Month: February 2018

Over the many Seasons of Lent we have lived, what continues to be impressed upon us by the Church is the need to fast, the need to pray, and need to give alms. These “disciplines” are the key means in which we are able to enter into an even deeper relationship with the God who created us and loves us. Relationship is the key word here.

We live lives always in relationship with something. We have a relationship with the things we have or own, for example, cars, homes, cell phones, tablets, food, to name just a few. We have a relationship with the things that we do, work, sports, and other entertainments. The relationship we have with these things can dominate our lives. The 3 disciplines of Lent allow us to “refocus” the relationships that may overwhelm our lives.

Fasting from the relationships we may have with the things we own or the things we do, frees us to be more in relationship with God. Following the example of Jesus, prayer is a very intimate way in which we commune with God. While Mass is the ultimate prayer, let us pray daily. Prayer is not confined to the rote prayer we learned as kids. Among the myriad number of ways to pray are walking in nature, meditation, reading scripture, the rosary. We need to find the way we pray best, and then do it daily. Giving alms allows us to enter into a relationship with the presence of God in others. The means by which we give alms is as many as the ways to pray. We may give money to worthy causes. However, we may better give alms volunteering our time to help others. Visiting someone who is sick or homebound, volunteering in our child’s school, or at church, or in our community. Spending more quality time with our own children are all ways to “give alms”.

Lent is more than just giving up chocolate. Lent is about building a deeper relationship with God through the time honored disciplines of fasting, prayer, and alms giving.

In praying the Liturgy of the Hours on Ash Wednesday, specifically Morning Prayer, the prayer began with the hymn, “Creator of the Earth and Skies.” This is the text of the hymn:

“Creator of the earth and skies,
to whom the words of life belong,
Grant us your truth to make us wise;
Grant us our power to make us strong.

Like theirs of old, our life is death,
Our light is darkness,
till we see the eternal Word made flesh and breath,
The God who walked by Galilee.

We have not known thee:
to the skies our monuments of folly soar,
And all our self-wrought miseries
Have made us trust ourselves the more.

We have not loved thee:
far and wide the wreckage of our hatred spreads,
And evils wrought by human pride
Recoil on unrepentant heads.

For this, our foolish confidence,
Our pride of knowledge and our sin,
We come to you in penitence;
In us the work of grace begin.”

I have been reflecting on the text of this hymn since Ash Wednesday morning. How well it applies to much of what has happened in human history. How sadly it comments on the present state of our United States. In terms of present policies and presidential orders affecting immigration, taxation, foreign policy, healthcare, the attacks on the important safety nets for our elderly, our poor, the hungry of our nation, all of it is based on human folly and greed. From the White House, and the halls of Congress, from the State Houses and the corporate board rooms, from the mansions of the rich to the homes and hovels of the poor, from the naves of mighty cathedrals and TV evangelists to the store front churches, we all be need be dressed in sackcloth and ashes.

I received an education in how people like to group people into categories when, as a junior in high school, I moved back to Minnesota from Chicago. The high school that I chose was a microcosm of cliques, of those who were “in” and those who were “out”. Having been in the same school from kindergarten, students over time had been sentenced to social ghettos within the high school. There were the jocks/cheerleaders, the popular kids, the geeks, the street kids, the hippies, and so on. Being new to the school, I could not be assigned a specific student ghetto. As a result, I floated freely within the social ghettos of the high school and quickly learned the difference between a genuine welcome and a phony welcome. I chose the clique that welcomed me genuinely and in doing so met my future bride.

In the scripture readings today we experience the social ghettos of 1^st century Jewish society. There were those people who were the religiously righteous and those who were the ostracized. Jesus floated equally among the contrasting religious ghettos of his society. What the religious righteous of his time could not wrap their minds around was why Jesus didn’t spend more time with them, and why he spent more of his time associating with and ministering to the lepers, social and literal, of their society, namely, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and all they considered “sinners.” As the Gospels illustrate, Jesus was very astute as to who welcomed him genuinely and those who did not.

In our relationship with other people we like to think in categories of “us” and “them.” What this Gospel demonstrates for us is that there are no “lepers” estranged from God. There is no “us” and “them” in God’s eyes. All humanity, regardless of race, culture, religion and nation, are children of the one, true God. The religious and social ghettos we construct in human society and within our own parish are in direct conflict with the Divine plan of God. This Gospel challenges all of us to reexamine the way we order our world.