33 Sunday A #157
Prv 31, 10-13. 19-20. 30-31
Ps 128
1 Thes 5, 1-6
Mt 25, 14-30
Deacon Tom Cornell
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 16, 2008
Today’s Gospel parable can be confusing. But before we get to that, a married deacon can hardly let pass our first reading from Proverbs. It reads like a song, doesn’t it? The valiant women, the worthy wife brings her family increase by her labors and reaches her hands out to the poor and brings the favor of God upon her house. Beauty is fleeting. Well, not always. Not this time. It will be forty-five years for us, Monica and me. Our son and daughter came to us a couple of weeks ago and said they want to throw us a Golden Wedding Anniversary party next July. “But,” I said, “It’s only our 45th!” My daughter answered, “But Pa, how do you now you’re going to live another five years? And you might as well enjoy it now while you can.” That’s Catholic realism for you! We brought her up right. Family life is not for everyone. For us it’s been about as good as it gets – at last.
Today’s Gospel parable reminds me of the one in Luke’s Gospel about the unjust steward. The unjust steward writes off the debt owed to his master. Remember, he calls in the debtors and asks each one how much do you owe, and then has them change their bill to much less. He steals from his master in order to feather his own nest and yet his master praises him. Jesus was not suggesting in that parable that what the steward did was right and good. He makes it clear in the beginning that this is an unjust man, a man of darkness, like today’s master who reaps where he has not sown. The unjust steward acts wisely according to the wisdom of the age, the wisdom of darkness, of the unredeemed world. So it is with today’s parable. Jesus is not commending shrewd banking practices or investment tactics. In this parable too, Jesus holds up the guile and resourcefulness of the children of darkness to urge on the children of light. “We belong neither to darkness or to night; therefore let us not sleep like the rest, but stay awake and sober” against the day of judgment.
Let’s take a closer look at this parable. Jesus was talking about enormous sums of money, between sixty-five and one hundred pounds of silver or gold to one talent! His hearers were ill at ease listening to this, we can assume. Such sums of money were beyond their experience or
comprehension, mine too. They were uneasy too because the prophets of Israel had condemned usury, that is, taking interest on a loan, and so had the Psalmist. Money was for exchange, in their old fashioned view of things, not for making more money. Money stood for the value of goods that otherwise would have to be bartered. It’s a medium of exchange, that’s all. Money, or so they thought, is barren, sterile. It does not reproduce like a plant or an animal. Money does not make money and wealth. Work produces money and wealth. So the taking of money at interest was thought of as unnatural, perverse. Men are meant to live by the sweat of their brows, we learn in Genesis, the sweat of their own brows, not other peoples’ brows. And that is the essence of capitalism, living off the sweat of other peoples’ brows.
The Church is very suspicious and critical of capitalism. Many people are surprised to hear that. But it’s true. Still, we live in the real world and even the Church has investments. But the Church warns us to keep a watchful eye, because abuse of unregulated capitalism is so very easy. Wealth tends to percolate up to fewer and fewer hands, not filter down to more and more, and with wealth, power and influence, even over mass media, the power to misinform, to delude and manipulate. Power in fewer and fewer hands is a threat to democracy. Power serves its own purposes.
The Church always asks, of any economic or social program, “What does this do to the most vulnerable among us, the poor, the aged, the young? What does it do to the common good, the good of all of us?” Without some way of protecting the common good, things go wrong, desperately wrong, as we now must know. Unregulated lending for profit, usury, has led us into our present day economic crisis. How bad it’s going to get, and for how long, nobody knows. But we do know this: we are all going to feel it, sooner or later, and it’s going to be hard.
Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God. So the Church must proclaim the Kingdom of God, the City of God in the City of Man. That’s where we are, “in the world but not of it,” as we say. We strive for the Kingdom in our work. We pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” in the confidence that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. The Kingdom of God is a reign of peace and justice. So where is the justice, where the peace? This is the rabbis’ answer to our claim that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. “If he has come, where is the peace, where the justice? Look around. Nothing has changed. We’ll wait.”
Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is upon us, within us, in our midst, now. But as we can see, peace and justice do not reign on earth, not yet. The rabbis have a point. So we say of the Kingdom of God that it is here and not here, now but yet to come. Does that make any sense?
In Jesus it makes sense. Only in Jesus does it make sense. Jesus broke down the wall between Jew and gentile, between slave and free, between man and woman. More than that, Jesus broke down the wall between time and eternity, space and the “no-place” where God was before the Creation. “My peace I give you, not as the world gives.” We recall these words, his words in a few minutes. “My peace.” Those who struggle for peace and justice must know that neither peace nor justice is our first goal, but Jesus, friendship with Jesus, a personal knowledge of Jesus, a communion with Jesus. And that is precisely why we gather here today and every Sunday, to draw closer to Jesus and closer to each other in Jesus. Then the Kingdom breaks through, little by little.
We can help build the Kingdom of God, but we can not complete it. Only God can do that. Jesus will come again, and he will continue and finish what began aeons ago when Wisdom, Logos, witnessed the Creation and danced with joy. Only Jesus can lead us in the dance. Come, Lord Jesus!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Military Chaplaincy
The Chaplain's Dilemma
Can pastors in the military serve God and government?
By Tom Cornell | NOVEMBER 17, 2008
the cover of America, the Catholic magazine
Editor’s note. In response to readers’ queries about the publication of advertisements in America for military chaplaincies, the editors invited articles about pastoral ministry to U.S. troops from John J. McLain, S.J., and Tom Cornell.
Full-page color advertisements for the military chaplaincy in Catholic publications have aroused ire in some—an emotion that pacifists shun, of course. I too was taken aback when I first saw in America magazine just such an ad. It was largely out of envy, another capital sin, because the Catholic Peace Fellowship cannot afford to advertise its full-time professional counseling. The C.P.F. receives 6 percent of all the calls made to the national GI Rights Hotline and takes calls at its own office in South Bend, Ind. Many of the calls come from members of the military and their families who are seeking counseling that, in better times and circumstances, they might expect from chaplains.
Since its beginning in 1964, the Catholic Peace Fellowship has specialized in counseling. Jim Forest and I had to train ourselves in counseling techniques, in the law and in Selective Service rules and regulations, which we did with help from colleagues at the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (now called the Center on Conscience & War) in Washington, D.C. At first we counseled Catholic conscientious objectors, then anyone who came to us from any background with any problem related to the draft, participation in war or military service. We had a very high success rate; clients received the Selective Service classification or discharge they sought. In 1980 we started training other counselors.
For decades, I have been thinking about the military chaplaincy. Surely men and women in the military deserve and have a right to the ministry of the church in word and sacrament. In this respect Catholics in the military and their dependents currently are underserved. The Archdiocese for the Military Services reports that Catholics make up 40 percent of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard and are served by 140 priest chaplains; 28 percent of the Air Force, served by 90 chaplains; and 25 percent of the Army, served by 105 chaplains. If dependents and family members of service personnel are counted, the figure approximates two million persons served by 335 priests.
Need for Care
Members of the military are especially in need of pastoral care, young as most are and often married, with severe pressures on them in the best of times. These are among the worst of times, with multiple deployments to combat zones. We need more priest chaplains in military hospitals and in reserve and active units.
JVC provides the cornerstone for living out a commitment to faith and justice.
Consider the rate of divorce and of suicide in the military (double that of only a few years ago) or among veterans of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. In its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress in 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 15 percent of the 671,888 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people in the United States are veterans. And the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that up to 467,877 veterans are “at risk of homelessness,” because their means lie below the poverty level and they pay more than 50 percent of their household income on rent alone. The physical, mental and moral damage done to our sons and daughters calls for everything the Christian community can offer in the way of prevention and relief.
I remember hashing all this over more than once with the late Gordon Zahn, who proposed having the chaplaincy disestablished. He would have had priests minister to the troops, but as civilians, their formation and support coming from the church, not the state. That has been the case in the past in this country and elsewhere.
Disestablishment would solve some problems, but it would give rise to others. It is hard to imagine that the church could afford to make the prospect of chaplaincy to the military as attractive as the federal government can. Moreover, priests must have the permission of their diocesan bishops or religious superiors to volunteer for the military chaplaincy and to leave their parish or other assignments. Many bishops and superiors think they cannot spare priests for even a single period of enlistment.
Military Service as Morally Problematic
Military service for some men and women becomes morally problematic when after recruitment they become aware of church teaching and of the realities in which they are immersed. They need moral guidance especially at this point in their lives.
Catholics hear the definitive teaching of the Second Vatican Council: “Those who are pledged to the service of their country as members of its armed forces should regard themselves as agents of security and freedom on behalf of their people. As long as they fulfill their role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace” (“The Church in the Modern World,” No. 79). They also hear the absolute condemnations of the use of weapons of mass destruction (No. 80) and the ratification, even the praise of the right to conscientious objection (Nos. 78 and 79). In view of that condemnation of the use of weapons of mass destruction and of The Challenge of Peace, the 1983 pastoral letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops, the Pentagon considered banning observant Catholics from postings to missile silos where nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept ready for launch. Church authorities allayed their fears, however. American Catholics are “good citizens.” Contrary to international law and to Vatican II (No. 79), good Catholics can be relied upon to pass moral responsibility up the chain of command, or so they were advised.
I am not making an argument here for absolute pacifism as national policy. Justice demands the protection of the innocent, even by lethal force if necessary. But it is difficult, as Pope Benedict XVI has stated, to imagine that a war might be just in these times, even though justice may require police action, as in Rwanda or Sudan, as a last resort. An army as a valid police force is not what we object to. But what of those recruits who are convinced that the war in Iraq is illegal, unjust and immoral?
Early in the war, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, then head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, sent a pastoral letter to Catholic chaplains, advising them that they may calm the doubts of soldiers by telling them that their government leaders are privy to more information than is available to the public and that they may trust their leaders’ claims to justice for the cause. His letter did not endorse the war and did not question it either. It was very temperate. But any defender of the cause of any war at any time could utilize its reasoning. Not so with Bishop John Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Diocese in Canton, Ohio, who forbade his faithful to participate in the Iraq war under pain of mortal sin. Had other bishops or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops itself followed suit, we might well have had a crisis of church-state relations on our hands. Might it not be time for that?
The Web site of the military archdiocese offers a supportive commentary on the war in Iraq by Archbishop O’Brien from the time when he was the bishop in charge. But he would have come across different evidence and reached a different conclusion had his guides in Iraq not been U.S. military and political functionaries, but the unembedded journalists Ned Rosen, Dahr Jamail or Kathy Kelly, or had the archbishop visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Kurdistan.
Instilling Blood Lust
What of those in basic training who come to a sudden realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with efforts to instill blood lust in them? That is the training method since the discovery after World War II and the Korean war that only a small minority of soldiers who had an opportunity to shoot at a fellow human being wearing an enemy uniform would in fact do so. This was because of the normal instinct of our species not to kill those of our own kind. Since then, the psychological science of “killogy” has revolutionized basic training to override that instinct. (Pardon the grotesque neologism; it is not mine, but Col. Dave Grossman’s, former professor of psychology at West Point and author of studies on how to desensitize people to the point of loss of scruple against homicide.) Troops in training are led to chant, “Kill! Kill!” Here is a cadence commonly used now: “What makes the grass grow? Blood makes the grass grow! Who makes the blood flow? We do! We do! Blood! Blood! Blood!” These are not theoretical considerations. I know personally a young woman of humble origin and a director of Catholic Charities in a major archdiocese who both concluded that there is something morally wrong with this kind of basic training.
Chris Hedges, for 20 years a war correspondent for the The New York Times in El Salvador, the Middle East and the Balkans, noted in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that there is an erotic charge to all this. This is not your grandfather’s army! It is impossible to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower saying in public, as General James Mattis did, “It’s a hoot…it’s fun to shoot some people.”
What of the young man or woman who knows instinctively that this attitude is wrong? What of the U.S. Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Joshua Casteel, who had an awakening when a Muslim prisoner challenged his Christian faith? What is the chaplain’s proper role then? Are chaplains prepared to deal with men and women in a crisis of conscience that puts them outside the pale of the military? As pastors, I mean, not as military officers. Joshua’s chaplain was supportive, but many chaplains are not.
Priests enlist in the military as chaplains with the best of intentions: to serve pastoral needs. But this is not why they are commissioned as officers or what they are paid for. According to their employers, the chaplaincy’s purpose is to contribute to the military success of the unit to which the chaplain is attached. This purpose may cause cognitive dissonance for some chaplains. It is not unreasonable to assume that many, however, will resolve their distress in favor of the presuppositions of the officer corps of which they are a part and into which they have been socialized.
In 1968 then-bishop John J. O’Connor, who was chief of chaplains for the U.S. military, wrote a book called A Chaplain Looks at Vietnam, in which he defended the U.S. war policy there. He sent me, among others, an autographed copy and asked what I thought of it. Later he withdrew the book and apologized for it, calling it “a very poor book that I would like to re-write today, or hide.” He wrote it obviously influenced by the officers with whom he served in Vietnam, most of them before 1968, who were sanguine about the enterprise and its outcome. In this way O’Connor started a relationship with me and I dare say even a friendship. After some correspondence he assured me that all chaplains under his command were trained to know and understand the law and rules and regulations that apply to discharge from military service on grounds of conscience, and that Catholic chaplains were told to counsel conscientious objector claimants with the presumption of good will.
I am sure Cardinal O’Connor meant what he said, but I am not sure he had the means to see whether the policy was actually in place. In fact, not long ago a highly regarded cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had to face his chaplain as an adversary during a hearing to judge his conscientious objector claim. At that hearing, when Bishop Thomas Gumbleton appeared for the claimant, the chaplain remained silent. The cadet was released without prejudice. He deserved his chaplain’s support but did not get it.
Cardinal O’Connor had the right idea, or at least the right intention. The training of chaplains to support conscientious objectors never really took place, but if it had, much of the peace movement’s criticism of the military chaplaincy would be muted. We do not expect chaplains to trouble the consciences of their charges with the judgment of popes and episcopal conferences as to the justice of this or that war or of war in general. But we expect, even demand, that chaplains know the law and the rules and regulations pertaining to separation from military service by reason of conscience, and more critically, that they be instructed to counsel those who claim conscientious objection with a presumption of good intention.
Anecdotal evidence has it that the opposite is often the case. Conscientious objector claimants are sometimes challenged, accused of bad faith and dismissed out of hand as cowards and malingerers. That amounts to a dereliction of duty on the part of priest counselors. Citizens, even soldiers, have the right to appeal to the law. And counselors have an obligation to assume good faith in the absence of factual contrary evidence. Good conscience and right conscience are two different things, but the distinction may be assumed; questions of fact and logic may be raised, but not the validity of a moral judgment made honestly.
