Love In Search of Sinners

What was it that prompted the unnamed woman to break social convention and approach Jesus,  doing something as intimate as washing his feet (with her tears and hair, no less), kissing them, and anointing them with expensive ointment? (cf. Luke 7:36-8:3) Had she heard him preaching? Was she one of those who had witnessed his wonders? Saint Luke, who makes those on the fringes of society a special focus of his gospel, doesn’t give the woman a name, although her identity is clear: “a woman in the city, who was a sinner.” For Simon “the Pharisee” and the other guests at that dinner so long ago, who the woman was mattered nothing compared to what she was—a sinner. Her act not only brought on the derision of the dinner guests—“Who is this woman who would dare touch this man?”—but also placed Jesus in the position of having to defend her and his own willingness to receive and forgive her: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.”

Detail from a window
in Chartres Cathedral

Jesus’ response to Simon’s indictment of the woman is important. First, it reminds us that the scope of God’s mercy transcends any sort of restrictions we might place upon our own willingness to forgive. Second, it places before us our tendency to become anxious, nervous, worrying people who are, as Henri Nouwen wrote, “caught in the questions of survival: our own survival, the survival of our church, our country, and our world. Once these fearful survival questions become the guiding questions of our lives, we tend to dismiss words spoken from the house of love as unrealistic, romantic, sentimental, pious, or just useless” (from Jesus:A Gospel). Undoubtedly Simon, Jesus’ host that night, and many others present had heard Jesus preach love and forgiveness. The presence and actions of that woman, in that moment, seem to have undone whatever expansion and openness that might have taken place in the Pharisee’s heart.  

Psalm 32 declares, “Blessed is the one whose fault is taken away, whose sin is covered… to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, in whose spirit is no guile” (vv. 1-2). Even beyond this, Sirach reminds us that “to the penitent [God] provides a way back, he encourages those who are losing hope!” (17:19). These are truths that the woman in this Gospel passage understood, and Jesus doesn’t deny that she is a sinner. However, he doesn’t reduce her to her sin or seek to label her. Because, for love, she acted as she did, she found what she was seeking—a love that would allow her to love even more. 

The labels that we have for others—labels that are based on difference, fear, anxiety, and our own desire for constancy and security—all too often deny the basic goodness and humanity in the one we are making an “other.” And we, as Church people, are often among the first to use labels, particularly for those whose theological/ecclesiological/philosophical/political outlook differs from ours. But, as an ancient Syrian preacher observed, “A sinful woman has proclaimed to us that God’s love has gone forth in search of sinners.” This is the Good News to which we are dedicated: mercy and grace which are God’s prerogative without strings attached. 

Too often, like Simon, we waste so many wonderful opportunities by expending our energy trying to protect something we rightly love (our selves, our families, our church, our homeland) from those we believe are a threat to our comfort and security. But, Simon’s great fault was the he forgot that he, too, was in need of forgiveness and that it is Jesus who forgives sins. Where Simon’s perspective failed him, we are given an opportunity to live in humility: yes, the woman was a sinner, but so are we all. Just as God knew her for who she was—by name and as His wondrous creation—God sees us in the same way and offers us the same mercy, grace, and love. 

 

Corpus Christi: "You Feed Them!"

In 1928, Myles Connolly published a small novel entitled Mr. Blue. A compliment to G.K. Chesterton’s life of Saint Francis of Assisi and as a sort of anti-Gatsby (Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had been published three years before), Mr. Blue tells the story of a young man—Blue himself—who decides to live out the Christian Faith in a serious, transforming way. Like J. Gatsby, Blue lives a life of extremes, we might even say of excess, but it is a far cry from the extravagance of the 1920s. Blue’s love affair with St. Francis’ “Lady Poverty” leads him to live in a packing crate atop a skyscraper, in mansions, in a Boston lodging house and, finally, the ward of a public hospital. He works odd jobs and survives on “backdoor begging.” He prays and he shares his faith with everyone he meets.

