Today, in Mercy, let this picture carry home the message of today’s Gospel for our time. Let us consider our moral and civic responsibilities to this child and the thousands like him throughout the world. Let us pray in the spirit of Jesus to understand what Mercy requires of us.
Enough said.
If you would like to help our Sister Anne Connolly working directly at our southern border with refugee families:
Gifts may be sent to:
Sisters of Mercy
(Please mark “Border Aid”)
c/o Sisters of Mercy-Border Aid
Development Office
515 Montgomery Avenue Merion, PA.19066
Today, in Mercy, our beautiful reading from Sirach reminds us how blessed we are in our friends.
To have a true friend, loving, honest and concerned for us is a gift beyond description. In modern parlance, such friends are often referred to as BFFs – “Best Friends Forever”.
Pray in thanksgiving for your BFFs today.
Some you may not have seen in many years. Still they are nestled in a place of eternal thanksgiving within you.
Some you may not speak to every day. You still carry and can depend on their strength and love.
Some may have been present to only a small part of your life. Still their impression lives in you.
Some may have grown old and gone home to God. Their eternal life rises in you.
Let us all give thanks today for the precious gift of friendship. Let us pray to be good and faithful friends ourselves.
(A second posting today with a few of my poems on friendship. Thank you to all of you, my friends, for the gift of your friendship.)
Today, in Mercy, we celebratethe Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle. It seems both fitting and painfully ironic that this feast should coincide with the Pope’s Summit on Protection of Minors in the Church. When He handed the “keys” to Peter, could Christ ever have foreseen that his beloved church would descend to this shame?
Factions in the Catholic Church argue over where to place the blame for this horror. Some point to the entitlements of clericalism. Some point to more liberal stances on sexuality. The most vocal factions use their voices to blame others rather than look to their own faults.
But today’s Gospel suggests that none of these explanations goes to the root of the crisis.
What Christ handed Peter was POWER. Our Gospel says that this power was to be used to map the journey to heaven for the rest of us – appropriately “binding” and “loosening” the guidelines of that journey.
That’s a lot of power!
Unfortunately, the famous quote of John Dalberg-Acton, a 19th century Catholic writer, too often proves true. He said:
Power tends to corrupt.
And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What was it that Jesus saw in Peter to give him hope for Peter’s incorruptibility?
Peter, who abandoned his livelihood in full devotion to the call.
Peter, who tried to protect his beloved Lord from the wrath of the Pharisees
Peter who, defending Jesus in the Garden, cut off the ear of Malchus
Peter, who recognized and begged forgiveness for his weakness
Peter, who chose an inverted crucifixion because he deemed himself unworthy to die as his master did.
Power fueled by this kind of single-hearted devotion and humility is the true “Power of the Keys”. It suffers no shadow of greed, self-importance, domination, or lust. It is always “power for” not “power over” others.
Until our church structures foster this kind of mutual, non-exclusionary power in our leaders AND members, we have little hope of transformation.
Let us pray for true insight and courage for those gathered in Rome.
Music: (Maybe the Cardinals could sing this song in their hearts on the way to their meetings? Maybe we could sing it too sometimes?)
Today, in Mercy, Adam and Eve get to “pay the piper”. Now, they have to answer to God for the delicious, forbidden bite!
And God is tough on them! No hint of that “lavish mercy”! Of course, the writer(s) of Genesis had to fold a lot of explanations into this story such as:
why we feel body shame
why we are estranged from nature
why women suffer labor
why men work hard to no avail
why we die
We know that these explanations were written originally to meet the questions of an ancient culture. They were told and retold in the form of a story with all that structure’s inherent possibilities and handicaps.
Some of us are inclined to accept “story” only as history, demanding that the events recount specific concrete people and interactions. In other words, we demand that Adam and Eve were real people with a historical identity.
Some of us accept the “story” only as myth, not necessarily integral to the foundation of our modern faith.
The great biblical scholar Walter Bruggemann says neither stance is accurate. He says that these sacred stories are “mystery” which continue to unfold through the ages in the faith-life and sharing of the living community.
