The True Kingdom of God

In contrast to John the Baptist and other Jewish contemporaries, Jesus said the Kingdom of God is at hand--now.

First century Jews were looking for the coming of the Anointed One who would save--rescue--the Jewish people who had endured so much. Their centuries-old faith told them that God was a God of justice and yet their lives told a different story.  How were they to reconcile that?  They were waiting for a Savior who would bring about God's Kingdom--His justice--to His people.

Jesus, whom Christians recognize as that Savior, came and told them that God's Kingdom had already arrived.  How in the world could that be true?  Injustice still reined.  The answer is that God's Kingdom was not going to be a magical, much less a violent ushering in of a futuristic paradise.  It would ONLY come about with mankind's full cooperation with the Just God.  It can happen no other way, because God created us with free will and He created us and the world as "good".

We need to cooperate with God in living His Kingdom of Love here on earth.  The very fact that we call God's periodic direct interventions "miracles" is that they are so over and above the usual way things are done.  Jesus did not come to the earth to tell us, "Wait a couple of thousand years or more--God will smite those awful enemies eventually."  Jesus came to live among us to show us how to live His kingdom on earth.

Wrong-headed focus on the "end times" causes us to see God's Kingdom as either something that is basically His responsibility to "do" (and therefore, we blame Him when it has not occurred) or we see it as something that must be ushered in violently--as a battle of sorts.  This sort of thinking has caused so many problems over the centuries and continues to cause problems in our world.  Who are we battling against?  Those not of our language, race or faith?  Any student of history can easily see the results of that line of thinking.

No, the true Kingdom of God is one of loving non-violence.  That is the life that Jesus led when He was on earth.  His very death shows us by stark contrast, the extreme to which He went, to show us God's Kingdom on earth.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  ~Jesus

Book Review--John Moles

Jesus the Healer in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Early Christianity by John Moles

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This scholarly article proposes that the name of Jesus was similar in appearance, sound and meaning to the words "healing" and "saves" in both Greek and Hebrew and that this relationship would have been obvious to Hellenized Jews as well as to Greeks of the first few centuries, A.D. New Testament writers used this relationship between a person's name and other words, as did Classical Greek writers, to illustrate and reinforce (through assonance, alliteration and "punning through synonyms") characteristics of the person being written about.

Greek gods and goddesses themselves carried names that pointed to their functions in the Pantheon. The consistent juxtaposition of the name of Jesus with words like "healing" and "saves" illustrates the superiority of Jesus to Greek gods with names of similar sound and meaning. This point was driven home by the New Testonament writers, whose audience would have picked up on these textual similarities.

Salvation, Moles says, is linked to healing in the sense that illness was often seen by Jesus' contemporaries as being related to sin. So, the name "Jesus" which means "Yahweh saves" also means "Yahweh heals". The idea of God/religion/Jesus-as-healer is one that pervades Eastern Christianity which sees salvation as being primarily a healing process rather than the more retributive view of the West.

To read this work in its entirety, go here:

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What do I consume?

I've been thinking lately, during the Consecration at Mass about being consumed by God and consuming God.  In the Eucharist, we consume our Lord. When we feel an overwhelming love for someone, such as a small child, we often use food-related imagery:  "I could just eat you up."   At Mass, God asks us to consume Him so that he can consume us.  We become one.

Now that we are "coming down" from the Christmas season, we may want to ask ourselves, "What do I consume? Am I focused on things, on myself, my worries and my pain or am I focused on my inner hunger for oneness with my Creator?"

As a New Year's resolution, why not shift focus to our creator who is "everywhere present and fills all things", yet is not visible to our naked eye except in the faces of our fellow human beings?  Pray for an awareness of God's presence as you go through your day.

Online Homilies

Ever feel a hunger for a good homily?  I have been searching for some online homilies to help us feed our faith and have come up with a list on the sidebar.  Check out these great resources for some homilies from around the world!

A Christmas Poem

In the bleak midwinter

The Christ Child again 

asks to enter into our hearts

and melt the ice that insists 

on forming there

against our better judgment-- 

our attempts at thawing

only serving to set it afire

in a soul-consuming explosion--

our attempts at cooling 

turning it once again

to ice. 

Christmas Love

This is the time of year when I lay out the various Christmas gifts I have bought for loved-ones, categorize and wrap them.

Almost every year, I have this awful feeling that it is not enough.

Not enough what? Not enough money spent? Not enough in terms of number or size?