We in the peace movement will never be satisfied until the military chaplaincy is disestablished and priests and deacon chaplains are unambiguously servants of Christ and his church. Priests should not be forced to serve two masters.
Can pastors in the military serve God and government?
By Tom Cornell | NOVEMBER 17, 2008
the cover of America, the Catholic magazine
Editor’s note. In response to readers’ queries about the publication of advertisements in America for military chaplaincies, the editors invited articles about pastoral ministry to U.S. troops from John J. McLain, S.J., and Tom Cornell.
Full-page color advertisements for the military chaplaincy in Catholic publications have aroused ire in some—an emotion that pacifists shun, of course. I too was taken aback when I first saw in America magazine just such an ad. It was largely out of envy, another capital sin, because the Catholic Peace Fellowship cannot afford to advertise its full-time professional counseling. The C.P.F. receives 6 percent of all the calls made to the national GI Rights Hotline and takes calls at its own office in South Bend, Ind. Many of the calls come from members of the military and their families who are seeking counseling that, in better times and circumstances, they might expect from chaplains.
Since its beginning in 1964, the Catholic Peace Fellowship has specialized in counseling. Jim Forest and I had to train ourselves in counseling techniques, in the law and in Selective Service rules and regulations, which we did with help from colleagues at the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (now called the Center on Conscience & War) in Washington, D.C. At first we counseled Catholic conscientious objectors, then anyone who came to us from any background with any problem related to the draft, participation in war or military service. We had a very high success rate; clients received the Selective Service classification or discharge they sought. In 1980 we started training other counselors.
For decades, I have been thinking about the military chaplaincy. Surely men and women in the military deserve and have a right to the ministry of the church in word and sacrament. In this respect Catholics in the military and their dependents currently are underserved. The Archdiocese for the Military Services reports that Catholics make up 40 percent of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard and are served by 140 priest chaplains; 28 percent of the Air Force, served by 90 chaplains; and 25 percent of the Army, served by 105 chaplains. If dependents and family members of service personnel are counted, the figure approximates two million persons served by 335 priests.
Need for Care
Members of the military are especially in need of pastoral care, young as most are and often married, with severe pressures on them in the best of times. These are among the worst of times, with multiple deployments to combat zones. We need more priest chaplains in military hospitals and in reserve and active units.
JVC provides the cornerstone for living out a commitment to faith and justice.
Consider the rate of divorce and of suicide in the military (double that of only a few years ago) or among veterans of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. In its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress in 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 15 percent of the 671,888 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people in the United States are veterans. And the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that up to 467,877 veterans are “at risk of homelessness,” because their means lie below the poverty level and they pay more than 50 percent of their household income on rent alone. The physical, mental and moral damage done to our sons and daughters calls for everything the Christian community can offer in the way of prevention and relief.
I remember hashing all this over more than once with the late Gordon Zahn, who proposed having the chaplaincy disestablished. He would have had priests minister to the troops, but as civilians, their formation and support coming from the church, not the state. That has been the case in the past in this country and elsewhere.
Disestablishment would solve some problems, but it would give rise to others. It is hard to imagine that the church could afford to make the prospect of chaplaincy to the military as attractive as the federal government can. Moreover, priests must have the permission of their diocesan bishops or religious superiors to volunteer for the military chaplaincy and to leave their parish or other assignments. Many bishops and superiors think they cannot spare priests for even a single period of enlistment.
Military Service as Morally Problematic
Military service for some men and women becomes morally problematic when after recruitment they become aware of church teaching and of the realities in which they are immersed. They need moral guidance especially at this point in their lives.
Catholics hear the definitive teaching of the Second Vatican Council: “Those who are pledged to the service of their country as members of its armed forces should regard themselves as agents of security and freedom on behalf of their people. As long as they fulfill their role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace” (“The Church in the Modern World,” No. 79). They also hear the absolute condemnations of the use of weapons of mass destruction (No. 80) and the ratification, even the praise of the right to conscientious objection (Nos. 78 and 79). In view of that condemnation of the use of weapons of mass destruction and of The Challenge of Peace, the 1983 pastoral letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops, the Pentagon considered banning observant Catholics from postings to missile silos where nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept ready for launch. Church authorities allayed their fears, however. American Catholics are “good citizens.” Contrary to international law and to Vatican II (No. 79), good Catholics can be relied upon to pass moral responsibility up the chain of command, or so they were advised.
I am not making an argument here for absolute pacifism as national policy. Justice demands the protection of the innocent, even by lethal force if necessary. But it is difficult, as Pope Benedict XVI has stated, to imagine that a war might be just in these times, even though justice may require police action, as in Rwanda or Sudan, as a last resort. An army as a valid police force is not what we object to. But what of those recruits who are convinced that the war in Iraq is illegal, unjust and immoral?
Early in the war, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, then head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, sent a pastoral letter to Catholic chaplains, advising them that they may calm the doubts of soldiers by telling them that their government leaders are privy to more information than is available to the public and that they may trust their leaders’ claims to justice for the cause. His letter did not endorse the war and did not question it either. It was very temperate. But any defender of the cause of any war at any time could utilize its reasoning. Not so with Bishop John Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Diocese in Canton, Ohio, who forbade his faithful to participate in the Iraq war under pain of mortal sin. Had other bishops or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops itself followed suit, we might well have had a crisis of church-state relations on our hands. Might it not be time for that?
The Web site of the military archdiocese offers a supportive commentary on the war in Iraq by Archbishop O’Brien from the time when he was the bishop in charge. But he would have come across different evidence and reached a different conclusion had his guides in Iraq not been U.S. military and political functionaries, but the unembedded journalists Ned Rosen, Dahr Jamail or Kathy Kelly, or had the archbishop visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Kurdistan.
Instilling Blood Lust
What of those in basic training who come to a sudden realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with efforts to instill blood lust in them? That is the training method since the discovery after World War II and the Korean war that only a small minority of soldiers who had an opportunity to shoot at a fellow human being wearing an enemy uniform would in fact do so. This was because of the normal instinct of our species not to kill those of our own kind. Since then, the psychological science of “killogy” has revolutionized basic training to override that instinct. (Pardon the grotesque neologism; it is not mine, but Col. Dave Grossman’s, former professor of psychology at West Point and author of studies on how to desensitize people to the point of loss of scruple against homicide.) Troops in training are led to chant, “Kill! Kill!” Here is a cadence commonly used now: “What makes the grass grow? Blood makes the grass grow! Who makes the blood flow? We do! We do! Blood! Blood! Blood!” These are not theoretical considerations. I know personally a young woman of humble origin and a director of Catholic Charities in a major archdiocese who both concluded that there is something morally wrong with this kind of basic training.
Chris Hedges, for 20 years a war correspondent for the The New York Times in El Salvador, the Middle East and the Balkans, noted in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that there is an erotic charge to all this. This is not your grandfather’s army! It is impossible to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower saying in public, as General James Mattis did, “It’s a hoot…it’s fun to shoot some people.”
What of the young man or woman who knows instinctively that this attitude is wrong? What of the U.S. Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Joshua Casteel, who had an awakening when a Muslim prisoner challenged his Christian faith? What is the chaplain’s proper role then? Are chaplains prepared to deal with men and women in a crisis of conscience that puts them outside the pale of the military? As pastors, I mean, not as military officers. Joshua’s chaplain was supportive, but many chaplains are not.
Priests enlist in the military as chaplains with the best of intentions: to serve pastoral needs. But this is not why they are commissioned as officers or what they are paid for. According to their employers, the chaplaincy’s purpose is to contribute to the military success of the unit to which the chaplain is attached. This purpose may cause cognitive dissonance for some chaplains. It is not unreasonable to assume that many, however, will resolve their distress in favor of the presuppositions of the officer corps of which they are a part and into which they have been socialized.
In 1968 then-bishop John J. O’Connor, who was chief of chaplains for the U.S. military, wrote a book called A Chaplain Looks at Vietnam, in which he defended the U.S. war policy there. He sent me, among others, an autographed copy and asked what I thought of it. Later he withdrew the book and apologized for it, calling it “a very poor book that I would like to re-write today, or hide.” He wrote it obviously influenced by the officers with whom he served in Vietnam, most of them before 1968, who were sanguine about the enterprise and its outcome. In this way O’Connor started a relationship with me and I dare say even a friendship. After some correspondence he assured me that all chaplains under his command were trained to know and understand the law and rules and regulations that apply to discharge from military service on grounds of conscience, and that Catholic chaplains were told to counsel conscientious objector claimants with the presumption of good will.
I am sure Cardinal O’Connor meant what he said, but I am not sure he had the means to see whether the policy was actually in place. In fact, not long ago a highly regarded cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had to face his chaplain as an adversary during a hearing to judge his conscientious objector claim. At that hearing, when Bishop Thomas Gumbleton appeared for the claimant, the chaplain remained silent. The cadet was released without prejudice. He deserved his chaplain’s support but did not get it.
Cardinal O’Connor had the right idea, or at least the right intention. The training of chaplains to support conscientious objectors never really took place, but if it had, much of the peace movement’s criticism of the military chaplaincy would be muted. We do not expect chaplains to trouble the consciences of their charges with the judgment of popes and episcopal conferences as to the justice of this or that war or of war in general. But we expect, even demand, that chaplains know the law and the rules and regulations pertaining to separation from military service by reason of conscience, and more critically, that they be instructed to counsel those who claim conscientious objection with a presumption of good intention.
Anecdotal evidence has it that the opposite is often the case. Conscientious objector claimants are sometimes challenged, accused of bad faith and dismissed out of hand as cowards and malingerers. That amounts to a dereliction of duty on the part of priest counselors. Citizens, even soldiers, have the right to appeal to the law. And counselors have an obligation to assume good faith in the absence of factual contrary evidence. Good conscience and right conscience are two different things, but the distinction may be assumed; questions of fact and logic may be raised, but not the validity of a moral judgment made honestly.
We in the peace movement will never be satisfied until the military chaplaincy is disestablished and priests and deacon chaplains are unambiguously servants of Christ and his church. Priests should not be forced to serve two masters.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Crossing the Bridge, Selma, 1965
Selma, Alabama, 1965
Our boy Tommy, Monica’s and mine, was born on February 10th, a month before Martin Luther King sent out the call for people from all over the country to come down to Selma, Alabama, to add momentum to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to win the right to vote for black people. Monica and I agreed, I had to go. Dan Berrigan gave me sixty dollars, the airfare. I flew into Montgomery, not knowing where I was going to stay the night. I walked where my nose led me with the intention of knocking on the first Catholic rectory door I came upon. So it was. I told the pastor why I had come. The local clergy had been forbidden to participate in the demonstrations, but not from aiding and abetting. The priest set the table, warmed up some leftovers, put a bottle of bourbon by my plate, sat with me and ate, then gave me a bed. The next day I took a bus to Selma, and was met there by Leroy Moton. He showed me the town. I had a choice of accommodations, he said. The floor of the parish center at Saint Edmund’s Church was littered with clerical Roman collars, black trousers and jackets. I chose to roll a bed into an x-ray room that was under construction at Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and establish a comfortable little nook for myself.
Selma was strictly segregated in those days. The white people lived in a pretty little town with tidy pretty houses, green lawns, flowering trees and shrubs. The black section looked like something out of the old South Africa, shanties mostly and a project on sun-baked clay. On Sunday, March 7th, six hundred people attempted to cross the Pettus Bridge on a March to Montgomery to press for voting rights for all. The police met them with vicious dogs, high powered fire-hoses, water-cannon. The whole world saw it on television, peaceful black demonstrators with dogs tearing at their flesh and high powered water-cannon knocking them over and pinning them against walls with such force as to rip their clothes off. Two days later, three of the “outside agitators” were attacked with a baseball bat, one of them critically, a white man, Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister. Many blacks had been killed, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. When a white man lay dying, Martin King seized the moment and put out the call. He asked everyone who could to come to Selma. I had to go.
At that point, the black people of Selma tried again to take an elderly black gentleman to register to vote. The police stopped them in front of Brown’s chapel, so they sat down in front of the police, and they sat there, and they sat, for four days and nights, under the sun and the moon. We sang, “They got a thing called the Berlin Wall, in Selma, Alabama.” “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round. Keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking, walking up to freedom land.” “Paul and Silas were bound in jail, ain’t nobody for to go their bail. Keep your eye on the prize, hold on, hold on!” “We are soldiers in the army, we have to fight, we know we have to die.”
The state police chief came to intimidate us. Bull Connor had the neck of a bull. He played his part well. And with him came a public relations officer from Governor Wallace’s office, Wilson Baker, Mutt and Jeff, as the saying goes, “good cop, bad cop.” They weren’t happy. We sang to them, “We love Bull Connor....” “We love Wilson Baker in our hearts.” We tried to mean it. We had to hold on to the belief that good will overcome evil and to trust in God. I joined a group of about twenty clergy to picket Mayor Joe Smitherman’s house. Bull Connor promptly arrested us and herded us onto a bus. We started to sing. He growled. We stopped. That man was truly frightening. The arrest was clearly illegal and we were released shortly.
But those white people wanted to kill us, they really wanted to kill us, some of them. Doctor King told us that blood would flow. He said it had to be our blood, not theirs. He meant it. We knew it, and we accepted it. Our blood, not theirs! “We are soldiers in the army....” A different kind of army! A policeman had killed Jimmy Lee Jackson, just another black man, for trying to shield his grandmother from another police bully. Just arrived, I was with Jimmy Lee Jackson’s people for his wake. His little brother’s face! A nine year old suddenly stripped of his innocence, the sorrow in his eyes. He had seen hatred, blind, stupid hatred.
Jim Reeb’s body was taken to Brown’s Chapel. Abraham Joshua Heschel recited Kaddish as the overflow congregation hummed, “We Shall Overcome.” Martin King preached, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church gave the benediction. Bishop Shannon, then President of Saint Thomas College in Minnesota, was there, and Richard John Neuhaus, priests and nuns and rabbis and ministers, black and white together, in Brown’s Chapel. After that funeral the police lifted the barricades and we marched to Selma Town Hall and we registered that voter.
Then at last the great March to Montgomery. I was a marshal for the first leg. A smaller representation made the whole route walking on Highway 80. Attorney General Nick Katzenbach mobilized the National Guard to protect us. At night we all gathered, one night at the Hospital of Saint Jude to hear Harry Bellafonte and Joan Baez sing to us. We made it to the state Capitol, a sea of people, and left our demands with Governor George Wallace. Then we returned to Selma.