As we pray with these passages, we may deepen our faith by looking for the revelations within them:
God created us in God’s own image
God formed a covenant of love with us
We are called to be responsive to that loving covenant
We sometimes fail and reap the fruits of that failure
But God did not dissolve Creation nor the Covenant
And so, in every age, we place our hope in Jesus Christ, the New Creation and New Covenant
Today, in Mercy, our reading from Genesis tells of the creation of Eve to be Adam’s companion.Theological volumes are written to interpret this passage. But for today’s prayer, let’s draw out one small phrase:
The LORD God said:
“It is not good for this human being to be alone.
God, Who lives in the community of the Trinity, exists within relationship. God knows that is the only way that any life can exist. This leads us to realize that:
We were created from Love for Love
We were meant to learn love in one another’s company.
Our learning with one another is modeled on the perfect triune love of God.
On Valentine’s Day, our culture romanticizes the notion of love (and makes a lot of money doing so!) But it might also be a good day for us to consider what and whom we have fallen in love with all throughout our lives.
The late Father Pedro Arrupé, now being considered for sainthood, was once the superior general of the Jesuit community. Understanding what it meant to be in love with God and God’s Creation, Arrupé wrote this:
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
(I’ll be sending two of my love poems to God in a later email.I hope you find them helpful to your prayer.)
Music: Love Changes Everything ~ Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, Don Black
Today, in Mercy, our Gospel recounts the dramatic story of John the Baptist’s death. John, the one who went before Christ, paving the way for him, precedes him even in death.
Jesus expressed great respect and gratitude for John when he said:
I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John …
(Luke 7:28)
Today’s passage from Hebrews closes by exhorting us to:
Remember those who have gone before you,
who spoke the word of God to you.
Consider the outcome of their way of life
and imitate their faith.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The readings inspire us to gratefully remember and prayerfully honor the many people who have gone before us, leading us in faith. Parents and family, teachers, religious women and men, friends and mentors. Slowly naming these individuals in our prayer will remind us of our abundant blessings and encourage us to live lives worthy of their gifts to us.
Today, in Mercy, Jesus’s disciples set out on their first solo mission. Most of us can relate to their feelings that morning.
Remember your first real job? You had studied, trained, prepared. You had aced the interview. You bought a new blouse, shirt or pair of shoes. You were IN!
And you were scared. You might have done a dry run to make sure you wouldn’t be late your first day. You checked that your gas tank was topped off. You packed a lunch (or someone who loved you did), and wondered who would eat with you.
The disciples were probably scared too. Look at whose shoes they were following in! And Jesus sets out some tough dress code for their work life:
take nothing but a walking stick
no food, no sack, no money in their belts
wear sandals but not a second tunic.
The behavior code was just as lean:
take a buddy for support
when you enter a house, stay there the whole time
if they don’t welcome you or listen to you, don’t argue
leave there and shake the dust off your feet
As we set out to work each day, do we think of our labor as “ministry”? Do we see that our work in some way benefits the life of the community? Do our interactions with our peers encourage their contributions to the common good?
We all need jobs to earn the means to live. But if that’s all our job is, we will never find happiness in it. Meaningful work must benefit more than ourselves and, in that, it can become a ministry.
If Jesus were sending us out to our workday this morning, he might give instructions like these:
work responsibly, mutually and unselfishly
earn all that you need to be happy, but avoid greed
make sure your labors enhance life for others as well as yourself
if your job chokes your soul, move on
What we do does not determine our worth. How we do it does. We may be sewing buttons on shirts. If we do that with attention and pride, our work will have meaning for us and for others.
Every meaningful job gives us the chance to make the world better for those we serve, and for those with whom we work – to add to the beauty of the world already begun in the blessing of God. Does our work offer us that life-giving opportunity? Do we respond to it wholeheartedly?
See to it that no one
be deprived of the grace of God, that no bitter root spring up and cause trouble, through which many may become defiled.
In our Gospel, Luke writes to his community
So Jesus was not able to perform any mighty deed in his hometown, … He was amazed at their lack of faith.
So what is this bitter root that robs a heart of faith, forgiveness, trust, hope and love?
Think of the things we humans bury deep in our souls, before they can be seen, named and confronted. Naïvely, we think that hiding them will make them disappear.
We bury our:
These buried irritants never disappear. They thicken under the surface, choking the possibility of new life — of Grace. These “bitter roots” steal our spiritual health and cripple the Holy Spirit within us. They deprive the community of our vigor and life.
