“God is love.”
That’s a pretty stark statement, no adverb, no adjective, no
qualification. I remember the first time
I heard it, really heard it I mean. It
hit me hard. I was a teenager and I was
struck to the core and I never got over it, and I pray I never will. Love is not just a four letter word! The idea of love is cheapened in our world
today. It is not lust. It is not sentimental “puppy” stuff. It is not a Hallmark jingle for Mothers’
Day. "No greater love hath any man than
this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” And even more, for his enemies, as Jesus did.
Love is the force that set the world,
everything, creation in motion. Love
alone could move the Unmoved Mover. Love
unites us, makes us one, one with each other, one with Jesus, one with God. Jesus’ prayer to the Father at the Last
Supper is that his disciples be one, united, and their disciples after them,
that they all be one as he is in the Father and the Father in him so that the
world might believe, believe that it is God who has sent Jesus, that Jesus’ way
is the way God wants us all to follow, the way of self-giving love. He prays that their unity might be complete
so that the whole world might come to believe.
Today they will come to believe when they see how we love one another. The ancient Greek and Roman pagans saw the
Christians, how they lived, and said to their fellows, “See how they love one
another.” And so the Empire was
converted. “Preach the Good News always,
and if you must, use words.” If today they
do not believe, it is because we do not love enough.
Christ’s church is one. Christ willed it, so it must be. But our unity is not complete, it is not
visible. At the Second Vatican Council
the Council Fathers were asked to define the church. They did not.
They could not. Not if define
means put a limit to, put borders around,
de fine. You can not define God, put
borders around God. Jesus Christ is his
sacrament, his efficacious sign, as we say.
But you can not define Jesus Christ, that is exhaust the meaning of
“true God and true man.” The church is his sacrament, his efficacious sign in
the world. And neither can you define
the church, put borders around it, de
fine. The Council Fathers were asked
to identify the church of Christ with the Roman Catholic Church. They refused.
We can define, put borders around the Roman Catholic Church, say who is
in and who is out, but we can not put borders around the church of Christ, say
who is in and who is out. So the Council
Fathers put it that the church of Christ subsists
in the Catholic Church. That means that
the Catholic Church is necessary for the very being of the church of
Christ. It is interesting to note that
the other churches and denominations define themselves in terms of which teachings of the Catholic Church they reject.
We no longer hear of the Catholic
Church claiming to be “the one true church.”
Dorothy Day in her autobiography, The
Long Loneliness, wrote that she
never considered the claim of the Catholic Church to be the one true church, or
any of its other claims, whether they were true or not; she just accepted them
because she experienced the Catholic Church as the church of the poor, the
church of the workers, the church of the immigrants in all the cities where she
had ever lived. That was enough for
her. We say nowadays that the Catholic
Church, if not the “one true church,” is the “uniquely true church” because it
has a unique fullness of the means of salvation, including the Petrine ministry. It is also, and this is most important, the
sacrament of the unity of the human race, the sign that brings into being the
knowledge of the human family as one with no ethnic, no racial, no national
distinctions.
They tell us today that the Catholic Church
is polarized between conservatives and progressives. Dorothy Day is now seen as a bridge between
the so-called conservatives on the one hand and the so-called progressives on
the other. I can tell you from personal
knowledge that Dorothy Day was a fiercely loyal, though sometimes an angry
daughter of the Church. She was angry
when she saw Church leaders and institutions failing to live up to their own
teachings. But she stood her ground in
loyalty and obedience. When she was
asked, during a tense period of the Cold War, what she would do if the Cardinal
(Spellman) ordered her to close down the Catholic Worker, she said she would
obey. She also told me that in that event
she would move the operation across the East River to the Diocese of Brooklyn
or across the Hudson River to the Diocese of Newark!
Dorothy would be astonished if, when she was
alive, anyone were to tell her that she would one day be seen as a sign, an
efficacious sign, of unity. But that is
what her life was about, the unity of the Church in witness to an unbelieving
world, a witness to love and to compassion.
It is only that the rest of us are finally catching up to her. If you would like to consider membership in
the Guild that Cardinal Egan established to forward her canonization as a
saint, see me any time. W
It’s Labor Day Weekend already, the end of summer, back to school. What does Labor Day have to do with labor? And why should we talk about it in church? When you get back to school, take a look at your high school history book, you students. Parents, you take a look too and see what it has to say about the labor movement. I have taught public high school in four jurisdictions, Connecticut, New York City and New YorkState, and New Hampshire. We are lucky here in Marlboro. Jack Mazza tells me there is a whole week long unit on labor in the advanced placement American History course in our high school. That’s great but it’s not the way it is in most places, and it’s still not enough. You’re lucky to get a paragraph on the Knights of Labor in the 19th Century and another on the AFL-CIO in the 20th, and something about the Wagner Act of 1935 that established the National Labor Relations Board and (this they never tell you) the weakest labor laws in the industrialized world.
