Author: DVO

“It is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles him or her, it is what comes out of the mouth. For what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart and, from there, issue forth lies, evil thoughts, and slander.” With words very similar to these, Jesus summarizes the eighth commandment. Leo Tolstoy once said that all happy families resemble each other but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that it is true, and it is also true of generations. Each generation has its own unique demons peculiar to it, which spawn a particular form of unhappiness. We see the effects of this in a growing hardness of heart everywhere within the culture and the church. In virtually every circle, liberal and conservative alike, we see hardness, cynicism, the tendency to demonize and slander others, and a blunt, angry, rationalized refusal to look honestly at the truth without inflations, ideologies, denial, and distortion. We see, as well, an absence of healthy self-criticism, which is then compensated for by an excess of criticism of those outside the circle. We rarely see pockets of tenderness, forgiveness, and repentance today. The absence of these is an infallible sign that we are not living in the truth but are lying and not sinning bravely. Lying and rationalization form the root of bitterness, the root of slander, and the root of the unhappy hardness of the heart. If I am a liberal, I lie through self-hatred. I look at my background and history and find no difficulty seeing and naming the lies of the great institutions that shaped me. Thus, I look at family, church, and nation and can see and name every kind of falsehood in them. So, I go through life made unhappy by the liberal life, a “recovering Catholic,” bitter at my own past, hating my own roots and, not infrequently, distorting those roots through a revisionist rereading of them that is based more on ideology and hatred than accuracy. If I am conservative, my drug of choice when it comes to lying is denial. As a conservative, I have little difficulty in seeing and naming personal sin. I see sin all over. Moreover, I have no trouble genuflecting; I am forever insisting that everyone genuflect. My failure of not facing the truth is the exact opposite of the liberal. I can never admit the real faults, historical and present, inherent and incidental, which come from family, church, nation, and every other revered institution within life. The most dangerous of all sins is lying. The unforgivable sin against the Spirit begins with a lie. But there is a flip side to this. Scripture also tells us that the single condition for finding and acknowledging Christ is the refusal to lie. The eighth commandment is trying to teach us just this.

One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, and accurate. Our problem is that we seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting up to God what is on our minds and hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out our minds and hearts, we tell God what we think God wants to hear, not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him. Fr. Rolheiser writes that expressing those feelings is the whole point of heartfelt prayer. Sometimes, we feel good, and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives have too their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness spontaneously boil under the surface. One of the beautiful things is knowing that scripture can give us a voice, particularly the Psalms (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”), even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it. As Kathleen Norris puts it: “If you pray regularly, there is no way you can do it right. You will not always sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You won’t wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great book of praises through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them right in front of God and everyone.” Feel-good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the Psalms, which express how we feel. Anyone who would lift their mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred, and war should write slogans for greeting cards and not be anyone’s spiritual advisor.

The Church’s old catechisms used to tell us that we reach the age of reason at roughly age seven. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that at one level, that’s true, we can be responsible for ourselves then in a way we couldn’t when we were toddlers or in kindergarten. But it takes a lot longer than age seven, a lifetime, really, to be in full ownership of ourselves. And so, at another level, we might better peg the age of reason sometime after age 30, when we have a more responsible sense of who we are, what our lives mean, and what decisions we need to make to bring life to ourselves and theirs. It takes a long time before we can be really responsible. But there’s a further problem, by the time we reach maturity, we have also lost some vital, life-giving parts of ourselves. By the time we get to possess ourselves, all of us have been wounded and shamed in our enthusiasm, and parts of our bodies and our souls have died and turned cold. By the time we get to be more fully in possession of ourselves, we are no longer whole. We are all familiar with the story of a woman who, we are told, had been suffering from internal hemorrhaging for twelve years and had spent all her money on doctors without getting any better, approaches him surreptitiously, saying to herself: “If I but touch the hem of his garment, I will be healed!” She does just that and, the gospels tell us, instantly the flow of blood stopped. Touching Jesus did for her what doctors couldn’t do, it stopped her internal hemorrhaging. What Jesus does is give back to this woman the possibility of giving life, in one case by stopping the flow of blood and in the other by starting it. How do we, like the woman, touch the hem of the garment to be healed? Willpower, while important, is not enough. Only by touching some higher power, and this is most easily done inside a community, can we change our lives. Therapy too is helpful to a point, but only to a point. In the end, the power to give life can only be restored to us through grace and community, through letting a power beyond give us something that we cannot give to ourselves.

Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? Job was clearly expressing feelings that we all face at times. He speaks of a sleepless night. Feelings of a loss of hope. Months of misery. Everyone wants to seize the day. But as Irish novelist John McGahern says: “There is nothing more difficult to seize than the day!” Why? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we have an incredible naivete about this. For example, a young man once wrote to Rainer Marie Rilke complaining that he wanted to be a poet, but his daily life offered little in the way of inspiration. His life was not the stuff of poetry, he complained: too much drudgery, too many pressures, life in a small village. How could he write poetry out of such life? He concluded by saying that he envied Rilke’s life as an admired poet, living in a big city and meeting exciting people. Rilke wasn’t exactly sympathetic: “If your daily life seems poor to you,” he replied, “then you aren’t poet enough to call forth its riches. For a poet, there are no uninteresting places, no uninteresting life.” The day is there to be seized. Every season, whether chronological, cultural, or religious, brings with it a particular spirit, mood, and feeling that we sometimes capture and sometimes miss. The same is true for the various periods of the day – morning, noon, early afternoon, late afternoon, evening, and night. Each has its unique light and impact on our feelings, and (speaking in metaphor) its unique angels who carry its special grace. For example, the light of the morning greets us differently than the light of the late afternoon. Thus, the angels of sunrise impact us differently than those of sunset. To seize the day is to meet these angels and let them bless us. Many things keep us from meeting the angels of the hour – preoccupation, tiredness, distraction, heartache, anger, daydreams, stress, hurriedness. It’s easy to miss a particular season and even easier to miss an ordinary morning, afternoon, evening, or entire day. What do we do so as not to miss them? We need to pray. Simply put: If we don’t pray on a given morning, that omission doesn’t offend God. We don’t owe God our prayers. It’s a gift, not a debt owed. But, if we miss praying some morning, there is, as our experience makes evident again and again, the real danger that we will also miss the morning.

“What I want is to leap out of this personality, and then sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.” – Rumi

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, “In a day of instant and constant communication, cell phones and emails, I suspect that we all fit that description. Certainly, I do. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.” It seems that we’re almost always overstretched with too much to do. We come to the end of each day tired, yet conscious of what we’ve left undone. There’s always someone else we should have phoned, emailed, or attended to in some way. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases, crammed to the brim, and still unable to hold all we need to carry along. What’s wrong here? Whenever we feel that way, it’s a sure sign that we’ve lost the proper sense of time. Life is meant to be busy, but we’re also meant, at regular times, to have sabbatical, sabbath time, to rest and enjoy. Wayne Muller wrote a little book entitled, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives. I leave you with some of his wisdom:

– The Sabbath need not be a year or even a day. It can also be an afternoon, an hour, a walk, or a dinner. Sabbath is a time when we drink, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight. It is a time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, and true.

– We are almost always running, trying to catch the things that will make us happy when, in fact, those very things are trying to catch us!

– God said: “Remember to rest.” This is not a lifestyle suggestion, but a commandment, as important as not stealing, not murdering, or not lying.

We need Sabbath. We’ve all lived too long where we can be reached.

Mary and Joseph’s faith traditions told them that the child was a gift from God. Listening to the wisdom of their history, Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple. Sr. Thea Bowman writes that it’s fitting that we call to mind black history and present the legacy of black life to God on this Feast of the Presentation. Like Mary and Joseph, we are doing today what the wisdom of our cultural and faith traditions have told us to do, for we live at a time in human history when it is clear that we need to remember the heritage that lives on is us. It didn’t matter to Mary and Joseph that when they got to the Temple it was only a simple old man and a feeble old woman who recognized the presence of God in their child. They didn’t need the recognition of the high priest or the approval of the chief magistrate to know that Jesus was a gift from God. It seems to me that our ancestors had a “Mary and Joseph way of looking at things.” It didn’t matter to our ancestors that their children were born in the stable of a hostile society. They shared their belief in a God who could make a way out of no way. God has spoken to the world through us. He has made himself present to the world through us. So we gather in God’s house, just as Mary and Joseph did, to give praise with our thanksgiving. Knowing the wisdom of our ancestors who did with us what Mary and Joseph had done, we present our history and our lives before the altar and say thank you to God.

