The Great Summation: Sixth Week of Lent and the Easter Triduum, April 1 to 7, 2012

This week is the transition from Lent to Easter season, and from the theme of dedication to mission (“Thy Kingdom come!”) to surrender in ministry (“Thy will be done!”).

Lent ends when we begin the “Easter Triduum” (“triduum” is the compression of tres dies, “three days”). Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday (vigil of Easter Sunday) are all one celebration. This week of transition “sums up” and simplifies the whole mystery of redemption, which is the mystery of Christian life.

In a nutshell, to “be Christ” authentically we must “die to” ourselves by “emptying ourselves” of all pretense to human power and prestige, and “find ourselves” by “losing ourselves” in humble service to others. This is what it means to love one another as Christ has loved us.

This is — predictably — the last lesson that any of us learn, bishops, priest and laity alike. It was the first teaching of Jesus that Peter rejected after being named Pope. And on the very eve of Christ’s passion the Twelve Apostles had still not learned it (see Matthew 16:22 and Luke 22:24). This should not surprise us. Self-emptying love is the goal of everything Jesus taught, and goals are the last to be achieved. The rarest thing in football is a touchdown. If the rejection of power and prestige are the rarest thing in the Church, why should that shock us?

The final readings for Lent all call us to go beyond the human to think and act on the level of God — as made divine by Baptism. The Holy Week readings teach us, by the example of Jesus above all, that the way to reach this exalted level is to relish being at the bottom of the heap. But we are closed to it.

The easiest and most acceptable way to “be last” is to surrender ourselves in humble, loving service of others. To love is to put another first. To love like Christ is to put everyone first. It is impossible to do this without making ourselves last. This is what Jesus did, who, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” and “humbled himself” by becoming “obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross.”

If we let that theme guide us through Holy Week, all will make sense to us.

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Life Through Surrender: Fifth Week of Lent: March 25 to 31, 2012

The readings this week are all about new life, the “life to the full’ that Jesus came to give and only he can give.

Life we can only enter into through surrender; another word for which is “dying.” That sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? But look at the alternatives.

Jesus knew his life would be fruitless if he didn’t die: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat.” It remains alone, isolated. “But if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

If we don’t “die” by surrendering our self-sufficiency, our complacency in being “right” that closes us to the ideas of others, we remain alone, isolated. The truth we do have dies with us, unfertilized by the ideas of others; a pocket of truth zippered so tight it stales into sterility.
Parents who do not share their religious experience with their children cannot pass on their faith. Catholics who do not dialogue receptively with Protestants perpetuate the division. “Dialogue” begins with asking about another’s experience of God and sharing one’s own. Any discussion not based on a recognition of common experience is doomed to degenerate into nothing but argument. Teachers and preachers of the “Catholic faith” do damage if they don’t listen to the “catholic experience” of those who are living it on ground level and learn from what they hear. And all Christians stunt their growth if they just “hunker down” in the understanding of the faith they grew up with and do not continue to read Scripture and hear with openness what others read and find in it.

This was the sin of the Pharisees. Faced with Jesus, who had personal, intimate knowledge of the Father, they didn’t want to hear about him. They had laws to live by. That was enough for them. So they crucified Jesus, as their successors today crucify anyone who tries to open their minds to more truth.

The only true obedience is surrender to the “endless exploration” of the mystery that is God — and the mystery of sharing in the divine life of God by Baptism. Ultimately, there are only two choices: discipleship — which means commitment to learning the mind and heart of God — and Phariseeism, which means stiff-necked resistance to anything we don’t know already.
Paul said that Jesus himself “learned obedience from what he suffered.” That is, from what he surrendered to. We learn obedience by surrendering our minds to new insights into the truth of our faith, our wills to new ideals, new principles of action that follow from it, our hearts to higher levels of inspiration.

The only true sterility is spiritual fruitlessness. When we stop surrendering to the seed of truth, we begin to die: sterile and alone.


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“Water words,” Source and Support of Life: Fourth Week of Lent: March 18 to 24, 2012

Baptism invites us into “ecstasy.” “Ecstasy” means “standing outside of,” being “out of ourselves.” Baptism is not an “out of the body” experience, but the experience, and freedom, of being “out of” the world itself — while being deeply involved.

Because we have “died to the world” in Baptism, we are free. We depend on nothing and nobody here. We are physically walking around on earth, but we don’t depend on having the planet under our feet. “Our citizenship is not here.” We have “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” This makes us radically free of our “culture.” Free to be different and to call others to be different.

