Reflection for October 30, 2011

You have but one Father in heaven and one master, the Christ (Gospel Acclamation)

When I was a minor seminarian (the stage of training that covered our high school education and first two years of college in a residential environment) – we were required to spend our afternoons and evenings in “study hall” in silence, preparing for the next day’s classes. (As a result I received good grades in this phase of my training because I HAD to study! If I had been on my own in a loose set up at home, I would have fallen so far behind that – well, one semester prior to my entering the seminary (while I was in first year high school, after three semesters) I received the Distinguished Flying Cross in Latin – i.e. a D an F and a C!

But getting back to my minor seminary days, there came a time, when I became an upper classman, that I was assigned to monitor the study hall – sit up front at a high desk and make sure that people were studying, that no passing of notes or monkey business was going on. I was, therefore, no longer among the peons but placed in charge! What a change in my personality! As soon as I saw or thought I saw any of the underclassmen giggling or whispering from desk to desk – in other words, challenging my “authority” (in other words trying to “make a fool of me”), I shouted out like some top sergeant – frightened even myself – in order to enforce order, to get people back to their books.

I didn’t like what I did; it seemed to have to do mainly with my ego – I wasn’t getting the respect I should get as study hall monitor and I soon abdicated the role – again probably to conceal my vulnerable ego under a low profile. Rising to a position of authority, therefore, has its risks; it can detach one from a sense of solidarity with others with whom you were so recently rubbing shoulders. Today’s readings – if read closely – deal with the importance of our not forgetting our sense of solidarity, of our sibling relationship – even when it is necessary for someone of us to be “in charge”.

The theme of this Sunday is stated in “Have we not all one father? Has not the one God created us?” and “Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven,” which Gospel statement is repeated as our Alleluia refrain, if you listen closely. In other words, it is imperative that both those in charge of the community (at all levels down even to study hall monitor) not let the distance of their status elbow out the fact that we are all brothers and sisters of God’s family and should treat each other not as inferiors but as kin, even as peers, personally, as members of a family of faith that’s buffeted enough from the world at large not to need aggravations from within.

That’s a hard thing to maintain, a family tone to our interactions. The scribes and Pharisees whose authority still intimidated many a Jewish Christian in the days of Matthew seemed to have forgotten that sense of family; tended to embarrass God by their “shouting for order in the study hall” (which so often begets a shouting match among their subordinates) - instead of all members of the family valuing, loving one other as siblings under God.

To which the prophet Malachi pleads, “Why then do we break faith with one another, violating the covenant of our fathers” or of our one Father – whose presence is made sacramentally manifest at the head of our one table - in the Christ of the Eucharist?

Reflection for October 23, 2011

Declining the Frisbee

Toward the end of the Gospel of Saint Matthew (which is the Gospel from which our lectionary readings for this year are selected) Jesus is confronted by priests and scribes (experts in the Law of Moses) relative to the major topics of 30 AD – whether there is a resurrection from the dead, whether Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, what is the relative importance of the many commandments of Jewish Law. By the way, according to scholars, the Law was not simply the Ten Commandments but included an additional 613 other commandments, 365 interdictions and 248 other prescriptions – so that the question of priorities was bound to arise.

Many rabbis underscored the equal importance of all the maxims in expressions like: whoever transgresses but one of the commandments breaks his relationship with God just as much as anyone who transgresses all the commandments. Or: the lightest commandment should be held as important as the gravest commandment. Or: if anyone transgresses loving one’s neighbor as oneself, he will soon wind up hating his neighbor even to the point of bloodshed. Not much room for latitude in any of these cases. So something of these extreme interpretations of the Law lay behind the question put to Jesus: “Teacher, which commandment of the Law is greatest?”

But is this question sincere? So often in an argument someone will ask a question, pretending to seek information – no ulterior motive. But just as often, if not more often, someone asks a question already knowing the answer he wants! He does not really seek information but wants to test someone, wants to catch someone in his speech (as might happen at an Inquisition). Jesus seems to have detected this motivation among the authorities that question him in Matthew. It’s as if they launch a Frisbee at him and every time he refuses to catch it and get trapped in a give and take that leads nowhere. No, rather he always lets the Frisbee fly past his ear as he lifts the discussion to a higher plane.

In this case, Jesus doesn’t get lost among the trees of the scribal forest – to select this commandment or that. He simply sums up the whole law in a combined quote from the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is its equivalent: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He concludes: the whole of Scripture (and your life) pivots upon these two commandments – to love.

