The past couple of days I've been reflecting on Jesus' remark to his critics: "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God is here" (Lk 11:20). I keep picturing Michelangelo's painting of the Creation of man in the Sistine chapel, in which God is reaching out his finger to instill life into Adam. Well, a few minutes ago the Lord put this very picture in front of me; it seems that it is part of a post that somehow never got published but was accidentally left as a draft. So I'm taking the hint and publishing it below.

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I heard a woman writer being interviewed this week on NPR, concerning a book she had written about atheism and atheists. She came across as very reasonable and calm and rational as she explained that many people who wind up rejecting the idea of God do so after the death of a loved one.

She began speaking for these people but soon seemed to be speaking for herself as well,

offering this observation: “Believers will say that despite all the horrible suffering in the world, God has this Grand Plan for the world, but we’re unable to see it.” She went on, “This is such a weak argument, to refer everything to some divine Grand Plan. Anyone could write a better plan than the alleged present one that includes the senseless suffering of babies and the horrible destructive power of hurricanes. Even you or I could write a better plan than that! The idea of a Divine Plan just doesn’t work because it’s so obviously a bad plan.”  

Because of her reasonable and sincere tone of voice, I kept listening to her for a while longer. While there was nothing new in what she was saying, it made me conscious of what a gift my faith is: you can’t reason your way to a Divine Plan that’s behind the present world with its mysterious suffering and evils of all kinds. The writer is correct on that score: from the point of view of reason, this is indeed an inexplicably nasty world much of the time, one that makes no sense, it is indeed absurd. Yet here I am believing confidently that this absurd world is not all there is.

Then this morning I was reflecting on the first reading of today’s mass, the hymn about Christ in Colossians Ch. 1:15-20, which begins “He is the image of the invisible God.” There’s your leap of faith, right? You can’t truly reason your way to an encounter with an invisible God. But the line that really caught my attention is a couple of verses later in Col. 1:17:  “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” “All things hold together?” Hmm..., I don’t know about that! Looking at the morning headlines one would rather conclude that the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was closer to the truth about our world with his book title, “Things Fall Apart.” As I reflected on the image of Christ “holding everything together” I remembered that writer from the radio interview, and I thought, “Well, if Christ isn’t doing such a great job holding the world together, what’s the alternative?” I’m not sure she had answered that question with her idea that your or I could easily write a much better script for running the world. Then a thought jumped out at me. Yikes! Writing my own story? That’s exactly where I get

myself in trouble, isn’t it? I reject the Gospel script centered on Christ's self-sacrificing love, and start writing my own, presumably “better” version of my story. My version avoids, say, the inconvenience of helping a needy neighbor, or the accepting of consequences of my own actions. So my improved story starts to include self-centeredness and lying. Now, so far, I have to admit that this does not really sound like much of an improvement over God’s Grand Plan with its infant deaths and killer hurricanes. I humbly admit that, as much as I may dislike the present mysterious Plan, I really cannot offer a better one. How about you? So, in the absence of a better story, I embrace the one we’ve been given, and call it “my story,” and turn it into “my song.” Frances J. Crosby did just that with her beautiful hymn,

"Blessed Assurance."

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Refrain:

This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my Savior all the day long;

This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my Savior all the day long.

Perfect submission, perfect delight,

Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;

Angels, descending, bring from above

Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

Perfect submission, all is at rest,

I in my Savior am happy and blest,

Watching and waiting, looking above,

Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.

I keep praying for that good woman I heard on the radio, imagining her delighted surprise when she dies and wakes up to behold the Great Plan in its fulness in heaven!

GUARDIAN ANGELS

October 2is the feast of the Guardian Angels. I wrote this post many years ago, but I think it may be worth putting out there again.

For most of us, I suppose, the notion of "guardian angels" evokes images of winged figures watching lovingly over little children, like heavenly babysitters. I remember praying every day when I was a child:

  “Angel of God, my guardian dear

   To whom God’s love commits me here.

   Ever this day be at my side to light and guard,

   To rule and guide. Amen.”

At some point I outgrew my devotion to my guardian angel, who went the way of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I’d like to take a moment on this feast, however, to reflect on the meaning, or better, the relevance of Guardian Angels.

