Discipleship Gives Sight To The Blind: First Week of Lent: February 26 to March 3, 2012

The theme that unites and brings to excitement all the readings this week is the key role of seeing.

The purpose of seeing is to “take aim.” To aim we have to see the target. To “take aim” in life, we have to see what we are aiming at in life, what our goal is. What we call “repentance” is a recognition that our aim is off, that we are “missing” the target. To “convert” is to correct our aim. That involves correcting attitudes and priorities.

God’s word is the lens through which we focus on the target. Like a telescopic sight, it brings the far away near. Wisdom is to see everything in the light of our ultimate end: to see clearly what is most distant in order to get in focus what is right in front of us: our present choices and actions. Without the lens of God’s word everything gets distorted. Our “culture” blinds us.

To focus on Church rules; — even on God’s laws! — can blind us, unless we see the rules in the light of their goal and God’s laws in the light of his mind and heart, which they are intended to reveal. The goal is always God; never good behavior. “Good behavior” that does not lead to God has “missed the mark,” which is the Scriptural definition of “sin.” That is why Jesus says many will be surprised at the Final Judgment. We will see what we were really aiming at in life, as opposed to what we thought we were. So our basic choice in life is whether to look at what God says we are and aim at being that, or not to look and just be lost.

The Our Father teaches us what to aim at by listing what Jesus lived for: his priorities, the purpose for which he came. Praying it daily helps us refocus every day. We need to pray it consciously, aware that we are “taking aim.”

In our prayer we “say what we see.” We ask for what we see as good for us. And we can only see what is good for us in the light of faith. Faith tells us what we are, what our real goal is, what we should aim at. What enlightens our faith is God’s word.

To be ourselves we have to see ourselves. Baptism, the “sacrament of faith,” gives us divine light to see we have “become Christ.” and that “in him,” the “only Son of God,” we are sons and daughters of the Father. The only authentic “self” we have is our self as the risen Jesus, the body of Christ. That is why “following Christ” means being Christ. We don’t follow abstract teachings and rules; we look at Christ as he reveals himself in Scripture through words and actions. To be a Christian is to be what we see. “Disciples” are those who keep looking.

As Church we look together. And we say together what we see together. That is why our communal prayer, especially the Mass, is dependent on our communal faith. We can only say together what we see together. That is why we need to be “disciples — students — of the Mass.” We need to understand what we are saying and doing when we pray together as Christ.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

Accepting New Life: Seventh Week in “Ordinary Time” and Beginning of Lent: February 19-25, 2012

As the Sundays and weeks of “Ordinary Time” are interrupted by the special focus and readings of Lent, the liturgy first prepares us, then invites us to accept the call to “metanoia.”

We translate metanoia as “repentance,” but it really means a “complete makeover” of mind, will, heart and lifestyle. Really active Christians can never get bored, because the Church keeps calling us to change.

From Sunday to Tuesday the readings try to overcome our fear of change. The truth is, we are afraid to think about Scripture or to ask Jesus questions, because we assume we won’t like the answers. We reject “wisdom” because we accept in practice, if not in theory, that “ignorance is bliss.” We deliberately choose not to be disciples, “students” of the mind and heart of God.

We can avoid asking the questions. But we cannot avoid the consequences.

The readings reassure us. The call to “repentance” is always joyful, because it is always joined to the promise of life-experience on a higher, richer, more satisfying level. Every sin is a sign of an unsatisfied heart. Jesus promises “life to the full” to those who listen to his words.

And that is what discipleship is: “committed listening.” Lent invites us to commit to meeting regularly with Jesus, asking him questions and letting him teach us.

From Ash Wednesday to Saturday the readings pinpoint what “repentance” means. It means to accept a new mindset. For those who are already “practicing Christians,” Scripture emphasizes the choice between focusing on law observance or on living and giving love. This is a major crisis in the Church today. And always.

Jesus focused on giving life, not on enforcing rules. The Great Metanoia is 1. to realize we “became Christ” by Baptism; and 2. to commit ourselves in concrete ways to learning how to think, love and live like him.

This is the commitment that makes us disciples.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

To Get Real, Get Practical: Sixth Week in “Ordinary Time”: February 12-18, 2012

We will be spending this week with James — who is no-nonsense practicality when it comes to living by God’s word.

The Sunday readings “soften us up” for James’ hard line by telling us the great things Jesus does for those who really listen to what he says. He frees us from hurting others by giving us light to see what does harm. He frees us from loneliness by always being present to us and teaching us that loving unites us to others. He frees us from looking down on ourselves by showing us how he looks at us, and from despair by promising us the Holy Spirit. But he does this only if we let him guide us by reflecting on his words.