Not enough love.

It is never enough, is it? It isn't a matter of number, cost or size of the gifts given. It is a matter of one day a year not being nearly enough to show the depth of our love. Perhaps this is part of the malaise that often surrounds us at Christmastime. We get the feeling that we have missed the mark, which, of course, we have.

This is why we need to open our hearts and reach out to the Baby in the manger who came down into our lives to show us how to love.

As the Christmas season draws to a close in the early days of 2012, let's resolve to show the love we struggle to show during Christmas, throughout the entire year. It is what we are called to do as Christians.  It is the Christian message: the promise of new beginnings in God-as-helpless-infant, ready for our love.

God Speaks to us in the Midst of our Depression

Our priest gave an interesting homily this morning.  He said that the Jewish people were depressed because they had been in exile and were waiting for their Messiah when the prophet Isaiah gave them a message of hope:

Strengthen the hands that are feeble,make firm the knees that are weak,Say to those whose hearts are frightened:Be strong, fear not!Here is your God,he comes with vindication;With divine recompensehe comes to save you.

I had never heard the word "depression" used in this context before, but as someone who struggles with depression,  I appreciate the connection.  The Lord is always there to bring us out of our dark days, whether through a word,  a smile, or a helping hand.   


I know I have to remind myself often not to give into feelings of despair and despondency.  Knowing that God is ready to listen makes a difference.  

Quantum Physics and God

I know as much about Quantum Physics as would fit on the head of a pin, but what little I understand is intriguing.

No Time Like the Present
Time, as Einstein explained, is relative. That is, time is not constant between people. If 2 people synchronize their watches exactly and one remains still while the other one runs around a predetermined and roped-off space, when they come back together, their watches will be quite a number of minutes apart. Time, it seems, slows down for the person in motion and speeds up (relative to the person running) for the person who is standing still.

An Atomic Experiment and Free Will
It has been shown that if an atom is split so that half of its wave function is in one box and half in another, a scientist can open both boxes at once and the respective waves will both exit their respective boxes and interact.

If you were to take the same 2 wave functions in the same 2 boxes and let them out one at a time, one box will ALWAYS be empty. Where did the other wave function go? How did the split atoms “know” whether you were going to open both boxes at once or open one at a time?

Some physicists, apparently, think that the above experiment proves that everything is predetermined in some way--that there are, perhaps, infinite numbers of universes housing infinite numbers of possibilities for each of the infinite number of choices we make every day. In some universe, somewhere, we have decided not to make our customary cup of tea, but to drink coffee instead. In another, we decide against drinking anything.

In this way, some scientists say that this then disproves free will and therefore God, (or at least traditional religion) but I disagree. If we as Christians see God as existing from all eternity and outside of time, then, in a sense, He houses all these infinite possibilities within Himself. For God, there is no “yesterday” or “tomorrow.”

God sees what is reality: The eternal now.

We humans have free will in the sense that we do not have within ourselves the outside-of-time perspective that God does. We can imagine different scenarios (in the sense that most animals probably cannot) but we do not actually experience these possible scenarios as having happened. Therefore we have to choose everything, minute-by-minute.

Another Experiment--Do You Hear What I Hear?
Somewhere along the line a scientist slowed down Beethoven’s 9th symphony so that it takes a full 24 hours to listen to. The result, to our ears, is a whale-song-like series of sounds that are imperceptible as the original symphony.

Those who listened to it commented that the musical climax never occurred--although of course, it did--they just were unable to perceive it, even after listening to the piece all the way through. To their ears, it sounded like a slow series of sounds peppered with periods of silence. But, somewhere within that recording was Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

To extend the metaphor, God can hear and perceive--in fact He has written--the symphony of the universe. Our poor ears do not understand it. We rant and rail against the happenings of our lives because to us, they contain random boredom peppered with too-short periods of joy and agonizing periods of tragedy.

To make God into a sweaty small-town Sherriff who delights in abusing His power is to dumb down Christianity and cause people to run screaming to atheism. God is awesome in the largest sense of the word--He is awe-inspiring, awe-creating and Awe Itself.

We must trust that God exists and that what seems to us as nonsensical is really a symphony in God’s ears that is imperceptible to us while on earth. He is, as the Eastern Christians say, “Everywhere present and filling all things”--He is “uncreated energy”.

Our spiritual task is to unite with Him and become (again, as the Eastern Christians say) “deified”. Then, we will no longer “see in a glass, darkly” but see things as they are, through the eyes of Love.