Let's begin with the idea of the "Good News" that Jesus came to announce. Most of us suppose that the Good News announced was that in the end we believers will escape this vale of tears and all go up to heaven. But the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that if we think that the Good News is about going to heaven then we’re grabbing the stick by the wrong end. It's really the other way around: the Good News is not about our going up to heaven – rather, it’s about heaven coming to earth. The good news is that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

One of the central beliefs of Judaism at the time of Christ was, in fact, that heaven touches earth. For the Jews, heaven touches earth in two ways First, in the temple, where God comes down to be present among his people. And second, God is present in the Law, the Torah. This explains why we hear so often in the psalms this love of God’s Law. Remember, too, that the Hebrew God is a God of History, who gets involved in worldly events, to deliver his people through the Red Sea, for example, or guide them through the wilderness. These divine interventions are other ways that heaven touches earth.

The idea that heaven touches earth prepared the way for the incarnation when God would come down in person, and heaven would touch earth, and nothing would ever be the same, and it’s against this backdrop that we should understand the Judeo-Christian belief in angels.

Keeping this idea in mind, I invite you to look at these scripture passages with me:

- You remember how the Lord sends the angel Raphael to guide and guard the young Tobiah on his journey.
- During the entrance procession this evening we chanted “The angel of the Lord is encamped around those who fear him.”
- Then we heard in the first reading this evening, how God appoints an angel to guide the Israelites in the wilderness. "See, I am sending an angel before you, to guard you on the way and bring you to the place I have prepared." (Exodus 23:20).
- Following the reading, in the Responsorial Psalm we sang: "He has commanded his angels... to keep you in all your ways"
- And we heard in this evening’s gospel the famous passage that seems to be the basis for connecting the guardian angels with children: Jesus says: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father" (Mt 18:10).

As we look at these passages, we see that angels are sent to guard not children, but adults. This feast, then, has to do directly with US.

Ask yourself this question: Would it be so surprising if the same Lord who gave you the help of a guardian angel should ask you to pass that favor on to a brother or sister who is of the same high worth as you and who needs some help?

You remember Cain’s evasive response when the Lord ask him where his brother, Abel, might be: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Well, the Lord answers that question with a resounding “Yes, you are!” “Yes, you are your brother’s comforter.” “Yes, you are your sister’s helper.” “Yes, you are your brother’s encourager -- just as your guardian angel is for you.”

Our guardian angels remind us that just as the Lord sends each of them to us to be ministers of the Good News, to make heaven touch earth, so he sends each of us. And our Guardian Angels can us teach us by their example how to make heaven touch earth, how to be good news for one another: By imitating their loving concern for us, by imitating their spirit of humble service, by encouraging, comforting and protecting us. 

Imagine a world in which everyone worked as tirelessly as the Guardian Angels to make the Good News take flesh among us. Then indeed we could rejoice to see the day when the Good News comes to its glorious completion: heaven finally touching earth forever and ever. Amen.

A TALE OF TWO SONS

On Sunday, September 27, 2026, we hear the following parable:

"A man had two sons..."

Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people: "What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, 'Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.' He said in reply, 'I will not,' but afterwards changed his mind and went.

The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, 'Yes, sir, 'but did not go.

Which of the two did his father's will?" They answered, "The first." 

Here are are some thoughts by a respected French theologian, Yves de Montcheuil:

This parable alludes in the first place to the Jews and the Gentiles; but it also applies to each one of us we said “yes“ when we recognized the legitimacy of God‘s law and promised to submit to it; but very often we go on living as before, without troubling ourselves about the will of God. 

We think we live in the kingdom because our “yes“ was once sincere, and yet the force of daily habit, an alludes, the will of God who is calling us to the kingdom. Often perhaps his will, and our action coincide, but when a discrepancy arises between his will, and hours, it is the latter which carries the day; we obey our own wishes and whims.

Now life in the kingdom does not merely consist in putting one’s name down for it. Entry into the kingdom requires of us a continuing and living desire to accept God‘s will for us at each moment of our life. It is a “yes“ said over and over again.

In practice, though, it is our unfaithfulness which is repeated.

I was intrigued by the idea that I have both sons in myself, and hope that you, too, may find this reflection useful. 

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

Very often when someone comes to me to tell me about their suffering, about some awful thing that is happening in their life, they will say, “I don’t understand! Why would God allow this terrible thing?”