When we arrived back at Good Samaritan Hospital, I went to the old folks’ solarium hoping that we made the evening news. There on the TV screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressing a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the nation, an estimated audience of seventy million people. He was talking about us in Selma, he named us, he spoke of “that good man,” Jim Reeb. He told America that we were right, that the problem was not a “Negro problem, or a Southern problem, but an American problem,” and that it was “deadly wrong” to deny any American the right to vote. It was time to rid this nation of every trace of bigotry and race hatred, he said, and he asked Congress to send him the Voters’ Rights bill, that he would sign into law. This was a Southern white man speaking with a Southern accent. With his every phrase, our hearts lept. He punctuated his text with the words, “We shall overcome.” As he ended, he looked up straight at the camera and the world and he said again: “We shall overcome!” He placed himself with us. The Congress rose and roared approval.
We were thunderstruck. At that moment, we knew -- we had won! After so much suffering and death, nonviolence had won. The South was going to change. America would change. We had touched the conscience of the nation. We had won! I looked around that room at hardened radicals, veterans of bitter and bloody labor battles, veterans of the peace movement who had paid the price for refusal of military service in long prison terms, and I saw tears streaming down their faces. Dr. King wept too. Nobody in the Movement ever saw him cry before, just that once.
Lyndon Johnson knew what he was doing. Against the advice of his closest advisors, he was handing the South over to the Republican Party, shattering the Rooseveltian coalition of Southern conservatives with Northern liberal progressives and realigning American politics for the foreseeable future. We had crossed more than the Pettus Bridge.
Our boy Tommy, Monica’s and mine, was born on February 10th, a month before Martin Luther King sent out the call for people from all over the country to come down to Selma, Alabama, to add momentum to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to win the right to vote for black people. Monica and I agreed, I had to go. Dan Berrigan gave me sixty dollars, the airfare. I flew into Montgomery, not knowing where I was going to stay the night. I walked where my nose led me with the intention of knocking on the first Catholic rectory door I came upon. So it was. I told the pastor why I had come. The local clergy had been forbidden to participate in the demonstrations, but not from aiding and abetting. The priest set the table, warmed up some leftovers, put a bottle of bourbon by my plate, sat with me and ate, then gave me a bed. The next day I took a bus to Selma, and was met there by Leroy Moton. He showed me the town. I had a choice of accommodations, he said. The floor of the parish center at Saint Edmund’s Church was littered with clerical Roman collars, black trousers and jackets. I chose to roll a bed into an x-ray room that was under construction at Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and establish a comfortable little nook for myself.
Selma was strictly segregated in those days. The white people lived in a pretty little town with tidy pretty houses, green lawns, flowering trees and shrubs. The black section looked like something out of the old South Africa, shanties mostly and a project on sun-baked clay. On Sunday, March 7th, six hundred people attempted to cross the Pettus Bridge on a March to Montgomery to press for voting rights for all. The police met them with vicious dogs, high powered fire-hoses, water-cannon. The whole world saw it on television, peaceful black demonstrators with dogs tearing at their flesh and high powered water-cannon knocking them over and pinning them against walls with such force as to rip their clothes off. Two days later, three of the “outside agitators” were attacked with a baseball bat, one of them critically, a white man, Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister. Many blacks had been killed, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. When a white man lay dying, Martin King seized the moment and put out the call. He asked everyone who could to come to Selma. I had to go.
At that point, the black people of Selma tried again to take an elderly black gentleman to register to vote. The police stopped them in front of Brown’s chapel, so they sat down in front of the police, and they sat there, and they sat, for four days and nights, under the sun and the moon. We sang, “They got a thing called the Berlin Wall, in Selma, Alabama.” “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round. Keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking, walking up to freedom land.” “Paul and Silas were bound in jail, ain’t nobody for to go their bail. Keep your eye on the prize, hold on, hold on!” “We are soldiers in the army, we have to fight, we know we have to die.”
The state police chief came to intimidate us. Bull Connor had the neck of a bull. He played his part well. And with him came a public relations officer from Governor Wallace’s office, Wilson Baker, Mutt and Jeff, as the saying goes, “good cop, bad cop.” They weren’t happy. We sang to them, “We love Bull Connor....” “We love Wilson Baker in our hearts.” We tried to mean it. We had to hold on to the belief that good will overcome evil and to trust in God. I joined a group of about twenty clergy to picket Mayor Joe Smitherman’s house. Bull Connor promptly arrested us and herded us onto a bus. We started to sing. He growled. We stopped. That man was truly frightening. The arrest was clearly illegal and we were released shortly.
But those white people wanted to kill us, they really wanted to kill us, some of them. Doctor King told us that blood would flow. He said it had to be our blood, not theirs. He meant it. We knew it, and we accepted it. Our blood, not theirs! “We are soldiers in the army....” A different kind of army! A policeman had killed Jimmy Lee Jackson, just another black man, for trying to shield his grandmother from another police bully. Just arrived, I was with Jimmy Lee Jackson’s people for his wake. His little brother’s face! A nine year old suddenly stripped of his innocence, the sorrow in his eyes. He had seen hatred, blind, stupid hatred.
Jim Reeb’s body was taken to Brown’s Chapel. Abraham Joshua Heschel recited Kaddish as the overflow congregation hummed, “We Shall Overcome.” Martin King preached, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church gave the benediction. Bishop Shannon, then President of Saint Thomas College in Minnesota, was there, and Richard John Neuhaus, priests and nuns and rabbis and ministers, black and white together, in Brown’s Chapel. After that funeral the police lifted the barricades and we marched to Selma Town Hall and we registered that voter.
Then at last the great March to Montgomery. I was a marshal for the first leg. A smaller representation made the whole route walking on Highway 80. Attorney General Nick Katzenbach mobilized the National Guard to protect us. At night we all gathered, one night at the Hospital of Saint Jude to hear Harry Bellafonte and Joan Baez sing to us. We made it to the state Capitol, a sea of people, and left our demands with Governor George Wallace. Then we returned to Selma.
When we arrived back at Good Samaritan Hospital, I went to the old folks’ solarium hoping that we made the evening news. There on the TV screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressing a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the nation, an estimated audience of seventy million people. He was talking about us in Selma, he named us, he spoke of “that good man,” Jim Reeb. He told America that we were right, that the problem was not a “Negro problem, or a Southern problem, but an American problem,” and that it was “deadly wrong” to deny any American the right to vote. It was time to rid this nation of every trace of bigotry and race hatred, he said, and he asked Congress to send him the Voters’ Rights bill, that he would sign into law. This was a Southern white man speaking with a Southern accent. With his every phrase, our hearts lept. He punctuated his text with the words, “We shall overcome.” As he ended, he looked up straight at the camera and the world and he said again: “We shall overcome!” He placed himself with us. The Congress rose and roared approval.
We were thunderstruck. At that moment, we knew -- we had won! After so much suffering and death, nonviolence had won. The South was going to change. America would change. We had touched the conscience of the nation. We had won! I looked around that room at hardened radicals, veterans of bitter and bloody labor battles, veterans of the peace movement who had paid the price for refusal of military service in long prison terms, and I saw tears streaming down their faces. Dr. King wept too. Nobody in the Movement ever saw him cry before, just that once.
Lyndon Johnson knew what he was doing. Against the advice of his closest advisors, he was handing the South over to the Republican Party, shattering the Rooseveltian coalition of Southern conservatives with Northern liberal progressives and realigning American politics for the foreseeable future. We had crossed more than the Pettus Bridge.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Voting Is Not Enough
31 Sunday A #148
Ex 22, 20-25
Ps 18
1 Thes 1, 5-10
Mt 22, 34-40
Newman Parish
University of Rochester
October 26, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
I have here a long sermon, about 2,000 words, five pages single-spaced. When I showed it to Fr. Brian he said, “Oh, no, Tom! These are college students. Give them a break! They’ve been lectured at all week! Have mercy!” Okay, here, I’ll put it down.
In a week and two days we go to the polls, many if not most of us for the first time. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, intrinsic evils, and the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And our unjust immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it.
The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children. And let me add torture. Torture is also a crime against life, condemned by the Second Vatican Council.
Our bishops have not addressed issues that address the political order as such, for instance the erosion of civil liberties in the so-called “War on Terror.” In a university setting, it is not inappropriate to take note of the expansion of the powers of the President these past eight years, usurpation of powers to put it more accurately, under the concept of the unitary executive and how that affects human dignity: the power to override Congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health care, the power to wage undeclared war, the power to create military courts to try civilians, the power to seize and transport anyone to secret prisons in foreign lands, to authorize torture. Never has the Constitution been under such attack, and few seem to notice. In these days of economic turmoil, our attention is on matters closer to home.
No party and no candidate fills the bill when it come to our needs at home or our foreign policy. Neither party comes clean on Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards.
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. It’s gone to the same people who engineered the economic crisis we are now entering, the worst since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch.
No matter who wins on November 4th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their last debate. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
Voting is important, a duty, but it is not enough. This country has never made any social advance unless the people rose up and demanded it. So we learned in the labor movement, so we learned in the Civil Rights Movement. So we learned during the Viet Nam war on the streets and in jail cells and in prison.
The kind of struggle we need, this country needs, will be long and hard and it’s going to cost. The kind of struggle we need can not be sustained by weak tea, I mean by a watered down faith. We need a strong and deep faith, strengthened and deepened by prayer and the sacraments.
Let me tell you a story. My friend Igal Roodenko was born in Philadelphia of a secular Jewish family in 1911. His first language was Yiddish. Igal was very well loved in our Catholic Worker community, although he was an atheist. He earned a master’s degree in plant pathology at Cornell University before World War II so that he could go to Palestine to help establish a Jewish state there, “a land without people for a people without a land.” That’s the founding myth of the modern Israeli state, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But then as Igal completed his course work, it occurred to him: there are people in Palestine. They are Palestinians. They have been there for thousands of years. They would resist having their land, their homes and farms and businesses taken from them. The Zionists would have to kill lots of Arab Palestinians to control Palestine! Igal could not eat meat. He was a vegetarian. He couldn’t even eat a fish! How was he going to kill an Arab?
Igal went to prison in World War II for three years for refusing to kill Germans and Japanese. He told me more than once that he would have loved to be able to join the army and take part in the great adventure of his generation. But he couldn’t go. He just couldn’t. In prison he met men he would never have found in the course of ordinary life, men who thought as he did. There were, and are, few of them, but more of them today. Together they studied the nonviolent theory and practice of Mahatma Gandhi. These men studied and argued about nonviolence and about our country’s social problems, and came to the conclusion that race is the fault-line in this society. They determined that after the war, after they were released from prison, they would apply Gandhian nonviolence to the race issue. The first Freedom Ride was not in 1960 – the photos you may have seen of the bus burning in Anniston, Georgia. The first Freedom Ride was in 1947, and every man on that ride spent World War II in prison for refusing military service. Igal served thirty days on a chain-gang in Virginia for sitting next to a black man on a bus. Those men sparked the great movement that finally dismantled the legal structures of racial segregation in this country, and, it is not too much to say, they saved this country.
Not long before he died, Igal reminisced. He said to me, “I’ve been in the Movement for a long time.” (He meant the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the peace movement.) “The Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties. There were all kinds of radicals. There were Communists and Trotskyists and Socialists and anarchists and you Catholic Workers. Now they’re all gone. All gone but you. And you are stronger than ever. You know what it is, I think, what keeps you going?” “Tell me Igal, what is it?” “I think it’s your religious faith!” Igal did not die an atheist.
Today’s Gospel has Jesus restate the Two Great Commandments of love, love of God and love of neighbor, and in the parable of the Good Samaritan he expands neighbor to include even the foreigner, even the enemy. If we love God with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength and our neighbors as ourselves, then we will not be content just to vote. We will want to take our part in the struggle for peace and justice with all our hearts and minds and strength, the nonviolent struggle for the beloved community, the only struggle that can truly claim to have God on its side.
Ex 22, 20-25
Ps 18
1 Thes 1, 5-10
Mt 22, 34-40
Newman Parish
University of Rochester
October 26, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
I have here a long sermon, about 2,000 words, five pages single-spaced. When I showed it to Fr. Brian he said, “Oh, no, Tom! These are college students. Give them a break! They’ve been lectured at all week! Have mercy!” Okay, here, I’ll put it down.
In a week and two days we go to the polls, many if not most of us for the first time. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, intrinsic evils, and the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And our unjust immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it.
The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children. And let me add torture. Torture is also a crime against life, condemned by the Second Vatican Council.
Our bishops have not addressed issues that address the political order as such, for instance the erosion of civil liberties in the so-called “War on Terror.” In a university setting, it is not inappropriate to take note of the expansion of the powers of the President these past eight years, usurpation of powers to put it more accurately, under the concept of the unitary executive and how that affects human dignity: the power to override Congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health care, the power to wage undeclared war, the power to create military courts to try civilians, the power to seize and transport anyone to secret prisons in foreign lands, to authorize torture. Never has the Constitution been under such attack, and few seem to notice. In these days of economic turmoil, our attention is on matters closer to home.
No party and no candidate fills the bill when it come to our needs at home or our foreign policy. Neither party comes clean on Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards.
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. It’s gone to the same people who engineered the economic crisis we are now entering, the worst since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch.
No matter who wins on November 4th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their last debate. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
Voting is important, a duty, but it is not enough. This country has never made any social advance unless the people rose up and demanded it. So we learned in the labor movement, so we learned in the Civil Rights Movement. So we learned during the Viet Nam war on the streets and in jail cells and in prison.
The kind of struggle we need, this country needs, will be long and hard and it’s going to cost. The kind of struggle we need can not be sustained by weak tea, I mean by a watered down faith. We need a strong and deep faith, strengthened and deepened by prayer and the sacraments.
Let me tell you a story. My friend Igal Roodenko was born in Philadelphia of a secular Jewish family in 1911. His first language was Yiddish. Igal was very well loved in our Catholic Worker community, although he was an atheist. He earned a master’s degree in plant pathology at Cornell University before World War II so that he could go to Palestine to help establish a Jewish state there, “a land without people for a people without a land.” That’s the founding myth of the modern Israeli state, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But then as Igal completed his course work, it occurred to him: there are people in Palestine. They are Palestinians. They have been there for thousands of years. They would resist having their land, their homes and farms and businesses taken from them. The Zionists would have to kill lots of Arab Palestinians to control Palestine! Igal could not eat meat. He was a vegetarian. He couldn’t even eat a fish! How was he going to kill an Arab?
