NO VACANCY

The gospel passage for this morning‘s mass (Saturday after the epiphany) Has John the Baptist telling his disciples “He must increase, I must decrease“(Jn 3:30). I used that verse as my early morning meditation. 

Then at morning prayer we sang Psalm 24, which had this line “Let him enter the King of Glory!” That got me thinking. What if the Lord were to come to my heart and ask to enter? 

Would he find any room there or would he find instead a “No Vacancy” sign? Would all the space be already taken up by my artificial self: my self image, my pride, my preoccupation with work and so on? That’s the “me” that must decrease. (Thomas Merton calls that my “false self.“)

The situation is what some would call a zero-sum game: The space in my heart will always be filled.  So Christ’s presence there will increase exactly to the extent to which my “ false self” decreases and leaves Him room.

We all know very well how this “decreasing” works in practice. Through humility, gentleness, and serving others in love, our artificial ego-centered self shrinks so that the Lord has room to “increase“ in our hearts.

So, as the Christmas season comes to a close with the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord on Sunday, January 12,  we should be listening to the words of John the Baptist and setting about making room for Christ in our Hearts by the way we act toward others.

Let us all pray that “He May increase as we decrease.”

THE JOURNEY

 

I first posted this reflection 11 years ago, but it still seems fresh.

In his second chapter the evangelist Matthew treats us to a charming story full of oriental color

and rich with mystery: the story of the wise men that follow a star in search of the infant Christ. We commemorate this story this Sunday on the feast of the Epiphany.

In celebrating this feast the church celebrates the belief that God has expressed and revealed himself totally in Christ. Christ is the “epiphany” (“showing forth”) of God. From now on we have a path to follow in our search for God: Christ.

The search for God is an adventure that starts very early in life, with our first steps as babies. St. Augustine says that we’re created for God and our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And so we find ourselves drawn to the journey, like the magi, following a star.

It’s a long voyage in which grace and human effort are mysteriously united. The star, we might say, is grace, God showing the path and offering us hope. The walking, the doubts and the questions, they’re all part of the human effort.

Seeking God can be a difficult journey at times, and it lasts our whole life. Sometimes the star gets hidden behind a layer of clouds, at other times we feel too tired to continue. Although the journey of the wise men is filled with a sense of gospel joy, it must have been a difficult one just the same. T.S. Eliot captures this difficult aspect in the first half of his poem, “The Journey of the Magi.”

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

May the Lord give us the strength to follow the star, and to help one another on the journey especially during difficult times, when the star is behind the clouds. Le me end with the second half of Eliot’s poem:

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

FAMILY VIRTUES

One of the choices for the second reading for today’s feast of the holy family is from Colossians 3:12-17. It begins this way:

¨Brothers and sisters: Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another...¨

 Paul describes here the kind of virtue that it takes to make a family truly unified. Most of these qualities are pretty familiar: kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience and so on. But I would like to look at the first virtue on the list, “feelings of compassion.” Both of these words are very powerful in the original Greek.

First, some background on the word for ¨feelings¨ splanchna. The Greeks considered the internal organs of the abdomen (intestines, heart, spleen, etc.) as the seat of the strong emotions. We still describe certain situations as "gut-wrenching" or "heart-breaking." For the Hebrews, however, these inner organs were identified more with compassion and mercy. 

The Greek word for the parts of the body involved in emotions is the plural noun splanchna. The King James Bible translates it as "bowels," while modern bibles usually translate it, depending on the context, as "affection" or "compassion." In Philippians, for example, the  KJV has "If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels (splanchna) and mercies…" The New American Bible has "If there is any encouragement in Christ, any solace in love, any participation in the Spirit, any compassion (splanchna) and mercy… (Phil. 2:1)" So the writer of Colossians has chosen Greek's strongest word to express feelings of compassionate love, of being moved in the depths of ones "guts."

The second word, ¨compassion,¨ oiktirmou, comes from the verb oikteiro, which means, according to my dictionary “to have pity a feeling of distress through the ills of others¨. The noun form is used of God in Romans 9:15: ¨For he says to Moses: “I will show mercy to whom I will, I will take pity on whom I will.”

It is very easy, it seems tome, to feel “sympathy“ for someone, because you are standing safely outside of

the situation, a safe distance from their actual pain. But our word here, “empathy,¨ is different. When I feel empathy or compassion, I am  not just an observer sharing the other person’s pain. I am trying to get inside what that person is experiencing, and feeling it myself. 

So when the sacred writer combines these two words, splanchna and oiktirmou to mean ¨feelings of compassion,¨ they form a powerful picture of how we are supposed to act toward others: Allowing ourselves to be moved to the depths of our being by someone else’s suffering by identifying with that other person and feeling their pain as much as they feel it. 