It is so necessary and important for us to bring these tangled undergrowths to light! It is so necessary and important for us to be the loving community that offers understanding, healing, listening and love.
How do we uncover and release these hidden poisons? Prayer, of course, can help us, and the gentle discipline of honesty with ourselves; the natural self-revelation of a trusted friendship, the insights of spiritual direction and retreat, and, sometimes, the professional accompaniment of a counselor.
Mary Oliver, beloved poet, describes a buried darkness in her own life in this poem “The Uses of Sorrow”:
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
As part of the faith community, we need to contribute to that place of trust and friendship that invites others to work through their darknesses. Healing is not magic. It comes through the tenderness, patience, honesty, awareness and encouragement of the surrounding community, as well as through our own courage. We need that community ourselves, and we need to be that community for others.
Music: Ubi Caritas (Where Charity and Love prevail, there is God.)
Today, in Mercy, our readings are all about God’s transforming power and our human ability to tap into that power by our faith.
Hebrews 11 references several heroes, named and unnamed, whose faith and perseverance were so great that, “The world was not worthy of them.”
Mark’s Gospel tells the story of the Gerasene demoniac, a story with many layers of meaning and challenge. In it, Jesus demonstrates an astounding power that both amazes and frightens his audience.
We have the very detailed description of the demoniac, a wild, unnaturally strong and violent man. We have the Gerasene community which doesn’t know what else to do to control the disruptive forces of this wretched man. And we have an innocent, unsuspecting herd of pigs.
Jesus is unafraid of the forces erupting from this troubled man. He approaches the man’s suffering on a whole different level from the unsuccessful tactics of the community.Jesus speaks to the man’s soul which has been shattered into many howling fragments by the evil dwelling inside him. Jesus then casts out that evil in a demonstration that both awes and angers his observers.
Imagine how the pig farmers felt. Their livelihood lay drowning at the bottom of a precipice! The food supply, water integrity, employment opportunities all took a steep drop in that one moment of Christ’s command. In healing this broken man, who is representative of all suffering humanity, Jesus disrupted the comfortable systems which had allowed him to be isolated and chained at the edge of this society.
Jesus challenged this whole community to see the world from a different perspective – a spiritual one in which human life and wholeness is at the heart of all our societal systems. This man was more important than a herd of 2000 pigs!
These readings challenge us who live in a surface world “not worthy” of our faith.
There is incredible suffering throughout this world. It is not enough to simply pray that it is alleviated. It is surely not enough to “chain” it by our indifference and acceptance.
Global suffering will be addressed only by confronting our comfortable systems (our herd of pigs). Our legal, political, economic and social systems must cherish the integrity of the human person. Otherwise, they should be challenged, changed, and maybe even cast away.
Our small part is to learn, understand, choose, vote and speak out for this kind of wholeness – both in our immediate, personal experiences as well as through the social justice structures available to us. For example:
Today, in Mercy, we celebrate the feast of St. John Bosco, Priest and Teacher. He is a saint I would not have paid much attention to except for someone very special to me.
St. John Bosco was the patron saint of Sister Mary Giovanni, my sponsor when I entered the Sisters of Mercy over fifty years ago.She was my high school teacher and my later friend.
Like her patron saint, she was humble, honest, loving and uncomplicated. Her quiet humor, evenness and easy acceptance of others inspired me.She motivated me to want to be good and do good.
Sister Giovanni with Three Musketeers from the Class of 1963
In reading Hebrews today, I thought of her immediately. Verse 10:24 reads:
We must consider
how to rouse one another
to love and good works.
That’s what she did for me. She wasn’t preachy.She wasn’t bossy. She didn’t even obviously try to influence me. But her humble, honest, loving care for people wowed me. I wanted to live life the way she did.
This is what Paul is talking about in our first reading today. We need one another’s faith, goodness, and example to energize our Spirit life.
Certainly, teachers have a great opportunity for this kind of influence in shaping a person’s life. But so do we all – with youngsters and those not so young 😊!
Let’s try to be that kind of person today.
Let’s give thanks for the gift of those persons in our lives.
Music: In Your Hands ~ Ron Hiller and Judy Millar
While directed toward teachers, this song can motivate us all to think about how we “teach” with our lives. It can remind us of the many kinds of “teachers” who have blessed us.
Lavish Mercy 