Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

In scripture, God’s promise, revelation, and new truth are often brought not through what’s familiar or through those we know and who are like us but through a stranger. As Jews, Jesus and his disciples would have been immersed in the divisions within the Jewish and Samaritan cultures. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan woman at the well demonstrates the existing cultural tension. Today, our reading from Luke’s gospel tells the story of the ten lepers and the only one to return to thank Jesus for his healing; he was the Samaritan. In these instances, the players in the story deal with individuals who are “strange” to them. In Parker Palmer’s work, The Company of Strangers, he writes: “The role of the stranger in our lives is vital in the context of the Christian faith, for the God of faith is one who continually speaks truth afresh, who continually makes all things new. God persistently challenges conventional truth and regularly upsets the world’s way of looking at things. It is no accident that this God is so often represented by the stranger, for the truth that God speaks in our lives is very strange indeed. Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith. Where the world sees death, God proclaims life. God uses the stranger to shake us from our conventional points of view, to remove the scales of worldly assumptions from our eyes.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the challenge Palmer presents concerns racism, sexism, provincialism, and sectarianism. Invariably, we are afraid of and un-welcoming to strangers – be they different vis-a-vis race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation.  We fear what is different from ourselves. We are comfortable only with our own. However, within our own circles, much of the otherness of God cannot be revealed. Within familiar circles, good as these might be, there is too little in the way of promise, of newness. God can speak only a limited word here. Nothing is impossible with God, but that is only true when we move outside of our own circles. Like Jacob, we must wrestle in the dust with the stranger. In welcoming the stranger and showing genuine hospitality to those who seem foreign to us, whom we do not understand, we are given the opportunity to hear new promises and a fuller revelation of God.

We live in a time of pain and division. Daily, in the world and in the church, hatred, anger, and bitterness are growing. It is even harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, and to not alienate someone just by being. There is so much wound and division around. But the hatred Jesus speaks about today is the denial of love. It is even more than the denial of love; it is active anti-love. Very often, the one who hates wants to be hated himself. If you hate anyone, you are thereby throwing in the slogan to build a world without God. Because God is love, it happens to us that someone hates us, and our first impulse should be to check whether we are giving any reason for this hatred. Understudying someone else’s point of view, fixing what should be fixed, and yielding where it is allowed to yield, sometimes it dries up the sources of hatred. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that our call today is to reconcile by feeling the pain of all sides and by letting our pain and helplessness be a buffer that heals, the blood that helps wash the wound. As a simple start, we can test how open-minded we are on all of these issues by seeing how much pain we are in. Not to be in pain is not to be open-minded. It is a time of pain for the church, a time when we will all feel some hatred, a time when, above all, we must keep our peace of mind, our inner calm of spirit, and our outer charity.

“There’s so much evil in the world, and so many people are suffering from other people’s sins that there must be retribution, some justice. Don’t tell me that the people who are doing these things – from molesting children to ignoring all morality – are going to be in heaven when we get there! What would that say about God’s justice?” That is something almost all of us have reiterated at some point in life, especially after witnessing the senseless loss of life by mankind’s own hands. At least, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, we’re in good company; as was the case for the prophet Isaiah, this was no different. For him it was not enough that the Messiah should usher in heaven for good people. Along with rewards for the good, he felt, there also needed to be a “day of vengeance” on the bad. Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance. All that worry that somebody might be getting away with something and all that anxiety that God might not be an exacting judge suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing many things right but are missing something important inside of ourselves. We are dutiful and moral but bitter underneath and are unable to enter the circle of celebration and the dance. Too often, for too many of us, far from basking in gratitude in the beautiful symphony of relaxed, measureless love and infinite forgiveness that makeup heaven, we feel instead the bitterness, self-pity, anger, and incapacity to let go and dance that was felt by the older brother of the prodigal son. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we protest our right to despair and to be unhappy and demand that a reckoning justice one day give us our due by punishing the bad. In the end, it’s mostly because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, that it might be too lenient, that the bad will not be fully punished. But we should worry less about that and more about our own incapacity to forgive, to let go of our hurts, to take delight in life, to give others the gaze of admiration, to celebrate, and to join in the dance. To be fit for heaven, we must let go of bitterness and embrace the love of others, which is so very hard to do for so many of us.