If a history book tells you in the Preface that it’s going to give you an overview of the story of our nation, how it came to be, who formed it and how and it does not include the mighty battle to establish minimal protections for the working people of this country, then it is not telling you the truth. If it’s not the truth, it’s a lie. I realized this when a good Jesuit priest, Father Ryan, offered to teach a course in Labor History for us at Fairfield Prep, after school, not for credit. It was the most important class I ever took, in high school or in college, because it taught me that what I had been led to believe was history, wasn’t. The struggle for the forty hour week, for health and safety regulations, for the right to organize for collective bargaining, for social security old age pensions, for workers’ compensation for injury on the job, for unemployment compensation, for a minimum wage, that was all left out.
It cost blood! Yes, there was violence, almost all of it aimed against unarmed workers. Men, women and children were burned to death, men were shot, some were lynched, castrated, dragged through the streets and hanged. Deputy sheriffs near Hazelton, Pennsylvania in 1897 shot down nineteen unarmed Slavic, Hungarian and Sicilian miners because they went out on strike. That stimulated the building of the United Mineworkers Union. Organizers were imprisoned unjustly for as long as twenty years, all for trying to form a union. Why talk about this sort of thing in church? Church is where we come to get closer to God, to hear the Word and to come together in Communion with Jesus our God and with one another and all God’s children. There you have it! ALL GOD’S CHILDREN, not just the sons and daughters of the powerful. The God we worship is a God who demands justice, “Whose mighty right arm scatters the proud in their conceit, who lifts up the lowly and casts down the mighty from their thrones, who fills the hungry with good things....”
By the middle of the 19th Century, the Catholic Church had to deal with the devastating effects of the industrial revolution on its people. In countries where the bishops were chosen from the sons of the powerful, the Church was very slow, too slow to respond to the crisis, and Pope Pius IX lamented, “We have lost the working classes.” In England, where the Catholic population was small and mostly Irish and poor, and in the United States, where the bishops were, almost every single one of them, sons of workers, the response was quick and positive. The rich and powerful, the noble families that ruled Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the Austro- Hungarian Empire and their bishop cousins wanted the Pope to condemn the labor movement, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Labor in the US as Communists and enemies of Christ and his Church. On the other side were Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore and Cardinal Manning in London. They went to Rome and appealed directly to the Pope. Gibbons and Manning won.
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII gave his answer to the social question in an encyclical that set off the development of modern Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum, or In These Revolutionary Times. Labor is prior to capital. Work comes first, because work creates capital. People come first because men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. Dollars, pounds and euros are made in the mint! Labor is not a commodity on the market, subject to the law of supply and demand. All God’s creation was meant for the benefit of all. On the other hand, the Church defends the right to private property. “Property is proper to man.” The problem with capitalism is that it doesn’t get enough capital to enough people. Private property, yes, but it is not an absolute right and must be subject to the requirements of the common good. Workers have a right, even an obligation, to band together to assert their right to a fair share of the product of their own labor by all honorable means, including the withholding of their labor. The public sector has the duty to intervene for the re-distribution of wealth when necessary.
Catholic Social Teaching is the envy of our fellow Christians in the denominations. Many times I have been told by Protestant colleagues that they simply do not have the resources to develop and bring together such a body of teaching. “You write the documents, and we teach them in our seminaries,” one told me. And yet, so very few of our fellow Catholics are aware of it. Even a smaller percentage of our fellow citizens know anything about the terrible long struggle to attain the degree of social justice we enjoy in this land today, the Pullman Strike in 1894, for example. President Grover Cleveland called out 20,000 troops to put it down. They shot thirteen unarmed men dead and wounded fifty-seven more and the courts condemned, not the killers, but the strikers’ leader, Eugene Victor Debs, in prison for six months, one of the greatest Americans of all time. Or the Haymarket Riots of May 4, 1886 in Chicago. Someone threw a bomb at a rally and four policemen were murdered. It was a terrible crime. Somebody had to pay, so four labor leaders were hanged and one cheated the gallows by suicide in prison. Or the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of 1911, the “Bread and Roses Strike.” Two women representing the strikers went to the local newspaper editor. He asked them, “What do you want?” One woman answered, “We want bread!” The other chimed in, “And roses too!” Or the Ludlow Massacre on Easter Night, 1914, when the National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado shot dead a dozen striking coal miners, thirteen of their children and one pregnant woman.Or the Lawrence strike of 1919, led by my beloved teacher, A.J. Muste, or the 1937 Flint, Michigan strike against General Motors that established the United Auto Workers Union, led by A.J.’s students.
