TWO GODS?

 The readings at mass for this past Tuesday, July 1 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070125.cfm),

show an interesting contrast.

The first reading, from the book of Genesis, tells how the Lord In his anger totally destroys the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah including little babies and all the animals.

The gospel reading from Matthew tells us how Jesus stood up in the boat during the height of a storm on the sea of Galilee and “rebuked the winds and the waves, and there was great calm. The men were amazed, and said, ‘What sort of man is this whom even the winds and the sea obey?’”

In each of these readings, we see the tremendous power of God at work. In the first, he destroys two cities by raining down fire from heaven, while in the second, he saves the apostles from drowning by simply commanding the winds and the seas to calm down.

It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast than this one. The God of Genesis uses his power to kill people, many of whom are innocent. The God in the gospel, on the other hand, shows his power by saving the lives of several people, delivering them from a deadly peril by a simple word.

How can this be? Is this the same God in both instances?  One of the earliest heresies In Christian history was taught by a theologian named Marcion. He concluded that there must be two different Gods: the angry, destructive God of the Old Testament, and the loving life-giving God of the New Testament. This idea of his was quickly condemned as incorrect. There is only one God, not two.

Over the centuries, the Church has come up with one way of understanding this contrast between the God of the first reading and the God of the gospel. It’s called “Progressive Revelation.“ The idea is very simple: God is infinitely mysterious. There is no way that we human beings can comprehend this God all at once. So God gives us glimpses of the divine mystery a little at a time instead of all at one time.

In the first reading, God reveals infinite power by destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. What is not revealed to us in that passage is the side of God that is infinite love and forgiveness. 

As the story of the Bible progresses from Genesis through the Gospels, we keep learning more and more about the attributes of God until finally, God totally reveals his identity by coming among us as a person, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the full revelation of the heavenly Father.

In the fullness of this revelation, there is no more room for anger in this Heavenly Abba who is love itself. In the parables and in his teachings, Jesus tries to tell us about God‘s infinite forgiveness and boundless love, especially for sinners. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

So, God‘s self revelation has progressed a long way from the early chapters of Genesis to the sermon on the mount and the parable of the good Shepherd. 

Sure, in the Old Testament we see a God who hates his enemies and kills them. There are times when we may wish that we could imitate that God, but the Holy Spirit intervenes with the gifts of love, peace, reconciliation, and so on. 

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back.

We need to keep in mind that while biblical revelation is relentlessly moving forward toward the ultimate finale when at the end of time God’s love will conquer evil and death and God’s love will be all that is. But because the scriptures were written by human authors who were writing out of their own cultural  background and their own experience, sometimes that human side shows through and we have accounts of Jesus vengefully condemning sinners to a fiery pit for all eternity. This is an example of “two steps back.” That is, it’s clearly not going in the overall direction of divine revelation, which is always moving toward the ultimate victory of God’s infinite Love. 

So the end point of progressive revelation is the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, the truth that “God is love.“ Which is a long journey from the smoldering ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

HEART HEALTH

 In 1944, Pope Pius XII instituted the universal feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to becelebrated annually on August 22.  In 1969, Pope Paul VI moved the celebration to the Saturday after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

Today, June 28, as we celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I’d like to reflect not on all those things that make us think of Mary as being so high above the rest of us mortals (conceived without original sin, a model of endless patience, constantly contemplating the Divine Presence, assumed bodily into heaven, etc.).

Rather, in reflecting on Mary’s Immaculate Heart, I would like to find a lesson or two that might be of help to you and me as we try to live the gospel each day. 

The Collect of the mass for the feast suggests an approach:

“O God, who prepared a fit dwelling place for the Holy Spirit

in the Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary,

graciously grant that through her intercession

we may be a worthy temple of your glory.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ …"

This feast, then, celebrates the fact that Mary’s heart was a “fit dwelling place for the Holy Spirit.” Isn't this something we can aim at as we go through our everyday lives?