And this little two-word phrase is at the head of the list of behaviors that it takes to make a healthy and life giving family.

So today we ask Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the members of the holy family, to help each of us to imitate their selfless love for one another in their family.

IN A TIME OF VISITATION

 

Rosetti's Annunciation

The gospel reading for Friday, December 20 presented one of my favorite scenes from the Christmas narrative, the “Annunciation.” You remember it begins this way: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!' But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be" (Lk 1:26-29). What follows is based on a post from several years ago.

Some Background

The Barren woman bears a child. The annunciation to Mary resembles certain other annunciation scenes from the Old Testaments. The most important of these is the announcement of the birth of Samson: 

Manoah and his wife

There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne gel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, ‘Although you are barren, having borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, or to eat anything unclean, for you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines’ (Judges 13:2-5).

Luke’s choice of words points us to a messianic prophecy the Church uses on Palm Sunday: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he." (Zech. 9:9)

There is also a reflection of this shout of messianic joy in Zephaniah 3:14, "Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!."

The image of a barren woman bearing a child and the messianic overtones in the passages that tell the “daughter” Jerusalem to “rejoice” at what is about to happen form just some of the background for Luke’s opening chapter. Let’s not forget the angel’s appearing to Zechariah to announce to him that his old, barren wife would bear a son, John the Baptist (Lk 1:7, etc.) 

"Hail, full of Grace." If you, like me, pray the “Hail Mary” constantly, you might be interested in a quick aside to look at what Luke’s original Greek text reveals about the angel’s greeting.

First, there’s the wonderful alliteration of the three “k” sounds in Gabriel’s “Chaire kecharitomene," (kyray kekahritoh meneh). Chaire is the normal word of greeting, “Hail.” I remember how we First Year Greek students used to exchange chaire with one another in the hallways just for fun. The second word is difficult to translate. It’s actually a verb (the perfect passive participle if you’re interested), charitoo, which means “to bestow favor upon, to favor highly, to bless.” The root of the word, char-, means “gift, grace.” The ending on the verb is feminine singular. So we can try translating the two words “Hail, O highly favored one” or “Hail, Gifted Lady.” 

St. Jerome translated it into Latin as “Ave, gratia plena,” “Hail, full of grace.” Although the word “grace” catches the Greek root of the verb, it seems to me to say both too much and too little. Gabriel is not telling Mary that she is filled with grace, but rather that she has been highly favored by God.

“The Lord is with you.” The strange greeting above is followed by “the Lord is with you.” To show just how odd and overwhelming this phrase was, Luke says that the young maiden (aged 12 or 13?) was “troubled” by the angel’s words. Let’s look at that word for a moment. In1:12 when Zechariah sees the angel that appears to him in the temple he is “troubled” (Greek terasso -- the RSV translates it a little strongly as “terrified”). So now when Luke describes this young teenage girl reacting to the appearance and the strange greeting of the angel, he uses not terasso but diaterasso, the dia- is an intensifier that adds the idea of “thoroughly.” The poor girl was “thoroughly terrified” by the angel! Or at least she was “utterly confused” by the words and “wondered what the greeting might mean” (v.29). Gabriel has to calm her down and tell her “Do not be afraid, Mary” (v.31).

John Collier, Annunciation 

We can only try to imagine Mary’s reaction to being told that she has been “highly favored” by God. Luke Timothy Johnson reminds us “She is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. Furthermore she has neither husband nor child to validate her existence. That she should have “found favor with God” and be “highly gifted” shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. ("The Gospel of Luke," Liturgical Press, 1991, p. 39)”

SO WHAT?

Luke’s recounting of the annunciation offers us a couple of lessons that we can profit from. 

First, “God’s activity is often surprising and paradoxical,” as those barren women in the Old testament can testify and as young Mary found out that day as she was going about her daily work and suddenly and angel from heaven appeared to her. We must try to remember that God works the same way in our lives, that is, using mystery, paradox and surprises in working out the divine, loving plan. 

Second, Mary also experienced something that many of us have endured: “Sometimes God’s plan for us can be overwhelming or even terrifying.” Which is why we hear so often in the bible the words that Gabriel uses at the annunciation: "Do not be afraid!" Let us try to hear with the ears of faith those same words from heaven addressed to us:  "Do not be afraid!" If you haven't gotten that message yet, listen harder.

Third, I believe that many of the teenage girls and boys in our school would really be comforted to learn this lesson from the annunciation: God often uses the young, the powerless and the minority person to further the divine plan. If you find yourself in one or more of those categories, as Mary did, then you better stay on your toes: God probably has something special for you to do.

Finally, in reply to Mary's question about how all this was to take place since shoe had no relations with a man, Gabriel offers this reminder: “Nothing is impossible for God.” Let that belief be behind every prayer we utter.