Mr. Blue has much to say to us about how faith in Christ can shape a life, transforming a person’s very existence into an act of Eucharist—an act of Thanksgiving—that by its very nature draws others into communion.
 

Window by Marc Chagall in the
Chapelle du Saint-Sacrament
in Moissac, France
 

 

In the novel, Blue tells the story about the kingdom of the Antichrist: the days of the “the ecstatic, passionate, beauty-loving, liberty-seeking people had, as was early predicted, come to a close. The sluggish frigid races had survived.” In the climax of Blue’s tale of a new world in which even laughter and curiosity had been forbidden by law, a priest, the last Christian, climbs the highest tower in a city of metal and, using hosts made from wheat he has grown himself, offers the last Mass, fulfilling his promise to “bring God back to the earth.” As the government’s forces prepare to destroy the priest high atop the tower using planes and bombs, the priest began to repeat the words of Christ as the Last Super (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23-26):

One plane is now low over the roof of the tower, so low that the crew can make out the figure of the cross on the priest’s chasuble. A bomb is made ready…

And now the priest comes to the words that shall bring Christ to earth again. His head almost touches the altar: Hoc est enim corpus meum…

The bomb did not drop. No. No. There was a burst of light beside which day itself is dusk. Then a trumpet peal, a single trumpet peal that shook the universe. The sun blew up like a bubble. The stars and planets vanished like sparks. The earth burst asunder… And through this unspeakably luminous new day, through the vault of the sky ribbed with lightning came Christ as he had come after the Resurrection

The image of a loan priest standing atop a tower in a burned-out world from which even the most basic expressions of joy, fraternity, and human freedom had been banned is a powerful one. But, its power lay not in the revolutionary act of the priest but in the way we are reminded of the expansive power of the Eucharist.

 

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord (Corpus Christi) is a day set aside  to reflect in a special way on the gift of the Eucharist. But, to use this celebration only as a time to focus our own individual engagement and devotion with the Christ who is present—body, blood, soul, and divinity—in the Eucharistic elements is to limit the scope of this Solemnity and the dynamic of the Eucharist itself. The mystery of Transubstantiation is, as Fr. James T. O’Connor notes, “not one wherein the Lord descends from heavenly glory to "enter" under the appearances of bread and wine. Rather it is one in which he, not coming down, lifts the creaturely realities to himself, drawing them up to where he is now with the Father. He draws them to himself in such a fashion that he subjugates them and so transforms their own being that it becomes identical with his… By drawing the reality of all the elements scattered throughout the world unto and into himself, Jesus maintains his own bodily unity. The elements are changed into him, not he into them” (from The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist).

In the same way, in our sharing in the Eucharist, an act of communion, we are brought into the life of Christ and the Church and we are brought out of ourselves. We are raised up into the expansiveness of the Eucharist in a way that transcends any personal acts of devotion—we are given a share in the life of God which is by nature expansive and always oriented to others. We are reminded of this when, in the account of Jesus feeding the multitude with only a few fish and loaves, he gives the command: “You feed them!” 

And so, we do. We take the gift we have been given, the life we have been brought into by our act of communion, and we share that with others. This happens in the Church through the actions of the priest in the Mass and in our work to provide for the spiritual and physical needs of those who hunger for their “daily bread”—in what whatever way.

 

 

The Visitation: Let Mary's Soul Be In You

In his Gospel, Saint Luke relates that after the Annunciation, Mary “went in haste” to see her kinswoman, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist (cf. Luke 1:39-56). This is the event that is at the heart of the Feast of the Visitation (celebrated on May 31). And yet, as with so many of the Church’s festive celebrations, the significance of the Feast of the Visitation extends well beyond a simple remembering of past event.

The Visitation
by Romare Bearden

In the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, we are presented with two women who are living in expectation. Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary, carrying God within her, embody the hopes and expectations of Israel. Theirs was a waiting full of promise: “People who have to wait have received a promise that allows them to wait. They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow” (Henri Nouwen, from the essay “A Spirituality of Waiting”). This kind of waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. Rather, it is a movement from something to something more.