Bad Times as a Gift from God

It occurred to me recently that the bad times we have all been experiencing are a gift from God. As a collective whole, our society has gotten to the point where many of us expect a certain lifestyle. This should not include anything we have not planned for--not emergencies, not setbacks and certainly not (unplanned) children.

It does not even occur to us any more to help each other and so many children are being raised without any knowledge of a Power higher than themselves. It is no wonder these children are now rioting throughout the "civilized" world for the latest toys. This is, apparently, what this generation considers "civil disobedience." I would suggest to them that they read up on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi's philosophies and find out what civil disobedience is really all about.

I think this economy is a gift to us from God, frankly. We need some shaking up--our whole society does. Since we don't seem to appreciate what we've been given, it is being taken away so we learn to feed each other instead of sitting at the table with our too-long chop sticks starving because we don't see the option of sharing.

Gandhian Economics

I've long thought that some basic things need to change about our society.  The current economic crisis is (perhaps God's way of) providing us the opportunity to begin to change the way we look at things, the way we spend money and the way we treat each other.

In his article Economic Crisis or Non-Violent Opportunity?, Michael Nagler asks the question: What is an economy for? Gandhi's vision, Nagler says is that

The real purpose of an economic system is to guarantee to every person in its circle the fundamentals of physical existence (food, clothing, shelter) and the tools of meaningful work so that they can get on with the business of living together and working out our common destiny.

Our economic system, fueled by intrusive, ubiquitous advertising, is based on buying things we don't need.  This does tend to fuel jobs, but, increasingly, they are overseas and do not fuel our economy at home.  Gandhi's idea is to have a local economy--one where producers and consumers are neighbors and have each others' best interests at heart.

The cornerstone of this philosophy is one of trusteeship.  If we look at our "possessions" as being held in trust rather than outright ownership, we can begin to divest ourselves of the innate selfishness that is part of our current consumer culture.

Jesus told us the parable of the rich fool.  (Luke 12: 16-21).  In it, the rich man decides to store (hoard?) his surplus grain instead of using it to feed the poor.  He makes grandiose plans for his future in light of his new-found riches.  God then says to him, "You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded back
from you and who will get what you have prepared for yourself?"

Nothing we have is really ours.  It is only on loan to us to use for the greater good of those among whom God has placed us.  Material goods are not given to us to hoard or use like an addictive drug.  If we each lived in godly simplicity, we would all be closer to the love of God which is a triune one of relationship with others.

This, and all hardships are allowed to come for the greater good.   That is how God works.  Lets try to learn the lessons we are meant to learn.

This is Faith

This is an indescribable and touching video.  It makes me ask, what is faith?  And, how can I have this couple's faith?  I think it is a matter of  throwing yourself at the feet of Jesus on the cross bringing your tears to Him.

This was grace - short film from Andrew Laparra on Vimeo.

Mercies in Disguise

This is a beautiful song by Laura Story called Blessings. It talks about the purpose of suffering in this life.

Educating Adolescents: Questions or Answers--Dealing with Doubt in Religious Ed.

Matt Emerson writes a very insightful article on doubt and religious education called Teaching to the Tests of Faith.  In it he talks about how his sophomore religion class dealt with the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He decided to take his cue from President Obama's quotation of Psalm 46.  While the President only quoted parts of it, Emerson went over the whole thing with his class with the lights out to give them a sense of the sacred.

The psalm has in it the famous line, "God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in times of distress." When Mr. Emerson asked his students if that was true for them they began to express their doubts and a very important discussion then occurred.

Rather than shoot down their misgivings about the efficacy of prayer and even the existence of God, Emerson let them express their doubts.  The fruitfulness of the discussion lead him to ask whether or not religious education, at least for that age group, should be shifted away from answers to questions.

I wholeheartedly think it should.  As a member of the generation who "didn't learn anything" in my years in Catholic school, I have long been a proponent of exposing children to the richness of the faith from an early age.  Emerson implies that this was done for these children.  They did all the right things, participated in the liturgical life of the Church and still they expressed grave doubts.

I have come to realize that this is normal.  The over-focus on filling children with answers "while they are still in (Catholic) school" or religious ed leaves them feeling misunderstood and not listened to.  Certainly by the time a child is junior high or high school age, religious educators should be carefully chosen mentors to help them express their doubts and questions and work through them.

Religion is about the "big questions."  We need to stop being afraid of our children asking them and of asking them ourselves.