To do this we must be disciples, students of the mind and heart ofd God. Today’s laity are the most educated congregations priests have faced since the beginning of the world. Unfortunately, that education does not always include familiarity with Scripture or with the groundlevel, reader-friendly theology available today to everyone (e.g. the sixteen documents of Vatican II). That has to be corrected. It is essential for the reform of the Church.

True, two thirds of those studying for doctorates in theology are laity. True, priests cannot assume today, as before, that they know more theology than anyone out there in the pews. But the general level of theological knowledge (and awareness, another issue) of the general Catholic population has to be raised.

It won’t just “be raised.” We have to raise it.

The water Ezekiel saw flowing from the temple was a mere “trickle” at first. It gradually deepened until it was “deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed.” We find this “water" in the words of Jesus: "Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” But we have to read his words.

Not just read them: we have to make Scripture reading a way of life. The difference between this and an occasional “Scripture study” matches the difference between sporadic dieting and a conversion to healthy eating.

Health requires consistent nourishment and exercise. Spiritual health requires both consistent reading of the word of God and consistent acting on it. When we make reading Scripture and acting on it a regular part of our lives, we will enjoy a spiritual health that will enable us to reform both the Church and the world.

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To See or Not To See: That is the Question: Third Week of Lent: March 11 to 17, 2012

“Lord, you have the words of everlasting life.” If we believe that, we have to believe that committed discipleship — regular reading and refection on God’s word — can “fill the hearts of the faithful” and “renew the face of the earth.” If we choose to look and see.

“My soul is thirsting for the living God.” It will be, if I am aware of God’s presence, power and goodness. This awareness is the fruit of committed discipleship that does not just take Christianity for granted, but keeps delving into the mystery of God’s mind and heart until everything within us is crying, "Hallowed be thy name!"

“Remember your mercy, O Lord.” If we remember it, and let reflection on God’s word remind us of it daily, we will see every problem in the Church and in the world countered by signs of hope. The strongest sign, available to us every day, is the Mass. As long as Jesus is present on the altar, dying and rising in sacrifice, we know the Church is dying and rising daily in him.

“Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.” If we — and the rest of humanity — would reflect on God’s laws enough to see how “wise and intelligent” they are, rejection would be replaced by praise. And society would be renewed. This is a motive for committing to discipleship.

“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Hardness of heart reveals itself in indecision. If Sunday after Sunday we listen to the word of God at Mass without making any choices in response, we have something to worry about. Do you want to “harden your heart” against this statement, or do you want to start making choices every Sunday before leaving church?

“I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.” Unless we are committed to deep, regular listening to the voice of God through reading and reflecting on his words, we are not choosing to live a happy life. The only true way to happiness is the way of discipleship. Jesus is “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” But he cannot be Life for us unless we learn to follow his Way by absorbing his Truth. For this we must be disciples.

“It is steadfast love, not sacrifice, that God desires.” But in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross — made present in every Mass — we see God’s “steadfast love” revealed in its perfection. This is the “perfection of love” which every Christian is committed by Baptism to pursue. We learn how to do this by reading and reflecting on God’s word.

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Metanoia is Openness: Second Week of Lent: March 4 to 10, 2012

The readings are all about commitment to discipleship; that is, to seeking clearer understanding of the mystery we see by faith, in order to express it more authentically in action. The motive that drives us to seek this greater authenticity is desire to make the Father known and loved: Hallowed be thy Name! We want to be able to say with Jesus, “Whoever sees me has seen the Father!”

The problem is, there is a clear resistance to discipleship in the Church. At the core of it are the same kind of people who closed their minds to Jesus so fanatically in the Gospels that it eventually led them to kill him. These are the “Pharisee party” (not known by that name, of course), who typically — now as well as then — are the most “established” or “accredited” members of the Church. In the Gospels these are clearly and repeatedly identified as the three categories of “chief priests,” “scribes,” and “Pharisees.”

The “chief priests” were the higher clergy. The scribes were the officially approved “teachers of the Law,” which included doctrine as well as rules. And the Pharisees were members of a reform movement who insisted most inflexibly on keeping all the rules and spoke out most strongly against those they perceived as bending them. What the three had in common, that united them against Jesus, were prestige, power, and a complacency in what they were teaching and doing that made them resistant to anything new.

The key to the Catholic spirit is a recognition of mystery. The teaching that comes from God himself, and the New Law of Jesus are so far beyond human understanding that we can only grow into them through commitment to that open-minded, never-ending faith formation the American bishops begged for in their letter Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us. If we ever think we “understand” our religion, we have denied the faith!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.