We can ask Mary’s help as we try to keep our hearts free from the clutter that often fills our hearts. When the Lord wants to come into our hearts will he find any room left there? Of will he find our hearts stuffed with worries and fears and preoccupations about our jobs, our children, our insurance coverage and car payments. 

Here's an exercise for the feast: Examine your own heart and look for the things that make it hard for the Lord to find there a “fit dwelling place.”

On this feast of the Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, let us pray in the words of the day’s Collect that “through her intercession we may be a worthy temple of your glory. Amen.”

HOW SMALL IS YOUR GOD?

In Richard Rohr's "Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality," (which I highly recommend), on page 148 he offers an example of how God forgives and transforms us. Here are a few lines:

Paul, of course, in the New Testament, is presented as a transformed accuser, a converted persecutor, maybe even a mass-murderer, whom we now call a saint. No one had been more pious, Jewish and law-abiding than Paul (Philippians 3:5-16). He was a perfect Pharisee, as he said, and suddenly he realized that in the name of love he had become hate, in the name of religion he had become a murderer, in the name of goodness he had become evil.

Paul was set up to recognize the dark side of religion, the scapegoating mechanism, the self-serving laws of small religion. He went global and that changed everything, and is probably why most of us are reading the bible today." 148

During the Easter season the daily mass lectionary took us through the story of the early church with readings from the Acts of the Apostles, so we're familiar with the story of Saul's conversion as well as the opposition of the Pharisees and Scribes. One phrase in the above passage caught my eye, however, and gave me pause: "the self-serving laws of small religion." 

What does "small religion" look like? I'm afraid that a description might start hitting pretty close to home for some of us. "Small religion" limits God's sphere of action to members of the particular in-group, those who have the legal formulas for pleasing God and the moral laws which, if obeyed, guarantee one's entrance into eternal reward. 

The first Christians were, as we know, all Jewish. When non-Jews began being converted to Christ and seeking Baptism, these Jewish Christians faced a momentous decision: Should non-Jews be required to become Jews first and follow Jewish dietary laws and observe the sabbath? The principles of "small religion" were telling many of these Jewish Christians to insist that any convert must observe Jewish laws (Acts 15:1). 

But Peter, Paul and others, seeing how the Holy Spirit had come down upon these gentile converts, insisted that there be no such restrictions placed on the gentile converts. Thanks in great part to Paul, who had once been a champion of "small religion," the temptation to make Christianity a "small religion" of exclusivity and self-serving laws had been overcome, and the Good News could then begin to spread throughout the Gentile world with a speed that still to this day amazes even atheistic historians and scholars.  

To what extent is my religion a "small religion?" The answer is not a matter of black-or-white, but one of degree. For example, to what extent am I so preoccupied with obeying rules and regulations that I overlook any intimate personal relationship with God? To what extent is my God a fearsome enforcer who punishes us sinners (the contrary of the loving Father revealed to us by Jesus in the parables)? What is my God's attitude toward atheists, or Buddhists or Jews or Protestants or folks of a different political viewpoint? To what extent is my religion confined merely to Church and its clear boundaries, obligations, authority structure and so forth? I'm afraid that there are Catholics who take great comfort in the "small religion" aspects of our Church and ignore the saving message of the Universal Christ who came to save the whole of humanity. We could all do well to listen to the message of a certain visionary priest and scholar.

 

The French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), was a priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian and philosopher who taught that the idea of evolution was at the center of God's ongoing plan for the world, and that everything in the universe was taking part in this development; the Universal Christ and his mystical body were part of this evolution that was heading toward one ultimate goal. 

Since tomorrow is the feast of Corpus Christi, it seems appropriate to share with you some of his thinking on the subject of the Holy Eucharist.

His vision of the Holy Eucharist is a perfect antidote to "small religion's" view of the world. When he gazed at the host as he elevated it during mass, he saw not God captured in a small wafer of bread for the benefit of the people attending mass, but saw rather a point from which infinite energy of divine love radiated out  beyond the farthest galaxies into the entire universe, and into every electron and every atom in every molecule in the universe. This is not "small religion!" He encourages us to see ourselves as members of the Body of the Universal Christ, the One who loves all of creation with unbounded love. This is the Christ that Saint Paul spent the rest of his life preaching.