Igal went to prison in World War II for three years for refusing to kill Germans and Japanese. He told me more than once that he would have loved to be able to join the army and take part in the great adventure of his generation. But he couldn’t go. He just couldn’t. In prison he met men he would never have found in the course of ordinary life, men who thought as he did. There were, and are, few of them, but more of them today. Together they studied the nonviolent theory and practice of Mahatma Gandhi. These men studied and argued about nonviolence and about our country’s social problems, and came to the conclusion that race is the fault-line in this society. They determined that after the war, after they were released from prison, they would apply Gandhian nonviolence to the race issue. The first Freedom Ride was not in 1960 – the photos you may have seen of the bus burning in Anniston, Georgia. The first Freedom Ride was in 1947, and every man on that ride spent World War II in prison for refusing military service. Igal served thirty days on a chain-gang in Virginia for sitting next to a black man on a bus. Those men sparked the great movement that finally dismantled the legal structures of racial segregation in this country, and, it is not too much to say, they saved this country.
Not long before he died, Igal reminisced. He said to me, “I’ve been in the Movement for a long time.” (He meant the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the peace movement.) “The Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties. There were all kinds of radicals. There were Communists and Trotskyists and Socialists and anarchists and you Catholic Workers. Now they’re all gone. All gone but you. And you are stronger than ever. You know what it is, I think, what keeps you going?” “Tell me Igal, what is it?” “I think it’s your religious faith!” Igal did not die an atheist.
Today’s Gospel has Jesus restate the Two Great Commandments of love, love of God and love of neighbor, and in the parable of the Good Samaritan he expands neighbor to include even the foreigner, even the enemy. If we love God with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength and our neighbors as ourselves, then we will not be content just to vote. We will want to take our part in the struggle for peace and justice with all our hearts and minds and strength, the nonviolent struggle for the beloved community, the only struggle that can truly claim to have God on its side.
Voting Conscience
29 Sunday A #145
Is 45, 1. 4-6
Ps 96
1 Thes 1, 1-5
Mt 22, 15-21
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
October 19, 2008
As Catholic Christians and as American citizens we face dilemmas approaching the polls two weeks and two days from now. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” first as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And we are to consider immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it. The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children.
No party and no candidate fills the bill. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards. Have you noticed?
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, year after year, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. I don’t have to tell you. It’s gone to the same people who cooked up the mess we are now entering, the worst economic crisis since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch. What to do now? No party and no candidate passes muster on each and every issue and some issues are more important than others. Each voter must weigh them. There is no one litmus test that’s going to help you make up your mind, and no bishop, priest or deacon is going to do it for you either. Maybe it’s time to consider a third party. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re taking on water.
No matter who wins on November 4th, no matter who takes the White House on January 20th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one as is so often the case, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their debate last Wednesday night. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! Too many of us, even many of us who are poor by ordinary standards, live wasteful lives, unsustainable for the planet. If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. We have to find different ways of living. Put the laundry out to dry on a clothesline rather than into an electric dryer. Turn down the thermostat five degrees and dig out Grandpa’s long johns and put on a sweater. How about the old Christian practice of fasting? Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” The Pharisees tried to set a trap for Jesus. Jesus didn’t answer their question. Jesus gave an answer to a question they didn’t ask. Modern politicians have adopted that tactic, if little else from Jesus. “Show me a coin,” he said. Jesus did not have a coin of his own. He had to ask for one. Dorothy Day used to say the less we have of Caesar’s the less we have to give him back. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Where do the things of God end and the things of Caesar begin? Surely we must obey God rather than man, and just as surely, we are called to responsible citizenship. The things that are God’s are human life, human dignity because God created man in his own image and likeness. Come to think of it, there are no things that are not God’s things ultimately, for God created them all and saw that they are good and gave them all to all of us, not to some of us, but to all of us to share and to pass on.
“Render unto Caesar!” Our boast as Americans is that we have no king, no Caesar. Ours is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, unless we let it fall from our grasp into the hands of invisible and irresponsible corporate managers for them to pull the strings that move our Congress and even our courts and to speak with ventriloquist voice from the Oval Office.
The old American Indian saying goes, “When you see that your canoe is heading toward a waterfall, pray to God and row as hard as you can to shore!” Pray to Archangel Michael to help us row the boat ashore. Old-timers remember a prayer we all recited after every Latin Mass for the conversion of Russia:
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, and do thou, Oh prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander the earth seeking the ruin of souls.” Pray that prayer now for the conversion of the United States!
Is 45, 1. 4-6
Ps 96
1 Thes 1, 1-5
Mt 22, 15-21
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
October 19, 2008
As Catholic Christians and as American citizens we face dilemmas approaching the polls two weeks and two days from now. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” first as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And we are to consider immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it. The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children.
No party and no candidate fills the bill. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards. Have you noticed?
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, year after year, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. I don’t have to tell you. It’s gone to the same people who cooked up the mess we are now entering, the worst economic crisis since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch. What to do now? No party and no candidate passes muster on each and every issue and some issues are more important than others. Each voter must weigh them. There is no one litmus test that’s going to help you make up your mind, and no bishop, priest or deacon is going to do it for you either. Maybe it’s time to consider a third party. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re taking on water.
No matter who wins on November 4th, no matter who takes the White House on January 20th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one as is so often the case, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their debate last Wednesday night. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! Too many of us, even many of us who are poor by ordinary standards, live wasteful lives, unsustainable for the planet. If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. We have to find different ways of living. Put the laundry out to dry on a clothesline rather than into an electric dryer. Turn down the thermostat five degrees and dig out Grandpa’s long johns and put on a sweater. How about the old Christian practice of fasting? Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” The Pharisees tried to set a trap for Jesus. Jesus didn’t answer their question. Jesus gave an answer to a question they didn’t ask. Modern politicians have adopted that tactic, if little else from Jesus. “Show me a coin,” he said. Jesus did not have a coin of his own. He had to ask for one. Dorothy Day used to say the less we have of Caesar’s the less we have to give him back. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Where do the things of God end and the things of Caesar begin? Surely we must obey God rather than man, and just as surely, we are called to responsible citizenship. The things that are God’s are human life, human dignity because God created man in his own image and likeness. Come to think of it, there are no things that are not God’s things ultimately, for God created them all and saw that they are good and gave them all to all of us, not to some of us, but to all of us to share and to pass on.
“Render unto Caesar!” Our boast as Americans is that we have no king, no Caesar. Ours is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, unless we let it fall from our grasp into the hands of invisible and irresponsible corporate managers for them to pull the strings that move our Congress and even our courts and to speak with ventriloquist voice from the Oval Office.
The old American Indian saying goes, “When you see that your canoe is heading toward a waterfall, pray to God and row as hard as you can to shore!” Pray to Archangel Michael to help us row the boat ashore. Old-timers remember a prayer we all recited after every Latin Mass for the conversion of Russia:
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, and do thou, Oh prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander the earth seeking the ruin of souls.” Pray that prayer now for the conversion of the United States!
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Little Things Mean a Lot
20 Sunday A #118
Is 56, 1. 6-7
Ps 67
Rom 11, 13-15. 29-32
Mt 15, 21-28
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
August 17, 2008
Oh what a beautiful morning! The worst of the summer heat has passed and the air is so fresh. It’s great to be out in it. But even so, life gets too noisy sometimes, lots of times. It was the same with Jesus. Jesus and the apostles didn’t have radio, TV, movies, cell phones, i-pods and e-mail, but they had noise too, the braying of donkeys, the clatter of chariot wheels on cobblestone, the shouting of peddlers and fishwives in the streets and often the crowds that followed and gathered around them. Jesus had to get away sometimes, away from the crowds, away from the smells and the noise and distractions. Jesus had to take time to pray, to center on his mission, on his Father’s will. Remember, directly after his baptism by John, Jesus spent forty days in the desert, to listen to the voice in the stillness. If the incarnate Word of God has to collect himself in quiet to pray, then surely you and I do too.
Last Sunday Matthew recounted how Jesus withdrew from the crowds after having fed the five thousand. He had been preaching to them all day. He must have been exhausted. He had to get away, even from his close friends, so he sent them on ahead across the lake. This week Jesus and his disciples are traveling north, away from Jewish territory heading into the district of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon. They are looking for some peace and quiet where they are not known and nobody will bother them. Suddenly a Canaanite woman approaches and breaks the silence. She begs Jesus to cure her daughter, says the girl is tormented by an evil spirit. It was a nervous disorder probably, but the ancients didn’t know much about neurology. They attributed all kinds of disorders to evil spirits. Whatever the case, the disciples have had enough of people and their problems and ask Jesus to get rid of her. He doesn’t do it. Jesus engages the woman in a dialogue, a dialogue that sounds very strange to our ears.
He tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She throws herself down at Jesus’ feet and begs him, saying “Lord, help me!” He replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Then she said, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” Then Jesus said to her in reply, “Oh woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that hour.
It’s a little easier for us to hear this passage if we know that the Greek word for dogs used here is really puppies. It takes some of the sting out of what sounds like an insult. But to refer to non-Jewish people as dogs of any age or kind seems insensitive at very least to the modern ear. That’s not how Matthew’s audience heard these words. Most of them were Jews who had accepted Jesus, but they remained Jews. They observed the Torah commandments, went to synagogue and the Temple and saw themselves as “The Chosen” in a way that no other people could claim to be chosen. But more and more pagan converts were joining their Christian ranks. Soon they would be outnumbered. Both Peter and Paul taught that the Holy Spirit does not discriminate in the house of faith in Jesus Christ. The Jewish Christians didn’t quite know what to make of this, how they should relate to their new brothers and sisters in Christ.
In today’s Gospel story, it is remarkable that Jesus is talking to a woman at all. That isn’t done in that part of the world by traditional people even to this day, unless the woman is accompanied by a male family member. But more than that. She is a Canaanite! Any good Jew would avoid even words with a pagan. But Matthew’s hearers would enjoy the one-upmanship in this inter-play. The Canaanite woman gets the better of Jesus. Jesus enjoyed that, and so did Matthew’s hearers.
The obvious point here is the power of faith. It is her faith that Jesus can indeed cure her daughter that moved him. There is another point here too, and that is the mysterious relationship of Jews to Christians. Saint Paul is at pains in the readings we have heard today and last week to point out that God’s Covenant with the Jewish people is not broken, the Promise to the Jews is irrevocable, and more, that salvation comes from the Jews because Jesus is a Jew. Jesus is the new Moses. Moses freed the People from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Law. Jesus frees us from sin and death and writes the law of love, not on tablets of stone but on the flesh of our hearts. Jesus is a prophet in the line of Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the fulfillment of their prophecies. And Jesus is a priest, a high priest in the line of Melchizedek, the only high priest, the sole mediator between God and man. And Jesus is king, the son, the heir of David. God promised David his seed would reign forever, his kingdom would have no end, and so it does, in Jesus. Paul suggests that if the Jews as a whole had accepted Jesus, then the mission to the gentiles would not have been. So we are in a mysterious relationship, Jews and Christians.
The modern ear has difficulty hearing of an exclusively “chosen” people. God’s grace is just that, free, as Saint Paul tells us. God will give it where he will. Otherwise it wouldn’t be grace, a gift. God chose Israel not for its own sake, but to be a light to the nations. The Jerusalem Temple would at last be a house of prayer for all people. The temple of stone is long gone but the temple of the Spirit remains. The Christian Church, Paul tells us, is as a branch grafted on to the root stock of the olive tree that is Israel. How can the branch survive if the stock should wither and die?
In the end, Israel will enter the fullness of salvation, as we pray every Good Friday. And so will we. But what each one of us as individuals will be in the New Jerusalem, Jew or gentile, will depend on many things. First, the grace of God to accept the faith as it has been handed on to us and make it our own. Then how we live our faith. In the rush of modern life, in the clang and clatter of it all, we must take to the desert, as Jesus did, make a desert place in our hearts, an empty place, for God. If you don’t already, set ten minutes aside every day for prayer. Then make it fifteen, then maybe twenty. Quiet down, calm down. Make room for God. It will lower your blood pressure.
Life is unpredictable, our own individual lives and our life in common. Whatever comes, the little choices we make every day add up and in the end they make all the difference. If little, ordinary things are done in the love of God and neighbor, then that’s what really matters. Sweep the floor for the love of God and of your wife. Do the dishes as a prayer. When I see my wife make a bed with such love and care and attention, I know it is a prayer. Be mindful of the pain of your neighbor who is caring for an ailing child. Comfort the mourner. Say a kind word to someone in need. Many years working in soup kitchens and homeless shelters taught me that a smile, a friendly word, “How are you?” “See you tomorrow,” “God Bless you!” are far more important than the bowl of soup or the bed.
Make it a habit. That’s what the word virtue means, a habit. We can’t tell what the future will bring, our own or the larger world’s, a dread diagnosis, the effects of natural disaster, or of war or economic collapse. The best we can do is to meet every crisis that comes with the strength to meet it, to make the right decision at that time, out of habit, the habits that guide us day by day in all the little things we do. It’s the little things that add up. The rest is up to God. So pray, like the Canaanite woman, “Lord, help me.”
Is 56, 1. 6-7
Ps 67
Rom 11, 13-15. 29-32
Mt 15, 21-28
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
August 17, 2008
Oh what a beautiful morning! The worst of the summer heat has passed and the air is so fresh. It’s great to be out in it. But even so, life gets too noisy sometimes, lots of times. It was the same with Jesus. Jesus and the apostles didn’t have radio, TV, movies, cell phones, i-pods and e-mail, but they had noise too, the braying of donkeys, the clatter of chariot wheels on cobblestone, the shouting of peddlers and fishwives in the streets and often the crowds that followed and gathered around them. Jesus had to get away sometimes, away from the crowds, away from the smells and the noise and distractions. Jesus had to take time to pray, to center on his mission, on his Father’s will. Remember, directly after his baptism by John, Jesus spent forty days in the desert, to listen to the voice in the stillness. If the incarnate Word of God has to collect himself in quiet to pray, then surely you and I do too.
Last Sunday Matthew recounted how Jesus withdrew from the crowds after having fed the five thousand. He had been preaching to them all day. He must have been exhausted. He had to get away, even from his close friends, so he sent them on ahead across the lake. This week Jesus and his disciples are traveling north, away from Jewish territory heading into the district of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon. They are looking for some peace and quiet where they are not known and nobody will bother them. Suddenly a Canaanite woman approaches and breaks the silence. She begs Jesus to cure her daughter, says the girl is tormented by an evil spirit. It was a nervous disorder probably, but the ancients didn’t know much about neurology. They attributed all kinds of disorders to evil spirits. Whatever the case, the disciples have had enough of people and their problems and ask Jesus to get rid of her. He doesn’t do it. Jesus engages the woman in a dialogue, a dialogue that sounds very strange to our ears.
He tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She throws herself down at Jesus’ feet and begs him, saying “Lord, help me!” He replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Then she said, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” Then Jesus said to her in reply, “Oh woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that hour.
It’s a little easier for us to hear this passage if we know that the Greek word for dogs used here is really puppies. It takes some of the sting out of what sounds like an insult. But to refer to non-Jewish people as dogs of any age or kind seems insensitive at very least to the modern ear. That’s not how Matthew’s audience heard these words. Most of them were Jews who had accepted Jesus, but they remained Jews. They observed the Torah commandments, went to synagogue and the Temple and saw themselves as “The Chosen” in a way that no other people could claim to be chosen. But more and more pagan converts were joining their Christian ranks. Soon they would be outnumbered. Both Peter and Paul taught that the Holy Spirit does not discriminate in the house of faith in Jesus Christ. The Jewish Christians didn’t quite know what to make of this, how they should relate to their new brothers and sisters in Christ.
In today’s Gospel story, it is remarkable that Jesus is talking to a woman at all. That isn’t done in that part of the world by traditional people even to this day, unless the woman is accompanied by a male family member. But more than that. She is a Canaanite! Any good Jew would avoid even words with a pagan. But Matthew’s hearers would enjoy the one-upmanship in this inter-play. The Canaanite woman gets the better of Jesus. Jesus enjoyed that, and so did Matthew’s hearers.
The obvious point here is the power of faith. It is her faith that Jesus can indeed cure her daughter that moved him. There is another point here too, and that is the mysterious relationship of Jews to Christians. Saint Paul is at pains in the readings we have heard today and last week to point out that God’s Covenant with the Jewish people is not broken, the Promise to the Jews is irrevocable, and more, that salvation comes from the Jews because Jesus is a Jew. Jesus is the new Moses. Moses freed the People from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Law. Jesus frees us from sin and death and writes the law of love, not on tablets of stone but on the flesh of our hearts. Jesus is a prophet in the line of Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the fulfillment of their prophecies. And Jesus is a priest, a high priest in the line of Melchizedek, the only high priest, the sole mediator between God and man. And Jesus is king, the son, the heir of David. God promised David his seed would reign forever, his kingdom would have no end, and so it does, in Jesus. Paul suggests that if the Jews as a whole had accepted Jesus, then the mission to the gentiles would not have been. So we are in a mysterious relationship, Jews and Christians.
The modern ear has difficulty hearing of an exclusively “chosen” people. God’s grace is just that, free, as Saint Paul tells us. God will give it where he will. Otherwise it wouldn’t be grace, a gift. God chose Israel not for its own sake, but to be a light to the nations. The Jerusalem Temple would at last be a house of prayer for all people. The temple of stone is long gone but the temple of the Spirit remains. The Christian Church, Paul tells us, is as a branch grafted on to the root stock of the olive tree that is Israel. How can the branch survive if the stock should wither and die?
In the end, Israel will enter the fullness of salvation, as we pray every Good Friday. And so will we. But what each one of us as individuals will be in the New Jerusalem, Jew or gentile, will depend on many things. First, the grace of God to accept the faith as it has been handed on to us and make it our own. Then how we live our faith. In the rush of modern life, in the clang and clatter of it all, we must take to the desert, as Jesus did, make a desert place in our hearts, an empty place, for God. If you don’t already, set ten minutes aside every day for prayer. Then make it fifteen, then maybe twenty. Quiet down, calm down. Make room for God. It will lower your blood pressure.
Life is unpredictable, our own individual lives and our life in common. Whatever comes, the little choices we make every day add up and in the end they make all the difference. If little, ordinary things are done in the love of God and neighbor, then that’s what really matters. Sweep the floor for the love of God and of your wife. Do the dishes as a prayer. When I see my wife make a bed with such love and care and attention, I know it is a prayer. Be mindful of the pain of your neighbor who is caring for an ailing child. Comfort the mourner. Say a kind word to someone in need. Many years working in soup kitchens and homeless shelters taught me that a smile, a friendly word, “How are you?” “See you tomorrow,” “God Bless you!” are far more important than the bowl of soup or the bed.
Make it a habit. That’s what the word virtue means, a habit. We can’t tell what the future will bring, our own or the larger world’s, a dread diagnosis, the effects of natural disaster, or of war or economic collapse. The best we can do is to meet every crisis that comes with the strength to meet it, to make the right decision at that time, out of habit, the habits that guide us day by day in all the little things we do. It’s the little things that add up. The rest is up to God. So pray, like the Canaanite woman, “Lord, help me.”
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Kingdom Surprises
16 Sunday A #106
Wis 12, 13. 16-19
Ps 86
Rm 8, 26-27
Mt 13, 14-43
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
July 20, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
The kingdom of God is like seed scattered on the ground, some seed taking root and flourishing, some not. Jesus invites us to ponder why. The kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed. It grows into a bush large enough for birds of the air to nest in it. Or the kingdom is like a field with buried treasure such as one would sell all he has to purchase, or a pearl of great price, or yeast kneaded into dough. Today’s parable is of the weeds sown in a field of wheat. The farmer will let the weeds grow along with the wheat, lest in pulling them up the wheat may be damaged as well. He will wait until harvest time. Then he will order his workers to gather the wheat into his barns, and to burn the weeds in the furnace.
God is good and forgiving, our Psalm tells us. But he is also just. His mercy exceeds his justice, but justice remains. Saint Paul tells us that once we are in Christ we are dead to sin. We are saved by the gracious act of God in giving us his very self. God is great, great beyond all understanding or words to describe, but in our adoption we cry out, Abba, Father! We are saved in faith and in hope, by the incarnation, the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Into him we have been baptized. If we are truly in Christ we will do the things of Christ, the works of justice and mercy. We will feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, comfort the sorrowing, counsel the doubtful, denounce evil yet forgive injuries. This is how we will know our faith is real, by its fruit. The spirit battles against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit, Paul tells us. By the flesh he means the works of death, malicious talk, envy, greed, theft and violence. But the victory is ours, in Christ.
Pope Benedict is in Australia today, at the World Youth Festival, with almost a quarter of a million young Catholics from around the world. This pope is full of surprises. We didn’t expect him to do much traveling. He has a heart condition that makes it dangerous for him to fly long hours, and Australia is long hours from Rome. We never know what to expect from this man! Or from young people, for that matter. They are full of surprises too. We are told that today’s youth are spoiled rotten, corrupted by materialism and easy pleasure. Yet they flock to the Holy Father. We are told that faith is weak among the young. Don’t you believe that either. Look at them, wonderful young Catholics! Their faith is weak as compared to what? If we compare the faith of young Catholics today to that of previous generations, we have to admit that a lot of our elders were baptized but never really evangelized.
Today’s young Catholics are different, and they will make a difference. They are Catholics by free choice. They are here today not because of any social pressure (if there is pressure it’s in the opposite direction). They made the right choice, and they have other choices to make. Some are being called to the priesthood, to the diaconate and the religious life. Some are being called to lay ministry. All are called to holiness, all are called to witness. All have to decide how they will spend their lives’ energy. They have to make the right choices, or we are done for, done for as an American society! Maybe even as a species!
This generation has a role to play. They will not usher in the kingdom of God. Only God can do that. But they have a crucial part to play in conserving the very land that feeds us and the air we breathe and the water that sustains us, and in building structures of peace and justice in the name of the Lord. God is love and God is truth and the truth will set you free, but you have to dig for the truth! You will not learn the truth from the mass media. You will not learn the truth from any government. You will not learn the truth from any political party, or from any text book either. You have to look long and hard for it, yourself, then judge reality by the light of the Gospel, then act, alone if you have to, together if you can.
On his arrival in Australia, the Pope met first with representatives of all the major religions, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus. He told them that religion must never be a cause of hatred and division of people but rather a force for unity and peace. He said, "In a world threatened by sinister and indiscriminate forms of violence, the unified voice of religious people urges nations to resolve conflicts through peaceful means and with full regard for human dignity."
History, reality itself has moved the Church forward on questions of war and peace and social justice far beyond anything anyone imagined only as few decades ago. Some of us here remember the day in late October, 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair’s breadth of an exchange of hydrogen bombs that would have made this planet largely uninhabitable, the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy had his finger on the button in the White House and Nikita Khrushchev had his finger on his own button in the Kremlin, the button that would give the signal to launch an attack. We had thousands of missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at them and they had as many aimed at us, all our major cities. The Russian military were begging Khrushchev to push that button, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington were demanding that Kennedy push it first! John Kennedy was heard to say, as he came out of a meeting with them, “They’re crazy!” For their part, some of the military thought President Kennedy was toying with treason. “Better dead than red,” they said. Kennedy held off. Secret negotiations through the Vatican resolved the conflict. Khrushchev backed down and a deal was struck. The Soviets would pull their missiles out of Cuba and the US would pledge not to invade Cuba and pull its nuclear missiles out of Turkey.
Imagine how President Kennedy must have felt the day after, when the dust settled! When John Kennedy realized what he had almost done, how close he and Khrushchev had come to destroying everything they had pledged to defend, at that moment he had a change of heart, a profound and fundamental change, a conversion, a turn toward peace. Eight months later, in June, 1963, Kennedy addressed the Commencement at American University in Washington, announcing a strategy of peace and calling for disarmament and a nuclear test ban treaty. There he said, "Man must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” He went on to say, “War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." That was a World War II hero speaking, President John Kennedy, to be shot down five months later, by whom we still do not know!
For over fifteen hundred years, Catholics wrote their governments, each side of every war, a blank check. That had to change. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council urged all of us to re-think war and peace with an entirely new attitude. In 1983 the bishops of our country, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, recognized nonviolence as an authentic Christian way and named Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day as models of Christian discipleship. Five years ago, in 2003, the Vatican approved a joint statement of Catholic and Mennonite theologians that made nonviolence the default position of the Catholic Church in times of conflict. From now on, no government gets a blank check! But for you and me, it is not enough to resist the war-makers. It’s not enough to denounce. We must announce a different way of living, living lives that remove the causes of war, and for that we need to pray to God for we can not do it by ourselves.
We do not know how to pray as we ought, Paul tells us. The Spirit within us prays for us, the God who revealed himself to Moses in the Burning Bush as Liberator, the God who revealed himself at last in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, the God whose mercy exceeds his justice, the God who makes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust and his sun to shine on the wicked and the good, Jesus, Brother, Lord and Savior.
Wis 12, 13. 16-19
Ps 86
Rm 8, 26-27
Mt 13, 14-43
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
July 20, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
The kingdom of God is like seed scattered on the ground, some seed taking root and flourishing, some not. Jesus invites us to ponder why. The kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed. It grows into a bush large enough for birds of the air to nest in it. Or the kingdom is like a field with buried treasure such as one would sell all he has to purchase, or a pearl of great price, or yeast kneaded into dough. Today’s parable is of the weeds sown in a field of wheat. The farmer will let the weeds grow along with the wheat, lest in pulling them up the wheat may be damaged as well. He will wait until harvest time. Then he will order his workers to gather the wheat into his barns, and to burn the weeds in the furnace.
God is good and forgiving, our Psalm tells us. But he is also just. His mercy exceeds his justice, but justice remains. Saint Paul tells us that once we are in Christ we are dead to sin. We are saved by the gracious act of God in giving us his very self. God is great, great beyond all understanding or words to describe, but in our adoption we cry out, Abba, Father! We are saved in faith and in hope, by the incarnation, the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Into him we have been baptized. If we are truly in Christ we will do the things of Christ, the works of justice and mercy. We will feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, comfort the sorrowing, counsel the doubtful, denounce evil yet forgive injuries. This is how we will know our faith is real, by its fruit. The spirit battles against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit, Paul tells us. By the flesh he means the works of death, malicious talk, envy, greed, theft and violence. But the victory is ours, in Christ.
Pope Benedict is in Australia today, at the World Youth Festival, with almost a quarter of a million young Catholics from around the world. This pope is full of surprises. We didn’t expect him to do much traveling. He has a heart condition that makes it dangerous for him to fly long hours, and Australia is long hours from Rome. We never know what to expect from this man! Or from young people, for that matter. They are full of surprises too. We are told that today’s youth are spoiled rotten, corrupted by materialism and easy pleasure. Yet they flock to the Holy Father. We are told that faith is weak among the young. Don’t you believe that either. Look at them, wonderful young Catholics! Their faith is weak as compared to what? If we compare the faith of young Catholics today to that of previous generations, we have to admit that a lot of our elders were baptized but never really evangelized.
Today’s young Catholics are different, and they will make a difference. They are Catholics by free choice. They are here today not because of any social pressure (if there is pressure it’s in the opposite direction). They made the right choice, and they have other choices to make. Some are being called to the priesthood, to the diaconate and the religious life. Some are being called to lay ministry. All are called to holiness, all are called to witness. All have to decide how they will spend their lives’ energy. They have to make the right choices, or we are done for, done for as an American society! Maybe even as a species!
This generation has a role to play. They will not usher in the kingdom of God. Only God can do that. But they have a crucial part to play in conserving the very land that feeds us and the air we breathe and the water that sustains us, and in building structures of peace and justice in the name of the Lord. God is love and God is truth and the truth will set you free, but you have to dig for the truth! You will not learn the truth from the mass media. You will not learn the truth from any government. You will not learn the truth from any political party, or from any text book either. You have to look long and hard for it, yourself, then judge reality by the light of the Gospel, then act, alone if you have to, together if you can.
On his arrival in Australia, the Pope met first with representatives of all the major religions, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus. He told them that religion must never be a cause of hatred and division of people but rather a force for unity and peace. He said, "In a world threatened by sinister and indiscriminate forms of violence, the unified voice of religious people urges nations to resolve conflicts through peaceful means and with full regard for human dignity."
History, reality itself has moved the Church forward on questions of war and peace and social justice far beyond anything anyone imagined only as few decades ago. Some of us here remember the day in late October, 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair’s breadth of an exchange of hydrogen bombs that would have made this planet largely uninhabitable, the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy had his finger on the button in the White House and Nikita Khrushchev had his finger on his own button in the Kremlin, the button that would give the signal to launch an attack. We had thousands of missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at them and they had as many aimed at us, all our major cities. The Russian military were begging Khrushchev to push that button, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington were demanding that Kennedy push it first! John Kennedy was heard to say, as he came out of a meeting with them, “They’re crazy!” For their part, some of the military thought President Kennedy was toying with treason. “Better dead than red,” they said. Kennedy held off. Secret negotiations through the Vatican resolved the conflict. Khrushchev backed down and a deal was struck. The Soviets would pull their missiles out of Cuba and the US would pledge not to invade Cuba and pull its nuclear missiles out of Turkey.