But this is rare. Most Christians don’t really want to grow to spiritual maturity and to the “perfection of love.” At Mass they don’t “listen to do.” They don’t commit themselves in any concrete ways to being disciples, “students” of Jesus. Fact is fact. What did you do in response to what you heard last Sunday? Or read in these Reflections all week? What does that say about you? (Okay, okay — but James is even tougher!)

Perseverance in reading and reflecting on Scripture is a “miracle” of empowerment by grace that makes us a “sign” of Jesus risen. The alternative is failure to be a Church that bears the witness to Jesus we should bear.

We can be disciples, or inert, or closed to God’s word (like Pharisees). Jesus breaks our inertia by leading us “out” of our cultural apathy. We become free by repeated exposure to his word combined with repeated decisions about how to put it into practice.

Failure to do this explains why we, the Church, in many ways live in contradiction to Christ’s clear teaching. We forget “who we are.” We don’t let his words mature and bear fruit in us by discipleship that lead us into mission (as prophets) and ministry (as priests) and into taking responsibility (as stewards of Christ’s kingship) for bringing about changes in society.

James keeps urging the practical response of concrete commitment to the “three R’s” of Christian meditation: Reading and Reflecting on God’s words, and Responding to them in real decisions to act on what we have seen.

Praying, “Hallowed be thy Name!” impels us to accept the discipline of discipleship. That is to let Jesus lead us up “into the mountain,” where we will see him transfigured, hear the Father speaking to us, and be moved to stay with him as disciples.

The key to everything is a commitment to a concrete regime of reading and reflecting on the word of God for the purpose of making responses in choices.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

To Be or Not To Be: Fifth Week in “Ordinary Time”: February 5-11, 2012

The readings this week supply a battery of motives for being a disciple.

In the Our Father, Jesus teaches us to pray by teaching us what we should pray for. What he presents and reveals are the priorities of his own heart. If we make Jesus’ priorities our own, we will pray well and learn to pray better.

Jesus reveals his first priority in the “second phrase” of the Our Father, “Hallowed be thy Name!” To make the Father known and loved is what he lived and breathed for. This should be the first desire of our life. Every time we pray the Our Father, it reminds us. And motivates us to learn who the Father is so that we might appreciate him more ourselves and make him known to others.

Sunday tells us we do not become disciples until we commit to doing concrete things, on a regular basis, that let us enter into the mind and heart of God. Like reading and reflecting on Scripture. What sustains this commitment is hope that God actually will reveal himself to us.

Monday and Tuesday focus us on the core mystery of Christianity, which is the interaction between the divine and the human. By taking flesh in his Incarnation, Jesus put the divine and the human into physical contact. God’s presence in the Book of his words is more awesome than his presence in the Temple. Through it he touches our minds as truly as Jesus touched and healed the bodies of people he healed. Not to read Scripture is to settle for “second-hand exposure” to the Christian faith.

Wednesday: True response to God is not in external actions, but in what they express. Discipleship enlightens, guides and nourishes interior response to God: conversion of mind, heart and will.

Thursday: Full union with another person is impossible without union of mind, heart and will on the level of shared faith. We seek this by openness to others and by sharing in prayer and worship..

Friday: Right direction in the Church requires the collaboration of authority and lay leadership. But good leadership depends on discipleship. To “speak” as Jesus we need to “listen” to Jesus. Leaders come from those who have made listening their lifestyle.

Saturday: When people leave the Church, it is not just the clergy they abandon, but their Covenant, Sacrifice, history, theological and spiritual inheritance, and communion with the Saints and others in the Church. We are vulnerable to this in the measure we are “secondhand Christians,” gullible to false teaching — from those both in and outside the Church — because we are not disciples of Jesus ourselves.

When we pray, “Hallowed be thy Name!” we are called and committing ourselves to keep learning through “word and sacrament and Spirit” the mind and heart of God. This commitment makes us disciples.

------------------------------------------------------------------

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

To End Where We Began: Fourth Week in “Ordinary Time”: January 29 – February 4, 2012

This is the last week of reflections in the booklet “Our Father... in Heaven” — that presents through the “first phrase” of the Lord’s Prayer the “first phase” of our growth into the “perfection of love” for God and all he created. The first phase is awareness of the mystery of our graced relationship with God as true children of the Father, sharing in God’s own divine life through identification with his Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit to let Jesus act with us, in us and through us in everything we do. Practical suggestion: use the WIT prayer.

