Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

God is ineffable because God’s energy is ineffable. What, indeed, is energy? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we rarely ask this question because we take energy as something so primal that it cannot be defined but only taken as a given, as self-evident. We see energy as the primal force that lies at the heart of everything that exists, animate and inanimate. Moreover, we feel energy powerfully within ourselves. We know energy and feel energy but can rarely recognize its origins, its prodigiousness, its joy, its goodness, its effervescence, and its exuberance. We rarely recognize what it tells us about God. What does it tell us? The first quality of energy is its prodigiousness. It is prodigal beyond our imagination, and this speaks something about God. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes?  What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children? And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit, and irony tell us about God? No doubt the energy we see around us and feel irrepressibly within us tells us that, underneath, before and below everything else, there flows a sacred force, both physical and spiritual, which is at its root, joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving.  That energy is God. That energy speaks of God, and that energy tells us why God made us and what kind of permissions God is giving us for living out our lives. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal, and loving, it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic, and exuberant at it very core. To feel it is an invitation to gratitude. The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors it and its origins. That means keeping our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we take from it permission to be more robust, free, joyous, humorous, and playful – and especially more grateful.

The Lazarus story begs a lot of questions. Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary, were very close friends of Jesus. Martha and Mary sent word to Jesus that “the man you love is ill.” That man was Lazarus. So their request came with an implied reaction that Jesus should come and heal him. Hence, we are understandably taken aback by Jesus’ seeming lack of response to Lazarus’ illness and the request to come and heal him. As Jesus approaches the village where Lazarus has died, he is met by Martha and then, later, by Mary. Each, in turn, asks him the question: “Why?”  Why, since you loved this man, did you not come to save him from death? Jesus doesn’t offer any theoretical apologia in response. Instead, he asks where they have laid the body, lets them take him there, sees the burial site, weeps in sorrow, and then raises his dead friend back to life.  So why did he let him die in the first place? Why didn’t Jesus rush down to save Lazarus since he loved him? The answer to that question teaches a very important lesson about Jesus, God, and faith, namely, that God is not a God who ordinarily rescues us but is rather a God who redeems us. God doesn’t ordinarily intervene to save us from humiliation, pain, and death; rather, he redeems humiliation, pain, and death after the fact. This is one of the key revelations inside the resurrection: We have a redeeming, not a rescuing, God. Jesus never promised us rescue, exemptions, immunity from cancer, or escape from death. He promised rather that, in the end, there will be redemption, vindication, immunity from suffering, and eternal life. But that’s in the end; meantime, in the early and intermediate chapters of our lives, there will be the same kinds of humiliation, pain, and death that everyone else suffers. The death and resurrection of Jesus reveal a redeeming, not a rescuing, God.

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. This has many implications. It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummeting radically everywhere in the secular world. Those who are opting out don’t all look the same, nor go by the same name. Some are atheists, explicitly denying the existence of God. Others are agnostics, open to accepting the existence of God but remaining undecided. Others self-define as nones; asked what faith they belong to they respond by saying none. There are those who define themselves as dones, done with religion and done with church. Then there are the procrastinators, persons who know that someday they will have to deal with the religious question, but, like Saint Augustine, keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet! Finally, there’s that huge group who define themselves as spiritual but not religious, saying they believe in God but not in institutionalized religion. I suspect that God doesn’t much share our anxiety here, not that God sees this as perfectly healthy (humans are human!), but rather that God has a larger perspective on it, is infinitely loving, and is longsuffering in patience while tolerating our choices. Gabriel Marcel once famously stated, To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say, ‘you will never be lost’. As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways that ensure that nobody gets lost. God is infinitely patient. We have an intended destination, and God gives us constant instructions along the way.  Religion and the church are an excellent GPS. However, they can be ignored and frequently are. But God’s response is never one of anger nor of a final impatience. Like a trusted GPS, God is forever saying ‘recalculating’ and giving us new instructions predicated on our failure to accept the previous instruction. Eventually, no matter our number of wrong turns and dead ends, God will get us home. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. 