In God's own time, God called the patriarchs and prophets, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so many others, to prepare the way for his Son (cf. Dei Verbum, 3; Hebrews 1:1-2). And, in Mary and her Child, the promises and longings of countless generations were finally being fulfilled: “from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel; whose origin is from of old, from ancient times… He shall stand firm and shepherd his flock” (Micah 5:1, 3a). 

Mary teaches us how to receive the Word of God: "She exhorts us, first of all, to humility, so that God can find a space in our heart not darkened by pride or arrogance. She points out to us the value of silence, which knows how to listen to the song of the Angels and the crying of the Child, not stifling them by noise and confusion. Together with her, we stop before the Nativity scene with intimate wonder, savoring the simple and pure joy that this Child gives to humanity” (Blessed John Paul II, Angelus, December 21, 2003).

But, there is yet another dimension to the Feast of the Visitation: we also honor the spirit of service, diakonia, of Mary. Mary's generous care for Elizabeth anticipates the same spirit of service that should be the hallmark of the Church, which is sent especially to the poor. Just as in Mary, the Lord is brought forward to visit his people (cf. Zephaniah 3:14-18), the Church brings Christ to the poor and forgotten, sharing with them the truth of God’s abiding love and presence. This is the overarching theme of Mary’s great hymn of praise, the Magnificat, which she sings in response to Elizabeth’s greeting: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior… He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty…” (cf. Luke 1:46-55). It is in this great hymn, which the Church sings every day at the time of Evening Prayer, that Mary "first acknowledges the special gifts she has been given. Then she recalls God's universal favors, bestowed unceasingly on the human race" (Saint Bede the Venerable).

Although we may have a tendency to sentamentalize the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, we should keep in mind the great gift of salvation that is at the heart of this mystery and feast: "The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst, you have no further misfortune to fear" (Zephaniah 3:15b). Each of us is entrusted with the task to take the same Christ who dwells in our hearts, minds, and souls out into the world: "Let Mary's soul be in each of you, to proclaim the greatness of the Lord" (Saint Ambrose of Milan).

Prayer for the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary +
Almighty ever-living God,
who, while the Blessed Virgin Mary was carrying your Son in her womb,
inspired her to visit Elizabeth,
grant us, we pray,
that, faithful to the promptings of the Spirit,
we may magnify your greatness
with the Virgin Mary at all times.
Through our Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trinity Sunday: Hope Beyond Words

Through the centuries, Christian Tradition has discerned four attributes that seem to capture what is essential to Who God is. Drawing on earlier Greek writers, Saint Thomas Aquinas identified three of these “Divine Attributes”: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness; his contemporary, Saint Bonaventure, added unity to the list. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI reflected that: “There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendor of God’s truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good” (Homily for Midnight Mass, 2012).
 

The Holy Trinity
by Nicoletto Semitecolo 

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity is rich and complex, a mystery that has all-too-often been distorted into a sort of metaphysical brainteaser that theologians and philosophers have tried to puzzle-out since the first generations after Christ. On the other, there is a simplicity to the Trinity that allows us to connect and commune with God in a way that is ultimately accessible, especially when we engage the Trinity beyond the language of “Divine Persons” and “Natures,” entering into the relationship and possibility that is the God we worship. 

It took centuries for the Church to fully embrace the truth of the Trinity and to understand how to engage the mystery in prayer and worship. Although there have been churches dedicated to the Holy Trinity in the 8^th century, there was no set feast celebrating the Trinity. When attempts were made to introduce such a celebration, medieval popes opposed the effort, citing that the mystery was already celebrated every Sunday and every day (cf. Adolf Adam, The Liturgical Year). Nevertheless, the idea of the feast spread and was embraced in the theologically and philosophically fertile decades of the 13^th and 14^th centuries  (the age of Aquinas and Bonaventure), and it was added to the Universal Calendar in 1334. By placing the Feast of the Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost (the climax of the Easter Season), the Church is summarizing in a single celebration the creative, saving, and sanctifying work of the God we worship as “one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity” (cf. Athanasian Creed and Catechism of the Catholic Church, 266).  

