Mary and God: No Strangers to Sorrow,

My heart is heavy as I consider the hundreds of people who die of the coronavirus each day. This day, 2000+ years ago Mary stood beneath the cross of her dying son. Now, in 2020, she stands beneath the cross of so  many of her sons and daughters dying of this horrible disease and grieves with the parents, siblings, sons and daughters, grandchildren and other relatives and friends of those losing their lives to this virus.  She knows the sorrows of each, as she herself is no stranger to sorrow!

Just as Mary could do nothing but stand and watch, so, too, family members can do nothing either but stand and watch a loved one die. And in many cases can not even do that, as they are not allowed by the bedside of the sick person! 

God, too, knows our sorrow and grieves with us!  Why, we ask, doesn't God remove this scourge from the face of the earth? Why did he not stop the crucifixion of His only begotten son?  Perhaps the answer to that question is the same answer.  Our salvation depended upon Jesus being obedient to God unto death. Jesus, we are told in the Scriptures, learned obedience from what He suffered!  Are we, too, to learn obedience to God from what we suffer? Are we, in fact, suffering this horrible virus because of the many, many times that we walked away from the challenges of surrendering to God's way of living here on earth?  Have we made serious mistakes that led to this pandemic?

Jesus, we know, did not make any serious mistakes while He walked, lived, taught among us here on earth. His honesty, His confrontation of evil, His building the Kingdom of love and peace that He was sent to build, His healing of the sick, His driving out of demons, His way of challenging the people to live  the spirit of the law and to realize that the letter of the law can, at times, kill led the chief priests, the scribes or teachers of the law as well as the leaders and elders of the nation to feel threatened by Him and jealous of Him and therefore were determined to destroy Him, which they did on the first Good Friday 2000+ years ago!

Jesus, may the crisis which we are now experiencing because of the spread of this virus be a wake up call for us. May our eyes be opened to the fact that, like you, none of us will escape death however it comes to us. However, may we also realize that death is not the end of our life but the beginning of a new resurrected life in heaven with You.  I ask for these graces in your name. Amn

Choose Life, not Death

Today’s readings, Dt. 30: 15-20 and Luke 9: 22-25, challenge us with the following statements: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom….Choose life, then,…by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.”  In the Gospel Jesus says to us: “If anyone wishes to come after me, he [or she] must deny…[him or herself] and take up his [or her] cross daily and follow  me. For whoever wishes to save his [or her] life for my sake will save it….”  Following Jesus, we know, leads to death and resurrection. Many times, we focus only on the dying part and get scared and flee the scene as the apostles did on Calvary. But following Jesus, dying with Jesus, always  leads to resurrection, to new life, new hope, deeper faith and stronger loving.  The dying is what is difficult. None of us cherishes letting go of that in us that needs to die if new life is to arise for us and in and through us.  

Recently, in a slump, I cried out to the Lord, offering Him the following prayer:

“Lord, I give you my all:

•   My holiness and sinfulness

•   My humility and my pride

•   My hope and my hopelessness

•   My manipulativeness and my straightforwardness

•   My generosity and my stinginess

•   My love and my hate

•   My serenity and my anxiety

•   My selflessness and my selfishness

•   My faith and my faithlessness”

The cross—my sinful nature, my weaknesses, my frustrations, my disappointments, my doubts and fears and anxieties, my pride—all of that I need to take up, acknowledge, bring to the Lord in humility and trust. 

Follow me, Jesus, says to us.  Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem. Deliberately! Even when He knew that the chief priests and leaders of his people were waiting to arrest him, charge him as a blasphemer and put him to death, He still went to this city to “sell all”.  Choosing death was, for Jesus, choosing life for all of us. Jesus truly believed in the resurrection. In John 2: 19, Jesus says to the Jews: “Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up.”

Do I believe that when I allow Jesus to destroy sin in me, that He will raise me up in three days to new life, new hope, deeper love?

Challenged to leave our comfort zones

In today’s first reading, Acts 9: 31-34, Peter invites Aeneas, a  paralytic for eight years, to get up and make his bed!  He immediately is healed by Peter’s faith  in the Risen Lord.  People hear that Peter is not that far away from Joppa, where Tabitha, a highly respected woman, has died. Peter  goes to Joppa and finds people wailing, deeply saddened by the loss of Tabitha, a person who reached out to the poor in the area. Her generosity, her love, her commitment to be of service in whatever way possible was well  known.  Peter goes up to the room where the dead body is laid out, asks everyone to leave the room, kneels down in prayer, and then, believing in the power of the Risen Lord to do the impossible, humanly speaking,  turns to the body and says to Tabitha: Rise, get up. He then presents her alive to those who were grieving her loss.

Many times you and I are like the two people in today’s first reading. Parts of us may be  impaired, lying dormant “in bed,” where we feel safe, comfortable, and unchallenged. Other parts of us may be “dead” and need to be raised to new life.  Nothing is impossible to God, as Peter’s faith in the Risen Lord reveals. 

Right now,  it is springtime. All of nature is coming alive, leaving its dormant state, rising from what looks like death to the naked eye.  We see the power of the Lord’s  resurrection in the tiny seeds that bear flowers, brilliant pink and white blossoms. We see God’s  creativity also in the night sky when billions of stars appear.

The transformation of Aeneas, of Tabitha, of nature are testimony of our Creator’s ability to transform our lives as well. Whether any one of us is in the springtime, the summertime, the fall time, the wintertime of our lives, God has the power to bring forth new life, to do what needs to be done at any moment to bring life out of death, mobility out of immobility, to get the “Aeneas” part of ourselves “out of bed” and the “Tabitha” part of ourselves to a resurrected state in which the good we are meant to do continues to be realized by our renewed efforts.

Happy Easter

What a glorious day!  Imagine the women rushing to the tomb early this morning. It is still dark. They are distraught over Jesus' death and wondering who will roll back the stone for them, as they went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus (Mark 16: 1-3).  Matthew tells us that "all of a sudden there was a violent earthquake, for the angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone and sat on it. His face was like lightening, his robe white as snow" (Mt. 28: 1-4).

The women expected to anoint a dead body, say their goodbyes once again, and leave the tomb as hopeless and downtrodden as they had come.  Is that not what often happens in our lives?  We face the same distressing, hopeless situation deprived of life, depleted of joy, nothing new!  We may have been hoping for some kind of miracle and none came; nothing happens.  Then "all of a sudden" something "rolled away the depression, changed the hardened heart of a loved one or our own; a tragic accident averted, transformed paralytic limbs restored to movement, or a phone call comes for the needed transplant and life is changed forever.Out of nowhere, so it seems "...the angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone and sat on it"!

At last night glorious celebration of Jesus' resurrection,  I wondered where my Easter joy was. I seemed so blah, not the usual exuberance about Easter. Did I lose my faith? It was alive on Good Friday. What happened?   I shared my concerns with the Lord.  He seemed awfully quiet.  This morning, I went to Easter Sunday liturgy and felt somewhat renewed but not to the extent that I usually experience Easter.

Then it happened as I was going out for an afternoon stroll. I met someone with whom I have been at odds for about six months. I knew she was angry with me. She would not make eye contact with me, would say things within my hearing range that were hurtful and stopped dropping in for quick visits.  Today, Easter Sunday, we met as I left the building for my daily walk. We talked out our differences, as she, too, felt my anger--yes, I was angry with her also for several reasons. We shared the reasons for our anger.  The "stone" had been rolled back; the anger dissolved with forgiveness and reconciliation.  I had met Jesus! Truly He had risen from the dead debris of my life.