How much do I want God? (Fr. James Martin)

  During our pilgrimage to the Holy Land last year, my friend George and I ended up in the desert.  And it was hot… Brutally hot.  Bakingly hot.  Unbelievably hot.

  At one point, George and I trudged through a desert ravine, in order to reach the Monastery of St. George.  It was so hot and dry that I thought one or both of us would pass out.  And the line from today’s psalm came to mind:  O God, you are my God whom I seek; for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts, like the earth, parched and lifeless without water. Actually, the whole line didn’t come to mind:  I was too hot to think!  Just the part about my soul desiring God as much as the dry land.

  How much do I want God?  I remember thinking.

  How much do I want God?  As much as I did when I was thirsting in the desert and would have given anything for a long cold drink of grape juice, or a mouthful of Cherry Slurpee?  As much as that deer seemed to long for water in that painting, his head bent down, completely intent on lapping up a cool drink?  I wonder.  Sometimes I end up not praying as much as I want to, or even, to use a loaded word, should.

  Why is that?  I have a work ethic that gets me to my desk every day at 9 a.m. without fail.  What’s my prayer ethic?  How much do I want God? 

--Fr. James Martin, Facebook, June 2, 2012

Image source:  https://sojo.net/articles/learning-walk-desert

Self-sacrificing love (Bishop Robert Barron)

  [Here are] Jesus’ conditions for discipleship:  If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

   How do we overcome pain?  How do we attain joy?  Not from a Stoic resignation, nor from a Buddhist negation of the self, nor from a Platonic contemplation of eternal forms, but rather from the sacrifice of the self in love.  Jesus is going to Jerusalem in order to give himself away, to sacrifice himself self in love for the other – and in this, he will become a source of life to others.

   Ronald Knox talked about the sign of the cross this way:  the first two gestures form the letter I and the next two cross it out.  That’s what the cross of Jesus meant and means. The path of discipleship is the path of self-sacrificing love – and that means the path of suffering.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, March 7, 2019

Image source:  https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/restore-and-reactivate-sign-of-the-cross/

In loving the cross (St. John Vianney)

  My children, it is in loving the cross that we find true peace, not running from it.

--St. John Vianney

Image source:  https://mudpreacher.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/standing-at-the-cross.jpg

Taking up your cross means befriending your wounds (Henri Nouwen)

  Your pain is deep, and it won’t just go away. It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences.

  Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.  Yes, you have to incorporate your pain into your self and let it bear fruit in your heart and the hearts of others.

  This is what Jesus means when he asks you to take up your cross. He encourages you to recognize and embrace your unique suffering and to trust that your way to salvation lies therein.  Taking up your cross means, first of all, befriending your wounds and letting them reveal to you your own truth.

  There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.  Once you have taken up that cross, you will be able to see clearly the crosses that others have to bear, and you will be able to reveal to them their own ways to joy, peace, and freedom.

--Henri Nouwen

Image source:  https://exploringyourmind.com/5-childhood-wounds-still-affecting/

Quotation source

Sunday Gospel, August 30. 2020: Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself...

Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself…

Does your faith involve the whole of your being?

  The prophet Jeremiah at times has issues with God’s methods:  You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped, he says.  God calls Jeremiah as a prophet but God doesn’t give Jeremiah his whole message immediately, and Jeremiah suffers rejection because of it.  And yet, when Jeremiah decides he’s done – I say to myself I will say his name no more – he realizes that his bond with the Lord nevertheless continues, a bond that is physical as well as spiritual:  God’s name becomes like fire burning in his heart, imprisoned in his bones.  Having opened himself to the love of God, Jeremiah continues to experience that love in his heart and flesh both, an experience that causes him to maintain his total commitment to the Lord in spite of himself.