This Gospel is not only highly insightful, but it’s also very realistic and compassionate. With injustices and crises in every part of the world, many ask ultimate questions about good and evil. “Where do the weeds come from? Where does evil originate? Why do people do such harmful things?” Fr. Richard Rohr writes that he asks this question a dozen times daily. This world doesn’t make sense. How can people be so malicious, so unkind, so uncaring? It’s like we don’t know how to care anymore, as though we don’t know how to access our hearts, souls, and spirits. Those of us who grew up as Christians may have heard this parable when we were younger. We may have been told to pull out the imperfect weeds and eliminate our faults. But since we really couldn’t get rid of them, we covered them up and pretended we didn’t have them. And that doesn’t work. Yet Jesus shows us absolute realism. He said something never said to me when I was young: “Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together.” Wow! That’s risky. I can’t pretend to logically understand it, although I know it allows me to be compassionate with myself. After all, I’m also a field of weeds and wheat, just like you and everything else. Everything is a mixed bag, a combination of good and bad. We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and everybody else. If we don’t, we usually become very angry people. Our world is filled with a lot of angry people because they cannot accept their own weeds. To accept this teaching doesn’t mean we can say, “It’s okay to be selfish, violent, and evil.” It means that we have some realism about ourselves and each other. We have to name the weed as a weed. We can’t just pretend it’s all wheat, all good, because it isn’t. We’re not perfect. Our countries are not perfect. The Church is not perfect. The project of learning how to love—which is our only life project—is quite simply learning to accept this. If you really love anybody, and I hope you all do, then you have learned to accept a person despite, and sometimes even because of, their faults. Love means saying, “I know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.” Only God’s heart, only the mind of Christ in us, really and fully knows how to do that.

Our gospel reading today continues our discussion on the “Sower.” We have previously noted that God’s generosity is beyond our human understanding as He sows seed everywhere. Fr. Ron Rolheiser looks at God’s abundance from a perspective of how we embrace God’s generosity in a world becoming increasingly divided and separated. He asks us, “What does it mean to be inclusive?” He writes that it begins with the word “Catholic.” The opposite of being “Catholic” is not being “Protestant”. The opposite of “Catholic” is being narrow, exclusive, and overly selective in our embrace. The opposite of being “Catholic” is to define our faith-family too narrowly. “Catholic” means to be wide and universal. It means incarnating the embrace of an abundant and prodigal God whose sun shines on all indiscriminately, the bad and the good. Jesus once defined this by saying, “In my father’s house, there are many rooms.” God’s heart is wide, abundant, prodigal, and universally embracing. His heart takes care to pray for those “other sheep who are not of this fold.” To be “Catholic” is to imitate that. The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God, there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy. As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil – bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil. God can do this because God’s love and mercy are limitless. It seems God never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace. Jesus also assures us that God is prodigal, like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother. God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity and the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that. Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we must remind ourselves what living under an abundant, prodigal, universally embracing, and “Catholic” God means. What it means, among other things, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity. How wide are our hearts? Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and passion for truth. Still, it invariably reveals itself in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection. More importantly, it often, too, reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle, and in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God.

July 25th, is the Feast of St. James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles and the first of the apostles to be martyred. Acts of the Apostles records that he was killed at the command of Herod Agrippa, a descendent of the tyrant king, Herod, who is named in Matthew’s Gospel as the sociopath that orchestrated the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. The scriptures provide us with a few details about St. James, but where they fall silent, popular piety has many tales to tell. St. James is reputed to have been the first Christian missionary to Spain, and after his execution, his remains were brought from Jerusalem to Galicia for safekeeping. A shrine was built to honor his memory, which was destroyed by the Romans during a persecution of the Church. St. James’ relics were lost until they were rediscovered under miraculous circumstances in the year 814 AD. These relics quickly became a focal point of pilgrimage, and in the year 1075 AD, the construction of the grand cathedral of Santiago de Compostela was begun. The shrine was consecrated in the year 1128, though the building that we see today is the result of architectural and artistic embellishment that took place over many centuries. The edifice rises like a great ornate mountain of granite over the city that bears its name. The magnitude of the cathedral is testimony to not only the esteem in which the Galicians hold their Saint, but also serves as a reminder that for hundreds of years, the cultural and economic life of European civilization was powered by a vast network of shrines and pilgrimage destinations. Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela has been a constant since the Middle Ages, and thousands have walked the sacred way to the cathedral, which stretches about 500 miles from Biarritz in France all the way to Compostela. Upon arriving in the church, pilgrims complete their journey by climbing a staircase behind the main altar of the cathedral, where a gilded and bejeweled image of St. James is displayed. Pilgrims embrace the statue as if they are meeting a friend, placing their arms around the saint’s shoulders and delivering prayers that during their long pilgrimage were held as treasures in their hearts. – Fr. Steve Grunow