Next week we begin the second booklet: reflections on how the Mass readings contribute to the “second phase” of our spiritual growth, to which we are called by the “second phrase” of the Our Father: “Hallowed be thy Name!”

Appropriately, this week’s readings sound a final, crashing chord of awareness.

Sunday invites us to be aware that God calls us to “go to the source” for enlightenment on how to live as divine. Reading Scripture keeps us aware of how to live as children of the Father.

Monday explains how the “absence of God” in times of “dryness” makes us aware that love is choice, not feeling, and keeps us aware that we need God’s constant empowerment to keep making the choice to love God.

Tuesday shows us how what we choose to be aware of sways our choices and subjects us to or delivers us from our culture’s “spin.”

Wednesday focuses on the “ignored temptation” that our religious formation did not make us sufficiently aware of: desire for power.

Thursday, Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the temple, shows us how our expectations can make encounter with Jesus lifegiving or destructive for us. The readings — and the event they relate — call us to cultivate conscious awareness of what we hope for, what we fear, what we have set our hearts on.

Friday pinpoints what should be the core of our awareness: the mystery of our identification with Jesus the Son that gives us our relationship with God as Father, brought to awareness through the indwelling enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Saturday tells us that all the bishops and priests in the world cannot “build a house” where Catholics can find God unless the laity do their part. For example, by expressing enthusiastically at Mass their awareness of the Good News of the mystery of their being as sharers in the life and mission of Jesus, Son of God.

Next week we take up the theme of discipleship, which is simply commitment to learning (as “students”) the “ breadth and length and height and depth” of the Name we pray will be “hallowed.” Then we will know the love Christ has for the Father, “that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God” — and fill the world with it.

To be Aware of What We Share: Third Week in "Ordinary Time": January 22-28, 2012

--------------------------------

This week’s readings all invite us to awareness, which is the first and foundational phase of growth into the fullness of life and love.

We need to actively cultivate awareness of the whole mystery that has been revealed to us, the mystery that we are living, the mystery we need to see in others.

For example, the readings this week invite us to be aware of:

• the greatest power on earth, which is good example. Think about it; and how the Holy Spirit empowers us to give it in Christian witness.

• the peace that is ours in obeying God alone, and humans only in the measure that, in doing it, we can see we are surrendering in love to God.

• the way experience impels to expression and reaches completeness only in our expression of what is within us.

• the core mystery of our Christian life: “Christ in us, the hope of glory.” This is the awareness everything else grows out of and feeds into.

• the mystery of Christ growing to “full stature” in us, and that helping this happen is the first commitment of our Baptism and should be our main preoccupation in life.

• ministry as bringing Christ to fullness in others, which is Christian love of neighbor and the “second greatest” Commandment.

• the Gift in the gifts God is giving us. Praise and thanksgiving make us aware that through all he is offering us the Gift of being like God.

• the mystery of others: seeing the “whole picture” of what they are when we are tempted to reduce them to nothing but the sin we see in them.

• the mystery of the Church: seeing the saints as well as the sinners; being aware of the sinful Church as the beloved Bride of Christ being purified for the “marriage feast of the Lamb.”

• the mystery of God’s steadfast love, explained in part by the fact God sees in others what we don’t see. Only God can read their hearts.

• the attitude of our own heart: the real self that we discover in the act of confessing sin as sin. We cannot look down on anything unless something within us has risen above it — that is, been raised by the gift of God’s sharing and our acceptance of his own ideals.

• the love and care we know God has for us when we call out to him in danger.

These are just examples of the awareness we are called to by this week’s readings. Use them to ‘prime the pump” and expand into the awareness Paul prayed we would grow into:

*************************

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Truth is Perspective: Second Week in “Ordinary Time”: January 15-21, 2012

This week’s readings are all about perspective — seeing ourselves, the meaning of our “names,” our good actions and bad, our relationships, our goals and desires in perspective. Perspective both clarifies and blinds us to the truth.

Up close, when it’s fourth and goal, the last twenty seconds of a tied game seem so important people won’t even answer their cell phones. Even teenagers stop texting. But if we “zoom out” to see this moment in the context of our whole life, or of the history of the world, it has no significance at all. Perspective.

An eighteen-wheeler seems massive on the freeway. Caught in hurricane winds, it is tossed about like a feather. Perspective.

Highschool trophies mean little in college. Our greatest successes and failures lose importance with time. But there is a strange exception: a moment of love — given or refused — is forever a memory that affects us. We always feel good or bad about it. What does this tell us?