The last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Lower Manhattan in 1911 just died this year. Two hundred and seventy-five young women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants right off the boat, worked six day weeks ten hours a day in this sweatshop. The doors were kept locked so that none of them could sneak out. When fire broke out on the ninth and tenth floors, many of them jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. One hundred and forty-six died. That spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, where my aunt learned to speak English, with a Jewish-Italian accent. These lives were part of the price we paid for health and safety regulations in factories.
Who remembers that Gene Debs ran for President of the United States from a federal prison cell and won a million votes! Debs opposed World War I. For saying so out loud, that’s right, just for saying so in public, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. President Harding freed him after three years, but Debs’s health was broken and he died not long after. Or A. Philip Randolph, who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black union when many unions were still segregated? Mister Randolph – even his closest associates called him Mister Randolph – was the Martin Luther King of his time.
I hope in this parish the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are not forgotten, men who were executed in 1927 for being labor activists and for being Italian immigrants. “We never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today, which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never!” Vanzetti wrote the night before he was murdered in the electric chair. The State of Massachusetts legislature has apologized, thank you! Let us never forget! The trial and appeal records are there for anyone to read, and a more shameful exhibition of ethnic prejudice and hatred can not be found. My Italian mother impressed upon me the meaning of all this, and why we must all come to the defense of any people who are humiliated for their race or their ethnic identity. Lest we forget!
It wasn’t all beer and skittles within the labor movement. Communists vied for control with gangsters. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, before and after World War II, set up labor schools all over the country to teach rank-and-file union members how to keep control of their own unions. One of its leaders, my friend John Cort, died just last month at age 92.
Little is known of the part that organized labor played in the great Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, but I know because I was there. I know who paid the bills! My teacher, A.J. Muste, trained Walter and Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers Union. These names, if you don’t know them, and Cesar Chavez’s, each of them deserves a chapter of its own in every American history book. And they were all connected to Martin Luther King through A.J. Muste. A.J. sent Bayard Rustin to Montgomery in 1956 to assist Doctor King in running the Bus Boycott. Then Bayard put together the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, Dr. King’s organization.
You have to ask yourself why they are not there in your history book, except for King of course. Many texts don’t even tell you that King was a Christian minister, and they surely don’t tell you anything about his social philosophy. Whose interests does this silence serve? If you want to know the answer to that, look for the people who fought Social Security then and would undo it now, look for those who fought the minimum wage then and now, for those who fought the forty hour week and are fighting still to keep it all for themselves.
When workers band together to secure justice for themselves and their fellows so that they might raise their families in decency, they are acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God. That’s what Dorothy Day taught, and that’s what Cardinal O’Connor taught, and it’s right out of the social encyclicals of the Popes for the last one hundred years.
It was one hundred years ago, in 1906, that Father John Ryan published his book, The Living Wage, arguing that everyone has the right to honest work and that all honest full-time labor deserves compensation at a level sufficient to maintain a family in decency. One hundred years later we still don’t have it, and it takes two full-time jobs to maintain a family with the kids in child-care, educated not by a parent in their family’s beliefs and traditions and values, but by a corps of hirelings in a day-care center where the mention of God is forbidden and the concept of family is, shall we say, flexible.
Young people crave adventure. Do you want a struggle, young people? Here’s a struggle for you! Learn your own history, not the lying pap they feed you in school or in the mass media. You have to search it out for yourself. You have to find it. Then engage yourself, get in gear, take your part in the struggle, the only struggle that can honestly claim that it has God on its side, the nonviolent struggle for justice, peace and equality in this land of the free and home of the brave.
Happy Labor Day, everyone, and remember where you came from. Remember Labor! And as Mother Jones put it, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!” W
October 18, 2009
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
Deacon Tom Cornell
(Is knowing and believing the same? What can we know about God, really know? Everyone has at least a vague intuition of The Other early in life, the Mystery we call God. One opens to the mystery, or one does not, and believes, or does not. And even if one does not, God is known to pursue, the “The Hound of Heaven,” relentlessly. When we open ourselves to God, our consciousness expands. That’s if we pray, not just mouthing words but really pray. Then we are more aware of everything. But human consciousness cannot capture the Infinite. We can not imagine God, that is, make an image of Him. We can not take hold of Him, capture Him. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God is involved in history, God cares. He didn’t just create the world, walk away and leave it at that. He called Abraham out of Ur to form a People and He led the People out of Egypt.)