We, and everything on our planet, live because of the sun’s generosity. The sun reflects the abundance of God, a generosity that invites us also to be generous, to have big hearts, to risk more in giving ourselves away in self-sacrifice, and to witness God’s abundance. But Fr. Rolheiser writes this is challenging. Instinctually, we move more naturally toward self-preservation and security. By nature, we fear, and we horde. Because of this, whether we are poor or not, we tend to work out of a sense of scarcity, fearing always that we don’t have enough, that there isn’t enough, and that we need to be careful in what we give away, that we can’t afford to be too generous. But God belies this, as does nature. God is prodigal, abundant, generous, and wasteful beyond our small fears and imaginations. In the biblical parable of the Sower, the Sower scatters seeds indiscriminately everywhere: on the road, in the bushes, in the rocks, into barren soil, and good soil. It seems he has unlimited seeds, so he works from a generous sense of abundance rather than from a guarded sense of scarcity. God is equally as prodigal and generous in forgiveness, as we see in the gospels. In the parable of the Father, who forgives the prodigal son, we see a person who can forgive out of a richness that dwarfs dignity and calculated cost to self. From everything we can see, God is so rich in love and mercy that he can afford to be wasteful, over-generous, non-calculating, non-discriminating, incredibly risk-taking, and big-hearted beyond our imaginations. And that’s the invitation: to have a sense of God’s abundance and always risk a bigger heart and generosity beyond the instinctual fear. Jesus assures us that the measure we measure out is the measure that we ourselves will receive in return. Essentially, that says that the air we breathe out will be the air we re-inhale. If we breathe out miserliness, we will re-inhale miserliness; if we breathe out pettiness, we will breathe in pettiness; if we breathe out bitterness, then bitterness will be the air that surrounds us; and if we breathe out a sense of scarcity that makes us calculate and be fearful, then calculation and fearfulness will be the air we re-inhale. But, if we are aware of God’s abundance, we breathe out generosity and forgiveness; we will breathe in the air of generosity and forgiveness. We re-inhale what we exhale. To be generous and big-hearted, we must first trust in God’s abundance and generosity.

One of the great iconoclasts of our age, Simone Weil, was fond of pointing out that there are many rooms in the house of idolatry. “One can take as an idol,” she states, “not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, an idea, a philosophy, a religion, something just as earthly. All of these can be essentially inseparable from idolatry.” When Christ states that no one can be a true disciple of his unless he or she first hates his father, mother, wife, husband, children, brothers, sisters, and even his or her own life, the harshness of that statement must be understood precisely in the context of idolatry. Family can be idolatrous if it lets its demands get in the way of the higher dictates of charity and respect. What does this mean? How can family, which is itself a sacred concept (and one which is under siege today and needs all the defense that the churches can give it), be idolatrous? For all its sacredness and importance, the natural family must always be subservient to the higher family, the family of charity. Jesus himself clearly affirms this when he says, “Who are my mother, and brother and sisters? Those who hear the word of God and keep it!” In Jesus’ view, only one kind of family does not, at a point, have to give way to something higher and more important than itself. The family that is constituted by “charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, fidelity, mildness, and chastity” is the only normative family. It’s bonding alone that is nonrelative. All other families are subservient to it. To deny this is to break the first commandment and worship the golden calf.
– Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Family as Idolatry”

Fr. James Stephen Behrens writes that something in the human heart dies when it suffers the loss of a loved one. Mary Magdalene loved Jesus. She gave him her heart in life, and a living piece of her heart went with him in his death. Her encounter with the risen Lord speaks to all of us who have known the pain of human loss. Many of us are fortunate to be given love and support from family and friends. There are also those who suffer alone, not being able to share their anguish. But all of us look for some kind of comfort to lessen the pain. In our times of grief, faith leads us to seek the presence of God in those who share our pain and who teach us that no part of the heart can ever die. It can be seemingly broken through death, but in truth, it was given to God, who, through death, transforms the heart. And in our tears, we find what we were looking for.

Our gospel today speaks of the shepherd and why one is needed in our lives. There is the story of a young woman who grew up in a pious and religious home and, after attending college, had moved away from church attendance or any aspect of a prayer life. On a trip to visit her sister in Colorado to spend time skiing, her sister invited her to go with her to mass on the Sunday she arrived, but she politely refused and went skiing instead. She hit a tree on her first run down the slopes and broke her leg. After being released from the hospital for rest at her sister’s residence, her sister once again asked her to come to mass with her the following Sunday. With “nothing better to do,” she said yes. It was Good Shepherd Sunday, and the presiding priest was visiting from Israel. In his homily, he spoke of the custom among shepherds in Israel that existed in the time of Jesus and is still practiced today. “Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, a shepherd senses that it will be a congenital stray, that it will forever be drifting away from the herd. What that shepherd does then is deliberately break its leg so that he must carry it until its leg is healed. By then, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.” That providential story woke her from the fifteen years of distance from God. John of the Cross once wrote that the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives. James Mackey once said that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents. What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life through a conspiracy of accidents. Now, God does not start fires, floods, wars, AIDS, or anything else of this nature. Nature, chance, human freedom, and human sin bring these things to pass. However, saying that God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, both disastrous and advantageous ones. In the conspiracy of accidents that make up what looks like ordinary secular life, the finger of God is writing. We are children of Israel and Christ (and of our mothers and fathers in the faith) when we look at every event in our lives and ask ourselves: “What is God saying to us in all of this?”