Stoning or Soothing?

The Casey Anthony trial and its resulting mass hysteria has prompted me to think of mercy.

I admit to being carried along by the auto-accident-like atmosphere of the whole thing. It is very difficult once you get hooked on a news story like this one, which plays out way beyond its normal news cycle, to stop feeding into the media hype. It has become something horrific on the side of the road that we don't want to focus on, but can't seem to look away from.

Our "news" is now so far from anything newsworthy as to be unbelievable. We are no better than medieval mobs chasing a fellow villager and crying out for blood. We now do this for entertainment and sport!  Now some of the jurors are fleeing Florida for their lives because the public's taste for blood has been fed by the media to the point where death threats have occurred for the jurors and the Anthonys alike.

What is needed now is Mercy. Jesus stopped the mob who was getting ready to stone the woman caught in adultery by reminding them that all sin.

This trial and these people are real.  They are not characters in a movie or a "reality" tv show.  The same is true for any sensational news story that we hang onto--these are real people and they are crying out, as we all cry out, for God's tender mercies to be poured onto them like a healing balm.

Jesus came to heal and He came to cure.  He expects us to do the same. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus showed his listeners that to participate in His healing ministry was more important than outwardly appearing religious and pious.  Will we be stoning these sinners brought before us by our entertainment media, or will we be surrounding them in the soothing balm of Christ's love?

To gather the strength necessary for such a mission, Jesus spent entire nights, hours and hours, in prayer.  Perhaps it is time we turn away from our "entertainment" to the reality of God and His mercy and ask Him to come heal our broken world.

To Tell the Truth

Fr. Stephen at Glory to God for All Things has a very enlightening post on lying. 

Bascially he says that we as Christians should not look at lying and similar things from a "moral" perspective.  We should not think of the admonition not to lie as merely "one of those rules" that the Church "tells" us we have to do. 

Instead, lying is really about not telling the Truth.  And, Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life.  Our goal as Christians is to be Truth-tellers. 

Lying, of course, comes from the Evil One and does not really exist.  Think about it.  Lying is telling an untruth--something which, by definition, does not exist.  Satan has been called "the father of lies".  He tries to be the creator of his own world that does not exist. 

Truth, on the other hand, is the ultimate reality.  No matter how things may look to us, Truth exists on an existential level.  That is why we should not lie.  It is not about "God told me and He's going to punish me if I lie."  It is about living in Truth--having God's Kingdom within.  If we persist in living lies while on earth, we will live forever in lies for eternity. The Kingdom of God is now. We must begin to live in the Truth now, while we still have the gift of this life that has been given to us.

Fr. Stephen begins his article with a teaching from Abba Poelman:  Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart. 

As fallible human beings, what is in our hearts is often the lies we tell ourselves and others. What then?  Should we still "say what is in our hearts"?  Yes--in confession! The job, so to speak, of Christians, is to become healed by the Truth.  To do this, we must open our wounds to the Light.  "Speak what is in your heart" to God's representative on earth in the Sacrament of Confession, and your soul will be filled with  Light and gain the strength to carry on in Truth.

Art and Beauty Tuesday--Larry Dyke

The Good Shepherd by Larry Dyke is a classic yet unusual rendition of the ancient title of Christ.  We see Jesus far off, with light shining from His face, in a style reminiscent of Rembrandt. Jesus leads His sheep through a beautiful pastoral valley, surrounded by a rocky mountain on one side, and a vegetation-filled hill on the other.

Christ always sees the way clear for us and will lead us through to the Light that is afar off.

Happy Good Shepherd Sunday

Happy Good Shepherd Sunday!  I love the image of Christ the Good Shepherd.  Many other Christian denominations celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday, as Catholics do on the 4th Sunday of Easter.  The image of a "good shepherd" is so compelling that Hermes, the Greek god of shepherds, among other things, was called The Good Shepherd in ancient times.

Christians may have adopted this title as one applied to Christ, who, in today's Gospel from John, calls himself "The Gate of the Sheepfold" through which believers "go in and out" and are "safe".

This is also where Christ proclaims his purpose in having come:  I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.  "The thief," Christ says, "comes only to steal and kill and destroy."

The above image is nice variation on Christ as the Good Shepherd because He is carrying the black sheep to safety and abundance.  Let's learn to rest in the arms of the Good Shepherd whom God sent to give us abundant life.

