Reflecting on Mk. 10: 46-52

One of the more insightful comments during the pope’s visit came from someone―I can’t remember who―in the print media, who observed that the pope seemed to be just marking time during his visits with dignitaries, glancing at his watch until it was time to be with those whom he was longing to see. Seeing his face light up in the presence of those who are poor in this world, those who are economically vulnerable, those who face life every day with disabilities, it became obvious that those who are “the least” in this world are exactly whom he came so far to see.

I don’t think the apostles understood why Jesus was in Jericho. Given the hundreds of miles they walked with him, it’s easy to assume that they were strong and fit. I don’t think they understood that Jesus saw their struggles. He didn’t choose them, they might have been surprised to learn, because they were the strongest and the smartest. He chose them not because they were whole, but because he knew that they were broken.

And so, when the blind man called out to Jesus, those broken men shushed him. Don’t bother Jesus! He’s important, and you’re not! Somehow they didn’t realize, even after all they knew of him, that Bartimaeus was exactly whom Jesus had come that far to see.

So, let me ask you. What hurts you today? Lower back pain? Asthma? Anxiety? Aging parents whose physical needs are exhausting you? Kids who don’t go to church? You are exactly whom Jesus has come to see.

What do you want me to do for you? he asks. Tell him. Then take courage, and get up. Jesus is calling you.

The Church exists to assist and heal. How can you gather that help to yourself?

Reflecting on Mark 10: 35-45

They were some of the most sophisticated men in the world in the 1630s. Highly regarded professors of language and philosophy, dozens of Jesuit priests chose to leave it all behind in order to live and die in the longhouses of the Huron Indians of Ontario, Canada. Eight of them would be horribly martyred at the hands of the ancient enemy of the Huron, the Iroquois.

“What do you expect of your priesthood?” the bishop asked Isaac Jogues on his ordination day in 1636. “Ethiopia, and martyrdom,” said the new missionary. “You’re wrong,” said the bishop. “You will die in Canada.” But, as it turned out, he was wrong.  Isaac Jogues, after serving three years in the Canadian mission, was captured by the Iroquois in 1642, horribly tortured, and then forced into slavery in their village in what is now upstate New York.

After thirteen months of brutal servitude, he escaped and made his way back to France. There, he was the toast of Paris. The queen knelt before him and kissed his mangled hands. Devoteés lined up outside the church to receive his blessing. His journals―some of the most beautiful letters to come from this period of history―were bestsellers all over France.

This celebrity, he wrote, was far worse torture than what he endured at the hands of the Iroquois. He longed not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many. And so he did. He returned to New York, and on this day in 1646, was beheaded by an Iroqouis brave, and his body tossed into the Mohawk River. Years later that brave turned himself into the French, asking for baptism.

In what ways have you been converted by those who live not to be served, but to serve?

Reflecting on Wisdom 7: 7-11

Wisdom. We don’t think of it very often, but each of us operates out of the wisdom we learned―or, tragically, didn’t learn―in our youth. The ancient author of the Book of Wisdom valued wisdom far above any other possession. Why? Because if you learn to be wise in some things, everything else will come your way.

Families have certain Wisdom Traits that get passed through the generations. Never whine about the outcome of a game (or a test, or a grade in school). Be the first to congratulate your opponent, win or lose. Is your kindergarten classmate struggling with learning the skill of tying shoes? Kindly show her how you figured it out, then stick around until she gets the hang of it. These wisdom lessons set kids up for happy lives. Learn this wisdom early in life and even more wisdom will come your way.

My favorite Wisdom Saying came from my Irish grandfather, transmitted to me when I was a self-conscious adolescent. Kathleen, you wouldn’t care so much what people think of you if you knew how seldom they do.

Ouch! That’s horrible, right? But what a character-building truth that is. Unless we are, say, the quarterback of a certain football team, chances are very good that the people around us are not obsessing about what we did yesterday, or will do today. How liberating that is. How wise is the one who truly learns that.

Other Wisdom Sayings come to mind. If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all. Never let the sun set on your anger. Pick up after yourself.