Imagine how President Kennedy must have felt the day after, when the dust settled! When John Kennedy realized what he had almost done, how close he and Khrushchev had come to destroying everything they had pledged to defend, at that moment he had a change of heart, a profound and fundamental change, a conversion, a turn toward peace. Eight months later, in June, 1963, Kennedy addressed the Commencement at American University in Washington, announcing a strategy of peace and calling for disarmament and a nuclear test ban treaty. There he said, "Man must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” He went on to say, “War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." That was a World War II hero speaking, President John Kennedy, to be shot down five months later, by whom we still do not know!
For over fifteen hundred years, Catholics wrote their governments, each side of every war, a blank check. That had to change. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council urged all of us to re-think war and peace with an entirely new attitude. In 1983 the bishops of our country, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, recognized nonviolence as an authentic Christian way and named Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day as models of Christian discipleship. Five years ago, in 2003, the Vatican approved a joint statement of Catholic and Mennonite theologians that made nonviolence the default position of the Catholic Church in times of conflict. From now on, no government gets a blank check! But for you and me, it is not enough to resist the war-makers. It’s not enough to denounce. We must announce a different way of living, living lives that remove the causes of war, and for that we need to pray to God for we can not do it by ourselves.
We do not know how to pray as we ought, Paul tells us. The Spirit within us prays for us, the God who revealed himself to Moses in the Burning Bush as Liberator, the God who revealed himself at last in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, the God whose mercy exceeds his justice, the God who makes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust and his sun to shine on the wicked and the good, Jesus, Brother, Lord and Savior.
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Harvest is Great
11 Sunday A #91
Ex 19, 2-6b
Ps 100
Rom 5, 6-11
Mt 9, 36. 10, 1-8
Deacon Tom Cornell
Saint Mary’s Church
Marlboro, N.Y.
June 15, 2008
In Paul’s Letter to the Romans we read, “When we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, we were still enemies; now that we have been reconciled, surely we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” What strikes me is “we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” We are accustomed to hearing that we are saved by the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross. But here we are told that we are saved by his life also, by his words and his deeds, his teaching and example.
Our Gospel has Jesus sending the Twelve out on their first mission. He tells them to avoid Gentile territory, not even to enter a Samaritan town but to go only “to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” with his good news, that the kingdom of God it at hand. Little by little, the disciples came to realize who Jesus is, the Christ, the awaited one. When Jesus asks them, “Who do you think that I am,” Peter answers for the rest, “You are the Christ, the Son of God.” At Lazarus’ tomb, Martha exclaims, “You are the Christ, the one who is to come into this world.” On Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration, Jesus instructed Peter and James and John to tell no one their vision of him with Moses and Elijah until after his Resurrection. That Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, is a secret, “the messianic secret,” as it is called, that they are to keep until the Resurrection. Then the Holy Spirit will descend upon them. They will be enlightened and grasp the meaning of all the things that had happened.
The first reading today from Exodus has Moses and the People Mount Sinai after forty years in the desert. Moses will ascend the mountain and receive the Ten Commandments. God is about to establish his Covenant with the People of Israel: “You shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”
Israel was not worthy. No people, no nation and no person can ever be worthy of God’s grace. God’s gifts are given freely, undeservedly. “Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give.” Israel was unfaithful over and over again, but God called the People back through a faithful remnant and through the Prophets. God did not choose Israel for its own sake but that Israel might be a light to the nations, a beacon of his justice, mercy and peace to all. All the nations will some day climb the Mountain of the Lord to learn the Lord’s ways. Then they will beat their swords into ploughshares and study war no more.
Jesus’ earthly mission was to the lost sheep of Israel. But after his Resurrection, his last instruction to his disciples was to go out to all the peoples. “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” the Great Commission. The apostles preached Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and they established churches throughout the ancient world. And as he promised, Jesus has been with us, and will be with us, through the end of time. But just as God did not choose Israel for its own sake, so God did not establish the Church for its own sake. The Church is to be a beacon of God’s justice, mercy, peace and reconciliation for all peoples and lead them at last to the Holy Mountain and to teach them the Lord’s ways.
I was trained as a high school teacher. As a teacher I learned that people do not learn so much from lessons, sermons, lectures or books as they do from stories, stories of people whose lives inspire. We have so many examples in our saints. The Church shows her human face, Christ’s face, in the witness of the saints, the canonized and the un-canonized. And we are all called to be saints.
When I am in Rome I like to live in the house where the young men from England and Wales live as they prepare for ordination to the priesthood. During the time of Elizabeth I, these men knew that if they returned to England as priests they would be pursued by agents of the Crown, and if they were caught they would have the opportunity to deny their Catholic faith or be killed. One by one, two by two and three by three they went back to England as newly ordained priests. Forty-three were hunted down, executed, hanged, drawn and quartered. Walking the halls they walked, eating in their same refectory, praying in their same chapel, you feel the presence of those young men. Theirs was a faith worth dying for. Go to Assisi and you will sense the presence even today of Saints Francis and Clare and Saint Anthony, who denounced social injustice with vehemence! And at Pietrelcina, Padre Pio. There Padre Pio established a hospital that he called “The House for the Relief of Suffering.” Isn’t that a wonderful name for a church, the Church? “A house for the relief of suffering!” Theirs is a faith worth living.
We think of Damian the Leper on Molokai, of Mother Cabrini and Mother Ann Seton and Mother Teresa, of John Henry Newman and Dorothy Day. They met the poor and the wretched, lived with them and gave them not only physical relief but a sense of worth, a feeling of being loved and forgiven their sins and their faults, God’s love. They did it day by day, directly, person to person. Our young people should know these stories. They will strengthen them in the Faith more than any threat of eternal damnation! Young people crave adventure and great deeds; their hearts are generous. They seek something bigger than themselves. The harvest is great, but the laborers few.
The saints are our models. Their stories are close at hand. People who follow their example can not fail to grow in love. They will also grow in courage and strength. They will inevitably come to ask why there is such need, why are there so many poor and why so much needless suffering in this world. Why the enormous gap between the few very rich and the many very poor when God’s creation is meant for all? Do we have more than our share? They will search for answers and they will take them into the public square.
There will be a reckoning one day, and all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will not enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of the Father. Our graces, our gifts from the Lord, we never earned them and they are not for our sakes only but for the world, the whole world, the good and the bad. For the Lord makes his rain to fall on the good and the bad and his sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. It is not ours to judge, simply to act, in truth and in love. God will do whatever sorting there need be at the End.
Ex 19, 2-6b
Ps 100
Rom 5, 6-11
Mt 9, 36. 10, 1-8
Deacon Tom Cornell
Saint Mary’s Church
Marlboro, N.Y.
June 15, 2008
In Paul’s Letter to the Romans we read, “When we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, we were still enemies; now that we have been reconciled, surely we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” What strikes me is “we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” We are accustomed to hearing that we are saved by the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross. But here we are told that we are saved by his life also, by his words and his deeds, his teaching and example.
Our Gospel has Jesus sending the Twelve out on their first mission. He tells them to avoid Gentile territory, not even to enter a Samaritan town but to go only “to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” with his good news, that the kingdom of God it at hand. Little by little, the disciples came to realize who Jesus is, the Christ, the awaited one. When Jesus asks them, “Who do you think that I am,” Peter answers for the rest, “You are the Christ, the Son of God.” At Lazarus’ tomb, Martha exclaims, “You are the Christ, the one who is to come into this world.” On Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration, Jesus instructed Peter and James and John to tell no one their vision of him with Moses and Elijah until after his Resurrection. That Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, is a secret, “the messianic secret,” as it is called, that they are to keep until the Resurrection. Then the Holy Spirit will descend upon them. They will be enlightened and grasp the meaning of all the things that had happened.
The first reading today from Exodus has Moses and the People Mount Sinai after forty years in the desert. Moses will ascend the mountain and receive the Ten Commandments. God is about to establish his Covenant with the People of Israel: “You shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”
Israel was not worthy. No people, no nation and no person can ever be worthy of God’s grace. God’s gifts are given freely, undeservedly. “Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give.” Israel was unfaithful over and over again, but God called the People back through a faithful remnant and through the Prophets. God did not choose Israel for its own sake but that Israel might be a light to the nations, a beacon of his justice, mercy and peace to all. All the nations will some day climb the Mountain of the Lord to learn the Lord’s ways. Then they will beat their swords into ploughshares and study war no more.
Jesus’ earthly mission was to the lost sheep of Israel. But after his Resurrection, his last instruction to his disciples was to go out to all the peoples. “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” the Great Commission. The apostles preached Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and they established churches throughout the ancient world. And as he promised, Jesus has been with us, and will be with us, through the end of time. But just as God did not choose Israel for its own sake, so God did not establish the Church for its own sake. The Church is to be a beacon of God’s justice, mercy, peace and reconciliation for all peoples and lead them at last to the Holy Mountain and to teach them the Lord’s ways.
I was trained as a high school teacher. As a teacher I learned that people do not learn so much from lessons, sermons, lectures or books as they do from stories, stories of people whose lives inspire. We have so many examples in our saints. The Church shows her human face, Christ’s face, in the witness of the saints, the canonized and the un-canonized. And we are all called to be saints.
When I am in Rome I like to live in the house where the young men from England and Wales live as they prepare for ordination to the priesthood. During the time of Elizabeth I, these men knew that if they returned to England as priests they would be pursued by agents of the Crown, and if they were caught they would have the opportunity to deny their Catholic faith or be killed. One by one, two by two and three by three they went back to England as newly ordained priests. Forty-three were hunted down, executed, hanged, drawn and quartered. Walking the halls they walked, eating in their same refectory, praying in their same chapel, you feel the presence of those young men. Theirs was a faith worth dying for. Go to Assisi and you will sense the presence even today of Saints Francis and Clare and Saint Anthony, who denounced social injustice with vehemence! And at Pietrelcina, Padre Pio. There Padre Pio established a hospital that he called “The House for the Relief of Suffering.” Isn’t that a wonderful name for a church, the Church? “A house for the relief of suffering!” Theirs is a faith worth living.
We think of Damian the Leper on Molokai, of Mother Cabrini and Mother Ann Seton and Mother Teresa, of John Henry Newman and Dorothy Day. They met the poor and the wretched, lived with them and gave them not only physical relief but a sense of worth, a feeling of being loved and forgiven their sins and their faults, God’s love. They did it day by day, directly, person to person. Our young people should know these stories. They will strengthen them in the Faith more than any threat of eternal damnation! Young people crave adventure and great deeds; their hearts are generous. They seek something bigger than themselves. The harvest is great, but the laborers few.
The saints are our models. Their stories are close at hand. People who follow their example can not fail to grow in love. They will also grow in courage and strength. They will inevitably come to ask why there is such need, why are there so many poor and why so much needless suffering in this world. Why the enormous gap between the few very rich and the many very poor when God’s creation is meant for all? Do we have more than our share? They will search for answers and they will take them into the public square.
There will be a reckoning one day, and all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will not enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of the Father. Our graces, our gifts from the Lord, we never earned them and they are not for our sakes only but for the world, the whole world, the good and the bad. For the Lord makes his rain to fall on the good and the bad and his sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. It is not ours to judge, simply to act, in truth and in love. God will do whatever sorting there need be at the End.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI in New York
5 Easter A #52
Acts 6, 1-7
Ps 33
1 Pt 2, 4-9
Jn 14, 1-12
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 20, 2008
Today’s readings offer at least three themes for a homily. “A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people the Lord claims as his own.” That’s you, dear friends, a good text from Peter’s First Letter for a sermon on the priesthood of the laity. The reading from Acts relates the institution of the order of deacons. That’s a hard one for me to pass up. Then the Gospel reading from John has Jesus tell Philip that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, that Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is the revelation of God. But because the Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and he’s in New York City today, I have to talk about him.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger first came into public view he was portrayed as a harsh man, seeking out heretics to punish. The media called him the Panzerkardinal, and John Paul’s Rottweiler. That was unfair. It was never true. When Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he did his job, and that job was to see to it that what is taught in the name of the Church is indeed what the Church teaches, and he did it well. But he was never harsh or mean.
Our friend Father Martin Laird came to Monica and me twenty-five years ago as a student working for his master’s degree in divinity on the way to ordination to the priesthood. He’s a professor of theology at Villanova University now. Father Marty spent five years studying in Rome, and there he met Cardinal Ratzinger, quite by accident. He was walking in St. Peter’s Square one day when he recognized the Cardinal. “Buon giorno, Eminenza!” he said. Cardinal Ratzinger responded and stopped to ask him where he was from and what he was doing in Rome. They met the same way a few more times. The Cardinal never failed to ask, “How is your mother in Tulsa, how’s her health?” or some other personal question that showed he remembered and that he cared. And Cardinal Ratzinger would show up sometimes when doctoral candidates were defending their dissertations at the Roman universities. He never put a student down or on the spot, never asked a trick question. He was always encouraging, kind and affirming.
Now that he is pope everyone wants to know what he is going to say. There is no voice on earth that speaks with the moral authority of the bishop of Rome. Whether Catholic or not, whether Christian or not, whether believer or not – most people look to the Holy Father as just that, a holy father, a man who will speak for their hearts’ desire, their hope for peace and human decency, justice and freedom, and give them maybe a glimpse of the Beyond.
Most people don’t ask so very much out of life, just an honest job to provide a roof over their heads and food on the table, to sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, to live in peace and unafraid, free to worship God, free to share their most cherished beliefs and traditions and to pass them on. And most people have at least an intuition of the Transcendent, a sense of the holy, the sacred, beyond words. The Pope speaks to that in everyone. You don’t have to be a Catholic to thrill to the Pope’s words of unity and compassion, hope and faith and God’s love and mercy, but it’s great to be a Catholic when he speaks as he does, one of his flock, this good shepherd.
That’s what a pope is, that’s what his job is, to be a pastor, a shepherd, a father. Some may say, “We don’t need a shepherd, we are men and women, not sheep. We are adults, and we don’t need a father. This is ‘a world come of age,’” they say. “We make our own way, we know where we are going.” Sure! A steady march to a cliff, the very brink of destruction! We pollute the earth, the water, the air we breathe. We live on others, taking more than our share. And to keep it that way, we live, each one of us every day, under a nuclear cloud, the threat of extinction by our own blind greed and pride. We need a shepherd, a father, to show us another way.