The Hebrew religion is about a book, and the Muslim religion is about a book. But the Christian religion is about a man, Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, who we believe is the ultimate revelation of God, the God-man. Eternally begotten of the Father, he became one of us. Jesus is what we can know about God, all we need to know.
If you want to know what God is like, then look to Jesus. You want to get closer to God? Then develop a personal relationship with Jesus, a real, a personal relationship. Picture him in your mind. That’s what the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross are meant to do, to help us to imagine Jesus, to picture in our minds the scenes of his life, and his mother’s life, and to enter into them. Make a mental image. Imagine. Talk to him, every day, several times a day. And know that no matter what happens, good or bad, Jesus is with you, by your side, your best friend. He will never abandon you. He taught us to pray “Thy will be done.” “Let it be,” said his mother, “Let it be done unto me according to thy word.” But we have our part to play too in God’s plan. Pray “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Then turn to Jesus.
Picture Jesus? The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus looked like, the color of his eyes, his height or weight or complexion or build or voice. Did he have blue eyes, and wavy blond hair? If you want to imagine him that way, go ahead, but that’s not likely. He was a Palestinian Jew. So he probably had brown eyes and skin darkened by the desert sun. But picture him as you will. The Shroud of Turin may or may not be the burial cloth of Jesus. But it’s easy to imagine that Jesus looked like the mysterious, unaccountable imprint on that cloth. I see a well-built man with a manly face, a large nose and full firm jaw and chin, with deep-set eyes, not beautiful, not even handsome really, but strong, commanding attention. His strength radiates gentleness by the way he carries himself. His voice is strong too, but it is soothing, reassuring with quiet authority.
People gathered around him to hear him preach, thousands of people at a time. He taught sitting down. That was the custom. There were no microphones in those days, no loudspeakers, so he must have had a powerful voice. He went on for hours, long enough for people to get hungry and need to eat a meal. So he must have had a strong voice. And he must have had physical stamina too.
He died after only three hours on the Cross. Of course he had lost a lot of blood from the scourging. He fell, maybe even passed out three times on the way to Golgotha. A large man will die sooner on a cross than a small man because the weight of his body will pull him forward and inhibit breathing. So there is every reason to believe that Jesus was a large man, imposing, dark, with piercing black eyes and a powerful voice. But at the same time, he was gentle and kindly, humble, meek even, seldom moved to anger. But then he could ring out condemnation like thunder. The meek and gentle Jesus could in a moment rise up in righteous wrath casting the money changers from the Temple, or castigating hypocrites, pious frauds.
God looked upon his creation and saw that is was good. Jesus looked upon the Father’s creation and saw that is was good. He was intensely aware, of everything. That is what happens when we allow God into our lives. Our consciousness expands; we become more aware. We can see His traces in a grain of sand or the starry skies or the eyes of a child. And at the same time we are able, as Jesus was, to empty our minds, to peer into the void. For some few destined for the highest spiritual development, God hides in a “dark night of the soul,” as with Mother Theresa. God seems to withdraw, to be absent; all spiritual consolation is withheld, only to purify the soul of any delusion. Even Jesus had a moment like that when he cried out, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
All through his life Jesus loved everything he saw, the earth, the sea, the sky, birds, his home, his tools, flowers, rocks, rain and sun and children. He loved people, not with a sentimental love. The love that moved God at the Creation is Jesus’ love, the love he revealed. Men had turned away; they rejected God’s love in mythic Eden. But Jesus revealed it once again, to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh, eyes to see, ears to hear, to love as he loved, even to the Cross. He loved everyone, but especially the lowly, the outcast, the ones nobody else wanted. He ate with them. That was the ultimate sign and act of friendship, solidarity in those days in Palestine, to eat together, and it still is. Jesus ate with tax collectors, even fallen women, and public sinners. He did not encourage sin. Quite the contrary. When Jesus rescued the woman caught in adultery who was about to be stoned, he forgave her but he told her to go and sin no more! But the fact is he forgave. And he still calls sinners to the table. And forgives.