In effect he seems to say, stop becoming unhealthily scrupulous over things like gleaning wheat on the Sabbath or touching unclean people like a leper or Gentile. Reach down deep into the love that made you and let that flow forth – even as that wonderful river in the Book of Ezekiel flowed forth from the Temple and turned the Salt Sea into something sweet. If you adhere to this principle, the details will take care of themselves.

Spontaneous goodness – such as characterized Jesus – will prevail. Become a virtuoso when it comes to virtue and not forever an amateur.

There follows in Matthew then a whole chapter in which Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the scribes – in terms like “Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.” Which leads to the question: are you as scrupulous about love and a deeper exploration of your faith as you are about your posture in church?

Reflection for October 16, 2011

Free at last!

I think it was in the autumn of 1941 (when I had entered first year high school) that the popular painter Norman Rockwell came out with his now famous illustrations of the Four Freedoms. We were not at war yet but we were sympathetic to Great Britain in its stand against the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany. Indeed President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had met on an American cruiser in a bay up in Newfoundland in August of that year to frame what has been called the Atlantic Charter – a declaration of Four Freedoms to which the democracies of the West were dedicated.

Now “freedom” was something the United States embraced way back in 1787 when Congress approved what is known as the Bill of Rights. The first two clauses speak of the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, of the press, the right to peaceable assembly and the right to retain arms. But when President Roosevelt first stated the Four Freedoms of 1941 in his State of the Union address he repeated the ideal of freedom of speech and worship (in keeping with the Bill of Rights) but added two more: freedom from want and freedom from fear. The freedom from want no doubt expressed his political philosophy embodied in such programs as Social Security. It meant that nobody should be subject to extreme need anywhere in the world. Freedom from fear meant nobody should have to put up with ruthless dictatorships, for example.

I remember well Norman Rockwell’s paintings – especially the freedom from want illustration showing an extended family on Thanksgiving Day, the aging parents laying down a platter containing a huge turkey upon a table full of other traditional foods and surrounded by the smiling, laughing younger members of the family.

But if we ponder our heritage of all such freedoms it comes across more often as having to do with “my rights” or as “freedom from” something. We don’t want to be oppressed. We want to be valued. Often in the last 70 years if comes across in terms of such songs as “I did it my way” or expressions like “I gotta be me” or in spiritual quests that take one far away “from the madding crowd” – like to India or Antarctica! Freedom seems to mean don’t crowd me; I should be able to do as I d----d please. It seems almost anti-social.

Is this what the Bible, what the Gospel mean by freedom: “Don’t tread on me”? The freedom to which the Gospel calls us is the freedom to love, to care! I mean I look at myself. In what way am I really in bondage? In what way am I kept bound, restrained, enslaved? I want to love, to break loose, to care but how much am I handicapped by the inherited prejudices of my ancestors, the party politics of my environment, my parents’ constant warnings not to trust anyone, the paranoia I pick up reading the news, the threat of failure in school, the presence of competitors who are more savvy than I, the precarious nature of my economic existence, my own sloth . . . I could go on listing the things external and internal that hold me back from doing the thing I really want to do which is ultimately to love, to care, to relate, to be generous, to be courageous, to be my best self, to be Christ.

May that not be the freedom that Martin Luther King longed for when he cried out “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty I’m free at last!”

October 9, 2011

Il Sacro Speco (The Holy Cave)

About forty miles east of Rome you run up against the mountains around Subiaco, the region to which a young St. Benedict retired around 500 A.D. to live in solitude and contemplation. An older hermit showed him a cave high up on the cliff of a canyon and there he remained until, drawn by appeals of others, he emerged to found the present monastery at Subiaco and the Benedictine Order which went on to civilize Europe’s barbarian ancestors. The original cave can still be seen within the walls of the precariously perched priory that was built around it ages ago. It has been incorporated into a series of three chapels dating from before 1100 A.D. There is a large upper chapel from which a stone stairway leads to the chapel built around the cave itself. Each chapel is a jewel. There are arches and slender columns, a marble altar covered with gold, blue and crimson mosaics. But most overwhelming are the frescos dating from as early as 700 A.D. which cover every square foot of wall and ceiling.

Obviously the monks who created these chapels were not content to hear the Gospel. They needed to see it happening all around them. And so they painted the walls and ceilings with splendid impressions of Gospel events. The upper chapel portrays the whole climax of Christ’s life, from his entry into Jerusalem, the kiss of Judas, the flight of the disciples, his crucifixion, the meeting with Mary Magdalene in the garden, his confrontation of doubting Thomas, to his ascension into heaven. There it is in reds, blues, purples, silver and gold. And then there are iconic images of Mary and saints. In the lowest chapel there’s even an image of St. Francis, painted from life when he visited the place in 1223. It’s tucked behind a corner at shoulder level and when you stumble upon it in all your vulnerability, his wide open, gracious eyes look right into your soul.

