SECONDARY COVERAGE

Your secondary insurance?

When I go to a doctor‘s office for the first time, they always ask: “what’s your insurance?“ The next question is “what is your secondary insurance?“

When someone asks me “what religion are you of course answer “ Roman Catholic. What if the next question were “What is your secondary religion?“

What is your backup religion? What do you use to fill in the emptiness when God is not enough? The possible answers are a short list that is as old and as widespread as you can imagine: Possessions, power, prestige, and pleasure.

These are the things that we seek after when God does not answer as quickly as we might want, or when God leaves us still hungry and feeling incomplete.

The central insight of Judaism is there there are not many gods, but only one. A very important prayer that all Jews still repeat every day is Shema Israel, (Deuteronomy Chapter 6 verses 4-5): “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.“ 

These verses show up again in the gospels. For example Mark chapter 12 verses 29-31.

Look closely at this passage For a moment. It seems logical that if there is only this one God, then we should love this God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.

I would be much more comfortable with the command to love God with “ most” of my heart or “most¨ of my soul or “most” of my strength. But that is not the deal! Unfortunately. I am to love God with all of myself, without falling back on any kind of secondary insurance policy, trying to fill the aching void inside my with possessions, power, prestige or pleasure. 

A good way to examine my conscience is for me to ask myself “what is my secondary insurance?” And “have I fallen back onto my secondary insurance policy lately?“

Let’s pray for one another that through the gift of faith we will be able to rely only on this God who indeed is “God alone.“

A GOOD QUESTION

This past Sunday, October 27, presented us with the powerful scene of Jesus healing the blind beggar,Bartimaeus. One of the many interesting details in this miracle story occurs when the blind man stands in front of Jesus and Jesus asks him “What do you want me to do for you?” 

I reflected on Jesus‘s question and wondered why he had to ask such an obvious thing of a blind man who had cried out to him “Son of David have pity on me.“ 

It wasn’t long before my meditation shifted from that scene in Jericho and landed squarely in my heart. I heard Jesus directing his question not to Bartimaeus but to me: “Albert what do you want me to do for you?¨ I was caught off guard by the offer

Of course I was pleased at the love and generosity that lay behind the question, but I was at a loss as to what to ask for.

After going through a couple of possibilities, however, I soon enough settled on one. As I answered the question I realized that I had never before asked for God´s help with that particular matter.

But then I said to myself, ¨Why stop with just one request?” That´s when I went on a roll, and started placing before the Lord all sorts of concerns and problems. It was a very intimate moment, as I stood before Jesus with completely empty hands, asking his help.

Taking Jesus up on his offer, I had told him lots of things that he could do for me if he wished. If you have not tried this recently, I can recommend it as a great approach to prayer: putting yourself in the place of Bartimaeus and answering Jesus´ question with your own wants and needs.

What do you want me to do for you?

THOUGHTS ON SUFFERING

During the past week or so I have been meditating on a couple of passages from Richard Rohr's “The Divine Dance.” I would like to share a few of these thoughts with you in the hope that you may want to read the complete version in the book itself:

Awe and wonder are terms that are often correlative with mystery. All fundamentalist religion is terribly uncomfortable with mystery; it likes to take full control of the data, and mystery by definition leaves you out of control. Such moments of vulnerability are the very space where God can most easily break in with fresh experience; in fact, I doubt if God can break through in any other way.   …

Suffering is the only thing strong enough to break down your control systems, explanatory mechanisms, logical paradigms, desire to be in charge, and carefully maintained sense of control. Both God and the guided soul know to trust suffering, it seems. 

God normally has to lead you to the limits of your private resources. Some event, person, or moral situation must force you to admit, I cannot do this in my present state. This is our suffering.

Or your understanding of “what it all means“ has to fail you in a very personal way: I can’t make sense of this. I can’t get through today.

This often happens when there has been a physical death, or the death of a marriage, a reputation, or an occupation. But you always feel both afraid and trapped. “How?” You cry out with ten levels of anguish and impossibility.

A good spiritual Director might say quietly to themselves (not to the sufferer), Hallelujah! Now we’re going to begin the real spiritual journey. P.125

I hope that something in this post will catch your attention and challenge you the way I have been challenged myself.

Can you let go and let God catch you?

"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you" (Mt 7:7).

I don’t know about you, but this passage about the effectiveness of prayer usually leaves me uncomfortable. When I knock, the door is not always opened to me, and when I ask, I don’t always receive.

