Author: DVO

Sometimes in our fear of being tainted in our orthodoxy we forget that many of the great theologians in Christian tradition were unafraid to pick up pagan thinkers, mine their insights for truth, and then blend these with their faith. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that St. Augustine did this with Platonism. Thomas Aquinas, in the face of considerable ecclesial criticism, did the same thing with Aristotle. Ironically, centuries later, we now take many of their intellectual categories, which they originally took from pagan thought, as our very criteria for orthodoxy. Dare one say that Jesus did the same thing? He picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it. If one picks up truths from diverse pagan and secular sources and harmonizes them with one’s Christian faith, how does one avoid the accusation of being syncretistic? Syncretism is combining insights gleaned from everywhere in a way that is uncritical of internal contradiction. But we must not confuse tension with contradiction. Tension is not necessarily a sign of contradiction; it’s often the opposite: True faith is humble enough to accept truth, wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big mind and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And, true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be. God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceive and receive goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.

In Luke’s Gospel for the Assumption, Mary sings of God’s mercy and his special care for those whom the world would cast aside. God has “lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things,” the young Mary says to her older cousin Elizabeth. The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not defined as a dogma until 1950 but has roots as far back as the fifth century. God’s taking up into heaven of the physical body of Mary is in keeping with what we teach about both the importance of Mary and the importance of our bodies as human creatures. Mary, in her body, goes ahead of us to heaven. Mary, who experienced all the precarity and danger of being a religious minority in an occupied country, who had to flee with her family across a border to save the life of her young child, and who watched a brutal government torture and kill that child as an adult, would come to know the Magnificat in a completely different way over the course of her life. The Magnificat is Mary’s famous song of praise to God. It shakes the complacency of the powerful and reminds them of God’s strength: “He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones.” Mary’s song and her Assumption could not be more relevant. On August 12, Bishop Vasquez of Austin, Texas, Chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, issued a statement urging protection of migrant families. He declared that a new government rule, which would severely limit asylum eligibility, “jeopardizes the safety of vulnerable individuals and families fleeing persecution and threatens family unity.” The Assumption reminds us of our call to care for all who are experiencing danger, hunger, homelessness, statelessness, or are treated as outcasts. It reminds us that God cares for the least and the lowly, and so must we.

Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Regis Armstrong writes that Fr. Kolbe is known for giving his life to the Nazis at the Horror Camp Auschwitz in place of another on August 14, 1941. What led to this was a camp count on July 29, 1941, revealing that three prisoners were missing from Block 11 and the Camp’s Sub-Commander ordering that ten men suffer reprisal. Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritsch instructed all the men of Block 11 to form a line, which he walked selecting their life or their slow death by starvation, “This one. That one.” Amongst them was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a married family man. Before the group of 10 was marched to Block 13, the starvation bunker, Prisoner Number 16670, Maximilian Kolbe, broke rank and said: “I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am old, and he has a wife and children.” Maximilian and the other nine men went to a slow death of torture and starvation in the notorious Block 13. After three weeks, only four remained alive; among them was Maximilian. On August 14th, the commandant decided the bunker was needed and ordered the prisoners to be injected with carbolic acid. Still conscious, Maximilian looked at the doctor and offered his arm. The body of Prisoner 16670 was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like the hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.” Survivor Jozef Stemler recalled, “In that desert of hatred, he had sown love. There was nothing artificial in his behavior; he was serious but happy and had the smile of a youth. These qualities attracted many people to him. I was coming back from the evening roll call, half-dead from work and hungry, when an SS Guard ordered me to carry two dead bodies to the crematorium. The sight of the body of a young man almost made me faint when I realized it was Father Kolbe.”

We all like to think of ourselves as big-hearted, having wide compassion and loving as Jesus did, but too much within our attitudes and actions belies this. Our love, truth, and worship are often unconsciously predicated on making ourselves right by making others wrong. Too often, we have an unconscious mantra that says: I can only be good if someone else is bad. I can only be right if someone else is wrong. My dogma can only be true if someone else’s is false. My religion can only be right if someone else’s is wrong. My Eucharist can only be valid if someone else’s is invalid. And I can only be in heaven if someone else is in hell. Fr. Ron Rolheiser wrote the above as he spoke about how we view heaven and the kingdom of God. Yet, as Fr. Rolheiser writes, the scripture verse today tells us God’s salvific will is universal and that God’s deep, constant, passionate longing is that everyone, absolutely everyone, regardless of their attitude and actions, is somehow brought into the house. It seems God does not want to rest until everyone is home, eating at the same table. We see in the Gospel of Luke how Jesus weaves together three stories to make this point: The shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to search for the one stray; the woman who has ten coins, loses one, and cannot rest until she has found her lost coin; and the father who loses two sons, one to weakness and one to anger, and will not rest until he has both back in the house. Our heaven, too, must be a wide one. Like the woman who lost a coin, like a shepherd who has lost a sheep, and like the father of the prodigal son and older brother, we too shouldn’t rest easy when others are separated from us. The family is only happy when everyone is home. What ultimately characterizes a genuine faith and a big heart is not how pure our churches, doctrines, and morals might be, but how wide the embrace of our hearts is.

