Reflecting on Mark 1: 40-45

In her fascinating new book on the American saints (When the Saints Came Marching In: Exploring the Frontiers of Grace in America; Liturgical Press 2015) author Kathy Coffey lingers lovingly on St. Marianne Cope, the Franciscan nun who, with six others sisters from her community in Syracuse, N.Y., warmly accepted the same invitation from the Hawaiian government which fifty other religious communities had turned down.

I am not afraid of any disease, she wrote in 1883. Hence it would be my greatest delight to minister even to the abandoned lepers of Molokai.

And so she did. She and her sisters cared for the dying St. Damien, assuring him that his work with those who had contracted the dread disease would continue after his death. She finally achieved real safety for the women and girls on the island by establishing schools and hospitals just for them. She brought games, and laughter, and fun.

The most compelling thing about her for me is how beautiful she was, and how celebrated she is in Hawaii. A visitor to Molokai is immediately greeted by a large, framed photograph of this smiling, radiant Franciscan sister.  Throughout the Hawaiian Islands (where her sisters still minister) her lovely face, shrouded in the white coif and wimple of the 19^th century habit, is celebrated on key chains, tins of macadamian nuts, and even beer mugs. She and her sisters are beloved, and the Hawaiians want the world to know about them.

Jesus warned the man he cured of leprosy to tell no one.  Instead, he broadcast it far and wide. When the love of Christ overshadows you, even the remotest parts of the Hawaiian Islands shout for joy.

What ways have you found to reach out to modern-day lepers?

Reflecting on Jb 7:1-4,6-7, Mk. 1: 29-39

For some reason I am always surprised by it, every single time. After another sleepless night, I finally go into the room to read. In three hours it will be dawn, and I’ll be exhausted all day.

Except that it almost never happens that way. Somehow my book is closed, the light is off, and blessed sleep overtakes me. I awake hours later, rested.  I happen to turn my head and look out the window. And there it is. Beautiful, faithful, stunning morning.

I’m shocked by it, somehow. In my midnight tossings it seemed that it would always be night, and that I would still be wide awake, restless and miserable, at first light.

But, instead, the slow strength of morning works its wonder. I actually laugh out loud. Look what God did, again! While I was sleeping, the dawn slipped in. The morning star winked goodnight. The sun took out her paints and began to brush the tops of the trees. Bright, blessed day arrived, without my doing one single thing to help it along.

Poor Job. While in the depths of his misery, sleep never came, and dawn only brought another agonizing day. He was trapped, we could say, in the eternal chill of Narnia before it was redeemed by Aslan (Christ), where it is “always winter, but never Christmas.”

A thousand years later, Christmas―that is to say, Jesus, the Incarnate One―entered Simon’s mother-in-law’s house in Capernaum. He grasped her feverish hand and she arose, healed. Her nighttime struggle was over.  Christ, the Morning Star, shed his peaceful light on her.

Tomorrow morning, notice what Christ did while you were sleeping. And then, healed, arise and wait on him.

In what ways does God heal you in your sleep?

Reflecting on I Corinthians 7: 32-35

We’re going to four weddings this year! That’s four more than we have attended in the past several years. We’re thrilled that the children of our dear friends have found the person with whom they long to commit their lives. Each engagement represents a radical departure from the cultural imperative ― especially for young men― to run from commitment, to date every single person on Match until they’re sure they’ve secured the best deal, and to delay commitment until every possible whim has been satisfied.

How boring. There is no greater adventure than a great marriage, and if you are blessed to find that great love, get married already. You can do all the things the tv commercials say you have to do― skydiving, trekking in Nepal, extreme kayaking in British Columbia― together, and if you survive you’ll have the rest of your lives to brag about it.

For all his talk about the virtues of the single life for the advance of the gospel, I wonder what St. Paul would say to the marriage-averse younger generations today. Since the unmarried 20-year-old Jewish male in Paul’s day was considered “cursed,” Paul was being extremely counter-cultural in suggesting that men and women not marry so as to “adhere to the Lord without distraction”.

It’s possible that when St. Paul wrote that first letter to the church at Corinth (today’s second reading) he was still expecting the imminent return of Jesus. In anticipation of that world-altering moment, he advised that those who were single remain single.

Ironically, that’s exactly the same advice the culture gives today two thousand years later. Hmm. How’s that workin’ for us?

How do you view marriage and its call to holiness?

Reflecting on Jonah 3: 1-5, 10

I thought of Jonah a lot as I read Laura Hillenbrand’s stunning book Unbroken, and again last week when I saw the movie. What terror Louie Zamperini experienced as he was shot out of the sky by the Japanese, then set adrift on the sea for 47 (!!) days, dying of thirst and beset by hungry sharks circling his bullet-riddled raft.