Seen in perspective, all that counts in this life (or after) are our relationships. Our relationships define the meaning of our “name” (because we are in the image of God, and, theology tells us, the three Persons of the Trinity are defined by their relationships). What are our achievements except results, or causes, of relationship with others? What value does anything have, isolated from relationship with other people or God?

Think about it. This leads us to say the only true value in life is love. Love gives value to everything else. A no-brainer, since all life is from God, and in God, Life is Love. But we tend to forget it. Because we lose perspective.

Jesus taught us to see everything in the perspective of relationship. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; if anyone takes your coat, give your cloak as well; if anyone forces you to go one mile, go two.” In other words, don’t let hurt feelings, or concern for property or time block perspective. Value relationship with the other more than any of these.

We sin because we fail to see ourselves and God in perspective. Or to see others in perspective as being in relationship with God. We give priority to what, in the perspective of life and death, time and eternity, are minor issues. We neglect the “one thing” necessary (look it up: Mark 10:21; Luke 10:42) because we lose perspective.

Fear of the Lord and Wisdom are perspective. Awareness of our graced identity is perspective. We commit to discipleship, dedicate ourselves to mission, surrender to God’s will, and abandon ourselves to the work of the Kingdom when we see things in perspective.

To lose perspective is to lose the meaning, the value and the fulfillment of life. To lose perspective is to lose our souls.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

“Light of the World ”: First Week in “Ordinary Time”: January 8-14, 2012

Week after the Epiphany and Baptism of the Lord
--------------------------------------------------

In the authentic version of Titus 2:1-3, that we misquote in the Rite of Communion, what we are looking forward to and waiting for is the “blessed hope and the manifestation (epiphaniam) of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” It is the preview and promise of this in the “manifestation” of Jesus to the Gentiles that we celebrate on Sunday, the Feast of the Epiphany.

The Magi were led to Jesus by a star. But what the readings are saying is that we are all called to be stars: not movie stars, rock stars or football stars, but stars like the one in the Gospel: stars that lead others to Jesus. This is our vocation and mission from God. But to fulfill it, we have to keep ourselves aware of the light that is within us.

In celebrating the Baptism of Jesus we celebrate the mystery of our own Baptism and the “essence of our redemption,” which is that we have become Christ. We are (in his words, not ours) the light of the world. We need to keep ourselves so aware of this that we will let his light in us shine out — be an epiphany, a “manifestation” of God’s light and life in us — in every word we speak, every choice we make, every action we perform.

Jesus was never bored or boring. And no Christian who is aware of the gift of his light and life should ever be bored either, or boring to others. We have within us the excitement of the world. If that is not obvious to ourselves and others, we are failing to keep aware of and to share the Good News. It is time to change that. What is stopping you?

The truth is, we are anointed by God, solemnly anointed in Baptism, to be prophets: people with a message to deliver. Nothing is stopping us but our failure to recognize the truth of what we are and to express it in our lifestyle. Again: it is time to change that.

The Second Vatican Council proclaimed that “every Catholic must aim at Christian perfection.” And not only that, the Council called on all Catholics to “undertake with vigor” the task of renewing and reforming the “pilgrim” and imperfect Church.” We are obliged to.

We were all sacramentally anointed by God to be prophets, priests and stewards of the kingship of Christ. As we begin Ordinary Time, the readings invite us to keep ourselves aware of the extraordinary dignity and duties inherent in this anointing.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

“Happy New Year ” First Week of the Year, January 1-7, 2012

To understand all this week’s readings — and human life itself — see this world as a staging area. That is what it is. To see it as anything else falsifies human existence from top to bottom.

God created humans for one reason only: to share his own divine life and happiness with them forever. But he puts us first in a staging area where we will have time to integrate the human life we receive at birth and the divine life we receive at Baptism. Doing this, helping others to do it, and creating an environment that makes it easier for everyone to do it, is what human life is all about. The beginning of the New Year is a good time to remember this. A good New Year’s Resolution would be to decide on ways to keep ourselves aware of it.

The basic principle is: We make all that is human in us divine by making all that is divine in us human. This began with the Incarnation and birth of Jesus, which we celebrate, fittingly, on January 1, Feast of Mary, Mother of God. Jesus made a seed of Mary’s human flesh divine by making the divine in himself human in her. And when we give our human bodies in Baptism to become the divine body of Jesus on earth, his divinity begins to work with, in and through our human acts of thinking, choosing, speaking and acting, gradually conforming all we are to all he is.