Well, as if the art weren’t enough, when Jane and I visited this treasure there was a wedding in the upper chapel. In other words, we were lucky enough to experience the place not as a mere museum but as an environment alive with faith and love. It was as though all those frescos were hardly relics of the past but beautifully present participants in the current event, beaming down with eyes strangely alive upon the equally beautiful bride and groom, family and friends - who were also beautifully attired. (Looking at them I understood why Italians rank among the foremost fashion designers in the world!)

Bellezza! Beauty! That’s what summed up for me the whole experience of that place and moment. Beauty. And after all, isn’t that what religion is ultimately about: becoming beautiful, perceiving and creating beauty everywhere, behaving beautifully and not just puritanically? And then I shuddered - for, standing there amid all that beauty dressed as I was in the khaki trousers, sports shirt and hiking boots of your standard American tourist, there came to my mind today’s Gospel about a wedding feast and I expected someone at any moment to approach me like the king in the parable and ask: “My friend, how is it you came in here not properly dressed?”

And I thought, “By golly, I’ve got to acquire a change of wardrobe. Not only literally but spiritually. I’ve got to divest myself of all the sourness and whining and grinding of teeth, the resentments, anxiety, excuses - the things that perpetually mute my beauty. I’ve got to get more joy, faith, love, vision, grace - in a word - more beauty into my life if I am ever to become eligible to enjoy the world of Christ so beautifully reflected here within this Sacro Speco of Subiaco.”

Reflection for October 2, 2011

A vine from Egypt you transplanted; / . . . It put forth its foliage to the Sea, / its shoots as far as the River. Psalm 80.

It’s good to get away. Jane and I decided, before the cold weather sets in, to return to Italy for a couple of weeks this past September. We chose the town of Spello, which is not far from Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis whose feast occurs on October 4^th. Spello is a hillside town, not large, built within an ancient wall, narrow streets, tile roofs, a parish church with a threefold fresco of the Annunciation, Birth of Jesus and the boy Jesus instructing the doctors in the Temple – done by Pinturicchio around 1500 AD. I must say, surveying these magnificent paintings with all their detail, contemporary faces, garments, landscapes, angels, golden haloes, colors, with all the imagination and work that must have gone into them . . . (my apologies to devotees of modern art) but they make Picasso look like a scribbler.

And what I mean by its being good to get away to a place like Spello and surrounding medieval towns like Deruta and Montefalco is – it revives one’s appreciation of the beauty all around us here and now; it rinsed my own vision of the familiarity that beclouds my appreciation of our Sonoma Valley – makes it come alive, fresh again even as the Valley of Umbria seen from our Spello window appeared so fresh, so much a painting, a work of art in itself.

Which ties in with our readings about vineyards for today. Our biblical writers use the metaphor of a vineyard to describe the world as God made it, as God wants it to be, as we should cultivate it. But familiarity, the distractions of politics, of commerce, of gossip, of self-interest – all those things that blind us to the deeper meaning and beauty of creation – turn this vineyard world (and valley) into a blur as we speed down Highway 12 or Arnold Drive – turn it into something that (figuratively speaking) might as well be unpruned, overgrown with thorns and briers, parched, open to trespass by every passerby or “beast of the field” as far as our notice is concerned.

For you see, it is not God (as the biblical readings suggest) who lays our vineyard world waste, but we in so far as we live detached from God, each other, the landscape out of which we were born, of which we are meant to be not just spectators but participants – even as St. Francis saw in the Sun, Wind, Air and Fire brothers; in the Moon, Water and Death sisters, in the Earth itself a Mother – in the whole of the universe around us on and beyond the reach of this globe – a Family of which we are the Care-Takers (the people who should Care!).

Why I reaped the reward of our trip to Spello this very morning when, in walking around the Plaza at dawn, the eastern sky, the silent trees, flowers, the chill in the air, the shops, the lamplights – after having become somewhat strange from seeming outside me for so long - quietly greeted me personally – you might say as a quiet vineyard, an environment no longer laden with sour grapes.

And so may we not make our prayer that of the Psalm for today: Once again, O Lord of hosts, / look down from heaven, and see; / take care of this vine, / and protect what your right hand has planted. // . . . give us new life, . . . / O Lord, God of hosts, restore us; / if your face shine upon us, then we shall be saved.