Poverty is what can make us grateful for everything we have. One new blouse does not get lost among all the other hangers in the cupboard. One new book becomes a treasure, not just one more kind of recreation. No new toys, clothes, or furniture makes us treasure what little of each of them we have. Sister Joan Chittister writes about a young mother who found the pair of new shoes she had just bought her daughter that week in a trash bin in front of the house, awaiting the city trash collectors. “What are these doing here?” she asked her daughter. “I just got them for you two days ago.” “I don’t like them,” the teen said back. “None of the other kids wear anything like this.” Only poverty, perhaps, can give us a sense of what it is to be grateful for what you have and even more thankful for what you get for nothing. In poverty, God is not a question. The God who hears the cry of the poor is all the poor can be sure of because it can only be the goodness of God that supplies their daily needs. To learn the lesson of generosity from the widow in today’s Gospel, we first must notice the widow, which may be the more significant challenge Jesus puts before us. In Jesus’ time on earth, the crowd of rich, powerful, and privileged persons overshadowed those on the margins of society: the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the woman in today’s reading, who were quickly lost in the crowd. But Jesus notices the widow and sees what she is doing, tossing her precious coins. In his typical way of overturning expectations and disrupting convention, Jesus makes the widow the center of attention. The one on the margin is brought to the center. Jesus creates a new way of looking at the world, religion, and one another. So, the alleluia that arises out of poverty is not about having nothing; the alleluia is in gratitude for the kind of poverty that wants for nothing that does not add to a sense of the presence of God and the liberating grace of knowing we have enough if we have him. May we all be so lucky to have that much.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the mystery of Christ is wider, deeper, and more encompassing than what can be seen simply within the visible life of Jesus and the visible history of the Christian churches. Granted, what we see visibly in the life of Jesus and the history of the Christian churches is something very precious and very privileged. The Christian churches are (like Mary, the Mother of Jesus) the place where God visibly, concretely, tangibly, and historically enters this world. But, as scripture and Christian theology affirm, the mystery of Christ is more encompassing than what we can see visibly and historically. It also includes what the Epistle to the Colossians teaches, namely, that physical creation itself was somehow created through Christ, that Christ is what holds it together, and that Christ is what gives it an eternal future. The mystery of Christ is not just about saving us, the people on this planet, it is also about saving the planet itself. Incorporating this into our understanding has huge consequences for how we understand our planet, Earth, and other religions. This has huge implications for how we view other religions. As Christians, we must take seriously Jesus’ teaching that Christ is the (only) way to salvation and that nobody goes to the Father except through Christ. So where does that leave non-Christians and other sincere people, given that at any given time, two-thirds of the world does not relate to the historical Jesus or Christian churches? Unless we understand the mystery of Christ as deeper and wider than what we can see visibly and historically, this quandary will invariably lead us to either abandon Jesus’ teaching about being normative or lead us into an exclusivity that goes against God’s universal will for salvation. If, by the mystery of Christ, we mean only the visible Jesus and the visible church, then we are caught in a dilemma with no answer. If, however, by the mystery of Christ, we also mean the mystery of God becoming incarnate inside of physical creation, beginning already in the original creation, continuing there as the soul that binds the whole of physical creation together, and being there as both the energy that lures creation towards its Creator and the consummation of that creation, then all things have to do with Christ, whether they realize it or not, and all authentic worship leads to the Father, whether we can see this or not.

Recently, a man I knew was in church with his family, including his seven-year-old son, Michael, his mother, and grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched and scolded him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambiance of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes, we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling. My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us. But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying in that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration, something, I submit, we have failed to give to our own children sufficiently. Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel. The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief?  Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.”  They are, and so is life sometimes, and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Sacred Permission to be Human and the Tools to Handle Frustration”]