Aristotle begins one of his works with this simple statement: “All humans desire to

know.” And to me, this is exactly what gets us into trouble in our relationship with God. We want to know why God did or allowed a certain event in our lives. This is, of course, particularly troublesome when the event is a negative one. Why does God allow evil to exist in the world?

Usually that question is posed as an indirect challenge to God.  As Aristotle says, we all want to know. But, as we all have experienced, the so-called “problem of evil“ is completely unsolvable from our limited  human perspective. 

The Gospel reading for today (Sunday, September 20) presents the familiar parable about the workers in the vineyard, and that they were all paid the same wage at the end of the day, whether they had worked eight hours or only one. 

The first reading at mass prepares us to hear the parable. It’s the Lord speaking through Isaiah.  I’ve reprinted it herewith some words in bold type.:

Seek the LORD while he may be found, call him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the LORD for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts (Isaiah 55:6-9)

Now let’s return to my friend who is struggling to come to grips with some terribleevent in her life, and who complains  “I don’t understand! Why would God allow this terrible thing?” Will this passage from Isaiah be of any comfort to her? I doubt it. Her complaint, “I just don ‘t understand” is still sitting there.

We Christians, however, have a few ways of approaching the problem of evil. None of them provide “answers” or “solutions”, but rather they offer us a place to stand, a bit of perspective. At the center of the issue is the idea of “mystery.” The Lord is clear: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,”

I’m not God, and so shouldn't expect to grasp the mystery of God’s hidden plan. The virtue of Hope, however, is God’s gift that strengthens me to believe that God has a loving plan for the world, and that whatever things may look like to me, God's plan is working itself out in ways that I simply can’t comprehend with my limited intellect.

This won’t help my friend to “understand” anything, but it offers a place to stand, a perspective. In the end, then, I need to trust in the Lord’s goodness and wisdom and infinite Love. 

I wonder what that vineyard worker felt like as he walked away with his denarius after a full day’s work knowing that some of his fellow workers got their denarius for working only one hour. Maybe he mumbled “I just don’t understand!"

"My friend, I have done you  no wrong..."

WHERE WAS GOD ON SEPT. 11, 2001?

This past Friday, September 11, we made a good effort (somewhat successful, I think) to acquaint our 800 students with what "Nine-eleven" is all about. A colleague said to me in  a conversation that the way you can tell that this day is important is that twenty-five years later Americans over the age of thirty-five can tell you where they were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. 

In this post, though, I'd like to ask not "Where were you?" but rather "Where was GOD on September 11, 2001?" Countless numbers of believers have asked themselves that question, sometimes in anger, sometimes in bewilderment. I'd like to offer the following essay by a monk, Aelred Graham, excerpted from his book, Zen Catholicism. Parts of it are a bit dense, but it may be of some help to you.

Among the factors that turn the existence of suffering into a "problem," even for religious people (perhaps especially for them), is a tendency to apply to God their own notions of good and evil, right and wrong. The expectation that the Almighty will conform to a moral pattern laid down for him in advance by his creatures still endures, despite the whole weight of biblical evidence to the contrary. The assumption that if one's conscience is clear God must be on one's side explains the self-righteousness that usually characterizes this or that "crusade" -- "we" being in the right, “they” hopelessly in the wrong — in which the participants are confident that they are fighting the battles of the Lord. 

A Christian truth which, often to our great detriment, we are for some reason reluctant to face is that God is implicated in created evil. Does disaster strike a city if the Lord has not sent it? I make the light and create darkness. I make weal and create woe. I, the Lord, do all these things. These texts from the inspired scriptures are to be explained in the light of a consistent theology, but they are not to be explained away. God has created a universe in which his positive action, the generation of things, implies a corresponding negative corruption or destruction. In order that human beings may live, part of the animal and vegetative world must die. Even moral evil, ť sin, falls within the divine plan. Though sin, being a defect in a creature's will, does not require God's causality, sin could not happen unless God permitted it. God, having created a race of frail human beings, takes account of the fact that large numbers of them will prove their frailty in action. God's universe contains the built-in realities of physical and moral evil. 

