ninth Ward. We see Him looking for work on Bourbon Street.

Maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s you.

So we have this glorious promise. He will care for us. Like He tends to the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, He will watch over us and provide us with what we need. Too good to be true? A pipe dream? Maybe not. Maybe, if we all choose to hear this call to live for others, if we choose to give ourselves away, if we choose to give our hands and feet and eyes and mouth to Christ, maybe then will we realize that God’s promise to us is real, it just requires us to believe in it and to play our part.

He won’t do it alone. Who will help Him? Who is going to do it?

Maybe it’s you.

Chris Haddad

On Possibility

Many have heard the phrase that “nothing will be impossible with God”. These revered words spoken in Luke’s gospel by the angel Gabriel to Mary are particularly present to us at Christmas time when we reflect on the birth of Jesus. Gabriel tells Mary that her cousin Elizabeth who was thought to be past her child-bearing years is already in her sixth month. Gabriel offers this information to Mary as a kind of “proof” of God’s power and God’s plan for her. Gabriel assures Mary that there is nothing God cannot do. Many will nod in agreement that since it is written in scripture that all things are possible with God then, it must be so.

Yet, for many of us our sense of possibility has diminished in our lives. We feel our lives have been defined, our fate sealed. We rarely consider how powerful our Creator is. Our belief in the boundless creativity of our Creator has been challenged by our disappointments and set-backs. Somewhere along the way we decided how powerful God is for us. Over time, we set limits on how much God can give us or help us and we in turn decide how much we can give and how much we can help ourselves and others.

This has certainly been true in my life. I am so sure I know what I am capable of – what I can accomplish and what is beyond my grasp. Indeed, if all I had to depend on was my own petty strength my assessments on my abilities would probably be accurate. I am reminded how powerful our Creator is as I reflect on the miraculous birth of Jesus. I think about the words spoken to Mary by the angel Gabriel “nothing will be impossible with God.” I notice that Gabriel says with God not for God meaning that when we act with our Creator all things will be possible for us.

The significance of my life has not been settled. My life is not a “done deal” rather it’s more like a work in progress. Everyday I have the opportunity to care for and cherish all that I hold dear. Everyday I have the opportunity to be the person God created me to be. With God, the possibilities are infinite.
The miraculous birth of Jesus - God becoming flesh - is my “proof” that God’s creativity and love is limitless and beyond my understanding. When I pause to reflect on this truth, the possibility that God can mend my strained relationships, comfort me in times of sorrow and inspire me to help others seems, well, entirely possible!

Theresa Wiss,
Director of Youth Ministry

What I Really Believe

I watch what I do to see what I really believe.

Belief and faith are not just words. It's one thing for me to say I'm a Christian, but I have to embody what it means; I have to live it. So, writing this essay and knowing I'll share it in a public way becomes an occasion for me to look deeply at what I really believe by how I act.

"Love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus said, and as a beginner nun I tried earnestly to love my neighbor — the children I taught, their parents, my fellow teachers, my fellow nuns. But for a long time, the circle of my loving care was small and, for the most part, included only white, middle-class people like me. But one day I woke up to Jesus' deeper challenge to love the outcast, the criminal, the underdog. So I packed my stuff and moved into a noisy, violent housing project in an African-American neighborhood in New Orleans.

I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it: the sound of gunshots in the night, mothers calling out for their children. I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a nun with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer. Working in that community in New Orleans soon led me to Louisiana's death row.

So, I keep watching what I do to see what I actually believe.

Jesus' biggest challenge to us is to love our enemies. On death row, I encountered the enemy — those considered so irredeemable by our society that even our Supreme Court has made it legal to kill them. For 20 years now, I've been visiting people on death row, and I have accompanied six human beings to their deaths. As each has been killed, I have told them to look at me. I want them to see a loving face when they die. I want my face to carry the love that tells them that they and every one of us are worth more than our most terrible acts.