Jesus sends out the disciples to spread the Good News. He requires them to be free of any form of attachment if they are to preach the Gospel. A disciple who has the mission of bringing the Kingdom of God to souls through preaching should not rely on human resources but on God’s providence. Whatever he does need in order to live with dignity as a herald of the Gospel, he must obtain from those who benefit from his preaching, for the laborer deserves his upkeep. St Bede clarifies this teaching for those who proclaim the Good News: “The preacher should so trust in God that he is convinced that he will have everything he needs to support life, even if he cannot himself obtain it; for he should not neglect eternal things through worrying about temporal things.” In the end, it gets back to the question raised by the Evil one in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve, “Did God really say…?” In essence, he was asking them, “Do you really trust God’s word?” We see in the action of the disciples what occurred when they obeyed Christ and put their total trust in Him. How does our life reflect trust in God? All we need to do is look into our hearts, our minds, and our souls. We will either be affirmed or challenged. Embrace the answer and change your life.

Everyone has experienced this feeling of being stereotyped in some way. It might be returning to the area where you grew up after graduating college and working for a few years. But the people “back home” only recall the youth who often get into trouble. So, they would be skeptical to the point of laughter and possibly mocking you when you told them you were working for the FBI. Today’s Gospel develops an uncomfortable theme. It tells how the people of Nazareth rejected Jesus. Bishop Barron writes that authentically religious and authentically spiritual people will almost always be opposed. The logic behind this is simple and unanswerable: we live in a world gone wrong, a world turned upside down; therefore, when someone speaks the truth to us, we will think that they are crazy and dangerous. Think for just a moment what would happen to you if you consistently and publicly spoke the word of God to our culture. If you spoke out against abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, human trafficking, rampant materialism, and ideological secularism, what would happen to you? If you presented, in a full-throated way, the full range of Catholic social, moral, and spiritual teachings, what would they do to you? Perhaps this is an excellent day to consider our reactions. Just because we have known people for years, we sometimes fail to recognize that they have changed. In our blindness, we can miss the talents they have acquired. How open and gracious are we in seeing people in a positive light when we are caught off guard by a revelation about who they have become that is different than what we pictured? How willing are we to listen and accept them as they are now?

The centerpiece of today’s Gospel is Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman. Having a flow of blood for twelve years meant that anyone with whom she came in contact would be considered unclean. She couldn’t, in any meaningful sense, participate in the ordinary life of her society. The afflicted woman in this episode is a model for approaching Jesus. While crowds of people were bumping into him as he walked along, she touched him. The woman touches Jesus and how radical and dangerous an act this was since it should have rendered Jesus unclean. But so great is her faith that her touch, instead, renders her clean. Jesus effectively restores her to full participation in her community. Her faith brought her into living contact with Jesus, and as a result, she experienced a dramatic healing. The difference between the crowds and the woman prompts the question: How often do we merely bump up against Jesus—for instance, when we receive him in the Eucharist? Do we half-consciously jostle against him amid all the other preoccupations of the day, or do we come to him determined to touch him personally, with a lively awareness of the grace and power that can flow forth from him into our lives? Bishop Barron notes that what is perhaps most important is this: Jesus implicitly puts an end to the ritual code of the book of Leviticus. What he implies is that the identity of the new Israel, the Church, would not be through ritual behaviors but through imitation of him. Notice, please, how central this is in the New Testament. We hear elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus declares all foods clean, and throughout the letters of Paul, we hear a steady polemic against the Law. All of this is meant to show that Jesus is at the center of the new community.

There’s a well-known marble quarry in our area. Recently, we went over for their annual festival, where sculptors spent a week working on a piece of stone. One artist was sculpting a complicated knotted figure. He explained how he spent time with the stone, studying and almost “listening” to it, learning how to work with it. If he imposed his will upon the stone, he risked destroying it. Today’s Gospel shows Jesus driving the unclean spirit from the Gerasene demoniac. The people of Gerasene experienced God’s grace, the healing of a profoundly tormented man. But they didn’t get it or perhaps didn’t want to. They had their own narrative. Jesus didn’t fit, and so they turned from him. We must wonder what moments of God’s creative grace and healing we miss when we see life simply as a chance to work out our own agenda instead of responding to the present moment. Though God typically lets the universe run according to its natural rhythms and patterns, what is to prevent God from shaping it and influencing it occasionally in remarkable ways to signal his purpose and presence? Jesus, open my heart to your presence here and now.