The reason that a celebration such as this remains important is that it places squarely in front of us the truth that God exists both in an internal relationship as Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and in relationship with humanity. Reflecting on these relationships, Henri Nouwen wrote:

[All] relationships are reflections of the relationship within God. God is the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that binds us in unity. God invites us to be part of that inner movement of love… all our human relationships can be lived in God, and as witness to God’s divine presence in our lives.

I am deeply convinced that most human suffering comes from broken relationships. Anger, jealousy, resentment, and feelings of rejection all find their source in conflict between people who yearn for unity, community, and a deep sense of belonging. By claiming the Holy Trinity as home for our relational lives, we claim the truth that God gives us what we most desire and offers us the grace to forgive each other for not being perfect in love. (From Behold the Beauty of the Lord).

It is this “claiming the Holy Trinity” that Saint Paul spoke of in his Letter to the Romans: “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand… because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (5:1b-2, 5). In this brief passage, Paul is highlighting the relationships among God the Father/Creator, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit and reminding us that through them we are given peace, love, and hope.  

All of this having been said, it remains impossible for us to rationally describe the nature of the Trinity or how we share in that Divine relationship. It is the dynamic of the Trinity itself, and our experience of that dynamic, that makes it real for us. Our efforts to put words to this mystery will always fall short.

Although we are brought into the life of the Trinity in our baptism, our experiences of fear, anxiety, apprehension, and preoccupations cause us to pull back, to turn in on ourselves for protection, comfort, or security, responding to what the novelist Edwin O’Connor called “this spreading, endless despair, hanging low like a blanket, never lifting, the fatal slow smog of the spirit.”   

 

It is because we have faith and the assurance that we are united to God that we can find meaning in the darkness of the world around us and within us. Saint Paul teaches us that, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4). Ultimately, we have a choice about whether we will live in the relationship and possibility of the God who is Three-in-One. This hope doesn’t rely on our ability to explain or adequately name the Trinity—it is a hope that is beyond words. 

Past the externals of sound bites, politicizing, and party-lines, is grace—the gift of possibility that is God-alive in each of us. It was possibility that allowed Blessed Julian of Norwich to envision the world contained in a hazelnut and to declare that “all will be well” and Martin Luther King to dream his dream. It is by choosing to live a spiritual life, to pray, to breathe God’s breath, that we begin to open up to the possibilities and beauty in the world around us, without the definitions, causes, and explanations we all too often think we need. 

In Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris wrote:

Mystery penetrates the Bible stories that intrigued me as a child and still offer sustenance: I pass through turbulent waters dry-shod and am led by a pillar of cloud or fire. I am refreshed by water that flows unexpectedly from rock. If I now see through a glass, darkly, I can hope to one day see face-to-face. Relying on reason yet pointing to truths beyond my imagining, religion always offers me something more than I can fully articulate or comprehend. And it makes me sense that I am not alone.

Trinity Sunday is an invitation to live beyond our selves. This Feast reminds us of the powerful ways that God is at work in the world: in the ongoing act of creation, in the perduring gifts  of healing and redemption, and the ever-vital Spirit that inspires and sustains faith, hope, and love.

 

Extraordinary Lives in Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time (which resumed the day after Pentecost) is the longest season of the Church year and is often dismissed by many people as being, well… ordinary. As the “Green Season,” Ordinary Time spans those late-winter weeks between the Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday and the summer and fall months, ending with the great celebration of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe on the last Sunday before Advent.

 

Summer from the Tree of Life Chapel
at First Presbyterian Church, Kirkwood, Missouri
designed by Martin Erspamer, O.S.B.

 

On the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ordinary Time is described in this way:

 The Sundays and weeks of Ordinary Time… take us through the life of Christ. This is the time of conversion. This is living the life of Christ.