How desperately the human race needs wisdom now. Lady Wisdom, come to us.

What are the favorite Wisdom Sayings in your family?

Reflecting on Gen. 2:18-24

What a charming―and kind of scary― story the Genesis author composed in order to teach how man and woman came into the world. It’s charming because we learn that it was not good for Adam to be alone. He needed a suitable companion. It’s scary because God, apparently, presented him with all kinds of options――birds, cattle, wild animals―in hopes that Adam would say, “That’s the ticket. I’ll take that one!”

That’s one of the many humorous clues Genesis gives us that these primordial histories are actually sacred stories shot through with deep cultural symbols.  The ancients understood that the writer was simply displaying God’s immense creativity in showing the great diversity of God’s creations. I know I couldn’t sleep at night if I actually believed that the Master of the Universe tried to get Adam interested in a caterpillar as a suitable life partner.

There are other funny sections in Genesis too, that show the sacred author’s keen insight into the human heart. When God confronts Adam and Eve about their disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit, their response is classic. The woman made me do it, says Adam.  The snake made me do it, says Eve. The snake, curiously, so chatty earlier, decides to stay quiet, probably because there is no one else to whom blame could possibly be assigned.

When we are, with God’s grace, enjoying an eternity of perfect peace, it will be fascinating to talk with these brilliant authors of the Genesis stories. I’ll bet we will be astonished at how much more sophisticated and insightful they were than even the best writers of our own times. The snake, I assume, will not be present for that conversation.

What is your favorite story from the book of Genesis?

Reflecting on James 5:1-6

Today is the feast day of one of the greatest figures in church history, and yet many of us know very little about St. Vincent de Paul. Let’s take a moment to remember him.

It appears that his main incentive for becoming a priest (in the year 1600) was to have a comfortable life. Can’t you just hear Pope Francis railing against a cleric like that? His conversion occurred after hearing the deathbed confession of a poor servant of his employer, the Countess de Gondi. He was so moved by him that he dedicated his life to serving galley-slaves from North Africa, victims of war, and those who were poor in many different ways.

Boy does that sound familiar. This French saint, and his great friend St. Louise de Marillac, would be right there on the front lines today, feeding and comforting and binding up the wounds of those millions who are fleeing Syria and Iraq and Africa right this minute.

St. Louise founded the Daughters of Charity as the first non-cloistered community of women, “whose convent is the sickroom, whose chapel is the parish church, whose cloister is the streets of the city.”

The letter of James today rails against the rich who cheat the poor. But the life-saving works that St. Vincent de Paul put into place in 17^th century France were dependent upon the consistent, faithful generosity of the rich. He had close friends who were wealthy, and friends who were impoverished. So did Jesus.

I thank God for blessing with wealth all those who give it away so graciously.

Have you ever considered joining the St. Vincent de Paul Society?

Reflecting on James 3:16-4:3

I had heard about this outrageous behavior, but didn’t realize it actually happened, until, in the past several years, many friends confided to me that at least one of their siblings had embezzled money from their parents’ estate in the years before their deaths. Then, astonishingly, they demanded even more than their share of the estate―often in blatant disregard of the parents’ express wishes―after their deaths.

Where do the wars and conflicts among you come from? asks the letter of James today. They come from exactly this kind of behavior. If there are five children, and an estate is supposed to be divided equally among them, then one child does not demand―or steal, as it turns out―more than twenty percent of the estate. Somehow, this easy math eludes a huge number of adults today, who apparently never catch on that their share of the pie is in direct proportion to the number of people at the table.

Why can’t we ever seem to remember that? How is it that adult children ask that they receive more than their share of an estate, with the certain result that their parents’ other children receive less?

You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

Now that makes sense. If we consider that God is the creator of ALL life, than asking God to give us more (so that the rest of God’s creatures can have less) is a waste of God’s time and ours.  Indeed, as Dag Hammarskjöld wrote, “Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.”

Do you ever assume that you are entitled to more than your share of the earth’s resources?