The pope is the symbol of our unity as Catholic Christians, and he is the guarantor of our unity. Jesus prayed at the Last Supper for his disciples, “that they be one, even as you and I, Father, are one, so that the world might believe” (Jn 17, 21). Saint Peter was the one who spoke for all the others when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And we know what Jesus said to him. He gave him a new name: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church... the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, it is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, it is loosed in heaven” (Mt. 15, 13-19). It was Peter who gathered the apostles after the Resurrection and rallied them to proclaim the Good News. Peter held the new Christians together in the first generation of the Church.
How is it that the bishop of Rome gets an official welcome at the White House and gets to address the United Nations as a head of state? It is because he is a head of state. The Holy See has had a role in framing international treaties since the Early Middle Ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, in the 5th Century, the Church in the West was able to maintain its independence because it controlled territories of its own. The Church in the East had a different history, where the Empire survived another thousand years. The Byzantine emperor not only acted as the protector of the Church, but presumed to act as its head, and, in the words of Orthodox Bishop Timothy Ware, the Orthodox venerated the emperor as “the very icon of God on earth.” If history has taught us nothing else, it is this: the closer the Church gets to power, the worse for the Church. Giuseppe Garibaldi did the Church and the papacy an enormous favor when he seized almost all of the papal territory for a united Italy. The pope was left with a small section of the City of Rome, Vatican Hill. But the Vatican remains an independent state, and that is why the pope has retained juridical status in the world of international diplomacy and why the Holy See is represented at the United Nations. But that wouldn’t count for much if this pope didn’t show the face of Christ. That’s what really matters.
Pope Benedict had a lot to say when he went to the White House (I’d love to hear what he had to say in private), and to the United Nations, and at the seminary for the Youth Rally and at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and he will have more to say today at Yankee Stadium. I hope it will all be collected in a book, Benedict XVI in the USA. I can’t touch on even a little bit of it now, except to say that his heart pleads for the most oppressed, the peoples of Darfur and Sudan, the people of Palestine, of Iraq as well as for the most vulnerable among us, the young, the elderly, immigrants and the unborn. His criticisms have been clear but not strident. He reaffirmed the Church’s support for the United Nations and he took sides in the current debate over national sovereignty as opposed to the duty of the international community to protect the innocent when national states will not or can not. That means Darfur! He spoke of immigrants’ rights. That means the way we treat aliens! And of unilateralism. That means the invasion of Iraq! And he criticized the culture’s hedonism and materialism, individualism and relativism. But his tone has been positive and affirming throughout. We have been through some hard years, scandal, but the Pope spoke to that frankly and earnestly, and the people heard him, and they love him.
We can all be proud of this good and gentle Holy Father. His constant reference is to Jesus Christ, not himself, but to Christ our hope, now and forever. It is the love of Christ that urges us on to prayer and to service. Benedict is a brilliant theologian, and he has a heart as warm as his brain is powerful. It is so good to have him here with us, so good to feel pride in our Catholic faith and our Church, so good to stand with Pope Benedict as he stands for the good of all people, their well-being on earth and their eternal salvation in heaven. Thank you, Holy Father!
Acts 6, 1-7
Ps 33
1 Pt 2, 4-9
Jn 14, 1-12
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 20, 2008
Today’s readings offer at least three themes for a homily. “A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people the Lord claims as his own.” That’s you, dear friends, a good text from Peter’s First Letter for a sermon on the priesthood of the laity. The reading from Acts relates the institution of the order of deacons. That’s a hard one for me to pass up. Then the Gospel reading from John has Jesus tell Philip that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, that Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is the revelation of God. But because the Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and he’s in New York City today, I have to talk about him.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger first came into public view he was portrayed as a harsh man, seeking out heretics to punish. The media called him the Panzerkardinal, and John Paul’s Rottweiler. That was unfair. It was never true. When Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he did his job, and that job was to see to it that what is taught in the name of the Church is indeed what the Church teaches, and he did it well. But he was never harsh or mean.
Our friend Father Martin Laird came to Monica and me twenty-five years ago as a student working for his master’s degree in divinity on the way to ordination to the priesthood. He’s a professor of theology at Villanova University now. Father Marty spent five years studying in Rome, and there he met Cardinal Ratzinger, quite by accident. He was walking in St. Peter’s Square one day when he recognized the Cardinal. “Buon giorno, Eminenza!” he said. Cardinal Ratzinger responded and stopped to ask him where he was from and what he was doing in Rome. They met the same way a few more times. The Cardinal never failed to ask, “How is your mother in Tulsa, how’s her health?” or some other personal question that showed he remembered and that he cared. And Cardinal Ratzinger would show up sometimes when doctoral candidates were defending their dissertations at the Roman universities. He never put a student down or on the spot, never asked a trick question. He was always encouraging, kind and affirming.
Now that he is pope everyone wants to know what he is going to say. There is no voice on earth that speaks with the moral authority of the bishop of Rome. Whether Catholic or not, whether Christian or not, whether believer or not – most people look to the Holy Father as just that, a holy father, a man who will speak for their hearts’ desire, their hope for peace and human decency, justice and freedom, and give them maybe a glimpse of the Beyond.
Most people don’t ask so very much out of life, just an honest job to provide a roof over their heads and food on the table, to sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, to live in peace and unafraid, free to worship God, free to share their most cherished beliefs and traditions and to pass them on. And most people have at least an intuition of the Transcendent, a sense of the holy, the sacred, beyond words. The Pope speaks to that in everyone. You don’t have to be a Catholic to thrill to the Pope’s words of unity and compassion, hope and faith and God’s love and mercy, but it’s great to be a Catholic when he speaks as he does, one of his flock, this good shepherd.
That’s what a pope is, that’s what his job is, to be a pastor, a shepherd, a father. Some may say, “We don’t need a shepherd, we are men and women, not sheep. We are adults, and we don’t need a father. This is ‘a world come of age,’” they say. “We make our own way, we know where we are going.” Sure! A steady march to a cliff, the very brink of destruction! We pollute the earth, the water, the air we breathe. We live on others, taking more than our share. And to keep it that way, we live, each one of us every day, under a nuclear cloud, the threat of extinction by our own blind greed and pride. We need a shepherd, a father, to show us another way.
The pope is the symbol of our unity as Catholic Christians, and he is the guarantor of our unity. Jesus prayed at the Last Supper for his disciples, “that they be one, even as you and I, Father, are one, so that the world might believe” (Jn 17, 21). Saint Peter was the one who spoke for all the others when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And we know what Jesus said to him. He gave him a new name: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church... the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, it is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, it is loosed in heaven” (Mt. 15, 13-19). It was Peter who gathered the apostles after the Resurrection and rallied them to proclaim the Good News. Peter held the new Christians together in the first generation of the Church.
How is it that the bishop of Rome gets an official welcome at the White House and gets to address the United Nations as a head of state? It is because he is a head of state. The Holy See has had a role in framing international treaties since the Early Middle Ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, in the 5th Century, the Church in the West was able to maintain its independence because it controlled territories of its own. The Church in the East had a different history, where the Empire survived another thousand years. The Byzantine emperor not only acted as the protector of the Church, but presumed to act as its head, and, in the words of Orthodox Bishop Timothy Ware, the Orthodox venerated the emperor as “the very icon of God on earth.” If history has taught us nothing else, it is this: the closer the Church gets to power, the worse for the Church. Giuseppe Garibaldi did the Church and the papacy an enormous favor when he seized almost all of the papal territory for a united Italy. The pope was left with a small section of the City of Rome, Vatican Hill. But the Vatican remains an independent state, and that is why the pope has retained juridical status in the world of international diplomacy and why the Holy See is represented at the United Nations. But that wouldn’t count for much if this pope didn’t show the face of Christ. That’s what really matters.
Pope Benedict had a lot to say when he went to the White House (I’d love to hear what he had to say in private), and to the United Nations, and at the seminary for the Youth Rally and at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and he will have more to say today at Yankee Stadium. I hope it will all be collected in a book, Benedict XVI in the USA. I can’t touch on even a little bit of it now, except to say that his heart pleads for the most oppressed, the peoples of Darfur and Sudan, the people of Palestine, of Iraq as well as for the most vulnerable among us, the young, the elderly, immigrants and the unborn. His criticisms have been clear but not strident. He reaffirmed the Church’s support for the United Nations and he took sides in the current debate over national sovereignty as opposed to the duty of the international community to protect the innocent when national states will not or can not. That means Darfur! He spoke of immigrants’ rights. That means the way we treat aliens! And of unilateralism. That means the invasion of Iraq! And he criticized the culture’s hedonism and materialism, individualism and relativism. But his tone has been positive and affirming throughout. We have been through some hard years, scandal, but the Pope spoke to that frankly and earnestly, and the people heard him, and they love him.
We can all be proud of this good and gentle Holy Father. His constant reference is to Jesus Christ, not himself, but to Christ our hope, now and forever. It is the love of Christ that urges us on to prayer and to service. Benedict is a brilliant theologian, and he has a heart as warm as his brain is powerful. It is so good to have him here with us, so good to feel pride in our Catholic faith and our Church, so good to stand with Pope Benedict as he stands for the good of all people, their well-being on earth and their eternal salvation in heaven. Thank you, Holy Father!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Help Thou My Unbelief
2 Lent A #25
Gen 12, 1-4a
Ps 33
2 Tim 1, 8b-10
Mt 17, 1-9
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 17, 2008
I hope everyone here has seen Roberto Benigni’s wonderful film, Life is Beautiful, La Vita è Bella in Italian. It won three Academy Awards. If you haven’t, you can make a date with Monica and come over to our house to watch it on VHS. Life is beautiful, indeed, yes it is, despite it all.
The movie’s plot is set in World War II, the persecution of the Jews. An Italian Jew and his son are picked up by the Nazis and sent to a death camp. The father tries to convince his young son -- he looks no more than five or six years old -- that it’s all a game, a contest, and that if he plays his part and keeps out of sight of the guards, he may win the prize. He tells the boy that everyone else in the camp is competing for the same prize, a tank, a military tank, not a toy, a real one. At last, the U.S. Army advances on the camp. The Nazis flee. But before they go, they kill all the prisoners they can. Improbably, the boy Joshua survives, playing hide-and-seek as his father is led away to be shot. When all is quiet, Joshua comes out of hiding and stands alone in a large, deserted open space. Suddenly a U.S. Army tank enters the camp, heads toward him and stops right in front of him. Joshua’s eyes light up with amazement. “È vero!” he says, “It’s true!” Joshua thinks that this is the prize, his prize, that he has won. He had begun to doubt. Soon he comes to realize just what it was that his father had given him, not a tank, but life, life itself. “It’s true!” But it’s more than he could ever have imagined, far more. Far more than a tank! It’s true!
Abraham believed and he obeyed. That is why he is our “Father in Faith.” He set out from his own country not knowing where he was to go, in obedience to God, to start a new life in a Promised Land. He was seventy-five years old. At that age one does not start a new life, you can take it from me. But he had the Promise. His wife had never conceived. And yet he is told that he will father nations, that his offspring will outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore. Sarah laughed at the very idea. And yet, Abraham became the ancestor of the Hebrews and the Arabs as well (and many of us here too, those of us whose roots are in Sicily and Southern Italy, where the Arabs held sway for two hundred years; they made genetic contributions to our people). Spiritually Abraham and Sarah are the father and the mother of all believers in the One God of the Hebrew Bible. They had reason to doubt. Abraham knew he was not the man he used to be, and Sarah laughed. They could not imagine that billions of Muslims and Christians as well as Jews would be blessed in their name and bless them in turn. But the Promise was true. More than they could possibly imagine.
Twice each year we hear the story of the Transfiguration, every Second Sunday of Lent, and again on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6th. Just six days before, Jesus had told his disciples that he was to be handed over to his enemies to be killed, and then be raised up. He took the three, Peter, James and John, up Mount Tabor, there to be transfigured, gleaming like the sun. Moses and Elijah appeared with him. Then the voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved Son.... Listen to him!” Peter, James and John fell on their faces, struck with terror. Jesus told them to get up, not to be afraid and not to tell anyone their vision until he had risen. What they had seen was a pale glimpse of what was to be, a sign of the glory that is to come after Jesus’ death. It is a sign of the Resurrection. No one is to speak of it until it is accomplished.
We believe in the glory that is to come; we have the Promise. Doubt may linger. We pray, “Lord I do believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk 9,24). Any high school astronomy student can tell you that our sun is but a pebble wandering in the Milky Way in limitless space, aimlessly, it would seem. Our planet Earth is a speck of dust in the immensity of it all. Our lifespan, seventy or eighty years or ninety, is as a nanosecond in the billions of years the universe has been expanding. What are we then? The Psalmist sings, “What is man that you should pay him heed? You have created him a little lower than the angels....” Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls from the sky nor a hair from our heads without God our Father’s leave, and that the Father has care of us.
Non-believers do not agree. That’s nothing new. An epitaph found in the ruins of a two thousand year old Roman cemetery reads, “In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus.” “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we fall back.” An atheist friend of mine said the very same thing to me not long ago, “from a vast void into a vast void” he said of birth and death. In this view, life is meaningless, or worse; it is cruel. Lost in the stars we are victims of blind chance, and nothing more. Some claim it is all the more noble to struggle for peace and justice when you are convinced it is useless, as they do. Let’s see about that! I wish them a lot of luck! A world at peace, a world of solidarity, even a world that can sustain the impact of man will never be built unless we face the hard fact that our moral failings, pride and greed and the rest, are at bottom spiritual and must be addressed with the weapons of the spirit: prayer and the sacraments, penance and fasting, self-denial and the works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual.
Lent is a time of waiting. We wait in quiet hope. We slow down. We pray more. We turn off the radio and the TV and we listen to what God is trying to tell us. We wait for Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus.
What is it we wait for in the afterlife for ourselves and our loved ones? We don’t know! We can be sure that it is glorious, to be in God, in God’s glory. It is life, the fullness of life, life everlasting. Saint John tells us, “We are God’s children now. What we shall be has not yet come to light. We know that when it comes to light we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3, 2).
It’s true! When we wake to it in the Resurrection, that’s what we will say, like little Joshua. È vero! It’s true, more than anything we could possibly imagine.
Get up. Do not be afraid!
Gen 12, 1-4a
Ps 33
2 Tim 1, 8b-10
Mt 17, 1-9
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 17, 2008
I hope everyone here has seen Roberto Benigni’s wonderful film, Life is Beautiful, La Vita è Bella in Italian. It won three Academy Awards. If you haven’t, you can make a date with Monica and come over to our house to watch it on VHS. Life is beautiful, indeed, yes it is, despite it all.