A commonly felt reluctance to face the fact that evil enters into God's scheme of things is due to a mental confusion. God is supremely good, we rightly say: therefore he can have no part in evil. But the conclusion does not follow. There is a distinction to be drawn between the ontological goodness, which is one of God's attributes, and moral goodness, which is based on conformity to an external norm. God is infinitely good because he lacks nothing of being, but his actions are not regulated by any norm other than his own inscrutable wisdom. God's holiness, which means "wholeness," includes all that is positive in moral goodness as we understand it; but what he sees as beneficial to the universe as a whole may involve evil to individuals. If we are to discover our true self, which is our being as harmonized with God, then we must learn to look upon areas of evil, not with approval, but calmly and dispassionately. What God tolerates we have no business to find intolerable. Or, to state the same point in more positive terms, we should seek to become increasingly identified with the attitude of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and equally on the good, his rain to fall on the just and equally on the unjust. 

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NEW WINESKINS NEEDED

Earlier this week, Jesus told two parables that warned His hearers against trying to combine the old and the new. 

They were complaining to Him that he and His followers were not strictly obeying he Jewish ritual laws. So He made it clear to them that the Good News that He was preaching was indeed something quite new. You don't put new wine in old wineskins, or the new wine will burst the wineskins.

The Gospel, He tells them is not a patch-up job of Judaism, it is not simply a reform movement. Nor can it be contained within the limits of the mosaic law.

I think we can understand what He is saying here: the Pharisees will have to let go of their cherished  system of detailed laws and observances in order to relate in a new way to the God of infinite love and forgiveness, His Abba. They have a difficult decisio9n to make.

But what about me?

Do I ever try to squeeze the gospel down to a manageable size so that I can work with it without disrupting my present comfortable way of relating to the world?

Do I ever find myself trying to contain the gospel within the limits of my own easy truce with my faults and minor venial sins?  

 

I was asking myself this question when it occurred to me that the Lord is doing

something new with our community here at Newark Abbey. With the recent death of our beloved Abbot Melvin, we are now down to 11 members. 

What if the Lord is offering our community the gift of “new wine" while we are still using the old wine skins that we’ve grown used to over the decades? Maybe we should be looking at new ways of living the gospel in our monastic life.

It seems to me that maybe we need to be open to the possibility that the Lord is doing something really new, something that can’t be contained within our present wine skins? 

Maybe we are being faced with the same challenge as those Pharisees: Maybe the Lord is not asking us to “patch up” our present way of being, but is asking us to let him do something entirely new with our community.

Actually, this has a familiar ring to some of us monks who were here when God did the same thing in 1972.

Let us all pray for one another, that all of us will be able to recognize and then face courageously whatever challenges the Lord sends our way!

CHANGE OF PLANS

In the gospel for Sunday, August 30, we see Jesus and his disciples on their way up to Jerusalem. The apostles are expecting that the journey will end with Jesus, the Messiah, being anointed as king.  

But Jesus did not come to fulfill human expectations or achieve worldly triumph.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!"

And He reveals what is actually going to happen to Him in Jerusalem. So Peter’s demand that Jesus avoid going up there to undergo such an unexpected and terrible fate is an obstacle on the way to the cross, the cross that Jesus knows He must accept. So Jesus turns and tells the disciples that they must let go of their dreams of Messianic grandeur, deny their ambitions, and prepare instead to carry their crosses. They must be willing, in fact, to give their very lives for his sake! 

They must exchange their own wills for the Father’s will just as He Himself will do in the garden of Gethsemane, and as He had taught them to pray “thy will be done.”

Paul will one day write to the Romans “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,“ in imitation of Jesus, who was following God‘s will.
This is what Jesus continues to call his disciples to do today.

It seems that He had a pretty good idea of His Father’s will for Him. But you and I have to rely on the Holy Spirit to help us discern what is “good and pleasing to God.” (Romans, 12:1).
One good way to start our discernment might be to meditate on what happens to the apostles on the way to Jerusalem and notice how they have to begin to let go of their own plans and their own vision of the future in order to follow Jesus completely. So we ask ourselves what we may need to sacrifice in order to follow Jesus and “to do what is good and pleasing to God?”

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who once wrote something like, “If you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans.“

Because discernment is not an easy task, the Lord sends us the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit of Wisdom. Actually, I doubt that Jesus laughs at us. I picture him smiling gently as he watches us as we try to let go of our dearest hopes and plans so we can take up our cross and walk with him up to Calvary. He knows very well, of course, that once we share with Him the temporary suffering of Good Friday, we will go on to share with Him the eternal Victory of Easter in heaven.