The other night, while enjoying an otherwise perfect evening downtown, my sainted husband Ben pointed out an older woman walking in the mall, dragging her suitcase behind her. Come to think of it, he said, I’ve seen several people this year in different parts of the city, carrying their suitcases around. They don’t appear to be going to the airport.

Who are these people, living in this country, who have to drag their belongings around with them? I can’t imagine how cumbersome, how exhausting that must be. When I travel, I always check my suitcase. It’s too hard to drag it with me everywhere I go. How terrible to have to carry your belongings around with you every minute of your life.

I try to get through the day not noticing the suffering around me because it’s so upsetting, and I don’t know how to truly help. And yet I love to read about heroic Christians of the past who stood up to slave owners, or ran soup kitchens out of their homes during the Depression, or brought to light, at their own risk, the terrible injustices of their day.

Hopefully, future generations will say, “I can’t believe our grandparents tolerated so much misery in their midst. We wouldn’t let any of that happen today. Was that really the best they could do?”

We’re trying! I want to shout. We need guidance to know how to do better! Yet that guidance comes straight from the letter of James today: Faith without works is dead. So, I’m going to try to really see the suffering around me. That’s the faith that will make future generations proud to call themselves Christian.

Have you ever been hungry and had someone say, “Stay warm and well fed”?

Reflecting on Mark 7: 31-37

There are so many things that shout to us that the kingdom of God has not yet been fulfilled. War, and its accompanying miseries that ripple around the world, is the same soul-deadening sadness no matter which app you choose to read about it.

We feel distanced from it, thank God. But illness and health challenges are always right in front of us, and it seems like we ought to be masters of it by now. But, for all of our technological wizardry, those who are blind, or lame, or hearing impaired, or suffer from autism, or devastating mental illnesses, still bear witness that the kingdom is not quite here.

I think that might be why Jesus groans when he looks up to heaven and cries Ephphatha! Be opened! I imagine him, with his fingers in the ears of the man who is deaf, crying out to his Father from the depths of his soul: Father, look at all this sickness and suffering. Have mercy on these children. Open his ears. Open her eyes. Let them all be healed. The kingdom of God is here.

And immediately the man’s ears were opened. The kingdom had broken through.

And it continues to break through. Isaiah could read like this today: Then shall polio, and measles, and smallpox be vanished from the earth. Then shall those who are in pain get relief, and those who need new kidneys receive them.

In fact, if we had the will, we could wipe malaria off the face of the earth. Maybe that’s why Jesus groaned. He was begging those who have seen glimpses of the kingdom to partner with him to help make the kingdom come.

What advances in medicine have made your life easier?

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

Within you read the bumper sticker on the car ahead of me. I’m getting better at recognizing grace when it hits me between the eyes, and so I relaxed into that beautiful message and felt more grace course through me.

Are you churning with rage over the behaviors of others? The power to forgive is within you. Are you tormented with anxiety about your children, your parents, your future? The grace to trust that the same God who has been faithful in the past will be faithful in the future is within you.

Why live a life steeped in sacramental grace if you don’t dip into it every day? It is there, within you, waiting to be activated. Jesus reminded the Pharisees of this. It’s not whatever image we try to project to others that is going to comfort us in times of need. It’s what is truly within us, and we have an endless bank of grace to see us through.

That is, of course, if we place ourselves in the direction of grace so we can receive it.

“Two wolves,” says the Cherokee grandfather, “battle within me. One is evil, anger, resentment, inferiority, superiority, and ego. The other is serenity, hope, empathy, compassion and faith.”

“Which wolf wins?” asks his grandson.

“The one I feed.”

So, says Jesus, make a conscious effort every day to feed your soul the grace that goes the distance. Give the benefit of the doubt every single time. See things from the perspective of others. Recognize―and this always comes as a shock ―that people have been forgiving you every single day too.

Graciousness, kindness, forgiveness. All these things come from within you, and they will save the world.

How will you activate sacramental grace today?

Reflecting on John 6: 60-69

As I write this, 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, 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?