This is what the staging area is for. We use our time on earth to grow into Christ, or let Christ “grow to full stature” in us, by putting to human use all the divine gifts we receive with grace (the life of God in us). The gift of faith lies dormant in us until we put it to work in human reflection, and express it in human thoughts and words: for example, calling God “Our Father” with awareness of what we are saying and pondering what it means.

As we absorb the mysteries of faith, they give us hope, which we express in action by striving for the “perfection of love.” As we translate these divine gifts into human action, all that is human in us operates more and more as divine, by the power of Jesus in us.

This world is a staging area in which humans help other humans to arrive, survive and thrive. We are constantly shifting, and helping others to shift: first from the “arrival dock,” where we become aware of who we are and what our divine-human identity is, to the “instruction area,” where we commit ourselves to learn what the five stages of progress are and how to advance through them (discipleship). When we are mature enough to work, we advance ourselves by helping others advance: first by dedication (as prophets) to making known the Good News of the Kingdom that is our destination; then by surrendering more deeply (as priests) to the reign of Christ in us, letting him express himself through our bodies to enhance the divine life of others; finally, by totally abandoning ourselves to live, work and long for nothing else (as stewards of his kingship) except to bring all in the staging area to the “point of embarkation” for the city that is our true home, that God has prepared for us.

Try keeping this explanation in mind as you read the Scriptures for this week.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.

“Merry Christmas ” First Week of Christmas, December 25-31, 2011

-----------------------------------------------

Christmas brings families together — at least in memory, when they cannot be physically. And this is what Jesus came to do: to bring the whole human race together as one family whose Father is God; in whom Jesus as Son is visible and growing to “full stature” by the indwelling presence and power of the Spirit.

Christmas is togetherness. And that is the mystery of God’s Being: God is the togetherness of Father, Son and Spirit: the Trinity.

It is striking to see how the roles of each Person of the Trinity appear in the Mass readings for Jesus’ birth:

Vigil Mass: “For the child [Son of the Father] conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Midnight Mass: A son is given to us.... called: Wonderful Counselor [Holy Spirit], Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince [Son] of Peace.”

Mass at Dawn: They shall be called “The Holy People” [Holy Spirit, Sanctifier], “The Redeemed of the LORD” [Son, Jesus]; “Cared For,” “A City Not Forsaken” [by the Father, God of the Covenant]. And “He saved us... through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he [the Father] poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ [Son] our Savior.”

Mass during the Day: “They see the LORD [Yahweh, Father] restoring Zion.... for the LORD comforts his people [Holy Spirit, the Comforter], he redeems Jerusalem” [Jesus, Son]. “The Word [Son] was with God [the Father].... In him was life, and the life was the light [Holy Spirit] of all people.”

The readings all week tell us what this family is in which we find — and need to be constantly aware of — our identity. We are different. Stephen’s martyrdom reveals us as a people who live to die and die to live forever in Christ. John’s feast focuses us, as he does, on the “koinonia,” “communion, fellowship,” that should not only exist but be visible among us — which requires that we keep ourselves aware that we are all alive in Christ and as Christ.

The readings for the feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us we are a community, not of the righteous, but of the redeemed. Our “innocence” is not in our “perfect record,” but in our incorporation into Christ’s death that “takes away” our sin. When Jesus is held up at Mass as the “Lamb of God,” we are all invited to Communion. We receive Communion, not to proclaim we are “innocent,” but to say we are sinners with hope. Thursday’s readings tell us that to “keep the Commandments” means, first of all, to keep God’s words, his laws, in our hearts. We judge ourselves by the deep faith and desire we find in our hearts, not just by the success or failure of our external law observance. It is “Phariseeism” to judge ourselves or others simply by behavior.

The feast of the Holy Family — three persons united, like the Trinity, in the “communion of the Holy Spirit — promises us a “posterity” from the Father (blessed will be the fruit of our lives). It calls us to embody in our family life the love and truth Jesus embodied as Son, the Word made flesh. And it calls us (in the full text of the alternate reading from Hebrews) to design our family lifestyle by interaction with the Spirit in faith, so that our family life will bear witness to the world that we live here “as in a foreign land,” looking forward to “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” John tells us, on the last day of the year, that we “know we know God” when our “anointing” by the Holy Spirit keeps us united to one another in the expression of our faith.

Being family is what the life of the Trinity — in God and in us — is all about.

To order your own Daily Reflections for the Immersed in Christ program, click here to visit http://www.immersedinchrist.com/.

Click here to subscribe to Daily Mass Readings delivered by email.