Think of the titles given to Jesus: Lord, Messiah-Christ, Son of David, Son of Man, Son of God, High Priest and Prophet, Savior, Redeemer, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Teacher, Rabbi Rabboni, Good Shepherd, Morning Star, Dawn from on High, Comforter, Everlasting Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, Way, Truth, Life. He is all of that and more, Holy, Mighty Immortal! And yet so close, so near, Emmanuel, God-with-us, brother, friend. Need we ever fear, can we ever be thankful enough?
Christ is risen. He is truly risen! “What good would life have been to us had not Christ risen from the dead?” He rose to take us with him. Otherwise life has no meaning at all: death is the end, a void, nothingness, an absurdity, even a mockery. We have hope, we have faith, all due to God’s mercy. Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. We have never done anything to deserve God’s mercy. Nor can we ever. It is a free gift, grace: saved by the gift of faith and hope, saved from death, saved from meaninglessness.
We really don’t know much about the life of the world to come, heaven, hell, purgatory. George Bernanos said that hell is not to love any more, and Fyodor Dostoevsky said the same. We don’t hear much about purgatory these days. What if Hitler and Stalin had the grace of final repentance? Would they then sit at the same table with Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day in heaven? Not for a while, I venture to say, not for a while.
Our first reading today is about the Jerusalem commune. Yes, the earliest Christians were communists. It’s likely that many of their fellow Jews in Jerusalem thought of them as some kind of hippies, as we might say. People who really believe tend to look funny to an unbelieving world. They certainly weren’t living the way most people did. They shared their goods, everything they had so that there was no one needy among them, “to each according to his need.” They didn’t say, “Is this person worthy of our help? She’s a drunk. She brought this need upon herself!” Or “He’s a mooch, says he’s too fat to work. He made his bed now let him lie in it! Why should we pick up the pieces of their broken lives when it’s not our fault but their own?” The Jerusalem disciples didn’t ask these questions. They didn’t distinguish between the “deserving” as opposed to the “undeserving” poor; they just shared.
Karl Marx thought that was a good line, from Acts, “to each according to his need.” He adopted it and added, “from each according to his ability.” That’s not a bad idea either! Marx’s mistake was to deny God, and to deny the freedom of the children of God, and so millions perished, tens of millions, for a utopian dream! When Eleanor Roosevelt presented the Declaration of Universal Human Rights to the United Nations in 1948, even though that declaration did not admit the divine origin of human rights, Mrs. Roosevelt warned that these rights will never be implemented without the world’s churches and synagogues weighing in. And we do.
God created this world for all to share. That teaching of the Church is called “the universal destination of goods,” and it has been explicit Catholic doctrine since 1891: that God did not create this beautiful world just for the children and grandchildren of the rich and powerful, but for all, since we are all are God’s children. Does that mean that people don’t have the right to private property and the profits of their own honest labor? No, not at all! Human freedom and human dignity depend upon it. We have a right to the fruits of our labor. But not to the fruits of other peoples’ labor. Man is to live by the sweat of his brow, we learn in Genesis, not the sweat of other peoples’ brows. You see there is some tension between these two ideas. We must share with those in need but at the same time we have a moral obligation to try to make our own way in the world, to support ourselves and our families.
The right to private property is not absolute but must be harmonized with the common good. That’s a hard lesson for many people to learn. Unspeakable human grief has been caused in our own living memory by those who would force the issue with grand schemes. What if twenty or thirty million men and women and children had to be sacrificed for the utopian dream? The future would be heaven on earth! A heaven without a God! In other words, a hell. And by neglect too. Indifference is worse than hatred. Too many just turn their backs, and again millions die, 16,000 children every day die from hunger, malnutrition. It doesn’t have to be.
There is no safe foundation for human rights other than the Hebrew belief that we are made in the image and likeness of God and the Christian conviction that we are saved by the blood of Christ, saved for the kingdom of God, a kingdom that can not be built by human hands alone, a kingdom that will only be realized in the fullness of time by his own return when we will share Christ’s divinity, who humbled himself to share our own humanity. That’s what Easter means. God has been good to us, generous, so merciful. So let us stop judging and show each other mercy. If we got what we deserve, none of us would get off easy! That too is what Easter means. Can we live this faith?
The Apostle Thomas’ faith faltered. He had followed Jesus through Galilee and Samaria to Jerusalem. He was there at the Sermon on the Mount. He was there when Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes. He was there at the Last Supper and so he was among Christ’s first priests. And yet he could say, “I’ll never believe unless….” Thomas’s doubt is a grace to all of us whose faith sometimes falters or grows weak. If we have the gift of faith, even as small as a mustard seed, we can water it, nurture it; it can grow, as the mustard seed, and shelter many. God has been merciful to us. Let us then be merciful to one another.