May the graces of the Holy Eucharist open our hearts and minds to this vision of a universal Christ and a universal Church!

Chardin could hardly have imagined the universe shown in this 2024 photograph!

THE TRINITY AND THE KINGDOM

Over the years I've reflected many times on the two topics of the Holy Trinity and the Kingdom of God.  (You can use the "Labels" list in the column to the left of the screen to click on each of these topics for a more thorough treatment of each.) 

On this Trinity Sunday, June 15, I'd like to reflect on how similar these two mysteries are. I hope my brief summaries of the Trinity and the Kingdom will be of some help.

 GOD AS TRINITY

The Holy Trinity is the complete expression of God’s Love. When a family is faithful, their love transforms itself into the image of the Holy Trinity on earth. The Holy Trinity, like the family, is above all a mystery of unity. Love is union. Two spouses who love one another are united, and two distinct persons who become one: “And the two shall become one flesh.” This unity and diversity of two-in-one helps us to understand the Trinity: Three in One, three distinct persons in a unity of love.

The Holy Trinity, like the family, is a mystery of fruitful love and unity. The man and woman who love each other participate in the creative power of God, in the Love that gives life. The child is the living image of the parents’ love, just as in the Trinity, where the Son is the perfect Image of God.

If God is a Trinity of distinct persons, then God is relation-ship. To make it sound more real you can say that God is family. If that’s so, then you need to approach the mystery of the Holy Trinity with more than just your mind -- you need an open heart. To grasp more about the Trinity you have to be ready to receive God into your life, this God who is boundless, unconditional love.

God is family. We are all family. Think of that the next time you’re thinking ill of someone, especially someone who hates you. No matter who that person is, you have to say to yourself, “I better be real careful because after all that person is family.”

If your God's love has boundaries around it and is limited to only certain people, then that is not the Triune God of the Christian faith, but a God with boundaries. A god with boundaries is obviously not much of a God, but rather an idol.

Our belief in the Trinity, in God as Family, challenges us to open our hearts in LOVE to all of creation. Sure we may fall short of this, but the Trinity is like that -- something we never quite get completely.

On our end, we can deflect or interrupt the Flow of love in our lives, we can isolate ourselves from the divine circle dance, but the Spirit is always working to draw us back into it.

 

THE KINGDOM

In the gospels Jesus tells his disciples, “The kingdom of God is among you.” The kingdom that Jesus began is a whole new way of relating with God and with one another, that is, a whole new way of filling the space between us.

The kingdom exists not so much inside each of us as in the spaces between each of us. We get to decide the character of each of those spaces. I freely choose how to fill that space between me and a student, say, or between me and a street beggar, of between me and a brother monk, and so on.

The Kingdom, then is all about relationships of LOVE.

And the Trinity, too, it turns out, is all about relationships of LOVE.

The two deepest mysteries of our faith, then, are about the same thing: LOVE:

THE HOLY TRINITY: God's mysterious internal life of the mutual love of three persons and infinite love for us creatures.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD: The Love that comes about in the spaces, the relationships between God and us and our neighbors.

La Santisima Trinidad - C. Cervantez

PENTECOST: THE OTHER SIDE OF GOD

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GOD IS NOT NICE

I read somewhere this saying attributed to an old rabbi: "God is not nice. God is not your uncle. God is an earthquake." I've found it a useful reminder from time to time in my own life. Just when I start getting comfortable with the calm, quiet, and comforting side of God, and begin to think that the Almighty is supposed to be "nice," I experience some struggle or tragedy. Then I remember that there's that other side of God. A good place to glimpse this other aspect is in Luke’s account of the story of Pentecost.