May the Lord of the Impossible, the Lord of Surprises, bless all of us and keep us safe during this time of mysterious "visitation!"

.

Henry Owassa Tanner, Annunciation

LETTERS FROM GOD?

 

CHRISTMAS CARDS

X

I was meditating in church the other morning, and started out with the reflection assigned for Saturday of the Second Week of Advent in my book From Holidays to Holy Days. (I find that the questions I was asking myself years ago tend to stay fresh and green for a long time.)

There were two aspects to the meditation about Christmas cards. The first was the idea of that God is always sending me Christmas cards. In his poem "Leaves of Grass" Walt Whitman wrote: 

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name." God is constantly dropping Christmas cards at my feet as reminders of his love.

For the past couple of weeks I have been feeling so blessed by the people around me, especially the students. I have been so thankful for these gifts that expand my heart.

,

The other half of the metaphor, though, was a natural follow-up to the idea that God is always dropping letters rto me at my feet. The second part is contained in this paragraph:

And it occurs to me that God must entrust me with the task of delivering many of those divine Christmas cards to others: a little favor done for a brother monk, spending fifteen minutes listening to a student tell me his problems, taking special care to prepare a good homily for the people for whom I say mass on Sunday. God uses me to drop all of these “letters” at people’s feet to assure them that they are loved, and that the Lord is with them every minute.

In the reflection questions I’d asked: “When has the Lord used you to deliver a message of love and concern to someone?”

I smiled as I remembered all the situations I was in yesterday that were testing my patience and my calmness. I’d tried very hard at the time not to be resentful of all the demands on my time and energy. I guess it was a gift that I was able to pull it off pretty well, especially on a Friday. In other words I was able to see that most of what I was doing involved being of some sort of help to others. Being patient with a troubled student who was being difficult, hearing confessions, discussing a student’s grades with him, reviewing the light cues for tomorrow’s Christmas Program....

So now Saturday morning’s reflection question gave me a lovely way of seeing what I’d been doing recently: “When has the Lord used you to deliver a message of love and concern to someone?”

I don’t send out Christmas cards. But now I realize that I have the opportunity to send them by the hundreds every day. Each one personal -- and postage free -- and signed by God.

Each of us is meant to be a letter carrier for the Lord, delivering his “love letters.”

It gives a new meaning to an expression people don’t use any more: “You’re such a card!”

COOPERATING WITH GOD

THWARTING GOD'S PLAN?

Tomorrow, the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist features John the Baptist. I like to revisit a post from many years ago the still speaks to me. Letś begin with Jesus´referring to John:

I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.’ (And all the people who heard this, including the tax-collectors, acknowledged the justice of God, because they had been baptized with John’s baptism. But by refusing to be baptized by him, the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves.) (Lk 7:28-30)

I was struck by the phrase, “[they] rejected God’s purpose for themselves.”
Other translations include: “[they] frustrated God’s purpose for them (Phillips Bible)” and “[they] thwarted God's plan for them (NJB).

When I was reflecting on this passage about the people who “frustrated God’s plan for them” and applying it to myself I decided that instead of looking at the hundreds of ways I frustrate God’s plans for me, I would take a more positive approach and look at what happens when it DO cooperate with God’s plan for me. The exercise was tremendously gratifying.

I discovered that the events or periods in my life that have been most satisfying usually show one of two characteristics: risk-taking or putting myself second. And these just happen to be the characteristics of the two principle personalities of the Advent season: The Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.

THE VIRGIN MARY’S COURAGE

The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Dec. 18) is the story of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel gets Mary’s consent: “Mary said, I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me as you have said.” Mary is the perfect example of willingness to cooperate with God’s plan. But of course, Mary had an angel appear to her and tell her what God expected of her. That made it a lot easier, right? We keep wishing that God would just send US an angel the way He did to Mary, and tell us what he wants. Then we’d be able to do God’s will much more easily.

But Luke makes it pretty clear that Mary was in fact uncertain about what was happening and what she was getting herself involved in. Think about it: She was saying yes to something that was unheard of, unthinkable in fact, that she would conceive through the Holy Spirit 'the Son of the Most High God." This makes her “Let it be done to me” that much more impressive. She had to keep “pondering all these things in her heart,” trying to discern God’s will for her. She is actually a good model for us who are living with uncertainty in our lives and who have to take risks without the security of knowing for certain if this is the right thing to do.

So, in my own reflections I found that two of the most blessed times of my life involved risk-taking, venturing out of the comfortable circle of the given into alien, unknown places. Specifically, when we decided to re-open St. Benedict’s Prep in 1973 we were leaping into the dark because it seemed to be what God was asking us to do at the time. The second life-changing event was when I left the security and routine of monastery for an eleven-month sabbatical, traveling to completely new places both physically and spiritually. There’s no doubt in my mind that these two decisions were part of “God’s plan” for me.