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y. February 26, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Have you lost any weight yet? Just last Wednesday I realized that I won’t be able to get into my suit trousers if I don’t lose a few pounds. Lent is just in time. It’s a very good idea to revive the old Lenten fast, not because we have to, but because we want to. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these cover a multitude of sins, and they are the three essential elements of the penitential season. Prayer comes first!
It’s really so good to see you here, every Sunday. You are the faithful ones. You are here. Where are the others? Father Bader and Deacon Vinny and I and the lay ministers of the Eucharist, when we stand at the foot of the altar to give you Communion: every time we feel the same warmth of recognition. We are native born and foreign born, liberals and conservatives, of many different racial and ethnic strains, but here we are all one, together, united in the love of God and Jesus Christ and all our differences fade away into insignificance. Communion: that’s what the word means. We are one with God in Christ Jesus who died for us, who showed us a way to live and who rose again to take us with him; and we are one with each other. The sacrament makes it real. Where are the others? Don’t they know what they’re missing?
Let’s get back to the subject, the penitential season of Lent, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Prayer comes first. If I fast seriously enough to get back into those trousers, that’s all well and good. But if my fast did not begin in with prayer, if it was not carried out in prayer and if it does not end in prayer, then it is of no spiritual benefit whatever. If I tithe and write a substantial check to the Campaign for Human Development, that’s all well and good. But if my charity does not begin in prayer, if it is not sustained in prayer, if it does not end in prayer, again, it avails me nothing in the realm of the spirit.
Saint Paul counsels “pray without ceasing” (1 Th 5,17). How do you do that? One way is to start the day with The Morning Offering. There are many forms of that prayer. Here’s the one I learned as a boy:
O Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works, joys, sufferings of this day, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world. I offer them for all the intentions of your Sacred Heart; the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, the reunion of Christians; and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father this month. Amen.
The Rosary is a very good way to pray. We let our fingers do the walking, as it were, counting the beads. Giving our hands something to do helps us to concentrate on the prayers itself. The repetition of the words of the Hail Mary, especially, are supposed to become automatic, freeing our minds to concentrate on the mysteries, from the Annunciation to the Birth of Jesus, from the Agony in the Garden to the Crucifixion, from the Resurrection to the Coronation of Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth. If you want, you can concentrate on other events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. Of course your mind will wander. When that happens, just bring it back!
Then there is silent prayer, contemplative prayer. Don’t be frightened off by the idea that this form of prayer is only for the spiritually advanced, monks and cloistered nuns. Not at all; we can all do it. One way is to read a short passage of Scripture, just to get in the right frame of mind. You’ll have to have a quiet place, nobody else around, no radio or TV noise in the background. You’ll have to set aside a few minutes, just a few at first. Sit in a comfortable chair with your back straight. Take a deep breath in through your nose, as deep as you can, then let it out through your lips, slowly. Do it again, and a third time. Now as you empty your lungs, empty your mind. There’s a lot of noise in our heads, so many thoughts, a lot of busy-ness. Breathe it all out as best you can. Empty you mind. Some people focus on a word or a short phrase, a “prayer word” or a “mantra.” Many people use the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” I use the beads for this prayer too, repeating it over and over. Again, inevitably, your mind wanders. All right, just call it back. Shorten the prayer, to just two words, “Jesus, mercy,” or one word if you like, “Jesus”! If you try this once a day, you will find that you will need just the word to call you back when you are distracted. Then maybe you can try it twice a day.
Let us pray! By the end of Lent may we all be prepared to meet the Risen Lord; may our waist lines be a little smaller and may some people living in poverty have some relief from our giving in Jesus’ name.
Lent begins this Wednesday! Sing Alleluia today, because we won’t sing it again until the Easter Vigil.
The Lenten fast of years gone by was strict and imposed upon the faithful under pain of sin. Today we are expected to act like grownups and adjust our penitential acts according to our own needs and judgment. We are all held to abstinence from meat on all Fridays of Lent, and for those of us between ages 14 and 60, the fast, not much of a fast really, two small meals and one main meal with no snacks in-between on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Some of us would benefit by observing the fast every weekday of Lent. It might even help many of us lose the excess wright we have been carrying around.
There are three elements to the penitential season that we should all observe: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Pray more often and more deeply; curb all appetites; and give to the poor. These are still and always will be key elements to our preparation for the great mystery of the Resurrection and our salvation. And if your conscience is burdened by serious sin, come to the sacrament of reconciliation. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these three cover a multitude of sins and make us open to the grace of God. Now let’s look at today’s Gospel reading.