Ordinary Time is a time for growth and maturation, a time in which the mystery of Christ is called to penetrate ever more deeply into history until all things are finally caught up in Christ.

Through the days and weeks of Ordinary Time, we hear continuous readings from the prophets and histories of the Old Testament, the letters of the New Testament, and the Gospels. The Church slowly and intentionally moves us through the mysteries and miracles of the life of Jesus. The white and red of the Feasts and Memorials of Mary and the Saints become like individual flowers amid a field of green. Most often, these days go by unnoticed, but they are there nonetheless, offering a sort of commentary on the well-lived Christian life.
 

In her extended reflection, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life, Benedictine sister Joan Chittister shares this story:

It was a normal rush-hour day in a New York City airport. Commuters raced down concourses to make quick connections between major incoming flights and local helicopters and business jets that would take them from one small airport to another in time for supper. Men in heavy coats swinging heavy briefcases, and women in high heels loaded down with cumbersome shoulder bags skidded around vendors and carts, corners and counters in a mad rush to reach gates where the doors were already closing…

Suddenly, everyone heard the crash. The fruit stand teetered for a moment and then tilted the fruit baskets off the countertop to the floor. Apples and oranges rolled helter-skelter up and down the concourse. Then the girl behind the counter burst into tears, fell to her knees, and began to sweep her hands across the floor, searching for the fruit. “What am I going to do?” she cried. “It’s all ruined. It’s all bruised. I can’t sell this!” One man, seeing her distress as he ran by, stopped and came back.

Seeing how frantic she was, he got down on the floor with the girl and began putting apples and oranges back into baskets. And it was then, as he watched her sweep the space with her hands, randomly, frantically, that he realized that she was blind. “They’re ruined,” she kept saying.

The man took forty dollars out of his wallet, pressed it into her hand. “Here,” he said as he prepared to go, “here is forty dollars to pay for the damage we’ve done.” The girl straightened up. She began to grope the air, looking for him now. “Mister,” the bewildered blind girl called out to him, “Mister, wait…” He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes. “Mister,” she said, “are you Jesus?”

 

Our journey through the extraordinary seasons of the Church year inevitably leads us back into the ordinary times of late winter cold, summer haze, and fall’s slow descent back into winter’s darkness. The question then becomes: what difference did those extraordinary feasts and seasons make if we aren’t able to live a Christ-life in the ordinary times and seasons of life?

 

 

In these first days after Pentecost, the Church remembers dozens of men and women who have something to teach us about living extraordinary lives in ordinary time. As varied as the times and places in which they live, these figures, like all the saints, help us to understand what it means to “be like Jesus.” Alongside the monks and nuns, priests and popes, are “ordinary” saints, who were not consecrated religious or clerics, who also lived extraordinary lives and prove that is possible “to be other than those around us who live to exploit here rather than to grow in the light of the hereafter”: Saint Euprhosyne of Polotsk (d. 1172; May 23); Saint William of Rochester/Perth (d. 1201; May 23); the twin brothers, Donation and Rogation (d. ca. 304; May 24); Saint Agatha Yi So-Sa (d. 1831; May 24); Saint Mariana of Quito, Ecuador (d. 1645; May 26); BlessedMargaret Pole (d. 1541; May 28) ; Saint Ferdinand of Castile (d. 1252; May 30); and Saint Joan of Arc (d. 1431; May 30).

 

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote:

The shadow’s the thing. Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered down inestimable distances. Muslims, whose religion bans representational art as idolatrous, don’t observe the rule strictly; but they do forbid sculpture, because it casts a shadow. So shadows define the real. If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. They give the light distance; they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light.

 

The shadows which the saints cast on the liturgical calendar help us make sense of the light of the Christmas Star, the Easter dawn, and the Pentecost-fire of the Holy Spirit. By “defining the real,” the saints help us to recognize that no time is ordinary because we have each been called to live an extra-ordinary life.  

A challenge for these ordinary days might be to learn the saints’ stories and listen to them, find courage in their witness, and remember that what was possible for them, is possible for us.