Monthly Archives: August 2024

Reflecting on Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. Oh, boy. Leave it to the letter of James to hit you straight in the heart. I’ve decided that my generation is the Education Generation. We came of age at Vatican Council 11. The Catholic Biblical School was bursting with adult students, eager to spend hours a week at the feet of their teachers, and then in study before the next class. Everywhere you turned, there were fascinating classes to take. There still are, and I’m signed up for every one of them.

Even though I’m now a mini-expert on racial equity, migration issues, eco-spirituality, and all the other human rights under the Respect Life banner, I confess to you that I am more successful at learning about Catholic Social Teaching than I am at carrying it out.

It’s taken me YEARS to remember to bring my own silverware and dish to a potluck so I’m not adding more plastic to the landfill. Yes, I carry my own coffee mug with me. No, I don’t remember to bring it into whatever marvelous class I’m taking. Pass the Styrofoam cups, please.

At present, I know of a single mom and three kids who are living on the street because they don’t speak the language and don’t have anyone to interpret for them. A community of families has taken in 600 migrants just like them. I love reading and learning about them, from afar. Their commitment terrifies me.

We live in an era of Catholic Information Explosion. But can I do a better job of ACTING on all that I know? It’s challenging to HEAR the Word. It’s more challenging to DO it.

In what ways are you DOING the Word you’ve heard?

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Reflecting on John 6:60-69

The bells are ringing, calling the pilgrims who have traveled to the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario to prayer. The Jesuits came here to New France in the 1630s, to freeze and starve, to paddle canoes over thousands of miles of treacherous waterways, and to live and die in the camps of the Hurons. Eight Jesuits―six priests and two donnés, or lay helpers―were martyred here and in upstate New York.

We Americans know St. Isaac Jogues the best of the eight because he was killed by an Iroquois tomahawk in New York, and he left the most unbelievably vivid and brilliant journal of his life as a missionary to the Mohawks.

But here in Canada, St. Jean de Brébeuf is the most beloved of all those martyrs. He was a large, generous, extraordinarily loving man who lived with the Huron/Wendat for nearly twenty years. It is his name that the native converts called when they were sick and dying. And when the village where he was giving a mission was raided by the Iroquois one terrible night in 1649, instead of fleeing from the fires they said, “Come, let us die with him.”

And so they became eyewitnesses to the destruction, through hours of torture, of the body of the man who had baptized them, comforted them, nursed them through illness, and brought them to Jesus. Because of them, we know that, in the end, his tormentors cut out his heart and consumed it so that they might have, in their own bodies, his strength and power.

Unless you eat my Body and drink my Blood you shall not have life within you.

I think I get it now.

In what ways does your reception of the Eucharist give you Jesus’ strength and power?

Kathy McGovern c. 2024

Reflecting on John 6: 51-58

Turn your radio on. That’s the only way to truly tune into the precise and beautiful wavelength of the Fourth Gospel. The author of the Gospel of John is determined to take his readers on a different, more intuitive, more poetic journey into Jesus’s signs, and the glory of his death and resurrection.

Take these five weeks of intense study of John 6. Did you notice, last Holy Thursday, that even though we always hear from John’s version of the Last Supper on that night, he is the only evangelist who doesn’t mention the words of Consecration? John doesn’t include them in remembering Jesus’ words and actions on the night of his arrest. Instead, it’s only John who tells us that Jesus took great pains to wash his disciples’ feet that fateful night.

Now, it’s very probable that John already knew the Synoptic (“same eye”) gospels well. The theory is that they had circulated widely in the decades after the Resurrection, so he wasn’t interested in repeating what Mark, Matthew, and Luke had already told so beautifully about the giving of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday. He chose, instead, to link the basin and the towel, where the glory of God is revealed when we serve one another.

Besides, as we see so powerfully these five weeks in the summer of Cycle B, where Mark’s gospel is interrupted so the whole Church can meditate on John’s lesson on the Eucharist, we learn everything we need in his sixth chapter. But this requires us to fiddle with the channels of our brains, quietly waiting for the John Channel to bring in the voice of Jesus, loud and clear.

How has your embrace of the Eucharist changed over your lifetime?

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Reflecting on 1 Kings. 19: 4-8

The one experience I’ve had of being hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and miles away from home was a boiling hot summer day in 1993. EKKLESIA, the Christian music group from Denver, was singing at the World Youth Day event in Cherry Creek State Park. We walked into the park, singing the psalms all the way. We were energized, and thrilled to be part of the historic event.

Coming out several hours later, I was sunburned, thirsty, hungry, and in pain. Hundreds of thousands were in the park, all jostling for the same resources. My endlessly merciful husband Ben carried me out of the park and gave me nearly all his water. Like Elijah, I “came to” and made the rest of the journey on my own.

Last week, my sister and brother-in-law were hiking in one-hundred-degree heat in Yosemite. Short on water, they somehow became separated, and both of their phones were nearly dead. Nearly unconscious from the heat, Mollie was miraculously noticed by a passerby, who took her to the lodge where she was staying. She and John were reunited soon after. Married for 55 years, this was the closest they’d ever come to something terrible happening. After water and food, they “came to” and continued their vacation.

I’ve written before about the heavenly strangers who saw 19-year-old Ben, lying in the desert heat next to his bike. At first, they drove by, but then, worried, returned. They lifted him into their station wagon and drove to the nearest Catholic Church, where the bishop’s housekeeper nourished him back from sunstroke.

That angel who revived Elijah for his long walk ahead has certainly been active in my life, too.

What angels have met you in the deserts of your life?

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Manna. Yuck. Can you imagine a multitude of half a million people, hungry and thirsty, in a terrifying desert? Crying out to the mysterious God of Moses, they begged for food, and what did they get? Some evaporated dew. It seems it was a small, round, wafer-like cake that resembled hoar frost. The Israelites used it to make bread, which they called “bread from heaven.”

My friend Celeste remembers leading a group in the Sinai years ago, and actually seeing quail fall from the sky. Exhausted by trying to fly over the desert heat, they fell, giving the pilgrims a first-hand look at what the Israelites were given as food.

So, manna and quail. For forty years. No wonder they initially hungered for that place of slavery, where the fleshpots and bread filled their bellies, even though their cruel Egyptian masters administered it.

Little by little, though, they grew used to trusting that the same God who had called them to walk out of Egypt would provide their daily bread. Water from rocks, quail and bread from the sky,  at some point they adapted to the food God sent. They even learned to gather up the double portions God sent on Friday, so they would have food for the Sabbath.

Sometimes, I wonder how long we could last at our house if the grocery stores (and restaurants) closed and we had to make do with what we have in the cupboard right now. And that begs the question, why are our cupboards so full if we never take anything out? The lesson of the manna is to trust God, and not hoard. I’m making a run to the food pantry.

Have you ever had to trust God every day for food?

Kathy McGovern ©2024