The movie’s plot is set in World War II, the persecution of the Jews. An Italian Jew and his son are picked up by the Nazis and sent to a death camp. The father tries to convince his young son -- he looks no more than five or six years old -- that it’s all a game, a contest, and that if he plays his part and keeps out of sight of the guards, he may win the prize. He tells the boy that everyone else in the camp is competing for the same prize, a tank, a military tank, not a toy, a real one. At last, the U.S. Army advances on the camp. The Nazis flee. But before they go, they kill all the prisoners they can. Improbably, the boy Joshua survives, playing hide-and-seek as his father is led away to be shot. When all is quiet, Joshua comes out of hiding and stands alone in a large, deserted open space. Suddenly a U.S. Army tank enters the camp, heads toward him and stops right in front of him. Joshua’s eyes light up with amazement. “È vero!” he says, “It’s true!” Joshua thinks that this is the prize, his prize, that he has won. He had begun to doubt. Soon he comes to realize just what it was that his father had given him, not a tank, but life, life itself. “It’s true!” But it’s more than he could ever have imagined, far more. Far more than a tank! It’s true!
Abraham believed and he obeyed. That is why he is our “Father in Faith.” He set out from his own country not knowing where he was to go, in obedience to God, to start a new life in a Promised Land. He was seventy-five years old. At that age one does not start a new life, you can take it from me. But he had the Promise. His wife had never conceived. And yet he is told that he will father nations, that his offspring will outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore. Sarah laughed at the very idea. And yet, Abraham became the ancestor of the Hebrews and the Arabs as well (and many of us here too, those of us whose roots are in Sicily and Southern Italy, where the Arabs held sway for two hundred years; they made genetic contributions to our people). Spiritually Abraham and Sarah are the father and the mother of all believers in the One God of the Hebrew Bible. They had reason to doubt. Abraham knew he was not the man he used to be, and Sarah laughed. They could not imagine that billions of Muslims and Christians as well as Jews would be blessed in their name and bless them in turn. But the Promise was true. More than they could possibly imagine.
Twice each year we hear the story of the Transfiguration, every Second Sunday of Lent, and again on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6th. Just six days before, Jesus had told his disciples that he was to be handed over to his enemies to be killed, and then be raised up. He took the three, Peter, James and John, up Mount Tabor, there to be transfigured, gleaming like the sun. Moses and Elijah appeared with him. Then the voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved Son.... Listen to him!” Peter, James and John fell on their faces, struck with terror. Jesus told them to get up, not to be afraid and not to tell anyone their vision until he had risen. What they had seen was a pale glimpse of what was to be, a sign of the glory that is to come after Jesus’ death. It is a sign of the Resurrection. No one is to speak of it until it is accomplished.
We believe in the glory that is to come; we have the Promise. Doubt may linger. We pray, “Lord I do believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk 9,24). Any high school astronomy student can tell you that our sun is but a pebble wandering in the Milky Way in limitless space, aimlessly, it would seem. Our planet Earth is a speck of dust in the immensity of it all. Our lifespan, seventy or eighty years or ninety, is as a nanosecond in the billions of years the universe has been expanding. What are we then? The Psalmist sings, “What is man that you should pay him heed? You have created him a little lower than the angels....” Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls from the sky nor a hair from our heads without God our Father’s leave, and that the Father has care of us.
Non-believers do not agree. That’s nothing new. An epitaph found in the ruins of a two thousand year old Roman cemetery reads, “In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus.” “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we fall back.” An atheist friend of mine said the very same thing to me not long ago, “from a vast void into a vast void” he said of birth and death. In this view, life is meaningless, or worse; it is cruel. Lost in the stars we are victims of blind chance, and nothing more. Some claim it is all the more noble to struggle for peace and justice when you are convinced it is useless, as they do. Let’s see about that! I wish them a lot of luck! A world at peace, a world of solidarity, even a world that can sustain the impact of man will never be built unless we face the hard fact that our moral failings, pride and greed and the rest, are at bottom spiritual and must be addressed with the weapons of the spirit: prayer and the sacraments, penance and fasting, self-denial and the works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual.
Lent is a time of waiting. We wait in quiet hope. We slow down. We pray more. We turn off the radio and the TV and we listen to what God is trying to tell us. We wait for Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus.
What is it we wait for in the afterlife for ourselves and our loved ones? We don’t know! We can be sure that it is glorious, to be in God, in God’s glory. It is life, the fullness of life, life everlasting. Saint John tells us, “We are God’s children now. What we shall be has not yet come to light. We know that when it comes to light we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3, 2).
It’s true! When we wake to it in the Resurrection, that’s what we will say, like little Joshua. È vero! It’s true, more than anything we could possibly imagine.
Get up. Do not be afraid!
Friday, February 1, 2008
Remembering Selma, '65
2 Sunday A #64
Is 49, 3. 5-6
Ps 40
1 Cor 1, 1-3
Jn 1, 29-34
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 20, 2008
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist proclaims Jesus the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1, 29). Lamb of God, one of Jesus’ titles. Jesus has many titles, each tells a tale, Christ, Redeemer, Son of God. Jesus is not just a son of God but the Son of God, the only begotten Son of God, the revelation of God the Father. Today we fix our attention on Jesus the Lamb of God, as John directs us. The lamb is a symbol of innocence. The innocent lamb led to the slaughter is a symbol of unmerited suffering. Unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. That is how the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King explained the dynamic of the Civil Rights Movement, which came to its climax in Selma, Alabama, in March, 1965. Unmerited suffering willingly accepted. Monsignor Dugan was there. So was I. We would not meet for another fourteen years, but when we did, Father Dugan and I, we acknowledged that that time was a highpoint in our lives, something precious that we shared, a bond as of a Band of Brother and Sisters who put our lives on the line.
Forty-three years ago! Is it possible? Today a black man has a shot at the presidency. We could not imagine it back then, when Americans, black and white, scores of them, lay down their lives just so black people could vote. Sometimes, even when I am alone and writing about those times, tears flow down my face and I choke on sobs. I don’t know why. When I talk about them at schools and colleges I have to keep my emotions in check, so bear with me if my voice cracks. Andy Young was my boss down there. I was one of his marshals. Andy went on from the Movement to the United States House of Representatives and then to the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador. I worked with him there too, in the Congress and at the U.N. I saw him on TV not long ago, talking about The Days, Selma, ’65. To wind up, the interviewer, asked him, “Do you think about those days often?” He answered, “No, not often, always, all the time!” Then he broke down and sobbed, right on screen. That made me feel better.
Fast forward to Iraq, 2003, the lobby of the Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad and a few Americans sipping sweet tea in the lobby. Somehow Selma came up. “I was there,” said a lady from Colorado. “So was I,” I told her. “Do you remember Leroy, Leroy Moton?” I asked her. Leroy was my first friend there. I often thought of him, a nineteen year old kid, about six feet seven inches tall, lanky, very dark and full of nervous energy. Leroy showed me around town and helped me to settle in. Then he went on to lead the singing as we sat night and day under sun and rain for ten days in front of Brown’s Chapel. When the police lifted the barricades and the great march made it to and returned from Montgomery, when it was all over, Leroy helped a white woman from Detroit drive people to the airport and to the bus and train stations to return to their homes up North. Her name was Viola Liuzzo, wife of a union organizer and mother of a family. Maybe some of you remember. When we got home we heard on the news that four white men in a car menaced Mrs. Liuzzo when they saw a black youth sitting next to her in her Olds, and drove into her rear bumper. Then they gave chase, at over 80 miles per hour on a state highway. They drew alongside Mrs. Liuzzo’s car and shot her in the head. She died instantly. Leroy survived somehow. It turned out that one of the men in the car was an FBI plant who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He testified against the Ku Kluxers at a state trial for murder, but an all white jury refused to convict. The killers were then tried in federal court for violation of civil rights. There they were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Three years for murder!
“I wonder what happened to Leroy after all he went through,” I told my new friend in Baghdad. “I’d love to find him, see how he did in life. If if he’s in need, well, we have a farm in Marlboro....” My friend was still in touch with some people in Alabama. She gave me a clue, and the long and the short of it is: I found Leroy in Connecticut. He’s in his sixties now, retired on disability income, bent over from an industrial accident but still six feet seven if you could straighten him out. He has had a hard but a good life as a factory worker and he has a son now in high school in Hartford. Leroy shares his story with young people in schools and churches, as I’m sharing it with you today, to show just how unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. We didn’t just win the vote, we bought back America’s soul! That’s what redemption means, a buying back, at a price. We did it, black and white, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and Jew and Muslim together, and maybe an agnostic or two. We won the vote and we tore down the legal structures of racial segregation. The institutional framework for this great movement was the black Protestant church, but at the March to Montgomery, you could see a swarm of Catholic nuns in habit and priests in Roman collars, more then any identifiable group.
These days we are celebrating the Church Unity Octave, praying for, and working for the restoration of Christian unity, one church that will be truly catholic, truly orthodox, truly evangelical and truly reformed. We are already one, Saint Paul tells us over and over again, for there is but “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5). So, what we can do together, we must do together. We can pray together. We can study together. But the best way to achieve the unity that Jesus prayed the Father for his church is to struggle for peace and justice together in his name, in his way, even at a price. Jesus, the Lamb of God, has paid the price of our sin, once and for all. We are in Christ. If in baptism we died in Christ, and if in baptism we rose with Christ, then in baptism we share his saving mission too. It’s still going on, and it’s up to you. Redemption does not come on the cheap.
The night before Martin King was assassinated, Andy got him up out of a sickbed in a motel in Memphis. A large congregation was waiting in a church to hear him speak. He looked haggard and dispirited at first. But after a few minutes the Spirit caught him. His voice rang, he spoke as if he knew what was coming the next day. “Like anybody, I’d like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Martin King was surely a lamb of God. I never heard of a wolf of God.
Is 49, 3. 5-6
Ps 40
1 Cor 1, 1-3
Jn 1, 29-34
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 20, 2008
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist proclaims Jesus the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1, 29). Lamb of God, one of Jesus’ titles. Jesus has many titles, each tells a tale, Christ, Redeemer, Son of God. Jesus is not just a son of God but the Son of God, the only begotten Son of God, the revelation of God the Father. Today we fix our attention on Jesus the Lamb of God, as John directs us. The lamb is a symbol of innocence. The innocent lamb led to the slaughter is a symbol of unmerited suffering. Unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. That is how the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King explained the dynamic of the Civil Rights Movement, which came to its climax in Selma, Alabama, in March, 1965. Unmerited suffering willingly accepted. Monsignor Dugan was there. So was I. We would not meet for another fourteen years, but when we did, Father Dugan and I, we acknowledged that that time was a highpoint in our lives, something precious that we shared, a bond as of a Band of Brother and Sisters who put our lives on the line.
Forty-three years ago! Is it possible? Today a black man has a shot at the presidency. We could not imagine it back then, when Americans, black and white, scores of them, lay down their lives just so black people could vote. Sometimes, even when I am alone and writing about those times, tears flow down my face and I choke on sobs. I don’t know why. When I talk about them at schools and colleges I have to keep my emotions in check, so bear with me if my voice cracks. Andy Young was my boss down there. I was one of his marshals. Andy went on from the Movement to the United States House of Representatives and then to the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador. I worked with him there too, in the Congress and at the U.N. I saw him on TV not long ago, talking about The Days, Selma, ’65. To wind up, the interviewer, asked him, “Do you think about those days often?” He answered, “No, not often, always, all the time!” Then he broke down and sobbed, right on screen. That made me feel better.
Fast forward to Iraq, 2003, the lobby of the Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad and a few Americans sipping sweet tea in the lobby. Somehow Selma came up. “I was there,” said a lady from Colorado. “So was I,” I told her. “Do you remember Leroy, Leroy Moton?” I asked her. Leroy was my first friend there. I often thought of him, a nineteen year old kid, about six feet seven inches tall, lanky, very dark and full of nervous energy. Leroy showed me around town and helped me to settle in. Then he went on to lead the singing as we sat night and day under sun and rain for ten days in front of Brown’s Chapel. When the police lifted the barricades and the great march made it to and returned from Montgomery, when it was all over, Leroy helped a white woman from Detroit drive people to the airport and to the bus and train stations to return to their homes up North. Her name was Viola Liuzzo, wife of a union organizer and mother of a family. Maybe some of you remember. When we got home we heard on the news that four white men in a car menaced Mrs. Liuzzo when they saw a black youth sitting next to her in her Olds, and drove into her rear bumper. Then they gave chase, at over 80 miles per hour on a state highway. They drew alongside Mrs. Liuzzo’s car and shot her in the head. She died instantly. Leroy survived somehow. It turned out that one of the men in the car was an FBI plant who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He testified against the Ku Kluxers at a state trial for murder, but an all white jury refused to convict. The killers were then tried in federal court for violation of civil rights. There they were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Three years for murder!
“I wonder what happened to Leroy after all he went through,” I told my new friend in Baghdad. “I’d love to find him, see how he did in life. If if he’s in need, well, we have a farm in Marlboro....” My friend was still in touch with some people in Alabama. She gave me a clue, and the long and the short of it is: I found Leroy in Connecticut. He’s in his sixties now, retired on disability income, bent over from an industrial accident but still six feet seven if you could straighten him out. He has had a hard but a good life as a factory worker and he has a son now in high school in Hartford. Leroy shares his story with young people in schools and churches, as I’m sharing it with you today, to show just how unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. We didn’t just win the vote, we bought back America’s soul! That’s what redemption means, a buying back, at a price. We did it, black and white, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and Jew and Muslim together, and maybe an agnostic or two. We won the vote and we tore down the legal structures of racial segregation. The institutional framework for this great movement was the black Protestant church, but at the March to Montgomery, you could see a swarm of Catholic nuns in habit and priests in Roman collars, more then any identifiable group.
These days we are celebrating the Church Unity Octave, praying for, and working for the restoration of Christian unity, one church that will be truly catholic, truly orthodox, truly evangelical and truly reformed. We are already one, Saint Paul tells us over and over again, for there is but “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5). So, what we can do together, we must do together. We can pray together. We can study together. But the best way to achieve the unity that Jesus prayed the Father for his church is to struggle for peace and justice together in his name, in his way, even at a price. Jesus, the Lamb of God, has paid the price of our sin, once and for all. We are in Christ. If in baptism we died in Christ, and if in baptism we rose with Christ, then in baptism we share his saving mission too. It’s still going on, and it’s up to you. Redemption does not come on the cheap.
The night before Martin King was assassinated, Andy got him up out of a sickbed in a motel in Memphis. A large congregation was waiting in a church to hear him speak. He looked haggard and dispirited at first. But after a few minutes the Spirit caught him. His voice rang, he spoke as if he knew what was coming the next day. “Like anybody, I’d like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Martin King was surely a lamb of God. I never heard of a wolf of God.
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