  If we are, as Peter does in Matthew’s Gospel, to proclaim Jesus as the living God, then we need to mean it in the depth of our beings, and live accordingly, denying ourselves, abandoning any self-interest, recognizing that we belong utterly to God.  We live by the grace of God, we exist because of God alone, and so we must dedicate ourselves wholly to life in him, accepting the cross, surrendering all, physically and spiritually, to the Lord.  Paul reminds the Romans that they must offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicating the whole of themselves to the love they are called to.  God created us whole, spirit and flesh, with a a capacity to know him and to love him.  Self-focus, self-interest, the flesh:  none of this has any place in that relationship. If we were thus transformed by the renewal of our minds, we would constantly echo the refrain of Psalm 63: my soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.  It is an expression of our desire for God that consumes both spirit and flesh, and for a life in which no aspect of our lives is not engaged by God.  Faith has to involve the whole of who we are, the entirety of our being.  May we too long at every moment to experience the presence of the God like a fire burning in our hearts, that we might know the depths of his constant love.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

If Jesus be not your friend (Thomas à Kempis)

  You cannot live well without a friend, and if Jesus be not your friend above all else, you will be very sad and desolate.  Thus, you are acting foolishly if you trust or rejoice in any other.  Choose the opposition of the whole world rather than offend Jesus.  Of all those who are dear to you, let Him be your special love.  Let all things be loved for the sake of Jesus, but Jesus for His own sake.  Jesus Christ must be loved alone with a special love, for He alone, of all friends, is good and faithful. For Him and in Him you must love friends and foes alike, and pray to Him that all may know and love Him.

--Thomas à Kempis

Image source:  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Face of Jesus, http://www.windsorstar.com/gallery+rembrandt+face+jesus/5733422/story.html

Quotation source

The Chi-Rho Symbol (Philip Kosloski)

We often use the Greek letters chi (X) and rho (P), superimposed one on the other, as a symbol to reference Christianity.  In an article published by Aleteia, Philip Kosloski explains that, the monogram (also called a christogram) primarily represents Jesus Christ while also being a common representation of the crucifixion scene.

  According to the historian Eusebius, [the emperor] Constantine received a heavenly vision while he was praying:

  [W]hile he was thus praying… a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven… [W]hen the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.  At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.

  What’s interesting is how the miracle was not private, but witnessed by his entire army.  Constantine even swore an oath regarding the account of the event.  Even more so, at this time Constantine had not yet been instructed in the Christian faith and this event spurred him into deeper studies of Christianity.

  The vision was confirmed that same night when Jesus appeared to Constantine and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies. 

  Quickly after the vision Constantine sought to fulfill the command and instructed the army to create the following image based on the vision he received.

  A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it.  On the top of the whole was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones; and within this, the symbol of the Saviour’s name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters, the letter P [rho] being intersected by X [chi] in its centre:  and these letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period… The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies.

While some historians debate the authenticity of this tale, what is certain is after this event the Chi-Rho symbol spread like wildfire and was used in Christian art throughout the Roman Empire.  Even to this day it is used in churches around the world and continues to represent the victorious God who has defeated sin and death.

--Philip Kosloski,

The Miraculous Story of the Chi-Rho Symbol

Image source:  Chi-Rho Symbol, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy (425-450), https://twitter.com/byzantinelegacy/status/1079421654688776192

In order to place yourself in the Presence of God (St. Francis de Sales)

  And in order to place yourself in the Presence of God, I will suggest four chief considerations which you can use at first.

  First, a lively earnest realization that His Presence is universal; that is to say, that He is everywhere, and in all, and that there is no place, nothing in the world, devoid of His Most Holy Presence, so that, even as birds on the wing meet the air continually, we, let us go where we will, meet with that Presence always and everywhere.

  The second way of placing yourself in this Sacred Presence is to call to mind that God is not only present in the place where you are, but that He is very specially present in your heart and mind, which He kindles and inspires with His Holy Presence, abiding there as Heart of your heart, Spirit of your spirit.

  The third way is to dwell upon the thought of our Lord, Who in His Ascended Humanity looks down upon all men, but most particularly on all Christians, because they are His children; above all, on those who pray, over whose doings He keeps watch. Nor is this any mere imagination, it is very truth, and although we see Him not, He is looking down upon us.

  The fourth way is simply to exercise your ordinary imagination, picturing the Savior to yourself in His Sacred Humanity as if He were beside you just as we are wont to think of our friends, and fancy that we see or hear them at our side.

  Make use of one or other of these methods for placing yourself in the Presence of God before you begin to pray — do not try to use them all at once, but take one at a time, and that briefly and simply.

