Thoughts on human value

 

The Value of a Human Person

We are living in a culture that measures the value of the human person by degrees of success and productivity. What is your title? How much money do you make? How many friends do you have? What are your accomplishments? How busy are you? What do your children do? But it is important for us to remember that as we grow older our ability to succeed in this way gradually diminishes. We lose our titles, our friends, our accomplishments, and our ability to do many things, because we begin to feel weaker, more vulnerable, and more dependent. If we continue to look at ourselves from the point of view of success, our condition is not a good one! Because of our strong cultural vision, it is a huge challenge to look at vulnerability not as a negative thing but as a positive thing. Do we dare to look at weakness as an opportunity to become fruitful? Fruitfulness in the spiritual life is about love, and this fruitfulness is very different from success or productivity.

“They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green…”   - Psalm 92: 14

Thoughts on detachment

 

Twenty-Third Week in Ordinary Time

Luke 6:20–26

Friends, our Gospel for today is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, less well-known than Matthew’s but actually punchier, more to the point. It all hinges on detachment, that decisively important spiritual attitude—apatheia in the Greek fathers, indifferencia in Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual detachment means that I am unattached to worldly values that become a substitute for the ultimate good of God. How bluntly Luke’s account puts things! Look at Luke’s first beatitude, a model for the rest: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.” What if we translated this as, “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to material things.” When we place material things in the center of our concerns, we find ourselves caught in an addictive pattern. Because material goods don’t satisfy the hunger in my soul, I convince myself that I need more of them to gain contentment. So I strive and work to get more nice things—cars, homes, TVs, clothes—and then I find that those don’t satisfy me. So I strive and strive, and the rhythm continues. Therefore, how lucky I would be if I were poor, unattached to material goods, finally indifferent to them. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on healing

 

Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest

Luke 6:12–19

Friends, after Jesus names his twelve apostles in today’s Gospel, he heals a multitude of people. And that multitude represents us, for we all stand in need of the Savior’s healing touch. We are made for love and connection and justice and nonviolence, but at every turn and in every way we are twisted in the direction of hatred, separation, injustice, and violence. We are, as St. Augustine put it, wandering in the land of dissimilitude and in the grip of the libido dominandi. The contemporary philosopher René Girard has reminded us that all of our social arrangements are marked by scapegoating and oppression.  The human race is best characterized as a dysfunctional spiritual family, all of us having been marked from birth by the effects of sin. Sin has found its way into every aspect of human life, personally and institutionally. We would be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise.  And so we need not just a philosopher or social theorist or political activist or military hero but a savior, someone who can break into our dysfunction from the outside and heal us. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

 

Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Matthew 1:1–16, 18–23

Friends, today as we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church gives us the very beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel. It is desperately important for Matthew to show that Jesus doesn’t just appear out of the blue. Rather, he comes out of a rich, densely textured history. St. Irenaeus tells us that the Incarnation had been taking place over a long period of time, God gradually accustoming himself to the human race.  Look at this long line of characters: saints, sinners, cheats, murderers, poets, kings, insiders, and outsiders—all leading to the Christ. Of course, King David is mentioned. He is, without doubt, a great figure, the king who unites the nation, defeats its enemies, and establishes the first Israelite empire. But he is also, we know, an adulterer and a murderer, the one who abuses his power in order to eliminate Uriah the Hittite. And finally the climactic entry that notes the virgin whose birthday we celebrate today: “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.” Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the Gospel

 

Luke 14: 25 – 33                                                                             

 23^rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple                

 

This Sunday’s Gospel is a mixture of good news and bad news. It is good news, but not in the way we normally expect. It sounds more like bad news concerning things quite unpleasant and undesirable, even impossible.

 

We have become used to hearing the Gospel called the “Good News” of Jesus Christ. That is what gospel literally means. Our English word comes from the Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) language spoken in England from about the 5^th to the 12^th centuries. The it combines god (good) and spel (news, story, message).

 

But today’s Gospel reminds us that “Good News” is not only what we desire and what we think will make us happy. The Gospel is called “Good News” because it announces, not necessarily what we want for our happiness, but what we need for our salvation

 

Today's Gospel can sound like Bad News because Jesus teaches:

           • You cannot be my disciple without hating your family and your own life.