While I was preaching on this passage recently, however, a vivid image came to me: there I was knocking repeatedly on a door, but no one was answering. It turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door!

When I knock on the door of material wealth, or power, for example, expecting that behind such a door I will find ultimate satisfaction, then no wonder that the door never opens.

Then there are surely times when I seek desperately but do not find what I am looking for. But these are undoubtedly the times when I am seeking in the wrong place! It’s a tale as old as the story of Adam and Eve, and which keeps repeating itself through the ages: we race around, looking for meaning in our lives in such things as possessions, power, and prestige. But in the end, we are still left feeling incomplete, with that inner hollowness still there, unfilled.

Looking in the wrong place and knocking on the wrong door end up leaving us frustrated and disappointed in God who does not answer our prayers.

“Why doesn’t God open the door? I have been knocking on it for years!” Well, it’s always a good idea to be sure that I am knocking on the right door and not on one that leads nowhere. Once I'm sure that I've got the right door, then I'm faced with the mystery of unanswered prayer. Saint Paul writes about this problem when he reminds his readers that when our prayers are not answered, one reason may be because we do not ask properly, or do not ask for the right things.

But that's a topic for another post or two.

I have found these two images, of seeking in the wrong place and knocking on the wrong door, helpful in approaching that complex question of why God does not seem to answer our prayers.

Tree of Life and Crucifixion

CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS

 

This past weekend was taken up with the celebration of Br. Bruno's solemn vows celebration, so my weekly blog post got postponed.  A week ago I attended our now biennial St. Benedict's Prep Hall of Fame dinner. So with your permission I am re-posting something from November 2011 related to the Hall of Fame.

A DIFFERENT CELEBRATION
Thursday evening I attended the Saint Benedict’s Prep Hall of Fame dinner. We honored athletes from all various decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s.

At these school events I’m one of the lucky ones for whom the evening is not simply one of nostalgia, not a matter of suddenly jumping back over a chasm of twenty or forty years to revisit some golden bygone days of ghostly schoolboy glories. For me these banquets are not homecomings at all -- I’m already home after all --rather they’re celebrations of community and continuity.

On Thursday night as I moved around the huge banquet room saying hello to people I hadn’t seen in decades, I was gliding back and forth along a single unbroken strand extending back in time, along which the years and the people flow together to form one single plot, one story from my days as a freshman in 1956 through my returning to teach in 1969, the closing and re-opening of the school in the early 1970’s right up until 2011. I experienced a feeling of wholeness, a sense of being carried along by the dynamic life of a beautiful community.

We also have an annual banquet at which we honor people who have contributed in various ways to our school, while the Hall of Fame Dinner, which happens only every few years, is pretty much restricted to athletes. The printed program of the latter always includes a list of the impressive athletic accomplishments of each inductee to show why the committee chose them to be honored.

THE ONE CRITERION

But later on as I flipped through the biographies in this year’s Hall of Fame program I wondered what God sees when looking at my life. What are God’s criteria for success? I already knew the answer, of course, so last night I started perusing an old copy of Ernesto Cardenale’s Vida en el Amor (1970) (translated into English in 1972 as “To Live Is to Love.” ), looking for a good way of expressing the criteria needed to get into God's Hall of Fame. After just a minute or two I found the following few sentences that seemed a pretty good summary of the criteria that are important to God [my translation]:

Man was created for love, only to love his creator. And whatever time he does not spend in this love is wasted time.

Love is the single law that governs the universe. That law that moves the sun and the other stars, as Dante says, because it is the law of cohesion uniting all things. The material out of which the universe is made is love.”

I sensed this love present in the vast banquet room as I shared stories and jokes with dozens of people. Love was the single thread "uniting all things:" God’s divine love uniting teammates, athletes and coaches, and also uniting the years and the experiences of my life, the triumphs and the trials (mine and those of my brothers and sisters), helping make sense of everything.

I came away as I always do after one of those dinners, thankful to be part of a monastery and a school community that has provided the possibility for this much love to pour itself out on the earth among so many varied people. “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

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A HINT FROM HEROD

Herod Antipas

Herod the tetrarch heard about all that was happening,

and he was greatly perplexed because some were saying,

“John has been raised from the dead”;

others were saying, “Elijah has appeared”;

still others, “One of the ancient prophets has arisen.”

But Herod said, “John I beheaded.

Who then is this about whom I hear such things?”

And he kept trying to see him. (Luke 9:7-9)

The passage above was the gospel at mass this past Thursday. The celebrant, Fr. Edwin, pointed out in his homily the last sentence: “Herod kept trying to see Jesus.”