But I knew being with the perpetrators wasn't enough. I also had to reach out to victims' families. I visited the families who wanted to see me, and I founded a victims’ support group in New Orleans. It was a big stretch for me, loving both perpetrators and victims' families, and most of the time I fail because so often a victim's families interpret my care for perpetrators as choosing sides — the wrong side. I understand that, but I don't stop reaching out.

I've learned from victims' families just how alone many of them feel. The murder of their loved one is so horrible, their pain so great, that most people stay away. But they need people to visit, to listen, to care. It doesn't take anyone special, just someone who cares.

Writing this essay reminds me, as an ordinary person, that it's important to take stock, to see where I am. The only way I know what I really believe is by keeping watch over what I do.

Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J

Saved by Hope

In the encyclical “Saved by Hope” which Pope Benedict issued close to a year ago, he asks some disturbing questions. “How could the idea have developed that Jesus’ message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly?” It’s as though the Pope were saying, “Where in the world did that idea come from?” And he goes on in the same vein as though in exasperation at such a distortion of what the message of Jesus is: “How did we arrive at this interpretation of the salvation of the soul as a flight from responsibility for the whole and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?”

In his address to the bishops of the United States in April of this year at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict stated the same problem in the affirmative. He said, “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”

This misunderstanding, this privatizing of the faith, is something all of us are vulnerable to. However, in the United States with its culture of individualism, with the way we lionize the “self-made” person with all that term suggests by way of going it alone and an unregulated autonomy make us particularly susceptible to this distortion of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

The Pope was not expressing a pet peeve or some kind of idiosyncratic beef. Ingredient to the gospel preached and lived by Jesus is the understanding that we are all interrelated and interconnected and called to serve even as Jesus came not to be served but to serve and to give.. Jesus has not been called The Man for Others because he isolated himself from his contemporaries or was indifferent to the human condition. To trace this reality even farther back, at the very beginnings of God’s dealing with humanity; God was not pleased with Cain’s response to the question, “Where is your brother?” “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain should have known better and, certainly by now, so should we.

As the followers of Jesus, we cannot hold ourselves aloof from the condition of our brothers and sisters in the family of God, nor is it permitted us to be disinterested and detached from what is happening to Earth, our home. The imperative from our baptism is to get ourselves involved.

First of all by prayer, yes. The prayer for enlightenment as to where we can best serve the human family, where we can best be those channels of the values of the reign of God. Prayer, too, for our own transformation of heart that we may be unselfseeking and involve ourselves in a self-emptying way that the Spirit flowing through us will empower those we serve.

But, then, to really get ourselves engaged, to be willing to leave our own comfort zone, to get our hands dirty, to share with others whatever we have to share, whether materially, emotionally, spiritually as the case and the demand may be. To do this with a certain spirit of abandon, not even looking for results, with the faith conviction that, if we serve in this fashion, the Spirit of God flowing through us will produce its own fruit at the proper time.

This calls not for a knee-jerk response but for reflection with other like-minded citizens of this planet, preferring always cooperation over competition. There is no telling how much good can be done if we would not concern ourselves with who will get the credit! To study or engage with others who have studied societal or ecological problems to discover what structures in our society have to be changed or done away with if we are to have the just society we all are hungry and thirsty for is a part of this involvement and living out our commitment as incorporated into the Christ who lives in the world today.

One does not have to be a philanthropist in order to enrich others (and it may be observed, be enriched ourselves in the process), we have only to draw upon the inheritance that is ours as alive with the life of the risen Lord in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, in whom dwells the fullness of divinity which we share by the life of grace! We have been given a wild tiger that we have tamed into a cuddly pussy cat. This season of Advent-Christmas season when we celebrate the birth of him who through his union with one of us has taken up his abode in all of us may be an excellent time to arouse this reality from its torpor! And truly acknowledge the presence of him who has never left us by his presence in our fellowman and woman!

Fr. John Baptist Pesce, C.P.