--St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Image source:  https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/intimacy-is-the-basic-issue/

Greater than our mind (Henri Nouwen)

  There is a great and subtle temptation to suggest to myself or others where God is working and where not, when he is present and when not, but nobody, no Christian, no priest, no monk, has any special knowledge about God. God cannot be limited by any human concept or prediction.  He is greater than our mind and perfectly free to reveal himself where and when he wants.

--Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

Image source:  https://saltandlighttv.org/blogfeed/getpost.php?id=54961

Like a parachute (Frank Zappa)

  Like a parachute, the mind only works when open.

--Frank Zappa

Image source:  https://www.incrediblesnaps.com/amazing-photographs-of-parachutes

I need a God... (Nadia Bolz-Weber)

   I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive.  Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

--Nadia Bolz-Weber, 

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith 

of a Sinner & Saint

Image source: lxrowe, Mysterious Landscape,  https://livingthelifeofspirit.com/2014/09/26/the-all-powerful-unknowable-2/

Sunday Gospel Reflection, August 23, 2020: Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!

Do we have access to God?

  Humankind has long known that God is ineffable, that is, that God is too great to be expressed or described in words.  Paul recognizes this in his Letter to the Romans:  How inscrutable are God’s judgments and how unsearchable his ways!  We can’t know the mind of the Lord; we can’t plumb the depths of God’s wisdom.  And so, like Paul, we must simply trust, confident in our God who has invested all in Creation – for from him and through him and for him are all things – with faith in God’s plan for us all. 

  And yet… ultimately, Jesus himself is our access to God. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  Like the key placed on Eliakim’s shoulder in Isaiah’s story of Shebna, a key that gives access to the king, Jesus opens our way to God through his death and resurrection.  Our role is to collaborate with him, remaining open to the Lord and to the Lord’s revelation as Peter was, even as we are fully aware of the inscrutability of the Lord.  The Christian community was founded on faith, on the disciples’ ability to hear God and to be open to God.  Indeed, faith is the key that opens us to God’s will rather than subjecting us to our own will.  Knowing, as Psalm 138 suggests, that the Lord hears the words of our mouth, we must be open to the intimacy that the Lord reveals, a community or ekklesia gathered together around our belief in Jesus, willing to embrace his inscrutability as we nonetheless seek a covenant relationship with our Lord, our God of kindness and truth.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Faith is like a bright ray of sunlight (St. Francis de Sales)

Faith is like a bright ray of sunlight. 

It allows us to see God in all things 

as well as all things in God. 

--St. Francis de Sales             

Image source:  https://www.tes.com/lessons/P7_tJgwzBkjVcw/living-organisms

Quotation source

A thousand unbreakable links (Mary Oliver)

  There exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and our dignity and our chances are one.  The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list.  The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together.  We are each other’s destiny.

--Mary Oliver, Upstream             

Image source:  https://hrexach.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/an-invisible-thread-we-are-all-connected/

What have you learned in unexpected places, and from unexpected people? (Fr. James Martin)

  In the Gospel of Matthew (15:21-28), Jesus speaks sharply to a Canaanite or Syrophoenician woman who asks him to heal her daughter.  The woman is not Jewish and, apparently as a result, Jesus seems to dismiss her with a callous comment:  It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.

  That seems a stinging rebuke, no matter what the context.  Dogs?  I imagine the woman, hurt, thinking, Did he just call me a dog?  Did he just compare my people to dogs?

  When the woman responds that even the dogs get scraps from the table, Jesus softens.  And he heals her daughter.

  You could say that the woman shows us the importance of faith and persistence. And you could also say that Jesus evoked a beautiful response from her.  His presence brings forth her faith.

  But you could also ask, Why did Jesus speak so sharply?  Was he testing the woman’s faith?  If so, it’s a harsh way of doing so, at odds with the compassionate Jesus many of us expect to meet in the Gospels.  Perhaps Jesus needed to learn something from the woman’s persistence:  his ministry extended to everyone, not just the Jewish.

  Or maybe he was just tired.  A few lines earlier, in Mark’s version of this same story, we read, He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.  Perhaps the curt remark indicates physical weariness.