Christianity teaches us that our world is holy and that everything is a matter for the sacrament. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that in this view, the universe manifests God’s glory, and humanity is made in God’s image. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, our food is sacramental, and in our work and sexual embrace, we are co-creators with God. When we watch the news at night, our world doesn’t look like the glory of God; what we do with our bodies at times makes us wonder whether these really are temples of the Holy Spirit, the heartless and thankless way that we consume food and drink leaves little impression of sacramentality, and the symbols and language with which we surround our work and sex speak precious little of co-creation with God. We have lost the sense that the world is holy and that our eating, working, and making love are sacramental, and we’ve lost it because we no longer have the right kind of prayer and ritual in our lives. We no longer connect ourselves, our world, our eating, and our making love to their sacred origins. In not making this connection, our prayer and ritual fall short. Among the Osage Indians, there is a custom that when a child is born before it is allowed to drink from its mother’s breast, a holy person is summoned, and someone “who has talked to the gods” is brought into the room. This person recites to the newborn infant the story of the creation of the world and of terrestrial animals. Not until this has been done is the baby given the mother’s breast. An older generation, that of my parents, had their own pious way of doing this ritual. They blessed their fields and workbenches and bedrooms, they prayed grace before and after every meal, and some of them went to finalize their engagement for marriage in a church. That was their way of telling the story of the sacred origins of water before drinking it. By and large, we have rejected the mythological way of the Osage Indians and the pious way of my parent’s generation. We live, eat, work, and make love under a lower symbolic hedge. Most of our eating isn’t sacramental because we don’t connect the food we eat to its sacred origins—and, for the most part, we don’t really pray before and after meals. We must find a way to connect our eating, drinking, working, and making love to their sacred origins.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, writing in response to the gospel reading today for John on the “bread of life,” says that sin is the spiritual death of the soul. Hence, man is preserved from future sin in the same way as the body is preserved from future death of the body: and this happens in two ways. First of all, man’s nature is strengthened inwardly against inner decay, and so by means of food and medicine, he is preserved from death. Secondly, he is guarded against outward assaults, and thus, he is protected by the means of arms by which he defends his body. Now, the Eucharist preserves man from sin in both of these ways. For, first of all, by uniting man with Christ through grace, it strengthens his spiritual life, as spiritual food and spiritual medicine, “That bread strengthens strengthen man’s heart (Ps. 103:5).” Augustine likewise says, “Approach without fear. It is bread, not poison.” Secondly, because it is a sign of Christ’s Passion, whereby the devils are conquered, it repels all the assaults of demons. Hence, Chrysostom says, “Like lions breathing forth fire, thus do we depart from that table, being made terrible to the devil.” Indeed, it is also true that many, after receiving this sacrament, worthily fall again into sin, but it is due to the changeableness of free will that man sins after possessing charity, for his free will can easily be fixed on good or evil. Hence, although this sacrament itself has the power to preserve us from sin, it does not take away from man the possibility of sinning. And the same must be said of charity. For charity in itself preserves man from sin, but because of the weakness of free will, it happens that one sins after possessing charity just as one does after receiving this sacrament. Although this sacrament is ordained directly to lessen the inclination to sin, it does lessen it as a consequence, inasmuch as it increases charity because, as Augustine says, “the increase of charity is the lessening of concupiscence.” But it directly strengthens man’s heart in good, whereby he is also preserved from sin.

In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25, Jesus speaks to the judgment of the nations, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.” By what measure does he separate the sheep and goats? His answer follows his opening statement, “Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Invite in the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick and imprisoned? Because when you do these things to the hungry, to the thirsty, to strangers, to the sick, and to the imprisoned, you do them to God.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is when we see both groups in the story befuddled. “Both those who did what was asked and those who didn’t were equally befuddled and lodged the same protest: “When? When did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty?” Both are caught off guard and both ask seemingly the same question, but their protests are in fact very different: The first group, those who had measured up, are pleasantly surprised. What they say to Jesus is essentially this: “We didn’t know it was you! We were just doing what was right!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In serving them, you were meeting me!” The second group, those who hadn’t measured up, is rudely shocked. Their protest, in effect, is this: “If we had only known! If we had known that it was you inside the poor we would have responded. We just didn’t know!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In not serving them, you were avoiding me!” In this gospel story, neither those who served God in the poor nor those who didn’t serve God in poor knew what they were doing. The first group, who did respond, did so simply because it was the right thing to do. They didn’t know that God was hidden inside the poor. The second group, who didn’t respond, didn’t reach out because they didn’t realize that God was inside the poor. Neither knew that God was there and that is the lesson. A mature disciple doesn’t calculate or make distinctions as to whether God is inside of a certain situation or not, whether a person seems worth it or not, whether a person is a Christian or not, or whether a person appears to be a good person or not, before reaching out in service. A mature disciple serves whoever is in need, independent of those considerations. Jesus would add that doing the right thing is reason enough.