Namaste

Namaste is an Indian term that is used by Hindus. In recent years it has gained popularity in American New Age movements. You can often hear the expression used at the beginning of a yoga class. There are many definitions of the term all centering on the same concept. Aadil Palkhivala suggests the following: “The gesture Namaste represents the belief that there is a Divine spark within each of us that is located in the heart chakra. The gesture is an acknowledgment of the soul in one by the soul in another. "Nama" means bow, "as" means I, and "te" means you. Therefore, Namaste literally means "bow me you" or "I bow to you." Other definitions include:

The God in me recognizes and honors the God in you.

I honor the place in you
in which the entire Universe dwells.

I honor the place in you
which is of Love, of Truth, of Light and of Peace.

When you are in that place in you,
and I am in that place in me,
we are one.

I do not believe that the literal translation is important, rather the idea that we are connected to each other and we are all connected and one with God, though I have had occasion to be with groups of people who will argue about the true meaning of the term Namaste. I have thought to myself that if you have to argue about the literal translation you are truly missing the meaning and purpose of the term and gesture. I am always more struck by the similarities between religious and/or spiritual traditions then the differences.

Recently I had the occasion to travel to New York City for business. I wanted to make the trip as productive as possible so I scheduled a meeting in the morning with clients and two meetings in the afternoon with different clients. My first clients then decided they wanted a second meeting with others in their company, immediately following the first meeting. Needless to say I knew that I was in store for a “Day from Hell”. Especially since my clients were all in different parts of the city. My schedule left me no time for eating and barely enough time to go to the bathroom.

My day did not start out well. The train was late, it was crowded so I had to stand the entire train ride and the air conditioner was not working. By the time I arrived at Grand Central Station I was already late, tired, sweaty, and aggravated; and my day was just beginning. The day did not improve as it wore on. Almost everything that was discussed at these meetings could have been discussed with a conference call. I thought to my self what a colossal waste of my time. I began to think, I am a very busy person how dare these people waste my time like this. Finally around 5:00 the last meting ended. I was hot, tired, hungry and frustrated. I couldn’t wait to get back home. As I left the building I noticed the people all rushing to get here or there. It felt like there must have been millions of people, the streets and sidewalks were crowded. The people were pushing and shoving trying to grab a cab or get to were ever they needed to be. I thought that it would take to long to try and hail a cab and fight rush hour traffic to get back to Grand Central Station. So I decided to take the subway. The subway platform was packed with people; you could not turn without bumping into someone. I hoped that they were all taking a different train. But when the number 4 pulled up and the doors opened the crush of people trying to get on began. I managed to squeeze into the car. I felt my personal space being invaded from every direction. Yet more people tried to squeeze into the remaining space. I wanted to scream out please just wait for the next train. As the train pulled out of the station I though I would have just enough time to grab a candy bar and hop on my train back to Connecticut. I also decided I was getting a seat on the train home. I could not stand another two hours in a hot crowded train. Woman, children, disabled and elderly be dammed I would push and shove my way through everyone to get a seat.

When the subway stopped at Grand Central Station I began moving in a focused determined pattern to get to my train. I did not notice anyone else I was totally focused on accomplishing my goal of grabbing a snack and getting a seat on the train. As I moved forward I suddenly bumped into a woman who was carrying several packages. She dropped all her packages. In that brief instant several thoughts crossed my mind. I first became angry, how dare this woman get in my way can’t she see I am on a mission. Then I thought she is fine she can pick up her own packages I need to hurry to catch my train. Finally I bent down to help her pick up her parcels and I apologized to her for bumping into her. She looked at me smiled and replied NAMASTE. She then turned and slowly walked away.

I was somewhat stunned. I stood there for a few moments watching her walk away. I had known the term. I had even used it on occasion. But it was more perfunctory like saying God blesses you when someone sneezes or hi how are you when you meet a person, a phrase without real meaning. This was different; when she smiled and said Namaste I could feel her inner peace touching me. I could see the God joy and happiness in her. I remembered my favorite passage from the Bible: John chapter 14 vs. 20 “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you’. I realized that when she replied Namaste she was saying that we are both children of God and that God is in each of us therefore we are one.