The Virtual Abbey

I wanted to let you all know about The Virtual Abbey.  They are, I think, an Episcopalian organization that tweets the daily office each day on Twitter.  I find this reminder to pray very helpful and love the language used in their prayers.

They are also on YouTube with various musical play lists for prayer and meditation including ones for Easter, Advent and Epiphany as well as music of Hildegard von Bingen, Palestrina, Taize, nature and Celtic meditation music.

Stop by for a little spiritual refreshment.

What Kind of God Would Ask Love of Enemies?

As usual, Father Stephen from Glory to God for All Things, says it much better than I could.

Why did Jesus tell us to love our enemies?  Because that is who God is.

God is not the divine boss-from-hell.  He does not exercise a power trip over His creation from his lofty place in the sky.  Jesus did not come to burden us with the minutia of impossible-to-follow commandments--Love is the commandment that covers all others. Jesus came to show us God and to lead us to God.  That is the sole purpose of this life.

The world had gone so far astray from God that He sent His son, God Himself as the Church teaches, to show us what Love is.  Love is not taking revenge.  Love is dying to one's self for others. Love is mourning the sins of one's enemies rather than plotting revenge.

The kind of God who asks us to love our enemies is the God who, in His infinite mercy, loves us despite our own sin (literally "missing the mark"). He constantly calls us back, searching for us in the garden when we have hidden ourselves in shame.

Without love, the world makes no sense.  Without love, nothing works.  Love is all.

The Modern Catholic--An Immigrant in One’s Own Country

It is a well known phenomenon that children of immigrants with a minority language, culture and religion will lose that language, culture and religion within the first 2 or 3 generations in a new country.  

How much of that phenomenon can be used to explain the choice of so many of today’s Americans to change or abandon their religion of origin?

Many aging parents blame themselves for the religious choices of their offspring and wonder what they could have done differently to influence those choices.

What is often missing is a realization that the very culture we live in puts Christianity and in particular Catholicism, in the position of being an unsupported minority religion within an alien culture. 

We are immigrants in our own country.

Where We Have Been
One hundred years ago, parishes were local and in many cases, ethnic. People lived within walking distance of their church, parochial schools were affordable even to those with large families, and a majority of the parishioners came from the same ethnic background, which influenced and colored the feasts and festivals throughout the year.

Lack of modern transportation and communication technology meant that many raised their children in the same neighborhood in which they themselves grew up. To leave the religion of one’s childhood meant leaving an entire cultural and familial experience.

Today things are so different as to be almost unrecognizable. Church shopping is de regueur with the ease of transportation and internet research possibilities. At the same time, it is often difficult to find a comfortable parish home in part because of the lack of common cultural ties among its parishioners.

Feast days are no longer a time for bringing parishioners together because many are on the road travelling to visit far off family members, and feeling out of place worshipping in their parishes, or, often, desperately Googling Mass times for a strange city, hoping to get to Mass with a minimum of “good-natured” teasing from family members.

Catholicism today is becoming a minority religion in America. Culturally it is an accepted practice to publically demonize the Church either in a veiled way through humor or in a more direct way through endless posting, forwarding and discussing the bottomless pit of negative stories about the Church in the media. This would be unthinkable in the same circles with other religions.

Where We are Headed
Pope Benedict XVI has said that he thinks the future of Catholicism will be stronger but smaller, and I agree. The cultural supports that held it in place a century ago just do not exist anymore, and the current challenges are many and severe. Christianity is a way of life. Those who cannot abide its precepts will not stay in the Church merely out of respect for its culture. Those who do stay must do all they can to follow the teachings of Christ and become Christ to others. 

Dangers
What we need to guard against, though, is the temptation to become more aggressive as we feel more isolated. The challenge will be to insist upon respect for our beliefs while still giving respect to others for theirs. Jesus would do no less and expects no less of us.

Solutions
To make Christianity into a political weapon is to enter into dangerous territory that Jesus never intended for His followers. Individual political issues should be pondered thoroughly and debated calmly and rationally. To use coercion of any kind as an excuse for converting others is dangerous and decidedly anti-Christian.

Prayer and confession are powerful. Beginning with poverty of spirit and true humility, they connect us with God and help to clarify His will. Prayer and the Sacraments will help us to navigate these difficult and rapidly changing times as we see Christianity go from being a part of the cultural air we breathe, to being an almost underground, or at least, a type of second-class culture within the larger culture which seems to be built around rebelling against its values.

Christianity is needed now more than ever.