  Whatever the case (and we’ll never know for sure) both possibilities – he is learning; he is tired – show Jesus’s humanity on full display here.

  Jesus was fully human and fully divine.  That meant he had both a human and divine consciousness.  That’s hard to grasp, a mystery if there ever was one.  But clearly he could learn.  After all, the Gospel of Luke says that as a boy Jesus progressed in wisdom.  In other words, in his human consciousness, he learned.

  At least that’s how it seems to me.  And here we see the fully human Jesus learning from an unexpected source.

  What have you learned in unexpected places, and from unexpected people?  How have they brought you closer to understanding who you are?

--Fr. James Martin, SJ

Evening Prayer:  The Syrophoenician Woman

Facebook, August 7, 2013

Image source:  Michael Angelo Immenraet, The Woman of Canaan (17^th c.), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_the_Syrophoenician_woman%27s_daughter#/media/File:Michael_Angelo_Immenraet_-_Jesus_and_the_Woman_of_Canaan.jpg

O woman, great is your faith! (Ben Witherington)

  Jesus’ willingness to talk with and help [the Canaanite woman of this week’s Gospel] is proof of His rejection of certain rabbinic teachings concerning discourse with women and the uncleanness of Gentiles.  […] In Mark, the woman’s trust is indicated by the fact that she believes Jesus when He says her daughter is healed, and leaves in full confidence.  Matthew makes explicit what is implicit in Mark, O woman, great is your faith.  Only one other in the Synoptic tradition is praised in these terms, again a non-Jew (Mt 8.5-13, Lk 7.1-10).  This woman serves as an example to the Evangelists’ audiences.  In Matthew her great faith contrasts with the disciples’ great annoyance with her persistent pleading. How surprised Matthew’s audience must have been to hear this Gentile woman’s faith called great, when a characteristic description of Jesus’ own disciples in that Gospel is that they have little faith.

--Ben Witherington III, Women in the Ministry of Jesus

Image source:  Jesus Exorcising the Canaanite Woman’s Daughter, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 15^th c.,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_the_Syrophoenician_woman%27s_daughter#/media/File:Folio_164r_-_The_Canaanite_Woman.jpg

Mary, the Ark of the Covenant (Pope Benedict XVI)

  Mary is the Ark of the Covenant because she welcomed Jesus within her; she welcomed within her the living Word, the whole content of God’s will, of God’s truth; she welcomed within her the One who is the new and eternal Covenant, which culminated in the offering of his Body and his Blood:  a body and blood received through Mary.  Therefore, Christian piety rightly turns to Our Lady in the litanies in her honour, invoking her as Foederis Arca, that is, the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of God’s presence, the Ark of the Covenant of love which God desired to establish with the whole of humanity, in Christ, once and for all.

--Pope Benedict XVI,
Homily, August 15, 2011

Image source:  https://catholicstrength.com/tag/mary-as-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant/

Quotation source

A holy longing for kinship (Fr. Greg Boyle SJ)

   How do we tame this status quo [of Us vs. Them] that lulls us into blindly accepting the things that divide us and keep us from our own holy longing for the mutuality of kinship—a sure and certain sense that we belong to each other?

--Fr. Greg Boyle, Barking to the Choir

Image source:  https://www.isemag.com/2018/12/longing-for-belonging/#prettyPhoto/0/

Sunday Gospel Reflection, August 16, 2020: For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable...

For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable…

Is God’s love open and available to all?

  The people of Israel originally believed that some people had no access to God.  But the prophet Isaiah causes them to rethink this idea:  my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples, the Lord tells them, including foreigners who join themselves to the Lord.  Isaiah wants the people of Israel to change how they think of themselves and of their relationship with God; they need to start to think of the people of God in broader terms.  God is joyful as we draw closer to him, Isaiah says; God’s salvation is available to all.  And so the psalmist can sing in Psalm 67, O God, let all the nations praise you!  God wants salvation to be known upon earth, among all nations.

  Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman of Tyre and Sidon in Matthew's Gospel may make us momentarily question this truth, however.  When the woman approaches Jesus for help because her daughter is tormented by a demon, Jesus insults her:  It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs, he says!  This seems unconscionably harsh, but the woman is not, after all, a Jew, and Jesus claims at first that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  But look at the end result of this apparent obstinacy on his part:  what he achieves is to get the woman to state her faith on a deeper level than many of the house of Israel have ever done, and with the utmost humility:  Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.  Ultimately, Jesus broadens his own disciples’ perspectives:  O woman, great is your faith!  Though he may challenge the more unlikely candidates, Jesus clearly offers salvation for all; he seeks hearts that are open to change, ready to receive and to respond to the love he has for them.  In his Letter to the Romans, Paul reminds the Gentiles that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable; life from the dead—salvation— is open to all, Jews and Gentiles alike, so long as our hearts are open to the opportunity of life in Christ.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

And the sea lay down (Mary Oliver)

Sweet Jesus, talking

   his melancholy madness,

      stood up in the boat

         and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.

   So everybody was saved

      that night.

         But you know how it is

when something

   different crosses

      the threshold – the uncles

         mutter together,

the women walk away,

   the young brother begins

      to sharpen his knife.

          Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes

   like the wind over the water –

      sometimes, for days,

         you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,

   after the multitude was fed,

      one or two of them felt

         the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight

   before exhaustion,

      that wants to swallow everything,

         gripped their bones and left them,

miserable and sleepy,

   as they are now, forgetting

      how the wind tore at the sails

         before he rose and talked to it –

tender and luminous and demanding

   as he always was –

      a thousand times more frightening

         than the killer storm.

--Mary Oliver, Maybe                     

Image source: Bro. Mickey McGrath, No Storm Can Shake My Inmost Calm, available for purchase at:  https://embracedbygod.org/product/storm-can-shake-inmost-calm/

Be still (Fr. Richard Rohr on Psalm 46)

Find a quiet place, gently close your eyes, 

and take a few deep breaths.

Pray Psalm 46 sentence by sentence, 

repeating each sentence (aloud or to yourself) 

several times until you are ready to go on, 

taking a deep breath after each repetition.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I AM.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

Amen.

--Fr. Richard Rohr, Prayer of Being

Image source:  Julius Sergius Klever, Christ Walking on Water (1880), https://www.bibleblender.com/wp-content/uploads/christ-walking-on-water-julius-sergius-klever-1880.png

Prayer source

The disciples' terror (Fr. James Martin)

  The disciples’ terror is unsurprising.  We’re so inured to these Gospel stories that they may seem bland; but place yourself on the narrow wooden seats next to the disciples:  Jesus’ power would render you speechless.  And the disciples are frightened by not simply the miraculous – or what might seem magical – power, but what it meant.  Controlling nature was the prerogative of God alone.  The creation story in Genesis recounts God’s dividing of the waters, separating the rains above and the seas below, and also exerting power over chaotic nature.  Devout Jews aboard might have remembered one of many psalms on that theme:  You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them.

--Fr. James Martin, SJ

Facebook, January 9, 2013

Image source:  Sadao Watanabe, Boat in the Storm (1981), https://www.artway.eu/userfiles/Watanabe,%20Boat%20in%20the%20Storm%201981%20Blue%202.JPG

The hour of the storm (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

   Learn to recognize this sign in your own life.  Learn to recognize and understand the hour of the storm, when you were perishing.  This is the time when God is incredibly close to you, not far away.  Right there, when everything else that keeps us safe is breaking and falling down, when one after another all the things our lives depend on are being taken away or destroyed, where we have to learn to give them up, all this is happening because God is coming near to us, because God wants to be our only support and certainty. God lets our lives be broken and fail in every direction, through fate and guilt, and through this very failure, God brings us back; we are thrown back upon God alone.  God wants to show us that when you let everything go, when you lose all your own security and have to give it up, that is when you are totally free to receive God and be kept totally safe in God.  So may we understand rightly the hours of affliction and temptation, the hours in our lives when we are on the high seas!  God is close to us then, not far away.  Our God is on the cross.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Overcoming Fear

Image source:  Peter Paul Rubens, Christ on the Sea of Gallilee (c. 1611-1614), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calming_the_storm#/media/File:Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Christ_on_the_Sea_of_Galilee.jpg

Quotation source