We find Jesus at home in Capernaum on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum was the center for Jesus’ Galilean ministry, his home away from Nazareth. His first disciples, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew lived in Capernaum too. He preaches in the local synagogue and goes about healing the sick. It doesn’t take long for Jesus’ fame to spread. Today he is at home. So many people come to see him, hear him, petition him that the one most in need of his help can’t even get in the door. So his friends climb up onto the roof, pull away bundles of thatch and open a large hole in the roof. It had to be a pretty big hole to lower a man down on a mat. Imagine the people in the room below with Jesus, with dust and dirt and pieces of wood and bits of straw falling on their heads. They look up to see people taking the roof apart! This is not the way petitioners were expected to approach someone for help. Last Sunday we saw a leper approach Jesus. The leper bowed down low and knelt at Jesus’ feet. That’s the way to do it, not opening a hole in the roof. But Mark is setting the stage to make a point here.
We are only into the second chapter of his gospel today. Mark wastes no time. Jesus tells the paralytic his sins are forgiven. The scribes accuse Jesus of blasphemy, making himself equal to God. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they complain. To quiet them, Jesus answers: “Which is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven? Or take up your mat and walk?’ ” To prove to them that he has the power to forgive sins, he commands the paralytic: “Stand up, pick up you mat and go home.” And so he does.
Mark wrote about thirty years after Jesus’ life on earth. The first Christians were still trying to figure out what had hit them. Just who was, or who is this man, Jesus? Mark begins his gospel with the words, “The gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” Jesus had changed their lives. He had turned them upside down. Near the end of his gospel, Mark records the centurion at the foot of the Cross saying these same words, “This truly is the Son of God.” Mark calls him Jesus Christ, as if Christ were his last name. Very early on, Jesus was seen as the long awaited Messiah. So Matthew and Luke see Jesus as Messiah too. John will identify Jesus as the Word, eternally begotten of the Father, through whom all things were made. It took until the 4th Century of the Christian Era before the Holy Spirit inspired the Church to formulate the words we will recite in a few minutes, “the only begotten son of God… God from God, light form light, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things were made….”
During this Lent, maybe the best way to observe it, is simply to pray, to ponder the mystery of God revealed in Jesus more deeply, with a Bible. Can you picture God in your head? Don’t! Make no image of God, not even a mental image! Fix your mind on Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God, Lord and savior, the merciful, the forgiving, the loving, the one who invites us to follow in his footsteps, the one who conquers death itself and gives our lives meaning, forever, eternal meaning.
The life we will live in eternity is forged right here and now. You know in The Divine Comedy, Dante has the condemned pitched upside down in vats of boiling oil and such tortures as that. He drew those terrible images as metaphors to drive home a point. That point is the same as in the wonderful novel by George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest. Its hero explains, “Hell is not to love anymore.” If Hell is not to love any more, then what is Heaven? The ancient Jews pictured heaven as a banquet, a love feast. If Hell is not to love any more, then Heaven is to love forever.
What are the Two Great Commandments but to love? Love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus’ great commandment at the Last Supper was to love one another as he has loved us, even unto death. And most astoundingly, to love of neighbor, Jesus adds love of enemies. “I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Lk 6, 27) and again, he repeats, “Love your enemies” (Lk 6, 35).
And in John , we read, “God is love” (1 Jn 4, 8). Love, love at the end.
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y. January 15, 2012
Deacon Tom Cornell
Three weeks ago it was Christmas. Last Sunday the Three Kings visited the Christ Child in the manger. Today we see Jesus a grown man walking by the Jordan River. John the Baptist and two of his disciples notice him. John had a large following. His disciples stayed with him, studying his interpretation of sacred history and preparing for the next stage, some of them for years. Jesus probably joined John’s school for a time. But John says he didn’t recognize Jesus at first, that is, he didn’t realize who he really was. But he sensed that something new was happening, precisely what neither of them knew, neither John nor Jesus. But at his baptism, it became clear that yes, something new was happening.
In today’s reading, Andrew goes to his brother Simon and says, “We have found the Messiah!” Astounding, powerful words! Jews had been waiting for the Messiah since the time of Moses, for God’s anointed, in Greek the Christ, who would deliver them at last and forever from oppression, foreign domination and shame as a conquered people. They thought of the Messiah as a warrior king who would drive the Romans out and re-establish the glory days of Kings David and Solomon and maybe even make Israel an imperial power.