James Martin in his book, Jesus, A Pilgrimage suggests that taking up our cross daily and giving up life in order to find deeper life means six interpenetrating things:

1. It means accepting that suffering is a part of our lives. Accepting our cross means that, at some point, we have to make peace with the unalterable fact that frustration, disappointment, pain, misfortune, illness, unfairness, sadness, and death are a part of our lives and they must ultimately be accepted without bitterness.
2. We may not, in our suffering, pass on any bitterness to those around us. There is a difference between healthily groaning under the weight of our pain and unhealthily whining in self-pity and bitterness under that weight. The cross gives us permission to do the former, but not the latter.
3. We must accept some other deaths before our physical death, that we are invited to let some parts of ourselves die. Maturity and Christian discipleship are about perennially naming our deaths, claiming our births, mourning our losses, letting go of what’s died, and receiving a new spirit for the new life that we are now living.
4. We must wait for the resurrection, that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished. So much of life and discipleship is about waiting, waiting in frustration, inside injustice, inside pain, in longing, battling bitterness, as we wait for something or someone to come and change our situation. Sometimes in the midst of pain the best we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait.
5. Accepting that God’s gift to us is often not what we expect. God always answers our prayers but, often times, by giving us what we really need rather than what we think we need.
6. Living in a faith that believes that nothing is impossible for God. It’s only possible to accept our cross, to live in trust, and to not grow bitter inside pain if we believe in possibilities beyond what we can imagine, namely, if we believe in the Resurrection. We can take up our cross when we begin to believe in the Resurrection.

In the centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus and among Jesus’ contemporaries there were numerous notions of what the Christ would look like. We don’t know which notion Peter had but obviously it wasn’t the right one because Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, immediately shuts it down. Fr. Rolheiser writes that what Jesus says to Peter is not so much: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Christ” but rather “Don’t tell anyone that I am what you think the Christ should be. That’s not who I am.” Like virtually all of his contemporaries and not unlike our own fantasies of what a Savior should look like, Peter no doubt pictured the Savior who was to come as a Superman, a Superstar who would vanquish evil through a worldly triumph within which he would simply overpower everything that’s wrong by miraculous powers. But Jesus was not a Superman or Superstar in this world or a miracle worker who would prove his power through spectacular deeds. So, who is he? The Messiah is a dying and rising Messiah, someone who in his own life and body will demonstrate that evil is not overcome by miracles but by forgiveness, magnanimity, and nobility of soul and that these are attained not through crushing an enemy but through loving him or her more fully. The glory of the Messiah is not demonstrated by overpowering us with spectacular deeds.  Rather it is demonstrated in Jesus letting himself be transformed through accepting with proper love and graciousness the unavoidable passivity, humiliation, diminishment, and dying that eventually found him. That’s the dying part. But when one dies like that or accepts any humiliation or diminishment in this way there’s always a subsequent rising to real glory, that is, to the glory of a heart so stretched and enlarged that it is now able to transform evil into good, hatred into love, bitterness into forgiveness, humiliation into glory. That’s the proper work of a Messiah. How do we imagine the Messiah?  How do we imagine triumph? Imagine Glory?  If Jesus looked us square in the eye and asked, as he asked Peter: “How do you understand me?” Would he laud us for our answer or would he tell us: “Don’t tell anyone about that!”

Fr. Rolheiser challenges us to see a God of all and not a God of just “us.” He writes that he believes that we are standing today as Christians, on new borders in terms of relating to other religions, not least to our Islamic brothers and sisters. The single most important agenda item for our churches for the next fifty years will be the issue of relating to other religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous Religions in the Americas and Africa, and various forms, old and new, of Paganism and New Age. Simply stated, if all the violence stemming from religious extremism hasn’t woken us yet then we are dangerously asleep.  We have no choice. The world has become one village, one community, one family, and unless we begin to understand and accept each other more deeply we will never be a world at peace. Our God calls us to recognize and welcome all sincere believers into our hearts as brothers and sisters in faith. Jesus makes this abundantly clear most everywhere in his message, and at times makes it uncomfortably explicit: Who are my brothers and sisters? It is those who hear the word of God and keep it. … It is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord, who enter the Kingdom of Heaven but those who do the will of God on earth. Who can deny that many non-Christians do the will of God here on earth? But what about the extremism, violence, and perverse expressions of religion we frequently see in other religions? All religions are to be judged, as Huston Smith submits, by their highest expressions and their saints, not by their perversions. This is true too for Christianity. We hope that others will judge us not by our darkest moments or by the worst acts ever done by Christians in the name of religion, but rather by all the good Christians have done in history and by our saints. This may come as a surprise to some but, in fact, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on an understanding of the God whom we worship as Christians.  The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. There is in the end only one God and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion.