#177: Exclusion

Why do some priests at funeral and wedding Masses announce that only Catholics in ‘good standing’ can receive Communion? Sounds pretty judgmental and unchristian to me.

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were a tad preoccupied with issues of "purity." The scribe’s advice to maintain purity was to avoid anything unclean. The scribes set and maintained boundaries. John Shea says “Jesus boldly crosses this boundary of clean and unclean. This boundary had become a division, and the division had lead to exclusion. Jesus represents God’s loving outreach to those whom society, in the name of holiness, had pushed away and whom Jesus, in the name of holiness, draws in.” Jesus is teaching us that the path of love sometimes requires that we cross boundaries.

#178: Wealth

Why do we talk about money so often in church?

The manager in our parable today knows that his job loss will lead to starvation. If something doesn’t change, he is going to die. So, he sizes up his situation and wastes no time executing his sly plan for survival.

While he still has power to make deals with his master’s money, he calls each of the debtors in for a one-on-one meeting. He has each of them acknowledge how much they owe and then has them altar the numbers. It is the manager’s idea, but the debtors change the amount owed in their own handwriting. Now they are partners in crime. The manager has taught them how to cook the books, but they have gone there willingly. When he’s fired, they will welcome him into their homes because if not, he will ‘out them’ to the master.

And Jesus says “his master commended that dishonest manager for acting shrewdly.” And we all say “Whaa?”

Reflection on the lost sheep/coin, Luke 15:1-32 (Audio & Text)

To LISTEN to this reflection on Luke 15: 1-32 as it was delivered at Mass, please follow this link: http://www.ctredeemer.org/september-15-2019/

The parables we hear today speak to our deep longing for a sense of wholeness and belonging. By God’s design, all of creation is connected in ways that we couldn’t even begin to understand.

Just like a bee is drawn to pollen and a flower turns towards the sun and soaks up the rain, so too we are created by God for relationship. So when we are fragmented or alienated from one another, we suffer and wither.

And yet, a stark division begins this Gospel reading. The tax collectors and sinners on one side - and the Scribes and the Pharisees on the other. Per usual, Jesus doesn’t wag a finger at the sinners, but rather addresses these parables to the religious authorities, who are criticizing Jesus’ choice of dining partners.

One of the keystones of Jesus’ ministry was to eat with those who were labeled by society as unclean. Those who, for the most part, disregarded religion because they were considered outcasts.

#176 - Tradition

Why am I here today?

I’m Lisa Brown, the Director of Religious Education here at CTR. Part of my job is writing this little column where someone submits a question and I do my best to respond. I made-up this particular question because I suspect many of us are asking it quietly to ourselves at this prickly juncture in our Catholic history.

I’ve only been given 600 words, so let’s cut to the chase - it’s been a rough year for us Catholics. Well, maybe we should say a rough 17 or 70 years given the sexual abuse crisis? Or a rough 1000 years since the Crusades? Well, dang, let’s just call it. We Christians have been a train wreck from day one. So why are we still here?

The late Irish poet John O’Donohue, says “Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual…it’s a huge naïveté for anyone to believe that a religion, understood as the collective wisdom and the lived spirit experience of a people, is an empty mass. It’s a huge resource! Tradition, like memory, has huge dark passages - within the Christian tradition there are dark zones of complete horror - but there are also zones of great light and immense wells of refreshment and healing.”

This speaks to me. My rose-colored glasses are long gone, but my love for our resilient Catholic family hasn’t waned. We just keep showing up and searching for God in this mess and there is something deeply endearing about this indomitable level of hope; something I find safe and lovely. Yes, we Catholics have a seemingly bottomless font of dysfunction, but what family doesn’t? To leave would be just trading one family’s problems for another. I intimately know MY family’s problems; our language, customs, faults and factions, and I feel that in terms of bringing about change, this awareness is an extremely valuable tool.

#175 - Mystery

Is it true that the “tree” that grows from the mustard seed is actually considered more of a weed in the region where Jesus lived?

It’s this kind of unexpected tidbit that makes me fall even deeper in love with Jesus and his style of teaching. No matter how learned we are, there are still surprises such as this; things that invite us to ponder each parable anew and reexamine what we “think” we know about the great mystery we call God.

In the atrium with the children we describe parables as “short stories Jesus told that hold a mystery.” They are not mysterious because Jesus is trying to conceal something from us or keep the Kingdom of God hidden from us, but rather it is because the mystery of God is so big and beyond our understanding, the closest we can come with our little brains to understanding is through metaphors, or parables.

The first thing that parables teach us is that “mystery” is not something different than our everyday lives; rather it is the real meaning – the secret truth – the hidden seed at the very heart of our lives. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to interpret a parable because each holds a surplus of meaning that we can never exhaust; a mystery not in the sense of a puzzle or problem to be solved but rather as the sometimes-elusive depth of life where meaning dwells.

Tis true that the mustard seed isn’t highly prized. It is used to flavor food and some parts of the plant are thought to have medicinal properties, but it is also considered something of nuisance.

#174 - The God I Don’t Believe In – by Juan Arias

The God I Don’t Believe In
(edited for space) – by Juan Arias

No, I shall never believe in:

The God who catches us by surprise in a sin of weakness, the God who condemns material things, the God incapable of giving an answer to the grave problems of a sincere and honest person who cries in tears: “I can’t!”

The God who loves pain, the God who sterilizes our reason, the God who is a magician and sorcerer, the God who makes himself feared, the God who does not allow us to talk familiarly to him, the grandfather-God whom one can twist around one’s little finger, the God who makes himself the monopoly of a church, a race, a culture or a caste, the lottery-god whom one can find only by chance, the judge-God who can give a verdict only with a rule book in his hands, the God incapable of smiling at many of our awkward mistakes, the God who “sends” people to hell, the God who always demands 100 percent in examinations.

The God who can be fully explained by a philosophy, the God adored by those who are capable of condemning a person to death, the God incapable of loving what many people despise, the God incapable of forgiving what many condemn, the God incapable of redeeming the wretched, the God incapable of understanding that children will always get themselves dirty and be forgetful, the God who prevents us from growing and conquering, transforming and overcoming.

#173 - Mysticism

What is a mystic?
Many bemoan the drop in attendance and involvement in all main-line churches over the past several decades, including Catholics. In fact our “fallen-away” number is the biggest of the bunch. Many parents worry whether their children will ever “come back” or “make it to heaven.” Perhaps there might be another way of looking at things?

Back in the early 60’s Fr. Karl Rahner said that “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or nothing at all” – a mystic being someone who has had an experience of spiritual union or direct communion with God. In 1962 pollsters found that 22% of Americans claimed to have had a “mystical experience” of God. In 1976 that number had risen to 31% of our U.S. population. The most recent poll reported a whopping 48% who said that they had this kind of encounter with the divine. Diana Butler Bass believes that these numbers indicate that “American faith has undergone a profound and extensive reorientation away from externalized religion towards internalized spiritual experience.” Is this a good? Bad? I don’t know.

What if the trend we are observing is “the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual, social and cultural transformation? Have we lived the majority of our lives in the context of this awakening, struggling towards new understandings of God, how we should act ethically and politically, and who we are deep in our souls? What if <we are> playing a significant role in forming the contours of a new kind of faith beyond conventional religious boundaries? Is America living in the wake of a revival gone awry or a spiritual awakening that is finally taking concrete - albeit unexpected - shape?” (Bass)