PENTECOST'S SURPRISING IMAGERY

In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells the familiar story of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles when they are huddled together in a room, afraid that at any moment they will be found and arrested (Acts 2:1-13). A close look at the passage reveals some surprises. Take, for instance, the tongues of fire that appear above each apostle’s head (2:3). Fire is never used in scripture as a symbol of peace or contentment; it is rather a means of purifying or even destroying (as in Luke 3:9, 16-17). The phrase "tongues of fire" appears in Isaiah as an image of destructive power: "As the tongue of fire devours the stubble…" (Isaiah 5:24). The fire of Pentecost, then, should remind us of what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews warns us: “Our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29). This is hardly a soothing image!

Another detail in the story of Pentecost brings out this unsettling side of the Spirit: “They were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong, driving wind, and it filled the entire house where they were" (Acts 2:1-2). The metaphor of "wind" already gives us a hint that the Spirit may not necessarily be something soothing, static or passive. In fact, it is Luke's description of the wind that sends the clearest warning that what is about to happen is anything but peaceful and gentle. The Greek says literally “And there came suddenly out of heaven a sound as of a rushing, violent [biaios] wind" (Acts 2:2). The adjective biaios comes from the noun bia, “violence, physical force.” A quick look at the other places in Acts where Luke uses bia gives an idea of what he is implying with his image of the wind.

In chapter five, as soon as the angel had led the apostles out of jail, they hurried back into the temple to continue preaching. Then “the captain and the court officers went and brought them in, but without violence [bia], because they were afraid of being stoned by the people" (Acts 5:27). Bia is the kind of force that can unleash a riot in the streets. In fact, Luke later uses the word to describe just such a melee: with the whole city in turmoil, a mob rushed in and dragged Paul out of the temple. A cohort of Roman soldiers was sent to break up the riot, and “When he reached the steps, Paul was carried by the soldiers because of the violence [bia] of the mob" (Acts 21:35). In Chapter 27, during a fierce storm, the captain deliberately runs the ship aground, and its stern is shattered to pieces "under the violence [bia] of the waves” (Acts 27:41).

THE BREATH OF THE SPIRIT

Biaios leaves no doubt, then, as to the kind of wind Luke is talking about at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is not a gentle breeze, but a gale force wind. I picture one of those television news clips of a hurricane tearing the tops off of palm trees and heaving houses from their foundations.

Biaios warns me that the same "mighty wind" that troubled the waters in Genesis (Genesis 1:2), and that blew on the apostles, continues to blow today. Now and then the wind of the Spirit is going to roar into my own comfortable life and uproot my favorite assumptions, and perhaps tear the roof off of my snug spirituality. Luke wants me to remember that this is a part of the mysterious, creative pattern of God’s work in my life: the Spirit sometimes needs to remove obstacles that are standing in the way of my spiritual growth, so as to replace them with new possibilities and new promises.

It may be easy enough to sense the presence of the Lord in the midst of loving friends, in the gorgeous colors of autumn leaves, or after a good meal and a glass of wine. But when things are going wrong in my life, when there is upset and confusion and pain, I need the eyes of faith to see that even in the midst of my chaotic situation the Spirit is right there with me. It is at times like this that biaios can be especially helpful -- it reminds me that God is not necessarily supposed to be "nice" all the time. The same Spirit that brings us the sweet infant Jesus and Christ's healing miracles, also comes as a violent wind and a searing fire, to renew the face of the earth.

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.........................                                    ...Martin Sharp. "PENTECOST"

A TIMELY GIFT

 

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THE GIFT OF THE ASCENSION

This year our Archbishop has once again transferred the celebration of the Ascension of the Lord from Thursday,  to this Sunday. The message of the feast, however, remains the same. The liturgy of the paschal season has been leading us toward this feast for weeks, and reflecting on the meaning of the mystery of the Ascension can be a help to all of us.

Because St. Benedict's Prep has two graduations this weekend, one for the girls and one for the boys, I've dug into my archives to offer this reflection from five years ago when the pandemic was still raging.