Something new was happening. Jesus did not understand his mission at first. Although the only begotten Son of God, one in being with the Father, true God from true God, he was also a man like any other man except sin, and so he had to grow in wisdom, age and grace before God and man. After his baptism he was driven into the desert for forty days by the Evil One to be tempted, recalling the forty days Moses led the People through the desert. There in the wilderness it was revealed to him: the power of spirit over the power of brute force. That is something new. Jesus will overcome the power of darkness by the Cross, not by imposing it upon others, even his killers, but by taking it upon himself.
Something new is happening now. Tomorrow we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. It’s debatable when it started. Some would say it started with Thoreau in 19th Century Massachusetts when he wrote the Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Others will say Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent campaign to free India in the first half of the 20th Century. Others will say December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. I say it started on Calvary two thousand years ago, and I know Martin King would say that too. But it takes time for something really new to be recognized for what it is. It’s been two thousand years, but with God a thousand years is as one day. So we, our church, are only two days old.
Down in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965, a Unitarian minister, James Reeb, a white man, had been beaten to death by a racist mob. Martin King knew this was the time for an all-out push. He called everybody who could to come to Selma for a March to Montgomery. Monica and I agreed I had to go.
It wasn’t the first time I had been in the Deep South. Not long after college, I went to South Carolina to work on a refugee resettlement project. Small-scale, successful family farmers in the Po Valley of Italy had been ruined by floods. The National Catholic Rural Life Conference determined to resettle them on the land in America. We had 2,500 acres and 45 Italians. The project was run by a priest of the Rock Hill Oratory. He rented a modest house in a small town between the farm and the Oratory, and invited me to share it with him. The Catholic population in that area was .5%. We did not have a church. The local parish, a very small one, met for Sunday Mass in the chapel of a Catholic hospital run by nuns. Fr. Maurice said daily Mass there as well. One morning, as we approached the hospital, I saw a dead body on the lawn, a man, shot. “”What’s going on, Father?” “They dumped him here because they have a morgue; they can put him on ice.” “Where’s the sheriff?” I asked. “There won’t be a sheriff!” “The police?” “There won’t be any police!” “An inquest?” “Tom,” he said, “there won’t be any inquest. Look at him. Don’t you see? He’s black! They’ll bury him. That’s all!” That’s the way it was, the way it was in the land of strange fruit.
Tomorrow is also Monica’s 70th birthday. She had given birth to our son just one month before Martin King called us to Selma. None of us knew what was going to happen, or whether we would ever come home. She let me go, and I am eternally grateful to her for that. Monsignor Dugan was there too. He slept on the gymnasium floor of Saint Edmund’s parish. I snuck a hospital bed into an unfinished X-ray lab in the Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and made a comfortable space for myself until we set out on the March to Montgomery. It took four days, as I recall, along Alabama Route 80. We were sitting ducks. Nick Katzenbach, the U.S. Attorney General, sent the National Guard to protect us, and I must admit, I was glad. I wanted to get back home to Monica and raise my son. My father didn’t get to do that.
When we came back from the March, I went to the old folks’ solarium in the hospital to see if we made national TV news that night. We were so often ignored by the media. But there on the screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressing a joint session of the Congress and the Senate, and all the country and all the world. He was talking about us. He named us. He said we were right. A white man with a Southern accent said there was no longer any room in this country for bigotry and racial hatred. He demanded that the Congress pass the Voting Rights Bill. He would sign it into law. He came to the end of his speech, put his papers down, looked into the camera, paused and said, “We shall overcome!” Astonishing, powerful words from that mouth! With those words, he stood with us, the President, a Southern white man stood with us! We knew in that instant that we had won and the South, and America would never be the same. We would have the vote, all of us! It had taken ten years since Emmitt Till had been murdered and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Forty-two of us had been killed. But we never struck back, and we won, faith and nonviolence had won! I looked around the room. It was crowded with students and clergy and old radicals from the labor movement, some of them hardened veterans of terrible battles, and there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen. Tears poured down their faces. Martin King was never seen to cry but that once. We had won. Nonviolence had won.
Something new is happening in North Africa and the Middle East and in American cities now. Or is it new? Maybe it’s so old it looks like new. It’s the power of spirit, the power of love, the power of the Cross, the power of nonviolence. Christ has overcome. Jesus is our peace. There is nothing to fear. Peace be with you.
I am a life-long Catholic Worker, deacon in our local parish, grandpa. I live now with wife Monica on the Catholic Worker Farm in the Hudson Valley and welcome guests enthusiatically, especially those who like garden work and old movies.