           • You cannot be my disciple without carrying your cross.

           • You cannot be my disciple without giving up all your possessions.

 

So, in the midst of these unpleasant teachings, what’s the Good News? If we follow Christ closely, as His disciple, we will follow Him in glory to everlasting life. Still, it seems to be an impossible task:

Hating our closest loved ones? Embracing painful suffering?  Renouncing all possessions?

 

Be not afraid! We should not take the harsh, unpleasant words completely literally. Hyperbole (exaggeration for emphasis or effect), was a common literary feature of the ancient Middle Eastern world. 

 

The Gospel is about counting the cost of discipleship. And the cost is putting God first in our lives:

● Our Lord teaches that God should come before family and other relationships of this world (That's “hating” father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, even one's own life).

● God should be put before comfort, convenience, health, satisfaction (That's carrying the Cross).

● God must always be in our lives before possessions (That's renouncing all one's possessions).

 

It is up to us to work out the specific details in our lives, but always asking, “How can I put God first?”  It is a daunting task, but it’s a question that should begin every day and every effort: “How does the Lord, here and now, ask me to put Him first?”

 

An ancient prayer of the Church, The Actiones Nostras, may be just the thing to begin our day:

                       Direct, we beseech Thee, O Lord,

                       All our actions by Thy holy inspirations

                       And carry them on by Thy gracious assistance;

                       That every prayer and work of ours

                       May always begin with Thee

                       And through Thee be happily ended

                       Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

 

Today’s Gospel may seem like “Bad News”: we are told to renounce selfishness, possessiveness, ease, comfort, convenience. But, if we do strive to follow Christ more closely as disciples – always with the necessary help of his grace – we will one day hear that best “Good News” of all, as we are welcomed by Our Lord: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

                                                                                               

Don Saunders, SJ

Thoughts on healing

 

Memorial of Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church

Luke 4:38–44

Friends, in our Gospel today, we see Jesus in action. He is always hurrying from place to place, on the go. Today, Luke gives us a sort of “day in the life” of Jesus. And it is quite a day! Our Gospel opens just after the dramatic expulsion of a demon in the Capernaum synagogue. And after entering the house of Simon, Jesus cures his mother-in-law, and then the entire town comes to his door. Jesus spends the whole evening curing presumably hundreds who were variously afflicted. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, in an attempt to make Jesus more palatable to rationalists and “realists,” theologians put great stress on Jesus’s preaching, especially his ethical teaching. But this is not the Jesus that Luke presents. Rather, he is a healer—soter, rendered in Latin as salvator, which just means “the bearer of the salus” or health. Jesus is portrayed as a healer, a savior. In him, divinity and humanity have come together; in him, the divine life and divine power are breaking through. God’s deepest intentions for his beloved creatures appear—what God plans for us in the kingdom to come is now historically anticipated. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on summer

Summer

For many people, summer has a lot of different parameters as far as when it begins and when it ends. For children, summer begins when school lets out for the year.  When I was a kid, that meant sometime in June, but now it means late May.  This past school year, my children were done for the year on May 23rd!  For people who work for a living, Memorial Day weekend kind of marks the beginning of summer, a time when the temperatures are warmer and the local swimming pools open up.  Of course, if you go by the calendar, the official beginning of summer is on June 21st with the summer solstice.  If the weather doesn't cooperate, most anyone else will have to admit that by July 4th, Independence Day weekend, we are definitely into summer.  For a few, summer doesn't begin until you take your vacation from work and go on a trip out of town. 

People who have children in school will most likely agree that what we think of as summer, the time off between when school ends and when it begins, has definitely moved from a Memorial Day to Labor Day time period to a late May to early to mid August time period as schools nation wide have adjusted their schedules over the last 20 years or so.  For many folks, once the calendar flips over to August, vacations are over and you are buying back to school supplies and thinking about school starting again.  But really, summer is only about half over because it doesn't really end until Sept 21st. So when is summer to you?  I guess it really doesn't matter, unless you make calendars.  Enjoy the warm weather and time off of work.  Slow down and enjoy the enjoyment!

Scott