JOHN THE BAPTIST’S HUMILITY

As I reflected on how I’ve managed to “follow God’s plan for me,” I found that often this involved putting myself second. This seems, in fact, like a universal property of life at least in my experience, like one of Newton’s three laws of motion: the less self-centered I am, the more satisfying my life becomes. When I go out of my way to stop and pay attention to a little child who wants to say something to me, that is always rewarding – and it’s clearly God’s will for me. When I skip my afternoon walk to talk with a troubled student who needs a sympathetic listener and a word of encouragement, that is always a rewarding experience – and it feels like God’s will for me.

The Advent model for putting myself second is, of course, John the Baptist. The gospel for the Second Sunday of Advent (Dec.11, 2011) tells of how John bore witness to Christ. “I am not the Christ,” he told those who asked him. His job was to decrease so that Christ could increase, to point out to people “Look! There is the Lamb of God.”

John is the perfect model for “It’s not about me!” If I want to follow “God’s plan for me,” then, I need to follow John’s lead and remove myself from the center of the stage so that Christ can become visible to people through my actions, words and attitudes.

ADVENT ADVERBS

“Does God want me to put the house on the market now?” “Does God want me to start looking for a new job?” “Does God want us to take our daughter out of the school she’s attending and transfer her to another one?” We shouldn’t expect help from God in the form of answers to these questions. (Sorry!) The answers are simply not going to come.

But we can be sure of THE WAY in which God wants us to approach those questions. We get two good adverbs from the example of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.

The first adverb is “confidently:” “Does God want me to trust in his goodness as I try to decide to accept this job offer?” “Does God want me to wait in joyful hope as I wait for the results my medical test?”

The second adverb is "humbly:" “Does God want me to grab the limelight and make myself the center of attention as the family is grieving over the death of my aunt, or does He expect me to help people meet Christ through my humble loving words and my quiet sharing in their various ways of dealing with their grief?”

It’s clear HOW God expects me to act in these cases even if I don’t know exactly WHAT I should do. But it’s the “how” that I'm going to be judged on, it seems to me. Did you act humbly? Generously? Openly? Considerately? These ways of acting are without any doubt “God’s plan for me.”

And I’ve found that they are also the keys to living a life that is rewarding, fruitful and life-giving..


,,,,,Henry Owassa Turner "The Annunciation"
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BEWARE OF SCAMS!

If you're like me, you get a lot of calls on your cell phone from numbers that you do not recognize. My phone tells me the location of the caller, which is very helpful. When I get a call from Pascagoula, Mississippi, say, or Waco, Texas, I don’t answer it. I have become very suspicious. If the person really needs to speak to me, they will leave me a voicemail message.

Recently I have gotten voicemail messages from some nice lady who is offering to help me with my serious problems with the IRS over my back taxes. Since I have never filed income tax in my life, I don’t bother to return her call. The same with someone who is warning me that my auto insurance is about to be canceled. I don’t have a car, nor do I have insurance for a car so I don’t bother to respond.

We are becoming more and more wary every day of scams. 

Living in the in-between time

The first Christians were expecting Jesus to return in glory within a matter of weeks or maybe months. As time went on, however, it became apparent that Christ was not returning right away, and Christians had to adjust their hopes. If Christ is not coming back immediately, then what do we do in the meantime? This is the situation that Saint Paul addresses in his letter do the Thessalonians in today’s second Reading. He writes to his readers,

May the Lord make you increase and abound in love

for one another and for all,

just as we have for you, 

so as to strengthen your hearts, 

to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.  Amen.

Every Christian knows how we are supposed to live as we wait for the coming of our Lord: Loving one another, being just and generous, meek and forgiving, and so forth.

However, our culture is constantly trying to trick us with false messages about how to fill up emptiness we feel inside -- an emptiness that only God can fill. So we are constantly bombarded with scams every bit as phony and sleazy as any telephone scam you could Imagine. 

¨You will feel happy and satisfied if you have enough possessions. So go shopping for more stuff¨ That is a scam!

¨You will be fulfilled if everybody respects and envies you when they see the luxury car that you are driving or the designer clothes that you are wearing.¨ That, too, is a scam, a lie.

We are bombarded every day by scams offering to make us fulfilled, happy and content. They are all lies! Don’t listen to them! Just keep deleting those false messages.

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, encourages us to prepare our hearts for the coming of Christ, to make sure that we are living our lives In accord with Jesus’s teaching as we wait in joyful hope for his coming. His promises are true, they are not scams.

Let us pray for one another during this holy season that we can get better at ignoring those calls from unknown callers, calls that lead to nothing but trouble.

Come, Lord Jesus!