My entire perspective changed. All of a sudden rushing to catch the train did not seem near as important. I realized that I had been surrounded by thousands upon thousands of people and I was so focused on myself that I never noticed a single one of them. I found an empty table and sat down for a few minutes. I began noticing people going by. But I did not notice if they were tall or short, black or white, I didn’t see their warts or if they had a big nose. I thought each person is a son or daughter of God. I began to see that place in them where God dwells. I began to see their inner beauty and peace. I would smile at people as the rushed past. Some would keep rushing but occasionally a person would slow down and smile back. As I reflected for a moment on each person and the God within them I felt more and more at peace with myself. I was no longer hungry or tired. After a bit a man came over and asked if he could sit in the other chair at my table. I told him that I had reserved it for him, to which he chuckled and said thanks. We chit chatted for a few minutes. Talking about what we were doing in New York what kind of work we did and that sort of stuff. He then got up excused himself and said he had to catch his train home. But then he stopped turned around looked at me and said; “You must have had a really good day today” I was intrigued and asked why he thought that. He replied that he had noticed me sitting there and I looked very at peace. He continued that he had a very tough day and felt he needed a moment to calm himself before he continued his journey home. When he sat down next to me he could feel my inner peace and it helped to calm him. I got up looked at him smiled and Namaste and turned and walked toward my train.

Patrick Carolan

Moving Mysteries

“Nothing fills the body more quickly or completely with divine power and joy…than spontaneously expressing gratitude in dance.”
-Andrew Harvey

In July, I was blessed and honored to attend the 50th anniversary festival, “Moving Mysteries”, of the Sacred Dance Guild. Over 200 women, and a few brave men, gathered to share their love of dance as part of their faith.

Although I went without knowing anyone, I left with a wealth of friendships and experiences of dance as prayer in forms as vast and different as we are. From the woman who danced her grief for her friend and mentor whom she recently lost to cancer, to the legends and pioneers of liturgical dance who graciously shared their knowledge, experience and history with us. Just to be in their presence felt holy.

Each day our morning began in a large grassy field where we moved our bodies to awaken and greet one another. Looking into the eyes of each person was a joyful and peaceful way to begin our day. In our world sometimes greetings are lost in the swift tide of the moment. It meant something to be still with another, look into their eyes and acknowledge their presence in the universe.

One teacher, the beautiful and graceful Stella Matsuda, led us through set movement to the music “Come Drink Deep.” The movement was graceful and interpretive of the words. We struggled in areas to get the motions “right” until we were released from this burden when Stella invited us to connect with the words and the movement as it held meaning for us, not worrying about getting it “right”. Having worked on that for a bit, she split us into small groups to allow us more space to move in. I watched as my fellow classmates became prayers themselves. I witnessed women lost in the movement, some expressing joy, some sadness, others redemption. Tears escaped my eyes as I was held captive by them. It was intensely moving to see young girls as well as women doing "the same” movement yet with their emotions and experiences added, they each told their own story. I felt incredibly honored to share in their prayer.

When we add movement to our own prayer, we find wells deep within us that have been longing to escape. When we find that in ourselves and express it with our bodies, others join in our journey… they become part of our prayer.

Dance has been a part our human story for as long as we have existed. So much of our own life’s story is told without words. Responding to rhythms in our environment, in our interactions with others, in our internal self…is instinct. My hope is that if you are ever in the presence of dance in worship, though it may seem foreign, and even a bit uncomfortable at first, you will be open to experiencing it. Sometimes it takes something old and ancient, to teach us something new and timeless.

I believe in the power of all forms of prayer--spoken, danced, sung, played on a musical instrument, painted on a canvas. It is truly a prayer to use the gifts God has given us to reflect them back to our brothers and sisters, sharing our essence with the universe. The Spirit is always moving through us...

Karen Rossignol

The Year of St. Paul

When I told a friend that I had named my son after St. Paul, she had an arch reaction. "Why would you name your son after that misogynist?" she said. I was prepared for that. Whether invoking Paul's imprecation that "wives must be submissive to their husbands," (Ephesians 5: 22-23) or that Jews "killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets," (Thess 2: 15), Paul of Tarsus has been the fall guy for every iniquity from misogyny to anti-Semitism.