In  the naïve worldview of ancient Israel, where the earth was as flat as a dinner plate and the firmament was above and the netherworld below, the idea of Jesus’ “ascending” up into a cloud was easily accepted. Too easily, perhaps, because it would then seem to mean that Jesus, taken “up” into heaven, had gone away from us and was thus no longer present.

Fortunately our modern astronomy won’t allow us to settle for this simple picture of Jesus rising “upward” to heaven. And that’s great, because we’re not as likely to misinterpret it as meaning “Jesus left us.” We are forced to look for the meaning of the event rather than simply settling for “Jesus went up into the clouds of heaven.” And it is precisely this theological meaning that can be a comfort to us during these sad and uncertain times of pandemic.

The feast of the Ascension celebrates Jesus’ passing beyond the familiar dimensions of time and space, beyond the reach of our senses and into the presence of the Father. So what? Well, think about it: This means that Jesus is no longer bound by time and space, so he is now more present to us than he ever was previous to the Ascension. He is in our hearts and bodies, in our friends and our foes, in the spring breeze and, mysteriously, in the strands of DNA inside the novel coronavirus.

Now, we may be repelled by the idea that God could somehow be present in a terrible, deadly virus and all of the suffering it has caused, but that’s far more comforting than the alternate view – that God is totally absent from those tragic events and horrible microorganisms, and that we are left to face these horrors on our own. A God who’s only present to us when times are good is not much of a God.

So as we continue to struggle with the depressing statistics, the deaths of family members or friends, the dark uncertainties of unemployment and closed classrooms, let's remember the lesson of the Ascension: Christ is intimately present with each of us in the midst of this whole mess, and is walking every step with us through this valley of the shadow of death.

 "Though I walk in the valley of darkness

I fear no evil, for you are at my side. (Psalm 23:4)"

ON HIKING AND LIVING

 

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DOWNTOWN BACKPACKERS

Here's a post from many years ago. But I think you and I can still profit from its message.

Monday morning commuters stared from buses and cars at the strange sight: a steady stream of teenage boys and girls slowly filing up the stone steps into Saint Benedict’s Prep wearing big backpacks. By now I suppose a lot of people around town know of our Freshman Backpacking Project that takes place each May.

Occasionally I’ll bump into one of our kids downtown wearing an empty backpack at the end of a training day when he’s had to bring it to school or has rented it from us for a nominal fee.

At first this seems incongruous if not comical: You expect to see backpackers along the side of a road in, say, the Adirondacks, but not on Market Street in Newark. Yet the sight can also prompt some serious reflections about the journey that each of us lives every day. It doesn't take much imagination to see everyone around you carrying a backpack on the one same human journey. All the principles of backpacking apply to the journey of life. Here are just a few:

FOUR BACKPACKING PRINCIPLES

First, don’t carry any unnecessary weight on the journey. Ever notice how some people are staggering through life under the weight of burdens they keep collecting and refuse to let go of, such as resentments, prejudices, injured feelings? They're ignoring Principle #1: Travel light, it makes the trip more enjoyable.

Second, don’t hike alone: Even in New Jersey a simple hiking mishap can turn deadly if you are by yourself. A story I just heard yesterday will serve as a good example: during the hike this past week a freshman got lightheaded and dizzy (probably from dehydration) and fell, striking his head on a rock. He was unconscious when our trained EMT person arrived, driving up a narrow woods road nearby; since the victim was unresponsive the EMT called for an ambulance which in turn took the injured hiker to a helicopter for evacuation to a hospital where everything eventually turned out fine. So, that’s why we have Principle #2: Don’t try to hike alone!

Third, backpacking is NOT a virtual experience -- you do not get virtual blisters on the Appalachian Trail! Your actions have very real consequences; for example, you decide not to protect your clothes in plastic bags inside your pack and therefore wind up with four days to go and no dry clothes to wear.

