Reflecting on Gen. 2: 18-24

We get to talk about LOVE this week, my favorite topic. Genesis says that God even created woman from the rib of man so that the two might become one flesh. What a painful image! But we get the point.

Jesus stands by the Genesis account. When confronted with the issue of divorce, he reminds the Pharisees that God intends that women and men enjoy happy and fruitful lives together. Yes, today, divorce is everywhere, and no, I’ve never met a single person who had to endure a divorce who wasn’t ripped to shreds by it.

Of course, marriage in Jesus’ day bore little resemblance to our own. It was an economic arrangement, usually between members of the same clan, to provide progeny and, depending on the wealth of the bride’s father, financial profit for the groom, his father, and his brothers.

But St. Paul says an extraordinary thing in Ephesians 5:25: Husbands, love your wives. What? Was there love involved in the contract? There has to have been. Yes, the marriages were arranged, but even today, the arranged marriages that still take place around the world yield not only children but, often, enduring love. St. Paul understood that for the social contract to be successful, the two people had to look beyond the aggravations of day-to-day life and see the Divine in their union.

Speaking of the Divine, my favorite activity is watching parents with their kids. Is there any love like that? It perfectly images God’s love for us—unconditional and wildly out of proportion to what we can ever deserve. But this outrageous love keeps going on in every age. Such is the fruit of the Trinity becoming ONE FLESH with us.

Name some different things you’ve learned about love from the different relationships in your life.

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Reflecting on James 5: 1-6

One of the hardest things to do in this ridiculous political climate is to actually listen to the opposing party with as open a mind as you can muster. I admit there have been a few moments in the debates when I thought the other side made a good point. I don’t dare say that out loud, though, for fear I’ll be torn to pieces by those who know better, who don’t tolerate fools, who hold the key to my acceptance into the cool club.

Isn’t that terrible, that even at this stage in my life, I can’t say out loud that I think the Spirit might be working in someone other than The Good Guys? But Eldad and Medad offer the Old Testament example—and there are many, come to think of it—of the Spirit flowing from two who weren’t at the Tent of Meeting, weren’t at the designated “holy place” at the designated time, just didn’t fit with the way we’ve told God to behave. And God behaved anyway!

That leads us to our last exposure to James’s letter for the next three years. WHEW. For five weeks, we’ve once again heard those powerful cries of the poor from James. We won’t hear from him again for three years. What will be different in our approach to how we live these next three years? Will it be business as usual, with our successful accumulation of wealth, being unwilling to hear the Spirit calling from the broken parts of our economy that exclude those who are poor?

Give us ears, oh God, to hear your Spirit, even where we least want it.

Who are the people in your life who unwittingly speak for the Spirit?

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Reflecting on James 3:16-4:3

Ah, desire. We know what that feels like. And it’s captured beautifully in the third chapter of the letter to James. Jealousy, selfish ambition, covetousness, envy…who hasn’t suffered these disordered desires? Envy, the book of Genesis makes clear, is the Original Sin. Cain was so envious of his brother Abel’s favorable offering to God that he murdered him! We get no explanation for WHY Abel’s sacrifice was found acceptable. Still, we can certainly hear today’s Wisdom passage in Cain’s murderous act: The wicked say: Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us.

Our first parents suffered envy so terribly that they willingly ate the forbidden fruit—probably imagined as a pomegranate, by the way, not the apple we often see in religious art—because they believed the Tempter’s Lie that it would make them like gods. They didn’t realize that they already lived like gods. Now, (the author of Genesis believed), we can all thank them as we wrestle with those relentless weeds in our gardens.

But here’s the good news, for you younger readers. It gets SO MUCH BETTER with age. As we get older, many of the envies that tormented us when we were young are long gone.  Life has sorted itself out, and, at least in my observance, elderly people are not still pining for their teenage heartthrob. At least I HOPE not!

But here’s where it gets really good. The Jewish faith believes that the heart is where we make our choices. We can CHOOSE against envy by CHOOSING not to want what the advertisers so passionately NEED us to want. This is a good thing to remember as we enter these pre-Christmas months.

How has desire made you unwise? How has wisdom calmed the desire for more?

(Thank you, Alice Camille, for these great questions from God’s Word is Alive) Kathy McGovern ©2024

We had another class reunion last week. We’re all so close we can’t stop getting together. In attendance were our brilliant and humble valedictorian, our beautiful cheerleader-school principal-grandma, and a heartbroken mother whose son had just died from cancer. He was going to give her his kidney, to save her from three days a week of dialysis.

Each of us sat with her, holding her hand, listening as she described the many terrible deaths in her family in recent years. And then we moved on. There were so many people to see, so many photos to pull up on our phones. But one classmate, who has never been attracted to religious observance, said to our grieving friend, “You will never go to one more dialysis appointment by yourself. I will pick you up at 5:30 am and stay with you through every appointment. Don’t even think about going through this alone.” Works without faith is such a powerful witness.

And I always preface this next story by saying, “That’s who I went to high school with.” One bitterly cold January afternoon I was attempting to navigate the icy ramp out of the grocery store, my cart slipping to the left and right. A beautiful young lady, maybe fourteen years old, was just coming out of the store. “Can I help you?” Relief flooded through me. “Yes! I’m in trouble here. Please help me.” She immediately and easily took my cart down the ramp and to my car. While unloading the groceries, her grandma looked at me in surprise and said, “Oh, hi, Kathy.” We hadn’t seen each other since our last reunion.

Don’t you love seeing “works” at work in the world?

What good works are you extending these days?

Kathy McGovern ©2024

Reflecting on Is. 35: 4-7a

Two weeks ago, I had an unforgettable experience. August 23^rd, the feast day of St. Rose of Lima,  set off a weekend of joyful reunions at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Denver. The parish celebrated its one-hundredth-year anniversary. The little church with the big heart, sitting snugly in the Platte River Valley, has been home to various ethnic groups—-from its German founders to its present, vibrant Hispanic community—and hundreds of “legacy families” that filled the pews for generations.

The word “grace” means “undeserved kindness.” During the 1980s, I had the grace to serve on the staff at this uniquely loving parish. Coming back after several decades, I was nearly lifted into the air by the stunning congregational singing at the joyous anniversary Mass. But why was I crying so uncontrollably, that evening and well into the next day? It was because the scales fell off my eyes, and my deaf ears were opened. I saw and heard all the loving family and friends, many deceased, many still alive, who had been so present to me during those years.

I saw every dear choir member who gave up so many precious evenings in order to learn music for the beautiful Sundays we shared at St. Rose. I saw those gorgeous “sock hops” we had in the gym, colors swirling through the room, the live band keeping hundreds of dancers going ‘til the late hours.

I saw the beloved bishop of our Archdiocese, coming home from the chancery and checking in with each of the housekeeper’s kids. I saw a great cloud of witnesses to those one hundred years. I hear their voices even now.

Close your eyes and see the ancestors who built your parish. Say, thank you.

Kathy McGovern ©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