Today, our reflection verse quotes Jesus telling the temple sellers that God’s house is a house of prayer. But we also know from church teaching that our house should be a house of prayer, as we are each individually a walking temple of the Lord. So, what exactly is prayer? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that there are four distinct kinds of Christian prayer: There is Incarnational prayer, Mystical prayer, Affective prayer, and Priestly prayer. Incarnational Prayer.  St. Paul invites us to “pray always.” This means that we are to look for the finger of God in every event in our lives. That means looking at every event in our lives and the major events of our world, and asking ourselves: “What is God saying in this event?” Mystical Prayer is simply being touched by God in a way that is deeper than what we can grasp and understand in our intellect and imagination, a knowing beyond head and heart. So your head tells you what you think is wise to do; your heart tells you what you want to do; and your mystical center tells you what you have to do. Affective Prayer can bascially be summed up as devotional prayers (adoration of Christ, litanies, rosaries) as well as all forms of meditation and contemplation. At the end of the day, what we are all looking for is God’s voice, one-to-one, speaking unconditional love, lovingly saying our name. Lastly, there is Priestly Prayer. This is the prayer of Christ through the church for the world. We pray liturgically this priestly prayer, whenever we gather to celebrate the scriptures, the Eucharist, or any sacrament. As well we pray in this way when, in community or privately, we pray what is called the Liturgy of the Hours or the Divine Office where we join others around the world in a common prayer. A mature, spiritually healthy Christian prays in these four ways, and it can be helpful to distinguish clearly among these kinds of prayers so as to be praying always and praying with Christ.

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which we celebrate today, memorializes Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anne, who brought her to the Temple to consecrate her to God. At the time, all young Jewish girls were traditionally left in the temple’s care for a period of time, where they received education and faith formation. This memorial originated in the Orient around the seventh century. The Western Church adopted it in the 14th century. Mary grew up to birth the Son of God, the Savior of the world and became the first disciple as she modeled for all future disciples what “yes” to God means. She heard the word of God and kept it. That obedience, more than biological motherhood, gave both an infant Jesus and an adult Christ to the world. And in this, Mary wants imitation, not admiration. Our task, symbolically, is to give birth to Christ in our lives. From her, we get the pattern of “birthing” Christ: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.

“We talk as if we need to save the world as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus, the world is already saved; the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We only need to live in such a way to show that world that we believe this.” This quote came from William Stringfellow, an American lay theologian, lawyer, and social activist. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that what Stringfellow is telling us is what Jesus tried to teach, namely, that the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief and doubt in the existence of God as it is anxiety and fretless worry. The opposite of faith is what Jesus cautions Martha against: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things!” We are not to be anxious about many things. We are in good hands all the time. To say the creed is to have a very particularized, concrete trust, a trust that God has not forgotten about me and my problems and that, despite whatever indications there are to the contrary, God is still in charge and is very concerned with my life and its concrete troubles. In the Garden of Gethsemane, with all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, Jesus begins his prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.”  What Jesus is saying is that, despite indications to the contrary, despite the fact that it looks like God is asleep at the switch, God is still in charge, is still Lord of this universe, is still noticing everything, and is still fully in power and worthy of trust. The trouble, though, is that this is hard to do, even when we do believe in a God who is Lord of the universe. Our problem is that we project our limited, selective care onto this God. We fear that God sometimes forgets and does not notice us, that God, like us, is an inadequate Lord of the universe. That is why we get anxious and fret because, like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe. Remember Mary; she chose to rest in the love of God; we should do no less.

Faith asks us to believe that God’s saving activity in the Christ extends to more than only human beings and more than even animals and other living things. God’s saving activity in Christ reaches so deep that it saves creation itself – the oceans, the mountains, the soil that grows our food, the desert sands, and the earth itself. Christ came to save all of those things too, not just us, the people. Where, you might ask, does scripture teach this? Saint Paul writes in Romans, chapter 8: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” What St. Paul is saying here is that physical creation itself, the cosmic world, will, at the end of time, be transformed in some glorious way and enter into heaven, just as human beings do. He’s also saying that, like us, it too somehow senses its mortality and groans to be set free from its present limits. Science tells us that physical creation is mortal, that the sun is burning out, that energy is ever-so-slowly decreasing and that the earth as we know it will someday die. The earth is as mortal as we are and so if it’s to have a future it needs to be saved by Something or Someone from outside itself. That Something and Someone are revealed in the mystery of the incarnation within which God takes on physical flesh in Christ in order to save the world and what he came to save was not just us, the people living on this earth, but rather, “the world”, the planet itself, and everything on it. Jesus assured us that nothing is ever ultimately lost. No hair falls from someone’s head and no sparrow falls from the sky and simply disappears forever, as if it had never been. God created, loves, cares for, and ultimately resurrects every bit of creation for all eternity. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Deep Incarnation – Another Meaning of Christmas”]