Jonah’s terror was quite different. History’s most reluctant (and irritating) prophet was running away from God when the sailors transporting him threw him overboard in order to avoid God’s wrath. Sure enough, the moment he was in the sea the terrible storm calmed. And Jonah was swallowed up by a great fish.

Louie and Jonah were bound by the same journey. Their outcomes, however, were very different.  While suffering on the raft, a choir of angels appeared to Louie, singing him a song of healing that sustained him for the rest of his life.

Jonah too was given grace. Trapped for three days and nights in the belly of the beast, he was consoled by God’s presence. But, alas, once vomited back onto dry land his bitter heart was unchanged.

Their enemies were legion. Louie suffered unbelievable tortures at the hands of a particularly sadistic Japanese captor during his two years as a POW. Jonah refused to forget the atrocities and brutality of the Assyrians who had decimated his land. And God wanted to forgive them? No way.

In 1998, a jubilant Louie, having forgiven his tormentors years earlier, carried the Olympic torch past his old prison camp, the smiling Japanese applauding him on. Jonah? He’s still pouting under that shriveled broom tree, waiting for God to hate as much as he does.

How has grace given you an unbroken ability to forgive?

Reflecting on I Sam. 3:3b-10, 19

How are you sleeping these days? Do you nod off and sleep easily through the night? Or do you, like the child Samuel, often awake with the sense that you are being called, and then can’t get back to sleep until you finally acknowledge that it is God who is nudging you?

Maybe your dreams are where God is revealing a path for you. If you have a recurring dream―maybe the one where you forgot to go to class all semester and now it’s time to take the final, or ones as urgent as the dreams that alerted me to a ten-centimeter ovarian mass in 2004―it’s possible that God is using your subconscious to guide and heal you.

Then of course there is simply the tossing and turning that goes with finding night-time peace with day-time conflicts. How much longer can you bite your tongue at work? Will the new generation of graduates get the job you’ve excelled at for years? For that matter, will any of the older generation step aside so that your own kids can find meaningful work?

And speaking of the kids, do you lose sleep worrying that they aren’t happy, aren’t healthy, and will probably not carry on the faith that has sustained you your entire life? That’s a lot of sleep to lose over worries that have kept parents awake forever, including, most probably, your own.

But here’s the secret. In all your midnight wrestlings, God is there. It might be that God is aiding you in resolving problems.  Or, just possibly, God is calling you. In that case, the only thing to do is to rouse yourself and say, “Speak, Lord. I’m listening.”

In what ways does God use your sleep to heal you?

Reflecting on John 18: 33b-37

Lucas Cranash the Elder, 1510 “Christ Crowned with Thorns”

When Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” I always squirm a little.  Why isn’t it?  Why isn’t the incarnation—God made flesh and dwelling among us—the kingdom of God?  I squirm because I really, really like this world, and there are many moments every day where I think, “Yes, this is the kingdom, right here.”

Now that we have come to the end of the Year of Mark we can look back and find all kinds of ways in which Jesus created the kingdom while he lived.  Remember those four friends who carried their paralyzed friend across town, then took the roof off and lowered him down so that Jesus could heal him?  That’s the kingdom, right there.

Or remember when Jairus compelled Jesus to go off in a new direction in order to heal his daughter, and in so doing Jesus walked right into the path of the hemorrhaging woman, who reached out and grabbed the hem of the Kingdom as he passed?  A young girl and an aging woman, both brought back to health because they met the Kingdom of God.

There was Peter’s wife’s mother who, overjoyed at being made well, immediately resumed her life of service to the Kingdom.   These are just a few of the stories Mark told us this year, but they all end the same: the encounter with Jesus is the encounter with the Kingdom, and yet the fullness of that kingdom is still to come.  Let’s let Handel, and Revelation 11:15, end the year for us:

The Kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ!

What glimpses of the Kingdom do you have in your life?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 13: 24-32

I have an image in my mind, a kind of “save page” in my soul, that holds who I am and how I will always see the world.  It’s an actual picture of our backyard, circa 1958.  My sister and I are swinging on the swing-set, and my baby brother is playing in his crib on the porch.  My dad and two older brothers are playing basketball on our driveway basketball court, just outside our yard and just inside the picture. My mother’s fire-red roses climb up the fence and spill out in bushes that encircle the green, green grass.

It rains most afternoons, sending heavenly moisture into the ground and giving the grass that deep green, and the roses that deep red, that explodes in my memory even after all these years.