That little sentence is really worth reflecting on. This evil, pagan king is trying to see Jesus. The verb “trying” is in the imperfect tense in Greek, implying a repeated or continuous action in the past; this was not just a one time feeling for Herod. The verb has a few different meanings, another possible one is “desiring.”

And what about me? Could I honestly say that I myself keep "trying to see Jesus?” How badly do I “want to see Jesus?”

My faith tells me that God is constantly seeking me, pursuing me, inviting me to a relationship of intimacy with Him. But, do I do the same thing toward the Lord? Do I truly seek a close, intimate relationship with Jesus, or am I satisfied with saying routine prayers, and celebrating sacraments that give me grace? Although I may well be doing these things, but meanwhile the Lord keeps wanting to draw closer and closer to me in quiet meditation, in prayerful meditation on scripture, on self-sacrificing love of my brothers and sisters,

I can manage to keep God at a safe distance by doing lots of good works, and by reciting lots of prayers. But this is not the path that the Lord invites me to travel. He wants something a lot closer, a lot deeper: a relationship of love.

Back to the tetrarch Herod, who keeps trying to see Jesus. It seems a little odd to take this awful character as a model for my Christian life, but in his own way he is on to something. Maybe his example can shame me into seeking a deeper relationship with Jesus, and to keep seeking, to keep wanting to be closer to Him.

MATTHEW KEEPS LEAVING HIS POST

 

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Today the Church in invites us to celebrate the faith of Saint Matthew. You know the story of how he was converted from a sinner to a disciple in the blink of an eye:

As Jesus passed by,

he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.

He said to him, "Follow me."

And he got up and followed him. (Mt 9:9)

Matthew's response is an extreme example of someone following the invitation that Jesus extends to each one of us:

“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,

wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.....
anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.” (Lk 14:26, 27, 33)

The last verse interesting, especially the verb that's translated here as "renounce." In Greek, the word apotassomai means "to say farewell, to take leave of." In an earlier chapter of Luke, Jesus invites a man to follow him, and the fellow responds, "Let me go first and say good-bye to (apotassomai) my father." But in the above passage, the word is used in the extended sense of "to part with possessions."

This morning I asked myself, "What are the things that I need to say good-bye to in order to follow Jesus?" Each of us has his or her unique list, obviously, that may include worrying, trying to control other people, being preoccupied about material goods or money, and so on. The verb apotassomai  gave me pause: "unless you say good-bye to whatever you have..."  Okay, so let's say that I decide to give up my habit of trying to control everything, so that I can follow Christ. Let's say, further, that my resolution works and that I find myself walking across the wilderness with Jesus as a faithful follower. Then, I imagined the following scene this morning: As I'm following Jesus, I glance behind me and I see a little cloud of dust on the horizon, but I don't think anything of it. Ten minutes later, though, I look again and the cloud has gotten much bigger, and much closer. Clearly it's being caused by something travelling across the dusty wilderness -- something that's following us. I begin to wonder what it could be. The next time I look over my shoulder, I can make out what it is that's following us: it's my need to control all the people around me! The very thing that I left behind in order to walk with Jesus. The very thing that I "said goodbye to" not so long ago.

The problem is twofold: First, that although I had said good-bye to the habit, the habit hadn't said goodbye to me, and second, that I thought I was doing this all on my own, like spiritual a do-it-yourself project. Both of these are bad mistakes. Think of this image: You say goodbye to someone who you've come to realize is a bad influence on you; you leave them with a sigh of relief, not intending to see them ever again. But shortly thereafter, this person comes ringing your doorbell or starts texting you, clearly thinking that they're still part of your life. How frustrating! And you thought you were rid of this problem person! It seems that "saying goodbye" is not always enough to finish the job of separating from that other.

So, I've "said goodbye" to some practice or habit that could hold me back from following Jesus more closely. I think of Matthew having to constantly give up his former life as a tax-collector. My "conversion" project is not as dramatic as Matthews's was. But I bet that he was a lot like me in this: one goodbye wasn't enough: I need to keep repeating the same goodbye every day, I need to be converted not just once but constantly.


Clearly this can get frustrating and tiring -- which is why Jesus tells me to keep walking close to him: After all, this isn't my project as much as it is His.

I pray on the feast of St. Matthew for the gift of humility so that I can keep admitting that I depend on the Lord's help to keep converting every day of my life. I hope that I'll be able to accept his help and hear his words,"Do not be afraid. I am with you!"