And yet this year, the 2,000th anniversary of his birth, the Vatican is celebrating "the year of St. Paul," by encouraging Catholics to re-examine Paul, the most influential shaper of Christianity outside of Jesus. How far this will go in reshaping the conventional wisdom about Paul will depend on how far the church is willing to go to bring new, more nuanced scholarship about this exhilarating [Dash] and exasperating [Dash] man into the pews.

From Andre Gide, to Thomas Jefferson, to George Bernard Shaw, the devout and the doubtful have taken aim at Paul, dismissing him as the wet blanket of the New Testament, a rigid, chauvinistic scold who took all the Good out of the Good News and replaced in with a dour, censorious bleakness. Jefferson called Paul the "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus." Nietzsche said that the evangelist had "a genius for hatred."

Paul, the first and most vigorous of theologians, has been the most maligned, misunderstood and misrepresented saint in Christian history. And yet I chose to name my son after him because I believe Paul best articulates the electrifying possibilities of humankind and the ecstatic contradictions that make it so difficult to achieve them. I love the very qualities that have vexed so many: Paul's volatility, his gusto, his self-lacerating disappointment in himself and his fiery invectives against those who he believes diminish Jesus' message. If Paul is vicious in his condemnation of the wicked, he can at least be credited for lumping himself in that group.

As historian Henry Bamford Parkes wrote, "Emotional and excitable, alternating between states of ecstasy and depression, utterly convinced of his guidance by the Spirit and given to boasting of his own achievements, utterly convinced of his guidance by the Spirit...Paul revealed his whole personality with an astonishing candor and sincerity. His letters were the earliest example of that full acceptance of naked humanity not as it ought to be, but as it was...."

Part of the problem for Paul is that his letters are a response to first-century crisis about which we know next to nothing. As Gary Wills writes in "What Paul Meant," "We hear his raised voice without knowing what the other side was shouting." The second problem, as Georgetown University Professor Anthony Tambasco told me, is that "some of the text that Paul gets blamed for, he probably didn't write."

Of the 13 letters attributed by Paul, only seven are now accepted as certainly his. Letters like those to Timothy and Titus, for instance, were clearly not written by Paul. They were written at a time when the church had become more systematized [Dash] and patriarchal. Hence: "Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man, she is to keep silent" (Timothy 2:11-13) was almost certainly not written by Paul."Paul had people who he called fellow apostles and they were women," said Tambasco, author of "In The Days of Paul."

The problem is while Paul writes memorably that "in Christ there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28), he nevertheless believes, as Harold W. Attridge, Dean of Yale Divinity School, told me, "There's also the natural order of things that needs to be respected." And that was a first-century social order."There were some people in Paul's school and tradition who took that impulse in Paul rather strictly," Attridge said. "So the passage that talks about women not to take leadership roles or to teach in the church are probably not by Paul."

Paul's alleged anti-Semitism is a bit more subtle. As a bridge between Judaism and Christianity, Paul wrestles deeply with the necessity to keep all of Jewish ritual, including circumcision, or whether the risen Jesus is "the saving reality" and that the law, as Tambasco says "is God's second best gift." It's fine to keep it, Paul says, but don't impose it on non-Jews. Later Christians, of course, used this and other scriptural readings to bolster a raging anti-Semitism the vestiges of which are tenacious.

But the Paul I love best is the Paul who wrestles with his own failings and finds healing in God's grace. "I do not understand my own actions," he laments in Romans. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate....For I do not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom: 7-15-16; 18-20). This is a man who admits he is clumsy at devotion "we do not know how to pray as we out, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."

Is Paul harsh? Sure he is. But he is also gloriously poetic, recognizing that despite humanity's failings, it is trussed irrevocably to God. "For I am convinced," he writes in Roman, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Tracey O'Shaughnessy