It seems sometimes that the world is ending.  Winters are too mild. Summers are too hot.  In the new normal of drought and fires, roses and lawns are replaced with xeriscapes.

Do kids still swing on swing-sets in fragrant backyards, and does that even matter?  I guess not.  It looks like the world will keep spinning.  Children will delight their parents, and will grow to be parents themselves.  Generations will pass away, and the moon will still give light, and the stars will stay in the sky.  The heavens will not be shaken.

Yet, the world is ending, and someday we will see the Creator of all this beauty.  Blessed are those who have radiated so much light in their lives that the shock of all that Light won’t slow them down from receiving the joyous welcomes of all who have gone before them, marked with sign of faith.

We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love (William Blake).

In what ways are you “beaming love”?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 12: 38-44

Jesus, sitting opposite of the Temple treasury, watched that widow put her whole livelihood into the coffer.  You know what I think happened next?  I think his heart broke.  You’ve experienced it.  It’s that painful arrow to the heart that catches you off guard and makes your chest hurt.

The first time I felt it was while riding a bus one bitter cold January day.  I looked out the window and saw two old men, shivering together on a park bench, gusts of sleet plummeting them.  I looked away, but it was too late.  Compassion broke my heart.

Years later, working as a waitress, I watched a widow, solitary and sad, come into the restaurant and eat alone every Saturday night.  At the end of her meal she would gather the leftovers in a bag, careful to have something to eat for her lonely Sunday.  I tried to hide my heart, but it was too late.  It broke in half.

I’ll bet that’s what happened that day near the Treasury.  Jesus, so steeped in the powerful, ethical laws of Moses, watched a widow, the very person whom Jewish leadership was to most protect from poverty, give from her great need.  He watched her, and then his heart broke. He called to his friends and invited them to have their hearts broken too.

We never know how our lives touch people, but it’s almost never for the reasons we think.  It’s not our wholeness that makes its deepest mark in the hearts of those who watch us.  It’s our brokenness, our vulnerability, that breaks the heart, and of course it’s the crack in the heart that lets the Light shine through.

How has a broken heart changed you?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

It’s November, that month in which the saints go marching into our consciousness in all kinds of touching ways.  I suspect that Jim Becker’s beautiful Litany of the Saints is finding its way into the Sunday liturgy. Invoking the saints isn’t just for the Easter Vigil anymore.

What a comfort it is to know that we’ve got friends in high places. From the earliest years of the Christian faith, believers have had a certain surety that those who had gone before them (particularly through the sword of martyrdom) were still in communion with them.

The month begins with the celebration of the saints, and then immediately remembers all the souls who have gone before us to God. Most people have a certain sense that we are not alone in this universe, that we are accompanied, as Hebrews says, by a “vast cloud of witnesses” (12:1,2).  There is something in us that innately reaches out to those whose lives on earth were awash in God, and we call to them when we feel our lives on earth intersecting with theirs.

The patron saints of all of our earthly travails—lost faith, lost health, lost keys—have been so identified because there was something in their lives, on one side or the other side of heaven, that gained some victory over these earthly enemies.

Imagine what that day will be like when we have arrived joyfully in heaven, to be met by the smiles of the martyrs and our own beloved dead, who loved us on both sides of the grave. Until then we live in the mystery of their presence with us here. All you holy men and women, pray for us!

Are you close to your patron saint?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 10: 46-52

I wonder why the disciples of Jesus and the rest of the crowd tried to shush the blind man when he called.  Did they think that Jesus only wanted to be approached by the fit and good-looking?  Did they assume that their own positions as disciples and followers were based on their superior wit, or status, or lovability?  They must have felt quite honored to be in his entourage as he moved from place to place, from crowd to crowd.  Shush, they scolded the blind man.  You’re not one of his chosen.  You stay in your place.

Oh, wait.  Take courage, Bartimaeus!  He’s calling you!  Take heart! And now we feel the compassion of the disciples as they rush to tell this blind beggar that the Son of David has heard his plea and is calling for him.  He throws off his cloak, springs up and comes to Jesus.  He must be trembling.  The Healer has called for him.  What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asks.  Master, I want to see. And then, after a lifetime in the dark, he sees light, and color, and family, and the side of the road where he begged for so many years.  His faith has saved him.  He immediately follows Jesus on The Way.

Do you know people who have recently received a cancer diagnosis, or perhaps are full of anxiety over the illness of a loved one?  Go to them this week.  Step out of your own comfort zone and gather around them.  Hold them tight and say Take courage.  Jesus is calling you.

And then, trembling, help them follow him on The Way.

How can you personally help someone who is sick take courage?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).