I was thinking of developing a computer simulation called “Backpacker.” The idea would be that we could save the expense of dragging all those kids out into the woods, and also make the insurance companies breathe a great collective sigh of relief. The game would simulate the backpacking hike with gorgeous mountain vistas, a detailed map, and an accurate report of the weight of the player's backpack. The participant on the virtual hike would see messages on the screen such as: “There was a heavy downpour last night but you had not wrapped anything in protective plastic bags. You will therefore walk all day wearing wet clothes and carrying a pack that is heavier because of its soggy contents.” See, there would be the consequences of not following directions about protecting your stuff from rain. Now I suppose that some might say that reading about wet underwear is different from wearing it, but nothing’s perfect. Principle #3, then, sounds like real life: Make good decisions because you have to live with the consequences.

A fourth principle of the backpacking project, among many others, is that your fate is inevitably linked with the fate of those around you. You can only hike as fast as the slowest member of your eight-man team. If one of your teammates does something stupid that causes his pack to break, you have to wait while he fixes it, and may even have to help him with the repairs. Life is like that. Your car insurance rates, for instance, keep going up because of the rotten driving of people you’ve never even met. This is the result of Principle #4: You are interdependent with other people whether you want to be or not.

A CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE

For all its surprises both good and bad, however, the Backpacking Project lacks something that everyday living has in abundance: the element of mystery, and most especially for me this week, the mystery of suffering and evil.

While the freshmen were out hiking, those of us who stayed home celebrated a funeral on Wednesday in the abbey church. A graduate of our school in 1997, Rob had won the Presidential Award (our school's highest honor, given to one graduating senior each year) and went on to graduate from Yale with a degree in microbiology. He came back and taught at our school for four years before moving on. Sounds like a wonderful success story, right? Maybe he would go on to help find a cure for cancer. But here’s where the mystery of evil comes in. He came from a family background that included jail and addiction to alcohol and drugs. People who knew him well realized that he was carrying some of those very same demons around inside him his whole life, wrestling with them constantly. He did not go on to find a cure for cancer.

Instead he apparently began applying his scientific knowledge to the raising of huge crops of marijuana in sophisticated hydroponic tanks in his basement and making an estimated $1,000 a day. Until someone shot and killed him last week.

FACING THE MYSTERY
As I looked at Rob’s body lying in the open casket I noticed that the expression on his thirty-year-old face showed a hardness and grimness that it didn’t have the last time I saw him a few years ago. His recent experiences had obviously changed him greatly. There is no fathoming that mysterious kind of evil, I said to myself; we’re helpless when we try to make sense of it. But then I happened to notice the paschal candle perched in its high stand nearby, its flame flickering steadily and brightly twelve feet above the casket.

The viewing and the funeral service were held, as I mentioned, in our church. Although the atmosphere of grief and deep discouragement clashed sharply with the message of the Easter lilies and other beautiful decorations that proclaimed the joy of the paschal season, the contrast was not ironic or painful. Rather it was just the opposite: It is precisely in the face of evil and death that Easter takes on its fullest meaning.
Easter celebrates Christ’s victory over those ancient enemies, sin and death. The victory is still incomplete of course, as Rob’s life and death can attest, but our faith in the risen Lord and in his ultimate victory helps us to continue even in the face of violence, addiction, suffering and death itself.

As I turned away from the coffin and glanced around, the church decorations and the Easter flowers suddenly seemed me to take on a defiant look, as if they were quietly but resolutely insisting that no matter what things look like, one day the victory will be ours.
One day the tears will be wiped away.
One day the horrors of crime and hatred, of violence and sin will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye when the trumpet sounds and Rob and the all the rest of us rise incorruptible.

Meanwhile we go to wakes to weep for young alumni, even ones with degrees from Yale in microbiology.

HOMECOMING

The next day the first wave of backpackers returned from their long hike. As I came out of our school library across the street I stopped and studied the returning hikers, some of whom were flopped on the sidewalk in front of the school waiting for their ride home. Some looked exhausted, others happy, and others showed little emotion at all.

I wondered what was going on in their heads and hearts. What had they learned from coping with the challenges of mountains and rainstorms and difficult companions?

Then I looked at them again and wondered if maybe three years from now one of them just might get into Yale and then even, who knows, go on to find a cure for cancer.
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